18184	----	SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION----BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY. ANIMAL CARVINGS FROM MOUNDS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. BY HENRY W. HENSHAW. CONTENTS. Introductory 123 Manatee 125 Toucan 135 Paroquet 139 Knowledge of tropical animals by Mound-Builders 142 Other errors of identification 144 Skill in sculpture of the Mound-Builders 148 Generalization not designed 149 Probable totemic origin 150 Animal mounds 152 The "Elephant" mound 152 The "Alligator" mound 158 Human sculptures 160 Indian and mound-builders' art compared 164 General conclusions 166 ILLUSTRATIONS. Fig. 4.--Otter from Squier and Davis 128 5.--Otter from Squier and Davis 128 6.--Otter from Rau. Manatee from Stevens 129 7.--Manatee from Stevens 129 8.--Lamantin or Sea-Cow from Squier and Davis 130 9.--Lamantin or Sea-Cow from Squier 130 10.--Manatee (_Manatus Americanus_, Cuv.) 132 11.--Manatee (_Manatus Americanus_, Cuv.) 132 12.--Cincinnati Tablet--back. From Squier and Davis 133 13.--Cincinnati Tablet--back. From Short 134 14.--Toucan from Squier and Davis 135 15.--Toucan from Squier and Davis 135 16.--Toucan from Squier and Davis 136 17.--Toucan as figured by Stevens 137 18.--Keel-billed Toucan of Southern Mexico 139 19.--Paroquet from Squier and Davis 140 20.--Owl from Squier and Davis 144 21.--Grouse from Squier and Davis 144 22.--Turkey-buzzard from Squier and Davis 145 23.--Cherry-bird 145 24.--Woodpecker 146 25.--Eagle from Squier and Davis 146 26.--Rattlesnake from Squier and Davis 147 27.--Big Elephant Mound in Grant County, Wisconsin 153 28.--Elephant Pipe. Iowa 155 29.--Elephant Pipe. Iowa 156 30.--The Alligator Mound near Granville, Ohio 159 31.--Carvings of heads 162 32.--Carvings of heads 162 33.--Carvings of heads 162 34.--Carving of head 163 35.--Carving of head 163 ANIMAL CARVINGS FROM MOUNDS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. BY H. W. HENSHAW. INTRODUCTORY. The considerable degree of decorative and artistic skill attained by the so-called Mound-Builders, as evidenced by many of the relics that have been exhumed from the mounds, has not failed to arrest the attention of archæologists. Among them, indeed, are found not a few who assert for the people conveniently designated as above a degree of artistic skill very far superior to that attained by the present race of Indians as they have been known to history. In fact, this very skill in artistic design, asserted for the Mound-Builders, as indicated by the sculptures they have left, forms an important link in the chain of argument upon which is based the theory of their difference from and superiority to the North American Indian. Eminent as is much of the authority which thus contends for an artistic ability on the part of the Mound-Builders far in advance of the attainments of the present Indian in the same line, the question is one admitting of argument; and if some of the best products of artistic handicraft of the present Indians be compared with objects of a similar nature taken from the mounds, it is more than doubtful if the artistic inferiority of the latter-day Indian can be substantiated. Deferring, however, for the present, any comparison between the artistic ability of the Mound-Builder and the modern Indian, attention may be turned to a class of objects from the mounds, notable, indeed, for the skill with which they are wrought, but to be considered first in another way and for another purpose than mere artistic comparison. As the term Mound-Builders will recur many times throughout this paper, and as the phrase has been objected to by some archæologists on account of its indefiniteness, it may be well to state that it is employed here with its commonly accepted signification, viz: as applied to the people who formerly lived throughout the Mississippi Valley and raised the mounds of that region. It should also be clearly understood that by its use the writer is not to be considered as committing himself in any way to the theory that the Mound-Builders were of a different race from the North American Indian. Among the more interesting objects left by the Mound-Builders, pipes occupy a prominent place. This is partly due to their number, pipes being among the more common articles unearthed by the labors of explorers, but more to the fact that in the construction of their pipes this people exhibited their greatest skill in the way of sculpture. In the minds of those who hold that the Mound-Builders were the ancestors of the present Indians, or, at least, that they were not necessarily of a different race, the superiority of their pipe sculpture over their other works of art excites no surprise, since, however prominent a place the pipe may have held in the affections of the Mound-Builders, it is certain that it has been an object of no less esteem and reverence among the Indians of history. Certainly no one institution, for so it may be called, was more firmly fixed by long usage among the North American Indians, or more characteristic of them, than the pipe, with all its varied uses and significance. Perhaps the most characteristic artistic feature displayed in the pipe sculpture of the Mound-Builders, as has been well pointed out by Wilson, in his Prehistoric Man, is the tendency exhibited toward the imitation of natural objects, especially birds and animals, a remark, it may be said in passing, which applies with almost equal truth to the art productions generally of the present Indians throughout the length and breadth of North America. As some of these sculptured animals from the mounds have excited much interest in the minds of archæologists, and have been made the basis of much speculation, their examination and proper identification becomes a matter of considerable importance. It will therefore be the main purpose of the present paper to examine critically the evidence offered in behalf of the identification of the more important of them. If it shall prove, as is believed to be the case, that serious mistakes of identification have been made, attention will be called to these and the manner pointed out in which certain theories have naturally enough resulted from the premises thus erroneously established. It may be premised that the writer undertook the examination of the carvings with no theories of his own to propose in place of those hitherto advanced. In fact, their critical examination may almost be said to have been the result of accident. Having made the birds of the United States his study for several years, the writer glanced over the bird carvings in the most cursory manner, being curious to see what species were represented. The inaccurate identification of some of these by the authors of "The Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley" led to the examination of the series as a whole, and subsequently to the discussion they had received at the hands of various authors. The carvings are, therefore, here considered rather from the stand-point of the naturalist than the archæologist. Believing that the question first in importance concerns their actual resemblances, substantially the same kind of critical study is applied to them which they would receive were they from the hands of a modern zoological artist. Such a course has obvious disadvantages, since it places the work of men who were in, at best, but a semi-civilized condition on a much higher plane than other facts would seem to justify. It may be urged, as the writer indeed believes, that the accuracy sufficient for the specific identification of these carvings is not to be expected of men in the state of culture the Mound-Builders are generally supposed to have attained. To which answer may be made that it is precisely on the supposition that the carvings were accurate copies from nature that the theories respecting them have been promulgated by archæologists. On no other supposition could such theories have been advanced. So accurate indeed have they been deemed that they have been directly compared with the work of modern artists, as will be noticed hereafter. Hence the method here adopted in their study seems to be not only the best, but the only one likely to produce definite results. If it be found that there are good reasons for pronouncing the carvings not to be accurate copies from nature, and of a lower artistic standard than has been supposed, it will remain for the archæologist to determine how far their unlikeness to the animals they have been supposed to represent can be attributed to shortcomings naturally pertaining to barbaric art. If he choose to assume that they were really intended as imitations, although in many particulars unlike the animals he wishes to believe them to represent, and that they are as close copies as can be expected from sculptors not possessed of skill adequate to carry out their rude conceptions, he will practically have abandoned the position taken by many prominent archæologists with respect to the mound sculptors' skill, and will be forced to accord them a position on the plane of art not superior to the one occupied by the North American Indians. If it should prove that but a small minority of the carvings can be specifically identified, owing to inaccuracies and to their general resemblance, he may indeed go even further and conclude that they form a very unsafe basis for deductions that owe their very existence to assumed accurate imitation. MANATEE. In 1848 Squier and Davis published their great work on the Mounds of the Mississippi Valley. The skill and zeal with which these gentlemen prosecuted their researches in the field, and the ability and fidelity which mark the presentation of their results to the public are sufficiently attested by the fact that this volume has proved alike the mine from which subsequent writers have drawn their most important facts, and the chief inspiration for the vast amount of work in the same direction since undertaken. On pages 251 and 252 of the above-mentioned work appear figures of an animal which is there called "Lamantin, Manitus, or Sea Cow," concerning which animal it is stated that "seven sculptured representations have been taken from the mounds." When first discovered, the authors continue, "it was supposed they were monstrous creations of fancy; but subsequent investigations and comparison have shown that they are faithful representations of one of the most singular animal productions of the world." These authors appear to have been the first to note the supposed likeness of certain of the sculptured forms found in the mounds to animals living in remote regions. That they were not slow to perceive the ethnological interest and value of the discovery is shown by the fact that it was immediately adduced by them as affording a clew to the possible origin of the Mound-Builders. The importance they attached to the discovery and their interpretation of its significance will be apparent from the following quotation (p. 242): Some of these sculptures have a value, so far as ethnological research is concerned, much higher than they can claim as mere works of art. This value is derived from the fact that they faithfully represent animals and birds peculiar to other latitudes, thus establishing a migration, a very extensive intercommunication or a contemporaneous existence of the same race over a vast extent of country. The idea thus suggested fell on fruitful ground, and each succeeding writer who has attempted to show that the Mound-Builders were of a race different from the North American Indian, or had other than an autochthonous origin, has not failed to lay especial stress upon the presence in the mounds of sculptures of the manatee, as well as of other strange beasts and birds, carved evidently by the same hands that portrayed many of our native fauna. Except that the theories based upon the sculptures have by recent writers been annunciated more positively and given a wider range, they have been left almost precisely as set forth by the authors of the "Ancient Monuments," while absolutely nothing appears to have been brought to light since their time in the way of additional sculptured evidence of the same character. It is indeed a little curious to note the perfect unanimity with which most writers fall back upon the above authors as at once the source of the data they adduce in support of the several theories, and as their final, nay, their only, authority. Now and then one will be found to dissent from some particular bit of evidence as announced by Squier and Davis, or to give a somewhat different turn to the conclusions derivable from the testimony offered by them. But in the main the theories first announced by the authors of "Ancient Monuments," as the result of their study of the mound sculptures, are those that pass current to-day. Particular attention may be called to the deep and lasting impression made by the statements of these authors as to the great beauty and high standard of excellence exhibited by the mound sculptures. Since their time writers appear to be well satisfied to express their own admiration in the terms made use of by Squier and Davis. One might, indeed, almost suppose that recent writers have not dared to trust to the evidence afforded by the original carvings or their fac-similes, but have preferred to take the word of the authors of the "Ancient Monuments" for beauties which were perhaps hidden from their own eyes. Following the lead of the authors of the "Ancient Monuments," also, with respect to theories of origin, these carvings of supposed foreign animals are offered as affording incontestible evidence that the Mound-Builders must have migrated from or have had intercourse, direct or indirect, with the regions known to harbor these animals. Were it not, indeed, for the evident artistic similarity between these carvings of supposed foreign animals and those of common domestic forms--a similarity which, as Squier and Davis remark, render them "indistinguishable, so far as material and workmanship are concerned, from an entire class of remains found in the mounds"--the presence of most of them could readily be accounted for through the agency of trade, the far reaching nature of which, even among the wilder tribes, is well understood. Trade, for instance, in the case of an animal like the manatee, found no more than a thousand miles distant from the point where the sculpture was dug up, would offer a possible if not a probable solution of the matter. But independently of the fact that the practically identical character of all the carvings render the theory of trade quite untenable, the very pertinent question arises, why, if these supposed manatee pipes were derived by trade from other regions, have not similar carvings been found in those regions, as, for instance, in Florida and the Gulf States, a region of which the archæology is fairly well known. Primitive man, as is the case with his civilized brother, trades usually out of his abundance; so that not seven, but many times seven, manatee pipes should be found at the center of trade. As it is, the known home of the manatee has furnished no carvings either of the manatee or of anything suggestive of it. The possibility of the manatee having in past times possessed a wider range than at present seems to have been overlooked. But as a matter of fact the probability that the manatee ever ranged, in comparatively modern times at least, as far north as Ohio without leaving other traces of its presence than a few sculptured representations at the hands of an ancient people is too small to be entertained. Nor is the supposition that the Mound-Builders held contemporaneous possession of the country embraced in the range of the animals whose effigies are supposed to have been exhumed from their graves worthy of serious discussion. If true, it would involve the contemporaneous occupancy by the Mound-Builders, not only of the Southern United States but of the region stretching into Southern Mexico, and even, according to the ideas of some authors, into Central and South America, an area which, it is needless to say, no known facts will for a moment justify us in supposing a people of one blood to have occupied contemporaneously. Assuming, therefore, that the sculptures in question are the work of the Mound-Builders and are not derived from distant parts through the agency of trade, of which there would appear to be little doubt, and, assuming that the sculptures represent the animals they have been supposed to represent--of which something remains to be said--the theory that the acquaintance of the Mound-Builders with these animals was made in a region far distant from the one to which they subsequently migrated would seem to be not unworthy of attention. It is necessary, however, before advancing theories to account for facts to first consider the facts themselves, and in this case to seek an answer to the question how far the identification of these carvings of supposed foreign animals is to be trusted. Before noticing in detail the carvings supposed by Squier and Davis to represent the manatee, it will be well to glance at the carvings of another animal figured by the same authors which, it is believed, has a close connection with them. [Illustration: Fig. 4.--Otter. From Ancient Monuments.] Figure 4 is identified by the authors of the "Ancient Monuments" (Fig. 156) as an otter, and few naturalists will hesitate in pronouncing it to be a very good likeness of that animal; the short broad ears, broad head and expanded snout, with the short, strong legs, would seem to belong unmistakably to the otter. Added to all these is the indication of its fish-catching habits. Having thus correctly identified this animal, and with it before them, it certainly reflects little credit upon the zoological knowledge of the authors and their powers of discrimination to refer the next figure (Ancient Monuments, Fig. 157) to the same animal. [Illustration: Fig. 5.--Otter of Squier and Davis.] Of a totally different shape and physiognomy, if intended as an otter it certainly implies an amazing want of skill in its author. However it is assuredly not an otter, but is doubtless an unfinished or rudely executed ground squirrel, of which animal it conveys in a general way a good idea, the characteristic attitude of this little rodent, sitting up with paws extended in front, being well displayed. Carvings of small rodents in similar attitudes are exhibited in Stevens's "Flint Chips," p. 428, Figs. 61 and 62. Stevens's Fig. 61 evidently represents the same animal as Fig. 157 of Squier and Davis, but is a better executed carving. In illustration of the somewhat vague idea entertained by archæologists as to what the manatee is like, it is of interest to note that the carving of a second otter with a fish in its mouth has been made to do duty as a manatee, although the latter animal is well known never to eat fish, but, on the contrary, to be strictly herbivorous. Thus Stevens gives figures of two carvings in his "Flint Chips," p. 429, Figs. 65 and 66, calling them manatees, and says: "In one particular, however, the sculptors of the mound-period committed an error. Although the lamantin is strictly herbivorous, feeding chiefly upon subaqueous plants and littoral herbs, yet upon one of the stone smoking-pipes, Fig. 66, this animal is represented with a fish in its mouth." Mr. Stevens apparently preferred to credit the mound sculptor with gross ignorance of the habits of the manatee, rather than to abate one jot or tittle of the claim possessed by the carving to be considered a representation of that animal. Stevens's fish-catching manatee is the same carving given by Dr. Rau, in the Archæological Collection of the United States National Museum, p. 47, Fig. 180, where it is correctly stated to be an otter. This cut, which can scarcely be distinguished from one given by Stevens (Fig. 66), is here reproduced (Fig. 6), together with the second supposed manatee of the latter writer (Fig. 7). [Illustration: Fig. 6.--Otter of Rau; Manatee of Stevens.] [Illustration: Fig. 7.--Manatee of Stevens.] To afford a means of comparison, Fig. 154, from the "Ancient Monuments" of Squier and Davis, is introduced (Fig. 8). The same figure is also to be found in Wilson's Prehistoric Man, vol. i, p. 476, Fig. 22. Another of the supposed lamantins, Fig. 9, is taken from Squier's article in the Transactions of the American Ethnological Society, vol. ii, p. 188. A bad print of the same wood-cut appears as Fig. 153, p. 251, of the "Ancient Monuments." It should be noted that the physiognomy of Fig. 6, above given, although unquestionably of an otter, agrees more closely with the several so-called manatees, which are represented without fishes, than with the fish-bearing otter, first mentioned, Fig. 4. Fig. 6 thus serves as a connecting link in the series, uniting the unmistakable otter, with the fish in its mouth, to the more clumsily executed and less readily recognized carvings of the same animal. [Illustration: Fig. 8.--Lamantin or sea-cow of Squier and Davis.] [Illustration: Fig. 9.--Lamantin or sea-cow of Squier.] It was doubtless the general resemblance which the several specimens of the otters and the so-called manatees bear to each other that led Stevens astray. They are by no means facsimiles one of the other. On the contrary, while no two are just alike, the differences are perhaps not greater than is to be expected when it is considered that they doubtless embody the conceptions of different artists, whose knowledge of the animal, as well as whose skill in carving, would naturally differ widely. Recognizing the general likeness, Stevens perhaps felt that what one was all were. In this, at least, he is probably correct, and the following reasons are deemed sufficient to show that, whether the several sculptures figured by one and another author are otters or not, as here maintained, they most assuredly are not manatees. The most important character possessed by the sculptures, which is not found in the manatee, is an external ear. In this particular they all agree. Now, the manatee has not the slightest trace of a pinna or external ear, a small orifice, like a slit, representing that organ. To quote the precise language of Murie in the Proceedings of the London Zoological Society, vol. 8, p. 188: "In the absence of pinna, a small orifice, a line in diameter, into which a probe could be passed, alone represents the external meatus." In the dried museum specimen this slit is wholly invisible, and even in the live or freshly killed animal it is by no means readily apparent. Keen observer of natural objects, as savage and barbaric man certainly is, it is going too far to suppose him capable of representing an earless animal--earless at least so far as the purposes of sculpture are concerned--with prominent ears. If, then, it can be assumed that these sculptures are to be relied upon as in the slightest degree imitative, it must be admitted that the presence of ears would alone suffice to show that they cannot have been intended to represent the manatee. But the feet shown in each and all of them present equally unquestionable evidence of their dissimilarity from the manatee. This animal has instead of a short, stout fore leg, terminating in flexible fingers or paws, as indicated in the several sculptures, a shapeless paddle-like flipper. The nails with which the flipper terminates are very small, and if shown at all in carving, which is wholly unlikely, as being too insignificant, they would be barely indicated and would present a very different appearance from the distinctly marked digits common to the several sculptures. Noticing that one of the carvings has a differently shaped tail from the others, the authors of the "Ancient Monuments" attempt to reconcile the discrepancy as follows: "Only one of the sculptures exhibits a flat truncated tail; the others are round. There is however a variety of the lamantin (_Manitus Senigalensis_, Desm.) which has a round tail, and is distinguished as the "round-tailed manitus." (Ancient Monuments, p. 252.) The suggestion thus thrown out means, if it means anything, that the sculpture exhibiting a flat tail is the only one referable to the manatee of Florida and southward, the _M. Americanus_, while those with round tails are to be identified with the so-called "Round-tailed Lamantin," the _M. Senegalensis_, which lives in the rivers of Senegambia and along the coast of Western Africa. It is to be regretted that the above authors did not go further and explain the manner in which they suppose the Mound-Builders became acquainted with an animal inhabiting the West African coast. Elastic as has proved to be the thread upon which hangs the migration theory, it would seem to be hardly capable of bearing the strain required for it to reach from the Mississippi Valley to Africa. Had the authors been better acquainted with the anatomy of the manatees the above suggestion would never have been made, since the tails of the two forms are, so far as known, almost exactly alike. A rounded tail is, in fact, the first requisite of the genus _Manatus_, to which both the manatees alluded to belong, in distinction from the forked tail of the genus _Halicore_. Whether the tails of the sculptured manatees be round or flat matters little, however, since they bear no resemblance to manatee tails, either of the round or flat tailed varieties, or, for that matter, to tails of any sort. In many of the animal carvings the head alone engaged the sculptor's attention, the body and members being omitted entirely, or else roughly blocked out; as, for instance, in the case of the squirrel given above, in which the hind parts are simply rounded off into convenient shape, with no attempt at their delineation. Somewhat the same method was evidently followed in the case of the supposed manatees, only after the pipe cavities had been excavated the block was shaped off in a manner best suited to serve the purpose of a handle. Without, however, attempting to institute farther comparisons, two views of a real manatee are here subjoined, which are fac-similes of Murie's admirable photo-lithograph in Trans. London Zoological Society, vol. 8, 1872-'74. A very brief comparison of the supposed manatees, with a modern artistic representation of that animal, will show the irreconcilable differences between them better than any number of pages of written criticism. [Illustration: Fig. 10.--Manatee (_Manatus Americanus_, Cuv.). Side view.] [Illustration: Fig. 11.--Manatee (_Manatus Americanus_, Cuv.). Front view.] There would seem, then, to be no escape from the conclusion that the animal sculptures which have passed current as manatees do not really resemble that animal, which is so extraordinary in all its aspects and so totally unlike any other of the animal creation as to render its identification in case it had really served as a subject for sculpture, easy and certain. As the several sculptures bear a general likeness to each other and resemble with considerable closeness the otter, the well known fish-eating proclivities of this animal being shown in at least two of them, it seems highly probable that it is the otter that is rudely portrayed in all these sculptures. The otter was a common resident of all the region occupied by the Mound-Builders, and must certainly have been well known to them. Moreover, the otter is one of the animals which figures largely in the mythology and folk-lore of the natives of America, and has been adopted in many tribes as their totem. Hence, this animal would seem to be a peculiarly apt subject for embodiment in sculptured form. It matters very little, however, whether these sculptures were intended as otters or not, the main point in the present connection being that they cannot have been intended as manatees. Before leaving the subject of the manatee, attention may be called to a curious fact in connection with the Cincinnati Tablet, "of which a wood-cut is given in The Ancient Monuments" (p. 275, Fig. 195). If the reverse side as there shown be compared with the same view as presented by Short in The North Americans of Antiquity, p. 45, or in MacLean's Mound-Builders, p. 107, a remarkable discrepancy between the two will be observed. [Illustration: Fig. 12.--Cincinnati Tablet. (Back.) From Squire and Davis.] In the former, near the top, is indicated what appears to be a shapeless depression, formless and unmeaning so far as its resemblance to any special object is concerned. The authors remark of this side of the tablet, "The back of the stone has three deep longitudinal grooves, and several depressions, evidently caused by rubbing,--probably produced in sharpening the instrument used, in the sculpture." This explanation of the depressions would seem to be reasonable, although it has been disputed, and a "peculiar significance" (Short) attached to this side of the tablet. In Short's engraving, while the front side corresponds closely with the same view given by Squier and Davis, there is a notable difference observable on the reverse side. For the formless depression of the Squier and Davis cut not only occupies a somewhat different position in relation to the top and sides of the tablet, but, as will be seen by reference to the figure, it assumes a distinct form, having in some mysterious way been metamorphosed into a figure which oddly enough suggests the manatee. It does not appear that the attention of archæologists has ever been directed to the fact that such a resemblance exists; nor indeed is the resemblance sufficiently close to justify calling it a veritable manatee. But with the aid of a little imagination it may in a rude way suggest that animal, its earless head and the flipper being the most striking, in fact the only, point of likeness. Conceding that the figure as given by Short affords a rude hint of the manatee, the question is how to account for its presence on this the latest representation of the tablet which, according to Short, Mr. Guest, its owner, pronounces "the first correct representations of the stone." The cast of this tablet in the Smithsonian Institution agrees more closely with Short's representation in respect to the details mentioned than with that given in the "Ancient Monuments." Nevertheless, if this cast be accepted as the faithful copy of the original it has been supposed to be, the engraving in Short's volume is subject to criticism. In the cast the outline of the figure, while better defined than Squier and Davis represent it to be, is still very indefinite, the outline not only being broken into, but being in places, especially toward the head, indistinguishable from the surface of the tablet into which it insensibly grades. In the view as found in Short there is none of this irregularity and indefiniteness of outline, the figure being perfect and standing out clearly as though just from the sculptor's hand. As perhaps on the whole the nearest approach to the form of a manatee appearing on any object claimed to have originated at the hands of the Mound-Builders, and from the fact that artists have interpreted its outline so differently, this figure, given by the latest commentators on the Cincinnati tablet, is interesting, and has seemed worthy of mention. As, however, the authenticity of the tablet itself is not above suspicion, but, on the contrary, is believed by many archæologists to admit of grave doubts, the subject need not be pursued further here. [Illustration: Fig. 13.--Cincinnati Tablet. (Back.) From Short.] TOUCAN. The _a priori_ probability that the toucan was known to the Mound-Builders is, of course, much less than that the manatee was, since no species of toucan occurs farther north than Southern Mexico. Its distant habitat also militates against the idea that the Mound-Builders could have acquired a knowledge of the bird from intercourse with southern tribes, or that they received the supposed toucan pipes by way of trade. Without discussing the several theories to which the toucan pipes have given rise, let us first examine the evidence offered as to the presence in the mounds of sculptures of the toucan. It is a little perplexing to find at the outset that Squier and Davis, not content with one toucan, have figured three, and these differing from each other so widely as to be referable, according to modern ornithological ideas, to very distinct orders. [Illustration: Fig. 14.--Toucan of Squier and Davis.] The first allusion to the toucan in the Monuments of the Mississippi Valley is found on page 194, where the authors guardedly remark of a bird's head in terra cotta (Fig. 79), "It represents the head of a bird, somewhat resembling the toucan, and is executed with much spirit." This head is vaguely suggestive of a young eagle, the proportions of the bill of which, until of some age, are considerably distorted. The position of the nostrils, however, and the contour of the mandibles, together with the position of the eyes, show clearly enough that it is a likeness of no bird known to ornithology. It is enough for our present purpose to say that in no particular does it bear any conceivable resemblance to the toucan. Of the second supposed toucan (Ancient Monuments, p. 260, Fig. 169) here illustrated, the authors remark: The engraving very well represents the original, which is delicately carved from a compact limestone. It is supposed to represent the toucan--a tropical bird, and one not known to exist anywhere within the limits of the United States. If we are not mistaken in supposing it to represent this bird, the remarks made respecting the sculptures of the manitus will here apply with double force. [Illustration: Fig. 15.--Toucan of Squier and Davis.] This sculpture is fortunately easy of identification. Among several ornithologists, whose opinions have been asked, not a dissenting voice has been heard. The bird is a common crow or a raven, and is one of the most happily executed of the avian sculptures, the nasal feathers, which are plainly shown, and the general contour of the bill being truly corvine. It would probably be practically impossible to distinguish a rude sculpture of a raven from that of a crow, owing to the general resemblance of the two. The proportions of the head here shown are, however, those of the crow, and the question of habitat renders it vastly more likely that the crow was known to the Mound-Builders of Ohio than that the raven was. What possible suggestion of a toucan is to be found in this head it is not easy to see. Turning to page 266 (Fig. 178) another and very different bird is held up to view as a toucan. [Illustration: Fig. 16.--Toucan of Squier and Davis.] Squier and Davis remark of this sculpture: From the size of its bill, and the circumstance of its having two toes before and two behind, the bird intended to be represented would seem to belong to the zygodactylous order--probably the toucan. The toucan (Ramphastos of Lin.) is found on this continent only in the tropical countries of South America. In contradiction to the terms of their description their own figure, as will be noticed, shows _three_ toes in front and two behind, or a total of five, which makes the bird an ornithological curiosity, indeed. However, as the cast in the Smithsonian collection shows three toes in front and one behind, it is probably safe to assume that the additional hind toe was the result of mistake on the part of the modern artist, so that four may be accepted as its proper quota. The mistake then chargeable to the above authors is that in their discussion they transferred one toe from before and added it behind. In this curious way came their zygodactylous bird. This same pipe is figured by Stevens in Flint Chips, p. 426, Fig. 5. The wood-cut is a poor one, and exhibits certain important changes, which, on the assumption that the pipe is at all well illustrated by the cast in the Smithsonian, reflects more credit on the artist's knowledge of what a toucan ought to look like than on his fidelity as an exact copyist. The etchings across the upper surface of the base of the pipe, miscalled fingers, are not only made to assume a hand-like appearance but the accommodating fancy of the artist has provided a roundish object in the palm, which the bird appears about to pick up. The bill, too, has been altered, having become rounded and decidedly toucan-like, while the tail has undergone abbreviation, also in the direction of likeness to the toucan. In short, much that was lacking in the aboriginal artist's conception towards the likeness of a toucan has in this figure been supplied by his modern interpreter. [Illustration: Fig. 17.--Toucan as figured by Stevens.] This cut corresponds with the cast in the Smithsonian collection, in having the normal number of toes, four--three in front and one behind. This departure from the arrangement common to the toucan family, which is zygodactylous, seems to have escaped Stevens's attention. At least he volunteers no explanation of the discrepancy, being, doubtless, influenced in his acceptance of the bird as a toucan by the statements of others. Wilson follows the cut of Squier and Davis, and represents the bird with five toes, stating that the toucan is "imitated with considerable accuracy." He adds: "The most important deviation from correctness of detail is, it has three toes instead of two before, although the two are correctly represented behind." How Wilson is guided to the belief that the sculptor's mistake consists in adding a toe in front instead of one behind it would be difficult to explain, unless, indeed, he felt the necessity of having a toucan at all hazards. The truth is that, the question of toes aside, this carving in no wise resembles a toucan. Its long legs and proportionally long toes, coupled with the rather long neck and bill, indicate with certainty a wading bird of some kind, and in default of anything that comes nearer, an ibis may be suggested; though if intended by the sculptor as an ibis, candor compels the statement that the ibis family has no reason to feel complimented. The identification of this sculpture as a toucan was doubtless due less to any resemblance it bears to that bird than to another circumstance connected with it of a rather fanciful nature. As in the case of several others, the bird is represented in the act of feeding, upon what it would be difficult to say. Certainly the four etchings across the base of the pipe bear little resemblance to the human hand. Had they been intended for fingers they would hardly have been made to extend over the side of the pipe, an impossible position unless the back of the hand be uppermost. Yet it was probably just this fancied resemblance to a hand, out of which the bird is supposed to be feeding, that led to the suggestion of the toucan. For, say Squier and Davis, p. 266: In those districts (_i.e._, Guiana and Brazil) the toucan was almost the only bird the aborigines attempted to domesticate. The fact that it is represented receiving its food from a human hand would, under these circumstances, favor the conclusion that the sculpture was designed to represent the toucan. Rather a slender thread one would think upon which to hang a theory so far-reaching in its consequences. Nor was it necessary to go as far as Guiana and Brazil to find instances of the domestication of wild fowl by aborigines. Among our North American Indians it was a by no means uncommon practice to capture and tame birds. Roger Williams, for instance, speaks of the New England Indians keeping tame hawks about their dwellings "to keep the little birds from their corn." (Williams's Key into the Language of America, 1643, p. 220.) The Zuñis and other Pueblo Indians keep, and have kept from time immemorial, great numbers of eagles and hawks of every obtainable species, as also turkies, for the sake of the feathers. The Dakotas and other western tribes keep eagles for the same purpose. They also tame crows, which are fed from the hand, as well as hawks and magpies. A case nearer in point is a reference in Lawson to the Congarees of North Carolina. He says, "they are kind and affable, and tame the cranes and storks of their savannas." (Lawson's History of Carolina, p. 51.) And again (p. 53) "these Congarees have an abundance of storks and cranes in their savannas. They take them before they can fly, and breed them as tame and familiar as a dung-hill fowl. They had a tame crane at one of these cabins that was scarcely less than six feet in height." So that even if the bird, as has been assumed by many writers, be feeding from a human hand, of which fact there is no sufficient evidence, we are by no means on this account driven to the conclusion, as appears to have been believed, that the sculpture could be no other than a toucan. As in the Cass of the manatee, it has been thought well to introduce a correct drawing of a toucan in order to afford opportunity for comparison of this very striking bird with its supposed representations from the mounds. For this purpose the most northern representative of the family has been selected as the one nearest the home of the Mound-Builders. The particulars wherein it differs from the supposed toucans are so many and striking that it will be superfluous to dwell upon them in detail. They will be obvious at a glance. Thus we have seen that the sculptured representation of three birds, totally dissimilar from each other, and not only not resembling the toucan, but conveying no conceivable hint of that very marked bird, formed the basis of Squier and Davis' speculations as to the presence of the toucan in the mounds. These three supposed toucans have been copied and recopied by later authors, who have accepted in full the remarks and deductions accompanying them. At least two exceptions to the last statement may be made. It is refreshing to find that two writers, although apparently accepting the other identifications by Squier and Davis, have drawn the line at the toucan. Thus Rau, in The Archæological Collections of the United States National Museum, pp. 46-47, states that-- The figure (neither of the writers mentioned appear to have been aware that there was more than one supposed toucan) is not of sufficient distinctness to identify the original that was before the artist's mind, and it would not be safe, therefore, to make this specimen the subject of far-reaching speculations. [Illustration: Fig. 18.--Keel-Billed Toucan of Southern Mexico (_Rhamphastos carinatus_.)] Further on he adds, "Leaving aside the more than doubtful toucan, the imitated animals belong, without exception, to the North American fauna." Barber, also, after taking exception to the idea that the supposed toucan carving represents a zygodactylous bird, adds in his article on Mound Pipes, pp. 280-281 (American Naturalist for April, 1882), "It may be asserted with a considerable degree of confidence that no representative of an exclusively exotic fauna figured in the pipe sculptures of the Mound-Builders." PAROQUET. The presence of a carving of the paroquet in one of the Ohio mounds has been deemed remarkable on account of the supposed extreme southern habitat of that bird. Thus Squier and Davis remark ("Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley," p. 265, Fig. 172), "Among the most spirited and delicately executed specimens of ancient art found in the mounds, is that of the paroquet here presented." "The paroquet is essentially a southern bird, and though common along the Gulf, is of rare occurrence above the Ohio River." The above language would seem to admit of no doubt as to the fact of the decided resemblance borne by this carving to the paroquet. Yet the bird thus positively identified as a paroquet, upon which identification have, without doubt, been based all the conclusions that have been published concerning the presence of that bird among the mound sculptures is not even distantly related to the parrot family. It has the bill of a raptorial bird, as shown by the distinct tooth, and this, in connection with the well defined cere, not present in the paroquet, and the open nostril, concealed by feathers in the paroquet, places its identity as one of the hawk tribe beyond doubt. [Illustration: Fig. 19.--Paroquet of Squier and Davis.] In fact it closely resembles several of the carvings figured and identified as hawks by the above authors, as comparison with figures given below will show. The hawks always appear to have occupied a prominent place in the interest of our North American Indians, especially in association with totemic ideas, and the number of sculptured representations of hawks among the mound relics would argue for them a similar position in the minds of the Mound-Builders. A word should be added as to the distribution of the paroquet. The statement by Squier and Davis that the paroquet is found as far north as the Ohio River would of itself afford an easy explanation of the manner in which the Mound-Builders might have become acquainted with the bird, could their acquaintance with it be proved. But the above authors appear to have had a very incorrect idea of the region inhabited by this once widely spread species. The present distribution, it is true, is decidedly southern, it being almost wholly confined to limited areas within the Gulf States. Formerly, however, it ranged much farther north, and there is positive evidence that it occurred in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Nebraska. Up to 1835 it was extremely abundant in Southern Illinois, and, as Mr. Ridgway informs the writer, was found there as late as 1861. Specimens are in the Smithsonian collection from points as far north as Chicago and Michigan. Over much of the region indicated the exact nature of its occurrence is not understood, whether resident or a more or less casual visitor. But as it is known that it was found as far north as Pennsylvania in winter it may once have ranged even farther north than the line just indicated, and have been found in Southern Wisconsin and Minnesota. Occurring, as it certainly did, over most of the mound region, the peculiar habits of the paroquet, especially its vociferous cries and manner of associating in large flocks, must, it would seem, have made it known to the Mound-Builders. Indeed from the ease with which it is trapped and killed, it very probably formed an article of food among them as it has among the whites and recent tribes of Indians. Probable, however, as it is that the Mound-Builders were well acquainted with the paroquet, there appears to be no evidence of the fact among their works of art. KNOWLEDGE OF TROPICAL ANIMALS BY MOUND-BUILDERS. The supposed evidence of a knowledge of tropical animals possessed by the ancient dwellers of the Mississippi Valley which has just been discussed seems to have powerfully impressed Wilson, and in his Prehistoric Man he devotes much space to the consideration of the matter. His ideas on the subject will be understood from the following quotation: By the fidelity of the representations of so great a variety of subjects copied from animal life, they furnish evidence of a knowledge in the Mississippi Valley, of the fauna peculiar not only to southern, but to tropical latitudes, extending beyond the Isthmus into the southern continent; and suggestive either of arts derived from a foreign source, and of an intimate intercourse maintained with the central regions where the civilization of ancient America attained its highest development: or else indicative of migration, and an intrusion into the northern continent, of the race of the ancient graves of Central and Southern America, bringing with them the arts of the tropics, and models derived from the animals familiar to their fathers in the parent-land of the race. (Vol. 1, p. 475.) The author subsequently shows his preference for the theory of a migration of the race of the Mound-Builders from southern regions as being on the whole more probable. Wilson does not, however, content himself with the evidence afforded by the birds and animals which have just been discussed, but strengthens his argument by extending the list of supposed exotic forms known to the Mound-Builders in the following words (vol. 1, p. 477): But we must account by other means for the discovery of accurate miniature representations of it (_i.e._ the Manatee) among the sculptures of the far-inland mounds of Ohio; and the same remark equally applies to the jaguar or panther, the cougar, the toucan; to the buzzard possibly, and also to the paroquet. _The majority of these animals are not known in the United States; some of them are totally unknown to within any part of the North American continent._ (Italics of the present writer.) Others may be classed with the paroquet, which, though essentially a southern bird, and common in the Gulf, does occasionally make its appearance inland; and might possibly become known to the untraveled Mound-Builder among the fauna of his own northern home. The information contained in the above paragraph relative to the range of some of the animals mentioned may well be viewed with surprise by naturalists. To begin with, the jaguar or panther, by which vernacular names the _Felis onca_ is presumably meant, is not only found in Northern Mexico, but extends its range into the United States and appears as far north as the Red River of Louisiana. (See Baird's Mammals of North America.) Hence a sculptured representation of this animal in the mounds, although by no means likely, is not entirely out of the question. However, among the several carvings of the cat family that have been exhumed from the mounds and made known there is not one which can, with even a fair degree of probability, be identified as this species in distinction from the next animal named, the cougar. The cougar, to which several of the carvings can with but little doubt be referred, was at the time of the discovery of America and is to-day, where not exterminated by man, a common resident of the whole of North America, including of course the whole of the Mississippi Valley. It would be surprising, therefore, if an animal so striking, and one that has figured so largely in Indian totemism and folk-lore, should not have received attention at the hands of the Mound-Builders. Nothing resembling the toucan, as has been seen, has been found in the mounds; but, as stated, this bird is found in Southern Mexico. The buzzard is to-day common over almost the entire United States, and is especially common throughout most of the Mississippi Valley. As to the paroquet, there seems to be no evidence in the way of carvings to show that it was known to the Mound-Builders, although that such was the case is rendered highly probable from the fact that it lived at their very doors. It therefore appears that of the five animals of which Wilson states "the majority are not known in the United States," and "some of them are totally unknown, within any part of the North American continent," every one is found in North America, and all but one within the limits of the United States, while three were common residents of the Mississippi Valley. As a further illustration of the inaccurate zoological knowledge to which may be ascribed no small share of the theories advanced respecting the origin of the Mound-Builders, the following illustration may be taken from Wilson, this author, however, being but one of the many who are equally in fault. The error is in regard to the habitat of the conch shell, _Pyrula (now Busycon) perversa_. After exposing the blunder of Mr. John Delafield, who describes this shell as unknown on the coasts of North and South America, but as abundant on the coast of Hindostan, from which supposed fact, coupled with its presence in the mounds, he assumes a migration on the part of the Mound-Builders from Southern Asia (Prehistoric Man, vol. 1, p. 219, _ibid._, p. 272), Wilson states. No question can exist as to the tropical and marine origin of the large shells exhumed not only in the inland regions of Kentucky and Tennessee, but in the northern peninsula lying between the Ontario and Huron Lakes, or on the still remoter shores and islands of Georgian Bay, at a distance of upwards of three thousand miles from the coast of Yucatan, on the mainland, _the nearest point where the Pyrula perversa is found in its native locality_. (Italics of the present writer.) Now the plain facts on the authority of Mr. Dall are that the _Busycon (Pyrula) perversa_ is not only found in the United States, but extends along the coast up to Charleston, S.C., with rare specimens as far north as Beaufort, N.C. Moreover, archæologists have usually confounded this species with the _Busycon carica_, which is of common occurrence in the mounds. The latter is found as far north as Cape Cod. The facts cited put a very different complexion on the presence of these shells in the mounds. OTHER ERRORS OF IDENTIFICATION. [Illustration: Fig. 20.--"Owl," from Squier and Davis.] The erroneous identification of the manatee, the toucan, and of several other animals having been pointed out, it may be well to glance at certain others of the sculptured animal forms, the identification of which by Squier and Davis has passed without dispute, with a view to determining how far the accuracy of these authors in this particular line is to be trusted, and how successful they have been in interpreting the much lauded "fidelity to nature" of the mound sculptures. Fig. 20 (Squier and Davis, Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, p. 225, Fig. 123) represents a tube of steatite, upon which is carved, as is stated, "in high relief this figure of an owl, attached with its back to the tube." This carving, the authors state, is "remarkably bold and spirited, and represents the bird with its claws contracted and drawn up, and head and beak elevated as if in an attitude of defense and defiance." [Illustration: Fig. 21.--"Grouse," from Squier and Davis.] This carving differs markedly from any of the avian sculptures, and probably was not intended to represent a bird at all. The absence of feather etchings and the peculiar shape of the wing are especially noticeable. It more nearly resembles, if it can be said to resemble anything, a bat, with the features very much distorted. Fig. 21 (Fig. 170 from Squier and Davis) it is stated, "will readily be recognized as intended to represent the head of the grouse." The cere and plainly notched bill of this carving clearly indicate a hawk, of what species it would be impossible to say. [Illustration: Fig. 22.--"Turkey Buzzard," from Squier and Davis.] Fig. 22 (Fig. 171 from Squier and Davis) was, it is said, "probably intended to represent a turkey buzzard." If so, the suggestion is a very vague one. The notches cut in the mandibles, as in the case of the carving of the wood duck (Fig. 168, Ancient Monuments), are perhaps meant for serrations, of which there is no trace in the bill of the buzzard. As suggested by Mr. Ridgway, it is perhaps nearer the cormorant than anything else, although not executed with the detail necessary for its satisfactory recognition. [Illustration: Fig. 23.--"Cherry-bird," from Squier and Davis.] Fig. 23 (Fig. 173 from Squier and Davis) it is claimed "much resembles the tufted cherry-bird," which is by no means the case, as the bill bears witness. It may pass, however, as a badly executed likeness of the tufted cardinal grosbeak or red-bird. The same is true of Figs. 174 and 175, which are also said to be "cherry-birds." Fig. 24 (Fig. 179 from Squier and Davis), of which Squier and Davis say it is uncertain what bird it is intended to represent, is an unmistakable likeness of a woodpecker, and is one of the best executed of the series of bird carvings. To undertake to name the species would be the merest guess-work. [Illustration: Fig. 24.--Woodpecker, from Squier and Davis.] The heads shown in Fig. 25, which the authors assert "was probably intended to represent the eagle" and "are far superior in point of finish, spirit, and truthfulness to any miniature carving, ancient or modern, which have fallen under the notice of the authors," cannot be identified further than to say they are raptorial birds of some sort, probably not eagles but hawks. Fig. 26 (Fig. 180 from Squier and Davis), according to the authors, "certainly represents the rattlesnake." It certainly represents a snake, but there is no hint in it of the peculiarities of the rattlesnake; which, indeed, it would be difficult to portray in a rude carving like this without showing the rattle. This is done in another carving, Fig. 196. [Illustration: Fig. 25.--"Eagle," from Squier and Davis.] The extraordinary terms of praise bestowed by the authors on the heads of the hawks just alluded to, as well as on many other of the sculptured animals, suggest the question whether the illustrations given in the Ancient Monuments afford any adequate idea of the beauty and artistic excellence asserted for the carvings, and so whether they are fair objects for criticism. While of course for the purpose of this paper an examination of the originals would have been preferable, yet, in as much as the Smithsonian Institution contains casts which attest the general accuracy of the drawings given, and, as the illustrations by other authors afford no higher idea of their artistic execution, it would seem that any criticism applicable to these illustrations must in the main apply to the originals. With reference to the casts in the Smithsonian collection it may be stated that Dr. Rau, who had abundant opportunity to acquaint himself with the originals while in the possession of Mr. Davis, informs the writer that they accurately represent the carvings, and for purposes of study are practically as good as the originals. The latter are, as is well known, in the Blackmore Museum, England. [Illustration: Fig. 26.--"Rattlesnake," from Squier and Davis.] Without going into further detail the matter may be summed up as follows: Of forty-five of the animal carvings, including a few of clay, which are figured in Squier and Davis's work, eleven are left unnamed by the authors as not being recognizable; nineteen are identified correctly, in a general way, as of a wolf, bear, heron, toad, &c.; sixteen are demonstrably wrongly identified, leaving but five of which the species is correctly given. From this showing it appears that either the above authors' zoological knowledge was faulty in the extreme, or else the mound sculptors' ability in animal carving has been amazingly overestimated. However just the first supposition may be, the last is certainly true. SKILL IN SCULPTURE OF MOUND-BUILDERS. In considering the degree of skill exhibited by the mound sculptors in their delineation of the features and characteristics of animals, it is of the utmost importance to note that the carvings of birds and animals which have evoked the most extravagant expressions of praise as to the exactness with which nature has been copied are uniformly those which, owing to the possession of some unusual or salient characteristic, are exceedingly easy of imitation. The stout body and broad flat tail of the beaver, the characteristic physiognomy of the wild cat and panther, so utterly dissimilar to that of other animals, the tufted head and fish-eating habits of the heron, the raptorial bill and claws of the hawk, the rattle of the rattlesnake, are all features which the rudest skill could scarcely fail to portray. It is by the delineation of these marked and unmistakable features, and not the sculptor's power to express the subtleties of animal characteristics, that enables the identity of a comparatively small number of the carvings to be established. It is true that the contrary has often been asserted, and that almost everything has been claimed for the carvings, in the way of artistic execution, that would be claimed for the best products of modern skill. Squier and Davis in fact go so far in their admiration (Ancient Monuments, p. 272), as to say that, so far as fidelity is concerned, many of them (_i.e._, animal carvings) deserve to rank by the side of the best efforts of the artist naturalists in our own day--a statement which is simply preposterous. So far, in point of fact, is this from being true that an examination of the series of animal sculptures cannot fail to convince any one, who is even tolerably well acquainted with our common birds and animals, that it is simply impossible to recognize specific features in the great majority of them. They were either not intended to be copies of particular species, or, if so intended, the artist's skill was wholly inadequate for his purpose. Some remarks by Dr. Coues, quoted in an article by E. A. Barber on Mound Pipes in the American Naturalist for April, 1882, are so apropos to the subject that they are here reprinted. The paragraph is in response to a request to identify a bird pipe: As is so frequently the probable case in such matters, I am inclined to think the sculptor had no particular bird in mind in executing his rude carving. It is not necessary, or indeed, permissible, to suppose that particular species were intended to be represented. Not unfrequently the likeness of some marked bird is so good as to be unmistakable, but the reverse is oftener the case; and in the present instance I can make no more of the carving than you have done, excepting that if any particular species may have been in the carver's mind, his execution does not suffice for its determination. The views entertained by Dr. Coues as to the resemblances of the carvings will thus be seen to coincide with those expressed above. Another prominent ornithologist, Mr. Ridgway, has also given verbal expression to precisely similar views. So far, therefore, as the carvings themselves afford evidence to the naturalist, their general likeness entirely accords with the supposition that they were not intended to be copies of particular species. Many of the specimens are in fact just about what might be expected when a workman, with crude ideas of art expression, sat down with intent to carve out a bird, for instance, without the desire, even if possessed of the requisite degree of skill, to impress upon the stone the details necessary to make it the likeness of a particular species. GENERALIZATION NOT DESIGNED. While the resemblances of most of the carvings, as indicated above, must be admitted to be of a general and not of a special character, it does not follow that their general type was the result of design. Such an explanation of their general character and resemblances is, indeed, entirely inconsistent with certain well-known facts regarding the mental operations of primitive or semi-civilized man. To the mind of primitive man abstract conceptions of things, while doubtless not entirely wanting, are at best but vaguely defined. The experience of numerous investigators attests how difficult it is, for instance, to obtain from a savage the name of a class of animals in distinction from a particular species of that class. Thus it is easy to obtain the names of the several kinds of bears known to a savage, but his mind obstinately refuses to entertain the idea of a bear genus or class. It is doubtless true that this difficulty is in no small part due simply to the confusion arising from the fact that the savage's method of classification is different from that of his questioner. For, although primitive man actually does classify all concrete things into groups, the classification is of a very crude sort, and has for a basis a very different train of ideas from those upon which modern science is established--a fact which many investigators are prone to overlook. Still there seems to be good ground for believing that the conception of a bird, for instance, in the abstract as distinct from some particular kind or species would never be entertained by a people no further advanced in culture than their various relics prove the Mound-Builders to have been. In his carving, therefore, of a hawk, a bear, a heron, or a fish, it seems highly probable that the mound sculptor had in mind a distinct species, as we understand the term. Hence his failure to reproduce specific features in a recognizable way is to be attributed to the fact that his skill was inadequate to transfer the exact image present in his mind, and not to his intention to carve out a general representative of the avian class. To carry the imitative idea farther and to suggest, as has been done by writers, that the carver of the Mound-Building epoch sat down to his work with the animal or a model of it before him, as does the accurate zoological artist of our own day, is wholly insupported by evidence derivable from the carvings themselves, and is of too imaginative a character to be entertained. By the above remarks as to the lack of specific resemblances in the animal carvings it is not intended to deny that some of them have been executed with a considerable degree of skill and spirit as well as, within certain limitations heretofore expressed, fidelity to nature. Taking them as a whole it can perhaps be asserted that they have been carved with a skill considerably above the general average of attainments in art of our Indian tribes, but not above the best efforts of individual tribes. That they will by no means bear the indiscriminate praise they have received as works of art and as exact imitations of nature may be asserted with all confidence. PROBABLE TOTEMIC ORIGIN. With reference to the origin of these animal sculptures many writers appear inclined to the view that they are purely decorative and ornamental in character, _i.e._, that they are attempts at close imitations of nature in the sense demanded by high art, and that they owe their origin to the artistic instinct alone. But there is much in their general appearance that suggests they may have been totemic in origin, and that whatever of ornamental character they may possess is of secondary importance. With, perhaps, no exceptions, the North American tribes practiced totemism in one or other of its various forms, and, although it by no means follows that all the carving and etchings of birds or animals by these tribes are totems, yet it is undoubtedly true that the totemic idea is traceable in no small majority of their artistic representations, whatever their form. As rather favoring the idea of the totemic meaning of the carvings, it may be pointed out that a considerable number of the recognizable birds and animals are precisely the ones known to have been used as totems by many tribes of Indians. The hawk, heron, woodpecker, crow, beaver, otter, wild cat, squirrel, rattlesnake, and others, have all figured largely in the totemic divisions of our North American Indians. Their sacred nature too would enable us to understand how naturally pipes would be selected as the medium for totemic representations. It is also known to be a custom among Indian tribes for individuals to carve out or etch their totems upon weapons and implements of the more important and highly prized class, and a variety of ideas, superstitious and other, are associated with the usage; as, for instance, in the case of weapons of war or implements of the chase, to impart greater efficiency to them. The etching would also serve as a mark of ownership, especially where property of certain kinds was regarded as belonging to the tribe or gens and not to the individual. Often, indeed, in the latter case the individual used the totem of his gens instead of the symbol or mark for his own name. As a theory to account for the number and character of these animal carvings the totemic theory is perhaps as tenable as any. The origin and significance of the carvings may, however, involve many different and distinct ideas. It is certain that it is a common practice of Indians to endeavor to perpetuate the image of any strange bird or beast, especially when seen away from home, and in order that it may be shown to his friends. As what are deemed the marvellous features of the animal are almost always greatly exaggerated, it is in this way that many of the astonishing productions noticeable in savage art have originated. Among the Esquimaux this habit is very prominent, and many individuals can show etchings or carvings of birds and animals exhibiting the most extraordinary characters, which they stoutly aver and doubtless have come to believe they have actually seen. ANIMAL MOUNDS. As having, for the purposes of the present paper, a close connection with the animal carvings, another class of remains left by the Mound-Builders--the animal mounds--may next engage attention. As in the case of the carvings, the resemblance of particular mounds to the animals whose names they bear is a matter of considerable interest on account of the theories to which they have given rise. The conclusion reached with respect to the carvings that it is safe to rely upon their identification only in the case of animals possessed of striking and unique characters or presenting unusual forms and proportions, applies with far greater force to the animal mounds. Perhaps in none of the latter can specific resemblances be found sufficient for their precise determination. So general are the resemblances of one class that it has been an open question among archæologists whether they were intended to represent the bodies and arms of men, or the bodies and wings of birds. Other forms are sufficiently defined to admit of the statement that they are doubtless intended for animals, but without enabling so much as a reasonable guess to be made as to the kind. Of others again it can be asserted that whatever significance they may have had to the race that built them, to the uninstructed eyes of modern investigators they are meaningless and are as likely to have been intended for inanimate as animate objects. There are many examples among the animal shapes that possess peculiarities affording no hint of animals living or extinct, but which are strongly suggestive of the play of mythologic fancy or of conventional methods of representing totemic ideas. As in the case of the animal carvings, the latter suggestion is perhaps the one that best corresponds with their general character. THE "ELEPHANT" MOUND. By far the most important of the animal mounds, from the nature of the deductions it has given rise to, is the so-called "Elephant Mound," of Wisconsin. By its discovery and description the interesting question was raised as to the contemporaneousness of the Mound-Builder and the mastodon, an interest which is likely to be further enhanced by the more recent bringing to light in Iowa of two pipes carved in the semblance of the same animal, as well as a tablet showing two figures asserted by some archæologists to have been intended for the same animal. Although both the mound and pipes have been referred in turn to the peccary, the tapir, and the armadillo, it is safe to exclude these animals from consideration. It is indeed perhaps more likely that the ancient inhabitants of the Upper Mississippi Valley were autoptically acquainted with the mastodon than with either of the above-named animals, owing to their southern habitat. Referring to the possibility that the mastodon was known to the Mound-Builders, it is impossible to fix with any degree of precision the time of its disappearance from among living animals. Mastodon bones have been exhumed from peat beds in this country at a depth which, so far as is proved by the rate of deposition, implies that the animal may have been alive within five hundred years. The extinction of the mastodon, geologically speaking, was certainly a very recent event, and, as an antiquity of upwards of a thousand or more years has been assigned to some of the mounds, it is entirely within the possibilities that this animal was living at the time these were thrown up, granting even that the time of their erection has been overestimated. It must be admitted, therefore, that there are no inherent absurdities in the belief that the Mound-Builders were acquainted with the mastodon. Granting that they may have been acquainted with the animal, the question arises, what proof is there that they actually were? The answer to this question made by certain archæologists is--the Elephant Mound, of Wisconsin. [Illustration: Fig. 27.--The Elephant Mound, Grant County, Wisconsin.] Recalling the fact that among the animal mounds many nondescript shapes occur which cannot be identified at all, and as many others which have been called after the animals they appear to most nearly resemble, carry out their peculiarities only in the most vague and general way, it is a little difficult to understand the confidence with which this effigy has been asserted to represent the mastodon; for the mound (a copy of which as figured in the Smithsonian Annual Report for 1872 is here given) can by no means be said to closely represent the shape, proportions, and peculiarities of the animal whose name it bears. In fact, it is true of this, as of so many other of the effigies, the identity of which must be guessed, that the resemblance is of the most vague and general kind, the figure simulating the elephant no more closely than any one of a score or more mounds in Wisconsin, except in one important particular, viz, the head has a prolongation or snout-like appendage, which is its chief, in fact its only real, elephantine character. If this appendage is too long for the snout of any other known animal, it is certainly too short for the trunk of a mastodon. Still, so far as this one character goes, it is doubtless true that it is more suggestive of the mastodon than of any other animal. No hint is afforded of tusks, ears, or tail, and were it not for the snout the animal effigy might readily be called a bear, it nearly resembling in its general make-up many of the so-called bear mounds figured by Squier and Davis from this same county in Wisconsin. The latter, too, are of the same gigantic size and proportions. If it can safely be assumed that an animal effigy without tusks, without ears, and without a tail was really intended to represent a mastodon, it would be stretching imagination but a step farther to call all the large-bodied, heavy-limbed animal effigies hitherto named bears, mastodons, attributing the lack of trunks, as well as ears, tusks, and tails, to inattention to slight details on the part of the mound artist. It is true that one bit of good, positive proof is worth many of a negative character. But here the one positive resemblance, the trunk of the supposed elephant, falls far short of an exact imitation, and, as the other features necessary to a good likeness of a mastodon are wholly wanting, is not this an instance where the negative proof should be held sufficient to largely outweigh the positive? In connection with this question the fact should not be overlooked that, among the great number of animal effigies in Wisconsin and elsewhere, this is the only one which even thus remotely suggests the mastodon. As the Mound Builders were in the habit of repeating the same animal form again and again, not only in the same but in widely distant localities, why, if this was really intended for a mastodon, are there no others like it? It cannot be doubted that the size and extraordinary features of this monster among mammals would have prevented it being overlooked by the Mound-Builders when so many animals of inferior interest engaged their attention. The fact that the mound is a nondescript, with no others resembling it, certainly lessens the probability that it was an intentional representation of the mastodon, and increases the likelihood that its slight resemblance was accidental; a slide of earth from the head, for instance, might readily be interpreted by the modern artist as a trunk, and thus the head be made to assume a shape in his sketch not intended by the original maker. As is well known, no task is more difficult for the artist than to transfer to paper an exact copy of such a subject. Especially hard is it for the artist to avoid unconsciously magnifying or toning down peculiarities according to his own conceptions of what was originally intended, when, as is often the case, time and the elements have combined to render shape and outlines obscure. Archæologic treatises are full of warning lessons of this kind, and the interpretations given to ancient works of art by the erring pencil of the modern artist are responsible for many an ingenious theory which the original would never have suggested. It may well be that future investigations will show that the one peculiarity which distinguishes the so-called Elephant Mound from its fellows is really susceptible of a much more commonplace explanation than has hitherto been given it. Even if such explanation be not forthcoming, the "Elephant Mound" of Wisconsin should be supplemented by a very considerable amount of corroborative testimony before being accepted as proof positive of the acquaintance of the Mound-Builders with the mastodon. As regards likeness to the mastodon, the pipes before alluded to, copies of which as given in Barber's articles on Mound Pipes in American Naturalist for April, 1882, Figs. 17 and 18, are here presented, while not entirely above criticism, are much nearer what they have been supposed to be than the mound just mentioned. [Illustration: Fig. 28.--Elephant Pipe, Iowa] [Illustration: Fig. 29.--Elephant Pipe, Iowa.] Of the two, figure 29 is certainly the most natural in appearance, but, if the pipes are intentional imitations of any animal, neither can be regarded as having been intended for any other than the mastodon. Yet, as pointed out by Barber and others, it is certainly surprising that if intended for mastodons no attempt was made to indicate the tusks, which with the trunk constitute the most marked external peculiarities of all the elephant kind. The tusks, too, as affording that most important product in primitive industries, ivory, would naturally be the one peculiarity of all others which the ancient artist would have relied upon to fix the identity of the animal. It is also remarkable that in neither of these pipes is the tail indicated, although a glance at the other sculptures will show that in the full-length figures this member is invariably shown. In respect to these omissions, the pipes from Iowa are strikingly suggestive of the Elephant Mound of Wisconsin, with the peculiarities of which the sculptor, whether ancient or modern, might almost be supposed to have been acquainted. It certainly must be looked upon as a curious coincidence that carvings found at a point so remote from the Elephant Mound, and presumably the work of other hands, should so closely copy the imperfections of that mound. In considering the evidence afforded by these pipes of a knowledge of the mastodon on the part of the Mound-Builders, it should be borne in mind that their authenticity as specimens of the Mound-Builders' art has been called seriously in question. Possibly the fact that the same person was instrumental in bringing to light both the pipes has had largely to do with the suspicion, especially when it was remembered that although explorers have been remarkably active in the same region, it has fallen to the good fortune of no one else to find anything conveying the most distant suggestion of the mastodon. As the manner of discovery of such relics always forms an important part of their history, the following account of the pipes as communicated to Mr. Barber by Mr. W. H. Pratt, president of the Davenport Academy (American Naturalist for April, 1882, pp. 275, 276), is here subjoined: The first elephant pipe, which we obtained (Fig. 17) a little more than a year ago, was found some six years before by an illiterate German farmer named Peter Mare, while planting corn on a farm in the mound region, Louisa County, Iowa. He did not care whether it was elephant or kangaroo; to him it was a curious 'Indian stone,' and nothing more, and he kept it and smoked it. In 1878 he removed to Kansas, and when he left he gave the pipe to his brother-in-law, a farm laborer, who also smoked it. Mr. Gass happened to hear of it, as he is always inquiring about such things, hunted up the man and borrowed the pipe to take photographs and casts from it. He could not buy it. The man said his brother-in-law gave it to him and as it was a curious thing--he wanted to keep it. We were, however, unfortunate, or fortunate, enough to break it; that spoiled it for him and that was his chance to make some money out of it. He could have claimed any amount, and we would, as in duty bound, have raised it for him, but he was satisfied with three or four dollars. During the first week in April, this month, Rev. Ad. Blumer, another German Lutheran minister, now of Genesee, Illinois, having formerly resided in Louisa County, went down there in company with Mr. Gass to open a few mounds, Mr. Blumer being well acquainted there. They carefully explored ten of them, and found nothing but ashes and decayed bones in any, except one. In that one was a layer of red, hard-burned clay, about five feet across and thirteen inches in thickness at the center, which rested upon a bed of ashes one foot in depth in the middle, the ashes resting upon the natural undisturbed clay. In the ashes, near the bottom of the layer, they found a part of a broken carved stone pipe, representing some bird; a very small beautifully formed copper 'axe,' and this last elephant pipe (Fig. 18). This pipe was first discovered by Mr. Blumer, and by him, at our earnest solicitation, turned over to the Academy. It will be seen from the above that the same gentleman was instrumental in bringing to light the two specimens constituting the present supply of elephant pipes. The remarkable archæologic instinct which has guided the finder of these pipes has led him to even more important discoveries. By the aid of his divining rod he has succeeded in unearthing some of the most remarkable inscribed tablets which have thus far rewarded the diligent search of the mound explorer. It is not necessary to speak in detail of these here, or of the various theories to which they have given rise and support, including that of phonetic writing, further than to call attention to the fact that by a curious coincidence one of the tablets contains, among a number of familiar animals, figures which suggest in a rude way the mastodon again, which animal indeed some archæologists have confidently asserted them to be. The resemblance they bear to that animal is, however, by no means as close as exhibited by the pipe carvings; they are therefore not reproduced here. Both figures differ from the pipes in having tails; both lack trunks, and also tusks. Archæologists must certainly deem it unfortunate that outside of the Wisconsin mound the only evidence of the co-existence of the Mound-Builder and the mastodon should reach the scientific world through the agency of one individual. So derived, each succeeding carving of the mastodon, be it more or less accurate, instead of being accepted by archæologists as cumulative evidence tending to establish the genuineness of the sculptured testimony showing that the Mound-Builder and mastodon were coeval, will be viewed with ever increasing suspicion. This part of the subject should not be concluded without allusion to a certain class of evidence, which, although of a negative sort, must be accorded very great weight in considering this much vexed question. It may be asked why if the Mound-Builders and the mastodon were contemporaneous, have no traces of the ivory tusks ever been exhumed from the mounds? No material is so perfectly adapted for the purposes of carving, an art to which we have seen the Mound-Builders were much addicted, as ivory, both from its beauty and the ease with which it is worked, to say nothing of the other manifold uses to which it is put, both by primitive and civilized man. The mastodon affords an abundant supply of this highly prized substance, not a particle of which has ever been exhumed from the mounds either in the shape of implements or carving. Yet the exceedingly close texture of ivory enables it to successfully resist the destroying influences of time for very long periods--very long indeed as compared with certain articles which commonly reward the search of the mound explorer. Among the articles of a perishable nature that have been exhumed from the mounds are large numbers of shell ornaments, which are by no means very durable, as well as the perforated teeth of various animals; sections of deers' horns have also been found, as well as ornaments made of the claws of animals, a still more perishable material. The list also includes the bones of the muskrat and turtle, as of other animals, not only in their natural shape, but carved into the form of implements of small size, as awls, etc. Human bones, too, in abundance, have been exhumed in a sufficiently well preserved state to afford a basis for various theories and speculations. But of the mastodon, with which these dead Mound-Builders are supposed to have been acquainted, not a palpable trace remains. The tale of its existence is told by a single mound in Wisconsin, which the most ardent supporter of the mastodon theory must acknowledge to be far from a facsimile, and two carvings and an inscribed tablet, the three latter the finds of a single explorer. Bearing in mind the many attempts at archæological frauds that recent years have brought to light, archæologists have a right to demand that objects which afford a basis for such important deductions as the coeval life of the Mound-Builder and the mastodon, should be above the slightest suspicion not only in respect to their resemblances, but as regards the circumstances of discovery. If they are not above suspicion, the science of archæology can better afford to wait for further and more certain evidence than to commit itself to theories which may prove stumbling-blocks to truth until that indefinite time when future investigations shall show their illusory nature. THE "ALLIGATOR" MOUND. Although of much less importance than the mastodon, a word may be added as to the so-called alligator mound, more especially because the alligator, owing to its southern habitat, is not likely to have been known to the Mound-Builders of Ohio. That it may have been known to them either through travel or hearsay is of course possible. A copy of the mound from the "Ancient Monuments" is subjoined. The alligator mound was described under this name for no other reason than because it was known in the vicinity as such, this designation having been adopted by Squier and Davis, as they frankly say, "for want of a better," adding "although the figure bears as close a resemblance to the lizard as any other reptile." (Ancient Monuments, p. 99.) In truth it bears a superficial likeness to almost any long-tailed animal which has the power of curling its tail--which, the alligator has not--as, for instance, the opossum. It is, however, the merest guess-work to attempt to confine its resemblances to any particular animal. Nevertheless recent writers have described this as the "alligator mound" without suggesting a word of doubt as to its want of positive resemblance to that saurian. [Illustration: Fig. 30.--"Alligator" Mound.] HUMAN SCULPTURES. The conclusion reached in the foregoing pages that the animal sculptures are not "exact and faithful copies from nature," but are imitations of a general rather than of a special character, such as comport better with the state of art as developed among certain of the Indian tribes than among a people that has achieved any notable advance in culture is important not only in its bearing on the questions previously noticed in this paper, but in its relation to another and highly interesting class of sculptures. If a large proportion of the animal carvings are so lacking in artistic accuracy as to make it possible to identify positively only the few possessing the most strongly marked characters, how much faith is to be placed in the ability of the Mound sculptor to fix in stone the features and expressions of the human countenance, infinitely more difficult subject for portrayal as this confessedly is? That Wilson regards the human sculptures as affording a basis for sound ethnological deductions is evident from the following paragraph, taken from Prehistoric Man, vol. 1, p. 461: Alike from the minute accuracy of many of the sculptures of animals, hereafter referred to, and from the correspondence to well known features of the modern Red Indian suggested by some of the human heads, these miniature portraits may be assumed, with every probability, to include faithful representations of the predominant physical features of the ancient people by whom they were executed. Short, too, accepting the popular idea that they are faithful and recognizable copies from nature, remarks in the North Americans of Antiquity, p. 98, _ibid._, p. 187: There is no reason for believing that the people who wrought stone and clay into perfect effigies of animals have not left us sculptures of their own faces in the images exhumed from the mounds;" and again, "The perfection of the animal representations furnish us the assurance that their sculptures of the human face were equally true to nature. Squier and Davis also appear to have had no doubt whatever of the capabilities of the Mound-Builders in the direction of human portraiture. They are not only able to discern in the sculptured heads niceties of expression sufficient for the discrimination of the sexes, but, as well, to enable them to point out such as are undoubtedly ancient and the work of the Mound-Builders, and those of a more recent origin, the product of the present Indians. Their main criterion of origin is, apparently, that all of fine execution and finish were the work of the Mound sculptors, and those roughly done and "immeasurably inferior to the relics of the mounds," to use their own words, were the handicraft of the tribes found in the country by the whites. Conclusions so derived, it may strike some, are open to criticism, however well suited they may be to meet the necessities of preconceived theories. After discussing in detail the methods of arranging the hair, the paint lines, and tattooing, the features of the human carvings, Squier and Davis arrive at the conclusion that the "physiological characteristics of these heads do not differ essentially from those of the great American family." Of later writers some agree with Squier and Davis in believing the type illustrated by these heads to be Indian; others agree rather with Wilson, who dissents from the view expressed by Squier and Davis, and, in conformity with the predilections visible throughout his work, is of the opinion that the Mound-Builders were of a distinct type from the North American Indian, and that "the majority of sculptured human heads hitherto recovered from their ancient depositories do not reproduce the Indian features." (Wilson's Prehistoric Man, vol. 1, p. 469.) Again, Wilson says that the diversity of type found among the human sculptures "proves that the Mound-Builders were familiar with the American Indian type, but nothing more."--_Ibid._, p. 469. The varying type of physiognomy represented by these heads would better indicate that their resemblances are the result of accident rather than of intention. For the same reason that the sculptured animals of the same species display great differences of form and expression, according to the varying skill of the sculptors or the unexacting demands made by a rude condition of art, so the diversified character of the human faces is to be ascribed, not to the successful perpetuation in stone by a master hand of individual features, but simply to a want of skill on the part of the sculptor. The evidence afforded by the animal sculptures all tends to the conclusion that exact individual portraiture would have been impossible to the mound sculptor had the state of culture he lived in demanded it; the latter is altogether improbable. A glance at the above quotations will show that it is the assumed fidelity to nature of the animal carvings and their fine execution which has been relied upon in support of a similar claim for the human sculptures. As this claim is seen to have but slight basis in fact the main argument for asserting the human sculptures to be faithful representations of physical features, and to embody exact racial characters falls to the ground, and it must be admitted as in the last degree improbable that the art of the mound sculptor was adequate for the task of accurate human portraiture. To base important ethnologic deductions upon the evidence afforded by the human sculptures in the present state of our knowledge concerning them would seem to be utterly unscientific and misleading. Copies of several of the heads as they appear in "Ancient Monuments" (pp. 244-247) are here subjoined to show the various types of physiognomy illustrated by them: [Illustration: Fig. 31. Fig. 32. Fig. 33. Human Carvings from the Mounds.] [Illustration: Fig. 34. Fig. 35. Human Carvings from the Mounds.] Could the many other stone and terra-cotta sculptures of the human face which have been ascribed to the Mound-Builders be reproduced here it would be seen that the specimens illustrated above are among the very best. In not a few, traces of the grotesque are distinctly visible, and there is little in their appearance to suggest that they had a different origin or contain a deeper meaning than similar productions found among present Indians. As each of the many carvings differ more or less from every other, it will at once be perceived that the advocates of different theories can readily find in the series abundant testimony in support of any and all assumptions they may choose to advance. INDIAN AND MOUND-BUILDERS' ART COMPARED. Turning from special illustrations of the artistic skill of the Mound-Builders, brief attention may be paid to their art in its more general features, and as compared with art as found among our Indian tribes. Among some of the latter the artistic instinct, while deriving its characteristic features, as among the Mound-Builders, from animated nature, exhibits a decided tendency towards the production of conventional forms, and often finds expression in creations of the most grotesque and imaginative character. While this is true of some tribes it is by no means true of all, nor is it true of all the art products of even those tribes most given to conventional art. But even were it true in its broadest terms, it is more than doubtful if the significance of the fact has not been greatly overestimated. Some authors indeed seem to discern in the introduction of the grotesque element and the substitution of conventional designs of animals for a more natural portrayal, a difference sufficient to mark, not distinct eras of art culture merely, but different races with very different modes of art expression. To trace the origin of art among primitive peoples, and to note the successive steps by which decorative art grew from its probable origin in the readily recognized adornments of nature and in the mere "accidents of manufacture," as they have been termed, would be not only interesting, but highly instructive. Such a study should afford us a clew to the origin and significance of conventional as contrasted with imitative art. The natural process of the evolution of art would seem to be from the purely imitative to the conventional, the tendency being for artistic expression of a partially or wholly imaginative character to supplant or supplement the imitative form only in obedience to external influences, especially those of a religious or superstitious kind. In this connection it is interesting to note that even among tribes of the Northwest, the Haidahs, for instance, whose carvings or paintings of birds and animals are almost invariably treated in a manner so highly conventional or are so distorted and caricatured as to be nearly or quite unrecognizable, it is still some natural object, as a well known bird or animal, that underlies and gives primary shape to the design. However highly conventionalized or grotesque in appearance such artistic productions may be, evidences of an underlying imitative design may always be detected; proof, seemingly, that the conventional is a later stage of art superimposed upon the more natural by the requirements of mythologic fancies. As it is with any particular example of savage artistic fancy, so is it with the art of certain tribes as a whole. Nor does it seem possible that the growth of the religions or mythologic sentiment has so far preceded or outgrown the development of art as to have had from the first a dominating influence over it, and that the art of such tribes as most strongly show its effect has never had what may be termed its natural phase of development, but has reached the conventional stage without having passed through the intermediate imitative era. It is more natural to suppose, so far, at least as the North American Indians are concerned, that the road to conventionalism has always led through imitation. The argument, therefore, that because a tribe or people is less given than another to conventional methods of art, it therefore must necessarily be in a higher stage of culture, is entitled to much less weight than it has sometimes received. Squier and Davis, for instance, referring to the Mound-Builders, state that "many of these (_i.e._, sculptures) exhibit a close observance of nature such as we could only expect to find among a people considerably advanced in the minor arts, and to which the elaborate and laborious, but usually clumsy and ungraceful, not to say unmeaning, productions of the savage can claim but a slight approach." It is clearly not the intention of the above authors to claim an entire absence of the grotesque method of treatment in specimens of the Mound-Builder's art, since elsewhere they call attention to what appears to be a caricature of the human face, as well as to the disproportionate size of the heads of many of the animal carvings. Not only are the heads of many of the carvings of disproportionate size, which, in instances has the effect of actual distortion, but in not a few of the sculptures nature, instead of being copied, has been trifled with and birds and animals show peculiarities unknown to science and which go far to prove that the Mound-Builders, however else endowed, possessed lively imaginations and no little creative fancy. Decided traces of conventionalism also are to be found in many of the animal carvings, and the method of indicating the wings and feathers of birds, the scales of the serpent, &c., are almost precisely what is to be observed in modern Indian productions of a similar kind. Few and faint as are these tendencies towards caricaturing and conventionalizing as compared with what may be noted in the artistic productions of the Haidahs, Chinooks, and other tribes of the Northwest, they are yet sufficient to show that in these particulars no hard and fast line can be drawn between the art of the Indian and of the Mound-Builder. As showing how narrow is the line that separates the conventional and imitative methods of art, it is of interest to note that among the Esquimaux the two stages of art are found flourishing side by side. In their curious masks, carved into forms the most quaint and grotesque, and in many of their carvings of animals, partaking as they do of a half human, half animal character, we have abundant evidence of what authors have characterized as savage taste in sculpture. But the same tribes execute carvings of animals, as seals, sea-lions, whales, bears, &c., which, though generally wanting in the careful modeling necessary to constitute fine sculpture, and for absolute specific resemblance, are generally recognizable likenesses. Now and then indeed is to be found a carving which is noteworthy for spirited execution and faithful modeling. The best of them are far superior to the best executed carvings from the mounds, and, are much worthier objects for comparison with modern artistic work. As deducible from the above premises it may be observed that, while the state of art among primitive peoples as exemplified by their artistic productions may be a useful index in determining their relative position in the scale of progress, unless used with caution and in connection with other and more reliable standards of measurement it will lead to very erroneous conclusions. If, for instance, skill and ingenuity in the art of carving and etching be accepted as affording a proper idea of a people's progress in general culture, the Esquimaux of Alaska should be placed in the front rank of American tribes, a position needless to say which cannot be accorded them from more general considerations. On the other hand, while the evidences of artistic skill left by the Iroquoian tribes are in no way comparable to the work produced by the Esquimaux, yet the former have usually been assigned a very advanced position as compared with other American tribes. GENERAL CONCLUSIONS. The more important conclusions reached in the foregoing paper may be briefly summed up as follows: That of the carvings from the mounds which can be identified there are no representations of birds or animals not indigenous to the Mississippi Valley. And consequently that the theories of origin for the Mound Builders suggested by the presence in the mounds of carvings of supposed foreign animals are without basis. Second. That a large majority of the carvings, instead of being, as assumed, exact likenesses from nature, possess in reality only the most general resemblance to the birds and animals of the region which they were doubtless intended to represent. Third. That there is no reason for believing that the masks and sculptures of human faces are more correct likenesses than are the animal carvings. Fourth. That the state of art-culture reached by the Mound Builders, as illustrated by their carvings, has been greatly overestimated. INDEX. Animal carvings from mounds of the Mississippi Valley, by H. W. Henshaw, 117 Bat, Carving of the, 144 Birds domesticated by Indians, 138 Buzzard, Range of the, 142 Carvings, Animal, from mounds, 117 "Cherry Bird", Carving of the, 145 Cincinnati tablet, 133 Conch shell, Range of the, 143 Coues, Dr. E., on bird carvings from mounds, 148 Cougar, Range of the, 142 Crow, Carvings of the, 136 Cushing, F. H., on Zuñi fetiches, 145 Dall, W. H., on the conch shell (_Pyrula_), 143 Eagle, Carvings of the, 146 "Elephant mound", 152 pipes, 155 "Grouce," Carving of the, 144 Henshaw, H. W., Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Miss. Valley, 117 Human sculptures, 160 Jaguar, Range of the, 142 Manatee, Sculptures of the, 125 Mound-builders' art _vs._ Indian art, 164 carvings, 117 skill in sculpture, 148 methods in art, 149 Mounds, Animal, 152 Otter, Carvings of the, 125 Owl, Carvings of the, 144 Panther, Range of the, 142 Paroquet, Carving of the, 139 , Range of the, 140 Pipe sculpture of the mounds builders, 124 Pipes, "Elephant", 155,157 _Pyrula perversa_, Range of the, 143 "Rattlesnake," Carving of the, 147 Skill in sculpture of the Mounds Builders, 148 Squirrel, Ground, Carving of the, 128 Totemism, 150 Tropical animals known to Mound Builders, 142 "Turkey" Buzzard, Carving of the, 145 White, C. A., Unios identified by, 129 Wilson on the conch shell (_Pyrula_), 143 carvings of tropical animals, 142 Woodpecker, Carvings of the, 146 
24400	----	None 
11151	----	THE LOST TRAIL BY EDWARD S. ELLIS AUTHOR OF "SETH JONES," "THE FOREST SPY," ETC., ETC. 1911 [Illustration: "THAT INDIAN HAS CARRIED CORA AWAY!"--_Frontispiece_.] CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. The Shadow II. The Adventures of a Night III. The Jug Acquaintances IV. An Ominous Rencounter V. Gone VI. The Lost Trail VII. A Hibernian's Search for the Trail VIII. The Trail of Death IX. The Dead Shot X. Conclusion LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. He held his long rifle in his right hand, while he drew the shrubbery apart with his left, and looked forth at the canoe. "A purty question, ye murtherin haythen!" "Where does yees get the jug?" Dealt the savage a tremendous blow "Well, At-to-uck," said he, kindly, "you seem troubled." The trail was lost! "And so, Teddy, ye're sayin' it war a white man that took away the missionary's wife." "It's all up!" muttered the dying man. "I am wiped out at last, and must go under!" "Harvey Richter--don't you know me?" he gasped. THE LOST TRAIL. CHAPTER I. THE SHADOW. Ye who love the haunts of nature, Love the sunshine of the meadow, Love the shadow of the forest, Love the wind among the branches, And the rain-shower and the snow-storm, And the rushing of great rivers. Listen to these wild traditions.--HIAWATHA. One day in the spring of 1820, a singular occurrence took place on one of the upper tributaries of the Mississippi. The bank, some fifteen or twenty feet in height, descended quite abruptly to the stream's edge. Though both shores were lined with dense forest, this particular portion possessed only several sparse clumps of shrubbery, which seemed like a breathing-space in this sea of verdure--a gate in the magnificent bulwark with which nature girts her streams. This green area commanded a view of several miles, both up and down stream. Had a person been observing this open spot on the afternoon of the day in question, he would have seen a large bowlder suddenly roll from the top of the bank to bound along down the green declivity and fall into the water with a loud splash. This in itself was nothing remarkable, as such things are of frequent occurrence in the great order of things, and the tooth of time easily could have gnawed away the few crumbs of earth that held the stone in poise. Scarcely five minutes had elapsed, however, when a second bowlder rolled downward in a manner precisely similar to its predecessor, and tumbled into the water with a rush that resounded across and across from the forest on either bank. Even this might have occurred in the usual course of things. Stranger events take place every day. The loosening of the first stone could have opened the way for the second, although a suspicious observer might naturally have asked why its fall did not follow more immediately. But, when precisely the same interval had elapsed, and a third stone followed in the track of the others, there could be no question but what human agency was concerned in the matter. It certainly appeared as if there were some _intent_ in all this. In this remote wilderness, no white man or Indian would find the time or inclination for such child's play, unless there was a definite object to be accomplished. And yet, scrutinized from the opposite bank, the lynx-eye of a veteran pioneer would have detected no other sign of the presence of a human being than the occurrences that we have already narrated; but the most inexperienced person would have decided at once upon the hiding-place of him who had given the moving impulse to the bodies. Just at the summit of the bank was a mass of shrubbery of sufficient extent and density to conceal a dozen warriors. And within this, beyond doubt, was one person, at least, concealed; and it was certain, too, that from his hiding-place, he was peering out upon the river. Each bowlder had emerged from this shrubbery, and had not passed through it in its downward course; so that their starting-point may now be considered a settled question. Supposing one to have gazed from this stand-point, what would have been his field of vision? A long stretch of river--a vast, almost interminable extent of forest--a faint, far-off glimpse of a mountain peak projected like a thin cloud against the blue sky, and a solitary eagle that, miles above, was bathing his plumage in the clear atmosphere. Naught else? Close under the opposite shore, considerably lower down than the point to which we first directed our attention, may be descried a dark object. It is a small Indian canoe, in which are seated two white men and a female, all of whom are attired in the garb of civilization. The young man near the stern is of slight mold, clear blue eye, and a prepossessing countenance. He holds a broad ashen paddle in his hand with which to assist his companion, who maintains his proximity to the shore for the purpose of overcoming more deftly the opposition of the current. The second personage is a short but square-shouldered Irishman, with massive breast, arms like the piston-rods of an engine, and a broad, good-natured face. He is one of those beings who may be aptly termed "machines," a patient, plodding, ox-like creature who takes to the most irksome labor as a flail takes to the sheafs on the threshing-floor. Work was his element, and nothing, it would seem, could tire or overcome those indurated muscles and vice-like nerves. The only appellation with which he was ever known to be honored was that of "Teddy." Near the center of the canoe, which was of goodly size and straight, upon a bed of blankets, sat the wife of the young man in the stern. A glance would have dissipated the slightest suspicion of her being anything other than a willing voyager upon the river. There was the kindling eye and glowing cheek, the eager look that flitted hither and yon, and the buoyant feeling manifest in every movement, all of which expressed more of enthusiasm than of willingness merely. Her constant questions to her husband or Teddy, kept up a continual run of conversation, which was now, for the first time, momentarily interrupted by the occurrence to which we have alluded. At the moment we introduce them the young man was holding his paddle stationary and gazing off toward his right, where the splash in the water denoted the fall of the third stone. His face wore an expression of puzzled surprise, mingled with which was a look of displeasure, as if he were "put out" at this manifestation. His eyes were fixed with a keen, searching gaze upon the river-bank, expecting the appearance of something more. Teddy also was resting upon his paddle, and scrutinizing the point in question; but he seemed little affected by what had taken place. His face was as expressionless as one of the bowlders, save the ever-present look of imperturbable good-humor. The young woman seemed more absorbed than either of her companions, in attempting to divine this mystery that had so suddenly come upon them. More than once she raised her hand, as an admonition for Teddy to preserve silence. Finally, however, his impatience got the better of his obedience, and he broke the oppressive stillness. "And what does ye make of it, Miss Cora, or Master Harvey?" he asked, after a few moments, dipping his paddle at the same time in the water. "Arrah, now, has either of ye saan anything more than the same bowlders there?" "No," answered the man, "but we may; keep a bright look-out, Teddy, and let me know what you see." The Irishman inclined his head to one side, and closed one eye as if sighting an invisible gun. Suddenly he exclaimed, with a start: "I see something now, _sure_ as a Bally-ma-gorrah wake." "What is it?" "The sun going down in the west, and tilling us we've no time to shpare in fooling along here." "Teddy, don't you remember day before yesterday when we came out of the Mississippi into this stream, we observed something very similar to this?" "An' what if we did, zur? Does ye mane to say that a rock or two can't git tired of layin' in bed for a thousand years and roll around like a potaty in a garret whin the floor isn't stiddy?" "It struck us as so remarkable that we both concluded it must have been caused _purposely_ by some one." "Me own opinion was, ye remember, that it was a lot of school-boys that had run away from their master, and were indulging themselves in a little shport, or that it was the bears at a shindy, or that it was something else." "Ah! Teddy, there are times when jesting is out of place," said the young wife, reproachfully; "and it seems to me that when we are alone in this vast wilderness, with many and many a long mile between us and a white settlement, we should be grave and thoughtful." "I strives to be so, Miss Cora, but it's harder than paddling this cockle-shell of a canoe up-shtream. My tongue will wag jist as a dog's tail when he can't kape it still." The face of the Irishman wore such a long, woebegone expression, that it brought a smile to the face of his companion. Teddy saw this, and his big, honest blue eyes twinkled with humor as he glanced upward from beneath his hat. "I knows yees _prays_ for me, Misther Harvey and Miss Cora, ivery night and morning of your blessed life, but I'm afeard your prayers will do as little good for Teddy as the s'arch-warrant did for Micky, the praist's boy, who stole the praist's shirt and give it away because it was lou--" "_Look!_" From the very center of the clump of bushes of which we have made mention, came a white puff of smoke, followed immediately by the faint but sharp report of a rifle. The bullet's course could be seen as it skipped over the surface of the water, and finally dropped out of sight. "What do you say, now?" asked the young man. "Isn't that proof that we've attracted attention?" "So it saams; but, little dread need we have of disturbance if they always kaap at such a respictable distance as that. Whisht, now! but don't ye saa those same bushes moving? There's some one passing through them! Mebbe it's a shadow, mebbe it's the divil himself. If so, here goes after the imp!" Catching up his rifle, Teddy discharged it toward the bank, although it was absolutely impossible for his bullet to do more than reach the shore. "That's to show the old gintleman we are ready and ain't frightened, be he the divil himself, or only a few of his children, that ye call the poor Injuns!" "And whoever it is, he is evidently as little frightened as you; that shot was a direct challenge to us." "And it's accepted. Hooray! Now for some Limerick exercise!" Ere he could be prevented, the Irishman had headed his canoe across stream, and was paddling with all his might toward the spot from which the first shot had been fired. "Stop!" commanded his master. "It is fool-hardiness, on a par with your general conduct, thus to run into an undefined danger." Teddy reluctantly changed the course of the boat and said nothing, although his face plainly indicated his disappointment. He had not been mistaken, however, in the supposition that he detected the movements of some person in the shrubbery. Directly after the shot had been fired, the bushes were agitated, and a gaunt, grim-visaged man, in a half-hunter and half-civilized dress, moved a few feet to the right, in a manner which showed that he was indifferent as to whether or not he was observed. He looked forth as if to ascertain the result of his fire. The man was very tall, with a face by no means unhandsome, although it was disfigured by a settled scowl, which better befitted a savage enemy than a white friend. He held his long rifle in his right hand, while he drew the shrubbery apart with his left, and looked forth at the canoe. [Illustration: He held his long rifle in his right hand, while he drew the shrubbery apart with his left, and looked forth at the canoe.] "I knew the distance was too great," he muttered, "but you will hear of me again, Harvey Richter. I've had a dozen chances to pick you off since you and your friends started up-stream, but I don't wish to do _that_. No, no, not that. Fire away; but you can do me no more harm than I can you, at this moment." Allowing the bushes to resume their wonted position, the stranger deliberately reloaded his piece and as deliberately walked away in the wood. In the meantime, the voyagers resumed their journey and were making quite rapid progress up-stream. The sun was already low in the sky, and it was not long before darkness began to envelop wood and stream. At a sign from the young man, the Irishman headed the canoe toward shore. In a few moments they landed, where, if possible, the wood was more dense than usual. Although quite late in the spring, the night was chilly, and they lost no time in kindling a good fire. The travelers appeared to act upon the presumption that there were no such things as enemies in this solitude. Every night they had run their boat in to shore, started a fire, and slept soundly by it until morning, and thus far, strange as it may seem, they had suffered no molestation and had seen no signs of ill-will, if we except the occurrences already related. Through the day, the stalwart arms of Teddy, with occasional assistance from the more delicate yet firm muscles of Harvey, had plied the paddle. No attempt at concealment was made. On several occasions they had landed at the invitation of Indians, and, after smoking, and presenting them with a few trinkets, had departed again, in peace and good-will. Not to delay information upon an important point, we may state that Harvey Richter was a young minister who had recently been appointed missionary to the Indians. The official members of his denomination, while movements were on foot concerning the spiritual welfare of the heathen in other parts of the world, became convinced that the red-men of the American wilds were neglected, and conceding fully the force of the inference drawn thence, young men were induced to offer themselves as laborers in the savage American vineyard. Great latitude was granted in their choice of ground--being allowed an area of thousands upon thousands of square miles over which the red-man roamed in his pristine barbarism. The vineyard was truly vast and the laborers few. While his friends selected stations comparatively but a short distance from the bounds of civilization, Harvey Richter decided to go to the Far Northwest. Away up among the grand old mountains and majestic solitudes, hugging the rills and streams which roll eastward to feed the great continental artery called the Mississippi, he believed lay his true sphere of duty. Could the precious seed be deposited there, if even in a single spot, he was sure its growth would be rapid and certain, and, like the little rills, it might at length become the great, steadily-flowing source of light and life. Harvey Richter had read and studied much regarding the American aborigines. To choose one of the wildest, most untamed tribes for his pupils, was in perfect keeping with his convictions and his character for courage. Hence he selected the present hunting-grounds of the Sioux, in upper Minnesota. Shortly before he started he was married to Cora Brandon, whose devotion to her great Master and to her husband would have carried her through any earthly tribulations. Although she had not urged the resolution which the young minister had taken, yet she gladly gave up a luxurious home and kind friends to bear him company. There was yet another whose devotion to the young missionary was scarcely less than that of the faithful wife. We refer to the Irishman, Teddy, who had been a favorite servant for many years in the family of the Richters. Having fully determined on sharing the fortunes of his young master, it would have grieved his heart very deeply had he been left behind. He received the announcement that he was to be a life-long companion of the young man, with an expression at once significant of his pride and his joy. "Be jabers, but Teddy McFadden is in luck!" And thus it happened that our three friends were ascending one of the tributaries of the upper Mississippi on this balmy day in the spring of 1820. They had been a long time on the journey, but were now nearing its termination. They had learned from the Indians daily encountered, the precise location of the large village, in or near which they had decided to make their home for many and many a year to come. After landing, and before starting his fire, Teddy pulled the canoe up on the bank. It was used as a sort of shelter by their gentler companion, while he and his master slept outside, in close proximity to the camp-fire. They possessed a plentiful supply of game at all times, for this was the Paradise of hunters, and they always landed and shot what was needed. "We must be getting well up to the northward," remarked the young man, as he warmed his hands before the fire. "Don't you notice any difference in the atmosphere, Cora?" "Yes; there is a very perceptible change." "If this illigant fire only keeps up, I'm thinking there'll be a considerable difference afore long. The ways yees be twisting and doubling them hands, as if ye had hold of some delightsome soap, spaaks that yees have already discovered a difference. It is better nor whisky, fire is, in the long run, providin' you don't swaller it--the fire, that is." "Even if swallowed, Teddy, fire is better than whisky, for fire burns only the body, while whisky burns the soul," answered the minister. "Arrah, that it does; for I well remimbers the last swig I took a'most burnt a hole in me shirt, over the bosom, and they say that is where the soul is located." "Ah, Teddy, you are a sad sinner, I fear," laughingly observed Mrs. Richter, at this extravagant allusion. "A _sad_ sinner! Divil a bit of it. I haven't saan the day for twinty year whin I couldn't dance at me grandmother's wake, or couldn't use a shillalah at me father's fourteenth weddin'. Teddy _sad_? Well, that is a--is a--a mistake," and the injured fellow further expressed his feelings by piling on the fuel until he had a fire large enough to have roasted a battalion of prize beeves, had they been spitted before it. Darkness at length fairly settled upon the wood and stream; the gloom around became deep and impressive. The inevitable haunch of venison was roasting before the roaring fire, Teddy watching and attending it with all the skill of an experienced cook. While thus engaged, the missionary and his wife were occupied in tracing the course of the Mississippi and its tributaries upon a pocket map, which was the chief guide in that wilderness of streams and "tributaries." Who could deny the vastness of the field, and the loud call for laborers, when such an immense extent then bore only the name of "Unexplored Region!" And yet, this same headwater territory was teeming with human beings, as rude and uncultivated as the South Sea Islanders. What were the feelings of the faithful couple as their eyes wandered to the left of the map, where these huge letters confronted them, we can only surmise. That they felt that ten thousand self-sacrificing men could be employed in this portion of the country we may well imagine. As the evening meal was not yet ready, the missionary folded the map and fell to musing--musing of the future he had marked out for himself; enjoying the sweet approval of his conscience, higher and purer than any enjoyment of earth. All at once came back the occurrence of the afternoon, which had been absent from his thoughts for the hour past. But, now that it was recalled, it engaged his mind with redoubled force. Could he be assured that it was a red-man who had fired the shot, the most unpleasant apprehension would be dissipated; but a suspicion _would_ haunt him, in spite of himself, that it was not a red-man, but a white, who had thus signified his hostility. The rolling of the stones must have been simply to call his attention, and the rifle-shot was intended for nothing more than to signify that he was an enemy. And who could this enemy be? If a hunter or an adventurer, would he not naturally have looked upon any of his own race, whom he encountered in the wilderness, as his friends, and have hastened to welcome them? What could have been more desirable than to unite with them in a country where whites were so scarce, and almost unknown? Was it not contrary to all reason to suppose that a hermit or misanthrope would have penetrated thus far to avoid his brother man, and would have broken his own solitude by thus betraying his presence? Such and similar were the questions Harvey Richter asked himself again and again, and to all he was able to return an answer. He had decided who this strange being might possibly be. If it was the person suspected, it was one whom he had met more frequently than he wished, and he prayed that he might never encounter him again in this world. The certainty that the man had dogged him to this remote spot in the West; that he had patiently plodded after the travelers for many a day and night; that even the trackless river had not sufficed to place distance between them; that, undoubtedly, like some wild beast in his lair, he had watched Richter and his companions as they sat or slumbered near their camp-fire--these, we may well surmise, served to render the missionary for the moment excessively uncomfortable, and to dull the roseate hues in which he had drawn the future. The termination of this train of thought was the sudden suspicion that this very being was at that moment in close proximity. Unconsciously, Harvey rose to the sitting position and looked around, half expecting to descry the too well remembered figure. "Supper is waiting, and so is our appetites, be the same token in your stomachs that is in mine. How bees it with yourself, Mistress Cora?" The young wife had risen to her feet, and the husband was in the act of doing the same, when the sharp crack of a rifle broke the stillness, and Harvey plainly heard and felt the whiz of the bullet as it passed before his eyes. "To the devil wid yer nonsense!" shouted Teddy, furiously springing forward, and glaring around him in search of the author of the well-nigh fatal shot. Deciding upon the quarter whence it came, he seized his ever-ready rifle, which he had learned to manage with much skill, dashed off at the top of his speed, not heeding the commands of his master, nor the appeals of Mrs. Richter to return. Guided only by his blind rage, it happened, in this instance, that the Irishman proceeded directly toward the spot where the hunter had concealed himself, and came so very near that the latter was compelled to rise to his feet to escape being trampled upon. Teddy caught the outlines of a tall form tearing hurriedly through the wood, as if in terror of being caught, and he bent all his energies toward overtaking him. The gloom of the night, that had now fairly descended, and the peculiar topography of the ground, made it an exceedingly difficult matter for both to keep their feet. The fugitive, catching in some obstruction, was thrown flat upon his face, but quickly recovered himself. Teddy, with a shout of exultation, sprung forward, confident that he had secured their persecutor at last, but the Irishman was caught by the same obstacle and "floored" even more completely than his enemy. "Bad luck to it!" he exclaimed, frantically scrambling to his feet, "but it has knocked me deaf and dumb. I'll have ye, owld haythen, yit, or me name isn't Teddy McFadden, from Limerick downs." Teddy's fall had given the fugitive quite an advantage, and as he was fully as fleet of foot as the Irishman, the latter was unable to regain his lost ground. Still, it wasn't in his nature to give in, and he dashed forward as determinedly as ever. To his unutterable chagrin, however, it was not long before he realized that the footsteps of his enemy were gradually becoming more distant. His rage grew with his adversary's gradual escape, and he would have pursued had he been certain of rushing into destruction itself. All at once he made a second fall, and, instead of recovering, went headlong down into a gully, fully a dozen feet in depth. Teddy, stunned by his heavy fall, lay insensible for some fifteen or twenty minutes. He returned to consciousness with a ringing sensation in his ears, and it was some time before he could recall all the circumstances of his predicament. Gradually the facts dawned upon him, and he listened. Everything was oppressively still. He heard not the voice of his master, and not even the sound of any of the denizens of the wood. His first movement was to feel for his rifle, which he had brought with him in his descent, and which he found close at hand. In the act of rising, he caught the sound of a footstep, and saw, at the same instant, the outlines of a person that he knew at once could be no other than the man whom he had been pursuing. The hunter was about a dozen feet distant, and seemed perfectly aware of the Irishman's presence, for he stood with folded arms, facing his pursuer. The darkness prevented Teddy's discovering anything more than his enemy's outline But this was enough for a shot to do its work. Teddy cautiously brought his rifle to his shoulder, and lifted the hammer. Pointing it at the breast of his adversary, so as to be sure of his aim, he pulled the trigger, but there was no response. The gun either was unloaded, or had been injured by its rough usage. The dull click of the lock reached the ear of the target, who asked, in a low, gruff voice: "Why do _you_ seek me? You and I have no quarrel." "A purty question, ye murtherin' haythen! I'll settle with yees, if yees only come down here like a man. Jist play the wolf and belave me a sheep, and come down here for your supper." [Illustration: "A purty question, ye murtherin haythen!"] "My quarrel is not with you, I tell you, but with your psalm-singing _master_--" "And ain't that _meself_?" interrupted Teddy. "What's mine is his, and what's his is mine, and what's me is both, and what's both is me, barring neither one is my own, but all belong to Master Harvey, and Miss Cora, God bless their souls. Don't talk of quarreling wid _him_ and being friendly to _me_, ye murtherin' spalpeen! Jist come down here a bit, I say, if ye's got a spick of honor in yer rusty shirt." "My ill-will is not toward you, although, I repeat, if you step in my way you may find it a dangerous matter. You think I tried to shoot you, but you are mistaken. Do you suppose I could have come as near and _missed_ without doing so on _purpose_? To-night I could have brought you and your master, or his wife, and sent you all out of the world in a twinkling. I've roamed the woods too long to miscarry at a dozen yards." Teddy began to realize that the man told the truth, yet it cannot be said that his anger was abated, although a strong curiosity mingled with it. "And what's yer raison for acting in that shtyle, to as good a man as iver asked God's blessing on a sunny morning, and who wouldn't tread on one of yer corns, that is, if yer big feet isn't all corns, like a toad's back, as I suspict, from the manner in which ye leaps over the ground." "_He_ knows who I am, and he knows he has given me good cause to remind him of my existence. _He_ can tell you, if he chooses; I shall not. But let yourself and him take warning from what you already know." "And be the same token, let yourself be taking warning. As sure as I'm the ninth son of the seventh mother, I'll--" The hunter was gone! CHAPTER II. THE ADVENTURES OF A NIGHT. The echoing rock, the rushing flood, The cataract's swell, the moaning wood; The undefined and mingled hums-- Voice of the desert never dumb! All these have left within this heart A feeling tongue can ne'er impart; A wildered and unearthly flame, A something that's without a name.--ETTRICK SHEPHERD. With extreme difficulty, Teddy made his way out of the ravine into which purposely he had been led by the hunter. He was full of aches and pains when he attempted to walk, and more than once was compelled to halt to ease his bruised limbs. As he painfully made his way back to the camp he did a vast deal of cogitation. When in extreme pain of body, produced by a mishap intentionally conceived by another, it is but following the natural law of cause and effect to feel a certain degree of exasperation toward the evil-doer; and, as the Irishman at every step experienced a sharp twinge that ofttimes made him cry out, his ejaculations were neither conceived in charity nor uttered in good-will toward all men. Still, he pondered deeply upon what the hunter had said, and was perplexed to know what could possibly be its meaning. The simple nature of the Irishman was unable to fathom the mystery. He could not have believed even had Harvey Richter himself confessed to having perpetrated a crime or a wrong, that the minister had been guilty of anything sufficient to give cause of enmity. The strange hunter whom they had unexpectedly encountered several times, must be some crack-brained adventurer, the victim of a fancied wrong, who, most likely, had mistaken Harvey Richter for another person. What could be the object in firing at the missionary, yet taking pains that no harm should be inflicted? That was another impenetrable mystery; but, let it be comprehensible or not, the wrathful servitor inwardly vowed that, if the man crossed the path of himself or his master again, and the opportunity offered, he should shoot him down as he would a wild animal. In the midst of his absorbing reverie, Teddy suddenly paused and looked around him. He was lost. Shrewd enough to understand that to attempt to extricate himself would only lead into a greater entanglement, from which it might not be possible to escape at all, he wisely concluded to remain where he was until daylight. Gathering a few twigs and leaves, with his well-stored "punk-box" he soon started a small fire, by the light of which he collected a sufficient quantity of fuel to last until morning. Few scenes of nature are more impressive than a forest at night. That low deep roar, born of silence itself--the sad sighing of the wind--the tall, column-like trunks, resembling huge sentinels keeping guard over the mysteries of ages--the silent sea of foliage overhead, that seems to shut in a world of its own--all have an influence, peculiar, irresistible and sublime. The picket upon duty is a prey to many an imaginary danger. The rustling of a leaf, the crackling of a twig, the flitting shadows of the ever-changing clouds, are made to assume the guise of a foe, endeavoring to steal upon him unawares. Again and again Teddy was certain he heard the stealthy tread of the strange hunter, or some prowling Indian, and his heart throbbed violently at the expected encounter. Then, as the sound ceased, a sense of his utter loneliness came over him, and he pined for his old home in the States, which he had so lately left. A tremulous wail, which came faintly through the silence of the boundless woods, reminded him that there were other inhabitants of the solitude besides human beings. At such times, he drew nearer to the fire, as a child would draw near to a friend to shun an imaginary danger. But, finally the drowsy god asserted himself, and the watcher passed off into a deep slumber. His last recollection was a dim consciousness of hearing the tread of something near the camp-fire. But his stupor was so great that he had not the inclination to arouse himself, and with his face buried in the leaves of his bushy couch, he quickly lost cognizance of all things, and floated off into the illimitable realms of sleep--Sleep, the sister of Death. He came out of his heavy slumber from feeling something snuffing and clawing at his shoulder. He was wide awake at once, and all his faculties, even to his anger, were aroused. "Git out, ye owld sarpent!" he shouted, springing to his feet. "Git out, or I'll smash yer head the same as I smashed the assassin's, barring I didn't do it!" The affrighted animal leaped back several yards, as lightly as a shadow. Teddy caught only a glimpse of the beast, but could plainly detect the phosphorescent glitter of his angry eyes, that watched every movement. The Irishman's first proceeding was to replenish the fire. This kept the creature at a safe distance, although he began trotting around and around, as if to seek some unguarded loophole through which to compass the destruction of the man who had thus invaded his dominions. The tread of the animal resembled the rattling of raindrops upon the leaves, while its silence, its gliding motion, convinced the inexperienced Irishman of the brute's exceedingly dangerous character. His rifle was too much injured to be of use and he could therefore only keep his precocious foe at a safe distance by piling on fuel until the camp-fire burned defiantly. There was no more sleep for Teddy that night. He had received too great a shock, and the impending danger was too imminent for him to do any thing but watch, so long as darkness and the animal remained. Several times he thought there was evidence of the presence of another beast, but he failed to discover it, and finally believed he had been mistaken. It was a tiresome and lonely occupation, this incessant watching, and Teddy had recourse to several expedients to while away the weary hours. The first and most natural was that of singing. He trolled forth every song that he could recall to remembrance, and it may be truly said that he awoke echoes in those forest-aisles never before heard there. As in the pauses he heard the volume of sound that seemed quivering and swaying among the tree-trunks, like the confined air in an organ, he was awed into silence. "Whist, ye son of Patrick McFadden; don't ye hear the responses all around ye, as if the spirits were in the organ loft, thinkin' ye a praist and thimselves the choir-boys. I belaves, by me sowl, that ivery tree has got a tongue, for hear how they whispers and mutters. Niver did I hear the likes. No more singin', Teddy my darlint, to sich an audience." He thereupon relapsed into silence, but it was only momentary. He suddenly looked out into the darkness which shrouded the still watchful beast from sight, and exclaimed: "Ye owld shivering assassin, out there, did yees ever hear till how Tom O'Reilly got his wife? Yees never did, eh? Well, then, be aisy now, and I'll give yees the truths of the matter. "Tom was a great, rollicking boy, that had an eye gouged out at the widow Mulloney's wake, and an ugly cut that made his mouth six inches wide: and, before he got the cut, it was as broad as yer own out there. Besides, his hair being of a fire's own red, you may safely say that he was not the most beautiful young man in Limerick, and that there wasn't many gals that were dying of a broken heart for the same Tom. "But Tom thought a mighty sight of the gals and a great deal more of Kitty McGuire, that lived close by the brook as yees come a mile or two out of this side of Limerick. Tom was possessed after that same gal, and it only made him the more determined when he found that Kitty didn't like him at all. He towld the boys he was bound to have her, and any one who said he wasn't would get his head broke. "There was a little orphan girl, whose father had gone to Ameriky and whose mother was dead, that was found one night, years before, in front of old Mrs. McGuire's door. She was about the same age as Kitty, and the owld woman took her out of kindness and brought them up together. She got to be jist as ugly a looking a gal as Tom was a man. Her hair was redder than his, and her face was just that freckled that yees couldn't tell which was the freckle and which was the skin itself. And her nose had a twist, on the ind of it, that made one think it had been made for a corkscrew, or some machine that you bore holes with. "This gal, Molly Mulligan, used to encourage Tom to come to the house, and was always so mighty kind to him that he used to kiss and shpark her by way of compinsating her for her trouble. She used to take this all _very_ well, for she was a great admirer of Tom's, and always spoke his praise. But Tom didn't make much headway with Kitty. It wasn't often that he could saa her, and when he did; she was mighty offish, and was sure to have the owld woman present, like a dumb-waiter, to be sure. She come to tell him at length that she didn't admire his coming, and that he would greatly plaise her if he would make his visits by staying away altogether. The next time Tom went he found the door locked, and, after hammering a half-hour, and being towld there was no admittance, he belaved it was meant as a kind hint that his company was not agreeable. Be yees listening, ye riptile? "Tom might have stood it very well, if another chap hadn't begun calling on Kitty about this time. He used to go airly in the evening, and not come out of the house till after midnight, so that one might belave his visits were welcome. This made Tom feel mighty bad, and so he hid behind the wall and waylaid the chap one night. He would have killed the chap, his timper was so ruffled, if the man hadn't nearly killed him afore he had the chance. He laid all night in the gutter, and was just able to crawl home next day, while the fellow went a-courting the next night, as if nothing had happened. "Tom begun to git melancholy, and his mouth didn't appear quite as broad as usual. Molly Mulligan thought he had taken slow poison and it was gradually working through his system; but he could ate his pick of praties the same as iver. But Tom felt mighty bad; that fact can't be denied, and he went frequently to consult with a praist that lived near this ind of Limerick, and who was knowed to cut up a trick or two during his lifetime. When Tom came out one day looking bright and cheery, iverybody belaved they had been conspiring togither, and had hit on some thavish trick they was to play on little Kitty McGuire. "When the moon was bright, Kitty used to walk to Limerick and back again of an evening. Her beau most likely went with her, but sometimes she preferred to go alone, as she knowed no one would hurt a bonny little gal as herself. Tom knowed of these doings, as in days gone by he had jined her once or twice. So one night he put a white sheet around him as she was coming back from Limerick, and hid under the little bridge over the brook. It was gitting quite late, and the moon was just gone down, so, when she stepped on the bridge, and he came out afore her, she gave one shriek, and like to have fainted intirely. "'Make no noise, or I'll ate ye up alive,' said Tom, trying to talk like a ghost. "'What isht yees want?' she asked, shaking like a leaf, 'and who are yees?' "'I'm a shpirit, come to warn ye of your ill-doings.' "'I know I'm a great sinner,' she cried, covering her face with her hands; 'but I try to do as well as I can.' "'Do you know Tom O'Reilly?' he asked, loud enough to be heard in Limerick. 'You have treated him ill.' "'That I know I have,' she sobbed, 'and how can I do him justice?' "'He loves you.' "'I know he does!' "'He is a shplendid man, and will make a much bitter husband than the spalpeen that ye now looks on with favor.' "'Shall I make him my husband?' "'Yis; if ye wish to save yourself from purgatory. If the other man marries yees, he'll murder yees the same night.' "'Oh!' shrieked the gal, as if she'd go down upon the ground, 'and how shall I save meself?' "'By marrying Tom O'Reilly.' "'Is that the only way?' "'Ay. Does yees consint?' "'I do; I must do poor Tom justice.' "'Will ye marry him this same night?' "'That I will.' "'Tom is hid under this bridge; I'll go down and bring him up, and he'll go to the praist's with yees. Don't ye shtir or I'll ate yees.' "So Tom whisked under the ind of the bridge, slipped off the sheet, all the time kaaping one eye cocked above to saa that Kitty didn't give him the shlip. He then came up and spoke very smilingly to the gal, as though he hadn't seen her afore that night. He didn't think that his voice was jist the same. "Kitty didn't say much, but she walked very quiet by his side, till they came to the praist's house at this ind of Limerick. The owld fellow must have been expecting him, for before he could knock, he opened the door and let him in. The praist didn't wait long, and in five minutes he towld them they were man and wife, and nothing but death could iver make them different. Tom gave a regular yell that made the windys rattle, for he couldn't kaap his faalings down. He then threw his arms around his wife, gave her another hug, and then dropped her like a hot potato. For instead of being Kitty McGuire, it was Molly Mulligan! The owld praist wasn't so bad after all. He had told Kitty and Molly of Tom's plans, and they had fixed the matter atween thim. "Wal, the praist laughed, and Tom looked melancholier than iver; but purty soon he laughed too, and took the praist's advice to make the bist of the bargain. Whisht!" Teddy paused abruptly, for he heard a prolonged but faint halloo. It was, evidently, the call of his master, and indicated the direction of the camp. He replied at once, and without thinking one moment of the prowling brute which might be upon him instantly, he passed beyond the protecting circle of his fire, and dashed off at top of his speed through the woods, and ere long reached the camp-fire of his friends. As he came in, he observed that Mrs. Richter still was asleep beneath the canoe, while her husband stood watching beside her. Teddy had determined to conceal the particulars of the conversation he had held with the officious hunter, but he related the facts of his pursuit and mishap, and of his futile attempt to make his way back to camp. After this, the two seated themselves by the fire, and the missionary was soon asleep. The adventures of the night, however, affected Teddy's nerves too much for him even to doze, and he therefore maintained an unremitting watch until morning. At an early hour, our friends were astir, and at once launched forth upon the river. They noted a broadening of the stream and weakening of the current, and at intervals they came upon long stretches of prairie. The canoe glided closely along, where they could look down into the clear depths of the water, and discover the pebbles glistening upon the bottom. Under a point of land, where the stream made an eddy, they halted, and with their fishing-lines, soon secured a breakfast which the daintiest gourmand might have envied. They were upon the point of landing so as to kindle a fire, when Mr. Richter spoke: "Do you notice that large island in the stream, Cora? Would you not prefer that as a landing-place?" "I think I should." "Teddy, we'll take our morning meal there." The powerful arms of the Irishman sent the frail vessel swiftly over the water, and a moment later its prow touched the velvet shore of the island. Under the skillful manipulations of the young wife, who insisted upon taking charge, their breakfast was quickly prepared, and, one might say, almost as quickly eaten. They had now advanced so far to the northward that all felt an anxiety to reach their destination. Accordingly no time was lost in the ascent of the stream. The exhilarating influence of a clear spring morning in the forest, is impossible to resist. The mirror-like sparkle of the water that sweeps beneath the light canoe, or glitters in the dew-drops upon the ashen blade; the golden blaze of sunshine streaming up in the heavens; the dewy woods, flecked here and there by the blossoms of some wild fruit or flower; the cool air beneath the gigantic arms all a-flutter with the warbling music of birds; all conjoin to inspire a feeling which carries us back to boyhood again--to make us young once more. As Richter sat in the canoe's stern, and drank in the influence of the scene, his heart rose within him, and he could scarcely refrain from shouting. His wife, also, seemed to partake of this buoyancy, for her eyes fairly sparkled as he glanced from side to side. All at once Teddy ceased paddling and pointed to the left shore. Following the direction of his finger, Richter saw, standing upon the bank in full view, the tall, spare figure of the strange hunter. He seemed occupied in watching them, and was as motionless as the tree-trunks behind him--so motionless, indeed, that it required a second scrutiny to prove that it really was not an inanimate object. The intensity of his observation prevented him from observing that Teddy had raised his rifle from the canoe. He caught the click of the lock, however, and spoke in a sharp tone: "Teddy, don't you dare to--" His remaining words were drowned in the sharp crack of the piece. "It's only to frighten him jist, Master Harvey. It'll sarve the good purpose of giving him the idee we ain't afeard, and if he continues his thaiving tricks, he is to be shot at sight, as a shaap-stalin' dog, that he is, to be sure." "You've hit him!" said his master, as he observed the hunter leap into the woods. "Thank the Lord for that, for it was an accident, and he'll l'arn we've rifles as well as himself. It's mighty little harm, howiver, is done him, if he can travel in that gay style." "I am displeased, for your shot might have taken his life, and--but, see yonder, Teddy, what does that mean?" Close under the opposite bank, and several hundred yards above them was discernible a long canoe, in which was seated at least a dozen Indians. They were coming slowly down-stream, and gradually working their way into the center of the river. Teddy surveyed them a moment and said: "That means they're after us. Is it run or fight?" "Neither; they are undoubtedly from the village, and we may as well meet them here as there. What think you, dear wife?" "Let us join them, by all means, at once." All doubts were soon removed, when the canoe was headed directly toward them, and under the propulsion of the many skillful arms, it came like a bird over the surface of the waters. A few rods away its speed was slackened, and, before approaching closer, it made a circuit around the voyageurs' canoe, as if the warriors were anxious to assure themselves there was no decoy or design in this unresisting surrender. Evidently satisfied that it was a _bona fide_ affair, the Indians swept up beside our friends, and one of the warriors, stretching out his hands, said: "Gib guns me--gib guns." "Begorrah, but it would be mighty plaisant to us, if it would be all the same to yees, if ye'd be clever enough to let us retain possission of 'em," said Teddy, hesitating about complying with the demand. "They might do ye some injury, ye know, and besides, I didn't propose to--" "Let them have them," said Richter. The Irishman reluctantly obeyed, and while he passed his rifle over with his left hand, he doubled up his right, shaking it under the savage's nose. "Ye've got me gun, ye old log of walnut, but ye hain't got me fists, begorrah, but, by the powers, ye shall have them some of these fine mornings whin yer eyes want opening." "Teddy, be silent!" sharply commanded the missionary. But the Indians, understanding the significance of the Irishman's gestures, only smiled at them, and the chief who had taken his gun, nodded his head, as much as to say he, too, would enjoy a fisticuff. When the whites were defenseless, one of the savages vaulted lightly into their canoe, and took possession of the paddle. "I'm highly oblaiged to ye," grinned Teddy, "for me arms have been waxin' tired ever sin' I l'arned the Injin way of driving a canoe through the water. When ye gets out o' breath jist ax another red-skin to try his hand, while I boss the job." The canoes were pulled rapidly up-stream. This settled that the whites were being carried to the village which was their original destination. Both Harvey and his wife were rather pleased than otherwise with this, although the missionary would have preferred an interview or conversation in order to make himself and intentions known. He was surprised at the knowledge they displayed of the English language. He overheard words exchanged between them which were as easy to understand as much of Teddy's talk. They must be, therefore, in frequent communication with white men. Their location was so far north that, as Richter plausibly inferred, they were extensive dealers in furs and peltries, which must be disposed of to traders and the agents of the American Fur and Hudson Bay Companies. The Selkirk or Red river settlement also, must be at an easily accessible distance. It may seem strange that it never occurred to the captives that the savages might do them harm. In fact, nothing but violence itself would have convinced the missionary that such was contemplated. He had yielded himself, heart and soul, to his work; he felt an inward conviction that he was to accomplish great good. Trials and sufferings of all imaginable kinds he expected to undergo, but his life was to be spared until the work was accomplished. Of that he never experienced a moment's doubt. Our readers will bear in mind that the period of which we write, although but a little more than forty years since, was when the territory west of the Mississippi was almost entirely unknown. Trappers, hunters and fur-traders in occasional instances, penetrated into the heart of the mighty solitude. Lewis and Clarke had made their expedition to the head-waters of the Columbia, but the result of all these visits, to the civilized world, was much the same as that of the adventurers who have penetrated into the interior of Africa. It was known that on the northwest dwelt the warlike Blackfeet, the implacable foes of every white man. There, also, dwelt other tribes, who seemed resolved that none but their own race should dwell upon that soil. Again, there were others with whom little difficulty was experienced in bartering and trading, to the great profit of the adventurous whites, and the satisfaction of the savages; still, the shrewd traders knew better than to trust to Indian magnanimity or honor. Their reliance under heaven, was their tact in managing the savages, and their own goodly rifles and strong arms. The Sioux were among the latter class, and with them it was destined that the lot of Harvey Richter and his wife should be cast. The Indian village was reached in the course of a couple of hours. It was found to be much larger than Richter could have anticipated. The missionary soon made known his character and wishes. This secured an audience with the leading chief, when Harvey explained his mission, and asked permission for himself and companions to settle among them. With the ludicrous dignity so characteristic of his people, the chief deferred his reply until the following day, at which time he gave consent, his manner being such as to indicate that he was rather unwilling than otherwise. That same afternoon, the missionary collected the dusky children of the forest together and preached to them, as best he could, through the assistance of a rude interpreter. He was listened to respectfully by the majority, among whom were several whom he inferred already had heard the word of life. There were others, however, to whom the ceremony was manifestly distasteful. The hopeful minister felt that his Master had directed him to this spot, and that now his real life-work had begun. CHAPTER III. THE JUG ACQUAINTANCES. With that dull, callous, rooted impudence, Which, dead to shame and every nicer sense, Ne'er blushed, unless, when spreading Vice's snares, He stumbled on some virtue unawares.--CHURCHILL. A YEAR has passed since the events recorded in the preceding pages, and it is summer again. Far up, beside one of those tributaries of the Mississippi, in the western portion of what is now the State of Minnesota, stands a small cabin, such as the early settlers in new countries build for themselves. About a quarter of a mile further up the stream is a large Sioux village, separated from the hut by a stretch of woods through which runs a well-worn footpath. This arrangement the young missionary, Harvey Richter, preferred rather than to dwell in the Indian village. While laboring with all his heart and soul to regulate these degraded people, and while willing to make their troubles and afflictions his own, he still desired a seclusion where his domestic cares and enjoyments were safe from constant interruption. This explains why his cabin had been erected at such a distance from his people. Every day, no matter what might be the weather, the missionary visited the village, and each Sabbath afternoon, when possible, service was held. This was almost invariably attended by the entire population, who now listened attentively to what was uttered, and often sought to follow the counsels uttered by the good man. A year's residence had sufficed to win the respect and confidence of the Indians, and to convince the faithful servant that the seed he had sown was already springing up and bearing fruit. About a mile from the river, in a dense portion of the wood, are seated two persons, in friendly converse. But a glance would be required to reveal that one of these was our old friend Teddy, in the most jovial and communicative of moods. The other, painted and bedaubed until his features were scarcely recognizable, and attired in the gaudy Indian apparel, sufficiently explains his identity. A small jug sitting between them, and which is frequently carried to the mouth of each, may disclose why, on this particular morning, they seemed on such confidential terms. The sad truth was that the greatest drawback to Harvey Richter's ministrations was his own servant Teddy. The Indians could not understand why he who lived constantly with the missionary, should be so careless and reckless, and should remain "without the fold," when the good man exhorted them in such earnest language to become Christians. It was incomprehensible to their minds, and served to fill more than one with a suspicion that all was not what it should be. Harvey had spent many an hour with Teddy, in earnest, prayerful expostulation, but, thus far, to no purpose. For six months after the advent of the missionary and his wife, nothing had been seen or heard of the strange hunter, when, one cold winter's morning, as the former was returning from the village through the path, a rifle was discharged, and the bullet whizzed within an inch or two of his eyes. He might have believed it to be one of the Indians, had he not secured a fair look at the man as he ran away. He said nothing of it to his wife or Teddy, although it occasioned him much trouble and anxiety of mind. A month or two later, when Teddy was hunting in the woods, and had paused a moment for rest, a gun was discharged at him, from a thick mass of undergrowth. Certain that the unknown hunter was at hand, he dashed in as before, determined to bring the transgressor to a personal account. Teddy could hear him fleeing, and saw the agitation of the undergrowth, but did not catch even a glimpse of his game. While prosecuting the search, Teddy suddenly encountered an Indian, staggering along with a jug in his hand. The savage manifested a friendly disposition, and the two were soon seated upon the ground, discussing the fiery contents of the vessel and exchanging vows of eternal friendship. When they separated it was with the understanding that they were to meet again in a couple of days. Both kept the appointment, and since that unlucky day they had encountered quite frequently. Where the Indian obtained the liquor was a mystery, but it was an attraction that never failed to draw Teddy forth into the forest. The effect of alcoholic stimulants upon persons is as various as are their temperaments. The American Indian almost always becomes sullen, vindictive and dangerous. Now and then there is an exception, as was the case with the new-made friend of Teddy. Both were affected in precisely a similar manner; both were jolly. "Begorrah, but yees are a fine owld gintleman, if yer face does look like a paint-jug, and ye isn't able to lay claim to one-half the beauty meself possesses. That ye be," said Teddy, a few moments after they had seated themselves, and before either had been affected by the poisonous liquid. "I loves you!" said the savage, betraying in his manner of speech a remarkable knowledge of the English language. "I think of you when I sleep--I think of you when I open my eyes--I think of you all the time." "Much obleeged; it's meself that thinks and meditates upon your beauty and loving qualities all the time, barring that in which I thinks of something else, which is about all the time--all the same to yer honor." "Loves you very much," repeated the savage; "love Mister Harvey, too, and Miss Harvey." "Then why doesn't ye come to hear him preach, ye rose of the wilderness?" "Don't like preaching." "Did yees ever hear him?" "Neber hear him." "Yer oughter come; and that minds me I've never saan ye around the village, for which I axes yees the raison?" "Me ain't Sioux--don't like 'em." "Whinever yees are discommoded with this jug, p'raps it wouldn't be well for yees to cultivate the acquaintance of any one except meself, for they might be dispoused to relave yees of the article, when yees are well aware it's an aisy matter for us to do that ourselves. Where does yees get the jug?" [Illustration: "Where does yees get the jug?"] "Had him good while." "I know; but the contents I mean. Where is it ye secures the vallyble contents?" "Me get 'em," was the intelligent reply.. "That's what I've been supposing, that yees was gitting more nor your share; so here's to prevint," remarked Teddy, as he inverted the jug above his head. "Now, me butternut friend, what 'bjections have yees to that?" "All right--all be good--like Miss Harvey?" Teddy stared at the savage, as if he failed to take in his question. "Like Miss Harvey--good man's squaw--t'ink she be good woman?" "The loveliest that iver trod the airth--bless her swate soul. She niver has shpoken a cross word to Teddy, for all he's the biggest scamp that iver brought tears to her eyes. If there be any thing that has nigh fotched this ould shiner to his marrowbones it was to see something glistening in her eyes," said the Irishman, as he wiped his own. "God bliss Miss Cora," he added, in the same manner of speech that he had been wont to use before she became a wife. "She might make any man glad to come and live alone in the wilderness wid her. It's meself that ought to be ashamed to come away and l'ave her alone by herself, though I thinks even a wild baste would not harm a hair of her blissid head. If it wasn't for this owld whisky-jug I wouldn't be l'aving her," said Teddy, indignantly. "How be 'lone?--Mister Harvey dere." "No, he isn't, by a jug-full--barring the jug must be well-nigh empty, and the divil save the jug, inny-how; but not until it's impty." "Where Mr. Harvey go, if not in cabin?" asked the savage, betraying a suspicious eagerness that would have been observed by Teddy upon any other occasion. "To the village, that he may preach and hould converse wid 'em. I allers used to stay at home when he's gone, for fear that owld thaif of a hunter might break into the pantry and shtail our wines--that is, if we had any, which we haven't. Blast his sowl--that hunter I mane, an' if iver I cotch him, may I be used for a flail if I don't settle _his_ accounts." "When Mister Harvey go to village?" "Whin he plaises, which is always in the afternoon, whin his dinner has had a fair chance to sittle. Does ye take him for a michanic, who goes to work as soon as he swallows his bread and mate?" said the Irishman, with official dignity. "Why you not stay with squaw?" "That's the raison," replied Teddy, imbibing from the vessel beside him. "But you will plaise not call Miss Cora a _shquaw_ any more. If ye does, it will be at the imminent risk of havin' this jug smashed over yer head, afther the whisky is all gone, which it very soon will be if a plug isn't put into your mouth." "Nice woman--_much_ good." "You may well say that, Mister Copperskin, and say nothing else. And it's a fine man is Mister Harvey, barring he runs me purty close once in a while on the moral quishtion. I'm afeard I shall have to knock under soon. If I could but slay that thaif of a hunter that has been poking around here, I think I could go the Christian aisy; but whin I thinks of _that_ man, I faals like the divil himself. They's no use tryin' to be pious whin _he's_ around; so pass the jug if ye don't mane to fight meself." "He bad man--much bad," said the savage, who had received an account of him from his companion. "I promised Master Harvey not to shoot the villain, excipt it might be to save his life or me own; but I belave if I had the chance, I'd jist conveniently _forgit_ me promise, and let me gun go off by accident. St. Pathrick! _wouldn't_ I like to have a shindy wid the sn'akin, mean, skulkin' assassin!" "Does he want kill you?" "Arrah, be aisy now; isn't it me master he's after, and what's the difference? Barring I would rather it was meself, that I might sittle it gintaaly wid him;" and Teddy, "squaring" himself, began to make threatening motions at the Indian's head. "Bad man--why not like Mr. Harvey?" said the savage, paying no attention to Teddy's demonstrations. "There yees has me. There's something atween 'em, though what it might be none but Mr. Harvey himself knows, less it mought be the misthress, that I don't belave knows a word on it. But what is it yer business, Mr. Mahogany?" "Mebbe Mr. Harvey hurt him some time--do bad with him," added the Indian, betraying an evident interest in the subject. "Begorrah, if yees can't talk better sinse nor that, ye'd bist put a stopper on yer blab. The idaa of me master harming any one is too imposterous to be intertained by a fraa and inlightened people--a fraa and inlightened people, as I used to spell out in the newspapers at home. But whisht! Ye are a savage, as don't know anything about Fourth of July, an' all the other affections of the people." "You dunno what mebbe he done." "Do ye know?" asked Teddy, indignantly. "Nebber know what he do--how me know?" "Thin what does ye mane by talking in that shtyle? I warns ye, there's some things that can't be passed atween us and that is one of 'em. If ye wants to fight, jist you say that again. I'm aching for a shindy anyhow: so now s'pose ye jist say that again." And Teddy began to show unmistakable signs of getting ready. "Sorry--didn't mean--feel bad." "Oh blarney! Why didn't ye stick to it, and jist give me a chance to express meself? But all's right; only, be careful and don't say anything like it again, that's all. Pass along the jug, to wash me timper down, ye know." By this time Teddy's ideas were beginning to be confused, and his manner maudlin. He had imbibed freely, and was paying the consequences. The savage, however, had scarcely taken a swallow, although he had made as if to do so several times. His actions would have led an inexperienced person to think that he was under the influence of liquor; but he was sober, and his conduct was feigned, evidently, for some purpose of his own. Teddy grew boisterous, and insisted on constantly shaking hands and renewing his pledges of eternal friendship to the savage, who received and responded to them in turn. Finally, he squinted toward the westering sun. "I told Mr. Harvey, when I left, I was going to hunt, and if I expects to return to-day, I thinks, Mr. Black Walnut, we should be on our way. The jug is intirely impty, so there is no occasion for us to remain longer." "Dat so--me leave him here." "Now let's shake hands agin afore we rise." The shaking of hands was all an excuse for Teddy to receive assistance in rising to his feet. He balanced himself a moment, and stared around him, with that aimless, blinking stare peculiar to a drunken man. "Me honey, isn't there an airthquake agitatin' this solitude?" he asked, steadying himself against a sapling, "or am I standing on a jug?" "Dunno--mebbe woods shake--feel him a little--earth must be sick," said the savage, feigning an unsteadiness of the head. "Begorrah, but it's ourselves that's the sickest," laughed Teddy, fully sensible of his sad condition. "It'll niver do to return to Master Harvey in _this_ shtyle. There'd be a committee of investigation appointed on the spot, an' I shouldn't pass muster excipt for a whisky-barrel, och hone!" "Little sick--soon be well--then shoot." "I wonder now whether I could howld me gun straight enough to drop a buffler at ten paces. There sits a bird in that tree that is grinning at me. I'll t'ach him bitter manners." The gun was discharged, the bullet passing within a few inches of the head of the Indian, who sprung back with a grunt. "A purty good shot," laughed Teddy; "but it _would_ be rayther tiresome killing game, being I could only hit them as run behind me, and being I can't saa in that direction, I'll give over the idaa; and turn me undivided attention to fishing. Ah, divil a bit of difference is it to the fish, whin a worm is on the right ind, whether a drunken man or a gintleman is at the other." The Indian manifested a readiness to assist every project of the Irishman, and he now advised him to fish by all means, urging that they should proceed to the river at once. But Teddy insisted upon going to a small creek near at hand. The savage strongly demurred, but finally yielded, and the two set out, making their way somewhat after the fashion of a yoke of oxen. Upon reaching the stream, Teddy, instead of pausing upon the bank, continued walking on until he was splashing up to his waist in water. Had it not been for the prompt assistance of the Indian, the poor fellow most probably would have had his earthly career terminated. This incident partially sobered Teddy, and made him ashamed of his condition. He saw the savage was by no means so far gone as himself, and he bewailed his foolishness in unmeasured terms. "Who knows but Master Harvey has gone to the village, and Miss Cora stands in the door this minute, 'xpacting this owld spalpaan?" "No go till arternoon," said the savage. "What time might it be jist now?" "'Tain't noon yit--soon be--bimeby." "It's all the same; I shan't be fit to go home afore night, whin I might bist stay away altogether. And you, Mr. Copperskin, was the maans of gittin' me in this trouble." "_Me_ make you drink him?" asked the savage. "You not ax for jug, eh? You not want him?" "Yes, begorrah, it was me own fault. Whisky is me waikness. Its illigant perfume always sits me wild fur it. Mister Harvey was belaving, whin he brought me here, that I wouldn't be drinking any of the vile stuff, for the good rais'n that I couldn't git none; but, what'll he say now? Niver was I drunker at Donnybrook, and only once, an' that was at me father's fourteenth weddin'." "Don't want more?" "NO!" thundered Teddy. "I hope I may niver see nor taste another drop so long as I live. I here asserts me ancient honor agin, an' I defy the jug, ye spalpeen of a barbarian what knows no better." Teddy's reassertion of dignity was very ludicrous, for a tree had to support him as he spoke; but he evidently was in earnest. "Neber gib it--if don't want it." "They say an Indian never will tell a lie to a friend," said Teddy, dropping his voice as if speaking to himself. "Do you ever lie, Mr. What's-your-name?" "No," replied the savage, thereby uttering an unmitigated falsehood. "You give me your promise, then, that ye'll niver furnish me anither drap?" "Yis." "Give me yer hand." The two shook hands, Teddy's face, despite its vacant expression, lighting up for the time with a look of delight. "Now I'll fish," said Teddy. "P'raps it is best that ye l'ave these parts; not that I intertains inmity or bad-will toward you, but thin ye know----hello! yees are gone already, bees you?" The Indian had departed, and Teddy turned his attention toward securing the bait. In a few moments he had cast the line out in the stream and was sound asleep, in which condition he remained until night set in. CHAPTER IV. AN OMINOUS RENCOUNTER. "I will work him To an exploit now rich in my device, Under the which he shall not choose but fall." The sun passed the meridian, on that summer day in 1821 and Harvey Richter, the young missionary, came to the door of his cabin, intending to set forth upon his walk to the Indian village. It was rather early; the day was pleasant and as his wife followed him, he lingered awhile upon the steps, loth to leave a scene of such holy joy. The year which the two had spent in that wilderness had been one of almost unalloyed happiness. The savages, among whom they had come to labor, had received them more kindly than they deemed it right to anticipate, and had certified their esteem for them in numberless ways. The missionary felt that a blessing was upon his labor. An infant had been given them, and the little fellow brought nothing but gladness and sunlight into the household. Ah! none but a father can tell how precious the blue-eyed image of his mother was to Harvey Richter; none but a mother can realize the yearning affection with which she bent over the sleeping cherub; and but few can enter into the rollicking pride of Teddy over the little stranger. At times, his manifestations were fairly uproarious, and it became necessary to check them, or to send him further into the woods to relieve himself of his exuberant delight. Harvey lingered upon the threshold, gazing dreamily away at the mildly-flowing river, or at the woods, through which for a considerable distance, he could trace the winding path which his own feet had worn. Cora, his wife, stood beside him, looking smilingly down in his face, while her left hand toyed with a stray ringlet that would protrude itself from beneath her husband's cap. "Cora, are you sorry that we came into this wild country?" The smile on her face grew more radiant, as she shook her head without speaking. She was in that pleasant, dreamy state, in which it seems an effort to speak--so much so that she avoided it until compelled to do so by some direct question. "You are perfectly contented--happy, are you?" Again the same smile, as she answered in the affirmative by an inclination of the head. "You would not change it for a residence at home with your own people if you could?" The same sweet denial in pantomime. "Do you not become lonely sometimes, Cora, hundreds of miles away from the scenes of your childhood?" "Have I not my husband and boy?" she asked, half reproachfully, as the tears welled up in her eyes. "Can I ask more?" "I have feared sometimes, when I've been in the village, that perhaps you were lonely and sorrowful, and often I have hurried my footsteps that I might be with you a few moments sooner. When preaching and talking to the Indians, my thoughts would wander away to you and the dear little fellow there. And what husband could prevent them?" said Harvey, impulsively, as he drew his wife to him, and kissed her again and again. "You must think of the labor before you." "There is scarcely a moment of my life in which I don't, but it is impossible to keep you and him from my mind. I am sorry that I am compelled to leave you alone so often. It seems to me that Teddy has acted in a singular manner of late. He is absent every afternoon. He says he goes hunting and yet he rarely, if ever, brings anything back with him." "Yesterday he returned shortly after you left, and acted so oddly, I did not know what to make of him. He appeared very anxious to keep me at a distance, but once he came close enough for me to catch his breath, and if it did not reveal the fumes of liquor then I was never more mistaken in my life." "Impossible! where could he obtain it?" "The question I asked myself and which I could not answer; nevertheless his manner and the evidence of his own breath proved it beyond all doubt to my mind. You have noticed how set he is every afternoon about going away in the woods. Such was not his custom, and I think makes it certain some unusual attraction calls him forth." "What can it all mean?" asked the missionary of himself. "No; it cannot be that he brought any of the stuff with him and concealed it in the boat. It must have been discovered." "Every article that came with us is in this house." "Then some one must furnish him with it, and who now can it be?" "Are there not some of your people who are addicted to the use of liquor?" "Alas! there are too many who cannot withstand the tempter; but I never yet heard of an Indian who knew how to _make_ it. It is only when they visit some of the ports, or the Red river settlement, that they obtain it. Or perhaps a trader may come this way, and bring it with him." "And could not Teddy have obtained his of such a man?" "There has been none here since last autumn, and then those who visited the village had no liquor with them. They always come to the village first so that I could not avoid learning of their presence. Let me see, he has been away since morning?" "Yes; he promised an early return." "He will probably make his appearance in the course of an hour or so. Watch him closely. I will be back sooner to-day, and we shall probe this matter to the bottom. Good-by!" Again he embraced his wife, and then strode rapidly across the Clearing in the direction of the woods. His wife watched his form winding in and out among the trees, until it finally disappeared from view; and then, waiting a few moments longer, as if loth to withdraw her gaze from the spot where she had last seen him, she finally turned within the house to engage in her domestic duties. The thrifty housewife has seldom an idle moment on her hands, and Cora passed hither and thither, performing the numerous little acts that were not much in themselves, but collectively were necessary, if not indispensable, in her household management. Occasionally she paused and bent over her child, that lay sleeping on the bed, and like a fond mother, could not restrain herself from softly touching her lips to its own, although it was at the imminent risk of awaking it. An hour passed. She went to the door and looked out to see whether Teddy was in sight; but the woods were as silent as if they contained no living thing. Far away over the river, nearly opposite the Indian village, she saw two canoes crossing the stream, resembling ordinary-sized water-birds in the distance. These, so in harmony with the lazy, sunshiny afternoon, were all that gave evidence that man had ever invaded this solitude. Cora Richter could but be cheerful, and, as she moved to and fro, she sung a hymn, one that was always her husband's favorite. She sung it unconsciously, from her very blithesomeness of spirits, not knowing she was making music which the birds themselves might have envied. All at once her ear caught the sound of a footstep, and confident that Teddy had come, she turned her face toward the door to greet him. She uttered a slight scream, as she saw, instead of the honest Hibernian, the form of a towering, painted savage, glaring in upon her. Ordinarily such a visitor would have occasioned her no surprise or alarm. In fact, it was rare that a day passed without some Indian visiting the cabin--either to consult with the missionary himself, or merely to rest a few moments. Sometimes several called together, and it often happened that they came while none but the wife was at home. They were always treated kindly, and were respectful and pleased in turn. During the nights in winter, when the storm howled through the forest, a light burned at the missionary's window, and many a savage, who belonged often to a distant tribe, had knocked at the door and secured shelter until morning. Ordinarily we say, then, the visit of an Indian gave the young wife no alarm. But there was something in the appearance of this painted sinewy savage that filled her with dread. There was a treacherous look in his black eyes, and a sinister expression visible in spite of vermilion and ocher, that made her shrink from him, as she would have shrunk from some loathsome monster. As the reader may have surmised, he was no other than Daffodil or Mahogany, who had left Teddy on purpose to visit the cabin, while both the servant and his master were absent. In spite of the precaution used, he had taken more liquor than he intended; and, as a consequence, was just in that reckless state of mind, when he would have hesitated at no deed, however heinous. From a jovial, good-natured Indian, in the company of the Hibernian, he was transformed into a sullen, vindictive savage in the presence of the gentle wife of Harvey Richter. He supported himself against the door and seemed undecided whether to enter or not. The alarm of Cora Richter was so excessive that she endeavored to conceal it. "What do you wish?" she asked. "Where Misser Richter?" "Gone to the village," she replied, bravely resolving that no lie should cross her lips if her life depended upon it. "When come back?" "In an hour or so perhaps." "Where Ted?" "He has gone hunting." "Big lie--he drunk--don't know nothing--lay sleep on ground." "How do you know? Did you see him?" "Me gib him fire-water--much like it--drink good deal--tumble over like tree hain't got root." "Did you ever give it him before?" asked the young wife, her curiosity supplanting her alarm for the moment. "Gib him offin--gib him every day--much like it--drink much." Again the wife's instinctive fear came back to her, and she endeavored to conceal it by a calm, unimpassioned exterior. "Won't you come in and rest yourself until Mr. Richter returns?" "Don't want to see him," replied the savage, sullenly. "Who do you wish to see then?" "You--t'ink much of you." The wife felt as if she would sink to the floor. There was something in the tones of his voice that had alarmed her from the first. She was almost certain this savage intended rudeness, now that he knew the missionary himself was gone. She glanced up at the rifle which was hung above the fireplace. It was charged, and she had learned how to fire it since her marriage. Several times she was on the point of springing up and seizing it and placing herself upon the defensive. Her heart throbbed wildly at the thought, but she finally concluded to resort to such an act only at the last moment. She might still conciliate the Indian by kindness, and after all, perhaps he meditated no harm or rudeness. "Come and sit down then, and talk with me awhile," said she, as pleasantly as it was possible. The savage stumbled forward a few feet, and dropped into a seat, where he glared fully a minute straight into the face of the woman. This was the most trying ordeal of all, especially when she raised her own blue eyes, and addressed him. It seemed impossible to combat the fierce light of those orbs, although she bore their scrutiny like a heroine. He had seated himself near the door, but he was close enough for her to detect the fumes of the liquor he had drank, and she knew a savage was never so dangerous as when in a half-intoxicated condition. "Have you come a long distance?" she asked. "Good ways--live up north." "You are not a Sioux, then?" "No--don't like Sioux--bad people." "Why do you come in their neighborhood--in their country?" "'Cause I want to--_come see you_." "You must come again--" At this juncture, the child in the cradle awoke and began crying. The face of the savage assumed an expression of ferocity, and he said, abruptly: "Stop noise--me tomahawk if don't." As he spoke he laid his hand in a threatening manner upon his tomahawk, and the mother sprung up and lifted the infant in her arms for the purpose of pacifying it. The dreadful threat had almost unnerved her, for she believed the savage would carry it out upon the slightest pretext. But before that tomahawk should reach her child, the mother must be stricken to the earth. She pressed it convulsively to her breast, and it quickly ceased its cries. She waited until it closed its eyes in slumber and then some impulse prompted her to lay it upon the bed, and to place herself between it and the Indian, so that she might be unimpeded in her movements if the savage should attempt harm to her or her offspring. Several moments now passed without the Indian speaking. The interval was occupied by him in looking around the room and examining every portion upon which it was possible to rest his gaze. The survey completed, he once more fixed his scrutiny upon the young wife, and suddenly spoke in his sententious, abrupt manner. "Want sunkin eat." This question was a relief, for it afforded the wife an opportunity of expressing her kindness; but, at the same time, it caused a more rapid beating of her heart, since to procure what was asked, she would be compelled to pass out of the door, and thus not only approach him much more closely than she was willing, but it would be necessary to leave him alone with her infant until her return. She was in a painful dilemma, to decide whether it was best to refuse the visitor's request altogether or to comply with it, trusting to Providence to protect them both. A casual glance at the Indian convinced her that it would be dangerous to thwart his wishes longer; and, with an inward prayer to God, she arose and approached the door. As she passed near him, he moved and she involuntarily quickened her step, until she was outside. The Indian did not follow, and she hurried on her errand. She had gone scarcely a yard, when she heard him walking across the floor, and detected at the same moment, the cry of her infant. Fairly beside herself with terror, she ran back in the house, and saw the savage taking down her husband's rifle. The revulsion of her feelings brought tears to her eyes, and she said: "I wish you would go away, I don't like you." "Kiss me--den I go!" said he, stepping toward her. "Keep away! keep away!" she screamed, retreating to the door and yet fearing to go out. "Kiss me--tomahawk pappoose!" said the savage, placing his hand upon the weapon. The young wife placed her hands over her face and sobbed aloud. She did not hear the cat-like footsteps of the savage, as he approached. His long arm was already stretched forth to clasp her, when the door was darkened, a form leaped into the room, and with the quickness of lightning, dealt the savage a tremendous blow that stretched him limp and lifeless upon the floor. [Illustration: Dealt the savage a tremendous blow.] "Move a limb and I will kill you!" shouted the young missionary, his face all ablaze with passion. "Cora, has he harmed you?" "No, no, no, Harvey; have you not already killed him?" "Pity that I haven't. He is not fit to live." "Dear Harvey, you are carried away by your passion. Do restrain yourself." Woman-like, the only emotion of Cora Richter was that of commiseration for the poor wretch that had been stricken down by the hand of her husband. She saw the blood trickling from his face and knew that he was dreadfully injured. The missionary, too, began to become more calm and collected; and yet, while regretting the occasion, he could but think he had done his simple duty to his insulted wife. Had he been prepared as he entered the door, he would have shot the savage dead in his tracks. Harvey picked up his rifle that lay in the middle of the floor, and approached the prostrate Indian. After pushing and shaking, he gave signs of returning consciousness, and at length arose to his feet. His nose had bled copiously, and one eye was "closed," as if he had been under the manipulation of some pugilist. The wife brought a basin of water, and offered a bandage, while Harvey proffered his assistance. But the Indian, without speaking, motioned them aside, and made his way out the door. On the threshold he paused a moment and looked back--and that look Harvey Richter will remember to his dying day. Both breathed freer when he had gone. They then looked in each other's faces a moment and the wife sunk into her husband's arms. "Did I not do right, Cora?" "Yes; oh, yes; but, Harvey, this will not be the last of it. You have made an enemy of that Indian, and he can never be made a friend." "Such is often the result of doing your simple duty. Let us therefore trust to God and say no more about it. Ah! here comes Teddy." The Irishman at this moment entered the door. He was still under the influence of liquor though he made ludicrous efforts to conceal it. The wife found opportunity to communicate to her husband all that had been told her, before the conversation had progressed far. The peril which she had so narrowly escaped decided the missionary to be severely just with his servant. "Teddy, where have you been?" "Won't that spake for itself?" he replied, holding up a handsome string of fish. "Begorrah, but it was mighty poor luck I had hunting." "I should judge you had discovered something unusual from your strange actions." The face of the Irishman flushed scarlet, and his confusion was distressing. "Teddy," he continued, "I am displeased at the manner in which you have acted for the last week or two. Had it not happened that I left the village sooner than usual to-day, most probably my wife and son would have been killed." The fellow was completely sobered. "What is it ye say, Mister Harvey?" "For several days you have failed to return in the time you promised, so that I have been compelled to leave them alone and unprotected. This afternoon, an Indian came in the house and threatened the life of both my wife and child--" "Where the divil is he?" demanded Teddy, springing up; "I'll brake ivery bone in his body." "He is gone, never to return I trust." "Be the powers! if I could but maat him--" "Do not add falsehood to your conduct. He said that you and he have met constantly and drank liquor together." The expression of blank amazement was so genuine and laughable that the missionary could hardly repress a smile. He felt that his last remark was hardly fair. Teddy finally burst out. "'Twas that owld Mahogany copperskin; but did I iver 'xpact he was up to _sich_ a trick and he would niver have l'aved me a-fishing. Oorah, oorah!" he muttered, gnashing his teeth together. "What a miserable fool I _have_ been. He to come here and insult me mistress after professin' the kindest regards. May I be made to eat rat-tail files for potaties if iver I trust red-skin honor again!" "It strikes me that you and this precious savage had become quite intimate. I suppose in a few weeks longer you would have left us and lived with him altogether." The tears trickled down Teddy's cheeks, and he made answer in a meek, mournful tone: "Plaise forgive me, Mister Harvey, and Miss Cora. Yees both knows I would die for yees, and it was little I dr'amed of a savage iver disecrating this house by an ungentlemanly act. Teddy never'll sarve yees the like agin." "I have no faith in the promises of a man who is intemperate." The Irishman raised his hand to heaven: "May the good Father above strike me dead if I iver swallow another drop! Do yees belave me now. Mister Harvey?" "You must not place the reliance in your own power, Teddy. Ask His assistance and you'll succeed." "I'll do so; but, ye saa, the only mill where I could get the cursed stuff was of this same Indian, and as I politely towld him I'd practice wid me gun on him if he offered me anither drop, and, as I'd pick him off now, after this shine, as quick as I would a sarpent, it ain't likely he'll bother me agin." "I hope not, but I have the same apprehension as Cora that he will return when we least expect him. We must manage so that we are never both away from the house at the same time. It is now getting well along in the afternoon, Teddy; you may prepare your fish for supper." The Irishman obediently moved away, and the young missionary and his wife were left together. CHAPTER V. GONE! Alas, alas, fair Inez, She went away with song, In sounds that sang Farewell, Farewell To her you've loved so long.--HOOD. Alertness or watchfulness is sure to succeed the accomplishment of an enemy's designs. The moment danger is over, then the most vigilant preparations against it are made. The burglar knows better than to visit the same house two nights in succession. He is wise enough to wait until time has lulled the inmates into fancied security. With such an interest at stake as had Harvey Richter, one may well believe that no precaution was neglected which could operate to defeat the designs of the savage whom he had driven in anger from his door. He changed his hour of visitation from the afternoon to the forenoon. Teddy needed no admonition against leaving the house during his absence. He kept watch and ward over the house as if he would atone by vigilance for past shortcomings. The missionary had dwelt long enough among the Indians to gain a pretty accurate estimate of their character. What troubled him most, therefore, was a conviction that the savage's revenge, though delayed for ten years, for want of the convenient opportunity, was sure to be accomplished. He might have gone immediately to the north or east, there to remain with his own tribe until convinced that the moment had come to strike the blow--a blow, which no human influence, no personal danger, no suffering, could persuade him from inflicting upon the offending white man. But there was no certainty even of delay. Did the savage believe the moment to strike propitious, he would be ready for the trial. Even then, he might be skulking in the woods, with his black eyes fixed upon the cabin. It will be perceived, that, did he contemplate the death of either of the parties concerned, he could have compassed it without difficulty. Opportunities offered every day for the fatal bullet to reach its mark; but the _insult_ to the Indian was so great, that he contemplated a far sweeter compensation than death itself. Whatever that might be, time would be sure to develop it, and that, too, at the moment when least expected. This fear became so ever-present and troublesome, that the missionary made it known in the village, where he could command the services of half a hundred warriors. A dozen at once made search through the woods to ascertain whether the savage was concealed anywhere in the vicinity. One of these chanced upon a trail, which, after following some distance, was lost in the river. This, however, he pronounced to be the trail of a _white man_. The suspected Indian evidently, had fled, and no trace was discovered of him. Another source of annoyance was opened to Harvey. Since the shot at Teddy, nothing had occurred to remind them of the existence of the strange hunter, whose mysterious warnings had accompanied their advent into the country. Richter could not believe that the man had left altogether, but regarded his actions with considerable equanimity, as it was apparent that his warning shots were intended rather to frighten than to kill. Harvey never would converse with his wife about this white foe, and had cautioned Teddy not to allude to him in her presence. The missionary had a strong hope that, some day, he would be brought face to face with this stranger, when an explanation would be secured and the annoyance ended. He therefore repeated his warning to the Irishman not to shoot the hunter, unless compelled to do so to save his own life; but rather to use every effort to secure him and bring him to the cabin. About a week after the occurrence narrated, Teddy went fishing, leaving the husband and wife together. He followed the shore of the river about a half-mile downward, when he settled himself by a huge rock that projected a few feet into the water. He had just thrown his line into the stream, when he heard the crackling of bushes behind him, and, turning, saw the hunter walking in a direction parallel with the river, with his head bent, as if in thought. Apparently he was unsuspicious of the presence of any one. Teddy at once sunk down to screen himself as he watched the movements of his old foe, out of all manner of patience with himself that he had left his rifle at home, and possessed only the arms that nature had furnished him. Still, he resolved that the man should be secured, if possible. "Arrah, now, be aisy!" he whispered, "and yees may cotch a fish that didn't nibble at yer bait. Whisht! but do ye _saa_ him? But _isn't_ he a strappin' fellow, to be sure--a raal shark ten foot long, with claws like an alligator!" The hunter walked but a few rods, when he seated himself upon a fallen tree, with his back toward the Irishman. This was the coveted opportunity. "Yees have got the fellow now, Teddy, barring yees haven't got him at all, but that ain't saying ye won't get him. Be aisy now, and don't get excited! Jist be as wise as a rat and as still as a mouse, and ye'll catch the catamount, if he don't catch you, that is." These self-admonitions were much needed, for the fellow was all tremulous with excitement and scarcely able to restrain himself. Waiting a few moments until he could tone down his nerves, he commenced making his way toward his victim. He exercised extreme caution until within a rod, when a twig snapped under his foot. He made ready to spring, for he was certain of being discovered; but, to his surprise, the hunter made no motion at all. He evidently was so absorbed in some matter as to be unconscious of what was passing around. Slowly and stealthily Teddy glided toward the man, until he arose almost to the standing position, not more than a foot distant. Then slowly spreading out his arms, so as to inclose the form of the stalwart woodsman, he brought them together like a vise, giving utterance at the same time to an exultant "whoop." "Yer days of thramping _this_ country, and alarming paceable inhabitants are done wid, Mister Anaconda. So jist kaal over gracefully, say tin Ave Marias, and consider yourself in the hands of Gabriel sint for judgment." All this time Teddy had been straining and hugging at the hunter as if determined to crush him, while he, in turn, had taken it very coolly, and now spoke in his gruff bass voice: "Let go!" "Let go! Well now, that's impudint, ye varlet. As if Teddy McFadden would let go hook and line, bob and sinker, whin he had got hold of a sturgeon. Be aisy now; I'll squaze the gizzard and liver iv ye togither, if ye doesn't yield gracefully." "Let go, I say! Do you hear?". "Yis, I hears, and that is the extint--" Teddy's next sensation was as if a thunderbolt had burst beneath his feet, for he was hurled headlong full half a rod over the head of the hunter. Though considerably bruised, he was not stunned by the fall, and quickly recovered. Scratching his head, he cried: "Begorrah, but yees can't repate _that_ trick!" making a rush toward his antagonist, who stood calmly awaiting his onset. "By heavens, I'll give you something different then!" said the man, as he caught him bodily in his arms, and running to the edge of the river, flung him sprawling into it. The water was deep, and it required considerable struggling to reach the shore. This last prodigious exhibition of strength inspired the Irishman with a sort of respect for the stranger. Teddy had found very few men, even among frontiersmen and Indians, who could compete with him in a hand-to-hand struggle; yet, there was now no question but what he was overmatched, and he could but admire, in a degree, the man who so easily handled his assailant. It was useless to attack the enemy after such a repulse; so he quietly seated himself upon the shore. "Would ye have the kindness, ye assassinating disciple of the crowner's jury, whin yees have jist shown how nately ye can dishpose of a man like meself, to tell me why it was you run so mighty harrd whin I took once before after yees? Why didn't ye pause, and sarve me then jist as ye have done? I'd jist like to know that before we go any further wid _this_ matter." "It wasn't because I feared you!" said the hunter, turning sullenly away, and walking into the wood. "Farewell!" called out Teddy, waving his hand toward him. "Ye're a beauty, and yees have quite taking ways wid ye; but it wouldn't be safe for me to find yees lurking about the cabin, if I had a rifle in me hand. You'd have trouble to fling a bullet off as ye flung me. Be jabers, but _wasn't_ that a nate thing, to be sure. I'll bet a thousand pounds which I niver had, that that fellow could draw the Mississippi up-stream if he was fairly hitched on to it. Ah, Teddy, you ain't much, afther all," he added, looking dolefully at his wet garments. Teddy had been so completely outwitted that he was unwilling any one should know it. So he resolved to continue fishing until his clothes were thoroughly dry, and until he had secured enough fish to repay him for his journey. It was near the middle of the afternoon, and, as he had remained at home until the return of the young missionary from the village, there was nothing to disturb his labor, or sport as it might be called, except darkness itself. During this same afternoon, Harvey Richter and his wife were sitting on a bench in front of their cabin. The day was warm, but, as the bench always was shaded, it was the ordinary resort of the young couple when the weather was sultry. The missionary had been reading, but the volume was laid aside, and he was smilingly watching his wife as she sported with the boy in her lap. The little fellow was in exuberant spirits, and the parents, as a matter of course, were delighted. Finally he betrayed signs of weariness, and in a few moments was asleep in his mother's arms. "I think it was a wise thing, for several reasons--that of changing your hour from the afternoon to the forenoon," said the wife. "Why do you think so?" "We all feel more wearied and less inclination at this time of day for work than we do during the earlier hours. We could then be little together, but now nothing interferes with our afternoon's enjoyment of one another's society." "That is true; but you see the Indians are more likely to be off fishing or hunting during the earlier part of the day. They have willingly conformed, however, to the change." "I think it is more in accordance with your own disposition," smiled the wife, "is it not?" "Yes; I am free to admit that my lazy body inclines to quiet and rest after partaking of a hearty dinner, as I have done to-day." "If we think of rest at this early stage in our lives, how will it be when we become thirty or forty years older?" "I refer only to the temporary rest of the body and mind, such as they must have after periods of labor and excitement. Such rest the youngest as well as the oldest requires. Be careful, Cora, you don't drop the little fellow!" "Never fear," laughed the mother, as the youngster woke and commenced several juvenile antics more interesting to the parents than to any one else: "How lively!" remarked the proud father. "It seems to me I never saw a child at his age as bright and animated." And what father does not hold precisely the same opinion of his young hopeful? "Look!" exclaimed the mother, "some one must be coming to see you." An Indian woman was discernible among the trees, walking along the path at a rapid walk, as if she were greatly hurried. Her head was bent, but now and then she raised it and glanced toward the cabin, showing that that was her destination. Passing from the shadow of the wood into the Clearing, the missionary recognized one of the worst women of the tribe. She had scoffed at his preaching, had openly insulted him, and during the first month or two had manifested a disposition approaching violence. To this Richter only answered by kindness; he used every means to conciliate her good-will, but thus far with indifferent success. Her husband, The-au-o-too, a warrior favorably inclined toward the white man, was thoughtful and attentive; and the good minister wondered that the savage did not restrain these unwomanly demonstrations upon his squaw's part. She approached with rapid step, until she stood directly in front of them. Harvey saw that her countenance was agitated. "Well, At-to-uck," said he, kindly, "you seem troubled. Is there anything I can do for you?" [Illustration: "Well, At-to-uck," said he, kindly, "you seem troubled."] "Me ain't trouble," she answered, using English as well as her very imperfect knowledge would admit. "Me ain't trouble--_me_ ain't." "Who may it be then?" "The-au-o-too--he _much_ trouble. Sick--in woods--die--_berry_ sick." "What do you mean, At-to-uck?" asked the missionary, his interest strongly awakened. "Has anything befallen your husband?" "He fall," she answered, eagerly, catching at the helping word, "he fall--much hurt--die--die--won't got well." "Where is he?" She spun around on one foot, and pointed deeper into the woods. "He dere--lay on back--soon die." "And he wishes me to see him; is that it?" She nodded her head vigorously, but made no answer for a moment. Then she suddenly broke forth: "Send At-to-uck to git good man--hurry--berry hurry--he die--won't live. The-au-o-too say hurry--die soon--won't see good man--Riher." Harvey looked at his wife. "What must I do, Cora? It will not do to leave you, as Teddy may not return for several hours, and yet this poor Indian should be attended in his dying moments." "You should go, Harvey; I will not fear." He turned to the squaw in perplexity. "How far away is The-au-o-too?" "Not much far--soon find--most dead." "It may be," he said in a low tone, "that he can be got to the house, although it would be no easy matter for us two to bring him." "I think your duty calls you to the dying man." "I ought to be there, but I tell you, Cora, I don't like this leaving you alone," said he, impressively. "You know we made up our minds that it should never occur again." "There must be occasions when it cannot be avoided, and this is one of them. By refusing to attend this man, you may not only neglect a great duty, but incur the ill-will of the whole tribe. You know the disposition of this woman." The latter, at this point, began to give evidence of agitation, and to remark in her broken accents that The-au-o-too was dying and would be dead before they could reach him. The missionary, in sore perplexity, looked at his wife. "Go," she said, or rather signified without speaking. "I will," he said, rising with an air of decision. "God grant I may never regret this." "I trust you never will." He kissed the infant, embraced his wife and then signified to the squaw to lead the way. "Keep up a good heart," he added, turning, as he moved away. The wife smilingly nodded her head but said nothing. It did not escape the notice of her husband that there were tears in her eyes, and he half resolved to remain with her after all, but the next moment he moved on. The squaw took the well-beaten track, walking very rapidly and often looking back to see that she was followed. Her strangeness of manner the missionary attributed to her excitement regarding her husband. Several times she exhibited hesitation, and once or twice muttered something that was unintelligible to him. When they were about half-way to the village, she paused. "Well, At-to-uck, what is the matter now?" "Mebbe dead." "Oh, I hope not," he answered, cheerfully. "Do you turn off here?" She answered in the affirmative and asked him to lead the way. "No; I am unacquainted, and you ought certainly to know where to find your dying husband better than I do." She took the duty of guide upon herself again, and advanced but a rod, when she abruptly paused. "Hark! hear groan? Me hear him." Harvey listened intently but heard nothing. Knowing that the hearing of the Indians is marvelously acute, he believed the squaw had heard sounds of distress; but, instead of quickening her steps, she now moved more slowly than ever. "Have you lost your way, At-to-uck?" "No," she answered, in a significant voice. The suspicions of the missionary that had been slumbering were now fully roused. "What do you mean then?" The squaw turned full around and gave a leer which, if possible, made her face more hideous than ever. Without thinking Harvey caught her by the arm and shook her sharply. "Explain this, At-to-uck. What is the meaning of this?" "He-he-e-e-e! _big_ fool. The-au-o-too hunt--_no hurt_!" A sharp reproof arose to the missionary's lips, but deeming it would be lost upon such a person, he merely turned his back upon her and walked away. She called and taunted him, but he was the last man who could have been roused to anger by such means, and he walked, with his arms folded, slowly and deliberately away toward the path. It had not occurred, as yet, to the mind of Richter that anything more than a simple annoyance to himself was contemplated by this proceeding; but, as he resumed his steps homeward, a suspicion flashed upon him which almost checked the beating of his heart. "God save it being so!" was his mental prayer, as he hurried forward. A moment later he was on a full run. The afternoon was well advanced, but he soon caught a glimpse of his cabin through the trees. Before this, however, he had detected the outcries of his infant, which struck him as a favorable omen, and he abated his speed somewhat. But, as he came into the Clearing, his heart gave a great bound, as he saw his child lying upon the ground some distance from the house. His anxiety was so distressing that he dashed by it into the cabin. "Cora, Cora, what is the matter? Where have you concealed yourself? Why this untimely pleasantry?" He came out again, caught up the infant and attempted to soothe it, all the time looking wildly about in the hope of seeing the returning mother. "CORA! CORA!" he again called in agonized tones, but the woods gave back only the hollow echo. For a few moments he was fairly beside himself; but, at the end of that time, he began to reason more calmly. He attempted to persuade himself that she might return, but it was useless; and with a sort of resigned despair, he looked about him for signs of the manner in which she was taken away. The most convincing evidence was not wanting. The ground was trampled and torn, as if there had been a violent struggle; and, inexperienced as were his eyes, he detected the unmistakable impress of a moccasin upon the soft earth, and in the grass. The settle, too, was overturned and the baby lay in the grass as if tossed there by the act of some other arm, than a mother's. CHAPTER VI. THE LOST TRAIL. "'Twas night--the skies were cloudless blue, And all around was hushed and still, Save paddle of the light canoe, And wailing of the whippowill." On that sunny afternoon, the fish in a particular locality of a tributary of the Mississippi did not take the bait very well. The spot to which we refer was that immediately surrounding Teddy, whose patience was well-nigh exhausted. There he sat for several tedious hours, but had secured only two nibbles at his line, neither of which proved to be anything more. "Begorrah, but it must be they'se frightened by meself, when that ould scalliwag give me a fling into the stream. Jabers! _wasn't_ it done nately. Hallo! there's a bite, not bigger, to be sure, than a lady's fut, but a bull-pout it is I know." He instantly arose to his feet, as if he were about to spring in the water, and stood leaning over and scanning the point where his line disappeared in the stream, with an intense interest which the professional angler alone can appreciate. But this, like all others, proved a disappointment, and he soon settled down into his waiting but necessary attitude of rest. "A half-hour more of sunshine, and then these same pants will be the same as if they've niver saan water, barring it's mighty seldom they have or they wouldn't be in this dirty condition. Arrah! what can be the m'aning of that?" Faintly but distinctly through the long stretch of woods came the sound of his name. It was repeated again and again until the Irishman was convinced beyond all possibility of mistake. "What is up now?" he asked of himself as he drew in his line. "That is Mister Harvey's voice sure, and he is calling as though he was in a mighty hurry. Faith, and I must not linger! If anything _should_ happen whin I was away I'd feel wus'n old Boney at Watherloo whin he lost the day an' his crown." The line was soon stowed away, and Teddy made his way at a half-walk and ran in a homeward direction. He had gone about a hundred rods when he paused and listened. Clearer and more distinctly came his name in tones whose earnest entreaty could not be mistaken. Teddy rose on his heels and made reply to the hail, to assure his master, if possible, that he was approaching with all speed. The Irishman's words were yet lingering in his mouth, when another and more terrible sound reached his ears. It was that of a suppressed, half-smothered woman's scream--a sort of gasp of terror. It was so short and so far away that it was impossible to tell its direction. He stopped, his heart beating like a hammer, but he heard no more. "God protect me, but there's something gone wrong at the cabin!" he exclaimed, dashing forward through the wood at a reckless rate. A few moments later it came in view, and he then saw his master walking to and fro, in front of the house, with the child in his arms. His manner and deathly pale face confirmed the forebodings of Teddy's heart. "What's the matter, Mister Harvey? What's the matter?" "_That Indian has carried Cora away_!" was the agonized reply. "Where has the owld divil carried her?" very naturally asked the Hibernian. "I do not know! I do not know! but she has gone, and I fear we shall never see her again alive." "May me owld head be scraped wid a scalping-knife, an' me hands be made into furnace-grates for being away," ejaculated the servant, as the tears streamed down his cheeks. "No, Teddy, you are not in the least to blame, nor is it my fault," impetuously interrupted the missionary. "Till me how it was, Mister Harvey." The husband again became composed and related what is already familiar to the reader. At its close, Teddy dashed into the house and brought out his rifle. "I'll murther that At-to-uck, be me sowl, and then I'll murther that haythen assassinator, an' iverybody that gits in me way. Be the powers of the saints and divils, but I'll murther somebody. May the divil roast me if I--" "Hold!" said the missionary, who by this time was himself again. "The first thing to be attended to is pursuit. We must not lose a second. We can never follow them ourselves through the wood. Hold the child, while I go to the village and get some of the Indians to help us." Teddy took the child that had cried itself asleep, and the missionary started on a full run up the river. When he reached the settlement, it required but a moment to make his errand known. A dozen warriors volunteered at once, for these dozen would have laid down their lives for their faithful instructor. Many of the squaws also gave utterance to dismal howls upon learning what had befallen their pale-faced sister. Had the missionary chosen to tell the part taken by At-to-uck in the affair, it may be reasonably doubted whether her life would have been spared. But he was not the man to do such a thing. Knowing how anxious Teddy would be to participate in the pursuit, he secured the wife of one of the Christian Indians to return with him, and take charge of the boy during their absence. At the time of the missionary's visit, the chief and his principal warriors were absent on an expedition to the north. Although holding little interest himself in the mission of the minister among his people, he would undoubtedly have led a party to the search for the audacious savage who had abducted the respected white woman; and, had he been overtaken, a swift and merciless retribution would have fallen upon the trangressor's head. Harvey Richter deemed it best to take but a few Indians with him. Accordingly he selected five that he knew to be skillful, and with them hurried at once in the direction of his cabin. He saw with a sinking heart, as he returned, that the sun was already low in the horizon, and the woods were becoming dark and gloomy. Teddy was at his post chafing like a confined lion. "This woman, Teddy, will take care of the boy, so that you may join us in the search." "Bliss you for that! It would be the hardest work of me life to stay here when I thought there's a chance of gitting a whack at that thaiving villian. Oh, _if_ I could only git howld of him, I wouldn't l'ave a piece of him big enough to spit on." "I think there's little probability of either of us obtaining a glimpse of him. We must rely upon these Indians to take the trail and follow it to the end." "They're like the hounds in the owld country, barring they go on two legs an' don't stick their noses in the ground, nor howl whin they git on trail. They're mighty handy to have around ye at such a time as this, if they be savages wid only a spark of Christianity in 'em not bigger than a tobaccy pipe." "It will be impossible, I think, for the savage to conceal traces of his flight, and, if there be any chance of coming up with him, these men will surely do so." "But suppose Miss Cora should be tomahawked and--" "Don't mention it," said the missionary, with a shudder. While these words were interchanged, the Indians had employed the time more profitably in solving the meaning of the footsteps upon the ground. A slight whoop announced the trail's discovery, and when the missionary turned, he saw the whole five gliding off in a line through the woods. They went in "Indian file," and resembled a huge serpent making its way with all swiftness toward its prey. Our two friends started at once after them. On reaching the edge of the Clearing Teddy asked, abruptly: "If the haythen comes back to the cabin while we's be gone?" "Impossible! he cannot." "Spowsen he hides his track in that manner, he may take a notion to gobble up the little boy." "He would not dare--" Nevertheless, the remark of his servant alarmed the missionary, and he hesitated. There might be foundation for what had been said. The savage finding the pursuit too close to escape with his prey, might slay her and then return stealthily to the cabin and dispatch the boy. It would not do to leave him alone with the Indian woman. "I can afford little assistance in the hunt, and will remain behind. Hurry on, Teddy, or they will be too far away for you to follow." The Hibernian shot off through the trees, at a rate that soon exhausted him, while Harvey Richter returned within his cabin, there to keep company with his great woe, until the return of the pursuers brought tidings of the lost one. An Indian on the trail is not likely to permit any trivial cause to turn him aside, and the five Sioux made rapid progress so long as the light in the wood allowed them to do so. This, however, was a comparatively short time; and, after progressing fitfully and uncertainly for several hundred yards, they finally drew up to wait until the morrow. The trail, instead of taking the direction of the river, as the pursuers believed it would, ran precisely parallel to it. So long as the savage kept away from the stream--that is, so long as he did not take to a canoe--his trail could be followed with absolute certainty, and he be overtaken beyond doubt. Impeded by an unwilling captive, he could not avoid a rapid gain upon him by his pursuers; and to escape certain capture, he must either abandon his prey or conceal his flight by resorting to the river. It might be, and the pursuers themselves half believed, that the fleeing Indian did not fear a pursuit by any of his own race, in which case he could make a leisurely escape, as the unpracticed white men could not have followed him for a half-mile through the wilderness. If this were really the case, the Sioux were confident of coming up with him before the morrow's sun should go down. The Indians had paused but a few moments, when a great tearing and scrambling was heard, and Teddy came panting upon them. "What be yees waiting for?" he demanded. "Tired out?" "Can't go furder--dark--wait till next day." "I'm sorry that yees didn't stand it bitter. I can go some ways further meself if yees'll be kind enough to show me the trail. But, yees don't pant or blow a bit, so I can't think ye're too much tired." "Too dark--can't see--wait till sun." "Oh, begorrah! I didn't understand ye. The Injin 'l' git a good start on us, won't he though?" "Ain't Injin--_white man_!" "A white man, does ye say, that run off wid Miss Cora?" Two of the Indians replied in the affirmative. Teddy manifested the most unbounded amazement, and for a while, could say nothing. Then he leaped into the air, struck the sides of his shoes with his fingers, and broke forth: "It was that owld hunter, may purgatory take him! Him and that owld Mahogany, what made me drunk--blast his sowl--have been hid around in the woods, waiting for a chance to do harm, and one is so much worse than t'other yees can't tell both from which. Och! if I but had him under the sight of me gun." The spot upon which the Indians and Teddy were standing was but a short distance from the village, and yet, instead of returning to it, they started a small fire and lay down for the night. _They were upon the trail_, and nothing was to turn them aside from it until their work was completed, or it was utterly lost to them. Teddy was more loth than they to turn his face backward, but, under the circumstances, he could not forget the sad, waiting husband at home. So he returned to the cabin, to make him acquainted with the result of their labors thus far. "If the Indian only avoids the river, he may be overtaken, but if he takes to that, I am fearful he can never be found." "Be me sowl, Mr. Harvey, but thim savages says he's not an Injin, but a _white man_, and yees know they cannot be mistook fur they've got eyes like hawks, and sinses sharper than me only needle, which, begorrah, hasn't got a point." "Can it be that Bra--that that hunter has done me this great wrong?" said the missionary, correcting himself so dextrously that his servant failed to observe it. "Has such been the revenge that he has been harboring up for so many years? And he has followed us these hundreds of miles for the purpose of striking the blow!" "The owld haythen assassinator! The bloodthirsty beast, the sneakin' dog, the dirthy jail-bird, the--" "He has not shot either of us when we were at his mercy, for the purpose of lulling us into security, the better to obtain his revenge, and oh, he has succeeded how well!" The strong man, who still sat in the front of his cabin, where he might catch the first sound of returning footsteps, now covered his face, and his whole form heaved with emotion. Teddy began to feel uncomfortable. He arose, walked to and fro, and wiped the tears from his own cheeks. Despite his tears, however, he recognized in the exclamations of his master a reference to some mystery which he had long suspected, but which had never been cleared up. The missionary must have met this strange hunter before this encounter in the wilderness, and his identity, and the cause of his deadly enmity, must, also, be known. Teddy had a great curiosity; but, as his master had repulsed his inquiries upon a previous occasion, he forbore to make any reference to it. He walked backward and forward until the good man's emotion had subsided somewhat, and then he said: "Good Master Harvey, the owld cabin is so lonely wid the form of Miss Cora gone, that it's meself that couldn't very well stay here till morning. So, wid yer leave jist, I'll return to the Injins, so as to be ready to folly the trail bright and early in the mornin'." "And how do you suppose I feel, Teddy?" "God save us! It can be no worse than meself." "I am willing that you should go." The missionary had need, indeed, for the sustaining power which can come only from above. The faithful Indian woman remained with his child through the night, while he, with bare head, and hands griped together, paced backward and forward until the morrow's sun had risen. How he prayed and agonized in spirit during those long, lonely hours, God and himself only know. When the day had fairly dawned, he entered the house, lay down wearily, and slept a "long and troubled sleep." With a heavy heart Teddy made his way back through the woods to where the Indians were congregated. They were seated around the camp-fire engaged in smoking, but did not exchange nor utter a syllable. They all understood each other, and therefore there was no need of talk. The Irishman seated himself beside them, and joined an hour or two in smoking, when they all lay down and slumbered. All with the exception of Teddy, who could not sleep. He rolled hither and thither, drew deep sighs, and took new positions, but it availed nothing. The events of the past day had driven sleep far from his eyelids, and he soon gave over the effort altogether. Rising to a sitting position, he scratched his head (which was significant only of abstraction of thought), and gazed meditatively into the smoldering embers. While seated thus, an idea suddenly came to him which brought him instantly to his feet. The fact that it had not occurred to the Indians he attributed to their inferior shrewdness and sagacity. He recalled that the abduction of the young wife took place quite late in the afternoon; and, as she must be an unwilling captive of course, she would know enough to hinder the progress of the man so as to afford her friends a chance to overtake them. Such being the case, the hunter would find himself compelled to encamp for the night, and therefore he could be but a short distance away. The more the Irishman reflected, the more he became convinced that his view was right; and, we may state, that for once, at least, his supposition had a foundation to stand upon. The matter, as has been evident from the first to the reader, rested entirely upon the impossibility of following the trail at night. Thus far it had maintained its direction parallel with the river, and he deduced that it must continue to do so. Such being the case, the man could be reached as well during the darkness as daylight. Teddy concluded not to awaken the savages, as they would hardly coincide with him. So he cautiously rose to his feet, and walking around them, made off in the darkness. He was prudent enough to obtain an idea of the general direction before starting, so as to prevent himself going astray; after which he pressed the pursuit with all possible speed. At intervals he paused and listened, but it seemed as if everything excepting himself was asleep. He heard no sound of animal or man: He kept his eyes flitting hither and thither, for he had hopes of chancing upon the camp-fire of the abductor. It is always a difficult matter to keep one's "reckoning" in the woods. If they be of any extent, it requires extraordinary precautions upon the part of an inexperienced person to prevent himself from being lost. Should he endeavor to travel by night, it would be almost a miracle indeed if he could save himself from going totally astray. Teddy had every disadvantage to contend against, and he had not journeyed a half-hour, when his idea of his own position was just the opposite of truth. As he had not yet become aware of it, however, it perhaps was just as well as if he had committed no error. He was pressing forward, with that peculiar impelling feeling that it was only necessary to do so ultimately to reach his destination, when a star-like glimmer caught his eye. Teddy stopped short, and his heart gave a great bound, for he believed the all-important opportunity had now come. He scanned the light narrowly, but it was only a flickering point, such as a lantern would give at a great distance at night. The light alone was visible, but no flame. It was impossible to form any correct idea of its location, although, from the fact that the nature of the wood must prevent the rays penetrating very far, he was pretty certain it was comparatively close at hand. With this belief he commenced making his way toward it, his movements certifying his consciousness that a mis-step would prove fatal. To his dismay, however, he had advanced but a dozen steps or so when the light disappeared, and he found it impossible to recover it. He moved from side to side, forward and backward, but it availed nothing, and he was about to conclude it had been extinguished, when he retreated to his starting-point and detected it at once. Keeping his eye fixed upon it, he now walked slowly, but at the same point as before it disappeared. This, he saw, must arise from some limb, or branch or tree interfering, and it only remained for him to continue advancing in the same line. Having proceeded a hundred rods or so, he began to wonder that he still failed to discover it. Thinking he might be mistaken in the distance, he went forward until he was sure he had passed far beyond it, when he turned and looked behind him. Nothing but the dim figures of the tree-trunks rewarded his gaze. Fully a half-hour was spent in wandering to and fro in the further efforts to locate the light that had caught his eye, and he finally sought to obtain his first stand-point. Whether he succeeded or not Teddy never could tell, but he never saw nor learned anything more regarding the camp-fire to which he was confident that he had been in such close proximity. About this time, which was in the neighborhood of midnight, Teddy made the discovery that he was lost, and, like a sensible person, gave up all efforts to right himself. He was so wearied that he did not awake until daylight, when he was aroused by the five Indians, whose trail-hunt led them to the spot where he lay sleeping. The trail was now followed rapidly for a half-mile when, as the pursuers had feared all along, it made a sudden bend to the river, upon the banks of which it was totally lost. Not to be baffled in this manner, a canoe was produced with which three crossed the river. The entire day was spent by these upon one bank, while the two other Indians and Teddy pursued the search for traces of the hunter's landing upon their own side of the stream. Not the slightest evidence was discovered that he had touched shore after embarking. The man had escaped, and even the eagle-eyed Sioux were compelled on the second night to return to their village with the sad announcement that the TRAIL WAS LOST! [Illustration: THE TRAIL WAS LOST.] CHAPTER VII. A HIBERNIAN'S SEARCH FOR THE TRAIL. "Oh I let me only breathe the air, The blessed air that's breathed by thee; And, whether on its wings it bear Healing or death, 'tis sweet to me." At the close of a windy, blustering day in 1821, two men were seated by a camp-fire in the depths of the wilderness of the northwest. The wind howled through the branches with a moaning sound such as often heralds the approach of bitter cold weather; and a few feathery flakes of snow that sailed along on the wind, proved that the season of storms was close at hand. The fire was built down deep in a sort of gorge, where its cheery, crackling blaze could not be seen by any one until he was nearly upon it. The men sat with their pipes in their mouths, their rifles beside them and their feet toward the fire. From appearances they were on the best of terms. One of them needs no introduction, as he is our old friend Teddy, who evidently feels at home in his new situation. The other is a man of much the same build although somewhat older. His face, where it is not concealed by a heavy, grizzly beard, is covered by numerous scars, and the border of one eye is disfigured from the same cause. His dress and accouterments betray the hunter and trapper. "And so, Teddy, ye're sayin' it war a white man that took away the missionary's wife, and hain't been heard on since. Let me see, you said it war nigh onto three months ago, warn't it?" [Illustration: "And so, Teddy, ye're sayin' it war a white man that took away the missionary's wife."] "Three months, come day after to-morrow. Begorrah, but it's not I that'll forgit that same date to my dying day, if, indade, I forgit it at all, at all, even whin somebody else will be wearin' me clothes." "It was a dirty trick, freeze me if it wasn't; but you can _allers_ find a white man to do a mean trick, when you can't a copperskin; _that_ you may set down as a p'inted fact, Teddy." "I belaves ye, Mister Tim. An Indian is a poor mean thing at the bist, an' their squaws--kah! they are the dirtiest beasts that iver jabbered human lingo; an' their babies, I raaly belaves, is caught with a hook an' line in the muddy creeks where the catfish breed; but, fur all that, I don't think they could have been equal to this piece of wickedness. May the divil git howld of his soul. Blazes, but won't there be a big squeal in purgatory when the divil gits howld of him!" And Teddy seemed to contemplate the imaginary scene in Hades with a sense of intense satisfaction. "But it's powerful strange you could never git on the trail. I don't boast of my own powers, but I'll lay if I'd been in the neighborhood, I'd 've found it and stuck to it like a bloodhound, till I'd 've throttled that thievin' wretch." "The Sioux spent the bitter part of the day in the s'arch, an' meself an' siveral other savages has been looking iver since, and none of us have got so much as a scint of his shoe, bad luck to him." "But, Teddy, what made him do it?" asked the trapper, turning his keen, searching eyes full upon him. "There's where I can't answer yees." "There be some men, I allow, so infarnal mean they'll do a mean thing just 'cause they _like_ to do it, and it might be he's one of them." "It's meself that belaves he howlds some spite agin Mister Harvey for something done in years agone, and has taken this means of revinging himself upon the good man, as I am sure niver did one of his fellow-creatures any harm." "It may be there's been ill-blood a long time atween 'em, but the missionary couldn't a done nothin' to give the rapscallion cause to run off with his wife, 'less he'd run off with this hunter's old woman before, and the hunter was paying him for it." "Git out wid yer nonsense!" said Teddy, impatiently. "It couldn't been a great deal, or if it was, it couldn't been done purposely, for I've growed up wid Mister Harvey, and knowed him ever since he was knee high to a duck, and he was _always_ a boy that did more praying than fighting. The idea of _his_ harming anyone, is _pre-pos-te-trous._ After the haythen had fired at us, the good man actilly made me promise not to do the wretch hurt if the chance was given me; and a mighty foolish thing, for all it was Master Harvey who towld me, fur I've had a chance or two at the spalpaan since. Oh blissed Virgin, why _didn't_ I cut his wizzen for him whin I could have done it--that is, if I could!" "And you've been huntin' 'im these three or four months be you?" "The same, yer honor, huntin' constantly, niver losing a day rain or shine, wid Indians an' widout 'em, cold, hungry and tired, but not a day of rist." "Freeze me then, if you haven't got _grit_. Thar ain't many that would track through the woods that ar long. And ye haven't caught a glimpse of the gal nor heard nothin' of her?" "Not a thing yet; but it's meself that 'xpacts to ivery day." "In course, or ye wouldn' keep at the business. But s'pose, my friend, you go on this way for a year more--what then?" "As long as I can thravel over the airth and Miss Cora isn't found, me faat shall niver find rest." The trapper indulged in an incredulous smile. "You'd be doing the same, Tim, if yees had iver laid eyes on Miss Cora or had iver heard her speak," said Teddy, as his eyes filled with tears. "God bliss her! she was worth a thousand such lives as mine--" "Don't say nothin'" interrupted the trapper, endeavoring to conceal his agitation; "I've l'arned years ago what that business is. The copperskins robbed me of a prize I'll never git agin, long afore you'd ever seen one of the infarnal beings." "Was she a swateheart?" "Never mind--never mind; it'll do no good to speak of it now. She's _gone_--that's enough." "How do you know she can't be got agin, whin--" "She was tomahawked afore my eyes--ain't that enough?" demanded the trapper, indignantly. "I axes pardon, but I was under the impression they had run away with her as they did with Miss Cora." "Hang 'em, no! If they'd have done that I'd have chased 'em to the Pacific ocean and back agin afore I'd give 'em up." "And that's what meself intends to do regarding Miss Cora." "Yer see, yer don't know much about red-skins and their devilments, and therefore, it's my private opine, instead of getting the gal, they'll git you, and there'll be the end on't." "Tim, couldn't yees make the s'arch wid me?" asked Teddy, in a deeply earnest voice. The trapper shook his head. "Like to do't, but can't. It's time I was up to the beaver runs this night and had my traps set. Yer see I'm _compelled_ to be in St. Louey at the end of six months and hain't got a day to spare." "Mister Harvey has money, or, if he hasn't, he has friends in St. Louis, be the same token, that has abundance of it, and you'd find it paid you bitter in the ind than catching poor, innocent beavers, that niver did yees harm." "I don't foller sich business for money, but I've agreed to be in St. Louey at the time I was tellin' you, and it's allers a p'int of honor with me to keep my agreements." "Couldn't yees be doing that, and this same thing, too?" "Can't do't. S'pose I should git on the trail that is lost, can yer tell me how fur I'd have to foller it? Yer see I've been in that business afore, and know what it is. Me and three others once chased a band of Blackfeet, that had carried off an old man, till we could see the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, and git a taste of the breath of wind that comes down from their ice and snow in middle summer." "Didn't yees pursue the subjact any further?" "We went fur enough to find that the nimble-footed dogs had got into the mountains, and that if we wanted to keep our ha'r, we'd only got to undertake to foller 'em thar. So we just tramped back agin, havin' our trouble for nothin'." "Wasn't that about as poor a business, for yees, as this be for me, barring yees was hunting for an old man and I'm hunting for a young woman?" "It warn't as foolish by a long shot, 'cause we _war on the trail_ all the time, and kept it, while you've lost yours, and never'll be able to find it agin. We war so close more nor once that we reached their camp-fires afore the embers had died out and from the tops of two, three hills we got a glimpse on 'em on thar horses. We traveled all night a good many times, but it done no good as they done the same thing, and we found we war further away, if anything, next morning than we war at sundown. If we'd ever lost the trail so as not to find it we'd guv up and come home, but we never done that nor never lost more nor an hour in lookin' for it. You see," added the trapper, impressively, "you never have found the trail, and, therefore, there ain't the shadder of a chance." "Begorrah, yees can't blame us whin we tried to the bist of our indeavor to find it and wasn't able." "Yer done the best yer knowed, I s'pose; but why didn't four on 'em divide so as to let one go up one side the river and one t'other, and the same way down-stream. Yer don't s'pose that feller was able to keep paddlin' forever in the river, do yer? and jist so soon as he landed, jist so sure would one of them Sioux find the spot where he touched land, and foller him to his hole." "Begorrah, if wees had only thought of that!" "A Sioux is as cunning a red-skin as I ever found, and it's jist my opine every one of 'em _did_ think of that same thing, but they didn't try it for fear they might catch the varmint! They knew their man, rest assured o' that." Teddy looked up as if he did not comprehend the meaning of the last remark. "'Cordin' to yer own showin', one of them infarnal copper-gals was at the bottom of the hull business, and it's like as not the men knowed about it, too, and didn't _want_ to catch the gal!" "There's where yees are mightily mistook, as Pat McGuire said whin his landlord called him honest, for ivery one of them same chocolate-colored gintlemen would have done their bist for Master Harvey. They would have cut that thaif's wizzen wid a mighty good will, I knows." "Mebbe so, but I don't believe it!" said the hunter, with an incredulous shake of his head. "Would ye have me give up the s'arch altogether?" "Can't say that I would; howsumever, the chance is small, and ye'd better go west with me, and spend the winter in l'arning how to trap fur beaver and otter." "What good might result from that?" "None, as I knows on." "Then it's meself that thanks yees for the offer and respectfully declines to accept the nomination. I'll jist elict meself to the office of sheriff an' go about these regions wid a s'arch-warrint in my shoes that'll niver let me rist until Miss Cora is found." "Wal, I 'spose we'll part in the mornin' then. As yer say this are the first time you've got as fur north, I'll say I think you're nearer the trail than yer ever war yit." "What might be the reason for that?" eagerly asked Teddy. "I can't say what it is, only I kind o' feel it in my bones. Thar's a tribe of copperskins about a hundred miles to the north'ard, that I'll lay can tell yer _somethin'_ about the gal." "Indians? An' be what token would they be acquaint with her?" "They're up near the Hudson Bay Territory line, and be a harmless kind of people. I stayed among 'em two winters and found 'em a harmless lot o' simpletons that wouldn't hurt a hair o' yer head. Thar's allers a lot of white people staying among 'em." "I fails yit to see what they could be doing with Miss Cora." "Mind I tells yer only what I _thinks_--not what I _knows_. It's my private opine, then, that that hunter has took the gal up among them Injins, and they're both living thar. If that be so, you needn't be afeard to go right among 'em, for the only thing yer'll have to look out fur will be the same old hunter himself." This remark made a deep impression upon Teddy. He sat smoking his pipe, and gazing into the glowing embers, as if he could there trace out the devious, and thus far invisible, trail that had baffled him so long. It must be confessed that the search of the Hibernian thus far had been carried on in a manner that could hardly be expected to insure success. He had spent weeks in wandering through the woods, sleeping upon the ground or in the branches of some tree, fishing for awhile in some stream, or hunting for game--impelled onward all the time by his unconquerable resolve to find Cora Richter and return her to her husband. On the night that the five Sioux returned to the village, and announced their abandonment of the pursuit, Teddy told the missionary that he should never see him again, until he had gained some tidings of his beloved mistress, or had become assured that there could be no hope of her recovery. How long this peculiar means of hunting would have gone on, it is impossible to tell, but most probably until Teddy himself had perished, for there was not the shadow of a chance of his gaining any information of the lost one. His meeting with the trapper was purely accidental, and the hint thrown out by the latter was the reason of setting the fellow to work in the proper way. The conversation was carried on for an hour or so longer, during which the trapper gave Teddy more advice, and told him the best manner of reaching the tribe to which he referred. He cautioned him especially against delaying his visit any longer, as the northern winter was almost upon them, and should he be locked in the wilderness by it, it would be almost impossible for him to survive its rigor; but if he should be among the tribe, he could rest in security and comfort until the opening of spring. Teddy concluded to do as his companion advised, and, after more unimportant conversation, both stretched themselves out by the camp-fire and slept. Just as the earliest light was breaking through the trees, the trapper was on his feet, rekindling the fire. Finding, after this was completed, that Teddy still slumbered, he brought him to his senses by several forcible applications of his foot. "Begorrah, it's meself that's thinking yees 'av a mighty gintle way of coming upon one unawares, barring it's the same as a kick from a wild horse. I was dr'aming jist thin of a blast of powder in a stone quarry, which exploded under me feet, an' sint me up in the ship's rigging, an' there I hung by the eaves until a lovely girl pulled me in at the front door and shut it so hard that the chinking all fell out of the logs, and woke me out of me pleasint delusions." The trapper stared at the Irishman incredulously, thinking him demented. Teddy's gaping and rubbing of his eyes with his fists, and, finally, his stretching of arms and legs, reassured Tim of the fellow's sanity, and he added: "If yer hadn't woke just now, I'd tried ef lammin' yer over the head would've done any good." "Yees might have done that, as long as ye plaised, fur me sconce got used to being cracked at the fairs in the owld country." "I thought yer allers lived in this country." "Not always, or how could I be an Irishman? God plaise I may niver live here long enough to forgit owld Ireland, the Gim of the Sea. What's the matter with yees now?" The trapper having wandered a few yards from the camp-fire, had paused suddenly and stood gazing at the ground. Teddy was obliged to repeat his question. "What is it yees have diskivered?" "Sign, or ye may shoot me." "Sign o' what?" "Injins, ye wood-head! What else could I mean?" Teddy now approached and narrowly examined the ground. His knowledge of wood-craft had been considerably increased during the past month or two, and he had no difficulty in distinguishing the imprint of a moccasin. "Look at the infarnal thing!" exclaimed the trapper, in disgust. "Who'd a thort there'd 've been any of the warmints about, whin we took sich pains with our fire. Why the chap didn't send a piece of cold lead into each of our bread-baskets is more nor I can tell. It would've sarved us both right." "P'raps thim tracks there was made fornenst the night, and that it's ourselves that was not here first." "Don't yer s'pose I know all about _that_?" demanded the trapper, savagely. "Them tracks was made not more'n three or four hours ago." As he spoke. Tim turned and followed it a rod or two, and then, as he came back, said: "If I had the time I'd foller it; but it goes just t'other way from what I want to go. I think like 'nough it leads to the village that you want to find; so if yer'd like one of 'em to introduce yer to the rest on 'em, drive ahead and make his acquaintance. Maybe he kin tell yer something about the gal." Teddy determined to follow the trail by all means. He partook of the morning meal with the trapper, exchanged a pleasant farewell, and then the two parted never to meet again. The footprints were distinct and easily followed. Teddy advanced with long, loping strides, at a gait considerably more rapid than his usual one. He indulged in curious reveries as he followed it, fancying it to be an unfriendly Indian with whom a desperate collision must inevitably take place, or some friendly member of the tribe, of whom the trapper had told him, that would prove a boon companion to him. All at once he reached a small, marshy tract, where the trail was much more palpable; and it was here that he either saw or fancied the toes of the footprints turned _outward_, thus demonstrating that, instead of an Indian, he was following a white man. The Hibernian's heart throbbed at the thought that he was upon the track of the strange hunter, with all probability of overtaking him. It caused his heart to throb violently to reflect how close he was upon the critical moment. Drawing a deep breath and closing his lips tightly, he pressed on ready for the conflict. The trail continued as distinct as ever, and the pursuit suffered no interruption until it entered a deep swamp into which Teddy hesitated to enter, its appearance was so dark and forbidding. As he gazed into its gloomy depths, he was almost certain that he had discovered the _home_ of the hunter. That at that moment the criminal was within its confines, where perhaps the beloved Cora was imprisoned, a miserable and pining captive. The thought maddened him, and he pressed forward so rashly that he soon found himself completely entrapped in a network of briers and brambles. Carefully withdrawing into the open wood, it suddenly occurred to him, that if the hunter had passed through the thicket, there was no earthly necessity of his doing it. He could pass around, and, if the footprints were seen upon the opposite side, it only remained to follow them, while, if they were not visible, it certified that he was still within the thicket and he could therefore shape his actions accordingly. Teddy therefore made his way with patience and care around one end of the thicket. He found the distance more considerable than he at first supposed. It was full an hour before he was fairly upon the opposite side. Here he made a careful search and was soon rewarded by finding unmistakable footprints, so that he considered it settled that the hunter had passed straight through the thicket. "It's a quaar being he is entirely, when it's meself that could barely git into the thicket, and he might have saved his hide by making a short thramp around, rather than plunging through in this shtyle." Teddy pressed on for two hours more, when he began to believe that he was close upon the hunter, who must have traveled without intermission to have eluded him thus far. He therefore maintained a strict watch, and advanced with more caution. The woods began to thicken, and the Hibernian was brought to a stand-still by the sound of a rustling in the bushes. Proceeding some distance further, he came upon the edge of a bank or declivity, where he believed the strange hunter had laid down to rest. The footprints were visible upon the edge of the bank, and at the bottom of the latter was a mass of heavy undergrowth, so dense as effectually to preclude all observation of what might be concealed within it. It was in the shrubbery, directly beneath him, that Teddy believed the hunter lay. He must be wearied and exhausted, and no doubt was in a deep sleep. Teddy was sure, in his enthusiasm, that he had obtained a glimpse of the hunter's clothes through the interstices of the leaves, so that he could determine precisely the spot where he lay, and even the position of his body--so eagerly did the faithful fellow's wishes keep in advance of his senses. And now arose the all-important question as to what he should do. He might shoot him dead as he slept, and there is little question but what Teddy would have done it had he not been restrained by the simple question of expediency. The hunter was alone, and, if slain, all clue to the whereabouts of Mrs. Richter would be irrecoverably lost. What tidings that might ever be received regarding her, must come from the lips of him who had abducted her. If he could desperately wound the man, he might frighten him into a confession, but then Teddy feared instead of wounding him merely with his rifle, he would kill him altogether if he attempted to shoot. After a full half-hour's deliberation, Teddy decided upon his course of action. It was to spring knife in hand directly upon the face of the hunter, pin him to the ground and then force the confession from his lips, under a threat of his life, the Irishman mercifully resolving to slay him at any rate, after he had obtained all that was possible from him. Teddy did not forget his experience of a few months before when the hunter gave him an involuntary bath in the river. He therefore held his knife firmly in his right hand. Now that he had concluded what to do, he lost no time in carrying his plan into execution. He took a crouching position, such as is assumed by the panther when about to spring upon its prey, and then drawing his breath, he leaped downward. A yelping howl, an impetuous scratching and struggling of the furious mass that he attempted to inclose in his arms, told Teddy that instead of the hunter, he had pounced down upon an innocent, sleeping bear! It was well for the Irishman that the bear was peaceably inclined, else his search for the lost trail might have terminated then and there. The brute, after freeing itself from its incubus, sprung off and made all haste into the woods, leaving Teddy gazing after it in stupefied amazement. He rose to his feet, stared at the spot where it had last appeared and then drew a deep sigh, and sadly shook his head. "I say nothing! Be jabers! it's meself that can't do justice to the thame!" Harvey Richter stood in his cabin-door, about five months after his great loss, gazing off toward the path which led to the Indian village, and which he had traveled so many, many times. Sad and weary was his countenance, as he stood, at the close of the day, looking into the forest, as if he expected that it would speak and reveal what it knew of his beloved partner, who was somewhere concealed within its gloomy depths. Ah, how many an hour had he looked, but in vain. The forest refused to give back the lost, nor did it breathe one word of her, to ease the gloom which hung so heavily upon his soul. A footfall caught his ear, and turning, he saw Teddy standing before him. The face of the Irishman was as dejected as his own, and the widowed man knew there was scarce need of the question: "Have you heard anything, Teddy?" "Nothing, sir, saving that nothing is to be learnt." "Not my will, but thine, oh God, be done!" exclaimed the missionary, reverently, and yet with a wailing sadness, that proved how unutterable was his woe. CHAPTER VIII. THE TRAIL OF DEATH. These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence; Therefore, I pray you, stay not to discourse, But mount you presently.--SHAKESPEARE. The trapper, after separating from the Irishman, pursued his way through the woods with a slow tread, as if he were deliberating some matter with himself. Occasionally he muttered and shook his head, in a manner that showed his conscience was getting the better of the debate, whatever it might be. Finally he paused. "Yas, sir; it's a mean piece of business in me. 'Cause I want to cotch a few beavers I must let this gal be, when she has been lost to her husband already for three months. It's ongenerous, and _can't be done_!" he exclaimed, emphatically. "What if I does lose a few peltries when they're bringing such a good price down in St. Louey? Can't I afford to do it, when there's a gal in the matter?" He resumed his walk as slowly and thoughtfully as before, muttering to himself. "If I go, I goes alone; least I don't go with that Teddy, for he'd be sartin to lose my ha'r as sure as we got onto a trail. There's no calc'latin' the blunders of _such_ a man. How he has saved his own scalp to this time is more nor I can tell, or himself neither, for that matter, I guess. I've been on many a trail-hunt alone, and if I goes--if I goes, why, _in course_ I does!" he added, impetuously. The resolution once taken seemed to afford him unusual pleasure, as it does with us all when the voice of conscience is a monitor that is heeded. He was tramping toward the west, and now that the matter was decided in his own mind, he paused again, as if he could better debate other matters that must in the circumstances necessarily present themselves. "In the first place, there's no use of going any further on _this_ track, for I ain't gettin' any nigher the gal, that's pretty sartin. From what that Teddy told me of his travels, it can't be that she's anywhere in these parts, for if she war, he couldn't have helped l'arning something of her in all this time. There's a tribe up north that I've heard was great on gettin' hold of white gals, and I think I'll make a s'arch in that direction afore I does anything else." Nothing more remained for Tim but to carry out the resolution he had made, and it was characteristic of the man that he did it at once. Five minutes after the above words had been muttered, he was walking rapidly along in a northern direction, his rifle thrown over his arm, and a beaming expression of countenance that showed there were no regrets at the part he was acting. He had a habit of talking with himself, especially when some weighty or unusual matter obtruded itself. It is scarcely to be wondered, therefore, that he became quite talkative at the present time. "I allers admire such adventur's as this, if they don't bring in anything more nor thanks. The style in which I've received them is allers worth more money nor I ever made trapping beavers. The time I cotched that little gal down on the Osage, that had been lost all summer, I thought her mother would eat me up afore she'd let me go. I believe I grinned all day and all night for a week after that, it made me think I was such a nice feller. Maybe it'll be the same way with this. Hello!" The trapper paused abruptly, for on the ground before him he saw the unmistakable imprint of a moccasin. A single glance of his experienced eye assured him upon that point. "That there are Injins in these parts is a settled p'int with me, and that red and white blood don't agree is another p'int that is settled. That track wasn't made there more nor two hours ago, and it's pretty sartin the one that made it ain't fur away at this time. It happens it leads to the north'ard, and it'll be a little divarsion to foller it, minding at the same time that there's an Injin in it." For the present the trapper was on a trail, and he kept it with the skill and certainty of a hound. Over the dry leaves, the pebbly earth, the fresh grass, the swampy hollow--everywhere, he followed it with unerring skill. "That Injin has been on a hunt," he muttered, "and is going back home agin. If it keeps in this direction much longer, I'll believe he's from the very village I'm hunting after. Heigh! there's something else up!" He suddenly checked himself and began snuffing the air, as though it was tainted with something suspicious. "I hope I may be shot if there ain't a camp-fire within two hundred yards of where I am standing." He looked sharply around in every direction, but saw nothing of the camp, although positive that his olfactories could not have deceived him. "Whether it belongs to white or red can't be said, _sartin_; but it's a great deal most likely that it's red, and it's just about as sartin that that Injin ahead of me has gone pretty close to the camp, so I'll keep on follering him." A short distance further he became assured that he was in close proximity to the fire, and he began to use extreme caution in his movements. He knew very well how slight an inadvertence would betray his approach, and a betrayal was almost fatal. Advancing some distance further, he suddenly came in full view of the camp-fire. He saw three Indians seated around it, smoking, and appearing as if they had just finished their morning meal. It seemed, also, as if they were discussing some matter that deeply interested all. The mumbling of their voices could be heard, and one of them gesticulated quite freely, as though he were excited over the conference. There was not even the most remote possibility that what they were saying was of the least concern to the trapper; and so, after watching them a few moments, he moved cautiously by. It was rarely that Tim ever had a mishap at such perilous times as these, but to his dismay something caught his foot so dextrously, that in spite of himself he was thrown flat upon his face. There was a dull thump, not very loud, it is true, but he feared it had reached the ears of the savages. He lay motionless, listening for a while, but hearing nothing of their voices or footsteps, he judged that either they had no suspicion of the true cause, or else had not heard him at all. He therefore rose to his feet and moved on, occasionally glancing back, to be sure he was not pursued. The trapper proceeded in this manner until noon. Had the case been urgent, he would not have paused until nightfall, as his indurated muscles demanded no rest; he could go a couple of days without nourishment, and experience little inconvenience. But there was no call for haste. He therefore paused at noon, on the banks of a small stream, in quest of some water-fowl. Tim gazed up and down-stream, but saw nothing that would serve as a dinner. He could have enticed a fish or two from their element, but he had set his heart upon partaking of a bird, and was not willing to accept anything else. Accordingly, he began walking down the bank of the creek in search of one. In such a country as was Minnesota forty years ago, the difficult matter would have been to _avoid_ game rather than to find it. The trapper had searched but a short distance, when he caught sight of a single ptarmigan under the opposite bank. In a twinkling Tim's rifle was raised, and, as it flashed forth its deadly messenger, the bird made a single struggle, and then floated, a dead object, down the current. Although rather anxious for his prize, the trapper, like many a hunter since that day, was not willing to receive a wet skin so long as it was possible to avoid it. The creek could be only of inconsiderable depth, yet, on such a blustering day, he felt a distaste toward exposing himself to its chilling clasp. Some distance below he noticed the creek narrowed and made a curve. At this point he hoped to draw it in shore with a stick, and he lost no time in hurrying to the point. Arrived there, the trapper stood on the very margin of the water, with a long stick in hand, waiting for the opportune moment. He naturally kept his eye upon the floating bird, as any animal watches the prey that he is confident is coming directly into his clutches. From the opposite bank projected a large, overhanging bush, and such was the bird's position in the water, that it was compelled to float within a foot, at least, of this. Tim's eyes happened to be fixed intently upon it at this moment, and, at the very instant it was at the point named, he saw a person's hand flash out, seize the ptarmigan by the neck, and bring it in to shore in a twinkling. Indignation upon the part of the trapper was perhaps as great as his surprise. He raised his rifle, and had it already sighted at the point where he was confident the body of the thief must be concealed, when a second thought caused him to lower his piece, and hurry up-stream, to a spot directly opposite where the bird had disappeared. Here he searched the shore narrowly, but could detect no sign of the presence of any person. That there was, or had at least been, one there, needed no further confirmation. The trapper was in no mood to put up with the loss of his dinner, and he considered it rather a point of honor that he should bring the offending savage to justice. That it was an Indian he did not doubt, but he never once suspected, what was true, that it was the identical one he had been following, and who had passed his camp-fire. In a few moments he found a shallow portion of the creek across which he immediately waded and made his way down the bank, to where the Indian had first manifested his presence. Here the keen eye of Tim at once detected moccasin prints, and he saw that the savage had departed with his prize. There was no difficulty in following the trail, and the trapper did so, with his long, loping, rapid walk. It happened to lead straight to the northward, so that he felt it was no loss of time for him to do so. It was morally certain the savage could be at no great distance; hence the pursuer was cautious in his advance. The American Indian would rather seek than avoid an encounter, and he was no foe to be despised in a hand-to-hand contest. The trapper was in that mood that he would not have hesitated to encounter two of them in deadly combat for the possession of the bird which was properly his own, and which he was not willing to yield until compelled to do so by physical force. About a hundred rods brought the trapper to a second creek of larger size than the first. The trail led directly into this, so he followed without hesitation. Before doing so, he took the precaution to sling his rifle to his back, so that his arms should be disencumbered in any sudden emergency. The creek proved to be of considerable depth, but not sufficient to cause him to swim. Near the center, when it was up to his armpits, and he was feeling every foot of the way as he advanced, he chanced by accident to raise his head. As he did so, he caught a movement among the undergrowth, and more from habit than anything else, dodged his head. The involuntary movement allowed the bullet that was discharged at that moment to pass harmlessly over his crown and bury itself in the bank beyond. The next instant the trapper dashed through the water, reaching the shore before the savage could reload. To his disappointment and chagrin, the Indian was gone. Tim, however, was not to be baffled in this manner, and dashed on as impetuously as before. He was so close that he could hear the fugitive as he fled, but the nature of the ground prevented rapid progress upon the part of either, and it was impossible to tell for a time who it was that was gaining. "There's got to be an end to this race _some time_," muttered Tim, "or I'll chase you up the north pole. You've stole my dinner, and tried to steal my topknot, and now you shall have it or I shall have yours." For some time this race (which in many respects resembled that of Teddy and the strange hunter) continued, until the trapper found it was himself that was really losing ground, and he sullenly came down to a walk again. Still, he held to the trail with the unremitting perseverance of the bloodhound, confident that, sooner or later, he must come up with the fugitive. All at once, something upon the ground caught his eye. It was the ptarmigan, and he sprung exultingly forward and picked it up. It was unharmed by the Indian, and he looked upon it as a tacit surrender, on the part of his adversary, of the matter of dispute between them. At first Tim was disposed to keep up the pursuit; but, on second thought, he concluded to partake of his dinner, and then continue his search for his human game. In order to enjoy his dinner it was necessary to have it cooked, and he busied himself for a few moments in collecting a few dried sticks, and plucking the feathers from the fowl and dressing it. While thus occupied, he did not forget to keep his eyes about him, and to be prepared for the Indian in case he chose to come back. He discovered nothing suspicious, however, and came to believe there was no danger at all. At length, when the afternoon was well advanced, the trapper's dinner was prepared. He took the fowl from the blaze, and cutting a piece with his hunting-knife, was in the very act of placing it in his mouth, when the sharp crack of a rifle broke the stillness, and he fell backward, pierced through the body by the bullet of the Indian whom he had been pursuing. "It's all up!" muttered the dying man. "I am wiped out at last, and must go under!" [Illustration: "It's all up!" muttered the dying man. "I am wiped out at last, and must go under!"] The Lost Trail had been the means of Tim, the trapper, discovering what proved to him _the trail of death!_ CHAPTER IX. THE DEAD SHOT. And now 'tis still I no sound to wake The primal forest's awful shade; And breathless lies the covert brake, Where many an ambushed form is laid. I see the red-man's gleaming eye, Yet all so hushed, the gloom profound, That summer birds flit heedlessly, And mocking nature smiles around.--LUNT. Five years have passed. It is the summer of 1825. In that comparatively brief period, what vast changes have taken place! How many have come upon and departed from the stage of life! How many plans, intentions and resolutions have been formed and either failed or succeeded! How many governments have toppled to the earth, and followed by "those that in their turn shall follow them." What a harvest it has been for Death! The missionary's cabin stands on the Clearing where it was first erected, and there is little change in its outward appearance, save that perhaps it has been more completely isolated from the wood. The humble but rather massive structure is almost impervious to the touch of time. It is silent and deserted within. Around the door plays a little boy, the image of his mother, while some distance away, under the shadow of the huge tree, sits the missionary himself. One leg is thrown over the other, an open book turned with its face downward upon his lap, while his hands are folded upon it, and he is looking off toward the wood in deep abstraction of thought. Time has not been so gentle with Harvey Richter. There are lines upon his face, and a sad, wearied expression that does not properly belong there. It would have required full fifteen years, in the ordinary course of events, to have bowed him in this manner. The young man--for he is still such--and his little boy are the only ones who now dwell within the cabin. No tidings or rumors have reached him of the fate of his wife, who was so cruelly taken from him four years before. The faithful Teddy is still searching for her. The last two winters he has spent at home, but each summer he has occupied in wandering hither and thither through the great wilderness, in his vain searching for the lost trail. Cast down and dejected, he has never yet entirely abandoned hope of finding traces of her. He had followed out the suggestion of the trapper, and visited the Indians that dwelt further north, where he was informed that nothing whatever was known of the missing woman. Since that time his search had been mostly of an aimless character, which, as we have already stated, could be productive of no definite results. The missionary had become, in a degree, resigned to his fate; and yet, properly speaking, he could not be said to be resigned, for he was not yet convinced that she was entirely lost to him. All traces of the strange hunter seemed irrecoverably gone, but Richter still devoutly believed the providence of God would adjust everything in due time. It is true, at seasons, he was filled with doubt and misgiving; but his profession, his devotedness to his work, brought him in such close communion with his divine Master that he trusted fully in his providences. On this summer afternoon, thoughts of his wife and of the strange hunter occupied his mind more exclusively than they had for a year past. So constant and preoccupying, indeed, were they, that he once or twice believed he was on the eve of learning something regarding her. While engaged in reading, the figures of his wife and the hunter would obtrude themselves; he found it impossible to dismiss them, so he had laid down the book and gone off into this absorbing reverie. An additional fear or presentiment at times haunted the mind of the missionary. He believed this hunter who could resort to such diabolical means to revenge himself, would seek to inflict further injury upon him, and he instinctively looked upon his boy as the vulnerable point where the blow would be likely to fall. For over a year, while Teddy was absent, Richter had taken the boy with him, when making his daily visits to the village, and made it a point never to lose sight of him. During these years of loneliness, also, Harvey Richter had hunted a great deal in the woods and had attained remarkable skill in the use of the rifle--an accomplishment for which he had reason to be thankful for the remainder of his life, as we shall presently see. On a pleasant afternoon, he frequently employed himself in shooting at a target, or at small game in the lofty trees around him, until his aim became so unerring that not a warrior among the Sioux could excel him. It may seem singular, but our readers will understand us when we say that this added to his popularity--and, in a manner, paved a way for reaching many a heart that hitherto had remained unmoved by his appeals. The year preceding, an Indian had presented the missionary with a goat, to the neck of which was attached a large cow-bell, that probably had been obtained of some trader. Where the animal came from, however, he had never been able to tell. It was a very acceptable present, as it became a companion for his Charley, who spent many and many an hour in sporting with it. It also afforded for a while a much-valued luxury in the shape of milk, so that the missionary came to regard the animal as an indispensable requirement in his household. The goat acquired a troublesome habit of wandering off in the woods, with an inclination not to return for several days. From this cause the bell became useful as a signal to indicate the animal's whereabouts. It rarely wandered beyond hearing, and caused no more trouble than would have resulted from a cow under the same circumstances. For the last few weeks it had been the duty, or rather privilege, of Charley to bring his playmate home, and the child had become so expert that the father had little hesitation in permitting him to go out for it. The parent had misgivings, however, in allowing him to leave the house, so near dark, to go beyond his sight if not beyond his hearing; and for some time he had strenuously refused to permit the boy to go upon his errand; but the little fellow plead so earnestly, and the father's ever-present apprehensions having gradually dulled by their want of realization, he had given his reluctant consent, until it came to be considered the special province of the boy to bring in the goat every evening just before nightfall. The afternoon wore away, and still the missionary sat with folded hands, gazing absently off in the direction of the wood. The boy at length aroused him by running up and asking: "Father, it is getting late. Isn't it time to bring Dolly home?" "Yes, my son; do you hear the bell?" "Listen!" The pleasant _tink-a-link_ came with faint distinctness over the still summer air. "It isn't far away, my son; so run as fast as you can and don't play or loiter on the way." The child ran rapidly across the Clearing in the direction of the sound, shot into the wood, and, a moment later, had disappeared from his father's sight. The father still sat in his seat, and was looking absently toward the forest, when a startled expression flashed over his face and he sprung to his feet. What thus alarmed him? _It was the sound of the goat-bell._ All of my readers who have heard the sound of an ordinary cow-bell suspended to the neck of an animal, have observed that the natural sound is an _irregular one_--that is, there is no system or regularity about the sound made by an animal in cropping the grass or herbage. There is the clapper's tink-a-link, tink-a-link--an interval of silence--then the occasional tink, tink, tink, to be followed, perhaps, by a repetition of the first-named sounds, varied occasionally by a compound of all, caused by the animal flinging its head to free itself from troublesome flies or mosquitoes. The bell in question, however, gave no such sounds _as these_, and it was this fact which filled the missionary with a sudden, terrible dread. Suppose a person take one of these bells in his hand, and give a steady, _uninterrupted_ motion. The consequence must be a regular, unvarying, monotonous sound, which any ear can distinguish from the natural one caused by the animal itself. It was a steady tink, tink, tink, that the bell in question sent forth. The missionary stood but a moment; then dashing into the house, he took down his ever-loaded rifle and ran in the direction of the sound. In his hurry, he forgot powder-horn and bullet, and had, as a consequence, but a single charge in his rifle. He had gone scarcely a hundred yards, when he encountered the goat returning home. One glance showed there was _no bell_ to its neck, while that ominous tink, tink, tink, came through the woods as uninterruptedly as before. The father now broke into a swifter run, almost losing his presence of mind from his great, agonizing fear. The picture of the Indian, whom he had felled to the floor, when he insulted his wife years before, rose before him, and he saw his child already struggling in the savage's merciless grasp. Nearer and nearer he approached the sound, until he suddenly paused, conscious that it was but a short distance away. Hurrying stealthily but rapidly several rods to the right, the whole thing was almost immediately made plain to him. Two trees, from some cause or other, had fallen to the ground in a parallel direction and within a yard of each other. Between the trunks of these an Indian was crouched, who held the goat-bell in his left hand, and caused the sound which so startled the father. The savage had his back turned toward the missionary, and appeared to be looking in the opposite direction, as if he were waiting the appearance of some one. While the father stood gazing at this, he saw his boy come to view about fifty feet the other side of the Indian, and, as if wearied with his unusual hunt, seat himself upon a log. As soon as the boy was visible, the savage--whom Richter recognized at once as the same man that he had felled to the floor of his cabin, four years before--called into use a little common sense, which, if it had been practised somewhat sooner, must have completely deluded the father and accomplished the design meditated. If, instead of giving the bell the monotonous tink, the Indian had shaken the clapper irregularly, it would have resulted in the certain capture of the child, beyond the father's power of aid or rescue. The missionary, we say, penetrated the design of the Indian almost instantly. Although he saw nothing but the head and top of one shoulder, he recognized, with a quick instinct, the villain who had felt the weight of his hand years before, and who had now come in the fullness of time, to claim his revenge. Directly in front of the savage rose a small bush, which, while it gave him a view of the boy, concealed himself from the child's observation. The object of the Indian seemed to be to lure the boy within his reach, so as to secure him without his making an outcry or noise. If he could draw him close to the logs, he would spring upon him in an instant, and prevent any scream, which assuredly must reach the father, who, with his unerring rifle would have been upon the ground in a few moments. It was an easy matter for the savage to slay the boy. It would not have done to shoot his rifle, but he could have tomahawked him in an instant; hence it was plain that he desired only to take him prisoner. He might have sprung upon his prey in the woods, but there he ran the risk of being seen by the child soon enough for him to make an outcry, which would not fail of bringing immediate assistance. His plan, therefore, was, to beguile the little fellow on until he had walked directly into the snare, as a fly is lured into the web of a spider. This, we say, was the plan of the Indian. It had never entered into his calculations that the goat, after being robbed of her bell, might go home and tell a tale, or that there were other ways in which the boy could be secured, without incurring half the peril he already had incurred. The moment the father comprehended what we have endeavored to make plain, he raised his rifle, with the resolve to shoot the savage through the head. As he did so, he recalled the fact that he had but a single charge, and that, as a consequence, a miss would be the death-warrant of himself as well as of his child. But he knew his eye and hand would never fail him. His finger already pressed the trigger, when he was restrained by an unforeseen impediment. While the deadly rifle was poised, the boy stretched himself up at full length, a movement which made known to the father that his child was exactly in range with the Indian himself, and that a bullet passing through the head of the savage could not fail to bury itself in the little fellow's body. This startling circumstance arrested the pressure of the trigger at the very moment the ball was to be sped upon its errand of death. The missionary sunk down upon one knee, with the intention of bringing the head of the savage so high as to carry the bullet over the body of his boy, but this he found could not be done without too seriously endangering his aim. He drew a bead from one side of the tree, and then from the other, but from both stand-points the same dreadful danger threatened. The ground behind the tree was somewhat elevated, and was the only spot from which he could secure a fair view of the bronze head of the relentless enemy. Two resorts were at the command of Richter. He could leave the tree altogether, and pass around so as to come upon the savage from a different direction; but this involved delay during which his boy might fall into the Indian's power and be dispatched, as he would be sure to do when he found that the father was close at hand; and from the proximity of the two men, it could hardly fail to precipitate a collision between them. The Indian, finding himself at bay, could not fail to prove a most troublesome and dangerous customer, unarmed, as Richter was, with weapons for a close encounter. The father might also wait until the boy should pass out of range. Still, there was the possibility of his proceeding directly up to the spot where the savage lurked, thus keeping in range all the while. Then the attempted rescue would have to be deferred until the child was in the hands of the savage. These considerations, passing through Richter's brain much more rapidly than we have narrated them, decided him to abandon both plans, and to resort to what, beyond question, was a most desperate expedient. The Indian held the bell in his left hand. It was suspended by the string which had clasped the neck of the goat, and, as it swayed gently back and forth, this string slowly twisted and untwisted itself, the bell, of course, turning back and forth. The father determined to slay the Indian and save his son by _shooting this bell_! It is not necessary to describe the shape and make of the common cow-bell in general use throughout our country; but it is necessary that the reader should bear them in mind in order to understand the manner in which the missionary proposed to accomplish this result. His plan was to strike the bell when in the proper position, and _glance the bullet into the head of the savage_! The desperate nature of this expedient will be seen at once. Should the gun be discharged when the flat side of the bell was turned toward him, the ball would pass through, and most probably kill his child without endangering the life of the Indian. If it struck the narrow side, it accomplished neither harm nor good; while, if fired at the precise moment, and still aimed but an inch too low, the bell would most likely be perforated. Consequently, it was requisite that the rifle be discharged at the precise instant of time when the signal brass was in the correct position, and that the aim should be infallibly true. All this Richter realized only too painfully; but, uttering an inward prayer, he raised his rifle with a nerve that knew no faltering or fear, holding it pointed until the critical moment should arrive. That moment would be when the string was wound up, and was turning, to unwind. Then, as it was almost stationary, he fired. No sound or outcry betrayed the result; but, clubbing his rifle, the father bounded forward, over the trees, to the spot where the Indian was crouching. There he saw him in his death-struggle upon the ground the bell still held fast in his hand. In that critical moment, Harvey Richter could not forbear glancing at it. Its top was indented, and sprinkled with white by the glancing passage of the lead. The blood, oozing down the face of the savage, plainly showed how unerringly true had been the aim. Something in the upward look of the dying man startled the missionary. "Harvey Richter--don't you know me?" he gasped. [Illustration: "Harvey Richter--don't you know me?" he gasped.] "I know you as a man who has sought to do me a wrong that only a fiend could have perpetrated. Great Heaven! Can it be? Is this you, Brazey Davis?" "Yes; but you've finished me, so there isn't much left." "Are you the man, Brazey, who has haunted me ever since we came in this country? Are you the person who carried away poor, dear Cora?" "Yes--yes!" answered the man, with fainting weariness. Such, indeed, was the case. The strange hunter and the Indian known as Mahogany were one and the same person. "Brazey, why have you haunted me thus, and done me this great wrong?" "I cannot tell. When I thought how you took her from me, it made me crazy when I thought about it. I wanted to take her from you, but I wouldn't have dared to do that if you hadn't struck me. I wanted revenge then." "What have you done with her?" "She is gone, I haven't seen her since the day after I seized her, when a band of Indians took her from me, and went up north with her. They have got her yet, I know, for I have kept watch over her, and she is safe, but is a close prisoner." This he said with great difficulty. "Brazey, you are dying. I forgive you. But does your heart tell you you are at peace with Him whom you have offended so grievously?" "It's too late to talk of that now. It might have done years ago, when I was an honest man like yourself, and before I became a vagabond, bent on injuring one who had never really injured me." "It is never too late for God to forgive--" "Too late--too late, I tell you! _There!_" He rose upon his elbow, his eyes burning with insane light and his hand extended. "I see her--she is coming, her white robes floating on the air. Oh, God, forgive me that I did her the great wrong! But, she smiles upon me--she forgives me! I thank thee, angel of good----" He sunk slowly backward, and Harvey Richter eased the head softly down upon the turf. Brazey Davis was no more. CHAPTER X. CONCLUSION. Heart leaps to heart--the sacred flood That warms us is the same; That good old man--his honest blood Alike we frankly claim.--SPRAGUE. The missionary gazed sadly upon the inanimate form before him. He saw the playmate of his childhood stricken down in death by his own hand, which never should have taken human life, and although the act was justifiable under the circumstances, the good man could but mourn the painful necessity that occasioned it. The story, although possessing tragic interest, was a brief one. Brazey Davis, as he had always been termed, was a few years older than himself, and a native of the same neighborhood. He was known in childhood as one possessing a vindictive spirit that could never forgive an injury--as a person who would not hesitate at any means to obtain revenge. It so happened that he became desperately enamored of the beautiful Cora Brandon, but becoming aware, at length, that she was the betrothed of Harvey Braisted, the young missionary in embryo, the disappointed lover left the country, and was never heard of by the missionary until he made himself known in the singular manner that we have related at the opening of our narrative. He had, in fact, come to be a sort of monomaniac, who delighted in annoying his former rival, and in haunting his footsteps as if he were his evil shadow. The abduction of his wife had not been definitely determined upon until that visit to the cabin, in the garb and paint of an Indian, when he received the tremendous blow that almost drove the life from his body. Davis then resolved to take the revenge which would "cut" the deepest. How well he succeeded, the reader has learned. The missionary's child stood pleading for an explanation of the strange scene before him. Loosening the bell from the grasp of the dead man, the minister took the little hand, and, with a heart overflowing with emotion, set out for his cabin. It was his wish to give the hunter a Christian burial; but, for the present, it was impossible. These dying words rung in his ears: "The Indians took her from me, and went up north with her, where she now is, _and safe_!" Blessed thought! She was then living, and was yet to be restored to his arms. The shadow of death passed away, and a great light illuminated his very being. The lost was found! When the missionary came to be more collected, he concluded that this must be the tribe of which Teddy had once spoken, but which had been visited by him without success. The prize was too great to be intrusted in the hands of another, and Harvey determined to make the search in person, to settle, if possible, once and forever, the fate of his beloved wife. He soon proceeded to the Indian village, where he left his boy and gave notice that he should not be back for several days. He then called one of the most trusty and skillful warriors aside, and asked for his company upon the eventful journey. The savage cheerfully complied, and the two set out at once. It was a good distance to the northward, and when night came down upon them, many miles yet remained to be passed. There was little fear of disturbance from enemies, and both lay down and slept until daylight, when they were immediately on their way again. This journey through the northern wilderness was unvaried by any event worthy of record, and the details would be uninteresting to the reader. Suffice it to say that, just as the fourth day was closing in, they struck a small stream, which pursued a short distance, brought them directly upon the village for which they had been searching. The advent of the Indian and missionary among them created considerable stir, but they were treated with respect and consideration. Harvey Richter asked immediately for the chief or leading man, and shortly stood in his presence. He found him a short, thick-set half-breed, whose age must have been well-nigh three-score years, and who, to his astonishment, was unable to speak English, although many of his subjects spoke it quite intelligibly. He understood Sioux, however, and the missionary's companion acted as interpreter. Our friend made a full statement of his wife's abduction, years before, and of the assertion of the dying man that she had been taken from him by members of this tribe, who had retained her ever since. The chief waited sometime before replying; he seemed debating with himself as to the proper course to pursue. Finally he said he must consult with one of his warriors, and departed abruptly from the lodge. Ten minutes later, while the missionary, with a painfully-throbbing heart, was gazing around the lodge, with that minute scrutiny of the most trifling objects peculiar to us at such times, he caught the sound of returning footsteps, and turned to the lodge door. There stood the Indian, and, directly beside him, his own lost Cora! The next day at noon, a camp-fire might have been seen some miles south of the northern village of which we have made mention. An Indian was engaged in cooking a piece of meat, while the missionary and his reclaimed jewel, sitting side by side, her head reclining upon his shoulder and his hand dallying with her hair, were holding delightful communion. She looked pale and somewhat emaciated, for these years of absence had indeed been fraught with suffering; but the old sweet look had never departed. It was now changed into an expression of perfect joy. The wife's great anxiety was to reach home and see the child she had left an infant, but who was now a frolicksome boy, and she could hardly consent to pause even when night overtook them, and her lagging limbs told her husband how exhausted she had become. Cora never had suspected the identity of the Indian and the hunter, until on that sad day when he sprung from behind the cabin and hurried her off into the wood. There was something, however, in his look, when he first felt the weight of her husband's blow, that never left her remembrance. While hurrying her swiftly through the wood he said nothing at all, and at night, while she pretended to sleep, he watched by the camp-fire. It was the light of this fire which had puzzled Teddy so much. On the succeeding day the abductor reached the river and embarked in his canoe. A half-hour later he leaned over the canoe and washed the paint from his face and made himself known in his true character, as Brazey Davis, her former lover. He had scarcely done so, when an Indian canoe rounded a bend in the river, and, despite his earnest protestations, the savages took the captive from him, and carried her with them to their village, where she had been ever since. Retained very closely, as all prisoners among Indians are, she had heard nothing of Teddy's visit. She was treated with kindness, as the destined wife of a young chief; but the suit for her consent never was pressed by the chief, as it is in an Indian's code of honor never to force a woman to a distasteful marriage. The young brave, with true Indian pertinacity, could wait his time, confident that his kindness and her long absence from home would secure her consent to the savage alliance. She was denied nothing but her liberty, and her prayers to be returned to her husband and child. At this point in her narration, an exclamation from the Indian arrested attention. All listened and heard but a short distance away: "Begorrah, Teddy, it's yerself that's entitled to a wee bit of rist, as yees have been on a mighty long tramp, and hasn't diskivered anything but a country that is big enough to hide the Atlantic ocean in, wid Ireland on its bosom as a jewel. The chances are small of yees iver gitting another glimpse of heaven--that is, of Miss Cora's face. The darlint; if she's gone to heaven, then Teddy McFadden don't care how soon somebody else wears out his breeches--that is, on the presumption that St. Peter will say, 'Teddy, me lad, ye can inter an' make yerself at home, to be sure!'" The husband and wife glanced at each other significantly as the fellow rattled on. "Wait a moment," said Harvey, rising to his feet, and carefully making his way in the direction of the sound. It was curious that the Irishman should have paused for his noonday rest in such close proximity to our friends; but, he had learned from a trader who had recently visited the Red River country, that there _was_ a white woman, beyond all question, among the tribe in the north, and he was on his way to make them a second visit. The missionary found his servant seated by a tree. Teddy looked up as he heard a footstep. It seemed as if his eyes would drop from their sockets. His mouth opened wide, and he seemed, for the moment, confounded. Then he recovered his presence of mind in a measure, and proceeded to scratch his head vigorously. That, with him, ever was a sign of the clearing up of his ideas. "How do you do, Teddy?" at length the missionary said, after having enjoyed the poor fellow's confusion. "Faith, but ye sent the cold shivers over me. _Is_ it yerself, Mister Harvey, out in these woods, or is it yer ghost on the s'arch for Misthress Cora? I sometimes thinks me own ghost is out on the s'arch without me body, an' I shouldn't be surprised to maat it some day. But I'm mighty glad it's yerself an' not yer ghost, for, to till the thruth, I don't jist like ghosts--they makes a body feel so quare in the stomach." "Come with me; I have an Indian as company, and you may as well join us." The Hibernian followed, a few paces behind, continually expressing his astonishment at seeing his master so far away from home. He did not look up until they were within a few paces of the camp-fire, when Richter stepped from before him. "Save us! save us! but if there isn't the ghowst of Miss Cora come to haunt me for not finding her afore!" exclaimed Teddy, retreating a step or two in genuine terror. "Saint Patherick, Saint Pether, Saint Virgin Mary, protict me! I didn't mane to get dhrunk that day, ye know, nor to make a frind of--" "I am no ghost but my own self, Teddy, restored to my husband in safety. Can you not welcome me?" "Oorah! Oorah!" and he danced a moment in uncontrollable joy. Then he exclaimed: "God bliss yer own swate self!" taking her in his brawny arms. "God bliss you! No ghost, but yer own swate self. Oh, I feel like a blast of powder ready to go off!" And again he danced a singular commixture of the jig and cotillion, much to the Indian's amazement, for he thought him crazy. "I knew that I should look upon your face again; but, till me where it is yees have come from?" he finally subsided enough to ask. Teddy was soon made to understand all that related to the return of the young wife. When he learned that Mahogany, with whom he had so often drank and "hobnobbed," was only the hunter disguised, who was thus plotting his crime, the Irishman's astonishment can hardly be described. He was irritated, also, at his own stupidity. "That Teddy McFadden iver should have been so desaved by that rascal of purgatory!" he exclaimed; but, as the evil man had gone to the great tribunal above, there was no disposition, even in Teddy's heart, to heap curses on his memory. A few days more, and the three whites passed through the Indian village on their way to the Clearing. The joy of the savages at the return of their sweet, pale-faced sister was manifested in many ways, and she once feared they would never allow her to leave them and go to her own humble home. Finally, however, they reached the Clearing, and, as they walked side by side across it, opened the door and sat down within the cabin, and the fond mother took the darling boy in her lap, the wife and husband looked in each other's faces with streaming eyes, and murmured "Thank God! thank God!" THE END. * * * * * Reasons why you should obtain a Catalogue of our Publications 1. You will possess a comprehensive and classified list of all the best standard books published, at prices less than offered by others. 2. You will find listed in our catalogue books on every topic: Poetry, Fiction, Romance, Travel, Adventure, Humor, Science, History, Religion, Biography, Drama, etc., besides Dictionaries and Manuals, Bibles, Recitation and Hand Books, Sets, Octavos, Presentation Books and Juvenile and Nursery Literature in immense variety. 3. 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31907	----	SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION--BUREAU OF ETHNOLOGY. ANCIENT POTTERY OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. BY WILLIAM H. HOLMES. * * * * * CONTENTS. Page. Introductory 367 Ceramic groups 369 Middle Mississippi province 369 Distribution 369 How found 370 Age 371 Use 371 Construction 372 Material 372 Color 373 Form 373 Finish 373 Ornament 373 Modification of shape 373 Relief ornament 374 Intaglio designs 374 Designs in color 374 Classification of forms 375 Origin of form 376 Bowls 376 Form 376 Ornament 377 Illustrations 378 Ordinary forms 378 Eccentric forms 380 Life forms 383 Pot-shaped vessels 392 Material 393 Form 393 Handles 393 Origin of handles 393 Ornament 394 Illustrations 394 Wide-mouthed bottles or jars 398 Form 399 Ornament 399 Illustrations 399 Ordinary forms 399 Eccentric forms 403 Life forms 404 High-necked bottles 411 Form 411 Ornament 412 Illustrations 413 Ordinary forms 413 Eccentric forms 420 Life forms 422 Upper Mississippi province 426 Gulf province 431 Résumé 434 ILLUSTRATIONS. Page. FIG. 361.--Scale of forms 376 362.--Forms of bowls 376 363.--Rim modification 377 364.--Bowl: Arkansas 378 365.--Bowl: Arkansas 378 366.--Cup: Arkansas 379 367.--Bowl: Arkansas 379 368.--Bowl: Arkansas 380 369.--Cup: Arkansas 380 370.--Cup: Arkansas 380 371.--Rectangular bowl: Arkansas 381 372.--Burial casket: Tennessee 381 373.--Trough-shaped vessel: Arkansas 382 374.--Clay vessels imitating shell 384 375.--Bowl imitating a conch shell 384 376.--Frog-shaped bowl: Arkansas 385 377.--Frog-shaped bowl: Arkansas 385 378.--Animal-shaped bowl: Arkansas 385 379.--Bird-shaped bowl: Arkansas 386 380.--Bird-shaped bowl: Arkansas 386 381.--Bird-shaped bowl: Arkansas 387 382.--Bowl with grotesque heads: Arkansas 387 383.--Heads of birds 388 384.--Grotesque heads 388 385.--Bowl with grotesque head: Arkansas 389 386.--Bowl with grotesque head: Arkansas 389 387.--Bowl with grotesque handle: Arkansas 390 388.--Animal-shaped bowl: Arkansas 390 389.--Animal-shaped bowl: Arkansas 391 390.--Bowl with bat's head: Arkansas 392 391.--Bowl: Arkansas 392 392.--Forms of pots 393 393.--Handles 393 394.--Pot: Arkansas 394 395.--Pot: Arkansas 395 396.--Pot: Tennessee 395 397.--Pot: Arkansas 395 398.--Pot: Arkansas 395 399.--Pot: Alabama 396 400.--Pot: Arkansas 396 401.--Pot: Arkansas 396 402.--Pot: Arkansas 396 403.--Pot: Arkansas 397 404.--Pot: Tennessee 397 405.--Pot: Arkansas 398 406.--Forms of jar-shaped bottles 399 407.--Bottle: Arkansas 399 408.--Bottle: Arkansas 400 409.--Bottle: Arkansas 400 410.--Engraved bottle: Arkansas 401 411.--Engraved bottle: Arkansas 401 412.--Engraved design 402 413.--Teapot-shaped vessel: Arkansas 403 414.--Vessel of eccentric form: Arkansas 403 415.--Vessel of eccentric form: Arkansas 404 416.--Animal-shaped vase: Arkansas 404 417.--Sun-fish vase: Arkansas 405 418.--Opossum vase: Arkansas 405 419.--Animal-shaped vase: Arkansas 406 420.--Head-shaped vase: Arkansas 407 421.--Engraved figures 408 422.--Head covering 408 423.--Head-shaped vase: Arkansas 409 424.--Head-shaped vase: Arkansas 410 425.--Scale of forms 411 426.--Tripods 411 427.--Stands 412 428.--Compound forms of vessels 412 429.--Adaptation of the human form 412 430.--Bottle: Tennessee 413 431.--Gourd-shaped vessel: Tennessee 413 432.--Bottle: Arkansas 414 433.--Bottle: Arkansas 414 434.--Bottle: Arkansas 415 435.--Engraved bottle: Arkansas 416 436.--Bottle: Arkansas 417 437.--Bottle: Arkansas 417 438.--Bottle: Arkansas 418 439.--Fluted bottle: Arkansas 419 440.--Engraved bottle: Arkansas 419 441.--Tripod bottle: Arkansas 420 442.--Tripod bottle: Arkansas 421 443.--Tripod bottle: Arkansas 421 444.--Bottle of eccentric form: Arkansas 422 445.--Owl-shaped bottle: Arkansas 422 446.--Bear-shaped bottle: Tennessee 423 447.--Bear-shaped bottle: Arkansas 423 448.--Bottle with human head: Arkansas 424 449.--Bottle with human head: Arkansas 424 450.--Bottle with human head: Arkansas 424 451.--Bottle with human head: Arkansas 424 452.--Bottle with human head: Arkansas 425 453.--Position of feet 425 454.--Bottle with human form: Arkansas 426 455.--Bottle with human form: Arkansas 426 456.--Vase: Iowa 428 457.--Vase: Wisconsin 429 458.--Vase: Illinois 430 459.--Cup: Alabama 431 460.--Bowl: Alabama 432 461.--Bottle: Mississippi 432 462.--Bottle: Alabama 433 463.--Painted design 434 ANCIENT POTTERY OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. By WILLIAM H. HOLMES. INTRODUCTORY. This paper is the third of a series of preliminary studies of aboriginal ceramic art which are intended to be absorbed into a final work of a comprehensive character. The groups of relics selected for these studies are in all cases of limited extent, and are such as can lay claim to a considerable degree of completeness. It is true that no series of archæologic objects can ever be considered complete, but in exceptional cases the sources of supply may be so thoroughly explored that the development of new features of importance cannot reasonably be expected. If any series of American ceramic products has reached such a condition, it is that of the middle portions of the Mississippi Valley; yet, even in this case, I consider it unwise to attempt a monographic study, and prefer to single out a particular collection, making it the subject of a thorough investigation. When the idea of preparing such a paper was first conceived, the collection presenting the greatest advantages was that of the Academy of Natural Sciences at Davenport, Iowa, which was, therefore, chosen. Other museums, especially those at Cambridge, Saint Louis, and Washington, were rich in material from this region, but none of these collections were so homogeneous and satisfactory. The National Museum has recently received important accessions from the Mississippi Valley, through the agency of the Bureau of Ethnology, and ere the publication of this paper will probably excel all others in the number and variety of its mound relics. Some of its material has already been published by Dr. Charles Rau, Prof. C. C. Jones, Dr. Joseph Jones, and myself, and several additional examples are given in this paper. Professor F. W. Putnam has described and illustrated many pieces belonging to the Peabody Museum, and Professor W. B. Potter and Dr. Edward Evers have issued an important work on the Saint Louis collections, in Contributions to the Archæology of Missouri. This study is intended to pave the way to a thorough classification of the multitude of relics, and to the discovery of a method of procedure suited to a broad and exhaustive treatment of the ceramic art. I do not expect to discuss ethnical questions, although ceramic studies will eventually be of assistance in determining the distribution and migrations of peoples, and in fixing the chronology of very remote events in the history of pottery-making races. Some of the results of my studies of the evolutionary phase of the subject are embodied in an accompanying paper upon the "Origin and Development of Form and Ornament," and a second paper will soon follow. Before the final work is issued I hope to make close studies of all the principal collections, public and private. In such a work the importance of great numbers of examples cannot be overestimated. Facts can be learned from a few specimens, but relationships and principles can only be derived from the study of multitudes. I shall probably have occasion to modify many of the views advanced in these preliminary papers, but it is only by pushing out such advance guards that the final goal can be reached. Since the original issue of this paper in the Proceedings of the Davenport Academy of Sciences, a careful revision of the text has been made and much additional matter and a number of illustrations have been added. I wish in this place to express my obligations to the officers and members of the Davenport Academy of Sciences, and especially to Mrs. M. L. D. Putnam and Prof. W. H. Pratt, whose generous aid has been of the greatest service to me. CERAMIC GROUPS. In studying the collections from the Mississippi Valley, I find it convenient to classify the ceramic products in three great groups, which belong to as many pretty well-defined districts; these I have named, for convenience of treatment, the Upper Mississippi, the Middle Mississippi, and the Lower Mississippi or Gulf provinces. Other pottery occurs within the limits of these areas, but the examples found in the museums are so few that very little of importance can be learned from them. The three groups enumerated are not equally represented. The great body of our collections is from the middle province. The ware of the Lower Mississippi or Gulf district, of which we have but a small number of pieces, has many features in common with the pottery of the middle district, and at the same time is identical in most respects with that of the Gulf coast to the east. No well-defined line can be drawn between them; but the ware of the north is wholly distinct and need never be confounded with the other groups. MIDDLE MISSISSIPPI PROVINCE. DISTRIBUTION.--It must not be inferred that there is perfect uniformity in the pottery of this, or any other, extended region; local peculiarities are always to be found. The products of contiguous districts, such, for example, as those of Mississippi County, Arkansas, and New Madrid County, Missouri, have much in common, and will at once be recognized as belonging to the same family, yet the differences are so marked that the unskilled observer could point them out with ease. As indicated by decided family resemblances, the wares of this group extend over the greater part of the States of Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee, cover large portions of Mississippi, Kentucky, and Illinois, and reach somewhat into Iowa, Indiana, Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas. The types are better marked and the products more abundant about the center of this area, which may be defined roughly as including contiguous parts of Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee, with a pretty decided focal center, at least in the abundance of relics, at Pecan Point, Arkansas. The borders of the district are necessarily not clearly defined. The characters of the art products blend more or less with those of neighboring sections. This is a usual phenomenon, and is probably due to a variety of causes. The mere contact of peoples leads to the exchange of ideas, and, consequently, to similarities in the products of industry. A change of habitat, with its consequent change of environment, is capable of modifying art to a great extent. Groups of relics and remains attributed by archæologists to distinct stocks of people, may, in cases, be the work of one and the same people executed under the influence of different environments and at widely separated periods of time. Mixed conditions in the remains of a locality are often due to the presence of different peoples, synchronously or otherwise. This occurs in many places on the outskirts of this district, a good illustration being found in East Tennessee, where three or four distinct groups of ware are intermingled. As would naturally be expected, the distribution is governed somewhat by the great water-ways, and pottery of this province is found far up the Ohio, Tennessee, and Arkansas Rivers. HOW FOUND.--All peoples have resorted, at some period of their history, to the practice of burying articles of use or value with the dead. It is to this custom that we owe the preservation of so many entire pieces of these fragile utensils. They are exhumed from burial mounds in great numbers, and to an equal extent, perhaps, from simple, unmarked graves which are constantly being brought to light by the plowshare. Fragmentary ware is found also in refuse heaps, on house and village sites, and scattered broadcast over the face of the land. This pottery, at its best, was probably not greatly superior in hardness to our own soft earthenware, and the disintegrating agencies of the soil have often reduced it to a very fragile state. Some writer has expressed the belief that a considerable portion of the ware of this province was sun-baked merely. This view is hardly a safe one, however, as clay, unmixed with lime or other like indurating ingredient, no matter how long exposed to the rays of the sun, would, from ages of contact with the moist earth, certainly return to its original condition. I have seen but few pieces that, even after the bleaching of centuries, did not show traces of the dark mottlings that result from imperfect firing. There probably was a period of unbaked clay preceding the terra-cotta epoch, but we cannot expect to find definite traces of its existence except, perhaps, in cases where large masses, such as mounds or fortifications, were employed. The relations of the various articles of pottery to the bodies with which they were associated seem to be quite varied. The position of each vessel was determined by its contents, by its symbolic use, or by the pleasure of the depositor. Uniformity cannot be expected in this more than in other features of burial. In other sections of the country the pieces of pottery are said to have been broken before final inhumation took place, but such was certainly not the practice in this province. AGE.--There can be no reasonable doubt that the manufacture of this ware began many centuries before the advent of the white race, but it is equally certain that the art was extensively practiced until quite recent times. The early explorers of Louisiana saw it in use, and the processes of manufacture are described by Dumont and others. Possibly Du Pratz had in mind some of the identical vessels now upon our museum shelves when he said that "the women make pots of an extraordinary size, jars with a medium-sized opening, bowls, two-pint bottles with long necks, pots or jugs for containing bear's oil, which hold as much as forty pints, and finally plates and dishes in the French fashion."[1] Vessels were certainly made in great numbers by the Natchez and other tribes within our period, and it is reasonable to suppose that they belonged to the great group under discussion. If not, it will be necessary to seek the cause of their total disappearance, since, as I have already said, the pottery of this district, as shown by the relics, is practically a unit. The introduction of metal utensils was a death-blow to the native industry, although some of the southern tribes, the Cherokees, for example, seem to have practiced the art continuously, in a very limited way, down to the present time. There is but little evidence of the influence of the art of the whites upon the ceramic products of this province, although the forms are sometimes thought to be suggestive of European models. It is certain, however, that the art had reached its highest stage without the aid of civilized hands, and in the study of its many interesting features we can feel assured that we are dealing with purely aboriginal ideas. The pottery of this province is remarkably homogeneous in character, and we are warranted in assigning it to a single period of culture, and, in concluding, that the peoples who developed and practiced the art belonged to a group of closely-allied tribes. We can also state without fear of precipitating a controversy that the people who made this pottery were "mound-builders." At the same time, they were not necessarily of the same people as the builders of the mounds of Wisconsin, Ohio, or Georgia or contemporaneous with them. [Footnote 1: Du Pratz: Histoire de la Louisiane, Vol. II, p. 179.] USE.--It is difficult to determine the functions of the various forms of vessels. We are safe in stating that in very primitive times nearly all were intended for use in the domestic arts, and that as time went on uses were differentiated--form, as a consequence, undergoing many changes. Early writers on the Southern States mention a number of ordinary uses, such as cooking, the carrying and boiling of water, the manufacture of sugar and salt, and the preservation of honey, oil, and paint. Only a small percentage of the vessels, and these generally of the pot-shaped variety, show indications of use over fire. It is well known that with most peoples particular forms were devoted to especial ceremonial uses. The construction of vases exclusively for mortuary purposes was probably not generally practiced, although a few examples, notably those illustrated in Figs. 372 and 420, point decidedly in this direction. The simple conditions of life with these people are indicated by the absence of certain forms. Lamps, whistles, toys, bricks, tiles, and other articles in common use with many barbaric nations, are not found in this province. Pipes, so neatly shaped by other mound-building peoples, are here of a very rude character, a point indicating decided distinctions between the tribes of this province and those of neighboring sections. CONSTRUCTION.--The methods of manufacture have evidently been of a primitive character. The wheel or lathe has not been used. At the advent of the whites, the natives were observed to build their vessels by a process known as "coiling," and by modeling over gourds, and over blocks of wood and masses of indurated clay shaped for the purpose. It is probable that in many cases the support was not a mold in the ordinary sense, but was simply a rounded object of small size held in one hand while the base of the vessel was formed over it by the other. Rounded pebbles, or the mushroom-shaped objects of clay sometimes found in the mounds, would have served the purpose perfectly. Trowels, paddles, stamps, polishing-stones, and other implements were used in finishing. Baskets were also used as molds, and pliable fabrics, such as nets and coarse cloths, were employed in some sections. The methods of baking have apparently not been described in much detail by early writers, but the ware itself bears the marks of those simple processes known to our modern tribes. It is highly probable that the work was done by the women, and that each community had its skilled potters, who built and baked the ware in the open air, going through those simple mummeries that accompany the work among most primitive peoples. MATERIAL.--The material employed was usually a moderately fine-grained clay, tempered, in a great majority of cases, with pulverized shells. The shells used were doubtless obtained from the neighboring rivers. In many of the vessels the particles are large, measuring as much as one-fourth or even one-half of an inch in width, but in the more elegant vases the shell has been reduced to a fine powder. Powdered potsherds were also used. The clay was, apparently, often impure or loamy. It was, probably, at times, obtained from recent alluvial deposits of the bayous--the sediment of overflows--as was the potter's clay of the Nile. There is no reason for believing that the finer processes of powdering and levigation were known. A slip or wash of very finely comminuted clay was sometimes applied to the surface of the vessel. The walls of the vessels are often thick and uneven, and are always quite porous, a feature of no little importance in the storage of drinking-water, but one resulting from accident rather than from design. COLOR.--The paste of this ware presents two marked varieties of color, a dark and a light hue. In a majority of cases it is dark, ranging from a rich black to all shades of brown and gray. The lighter tints are usually warm ochrey grays, rarely approaching reddish or terra-cotta hues. It is highly probable that the differences of color were, to some extent, intentionally produced, and that the material or methods of firing were regulated in a way to produce one tint or another at pleasure. This theory is confirmed by the fact that certain forms of vases are pretty generally dark, while certain other forms are as uniformly light--the latter in nearly all cases being used for the application of color, or of designs in color. FORM.--This ware exhibits a great variety of forms, many of which are extremely pleasing. In this respect it is far superior to the other prehistoric groups of the eastern United States. The shapes are as varied and elegant as those of the ancient Pueblo pottery, but are inferior to those of Mexico, Central America, and Peru. They take a higher rank than the prehistoric wares of central and northern Europe, but as a matter of course lack the symmetry and refinement of outline that characterize the wheel-made wares of Mediterranean countries. As I classify by form farther on, and discuss the origin of form as each form-group is presented, I shall not make further reference to this topic here. FINISH.--The finish, as compared with the work of civilized nations, is rude. The surface is often simply hand or trowel smoothed. Generally, however, it was more or less carefully polished by rubbing with an implement of stone, shell, bone, or other suitable substance, the markings of these tools being distinctly visible. Nothing resembling a glaze has been found on pieces known to be ancient. The surface was sometimes washed or coated with a slip or film of fine clay which facilitated the polishing, and in very many cases a coat of thick red ocher was applied. ORNAMENT.--The ancient potter of the middle province has taken especial delight in the embellishment of his wares, and the devices used are varied and interesting. They include, first, fanciful modifications of form; second, relief ornament; third, intaglio figures; and, fourth, designs in color. _Modification of shape_.--It can hardly be claimed that the ancient peoples of this region had a very refined appreciation of elegance of outline, yet the simple, essential forms of cups and pots were by no means satisfactory to them. There are many modifications of shape that indicate a taste for higher types of beauty, and a constant attempt to realize them. The æsthetic sentiment was considerably developed. There is also a decided tendency toward the grotesque. To such an extreme have the dictates of fancy been followed, in this respect, that utility, the true office of the utensil, has often taken a secondary place, although it is never lost sight of entirely. Bowls have been fashioned into the shapes of birds, fishes, and reptiles, and vases and bottles into a multitude of animal and vegetable forms without apparent regard to convenience. All of these modifications of essential forms were doubtless looked upon as, in a sense, ornamental. So far as I can determine they were in no case intended to be humorous. _Relief ornament._--Decorative ideas of a purely conventional character are often worked out in both low and salient relief. This is generally accomplished by the addition of nodes and fillets of clay to the plain surfaces of the vessel. Fillets are applied in various ways over the body, forming horizontal, oblique, and vertical bands or ribs. When placed about the rim or base, these fillets are often indented with the finger or an implement in a way to imitate, rudely, a heavy twisted cord--a feature evidently borrowed from basketry. Nodes are likewise attached in various ways to the neck and body of the vessel. In some cases the entire surface of the larger vessels is varied by pinching up small bits of the clay between the nails of the fingers and thumb. An implement is sometimes used to produce a similar result. _Intaglio designs._--The æsthetic tendencies of these potters are well shown by their essays in engraving. They worked with points upon both the plastic and the sun-dried clay, as well as at times upon the fire-baked surface. Figures thus produced exhibit a wide range of artistic achievement. They illustrate all stages of progress from the most archaic type of ornament--the use of dots and straight lines--to the most elegant combinations of curves; and, finally, to the delineation of life forms and fanciful conceptions. Generally, when a blunt implement is employed, the line is produced by a movement that I shall call _trailing_, in contradistinction to _incision_, in which a sharp point is used, and _excision_ or _excavation_, which is more easily accomplished with the end of a hollow reed or bone. _Impressed_ or _stamped_ ornament is of rare occurrence, and anything like _repoussée_ work is practically unknown. The practice of impressing cords and fabrics was common among many of the northern tribes, and nets have been used in the manufacture and ornamentation of vases at many points within this province. The use of stamps, especially prepared, was in vogue in most of the Gulf States, and to a limited extent in northern localities. _Designs in color._--The colors used in painting are white, red, brown, and black, and have generally consisted of thick, opaque, clayey paste, white or colored with ochers. Occasionally the colors used seem to have been mere stains. All were probably laid on with coarse brushes of hair, feathers, or vegetable fiber. The figures are in most cases simple, and are applied in broad, bold lines, indicative of a strong talent for decoration. The forms are, to a great extent, curvilinear, and embrace meanders, scrolls, circles, and combinations and groupings of curved lines in great variety. Of rectilinear forms, lozenges, guilloches, zigzags, and checkers are best known. The decided prevalence of curved forms is worthy of remark. With all their fertility of invention, the inhabitants of this valley seem never to have achieved the rectangular linked meander, or anything more nearly approaching it than the current scroll or the angular guilloche, while other peoples, such as the Pueblos of the Southwest and the ancient nations of Mexico and Peru found in it a chief resource. The reasons for this, as well as for other peculiarities of the decorative art of the mound-builders as embodied in pottery, must be sought for in the antecedent and coëxistent arts of these tribes. These peoples were certainly not highly accomplished in the textile arts, nor had they felt the influence of advanced architecture such as that of Mexico. The influence of such arts inevitably gives rise to angular geometric figures. Taken as a whole, the remains of the mound-builders would seem to point to a hyperborean origin for both the people and their arts. The origin of decorative ideas, the processes by which they are acquired by the various arts, and their subsequent mutations of form and significance are matters of the greatest interest, and a separate paper will be devoted to their consideration. CLASSIFICATION OF FORMS.--Form cannot be made a satisfactory basis of classification, yet within a given group of products, defined by general characters, a classification by shape will be found to facilitate description. In making such a classification we must distinguish essential from non-essential features, that is to say, for example, that bowls must be placed with bowls, bottles with bottles, etc., disregarding the various fanciful modifications given to rims, necks, and bodies for the sake of embellishment. To recognize these adventitious features, which are almost infinite in variety, would be to greatly embarrass form classification. There is also another difficulty in the employment of form in classification--the nomenclature is very imperfect. We cannot use Greek names, as our forms correspond in a very few instances only with the highly developed forms known to classic art. Our own plain terms, although defective, are better and far more appropriate. All necessary correlations of form can readily be made when the comparative study of the pottery of the world is undertaken. If we take a full set of these primitive vessels and arrange them in the order of increasing complexity we have an unbroken series ranging from the simplest cup to the high-necked bottle with perforated foot or with tripod. A partial series is shown in the upper line, Fig 361. A multitude of variations from these outlines are found, a few of which are suggested in the lower line. [Illustration: FIG. 361.--Scale of forms.] Compound, eccentric, and life forms are given elsewhere. In deciding upon the order of arrangement for the various form groups, I shall be governed by what appears to be the natural order of evolution--a progress from simple to complex. First then we have basin-like vessels, such as _dishes_, _cups_, and _bowls_. Second, vases with wide mouths and somewhat globular bodies, the larger of which would be very generally recognized as _pots_. Third, vases with full bodies and narrow mouths, such as are often termed _jars_, but which are as properly called bottles. Fourth, vessels with high, narrow necks, universally denominated _bottles_. Vessels that cannot be grouped with either of these classes will have to be described in sub-groups, arranged in the order of their complexity or importance. ORIGIN OF FORM.--The derivation and subsequent mutations of form will be treated somewhat in detail as the various forms come up, and a subsequent paper will dwell upon the topic at considerable length. BOWLS. Basin or bowl-shaped vessels exhibit great diversity of shape and ornament. In size they range from less than one inch in diameter and depth to more than twenty inches in diameter and a foot in depth. In color and finish they are uniform with vessels of the other classes. Their uses were doubtless chiefly domestic. [Illustration: FIG. 362.--Forms of bowls.] FORM.--The forms are greatly varied, as will be seen in Fig. 362. Many are simply segments of spheres and vary from a shallow saucer to a hollow perforated globe. Others have elongated, compressed, or conical bodies, with round or flattened bases. Rectangular and irregular forms are sometimes found. Stands and legs are but rarely attached, and handles, excepting those of a grotesque character, are exceptional. It will probably be safe to assume that some form of shallow vessel--a dish, cup, or bowl, was the first artificial form produced. Such a vessel would be most easily fashioned in clay and may have been suggested by accident, or by natural or artificial vessels. Whatever the origin or whichever the method of construction, the difficulties encountered would at first prevent the manufacture of other than the simplest forms. ORNAMENT.--The ornamentation of bowls was accomplished in a variety of ways. These have been already described in a general way, under the head of ornament. Rim modifications constitute an important feature. The margin or lip may be square, oblique, round, or grooved, as indicated in Fig. 363 _a_, _b_, _c_, and _d_. The scallop may be employed as in _e_ and _f_, and relief ornament may be added, such as fillets and nodes, and various horizontal projections, as shown in the second line, Fig. 363, to say nothing of incised lines and indentations, which are the heritage of wicker-work. [Illustration: FIG. 363.--Modification of rims.] Not satisfied with these simple ideas of decoration, the fancy of the potter led him to add embellishments of most varied and often of extraordinary character. The nodes and ridges have been enlarged and prolonged, and fashioned into a thousand natural and fanciful forms. Shells, fish, birds, beasts, human and impossible creatures have been utilized in a multitude of ways. Many illustrations of these are given on subsequent pages. The body of the bowl is somewhat less profusely ornamented than the rim. The interior, as well as the exterior, has received painted, relieved, and intaglio designs. In the painted ones the favorite idea for the interior is a series of volutes, in broad lines, radiating from the center of the basin. Groups of festooned lines, either painted or engraved, and arranged to give the effect of imbricate scales, form also a favorite motive. The exterior surface of the incurved rims of globular vessels offers a tempting surface to the artist and is often tastefully decorated in all the styles. ILLUSTRATIONS.--_Ordinary forms._--I have not thought it necessary to present many cuts of simple undecorated vessels, as their shapes are repeated numberless times in elaborated forms. The crude examples teach nothing as to stage of culture. They are of the same time and people as the finer specimens. [Illustration: FIG. 364.--Bowl: Arkansas.--1/3.] The small bowl given in Fig. 364 is unusually well made, and is peculiar in having its interior surface decorated with a rather chaste incised design consisting of festooned lines. This was a favorite idea with the ancient potters and may be seen on both exterior and interior surfaces of a variety of vessels. The rim is beveled on the inner edge and has a beaded or indented fillet encircling the outer margin. The bottom is somewhat flattened. This specimen is from Arkansas. [Illustration: FIG. 365.--Bowl: Arkansas.--1/3.] In Fig. 365 we have a good example of the dark, nicely-finished ware of Arkansas. The widely expanding rim is neatly scalloped on the margin and is finished on the inside with a pattern of incised lines. These lines appear to have been engraved in the hardened clay. The form is rendered graceful by a shallow encircling depression or groove at the base of the rim. The bottom is somewhat flattened. Occasionally we find very deep bowls with sloping sides and flat bottoms resembling our common flower pots. One example from Arkansas is seven inches in diameter at the top and four at the base, and five inches deep. A heavy band of clay has been added to the outer margin of the rim, leaving a channel above and beneath. A number of perforations occur in this rim, as if made for the passage of thongs or filaments. A similar specimen of larger dimensions may be seen in the National Museum. We have a number of bowls with incurved rims. This form is more characteristic of the south and is common along the Gulf coast. A very small example is shown in Fig. 366. The lower part of the body is nearly hemispherical while the rim contracts slightly, giving a rather graceful outline. The exterior is embellished with a simple figure consisting of four linked scrolls which have been traced with a blunt point in the moist clay. [Illustration: FIG. 366.--Cup: Arkansas.--1/3.] A much larger vessel resembling the above in shape is given in Fig. 367. It is of the dark brownish shell-tempered ware, characteristic of Arkansas. The lip is much incurved and the base considerably flattened, so that the form is that of a greatly compressed oblate spheroid. The outer surface has been moderately well polished, and is ornamented in a very effective manner by a series of figures, outlined by incised lines, alternate spaces being filled in with minute punctures. [Illustration: FIG. 367.--Bowl: Arkansas. (?)--1/3.] A favorite form is a bowl with full deep body and incurved lip. A vessel of this class is illustrated in Fig. 368. The rim is but slightly incurved, while the body is considerably constricted below the greatest circumference. It is a unique and handsome specimen. The color of the slip is a pale, reddish-gray, a little darker than an ordinary flesh tint. The paste is seen to be yellowish where the surface has been injured. The ornament is a simple meander, consisting of three incised lines. It is said to have been found in Arkansas. Other bowls of like form and of elegant finish are found in the collection. They are generally dark in color, and have large apertures, low walls and flattened bases. The meander, mostly in its more simple forms, is the favorite decoration. [Illustration: FIG. 368.--Bowl: Arkansas.--1/3.] There are many red vessels of the class under consideration, but the majority are less contracted at the aperture and thus are somewhat pot-shaped. They are rather rudely constructed and finished, and but for the color, would seem to be intended for ordinary cooking purposes. I observe in a number of cases that circular medallion-like ornaments have been set around the rim. These are from one-half to one inch in diameter, and are generally perforated or punctured in two or three places, apparently with the idea of representing a face. The effect is very much like that of the small perforated disks, riveted upon the exterior of copper or tin kettles for the purpose of attaching handles. Occasionally a tail-like appendage is added to the under side of these discoidal heads, suggesting the tadpole figures upon the sacred water vessels of the Pueblo Indians. One large basin with slightly incurved rim has a series of triangular figures in red and brown upon both the inner and the outer surfaces. It is rudely finished and of large size, being eleven inches in diameter and seven and a half in height. _Eccentric forms._--Before proceeding with the discussion of life-forms as exhibited in bowls, I must present a few unique shapes. [Illustration: FIG. 369. FIG. 370. Cups: Arkansas (?).--1/3.] These consist of ladle-shaped vessels, and of bowls or basins with rectangular, oval, or unsymmetrical outlines. Ladles are of rare occurrence. In the Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology I have illustrated the best example that has come to my notice. The Davenport collection contains but one specimen--a rude shallow cup with a short thick handle. The form suggests the wooden and horn spoons of the modern tribes and may have originated in their archaic prototypes. Fig. 369 illustrates a minute cup rudely made of coarse clay. The outline is oval and slightly pointed at one end, as if intended for pouring liquids. In Fig. 370 we have another small vessel of rude finish with two pointed lips. A much larger vessel of similar shape may be seen in the Davenport collection. The projecting pointed lip is rarely found in aboriginal pottery, although I see no reason why such a feature may not readily have been suggested to the savage by the prolonged margins of his vessels of shell. Rectangular vessels are of the rude shell-tempered ware, and, although rare, are widely distributed. Fig. 371 illustrates a specimen from Pecan Point, Arkansas. The surface is rudely finished and without polish. The color is a dark gray, much flecked with large particles of white shell. Another example has a square rim but a rounded bottom, and is covered with a coat or slip of dark red clay. [Illustration: FIG. 371.--Rectangular bowl: Pecan Point, Arkansas.--1/3.] A small vessel from the same region as the preceding has the rim pressed in on the four sides, leaving sharp, projecting corners. One of the most notable vessels in the collection is illustrated in Fig. 372. It is a heavy casket consisting of two parts, body and lid, and is made as usual of clay and coarsely pulverized shell. It is brownish gray in color and bears some marks of the baking. It was obtained by Captain W. P. Hall from a low mound at Hale's Point, Tennessee, and is described by Mr. W. H. Pratt, in the following language: "It is of rude, irregular, quadrangular form, made in two parts. The lower, or case proper, is 12 inches long, 7 inches wide, and 5 inches deep, inside measure, the upper edge being slightly bent inward all around. The upper part or lid is of similar form and dimensions, being very slightly larger, so as to close down over the other part, about one and a half inches, and is somewhat more shallow. As the lid does not fit very perfectly, the joint around the edge had been plastered up with clay. When found, it contained the remains of a very small child reduced to dust, except that some of the bones of the skull, jaws, and limbs retained their form, crumbling rapidly, however, upon removal and exposure to the air. There were also found two or three dozen small shell beads. Excepting the remains described, the case was entirely empty. The case weighs six and a quarter, and the lid just six pounds." This is one of the very few vessels that would seem to have been constructed especially for mortuary purposes. [Illustration: FIG. 372.--Burial casket: Hale's Point, Tennessee.--1/4.] I wish to add to the list of eccentric forms a singular example from the collection of J. R. Thibault, of Little Rock, Arkansas. As shown in Fig. 373 it is an oblong, trough-like vessel with flat projecting wings at the ends. It is extremely well-finished, with thin walls, symmetrical form, and high polish. The color is quite dark and the material is as usual. The engraved design consists of incised lines, which form a number of rectangular compartments extending around the exterior surface of the body. The wings are perforated. The form of this vessel suggests the wooden trays of some modern tribes. A similar example, which is illustrated in the Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, is of much inferior interest, being plain and rude. _Life forms._--A very large percentage of the bowls of this district are modified in such a way as to resemble, more or less closely, the form of some living creature--bird, beast, or reptile. Especial attention has been given to the heads. These are modeled in the round and attached to the rim or side, while other parts of the animal appear upon different portions of the vessel. [Illustration: FIG. 373.--Trough-shaped vessel: Arkansas.--1/3. [_National Museum._]] It will be difficult to determine the origin of this curious practice. We shall not be able to say that it came from the elaboration of handles, simply to please fancy, for the reason that vessels of this class are rarely known to have had simple handles; nor from the modification of simple ornaments, as such were but little used. It is still less probable that animal forms were first modeled independently, and afterwards changed in such a way as to serve as vessels. There are no examples of animal forms in clay independent of vessels. It would not be consistent with primitive methods of procedure to copy nature direct, at least until some mystic significance had become attached to the form employed. It is possible, however, that the origin of this practice is not to be found within the plastic art itself, but in the shapes of antecedent and co-existent vessels of other materials in which life forms had been employed; or in the use of natural objects themselves as utensils, the original forms not having been lost sight of and having in time suggested the employment of other natural forms. Examples of the latter class may be cited. Shells were primitive vessels. The hard cases of seeds and fruits were also much used. These were doubtless antecedent to vessels of clay. They were the natural models for the potter, the carver in wood or stone, and their employment as such served to lead up gradually to a more realistic and general use of natural shapes in works of art to which they were not essential features. The importance of the various animal forms was increased by their association with religious ideas. Nearly all the vessels of this class presented in the following illustrations come from the vicinity of Pecan Point, Arkansas. Clay vessels imitating both marine and fresh-water shells are occasionally obtained from the mounds and graves of the Mississippi Valley. The conch shell appears to have been a favorite model, especially in its modified form, Fig. 374, _a_ and _b_. The clam shell is also imitated in _c_ and _d_. The more conventional forms of these vessels are exceedingly interesting, as they point out the tendencies and possibilities of modification. An instructive example illustrated in _e_ has four groups of nodes, each, consisting of a large central node with four or five smaller ones, surrounding it, set about the rim, the conception being that of four shells joined in one vessel, with the noded apexes turned outward and the bases inward. A still more highly conventionalized form is shown in _f_. The cup is unsymmetrical in outline, and has a few imperfect nodes near one corner, but its resemblance to a shell would hardly be recognized by one unacquainted with more realistic renderings of like subjects. In _g_ we have an imitation of a shell cup placed within a plain cup. [Illustrations: FIG. 374.--Clay vessels imitating shells.] A very good illustration of this class of vessel is given in Fig. 375. It is evidently intended to imitate a trimmed conch shell. The apex and a few of the surrounding nodes are shown at the right, while the base or spine forms a projecting lip at the left. A coil of clay forms the apex. This is carried outward in a sinistral spiral to the noded shoulder. We have here a suggestion of the origin of a favorite decorative motive, the scroll, a clew, however, which the paucity of examples makes it difficult to follow up satisfactorily. [Illustration: FIG. 375.--Bowl imitating a modified conch shell.--1/3.] Although we may not be able to arrive at any definite conclusion in regard to the origin and significance of the practice of modeling life forms in clay, we are certain of one thing, that it became an important feature in the potter's art, and that in due course of time the practice broke loose from the restraints of birth and tradition and asserted its freedom in the production of any form that superstition or fancy happened to select. The artist probably did not follow nature with great accuracy in all the details of species and varieties, but some definite model must have been in view, in nearly all cases, and such characters as came to be regarded as essential to that creature were never lost sight of, consistency being a most notable characteristic of the art of a savage or barbaric people. [Illustration: FIG. 376.--Frog-shaped bowl: Craigshead Point, Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 377.--Frog-shaped bowl: Pecan Point, Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 378.--Animal-shaped bowl: Arkansas.--1/3.] The sun-fish was a favorite model, but its form was generally employed in vessels with upright necks. A number of examples occur in the next section. Of reptilian forms the frog seems to have been the favorite. [Illustration: FIG. 379.--Bird-shaped bowl: Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 380.--Bird-shaped bowl: Arkansas.--1/3.] Few examples occur, however, in the shallower vessels. In the bowl illustrated in Fig. 376, the various members of the body are boldly modeled, and appear about the most expanded portion of the vessel. The rim is ornamented with a series of notches, and two small loops connect the rim with the head and tail of the creature. The legs are characteristic, and the long toes extend beneath the body. The bottom of the vessel is flat. The make and finish are as usual, but the surface has been painted red. A similar vessel is shown in Fig. 377, the view being taken from the front. It is well polished and has a rounded bottom. The color is dark. [Illustration: FIG. 381.--Bird-shaped bowl: Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 382.--Bowl with grotesque heads: Arkansas.--1/3.] Another remarkable example of this use of animal forms is seen in the vessel presented in Fig. 378. A deep globular bowl of dark, well-polished ware is made to represent the head of an animal. A long snout, with teeth and nostrils and accompanied by a pair of knobs for eyes, embellishes the right side--as seen in the cut--ears appear at the front and back, and a circular node standing, perhaps, for the severed neck, is placed at the left. The head has a decidedly porcine look, yet it may have been intended for a raccoon or an opossum. Fig. 379 illustrates a large shallow bowl or pan of ordinary form and finish. The head of a bird resembling a turkey is attached to one side, with the bill turned inward. On the opposite side there is a small handle-like projection that represents the bird's tail. A vessel of somewhat extraordinary form is shown in Fig. 380. The bowl is smaller and deeper than the last, and serves as the body of a bird, the head and tail of which are of unusual proportions. The neck is very long and thick and is gracefully curved, but the head is not modeled with sufficient care to make apparent the species intended. The vessel shown in Fig. 381 is also finished in imitation of a bird. In this case the bird is placed upon its back, the neck and head being looped up to form a sort of handle on one side, while the legs answer a like purpose on the opposite side. The wings are represented by a number of lines rudely engraved upon the sides of the vessel. The resemblance of this bowl to the wooden basins made by Northwest Coast Indians is very striking. The vessel shown in Fig. 382 is one of the most unique yet brought to light. It is a heavy, rather rudely finished bowl, to the rim of which two grotesque heads, apparently of nondescript character, have been attached. One resembles the oft-occurring plumed serpent of aboriginal American art in a number of its characters. The other has a double comb somewhat resembling that of a domestic fowl. No description can convey as clear a conception of these monstrosities as the accompanying illustration. [Illustration: FIG. 383.--Heads of birds.] [Illustration: FIG. 384.--Grotesque heads.] A good degree of skill is shown in the modeling of varieties of birds. A fair idea of the accuracy of these potters in this direction will be conveyed by the series of heads shown in Fig. 383. Several species of ducks are apparently differentiated, one of which, resembling the summer duck closely, is given in _a_, while the head given in _b_, although possibly also intended for a duck, is much like a grouse or partridge. The pigeon or dove is seen in _c_, the vulture or eagle in _d_, and the owl in _e_. [Illustration: FIG. 385.--Bowl with grotesque head: Pecan Point, Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 386.--Bowl with grotesque head: Pecan Point, Arkansas.--1/2.] It would be difficult to imagine more grotesque and outlandish heads than those attached to the bowls illustrated in Figs. 385 and 386. The vessels themselves are of the usual type, rudely modeled and finished and very heavy. The first is dark in color, the other red. The strange animal here represented is certainly not a close copy of anything in nature. It is characterized by upright ears, a high bulbous snout and a grinning mouth. The teeth in some cases resemble the fangs of a serpent. The eyes consist of rounded nodes; and often curved lines, incised or in relief, extend from them or the mouth down the sides of the neck. The tail at the opposite end of the vessel is turned upward and coiled. The type specimens of this form are from Pecan Point, Arkansas. [Illustration: FIG. 387.--Bowl with grotesque handle: Scanlon's Landing, Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 388.--Animal-shaped bowl: Arkansas.--1/3.] The peculiar character of this class of heads is well shown in the series given in Fig. 384. My observations have led me to suspect that they may be the result of attempts to model in clay the mythical plumed serpent which is so graphically delineated in the engraving upon the little vase shown in Fig. 407. The fact that in one case legs have been added to the base of the body militates against this theory. Their resemblance to the gargoyle heads of mediæval architecture suggests the possibility of early European influence. If possible, a still more novel conceit is embodied in the handle of the vessel shown in Fig. 387. It can be likened to nothing in nature more readily than to the antler of an elk. This vessel is of a dark brownish color, and is but slightly polished. A duplicate specimen of inferior size and finish has recently been added to the National Museum from a grave at Pecan Point. Similar to the preceding in general appearance are a number of bowls or deep pans, embellished with the heads of animals. A very good example is given in Fig. 388. The head has a decided resemblance to that of a female deer or fawn. The tail appears upon the opposite side of the basin, and is pendant, as in nature. Legs have been added to the base of the bowl; these terminate beneath the body in cloven hoofs. The small bowl, shown in Fig. 389, is nearly hemispherical in shape. [Illustration: FIG. 389.--Animal-shaped bowl: Arkansas.--1/3.] A small head, representing some animal, has been attached to the rim. The exterior surface is covered with a number of groups of roughly-worked concentric ridges, which may be meant to imitate hair. These ridges have apparently been made by pinching up the clay between the nails of the fingers and thumb. Figures of similar form are generally incised. This vessel is probably from the vicinity of Pecan Point. The creature represented by the head, shown in Fig. 390, would not be recognized from the cut, or perhaps not even with certainty from any single specimen, but with a number of examples in view, there need be no hesitation. The animal intended is a bat. In a number of features the likeness is striking. The high top head, the angular ears, and the small eyes crowded down upon the mouth are characteristic. The tail is flat, curved a little upward, and ridged along the middle in imitation of the attenuated caudal column. The general consistency of this work is demonstrated by the fact that this particular form of tail accompanies this form of head in all cases, and is not associated with any other. The face of the bat is always turned toward the vessel; in imitation of other varieties of animals, it is nearly always turned out. [Illustration: FIG. 390.--Bowl with bat's head: Pecan Point, Arkansas.--1/3.] In one case, Fig. 391, we have, what appears to be, a human head attached to the side of the bowl. This head is furnished with a triangular crest, notched on the edges, and enlarged at the top. The case is a perplexing one, especially as a tail like that attached to the bird bowls occurs on the side opposite the head. [Illustration: FIG. 391.--Bowl: Arkansas.--1/3.] POT-SHAPED VESSELS. There is no hard line of demarcation between the class of vessels now to be considered and those already described. The distinction is made chiefly for convenience of treatment. MATERIAL, ETC.--As a rule, pot-shaped vessels are of coarser materials and of ruder finish than other forms, indicating, perhaps, their exclusive relegation to the culinary arts, where nice finish was not essential. In many cases they show use over fire. In size, they have a wide range. The larger are often as much as fifteen inches in diameter, and twenty in height. There are a score or more of very large size in the Davenport museum. FORM.--The form characteristics are a full globular body--sometimes elongated, sometimes compressed vertically--a low neck, and a wide aperture. The bottom is very generally rounded. A few of the form modifications are shown in Fig. 392. The rim or neck is always short, and is upright or slightly recurved. Many vessels resembling the shapes here presented are placed with the succeeding group, as they appear to be functionally distinct from this. There are no examples with legs or stands. [Illustration: FIG. 392.--Forms of pots.] HANDLES.--Looped handles are confined almost wholly to this class of vessels. They are generally ranged about the rim or neck. In a majority of cases there are four handles to a vessel. We rarely find less than that number, but often more. It is a usual thing to see fifteen or twenty handles set about the rim. Originally the handles may have been exclusively functional in character; they were so at least in antecedent forms. These potters have certainly, at times, employed them for purposes of embellishment. In some cases they are too fragile for use, in others they are flattened out against the neck of the vessel and united with it throughout their whole length. Again, they have degenerated into mere ridges, notched and otherwise modified to suit the fancy. In many instances their place is taken by incised lines or indentations which form effective and appropriate ornamental figures. A series of vessels showing gradations from perfect handles to their atrophied representatives is shown in Fig. 393. [Illustration: FIG. 393.--Handles.] ORIGIN OF HANDLES.--Handles were doubtless originally attached to facilitate the suspension and handling of vessels and other articles. They probably had their typical development in basketry, and there are good reasons for supposing that certain forms of the handles upon pottery owe their existence to contact with the sister art. This idea is confirmed by their shapes, and by the fact that a large percentage of the pottery handles are useless as aids to suspension or transportation. ORNAMENT.--Rim margins are modified for decorative purposes, very much as they are in bowls. See Fig. 363. The bodies of these vessels are often elaborately ornamented, mostly by incised figures, but often by punctures, nodes and ribs. The incised lines are arranged principally in groups of straight lines forming angular figures--a very archaic style--and in groups of festooned lines so placed as to resemble scales. The punctures are made with a sharp point, and form encircling lines and various carelessly executed patterns. A rude sort of ornamentation is produced by pinching up the soft clay of the surface between the nails of the fingers and thumb. Relief ornament consists chiefly of applied fillets of clay, arranged to form vertical ribs. Rows of nodes are sometimes seen, and in a few cases the whole body is covered with rude nodes. ILLUSTRATIONS.--The specimens selected for illustration are intended to epitomize the forms and decorations of a very great number of vessels, and are not always the most showy examples to be found. A vessel of rather exceptional shape is given in Fig. 394. It could as well be classed with bowls as with pots. The ware is of the rude kind generally used over the fire. The body is high and cylindrical, the rim flaring, and the bottom quite flat. The form is suggestive of our domestic crockery. [Illustration: FIG. 394.--Pot: Arkansas (?).--1/3.] Another bowl-like pot is illustrated in Fig. 395. It is of the dark, rudely hand-polished variety. The body is globular, the neck is very short and is ornamented with a dentate band. Below this are two pairs of perforations, probably used for suspending the vessel. There are a number of vessels of this variety, mostly smaller than the example given. The vessel shown in Fig. 396 is still more pot-like. The neck is higher than the preceding and is slightly constricted. It is of very rude construction and finish. The rim is furnished with two small horizontal projections, and the body is somewhat obscurely lobed. It represents a very numerous class, especially plentiful in Southeast Missouri. [Illustration: FIG. 395.--Pot: Arkansas (?).--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 396.--Pot: Waverly, Tennessee.--1/3.] The little pot presented in Fig. 397 has the body covered with rude nodes. The neck is surrounded by a heavy fillet, notched obliquely in imitation of a twisted cord. Four rude handles have also been attached. [Illustration: FIG. 397.--Pot: Arkansas (?).--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 398.--Pot: Arkansas.--1/3.] In Fig. 398 we have one of the rudest examples in the collection. The neck is furnished with four handles, which alternate with four vertical ribs. The body is misshapen and rough, and is ornamented with a series of nearly vertical ridges, a rather usual device, and one which is sometimes very neatly executed. The body of the nicely finished pot shown in Fig. 399 is embellished with short, incised markings, arranged in vertical lines. The neck is furnished with a heavy indented band and four strong handles. The locality given is "Four-Mile Bayou, Alabama." The specimen given in Fig. 400 illustrates the use of great numbers of handles. In this case there are sixteen. They are gracefully formed and add much to the appearance of the vessel, which is really a bowl with wide, flaring rim. In most of its characters it resembles the pots. [Illustration: FIG. 399.--Pot: Alabama (?).--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 400.--Pot: Arkansas (?).--1/3.] Another curious variation in the shape of handles is shown in the little cup given in Fig. 401. This can hardly be called a usual feature, although occurring in vessels of various localities. I have seen an example from the Missouri Valley in which a great number of perforated handles were set about the rim, and another in which there was a continuous, partially free, collar perforated at intervals. There is a specimen of this class in the Davenport Academy collection in which the flattened handles are so placed about the neck as to form a series of arches. These, I take it, are partially atrophied forms. The body is ornamented by a scale-like pattern of incised lines--a favorite method of decoration with the ancient potter. [Illustration: FIG. 401.--Pot: Arkansas (?).--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 402.--Pot: Arkansas (?).--1/3.] In Fig. 402 we have an illustration of total atrophy. The handles are represented by simple incised lines. There is no relief whatever. In many cases the form of the handles is shown in low relief, the outer surface being plain or ornamented with incised lines or punctures. The body of the vessel last mentioned is covered with rudely incised scroll designs. Another good illustration of this class of vessels is shown in Fig. 403. The cut is taken from my paper in the Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. The handles are indicated by incised lines. The body was ornamented by pinching up the clay between the nails of the thumb and forefinger. Locality: Pecan Point, Arkansas. [Illustration: FIG. 403.--Pot: Pecan Point, Arkansas.--1/3. [_National Museum_]] [Illustration: FIG. 404.--Pot: Hale's Point, Tennessee.--1/3.] A good example of the larger pots is illustrated in Fig. 404. It is engraved a little less than one-fourth the dimensions of the original. The height is seventeen inches and the greatest diameter eighteen inches. It is very well made. The walls are even and only moderately thick. The dark, unpolished surface is profusely speckled with fragments of white shell. There are four wide, strong handles. The rim and neck are ornamented with encircling lines of finger-nail indentations. [Illustration: FIG. 405.--Pot: Pecan Point, Arkansas.--1/3.] A masterpiece of this class of work is shown in Fig. 405. It was obtained at Pecan Point. It is not quite symmetrical in form but is carefully finished. The color is gray, with mottlings of dark spots, the result of firing. The height is eleven inches, and the aperture is ten inches in diameter. There are ten strong, well-proportioned handles, each having a knob resembling a rivet head, near the upper end. The margin of the rim has a circle of indentations. There are a few red vessels of this shape which have figures of reptiles attached to the neck. WIDE-MOUTHED BOTTLES OR JARS. Vessels of this class were probably not devoted to the ordinary uses of cooking and serving food. They are handsome in shape, tasteful in decoration, and generally of small dimensions. They are found, as are all other forms, buried with the dead, placed by the head or feet, or within reach of the hands. Their appearance is not suggestive of their original office, as there is no indication of wear, or of use over fire. FORM.--I include under this head a series of forms reaching from the wide-mouthed pot to the well-developed bottle. They really correspond closely to the high-necked bottles in all respects save in height of neck, and the separation is therefore for convenience of treatment only. The following illustration (Fig. 406) will give a good idea of the forms included. [Illustration: FIG. 406.--Forms of jar-shaped bottles.] There are also many eccentric and many extremely interesting life forms included in this group. A number of vases, modeled after the human head, are, by their general outline, properly included. ORNAMENTATION.--The rims, bodies, and bases are embellished much after the fashion of the vessels already described, with the exception that handles or handle-like appendages or ornaments seldom appear. The painted designs are in one, two, or three colors, and the incised figures have been executed both in the soft and in the thoroughly dried clay. The style of execution is often of a very high order, especially in some of the more southerly examples, a number of which are from the mounds of Mississippi and Louisiana. We note the fact that in a few of the designs there is a slight suggestion of Mexican forms. In illustrating this group, I am compelled, for the want of space to omit many interesting examples. I present only such as seem to me especially instructive. [Illustration: FIG. 407.--Bottle: Pecan Point, Arkansas.] ILLUSTRATIONS.--_Ordinary forms._--The vessel shown in Fig. 407 may be taken as a type of a very large class. It is most readily described as a short-necked, wide-mouthed bottle. It is symmetrical in shape and very nicely finished. The lip is supplied with a narrow, horizontal rim. The body expands somewhat abruptly from the base of the upright neck to the squarish shoulder, and contracts below in an even curve, giving a hemispherical base. There are a multitude of variations from this outline, a few of which are suggested in Fig. 406. These vessels are nearly all of the dark, grayish-brown, fire-mottled ware. A few are yellowish, and such are often painted red or decorated with designs in red and white. [Illustration: FIG. 408.--Bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 409.--Bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] Two charming vases are shown in Figs. 408 and 409. The surface finish is in both cases very superior. The lines of the figures are carefully drawn, and seem to have been produced by the trailing, under even pressure, of a smooth rather blunt point. It is difficult to get so nicely finished and even a line by simple incision, or by excavating the clay. The design in Fig. 408 consists of eight groups of curved lines arranged in pairs, which are separated by plain vertical bands. It might be considered an interrupted or imperfectly connected form of the running scroll. This grouping of lines is frequently met with in the decorative designs of the Southern States. The design upon the other vase, Fig. 409, is still more characteristic of the South. It consists of an encircling row of round, shallow indentations, about which series of incised scrolls are linked, and of two additional rows of depressions, one above and the other below, through which parallel lines are drawn. Many other interesting illustrations of the simpler forms could be given, but nearly all are very similar in their more important features to the examples that precede or follow. As skilled as these peoples were in modeling life forms, and in engraving geometric devices, they seem rarely to have attempted the linear representation of life forms. We have, however, two very good examples. [Illustration: FIG. 410.--Engraved bottle: Arkansas.] The first of these is shown in outline in Fig. 410. It is a large bottle embellished with four rude drawings of the human figure, executed with a sharp point in the soft clay. Height of vessel, eight inches. The work is characteristic of a very early stage of art. The figures could be duplicated in the work of the ancient Pueblos, and in the pictographic art of many of our savage tribes. They are probably derived from symbolic art, and possibly relate to the guardians of the four points of the compass, or to some similar mythical characters. [Illustration: FIG. 411.--Engraved bottle: Arkansas.--3/4.] The work upon the neat little bottle, presented in Fig. 411, is of the same class as the above but of a much higher grade, both in execution and conception. The engraved design is one of the most remarkable ever obtained from the mounds. It consists of two winged and crested rattlesnakes, which encircle the most expanded part of the vessel, and of two sunflower-like figures, alternating with them. These designs are very carefully engraved with a needle-like point, and are adjusted to the form of the vase in a way that suggests forethought and an appreciation of the decorative value of the figures. By dint of rubbings, photographs and sketches, I have obtained the complete drawing of the various figures which are given in Fig. 412 on a scale of one-half the original. [Illustration: FIG. 412.--Engraved design.--1/2.] The serpent, especially the rattlesnake, has always taken a leading place in the mythology and the art of the more cultured American races, and crest-plumes, and wings have often been considered its proper attributes. The conventional method of representation is also characteristically aboriginal. The plumes, the figure connected with the eye, the bands upon the neck, the stepped figures of the body, and the semi-circular patches on the wings are all characters that appear again and again in the ancient art of the United States. The peculiar emblematic treatment of the heart is almost universal in temperate North America. And just here I may be permitted to suggest that the remarkable feature of the great earth-work serpent of Adams county, Ohio, which has been regarded as the "symbolic egg," and which in its latest phase has become the issue of a frog and the prey of the serpent, is possibly intended for the heart of the serpent, the so-called frog being the head. The rosette figures are not often duplicated in Indian art. There can be little doubt that the figures of this design are derived from mythology. _Eccentric forms._--A form of vessel of which civilized men make peculiar use is depicted in Fig. 413. There is a marked resemblance to a common tea-pot. A very few examples have been found, two of which are illustrated in the Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. The specimen here given is well made and carefully finished. The neck is low and wide, and the body is a compressed sphere. The spout is placed upon one side and a low knob upon the other. The absence of a handle for grasping indicates that the vessel was probably not intended for boiling water. These characters are uniform in all the specimens that have come to my notice. Two small circular depressions occur on the sides of the vessel alternating with the spout and the knob and with these features form centers for four rosettes of involute incised lines. The origin of this form of vessel is suggested by a fine red piece from "Mississippi," now in the national collection. The knob is the head of a turtle or other full-bodied reptile, and the spout takes the place of the creature's tail. Many of the animal-shaped vases would resemble this form closely if an opening were made through the top of the body and through the tail. [Illustration: FIG. 413.--Teapot-shaped vessel: Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 414.--Vessel of eccentric form: Arkansas.--1/3.] In connection with the teapot-like vessels it will be well to describe another novel form not wholly unlike them in appearance, an example being shown in Fig. 414. The shoulder is elongated on opposite sides into two curved, horn-like cones, which give to the body a somewhat crescent-shaped outline. It is of the ordinary plain, dark ware, and has had a low stand or base which is now broken away. The specimen given in Fig. 415 has been considerably mutilated, but evidently belongs to the same class as the preceding. It probably also resembled the vessel which follows; it serves at least as a link between the two. The body is ornamented with carelessly drawn, deeply incised, involute designs. [Illustration: FIG. 415.--Vessel of eccentric form: Pecan Point, Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 416.--Animal-shaped vase: Pecan Point, Arkansas.--1/3.] _Life forms._--A further elaboration of the preceding forms is illustrated in Fig. 416. On one side the conical projection is greatly elongated and fashioned to resemble the head of some grotesque beast, with horns, expanded nostrils, and grinning mouth. The opposite point is elongated and looped, forming a tail, while the base of the body is furnished with four feet. On the sides of the vessel are engraved figures, consisting of clusters of involute lines, as in the specimen just given. It is of the ordinary dark pottery, and was obtained at Pecan Point. Equally noteworthy as plastic representations are the two examples that follow. The vessel shown in Fig. 417 is modeled in imitation of a sunfish. The body is much flattened and is neatly polished. The head is well modeled, as are also the fins and tail. Many examples of this form are found, some of which are elaborately treated, the scales being minutely shown. The body of the fish is sometimes placed in the natural upright position, the neck of the vessel rising from the back, producing a lenticular shape. [Illustration: FIG. 417.--Sunfish vase: Arkansas.--1/3.] The animal so carefully modeled in the vessel given in Fig. 418 resembles a raccoon or an opossum. The mouth of the vessel is wide and the neck upright and short. The body is ornamented with a pattern made up of triangular groups of incised lines, which may or may not be meant for hair. [Illustration: FIG. 418.--Opossum vase: Arkansas.--2/3.] The love of modeling life forms shows itself again in the little vase illustrated in Fig. 419. The head of some animal, rudely suggested, projects from one side, while a curved tail on the other carries out the idea of the complete creature. The round body is decorated with broad vertical lines in dark red. A red line encircles the rim. [Illustration: FIG. 419.--Animal-shaped vase: Arkansas.--1/3.] It is not strange that a people who had successfully engaged in the modeling of life forms, and especially the heads of animals, should attempt the human head. Their remarkable success in this direction is shown in a number of vases, one of which is given in Fig. 420. This and kindred peoples had made considerable progress in carving in stone and other materials, evincing a decided talent for sculpture; but clay is so much more readily manipulated than either wood, stone, or shell, that we are not surprised to find their best work in that material. It is an interesting fact that with all this cleverness in the handling of clay, and in the delineation of varied models, the art had not freed itself from the parent stem--the vessel--and launched out into an independent field. In a few cases such an end seems to have been achieved by certain groups of mound builders, notably those whose works at Madisonville, Ohio, have recently been explored by Professor Putnam. Modeling in clay was probably confined to vessels for the reason that, through their humble agency, the art was developed. Up to the present time I have met with but eight of these curious head-shaped vases. All were obtained from the vicinity of Pecan Point, Arkansas, and, like other vessels, have been associated with human remains in graves or mounds. It is true that in all cases the bones of the dead have not been found, but this only indicates their complete decay. The question as to whether or not these vases were made exclusively for sepulchral purposes must remain unanswered; there is no source of information upon the subject. Such a purpose is, however, suggested in this case by the semblance of death given to the faces. The finest example yet found is shown in Fig. 420. In form it is a simple head, five inches in height and five inches wide from ear to ear. The aperture of the vase is in the crown, and is surrounded by a low, upright rim, slightly recurved. The cavity is roughly finished, and follows pretty closely the contour of the exterior surface, excepting in projecting features such as the ears, lips, and nose. The walls are generally from one-eighth, to one-fourth of an inch in thickness, the base being about three-eighths. The bottom is flat, and takes the level of the chin and jaws. The material does not differ from that of the other vessels of the same locality. There is a large percentage of shell, some particles of which are quite large. The paste is yellowish gray in color and rather coarse in texture. The vase was modeled in the plain clay and permitted to harden before the devices were engraved. After this a thick film of fine yellowish-gray clay was applied to the face, partially filling up the engraved lines. The remainder of the surface, including the lips, received a thick coat of dark red paint. The whole surface was then highly polished. [Illustration: FIG. 420.--Head-shaped vase: Pecan Point, Arkansas.--1/2.] The illustration will convey a more vivid conception of this striking head than any description that can be given. The face cannot be said to have a single feature strongly characteristic of Indian physiognomy. We have instead the round forehead and the projecting mouth of the African. The nose, however, is small and the nostrils are narrow. The face would seem to be that of a youngish person, perhaps a female. The features are all well modeled, and are so decidedly individual in character that the artist must have had in his mind a pretty definite conception of the face to be produced as well as of the expression appropriate to it, before beginning his work. It will be impossible, however, to prove that the portrait of a particular personage was intended. The closed eyes, the rather sunken nose, and the parted lips were certainly intended to give the effect of death. The ears are large, correctly placed, and well modeled; they are perforated all along the margin, thus revealing a practice of the people to whom they referred. The septum of the nose appears to have been pierced, and the horizontal depression across the upper lip may indicate the former presence of a suspended ornament. [Illustration: FIG. 421.--The engraved figures.] [Illustration: FIG. 422.--Head covering.] Perhaps the most unique and striking feature is the pattern of incised lines that covers the greater part of the face. The lines are deeply engraved and somewhat "scratchy," and were apparently executed in the hardened clay before the slip was applied. The left side of the face is plain, with the exception of a figure somewhat resembling a grappling hook in outline which partially surrounds the eye. The right side is covered with a comb-like pattern, placed vertically, with the teeth upwards. The middle of the forehead has a series of vertical lines and a few short horizontal ones just above the root of the nose. There are also three curved lines near the corner of the mouth not shown in the cut. The diagram presented herewith (Fig. 421) gives in dotted lines the correct outline of the front face, and shows projected in solid lines the engraved figures. The significance of these markings can only be surmised in the most general way. Their function is probably the same as that of the tattooed and painted figures upon the faces of living races. It will be well to observe that upon the forehead, at the top, there is a small perforated knob or loop. Similar appendages may be seen upon many of the clay human heads from this valley. A Mexican terra-cotta head now in the museum at Mexico has a like feature, and, at the same time, has closed eyes and an open mouth. The head dress should be noticed. It seems to have been modeled after a cloth or skin cap. It extends over the forehead, falls back over the back of the head, and terminates in points behind, as seen in Fig. 422. Two layers of the material are represented, the one broad, the other narrow and pointed, both being raised a little above the surface upon which they rest. This vase head is somewhat smaller than the average human head. [Illustration: FIG. 423.--Head-shaped vase: Pecan Point, Arkansas.--1/2. [_National Museum._]] Another of a very similar character now in the Davenport Museum is about one-half the size of this. The face is much mutilated. A third is somewhat larger than the one illustrated, but is nearly the same in finish and color. The face also has the semblance of death, but the features are different, possessing very decided Indian characteristics. There is no tattooing. All of these heads, including also some of those in the National Museum, are much alike in conception and execution. This fact will be forcibly impressed upon the mind by a study of Fig. 423, which represents a specimen recently exhumed at Pecan Point by agents of the Bureau of Ethnology. In size, form, color, finish, modeling of features, and expression, this head closely resembles the one first described. The work is not quite so carefully executed and the head has probably not such pronounced individuality. The curious device that in the other example appeared near the left eye here occurs on both sides. The lower part of the face is elaborately engraved. Three lines cross the upper lip and cheeks, reaching to the ear; a band of fret-like devices extends across the mouth to the base of the ears, and another band filled in with oblique reticulated lines passes around the chin and along the jaws. The ears are perforated as in the other case and the septum of the nose is partially broken away as if it had once held a ring. A perforated knob has occupied the top of the forehead as in the other case. The face is coated with a light yellowish gray slip, and the remainder of the surface is red. [Illustration: FIG. 424.--Head-shaped vase: Arkansas.--1/3. [_Thibault Collection._]] Fig. 424 illustrates a very interesting specimen of the red pottery of Arkansas. It belongs to the collection of Mr. Thibault, of Little Rock, and was obtained from a mound in the vicinity of that city. The body is slightly lenticular and the human face, which is modeled upon one side, interferes but little with the outline. The face is slightly relieved and extends from the neck of the vase to the widest part of the body, and laterally occupies about one-third of the circumference. The middle portion of the face is finished with a light flesh-colored slip, the remainder of the surface of the vessel being painted a bright rich red. Like the preceding example, the countenance is made to give the appearance of death or sleep. Other face-vessels of scarcely less interest are found in the Thibault collection. HIGH-NECKED BOTTLES. High-necked, full-bodied bottles form a decided feature in the pottery of this province. Similar vessels are rarely found in other sections of the United States, but occur in Mexico and South America. The forms are nowhere else so pronounced. They suggest the well-known water bottles of eastern countries. In material, finish, and decorative treatment they do not differ greatly from the vases described in the preceding section. FORM.--Their forms are greatly and often happily varied as will be seen from the series of outlines given in Fig. 425. [Illustration: FIG. 425.--Scale of forms.] [Illustration: FIG. 426.--Tripods.] A striking feature is found in the presence of legs and stands. The former exhibit globular, conical, cylindrical, and terraced forms, Fig. 426. No example has any striking resemblance to European forms. All are tripods, and are attached to ordinary forms of vessels in a way to suggest that they are superadded features probably rather recently acquired; at the same time legs were doubtless employed by the precolumbian peoples. This is known to be true of Mexico, and Central and South America. There is no reason why the mound-builders of the Mississippi should not have discovered the use of such a device, readily suggested by the use of supports in building, in baking, or in using the vessels, and it would necessarily follow the modeling of life forms. It is true that quadrupeds would not directly suggest the tripod, but birds modeled in clay were made to rest upon the feet and tail, thus giving three supports; besides it would readily be discovered that more than three supports are unnecessary. The stands attached to these bottles are not essentially different from those described in the preceding section. They take the form of simple bands, as seen at _a_, Fig. 427; double bands, as shown in _b_ and _c_; or perforated feet, as seen in _d_. [Illustration: FIG. 427.--Stands.] Compound vessels are rather rare, nearly all of the varieties being outlined in Fig. 428. Some of these are formed by uniting two or even three simple forms in one. Others are only partially compound and resemble the askoidal shapes of Greek art. Attention will be called to the probable origin of all these shapes elsewhere. [Illustration: FIG. 428.--Compound forms.] Life forms are found in all the groups of ware, but differ in the manner in which they are employed. Fig. 429 shows the usual methods of adapting the human form to high-necked bottles. Quadrupeds, fishes, and birds are treated in somewhat similar ways. The vessels represented in this and the four preceding illustrations belong to the various museums of the country. [Illustration: FIG. 429.--Adaptation of the human form.] ORNAMENT.--The styles of decoration are not distinct from those of other classes of vessels. The incised scroll patterns are sometimes very elaborate, and the designs in color are perhaps executed with greater care than in other groups. [Illustration: FIG. 430.--Bottle: Tennessee.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 431.--Gourd-shaped vessel: Arkansas.--1/3. [_National Museum._]] ILLUSTRATIONS.--_Ordinary forms._--I have not thought it advisable to figure many specimens of plain bottles, as all the varieties of outline are repeated in the more highly elaborated or embellished pieces. Fig. 430 represents a plain bottle of the ordinary dark porous ware. The neck is narrow above and expands abruptly below. The body is globular. Looking at this vessel with reference to a possible origin, we observe its resemblance to a common form of gourd. By a review of the collection, we find that there are many similar vessels actually modeled in imitation of gourds. Good examples are given in the Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, from which Fig. 431 is taken, and in a paper by Edward Evers in Contributions to the Archæology of Missouri. The markings of the original are often shown with a great deal of truthfulness in the earthenware reproductions. [Illustration: FIG. 432.--Bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 433.--Bottle: Arkansas.--1/3. [_National Museum._]] Quite distinct in outline from the preceding forms is the bottle shown in Fig. 432. The neck is high and cylindrical and the body resembles a slightly-flattened globe. Set about the shoulder are four medallion-like faces, the features of which are modeled roughly in low relief. The ware is of the ordinary dark, slightly polished variety. We have in Fig. 433 a good example of bottle-shaped vessels, the neck of which is wide and short, and the body much compressed vertically. There are a number of duplicates of it in the Museum. The specimen illustrated is in the national collection, and was obtained in Arkansas. It is a handsome vase, symmetrical in form, quite dark in color, and highly polished. The upper surface of the body is ornamented with a collar formed of a broad fillet of clay, or rather of two fillets, the pointed ends of which unite on opposite sides of the vase. [Illustration: FIG. 434.--Bottle: Arkansas.--1/2. [_National Museum._]] The handsome vase shown in Fig. 434 is of a somewhat different type from the preceding. It was obtained, along with many other fine specimens, from mounds near Little Rock, Arkansas. It is of the dark polished ware with the usual fire mottlings. The form is symmetrical and graceful. The neck is ornamented with a band of incised chevrons and the sloping upper surface of the body, viewed from above, has a cruciform arrangement of stepped figures engraved in the plastic clay. One of the most striking of the bottle-shaped vases is shown in Fig. 435. It is symmetrical in shape, well proportioned and well finished. The color is now quite dark and the surface is roughened by a multitude of pits which have resulted from the decay of shell particles. The paste crumbles into a brownish dust when struck or pressed forcibly. [Illustration: FIG. 435.--Engraved bottle: Arkansas.--1/3. [_National Museum._]] By far the most remarkable feature of the piece is the broad, convex hood-like collar that encircles the neck and spreads out over the body like an inverted saucer. This collar is curiously wrought in incised lines and low ridges by means of which two grotesque faces are produced. The eyes are readily detected, being indicated by low knobs with central pits surrounded each by three concentric circles. They are arranged in pairs on opposite sides. Between the eyes of each pair an incipient nose and mouth may be made out. The face is outlined below by the lower edge of the collar and above, by a low indented ridge crossing the collar tangent to the base of the neck. The most expanded part of the body is encircled by an incised pattern consisting of five sets of partially interlocked scrolls--an ornament characteristic of the pottery of Arkansas. Modifications of the simple outlines of bottles exhibit many interesting peculiarities. Compound forms are not unusual and consist generally of imitations of two vessels, the one superimposed upon or set in the mouth of another. A good example in the ordinary plain dark ware is given in Fig. 436. Similar shapes are suggested by lobed forms of the gourd. [Illustration: FIG. 436.--Bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] Other specimens may be seen in which there is only a gentle swelling of the neck, but all gradations occur between this condition and that in which forms of two vessels distinctly appear. [Illustration: FIG. 437.--Bottle: Pecan Point, Arkansas.--1/3.] A very usual form is illustrated in Fig. 437. Below the overhanging lip the neck contracts and then expands until quite full, and at the base contracts again. This feature corresponds to the upper vessel suggested in the preceding case. Four flattened handles are placed about the upper part of the neck and three rows of small conical pits encircle the most expanded portion. The body is plain and much compressed vertically. A low wide stand is attached to the base. A number of good examples, now in the National Museum, were found in Arkansas. The vase shown in Fig. 438 has also the double body, the vessels copied having been somewhat more elaborately modeled than in the preceding cases. A bottle is set within the mouth of a pot. The neck is high, wide, and flaring and rests upon the back of a rudely modeled frog, which lies extended upon the upper surface of the body. The notched encircling ridge beneath the feet of the reptile represents the rim of the lower vessel, which is a pot with compressed globular body and short, wide neck. This vase is of the dark, dead-surfaced ware and is quite plain. Four vertical ridges take the place of handles. I have observed other examples in which two vessels, combined in this way, served as models for the potter; one, a shell set within a cup, is illustrated in the Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology; another is given in Contributions to the Archæology of Missouri. [Illustration: FIG. 438.--Bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] Fig. 439 illustrates a rather graceful form of bottle. It is furnished with a rather high perforated stand or foot, and the body is fluted vertically with narrow, widely separated channels. The neck is high and flaring and has a narrow notched collar at the base. [Illustration: FIG. 439.--Fluted bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 440.--Engraved bottle: Arkansas.(?)--1/3.] There are many good examples of engraved geometric designs upon bottle-shaped vessels. One of the most elaborate is presented in Fig. 440. This vessel has a full, wide neck, a heavy, flattened body, and a broad rudimentary foot. The color is quite dark, and the surface well polished. The engraved design consists of four elaborate, interlinked scrolls, comprising a number of lines, and bordered by wing-like, triangular figures, filled in with reticulated lines. This latter feature is often associated with native delineations of mythic reptiles, and it is not impossible that this scroll work is a highly conventionalized form of some such conception. The four volute centers are slightly concave. Three excellent examples of tripod bottles are illustrated in the accompanying figures. The first, Fig. 441, is a large-necked, rather clumsy vessel of ordinary workmanship, which rests upon three globular legs. These are hollow and the cavities connect with that of the body of the vessel. The whole surface is well polished and very dark. [Illustration: FIG. 441.--Tripod bottle: Arkansas.(?)--1/3.] The vessel depicted in Fig. 442 has a number of noteworthy features. In shape, it resembles the preceding with the exception of the legs, which are flat and have stepped or terraced margins. The whole surface of the vessel is decorated with characteristic designs in red and white upon a warm gray ground. A stepped figure, resembling the Pueblo emblematic "rim of the sky," encircles the neck, and semicircular figures in white appear on opposite sides at the top and base. The body is covered with scroll work in broad red lines, the spaces being filled in with white in the form of a thick earthy paste. Each of the legs has one-half red and the other white. The vessel illustrated in Fig. 443 is of ordinary, dark, polished ware, and is entirely plain. It is peculiar in the shape of its extremities. The neck resembles a long truncated cone, and the legs are heavy and conical, being not unlike those of a common iron pot. _Eccentric forms._--In this place I am able to give but one example of what I have denominated eccentric forms. Others have been indicated on preceding pages. The vase given in Fig. 444 has a flattish, ovoidal body from the opposite ends of which springs a hollow arch--a sort of double neck. This has been perforated at the highest point, and a low recurving rim, which serves as the mouth of the vessel, has been attached. [Illustration: FIG. 442.--Tripod bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 443.--Tripod bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 444.--Bottle of eccentric form: Pecan Point, Arkansas.--1/3.] Another example of this form has recently been received at the Davenport Museum. It is in fragments, but was originally nicely finished and painted. Illustrations of others may be seen in the Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, and in Contributions to the Archæology of Missouri. The specimen illustrated was found at the foot of a skeleton in a grave at Pecan Point. This shape is common to the art of many countries, and was a great favorite in ancient Peru. [Illustration: FIG. 445.--Owl-shaped bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] _Life forms._--In the introduction to this section, I have indicated the many ways in which the human form is employed in the embellishment or the elaboration of bottles. Birds, beasts, fishes, and reptiles are treated in a similar manner. The owl was a favorite subject with the potter, probably on account of the upright, compact figure of the body, or possibly because of some especial regard in which this bird was held. A rather handsome specimen is shown in Fig. 445. The modeling is more than usually successful, and the surface is carefully finished. The wings are treated in a pleasing but highly conventional manner. The plumage is indicated by alternate bands of pale-red and yellow-gray, the latter being the ground color. These bands are outlined by fine incised lines. The remainder of the body is painted red. The vessel rests upon the feet and tail--a natural tripod. In many cases the head of the bird forms the top of the neck of the bottle--the body of the vessel itself being plain and globular. [Illustration: FIG. 446.--Hale's Point, Tennessee.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 447.--Arkansas (?).--1/3.] The heads of animals are treated in the same manner, as may be seen by reference to Figs. 446 and 447. The head shown in Fig. 446 is clearly that of a bear. The whole vessel is painted red. Fig. 447 illustrates a small dark bottle, surmounted by a head of nondescript character. The aperture in these vessels is generally at the back of the head. Fish and reptiles appear somewhat more rarely in connection with high-necked bottles. The Davenport Museum has recently acquired a fine example, painted in red and white, which has the head and other features of a fish, modeled in relief upon the sides and bottom of the body. A small, dark vessel of like character is illustrated in the Third Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology. In the example given in Figs. 448 and 449 the upper part of the neck has been modified in such a way as to accommodate a curious, medallion-like relievo of the human face, while in Figs. 450 and 451 the neck is replaced by grotesque heads, the latter being intended apparently for an owl. These potters dealt with the human figure in a very bold manner for savages. They were evidently capable of representing many creatures with accuracy, but preferred grotesque or conventional forms. A man or a woman is generally modeled with a large body and a curious hunched back, the vertebræ appearing along the prominent ridge. The shoulder blades are usually shown with anatomical distinctness, if not with precision; the arms are long and slender and the hands rest upon the knees or the sides. The position assumed is mostly that of kneeling or squatting, the feet being doubled up beneath and uniting with the bottom of the vessel. [Illustration: FIG. 448.--Bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 449.--Bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 450.--Bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 451.--Bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] These effigy vases are numerous, and greatly varied in size and color. They are mostly of the dark ware, but are found painted plain red or in red and white figures, some of which represent parts of the costume, others, emblematic devices. The largest specimen with which I am acquainted is illustrated in Fig. 452. It is well modeled, a good deal of attention having been given to the details of anatomy. The back is very much humped, and the vertebræ are represented by a series of knobs. The position of the feet beneath the body is, perhaps, worthy of notice. This is shown in Fig. 453_b_. It will be seen that the knees, calves, ankles, and the various parts of the feet are indicated with an approach to accuracy. The projecting back is seen below. The bottom of the vessel is nearly flat, and the legs are modeled in low relief upon it. Other positions are shown in Fig. 453. [Illustration: FIG. 452.--Effigy bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] Fig. 454 illustrates a characteristic profile. [Illustration: FIG. 453.--Positions of feet.] One of these vases has a cross painted upon the breast of the personage represented. The kneeling position, taken in connection with the cross, leads to the thought that perhaps the potter lived in the period of the French missionary, and attempted to model him in clay. There is, however, no indication of costume, and the painting, with the exception of the cross, is in a purely aboriginal style of design. The ground color of the vase is, as usual, a moderately dark gray brown, and the painted figures are laid on in thick, blackish paint. Lines partially encircle the eyes, and extend down over the cheek to the neck, and a line passes around the mouth and extends down over the chin, neck, and chest to the base of the body. The horizontal bar of the cross connects the nipples. The shoulder blades and the hands are also painted black. The back is very curiously modeled and painted. [Illustration: FIG. 454.--Effigy bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] [Illustration: FIG. 455.--Effigy bottle: Arkansas.--1/3.] There are in the collection a number of specimens that do not come under either of the preceding heads. Of these I may mention three small figures from Paducah, Kentucky, which represent a snake, a man, and a deer. They are very rudely done, and are possibly modern work. Attention should be called to some small specimens resembling toadstools or mushrooms in shape, some of which may have been stoppers for bottles, while others could have served as implements in some of the arts. One of these pieces has a distinctly vitrified surface. Its age, however, cannot be determined. There are a few rude pipes of usual forms and of no special interest. The comparative scarcity of these articles, so plentiful in some of the mound districts, is certainly worthy of the attention of archæologists. UPPER MISSISSIPPI PROVINCE: I have already pointed out the fact that most of the pottery of the Upper Mississippi region belongs to a distinct family. It has never been as abundant as the pottery of the more southern sections of the country and is not well represented in our museums. There are only a few pieces in the Davenport collection and these are all in a more or less fragmentary state. A majority are from a mound near the city of Davenport, but a limited number came from Wisconsin. At this time it is impossible to define, with any degree of precision, the geographical limits of this class of ware. The tribes by whom it was manufactured have evidently, at one time or another, occupied the greater part of the Mississippi basin north of the mouth of the Missouri River. Similarities of material, shape, methods of manufacture, and ornamentation, tend to show that we must include the greater parts of the States of Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio, in the area covered by this or closely related ceramic groups, and indications of its presence are discovered far beyond these limits. The mounds of Manitoba have recently furnished examples of this class of ware, and it has decided relationships with the ware of the Eastern and Northeastern States. It is not yet time to draw close distinctions, as sufficiently detailed studies of the products of the various districts have not been made. On the shelves of our museums the difference between the two great families of the middle and Upper Mississippi are strikingly manifest. The ware of the former district, as already shown, exhibits variously tinted pastes tempered with coarsely pulverized shells or potsherds; the vases, as a rule, having full bodies, well rounded bases, and in very many cases, narrow necks. They exhibit great variety of decoration and no little care in finish. The northern family shows a dark paste tempered with sand, often apparently granitic; a rough fracture, and generally a rude finish. The shapes are comparatively simple, often long, tapering below, and flat bottomed. The ornamentation is totally unlike that of the southern variety. It consists of cord impressions, incised lines, and implement indentations arranged in figures peculiar to the district. There are many other features that, like the subtile characters of human physiognomy, cannot easily be described, but which are of first importance as indices of relationship or the lack of it. The best preserved of the Davenport specimens was described and illustrated in the first volume of the proceedings of the Davenport Academy. This vessel, Fig. 456, was found in a mound near Davenport along with human remains, and closely associated with other relics, among which were several copper implements covered with coarse woven fabrics. Its height is eleven inches, width of aperture seven and a half inches, and diameter of base four inches. It is estimated to contain a little over one gallon. There is a broad, shallow constriction at the neck. The walls are from one-fourth to three-eighths of an inch thick, and the margin of the rim is squared off, showing the full thickness--a strong characteristic of the northern pottery. The form is nearly symmetrical, and the surface is hand-smoothed but not polished. The paste is now dark and crumbling, and shows a rough fracture. A large percentage of sand was used in tempering. The color is a dark gray-brown. The entire surface, with the exception of a narrow band about the base, has been covered with ornamentation. This is executed with considerable care, and shows a great deal of ingenuity and some taste. There is apparently no feature copied from nature or from ideographic art. Two or three distinct implements have been used. A part of the neck ornament was made by rolling back and forth a circular tool, a _roulette_, the edge of which was notched. A row of indented nodes has been produced upon the exterior surface of the neck by impressing upon the inside the end of a reed or hollow bone about one-fourth of an inch in diameter. Patterns of bold, rather carelessly drawn lines cover the body and seem to have been made by trailing, under pretty strong pressure, the smooth point of a stylus--probably the bone or reed already suggested. Some of the larger indentations upon the lower part of the neck may have been made by the same implement held in an oblique position. The use to which this vessel was applied can hardly be guessed. It was found with the remains of its owner, and probably contained food or drink. [Illustration: FIG. 456.--Vase: Davenport, Iowa.--1/3.] Another smaller vessel from the same locality and found under similar conditions shows the same characteristics of material, form, and ornament. There are also a few other fragments of the same ware from this group of mounds. One of these shows that decoration by the indentation of twisted cords was practiced here as elsewhere. A similar vase tastefully decorated with indented lines about the neck, and a band of decoration consisting of broad, plain, sinuous bands upon the body, comes from a mound in Scott County, Iowa. Height six inches, diameter the same. The rims of all these vessels are square on the edge, showing the full thickness of the walls. [Illustration: FIG. 457.--Vase: Wisconsin.--1/2. [_National Museum._]] A very interesting vessel obtained by Captain Hall from a mound in Wisconsin is represented by a number of large fragments, probably comprising about one-half of the walls. It must have been somewhat larger than the vase given in Fig. 456, and in a general way resembles it closely. It appears to be more pointed below than the other, and has a slightly flaring rim. The walls are one-fourth of an inch thick. The paste is coarse and is tempered with sand, as in the cases already described. The lower part of the body is covered with nearly vertical cord marks. The upper part was smoothed, rather rudely, for the reception of additional decoration, which consists of several bands of indented figures. The principal implement used was apparently a stiff cord, or a slender osier wrapped with fine thread, which has been laid on and impressed with the fingers, forming nearly continuous encircling lines. Bands of short oblique lines made in the same manner also occur. Just below the margin there is a line of annular indentations made from the exterior, leaving nodes on the inside--the reverse of the treatment noticed in the vessel already illustrated. Fragments of identically marked ware from the vicinity of Prairie du Chien may be seen in the National Museum. A large fragment from Baraboo County, Wisconsin, shows a full body and a slightly flaring rim. The upper part is ornamented with horizontal lines of annular indentations, and the body is covered with rather rude patterns made by rolling a notched wheel or _roulette_ back and forth in zigzag lines. Two handsome pieces of this ware were recently obtained by the Bureau of Ethnology from a mound in Vernon County, Wisconsin. The finest of these, which is shown in Fig. 457, is six and a half inches in height, and in symmetry and finish rivals the best work of the south. The paste is dark, compact, and fine grained, and tempered apparently with sand. The color of the surface is a rich, mottled brown. The most striking feature of the decoration consists of a number of polished bands, extending in divers directions over the surface, the interstices being filled in with indented figures. The lip is smooth and the margin rounded. The exterior surface of the narrow collar is ornamented with oblique lines made by a _roulette_, and crossed at intervals with fine incised lines. The neck is slightly constricted, and is encircled by a polished zone one and one-fourth inches wide, having a line of indentations along the upper edge. The body is separated into four lobes by four vertical, depressed, polished bands about one inch wide. Two of these lobes are crossed obliquely by similar polished bands. These bands were all finished with a polishing implement, and are somewhat depressed, probably the result of strong pressure with this tool. They are bordered by wide incised lines. The intervening spaces are indented with a _roulette_. [Illustration: FIG. 458.--Vase; Illinois.--3/4.] A handsome little vessel, obtained from a mound at Albany, Whitesides County, Illinois, is illustrated in Fig. 458. It apparently belongs to the silicious ware of the north. The shape and ornamentation are somewhat novel. Four large flattish lobes occur about the body, on each of which a figure somewhat resembling a Maltese cross has been made by incising or impressing broad, shallow lines. The remainder of the body is covered with marks that resemble impressions of a coarse osier basket. This specimen was collected by Mr. C. A. Dodge, and a short description was published by Prof. W. H. Pratt in the third volume of the proceedings of the Davenport Academy. GULF PROVINCE. Our museums contain but few pieces of pottery from the Lower Mississippi, and in the Davenport Academy collection there are probably not more than a dozen typical examples of the leading varieties of ware of the Gulf States. Louisiana and Mississippi have furnished some very fine specimens of the pottery of the middle province, more refined, perhaps, in form, material, and finish than the ware of Arkansas and Missouri, but still differing decidedly from the typical pottery of Alabama and Georgia. Not wishing at present to enter upon the detailed study of the latter class of ware, I shall present only the few examples contained in the Davenport collection. The southern ware is characterized by refinement of outline, color, finish and ornament, and is distinguished from that of the Middle Mississippi by its material, which is a fine-grained paste, tempered with very fine silicious matter instead of pulverized shells. [Illustration: FIG. 459.--Cup: Alabama.--1/3.] The little cup given in Fig. 459 is from Mobile, Alabama. It is pointed at opposite ends and was probably modeled after or within some basket or fruit shell, the impressions from which are seen on the surface. The paste contains no perceptible tempering material. The largest and most pleasing vessel of this class is from Alabama, and is shown in Fig. 460. The aperture is ten and a half inches in diameter, and the height nine and one-half inches. The form is full above and somewhat conical below. The walls are thin and even and the surface well polished. The color is dark and shows the usual fire mottlings. There is no admixture of shell material, finely pulverized micaceous matter appearing in its place. The ornamentation is simple, but is applied in a way to greatly enhance the beauty of the vessel. It consists of a single broad zone of incised figures. Three zigzag lines meander the middle of the band and the intervening triangles are filled in with groups of straight lines. All the lines are well drawn and appear to have been cut with a sharp point in the dry clay. [Illustration: FIG. 460.--Bowl: Alabama.--1/3.] Bottle-shaped vases are not found to any great extent outside of the Mississippi Valley, and are quite rare in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. [Illustration: FIG. 461.--Bottle: Mississippi.--1/3.] The piece illustrated in Fig. 461 is from Mississippi, and in most respects is identical with the ware of the Gulf Province. The paste is silicious, fine-grained, and quite hard. The color is slightly ferruginous and clouded with fire stains from the baking. The body is ornamented with the engraved figure of a bird apparently intended for an eagle. The head, with its notched and strongly curved beak and conventionalized crest, occupies one side. The wings may be seen at the right and left, while the tail appears on the side opposite the head. The flattened base of the vessel occupies the place of the body. The lines have been scratched with a sharp point in the hardened clay. Certain spaces in the plumes, wings, and tail are filled in with reticulated lines. [Illustration: FIG. 462.--Bottle: Alabama.--1/3.] The bottle presented in Fig. 462 is embellished with a rather remarkable design in color. The material is fine grained and without admixture of shell. The color of the paste is a pale, salmon gray. The surface is coated with a thick slip or enamel of whitish clay, very fine grained and smooth; upon this the design was painted, not in the thick earthy color employed farther north, but in what appears to be a dark purplish-gray stain. The design upon the body is wholly unlike anything yet described. It is developed in the light ground tint by filling in the interstices with the dark color. The peculiar character of this design inclines me to the view that it probably had an ideographic origin, although possibly treated here as pure decoration. The open hand is sometimes seen, in both the decorative and the symbolic work of the Gulf coast tribes, and is not unknown elsewhere. The figures alternating with the hands are suggestive of a highly conventionalized face, the eyes being indicated by the volutes and the mouth and teeth by the lower part of the figure, as will be seen in the fully projected design, Fig. 463. The neck has two indistinct bands of triangular dentate figures apparently painted in the dark color. The bottom is flattish and without the coating of light clay. Both paste and slip can be readily scratched with the finger nail. This vase was found in Franklin County, Alabama, near the Mississippi line. [Illustration: FIG. 462.--Painted design.] RÉSUMÉ. Attention has been called to the great numbers of pieces of earthenware recovered from the mounds and graves of the middle province of the Mississippi Valley. In certain districts--as remarked by one of our collectors--we have but to dig to fill museums. Such districts must have been occupied for a long period by a numerous people who recognized the claims of the dead upon their worldly treasures. The burial grounds of many other sections of the American continent are correspondingly rich in ceramic remains. The vessels were not to any extent cinerary, and probably not even mortuary in the sense of having been constructed especially for inhumation with the dead. They were receptacles for food, drink, paint, and the like, placed in the grave along with other possessions of the departed in obedience to the demands of an almost universal custom. The material employed in manufacture embraced clay in all grades of refinement, from coarse loamy earths to the refined slips used in surface finish. The tempering materials--used in greater or lesser quantity according to the character of the vessel to be made--consisted of shell, sand, and potsherds reduced to various degrees of pulverulence. The stage of the art represented by this ware is one of hand building purely. No lathe or other revolving device was known, although varieties of improvised molds--baskets, gourds, and the like, such as are known to nearly all pottery-making peoples--were frequently employed. The highest degree of finish known was attained by the application of a slip or wash of fine clay which was given a good degree of mechanical polish by means of a smooth implement held in the hand. Ornament was produced by both flat and plastic methods. The colors used in painting were white, black, and red earths. The plastic subjects were incised, stamped, relieved, and modeled in the round. The period was one of open-air baking, a moderate degree of hardness being secured. The texture was porous and the vessels were without resonance. The paste exhibits two distinct varieties of color which may be described roughly as light and dark. A certain range of dark hues--blacks, browns, and grays--were probably produced by "smother baking." Another set of colors embracing light reddish and yellowish grays resulted from changes in the clay produced by simple open air baking. A feature worthy of especial note is the great diversity of form--indicating a long practice of the art, a high specialization of uses, and a considerable variety in the originals copied. The manual skill exhibited is of no mean order. Symmetry of form combined with considerable grace of outline has been achieved without the wheel--a result attained in still greater perfection by other American races. Notwithstanding the great diversity of the forms of vessels, the very primitive condition of the art is indicated by the absence of bricks, tiles, whistles, lamps, spindle-whorls, toys, and statuettes. The models from which the vessels were copied must have been quite varied, comprising shells of mollusks--marine and fresh-water--gourd shells of varying shapes, and vessels of wicker, bark, horn, and wood, such as are in common use with our western and northern tribes. The execution of the ornamental designs indicates a rather low grade of skill. This is especially true of work in color, which has the appearance of a newly acquired art. Intaglio and relief work evinces much greater skill--the incised forms especially giving evidence of long experience. In subject-matter the ornament employed bespeaks nothing higher perhaps than could be expected of our historic tribes. The great body of the devices are geometric, and comprise such motives as could have developed within the art or that might have been borrowed from closely associated arts. A small percentage of incised linear designs come, apparently, from mythologic sources, and delineate, in a rude way, both men and animals. The modeling of life forms in connection with earthen vessels constitutes a feature of considerable interest, the highest known achievement being represented by a series of vases imitating human heads. Animal forms are generally rudely modeled, the imitation of nature having been apparently a secondary consideration--the associated idea or the fancy for the grotesque being the stronger motive. The animal forms are inferior to those carved in stone by some of the mound-building peoples. That any of these images were idols in the ordinary acceptation of the term is an idea that cannot be entertained. They are always associated directly with vessels, and could not be more than representations of the tutelary deities supposed to be interested in the uses or ceremonies to which the vessels were assigned. In form there are many suggestions of the characteristic utensils of the north, in ornament there are occasional hints of the south--of Caribbean and Mexican art. With the Pueblo peoples, notwithstanding their proximity, there is hardly a hint of relationship of any kind. Unlike the Pueblos, the ethnical environment of the Mississippi Valley races would seem to have been considerably diversified; there was less isolation; yet there are strong indications that the art is mainly of indigenous growth, as there is unity and consistency in all its features. In reference to the period of culture represented by this ware, a few words may be added. There is no feature in it that could not reasonably be expected of the more advanced historic tribes of the Valley. It indicates a culture differing in many ways from that of the Pueblos, ancient and modern, but on the whole rather inferior to it. The work of Mexico, Central and South America is decidedly superior in every essential feature. There are many difficulties in the way of instituting a comparison of this work with that of the primitive work of the Old World. These I shall not stop to present in this place. In the most general way, I may say that the ceramic art of the Middle Mississippi is apparently superior to that of the stone age in Europe, but little can be inferred in regard to relative grades of culture. In classic countries it is difficult to find its true equivalent. To reach a stage of art correspondingly low we shall have to go behind the heroic age--to pass down through more than the five prehistoric cities of the hill of Hissarlik and descend into the lowest archæologic substratum. Even this, unless it represent the first achievement of that grade of art upon the continent, would afford uncertain data for comparative study. A given grade of ceramic achievement runs so freely up and down the scale of culture that alone its evidence is of little value in determining culture status. Index Adams County, Ohio, Serpent earthwork in 402 Age of pottery in Mississippi Valley 371 Alabama, Pottery from 395, 396, 431, 434 Albany, Illinois, Pottery from 430 Ancient pottery of the Mississippi Valley, William H. Holmes 361-436 Animal forms in pottery 383-392 Arkansas, Pottery from 378-392, 394-398, 399-410, 413-426 Baraboo County, Wisconsin, Pottery from 430 Basket molds for pottery 372 Bottles or jars, Wide-mouthed 398-411 Burial grounds, Pottery in 434 mounds, Pottery in 370 Burning pottery 434-435 Ceramic art groups 369 Change of habitat modifies ideas 370 Cherokee pottery 371 Color in Mississippi Valley pottery 373, 374 Classification of form Mississippi Valley pottery 375 Compound vessels 412 Contact of people modifies ideas 370 Construction of pottery in Mississippi Valley 372 Contributions to the Archæology of Missouri 367, 414, 418, 422 Culture represented in pottery 430 Curved forms 375 Davenport, Iowa, Pottery from vicinity of 427, 428 Differences in pottery of different regions 427, 431 Dodge, C. A., collected pottery 431 Du Pratz describes pottery 371 Evers, Dr. Edward, Publication by 367, 414 Finish of Mississippi Valley pottery 373 Form in Mississippi Valley pottery 373 Franklin County, Alabama, Pottery in 434 Gulf Province in pottery 431 Habitat modifies ideas, Change of 370 Hall, Captain, Pottery obtained by 381, 429 Holmes, W. H.; Ancient pottery of the Mississippi Valley 361-436 Ideas modified by certain influences 370 Illinois, Pottery from 430 Iowa, Pottery from 427, 428, 429 Jars, Wide-mouthed bottles or 398-411 Jones, Dr. Joseph, Publication by 367 Kentucky, Pottery from 426 Little Rock, Ark., Collection of pottery at (_See_ Thibault). Pottery from mound near 415 Louisiana, Pottery from 399, 431 Madisonville, Ohio, Mounds at 406 Mexican pottery head 409, 411 Middle Mississippi province in pottery 369-426 Mississippi, Pottery from 399, 403, 431, 432 province in pottery, Middle 369-426 [province in pottery], Upper 426-431 Valley, Ancient pottery of the (W. H. Holmes) 361-436 Missouri, Pottery from 395, 396 Mobile, Pottery from 431 Modification of form in pottery 373 Mound-builders 406, 435 Mounds, Pottery from 370, 415, 429, 431 Natchez pottery 371 Ohio, Mounds at Madisonville 406 Serpent earthwork in Adams County 402 Paducah, Pottery from 426 Peabody Museum collections 367 Pecan Point, Pottery from 369, 381, 390, 391, 392, 396, 397, 398, 399, 404, 408-409, 410, 417, 422 Pot-shaped vessels 392-398 Potter, Prof. W. B., Publication by 367 Pottery buried with the dead 370, 434 from Arkansas 394-398 of the Mississippi Valley, Ancient 361-436 Pratt, Prof. W. H., Aid of 368, 381, 431 Prairie du Chien, Pottery from vicinity of 430 Putnam, Mrs. M. L. D., Aid of 368 Scott County, Iowa, Pottery from. (_See_ Davenport). Serpent in pottery 402 Shells as primitive vessels 383 used in pottery 372 South American pottery 411 Storage vessels of pottery 371 Technique modifies ornament 400-465 Tennessee, Pottery from 381-382, 395, 397, 413, 423 Thibault, J. H., Pottery collection of 382, 410 Tripod bottles 420, 421 Upper Mississippi province in pottery 426-430 Vernon County, Wisconsin, Pottery from 430 Whitesides County, Illinois, Pottery from 430 Wisconsin, Pottery from 429, 430 * * * * * Transcriber's Note Errata Missing and illegible/damaged punctuation has been repaired. Page 366: '420' corrected to '422': "445.--Owl-shaped bottle: Arkansas." (Page) 422 Page 434: 'enployed' corrected to 'employed': "known to nearly all pottery-making peoples--were frequently employed." Sundry page numbers in the Index have also been corrected. 
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23155	----	[Illustration: THE PEDDLER.] [Illustration: WESTERN CHARACTERS Redfield.] WESTERN CHARACTERS OR TYPES OF BORDER LIFE IN THE WESTERN STATES BY J. L. McCONNEL AUTHOR OF "TALBOT AND VERNON,"--"THE GLENNS," ETC. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY DARLEY [Illustration] REDFIELD, 110 AND 112 NASSAU STREET, NEW YORK. 1853. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1853, BY J. S. REDFIELD, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, in and for the Southern District of New York. STEREOTYPED BY C. C. SAVAGE, 13 Chambers Street, N. Y. PREFATORY NOTE. Attempts to delineate local character are always liable to misconstruction; for, the more truthful the sketch, the greater is the number of persons, to whom resemblance may be discovered; and thus, while in fact only describing the characteristics of a class, authors are frequently subjected, very unjustly, to the imputation of having invaded the privacy of individuals. Particularly is this so, when the class is idealized, and an imaginary type is taken, as the representative of the species. I deem it proper, therefore, to say in advance, that no attempt has been made in the following pages, to portray any individual; and that--although I hope I have not been so unsuccessful, as to paint pictures which have no originals--if there be a portrait in any sketch, it consists, not in the likeness of the picture to the person, but of both to the type. As originally projected, the book would have borne this explanation upon its face; but the circumstances which have reduced its dimensions, and changed its plan, have also rendered necessary a disclaimer, which would, otherwise, have been superfluous. * * * * * One or two of the sketches might have been made more complete had I been fortunate enough to meet with certain late publications, in time to use them. Such is the elaborate work of Mr. Schoolcraft upon Indian History and Character; and such, also, is that of Mr. Shea, upon the voyages and labors of Marquette--a book whose careful accuracy, clear style, and lucid statement, might have been of much service in writing the sketch entitled "_The Voyageur_." Unfortunately, however, I saw neither of these admirable publications, until my work had assumed its present shape--a fact which I regret as much for my reader's sake as my own. J. L. McC. _July 15, 1853._ CONTENTS. PAGE. INTRODUCTORY 7 I. THE INDIAN 19 II. THE VOYAGEUR 62 III. THE PIONEER 106 IV. THE RANGER 157 V. THE REGULATOR 171 VI. THE JUSTICE OF THE PEACE 246 VII. THE PEDDLER 268 VIII. THE SCHOOLMASTER 288 IX. THE SCHOOLMISTRESS 319 X. THE POLITICIAN 340 INTRODUCTORY. --"Our Mississippi, rolling proudly on, Would sweep them from its path, or swallow up, Like Aaron's rod, those streams of fame and song." MRS. HALE. The valley of a river like the channel of a man's career, does not always bear proportion to the magnitude or volume of the current, which flows through it. Mountains, forests, deserts, physical barriers to the former--and the obstacles of prejudice, and accidents of birth and education, moral barriers to the latter--limit, modify, and impair the usefulness of each. A river thus confined, an intellect thus hampered, may be noisy, fretful, turbulent, but, in the contemplation, there is ever a feeling of the incongruity between the purpose and the power; and it is only when the valley is extended, the field of effort open, that we can avoid the impression of energy wasted, and strength frittered away. The great intellect, whose scope is not confined by ancient landmarks, or old prejudices, is thus typified by the broad, deep river, whose branches penetrate the Earth on every hand, and add to the current the tributaries of all climes. In this view, how noble an object is the Mississippi! In extent, fertility, variety of scenery, and diversity of climate, its valley surpasses any other in the world. It is the great aorta of the continent, and receives a score of tributary rivers, the least of which is larger than the vaunted streams of mighty empires. It might furnish natural boundaries to all Europe, and yet leave, for every country, a river greater than the Seine. It discharges, in one year, more water than has issued from the Tiber in five centuries; it swallows up near fifty nameless rivers longer than the Thames; the addition of the waters of the Danube would not swell it half a fathom; and in a single bend, the navies of the world might safely ride at anchor, five hundred miles from sea. It washes the shores of twelve powerful states, and between its arms lies space enough for twenty more. The rains which fall upon the Alleghenies, and the snows that shroud the slopes and cap the summits of the Rocky mountains, are borne upon its bosom, to the regions of perpetual summer, and poured into the sea, more than fifteen hundred leagues from their sources. It has formed a larger tract of land, by the deposits of its inundations, than is contained in Great Britain and Ireland; and every year it roots up and bears away more trees, than there are in the Black Forest. At a speed unknown to any other great river, it rolls a volume, in whose depths the cathedral of St. Paul's might be sunk out of sight; and five hundred leagues from its mouth, it is wider than at thirty. It annually bears away more acres than it would require to make a German principality, engulfing more than the revenues of many a petty kingdom. Beneath its turbid waters lie argosies of wealth, and floating palaces, among whose gilded halls and rich saloons are sporting slimy creatures; below your very feet, as you sail along its current, are resting in its bed, half buried in the sand, the bodies of bold men and tender maidens; and their imploring hands are raised toward Heaven, and the world which floats, unheeding, on the surface. There lies, entombed, the son whose mother knows not of his death; and there the husband, for whose footstep, even yet, the wife is listening--here, the mother with her infant still clasped fondly to her breast; and here, united in their lives, not separated in their death, lie, side by side, the bride and bridegroom of a day;--and, hiding the dread secrets from all human ken, the mighty and remorseless river passes onward, like the stream of human life, toward "the land of dreams and shadows!" To the contemplative mind, there is, perhaps, no part of the creation, in which may not be found the seed of much reflection; but of all the grand features of the earth's surface, next to a lofty mountain, that which impresses us most deeply is a great river. Its pauseless flow, the stern momentum of its current--its remorseless coldness to all human hopes and fears--the secrets which lie buried underneath its waters, and the myriad purposes of those it bears upon its bosom--are all so clearly typical of Time. The waters will not pause, though dreadful battles may be fought upon their shores--as Time will steadily march forward, though the fate of nations hang upon the conflict. The moments fly as swiftly, while a mighty king is breathing out his life, as if he were a lowly peasant; and the current flows as coldly on, while men are struggling in the eddies, as if each drowning wretch were but a floating weed. Time gives no warning of the hidden dangers on which haughty conquerors are rushing, as the perils of the waters are revealed but in the crashing of the wreck. But the parallel does not stop here. The sources of the Mississippi--were it even possible that they should ever be otherwise--are still unknown to man. Like the stream of history, its head-springs are in the regions of fable--in the twilight of remote latitudes; and it is only after it has approached us, and assumed a definite channel, that we are able to determine which is the authentic stream. It flows from the country of the savage, toward that of civilization; and like the gradations of improvement among men, are the thickening fields and growing cultivation, which define the periods of its course. Near its mouth, it has reached the culmination of refinement--its last ripe fruit, a crowded city; and, beyond this, there lies nothing but a brief journey, and a plunge into the gulf of Eternity! Thus, an emblem of the stream of history, it is still more like a march along the highway of a single human life. As the sinless thoughts of smiling childhood are the little rivulets, which afterward become the mighty river; like the infant, airy, volatile, and beautiful--sparkling as the dimpled face of innocence--a faithful reflex of the lights and shadows of existence; and revealing, through the limpid wave, the golden sands which lie beneath. Anon, the errant channels are united in one current--life assumes a purpose, a direction--but the waters are yet pure, and mirror on their face the thousand forms and flashing colors of Creation's beauty--as happy boyhood, rapidly perceptive of all loveliness, gives forth, in radiant smiles, the glad impressions of unfaded youth. Yet sorrow cometh even to the happiest. Misfortune is as stern a leveller as Death; and early youth, with all its noble aspirations, gorgeous visions, never to be realized, must often plunge, like the placid river over a foaming cataract, down the precipice of affliction--even while its current, though nearing the abyss, flow softly as "the waters of Shiloah." It may be the death of a mother, whom the bereaved half deemed immortal--some disappointment, like the falsehood of one dearly loved--some rude shock, as the discovery of a day-dream's hollowness; happy, thrice happy! if it be but one of these, and not the descent from innocence to sin! But life rolls on, as does the river, though its wave no longer flows in placid beauty, nor reveals the hidden things beneath. The ripples are now whirling eddies, and a hundred angry currents chafe along the rocks, as thought and feeling fret against the world, and waste their strength in vain repining or impatient irritation. Tranquillity returns no more; and though the waters seem not turbid, there is a shadow in their depths--their transparency is lost. Tributaries, great and small, flow in--accessions of experience to the man, of weight and volume to the river; and, with force augmented, each rolls on its current toward the ocean. A character, a purpose, is imparted to the life, as to the stream, and usefulness becomes an element of being. The river is a chain which links remotest latitudes, as through the social man relations are established, binding alien hearts: the spark of thought and feeling, like the fluid of the magnet, brings together distant moral zones. On it rushes--through the rapids, where the life receives an impulse--driven forward--haply downward--among rocks and dangerous channels, by the motives of ambition, by the fierce desire of wealth, or by the goad of want! But soon the mad career abates, for the first effect of haste is agitation, and the master-spell of power is calmness. Happy are they, who learn this lesson early--for, thence, the current onward flows, a tranquil, noiseless, but resistless, tide. Manhood, steady and mature, with its resolute but quiet thoughts, its deep, unwavering purposes, and, more than all, its firm, profound affections, is passing thus, between the shores of Time--not only working for itself a channel broad and clear, but bearing on its bosom, toward Eternity, uncounted wealth of hopes. But in the middle of its course, its character is wholly changed; a flood pours in, whose waters hold, suspended, all impurities. A struggle, brief but turbulent, ensues: the limpid wave of youth is swallowed up. Some great success has been achieved; unholy passions are evoked, and will not be allayed; thenceforward there is no relenting; and, though the world--nay! Heaven itself!--pour in, along its course, broad tributaries of reclaiming purity, the cloud upon the waters can never be dispelled. The marl and dross of Earth, impalpable, but visibly corrupting, pervade the very nature; and only when the current ceases, will its primitive transparency return. Still it hurries onward, with velocity augmented, as it nears its term. Yet its breadth is not increased; the earth suspended in its waters, like the turbid passions of the human soul, prevents expansion;[1] for, in man's career through time, the heart grows wider only in the pure. Along the base of cliffs and highlands--through the deep alluvions of countless ages--among stately forests and across extended plains, it flows without cessation. Beyond full manhood, character may change no more--as, below its mighty tributaries, the river is unaltered. Its full development is reached among rich plantations, waving fields, and swarming cities; while, but the journey of a day beyond, it rushes into Eternity, leaving a melancholy record, as it mingles with the waters of the great gulf, even upon the face of Oblivion. --Within the valley of this river, time will see a population of two hundred millions; and here will be the seat of the most colossal power Earth has yet contained. The heterogeneous character of the people is of no consequence: still less, the storms of dissension, which now and then arise, to affright the timid and faithless. The waters of all latitudes could not be blended in one element, and purified, without the tempests and cross-currents, which lash the ocean into fury. Nor would a stagnant calmness, blind attachment to the limited horizon of a homestead, or the absence of all irritation or attrition, ever make one people of the emigrants from every clime. And, when this nation shall have become thoroughly homogeneous--when the world shall recognise _the race_, and, above this, _the power_ of the race--will there be no interest in tracing through the mists of many generations, the outlines of that foundation on which is built the mighty fabric? Even the infirmities and vices of the men who piled the first stones of great empires, are chronicled in history as facts deserving record. The portrait of an ancient hero is a treasure beyond value, even though the features be but conjectural. How much more precious would be a faithful portrait of _his character_, in which the features should be his salient traits--the expression, outline, and complexion of his nature! To furnish a series of such portraits--embracing a few of the earlier characters, whose "mark" is traceable in the growing civilization of the West and South--is the design of the present work. The reader will observe that its logic is not the selection of actual, but of ideal, individuals, each representing a class; and that, although it is arranged chronologically, the periods are not historical, but characteristic. The design, then, is double; _first_, to select a _class_, which indicates a certain stage of social or political advancement; and, _second_, to present a picture of an imaginary individual, who combines the prominent traits, belonging to the class thus chosen. The series halts, beyond the Rubicon of contemporaneous portraiture, for very obvious reasons; but there are still in existence abundant means of verifying, or correcting, every sketch. I have endeavored to give the consciousness of this fact its full weight--to resist the temptation (which, I must admit, was sometimes strong) to touch the borders of satire; and, in conclusion, I can only hope that these wishes, with an earnest effort at fidelity, have enabled me to present truthful pictures. FOOTNOTES: [1] "Were it a clear stream, it would soon scoop itself out a channel from bluff to bluff."--_Flint's Geography_, p. 103. I. THE INDIAN. "In the same beaten channel still have run The blessed streams of human sympathy; And, though I know this ever hath been done, The why and wherefore, I could never see!" PHEBE CAREY. In a work which professes to trace, even indistinctly, the reclamation of a country from a state of barbarism, some notice of that from which it was reclaimed is, of course, necessary; and an attempt to distinguish the successive periods, each by its representative character, determines the logic of such notice. Were we as well acquainted with the gradations of Indian advancement--for such unquestionably, there were--as we are with those of the civilized man, we should be able to distinguish eras and periods, so as to represent them, each by its separate _ideal_. But civilization and barbarism are comparative terms; and, though it is difficult, perhaps impossible, precisely to fix the point at which one ceases and the other begins, yet, within that limit, we must consider barbarism as _one_ period. Of this period, in our plan, the Indian, without reference to distinction of tribe, or variation in degree of advancement, is the representative. As all triangles agree in certain properties, though widely different in others, so all Indians are alike in certain characteristics, though differing, almost radically, each from every other: But, as the points of coincidence in triangles are those which determine the class, and the differences only indicate subspecies, so the similar characteristics in the Indian, are those which distinguish the species, and the variations of character are, at most, only tribal limits. An Indian who should combine all the equivalent traits, without any of the inequalities, would, therefore, be the pure ideal of his race. And his composition should include the evil as well as the good; for a portrait of the savage, which should represent him as only generous and brave, would be as far from a complete ideal, as one which should display only his cruelty and cunning. My object in this article is, therefore, to combine as many as possible--or as many as are necessary--of the general characteristics of the Indian, both good and bad--so as to give a fair view of the character, according to the principle intimated above. And I may, perhaps without impropriety, here state, that this may be taken as the key to all the sketches which are to follow. It is quite probable that many examples of each class treated, might be found, who are exceptions to the rules stated, in almost every particular; and it is possible, that no _one_, of _any_ class treated, combined _all_ the characteristics elaborated. Excepting when historical facts are related, or well-authenticated legends worked in, my object is not to give portraits of individuals, however prominent. As was hinted above--the logic of the book points only to the ideal of each class. And this view of the subject excludes all those discussions, which have so long puzzled philosophers, about the origin of the race--our business is with the question _What is he?_ rather than with the inquiry, _Whence did he come?_ The shortest argument, however--and, if the assumption be admitted, the most conclusive--is that, which assumes the literal truth of the Mosaic account of the creation of man; for from this it directly follows, that the aboriginal races are descendants of Asiatic emigrants; and the minor questions, as to the route they followed--whether across the Pacific, or by Behring's strait--are merely subjects of curious speculation, or still more curious research. And this hypothesis is quite consistent with the evidence drawn from Indian languages, customs, and physical developments. Even the arguments against the theory, drawn from differences in these particulars among the tribes, lose their force, when we come to consider that the same, if not wider differences, are found among other races, indisputably of a single stock. These things may be satisfactorily accounted for, by the same circumstances in the one case, as in the other--by political and local situation, by climate, and unequal progress. Thus, the Indian languages, says Prescott, in his "Conquest of Mexico," "present the strange anomaly of differing as widely in etymology, as they agree in organization;" but a key to the solution of the problem, is found in the latter part of the same sentence: "and, on the other hand," he continues,[2] "while they bear some slight affinity to the languages of the Old World, in the former particular, they have no resemblance to them whatever, in the latter." This is as much as if he had said, that the incidents to the lives of American Indians, are totally different to those of the nations of the Old World: and these incidents are precisely the circumstances, which are likely to affect organization, more than etymology. And the difficulty growing out of their differences among themselves, in the latter, is surmounted by the fact, that there is a sufficient general resemblance among them all, to found a comparison with "the languages of the Old World." I believe, a parallel course of argument would clear away all other objections to the theory.[3] But, as has been said, the scope of our work includes none of these discussions; and we shall, therefore, pass to the Indian character, abstracted from all antecedents. That this has been, and is, much misunderstood, is the first thought which occurs to one who has an opportunity personally to observe the savage. Nor is it justly a matter of surprise. The native of this continent has been the subject of curious and unsatisfactory speculation, since the discovery of the country by Columbus: by the very _want_ of those things, which constitute the attraction of other nations, he became at once, and has continued, the object of a mysterious interest. The absence of dates and facts, to mark the course of his migration, remits us to conjecture, or the scarcely more reliable resource of tradition--the want of history has made him a character of romance. The mere name of Indian gives the impression of a shadowy image, looming, dim but gigantic, through a darkness which nothing else can penetrate. This mystery not only interests, but also disarms, the mind; and we are apt to see, in the character, around which it hovers, only those qualities which give depth to the attraction. The creations of poetry and romance are usually extremes; and they are, perhaps, necessarily so, when the nature of the subject furnishes no standard, by which to temper the conception. "The efforts of a poet's imagination are, more or less, under the control of his opinions:" but opinions of men are founded upon their history; and there is, properly, _no_ historical Indian character. The consequence has been, that poets and novelists have constructed their savage personages according to a hypothetical standard, of either the virtues or vices, belonging, potentially, to the savage state. The same rule, applied to portraiture of civilized men, would at once be declared false and pernicious; and the only reason why it is not equally so, in its application to the Indian, is, because the separation between him and us is so broad, that our conceptions of his character can exert little or no influence upon our intercourse with mankind. Sympathy for what are called the Indian's misfortunes, has, also, induced the class of writers, from whom, almost exclusively, our notions of his character are derived, to represent him in his most genial phases, and even to palliate his most ferocious acts, by reference to the injustice and oppression, of which he has been the victim. If we were to receive the authority of these writers, we should conclude that the native was not a savage, at all, until the landing of the whites; and, instead of ascribing his atrocities to the state of barbarism in which he lived--thus indicating their only valid apology--we should degrade both the white and the red men, by attributing to the former all imaginable vices, and, to the latter, a peculiar aptitude in acquiring them. These mistakes are natural and excusable--as the man who kills another in self-defence is justifiable; but the Indian character is not the less misconceived, just as the man slain is not less dead, than if malice had existed in both cases. To praise one above his merits, is as fatal to his consideration, as decidedly to disparage him. In either case, however, there is a chance that a just opinion may be formed; but, when both extremes are asserted with equal confidence, the mind is confused, and can settle upon nothing. The latter is precisely the condition of the Indian; and it is with a view of correcting such impressions, that this article is written. The American Indian, then, is the ideal of a savage--no more, no less: and I call him the ideal, because he displays _all_ those qualities, which the history of the human race authorizes us to infer, as the characteristics of an unenlightened people, for many ages isolated from the rest of mankind.[4] He differs, in many particulars, from the other barbarians of the world; but the broadest distinction lies in this _completeness_ of his savage character. The peculiarities of the country in which their lives assume their direction, its climate, isolation; or connection with the world--all these things contribute to modify the aspects presented by native races. In such points as are liable to modification by these causes, the American differs from every other savage; and without entering into an elaborate comparison of circumstances--for which we have neither the material, the inclination, nor the space--it may be proper briefly to consider _one_ of these causes, and endeavor to trace its effects in the Indian's moral physiognomy. The state of this continent, when the first Asiatic wanderers landed upon its shores, was, of course, that of a vast, unbroken solitude; and the contemplation of its almost boundless extent and profound loneliness, was certainly the first, and probably the most powerful agency, at work in modifying their original character. What the primary effects of this cause were likely to be, we may observe in the white emigrants, who have sought a home among the forests and upon the plains of the west: whatever they may have been before their migration, they soon become meditative, abstracted, and taciturn. These, and especially the last, are the peculiar characteristics of the Indian; his taciturnity, indeed, amounts to austerity, sometimes impressing the observer with the idea of affectation. The dispersion, which must have been the effect of unlimited choice in lands--the mode of life pursued by those who depended upon the chase for subsistence--the gradual estrangement produced among the separate tribes, by the necessity of wide hunting-grounds--the vast expanse of territory at command--causes operating so long, as to produce a fixed and corresponding nature--are the sources, to which we may trace almost all the Indian's distinctive traits. "Isolation," Carlyle says, "is the sum total of wretchedness to man;" and, doubtless, the idea which he means to convey is just. "But," in the words of De Quincey, "no man can be truly _great_, without at least chequering his life with solitude." Separation from his kind, of course, deprives a man of the humanizing influences, which are the consequences of association; but it may, at the same time, strengthen some of the noblest qualities of human nature. Thus, we are authorized to ascribe to this agency, a portion of the Indian's fortitude under hardships and suffering, his contempt for mere meanness, and above all, the proud elevation of his character. The standards of comparison, which were furnished by his experience, were few, and, of course, derived from the ideas of barbarians; but all such as were in any way modified by the solitude of his existence, were rendered impressive, solemn, and exalted. In the vast solitudes of Asia, whence the Indian races migrated to this continent, so far as the loneliness of savage deserts and endless plains might exert an influence, we should expect to find the same general character. But the Asians are almost universally pastoral--the Americans never; the wildest tribes of Tartary possess numerous useful domesticated animals--the Americans, even in Mexico,[5] had none; the Tartars are acquainted with the use of milk, and have been so from time immemorial--the Indian, even at this day, has adopted it only in a few localities, among the more enlightened tribes. The migration of the latter either took place at a period before even his Asiatic father had discovered its use, or the accidents which brought him to this continent, were such as to preclude importing domesticated animals; and the lapse of a few generations was sufficient to obliterate even the recollection of such knowledge. "And," says Prescott,[6] "he might well doubt, whether the wild, uncouth monsters, whom he occasionally saw bounding with such fury over the distant plains, were capable of domestication, like the meek animals which he had left grazing in the green pastures of Asia." To this leading distinction--the adoption and neglect of pastoral habits--may be referred most of the diversities among races, unquestionably of one stock. Reasoning from the effects upon human character, produced by the face of different countries, we might expect to find, in the Indian, among other things, a strong tendency toward poetical thought, embodied, not in the mode of expression usually denominated poetry, but in the style of his addresses, the peculiarities of his theories, or the construction of his mythology, language, and laws. This expectation is totally disappointed; but when we examine the _degree_ and _character_ of his advancement, and recollect a few of the circumstances, among which the poetry looked for would be obliged to grow, our disappointment loses its element of surprise. The contemplation of Nature in her primitive, terrible, and beautiful forms--the habit of meditation, almost the necessary consequence of solitude--the strange, wild enchantment of an adventurous life--have failed to develop in the Indian, any but selfish and sensual ideas. Written poetry was, of course, not to be expected, even from the indigenous civilization of Mexico and Peru; yet we might, with some ground for hope, seek occasional traces of poetical thought and feeling. We look in vain for any such thing. "Extremes meet," says one of the wisest of adages; and the saying was never more singularly and profoundly vindicated, than in its application to civilization and barbarism. The savage rejects all that does not directly gratify his selfish wants--the highly-civilized man is, in like manner, governed by the principle of _utility_; and, by both, the merely fanciful and imaginative is undervalued. Thus, as Mr. Macaulay[7] ingeniously says, "A great poem, in a highly-polished state of society, is the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius." But, for the same reasons, the savage, who should display any remarkably poetical feeling or tone of thought, would be quite as great a prodigy. Poetry flourishes most luxuriantly midway between the two extremes. Its essence is the contemplation of great passions and actions--of love, revenge, ambition. Imagination is then vivified by the means of expression or articulation; and, in the half-civilized state, neither a refined public sentiment, nor the other extreme of barbarous isolation, restrains the exhibition of great (and poetical) emotions. The best of Hazlitt's numerous definitions of poetry, determines it to be "the excess of imagination, beyond the actual or ordinary impression of any object or feeling."[8] But the Indian was destitute of all imagination; apparently, the composition of his nature included no such element; and, certainly, the rude exigencies of his life did not admit its action. Even the purity of his mythology, compared to that of the Greeks and Romans,[9] has been (by Lord Lindsay) attributed to this want--though, if such were its only effects, it might very well be supplied. The Indian has no humor, no romance--how could he possess poetical feeling? The gratification of sensual wants is the end of his life--too often, _literally_ the end! "He considers everything beneath his notice, which is not necessary to his advantage or enjoyment."[10] To him a jest is as unmeaning as the babbling of a brook; his wife is a beast of burden; and even his courting is carried on by gifts of good things _to eat_, sent to the parents.[11] Heaven is merely a hunting-ground; his language has no words to express abstract qualities, virtues, vices, or sentiments.[12] His idea of the Great Spirit, and the word which expresses it, may be applied with equal propriety to a formidable (though not beneficent) _animal_; indeed, the Indian words which we translate "spirit," mean only superior power, without the qualification of good or evil. He has not even the ordinary inhabitive instinct of the human race; his attachment to any region of country depends upon its capacity to furnish game, and the fading of the former keeps pace with the disappearance of the latter. "Attachment to the graves of his fathers," is an agreeable fiction--unfortunately, only a fiction.[13] He has always been nomadic, without the pastoral habits which the word supposes: a mere wandering savage, without purpose or motive, beyond the gratification of the temporary want, whim, or passion, and void of _everything_ deserving the name of sentiment. An extravagant, and, I am sorry to say, groundless, notion has obtained currency, among almost all writers upon the Indian character, that he is distinguished for his _eloquence_. But the same authors tell us, that his language, the vehicle of the supposed eloquence, can express only material ideas.[14] Now, if we knew no more of his character than this, we should be authorized to infer (what is, indeed, true), that he possesses no standard for the distinction of good and evil, and that his imagination is bounded by the lines of his sensible experience. How any degree of eloquence can be compatible with this state of things, passes comprehension. And what reflection would conclude, a little examination will confirm. The mistake has, doubtless, grown out of a misconception of the nature of eloquence itself.[15] If eloquence were all _figure_--even if it were, in any considerable degree, _mere_ figure--then the tawdriest rhetorician would be the greatest orator. But it is not so. On the contrary, the use of many words (or figures) to express an idea, denotes not command of language, but the absence of that power--just as the employment of numerous tools, to effect a physical object, indicates, not skill in the branch of physics, to which the object belongs, but rather awkwardness. Of course, much must be placed, in both cases, to the account of clumsy instruments; but the instrument of speech differs from others in this: it is fashioned _by_, as well as _for_, its use; and a rude, unpolished language is, therefore, an index, in two ways, of the want of eloquence among the people who employ it. In this view, the figurative elocution of the Indian, so far from affording evidence of oratorical power, if it proves anything, proves the opposite. It is the barrenness of his language, and not the luxuriance of his imagination, which enforces that mode of speech.[16] Imagination is the first element of oratory, simplicity its first condition. We have seen that the Indian is wholly destitute of the former; and the stilted, meretricious, and ornate style, of even his ordinary communications, entirely excludes the latter from our conception of his character.[17] For example: take the expressions "bury the hatchet," for "make peace," and "a cloudless sky," for "prosperity"--the latter being the nearest approximation to an abstract idea observed in Indian oratory. Upon examining these, and kindred forms of speech, we shall at once perceive that they are not the result of imagination, but are suggested by _material_ analogies. Peace, to the savage, is, at best, but a negative idea; and the _state_ of peacefulness, abstracted from the absence of war, finds no corresponding word in his language. Even friendship only means that relation, in which friends may be of _use_ to each other. As his dialects are all synthetic,[18] his ideas are all concrete. To say, "_I love_" without expressing _what_ or _whom_ I love, would be, so to speak, very bad Indian grammar. He can not even say "two" correctly, without applying the numeral to some object. The notion of absolute being, number, emotion, feeling, posture, or relation, is utterly foreign to his mode of thought and speech. So, also, of the "cloudless sky," used to express a state of prosperity. He does not mean, by the phrase, the serenity of mind which prosperity produces, nor any other abstract inflexion or suggestion of the figure. He is constantly exposed to the storms of heaven, in the chase, and on the war path; and, even in his best "lodge," he finds but little shelter from their fury. Clear weather is, therefore, grateful to him--bright sunshine associates itself, in his mind, with comfort, or (that supremest of Indian pleasures) undisturbed indolence. And the transition, though, as we have said, an approach to an abstract conception, is easy, even to the mind of a savage. His employment of such illustrations is rather an evidence of rudeness, than of eloquence--of barrenness, than of luxuriance of idea.[19] From these considerations, it results, that even the very best specimens of Indian oratory, deserve the name of _picturesque_, rather than of _eloquent_--two characteristics which bear no greater affinity to each other, than do the picture-writing of the Aztec and the alphabetical system of the Greek. The speech of Logan--the most celebrated of Indian harangues--even if genuine,[20] is but a feeble support to the theory of savage eloquence. It is a mixture of the lament and the song of triumph, which may be found in equal perfection among all barbarous people; but, so far as we are aware, was never elsewhere dignified with that sounding name. The slander of a brave and honorable man,[21] which it contains, might be the result of a mistake easily made; the wrongs of which this chief was the victim, might render even a savage eloquent; and the mixture of bloody vaunting with profound grief, is scarcely to be expected in any _but_ a savage. "Logan never knew fear," he says; "he would not turn on his heel to save his life." This species of boasting is perfectly in keeping with the Indian character; but the pathetic reason for this carelessness, which follows--"There is no one to mourn for Logan"--is one not likely to have occurred to an Indian, even in his circumstances. And, granting that the expression _was_ used by the orator, and not (as it seems probable it was) added by Jefferson, it is, I believe, the only example on record of poetical feeling in any Indian speech. The _religion_ of the Indian has given as much troublesome material to the builders of systems, as has been furnished by all his other characteristics combined. The first explorers of America supposed that they had found a people, quite destitute of any religious belief. But faith in a higher power than that of man, is a necessity of the human mind; and its organization, more or less enlightened, is as natural, even to the most degraded savage, as the formation of his language. Both depend upon general laws, common to the intellect of all races of men; both are affected by the external circumstances of climate, situation, and mode of life; and the state of one may always be determined by that of the other. "No savage horde has been caught with its language in a state of chaos, or as if just emerging from the rudeness of indistinguishable sounds. Each appears, not as a slow formation by painful processes of invention, but as a perfect whole, springing directly from the powers of man."[22] And though this rigor of expression is not equally applicable to the Indian's religion, the fact is attributable solely to the difference in nature of the subjects. As the "primary sounds of a language are essentially the same everywhere," the impulses and instincts of piety are common to all minds. But, as the written language of the Indian was but the pictorial representation of visible objects, having no metaphysical signification, so the symbols of his religion, the objects of his adoration, were drawn from external nature.[23] Even his faith in the Great Spirit is a graft upon his system, derived from the first missionaries;[24] and, eagerly as he adopted it, it is probable that its meaning, to him, is little more exalted, than that of the "Great Beaver," which he believes to be the first progenitor, if not the actual creator, of that useful animal. We often see the fact, that the Indian believes in his _manitou_, cited as an evidence, that he has the conception of a spiritual divinity. But the word never conveyed such a meaning; it is applicable more properly to material objects, and answers, with, if possible, a more intense and superstitious significance, to the term _amulet_. The Indian's _manitou_ might be, indeed always was, some wild animal, or some part of a beast or bird--such as a bear's claw, a buffalo's hoof, or a dog's tooth.[25] And, though he ascribed exalted powers to this primitive guardian, it must be remembered that these powers were only physical--such, for example, as would enable it to protect its devotee from the knife of his enemy, or give him success in hunting. Materialism, then, reigns in the religion, as in the language, of the Indian; and its effects are what might be expected. His whole system is a degraded and degrading superstition; and, though it has been praised for its superior purity, over that of the ancients, it seems to have been forgotten, that this purity is only the absence of _one kind_ of _im_purity: and that its cruel and corrupting influences, of another sort, are ten-fold greater than those of the Greek mythology. The faith of the Greek embodied itself in forms, ceremonies, and observances--regularly appointed religious rites kept his piety alive; the erection of grand temples, in honor of his deity, whatever might be his conception of that deity's character, attested his genuine devotion, and held constantly before his mind the abstract idea of a higher power. The Indian, before the coming of the white man, erected no temples[26] in honor of his divinities; for he venerated them only so long as they conferred physical benefits[27] upon him; and his idea of beneficence was wholly concrete. He had no established form of worship; the ceremonies, which partook of a religious character, were grotesque in their conception, variable in their conduct, and inhuman in their details. Such, for example, are the torturing of prisoners, and the ceremonies observed on the occasion of a young Indian's placing himself under his guardian power. The dogmas of the Indian religion, until varied by the teaching of missionaries, were few and simple--being circumscribed, like everything else belonging to him, by the material world. He believed in a good spirit, and an evil spirit; but his conception was limited by the ideas of benefit or injury, _to himself_; indeed, it may safely be doubted, whether the word "spirit," in its legitimate sense, is at all applicable to his belief. "Power in a state of exertion," is the more accurate description of his imperfect notion: abstract existence he never conceived; the verb "_to be_" except as relating to time, place, and action, had no meaning in his language.[28] He believed, also, in subordinate powers of good and evil; but, since his life was occupied more in averting danger and calamity, than in seeking safety or happiness, he paid far more respect to the latter than to the former--he prayed oftener and more fervently to the devils, than to the angels. His clearest notion of divinity, was that of a being able to injure him; and, in this sense, his devotion might be given to man, bird, or beast. There seems to be no doubt, that he believed in a sort of immortality, even before the missionaries visited his country. But it was not so much a new state of existence, as a continuation of present life.[29] He killed horses upon the grave of the departed warrior, that he might be mounted for his long journey; and buffalo meat and roasted maize were buried with him, that he might not suffer from hunger.[30] On arriving in the land of the blest, he believed, that the dead pursued the game of that country, as he had done in this; and the highest felicity of which he conceived, was the liberty to hunt unmolested by the war-parties of his enemies. Heaven was, therefore, in his conception, only a more genial earth, and its inheritors but keener sportsmen. That this idea of immortality involved that of accountability, in some form, seems to admit of no doubt; but this doctrine, like almost all others belonging to the primitive savage, has been moulded to its present definite shape, by the long-continued labors of Christian missionaries.[31] He believed, indeed, that the bad Indians never reached the happy hunting-grounds, but the distinction between the good and the bad, in his mind, was not at all clear; and, since the idea of the passage across the gulf of death most prevalent among all tribes, is that of a narrow bridge, over which only steady nerves and sure feet may carry the wanderer, it seems probable that the line was drawn between the brave warrior and the successful hunter, on the one hand, and the coward and the unskilful, on the other. If these views be correct, the inferences to be drawn from the Indian's belief in immortality and accountability, are of but slender significance. Corrupt manners and degrading customs never exist, in conjunction with a pure religious system. The outlines of social institutions are metaphysically coincident with the limits of piety; and the refinement of morals depends upon the purity of faith. We may thus determine the prevailing spirit of a national religion, by observation of domestic manners and habits; and, among all the relations of life, that of parent and child is the best index to degree of advancement. Filial piety is but the secondary manifestation of a devotional heart; and attachment and obedience to a father on earth, are only imperfect demonstrations of love to our Father in heaven. What, then--to apply the principle--is the state of this sentiment in the Indian? By the answer to that question, we shall be able to estimate the value of his religious notions, and to determine the amount of hope, for his conversion, justified by their possession. The answer may be given in a few words: There is no such sentiment in the Indian character. Children leave their infirm parents to die alone, and be eaten by the wolves;[32] or treat them with violent indignity,[33] when the necessity of migration gives no occasion for this barbarous desertion. Young savages have been known to beat their parents, and even to kill them; but the display of attachment or reverence for them, is quite unknown. Like the beast of the forest, they are no sooner old enough to care for themselves, than they cease even to remember, by whose care they have become so; and the slightest provocation will produce a quarrel with a father, as readily as with a stranger. The unwritten law of the Indian, about which so many writers have dreamed, enacts no higher penalty for parricide, than for any other homicide; and a command to honor his father and mother because they _are_ his father and mother, would strike the mind of an Indian as simply absurd. If the possession of a religion, whose fruits are no better than these, can, of itself, give ground for hope to the Christian philanthropist, let him cherish it fondly. But it is much to be feared, that the existence of such a system indefinitely postpones, if it does not entirely preclude, the Indian's conversion. Even a bird which has never known the forest, will eventually escape to the wilds which God has made its home; and the young Indian, who has been reared in the city, will fly to the woods and prairies, and return to the faith of his fathers, because these, and only these, will satisfy his nature.[34] A theme of praise, in itself more just, has been the Indian's courage; but the same circumstances of poetical interest, which have magnified men's views of his other qualities, have contributed to exaggerate this also. If calm steadiness of nerve, in the moment of action, be an element in true courage, that of the primitive savage was scarcely genuine. In all his battles, there were but two possible aspects--the furious onset, and the panic retreat: the firmness which plants itself in line or square, and stubbornly contends for victory, was no part of his character. A check, to him, always resulted in a defeat; and, though this might, in some measure, be the consequence of that want of discipline, which is incident to the savage state, the remark applies with equal justice, whether he fought singly or in a body. He was easily panic-struck, because the impulse of the forward movement was necessary to keep him strung to effort; and the retrograde immediately became a rout, because daring, without constancy, collapses with the first reaction. Notwithstanding the enervating influences attributed to refinement and luxury, genuine, steady courage is one of the fruits borne by a high civilization. It is the result of combination, thought, and the divinity which attaches to the cultivated man. And, though it may seem rather unfair to judge a savage by the rules of civilization, it has long been received as a canon, that true valor bears an inverse ratio to ferocious cruelty. Of all people yet discovered upon earth, the Indian is the most ferocious. We must, therefore, either vary the meaning of the word, when applied to different people, or deny the savage the possession of any higher bravery, than that which lives only through the onset. Cunning supplied the place of the nobler quality; the object of his warfare was to overcome by wily stratagem, rather than by open combat. "Skill consisted in surprising the enemy. They followed his trail, to kill him when he slept; or they lay in ambush near a village, and watched for an opportunity of suddenly surprising an individual, or, it might be, a woman and her children; and, with three strokes to each, the scalps of the victims being suddenly taken off, the brave flew back with his companions, to hang the trophies in his cabin."[35] If they succeeded in taking prisoners, it was only that they might be reserved for the most infernal torments, and the gratification of a brutal ferocity, not the trial and admiration of the victim's courage, was the purpose of their infliction.[36] The fortitude of the Indian under suffering, has often been referred to, in evidence of moral courage. And it is certainly true, that the display so frequently made of triumph in the hour of death by torture, indicates,[37] in part, an elevation of character, seldom found among more civilized men. It is, however, the elevation of a barbarian; and its manifestations are as much the fruit of impotent rage, as of a noble fortitude. The prisoner at the stake knows that there is no escape; and his intense hatred of his enemies takes the form of a wish, to deprive them of a triumph. While his flesh is crisping and crackling in the flames, therefore, he sings of the scalps he has taken, and heaps opprobrious epithets upon the heads of his tormentors. But his song is as much a cry of agony, as of exultation--his pain only adopts this mode of expression. It is quite certain, also, that he does not suffer so deeply, as would a white man in the same circumstances. By long exposure, and the endurance of hardships incident to his savage life, his body acquires an insensibility akin to that of wild animals.[38] His nerves do not shrink or betray a tendency to spasm, even when a limb is amputated. Transmitted from one generation to another, this physical nature has become a peculiarity of the race. And when assisted by the fierce hatred above referred to, it is not at all strange that it should enable him to bear with fortitude, tortures which would conquer the firmness of the most resolute white man.[39] The Indian's dignified stoicism has been as much exaggerated, as his courage and fortitude. It is not quite true that he never expresses surprise, or becomes loquacious. But he has a certain stern impassibility of feature--a coldness of manner--which have been mistaken for dignity. His immobility of countenance, however, may be the effect of sluggish sensibilities, or even of dull perceptions;[40] and the same savage vanity, which leads him to make a display of strength or agility before friend or enemy, prevents his acknowledging ignorance, by betraying surprise.[41] We have been in company with Indians from the Far West, while they saw a railroad for the first time. When they thought themselves unnoticed, they were as curious about the singular machinery of the locomotive, and as much excited by the decorations and appointments of the cars, as the most ignorant white man. But the moment they discovered that their movements were observed, they resumed their dignified composure; and, if you had judged of the Indian country by their subsequent deportment, you might have believed that the vast prairies of the Missouri were everywhere intersected by railroads--that the Indian had, in fact, never known any other mode of travelling. "On first seeing a steamboat, however," says Flint, who well understands his character, "he never represses his customary '_Ugh_!'" Generally, among white men, he who is fondest of inflicting pain, is least able to endure it. But the Indian reverses almost all the principles, which apply to civilized life; and, accordingly, we find that, with all his so-called fortitude, he is the most intensely cruel of all living men. Before possession of the continent was taken by Europeans, war was more constantly the occupation of his life, than it has been since; but even now his only object in taking his enemies alive, is to subject them to the most inhuman tortures.[42] And in these brutal orgies, the women are most active, even taking the lead, in applying the cord and the brand.[43] Nor is this cruelty confined to enemies, as the practice of leaving the aged and infirm to die of starvation sufficiently proves. And his treachery is equal to his cruelty. No treaty can bind him longer than superior force compels him to observe it. The discovery that his enemy is unprepared for an attack, is sufficient reason to him for making it; his only object in concluding peace, is to secure an advantage in war; and before the prospect of a bloody inroad, his faith melts away, like snow before the sun. The claims of gratitude he seldom acknowledges; he cherishes the memory of a benefit, only until he finds an opportunity of repaying it with an injury; and forbearance to avenge the latter, only encourages its repetition.[44] The numerous pretty stories published of Indian gratitude, are either exceptional cases, or unmixed romances. There have been some tribes of Indians in a measure reclaimed from their state of barbarism; the Cherokees, I believe, (and perhaps one or two other nations,) have even increased in numbers, under the influence of civilization. But this is the result of numerous favorable causes combined, and proves nothing, from which to infer the Indian's docility. Other savages, on coming in contact with civilized men, have discovered a disposition to acquire some of the useful arts--their comforts have been increased, their sufferings diminished, and their condition ameliorated, by the grafting of new ideas upon the old. But, between the red man and the white, contiguity has brought about little more than an exchange of vices. Almost the only things coveted by the "redskin" from the "paleface," were his arms, his trinkets, and his "firewater." He could appreciate whatsoever gave him superiority in war, gratified his childish vanity, or ministered to his brutal appetite. But the greater comfort of the white man's house--the higher excellence of his boat--his improved agricultural implements or extended learning--none of these things appealed to the Indian's passions or desires. The arts of peace were nothing to him--refinement was worse than nothing. He would spend hours in _decorating_ his person, but not a moment in _cleansing_ it: I believe no tradition exists of an Indian ever having used soap or bought a fine-tooth comb! He is, indeed, a "pattern of filthiness;" but even in civilized life, we find that this is not at all incompatible with an extravagant love of ornament; and, in this respect, the savage is not behind his more enlightened brethren and sisters. Beads, ribands, and scarlet cloth--with powder and lead, guns, tomahawks, and knives--are the acquisitions which he prizes most highly. Pre-eminent, however, above all these in his estimation, is the greatest curse which has yet reached him--the liquid fire called whiskey! He is, by nature, a drunkard, and the fury of his intoxication equals the ferocity of his warfare. "All words would be thrown away," says Mr. Flint,[45] "in attempting to portray, in just colors, the effects of whiskey upon such a race." Fire should be kept away from combustibles--whiskey from the Indian, and for the same reason. With drunkenness, he possesses, also, its inseparable companion, the vice of gambling.[46] He is the most inveterate gamester: Before the demon of avarice everything gives way. He even forgets his taciturnity, in the excitement of the game, and becomes loquacious and eager. He will stake all his most valuable possessions, and, losing these, will even risk his own liberty, or life, on the turn of a card. We were once witness to a game in San Antonio (in Western Texas), among a party of Lipans,[47] a race of fine-looking men, who range the table-lands north of the sources of the Nueces. Two of them, one the handsomest warrior among them, lost, first, the money, which they had just received as the price of skins, brought to the city for sale. They then staked, successively, their horses, their arms, their moccasins, and their blankets. The "luck" was against them--everything was lost; and we supposed the game was over. But--as a last resource, like drawing blood from their beating hearts--each produced a _little leathern bottle_, containing whiskey! And, as if these possessed a higher value than all the articles yet lost, the game went on with increased interest! Even the potent "spirit" thus evoked, could not prevail upon Fortune to change her face: the whiskey was lost with the rest! Each rose to his feet, with the usual guttural exclamation, and, afoot, and unarmed as he was, silently took his way to the prairies; while the winners collected in a group, and with much glee, proceeded to consume the liquid poison so cheaply obtained. We come, finally to the question of the Indian's fate: What is to become of the race? The answer presents no difficulties, save such as grow out of men's unwillingness to look unpleasant truths in the face. There has been, of late years, much lamentation, among our own people, over the gradual extinction of these interesting savages; and in Europe we have been made the subject of indignant eloquence, for (what those, who know nothing about it, are pleased to call) "our oppression of the Indian." But, in the first place, the decay of the American races is neither so rapid nor so universal, as is generally supposed;[48] and, in the second place, if the fact were otherwise, we could, at the worst, be charged only with accelerating a depopulation already begun. "The ten thousand mounds in the Mississippi Valley, the rude memorials of an immensely numerous former population, but, to our view, no more civilized than the present races, are proofs that the country _was depopulated_, when the white man first became acquainted with it. If we can infer nothing else from these mounds, we can clearly infer, that this country once had its millions."[49] What had become of this immense population? The successive invasions of new hordes of barbarians from the north, intestine wars, and the law, that men shall advance toward civilization, or decay from the earth--these are the only causes to which we may ascribe their disappearance. The extinction of the Indian race is decreed, by a law of Providence which we can not gainsay. Barbarism _must_ give way to civilization. It is not only inevitable, but _right_, that it should be so. The tide of empire, which has been flowing since the earliest times, has set steadily toward the West. The Indian emigrated in the wrong direction: and now, after the lapse of many centuries, the descendants of the first Asians, having girdled the globe, meet on the banks of the Mississippi! On the one side, are enlightenment, civilization, Christianity: on the other, darkness, degradation, barbarism: and the question arises, which shall give way? The Indian recedes: at the rate of seventeen miles a year,[50] the flood rolls on! Already it has reached the shores of the Pacific: One century will reduce the whole continent to the possession of the white man; and, then, the lesson which all history teaches, will be again taught--that two distinct races cannot exist in the same country on equal terms. The weaker must be incorporated with the stronger--or exterminated.[51] FOOTNOTES: [2] Vol. III., page 394. [3] There is, however, little necessity for any argument on the subject: For, leaving out of the question the highest and most sacred of authorities, almost all respectable writers upon ethnology, including Buffon, Volney, Humboldt, &c., agree in assigning a common origin to all nations,--though the last deduces from many particulars, the conclusion that the American Indian was "isolated in the infancy of the world, from the rest of mankind."--_Ancient Inhabitants of America_, vol. i., p. 250. [4] It will be observed, that I assume the _unity_ of the Indian race; and I am not sufficiently acquainted with the recent discussions on the subject, to be certain whether the question is still considered open. But the striking analogies between the customs, physical formation, and languages of all the various divisions, (except the Esquimaux, who are excluded), I think, authorize the assumption. [5] _Conquest of Mexico_, vol. iii., p. 416. [6] _Conquest of Mexico_, vol. iii., p. 417. [7] _Essays_--Art. 'Milton.' [8] _Lectures on English Poets_, p. 4. [9] No very high compliment, but as high as it deserves. We shall see anon. [10] Warburton's _Conquest of Canada_, vol. i., p. 177. [11] Bancroft's _United States_, vol. iii., p. 256. [12] Hunter's _Memoirs_, p. 236. _Western Annals_, p. 712. [13] _Flint's Geography_, p. 108. [14] "All ideas are expressed by figures addressed to the senses." _Warburton_, vol. i., p. 175. Bancroft, ut supra. [15] See Bancroft, Hunter, Catlin, Flint, Jefferson, &c.--passim--all supporters of Indian eloquence, but all informing us, that "combinations of material objects were his _only_ means of expressing abstract ideas." [16] Vide Bancroft's _United States_, vol. iii., pp. 257, 266, etc. [17] _E. G._ "They style themselves the 'beloved of the Great Spirit.'"--_Warburton_, vol. i., p. 186. "In the Iroquois language, the Indians gave themselves the appellation of 'Angoueonoue', or 'Men of Always.'"--_Chateaubriand's Travels in America_, vol. ii., p. 92. Note, also, their exaggerated boastfulness, even in their best speeches: "Logan never knew fear," &c. [18] "The absence of all reflective consciousness, and of all logical analysis of ideas, is the great peculiarity of American speech."--_Bancroft_, vol. iii., p. 257. [19] Warburton's _Conquest of Canada_, vol. i., p. 180. [20] I have seen it hinted, though I have forgotten where, that Jefferson, and not Logan, was the author of this speech; but the extravagant manner in which Jefferson himself praises it, seems to exclude the suspicion. "I may challenge the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero," he says, "and of any other more eminent orator, if Europe has furnished more eminent, to produce a single passage superior to the speech of Logan!" Praise certainly quite high enough, for a mixture of lamentation and boastfulness. [21] The evidence in this matter has long ago been thoroughly sifted; and it is now certain that, so far from being present aiding at the massacre of Logan's family, Colonel Cresap earnestly endeavored to dissuade the party from its purpose. And yet the falsehood is perpetuated even in the common school-books of the country, while its object has been mouldering in his grave for a quarter of a century.--_Western Annals_, p. 147. _American Pioneer_, vol. i., p. 7, _et seq._ [22] Bancroft, vol. iii., p. 254. [23] Bancroft, vol. iii., p. 285.--"The God of the savage was what the metaphysician endeavors to express by the word _substance_." But the Indian's idea of substance was altogether _concrete_. [24] The best authority upon this subject is found in the _Jesuit_ "_Relaciones:_" but it is at least probable, that the preconceptions of the good Fathers colored, and, perhaps, shaped, many of the religious wonders there related. [25] "Lettres Edifiantes," vol. vi., p. 200, _et seq._ Warburton, vol. i., p. 187. [26] The extravagant stories told of the Natchez Indians (among whom there was said to be a remarkable temple for worship) are quite incredible, even if they had not been disproved. [27] When the _manitou_ of the Indian has failed to give him success in the chase, or protection from danger, "he upbraids it with bitterness and contempt, and threatens to seek a more effectual protector. If the _manitou_ continues useless, this threat is fulfilled." Warb. _ut supra_. _Vide_, also, Catlin's "American Indians," vol. i., p. 36, _et seq._ [28] Bancroft, vol. iii., p. 258. [29] "He calls it [the soul] the shadow or image of his body, but its acts and enjoyments are all the same as those of its earthly existence. He only pictures to himself a continuation of present pleasures." Warb. vol. i., p. 190. _Vide_, also, Catlin's "_American Indians_," vol. i., p. 158, _et seq._ [30] The Indian never believed in the resurrection of the body; but even corn and venison were supposed to possess a spirit, which the spirit of the dead warrior might eat.--_Jesuit_ "_Relacion_," 1633, p. 54. [31] "The idea of retribution," says Bancroft, vol. iii., p. 299, "as far as it has found its way among them, was derived from Europeans." And the same remark may be made, of most of the other wonders, in which enthusiastic travellers have discovered coincidences with Christianity. [32] James's "_Expedition_," vol. i., p. 237.--Catlin's "_American Indians_," vol. i., pp. 216-'18. The latter is a zealous apologist for Indian cruelties and barbarisms. [33] "_Conquest of Canada_," vol. i., pp. 194-'5. [34] The following may serve to indicate the sort of impression of Christianity which even the most earnest and enlightened preaching has been able to make upon the Indian mind: "Here I saw a most singular union; one of the [Indian] graves was surmounted by a cross, while close to it a trunk of a tree was raised, covered with hieroglyphics, recording the number of enemies slain by the tenant of the tomb. Here presenting a hint to those who are fond of system-making on the religion of these people," &c.--_Beltrami's Pilgrimage, &c._, vol. ii., p. 307. Bancroft's _United States_, vol. iii., pp. 303-'4. Flint's _Geography_, pp. 109, 126. [35] Bancroft, vol. iii., p. 281. [36] "To inflict blows that can not be returned," says this historian (Bancroft, vol. iii., p. 282), "is a proof of full success, and the entire humiliation of the enemy. It is, moreover, an experiment of courage and patience." But we think such things as much mere brutality, as triumph. [37] The frequent change of tense in this article, refers to those circumstances in which the _present_ differs from the _past_ character of the Indian. [38] "It is to be doubted, whether some part of this vaunted stoicism be not the result of a more than ordinary degree of physical insensibility."--_Flint's Geography_, vol. i., p. 114. [39] Many white men, however, have endured the utmost extremities of Indian cruelty. See cases of Brebeuf, and Lallemand, in _Bancroft_, vol. iii., p. 140. [40] "It is intellectual culture which contributes most to diversify the features."--_Humboldt's Personal Narrative_, vol. iii., p. 228. [41] "They have probably as much curiosity [as the white], but a more stern perseverance in repressing it."--_Flint's Geography_, vol. i., p. 124. [42] "The enemy is assailed with treachery, and, if conquered, treated with revolting cruelty." * * "A fiendish ferocity assumes full sway."--_Conquest of Canada_, vol. i., p. 206. [43] It is perhaps not very remarkable, however, that the women are most cruel to the aged and infirm--the young and vigorous being sometimes adopted by them, to console them for the loss of those who have fallen.--_Idem_, p. 210. [44] "We consider them a treacherous people, easily swayed from their purpose, paying their court to the divinity of good fortune, and always ready to side with the strongest. We should not rely upon their feelings of to-day, as any pledge for what they will be to-morrow."--_Flint's Geography_, vol. i., p. 120. [45] "_Geography of the Mississippi Valley_," vol. i., p. 121. [46] "The Indians are immoderately fond of play."--_Warburton_, vol. i., p. 218. [47] These used cards; but they have, among themselves, numerous games of chance, older than the discovery of the continent. [48] "The Cherokee and Mobilian families of nations are more numerous now than ever."--_Bancroft_, vol. iii., p. 253. In speaking of this declamation about the extinction of the race, Mr. Flint very pertinently remarks: "One would think it had been discovered, that the population, the improvements, and the social happiness of our great political edifice, ought never to have been erected in the place of these habitations of cruelty."--_Geography_, vol. i., p. 107. [49] Idem. [50] This is De Tocqueville's estimate.--_Democracy in America_, vol. ii., chap. 10. [51] "We may as well endeavor to make the setting sun stand still on the summit of the Rocky Mountains, as attempt to arrest the final extermination of the Indian race!"--_Merivale on Colonization_--_Lecture_ 19. The principle stated in the text will apply with equal force to the negro-race; and those who will look the facts firmly in the face, can not avoid seeing, that the ultimate solution of the problem of American Slavery, can be nothing but _the sword_. II. THE VOYAGEUR. "Spread out earth's holiest records here, Of days and deeds to reverence dear: A zeal like this, what pious legends tell?" The shapeless knight-errantry of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, rich as it was in romance and adventure, is not to be compared, in any valuable characteristic, to the noiseless self-devotion of the men who first explored the Western country. The courage of the knight was a part of his savage nature; his confidence was in the strength of his own right arm; and if his ruggedness was ever softened down by gentler thoughts, it was only when he asked forgiveness for his crimes, or melted in sensual idolatry of female beauty. It would be a curious and instructive inquiry, could we institute it with success, how much of the contempt of danger manifested by the wandering knight was referable to genuine valor, and what proportion to the strength of a Milan coat, and the temper of a Toledo or Ferrara blade. And it would be still more curious, although perhaps not so instructive, to estimate the purity and fidelity of the heroines of chivalry; to ascertain the amount of true devotion given them by their admirers, "without hope of reward." But without abating its interest by invidious and ungrateful inquiries, we can see quite enough--in its turbulence, its cruelty, arrogance, and oppression--to make us thank Heaven that "the days of chivalry are gone." And from that chaotic scene of rapine, raid, and murder, we can turn with pleasure to contemplate the truer, nobler chivalry--the chivalry of love and peace, whose weapons were the kindness of their hearts, the purity of their motives, and the self-denial of their lives. The term "_voyageur_"[52] literally signifies "traveller;" and by this modest name are indicated some of the bravest adventurers the world has ever seen. But it is not in its usual, common-place signification that I employ the word, nor yet in that which is given it by most writers on the subject of early French settlements and explorations. Men are often affected by the names given them, either of opprobrium or commendation; but words are quite as frequently changed, restricted, or enlarged in meaning, by their application to men. For example: you apply the word soldier to a class of men; and if robbery be one of the characteristics of that class, "soldier" will soon come to mean "robber" too. And thus, though the parallel is only logical, has it been with the term "_voyageur_." The class of men to whom it is applied were travellers--_voyageurs_; but they were _more_; and as the habits and qualities of men came in time to be better understood than the meaning of French words, the term, used in reference to Western history, took much of its significance from the history and character of the men it assumed to describe. Thus, _un voyageur_ means not only a traveller, but a traveller with a purpose; an adventurer among the Western wilds; a chivalrous missionary, either in the cause of science or religion. It includes high courage, burning zeal for church and country, and the most generous self-devotion. It describes such men as Marquette, La Salle, Joliet, Gravier, and hundreds of others equally illustrious, who lived and died among the dangers and privations of the wilderness; who opened the way for civilization and Christianity among the savages, and won, many of them, crowns of martyrdom. They were almost all Frenchmen. The Spaniards who came to this continent were mere gold-seekers, thirsting only for wealth; and if they sought to propagate Christianity, or rather the Christian _name_, it was only a sanguinary bigotry that prompted them. On the other hand, the English emigrants came to take possession of the country for themselves. The conversion of the natives, or territorial acquisition for the mother-country, were to them objects of barely secondary importance. They believed themselves persecuted--some of them _were_ persecuted--and they fled: it was only safety for themselves, and the rich lands of the Indian, that they sought. Providence reserved for the French chevaliers and missionaries the glory of leaving their homes without compulsion, real or imaginary, to penetrate an inhospitable wilderness; to undergo fatigues; to encounter dangers, and endure privations of a thousand kinds; enticed by no golden glitter, covetous of no riches, save such as are "laid up in heaven!" They came not as conquerors, but as ministers of peace, demanding only hospitality. They never attacked the savages with sword or fagot; but extending hands not stained by blood, they justified their profession by relief and love and kindly offices. Sometimes, indeed, they received little tracts of land; not seized by the hand of power, nor grasped by superior cunning, but possessed as the free gift of simple gratitude; and upon these they lived in peace, surrounded by savages, but protected by the respect inspired by blameless and beneficent lives. Many of those whose vows permitted it, intermarried among the converted natives, and left the seeds of many meliorations in a stony soil; and many of them, when they died, were as sincerely mourned by the simple children of the forest, as if they had been chiefs and braves. Such were the men of peace who penetrated the wilderness through the French settlements in Canada, and preached the gospel to the heathen, where no white man had ever before been seen; and it is particularly to this class that I apply the word at the head of this article. But the same gentle spirit pervaded other orders of adventurers--men of the sword and buckler, as well as of the stole and surplice. These came to establish the dominion of _La Belle France_; but it was not to oppress the simple native, or to drive him from his lands. Kindness marked even the conduct of the rough soldier; and such men as La Salle, and Iberville, who were stern enough in war, and rigid enough in discipline, manifested always an anxious solicitude for the _rights_, as well as for the spiritual welfare of the Indian. They gave a generous confidence where they were conscious of no wish to injure; they treated frankly and on equal terms, with those whom their religion and their native kindness alike taught them to consider brethren and friends. Take, for example, that significant anecdote of La Salle, related by the faithful chronicler[53] of his unfortunate expeditions. He was building the fort of _Crevecoeur_, near the spot where now stands the city of Peoria, on the Illinois river; and even the name of his little fortress (_Crevecoeur_, Broken Heart) was a mournful record of his shattered fortunes. The means of carrying out his noble enterprise (the colonizing of the Mississippi valley) were lost; the labor of years had been rendered ineffectual by one shipwreck; his men were discontented, even mutinous, "attempting," says Hennepin, "first to poison, and then desert him;" his mind was distracted, his heart almost broken, by accumulated disasters. Surrounded thus by circumstances which might well have rendered him careless of the feelings of the savages around him, he observed that they had become cold and distant--that in effect they no longer viewed him as their friend. The Iroquois,[54] drifting from the shores of Lake Ontario, where they had always been the bitterest foes of the French, had instilled fear and hatred into their minds; it was even said that some of his own men had encouraged the growing discontent. In this juncture, what measures does he take? Strengthen his fortifications, and prepare for war, as the men of other nations had done? Far from it. Soldier and adventurer as he was, he had no wish to shed innocent blood; though with his force he might have defied all the nations about him. He went as a friend, frankly and generously, among them, and demanded the reasons of their discontent. He touched their hearts by his confidence, convinced them of his friendship, and attached them to himself more devotedly than ever. A whole history in one brief passage! But it is more especially to the _voyageurs_ of the church--the men of faith and love--that I wish to direct my readers' attention: To such men as Le Caron, a Franciscan, with all the zeal and courage and self-abnegation of his order, who wandered and preached among the bloody Iroquois, and upon the waters of Huron, as early as 1616: to Mesnard, a devoted missionary of the same order, who, in 1660, founded a mission at the Sault de Ste. Marie, and then went into the forest to induce the savages to listen to the glad tidings he had brought, and never came back: to Father Allouez, who rebuilt the mission five years afterward (the first of these houses of God which was not destroyed or abandoned), who subsequently crossed the lakes, and preached to the Indians on Fox river, where, in one of the villages of the Miamis and Mascoutens, Marquette found a cross still standing, after the lapse of years, where Allouez had raised it, covered with the offerings of the simple natives to an unknown God. He is the same, too, who founded Kaskaskia, probably the earliest settlement in the great valley, and whose history ends (significant fact!) with the record of his usefulness. To Father Pinet, who founded Cahokia, and was so successful in the conversion of the natives, that his little chapel could not contain the numbers who resorted to his ministrations: to Father Marest, the first preacher against intemperance; and, finally, to Marquette, the best and bravest of them all, the most single-hearted and unpretending! Enthusiasm is a characteristic of the French nation; a trait in some individuals elevated to a sublime self-devotion, and in others degraded to mere excitability. The vivacity, gesticulation, and grimace, which characterize most of them, are the external signs of this nature; the calm heroism of the seventeenth century, and the insane devotion of the nineteenth, were alike its fruits. The _voyageur_ possessed it, in common with all his countrymen. But in him it was not noisy, turbulent, or egotistical; military glory had "neither part nor lot" in his schemes; the conquests he desired to make were the conquests of faith; the dominion he wished to establish was the dominion of Jesus. In the pursuit of these objects, or rather of this single object, I have said he manifested the enthusiasm of his race; but it was the noblest form of that characteristic. The fire that burned in his bosom was fed by no selfish purpose. To have thought of himself, or of his own comforts, or glory, to the detriment of any Christian enterprise, however dangerous or unpromising, would, in his eyes, have been a deadly sin. At Sault de Ste. Marie, Father Marquette heard of many savages (whom he calls "God's children") living in barbarism, far to the west. With five boatmen and one companion, he at once set out for an unexplored, even unvisited wilderness. He had what they had not--the gospel; and his heart yearned toward them, as the heart of a mother toward an afflicted child. He went to them, and bound them to him "in the bond of peace." If they received him kindly--as they usually did, for even a savage recognises and respects genuine devotion--he preached to them, mediated among them, softened their hearts, and gathered them into the fold of God. If they met him with arms in their hands--as they sometimes did, for savages, like civilized men, do not always know their friends--he resolutely offered peace; and, in his own simple and pious language, "God touched their hearts," and they cast aside their weapons and received him kindly. But the _voyageur_ had higher qualities than enthusiasm. He was capable of being so absorbed in a cause as to lose sight of his own identity; to forget that he was more than an instrument in the hands of God, to do God's work: and the distinction between these traits is broad indeed! Enthusiasm is noisy, obtrusive--self-abnegation is silent, retiring; enthusiasm is officious, troublesome, careless of time and place--self-abnegation is prudent, gentle, considerate. The one is active and fragmentary--the other passive, but constant. Thus, when the untaught and simple native was to be converted, the missionary took note of the spiritual capacity as well as of the spiritual wants; he did not force him to receive, at once, the whole creed of the church, as a mere enthusiast would have done; for _that_ wisdom would feed an infant with strong meats, even before it had drawn its mother's milk. Neither did he preach the gospel with the sword, like the Spaniard, nor with fire and fagot, like the puritan. He was wise as the serpent, but gentle as the dove. He took the wondering Indian by the hand; received him as a brother; won him over to listen patiently; and then taught him first that which he could most easily comprehend: he led him to address the throne of grace, or, in the language of the time, "to embrace the prayer;" because even the savage believed in Deity. As his understanding was expanded, and his heart purified--as every heart must be which truly lifts itself to God--he gradually taught him the more abstruse and wonderful doctrines of the Church of Christ. Gently and imperceptibly he led him on, until the whole tremendous work was done. The untutored savage, if he knew nothing else, yet knew the name of his Redeemer. The bloody warfare, the feuds and jealousies of his tribe, if not completely overcome, at least were softened and ameliorated. When he could not convert, he endeavored to humanize; and among the tribes of the Illinois,[55] though they were never thoroughly Christianized, the influence of the good fathers soon prevailed to abolish the barbarous practice of torturing captives.[56] For though they might not embrace the religion, the savages venerated its teachers, and loved them for their gentleness. And this gentleness was not want of courage; for never in the history of the world has truer valor been exhibited than that shown by the early missionary and his compeers, the first military adventurers! Read Joutel's account of the melancholy life and death of La Salle; read the simple, unpretending "Journal" of Marquette;[57] and compare their constancy and heroism with that displayed at any time in any cause! But the _voyageur_ possessed higher qualities than courage, also; and here again we recur to his perfect abnegation of himself; his renunciation of all personal considerations. Courage takes note of danger, but defies it: the _voyageur_ was careless of danger, because he counted it as nothing; he gave it no thought, because it only affected _himself_; and he valued not his own safety and comfort, so long as he could serve the cause by forgetting them. Mere courage is combative, even pugnacious; but the _voyageur_ fought only "the good fight;" he had no pride of conquest, save in the victories of Faith, and rather would suffer, himself, than inflict suffering upon others. Mere courage is restless, impatient, purposeless: but the _voyageur_ was content to remain wherever he could do good, tentative only in the cause of Christ, and distracted by no objects from his mission. His religion was his inspiration; his conscience his reward. His system may have been perverted, his zeal mistaken, his church a sham; we are not arguing that question. But the purity of his intentions, the sincerity of his heart, can not be doubted; and the most intolerant protestant against "the corruptions of Rome" will, at least, admit that even catholicism was better than the paganism of the savage. "There is not," says Macaulay,[58] "and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church." And certainly all other systems combined have never produced one tithe of the astounding results brought about by this alone. Whether she has taught truth or falsehood; whether, on the whole, it had been better or worse for the cause of Christianity, had no such organization ever existed; whether her claims be groundless or well-founded, are questions foreign to our purpose. But that her polity is the most powerful--the best adapted to the ends she has in view--of all that man has hitherto invented, there can be no doubt. Her missionaries have been more numerous and more successful, ay, and more devoted, than those of any other church. They have gone where even the sword of the conqueror could not cleave his way. They have built churches in the wilderness, which were time-worn and crumbling when the first emigrant penetrated the forests. They have preached to youthful savages who never saw the face of another white man, though they lived to three-score years and ten. They have prayed upon the shores of lonely lakes and rivers, which were not mapped by geographers for centuries after their deaths. They have travelled on foot, unarmed and alone, where an army could not march. And everywhere their zeal and usefulness have ended only with their lives; and always with their latest breath they have mingled prayers for the salvation of their flocks, with aspirations for the welfare of their church. For though countless miles of sea and land were between her and them, their loyalty and affection to the great spiritual Mother were never forgotten. "In spite of oceans and deserts; of hunger and pestilence; of spies and penal laws; of dungeons and racks, of gibbets and quartering-blocks," they have been found in every country, at all times, ever active and zealous. And everywhere, in palace, or hovel, or wilderness, they have been true sons of the church, loyal and obedient. An organization capable of producing such results is certainly well worth examination. For the influence she has wielded in ages past gives promise of her future power; and it becomes those who think her permanence pernicious to the world, to avoid her errors and yet imitate her wisdom. If the system be a falsehood and a sham, it is a most gigantic and successful one, and it is of strange longevity. It has lived now more than fifteen hundred years, and one hundred and fifty millions of people yet believe it. If it be a counterfeit, it is high time the cheat were detected and exposed. Let those who have the truth give forth its light, that the falsehood may wither and die. Unless they do so, the life which has already extended over so many centuries may gain fresh vigor, and renew its youth. Even yet the vision of the essayist may be realized: "She may still exist in undiminished vigor, when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's!" It was to this church that the early _voyageurs_ belonged. And I do not use that word "belonged" as it is employed in modern times among protestants: I mean _more_ than that convenient, loosely-fitting profession, which, like a garment, is thrown on and off, as the exigencies of hypocrisy or cupidity may require. These men actually _did belong_ to the church. They were hers, soul and body; hers, in life and in death; hers to go whithersoever she might direct, to do whatsoever she might appoint. They believed the doctrines they taught with an abiding, _active_ faith; and they were willing to be spent in preaching them to the heathen. It has always been a leading principle in the policy of the Roman church, to preserve her unity, and she has been enabled to do so, principally by the ramified and elastic polity for which she has been distinguished, to which she owes much of her extent and power, as well as no small part of the reproach so liberally bestowed upon her in the pages of history. There are many "arms" in her service: a man must be impracticable indeed, when she can find no place in which to make him useful, or to prevent his being mischievous. She never drives one from the pale of the church who can benefit it as a communicant, or injure it as a dissenter. If he became troublesome at home, she has, in all ages, had enterprises on foot in which she might clothe him with authority, and send him to the uttermost parts of the earth; thus ridding herself of a dangerous member, and, by the same act, enlarging the sphere of her own dominion. Does an enthusiast become noisy, or troublesome upon unimportant points, the creed is flexible, and the mother will not quarrel with her child, for his earnestness may convince and lead astray more valuable sons and daughters. She will establish a new order, of which the stubborn fanatic shall be founder; the new order is built into the old church organization, and its founder becomes a dignitary of the ecclesiastical establishment. Instead of becoming a dangerous heretic and schismatic, he is attached to orthodoxy by cords stronger than steel; henceforth all his earnest enthusiasm shall be directed to the advancement of his order, and consequently of his church. Does one exhibit inflexibility in some matter of conscience upon which the church insists, there are many of God's children in the wilderness starving in spirit for the bread of life; and to these, with that bread, shall the refractory son be sent. He receives the commission; departs upon his journey, glad to forget a difference with his spiritual superiors; preaches to the heathen; remembers only that the church is his mother; wins a crown of martyrdom, and is canonized for the encouragement of others! Thus she finds a place for all, and work enough for each; and thus are thrown off the elements of schism and rebellion. Those who had most courage in the cause of right; all who were likely to be guided in matters of conscience by their own convictions; the most sincere and single-hearted, the firmest and purest and bravest, were, in matters of controversy, the most dangerous champions, should they range themselves against the teaching of the church. They were consequently, at the period of which I am writing, the men whom it was most desirable to send away; and they were eminently well fitted for the arduous and wasting duties of the missionary. To this class belonged the large majority of the _voyageur_ priests: men who might be inconvenient and obtrusive monitors, or formidable adversaries in controversy, if they remained at home; but who could only be useful--who of all men could be _most_ useful--in gathering the heathen into the fold of the church. There were, doubtless, a few of another class; the restless, intriguing, and disobedient, who, though not formidable, were troublesome. But even when these joined the missionary expeditions, they did but little to forward the work, and are entitled to none of the honor so abundantly due to their more sincere brethren. To this class, for example, belonged the false and egotistical Hennepin, who only signalized himself by endeavoring to appropriate the reputation so hardly won by the brave and unfortunate La Salle.[59] It does not appear upon the record that any of these men--of either the restless and ambitious, or of the better class--were literally _sent away_. But such has been the politic practice of this church for many ages; and we may safely believe, that when she was engaged in an unscrupulous and desperate contest for the recovery, by fair means or foul, of her immense losses, there might be many in the ranks of her pious priesthood whom it would be inconvenient to retain at home. And during that conflict especially, with the most formidable enemies she ever had, she could not afford to be encumbered. But whatever may have been the motives of their spiritual superiors, the missionaries themselves were moved only by the considerations of which we have spoken--the truest piety and the most burning zeal. Of these influences they were conscious; but we shall perhaps not do the character injustice if we add another spur to action, of which they were _not_ conscious. There is a vein of romance in the French composition; a love of adventure for the sake of the adventure itself, which, when not tamed or directed, makes a Frenchman fitful, erratic, and unreliable. When it is toned by personal ambition, it becomes a sort of Paladin contempt for danger; sometimes a crazy furor. When accompanied by powerful intellect, and strengthened by concentration on a purpose, it makes a great commander--great for the quickness of his comprehension, the suddenness of his resolutions, the rapidity of their execution. When humanized by love, and quickened by religious zeal, it is purified of every selfish thought, and produces the chivalrous missionary, whom neither fire nor flood, neither desert nor pathless wilderness, shall deter from obeying the command of Him who sent his gospel "unto every creature." And thus are even those traits, which so often curse the world with insane ambition and sanguinary war, turned by the power of a true benevolence to be blessings of incalculable value. Such were the purposes, such the motives, of this band of noble men; and whatever may have been their errors, we must at least accord them the virtues of _sincerity_, _courage_, _and self-denial_. But let us look a little more closely at the means by which they accomplished undertakings which, to any other race of men, would have been not only impracticable, but utterly desperate. Take again, as the representative of his class, the case of Father Marquette, than whom, obscure as his name is in the wastes of history, no man ever lived a more instructive and exemplary life. From the year 1668 to 1671,[60] Marquette had been preaching at the Sault de Sainte Marie, a little below the foot of Lake Superior. He was associated with others in that mission; but the largest type, though it thrust itself no higher than the smallest, will make the broadest impress on the page of history; and even in the meager record of that time, we may trace the influence of his gentle but firm spirit--those by whom he was accompanied evidently took their tone from him. But he was one of the Church's pioneers; that class whose eager, single-hearted zeal is always pushing forward to new conquests of the faith; and when he had put aside the weapons that opposed their way, to let his followers in, his thoughts at once went on to more remote and suffering regions. During his residence at the Sault, rumors and legends were continually floating in of the unknown country lying to the west--"the Land of the Great River," the Indians called it--until the mind of the good father became fully possessed with the idea of going to convert the nations who dwelt upon its shores. In the year 1671, he took the first step in that direction, moving on to Point St. Ignatius, on the main land, north of the island of Mackinac. Here, surrounded by his little flock of wondering listeners, he preached until the spring of 1673; but all the time his wish to carry the gospel where its sound had never been heard was growing stronger. He felt in his heart the impulse of his calling, to lead the way and open a path for the advance of light. At the period mentioned, he received an order from the wise intendant in New France, M. Talon, to explore the pathless wilderness to the westward. Then was seen the true spirit of the man, and of his order. He gathered together no armament; asked the protection of no soldiers; no part of the cargo of his little boat consisted of gunpowder, or of swords or guns; his only arms were the spirit of love and peace; his trust was in God for protection. Five boatmen, and one companion, the Sieur Joliet, composed his party. Two light bark canoes were his only means of travelling; and in these he carried a small quantity of Indian corn and some jerked meat, his only means of subsistence. Thus equipped, he set out through Green Bay and up Fox river, in search of a country never yet visited by any European. The Indians endeavored to dissuade him, wondering at his hardihood, and still more at the motives which could induce him thus to brave so many dangers. They told him of the savage Indians, to whom it would be only pastime to torture and murder him; of the terrible monsters which would swallow him and his companions, "canoes and all;" of the great bird called the _Piasau_,[61] which devoured men, after carrying them in its horrible talons to inaccessible cliffs and mountains; and of the scorching heat, which would wither him like a dry leaf. "I thanked them kindly," says the resolute but gentle father, "for their good counsel; but I told them that I could not profit by it, since the salvation of souls was at stake, for which object I would be overjoyed to give my life." Shaking them by the hand, one by one, as they approached to bid him farewell, as they thought, for the last time, he turned his back upon safety and peace, and departed upon his self-denying pilgrimage. Let him who sits at ease in his cushioned pew at home--let him who lounges on his velvet-covered sofa in the pulpit, while his well-taught choir are singing; who rises as the strains are dying, and kneels upon a cushioned stool to pray; who treads upon soft carpets while he preaches, in a white cravat, to congregations clad in broadcloth, silk, and satin--let him pause and ponder on the difference between his works, his trials, his zeal--ay, and his glory, both of earth and heaven!--and those of Father James Marquette! The little party went upon their way; the persuasions of their simple-hearted friends could not prevail, for the path of duty was before them, and the eye of God above. Having passed through Green Bay, and painfully dragged their canoes over the rapids of Fox river, they reached a considerable village, inhabited by the united tribes of Kickapoos, Miamis, and Mascoutimes. Here they halted for a time, as the mariner, about to prove the dangers of a long voyage, lingers for a day in the last port he is likely to enter for many months. Beyond this point no white man had ever gone; and here, if anywhere, the impulses of a natural fear should have made themselves felt. But we hear of no hesitation, no shrinking from the perilous task; and we know from the unpretending "Journal" of the good father, that a retreat, nay, even a halt--longer than was necessary to recruit exhausted strength, and renew the memory of former lessons among the natives--was never thought of. "My companion," said Marquette, referring to Joliet, "is an envoy from the king of France, and I am an humble minister of God. I have no fear, _because I shall consider it the highest happiness to die in the service of my master!_" There was no bravado in this, for, unlike many from whom you may, any day, hear the same declaration, he set forth immediately to encounter the perils of his embassy. The Indians, unable to prevail with him to abandon the enterprise, made all their simple provision for his comfort; and, furnishing him with guides and carriers across the portage to the Wisconsin river, parted with him as one bound for eternity. Having brought them safely to the river, the guides left them "alone in that unknown country, in the hand of God;" and, trusting to the protection of that hand, they set out upon their journey down the stream.[62] Seven days after, "with inexpressible joy," they emerged upon the bosom of the great river. During all this time they had seen no human being, though, probably, many a wandering savage had watched them from the covert of the bank, as they floated silently between the forests. It was an unbroken solitude, where the ripple of their paddles sounded loudly on the ear, and their voices, subdued by the stillness, were sent back in lonely echoes from the shore. They were the first white men who ever floated on the bosom of that mighty river[63]--"the envoy from the king of France, and the embassador of the King of kings." What were their thoughts we know not, but from Marquette's simple "Journal;" for, in returning to Quebec, Joliet's boat was wrecked in sight of the city, and all his papers lost.[64] Of the Sieur himself, we know nothing, save as the companion of Marquette on this voyage; but from this alone his fame is imperishable. They sailed slowly down the river, keeping a constant outlook upon the banks for signs of those for whose spiritual welfare the good father had undertaken his perilous journey. But for more than sixty leagues not a human form or habitation could be seen. They had leisure, more than they desired, to admire the grand and beautiful scenery of that picturesque region. In some places the cliffs rose perpendicularly for hundreds of feet from the water's edge; and nodding over their brows, and towering against the sky, were stately pines and cedars of the growth of centuries. Here, there lay between the river and the cliffs, a level prairie, waving in all the luxuriance of "the leafy month of June;" while beyond, the bluffs, enclosing the natural garden, softened by the distance, and clothed in evergreen, seemed but an extension of the primitive savanna. Here, a dense, primeval forest grew quite down to the margin of the water; and, hanging from the topmost branches of the giant oaks, festoons of gray and graceful moss lay floating on the rippled surface, or dipped within the tide. Here, the large, smooth roots of trees half undermined, presented seats and footholds, where the pleasant shade invited them to rest, and shelter from the sultry summer sun. Anon, an open prairie, with no cliff or bluff beyond, extended undulating from the river, until the eye, in straining to measure its extent, was wearied by the effort, and the plain became a waving sea of rainbow colors; of green and yellow, gold and purple. Again, they passed a gravelly beach, on which the yellow sand was studded with a thousand sets of brilliant shells, and little rivulets flowed in from level prairies, or stealthily crept out from under roots of trees or tangled vines, and hastened to be hidden in the bosom of the great father of waters. They floated on, through the dewy morning hours, when the leaves were shining in the sunlight, and the birds were singing joyously; before the summer heat had dried the moisture, or had forced the feathered songsters to the shade. At noon, when the silence made the solitude oppressive; when the leaves hung wilting down, nor fluttered in the fainting wind: when the prairies were no longer waving like the sea, but trembling like the atmosphere around a heated furnace: when the _mirage_ hung upon the plain: tall trees were seen growing in the air, and among them stalked the deer, and elk, and buffalo: while between them and the ground, the brazen sky was glowing with the sun of June: when nothing living could be seen, save when the _voyageur's_ approach would startle some wild beast slaking his thirst in the cool river, or a flock of waterfowl were driven from their covert, where the willow branches, drooping, dipped their leaves of silvery gray within the water. They floated on till evening, when the sun approached the prairie, and his broad, round disc, now shorn of its dazzling beams, defined itself against the sky and grew florid in the gathering haze: when the birds began to reappear, and flitted noiselessly among the trees, in busy preparation for the night: when beasts of prey crept out from lurking-places, where they had dozed and panted through the hours of noon: when the wilderness grew vocal with the mingled sounds of lowing buffalo, and screaming panther, and howling wolf; until the shadows rose from earth, and travelled from the east; until the dew began to fall, the stars came out, and night brought rest and dreams of home! Thus they floated on, "from morn till dewy eve," and still no sign of human life, neither habitation nor footprint, until one day--it was the twenty-fifth of June, more than two weeks since they had entered the wilderness--in gliding past a sandy beach, they recognised the impress of a naked foot! Following it for some distance, it grew into a trail, and then a path, once more a place where human beings habitually walked. Whose feet had trodden down the grass, what strange people lived on the prairies, they knew not, what dangers might await them, they cared not. These were the people whom the good father had come so far to convert and save! And now, again, one might expect some natural hesitation; some doubt in venturing among those who were certainly barbarians, and who might, for aught they knew, be brutal cannibals. We could forgive a little wavering, indeed, especially when we think of the frightful stories told them by the Northern Indians of this very people. But fear was not a part of these men's nature; or if it existed, it lay so deep, buried beneath religious zeal and pious trust, that its voice never reached the upper air. Leaving the boatmen with the canoes, near the mouth of the river now called Des Moines, Marquette and Joliet set out alone, to follow up the trail, and seek the people who had made it. It led them to an open prairie, one of the most beautiful in the present state of Iowa, and crossing this, a distance of six miles, they at last found themselves in the vicinity of three Indian villages. The very spot[65] where the chief of these stood might now be easily found, so clear, though brief, is the description of the simple priest. It stood at the foot of a long slope, on the bank of the river Moingona (or Des Moines), about six miles due west of the Mississippi; and at the top of the rise, at the distance of half a league, were built the two others. "We commended ourselves unto God," writes the gentle father; for they knew not at what moment they might need his intervention; and crying out with a loud voice, to announce their approach, they calmly advanced toward the group of lodges. At a short distance from the entrance to the village, they were met by a deputation of four old men, who, to their great joy, they perceived bore a richly-ornamented pipe of peace, the emblem of friendship and hospitality. Tendering the mysterious calumet, they informed the Frenchmen that they belonged to one of the tribes called "Illinois" (or "Men"), and invited them to enter their lodges in peace: an invitation which the weary _voyageurs_ were but too glad to accept. A great council was held, with all the rude but imposing ceremonies of the grave and dignified Indian; and before the assembled chiefs and braves, Marquette published his mission from his heavenly Master. Passing, then, from spiritual to temporal things--for we do not hear of any address from Joliet, who probably was no orator--he spoke of his earthly king, and of his viceroy in New France; of his victories over the Iroquois, the dreaded enemies of the peaceful Western tribes; and then made many inquiries about the Mississippi, its tributaries, and the nations who dwelt upon their banks. His advances were kindly received, his questions frankly answered, and the council broke up with mutual assurances of good-will. Then ensued the customary festival. Hominy, fish, buffalo, and _dog-meat_, were successively served up, like the courses of a more modern table; but of _the last_ "we declined to partake," writes the good father, no doubt much to the astonishment and somewhat to the chagrin of their hospitable friends; for even yet, among the western Indians, dog-meat is a dish of honor. Six days of friendly intercourse passed pleasantly away, diversified by many efforts on the part of Marquette to instruct and convert the docile savages. Nor were these entirely without result; they excited, at least, the wish to hear more; and on his departure they crowded round him, and urgently requested him to come again among them. He promised to do so, a pledge which he afterward redeemed. But now he could not tarry; he was bent upon his hazardous voyage down the Great River, and he knew that he was only on the threshold of his grand discoveries. Six hundred warriors, commanded by their most distinguished chief, accompanied him back to his boats; and, after hanging around his neck the great calumet, to protect him among the hostile nations of the south, they parted with him, praying that the Great Spirit, of whom he had told them, might give him a prosperous voyage, and a speedy and safe return. These were the first of the nations of the Mississippi Valley visited by the French, and it is from them that the state of Illinois takes its name. They were a singularly gentle people; and a nature originally peaceful had been rendered almost timid by the cruel inroads of the murderous Iroquois.[66] These, by their traffic with the Dutch and English of New-York, and by their long warfare with the French of Canada, had acquired the use of fire-arms, and, of course, possessed an immense advantage over those who were armed only with the primitive bow and arrow. The restless and ambitious spirit of the singular confederacy, usually called the Five Nations, and known among their neighbors by the collective name of Iroquois, had carried their incursions even as far as the hunting-grounds of the Shawanese, about the mouth of the Ohio; and their successes had made them a terror to all the western tribes. The Illinois, therefore, knowing the French to be at war with these formidable enemies, were the more anxious to form an alliance with them; and the native gentleness of their manners was, perhaps, increased by the hope of assistance and protection. But, whatever motives may have influenced them, besides their natural character, their forethought was of vital service to the wanderers in the countries of the south, whither they proceeded. The little party of seven resumed their voyage on the last day of June, and floating with the rapid current, a few days afterward passed the rocks, above the site of Alton, where was painted the image of the ravenous _Piasau_, of which they had been told by the Northern Indians, and on the same day reached the mouth of the Pekitanoni, the Indian name for the rapid and turbulent Missouri. Inwardly resolving, at some future time, to ascend its muddy current, to cross the ridge beyond, and, descending some river which falls into the Great South sea (as the Pacific was then called), to publish the gospel to all the people of the continent, the zealous father passed onward toward the south. Coasting slowly along the wasting shore, lingering in the mouths of rivers, or exploring dense forests in the hope of meeting the natives, they continued on their course until they reached the mouth of a river which they called the _Ouabache_, or Wabash, none other than the beautiful Ohio.[67] Here they found the advanced settlement of Shawanese, who had been pushed toward the southwest by the incessant attacks of the Iroquois. But by this time, fired with the hope of ascertaining the outlet of the Mississippi, they postponed their visit to these people until their return, and floated on. It is amusing, as well as instructive, to observe how little importance the travellers gave to the river Ohio, in their geographical assumptions. In the map published by Marquette with his "Journal," the "_Ouabisquigou_" as he denominates it, in euphonious French-Indian, compared to the Illinois or even to the Wisconsin, is but an inconsiderable rivulet! The lonely wanderers were much farther from the English settlements than they supposed; a mistake into which they must have been led, by hearing of the incursions of the Iroquois; for even at that early day they could not but know that the head-waters of the Ohio were not distant from the hunting-grounds of that warlike confederacy. Even this explanation, however, scarcely lessens our wonder that they should have known so little of courses and distances; for had this river been as short as it is here delineated, they would have been within four hundred miles of Montreal. After leaving the Ohio, they suffered much from the climate and its incidents; for they were now approaching, in the middle of July, a region of perpetual summer. Mosquitoes and other venomous insects (in that region we might even call them _ravenous_ insects) became intolerably annoying; and the _voyageurs_ began to think they had reached the country of the terrible heats, which, as they had been warned in the north, "would wither them up like a dry leaf." But the prospect of death by torture and savage cruelty had not daunted them, and they were not now disposed to be turned back by any excess of climate. Arranging their sails in the form of awnings to protect them from the sun by day and the dews by night, they resolutely pursued their way. Following the course of the river, they soon entered the region of cane-brakes, so thick that no animal larger than a cat could penetrate them; and of cotton-wood forests of immense size and of unparalleled density. They were far beyond the limits of every Indian dialect with which they had become acquainted--were, in fact, approaching the region visited by De Soto, on his famous expedition in search of Juan Ponce de Leon's fountain of youth.[68] The country was possessed by the Sioux and Chickasaws, to whom the _voyageurs_ were total strangers; but they went on without fear. In the neighborhood of the southern boundary of the present state of Arkansas, they were met in hostile array by great numbers of the natives, who approached them in large canoes made from the trunks of hollow trees. But Marquette held aloft the symbol of peace, the ornamented calumet, and the hearts of the savages were melted, as the pious father believed, by the touch of God. They threw aside their weapons, and received the strangers with rude but hearty hospitality. They escorted them, with many demonstrations of welcome, to the village of Michigamia; and, on the following day, having feasted their strange guests plentifully, though not with the unsavory meats of the Illinois, they marched in triumphal procession to the metropolis of Akansea, about ten leagues distant, down the river. This was the limit of their voyage. Here they ascertained, beyond a doubt, that the Mississippi flowed into the gulf of Mexico, and not, as had been conjectured, into the great South sea. Here they found the natives armed with axes of steel, a proof of their traffic with the Spaniards; and thus was the circle of discovery complete, connecting the explorations of the French with those of the Spanish, and entirely enclosing the possessions of the English. No voyage so important has since been undertaken--no results so great have ever been produced by so feeble an expedition. The discoveries of Marquette, followed by the enterprises of La Salle and his successors, have influenced the destinies of nations; and passing over all political speculations, this exploration first threw open a valley of greater extent, fertility, and commercial advantages, than any other in the world. Had either the French or the Spanish possessed the stubborn qualities which _hold_, as they had the useful which _discover_, the aspect of this continent would, at this day, have been far different. On the seventeenth of July, having preached to the Indians the glory of God and the Catholic faith, and proclaimed the power of the _Grand Monarque_--for still we hear nothing of speech-making or delivering credentials on the part of Joliet--he set out on his return. After severe and wasting toil for many days, they reached a point, as Marquette supposed, some leagues below the mouth of the Moingona, or Des Moines. Here they left the Mississippi, and crossed the country between that river and the Illinois, probably passing through the very country which now bears the good father's name, entering the latter stream at a point not far from the present town of Peoria. Proceeding slowly up that calm river, preaching to the tribes along its banks, and partaking of their hospitality, he was at last conducted to Lake Michigan, at Chicago, and by the end of September was safe again in Green Bay, having travelled, since the tenth of June, more than three thousand miles. It might have been expected that one who had made so magnificent a discovery--who had braved so much and endured so much--would wish to announce in person, to the authorities in Canada, or in France, the results of his expedition. Nay, it would not have been unpardonable had he desired to enjoy, after his labors, something of the consideration to which their success entitled him. And, certainly, no man could ever have approached his rulers with a better claim upon their notice than could the unpretending _voyageur_. But vainglory was no more a part of his nature, than was fear. The unaspiring priest remained at Green Bay, to continue, or rather to resume, as a task laid aside only for a time, his ministrations to the savages. Joliet hastened on to Quebec to report the expedition, and Marquette returned to Chicago, for the purpose of preaching the gospel to the Miami confederacy; several allied tribes who occupied the country between Lake Michigan and the Des Moines river. Here again he visited the Illinois, speaking to them of God, and of the religion of Jesus; thus redeeming a promise which he had made them, when on his expedition to the South. But his useful, unambitious life was drawing to a close. Let us describe its last scene in the words of our accomplished historian:-- "Two years afterward, sailing from Chicago to Mackinac, he entered a little river in Michigan. Erecting an altar, he said mass, after the rites of the Catholic church; then, begging the men who conducted his canoe to leave him alone for a half hour, "----'In the darkling wood, Amid the cool and silence, he knelt down, And offered to the mightiest solemn thanks And supplication.' "At the end of the half hour they went to seek him, _and he was no more_. The good missionary, discoverer of a world, had fallen asleep on the margin of the stream that bears his name. Near its mouth, the canoe-men dug his grave in the sand. Ever after, the forest rangers, in their danger on Lake Michigan, would invoke his name. The people of the West will build his monument."[69] The monument is not yet built; though the name of new counties in several of our western states testifies that the noble missionary is not altogether forgotten, in the land where he spent so many self-denying years. Such was the _voyageur_ priest; the first, in chronological order, of the succession of singular men who have explored and peopled the great West. And though many who have followed him have been his equals in courage and endurance, none have ever possessed the same combination of heroic and unselfish qualities. It ought not to be true that this brief and cursory sketch is the first distinct tribute yet paid to his virtues; for no worthier subject ever employed the pen of the poet or historian. NOTE.--Struck with the fact that the history of this class of men, and of their enterprises and sufferings, has never been written, except by themselves in their simple "Journals" and "Relations"--for the _résumé_ given of these by Sparks, Bancroft, and others, is of necessity a mere unsatisfactory abstract--the writer has for some time been engaged in collecting and arranging materials, with the intention of supplying the want. The authorities are numerous and widely scattered; and such a work ought to be thoroughly and carefully written, so that much time and labor lies between the author and his day of publication. Should he be spared, however, to finish the work, he hopes to present a picture of a class of men, displaying as much of true devotion, genuine courage, and self-denial, in the humble walk of the missionary, as the pages of history show in any other department of human enterprise. FOOTNOTES: [52] In common use, this word was restricted so as to indicate only the boatmen, the carriers of that time; but I am writing of a period anterior, by many years, to the existence of the Trade which made their occupation. [53] Joutel, who was one of La Salle's party, and afterward wrote an account of the enterprise, entitled _Journal Historique_, published in Paris, 1713. Its fidelity is as evident upon its face, as is the simplicity of the historian. [54] This was in the winter of 1679-'80; and the Five Nations, included in the general term Iroquois, had not then made the conquest upon which the English afterward founded their claim to the country. They were, however, generally regarded as enemies by all the Illinois tribes. [55] A collective name, including a number, variously stated, of different tribes confederated. [56] _Annals of the West_, by J. H. Perkins and J. M. Peck, p. 679. St. Louis. 1850. [57] The substance of the Journal may be found, republished by Dr. Sparks, in the second edition of _Butler's Kentucky_, p. 493, _et seq._, and in vol. x. of his _American Biography_. [58] _Miscellanies_, "Review of Ranke's History of the Popes." [59] In a book which he published at Utrecht, in 1697, entitled _A New Discovery of a Vast Country_, he claims to have gone down the Mississippi to its mouth before La Salle. The whole book is a mere plagiarism. See Sparks's _Life of La Salle_, where the vain father is summarily and justly disposed of. [60] Most of these dates may be found in Bancroft's _United States_, vol iii. [61] The legend of the Piasau is well known. Within the recollection of men now living, rude paintings of the monster were visible on the cliffs above Alton, Illinois. To these images, when passing in their canoes, the Indians were accustomed to make offerings of maize, tobacco, and gunpowder. They are now quite obliterated. [62] June 10, 1673. [63] I mean, of course, the upper Mississippi; for De Soto had reached it lower down one hundred and thirty-two years before. [64] It was announced, some months since, that our minister at Rome, Mr. Cass, had made discoveries in that city which threw more light upon this expedition. But how this can be, consistently with the fact stated in the text (about which there is no doubt), I am at a loss to divine. [65] The place of Marquette's landing--which should be classic ground--from his description of the country, and the distance he specifies, could not have been far from the spot where the city of Keokuk now stands, a short distance above the mouth of the Des Moines. The locality should, if possible, be determined. [66] It was by virtue of a treaty of purchase--signed at Fort Stanwix on the 5th of November, 1768--with the Six Nations, who claimed the country as their conquest, that the British asserted a title to the country west of the Alleghenies, Western Virginia, Kentucky, etc. [67] The geographical mistakes of the early French explorers have led to some singular discussions about Western history--have even been used by diplomatists to support or weaken territorial claims. Such, for example, is the question concerning the antiquity of Vincennes, a controversy founded on the mistake noticed in the text. Vide _Western Annals_. 2d Ed. Revised by J. M. Peck. [68] In 1541, De Soto crossed the Mississippi about the thirty-fifth parallel of latitude, or near the northern boundary of the state of that name. It is not certain how far below this Marquette went, though we are safe in saying that he did not turn back north of that limit. [69] Bancroft's _History of the United States_, vol. iii., p. 161, _et seq._, where the reader may look for most of these dates. III. THE PIONEER. "I hear the tread of pioneers, Of nations yet to be-- The first low wash of waves where soon Shall roll a human sea." WHITTIER. "The axe rang sharply 'mid those forest shades Which, from creation, toward the sky had towered In unshorn beauty." SIGOURNEY. [Illustration: THE PIONEER.] Next, in chronological order, after the missionary, came the military adventurer--of which class La Salle was the best representative. But the expeditions led by these men, were, for the most part, wild and visionary enterprises, in pursuit of unattainable ends. They were, moreover, unskilfully managed and unfortunately terminated--generally ending in the defeat, disappointment, and death of those who had set them on foot. They left no permanent impress upon the country; the most acute moral or political vision can not now detect a trace of their influence, in the aspect of the lands they penetrated; and, so far from hastening the settlement of the Great Valley, it is more probable that their disastrous failures rather retarded it--by deterring others from the undertaking. Their history reads like a romance; and their characters would better grace the pages of fiction, than the annals of civilization. Further than this brief reference, therefore, I find no place for them, in a work which aims only to notice those who either aided to produce, or indicated, the characteristics of the society in which they lived. Soon after them, came the Indian-traders--to whose generosity so many of the captives, taken by the natives in those early times, were indebted for their ransom. But--notwithstanding occasional acts of charity--their unscrupulous rapacity, and, particularly, their introduction of spirituous liquors among the savages, furnish good reason to doubt, whether, on the whole, they did anything to advance the civilization of the lands and people they visited. And, as we shall have occasion to refer again, though briefly, to the character in a subsequent article, we will pass over it for the present, and hasten on to the _Pioneer_. Of this class, there are two sub-divisions: the floating, transitory, and erratic frontierman--including the hunter, the trapper, the scout and Indian-fighter: men who can not be considered _citizens_ of any country, but keep always a little in advance of permanent emigration. With this division of the class, we have little to do: first, because they are already well understood, by most readers in this country, through the earlier novels of Cooper, their great delineator; and, second, because, as we have intimated, our business is chiefly with those, whose footprints have been stamped upon the country, and whose influence is traceable in its civilization. We, therefore, now desire to direct attention to the other sub-division--the genuine "settler;" the firm, unflinching, permanent emigrant, who entered the country to till the land and to possess it, for himself and his descendants. And, in the first place, let us inquire what motives could induce men to leave regions, where the axe had been at work for many years--where the land was reduced to cultivation, and the forest reclaimed from the wild beast and the wilder savage--where civilization had begun to exert its power, and society had assumed a legal and determined shape--to depart from all these things, seeking a new home in an inhospitable wilderness, where they could only gain a footing by severe labor, constant strife, and sleepless vigilance? To be capable of doing all this, from _any_ motive, a man must be a strange compound of qualities; but that compound, strange as it is, has done, and is doing, more to reclaim the west, and change the wilderness into a garden, than all other causes combined. A prominent trait in the character of the genuine American, is the desire "to better his condition"--a peculiarity which sometimes embodies itself in the disposition to forget the good old maxim, "Let well-enough alone," and not unfrequently leads to disaster and suffering. A thorough Yankee--using that word as the English do, to indicate national, not sectional, character--is never satisfied with doing well; he always underrates his gains and his successes; and, though to others he may be boastful enough, and may, even truly, rate the profits of his enterprise by long strings of "naught," he is always whispering to himself, "I ought to do better." If he sees any one accumulating property faster than himself, he becomes emulous and discontented--he is apt to think, unless he goes more rapidly than any one else, that he is not moving at all. If he can find no one of his neighbors advancing toward fortune, with longer strides than he, he will imagine some successful "speculator," to whom he will compare himself, and chafe at his inferiority to a figment of his own fancy. If he possessed "a million a minute," he would cast about for some profitable employment, in which he might engage, "to pay expenses." He will abandon a silver-mine, of slow, but certain gains, for the gambling chances of a gold "placer;" and if any one within his knowledge dig out more wealth than he, he will leave the "diggings," though his success be quite encouraging, and go quixoting among the islands of the sea, in search of pearls and diamonds. With the prospect of improvement in his fortunes--whether that prospect be founded upon reason, be a naked fancy, or the offspring of mere discontent--he regards no danger, cares for no hardship, counts no suffering. Everything must bend before the ruling passion, "to better his condition." His spirit is eminently encroaching. Rather than give up any of his own "rights," he will take a part of what belongs to others. Whatever he thinks necessary to his welfare, to that he believes himself entitled. To whatever point he desires to reach, he takes the straightest course, even though the way lie across the corner of his neighbor's field. Yet he is intensely jealous of his own possessions, and warns off all trespassers with an imperial menace of "the utmost penalty of the law." He has, of course, an excellent opinion of himself--and justly: for when not blinded by cupidity or vexed by opposition, no man can hold the scales of justice with a more even hand. He is seldom conscious of having done a wrong: for he rarely moves until he has ascertained "both the propriety and expediency of the motion." He has, therefore, an instinctive aversion to all retractions and apologies. He has such a proclivity to the forward movement, that its opposite, even when truth and justice demand it, is stigmatized, in his vocabulary, by odious and ridiculous comparisons. He is very stubborn, and, it is feared, sometimes mistakes his obstinacy for firmness. He thinks a safe retreat worse than a defeat with slaughter. Yet he never rests under a reverse, and, though manifestly prostrate, will never acknowledge that he is beaten. A check enrages him more than a decided failure: for so long as his end is not accomplished, nor defeated, he can see no reason why he should not succeed. If his forces are driven back, shattered and destroyed, he is not cast down, but angry--he forthwith swears vengeance and another trial. He is quite insatiable--as a failure does not dampen him, success can never satisfy him. His plans are always on a great scale; and, if they sometimes exceed his means of execution, at least, "he who aims at the sun," though he may lose his arrow, "will not strike the ground." He is a great projector--but he is eminently practical, as well as theoretical; and if _he_ cannot realize his visions, no other man need try. He is restless and migratory. He is fond of change, for the sake of the change; and he will have it, though it bring him only new labors and new hardships. He is, withal, a little selfish--as might be supposed. He begins to lose his attachment to the advantages of his home, so soon as they are shared by others. He does not like near neighbors--has no affection for the soil; he will leave a place on which he has expended much time and labor, as soon as the region grows to be a "settlement." Even in a town, he is dissatisfied if his next neighbor lives so near that the women can gossip across the division-fence. He likes to be at least one day's journey from the nearest plantation. I once heard an old pioneer assign as a reason why he must emigrate from western Illinois, the fact that "people were settling right under his nose"--and the farm of his nearest neighbor was twelve miles distant, by the section lines! He moved on to Missouri, but there the same "impertinence" of emigrants soon followed him; and, abandoning his half-finished "clearing," he packed his family and household goods in a little wagon, and retreated, across the plains to Oregon. He is--or was, two years ago--living in the valley of the Willamette, where, doubtless, he is now chafing under the affliction of having neighbors in the same region, and nothing but an ocean beyond. His character seems to be hard-featured. But he is neither unsocial, nor morose. He welcomes the stranger as heartily as the most hospitable patriarch. He receives the sojourner at his fireside without question. He regales him with the best the house affords: is always anxious to have him "stay another day." He cares for his horse, renews his harness, laughs at his stories, and exchanges romances with him. He hunts with him; fishes, rides, walks, talks, eats, and drinks with him. His wife washes and mends the stranger's shirts, and lends him a needle and thread to sew a button on his only pair of pantaloons. The children sit on his knee, the dog lies at his feet, and accompanies him into the woods. The whole family are his friends, and only grow cold and distant when they learn that he is looking for land, and thinks of "settling" within a few leagues. If nothing of the sort occurs--and this only "leaks out" by accident, for the pioneer never pries inquisitively into the business of his guest, he keeps him as long as he can; and when he can stay no longer, fills his saddle-bags with flitches of bacon and "pones" of corn-bread, shakes him heartily by the hand, exacts a promise to stop again on his return, and bids him "God-speed" on his journey. Such is American character, in the manifestations which have most affected the settlement and development of the West; a compound of many noble qualities, with a few--and no nation is without such--that are not quite so respectable. All these, both good and bad, were possessed by the early pioneer in an eminent, sometimes in an extravagant degree; and the circumstances, by which he found himself surrounded after his emigration to the West, tended forcibly to their exaggeration. But the qualities--positive and negative--above enumerated, were, many of them, at least, peculiarities belonging to the early emigrant, as much before as after his removal. And there were others, quite as distinctly marked, called into activity, if not actually created by his life in the wilderness. Such, for example, was his self-reliance--his confidence in his own strength, sagacity, and courage. It was but little assistance that he ever required from his neighbors, though no man was ever more willing to render it to others, in the hour of need. He was the swift avenger of his own wrongs, and he never appealed to another to ascertain his rights. Legal tribunals were an abomination to him. Government functionaries he hated, almost as the Irish hate excisemen. Assessments and taxes he could not endure, for, since he was his own protector, he had no interest in sustaining the civil authorities. Military organizations he despised, for subordination was no part of his nature. He stood up in the native dignity of manhood, and called no mortal his superior. When he joined his neighbors, to avenge a foray of the savages, he joined on the most equal terms--each man was, for the time, his own captain; and when the leader was chosen--for the pioneers, with all their personal independence, were far too rational to underrate the advantages of a head in the hour of danger--each voice was counted in the choice, and the election might fall on any one. But, even after such organization, every man was fully at liberty to abandon the expedition, whenever he became dissatisfied, or thought proper to return home. And if this want of discipline sometimes impaired the strength, and rendered unavailing the efforts, of communities, it at least fostered the manly spirit of personal independence; and, to keep that alive in the breasts of a people, it is worth while to pay a yearly tribute, even though that tribute be rendered unto the King of Terrors! This self-reliance was not an arrogant and vulgar egotism, as it has been so often represented in western stories, and the tours of superficial travellers. It was a calm, just estimate of his own capabilities--a well-grounded confidence in his own talents--a clear, manly understanding of his own individual rights, dignity, and relations. Such is the western definition of independence; and if there be anything of it in the western character at the present day, it is due to the stubborn and intense individuality of the first pioneer. He it was who laid the foundation of our social fabric, and it is his spirit which yet pervades our people. The quality which next appears, in analyzing this character, is his _courage_. It was not mere physical courage, nor was it stolid carelessness of danger. The pioneer knew, perfectly well, the full extent of the peril that surrounded him; indeed, he could not be ignorant of it; for almost every day brought some new memento, either of his savage foe, or of the prowling beast of prey. He ploughed, and sowed, and reaped, and gathered, with the rifle slung over his shoulders; and, at every turn, he halted, listening, with his ear turned toward his home; for well he knew that, any moment, the scream of his wife, or the wail of his children, might tell of the up-lifted tomahawk, or the murderous scalping-knife. His courage, then, was not ignorance of danger--not that of the child, which thrusts its hand within the lion's jaws, and knows naught of the penalty it braves. His ear was ever listening, his eye was always watching, his nerves were ever strung, for battle. He was stout of heart, and strong of hand--he was calm, sagacious, unterrified. He was never disconcerted--excitement seldom moved him--his mind was always at its own command. His heart never lost its firmness--no suffering could overcome him--he was as stoical as the savage, whose greatest glory is to triumph amidst the most cruel tortures. His pride sustained him when his flesh was pierced with burning brands--when his muscles crisped and crackled in the flames. To the force of character, belonging to the white, he added the savage virtues of the red man; and many a captive has been rescued from the flames, through his stern contempt for torture, and his sneering triumph over his tormentors. The highest virtue of the savage was his fortitude; and he respected and admired even a "pale face," who emulated his endurance. But fortitude is only passive courage--and the bravery of the pioneer was eminently active. His vengeance was as rapid as it was sometimes cruel. No odds against him could deter him, no time was ever wasted in deliberation. If a depredation was committed in the night, the dawn of morning found the sufferer on the trail of the marauder. He would follow it for days, and even weeks, with the sagacity of the blood-hound, with the patience of the savage: and, perhaps, in the very midst of the Indian country, in some moment of security, the blow descended, and the injury was fearfully avenged! The debt was never suffered to accumulate, when it could be discharged by prompt payment--and it was never forgotten! If the account could not be balanced now, the obligation was treasured up for a time to come--and, when least expected, the debtor came, and paid with usury! It has been said, perhaps truly, that a fierce, bloody spirit ruled the settlers in those early days. And it is unquestionable, that much of that contempt for the slow vengeance of a legal proceeding, which now distinguishes the people of the frontier west, originated then. It was, doubtless, an unforgiving--eminently an unchristian--spirit: but vengeance, sure and swift, was the only thing which could impress the hostile savage. And, if example, in a matter of this sort, could be availing, for their severity to the Indians, they had the highest! The eastern colonists--good men and true--"willing to exterminate the savages," says Bancroft,[70] who is certainly not their enemy, offered a bounty for every Indian scalp--as we, in the west, do for the scalps of wolves! "To regular forces under pay, the grant was _ten_ pounds--to volunteers, in actual service, _twice that sum_; but if men would, of themselves, without pay, make up parties and patrol the forests in search of Indians, _as of old the woods were scoured for wild beasts_, the chase was invigorated by the promised 'encouragement of _fifty_ pounds per scalp!'" The "fruitless cruelties" of the Indian allies of the French in Canada, says the historian, gave birth to these humane and nicely-graduated enactments! Nor is our admiration of their Christian spirit in the least diminished, when we reflect that nothing is recorded in history of "bounties on scalps" or "encouragement" to murder, offered by Frontenac, or any other French-Canadian governor, as a revenge for the horrible massacre at Montreal, or the many "fruitless cruelties" of the bloody Iroquois![71] The descendants of the men who gave these "bounties" and "encouragements," have, in our own day, caressed, and wept and lamented over the tawny murderer, Black-Hawk, and his "wrongs" and "misfortunes;" but the theatre of Indian warfare was then removed a little farther west; and the atrocities of Haverhill and Deerfield were perpetrated on the western prairies, and not amid the forests of the east! Yet I do not mean, by referring to this passage of history--or to the rivers of wasted sentiment poured out a few years ago--so much to condemn our forefathers, or to draw invidious comparisons between them and others, as to show, that the war of extermination, sometimes waged by western rangers, was not without example--that the cruelty and hatred of the pioneer to the barbarous Indian, might originate in exasperation, which even moved the puritans; and that the lamentations, over the fictitious "wrongs" of a turbulent and bloody savage, might have run in a channel nearer home. Hatred of the Indian, among the pioneers, was hereditary; there was scarcely a man on the frontier, who had not lost a father, a mother, or a brother, by the tomahawk; and not a few of them had suffered in their own persons. The child, who learned the rudiments of his scanty education at his mother's knee, must decipher the strange characters by the straggling light which penetrated the crevices between the logs; for, while the father was absent, in the field or on the war-path, the mother was obliged to bar the doors and barricade the windows against the savages. Thus, if he did not literally imbibe it with his mother's milk, one of the first things the pioneer learned, was dread, and consequently hatred, of the Indian. That feeling grew with his growth, strengthened with his strength--for a life upon the western border left but few days free from sights of blood or mementoes of the savage. The pioneer might go to the field in the morning, unsuspecting; and, at noon, returning, find his wife murdered and scalped, and the brains of his little ones dashed out against his own doorpost! And if a deadly hatred of the Indian took possession of his heart, who shall blame him? It may be said, the pioneer was an intruder, seeking to take forcible possession of the Indian's lands--and that it was natural that the Indian should resent the wrong after the manner of his race. Granted: and it was quite as natural that the pioneer should return the enmity, after the manner of _his_ race! But the pioneer was _not_ an intruder. For all the purposes, for which reason and the order of Providence authorize us to say, God made the earth, this continent was vacant--uninhabited. And--granting that the savage was in possession--for this is his only ground of title, as, indeed, it is the foundation of all primary title--there were at the period of the first landing of white men on the continent, between Lake Superior and the Gulf of Mexico, east of the Mississippi, about one hundred and eighty thousand Indians.[72] That region now supports at least twenty millions of civilized people, and is capable of containing quite ten times that number, without crowding! Now, if God made the earth for any purpose, it certainly was _not_ that it should be monopolized by a horde of nomad savages! But an argument on this subject, would not be worth ink and paper; and I am, moreover, aware, that this reasoning may be abused. _Any_ attempt to construe the purposes of Deity must be liable to the same misapplication. And, besides, it is not my design to go so far back; I seek not so much to excuse as to account for--less to justify than to analyze--the characteristics of the class before me. I wish to establish that the pioneer hatred of the Indian was not an unprovoked or groundless hatred, that the severity of his warfare was not a mere gratuitous and bloody-minded cruelty. There are a thousand actions, of which we are hearing every day, that are indefensible in morals: and yet we are conscious while we condemn the actors, that, in like circumstances, we could not have acted differently. So is it with the fierce and violent reprisals, sometimes made by frontier rangers. Their best defence lies in the statement that they were men, and that their manhood prompted them to vengeance. When they deemed themselves injured, they demanded reparation, in such sort as that demand could then be made--at the muzzle of a rifle or the point of a knife. They were equal to the times in which they lived.--Had they not been so, how many steamboats would now be floating on the Mississippi? There was no romance in the composition of the pioneer--whatever there may have been in his environment. His life was altogether too serious a matter for poetry, and the only music he took pleasure in, was the sound of a violin, sending forth notes remarkable only for their liveliness. Even this, he could enjoy but at rare periods, when his cares were forcibly dismissed. He was, in truth, a very matter-of-fact sort of person. It was principally with facts that he had to deal--and most of them were very "stubborn facts." Indeed, it may be doubted--notwithstanding much good poetry has been written (in cities chiefly), on solitude and the wilderness--whether a life in the woods is, after all, very suggestive of poetical thoughts. The perils of the frontier must borrow most of their "enchantment" from the "distance;" and its sufferings and hardships are certainly more likely to evoke pleasant fancies to him who sits beside a good coal fire, than to one whose lot it is to bear them. Even the (so-called) "varied imagery" of the Indian's eloquence--about which so much nonsense has been written--is, in a far greater measure, the result of the poverty and crude materialism of his language, than of any poetical bias, temperament, or tone of thought. An Indian, as we have said before, has no humor--he never understands a jest--his wife is a beast of burthen--heaven is a hunting-ground--his language has no words to express abstract qualities, virtues, or sentiments. And yet he lives in the wilderness all the days of his life! The only trait he has, in common with the poetical character, is his laziness. But the pioneer was not indolent, in any sense. He had no dreaminess--meditation was no part of his mental habit--a poetical fancy would, in him, have been an indication of insanity. If he reclined at the foot of a tree, on a still summer day, it was to sleep: if he gazed out over the waving prairie, it was to search for the column of smoke which told of his enemy's approach: if he turned his eyes toward the blue heaven, it was to prognosticate to-morrow's storm or sunshine: if he bent his gaze upon the green earth, it was to look for "Indian sign" or buffalo trail. His wife was only a help-mate--he never thought of making a divinity of her--she cooked his dinner, made and washed his clothes, bore his children, and took care of his household. His children were never "little cherubs,"--"angels sent from heaven"--but generally "tow-headed" and very earthly responsibilities. He looked forward anxiously, to the day when the boys should be able to assist him in the field, or fight the Indian, and the girls to help their mother make and mend. When one of the latter took it into her head to be married--as they usually did quite early in life; for beaux were plenty and belles were "scarce"--he only made one condition, that the man of her choice should be brave and healthy. He never made a "parade" about anything--marriage, least of all. He usually gave the bride--not the "blushing" bride--a bed, a lean horse, and some good advice: and, having thus discharged his duty in the premises, returned to his work, and the business was done. The marriage ceremony, in those days, was a very unceremonious affair. The parade and drill which now attend it, would then have been as ridiculous as a Chinese dance; and the finery and ornament, at present understood to be indispensable on such occasions, then bore no sway in fashion. Bridal wreaths and dresses were not known; and white kid gloves and satin slippers never heard of. Orange blossoms--natural and artificial--were as pretty then as now; but the people were more occupied with substance, than with emblem. The ancients decked _their_ victims for the sacrifice with gaudy colors, flags, and streamers; the moderns do the same, and the offerings are sometimes made to quite as barbarous deities. But the bride of the pioneer was clothed in linsey-wolsey, with hose of woollen yarn; and moccasins of deer-skin--or as an extra piece of finery, high-quartered shoes of calf-skin--preceded satin slippers. The bridegroom came in copperas-colored jeans--domestic manufacture--as a holiday suit; or, perhaps, a hunting-shirt of buckskin, all fringed around the skirt and cape, and a "coon-skin" cap, with moccasins. Instead of a dainty walking-stick, with an opera-dancer's leg, in ivory, for head, he always brought his rifle, with a solid maple stock; and never, during the whole ceremony, did he divest himself of powder-horn and bullet-pouch. Protestant ministers of the gospel were few in those days; and the words of form were usually spoken by a Jesuit missionary. Or, if the Pioneer had objections to Catholicism--as many had--his place was supplied by some justice of the peace, of doubtful powers and mythical appointment. If neither of these could be procured, the father of the bride, himself, sometimes assumed the functions, _pro hâc vice_, or _pro tempore_, of minister or justice. It was always understood, however, that such left-handed marriages were to be confirmed by the first minister who wandered to the frontier: and, even when the opportunity did not offer for many months, no scandal ever arose--the marriage vow was never broken. The pioneers were simple people--the refinements of high cultivation had not yet penetrated the forests or crossed the prairies--and good faith and virtue were as common as courage and sagacity. When the brief, but all-sufficient ceremony was over, the bridegroom resumed his rifle, helped the bride into the saddle--or more frequently to the pillion behind him--and they calmly rode away together. On some pleasant spot--surrounded by a shady grove, or point of timber--a new log-cabin has been built: its rough logs notched across each other at the corners, a roof of oaken clapboards, held firmly down by long poles along each course, its floor of heavy "puncheons," its broad, cheerful fireplace, large as a modern bed-room--all are in the highest style of frontier architecture. Within--excepting some anomalies, such as putting the skillet and tea-kettle in the little cupboard, along with the blue-edged plates and yellow-figured tea-cups--for the whole has been arranged by the hands of the bridegroom himself--everything is neatly and properly disposed. The oaken bedstead, with low square posts, stands in one corner, and the bed is covered by a pure white counterpane, with fringe--an heirloom in the family of the bride. At the foot of this is seen a large, heavy chest--like a camp-chest--to serve for bureau, safe, and dressing-case. In the middle of the floor--directly above a trap-door which leads to a "potato-hole" beneath--stands a ponderous walnut table, and on it sits a nest of wooden trays; while, flanking these, on one side, is a nicely-folded tablecloth, and, on the other, a wooden-handled butcher-knife and a well-worn Bible. Around the room are ranged a few "split-bottomed" chairs, exclusively for use, not ornament. In the chimney-corners, or under the table, are several three-legged stools, made for the children, who--as the bridegroom laughingly insinuates while he points to the uncouth specimens of his handiwork--"will be coming in due time." The wife laughs in her turn--replies, "no doubt"--and, taking one of the graceful tripods in her hand, carries it forth to sit upon while she milks the cow--for she understands what she is expected to do, and does it without delay. In one corner--near the fireplace--the aforesaid cupboard is erected--being a few oaken shelves neatly pinned to the logs with hickory forks--and in this are arranged the plates and cups;--not as the honest pride of the housewife would arrange them, to display them to the best advantage--but piled away, one within another, without reference to show. As yet there is no sign of female taste or presence. But now the house receives its mistress. The "happy couple" ride up to the low rail-fence in front--the bride springs off without assistance, affectation, or delay. The husband leads away the horse or horses, and the wife enters the dominion, where, thenceforward, she is queen. There is no coyness, no blushing, no pretence of fright or nervousness--if you will, no romance--for which the husband has reason to be thankful! The wife knows what her duties are and resolutely goes about performing them. She never dreamed, nor twaddled, about "love in a cottage," or "the sweet communion of congenial souls" (who never eat anything): and she is, therefore, not disappointed on discovering that life is actually a serious thing. She never whines about "making her husband happy"--but sets firmly and sensibly about making him _comfortable_. She cooks his dinner, nurses his children, shares his hardships, and encourages his industry. She never complains of having too much work to do, she does not desert her home to make endless visits--she borrows no misfortunes, has no imaginary ailings. Milliners and mantua-makers she ignores--"shopping" she never heard of--scandal she never invents or listens to. She never wishes for fine carriages, professes no inability to walk five hundred yards, and does not think it a "vulgar accomplishment," to know how to make butter. She has no groundless anxieties, she is not nervous about her children taking cold: a doctor is a visionary potentate to her--a drug-shop is a dépôt of abominations. She never forgets whose wife she is,--there is no "sweet confidante" without whom she "can not live"--she never writes endless letters about nothing. She is, in short, a faithful, honest wife: and, "in due time," the husband must make _more_ "three-legged stools"--for the "tow-heads" have now covered them all! Such is the wife and mother of the pioneer, and, with such influences about him, how could he be otherwise than honest, straightforward, and manly? But, though a life in the woods was an enemy to every sort of sentimentalism--though a more unromantic being than the pioneer can hardly be imagined--yet his character unquestionably took its hue, from the primitive scenes and events of his solitary existence. He was, in many things, as simple as a child: as credulous, as unsophisticated. Yet the utmost cunning of the wily savage--all the strategy of Indian warfare--was not sufficient to deceive or overreach him! Though one might have expected that his life of ceaseless watchfulness would make him skeptical and suspicious, his confidence was given heartily, without reservation, and often most imprudently. If he gave his trust at all, you might ply him, by the hour, with the most improbable and outrageous fictions, without fear of contradiction or of unbelief. He never questioned the superior knowledge or pretensions of any one who claimed acquaintance with subjects of which _he_ was ignorant. The character of his intellect, like that of the Indian, was thoroughly synthetical: he had nothing of the faculty which enables us to detect falsehood, even in matters of which we know nothing by comparison and analogy. He never analyzed any story told him, he took it as a unit; and, unless it violated some known principle of his experience, or conflicted with some fact of his own observation, never doubted its truth. At this moment, there are men in every western settlement who have only vague, crude notions of what a city is--who would feel nervous if they stepped upon the deck of a steamboat--and are utterly at a loss to conjecture the nature of a railroad. Upon either of these mystical subjects they will swallow, without straining, the most absurd and impossible fictions. And this is not because of their ignorance alone, for many of them are, for their sphere in life, educated, intelligent, and, what is better, sensible men. Nor is it by any means a national trait: for a genuine Yankee will scarcely believe the truth; and, though he may sometimes trust in very wild things, his faith is usually an active "craze," and not mere passive credulity. The pioneer, then, has not derived it from his eastern fathers: it is the growth of the woods and prairies--an embellishment to a character which might otherwise appear naked and severe. Another characteristic, traceable to the same source, the stern reality of his life, is the pioneer's gravity. The agricultural population of this country are, at the best, not a cheerful race. Though they sometimes join in festivities, it is but seldom; and the wildness of their dissipation is too often in proportion to its infrequency. There is none of the serene contentment--none of that smiling enjoyment--which, according to travellers like Howitt, distinguishes the tillers of the ground in other lands. _Sedateness_ is a national characteristic, but the gravity of the pioneer is quite another thing; it includes pride and personal dignity, and indicates a stern, unyielding temper. There is, however, nothing morose in it: it is its aspect alone, which forbids approach; and that only makes more conspicuous the heartiness of your reception, when once the shell is broken. Acquainted with the character, you do not expect him to _smile_ much; but now and then he _laughs_: and that laugh is round, free, and hearty. You know at once that he enjoys it, you are convinced that he is a firm friend and "a good hater." It is not surprising, with a character such as I have described, that the pioneer is not gregarious, that he is, indeed, rather solitary. Accordingly, we never find a genuine specimen of the class, among the emigrants, who come in shoals and flocks, and pitch their tents in "colonies;" who lay out towns and cities, projected upon paper, and call them New Boston, New Albany, or New Hartford, before one log is placed upon another; nor are there many of the unadulterated stock among that other class, who come from regions further south, and christen their towns, classically, Carthage, Rome, or Athens: or, patriotically, in commemoration of some Virginian worthy, some Maryland sharpshooter, or "Jersey blue." The real pioneer never emigrates gregariously; he does not wish to be within "halloo" of his nearest neighbor; he is no city-builder; and, if he does project a town, he christens it by some such name as Boonville or Clarksville, in memory of a noted pioneer: or Jacksonville or Waynesville, to commemorate some "old hero" who was celebrated for good fighting.[73] And the reason why the outlandish and _outré_ so much predominate in the names of western towns and cities, must be sought in the fact referred to above, that the western man is not essentially a town-projector, and that, consequently, comparatively few of the towns were "laid out" by the legitimate pioneer. We shall have more to say of town-building under another head; and, in the meantime, having said that the pioneer is not gregarious, let us look at the _manner_ of his emigration. Many a time, in the western highways, have I met with the sturdy "mover," as he is called, in the places where people are stationary--a family, sometimes by no means small, wandering toward the setting sun, in search of pleasant places on the lands of "Uncle Sam." Many a time, in the forest or on the prairie--generally upon some point of timber which puts a mile or two within the plain--have I passed the "clearing," or "pre-emption," where, with nervous arm and sturdy heart, the "squatter"[74] cleaves out, and renders habitable, a home for himself and a heritage for his children. Upon the road, you first meet the pioneer himself, for he almost always walks a few hundred yards ahead. He is usually above the medium height, and rather spare. He stoops a little, too; for he has done a deal of hard work, and expects to do more; but you see at once, that unless his lungs are weak, his strength is by no means broken, and you are quite sure that many a stately tree is destined to be humbled by his sinewy arm. He is attired in frontier fashion: he wears a loose coat, called a hunting-shirt, of jeans or linsey, and its color is that indescribable hue compounded of copperas and madder; pantaloons, exceedingly loose, and not very accurately cut in any part, of like color and material, defend his lower limbs. His feet are cased in low, fox-colored shoes, for of boots, he is, yet, quite innocent. Around his throat and wrists, even in midsummer, you see the collar and wristbands of a heavy, deep-red, flannel-shirt. Examine him very closely, and you will probably find no other garment on his person. His hair is dark, and not very evenly trimmed--for his wife or daughter has performed the tonsure with a pair of rusty shears; and the longer locks seem changed in hue, as if his dingy wool hat did not sufficiently protect them against the wind and rain. Over his shoulder he carries a heavy rifle, heavier than a "Harper's ferry musket," running about "fifty to the pound." Around his neck are swung the powder-horn and bullet-pouch, the former protected by a square of deer-skin, and the latter ornamented with a squirrel's tail. You take note of all these things, and then recur to his melancholy-looking face, with its mild blue eyes and sharpened features. You think he looks thin, and conjecture that his chest may be weak, or his lungs affected, by the stoop in his shoulders; but when he lifts his eyes, and asks the way to Thompson's ferry, or how far it is to water, you are satisfied: for the glance of his eye is calm and firm, and the tone of his voice is round and healthy. You answer his question, he nods quietly by way of thanks, and marches on; and, though you draw your rein, and seem inclined to further converse, he takes no notice, and pursues his way. A few minutes afterward, you meet the family. A small, light wagon, easily dragged through sloughs and heavy roads, is covered with a white cotton cloth, and drawn, by either two yokes of oxen, or a pair of lean horses. A "patch-work" quilt is sometimes stretched across the flimsy covering, as a guard against the sun and rain. Within this vehicle are stowed all the emigrant's household goods, and still, it is not overloaded. There is usually a large chest, containing the wardrobe of the family, with such small articles as are liable to loss, and the little store of money. This is always in silver, for the pioneer is no judge of gold, and, on the frontier, paper has but little exchangeable value. There are then two light bedsteads--one "a trundle-bed"--a few plain chairs, most of them tied on behind and at the sides; three or four stools, domestic manufacture; a set of tent-poles and a few pots and pans. On these are piled the "beds and bedding," tied in large bundles, and stowed in such manner as to make convenient room for the children who are too young to walk. In the front end of the wagon, sits the mother of the family: and, peering over her head and shoulders, leaning out at her side, or gazing under the edge of the cotton-covering, are numerous flaxen heads, which you find it difficult to count while you ride past. There are altogether too many of them, you think, for a man no older than the one you met, a while ago; and you, perhaps, conjecture that the youthful-looking woman has adopted some of her dead sister's children, or, perchance, some of her brothers and sisters themselves. But you are mistaken, they are all her offspring, and the father of every one of them is the stoop-shouldered man you saw ahead. If you look closely, you will observe that the mother, who is driving, holds the reins with one hand, while, on the other arm, she supports an infant not _more_ than six months old. It was for the advent of this little stranger, that they delayed their emigration: and they set out while it was very young, for fear of the approach of its successor. If they waited for their youngest child to attain a year of age, they would never "move," until they would be too old to make another "clearing." You pass on--perhaps ejaculating thanks that your lot has been differently cast, and thinking you have seen the last of them. But a few hundred yards further, and you hear the tinkling of a bell; two or three lean cows--with calves about the age of the baby--come straggling by. You look for the driver, and see a tall girl with a very young face--the eldest of the family, though not exceeding twelve or thirteen years in age. You feel quite sure, that, besides her sun-bonnet and well-worn shoes, she wears but one article of apparel--and that a loose dress of linsey, rather narrow in the skirt, of a dirty brown color, with a tinge of red. It hangs straight down about her limbs, as if it were wet, and with every step--for she walks stoutly--it flaps and flies about her ankles, as if shotted in the lower hem. She presents, altogether, rather a slatternly figure, and her face is freckled and sunburnt. But you must not judge her too rashly; for her eye is keen and expressive, and her mouth is quite pretty--especially when she smiles. A few years hence--if you have the _entrée_--you may meet her in the best and highest circles of the country. Perhaps, while you are dancing attendance upon some new administration, asking for a "place," and asking, probably, in vain, she may come to Washington, a beautiful and accomplished woman--the wife of some member of Congress, whose constituency is numbered by the hundred thousand! You may pass on, now, and forget her; but, if you stop to talk five minutes, she will not forget _you_--at least, if you say anything striking or sensible. And when you meet her again, perhaps in a gilded saloon, among the brightest and highest in the land--if you seek an introduction, as you probably will--she will remind you of the meeting, and to your astonishment, will laughingly describe the scene, to some of her obsequious friends who stand around. And then she will perhaps introduce you, as an old friend, to one of those flax-haired boys, who peeped out of the wagon over his mother's shoulder, as you passed them in the wilderness: and you recognise one of the members from California, or from Oregon, whose influence in the house, though he is as yet a very young man, is already quite considerable. If you are successful in your application for a "place," it may be that the casual meeting in the forest or on the prairie was the seed which, germinating through long years of obscurity, finally sprung up _thus_, and bore a crop of high official honors! The next time you meet a family of emigrants on the frontier, you will probably observe them a little more closely. Not a few of those who bear a prominent part in the government of our country--more than one of the first men of the nation--men whose names are now heard in connection with the highest office of the people--twenty years ago, occupied a place as humble in the scale of influence, as that flaxen-haired son of the stoop-shouldered emigrant. Such are the elements of our civilization--such the spirit of our institutions! We have hitherto been speaking only of the American pioneer, and we have devoted more space to him, than we shall give to his contemporaries, because he has exerted more influence, both in the settlement of the country, and in the formation of sectional character and social peculiarities, than all the rest combined. The French emigrant was quite a different being. Even at this day, there are no two classes--not the eastern and western, or the northern and southern--between whom the distinction is more marked, than it has always been between the Saxon and the Frank. The advent of the latter was much earlier than that of the former; and to him, therefore, must be ascribed the credit of the first settlement of the country. But, for all purposes of lasting impression, he must yield to his successor. It was, in fact, the American who penetrated and cleared the forest--who subdued and drove out the Indian--who, in a word, reclaimed the country. In nothing was the distinction between the two races broader, than in the feelings with which they approached the savage. We have seen that the hatred, borne by the American toward his red enemy, was to be traced to a long series of mutual hostilities and wrongs. But the Frenchman had no such injuries to avenge, no hereditary feud to prosecute. The first of his nation who had entered the country were non-combatants--they came to convert the savage, not to conquer him, or deprive him of his lands. Even as early as sixteen hundred and eight, the Jesuits had established friendly relations with the Indians of Canada--and before the stern crew of the May Flower had landed on Plymouth Rock, they had preached the gospel on the shores of Lake Huron. Their piety and wisdom had acquired an influence over the untutored Indian, long before the commencement of the hostilities, which afterward cost so much blood and suffering. They had, thus, smoothed the way for their countrymen, and opened a safe path through the wilderness, to the shore of the great western waters. And the people who followed and accompanied them, were peculiarly adapted to improve the advantages thus given them. They were a gentle, peaceful, unambitious people. They came as the friend, not the hereditary enemy, of the savage. They tendered the calumet--a symbol well understood by every Indian--and were received as allies and brethren. They had no national prejudices to overcome: the copper color of the Indian was not an insuperable objection to intermarriage, and children of the mixed blood were not, for that reason, objects of scorn. An Indian maiden was as much a woman to a Frenchman, as if she had been a _blonde_; and, if her form was graceful and her features comely, he would woo her with as much ardor as if she had been one of his own race. Nor was this peculiarity attributable only to the native gallantry of the French character, as it has sometimes been asserted; the total want of prejudice, which grows up in contemplating an inferior race, held in limited subjection, and a certain easiness of temper and tone of thought, had far more influence. The Frenchman has quite enough vanity, but very little pride. Whatever, therefore, is sanctioned by those who surrounded him, is, in his eyes, no degradation. He married the Indian woman--first, because there were but few females among the emigrants, and he could not live without "the sex;" and, second, because there was nothing in his prejudices, or in public sentiment, to deter him. The descendants of these marriages--except where, as in some cases, they are upheld by the possession of great wealth--have no consideration, and are seldom seen in the society of the whites. But this is only because French manners and feelings have long since faded out of our social organization. The Saxon, with his unconquerable prejudices of race, with his pride and jealousy, has taken possession of the country; and, as he rules its political destinies, in most places, likewise, gives tones to its manners. Had Frenchmen continued to possess the land--had French dominion not given place to English--mixture of blood would have had but little influence on one's position; and there would now have been, in St. Louis or Chicago, as many shades of color in a social assembly, as may be seen at a ball in Mexico. The French are a more cheerful people, than the Americans. Social intercourse--the interchange of hospitalities--the enjoyment of amusements in crowds--are far more important to them than to any other race. Solitude and misery are--or ought to be--synonyms in French; and enjoyment is like glory--it must have witnesses, or it will lose its attraction. Accordingly, we find the French emigrant seeking companionship, even in the trials and enterprises of the wilderness. The American, after the manner of his race, sought places where he could possess, for himself, enough for his wants, and be "monarch of all he surveyed." But the Frenchman had no such pride. He resorted to a town, where the amusements of dancing, _fêtes_, and social converse, were to be found--where the narrow streets were scarcely more than a division fence, "across which the women could carry on their voluble conversations, without leaving their homes."[75] This must have been a great advantage, and probably contributed, in no slight degree, to the singular peace of their villages--since the proximity afforded no temptation to going abroad, and the distance was yet too great to allow such whisperings and scandal, as usually break up the harmony of small circles. Whether the fact is to be attributed to this, or to some other cause, certain it is that these little communities were eminently peaceful. From the first settlement of Kaskaskia, for example, down to the transfer of the western country to the British--almost a century--I find no record, even in the voluminous epistolary chronicles, of any personal rencontre, or serious quarrel, among the inhabitants. The same praise can not be given to any American town ever yet built. A species of communism seems to be a portion of the French character; for we discover, that, even at that early day, _paysans_, or _habitans_, collected together in villages, had their _common fields_, where the separate portion of each family was still a part of the common stock--and their tract of pasture-land, where there was no division, or separate property. One enclosure covered all the fields of the community, and all submitted to regulations made by the free voice of the people. If one was sick, or employed in the service of the colony, or absent on business of his own at planting or harvest time, his portion was not therefore neglected: his ground was planted, or his crop was gathered, by the associated labor of his neighbors, as thoroughly and carefully as if he had been at home. His family had nothing to fear; because in the social code of the simple villagers, each was as much bound to maintain the children of his friend as his own. This state of things might have its inconveniences and vices--of which, perhaps, the worst was its tendency to merge the family into the community, and thus--by obliterating the lines of individuality and personal independence--benumbing enterprise and checking improvements: but it was certainly productive of some good results, also. It tended to make people careful each of the other's rights, kind to the afflicted, and brotherly in their social intercourse. The attractive simplicity of manners observable, even at this day, in some of the old French villages, is traceable to this peculiar form of their early organization. It would be well if that primitive simplicity of life and manners, could be combined with rapid, or even moderate improvement. But, in the present state of the world, this can scarcely be; and, accordingly, we find the Frenchman of the passing year, differing but little from his ancestor of sixteen hundred and fifty--still living in the old patriarchal style, still cultivating his share of the common field, and still using the antiquated processes of the seventeenth century. But, though not so active as their neighbors, the Americans, they were ever much happier. They had no ambition beyond enough for the passing hour: with that they were perfectly contented. They were very patient of the deprivation, when they had it not; and seasons of scarcity saw no cessation of music and dancing, no abridgment of the jest and song. If the earth yielded enough in one year to sustain them till the next, the amount of labor expended for that object was never increased--superfluity they cared nothing for: and commerce, save such limited trade as was necessary to provide their few luxuries, was beyond both their capacity and desires. The prolific soil was suffered to retain its juices; it was reserved for another people to discover and improve its infinite productiveness. They were indolent, careless, and improvident. Great enterprises were above or below them. Political interests, and the questions concerning national dominion, were too exciting to charm their gentle natures. Their intelligence was, of course, not of the highest order: but they had no use for learning--literature was out of place in the wilderness--the pursuit of letters could have found no sympathy, and for solitary enjoyment, the Frenchman cultivates nothing. Life was almost altogether sensuous: and, though their morals were in keeping with their simplicity, existence to them was chiefly a physical matter. The fertility of the soil, producing all the necessaries of life with a small amount of labor, and the amenity of the climate, rendering defences against winter but too easy, encouraged their indolence, and soothed their scanty energy. "They made no attempt," said one[76] who knew them well, "to acquire land from the Indians, to organize a social system, to introduce municipal regulations, or to establish military defences; but cheerfully obeyed the priests and the king's officers, and enjoyed the present without troubling their heads about the future. They seem to have been even careless as to the acquisition of property, and its transmission to their heirs. Finding themselves in a fruitful country, abounding in game--where the necessaries of life could be procured with little labor--where no restraints were imposed by government, and neither tribute nor personal service was exacted, they were content to live in unambitious peace and comfortable poverty. They took possession of so much of the vacant land around them, as they were disposed to till, and no more. Their agriculture was rude: and even to this day, some of the implements of husbandry and modes of cultivation, brought from France a century ago, remain unchanged by the march of mind or the hand of innovation. Their houses were comfortable, and they reared fruits and flowers, evincing, in this respect, an attention to comfort and luxury, which has not been practised by the English and American first settlers. But in the accumulation of property, and in all the essentials of industry, they were indolent and improvident, rearing only the bare necessaries of life, and living from generation to generation without change or improvement." "They reared fruits and flowers," he says; and this simple fact denotes a marked distinction between them and the Americans, not only in regard to the things themselves, as would seem to be the view of the author quoted, but in mental constitution, modes of thought, and motives to action. Their tastes were elegant, ornate, and refined. They found pleasure in pursuits which the American deems trivial, frivolous, and unworthy of exertion. If any trees sheltered the house of the American, they were those planted by the winds; if there were any flowers at his door, they were only those with which prodigal nature has carpeted the prairies; and you may see now in the west, many a cabin which has stood for thirty years, with not a tree, of shade or fruit, within a mile of its door! Everything is as bare and as cheerless about the door-yard, as it was the first winter of its enclosure. But, stretching away from it, in every direction, sometimes for miles, you will see extensive and productive fields of grain, in the highest state of cultivation. It is not personal comfort, or an elegant residence, for which the American cares, but the enduring and solid results of unwearied labor. A Frenchman's residence is surrounded by flower-beds and orchards; his windows are covered by creeping-vines and trellis-work; flower-pots and bird-cages occupy the sills and surround the corridors; everything presents the aspect of elegant taste, comfort, and indolence. The extent of his fields, the amount of his produce, the intelligence and industry of his cultivation, bear an immense disproportion to those of his less ornamental, though more energetic, neighbor. The distinction between the two races is as clear in their personal appearance and bearing, as in the aspect of their plantations. The Frenchman is generally a spruce, dapper little gentleman, brisk, obsequious, and insinuating in manner, and usually betraying minute attention to externals. The American is always plain in dress--evincing no more taste in costume than in horticulture--steady, calm, and never lively in manner: blunt, straightforward, and independent in discourse. The one is amiable and submissive, the other choleric and rebellious. The Frenchman always recognises and bows before superior rank: the American acknowledges no superior, and bows to no man save in courtesy. The former is docile and easily governed: the latter is intractable, beyond control. The Frenchman accommodates himself to circumstances: the American forces circumstances to yield to him. The consequence has been, that while the American has stamped his character upon the whole country, there are not ten places in the valley of the Mississippi, where you would infer, from anything you see, that a Frenchman had ever placed his foot upon the soil. The few localities in which the French character yet lingers, are fast losing the distinction; and a score or two of years will witness a total disappearance of the gentle people and their primitive abodes. Even now--excepting in a few parishes in Louisiana--the relics of the race bear a faded, antiquated look: as if they belonged to a past century, as, indeed, they do, and only lingered now, to witness, for a brief space, the glaring innovations of the nineteenth, and then, lamenting the follies of modern civilization, to take their departure for ever! Let them depart in peace! For they were a gentle and pacific race, and in their day did many kindly things! "The goodness of the heart is shown in deeds Of peacefulness and kindness." Their best monument is an affectionate recollection of their simplicity: their highest wish ----"To sleep in humble life, Beneath the storm ambition blows." FOOTNOTES: [70] _History of the United States_, vol. iii., p. 336. Enacted in Massachusetts. [71] A detailed and somewhat tedious account of these savage inroads, may be found in Warburton's _Conquest of Canada_, published by Harpers. New-York. 1850. [72] This is the estimate of Bancroft--and, I think, at least, thirty thousand too liberal. If the number were doubled, however, it would not weaken the position in the text. [73] On the subject of naming towns, much might have been said in the preceding article in favor of French taste, and especially that just and unpretending taste, which led them almost alway to retain the Indian names. While the American has pretentiously imported from the Old World such names as Venice, Carthage, Rome, Athens, and even London and Paris, or has transferred from the eastern states, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York, the Frenchman, with a better judgment, has retained such Indian names as Chicago, Peoria, Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Illinois, Wisconsin, Missouri, Wabash, and Mississippi. [74] This word is a pregnant memento of the manner in which the vain words of flippant orators fall, innocuous, to the ground, when they attempt to stigmatize, with contemptuous terms, the truly noble. "Squatter" is now, in the west, only another name for "Pioneer," and that word describes all that is admirable in courage, truth, and manhood! [75] Perkins's _Western Annals_. [76] "Sketches of the West," by Judge Hall, for many years a resident of Illinois. [Illustration: THE RANGER.] IV. THE RANGER. "When purposed vengeance I forego, Term me a wretch, nor deem me foe; And when an insult I forgive, Then brand me as a slave, and live." SCOTT. In elaborating the character of the pioneer, we have unavoidably anticipated, in some measure, that of the Ranger--for the latter was, in fact, only one of the capacities in which the former sometimes acted. But--since, in the preceding article, we have endeavored to confine the inquiry, so as to use the term _Pioneer_ as almost synonymous with _Immigrant_--we have, of course, ignored, to some extent, the subordinate characters, in which he frequently figured. We therefore propose, now, briefly to review one or two of them in their natural succession. The progress of our country may be traced and measured, by the representative characters which marked each period. The missionary-priest came first, when the land was an unbroken wilderness. The military adventurer, seeking to establish new empires, and acquire great fortunes, entered by the path thus opened. Next came the hunter, roaming the woods in search of wild beasts upon which he preyed. Making himself familiar with the pathless forest and the rolling prairie, he qualified himself to guide, even while he fled from, the stream of immigration. At last came the pioneer, to drive away the savage, to clear out the forests, and reclaim the land. At first, he was _only_ a pioneer. He had few neighbors, he belonged to no community--his household was his country, his family were his only associates or companions. In the course of time others followed him--he could occasionally meet a white man on the prairies; if he wandered a few miles from home, he could see the smoke of another chimney in the distance. If he did not at once abandon his "clearing" and go further west, he became, in some sort, a member of society--was the fellow-citizen of his neighbors. The Indians became alarmed for their hunting grounds, or the nations went to war and drew them into the contest: the frontier became unsafe: the presence of danger drew the pioneers together: they adopted a system of defence, and the ranger was the offspring and representative of a new order of things. Rough and almost savage as he sometimes was, he was still the index to a great improvement. Rude as the system was, it gave shape and order to what had before been mere chaos. The ranger marks a new era, then; his existence is another chapter in the history of the west. Previous to his time, each pioneer depended only on himself for defence--his sole protection, against the wild beast and the savage, was his rifle--self-dependence was his peculiar characteristic. The idea of a fighting establishment--the germ of standing armies--had never occurred to him: even the rudest form of civil government was strange to him--taxes, salaries, assessments, were all "unknown quantities." But, gradually, all this changed; and with his circumstances, his character was also modified. He lost a little of his sturdy independence, his jealousy of neighborhood was softened--his solitary habits became more social--he acknowledged the necessity for concert of action--he merged a part of his individuality into the community, and--became a ranger. In this capacity, his character was but little different to what it had been before the change; and, though that change was a great improvement, considered with reference to society, it may safely be doubted whether it made the individual more respectable. He was a better _citizen_, because he now contributed to the common defence: but he was not a better _man_, because new associations brought novel temptations, and mingling with other men wore away the simplicity, which was the foundation of his manliness. Before assuming his new character, moreover, he never wielded a weapon except in his own defence--or, at most, in avenging his own wrongs. The idea of justice--claiming reparation for an injury, which he alone could estimate, because by him alone it was sustained--protected his moral sense. But, when he assumed the vindication of his neighbor's rights, and the reparation of his wrongs--however kind it may have been to do so--he was sustained only by the spirit of hatred to the savage, could feel no such justification as the consciousness of injury. Here was the first introduction of the mercenary character, which actuates the hireling soldier; and, though civilization was not then far enough advanced, to make it very conspicuous, there were other elements mingled, which could not but depreciate the simple nobility of the pioneer's nature. Many of the qualities which, in him, had been merely passive, in the ranger became fierce and active. We have alluded, for example, to his hatred of the Indian; and this, habit soon strengthened and exaggerated. Nothing marks that change so plainly as his adoption of the barbarous practice of scalping enemies. For this there might be some little palliation in the fact, that the savage never considered a warrior overcome, though he were killed, unless he lost his scalp; and so long as he could bring off the dead bodies of his comrades, not mutilated by the process, he was but partially intimidated. Defeat was, in that case, converted to a sort of triumph; and having gone within one step of victory--for so this half-success was estimated--was the strongest incentive to a renewal of the effort. It might be, therefore, that the ranger's adoption of the custom was a measure of self-defence. But it is to be feared that this consideration--weak as it is, when stated as an excuse for cruelty so barbarous--had but little influence in determining the ranger. Adopting the code of the savage, the practice soon became a part of his warfare; and the taking of the scalp was a ceremony necessary to the completion of his victory. It was a bloody and inhuman triumph--a custom, which tended, more forcibly than any other, to degrade true courage to mere cruelty; and which, while it only mortified the savage, at the same time, by rendering his hatred of the white men more implacable, aggravated the horrors of Indian warfare. But the only measure of justice in those days, was the _lex talionis_--"An eye for an eye," a scalp for a scalp; and, even now, you may hear frontiermen justify, though they do not practise it, by quoting the venerable maxim, "Fight the devil with fire." But, though the warfare of the ranger was sometimes distinguished by cruelty, it was also ennobled by features upon which it is far more pleasant to dwell. No paladin, or knight, of the olden times, ever exhibited more wild, romantic daring, than that which formed a part of the ranger's daily action. Danger, in a thousand forms, beset him at every step--he defied mutilation, death by fire and lingering torture. The number of his enemies, he never counted, until after he had conquered them--the power of the tribe, or the prowess of the warrior, was no element in his calculations. Where he could strike first and most effectually, was his only inquiry. Securing an avenue for retreat was no part of his strategy--for he had never an intention or thought of returning, except as a victor. "Keeping open his communications," either with the rear or the flanks, had no place in his system; "combined movements" he seldom attempted, for he depended for victory, upon the force he chanced to have directly at hand. The distance from his "base of operations" he never measured; for he carried all his supplies about his person, and he never looked for reinforcements. Bridges and wagon-roads he did not require, for he could swim all the rivers, and he never lost his way in the forest. He carried his artillery upon his shoulder, his tactics were the maxims of Indian warfare, and his only drill was the "ball-practice" of the woods. He was his own commissary, for he carried his "rations" on his back, and replenished his havresack with his rifle. He needed no quartermaster; for he furnished his own "transportation," and selected his own encampment--his bed was the bosom of mother-earth, and his tent was the foliage of an oak or the canopy of heaven. In most cases--especially in battle--he was his own commander, too; for he was impatient of restraint, and in savage warfare knew his duty as well as any man could instruct him. Obedience was no part of his nature--subordination was irksome and oppressive. In a word, he was an excellent soldier, without drill, discipline or organization. He was as active as he was brave--as untiring as he was fearless. A corps of rangers moved so rapidly, as apparently to double its numbers--dispersing on the Illinois or Missouri, and reassembling on the Mississippi, on the following day--traversing the Okan timber to-day, and fording the Ohio to-morrow. One of them, noted among the Indians for desperate fighting, and personally known for many a bloody meeting, would appear so nearly simultaneously in different places, as to acquire the title of a "Great Medicine;" and instances have been known, where as many as three distinct war-parties have told of obstinate encounters with the same men in one day! Their apparent ubiquity awed the Indians more than their prowess. General Benjamin Howard, who, in eighteen hundred and thirteen resigned the office of governor of Missouri, and accepted the appointment of brigadier-general, in command of the militia and rangers of Missouri and Illinois, at no time, except for a few weeks in eighteen hundred and fourteen, had more than one thousand men under his orders: And yet, with this inconsiderable force, he protected a frontier extending from the waters of the Wabash, westward to the advanced settlements of Missouri--driving the savages northward beyond Peoria, and intimidating them by the promptitude and rapidity of his movements. Our government contributed nothing to the defence of its frontiers, except an act of Congress, which authorized them to defend themselves! The Indians, amounting to at least twenty tribes, had been stirred up to hostility by the British, and, before the establishment of rangers, were murdering and plundering almost with impunity. But soon after the organization of these companies, the tide began to turn. The ranger was at least a match for the savage in his own mode of warfare; and he had, moreover, the advantages of civilized weapons, and a steadiness and constancy, unknown to the disorderly war-parties of the red men. He was persevering beyond all example, and exhibited endurance which astonished even the stoical savage. Three or four hours' rest, after weeks of hardship and exposure, prepared him for another expedition. If the severity of his vengeance, or the success of a daring enterprise, intimidated the Indian for a time, and gave him a few days' leisure, he grew impatient of inactivity, and was straightway planning some new exploit. The moment one suggested itself, he set about accomplishing it--and its hardihood and peril caused no hesitation. He would march, on foot, hundreds of miles, through an unbroken wilderness, until he reached the point where the blow was to be struck; and then, awaiting the darkness, in the middle of the night, he would fall upon his unsuspecting enemies and carry all before him. During the war of independence, the rangers had not yet assumed that name, nor were they as thoroughly organized, as they became in the subsequent contest of eighteen hundred and twelve. But the same material was there--the same elements of character, actuated by the same spirit. Let the following instance show what that spirit was. In the year seventeen hundred and seventy-seven, there lived at Cahokia--on the east side of the Mississippi below Saint Louis--a Pennsylvanian by the name of Brady--a restless, daring man, just made for a leader of rangers. In an interval of inactivity, he conceived the idea of capturing one of the British posts in Michigan, the nearest point of which was at least three hundred miles distant! He forthwith set about raising a company--and, at the end of three days, found himself invested with the command of _sixteen men_! With these, on the first of October, he started on a journey of more than one hundred leagues, through the vast solitudes of the prairies and the thousand perils of the forest, to take a military station, occupied by a detachment of British soldiers! After a long and toilsome march, they reached the banks of the St. Joseph's river, on which the object of their expedition stood. Awaiting the security of midnight, they suddenly broke from their cover in the neighborhood, and by a _coup de main_, captured the fort without the loss of a man! Thus far all went well--for besides the success and safety of the party, they found a large amount of stores, belonging to traders, in the station, and were richly paid for their enterprise--but having been detained by the footsore, on their homeward march, and probably delayed by their plunder, they had only reached the Calumet, on the borders of Indiana, when they were overtaken by three hundred British and Indians! They were forced to surrender, though not without a fight, for men of that stamp were not to be intimidated by numbers. They lost in the skirmish one fourth of their number: the survivors were carried away to Canada, whence Brady, the leader, escaped, and returned to Cahokia the same winter. The twelve remained prisoners until seventeen hundred and seventy-nine. Against most men this reverse would have given the little fort security--at least, until the memory of the disaster had been obscured by time. But the pioneers of that period were not to be judged by ordinary rules. The very next spring (1778), another company was raised for the same object, and to wipe out what they considered the stain of a failure. It was led by a man named Maize, over the same ground, to the same place, and was completely successful. The fort was retaken, the trading-station plundered, the wounded men of Brady's party released, and, loaded with spoil, the little party marched back in triumph! There is an episode in the history of their homeward march, which illustrates another characteristic of the ranger--his ruthlessness. The same spirit which led him to disregard physical obstacles, prevented his shrinking from even direful necessities. One of the prisoners whom they had liberated, became exhausted and unable to proceed. They could not carry him, and would not have him to die of starvation in the wilderness. They could not halt with him, lest the same fate should overtake them, which had defeated the enterprise of Brady. But one alternative remained, and though, to us, it appears cruel and inhuman, it was self-preservation to them, and mercy, in a strange guise, to the unhappy victim--_he was despatched by the hand of the leader_, and buried upon the prairie! His grave is somewhere near the head-waters of the Wabash, and has probably been visited by no man from that day to this! Mournful reflections cluster round such a narrative as this, and we are impelled to use the word "atrocious" when we speak of it. It was certainly a bloody deed, but the men of those days were not nurtured in drawing-rooms, and never slept upon down-beds. A state of war, moreover, begets many evils, and none of them are more to be deplored than the occasional occurrence of such terrible necessities. The ranger-character, like the pioneer-nature of which it was a phase, was compounded of various and widely-differing elements. No one of his evil qualities was more prominent than several of the good; and, I am sorry to say, none of the good was more prominent than several of the bad. No class of men did more efficient service in defending the western settlements from the inroads of the Indians; and though it seems hard that the war should sometimes have been carried into the country of the untutored savage by civilized men, with a severity exceeding his own, we should remember that we can not justly estimate the motives and feelings of the ranger, without first having been exasperated by his sufferings and tried by his temptations. V. THE REGULATOR. "Thieves for their robbery have authority, When judges steal themselves."-- MEASURE FOR MEASURE. At the conclusion of peace between England and America, in eighteen hundred and fifteen, the Indians, who had been instigated and supported in their hostility by the British, suddenly found themselves deprived of their allies. If they now made war upon the Americans, they must do so upon their own responsibility, and, excepting the encouragement of a few traders and commanders of outposts, whose enmity survived the general pacification, without assistance from abroad. They, however, refused to lay down their arms, and hostilities were continued, though languidly, for some years longer. But the rangers, now disciplined by the experience of protracted warfare, and vastly increased in numbers, had grown to be more than a match for them, so that not many years elapsed before the conclusion of a peace, which has lasted, with but occasional interruptions, to the present day. When danger no longer threatened the settlements, there was no further call for these irregular troops. The companies were disbanded, and those who had families, as a large proportion of them had, returned to their plantations, and resumed the pursuits of industry and peace. Those who had neither farms nor families, and were unfitted by their stirring life for regular effort, emigrated further west. Peace settled upon our borders, never, we hope, to be seriously broken. But as soon as the pressure of outward danger was withdrawn, and our communities began to expand, the seeds of new evils were developed--seeds which had germinated unobserved, while all eyes were averted, and which now began to shoot up into a stately growth of vices and crimes. The pioneers soon learned that there was among them a class of unprincipled and abandoned men, whose only motive in emigrating was to avoid the restraints, or escape the penalties, of law, and to whom the freedom of the wilderness was a license to commit every sort of depredation. The arm of the law was not yet strong enough to punish them. The territorial governments were too busy in completing their own organization, to give much attention to details: where states had been formed, the statute-book was yet a blank: few officers had been appointed, and even these were strangers to their duties and charge of responsibility. Between the military rule of the rangers--for they were for internal police as well as external defence--and the establishment of regular civil government, there was a sort of interregnum, during which there was neither law nor power to enforce it. The bands of villains who infested the country were the only organizations known; and, in not a few instances, these bands included the very magistrates whose duty it was to see that the laws were faithfully executed. Even when this was not the case, it was a fruitless effort to arrest a malefactor; indeed, it was very often worse than fruitless, for his confederates were always ready to testify in his favor: and the usual consequence of an attempt to punish, was the drawing down upon the head of the complainant or prosecutor, the enmity of a whole confederacy. Legal proceedings, had provision been made for such, were worse than useless, for conviction was impossible: and the effort exasperated, while the failure encouraged, the outlaw spirit. An _alibi_ was the usual defence, and to those times may be referred the general prejudice entertained among our people, even at the present day, against that species of testimony. A jury of western men will hardly credit an _alibi_, though established by unexceptionable witnesses; and the announcement that the accused depends upon that for his defence, will create a strong prejudice against him in advance. Injustice may sometimes be done in this way, but it is a feeling of which our people came honestly in possession. They established a habit, in early days, of never believing an _alibi_, because, at that time, nine _alibis_ in ten were false, and habits of thought, like legal customs, cling to men long after their reason has ceased. It is right, too, that it should be so, on the principle that we should not suspend the use of the remedy until the disease be thoroughly conquered. In a state of things, such as we have described, but one of two things could be done: the citizens must either abandon all effort to assert the supremacy of order, and give the country over to thieves and robbers, or they must invent some new and irregular way of forcing men to live honestly. They wisely chose the latter alternative. They consulted together, and the institution of _Regulators_ was the result of their deliberations. These were small bodies of men, chosen by the people, or voluntarily assuming the duty--men upon whom the citizens could depend for both discretion and resolution. Their duties may be explained in a few words: to ferret out and punish criminals, to drive out "suspicious characters," and exercise a general supervision over the interests and police of the settlements, from which they were chosen. Their statute-book was the "code of Judge Lynch"--their order of trial was similar to that of a "drum-head court-martial"--the principles of their punishment was certainty, rapidity, and severity. They were judges, juries, witnesses, and executioners. They bound themselves by a regular compact (usually verbal, but sometimes in writing[77]), to the people and to each other, to rid the community of all thieves, robbers, plunderers, and villains of every description. They scoured the country in all directions and in all seasons, and by the swiftness of their movements, and the certainty of their vengeance, rivalled their predecessors, the rangers. When a depredation had been committed, it was marvellous with what rapidity every regulator knew it; even the telegraph of modern days performs no greater wonders: and it frequently happened, that the first the quiet citizens heard of a theft, or a robbery, was the news of its punishment! Their acts may sometimes have been high-handed and unjustifiable, but on the whole--and it is only in such a view that social institutions are to be estimated--they were the preservers of the communities for whom they acted. In time, it is true, they degenerated, and sometimes the corps fell into the hands of the very men they were organized to punish. Every social organization is liable to misdirection, and this, among others, has been perverted to the furtherance of selfish and unprincipled purposes; for, like prejudices and habits of thought, organized institutions frequently survive the necessities which call them into existence. Abuses grow up under all systems; and, perhaps, the worst abuse of all, is a measure or expedient, good though temporary, retained after the passing away of the time for which it was adopted. But having, in the article "Pioneer," sufficiently elaborated the _character_--for the regulator was of course a pioneer also--we can best illustrate the mode of his action by a narrative of facts. From the hundreds of well-authenticated stories which might be collected, I have chosen the two following, because they distinguish the successive stages or periods of the system. The first relates to the time when a band of regulators was the only reliable legal power, and when, consequently, the vigilance of the citizens kept it comparatively pure. The second indicates a later period, when the people no longer felt insecure, and there was in fact no necessity for the system; and when, not having been disused, it could not but be abused. We derive both from an old citizen of the country, who was an actor in each. One of them, the first, has already been in print, but owing to circumstances to which it is needless to advert, it was thought better to confine the narrative to facts already generally known. These circumstances are no longer operative, and I am now at liberty to publish entire the story of "The First Grave." THE FIRST GRAVE. At the commencement of the war of eighteen hundred and twelve, between Great Britain and the United States, there lived, in the western part of Virginia, three families, named, respectively, Stone, Cutler, and Roberts. They were all respectable people, of more than ordinary wealth; having succeeded, by an early emigration and judicious selection of lands, in rebuilding fortunes which had been somewhat impaired east of the Blue Ridge. Between the first and second there was a relationship, cemented by several matrimonial alliances, and the standing of both had been elevated by this union of fortunes. In each of these two, there were six or seven children--the most of them boys--but Captain Roberts, the head of the third, had but one child, a daughter, who, in the year named, was approaching womanhood. She is said to have been beautiful: and, from the extravagant admiration of those who saw her only when time and suffering must have obscured her attractions, there can be little doubt that she was so. What her character was, we can only conjecture from the tenor of our story: though we have reason to suspect that she was passionate, impulsive, and somewhat vain of her personal appearance. At the opening of hostilities between the two countries, she was wooed by two suitors, young Stone, the eldest of the sons of that family, and Abram Cutler, who was two or three years his senior. Both had recently returned home, after a protracted absence of several years, beyond the mountains, whither they had been sent by their ambitious parents, "to attend college and see the world." Stone was a quiet, modest, unassuming young man, rather handsome, but too pale and thin to be decidedly so. Having made the most of his opportunities at "William and Mary," he had come home well-educated (for that day and country) and polished by intercourse with good society. His cousin, Abram Cutler, was his opposite in almost everything. He had been wild, reckless, and violent, at college, almost entirely giving up his studies, after the first term, and always found in evil company. His manners were as much vitiated as his morals, for he was exceedingly rough, boisterous, and unpolished: so much so, indeed, as to approach that limit beyond which wealth will not make society tolerant. But his freedom of manner bore, to most observers, the appearance of generous heartiness, and he soon gained the good will of the neighborhood by the careless prodigality of his life. He was tall, elegantly formed, and quite well-looking; and though he is said to have borne, a few years later, a sinister and dishonest look, it is probable that most of this was attributable to the preconceived notions of those who thus judged him. Both these young men were, as we have said, suitors for the hand of Margaret Roberts, and it is possible that the vain satisfaction of having at her feet the two most attractive young men in the country, led her to coquet with them both, but decidedly to prefer neither. It is almost certain, that at the period indicated, she was sufficiently well-pleased with either to have become his wife, had the other been away. If she _loved_ either, however, it was Stone, for she was a little timid, and Cutler sometimes frightened her with his violence: but the preference, if it existed at all, was not sufficiently strong to induce a choice. About this time, the elder Cutler died, and it became necessary for Abram, as executor of a large estate, to cross the mountains into the Old Dominion, and arrange its complicated affairs. It was not without misgiving that he went away, but his duties were imperative, and his necessities, produced by his spendthrift habits, were pressing. He trusted to a more than usually favorable interview with Margaret, and full of sanguine hopes, departed on his journey. Whether Stone entertained the idea of taking an unfair advantage of his rival's absence, we can not say, but he straightway became more assiduous in his attentions to Margaret. He was also decidedly favored by Captain Roberts and his wife, both of whom had been alarmed by the violent character of Cutler. Time soon began to obscure the recollection of the absent suitor, and Stone's delicate and considerate gallantry rapidly gained ground in Margaret's affections. It was just one month after Cutler's departure that his triumph was complete; she consented to be his wife so soon as the minister who travelled on that circuit should enter the neighborhood. But the good man had set out on his circuit only the day before the consent was given, and it would probably be at least a month before his return. In the meantime, Cutler might recross the mountains, and Stone had seen quite enough of Margaret's capriciousness to tremble for the safety of his conquest, should that event occur before it was thoroughly secured. This was embarrassing: but when a man is in earnest, expedients are never wanting. There was an old gentleman living a few miles from the valley, who had once held the commission of a justice of the peace, and though he had not exercised his functions, or even claimed his dignity, for several years, Stone was advised that he retained his official power "until his successor was appointed and qualified," and that, consequently, any official act of his would be legal and valid. He was advised, moreover, and truly, that even if the person performing the ceremony were not a magistrate, a marriage would be lawful and binding upon the simple "consent" of the parties, properly published and declared. Full-freighted with the happy news, he posted away to Captain Roberts, and without difficulty obtained his sanction. He then went to Margaret, and, with the assistance of her mother, who stood in much dread of Cutler's violence, succeeded in persuading her to consent. Without delay, the _cidevant_ magistrate was called in, the ceremony was performed, and Margaret was Stone's wife! The very day after this event, Cutler returned! What were his thoughts no one knew, for he spoke to none upon the subject. He went, however, to see "the bride," and, in the presence of others, bantered her pleasantly upon her new estate, upon his own pretensions, and upon the haste with which the ceremony had been performed. He started away with the rest of the company present; but, on reaching the door--it was afterward remembered--pretended to have forgotten something, and ran back into the room where they had left Margaret alone. Here he remained full ten minutes, and when he came out walked thoughtfully apart and disappeared. What he said to Margaret no one knew; but, that evening, when they were alone, she asked anxiously of her husband, "whether he was quite sure that their marriage had been legal?" Stone reassured her, and nothing more was said upon the subject. Cutler had brought with him, over the mountains, the proclamation of the governor of Virginia, announcing the declaration of war, and calling upon the state for its quota of troops to repel invasion. He manifested a warm interest in the enrolling and equipment of volunteers, and, in order to attest his sincerity, placed his own name first upon the roll. A day or two afterward, on meeting Stone, in the presence of several others who had enrolled themselves, he laughingly observed, that the new bridegroom "was probably too comfortable at home, to desire any experience in campaigning:" and, turning away, he left the company laughing at Stone's expense. This touched the young man's pride--probably the more closely, because he was conscious that the insinuation was not wholly void of truth--and, without a moment's hesitation, he called Cutler back, took the paper, and enrolled his name. Cutler laughed again, said _he_ would not have done so, had he been in Stone's circumstances, and, after some further conversation, walked away in the direction of Stone's residence. Whether he actually entered the house is not known; but when the young husband returned home, a few hours afterward, his wife's first words indicated that she knew of his enrolment. "Is it possible," said she, with some asperity, "that you already care so little for me as to enrol yourself for an absence of six months?" Stone would much have preferred to break the news to her himself, for he had some foreboding as to the view she might take of his conduct. He had scarcely been married a week, and he was conscious that a severe construction of the act of enrolment, when there was notoriously not the least necessity for it, might lead to inferences, than which, nothing could be more false. If he had said, at once, that he had been taunted by his old rival, and written his name under the influence of pride, all would have been well, for his wife would then have understood, though she might not have approved his action. But this confession he was ashamed to make, and, by withholding it, laid the foundation for his own and his wife's destruction. He at once acknowledged the fact, disclaiming, however, the indifference to her, which she inferred, and placing the act upon higher ground:-- "The danger of the country," he said, "was very imminent, and it became every good citizen to do all he could for its defence. He had no idea that the militia would be called far from home, or detained for a very long time; but, in any event, he felt that men were bound, in such circumstances, to cast aside personal considerations, and contribute, each his share, to the common defence." His wife gazed incredulously at him while he talked this high patriotism: and well she might, for he did not speak as one moved by such feelings. The consciousness of deceit, of concealment, and of childish rashness, rendered his manner hesitating and embarrassed. Margaret observed all this, for her jealousy was aroused and her suspicions sharpened; she made no reply, however, but turned away, with a toss of the head, and busied herself, quite fiercely, with her household cares. From that moment, until the day of his departure, she stubbornly avoided the subject, listening, but refusing to reply, when her husband attempted to introduce it. When Cutler came--rather unnecessarily, as Stone thought--to consult him about the organization of a spy-company, to which both were attached, she paid no attention to their conversation, but walked away down a road over which she knew Cutler must pass on his return homeward. Whether this was by appointment with him is not known: probably, however, it was her own motion. We need not stay to detail all that took place between her and her former suitor, when, as she had expected, they met in a wood some hundreds of yards from her home; its result will sufficiently appear in the sequel. One circumstance, however, we must not omit. She recurred to a conversation which had passed sometime before, in relation to the legality of her marriage; and though Cutler gave no positive opinion, his parting advice was nearly in the following words:-- "If you think, from your three weeks' experience, that Stone cares enough for you to make it prudent, I would advise you to have the marriage ceremony performed by Parson Bowen, immediately upon his return; and if you care enough for him to wish to retain him, you had better have it performed _before he goes away_." With these words, and without awaiting an answer, he passed on, leaving her alone in the road. When she returned home, she did not mention the subject; and though Parson Bowen returned to the neighborhood quite a week before Stone went away, she never suggested a repetition of the ceremony. When Stone manifested some anxiety on the subject, she turned suddenly upon him and demanded-- "You do not think our marriage legal, then?" He assured her that he only made the suggestion for her satisfaction, entertaining no doubt, himself, that they were regularly and lawfully married. "I am content to remain as I am," she said, curtly, and the parson was not summoned. Five days afterward the troops took up the line of march for the frontier. Hull had not yet surrendered Michigan; but Proctor had so stirred up the Indians (who, until then, had been quiet since the battle of Tippecanoe), as to cut off all communication with the advanced settlements, and even to threaten the latter with fire and slaughter. Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, were then overrun by British and Indians; for Hopkins had not yet commenced his march from Kentucky, and Congress was still debating measures for protection. Hull's surrender took place on the sixteenth of August, eighteen hundred and twelve, and in the following month, General Harrison, having been appointed to the chief command in the northwest, proceeded to adopt vigorous measures for the defence of the country. It was to one of the regiments organized by him, that our friends from Virginia found themselves attached. They had raised a company of spies, and in this both Stone and Cutler held commissions. They marched with the regiment, or rather in advance of it, for several weeks. By that time, they had penetrated many miles beyond the settlements, and Harrison began to feel anxious to ascertain the position of General Hopkins, and open communications with him. For this service Cutler volunteered, and was immediately selected by the general. On the following morning, he set out with five men to seek the Kentuckians. He found them without difficulty and delivered his despatches; but from that day he was not seen, either in the camp of Hopkins or in that of Harrison! It was supposed that he had started on his return, and been taken or killed by the Indians, parties of whom were prowling about between the lines of the two columns. Stone remained with his company two or three months longer, when, the enterprise of Hopkins having failed, and operations being suspended for the time, it was thought inexpedient to retain them for the brief period which remained of their term of enlistment, and they were discharged. Stone returned home, and, full of anticipations, the growth of a long absence, hastened at once to his own house. The door was closed, no smoke issued from the chimney, there was no one there! After calling in vain for a long time, he ran away to her father's, endeavoring to feel certain that he would find her there. But the old man received him with a mournful shake of the head. Margaret had been gone more than a month, no one knew whither or with whom! A report had been in circulation that Cutler was seen in the neighborhood, a few days before her disappearance; but no news having been received of his absence from the army, it had not been generally credited. But now, it was quite clear! The old man invited Stone to enter, but he declined. Sitting down on a log, he covered his face with his hands, for a few moments, and seemed buried in grief. It did not last long, however: he rose almost immediately, and going a little aside, calmly loaded his rifle. Without noticing the old man, who stood gazing at him in wonder, he turned away, and, with his eyes fixed upon the ground, took the path toward his own house. He was seen to break the door and enter, but he remained within only a few minutes. On coming out, he threw his rifle over his shoulder, and walked away through the forest. Half an hour afterward, smoke was seen issuing from the roof of the house in several places, and on repairing thither, the neighbors found the whole place in a bright flame! It was of no use to attempt to save it or any of its contents. An hour afterward, it was a heap of smouldering ruins, and its owner had disappeared from the country! Seven years passed away. The war was over: the Indians had been driven to the north and west, and the tide of emigration had again set toward the Mississippi. The northwestern territory--especially that part of it which is now included within the limits of Illinois and Indiana--was rapidly filling up with people from the south and east. The advanced settlements had reached the site of Springfield, in the "Sangamon country,"[78] now the capital of Illinois, and a few farms were opened in the north of Madison county--now Morgan and Scott. The beautiful valley, most inaptly called, of the _Mauvaisterre_, was then an unbroken wilderness. The grass was growing as high as the head of a tall man, where now well-built streets and public squares are traversed by hurrying crowds. Groves which have since become classic were then impenetrable thickets; and the only guides the emigrant found, through forest and prairie, were the points of the compass, and the courses of streams. But in the years eighteen hundred and seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen, the western slope of the Sangamon country began rapidly to improve. Reports had gone abroad of "the fertility of its soil, the beauty of its surface, its genial climate, and its many advantages of position"--and there is certainly no country which more richly deserves these praises. But the first emigrant who made his appearance here, in the autumn of eighteen hundred and nineteen, was probably moved by other considerations. It was none other than Abram Cutler! And his family consisted of a wife and three young children! That wife was Margaret Roberts--or rather Margaret Stone; for, notwithstanding the representations of Cutler, her union with Stone had been perfectly legal. By what arts he had succeeded in inducing her to elope with him, we can only judge from his previous proceedings; but this is certain, that resentment toward Stone, who, she probably believed, had unfairly trapped her, was as likely to move her impulsive and unstable spirit, as any other motive. Add to this, the wound given to her vanity by the sudden departure of her young husband upon a long campaign, with the acuteness given to this feeling by the arts of Cutler, and we shall not be at a loss to explain her action. Whether she had not bitterly repented her criminal haste, we know not; but that hardship and suffering of some sort had preyed upon her spirit, was evident in her appearance. Her beauty was much faded; she had grown pale and thin; and though she was scarcely yet in the prime of womanhood, her step was heavy and spiritless. She was not happy, of course, but her misery was not only negative: the gnawings of remorse were but too positive and real! Cutler was changed almost as much as his victim. The lapse of seven years had added a score to his apparent age; and, if we are to credit the representations of persons who were probably looking for signs of vice, the advance of time had brought out, in well-marked lineaments, upon his countenance, the evil traits of his character. His cheeks were sunken, his features attenuated, and his figure exceedingly spare, but he still exhibited marks of great personal strength and activity. His glance, always of doubtful meaning, was now unsettled and furtive; and I have heard one of the actors in this history assert, that it had a scared, apprehensive expression, as if he were in constant expectation of meeting a dangerous enemy. Nor is this at all improbable, for during the seven years which had elapsed since the consummation of his design upon Margaret, he had emigrated no less than three times--frightened away, at each removal, by some intimation, or suspicion, that the avenger was on his track! No wonder that his look was wary, and his face pale and haggard! On this, his fourth migration, he had crossed the prairies from the waters of the Wabash; and having placed the wide expanse of waving plain between him and the settlements, he at length considered himself safe from pursuit. Passing by the little trading-station, where Springfield now stands, he traversed the beautiful country lying between that and the Mauvaisterre. But the alternation of stately timber and lovely prairie had no charms for him: he sought not beauty or fertility, but seclusion; for his pilgrimage had become wearisome, and his step was growing heavy. Remorse was at his heart, and fear--the appealing face of his patient victim kept his crime in continual remembrance--and he knew, that like a blood-hound, his enemy was following behind. It was a weary load! No wonder that his cheeks were thin or his eyes wild! He passed on till he came to a quiet, secluded spot, where he thought himself not likely soon to be disturbed by emigration. It was sixteen miles west of the place where Jacksonville has since been built, upon the banks of the lower Mauvaisterre, seven miles from the Illinois river. The place was long known as Cutler's grove, but a town grew up around it, and has been christened by the sounding name of Exeter. Those who visit it now, and have heard the story of Cutler, will commend his judgment in selecting it for retirement; for, town as it is, a more secluded, dreamy little place is nowhere to be found. It would seem that the passage of a carriage through its _street_--for it has but one--would be an event in its history; and the only things which redeem it, in the fancy, from the category of visionary existences, are a blacksmith's shop and a mill! But Cutler's trail was seen upon the prairies, and the course of many an emigrant was determined by the direction taken by his predecessor. It was not long before others came to "settle" in the neighborhood. Emigration was gradually encroaching, also, from the south; families began to take possession of the river "bottoms;" the smoke from frontier cabins ascended in almost every point of timber; and by the summer of eighteen hundred and twenty, Cutler found himself as far from the frontier as ever! But he was resolved not to move again: a dogged spirit--half weariness, half despair--had taken possession of him. "I have moved often enough," he said to Margaret, "and here I am determined to remain, come what may!" Actuated by such feelings--goaded by a fear which he could not conquer, and yet was resolute not to indulge--the lurking devil in his nature could not long remain dormant. Nothing develops evil tendencies so rapidly as the consciousness of wrong and the fear of punishment. His life soon became reckless and abandoned, and the first sign of his degradation was his neglect of his household. For days together Margaret saw nothing of him; his only companions were the worthless and outlawed; and, when intoxicating liquors could be procured, which was, fortunately, not often, he indulged in fearful excesses. Of evil company, there was, unhappily, but too much; for the settlement was cursed with a band of desperadoes, exiles from organized society, who had sought the frontier to obtain impunity for their misdeeds. The leaders of this band were three brothers, whom no law could control, no obligation restrain; and with these men Cutler soon formed a close and suspicious intimacy. The eyes of the citizens had been for some time directed toward the companions, by circumstances attending various depredations; and, though unknown to themselves, they were constantly watched by many of their neighbors. It is uncertain whether Cutler was acquainted with the character of the men when his association with them first commenced, for in none of the places where he had lived, had he hitherto been suspected of crime. It is most probable that he sought their company because they were "dissipated" like himself; and that, in the inception of their acquaintance, there was no other bond between them than the habit of intoxication. Had we time and space, we would fain pause here to reflect upon the position and feelings of the false wife--deserted, in her turn, by him for whom she had given up truth and honor--alone in the wilderness with her children, whose birth she could not but regret, and harassed by thoughts which could not but be painfully self-condemning. But we must hasten on. In the autumn of eighteen hundred and twenty, information was brought to the settlement, that a store at Springfield (as it is now called), had been entered and robbed--that the leaders of the desperadoes above alluded to, were suspected--and that the goods stolen were believed to be concealed in Cutler's grove, where they lived. Warrants were issued, and the three were arrested; but the magistrate before whom they were taken for examination, was a timid and ignorant man; and by the interference of Cutler, who assumed to be a lawyer, they were examined separately, and allowed to testify, each for the other! An officer who knew no more than to permit this, of course could do no less than discharge them. The arrest and examination, however, crude and informal as they were, confirmed the suspicions of the citizens, and directed them, more vehemently than ever, against Cutler, as well as his friends. It satisfied them, moreover, that they would never be able to reach these men through the ordinary forms of law, and strengthened the counsels of those who had already suggested the organization of a company of regulators. While these things were fermenting in the minds of the people, the desperadoes, encouraged by their success, and rendered bold by impunity, committed their depredations more frequently and openly than ever. It was remarked, too, that Cutler, having committed himself at the examination of friends, was now more constantly and avowedly their associate; and, since he was not a man to play a second part, that they deferred to him on all occasions, never moving without him, and treating him at all times as an acknowledged leader. The people observed, moreover, that from being, like his neighbors, a small farmer of limited possessions, he rose rapidly to what, on the frontier, was considered affluence. He soon ceased to labor on his lands, and set up a very considerable "store," importing his goods from Saint Louis, and, by means of the whiskey he sold, collecting all the idle and vicious of the settlement constantly about him. His "store" was in exceedingly bad repute, and the scanty reputation which he had retained after the public part he had taken before the magistrate, was speedily lost. Things were in this state in the spring of eighteen hundred and twenty-one, when an old gentleman of respectable appearance, who had emigrated to this country by water, having been pleased with the land in the neighborhood of the place where the town of Naples now stands, landed his family and effects, and settled upon the "bottom." It was soon rumored in the settlement, that he had brought with him a large amount of money; and it was also remarked that Cutler and his three companions were constantly with him, either at the "Grove" or on the "bottom." Whether the rumor was the cause of their attention, or their assiduity the foundation of the report, the reader must determine for himself. One evening in May, after a visit to this man, where Cutler had been alone, he came home in great haste, and suddenly announced to Margaret his intention to "sell out," and move further westward! His unhappy victim supposed she knew but too well the meaning of this new movement: she asked no questions, but, with a sigh of weariness, assented. On the following day, he commenced hastily disposing of his "store," his stock, his cabin--everything, in fact, save a few farming utensils, his furniture, and a pair of horses. It was observed--for there were many eyes upon him--that he never ventured out after twilight, and, even in the broad sunshine, would not travel far, alone or unarmed. In such haste did he seem, that he sold many of his goods at, what his friends considered, a ruinous sacrifice. The fame of great bargains brought many people to his counter, so that, within ten days, his arrangements were complete; and, much to the satisfaction of his neighbors, he set out toward the river. Two of his associates accompanied him on his journey--a precaution for which he would give no reason, except that he wished to converse with them on the way. He crossed the Illinois near the mouth of the Mauvaisterre, and, turning northward, in the evening reached a cabin on the banks of M'Kee's creek, not more than ten miles from his late residence. This house had been abandoned by its former occupant, on account of the forays of the Indians; but was now partially refitted, as for a temporary abode. Here, the people about "the grove" were surprised to learn, a few days after Cutler's departure, that he had halted with the apparent intention to remain, at least for some time. Their surprise was dissipated, however, within a very few weeks. The old gentleman, spoken of above, had left home upon a visit to Saint Louis; and during his absence, his house had been entered, and robbed of a chest containing a large amount of money--while the family were intimidated by the threats of men disguised as savages. This was the culmination of villany. The settlement was now thoroughly aroused; and, when one of these little communities was once in earnest, it might safely be predicted that _something_ would be _done_! The first step was to call "a meeting of the friends of law and order;" but no proclamation was issued, no handbills were circulated, no notices posted: not the least noise was made about the matter, lest those against whom it was to act, might hear of and prepare for it. They came together quietly but speedily--each man, as he heard of the appointment, going forthwith to his neighbor with the news. They assembled at a central point, where none need be late in coming, and immediately proceeded to business. The meeting was not altogether a formal one--for purposes prescribed by law--but it was a characteristic of those men, to do everything "decently and in order"--to give all their proceedings the sanction and solemnity of mature deliberation. They organized the assemblage regularly--calling one of the oldest and most respectable of their number "to the chair" (which, on this occasion, happened to be the root of a large oak), and appointing a younger man secretary (though they gave him no desk on which to write). There was no man there who did not fully understand what had brought them together; but one who lived in the "bottom," and had been the mover of the organization, was still called upon to "explain the object of the meeting." This he did in a few pointed sentences, concluding with these significant words: "My friends, it is time that these rascals were punished, and it is our duty to punish them." He sat down, and a silence of some moments ensued, when another arose, and, without any preliminary remarks, moved that "a company of regulators be now organized, and that they be charged with the duty of _seeing the law administered_." The motion was seconded by half a dozen voices--the question was put in due form by the chairman, and decided unanimously in the affirmative. A piece of paper was produced, and the presiding officer called on the meeting for volunteers. Ten young men stepped forward, and gave their names as rapidly as the secretary could enrol them. In less than five minutes, the company was complete--the chairman and four of the meeting, as a committee, were directed to retire with the volunteers, and see that they were fully organized--and the meeting adjourned. All, except the volunteers and the committee, went directly home--satisfied that the matter needed no further attention. Those who remained entered the house and proceeded to organize in the usual manner. A "compact" was drawn up, by the terms of which the regulators bound themselves to each other, and to their neighbors, to ferret out and punish the perpetrators of the offences, which had recently disturbed the peace of the settlement, and to rid the country of such villains as were obnoxious to the friends of law and order. This was then signed by the volunteers as principals, and by the committee, as witnesses; and was placed in the hands of the chairman of the meeting for safekeeping. It is said to be still in existence, though I have never seen it, and do not know where it is to be found. When this arrangement was completed, the committee retired, and the company repaired to the woods, to choose a leader. They were not long in selecting a certain Major B----, who had, for some weeks, made himself conspicuous, by his loud denunciations of Cutler and his associates, and his zealous advocacy of "strong measures." They had--one or two of them, at least--some misgivings about this appointment; for the major was inclined to be a blusterer, and the courage of these men was eminently silent. But after a few minutes' discussion, the matter was decided, and the leader was chosen without opposition. They at once dispersed, to make arrangements for the performance of their duties--having first appointed an hour and a place of meeting. They were to assemble at sunset on the same day, at the point where the state road now crosses the "bluff;" and were to proceed thence, without delay, to Cutler's house on M'Kee's creek, a distance of little more than eight miles. There they were to search for the stolen property, and whether they found it or not, were resolved to notify Cutler to leave the country. But under no circumstances were they to take his life, unless it became necessary in self-defence. The hour came, and with it, to the bluff, came all the regulators--_save one_. But that one was a very important personage--none other, indeed, than the redoubtable major, who was to head the party. The nine were there a considerable time before sunset, and waited patiently for their captain's arrival; though, already, there were whisperings from those who had been doubtful of him in the outset, that he would not keep his appointment. And these were right--for, though they waited long beyond the time, the absentee did not make his appearance. It was afterward ascertained that he excused himself upon the plea of sudden illness; but he was very well again on the following day, and his excuse was not received. The ridicule growing out of the affair, and his reduction from the rank of major to that of captain, in derision, finally drove him in disgrace from the country. His defection left the little company without a leader; and though they were determined not to give up the enterprise, an obstacle to its prosecution arose, in the fact that no one was willing to replace the absent captain. Each was anxious to play the part of a private, and all had come prepared to discharge the duties of the expedition, to the utmost of their ability. But they were all young men, and no one felt competent to take the responsibility of command. They were standing in a group, consulting eagerly about their course, and, as one of them afterward said, "nearly at their wits' end," when the circle was suddenly entered by another. He had come upon them so noiselessly, and they had been so much absorbed in their council, that no one saw him until he stood in their midst. Several of them, however, at once recognised him, as a hunter who had recently appeared in the southern part of the county, and had lived a singularly solitary life. No one knew his name, but, from his mode of life, he was already known among those who had heard of him, as "the wild hunter." He was but little above the medium height, and rather slender in figure; but he was well and firmly built, and immediately impressed them with the idea of great hardihood and activity. His face, though bronzed by exposure, was still handsome and expressive; but there was a certain wildness in the eye, and a compression about the mouth, which gave it the expression of fierceness, as well as resolution. He was dressed in a hunting-shirt and "leggings" of deer-skin, fringed or "fingered" on the edges; and his head and feet were covered, the one by a cap of panther's hide, and the others by moccasins of dressed buckskin. At his belt hung a long knife, and in his hand he carried a heavy "Kentucky rifle." As he entered the circle, he dropped the breech of the latter to the ground, and, leaning calmly upon the muzzle, quietly surveyed the countenances of the group, in profound silence. The regulators were too much surprised to speak while this was going on; and the stranger seemed to be in no haste to open the conversation. When he had finished his scrutiny, however, he stepped back a pace or two, and resuming his easy attitude, addressed them:-- "You must pardon me, my friends," he commenced, "when I tell you, that I have overheard all you have said in the last half hour. I did not remain in that thicket, however, for the purpose of eaves-dropping; but having accidentally heard one of you mention a name, the sound of which touches a chord whose vibrations you can not understand, I remained, almost against my own will, to learn more. I thus became acquainted with the object of your meeting, and the dilemma in which you find yourselves placed by the absence of your leader. Now, I have but little interest in this settlement, and none in the preservation of peace, or the vindication of law, anywhere: but I have been seeking this man, Cutler, of whom you spoke, nearly nine years. I supposed, a few days ago, that I had at last found him; but on going to his house, I learned that he had once more emigrated toward the west. You seem to know where he is to be found, and are without a leader: I wish to find him, and, if you will accept my services, will fill the place of your absent captain!" He turned away as he finished, allowing them an opportunity for consultation among themselves. The question was soon decided: they called him back--announced their willingness to accept him as their leader--and asked his name. "My name is _Stone_," he replied. It was after nightfall when the little party set out from the bluff. They had, then, more than eight miles to travel, over a country entirely destitute of roads, and cut up by numberless sloughs and ponds. They had, moreover, a considerable river to cross, and, after that, several miles of their way lay through a dense and pathless forest. But they were not the men to shrink from difficulties, at any time; and now they were carried along even more resolutely, by the stern, unwavering spirit of their new leader. Having once learned the direction, Stone put himself at the head of the party, and strode forward, almost "as the bird flies," directly toward the point indicated, regardless of slough, and swamp, and thicket. He moved rapidly, too--so rapidly, indeed, as to tax the powers of some of his followers almost too severely. Notwithstanding this swiftness, however, they could not avoid a long delay at the river; and it was consequently near midnight, when, having at last accomplished a crossing, they reached the bank of M'Kee's creek, and turned up toward Cutler's house. This stood in the centre of a "clearing," some two or three acres in extent; and upon reaching its eastern limit, the little company halted to reconnoitre. Notwithstanding the lateness of the hour, they discovered that the people of the house were still awake; and by a bright light, which streamed through the open door, they could see several men, sitting and standing about the room. "We shall make a good haul," said one of the regulators; "the whole gang is there." And immediately the party were for rushing forward. But Stone restrained them. "My friends," said he, "you have taken me for your leader, and must obey my directions." He then announced his determination to go forward alone; instructing his men, however, to follow at a little distance, but in no case to show themselves until he should give the signal. They agreed, though reluctantly, to this arrangement, and then--silently, slowly, but surely--the advance commenced. The hour had at last arrived! In the meantime, Cutler and his three friends were passing the time quite pleasantly over a bottle of backwoods nectar--commonly called whiskey. They seemed well pleased, too, with some recent exploit of theirs, and were evidently congratulating themselves upon their dexterity; for, as the "generous liquid" reeked warmly to their brains, they chuckled over it, and hinted at it, and winked knowingly at each other, as if they enjoyed both the recollection and the whiskey--as they probably did, exceedingly. There were four present, as we said--Cutler and the three worthies so often alluded to. These last sat not far from the open door; and each in his hand held a kerchief, or something of that description, of which the contents were apparently very precious; for, at intervals of a few moments, each raised his bundle between him and the light, and then were visible many circular prints, as if made by the coinage of the mint. This idea was strengthened, too, by several piles of gold and silver, which lay upon the table near the bottle, to which Cutler directed no infrequent glances. They had all been indulging pretty freely in their devotions to the mythological liquid--rewarding themselves, like soldiers after storming a hostile city, for their hardships and daring. There were a few coals in the chimney, although it was early in the autumn; and on them were lying dark and crumpled cinders, as of paper, over which little sparks were slowly creeping, like fiery insects. Cutler turned them over with his foot, and there arose a small blue, flickering blaze, throwing a faint, uncertain light beneath the table, and into the further corners of the room, and casting shadows of the money-bundles on the open door. If the betrayer could have known what eyes were strained upon him, as he thus carelessly thrust his foot among the cinders, how changed his bearing would have been. Stone had now approached within fifty paces of the house, and behind him, slowly creeping after, were the regulators. A broad band of light streamed out across the clearing from the door, while, on each side of this, all lay in shadow deepened by the contrast. Through the shadows, cautiously and silently came the footsteps of the avenger! There was no trepidation, no haste--the strange leader rather lingered, with a deadly slowness, as if the movement was a pleasant one, and he disliked to end it. But he never halted--not even for a moment--he came, like fate, slowly, but surely! "Come, boys," said Cutler, and his voice penetrated the stillness quite across the clearing, "let us take another drink, and then lie down; we shall have a long journey to-morrow." They all advanced to the table and drained the bottle. Cutler drank last, and then went back to the fire. He again stirred the smouldering cinders with his foot, and, turning about, advanced to close the door. But--he halted suddenly in the middle of the room--his face grew ashy pale--his limbs trembled with terror! Stone stepped upon the threshold, and, without speaking, brought his rifle to his shoulder! Cutler saw that it pointed to his heart, but he had not the power to speak or move! "Villain!" said Stone, in a low, suppressed voice, "your hour has come, at last!" Cutler was by no means a coward; by any one else he would not have been overcome, even for an instant. As it was, he soon recovered himself and sprang forward; but it was only to fall heavily to the floor; for at the same moment Stone fired, and the ball passed directly through his heart! A groan was the only sound he uttered--his arm moved, as in the act of striking, and then fell to the ground--he was dead! The regulators now rushed tumultuously into the house, and at once seized and pinioned the three desperadoes; while Stone walked slowly to the hearth, and resting the breech of his gun upon the floor, leaned calmly upon its muzzle. He had heard a scream from above--a voice which he knew too well. Margaret had been aroused from sleep by the report of the gun; and now, in her night-dress, with her hair streaming in masses over her shoulders, she rushed down the rude stairway. The first object that met her wild gaze was the body of Cutler, stretched upon the floor and already stiffening in death. With another loud scream, she threw herself upon him--mingling lamentations for his death, with curses upon his murderers. Stone's features worked convulsively, and once or twice his hand grasped the hilt of the knife which hung at his belt. At last, with a start, he drew it from the sheath. But, the next moment, he dashed it into the chimney, and leaning his gun against the wall, slowly advanced toward the unhappy woman. Grasping her arm, he lifted her like a child from the body to which she clung. Averting his head, he drew her, struggling madly, to the light; and having brought her face full before the lamp, suddenly threw off his cap, and turned his gaze directly into her eyes. A scream, louder and more fearful than any before, rang even to the woods beyond the clearing; she closed her eyes and shuddered, as if she could not bear to look upon him, whom she had so deeply wronged. He supported her on his arm, and perused her sunken and careworn features, for many minutes, in silence. Then slowly relaxing his grasp-- "You have been punished sufficiently," he said; and seating her gently upon the floor, he quietly replaced his knife in its sheath, resumed his rifle, and left the house. He was never again seen by any of the parties, except Margaret. She, soon after this event, returned to Virginia; and here Stone paid her an annual visit. He always came without notice, and departed as suddenly, always bearing his rifle, and habited as a hunter. At such times he sought to be alone with her but a few moments, and never spoke more than three words: "Your punishment continues," he would say, after gazing at her worn and haggard face for some minutes; and, then, throwing his rifle over his shoulder, he would again disappear for twelve months more. And truly her punishment _did_ continue; for though no one accurately knew her history, she was an object of suspicion to all; and though she led a most exemplary life, her reputation was evil, and her misery was but too evident. One after the other, her children died, and she was left utterly alone! At last _her_ lamp also began to flicker, and when Stone arrived in the country, upon his twelfth annual visit, it was but to see her die, and follow her to the grave! He received her last breath, but no one knew what passed between them in that awful hour. On the day after her burial he went away and returned no more. The regulators hastily dug a grave on the bank of the creek, and in the silence of the night placed Cutler within it. Then, taking possession of the stolen money, they released their prisoners, notifying them to leave the country within ten days, and returned to the east side of the river. A few years ago, a little mound might be seen, where they had heaped the dirt upon the unhappy victim of his own passions. It was "_the first grave_" in which a white man was buried in that part of the Illinois valley. At the expiration of the ten "days of grace," it became the duty of the regulators to see that their orders had been obeyed; and, though the death of Cutler had been more than they had designed or foreseen, they had no disposition to neglect it. They met, accordingly, on the morning of the eleventh day, and having chosen a new leader, proceeded to Cutler's grove. They found the houses of all those to whom they had given "notice" deserted _excepting one_. This was the cabin of the youngest of the three brothers; and declaring his intention to remain, in defiance of regulators and "Lynch law," he put himself upon his defence. Without ceremony the regulators set fire to the house in which he had barricaded himself, and ten minutes sufficed to smoke him out. They then discovered what they had not before known: that his elder brothers were also within; and when the three rushed from the door, though taken by surprise, they were not thrown off their guard. The trio were at once seized, and, after a sharp struggle, securely pinioned. A short consultation then decided their course. Leaving the house to burn at leisure, they posted away for the river, driving their prisoners before them, and a march of three hours brought them to the mouth of the Mauvaisterre. Here they constructed a "raft", by tying half-a-dozen drift-logs together, and warning them that death would be the penalty of a return, they placed their prisoners upon it, pushed it into the middle of the stream, and set them adrift without oar or pole! Although this seems quite severe enough, it was a light punishment compared to that sometimes administered by regulators; and in this case, had not blood been spilt when they did not intend it, it is probable that the culprits would have been first tied to a tree, and thoroughly "lynched." The involuntary navigators were not rescued from their unpleasant position until they had nearly reached Saint Louis; and though they all swore vengeance in a loud voice, not one of them was ever again seen in the Sangamon country. Vigorous measures, like those we have detailed, were usually effectual in restoring good order. Where there was no trial, there was no room for false witnesses; and where a punishment, not unfrequently disproportioned to the offence, so rapidly and certainly followed its commission, there was little prospect of impunity, and therefore slight inducement to violate the law. In most localities, it required but few severe lessons to teach desperadoes that prudence dictated their emigration; and, it must be acknowledged, that the regulators were prompt and able teachers. But we should give only a partial and incomplete view of this institution (for such, in fact, it was), were we to notice its uses and say nothing of its abuse; because, like everything else partaking so largely of the mob element, it was liable to most mischievous perversions. Had the engine been suffered to rest, when it had performed its legitimate functions, all would have been well; but the great vice of the system was its obstinate vitality: it refused to die when its life was no longer useful. As soon as the danger was past, and the call for his services had ceased, the good citizen, who alone could confine such a system to its proper limits, retired from its ranks: it was consequently left, with all its dangerous authority, in the hands of the reckless and violent. The selfish and designing soon filled up the places of the sober and honest, and from being a terror to evil-doers, and a protection to the peaceful citizen, it became a weapon in the hands of the very men against whom it should have been directed. When this came to be the case, the institution was in danger of doing more harm in its age, than it had accomplished of good in its youth. But it must not thence be inferred that it should never have been adopted, or that it was vicious in itself. In seasons of public danger, extraordinary powers are often intrusted to individuals--powers which nothing but that danger can justify, and which would constitute the dictators intolerable despots, if they were retained after the crises are passed. The Congress of our confederacy, for example, found it necessary, at one period of our Revolutionary struggle, to invest Washington with such authority; had he exercised it beyond the pressure of immediate peril, the same outcry which has been made against others in similar circumstances, would have been justly raised against him. And most men, less soberly constituted than Washington, would have endeavored to retain it; for power is a pleasant thing, which few have the self-denial to resign without a struggle. The wrong consists not in the original delegation of the authority--for that is justified by the highest of all laws, the law of self-preservation--but in its retention and exercise, when the exigency no longer supports it. Having parted with the authority to redress grievances, and provide for protection and defence, the citizen can not at once recover it--it remains for a time in the hands of the representative, and is always difficult to regain. But it does not therefore follow, that he should never intrust it to another, for the inconvenience sometimes resulting from its delegation, is one of the incidents to human life, teaching, not obstinacy or jealousy, but circumspection. The following story, related by one who is well-acquainted with the early history of this country, will illustrate the manner in which the regulator system was sometimes made subservient to men's selfish purposes; and there have, unhappily, been too many instances, in which such criminal schemes were more successful than they were in this. I have entitled it "The Stratagem." THE STRATAGEM. Robert Elwood emigrated from Kentucky to Illinois, about the year in which the latter was erected into a state, and passing to the northwest of the regions then occupied by the French and Virginians, pitched his tent upon the very verge of the frontier. He was a man of violent passions, impatient of the restraints of law--arrogant, overbearing, and inclined to the use of "the strong-hand." His removal had been caused by a difficulty with one of his neighbors, in which he had attempted to right himself without an appeal to the legal tribunals. In this attempt, he had not only been thwarted, but also made to pay rather roundly for his temerity; and, vexed and soured, he had at once abandoned his old name, and marched off across the prairies, seeking a country in which, as he said, "a man need not meet a cursed constable every time he left his own door." His family consisted of three sons and one daughter, the latter being, at the time of his emigration, about sixteen years of age. In journeying toward the north, he halted one day, at noon, within a "point" of timber, which extended a mile into the prairie, and was surrounded by as beautiful a piece of rolling meadow-land, as one need wish to see. He was already half-a-day's journey beyond the thicker settlements; and, indulging a reasonable hope that he would not speedily be annoyed by neighbors, he at once determined here to erect his dwelling and open a new farm. With this view, he marked off a tract of about four hundred acres, including the point of timber in which he was encamped; and before the heats of summer came on, he had a cabin ready for his reception, and a considerable amount of grain planted. About a mile to the south, there was a similar strip of timber, surrounded, like that of which he took possession, by a rich tract of "rolling prairie;" and this he at once resolved to include in his farm. But, reflecting that it must probably be some years, before any one else would enter the neighborhood to take it up--and having only the assistance of his sons, but two of whom had reached manhood--he turned his attention, first, to the tract upon which he lived. This was large enough to engross his efforts for the present; and, for two years, he neglected to do anything toward establishing his claim to the land he coveted. It is true, that he told several of his neighbors, who had now begun to settle around him, that he claimed that piece, and thus prevented their enclosing it; but he neither "blazed" nor marked the trees, nor "staked off" the prairie. In the meantime emigration had come in, so much more rapidly than he had expected, that he found himself the centre of a populous neighborhood; and among other signs of advancing civilization, a company of regulators had been organized, for the protection of life and property. Of this band, Elwood, always active and forward, had been chosen leader; and the vigor and severity with which he had exercised his functions, had given a degree of quiet to the settlements, not usually enjoyed by these frontier communities. One example had, at the period of the opening of our story, but recently been made; and its extreme rigor had frightened away from the neighborhood, those who had hitherto disturbed its peace. This was all the citizens desired; and, having accomplished their ends, safety and tranquillity, those whose conservative character had prevented the regulator system from running into excesses, withdrew from its ranks--but took no measures to have it broken up. It was thus left, with recognised authority, in the hands of Elwood, and others of his violent and unscrupulous character. Things were in this position, when, on his return from an expedition of some length, Elwood bethought him of the handsome tract of land, upon which he had so long ago set his heart. What were his surprise and rage on learning--a fact, which the absorbing nature of his regulator-duties had prevented his knowing sooner--that it was already in possession of another! And his mortification was immeasurably increased, when he was told, that the man who had thus intruded upon what he considered his own proper demesne, was none other than young Grayson, the son of his old Kentucky enemy! Coming into the neighborhood, in the absence of Elwood, the young man, finding so desirable a tract vacant, had at once taken possession; and by the return of the regulator had almost finished a neat and "roomy" cabin. He had "blazed" the trees, too, and "staked off" the prairie--taking all those steps then deemed necessary, on the frontier, to complete appropriation. Elwood's first step was to order him peremptorily, to desist, and give up his "improvement"--threatening him, at the same time, with certain and uncertain pains and penalties, if he refused to obey. But Grayson only laughed at his threats, and went stoutly on with his work. When the young men, whom he had hired to assist him in building his house, gave him a friendly warning, that Elwood was the leader of a band of regulators, and had power to make good his menaces, he only replied that "he knew how to protect himself, and, when the time came, should not be found wanting." Elwood retired from the contest, discomfited, but breathing vengeance; while Grayson finished his house and commenced operations on his farm. But those who knew the headlong violence of Elwood's character, predicted that these operations would soon be interrupted; and they were filled with wonder, when month after month passed away, and there were still no signs of a collision. In the meantime, it came to be rumored in the settlement, that there was some secret connection between Grayson and Elwood's daughter, Hannah. They had been seen by several persons in close conversation, at times and places which indicated a desire for concealment; and one person even went so far as to say, that he had been observed to kiss her, on parting, late in the evening. Whatever may have been the truth in that matter, it is, at all events, certain, that Grayson was an unmarried man; and that the quarrel between the parents of the pair in Kentucky, had broken up an intimacy, which bade fair to issue in a marriage; and it is probable, that a subordinate if not a primary, motive, inducing him to take possession of the disputed land, was a desire to be near Hannah. Nor was this wish without its appropriate justification; for, though not strictly beautiful, Hannah was quite pretty, and--what is better in a frontier girl--active, fresh, and rosy. At the time of Grayson's arrival in the settlement, she was a few months past eighteen; and was as fine material for a border wife, as could be found in the new state. The former intimacy was soon renewed, and before the end of two months, it was agreed that they should be married, as soon as her father's consent could be obtained. But this was not so easily compassed; for, all this time, Elwood had been brooding over his defeat, and devising ways and means of recovering the much-coveted land. At length, after many consultations with a fellow named Driscol, who acted as his lieutenant in the regulator company, he acceded to a proposition, made long before by that worthy, but rejected by Elwood on account of its dishonesty. He only adopted the plan, now, because it was apparently the only escape from permanent defeat; and long chafing under what he considered a grievous wrong, had made him reckless of means, and determined on success, at whatever cost. One morning, about a week after the taking of this resolution, it was announced that one of Elwood's horses had been stolen, on the night before; and the regulators were straightway assembled, to ferret out and punish so daring an offender. It happened (accidently, _of course_) to be a horse which had cast one of its shoes, only the day before; and this circumstance rendered it easy to discover his trail. Driscol, Elwood's invaluable lieutenant, discovered the track and set off upon it, almost as easily as if he had been present when it was made. He led the party away into the prairie toward the east; and though his companions declared that they could now see nothing of the trail, the sharp-sighted lieutenant swore that it was "as plain as the nose on his face"--truly, a somewhat exaggerated expression: for the color, if not the size, of that feature in his countenance, made it altogether too apparent to be overlooked! They followed him, however, convinced by the earnestness of his asseverations, if not by their own eyes, until, after going a mile toward the east, he began gradually to verge southward, and, having wound about at random for some time, finally took a direct course, for the point of timber on which Grayson lived! On arriving at the point, which terminated, as usual, in a dense hazel-thicket, Driscol at once pushed his way into the covert, and lo! there stood the stolen horse! He was tied to a sapling by a halter, which was clearly recognised as the property of Grayson, and leading off toward the latter's house, was traced a man's footstep--_his_, of course! These appearances fully explained the theft, and there was not a man present, who did not express a decided conviction that Grayson was the thief. Some one remarked that his boldness was greater than his shrewdness, else he would not have kept the horse so near. But Driscol declared, dogmatically, that this was "the smartest thing in the whole business," since, if the trail could be obliterated, no one would think of looking _there_ for a horse stolen only a mile above! "The calculation" was a good one, he said, and it only failed of success because he, Driscol, happened to have a remarkably sharp sight for all tracks, both of horses and men. To this proposition, supported by ocular evidence, the regulators assented, and Driscol stock, previously somewhat depressed by sundry good causes, forthwith rose in the regulator market to a respectable premium! Having recovered the stolen property, the next question which presented itself for their consideration, was in what way they should punish the thief. To such men as they, this was not a difficult problem: without much deliberation, it was determined that he must be at once driven from the country. The "days of grace," usually given on such occasions, were ten, and in pursuance of this custom, it was resolved that Grayson should be mercifully allowed that length of time, in which to arrange his affairs and set out for a new home: or, as the regulators expressed it, "make himself scarce." Driscol, having already, by his praise-worthy efforts in the cause of right, made himself the hero of the affair, was invested with authority to notify Grayson of this decree. The matter being thus settled, the corps adjourned to meet again ten days thereafter, in order to see that their judgment was duly carried into effect. Meantime, Driscol, the official mouthpiece of the self-constituted court of general jurisdiction, rode away to discharge himself of his onerous duties. Halting at the low fence which enclosed the scanty door-yard he gave the customary "Halloo! the house!" and patiently awaited an answer. It was not long, however, before Grayson issued from the door and advanced to the fence, when Driscol served the process of the court _in hæc verba_:-- "Mr. Grayson, the regulators of this settlement have directed me to give you ten days' notice to leave the country. They will meet again one week from next Friday, and if you are not gone by that time, it will become their duty to punish you in the customary way." "What for?" asked Grayson, quietly. "For stealing this horse," the functionary replied, laying his hand on the horse's mane, "and concealing him in the timber with the intention to run him off." "It's Elwood's horse, isn't it?" "Yes," answered Driscol, somewhat surprised at Grayson's coolness. "When was he stolen?" asked the notified. "Last night," answered the official; "I suppose you know very well without being told." "Do you, indeed?" said Grayson, smiling absently. And then he bent his eyes upon the ground, and seemed lost in thought for some minutes. "Well, well," said he at length, raising his eyes again. "I didn't steal the horse, Driscol, but I suppose you regulators know best who ought to be allowed to remain in the settlement, so of course I shall have to obey." "I am glad to find you so reasonable," said Driscol, making a movement to ride away. "Stop! stop!" said Grayson: "don't be in a hurry! I shall be gone before the ten days are up, and you and I may not meet again for a long time, so get down and come in: let us take a parting drink together. I have some excellent whiskey, just brought home." Now, the worthy functionary, as we have intimated, or as the aforesaid nose bore witness, was "quite partial" to this description of produce: some of his acquaintances even insinuating that he took sometimes "a drop too much;" and though he felt some misgiving about remaining in Grayson's company longer than his official duties required, the temptation was too strong for him, and, silencing his fears, he sprang to the ground. "Tie your horse to the fence, there," said Grayson, "and come in." Driscol obeyed, and it was not long before he was seated in the cabin with a tin-cup in his hand, and its generous contents finding their way rapidly down his capacious throat. "Whiskey is a pleasant drink, after all, isn't it?" said Grayson, smiling at the gusto with which Driscol dwelt upon the draught, and at the same moment he rose to set his cup on the table behind the official. "Very pleasant indeed," said Driscol, in reply, and to prove his sincerity, he raised his cup again to his lips. But this time he was not destined to taste its contents. It was suddenly dashed from his hand--a saddle-girth was thrown over his arms and body--and before he was aware of what was being done, he found himself securely pinioned to the chair! A rope was speedily passed round his legs, and tied, in like manner, behind, so that he could, literally, move neither hand nor foot! He made a furious effort to break away, but he would not have been more secure had he been in the old-fashioned stocks! He was fairly entrapped, and though he foamed, and swore, and threatened, it all did no manner of good. Of this he at length became sensible, and grinding his teeth in impotent rage, he relapsed into dogged silence. Having thoroughly secured his prisoner, Grayson, who was something of a wag, poured out a small quantity of the seductive liquor, and coming round in front of the ill-used official, smiled graciously in his face, and drank "a health"-- "Success to you, Mr. Driscol," said he, "and long may you continue an ornament to the distinguished company of which you are an honored officer!" Driscol ground his teeth, but made no reply, and the toast was drunk, like some of those impressive sentiments given at public dinners, "in profound silence!" Having drained the cup, Grayson deposited it upon the table and himself in a chair; and, drawing the latter up toward his companion, opened the conference thus:-- "I think I have you pretty safe, Driscol: eh!" The lieutenant made no reply. "I see you are not in a very sociable humor," continued Grayson; "and, to tell you the truth, I am not much that way inclined myself: but I am determined to get to the bottom of this affair before you shall leave the house. I am sure you know all about it; and if you don't, why the worse for you, that's all." "What do you mean?" demanded Driscol, speaking for the first time. "I mean this," Grayson answered sternly: "I did not take that horse from Elwood's--_but you did_: I saw you do it. But since my testimony will not be received, I am determined that you shall give me a certificate in writing that such is the fact. You needn't look so obstinate, for by the God that made us both! you shall not leave that chair alive, unless you do as I say!" Grayson was a large, rather fleshy man, with a light complexion and blue eyes; and, though good-natured and hard to arouse, when once in earnest, as now, like all men of his stamp, he both looked, and was, fully capable of carrying his menaces into execution. The imprisoned functionary did not at all like the expression of his eye, he quailed before it in fear and shame. He was, however, resolved not to yield, except upon the greatest extremity. "Come," said Grayson, producing materials for writing; "here are pen, ink, and paper: are you willing to write as I dictate?" "No," said Driscol, doggedly. "We'll see if I can't make you willing, then," muttered his captor; and, going to the other end of the cabin, he took down a coil of rope, which hung upon a peg, and returned to his captive. Forming a noose at one end, he placed it about Driscol's neck, and threw the other end over a beam which supported the roof. "Are you going to murder me?" demanded the official in alarm. "Yes," answered Grayson, drawing the loose end down, and tightening the noose about Driscol's throat. "You'll suffer for this," said the lieutenant furiously. "That won't help _you_ much," coolly replied Grayson, tugging at the rope, until one leg of the chair gave signs of rising from the floor, and Driscol's face exhibited unmistakable symptoms of incipient strangulation. "Stop! stop!" he exclaimed, in a voice reduced to a mere wheeze--and Grayson "eased off" to hear him. "Won't anything else satisfy you but a written certificate?" he asked--speaking with difficulty, and making motions as if endeavoring to swallow something too large to pass the gate of his throat. "Nothing but that," answered Grayson, decidedly; "and if you don't give it to me, when your regulator friends arrive, instead of me, they will find you, swinging from this beam by the neck!" And, seeing his victim hesitate, he again tugged at the rope, until the same signs were exhibited as before--only a little more apparently. "Ho--hold, Grayson!" begged the frightened and strangling lieutenant; and, as his executioner again relaxed a little, he continued: "Just let me up, and I'll do anything you want." "That is to say," laughed Grayson, "you would rather take the chances of a fight, than be hung up like a sheep-stealing dog! Let you up, indeed!" And once more he dragged the rope down more vigorously than ever. "I--didn't--mean that--indeed!" gulped the unhappy official, this time almost strangled in earnest. "What _did_ you mean then?" sternly demanded Grayson, relaxing a little once again. "I will write the certificate," moaned the unfortunate lieutenant, "if you will let one arm loose, and won't tell anybody until the ten days are out--" "Why do you wish it kept secret!" "If I give such a certificate as you demand," mournfully answered the disconsolate officer, "I shall have to leave the country--and I want time to get away." "Oh! that's it, is it? Well--very well." About an hour after this, Driscol issued from the house, and, springing upon the horse, rode away at a gallop toward Elwood's. Here he left the animal, but declined to enter; telling Hannah, who happened to be in the yard, to say to her father that "it was all right," he pushed on toward home--tenderly rubbing his throat, first with the right hand and then with the left, all the way. Three days afterward, he disappeared from the settlement, and was heard of no more. Grayson waited until near nightfall, and then took his way, as usual, to a little clump of trees, that stood near Elwood's enclosures, to meet Hannah. Here he stayed more than an hour, detailing the circumstances of the accusation against him, and laughing with her, over the ridiculous figure cut by her father's respectable lieutenant. Before they parted their plans were all arranged, and Grayson went home in excellent humor. What these plans were, will be seen in the sequel. Eight days went by without any event important to our story--Hannah and Grayson meeting each evening, in the grove, and parting again undiscovered. On the ninth day, the former went to the house of a neighbor, where it was understood that she was to remain during the night, and return home on the following morning. Grayson remained on his farm until near sunset, when he mounted his horse and rode away. This was the last of his "days of grace;" and those who saw him passing along the road, concluded that he had yielded to the dictates of prudence, and was leaving the field. On the following morning, the regulators assembled to see that their orders had been obeyed; and, though Elwood was a little disconcerted by the absence of Driscol, since it was understood that Grayson had left the country, the meeting was considered only a formal one, and the presence of the worthy lieutenant was not indispensable. They proceeded in high spirits to the premises, expecting to find the house deserted and waiting for an occupant. Elwood was to take immediate possession, and, all the way across the prairie, was felicitating himself upon the ease and rapidity of his triumph. What was their surprise, then, on approaching the house, to see smoke issuing from the chimney, as usual--the door thrown wide open, and Grayson standing quietly in front of it! The party halted and a council was called, but its deliberations were by no means tedious: it was forthwith determined, that Grayson stood _in defiance of the law_, and must be punished--that is, "lynched"--without delay! The object of this fierce decree, all unarmed as he was, still stood near the door, while the company slowly approached the fence. He then advanced and addressed them:-- "I think the ten days are not up yet, gentlemen," said he mildly. "Yes, they are," answered Elwood quickly; "and we are here to know whether you intend to obey the authorities, and leave the country?" "I think, Elwood," said the young man, not directly replying, "this matter can be settled between you and me, without bloodshed, and even without trouble. If you will come in with George and John [his sons], I will introduce you to my wife, and we can talk it over, with a glass of whiskey." Another consultation ensued, when, in order to prove their dignified moderation, they agreed that Elwood and his sons should "go in and see what he had to say." Elwood, the elder, entered first: directly before him, holding her sides and shaking with laughter, stood his rosy daughter, Hannah! "_My wife_, gentlemen," said Grayson, gravely introducing them. Hannah's laughter exploded. "O, father, father, father!" she exclaimed, leaning forward and extending her hands; "ain't you caught, beautifully!" The laugh was contagious; and though the elder knit his brows, and was evidently on the point of bursting with very different emotions, his sons yielded to its influence, and, joining Hannah and her husband, laughed loudly, peal after peal! The father could bear it no longer--he seized Hannah by the arm and shook her violently, till she restrained herself sufficiently to speak; as for him, he was speechless with rage. "It's entirely too late to make a 'fuss,' father," she said at length, "for here is the marriage-certificate, and Grayson is your son!" "I have not stolen your horse, Elwood," said the bridegroom, taking the paper which the father rejected, "though I have run away with your daughter. And," he added, significantly, "since if you had this land, you would probably give it to Hannah, I think you and I had better be friends, and I'll take it as her marriage-portion." "If you can show that you did not take the horse, Grayson," said George, the elder of the two sons, "I'll answer for that: but----" "That I can do very easily," interrupted the young husband, "I have the proof in my pocket." He caught Elwood's eye as he spoke, and reassured him with a look, for he could see that the old man began to apprehend an exposure in the presence of his sons. This forbearance did more to reconcile him to his discomfiture than aught else, save the influence of George; for, like all passionate men, he was easily swayed by his cooler children. While Hannah and her brothers examined the marriage certificate, and laughed over "the stratagem," Grayson drew Elwood aside and exhibited a paper, written in a cramped, uneven hand, as follows:-- "This is to certify, that it was not Josiah Grayson who took Robert Elwood's horse from his stable, last night--but I took him myself, by arrangement, so as to accuse Grayson of the theft, and drive him to leave his new farm. "THOMAS DRISCOL." Elwood blushed as he came to the words "by arrangement," but read on without speaking. Grayson then related the manner in which he had entrapped the lieutenant, and the joke soon put him in a good humor. The regulators were called in, and heard the explanation, and all laughing heartily over the capture of Driscol, they insisted that Hannah and her husband should mount, and ride with them to Elwood's. Neither of them needed much persuasion--the whole party rode away together--the "lads and lasses" of the neighborhood were summoned, and the day and night were spent in merriment and dancing. Grayson and his wife returned on the following morning to their new home, where a life of steady and honorable industry, was rewarded with affluence and content. Their descendants still live upon the place, one of the most beautiful and extensive farms upon that fertile prairie. But on the spot where the disputed cabin stood, has since been built a handsome brick-house, and I pay only a just tribute to amiable character, when I say that a more hospitable mansion is not to be found in the western country. This was the last attempt at "regulating" in that region, for emigration came in so rapidly, that the supremacy of the law was soon asserted and maintained. Whenever this came to be so, the regulators, of course, ceased to be types of the state of society, and were succeeded by other characters and institutions. To these we must now proceed. [NOTE.--The following is a copy of a compact, such as is spoken of in the story of the "The First Grave," entered into by a company of regulators in somewhat similar circumstances. I am not sure that I can vouch for its authenticity, but all who are familiar with the history of those times, will recognise, in its peculiarities, the characteristics of the people who then inhabited this country. The affectation of legal form in such a document as this, would be rather amusing, were it not quite too significant; at all events, it is entirely "in keeping" with the constitution of a race who had some regard for law and its vindication, even in their most high-handed acts. The technical phraseology, used so strangely, is easily traceable to the little "Justice's Form Book," which was then almost the only law document in the country; and though the words are rather awkwardly combined, they no doubt gave solemnity to the act in the eyes of its sturdy signers:-- "_Know all men by these presents:_ "That we [_here follow twelve names_], citizens of ---- settlement, in the state of Illinois, have this day, _jointly and severally_, bound ourselves together as a company of Rangers and Regulators, to protect this settlement against the crimes and misdemeanors of, all and singular, every person or persons whomsoever, and especially against _all horse-thieves, renegades, and robbers_. And we do by these presents, hereby bind ourselves, jointly and severally as aforesaid, unto each other, and to the fellow-citizens of this settlement, to punish, according to the code of his honor, Judge Lynch, all violations of the law, _against the peace and dignity of the said people of_ ---- settlement; and to discover and bring to speedy punishment, _all illegal combinations_--to rid the country of such as are dangerous to the welfare of this settlement--to preserve the peace, and _generally to vindicate the law_, within the settlement aforesaid. All of which purposes we are to accomplish as peaceably as possible: _but we are to accomplish them one way or another_. "In testimony whereof, we have hereunto set our hands and affixed our seals, this twelfth day of October, _Anno Domini_, eighteen hundred and twenty. "(Signed by twelve men.) "Acknowledged and subscribed in the presence of "C---- T. H----n, "J---- P. D----n," and five others, who seem to have been a portion of "the fellow-citizens of this settlement," referred to in the document.] FOOTNOTES: [77] See note at the close of this article. [78] The "Sangamon country," as the phrase was then used, included all the region watered by the river of that name, together with the counties of Cass, Morgan, and Scott, as far south as Apple creek. VI. THE JUSTICE OF THE PEACE. "I beseech you, Wrest once the law to your authority: To do a great right, do a little wrong."-- MERCHANT OF VENICE. The reign of violence, when an evil at all, is an evil which remedies itself: the severity of its proceeding hastens the accomplishment of its end, as the hottest fire soonest consumes its fuel. A nation will endure oppression more patiently immediately after a spasmodic rebellion or a bloody revolution, than at any other time; and a community requires less law to govern it, after a violent and illegal assertion of the law's supremacy, than was necessary before the outbreak. After having thrown off the yoke of a knave--and perhaps hung the knave up by the neck, or chopped his head off with an axe--mankind not unfrequently fall under the control of a fool; frightened at their temerity in dethroning an idol of metal, they bow down before a paltry statue of wood. Men are not easily satiated with power, but when it is irregular, a pause in its exercise must eventually come. And there is a principle of human nature, which teaches, that whatsoever partakes of the mob-spirit is, at best, but temporary, and ought to have a speedy end. This is especially true of such men as first permanently peopled the western country; for though they sometimes committed high-handed and unjustifiable acts, the moment it was discovered that they had accomplished the purposes of order, they allowed the means of vindication to fall into disuse. The regulator system, for example, was directed to the stern and thorough punishment of evil men, but no sooner was society freed from their depredations, than the well-meaning citizens withdrew from its ranks; and, though regulator companies still patrolled the country, and, for a time, assumed as much authority as ever, they were not supported by the solid approbation of those who alone could give them lasting strength. They did many outrageous things for which they were never punished, and for some years, the shield which the good citizen had raised above his head for protection and defence, threatened to fall upon and crush him. But the western people are not the first who have been temporarily enslaved by their liberators, though, unlike many another race, they waited patiently for the changes of years, and time brought them a remedy. As the government waxed stronger, and public opinion assumed a direction, the regulators, like their predecessors, the rangers, found their "occupation gone," and gradually faded out from the land. Proclamations were issued--legislatures met--laws were enacted, and officers appointed to execute them; and though forcing a legal system upon a people who had so long been "a law unto themselves," was a slow and difficult process, it was powerfully assisted by the very disorders consequent upon their attempts at self-government. They had burnt their hands by seizing the hot iron-rod of irregular authority, and were, therefore, better inclined to surrender the baton to those who could handle it. Like Frankenstein, they had created a power which they could not immediately control: the regulators, from being their servants, had come to be their masters: and they willingly admitted any authority which promised deliverance. They had risen in wrath, and chastised, with no hesitating hand, the violators of their peace; but the reaction had taken place, and they were now content to be governed by whatsoever ruler Providence might send them. The state governments were established, then, without difficulty, and the officers of the new law pervaded every settlement. The character which I have selected as the best representative of this period, is one of these new officers--_the early justice of the peace_. So far as history or tradition informs us, there was never yet a country in which appointments to office were invariably made with reference only to qualification, and though the west is an exception to more than one general rule, in this respect we must set it down in the common category. The lawyer-period had not yet arrived; and, probably, there was never an equal number of people in any civilized country, of whom a larger proportion were totally ignorant of legal forms. There were not three in each hundred who had ever seen the inside of a courthouse, and they were quite as few who had once looked upon a law-book! Where such was the case, some principle of appointment was of course necessary, other than that which required fitness, by training, for the office conferred; and it is probable that the rule adopted was but little different to that in force among those who have the appointing power, where no such circumstances restrict the choice. Men were appointed conservators of the _peace_, because they had distinguished themselves in _war_; and he who had assumed the powers of the law, as a regulator, was thought the better qualified to exercise them, as a legal officer! Courage and capacity, as an Indian-fighter, gave one the prominence requisite to his appointment; and zeal for the preservation of order, exhibited as a self-constituted judge and executioner, was a guaranty for the faithful performance of new and regular duties. Nor was the rule a bad one. A justice of the peace chosen upon this principle, possessed two qualities indispensable to an efficient officer, in the times of which we write--he was prompt in the discharge of his duties, and was not afraid of responsibility. To obviate the danger, however, which might arise from these, he had also a rigid sense of justice, which usually guided his determinations according to the rights of parties in interest. This, the lawyers will say, was a very questionable trait for a judicial officer; and perhaps it _is_ better for society, that a judge should know the law, and administer it without reference to abstract justice, than that his own notions of right and wrong should be taken, however conscientiously, as the standard of judgment: for in that case, we shall, at least, have uniformity of adjudication; whereas, nothing is more uncertain, than a man's convictions of right. But, in the times of which we are writing, society was not yet definitely shaped--its elements were not bound together by the cohesive power of any legal cement--and no better rule was, therefore, to be expected, than the spontaneous suggestions of common sense. The minds of men were, moreover, habituated to a certain course of thought and action--(such as naturally obtains in a new state of society, where the absence of organization remits them to their own exertions for safety)--and it was, therefore, impossible that any artificial system should be at once adopted. The people had been accustomed to such primitive associations, as they had entered into "for the common defence and general welfare" of their infant communities; the rule of action had been swift, and sometimes very informal punishment, for every transgression; and this rule, having very well answered its purpose, though at the expense of occasional severity and injustice, they could not immediately understand the necessity for any other course of proceeding. One of the characteristics of the early justice, then, was a supreme contempt for all mere form. He called it "nonsense" and could never comprehend its utility. To him, all ceremony was affectation, and the refinements of legal proceeding were, in his estimation, anti-republican innovations upon the original simplicity of mankind. Technicalities he considered merely the complicated inventions of lawyers, to exhibit their perverse ingenuity--traps to catch the well-meaning or unwary, or avenues of escape for the guilty. The rules of evidence he neither understood nor cared for; he desired "to hear all about" every cause brought before him; and the idea of excluding testimony, in obedience to any rule, he would never entertain. He acted upon the principle--though he probably never heard of the maxim--that "the law furnishes a remedy for every wrong;" and, if he knew of none in positive enactment, he would provide one, from the arsenal of his own sense of right. He never permitted anything to obstruct the punishment of one whom he had adjudged guilty; and, rather than allow a culprit to escape, he would order his judgment to be carried at once into effect, in the presence, and under the direction of the court. He had a strong prejudice against every man accused of crime; and sometimes almost reversed the ancient presumption of the law, and held the prisoner guilty, until he proved himself innocent. He had unbounded confidence in the honesty of his neighbors and friends, and was unwilling to believe, that they would accuse a man of crime or misdemeanor, without very good cause. When it was proven that a crime _had been committed_, he considered the guilt of the prisoner already half established: it was, in his judgment, what one, better acquainted with legal terms, might have called "a _prima facia_ case," devolving the _onus probandi_ (or burthen of proof) upon the accused. And this may have been one cause of the frequent resort to _alibis_--a mode of defence which, as we have already remarked, is even yet in great disrepute. If a defence, of some sort, was not, then, very clearly and satisfactorily made out, the justice had no hesitation in entering judgment, and ordering immediate punishment; for the right of appeal was not generally recognised, and the justice took original and final jurisdiction, where now his duties are merely those of preliminary examination and commitment. In civil controversies--where such causes were presented for adjudication, which, however, was not very often--the order of proceeding was quite as summary. The justice heard the statements of the parties, and sometimes, not always, would listen to witnesses, also; then, taking the general "rights, interests, claims, and demands," of both sides into consideration--and viewing himself, not as a judicial officer, but as a sort of referee or arbitrator--he would strike a balance between the disputants, and dismiss them to their homes, with a significant admonition to "keep the peace." He usually acted upon the principle--no very erroneous one, either--that, when two respectable men resort to the law, as arbitrator of their controversies, they are both about equally blamable; and his judgments were accordingly based upon the corollary, that neither deserved to have all he claimed. This was the practice when any decision was made at all; but, in most cases, the justice acted as a pacificator, and, by his authority and persuasion, induced the parties to agree upon a compromise. For this purpose, he not unfrequently remitted both fees and costs--those due to the constables, as well as his own. An instance of this pacific practice has been related to me as follows: Two neighbors had quarrelled about a small amount of debt, and, after sundry attempts to "settle," finally went to law. The justice took them aside, on the day of trial, and proposed a basis of settlement, to which they agreed, _on condition_, that all costs should be remitted, and to this the magistrate at once pledged himself. But a difficulty arose: the constable, who had not been consulted in the arrangement, had had a long ride after the defendant, and having an unquestionable right to demand his fees, was unwilling to give them up. The justice endeavored to prevail with him by persuasion, but in vain. Finally, growing impatient of his obstinacy, he gave him a _peremptory order_ to consent, and, on his refusal, _fined him_ the exact amount of his fees _for contempt_, entered up judgment on the basis of the compromise, and adjourned the court! The man who thus discourages litigation at the expense of his own official emoluments, may be forgiven a few irregularities of proceeding, in consideration of the good he effects; for although under such a system it was seldom that either party obtained his full and just rights, both were always benefited by the spirit of peace infused into the community. It would, perhaps, be well for the country now, were our legal officers actuated by the same motives; unfortunately, however, such men belong only to primitive times. But the love of peace was not accompanied, in this character, as it usually is, by merciful judgment, for, as he was very swift in determining a prisoner's guilt, he was equally rigid in imposing the penalty. The enactments of the criminal code were generally so worded as to give some scope for the exercise of a compassionate and enlightened discretion; but when the decision lay in the breast of our justice, if he adjudged any punishment at all, it was usually the severest provided for by the statute. Half-measures were not adapted to the temper of the times or the character of the people; indeed, they are suited to _no_ people, and are signal failures at all times, in all circumstances. Inflicting light punishments is like firing blank cartridges at a mob, they only irritate, without subduing; and as the latter course usually ends in unnecessary bloodshed, the former invariably increases the amount of crime. _Certainty_ of punishment may be--unquestionably _is_--a very important element in the administration of justice, but as nothing so strongly disinclines a man to entering the water as the sight of another drowning, so nothing will so effectually deter him from the commission of crime, as the knowledge that another has been severely punished for yielding to the same temptation. The justice, however, based the rigor of his judgments upon no such argument of policy. His austerity was a part of his character, and had been rendered more severe by the circumstances in which he had lived--the audacity of law-breakers, and the necessity for harsh penalties, in order for protection. It will be observed that I say nothing of juries, and speak of justices of the peace, as officers having authority to decide causes alone. And, it must be recollected, that in the days of which I am writing, resort was very seldom had to this cumbersome and uncertain mode of adjudication. In civil causes, juries were seldom empanelled, because they were attended by very considerable expense and delay. The chief object, in going to law, moreover, was, in most cases, to have _a decision_ of the matter in dispute; and juries were as prone to "hang" then as now. Suitors generally, therefore, would rather submit to the arbitration of the justice, than take the risk of delay and uncertainty, with a jury. In criminal causes, the case was very similar: the accused would as lief be judged by one prejudiced man as by twelve; for the same rigorous spirit which actuated the justice, pervaded also the juries; and (besides the chance of timidity or favor in the justice) in the latter he must take the additional risks of personal enmity and relationship to the party injured. Thus, juries were often discarded in criminal causes also, and we think their disuse was no great sacrifice. Such a system can derive its utility, in this country, only from an enlightened public sentiment: if that sentiment be capricious and oppressive, as it too often is, juries are quite as likely to partake its vices as legal officers: if the sentiment be just and healthy, no judicial officer dare be guilty of oppression. So that our fathers lost nothing in seldom resorting to this "palladium of our liberties," and, without doubt, gained something by avoiding delay, uncertainty, and expense. The reader will also observe, that I say nothing of higher courts. But the lines between the upper and lower tribunals were not so strictly drawn then as they now are, and the limits of jurisdiction were, consequently, very indefinite. Most of the characteristics, moreover, here ascribed to the justice of the peace, belonged, in almost an equal degree, to the judges of the circuit courts; and, though some of the latter were men of respectable legal requirements, the same off-hand mode of administering the law which distinguished the inferior magistrates, marked the proceedings of their courts also. Both occasionally assumed powers which they did not legally possess; both were guided more by their own notions of justice, than by the rules of law; and both were remarkable for their severity upon all transgressors. Neither cared much for the rules of evidence, each was equal to any emergency or responsibility, and both had very exalted ideas of their own authority. But the functions of the justice were, in his estimation, especially important--his dignity was very considerable also, and his powers anything but circumscribed. A few well-authenticated anecdotes, however, will illustrate the character better than any elaborate portraiture. And, for fear those I am about to relate may seem exceptions, not fairly representing the class, I should state, in the outset, that I have selected them from a great number which I can recall, particularly because they are _not_ exceptive, and give a very just impression of the character which I am endeavoring to portray. Squire A---- was a plain, honest farmer, who had distinguished himself as a pioneer and ranger, and was remarkable as a man of undoubted courage, but singularly peaceable temper. In the year eighteen hundred and twenty, he received from Governor Bond of Illinois, a commission as justice of the peace, and though he was not very clear what his duties, dignities, and responsibilities, precisely were, like a patriot and a Roman, he determined to discharge them to the letter. At the period of his appointment, he was at feud with one of his neighbors about that most fruitful of all subjects of quarrel, a division-fence; and as such differences always are, the dispute had been waxing warmer for several months. He received his docket, blanks, and "Form-Book," on Saturday evening, and though he had as yet no suits to enter and no process to issue, was thus provided with all the weapons of justice. On the following Monday morning, he repaired, as usual, to his fields, about half-a-mile from home, and though full of his new dignity, went quietly to work. He had not been there long, before his old and only enemy made his appearance, and opened upon him a volley of abuse in relation to the division-fence, bestowing upon his honor, among other expressive titles, the euphonious epithet of "jackass." A---- bore the attack until it came to this point--which, it would seem, was as far as a man's patience ought to extend--and, it is probable, that had he not been a legal functionary, a battle would have ensued "then and there." But it was beneath the dignity thus outraged, to avenge itself by a vulgar fisticuff, and A---- bethought him of a much better and more honorable course. He threw his coat across his arm, and marched home. There he took down his new docket, and upon the first page, recorded the case of the "_People of the State of Illinois_ vs. _John Braxton_" (his enemy). He then entered up the following judgment: "_The defendant in this case, this day, fined ten dollars and costs, for_ CONTEMPT OF COURT, _he having called_ US _a jackass_!" On the opposite page is an entry of satisfaction, by which it appears that he forthwith issued an execution upon the judgment, and collected the money! This pretext of "contempt" was much in vogue, as a means of reaching offences not expressly provided for by statute; but the justice was never at a loss for expedients, even in cases entirely without precedent, as the following anecdote will illustrate:-- A certain justice, in the same state of Illinois, was one day trying, for an aggravated assault, a man who was too much intoxicated fully to realize the import of the proceedings or the dignity of the court. He was continually interrupting witnesses, contradicting their testimony, and swearing at the justice. It soon became evident that he must be silenced or the trial adjourned. The justice's patience at length gave way. He ordered the constable to take the obstreperous culprit to a creek, which ran near the office, "and duck him until he was sober enough to be quiet and respect the court!" This operation the constable alone could not perform, but in due time he brought the defendant back dripping from the creek and thoroughly sobered, reporting, at the same time, that he had availed himself of the assistance of two men, Messrs. B---- and L----, in the execution of his honor's commands. The trial then went quietly on, the defendant was fined for a breach of the peace, and ordered to pay _the costs_: one item of which was two dollars to Messrs. B---- and L---- "for assisting the constable in ducking the prisoner!" But, as the justice could find no form nor precedent for hydropathic services, he entered the charge as "_witness fees_," and required immediate payment! The shivering culprit, glad to escape on any terms, paid the bill and vanished! Whatever might have been the prevailing opinion, as to the legality of such a proceeding, the ridicule attaching to it would effectually have prevented any remedy--most men being willing to forgive a little irregularity, for the sake of substantial justice and "a good joke." But the summary course, adopted by these magistrates, sometimes worked even greater injustice--as might have been expected; and of this, the following is an example:-- About the year eighteen hundred and twenty-six, there lived, in a certain part of the west, a man named Smedley, who, so far as the collection of debts was concerned, was entirely "law-proof." He seemed to have a constitutional indisposition to paying anything he owed: and, though there were sundry executions in the hands of officers against him--and though he even seemed thrifty enough in his pecuniary affairs--no property could ever be found, upon which they could be levied. There was, at the same time, a constable in the neighborhood, a man named White, who was celebrated, in those days of difficult collections, for the shrewdness and success of his official exploits; and the justice upon whom he usually attended, was equally remarkable, for the high hand with which he carried his authority. But, though two executions were placed in the hands of the former, upon judgments on the docket of the latter, months passed away, without anything being realized from the impervious defendant, Smedley. Whenever the constable found him in possession of property, and made a levy, it was proven to belong to some one else; and the only result of his indefatigable efforts, was the additions of heavy costs to the already hopeless demand. At length, however, White learned that Smedley had _traded horses_ with a man named Wyatt, and he straightway posted off to consult the magistrate. Between them, the plan of operations was agreed upon. White levied first upon the horse then in the possession of Smedley, taking him under _one_ of the two writs: he then levied _the other_ execution upon the horse which Smedley had traded to Wyatt. The latter, apprehending the loss of his property, claimed the first horse--that which he had traded to Smedley. But, upon the "trial of the right of property," the justice decided that the horse was found in the possession of Smedley, and was, therefore, subject to levy and sale. He was accordingly sold, and the first judgment was satisfied. Wyatt then claimed the _second_ horse--that which he had received from Smedley. But, upon a similar "trial"--after severely reprimanding Wyatt for claiming _both_ horses, when, on his own showing, he never owned but _one_--the justice decided that the property in dispute had been in the possession of Smedley at the rendition of the judgment, and was therefore, like the other, subject to a lien, and equally liable to levy and sale! And accordingly, this horse, also, was sold, to satisfy the second execution, and Wyatt was dismissed by the justice, with no gentle admonition, "to be careful in future with whom he swapped horses!" A piece of advice which he probably took, and for which he ought to have been duly grateful! Fallen humanity, however, is very perverse; and it is at least supposable, that, having lost his horse, he considered himself hardly used--an opinion in which my legal readers will probably concur. Before leaving this part of my subject, I will relate another anecdote, which, though it refers more particularly to constables, serves to illustrate the characteristics of the early officers of the law--justices, as well as others:-- The constable who figured so advantageously in the anecdote last related, had an execution against a man named Corson, who was almost as nearly "law proof" as Smedley. He had been a long time endeavoring to realize something, but without success. At length, he was informed, that Corson had sued another man, upon an account, before a justice in a distant part of the same county. This, the delinquent officer at once saw, gave him a chance to secure something; and, on the day of trial, away he posted to the justice's office. Here, he quietly seated himself, and watched the course of the proceeding. The trial went on, and, in due time, the justice decided the cause in favor of Corson. At this juncture, White arose, and, while the justice was entering up judgment, approached the table. When the docket was about to be laid aside, he interposed:-- "Stop!" said he, placing his hand upon the docket, "_I levels on this judgment_!" And, giving no attention to remonstrances, he demanded and obtained the execution. On this he collected the money, and at once applied it to that, which he had been so long carrying--thus settling two controversies, by diligence and force of will. He was certainly a valuable officer! Thus irregular and informal were many of the proceedings of the primitive legal functionaries; but a liberal view of their characters must bring us to the conclusion, that their influence upon the progress of civilization of the country, was, on the whole, decidedly beneficial. VII. THE PEDDLER. "This is a traveller, sir; knows men and Manners."-- BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER. Previous to the organization of civil government, and "the form and pressure" given to the times by this and its attendant circumstances, the primitive tastes and habits of the western people, excluded many of those artificial wants which are gratified by commerce, and afforded no room for traders, excepting those who sold the absolute necessaries of life. In those days, housekeeping was a very simple matter. Neither steam-engines nor patent cook-stoves were yet known, as necessary adjuncts to a kitchen; the housewife would have "turned up her nose" in contempt of a bake-oven: would have thrown a "Yankee reflector" over the fence, and branded the innovator with the old-fashioned gridiron. Tin was then supposed to be made only for cups and coffee-pots: pie-pans had not yet even entered "the land of dreams;" and the tea-kettle, which then "sang songs of family glee," was a quaint, squat figure, resembling nothing so much as an over-fed duck, and poured forth its music from a crooked, quizzical spout, with a notch in its iron nozzle. If its shut-iron lid was ornamented with a brass button, for a handle, it was thought to be manufactured in superior style. Iron spoons were good enough for the daintiest mouth; and a full set of pewter was a household treasure. China dishes and silver plate had been heard of, but belonged to the same class of marvellous things, with Aladdin's lamp and Fortunatus's purse. Cooking was not yet reduced to a science, and eating was like sleep--a necessity, not a mere amusement. The only luxuries known, were coffee and sugar; and these, with domestics and other cotton fabrics, were the chief articles for which the products of the earth were bartered. French cloths and Parisian fashions were still less known than silver spoons and "rotary stoves." The men wore homemade jeans, cut after the _mode_ of the forest: its dye a favorite "Tennessean" brownish-yellow; and the women were not ashamed to be seen in linsey-wolsey, woven in the same domestic loom. Knitting was then not only an accomplishment, but a useful art; and the size which a "yarn" stocking gave to a pretty ankle, was not suffered to overbalance the consideration of its comfort. The verge of nakedness was not then the region of modesty: the neck and its adjacent parts were covered in preference to the hands; and, in their barbarous ignorance, the women thought it more shame to appear in public half-dressed, than to wear a comfortable shoe. They were certainly a very primitive people--unrefined, unfashionable, "coarse"--and many of their sons and daughters are even now ashamed to think what "savages" their parents were! In their mode of life, they sought comfort, not "appearances;" and many things which their more sophisticated descendants deem necessaries, they contemned as luxuries. But, in the course of time, these things began to change, for simplicity is always "primitive," and the progress of refinement is only the multiplication of wants. As the country was reduced to cultivation, and peace settled upon its borders, new classes of emigrants began to take possession of the soil; and, for the immediate purposes of rapid advancement, and especially of social improvement, they were better classes than their predecessors: for, as the original pioneers had always lived a little beyond the influences of regular civilization, these had remained within its limits until the pressure of legal organization began to grow irksome to their partially untamed spirits. There was, indeed, an unbroken gradation of character, from the nearly savage hunter, who visited the country only because it was uninhabited, except by wild beasts, to the genuine _citizen_, who brought with him order, and industry, and legal supremacy. The emigrants, of whom we are now writing, constituted the third step in this progression; and they imported along with them, or drew after them, the peculiarities belonging to their own degree of advancement. Their notions of comfort and modes of living, though still quite crude, indicated an appreciable stage of refinement. They were better supplied, for example, with cooking utensils--their household furniture was not so primitive--and in wearing apparel, they manifested some regard to elegance as well as comfort. Social intercourse disseminated these ideas among those to whom they were novel; where, previously, the highest motive to improvement had been a desire for convenience, the idea of gentility began to claim an influence; and some of the more moderate embellishments of life assumed the place of the mere necessaries. The transition was not rapid nor violent, like all permanent changes, it was the work of years, marked by comparatively slow gradations. First, tin-ware, of various descriptions, became necessary to the operations of the kitchen; and that which had been confined to one or two articles, was now multiplied into many forms. A housewife could no more bake a pie without a "scalloped" pie-pan, than without a fire: a tin-bucket was much more easily handled than one of cedar or oak; and a pepper-box, of the same material, was as indispensable as a salt-cellar. A little tea was occasionally added to the ancient regimen of coffee, and thus a tin-canister became necessary for the preservation of the precious drug. With tea came queensware: and half-a-dozen cups and saucers, usually of a dingy white, with a raised blue edge, were needful for the pranking of the little cupboard. But it was not only in the victualing department that the progress of refinement could be traced; for the thrifty housewife, who thought it proper to adorn her table, and equip her kitchen with all the late improvements, could not, of course, entirely overlook "the fashions:" the decoration of her person has been, in all ages, the just and honest pride of woman. Linsey-wolsey began to give place to calicoes and many-colored prints; calf-skin shoes were antiquated by the use of kid; and ribands fluttered gracefully upon new-fashioned bonnets. Progress of this kind never takes a step backward: once possessed of an improvement in personal comfort, convenience, or adornment, man--or woman--seldom gives it up. Thus, these things, once used, thenceforth became wants, whose gratification was not to be foregone: and it is one of the principles governing commerce, that the demand draws to it the supply. There were few "country stores," in those days, and the settlements were so scattered as to make it sometimes very inconvenient to visit them. From ten to twenty miles was a moderate distance to the dépôt of supplies; and a whole day was usually consumed in going and returning. The visits were, therefore, not very frequent--the purchases for many weeks--perhaps months--being made on each occasion. This was a very inconvenient mode of "shopping," even for the energetic women of that day; and, since the population would not justify more numerous "stores," it was desirable that some new system should be introduced, capable of supplying the demand at the cost of less trouble, and fewer miles of travel. To answer this necessity there was but one way--the "storekeeper" must carry his wares to the doors of his customers. And thus arose the occupation of the _Peddler_, or, as he called himself, the "travelling merchant." The population of the country was then almost exclusively agricultural--the mechanic arts belong to a more advanced period. The consequence was, that the first articles carried about from house to house, were such as are manufactured by artisans--and the chief of these was tin-ware. The tinkers of the rural districts in older countries, were, however, not known in this--they were not adapted to the genius of the people. The men who sold the ware were, scarcely ever, the same who made it; and, though the manual dexterity of most of these ready men, might enable them to mend a broken pan, or a leaky coffeepot, their skill was seldom put in requisition. Besides, since the mending of an old article might interfere with the sale of a new one, inability to perform the office was more frequently assumed than felt. In the course of time--as the people of the country began to acquire new ideas, and discover new wants--other articles were added to the peddler's stock. Calicoes were often carried in the same box with tin pans--cotton checks and ginghams were stowed away beneath tin-cups and iron-spoons--shining coffee-pots were crammed with spools of thread, papers of pins, cards of horn-buttons, and cakes of shaving-soap--and bolts of gaudy riband could be drawn from pepper-boxes and sausage-stuffers. Table-cloths, of cotton or brown linen, were displayed before admiring eyes, which had turned away from all the brightness of new tin plates; and knives and forks, all "warranted pure steel," appealed to tastes, which nothing else could excite. New razors touched the men "in tender places," while shining scissors clipped the purses of the women. Silk handkerchiefs and "fancy" neckcloths--things till then unknown--could occupy the former, while the latter covetously turned over and examined bright ribands and fresh cotton hose. The peddler was a master of the art of pleasing all tastes: even the children were not forgotten; for there were whips and jew's-harps for the boys, and nice check aprons for the girls. (The taste for "playing mother" was as much an instinct, with the female children of that day, as it is in times more modern; but life was yet too earnest to display it in the dressing and nursing of waxen babies.) To suit the people from whom the peddler's income was derived, he must consult at least the appearance of utility, in every article he offered; for, though no man could do more, to coax the money out of one's pocket, without leaving an equivalent, even _he_ could not succeed in such an enterprise, against the matter-of-fact pioneer. The "travelling merchants" of this country were generally what their customers called "Yankees"--that is, New-Englanders, or descendants of the puritans, whether born east of the Hudson or not. And, certainly, no class of men were ever better fitted for an occupation, than were those for "peddling." The majority of them were young men, too; for the "Yankee" who lives beyond middle age, without providing snug quarters for the decline of life, is usually not even fit for a peddler. But, though often not advanced in years, they often exhibited qualities, which one would have expected to find only in men of age and experience. They could "calculate," with the most absolute certainty, what precise stage of advancement and cultivation, was necessary to the introduction of every article of merchandise their stock comprised. Up to a certain limit, they offered, for example, linen table-cloths: beyond that, cotton was better and more saleable; in certain settlements, they could sell numbers of the finer articles, which, in others, hung on their hands like lead; and they seemed to know, the moment they breathed the air of a neighborhood, what precise character of goods was most likely to pay. Thus--by way of illustration--it might seem, to one not experienced in reading the signs of progress, a matter of nice speculation and subtle inquiry, to determine what exact degree of cultivation was necessary, to make profitable the trade in _clocks_. But I believe there is no instance of an unsuccessful clock-peddler on record; and, though this fact may be accounted for, superficially, by asserting that time is alike important to all men, and a measure of its course, therefore, always a want, a little reflection will convince us, that this explanation is more plausible than sound. It is, perhaps, beyond the capacity of any man, to judge unerringly, by observation, of the usual signs of progress, the exact point at which a community, or a man, has arrived in the scale of cultivation; and it may seem especially difficult, to determine commercially, what precise articles, of use or ornament, are adapted to the state indicated by those signs. But that there are such indications, which, if properly attended to, will be unfailing guides, is not to be denied. Thus, the quick observation of a clock-peddler would detect among a community of primitive habits, the growing tendency to regularity of life; for, as refinement advances, the common affairs of everyday existence, feeling the influence first, assume a degree of order and arrangement; and from the display of this improvement, the trader might draw inferences favorable to his traffic. Eating, for example, as he would perceive, is done at certain hours of the day--sleep is taken between fixed periods of the night and morning--especially, public worship--which is one of the best and surest signs of social advancement--must be held at a time generally understood. The peddler might conclude, also, when he saw a glazed window in a house, that the owner was already possessed of a clock--which, perhaps, needed repairing--or, at least, was in great need of one, if he had not yet made the purchase. One of these shrewd "calculators" once told me, that, when he saw a man with four panes of glass in his house, and no clock, he either sold him one straightway, or "set him down crazy, or a screw." "Have you no other 'signs of promise'"? I asked. "O yes," he replied, "many! For instance: When I am riding past a house--(I always ride slowly)--I take a general and particular survey of the premises--or, as the military men say, I make a _reconnaissance_; and it must be a very bare place, indeed, if I can not see some 'sign,' by which to determine, whether the owner needs a clock. If I see the man, himself, I look at his extremities; and by the appearance of hat and boot, I make up my opinion as to whether he knows the value of time: if he wears anything but a cap, I can pretty fairly calculate upon selling him a clock; and if, to the hat, he has added _boots_, I halt at once, and, without ceremony, carry a good one in. "When I see the wife, instead of the husband, I have no difficulty in making up my mind--though the signs about the women are so numerous and minute, that it would be hard to explain them. If one wears a check-apron and sports a calico dress, I know that a 'travelling merchant' has been in the neighborhood; and if he has succeeded in making a reasonable number of sales, I am certain that he has given her such a taste for buying, that I can sell her anything at all: for purchasing cheap goods, to a woman, is like sipping good liquor, to a man--she soon acquires the appetite, and thenceforward it is insatiable. "I have some customers who have a _passion_ for clocks. There is a man on this road, who has one for every room in his house; and I have another with me now--with a portrait of General Jackson in the front--which I expect to add to his stock. There is a farmer not far from here, with whom I have 'traded' clocks every year since I first entered the neighborhood--always receiving about half the value of the article I sell, in money, 'to boot.' There are clock-fanciers, as well as fanciers of dogs and birds; and I have known cases, in which a man would have two or three time-pieces in his house, and not a pair of shoes in the family! But such customers are rare--as they ought to be; and the larger part of our trade is carried on, with people who begin to feel the necessity of regularity--to whom the sun has ceased to be a sufficient guide--and who have acquired some notions of elegance and comfort. And we seldom encounter the least trouble in determining, by the general appearance of the place, whether the occupant has arrived at that stage of refinement." We perceive that the principal study of the peddler is human nature; and though he classifies the principles of his experience, more especially with reference to the profits of his trade, his rapid observation of minor traits and indications, is a talent which might be useful in many pursuits, besides clock-peddling. And, accordingly, we discover that, even after he has abandoned the occupation, and ceased to be a bird of passage, he never fails to turn his learning to a good account. He was distinguished by energy as well as shrewdness, and an enterprising spirit was the first element of his prosperity. There was no corner--no secluded settlement--no out-of-the way place--where he was not seen. Bad roads never deterred him: he could drive his horses and wagon where a four-wheeled vehicle never went before. He understood bearings and distances as well as a topographical engineer, and would go, whistling contentedly, across a prairie or through a forest, where he had not even a "trail" to guide him. He could find fords and crossings where none were previously known to exist; and his pair of lean horses, by the skilful management of their driver, would carry him and his wares across sloughs and swamps, where a steam-engine would have been clogged by the weight of a baby-wagon. If he broke his harness or his vehicle in the wilderness, he could repair it without assistance, for his mechanical accomplishments extended from the shoeing of a horse to the repair of a watch, and embraced everything between. He was never taken by surprise--accidents never came unexpected, and strange events never disconcerted him. He would whistle "Yankee Doodle" while his horses were floundering in a quagmire, and sing "Hail Columbia" while plunging into an unknown river! He never met a stranger, for he was intimately acquainted with a man as soon as he saw him. Introductions were useless ceremonies to him, for he cared nothing about names. He called a woman "ma'am" and a man "mister," and if he could sell either of them a few goods, he never troubled himself or them with impertinent inquiries. Sometimes he had a habit of learning each man's name from his next neighbor, and possessing an excellent memory, he never lost the information thus acquired. When he had passed through a settlement once, he had a complete knowledge of all its circumstances, history, and inhabitants; and, the next year, if he met a child in the road, he could tell you whom it most resembled, and to what family it belonged. He recollected all who were sick on his last visit--what peculiar difficulties each was laboring under--and was always glad to hear of their convalescence. He gathered medicinal herbs along the road, and generously presented them to the housewives where he halted, and he understood perfectly the special properties of each. He possessed a great store of good advice, suited to every occasion, and distributed it with the disinterested benevolence of a philanthropist. He knew precisely what articles of merchandise were adapted to the taste of each customer; and the comprehensive "rule of three" would not have enabled him to calculate more nicely the exact amount of "talk" necessary to convince them of the same. His address was extremely insinuating, for he always endeavored to say the most agreeable things, and no man could judge more accurately what would best please the person addressed. He might be vain enough, but his egotism was never obtruded upon others. He might secretly felicitate himself upon a successful trade, but he never boasted of it. He seemed to be far more interested in the affairs of others than in his own. He had sympathy for the afflictions of his customers, counsel for their difficulties, triumph in their success. Before the introduction of mails, he was the universal news-carrier, and could tell all about the movements of the whole world. He could gossip over his wares with his female customers, till he beguiled them into endless purchases, for he had heard of every death, marriage, and birth within fifty miles. He recollected the precise piece of calico from which Mrs. Jones bought her last new dress, and the identical bolt of riband from which Mrs. Smith trimmed her "Sunday bonnet." He knew whose children went to "meeting" in "store-shoes," whose daughter was beginning to wear long dresses, and whose wife wore cotton hose. He could ring the changes on the "latest fashions" as glibly as the skilfulest _modiste_. He was a _connoisseur_ in colors, and learned in their effects upon complexion. He could laugh the husband into half-a-dozen shirts, flatter the wife into calico and gingham, and praise the children till both parents joined in dressing them anew from top to toe. He always sold his goods "at a ruinous sacrifice," but he seemed to have a dépôt of infinite extent and capacity, from which he annually drew new supplies. He invariably left a neighborhood the loser by his visit, and the close of each season found him inconsolable for his "losses." But the next year he was sure to come back, risen, like the Phoenix, from his own ashes, and ready to be ruined again--in the same way. He could never resist the pleading look of a pretty woman, and if she "jewed" him twenty per cent. (though his profits were only two hundred), the tenderness of his heart compelled him to yield. What wonder is it, then, if he was a prime favorite with all the women, or that his advent, to the children, made a day of jubilee? But the peddler, like every other human "institution," only had "his day." The time soon came when he was forced to give way before the march of newfangledness. The country grew densely populated, neighborhoods became thicker, and the smoke of one man's chimney could be seen from another's front-door. People's wants began to be permanent--they were no longer content with transient or periodical supplies--they demanded something more constant and regular. From this demand arose the little neighborhood "stores," established for each settlement at a central and convenient point--usually at "cross-roads," or next door to the blacksmith's shop--and these it was which superseded the peddler's trade. We could wish to pause here, and, after describing the little dépôt, "take an account of stock:" for no store, not even a sutler's, ever presented a more amusing or characteristic assortment. But since these modest establishments were generally the _nuclei_, around which western towns were built, we must reserve our fire until we reach that subject. But the peddler had not acquired his experience of life for nothing, he was not to be outdone, even by the more aristocratic stationary shop-keeper. When he found his trade declining, he cast about him for a good neighborhood, still uninvaded by the Lombards, and his extensive knowledge of the country soon enabled him to find one. Here he erected his own cabin, and boldly entered the lists against his new competitors. If he could find no eligible point for such an establishment, or if he augured unfavorably of his success in the new walk, he was not cast down. If he could not "keep store," he could at least "keep tavern," an occupation for which his knowledge of the world and cosmopolitan habits, admirably fitted him. In this capacity, we shall have occasion to refer to him again; and have now only to record, that in the progress of time, he grew rich, if not fat, and eventually died, "universally regretted." VIII. THE SCHOOLMASTER. "There, in his quiet mansion, skilled to rule, The village _master_ taught his little school. * * * * * "I knew him well, and every truant knew: * * * * * "Yet he was kind; or, if severe in aught, The love he bore to learning was in fault. The village all declared how much he knew: 'Twas certain he could write, and cipher too."-- GOLDSMITH'S "DESERTED VILLAGE." [Illustration: THE SCHOOLMASTER.] In the progress of society, the physical wants are felt before the intellectual. Men appreciate the necessity for covering their backs and lining their stomachs before storing their minds, and they naturally provide a shelter from the storms of heaven, before they seek (with other learning) a knowledge of the heavenly bodies. Thus the rudest social system comprises something of the mechanic arts--government begins to advance toward the dignity of a science--commerce follows the establishment of legal supremacy--and the education of the citizen comes directly after the recognition of his social and political rights. So, the justice of the peace (among other legal functionaries) indicates subjection, more or less complete, to the regulations of law; the peddler represents the beginning of commercial interests; and the schoolmaster succeeds him, in the natural order of things. It may be possible to preserve a high respect for a _calling_, while we despise the men who exercise it: though I believe this is not one of the rules which "work both ways," and the converse is, therefore, not equally true. A man's occupation affects _him_ more nearly than _he_ does his occupation. A thousand contemptible men will not bring a respectable profession into so much disrepute, as a contemptible profession will a thousand respectable men. All the military talents, for example, of the commander-in-chief of our armies, would not preserve him from contempt, should he set up a barber-shop, or drive a milk-cart; but the barber, or the milkman, might make a thousand blunders at the head of an army, should extravagant democracy elevate him to that position, and yet the rank of a general would be as desirable, because as honorable, as ever. It is certainly true, however, that the most exalted station may be degraded by filling it with a low or despicable incumbent, for the mental effort necessary to the abstraction of the employment from him who pursues it, is one which most men do not take the trouble to make: an effort, indeed, which the majority of men are _incapable_ of making. A vicious priest degrades the priestly vocation--a hypocrite brings reproach upon the religious profession--a dishonest lawyer sinks the legal character--and even the bravest men care but little for promotion in an army, when cowardice and incompetency are rewarded with rank and power. But manifest incapacity, culpable neglect of duty, or even a positively vicious character, will not reduce a calling to contempt, or bring it into disrepute so soon, as any quality which excites ridicule. An awkward figure, a badly-shaped garment, or an ungainly manner, will sometimes outweigh the acquirements of the finest scholar; and the cause of religion has suffered more, from the absence of the softer graces, in its clerical representations, than from all the logic of its adversaries. A laugh is more effectual to subvert an institution, than an argument--for it is easier to make men ashamed, than to convince them. Truth and reason are formidable weapons, but ridicule is stronger than either--or both. Thus: All thinking men will eagerly admit, that the profession of the schoolmaster is, not only respectable, but honorable, alike to the individual, and to the community in which he pursues it: yet, rather than teach a school for a livelihood, the large majority of the same men would "split rails" or cut cord-wood! And this is not because teaching is laborious--though it _is_ laborious, and thankless, too, beyond all other occupations; but because a number and variety of causes, into which we need not inquire, have combined to throw ridicule upon him, who is derisively called the pedagogue--for most men would rather be shot at, than laughed at. Cause and effect are always inter-reactive: and the refusal of the most competent men, to "take up the birch"--which is the effect of this derision--has filled our school-rooms with men, who are, not unfairly, its victims. Thus the profession--(for such is its inherent dignity)--itself, has fallen into discredit--even though the judgment of men universally is, that it is not only useful, but indispensable. Nor is that judgment incorrect. For, though home-education may sometimes succeed, it is usually too fragmentary to be beneficial--private tutors are too often the slaves of their pupils, and can not enforce "attention," the first condition of advancement, where they have not the paraphernalia of command--and, as for self-education, logically there can be no such thing: "one might as well attempt to lift himself over the fence, by the straps of his boots," as to educate himself "without a master." The schoolmaster, then, is a useful member of society--not to be spared at any stage of its progress. But he is particularly necessary to communities which are in the transition state; for, upon the enlightenment of the rising generation depend the success and preservation of growing institutions. Nor does his usefulness consist altogether--or even in a great measure--in the number of facts, sciences, or theories, with which he may store the minds of his pupils. These are not the objects of education, any more than a knowledge of the compartments in a printer's "letter-case," is the ultimate result of the art of printing. The types are so arranged, in order to enable the compositors more conveniently to attain the ends, for which that arrangement is only a preparation: facts and sciences are taught for the improvement of the faculties, in order that they may work with more ease, force, and certainty, upon other and really important things; for education is only the marshalling of powers, preliminary to the great "battle of life." The mind of an uneducated man, however strong in itself, is like an army of undisciplined men--a crowd of chaotic, shapeless, and often misdirected elements. To bring these into proper subjection--to enable him to bind them, with anything like their native force, to a given purpose--a prescribed "training" is necessary; and it is this which education supplies. If you can give a mind the _habit of attention_, all the power it has will be made available: and it is through this faculty, that even dull minds are so frequently able to mount the car of triumph, and ride swiftly past so many, who are immeasurably their superiors. The first element of the discipline which develops this power, is submission to control; and without such subordination, a school can not exist. Thus, the first lesson that children learn from the schoolmaster, is the most valuable acquisition they can make. But it was no easy task to teach this principle to the sturdy children of the early Western "settler;" in this, as in all other things, the difficulty of the labor was in exact proportion to its necessity. The peculiarities of the people, and the state of the country, were not favorable to the establishment of the limited monarchy, requisite to successful teaching. In the first place, the parents very generally undervalued, what they called "mere book-learning." For themselves, they had found more use for a rifle than a pen; and they naturally thought it a much more valuable accomplishment, to be able to scalp a squirrel with a bullet, at a hundred paces, than to read the natural history of the animal in the "picture-book." They were enthusiastic, also, upon the subject of independence; and, though they could control their children sternly enough at home, they were apt to look, with a jealous eye, upon any attempt to establish dominion elsewhere. The children partook largely of the free, wild spirit of their fathers. They were very prompt to resist anything like encroachment upon their privileges or rights, and were, of course, pretty certain to consider even salutary control an attempt to assert a despotism. I believe history contains no record, whatever the annals of fiction may display, of a boy, with much spirit, submitting without a murmur to the authority of the schoolmaster: if such a prodigy of enlightened humility ever existed, he certainly did not live in the west. But a more important difficulty than either of these, was the almost entire want of money in the country; and without this there was but little encouragement for the effort to overcome other obstacles. Money _may_ be only a _representative_ of value, but its absence operates marvellously like the want of the value itself, and the primitive people of those days, and especially that class to which the schoolmaster belonged, had a habit, however illogical, of considering it a desirable commodity, _per se_. All these impediments, however, could, in the course of time, be conquered: the country was improving in social tone; parents must eventually take some pride even in the accomplishments they despised; and patience and gentleness, intermingled, now and then, with a little wholesome severity, will ultimately subdue the most stubborn spirit. As for the pecuniary difficulty, it was, as the political economists will tell us, only the absence of a medium at the worst: and, in its stead, the master could receive boarding, clothing, and the agricultural products of the country. So many barrels of corn, or bushels of wheat, "per quarter," might not be so conveniently handled, but were quite as easy to be counted, as an equal number of dollars; and this primitive mode of payment is even yet practised in many rural districts, perhaps, in both the east and west. To counter-balance its inconvenience of bulk, this "currency" possessed a double advantage over the more refined "medium of exchange" now in use: it was not liable to counterfeits, and the bank from which it issued was certain not to "break." So the schoolmaster was not to be deterred from pursuing his honorable calling, even by the difficulties incident to half-organized communities. Indeed, teaching was the resort, at least temporary, of four fifths of the educated, and nearly an equal number of the uneducated young men, who came to the west: for certainly that proportion of both classes arrived in the country, without money to support, friends to encourage, or pride to deter them. They were almost all what western people call "Yankees"--born and bred east of the Hudson: descendants of the sturdy puritans--and distinguished by the peculiarities of that strongly-marked people, in personal appearance, language, manners, and style and tone of thought. Like the peddlers, they were generally on the sunny side of thirty, full of the hopeful energy which belongs to that period of life, and only submitting to the labors and privations of the present, because through these they looked to the future for better and brighter things. The causes which led to their emigration, were as many and as various as the adventurers whom they moved. They were, most of them, mere boys: young Whittingtons, whom the bells did _not_ ring back, to become lord-mayors; who, indeed, had not even the limited possessions of that celebrated worthy; and, thus destitute, they wandered off, many hundreds of miles, "to see the world and make their fortunes," at an age when the youth of the present day are just beginning to think of college. They brought neither money, letters of introduction, nor bills of exchange: they expected to find neither acquaintance nor relatives. But they knew--for it was one of the wise maxims of their unromantic fathers--that industry and honesty must soon gather friends, and that all other desirable things would speedily follow. They had great and just confidence in their own abilities to "get along;" and if they did not actually think that the whole world belonged to them, they were well-assured, that in an incredibly short space of time, they would be able to possess a respectable portion of it. A genuine specimen of the class to which most of the early schoolmasters belonged, never felt any misgivings about his own success, and never hesitated to assume any position in life. Neither pride nor modesty was ever suffered to interfere with his action. He would take charge of a numerous school, when he could do little more than write his own name, just as he would have undertaken to run a steamboat, or command an army, when he had never studied engineering or heard of strategy. Nor would he have failed in either capacity: a week's application would make him master of a steam-engine, or a proficient (after the _present manner_ of proficiency) in tactics; and as for his school, he could himself learn at night what he was to teach others on the following day! Nor was this mere "conceit"--though, in some other respects, that word, in its limited sense, was not inapplicable--neither was it altogether ignorant presumption; for one of these men was seldom known to fail in anything he undertook: or, if he did fail, he was never found to be cast down by defeat, and the resiliency of his nature justified his confidence. The pursuit of a certain avocation, for a long period, is apt to warp one's nature to its inequalities; and as the character gradually assumes the peculiar shape, the personal appearance changes in a corresponding direction and degree. Thus, the blacksmith becomes brawny, square, and sturdy, and the characteristic swing of his arm gives tone to his whole bearing: the silversmith acquires a peering, cunning look, as if he were always examining delicate machinery: the physician becomes solemn, stately, pompous, and mysterious, and speaks like "Sir Oracle," as if he were eternally administering a bread-pill, or enjoining a regimen of drugs and starvation: the lawyer assumes a keen, alert, suspicious manner, as if he were constantly in pursuit of a latent perjury, or feared that his adversary might discover a flaw in his "case:" and so on, throughout the catalogue of human avocations. But, among all these, that which marks its votaries most clearly, is school-teaching. There seems to be a sort of antagonism between this employment and all manner of neatness, and the circle of the schoolmaster's female acquaintance never included the Graces. Attention to personal decoration is usually, though not universally, in an inverse ratio to mental garniture; and an artistically-tied cravat seems inconsistent with the supposition of a well-stored head above it. A mind which is directed toward the evolution of its own powers, has but little time to waste in adorning the body; and a fashionable costume would appear to cramp the intellect, as did the iron-vessel the genius of the Arabian tale. Although, therefore, there are numerous exceptions--persons whose externals are as elegant as their pursuits are intellectual--men of assiduously-cultivated minds are apt to be careless of appearances, and the principle applies, with especial force, to those whose business it is to develop the minds of others. Nor was the schoolmaster of early days in the west, an exception to the rule. He might not be as learned, nor as purely intellectual, as some of our modern college-professors, but he was as ungraceful, and as awkwardly clad, as the most slovenly of them all. Indeed, he came of a stock which has never been noted for any of the lighter accomplishments, or "carnal graces;" for at no period of its eventful history, has the puritan type been a remarkable elegant one. The men so named have been better known for bravery than taste, for zeal than polish; and since there is always a correspondence between habits of thought and feeling and the external appearance, the _physique_ of the race is more remarkable for rigor of muscle and angularity of outline, than for accuracy of proportion or smoothness of finish. Neither Apollo nor Adonis was in any way related to the family; and if either had been, the probability is that his kindred would have disowned him. Properly to represent his lineage, therefore, the schoolmaster could be neither dandy nor dancing-master; and, as if to hold him to his integrity, nature had omitted to give him any temptation, in his own person, to assume either of these respectable characters. The tailor that could shape a coat to fit _his_ shoulders, never yet handled shears; and he would have been as ill at ease, in a pair of fashionable pantaloons, as if they had been lined with chestnut-burrs. He was generally above the medium height, with a very decided stoop, as if in the habit of carrying burthens; and a long, high nose, with light blue eyes, and coarse, uneven hair, of a faded weather-stain color, gave his face the expression answering to this lathy outline. Though never very slender, he was always thin: as if he had been flattened out in a rolling-mill; and rotundity of corporation was a mode of development not at all characteristic. His complexion was seldom florid, and not often decidedly pale; a sort of sallow discoloration was its prevailing hue, like that which marks the countenance of a consumer of "coarse" whiskey and strong tobacco. But these failings were not the cause of his cadaverous look--for a faithful representative of the class held them both in commendable abhorrence--_they were not the vices of his nature_. There was a sub-division of the class, a secondary type, not so often observed, but common enough to entitle it to a brief notice. _He_ was, generally, short, square, and thick--the latitude bearing a better proportion to the longitude than in his lank brother--but never approaching anything like roundness. With this attractive figure, he had a complexion of decidedly bilious darkness, and what is commonly called a "dish-face." His nose was depressed between the eyes, an arrangement which dragged the point upward in the most cruel manner, but gave it an expression equally ludicrous and impertinent. A pair of small, round, black eyes, encompassed--like two little feudal fortresses, each by its moat--with a circle of yellowish white, peered out from under brows like battlements. Coarse, black hair, always cut short, and standing erect, so as to present something the appearance of a _chevaux de frise_, protected a hard, round head--a shape most appropriate to his lineage--while, with equal propriety, ears of corresponding magnitude stood boldly forth to assert their claim to notice. Both these types were distinguished for large feet, which no boot could enclose, and hands broad beyond the compass of any glove. Neither was ever known to get drunk, to grow fat, to engage in a game of chance, or to lose his appetite: it became the teacher of "ingenuous youth" to preserve an exemplary bearing before those whom he was endeavoring to benefit; while respectable "appearances," and proper appreciation of the good things of life, were the _alpha_ and _omega_ of his system of morality. But the schoolmaster--and we now include both sub-divisions of the class--was not deficient as an example in many other things, to all who wished to learn the true principles of living. Among other things, he was distinguished for a rigid, iron-bound economy: a characteristic which it might have been well to impart to many of his pupils. But that which the discreet master denominated _prudence_, the extravagant and wrong-headed scholar was inclined to term _meanness_: and historical truth compels us to admit, that the rigor of grim economy sometimes wore an aspect of questionable austerity. Notwithstanding this, however, when we reflect upon the scanty compensation afforded the benefactor of the rising generation, we can not severely blame his penurious tenacity any more than we can censure an empty wine-cask for not giving forth the nectar which we have never poured into it. If, accordingly, he was out at the elbows, we are bound to conclude that it was because he had not the money to buy a new coat; and if he never indulged himself in any of the luxuries of life, it was, probably, because the purchase of its necessaries had already brought him too near the bottom of his purse. He was always, moreover, "a close calculator," and, with a wisdom worthy of all imitation, never mortgaged the future for the convenience of the present. Indeed, this power of "calculation" was not only a talent but a passion: you would have thought that his progenitors had been arithmeticians since the time of Noah! He could "figure up" any proposition whatsoever: but he was especially great upon the question, how much he could save from his scanty salary, and yet live to the end of the year. In fact, it was only _living_ that he cared for. The useful, with him, was always superior to the ornamental; and whatever was not absolutely necessary, he considered wasteful and extravagant. Even the profusion of western hospitality was, in his eyes, a crime against the law of prudence, and he would as soon have forgiven a breach of good morals as a violation of this, his favorite rule. As might have been expected, he carried this principle with him into the school-room, and was very averse to teaching anything beyond what would certainly "pay." He rigidly eschewed embellishment, and adorned his pupils with no graceful accomplishments. It might be that he never taught anything above the useful branches of education, because he had never learned more himself; but it is certain that he would not have imparted merely polite learning, had his own training enabled him to do so: for he had, constitutionally, a high contempt for all "flimsy" things, and, moreover, he was not employed or paid to teach rhetoric or _belles-lettres_, and, "on principle," he never gave more in return than the value of the money he received. With this reservation, his duties were always thoroughly performed, for neither by nature, education, nor lineage, was he likely to slight any recognised obligation. He devoted his time and talents to his school, as completely as if he had derived from it the income of a bishop; and the iron constitution, of both body and mind, peculiar to his race, enabled him to endure a greater amount of continuous application than any other man. Indeed, his powers of endurance were quite surprising, and the fibre of his mind was as tough as that of his body. Even upon a quality so valuable as this, however, he never prided himself; for, excepting the boast of race, which was historical and not unjustifiable, he _had_ no pride. He might be a little vain; and, in what he said and did, more especially in its manner, there might occasionally be a shade of self-conceit: for he certainly entertained no mean opinion of himself. This might be a little obtrusive, too, at times; for he had but slight veneration for men, or their feelings, or opinions; and he would sometimes pronounce a judgment in a tone of superiority justly offensive. But he possessed the uncommon virtue of sincerity: he thoroughly believed in the infallibility of his own conclusions; and for this the loftiness of his tone might be forgiven. The most important of the opinions thus expressed, were upon religious subjects, for Jews, puritans, and Spaniards, have always been very decided controversialists. His theology was grim, solemn, and angular, and he was as combative as one of Cromwell's disputatious troopers. In his capacious pocket, he always carried a copy of the New Testament--as, of old, the carnal controvertists bore a sword buckled to the side. Thus armed, he was a genuine polemical "swash-buckler," and would whip out his Testament, as the bravo did his weapon, to cut you in two without ceremony. He could carve you into numerous pieces, and season you with scriptural salt and pepper; and he would do it with a gusto so serious, that it would have been no unreasonable apprehension that he intended to eat you afterward. And the value of his triumph was enhanced, too, by the consideration that it was won by no meretricious graces or rhetorical flourishes; for the ease of his gesticulation was such as you see in the arms of a windmill, and his enunciation was as nasal and monotonous as that of the Reverend Eleazar Poundtext, under whose ministrations he had been brought up in all godliness. But he possessed other accomplishments beside those of the polemic. He was not, it is true, overloaded with the learning of "the schools"--was, in fact, quite ignorant of some of the branches of knowledge which he imparted to his pupils: yet this was never allowed to become apparent, for as we have intimated, he would frequently himself acquire, at night, the lessons which he was to teach on the morrow. But time was seldom wasted among the people from whom he sprang, and this want of preparation denoted that his leisure hours had been occupied in possessing himself of other acquirements. Among these, the most elegant, if not the most useful, was music, and his favorite instrument was the flute. In "David Copperfield," Dickens describes a certain flute-playing tutor, by the name of Mell, concerning whom, and the rest of mankind, he expresses the rash opinion, "after many years of reflection," that "nobody ever could have played worse." But Dickens never saw Strongfaith Lippincott, the schoolmaster, nor heard his lugubrious flute, and he therefore knows nothing of the superlative degree of detestable playing. There _are_ instruments upon which even an unskilful performer may make tolerable music, but the flute is not one of them--the man who murders _that_, is a malefactor entitled to no "benefit of clergy:" and our schoolmaster _did_ murder it in the most inhuman manner! But, let it be said in mitigation of his offence, he had never received the benefit of any scientific teaching--he had not been "under the tuition of the celebrated Signor Wheeziana," nor had he profited by "the invaluable instructions of the unrivalled Bellowsblauer"--and it is very doubtful whether he would have gained much advantage from them, had he met the opportunity. He knew that, in order to make a noise on the flute, or, indeed, anywhere else, it was necessary to _blow_, and blow he did, like Boreas! He always carried the instrument in his pocket, and on being asked to play--a piece of politeness for which he always looked--he drew it out with the solemnity of visage with which a tender-hearted sheriff produces a death-warrant, and while he screwed the joints together, sighed blasts like a furnace. He usually deposited himself upon the door-sill--a favorite seat for him--and collecting the younger members of the family about him, thence poured forth his strains of concentrated mournfulness. He invariably selected the most melancholy tunes, playing, with a more profound solemnity, the gloomiest psalms and lamentations. When he ventured upon secular music, he never performed anything more lively than "The Mistletoe Bough," or "Barbara Allen," and into each he threw a spirit so much more dismal than the original, as almost to induce his hearers to imitate the example of the disconsolate "Barbara," and "turn their faces to the wall" in despair of being ever again able to muster a smile! He was not a scientific musician, then--fortunately for his usefulness--because thorough musicians are generally "good-for-nothing" else. But music was not a science among the pioneers, though the undertone of melancholy feeling, to which all sweet sounds appeal, was as easily reached in them as in any other people. Their wants in this, as in other things, were very easily satisfied--they were susceptible of pleasure from anything which was in the least commendable: and not feeling obliged, by any captious canon, to condemn nine true notes, because of the tenth false one, they allowed themselves to enjoy the best music they could get, without thinking of the damage done their musical and critical reputation. But his flute was not the only means of pleasing within the schoolmaster's reach: for he could flatter as well as if the souls of ten courtiers had transmigrated into his single body. He might not do it quite so gracefully as one of these, nor with phrases so well-chosen, or so correctly pronounced, but what he said was always cunningly adapted to the character of the person whom he desired to move. He had "a deal of candied courtesy," especially for the women; and though his sturdy manhood and the excellent opinion of himself--both of which came to him from his ancestry--usually preserved him from the charge of servility, he was sometimes a "cozener" whose conscience annoyed him with very few scruples. Occasionally he might be seen fawning upon the rich; but it was not with him--as it usually is with the parasites of wealthy men--because he thought Dives more respectable, but more _useful_, on account of his money: the opulent possessed what the indigent wanted, and the shortest road to the goal of Cupidity, lay through the region of Vanity. There was none of that servility which Mr. Carlyle has attempted to dignify with the name of "hero-worship," for the rich man was rather a bird to be plucked, than a "hero" to be worshipped. And though it may seem that I do the schoolmaster little honor by the distinction, I can not but think cupidity a more manly trait than servility: the beast of prey a more respectable animal than the hound. But the schoolmaster's obsequiousness was more in manner than in inclination, and found its excuse in the dependence of his circumstances. It has been immemorially the custom of the world, practically to undervalue his services, and in all time teaching and poverty have been inseparable companions. Nobody ever cared how poorly he was clad, how laborious his life, or how few his comforts; and if he failed to attend to his own interests by all the arts in his power, no one, certainly, would perform the office for him. He was expected to make himself generally useful without being particular about his compensation: he was willing to do the one, but was, very naturally, rather averse to the other: that which justice would not give him, he managed to procure by stratagem. His manners thus acquired the characteristics we have enumerated, with also others. He was, for example, very officious; a peculiarity which might, perhaps, be derived from his parentage, but which was never repressed by his occupation. The desire to make himself agreeable, and his high opinion of his ability to do so, rendered his tone and bearing very familiar; but this was, also, a trait which he shared with his race, and one which has contributed, as much as any other, to bring the people called "Yankees" into contempt in the west. The men of that section are not themselves reserved, and hate nothing more than ceremonious politeness: but they like to be the first to make advances, and their demonstrations are all hearty, blunt, and open. They therefore disliked anything which has an insinuating tone, and the man who attempts to ingratiate himself with them, whether it be by elaborate arts or sidelong familiarity, at once arms them against them. The schoolmaster was inquisitive, also, and to that western men most decidedly object. They have little curiosity themselves, and seldom ask impertinent questions. When they do so, it is almost always for the purpose of insulting the man to whom they are put, and _never_ to make themselves agreeable. The habit of asking numerous questions was, therefore, apt to prejudice them against men whose characteristics might be, in other respects, very estimable; and it must be acknowledged, that vulgar and obtrusive impertinence is an unfortunate accompaniment to an introduction. But the schoolmaster never meant to be impertinent, for he was far from being quarrelsome (except with his scholars), and the idea that any one could be otherwise than pleased with his notice, however given, never entered his mind. Though his questions were, for the most part, asked to gratify a constitutional curiosity, he was actuated in some degree, also, by the notion that his condescension would be acceptably interpreted by those whom he thus favored. But, like many other benevolent men, who put force upon their inclinations for the benefit of their neighbors, he was mistaken in his "calculation;" and where he considered himself a benefactor, he was by others pronounced a "bore." The fact is, he had some versatility, and, like most men of various powers, he was prone to think himself a much greater man than he really was. He was not peculiarly fitted to shine as a gallant "in hall or bower," but had he been the climax of knightly qualities, the very impersonation of beauty, grace, and accomplishment, he could not have been better adapted than, in his own estimation, he already was, to please the fancy of a lady. He was blissfully unconscious of every imperfection; and displayed himself before what he thought the admiring gaze of all _dames_ and _demoiselles_, as proudly as if he had been the all-accomplished victor in some passage of arms. Yet he carried himself, in outward appearance, as meekly as the humblest Christian, and took credit to himself accordingly. He seldom pressed his advantages to the utter subjugation of the sighing dames, but deported himself with commendable forbearance toward the weak and defenceless whom his perfections had disarmed. He was as merciful as he was irresistible: as considerate as he was beautiful. "What a saint of a knight is the knight of Saint John!" The personal advantages which he believed made him so dangerous to the peace of woman, were counteracted, thus, by his saintly piety. For--as it became him to be, both in the character of a man, and in that of a descendant of the puritans--he was always habited in "the livery of heaven." Some ill-natured and suspicious people, it is true, were inclined to call his exemplary "walk" hypocritical, and to stigmatise his pious "conversation" as _cant_. But the ungodly world has always persecuted the righteous, and the schoolmaster was correct in attributing their sneers to the rebuke which his example gave to their wickedness, and to make "capital" out of the "persecution." And who shall blame him--when in the weary intervals of a laborious and thankless profession, fatigue repressed enthusiasm--if he sometimes eked out the want of inspiration by a godly snuffle? True piety reduces even the weapons of the scorner to the service of religion, and the citadel of the Gloomy Kingdom is bombarded with the artillery of Satan! Thus, the nose, which is so serviceable in the production of the devilish and unchristian sneer, is elevated by a saintlike zeal, to the expression of a devout whine: and this I believe to be the only satisfactory explanation which has ever been given, of the connection, in so many good men, between the _nasal_ and the _religious_! But the schoolmaster usually possessed genuine religious feeling, as well as a pious manner; and, excepting an occasional display of hereditary, and almost unconscious, cunning, he lived "a righteous and upright life." The process of becoming a respectable and respected citizen was a very short and simple one--and whether the schoolmaster designed to remain only a lord of the ferrule, or casting the insignia of his office behind him, to seek higher things, he was never slow in adopting it. Among his scholars, there were generally half-a-dozen or more young women--marriageable daughters of substantial men; and from this number he selected, courted, and espoused, some healthy, buxom girl, the heiress of a considerable plantation or a quantity of "wild land." He always sought these two requisites combined--for he was equally fond of a fine person and handsome estate. Upon the land, he generally managed to find an eligible town-site; and, being a perfect master of the art of building cities on paper, and puffing them into celebrity, his sales of town-lots usually brought him a competent fortune. As years rolled on, his substance increased with the improvement of the country--the rougher points of his character were gradually rubbed down--age and gray hairs thickened upon his brow--honors, troops of friends, and numerous children, gathered round him--and the close of his career found him respected in life and lamented in death. His memory is a monument of what honesty and industry, even without worldly advantages, may always accomplish. [NOTE.--A friend expresses a doubt whether I have not made the foregoing portrait too hard-featured for historical accuracy; and, by way of fortifying his opinion, points to illustrious examples of men who have taught schools in their youth--senators and statesmen--some of whom now hold prominent positions before the people, even for the highest offices in their gift. But these men never belonged to the class which I have attempted to portray. Arriving in this country in youth, without the means of subsistence--in many cases, long before they had acquired the professions which afterward made them famous--they resorted to school-teaching as a mere expedient for present support, without any intention to make it the occupation of their lives, or the means of their advancement. They were moved by an ambition which looked beyond it, and they invariably abandoned it so soon as they had prepared themselves for another pursuit. But the genuine _character_ took it up as a permanent employment--he looked to it not only as a means of temporary subsistence, but as a source, by some of the direct or indirect channels which we have indicated, of lasting income--and he never threw it up until he had already secured that to which the other class, when _they_ abandoned the occupation, were still looking forward. In the warfare against Ignorance, therefore, these, whom we have described, were the regular army, while the exceptions were but volunteers for a limited period, and, in the muster-roll of permanent strength, they are, therefore, not included.] [Illustration: THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.] IX. THE SCHOOLMISTRESS "And yet I love thee not--thy brow Is but the sculptor's mould: It wants a shade, it wants a glow-- It is less fair than cold." L. E. L. But the family of the pioneer consisted of girls as well as boys; and though the former were never so carefully educated as the latter, they were seldom allowed to go wholly untaught. The more modern system, which separates the sexes while infants, and never suffers them to come together again until they are "marriageable," was not then introduced; and we think it would have been no great misfortune to the country had it remained in Spain, whence it would seem to have been imported. Children of both sexes were intended to grow up together--to be educated in company--at least until they have reached the points where their paths naturally diverge, for thus only can they be most useful to each other, in the duties, trials, and struggles, of after life. The artificial refinement which teaches a little girl that a boy is something to be dreaded--a sort of beast of prey--before she recognises any difference, save in dress, can never benefit her at best; for by-and-by she will discover the falsehood: the very instincts of her nature would unveil it, did she learn it in no other way: and as action and reaction are equal, the rebound may cause her to entertain opinions altogether too favorable to those whom she has so foolishly been taught to fear. Nor is the effect of such a system likely to be any better upon the other sex: for it is association with females (as early as possible, too, all the better), which softens, humanizes, graces, and adorns the masculine character. The boy who has been denied such association--the incidents to whose education have made him shy, as so many are, even of little girls--is apt to grow up morose and selfish, ill-tempered, and worse mannered. When the impulses of his developing nature finally force him into female society, he goes unprepared, and comes away without profit: his ease degenerates into familiarity, his conversation is, at best, but washy sentimentalism, and the association, until the accumulated rust of youth is worn away, is of very doubtful benefit to both parties. Indeed, parents who thus govern and educate their children, can find no justification for the practice, until they can first so alter the course of Nature, as to establish the law, that each family shall be composed altogether of girls, or shall consist exclusively of boys! But these modern refinements had not obtained currency, at the period of which we are writing; nor was any such nonsense the motive to the introduction of female teachers. But one of the lessons learned by observation of the domestic circle, and particularly of the influence of the mother over her children, was the principle, that a woman can teach males of a certain age quite as well as a man, and _females much better_; and that, since the school-teacher stands, for the time in the place of the parent, a _mistress_ was far more desirable, especially for the girls, than a _master_. Hence, the latter had exercised his vocation in the west, but a few years, before he was followed by the former. New England was the great nursery of this class, as it was of so many others, transplanted beyond the Alleghenies. Emigration, and the enticements and casualties of a seafaring life--drawing the men into their appropriate channels of enterprise and adventure, had there reduced their number below that of the women--thus remitting many of the latter, to other than the usual and natural occupations of "the sex." Matrimony became a remote possibility to large numbers--attention to household matters gave place to various kinds of light labor--and, since they were not likely to have progeny of their own to rear, many resorted to the teaching of children belonging to others. Idleness was a rare vice; and New England girls--to their honor be it spoken--have seldom resembled "the lilies of the field," in aught, save the fairness of their complexions! They have never displayed much squeamishness--about work: and if they could not benefit the rising generation in a maternal, were willing to make themselves useful in a tutorial capacity. The people of that enlightened section, have always possessed the learning necessary to appreciate, and the philanthropy implied in the wish to dispel, the benighted ignorance of all other quarters of the world; and thus a competent number of them have ever been found willing to give up the comforts of home, for the benefit of the "barbarous west." The schoolmistress, then, generally came from the "cradle" of intelligence, as well as "of liberty," beyond the Hudson; and, in the true spirit of benevolence, she carried her blessings (herself the greatest) across the mountain barrier, to bestow them, _gratis_, upon the spiritually and materially needy, in the valley of the Mississippi. Her vocation, or, as it would now be called, her "mission" was to teach an impulse not only given by her education, but belonging to her nature. She had a constitutional tendency toward it--indeed, a genius for it; like that which impels one to painting, another to sculpture--this to a learned profession, that to a mechanical trade. And so perfectly was she adapted to it, that "the ignorant people of the west" not recognising her "divine appointment," were often at a loss to conjecture, who, or whether anybody, could have taught _her_! For that same "ignorant," and too often, ungrateful people, she was full of tender pity--the yearning of the single-hearted missionary, for the welfare of his flock. _They_ were steeped in darkness, but _she_ carried the light--nay, she _was_ the light! and with a benignity, often evinced by self-sacrifice--she poured it graciously over the land-- "Heaven doth with us, as we with torches do: Not light them for themselves; for if our virtues Did not go forth of us, 't were all alike As if we had them not." For the good of the race, or of any (male) individual, she would immolate herself, even upon the altar of Hymen; and, since the number, who were to be benefited by such self-devotement, was small in New England, but large in the west, she did well to seek a field for her benign dedication, beyond the Alleghenies! Honor to the all-daring self-denial, which brought to the forlorn bachelor of the west, a companion in his labors, a solace in his afflictions, and a mother to his children! Her name was invariably Grace, Charity, or Prudence; and, if names had been always descriptive of the personal qualities of those who bore them, she would have been entitled to all three. In the early ages of the world, names were, or, at least, were supposed to be, fair exponents of the personal characters of those, upon whom they were bestowed. But, _then_, the qualities must be manifested, before the name could be earned, so that all who had never distinguished themselves, in some way, were said to be "nameless." In more modern times, however, an improvement upon this system was introduced: the character was anticipated, and parents called their children what they _wished_ them to be, in the hope that they would grow to the standard thus imposed. And it is no doubt, true, that names thus bestowed had much influence in the development of character--on the same principle, upon which the boards, to which Indian women lash their infants soon after birth, have much to do with the erect carriage of the mature savage. Such an appellation is a perpetual memento of parental counsels--a substitute for barren precept--an endless exhortation to Grace, Charity, or Prudence. I do not mean, that calling a boy Cicero will certainly make him an orator, or that all Jeremiahs are necessarily prophets; nor is it improbable, that the same peculiarities in the parents, which dictate these expressive names, may direct the characters of the children, by controlling their education; but it is unquestionable, that the characteristics, and even the fortunes of the man, are frequently daguerreotyped by a name given in infancy. There is not a little wisdom in the advice of Sterne to godfathers--not "to Nicodemus a man into nothing."--"Harsh names," says D'Israeli, the elder, "will have, in spite of all our philosophy, a painful and ludicrous effect on our ears and our associations; it is vexatious, that the softness of delicious vowels, or the ruggedness of inexorable consonants, should at all be connected with a man's happiness, or even have an influence on his fortune." "That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet;" but this does not touch the question, whether, if it had not smelt as sweet we would not have given it some other name. The celebrated demagogue, Wilkes, is reported to have said, that, "without knowing the comparative merits of the two poets, we would have no hesitation in preferring John Dryden to Elkanah Settle, _from the names only_." And the reason of this truth is to be found in the fact, that our impressions of both men and things depend upon associations, often beyond our penetration to detect--associations with which _sound_, depending on hidden laws, has quite as much to do, as _sense_. Among those who have carried the custom of picturesque or expressive naming, to an extent bordering on the ridiculous, were the hard-headed champions of the true church-militant, the English puritans--as Hume, the bigoted old Tory, rather ill-naturedly testifies! And the puritans of _New_ England--whatever advancing intelligence may have made them in the present--were, for a long time, faithful representatives of the oddities, as well as of the virtues, of their fathers. And, accordingly, we find the schoolmistress--being a descendant of the Jason's-crew, who landed from the Argo-Mayflower, usually bearing a name thus significant, and manifesting, even at her age, traits of character justifying the compellation. What that age precisely _was_, could not always be known; indeed, a lady's age is generally among indeterminate things; and it has, very properly, come to be considered ungallant, if not impertinent, to be curious upon so delicate a subject. A man has no more right to know how many years a woman has, than how many skirts she wears; and, if he have any anxiety about the matter, in either case, his eyes must be the only questioners. The principle upon which the women themselves proceed, in growing old, seems to be parallel to the law of gravitation: when a stone, for example, is thrown into the air the higher it goes the slower it travels; and the momentum toward Heaven, given to a woman at her birth, appears to decrease in about the same ratio. We will not be so ungallant, then, as to inquire too curiously into the age of the schoolmistress; but, without disparagement to her youthfulness, we may be allowed to conjecture that, in order to fit her so well for the duties of her responsible station (and incline her to undertake such labors), a goodly number of years must needs have been required. Yet she bore time well; for, unless married in the meanwhile, at thirty, she was as youthful in manners, as at eighteen. But this is not surprising: for, even as early as her twelfth year, she had much the appearance of a mature woman--something like that noticed in young quakers, by Clarkson[79]--and her figure belonged to that rugged type, which is adapted to bear, unscathed, more than the ravages of time. She was never above the medium height, for the rigid rule of economy seemed to apply to flesh and blood, as to all other things pertaining to her race; at all events, material had not been wasted in giving her extra longitude--at the ends. Between the extremities, it might be different--for she was generally very long-waisted. But this might be accounted for in the process of _flattening out_: for like her compeer, the schoolmaster, she had much more breadth than thickness. She was somewhat angular, of course, and rather bony; but this was only the natural correspondence, between the external development, and the mental and moral organization. Her eyes were usually blue, and, to speak with accuracy, a little cold and grayish, in their expression--like the sky on a bleak morning in Autumn. Her forehead was very high and prominent, having, indeed, an _exposed_ look, like a shelterless knoll in an open prairie: but, not content with this, though the hair above it was often thin, she usually dragged the latter forcibly back, as if to increase the altitude of the former, by extending the skin. Her mouth was of that class called "primped," but was filled with teeth of respectable dimensions. Her arms were long, and, indeed, a little skinny, and she swung them very freely when she walked; while hands, of no insignificant size, dangled at the extremities, as if the joints of her wrists were insecure. She had large feet, too, and in walking her toes were assiduously turned out. She had, however, almost always one very great attraction--a fine, clear, healthy complexion--and the only blemishes upon this, that I have ever observed, were a little _red_ on the tip of her nose and on the points of her cheek-bones, and a good deal of _down_ on her upper lip. In manners and bearing, she was brisk, prim, and sometimes a little "fidgety," as if she was conscious of sitting on a dusty chair; and she had a way of searching nervously for her pocket, as if to find a handkerchief with which to brush it off. She was a very fast walker, and an equally rapid talker--taking usually very short steps, as if afraid of splitting economical skirts, but using very long words, as if entertaining no such apprehension about her throat. Her gait was too rapid to be graceful, and her voice too sharp to be musical; but she was quite unconscious of these imperfections, especially of the latter: for at church--I beg pardon of her enlightened ancestors! I should say at "_meeting_"--her notes of praise were heard high over all the tumult of primitive singing; and, with her chin thrown out, and her shoulders drawn back, she looked, as well as sounded, the impersonation of _melody_, as contra-distinguished from _harmony_! But postponing, for the present, our consideration of her qualifications as a teacher, we find that her characteristics were still more respectable and valuable as a private member of society. And in this relation, her most prominent trait, like that of her brother teacher, was her stainless piety. In this respect, if in no other, women are always more sincere and single-hearted than men--perhaps because the distribution of social duties gives her less temptation to hypocrisy--and even the worldly, strong-minded, and self-reliant daughter of the church-hating Puritan-Zion, displayed a tendency toward genuine religious feeling.[80] But in our subject, this was not a mere bias, but a constant, unflagging sentiment, an everyday manifestation. She was as warm in the cause of religion on one day as upon another, in small things as in great--as zealous in the repression of all unbecoming and ungodly levity, as in the eradication of positive vice. Life was too solemn a thing with her to admit of thoughtless amusements--it was entirely a state of probation, not to be enjoyed in itself, or for itself, but purgatorial, remedial, and preparatory. She hated all devices of pleasure as her ancestors did the abominations of popery. A fiddle she could tolerate only in the shape of a bass-viol; and dancing, if practised at all, must be called "calisthenics." The drama was to her an invention of the Enemy of Souls--and if she ever saw a play, it must be at a _museum_, and not within the walls of that temple of Baal, the theatre. None but "serious" conversation was allowable, and a hearty laugh was the expression of a spirit ripe for the destination of unforgiven sinners. Errors in religion were too tremendous to be tolerated for a moment, and the form (or rather anti-form) of worship handed down by her fathers, had cost too much blood and crime to be oppugned. She thought Barebones's the only godly parliament that ever sat, and did not hate Hume half so much for his infidelity, as for his ridicule of the roundheads. Her list of martyrs was made up of the intruders ousted by Charles's "Act of Conformity," and her catalogue of saints was headed by the witch-boilers of Massachusetts Bay. She abhorred the memory of all _popish_ persecutions, and knew no difference between catholic and cannibal. Her running calendar of living saints were born "to inherit the earth," and heaven, too: they possessed a monopoly of all truth, an unlimited "indulgence" to enforce conformity, and, in their zeal, an infallible safeguard against the commission of error. She had no patience with those who could not "see the truth;" and he who reviled the puritan mode of worship, was "worse than the infidel." The only argument she ever used with such, was the _argumentum ad hominem_, which saves the trouble of conviction by "giving over to hardness of heart." New England was, to her, the land of Goshen--whither God's people had been led by God's hand--"the land of the patriarchs, where it rains righteousness"[81]--and all the adjacent country was a land of Egyptian darkness. She was commendably prudent in her personal deportment: being thoroughly pure and circumspect herself, she could forgive no thoughtless imprudence in her sister-woman: but she well-understood metaphysical distinctions, and was tolerant, if not liberal, to marriageable men. These she could hope to reform at some future time: and she had, moreover, a just idea of the weakness of man's nature. But being a woman, and a staid and sober-minded woman, she could never understand the power of temptation upon her own sex, or the commonest impulses of high spirits. Perhaps she was a little deficient in charity: but, as we have seen, it was chiefly toward her female friends, and since none can bear severe judgment more safely than woman, her austerity did little harm. But she sincerely regretted what she could never palliate; she hated not the guilty, though she could not forgive the sin; and no one was more easily melted to tears by the faults, and particularly by the _follies_, of the world. Wickedness is a very melancholy thing, but it is to be punished as well as lamented: and like the unfortunate governor who was forced to condemn his own son, she wept while she pronounced judgment. But earthly sorrow, by her, was given only to earthly faults: violations of simple good morals, crimes against heavenly creeds and forms (or rather _the_ form) of worship, claimed no tear. Her blood rose to fever-heat at the mention of an unbeliever, and she would as soon have wept for the errors of the fallen angels, as for those of anti-Robinsonians. But though thus rigid and austere, I never heard that she was at all disinclined to being courted: especially if it gave her any prospect of being able to make herself useful as a wife, either to herself, her husband, or her country. She understood the art of rearing and managing children, in her capacity as a teacher: she was thus peculiarly well-fitted for matrimonial duties, and was unwilling that the world should lose the benefit of her talents. But the man who courted her must do so in the most sober, staid, and regulated spirit, for it was seldom any unmixed romance about "love and nonsense," which moved _her_ to the sacrifice: if she entertained notions of that sort, they were such only as could find a place in her well-balanced mind, and, above all, were the subject of no raptures or transports of delight. If she indulged any enthusiasm, in view of the approaching change, it was in the prospect of endless shirt-making, and in calculations about how cheaply (not how happily) she could enable her husband to live. She had no squeamish delicacy about allowing the world to know the scope and meaning of her arrangements, and all her friends participated in her visions of comfort and economy. False modesty was no part of her nature--and her sentiment could be reduced to an algebraic formula--excluding the "unknown quantities" usually represented by the letters _b_, _c_, and _d_: meaning "bliss," "cottages," and "devotion." Yet, though she cared little for poetry, and seldom understood the images of fancy, she was not averse to a modicum of scandal in moments of relaxation: for the faults of others were the illustrations of her prudent maxims, and the thoughtlessness of a sister was the best possible text for a moral homily. The tense rigidity of her character, too, sometimes required a little unbending, and she had, therefore, no special aversion to an occasional surreptitious novel. But this she would indulge only in private; for in her mind, the worst quality of transgression was its bad example; and she never failed, in public, to condemn all such things with becoming and virtuous severity. Nor must this apparent inconsistency be construed to her disadvantage; for her strong mind and well-fortified morals, could withstand safely what would have corrupted a large majority of those around her; and it was meet, that one whose "mission" it was to reform, should thoroughly understand the enemy against which she battled. And these things never unfavorably affected her life and manners, for she was as prudent in her deportment (ill-natured people say _prudish_) as if some ancestress of hers had been deceived, and left in the family a tradition of man's perfidy and woman's frailty. She was careful, then, of three things--her clothes, her money, and her reputation: and, to do her justice, the last was as spotless as the first, and as much prized as the second, and that is saying a good deal, both for its purity and estimation. Neat, economical, and prudent, were, indeed, the three capital adjectives of her vocabulary, and to deserve them was her eleventh commandment. With one exception, these were the texts of all her homilies, and the exception was, unluckily, one which admitted of much more argument. It was the history of the puritans. But upon this subject, she was as dexterous a special pleader as Neale, and as skilful in giving a false coloring to facts, as D'Aubigné. But she had the advantage of these worthies in that her declamation was quite honest: she had been taught sincerely and heartily to believe all she asserted. She was of the opinion that but two respectable ships had been set afloat since the world began: one of which was Noah's ark, and the other the Mayflower. She believed that no people had ever endured such persecutions as the puritans, and was especially eloquent upon the subject of "New England's Blarney-stone," the Rock of Plymouth. Indeed, according to the creed of her people, historical and religious, this is the only piece of granite in the whole world "worth speaking of;" and geologists have sadly wasted their time in travelling over the world in search of the records of creation, when a full epitome of everything deserving to be known, existed in so small a space! All the other rocks of the earth sink into insignificance, and "hide their diminished heads," when compared to this mighty stone! The Rock of Leucas, from which the amorous Lesbian maid cast herself disconsolate into the sea, is a mere pile of dirt: the Tarpeian, whence the Law went forth to the whole world for so many centuries, is not fit to be mentioned in the same day: the Rock of Cashel, itself, is but the subject of profane Milesian oaths; and the Ledge of Plymouth is the real "Rock of Ages!" It is well that every people should have something to adore, especially if that "something" belongs exclusively to themselves. It elevates their self-respect: and, for this object, even historical fictions may be forgiven. But, as we have intimated, in the course of time the schoolmistress became a married woman; and as she gathered experience, she gradually learned that New England is not the whole "moral vineyard," and that one might be more profitably employed than in disputing about questionable points of history. New duties devolved upon her, and new responsibilities rained fast. Instead of teaching the children of other people, she now raised children for other people to teach. New sources of pride were found in these, and in her husband and his prosperity. She discovered that she could be religious without bigotry, modest without prudery, and economical without meanness: and, profiting by the lessons thus learned, she subsided into a true, faithful, and respectable matron, thus, at last, fulfilling her genuine "mission." FOOTNOTES: [79] Author of the Life of William Penn, whose accuracy has lately been questioned. [80] By this form of expression, which may seem awkward, I mean to convey this idea: That consistency of character would seem to preclude any heartfelt reverence in the descendant of those whose piety was manifested more in the _hatred of earthly_, than in _the love of heavenly_, things. [81] The language of a precious pamphlet, even now in circulation in the west. X. THE POLITICIAN. "All would be deemed, e'en from the cradle, fit To rule in politics as well as wit: The grave, the gay, the fopling, and the dunce, Start up (God bless us!) statesmen all at once!" CHURCHILL. In a country where the popular breath sways men to its purposes or caprices, as the wind bends the weeds in a meadow, statesmanship may become a _system_, but can never rise to the dignity of a _science_; and politics, instead of being an _art_, is a series of _arts_. A system is order without principle: a science is order, based upon principle. Statesmanship has to do with generalities--with the relations of states, the exposition and preservation of constitutional provisions, and with fundamental organizations. Politics relates to measures, and the details of legislation. The _art_ of governing is the accomplishment of the true politician: the _arts_ of governing are the trickeries of the demagogue. _Right_ is the key-note of one: _popularity_ of the other. The large majority of men are sufficiently candid to acknowledge--at least to themselves--that they are unfit for the station of law-giver; but the vanity and jealousy begotten by participation in political power, lead many of them, if not actually to believe, at all events to _act_ upon the faith, that men, no more able than themselves, are the best material for rulers. It is a kind of compromise between their modesty and self-love: not burthening them with the trials and responsibilities of positions for which they feel incompetent, but soothing their vanity by the contemplation of office-holders not at all their superiors. Below a certain (or uncertain) grade, therefore, political stations are usually filled by men of very moderate abilities: and their elevation is favored--indeed, often effected--by the very causes which should prevent it. Such men are prone to thrust themselves upon public notice, and thus secure, by persistence and impudence, what might not be awarded them on the score of merit. It is a trite remark, that people are inclined to accept a man's estimate of himself, and to put him in possession of that place, in their consideration, which he has the hardihood to claim. And the observation is just, to this extent: if the individual does not respect himself, probably no one else will take that trouble. But in a country where universal suffrage reigns, it may be doubted whether the elevation of an ordinary man indicates any recognition of the justice of his claims. On the contrary, they may be endorsed precisely because they are false: that is, because he really possesses no other title to the support of common men, than that which is founded upon fellow-feeling or sympathy of character. Many a man, therefore, who receives his election as a compliment from the voters, if he understood the motives of their action, would throw up his office in disgust; for in a large majority of cases, the popular choice, so far from being an assertion of the candidate's peculiar fitness to be singled out from among his brethren, is only a declaration that neither talent nor character entitles him to the distinction. The cry that a man is "one of the people," will bring him great strength at the ballot-box: but this is a phrase which means very different things, according as it is used by the candidate or the voter; and, in many cases, if they could thoroughly understand each other, the latter would not give his support, and the former would not ask it. These remarks are applicable to all stages of society's progress; for, if the world were so enlightened, that, in the scale of intellect, such a man as Daniel Webster could only be classed as an idiot, there would still be the "ignorant vulgar," the "uneducated classes." Society is one entire web--albeit woven with threads of wool and silk, of silver and gold: turn it as you will, it must all turn together; and if a whirlwind of enlightenment should waft it to the skies, although each thread would be immeasurably above its present condition, the relation of one to another would still be the same. If the baser wool should be transmuted into gold, the very same process would refine and sublimate the precious metal, in a corresponding ratio; and the equilibrium of God's appointed relations would remain undisturbed. But it is more especially in the primitive periods, before the great political truths become household words, and while the reign of law and municipal organization is a vague and distant thing, that most citizens shrink from official duties. Diffidence, in this matter is, fortunately, a disease which time will alleviate--a youthful weakness, which communities "outgrow," as children do physical defects; and, I believe, of late years, few offices have "gone begging," either east or west of the great barrier of the Allegheny. In the earlier periods of its history, we have seen that the western country was peculiarly situated. The settlements were weak and the population small; with the exception of a few narrow fields, in the vicinity of each frontier fort, or stockade, the land was a wilderness, held in undisturbed possession by the savages and wild beasts. The great struggle, which we call the Revolution, but which was, in fact, only a justifiable and successful rebellion, had exhausted the force and drained the coffers of the feeble federal government; had plunged the infant states into enormous debts; and the only means of paying these were the boundless but unclaimed lands of the west, which the same causes rendered them unable to protect. The scattered settlements on the Mississippi side of the Alleghenies, were thus left to their own scanty resources; and the distance was so great, that, had the older states been able to afford assistance, the delays and losses attendant upon its transmission across so wide a tract of wilderness, would have made it almost nugatory. In those times, therefore, though a few were looking forward to separate political organization and the erection of new states, the larger number of the western people were too constantly occupied with their defence, to give much attention to internal politics. Such organization as they had was military, or patriarchal: the early pioneer, who had distinguished himself in the first explorations of the country, or by successfully leading and establishing a new settlement, as he became the commander of the local fort, was also the law-giver of the community. The pressure of external danger was too close to allow a very liberal democracy in government; and, as must be the case in all primitive assemblages of men, the counsels and commands of him whom they knew to be the _most able_, were always observed. He who had proven himself competent to lead was, therefore, the leader _ipso facto_ and _de jure_; and the evidence required was the performance of such exploits, and the display of such courage and sagacity, as were necessary to the defence, well-being, and protection of the community. It is obvious that no mere pretender could exhibit these proofs; and that, where they were taken as the sole measure of a man's worth, dexterity with a rifle must be of more value than the accomplishments of a talker--Indian-fighting a more respectable occupation than speech-making. Small politicians were, therefore, very small men, and saying that one had "a turn for politics," would have been equivalent to calling him a vagabond. The people had neither time nor patience to listen to declamation--the man who rose in a public assembly, and called upon his neighbors to follow him in avenging a wrong, made the only speech they cared to hear. "Preambles and resolutions" were unmeaning formalities--their "resolutions" were taken in their own minds, and, to use their own expressive words, they executed them "without preamble." An ounce of lead was worth more than a pound of advice; and, in the vindication of justice, a "charge" of gunpowder was more effectual than the most tedious judicial harangue. It is, even now, a proud, but well-founded boast, of western men, that these traits have been transmitted to them from their fathers--that they are more remarkable for _fighting_ than for _wrangling_, for _acting_ than for _talking_. In such a state of society, civil offices existed scarcely in name, and were never very eagerly sought. That which makes official station desirable is obedience to its authority, and if the title of "captain" gave the idea of more absolute power than that of "sheriff," one would rather command a company of militia than the "_posse comitatus_." Besides, the men of the frontier were simple-hearted and unambitious, desiring nothing so much as to be "left alone," and willing to make a compact of forbearance with the whole world--excepting only the Indians. They had never been accustomed to the restraints of municipal regulations, they were innocent of the unhealthy pleasures of office-holding, or the degrading impulses of office-seeking. Their lives had given them little or no knowledge of these things; experience had never suggested their importance, for their acquaintance with life was, almost exclusively, such as could be acquired in the woods and forest pathways. But as time rolled away, and the population of the country became more dense--as the pressure of external danger was withdrawn, and the necessities of defence grew less urgent--the rigor of military organization came gradually to be somewhat irksome. The seeds of civil institutions began to germinate among the people, while the extending interests of communities required corresponding enactments and regulations. The instincts of social beings, love of home and family, attachment to property, the desire of tranquillity, and, perhaps, a leaven of ambition for good estimation among neighbors, all combined to open men's eyes to the importance of peaceful institutions. The day of the rifle and scalping-knife passed away, and justice without form--the rule of the elementary strong-hand--gave place to order and legal ceremony. Then first began to appear the class of politicians, though, as yet, office-seeking had not become a trade, nor office-holding a regular means of livelihood. Politics had not acquired a place among the arts, nor had its professors become the teachers of the land. There were few, indeed, who sought to fill civil stations; and, although men's qualifications for office were, probably, not any more rigidly examined then than now, those who possessed the due degree of prominence, either deemed themselves, or were believed by their fellow-citizens, peculiarly capable of discharging such functions. They were generally men who had made themselves conspicuous or useful in other capacities--who had become well or favorably known to their neighbors through their zeal, courage, sagacity, or public spirit. A leader of regulators, for example, whose administration of his dangerous powers had been marked by promptitude and severity, was expected to be equally efficient when clothed with more regular authority. A captain of rangers, whose enterprises had been remarkable for certainty and _finish_, would, it was believed, do quite as good service, in the capacity of a civil officer. A daring pioneer, whose courage or presence of mind had saved himself and others from the dangers of the wilderness, was supposed to be an equally sure guide in the pathless ways of politics. Lawyers were yet few, and not of much repute, for they were, for the most part, youthful adventurers, who had come into the field long before the ripening of the harvest. There was another class, whose members held prominent positions, though they had never been distinguished for the possession of any of the qualifications above enumerated. These might be designated as the _noisy_ sort--loud-talking, wise-looking men, self-constituted oracles and advice-givers, with a better opinion of their own wisdom than any one else was willing to endorse. Such men became "file-leaders," or "pivot-men," because the taciturn people of the west, though inclined to undervalue a mere talker, were simple-minded enough to accept a man's valuation of his own powers: or easy-tempered enough to spare themselves the trouble of investigating so small a matter. It was of little consequence to them, whether the candidate was as wise as he desired to be thought; and since, in political affairs, they knew of no interest which they could have in disputing it, for _his_ gratification they were willing to admit it. These were halcyon days for mere pretenders--though for no very flattering reason: since their claims were allowed chiefly because they were not deemed worth controverting. Those days, thanks to the "progress of intelligence!" are now gone by: the people are better acquainted with the natural history of such animals, and--witness, ye halls of Congress!--none may now hold office except capable, patriotic, and disinterested men! Nor must we be understood to assert that the primitive politician was the reverse of all this, save in the matter of capability. And, even in that particular, no conception of his deficiency ever glimmered in his consciousness. His own assumption, and the complaisance of his fellow-citizens, were inter-reactive, mutually cause and effect. _They_ were willing to confirm his valuation of his own talents: _he_ was inclined to exalt himself in their good opinion. Parallel to this, also, was the oracular tone of his speech: the louder he talked, the more respectfully silent were his auditors; and the more attentive _they_ became, the noisier _he_ grew. Submission always encourages oppression, and admiration adds fuel to the fire of vanity. Not that the politician was precisely a despot, even over men's opinions: the application of that name to him would have been as sore a wound to his self-respect as the imputation of horse-stealing. He was but an oracle of opinion, and though allowed to dictate in matters of thought as absolutely as if backed by brigades of soldiers, he was a sovereign whose power existed only through the consent of his subjects. In personal appearance, he was well-calculated to retain the authority intrusted to him by such men. He was, in fact, an epitome of all the physical qualities which distinguished the rugged people of the west: and between these and the moral and intellectual, there is an invariable correspondence--as if the spirit within had moulded its material encasement to the planes and angles of its own "form and pressure." National form and feature are the external marks of national character, stamped more or less distinctly in different individuals, but, in the aggregate, perfectly correspondent and commensurate. The man, therefore, who possesses the national traits of character in their best development, will be, also, the most faithful representative of his race in physical characteristics. At some periods, there are whole classes of these types; and if there be any _one_ who embodies the character more perfectly than all others, the tranquillity of the age is not calculated to draw him forth. But in all times of trouble--of revolution or national ferment--the perfect Man-emblem is seen to rise, and (which is more to the purpose) is sure to stand at the head of his fellows: for he who best represents the character of his followers, becomes, by God's appointment, their leader. To this extent, the _vox populi_ is the _vox Dei_; and the unfailing success of every such man, throughout his appointed term, is the best possible justification of the choice. What was Washington, for example, but an epitome of the steady and noble qualities combined of cavalier and puritan, which were then coalescing in the American character? And what more perfect correspondence could be conceived between the moral and intellectual and the physical outlines? What was Cromwell but _the Englishman_, not only of his own time, but of all times? And the testimony of all who saw him, what is it, but that a child, who looked upon him, could not fail to see, in his very lineaments, the great and terrible man he was? And Napoleon, was he aught but an abridgment of the French nation, the sublimate and "proof" essence of French character? Not one, of all the great men of history, has possessed, so far as we know, a physical constitution more perfectly representing, even in its advancing grossness, both the strength and weakness of the people he led. In tranquil times, these things are not observed in one individual more than in others of his class, and we are, therefore, not prepared to decide whether, at such periods, _the one man_ exists. The great Leviathan, the king of all the creatures of the ocean, rises to the surface only in the tumult of the storm; his huge, portentous form, lies on the face of the troubled waters only when the currents are changed and the fountains of the deep are broken up. Nature does no superfluous work, and it may require the same causes which produce the storm to organize its Ruler. If a great rebellion is boiling among men, the mingling of the elements is projecting, also, the Great Rebel: if a national cause is to be asserted, the principles upon which it rests will first create its appropriate Exponent. But when no such agitation is on the point of breaking out--when the crisis is not near, and the necessity for such greatness distant--national character probably retains its level; and though there be no _one_ whom the people will recognise as the arch-man, the representatives, losing in intensity what they gain in numbers, become a class. They fill the civil stations of the country, and are known as men of mark--their opinions are received, their advice accepted, their leading followed. No one of them is known instinctively, or trusted implicitly, as the leader of Nature's appointment: yet they are, in fact, the exponents of their time and race, and in exact proportion to the degree in which they possess the character, will they exhibit, also, the physical peculiarities. Thus it was at the time of which we are writing, with the class to which belonged the politician, and a description of his personal appearance, like that of any other man, will convey no indistinct impression of his internal character. Such a description probably combined more characteristic adjectives than that of any other personage of his time--adjectives, some of which were applicable to many of his neighbors, respectively, but _all_ of which might be bestowed upon him _only_. He was tall, gaunt, angular, swarthy, active, and athletic. His hair was, invariably, black as the wing of the raven; even in that small portion which the cap of raccoon-skin left exposed to the action of sun and rain, the gray was but thinly scattered; imparting to the monotonous darkness only a more iron character. As late as the present day, though we have changed in many things, light-haired men seldom attain eminence among the western people: many of our legislators are _young_ enough, but none of them are _beardless_. They have a bilious look, as if, in case of illness, their only hope would lie in calomel and jalap. One might understand, at the first glance, that they are men of _talent_, not of _genius_; and that physical energy, the enduring vitality of the body, has no inconsiderable share in the power of the mind. Corresponding to the sable of the hair, the politician's eye was usually small, and intensely black--not the dead, inexpressive jet, which gives the idea of a hole through white paper, or of a cavernous socket in a death's-head; but the keen, midnight darkness, in whose depths you can see a twinkle of starlight--where you feel that there is meaning as well as color. There might be an expression of cunning along with that of penetration--but, in a much higher degree, the blaze of irascibility. There could be no doubt, from its glance, that its possessor was an excellent hater; you might be assured that he would never forget an injury or betray a friend. A stoop in the shoulders indicated that, in times past, he had been in the habit of carrying a heavy rifle, and of closely examining the ground over which he walked; but what the chest thus lost in depth it gained in breadth. His lungs had ample space in which to play--there was nothing pulmonary even in the drooping shoulders. Few of his class have ever lived to a very advanced age, but it was not for want of iron-constitutions, that they went early to the grave. The same services to his country, which gave the politician his prominence, also shortened his life. From shoulders thus bowed, hung long, muscular arms--sometimes, perhaps, dangling a little ungracefully, but always under the command of their owner, and ready for any effort, however violent. These were terminated by broad, bony hands, which looked like grapnels--their grasp, indeed, bore no faint resemblance to the hold of those symmetrical instruments. Large feet, whose toes were usually turned in, like those of the Indian, were wielded by limbs whose vigor and activity were in keeping with the figure they supported. Imagine, with these peculiarities, a free, bold, rather swaggering gait, a swarthy complexion, and conformable features and tones of voice: and--excepting his costume--you have before your fancy a complete picture of the early western politician. But the item of costume is too important to be passed over with a mere allusion. As well might we paint a mountain without its verdant clothing, its waving plumes of pine and cedar, as the western man without his picturesque and characteristic habiliments. The first, and indispensable article of dress, was the national hunting-shirt: a garment whose easy fit was well-adapted, both to the character of his figure and the freedom of his movements. Its nature did not admit much change in fashion: the only variations of which it was capable, were those of ornament and color. It might be fringed around the cape and skirt, or made plain; it might be blue, or copper-colored--perhaps tinged with a little madder. And the variety of material was quite as limited, since it must be of either jeans or deer-skin. Corresponding to this, in material, style, and texture, he wore, also, a pair of wide pantaloons--not always of precisely the proper length for the limbs of the wearer, but having invariably a broad waistband, coming up close under the arms, and answering the purpose of the modern vest. People were not so dainty about "set" and "fit," in those days, as they have since become; and these primitive integuments were equally well-adapted to the figure of any one to whose lot they might fall. In their production, no one had been concerned save the family of the wearer. The sheep which bore the wool, belonged to his own flock, and all the operations, subsequent to the shearing, necessary to the ultimate result of shaping into a garment, had been performed by his wife or daughter. Many politicians have continued this affectation of plainness, even when the necessity has ceased, on account of its effect upon the masses; for people are apt to entertain the notion, that decent clothing is incompatible with mental ability, and that he who is most manifestly behind the improvements of the time, is best qualified for official stations. A neck-cloth, or cravat, was never seen about the politician's throat; and for the same reason of expediency: for these were refinements of affectation which had not then been introduced; and a man who thus compassed his neck, could no more have been elected to an office, than if he had worn the cap and bells of a Saxon jester. The shirt-bosoms of modern days were in the same category; and _starch_ was an article contraband to the law of public sentiment--insomuch that no epithet expressed more thorough contempt for a man, than the graphic word "starched." A raccoon-skin cap--or, as a piece of extravagant finery, a white-wool hat--with a pair of heavy shoes, not unfrequently without the luxury of hose--or, if with them, made of blue-woollen yarn, from the back of a sheep of the aforesaid flock--completed the element of costume. He was not very extravagantly dressed, as the reader sees; but we can say of him--what could not be as truly spoken of many men, or, indeed, of many women, of this day--that his clothing bore distinct reference to his character, and was well-adapted to his "style of beauty." In fact, everything about him, form, face, manners, dress, was in "in keeping" with his characteristics. In occupation, he was usually a farmer; for the materials of which popular tribunes are made in later times--such as lawyers, gentlemen of leisure, and pugnacious preachers--were not then to be found. The population of the country was thoroughly agricultural; and though (as I believe I have elsewhere observed) the rural people of the west were neither a cheerful nor a polished race, as a class, they possess, even yet, qualities, which, culminating in an individual, eminently fit him for the _rôle_ of a noisy popular leader. But a man who is merely fitted to such a position, is a very different animal to one qualified to give laws for the government of the citizen. After all our vain boasting, that public sentiment is the law of our land, there is really a very broad distinction between forming men's opinions and controlling their action. If the government had been so organized, that the pressure of popular feeling might make itself felt, directly, in the halls of legislation, our history, instead of being that of a great and advancing nation, would have been only a chronicle of factious and unstable violence. It does not follow, that one who is qualified to lead voters at the polls, or, as they say here, "on the stump," will be able to embody, in enlightened enactments, the sentiment which he contributes to form, any more than that the tanner will be able to shape a well-fitting boot from the leather he prepares. "_Suum cuique proprium dat Natura donum_."[82] A blacksmith, therefore, is not the best manufacturer of silver spoons, a lawyer the ablest writer of sermons, nor either of them necessarily the safest law-maker. But those things to which his qualifications were appropriate, the politician did thoroughly and well. For example, he was a skilful farmer--at least in the leading branches of that calling, though he gave little or no attention to the merely ornamental. For the latter, he had neither time nor inclination. Even in the essentials, it was only by working, as he expressed it, "to the best advantage,"--that is, contriving to produce the largest amount of results with the least expenditure of labor and patience--that he got sufficient leisure to attend to his public duties; and as for "inclination," no quaker ever felt a more supreme contempt for mere embellishment. He was seldom very happy in his domestic relations; for, excepting at those seasons when the exigencies of his calling required his constant attention, he spent but little of his time at his own fireside. He absented himself _until_ his home became strange and uncomfortable to him: and he then did the same, _because_ it had become so. Every man who may try the experiment will discover that these circumstances mutually aggravate each other--are, interchangeably, cause and effect. His children were, however, always numerous, scarcely ever falling below half-a-dozen, and not unfrequently doubling that allowance. They generally appeared upon the stage in rapid succession--one had scarcely time to get out of the way, before another was pushing him from his place. The peevishness thus begotten in the mother--by the constant habit of nursing cross cherubs--though it diminished the amount of family peace, contributed, in another way, to the general welfare: it induced the father to look abroad for enjoyment, and thus gave the country the benefit of his wisdom as a political counsellor. Public spirit, and the consciousness of ability, have "brought out" many politicians: but uncomfortable homes have produced many more. He was an oracle on the subject of hunting, and an unerring judge of whiskey--to both which means of enjoyment he was strongly attached. He was careful, however, neither to hunt nor drink in solitude, for even his amusements were subservient to his political interests. To hunt alone was a waste of time, while drinking alone was a loss of good-fellowship, upon which much of his influence was founded. He was particularly attached to parties of half-a-dozen, or more; for in such companions, his talents were always conspicuous. Around a burgou[83] pot, or along the trenches of an impromptu barbecue, he shone in meridian splendor; and the approving smack of his lips, over a bottle of "backwoods' nectar," was the seal of the judgment which gave character to the liquor. "Militia musters" were days in his calendar, "marked with a white-stone;" for it was upon these occasions that he appeared in his utmost magnificence. His grade was never lower than that of colonel, and it not unfrequently extended to, or even beyond, the rank of brigadier-general. It was worth "a sabbath-day's journey" on foot, to witness one of these parades; for I believe that all the annals of the burlesque do not furnish a more amusing caricature of the "pomp and circumstance" of war. Compared to one of those militia regiments, Falstaff's famous corps, whose appearance was so unmilitary as to prevent even that liberal-minded gentleman from marching through Coventry in their company, was a model of elegance and discipline. Sedenó's cavalry in the South American wars, though their uniform consisted only of "leggings," a pair of spurs, and a Spanish blanket, had more the aspect of a regular _corps d'armée_ than these! A mob of rustics was never armed with a more extensive variety of weapons; and no night's "haul" of a recruiting sergeant's net, ever made a more disorderly appearance, when mustered in the morning for inspection. The "citizen-soldier" knew no more about "dressing the line," than about dressing himself, and the front of his company presented as many inequalities as a "worm-fence." Tall men and short men--beaver hats and raccoon-skin caps--rusty firelocks and long corn-stalks--stiff brogans and naked feet--composed the grand display. There were as many officers as men, and each was continually commanding and instructing his neighbor, but never thinking of himself. At the command "Right dress!" (when the officer _par excellence_ knew enough to deliver it) some looked right, others left--some thrust their heads out before--some leaned back to get a glimpse behind--and the whole line waved like a streamer in the wind. "Silence in line!" produced a greater clamor than ever, for each repeated the command to every other, sending the order along the ranks like a rolling fire, and not unfrequently enforcing it with the push of a corn-stalk, or a vigorous elbow-hint. When a movement was directed, the order reached the men successively, by the same process of repetition--so that while some files were walking slowly, and looking back to beckon on their lagging fellow-soldiers, others were forced to a quick run to regain their places, and the scramble often continued many minutes after the word "halt!" The longer the parade lasted, the worse was the drill; and after a tedious day's "muster," each man knew less, if possible, of military tactics, than he did in the morning. But the most ludicrous part of the display, was the earnest solemnity with which the politician-colonel endeavored "to lick the mass into shape." If you had judged only by the expression of his face, you would have supposed that an invading army was already within our borders, and that this democratic army was the only hope of patriotism to repel the foreign foe. And, indeed, it might not be too much to say, that some such idea actually occupied his mind: for he was so fond of "supposing cases," that bare possibilities sometimes grew in his mind to actual realities; and it was a part of his creed, as well as his policy to preach, that "a nation's best defence" is to be found in "the undisciplined valor of its citizens." His military maxims were not based upon the history of such countries as Poland and Spain--and Hungary had not then added her example to the list. He never understood the relation between discipline and efficiency; and the doctrine of the "largest liberty" was so popular, that, on his theory, it must be universally right. Tempered thus, and modified by some of the tendencies of the demagogue, his love of military parade amounted to a propensity, a trait which he shared with most of the people among whom he lived. The inference from this characteristic, that he possessed what phrenologists used to call "combativeness," is not unavoidable, though such was the fact. He was, indeed, quite pugnacious, ready, at all times, to fight for himself or for his friends, and never with any very special or discriminating reference to the cause of quarrel. He was, however, seldom at feud with any one whose enmity could materially injure him: extensive connections he always conciliated, and every popular man was his friend. Nor was he compelled, in order to compass these ends, to descend to any very low arts; for "the people," were not so fastidious in those days, as they seem since to have become; and a straightforward sincerity was then the first element of popularity. The politician was not forced to affect an exemplary "walk and conversation;" nor was an open declaration of principle or opinion dangerous to his success. This liberality in public sentiment had its evils: since, for example, the politician was not generally the less esteemed for being rather a hard _swearer_. In the majority of the class, indeed, this amounted only to an energetic or emphatic mode of expression; and such the people did not less respect, than if, in the same person, they had had reason to believe the opposite tone hypocritical. The western people--to their honor be it written!--were, and are, mortal enemies to everything like _cant_: though they might regret, that one's morals were no _better_ than they appeared, they were still more grieved, if they found evidence, that they were _worse_ than they claimed to be. But, though the politician was really very open and candid in all the affairs of life, in his own estimation he was a very dexterous and dangerous intriguer: he often deceived himself into the belief, that the success, which was in fact the result of his manly candor, was attributable only to his cunning management. He was always forming, and attempting to execute, schemes for circumventing his political opponents; but, if he bore down all opposition, it was _in spite of_ his chicanery, and not by its assistance. Left-handed courses are never advantageous "in the long run;" and, perhaps, it would be well if this lesson were better understood by politicians, even in our own enlightened day. For the arts of rhetoric he had small respect; in his opinion, the man who was capable of making a long, florid speech, was fit for little else. His own oratorical efforts were usually brief, pithy, and to the point. For example, here follows a specimen, which the writer heard delivered in Illinois, by a candidate for the legislature:-- "Fellow-citizens: I am no speech-maker, but what I say, _I'll do_. I've lived among you twenty years, and if I've shown myself a clever fellow, you know it, _without_ a speech: if I'm not a clever fellow, you know that, too, and wouldn't forget it _with_ a speech. I'm a candidate for the legislature: if you think I'm 'the clear grit,' _vote_ for me: if you think Major R---- of a better 'stripe' than I am, vote for _him_. The fact is, that either of us will make a devilish good representative!" For the satisfaction of the reader, we should record that the orator was triumphantly elected, and, though "no speech-maker," was an excellent member for several years. The saddest, yet cheerfullest--the quaintest, yet most unaffected of moralists, has written "A Complaint upon the Decay of Beggars," which will not cease to be read, so long as pure English and pure feeling are understood and appreciated. They were a part of the recollections of his childhood--images painted upon his heart, impressions made in his soft and pitying nature; and the "besom of societarian reformation," legislating busybodies, and tinkers of the general welfare, were sweeping them away, with all their humanizing influences, their deep lessons of dire adversity and gentle charity. There are some memories of the childhood of western men--unlike, and yet similar in their generous persuasions on all pure young hearts--upon whose "Decay" might, also, be written a "Complaint," which should come as truly, and yet as sadly, from the heart of him, who remembers his boyhood, as did that from the heart of Elia. Gatherings of the militia, burgou-hunts, barbecues, and anniversaries--phases of a primitive, yet true and hearty time!--are fast giving way, before the march of a barbarous "progress" (erroneously christened) "of intelligence." The hard spirit of money-getting, the harder spirit of education-getting, and the hardest of _all_ spirits, that of pharisaical morality, have divorced our youth, _a vinculo_, from every species of amusement; and life has come to be a probationary struggle, too fierce to allow a moment's relaxation. The bodies of children are drugged and worried into health, their intellects are stuffed and forced into premature development, or early decay--but their _hearts_ are utterly forgotten! Enjoyment is a forbidden thing, and only the miserable cant of "intellectual pleasure" is allowed. _Ideas_--of philosophy, religious observance, and mathematics--are supplied _ad nauseam_; but the encouragement of a generous _impulse_, or a magnanimous _feeling_, is too frivolous a thing to have a place in our vile system. Children are "brought up," and "brought out," as if they were composed exclusively of intellect and body: And, since the manifestations of any other element are pronounced pernicious--even if the existence of the element itself be recognised--the means of fostering it, innocent amusements, which make the sunshine brighter, the spirits more cheerful, and the heart purer and lighter, are sternly prohibited. Alas! for the generation which shall grow up, and be "educated" (God save the mark!) as if it had no heart! And wo to the blasphemy which dares to offer, as service to Heaven, an arrogant contempt of Heaven's gifts, and claims a reward, like the self-tormentors of the middle ages, for its vain mortifications. But, in the time of the politician, of whom we write, these things were far different. We have already seen him at a "militia muster," and fain would we pause here, to display him at a barbecue. What memories, sweet, though sad, we might evoke of "the glorious fourth" in the olden time! How savory are even the dim recollections of the dripping viands, which hung, and fried, and crisped, and crackled, over the great fires, in the long deep trenches! Our nostrils grow young again with the thought--and the flavor of the feast floats on the breezes of memory, even "across the waste of years" which lie between! And the cool, luxuriant foliage of the grove, the verdant thickets, and among them pleasant vistas, little patches of green sward, covered with gay and laughing parties--even the rosy-cheeked girls, in their rustling gingham dresses, cast now and then a longing glance, toward the yet forbidden tables! how fresh and clear these images return upon the fancy! And then the waving banners, roaring cannon, and the slow procession, moving all too solemnly for our impatient wishes! And finally, the dropping of the ropes, the simultaneous rush upon the open feast, and the rapid, perhaps ravenous consumption of the smoking viands, the jest, the laugh, all pleasant merriment, the exhilaration of the crowd, the music, and the occasion! What glories we heard from the orator, of victories achieved by our fathers! How we longed--O! brief, but glorious dream! to be one day spoken of like Washington! How wildly our hearts leaped in our boyish bosoms, as we listened to the accents of the solemn pledge and "declaration"--"our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor!" The whole year went lighter for that one day, and at each return, we went home happier, and better! How measureless we thought the politician's greatness then! This was his proper element--here he was at home; and, as he ordered and directed everything about him, flourishing his marshal's baton, clearing the way for the march of the procession--settling the "order of exercises," and reading the programme, in a stentorian voice--there was, probably in his own estimation, and certainly in ours, no more important or honored individual in all that multitude! In such scenes as these, he was, indeed, without a rival; but there were others, also, in which he was quite as useful, if not so conspicuous. On election days, for instance, when a free people assembled to exercise their "inestimable privilege," to choose their own rulers--he was as busy as a witch in a tempest. His talents shone forth with especial and peculiar lustre--for, with him, this was "the day for which all other days were made." He marshalled his retainers, and led them to "the polls"--not as an inexperienced tactician would have done, with much waste of time, in seeking every private voter, but after the manner of feudal times--by calling upon his immediate dependants, captains over tens and twenties, through whom he managed the more numerous masses. These were the "file-leaders," the "fugle-men," and "heads of messes;" and it was by a judicious management of these, that he was able to acquire and retain an extensive influence. The first article of his electioneering creed was, that every voter was controlled by somebody; and that the only way to sway the privates was, to govern the officers: and, whether true or not, it must be admitted that his theory worked well in practice. He affected to entertain a high respect for those whom he described as "the boys from the heads of the hollows"--men who were never seen beyond the precincts of their own little "clearings," except upon the Fourth of July and election day, from one end of the year to the other. With these he drank bad whiskey, made stale jokes, and affected a flattering condescension. With others, more important or less easily imposed upon, he "whittled" sociably in the fence-corners, talked solemnly in conspicuous places, and always looked confidential and mysterious. But, however earnestly engaged, he never forgot the warfare in which he was chief combatant. Like a general upon a field of battle, with his staff about him, he had sundry of his friends always near, to undertake any commission, or convey any order, which he desired to have executed; and not a voter could come upon the ground, whom there was the remotest chance to influence, that his vigilance did not at once discover and seize upon, through some one of these lieutenants. He resorted to every conceivable art, to induce the freemen to vote _properly_; and, when he could not succeed in this, his next study was to prevent their voting _at all_. The consequence usually was, that he secured his own election, or that of his chosen candidate; for, in him, vigilance and shrewdness were happily combined. But, perhaps fortunately for the country, his ambition was generally limited to such small offices, as he was quite capable of filling. The highest point at which he aimed, was a seat in the state legislature; and on reaching that goal, he signalized his term, chiefly, if at all, in advocating laws about division fences, and trespassers upon timber--measures which he deemed desirable for his own immediate constituency, with very little care for the question of their general utility. Indeed, he never went to the capital, without having his pockets full of "private bills," for the gratification of his personal friends, or near neighbors; and if, after a reasonable term of service, he had succeeded in getting all these passed into laws, he came home, contented to "subside," and live the remainder of his days, upon the recollection of his legislative honors. In the course of time, like all other earthly things, his class began to decay. The tide of immigration, or the increasing intelligence of the people, raised up men of larger views; and he speedily found himself outstripped in the race, and forgotten by his ancient retainers. Then--like his predecessor, the original frontierman--disgusted with civilization and its refinements--he migrated to more congenial regions, and, in the scenes of his former triumphs, was heard of no more. FOOTNOTES: [82] Translate "_donum_," talent. [83] A kind of soup, made by boiling all sorts of game with corn, onions, tomatoes, and a variety of other vegetables. When skilfully concocted and properly seasoned, not at all unsavory. So called from a soup made by seamen. EPILOGUE. Here we must pause. On the hither side of the period, represented by the early politician, and between that and the present, the space of time is much too narrow, to contain any distinct development: those who superseded the primitive oracles, are yet in possession of the temple. We could not, therefore, pursue our plan further, without hazarding the charge of drawing from the life. It is remarkable, that anything like a fair or candid estimate of--for example--a public man's character, while he is yet favored with the people's suffrages, is very certain to be pronounced a caricature; and it is not less singular, that, while the complaints of popular critics, in effect, affirm that there is fidelity enough in the picture to enable even obtuse minds to fit the copy to the original, they at the same time vehemently assert that the whole portrait is a libel. A just admeasurement of a demagogue's ability is thus always abated by the imputation of partisan falsehood or prejudice; and whosoever declines to join in the adulation of a temporary idol, may consider himself fortunate, if he escape with only the reproach of envy. Sketches of contemporaneous character--if they seek recognition among the masses, must, therefore, not reduce the altitude which blind admiration has assigned, nor cut away the foreign lace, nor tear the ornaments, with which excited parties have bedaubed their images of clay. And, yet, so prone are men to overrate their leaders, that no estimate of a prominent man can be just, without impugning popular opinion. There is probably no other ground quite so perilous as politics, unless it be literature: and, as yet, the west is comparatively barren of those "sensitive plants," literary men. But any attempt to delineate society, by portraiture of living characters, even though the pictures were purely ideal, would, upon the present plan, involve the suspicion (and perhaps the temptation to deserve it), indicated above. Before venturing upon such uncertain paths, therefore, we must display a little generalship, and call a halt, if not a council of war. Whether we are to march forward, will be determined by the "General _Orders_." THE END. J. S. REDFIELD, 110 AND 112 NASSAU STREET, NEW YORK, HAS JUST PUBLISHED: [Illustration] _EPISODES OF INSECT LIFE._ By ACHETA DOMESTICA. In Three Series: I. Insects of Spring.--II. Insects of Summer.--III. Insects of Autumn. Beautifully illustrated. Crown 8vo., cloth, gilt, price $2.00 each. The same beautifully colored after nature, extra gilt, $4.00 each. "A book elegant enough for the centre table, witty enough for after dinner, and wise enough for the study and the school-room. One of the beautiful lessons of this work is the kindly view it takes of nature. Nothing is made in vain not only, but nothing is made ugly or repulsive. A charm is thrown around every object, and life suffused through all, suggestive of the Creator's goodness and wisdom."--_N. Y. 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Recorder._ "It portrays in life-like colors the characters and daily habits of nearly all the English and Irish celebrities of that period."--_N. Y. Courier and Enquirer._ [Illustration] _JOMINI'S CAMPAIGN OF WATERLOO._ The Political and Military History of the Campaign of Waterloo, from the French of Gen. Baron Jomini, by Lieut. S. V. BENET, U. S. Ordnance, with a Map, 12mo, cloth, 75 cents. "Of great value, both for its historical merit and its acknowledged impartiality."--_Christian Freeman, Boston._ "It has long been regarded in Europe as a work of more than ordinary merit, while to military men his review of the tactics and manoeuvres of the French Emperor during the few days which preceded his final and most disastrous defeat, is considered as instructive, as it is interesting."--_Arthur's Home Gazette._ "It is a standard authority and illustrates a subject of permanent interest. 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They carry conviction with them."--_Home Journal._ "This volume is an almost indispensable companion to any of the editions of Shakespeare, so numerous and often important are many of the corrections."--_Register, Philadelphia._ [Illustration] _THE HISTORY OF THE CRUSADES._ By JOSEPH FRAN�OIS MICHAUD. Translated by W. Robson, 3 vols. 12mo., maps, $3.75. "It is comprehensive and accurate in the detail of facts, methodical and lucid in arrangement, with a lively and flowing narrative."--_Journal of Commerce._ "We need not say that the work of Michaud has superseded all other histories of the Crusades. This history has long been the standard work with all who could read it in its original language. Another work on the same subject is as improbable as a new history of the 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.'"--_Salem Freeman._ "The most faithful and masterly history ever written of the wild wars for the Holy Land."--_Philadelphia American Courier._ "The ability, diligence, and faithfulness, with which Michaud has executed his great task, are undisputed; and it is to his well-filled volumes that the historical student must now resort for copious and authentic facts, and luminous views respecting this most romantic and wonderful period in the annals of the Old World."--_Boston Daily Courier._ [Illustration] _MARMADUKE WYVIL._ An Historical Romance of 1651, by HENRY W. HERBERT, author of the "Cavaliers of England," &c., &c. Fourteenth Edition. Revised and Corrected. "This is one of the best works of the kind we have ever read--full of thrilling incidents and adventures in the stirring times of Cromwell, and in that style which has made the works of Mr. Herbert so popular."--_Christian Freeman, Boston._ "The work is distinguished by the same historical knowledge, thrilling incident, and pictorial beauty of style, which have characterized all Mr. Herbert's fictions and imparted to them such a bewitching interest."--_Yankee Blade._ "The author out of a simple plot and very few characters, has constructed a novel of deep interest and of considerable historical value. It will be found well worth reading."--_National �gis, Worcester._ =Life under an Italian Despotism!= LORENZO BENONI, OR PASSAGES IN THE LIFE OF AN ITALIAN. _One Vol., 12mo, Cloth--Price $1.00._ * * * * * =OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.= "The author of 'Lorenzo Benoni' is GIOVANNI RUFFINI, a native of Genoa, who effected his escape from his native country after the attempt at revolution in 1833. His book is, in substance, an authentic account of real persons and incidents, though the writer has chosen to adopt fictitious and fantastic designations for himself and his associates. Since 1833, Ruffini has resided chiefly (if not wholly) in England and France, where his qualities, we understand, have secured him respect and regard. In 1848, he was selected by Charles Albert to fill the responsible situation of embassador to Paris, in which city he had long been domesticated as a refugee. He ere long, however, relinquished that office, and again withdrew into private life. He appears to have employed the time of his exile in this country to such advantage as to have acquired a most uncommon mastery over the English language. The present volume (we are informed on good authority) is exclusively his own--and, if so, on the score of style alone it is a remarkable curiosity. But its matter also is curious."--_London Quarterly Review for July._ "A tale of sorrow that has lain long in a rich mind, like a ruin in a fertile country, and is not the less gravely impressive for the grace and beauty of its coverings ... at the same time the most determined novel-reader could desire no work more fascinating over which to forget the flight of time.... No sketch of foreign oppression has ever, we believe, been submitted to the English public by a foreigner, equal or nearly equal to this volume in literary merit. It is not unworthy to be ranked among contemporary works whose season is the century in which their authors live."--_London Examiner._ "The book should be as extensively read as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin,' inasmuch as it develops the existence of a state of slavery and degradation, worse even than that which Mrs. Beecher Stowe has elucidated with so much pathos and feeling."--_Bell's Weekly Messenger._ "Few works of the season will be read with greater pleasure than this; there is a great charm in the quiet, natural way in which the story is told."--_London Atlas._ "The author's great forte is character-painting. This portraiture is accomplished with remarkable skill, the traits both individual and national being marked with great nicety without obtrusiveness."--_London Spectator._ "Under the modest guise of the biography of an imaginary 'Lorenzo Benoni,' we have here, in fact, the memoir of a man whose name could not be pronounced in certain parts of northern Italy without calling up tragic yet noble historical recollections.... Its merits, simply as a work of literary art, are of a very high order. The style is really beautiful--easy, sprightly, graceful, and full of the happiest and most ingenious turns of phrase and fancy."--_North British Review._ "This has been not unjustly compared to '_Gil Blas_,' to which it is scarcely inferior in spirited delineations of human character, and in the variety of events which it relates. But as a description of actual occurrences illustrating the domestic and political condition of Italy, at a period fraught with interest to all classes of readers, it far transcends in importance any work of mere fiction."--_Dublin Evening Mail._ "SHAKESPEARE AS HE WROTE IT." THE WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE, _Reprinted from the newly-discovered copy of the Folio of 1632 in the possession of J. Payne Collier, containing nearly_ =Twenty Thousand Manuscript Corrections=, _With a History of the Stage to the Time, an Introduction to each Play, a Life of the Poet, etc._ BY J. PAYNE COLLIER, F.S.A. _To which are added, Glossarial and other Notes, the Readings of Former Editions, a_ PORTRAIT _after that by Martin Droeshout, a_ VIGNETTE TITLE _on Steel, and a_ FACSIMILE OF THE OLD FOLIO, _with the Manuscript Corrections_. 1 vol., Imperial 8vo. Cloth $4.00. The =WORKS OF SHAKESPEARE= the same as the above. Uniform in Size with the celebrated Chiswick Edition, 8 vols. 16mo, cloth $6.00. Half calf or moroc. extra. These are _American Copyright Editions_, the Notes being expressly prepared for the work. The English edition contains simply the text, without a single note or indication of the changes made in the text. In the present, the variations from old copies are noted by reference of all changes to former editions (abbreviated f.e.), and every indication and explanation is given essential to a clear understanding of the author. The prefatory matter, Life, &c., will be fuller than in any American edition now published. "This is the only correct edition of the works of the 'Bard of Avon' ever issued, and no lover or student of Shakespeare should be without it."--_Philadelphia Argus._ "Altogether the most correct and therefore the most valuable edition extant."--_Albany Express._ "This edition of Shakespeare will ultimately supersede all others. It must certainly be deemed an essential acquisition by every lover of the great dramatist."--_N. Y. Commercial Advertiser._ "This great work commends itself in the highest terms to every Shakespearian scholar and student."--_Philadelphia City Item._ "This edition embraces all that is necessary to make a copy of Shakespeare desirable and correct."--_Niagara Democrat._ "It must sooner or later drive all others from the market."--_N. Y. Evening Post._ "Beyond all question, the very best edition of the great bard hitherto published."--_New England Religious Herald._ "It must hereafter be the standard edition of Shakespeare's plays."--_National Argus._ "It is clear from internal evidence that they are genuine restorations of the original plays."--_Detroit Daily Times._ "This must we think supersede all other editions of Shakespeare hitherto published. Collier's corrections make it really a different work from its predecessors. Compared with it we consider them hardly worth possessing."--_Daily Georgian, Savannah._ "One who will probably hereafter be considered as the only true authority. No one we think, will wish to purchase an edition of Shakespeare, except it shall be conformable to the amended text by Collier."--_Newark Daily Advertiser._ "A great outcry has been made in England against this edition of the bard, by Singer and others interested in other editions; but the emendations commend themselves too strongly to the good sense of every reader to be dropped by the public--the old editions must become obsolete."--_Yankee Blade, Boston._ 
44823	----	NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY DOWN THE OHIO AND MISSISSIPPI IN 1789-90. BY MAJ. SAMUEL S. FORMAN WITH A MEMOIR AND ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES BY LYMAN C. DRAPER CINCINNATI ROBERT CLARKE & CO. 1888 COPYRIGHT. PREFATORY NOTE. I acknowledge my indebtedness to a friend of the Forman family for calling my attention to the interesting narrative of Major Samuel S. Forman's early journey down the Ohio and Mississippi, and for aiding me in securing a copy for publication. The manuscript of this monograph, as now presented, has been submitted to friends and kindred of Major Forman, who knew him long and well, and they have accorded it their warm approval. With their kind approbation, I feel encouraged to offer this little contribution to western historical literature to an enlightened public. L. C. D. Madison, Wis. MEMOIR OF MAJOR SAMUEL S. FORMAN. Every addition to our stock of information touching early western history and adventure, and of the pioneer customs and habits of a hundred years ago, deserves a kindly reception. The following narrative of a journey down the Ohio and Mississippi, in 1789-90, was not reduced to writing till 1849, after a lapse of sixty years; but an unusually fine memory enabled Major Forman to relate such incidents of his trip as left a lasting impression upon him, alike with interest and general accuracy. A sketch of the writer will give us a better insight into his trustworthiness and character. Major Forman, the third son of Samuel and Helena Denise Forman, was born at Middletown Point, Monmouth county, New Jersey, July 21, 1765. He was too young to participate in the Revolutionary war, during the stirring period of 1776 to 1780, in New Jersey; but his elder brothers, Jonathan and Denise, were prominent and active throughout the great struggle. Major Forman has recorded some incidents of the war that occurred in his region of New Jersey, and within his own knowledge, worthy of preservation as interesting scraps of Revolutionary history. At one time, a cousin of his, Tunis Forman, about seventeen years of age, met two Tory robbers, and after one had fired at him and missed, he, getting the advantage of them in the adjustment of his gun, forced them to throw down their weapons, when he marched them several miles before him, and lodged them in jail at Freehold. For this brave act, young Forman received a large reward.[1] [1] This incident, occurring in May, 1780, is related in Barber and Howe's _New Jersey Historical Collection_, 345-6. During the period while Major Henry Lee and his famous Light Dragoons were serving in New Jersey, intelligence came of the marauding operations of a band of Tory robbers, located in the extensive pine woods toward Barnegat, in Monmouth county, whose head-quarters were at a secret cave in that region. Lee dispatched a select party of fearless men, who approached the dangerous region in a farmer's wagon, concealed under a covering of straw. Fagans, the robber leader, with some followers, stopped the wagon to plunder it, when the concealed dragoons immediately put a ball through Fagans's head, and with his fall his associates fled. Fagans's body was conveyed to Barkalow's woods, the usual place of execution for such culprits, and there exposed on a gibbet till the flesh dropped from the bones. Mr. Forman mentions that his father, Samuel Forman, did not escape a visit from the Tories and British. At one time, they made a descent upon the village of Middletown Point. There was a mill at this place, which was well known and much resorted to for a great distance; and some of these Tory invaders had been employed in the erection of this mill, and were personally well known to the citizens, and it would appear that their object was, at least, to capture Samuel Forman, if not to kill him. They plundered the houses of the settlement, destroying what they could not carry off, boasting that they had aided in building the mill, and now assisted in kindling the fire in the bolting box to burn it down. They had surprised the guard placed for the protection of the place, killing several of their number, who had been their schoolmates in former years. Samuel Forman eluded their vigilance, but lost heavily by this invasion, for he owned almost all of one side of Middletown Point, and part of both sides of Main street. He never applied to Congress for any remuneration for his losses. He died in 1792, in his seventy-eighth year. In this foray, the enemy burned two store-houses of Mr. John H. Burrows, robbed his house, and took him prisoner to New York. After several months, he was exchanged, and returned home. My brother, Denise Forman, entered the service when he was about sixteen years old. He was in the battle of Germantown--in which engagement eighteen of the Forman connection took part--where the Americans were badly used, on account of the British having some light artillery in a large stone house. Our army had to retreat; when that took place, Lieutenant Schenck, under whom brother Denise served, took Denise's gun, and told him to take fast hold of his coat, and cling to it during the retreat. General David Forman conducted himself so well, that General Washington tendered his aid in securing a command in the Continental army; but General Forman declined the offer, as he believed he could be more serviceable to remain with the militia in Monmouth county, New Jersey, as they were continually harassed there by the enemy from Staten Island and New York. After this, Denise Forman engaged under a Captain Tyler, who had charge of a few gun-boats that coasted along the Jersey shore, to annoy and oppose the enemy. When the British fleet lay at anchor near Sandy Hook, Captain Tyler went, in the night, and surprised a large sloop at anchor among the men-of-war. Tyler's party boarded the sloop, secured the sailors, weighed anchor, and got her out from the fleet, and took her up Middletown creek, all without any fighting. The whole enterprise was conducted with so much judgment, that the sailor prisoners dared not speak or give the least sign of alarm. "When we first touched the sloop," said Denise Forman, "I felt for a moment a little streaked, but it was soon over, and then we worked fearlessly to get the vessel under weigh, without alarming the fleet." These gun-boats were all propelled by muffled oars, that dipped in and out of the water so as to make no noise; nor did any of the men speak above their breath. On the gunwale of the boat, a strip of heavy canvas was nailed, the inner edge having been left unfastened, under which were concealed their swords, guns, and other implements for use in a combat, and so placed that each man could, at an instant's notice, lay his hand upon his own weapon. Even in port, the men belonging to Tyler's party were not allowed to talk or speak to other people, as a matter of precaution; and the captain always spoke in an undertone, and if a man laid down an oar, it was always done as noiselessly as possible. At one time, fifteen hundred British and Tories landed on Middletown shore, and marched from six to ten miles back into the country. A beacon, placed on a conspicuous hill, was fired for the purpose of giving an alarm; and soon the militia of the country, understanding the notice, gathered, and opposed the enemy. In Pleasant Valley they checked their advance. Uncle John Schenck and brother Denise so closely cornered a British or Tory officer of this party in a barn-yard, that he jumped from his horse, took to his heels and escaped, leaving his horse behind him. Major Burrows[2] happened to be at home at that time, on a visit to his family. Some of the Americans dressed themselves in British red coats, which had been captured. The Rev. Mr. DuBois, who, like a good patriot, had turned out on this occasion, with his fowling-piece, when Major Burrows rode near by, eked out in British uniform; Mr. DuBois spoke to Captain Schenck, his brother-in-law, "Look, there is a good shot," and, suiting the action to the word, took deliberate aim. Captain Schenck, better understanding the situation, quickly knocked up the clergyman's gun, with the explanation--"Don't shoot; that's Major Burrows." Mr. DuBois supposed he was aiming at a British officer, within point blank shot, who was endeavoring to rejoin his fellows. [2] Major John Burrows was first a captain in Colonel David Forman's regiment. Forman had the nick-name of "Black David," to distinguish him from a relative of the same name, and he was always a terror to the Tories; and Captain Burrows, from his efficiency against these marauders, was called by those enemies of the country, "Black David's Devil." January 1, 1777, Captain Burrows was made a captain in Spencer's regiment on Continental establishment; and, January 22, 1779, he was promoted to the rank of major, serving in Sullivan's campaign against the hostile Six Nations, and remaining in the army till the close of the war. Several years after, he went on a journey to the interior of Georgia, in an unhealthy season, when he probably sickened and died, for he was never heard of afterward. Major Burrows left an interesting journal of Sullivan's campaign, which appears in the splendid volume on that campaign issued by the State of New York, in 1887. The original MS. journal is preserved by his grand-daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth Breese Stevens, of Sconondoa, Oneida county, New York. Denise Forman's next move was to enlist with Captain Philip Freneau, the well-known poet, who sailed from Philadelphia in a letter of marque, the _Aurora_, against British commerce on the high seas. While not long out, sailing toward the West Indies, Freneau and his adventurous vessel were captured by their enemies, sent to New York, and all incarcerated on board of the _Scorpion_, one of the prison ships floating in New York harbor and Wallabout Bay, its unhappy prisoners experiencing almost untold horrors. Captain Freneau, at least, was subsequently transferred to what he denominated "the loathesome _Hunter_." These prison ships attained an unenviable reputation for maltreating and half-starving their hapless and ill-fated victims, hundreds of whom died in consequence of their inhuman treatment. This sad experience became the subject of one of Freneau's subsequent poems, emanating from the depths of his embittered soul recollections. Brother Denise used to relate to me, after his return home, that, when on the prison ship, he had to shut his eyes whenever he ate the sea-biscuit or drank the water assigned him, so full were they of vermin! Freneau, in his poem, thus alludes to the fare with which the poor prisoners were treated: "See, captain, see! what rotten bones we pick. What kills the healthy can not cure the sick. Not dogs on _such_ by Christian men are fed; And see, good master, see that lousy bread!" "Your meat or bread," this man of flint replied, "Is not my care to manage or provide; But this, damn'd rebel dogs, I'd have you know, That better than you merit we bestow. Out of my sight!" No more he deigned to say, But whisk'd about, and, frowning, strode away. When the survivors were exchanged, after their long imprisonment, they were so weak and emaciated that they could scarcely walk--perfect living skeletons; and my brother, after his return home, was confined to his bed, and for several days nearly all hope of his recovery was abandoned; but he at length providentially recovered. Denise Forman received a captain's commission when a war was threatened with France, in 1798, and when the army was disbanded, he settled on a farm in Freehold, where he spent the remainder of his days. About 1790, Captain Freneau married my sister Eleanor. He was a prominent Anti-Federalist in his day, and edited various Democratic papers at different places, and was for a time translating clerk in the State Department. While he was able to translate the French documents, he found it cost him more than he received to get those in other foreign languages properly translated, and after a while he resigned. He had in early life been a college-mate with James Madison, at Princeton, and has been aptly called the "patriot poet" of the Revolution, his effusions having been useful to the cause of the country during its great struggle for independence. He lost his life in a violent snow-storm, in December, 1832, in his eighty-first year, near Monmouth, New Jersey. While attending grammar-school, the latter part of the Revolutionary war, at Freehold, young Forman records: The hottest part of the battle of Monmouth was about this spot, where my brother-in-law, Major Burrows, lived after he left the army, and with whom I and some fellow-students boarded. Our path to the school-house crossed a grave where a remarkably tall British officer was buried. We opened the grave; a few pieces only of blanket, which encompassed the corpse, remained. One school-mate, Barnes Smock, was a very tall person, but the thigh bones of this unfortunate officer far outmeasured his. I believe this was the only engagement when the two opposing armies had recourse to the bayonet,[3] and this was the place of that charge. The battle took place on the Sabbath. A British cannon ball went through Rev. Dr. Woodhull's church. Dr. Woodhull was now one of my teachers. The two armies lay upon their arms all night after the battle. General Washington and General La Fayette slept in their cloaks under an apple-tree in Mr. Henry Perrine's orchard. It was Washington's intention to have renewed the battle the next day, but the British, in the course of the night, stole a march as fast as they could for their fleet at Sandy Hook. [3] This is an error. Bayonet charges were resorted to by Morgan at the Cowpens, and in other engagements. In the spring of 1783, when peace was dawning, many of the old citizens of New York City, who had been exiled from their homes for some seven years, began to return to their abandoned domiciles, even before the British evacuation. Among them was Major Benjamin Ledyard, who had married my oldest sister. In September of that year, at the instance of my sister Ledyard, I went to New York as a member of her family. Every day I saw the British soldiers. Indeed, a young lieutenant boarded a short time in our family, as many families received the British officers as an act of courtesy. Even before the British evacuation, the American officers were permitted to cross over into the city, and frequently came, visiting the coffee-houses and other places of public resort. Here they would meet British officers, and some of them evinced a strong inclination to make disturbance with their late competitors, throwing out hints or casting reflections well calculated to provoke personal combats. There was a Captain Stakes, of the American Light Dragoons, a fine, large, well-built man, who had no fear about him. It was said, when he entered the coffee-house, that the British officers exercised a wholesome caution how they treated him, after some of them had made a feint in testing his powers. But it all happily passed over without harm. It was finally agreed between General Washington and Sir Guy Carleton that New York should be evacuated November 25th. In the morning of that day, the British army paraded in the Bowery. The Americans also paraded, and marched down till they came very close to each other, so that the officers of both armies held friendly parleys. The streets were crowded with people on an occasion so interesting. I hurried by the redcoats till I reached the Americans, where I knew I would be safe. So I sauntered about among the officer. Presently, an American officer seized me by the hand, when, I looking up at him, he said, encouragingly: "Don't be afraid, Sammy. I know your brother Jonathan. He is an officer in the same line with me, and my name is Cumming."[4] He continued to hold me by the hand till orders were given to advance. He advised me to keep on the sidewalk, as I might get run over in the street. [4] This was John N. Cumming, who rose from a lieutenant to be lieutenant-colonel, commanding the Third New Jersey Regiment, serving the entire war. The British steadily marched in the direction of their vessels, while the Americans advanced down Queen (since Pearl) street; the British embarking on board their fleet on East river, I believe, near Whitehall, and the Americans headed directly to Fort George, on the point where the Battery now is. Stockades were around the fort, and the large gate was opened. When the British evacuated the fort, they unreefed the halyards of the tall flag-staff, greased the pole, so that it was some time before the American flag was hoisted. At length, a young soldier[5] succeeded in climbing the pole, properly arranged the halyards, when up ran the striped and star-spangled banner, amid the deafening shouts of the multitude, that seemed to shake the city. It is easier to imagine than to describe the rejoicing, and the brilliancy of the fireworks that evening. [5] The editor, while at Saratoga Springs, in 1838, took occasion to visit the venerable Anthony Glean, who resided in the town of Saratoga, and who was reputed to be the person who climbed the greased flag-staff at the evacuation of New York, and who himself claimed to have performed that feat. He was then a well-to-do farmer, enjoying a pension for his revolutionary services, and lived two or three years later, till he had reached the age of well-nigh ninety. The newspapers of that period often referred to him as the hero of the flag-staff exploit, and no one called it in question. After the evacuation, Mr. Forman witnessed the affectionate and affecting parting of Washington and his officers, when he entered a barge at Whitehall wharf, manned by sea captains in white frocks, who rowed him to the Jersey shore, to take the stage for Philadelphia, on his way to Congress. Mr. Forman also saw General Washington while presiding over the convention of 1787, to form a Constitution for the new Republic. The general was attired in citizen's dress--blue coat, cocked hat, hair in queue, crossed and powdered. He walked alone to the State House, the place of meeting, and seemed pressed down in thought. A few moments before General Washington took his seat on the rostrum, the venerable Dr. Franklin, one of the Pennsylvania delegates, was brought in by a posse of men in his sedan, and helped into the hall, he being severely afflicted with palsy or paralysis at the time. On the adoption of the Constitution, a great celebration was held in New York to commemorate the event, which Mr. Forman also witnessed. A large procession was formed, composed of men of all avocations in life, and each represented by some insignia of his own trade or profession, marching through the streets with banners, flags, and stirring music. A full-rigged vessel, called "The Federal Ship Hamilton," was drawn in the procession, and located in Bowling Green, where it remained until it fell to pieces by age. After spending some years as a clerk in mercantile establishments in New York City, and once going as supercargo to dispose of a load of flour to Charleston, he engaged in merchandising at Middletown Point, New Jersey. Mr. Forman subsequently made the journey down the Ohio and Mississippi, in 1789-'90, as given in considerable detail in the narrative which follows. While spending the winter of 1792-'93 in Philadelphia, he witnessed the inauguration of Washington as President, at the beginning of his second term of office, and was within six feet of him when he took the oath of office. "I cast my eyes over the vast crowd," says Major Forman, "and every eye seemed riveted on the great chief. On Washington's right sat Chief-Justice Cushing, and on his left Senator Langdon, of New Hampshire. After sitting a little while in profound silence, the senator arose, and asked the President if he was ready to take the oath of office. General Washington rose up, having a paper in his left hand, when he made a very short address. Then Judge Cushing stood up, with a large open Bible before him, facing the President, who laid his hand upon the sacred volume, and very deliberately and distinctly repeated the oath of office as pronounced by the chief-justice. When Washington repeated his own name, as he did at the conclusion of the ceremony, it made my blood run cold. The whole proceedings were performed with great solemnity. General Washington was dressed in deep mourning, for, it was said, a favorite nephew who had lived at Mount Vernon during the Revolutionary war. He wore his mourning sword. Mrs. Washington was about the middling stature, and pretty fleshy." Mr. Forman now entered into the employ of the Holland Land Company, through their agents, Theophilus Cazenove and John Lincklaen, to found a settlement in the back part of the State of New York, where that company had purchased a large body of land. He accordingly headed a party, in conjunction with Mr. Lincklaen, for this purpose, conveying a load of merchandise to the point of operations, passing in batteaus up the Mohawk to old Fort Schuyler, now Utica, beyond which it was necessary to open up a road for the teams and loads of goods; lodging in the woods when necessary, living on raw pork and bread, which was better than the bill of fare at the well-known tavern in that region, kept by John Dennie, the half Indian--"no bread, no meat;" and one of Dennie's descendants indignantly resented being referred to as an Indian--"Me no Indian; only Frenchman and squaw!" At length, May 8, 1793, the party arrived on the beautiful body of water, since known as Cazenovia Lake, and founded the village of Cazenovia, where Mr. Forman engaged in felling trees, and erecting the necessary houses in which to live and do business, and in this rising settlement he engaged in merchandising for several years. He held many public positions of honor and trust; was county clerk, secretary for over thirty years of a turnpike company; served as major in a regiment of militia early organized at Cazenovia. The latter years of his life he spent in Syracuse, where he was greatly respected for his worth, his fine conversational powers, his social and generous feelings. He lived to the great age of over ninety-seven years, dying August 16, 1862. His closing years were embittered over the distracted condition of his country, embroiled in fratricidal war, and his prayer was that the proud flag which he witnessed when it was placed over the ramparts of Fort George, November 25, 1783, might again wave its ample folds over a firmly united American Confederacy. His patriotic prayer was answered, though he did not himself live to witness it. NARRATIVE OF A JOURNEY DOWN THE OHIO AND MISSISSIPPI, 1789-'90. General David Forman,[6] of New Jersey, entered into a negotiation with the Spanish minister, Don Diego de Gardoque, for his brother, Ezekiel Forman, of Philadelphia, to emigrate with his family and sixty odd colored people, and settle in the Natchez country, then under Spanish authority. [6] General Forman was born near Englishtown, Monmouth Co., New Jersey. He was, during the Revolutionary war, a terror to the tories of his region, and as brigadier-general commanded the Jersey troops at the battle of Germantown. No less than eighteen of the Forman connection were in his brigade in this engagement. He was subsequently a county judge, and member of the council of state. He died about 1812. I agreed with General Forman to accompany the emigrating party; and, about the last of November, 1789, having closed up my little business at Middletown Point, New Jersey, I set out from the general's residence, in Freehold, with Captain Benajah Osmun, an old continental captain, who was at that time the faithful overseer of the general's blacks. There were sixty men, women, and children, and they were the best set of blacks I ever saw together. I knew the most of them, and all were well-behaved, except two rather ill-tempered fellows. General Forman purchased some more, who had intermarried with his own, so as not to separate families. They were all well fed and well clothed. We had, I believe, four teams of four horses each, and one two-horse wagon, all covered with tow-cloth, while Captain Osmun and I rode on horseback. After the distressing scene of taking leave--for the general's family and blacks were almost all in tears--we sat out upon our long journey. The first night we camped on the plains near Cranberry, having accomplished only about twelve or fifteen miles. The captain and I had a bed put under one of the wagons; the sides of the wagon had tenter-hooks, and curtains made to hook up to them, with loops to peg the bottom to the ground. The colored people mostly slept in their wagons. In the night a heavy rain fell, when the captain and I fared badly. The ground was level, and the water, unable to run off, gave us a good soaking. I had on a new pair of handsome buckskin small clothes; the rain spoiled their beauty, and the wetting and subsequent shrinkage rendered them very uncomfortable to wear. The next morning we commenced our journey as early as possible. We drove to Princeton, where we tarried awhile, and all were made comfortable. We crossed the Delaware five miles above Trenton. On arriving at Lancaster, in Pennsylvania, the authorities stopped us, as we somewhat expected they would do. General Forman had furnished me with all the necessary papers relating to the transportation of slaves through New Jersey and Pennsylvania. While Judge Hubley was examining the papers, the servant women informed me that the females of the city came out of their houses and inquired of them whether they could spin, knit, sew, and do housework, and whether they were willing to go to the South; so, if the authorities stopped us, they could all soon have new homes. But our colored women laughed at the Lancaster ladies, who seemed mortified when they learned that we could not be detained. In Westmoreland county we had a little trouble with a drunken justice of the peace and some free blacks. These free blacks, as we learned from a faithful old colored woman, furnished the two ill-tempered blacks of our party with old swords and pistols, but nothing serious grew out of it. The weather began to grow very cold, the roads bad, and traveling tedious. We encamped one night in the woods, kindled a fire, and turned the tails of the wagons all inward, thus forming a circle around the fire. Another night we came to a vacant cabin without a floor; we made a large fire, and all who chose took their bedding and slept in the cabin, some remaining in the wagons. The captain and I had our beds spread before the fire. One Saturday evening, we were apprehensive of being obliged to encamp again in the woods. I went ahead, hoping to find night quarters. I rode up to a log house and went in; it was growing dark, and I began to ask the landlord to accommodate us for the night, addressing myself to a tall, lean man. Before I got through with my inquiry, he caught me up in his arms, as if I were merely a small child, and exclaimed: "Mighty souls! if this is not little Sammy Forman," and, hugging and kissing me, added, "Why, don't you remember Charley Morgan? Yes, you can have any thing I have, and we will do the best we can for you." This was somewhere in the Alleghany mountains, and here we remained till Monday, buying wheat, and sending it to mill, and converting a fat steer into meat, so that we were well provided for, for awhile. This Charley Morgan entered the regular service as a corporal in my brother Jonathan's company, when he was a captain, and raised his company in the vicinity of Middletown Point, New Jersey. He could ape the simpleton very well, and was sent as a spy into the British army, and returned safe with the desired information. I was surprised to meet him in this far-off mountain region. Somewhere about Fort Littleton or Fort Loudon, our funds ran out. When we left General Forman, he told me that Uncle Ezekiel Forman would leave Philadelphia with his family, and overtake us in time to supply our wants. But he did not start as soon as he expected, and on his way in the mountains the top of his carriage got broken by a leaning tree, which somewhat detained him, so that we arrived at Pittsburg two or three days before him. One morning, while in the neighborhood of Fort Littleton or Fort Loudon, I offered to sell my horse to the landlord where we took breakfast; he kept a store as well as a tavern, and was wealthy. The price of the horse I put very low, when the landlord asked why I offered him so cheap. I informed him that I was out of funds, and had expected that Ezekiel Forman, who owned the colored people, would have overtaken us before our means became exhausted. He replied: "I know your uncle, and I will lend you as much money as you need, and take your order on him, as he will stop here on his way. Now, step with me to the store." Pointing to the large piles of silver dollars on the counter in the store, he said: "Step up and help yourself to as much as you want, and give me your order." This was an unexpected favor. When uncle arrived, he satisfied the order. It had taken us near three weeks to journey from Monmouth to Pittsburg. After our arrival at this place, our first business was to find situations for our numerous family, while awaiting the rise of the Ohio, and to lay in provisions for our long river voyage. Colonel Turnbull, late of Philadelphia, and an acquaintance of uncle, politely offered him the use of a vacant house and store-room, exactly such apartments as were wanted. The colored people were all comfortably housed also. The horses and wagons were sold at a great sacrifice--uncle retaining only his handsome coach horses and carriage, which he took to Natchez on a tobacco boat, which Captain Osmun commanded, and on board of which the colored field hands were conveyed. These boats were flat-bottomed, and boarded over the top, and appeared like floating houses. Uncle's boat was a seventy feet keel-boat, decked over, with a cabin for lodging purposes, but too low to stand up erect. The beds and bedding lay on the floor, and the insides lined with plank to prevent the Indians from penetrating through with their balls, should they attack us. We had a large quantity of dry goods, and a few were opened and bartered in payment for boats and provisions. On board of the keel-boat, uncle and family found comfortable quarters. Mr. and Mrs. Forman, Augusta, Margaret, and Frances, aged about nine, eleven, and thirteen, and David Forman and Miss Betsey Church, the latter housekeeper and companion for Aunt Forman, an excellent woman, who had lived in the family several years, and occasionally took the head of the table. I and five or six others, two mechanics, and about eight or ten house servants, were also occupants of this boat. The family received much polite attention while in Pittsburg. By the time we got prepared for our departure, the Ohio river rose. We tarried there about a month. Both boats were armed with rifles, pistols, etc. It being in Indian war time, all boats descending that long river, of about eleven hundred miles, were liable to be attacked every hour by a merciless foe, oftentimes led on by renegade whites. Uncle fixed on a certain Sabbath, as was the custom in those days, to embark on ship-board. On that day, the polite and hospitable Colonel Turnbull, then a widower, gave uncle an elegant dinner, and invited several gentlemen to grace the occasion with their presence. After dinner, which was not prolonged, we embarked on board our little squadron. Colonel Wm. Wyckoff, and his brother-in-law, Kenneth Scudder, of Monmouth county, New Jersey, accompanied us on our voyage. The colonel had been, seven years previous to this, an Indian trader, and was now on his way to Nashville, Tennessee. Uncle Forman's keel-boat, Captain Osmun's flat-boat, and Colonel Wyckoff's small keel-boat constituted our little fleet. The day of our departure was remarkably pleasant. Our number altogether must have reached very nearly a hundred. The dinner party accompanied us to our boats, and the wharf was covered with citizens. The river was very high, and the current rapid. It was on the Monongahela where we embarked. Our keel-boat took the lead. These boats are guided by oars, seldom used, except the steering oar, or when passing islands, as the current goes about six or seven miles an hour. As the waters were now high, the current was perhaps eight or nine miles an hour. Before day-break next morning we made a narrow escape from destruction, from our ignorance of river navigation. We had an anchor and cable attached to our keel-boat. The cable was made fast to small posts over the forecastle, where were fenders all around the little deck. When it began to grow dark, the anchor was thrown over, in hopes of holding us fast till morning, while the other boats were to tie up to trees along the river bank. As soon as the anchor fastened itself in the river bottom, the boat gave a little lurch or side motion, when the cable tore away all the frame-work around the deck, causing a great alarm. Several little black children were on deck at the time, and as it had now become quite dark, it could not be ascertained, in the excitement of the moment, whether any of them had been thrown into the water. Fortunately none were missing. During our confusion, Captain Osmun's boat passed ours, a few minutes after the accident, and we soon passed him, he hailing us, saying that he was entangled in the top of a large tree, which had caved into the river, and requested the small row-boat to assist him. Uncle Forman immediately dispatched the two mechanics, with the small boat, to his assistance. Osmun got clear of the tree without injury, and the two mechanics rowed hard, almost all night, before they overtook him. Mrs. Forman and daughters braved out our trying situation very firmly. After we lost our anchor, Uncle Forman took a chair, and seated himself on the forecastle, like a pilot, and I took the helm. He kept watch, notifying me when to change the direction of the boat. When he cried out to me, "port your helm," it was to keep straight in the middle of the stream; if to bear to the left, he would cry out, "starboard;" if to the right, "larboard." I was not able to manage the helm alone, and had a man with me to assist in pulling as directed. Uncle Forman and I were the only ones of our party who understood sailor's terms. Ours was a perilous situation till we landed at Wheeling; it was the most distressing night I ever experienced. The next morning, all our boats landed at Wheeling, Virginia, rated at ninety-six miles from Pittsburg. Here we obtained a large steering oar for the keel-boat, as the strong current kept the rudder from acting, without the application of great strength. Having adjusted matters, we set out again. We seldom ventured to land on our journey, for fear of lurking Indians. One day, we discovered large flocks of wild turkeys flying about in the woods on shore. The blacksmith, who was a fine, active young man, asked Uncle Forman to set him on shore, and give him a chance to kill some of them. The little boat was manned, and taking his rifle and a favorite dog, he soon landed. But he had not been long on shore, before he ran back to the river's bank, and made signs for the boat to come and take him on board. When safely among his friends, he said that he came to a large fire, and, from appearances, he supposed a party of Indians was not far off. He, however, lost his fine dog, for he dared not call him. We landed and stopped at Marietta, at the mouth of the Muskingum, where was a United States garrison. Some of the officers were acquainted with the family. It was a very agreeable occurrence to meet with old acquaintances in such a dreary place. The young ladies were good singers, and entertained the officers awhile with their vocal music. This night, we felt secure in sleeping away the fatigues of the journey. Governor St. Clair had his family here. There were a few other families, also; but all protected by the troops. I believe there was no other settlement[7] until we arrived at Fort Washington, now Cincinnati, some three hundred miles below Marietta. [7] Mr. Forman forgot to mention Limestone, now Maysville, Kentucky, some sixty miles above Cincinnati, an older settlement by some four years than Marietta or Cincinnati. Perhaps it was passed in the night, and unobserved. And Columbia, too, at the mouth of the Little Miami, about six miles above Cincinnati, and a few months its senior in settlement. A few hundred yards above Fort Washington, we landed our boats, when Uncle Forman, Colonel Wyckoff, and I went on shore, and walked up to head-quarters, to pay our respects to General Harmar, the commander of our troops in the North-western Territory. The general received us with much politeness. As we were about taking leave of him, he kindly invited us to remain and take a family dinner with him, observing to Uncle, that we should have the opportunity of testing the deliciousness of what he may never have partaken before--the haunch of a fine buffalo. It being near dining hour, the invitation was, of course, accepted. As the general and lady were acquainted with Uncle and Aunt Forman in Philadelphia, they very politely extended their kindness by asking that Uncle, Aunt, and their family, together with Colonel Wyckoff and Brother-in-law Scudder and Captain Osmun, would spend the next day with them, which was accepted with great pleasure. General Harmar directed where to move our little fleet, so that all should be safe under military guard. We then returned to our boats, and conveyed them down to the appointed place. The next morning, after breakfast, and after attending to our toilets, we repaired to General Harmar's head-quarters, where we were all received most cordially. Our company consisted of Mr. and Mrs. Forman, their three daughters, and Master David Forman, Miss Church, Captain Osmun, S. S. Forman, Colonel Wyckoff, and Mr. Scudder--eleven in all. Mrs. Forman and Mrs. Harmar resembled each other as much as though they were sisters. The general invited some of his officers to share his hospitalities, also, and we had a most sumptuous dinner and tea. Before it was quite dark, we took leave of our hospitable friends. I had the honor of a seat at the table next to the general. While at dinner, the officer of the day called on General Harmar for the countersign, so as to place out the sentinels. Captain Kirby,[8] of the army, who dined with us, was directed by the general to accompany us on our return to our boats. Just before we came to the sentinel, Captain Kirby asked us to halt, until he could advance and give the countersign, which is done with much prudence. I sauntered along, and happened to hear the challenge by the guard, and the reply of the captain. The countersign was, I believe, "Forman." [8] Neither the _Dictionary of the Army_, the _MS. Harmar Papers_, nor the _Journal of Major Denny_, who was then an aide to General Harmar, make any mention of a Captain Kirby. It is probable, that William Kersey was the officer referred to. He served in New Jersey during the Revolution, rising from a private to a captaincy by brevet at the close of the war. At this period, early in 1790, he was a lieutenant. Probably, by courtesy of his rank and title in the Revolution, he was called captain. He attained that rank the following year; major, in 1794; and died, March 21, 1800. In the morning, Captain Osmun said to me, that, after paying our respects to General Harmar, he wanted me to accompany him to the quarters of the other officers, as he probably knew all of them; that they were old continental officers retained in service, and he added: "They all know your brother, Colonel Jonathan Forman,[9] of the Revolution, and will be glad to see you on his account." We, accordingly, after our interview with General Harmar, went to their quarters. They recollected Captain Osmun, and he introduced me, when they welcomed me most cordially, and made many inquiries after my brother. [9] Jonathan Forman was born October 16, 1755; was educated at Princeton College, where he was a fellow-student with James Madison, and entering the army in 1776 served as captain for five years, during which he participated in Sullivan's campaign against the hostile Six Nations; and, promoted to the rank of major in 1781, he served under La Fayette in Virginia; and early in 1783 he was made a lieutenant-colonel, and continued in the army till the end of the war. He headed a regiment against the whisky insurgents of West Pennsylvania in 1794, and two years later he removed to Cazenovia, N. Y., where he filled the position of supervisor, member of the legislature and brigadier-general in the militia. He married Miss Mary Ledyard, of New London, Conn., who "went over her shoe tops in blood," in the barn where the wounded lay, the morning after Arnold's descent on New London and Fort Griswold, on Groton Heights, where her uncle, Colonel William Ledyard, was killed in cold blood after his surrender. General Forman died at Cazenovia, May 25, 1809, in his sixty-fourth year, and his remains repose in the beautiful cemetery at that place. I think it was in the autumn of 1790 that General Harmar was defeated by the Indians, and most of these brave officers were killed. At that period officers wore three-cornered hats, and by that means nearly all of them were singled out and killed, as they could be so easily distinguished from others. Some distance above Fort Washington, the Scioto river empties into the Ohio. Near this river was a cave, which the whites had not discovered till after Harmar's defeat. Here the Indians would sally out against boats ascending the Ohio. A canoe passed us the day before we passed the Scioto, which had been fired into at that point, one man having been shot through the shoulder, another through the calf of the leg, while the third escaped unhurt. When these poor fellows arrived at Fort Washington, they waited for us. After our arrival, understanding that we were going to tarry a day, they set off. Harmar's defeat caused a French settlement near the Scioto to be broken up;[10] some of them were killed by the Indians. [10] The Gallipolis settlement was much annoyed by the Indians; some of the poor French settlers were killed, others abandoned the place, but the settlement was maintained, despite all their trials and sufferings. I must mention an anecdote about my friend, Captain Osmun. At the battle of Long Island, and capture of New York by the British, many American prisoners were taken, Captain Osmun among them. He pretended to be a little acquainted with the profession of physic, but he never studied it, and could bleed, draw teeth, etc. A German officer had a very sick child, the case baffling the skill of all the English and German physicians, and the child's recovery was given up as hopeless. At last it was suggested to call in the rebel doctor. So Osmun was sent for. He suppressed as well as he could his half-comical, half-quizzical expression, and assumed a serious look; felt of the child's pulse, and merely said he would prepare some pills and call again. He accordingly did so, giving the necessary directions, and promised to call at the proper time to learn the effect. When he called the third time the child had grown much better, and finally recovered. He said that all he did for the little sufferer was to administer a little powder-post, mixed up with rye-bread, made into little pills. He said he knew they could do no harm, if they did no good, and regarded himself as only an instrument in the hands of the Almighty in saving the child's life. The father of the child gave him almost a handful of guineas. Prior to this occurrence he had, while a prisoner, suffered for the necessaries of life, but thenceforward he was able to procure needful comforts till his exchange. The next morning, after our entertainment by General Harmar and lady, we renewed our journey, floating rapidly down the Belle Riviere. Nothing of moment occurred till our arrival at Louisville, at the Falls of the Ohio. The weather now grew so severely cold, in the latter part of January, 1790, that the river became blocked with ice. Here we laid up, disembarked, and took a house in the village, the front part of which was furnished for a store, which exactly suited us, and which was gratuitously offered to Uncle Forman by a Mr. Rhea, of Tennessee. We were remarkably fortunate in this respect, both here and at Pittsburg. Here I opened a store from our stock of goods, and took tobacco in payment, which was the object in bringing the merchandise. Louisville then contained about sixty dwelling-houses. Directly opposite was Fort Jefferson,[11] which was, I believe, only a captain's command. At the Great Miami was Judge Symmes's settlement,[12] which dragged heavily along at that time, having been allowed only a sergeant's command for its protection. [11] This is evidently an error of memory; it was known as Fort Steuben, located where Jeffersonville now is. [12] Trivial circumstances sometimes change the fate of nations, and so it would seem they do of cities also. North Bend might have become the great commercial metropolis of the Miami country, instead of Cincinnati, but for an affair of the heart, if we may credit the tradition preserved by Judge Burnet in his _Notes on the North-western Territory_. Ensign Francis Luce had been detailed, with a small force, for the protection of the North Bend settlement, and to locate a suitable site for a block-house. While the ensign was keenly but very leisurely on the lookout for a proper location, he made a discovery far more interesting to him--a beautiful black-eyed lady, the wife of one of the settlers. Luce became infatuated with her charms, and her husband, seeing the danger to which he was exposed if he remained where he was, resolved at once to remove to Cincinnati. The gallant ensign was equal to the unexpected emergency, for he now began to discover what he had not discovered before, that North Bend was not, after all, so desirable a locality for the contemplated block-house as Cincinnati, and forthwith apprised Judge Symmes of these views, who strenuously opposed the movement. But the judge's arguments were not so effective as the sparkling eyes of the fair dulcinea then at Cincinnati. And so Luce and his military force were transplanted in double-quick time to Cincinnati; and where the troops were the settlers congregated for their protection and safety. And so, the Queen City of the West followed the fortunes of this unnamed forest queen, who so completely beguiled the impressible ensign. In this case there was no ten years' war, as in the case of the beautiful Spartan dame, which ended in the destruction of Troy; but, by Luce's infatuation and removal, North Bend was as much fated as though the combined Indians of the North-west had blotted it out of existence. Soon after this portentious removal, Luce, on May 1, 1790, resigned from the army--whether on account of his fair charmer, history fails to tell us. This romantic story has been doubted by some, but Judge Burnet was an early settler of Cincinnati, and had good opportunities to get at the facts; and when I met the judge, fully forty years ago, he seemed not the man likely to indulge in romancing. That General Harmar, in forwarding Luce's resignation to the War Office, seemed particularly anxious that it should be accepted, would seem to imply that, for this intrigue, or some other cause, the general was desirous of ridding the service of him. Besides Symmes', there was no other settlement between Cincinnati and Louisville, except that of a French gentleman named Lacassangue, a few miles above Louisville, who began a vineyard on the Indian side of the river; and one day Indians visited it, killing his people, and destroying his vines.[13] Mr. Lacassangue was a polite, hospitable man, and gave elegant dinners. [13] Michael Lacassangue, a Frenchman of education, settled in Louisville as a merchant prior to March, 1789, when General Harmar addressed him as a merchant there. He located a station on the northern shore of the Ohio, three miles above Fort Steuben, now Jeffersonville, where he had purchased land in the Clark grant. In a MS. letter of Captain Joseph Ashton, commanding at Fort Steuben, addressed to General Harmar, April 3, 1790, these facts are given relative to the attack on Lacassangue's station. That on the preceding March 29th, the Indians made their attack, killing one man. There were only two men, their wives, and fourteen children in the station. Word was immediately conveyed to Captain Ashton of their situation, who detached a sergeant and fourteen men to their relief, and who arrived there, Captain Ashton states, in sixteen minutes after receiving intelligence of the attack. The Indians, three in number, had decamped, and were pursued several miles until their trail was lost on a dry ridge. The families were removed to Fort Steuben, and thus the station was, for a time, broken up. Mr. Lacassangue must have been quite a prominent trader at Louisville in his day. About the first of June, 1790, Colonel Vigo, an enterprising trader of the Illinois country, consigned to him 4,000 pounds of lead, brought by Major Doughty from Kaskaskia. Mr. Lacassangue made efforts, in after years, to give character to his new town of Cassania--a name evidently coined out of his own--hoping from its more healthful situation, and better location for the landing of vessels destined to pass the Falls, to supplant Louisville. The little place, General Collot says, had in 1796, when he saw it, "only two or three houses, and a store." The ambitious effort was a vain one, and Cassania soon became lost to the geographical nomenclature of the country. Mr. Lacassangue died in 1797. A nephew of Mrs. Washington of the name of Dandridge lived with Mr. Lacassangue. When I returned to Philadelphia, I there met him again; he resided at General Washington's. While the Dandridge family stayed at Louisville, they received much attention. It was the custom of the citizens, when any persons of note arrived there, to get up a ball in their honor. They would choose managers; circulate a subscription paper to meet the expenses of the dance. Every signer, except strangers, must provide his partner, see her safe there and home again. We had scarcely got located before a subscription paper was presented to Uncle Forman and myself. But the first ball after our arrival proved a failure, owing to the inclemency of the weather, so that no ladies could attend. General Wilkinson happened in town, and though he and Uncle Forman stayed but a little while, the young blades were disposed for a frolic. Some time before this a ball was tendered to General St. Clair, when the youngsters had a row, and destroyed the most of the breakable articles that the house afforded. But such instances of rudeness occurred only when no ladies were present. Not long after the failure on account of the weather, the scheme for a dance was renewed, and, at length, we had an elegant collection of southern fair. The ball was opened by a minuet by Uncle Forman and a southern lady--Aunt Forman did not dance. This was the last time, I believe, that I saw that elegant dance performed. Then two managers went around with numbers on paper in a hat--one going to the ladies, the other to the gentlemen. When the manager calls for lady No. 1, the lady drawing that number stands up, and is led upon the floor, awaiting for gentleman No. 1, who, when called, takes his place, and is introduced by the manager to the lady. So they proceed with the drawing of couples until the floor is full for the dance. I, in my turn, was drawn, and introduced to my dancing partner from Maryland, and we were called to the first dance. This lady happened to be acquainted with Uncle Forman's oldest son, General Thomas Marsh Forman, which circumstance rendered our casual meeting all the more agreeable. The officers of the garrison over the river generally attended, and they brought the military music along. I became well acquainted with the officers. Dr. Carmichael,[14] of the army, used often to come over and sit in my store. [14] Dr. John F. Carmichael, from New Jersey, entered the army in September, 1789, and, with the exception of a few months, retained his position till his resignation in June, 1804. It was the last of February, I believe, when Uncle Forman and his little fleet took their departure from Louisville, destined for the Natchez country. The river was now free from ice. There subsequently came a report, that when they reached what was called the low country, below the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, they were captured by the Indians. I was in a painful suspense for a long time, and until I heard from them. While Uncle Forman and party were sojourning in Louisville, there was, it appears, a white man there, who learned the names of Ezekiel Forman and Captain Osmun, their place of destination, and all about them. This fellow was a decoyer, who lived among the Indians, and whose business it was to lure boats ashore for purposes of murder and robbery. At some point below the mouth of the Tennessee, this renegade saw the boats approaching, ran on the beach, imploring, upon his bended knees, that Mr. Forman, calling him by name, would come ashore and take him on board, as he had just escaped from the Indians. Mr. Forman began to steer for his relief, when Captain Osmun, who was a little way in the rear, hailed Uncle, warning him to keep in the middle of the stream, as he saw Indians in hiding behind trees along the bank where the wily decoyer was playing his treacherous part. Giving heed to this admonition, Uncle Forman kept clear of the dangerous shore. Then an old Indian, finding that his plot was exposed, ran down to the beach, hailing the boats: "Where you go?" It is not clear what could have been the Indian's motive in making a display of himself, and seeking the information already known to his renegade associate. But for the circumstance of Captain Osmun being in the rear, and discovering the exposed Indians screened behind trees, the whole party might have been lured on shore and massacred. It seems that, after boats entered the Mississippi, they were not molested by the Indians, as they were not at war with the Spaniards. I was left in Louisville, with a store of goods. When I had disposed of them, I was directed to join Uncle Forman at Natchez; but some considerable time was necessary to trade off my stock, and convert it into tobacco. I spent my time very pleasantly at Louisville. The southern people are remarkably friendly to strangers. One family, in particular, Mr. and Mrs. Ashby, were as kind to me as though I had been their own son. They soon called on Uncle and Aunt Forman, showing all possible attention, and soon became quite familiar. One day, Mr. Ashby called, and inquired of Aunt for "_old_ Mr. Forman." "I tell you, Mr. Ashby," Mrs. Forman laughingly replied, "you shall not call my husband _old_. Please to refer to him as Mr. Forman, and our nephew as Mr. Sam. Forman." Mr. Ashby took the suggestion in good part, and promised ready obedience. After Uncle and Aunt Forman left for the Natchez country, Mrs. Ashby would come to my store like a mother, and inquire into the condition of my lodgings, and sent bed and bedding, and had a kind old woman examine my trunk, taking out all my clothing, first airing and then nicely replacing them, and kindly did all my washing during my stay. Mr. Ashby had a farm a little way out of town, but he and his family came in very often. Mrs. Ashby never came without making me a motherly call, and looking over my clothing to see if any repairs were needed. I never parted with briefly-made acquaintances with so much regret. I became very intimate with a Mr. Smith, from New York, a young gentleman about my own age. The Virginians, as were most of the Louisville people, were very fond of dancing. Smith and I agreed to let each other know when a hop was in agitation, and they were very frequent. When notified by him of one such occasion, I apologized for not being able to go, as I had no suitable pumps. "You have purchased," said he, "a parcel of elegant moccasins for your New York ladies. You don a pair, and I will another." "Good! good!" we mutually ejaculated. So we engaged our favorite partners, and attended the ball. It was something new to appear in such an assembly decked off in such Indian gear; but they were much admired, and, at the next dance, almost all appeared in moccasins. So, it seems, we led the ton, and introduced a new fashion. There was but one tavern and one boarding-house in the place. The boarding-house was kept by a Dr. Walter, who was also the pilot to take boats over the Falls; and he was, moreover, a great hunter and fisherman. One day in April, I think, at some public festival, several of our boarders, the leader was the Commissary of the Army, proposed to have what they called _a setting_, and asked me to join them. I had often heard the commissary relate his exploits--drinking egg-nog was then all the go. I declined to share in the frolic, fearing the influence of these southern blades on such occasions. In the course of the night, I was alarmed by the rattling of stones thrown against my store-door and window-shutters. At first, I thought it might be Indians. The clatter was kept up, and the glass windows all broken. I finally concluded that it was the work of the egg-nog party. Not only were my windows completely shattered, but my store door was broken open by the pelting of large stones. These egg-nog disturbers served Captain Thomas, the landlord, in the same way as they had done me. The next morning, when we all met at the breakfast table at our boarding-house, scarcely a word was spoken during the meal. As I went out of the door, passing my friend, the commissary, I asked him if he would direct my windows glazed, and some little carpenter work done. He pretended to be astonished how they should have been broken. I made no reply, but walked back to my store, only looked at him and smiled. In the afternoon, at Captain Thomas's, the business assumed almost a tragical form--dirks were nearly drawn; however, it was amicably settled. The next morning these gentlemen asked me if I would be satisfied if my windows and door were made whole. I answered in the affirmative, and asked them whether they had not acted very imprudently, situated as we were on the frontiers in time of Indian warfare. "You know," said I, "that it was but a little time since that Captain Thomas and some others saw Indians in the night making, as they supposed, for my store, when I kept it up by Bear Grass creek; and a few people got together in the night, and followed the Indian trail out of the village without alarming me. The Indians evidently thought themselves discovered, and retired, hence I escaped. In consequence of this alarm, I immediately moved from that place to the center of the village, into the corner building opposite the tavern." It was observed one Sunday morning, soon after starting my store, that it was not opened on that day, as other establishments were; and I was asked why I kept my store closed--that Sunday had not crossed the mountains, and that I was the first person who kept his store shut on that day. I told them that I brought the Sabbath with me. It so happened that I had the honor of being the first to observe the day in Louisville. Directly opposite to me a billiard table was kept. It was customary at the south for ladies to indulge in billiards, considering it a genteel and healthful amusement. During the morning hours, a few ladies used to honor me with a call, when I would spend a little while in that pleasant recreation; but I never gambled, and ladies' company is always more agreeable than gentlemen's. Besides, if you play with gentlemen, it is apt to lead to gambling; and it was consequently better to pay for the use of the table with ladies, when one improves in manners from their refinement. One day Captain Thomas brought a little negro boy to my store, tendering me his services while I remained in Louisville; that he should be of no expense to me, but live at home, and come over regularly and do my chores, tote water, sweep my store, clean my shoes, etc. The captain explained that he had another boy of about the same age and size, and that one was better than both. I had a spruce colored barber, who was also a tailor, the pleasure of whose company I occasionally had in helping out in my labors. Sometime about the latter part of May, perhaps, four tobacco boats arrived at Louisville on their way to New Orleans, under the respective command of Captain Andrew Bayard, Captain Winters, and Captain Gano, of New York, and Captain January, of Kentucky. Captain Bayard's boat received some injury in passing over the Falls of the Ohio, and he had to unload to repair damages. I had been some time negotiating with a rich planter, Mr. Buckner, of Louisville. After I had heard of the accident to Captain Bayard's boat, Mr. Buckner came into the village. I got him in my store, locked the door, and told him that now was the time to close our long-talked-of trade, so that I could have the company of this descending fleet. After spending the night in conversation, I gave up my bed to Mr. Buckner, and threw down some blankets and coarse clothes for my own lodging. To make a long story short, we effected a trade--closing out my store of goods to him. He bought me a tobacco boat, loaded her with this product of the country, and got matters and things arranged so that I was ready to accompany the descending fleet. Of these tobacco traders, I was partially acquainted with Mr. Bayard. I had at Louisville a competitor in trade, a young Irish gentleman, but he could not succeed. My boat was loaded below the Falls, and by some means the hands suffered her to break from her fastenings, and went a mile or two down stream before they brought her to. I put my blanket on board of Mr. Bayard's boat, and got on board with him, and took my tea with him. In the evening, being moonlight, my canoe, with an old sailor, came for me. I took some blankets and wrapped them around my arms carelessly. I jumped into the canoe; and the sailor, it seems, had taken a little too much whisky, so that when he pushed off from Mr. Bayard's boat, in order to clear its bow, he leaned over so far as to make the canoe dip water; and, in recovering his position, he leaned so far the other way that the canoe filled. My arms being entangled with the blankets, I was totally helpless. Mr. Bayard's hands jumped into their small boat, came to my rescue, and saved me from a watery grave. Partly from economy, and partly from lack of time to secure another hand, I attempted to manage my tobacco boat, which was somewhat smaller than the usual size, with less than the usual supply of boatmen. This made it come hard on me, whose unskilled strength was but half that of an ordinary man. I had this old sailor with me for one watch, and an old North-western man and a Jerseyman for another. The boats would follow the current, except when passing islands, when the men must all beat their oars. I believe the old sailor, while on board, was a little deranged. After I discharged him at Natchez, he was found, I was told, in the woods, dead. Nothing of any moment occurred while descending the Ohio, until we reached Fort Massac, an old French fortification, about thirty miles above the mouth of the Ohio. It was a beautiful spot. All of the captains, and some of the hands, with a small boat, went on shore, while our tobacco boats glided gently along. When we landed, we separated in squads, and visited the old deserted ramparts, which appeared quite fresh. It was in the afternoon, just after a refreshing shower. Those first arriving at the intrenchment, espied a fresh moccasin track. We all looked at it, and then at each other, and, without uttering a word, all faced about, and ran as fast as possible for the little boat. Some hit its locality, while others struck the river too high up, and others, too low. Those of us who missed our way concluded, in our fright, that the Indians had cut us off; and no one had thought to take his rifle but me, and I feared that I should be the first to fall. After we were all safe on one of the tobacco boats, we recovered our speech, and each one told how he felt, and what he thought, during our flight to the boats. This locality of Fort Massac, we understood, was the direct way from the Ohio, in that country, to St. Louis, and probably the track we saw was that of some lonely Indian; and, judging from its freshness, the one who made it was as much frightened from our numbers as we were at our unexpected discovery. I will note a little circumstance that occurred during our passage down the Ohio. One day, I was ahead of the fleet, when one of the boats passed by suddenly, when we observed by the woods that we were standing still--evidently aground, or fast on something below the surface. I gave notice to the boats behind to come on, and take position between my boat and shore, hoping, by this means, to raise a temporary swell in the river, and, by fastening a rope to my boat, and extending along beside the others, and making the other end fast to a tree on shore, be enabled to get loose. While thus engaged, we heard a whistle, like that of a quail. Some observed that quail never kept in the woods, and we felt some fear that it might be Indians; but we continued our efforts at the rope, and the boat was soon so far moved that we discovered that we were fast upon a planter--that is, the body of a tree firmly embedded in the river bottom. At last, the men could partly stand upon it, and, with a hand-saw, so weakened it that it broke off, and we were released. Another dangerous obstruction is a tree becoming undermined and falling into the river, and the roots fastening themselves in the muddy bottom, while, by the constant action of the current, the limbs wear off, and the body keeps sawing up and down with great force, rising frequently several feet above the water, and then sinking as much below. These are called "sawyers," and often cause accidents to unsuspecting navigators. When we arrived at the mouth of the Ohio, we stopped. I fastened my boat to trees, and the other boats did likewise. We kept watch, with an ax in hand, to cut the fastenings in case of a surprise by Indians. Here were marks of buffalo having rested. Where the waters of the Mississippi and Ohio mingle, they look like putting dirty soap-suds and pure water together. So we filled all our vessels that were water-tight, for fear we might suffer for want of good water on our voyage. But we found out, afterward, that the Mississippi was very good water, when filtered. After we got all arranged, the second day after we embarked, the captains agreed that we would, in rotation, dine together, which rendered our journey more pleasant. Mr. Bayard's and my boat were frequently fastened together while descending the Ohio, but on the Mississippi, from the turbulence of the stream, it was not possible to do so. The first day that we entered the Mississippi, we discharged all our rifles and pistols, as we were then out of danger from the hostile Indians. In the afternoon, we had a strong wind ahead, which made a heavy sea, accompanied with thunder and lightning. The waves ran so high that we felt in danger of foundering. The forward boat pulled hard for shore, which we all followed. Presently, we saw an Indian canoe pulling for that boat. I asked my North-western man what that meant. He looked wild, but did not know what to make of it. I directed the men to pull away, and I would keep an eye upon the suspicious visitors, and at the same time load our rifles and pistols again. Reaching the advanced boat, the Indians were kindly received, and no fighting; and, instead of hostile demonstrations, they lent a hand in rowing. After much hard work, we at length all effected a landing in safety. We then prepared for dinner. It so happened that it was my turn to receive the captains at dinner. Having a large piece of fresh beef--enough and to spare, I invited three of our copper-faces to dine with us. Dinner over, Captain Gano set the example of _pitching the fork_ into the beef, as we used, in our school days, to pitch the fork into the ground. So the Indians, one after the other, imitated the captain, and very dextrously pitched their forks also into the beef, thinking, probably, that it was a white man's ceremony that should be observed. After dinner, at the conclusion of the pitching incident, I mixed some whisky and water in the only glass I had, and handed it to one of the captains; and then repeating it, filling the tumbler equally alike in quantity, handed it in succession to the others. When I came to the Indians, not knowing their relative rank, I happened to present the glass to the lowest in order, as I discovered by his declining it; but when I came to the leader, he took the offering, and reaching out his hand to me in a genteel and graceful manner, shook mine heartily; and then repeated the cordial shake with each of the others, not omitting his own people, and then drank our healths as politely, I imagine, as Lord Chesterfield could have done. The other Indians were similarly treated, and, in turn, as gracefully acknowledged the compliment. They all appeared much pleased with their reception. This ceremony over, our men asked leave to visit the opposite side of the river, where these Indians had a large encampment. This granted, they all went to get their rifles. The Indians seemed to understand etiquette and politeness, and objected to the men going armed. But, instead of speaking to the men, they addressed the captains of the boats, saying: "We have no objections to your men going among our people, if they don't take their rifles. We came among you as friends, bringing no arms along." We, of course, told our men to leave their rifles behind. They did so. Returning, they reported that there were a good many Indians there. By some means, some of our men must have let the Indians have _la tafia_--a cheap variety of rum distilled from molasses. At all events, they became very much intoxicated, "and we," said the visitors, "were very apprehensive of difficulty; but a squaw told us that the Indians could not fight, as she had secreted all their knives, and we were very much relieved when morning appeared, so we could bid good-by to our new acquaintances." The next day we arrived at _L'Anse a la Graisse_, which place, or adjoining it, bears the name of New Madrid, which is the American part of the little village settled under the auspices of Colonel George Morgan. Uncle Forman wrote me by all means to call at this Spanish post, as he had left my name with the genteel commandant there, who would expect to see me. In the morning, after breakfast, we all prepared our toilets preparatory to paying our respects to the officer of the place. The captains did me the honor of making me the foreman of the party, as my name would be familiar to the commandant. I regret that I have forgotten his name.[15] We made our call at as early an hour as we could, so that we might pursue our voyage without any unnecessary waste of time. [15] In July, 1789, less than a year before, Lieutenant Pierre Foucher, with four officers and thirty soldiers, had been sent from New Orleans to establish a post at this place, as stated in _Gayarre's Louisiana_, 1854, p. 268. It is generally asserted that this settlement was commenced as early as 1780; but the Spanish census of Louisiana, both in 1785 and 1788, make no mention of the place. Arrived at the gate, the guard was so anxious to trade his tame raccoon with our men that he scarcely took any notice of us. We went to head-quarters; there was but little ceremony. When we were shown into the commander's presence, I stepped toward him a little in advance of my friends, and announced my name. I was most cordially and familiarly received. Then I introduced my friends, mentioning their respective places of residence. After a little conversation, we rose to retire, when the commandant advanced near me, and politely asked me to dine with him an hour after twelve o'clock, and bring my accompanying friends with me. I turned to the gentlemen for their concurrence, which they gave, when we all returned to our boats. I then observed to my friends that the commandant would expect some present from us--such was the custom--and what should it be? Mr. Bayard, I believe, asked me to suggest some thing in our power to tender. I then remarked, that, as we had a plenty of good hams, that we fill a barrel, and send them to our host; that they might prove as acceptable as any thing. The proposition met the approval of all, and the hams were accordingly sent at once, with perhaps an accompanying note. At one hour after twelve o'clock, I well remember, we found ourselves comfortably seated at the hospitable board of the Spanish commandant, who expressed much delight at receiving our fine present. He gave us an elegant dinner in the Spanish style, and plenty of good wine and liquors, and coffee without cream. The commandant, addressing me, while we were indulging in the liquids before us, said that we must drink to the health of the ladies in our sweet liquors. "So," said he, "we will drink the health of the Misses Forman"--my worthy cousins, who had preceded us in a visit to this garrison. After dinner, the commandant invited us to take a walk in the fine prairies. He said he could drive a coach-and-four through these open woods to St. Louis. There came up a thunder-storm and sharp lightning, and he asked me what I called that in English, and I told him, when he pleasantly observed: "You learn me to talk English, and I will learn you French." Returning to head-quarters, we took tea, and then got up to take our final leave. "O, no!" said he, "I can't spare you, gentlemen. I'm all alone. Please to come to-morrow, one hour after twelve, and dine again with me." So, at the appointed time, we were on hand again. The same kind hospitality was accorded us as on the preceding day. In the evening, we thought we should surely tender the last farewell. But no; we must come again, for the third day, to enjoy his good company and delightful viands. That evening, there was a Spanish dance, all common people making up the company--French, Canadians, Spaniards, Americans. The belle of the room was Cherokee Katy, a beautiful little squaw, dressed in Spanish style, with a turban on her head, and decked off very handsomely. On these occasions, a king and queen were chosen to be sovereigns for the next meeting. The commandant was asked to honor them by taking a partner, and sharing in the mazy dance, which, of course, he declined; and we also had an invitation, but declined also. The commandant said he always went to these happy gatherings, and sat a little while, and once, he added, he played a little while on his own violin, for his own and their amusement. He expressed much regret at parting with us. He said he was so lonesome. He was a man not over thirty, I suppose, highly accomplished, and spoke pretty good English. I fear he was, in after years, swallowed up in the earthquake,[16] which destroyed many; among them, I believe, a Mr. Morris, who was a brother to Mrs. Hurd; a Mr. Lintot, from Natchez, who was a passenger with me from New Orleans to Philadelphia. [16] We learn, from Gayarre's _History of the Spanish Domination of Louisiana_, that, in July, 1789, Pierre Foucher, a lieutenant of the regiment of Louisiana, was sent, with two sergeants, two corporals, and thirty soldiers, to build a fort at New Madrid, and take the civil and military command of that district, with instructions to govern those new colonists in such a way as to make them feel that they had found among the Spaniards the state of ease and comfort of which they were in quest. Colonel John Pope, in his _Tour Through the Western and Southern States_, states, under date, March 12, 1791: "Breakfasted and dined with Signor Pedro Foucher, commandant at New Madrid. The garrison consists of about ninety men, who are well supplied with food and raiment. They have an excellent train of artillery, which appears to be their chief defense. Two regular companies of musqueteers, with charged bayonets, might take this place. Of this opinion is the commandant himself, who complains that he is not sufficiently supported. He is a Creole of French extraction, of Patagonian size, polite in his manners, and of a most noble presence." Lieutenant Foucher must have left the country long before the great earthquake of 1811-12. The Spaniards evacuated their posts on the Mississippi to the north of 31st degree in 1798; and, two years later, transferred the country to France, and, in 1803, it was purchased by the United States. On our entering the Mississippi, we had agreed that the foremost boat should fire a gun as a token for landing, if they saw a favorable spot after the middle of the afternoon. It was not possible to run in safety during the night. It so happened that every afternoon we had a thunder shower and head wind. Nothing special occurred, I believe, till our arrival at Natchez. There was no settlement from _L'Anse a la Graisse_ to _Bayou Pierre_, something like sixty miles above Natchez. At Bayou Pierre lived Colonel Bruin,[17] of the Virginia Continental line, who, after the war, took letters from General Washington to the governor of that country while it belonged to Spain, and secured a fine land grant. I once visited Colonel Bruin, with a gentleman from Natchez. That section of country is remarkably handsome, and the soil rich. The colonel's dwelling-house was on the top of a large mound, and his barn on another, near by. These mounds are common in the Ohio and Mississippi countries, and no tradition gives their origin. [17] Colonel Peter Bryan Bruin, son of an Irish gentleman, who had become implicated in the Irish Rebellion of 1756, and confiscation and exile were his penalty. He brought with him to America his only son, who was reared a merchant. In the War of the Revolution, he entered Morgan's famous riflemen as a lieutenant, shared in the assault on Quebec, where he was made a prisoner, and confined in a prison ship, infected with small-pox, for six months. He was finally exchanged, and at length promoted to the rank of major, serving to the end of the war. Soon after settling near the mouth of Bayou Pierre, he was appointed alcalde, or magistrate, under the Spanish Government; and when the Mississippi Territory was organized, in 1798, he was appointed one of the three territorial judges, remaining in office until he resigned, in 1810. He lived till a good old age, was a devoted patriot, and a man of high moral character. While in Louisville, I bought a young cub bear, and kept him chained in the back room of my store. He was about a month or two old when I got him; and when I went down the river, I took him along to Natchez. When twelve or fifteen months old, he became very saucy; I only could keep him in subjection. When he became too troublesome, Uncle Forman had him killed, and invited several gentlemen to join him in partaking of his bear dinner. When our little fleet of five boats first came in sight of the village of Natchez, it presented quite a formidable appearance, and caused a little alarm at the fort; the drum beat to arms, but the affright soon subsided. About this time, a report circulated that general somebody, I have forgotten his name, was in Kentucky raising troops destined against that country; but it all evaporated.[18] [18] This refers to the proposed settlement at the Walnut Hills, at the mouth of the Yazoo, under the auspices of the famous Yazoo Company, composed mostly of prominent South Carolina and Georgia gentlemen. Dr. John O'Fallon, who subsequently married a sister of General George Rogers Clark, located at Louisville, Ky., as the agent and active partner in that region and endeavored to enlist General Clark as the military leader of the enterprise; but it would appear that the general declined the command, and Colonel John Holder, a noted Kentucky pioneer and Indian fighter, was chosen in his place. But nothing was accomplished. The original grant was obtained by bribery, fraud, and corruption, from the Georgia Legislature; and a subsequent legislature repudiated the transaction, and ordered all the documents and records connected with it to be burned in the public square. Natchez was then a small place, with houses generally of a mean structure, built mostly on the low bank of the river, and on the hillside. The fort was on a handsome, commanding spot, on the elevated ground, from which was a most extensive view up the river, and over the surrounding country. The governor's house was not far from the garrison. Uncle Forman had at first hired a large house, about half-way up the hill from the landing, where he lived until he bought a plantation of five hundred acres on the bank of St. Catherine's creek, about four miles from Natchez. This he regarded as only a temporary abode, until he could become better acquainted with the country. The place had a small clearing and a log house on it, and he put up another log house to correspond with it, about fourteen feet apart, connecting them with boards, with a piazza in front of the whole. The usual term applied to such a structure was that it was "two pens and a passage." This connecting passage made a fine hall, and altogether gave it a good and comfortable appearance. Boards were scarce, and I do not remember of seeing any saw or grist-mills in the country. Uncle Forman had a horse-mill, something like a cider-mill, to grind corn for family use. In range with his dwelling he built a number of negro houses, some distance off, on the bank of St. Catherine's creek. It made quite a pretty street. The little creek was extremely convenient. The negroes the first year cleared a large field for tobacco, for the cultivation of that article was the object of Mr. Forman's migration to that country. After my arrival, and while sojourning at Natchez, Uncle Forman asked me if I intended to apply to the government for lands. I replied that I did not want any. He said he was glad of it, unless I remained in the country. He hinted something to the effect that one of the Spanish officers, who talked of leaving the country, had an elegant plantation, with negroes for its cultivation, and he thought of buying it, if I would stay and take it; that if I took land of government, and sold out, it might give umbrage to the governor, and I, being a relation, he suffer by it. I told him my father was loath to let me come away, and I promised that I would return if my life was spared me. After this, Surveyor-General Dunbar,[19] much to my surprise, called on me, and said that he brought the survey and map of my land, and presented a bill of sixty dollars for his services. I told him that I had not asked for land, nor had Governor Gayoso ever said any thing to me about land, nor did I want any. General Dunbar replied that the governor directed him to survey for Don Samuel S. Forman eight hundred acres of land, and that it was the best and most valuable tract that he knew of in the district, including a beautiful stream of water, with a gravelly bottom--rare in that country; that it was well located, near a Mr. Ellis, at the White Cliffs, and advised me by all means to take it. Uncle Forman happened to be absent, and I was in doubt what to do. At last I paid the bill and took the papers. The largest quantity that the Spanish Government gave to a young man who settled in that country was two hundred and forty acres, so the governor showed much friendship by complimenting me with so large a grant. [19] Sir William Dunbar, son of Sir Archibald Dunbar, was born at Elgin, Scotland, and received a superior education in Glasgow and London. On account of failing health, he obtained a stock of goods for the Indian trade; and, landing in Philadelphia in April, 1771, took his goods to Fort Pitt, and about 1773 he went to West Florida to form a plantation. He suffered much during the period of the Revolution, and in 1772 settled near Natchez, became chief surveyor under the Spanish Government, and in 1798 he was appointed astronomical commissioner on the part of Spain in establishing the boundary. He was shortly after appointed by Governor Sargeant, on the organization of Mississippi Territory, under the United States Government, chief judge of the Court of Quarter Sessions. He corresponded with the most distinguished scientific men of his time, and contributed to the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society. He died in 1810, leaving many descendants. I must go back a little, and state that my good traveling companions, Messrs. Bayard, Gano, Winters, and January, parted from me, and continued their journey down the river. Uncle Forman had been acquainted with Mr. Bayard, in Philadelphia, and their meeting in a distant and foreign country was very gratifying. The interview was very brief, for Mr. Bayard and associates were anxious to pursue their voyage. At Natchez we made many agreeable acquaintances. Governor Gayoso, a bachelor, was very affable and pleasant, and had an English education. The fort-major, Stephen Minor,[20] was a Jerseyman from Princeton, and Mr. Hutchins,[21] a wealthy planter, was a brother to Thomas Hutchins, the geographer-general of the United States. His wife was a Conover, from near Freehold village, and knew more about Freehold than I did. Also a Mr. Moore, a wealthy planter, Mr. Bernard Lintot, who moved from Vermont before the war, and Mr. Ellis, a wealthy planter--all having large families, sons and daughters, very genteel and accomplished. These all lived from eight to fourteen miles from us. [20] Stephen Minor was a native of Pennsylvania, well-educated, and early made his way West; first to St. Louis, and then to New Orleans, and was soon appointed to official station by the Spanish Government, rising eventually to the governorship at Natchez, and so continuing till the evacuation of the country. He then became a citizen of the United States, and was useful to the country. He died in after years at Concord, Mississippi. [21] Colonel Anthony Hutchins was a native of New Jersey; early migrated to North Carolina, and in 1772 explored the Natchez country, settling permanently at the White Apple village, twelve miles from Natchez, the following year, and survived the troubles of the Revolution, and died when past eighty years of age. In the village of Natchez resided Monsieur and Madam Mansanteo--Spanish Jews, I think--who were the most kind and hospitable of people. These families, in town and country, formed our principal associates. Governor Gayoso told us, after we moved out to St. Catherine, that there would always be a plate for us at his table. The year 1790 was a very sickly one for unacclimated persons in the Natchez country. All our family adults had more or less fever, and fever and ague. Uncle Forman was severely afflicted with gout--a lump almost as big as a small hen's egg swelled out at one of his elbows, with something of the appearance of chalk. Poor Betsey Church was taken with a fever, and died in a few days; a great loss to the family, having been a valuable and much respected member of it for many years. I was the only adult of the family who was not confined to the house with sickness. Stephen Minor, the fort-major, married the eldest daughter of the planter, Mr. Ellis. Our family was much visited by the Spanish officers, who were very genteel men; and Major Minor was very intimate, and seemed to take much interest in us. When the time was fixed for my departure, by the way of New Orleans, and thence by sea to Philadelphia, Uncle Forman said: "Well, you must direct Moses, the coachman, to get up the carriage, take two of your cousins with you, and take leave of all your good friends." The carriage, which had its top broken off crossing the mountains in Pennsylvania, had been fitted up in Natchez, with neat bannister work around the top of the body, which rendered it more convenient for the country. We sometimes took the family in it, and went out strawberrying over the prairies. Cousins Augusta and Margaret accompanied me on my farewell tour. Ours was the first four-wheeled carriage that ever passed over those grounds--I can't say roads, for the highway was only what was called a bridle-path--all traveling at that day was on horseback. When we visited one place, some of our friends from another locality meeting us there would ascertain the day we designed visiting their house, that they might have the cane-brakes along the trail cleared away sufficient to permit the comfortable passage of the carriage; and we must, moreover, be on time, or some small gust of wind might again obstruct the passage. Our visits were all very pleasant save the unhappy part of the final bidding each other farewell. During this excursion, Governor Gayoso had given permission for a Baptist clergyman to preach one Sunday, which was the first time a protestant minister had been allowed to hold religious services. The meeting was held at Colonel Hutchins'. We went from the residence of some friends in that vicinity. After service we were invited to stay and dine at Colonel Hutchins'. When we were ready to depart, all came out of the house to see us off, and I asked the ladies in a jocose way to join us in the ride, when they began to climb over the wheels as though they might endanger the safety of the carriage; but this frolicsome banter over, we took our departure. We spent several days in performing this friendly round of visits--by-gone days of happiness never to return. When I was about leaving the country, Governor Gayoso asked me what I intended to do with my land. I replied, that if I did not return in a year or two, that his excellency could do what he pleased with it. Some years after, when I lived in Cazenovia, I contemplated going back, and went to my large chest, which had traveled with me from Pittsburg to New Orleans, and thence in all my tramps and changes, where I supposed all my Spanish papers were safe in a little drawer; but, to my surprise, they were missing, and I never could tell what became of them, as I kept the chest locked, and retained the key. So vanished my eight hundred acres of valuable land in the promising Mississippi country. On the arrival of Colonel Wyckoff, with his brother-in-law, Scudder, from Tennessee, preparations were made for our departure. Uncle Forman went down to New Orleans with us. It was in June, 1791, I believe, that we left Natchez. The parting with my kindred was most trying and affecting, having traveled and hazarded our lives together for so many hundred miles, and never expecting to meet again in this life. Many of the poor colored people, too, came and took leave of me, with tears streaming down their cheeks. Take them altogether, they were the finest lot of servants I ever saw. They were sensible that they were all well cared for--well fed, well clothed, well housed, each family living separately, and they were treated with kindness. Captain Osmun,[22] their overseer, was a kind-hearted man, and used them well. They had ocular proof of their happy situation when compared with their neighbor's servants. It was the custom of the country to exchange work at times; and, one day, one of our men came to me, and said: "I don't think it is right to exchange work with these planters; for I can, with ease, do more work than any two of their men;" and added, "their men pound their corn over night for their next day's supply, and they are too weak to work." Poor fellows, corn was all they had to eat. [22] Benajah Osmun served, as Mr. Forman has previously stated, at the defeat of General Washington's troops on Long Island, in August, 1776, when he was made a prisoner; he was then, apparently, a soldier in the ranks. On January 1, 1777, he was appointed a second lieutenant and quartermaster in Colonel Shreve's Second New Jersey regiment, which he subsequently resigned. In September, 1778, he again entered the army as an ensign in the second regiment; was a prisoner of war on April 25, 1780; made a lieutenant January 1, 1781, retiring at the close of the war with the brevet rank of captain. In 1802, he was made lieutenant-colonel of the Adams county militia; and when Colonel Burr visited the country, in 1807, on his mysterious mission, he was the guest of Colonel Osmun, who was one of his two bondsmen for his appearance at court, for they were fellow officers in the Revolution. Colonel Osmun settled a plantation at the foot of Half Way hill, near Natchez, became wealthy, and there died, a bachelor, at a good old age. Uncle Forman and I stopped the first night with Mr. Ellis, at the White Cliffs, and next day embarked on board of a boat for New Orleans. On our way down we sometimes went on shore and took a bowl of chocolate for breakfast with some rich planter, a very common custom of the country. The night before our arrival at New Orleans we put up with a Catholic priest; some gentlemen of our company were well acquainted between Natchez and New Orleans, and had learned the desirable stopping places. The good priest received us kindly, gave us an excellent supper, plenty of wine, and was himself very lively. We took breakfast with him the next morning; and before our departure the priest came up to me with a silver plate in his hand, on which were two fine looking pears, which he tendered me. He looked at first very serious; but, remembering his good humor the previous evening, I suspected his fun had not yet all run out. I eyed him pretty close, and while thanking him, I rather hesitated, when he urged me to take them. I knew no pears grew in that country. I finally took one, weighed it in my hand, and looked at him, till he bursted out into a loud laugh. They were ingeniously wrought out of stone or marble, and looked exactly like pears. I brought them home and gave them to a friend. Arriving in New Orleans, we took lodgings, and our first business was to wait on his excellency Governor Miro. Mr. Forman settling within his government with so large a number of people, under an arrangement with the Spanish ambassador at New York, Don Diego de Gardoque, gave him a high standing. Uncle Forman was in person a fine-looking man, very neat, prepossessing, and of genteel deportment, so that he was always much noticed. As there was then no vessel in port destined for the United States, I had to delay a couple of weeks for one. At length the brig Navarre, Captain McFadden, made its appearance, and soon loaded for Philadelphia. There were a number of Americans in waiting, who engaged their passage with me, on this vessel. Uncle Forman did not leave the city until after the Navarre had taken its departure. He suggested that I should take a formal leave of Governor Miro and his secretary, Don Andre. The secretary was a large, fine-looking man. I politely asked him if he had any commands for the cape--Cape Francois, a fine town in the northern part of St. Domingo, usually dignified with the designation of the _The Cape_--for which port, I believe, the vessel cleared. "I know not," said the secretary, "to what cape you are going--only take good care of yourself." After all were on board, the brig dropped down two or three miles, where the passengers went ashore, and laid in provisions enough, the captain said, to have carried us to London after our arrival in Philadelphia. I may mention something about distances as computed in those days. From Natchez to New Orleans was called three hundred miles by water, and only one hundred and fifty by land. From New Orleans to the Balize, at the mouth of the Mississippi, was reckoned one hundred and five miles. It was said that such was the immense volume of the Mississippi river that it kept its course and muddy appearance for a league out at sea. There were no ladies among the passengers. We entered into an arrangement that each passenger should, in rotation, act as caterer for the party for each day. It fell to my lot to lead off in this friendly service. We got along very nicely, and with a good deal of mirthful pleasure, for a couple of weeks, enjoying our viands and wine as comfortably as if at a regular boarding house. The captain's wife, however, was something of a drawback to our enjoyment. She was a vinegary looking creature, and as cross and saucy as her looks betokened, was low-bred, ill-tempered, and succeeded in making herself particularly disagreeable. During the pleasant weather portion of our voyage, she managed, without cause, to raise a quarrel with every passenger; and what added to her naturally embittered feeling, was that we only laughed at her folly. When we arrived in sight of Cuba, the wind arose, and blew almost a hurricane, causing a heavy sea. We were in such danger of being cast away on the Florida reefs that the captain summoned all hands on deck for counsel. But, providentially, we escaped. For near two weeks no cooking could be done, and each one was thankful to take whatever he could obtain in one hand, and hold fast to something with the other, such was the rolling and pitching of our frail vessel. Most of the passengers were sea-sick; I was among the few who escaped from that sickening nausea. One night the rain was so heavy, the lightning so vivid, and thunder so tremendous, that the vessel trembled at every clap; when I went to my friend Wyckoff, as well as others who were asleep, informing them that it was a moment of no little danger and excitement. Captain McFadden was a most profane man. But during the hours of our distress and danger he became very mild and humble, but it lasted no longer than the storm. The vinegary Mrs. McFadden, too, was very sensibly affected during this trying period; for, standing in the companion-way, leading to the cabin, she very humbly and demurely said that she would go below and make her peace. We all thought she could not be too quick about it. She was a veritable Katharine, but he was not a Petruchio. Before we arrived at the capes of the Delaware, an American sailor, who had made his escape from a British man-of-war at the mouth of the Mississippi, sickened and died on board our craft. When we got into the Delaware, the sailors took his remains on shore and gave them a decent sepulture. At length we reached Philadelphia in safety. GENERAL INDEX. Prefatory note, 3 Memoir of Major S. S. Forman, 5 Forman's narrative, 5 Tunis Forman captures two Tories, 6 Major Lee's strategy, 6 British foray at Middletown Point, 6, 7 Major Burrows's loss and captivity, 7 Denise Forman's services, 7 General David Forman, 7 German town battle, 7 Capture of a British sloop, 8 A British and Tory scout, 9 Services of Major Burrows, 9 Major Burrows's narrow escape, 9, 10 Denise Forman and Philip Freneau, 10 Sufferings in British prison ships, 10, 11 Captain Freneau's after-life, 11, 12 Monmouth battle, 12 Fugitives return to New York, 12 British evacuate New York, 13-15 Lieutenant-Colonel J. N. Cumming, 14 Anthony Glean noticed, 14 Washington parting with his officers, 15 Washington and Franklin in Federal Convention, 15 Washington's second inauguration, 16 Major Forman settles at Cazenovia, N. Y., 17 His subsequent career, 17, 18 His narrative--departure for the Ohio, 19 Detention at Lancaster, 20 Meeting Charley Morgan, 22 Scant of funds for traveling, 22 Arrival at Pittsburg, 23 Flat-bottomed boats for the journey, 23 Colonel Turnbull's entertainment, 24 Departure down the river, 25 Difficulties of navigation, 25, 26 Arrival at Wheeling, 26 Flocks of wild turkeys, 26 Arrival at Marietta, 27 Limestone and Columbia, 27 Arrival at Cincinnati, 27 General Harmar's hospitality, 27, 28 Captain Kirby _vs._ Captain Kersey, 28, 29 General Jonathan Forman noticed, 29 General Harmar's defeat, 30 Indian rendezvous at Scioto, 30 Gallipolis settlement, 30, 31 Anecdote of Captain Osmun, 31 Arrival at Louisville, 32 Fort Jefferson; Fort Steuben, 32 Ensign Luce and North Bend, 32, 33 Lacassangue and his station, 33, 34 Early dancing parties at Louisville, 35, 36 Generals Wilkinson and St. Clair, 35 Dr. John F. Carmichael, 36 Ezekiel Forman starts for Natchez, 36 Effort to lure ashore and destroy Forman's party, 37 Louisville incidents; Ashby and family; Mr. Smith; moccasins at balls, 38, 39 An egg-nog frolic, 39, 40 The Sabbath kept by S. S. Forman, 40 A billiard-table at Louisville, 40, 41 A fleet of tobacco boats, 41 Mr. Buckner purchases Mr. Forman's goods, 42 Mr. Forman's mishap, 42 Departure from Louisville, 42, 43 Incident at Fort Massac, 43 Planters and sawyers, 44 Mouth of the Ohio, 44, 45 An Indian alarm, 45 Indian visit; dinner, 46 Visit Indian village, 46, 47 Arrival at _L'Anse a la Graisse_, 47 Lieutenant Foucher's hospitality, 48-50 Lieutenant Foucher noticed, 47, 48-50 Colonel Pope's tour cited, 50 Colonel P. B. Bruin noticed, 51, 52 A cub bear, 52 Arrival at Natchez, 52 Walnut Hills settlement project, 52, 53 Dr. O'Fallon; General Clark; Colonel Holder, 52, 53 Natchez and surroundings, 53 Sir Wm. Dunbar noticed, 54 S. S. Forman's land grant, 55, 58, 59 Fine society at Natchez, 56 Mons. and Madam Mansanteo, 56 Major Stephen Minor noticed, 56, 57 Colonel Anthony Hutchins noticed, 56 Sickly at Natchez in 1790, 56, 57 A round of visits, 57, 58 Bad treatment of servants, 59 Colonel Osmun noticed, 59, 60 Departure for New Orleans, 60 A genial priest, 60, 61 Voyage and incidents to Philadelphia, 61-63 ROBERT CLARKE & CO., CINCINNATI, O. HAVE JUST PUBLISHED Major Forman's Narrative. Narrative of a Journey down the Ohio and Mississippi in 1789-90. By Major Samuel S. Forman, of New Jersey. With a Memoir and Illustrative Notes. By Lyman C. Draper, LL.D. of Wisconsin. 12mo. Paper, 50 cents; cloth, 75 cents. General David Forman of New Jersey in 1789, entered into a negotiation with the Spanish minister Don Diego de Gardoque, for his brother Ezekiel Forman of Philadelphia, to emigrate with his family, and about sixty colored people, men, women and children, and settle in the Natchez country, then under Spanish authority. Major Samuel S. Forman accompanied this emigrating party, and in this narrative gives a minute account of their trip, the places they passed through and at which they stopped, prominent people they met, with many curious particulars. This book has not been stereotyped, and the edition is a limited one. _Sent by mail, prepaid, on receipt of the price._ ROBERT CLARKE & CO., _Publishers_, Cincinnati, O. Transcriber's Note Archaic spelling is preserved as printed. Inconsistency in the use of apostrophes in date ranges is preserved as printed. Minor punctuation errors have been repaired. There were some instances of a single inconsistent spelling of a proper noun where it appears more than once. These, along with apparent typographic errors, have been repaired as follows: Page 19--Foreman amended to Forman--General David Forman, ... Page 37--beech amended to beach--... ran on the beach, imploring ... Page 37--Osmnn amended to Osmun--But for the circumstance of Captain Osmun ... Page 51--à amended to a--... from _L'Anse a la Graisse_ to _Bayou Pierre_, ... Page 57--afflcted amended to afflicted--Uncle Forman was severely afflicted ... Page 58--Pittsburgh amended to Pittsburg--... which had traveled with me from Pittsburg ... Page 60--ta amended to at--... of the country to exchange work at times; ... Page 63--Wickoff amended to Wyckoff--... when I went to my friend Wyckoff, ... Page 66--mocassins amended to moccasins--... Mr. Smith; moccasins at balls, ... Page 67--Madame Mansant amended to Madam Mansanteo--Mons. and Madam Mansanteo, 56 
44268	----	Transcriber's Note Some typographical features could not be reproduced in this version. Italics are therefore delimited with the underscore character as _italic_. Any words or phrases appearing in mixed case using small capital letters, are shifted to all upper case. Please note that the longitudes used in this text, which predates the establishment of Greenwich as the reference, used the nation's capitol, Washington, D.C. (approx. W 77°) as its basis. Thus, Cincinnati, at W 84° 30' on p. 1, is placed at a longitude of 7° 31'. Also, on p. 33, the location of the state of Indiana is mistakenly given using seconds (") of longitude, rather than minutes ('). These were corrected. The spelling of place names was fluid at the time and all are retained here. Footnotes, which appeared on the bottom of pages, have been relocated to follow the paragraph where they are referenced. They have been lettered consecutively from A to K for ease of reference. Please consult the transcriber's end note at the bottom of this text for any other details. THE AMERICANS AS THEY ARE; DESCRIBED IN A TOUR THROUGH THE VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI. BY THE AUTHOR OF "AUSTRIA AS IT IS." LONDON: HURST, CHANCE, AND CO. ST. PAUL'S CHURCH YARD. 1828. LONDON: Printed by Bradbury and Dent, St. Dunstan's-ct., Fleet-st. ADVERTISEMENT. The publication of this tour was intended for the year 1827. Several circumstances have prevented it. The American is, as far as relates to his own country, justly supposed to be prone to exaggeration. English travellers, on the contrary, are apt to undervalue brother Jonathan and his country. The Author has twice seen these countries, of whose present state he gives a sketch in the following pages. He is far from claiming for his work any sort of literary merit. Truth and practical observation are his chief points. Whether his opinions and statements are correct, it remains for the reader to judge, and experience to confirm. _London, March, 1828._ PREFACE. Upwards of half a century has now elapsed since the independence of the United States became firmly established. During this period two great questions have been solved, exposing the fallacies of human calculations, which anticipated only present anarchy and ultimate dissolution as the fate of the new Republics. The possibility of a people governing themselves, and being prosperous and happy, time, the sure ordeal of all projects, has at length demonstrated. Their political infancy is over, they are approaching towards manhood, and fully sensible of their strength, their first magistrate has ventured to utter those important words contained in his address of 1820: that "notwithstanding their neutrality, they would consider any attempt on the part of the European Powers, to extend their system to any portion of THEIR hemisphere, as dangerous to their peace and safety; and that they could not admit of any projects of colonization on the part of Europe." Thus, for the first time, they have asserted their right of taking a part DE FACTO in the great transactions of European Powers, and pronounced their declaration in a tone, which has certainly contributed to the abandonment of those intentions which were fast ripening into execution. The important influence of American liberty throughout the civilised world, has been already apparent; and more especially in France, in the South American revolutions, and in the commotions in Spain, Portugal, Naples, and Piedmont. These owe their origin, not to any instigation on the part of the United States, but to the influence of their example in raising the standard of freedom, and more than all, to the success which crowned their efforts. Great has been on the other hand, the influence of European politics on the North American nation. A party, existing since the revolution, and extending its ramifications over the whole United States, is now growing into importance, and guided by the principles of European diplomacy, is rooting itself deeper and deeper, drawing within its ranks the wealthy, the enlightened, the dissatisfied; thus adding every day to its strength. We see, in short, the principle of monarchy developing itself in the United States, and though it is not attempted to establish it by means of a revolution, which would infallibly fail, there is a design to bring it about by that cunning, cautious, and I may add, American way, which must eventually succeed; unless the spirit of freedom be sufficiently powerful to neutralize the subtle poison in its progress, or to triumph over its revolutionary results. There have occurred many changes in the United States within the last ten years. The present rulers have succeeded in so amalgamating opinions, that whatever may be said to the contrary, only two parties are now in existence. These are the monarchists, who would become governors, and the republicans, who would not be governed. The object proposed in the following pages has been to exhibit to the eyes of the European world, the real state of American affairs, divested of all prejudice, and all party spirit. Adams on the whole is a favourite with Great Britain. This empire however, has no reason to admire him; should his plans succeed, the cost to Great Britain would be the loss of her last possession in North America. But as long as the American Republic continues united, this unwieldy mass of twenty-four states can never become dangerous. Of the different orders of society, there is yet little to be said, but they are developing themselves as fast as wealth, ambition, luxury, and the sciences on the one side, and poverty, ignorance, and indirect oppression on the other, will permit them. There, as every where else, this is the natural course of things. To show the state of society in general, and the relative bearings of the different classes to each other, and thus to afford a clear idea of what the United States really are, is the second object attempted in this work. To represent social intercourse and prevailing habits in such a manner as to enable the future emigrant to follow the prescribed track, and to settle with security and advantage to himself and to his new country; to afford him the means of judging for himself, by giving him a complete view of public and private life in general, as well as of each profession or business in particular, is the third object here contemplated. The capitalist, the merchant, the farmer, the physician, the lawyer, the mechanic, cannot fail, I trust, to find adequate information respecting the course which, on their settling in the Union, will be the most eligible to pursue. Farther explanation I think unnecessary. He who would consider the following condensed picture of Trans-atlantic society and manners insufficient, would not be better informed, if I were to enlarge the work to twice its size. Such an objection would shew him to be unfit to adventure in the character of a settler in a country where so many snares will beset his path, and call for no small degree of natural shrewdness and penetration. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Cincinnati.--Parting glance at Ohio.--Its Government and Inhabitants. CHAPTER II. Tour through the state of Kentucky.--Bigbonelick.--Mammoths.--Two Kentuckian Characters.--Kentuckian Scenes. CHAPTER III. Vevay.--Geographical Sketch of the state of Indiana--Madison.-- Charleston.--Jeffersonville.--Clarksville.--New Albany.--The Falls of Ohio. CHAPTER IV. Louisville.--Canal of Louisville.--Its Commerce.--Surrounding Country.--Sketch of the state of Kentucky, and of its Inhabitants. CHAPTER V. A Keel-boat journey.--Description of the preparations.--Fall of the Country.--Troy.--Lady Washington.--The River sport.-- Owensborough.--Henderson. CHAPTER VI. Mr. Owen's of Lanark, formerly Rapp's settlement.--Remarks on it.--Keel-boat Scenes.--Cave in Rock.--Cumberland and Tennessee rivers.--Fort Massai. CHAPTER VII. The Mississippi.--General Features of the state of Illinois, and of its Inhabitants. CHAPTER VIII. Excursion to St. Louis.--Fall of the Country.--Sketch of the state of Missouri.--Return to Trinity. CHAPTER IX. The state of Tennessee.--Steam boats on the Mississippi.--Flat Boats. CHAPTER X. Scenery along the Mississippi.--Hopefield.--St. Helena.--Arkansas Territory.--Spanish Moss.--Vixburgh. CHAPTER XI. The city of Natchez.--Excursion to Palmira.--Plantations.--The cotton planter of the state of Mississippi.--Remarks.--Return to Natchez. CHAPTER XII. Arrival at New Orleans.--Cursory reflections. CHAPTER XIII. Topographical sketch of the City of New Orleans. CHAPTER XIV. The situation of New Orleans considered in a commercial point of view. CHAPTER XV. Characteristic features of the Inhabitants of New Orleans and of Louisiana.--Creoles.--Anglo Americans. CHAPTER XVI. Frenchmen.--Free people of colour.--Slaves.--Public spirit.-- Education.--State of religious worship.--Public entertainments.-- Theatres.--Balls, &c. CHAPTER XVII. The Climate of Louisiana.--The yellow fever. CHAPTER XVIII. Hints for Emigrants to Louisiana.--Planters.--Farmers.--Merchants.-- Mechanics. CHAPTER XIX. Geographical features of the state of Louisiana.--Conclusion. AMERICA. CHAPTER I. Cincinnati.--Parting Glance at Ohio.--Character of its Government and its Inhabitants. The city of Cincinnati is the largest in the state of Ohio: for the last eight years it has left even Pittsburgh far behind. It is situated in 39° 5' 54" north latitude, and 7° 31' west longitude, on the second bank of the Ohio, rising gradually and extending to the west, the north, and the east, for a distance of several miles. The lower part of the city below the new warehouse, is exposed, during the spring tides, to inundations which are not, however, productive of serious consequences; the whole mass of water turning to the Kentuckian shore. The river is here about a mile wide, and assumes the form of a half moon. When viewed from the high banks, the mighty sheet of water, rolling down in a deep bed, affords a splendid sight. In 1780, the spot where now stands one of the prettiest towns of the Union, was a native forest. In that year, the first attempt was made at forming a settlement in the country, by erecting a blockhouse, which was called Fort Washington, and was enlarged at a subsequent period. In the year 1788, Judge Symmes laid out the town, whose occupants he drew from the New England States. Successive attacks, however, of the Indians wearied them out, and the greater part withdrew. The battle gained by General Wayne over these natives, tranquillised the country; and after the year 1794, Cincinnati rapidly improved. It became the capital of the western district, which was erected into a territorial government. When Ohio was declared an independent state, in the year 1800, Cincinnati continued to be the seat of the legislature till 1806. Fort Washington has since made room for peaceful dwellings. Their number is at present 1560, with 12,000 inhabitants. The streets are regular, broad, and mostly well paved. The main street, which runs the length of a mile from the court-house down to the quay, is elegant.--Among the public buildings, the court-house is constructed in an extremely simple but noble style; the Episcopalian, the Catholic, and the Presbyterian churches, the academy and the United States' bank, are handsome buildings. Besides these, are churches for Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Swedenborghians, Unitarians, a Lancasterian school, the farmers', the mechanics', and the Cincinnati banks, a reading room with a well provided library, five newspaper printing offices;--among these papers are the Cincinnati Literary Gazette, and a price current--and the land office for the southern part of the state. The colonnade of the theatre is, however, a strange specimen of the architectural genius of the backwoods. Among the manufacturing establishments, the principal are,--the steam mill on the river, a saw-mill, cloth and cotton manufactories, several steam engines, iron and nail manufactories, all on the steam principle. Cincinnati carries on an important trade with New Orleans, and it may be considered as the staple of the state. The produce of the whole state is brought to Cincinnati, and shipped down the Ohio and Mississippi. The only impediments to its uninterrupted trade, are the falls of the Ohio at Louisville, which obstruct the navigation during eight months in the year. These obstacles are now on the point of being removed. The exports from Cincinnati are flour, whisky, salt, hams, pork, beef, dried and fresh fruits, corn, &c.; the imports are cotton, sugar, rice, indigo, tobacco, coffee, and spices. The manufactured goods are generally brought in waggons from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and discharged there. In order to improve the commerce of Cincinnati, an insurance company has been formed. There is a committee established for the inspection of vessels running between New Orleans and this place. There are a number of steam and other boats building at the present time. For the benefit of travellers, &c., a line of steam boats is established between Cincinnati and Louisville; and they start regularly every second day, performing the voyage of 115 miles to Louisville in twelve, and back again in twenty hours. There are in Cincinnati a great number of wholesale, commission, and retail merchants; but the want of ready money is as much felt here as anywhere else, and causes a stagnation of business. The inhabitants are chiefly American born, with some admixture of Germans, French, and Irish. As the former are mostly from the New England States, the general character of the inhabitants has taken an adventurous turn, which is conspicuous in their buildings. Most of the houses in the city are elegant, many are truly beautiful; but they belong to the bank of the United States, which possesses at least 200 of the finest houses in Cincinnati. The building mania obtained such strong hold of the inhabitants, that most of them forgot their actual means; and accordingly, having drawn money from the bank which they were unable to refund, they had at last to give up lots and buildings to the United States' bank. Though this city possesses in itself many advantages over other towns of the Ohio, and has much the start of them in point of commerce and manufactures, yet there is little expectation of its increasing in the same proportion as it has hitherto done. Neither of the canals which are intended to join the Ohio, will come up as far as this town. The great Ohio canal is to run near the mouth of the Sciota river; the _Dayton_ canal below Cincinnati; and these places will attract a considerable part of the population. The third canal, which is to connect the waters of the Chesapeake Bay and of the Ohio, will be more advantageous to the towns of Upper Ohio, Marietta, Steubenville, and Wheeling. Commerce will thus be more equally divided, and Cincinnati cannot always expect to continue as it has hitherto been, the staple of the trade to the southward of the Ohio. The merchant possessed of a moderate capital, if he consult his interest, will not establish himself at Cincinnati, but at one of the intermediate places of the above-mentioned three canals. The farmer has eligible spots in the Tuscarora valleys, about New Lancaster, Columbus, Franklintown, Pickaway, Chilicathe, and especially in the Sandusky counties on lake Erie. Mechanics, such as carpenters, cabinet makers, &c., will also find these new settlements more advantageous markets for their industry than the city of Cincinnati itself. The manufacturers, of every kind, will choose either Cincinnati or Pittsburgh, but still give the preference to the former, in spite of its smoke and dirt, as the place most favoured by natural position, which must necessarily become the first manufacturing town of the Union, notwithstanding the well-known inactivity of the Pennsylvanians. But as the state of Ohio must look to its manufactures, unless it chooses to continue a loser by the exchange of its raw produce; Cincinnati, whose manufactures have attained a high degree of perfection, favoured as it is by its coal mines, its water communication, and the fertility and consequent cheapness of the necessaries of life, must always possess very great advantages. Travellers arriving from the north, proceed to the south by way of Louisville on board a steam boat; and coming from thence, they go either to the eastward to Philadelphia by the mail stage, or by the same conveyance northward, through Chilicathe and Columbus, to lake Erie, where they embark for Buffalo. During my stay, on the twenty-fifth of October, a question of some importance for the inhabitants of Cincinnati was to be decided. It was concerning a stricter police and its necessary regulations. The city council, with the wealthier class of inhabitants, had been for some time previous to the decision, engaged in preparing and gaining over the multitude. I went to the court-house in company with Mr. Bama, a wholesale merchant, and several gentlemen, to hear the speeches delivered on both sides, and the result of the motion. It was four o'clock when we arrived, and about 600 persons were assembled in and outside of the court-house. The noise, however, was such, that it was impossible to hear more than detached periods. At eight o'clock, when almost dark, they had gone through the business, and the poll was about to commence. The party for abridging public liberty was ordered to go out on the left:--those who insisted on the preservation of the present order of things, were to draw off to the right. On arriving before the court-house, they ranged themselves in two separate ranks, each of which was counted by the presiding judge. There was a majority of 72 votes in favour of the party which upheld the present system, and the question was, therefore, decided in favour of popular liberty. I found here, as well as everywhere else, that the freedom of a community is nowhere more exposed to encroachments than in large towns, where dissipation and occupations of every kind are likely to engross the attention of the people, who leave the magistrates to do what they please. The city council were on the point of obtaining the majority, had it not been for the farmers whom the market-day had drawn to town. These, of course, did not fail to open the eyes of the honest burghers; and the question was accordingly negatived. The prevailing manners of society at Cincinnati, are those peculiar to larger cities, without the formalities and mannerism of the eastern sea ports. Freedom of thought prevails in a high degree, and toleration is exercised without limitation. The women are considered very handsome; their deportment is free from pride; but simple and unassuming as they appear, they evince a high taste for literary and mental accomplishments. The Literary Gazette owes its origin to their united efforts. There is no doubt that the commanding situation of this beautiful town, its majestic river, its mild climate, which may be compared to the south of France, and the liberal spirit of its inhabitants, contribute to render this place, both in a physical and moral point of view, one of the most eligible residences in the Union. As much, indeed, may be said of the state of Ohio in general. It combines in itself all the elements that tend to make its inhabitants the happiest people on the face of the earth. Nature has done every thing in favour of this country. In point of fertility, it excels every one of the thirteen old states; and, owing to its political institutions, and the abolition of slavery, it has taken the lead among those newly created. Ohio is bounded on the north by lake Erie, on the west by the state of Indiana, on the south by the river Ohio, and on the east by Pennsylvania, comprising an area of 4,000 square miles; it is divided into 71 counties, and has a population of 72,000 souls. This state forms the eastern extremity of the great valley of the Mississippi, which has the Alleghany for its eastern, and the Rocky Mountains for its western boundary, sinking by degrees as it approaches the Mississippi, and extending more than a thousand miles towards the south. The climate of this state, which presents for the most part the form of an elevated plain, running between the mountainous Pennsylvania and the swampy Mississippi states, is temperate, extending from 38° 28', to 72° 58' northern latitude, and from 3° 32', to 7° 40' west longitude. Its temperature varies less than that of other states. Its soil is inexhaustible; its fertility, especially in the northern and southern parts, being truly astonishing; and though some portions have been cultivated upwards of thirty years without being manured, the land still yields the same quantity of produce. The northern inhabitants of the state send their produce down to New York by lake Erie, and the Buffalo canal; the southern find a market in Louisiana and New Orleans. The middle part suffered greatly from the want of water communication, to which they are now on the point of applying a remedy, in order to obtain an intercourse with New York; which, as it is well known, has effected by means of a canal, a water communication with lake Erie. The Ohions commenced a canal in the year 1825, beginning at Cleveland on the shores of lake Erie, taking thence a southern course through Tuscarora county at Zanesville, turning to the right six miles below Columbus, and running down to the shores of the Ohio. It is intended to be completed in the space of three years. The state of Ohio expects from this canal, which if the pecuniary means be considered may be called a gigantic undertaking, a ready market for its produce in the city and state of New York; looking forward, at the same time, to become the staple for the trade between New York and New Orleans. It cannot fail, however, to be productive of still greater advantage to the United States in general, and to the cities of New York and New Orleans in particular, which will thus have the means of a land or water communication, over a space of nearly 3,000 miles. The first idea of this canal originated with the state of New York; the citizens of which, when they had finished their own, encouraged those of Ohio to enter upon a similar undertaking. Encouragement was not much wanting; the plan of joining the waters of the Hudson and the Mississippi was taken up with enthusiasm; canal committees were formed; most of the towns in the state sent their deputies, and after the customary debates, the resolution was adopted. The only difficulty was to raise the requisite funds. New York offered to defray the necessary expenses, if allowed the revenue arising from the new canal, for a certain period. The pride of the Ohions revolted against the proposition; they preferred raising a loan in New York. In this respect the government of the state committed a great error. A loan of three millions of dollars, and the necessary evils attendant upon it, are certainly a heavy burthen to a new state, which can scarcely reckon an existence of forty years, especially as the new canal may be considered a continuation of the great one of New York, and as the advantage resulting from it to the state can bear no comparison with that which New York derives from its own. New York, already the most important commercial city of the Union, will, after the completion of this canal, enjoy the trade of the western and south-western states, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Mississippi, &c.; and thus the Ohio canal will rather contribute to the aggrandizement of New York, than to that of Ohio. Their debt, so out of proportion with the resources of the state, made the people of Ohio relax in their ardour for carrying this project into effect, and gave rise to discontent against the administration of the state. But the same case happened in New York, and the exultation of the inhabitants of Ohio, when they see the work accomplished, will scarcely yield to that which was manifested by the people of the former state. There is, nevertheless, not any city in the state of Ohio to be compared with New York, Philadelphia, or Boston, nor is it probable there will be. At the same time this want is largely compensated by the absence of immorality and luxury--evils necessarily attached to large and opulent cities--which may be said to attract the heart's blood of the country, and send forth the very dregs of it in return. In Ohio, wealth is not accumulated in one place, or in a few hands; it is visibly diffused over the whole community. The country towns and villages are invariably constructed in a more elegant and tasteful manner than those of Pennsylvania, and the Northern states. There is something grand in their plan and execution, though the prevailing want or insufficiency of means to carry them through, is still an obstacle in the way. The farms and country houses are elegant; I saw hundreds of them, which no English nobleman would be ashamed of. They are generally of brick, sometimes of wood, and built in a tasteful style. The turnpike roads are in excellent order. It is astonishing to see what has been done during a few years, and under an increasing scarcity of money, by the mere dint of industry. The traveller will seldom have reason to rail at bad roads or bad taverns; I could only complain of one of the latter, which stands upon a road that is seldom travelled. In every county town there are at least two elegant inns, and the tables are loaded with such a variety of venison and dishes of every kind, that even a _gourmand_ could not justly complain. The whole state bespeaks a wealthy condition, which, far removed from riches, rests on the surest foundation--the fertility of the soil, and the persevering industry of its cultivators. Although behind-hand, perhaps, with the Yankees in literary accomplishments, they are far more liberal, and intelligent, being endowed with a strong and enterprising mind. Crimes are here less frequently committed, the inhabitants consisting of the most respectable classes of the eastern and foreign states. Only men of moderate property came into the state; the wealthy were deterred by the difficulties attending a new settlement; the indigent by the impossibility of getting vacant lands, and thus the state remained equally free from money-born aristocrats, (certainly the worst in the world), and from beggars. Its form of government bears internal evidence of this, the governor of Ohio having neither the revenue, nor the power of the eastern governors. He is elected for the term of two years. The constitution bespeaks independence and liberality. The number of senators cannot exceed thirty, nor the representatives seventy-two. The general assembly has the sole power of enacting laws, the signature of the governor being in no case necessary. The judges are chosen by the legislature for seven years, and the justices of the peace for the term of three years, by their respective townships. The resolutions of their assembly are quite free from that narrow-minded prejudice found in Pennsylvania and the southern states, which sees in the law of Moses the only rule for direction, and loses sight of that liberal spirit which pervades the law of Christ. The inhabitants of Ohio are not, however, so religious as their neighbours, the Pennsylvanians. Their ministers exercise little influence; and numerous sects contribute greatly to lessen their authority, which is certainly not the case in the north. The people of Ohio are equally free from the uncultivated and rude character of the western American, and from the innate wiliness of the Yankees. This state is not unlike a vigorous and blooming youth, who is approaching to manhood, and whose natural form and manner excite our just admiration. CHAPTER II. Tour through Kentucky.--Bigbonelick.--Mammoths.--Two Kentuckian Characters.--Kentuckian Scenes. After a stay of six days in Cincinnati I departed; crossed the Ohio in the ferryboat, and landed in the state of Kentucky, at Newport, a small country town of Campbell county. It contains, besides the government arsenal for the western states, a court-house, and about 100 buildings, scattered irregularly upon the eminence. From thence to Bigbonelick, the distance is 23 miles; the country is more hilly than on the other side of the river; it is, however, fertile, the stratum being generally limestone. The growth of timber is very fine; the trees are beech, sugar-maple, and sycamore. The contrast between Ohio and Kentucky is striking, and the baneful influence of slavery is very soon discovered. Instead of elegant farms, orchards, meadows, corn and wheat fields carefully enclosed, you see patches planted with tobacco, the leaves neglected; and instead of well-looking houses, a sort of double cabins, like those inhabited in the north of Pennsylvania by the poorest classes. In one part lives the family, in the other is the kitchen; behind these, are the wretched cabins of the negroes, bearing a resemblance to pigsties, with half a dozen black children playing about them on the ground. About three o'clock I arrived at Bigbonelick, well known for its Mammoth bones. The lands ten miles on this side of Bigbone are of an indifferent character, dreary and mountainous. The valley of Bigbone is about a mile long, and of equal breadth; it no doubt has been the scene of some great convulsion of nature. The water is seen oozing forth from the many bogs, and has a saltish taste, impregnated with saltpetre and sulphur. These quagmires are covered with a thin grass, which has the same taste. Their depth is said to be unfathomable. Whether the Mammoth bones which are found here, were brought into the valley by a convulsion of the earth, by an inundation, or whether the animals sunk down when in search of food, remains to be decided. The first two suppositions seem authorised by the circumstance, that bones were found, not on their carcases, but scattered, which could not be the case if they were swallowed up alive. The same revolution of nature which carried elephants and palm-trees to Siberia and Lapland, and the lions of Africa to the coast of Gibraltar, may, in like manner, have brought these animals to Bigbonelick. The tradition handed down to us by the Indians respecting them, is remarkable. "In ancient times, it is said, a herd of these tremendous animals came to the Bigbonelicks, and commenced an universal destruction among the buffaloes, bears, and elks, which had been created for the Indians. The Great Spirit looking down from above, became so enraged at the sight, that taking some of his thunderbolts he descended, seated himself on a neighbouring rock which still bears the print of his footsteps, and hurling down the bolts among the destroyers, killed them all with the exception of the big bull, which, turning its front to the bolts, shook them off; but being struck at last in the side, he turned round, and with a tremendous leap bounded over the Ohio, the Wabash, the Illinois, and the great lakes, beyond which he is still living at the present day." Some few weeks later, I spoke with an Indian trader at Trinity. According to his account, he found in one of his excursions, traces of a large animal, belonging to none of the species known to him, and equal in size to the elephant. On making inquiries of an old Indian, the latter ascribed the traces to an immense, but very rare animal, the race of which was almost destroyed by the Great Spirit; there remaining but very few on the other side of the lakes. He also pretended that he had seen one of those animals: whether the tale of the Indian, or that of the trader, a class of people somewhat prone to exaggeration, be true or not, I am incapable of deciding. I afterwards met this man at New Orleans, and requested him to go along with me to one of my acquaintances, in order to furnish further information on this subject, and enable me to give publicity to it, but he pretended business, and refused to accompany me. The researches which were undertaken here, were amply rewarded. The greatest part of the early discoveries has been transmitted to London; a fine collection is exhibiting in the Museum at Philadelphia, and in the Levee at New Orleans. The road from Bigbonelick is, for the distance of ten miles, dreary and the country barren. I arrived late at a farm-house, of rather a better appearance, where I intended to stop the night. The first night's lodging convinced me but too plainly, that the inhabitants of this state, justly called in New York, half horse and half alligator, had not yet assumed a milder character. The farmer, or rather planter, was absent with his wife; and his brother, who took care of the farm, was at a horse race; an old man, however, with his daughter, answered my application for a lodging, in the affirmative. I was supping upon slices of bacon, roasted corn bread, and some milk, when the brother of the farmer returned from the races with his neighbour. Both had led horses besides those on which they rode. Before dismounting they discharged their pistols. Each of the Kentuckians had a pistol in his girdle, and a poniard in the breast pocket. Before resuming my supper I was pressed to take a dram. With a quart bottle in one hand, and with the other drawing the remains of tobacco from his mouth, in rather a nauseous manner, the host drank for half a minute out of the bottle; then took from the slave the can with water, and handed the bottle to me, the mouth of which had assumed, from the remains of the tobacco, a brownish colour. The Kentuckian looked displeased when I wiped the bottle. I however took no notice of him, but presented it, after having drunk, to his friend. We sat down. "How far are you come to day?" asked the landlord. "From Cincinnati." "You don't live in Cincinnati, I guess, do you?" "No, sir." "And where do you live?" "In Pennsylvania." "A fine distance!" exclaimed my host, "I like the people of Pennsylvania better than those G----d d----d Yankees, but still they are no Kentuckians." I gave my full and hearty assent. "The Kentuckians," continued my landlord, "are astonishingly mighty people; they are the very first people on earth!" "Yes, sir." "They are immensely great, and wonderfully powerful people; ar'nt they?" "Yes, sir." "They are ten thousand times superior to any nation on earth." "Yes, sir." "How do you like Kentucky?" "Very well, sir; I travelled through it four years ago." "G--d d--n my s--l t----e----l d----n!" roared he. "The Pennsylvanians have not a square mile of land in their state, equal to our poor lands. Bill," turning now to his neighbour on the left, "Bill has been marked in a mighty fine style. G--d d--n, &c., he blooded like a hog." "Yes," replied the neighbour, "Sam has stabbed exceedingly well, I presume. Bill has to wait four weeks before he may be on his legs again, if he will be at all. G--d d--n! but to tell Isaac, his horse, which he thinks so much of, is a poor beast compared with his--and so to give him the lie. I would have knocked him down, come what might _out of it_. But Dick and John!"--and now these two fellows broke out into roaring shouts of horse laughter. "How his eyes twinkled, he looked quite as squire Toms, when laying all night over the bottle; I guess he never will be able to set his eyes a-right." "He does not see," said the neighbour; "the one is quite out of its socket, and Joe was obliged to carry him home." "Why, the seconds are wonderfully lovely fellows, I warrant you; they did not spoil the sport with interfering." "Yes, they bore John an old grudge." "Oh, certainly--it was a mighty fine sport; I would not for the world have missed it. G--d d--n! Dick is a fine gouger--the second turn--John down--and both thumbs in his eyes.--I presume you have races in Pennsylvania?" turning to me. "Yes, sir." "And fightings and gougings?" "No, sir." With an expressive look towards his neighbour, he continued: "Yes, the Pennsylvanians are a quiet, religious sort of people; they don't kill anything but their hogs, and prefer giving their money to their parsons." The evening passed in these and similar conversations, of which the above are mere specimens; and it was eleven o'clock before the interesting pair separated. Some miles below Mr. White's farm, the road divides into two, the one leading to Newcastle, the other to the Ohio. I stopped at a farm fifteen miles from my former night's lodging. The landlord was mounting his horse for Newcastle; his wife sat in the kitchen, surrounded by eight negro girls, all busy knitting and sewing. The girls seemed to be in excellent spirits, and were tolerably well dressed; the house rather indicated affluence, though it was far from possessing the order and cleanliness of a few of only half its value in Ohio. It was a simple brick house; but constructed without the least attention to the rules of symmetry. The fields were in a very indifferent state. Behind the dwelling, were seen some negro infants at play, while an old negro woman was preparing my breakfast. The family had thirty-five slaves, both young and old, forming a capital of at least 10,000 dollars. "Was not I a fool?" asked the open-hearted landlady, "to marry Mr. Forth, who had but twelve slaves, and a plantation, with seven children; but they are provided for;--whereas I had fourteen slaves, and a plantation too, after my first husband's decease, and no children at all."--"I don't know," was my reply, afraid of engaging the old lady in further discussion. While descanting upon this theme, and on the advantages resulting to her happy husband from a match so disparaging on her part, I was allowed to take my breakfast, when some yells and hallooing called us to the door. A troop of horsemen were passing. Two of the party had each a negro slave running before him, secured by a rope fastened to an iron collar. A tremendous horsewhip reminded them at intervals to quicken their pace. The bloody backs and necks of these wretches, bespoke a too frequent application of the lash. The third negro had, however, the hardest lot. The rope of his collar was fastened to the saddle string of the third horseman, and the miserable creature had thus no alternative left, but to keep an equal pace with the trotting horse, or to be dragged through ditches, thorns, and copsewood. His feet and legs, all covered with blood, exhibited a dreadful spectacle. The three slaves had run away two days before, dreading transportation to Mississippi or Louisiana. "Look here," said Mrs. Forth, calling her black girls, "what is done with the bad negroes, who run away from their good masters!" With an indifference, and a laughing countenance, which clearly shewed how accustomed these poor children were to the like scenes, they expressed their sentiments at this disgusting conduct. The road from Mr. Forth's plantation runs a considerable distance along ridges, descending finally into the bottom lands along the Ohio. These are exceedingly fertile. The growth of timber is extremely luxuriant. I measured a sycamore of common size, and found it seventeen feet in diameter; their height is truly astonishing. The soil is of a deep brown colour, and where it is turned up, proves to be blackish. The stratum is generally limestone. I crossed the Ohio at Ghent, in Kentucky, opposite to Vevay, in Indiana. CHAPTER III. Vevay.--Geographical Sketch of the State of Indiana.--Madison.-- Charlestown--its Court.--Jeffersonville.--Clarksville.--New Albany.--The Falls of the Ohio. Vevay, in Indiana, became a settlement twenty years ago, by Swiss emigrants, who obtained a grant of land, equal to 200 acres for each family, under the condition of cultivating the vine; they accordingly settled here, and laid out vineyards. The original settlers may have amounted to thirty; others joined them afterwards, and in this manner was founded the county town of New Switzerland, in Indiana, which consists almost exclusively of these French and Swiss settlers. They have their vineyards below the town, on the banks of the river Ohio. The vines, however, have degenerated, and the produce is an indifferent beverage, resembling any thing but claret, as it had been represented. Two of them have attempted to cultivate the river hills, and the vineyards laid out there are rather of a better sort. The town is on the decline; it has a court-house, and two stores very ill supplied. The condition of these, and the absence of lawyers, are sure indications of the poverty of the inhabitants, if broken windows, and doors falling from their hinges, should leave any doubt on the subject; they are, however, a merry set of people, and balls are held regularly every month. In the evening arrived ten teams laden with fifty emigrants from Kentucky, going to settle in Indiana; their reasons for doing this were numerous. Although they had bought their lands in Kentucky twice over, they had to give them up a third time, their titles having proved invalid; but still they would have remained, had it not been for the insolent behaviour of their more wealthy neighbours, who, in consequence of these emigrants having no slaves, and being thus obliged to work for themselves, not only treated them as slaves, but even encouraged their own blacks to give them every kind of annoyance, and to rob them--for no other reason than their dislike to have paupers for neighbours. My landlord assured me that at least 200 waggons had passed from the Kentucky side, through Vevay, during the present season, all full of emigrants, discouraged from continuing among these lawless people. The state of Indiana, which I had now entered, begins below Cincinnati, running down the big Miami westward to the big Wabash, which separates this country from the Illinois. To the south, it is bounded by the Ohio; to the north, by lake Michigan; thus extending from 37° 50', to 42° 10', north latitude; and from 7° 40', to 10° 47', west longitude. Like the state of Ohio, it belongs to the class coming within the range of the great valley of the Mississippi. It exhibits nearly the same features as the state of Ohio, with the exception, that it approaches nearer to the Mississippi than its eastern neighbour, and is the second slope of the eastern part of the valley of the Mississippi: it declines more than Ohio, being but 250 feet above lake Erie, and 210 feet above lake Michigan, which is one hundred feet less in elevation than the state of Ohio. Two ridges of mountains, or rather hills, traverse the country; the Knobs, or Silver-hills, running ten miles below Louisville, in a north-eastern direction, and the Illinois mountains appearing from the west, and running to the north-east, where they fall to a level with the high plains of lake Michigan. These hills have a perfect sameness. The climate is rather milder than that of Ohio. Cotton and tobacco are raised by the farmers in sufficient quantities for their home consumption. The growth of timber is the same as in Ohio. The vallies are interspersed with sycamores and beeches; and below the falls, with maples, and cotton and walnut-trees. The hills are covered with beech, sassafras, and logwood. This state, though not inferior to Ohio in fertility, and taken in general, perhaps, superior to it, has one great defect. It has no sufficient water communication, and thus the inhabitants have no market for their produce. There is not in this state any river of importance, the Ohio which washes its southern borders excepted. A scarcity of money therefore is more severely felt here, than in any other state of the Union. This want of inter-communication, added to the circumstance that the state of Ohio had already engrossed the whole surplus population from the eastern states, had a prejudicial effect upon Indiana, its original population being in general by no means so respectable as that of Ohio. In the north-west it was peopled by French emigrants, from Canada; in the south, on the banks of the Ohio, and farther up, by Kentuckians, who fled from their country for debt, or similar causes. The state thus became the refuge of adventurers and idlers of every description. A proof of this may be seen in the character of its towns, as well as in the nature of the improvements that have been carried on in the country. The towns, though some of them had an earlier existence than many in Ohio, are, in point of regularity, style of building, and cleanliness, far inferior to those of the former state. The wandering spirit of the inhabitants seems still to contend with the principle of steadiness in the very construction of their buildings. They are mostly a rude set of people, just emerging from previous bad habits, from whom such friendly assistance as honest neighbours afford, or mutual intercourse and good will, can hardly be expected. The case is rather different in the interior of the country, and on the Wabash, the finest part of the state, where respectable settlements have been formed by Americans from the east. Wherever the latter constitute the majority, every necessary assistance may be expected. For adventurers of all descriptions, Indiana holds out allurements of every kind. Numbers of Germans, French, and Irish, are scattered in the towns, and over the country, carrying on the business of bakers, grocers, store, grog shops, and tavern keepers. In time, these people will become steady from necessity, and consequently prosperous. The number of the inhabitants of Indiana amounts to 215,000. Its admission into the Union as a sovereign state, dates from the year 1815 to 1816; its constitution differs in some points from that of Ohio, and its governor is elected for the term of three years. Madisonville, the seat of justice for Jefferson-county, on the second bank of the Ohio, fifty-seven miles above its falls, contains at present 180 dwelling-houses, a court-house, four stores, three inns, a printing office--with 800 inhabitants, most of them Kentuckians. The innkeeper of the tavern at which I alighted, does no credit to the character of this people. He was engaged for some time in certain bank-note affairs, which qualified him for an imprisonment of ten years; he escaped, however, by the assistance of his legal friends, and of 1000 dollars. The opportunity of testifying his gratitude to these gentlemen soon presented itself. One of his neighbours, a boatman, had the misfortune to possess a wife who attracted his attention. Her husband knowing the temper of the man, resolved to sell all he had, and to move down to Louisville. Some days before his intended departure, he met Sheets in the street, and addressed him in these words: "Mr. Sheets, I ought to chastise you for making such shameful proposals to my wife;" so saying, he gently touched him with his cane. Sheets, without uttering a syllable, drew his poniard, and stabbed him in the breast. The unfortunate husband fell, exclaiming, "Oh, God! I am a dead man!"--"Not yet," said Sheets, drawing his poniard out of the wound, and running it a second time through his heart; "Now, my dear fellow, I guess we have done." This monster was seized and imprisoned, and his trial took place. _His_ countrymen took, as might be expected, a great interest in his fate. With the assistance of 3000 dollars, he even this time escaped the gallows. I read the issue of the trial, and the summons of the jury, in the county paper of 1823, which was actually handed to me in the evening by one of the guests. But a more remarkable circumstance is, that the inhabitants continue to frequent his tavern. At first they stayed away for some weeks; but in less than a month the affair was forgotten, and his house is now visited as before. The road from Madison to Charleston, leads through a fertile country, in some parts well cultivated. The distance from Madison is twenty-eight miles. It is the chief town of Clark county, and seems to advance more rapidly than Madison, the country about being pretty well peopled, and agriculture having made more progress than in any part of the state through which I had travelled. I found it to contain 170 houses and 750 inhabitants, five well stored tradesmen's shops, a printing office, and four inns. The town is about a mile distant from the river, on a high plain. When I arrived, the court was going to adjourn, and I hastened to the court-house. The presiding judge and his two associate judges were in their tribune, and the parties seated on boards laid across the stumps of trees. One of the lawyers having concluded his speech, the defendant was called upon. The gentleman in question, whom I took for a pedlar, stood close by my side in conversation with his party, holding in his hand half an apple, his teeth having taken a firm bite of the other half. At the moment his name was called, he walked with his mouth full, up to the rostrum, and kept eating his apple with perfect indifference. "Well," interrupted the judge impatient of the delay; "what have you to say against the charge? You know it is high time to break up the court, and I must go home." The gentleman at the bar now pocketted his apple, and having thus augmented the store of provision which he probably kept by him, looked as if he carried two knapsacks behind his coat. "It strikes me mightily,"--was the exordium of this speech, which in point of elegance and conciseness was a true sample of back-wood eloquence. Fortunately the speaker took the judge's hint; in less than half an hour he had done--in less than one hour the jurymen returned a verdict, the county transactions were finished, and the court broke up. From Charleston to Louisville, the distance is fourteen miles. The lands are fertile. Several very well looking farms shew a higher degree of cultivation, especially near Jeffersonville. There the road turns into an extensive valley formed by the alluvions of the Ohio. Jeffersonville, the seat of justice for Floyd-county, three quarters of a mile above the falls of the Ohio, was laid out in 1802, and has since increased to 160 houses, among which are a bank, a Presbyterian church, a warehouse, a cotton manufactory, a court-house, and an academy, with a land office, for the disposal of the United States' lands. The commerce of the inhabitants, 800 in number, is of some importance, though checked by the vicinity of Louisville, and by the circumstance, that the falls on the Indiana side are not to be approached, except at the highest rise. Two miles below this town, is the village of Clarksville, laid out in 1783, and forming part of the grant made to officers and soldiers of the Illinois regiment. It contains sixty houses and 300 inhabitants. New Albany, a mile below Clarksville, has a thousand inhabitants, and a great deal of activity, owing to its manufactory of steam engines, its saw mills, and the steam boats lying at anchor and generally repairing there. It is a place of importance, and though hitherto the resort of sailors, boatmen, and travellers, who go down the river in their own boats, it is annually on the increase. The Ohio is generally crossed above the falls at Jeffersonville. The sheet of water dammed up here by the natural ledge of rocks which forms the falls, expands to 5,230 feet in breadth. The falls of the Ohio, though they should not properly be called falls, cannot be seen when crossing the river, and the waters do not pour like the falls of Niagara over an horizontal rock down a considerable depth, but press through a rocky bed, about a mile long, which spreads across the river, and causes a decline of twenty-two feet in the course of two miles. When the waters are high, the rocks and the falls disappear entirely. Seen from Louisville at low water, they have by no means an imposing appearance. The majestic and broad river branches off into several small creeks, and assumes the form of mountain torrents forcing their way through the ledge of rocks. When the river rises, and only three islands are to be seen, the immense sheet of water rushing down the declivity at the rate of thirteen miles an hour, must afford a magnificent spectacle. At the time I saw it, the river was lower than it had been for a series of years. CHAPTER IV. Louisville.--Canal of Louisville--its Commerce.--Surrounding Country.--Sketch of the State of Kentucky and its Inhabitants, &c. The road from the landing-place to Louisville, leads through one of the finest and richest alluvial bottoms on the banks of the Ohio. They are here about seventy feet above the level of the water, and sufficiently high to protect the town from inundation, but there being no outlets for stagnant waters and ponds, epidemic diseases are frequent. A lottery is now established for the purpose of raising the necessary funds for draining these nuisances. Louisville extends in an oblong square about a mile down the river, and may be considered as the natural key to the Upper and Lower Ohio, and the most important staple for trade on this river, not excepting the city of Cincinnati. The commodities coming during the summer and autumn from southern states are landed here. Travellers who arrive by water, whether from the north or south, engage steam boats at this place either for New Orleans or for Cincinnati. These advantages made the inhabitants less desirous of having a canal, notwithstanding the solicitations of the states watered by the Ohio. The Congress has, at last, interposed; the canal is now contemplated. Probably this undertaking, in which not only the Upper states of the river Ohio, but the Union at large, are very much interested, is already commenced. By means of this canal, steam vessels will be enabled to avoid the falls, and to proceed to the upper Ohio at every season of the year. It is to be two miles and a half long; to open at the mouth of Beargrasscreek and to terminate at Shippingport. The highest ground is twenty-seven feet; upon an average twenty feet; and it is of a clayey substance, bottomed upon a rock. The expences are estimated at about 200,000 dollars, a trifle compared with the object to be accomplished. Louisville, the seat of justice for Jefferson county, in Kentucky, in 38° 8' north latitude, is about half the size of Cincinnati, and lies 105 miles below that city, by the Kentucky road through Newcastle, and 125 miles by the Kentucky and Indiana road. It is 1500 miles northeast of New Orleans. The town is laid out on a grand scale, the streets running parallel with the river, and intersected by others at right angles. The main street, about three quarters of a mile long, is elegant; most of the houses are three stories high; those of the other streets are of course inferior in size. The number of dwelling houses amounts to 700, inhabited by 4,500 souls, exclusive of travellers and boatmen. Louisville has no remarkable public buildings; the court-house and the Presbyterian church are the best. Besides these, the Episcopalians, Catholics, and Unitarians have their meeting houses. There are now three banks, including a branch bank of the United States, an insurance company, and four newspaper printing offices. A quay is now constructing which will greatly contribute to the security of the middle part of the town, opposite to the falls. The manufactories of Louisville are important; and the distilleries and rope walks on a large scale. Besides these there are soap, candle, cotton, glass, paper, and engine manufactories, all on the same principle, with grist and saw mills. The commerce of Louisville is still more important. Of the hundred steam boats plying on the Mississippi and Ohio, fifty at least are engaged during six months in the year in the trade with Louisville. They descend to New Orleans in six days, returning in double the time. Though the town is but half as large as Cincinnati, the credit of the merchants is more substantial, and the inhabitants are in general more wealthy. Luxury is carried to a higher pitch than in any other town on this side of the Alleghany mountains. Here is the only billiard-table[A] to be met with between Philadelphia and St. Louis. The owner has to pay a tax of 563 dollars--an enormous sum. [A] Of course this billiard table is not mentioned as a matter of importance, but merely to give a characteristic idea of the state of society in these parts. Notwithstanding the circulating library, the reading-room, and several houses where good society is to be met with, Louisville is not a pleasant town to reside in, owing to the character of the majority of its inhabitants, the Kentuckians. Louisville has an academy, but sends its youth to the college of Bairdstown, thirty miles to the southwest, where lectures are given by some French priests. Below Louisville, are the two villages of Shippingport and Portland; the former is two miles from the town, with 150 inhabitants, the latter at the distance of three miles, with fifty inhabitants, mostly boatmen and keepers of grog shops, for the lowest classes of people. The environs of Louisville are well cultivated, Portland and Shippingport excepted, the inhabitants of which are said to extend their notions of common property too far. Behind Louisville the country is delightful; the houses and plantations vying with each other in point of elegance and cultivation. The woods have greatly disappeared, and for the distance of twenty miles, the roads are lined in every direction with plantations. This town holds the rank of the second order in Kentucky, a country which, in latter times, has obtained a renown of somewhat ambiguous nature. It extends to the south, from the river Ohio, to the state of Tennessee, having for its eastern boundary the state of Virginia; and to the west, the river Mississippi, which separates it from the state of Missouri. It extends from 36° 30' to 39° 10' north latitude, and from 4° 78' to 12° 20' west longitude. It embraces an area of 40,000 square miles. Though under a southern degree of latitude, it enjoys a moderate temperature, which is also less variable than in the more eastern states. The two great rivers of the Mississippi and the Ohio, forming the boundary of this state, secure to it no inconsiderable trade. The productions of this beautiful country might, if properly cultivated, become inexhaustible sources of wealth and prosperity to its inhabitants; tobacco is a staple article, excelling in quality even that of Virginia, if properly managed: cotton thrives well in the southern parts of the state. Corn yields from forty to ninety bushels; wheat from thirty to sixty; melons, sweet potatoes, peaches, apples, plumbs, &c., attain a superior degree of perfection. One of the principal articles of trade is hemp, the culture of which has been brought to a high state of improvement; it constitutes one of the chief articles of export to New Orleans. Kentucky has not such extensive plains as Ohio, but is equally fertile, and less exposed to bilious and ague fevers. The stratum, which is generally limestone, is a sure sign of inexhaustible fertility. Hills alternating with valleys form landscapes, which though consisting of native forests, are in the highest degree picturesque. There are parts about Lexington and its environs, which nothing can exceed in beauty of scenery. Even Louisville, with its three islands, the majestic Ohio, and the surrounding little towns, possesses charms seldom rivalled in any country. Kentucky is, without the least exaggeration, one of the finest districts on the face of the earth. The climate is equal to that of the south of France; fruits of every kind arrive at the highest perfection; and it would be difficult to quit this country, did not the character of the inhabitants lessen one's regret at leaving it. But notwithstanding these natural advantages, the population has not increased either in wealth or numbers, in proportion to the more recent state of Ohio. The inhabitants consist chiefly of emigrants from Virginia, and North and South Carolina, and of descendants from back-wood settlers--a proud, fierce, and overbearing set of people. They established themselves under a state of continual warfare with the Indians, who took their revenge by communicating to their vanquishers their cruel and implacable spirit. This, indeed, is their principal feature. A Kentuckian will wait three or four weeks in the woods, for the moment of satiating his revenge; and he seldom or never forgives. The men are of an athletic form, and there may be found amongst them many models of truly masculine beauty. The number of inhabitants is now 57,000, including 15,000 slaves. Planters are among the most respectable class, and form the mass of the population. Lawyers are next, or equal to them in rank, no less than the merchants and manufacturers. Physicians and ministers are a degree lower; and last of all, are those mechanics and farmers not possessed of slaves. These are not treated better than the slaves themselves. The constitution inclines towards federalism, landed property being required to qualify a man for a public station. Ministers, of whatever form of worship, are wholly excluded from public offices. Kentucky is not a country that could be recommended to new settlers; slavery; insecure titles to land: the division of the courts of justice into two parts, furiously opposed to each other; an executive, whose present chief is a disgrace to his station, and whose son would be hung in chains, had he been in Great Britain; the worst paper-currency, &c., are serious warnings to every lover of peace and tranquillity. We abstain from farther particulars, as our purpose is to give a characteristic description of the Union, which would assuredly not gain by a faithful representation of the state of things in this country, during the last ten years. The Desha family, the emetic scene, the proceedings of the legislature, and of the courts of justice, Sharp's death, &c., are facts which belong rather to the history of the tomahawk savages, than to that of a civilised state. Passions must work with double power and effect, where wealth, and arbitrary sway over a herd of slaves, and a warfare of thirty years with savages, have sown the seeds of the most lawless arrogance, and an untameable spirit of revenge. The literary institutions, the Transylvanian university of Lexington, and the college of Bairdstown, have hitherto exercised very little influence over these fierce people. But a still worse feature observable in them, is an utter disregard of religious principles. Ohio has its sects, thereby evincing an interest in the performance of the highest of human duties. The Kentuckian rails at these, and at every form of worship; certainly a trait doubly afflicting and deplorable in a rising state. CHAPTER V. A Keel-boat Voyage--Description of the Preparations.--Face of the Country.--Troy.--Lady Washington.--The River Sport.--Owensborough.--Henderson. The Ohio still continuing low, and there being no prospect of proceeding to New Orleans by a steam boat, I resolved to embark on board a keel boat, in company with several ladies and gentlemen, who were returning to their plantations and their homes. The preparations in such a case, are to dispose of horse and gig, where one does not choose going by land through Nashville, and Natchez. There is not much pleasure to be derived from a passage on board a keel boat--a machine, fifty feet long and ten feet broad, shut up on every side; with two doors, two and a half feet high. It forms a species of wooden prison, containing commonly four rooms; the first for the steward, the second a dining room, the third a cabin for gentlemen, and the fourth a ladies' cabin. Each of these cabins was provided with an iron stove, one of which some days afterwards was very near sending us all to heaven, in the manner which the most Catholic king has been pleased to adopt in regard to us heretics. On the sides were our births, in double rows, six feet in length and two broad. In former times this manner of travelling was generally resorted to on the Ohio and Mississippi; the application of steam, however, has superseded these primitive conveyances, and I hope to the regret of no one. Our passage to Trinity, 515 miles by water, including provisions, &c., was twenty-five dollars. We were sure of meeting there with steam boats. The company consisted of two ladies with their families, returning to Louisiana; two others were going to Yellow-banks, with several governesses, nieces, &c.; in all ten ladies, with eleven gentlemen, considered a happy omen. Amongst the men were three planters from Louisiana and Mississippi; three merchants, one a Yankee, the other a Kentuckian, the third a Frenchman; a lawyer, from Tennessee; two physicians, one from the same state, the other from Kentucky, with a Kentuckian six and a half feet high. Of these persons the Kentuckian doctor was the most to be pitied. He was in the last stage of a pulmonary affection, and expected relief from the mild climate of Louisiana; but much as we did to alleviate the fate of this man, whose perpetual cough was as insufferable to us, as the constant fire he kept up in the stove, and which at last communicated to our boat, the poor fellow died three days after his arrival at New Orleans. Four individuals of less note joined the company, consisting of three slave-drivers, and a Yankee who travelled to make his fortune. We resigned ourselves to our lot, with as good a grace as we could, the Frenchman excepted, who found fault with every thing but the dinner, when he handled his knife and fork with uncommon activity. A captain, a mate, and a steward, composed the officers, twelve oarmen formed the crew, and forty slaves, who were to be transported to the states of Mississippi and Louisiana, were a sort of deck passengers, so that the whole cargo, inside and out, amounted to ninety persons. As long as the weather continued fine, the poor negroes had a tolerable lot, but when afterwards it began to rain, and they continued on a deck seven and a half feet broad, and forty-two long, without any covering over their heads, or being able to move, our kitchen being likewise upon deck, their situation became truly distressing, and one of the infants died shortly afterwards; another, as I was informed, fell into the Mississippi above Palmyra settlements. We took our meals in three divisions; the first consisting of the ladies and five gentlemen, who were helped by the other six gentlemen; afterwards the six remaining sat down with the three drivers, and the Yankee; the latter personages were, however, excused from helping the ladies. After them came the captain, with his boatmen. Our dinner was very good, because we took the precaution of making it part of our agreement that we should purchase such provisions as we thought proper. Our breakfast at the hour of eight, consisted of pigeons, ducks, sometimes opossum, roast beef, chickens, pork cakes, coffee and tea. Our dinner at three o'clock, in the same manner, with the addition of a haunch of venison or a turkey. Our supper at six, was the same as our breakfast. To fill up the intervals, we took at eleven a lunch, consisting of a _doddy_; at nine at night we had a tea party given by the ladies, and the said ten gentlemen alternately. We started the 7th of November, at four o'clock in the afternoon, instead of nine in the morning. The cause of this delay was the alteration which had to be made in the births; for it appeared that two of the Kentuckians were considerably longer than the space allotted to them. They were therefore to be made more _lengthy_ at the expense of the dining rooms. When every thing was ready we started, heartily tired of this delay. We had taken the precaution to provide ourselves with powder and shot, in order to make shooting excursions, having a skiff along side the boat. The landscape on both banks of the Ohio was still hilly, the shores varying from bottom lands to moderate hills, thus forming a boundary line between the interior of Kentucky which lay to our left, and Indiana and the river lands on our right. The cotton tree is almost the only one here, with the exception of beeches and sycamores. The first do not quite attain the height of the sycamore, but still they are seldom less than 140 feet high. The forests assume a more southern character; the shrub-grass, thistles and thorns, are stronger, and the vines of an astonishing size. At several places we were unable to land from the thickness of the natural hedges which lined the banks, presenting an impenetrable barrier. Pigeons now appeared in flocks of thousands and tens of thousands. On the morning of the following day we shot seventy-five, and in the afternoon seventy, without any difficulty. Troy, the seat of justice for Crawford county, in Indiana, was the first place we visited. It has a court-house, a printing-office, and about sixty houses. The inhabitants seem rather indolent. On our asking for apples, they demanded ten dollars for half a barrel; the price for a whole one in Louisville being no more than three dollars. We advised them to keep their apples, and to plant trees, which would enable them to raise some for themselves; and to put panes of glass in their windows, instead of old newspapers. The surrounding country is beautiful and fertile. Farms, however, become more scarce, and are in a state of more primitive simplicity. A block cabin not unlike a stable, with as many holes as there are logs in it, patches of ground planted with tobacco, sweet potatoes, and some corn, are the sole ornaments of these back-wood mansions. We purchased, below Troy, half a young bear, at the rate of five cents per pound. Two others which were skinned, indicated an abundance of these animals, and more application to the sport than seems compatible with the proper cultivation of these regions. The settlers have something of a savage appearance: their features are hard, and the tone of their voice denotes a violent disposition. Our Frenchman was bargaining for a turkey, with the farmer's son, an athletic youth. On being asked three dollars for it, the Frenchman turned round to Mr. B., saying: "I suppose the Kentuckians take us for fools." "What do you say, stranger," replied the youth, at the same time laying his heavy hand across the shoulders of the poor Frenchman, in rather a rough manner. The latter looked as if thunderstruck, and retired in the true style of the Great Nation, when they get a sound drubbing. We remarked on his return, the pains he took to repress his feelings at the coarseness of the Kentuckians. He was, however, discreet enough to keep his peace, and he did very well; but his spirit was gone, and he never afterwards undertook to make a bargain, except with old women, for a pot of milk, or a dozen of eggs, &c. Below Lady Washington, or Hanging Rock, as it is called,--a bare perpendicular rock a hundred feet above the water on the right side of the river, the mountains, or rather hills, cease by degrees, and are succeeded by a vast plain on both sides the high banks of the Ohio. We had here the enjoyment of some sport on the water: a deer was crossing the river, contracted in this place to about a thousand feet, when it was discovered by three Kentuckians, who were going to do the same. Our boat was about half a mile above the spot when we discovered the game. Four of us leaped into the skiff in order to intercept it. The deer continued its course towards the Indiana side, and it was easy for us to intercept its path. As soon as we were near enough, we aimed a blow at it with our oars, having in the hurry forgotten our guns. The deer then took the direction of the boat--we followed--the Kentuckians approached from the other side: full thirty minutes elapsed before these could come up with the animal and give it a blow. Though its strength was on the decline, it did not relax its efforts, but advanced again towards us without our being able to reach it. A second blow on the part of the Kentuckians, who were more expert in handling their oars, seemed to stun the noble animal; yet, summoning up its remaining strength, it went up the stream on the Kentucky side, and reached the shore, but so exhausted by long swimming and the two blows from the powerful Kentuckians, that on landing it staggered and fell, without being able to ascend the high bank. Instantly one of the Kentuckians rushed upon it, cutting asunder its knee joints. The deer, taking a sudden turn, made a plunge at the Kentuckian, tearing away part of his trowsers, and lacerating his leg. So sudden was the last effort of this animal, that but for the speedy arrival of his companion, who had been assisting the third Kentuckian in drawing the skiff closer to the shore, it would infallibly have ripped up its aggressor's bowels. The dirk of the second Kentuckian ended _the sport_, which had terminated in a rather serious way. By this time we had also reached the field of battle. "What do you want, gentlemen?" said the wounded Kentuckian, accosting us with his poniard in his hand. "Part of the deer, which you know you could not have got without our assistance?" They first looked at our party of four, then at our boat, which was already at the distance of a mile and a half from us. The wounded man seating himself, asked again, "What part do you choose?" "Half the deer, with the bowels, and tongue for our ladies." "Have you ladies on board your vessel?" "Yes, sir." Without uttering a word more, they skinned the venison, cleaned, and divided it. We stepped aside meanwhile, collected a couple of dollars, and offered them to the wounded man. He took the money, thanked us, and the other two carried the venison to our boat. We parted after cordially shaking hands. There was now an abundance of pigeons, venison, and bear's flesh on board our boat; the latter, when young, is delicious, having a very fine flavour, with rather a sweet and luscious taste. We were all partial to it except the Frenchman, who most likely took us for a species of these animals. But as thoughts are free, even in the most despotic countries, he had the privilege of thinking, without daring to utter a syllable--assuredly the severest punishment upon one of the Great Nation. On the third day we lost part of our company, as two of the ladies landed on the Yellow-banks, so called from the yellow colour of the shores, which formerly gave the name to the county town of Davies county, now Owensborough. It contains eighty buildings, including a court-house, a newspaper printing office, and three stores. The distance hence to Louisville, is 170 miles. From this village, down to the mouth of the Green river, wild vines grow very luxuriantly, forming a continued series of hedges. The grapes are used for wine, which is of a hard taste, but not a bad flavour; if properly attended to they would certainly yield an excellent produce. We gathered in a few minutes abundance of grapes, and found them juicy and very good. Near the mouth of the Green river, and up its banks, are several ponds of bitumen, a material which is used by the inhabitants for lamp oil. The country abounds in saltpetre, and saltlicks. On the same side, sixty miles below Owensborough, is laid out Henderson, the seat of justice for the county of the same name. It contains 500 inhabitants, 90 dwellings, and a courthouse. Some of the houses are in tolerable order, but the greatest part in a shattered condition, and the town has a dirty appearance. The Ohio forms a bend between Owensborough and Henderson, thus making the distance by water sixty miles, which by land-travelling would not exceed twenty. A species of the mistletoe here makes its appearance for the first time. The trees are covered with bunches of this plant, its foliage is yellow, the berries milk white, and so viscous as to serve for bird lime; when falling they adhere to the branches, and strike root in the bark of the trees. In the morning of the sixth day we arrived at Miller's Ferry, twenty miles above the mouth of the Wabash. As the Ohio makes a great bend in this place, and our navigation was very slow, Messrs. B----, R----, and myself, determined on taking a tour to Harmony, now Owen's settlement, fifteen miles distant from the ferry. The guide we took led us through a rich plain, with settlements scattered over it; the road was excellent, though a mere path, and we arrived at half-past ten. CHAPTER VI. Mr. Owen's of Lanark, formerly Rapp's Settlement.--Remarks on it.--Keel-boat Scenes.--Cave in Rock.--Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers.--Fort Massai. About a hundred and fifty houses, built on the Swabian plan, with the exception of Mr. Rapp's[B] former residence--a handsome brick house--presented themselves to our view. We were introduced to one of the managers, a Mr. Shnee, formerly a Lutheran minister, who entered very soon into particulars respecting Mr. Owen's ulterior views, in rather a pompous manner. This settlement, which is about thirty miles above the mouth of the big Wabash, in Indiana, was first established by Rapp, in the year 1817, and was now (in the year 1823), purchased by Mr. Owen, of Lanark, for the sum of 150,000 dollars. The society is to be established on a plan rather different from the one he has pursued in Scotland, and on a larger scale. Mr. Owen has, it is said, the pecuniary means as well as the ability to effect something of importance. A plan was shown and sold to us, according to which a new building of colossal dimensions is projected; and if Mr. Owen's means should not fall short of his good will, this edifice would certainly exhibit the most magnificent piece of architecture in the Union, the capitol at Washington excepted. This palace, when finished, is to receive his community. According to his views, as laid down in his publications, in the lectures held by him at Washington and at New York, and as stated in the verbal communications of the persons who represent him, he is about to form a society, unshackled by all those fetters which religion, education, prejudices, and manners have imposed upon the human species; and his followers will exhibit to the world the novel and interesting example of a community, which, laying aside every form of worship and all religious belief in a supreme being, shall be capable of enjoying the highest social happiness by no other means than the impulse of innate egotism. It has been the object of Mr. Owen's study to improve this egotism in the most rational manner, and to bring it to the highest degree of perfection; and in this sense he has published the Constitution, which is to be adopted by the community. It is distributed, if I recollect rightly, into three subdivisions, with seventy or more articles.--Mechanics of every description--people who have learned any useful art,--are admitted into this community. Those who pay 500 dollars, are free from any obligation to work. The time of the members is divided between working, reading, and dancing. A ball is given every day, and is regularly attended by the community. Divine service, or worship of any kind, is entirely excluded; in lieu of it, moreover, a ball is given on Sunday. The children are summoned to school by beat of drum. A newspaper is published, chiefly treating of their own affairs, and of the entertainments and the social regulations of the community, amounting to about 500 members, of both sexes, composed almost exclusively of adventurers of every nation, who expect joyful days. The settlement has not improved since the purchase, and there appeared to exist the greatest disorder and uncleanliness. This community has since been dissolved as was to have been expected. The Scotchman seems to have a very high notion of the power of egotism. He is certainly not wrong in this point; but if he intends to give still greater strength to a spirit which already works with too much effect in the Union, it may be feared that he will soon snap the cords of society asunder. According to his notions, and those of his people, all the legislators of ancient and modern times, religious as well as political, were either fools or impostors, who went in quest of prosperity on a mistaken principle, which he is now about to correct. Scotchmen, it is known, are sometimes liable to adopt strange notions, in which they always deem themselves infallible. I am acquainted with an honorable president of the quarter-sessions, who, as a true Swedenborghian, is fully convinced that he will preside again as judge in the other world, and that the German farmers will be there the same fools they are here, whom he may continue to cheat out of their property. Great Britain has no cause to envy the United States this acquisition. We stayed at this place about two hours, crossed the Wabash, and took the road to Shawneetown, through part of Mr. Birkbeck's settlement. The country is highly cultivated, and the difference between the steady Englishman of the Illinois side, and the rabble of Owen's settlement, is clearly seen in the style and character of the improvements carried on. [B] Eighteen miles from Pittsburgh on the road to Beaver, the new and third settlement of the Swabian separatists, called Economy, was established two years ago by Rapp, a man celebrated in the Union for his rustic sagacity. This man affords an instance of what persevering industry, united with sound sense, may effect.--When he arrived with his 400 followers from Germany, twenty years ago, their capital amounted to 35,000 dollars; and so poor were they at first, that their leader could not find credit for a barrel of salt. They are now worth at least a million of dollars. Their new settlement promises to thrive, and to become superior to those which they sold in Buttler County, Pennsylvania, and in Indiana on the Wabash. Nothing can exceed the authority exercised by this man over his flock. He unites both the spiritual and temporal power in his own person. He has with him a kind of Vice-Dictator in the person of his adopted son, (who is married to his daughter), and a council of twelve elders, who manage the domestic affairs of the community, now amounting to 1000 souls. When he was yet residing in Old Harmony, twenty-eight miles north of Pittsburgh, the bridge constructed over a creek which passes by the village, wanted repair. It was winter time; the ice seemed thick enough to allow of walking across. The creek, however, was deep, and 100 feet wide: Master Rapp, notwithstanding, ventured upon it, intending to come up to the pier. He was scarcely in the middle of the river, when the ice gave way. A number of his followers being assembled on the shores, were eager to assist him.--"Do you think," hallooed Rapp, "that the Lord will withdraw his hands from his elect, and that I need your help?" The poor fellows immediately dropped the boards, but at the same time Master Rapp sunk deeper into the creek. The danger at last conquered his shame and his confidence in supernatural aid, and he called lustily for assistance. Notwithstanding the cries of the American by-standers, "You d--d fools, let the tyrant go down, you will have his money, you will be free," they immediately threw boards on the ice, went up to him, and took him out of the water, amidst shouts of laughter from the unbelieving Americans. On the following Sunday he preached them a sermon, purporting that the Lord had visited their sins upon him, and that their disobedience to his commands was the cause of his sinking. The poor dupes literally believed all this, promised obedience, and both parties were satisfied. Several of his followers left him, being shocked at his law of celibacy, but such was his ascendancy over the female part of the community, that they chose rather to leave their husbands than their father Rapp, as they call him. Last year, however (1826), he abolished this kind of celibacy, hitherto so strictly observed, and on the 4th of July, eighteen couples were permitted to marry. This settlement is one of the finest villages in the west of Pennsylvania. A manufactory of steam engines, extensive parks of deer, two elks, and a magnificent palace for himself, splendidly furnished, show that he knows how to avail himself of his increasing wealth. The inhabitants of Pittsburgh make frequent excursions to this settlement, and though his manners savour of the Swabian peasant, yet his wealth and his hospitality have considerably diminished the contempt in which he was formerly held by the Anglo-Americans. We arrived at Shawneetown, where our boat was waiting for us, having travelled since seven o'clock in the morning a distance of forty miles. We found our boat's company in the utmost confusion. Our ladies had hitherto given a regular tea party at nine o'clock, out of their own stock of provisions. With the exception of guns, powder, shot, some hundred cigars, a few bottles of wine, the gentlemen were furnished with nothing. They went therefore to Shawneetown, a village twelve miles below the mouth of the Wabash, with sixty houses, and 300 inhabitants, of a very indifferent character, mostly labourers at the salt works of the Saline river. The party however were not so fortunate as to procure anything except a dried haunch of venison. On their return, the invalid doctor missed the negro girl he had brought to wait upon him, intending to sell her along with a male slave. She was gone. A search was commenced, but the honest inhabitants declared, with many G--d d--ns, that they did not know anything about her. The company discovered what was wanting, and persuaded the physician to offer a reward for her recovery. In less than half an hour, one of the worthy inhabitants came up with the run-away girl, leading her by a rope. He had shortly before assured some of the inquirers, under the pledge of a round oath, of his utter ignorance of the matter, whilst at the same time the slave was concealed in his kitchen. The second physician from Tennessee had the benevolent precaution of suggesting to the patient to keep himself cool. But every advice was thrown away. The Kentuckian could not resist striking the girl. With the utmost pain he raised himself up in his bed, to give her blows, which did himself infinitely more harm. When called upon to pay the reward of twenty dollars, his wrath rose to the highest pitch, and if he had had strength we should have witnessed a strange scene. He paid, however, and contented himself with binding her arms, and fastening her to the door-post, from which she was released by the following accident, which took place about eight o'clock, just as we returned from our excursion. One of the planters, a Kentuckian by birth, made a regular excursion, twice a day, to fetch milk and eggs for the company. The captain refused to dispatch the skiff for him, but the rest of the company sent it without asking the captain's leave. Some hours after the Kentuckian's return he heard of the captain's refusal, and immediately accused him of negligence, &c. The captain gave him the lie, and hardly was the word spoken, when the Kentuckian rushed upon the young man with a dirk in his hand. He was, however, prevented, when turning round, he ran to the other side to fetch an axe, declaring at the same time, with a G----d d----n, he would knock down any body who dared to oppose him. I stood with Mr. B. at the door. A quarrel ensued, and he was going to force it open, when several gentlemen came to our assistance. During this riot the stove became heated to such a degree, as unobserved by any one, to set fire to the wood beneath it, so that the birth of our patient was in flames in a moment. Quarrelling, and murderous thoughts gave way to the danger of being roasted alive. All hands, even the Kentuckian, were assiduous in their endeavours to extinguish the fire; but this could not be so easily accomplished, the boat being extremely crowded. At last we succeeded; the poor doctor had almost been forgotten, and was very near being burnt alive, had it not been for his second servant, who immediately laid hold of a bucket full of water, and poured it over his master. The behaviour of this invalid was strange beyond description, and shewed a degree of passion, at once ludicrous and pitiable. "For heaven's sake," exclaimed he, "I am roasting! no, I am drowning! the wretch has poured a whole bucket of water over me. Come hither, rascal!" The servant was obliged to approach, and tender his face to receive a box on the ear, certainly the most harmless he ever got; the master at the same time reproaching him with his villainy, and lamenting the consequences which this bath would bring upon him, such as rheumatism, fever, &c. We stood astonished and confounded at this man, the living image of a burnt-out volcano. "But for heaven's sake," said Mr. B., "Doctor, you would have been roasted alive but for your slave, and you have been the only cause of the fire, by the unsupportable heat you kept up in the stove; you must not do that again." "He is my slave," was the answer, "and should have stayed with me, instead of listening to your ungentlemanly disputes; then the fire would not have broken out." We assented to this, and peace was fully restored. The next day we proceeded on our journey, having the state of Illinois on our right, and Kentucky on our left. Thirteen miles below Saline river we visited the cave of Rock Island. The limestone wall, 120 feet high, runs for about half a mile along the right bank of the Ohio; nearly at its end is the entrance to the cave. A few steps bring you at once into the grotto, which is about sixty-five feet wide at the base, narrowing as you ascend, and forming an arch, the span of which is from twenty-five to thirty feet, extending to a length of 120 feet. Marine shells, feathers, and bones of bears, turkies, and wild geese, afford ample testimony that this place has not been visited by the curious alone, but has been the resort of numerous families, which had taken temporary refuge here. Our sporting excursions had generally pigeons, turkies, or opossums, for their object; below the cave, in the rocks, wild geese and ducks become very plentiful. Flocks of from forty to one hundred were flying over our heads in every direction, and augmenting in numbers as we approached the Mississippi. We shot this day seven geese and ducks, and passed the small villages of Cumberland, at the mouth of the river of that name, and Smithland, three miles below. Both villages are now springing up. The Cumberland is 720 feet wide at its mouth. The river Tennessee, thirteen miles below, is 700 feet. Eleven miles lower down, on the Illinois side, is fort Spassai, erected on a high bank and in a commanding position, which overlooks the Ohio, here a mile wide. The prospect for a distance of forty miles, is charming. The extraordinary beauty of the river, which the French very properly called _la belle rivière_, on both sides the majestic native forests, clad in their autumnal foliage, here and there an island in the midst of the stream, with its luxuriant growth of trees, not unlike enchanted gardens. The charm which is diffused over the whole scene can scarcely be described. The fort is garrisoned by a captain, with a company of regulars, who, however, suffer much from swamps in the rear of the fort. On the two following days we passed the county towns of Golconda, the seat of justice for Pope county; Vienna, for Johnson; and America, for Alexander county; villages which have nothing in common with the cities of which they remind you but the name. They are inhabited by some Kentuckians and loiterers, who spend part of their time in bringing down the Mississippi the produce of the country, for the transport of which they demand double wages, and are thus enabled to spend the rest of their time sitting cross-legged over their whiskey. The ninth day, about noon, we arrived at Trinity. I was heartily tired of this manner of travelling, and resolved to wait here with Mr. B., and Mrs. Th---- and family, for a steam-boat from St. Louis. The rest of the company went on in the boat, after an hour's stopping. Trinity, or as it was formerly called, Cairo, is situated four and a half miles above the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi, consisting only of a tavern and a store, kept by a Mr. Bershoud. The inundations occurring regularly every year, have hitherto prevented the formation of settlements at this place. Though these inundations rise every year from four to ten feet above the banks, as may be seen from the weeds remaining in clusters on the trees, the inhabitants of these two houses have, if we except the trouble of transporting their effects and goods to the upper story, but little to apprehend, the rise of the river being gradually slow, and its power being lessened by its circuitous course, and by the trees on its bank. From Trinity down to Baton Rouge, a distance of 900 miles, the houses are constructed in such a manner as to be secured against accidents; the foundations are stumps of trees, or low brick pillars, four feet high. The houses are so built, or rather laid upon these pillars, as to allow the water to pass beneath. Notwithstanding this precaution, the flood generally reaches to the lower apartments, and passengers coming from Trinity to New Orleans last February, had to get into the skiff sent for them, through the window of the second story. From Trinity to the mouth of the Ohio, are reckoned four and a half miles. We visited on the following morning, this remarkable spot, where two of the most important rivers unite. CHAPTER VII. The Mississippi.--General Features of the State of Illinois and its Inhabitants. The nearer we approached the Mississippi, the lower the country became, and the more imposing the scenery. By degrees the river Ohio loses its blue tinge, taking from the mightier stream a milky colour, which changes into a muddy white when very near the junction--this junction itself is one of the most magnificent sights. On the left hand the Ohio, half a mile wide, overpowered, as it were, by its mightier rival--in front the more gigantic Mississippi, one mile and a half broad, rolling down its vast volumes of water with incredible rapidity. Farther on, the high banks of the state of Missouri, with some farm buildings of a diminutive appearance, owing to the great distance; in the back ground, the colossal native forests of Missouri; and lastly, to the south, these two rivers united and turning majestically to the south-west. The deep silence which reigns in these regions, and which is interrupted only by the rushing sound of the waves, and the immense mass of water, produce the illusion that you are no longer standing upon firm ground; you are fearful less the earth should give way to the powerful element, which, pressed into so narrow a space, rolls on with irresistible force. I had formerly seen the falls of Niagara; but this scene, taken in the proper point of view, is in no respect inferior to that which they present. The immense number of streams which empty into the Mississippi, and caused it to be named, very appropriately, the _Father of Rivers_, render it powerful throughout the year; it generally rises in February, and falls in July. In September and October the autumnal rains begin; and they continue to swell it through the winter. When it overflows its banks, the Mississippi inundates the country on both sides, for an extent of from forty-five to fifty miles, thus forming an immense lake. From the mouth of the Ohio to Walnut hills, in the state of Mississippi, the difference between the lowest water and the highest inundation, is generally sixteen feet. The nearer it approaches the gulph of Mexico, the less is the flood. The water leaving its bed on the west side never returns, but forms into lakes and marshes. On the east side they find resistance from the high lands, that follow the meanderings of the river. Above Natchez, the river inundates the lands for a space of thirty miles. At Baton Rouge, the high lands take on a sudden a south-eastern direction, while the river turns to the south-west, thus leaving the waters to form the eastern swamps of Louisiana. It rises to thirty feet at that place; whilst at New Orleans it scarcely attains the height of twelve feet, and at the mouth no difference between a rise and fall is perceptible. Whoever comes to the Mississippi with the expectation of beholding a sea-like river flowing quietly along, will find himself disappointed. The magnitude of this river does not consist in its width but in its depth, and the immense quantity of water it pours out into the sea. At the mouth of the Ohio it is a mile and a half wide. This moderate breadth rather diminishes as it proceeds in its course. At New Orleans, after receiving the waters of some great tributary streams, it is not more than a mile in width, and in some places three quarters of a mile. Its depth, however, continues to increase; below the Ohio it is reckoned to be from thirty-five to fifty feet deep. Below the Arkansas to Natchez, from 100 to 150. From Natchez to New Orleans, from 150 to 250 feet. At its mouth, owing to the sand bar at the Paliseter, the depth greatly diminishes, and it is well known that vessels drawing eighteen feet of water can hardly enter the mouth of the stream. The waters of the Mississippi are not clear at any period of the year. This was the second time I saw it, when it was said to be very low; still its waters were of a muddy turbid appearance. When rising it changes to a muddy yellow. A glass filled with water from the Mississippi, deposits in a quarter of an hour a mass of mud equal to one tenth of the whole contents. But when clear, it is excellent for drinking, and superior to any I have tasted. It is generally used by those who inhabit its banks. The accommodations in Trinity are comfortable, and the tables are well furnished, but the prices exorbitant. It cannot, however, be expected to be otherwise, owing to the new settlers, whose anxiety never permits them to neglect an opportunity of improving their means on their first outset. We found this to be the case on all occasions. Whenever some of our passengers made purchases of trifles, such as cigars, &c., they had to pay five times as much as in Louisville. It is therefore advisable to provide oneself with every thing, when travelling in these backwoods; the generality of the settlers on these banks being needy adventurers, partly foreigners, partly Kentuckians, who, with a capital of not quite 100 dollars, with which they purchase some goods in New Orleans, begin their commercial career, and may be seen with both hands in their pockets, their legs on the table or chimney-piece, and cigars in their mouths, selling their goods for five hundred per cent above prime cost. Towards the north on the banks of the Mississippi, the settlers are generally Frenchmen, who now assume by degrees the American manners and language. Many of them are wealthy store-keepers, merchants, and farmers; but for the most part, however, a lightfooted kind of people, who, from their fathers, have inherited frivolity, and from their mothers, Indian women, uncleanliness. The towns of Kaskakia, Cahokia, &c., as well as several villages up the Mississippi to the Prairie des Chiens, owe their origin to them. The solid class of inhabitants live on the big and little Wabash, and between these two rivers and the Illinois. This is, no doubt, the finest part of the state, and one of the most delightful countries on the face of the earth. It is mostly inhabited by Americans and Englishmen. Agriculture, the breeding of cattle, and improvements of every kind, are making rapid progress. The settlements in Bond, Crawford, Edward's, Franklin, and White Counties, are to be considered as forming the main substance of the state. A number of elegant towns have arisen in the space of a few years: among others, Vandalia, the capital, and for these three years past the seat of government, with a state house and a projected university, for which 36,000 acres of land have been assigned. An excellent spirit is acknowledged to prevail among the inhabitants of this district. Still, however, the style of architecture--if the laying of logs or of bricks upon each other deserves this name--the manners, the attempted improvements, every thing announces a new land, which has only a few years since started into political existence, and the settlers of which do not yet evince any anxiety for the comforts of life. Illinois has now 80,000 inhabitants, 1500 of whom are people of colour; the rest are Americans, English, French, and a German settlement about Vandalia. The state was received into the Union in the year 1818. The constitution, with a governor and a secretary at its head, resembles that of the state of Ohio. In the year 1824, the question was again brought forward concerning the possession of slaves: it was, however, negatived, and we hope it will never be pressed upon the people. The state is much indebted in every point to the late Mr. Birkbeck, who died too soon for the welfare of his adopted country. He was considered as the father of the state, and whenever he could gain over a useful citizen, he spared no expense, and sacrificed a considerable part of his property in this manner. The people of Illinois, in acknowledgment of his services, had chosen him for secretary of the state, in which character he died in 1825. He was generally known under the name of Emperor of the Prairies, from the vast extent of natural meadows belonging to his lands. It is to be regretted, however, that Mr. Birkbeck was not acquainted with the country about Trinity. His large capital and the number of hands who joined him, would no doubt succeed in establishing a settlement here. This will sooner or later take place, and will eventually render it one of the finest towns in the United States, as the advantages of its situation are incalculable. Illinois is, in point of commerce, more advantageously situated than any of the Ohio states; being bounded on the west by the river Mississippi, which forms the line between this state and that of Missouri, to the east by the big Wabash, and to the south by the Ohio, the river Illinois running through it with some smaller rivers; thus affording it an open navigation to the north-west, the west, the south, and the east. Towards the north the banks of the Upper Mississippi form a range of hills which join the Illinois mountains to the east, and lowering by degrees lose themselves in the plains of lakes Huron and Michigan. The country is, on the whole, less elevated than Indiana, and forms the last slope of the northern valley of the Mississippi, the hills being intersected by a number of valleys, plains, prairies, and marshes. The fertility of this state is extraordinary, surpassing that of Indiana and Ohio. In beauty, variety of scenery, and fertility, it may vie with the most celebrated countries. Wheat thrives only on high land, the soil of the valleys being too rich. Corn gives for every bushel a hundred. Tobacco planted in Illinois, if well managed, is found to be superior to that of Kentucky and Virginia. Rice and indigo grow wild, their cultivation being neglected for want of hands. Pecans, a product of the West Indies, grow in abundance in the native forests. This state having a temperate climate, possesses many of the southern products. The timber is of colossal magnitude. Sycamores and cotton trees of an immense height, walnut, pecan trees, honey-locusts and maples, cover the surface of this country, and are the surest indications of an exceedingly rich soil. The most fertile parts of the state are the bottom lands along the Mississippi, Illinois, and the big and little Wabash. The country is complained of as being sickly. There is no doubt that a state which abounds in rivers, marshes, and ponds, must be subject to epidemic diseases, but the climate being temperate the fault lies very much with the settlers and the inhabitants themselves. The settler who chooses for his dwelling-house a spot on an eminence, and far from the marshes, taking at the same time the necessary precautions in point of dress, cleanliness, and the choice of victuals and beverage, may live without fear in these countries. All agree in this opinion, and I have myself experienced the correctness of it. The greatest part, however, of the new comers and inhabitants live upon milk or stagnant water taken from the first pond they meet with on their way, with a few slices of bacon. Their wardrobe consists of a single shirt, which is worn till it falls to pieces. It cannot, therefore, be matter of astonishment if agues and bilious fevers spread over the country, and even in this case a quart of corn brandy is their prescription. This being the general mode of living, and we may add of dying, among the lower classes, disease must necessarily spread its ravages with more rapidity. CHAPTER VIII. Excursion to St. Louis.--Face of the Country.--Sketch of the State of Missouri.--Return to Trinity. The steam-boat, the Pioneer, having come up to Trinity the following day, on its way to St. Louis, Mr. B. and I resolved to take a trip to the latter place, as the best chance that offered to get away as soon as possible. We started at ten o'clock in the morning, turned round the fork, and ascended the muddy Mississippi. The first town we saw was Hamburgh, on the Illinois side, consisting of nineteen frame dwellings and cabins, and four stores. On the left, in the state of Missouri, is Cape Girardeau. The settlement mostly consists of Frenchmen, and German Redemptioners. The town has not a very inviting appearance. One hundred and six miles above the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi, we landed at St. Genevieve to take in wood. This town is the principal mart for the Burton mines; it has a Catholic chapel, twenty stores, a printing office, 250 houses, and 1600 inhabitants. Twenty-four miles farther up the same side, is Herculaneum, with 300 inhabitants, a court-house, and a printing office. The town had been laid out and peopled by Kentuckians. There are several villages on the right and left bank, and some good-looking farms. On the third day, at twelve o'clock, we reached the town of St. Louis, 170 miles above the mouth of the Ohio, and thirteen miles below the junction of the Mississippi, and the Missouri. This town extends, in a truly picturesque situation, in 38° 33' north latitude, and 12° 58' west longitude, for the length of two miles along the river, in three parallel streets, rising one above the other in the form of terraces, on a stratum of limestone. The houses are for the most part built of this material, and surrounded with gardens. The number of buildings amounts to 620, that of the inhabitants to 5000. Its principal buildings are, a Catholic, and two Protestant churches, a branch bank of the United States, and the bank of St. Louis, the courthouse, the government-house, an academy, and a theatre; besides these, there are a number of wholesale and retail stores, two printing offices, and an abundance of coffee-shops, billiard-tables, and dancing-rooms. The trade of St. Louis is not so extensive as that of Louisville, and less liable to interruption, as the navigation is not impeded at any season of the year, the Mississippi, being at all times navigable for the largest vessels. An exception, indeed, occurred in 1802, when the Ohio and other rivers were almost dried up. The inhabitants of St. Louis and of Missouri, have therefore a never-failing channel for carrying their produce to market. This they generally do, when the rivers which empty themselves into the Mississippi, are so low that they have no apprehension of finding any competition in New Orleans. Last year, the market of New Orleans was almost exclusively supplied with produce from St. Louis and Missouri. Eighty dollars was the general price for a bullock, which at a later period would not have obtained twenty-five dollars; flour was at eight dollars, whereas, two months afterwards, abundance could be had for two and a half dollars. In the same proportion they sold every other article. It is this circumstance which contributes to the wealth of St. Louis, and of Missouri in general, to the detriment, on the other hand, of the Ohio States, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio. At the time of our arrival at St. Louis, there were in its port, five steam vessels, and thirty-five other boats. St. Louis is a sort of New Orleans on a smaller scale; in both places are to be found a number of coffee-houses and dancing rooms. The French are seen engaged in the same amusements and passions that formerly characterised the creoles of Louisiana, with the exception, that the trade with the Indians has given to the French backwoods-men of St. Louis, a rather malicious and dishonest turn--a fault from which the creoles of Louisiana are free, owing to the greater respectability of their visitors and settlers, from Europe, and from the north of the Union. The majority of the inhabitants of this town, as well as of the state, consists of people descended from the French, of Kentuckians, and foreigners of every description--Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Irish, &c. Kentucky manners are fashionable. Not long before my arrival, there occurred a specimen of this, in an open assault and duel between two individuals in the public street. For the last five years, men of property and respectability, attracted by the superior advantages of the situation, have settled at St. Louis, and their example and influence have been conducive of some good to public morals. The enterprising spirit of the Americans is remarkable, even in this place and state. Within the twenty-three years that have elapsed since the cession of this country (part of the former Louisiana) to the Union, much more has been achieved in every point of view, than during the sixty years preceding, when it was in possession of France and Spain. Streets, villages, settlements, towns, and farms, have sprung up in every direction; the population has augmented from 20,000 to 84,000 inhabitants; and if they are not superior in wealth to their neighbours, it is certainly to be attributed to their want of industry, and to their passing the greater part of their time in grog-shops, or in dancing-companies, according to the prevailing custom. Slavery, which is introduced here, though so ill adapted to a northern state, contributes not a little to the aristocratic notions of the people, the least of whom, if he can call himself the master of one slave, would be ashamed to put his hand to any work. Still there is more ready money among the inhabitants, than in any of the western states, and prices are demanded accordingly. Cattle that fetch in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, ten dollars per head, are sold in Missouri for twenty-five dollars, and so in proportion. The country about St. Louis to the north, south, and west, consists of prairies, extending fifteen miles in every direction, with some very handsome farm houses, and numerous herds of cattle. Though in the same degree of northern latitude as the city of Washington, the climate is more severe, owing to the two rivers Missouri and Mississippi, whose waters coming from northern countries greatly contribute to cool the air. The cultivation of tobacco has not succeeded, and the produce chiefly consists of wheat, corn and cattle;--equally important is the profit from the lead mines, and the fur trade. The most improved settlements are those along the Mississippi, and on the Missouri they are beginning to be formed. Missouri was received into the Union in 1821, and is, with the exception of Virginia, the largest state of the Union, its area exceeding 60,000 square miles. To the north and west it borders on the Missouri territory; towards the east the Mississippi is the boundary between this state, Illinois, Kentucky, and Tennessee; the Arkansas territory lies to the south. It extends from 36° to 40° 25' north latitude, and from 12° 50' to 18° 10' west longitude. The country forms an elevated plain, sloping considerably to the south, where it is crossed by the Ozark mountains. Marshes and mountains prevail more in the southern parts, high plains in the northern. Along the Mississippi and Missouri, the bottom lands are generally extremely fertile. The soils, however, cannot be altogether compared with that of Illinois. The possession of slaves is allowed by the constitution of this state, and their number amounts to 10,000; that of the rest of the inhabitants to 70,000. The form of government approaches very nearly that of Kentucky. We remained one day at St. Louis, and returned in the steam-boat, General Brown, to Trinity, where we took on board the ladies and some new passengers, returning from thence to the Mississippi. We passed several small islands, and a large one (Wolf's Island), and landed at New Madrid at midnight, for the purpose of taking in wood. This place is the seat of justice for the county of the same name; it has, however, no court-house, and is a rather wretched looking place, containing about thirty log and shattered farm houses, with 180 inhabitants, Spaniards, French, and Italians. The two stores being open, we visited them. They were but poorly provided, having about a dozen cotton handkerchiefs, one barrel of whiskey, and a heap of furs. Two Indians were stretched on the ground before the door, and in a sound sleep, with their guns by their side. The Mississippi is continually encroaching upon the town, and has already swept away many intended streets, as the inhabitants say, obliging them to move back to their no small disappointment. The surrounding country is highly fertile, and in the rear of the town there are several well cultivated cotton and rice plantations. A rich plain stretches along to the west, behind New Madrid, as far as the waters of Sherrimack. CHAPTER IX. The State of Tennessee.--Steam-boats on the Mississippi.--Flat-boats. We had now passed the western extremity of Kentucky, and had the state of Tennessee on our left. The eastern banks of the Mississippi, viz. on the Tennessee side, are throughout lower than the western or Missouri shores; presenting a series of marshes from which cypress trees and canebrack seem just emerging, lining them for hundreds of miles to the southward. Farther eastward, towards the rivers Tennessee and Cumberland, the soil is overgrown with sugar-maples, sycamore trees, walnuts, and honey-locusts; the mountains with white and live oak and hickory. The eastern part of the state resembles North Carolina. The middle part is by far the best. Cotton and tobacco are staple articles. Rice is cultivated with success. Hemp is not considered of the same quality as the Kentuckian, the climate being too warm. The tropical fruits, such as figs, thrive well; chesnuts are superior to those of the other states. Melons, peaches, and apples, are abundant. Tennessee is considered altogether a rich and fertile land. The inhabitants are liberal, noble hearted, and noted for their good conduct towards strangers. Several foreigners settled in the state, have attained a high degree of wealth and prosperity. There is no state in the Union where slavery has had less pernicious effects upon the character of the people. The inhabitants are mostly descendants of emigrants from North Carolina, and their hospitality is without bounds. This state extends, in an oblong square, from the shores of the Mississippi towards Virginia and North Carolina, in 35° to 36° 30' north latitude, and 4° 26' to 13° 5' west longitude. It is bounded on the east by Virginia and North Carolina; on the south by Georgia, Albania, and Mississippi; on the west by the river Mississippi, and on the north by Kentucky, comprising altogether 40,000 square miles. East Tennessee partakes more of the sandy character of North Carolina. West Tennessee of the marshes of the Mississippi valley. Its principal rivers are the Cumberland and Tennessee, with the Mississippi on the west, where however, with the exception of some very small settlements, there are no improvements of any kind. The canal proposed by Governor Troup, of Georgia, to Governor Carrott, of Tennessee, which is to bring this state into immediate connection with the Atlantic, will have a very beneficial effect, these two rivers being navigable for steam-boats only during three months in the year, and New Orleans being the only market for Tennessee. Notwithstanding its straitened commerce, the state is rapidly improving, and several of its towns, though not large are yet very elegant. The chief wealth of the state, however, consists in the plantations, and the farmer and planter live in a style, which at least in point of eating, cannot be exceeded by the wealthiest nobleman in any country. Among the towns of the state, Nashville holds the first rank. This town occupies a commanding situation, on a solid cliff of rocks on the south side of the Cumberland, 200 feet above the level of the banks. The river is navigable here during three months in the year for steam-boats of 300 tons burthen. Besides the court-house, three churches, two banks, including a branch bank of the United States, three printing offices, and a great number of wholesale and retail merchants, there is the seat of the district court for the western part of Tennessee. Several literary institutions, such as Cumberland college, a ladies' school, and reading-room with a public library, are evident proofs of a liberal spirit. This spirit is combined with unbounded hospitality. There is a number of houses, such as those of Governor Carrott, Major General Jackson, &c., where every respectable stranger is welcome, and may be sure of meeting with a select company. The surrounding country is beautiful, cotton plantations lining the banks of the river, and extending in every direction hither. The wealthier inhabitants generally retire during the summer months, from the stifling heats prevailing on the barren rocks upon which Nashville stands. Knoxville in east Tennessee, with 400 houses and 2,500 inhabitants, is of less importance; it is the seat of the supreme district court for east Tennessee, and has a bank, a college, and two churches. The country about Knoxville is far inferior to that round Nashville. The capital of Tennessee, Murfreesborough, has 1500 inhabitants, with a state-house, a bank, two printing-offices, &c. It communicates by water with Nashville, through Stonecreek. The situation seems not to be very judiciously chosen for a chief town. This was the state of things four years ago, when I passed through the place; but doubtless it has since proportionably increased. Our company being on this occasion of a less mixed, and a less troublesome character, we sailed down the majestic father of rivers, with minds well disposed to acknowledge our obligations to Mr. Fulton, for his happy idea of applying the power of steam to navigation. The settlers of the Mississippi valley, are in duty bound to raise a monument to the memory of a man, who has effected in their mode of conveyance so adventurous, and so successful a change. Not ten years have elapsed since the inhabitants of the west were used to toil like beasts of burden, in order to ascend the stream for a distance of ten or fifteen miles a day; and when in 1802, some boats belonging to Mr. R., of Nashville, arrived from New Orleans in eighty-seven days, this passage was considered the _ne plus ultra_ of quick travelling by water, and was instantly made known throughout the Union. A passenger now performs the same voyage in five days, sitting all the while in a comfortable state-room, which in point of fitting-up vies with the most elegant parlours, writing letters, or reading the newspapers, and if tired of these occupations, paying visits to the ladies, if he be permitted to do so; or otherwise pacing the deck, where his less fortunate fellow passengers are hanging in hammocks--an indication to many of what may be their future state. There is certainly not any nation that can boast of a greater disposition for travelling, than Brother Jonathan; and there is again nobody more at home than he, whether in a tavern, or on board a vessel; as he is in the habit of considering a tavern, a vessel, or a steam-boat, as a kind of public property. Yet on board a vessel, or a steam-boat, he is very tractable. The great difference of fare between a cabin and a deck passage, from Louisville to New Orleans, being for the former forty dollars, and for the latter eight dollars, contributes to establish a distinction in this assemblage of people, placing those who are found too light in the upper house, and the more weighty in the lower. The first have to find themselves, the others are provided with every thing in a manner which shows that private institutions for the benefit of the public, are certainly more patronised here than in most other countries. If the pecuniary resources of the citizen of the United States do not reach a very low ebb, he will certainly choose the cabin, his pride forbidding him to mix with the rabble, though the expence may fall too heavy upon him. That economical refinement which the French evince on these occasions, is not to be seen in America. When I proceeded four months ago from Havre to Rouen, in the Duchess of Angouleme steam-boat, among the 100 passengers who were on board, more than fifty well-looking people were seen unpacking their bundles, and regaling themselves with their contents--bread, chicken, cutlets, wine, &c., &c., a frugality which will hardly be found to contribute to the improvement of a spirit of enterprise. The Americans would be ashamed of this kind of parsimony, which must ever impede all public undertakings. Owing to this cause, the American steam-boats are in point of elegance superior to those of other nations; and none but the English are able to compete with them. The furniture, carpets, beds, &c., are throughout elegant, and in good condition. Some of the new steam-boats are provided with small rooms, each containing two births, which passengers may use for their accommodation in shaving, dressing, &c. The general regulations are suspended above the side board in a gilt frame, and are as binding as a law. They prohibit speaking to the pilot during the passage--visiting the ladies' state-room, without their consent--lying down upon the bed with shoes or boots on--smoking cigars in the state-room--and playing at cards after ten o'clock. The first transgression is punished with a fine; if repeated, the transgressor is sent ashore. The fare is excellent, and the breakfasts, dinners, and suppers, are provided with such a multiplicity of dishes, and even dainties, as would satisfy the most refined appetite. The beverage consists of rum, gin, brandy, claret, to be taken at pleasure during meals; but out of that time they are to be paid for. Distressing accidents will of course occasionally occur; the last of this kind was of a truly heart-rending nature: it happened four years ago, above Walnut-hills, in the steam-boat Tennessee. The night was tempestuous, the rain fell in torrents, and the captain, instead of landing and waiting until the weather cleared up, lost his senses, and ran on a sawyer[C]. The steam-boat was not sixty feet distant from the bank, which could not be distinguished, and she went down in a few seconds, together with 110 passengers, save a few who by accident reached the shore. Since that time, although steam-boats have sunk, no such loss of lives has occurred. This, however, is not to be compared with the hardships, the toils, the loss of health and life, to which the navigators of flat and keel-boats were formerly, and are still exposed, when going down the Mississippi. Nothing more uncouth than these flat-boats was ever sent forth from the hands of a carpenter. They are built of rude timber and planks, sixty feet in length, and twenty-five feet in breadth, and so unmanageable, that only the strong arm of a backwoodsman can keep them from running upon planters[D], sawyers, wooden-islands, and all the Scyllas and Charybdes, that are to be met with on the voyage. We found numbers of them along the Ohio, detained by low water; and from St. Louis down to New Orleans, sometimes fifteen, twenty, and thirty together. Their uncouth appearance, the boisterous and fierce manners of their crews, the immense distance they have already proceeded, make them truly objects of interest. One of these flat-boats is from the Upper Ohio, laden with pine-boards, planks, rye, whisky, flour; close to it, another from the falls of the Ohio, with corn in the ear and bulk, apples, peaches; a third, with hemp, tobacco, and cotton. In the fourth you may find horses regularly stabled together; in the next, cattle from the mouth of the Missouri; a sixth will have hogs, poultry, turkeys; and in a seventh you see peeping out of the holes, the woolly heads of slaves transported from Virginia and Kentucky, to the human flesh mart at New Orleans. They have come thousands of miles, and still have to proceed a thousand more, before they arrive at their place of destination. [C] Sawyers are bodies of trees fixed in the river, which yield to the pressure of the current, disappearing and appearing by turns above water, like the rotatory motion of the saw-mill, from which they have derived their name. They sometimes point up the stream, sometimes in the contrary direction. A steam-boat running on a sawyer, cannot escape destruction. [D] Planters are large bodies of trees, firmly fixed by their roots to the bottom of the river, in a perpendicular manner, and rising no more than a foot above the surface at low water. They are so firmly rooted, as to be unmoved by the shock of steam-boats running upon them. CHAPTER X. Scenery along the Mississippi.--Hopefield.--St. Helena.--Arkansas Territory.--Spanish Moss.--Vixburgh. We pursued our course at the rate of ten miles an hour, passing the Chickasaw Bluffs, Memphis, a small settlement on the Tennessee side, and a number of smaller and larger islands, from two to six miles in length, but seldom more than one in breadth. The sediment of the Mississippi is continually forming new sand banks, at the same time that its irresistible power carries away old ones. That river was, as I have already mentioned, very low, and the numerous sand banks on both sides contracted its channel into a bed scarcely more than half a mile broad. On these banks numberless flocks of wild ducks, geese, cranes, swans, and pelicans, stationed themselves in rows, extending sometimes a mile in length. As soon as the steam boat approaches, dashing through the water with the noise of thunder, and vomiting forth columns of smoke, they fly up in masses resembling clouds, and retire to their covers in the marshes and ponds contiguous to the banks of the Mississippi. They abound most 150 miles above Natchez, and hundreds of thousands are seen crossing the river in every direction. The scenery in view is an immense valley, with banks sixty feet above the water, forests of colossal trees on both sides, and the vast expanse of waters rolling with a velocity the more surprising, as the country stretches in a continued plain, with scarcely any perceptible decline. The rural scenery of the regions consists of detached cabins raised on huge stumps of trees; instead of windows there are the natural apertures of the logs joined together; in front of them woodstacks, for the use of the steam boats; ten or twelve deer, bear, or fox skins drying in the open air; some turkies and hogs, scattered over a corn patch, &c. Farms, or plantations, properly so called, are seldom to be met with here; the chief object of these settlers being the breed of cattle and poultry, for the use of steam-boats. The only trace of agriculture is a small tract of cotton field, which the settlers endeavour to improve. We stayed an hour and a half in Hopefield, opposite to the Chickasaw Bluffs, the chief village of Hempstead county, with ten houses. There are two taverns, such as may be expected in these parts, a store and a post office. Two hours later we saw the mouth of the Wolf river; the beautiful President's island, ten miles long, which with its colossal forests presents an imposing sight, with several small islands in its train. Among these is the Battle island, taking its name from a battle fought here between two Kentuckians, who compelled their captain to land them, and returned after half an hour, the one with his nose bitten off, the other with his eyes scooped out of their sockets! This night we arrived in the county town of St. Helena, ninety-five miles above the mouth of the Arkansas. The place was laid out a few years ago, and bids fair to become of some importance, from the extreme scarcity of spots adapted for towns on the banks of the Mississippi. The village is situated a quarter of a mile from the west bank. The cabin houses are built upon dwarfish round hills, resembling sugar loaves. Viewed from a distance they have a handsome appearance, which, however, considerably diminishes on approaching nearer to them. The spot is quite broken land. Two hundred yards further up, a ridge eighty feet above the level of the water, extends about a quarter of a mile, and six other houses are built upon it, amongst which is a tavern and store, with few articles besides a barrel of whisky for their Indian guests. A heap of furs, of every description, indicates that this trade is a very lucrative one. About thirty miles to the westward are the military lands, granted as a reward to the soldiers who served in the last war; only a few of them have come to settle on these grants. The distance from the eastern cities being so immense, the expenses of the journey, compared with the object they were about to attain, were so great, that most of them remained in the east. On the following morning we passed the mouth of the White river, and thirteen miles lower down the river Arkansas, a beautiful, wide, and very important stream, next in size to the Ohio, which after a course of 2,500 miles, 900 of which are navigable for steam-boats, empties itself into the Mississippi at this place. From this river the territory of Arkansas has taken its name. It was formerly part of Louisiana, then of Missouri, and has since 1819, been separated from the latter, and now forms a distinct territory extending from 33° to 36° north latitude, and from 11° 45' to 23° west longitude. Its area is computed to be above 100,000 square miles. With the exception of a few towns, such as Arkopolis, Post Arkansas, Little-rock, &c., and some other settlements of less note, it is not otherwise known than from the reports of the expeditions sent into the interior at various times. According to their accounts it differs in some essential points from the eastern states. The eastern part of this vast territory bears the character of the Mississippi valley, and abounds in well wooded plains, prairies, and marshes, in alternate succession, the latter occupying almost exclusively the tract of land situated between the rivers Arkansas and St. Francis towards the Ozark mountains. There the country rises; rocks and mountains become visible, announcing the approach to the Rocky mountains. Between these and the Ozark mountains are vast plains covered with salt crusts, imparting to the rivers flowing through the country a brackish taste. There have also been discovered valleys competing in point of fertility with the valley of the Mississippi; eminences covered for a distance of many miles with vines, whose grapes are said to be equal to the best produce of the Cape. In other places are vast plains, which owing to their stratum being gravel, produce but a short and dry grape, without any trees. The territory in the interior contains important mineral and vegetable treasures. The Volcanos, the Hotsprings, the Ouachitta lake, and other natural wonders, will soon attract general attention. From what was related to me by an eye witness who bestowed all his attention on them, they are undoubtedly of the first importance. The springs are six in number, and they are situated about ten miles from the Ouachitta, near a volcano. Their temperature being 150°, the use which visitors make of them consists in exposing themselves to the vapour. They are impregnated with carbonic acid, muriate of soda, and a small quantity of iron and calcareous matter. Hitherto, besides Indians and hunters, but few persons resorted to them until the last two years, when several gentlemen went thither for the recovery of their health. But the present total want of ready money in these deserted parts has prevented a more rapid improvement. The population amounts to 18,000 souls, 2,000 of whom are slaves. Mental improvement is here sought for in vain. The American reads his Bible, and if opportunity offers, he visits once a year a Methodist Missionary. The French care as little for one as for the other. Colleges, academies, or literary institutions there are none, but in Post Arkansas, Arkopolis, and Little-rock, schools are established. Those cannot be expected from a country without any political importance, and with a population scattered over such an immense extent. An extract from a newspaper published in Arkopolis, which I found in St. Helena, may give some idea of the honourables of these parts: "Mr. White respectfully begs leave to announce himself as candidate for their Representative, &c.--N.B. Tailoring business done in the best manner, and at the shortest notice!!" Arkansas has hitherto been the refuge for poor adventurers, foreigners, French soldiers, German redemptioners, with a few respectable American families; men of fortune preferring the state of Mississippi or Louisiana, where society and the comforts of life can be found with less difficulty. It is certain, however, that the western part of this territory is healthier than the western states of Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, and that the Rocky and Ozark chain, running from east to west, obviates one great evil--the sudden change of temperature, caused by the want of high mountains to resist the power of the north and south winds. A traveller who first visits the valley of the Mississippi, is led to believe that the waters of this immense river rise above the trees along its banks, leaving the branches covered with weeds and mud when they retire to their bed. It is Spanish moss or Tellandsea which presents that appearance to the traveller. It is firmly rooted in the apertures of the bark, and hangs down from the trees, not unlike long rough beards. This plant has a yellow blossom, and a pod containing the seed. It is found along the coast of the Mississippi, from St. Helena to below New Orleans, and is universally applied to all those purposes for which curled hair is used in the north. It is gathered from the trees with long hooks, afterwards put into water for a few days in order to rot the outer part, and then dried. The substance obtained by this simple process is a fine black fibre resembling horse hair. A mattrass stuffed in this manner may serve for a year, if not wetted; it then becomes dusty and requires that the moss should be taken out, beaten, and the mattress filled again, by which means it becomes more elastic than it was before. We passed several settlements and islands, the mouth of the Yazoo rivers, and on the third day we arrived at Vixburgh, or Walnut-hills. We were now 600 miles from the mouth of the Ohio, and in that whole distance had not seen either a hill or mountain, with the exception of a few mole-hills at St. Helena, which rose, perhaps, to the height of twenty or twenty-five feet above the endless plain. The first objects which interrupt the sameness of this grand but rather uniform scenery, are the Walnut-hills, on the east bank of the river, in the state of Mississippi. They rise singly and perfectly detached. There may be eight or nine in number, with a small house on the top of each. Close to the landing-place is the warehouse of Mr. Brown; and farther back, some merchant's stores, and two taverns. Half a mile from the bank rises a ridge about four miles long, and 300 feet high. This hill, notwithstanding its inconvenient situation, will probably be selected for the site of part of Vixburgh town, which was laid out two years ago, and is now the seat of justice for Warren county. It has already fifty houses and three stores. Several steam-boats are regularly employed in the cotton trade. As there is not a single place on the banks of the Mississippi, where a town of some extent could be built without being exposed to the floods, Vixburgh must very soon become a place of great importance for the upper part of the state of Mississippi. The surrounding country begins to be rapidly settled; and civilization, which is almost extinct for more than a 1000 miles up the Mississippi and the Ohio, here resumes its power, and increases the farther you descend towards New Orleans. On the following day we passed Warrington, Palmyra, Davies', Judge Smith's settlements, the Grand and Petit Golfe, and Gruinsburgh, and arrived at five o'clock in the evening at Natchez. CHAPTER XI. The Town of Natchez.--Excursion to Palmyra Plantations.--The Cotton Planters of the State of Mississippi.--Sketch of the State of Mississippi.--Return to Natchez. Rain, and a subsequent frost, had a week before our arrival dispelled that scourge of the south--the yellow fever. The inhabitants had returned from the places of safety, to which they had fled in every direction, and intercourse was again re-established, the town having resumed all the activity I had found in it three years before. The road to the town, properly so called, leads through a suburb, known by the name of Low Natchez, consisting of some warehouses and shops of every description. This place deserves, in every respect, the epithet of Low Natchez, being a true Gomorrha, and containing an assemblage of the lowest characters. Although fifteen years ago, a great part of the bluff buried in its fall, several of these wretches, and every rainy season exposes the survivors to the same fate, yet they seem unconscious of their danger. The road ascends to the town on both sides of these liquor shops, built as it were on the brink of a precipice. Natchez is situated on a hill, 250 feet above the level of the water. The prospect from this hill, or bluff, as it is called, is beautiful. At your feet you behold this nest of sinners, close to it four or five steam-boats, and thirty or forty keel and flat-boats anchoring in the port, with the bustle and noise attendant on these wandering arks. On the opposite bank of the Mississippi, which is here one mile and a quarter wide, you see the county town of Concordia, and on both sides of this little town, numerous plantations, with the stately mansion of the wealthy cotton planter, and the numerous cabins of his black dependents; and in the background, the whole scenery is girded by an immense ring of cypress forests, which seem, as it were, to bury themselves in the flats below the Mississippi. To the right and left a charming elevated plain extends, with numerous gardens, which, though it was then the end of November, still preserved their verdure, faded, indeed, into an autumnal hue. In the rear is the town of Natchez, of moderate dimensions; but elegant and regular as far as the broken ground would admit. The dwelling-houses, several of them with colonnades, exhibit throughout a high degree of wealth. The court-house, an academy, the United States' branch bank, and the bank of Natchez, three churches, three newspaper printing offices, one of which publishes a literary journal (the Ariel), a library and reading-room, are the public institutions, and they are very liberally patronised. Neither during my former journey, nor in the present visit, could I discover any foundation for the charge of narrowness of mind, which is made against the inhabitants. Their number amounts to 3,540, and their houses to 600. They are mostly planters, merchants, lawyers, and physicians, of Anglo-American extraction, with the exception of ten or twelve German families. Natchez is considered as a port, and on this ground the representative of the state obtained the most useless grant of money ever made--1500 dollars--for the purpose of erecting a light-house, at a place 410 miles distant from the sea. This town had been considered a healthier spot than New Orleans, until the two last years, when it was repeatedly visited by the yellow-fever, from which New Orleans remained free. It is yet doubtful whether this evil is to be ascribed to the dissolute life prevailing in lower Natchez, or to the oppressive heat which prevails on these high plains. The distance, however, from the cooling current of the Mississippi, short as it is, and the unwholesome rain-water, which is used for drinking, must contribute to create bilious fevers. The great pecuniary resources which the inhabitants of Natchez have at command, would make it an easy matter for them to obtain their water for drinking from the Mississippi, in the same manner as the inhabitants of Philadelphia have raised the waters of Schuylkill. The country about Natchez is an extensive and elevated plain, 200 feet above the level of the Mississippi, stretching 130 miles from north to south, and about forty miles to the eastward. Although a fertile tract of land, it is far inferior to the Mississippi bottom-lands. The upland cotton grown upon it, is inferior in quantity and quality to that of Mississippi growth. The soil, however, produces corn, vegetables, plumbs, peaches, and figs in abundance. I stayed two days in Natchez, and rode with a friend to the distance of fifty-five miles above Natchez, on the Mississippi, passing through Gibsonport, twenty-five miles from Natchez, and six miles from the Mississippi, a town having a court-house, a newspaper printing office, and about sixty houses, with 1100 inhabitants. The following day we arrived at Messrs. D.'s plantation. These two brothers having purchased, three years ago, 6500 acres of land, at the rate of two dollars an acre, landed with their slaves at their new purchase, from their former residence in Kentucky. The lands being a complete wilderness, their first occupation was to raise cabins for themselves and their slaves. This was accomplished in four weeks. They succeeded during the first year in clearing fifty acres of land, twenty-five of which were sown in the month of February with cotton seed, the rest with corn. This was was sufficient to defray the expense of the first year. The clearing of woods, however, in this country, if not canebrack bottom, is not so easy a matter as in the northern states. Numerous shrubs, thistles, and thorns, of an immense size, form hedges, which it is almost impossible to penetrate. To these obstructions may be added, snakes, muskitoes, and in the marshes, alligators, which, though not so dangerous as the Egyptian crocodile, are still a great annoyance. The trees are here destroyed in the same manner as in the north, by killing them. Shrubs, underwood, canebrack, are burnt, and the corn or cotton is planted instead. This is the work of the negroes, who labour under the superintendence of their masters, or, if he be a wealthy man, of his overseer. In the months of June or July, the ground is ploughed or turned up; the weeds and shrubs are cleared away, as is done in the case of Indian corn; the cultivation of cotton, though more troublesome, being conducted much in the same manner. In the month of October, the cotton begins to ripen, the buds open, and the white flower appears. The present is the season for gathering cotton. Three kinds of cotton seeds are now sown in the southern states; the green, the black, and the Mexican seed, which latter is considered to be the best. Of the green seed cotton, a slave may gather 150 pounds a day, of the other two kinds, the utmost that can be collected is 100 pounds. The buds are broken from the plants, and the cotton, with the seed, taken out and put into round baskets, which when filled are brought into the cotton yard, and spread along planks, for the purpose of drying. The cotton is from thence carried to the cotton gin, the machinery of which is put into motion by three or four horses. The cotton is thrown between a cylinder moving round a projecting saw; by this process the seed is separated from the cotton, which is then thrown back into a large receptacle, and afterwards pressed into bales. These are laid in stores and kept ready for shipping, in steam or flat boats to Natchez or New Orleans. The two brothers in this, the third, year from the date of their establishment, raised 200 bales of cotton from 200 acres of cleared land. According to their own estimation, and from what I know, they might have raised 350 bales, had it not been for a disaster which befel them in the spring of the year 1825. They were visited with a hurricane, which lifted their dwelling-house from the ground, carried it to a considerable distance and completely destroyed it, with the entire furniture. Mr. D----, who was at the plantation at the time, had great difficulty in escaping with his wife and child, though not without a fractured leg, from the effects of which he was still suffering. Not even a chair had been spared. The immense trees torn up by the roots and still lying in every direction upon the ground, the shattered cabins of his negroes, every thing presented indications of the havoc made in this disastrous night. Happily no human life was lost. This misfortune had, of course, considerably retarded the improvements in progress, and thrown them back for at least a twelvemonth. Still the planters calculated this year upon a profit of 10,000 dollars from their plantation; 4000 dollars may be deducted from this for household and other necessary expenses, leaving a clear profit of 6000 dollars. The original capital of the two brothers consisted, (including the value of their slaves), of 20,000 dollars. They paid half the purchase money when they took possession, and the rest in the present year. Their plantation is now worth 60,000 dollars. In the state of Mississippi, the principal article of cultivation is cotton, as it is the staple article of its commerce; corn and the breeding of cattle are considered as secondary objects, though many plantations reckon from 100 to 300 head of cattle, which have a free range in the vast forests in quest of food. Only those intended for fattening are kept at home and fed with cotton seed, which in a few weeks will make them exceedingly fat. Turkeys and poultry in general are found in abundance, and constitute with firewood the articles which are sold to steam-boats passing on their way. Indian corn supplies in these parts the place of rye or wheat. The slaves live exclusively on corn bread; their masters vary it with wheat cakes. Wheat, flour, whiskey, articles of dress, sacking, and blankets, come from the north, or from New Orleans. The dress of the planter during the summer months consists of a linen jacket, pantaloons of the same, Monroe boots, and a straw hat. During the winter he wears a cotton shirt and a cloth dress. That of his slaves during summer is a coarse cotton shirt and trowsers, with shoes called mocasins. In winter they are furnished with cotton trowsers, and a coat made of a woollen blanket. The females have dresses of the same materials. The manner of living of the southern planter differs little from that of the northern; he likes his doddy, which the northern planter or farmer is also known to be fond of; he lives on wheat cakes or Indian corn bread, and superintends his slaves at their work, as the northern does his hands. Of the effeminate and luxurious style in which the southern planters are said to indulge--of their pretended fondness for female slaves, without whose assistance they cannot find their beds, I have never had any proofs, though in both my journeys I have not passed less than a year in Mississippi and Louisiana, and know one half of the plantations. The American planter lives in a higher style than his northern fellow citizen: this is quite natural, considering that his income is very large, and his taxes trifling. His chief expense, however, consists in his travels or summer excursions to the north, where he is pleased to shew his southern magnificence in a display of pompous dissipation. This fault, with few exceptions, is general with southern planters. They save at home, and renounce the very comforts of life in order to have the means of spending more money during the summer at Saratoga, Boston, or New York. The slave always rises at five o'clock, and works till seven, then breakfasts--generally upon soup with corn bread, baked on a pan, and eaten warm with a piece of bacon or salt-meat. Their tasks are assigned to them by the master of the plantation, or if he has been settled for some years, by an overseer. Part of the negroes are engaged in the cotton gin, others in carpenters' or in cabinet work, each plantation having two or three mechanics among the slaves. A third part works in the cotton or corn fields. The females have likewise their tasks. One or two of the girls are housemaids; two more are cooks, one for the white, the other for the black family. The old negro women have the washing assigned to them. The dinner of the slaves consists of corn bread, a pudding of the same stuff, and salt or fresh meat. It is usual to give them a piece of meat, in order to keep them in good condition. The supper is of corn bread again, and a soup without meat. They seldom get any whiskey, and tavern keepers are prohibited by law from selling it to them. The first transgression is punished with a fine, the second with the loss of the tavern licence. On Sundays the slaves are exempt from working for their master, and permitted to attend to their family or their own concerns. Many of them are seen gleaning the cotton fields, collecting this way from eighty to a hundred pounds of cotton in one day. They are not, however, so well treated as in the northern slave states, where they are rather considered as domestics, who in many cases would not exchange their condition for that liberty which is enjoyed by the German peasantry. The northern slave is, for this reason, extremely afraid of transportation, which is a sort of punishment. The southern blacks frequently run away, and there is not a newspaper published, in which some escapes are not announced. The Anglo-Americans, however, treat their slaves throughout better than the French and their descendants, with whom the wretched blacks, (their general allowance being ten ears of Indian corn a day), experience a treatment in few respects better than that of a beast. The principle upon which the French descendant acts, is, that the slave ought to repay him in three years the expense of his purchase. But, strange to say, the worst of all are the free people of colour, who are equally permitted to possess slaves. To be transferred into the hands of their own race, is the most dreadful thing which can happen to a slave. Formal marriages rarely take place between slaves: if the negro youth feels himself attracted by the charms of a black beauty, their master allows them to cohabit. If the female slave is on a distant plantation, the youth is permitted to see her, provided he be trustworthy, and not suspected of an intention to effect his escape. The children belong to the mother, or rather to her master, who is not permitted to dispose of them before they are ten years of age. The punishment which masters are allowed to inflict on their slaves at home, is a flogging of thirty-nine lashes. The huts of these people are of rough logs; lower down the river they are of regular carpenter's work. The mansions of the American planters are in the easy American style--sometimes frame, mostly, however, brick-houses, constructed on four piles in the manner already described. Below Natchez, the dwelling houses of the planters are in the old-fashioned Spanish style, with immense roofs, but comfortable and adapted to the climate. The windows are high and provided with shutters. They have a summer dining room to the north, open on all sides so as to admit of a free current of air. In the southern parts, the planter is the most respectable and wealthy inhabitant. He lives contented, though his domestic peace is sometimes troubled by the accidents inseparable from the state of bondage in which his black family is kept. If he manages his affairs well, for which very little is wanting beyond common sense and activity, he cannot fail to become wealthy in a few years. I am acquainted with several gentlemen, who settled in these states ten years ago, with a capital of from 10 to 20,000 dollars. They are worth now at least 100,000 dollars. The great difference between these plantations and the northern farms, is the ready mart they are sure to find, and the high price they obtain for their produce. Though the prices of cotton are considerably reduced, yet the profit which is derived from a capital employed in a plantation is superior to any other. The price of a well-conditioned plantation is enormous. I can instance Mr. B., who having inherited one half of a plantation, bought the other half for 32,000 dollars. The failures in crops are of very rare occurrence in these parts, and generally in the fourth year after a plantation has been begun, the produce is equal to the capital employed in the establishment. The management of these plantations requires by no means a very enterprising turn of mind. I know some ladies who have established cotton plantations, and raise from four to five hundred bales a year, being assisted only by their overseer. Mrs. Barrow, Mrs. Hook, &c., &c., are instances in proof of what I advance. Those who are unable to bear the summer heats, or are not inured to the climate, reside in the north, leaving a trusty overseer in charge of the plantation. The distance from Natchez to Louisville or Cincinnati, between 11 and 1200 miles, may be performed in nine or ten days. The journey is a pleasant one, and is amply rewarded by the purchases which planters generally make in the north for themselves, their families, and their slaves. Indolence, luxury, and effeminacy, are vices that are but seldom to be met with in the American planter. He does not yield to the northern farmer in activity or industry. He cannot work in person without exposing himself to a bilious fever; but this is not necessary; the superintendence of his affairs is a sufficient occupation for him. In this state I found matters: after a serious and practical investigation, and much experience, I can pronounce it to be a safer way of employing a moderate capital in an advantageous manner, than any other which offers itself in the United States. There can scarcely be a country where there is greater facility for hunting than in these parts. Mr. D. being still lame from his late accident, was obliged to remain at home, but he provided us with a guide, in the person of the overseer of the Palmyra plantation, five miles above Mr. D.'s settlement. We mounted our horses, and arrived in a few minutes on the outside of the cotton-fields, a tract of canebrack bottom, extending about ten miles, where we expected to start a deer or a bear. We had not ridden above half an hour when we discovered a bear, which was killed. We proceeded afterwards to a marsh two miles behind the plantation, the resort of flocks of ducks and wild geese. We found about 300 of them, and having shot nine returned home. The bear was found to be a young one, weighing 150 pounds:--its flesh was excellent. These animals, as well as every description of game, are found in such prodigious numbers, that our landlord thought it not worth while sending his slaves such a distance for the ducks and geese we had shot in the pond; and they were, therefore, left for birds of prey to feast upon. The following day we made a shooting excursion with the overseer of Palmyra plantation. After partaking of some refreshments at his dwelling, we proceeded in his company. He superintends the plantation of Mrs. Turner, for an annual salary of 1500 dollars, with board, lodging, &c.; a sum which would be considered in the north as a first rate salary, suitable to any gentleman. Seven wild turkeys were the spoils of this day; we divided them equally amongst us, reserving the seventh to be roasted at Warrington for our dinner. Warrington, formerly the seat of justice for Warren county, which is now transferred to Vixburgh, though situated sixty feet above the water level of the Mississippi, is regularly inundated by the spring floods. This town is on the decline, owing to the removal of the seat of justice. It contains 200 inhabitants, with forty houses, five of which are built of brick, the rest of wood. Two lawyers, who are now on the move, two taverns, and two stores, are to be found here. The two store-keepers, who were extremely poor when they first settled here, eight years ago, are now worth above 20,000 dollars; one of them is going to establish a plantation. We returned in good time, being here at a distance of twenty miles from the plantation. Although the tract of country we came through is extremely fertile, yet there is a great difference in the soil. The plantation of Mr. D----, has undoubtedly the advantage over the six which came under our notice; his cotton is of a superior quality. The richness of the soil depends on the stratum. The best is considered to be that which is found to have three or four feet of river sediment on a red brownish earth; where sand or gravel forms the stratum, the land, though fertile, is not of so durable a quality. The growth of timber is generally the surest mode of ascertaining the nature of the soil; we measured on the plantation of Major Davis, some sycamores torn up by the hurricane, which were not less than 200 feet in length; and cotton trees of 170 feet. Where such a gigantic vegetation is seen, one may rely on the fertility and inexhaustible quality of the soil. Our guide gave me a proof of this: in one of his fields, he raised tobacco for ten successive years, without doing more than ploughing the earth; the produce, instead of diminishing, has rather increased both in quantity and quality. One can hardly conceive how a soil, apparently sandy, can be of a nature so inexhaustibly productive; the overflowing of the Mississippi, and the sediment left on the banks, account, however, sufficiently for it. The following day we took leave of our hospitable landlord, and returned. The country we passed through is one continued range of the most beautiful forests, opening some times to give place to a rising plantation. I counted between Palmyra and Natchez, twenty-five. The State of Mississippi was received into the Union in the year 1817. It extends from 30° 10' to 35° north latitude, and from 11° 30' to 14° 32' west longitude; and is bounded on the north by Tennessee, on the west by Arkansas and Louisiana, on the south by Louisiana and the gulf of Mexico, and on the east by Alabama. It comprises an area of 15,000 square miles. Though this state has acquired, this ten years past, a political existence, and in point of fertility is far superior to Missouri and Indiana, yet its population has not increased in the same proportion;--it does not exceed 80,000 souls, including 34,000 slaves. The emigrants to Mississippi, are either men of fortune, or needy adventurers. The middle classes, having from 2 to 3,000 dollars property, seldom chose to settle there, having no prospect of succeeding by dint of personal industry. The fatigue and labour in these hot and sultry climates, can only be borne by slaves; a white man who should attempt the same labour which kept him stout and hearty in the north, would soon be overcome by the heat of the climate. Most of the respectable settlers are therefore from Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Kentucky; having sold their property there, and emigrated with their slaves into this country. The North American, properly so called, from New England, New York, &c., seldom ventures so far. Owing to this cause, the towns in Mississippi and Louisiana, are neither so elegant nor so wealthy as those of the north. With the exception of places of commerce, such as New Orleans and Natchez, the towns of the state of Mississippi cannot be compared to those of other states of more recent date. These smaller towns of Mississippi and Louisiana, are generally inhabited by mechanics, tradesmen, tavern-keepers, and the poorer classes of the people. Those who have any fortune, prefer laying it out on plantations,--a sure and infallible source of wealth, and the most respectable occupation in the country. Merchants who have succeeded in making a fortune in these small towns, remove to more convenient places. The traveller who judges of the wealth of the country from the mean appearance of these villages and towns, would be greatly mistaken. In order to form a correct opinion he must visit the plantations, and he will be surprised at the high degree of prosperity and comfort enjoyed by the possessors. After a stay of three days in Natchez, I took a passage on board the steam-boat Helen MacGregor, which had lately returned from New Orleans to Walnut hills, and was on its way to the capital of Louisiana. The intercourse between Natchez and New Orleans is by water, travellers naturally preferring this easy and comfortable mode of conveyance by steam-boats to land journeys, rendered disagreeable by the wretchedness of the roads, and the still worse condition of the generality of inns. This evil has been occasioned by the former hospitality of the French creoles. Any one calling at a plantation was sure of a welcome reception. This hospitality has ceased, and the most respectable traveller is now likely to have the door shut in his face, owing to the misconduct of the Kentuckians. It was the practice of these gentlemen to call on their rambles at these plantations, where plenty of rum and brandy, with other accommodations, could be had for nothing. They behaved with an arrogance and presumption almost incredible, not unfrequently calling the creoles in their own houses French dogs, and knocking them down if they presumed to shew the least displeasure. These people are the horror of all creoles, who when they wish to describe the highest degree of barbarity, designate it by the name of Kentuckian. The worst of it is that the creoles, who are far from being eminent scholars, comprehend the whole north under the appellation of Kentucky. We started from Natchez at nine o'clock in the evening, took in 300 bales of cotton at Bayon Sarah[E], and some firewood a few miles below, and then passed Baton Rouge, the Bayons Plaquimines, Manchac, Tourche, both sides of the river being lined with beautiful plantations, and arrived on Sunday, at four o'clock, above New Orleans. [E] Bayons, outlets of the Mississippi, formed by nature. They are in great numbers, and carry its waters to the gulph of Mexico. Without these outlets, New Orleans would be destroyed by the spring floods in a few hours. CHAPTER XII. Arrival at New Orleans.--Cursory Reflections. It is certainly mournful for a traveller to dwell among the monuments of Pompeii, of Herculaneum, and of Rome. There, if he feels at all, he feels among these wrecks of past grandeur, that he is nothing. A totally different sensation possesses the mind on entering an American city. In these man beholds what he can contend with, and what he can accomplish, when his strength is not checked by the arbitrary will of a despot. New Orleans, the wet grave[F], where the hopes of thousands are buried; for eighty years the wretched asylum for the outcasts of France and Spain, who could not venture 100 paces beyond its gates without utterly sinking to the breast in mud, or being attacked by alligators; has become in the space of twenty-three years one of the most beautiful cities of the Union, inhabited by 40,000 persons, who trade with half the world. The view is splendid beyond description, when you pass down the stream, which is here a mile broad, rolls its immense volume of waters in a bed above 200 feet deep, and as if conscious of its strength, appears to look quietly on the bustle of the habitations of man. Both its banks are lined with charming sugar plantations, from the midst of which rises the airy mansion of the wealthy planter, surrounded with orange, banana, lime, and fig trees, the growth of a climate approaching to the torrid zone. In the rear you discover the cabins of the negroes and the sugar-houses, and just at the entrance of the port, groups of smaller houses, as if erected for the purpose of concealing the prospect of the town. As soon as the steam-boats pass these out posts, New Orleans, in the form of a half moon, appears in all its splendour. The river runs for a distance of four or five miles in a southern direction; here it suddenly takes an eastern course, which it pursues for the space of two miles, thus forming a semicircular bend. A single glance exhibits to view the harbour, the vessels at anchor, together with the city, situated as it were at the feet of the passenger. The first object that presents itself is the dirty and uncouth backwoods flat boat. Hams, ears of corn, apples, whiskey barrels, are strewed upon it, or are fixed to poles to direct the attention of the buyers. Close by are the rather more decent keel-boats, with cotton, furs, whiskey, flour; next the elegant steam-boat, which by its hissing and repeated sounds, announces either its arrival or departure, and sends forth immense columns of black smoke, that form into long clouds above the city. Farther on are the smaller merchant vessels, the sloops and schooners from the Havannah, Vera Cruz, Tampico; then the brigs; and lastly, the elegant ships appearing like a forest of masts[G]. [F] In New Orleans, water is found two feet below the surface. Those who cannot afford to procure a vault for their dead, are literally compelled to deposit them in the water. [G] The whole number of vessels then in port was 100 schooners, brigs, and ships. What in Philadelphia and even in New York is dispersed in several points, is here offered at once to the eye--a truly enchanting prospect. Most of the steam-boats were kept back by the lowness of the Ohio, at Cincinnati, Louisville, and Nashville; we landed, therefore, close to the shore without encountering any impediment. In a moment our state room was filled with five or six clerks, from the newspaper printing offices, and a dozen negroes; the former to inspect the log-book of the steam-boat, and to lay before their subscribers the names of the goods, and of the passengers arrived; the latter to offer their services in carrying our trunks. After labouring to climb over the mountains of cotton bales which obstructed our passage, we went on shore. The city had increased beyond expectation, within the last four years. More than 700 brick houses had been erected; a new street (the Levee), was already half finished; the houses throughout were solid, and more or less in an elegant style. It was on a Sunday that we arrived; the shops, the stores of the French and creoles, were open as usual, and if there were fewer buyers than on other days, the coffeehouses, grog-shops, and the _estaminets_, as they are called, of the French and German inhabitants, exhibited a more noisy scene. A kind of music, accompanied with human, or rather inhuman voices, resounded in almost every direction. This little respect paid to the Sabbath is a relic of the French revolution and of Buonaparte, for whom the French and the creoles of Louisiana have an unlimited respect, imitating him as poor minds generally do, as far as they are able, in his bad qualities, his contempt of venerable customs, and his egotism, and leaving his great deeds and the noble traits in his character to the imitation of others better qualified to appreciate them. To a new comer, accustomed in the north to the dignified and quiet keeping of the Sabbath, this appears very shocking. The Anglo-Americans, with few exceptions, remain even here faithful to their ancient custom of keeping the Sabbath holy. I had many opportunities of appreciating the importance of the keeping of the Sabbath, particularly in new states. A well regulated observance of this day is productive of incalculable benefits, and though it is sometimes carried too far in the northern states, as is certainly the case in Pennsylvania and New England, still the public ought firmly to maintain this institution in full force. The man who provides in six days for his personal wants, may dedicate the seventh to the improvement of his mind; and this he can only accomplish by abstaining from all trifling amusements. In a despotic monarchy the case is different; there the government has no doubt every reason for allowing its slaves, after six toilsome days of labour, the indulgence of twenty-four hours of amusement, that they may forget themselves and their fate in the dissipation of dancing, smoking, and drinking. The case ought to be otherwise in a republic, where even the poor constitute, or are about to constitute, part of the sovereign body. These ought to remember to what purposes they are destined, and not to allow themselves, under any circumstances, to be the dupes of others. The keeping of the Sabbath is their surest safeguard. If there were no opportunities offered for dancing, their sons and their daughters would stay at home, either reading their Bible, or attending to other appropriate intellectual occupations, and learning in this manner their rights and duties, and those of other people. The American has not deviated in this respect from his English kinsman. If you enter his dwelling on the Sabbath, you will find the family, old and young, quietly sitting down, the Bible in hand, thus preparing themselves for the toils and hardships to come, and acquiring the firmness and confidence so necessary in human life; a confidence, which we so justly admire in the British nation; as far distant from the bravado of the French, as the unfeeling and base stupidity of the Russians; and which never displays itself in brighter colours than in the hour of danger. We are in this manner enabled to account for those high traits of character in moments full of peril--traits not surpassed in the most brilliant and the most virtuous epochs of Greece or of Rome. A single fact will speak volumes--the Kent East Indiaman, burning and going down in the bay of Biscay, in 1825. Ladies, gentlemen, officers, and soldiers, all on board exhibited a magnanimity of heart, and a truly Christian heroism, which must fill even the most rancorous enemies of the British people with admiration and regard. What a different picture would have been presented to us, if half a regiment of Bonaparte's soldiers had been on board the ship! CHAPTER XIII. Topographical Sketch of the City of New Orleans. The city of New Orleans occupies an oblong area, extending 3960 feet along the eastern bank of Mississippi, embracing six squares, 319 feet in length, and of equal breadth. Above and below this parallelogram are the suburbs. Higher up is the suburb of St. Mary, still belonging to the city corporation; farther up, the suburbs Duplantier, Soulel, La Course, L'Annunciation, and Religieuses; below, the suburbs of Marigny, Daunois, and Clouet; in the rear, St. Claude and Johnsburgh. The seven streets, named Levee, Chartres-street, Royal-street, Bourbon, Burgundy, Toulouse, and Rampart, run parallel with the river, and are intersected at right angles by twelve others, running from the banks of the Mississippi, called the Levee, in the direction of the swamps, the Custom-house-street, Brenville, Conti, St. Louis, and Toulouse. The city, with the exception of Levee and Rampart-streets, is paved, an improvement which occasions great expense to the corporation, as the stones are imported; flags, however, are not wanting even in the most distant suburbs. The ground on which New Orleans is built, is a plain, descending about seven feet from the banks of the river, towards the swamps; and it is lower than the level of the Mississippi. It is secured by a levee, which would afford very little resistance 400 miles higher up; but here, where numerous bayons and natural channels have carried off part of the waters to the gulf of Mexico, it answers every purpose. About the city, the breadth of this plain is half a mile, and above it three-quarters of a mile, terminating in the back-ground in impenetrable swamps. The city and suburbs are lighted with reflecting lamps, suspended in the middle of the streets. Between the pavement and the road, gutters are made for the purpose of carrying off the filth into the swamps, of refreshing the air with the water of the Mississippi, with which these gutters communicate, and of allaying the dust during the hot season. There are now about 6000 buildings, large and small, in New Orleans. In the first mentioned three streets, and the greater part of the upper suburb, the houses are throughout of brick; some are plastered over to preserve them from the influence of the sultry climate. Though building materials of every kind are imported, and consequently very dear, yet the houses are rapidly changing from the uncouth Spanish style, to more elegant forms. The new houses are mostly three stories high, with balconies, and a summer-room with blinds. In the lower suburbs, frame houses, with Spanish roofs, are still prevalent. Two-thirds of the private buildings may at present be said to rival those of northern cities, of an equal population. The public edifices, however, are far inferior to those of the former, both in style and execution. The most prominent is the cathedral, in the middle of the town, separated from the bank of the Mississippi, by the parade ground. It is of Spanish architecture, with a façade of seventy feet, and a depth of 120, having on each side a steeple, and a small cupola in the centre, which gives an air of dignity to a heavy and ill-proportioned structure. All illusion, however, is dispelled on entering the church. The Catholics had the strange notion of painting the interior, taking for this purpose the most glaring colours that can be found--green and purple. The church is painted over in fresco, with these colours, and presents at one view a curious taste of the creoles. The interior is not overloaded with decorations, as Catholic churches generally are. The high altar, and two side ones, are, with an organ, its only ornaments. Two tombs contain the remains of Baron Carondolet and Mr. Marigny. On one side of the cathedral is the city-hall, and on the other, the Presbytire. The former, erected in 1795, presents a façade of 108 feet, in which the meetings of the city council are held. The Presbytire, 114 in front, was built in 1813, and is the seat of the supreme District Court, and of the Criminal Court of New Orleans. These two edifices, and the cathedral between them, form together a dignified whole. The government-house, at the corner of Toulouse and Levee-streets, is an old and decaying edifice, where the legislature of the state holds its meetings. In point of situation, (among grog shops), and of style, it may be considered the poorest state-house in the Union. The Protestants have three churches. The Episcopalian, at the corner of Bourbon and Canal-streets, is an octagon edifice, with a cupola, in bad taste. Out of gratitude to the late governor Clayborne, the inhabitants have erected in the church-yard, a monument to his memory, with the following inscription: THE CITIZENS OF NEW ORLEANS, TO TESTIFY THEIR RESPECT FOR THE VIRTUES OF W. C. C. CLAYBORNE, LATE GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF LOUISIANA, HAVE ERECTED THIS MONUMENT. The Presbyterian church, in the suburb of St. Mary, is a simple, but chaste building, the expense of which amounted to 55,000 dollars. The congregation being unwilling to defray the cost of its erection, it was sold by the sheriff, and is now the property of Mr. Levy, an Israelite, who leases it out to the congregation for 1500 dollars. The Methodist church is a frame building, erected in 1826. The public hospital, in Canal-street, consists of two square buildings, with wards for fever maladies; for dysentery; one for chronic diseases; another for females; a third for convalescents; a bathing-room, an apothecary's-room, and a room for the physicians and assistants. Out of 1842 patients who were received into this hospital in the year 1824, 500 died, and the rest were discharged; out of 1700 received in 1825, 271 died, the others recovered. The accommodations in this house seem to be respectable; it has one thing, however, in common with all hospitals, that no one is tempted to return to it a second time. There are now four banks in New Orleans; the United States Bank, with a capital of one million of dollars; the Bank of the State, the Louisiana Bank, and the Bank of New Orleans, each having likewise a capital of one million of dollars. The insurance offices are five in number: the Louisiana State Insurance Company, with a capital of 400,000 dollars; the Fire Insurance Company, with 300,000; the Mississippi and Marine Insurance Company, with 200,000; and the London Phoenix Insurance Company. New Orleans has no less than six masonic lodges, including the grand lodge of Louisiana; a French and an American theatre. The latter was built by a Mr. Caldwell, from Nashville, in Tennessee, who has also the management of it. It has the advantage in point of architecture, and the French theatre in the selectness of its audience. Close to the latter are the ball-rooms, where are given the only masked balls in the United States. Among the public buildings may be reckoned the three market halls, for the sale of provisions of every kind; one of them is in the city, the two others on the upper and lower suburbs, on the Levee. The nuns have removed two miles below the town, and this convent is now the residence of the Roman Catholic bishop. In the chapel divine service is performed; this chapel, and the cathedral, are the places of worship belonging to the Catholics. The cotton-pressing establishments deserve to be mentioned. These are now nine in number; the most important is that of Mr. Rilieux, at the corner of Poydras-street. It has three presses; one worked by steam, another by an hydraulic machine, and the third by horsepower. For the security of cotton bales, eight wells, a fire-engine, &c., are within the range of buildings; the expenses of which amounted to 150,000 dollars. The cotton press formerly belonged to a German commission merchant, who failed in consequence of his extravagant cotton speculations; it is simple, but of solid construction. It can receive 10,000 bales. The expenses of the building amounted to 90,000 dollars. Besides these are the presses of Shiff, a Jew from Germany, Debays, Lorger, &c. A steam saw-mill on the bank of the Mississippi, in the upper suburb, with a few iron foundries, are the only manufacturies in New Orleans; every thing being imported from the north. Carondolots canal is in the rear of the town, towards the marshes. The entrance is a basin, containing from thirty to fifty small vessels, and opening into a canal, or rather a ditch, which has been cut through the swamps, in order to join the Bayon St. John with New Orleans. Small vessels drawing no more than six feet of water, arrive from Mobile and Pensacola[H], through lake Pont Chartrain, Bayon St. John, and the above-mentioned canal at New Orleans, performing only a third of the way they would otherwise have to make by going up the Mississippi. They are in general freighted with wood, planks, bricks, cotton, &c.; and take in goods in return. This canal, which is of great importance for the part of the city lying contiguous to the swamps, was commenced by Baron Carondolet, but given up at a subsequent time, and resumed in the year 1815. Its cost was trifling compared with the advantages resulting to this city, and the salutary effects it must have in draining off part of the swamps. [H] Pensacola has been established as a port for the United States navy: 1825-1826. The president of the city council is a mayor, or Maire, a creole. His police regulations deserve every praise, and New Orleans, which less than fifteen years ago was the lurking hole of every assassin, is now in point of security not inferior to any other city. The revenues of the city corporation amount to 150,000 dollars, which are, however, found to be insufficient, and loans are resorted to in order to cover the expenses. When the United States took possession of New Orleans, this town consisted of 1000 houses, and 8000 inhabitants, black and white. In the year 1820, it amounted to near 27,000; namely, 8000 white males, 5314 white females, 1500 foreigners, 2500 men, and 400 women of colour, 3000 male, and 4,500 female slaves; the population of the parish being then 14,000. In the year 1821, the population was 29,000; in 1822 it had risen to 32,000; in the present year 1826, it amounts to upwards of 40,000; to be distinguished as follows: 14,500 white males, and 7500 white females, 1300 foreigners, 3690 free men, and 800 free women of colour, 5500 male, and 6300 female slaves. The population of the parish is 15,000. As New Orleans, notwithstanding its being 109 miles distant from the sea, is considered as a seaport, all the officers necessarily connected with a place of that description reside there, as well as consuls from every nation, having commercial intercourse with it;--from England, Russia, Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, Hamburgh, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Portugal, Sardinia, with others from the Southern Republics. CHAPTER XIV. The situation of New Orleans considered in a commercial point of view. New Orleans groaned for a long time under the yoke of the most wretched tyranny; its crowned possessors so far from doing any thing towards the improvement of a plan which, considered in a commercial light, has not its equal on the face of the earth, contributed as much as was in their power to circumscribe it. After two hours rain, every kind of communication in the city itself was quite impracticable; paving or lighting the streets was of course out of the question; assassinations were of almost daily occurrence: but this was not all--the place was to be a fortress in spite of common sense. It was thought proper to surround it with a wall eighteen feet wide and pallisadoes, five bastions, and redoubts, upon which some old cannon were mounted, perhaps for the purpose of keeping the Indians at a proper distance. The Americans pulled down those pitiful circumvallations which could have no other effect than to impede commerce, and erected others in a situation where they are likely to be of more advantage--along the passes of the Mississippi and of lake Pontchartrain. The city has improved in an astonishing degree during the twenty-three years that it has been incorporated with the United States; indeed much more in proportion than any other town of the Union, in spite of the yellow fever, the deadly miasmata, and the myriads of musquitoes; and it has now become one of the most elegant and wealthy cities of the republic. If, however, we consider its situation, it is susceptible of still greater improvements, and it must eventually become, what nature destined it to be, the first commercial city, and the emporium of America, notwithstanding the concurrence of many unfavourable circumstances, and the gross selfishness of its inhabitants. The incredible fertility of Louisiana, the Egypt of the west, and the fertility of the states of the valley of the Mississippi in general, which can be duly appreciated only by personal observation, must render New Orleans one of the most flourishing cities in the world. There is not a spot on the globe that presents a more favourable situation for trade. Standing on the extreme point of the longest river in the world, New Orleans commands all the commerce of the immense territory of the Mississippi, being the staple pointed out by nature for the countries watered by this stream, or by its tributaries--a territory exceeding a million of square miles. You may travel on board a steam-boat of 300 tons and upwards for an extent of 1000 miles from New Orleans up the Red river; 1500 miles up the Arkansas river; 3000 miles up the Missouri and its branches; 1700 miles on the Mississippi to the falls of St. Anthony; the same distance from New Orleans up the Illinois; 1200 miles to the north-east from New Orleans on the big Wabash; 1300 on the Tennessee; 1300 on the Cumberland, and 2300 miles on the Ohio up to Pittsburgh. Thus New Orleans has in its rear this immense territory, with a river 4200 miles long, (including the Missouri)[I]; besides the water communication which is about to be completed between New York and the river Ohio. The coast of Mexico, the West India islands, and the half of America to the south, the rest of America on its left, and the continent of Europe beyond the Atlantic. New Orleans is beyond a doubt the most important commercial point on the face of the earth[J]. Although the states along the Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, the territories of Missouri, and Arkansas, undoubtedly the finest part of the Union, have not yet a population of 3,000,000 inhabitants, their trade with New Orleans may be estimated by the fact, that not less than 1500 keel and flat boats, with nearly a hundred steam vessels, are engaged every year in the trade with this city. The capital laid out on these steam-boats amounts alone to above two million of dollars. The number of vessels that clear out is upward of 1000, which export more than 200,000 bales of cotton, 25,000 hogsheads of sugar, 17,000 hogsheads of tobacco, about 1250 tons of lead, with a considerable quantity of rice, furs, &c. Besides these staple articles, the produce of the northern states is exported to Mexico, the West Indies, the Havannah, and South America. The commerce of New Orleans increases regularly every year in proportion with the improvements in its own state, and in those of the Mississippi. The wealth accruing to the country and to the city from this commerce, is out of proportion with the number of inhabitants. There are many families who, in the course of a few years, have accumulated a property yielding an income of 50,000 dollars, and 25,000 is the usual income of respectable planters. No other place offers such chances for making a fortune in so easy a way. Plantations and commerce, if properly attended to, are the surest means of succeeding in the favourite object of man's great pursuit,--"money making." This accounts for the avidity with which thousands seek New Orleans, in spite of the yellow fever again making room for thousands in rapid succession. [I] The whole course of the Mississippi exceeds, the Missouri included, 4200 miles. This latter is its principal tributary stream, and superior in magnitude even to the Mississippi. [J] Below New Orleans there is no place well adapted for the site of a large city. CHAPTER XV. Characteristic features of the Inhabitants of New Orleans and Louisiana.--Creoles.--Anglo-Americans.--French.--Free People of Colour.--Slaves. At the time of the cession of Louisiana to the United States (1803), this country with its capital was inhabited by Creoles--descendants of French settlers. Many reasons as they may have to congratulate themselves upon their admission into the great political Union, whether considered in a religious or political point of view, there were, however, several causes which contributed to render them disaffected to the measure. This repugnance is far from being removed. The advantages on both sides were equal, or perhaps greater on the part of the United States. The central government and the generality of Americans behaved towards Louisiana in a becoming manner. But there is in the character of American freedom, especially in the deportment of an American towards foreigners and strangers in his own country, something repulsive. It is not the pride of a nobleman accustomed to be obeyed, nor the natural pride of an Englishman, who carries his sulky temper along with him, and finds fault with every thing: it is rather the pride of an adventurer--of an upstart, who exults at his not being a runaway himself, although the descendant of one. Louisiana immediately after its cession, was admitted to the full enjoyment of all the advantages connected with its prerogative, as one of the states of the Union, and its white natives, the Creoles, were considered as citizens born of the United States. But the moment the cession was made, crowds of needy Yankees, and what is worse, Kentuckians, spread all over the country, attracted by the hope of gain; the latter treating the inhabitants as little better than a purchased property. Full of prejudice towards the descendants of a nation, of which they knew little more than the proverb, "French dog," they, without knowing or condescending to learn their language, behaved towards these people as if the lands, as well as the inhabitants, could be seized without ceremony. This was certainly not the way of thinking, or the conduct of all the northern new comers, there being amongst them many a useful mechanic, merchant, planter, or lawyer; but the greater number came with a degree of presumption, which was in an inverse ratio with their unbounded and absolute ignorance. The creoles, with a proper sense of their own independence, naturally retreated from the intercourse of these intruders. On the other hand, the consequences of an oppressive colonial government, the natural effects of an enervating and sultry climate, could not fail giving to the character of the creoles, a certain tone of passiveness, which makes them an object of interest. They are not capable either of violent passions, or of strong exertions. Gentle and frugal, they abhor drunkenness and gluttony. Their eyes are generally black; but without fire or expression. Their countenances evince neither spirit nor animation; they can boast of very few men of superior talents. Their gait and figure are easy, and their colour generally pale. Though unable to endure great hardships, they are far from being cowards, as the events of the year 1815, and the numerous duels, sufficiently attest. The drawbacks from their character are, an overruling passion for frivolous amusements, an impatience of habit, a tendency for the luxurious enjoyment of the other sex, without being very scrupulous in their choice of either the black or the white race. Their greatest defect, however, is their indifference towards the poor, and towards their own slaves. They treat the former with cold contempt, and cannot easily be induced to assist their fellow-creatures. In this respect they are far inferior to their fellow-citizens of the north, whose example they may follow with much advantage in many things. The Union has already changed much, and the restless and active spirit of their northern fellow-citizens has altered their character, which now partakes much less of the Sybarite, than it formerly did; still, they can never be brought to exercise a mechanical trade, which they consider as below their dignity. The female sex of Louisiana, (the creoles), have in general an interesting appearance. A black languishing eye, colour rather too pale, figure of middle size, which partakes of _en bon point_, and does not exhibit any waist, are the characteristics of the fair sex. With a great deal of vivacity, they show, however, a proper sense of decorum. Adultery is seldom known among the better classes, notwithstanding the many grounds afforded to them by the infidelity of their husbands. As wives and mothers, they are entitled to every praise; they are more moderate in their expenses than the northern ladies, and though always neat and elegantly dressed, they seldom go beyond reasonable bounds. Several instances are known of their having displayed a high degree of fortitude. In sickness and danger, they are the inseparable assistants and companions of their husbands. In literary education, however, they are extremely deficient; and nothing can be more tiresome than a literary _tête a tête_ with a Creole lady. They receive their education in the convent of the Ursalines, where they learn reading, writing, some female works, and the piano-forte. It is superfluous to observe, being descendants from the French, that they are the best dancers in the United States. Americans from other parts of the Union, may be considered as constituting about three-eighths of the present population of the state, and of New Orleans. Brother Jonathan is to be found in all parts of the Union, and properly speaking, nowhere at home. After having settled in one place, at the distance of 1000 miles from his late residence, cleared lands, reared houses, farms, &c., he leaves his spot as soon as a better chance seems to offer itself. He is an adventurer, who would as soon remove to Mexico, or New South Wales, provided he could "make money" by the change. Most of those who settled in Louisiana grew wealthy either as planters or merchants, and really the wealthiest families of Louisiana are at present Americans from other parts of the Union, who likewise hold the most important public stations. The governors, as well as the members of congress, and senators, have hitherto been Americans, from the very natural reason, that the creoles could not speak the English language, although some important offices are filled by the latter. Nothing can exceed or surpass the suppleness of the Yankey; and the refined Frenchmen, with all their dexterity, may still profit from them and their kindred. The emigrant French are numerous in New Orleans. Among them are many very respectable merchants, some lawyers, physicians, &c., the greater part, however, consists of adventurers, hair-dressers, dancing-masters, performers, musicians, and the like. The French are of all men the least valuable acquisition for a new state. Of a lavish and wanton temper, they spend their time in trifles, which are of no importance to any but themselves. Dancing, fighting, riding, and love-making, are the daily occupation of these people. Their influence on a new and unsettled state, whose inhabitants have no correct opinion of true politeness and manners, is far from being advantageous. Without either religion, morality, or even education, they pretend to be the leaders of the _bon ton_, because they came from Paris, and they in general succeed. As for religion and principles, except a sort of _point d'honneur_, they are certainly a most contemptible set, and greatly contribute to promote immorality. There are a great number of Germans in New Orleans. These people, without being possessed of the smallest resources, embarked eight or ten years ago, and after having lost one-half, or three-parts of their comrades during the passage, they were sold as white slaves, or as they are called, Redemptioners, the moment of their arrival. Thus mixed with the negroes in the same kind of labour, they experience no more consideration than the latter; and their conduct certainly deserves no better treatment. Those who did not escape, were driven away by their masters for their immoderate drinking; and all, with few exceptions, were glad to get rid of such dregs. The watchmen and lamp-lighters are Germans, and hundreds of these people fell victims to the fever, between the years 1814 and 1822. The rest of the white population consists of English, Irish, Spaniards, and some Italians, amongst whom are several respectable houses. The free people of colour consist of emancipated slaves; but chiefly of the offspring of an intercourse between the whites and blacks, the cause of which is to be sought in the nature of the climate, where sensual passions are so easily excited. Of these descendants, the females in particular are very handsome, and generally destined for the gratification of the wealthier class of the French and the creoles, as their mothers had been before them. The American seldom or never indulges in such unrestrained pleasures. He usually marries early, and remains faithful to his wife. Of a more steady and religious turn, he pays strict attention to decorum and appearances, with certain isolated exceptions of course; but in general he is more solicitous and careful of his public character than the Frenchman, or foreigner, who has seldom any reputation to lose. The negroes form the lowest class. There are certainly found some amongst them who are entitled to praise for their honesty and fidelity towards their masters; but thousands, on the other hand, will exhibit the vicious nature of a debased and slavish character. There is no doubt, that a malignant and cruel disposition characterises, more or less, this black race. Whether it be inborn, or the result of slavery, I leave to others to decide. All that can be said in favour of emancipation, may be reduced in the compass of these few words: In the present state of things, if the general cultivation of Louisiana, and the southern states, is to proceed successfully, emancipation is impossible. In this climate, no white person could stand the labour; the act of emancipation itself, treacherous and barbarous as the slaves are, would subject their former masters to certain destruction and death. We are, indeed, very far behind hand in the study of the human character, and of the different gradations of the human species. Unjust, as it assuredly was, to traffic in fellow-creatures, as though they were so many heads of cattle, it is equally unjust now to infringe upon a property which has been transmitted from generation to generation, and which time has sanctioned, without adopting some method of public compensation. All that should be required is, that the slaves be treated with humanity--a law might be enacted to that effect. The slaves will then be improved, and become ripe for a state of emancipation, which may be granted at a future period, without danger or inconvenience to their masters. It is, however, to be regretted, that the slave population of Louisiana are not so well treated as in the north. The cupidity of their masters, and their solicitude to make a rapid fortune, subject those poor wretches to an oppressive labour, which they are hardly able to endure. They revolted in Louisiana on three occasions, and several white persons fell victims to their vengeance; they were, however, easily subdued, and the example set by the executions, contributed to restore tranquillity. It is impossible to form an idea of the degree of jealousy with which the southern population watch and defend their rights, touching this point. A question upon the right of a slave, as a human being, is almost one of life and death; and lawyers, whenever they presume to defend slaves, and to hint at their rights, are in imminent danger of being stoned like Jews. Not long ago, a gentleman of the bar, Mr. D--e, was very near meeting this fate. CHAPTER XVI. Public Spirit.--Education.--State of Religious Worship.--Public Entertainments, Theatres, Balls, &c. Heterogeneous as this population may seem, and as it really is, in manners, language, and principles, they all agree in one point--the pursuit after--"money." Americans, English, French, Germans, Spaniards, all come hither--to make money, and to stay here as long as money is to be made. Half the inhabitants may be said to be regularly settled; the rest are half-settlers. Merchants, store-keepers, remain only until they have amassed a fortune answering their expectations, and then remove to their former houses. Others reside here during the winter, to carry on business, and retire to the north in the month of May. That is the case with all the Yankee commission merchants. This has, of course, a sensible and an extensive influence upon the public, and may explain why New Orleans, though one of the wealthiest cities of the Union, is so backward in mental improvement. Even the better Anglo-American families disdain to spend their money in the country where they have earned it, and prefer removing to the north. The institutions for education are consequently inferior to those of any city of equal extent and less wealth, such as Richmond, and even Albany. The only literary institution in the state of Louisiana, the college of New Orleans, is now established, and is intended to be revived at some distance from the capital. Free schools are now (1826) formed in the city, after the manner of the northern states, with a president and professors; and by and bye they will be extended to the rest of the state. Another college, still inferior to the above-mentioned, is superintended by the Catholic clergy. Excepting the elements of reading, writing, mathematics, and latin, it affords no intellectual information. The best of these schools is kept by Mr. Shute, rector of the Episcopalian church, an enlightened and clever man, who fully deserves the popularity he has acquired. Reading, writing, geography, particular and universal history, are taught under his tuition, and in his own rectory. This school, and other private ones where the rudiments are taught, comprehend all the establishments for education in the state. With respect to the female sex, the creoles are educated by the nuns; the Protestant young ladies by some boarding-school mistresses, partly French, partly Americans, who come from the north. The better classes of the Anglo-Americans, however, prefer sending their daughters to a northern establishment, where they remain for two years, and then return to their homes. Among the charitable institutions must be mentioned the Poydras Asylum for young orphan girls, founded in 1804, by Mr. Poydras. The legislature voted 4000 dollars towards it. Sixty girls are now educating in this asylum. Upon the same plan, is a second asylum for boys, where, in 1825, forty were admitted. These, besides the hospital, are the only public institutions for the benefit of the poor. New Orleans has eight newspapers; among these the State, and two other papers, are published in English and French, a fourth in the Spanish, and the rest in the English. The best of them is the Louisiana Advertiser. There is not a place in the Union where religion is so little attended to as in New Orleans. For a population of 40,000 inhabitants, it has only four churches; Philadelphia, with 120,000 inhabitants, reckons upwards of eighty; New York upwards of sixty. The city of Pittsburgh, with a population of 10,000 souls, has ten churches, far superior to those in New Orleans. Among the Protestant churches, the high church is best provided for, and the members of this congregation are said to be liberal, which they are generally found to be. They have recently finished a rectory for their minister, and show that liberality which so eminently distinguishes them. Of the Presbyterians we have spoken before. Though they would run ten times on a Sunday to church, and hear even as many sermons, yet they neither pay their minister, who by the bye is far from being an amiable character, nor redeem their church out of the hands of Israel, but prefer keeping their money to contributing towards such objects. The creoles, who are Catholics, seldom visit their church, and when they do, it is only at Easter. They have a very learned bishop, named Dubourgh, a Frenchman, who is not however very popular, and is spoken of for his gallantries, though a man of sixty. It is whispered about that there is a living proof of this. A more religious character is Pere Antoine, a highly distinguished old Capuchin friar, enjoying universal love and popularity. The manner in which I saw the Governor and the city authorities, with the most respectable persons of the county, behave towards him, does as much credit to them as to the object of their consideration. Of the two theatres, the American is open during five, and the French during eight months in the year. The American theatre has the advantage of becoming more and more national and popular, although at present it is only resorted to by the lower class of the American population; boatmen, Kentuckians, Mississippi traders, and backwoods-men of every description. The pieces are execrably performed. The late Charles Von Weber would not have been much delighted at witnessing the performance of his Der Freyshutz, here metamorphosed into the wild huntsmen of Bohemia. Six violins, which played any thing but music, and some voices far from being human, performed the opera, which was applauded; the Kentuckians expressed their satisfaction in a hurrah, which made the very walls tremble. The interior of the theatre has still a mean appearance. The curtain consists of two sail cloths, and the horrible smell of whiskey and tobacco is a sufficient drawback for any person who would attempt to frequent this place of amusement. The French theatre performs the old classic productions of Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, with the addition of some new ones, such as Regulus, Marie Stuart, and William Tell. The best performer of this theatre, is Madame Clauzel. Towards the close of December, the carnival commences; society balls, masquerades, or routs, besides a number of private balls, are then the order of the day. The first, the third, and the last masquerade, and the society balls, are the most splendid. They are regularly attended by the daughters of the merchants and planters, who at this time come to the city. There is, however, nothing more tiresome than a masked ball in New Orleans. Some young merchants, and sons of planters, took it into their heads to assume the character of poor paddies, and they dressed themselves accordingly. This would have been for the most unaccomplished American or English Miss, a fair opportunity for displaying at least some wit. But the creole Demoiselles, when addressed by their lovers, had not a word to say, except, "Oh, we know that you are no Paddies--You are very respectable--You are the wealthy C." Another would say, "Oh, I know that you are not an Irishman--You are the rich Y." This was the conversation all round. Still more tedious are the public balls given in commemoration of the eighth of January, on the anniversary of the birth-day of Washington, &c. Until last year, and owing to the shyness of the creoles towards their new brothers, the Americans and creoles stood with their ladies apart, neither speaking nor dancing with one another. Last year both parties seemed willing to draw nearer to each other. Even these entertainments, as well as more important affairs, are very subordinate to the all-powerful desire of "making money." This is the final object of every one, and on every occasion. Any pursuit of a different tendency than that of gaining money, is neglected, and deemed unworthy of consideration. That which every town of 2000 inhabitants is now provided with, a reading-room and circulating library, you would seek in vain at New Orleans. Though the Anglo-Americans attempted to establish such an institution, which is indispensable in a great commercial city, it failed through the unwillingness of the creoles to trouble their heads with reading. Churches or theatres are not more patronised. To improve the moral condition is far from their thoughts, every one being bent upon--making money, as quickly as possible, in order the sooner to leave the place. New Orleans, considering its situation, should again be what it was lately, were it not for the detestable selfishness which pervades all classes, and has established a dominion over the mind, as painful as it is disgusting. The complaints about luxury are unfounded. The wealthy inhabitants live by no means in such high style as they do at New York, Boston, and even Richmond, upon a less income. There is no cause for finding fault with their extravagance, or their dissolute manners, not because they have better moral principles, but because they are too selfish to indulge in pleasures that would cost "money," and would mar their principal object, which is to amass it. The American from the north, whilst he inhabits New Orleans, lives in a style far inferior to that in which he indulges at home; and even if he be a permanent settler, he chooses rather to go to the north in order to spend his money there. Only three American houses can be said to receive good company, the rest are creoles. The living in New Orleans, however, is good, though expensive. Board and lodging in a respectable house, will cost sixty dollars a month; in an inferior one, forty. The proper season of business for strangers, and those not accustomed to the climate, is the winter. In the summer, every one retires to the north, or across the lake, only such persons remaining as are compelled from circumstances to do so. CHAPTER XVII. The Climate of Louisiana.--The Yellow Fever. That a country, the fourth part of which consists of marshes, stagnant waters, rivers, and lakes, and which is so near the torrid zone, cannot be altogether healthy, is not to be denied. Although Louisiana is not so salubrious a country as the creoles or settlers inured to the climate, would persuade us that it is; on the other hand it is not the seat of the plague, or of continued disease, as the North Americans or Europeans imagine. Louisiana is no doubt a most agreeable country during the winter and spring. The former commences in December, and continues through January. Rains and showers will sometimes fall, during several successive weeks, snow very seldom. North and north-east winds prevail; a south wind will occasionally change the temperature, on a sudden, from a northern April day to the heat of summer. The coldest winter experienced for twenty years past, was that of the year 1821; the gutters were choked up with ice, and water exposed in buckets, froze to the thickness of an inch and a half. Fahrenheit's thermometer fell to 20° below zero. In this year, the orange, lime, and even fig-trees were destroyed by the frost. Towards the close of January the Mississippi rises, and the ice of the Ohio breaks up. This river, seldom, however, causes an inundation. This is generally reserved for the Missouri, the principal river that empties itself into the Mississippi. With the month of February the spring breaks forth in Louisiana. Frequent rains fall in this month, the vegetation advances astonishingly, and the trees receive their new foliage. On the 1st of March we had potatoes grown in the open fields, pease, beans, and artichokes. South winds prevail alternately with north-west winds. The month of March is undoubtedly the finest season in Louisiana; there are sometimes night frosts, though scarcely felt by any one except the creoles, and the equally tender orange flowers. The thermometer is in this month at 68°-70°. At this time prevails a disease, the influenza, which arises from the sudden alternations of cold and warm weather; it has carried off several persons. It is always necessary to wear cotton shirts, whether in cold or warm weather. Towards the close of March, the fruit-trees have done blooming, the forests are clad in their new verdure, and all nature bursts out in the most exuberant vegetation; every thing develops itself in the country with gigantic strides. Already the musquitoes are beginning to make their troublesome appearance, and musquito bars become necessary. Still the heat is moderate, being cooled by the north winds and the refreshing waters of the Mississippi. May brings with it the heat of a northern summer, moderated however, by cooling north and north-east breezes. The thermometer is at 78° to 80°. At this season, frequent showers and hurricanes coming from the south, rage with the utmost fury in those extensive plains. With the month of June the heats become oppressive; there is not a breath of air to be felt; the musquitos come in millions; one is incessantly pursued by those troublesome insects. The worst, however, is, that they will sometimes force their way through the musquito bars. Nothing is more disagreeable than this buzzing sound, and the pain occasioned by their sting; they keep you from sleeping the whole night. Still they are not so troublesome as the millepedes, an insect whose sting causes a most painful sensation. In the month of July the heat increases. August, September, and October, are dangerous months in New Orleans. A deep silence reigns during this time in the city, most of the stores and magazines are shut up. No one is to be seen in the streets in the day time except negroes and people of colour. No carriage except the funeral hearse. At the approach of evening the doors open, and the inhabitants pour forth, to enjoy the air, and to walk on the Levee above and below the city. The yellow fever has not made its appearance since 1822. It is not the extraordinary heat which causes this baneful disease, the temperature seldom exceeding 100°. In the year 1825, when the thermometer rose in New York and Boston above 108°, it was in New Orleans, no more than 97°. It is the pestilential miasmata which rise from the swamps and marshes, and infect the air to a degree which it is difficult to describe. These oppressive exhalations load the air, and it is almost impossible to draw breath. If a breeze comes at all, it is a south wind, which, from its baneful influence, exhausts the last remaining force after throwing you into a dreadful state of perspiration. The years 1811, 1814, and 1823, were the most terrible of any for New Orleans. From sixty to eighty persons were buried every day, and nothing was to be seen but coffins carried about on all sides. Whole streets in the upper suburb, (inhabited chiefly by Americans and Germans) were cleared of their inhabitants, and New Orleans was literally one vast cemetery. Among the inhabitants, the poorer classes were mostly exposed to the attacks of the unsparing and deadly disease, as their situation did not permit them to stay at home; thus women were for this reason, less exposed to its effects; and least of all the wealthiest inhabitants, who were not compelled to quit their dwellings. The creoles and others who were seasoned to the climate, were little affected. The creole, mulatto, and negro women, are said to be the most skilful in the cure of the disease. In 1822, hundreds of patients died under the hands of the most experienced physicians, when these old women commonly succeeded in restoring their own patients. Their preservatives and medicines are as simple as they are efficacious, and every stranger who intends to stay the summer in New Orleans, should make himself acquainted with one of these women, in case a necessity should arise for requiring their attendance. They give such ample proofs of their superior skill, as to claim in this point a preference over the ablest physicians. The inhabitants are in general forewarned of the approaching disease, by the swarms of musquitoes; although they come in sufficient quantity every summer, they make their appearance in infinitely greater numbers previously to a yellow fever. This is said to have been the case on the three occasions already mentioned. At such a time all business is of course suspended. The port is empty, the stores are shut up. Those officers alone whose presence is indispensable, or who have overcome the yellow fever, will remain with a set of wretches, who, like beasts of prey feed upon the relics of the dead, speculating upon the misery of their fellow creatures so far, as not unfrequently to buy at auctions the very beds upon which they have been known to expire in a few days afterwards. The first rain, succeeded by a little frost, banishes the deadly guest, and every one returns to his former business. It is to be hoped, that this scourge of the land, if it should not be wholly extirpated, will at least become less prevalent for the future. The police regulations adopted during the last four years, have proved very effectual. Among these are a strict attention to cleanliness, watering the streets by means of the gutters, shutting up the grog-shops after nine o'clock; and removing from the city all the poor and houseless people, at the expense of the corporation, as soon as the least indication of approaching infection is perceived. These, and several other wise regulations will, it is hoped, contribute greatly to increase the population, and to give the new comers a firmer guarantee for their lives, than they have hitherto found. When the plans in contemplation shall have been carried into effect, and the swamps behind the city drained, a measure the more beneficial, as the soil of these swamps is beyond all imagination fertile; then the surrounding country, and the city itself, will become as healthy as any other part of the Union. With the increasing population, we have no doubt, that Louisiana will present the same features, as Egypt in former days, bearing, as it does, the most exact resemblance to that country. During six months, and already at the present time, it is a delightful place, successfully resorted to from the north, by persons in a weak state of health. The mildness of the climate, which even during the two winter months, is seldom interrupted by frost, the most luxuriant tropical fruits--bananas, pine-apples, oranges, lemons, figs, cocoa-nuts, &c., partly reared in the country, partly imported in ship loads from the Havannah, a distance of only a few hundred miles; excellent oysters, turtle of the best kind, arriving every hour; fish from the lake Pontchartrain; game, venison of all sorts; vegetables of the finest growth,--all these advantages give New Orleans a superiority over almost every other place. Sobriety, temperance, and moderation in the use of sensual enjoyments, and especially in the intercourse with the sex, with a strict attention to the state of health, and an instant resort to the necessary preservatives in case of derangement in the digestive system,--such are the precautions that will best enable a stranger to guard against the attacks of the disorders incident to this place. CHAPTER XVIII. Hints for Emigrants to Louisiana.--Planters, Farmers, Merchants, and Mechanics. Whoever emigrates from a northern to a southern climate, experiences more or less a change in his constitution; his blood is thinned, and in a state of greater effervescence, and his frame weakened in consequence. The least derangement in the digestive system in this case, produces a bilious fever. The new comers emigrating to Louisiana, are either planters, farmers, merchants, or mechanics. The former, being more or less wealthy, come for the purpose of establishing themselves, and usually buy sugar or cotton lands, on the banks of the Mississippi, or Red-river, which, though in general healthy, are, on the other hand, a sure grave to those who neglect taking the necessary precautions. Planters descend to Louisiana in the winter months; but as the heat increases every moment, and has a debilitating effect upon their bodies, accustomed to a cold climate, they attempt to counterbalance this weakness by an excessive use of spirituous liquors, to promote digestion. Notwithstanding bad omens, and in spite of the advice of their more experienced neighbours, their mania for making money keeps them there during the summer, and they fall victims to their avidity for gain. Whoever intends to establish a plantation in Louisiana, has the free choice between the low lands on the Mississippi, or the Red-river. There are upwards of 200,000 acres of sugar lands still unoccupied. He may settle himself on the banks of the above-mentioned rivers, without the least fear, the yellow fever seldom or never penetrating to the plantations. Thousands of planters live and continue there without experiencing any attack of sickness. After having bought his lands, and obtained possession, he may stay till the month of May, taking the necessary measures for the improvement of the plantation, leave his directions with his overseer, and remove to the north. His house, if along the banks of the Mississippi, should be built not far from the river, in order that he may enjoy the cooling freshness of its waters. In the rear of his plantation, and about his house, he sows the seed of sun-flowers, to preserve his slaves from the morning and night exhalations of the swamps; a measure which, trifling as it may seem, will have an incredible effect in improving the air. With a capital of 25,000 dollars, 5,500_l._ sterling, he may purchase at the present time, 2,000 acres of land, for a sum of from 3 to 4,000 dollars, and thirty stout slaves for 15,000 dollars; there will remain 7,000 for his first year's expenses. The establishment of a sugar plantation amounts to not more than the above stated sum of 25,000 dollars. The produce of the third year, if the plantation be properly managed, amounts to 150,000 pounds of sugar, valued at 12,000 dollars, besides the molasses, the sale of which will cover the household expenses; each negro, therefore, yielding a clear annual income of 400 dollars. Failures in sugar crops in plantations along the banks of the Mississippi, never occur, except beyond 30° 30' of north latitude. The planter, however, cannot expect any thing in the first year from his sugar fields; the canes yielding produce only eighteen months after having been planted. The planting takes place from August until December, by means of eye-slips. The process at the sugar-houses is sufficiently known. These plantations, if well managed and well attended to, are, owing to the great and constant demand for sugar, the surest way of realising a capital, though the management requires considerable care and attention. Cotton plantations are not to be judged according to the same estimate. A cotton plantation may now be established by means of a capital of 10,000 dollars. 3000 dollars for the purchase of 1500 or 2000 acres of land, on the banks of the Mississippi, from Baton Rouge up to the Walnut-hills, on both sides of the river; or what is still preferable, on the banks of the Red-river. Ten slaves at 5000 dollars, leaves 2000 for the first year's current expenses. The beginner will not find it difficult to clear fifty acres in the first twelve months; and to raise from twenty-five acres, thirty bales of cotton, the produce of which will, with the crop of corn from the remaining twenty-five acres, keep him for the first year, the cotton alone being worth 1500 dollars, independently of the corn. The following year he may raise sixty bales, giving an income of 3000 dollars, every slave thereby yielding about 300 dollars; proceeding thus in a manner which in a few years more will render his income equal to his original capital. There are still unappropriated above two millions of acres of cotton lands, of the very first quality, in the state of Louisiana; and though it sometimes happens that the plants are killed by the frosts, as was the case in the spring of 1826, these accidents seldom affect the profits. The management of a cotton plantation is by no means difficult, as it differs but little from that bestowed upon Indian corn, and requires only a strict superintendence over the negroes. The cultivation of indigo has latterly been neglected, though 200,000 acres of land in the state of Louisiana are well adapted for it. This neglect was occasioned by the injurious effects produced upon the labourer by the watering of the plants, and the exhalations from them. The cultivation of rice is more extensive. There are 200,000 acres unoccupied. Planters generally combine the cultivation of this plant with that of cotton or sugar. Tobacco of a superior quality is reared about Natchitoches and Alexandria; the produce is little inferior to that of Cuba. The price of a stout male negro is 500 dollars; if a mechanic, from 6 to 900 dollars; females from 350 to 400 dollars; so that 5000 dollars will purchase five men, two of them mechanics, and five stout women, and enable their master at once to set about a plantation, which will, in the course of three years, double the capital of the owner, without his exposing himself to any risk. The easy way in which the planters of Louisiana are found to accumulate wealth, excites in every one the desire of pursuing the same road, without having the necessary means at command. Hundreds of respectable farmers have paid with their lives for a neglect of this truth. Instigated by the anxiety to become rich, and unable withal to purchase slaves, they were under the necessity of labouring for themselves. The consequence was, they shortly fell victims to their mistaken notions. One can only be seasoned by degrees to the climate of Louisiana. To force the march of time and habit, is impossible. The more stout and healthy the person, the greater the risk. People who, allured by the prospect of wealth, would attempt to work in this climate as they were used to do in the north, would fall sick and die, without having provided for their children, who are then forced upon the charity of strangers. There are many tracts of second-rate land, equal to land of the best quality in the northern states, in the west and east of Louisiana, which are perfectly healthy, and where farmers of less property may buy lands, and establish labour and corn farms, or raise cattle in abundance. Those who have proceeded in this way, which is more proportioned to their means, have never failed to acquire in the course of time, a large fortune, as by the open water communication the produce can easily be conveyed to New Orleans, where, in the summer, they find a ready and advantageous market. These parts have hitherto been too much neglected, to which circumstance it is greatly owing that New Orleans, at certain seasons, is almost destitute of provisions, when the waters of the tributary rivers of the Mississippi, Ohio, &c., are low. A third class of settlers in Louisiana are merchants. New Orleans has unfortunately the credit of being a place to which wealth flows in streams, and it is consequently the resort of all adventurers from Europe and America, who come hither in the expectation, that they have only to be on the spot to make money. Thousands of these ill-fated adventurers have lost their lives in consequence. It is true, that most of the wealthy merchants were needy adventurers, who began with scarcely a dollar in their pockets, as pedlars, who sold pins and glass beads to the Indians. But the surest way for the merchant who wishes to begin with a small capital, will always be to settle in one of the smaller towns, Francisville, Alexandria, Natchitoches, Baton Rouge, &c. Those who have followed this course grew wealthy in a short time. I admit there is an exception with respect to such as have a sufficient capital to begin business with in the city itself, or to embark in commercial relation with Great Britain, the north of the Union, or the continent of Europe. The commission trade is advantageous in the extreme; and the clear income realised in commercial business by several merchants, amounts to 50,000 dollars a year. All the French, English, and Spaniards, who have established themselves in this place, have become rich, especially if the individuals of the latter nations were conversant with the French language. For manufacturers, there is in New Orleans little prospect. In a slave state, where of course hard labour is performed only by slaves, whose food consists of Indian corn, and at the most, of salt meat, and their dress of cotton trowsers, or a blanket rudely adapted to their shapes, the mechanic cannot find sufficient customers. Half of the inhabitants have no need of his assistance; and as he cannot renounce his habits of living on wheat flour, fresh meat, &c., provisions which at certain seasons are very dear in New Orleans, his existence there must be very precarious. The charges are proportionably enormous. The price for the making of a great coat, is from fourteen to sixteen dollars; of a coat, from ten to twelve dollars. The greatest part of the inhabitants, therefore, buy their own dresses ready made in the north. The wealthy alone employ these mechanics. There are yet several trades which would answer well in New Orleans, such as clever tailors, confectioners, &c. But as almost every article is brought into this country, the mechanics have rather a poor chance of succeeding, and if not provided with a sufficient capital, they are exposed to great penury until they can find customers. This class of people are very little respected, and hardly more so than the people of colour in Louisiana. CHAPTER XIX. Geographical Features of the State of Louisiana.--Conclusion. Louisiana lies under the same degree of north latitude as Egypt, and bears a striking resemblance to that country. Their soil, their climate, and their very rivers, exhibit the same features, with the exception, that the Mississippi runs from north to south, whereas the Nile takes an opposite course. Close to the eastern bank of the former, we find a continued series of Cyprus, swamps, and lakes, sometimes intersected by a tributary stream of the Mississippi, with elevated banks or hills. Farther towards the east are large tracts of lands, with pinewoods stretching towards the river Mobile, which resembles the Mississippi in every thing, except in size. Further southward, between the Mississippi and Mobile, we find the rivers Amite, Tickfah, Tangipao, Pearl, Pascagola, emptying themselves into a chain of lakes and swamps, running in a south-east direction from the Mississippi to the mouth of the Mobile. Further to the westward is the Mississippi in its meandering course, its banks lined with plantations from Natchez to New Orleans, each plantation extending half a mile back to the swamps. South of New Orleans, is another chain of swamps, lakes, and bayons, terminating in the gulf of Mexico. West of the Mississippi, a multitude of rivers flow in a thousand windings, lined with impenetrable forests of cyprus, cotton trees, and cedars, intermixed with canebrack and the palmetta. In this labyrinth of rivers, the Red-river, the Arkansas, the White-river, and Tensaw rivers are seen meandering. Farther east are the immense prairies of Opelausas, and Attacapas, interspersed here and there with rising farms, forests along the banks of the Red-river, and more to the westward the great prairies, the resort of innumerable buffaloes and of every kind of game. The Red-river, like the Mississippi, forms an impenetrable series of swamps and lakes. Beyond this river are seen pinewoods, from which issues the Ouachitta, losing itself afterwards in the Delta of the Mississippi. Beyond these pine woods, in a north western direction, rise the Mazernes mountains, extending from the east to west 200 miles, and forming the boundary line between east and west Louisiana. To the north and west of the Red-river, the country is dry and healthy, but of inferior quality; to the east we find a chain of lakes; to the south another chain. In summer they dry up, thus affording fine pasturage to buffaloes. In autumn, with the rising of the rivers, they again fill with water. Southward is a continued lake, intermixed with swamps, which terminate at last in the gulph of Mexico. Louisiana, though the smallest of the states and territories formed out of the ancient Louisiana, is by far the most important, and the central point of the western commonwealth. Its boundaries are, on the south, the Gulph of Mexico; on the west, the Mexican province of Tecas; on the north, the Arkansas territory, and the state of Mississippi; and on the east, the state of Mississippi, and Mexico. The number of inhabitants amounts to 190,000, 106,000 of whom are people of colour. The constitution of the state inclines to Federal. The governor, the senators, and the representatives, in order to be eligible, must be possessed of landed property--the former to the amount of at least 5000 dollars, the next 1000, and the latter 500. Every citizen of the state is qualified to vote. The government in this, as well as in every other state, is divided into three separate branches. The chief magistrate of the state is elected for the term of four years. Under him he has a secretary of state. The present governor is an Anglo-American; Mr. Johnson, the secretary, is a Creole. The legislative branch is composed of the senators, and of the house of representatives. The former consists of sixteen members, elected for the term of four years. They choose from among themselves a president, who takes the place of the governor, in case of the demise of the latter.[K] The house of representatives consists of forty-four members, headed by a speaker; the court of justice of three judges of the district court, a supreme judge of the criminal court of New Orleans, and eight district judges, with an equal number of district attorneys. The sessions are held every Monday. The parish and county courts have twenty-eight county or parish judges, twenty-six sheriffs, and 159 lawyers, to assist them in their labours. In a political view, the acquisition of Louisiana is no doubt the most important occurrence in the United States since the revolution; and, considered altogether, it may be called a second revolution. Independently of the pacific acquisition of a country containing nearly a million and a half of square miles, with the longest river in the world flowing through a valley several thousand miles in length and breadth, their geographical position is now secured, and they form, since the further acquisition of Florida, a whole and compact body, with a coast extending upwards of 1000 miles along the gulph of Mexico, and 500 miles on the Pacific ocean. Whether the vast increase of wealth amassed by most of those who settled on the banks of the Mississippi will prove strong enough to retain this political link unbroken, is very much to be doubted. It is very clear that the inhabitants of the valley of the Mississippi, and especially of Louisiana, entertain a feeling of estrangement from their northern fellow citizens. [K] The governor of Louisiana has 5000 dollars a year: the governors of other states either 2 or 3000 dollars. According to the American money, four dollars forty-four cents make a pound: a dollar has 100 cents. With the exception of a number of respectable Americans, Louisiana and the valley of the Mississippi have hitherto been the refuge of all classes of foreigners, good and bad, who sought here an asylum from oppression and poverty, or from the avenging arm of justice in their native countries. Many have not succeeded in their expectations--many have died--others returned, exasperated against a country which had disappointed their hopes, because they expected to find superior beings, and discovered that they were men neither worse nor better than their habits, propensities, country, climate, and a thousand other circumstances had made them. The fault was theirs. Though there exists not, perhaps, a country in the world where a fortune can be made in an easier way, yet it cannot be made without industry, steadiness, and a small capital to begin with--things in which these people were mostly deficient. And there is another circumstance not to be lost sight of. Whoever changes his country should have before him a complete view and a clear idea of the state in which he intends to settle, as well as of the rest of the Union: he ought to depend upon his own means, on himself in short, and not upon others. Upon no other terms will prosperity and happiness attend the emigrant's exertions in the United States. The foreign mechanic who, emigrating into the United States, selects the states of New York, Pennsylvania, or Ohio, will find sufficient occupation, his trade respected, and his industry rewarded by wealth and political consequence. The manufacturer with a moderate capital, will choose Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and the like places. The merchant who is possessed of 2 or 3000 dollars, and settles in Ohio, in the north western part of Pennsylvania, or over in Illinois, will, if he be prudent and steady, have no reason to complain of the Yankees. The farmer, with a capital of from 3 to 4000 dollars, will fix upon the state of Ohio, in preference to any other, especially if he comes accompanied only by his own family, and is therefore obliged to rely on the friendly assistance of his neighbours. He will there prefer the lands adjacent to navigable rivers, or to the rise of the new canal. If he goes beyond Ohio, he will find eligible situations in Illinois, and in Missouri. Any one who can command a capital exceeding 10,000 dollars, who is not incumbered with a large family, and whose mind does not revolt at the idea of being the owner of slaves, will choose the state of Mississippi, or of Louisiana, and realize there in a short time a fortune beyond his most sanguine expectations. He has his choice there of the unsold lands along the Mississippi, and Red-river, in the parishes of Plaquemines or Bayon Bastier; in the interior, of La Fourche, Iberville, Attacapas, Opelousas, Rapides, Nachitoches, Concordia, New Feliciana, and all the way up the Mississippi, to Walnut-hills, four hundred miles above New Orleans. All that has been urged against the unhealthiness of the country may be answered in these few words. Louisiana, though not at every season of the year equally salubrious, is far healthier than Cuba, Jamaica, and the West Indies in general. Thousands of people live free from the attacks of any kind of fever. On the plantations there is not the least danger.--In New Orleans the yellow fever has not appeared these four years past, and the place is so far from being unhealthy now, that the mortality for the last three years was less in this place than in Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Cleanliness, sobriety, a strict attention to the digestive system, and the avoiding of strong liquors, and exposure to heat, or to the rising miasmata, will keep every one as healthy in Louisiana as any where else. The neglect of proper precautions will cause as serious inconvenience in Louisiana as in any other country. This is the real condition of the state, and those acquainted with it will readily bear testimony to the correctness of my opinion, that it holds out not only to British emigrants, but also to capitalists of that country, advantages far surpassing those of their own vast dominions in any quarter of the globe. In Louisiana they should embark a part of their capital, not in land speculations, or in buying extensive tracts, which they have to sell in the course of time in small parcels, but in plantations. These are sources of wealth far superior to the gold mines of Mexico, and are guaranteed by a firm constitution, and by the character and the habits of a liberal people, taken in the whole, whatever John Bull may have to say against it. In this manner may the said John Bull still reap the reward of his having formed and maintained the first settlements in the United States, at a vast expense of blood and treasure. This would be the means of drawing closer the now rather relaxed ties which formerly united him with his kinsman, for Brother Jonathan is neither so bad as John Bull supposes him to be, nor so faultless as he fancies himself.--_Medium tenuere beati._ THE END. TABLE OF THE STATES, COUNTIES, CITIES, TOWNS, AND VILLAGES. _Pittsburgh_, county town of _Alleghany_ county. _Alleghany_ (river), _Monongehela_ (river). _Oeconomy_, Rapp's Settlement in Beaver county. _Zanesville_, capital of _Muskiagum_ county. _New Lancaster_, capital of _Fairfield_ county. _Columbus_, capital of the State of _Ohio_. _Chilicothe_, capital of the _Sciota_ county. _Franklintown_, capital of _Franklin_ county. _Cincinnati_, capital of _Hamilton_ county. _Newport_, capital of _Campbell_ county, in _Kentucky_. _Vevay_, capital of _New Switzerland_ county, in the State of _Indiana_. _Madisonville_, capital of _Jefferson_ county. _Charlestown_, capital of _Clark_ county. _Jeffersonville_, capital of _Floyd_ county. _Clarkesville_ and _New Albany_, villages of _Floyd_ county. _Louisville_, capital of _Jefferson_ county, in _Kentucky_. _Shippingport_ and _Portland_, villages. _Troy_, capital of _Crawford_ county. _Owensborough_, capital of _Henderson_ county. _Harmony_, in _Indiana_, second settlement of _Rapp_, purchased 1823, by _Owen_, of _Lanark_. _Shawneetown_, in the State of _Illinois_. _Fort Massai_, in the State of _Illinois_. _Golconda_, capital of _Pope_ county. _Vienna_, capital of _Johnson_ county. _America_, capital of _Alexander_ county. _Trinity_, village of _Alexander_. _Kaskakia_, _Cahokia_, towns of _Illinois_. _Vandalia_, capital of the State of _Illinois_. _Hamburgh_, village in _Illinois_. _Cape Girardeau_, capital of the county of the same name. _St. Genevieve_ and _Herculaneum_, towns of the State of _Missouri_. _City of St. Louis_, capital of _Missouri_ (the state). _New Madrid_, capital of _New Madrid_ county. _Tennessee_, State of _Nashville_, _Knoxville_, towns of _Tennessee_, and _New Ereesborough_, capital of the State. _Hopefield_, capital of _Hempstead_ county. _St. Helena_, village of _Arkansas_ territory. _Vixburgh_, capital of _Warren_ county. _Warrington_, village of _Warren_ county. _Palmyra Plantations_, _Bruinsburgh_, _Natchez_ (city of), in the State of _Mississippi_. _Gibsonport_, capital of _Gibson_ county. _Baton Rouge_, _Plaquemines_, _Manchac_, _Bayon_, _Tourche_, the former the capital of the county, and the latter bayons. _New Orleans_ (city of), the capital of _Louisiana_. IN CHAPTER XIX. THE FOLLOWING RIVERS OCCUR. _Mobile_--the rivers _Amite_, _Tickfah_, _Tangipao_, _Pearl_, _Pascaguala_, _Arkansas_, _White_ and _Red-River_, _Tensaw_. _Plaquemines_, _Interior of la Tourche_, _Iberville_, _Attacapas_, _Opelousas_, _Rapides_, _Natchitoches_, _Concordia_, _Avoyelles_, _New Feliciana_, _Parishes of Louisiana_. N.B. The Counties in the State of Louisiana, are called Parishes. _Printed by Bradbury & Dent, Bolt-court, Fleet-street._ Transcriber's Note Minor errors in punctuation are corrected silently. In the final table of place names, 'New Ereesborough' is referred to as the state capital of Tennessee. This seems a corruption of 'Murfreesborough', which was the capital until 1826. The following issues, which were deemed printer's errors, and their resolutions are described here: p. ii [t]hroughout] Added. p. 80 approach[e]d Added. p. 82 Baton [D/R]ouge Corrected. p. 99 hickor[i]y Removed. p. 108 backswood-man / backwoods-man Corrected. p. 206 Fran[s]cisville Removed. 
44935	----	MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY AND THE GREAT LAKES Selected and Edited by KATHARINE B. JUDSON AUTHOR OF "MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF CALIFORNIA AND THE OLD SOUTHWEST," "MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST," ETC., ETC. ILLUSTRATED [Illustration] CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG & CO. 1914 Copyright A. C. McCLURG & CO. 1914 Published August, 1914 W. F. Hall Printing Co., Chicago _BY THE SAME AUTHOR_ MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF THE GREAT PLAINS. _Illustrated. Small quarto._ _$1.50 net._ MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF CALIFORNIA AND THE OLD SOUTHWEST. _Over fifty full-page illustrations. Small quarto._ _$1.50 net._ MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF ALASKA. _Beautifully illustrated. Small quarto._ _$1.50 net._ MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST. Especially of Washington and Oregon. _With fifty full-page illustrations. Small quarto._ _$1.50 net._ MONTANA: "The Land of Shining Mountains." _Illustrated. Indexed. Square 8vo._ _75 cents net._ WHEN THE FORESTS ARE ABLAZE. _Illustrated. Crown 8vo._ _$1.35 net._ A. C. McClurg & Co., Publishers [Illustration: EARLY INDIAN DRAWING SHOWING A WRESTLING BOUT FOR A TURKEY. The Donor, a Hunter, is the Shrouded Figure on the Horse. _From Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology._] PREFACE Mystery, magic, and manitoes abound in the land of Hiawatha, in the land of the Ojibwas, among the green islands, graceful and beautiful, lying amidst the dancing blue waters when the sun shines over Gitche Gomee, the Great Water.[1] Manitoes, great and mighty, lived in the cool depths of the mighty forests, in the rivers and lakes, and even in the snows of winter. And adventures there were in those early days amongst these islands of the North, when manitoes directed the affairs of men. [1] Gitche Gomee is Lake Superior. But the animal fathers lived upon the earth before there came the "two-legged walkers." There were many animals. There were many beavers. It was the beavers who made Gitche Gomee, the Great Water. They made it by building two dams. The first they built at the Grand Sault, and the second was five leagues below. When Great Hare came up the river, he said, "This must not be so." Therefore he stepped upon the first dam. But he was in haste. He did not break it down; therefore there are now great falls and whirlpools at that place. But at the second dam, Great Hare stepped upon it mightily; therefore there are now few falls and only a little swirling water at that place. Great Hare was very mighty. When he chased Beaver he stepped across a bay eight leagues wide. Around Michilimackinack was the land of Great Hare. There, amongst the green islets, under the cool shade of wide spreading trees, where fish leaped above the rippling waters, he made the first fish net. He made it after watching Spider weave a web for catching flies. It was Wenibojo,[2] who, in Ojibwa land, discovered the wild rice and taught the Indians to use it. He first pointed out the low grassy islands in the lakes, waving their bright green leaves and spikes of yellowish-green blossoms. He showed them how to cut paths through the wild rice beds before the grain was ripe, and later, to beat it into their canoes. He told them always to gather the wild rice before a storm, else the wind would blow it all into the water. Therefore the Indians use wild rice in all their feasts. They even taught the white men to use it. [2] Wenibojo is only a variation of the name also given as Manabush. Both are identical with Hiawatha. When the snows of winter lay deep upon the forests of the North, when ice covered lakes and rivers, then the story tellers of the Ojibwas, as of all other Indian tribes, told the tales of the olden times, when manitoes lived upon the earth, and when the animal fathers roamed through the forest. But such stories are not told in summer. All the woods and shores, all the bays and islands, are, in summer, the home of keen-hearing spirits, who like not to have Indians talking about them. But when the deep snows come, then the spirits are more drowsy. Then the Indians, when North West rattles the flaps of the wigwams, and wild animals hide in the shelter of the deep forest, tell their tales. All winter they tell them, while the fires burn in the wigwams--tell them until the frogs croak in the spring. Tales they tell of how Gitche Manito, the Good One, taught the Indians how to plant the Indian corn, how to strip and bury Mondamin, and how to gather the corn in the month of falling leaves, that there may be food in the camps when the snows of winter come. Tales they tell of Gitche Manedo, the Evil One, who brings only distress and sickness--tales of the land of Hiawatha. Mystery and magic lay all about them. It is a far cry from the stories of the North along the banks of the Mississippi, from that land of long winters, through the country of the mound builders, to the sunnier Southland; yet from north to south, around the glimmering Indian fires, grouped eager men and women and children, listening to the story tellers. But quite different are the tales of the Southland--of the Cherokees, Biloxis, and Chitimachas. They are stories of wild turkeys, of persimmons and raccoons, and of the spirits which dwell in the mountain places where none dare go. Stories also are they of Brer Rabbit and the tar wolf, which came from Indian slaves working in the fields in early days, through the negro slaves working beside them, to the children of the white men. * * * * * It is a loss to American literature that so much of the legendary history of these Indian tribes has gone, beyond hope of recovery. Exquisite in color, poetical in feeling, these legends of sun, moon, and stars, of snow, ice, lightning, thunders, the winds, the life of the forest birds and animals about them, and the longing to understand the why and the how of life--all which we have only in fragments. Longfellow's work shows the wonderful beauty of these northern legends, nor has he done violence to any of them in making them poetical. His picture of the departure of Hiawatha, the lone figure standing stately and solemn, as the canoe drifted out towards the glowing sunset, while from the shore, in the shadow of the forest, came the low Indian chant, mingling with the sighing of the pine trees, is truely Indian. For the mystical and poetical is strong in the Indian nature. As in all the other volumes of this series, no effort has been made to ornament or amplify these legends in the effort to make them "literary," or give them "literary charm." They must speak for themselves. What editing has been done has been in simplifying them, and freeing them from the verbose setting in which many were found. For in this section of the country, settled before it was realized that there was an Indian literature, the original work of noting down the myths was very imperfectly done. Thanks are due to the work of Albert E. Jenks, on the wild rice Indians of the upper lakes; to James Mooney, for the myths of the Cherokees; to George Catlin, for some of the upper Mississippi legends; to the well-known but almost inaccessible work of Schoolcraft, and to others. K. B. J. TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE The Earth-Maker _Winnebago_ 1 Creation _Chitimacha_ 5 The Creation _Wyandot_ 8 Creation of the Races _Biloxi_ 12 Story of the Creation _Ojibwa_ 14 Creation (a fragment) _Ojibwa_ 16 Creation of the Mandans _Mandan_ 17 The Flood _Chitimacha_ 19 The Great Flood (a fragment) _Mandan_ 20 The Great Flood _Menomini_ 21 Origin of Fire _Menomini_ 26 The Thunderers and the Origin of Fire _Menomini_ 28 The Origin of Fire _Chitimacha_ 31 The Gifts of the Sky God _Chitimacha_ 32 Mondamin _Ojibwa_ 34 Mondamin _Ottawa_ 37 The Corn Woman _Cherokee_ 40 Discovery of Wild Rice _Ojibwa_ 42 Origin of Wild Rice _Ojibwa_ 44 Origin of Winnebago _Menomini_ 45 The Origin of Tobacco _Menomini_ 49 Origin of Maple Sugar _Menomini_ 51 Manabush and the Moose _Menomini_ 53 Origin of Day and Night _Menomini_ 54 Origin of the Bear _Cherokee_ 56 Origin of the Word Chicago _Ojibwa_ 58 Origin of the Word Chicago _Menomini_ 60 The Coming of Manabush _Menomini_ 61 The Story of Manabush _Menomini_ 62 Manabozho and West _Ojibwa_ 65 Manabush and the Great Fish _Menomini_ 69 The Departure of Manabush _Menomini_ 72 The Return of Manabush _Menomini_ 74 The Request for Immortality _Menomini_ 75 Peboan and Seegwun _Ojibwa_ 77 The Grave Fires _Ojibwa_ 79 The Death Trail _Cherokee_ 82 The Duck and the North West Wind _Ojibwa_ 84 How the Hunter Destroyed Snow _Menomini_ 87 The Pipe of Peace _Ojibwa_ 90 The Thunder's Nest _Ojibwa_ 92 The Pipestone _Sioux_ 93 The Pipestone _Knisteneaux_ 94 Pau-puk-kee-wis _Ojibwa_ 95 Iagoo, the Boaster _Ojibwa_ 102 Ojeeg, the Summer-Maker _Ojibwa_ 104 Rabbit Goes Duck Hunting _Cherokee_ 109 Rabbit and the Tar Baby _Biloxi_ 111 Rabbit and Tar Wolf _Cherokee_ 114 Rabbit and Panther _Menomini_ 116 How Rabbit Stole Otter's Coat _Cherokee_ 118 Rabbit and Bear _Biloxi_ 122 Why Deer Never Eat Men _Menomini_ 125 How Rabbit Snared the Sun _Biloxi_ 128 When the Orphan Trapped the Sun _Ojibwa_ 130 The Hare and the Lynx _Ojibwa_ 134 Welcome to a Baby _Cherokee_ 137 Baby Song _Cherokee_ 139 Song to the Firefly _Ojibwa_ 140 Song of the Mother Bears _Cherokee_ 141 The Man in the Stump _Cherokee_ 143 The Ants and the Katydids _Biloxi_ 144 When the Owl Married _Cherokee_ 145 The Kite and the Eagle 147 The Linnet and the Eagle _Ojibwa_ 148 How Partridge got his Whistle _Cherokee_ 149 How Kingfisher got his Bill _Cherokee_ 151 Why the Blackbird Has Red Wings _Chitimacha_ 153 Ball Game of the Birds and Animals _Cherokee_ 155 Why the Birds Have Sharp Tails _Biloxi_ 158 The Wildcat and the Turkeys _Biloxi_ 159 The Brant and the Otter _Biloxi_ 161 The Tiny Frog and the Panther 163 The Frightener of Hunters _Choctaw_ (_Bayou Lacomb_) 166 The Hunter and the Alligator _Choctaw_ (_Bayou Lacomb_) 167 The Groundhog Dance _Cherokee_ 169 The Racoon _Menomini_ 171 Why the Opossum Plays Dead _Biloxi_ 172 Why the 'Possum's Tail is Bare _Cherokee_ 174 Why 'Possum Has a Large Mouth _Choctaw_ (_Bayou Lacomb_) 176 The Porcupine and the Two Sisters _Menomini_ 177 The Wolf and the Dog _Cherokee_ 179 The Catfish and the Moose _Menomini_ 180 Turtle _Menomini_ 181 The Worship of the Sun _Ojibwa_ 185 Tashka and Walo _Choctaw_ (_Bayou Lacomb_) 189 Sun and Moon _Menomini_ 192 The Moon Person _Biloxi_ 193 The Star Creatures _Cherokee_ 194 Meteors _Menomini_ 195 The Aurora Borealis _Menomini_ 196 The West Wind _Chitimacha_ 197 The Lone Lightning _Ojibwa_ 198 The Thunders _Cherokee_ 200 Months of the Year _Natchez_ 201 Why the Oaks and Sumachs Redden _Fox_ 202 The Man of Ice _Cherokee_ 205 The Nunnehi _Cherokee_ 207 The Little People _Cherokee_ 210 War Song _Ojibwa_ 212 The War Medicine _Cherokee_ 213 The Coming of the White Man _Wyandot_ 214 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Early Indian drawing showing a wrestling bout _Frontispiece_ Early Indian pottery 20 Wild rice tied in bunches or sheaves 42 Wild rice kernels after threshing and winnowing 42 Birch-bark yoke, and sap buckets, used in maple sugar making 52 Picture writing. An Ojibwa Meda song 84 Permanent ash-bark wigwam of the wild rice gathering Ojibwa 104 Shell gorget showing eagle carving 128 Indian jar from the mounds of Arkansas 128 Spider gorgets 158 Shell pins made and used by Indians of the Mississippi Valley 176 Ojibwa dancer's beaded medicine bag 198 MYTHS AND LEGENDS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY AND THE GREAT LAKES THE EARTH-MAKER _Winnebago_ When Earth-maker came to consciousness, he thought of the substance upon which he was sitting. He saw nothing. There was nothing anywhere. Therefore his tears flowed. He wept. But not long did he think of it. He took some of the substance upon which he was sitting; so he made a little piece of earth for our fathers. He cast this down from the high place on which he sat. Then he looked at what he had made. It had become something like our earth. Nothing grew upon it. Bare it was, but not quiet. It kept turning. "How shall I make it become quiet?" thought Earth-maker. Then he took some grass from the substance he was sitting upon and cast it down upon the earth. Yet it was not quiet. Then he made a man. When he had finished him, he called him Tortoise. At the end of all his thinking, after he came to consciousness, he made the two-legged walkers. Then Earth-maker said to this man, "The evil spirits are abroad to destroy all I have just created. Tortoise, I shall send you to bring order into the world." Then Earth-maker gave him a knife. But when Tortoise came to earth, he began to make war. He did not look after Earth-maker's creation. So Earth-maker took him back. Then he sent Hare down to earth to restore order. He said, "See, Grandmother, I have done the work my father directed me to do. The lives of my uncles and aunts, the two-legged walkers, will be endless like mine." His grandmother said, "Grandson, how could you make the lives of your uncles and aunts endless like yours? How could you do something in a way Earth-maker had not intended it to be? Earth-maker could not make them thus." Hare thought, "My grandmother must be related to some of the evil spirits I have killed. She does not like what I have done, for she is saying that I killed the evil spirits." Now grandmother heard him think. "No, Grandson, I am not thinking of that. I am saying that our father made death so there should not be a lack of food on earth. He made death to prevent overcrowding. He also made a spirit world in which they should live after death." Hare did not like what she said. "Grandmother surely does not like it," he thought. "She must be related to the evil spirits." "No, Grandson, it is not so. But to quiet you, your uncle and aunts will live to be very old." Then she spoke again, "Now, Grandson, stand up. The two-legged walkers shall follow me always. I shall follow you always. Therefore try to do what I tell you. Remember you are a man. Do not look back after you have started." Then they started to go around the earth. "Do not look back," she said. "I wonder why she says that," thought Hare. Then he turned his head the least little bit to the left, and looked back to the place from which they had started. Instantly everything caved in. "Oh, my! Oh, my!" exclaimed grandmother. "Grandson, a man you are; but I thought you were a great man, so I greatly encouraged you. Now even if I wished to, I could not prevent death." This she meant, so they say. Then they went around the earth, to the edge of the fire which encircles the earth. That way they went, so they say. CREATION _Chitimacha_ There was a Creator of All Things. This Great Mystery understood all things. He had no eyes, yet he could see. He had no ears, yet he could hear. He had a body, but it could not be seen. When the earth was first made, the Creator of All Things placed it under the water. The fish were first created. But when the Creator wanted to make men, there was no dry land. Therefore Crawfish was sent down to bring up a little earth. He brought up mud in his claws. Immediately it spread out and the earth appeared above the waters. Then the Great Mystery made men. He made the Chitimachas. It was at Natchez that he first made them. He gave them laws but the people did not follow the laws. Therefore many troubles came, so that the Creator could not rest. Therefore the Creator made tobacco. Then men could become quiet and rest. Afterwards he made women, but at first they were like wood. So he directed a chief to teach them how to move, and how to cook, and to sew skins. Now when the animals met the Chitimachas, they ridiculed them. For these men had no fur, and no wool, and no feathers to protect them from storms, or rain, or the hot sun. The Chitimachas were sad because of this. Then the Creator gave them bows and arrows, and taught them how these things should be used. He told them that the flesh of the animals was good for food, and their skins for covering. Thus the animals were punished. The Creator taught them also how to draw fire from two pieces of wood, one flat and the other pointed; thus they learned to cook their food. The Creator taught them also to honor the bones of their relatives; and so long as they lived, to bring them food. Now in those days, the animals took part in the councils of men. They gave advice to men, being wiser. Each animal took especial care of the Chitimachas. Therefore the Indians respect the animals which gave good advice to their ancestors, and this aids them even today in time of need. The Creator also made the moon and the stars. Both were to give life and light to all things on earth. Moon forgot the sacred bathing, therefore he is pale and weak, giving but little light to man. But Sun gives light to all things. Sun often stops on her trail to give more time to the Indians when they are hunting, or fighting their enemies. Moon does not, but always pursues his wife over the sky trail. Yet he can never catch up with her. The mounds in the Chitimacha country are the camping places of the spirit sent down by the Creator to visit the Indians. This spirit taught the men how to cook their food and to cure their wounds. He is still highly honored. THE CREATION _Wyandot_ There was, in olden days, something the matter with the earth. It has changed. We think so. We think the Great Mystery made it and made men also. He made them at a place called Mountains. It was eastward. When he had made the earth and these mountains, he covered the earth over with something. He did it with his hands. Under this, he put men. All the different tribes were there. One of the young men climbed up and found his way to the surface. It was very beautiful. Then a deer ran past, with an arrow in its side. He followed it to where it fell and died. He looked back to see its tracks, and he soon saw other tracks. They were the footprints of the person who shot the deer. He soon came up. It was the Maker of Men. Thus he taught the Indians what they must do when they came out of the earth. The creator showed the Indian how to skin the deer, and prepare it for food, and how to use the skin for dress. When everything was ready, he said, "Make a fire." The Indian said, "I do not know how." Therefore the creator made the fire. Then he said, "Put the meat on the fire. Roast it." The Indian did this, but he did not turn the stick. Therefore it was burned on one side and not roasted on the other. So the creator showed him how to turn the stick. Then the Great Mystery called all the Indians up out of the earth. They came out by tribes. To each tribe he gave a chief. Then he made a head chief over all the tribes, who should teach them what they should do. The Great Mystery also made Good and Evil. They were brothers. One made pleasant things grow. The other spent all his time spoiling his brother's work. He made stony places, and rocks, and made bad fruits to grow. He made great trouble among men. He annoyed them very much. Good had to go back and do his work over again. It kept him very busy. Then Good decided to destroy Evil. Therefore Good proposed to run a race with Evil. When they met, Good said, "Tell me first--what do you most fear?" "Bucks' horns," said Evil. "What do you most fear?" "Indian grass braided," said Good. Then Evil at once went to his grandmother, who braided Indian grass. He got a great deal of it. He put the grass in the trail, and put it in the limbs of the trees along the trail where Good was to run. Good also filled the path, where his brother Evil was to run, with bucks' horns. They said, "Who shall run first?" They argued about it. At last Good said, "Well, I will, because I proposed the race." So he started off and Evil followed him. When Good became tired, he pulled down a strand of braided green grass and chewed it. Thus he ran rapidly. But Evil became tired. Yet Good would not stop until he reached the end of the trail. The next day Evil started on his trail. Everywhere he was stopped by the branches of bucks' horns. They greatly annoyed him. He said to Good, "Let me stop." Good said, "No, you must go on." At last, towards evening, Evil fell in the trail. At once Good took bucks' horns and killed him. Then Good returned to his grandmother. She was very angry. She loved Evil. That night Good was awakened by a sound. The spirit of Evil was talking with his grandmother. Then when Evil knew Good was awake, he said, "Let me into the wigwam." But Good always said, "No." At last Evil said, "I go to the northwest land. You will never see me more. Those who follow me will never come back. Death will keep them." CREATION OF THE RACES[3] _Biloxi_ [3] Obviously influenced by missionary teaching, but a most curious myth. Kuti Mankdce, the One Above, made people. He made one person, an Indian. While the Indian was sleeping, he made a woman. Then the One Above went away to find food for the man and woman. After he left, something was standing there upright. It was a tree. A person said, "Why do you not eat the fruit of this tree? I think he made it for you to eat." So the woman pulled off some fruit and stewed it and she and the Indian ate it. Shortly after, the One Above returned. Now he had gone away to find food for them. When he found they had stewed this fruit, he was very angry. He said, "Work for yourself. Find your own food, else you shall be hungry." When the One Above had been a long time gone, he sent back a letter to the Indians. But the Indians did not receive it, because the Americans took it. That is why Americans know how to read and write. Now after the letter came, the people found a very clear stream of water. The American found it first and lay down in it; therefore he is very white all over. Next came the Frenchman, but the water was not so clear. Then came the Indians; therefore Indians are not of light complexion, because they did not find the water when it was clear. Afterwards came the Spaniard, and he was not white, because the water had become very muddy. Some time after the Negro was made. The One Above thought he should attend to work, so he made the Negro's nose flat. And by this time the water was very muddy, and the stream was very low. So the Negro washed only the palms of his hands. Therefore Negroes are very black except on the palms of their hands. STORY OF THE CREATION _Ojibwa_ When Gitche Manito, the Good Mystery, created the earth-plain, it was bare, without trees or shrubs. Then he created two Indians, a man and a woman. Now when there were ten persons on the earth-plain, death happened. The first man lamented, and went back and forth over the plain, complaining. He said, "Why did the Good Spirit send death so soon?" The Good Mystery heard this. He called a great council. He said, "Man is not happy. I have made him very frail, therefore death happens. What shall we do?" The council lasted six days, and there was not a breath of air to disturb the waters. The seventh was the _nageezhik_, the excellent day. The sky was blue and there were no clouds. On that day Gitche Manito sent down a messenger to earth. In his right hand was a piece of white hare's skin, and in the left the head of a white-headed eagle. On each was the blue stripe of peace. The messenger said, "Gitche Manito sent me. He has heard your words. You must obey his commands." Then he gave to the Indians the hare's skin, the eagle's head, and a white otter skin with the blue stripe of peace. Thus Gitche Manito taught the Indians how to make magic and how to be strong. CREATION (A fragment) _Ojibwa_ Long ago, Nokomis came down from Sky-land, but remained fluttering in mid air. There was no place on which to rest her foot. The Fishes at once held a great council. Now Tortoise had a shell-covered back, very broad. After the council, he rose to the surface so that Nokomis might rest upon his back. Then the drift-masses of the sea gathered about the Tortoise. Thus the land was made. Then Nokomis found herself alone on the land. So she married a manido from the Sky-land. Two sons had Nokomis--twin brothers. But the brothers were not friends. One was a good huntsman; the other could kill no game at all. So they disputed. Then one brother rose to the Sky-land. He caused the Thunders to roar over his brother's head. Now the sister of these twin brothers was the ancestor of the Ojibwas. CREATION OF THE MANDANS _Mandan_ The Mandans were the People of the Pheasants. They were the first people in the world. At first they lived in the earth. Now, in the dark Earth-land, they had many vines. Then at last one vine grew up through a hole in the Earth-plain, far above their heads. One of their young men at once went up the vine until he came out on the Earth-plain. He came out on the prairies, on the bank of a river, just where the Mandan village now stands.[4] [4] 1834. He looked all about him. The Earth-plain was very beautiful. There were many buffaloes there. He killed one with his bow and arrow, and found it was good for food. Then the young man returned to his people under the ground. He told them all he had seen. They held a council, and then they began to climb up the vine to the Earth-plain. Some of the chiefs, and the young warriors, and many of the women went up. Then came a very fat woman. The chiefs said, "Do not go up." But she did, so the vine broke. The Mandans were very sorry about this. Because no more could go up, the tribe on the Earth-plain is not very large. And no one could return to his village in the ground. Therefore the Mandans built their village on the banks of the river. But the rest of the people remained underground. THE FLOOD _Chitimacha_ Long, long ago, a great storm came. At once the people baked a great earthen pot, and in this two of them saved themselves. The pot was held up on the surface of the water. Now two rattlesnakes were also saved in the earthen jar, because in the olden days rattlesnakes were the friends of man. In those days, when an Indian left his lodge the rattlesnake entered it and protected it until he returned. When all the land was flooded, the red-headed woodpecker hooked his claws into the sky and so hung above the waters. But the flood rose so high that part of his tail was wet. You can see the marks even to this day. When the waters sank, he was sent to find land. He could find none. Then a dove was sent and came back with a grain of sand. This sand was placed on top of the great waters and immediately it stretched out. It became dry land. Therefore the dove is called "Ground Watcher." THE GREAT FLOOD (A fragment) _Mandan_ The earth is a large tortoise. It moves very slowly and carries a great deal of earth on its back. Long ago there was a tribe which is now dead. They used to dig deep down in the earth for badgers. They dug with knives. One day they stuck a knife far down into the earth. It cut through the shell of Tortoise. Therefore Tortoise at once began to sink into the water. The water rose through the knife cut until it covered all the ground. All the people were drowned except one man. But some of the old people say it was this way. They say there were four Tortoises, one in the East, one in the West, one in the South, and another in the North. Each Tortoise made it rain for ten days. Therefore the water covered the earth and all the people were drowned. [Illustration: EARLY INDIAN POTTERY. _From Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology._] THE GREAT FLOOD _Menomini_ Manabush[5] wanted to punish the evil manidoes, the Ana maqkiu who had destroyed his brother Wolf. Therefore he invented the ball game. [5] The Manabozho of the Ojibwas. The place selected by Manabush for a ball ground was near a large sand bar on a great lake near Mackinac. He asked the Thunderers to play against the Ana maqkiu. These evil manidoes came out of the ground as Bears. One chief was a silvery white bear, and the other a gray bear. They played the ball game all day. Manabush watched the game from a tree on a knoll. When night came, Manabush went to a spot between the places where the Bear chiefs had played ball. He said, "I want to be a pine tree, cut off halfway between the ground and the top, with two strong branches reaching out over the places where the Bear chiefs lie down." At once he became just such a tree. Now when the players came to the ball game the next morning, the Bear chiefs at once said, "This tree was not standing there yesterday." The Thunderers at once said, "Oh, yes. It was there." Thus they argued. At last one Bear chief said, "This tree is Manabush. Therefore we will kill him." At once they sent for Grizzly Bear. They said, "Climb this tree. Tear off the bark. Scratch it." Grizzly Bear did so. He also bit the branches. Then the Bear chiefs called to Serpent. They said, "Ho, Serpent! Come climb this tree. Bite it. Strangle it in your coils." Serpent at once did so. It was very hard for Manabush; yet he said nothing at all. Then the Bear chiefs said, "No, it is not Manabush. Therefore we will finish the game." Now when they were playing, someone carried the ball so far that the Bear chiefs were left entirely alone. At once Manabush drew an arrow from his quiver and shot the White Bear chief. Then he shot another arrow at Gray Bear chief. He wounded both of them. Then Manabush became a man again and ran for the sand bar. Soon the underground Ana maqkiu came back. They saw the two Bear chiefs were wounded. They immediately called for a flood from the earth to drown Manabush. It came very quickly and followed that one. Then Badger came. He hid Manabush in the earth. As he burrowed, he threw the earth behind him, and that held the water back. So the Ana maqkiu could not find Manabush. Therefore they gave up the search just as the water began to fill Badger's burrow. So Manabush and Badger returned above ground. Now the underground people carried their chiefs to a wigwam. They said to an old woman, "Take care of them." Then Manabush followed them. He met the old woman. He took her skin and hid himself in it. So he went into the wigwam. He killed both the Bear chiefs. Then he took the skins of the bears. When he came out of the wigwam he shook a network of basswood twigs, so that the Ana maqkiu might know he had been there. At once they pursued him. Water poured out of the earth in many places. A great flood came. Manabush at once ran to the top of the highest mountain. The waters followed him closely. He climbed a great pine tree on the mountain top, but the waters soon reached him. Manabush said to the pine, "Grow twice as high." At once it did so. Yet the waters rose higher. Manabush said again to the tree, "Grow twice as high." He said this four times, yet the waters kept rising until they reached his arm pits. Then Manabush called to Kisha Manido for help. The Good Mystery at once commanded the waters to stop. Manabush looked around. There were only a few animals in the water. He called, "Ho, Otter! Come to me and be my brother. Dive down into the water. Bring up some earth that I may make a new world." Otter dived down into the water and was gone a long time. When he appeared again on the surface, Manabush saw he was drowned. Then he called again, "Ho, Mink! Come to me and be my brother. Dive down into the water. Bring me some earth." Then Mink dived into the water. He was gone a long time. He also was drowned. Manabush looked about him again. He saw Muskrat. He called, "Ho, Muskrat! Come to me and be my brother. Dive down into the water. Bring me up earth from below." Muskrat immediately dived into the water. He was gone a very long time. Then when he came up, Manabush went to him. In his paw was a tiny bit of mud. Then Manabush held Muskrat up, and blew on him, so he became alive again. Then Manabush took the earth. He rubbed it between the palms of his hands and threw it out on the water. Thus a new world was made and trees appeared on it. Manabush told Muskrat that his tribe should always be numerous, and that wherever his people should live they should have enough to eat. Then Manabush found Badger. To him he gave the skin of the Gray Bear chief. But he kept for himself the skin of the silvery White Bear chief. ORIGIN OF FIRE _Menomini_ While Manabush was still a young man, he said to Nokomis, the Earth, "Grandmother, it is cold here and we have no fire. I shall go and get some." Nokomis said, "Oh, no! It is too dangerous." But Manabush said, "Yes, we must have fire." At once Manabush made a canoe of birch bark. Then he became a rabbit. So he started eastward, across the great water, to a land where lived an old man who had fire. He guarded the fire carefully so that people might not steal it. Now the old man had two daughters. One day they came out of the sacred wigwam where the fire was kept. Behold! There was a little rabbit, wet and cold and trembling. They took it up at once in their arms. They carried it into the wigwam. They set it down near the fire. So Manabush sat by the fire while the two girls were busy. The old man was asleep. Then Rabbit hopped nearer the fire. When he hopped, the whole earth shook. The old man roused. He said, "My daughters, what has happened?" The girls answered, "Nothing at all. We picked up a little wet rabbit and are letting him dry by the fire." Then again the old man fell asleep. The girls were busy. Suddenly Rabbit seized a stick of burning wood and ran out of the wigwam. He ran with great speed towards his canoe. The old man and the two girls followed him closely. But Rabbit reached his canoe and paddled quickly away, to the wigwam of Nokomis. He paddled so quickly that the fire stick burned fiercely. Sparks flew from it and burned Rabbit. At once Rabbit and Nokomis gave fire to the Thunderers. They have had the care of fire ever since. THE THUNDERERS AND THE ORIGIN OF FIRE _Menomini_ When the Great Mystery created the earth, he made also many manidos. Those of animal form were People of the Underground, and evil. But the bird manidos were Eagles and Hawks. They were the Thunderers. The golden eagle was the Thunder-which-no-one-could-see. Now when Masha Manido, the Good Mystery, saw that Bear was still an animal, he permitted him to change his form. Thus Bear became an Indian, with light skin. All this happened near Menomini River, near where it empties into Green Bay. At this place also Bear first came out of the ground. Bear found himself alone, so he called to Eagle, "Ho, Eagle! come to me and be my brother." So Eagle came down to earth and became an Indian. While the Thunderers stood there, Beaver came near. Now as Beaver was a woman, she became a younger brother of the Thunderers. Soon after, as Bear and Eagle stood on a river bank, they saw a stranger, Sturgeon. They called to him. Therefore Sturgeon became Bear's younger brother and his servant. So also Elk was adopted by the Thunderers. He became a younger brother and water carrier. At another time, Bear was going up Wisconsin River and sat down to rest. Out from beneath a waterfall came Wolf. Wolf said, "What are you doing in this place?" Bear said, "I am traveling to the source of the river. I am resting." Just then Crane came flying by. Bear called, "Ho, Crane. Carry me to my people at the head of the river. Then will I make you my younger brother." Crane stopped and took Bear on his back. As he was flying off, Wolf called, "Ho, Bear. Take me also as your younger brother. I am alone." Bear said, "I will take Wolf as my younger brother." This is how Wolf and Crane became younger brothers of Bear. Wolf afterwards let Dog and Deer join him, having seats in the council. Now Big Thunder lived at Winnebago Lake, near Fond du Lac. The Thunderers were all made by Masha Manido to be of benefit to the whole world. When they return from the Southwest in the spring, they bring with them the rains which make the earth green and the plants and trees to grow. If it were not for the Thunderers, the earth would be dry and all things would perish. Masha Manido gave to the Thunderers squaw corn, which grows on small sticks and has ears of several colors. The Thunderers were also the Makers-of-Fire. Manabush first gave it to them, but he had stolen it from an old man living on an island in the middle of a great lake. Bear and Sturgeon owned rice, which grew abundantly in the waters near Bear's village. One day the Thunderers visited Bear's village and promised to give corn and fire, if Bear would give them rice. The Thunderers are the war chiefs and have charge of the lighting of the fire. So Bear gave rice to them. Then he built a long tepee and a fire was kindled in the center by the Thunderers. From this all the people of the earth received fire. It was carried to them by the Thunderers. When the people travel, the Thunderers go ahead to the camping place and start the fire which is used by all. THE ORIGIN OF FIRE _Chitimacha_ Fire first came from the Great Being, Kutnakin. He gave it into the care of an Indian so old that he was blind. Now the Indians all knew that fire was good, therefore they tried to steal it. The old man could not see them when they came stealthily to his wigwam, but he could feel the presence of anyone. Then he would beat about him with his stick until he drove away the seekers for fire. Now one day an Indian seized the fire suddenly. At once the Watcher of the Fire began beating about him with his stick, until the thief dropped the fire. But the old man did not know he had dropped it. He still beat about him so fiercely with his stick that he pounded some of the fire into a log. That is why fire is in wood. THE GIFTS OF THE SKY GOD _Chitimacha_ Long, long ago, many Indians started to reach the Sky-world. They walked far to the north until they came to the edge of the sky, where it is fitted down over the Earth-plain. When they came to this place, they tried to slip through a crack under the edge, but the Sky-cover came down very tightly and quickly, and crushed all but six. These six had slipped through into the Sky-land. Then these men began to climb up, walking far over the sky floor. At last they came to the lodge of Kutnakin. They stayed with him as his guests. At last they wished to go back to their own lodges on the Earth-plain. Kutnakin said, "How will you go down to the Earth-plain?" One said, "I will go down as a squirrel." So he started to spring down from the Sky-land. He was dashed to pieces. Kutnakin said to the next, "How will you go down to the Earth-plain?" And this man also went as an animal. And so the next one also. They were dashed to pieces. Then the others saw that they were crushed by their fall. Therefore the fourth said, "I will go down as a spider." And he spun a long line down which he climbed safely to earth. The fifth said, "I will go down as an eagle," and he spread his wings and circled through the air until he alighted on a tree branch. The last one said, "I will go down as a pigeon," and so he came softly to earth. Now each one brought back a gift from Kutnakin. The one who came back as a spider had learned how to howl and sing and dance when people were sick. He was the first medicine man. But one Indian had died while these six men were up in the Sky-land. He died before the shaman came down to earth as a spider. Therefore death came among the Indians. Had the shaman come back to earth in time to heal this Indian, there would have been no death. The one who came back as an eagle taught men how to fish. And the pigeon taught the Indians the use of wild maize. MONDAMIN _Ojibwa_ When the springtime came, long, long ago, an Indian boy began his fast, according to the customs of his tribe. His father was a very good man but he was not a good hunter, and often there was no food in the wigwam. So, as the boy wandered from his small tepee in the forest, he thought about these things. He looked at the plants and shrubs and wondered about their uses, and whether they were good for food. He thought, "I must find out about these things in my vision." One day, as he lay stretched upon his bed of robes in the solitary wigwam, a handsome Indian youth came down from Sky-land. He was gaily dressed in robes of green and yellow, with a plume of waving feathers in his hands. "I am sent to you," said the stranger, "by the Great Mystery. He will teach you what you would know." Then he told the boy to rise and wrestle with him. The boy at once did so. At last the visitor said, "That is enough. I will come tomorrow." The next day the beautiful stranger came again from the Sky-land. Again the two wrestled until the stranger said, "That is enough. I will come tomorrow." The third day he came again. Again the fasting youth found his strength increase as he wrestled with the visitor. Then that one said, "It is enough. You have conquered." He sat himself down in the wigwam. "The Great Mystery has granted your wish," he said. "Tomorrow when I come, after we have wrestled and you have thrown me down, you must strip off my garments. Clear the earth of roots and weeds and bury my body. Then leave this place; but come often and keep the earth soft, and pull up the weeds. Let no grass or weeds grow on my grave." Then he went away, but first he said, "Touch no food until after we wrestle tomorrow." The next morning the father brought food to his son; it was the seventh day of fasting. But the boy refused until the evening should come. Again came the handsome youth from the Sky-land. They wrestled long, until he fell to the earth. Then the Indian boy took off the green and yellow robes, and buried his friend in soft, fresh earth. Thus the vision had come to him. Then the boy returned to his father's lodge, for his fasting was ended. Yet he remembered the commands of the Sky-land stranger. Often he visited the grave, keeping it soft and fresh, pulling up weeds and grass. And when people were saying that the Summer-maker would soon go away and the Winter-maker come, the boy went with his father to the place where his wigwam had stood in the forest while he fasted. There they found a tall and graceful plant, with bright silky hair, and green and yellow robes. "It is Mondamin," said the boy. "It is Mondamin, the corn."[6] [6] Then Nokomis, the old woman, Spake, and said to Minnehaha: "'Tis the Moon when leaves are falling; All the wild rice has been gathered, And the maize is ripe and ready; Let us gather in the harvest, Let us wrestle with Mondamin, Strip him of his plumes and tassels, Of his garments green and yellow." --_Hiawatha_ MONDAMIN _Ottawa_ When the Ottawas lived on the Manatoline Islands, in Lake Huron, they had a very strong medicine man. His name was Mass-wa-wei-nini, Living Statue. Then the Iroquois came and drove the Ottawas away. They fled to Lac Court Oreilles, between Lake Superior and the Mississippi River. But Living Statue remained in the land of his people. He remained to watch the Iroquois, so that his people might know of their plans. His two sons stayed with him. At night, the medicine man paddled softly around the island, in his canoe. He paddled through the water around the beautiful green island of his people. One morning he rose early to go hunting. His two boys were asleep. So Living Statue followed the game trail through the forest; then he came to a wide green plain. He watched keenly for the enemy of his people. Then he began to cross the plain. When Living Statue was in the middle of the plain, he saw a small man coming towards him. He wore a red plume in his hair. "Where are you going?" asked Red Plume. "I am hunting," said Living Statue. Red Plume drew out his pipe and they smoked together. "Where does your strength come from?" asked Red Plume. "I have the strength common to all men," said Living Statue. "We must wrestle," said Red Plume. "If you can make me fall, you will cry, 'I have thrown you, _Wa ge me na_!'" Now when they had finished smoking, they began to wrestle. They struggled long. Red Plume was small, but his medicine was strong. Living Statue grew weaker and weaker, but at last, by a sudden effort, he threw Red Plume. At once he cried, "I have thrown you, _Wa ge me na_!" Immediately Red Plume vanished. When Living Statue looked at the place where he had fallen, he saw only _Mondamin_, an ear of corn. It was crooked. There was a red tassel at the top. Someone said, "Take off my robes. Pull me in pieces. Throw me over the plain. Take the spine on which I grew and throw it in shady places near the edge of the wood. Return after one moon. Tell no one." Mass-wa-wei-nini did as the voice directed. Then he returned into the woods. He killed a deer. So he returned to his wigwam. Now after one moon, he returned to the plain. Behold! There were blades and spikes of young corn. And from the broken bits of spine, grew long pumpkin vines. When summer was gone, Living Statue went again to the plain with his sons. The corn was in full ear. Also the large pumpkins were ripe. Thus the Ottawas received the gift of corn. THE CORN WOMAN _Cherokee_ One day a hunter could find no game. He had but a few grains of corn with him. He was very hungry. In the night a dream came to him and he heard the sound of singing. Early the next morning the hunter rose, but again he found no game. When he slept again the dream came to him, and again came the sound of singing, but this time it was nearer. Yet again he could find no game. The third night the dream came to the hunter, and when he awoke, he still heard the song. Then he rose quickly and followed the song. At last he came to a single green stalk of Selu. The stalk spoke to him. It said, "Take off my roots, and take them with you to your wigwam. Tomorrow morning you must chew them before anyone awakes. Then go again into the woods. So will you always be successful in hunting." The green stalk gave him many directions for hunting the elk and the deer. So it talked until the sun rose to the very top of the sky trail. Immediately the green stalk became a woman. She rose gracefully into the air and vanished. Then all the people knew that the hunter had seen Selu, the Corn, wife of Kanati. Therefore the hunter was always successful. DISCOVERY OF THE WILD RICE _Ojibwa_ Long ago, Wenibojó[7] made his home with his grandmother, Nokomis. One day Nokomis said to her grandson, "Prove yourself a man. Take a long journey. Go through the great forests. Fast you. Prepare for the hardships of life." [7] Another form of the Ojibwa Manabozho, or the Menomini Manabush. So Wenibojó took his bow and arrow from his wigwam. He wandered out into the forest. Many days he wandered. Then at last he reached a broad lake, covered thick with heavy-headed stalks. But Wenibojó knew not that the grain was food. So Wenibojó went back to his grandmother, Nokomis. He told her of the broad, quiet lake, with the heavy-headed stalks. So Nokomis came, and in their canoe they gathered the wild rice and sowed it in another lake. [Illustration: WILD RICE TIED IN BUNCHES OR SHEAVES. _From Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology._] [Illustration: WILD RICE KERNELS AFTER THRESHING AND WINNOWING. _From Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology._] Again Wenibojó left Nokomis. With his bow and arrow he wandered far into the forest. Then some little bushes spoke as he walked. "Sometimes they eat us," they said. Wenibojó made no answer. Again the bushes spoke, "Sometimes they eat us." "Who are you talking to?" he asked. "To Wenibojó," they said. So he bent down and dug up the bushes by the roots. The roots were long, like an arrow. They were good to eat, but Wenibojó had fasted too long. After a while, Wenibojó wandered on. He was very hungry. Many bushes spoke to him. Many said, "Sometimes they eat us," but he made no answer. One day he followed the river trail, when the sun was high. Many little bunches of straw were growing out of the water. They spoke to him. They said, "Wenibojó, sometimes they eat us." So Wenibojó picked some of the grains from the heavy-headed stalks and ate. "You are good to eat," he said. "What do they call you?" "They call us _manomin_," answered the wild rice. Then Wenibojó waded far out into the water. He beat out grains and ate many. They were good for food. Then Wenibojó remembered the grain which Nokomis had sown, and he returned to his grandmother and the _manomin_ lake. ORIGIN OF WILD RICE _Ojibwa_ Now one evening Wenibojó returned to his wigwam from hunting. He had found no game. As he came towards his fire, he saw a duck sitting on the edge of a kettle of boiling water. Immediately the duck flew away. Wenibojó looked in the kettle. Behold! Grains were floating upon the water. Then he ate the broth made with the grains. It was good. So Wenibojó followed the trail of the duck. He came to a lake of _manomin_. All the birds and the ducks and geese were eating the grain. Therefore Wenibojó learned to know _manomin_, the wild rice. ORIGIN OF WINNEBAGO _Menomini_ One day Manabush walked along the lake shore. He was tired and hungry. Then he saw, around a sand spit jutting far out into the water, many waterfowl. Now Manabush had with him only a medicine bag. He hung that on a manabush tree in the brush. He put a roll of bark on his back, and returned to the lake shore. He passed slowly by so as not to frighten the birds. Duck and Swan suddenly recognized him, and swam quickly away from the shore. One of the Swans called out, "Ho! Manabush, where are you going?" "I am going to have a dance," said Manabush. "As you may see, I have all my songs with me." Then he called out to all the birds, "Come to me, brothers! Let us sing and dance." At once the birds returned to the shore and walked back upon an open space in the grass. Manabush took the bundle of bark from his back. He placed it on the ground, got out his singing sticks, and then he said to the birds, "Now, all of you dance around me as I drum. Sing as loudly as you can and keep your eyes closed. The first to look will always have red eyes." So Manabush began to beat time upon his bundle of bark. The birds with eyes closed danced around him. Then Manabush began to keep time with one hand, as the birds sang loudly. With the other he seized a Swan by the neck. Swan gave a loud squawk. "That's right, brothers! Sing as loudly as you can," shouted Manabush. Soon he seized another Swan by the neck. Then he seized a Goose. At last there were not so many birds singing. Then a tiny duck opened his eyes to see why. At once he shrieked, "Manabush is killing us! Manabush is killing us!" And he started for the water, followed by the rest of the birds. Now this little duck was a poor runner. Manabush quickly caught him and said, "I won't kill you; but you shall always have red eyes. And you shall be the laughing stock of all the birds." And with that Manabush pushed him so hard, yet holding on to his tail, that the duck went far out into the middle of the lake and his tail came off. Because of that he has red eyes and no tail, even to this day. Then Manabush gathered up the birds he had killed and took them out on the sand spit. He buried them in the sand and built a fire over them to cook them, but he left sticking out the heads of some and the legs of others so he would know where they were. But Manabush was tired. He slapped his thigh and said, "You watch the birds and awaken me if anyone comes near them." He stretched out on the sand with his back to the fire and went to sleep. After awhile, Indians came along in their canoes. They saw the fire and the roasting birds. They went ashore on the sand pit. They pulled out the birds and ate them. But they put back into the sand the heads and feet, just as they had found them. So they departed. Afterwards, Manabush awoke, very hungry. He pulled at the head of a swan. Behold! The head came out, but there was no bird. He pulled at the feet of a goose. No bird was there. So he tried every head and foot; but the birds were gone. He slapped his thigh again and asked, "Who has been here? Someone has robbed me of my feast. I told you to watch." His thigh answered, "I fell asleep also. I was very tired. See! There are people moving away in their canoes! They are dirty and poorly dressed." Then Manabush ran to the point of the sand spit. He could see the people who were just disappearing around a point. He shouted, "Winnebago! Winnebago!" Therefore the Menomini have always called their thievish neighbors Winnebago. THE ORIGIN OF TOBACCO _Menomini_ One day when Manabush was passing by a high mountain, a fragrant odor came to him from a crevice in the cliffs. He went closer. Then he knew that in the mountain was a giant who was the Keeper of the Tobacco. He entered the mouth of a cave, going through a long tunnel to the center of the mountain. There in a great wigwam was the giant. The giant said sternly, "What do you want?" Manabush said, "I want some tobacco." "Come back again in one year," said the giant. "The manidoes have just been here for their smoke. They come but once a year." Manabush looked around. He saw a great number of bags filled with tobacco. He seized one and ran out into the open air, and close after him came the giant. Up to the mountain tops fled Manabush leaping from peak to peak. The giant came close behind him, springing with great bounds. When Manabush reached a very high peak, he suddenly lay flat on the ground; but the giant, leaping, went over him and fell into the chasm beyond. The giant picked himself up, and began to climb up the face of the cliff. He almost reached the top, hanging to it by his hands. Manabush seized him, and drew him upwards, and dropped him down on the ground. He said, "For your meanness, you shall become Kakuene, the jumper. You shall become the pest of those who raise tobacco." Thus the giant became a grasshopper. Then Manabush took the tobacco, and divided it amongst his brothers, giving to each some of the seed. Therefore the Indians are never without tobacco. ORIGIN OF MAPLE SUGAR _Menomini_ One day Manabush returned from the hunt without any food. He could find no game at all. So Nokomis gathered all their robes, and the beaded belts, and their belongings together. They built a new wigwam among the sugar maple trees. Nokomis said, "Grandson, go into the woods and gather for me pieces of birch bark. I am going to make sugar." Manabush went into the woods. He gathered strips of birch bark, which he took back to the wigwam. Nokomis had cut tiny strips of the bark to use as thread in sewing the bark into hollow buckets. Then Nokomis went from tree to tree cutting small holes through the maple bark, so that the sap might flow. She placed a birch-bark vessel under each hole. Manabush followed her from tree to tree looking for the sap to drop. None fell. When Nokomis had finished, Manabush found all the vessels half full. He stuck his finger into the thick syrup. It was sweet. Then he said, "Grandmother, this is all very good, but it will not do. If people make sugar so easily, they will not have to work at all. I will change all this. They must cut wood and keep the sap boiling several nights. Otherwise they will not be busy." So Manabush climbed to the very top of a tree. He showered water all over the maples, like rain. Therefore the sugar in the tree dissolved and flows from the tree as thin sap. This is why the uncles of Manabush and their children always have to work hard when they want to make sugar. [Illustration: BIRCH-BARK YOKE, AND SAP BUCKETS, USED IN MAPLE SUGAR MAKING. _From Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology._] MANABUSH AND THE MOOSE _Menomini_ Manabush killed a moose. He was very hungry, but he was greatly troubled as to how he should eat it. "If I begin at the head," he said, "they will say I ate him headfirst. But if I begin at the side, they will say I ate him sideways. And if I begin at the tail, they will say I ate him tail first." He was greatly troubled. And while he thus spoke, the wind blew two tree branches together. It made a harsh, creaking sound. "I cannot eat in this noise," said Manabush, and he climbed the tree. Immediately the branches caught him by the arm and held him. Then a pack of wolves came and ate up the moose. ORIGIN OF DAY AND NIGHT _Menomini_ One day as Wabus, the Rabbit, traveled through a forest, he came to a clearing on the bank of the river. There sat Totoba, the Saw-whet Owl. The light was dim and Rabbit could not see well. He said to Saw-whet, "Why do you want it so dark? I do not like it. I will cause it to be light." Saw-whet said, "Do so, if you are strong enough. Let us try our powers." So Rabbit and the Owl called a great council of the birds. Some of the birds and animals wanted Rabbit to succeed so that it would be light. Others wanted it to remain dark. Rabbit and Owl began to try their powers. Rabbit began to repeat rapidly, "_Wabon. Wabon. Wabon_" (Light. Light. Light), while Owl kept saying as rapidly as he could, "_Uni tipa qkot. Uni tipa qkot. Uni tipa qkot_" (Night. Night. Night). If one of them should speak the word of the other, he would lose. So Rabbit kept repeating rapidly, "_Wabon. Wabon. Wabon_," while Owl said as rapidly as he could, "_Uni tipa qkot. Uni tipa qkot. Uni tipa qkot._" At last Owl said Rabbit's word, "_Wabon_," so he lost. Therefore Rabbit decided there should be light. But because some of the animals and birds could hunt only in the dark, he said it should be night part of the time. But all the rest of the time it is day. ORIGIN OF THE BEAR _Cherokee_ Long ago, before the white man came, in the land of the Cherokees was a clan called the Ani Tsagulin. One of the boys of the clan used to wander all day long in the mountains. He never ate his food at home. "Why do you do so?" asked his father and mother. The boy did not answer. "Why do you do so?" they asked many days, as the boy wandered away into the hills. He did not answer them. Then his mother saw that long brown hair covered his body. They said again, "Where do you go?" They asked, "Why do you not eat at home?" At last the boy said, "There is plenty to eat there. It is better than the corn in the village. Soon I shall stay in the woods all the time." His father and mother said, "No." The boy kept saying, "It is better than here. I am beginning to be different. Soon I shall not want to live here. If you come with me you will not have to hunt, or to plant corn. But first you must fast seven days." The people began to talk about it. They said, "Often we do not have enough to eat here. There he says there is plenty. We will go with him." So they fasted seven days. Then they left their village and went to the mountains. Now the other tribes had heard what they had talked in their village. At once they sent messengers. But when the messengers met them, they had started towards the mountains and their hair was long and brown. Their nature was changing. This was because they had fasted seven days. But the Ani Tsagulin would not go back to their village. They said to the others: "We are going where there is always plenty to eat. Hereafter we shall be called _Yana_, bears. When you are hungry, come into the woods and call us, and we will give you food to eat." So they taught these messengers how to call them and to hunt them. Because, even though they may seem to be killed, the Ani Tsagulin live forever. ORIGIN OF THE WORD CHICAGO _Ojibwa_ Once an Ottawa hunter and his wife lived on the shores of Lake Michigan. Then the hunter went south, toward the end of the lake, to hunt. When he reached the lake[8] where he had caught beaver the year before, it was still covered with ice. Then he tapped the ice to find the thinner places where the beaver families lived. He broke holes at these weaker points in the ice, and went to his wigwam to get his traps. [8] Between Milwaukee and Chicago, going south to where Chicago now stands. Now the hunter's wife chanced to pass one of these holes and she saw a beaver on the ice. She caught it by the tail and called to the hunter to come and kill it quickly, before it could get back into the water. "No," said the hunter, "if I kill this beaver, the others will become frightened. They will escape from the lake by other openings in the ice." Then the woman became angry, and they quarreled. When the sun was near setting, the hunter went out on the ice again, to set more traps. When he returned to his tepee, his wife had gone. He thought she had gone to make a visit. The next morning she had not returned, and he saw her footprints. So he followed her trail to the south. As he followed her trail, he saw that the footprints gradually changed. At last they became the trail of a skunk. The trail ended in a marsh, and many skunks were in that marsh. Then he returned to his people. And he called the place, "The Place of the Skunk." ORIGIN OF THE WORD CHICAGO[9] _Menomini_ [9] Schoolcraft gives the origin of the word Chicago, as follows: Chi-cag The animal of the leek or wild onion. Chi-cag-o-wunz The wild leek or pole-cat plant. Chi-ca-go Place of the wild leek. It would really seem, from the myths and the origin of the word, as given above, that the name originated from the great amount of skunk weed on the marshes now covered by the city. Potawatomi Indians used to live in the marshes where Chicago now stands. They sent out word to the other tribes that hunting was good. Then the Menomini Indians went to the marshes for game. In the night their dogs barked much. But when the Menomini Indians reached the spot where the dogs barked, they found only skunks. THE COMING OF MANABUSH _Menomini_ When the daughter of Nokomis, the Earth, died, Nokomis wrapped her new baby in soft dry grass. She laid him on the ground under a large wooden bowl. Then she mourned four days for her daughter. At the end of four days, Nokomis heard a sound in her wigwam. It came from the wooden bowl. Then she remembered. She took up the bowl. At once she saw a tiny white rabbit, with trembling pink ears. She took it up. She said, "Oh, my dear little Rabbit. Oh, my Manabush." She took care of him. One day Rabbit hopped across the wigwam. The earth shook. At once the evil underground spirits, the Ana maqkiu, said to one another, "What has happened? A great manido is born somewhere!" Immediately they began to plot against him. In this way Manabush came to earth. He soon grew to be a young man. THE STORY OF MANABUSH[10] _Menomini_ [10] The Manabozho of the Ojibwa given by Longfellow as Hiawatha. The daughter of Nokomis, the Earth, is the mother of Manabush, who is also the Fire. Flint first grew up out of Nokomis, and was alone. Then Flint made a bowl and filled it with earth. Wabus, the Rabbit, came from the earth, and became a man. Thus was Manabush created. Beneath the earth lived the Underground People, the enemies of Manabush. They were the Ana maqkiu who annoyed him constantly, and sought to destroy him. Now Manabush shaped a piece of flint to make an axe. While he was rubbing it on a rock, he heard the rock make sounds: _Ke ka ke ka ke ka ke ka_ _Goss goss goss goss_ He soon understood what the rock was saying: that he was alone on the earth. That he had neither father, mother, brother, nor sister. This is what Flint said while Manabush was rubbing it upon the rock. While he was thinking of this, he heard something coming. It was Mokquai, the Wolf. He said to Manabush, "Now you have a brother, for I, too, am alone. We shall live together and I will hunt for you." Manabush said, "I am glad to see you, my brother. Therefore I shall make you like myself." So he made him a man. Then Manabush and his brother moved away to the shore of a lake and there built a wigwam. Manabush told his brother of the evil spirits, the Underground People, who lived beneath the water. He said, "Never go into the water, and never cross on the ice." Now one day Wolf-brother went a-hunting. It was late when he started back. He found himself on the shore of the lake, just opposite the wigwam. He could see it clearly. He did not want to make a long journey around by the lake shore; therefore he began to cross on the ice. When he reached the middle of the lake, the ice broke. The Underground People pulled him under the water and he was drowned. Now Manabush knew this. He mourned four days for Wolf-brother. On the fifth day, while he was following the hunting trail, he saw him approaching. Wolf-brother said, "My fate will be the fate of all our people. They will all die, but after four days they will return." Then Manabush saw it was only the shade of his brother. Then he said, "My brother, return to the place of the setting sun. You are now called Naqpote. You will have charge of the dead." The Wolf-shade said, "If I go there, and others follow me, we shall not be able to return when we leave this place." Manabush again spoke. He said, "Go, Naqpote. Prepare a wigwam for others. Build a large fire that they may be guided to it. When they arrive there must be a wigwam for them." Thus Naqpote left the earth. He lives in the land of the shades, in the country of the setting sun, where the earth is cut off. MANABOZHO AND WEST _Ojibwa_ Manabozho lived with his grandmother Nokomis, the Earth, on the edge of a wide prairie. The first sound he heard was that of an owl. He quickly climbed down the tree. He ran to Nokomis. "Noko," he cried, "I have heard a monido." Nokomis said, "What kind of a noise did it make?" "It said, _Ko ho, Ko ho!_" said Manabozho. "Oh, it is only a bird," said Nokomis. One day Manabozho thought, "It is very strange I know so little and grandmother is so wise. I wonder if I have any father or mother." He went back to the wigwam. He was very silent. "What is the matter?" said Nokomis. Manabozho asked, "Have I no father or mother?" Now his mother had died when he was a very little baby, but Nokomis did not want to tell him. At last she said, "West is your father. He has three brothers. They are North, East, and South. They have great power. They travel on mighty wings. Your mother is not alive." Manabozho said, "I will visit my father," but he meant to make war on him because he had learned that his father had not been kind to his mother and he meant to punish him. Manabozho started on his journey. He traveled very rapidly. He went very far at each step. So at last he met his father, West, on the top of a high mountain. West was glad to see his son. Manabozho pretended to be glad. They talked much. One day the son asked, "What are you most afraid of on earth?" "Nothing," said West. Manabozho said, "Oh, yes, there must be something." At last West said, "There is a black stone on earth. I am afraid of that. If it should strike me, it would injure me." West said this was a great secret. One day he asked Manabozho, "What are you most afraid of?" "Nothing," was the answer. "Oh, yes, there must be something you are afraid of," said West. The son said, "_Ie-ee Ie-ee_--it is--it is--" He seemed afraid to mention it. West said, "Don't be afraid!" Then at last his son said, "It is the root of the _apukwa_, the bulrush." They quarreled because West had not been kind to the mother of Manabozho. Some days later they quarreled. Manabozho said, "I will get some of the black rock." "Oh, no! Do not do so," cried West. "Oh, yes!" said his son. West said at once, "I will get some of the _apukwa_ root." "Oh, no!" cried Manabozho, pretending to be afraid. "Do not! Do not!" "Oh, yes!" said West. Manabozho at once went out and brought to his father's wigwam a large piece of black rock. West pulled up and brought in some bulrush roots. Manabozho threw the black rock at West. It broke in pieces. Therefore you may see pieces lying around even to this day. West struck his son with the bulrush root. Thus they fought. But at last Manabozho drove West far over the plains to the Darkening Land. So West came to the edge of the world, where the earth is broken off short. Then he cried, "Stop, my son! I am immortal, therefore I cannot be killed. I will remain here on the edge of the Earth-plain. You must go about doing good. You must kill monsters and serpents and all evil things. All the kingdoms of the earth are divided, but at the last you may sit with my brother North."[11] [11] Back retreated Mudjekeewis, Rushing westward o'er the mountains, Stumbling westward down the mountains, Three whole days retreated fighting, Still pursued by Hiawatha To the doorways of the West-Wind, To the portals of the Sunset ... . . . . "Hold," at length cried Mudjekeewis, "Hold, my son, my Hiawatha! 'Tis impossible to kill me, For you cannot kill the immortal." --_Hiawatha_ Thus Manabozho became the Northwest wind. MANABUSH AND THE GREAT FISH _Menomini_[12] [12] The Ojibwas have a similar myth. After his brother Wolf had died, Manabush looked about him. He found he was no longer alone on earth. There were many other people, the children of Nokomis. They were his aunts and uncles. The evil manidoes annoyed the people very much. Therefore Manabush wished to destroy them. Therefore he went to the shores of the lake where they lived. He called to the waters to disappear. Four times he called out. At once the waters vanished. There lay the Ana maqkiu. They lay on the mud in the bottom of the lake. They looked like fishes. The chief lay near the shore. He was very large. Manabush said to Great Fish, "I shall destroy you because you will not allow my people to come near the shore." So he went towards Great Fish. But the smaller manidoes caused the waters to return. Thus they all escaped. Then Manabush went into the woods. He made a canoe of birch bark. He wanted to destroy Great Fish in the water. As he left the shore in his canoe, he began to sing, "Great Fish, come and swallow me." Only the young fish came near. Manabush said scornfully, "I do not wish you. I want your chief to come and swallow me." Great Fish was much annoyed. He darted forward and swallowed Manabush and his canoe. Thus Manabush found himself in the Great Fish. He looked about him. Many of his people were there. Bear and Deer, Porcupine and Raven, Buffalo, Pine-tree Squirrel, and many others. Manabush said to Buffalo, "My uncle, how did you get here? I never saw you near the water, but always on the prairie." Buffalo said, "I came near the lake to get some fresh green grass. Great Fish caught me." And thus said all the animals. They said, "We came near the lake and Great Fish swallowed us." Then Manabush said, "We will now have to go to the shore of Nokomis, my grandmother. You will all have to help me." At once they all began to dance around inside of Great Fish. Therefore he began to swim quickly towards shore. Manabush began to cut a hole over his head, so they could get out when Great Fish reached the shore of Nokomis, the Earth. They sang a magic song. They sang, "I see the sky. I see the sky." Pine Squirrel had a curious voice. He hopped around singing, "_Sek-sek-sek-sek!_" This was very amusing to the other people. Great Fish thought, "I ought not to have swallowed that man. I must swim to the shore where Nokomis lives." So he swam quickly until he reached the beach. Then Manabush cut a larger hole. Thus they all climbed out of Great Fish. The birds helped Manabush. They stood on the sides of Great Fish and picked the flesh from his bones.[13] [13] And again the sturgeon, Nahma, Heard the shout of Hiawatha, Heard his challenge of defiance, The unnecessary tumult, Ringing far across the water. . . . . In his wrath he darted upward, Flashing leaped into the sunshine, Opened his great jaws and swallowed Both canoe and Hiawatha. --_Hiawatha_ THE DEPARTURE OF MANABUSH _Menomini_ Now Manabush was going away. He went to Mackinac. When he reached there, he made a high, narrow rock, and this he leaned against the cliff. This rock is as high as an arrow can be shot from a bow. At this place he was seen by his people for the last time. Before he went, he talked with them. Manabush said, "I am going away now. I have been badly treated by other people who live in the land about you. I shall go across a great water towards the rising sun, where there is a land of rocks. There I shall set up my wigwam. When you hold a _mita-wiko-nik_ and are all together, you shall think of me. When you speak my name, I shall hear you. Whatever you ask, that I will do." Then Manabush spoke no more to his people. He entered the canoe. Then he went slowly over the great water, to the land of rocks. He vanished from his people as he went towards the rising sun.[14] [14] The Ojibwas say he went toward the setting sun. Thus departed Hiawatha, Hiawatha the Beloved, In the glory of the sunset, In the purple mists of evening, To the regions of the home-wind, Of the Northwest wind, Keewaydin ... --_Hiawatha_ THE RETURN OF MANABUSH _Menomini_ The uncles of Manabush, the people, used to visit a rock near Mackinac where the old men said Manabush was living. They built a long lodge there. They sang in their _mita-wiko-nik_ there. Manabush heard them. Sometimes he came to them. He appeared as a little white rabbit, trembling, with pink ears, just as he had first appeared to Nokomis, his grandmother. THE REQUEST FOR IMMORTALITY _Menomini_ One day long after Manabush had gone away from his people, an Indian dreamed that he spoke to him. At daylight, he sought seven friends, chief men of the Mita-wit. They held a council together, and then rose and went in search of Manabush. The Dreamer blackened his face. On the shore of the Great Waters, they entered canoes, and paddled toward a rocky place in the Land of the Rising Sun. Very long they paddled over the water, until they reached the land where dwelt Manabush. Soon they reached his wigwam. Manabush bade them enter. The door of the wigwam lifted and fell again as each one entered. When all were seated, Manabush said: "My friends, why is it you have come so long a journey to see me? What is it you wish?" All but one answered, at once: "Manabush, we wish some hunting medicine; thus we may supply our people with much food." "You shall have it," said Manabush. Then he turned to the silent one. He asked, "What do you wish?" The Indian replied, "I wish no hunting medicine. I wish to live forever." Manabush rose and went towards the Indian. He took him by the shoulders and carried him to his sleeping place. He set him down, and said: "You shall be a stone. Thus you shall be everlasting." Immediately the other Indians arose and went down to the shore. In their canoes they returned to their own land. It is from these seven who returned that we know of the abode of Manabush. PEBOAN AND SEEGWAN _Ojibwa_ Long ago an old man sat alone in his lodge beside a frozen stream. The fire was dying out, and it was near the end of winter. Outside the lodge, the cold wind swept before it the drifting snow. So the old man sat alone, day after day, until at last a young warrior entered his lodge. He was fresh and joyous and youthful. The old man welcomed him. He drew out his long pipe and filled it with tobacco. He lighted it from the dying embers of the fire. Then they smoked together. The old man said, "I blow my breath and the streams stand still. The water becomes stiff and hard like the stones." "I breathe," said the warrior, "and flowers spring up over the plain." "I shake my locks," said the old man, "and snow covers the land. Leaves fall from the trees. The birds fly away. The animals hide. The earth becomes hard." "I shake my locks," said the young man, "and the warm rain falls. Plants blossom; the birds return; the streams flow." Then the sun came up over the edge of the Earth-plain, and began to climb the trail through the Sky-land. The old man slept. Behold! The frozen stream near by began to flow. The fire in the lodge died out. Robins sat upon the lodge poles and sang. Then the warrior looked upon the sleeping old man. Behold! It was Peboan, the Winter-maker.[15] [15] In his lodge beside a river, Close beside a frozen river, Sat an old man, sad and lonely, White his hair was as a snow-drift; Dull and low his fire was burning, And the old man shook and trembled, . . . . Hearing nothing but the tempest As it roared along the forest, Seeing nothing but the snow-storm, As it whirled and hissed and drifted. All the coals were white with ashes And the fire was slowly dying, As a young man, walking lightly, At the open doorway entered. Red with blood of youth his cheeks were, Soft his eyes, as stars in Spring-time. --_Hiawatha_ THE GRAVE FIRES _Ojibwa_ A small war party of Ojibwas fought, long ago, with enemies on an open plain. Then their chief was shot by an arrow in his breast as he rode after the retreating enemy. When his warriors found their chief dead, they placed him, sitting, with his back against a tree. They left him there with his bow and arrows. But the chief was not dead. He saw the warriors leave him and he ran after them as they rode the homeward trail. He followed closely in their trail. He slept in their camp, yet they did not see him. When the war party reached their own village, they sang the song of victory, yet they sent up the death wail for those who were killed. The women and children came out. The chief heard his warriors tell of his death. He said, "No, I am not dead," but they did not hear him. Then the chief went to his own wigwam. His wife was weeping, and wailing for his death. "I am here," he said, but she did not hear him. "I am hungry," he said. She made no answer. Only she raised again the death wail. Then the chief thought. Perhaps only his spirit had returned. Perhaps his body was yet on the field of battle. So he followed the trail back to the battle field. It was a four days' journey. For three days he saw no one as he journeyed. The fourth day, on the edge of the plain, he saw a fire in his trail. He walked to one side and the other; the fire moved also and always burned before him. Then he turned in another direction. The fire was again in his trail. Then he sprang suddenly, and jumped through the flame. At once he awoke. He was sitting on the ground, with his back against a tree. Over his head in the branches sat a large war eagle. Now Eagle was his guardian, because he had come to him in his fasting vision in his youth. Then the wounded chief arose. He followed the trail of the war party to his village. Four days he followed the homeward trail. He came to a stream which flowed between him and his wigwam, therefore he gave the whoop which means the return of an absent friend. Then the Indians began to think. They said, "No one is absent. Perhaps it is an enemy." So they sent over a canoe with armed men. Thus the chief landed among his own people. Then the chief gave them instructions. He said it was pleasing to a spirit to have a fire burning at the grave for four days after the body was buried. This was because it is four days' journey on the death trail to the Ghost-land; so the spirit needed a fire at his camping place every evening. Also he said the spirit needed his bow and arrow, his best robes, in his journey. Therefore the Ojibwas burn a fire four nights at a new grave, that the spirit may be happy in following the Trail of the Dead to the Spirit-land.[16] [16] Thus they buried Minnehaha. And at night a fire was lighted, On her grave four times was kindled, For her soul upon its journey To the Islands of the Blessed. From his doorway Hiawatha Saw it burning in the forest, Lighting up the gloomy hemlocks; From his sleepless bed uprising, From the bed of Minnehaha, Stood and watched it at the doorway, That it might not be extinguished, Might not leave her in the darkness. --_Hiawatha_ THE DEATH TRAIL _Choctaw_ After a man dies, he must travel far on the death trail. It journeys to the Darkening-land, where Sun slips over the edge of the Earth-plain. Then the spirit comes to a deep, rapid stream. There are steep and rugged hills on each side, so that one may not follow a land trail. The Trail of the Dead leads over the stream, and the only bridge is a pine log. It is a very slippery log, and even the bark has been peeled off. Also on the other side of the bridge are six persons. They have rocks in their hands, and throw them at spirits when they are just at the middle of the log. Now when an evil spirit sees the stones coming, he tries to dodge them. Therefore he slips off the log. He falls far into the water below, where are evil things. The water carries him around and around, as in a whirlpool, and then brings him back again among the evil things. Sometimes evil spirit climbs up on the rocks and looks over into the country of the good spirits. But he cannot go there. Now the good spirit walks over safely. He does not mind the stones and does not dodge them. He crosses the stream and goes to a good hunting land. It is more beautiful there than on the Earth-plain. There are no storms. The sky is always blue, and the grass is green, and there are many buffaloes. Therefore there is always feasting and dancing. THE DUCK AND THE NORTH WEST WIND _Ojibwa_ Once Shingebiss, the duck, lived all alone in his wigwam on the shore of a lake. It was winter and very cold. Ice had frozen over the top of the water. Shingebiss had but four logs of wood in his wigwam, but each log would burn one month and there were but four winter months.[17] [17] And at night Kabibonokka To the lodge came, wild and wailing, Heaped the snow in drifts about it, Shouted down into the smoke-flue, Shook the lodge poles in his fury, Flapped the curtain of the doorway, Shingebis, the diver, feared not, Shingebis, the diver, cared not; Four great logs had he for firewood, One for each moon of the winter, And for food the fishes served him, By his blazing fire he sat there, Warm and merry, eating, laughing, Singing, "O Kabibonokka, You are but my fellow mortal!" --_Hiawatha_ [Illustration: PICTURE WRITING. AN OJIBWA MEDA SONG. _From Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology._] Shingebiss had no fear of the cold. He would go out on the coldest day. He would seek for places where rushes and flags grew through the ice. He pulled them up and dived through the broken ice for fish. Thus he had plenty of food. Thus he went to his wigwam dragging long strings of fish behind him on the ice. North West noticed this. He said, "Shingebiss is a strange man. I will see if I cannot get the better of him." North West shook his rattle and the wind blew colder. Snow drifted high. But Shingebiss did not let his fire go out. In the worst storms he continued going out, seeking for the weak places in the ice where the roots grew. North West noticed this. He said, "Shingebiss is a strange man. I shall go and visit him." That night North West went to the door of the wigwam. Shingebiss had cooked his fish and eaten it. He was lying on his side before the fire, singing songs. He sang, Ka neej Ka neej Be in Be in Bon in Bon in Oc ee Oc ee Ca We-ya Ca We-ya. This meant, "Spirit of North West, you are but my fellow man." Now he sang this because he knew North West was standing at the door of his wigwam. He could feel his cold breath. He kept right on singing his songs. North West said, "Shingebiss is a strange man. I shall go inside." Therefore North West entered the wigwam and sat down on the opposite side of the lodge. Shingebiss lay before the fire and sang: "Spirit of North West, you are but my fellow man." Then he got up and poked the fire. The wigwam became very warm. At last North West said, "I cannot stand this. I must go out. Shingebiss is a very strange man." So he went out. Then North West shook his rattles until the great storms came. Thus there was much ice and snow and wind. All the flag roots were frozen in hard ice. Still Shingebiss went fishing. He bit off the frozen flags and rushes, and broke the hard ice around their roots. He dived for fish and went home dragging strings of fish behind him on the ice. North West noticed this. He said, "Shingebiss must have very strong medicine. Some manito is helping him. I cannot conquer him. Shingebiss is a very strange man." So he let him alone. HOW THE HUNTER DESTROYED SNOW _Menomini_ Once a hunter with his wife and two children lived in a tepee. Each day the hunter went out for game. He was a good hunter and he brought back much game. But one day, after autumn had gone and winter had come, the hunter met Kon, Snow, who froze his feet badly. Then the hunter made a large wooden bowl and filled it with Kon. He buried it in a deep hole where the midday sun could shine down upon it, and where Snow could not run away. Then he covered the hole with sticks and leaves so that Snow would be a prisoner until summer. Now when midsummer came, and everything was warm, the hunter came back to this hole and pulled away the sticks and leaves. He let the midday sun shine down upon Kon so that he melted. Thus the hunter punished Kon. But when autumn came again, one day the hunter heard someone say to him, when he was in the forest: "You punished me last summer, but when winter comes I will show you how strong I am." The hunter knew it was Kon's voice. He at once built another tepee, near the one in which he lived, and filled it full of firewood. At last winter came again. When the hunter was in the forest one day, he heard Kon say: "Now I am coming to visit you, as I said I should. In four days I shall be at your tepee." When the hunter returned home, he made ready more firewood; he built a fire at the two sides of the tepee. After four days, everything became frozen. It was very cold. The hunter kept up the fires in the tepee. He took out all the extra fur robes to cover his wife and children. The cold became more severe. It was hard not to freeze. On the fifth day, towards night, the hunter looked out from his tepee upon a frozen world. Then he saw a stranger coming. He looked like any other stranger, except that he had a very large head and an immense beard. When he came to the tepee, the hunter asked him in. He at once came in, but he would not go near either of the fires. This puzzled the hunter, and he began to watch the stranger. It became colder and colder after the stranger had come into the tepee. The hunter added more wood to each of the fires until they roared. The stranger seemed too warm. The hunter added more wood, and the stranger became warmer and warmer. Then the hunter saw that as he became warm, he seemed to shrink. At last his head and body were quite small. Then the hunter knew who the stranger guest was. It was Kon, the Cold. So he kept up his fires until Kon melted altogether away. THE PIPE OF PEACE _Ojibwa_ In the olden days, so they say, the Indians fought much. Always they followed the war trail. Then Gitche Manito, the Good Mystery, thought, "This is not well. My children should not always follow the war trail." Therefore he called a great council. He called all the tribes together. Now this was on the upper Mississippi. Gitche Manito stood on a great wall of red rock. On the green plain below him were the wigwams of his children. All the tribes were there. Gitche Manito broke off a piece of the red rock. He made a pipe out of it. He made a pipe by turning it in his hands. Then he smoked the pipe, and the smoke made a great cloud in the sky. He spoke in a loud voice. He said, "See, my people, this stone is red. It is red because it is the flesh of all tribes. Therefore can it be used only for a pipe of peace when you cease to follow the war trail. Therefore it is the Place of Peace. To all the tribes it belongs." Then the cloud grew larger and Gitche Manito vanished in it. Now therefore, because of the command of Gitche Manito, the Indians smoke the pipe of peace when they cease to follow the war trail. And because it is the Place of Peace, the tomahawk and the scalping knife are never lifted there.[18] [18] On the Mountains of the Prairie, On the great Red Pipe-stone Quarry, Gitche Manito, the mighty, He the Master of Life descending, On the red crags of the quarry, Stood erect and called the nations, Called the tribes of men together. . . . . "I am weary of your quarrels, Weary of your wars and bloodshed, Weary of your prayers for vengeance, Of your wranglings and dissensions; . . . . Break the red stone from this quarry, Mould and make it into Peace-pipes, Take the reeds that grow beside you, Deck them with your brightest feathers, Smoke the calumet together." --_Hiawatha_ THE THUNDER'S NEST _Ojibwa_ Thunder had a Nest where a very small bird sits upon her eggs during fair weather. When an egg hatches, the skies are rent with bolts of thunder. THE PIPESTONE _Sioux_ Before there were any people on the earth, Gitche Manito hunted the buffalo. He killed them and cooked them before his camp fire on the Red Rocks, on the top of the Coteau des Prairies, the Mountain of the Prairies. So the blood of the buffaloes ran over the rocks and made them red. Gitche Manito was then a very large bird. We can still see his tracks in the red stone. Now it happened a large snake crawled out of its hole to eat the eggs of the Bird. Then at once the egg hatched out in a clap of thunder. Gitche Manito took a piece of stone to throw at the snake. He shaped it in his hands like to a man. Now this man's feet stood fast in the ground where he was. Thus he stayed for many ages; therefore he grew very old. He was older than a hundred men at the present time. At last another tree grew beside him. It grew a long while, until a snake bit off the roots. Then the two people left the pipestone quarry. They wandered away. They were the grandfathers of all the tribes. THE PIPESTONE _Knisteneaux_ A great flood came. Then the tribes met on the Coteau des Prairies, on the Mountain of the Prairies, to get out of the way of the waters. Then the waters rose higher; thus the tribes were drowned. Gitche Manito made them into stone. Therefore the stone is red. Now when the waters were rising, a young woman caught the foot of a large bird flying near. It was War-eagle. He carried her to the top of a large mountain. Thus she was saved. Then she married War-eagle. Now all the tribes were drowned. Therefore the children of War-eagle and the Indian woman were the ancestors of all the Indians. PAU-PUK-KEE-WIS _Ojibwa_ A man found himself standing alone on the prairie. He was very large and strong. He thought to himself, "How did I come here? Am I all alone on the earth? I must travel until I find the abode of men." So he started out. After a long time he came to a wood. There were decayed stumps there, very old, as if cut in the olden times. Again he journeyed a long time. He came to a wood in which there were more stumps, newly cut. Then he came to the fresh trail of people. He saw wood just cut, lying in heaps. At sunset he came out of the forest. He saw a village of many lodges standing on rising ground. He said, "I will go there on the run." He ran. When he came to the first lodge, he sprang over it. Those within saw something pass over the smoke hole. They heard a thump on the ground. They said, "What is that?" They ran out. They invited him to enter. Many warriors were in the wigwam, and an old chief. The chief said, "Where are you going? What is your name?" He said, "I am in search of adventures. I am Pau-puk-kee-wis." Then they laughed. After a short time he went on. A young man went with him as his _mesh-in-au-wa_, as his pipe bearer. As they journeyed, Pau-puk-kee-wis did strange things. He leaped over trees. He whirled on one foot until dust clouds were flying. One day a large village of wigwams came in their trail. They went to it. The chief told them of evil manitoes who had killed all the people going to that village. War parties had been sent against them. The warriors were all killed. Pau-puk-kee-wis said, "I will go and visit them." The chief said, "Oh, no. They are evil. They will kill you." Pau-puk-kee-wis said, "I will go and visit them." Then the chief said, "I will send twenty warriors with you." So Pau-puk-kee-wis, with his pipe bearer and twenty warriors, started off at once. They came near that lodge. Pau-puk-kee-wis said, "Hide here. Thus you will be safe. You will see what I do." He went to that lodge. He entered. The manitoes were very ugly. They were evil looking. There were a father and four sons. They offered him food. He refused it. The old manito said, "What have you come for?" "Nothing," said Pau-puk-kee-wis. "Do you want to wrestle?" asked the manito. "Yes," said Pau-puk-kee-wis. At once the eldest brother rose and they began to wrestle. These manitoes were very evil. They wished to kill Pau-puk-kee-wis in order to eat him. But that man was very strong. He tripped the manito. Then he threw him down. His head struck on a stone. The next brother wrestled with Pau-puk-kee-wis. He fell. Then the other two wrestled. All four fell on the ground. The old manito began to run. Pau-puk-kee-wis pursued him. He pursued him in a very queer way, just for fun. Sometimes he leaped over him and ran ahead. Sometimes he pushed him ahead from behind. All the twenty warriors cried, "Ha! ha! ha! Ha! ha! ha! Pau-puk-kee-wis is driving him." At last Pau-puk-kee-wis killed him. Thus all the evil manitoes were dead. Then they looked on the bones of the warriors and people who had been killed by those evil ones. Then Pau-puk-kee-wis took three arrows. He performed a ceremony to Gitche Manito. He shot one arrow. He cried, "You who are lying down, rise up or you will be hit." At once the bones all moved to one place. He shot a second arrow. He cried, "You who are lying down, rise up, or you will be hit." The proper bones moved together, toward each other. He shot a third arrow. He cried, "You who are lying down, rise up, or you will be hit." The people became alive again. Then Pau-puk-kee-wis led them back to the village of the friendly chief. This one then came to him with his council. He said, "You should rule my people. You only are able to defend them." Pau-puk-kee-wis said, "I am going on a journey. Let my pipe bearer be chief." So he was. Pau-puk-kee-wis began his journey. "Ho! ho! ho!" cried all the people. "Come back again. Ho! ho! ho!" He journeyed on. He came to a lake made by beavers.[19] He stood on the beaver dam and watched. He saw the head of a beaver peering out. [19] With a smile he spake in this wise: "O, my friend, Ahmeek, the beaver, Cool and pleasant is the water; Let me dive into the water, Let me rest there in your lodges; Change me, too, into a beaver!" Cautiously replied the beaver, With reserve he thus made answer, "Let me first consult the others, Let me ask the other beavers." --_Hiawatha_ "Make me a beaver like yourself," said Pau-puk-kee-wis. He wanted to see how beavers lived. "I will go and ask what the others have to say," said Beaver. Soon all the beavers looked out to see if he were armed. He had left his bow and arrow in a hollow tree. "Make me a beaver," said Pau-puk-kee-wis. "I wish to live among you." "Yes," said Beaver chief. "Lie down." He lay down. He found himself a beaver. "You must make me large," he said. "Yes," said Beaver chief. "When we get into the lodge, you shall be made very large." So they all dived down into the water again. They passed heaps of tree limbs and logs lying on the bottom of the river. "What are these for?" asked Pau-puk-kee-wis. "For our winter food," said Beaver chief. Now when they got into the lodge, they made Pau-puk-kee-wis very large. They made him ten times larger than themselves. Soon a beaver came running in. He cried, "The Indians are hunting us." At once all the beavers ran out of the lodge door on the bottom of the river. Pau-puk-kee-wis was too large. He could not get out. The Indians broke down the dam. They lowered the water. They broke in the lodge. They saw that one. "_Ty-au! Ty-au!_" cried the Indians. "_Me-sham-mek_, the chief of the beavers, is here." So they killed him. Yet Pau-puk-kee-wis kept thinking. They placed his great body on a pole. Seven or eight Indians carried it. They went back to their lodges. They sent out invitations for a great feast. Then the women came out to skin him on the snow. When his flesh became cold, the _Jee-bi_ of Pau-puk-kee-wis went away. His spirit went away. So Pau-puk-kee-wis found himself standing alone on a prairie. Soon there came near by a herd of elk. He thought, "They are very happy. I will be an elk." He went near them, and said, "Make me an elk. I wish to live among you." They said, "Yes. Get down on your hands and knees." Soon he found himself an elk. "I want big horns and big feet," said Pau-puk-kee-wis. "I want to be very large." "Yes, yes," said the elk. So they made him very large. At last they said, "Are you large enough?" Pau-puk-kee-wis said, "Yes." So he lived with the elks. One cold day they all went into the woods for shelter. Soon some of the herd came racing by like a strong wind. At once all began to run. "Keep out on the prairies," they said to Pau-puk-kee-wis. But he was so large he got tangled up in the thick woods. He soon smelt the hunters. They were all following his trail. Pau-puk-kee-wis jumped high. He broke down saplings. Then the hunters shot him. He jumped higher. He jumped over the tree tops. Then all the hunters shot him. So they killed him. Then they skinned him. When his flesh became cold, the spirit of Pau-puk-kee-wis went away. Thus Pau-puk-kee-wis had many adventures. After a long time Manabozho killed him. Then he was really dead because he was killed in his human form. Manabozho said, "You shall not be permitted to live on the earth again. I will make you a war eagle." Thus Pau-puk-kee-wis became a war eagle. He lives in the sky. IAGOO, THE BOASTER[20] _Ojibwa_ [20] From his lodge went Pau-puk-keewis, Came with speed into the village, Found the young men all assembled In the lodge of old Iagoo, Listening to his monstrous stories, To his wonderful adventures. . . . . Homeward now returned Iagoo, The great traveller, the great boaster, Full of new and strange adventures, Marvels many and many wonders. --_Hiawatha_ Iagoo was a great boaster. Once he told the people of a water lily he had seen. He said the leaf was large enough to make garments for his wife and daughter. One evening Iagoo was sitting in his wigwam, on the bank of the river. He heard ducks quack on the stream. He shot at them, without aiming. He shot through the door of the wigwam. Behold! His arrow pierced a swan flying by. It killed many ducks in the stream. The arrow flew farther. It killed two loons, just coming up from beneath the water. Then it killed a very large fish. Iagoo went hunting. He followed the trail of the deer through the forest. He shot a deer and skinned it. He lifted the meat upon his shoulders. As he came from his hunting place, Iagoo saw a person on a prairie before him. He pursued that person. Iagoo ran half a day after that one. Then he remembered the meat upon his shoulders. He remembered he carried the body of the deer. Iagoo had many adventures. He found mosquitoes in a bog-land. They were very large. The wing of one he used for a sail for his canoe, when the breeze blew. The nose of that insect was as large as his wife's digging stick. One day Iagoo watched a beaver's lodge. He watched for the peering head of a beaver. Behold! An ant went by. She had killed a hare. She dragged hare's body on the ground behind her. OJEEG, THE SUMMER-MAKER _Ojibwa_ Ojeeg was a great hunter. He lived on the southern shore of Lake Superior. Ojeeg had a wife and one son. Now the son hunted game as the father taught him. He followed the trails over the snow. For snow lay always on the ground. It was always cold. Therefore the boy returned home crying. One day as he went to his father's wigwam in the cold and snow he saw Red Squirrel, gnawing the end of a pine cone. Now the son of Ojeeg had shot nothing all day because his hands were so cold. When he saw Red Squirrel, he came nearer, and raised his bow. Red Squirrel said, "My grandson, put up your arrow. Listen to me." The boy put the arrow in his quiver. Red Squirrel said, "You pass my wigwam very often. You cry because you cannot kill birds. Your fingers are numb with cold. Obey me. Thus it shall always be summer. Thus you can kill many birds." [Illustration: PERMANENT ASH-BARK WIGWAM OF THE WILD RICE GATHERING OJIBWA. _From Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology._] Red Squirrel said again, "Obey me. When you reach your father's wigwam, throw down your bow and arrows. Begin to weep. If your mother says, 'My son, what is the matter?' do not answer her. Continue weeping. If she says, 'My son, eat this,' you must refuse the food. Continue weeping. In the evening when your father comes in he will say to your mother, 'What is the matter with my son?' She will say, 'He came in crying. He will not tell me.' Your father will say, 'My son, what is the matter? I am a spirit. Nothing is too hard for me.' Then you must answer, 'It is always cold and dreary. Snow lies always upon the ground. Melt the snow, my father, so that we may have always summer.' Then your father will say, 'It is very difficult to do what you ask. I will try.' Then you must be quiet. You must eat the food they give you." Thus it happened. Ojeeg then said, "I must make a feast. I must invite my friends to go on this journey with me." At once Ojeeg killed a bear. The next day he had a great feast. There were Otter, Beaver, and Lynx. Also Wolverine and Badger were at the feast. Then they started on their journey. On the twentieth day they came to the foot of a high mountain. There was blood in the trail. Some person had killed an animal. They followed the trail of that person. They arrived at a wigwam. Ojeeg said, "Do not laugh. Be very quiet." A man stood in the doorway of the wigwam. He was a great manito. He was a head only. Thus he was very strange. Then he made a feast for them. He made very curious movements, so Otter laughed. At once the manito leaped upon him. He sprang on him, but Otter slipped out from under him and escaped. The manito and the animals talked all night. The manito said to Ojeeg, the Fisher, "You will succeed. You will be the summer-maker. But you will die. Yet the summer will come." Now when they followed the trail in the morning, they met Otter. He was very cold and hungry, therefore Fisher gave him meat. Then they journeyed on. On the twentieth day, they came to the top of a lofty mountain. Then they smoked their pipes. Then Ojeeg, the Fisher, and the animals prepared themselves. Ojeeg said to Otter, "We must first make a hole in the Sky-cover. You try first." Otter made a great spring. He did not even touch the Sky-cover. He fell back, down the hill, to the bottom of the hill. Then Otter said, "I will go home." So he did. Then Beaver tried. He fell. Also Lynx and Badger fell. Then Wolverine tried. He made a great leap and touched the sky. Then he leaped again. He pressed against the Sky-cover. He leaped a third time. The Sky-cover broke, and Wolverine went into the Sky-land. Fisher also sprang in quickly after him. Thus Wolverine and Fisher were in the Sky-plain, in the summer land. There were many flowers and streams of bright water. There were birds in the trees, and fish and water birds on the streams. Many lodges stood there, but they were empty. In each lodge were many _mocuks_, many bird cages, with birds in them. At once Ojeeg began to cut the _mocuks_. The birds flew out. They flew down through the hole in the Sky-cover to the Earth-plain below. They carried warm air down with them. Now when the people of the Sky-land saw these strangers, and their birds escaping, they ran to their wigwams. But they were too late. Spring, and summer, and autumn had slipped down the hole in the Sky-cover. Endless summer was just passing through, but they broke it in two with a blow. Therefore only a part of endless summer came down to the Earth-plain. Now when Wolverine heard the noise of the sky people, running to their lodges, he jumped down the hole and escaped. Fisher also tried to jump, but the people had shut the cover. Therefore Fisher ran and the people pursued him. He climbed a great tree in the north, and the people began shooting at him. Now Fisher was a spirit; he could not be hurt except in the tip of his tail. At last they shot him in his tail. Fisher called to the Sky People to stop shooting. But they did not stop until darkness came. Then they went away. Fisher climbed down. He went towards the north. He said, "I have kept my promise to my son. The seasons will now be different. There will be many moons without snow and cold." Thus Fisher died, with the arrow sticking in his tail. It can be seen there, even to this day.[21] [21] He was telling them the story Of Ojeeg the Summer-Maker, How he made a hole in heaven, How he climbed up into heaven, And let out the summer-weather, The perpetual summer-weather. How the Otter first essayed it, How the Beaver, Lynx, and Badger, Tried in turn the great achievement, From the summit of the mountain ... --_Hiawatha_ RABBIT GOES DUCK HUNTING _Cherokee_ Rabbit was very boastful. One day he met Otter. Otter said, "Sometimes I eat ducks." "Well, I eat ducks, too," said Rabbit. So they went up the stream until they saw several ducks in the water. They followed the trail softly. Then they stood on the river bank. Rabbit said, "You go first." At once Otter dived from the bank. He swam under water until he reached a duck; then he pulled it under quickly so that the other ducks were not frightened. While he was under water, Rabbit peeled bark from a sapling and made a noose. "Now, watch me," he said, when Otter came back. He dived in and swam under water until he was nearly choked. So he came to the top to breathe. He did this several times. The last time he came up among the ducks and threw the noose over the head of one. Duck spread her wings and flew up, with Rabbit hanging to the end of the noose. Up and up flew the duck, but Rabbit could not hold on any longer. Then he let go and dropped. Rabbit fell into a hollow sycamore. It was very tall, and had no hole at the bottom. Rabbit stayed there until he was so hungry he ate his own fur, even as he does to this day. After many days, he heard children playing around the tree. He began to sing, Cut a door and look at me, I'm the prettiest thing you ever did see. The children at once ran home to tell their father. He came and cut a hole in the tree. As he chopped away, Rabbit kept singing, Cut it larger, so you can see me. I am very pretty. So they made the hole larger. Then Rabbit told them to stand back so they could get a good look at him. They stood back. Then Rabbit sprang out and leaped away. RABBIT AND THE TAR BABY _Biloxi_ Rabbit aided his friend the Frenchman with his work. They planted potatoes. Rabbit looked upon the potato vines as his share of the crop and ate them all. Again Rabbit aided his friend the Frenchman. This time they planted corn. When it was grown, Rabbit said, "This time I will eat the roots." So he pulled up all the corn by the roots, but he found nothing to satisfy his hunger. Then the Frenchman said, "Let us dig a well." Rabbit said, "No. You dig it alone." The Frenchman said, "Then you shall not drink water from the well." "That does not matter," said Rabbit. "I am used to licking off the dew from the ground." So the Frenchman dug his well. Then he made a tar baby and stuck it up close to the well. One day Rabbit came near the well, carrying a long piece of hollow cane and a tin bucket. When he reached the well he spoke to the tar baby; it did not answer. "Friend, what is the matter? Are you angry?" asked Rabbit. Tar baby did not answer. So Rabbit hit him with a forepaw. The forepaw stuck there. "Let me go," said Rabbit, "or I will hit you on the other side." Tar baby paid no attention, so Rabbit hit him with the other forepaw, and that stuck fast. "I will kick you," said Rabbit. But when he kicked him the hindpaw stuck. "Very well," he said, "I will kick you with the other foot." So he kicked him with the other foot and that stuck fast. By that time Rabbit looked like a ball, all four paws sticking to the tar baby. Just then the Frenchman came to the well. He picked Rabbit up, tied his paws together, laid him down and scolded him. Rabbit pretended to be in great fear of a brier patch. "If you are so afraid of a brier patch," said the Frenchman, "I will throw you into one." "Oh, no, no!" said Rabbit. "I will throw you into the brier patch," repeated the Frenchman. "I am much afraid of it," answered Rabbit. "Since you are in such dread of it, I will throw you into it," said the Frenchman. So he picked up Rabbit and threw him far into the brier patch. Rabbit fell far away from the Frenchman. Then he picked himself up and ran off, laughing at the trick he had played on the Frenchman. RABBIT AND TAR WOLF _Cherokee_ Once the weather was dry for so long that there was no more water in the springs and creeks. The animals held a council to see what to do about it. They decided to dig a well, and all agreed to help, except Rabbit who was a lazy fellow. Rabbit said, "I don't need to dig for water. The dew on the grass is enough for me." The others did not like this, but they all started to dig the well. It stayed dry for a long while and even the water in the well was low. Still Rabbit was lively and bright. "Rabbit steals our water at night," they said. So they made a wolf of pine gum and tar. They set it by the well to scare the thief. That night Rabbit came again to the well. He saw the black thing there. "Who's there?" he asked. But Tar Wolf did not answer. Rabbit came nearer. Yet Tar Wolf did not move. Rabbit grew brave and said, "Get out of my way." Tar Wolf did not move. So Rabbit hit him with his paw; but it stuck fast in the gum. Rabbit became angry and said, "Let go my paw!" Still Tar Wolf said nothing. So Rabbit hit him with his hind foot; that stuck in the gum. So Tar Wolf held Rabbit fast until morning. Then the other animals came for water. When they found Rabbit stuck fast, they made great fun of him for a while. At last Rabbit managed to get away. RABBIT AND PANTHER _Menomini_ Rabbit was a great boaster. He wanted a medicine lodge and to have people think he was a great medicine man. Now one day, Wabus, the Rabbit, and his wife were traveling. They came to a low hill covered with poplar sprouts. They were green and tender. Therefore Rabbit decided to make his home there. Rabbit went first to the top of a hill and built a wigwam. He made trails from it in all directions, so he might see anyone who approached. When the wigwam was finished, Rabbit told his wife he was going to dance; but first he ran all about the hill to see if anyone was watching him. He found no trail. Then he returned and began his song. Now just as Rabbit returned to his wigwam, Panther reached the base of the hill, and he found Rabbit's trail. He followed it until he reached the place where Rabbit and his wife were dancing. Here he hid to watch Rabbit. Now Rabbit told his wife to sit at one end of the lodge while he went to the other. He took his medicine bag. Then he approached her four times, chanting, Ye ha-a-a-a-a Ye ha-a-a-a-a Ye ha-a-a-a-a Ye ha-a-a-a-a Then he shot at his wife, just as a medicine man does when he shoots at a new member. Then Rabbit's wife arose and shot at him. Thus they were very happy. Then Rabbit began to sing a song which meant this: "If Panther comes across my trail while I am biting the bark from the poplars, he will not be able to catch me for I am a good runner." When he had finished his song, Rabbit told his wife he would go out hunting. Panther waited for his return. Now as Rabbit started home again he was very happy. But when he reached Panther's hiding place, his enemy sprang on his trail. Rabbit saw him and started back on his trail. Panther raced after him. He caught him and said, "You are the man who said I could not catch you. Now who is the fastest runner?" And before Rabbit could answer Panther ate him up. But Rabbit was such a boastful man. HOW RABBIT STOLE OTTER'S COAT _Cherokee_ All the animals were of different sizes and wore different coats. Some wore long fur and others wore short fur. Some had rings on their tails; others had no tails at all. The coats of the animals were of many colors--brown, or black, or yellow, or gray. The animals were always quarreling about whose coat was the finest. Therefore they held a council to decide the matter. Now everyone had heard a great deal about Otter, but he lived far up the trail; he did not often visit the others. It was said he had the finest coat of all, but it was so long since they had seen him that no one remembered what it was like. They did not even know just where he lived, but they knew he would come when he heard of the council. Rabbit was afraid the council would say that Otter had the finest coat. He learned by what trail Otter would come to the council. Then he went a four days' march up the trail to meet him. At last he saw Otter coming. He knew him at once by his beautiful coat of soft brown fur. Otter said, "Where are you going?" "They sent me to bring you to the council," answered Rabbit. "They were afraid you might not know the trail." So Rabbit turned back and they traveled together. They traveled all day. At night Rabbit picked out a camping place. Otter was a stranger in that part. Rabbit cut down bushes for beds and made everything comfortable. Next morning they started on again. In the afternoon, Rabbit picked up pieces of bark and wood, as they followed the trail, and loaded them on his back. "Why are you doing that?" asked Otter. "So that we may be warm and comfortable tonight," said Rabbit. Near sunset they stopped and made camp. After supper Rabbit began to whittle a stick, shaving it down to a paddle. "Why are you doing that?" asked Otter again. "Oh," said Rabbit, "I have good dreams when I sleep with a paddle under my head." When the paddle was finished, Rabbit began to cut a good trail through the bushes to the river. "Why are you doing that?" asked Otter. "This is called 'The Place Where It Rains Fire,' and sometimes it does rain fire here," said Rabbit. "The sky looks a little that way tonight. You go to sleep and I will sit up and watch. If you hear me shout, you run and jump into the river. Better hang your coat on that limb over there, so it will not get burned." Otter did as Rabbit told him; then both curled up and Otter went to sleep. But Rabbit stayed awake. After a while the fire burned down to red coals. Rabbit called to Otter; he was fast asleep. Then he called again, but Otter did not awaken. Then Rabbit rose softly. He filled the paddle with hot coals, threw them up into the air and shouted, "It's raining fire! It's raining fire!" The hot coals fell on Otter and he jumped up. "To the river," shouted Rabbit and Otter fled into the water. So he has lived in the water ever since. Rabbit at once took Otter's coat and put it on, leaving his own behind. Then he followed the trail to the council. All the animals were waiting for Otter. At last they saw him coming down the trail. They said to each other, "Otter is coming!" They sent one of the small animals to show him the best seat. After he was seated, the animals all went up in turn to welcome him. But Otter kept his head down with one paw over his face. The animals were surprised. They did not know Otter was so bashful. At last Bear pulled the paw away. There was Rabbit! He sprang up and started to run. Bear struck at him and pulled the tail off his coat. But Rabbit was too quick and got safely away. RABBIT AND BEAR _Biloxi_ Rabbit and Bear had been friends for some time. One day Rabbit said to Bear, "Come and visit me. I live in a very large brier patch." Then he went home. When he reached home he went out and gathered a quantity of young canes which he hung up. After a while Bear reached a place near his house, but was seeking the large brier patch. Now Rabbit really dwelt in a very small patch. When Rabbit found that Bear was near, he began to make a pattering sound with his feet. Bear was scared. He retreated to a distance and then stopped and stood listening. As soon as Rabbit saw this, he cried out, "Halloo! my friend! Was it you whom I treated in that manner? Come and take a seat." So Bear went back to Rabbit's house and took a seat. Rabbit gave the young canes to his guest, who swallowed them all. Rabbit nibbled now and then at one, while Bear swallowed all the others. "This is what I have always liked," said Bear when he went home. "Come and visit me. I dwell in a large bent tree." Not long after, Rabbit started on his journey. He spent some time seeking the large bent tree but he could not find it. Bear lived in a hollow tree, and he sat there growling. Rabbit heard the growls and fled for some distance before he sat down. Then Bear called, "Halloo! my friend! Was it you whom I treated in that manner? Come here and sit down." Rabbit did so. Bear said, "You are now my guest, but there is nothing for you to eat." So Bear went in search of food. Bear went to gather young canes, but as he went along, he gathered also the small black bugs which live in decayed logs. When he had been gone some time, he returned to his lodge with only a few young canes. He put them down before Rabbit and then walked around him in a circle. In a little while, he offered Rabbit the black bugs. "I have never eaten such food," said Rabbit. Bear was offended. He said, "When I was your guest, I ate all the food you gave me, as I liked it very well. Now when I offer you food, why do you treat me in this way?" Then Bear said, also, "Before the sun sets, I shall kill you." Rabbit's heart beat hard from terror, for Bear stood at the entrance of the hollow log to prevent his escape. But Rabbit was very nimble. He dodged first this way and then that, and with a long leap he got out of the hollow tree. He went at once to his brier patch and sat down. Rabbit was very angry with Bear. He shouted to him, "When people are hunting you, I will go toward your hiding place, and show them where you are." That is why, when dogs hunt a rabbit, they always shoot a bear. That is all. WHY DEER NEVER EAT MEN _Menomini_ After Rabbit had decided about light and darkness, he saw Owasse, the Bear, coming. Rabbit said, "Bear, what do you want for food?" Bear said, "Acorns and fruit." Then Rabbit asked Fish Hawk. He said, "Fish Hawk, what will you select for your food?" Fish Hawk said, "I will take that fellow, Sucker, lying in the water there." Sucker said at once, "You may eat me if you can, but that has still to be decided." Sucker at once swam out into the deepest part of the river, where Fish Hawk could not reach him. Then Fish Hawk rose into the air to a point where his shadow fell exactly on the spot where Sucker lay. Now as Sucker lay there, he saw the shadow of a large bird on the bed of the stream. He became frightened. He thought, "It must be a manido," so he swam slowly to the surface. At once Fish Hawk darted down on him and carried him into the air. Then he ate him. Rabbit looked about him again. He saw Moqwaio, the Wolf. He cried, "Ho, Wolf! What do you wish for food?" Wolf said, "I will eat Deer." Deer said, "You cannot eat me, because I can run too swiftly." Wolf said, "We will see about that." So they had a race. Deer started ahead and ran very swiftly. Wolf ran swiftly, too, but his fur robe was too heavy. At last he thought, "This robe is too heavy. I will slip it off." So he threw it off. Then he bounded ahead and caught Deer and ate him. Then Rabbit asked another Deer, of the same totem, "Deer, what will you select as food?" Deer said, "I will eat people. There are many Indians in the country. I will eat them." At once all the animals began to talk. They said to Deer, "The Indian is too powerful. You can never eat him." Deer said, "Well, I will plan to eat Indians, anyway." Then he walked off. Now one day an Indian was out hunting. He saw deer tracks to the right and so followed them. They went in a large circle until they brought him back where he had started. Then he saw deer tracks to the left. So he followed those, until they also brought him back, in a large circle, to the point where he started. Then the Indian saw that Deer was following him. Deer was determined to eat the Indians, because there were many of them. It would not be difficult to hunt for food. But first he wanted to frighten the hunter. So he pulled two ribs from his sides, and stuck them into his lower jaw. They looked like tusks. Deer looked very fierce. Then Deer came walking along, looking for an Indian. But the hunter raised his bow and shot Deer. He carried the deer meat back to his wigwam. The shade of Deer at once went to the council of birds and animals. He told Rabbit all about it. Rabbit said, "I told you that you could not eat people. You see how it is? Now you will have to live on grass and twigs." And so they do, even to this day. HOW RABBIT SNARED THE SUN _Biloxi_ Rabbit and his grandmother lived in a wigwam. Rabbit used to go hunting every day, very early in the morning. But no matter how early he went, a person leaving long footprints had passed along ahead of him. Each morning Rabbit thought, "I will reach there before him." Yet each morning the person leaving long footprints passed before him. One morning Rabbit said to his grandmother, "Oh, Grandmother, although I have long wished to be the first to get there, again has he got there ahead of me. Oh, Grandmother, I will make a noose, and I will place it in the trail of that one, and thus I will catch him." "Why should you do that?" asked grandmother. "I hate that person," said Rabbit. He departed. When he reached there, he found that the person had already departed. So he lay down near by and waited for night. Then he went to the trail where the person with long feet had been passing, and set a snare. [Illustration: SHELL GORGET SHOWING EAGLE CARVING. _From Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology._] [Illustration: INDIAN JAR FROM THE MOUNDS OF ARKANSAS. _From Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology._] Very early the next morning he went to look at his trap. Behold! Sun had been caught. Rabbit ran home very quickly. "Oh, Grandmother, I have caught something but it scares me. I wished to take the noose, but it scared me every time I went to get it." Then Rabbit took a knife and again went there. The person said, "You have done very wrong. Come and release me." Rabbit did not go directly toward him. He went to one side. He bent his head low and cut the cord. At once Sun went above on his trail. But Rabbit had been so near him that Sun burned his fur on the back of his neck. Rabbit ran home. He cried, "Oh, Grandmother, I have been severely burned." "Alas! My grandson has been severely burned," said grandmother. WHEN THE ORPHAN TRAPPED THE SUN _Ojibwa_ Animals and men lived on the earth in the beginning. The animals killed all the people except a girl and her tiny brother, who hid from them. The brother did not grow at all. Therefore when the sister collected firewood, she took him with her. She made him a bow and arrow. One day she said, "Now I must leave you for a while. Soon the snowbirds will come and pick worms out of the wood I have cut. Shoot one of them and bring it to me." The boy waited. The birds came and he shot at them with his arrows. He could not kill one. The next day he shot at them again. Then he killed one. He came back to the wigwam with a bird. He said, "My sister, skin it. I will wear the skins of the snowbirds." "What shall we do with the body?" she asked. "Cut it in two. We will put it in our broth." Now at that time, the animals were very large. People did not eat them. The boy killed ten snowbirds. Then his sister made a coat for him. One day he said, "Are we alone on the Earth-plain?" She said, "The animals who live in such a place have killed all our relatives. You must never go there." Therefore he went in that direction. Now he walked a long while and met no one. Then he lay down on a knoll where the sun had melted the snow. He fell asleep. Then Sun looked down at him and burned his bird-skin coat. He tightened it so that the boy was bound into it. When he awoke, the boy said to Sun, "You are not too high. I will pay you back." He went home. He said to his sister, "Sun has spoiled my coat." He would not eat. He lay down on the ground. He lay ten days on one side. Then he turned over and lay ten days on the other side. At last he rose. He said to his sister, "Make me a snare. I shall catch Sun." She said, "I have no string." The boy said, "Make a string." Then she remembered a bit of dried sinew which her father had had. So she made a snare for him. The boy said, "That will not do. Make a better snare." She said, "I have no string." At last she remembered. She cut off some of her hair. She made a string from that. The boy said, "That will not do. Make me a noose." She thought again. Then she remembered. She went out of the wigwam. She took something. She made a braid out of that thing. The boy said, "This will do." He was much pleased. When he took it, it became a long red cord. There was much of it. He wound it around his body. The boy left the wigwam while Sun was at home. He did this so that he might catch him as he came over the edge of the earth. He put the noose at the spot just where Sun came over the edge. When Sun came along, the noose caught his head. He was held tight, so that he could not follow his trail in the Sky-land. Now the animals who ruled the earth were frightened because Sun did not follow the trail. They said, "What shall we do?" So they called a great council. They said, "We must send someone to cut the noose." Thus they spoke in the council. Now all the animals were afraid to cut the cord. Sun was so hot he would burn them. At last Dormouse said, "I will go." He stood up in the council. He was as high as a mountain. He was the largest of all the animals. When Dormouse reached the place where Sun was snared, his fur began to singe and his back to burn. It was very hot. Dormouse cut the cord with his teeth. But so much of him was burned up, he became very small. Therefore Dormouse is the smallest of animals. That is why he is called Kug-e-been-gwa-kwa. THE HARE AND THE LYNX _Ojibwa_ Once there was a little white hare, living in a wigwam with her grandmother. Now Grandmother sent Hare back to her native land. When Hare had gone a short way, Lynx came down the trail. Lynx sang: Where, pretty white one, Where, pretty white one, Where do you go? "_Tshwee! Tshwee! Tshwee! Tshwee!_" cried Hare, and ran back to Grandmother. "See, Grandmother," she said, "Lynx came down the trail and sang, Where, pretty white one, Where, pretty white one, Where do you go?" "Ho!" said Grandmother. "Have courage! Tell Lynx you are going to your native land." Hare went back up the trail. Lynx stood there, so Hare sang, To the point of land I go, There is the home of the little white one, There I go. Lynx looked at the trembling little hare, and began to sing again, Little white one, tell me, Little white one, tell me, Why are your ears so thin and dry? "_Tshwee! Tshwee! Tshwee! Tshwee!_" cried little Hare, and ran back to Grandmother. "See, Grandmother," said Hare, "Lynx came down the trail and sang, Little white one, tell me, Little white one, tell me, Why are your ears so thin and dry?" "Ho!" said Grandmother, "Go and tell him your uncles made them so when they came from the South." So Hare ran up the trail and sang, My uncles came from the south; They made my ears as they are. They made them thin and dry. And then Hare laid her little pink ears back upon her shoulders, and started to go to the point of land. But Lynx sang again, Why do you go away, little white one? Why do you go away, little white one? Why are your feet so dry and swift? "_Tshwee! Tshwee! Tshwee! Tshwee!_" cried Hare and again she ran back to Grandmother. "Ho! do not mind him," said Grandmother. "Do not listen to him. Do not answer him. Just run straight on." So the little white hare ran up the trail as fast as she could. When she came to the place where Lynx had stood, he was gone. So Hare ran on and had almost reached her native land, on the point of land, when Lynx sprang out of the thicket and ate her up. WELCOME TO A BABY _Cherokee_ Little wren is the messenger of the Birds. She pries into everything. She gets up early in the morning and goes around to every wigwam to get news for the Bird council. When a new baby comes into a wigwam, she finds out whether it is a boy or a girl. If it is a boy, the Bird council sings mournfully, "Alas! The whistle of the arrow! My shins will burn!" Because the Birds all know that when the boy grows older he will hunt them with his bows and arrows, and will roast them on a stick. But if the baby is a girl, they are glad. They sing, "Thanks! The sound of the pestle! In her wigwam I shall surely be able to scratch where she sweeps." Because they know that when she grows older and beats the corn into meal, they will be able to pick up stray grains. Cricket also is glad when the baby is a girl. He sings, "Thanks! I shall sing in the wigwam where she lives." But if it is a boy, Cricket laments, "_Gwo-he!_ He will shoot me! He will shoot me! He will shoot me!" Because boys make little bows to shoot crickets and grasshoppers. When the Cherokee Indians hear of a new baby, they ask, "Is it a bow, or a meal sifter?" Or else they ask, "Is it ball-sticks or bread?" BABY SONG _Cherokee_ Ha wi ye hy u we, Ha wi ye hy u we. Yu we yu we he, Ha wi ye hy u we. The Bear is very bad, so they say, Long time ago he was very bad, so they say. The Bear did so and so, they say. SONG TO THE FIREFLY _Ojibwa_ In the hot summer evenings, when the grassy patches around the lakes and rivers sparkle with fireflies, the Indians sing a song to them. Flitting white-fire-bug, Flitting white-fire-bug, Give me your light before I go to sleep. Give me your light before I go to sleep. Come, little waving fire-bug. Come, little waving fire-bug. Light me with your bright torch. Light me with your bright torch.[22] [22] Saw the fire-fly, Wah-wah-taysee, Flitting through the dusk of evening, With the twinkle of its candle, Lighting up the brakes and bushes; And he sang the song of children, Sang the song Nokomis taught him; "Wah-wah-taysee, little fire-fly, Little, flitting, white-fire insect ..." --_Hiawatha_ SONG OF THE MOTHER BEARS _Cherokee_ One day a hunter in the woods heard singing in a cave. He came near and peeped in. It was a mother bear singing to her cubs and telling them what to do when the hunters came after them. Mother Bear said, When you hear the hunter coming down the creek, then Tsagi, tsagi, hwilahi, Tsagi, tsagi, hwilahi, Upstream, upstream, you must go. Upstream, upstream, you must go. But if you hear them coming down stream, Ge-i, ge-i, hwilahi, Ge-i, ge-i, hwilahi, Downstream, downstream, you must go. Downstream, downstream, you must go. Another hunter out in the woods one day thought he heard a woman singing to a baby. He followed the sound up a creek until he came to a cave under the bushes. Inside there was a mother bear rocking her cub in her paws and singing to it, Let me carry you on my back, Let me carry you on my back, Let me carry you on my back, Let me carry you on my back, On the sunny side go to sleep. On the sunny side go to sleep. This was after some of the people had become bears. The hunter knew they were of the Ani Tsagulin tribe.[23] [23] See "Origin of the Bear." THE MAN IN THE STUMP _Cherokee_ An Indian had a field of corn ripening in the sun. One day when he wanted to look at it, he climbed a stump. Now the stump was hollow and in it was a nest of bear cubs. The man slipped and fell down upon the cubs. At once the cubs began calling for their mother, and Mother Bear came running. She began to climb down into the stump backwards. Then the Indian caught hold of her leg; thus she became frightened. She began to climb out and dragged the Indian also to the top of the stump. Thus he got out of the stump. THE ANTS AND THE KATYDIDS _Biloxi_ The Ancient of Ants was building a house. She worked hard to finish her house before the cold weather came. Now when it was very cold, the Katydid and the Locust reached her house, asking for shelter. They said they had no houses. The Ancient of Ants scolded them. She said, "After you are grown up, in the warm weather, you sing all the time, instead of building a house." She would not let them come into her house. Then the Katydid and the Locust were ashamed, and as the weather was very cold, they died. That is why katydids and locusts die every winter, while the ants live in their warm houses. But the katydids and locusts never do anything in warm weather but sing. WHEN THE OWL MARRIED _Cherokee_ Once there was a widow with only one daughter. She said often, "You should marry and then there will be a man to go hunting." Then one day a man came courting the daughter. He said, "Will you marry me?" The girl said, "I can only marry a good worker. We need a man who is a good hunter and who will work in the cornfield." "I am exactly that sort of a man," he said. So the mother said they might marry. Then the next morning the mother gave the man a hoe. She said, "Go, hoe the corn. When breakfast is ready I will call you." Then she went to call him. She followed a sound as of someone hoeing on stony soil. When she reached the place, there was only a small circle of hoed ground. Over in the thicket someone said, "Hoo-hoo!" When the man came back in the evening, the mother said, "Where have you been all day?" He said, "Hard at work." The mother said, "I couldn't find you." "I was over in the thicket cutting sticks to mark off the field," he said. "But you did not come to the lodge to eat at all," she answered. "I was too busy," he said. Early the next morning he started off with his hoe over his shoulder. Then the mother went again to call him, when the meal was ready. The hoe was lying there, but there was no sign of work done. And away over in the thicket, she heard a hu-hu calling, _Sau-h! sau-h! sau-h! hoo-hoo! hoo-hoo! hoo-hoo! chi! chi! chi! whew!_ Now when the man came home that night, the mother asked, "What have you been doing all day?" "Working hard," he said. "But you were not there when I came after you." "Oh, I went over in the thicket awhile," said the man, "to see some of my relatives." Then the mother said, "I have lived here a long while, and no one lives in that swamp but lazy hu-hus. My daughter wants a husband that can work and not a hu-hu!" And she drove him from the house. THE KITE AND THE EAGLE Kite was very boastful. One day he spoke scornfully of Eagle, who heard his words. Kite began to sing in a loud voice, I alone, I alone, Can go up, So as to seem as if hanging from the blue sky. Eagle answered scornfully. He sang, Who is this, Who is this, Who boasts of flying so high? Kite was ashamed. He answered in a small voice, "Oh, I was only singing of the great Khakate. It is he who is said to fly so high." Eagle answered, "Oh, you crooked tongue! You are below my notice." Then Eagle soared high into the sky. But just as soon as he was out of hearing, Kite began to sing again in a very loud voice, I alone, I alone, Can go up, So as to seem as if hanging from the blue sky. THE LINNET AND THE EAGLE _Ojibwa_ All the Birds met in council, each claiming to fly the highest. Each one claimed to be the chief. Therefore the council decided that each bird should fly toward the Sky-land. Some of the birds flew very swiftly; but they tired and flew back to earth. Now Eagle went far above all. When Eagle could fly no farther, Linnet, who had perched upon Eagle's back, flew up. Far above Eagle flew the tiny gray bird. Now when the Birds held a council again, Eagle was made chief. Eagle had flown higher than all the rest, and had carried Linnet on his back. HOW PARTRIDGE GOT HIS WHISTLE _Cherokee_ In the old days, Terrapin had a fine whistle and Partridge had none. Terrapin whistled constantly. He was always boasting of his fine whistle. One day Partridge said, "Let me try your whistle." Terrapin said, "No." He was afraid Partridge would try some trick. Partridge said, "Oh, if you are afraid, stay right here while I use it." So Terrapin gave it to him. Partridge strutted around, whistling constantly. He said, "How does it sound with me?" "You do it very well," said Terrapin, walking by his side. "Now how do you like it?" asked Partridge, running ahead. "It's fine," said Terrapin, trying to keep up with him. "But don't run so fast!" "How do you like it now?" asked Partridge, spreading his wings and flying to a tree top. Terrapin could only look up at him. Partridge never gave the whistle back. He has it even to this day. And Terrapin was so ashamed because Partridge stole his whistle, and Turkey had stolen his scalp, that he shuts himself up in his box whenever anyone comes near him. HOW KINGFISHER GOT HIS BILL _Cherokee_ Some of the old men say that Kingfisher was meant in the beginning to be a water bird, but because he had no web on his feet and not a good bill, he could not get enough to eat. The animals knew of this, so they held a council. Afterwards they made him a bill like a long, sharp awl. This fish gig he was to use spearing fish. When they fastened it on to his mouth, he flew first to the top of a tree. Then he darted down into the water and came up with a fish on his bill. And ever since, Kingfisher has been the best fisherman. But some of the old people say it was this way. Blacksnake found Yellowhammer's nest in the hollow tree and killed all the young birds. Yellowhammer at once went to the Little People for help. They sent her to Kingfisher. So she went on to him. Kingfisher came at once, and after flying back and forth past the hole in the hollow tree, he made a quick dart at the snake and pulled him out, dead. When they looked, they saw he had pierced Blacksnake with a slender fish he carried in his bill. Therefore the Little People said he would make good use of a spear, so they gave him his long bill. WHY THE BLACKBIRD HAS RED WINGS _Chitimacha_ One day an Indian became so angry with everyone that he set the sea marshes on fire because he wanted to burn up the world. A little blackbird saw it. He flew up into a tree and shouted, "_Ku nam wi cu! Ku nam wi cu!_ The world and all is going to burn." The man said, "If you do not go away, I will kill you." But the bird only kept shouting, "_Ku nam wi cu!_ The world and all is going to burn." Then the Indian threw a shell and hit the little bird on the wings, making them bleed. That is how the red-winged blackbird came by its red wings. Now when people saw the marshes burning, they quickly ran down and killed game which had been driven from it by the fire. Then they said to the angry man, "Because you put fire in those tall weeds, the deer and bear and other animals have been driven out and we have killed them. You have aided us by burning them." Nowadays when the red-winged blackbird comes around the house, he still shouts, _Ku nam wi cu_, so they say. BALL GAME OF THE BIRDS AND ANIMALS _Cherokee_ Once the Animals challenged the Birds to a great ball play, and the Birds accepted. The Animals met near the river, in a smooth grassy field. The Birds met in the tree top over by the ridge. Now the leader of the Animals was Bear. He was very strong and heavy. All the way to the river he tossed up big logs to show his strength and boasted of how he would win against the Birds. Terrapin was with the Animals. He was not the little terrapin we have now, but the first Terrapin. His shell was so hard the heaviest blows could not hurt him, and he was very large. On the way to the river he rose on his hind feet and dropped heavily again. He did this many times, bragging that thus he would crush any bird that tried to take the ball from him. Then there was Deer, who could outrun all the others. And there were many other animals. Now the leader of the Birds was Eagle; and also Hawk, and the great Tlanuwa. They were all swift and strong of flight. Now first they had a ball dance. Then after the dance, as the birds sat in the trees, two tiny little animals no larger than field mice climbed up the tree where Eagle sat. They crept out to the branch tips to Eagle. They said, "We wish to play ball." Eagle looked at them. They were four-footed. He said, "Why don't you join the Animals? You belong there." "The Animals make fun of us," they said. "They drive us away because we are small." Eagle pitied them. He said, "But you have no wings." Then at once Eagle and Hawk and all the Birds held a council in the trees. At last they said to the little fellows, "We will make wings for you." But they could not think just how to do it. Then a Bird said, "The head of our drum is made of groundhog skin. Let us make wings from that." So they took two pieces of leather from the drum and shaped them for wings. They stretched them with cane splints and fastened them on the forelegs of one of the little animals. So they made Tlameha, the Bat. They began to teach him. First they threw the ball to him. Bat dropped and circled about in the air on his new wings. He did not let the ball drop. The Birds saw at once he would be one of their best men. Now they wished to give wings also to the second little animal, but there was no more leather. And there was no more time. Then somebody said they might make wings for the other man by stretching his skin. Therefore two large birds took hold from opposite sides with their strong bills. Thus they stretched his skin. Thus they made Tewa, the Flying Squirrel. Then Eagle threw to him the ball. At once Flying Squirrel sprang after it, caught it in his teeth, and carried it through the air to another tree nearby. Then the game began. Almost at the first toss, Flying Squirrel caught the ball and carried it up a tree. Then he threw it to the Birds, who kept it in the air for some time. When it dropped to the earth, Bear rushed to get it, but Martin darted after it and threw it to Bat, who was flying near the ground. Bat doubled and dodged with the ball, and kept it out of the way of Deer. At last Bat threw it between the posts. So the Birds won the game. Bear and Terrapin, who had boasted of what they would do, never had a chance to touch the ball. Because Martin saved the ball when it dropped to the ground, the Birds afterwards gave him a gourd in which to build his nest. He still has it. WHY THE BIRDS HAVE SHARP TAILS _Biloxi_ Once upon a time, they say, the world turned over. Then the waters rose very high and many people died. A woman took two children and lodged in a tree. She sat there waiting for the waters to sink, for she had no way of reaching the ground. When the woman saw the Ancient of Red-headed Buzzards, she called to him, "Help me to get down and I will give you one of the children." He assisted her, but she did not give him the child. The waters were so deep that the birds were clinging by their claws to the clouds, but their tails were under water. That is why their tails are always sharp. One of these birds was the Ancient of Yellowhammers. Therefore its tailfeathers are sharp at the ends. The large Red-headed Woodpecker was there, too, and the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, and that is why their tails have their present shape. [Illustration: SPIDER GORGETS. 1. From a Mound, Missouri. 2. From a Stone Grave, Illinois. 3. From a Mound, Illinois. 4. From a Mound, Tennessee. _From Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology._] THE WILDCAT AND THE TURKEYS _Biloxi_ The Ancient of Wildcats had been creeping up on the Wild Turkeys trying to catch some. He tried in vain. Then he got a bag, crawled inside, and rolled himself along. He rolled himself to the Ancient of Turkey Gobblers. Wildcat said, "Get into my bag and see what fun it is to roll." The Ancient of Turkey Gobblers crawled into the bag. Wildcat tied up the end and rolled it along for some time. After he had rolled it quite a distance, he stopped and untied the bag. "It is very good," said the First of All the Turkey Gobblers. Then he said to the other Wild Turkeys, "Get in the bag and see how pleasant it is." But the young Turkeys were afraid. Gobbler urged them to try the new game. At last one young Turkey stepped into the bag. Wildcat tied the end and pretended that he was going to roll it. It would not go. "It will not go because it is too light. There is only one in it," said Wildcat. "Let another young Turkey step in." At last another young Turkey stepped in. Wildcat tied the bag, threw it over his shoulder and ran home. When he reached home he laid the bag down. Then Wildcat said to his mother, "I have brought home something on my back, and placed it outside. Beware lest you untie the bag." His mother said to herself, "I wonder what it can be." So she untied the bag. One of the turkeys flew out. She managed to catch the other one. She caught both feet with one hand, and both wings with the other. She cried out, "Help! Help! I have caught four!" The Ancient of Wildcats scolded his mother. Then he killed the turkey and cooked it. His mother went into another room. Then Wildcat spread his feast. As he was eating the Turkey he made a constant noise. He walked back and forth. He talked continually and kept up a steady rattling. When he stopped the noise a little he said, "I am going home," as if a guest were speaking. He said this again and again. He made a noise with his feet as if people were walking about. He ate all the turkey except the hip bone. THE BRANT AND THE OTTER _Biloxi_ Once upon a time the Ancient of Brants and the Ancient of Otters were living as friends. One day the Ancient of Otters said to the Ancient of Brants, "Come to see me tomorrow," and departed. Brant went to make the call. When he arrived, the Ancient of Otters said, "Halloo! I have nothing at all for you to eat! Sit down!" Then he went fishing. He used a "leather vine" which he jerked now and then to straighten it. He caught many fish. When he reached home he cooked them. When the fish were cooked, ready for the feast, the Ancient of Otters put some into a very flat dish. But the Ancient of Brants could not eat from a flat dish. All he could do was to hit his bill against the dish, and raise his head as if swallowing something. But Otter ate rapidly. Otter said to his guest, "Have you eaten enough?" "Yes, I am satisfied," said Brant. "No, you are not satisfied," said Otter. He took more fish and placed them in the flat dish, eating rapidly as before. Brant could only hit his bill against the side of the dish. When the Ancient of Brants was departing, he said to Otter, "Come to see me tomorrow." When Otter reached the house of the Ancient of Brants the next day, Brant cried, "Halloo! I have nothing at all to give you to eat! Sit down!" Then the Ancient of Brants went fishing, using a "leather vine" which he jerked now and then to straighten it. He caught many fish and took them home to cook them. When the fish were cooked, they began to feast. But the Ancient of Brants had put some into a small round dish. Ancient of Otters could not get his mouth into the dish. But Brant ate rapidly. "Have you eaten enough?" Brant asked, after a while. Otter replied, "Yes, I am satisfied." "Nonsense!" said the Ancient of Brants. "How could you possibly be satisfied! I have served you as you served me." But this ended their friendship. THE TINY FROG AND THE PANTHER _Biloxi_ The Ancient of Tiny Frogs[24] was shut up by his grandmother, so that he might learn magic. Then she took him on a journey. [24] The tiny frog, called péska, is a black one, not more than an inch long, living in muddy streams in Louisiana. It differs from the bullfrog, common frog, and tree frog. First they met the Ancient of Panthers. The grandmother said to him, "This is your sister's son. Look at him and wrestle with him." The Ancient of Panthers was very brave. To show his strength, he climbed very high up a tree which he tore to pieces, falling to the ground with it. Then he seized the Ancient of Tiny Frogs. But the frog caught him by the hind legs and whipped him against a tree. He beat him so severely that Panther's jaw was broken in many places. That is why all panthers have a short jaw. The Ancient of Tiny Frogs and his grandmother continued their journey. Next they met Bear. The grandmother said to him, "Look at your sister's son. Go and wrestle with him." Bear began to pull the limbs off a tree to show his strength. Soon he rushed upon the Ancient of Tiny Frogs. But that one caught Bear by the hind legs and beat him against a tree until he broke off short his tail. That is why bears have such very short tails. Again the old grandmother, singing as she walked, went along the trail with her grandson. They met Buffalo. She said, "Look at your sister's son. Go and wrestle with him." Now Buffalo was very strong. With his horns he uprooted a tree, and then spent some moments in breaking it to pieces. Then he rushed at the Ancient of Tiny Frogs. But that one caught Buffalo by the hind legs and beat him against a tree. He beat him until the back of his neck was broken and he had a great hump on his shoulders. So Buffalo went away, but that is why buffaloes have such very heavy, humpbacked shoulders. Again they walked along the trail, singing. It was not long before they met with Deer. To him the grandmother said, "Look at your sister's son. Go and wrestle with him." Deer leaped up to show his agility. Then he sprang at the Ancient of Tiny Frogs. But that one seized him by the legs and beat him against a tree, breaking his nose, and leaving him with a very small nose, even as deer today have small noses. Then the Ancient of Tiny Frogs said to Deer: "I shall remain here under the leaves. When hunters are after you and have almost reached you, I will urge you to escape by saying, '_Pés! Pés!_' When I say that, do your best to get away." Hardly had he finished speaking, when he cried out, "_Pés! Pés!_ It is so! Go quickly! Do your best!" Then Deer leaped away. For just then the hunters had come, sure enough. Therefore, when a tiny frog cries out now, people say that some one is on the point of running after a deer. THE FRIGHTENER OF HUNTERS _Choctaw_ (_Bayou Lacomb_) Kashehotapalo is the frightener of hunters. His head is small and dried up, like an old man's. His legs and feet are like those of a deer. He lives in low, swampy places, far away from men. If the hunters come near him, when they are chasing a deer, he slips up behind them and calls loudly. Thus he frightens them away. His voice is like that of a woman. His name means "the woman call." THE HUNTER AND THE ALLIGATOR _Choctaw_ (_Bayou Lacomb_) All the hunters in a village killed many deer one winter, except one man. This one saw many deer. Sometimes he drew his bow and shot at them; yet they escaped. Now this hunter had been away from his village three days. He had seen many deer; not one had he killed. On the third day, when the sun was hot over his head, he saw an alligator. Alligator was in a dry, sandy spot. He had had no water for many days. He was dry and shriveled. Alligator said to the hunter, "Where can water be found?" The hunter said, "In that forest, not far away, is cold water." "I cannot go there alone," said Alligator. "Come nearer. Do not fear." The hunter went nearer, but he was afraid. "You are a hunter," said Alligator, "but all the deer escape you. Carry me into the water, and I will make you a great hunter. You shall kill many deer." The hunter was still afraid. Then he said, "I will carry you, but first I must bind you so that you cannot scratch me; and your mouth, so that you cannot bite me." So Alligator rolled over on his back and let the hunter bind him. He fastened his legs and mouth firmly. Then he carried Alligator on his shoulders to the water in the forest. He unfastened the cords and threw him in. Alligator came to the surface three times. He said, "Take your bow and arrow and go into the woods. You will find a small doe. Do not kill it. Then you will find a large doe. Do not kill it. You will meet a small buck. Do not kill that. Then you will meet a large, old buck. Kill that." The hunter took his bow and arrow. Everything happened just as Alligator had foretold. Then he killed the large, old buck. So he became a very great hunter. There was always venison in his wigwam. THE GROUNDHOG DANCE _Cherokee_ Seven wolves once caught a groundhog. They said, "Now we'll kill you and have something to eat." Groundhog said, "When we find good food, we should rejoice over it, as people do in the green-corn dances. You will kill me, and I cannot help myself. But if you want to dance, I'll sing for you. Now this is a new dance. I will lean up against seven trees in turn. You will dance forward and then go back. At the last turn you may kill me." Now the Wolves were very hungry, but they wanted to learn the new dance. Groundhog leaned up against a tree and began to sing. He sang, _Ho wi ye a hi_ and all the Wolves danced forward. When he shouted "_Yu!_" they turned and danced back in line. "That's fine," said Groundhog, after the first dance was over. Then he went to the next tree and began the second song. He sang, _Hi ya yu we_, and the Wolves danced forward. When he shouted "_Yu!_" they danced back in a straight line. At each song, Groundhog took another tree, getting closer and closer to his hole under a stump. At the seventh song, Groundhog said, "Now this is the last dance. When I shout '_Yu!_' all come after me. The one who gets me may have me." Then he sang a long time, until the Wolves were at quite a distance in a straight line. Then he shouted "_Yu!_" and darted for his hole. At once the Wolves turned and were after him. The foremost Wolf caught his tail and gave it such a jerk he broke it off. That is why Groundhog has such a short tail. THE RACOON _Menomini_ One day Racoon went into the woods to fast and dream. He dreamed that someone said to him, "When you awaken, paint your face and body with bands of black and white. That will be your own." When Racoon awoke, he painted himself as he had been told to do. So we see him, even to the present day. WHY THE OPOSSUM PLAYS DEAD _Biloxi_ The Ancient of Opossums thought that he would reach a certain pond very early in the morning, so that he might catch the crawfish on the shore. But someone else reached there first, and when Opossum reached there the crawfish were all gone. This person did this every day. Opossum did not know who it was, so he lay in wait for him. He found it was the Ancient of Racoons. They argued about the crawfish and the pond. They agreed to see which could rise the earlier in the morning, go around the shore of the pond and catch the crawfish. Racoon said, "I rise very early. I never sleep until daylight comes." Opossum said the same thing. Then each went home. Now Opossum lay down in a hollow tree and slept there a long time. He arose when the sun was very high and went to the pond. But Racoon had been there ahead of him, and had eaten all the crawfish. Racoon sang the Song of the Racoon as he was going home. Opossum stood listening. He, too, sang. He sang the Song of the Opossum, thus: _Hí na kí-yu wus-sé-di_ He met the Racoon who had eaten all the crawfish. "Ha!" said Racoon. "I have been eating very long, and I was going home, as I was sleepy." Opossum said, "I, too, have been eating so long that I am sleepy, so I am going home." Opossum was always telling a lie. People say this of the Opossum because if one hits that animal and throws it down for dead, soon it gets up and walks off. WHY THE 'POSSUM'S TAIL IS BARE _Cherokee_ 'Possum used to have a long, bushy tail and he was so proud of it that he combed it out every morning and sang about it at the dance. Now Rabbit had had no tail since Bear pulled it off because he was jealous. Therefore he planned to play a trick on 'Possum. The animals called a great council. They planned to have a dance. It was Rabbit's business to send out the news. One day as he was passing 'Possum's house, he stopped to talk. "Are you going to the council?" he asked. "Yes, if I can have a special seat," said 'Possum. "I have such a handsome tail I ought to sit where everyone can see me." Rabbit said, "I will see that you have a special seat. And I will send someone to comb your tail for the dance." 'Possum was very much pleased. Rabbit at once went to Cricket, who is an expert hair cutter; therefore the Indians call him the barber. He told Cricket to go the next morning and comb 'Possum's tail for the dance. He told Cricket just what to do. In the morning, Cricket went to 'Possum's house. 'Possum stretched himself out on the floor and went to sleep, while Cricket combed out his tail and wrapped a red string around it to keep it smooth until night. But all the time, as he wound the string around, he was snipping off the hair closely. 'Possum did not know it. When it was night, 'Possum went to the council and took his special seat. When it was his turn to dance, he loosened the red string from his tail and stepped into the middle of the lodge. The drummers began to beat the drum. 'Possum began to sing, "See my beautiful tail." Every man shouted and 'Possum danced around the circle again, singing, "See what a fine color it has." They all shouted again, and 'Possum went on dancing, as he sang, "See how it sweeps the ground." Then the animals all shouted so that 'Possum wondered what it meant. He looked around. Every man was laughing at him. Then he looked down at his beautiful tail. It was as bare as a lizard's tail. There was not a hair on it. He was so astonished and ashamed that he could not say a word. He rolled over on the ground and grinned, just as he does today when taken by surprise. WHY 'POSSUM HAS A LARGE MOUTH _Choctaw_ (_Bayou Lacomb_) Very little food there was for Deer one dry season. He became thin and weak. One day he met 'Possum. Deer at once exclaimed, "Why, 'Possum, how fat you are! How do you keep so fat when I cannot find enough to eat?" 'Possum said, "I live on persimmons. They are very large this year, so I have all I want to eat." "How do you get the persimmons?" asked Deer. "They grow so high!" "That is easy," said 'Possum. "I go to the top of a high hill. Then I run down and strike a persimmon tree so hard with my head that all the ripe persimmons drop on the ground. Then I sit there and eat them." "That is easily done," said Deer. "I will try it. Now watch me." 'Possum waited. Deer went to the top of a nearby hill. He ran down and struck the tree with his head. 'Possum watched him, laughing. He opened his mouth so wide while he laughed that he stretched it. That is why 'Possum has such a large mouth. [Illustration: SHELL PINS MADE AND USED BY INDIANS OF THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY. FOUND IN GRAVES. _From Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology._] THE PORCUPINE AND THE TWO SISTERS _Menomini_ Once there dwelt in a village two sisters, who were the swiftest runners in the Menomini tribe. Towards the setting sun was another village, two days' walk away. The sisters wished to visit this village. They began to run at great speed. At noon they came to a hollow tree lying across the trail. In the snow on the ground, there, behold! lay the trail of Porcupine, leading to the hollow tree. One of them broke off a stick and began to poke into the log, that Porcupine might come out. She said, "Let's have some fun with him." "No," said the other sister, "he is a manido. We should leave him alone." But the girl with a stick poked into the hollow log until Porcupine came out. Then she caught him and pulled out his long quills and threw them in the snow. The other said, "No, it is cold. Porcupine will need his robe." At last the sisters ran on. The village was still far away. Now when they left Porcupine, he crawled up a tall pine tree until he reached the very top. Then he faced the north and began to shake his small rattle, singing in time to its sound. Soon the sky darkened. Snow began to fall. Now the sisters could not run rapidly because of the deepening snow. One looked back and saw Porcupine in the tree top, shaking his rattle. She said, "We must go back to our own village. I am afraid some harm will overtake us." The other answered, "No, let us go on. We need not fear Porcupine." The snow became deeper, so they rolled up their blankets as they ran on. When the sun followed the trail over the edge of the world, the sisters could not even see the village. Still they ran on. Then in the late evening they came to a stream which they knew was near the village. Behold! It was dark. The snow was very deep. The sisters no longer had strength. They could hear voices in the village. They could not call loud enough to be heard. Thus they perished in the snow. One should never harm Porcupine because he is a manido. THE WOLF AND THE DOG _Cherokee_ In the beginning, so they say, Dog was put on the mountain side and Wolf beside the fire. When winter came, Dog could not stand the cold, and drove Wolf away from the fire. Wolf ran into the mountains and he liked it so well that he has stayed there ever since. THE CATFISH AND THE MOOSE _Menomini_ Once when the Catfish were all together in one place in the water, the Catfish chief said, "I have often seen a moose come to the edge of the water to eat grass. Let us watch for him and kill him and eat him. He always comes when the sun is a little way up in the sky." The Catfish agreed to attack Moose. So they went to watch. They crept everywhere in among the grass and rushes when Moose came down to the water's edge, slowly picking at the grass. All the tribe watched to see what the Catfish chief would do. He slipped slowly through the marshy grass to where Moose was standing. He thrust his spear into Moose's leg. Moose said, "Who has thrust a spear into my leg?" He looked down and saw the Catfish tribe. At once he began to trample upon them with his hoofs. He killed many, but others escaped and swam down the river. Catfish still carry spears, but their heads are flat, because Moose tramped them down in the mud. TURTLE _Menomini_ There was a large camp in which Miqkano, the Turtle, took up his abode. He built a wigwam but he had no one to keep house for him. He thought he needed a wife. Now Turtle found a young woman whom he liked. He said, "I want you to be my wife." She said, "How are you going to provide for me? You cannot keep up with the rest of the people when they move." Turtle replied, "I can keep up with the best of your people." Then the young woman wanted to put him off. She said, "Oh, well, I will marry you in the spring." Turtle was vexed with this. At last he said, "I shall go to war and take some captives. When I return in the spring, I shall expect you to marry me." Then Turtle prepared to go on the war path. He called all his friends, the Turtles, to him. He left camp, followed by a throng of curious Indians. The young woman he wanted to marry laughed as the Turtles moved away. They were so very slow. Turtle was vexed again. He said, "In four days from now you will surely mourn for me because I shall be at a great distance from you." "Why," said the girl, laughing, "in four days from this time you will scarcely be out of sight." Turtle immediately corrected himself, and said, "I did not mean four days, but four years. Then I shall return." Now the Turtles started off. They traveled slowly on until one day they found a great tree lying across their trail. Turtle said, "This we cannot pass unless we go around it. That would take too long. What shall we do?" Some said, "Let us burn a hole through the trunk," but in this they did not succeed. Therefore they had to turn back home, but it was a long time before they came near the Indian village again. They wanted to appear as successful warriors, so as they came near, they set up the war song. The Indians heard them. They at once ran out to see the scalps and the spoils. But when they came near, the Turtles each seized an Indian by the arm and said, "We take you our prisoners. You are our spoils." The Indians who were captured in this way were very angry. Now the Turtle chief had captured the young woman he said he was going to marry. He said to the Indian girl, "Now that I have you I will keep you." Now it was necessary to organize a dance to celebrate the victory over the Indians. Everyone dressed in his best robe and beads. Turtle sang, "Whoever comes near me will die, will die, will die!" and the others danced around him in a circle. At once the Indians became alarmed. Each one fled to his own lodge, in the village. Turtle also went to the village, but he arrived much later because he could not travel so fast. Someone said to him, "That girl has married another man." "Is that true?" stormed Turtle. "Let me see the man." So he went to that wigwam. He called, "I am going for the woman who promised to be my wife." Her husband said, "Here comes Turtle. Now what is to be done?" "I shall take care of that," said his wife. Turtle came in and seized her. He said, "Come along with me. You belong to me." She pulled back. She said, "You broke your promise." The husband said also, "Yes, you promised to go to war and bring back some prisoners. You failed to do so." Turtle said, "I did go. I returned with many prisoners." Then he picked up the young woman and carried her off. Now when Turtle arrived at his own wigwam, the young woman went at once to a friend and borrowed a large kettle. She filled it with water and set it on to boil. Turtle became afraid. He said, "What are you doing?" She said, "I am heating some water. Do you know how to swim?" "Oh, yes," said Turtle. "I can swim." The young woman said, "You jump in the water and swim. I can wash your shell." So Turtle tried to swim in the hot water. Then the other Turtles, seeing their chief swimming in the kettle, climbed over the edge and jumped into the water. Thus Turtle and his warriors were conquered. THE WORSHIP OF THE SUN _Ojibwa_ Long ago, an Ojibwa Indian and his wife lived on the shores of Lake Huron. They had one son, who was named "O-na-wut-a-qui-o, He-that-catches-the-clouds." Now the boy was very handsome, and his parents thought highly of him, but he refused to make the fast of his tribe. His father gave him charcoal; yet he would not blacken his face. They refused him food; but he wandered along the shore, and ate the eggs of birds. One day his father took from him by force the eggs of the birds. He took them violently. Then he threw charcoal to him. Then did the boy blacken his face and begin his fast. Now he fell asleep. A beautiful woman came down through the air and stood beside him. She said, "I have come for you. Step in my trail." At once he began to rise through the air. They passed through an opening in the sky, and he found himself on the Sky-plain. There were flowers on the beautiful plain, and streams of fresh, cold water. The valleys were green and fair. Birds were singing. The Sky-land was very beautiful. There was but one lodge, and it was divided into two parts. In one end were bright and glowing robes, spears, and bows and arrows. At the other end, the garments of a woman were hung. The woman said, "My brother is coming and I must hide you." So she put him in a corner and spread over him a broad, shining belt. When the brother came in, he was very richly dressed, and glowing. He took down his great pipe and his tobacco. At last, he said, "Nemissa, my elder sister, when will you end these doings? The Greatest of Spirits has commanded that you should not take away the children of earth. I know of the coming of O-na-wut-a-qui-o." Then he called out, "Come out of your hiding. You will get hungry if you remain there." When the boy came out, he gave him a handsome pipe of red sandstone, and a bow and arrows. So the boy stayed in the Sky-land. But soon he found that every morning, very early, the brother left the wigwam. He returned in the evening, and then the sister left it and was gone all night. One day he said to the brother, "Let me go with you." "Yes," said the brother, and the next morning they started off. The two traveled a long while over a smooth plain. It was a very long journey. He became hungry. At last he said, "Is there no game?" "Wait until we reach the place where I always stop to eat," said the brother. So they journeyed on. At last they came to a place spread over with fine mats. It was near a hole in the Sky-plain. The Indian looked down through the hole. Below were great lakes and the villages of his people. He could see in one place feasting and dancing, and in another a war party silently stealing upon the enemy. In a green plain young warriors were playing ball. The brother said, "Do you see those children?" and he sent a dart down from the Sky-plain. At once a little boy fell to the ground. Then all the people gathered about the lodge of his father. The Indian, looking down through the hole, could hear the _she-she-gwan_ of the _meta_, and the loud singing. Then Sun, the brother, called down, "Send me up a white dog." Immediately a white dog was killed by the medicine men, and roasted, because the child's father ordered a feast. All the wise men and the medicine men were there. Sun said to the Indian, "Their ears are open and they listen to my voice." Now the Indians on the Earth-plain divided the dog, and placed pieces on the bark for those who were at that feast. Then the master of the feast called up, "We send this to thee, Great Manito." At once the roasted dog came up to Sun in the Sky-plain. Thus Sun and the Indian had food. Then Sun healed the boy whom he had struck down. Then he began again to travel along the trail in the Sky-plain, and they reached their wigwam by another road. Then O-na-wut-a-qui-o began to weary of the Sky-land. At last he said to Moon, "I wish to go home." Moon said, "Since you like better the care and poverty of the earth, you may return. I will take you back." At once the Indian youth awoke. He was in the very plain where he had fallen asleep after he had blackened his face and begun his fast. But his mother said he had been gone a year. TASHKA AND WALO _Choctaw_ (_Bayou Lacomb_) Tashka and Walo were brothers. They lived a long while ago, so they say. Every morning they saw Sun come up over the edge of the earth. Then he followed the trail through the sky. When they were four years old, they started to follow Sun's trail. They walked all day, but that night when Sun died, they were still in their own country. They knew all the hills and rivers. Then they slept. Next morning they began again to follow Sun, but when he died at the edge of the earth, they could still see their own land. Then they followed Sun many years. At last they became grown men. One day they reached a great sea-water. There was no land except the shore on which they stood. When Sun went down over the edge of the earth that day, they saw him sink into the waters. Then they crossed the sea-water, to the edge. So they came to Sun's home. All around there were many women. The stars are women, and Moon also. Moon is Sun's wife. Moon asked them how they had found their way. They were very far from their own land. They said, "For many years we have followed Sun's trail." Sun said, "Do you know your way home?" They said, "No." So Sun took them up to the edge of the water. They could see the earth, but they could not see their own land. Sun asked, "Why did you follow me?" They said, "We wished to see where you lived." Sun said, "I will send you home. But for four days you must not speak a word to any person. If you do not speak, you shall live long. You shall have much wealth." Then Sun called to Buzzard. He put the two brothers on Buzzard's back. He said, "Take them back to earth." So Buzzard started for the earth. Now the clouds are halfway between heaven and earth. The wind never blows above the clouds, so they say. Buzzard flew from heaven to the clouds. The brothers could easily keep their hold. Then Buzzard flew from the clouds to the earth. But now Wind blew them in all directions. Then at last they came to earth. They saw the trees around their own village. They rested under the trees. An old man passing by knew them. So he went down the trail and told their mother. She at once hastened to see them. When she met them, she began to talk. She made them talk to her. They told her. So they spoke before the four days were ended. Therefore Sun could not keep his promise. SUN AND MOON _Menomini_ Once upon a time, Ke-so, the Sun, and his sister, Tipa-ke-so, the Moon, the "last-night sun," lived together in a wigwam in the East. One day Sun dressed himself to go hunting, took his bows and arrows, and left. He was gone a long time. When he did not return, his sister became frightened, and came out into the sky to look for her brother. At last he returned, bringing with him a bear which he had shot. Moon still comes up into the sky and travels for twenty days. Then she disappears, and for four days nothing is seen of her. At the end of the four days, she comes into the sky again, and travels twenty days more. Sun is a being like ourselves. He wears an otter skin about his head. THE MOON PERSON _Biloxi_ In olden days, the Moon Person used to make visits to the Indians. One day a child put out a dirty little hand and made a black spot on Moon Person. Therefore Moon felt ashamed and when night came he disappeared. He went up above. He stays up above all the time now, so they say. Sometimes he is dressed altogether in a shining robe, and therefore he is bright at night. But immediately afterwards he disappears. You can still see the black spot, so they say. THE STAR CREATURES _Cherokee_ One night hunters in the mountains noticed two shining lights moving along the top of a distant ridge. After a while the lights vanished on the other side. Thus they watched many nights, talking around the camp fire. One morning they traveled to the ridge. Then they searched long. At last they found two round creatures covered with soft fur or downy feathers. They had small heads. Then the hunters took these strange creatures to their camp. They watched them. In the day, they were only balls of gray fur; only when the breeze stirred their fur, then sparks flew out. At night they grew bright and shone like stars. They kept very quiet. They did not stir, so the hunters did not fasten them. One night they suddenly rose from the ground like balls of fire. They went above the tops of the trees, and then higher until they reached the Sky-land. So the hunters knew they were stars. METEORS _Menomini_ When a star falls from the sky it leaves a fiery trail. It does not die. Its shade goes back to its own place to shine again. The Indians sometimes find the small stars where they have fallen in the grass. THE AURORA BOREALIS _Menomini_ In the Land of the North Wind live the _manabaiwok_, the giants of whom our old people tell. The _manabaiwok_ are our friends, but we do not see them any more. They are great hunters and fishermen. Whenever they come out with their torches to spear fish, we know it because the sky is bright over that place. THE WEST WIND _Chitimacha_ A little boy named Ustapu was one day lying on the shore of a lake. His people had just reached the shore from the prairies, but the wind was too high for them to cross. As he lay there, he suddenly saw another boy fanning himself with a fan of turkey wings. This was the boy who made the West Wind. Ustapu said to his tribe, "I can break the arm of the boy who makes West Wind." But they laughed at him. He took a shell and threw it at the boy and struck his left arm. Therefore when the west wind is high, the Indians say that the boy is using his strong arm. When the west wind is a gentle breeze, they say he is using his injured arm. Before that, the west wind had always been so strong it was very disagreeable, because Wind-maker could use both arms. Now it is much gentler. The Indians think this boy also made the other winds. THE LONE LIGHTNING _Ojibwa_ At one time an orphan boy whose uncle was very unkind to him ran away. He ran a long way. He ran until night. Then because he was afraid of wild animals, he climbed into a tree in the forest. It was a high pine tree, and he climbed into the forked branches of it. A person came to him from the upper sky. He said, "Follow me. Step in my trail. I have seen how badly you are treated." Then at once as the boy stepped in his trail, he rose higher and higher into the upper sky. Then the person put twelve arrows into his hands. He said, "There are evil manitoes in the sky. Go to war against them. Shoot them with your bow and arrows." The boy went into the northern part of the upper sky. Soon he saw a manito and shot at him. But that one's magic was too strong. Therefore the shot failed. There was only a single streak of lightning in the northern sky, yet there was no storm, and not even a cloud. [Illustration: OJIBWA DANCER'S BEADED MEDICINE BAG. _From Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology._] Eleven times the boy thus failed to kill a manito, and thus he had but one arrow left. He held this in his hands a long while, looking around. Now these evil manitoes had very strong medicine. They could change their form in a moment. But they feared the boy's arrows because they were also strong magic. And because they had been given to him by a good manito, they had power to kill. At last the boy saw the chief of the evil manitoes. He drew his bow and shot his last arrow; but the chief saw it coming. At once he changed himself into a rock. And the arrow buried itself in a crack of the rock. The chief was very angry. He cried, "Now your arrows are all gone! And because you have dared to shoot at me, you shall become the trail of your arrow." Thus at once he changed the boy into Nazhik-a-wawa, the Lone Lightning. THE THUNDERS _Cherokee_ The Great Thunder and his sons, the two Thunder boys, live far in the West, above the Sky-plain. The lightning and the rainbow are their beautiful robes. Medicine men pray to Thunder, and call him the Red Man because there is so much red in his dress. There are other thunders that live lower down, in the cliffs and mountains, and under waterfalls. They travel on bridges from one peak to another, but the Indian cannot see these bridges. The Great Thunders above the sky are kind and helpful when we make medicine to them, but the others are always plotting mischief. One must not point to the rainbow. MONTHS OF THE YEAR _Natchez_ The Natchez begin the year in March, each being a lunar month. Therefore there are thirteen. 1 Deer month 2 Strawberry month 3 Little Corn month 4 Watermelon month 5 Peach month (July) 6 Mulberry month 7 Great Corn month (maize) 8 Turkey month (October) 9 Bison month 10 Bear month 11 Cold meal month (January) 12 Chestnut month 13 Nut month (nuts broken to make bread, at the close of winter, when supplies run low) WHY THE OAKS AND SUMACHS REDDEN _Fox_ Once on a time, long ago, when it was winter, so they say, it snowed for the first time. And while the very first snow lay on the ground, so they say, three men went early in the morning to hunt for game. In a thick growth of shrub on a side hill, a bear had entered in. They could see the trail in the snow. One went in after him, and started him going in flight. "Away from The-place-whence-comes-the-cold he is making fast!" he called to the others. But the one who had gone round by way of The-place-from-whence-comes- the-cold, cried, "In the direction From-whence-comes-the-source-of-midday is he hurrying away." Thus he said. The third, who had gone round by way of The-place-whence-comes-the- source-of-midday, cried out, "Towards-the-place-where-the-sun-falls-down is he hastening." Back and forth for a long while did they keep the bear fleeing from one to another. After a while, one of the hunters who was coming behind looked down. Behold! The earth below was green. For it is really true, so they say, that up into the Sky-land were they led away by the bear. While they were chasing him about the dense growth of shrubs, that was surely the time that up into the Sky-land they went. Then quickly he called, "Oh, Union-of-rivers, let us turn back. Truly into the Sky-land is he leading us away." So he called to Union-of-rivers, but no answer did he receive from that one. Now Union-of-rivers, who went running between the man ahead and the man behind, had a little puppy, Hold-tight. Now in the autumn, they overtook the bear. Then they slew him. After they had slain him, many boughs of an oak did they cut, also of sumach. So with the bear lying on top of the boughs, they skinned him, and cut up the meat. Then they began to scatter the pieces in all directions. Towards The-place-whence-comes-the-dawn-of-day they hurled the head. In winter, when dawn is nearly breaking, stars appear which are that head, so they say. Also to the east flung they his backbone. In winter time, certain stars lie close together. These are the backbone, so they say. And it has also been told of the bear and the hunters that the group of four stars in front are the bear and the three hunters. And between the front star and the star behind, a tiny little star hangs. That is the little dog, Hold-tight, which was the pet of Union-of-rivers. And so often as autumn comes, the oaks and sumachs redden at the leaf because their boughs were stained with the blood of the bear. THE MAN OF ICE _Cherokee_ Once when the people were burning the woods in the fall, a poplar tree began to burn. It burned until the fire went down into the roots; and then down into the ground. It burned and burned until there was a great hole in the ground, and the people began to be afraid the whole world would burn. They tried to put out the fire, but it was too deep in the ground. At last someone said, "There is a man living in a house of ice, far toward the Frozen Land. He can put out the fire." So messengers were sent. They traveled many sleeps until they came to the house of the Man of Ice. He was a little fellow with long braids of hair, hanging to the ground. He said at once, "Oh, yes, I can help you," and began to unbraid his hair. When it was all loose, he took it in one hand and struck the ends against the other hand. The messengers felt a wind blow against their cheeks. He struck the ends of his hair again across his hand. A light rain began to fall. A third time he struck the open hand with his hair. Sleet began to fall with the rain. The fourth time, and large hailstones fell. They fell as though they came out of the ends of his hair. "Now go home," said the medicine man. "I shall be there tomorrow." So the messengers returned. They found the people standing around the burning hole. The next day, as the people stood again at the burning hole, watching the fire, a light wind came from the north. They were afraid because they knew the medicine man had sent it. The wind made the flames sweep higher. Then a light rain began to fall. It but made the fire hotter. Then came sleet with a heavy rain, and hail. The flames died down but clouds of smoke and steam arose. Then the people fled to their wigwams for shelter. A great wind arose which blew the hail into the depths of the fire and piled up a great heap of hailstones. Then the fire died out and the smoke ceased. Now when the people went to look again--a lake stood where flames had been. Yet from below the water came the sound of embers still crackling. THE NUNNEHI _Cherokee_ The Nunnehi are The People Who Live Anywhere. They were spirit people who lived in the highlands of the Cherokee country, and they liked the bald mountain peaks where no timber ever grows. No one could see the Nunnehi except when the spirit-people let themselves be seen, and then they looked and acted just like other Indians. But they like music and dancing, and hunters in the mountains often could hear the dance songs and the drum; yet when they went towards the sound, it would suddenly shift behind them or in some other direction. They were a friendly people, too. Some Indians have thought they were the same as the Little People; but those are no larger than little children. Once a boy was with the Nunnehi. When he was about ten or twelve years old, he was playing one day near the river, shooting at a mark with his bow and arrow. Then he started to build a fish trap in the water. While he was piling up the stones in two long walls, a man came and stood on the bank. The man said, "What are you doing?" The boy told him. The man said, "That's pretty hard work. You ought to rest awhile. Come and take a walk up the river." The boy said, "No. I am going to the lodge to get something to eat." "Come to my lodge," said the man. "I'll give you good food and bring you home again in the morning." So the boy went to the man's lodge with him. They went up the river. The man's wife and all the other people were glad to see him. They gave him plenty to eat. While he was eating, a man that the boy knew very well indeed came in and spoke to him. So he did not feel strange. Afterwards he played with the other children and slept there that night. In the morning, their father took him down the trail. They went down a trail that had a cornfield on one side and a peach orchard on the other, until they came to a cross trail. Then the man said, "Go along this trail across that ridge and you will come to the river road that will take you straight to your home." So he went back to his house. The boy went down the trail, but soon he turned and looked back. There was no cornfield there; there were no peach trees or house--nothing but trees on the mountain side. Still he was not frightened. He went on until he came to the river trail in sight of his home. He saw many people standing about talking. When they saw him, they ran towards him shouting, "Here he is! He is not drowned or killed in the mountains!" Then they said, "Where have you been? We have been looking for you ever since yesterday noon." "A man took me over to his house, just across the ridge," said the boy. "I thought Udsi-skala would tell you where I was." Udsi-skala said, "I have not seen you. I was out all day in my canoe looking for you. It was one of the Nunnehi who made himself look like me." His mother said, "You say you had plenty to eat there?" "Yes," said the boy. "There is no house there," his mother answered. "There is nothing there but trees and rocks, but we hear a drum sometimes in the big bald peak above. The people you saw were the Nunnehi." THE LITTLE PEOPLE _Cherokee_ There is another race of spirits, the Little People. They live in rock caves and in the mountain side. They hardly reach to a man's knee, but they are very handsome, with long hair falling to the ground. They work wonders, and are fond of music. They spend half their time drumming and dancing. If their drum is heard in lonely places in the mountains, it is not safe to follow it. They do not like to be disturbed and they throw a spell over people who annoy them. And even when such a person at last gets back home, he seems dazed. Sometimes the Little People come near a house at night, but even if people hear them talking, they must not go out. And in the morning, the corn is gathered, or the field cleared, as if a great many people had been at work. When a hunter finds a knife in the woods, he must say, "Little People, I want to take this," because it may belong to them. Otherwise, they may throw stones at him as he goes home. There are other spirits. The Water Dwellers live in the water and fishermen pray to them. There are also the hunter spirits who are very handsome. Sometimes they help the hunters, but when someone trips and falls, we know one of these hunter spirits tripped him up. Then there is Det-sata. Det-sata was once a boy who ran away from his home. He has a great many children who are all just like him and have his name. When a flock of birds flies up suddenly as if frightened, it is because Det-sata is chasing them. He is mischievous and sometimes hides an arrow from the bird hunter who may have shot it off into a perfectly clear space, but looks and looks without finding it. Then the hunter says, "Det-sata, you have my arrow. If you do not give it up, I'll scratch you." When he looks again, he finds it. WAR SONG _Ojibwa_ From the place of the South They come. From the place of the South They come. The birds of war-- Hear the sound of their passing screams in the air. THE WAR MEDICINE _Cherokee_ Some warriors had medicine to change themselves into any animal or bird they wished. Long ago, a warrior coming in from the hunt, found enemies attacking the wigwams of his people across the river. The men were away hunting. On the river bank, he found a mussel shell. With his medicine he changed the shell into a canoe. Thus he crossed the river, and went to his grandmother's wigwam. She sat with her head in a blanket, waiting to be killed. At once he changed her into a small gourd, and fastened her to his belt. Then he climbed a tree and became a swamp woodcock. Thus he flew back across the river. So the warrior and his grandmother escaped. THE COMING OF THE WHITE MAN _Wyandot_ Now in early days, the Wyandots lived about the St. Lawrence River, in the mountains to the eastward. They were the first tribe of old. They had the first chieftainship. The chief said to his nephews, the Lenapées, "Go down to the seacoast and look. If you see anything, come and tell me." Now the Lenapées had a village by the sea. They often looked out, but they saw nothing. One day something came. When it came near the land, it stopped. Then the people were afraid. They ran into the woods. The next day two Indians went quietly to look. It was lying there in the water. Then something just like it came out of it and walked on two legs over the water.[25] When it came to the land, two men stepped out of it. They were different from us. They made signs for the Lenapées to come out of the woods. They gave presents. Then the Lenapées gave them skin clothes. [25] A row boat. The white men went away. They came back many times. They asked the Indians for room to put a chair on the land. So it was given. But soon they began to pull the lacing out of the bottom and to walk inland with it. They have not yet come to the end of the string. Transcriber's Note Variations in spelling and accent usage are preserved as printed. "The Death Trail" is accredited to the Cherokee in the Table of Contents, but to the Choctaw as a subtitle to the story itself. This is preserved as printed. "The Kite and the Eagle" has no credit to a particular nation. "The Tiny Frog and the Panther" had no credit in the Table of Contents, but is accredited to the Biloxi as a subtitle to the story. This is preserved as printed. Page 12 mentioned Kuti Mandkce. With reference to the 1912 Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 47, _A Dictionary of Biloxi and Ofo Languages_, this has been amended to Kuti Mankdce. Minor punctuation errors have been repaired. The following amendment has been made on the assumption that it was a printer error: Page v--Gitchee amended to Gitche--... who made Gitche Gomee, the Great Water. Illustrations have been moved where necessary so that they are not in the middle of a paragraph. The frontispiece illustration has been moved to follow the title page. 
12068	----	CAMP-FIRE AND COTTON-FIELD: SOUTHERN ADVENTURE IN TIME OF WAR. LIFE WITH THE UNION ARMIES, AND RESIDENCE ON A LOUISIANA PLANTATION. BY THOMAS W. KNOX, HERALD CORRESPONDENT. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS. 1865. TO THE REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PRESS, WHO FOLLOWED THE FORTUNES OF THE NATIONAL ARMIES, AND RECORDED THE DEEDS OF VALOR THAT SECURED THE PERPETUITY OF THE REPUBLIC, THIS VOLUME IS SYMPATHETICALLY INSCRIBED. [Illustration: THE REBEL RAM ARKANSAS RUNNING THROUGH OUR FLEET.] TO THE READER. A preface usually takes the form of an apology. The author of this volume has none to offer. The book owes its appearance to its discovery of a publisher. It has been prepared from materials gathered during the Campaigns herein recorded, and from the writer's personal recollections. Whatever of merit or demerit it possesses remains for the reader to ascertain. His judgment will be unprejudiced if he finds no word of promise on the prefatory page. NEW YORK, _September 15th, 1865_. ILLUSTRATIONS. THE RAM _Arkansas_ RUNNING THROUGH OUR FLEET ABOVE VICKSBURG HAULING DOWN A REBEL FLAG AT HICKMAN, KENTUCKY THE OPENING GUN AT BOONEVILLE THE DEATH OF GENERAL LYON GENERAL SIGEL'S TRANSPORTATION IN MISSOURI SHELLING THE HILL AT PEA RIDGE GENERAL NELSON'S DIVISION CROSSING THE TENNESSEE RUNNING THE BATTERIES AT ISLAND NUMBER TEN THE REBEL CHARGE AT CORINTH, MISSISSIPPI ASSAULTING THE HILL AT CHICKASAW BAYOU STRATEGY AGAINST GUERRILLAS THE STEAMER _Von Phul_ RUNNING THE BATTERIES CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. ANTE BELLUM. At the Rocky Mountains.--Sentiment of the People.--Firing the Southern Heart.--A Midwinter Journey across the Plains.--An Editor's Opinion.--Election in Missouri.--The North springing to Arms.--An amusing Arrest.--Off for the Field.--Final Instructions.--Niagara.--Curiosities of Banking.--Arrival at the Seat of War. CHAPTER II. MISSOURI IN THE EARLY DAYS. Apathy of the Border States.--The Missouri State Convention.--Sterling Price a Union Man.--Plan to take the State out of the Union.--Capture of Camp Jackson.--Energy of General Lyon.--Union Men organized.--An Unfortunate Collision.--The Price-Harney Truce.--The Panic among the Secessionists.--Their Hegira from St. Louis.--A Visit to the State Capital.--Under the Rebel Flag.--Searching for Contraband Articles.--An Introduction to Rebel Dignitaries.--Governor Jackson.--Sterling Price.--Jeff. Thompson.--Activity at Cairo.--Kentucky Neutrality.--The Rebels occupy Columbus. CHAPTER III. THE BEGINNING OF HOSTILITIES. General Harney Relieved.--Price's Proclamation.--End of the Truce.--Conference between the Union and Rebel Leaders.--The First Act of Hostility.--Destruction of Railway Bridges.--Promptness of General Lyon.--Capture of the State Capital.--Moving on the Enemy's Works.--The Night before Battle.--A Correspondent's Sensation. CHAPTER IV. THE FIRST BATTLE IN MISSOURI. Moving up the River.--A Landing Effected.--The Battle.--Precipitous Retreat of the Rebels.--Spoiling a Captured Camp.--Rebel Flags Emblazoned with the State Arms.--A Journalist's Outfit.--A Chaplain of the Church Militant.--A Mistake that might have been Unfortunate.--The People of Booneville.--Visiting an Official.--Banking-House Loyalty.--Preparations for a Campaign. CHAPTER V. TO SPRINGFIELD AND BEYOND. Conduct of the St. Louis Secessionists.--Collisions between Soldiers and Citizens.--Indignation of the Guests of a Hotel.--From St. Louis to Rolla.--Opinions of a "Regular."--Railway-life in Missouri.--Unprofitable Freight.--A Story of Orthography.--Mountains and Mountain Streams.--Fastidiousness Checked.--Frontier Courtesy.--Concentration of Troops at Springfield.--A Perplexing Situation.--The March to Dug Spring.--Sufferings from Heat and Thirst. CHAPTER VI. THE BATTLE OF WILSON CREEK. The Return from Dug Spring.--The Rebels follow in Pursuit.--Preparations to Attack them.--The Plan of Battle.--Moving to the Attack--A Bivouac--The Opening Shot.--"Is that Official?"--Sensations of a Spectator in Battle.--Extension of Distance and Time.--Characteristics of Projectiles.--Taking Notes under Fire.--Strength and Losses of the Opposing Armies.--A Noble Record.--The Wounded on the Field.--"One More Shot."--Granger in his Element.--General Lyon's Death. CHAPTER VII. THE RETREAT FROM SPRINGFIELD. A Council of War.--The Journalists' Council.--Preparations for Retreat.--Preceding the Advance-Guard.--Alarm and Anxiety of the People.--Magnificent Distances.--A Novel Odometer.--The Unreliable Countryman.--Neutrality.--A Night at Lebanon.--A Disagreeable Lodging-place.--Active Secessionists.--The Man who Sought and Found his Rights.--Approaching Civilization.--Rebel Couriers on the Route.--Arrival at Rolla. CHAPTER VIII. GENERAL FREMONT'S PURSUIT OF PRICE. Quarrel between Price and McCulloch.--The Rebels Advance upon Lexington.--A Novel Defense for Sharp-shooters.--Attempt to Re-enforce the Garrison.--An Enterprising Journalist.--The Surrender.--Fremont's Advance.--Causes of Delay.--How the Journalists Killed Time.--Late News.--A Contractor "Sold."--Sigel in Front.--A Motley Collection.--A Wearied Officer.--The Woman who had never seen a Black Republican.--Love and Conversion. CHAPTER IX. THE SECOND CAMPAIGN TO SPRINGFIELD. Detention at Warsaw.--A Bridge over the Osage.--The Body-Guard.--Manner of its Organization.--The Advance to Springfield.--Charge of the Body-Guard.--A Corporal's Ruse.--Occupation of Springfield.--The Situation.--Wilson Creek Revisited.--Traces of the Battle.--Rumored Movements of the Enemy.--Removal of General Fremont.--Danger of Attack.--A Night of Excitement.--The Return to St. Louis.--Curiosities of the Scouting Service.--An Arrest by Mistake. CHAPTER X. TWO MONTHS OF IDLENESS. A Promise Fulfilled.--Capture of a Rebel Camp and Train.--Rebel Sympathizers in St. Louis.--General Halleck and his Policy.--Refugees from Rebeldom.--Story of the Sufferings of a Union Family.--Chivalry in the Nineteenth Century.--The Army of the Southwest in Motion.--Gun-Boats and Transports.--Capture of Fort Henry.--The Effect in St. Louis.--Our Flag Advancing. CHAPTER XI ANOTHER CAMPAIGN IN MISSOURI. From St. Louis to Rolla.--A Limited Outfit.--Missouri Roads in Winter.--"Two Solitary Horsemen."--Restricted Accommodations in a Slaveholder's House.--An Energetic Quartermaster.--General Sheridan before he became Famous.--"Bagging Price."--A Defect in the Bag.--Examining the Correspondence of a Rebel General.--What the Rebels left at their Departure. CHAPTER XII. THE FLIGHT AND THE PURSUIT. From Springfield to Pea Ridge.--Mark Tapley in Missouri.--"The Arkansas Traveler."--Encountering the Rebel Army.--A Wonderful Spring.--The Cantonment at Cross Hollows.--Game Chickens.--Magruder _vs_. Breckinridge.--Rebel Generals in a Controversy.--Its Result.--An Expedition to Huntsville.--Curiosities of Rebel Currency.--Important Information.--A Long and Weary March.--Disposition of Forces before the Battle.--Changing Front.--What the Rebels lost by Ignorance. CHAPTER XIII. THE BATTLE OF PEA RIDGE. The Rebels make their Attack.--Albert Pike and his Indians.--Scalping Wounded Men.--Death of General McCulloch.--The Fighting at Elkhorn Tavern.--Close of a Gloomy Day.--An Unpleasant Night.--Vocal Sounds from a Mule's Throat.--Sleeping under Disadvantages.--A Favorable Morning.--The Opposing Lines of Battle.--A Severe Cannonade.--The Forest on Fire.--Wounded Men in the Flames.--The Rebels in Retreat.--Movements of our Army.--A Journey to St. Louis. CHAPTER XIV. UP THE TENNESSEE AND AT PITTSBURG LANDING. At St. Louis.--Progress of our Arms in the Great Valley.--Cairo.--Its Peculiarities and Attractions.--Its Commercial, Geographical, and Sanitary Advantages.--Up the Tennessee.--Movements Preliminary to the Great Battle.--The Rebels and their Plans.--Postponement of the Attack.--Disadvantages of our Position.--The Beginning of the Battle.--Results of the First Day.--Re-enforcements.--Disputes between Officers of our two Armies.--Beauregard's Watering-place. CHAPTER XV. SHILOH AND THE SIEGE OF CORINTH. The Error of the Rebels.--Story of a Surgeon.--Experience of a Rebel Regiment.--Injury to the Rebel Army.--The Effect in our own Lines.--Daring of a Color-Bearer.--A Brave Soldier.--A Drummer-Boy's Experience.--Gallantry of an Artillery Surgeon.--A Regiment Commanded by a Lieutenant.--Friend Meeting Friend and Brother Meeting Brother in the Opposing Lines.--The Scene of the Battle.--Fearful Traces of Musketry-Fire.--The Wounded.--The Labor of the Sanitary Commission.--Humanity a Yankee Trick.--Besieging Corinth.--A Cold-Water Battery.--Halleck and the Journalists.--Occupation of Corinth. CHAPTER XVI. CAPTURE OF FORT PILLOW AND BATTLE OF MEMPHIS. The Siege of Fort Pillow.--General Pope.--His Reputation for Veracity.--Capture of the "Ten Thousand."--Naval Battle above Fort Pillow.--The _John H. Dickey_.--Occupation of the Fort.--General Forrest.--Strength of the Fortifications.--Their Location.--Randolph, Tennessee.--Memphis and her Last Ditch.--Opening of the Naval Combat.--Gallant Action of Colonel Ellet.--Fate of the Rebel Fleet.--The People Viewing the Battle.--Their Conduct. CHAPTER XVII. IN MEMPHIS AND UNDER THE FLAG. Jeff. Thompson and his Predictions.--A Cry of Indignation.--Memphis Humiliated.--The Journalists in the Battle.--The Surrender.--A Fine Point of Law and Honor.--Going on Shore.--An Enraged Secessionist.--A Dangerous Enterprise.--Memphis and her Antecedents.--Her Loyalty.--An Amusing Incident.--How the Natives learned of the Capture of Fort Donelson.--The Last Ditch.--A Farmer-Abolitionist.--Disloyalty among the Women.--"Blessings in Disguise."--An American Mark Tapley. CHAPTER XVIII. SUPERVISING A REBEL JOURNAL. The Press of Memphis.--Flight of _The Appeal_.--A False Prediction.--_The Argus_ becomes Loyal.--Order from General Wallace.--Installed in Office.--Lecturing the Rebels.--"Trade follows the Flag."--Abuses of Traffic.--Supplying the Rebels.--A Perilous Adventure.--Passing the Rebel Lines.--Eluding Watchful Eyes. CHAPTER XIX. THE FIRST SIEGE OF VICKSBURG. From Memphis to Vicksburg.--Running the Batteries.--Our Inability to take Vicksburg by Assault.--Digging a Canal.--A Conversation with Resident Secessionists.--Their Arguments _pro_ and _con_, and the Answers they Received.--A Curiosity of Legislation.--An Expedition up the Yazoo.--Destruction of the Rebel Fleet.--The _Arkansas_ Running the Gauntlet.--A Spirited Encounter.--A Gallant Attempt.--Raising the Siege.--Fate of the _Arkansas_. CHAPTER XX. THE MARCH THROUGH ARKANSAS.--THE SIEGE OF CINCINNATI. General Curtis's Army reaching Helena.--Its Wanderings.--The Arkansas Navy.--Troops and their Supplies "miss Connection."--Rebel Reports.--Memphis in Midsummer.--"A Journey due North."--Chicago.--Bragg's Advance into Kentucky.--Kirby Smith in Front of Cincinnati.--The City under Martial Law.--The Squirrel Hunters.--War Correspondents in Comfortable Quarters.--Improvising an Army.--Raising the Siege.--Bragg's Retreat. CHAPTER XXI. THE BATTLE OF CORINTH. New Plans of the Rebels.--Their Design to Capture Corinth.--Advancing to the Attack.--Strong Defenses.--A Magnificent Charge.--Valor _vs_. Breast-Works.--The Repulse.--Retreat and Pursuit.--The National Arms Triumphant. CHAPTER XXII. THE CAMPAIGN FROM CORINTH. Changes of Commanders.--Preparations for the Aggressive.--Marching from Corinth.--Talking with the People.--"You-uns and We-uns."--Conservatism of a "Regular."--Loyalty and Disloyalty.--Condition of the Rebel Army.--Foraging.--German Theology for American Soldiers.--A Modest Landlord.--A Boy without a Name.--The Freedmen's Bureau.--Employing Negroes.--Holly Springs and its People.--An Argument for Secession. CHAPTER XXIII. GRANT'S OCCUPATION OF MISSISSIPPI. The Slavery Question.--A Generous Offer.--A Journalist's Modesty.--Hopes of the Mississippians at the Beginning of the War.--Visiting an Editress.--Literature under Difficulties.--Jacob Thompson and his Correspondence.--Plans for the Capture of Vicksburg.--Movements of General Sherman.--The Raid upon Holly Springs.--Forewarned, but not Forearmed.--A Gallant Fight. CHAPTER XXIV. THE BATTLE OF CHICKASAW BAYOU. Leaving Memphis.--Down the Great River.--Landing in the Yazoo.--Description of the Ground.--A Night in Bivouac.--Plan of Attack.--Moving toward the Hills.--Assaulting the Bluff.--Our Repulse.--New Plans.--Withdrawal from the Yazoo. CHAPTER XXV. BEFORE VICKSBURG. Capture of Arkansas Post.--The Army returns to Milliken's Bend.--General Sherman and the Journalists.--Arrest of the Author.--His Trial before a Military Court.--Letter from President Lincoln.--Capture of Three Journalists. CHAPTER XXVI. KANSAS IN WAR-TIME. A Visit to Kansas.--Recollections of Border Feuds.--Peculiarities of Kansas Soldiers.--Foraging as a Fine Art.--Kansas and Missouri.--Settling Old Scores.--Depopulating the Border Counties.--Two Examples of Grand Strategy.--Capture of the "Little-More-Grape" Battery.--A Woman in Sorrow.--Frontier Justice.--Trial before a "Lynch" Court.--General Blunt's Order.--Execution of Horse-Thieves.--Auction Sale of Confiscated Property.--Banished to Dixie. CHAPTER XXVII. GETTYSBURG. A Hasty Departure.--At Harrisburg.--_En route_ for the Army of the Potomac.--The Battle-Field at Gettysburg.--Appearance of the Cemetery.--Importance of the Position.--The Configuration of Ground.--Traces of Battle.--Round Hill.--General Meade's Head-Quarters.--Appearance of the Dead.--Through the Forests along the Line.--Retreat and Pursuit of Lee. CHAPTER XXVIII. IN THE NORTHWEST. From Chicago to Minnesota.--Curiosities of Low-Water Navigation.--St. Paul and its Sufferings in Earlier Days.--The Indian War.--A Brief History of our Troubles in that Region.--General Pope's Expeditions to Chastise the Red Man.--Honesty in the Indian Department.--The End of the Warfare.--The Pacific Railway.--A Bold Undertaking.--Penetrating British Territory.--The Hudson Bay Company.--Peculiarities of a Trapper's Life. CHAPTER XXIX. INAUGURATION OF A GREAT ENTERPRISE. Plans for Arming the Negroes along the Mississippi.--Opposition to the Movement.--Plantations Deserted by their Owners.--Gathering Abandoned Cotton.--Rules and Regulations.--Speculation.--Widows and Orphans in Demand.--Arrival of Adjutant-General Thomas.--Designs of the Government. CHAPTER XXX. COTTON-PLANTING IN 1863. Leasing the Plantations.--Interference of the Rebels.--Raids.--Treatment of Prisoners.--The Attack upon Milliken's Bend.--A Novel Breast-Work.--Murder of our Officers.--Profits of Cotton-Planting.--Dishonesty of Lessees.--Negroes Planting on their own Account. CHAPTER XXXI. AMONG THE OFFICIALS. Reasons for Trying an Experiment.--Activity among Lessees.--Opinions of the Residents.--Rebel Hopes in 1863.--Removal of Negroes to West Louisiana.--Visiting Natchez.--The City and its Business.--"The Rejected Addresses". CHAPTER XXXII. A JOURNEY OUTSIDE THE LINES. Passing the Pickets.--Cold Weather in the South.--Effect of Climate upon the Constitution.--Surrounded and Captured.--Prevarication and Explanation.--Among the Natives.--The Game for the Confederacy.--Courtesy of the Planters.--Condition of the Plantations.--The Return. CHAPTER XXXIII. ON THE PLANTATION. Military Protection.--Promises.--Another Widow.--Securing a Plantation.--Its Locality and Appearance.--Gardening in Louisiana.--How Cotton is Picked.--"The Tell-Tale."--A Southerner's Opinion of the Negro Character.--Causes and Consequences. CHAPTER XXXIV. RULES AND REGULATIONS UNDER THE OLD AND NEW SYSTEMS. The Plantation Record.--Its Uses.--Interesting Memoranda.--Dogs, Jail, and Stocks.--Instructions to the Overseer.--His Duties and Responsibilities.--The Order of General Banks.--Management of Plantations in the Department of the Gulf.--The two Documents. Contrasted.--One of the Effects of "an Abolition War". CHAPTER XXXV. OUR FREE-LABOR ENTERPRISE IN PROGRESS. The Negroes at Work.--Difficulties in the Way.--A Public Meeting.--A Speech.--A Negro's Idea of Freedom.--A Difficult Question to Determine.--Influence of Northern and Southern Men Contrasted.--An Increase of Numbers.--"Ginning" Cotton.--In the Lint-Room.--Mills and Machinery of a Plantation.--A Profitable Enterprise. CHAPTER XXXVI. WAR AND AGRICULTURE. Official Favors.--Division of Labor.--Moral Suasion.--Corn-gathering in the South.--An Alarm.--A Frightened Irishman.--The Rebels Approaching.--An Attack on Waterproof.--Falstaff Redivivus.--His Feats of Arms.--Departure for New Orleans. CHAPTER XXXVII. IN THE COTTON MARKET. New Orleans and its Peculiarities.--Its Loss by the Rebellion.--Cotton Factors in New Orleans.--Old Things passed away.--The Northern Barbarians a Race of Shopkeepers.--Pulsations of the Cotton Market.--A Quarrel with a Lady.--Contending for a Principle.--Inharmony of the "Regulations."--An Account of Sales. CHAPTER XXXVIII. SOME FEATURES OF PLANTATION LIFE. Mysteries of Mule-trading.--"What's in a Name?"--Process of Stocking a Plantation.--An Enterprising White Man.--Stratagem of a Yankee.--Distributing Goods to the Negroes.--The Tastes of the African.--Ethiopian Eloquence.--A Colored Overseer.--Guerrillas Approaching.--Whisky _vs_. Guerrillas.--A Hint to Military Men. CHAPTER XXXIX. VISITED BY GUERRILLAS. News of the Raid.--Returning to the Plantation.--Examples of Negro Cunning.--A Sudden Departure and a Fortunate Escape.--A Second Visit.--"Going Through," in Guerrilla Parlance.--How it is Accomplished.--Courtesy to Guests.--A Holiday Costume.--Lessees Abandoning their Plantations.--Official Promises. CHAPTER XL. PECULIARITIES OF PLANTATION LABOR. Resuming Operation.--Difficulties in the Way.--A New Method of Healing the Sick.--A Thief Discovered by his Ignorance of Arithmetic.--How Cotton is Planted.--The Uses of Cotton-Seed.--A Novel Sleeping-Room.--Constructing a Tunnel.--Vigilance of a Negro Sentinel. CHAPTER XLI. THE NEGROES AT A MILITARY POST. The Soldiers at Waterproof.--The Black Man in Blue.--Mutiny and Desertion.--Their Cause and Cure.--Tendering a Resignation.--No Desire for a Barber.--Seeking Protection.--Falsehood and Truth.--Proneness to Exaggeration.--Amusing Estimates. CHAPTER XLII. THE END OF THE EXPERIMENT. The Nature of our "Protection."--Trade Following the Flag.--A Fortunate Journey.--Our Last Visit.--Inhumanity of the Guerrillas.--Driving Negroes into Captivity.--Killing an Overseer.--Our Final Departure.--Plantations Elsewhere. CHAPTER XLIII. THE MISSISSIPPI AND ITS PECULIARITIES. Length of the Great River, and the Area it Drains.--How Itasca Lake obtained its Name.--The Bends of the Mississippi.--Curious Effect upon Titles to Real Estate.--A Story of Napoleon.--A Steamboat Thirty-five Years under Water.--The Current and its Variations.--Navigating Cotton and Corn Fields.--Reminiscences of the Islands. CHAPTER XLIV. STEAMBOATING ON THE MISSISSIPPI IN PEACE AND WAR. Attempts to Obstruct the Great River.--Chains, Booms, and Batteries.--A Novelty in Piloting.--Travel in the Days Before the Rebellion.--Trials of Speed.--The Great Race.--Travel During the War.--Running a Rebel Battery on the Lower Mississippi.--Incidents of the Occasion.--Comments on the Situation. CHAPTER XLV. THE ARMY CORRESPONDENT. The Beginning and the End.--The Lake Erie Piracy.--A Rochester Story.--The First War Correspondent.--Napoleon's Policy.--Waterloo and the Rothschilds.--Journalistic Enterprise in the Mexican War.--The Crimea and the East Indian Rebellion.--Experiences at the Beginning of Hostilities.--The Tender Mercies of the Insurgents.--In the Field.--Adventures in Missouri and Kentucky.--Correspondents in Captivity.--How Battle-Accounts were Written.--Professional Complaints. CHAPTER XLVI. THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE SOUTH. Scarcity of the Population.--Fertility of the Country.--Northern Men already in the South.--Kansas Emigrants Crossing Missouri.--Change of the Situation.--Present Disadvantages of Emigration.--Feeling of the People.--Property-Holders in Richmond.--The Sentiment in North Carolina.--South Carolina Chivalry.--The Effect of War.--Prospect of the Success of Free Labor.--Trade in the South. CHAPTER XLVII. HOW DISADVANTAGES MAY BE OVERCOME. Conciliating the People of the South.--Railway Travel and its Improvement.--Rebuilding Steamboats.--Replacing Working Stock.--The Condition of the Plantations.--Suggestions about Hasty Departures.--Obtaining Information.--The Attractions of Missouri. CHAPTER XLVIII. THE RESOURCES OF THE SOUTHERN STATES. How the People have Lived.--An Agricultural Community.--Mineral and other Wealth of Virginia.--Slave-Breeding in Former Times.--The Auriferous Region of North Carolina.--Agricultural Advantages.--Varieties of Soil in South Carolina.--Sea-Island Cotton.--Georgia and her Railways.--Probable Decline of the Rice Culture.--The Everglade State.--The Lower Mississippi Valley.--The Red River.--Arkansas and its Advantages.--A Hint for Tragedians.--Mining in Tennessee.--The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky.--Texas and its Attractions.--Difference between Southern and Western Emigration.--The End. CAMP-FIRE AND COTTON-FIELD. CHAPTER I. ANTE BELLUM. At the Rocky Mountains.--Sentiment of the People.--Firing the Southern Heart.--A Midwinter Journey across the Plains.--An Editor's Opinion.--Election in Missouri.--The North springing to Arms.--An amusing Arrest.--Off for the Field.--Final Instructions.--Niagara.--Curiosities of Banking.--Arrival at the Seat of War. I passed the summer and autumn of 1860 in the Rocky Mountain Gold Region. At that time the population of the young Territory was composed of emigrants from Northern and Southern States, those from the colder regions being in the majority. When the Presidential election took place, there was much angry discussion of the great questions of the day, and there were threats of violence on the part of the friends of the "institution." The residents of the Gold Region were unable to cast their votes for the men of their choice, but their anxiety to know the result was very great. When it was announced that the Republican candidate had triumphed, there were speedy signs of discontent. Some of the more impulsive Southerners departed at once for their native States, predicting a separation of Dixie from the North before the end of the year. Some went to New Mexico, and others to Texas, while many remained to press their favorite theories upon their neighbors. The friends of the Union were slow to believe that any serious difficulty would take place. Long after the secession of South Carolina they were confident our differences could be healed without an appeal to arms. My visit to the Rocky Mountains was a professional one. During my stay in that region I supplied several Eastern journals with letters from Colorado and New Mexico. One after another, the editors of these journals informed me that letters from the Territories had lost their interest, owing to the troubles growing out of the election. Wishing to take part in the drama about to be enacted, I essayed a midwinter journey across the plains, and, early in February, stood in the editorial room of _The Herald_. I announced my readiness to proceed to any point between the Poles, wherever _The Herald_ desired a correspondent. The editor-in-chief was busy over a long letter from some point in the South, but his response was promptly given. Half reading, half pausing over the letter, he briefly said:-- "A long and bloody war is upon us, in which the whole country will be engaged. We shall desire you to take the field; probably in the West. It may be several weeks before we need you, but the war cannot be long delayed." At that time few persons in the North looked upon the situation with any fears of trouble. There were some who thought a hostile collision was among the possibilities, but these persons were generally in the minority. Many believed the secession movement was only the hasty work of political leaders, that would be soon undone when the people of the South came to their senses. That the South would deliberately plunge the country into civil war was difficult to comprehend, even after the first steps had been taken. The majority of the Northern people were hoping and believing, day by day, that something might transpire to quell the excitement and adjust the difficulties threatening to disturb the country. Before leaving the Rocky Mountains I did not believe that war was certain to ensue, though I considered it quite probable. As I passed through Missouri, the only slave State that lay in my route, I found every thing comparatively quiet. In St. Joseph, on the day of my arrival, the election for delegates to the State Convention was being held. There was no disorder, more than is usual on election days in small cities. Little knots of people were engaged in discussion, but the discussions partook of no extraordinary bitterness. The vote of the city was decidedly in favor of keeping the State in the Union. Between the 7th of December and the 12th of April, the Northern blood warmed slowly. The first gun at Sumter quickened its pulsations. When the President issued his call for seventy-five thousand men for three months, to put down insurrection, the North woke to action. Everywhere the response was prompt, earnest, patriotic. In the Northern cities the recruiting offices were densely thronged. New York and Massachusetts were first to send their favorite regiments to the front, but they were not long in the advance. Had the call been for four times seventy-five thousand, and for a service of three years, there is little doubt the people would have responded without hesitation. For a short time after my arrival at the East, I remained in a small town in Southern New Hampshire. A few days after the first call was issued, a friend invited me to a seat in his carriage for a ride to Portsmouth, the sea-port of the State. On reaching the city we found the war spirit fully aroused. Two companies of infantry were drilling in the public square, and the citizens were in a state of great excitement. In the course of the afternoon my friend and myself were arrested, by a committee of respectable citizens, who suspected us of being Southern emissaries. It was with great difficulty we convinced them they had made a slight mistake. We referred them to the only acquaintances we had in the city. They refused to consider the truth established in the mouths of two witnesses, and were not induced to give us our liberty until all convenient proof of our identity had been adduced. To be arrested within twenty miles of home, on suspicion of being delegated from Charleston or Montgomery, was one of my most amusing experiences of the war. The gentleman who accompanied me was a very earnest believer in coercion. His business in Portsmouth on that occasion was to offer his services in a regiment then being formed. A few months later he received a commission in the army, but did not obtain it through any of our temporary acquaintances at Portsmouth. Our captors were the solid men of the city, any one of whom could have sat for the portrait of Mr. Turveydrop without the slightest alteration. On taking us into custody, they stated the grounds on which they arrested us. Our dark complexions and long beards had aroused suspicions concerning the places of our nativity. Suspicion was reduced to a certainty when one of them heard me mention my presence in Missouri on the day of choosing candidates for the Convention. Our purpose was divined when I asked if there was any activity at the Navy Yard. We were Rebel emissaries, who designed to lay their Navy Yard in ashes! On our release and departure we were followed to our homes, that the correctness of our representations might be ascertained. This little occurrence, in the center of New England, where the people claim to be thoroughly quiet and law-abiding, indicated that the war spirit in that part of the North was more than momentary. The West was not behind the Eastern States in the determination to subdue the Rebellion. Volunteers were gathering at Cairo, and threatening to occupy points further down the Mississippi. At St. Louis the struggle was active between the Unionists and the Secessionists. A collision was a mere question of time, and of short time at the best. As I visited _The Herald_ office for final instructions, I found that the managing editor had determined upon a vigorous campaign. Every point of interest was to be covered, so that the operations of our armies would be fully recorded from day to day. The war correspondents had gone to their posts, or were just taking their departure. One correspondent was already on the way to Cairo. I was instructed to watch the military movements in Missouri, and hastened to St. Louis as fast as steam could bear me. Detained twelve hours at Niagara, by reason of missing a railway train, I found that the opening war gave promise of affecting that locality. The hotel-keepers were gloomy at the prospect of losing their Southern patronage, and half feared they would be obliged to close their establishments. There were but few visitors, and even these were not of the class which scatters its money profusely. The village around the Falls displayed positive signs of dullness, and the inhabitants had personal as well as patriotic interest in wishing there was no war. The Great Cataract was unchanged in its beauty and grandeur. The flood from the Lakes was not diminished, and the precipice over which the water plunged was none the less steep. The opening war had no effect upon this wonder of the New World. In Chicago, business was prostrated on account of the outbreak of hostilities. Most of the banks in Illinois had been holding State bonds as securities for the redemption of their circulation. As these bonds were nearly all of Southern origin, the beginning of the war had materially affected their value. The banks found their securities rapidly becoming insecure, and hence there was a depreciation in the currency. This was not uniform, but varied from five to sixty per cent., according to the value of the bonds the respective banks were holding. Each morning and evening bulletins were issued stating the value of the notes of the various banking-houses. Such a currency was very inconvenient to handle, as the payment of any considerable sum required a calculation to establish the worth of each note. Many rumors were in circulation concerning the insecurity of a Northern visitor in St. Louis, but none of the stories were very alarming. Of one thing all were certain--the star of the Union was in the ascendant. On arriving in St. Louis I found the city far from quiet, though there was nothing to lead a stranger to consider his personal safety in danger. I had ample material for entering at once upon my professional duties, in chronicling the disordered and threatening state of affairs. On the day of my arrival, I met a gentleman I had known in the Rocky Mountains, six months before. I knew his courage was beyond question, having seen him in several disturbances incident to the Gold Regions; but I was not aware which side of the great cause he had espoused. After our first greetings, I ventured to ask how he stood. "I am a Union man," was his emphatic response. "What kind of a Union man are you?" "I am this kind of a Union man," and he threw open his coat, and showed me a huge revolver, strapped to his waist. There were many loyal men in St. Louis, whose sympathies were evinced in a similar manner. Revolvers were at a premium. Some of the Secessionists ordered a quantity of revolvers from New York, to be forwarded by express. To prevent interference by the Union authorities, they caused the case to be directed to "Colonel Francis P. Blair, Jr., care of ----." They thought Colonel Blair's name would secure the property from seizure. The person in whose care the revolvers were sent was a noted Secessionist, who dealt extensively in fire-arms. Colonel Blair learned of the shipment, and met the box at the station. Fifty revolvers of the finest quality, bought and paid for by the Secessionists, were distributed among the friends of Colonel Blair, and were highly prized by the recipients. CHAPTER II. MISSOURI IN THE EARLY DAYS. Apathy of the Border States.--The Missouri State Convention.--Sterling Price a Union Man.--Plan to take the State out of the Union.--Capture of Camp Jackson.--Energy of General Lyon.--Union Men organized.--An Unfortunate Collision.--The Price-Harney Truce.--The Panic among the Secessionists.--Their Hegira from St. Louis.--A Visit to the State Capital.--Under the Rebel Flag.--Searching for Contraband Articles.--An Introduction to Rebel Dignitaries.--Governor Jackson.--Sterling Price.--Jeff. Thompson.--Activity at Cairo.--Kentucky Neutrality.--The Rebels occupy Columbus. The Border States were not prompt to follow the example of the States on the Gulf and South Atlantic coast. Missouri and Kentucky were loyal, if the voice of the majority is to be considered the voice of the population. Many of the wealthier inhabitants were, at the outset, as they have always been, in favor of the establishment of an independent Southern Government. Few of them desired an appeal to arms, as they well knew the Border States would form the front of the Confederacy, and thus become the battle-field of the Rebellion. The greater part of the population of those States was radically opposed to the secession movement, but became powerless under the noisy, political leaders who assumed the control. Many of these men, who were Unionists in the beginning, were drawn into the Rebel ranks on the plea that it would be treason to refuse to do what their State Government had decided upon. The delegates to the Missouri State Convention were elected in February, 1861, and assembled at St. Louis in the following April. Sterling Price, afterward a Rebel general, was president of this Convention, and spoke in favor of keeping the State in the Union. The Convention thought it injudicious for Missouri to secede, at least at that time, and therefore she was not taken out. This discomfited the prime movers of the secession schemes, as they had counted upon the Convention doing the desired work. In the language of one of their own number, "they had called a Convention to take the State out of the Union, and she must be taken out at all hazards." Therefore a new line of policy was adopted. The Governor of Missouri was one of the most active and unscrupulous Secessionists. After the failure of the Convention to unite Missouri with the Confederacy, Governor Jackson overhauled the militia laws, and, under their sanction, issued a call for a muster of militia near St. Louis. This militia assembled at Lindell Grove, in the suburbs of St. Louis, and a military camp was established, under the name of "Camp Jackson." Though ostensibly an innocent affair, this camp was intended to be the nucleus of the army to hoist the Rebel flag in the State. The officers in command were known Secessionists, and every thing about the place was indicative of its character. The Governor of Louisiana sent, from the arsenal at Baton Rouge, a quantity of guns and munitions of war, to be used by the insurgent forces in Missouri. These reached St. Louis without hinderance, and were promptly conveyed to the embryonic Rebel camp. Captain Lyon, in command of the St. Louis Arsenal, was informed that he must confine his men to the limits of the United States property, under penalty of the arrest of all who stepped outside. Governor Jackson several times visited the grounds overlooking the arsenal, and selected spots for planting his guns. Every thing was in preparation for active hostility. The Union people were by no means idle. Captain Lyon had foreseen the danger menacing the public property in the arsenal, and besought the Government for permission to remove it. Twenty thousand stand of arms were, in a single night, loaded upon a steamer and sent to Alton, Illinois. They were conveyed thence by rail to the Illinois State Arsenal at Springfield. Authority was obtained for the formation of volunteer regiments, and they were rapidly mustered into the service. While Camp Jackson was being formed, the Union men of St. Louis were arming and drilling with such secrecy that the Secessionists were not generally aware of their movements. Before the close of the day Captain Lyon received permission for mustering volunteers; he placed more than six hundred men into the service. Regiments were organized under the name of "Home Guards," and by the 9th of May there were six thousand armed Union men in St. Louis, who were sworn to uphold the national honor. Colonel Francis P. Blair, Jr., commanded the First Regiment of Missouri Volunteers, and stood faithfully by Captain Lyon in all those early and dangerous days. The larger portion of the forces then available in St. Louis was made up of the German element, which was always thoroughly loyal. This fact caused the Missouri Secessionists to feel great indignation toward the Germans. They always declared they would have seized St. Louis and held possession of the larger portion of the State, had it not been for the earnest loyalty of "the Dutch." In the interior of Missouri the Secessionists were generally in the ascendant. It was the misfortune of the time that the Unionists were usually passive, while their enemies were active. In certain counties where the Unionists were four times the number of the Secessionists, it was often the case that the latter were the ruling party. The Union people were quiet and law-abiding; the Secessionists active and unscrupulous. "Peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must," was the motto of the enemies of the Republic. In some localities the Union men asserted themselves, but they did not generally do so until after the first blows were struck at St. Louis. When they did come out in earnest, the loyal element in Missouri became fully apparent. To assure the friends of the Union, and save Missouri from the domination of the insurgents, it was necessary for Captain Lyon to assume the offensive. This was done on the 10th of May, resulting in the famous capture of "Camp Jackson." On the night of the 9th, loyal parties in St. Louis supplied a sufficient number of horses to move the light artillery necessary to accomplish the desired object. On the morning of the 10th, Captain Lyon's command moved from various points, so as to surround the Rebel camp at three o'clock in the afternoon. At that hour General Frost, the Rebel commander, was surprised at the appearance of an overpowering force on the hills surrounding his position. A demand for surrender gave half an hour for deliberation. At the end of that time General Frost concluded to capitulate. The prisoners, less than a thousand in number, were marched to the arsenal and safely secured. This achievement destroyed Camp Jackson, and established the United States authority in full force over St. Louis. An unfortunate collision occurred between the soldiers and the crowd outside. Provoked by insults terminating in an assault with fire-arms, a portion of the German troops fired upon the multitude. Upward of thirty persons were killed or wounded in the affair. With the exception of this unhappy collision, the capture was bloodless. General Harney arrived at St. Louis soon after this event, and assumed command in Missouri. The agreement known as "the Price-Harney truce" was immediately made. Under an assurance from Governor Jackson that the State troops should be disbanded, General Harney promised that no hostilities should be undertaken, and attempted to cause the dispersal of the Union volunteers. The status of the latter had been so fixed that General Harney was not empowered to disarm them, and he so informed, the State authorities. His message announcing this read nearly as follows:-- "I have ascertained that I have no control over the Home Guards. "W. S. HARNEY, _Brig.-Gen_." This message was received at the Police Head-Quarters in St. Louis, on the morning of Sunday, May 15th. It was misunderstood by the parties who read it. They inferred, from the tenor of the dispatch, that General Harney was unable to restrain the Union volunteers. The most frightful stories had been circulated concerning the blood-thirsty character of these soldiers, particularly the German portion. Visions of murder, pillage, house-burning, and all the accompanying outrages committed by an unrestrained army, flitted through the minds of the Secessionists. The story spread, and gained intensity with each repetition. "The Dutch are rising; we shall all be slain in cold blood!" was the cry, echoed from house to house. Not less than five thousand people fled from the city on that day, and as many more within the succeeding twenty-four hours. Carriages, wagons, drays, every thing that could transport persons or valuables, commanded exorbitant prices. Steamboats were chartered as ferries to the Illinois shore or to go to points of safety, either up or down the river. Many persons abandoned their houses, taking with them only a few articles of value or necessity, while others carried away nothing, in their haste to escape. In a few days the excitement subsided and nearly all the refugees returned, but there are some who have never been in St. Louis since their remarkable hegira. In their determination to obtain their "rights," they entered the Rebel army and followed its checkered fortunes. Less than half of these persons are now alive. For a time after the appearance of General Harney's proclamation, there were no hostile demonstrations on either side. Governor Jackson had promised to disband the small force of militia at Jefferson City, but he failed to do so. The Rebel flag was flying in Jefferson City, from a staff in front of the Governor's mansion, and over the head-quarters of the Missouri State Guard. Missouri, through her State officers, was in favor of an armed neutrality, which really meant nothing less than armed secession. The Secessionists were quietly but earnestly at work to effect their object. They did not heed their promise to remain inactive. The Union authorities observed theirs to the letter. The Camp Jackson prisoners were paroled and restored to liberty. A portion of them observed the parole, but many did not. General Frost remained on his farm and took no part in the Rebellion until relieved from his parole, several months later. It is proper to add, that he was of very little account to the Rebels when he finally entered the field. While watching the progress of affairs in St. Louis, I determined upon a visit to Jefferson City. Though the Rebel flag was flying over the State Capitol, and the nucleus of the Missouri State Guard (Rebel) had its camp in the suburbs, the communication by railroad had not been interrupted. Taking the morning train from St. Louis, on the 27th of May, I found myself, at three o'clock of the afternoon, under the secession banner. The searching of the train for articles contraband of war was then a new feature. In the early days only the outside of a package was examined. If the "marks" indicated nothing suspicious, the goods were allowed to pass. Under this regulation, a large number of boxes marked "soap" were shipped on a steamboat for Lexington. So much soap going into Missouri was decidedly suspicious, as the people of the interior do not make extensive use of the article. An examination disclosed canisters of powder instead of bars of soap. The discovery was followed by the promulgation of an order requiring a rigid examination of all packages that might be of doubtful character. This order, with various modifications, was kept in force for a long time. In starting from St. Louis, I left a company of Union volunteers at the railway station. At Jefferson City I found the depot filled with the Rebel soldiers, or "neutrals," as Governor Jackson persisted in calling them. The particular duty they were performing I was unable to ascertain, but they bore unmistakable signs of being something more than a "neutral" body of men. Their camp was just in rear of the city. The Rebel flag, which floated above the camp, was recognized as the emblem of their neutrality. The proprietor of the hotel where I stopped held the reputation of an earnest friend of the Union, ready to Suffer any thing rather than sink his principles. He introduced me to several citizens, most of them, like himself, thoroughly loyal. We discussed freely the condition of affairs in Missouri. It was evident the State authorities intended war, as soon as the necessary preparations could be made. They were not quite ready to strike their first blow, but when they should be prepared, they would not hesitate a moment. Governor Jackson was exerting himself to the utmost to accumulate arms and military stores at various points in the State, where they would be of most value. In defiance of the truce between Generals Price and Harney, companies were being formed throughout the State, and were drilling for service in the field. Time was of great importance to the Rebels, and this they had secured by means of the truce. During my stay at Jefferson City, I met the three, men most prominent in bringing war upon Missouri. These were Governor Jackson, General Sterling Price, and Jeff. Thompson. Governor Jackson was elected in the previous December, before it was thought any serious trouble would grow out of Mr. Lincoln's election. He was not looked upon as a man of great ability, but no one doubted his desire to promote the best interests of the State. Those who knew him said his strength lay more in a public than in a private direction. He had few, if any, personal friends, and was considered dangerous when his passions were roused. Some said he was cold and treacherous, giving all around him a feeling of aversion. Even among the Secessionists, and those who should have been his ardent supporters, he was never mentioned with enthusiasm. Within two weeks from the day I saw him, Governor Jackson, by his own act, was a fugitive from the State capital. He never returned. After wandering in Arkansas and Louisiana, during the early part of the war, he died at Little Rock, in 1863, in a condition of extreme poverty. Of General Price, I heard many praises, even from those who opposed his course. He was said to be a man of warm friendship, of fair abilities, and quite popular among the masses of the inhabitants. He possessed much personal pride, and his ambition for public honor was very great. At the outset he deprecated secession, and prophesied a devastating war as the result. He was inclined to be loyal, but his ambition was greater than his patriotism. The offer of a high position in the Rebel service touched his weakest point, and carried him with the insurgents. In the Rebel service he never obtained much distinction. His principal successes were in saving his army after defeat. He displayed a capacity for annoying the Union armies without doing great damage. Though his oft-repeated promise of victory was never fulfilled, it served to keep many Missourians in the Rebel ranks. He was constantly expected to capture St. Louis. Some of the Rebel residents fully believed he would do so, and kept their wine-cellars ready for the event. Until the official announcement of the surrender of all forces west of the Mississippi, they did not abandon hope. General Price had given his promise, and, as they argued, was sure to keep it. Of Jeff. Thompson little can be said. Previous to that time he had been known as the mayor of St. Joseph, and a politician of some little importance in Northwest Missouri. He was famous for much gasconading, and a fondness for whisky and other material things. I could never learn that he commanded much respect. During the war the Rebels never trusted him with any command of importance. He made a very fair guerrilla, and, in 1861, gave our forces at Cairo and Bird's Point considerable annoyance. History is not likely to give him a very prominent place in the roll of distinguished military heroes. At this time Cairo was the most southerly point on the Mississippi in possession of the National forces. We could have occupied Columbus or Hickman, Kentucky, had not the sacredness of the soil prevented. Kentucky was neutral, and declared that neither party must set foot within her limits. Her declaration of neutrality was much like that issued by the Governor of Missouri. The United States forces were under great restrictions, while the Rebels could do pretty much as they pleased. General Prentiss sent a small expedition down the Mississippi, some sixty miles below Cairo. The Kentuckians were greatly enraged because our forces landed at Hickman and tore down a Rebel flag which the citizens had hoisted. It was an invasion of their soil, for which they demanded apology. A few weeks later the Rebels occupied both Hickman and Columbus, without any objection on the part of the neutrals. Columbus was made very strong by the Rebel engineers, and supplied with many heavy guns for its protection. At the same time, General Prentiss pushed forward the defenses of Cairo, in readiness for any attack by the Rebel gun-boats. For more than half a year Columbus was the northern limit of the Rebel domination of the Great River. On assuming command there, General Polk announced that Columbus was the throat of the Mississippi, and must be held at all hazards. The Rebels repeatedly urged the capture of Cairo, but it was never attempted. [Illustration: HAULING DOWN A REBEL FLAG AT HICKMAN, KY] CHAPTER III. THE BEGINNING OF HOSTILITIES. General Harney Relieved.--Price's Proclamation.--End of the Truce.--Conference between the Union and Rebel Leaders.--The First Act of Hostility.--Destruction of Railway Bridges.--Promptness of General Lyon.--Capture of the State Capital.--Moving on the Enemy's Works.--The Night before Battle.--A Correspondent's Sensation. On the first of June an order was received from Washington, relieving General Harney from command in Missouri. Captain Lyon had been promoted to the rank of a brigadier-general of volunteers, and was assigned to duty in General Harney's stead. On the 5th of June, General Price issued a proclamation, calling for the State Guard to be in readiness to defend Missouri against all enemies. The appearance of this proclamation was not altogether unexpected. It was far more satisfactory to the friends of the Union than to the Secessionists, as it showed the hostile position of Governor Jackson and his abettors, and gave an opportunity for proceeding actively against them. It demonstrated very clearly that the Secessionists were determined to make their actions correspond to their words. It was ascertained that, a few days before the publication of Price's proclamation, Governor Jackson was in consultation with an agent of the Rebel Government, who promised twenty-five thousand men, and arms and ammunition for fifty thousand more, if the State were fairly and unequivocally out of the Union. He had also conferred with an agent from the Indian Nation, with a view to putting several thousand Indians into the field on the side of the Rebels. General Lyon wanted an "overt act" on the part of the Rebels, before commencing actual hostilities. Price's proclamation was the thing desired. The troops in and around St. Louis were drilled as thoroughly as possible. Every day added to their effectiveness. Recruiting was pushed, trade with the interior was suspended, and boats passing down the river were made subject to stoppage and search at the arsenal. Every thing was assuming a warlike appearance. The Government was very tardy in supplying General Lyon's wants. In many cases it did not authorize him to do what was needed. Much of the money for outfitting the troops for the field was voluntarily contributed in the Eastern cities, or by patriotic men in St. Louis. In several things, General Lyon acted upon his own responsibility, under the advice and co-operation of Colonel Blair. On the 9th of June, Governor Jackson and General Price asked General Lyon to give them a safeguard to visit St. Louis. They wished to confer with General Lyon and Colonel Blair, upon the best means of bringing peace to the State and making an end of hostilities. The safeguard was granted, and, on the 11th of June, Jackson and Price reached St. Louis, and signified their readiness for the proposed conference. The meeting took place at the Planters' House, Governor Jackson declining to trust himself inside the walls of the arsenal, where General Lyon had invited him to be his guest. The interview began with many professions of goodwill on the part of Governor Jackson, and the assurance of his earnest desire for peace. He promised to disband the State troops, if General Lyon would first remove all United States troops from the limits of Missouri, and agree not to bring them back under any consideration. Of course, this proposition could not be entertained. A conversation then took place between General Lyon and General Price, but all to no purpose. Price and Jackson would do nothing, unless the United States troops were first sent out of Missouri. Lyon and Blair would not consent to any thing of the kind, and so the conference ended. Jackson and Price left St. Louis on a special train for Jefferson City, on the afternoon of the 11th. On the way up the road, they set fire to the bridges over the Gasconade and Osage Rivers, the former thirty-five miles from Jefferson City, and ninety from St. Louis, and the latter within nine miles of Jefferson City. If the conduct of these men had been neutral up to that time, this act made an end of their neutrality. General Lyon left the conference fully satisfied there was no longer any reason for hesitation. The course he should pursue was plain before him. Early in the forenoon of the 12th, he learned of the destruction of the bridges over the Gasconade and Osage Rivers. He immediately ordered a force to proceed up the road, and protect as much of it as possible from further damage. Within four hours of the reception of the order to move, the troops were on their way. On the next day, three steamers, with about two thousand men, left St. Louis for Jefferson City. General Lyon knew the importance of time, and was determined to give Governor Jackson very little opportunity for preparation. My first experience of a military campaign was on the expedition up the Missouri. I had seen something of Indian troubles on the Plains, in which white men were concerned, but I had never witnessed civilized warfare where white men fought against white men. A residence of several weeks in St. Louis had somewhat familiarized me with the appearance of troops at the arsenal and at the various camps in the city, but the preparations to take the field were full of novelty. I was on the boat which carried the First Missouri Infantry, and which General Lyon had selected for his head-quarters. The young officers were full of enthusiasm, and eagerly anticipating their first encounter with the Rebel battalions. Colonel Blair was less demonstrative than the officers of his regiment, but was evidently much elated at the prospect of doing something aggressive. General Lyon was in the cabin, quiet, reserved, and thoughtful. With Colonel Blair he conversed long and freely. Few others approached him. Outside the cabin the soldiers were ardently discussing the coming campaign, and wishing an early opportunity for winning glory in battle. To one who travels for the first time by steamboat from St. Louis in a northerly direction, a curious picture is presented. The water in the Mississippi above the mouth of the Missouri is quite clear and transparent. That from the Missouri is of a dirty yellow color, derived from the large quantity of earthy matter which it holds in solution. For several miles below the junction of the streams, the two currents remain separated, the line between them being plainly perceptible. The pilots usually endeavor to keep on the dividing line, so that one can look from the opposite sides of a boat and imagine himself sailing upon two rivers of different character at the same moment. Sometimes this distinctive line continues for fifteen or twenty miles, but usually less than ten. A soldier wittily remarked, that the water from the Upper Mississippi derived its transparency from the free States, from whence it came, while the Missouri, emerging from a slave State, was, consequently, of a repulsive hue. As Missouri is now a free State, the soldier's remark is not applicable. Steaming up the Missouri toward the State capital, we found the sentiment along the banks of the river strongly in favor of the Union. Home Guard organizations had been hastily formed, and were doing their best for the protection of the railway. Most of the villages along the Lower Missouri contained a strong German element, which needs no question of its loyalty. The railway bridges were thoroughly guarded, and each town had a small garrison to suppress any rising of the Secessionists. The conduct of the people in these villages was quite different from the course of those residing above Jefferson City. Where the inhabitants possessed no slaves, there was outspoken loyalty. In the most populous slave districts it was the reverse. Slaveholders declared that their interest lay in secession. There were a few exceptions, but they were very far in a minority. Our triumphal entry into Jefferson City was not marked by any noteworthy event. The Capitol was deserted. The Governor and most of the State officials had departed the previous day, in the direction of Booneville. We marched through the principal streets, and found many of the people delighted at our coming. We occupied the State House, and, of course, unfurled our flag from its cupola. A steamboat, seized at the landing, was pressed into our service for use further up the stream. An encounter with the Rebels was eagerly desired. We left a full regiment, a large force in those days, to retain possession of the place, and then pushed on in pursuit. The Rebels had disabled the railway, taking off nearly all the rolling stock and destroying a large bridge four miles west of the city. As the point where they had fled lay upon the river, we pursued them by water. At noon, on the 16th, General Lyon left Jefferson City for Booneville. Within twenty-four hours he fought his first battle in Missouri. It is slow work to proceed with a steamboat where one's way must be felt. Though we had only fifty miles to move, we advanced less than thirty before nightfall. Touching at a landing on the left bank of the river, fifteen miles below Booneville, a scout from the enemy's camp came easily into our hands. From being a scout of the enemy he became our scout, as he revealed in his fright all we wished to know. The enemy, confident of an easy victory, was waiting our approach, and expressed the most lively intention of destroying us all in the twinkling of an eye. Experience had not then demonstrated that there is little difference in the bravery of Americans, when well officered. Each side cherished the delusion that it had a monopoly of courage and endurance. One Southern man was thought equal to five Northern men in a fair contest, and if the former were given the advantage of a defensive position, any odds of numbers would be taken. There was nearly, though not quite, as much boasting on the part of our own press and people. The first severe battles made an end of the greater part of this gasconading. It is said the most trying moment on shipboard is when the deck, previous to an engagement, is sprinkled with saw-dust to receive the blood yet unshed. No man can know whose blood will be first to moisten that dust, or whose life will be passed away before the action is over. So on the eve of that first battle in Missouri, as I reclined in the cabin of our flag-boat, and saw the surgeons busy with their preparations for the coming day; as I saw them bring to light all the dreadful implements of their trade, and arrange them in readiness for sudden use--a coldness crept over me, and I fully realized we had earnest work before us. Since that time I have witnessed many a battle, many a scene of preparation and of bloody work with knife and saw and bandage, but I have never experienced a chill like that I felt on that early day of the Rebellion. The war has made us familiar with horrors. That which once touched us to the heart is now passed over with scarce a moment's thought. Our nerves have been hardened, our sensibilities blunted, our hearts steeled against suffering, in the terrible school through which we have passed. [Illustration: THE OPENING GUN AT BOONEVILLE] CHAPTER IV. THE FIRST BATTLE IN MISSOURI Moving up the River.--A Landing Effected.--The Battle.--Precipitous Retreat of the Rebels.--Spoiling a Captured Camp.--Rebel Flags Emblazoned with the State Arms.--A Journalist's Outfit.--A Chaplain of the Church Militant.--A Mistake that might have been Unfortunate.--The People of Booneville.--Visiting an Official.--Banking-House Loyalty.--Preparations for a Campaign. Daybreak on the 17th found us slowly moving up the river toward Booneville. General Lyon sat forward of the steamer's cabin, closely scanning both banks of the stream. Four miles below the town his glass sought out two pieces of artillery, partially concealed in a clump of trees, and trained upon the channel by which we were to pass. At once our engines were reversed, and the boats moved back to a landing about eight miles below Booneville. A little before seven o'clock we were on shore, and our column of fifteen hundred men began its advance upon the Rebel camp. It was the story that has found its repetition in many a battle since that time. The enemy's pickets were driven in. The enemy, in line of battle, was discovered on a long ridge, and our own line was formed on a ridge parallel to it. Then we opened fire with our artillery (one battery was all we possessed), and received no response, save by a desultory discharge of small-arms. Next our infantry added its tenor notes to the bass of the field-guns; the Rebel forces melted steadily away, and the field was in our possession, twenty minutes after the opening shot had been fired. Once in retreat, the Rebels did not halt until out of harm's reach. Their camp lay in the line of retreat, but they made no stop in passing it. Following in the rear of our column, I entered the camp, and found many signs of a hasty departure. I found the fires burning, and dozens of coffee-pots and frying-pans filled with the materials for breakfast. Here was a pan full of meat fried to a crisp, from the neglect of the cook to remove it before his sudden exodus. A few feet distant lay a ham, with a knife sticking in a half-severed slice. A rude camp-table was spread with plates and their accessories, and a portion of the articles of food were carefully arranged. The seats for the breakfast party were in position, two of them being overturned. I could not help fancying the haste with which that table had been abandoned, only a few moments before. The tents were standing, and in some the blankets were lying on the ground, as if they had been very suddenly vacated. In one tent was a side-saddle, a neat pair of gaiters, and a hoop-skirt. The proper connection of those articles with the battle-field I was unable to ascertain. In that camp was a fine lot of provisions, arms, equipments, and ammunition. Saddles were numerous, but there were no horses. It was evident that, the hasty evacuation left no time for the simple process of saddling. Early in the day I had come into possession of a horse with a very poor outfit. Once in camp, I was not slow to avail myself of the privilege of supply. I went into battle on foot, carrying only a knapsack containing a note-book and two pieces of bread. When the fight was over, I was the possessor of a horse and all the equipments for a campaign. I had an overcoat, a roll of fine blankets, and a pair of saddle-bags. The latter were well filled from the trunk of some one I had not the pleasure of knowing, but who was evidently "just my size." Mr. Barnes, of the Missouri _Democrat_, was my companion on that occasion. He was equally careful to provide himself from the enemy's stores, but wasted, time in becoming sentimental over two love-letters and a photograph of a young woman. The flags captured in this affair were excellent illustrations of the policy of the leading Secessionists. There was one Rebel flag with the arms of the State of Missouri filling the field. There was a State flag, with only fifteen stars surrounding the coat of arms. There was a. Rebel flag, with the State arms in the center, and there was one Rebel flag of the regular pattern. The rallying-cry at that time was in behalf of the State, and the people were told they must act for Missouri, without regard to any thing else. In no part of the country was the "State Rights" theory more freely used. All the changes were rung upon the sovereignty of States, the right of Missouri to exclude United States soldiers from her soil, the illegality of the formation of Union regiments, and the tyranny of the General Government. The flags under which Missouri soldiers were gathered clearly blended the interests of the State with secession. Our troops entered Booneville amid demonstrations of delight from one portion of the inhabitants, and the frowns and muttered indignation of the other. The Rebels had fled, a part of them by land, and the balance on a steamboat, toward Lexington. Quiet possession obtained, there was time to examine into the details of the fight. We had lost twelve men, the enemy probably twice as many. The action, three years later, would have been considered only a roadside skirmish, but it was then an affair of importance. Every man with General Lyon felt far more elation over the result than has since been felt over battles of much greater moment. We had won a signal victory; the enemy had suffered an equally signal defeat. During the battle, a chaplain, provided with four men to look after the wounded, came suddenly upon a group of twenty-four Rebels. An imperative demand for their surrender was promptly complied with, and the chaplain, with his force of four, brought twenty-four prisoners into town. He was so delighted at his success that he subsequently took a commission in the line. In time he was honored with the stars of a brigadier-general. General Lyon was my personal friend, but he very nearly did me great injustice. Seeing myself and a fellow-journalist on a distant part of the field, he mistook us for scouts of the enemy, and ordered his sharp-shooters to pick us off. His chief-of-staff looked in our direction, and fortunately recognized us in time to countermand the order. I was afterward on the point of being shot at by an infantry captain, through a similar mistake. A civilian's dress on the battle-field (a gray coat formed a part of mine) subjects the wearer to many dangers from his friends, as most war correspondents can testify. While approaching the town, I stopped to slake my thirst at a well. A group of our soldiers joined me while I was drinking. I had drank very freely from the bucket, and transferred it to a soldier, when the resident of a neighboring house appeared, and informed us that the well had been poisoned by the Rebels, and the water was certain to produce death. The soldiers desisted, and looked at me with much pity. For a moment, I confess, the situation did not appear cheerful, but I concluded the injury, if any, was already done, and I must make the best of it. The soldiers watched me as I mounted my horse, evidently expecting me to fall within a hundred yards. When I met one of them the following day, he opened his eyes in astonishment at seeing me alive. From that day, I entertained a great contempt for poisoned wells. In Booneville the incidents were not of a startling character. I found the strongest secession sympathy was entertained by the wealthier inhabitants, while the poor were generally loyal. Some cases of determined loyalty I found among the wealthy; but they were the exception rather than the rule. Accompanied by a small squad of soldiers, myself and companion visited the house of a gentleman holding office under the United States Government. We obtained from that house several Rebel cockades and small flags, which had been fabricated by the ladies. With the same squad we visited the principal bank of Booneville, and persuaded the cashier to give us a Rebel flag which had been floating for several days from a staff in front of the building. This flag was ten yards in length, and the materials of which it was made were of the finest quality. The interview between the cashier and ourselves was an amusing one. He protested he knew nothing of the flag or its origin, and at first declared it was not about the building. According to his own representation, he was too good a Union man to harbor any thing of the sort. Just as he was in the midst of a very earnest profession of loyalty the flag was discovered. "Somebody must have put that there to ruin me," was his exclamation. "Gentlemen, I hope you won't harm me; and, if you want me to do so, I will take the oath of allegiance this minute." Soon after the occupation of Booneville, General Lyon sent a small expedition to Syracuse, twenty-five miles in the interior. This force returned in a few days, and then preparations were begun for a march to Springfield. Colonel Blair left Booneville for St. Louis and Washington, while General Lyon attended to the preliminaries for his contemplated movement. The First Iowa Infantry joined him, and formed a part of his expeditionary force. The Rebels gathered at Lexington, and thence moved southward to reach the Arkansas line, to form a junction with the then famous Ben McCulloch. The prospect was good that Central Missouri would soon be clear of Rebels. Our general success in the State depended upon occupying and holding the Southwest. General Lyon was to move thither from Booneville. General Sweeney had already gone there by way of Rolla, while another force, under Major Sturgis, was moving from Leavenworth in a southeasterly direction. All were to unite at Springfield and form an army of occupation. Preparations went on slowly, as the transportation was to be gathered from the surrounding country. Foreseeing that the expedition would be slow to reach Springfield, I returned to St. Louis. There I made preparations to join the army, when its march should be completed, by a more expeditious route than the one General Lyon would follow. At Booneville, General Lyon established a temporary blockade of the Missouri River, by stopping all boats moving in either direction. In most cases a single shot across the bow of a boat sufficed to bring it to land. One day the _White Cloud_, on her way from Kansas City to St. Louis, refused to halt until three shots had been fired, the last one grazing the top of the pilot-house. When brought before General Lyon, the captain of the _White Cloud_ apologized for neglecting to obey the first signal, and said his neglect was due to his utter ignorance of military usage. The apology was deemed sufficient. The captain was dismissed, with a gentle admonition not to make a similar mistake in future. At that time the public was slow to understand the power and extent of military law and military rule. When martial law was declared in St. Louis, in August, 1861, a citizen waited upon the provost-marshal, in order to ascertain the precise state of affairs. After some desultory conversation, he threw out the question:-- "What does martial law do?" "Well," said Major McKinstry, the provost-marshal, "I can explain the whole thing in a second. Martial law does pretty much as it d--n pleases." Before the year was ended the inhabitants of St. Louis learned that the major's assertion was not far from the truth. CHAPTER V. TO SPRINGFIELD AND BEYOND. Conduct of the St. Louis Secessionists.--Collisions between Soldiers and Citizens.--Indignation of the Guests of a Hotel.--From St. Louis to Rolla.--Opinions of a "Regular."--Railway-life in Missouri.--Unprofitable Freight.--A Story of Orthography.--Mountains and Mountain Streams.--Fastidiousness Checked.--Frontier Courtesy.--Concentration of Troops at Springfield.--A Perplexing Situation.--The March to Dug Spring.--Sufferings from Heat and Thirst. The success of the Union arms at Booneville did not silence the Secessionists in St. Louis. They continued to hold meetings, and arrange plans for assisting their friends in the field. At many places, one could hear expressions of indignation at the restrictions which the proper authorities sought to put upon the secession movement. Union flags were torn from the front of private buildings--generally in the night or early morning. Twice, when Union troops were marching along the streets, they were fired upon by citizens. A collision of this kind had occurred at the corner of Fifth and Walnut streets, on the day after the capture of Camp Jackson. The soldiers returned the fire, and killed several persons; but this did not deter the Secessionists from repeating the experiment. In the affairs that took place after the battle of Booneville, the result was the same. Unfortunately, in each collision, a portion of those killed were innocent on-lookers. After a few occurrences of this kind, soldiers were allowed to march through the streets without molestation. About the first of July, there were rumors that an insurrection would be attempted on the National holiday. Ample provision was made to give the insurgents a warm reception. Consequently, they made no trouble. The printer of the bills of fare at a prominent hotel noticed the Fourth of July by ornamenting his work with a National flag, in colors. This roused the indignation of a half-dozen guests, whose sympathies lay with the Rebellion. They threatened to leave, but were so far in arrears that they could not settle their accounts. The hotel-keeper endeavored to soothe them by promising to give his printing, for the future, to another house. Several loyal guests were roused at this offer, and threatened to secede at once if it were carried out. The affair resulted in nothing but words. On the morning of the 11th of July I left St. Louis, to join General Lyon in the Southwest. It was a day's ride by rail to Rolla, the terminus of the Southwest Branch of the Pacific road. I well recollect the strange and motley group that filled the cars on that journey. There were a few officers and soldiers _en route_ to join their comrades in the field. Nearly all of them were fresh from civil life. They wore their uniforms uneasily, as a farmer's boy wears his Sunday suit. Those who carried sabers experienced much inconvenience when walking, on account of the propensity of those weapons to get between their legs. In citizen's dress, at my side, sat an officer of the old army, who looked upon these newly-made warriors with much contempt, mingled with an admiration of their earnestness. After an outburst of mild invective, he pronounced a well-merited tribute to their patriotism. "After all," said he, "they are as good as the material the Rebels have for their army. In some respects, they are better. The Northern blood is cold; the Southern is full of life and passion. In the first onset, our enemies will prove more impetuous than we, and will often overpower us. In the beginning of the struggle, they will prove our superiors, and may be able to boast of the first victories. But their physical energy will soon be exhausted, while ours will steadily increase. Patience, coolness, and determination will be sure to bring us the triumph in the end. These raw recruits, that are at present worthless before trained soldiers, distrusting themselves as we distrust them, will yet become veterans, worthy to rank with the best soldiers of the Old World." The civilian passengers on a railway in Missouri are essentially different from the same class in the East. There are very few women, and the most of these are not as carefully dressed as their Oriental sisters. Their features lack the fineness that one observes in New York and New England. The "hog and hominy," the general diet of the Southwest, is plainly perceptible in the physique of the women. The male travelers, who are not indigenous to the soil, are more roughly clothed and more careless in manner than the same order of passengers between New York and Boston. Of those who enter and leave at way-stations, the men are clad in that yellow, homespun material known as "butternut." The casual observer inclines to the opinion that there are no good bathing-places where these men reside. They are inquisitive, ignorant, unkempt, but generally civil. The women are the reverse of attractive, and are usually uncivil and ignorant. The majority are addicted to smoking, and generally make use of a cob-pipe. Unless objection is made by some passenger, the conductors ordinarily allow the women to indulge in this pastime. The region traversed by the railway is sparsely settled, the ground being generally unfavorable to agriculture. For some time after this portion of the road was opened, the natives refused to give it patronage, many of them declaring that the old mode of travel, by horseback, was the best of all. During the first week after opening the Southwest Branch, the company ran a daily freight train each way. All the freight offered in that time was a bear and a keg of honey. Both were placed in the same car. The bear ate the honey, and the company was compelled to pay for the damage. I have heard a story concerning the origin of the name of Rolla, which is interesting, though I cannot vouch for its truth. In selecting a name for the county seat of Phelps County, a North Carolinian residing there, suggested that it should do honor to the capital of his native State. The person who reduced the request to writing, used the best orthography that occurred to him, so that what should have been "Raleigh," became "Rolla." The request thus written was sent to the Legislature, and the name of the town became fixed. The inhabitants generally pronounce it as if the intended spelling had been adopted. The journey from Rolla to Springfield was accomplished by stage, and required two days of travel. For fifty miles the road led over mountains, to the banks of the Gasconade, one of the prettiest rivers I have ever seen. The mountain streams of Southwest Missouri, having their springs in the limestone rock, possess a peculiarity unknown in the Eastern States. In a depth of two feet or less, the water is apparently as clear as that of the purest mountain brook in New England. But when the depth reaches, or exceeds, three feet, the water assumes a deep-blue tinge, like that of the sky in a clear day. Viewed from an elevation, the picture is one that cannot be speedily forgotten. The blue water makes a marked contrast with surrounding objects, as the streams wind through the forests and fields on their banks. Though meandering through mountains, these rivers have few sharp falls or roaring rapids. Their current is usually gentle, broken here and there into a ripple over a slightly descending shallow, but observing uniformity in all its windings. My first night from Rolla was passed on the banks of the Gasconade. Another day's ride, extended far into the second night, found me at Springfield. When I reached my room at the hotel, and examined the bed, I found but one sheet where we usually look for two. Expostulations were of no avail. The porter curtly informed me, "People here use only one sheet. Down in St. Louis you folks want two sheets, but in this part of the country we ain't so nice." I appreciated my fastidiousness when I afterward saw, at a Tennessee hotel, the following notice:-- "Gentlemen who wish towels in their rooms must deposit fifty cents at the office, as security for their return." Travel in the Border and Southern States will acquaint a Northerner with strange customs. To find an entire household occupying a single large room is not an unfrequent occurrence. The rules of politeness require that, when bedtime has arrived, the men shall go out of doors to contemplate the stars, while the ladies disrobe and retire. The men then return and proceed to bed. Sometimes the ladies amuse themselves by studying the fire while the men find their way to their couches, where they gallantly turn their faces to the wall, and permit the ladies to don their _robes de nuit_. Notwithstanding the scarcity of accommodations, the traveler seeking a meal or resting-place will rarely meet a refusal. In New York or New England, one can journey many a mile and find a cold denial at every door. In the West and Southwest "the latch-string hangs out," and the stranger is always welcome. Especially is this the case among the poorer classes. Springfield is the largest town in Southwest Missouri, and has a fine situation. Before the war it was a place of considerable importance, as it controlled the trade of a large region around it. East of it the country is quite broken, but on the south and west there are stretches of rolling prairie, bounded by rough wood-land. Considered in a military light, Springfield was the key to that portion of the State. A large number of public roads center at that point. Their direction is such that the possession of the town by either army would control any near position of an adversary of equal or inferior strength. General Lyon was prompt in seeing its value, and determined to make an early movement for its occupation. When he started from St. Louis for Booneville, he ordered General Sweeney to march from Rolla to Springfield as speedily as possible. General Sweeney moved with three regiments of infantry and a battery of artillery, and reached Springfield in five days from the time of starting; the distance being a hundred and twenty miles. He then divided his forces, sending Colonel Sigel to Carthage, nearly fifty miles further toward the west, in the hope of cutting off the Rebel retreat in that direction. Major Sturgis was moving from Leavenworth toward Springfield, and expected to arrive there in advance of General Lyon. Major Sturgis was delayed in crossing a river, so that the Rebels arrived at Carthage before Colonel Sigel had been reinforced. The latter, with about eleven hundred men, encountered the Rebel column, twice as large as his own. The battle raged for several hours, neither side losing very heavily. It resulted in Sigel's retreat to avoid being surrounded by the enemy. Wonderful stories were told at that time of the terrific slaughter in the Rebel ranks, but these stories could never be traced to a reliable source. It is proper to say that the Rebels made equally large estimates of our own loss. On General Lyon's arrival all the troops were concentrated in the vicinity of Springfield. It was known that the Rebels were encamped near the Arkansas border, awaiting the re-enforcements which had been promised from the older States of the Confederacy. General Fremont had been assigned to the command of the Western Department, and was daily expected at St. Louis to assume the direction of affairs. Our scouts were kept constantly employed in bringing us news from the Rebel camp, and it is quite probable the Rebels were equally well informed of our own condition. We were able to learn that their number was on the increase, and that they would soon be largely re-enforced. After three weeks of occupation our strength promised to be diminished. Half of General Lyon's command consisted of "three-months men," whose period of enlistment was drawing to a close. A portion of these men went to St. Louis, some volunteered to remain as long as the emergency required their presence, and others were kept against their will. Meantime, General Lyon made the most urgent requests for re-enforcements, and declared he would be compelled to abandon the Southwest if not speedily strengthened. General Fremont promised to send troops to his assistance. After he made the promise, Cairo was threatened by General Pillow, and the re-enforcing column turned in that direction. General Lyon was left to take care of himself. By the latter part of July, our situation had become critical. Price's army had been re-enforced by a column of Arkansas and Louisiana troops, under General McCulloch. This gave the Rebels upward of twelve thousand men, while we could muster less than six thousand. General Price assumed the offensive, moving slowly toward Springfield, as if sure of his ability to overpower the National forces. General Lyon determined to fall upon the enemy before he could reach Springfield, and moved on the 1st of August with that object in view. On the second day of our march a strong scouting party of Rebels was encountered, and a sharp skirmish ensued, in which they were repulsed. This encounter is known in the Southwest as "the fight at Dug Spring." The next day another skirmish occurred, and, on the third morning, twenty-five miles from Springfield, General Lyon called a council of war. "Councils of war do not fight" has grown into a proverb. The council on this occasion decided that we should return to Springfield without attacking the enemy. The decision was immediately carried out. The beginning of August, in Southwest Missouri, is in the midst of the warm season. The day of the march to Dug Spring was one I shall never forget. In Kansas, before the war, I once had a walk of several miles under a burning sun, in a region where not a drop of water could be found. When I finally reached it, the only water to be found was in a small, stagnant pool, covered with a green scum nearly an inch in thickness. Warm, brackish, and fever-laden as that water was, I had never before tasted any thing half so sweet. Again, while crossing the Great Plains in 1860, I underwent a severe and prolonged thirst, only quenching it with the bitter alkali-water of the desert. On neither of these occasions were my sufferings half as great as in the advance to Dug Spring. A long ride in that hot atmosphere gave me a thirst of the most terrible character. Making a detour to the left of the road in a vain search for water, I fell behind the column as it marched slowly along. As I moved again to the front, I passed scores of men who had fallen from utter exhaustion. Many were delirious, and begged piteously for water in ever so small a quantity. Several died from excessive heat, and others were for a long time unfit for duty. Reaching the spring which gave its name to the locality, I was fortunate in finding only the advance of the command. With considerable effort I succeeded in obtaining a pint cupful of water, and thus allayed my immediate thirst. According to the custom in that region, the spring was covered with a frame building, about eight feet square. There are very few cellars in that part of the country, and the spring-house, as it is called, is used for preserving milk and other articles that require a low temperature. As the main portion of the column came up, the crowd around the spring-house became so dense that those once inside could not get out. The building was lifted and thrown away from the spring, but this only served to increase the confusion. Officers found it impossible to maintain discipline. When the men caught sight of the crowd at the spring, the lines were instantly broken. At the spring, officers and men were mingled without regard to rank, all struggling for the same object. A few of the former, who had been fortunate in commencing the day with full canteens, attempted to bring order out of chaos, but found the effort useless. No command was heeded. The officers of the two regiments of "regulars" had justly boasted of the superior discipline of their men. On this occasion the superiority was not apparent. Volunteers and regulars were equally subject to thirst, and made equal endeavor to quench it. Twenty yards below the spring was a shallow pool, where cattle and hogs were allowed to run. Directly above it was a trough containing a few gallons of warm water, which had evidently been there several days. This was speedily taken by the men. Then the hot, scum-covered pool was resorted to. In a very few minutes the trampling of the soldiers' feet had stirred this pool till its substance was more like earth than water. Even from this the men would fill their cups and canteens, and drink with the utmost eagerness. I saw a private soldier emerge from the crowd with a canteen full of this worse than ditch-water. An officer tendered a five-dollar gold piece for the contents of the canteen, and found his offer indignantly refused. To such a frenzy were men driven by thirst that they tore up handfuls of moist earth, and swallowed the few drops of water that could be pressed out. In subsequent campaigns I witnessed many scenes of hunger and thirst, but none to equal those of that day at Dug Spring. CHAPTER VI. THE BATTLE OF WILSON CREEK. The Return from Dug Spring.--The Rebels follow in Pursuit.--Preparations to Attack them.--The Plan of Battle.--Moving to the Attack--A Bivouac.--The Opening Shot.--"Is that Official?"--Sensations of a Spectator in Battle.--Extension of Distance and Time.--Characteristics of Projectiles.--Taking Notes under Fire.--Strength and Losses of the Opposing Armies.--A Noble Record.--The Wounded on the Field.--"One More Shot."--Granger in his Element.--General Lyon's Death. The return of General Lyon from Dug Spring emboldened the enemy to move nearer to Springfield. On the 7th of August the Rebels reached Wilson Creek, ten miles from Springfield, and formed their camp on both sides of that stream. General Ben. McCulloch was their commander-in-chief. On the night of the 8th, General Lyon proposed to move from Springfield for the purpose of attacking their position. The design was not carried out, on account of the impossibility of securing proper disposition of our forces in season to reach the enemy's camp at daylight. During the 8th and the forenoon of the 9th, preparations were made for resisting an attack in Springfield, in case the enemy should come upon us. In the afternoon of the 9th, General Lyon decided to assault the Rebel camp at daylight of the following morning. A council of war had determined that a defeat would be less injurious than a retreat without a battle, provided the defeat were not too serious. "To abandon the Southwest without a struggle," said General Lyon, "would be a sad blow to our cause, and would greatly encourage the Rebels. We will fight, and hope for the best." In arranging a plan of battle, Colonel Sigel suggested that the forces should be divided, so that a simultaneous attack would be made upon either extremity of the enemy's camp. The two columns were to move from Springfield at sunset, bivouac within four miles of the proposed battle-field, and begin their march early enough to fall upon the enemy's camp a little past daylight. We left Springfield about sunset on the 9th, General Lyon taking about three thousand men, while Colonel Sigel took less than two thousand. Exceptions have frequently been made to this mode of attack. Had it been successful, I presume no one would have found it faulty. It is an easy matter to criticise the plans of others, after their result is known. The columns moved by different roads to obtain the desired positions. The march was as silent as possible. The only sounds were the rumbling of wheels and the occasional clank of arms. No one was heavily encumbered, as we expected to return to Springfield before the following night. Midnight found us in a hay-field, four miles from the Rebel camp. There we rested till morning. On the previous night I had been almost without sleep, and therefore took speedy advantage of the halt. Two journeys over the Plains, a little trip into New Mexico, and some excursions among the Rocky Mountains, had taught me certain rules of campaign life. I rarely moved without my blankets and rubber "poncho," and with a haversack more or less well filled. On this occasion I was prepared for sleeping in the open air. One bivouac is much like another. When one is weary, a blanket on the ground is just as comfortable as a bed of down under a slated roof. If accustomed to lie under lace curtains, a tree or a bush will make an excellent substitute. "Tired nature's sweet restorer" comes quickly to an exhausted frame. Realities of the past, expectations of the future, hopes, sorrows, wishes, regrets--all are banished as we sink into sweet repose. At dawn we were in motion. At daylight the smoke hanging over the enemy's camp was fully before us. Sunrise was near at hand when the hostile position was brought to our view. It lay, as we had anticipated, stretched along the banks of Wilson Creek. Until our advance drove in the pickets, a thousand yards from their camp, the Rebels had no intimation of our approach. Many of them were reluctant to believe we were advancing to attack them, and thought the firing upon the pickets was the work of a scouting party. The opening of our artillery soon undeceived them, a shell being dropped in the middle of their camp. A Rebel officer afterward told me about our first shell. When the pickets gave the alarm of our approach, the Rebel commander ordered his forces to "turn out." An Arkansas colonel was in bed when the order reached him, and lazily asked, "Is that official?" Before the bearer of the order could answer, our shell tore through the colonel's tent, and exploded a few yards beyond it. The officer waited for no explanation, but ejaculated, "That's official, anyhow," as he sprang out of his blankets, and arrayed himself in fighting costume. Before the Rebels could respond to our morning salutation, we heard the booming of Sigel's cannon on the left. Colonel Sigel reached the spot assigned him some minutes before we were able to open fire from our position. It had been stipulated that he should wait for the sound of our guns before making his attack. His officers said they waited nearly fifteen minutes for our opening shot. They could look into the Rebel camp in the valley of the stream, a few hundred yards distant. The cooks were beginning their preparations for breakfast, and gave our men a fine opportunity to learn the process of making Confederate corn-bread and coffee. Some of the Rebels saw our men, and supposed they were their own forces, who had taken up a new position. Several walked into our lines, and found themselves prisoners of war. Previous to that day I had witnessed several skirmishes, but this was my first battle of importance. Distances seemed much greater than they really were. I stood by the side of Captain Totten's battery as it opened the conflict. "How far are you firing?" I asked. "About eight hundred yards; not over that," was the captain's response. I should have called it sixteen hundred, had I been called on for an estimate. Down the valley rose the smoke of Sigel's guns, about a mile distant, though, apparently, two or three miles away. Opposite Sigel's position was the camp of the Arkansas Division: though it was fully in my sight, and the tents and wagons were plainly visible, I could not get over the impression that they were far off. The explosions of our shells, and the flashes of the enemy's guns, a short distance up the slope on the opposite side of the creek, seemed to be at a considerable distance. To what I shall ascribe these illusions, I do not know. On subsequent battle-fields I have never known their recurrence. Greater battles, larger streams, higher hills, broader fields, wider valleys, more extended camps, have come under my observation, but in none of them has the romance exceeded the reality. The hours did not crowd into minutes, but the minutes almost extended into hours. I frequently found, on consulting my watch, that occurrences, apparently of an hour's duration, were really less than a half or a quarter of that time. As the sun rose, it passed into a cloud. When it emerged, I fully expected it would be some distance toward the zenith, and was surprised to find it had advanced only a few degrees. There was a light shower, that lasted less than ten minutes: I judged it had been twenty. The evolutions of the troops on the field appeared slow and awkward. They were really effected with great promptness. General Lyon was killed before nine o'clock, as I very well knew. It was some days before I could rid myself of an impression that his death occurred not far from noon. The apparent extension of the hours was the experience of several persons on that field. I think it has been known by many, on the occasion of their first battle. At Pea Ridge, an officer told me, there seemed to be about thirty hours between sunrise and sunset. Another thought it was four P.M. when the sun was at the meridian. It was only at Wilson Creek that I experienced this sensation. On subsequent battle-fields I had no reason to complain of my estimate of time. The first shell from the enemy's guns passed high over my head. I well remember the screech of that missile as it cut through the air and lost itself in the distance. "Too high, Captain Bledsoe," exclaimed our artillery officer, as he planted a shell among the Rebel gunners. In firing a half-dozen rounds the Rebels obtained our range, and then used their guns with some effect. The noise of each of those shells I can distinctly recall, though I have since listened to hundreds of similar sounds, of which I have no vivid recollection. The sound made by a shell, in its passage through the air, cannot be described, and, when once heard, can never be forgotten. I was very soon familiar with the whistling of musket-balls. Before the end of the action, I thought I could distinguish the noise of a Minié bullet from that of a common rifle-ball, or a ball from a smooth-bored musket. Once, while conversing with the officer in charge of the skirmish line, I found myself the center of a very hot fire. It seemed, at that instant, as if a swarm of the largest and most spiteful bees had suddenly appeared around me. The bullets flew too rapidly to be counted, but I fancied I could perceive a variation in their sound. After I found a position beyond the range of musketry, the artillery would insist upon searching me out. While I was seated under a small oak-tree, with my left arm through my horse's bridle, and my pencil busy on my note-book, the tree above my head was cut by a shell. Moving from that spot, I had just resumed my writing, when a shot tore up the ground under my arm, and covered me with dirt. Even a remove to another quarter did not answer my purpose, and I finished my notes after reaching the rear. It is not my intention to give the details of the battle--the movements of each regiment, battalion, or battery, as it performed its part in the work. The official record will be sought by those who desire the purely military history. It is to be regretted that the official report of the engagement at Wilson Creek displays the great hostility of its author toward a fellow-soldier. In the early campaigns in Missouri, many officers of the regular army vied with the Rebels in their hatred of "the Dutch." This feeling was not confined to Missouri alone, but was apparent in the East as well as in the West. As the war progressed the hostility diminished, but it was never entirely laid aside. The duration of the battle was about four and a half hours. The whole force under the National flag was five thousand men. The Rebels acknowledged having twelve thousand, of all arms. It is probable that this estimate was a low one. The Rebels were generally armed with shot-guns, common rifles, and muskets of the old pattern. About a thousand had no arms whatever. Their artillery ammunition was of poorer quality than our own. These circumstances served to make the disparity less great than the actual strength of the hostile forces would imply. Even with these considerations, the odds against General Lyon were quite large. Our loss was a little less than one-fifth our whole strength. Up to that time, a battle in which one-tenth of those engaged was placed _hors de combat_, was considered a very sanguinary affair. During the war there were many engagements where the defeated party suffered a loss of less than one-twentieth. Wilson Creek can take rank as one of the best-fought battles, when the number engaged is brought into consideration. The First Missouri Infantry went into action with seven hundred and twenty-six men. Its casualty list was as follows:-- Killed................................ 77 Dangerously wounded................... 93 Otherwise wounded..................... 126 Captured.............................. 2 Missing............................... 15 --- Total.......................... 313 The First Kansas Infantry, out of seven hundred and eighty-five men, lost two hundred and ninety-six. The loss in other regiments was quite severe, though not proportionately as heavy as the above. These two regiments did not break during the battle, and when they left the ground they marched off as coolly as from a parade. At the time our retreat was ordered our ammunition was nearly exhausted and the ranks fearfully thinned. The Rebels had made a furious attack, in which they were repulsed. General Sweeney insisted that it was their last effort, and if we remained on the ground we would not be molested again. Major Sturgis, upon whom the command devolved after General Lyon's death, reasoned otherwise, and considered it best to fall back to Springfield. The Rebels afterward admitted that General McCulloch had actually given the order for retreat a few moments before they learned of our withdrawal. Of course he countermanded his order at once. There were several battles in the late Rebellion in which the circumstances were similar. In repeated instances the victorious party thought itself defeated, and was much astonished at finding its antagonist had abandoned the struggle. In our retreat we brought away many of our wounded, but left many others on the field. When the Rebels took possession they cared for their own men as well as the circumstances would permit, but gave no assistance to ours. There were reports, well authenticated, that some who lay helpless were shot or bayoneted. Two days after the battle a surgeon who remained at Springfield was allowed to send out wagons for the wounded. Some were not found until after four days' exposure. They crawled about as best they could, and, by searching the haversacks of dead men, saved themselves from starvation. One party of four built a shelter of branches of trees as a protection against the sun. Another party crawled to the bank of the creek, and lay day and night at the water's edge. Several men sought shelter in the fence corners, or by the side of fallen trees. Two days before the battle, ten dollars were paid to each man of the First Kansas Infantry. The money was in twenty-dollar pieces, and the payment was made by drawing up the regiment in the customary two ranks, and giving a twenty-dollar piece to each man in the front rank. Three-fourths of those killed or wounded in that regiment were of the front rank. The Rebels learned of this payment, and made rigid search of all whom they found on the field. Nearly a year after the battle a visitor to the ground picked up one of these gold coins. During the battle several soldiers from St. Louis and its vicinity recognized acquaintances on the opposite side. These recognitions were generally the occasion of many derisive and abusive epithets. In the Border States each party had a feeling of bitter hostility toward the other. Probably the animosity was greater in Missouri than elsewhere. A lieutenant of the First Missouri Infantry reported that he saw one of the men of his regiment sitting under a tree during the battle, busily engaged in whittling a bullet. "What are you doing there?" said the officer. "My ammunition is gone, and I'm cutting down this bullet to fit my gun." (The soldier's musket was a "54-caliber," and the bullet was a "59.") "Look around among the wounded men," was the order, "and get some 54-cartridges. Don't stop to cut down that bullet." "I would look around, lieutenant," the soldier responded, "but I can't move. My leg is shot through. I won't be long cutting this down, and then I want a chance to hit some of them." Captain Gordon Granger was serving on the staff of General Lyon. When not actively engaged in his professional duties, he visited all parts of the field where the fight was hottest. Though himself somewhat excited, he was constantly urging the raw soldiers to keep cool and not throw away a shot. Wherever there was a weak place in our line, he was among the first to discover it and devise a plan for making it good. On one occasion, he found a gap between two regiments, and noticed that the Rebels were preparing to take advantage of it. Without a moment's delay, he transferred three companies of infantry to the spot, managing to keep them concealed behind a small ridge. "Now, lie still; don't raise your heads out of the grass," said Granger; "I'll tell you when to fire." The Rebels advanced toward the supposed gap. Granger stood where he could see and not be seen. He was a strange compound of coolness and excitement. While his judgment was of the best, and his resources were ready for all emergencies, a by-stander would have thought him heated almost to frenzy. The warmth of his blood gave him a wonderful energy and rendered him ubiquitous; his skill and decision made his services of the highest importance. "There they come; steady, now; let them get near enough; fire low; give them h--l." The Rebels rushed forward, thinking to find an easy passage. When within less than fifty yards, Granger ordered his men to fire. The complete repulse of the Rebels was the result. "There, boys; you've done well. D--n the scoundrels; they won't come here again." With this, the captain hastened to some other quarter. The death of General Lyon occurred near the middle of the battle. So many accounts of this occurrence have been given, that I am not fully satisfied which is the correct one. I know at least half a dozen individuals in whose arms General Lyon expired, and think there are as many more who claim that sad honor. There is a similar mystery concerning his last words, a dozen versions having been given by persons who claim to have heard them. It is my belief that General Lyon was killed while reconnoitering the enemy's line and directing the advance of a regiment of infantry. I believe he was on foot at the instant, and was caught, as he fell, in the arms of "Lehman," his orderly. His last utterance was, doubtless, the order for the infantry to advance, and was given a moment before he received the fatal bullet. From the nature of the wound, his death, if not instantaneous, was very speedy. A large musket-ball entered his left side, in the region of the heart, passing nearly through to the right. A reported wound in the breast was made with a bayonet in the hands of a Rebel soldier, several hours afterward. The body was brought to Springfield on the night after the battle. It was my fortune to be acquainted with General Lyon. During the progress of the war I met no one who impressed me more than he, in his devotion to the interests of the country. If he possessed ambition for personal glory, I was unable to discover it. He declared that reputation was a bubble, which no good soldier should follow. Wealth was a shadow, which no man in the country's service should heed. His pay as an officer was sufficient for all his wants, and he desired nothing more. He gave to the Nation, as the friend he loved the dearest, a fortune which he had inherited. If his death could aid in the success of the cause for which he was fighting, he stood ready to die. The gloom that spread throughout the North when the news of his loss was received, showed a just appreciation of his character. "How sleep the brave who sink to rest By all their country's wishes blest!" At that battle there was the usual complement of officers for five thousand men. Two years later there were seven major-generals and thirteen brigadier-generals who had risen from the Wilson Creek Army. There were colonels, lieutenant-colonels, and majors, by the score, who fought in the line or in the ranks on that memorable 10th of August. In 1863, thirty-two commissioned officers were in the service from one company of the First Iowa Infantry. Out of one company of the First Missouri Infantry, twenty-eight men received commissions. To the majority of the officers from that army promotion was rapid, though a few cases occurred in which the services they rendered were tardily acknowledged. [Illustration: DEATH OF GENERAL LYON] CHAPTER VII. THE RETREAT FROM SPRINGFIELD. A Council of War.--The Journalists' Council.--Preparations for Retreat.--Preceding the Advance-Guard.--Alarm and Anxiety of the People.--Magnificent Distances.--A Novel Odometer.--The Unreliable Countryman.--Neutrality.--A Night at Lebanon.--A Disagreeable Lodging-place.--Active Secessionists.--The Man who Sought and Found his Rights.--Approaching Civilization.--Rebel Couriers on the Route.--Arrival at Rolla. On the night after the battle, the army was quartered at Springfield. The Rebels had returned to the battle-ground, and were holding it in possession. The court-house and a large hotel were taken for hospitals, and received such of our wounded as were brought in. At a council of war, it was decided to fall back to Rolla, a hundred and twenty miles distant, and orders were given to move at daylight. The journalists held a council of war, and decided to commence their retreat at half-past two o'clock in the morning, in order to be in advance of the army. The probabilities were in favor of the enemy's cavalry being at the junction of certain roads, five miles east of the town. We, therefore, divested ourselves of every thing of a compromising character. In my own saddle-bags I took only such toilet articles as I had long carried, and which were not of a warlike nature. We destroyed papers that might give information to the enemy, and kept only our note-books, from which all reference to the strength of our army was carefully stricken out. We determined, in case of capture, to announce ourselves as journalists, and display our credentials. One of our party was a telegraph operator as well as a journalist. He did not wish to appear in the former character, as the Missouri Rebels were then declaring they would show no quarter to telegraphers. Accordingly, he took special care to divest himself of all that pertained to the transmission of intelligence over the wires. A pocket "instrument," which he had hitherto carried, he concealed in Springfield, after carefully disabling the office, and leaving the establishment unfit for immediate use. We passed the dangerous point five miles from town, just as day was breaking. No Rebel cavalry confronted us in the highway, nor shouted an unwelcome "halt!" from a roadside thicket. All was still, though we fancied we could hear a sound of troops in motion far in the distance toward Wilson Creek. The Rebels were doubtless astir, though they did not choose to interfere with the retreat of our army. As day broke and the sun rose, we found the people of both complexions thronging to the road, and seeking, anxiously, the latest intelligence. At first we bore their questions patiently, and briefly told them what had occurred. Finding that we lost much time, we began, early in the day, to give the shortest answers possible. As fast as we proceeded the people became more earnest, and would insist upon delaying us. Soon after mid-day we commenced denying we had been at the battle, or even in Springfield. This was our only course if we would avoid detention. Several residents of Springfield, and with them a runaway captain from a Kansas regiment, had preceded us a few hours and told much more than the truth. Some of them had advised the people to abandon their homes and go to Rolla or St. Louis, assuring them they would all be murdered if they remained at home. In pursuance of this advice many were loading a portion of their household goods upon wagons and preparing to precede or follow the army in its retreat. We quieted their alarm as much as possible, advising them to stay at home and trust to fortune. We could not imagine that the Rebels would deal severely with the inhabitants, except in cases where they had been conspicuous in the Union cause. Some of the people took our advice, unloaded their wagons, and waited for further developments. Others persisted in their determination to leave. They knew the Rebels better than we, and hesitated to trust their tender mercies. A year later we learned more of "the barbarism of Slavery." Southwest Missouri is a region of magnificent distances. A mile in that locality is like two miles in the New England or Middle States. The people have an easy way of computing distance by the survey lines. Thus, if it is the width of a township from one point to another, they call the distance six miles, even though the road may follow the tortuosities of a creek or of the crest of a ridge, and be ten or twelve miles by actual measurement. From Springfield to Lebanon it is called fifty miles, as indicated by the survey lines. A large part of the way the route is quite direct, but there are places where it winds considerably among the hills, and adds several miles to the length of the road. No account is taken of this, but all is thrown into the general reckoning. There is a popular saying on the frontier, that they measure the roads with a fox-skin, and make no allowance for the tail. Frequently I have been told it was five miles to a certain point, and, after an hour's riding, on inquiry, found that the place I sought was still five, and sometimes six, miles distant. Once, when I essayed a "short cut" of two miles, that was to save me twice that distance, I rode at a good pace for an hour and a half to accomplish it, and traveled, as I thought, at least eight miles. On the route from Springfield to Lebanon we were much amused at the estimates of distance. Once I asked a rough-looking farmer, "How far is it to Sand Springs?" "Five miles, stranger," was the reply. "May be you won't find it so much." After riding three miles, and again inquiring, I was informed it was "risin' six miles to Sand Springs." Who could believe in the existence of a reliable countryman, after that? Thirty miles from Springfield, we stopped at a farm-house for dinner. While our meal was being prepared, we lay upon the grass in front of the house, and were at once surrounded by a half-dozen anxious natives. We answered their questions to the best of our abilities, but nearly all of us fell asleep five minutes after lying down. When aroused for dinner, I was told I had paused in the middle of a word of two syllables, leaving my hearers to exercise their imaginations on what I was about to say. Dinner was the usual "hog and hominy" of the Southwest, varied with the smallest possible loaf of wheaten bread. Outside the house, before dinner, the men were inquisitive. Inside the house, when we were seated for dinner, the women were unceasing in their inquiries. Who can resist the questions of a woman, even though she be an uneducated and unkempt Missourian? The dinner and the questions kept us awake, and we attended faithfully to both. The people of this household were not enthusiastic friends of the Union. Like many other persons, they were anxious to preserve the good opinion of both sides, by doing nothing in behalf of either. Thus neutral, they feared they would be less kindly treated by the Rebels than by the National forces. Though they had no particular love for our army, I think they were sorry to see it departing. A few of the Secessionists were not slow to express the fear that their own army would not be able to pay in full for all it wanted, as our army had done. Horses and riders refreshed, our journey was resumed. The scenes of the afternoon were like those of the morning: the same alarm among the people, the same exaggerated reports, and the same advice from ourselves, when we chose to give it. The road stretched out in the same way it had hitherto done, and the information derived from the inhabitants was as unreliable as ever. It was late in the evening, in the midst of a heavy shower, that we reached Lebanon, where we halted for the night. I have somewhere read of a Persian king who beheaded his subjects for the most trivial or imaginary offenses. The officers of his cabinet, when awaking in the morning, were accustomed to place their hands to their necks, to ascertain if their heads still remained. The individuals comprising our party had every reason to make a similar examination on the morning after our stay in this town, and to express many thanks at the gratifying result. On reaching the only hotel at Lebanon, long after dark, we found the public room occupied by a miscellaneous assemblage. It was easy to see that they were more happy than otherwise at the defeat which our arms had sustained. While our supper was being prepared we made ready for it, all the time keeping our eyes on the company. We were watched as we went to supper, and, on reaching the table, found two persons sitting so near our allotted places that we could not converse freely. After supper several individuals wished to talk with us concerning the recent events. We made the battle appear much better than it had really been, and assured them that a company of cavalry was following close behind us, and would speedily arrive. This information was unwelcome, as the countenances of the listeners plainly indicated. One of our party was called aside by a Union citizen, and informed of a plan to rob, and probably kill, us before morning. This was not pleasing. It did not add to the comfort of the situation to know that a collision between the Home Guards and a company of Secessionists was momentarily expected. At either end of the town the opposing parties were reported preparing for a fight. As the hotel was about half-way between the two points, our position became interesting. Next came a report from an unreliable contraband that our horses had been stolen. We went to the stable, as a man looks in a wallet he knows to be empty, and happily found our animals still there. We found, however, that the stable had been invaded and robbed of two horses in stalls adjacent to those of our own. The old story of the theft of a saw-mill, followed by that of the dam, was brought to our minds, with the exception, that the return of the thief was not likely to secure his capture. The stable-keeper offered to lock the door and resign the key to our care. His offer was probably well intended, but we could see little advantage in accepting it, as there were several irregular openings in the side of the building, each of them ample for the egress of a horse. In assigning us quarters for the night, the landlord suggested that two should occupy a room at one end of the house, while the rest were located elsewhere. We objected to this, and sustained our objection. With a little delay, a room sufficient for all of us was obtained. We made arrangements for the best possible defense in case of attack, and then lay down to sleep. Our Union friend called upon us before we were fairly settled to rest, bringing us intelligence that the room, where the guns of the Home Guard were temporarily stored, had been invaded while the sentinels were at supper. The locks had been removed from some of the muskets, but there were arms enough to make some resistance if necessary. Telling him we would come out when the firing began, and requesting the landlord to send the cavalry commander to our room as soon as he arrived, we fell asleep. No one of our party carried his fears beyond the waking hours. In five minutes after dismissing our friend, all were enjoying a sleep as refreshing and undisturbed as if we had been in the most secure and luxurious dwelling of New York or Chicago. During several years of travel under circumstances of greater or less danger, I have never found my sleep disturbed, in the slightest degree, by the nature of my surroundings. Apprehensions of danger may be felt while one is awake, but they generally vanish when slumber begins. In the morning we found ourselves safe, and were gratified to discover that our horses had been let alone. The landlord declared every thing was perfectly quiet, and had been so through the night, with the exception of a little fight at one end of the town. The Home Guards were in possession, and the Secessionists had dispersed. The latter deliberated upon the policy of attacking us, and decided that their town might be destroyed by our retreating army in case we were disturbed. They left us our horses, that we might get away from the place as speedily as possible. So we bade adieu to Lebanon with much delight. That we came unmolested out of that nest of disloyalty, was a matter of much surprise. Subsequent events, there and elsewhere, have greatly increased that surprise. After a ride of thirteen miles we reached the Gasconade River, which we found considerably swollen by recent rains. The proprietor of the hotel where we breakfasted was a country doctor, who passed in that region as a man of great wisdom. He was intensely disloyal, and did not relish the prospect of having, as he called it, "an Abolition army" moving anywhere in his vicinity. He was preparing to leave for the South, with his entire household, as soon as his affairs could be satisfactorily arranged. He had taken the oath of allegiance, to protect himself from harm at the hands of our soldiers, but his negroes informed us that he belonged to a company of "Independent Guards," which had been organized with the design of joining the Rebel army. This gentleman was searching for his rights. I passed his place six months afterward. The doctor's negroes had run away to the North, and the doctor had vanished with his family in the opposite direction. His house had been burned, his stables stripped of every thing of value, and the whole surroundings formed a picture of desolation. The doctor had found a reward for his vigilant search. There was no doubt he had obtained his rights. Having ended our breakfast, we decided to remain at that place until late in the afternoon, for the purpose of writing up our accounts. With a small table, and other accommodations of the worst character, we busied ourselves for several hours. To the persona of the household we were a curiosity. They had never before seen men who could write with a journalist's ordinary rapidity, and were greatly surprised at the large number of pages we succeeded in passing over. We were repeatedly interrupted, until forced to make a request to be let alone. The negroes took every opportunity to look at us, and, when none but ourselves could see them, they favored us with choice bits of local information. When we departed, late in the afternoon, four stout negroes ferried us across the river. A hotel known as the California House was our stopping-place, ten miles from the Gasconade. As an evidence of our approaching return to civilization, we found each bed at this house supplied with two clean sheets, a luxury that Springfield was unable to furnish. I regretted to find, several months later, that the California House had been burned by the Rebels. At the time of our retreat, the landlord was unable to determine on which side of the question he belonged, and settled the matter, in conversation with me, by saying he was a hotel-keeper, and could not interfere in the great issue of the day. I inclined to the belief that he was a Union man, but feared to declare himself on account of the dubious character of his surroundings. The rapidity with which the Secessionists carried and received news was a matter of astonishment to our people. While on that ride through the Southwest, I had an opportunity of learning their _modus operandi_. Several times we saw horsemen ride to houses or stables, and, after a few moments' parley, exchange their wearied horses for fresh ones. The parties with whom they effected their exchanges would be found pretty well informed concerning the latest news. By this irregular system of couriers, the Secessionists maintained a complete communication with each other. All along the route, I found they knew pretty well what had transpired, though their news was generally mixed up with much falsehood. Even in those early days, there was a magnificence in the Rebel capacity for lying. Before the war, the Northern States produced by far the greatest number of inventions, as the records of the Patent Office will show. During the late Rebellion, the brains of the Southern States were wonderfully fertile in the manufacture of falsehood. The inhabitants of Dixie invent neither cotton-gins, caloric engines, nor sewing-machines, but when they apply their faculties to downright lying, the mudsill head is forced to bow in reverence. In the last day of this ride, we passed over a plateau twelve miles across, also over a mountain of considerable height. Near the summit of this mountain, we struck a small brook, whose growth was an interesting study. At first, barely perceptible as it issued from a spring by the roadside, it grew, mile by mile, until, at the foot of the mountain, it formed a respectable stream. The road crossed it every few hundred yards, and at each crossing we watched its increase. At the base of the mountain it united with another and larger stream, which we followed on our way to Rolla. Late in the afternoon we reached the end of our journey. Weary, dusty, hungry, and sore, we alighted from our tired horses, and sought the office of the commandant of the post. All were eager to gather the latest intelligence, and we were called upon to answer a thousand questions. With our story ended, ourselves refreshed from the fatigue of our long ride, a hope for the safety of our gallant but outnumbered army, we bade adieu to Rolla, and were soon whirling over the rail to St. Louis. CHAPTER VIII. GENERAL FREMONT'S PURSUIT OF PRICE. Quarrel between Price and McCulloch.--The Rebels Advance upon Lexington.--A Novel Defense for Sharp-shooters.--Attempt to Re-enforce the Garrison.--An Enterprising Journalist.--The Surrender.--Fremont's Advance.--Causes of Delay.--How the Journalists Killed Time.--Late News.--A Contractor "Sold."--Sigel in Front.--A Motley Collection.--A Wearied Officer.--The Woman who had never seen a Black Republican.--Love and Conversion. After the battle of Wilson Creek and the occupation of Springfield, a quarrel arose between the Rebel Generals, Price and McCulloch. It resulted in the latter being ordered to Arkansas, leaving General Price in command of the army in Missouri. The latter had repeatedly promised to deliver Missouri from the hands of the United States forces, and made his preparations for an advance into the interior. His intention, openly declared, was to take possession of Jefferson City, and reinstate Governor Jackson in control of the State. The Rebels wisely considered that a perambulating Governor was not entitled to great respect, and were particularly anxious to see the proclamations of His Excellency issued from the established capital. Accordingly, General Price, with an army twenty thousand strong, marched from Springfield in the direction of Lexington. This point was garrisoned by Colonel Mulligan with about twenty-five hundred men. After a siege of four days, during the last two of which the garrison was without water, the fort was surrendered. Price's army was sufficiently large to make a complete investment of the fortifications occupied by Colonel Mulligan, and thus cut off all access to the river. The hemp warehouses in Lexington were drawn upon to construct movable breast-works for the besieging force. Rolling the bales of hemp before them, the Rebel sharp-shooters could get very near the fort without placing themselves in great danger. The defense was gallant, but as no garrisons can exist without water, Colonel Mulligan was forced to capitulate. It afterward became known that Price's army had almost exhausted its stock of percussion-caps--it having less than two thousand when the surrender was made. General Fremont was highly censured by the Press and people for not re-enforcing the garrison, when it was known that Price was moving upon Lexington. One journal in St. Louis, that took occasion to comment adversely upon his conduct, was suddenly suppressed. After a stoppage of a few days, it was allowed to resume publication. During the siege a small column of infantry approached the north bank of the river, opposite Lexington, with the design of joining Colonel Mulligan. The attempt was considered too hazardous, and no junction was effected. Mr. Wilkie, of the New York _Times_, accompanied this column, and was much disappointed when the project of reaching Lexington was given up. Determined to see the battle, he crossed the river and surrendered himself to General Price, with a request to be put on parole until the battle was ended. The Rebel commander gave him quarters in the guardhouse till the surrender took place. Mr. Wilkie was then liberated, and reached St. Louis with an exclusive account of the affair. While General Price was holding Lexington, General Fremont commenced assembling an army at Jefferson City, with the avowed intention of cutting off the retreat of the Rebels through Southwest Missouri. From Jefferson City our forces moved to Tipton and Syracuse, and there left the line of railway for a march to Springfield. Our movements were not conducted with celerity, and before we left Jefferson City the Rebels had evacuated Lexington and moved toward Springfield. The delay in our advance was chiefly owing to a lack of transportation and a deficiency of arms for the men. General Fremont's friends charged that he was not properly sustained by the Administration, in his efforts to outfit and organize his army. There was, doubtless, some ground for this charge, as the authorities, at that particular time, were unable to see any danger, except at Washington. They often diverted to that point _matériel_ that had been originally designed for St. Louis. As the army lay at Jefferson City, preparing for the field, some twelve or fifteen journalists, representing the prominent papers of the country, assembled there to chronicle its achievements. They waited nearly two weeks for the movement to begin. Some became sick, others left in disgust, but the most of them remained firm. The devices of the journalists to kill time were of an amusing nature. The town had no attractions whatever, and the gentlemen of the press devoted themselves to fast riding on the best horses they could obtain. Their horseback excursions usually terminated in lively races, in which both riders and steeds were sufferers. The representatives of two widely-circulated dailies narrowly escaped being sent home with broken necks. Evenings at the hotels were passed in reviving the "sky-larking" of school-boy days. These scenes were amusing to participants and spectators. Sober, dignified men, the majority of them heads of families, occupied themselves in devising plans for the general amusement. One mode of enjoyment was to assemble in a certain large room, and throw at each other every portable article at hand, until exhaustion ensued. Every thing that could be thrown or tossed was made use of. Pillows, overcoats, blankets, valises, saddle-bags, bridles, satchels, towels, books, stove-wood, bed-clothing, chairs, window-curtains, and, ultimately, the fragments of the bedsteads, were transformed into missiles. I doubt if that house ever before, or since, knew so much noise in the same time. Everybody enjoyed it except those who occupied adjoining rooms, and possessed a desire for sleep. Some of these persons were inclined to excuse our hilarity, on the ground that the boys ought to enjoy themselves. "The boys!" Most of them were on the shady side of twenty-five, and some had seen forty years. About nine o'clock in the forenoon of the day following Price's evacuation of Lexington, we obtained news of the movement. The mail at noon, and the telegraph before that time, carried all we had to say of the affair, and in a few hours we ceased to talk of it. On the evening of that day, a good-natured "contractor" visited our room, and, after indulging in our varied amusements until past eleven, bade us good-night and departed. Many army contractors had grown fat in the country's service, but this man had a large accumulation of adipose matter before the war broke out. A rapid ascent of a long flight of stairs was, therefore, a serious matter with him. Five minutes after leaving us, he dashed rapidly up the stairs and entered our room. As soon as he could speak, he asked, breathing between, the words-- "Have you heard the news?" "No," we responded; "what is it?" "Why" (with more efforts to recover his breath), "Price has evacuated Lexington!" "Is it possible?" "Yes," he gasped, and then sank exhausted into a large (very large) arm-chair. We gave him a glass of water and a fan, and urged him to proceed with the story. He told all he had just heard in the bar-room below, and we listened with the greatest apparent interest. When he had ended, we told him _our_ story. The quality and quantity of the wine which he immediately ordered, was only excelled by his hearty appreciation of the joke he had played upon himself. Every army correspondent has often been furnished with "important intelligence" already in his possession, and sometimes in print before his well-meaning informant obtains it. A portion of General Fremont's army marched from Jefferson City to Tipton and Syracuse, while the balance, with most of the transportation, was sent by rail. General Sigel was the first to receive orders to march his division from Tipton to Warsaw, and he was very prompt to obey. While other division commanders were waiting for their transportation to arrive from St. Louis, Sigel scoured the country and gathered up every thing with wheels. His train was the most motley collection of vehicles it has ever been my lot to witness. There were old wagons that made the journey from Tennessee to Missouri thirty years before, farm wagons and carts of every description, family carriages, spring wagons, stage-coaches, drays, and hay-carts. In fact, every thing that could carry a load was taken along. Even pack-saddles were not neglected. Horses, mules, jacks, oxen, and sometimes cows, formed the motive power. To stand by the roadside and witness the passage of General Sigel's train, was equal to a visit to Barnum's Museum, and proved an unfailing source of mirth. [Illustration: GENERAL SIGEL'S TRANSPORTATION IN THE MISSOURI CAMPAIGN.] Falstaff's train (if he had one) could not have been more picturesque. Even the Missourians, accustomed as they were to sorry sights, laughed heartily at the spectacle presented by Sigel's transportation. The Secessionists made several wrong deductions from the sad appearance of that train. Some of them predicted that the division with _such_ a train would prove to be of little value in battle. Never were men more completely deceived. The division marched rapidly, and, on a subsequent campaign, evinced its ability to fight. One after another, the divisions of Fremont's army moved in chase of the Rebels; a pursuit in which the pursued had a start of seventy-five miles, and a clear road before them. Fremont and his staff left Tipton, when three divisions had gone, and overtook the main column at Warsaw. A few days later, Mr. Richardson, of the _Tribune_, and myself started from Syracuse at one o'clock, one pleasant afternoon, and, with a single halt of an hour's duration, reached Warsaw, forty-seven miles distant, at ten o'clock at night. In the morning we found the general's staff comfortably quartered in the village. On the staff there were several gentlemen from New York and other Eastern cities, who were totally unaccustomed to horseback exercise. One of these recounted the story of their "dreadful" journey of fifty miles from Tipton. "Only think of it!" said he; "we came through all that distance in less than three days. One day the general made us come _twenty-four_ miles." "That was very severe, indeed. I wonder how you endured it." "It _was_ severe, and nearly broke some of us down. By-the-way, Mr. K----, how did you come over?" "Oh," said I, carelessly, "Richardson and I left Syracuse at noon yesterday, and arrived here at ten last night." Before that campaign was ended, General Fremont's staff acquired some knowledge of horsemanship. At Warsaw the party of journalists passed several waiting days, and domiciled themselves in the house of a widow who had one pretty daughter. Our natural bashfulness was our great hinderance, so that it was a day or two before we made the acquaintance of the younger of the women. One evening she invited a young lady friend to visit her, and obliged us with introductions. The ladies persistently turned the conversation upon the Rebellion, and gave us the benefit of their views. Our young hostess, desiring to say something complimentary, declared she did not dislike the Yankees, but despised the Dutch and the Black Republicans." "Do you dislike the Black Republicans very much?" said the _Tribune_ correspondent. "Oh! yes; I _hate_ them. I wish they were all dead." "Well," was the quiet response, "we are Black Republicans. I am the blackest of them all." The fair Secessionist was much confused, and for fully a minute remained silent. Then she said-- "I must confess I did not fully understand what Black Republicans were. I never saw any before." During the evening she was quite courteous, though persistent in declaring her sentiments. Her companion launched the most bitter invective at every thing identified with the Union cause, and made some horrid wishes about General Fremont and his army. A more vituperative female Rebel I have never seen. She was as pretty as she was disloyal, and was, evidently, fully aware of it. A few months later, I learned that both these young ladies had become the wives of United States officers, and were complimenting, in high terms, the bravery and patriotism of the soldiers they had so recently despised. The majority of the inhabitants of Warsaw were disloyal, and had little hesitation in declaring their sentiments. Most of the young men were in the Rebel army or preparing to go there. A careful search of several warehouses revealed extensive stores of powder, salt, shoes, and other military supplies. Some of these articles were found in a cave a few miles from Warsaw, their locality being made known by a negro who was present at their concealment. Warsaw boasted a newspaper establishment, but the proprietor and editor of the weekly sheet had joined his fortunes to those of General Price. Two years before the time of our visit, this editor was a member of the State Legislature, and made an earnest effort to secure the expulsion of the reporter of _The Missouri_ _Democrat_, on account of the radical tone of that paper. He was unsuccessful, but the aggrieved individual did not forgive him. When our army entered Warsaw this reporter held a position on the staff of the general commanding. Not finding his old adversary, he contented himself with taking possession of the printing-office, and "confiscating" whatever was needed for the use of head-quarters. About twenty miles from Warsaw, on the road to Booneville, there was a German settlement, known as Cole Camp. When the troubles commenced in Missouri, a company of Home Guards was formed at Cole Camp. A few days after its formation a company of Secessionists from Warsaw made a night-march and attacked the Home Guards at daylight. Though inflicting severe injury upon the Home Guards, the Secessionists mourned the loss of the most prominent citizens of Warsaw. They were soon after humiliated by the presence of a Union army. CHAPTER IX. THE SECOND CAMPAIGN TO SPRINGFIELD. Detention at Warsaw.--A Bridge over the Osage.--The Body-Guard.--Manner of its Organization.--The Advance to Springfield.--Charge of the Body-Guard.--A Corporal's Ruse.--Occupation of Springfield--The Situation.--Wilson Creek Revisited.--Traces of the Battle.--Rumored Movements of the Enemy.--Removal of General Fremont.--Danger of Attack.--A Night of Excitement.--The Return to St. Louis.--Curiosities of the Scouting Service.--An Arrest by Mistake. The army was detained at Warsaw, to wait the construction of a bridge over the Osage for the passage of the artillery and heavy transportation. Sigel's Division was given the advance, and crossed before the bridge was finished. The main column moved as soon as the bridge permitted--the rear being brought up by McKinstry's Division. A division from Kansas, under General Lane, was moving at the same time, to form a junction with Fremont near Springfield, and a brigade from Rolla was advancing with the same object in view. General Sturgis was in motion from North Missouri, and there was a prospect that an army nearly forty thousand strong would be assembled at Springfield. While General Fremont was in St. Louis, before setting out on this expedition, he organized the "Fremont Body-Guard," which afterward became famous. This force consisted of four companies of cavalry, and was intended to form a full regiment. It was composed of the best class of the young men of St. Louis and Cincinnati. From the completeness of its outfit, it was often spoken of as the "Kid-Gloved Regiment." General Fremont designed it as a special body-guard for himself, to move when he moved, and to form a part of his head-quarter establishment. The manner of its organization was looked upon by many as a needless outlay, at a time when the finances of the department were in a disordered condition. The officers and the rank and file of the Body-Guard felt their pride touched by the comments upon them, and determined to take the first opportunity to vindicate their character as soldiers. When we were within fifty miles of Springfield, it was ascertained that the main force of the Rebels had moved southward, leaving behind them some two or three thousand men. General Fremont ordered a cavalry force, including the Body-Guard, to advance upon the town. On reaching Springfield the cavalry made a gallant charge upon the Rebel camp, which was situated in a large field, bordered by a wood, within sight of the court-house. In this assault the loss of our forces, in proportion to the number engaged, was quite severe, but the enemy was put to flight, and the town occupied for a few hours. We gained nothing of a material nature, as the Rebels would have quietly evacuated Springfield at the approach of our main army. The courage of the Body-Guard, which no sensible man had doubted, was fully evinced by this gallant but useless charge. When the fight was over, the colonel in command ordered a retreat of twenty miles, to meet the advance of the army. A corporal with a dozen men became separated from the command while in Springfield, and remained there until the following morning. He received a flag of truce from the Rebels, asking permission to send a party to bury the dead. He told the bearer to wait until he could consult his "general," who was supposed to be lying down in the back office. The "general" replied that his "division" was too much exasperated to render it prudent for a delegation from the enemy to enter town, and therefore declined to grant the request. At the same time he promised to send out strong details to attend to the sad duty. At sunrise he thought it best to follow the movements of his superior officer, lest the Rebels might discover his ruse and effect his capture. Two days after the charge of the Body-Guard, the advance of the infantry entered Springfield without the slightest opposition. The army gradually came up, and the occupation of the key of Southwest Missouri was completed. The Rebel army fell back toward the Arkansas line, to meet a force supposed to be marching northward from Fayetteville. There was little expectation that the Rebels would seek to engage us. The only possible prospect of their assuming the offensive was in the event of a junction between Price and McCulloch, rendering them numerically superior to ourselves. During our occupation of Springfield I paid a visit to the Wilson Creek battle-ground. It was eleven weeks from the day I had left it. Approaching the field, I was impressed by its stillness, so different from the tumult on the 10th of the previous August. It was difficult to realize that the spot, now so quiet, had been the scene of a sanguinary contest. The rippling of the creek, and the occasional chirp of a bird, were the only noises that came to our ears. There was no motion of the air, not enough to disturb the leaves freshly fallen from the numerous oak-trees on the battle-field. At each step I could but contrast the cool, calm, Indian-summer day, with the hot, August morning, when the battle took place. All sounds of battle were gone, but the traces of the encounter had not disappeared. As we followed the route leading to the field, I turned from the beaten track and rode among the trees. Ascending a slight acclivity, I found my horse half-stumbling over some object between his feet. Looking down, I discovered a human skull, partly covered by the luxuriant grass. At a little distance lay the dismembered skeleton to which the skull evidently belonged. It was doubtless that of some soldier who had crawled there while wounded, and sunk exhausted at the foot of a tree. The bits of clothing covering the ground showed that either birds or wild animals had been busy with the remains. Not far off lay another skeleton, disturbed and dismembered like the other. Other traces of the conflict were visible, as I moved slowly over the field. Here were scattered graves, each for a single person; there a large grave, that had received a dozen bodies of the slain. Here were fragments of clothing and equipments, pieces of broken weapons; the shattered wheel of a caisson, and near it the exploded shell that destroyed it. Skeletons of horses, graves of men, scarred trees, trampled graves, the ruins of the burned wagons of the Rebels, all formed their portion of the picture. It well illustrated the desolation of war. The spot where General Lyon fell was marked by a rude inscription upon the nearest tree. The skeleton of the general's favorite horse lay near this tree, and had been partially broken up by relic-seekers. The long, glossy mane was cut off by the Rebel soldiers on the day after the battle, and worn by them as a badge of honor. Subsequently the teeth and bones were appropriated by both Rebels and Unionists. Even the tree that designated the locality was partially stripped of its limbs to furnish souvenirs of Wilson Creek. During the first few days of our stay in Springfield, there were vague rumors that the army was preparing for a long march into the enemy's country. The Rebel army was reported at Cassville, fifty-five miles distant, fortifying in a strong position. General Price and Governor Jackson had convened the remnant of the Missouri Legislature, and caused the State to be voted out of the Union. It was supposed we would advance and expel the Rebels from the State. While we were making ready to move, it was reported that the Rebel army at Cassville had received large re-enforcements from Arkansas, and was moving in our direction. Of course, all were anxious for a battle, and hailed this intelligence with delight. At the same time there were rumors of trouble from another direction--trouble to the commander-in-chief. The vague reports of his coming decapitation were followed by the arrival, on the 2d of November, of the unconditional order removing General Fremont from command, and appointing General Hunter in his stead. Just before the reception of this order, "positive" news was received that the enemy was advancing from Cassville toward Springfield, and would either attack us in the town, or meet us on the ground south of it. General Hunter had not arrived, and therefore General Fremont formed his plan of battle, and determined on marching out to meet the enemy. On the morning of the 3d, the scouts brought intelligence that the entire Rebel army was in camp on the old Wilson Creek battle-ground, and would fight us there. A council of war was called, and it was decided to attack the enemy on the following morning, if General Hunter did not arrive before that time. Some of the officers were suspicious that the Rebels were not in force at Wilson Creek, but when Fremont announced it officially there could be little room for doubt. Every thing was put in readiness for battle. Generals of division were ordered to be ready to move at a moment's notice. The pickets were doubled, and the grand guards increased to an unusual extent. Four pieces of artillery formed a portion of the picket force on the Fayetteville road, the direct route to Wilson Creek. If an enemy had approached on that night he would have met a warm reception. About seven o'clock in the evening, a staff officer, who kept the journalists informed of the progress of affairs, visited General Fremont's head-quarters. He soon emerged with important intelligence. "It is all settled. The army is ready to move at the instant. Orders will be issued at two o'clock, and we will be under way before daylight. Skirmishing will begin at nine, and the full battle will be drawn on at twelve." "Is the plan arranged?" "Yes, it is all arranged; but I did not ask how." "Battle sure to come off--is it?" "Certainly, unless Hunter comes and countermands the order." Alas, for human calculations! General Hunter arrived before midnight. Two o'clock came, but no orders to break camp. Daylight, and no orders to march. Breakfast-time, and not a hostile shot had been heard. Nine o'clock, and no skirmish. Twelve o'clock, and no battle. General Fremont and staff returned to St. Louis. General Hunter made a reconnoissance to Wilson Creek, and ascertained that the only enemy that had been in the vicinity was a scouting party of forty or fifty men. At the time we were to march out, there was not a Rebel on the ground. Their whole army was still at Cassville, fifty-five miles from Springfield. On the 9th of November the army evacuated Springfield and returned to the line of the Pacific Railway. General Fremont's scouts had deceived him. Some of these individuals were exceedingly credulous, while others were liars of the highest grade known to civilization. The former obtained their information from the frightened inhabitants; the latter manufactured theirs with the aid of vivid imaginations. I half suspect the fellows were like the showman in the story, and, at length, religiously believed what they first designed as a hoax. Between the two classes of scouts a large army of Rebels was created. The scouting service often develops characters of a peculiar mould. Nearly every man engaged in it has some particular branch in which he excels. There was one young man accompanying General Fremont's army, whose equal, as a special forager, I have never seen elsewhere. Whenever we entered camp, this individual, whom I will call the captain, would take a half-dozen companions and start on a foraging tour. After an absence of from four to six hours, he would return well-laden with the spoils of war. On one occasion he brought to camp three horses, two cows, a yoke of oxen, and a wagon. In the latter he had a barrel of sorghum molasses, a firkin of butter, two sheep, a pair of fox-hounds, a hoop-skirt, a corn-sheller, a baby's cradle, a lot of crockery, half a dozen padlocks, two hoes, and a rocking-chair. On the next night he returned with a family carriage drawn by a horse and a mule. In the carriage he had, among other things, a parrot-cage which contained a screaming parrot, several pairs of ladies' shoes, a few yards of calico, the stock of an old musket, part of a spinning-wheel, and a box of garden seeds. In what way these things would contribute to the support of the army, it was difficult to understand. On one occasion the captain found a trunk full of clothing, concealed with a lot of salt in a Rebel warehouse. He brought the trunk to camp, and, as the quartermaster refused to receive it, took it to St. Louis when the expedition returned. At the hotel where he was stopping, some detectives were watching a suspected thief, and, by mistake, searched the captain's room. They found a trunk containing thirteen coats of all sizes, with no pants or vests. Naturally considering this a strange wardrobe for a gentleman, they took the captain into custody. He protested earnestly that he was not, and had never been, a thief, but it was only on the testimony of the quartermaster that he was released. I believe he subsequently acted as a scout under General Halleck, during the siege of Corinth. After the withdrawal of our army, General Price returned to Springfield and went into winter-quarters. McCulloch's command formed a cantonment at Cross Hollows, Arkansas, about ninety miles southwest of Springfield. There was no prospect of further activity until the ensuing spring. Every thing betokened rest. From Springfield I returned to St. Louis by way of Rolla, designing to follow the example of the army, and seek a good locality for hibernating. On my way to Rolla I found many houses deserted, or tenanted only by women and children. Frequently the crops were standing, ungathered, in the field. Fences were prostrated, and there was no effort to restore them. The desolation of that region was just beginning. CHAPTER X. TWO MONTHS OF IDLENESS. A Promise Fulfilled.--Capture of a Rebel Camp and Train.--Rebel Sympathizers in St. Louis.--General Halleck and his Policy.--Refugees from Rebeldom.--Story of the Sufferings of a Union Family.--Chivalry in the Nineteenth Century.--The Army of the Southwest in Motion.--Gun-Boats and Transports.--Capture of Fort Henry.--The Effect in St. Louis.--Our Flag Advancing. Early in the December following the events narrated in the last chapter, General Pope captured a camp in the interior of the State, where recruits were being collected for Price's army. After the return of Fremont's army from Springfield, the Rebels boasted they would eat their Christmas dinner in St. Louis. Many Secessionists were making preparations to receive Price and his army, and some of them prophesied the time of their arrival. It was known that a goodly number of Rebel flags had been made ready to hang out when the conquerors should come. Sympathizers with the Rebellion became bold, and often displayed badges, rosettes, and small flags, indicative of their feelings. Recruiting for the Rebel army went on, very quietly, of course, within a hundred yards of the City Hall. At a fair for the benefit of the Orphan Asylum, the ladies openly displayed Rebel insignia, but carefully excluded the National emblems. This was the state of affairs when eight hundred Rebels arrived in St. Louis. They redeemed their promise to enjoy a Christmas dinner in St. Louis, though they had counted upon more freedom than they were then able to obtain. In order that they might carry out, in part, their original intention, their kind-hearted jailers permitted the friends of the prisoners to send a dinner to the latter on Christmas Day. The prisoners partook of the repast with much relish. The capture of those recruits was accompanied by the seizure of a supply train on its way to Springfield. Our success served to diminish the Rebel threats to capture St. Louis, or perform other great and chivalric deeds. The inhabitants of that city continued to prophesy its fall, but they were less defiant than before. General Fremont commanded the Western Department for just a hundred days. General Hunter, his successor, was dressed in brief authority for fifteen days, and yielded to General Halleck. The latter officer endeavored to make his rule as unlike that of General Fremont as could well be done. He quietly made his head-quarters at the Government Buildings, in the center of St. Louis, instead of occupying a "palatial mansion" on Chouteau Avenue. The body-guard, or other cumbersome escort, was abolished, and the new general moved unattended about the city. Where General Fremont had scattered the Government funds with a wasteful hand, General Halleck studied economy. Where Fremont had declared freedom to the slaves of traitors, Halleck issued his famous "Order No. 3," forbidding fugitive slaves to enter our lines, and excluding all that were then in the military camps. Where General Fremont had surrounded his head-quarters with so great a retinue of guards that access was almost impossible, General Halleck made it easy for all visitors to see him. He generally gave them such a reception that few gentlemen felt inclined to make a second call. The policy of scattering the military forces in the department was abandoned, and a system of concentration adopted. The construction of the gun-boat fleet, and accompanying mortar-rafts, was vigorously pushed, and preparations for military work in the ensuing spring went on in all directions. Our armies were really idle, and we were doing very little on the Mississippi; but it was easy to see that we were making ready for the most vigorous activity in the future. In the latter part of December many refugees from the Southwest began to arrive in St. Louis. In most cases they were of the poorer class of the inhabitants of Missouri and Northern Arkansas, and had been driven from their homes by their wealthier and disloyal neighbors. Their stories varied little from each other. Known or suspected to be loyal, they were summarily expelled, generally with the loss of every thing, save a few articles of necessity. There were many women and children among them, whose protectors had been driven into the Rebel ranks, or murdered in cold blood. Many of them died soon after they reached our lines, and there were large numbers who perished on their way. Among those who arrived early in January, 1862, was a man from Northern Arkansas. Born in Pennsylvania, he emigrated to the Southwest in 1830, and, after a few years' wandering, settled near Fayetteville. When the war broke out, he had a small farm and a comfortable house, and his two sons were married and living near him. In the autumn of '61, his elder son was impressed into the Rebel service, where he soon died. The younger was ordered to report at Fayetteville, for duty. Failing to do so on the day specified, he was shot down in his own house on the following night. His body fell upon one of his children standing near him, and his blood saturated its garments. The day following, the widow, with two small children, was notified to leave the dwelling, as orders had been issued for its destruction. Giving her no time to remove any thing, the Rebel soldiers, claiming to act under military command, fired the house. In this party were two persons who had been well acquainted with the murdered man. The widow sought shelter with her husband's parents. The widow of the elder son went to the same place of refuge. Thus there were living, under one roof, the old man, his wife, a daughter of seventeen, and the two widows, one with two, and the other with three, children. A week afterward, all were commanded to leave the country. No cause was assigned, beyond the fact that the man was born in the North, and had been harboring the family of his son, who refused to serve in the Rebel ranks. They were told they could have two days for preparation, but within ten hours of the time the notice was served, a gang of Rebels appeared at the door, and ordered an instant departure. They made a rigid search of the persons of the refugees, to be sure they took away nothing of value. Only a single wagon was allowed, and in this were placed a few articles of necessity. As they moved away, the Rebels applied the torch to the house and its out-buildings. In a few moments all were in flames. The house of the elder son's widow shared the same fete. They were followed to the Missouri line, and ordered to make no halt under penalty of death. It was more than two hundred miles to our lines, and winter was just beginning. One after another fell ill and died, or was left with Union people along the way. Only four of the party reached our army at Rolla. Two of these died a few days after their arrival, leaving only a young child and its grandfather. At St. Louis the survivors were kindly cared for, but the grief at leaving home, the hardships of the winter journey, and their destitution among strangers, had so worn upon them that they soon followed the other members of their family. There have been thousands of cases nearly parallel to the above. The Rebels claimed to be fighting for political freedom, and charged the National Government with the most unheard-of "tyranny." We can well be excused for not countenancing a political freedom that kills men at their firesides, and drives women and children to seek protection under another flag. We have heard much, in the past twenty years, of "Southern chivalry." If the deeds of which the Rebels were guilty are characteristic of chivalry, who would wish to be a son of the Cavaliers? The insignia worn in the Middle Ages are set aside, to make room for the torch and the knife. The chivalry that deliberately starves its prisoners, to render them unable to return to the field, and sends blood-hounds on the track of those who attempt an escape from their hands, is the chivalry of modern days. Winder is the Coeur-de-Leon, and Quantrel the Bayard, of the nineteenth century; knights "without fear and without reproach." Early in January, the Army of the Southwest, under General Curtis, was put in condition for moving. Orders were issued cutting down the allowance of transportation, and throwing away every thing superfluous. Colonel Carr, with a cavalry division, was sent to the line of the Gasconade, to watch the movements of the enemy. It was the preliminary to the march into Arkansas, which resulted in the battle of Pea Ridge and the famous campaign of General Curtis from Springfield to Helena. As fast as possible, the gun-boat fleet was pushed to completion. One after another, as the iron-clads were ready to move, they made their rendezvous at Cairo. Advertisements of the quartermaster's department, calling for a large number of transports, showed that offensive movements were to take place. In February, Fort Henry fell, after an hour's shelling from Admiral Foote's gun-boats. This opened the way up the Tennessee River to a position on the flank of Columbus, Kentucky, and was followed by the evacuation of that point. I was in St. Louis on the day the news of the fall of Fort Henry was received. The newspapers issued "extras," with astonishing head-lines. It was the first gratifying intelligence after a long winter of inactivity, following a year which, closed with general reverses to our arms. In walking the principal streets of St. Louis on that occasion, I could easily distinguish the loyal men of my acquaintance from the disloyal, at half a square's distance. The former were excited with delight; the latter were downcast with sorrow. The Union men walked rapidly, with, faces "wreathed in smiles;" the Secessionists moved with alternate slow and quick steps, while their countenances expressed all the sad emotions. The newsboys with the tidings of our success were patronized by the one and repelled by the other. I saw one of the venders of intelligence enter the store of a noted Secessionist, where he shouted the nature of the news at the highest note of his voice. A moment later he emerged from the door, bringing the impress of a Secessionist's boot. The day and the night witnessed much hilarity in loyal circles, and a corresponding gloom in quarters where treason ruled. I fear there were many men in St. Louis whose conduct was no recommendation to the membership of a temperance society. All felt that a new era had dawned upon us. Soon after came the tidings of a general advance of our armies. We moved in Virginia, and made the beginning of the checkered campaign of '62. Along the Atlantic coast we moved, and Newbern fell into our hands. Further down the Atlantic, and at the mouth of the Mississippi, we kept up the aggression. Grant, at Donelson, "moved immediately upon Buckner's works;" and, in Kentucky, the Army of the Ohio occupied Bowling Green and prepared to move upon Nashville. In Missouri, Curtis had already occupied Lebanon, and was making ready to assault Price at Springfield. Everywhere our flag was going forward. CHAPTER XI. ANOTHER CAMPAIGN IN MISSOURI. From St. Louis to Rolla.--A Limited Outfit.--Missouri Roads in Winter.--"Two Solitary Horsemen."--Restricted Accommodations in a Slaveholder's House.--An Energetic Quartermaster.--General Sheridan before he became Famous.--"Bagging Price."--A Defect in the Bag.--Examining the Correspondence of a Rebel General.--What the Rebels left at their Departure. On the 9th of February I left St. Louis to join General Curtis's army. Arriving at Rolla, I found the mud very deep, but was told the roads were in better condition a few miles to the west. With an _attaché_ of the Missouri _Democrat_, I started, on the morning of the 10th, to overtake the army, then reported at Lebanon, sixty-five miles distant. All my outfit for a two or three months' campaign, was strapped behind my saddle, or crowded into my saddle-bags. Traveling with a trunk is one of the delights unknown to army correspondents, especially to those in the Southwest. My companion carried an outfit similar to mine, with the exception of the saddle-bags and contents. I returned to Rolla eight weeks afterward, but he did not reach civilization till the following July. From Rolla to Lebanon the roads were bad--muddy in the valleys of the streams, and on the higher ground frozen into inequalities like a gigantic rasp. Over this route our army of sixteen thousand men had slowly made its way, accomplishing what was then thought next to impossible. I found the country had changed much in appearance since I passed through on my way to join General Lyon. Many houses had been burned and others deserted. The few people that remained confessed themselves almost destitute of food. Frequently we could not obtain entertainment for ourselves and horses, particularly the latter. The natives were suspicious of our character, as there was nothing in our dress indicating to which side we belonged. At such times the cross-questioning we underwent was exceedingly amusing, though coupled with the knowledge that our lives were not entirely free from danger. From Lebanon we pushed on to Springfield, through a keen, piercing wind, that swept from the northwest with unremitting steadiness. The night between those points was passed in a log-house with a single room, where ourselves and the family of six persons were lodged. In the bitter cold morning that followed, it was necessary to open the door to give us sufficient light to take breakfast, as the house could not boast of a window. The owner of the establishment said he had lived there eighteen years, and found it very comfortable. He tilled a small farm, and had earned sufficient money to purchase three slaves, who dwelt in a similar cabin, close beside his own, but not joining it. One of these slaves was cook and housemaid, and another found the care of four children enough for her attention. The third was a man upward of fifty years old, who acted as stable-keeper, and manager of the out-door work of the establishment. The situation of this landholder struck me as peculiar, though his case was not a solitary one. A house of one room and with no window, a similar house for his human property, and a stable rudely constructed of small poles, with its sides offering as little protection against the wind and storms as an ordinary fence, were the only buildings he possessed. His furniture was in keeping with the buildings. Beds without sheets, a table without a cloth, some of the plates of tin and others of crockery--the former battered and the latter cracked--a less number of knives and forks than there were persons to be supplied, tin cups for drinking coffee, an old fruit-can for a sugar-bowl, and two teaspoons for the use of a large family, formed the most noticeable features. With such surroundings he had invested three thousand dollars in negro property, and considered himself comfortably situated. Reaching Springfield, I found the army had passed on in pursuit of Price, leaving only one brigade as a garrison. The quartermaster of the Army of the Southwest had his office in one of the principal buildings, and was busily engaged in superintending the forwarding of supplies to the front. Every thing under his charge received his personal attention, and there was no reason to suppose the army would lack for subsistence, so long as he should remain to supply its wants. Presenting him a letter of introduction, I received a most cordial welcome. I found him a modest and agreeable gentleman, whose private excellence was only equaled by his energy in the performance of his official duties. This quartermaster was Captain Philip H. Sheridan. The double bars that marked his rank at that time, have since been exchanged for other insignia. The reader is doubtless familiar with the important part taken by this gallant officer, in the suppression of the late Rebellion. General Curtis had attempted to surround and capture Price and his army, before they could escape from Springfield. Captain Sheridan told me that General Curtis surrounded the town on one side, leaving two good roads at the other, by which the Rebels marched out. Our advance from Lebanon was as rapid as the circumstances would permit, but it was impossible to keep the Rebels in ignorance of it, or detain them against their will. One of the many efforts to "bag" Price had resulted like all the others. We closed with the utmost care every part of the bag except the mouth; out of this he walked by the simple use of his pedals. Operations like those of Island Number Ten, Vicksburg, and Port Hudson, were not then in vogue. Price was in full retreat toward Arkansas, and our army in hot pursuit. General Sigel, with two full divisions, marched by a road parallel to the line of Price's retreat, and attempted to get in his front at a point forty miles from Springfield. His line of march was ten miles longer than the route followed by the Rebels, and he did not succeed in striking the main road until Price had passed. I had the pleasure of going through General Price's head-quarters only two days after that officer abandoned them. There was every evidence of a hasty departure. I found, among other documents, the following order for the evacuation of Springfield:-- HEAD-QUARTERS MISSOURI STATE GUARD, SPRINGFIELD, _February_ 13, 1862. The commanders of divisions will instanter, and without the least delay, see that their entire commands are ready for movement at a moment's notice. By order of Major-General S. Price. H.H. Brand, A.A.G. There was much of General Price's private correspondence, together with many official documents. Some of these I secured, but destroyed them three weeks later, at a moment when I expected to fall into the hands of the enemy. One letter, which revealed the treatment Union men were receiving in Arkansas, I forwarded to _The Herald_. I reproduce its material portions:-- DOVER, POPE CO., ARKANSAS, _December_ 7, 1861. MAJOR-GENERAL PRICE: I wish to obtain a situation as surgeon in your army. * * * Our men over the Boston Mountains are penning and hanging the mountain boys who oppose Southern men. They have in camp thirty, and in the Burrowville jail seventy-two, and have sent twenty-seven to Little Rock. We will kill all we get, certain: every one is so many less. I hope you will soon get help enough to clear out the last one in your State. If you know them, they ought to be killed, as the older they grow the more stubborn they get. Your most obedient servant, JAMES L. ADAMS. In his departure, General Price had taken most of his personal property of any value. He left a very good array of desks and other appurtenances of his adjutant-general's office, which fell into General Curtis's hands. These articles were at once put into use by our officers, and remained in Springfield as trophies of our success. There was some war _matériel_ at the founderies and temporary arsenals which the Rebels had established. One store full of supplies they left undisturbed. It was soon appropriated by Captain Sheridan. The winter-quarters for the soldiers were sufficiently commodious to contain ten thousand men, and the condition in which we found them showed how hastily they were evacuated. Very little had been removed from the buildings, except those articles needed for the march. We found cooking utensils containing the remains of the last meal, pans with freshly-mixed dough, on which the impression of the maker's hand was visible, and sheep and hogs newly killed and half dressed. In the officers' quarters was a beggarly array of empty bottles, and a few cases that had contained cigars. One of our soldiers was fortunate in finding a gold watch in the straw of a bunk. There were cribs of corn, stacks of forage, and a considerable quantity of army supplies. Every thing evinced a hasty departure. CHAPTER XII. THE FLIGHT AND THE PURSUIT. From Springfield to Pea Ridge.--Mark Tapley in Missouri.--"The Arkansas Traveler."--Encountering the Rebel Army.--A "Wonderful Spring."--The Cantonment at Cross Hollows.--Game Chickens.--Magruder _vs_. Breckinridge.--Rebel Generals in a Controversy.--Its Result.--An Expedition to Huntsville.--Curiosities of Rebel Currency.--Important Information.--A Long and Weary March.--Disposition of Forces before the Battle.--Changing Front.--What the Rebels lost by Ignorance. When it became certain the army would continue its march into Arkansas, myself and the _Democrat's_ correspondent pushed forward to overtake it. Along the road we learned of the rapid retreat of the Rebels, and the equally rapid pursuit by our own forces. About twenty miles south of Springfield one of the natives came to his door to greet us. Learning to which army we belonged, he was very voluble in his efforts to explain the consternation of the Rebels. A half-dozen of his neighbors were by his side, and joined in the hilarity of the occasion. I saw that something more than usual was the cause of their assembling, and inquired what it could be. "My wife died this morning, and my friends have come here to see me," was the answer I received from the proprietor of the house. Almost at the instant of completing the sentence, he burst into a laugh, and said, "It would have done you good to see how your folks captured a big drove of Price's cattle. The Rebs were driving them along all right, and your cavalry just came up and took them. It was rich, I tell you. Ha! ha!" Not knowing what condolence to offer a man who could be so gay after the death of his wife, I bade him good-morning, and pushed on. He had not, as far as I could perceive, the single excuse of being intoxicated, and his display of vivacity appeared entirely genuine. In all my travels I have never met his equal. Up to the time of this campaign none of our armies had been into Arkansas. When General Curtis approached the line, the head of the column was halted, the regiments closed up, and the men brought their muskets to the "right shoulder shift," instead of the customary "at will" of the march. Two bands were sent to the front, where a small post marked the boundary, and were stationed by the roadside, one in either State. Close by them the National flag was unfurled. The bands struck up "The Arkansas Traveler," the order to advance was given, and, with many cheers in honor of the event, the column moved onward. For several days "The Arkansas Traveler" was exceedingly popular with the entire command. On the night after crossing the line the news of the fall of Fort Donelson was received. Soon after entering Arkansas on his retreat, General Price met General McCulloch moving northward to join him. With their forces united, they determined on making a stand against General Curtis, and, accordingly, halted near Sugar Creek. A little skirmish ensued, in which the Rebels gave way, the loss on either side being trifling. They did not stop until they reached Fayetteville. Their halt at that point was very brief. At Cross Hollows, in Benton County, Arkansas, about two miles from the main road, there is one of the finest springs in the Southwest. It issues from the base of a rocky ledge, where the ravine is about three hundred yards wide, and forms the head of a large brook. Two small flouring mills are run during the entire year by the water from this spring. The water is at all times clear, cold, and pure, and is said never to vary in quantity. Along the stream fed by this spring, the Rebels had established a cantonment for the Army of Northern Arkansas, and erected houses capable of containing ten or twelve thousand men. The cantonment was laid out with the regularity of a Western city. The houses were constructed of sawed lumber, and provided with substantial brick chimneys. Of course, this establishment was abandoned when the Rebel army retreated. The buildings were set on fire, and all but a half-dozen of them consumed. When our cavalry reached the place, the rear-guard of the Rebels had been gone less than half an hour. There were about two hundred chickens running loose among the burning buildings. Our soldiers commenced killing them, and had slaughtered two-thirds of the lot when one of the officers discovered that they were game-cocks. This class of chickens not being considered edible, the killing was stopped and the balance of the flock saved. Afterward, while we lay in camp, they were made a source of much amusement. The cock-fights that took place in General Curtis's army would have done honor to Havana or Vera Cruz. Before we captured them the birds were the property of the officers of a Louisiana regiment. We gave them the names of the Rebel leaders. It was an every-day affair for Beauregard, Van Dorn, and Price to be matched against Lee, Johnston, and Polk. I remember losing a small wager on Magruder against Breckinridge. I should have won if Breck had not torn the feathers from Mac's neck, and injured his right wing by a foul blow. I never backed Magruder after that. From Cross Hollows, General Curtis sent a division in pursuit of Price's army, in its retreat through Fayetteville, twenty-two miles distant. On reaching the town they found the Rebels had left in the direction of Fort Smith. The pursuit terminated at this point. It had been continued for a hundred and ten miles--a large portion of the distance our advance being within a mile or two of the Rebel rear. In retreating from Fayetteville, the Rebels were obliged to abandon much of the supplies for their army. A serious quarrel is reported to have taken place between Price and McCulloch, concerning the disposition to be made of these supplies. The former was in favor of leaving the large amount of stores, of which, bacon was the chief article, that it might fall into our hands. He argued that we had occupied the country, and would stay there until driven out. Our army would be subsisted at all hazards. If we found this large quantity of bacon, it would obviate the necessity of our foraging upon the country and impoverishing the inhabitants. General McCulloch opposed this policy, and accused Price of a desire to play into the enemy's hands. The quarrel became warm, and resulted in the discomfiture of the latter. All the Rebel warehouses were set on fire. When our troops entered Fayetteville the conflagration was at its height. It resulted as Price had predicted. The inhabitants were compelled, in great measure, to support our army. The Rebels retreated across the Boston Mountains to Fort Smith, and commenced a reorganization of their army. Our army remained at Cross Hollows as its central point, but threw out its wings so as to form a front nearly five miles in extent. Small expeditions were sent in various directions to break up Rebel camps and recruiting stations. In this way two weeks passed with little activity beyond a careful observation of the enemy's movements. There were several flouring mills in the vicinity of our camp, which were kept in constant activity for the benefit of the army. I accompanied an expedition, commanded by Colonel Vandever, of the Ninth Iowa, to the town of Huntsville, thirty-five miles distant. Our march occupied two days, and resulted in the occupation of the town and the dispersal of a small camp of Rebels. We had no fighting, scarcely a shot being fired in anger. The inhabitants did not greet us very cordially, though some of them professed Union sentiments. In this town of Huntsville, the best friend of the Union was the keeper of a whisky-shop. This man desired to look at some of our money, but declined to take it. An officer procured a canteen of whisky and tendered a Treasury note in payment. The note was refused, with a request for either gold or Rebel paper. The officer then exhibited a large sheet of "promises to pay," which he had procured in Fayetteville a few days before, and asked how they would answer. "That is just what I want," said the whisky vender. The officer called his attention to the fact that the notes had no signatures. "That don't make any difference," was the reply; "nobody will know whether they are signed or not, and they are just as good, anyhow." I was a listener to the conversation, and at this juncture proffered a pair of scissors to assist in dividing the notes. It took but a short time to cut off enough "money" to pay for twenty canteens of the worst whisky I ever saw. At Huntsville we made a few prisoners, who said they were on their way from Price's army to Forsyth, Missouri. They gave us the important information that the Rebel army, thirty thousand strong, was on the Boston Mountains the day previous; and on the very day of our arrival at Huntsville, it was to begin its advance toward our front. These men, and some others, had been sent away because they had no weapons with which to enter the fight. Immediately on learning this, Colonel Vandever dispatched a courier to General Curtis, and prepared to set out on his return to the main army. We marched six miles before nightfall, and at midnight, while we were endeavoring to sleep, a courier joined us from the commander-in-chief. He brought orders for us to make our way back with all possible speed, as the Rebel army was advancing in full force. At two o'clock we broke camp, and, with only one halt of an hour, made a forced march of forty-one miles, joining the main column at ten o'clock at night. I doubt if there were many occasions during the war where better marching was done by infantry than on that day. Of course, the soldiers were much fatigued, but were ready, on the following day, to take active part in the battle. On the 5th of March, as soon as General Curtis learned of the Rebel advance, he ordered General Sigel, who was in camp at Bentonville, to fall back to Pea Ridge, on the north bank of Sugar Creek. At the same time he withdrew Colonel Jeff. C. Davis's Division to the same locality. This placed the army in a strong, defensible position, with the creek in its front. On the ridge above the stream our artillery and infantry were posted. The Rebel armies under Price and McCulloch had been united and strongly re-enforced, the whole being under the command of General Van Dorn. Their strength was upward of twenty thousand men, and they were confident of their ability to overpower us. Knowing our strong front line, General Van Dorn decided upon a bold movement, and threw himself around our right flank to a position between us and our base at Springfield. In moving to our right and rear, the Rebels encountered General Sigel's Division before it had left Bentonville, and kept up a running fight during the afternoon of the 6th. Several times the Rebels, in small force, secured positions in Sigel's front, but that officer succeeded in cutting his way through and reaching the main force, with a loss of less than a hundred men. The position of the enemy at Bentonville showed us his intentions, and we made our best preparations to oppose him. Our first step was to obstruct the road from Bentonville to our rear, so as to retard the enemy's movements. Colonel Dodge, of the Fourth Iowa (afterward a major-general), rose from a sick-bed to perform this work. The impediments which he placed in the way of the Rebels prevented their reaching the road in our rear until nine o'clock on the morning of the 7th. Our next movement was to reverse our position. We had been facing south--it was now necessary to face to the north. The line that had been our rear became our front. A change of front implied that our artillery train should take the place of the supply train, and _vice versâ_. "Elkhorn Tavern" had been the quartermaster's depot. We made all haste to substitute artillery for baggage-wagons, and boxes of ammunition for boxes of hard bread. This transfer was not accomplished before the battle began, and as our troops were pressed steadily back on our new front, Elkhorn Tavern fell into the hands of the Rebels. The sugar, salt, and bread which they captured, happily not of large quantity, were very acceptable, and speedily disappeared. Among the quartermaster's stores was a wagon-load of desiccated vegetables, a very valuable article for an army in the field. All expected it would be made into soup and eaten by the Rebels. What was our astonishment to find, two days later, that they had opened and examined a single case, and, after scattering its contents on the ground, left the balance undisturbed! Elkhorn Tavern was designated by a pair of elk-horns, which occupied a conspicuous position above the door. After the battle these horns were removed by Colonel Carr, and sent to his home in Illinois, as trophies of the victory. A family occupied the building at the time of the battle, and remained there during the whole contest. When the battle raged most fiercely the cellar proved a place of refuge. Shells tore through the house, sometimes from the National batteries, and sometimes from Rebel guns. One shell exploded in a room where three women were sitting. Though their clothes were torn by the flying fragments, they escaped without personal injury. They announced their determination not to leave home so long as the house remained standing. Among other things captured at Elkhorn Tavern by the Rebels, was a sutler's wagon, which, had just arrived from St. Louis. In the division of the spoils, a large box, filled with wallets, fell to the lot of McDonald's Battery. For several weeks the officers and privates of this battery could boast of a dozen wallets each, while very few had any money to carry. The Rebel soldiers complained that the visits of the paymaster were like those of angels. CHAPTER XIII. THE BATTLE OF PEA RIDGE. The Rebels make their Attack.--Albert Pike and his Indians.--Scalping Wounded Men.--Death of General McCulloch.--The Fighting at Elkhorn Tavern.--Close of a Gloomy Day.--An Unpleasant Night.--Vocal Sounds from a Mule's Throat.--Sleeping under Disadvantages.--A Favorable Morning.--The Opposing Lines of Battle.--A Severe Cannonade.--The Forest on Fire.--Wounded Men in the Flames.--The Rebels in Retreat.--Movements of our Army.--A Journey to St. Louis. About nine o'clock on the morning of the 7th, the Rebels made a simultaneous attack on our left and front, formerly our right and rear. General Price commanded the force on our front, and General McCulloch that on our left; the former having the old Army of Missouri, re-enforced by several Arkansas regiments, and the latter having a corps made up of Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana troops. They brought into the fight upward of twenty thousand men, while we had not over twelve thousand with which to oppose them. The attack on our left was met by General Sigel and Colonel Davis. That on our front was met by Colonel Carr's Division and the division of General Asboth. On our left it was severe, though not long maintained, the position we held being too strong for the enemy to carry. It was on this part of the line that the famous Albert Pike, the lawyer-poet of Arkansas, brought his newly-formed brigades of Indians into use. Pike was unfortunate with his Indians. While he was arranging them in line, in a locality where the bushes were about eight feet in height, the Indians made so much noise as to reveal their exact position. One of our batteries was quietly placed within point-blank range of the Indians, and suddenly opened upon them with grape and canister. They gave a single yell, and scattered without waiting for orders. The Indians were not, as a body, again brought together during the battle. In a charge which our cavalry made upon a Rebel brigade we were repulsed, leaving several killed and wounded upon the ground. Some of Pike's Indians, after their dispersal, came upon these, and scalped the dead and living without distinction. A Rebel officer subsequently informed me that the same Indians scalped several of their own slain, and barbarously murdered some who had been only slightly injured. On this part of the field we were fortunate, early in the day, in killing General McCulloch and his best lieutenant, General McIntosh. To this misfortune the Rebels have since ascribed their easy defeat. At the time of this reverse to the enemy, General Van Dorn was with. Price in our front. After their repulse and the death of their leader, the discomfited Rebels joined their comrades in the front, who had been more successful. It was nightfall before the two forces were united. In our front, Colonel Carr's Division fought steadily and earnestly during the entire day, but was pressed back fully two-thirds of a mile. General Curtis gave it what re-enforcements he could, but there were very few to be spared. When it was fully ascertained that the Rebels on our left had gone to our front, we prepared to unite against them. Our left was drawn in to re-enforce Colonel Carr, but the movement was not completed until long after dark. Thus night came. The rebels were in full possession of our communications. We had repulsed them on the left, but lost ground, guns, and men on our front. The Rebels were holding Elkhorn Tavern, which we had made great effort to defend. Colonel Carr had repeatedly wished for either night or re-enforcements. He obtained both. The commanding officers visited General Curtis's head-quarters, and received their orders for the morrow. Our whole force was to be concentrated on our front. If the enemy did not attack us at daylight, we would attack him as soon thereafter as practicable. Viewed in its best light, the situation was somewhat gloomy. Mr. Fayel, of the _Democrat_, and myself were the only journalists with the army, and the cessation of the day's fighting found us deliberating on our best course in case of a disastrous result. We destroyed all documents that could give information to the enemy, retaining only our note-books, and such papers as pertained to our profession. With patience and resignation we awaited the events of the morrow. I do not know that any of our officers expected we should be overpowered, but there were many who thought such an occurrence probable. The enemy was nearly twice as strong as we, and lay directly between us and our base. If he could hold out till our ammunition was exhausted, we should be compelled to lay down our arms. There was no retreat for us. We must be victorious or we must surrender. In camp, on that night, every thing was confusion. The troops that had been on the left during the day were being transferred to the front. The quartermaster was endeavoring to get his train in the least dangerous place. The opposing lines were so near each other that our men could easily hear the conversation of the Rebels. The night was not severely cold; but the men, who were on the front, after a day's fighting, found it quite uncomfortable. Only in the rear was it thought prudent to build fires. The soldiers of German birth were musical. Throughout the night I repeatedly heard their songs. The soldiers of American parentage were generally profane, and the few words I heard them utter were the reverse of musical. Those of Irish origin combined the peculiarities of both Germans and Americans, with their tendencies in favor of the latter. I sought a quiet spot within the limits of the camp, but could not find it. Lying down in the best place available, I had just fallen asleep when a mounted orderly rode his horse directly over me. I made a mild remonstrance, but the man was out of hearing before I spoke. Soon after, some one lighted a pipe and threw a coal upon my hand. This drew from me a gentle request for a discontinuance of that experiment. I believe it was not repeated. During the night Mr. Fayel's beard took fire, and I was roused to assist in staying the conflagration. The vocal music around me was not calculated to encourage drowsiness. Close at hand was the quartermaster's train, with the mules ready harnessed for moving in any direction. These mules had not been fed for two whole days, and it was more than thirty-six hours since they had taken water. These facts were made known in the best language the creatures possessed. The bray of a mule is never melodious, even when the animal's throat is well moistened. When it is parched and dusty the sound becomes unusually hoarse. Each hour added to the noise as the thirst of the musicians increased. Mr. Fayel provoked a discussion concerning the doctrine of the transmigration of souls; and thought, in the event of its truth, that the wretch was to be pitied who should pass into a mule in time of war. With the dawn of day every one was astir. At sunrise I found our line was not quite ready, though it was nearly so. General Curtis was confident all would result successfully, and completed the few arrangements then requiring attention. We had expected the Rebels would open the attack; but they waited for us to do so. They deserved many thanks for their courtesy. The smoke of the previous day's fight still hung over the camp, and the sun rose through it, as through a cloud. A gentle wind soon dissipated this smoke, and showed us a clear sky overhead. The direction of the wind was in our favor. The ground selected for deciding the fate of that day was a huge cornfield, somewhat exceeding two miles in length and about half a mile in width. The western extremity of this field rested upon the ridge which gave name to the battle-ground. The great road from Springfield to Fayetteville crossed this field about midway from the eastern to the western end. It was on this road that the two armies took their positions. The lines were in the edge of the woods on opposite sides of the field--the wings of the armies extending to either end. On the northern side were the Rebels, on the southern was the National army. Thus each army, sheltered by the forest, had a cleared space in its front, affording a full view of the enemy. [Illustration: SHELLING THE HILL AT PEA RIDGE.] By half-past seven o'clock our line was formed and ready for action. A little before eight o'clock the cannonade was opened. Our forces were regularly drawn up in order of battle. Our batteries were placed between the regiments as they stood in line. In the timber, behind these regiments and batteries, were the brigades in reserve, ready to be brought forward in case of need. At the ends of the line were battalions of cavalry, stretching off to cover the wings, and give notice of any attempt by the Rebels to move on our flanks. Every five minutes the bugle of the extreme battalion would sound the signal "All's well." The signal would be taken by the bugler of the next battalion, and in this way carried down the line to the center. If the Rebels had made any attempt to outflank us, we could hardly have failed to discover it at once. Our batteries opened; the Rebel batteries responded. Our gunners proved the best, and our shot had the greatest effect. We had better ammunition than that of our enemies, and thus reduced the disparity caused by their excess of guns. Our cannonade was slow and careful; theirs was rapid, and was made at random. At the end of two hours of steady, earnest work, we could see that the Rebel line was growing weaker, while our own was still unshaken. The work of the artillery was winning us the victory. In the center of the Rebel line was a rocky hill, eighty or a hundred feet in height. The side which faced us was almost perpendicular, but the slope to the rear was easy of ascent. On this hill the Rebels had stationed two regiments of infantry and a battery of artillery. The balance of their artillery lay at its base. General Curtis ordered that the fire of all our batteries should be concentrated on this hill at a given signal, and continued there for ten minutes. This was done. At the same time our infantry went forward in a charge on the Rebel infantry and batteries that stood in the edge of the forest. The cleared field afforded fine opportunity for the movement. The charge was successful. The Rebels fell back in disorder, leaving three guns in our hands, and their dead and wounded scattered on the ground. This was the end of the battle. We had won the victory at Pea Ridge. I followed our advancing forces, and ascended to the summit of the elevation on which our last fire was concentrated. Wounded men were gathered in little groups, and the dead were lying thick about them. The range of our artillery had been excellent. Rocks, trees, and earth attested the severity of our fire. This cannonade was the decisive work of the day. It was the final effort of our batteries, and was terrible while it lasted. The shells, bursting among the dry leaves, had set the woods on fire, and the flames were slowly traversing the ground where the battle had raged. We made every effort to remove the wounded to places of safety, before the fire should reach them. At that time we thought we had succeeded. Late in the afternoon I found several wounded men lying in secluded places, where they had been terribly burned, though they were still alive. Very few of them survived. Our loss in this battle was a tenth of our whole force. The enemy lost more than we in numbers, though less in proportion to his strength. His position, directly in our rear, would have been fatal to a defeated army in many other localities. There were numerous small roads, intersecting the great road at right angles. On these roads the Rebels made their lines of retreat. Had we sent cavalry in pursuit, the Rebels would have lost heavily in artillery and in their supply train. As it was, they escaped without material loss, but they suffered a defeat which ultimately resulted in our possession of all Northern Arkansas. The Rebels retreated across the Boston Mountains to Van Buren and Fort Smith, and were soon ordered thence to join Beauregard at Corinth. Our army moved to Keytsville, Missouri, several miles north of the battle-ground, where the country was better adapted to foraging, and more favorable to recuperating from the effects of the conflict. From Keytsville it moved to Forsyth, a small town in Taney County, Missouri, fifty miles from Springfield. Extending over a considerable area, the army consumed whatever could be found in the vicinity. It gave much annoyance to the Rebels by destroying the saltpeter works on the upper portion of White River. The saltpeter manufactories along the banks of this stream were of great importance to the Rebels in the Southwest, and their destruction seriously reduced the supplies of gunpowder in the armies of Arkansas and Louisiana. Large quantities of the crude material were shipped to Memphis and other points, in the early days of the war. At certain seasons White River is navigable to Forsyth. The Rebels made every possible use of their opportunities, as long as the stream remained in their possession. Half sick in consequence of the hardships of the campaign, and satisfied there would be no more fighting of importance during the summer, I determined to go back to civilization. I returned to St. Louis by way of Springfield and Rolla. A wounded officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Herron (who afterward wore the stars of a major-general), was my traveling companion. Six days of weary toil over rough and muddy roads brought us to the railway, within twelve hours of St. Louis. It was my last campaign in that region. From that date the war in the Southwest had its chief interest in the country east of the Great River. CHAPTER XIV. UP THE TENNESSEE AND AT PITTSBURG LANDING. At St. Louis.--Progress of our Arms in the Great Valley.--Cairo.--Its Peculiarities and Attractions.--Its Commercial, Geographical, and Sanitary Advantages.--Up the Tennessee.--Movements Preliminary to the Great Battle.--The Rebels and their Plans.--Postponement of the Attack.--Disadvantages of our Position.--The Beginning of the Battle.--Results of the First Day.--Re-enforcements.--Disputes between Officers of our two Armies.--Beauregard's Watering-Place. On reaching St. Louis, three weeks after the battle of Pea Ridge, I found that public attention was centered upon the Tennessee River. Fort Henry, Fort Donelson, Columbus, and Nashville had fallen, and our armies were pushing forward toward the Gulf, by the line of the Tennessee. General Pope was laying siege to Island Number Ten, having already occupied New Madrid, and placed his gun-boats in front of that point. General Grant's army was at Pittsburg Landing, and General Buell's army was moving from Nashville toward Savannah, Tennessee. The two armies were to be united at Pittsburg Landing, for a further advance into the Southern States. General Beauregard was at Corinth, where he had been joined by Price and Van Dorn from Arkansas, and by Albert Sidney Johnston from Kentucky. There was a promise of active hostilities in that quarter. I left St. Louis, after a few days' rest, for the new scene of action. Cairo lay in my route. I found it greatly changed from the Cairo of the previous autumn. Six months before, it had been the rendezvous of the forces watching the Lower Mississippi. The basin in which the town stood, was a vast military encampment. Officers of all rank thronged the hotels, and made themselves as comfortable as men could be in Cairo. All the leading journals of the country were represented, and the dispatches from Cairo were everywhere perused with interest, though they were not always entirety accurate. March and April witnessed a material change. Where there had been twenty thousand soldiers in December, there were less than one thousand in April. Where a fleet of gun-boats, mortar-rafts, and transports had been tied to the levees during the winter months, the opening spring showed but a half-dozen steamers of all classes. The transports and the soldiers were up the Tennessee, the mortars were bombarding Island Number Ten, and the gun-boats were on duty where their services were most needed. The journalists had become war correspondents in earnest, and were scattered to the points of greatest interest. Cairo had become a vast depot of supplies for the armies operating on the Mississippi and its tributaries. The commander of the post was more a forwarding agent than a military officer. The only steamers at the levee were loading for the armies. Cairo was a map of busy, muddy life. The opening year found Cairo exulting in its deep and all-pervading mud. There was mud everywhere. Levee, sidewalks, floors, windows, tables, bed-clothing, all were covered with it. On the levee it varied from six to thirty inches in depth. The luckless individual whose duties obliged him to make frequent journeys from the steamboat landing to the principal hotel, became intimately acquainted with its character. Sad, unfortunate, derided Cairo! Your visitors depart with unpleasant memories. Only your inhabitants, who hold titles to corner lots, speak loudly in your praise. When it rains, and sometimes when it does not, your levee is unpleasant to walk upon. Your sidewalks are dangerous, and your streets are unclean. John Phenix declared you destitute of honesty. Dickens asserted that your physical and moral foundations were insecurely laid. Russell did not praise you, and Trollope uttered much to your discredit. Your musquitos are large, numerous, and hungry. Your atmosphere does not resemble the spicy breezes that blow soft o'er Ceylon's isle. Your energy and enterprise are commendable, and your geographical location is excellent, but you can never become a rival to Saratoga or Newport. Cairo is built in a basin formed by constructing a levee to inclose the peninsula at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Before the erection of the levee, this peninsula was overflowed by the rise of either river. Sometimes, in unusual floods, the waters reach the top of the embankment, and manage to fill the basin. At the time of my visit, the Ohio was rising rapidly. The inhabitants were alarmed, as the water was gradually gaining upon them. After a time it took possession of the basin, enabling people to navigate the streets and front yards in skiffs, and exchange salutations from house-tops or upper windows. Many were driven from their houses by the flood, and forced to seek shelter elsewhere. In due time the waters receded and the city remained unharmed. It is not true that a steamer was lost in consequence of running against a chimney of the St. Charles Hotel. Cairo has prospered during the war, and is now making an effort to fill her streets above the high-water level, and insure a dry foundation at all seasons of the year. This once accomplished, Cairo will become a city of no little importance. Proceeding up the Tennessee, I reached Pittsburg Landing three days after the great battle which has made that locality famous. The history of that battle has been many times written. Official reports have given the dry details,--the movements of division, brigade, regiment, and battery, all being fully portrayed. A few journalists who witnessed it gave the accounts which were circulated everywhere by the Press. The earliest of these was published by _The Herald._ The most complete and graphic was that of Mr. Reid, of _The Cincinnati Gazette._ Officers, soldiers, civilians, all with greater or less experience, wrote what they had heard and seen. So diverse have been the statements, that a general officer who was prominent in the battle, says he sometimes doubts if he was present. In the official accounts there have been inharmonious deductions, and many statements of a contradictory character. Some of the participants have criticised unfavorably the conduct of others, and a bitterness continuing through and after the war has been the result. In February of 1862, the Rebels commenced assembling an army at Corinth. General Beauregard was placed in command. Early in March, Price and Van Dorn were ordered to take their commands to Corinth, as their defeat at Pea Ridge had placed them on the defensive against General Curtis. General A. S. Johnston had moved thither, after the evacuation of Bowling Green, Kentucky, and from all quarters the Rebels were assembling a vast army. General Johnston became commander-in-chief on his arrival. General Halleck, who then commanded the Western Department, ordered General Grant, after the capture of Forts Henry and Donelson, to move to Pittsburg Landing, and seize that point as a base against Corinth. General Buell, with the Army of the Ohio, was ordered to join him from Nashville, and with other re-enforcements we would be ready to take the offensive. Owing to the condition of the roads, General Buell moved very slowly, so that General Grant was in position at Pittsburg Landing several days before the former came up. This was the situation at the beginning of April; Grant encamped on the bank of the Tennessee nearest the enemy, and Buell slowly approaching the opposite bank. It was evidently the enemy's opportunity to strike his blow before our two armies should be united. On the 4th of April, the Rebels prepared to move from Corinth to attack General Grant's camp, but, on account of rain, they delayed their advance till the morning of the 6th. At daylight of the 6th our pickets were driven in, and were followed by the advance of the Rebel army. The division whose camp was nearest to Corinth, and therefore the first to receive the onset of the enemy, was composed of the newest troops in the army. Some of the regiments had received their arms less than two weeks before. The outposts were not sufficiently far from camp to allow much time for getting under arms after the first encounter. A portion of this division was attacked before it could form, but its commander, General Prentiss, promptly rallied his men, and made a vigorous fight. He succeeded, for a time, in staying the progress of the enemy, but the odds against him were too great. When his division was surrounded and fighting was no longer of use, he surrendered his command. At the time of surrender he had little more than a thousand men remaining out of a division six thousand strong. Five thousand were killed, wounded, or had fled to the rear. General Grant had taken no precautions against attack. The vedettes were but a few hundred yards from our front, and we had no breast-works of any kind behind which to fight. The newest and least reliable soldiers were at the point where the enemy would make his first appearance. The positions of the various brigades and divisions were taken, more with reference to securing a good camping-ground, than for purposes of strategy. General Grant showed himself a soldier in the management of the army after the battle began, and he has since achieved a reputation as the greatest warrior of the age. Like the oculist who spoiled a hatful of eyes in learning to operate for the cataract, he improved his military knowledge by his experience at Shiloh. Never afterward did he place an army in the enemy's country without making careful provision against assault. One division, under General Wallace, was at Crump's Landing, six miles below the battle-ground, and did not take part in the action till the following day. The other divisions were in line to meet the enemy soon after the fighting commenced on General Prentiss's front, and made a stubborn resistance to the Rebel advance. The Rebels well knew they would have no child's play in that battle. They came prepared for hot, terrible work, in which thousands of men were to fall. The field attests our determined resistance; it attests their daring advance. A day's fighting pushed us slowly, but steadily, toward the Tennessee. Our last line was formed less than a half mile from its bank. Sixty pieces of artillery composed a grand battery, against which the enemy rushed. General Grant's officers claim that the enemy received a final check when he attacked that line. The Rebels claim that another hour of daylight, had we received no re-enforcements, would have seen our utter defeat. Darkness and a fresh division came to our aid. General Buell was to arrive at Savannah, ten miles below Pittsburg, and on the opposite bank of the river, on the morning of the 6th. On the evening of the 5th, General Grant proceeded to Savannah to meet him, and was there when the battle began on the following morning. His boat was immediately headed for Pittsburg, and by nine o'clock the General was on the battle-field. From that time, the engagement received his personal attention. When he started from Savannah, some of General Buell's forces were within two miles of the town. They were hurried forward as rapidly as possible, and arrived at Pittsburg, some by land and others by water, in season to take position on our left, just as the day was closing. Others came up in the night, and formed a part of the line on the morning of the 7th. General Nelson's Division was the first to cross the river and form on the left of Grant's shattered army. As he landed, Nelson rode among the stragglers by the bank and endeavored to rally them. Hailing a captain of infantry, he told him to get his men together and fall into line. The captain's face displayed the utmost terror. "My regiment is cut to pieces," was the rejoinder; "every man of my company is killed." "Then why ain't you killed, too, you d----d coward?" thundered Nelson. "Gather some of these stragglers and go back into the battle." The man obeyed the order. [Illustration: NELSON CROSSING THE TENNESSEE RIVER.] General Nelson reported to General Grant with his division, received his orders, and then dashed about the field, wherever his presence was needed. The division was only slightly engaged before night came on and suspended the battle. At dawn on the second day the enemy lay in the position it held When darkness ended the fight. The gun-boats had shelled the woods during the night, and prevented the Rebels from reaching the river on our left. A creek and ravine prevented their reaching it on the right. None of the Rebels stood on the bank of the Tennessee River on that occasion, except as prisoners of war. As they had commenced the attack on the 6th, it was our turn to begin it on the 7th. A little past daylight we opened fire, and the fresh troops on the left, under General Buell, were put in motion. The Rebels had driven us on the 6th, so we drove them on the 7th. By noon of that day we held the ground lost on the day previous. The camps which the enemy occupied during the night were comparatively uninjured, so confident were the Rebels that our defeat was assured. It was the arrival of General Buell's army that saved us. The history of that battle, as the Rebels have given it, shows that they expected to overpower General Grant before General Buell could come up. They would then cross the Tennessee, meet and defeat Buell, and recapture Nashville. The defeat of these two armies would have placed the Valley of the Ohio at the command of the Rebels. Louisville was to have been the next point of attack. The dispute between the officers of the Army of the Tennessee and those of the Army of the Ohio is not likely to be terminated until this generation has passed away. The former contend that the Rebels were repulsed on the evening of the 6th of April, before the Army of the Ohio took part in the battle. The latter are equally earnest in declaring that the Army of the Tennessee would have been defeated had not the other army arrived. Both parties sustain their arguments by statements in proof, and by positive assertions. I believe it is the general opinion of impartial observers, that the salvation of General Grant's army is due to the arrival of the army of General Buell. With the last attack on the evening of the 6th, in which our batteries repulsed the Rebels, the enemy did not retreat. Night came as the fighting ceased. Beauregard's army slept where it had fought, and gave all possible indication of a readiness to renew the battle on the following day. So near was it to the river that our gun-boats threw shells during the night to prevent our left wing being flanked. Beauregard is said to have sworn to water his horse in the Tennessee, or in Hell, on that night. It is certain that the animal did not quench his thirst in the terrestrial stream. If he drank from springs beyond the Styx, I am not informed. CHAPTER XV. SHILOH AND THE SIEGE OF CORINTH. The Error of the Rebels.--Story of a Surgeon.--Experience of a Rebel Regiment.--Injury to the Rebel Army.--The Effect in our own Lines.--Daring of a Color-Bearer.--A Brave Soldier.--A Drummer-Boy's Experience.--Gallantry of an Artillery Surgeon.--A Regiment Commanded by a Lieutenant.--Friend Meeting Friend and Brother Meeting Brother in the Opposing Lines.--The Scene of the Battle.--Fearful Traces of Musketry-Fire.--The Wounded.--The Labor of the Sanitary Commission.--Humanity a Yankee Trick.--Besieging Corinth.--A Cold-Water Battery.--Halleck and the Journalists.--Occupation of Corinth. The fatal error of the Rebels, was their neglect to attack on the 4th, as originally intended. They were informed by their scouts that Buell could not reach Savannah before the 9th or 10th; and therefore a delay of two days would not change the situation. Buell was nearer than they supposed. The surgeon of the Sixth Iowa Infantry fell into the enemy's hands early on the morning of the first day of the battle, and established a hospital in our abandoned camp. His position was at a small log-house close by the principal road. Soon after he took possession, the enemy's columns began to file past him, as they pressed our army. The surgeon says he noticed a Louisiana regiment that moved into battle eight hundred strong, its banners flying and the men elated at the prospect of success. About five o'clock in the afternoon this regiment was withdrawn, and went into bivouac a short distance from the surgeon's hospital. It was then less than four hundred strong, but the spirit of the men was still the same. On the morning of the 7th, it once more went into battle. About noon it came out, less than a hundred strong, pressing in retreat toward Corinth. The men still clung to their flag, and declared their determination to be avenged. The story of this regiment was the story of many others. Shattered and disorganized, their retreat to Corinth had but little order. Only the splendid rear-guard, commanded by General Bragg, saved them from utter confusion. The Rebels admitted that many of their regiments were unable to produce a fifth of their original numbers, until a week or more after the battle. The stragglers came in slowly from the surrounding country, and at length enabled the Rebels to estimate their loss. There were many who never returned to answer at roll-call. In our army, the disorder was far from small. Large numbers of soldiers wandered for days about the camps, before they could ascertain their proper locations. It was fully a week, before all were correctly assigned. We refused to allow burying parties from the Rebels to come within our lines, preferring that they should not see the condition of our camp. Time was required to enable us to recuperate. I presume the enemy was as much in need of time as ourselves. A volume could be filled with the stories of personal valor during that battle. General Lew Wallace says his division was, at a certain time, forming on one side of a field, while the Rebels were on the opposite side. The color-bearer of a Rebel regiment stepped in front of his own line, and waved his flag as a challenge to the color-bearer that faced him. Several of our soldiers wished to meet the challenge, but their officers forbade it. Again the Rebel stepped forward, and planted his flag-staff in the ground. There was no response, and again and again he advanced, until he had passed more than half the distance between the opposing lines. Our fire was reserved in admiration of the man's daring, as he stood full in view, defiantly waving his banner. At last, when the struggle between the divisions commenced, it was impossible to save him, and he fell dead by the side of his colors. On the morning of the second day's fighting, the officers of one of our gun-boats saw a soldier on the river-bank on our extreme left, assisting another soldier who was severely wounded. A yawl was sent to bring away the wounded man and his companion. As it touched the side of the gun-boat on its return, the uninjured soldier asked to be sent back to land, that he might have further part in the battle. "I have," said he, "been taking care of this man, who is my neighbor at home. He was wounded yesterday morning, and I have been by his side ever since. Neither of us has eaten any thing for thirty hours, but, if you will take good care of him, I will not stop now for myself. I want to get into the battle again at once." The man's request was complied with. I regret my inability to give his name. A drummer-boy of the Fifteenth Iowa Infantry was wounded five times during the first day's battle, but insisted upon going out on the second day. He had hardly started before he fainted from loss of blood, and was left to recover and crawl back to the camp. Colonel Sweeney, of the Fifty-second Illinois Infantry, who lost an arm in Mexico and was wounded in the leg at Wilson Creek, received a wound in his arm on the first day of the battle. He kept his saddle, though he was unable to use his arm, and went to the hospital after the battle was over. When I saw him he was venting his indignation at the Rebels, because they had not wounded him in the stump of his amputated arm, instead of the locality which gave him so much inconvenience. It was this officer's fortune to be wounded on nearly every occasion when he went into battle. During the battle, Dr. Cornyn, surgeon of Major Cavender's battalion of Missouri Artillery, saw a section of a battery whose commander had been killed. The doctor at once removed the surgeon's badge from his hat and the sash from his waist, and took command of the guns. He placed them in position, and for several hours managed them with good effect. He was twice wounded, though not severely. "I was determined they should not kill or capture me as a surgeon when I had charge of that artillery," said the doctor afterward, "and so removed every thing that marked my rank." The Rebels made some very desperate charges against our artillery, and lost heavily in each attack. Once they actually laid their hands on the muzzles of two guns in Captain Stone's battery, but were unable to capture them. General Hurlbut stated that his division fought all day on Sunday with heavy loss, but only one regiment broke. When he entered the battle on Monday morning, the Third Iowa Infantry was commanded by a first-lieutenant, all the field officers and captains having been disabled or captured. Several regiments were commanded by captains. Colonel McHenry, of the Seventeenth Kentucky, said his regiment fought a Kentucky regiment which was raised in the county where his own was organized. The fight was very fierce. The men frequently called out from one to another, using taunting epithets. Two brothers recognized each other at the same moment, and came to a tree midway between the lines, where they conversed for several minutes. The color-bearer of the Fifty-second Illinois was wounded early in the battle. A man who was under arrest for misdemeanor asked the privilege of carrying the colors. It was granted, and he behaved so admirably that he was released from arrest as soon as the battle was ended. General Halleck arrived a week after the battle, and commenced a reorganization of the army. He found much confusion consequent upon the battle. In a short time the army was ready to take the offensive. We then commenced the advance upon Corinth, in which we were six weeks moving twenty-five miles. When our army first took position at Pittsburg Landing, and before the Rebels had effected their concentration, General Grant asked permission to capture Corinth. He felt confident of success, but was ordered not to bring on an engagement under any circumstances. Had the desired permission been given, there is little doubt he would have succeeded, and thus avoided the necessity of the battle of Shiloh. The day following my arrival at Pittsburg Landing I rode over the battle-field. The ground was mostly wooded, the forest being one in which artillery could be well employed, but where cavalry was comparatively useless. The ascent from the river was up a steep bluff that led to a broken table-ground, in which there were many ravines, generally at right angles to the river. On this table-ground our camps were located, and it was there the battle took place. Everywhere the trees were scarred and shattered, telling, as plainly as by words, of the shower of shot, shell, and bullets, that had fallen upon them. Within rifle range of the river, stood a tree marked by a cannon-shot, showing how much we were pressed back on the afternoon of the 6th. From the moment the crest of the bluff was gained, the traces of battle were apparent. In front of the line where General Prentiss's Division fought, there was a spot of level ground covered with a dense growth of small trees. The tops of these trees were from twelve to fifteen feet high, and had been almost mowed off by the shower of bullets which passed through them. I saw no place where there was greater evidence of severe work. There was everywhere full proof that the battle was a determined one. Assailant and defendant had done their best. It was a ride of five miles among scarred trees, over ground cut by the wheels of guns and caissons, among shattered muskets, disabled cannon, broken wagons, and all the heavier débris of battle. Everywhere could be seen torn garments, haversacks, and other personal equipments of soldiers. There were tents where the wounded had been gathered, and where those who could not easily bear movement to the transports were still remaining. In every direction I moved, there were the graves of the slain, the National and the Rebel soldiers being buried side by side. Few of the graves were marked, as the hurry of interment had been great. I fear that many of those graves, undesignated and unfenced, have long since been leveled. A single year, with its rain and its rank vegetation, would leave but a small trace of those mounds. All through that forest the camps of our army were scattered. During the first few days after the battle they showed much irregularity, but gradually took a more systematic shape. When the wounded had been sent to the transports, the regiments compacted, the camps cleared of superfluous baggage and _matériel_, and the weather became more propitious, the army assumed an attractive appearance. When the news of the battle reached the principal cities of the West, the Sanitary Commission prepared to send relief. Within twenty-four hours, boats were dispatched from St. Louis and Cincinnati, and hurried to Pittsburg Landing with the utmost rapidity. The battle had not been altogether unexpected, but it found us without the proper preparation. Whatever we had was pushed forward without delay, and the sufferings of the wounded were alleviated as much as possible. As fast as the boats arrived they were loaded with wounded, and sent to St. Louis and other points along the Mississippi, or to Cincinnati and places in its vicinity. Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati were the principal points represented in this work of humanity. Many prominent ladies of those cities passed week after week in the hospitals or on the transports, doing every thing in their power, and giving their attention to friend and foe alike. In all cases the Rebels were treated with the same kindness that our own men received. Not only on the boats, but in the hospitals where the wounded were distributed, and until they were fully recovered, our suffering prisoners were faithfully nursed. The Rebel papers afterward admitted this kind treatment, but declared it was a Yankee trick to win the sympathies of our prisoners, and cause them to abandon the insurgent cause. The men who systematically starved their prisoners, and deprived them of shelter and clothing, could readily suspect the humanity of others. They were careful never to attempt to kill by kindness, those who were so unfortunate as to fall into their hands. It was three weeks after the battle before all the wounded were sent away, and the army was ready for offensive work. When we were once more in fighting trim, our lines were slowly pushed forward. General Pope had been called from the vicinity of Fort Pillow, after his capture of Island Number Ten, and his army was placed in position on the left of the line already formed. When our advance began, we mustered a hundred and ten thousand men. Exclusive of those who do not take part in a battle, we could have easily brought eighty thousand men into action. We began the siege of Corinth with every confidence in our ability to succeed. In this advance, we first learned how an army should intrench itself. Every time we took a new position, we proceeded to throw up earth-works. Before the siege was ended, our men had perfected themselves in the art of intrenching. The defenses we erected will long remain as monuments of the war in Western Tennessee. Since General Halleck, no other commander has shown such ability to fortify in an open field against an enemy that was acting on the defensive. It was generally proclaimed that we were to capture Corinth with all its garrison of sixty or seventy thousand men. The civilian observers could not understand how this was to be accomplished, as the Rebels had two lines of railway open for a safe retreat. It was like the old story of "bagging Price" in Missouri. Every part of the bag, except the top and one side, was carefully closed and closely watched. Unmilitary men were skeptical, but the military heads assured them it was a piece of grand strategy, which the public must not be allowed to understand. During the siege, there was very little for a journalist to record. One day was much like another. Occasionally there would be a collision with the enemy's pickets, or a short struggle for a certain position, usually ending in our possession of the disputed point. The battle of Farmington, on the left of our line, was the only engagement worthy the name, and this was of comparatively short duration. Twenty-four hours after it transpired we ceased to talk about it, and made only occasional reference to the event. There were four weeks of monotony. An advance of a half mile daily was not calculated to excite the nerves. The chaplains and the surgeons busied themselves in looking after the general health of the army. One day, a chaplain, noted for his advocacy of total abstinence, passed the camp of the First Michigan Battery. This company was raised in Coldwater, Michigan, and the camp-chests, caissons, and other property were marked "Loomis's Coldwater Battery." The chaplain at once sought Captain Loomis, and paid a high compliment to his moral courage in taking a firm and noble stand in favor of temperance. After the termination of the interview, the captain and several friends drank to the long life of the chaplain and the success of the "Coldwater Battery." Toward the end of the siege, General Halleck gave the journalists a sensation, by expelling them from his lines. The representatives of the Press held a meeting, and waited upon that officer, after the appearance of the order requiring their departure. They offered a protest, which was insolently rejected. We could not ascertain General Halleck's purpose in excluding us just as the campaign was closing, but concluded he desired we should not witness the end of the siege in which so much had been promised and so little accomplished. A week after our departure, General Beauregard evacuated Corinth, and our army took possession. The fruits of the victory were an empty village, a few hundred stragglers, and a small quantity of war _matériel_. From Corinth the Rebels retreated to Tupelo, Mississippi, where they threw up defensive works. The Rebel Government censured General Beauregard for abandoning Corinth. The evacuation of that point uncovered Memphis, and allowed it to fall into our hands. Beauregard was removed from command. General Joseph E. Johnston was assigned to duty in his stead. This officer proceeded to reorganize his army, with a view to offensive operations against our lines. He made no demonstrations of importance until the summer months had passed away. The capture of Corinth terminated the offensive portion of the campaign. Our army occupied the line of the Memphis and Charleston Railway from Corinth to Memphis, and made a visit to Holly Springs without encountering the enemy. A few cavalry expeditions were made into Mississippi, but they accomplished nothing of importance. The Army of the Tennessee went into summer-quarters. The Army of the Ohio, under General Buell, returned to its proper department, to confront the Rebel armies then assembling in Eastern Tennessee. General Halleck was summoned to Washington as commander-in-chief of the armies of the United States. CHAPTER XVI. CAPTURE OF FORT PILLOW AND BATTLE OF MEMPHIS. The Siege of Fort Pillow.--General Pope.--His Reputation for Veracity. --Capture of the "Ten Thousand."--Naval Battle above Fort Pillow.--The John II. Dickey.--Occupation of the Fort.--General Forrest.--Strength of the Fortifications.--Their Location.--Randolph, Tennessee.--Memphis and her Last Ditch.--Opening of the Naval Combat.--Gallant Action of Colonel Ellet.--Fate of the Rebel Fleet.--The People Viewing the Battle.--Their Conduct. While I was tarrying at Cairo, after the exodus of the journalists from the army before Corinth, the situation on the Mississippi became interesting. After the capture of Island Number Ten, General Pope was ordered to Pittsburg Landing with his command. When called away, he was preparing to lay siege to Fort Pillow, in order to open the river to Memphis. His success at Island Number Ten had won him much credit, and he was anxious to gain more of the same article. Had he taken Fort Pillow, he would have held the honor of being the captor of Memphis, as that city must have fallen with the strong fortifications which served as its protection. The capture of Island Number Ten was marked by the only instance of a successful canal from one bend of the Mississippi to another. As soon as the channel was completed, General Pope took his transports below the island, ready for moving his men. Admiral Foote tried the first experiment of running his gun-boats past the Rebel batteries, and was completely successful. The Rebel transports could not escape, neither could transports or gun-boats come up from Memphis to remove the Rebel army. There was a lake in the rear of the Rebels which prevented their retreat. The whole force, some twenty-eight hundred, was surrendered, with all its arms and munitions of war. General Pope reported his captures somewhat larger than they really were, and received much applause for his success. The reputation of this officer, on the score of veracity, has not been of the highest character. After he assumed command in Virginia, his "Order Number Five" drew upon him much ridicule. Probably the story of the capture of ten thousand prisoners, after the occupation of Corinth, has injured him more than all other exaggerations combined. The paternity of that choice bit of romance belongs to General Halleck, instead of General Pope. Colonel Elliott, who commanded the cavalry expedition, which General Pope sent out when Corinth was occupied, forwarded a dispatch to Pope, something like the following:-- "I am still pursuing the enemy. The woods are full of stragglers. Some of my officers estimate their number as high as ten thousand. Many have already come into my lines." [Illustration: THE CARONDELET RUNNING THE BATTERIES AT ISLAND NO. 10] Pope sent this dispatch, without alteration, to General Halleck. From the latter it went to the country that "General Pope reported ten thousand prisoners captured below Corinth." It served to cover up the barrenness of the Corinth occupation, and put the public in good-humor. General Halleck received credit for the success of his plans. When it came out that no prisoners of consequence had been taken, the real author of the story escaped unharmed. At the time of his departure to re-enforce the army before Corinth, General Pope left but a single brigade of infantry, to act in conjunction with our naval forces in the siege of Fort Pillow. This brigade was encamped on the Arkansas shore opposite Fort Pillow, and did some very effective fighting against the musquitos, which that country produces in the greatest profusion. An attack on the fort, with such a small force, was out of the question, and the principal aggressive work was done by the navy at long range. On the 10th of May, the Rebel fleet made an attack upon our navy, in which they sunk two of our gun-boats, the _Mound City_ and the _Cincinnati_, and returned to the protection of Fort Pillow with one of their own boats disabled, and two others somewhat damaged. Our sunken gun-boats were fortunately in shoal water, where they were speedily raised and repaired. Neither fleet had much to boast of as the result of that engagement. The journalists who were watching Fort Pillow, had their head-quarters on board the steamer _John H. Dickey_, which was anchored in midstream. At the time of the approach of the Rebel gun-boats, the _Dickey_ was lying without sufficient steam to move her wheels, and the prospect was good that she might be captured or destroyed. Her commander, Captain Mussleman, declared he was _not_ in that place to stop cannon-shot, and made every exertion to get his boat in condition to move. His efforts were fully appreciated by the journalists, particularly as they were successful. The _Dickey_, under the same captain, afterward ran a battery near Randolph, Tennessee, and though pierced in every part by cannon-shot and musket-balls, she escaped without any loss of life. As soon as the news of the evacuation of Corinth was received at Cairo, we looked for the speedy capture of Fort Pillow. Accordingly, on the 4th of June, I proceeded down the river, arriving off Fort Pillow on the morning of the 5th. The Rebels had left, as we expected, after spiking their guns and destroying most of their ammunition. The first boat to reach the abandoned fort was the _Hetty Gilmore_, one of the smallest transports in the fleet. She landed a little party, which took possession, hoisted the flag, and declared the fort, and all it contained, the property of the United States. The Rebels were, by this time, several miles distant, in full retreat to a safer location. It was at this same fort, two years later, that the Rebel General Forrest ordered the massacre of a garrison that had surrendered after a prolonged defense. His only plea for this cold-blooded slaughter, was that some of his men had been fired upon after the white flag was raised. The testimony in proof of this barbarity was fully conclusive, and gave General Forrest and his men a reputation that no honorable soldier could desire. In walking through the fort after its capture, I was struck by its strength and extent. It occupied the base of a bluff near the water's edge. On the summit of the bluff there were breast-works running in a zigzag course for five or six miles, and inclosing a large area. The works along the river were very strong, and could easily hold a powerful fleet at bay. From Fort Pillow to Randolph, ten miles lower down, was less than an hour's steaming. Randolph was a small, worthless village, partly at the base of a bluff, and partly on its summit. Here the Rebels had erected a powerful fort, which they abandoned when they abandoned Fort Pillow. The inhabitants expressed much agreeable astonishment on finding that we did not verify all the statements of the Rebels, concerning the barbarity of the Yankees wherever they set foot on Southern soil. The town was most bitterly disloyal. It was afterward burned, in punishment for decoying a steamboat to the landing, and then attempting her capture and destruction. A series of blackened chimneys now marks the site of Randolph. Our capture of these points occurred a short time after the Rebels issued the famous "cotton-burning order," commanding all planters to burn their cotton, rather than allow it to fall into our hands. The people showed no particular desire to comply with the order, except in a few instances. Detachments of Rebel cavalry were sent to enforce obedience. They enforced it by setting fire to the cotton in presence of its owners. On both banks of the river, as we moved from Randolph to Memphis, we could see the smoke arising from plantations, or from secluded spots in the forest where cotton had been concealed. In many cases the bales were broken open and rolled into the river, dotting the stream with floating cotton. Had it then possessed the value that attached to it two years later, I fear there would have been many attempts to save it for transfer to a Northern market. On the day before the evacuation of Fort Pillow, Memphis determined she would never surrender. In conjunction with other cities, she fitted up several gun-boats, that were expected to annihilate the Yankee fleet. In the event of the failure of this means of defense, the inhabitants were pledged to do many dreadful things before submitting to the invaders. Had we placed any confidence in the resolutions passed by the Memphians, we should have expected all the denizens of the Bluff City to commit _hari-kari_, after first setting fire to their dwellings. On the morning of the 6th of June, the Rebel gun-boats, eight in number, took their position just above Memphis, and prepared for the advance of our fleet. The Rebel boats were the _Van Dorn_ (flag-ship), _General Price_, _General Bragg_, _General Lovell_, _Little Rebel_, _Jeff. Thompson_, _Sumter_, and _General Beauregard_. The _General Bragg_ was the New Orleans and Galveston steamer _Mexico_ in former days, and had been strengthened, plated, and, in other ways made as effective as possible for warlike purposes. The balance of the fleet consisted of tow-boats from the Lower Mississippi, fitted up as rams and gun-boats. They were supplied with very powerful engines, and were able to choose their positions in the battle. The Rebel fleet was commanded by Commodore Montgomery, who was well known to many persons on our own boats. The National boats were the iron-clads _Benton, Carondelet, St. Louis, Louisville_, and _Cairo_. There was also the ram fleet, commanded by Colonel Ellet. It comprised the _Monarch, Queen of the West, Lioness, Switzerland, Mingo, Lancaster No. 3, Fulton, Horner_, and _Samson_. The _Monarch_ and _Queen of the West_ were the only boats of the ram fleet that took part in the action. Our forces were commanded by Flag-officer Charles H. Davis, who succeeded Admiral Foote at the time of the illness of the latter. The land forces, acting in conjunction with our fleet, consisted of a single brigade of infantry, that was still at Fort Pillow. It did not arrive in the vicinity of Memphis until after the battle was over. Early in the morning the battle began. It was opened by the gun-boats on the Rebel side, and for some minutes consisted of a cannonade at long range, in which very little was effected. Gradually the boats drew nearer to each other, and made better use of their guns. Before they arrived at close quarters the rams _Monarch_ and _Queen of the West_ steamed forward and engaged in the fight. Their participation was most effective. The _Queen of the West_ struck and disabled one of the Rebel gun-boats, and was herself disabled by the force of the blow. The _Monarch_ steered straight for the _General Lovell_, and dealt her a tremendous blow, fairly in the side, just aft the wheel. The sides of the _Lovell_ were crushed as if they had been made of paper, and the boat sank in less than three minutes, in a spot where the plummet shows a depth of ninety feet. Grappling with the _Beauregard_, the _Monarch_ opened upon her with a stream of hot water and a shower of rifle-balls, which effectually prevented the latter from using a gun. In a few moments she cast off and drifted a short distance down the river. Coming up on the other side, the _Monarch_ dealt her antagonist a blow that left her in a sinking condition. Herself comparatively uninjured, she paused to allow the gun-boats to take a part. Those insignificant and unwieldy rams had placed three of the enemy's gun-boats _hors de combat_ in less than a quarter of an hour's time. Our gun-boats ceased firing as the rams entered the fight; but they now reopened. With shot and shell the guns were rapidly served. The effect was soon apparent. One Rebel boat was disabled and abandoned, after grounding opposite Memphis. A second was grounded and blown up, and two others were disabled, abandoned, and captured. It was a good morning's work. The first gun was fired at forty minutes past five o'clock, and the last at forty-three minutes past six. The Rebels boasted they would whip us before breakfast. We had taken no breakfast when the fight began. After the battle was over we enjoyed our morning meal with a relish that does not usually accompany defeat. The following shows the condition of the two fleets after the battle:-- _General Beauregard_, sunk. _General Lovell_, sunk. _General Price_, injured and captured. _Little Rebel_, " " " _Sumter_, " " " _General Bragg_, " " " _Jeff. Thompson_, burned. _General Van Dorn_, escaped. THE NATIONAL FLEET. _Benton_, unhurt. _Carondelet_, " _St. Louis_, " _Louisville_, " _Cairo_, " _Monarch_ (ram), unhurt. _Queen of the West_ (ram), disabled. The captured vessels were refitted, and, without alteration of names, attached to the National fleet. The _Sumter_ was lost a few months later, in consequence of running aground near the Rebel batteries in the vicinity of Bayou Sara. The _Bragg_ was one of the best boats in the service in point of speed, and proved of much value as a dispatch-steamer on the lower portion of the river. The people of Memphis rose at an early hour to witness the naval combat. It had been generally known during the previous night that the battle would begin about sunrise. The first gun brought a large crowd to the bluff overlooking the river, whence a full view of the fight was obtained. Some of the spectators were loyal, and wished success to the National fleet, but the great majority were animated by a strong hope and expectation of our defeat. A gentleman, who was of the lookers-on, subsequently told me of the conduct of the populace. As a matter of course, the disloyalists had all the conversation their own way. While they expressed their wishes in the loudest tones, no one uttered a word in opposition. Many offered wagers on the success of their fleet, and expressed a readiness to give large odds. No one dared accept these offers, as their acceptance would have been an evidence of sympathy for the Yankees. Americans generally, but particularly in the South, make their wagers as they hope or wish. In the present instance no man was allowed to "copper" on the Rebel flotilla. CHAPTER XVII. IN MEMPHIS AND UNDER THE FLAG Jeff. Thompson and his Predictions.--A Cry of Indignation.--Memphis Humiliated.--The Journalists in the Battle.--The Surrender.--A Fine Point of Law and Honor.--Going on Shore.--An Enraged Secessionist.--A Dangerous Enterprise.--Memphis and her Antecedents.--Her Loyalty.--An Amusing Incident.--How the Natives learned of the Capture of Fort Donelson.--The Last Ditch.--A Farmer-Abolitionist.--Disloyalty among the Women.--"Blessings in Disguise."--An American Mark Tapley. The somewhat widely (though not favorably) known Rebel chieftain, Jeff. Thompson, was in Memphis on the day of the battle, and boasted of the easy victory the Rebels would have over the National fleet. "We will chaw them up in just an hour," said Jeff., as the battle began. "Are you sure of that?" asked a friend. "Certainly I am; there is no doubt of it." Turning to a servant, he sent for his horse, in order, as he said, to be able to move about rapidly to the best points for witnessing the engagement. In an hour and three minutes the battle was over. Jeff, turned in his saddle, and bade his friend farewell, saying he had a note falling due that day at Holly Springs, and was going out to pay it. The "chawing up" of our fleet was not referred to again. As the _Monarch_ struck the _Lovell_, sinking the latter in deep water, the crowd stood breathless. As the crew of the sunken boat were floating helplessly in the strong current, and our own skiffs were putting off to aid them, there was hardly a word uttered through all that multitude. As the Rebel boats, one after another, were sunk or captured, the sympathies of the spectators found vent in words. When, at length, the last of the Rebel fleet disappeared, and the Union flotilla spread its flags in triumph, there went up an almost universal yell of indignation from that vast crowd. Women tore their bonnets from their heads, and trampled them on the ground; men stamped and swore as only infuriated Rebels can, and called for all known misfortunes to settle upon the heads of their invaders. The profanity was not entirely monopolized by the men. This scene of confusion lasted for some time, and ended in anxiety to know what we would do next. Some of the spectators turned away, and went, in sullen silence, to their homes. Others remained, out of curiosity, to witness the end of the day's work. A few were secretly rejoicing at the result, but the time had not come when they could display their sympathies. The crowd eagerly watched our fleet, and noted every motion of the various boats. The press correspondents occupied various positions during the engagement. Mr. Coffin, of the Boston _Journal_, was on the tug belonging to the flag-ship, and had a fine view of the whole affair. One of _The Herald_ correspondents was in the pilot-house of the gun-boat _Cairo_, while Mr. Colburn, of _The World_, was on the captured steamer _Sovereign_. "Junius," of _The Tribune_, and Mr. Vizitelly, of the London _Illustrated News_, with several others, were on the transport _Dickey_, the general rendezvous of the journalists. The representative of the St. Louis _Republican_ and myself were on the _Platte Valley_, in rear of the line of battle. The _Platte Valley_ was the first private boat that touched the Memphis landing after the capture of the city. The battle being over, we were anxious to get on shore and look at the people and city of Memphis. Shortly after the fighting ceased, Colonel Ellet sent the ram _Lioness_, under a flag-of-truce, to demand the surrender of the city. To this demand no response was given. A little later, Flag-Officer Davis sent the following note to the Mayor, at the hands of one of the officers of the gun-boat _Benton_:-- UNITED STATES FLAG-STEAMER BENTON, OFF MEMPHIS, _June_ 6, 1862. SIR:--I have respectfully to request that you will surrender the city of Memphis to the authority of the United States, which I have the honor to represent. I am, Mr. Mayor, with high respect, your most obedient servant, C. H. DAVIS, _Flag-Officer Commanding_. To his Honor, the Mayor of Memphis. To this note the following reply was received:-- MAYOR'S OFFICE, MEMPHIS, _June_ 6, 1862. C. H. Davis, _Flag-Officer Commanding_: SIR:--Your note of this date is received and contents noted. In reply I have only to say that, as the civil authorities have no means of defense, by the force of circumstances the city is in your hands. Respectfully, John Park, _Mayor of Memphis_. At the meeting, four days before, the citizens of Memphis had solemnly pledged themselves never to surrender. There was a vague understanding that somebody was to do a large amount of fighting, whenever Memphis was attacked. If this fighting proved useless, the city was to be fired in every house, and only abandoned after its complete destruction. It will be seen that the note of the mayor, in response to a demand for surrender, vindicates the honor of Memphis. It merely informs the United States officer that the city has fallen "by the force of circumstances." Since that day I have frequently heard its citizens boast that the place was not surrendered. "You came in," say they, "and took possession, but we did not give up to you. We declared we would never surrender, and we kept our word." About eleven o'clock in the forenoon, the transports arrived with our infantry, and attempted to make a landing. As their mooring-lines were thrown on shore they were seized by dozens of persons in the crowd, and the crews were saved the trouble of making fast. This was an evidence that the laboring class, the men with blue shirts and shabby hats, were not disloyal. We had abundant evidence of this when our occupation became a fixed fact. It was generally the wealthy who adhered to the Rebel cause. As a file of soldiers moved into the city, the people stood at a respectful distance, occasionally giving forth wordy expression of their anger. When I reached the office of _The Avalanche_, one of the leading journals of Memphis, and, of course, strongly disloyal, I found the soldiers removing a Rebel flag from the roof of the building. The owner of the banner made a very vehement objection to the proceeding. His indignation was so great that his friends were obliged to hold him, to prevent his throwing himself on the bayonet of the nearest soldier. I saw him several days later, when his anger had somewhat cooled. He found relief from his troubles, before the end of June, by joining the Rebel army at Holly Springs. On the bluff above the levee was a tall flag-staff. The Rebels had endeavored to make sure of their courage by nailing a flag to the top of this staff. A sailor from one of the gun-boats volunteered to ascend the staff and bring down the banner. When he had ascended about twenty feet, he saw two rifles bearing upon him from the window of a neighboring building. The sailor concluded it was best to go no further, and descended at once. The staff was cut down and the obnoxious flag secured. With the city in our possession, we had leisure to look about us. Memphis had been in the West what Charleston was in the East: an active worker in the secession cause. Her newspapers had teemed with abuse of every thing which opposed their heresy, and advocated the most summary measures. Lynching had been frequent and never rebuked, impressments were of daily and nightly occurrence, every foundery and manufactory had been constantly employed by the Rebel authorities, and every citizen had, in some manner, contributed to the insurrection. It was gratifying in the extreme to see the Memphis, of which we at Cairo and St. Louis had heard so much, brought under our control. The picture of five United States gun-boats lying in line before the city, their ports open and their guns shotted, was pleasing in the eyes of loyal men. Outside of the poorer classes there were some loyal persons, but their number was not large. There were many professing loyalty, who possessed very little of the article, and whose record had been exceedingly doubtful. Prominent among these were the politicians, than whom none had been more self-sacrificing, if their own words could be believed. There were many men of this class ready, no doubt, to swear allegiance to the victorious side, who joined our standard because they considered the Rebel cause a losing one. They may have become loyal since that time, but it has been only through the force of circumstances. In many cases our Government accepted their words as proof of loyalty, and granted these persons many exclusive privileges. It was a matter of comment that a newly converted loyalist could obtain favors at the hands of Government officials, that would be refused to men from the North. The acceptance of office under the Rebels, and the earnest advocacy he had shown for secession, were generally alleged to have taken place under compulsion, or in the interest of the really loyal men. A Memphis gentleman gave me an amusing account of the reception of the news of the fall of Fort Donelson. Many boasts had been made of the terrible punishment that was in store for our army, if it ventured an attack upon Fort Donelson. No one would be allowed to escape to tell the tale. All were to be slaughtered, or lodged in Rebel prisons. Memphis was consequently waiting for the best tidings from the Cumberland, and did not think it possible a reverse could come to the Rebel cause. One Sunday morning, the telegraph, without any previous announcement, flashed the intelligence that Fort Donelson, with twelve thousand men, had surrendered, and a portion of General Grant's army was moving on Nashville, with every prospect of capturing that city. Memphis was in consternation. No one could tell how long the Yankee army would stop at Nashville before moving elsewhere, and it was certain that Memphis was uncovered by the fall of Fort Donelson. My informant first learned the important tidings in the rotunda of the Gayoso House. Seeing a group of his acquaintances with faces depicting the utmost gloom, he asked what was the matter. "Bad enough," said one. "Fort Donelson has surrendered with nearly all its garrison." "That is terrible," said my friend, assuming a look of agony, though he was inwardly elated. "Yes, and the enemy are moving on Nashville." "Horrible news," was the response; "but let us not be too despondent. Our men are good for them, one against three, and they will never get out of Nashville alive, if they should happen to take it." With another expression of deep sorrow at the misfortune which had befallen the Rebel army, this gentleman hastened to convey the glad news to his friends. "I reached home," said he, "locked my front door, called my wife and sister into the parlor, and instantly jumped over the center-table. They both cried for joy when I told them the old flag floated over Donelson." The Secessionists in Memphis, like their brethren elsewhere, insisted that all the points we had captured were given up because they had no further use for them. The evacuation of Columbus, Fort Pillow, Fort Henry, and Bowling Green, with the surrender of Donelson, were parts of the grand strategy of the Rebel leaders, and served to lure us on to our destruction. They would never admit a defeat, but contended we had invariably suffered. An uneducated farmer, on the route followed by one of our armies in Tennessee, told our officers that a Rebel general and his staff had taken dinner with him during the retreat from Nashville. The farmer was anxious to learn something about the military situation, and asked a Rebel major how the Confederate cause was progressing. "Splendidly," answered the major. "We have whipped the Yankees in every battle, and our independence will soon be recognized." The farmer was thoughtful for a minute or two, and then deliberately said: "I don't know much about war, but if we are always whipping the Yankees, how is it they keep coming down into our country after every battle?" The major grew red in the face, and told the farmer that any man who asked such an absurd question was an Abolitionist, and deserved hanging to the nearest tree. The farmer was silenced, but not satisfied. I had a fine illustration of the infatuation of the Rebel sympathizers, a few days after Memphis was captured. One evening, while making a visit at the house of an acquaintance, the hostess introduced me to a young lady of the strongest secession proclivities. Of course, I endeavored to avoid the topics on which we were certain to differ, but my new acquaintance was determined to provoke a discussion. With a few preliminaries, she throw out the question: "Now, don't you think the Southern soldiers have shown themselves the bravest people that ever lived, while the Yankees have proved the greatest cowards?" "I can hardly agree with you," I replied. "Your people have certainly established a reputation on the score of bravery, but we can claim quite as much." "But we have whipped you in every battle. We whipped you at Manassas and Ball's Bluff, and we whipped General Grant at Belmont." "That is very true; but how was it at Shiloh?" "At Shiloh we whipped you; we drove you to your gun-boats, which was all we wanted to do." "Ah, I beg your pardon; but what is your impression of Fort Donelson?" "Fort Donelson!"--and my lady's cheek flushed with either pride or indignation--"Fort Donelson was an unquestioned victory for the South. We stopped your army--all we wanted to; and then General Forrest, General Floyd, and all the troops we wished to bring off, came away. We only left General Buckner and three thousand men for you to capture." "It seems, then, we labored under a delusion at the North. We thought we had something to rejoice over when Fort Donelson fell. But, pray, what do you consider the capture of Island Number Ten and the naval battle here?" "At Island Ten we defeated you" (how this was done she did not say), "and we were victorious here. You wanted to capture all our boats; but you only got four of them, and those were damaged." "In your view of the case," I replied, "I admit the South to have been always victorious. Without wishing to be considered disloyal to the Nation, I can heartily wish you many similar victories." In the tour which Dickens records, Mark Tapley did not visit the Southern country, but the salient points of his character are possessed by the sons of the cavaliers. "Jolly" under the greatest misfortunes, and extracting comfort and happiness from all calamities, your true Rebel could never know adversity. The fire which consumes his dwelling is a personal boon, as he can readily explain. So is a devastating flood, or a widespread pestilence. The events which narrow-minded mudsills are apt to look upon as calamitous, are only "blessings in disguise" to every supporter and friend of the late "Confederacy." CHAPTER XVIII. SUPERVISING A REBEL JOURNAL. The Press of Memphis.--Flight of _The Appeal_.--A False Prediction.--_The Argus_ becomes Loyal.--Order from General Wallace.--Installed in Office.--Lecturing the Rebels.--"Trade follows the Flag."--Abuses of Traffic.--Supplying the Rebels.--A Perilous Adventure.--Passing the Rebel Lines.--Eluding Watchful Eyes. On the morning of the 6th of June, the newspaper publishers, like most other gentlemen of Memphis, were greatly alarmed. _The Avalanche_ and _The Argus_ announced that it was impossible for the Yankee fleet to cope successfully with the Rebels, and that victory was certain to perch upon the banners of the latter. The sheets were not dry before the Rebel fleet was a thing of the past. _The Appeal_ had not been as hopeful as its contemporaries, and thought it the wisest course to abandon the city. It moved to Grenada, Mississippi, a hundred miles distant, and resumed publication. It became a migratory sheet, and was at last captured by General Wilson at Columbus, Georgia. In ability it ranked among the best of the Rebel journals. _The Avalanche_ and _The Argus_ continued publication, with a strong leaning to the Rebel side. The former was interfered with by our authorities; and, under the name of _The Bulletin_, with new editorial management, was allowed to reappear. _The Argus_ maintained its Rebel ground, though with moderation, until the military hand fell upon it. Memphis, in the early days of our occupation, changed its commander nearly every week. One of these changes brought Major-General Wallace into the city. This officer thought it proper to issue the following order:-- HEAD-QUARTERS THIRD DIVISION, RESERVED CORPS, ARMY OF TENNESSEE, MEMPHIS, _June_ 17,1862. EDITORS DAILY ARGUS:--As the closing of your office might be injurious to you pecuniarily, I send two gentlemen--Messrs. A.D. Richardson and Thos. W. Knox, both of ample experience--to take charge of the editorial department of your paper. The business management of your office will be left to you. Very respectfully, LEWIS WALLACE, _General Third Division, Reserved Corps._ The publishers of _The Argus_ printed this order at the head of their columns. Below it they announced that they were not responsible for any thing which should appear editorially, as long as the order was in force. The business management and the general miscellaneous and news matter were not interfered with. Mr. Richardson and myself entered upon our new duties immediately. We had crossed the Plains together, had published a paper in the Rocky Mountains, had been through many adventures and perils side by side; but we had never before managed a newspaper in an insurrectionary district. The publishers of _The Argus_ greeted us cordially, and our whole intercourse with them was harmonious. They did not relish the intrusion of Northern men into their office, to compel the insertion of Union editorials, but they bore the inconvenience with an excellent grace. The foreman of the establishment displayed more mortification at the change, than any other person whom we met. The editorials we published were of a positive character. We plainly announced the determination of the Government to assert itself and put down and punish treason. We told the Memphis people that the scheme of partisan warfare, which was then in its inception, would work more harm than good to the districts where guerrilla companies were organized. We insisted that the Union armies had entered Memphis and other parts of the South, to stay there, and that resistance to their power was useless. We credited the Rebels with much bravery and devotion to their cause, but asserted always that we had the right and the strong arm in our favor. It is possible we did not make many conversions among the disloyal readers of _The Argus_, but we had the satisfaction of saying what we thought it necessary they should hear. The publishers said their subscribers were rapidly falling off, on account of the change of editorial tone. Like newspaper readers everywhere, they disliked to peruse what their consciences did not approve. We received letters, generally from women, denying our right to control the columns of the paper for our "base purposes." Some of these letters were not written after the style of Chesterfield, but the majority of them were courteous. There were many jests in Memphis, and throughout the country generally, concerning the appointment of representatives of _The Herald_ and _The Tribune_ to a position where they must work together. _The Herald_ and _The Tribune_ have not been famous, in the past twenty years, for an excess of good-nature toward each other. Mr. Bennett and Mr. Greeley are not supposed to partake habitually of the same dinners and wine, or to join in frequent games of billiards and poker. The compliments which the two great dailies occasionally exchange, are not calculated to promote an intimate friendship between the venerable gentlemen whose names are so well known to the public. No one expects these veteran editors to emulate the example of Damon and Pythias. At the time Mr. Richardson and myself took charge of _The Argus, The Tribune_ and _The Herald_ were indulging in one of their well-known disputes. It was much like the Hibernian's debate, "with sticks," and attracted some attention, though it was generally voted a nuisance. Many, who did not know us, imagined that the new editors of _The Argus_ would follow the tendencies of the offices from which they bore credentials. Several Northern journals came to hand, in which this belief was expressed. A Chicago paper published two articles supposed to be in the same issue of _The Argus_, differing totally in every line of argument or statement of fact. One editor argued that the harmonious occupancy of contiguous desks by the representatives of _The Herald_ and _The Tribune_, betokened the approach of the millennium. When he issued the order placing us in charge of _The Argus_, General Wallace assured its proprietors that he should remove the editorial supervision as soon as a Union paper was established in Memphis. This event occurred in a short time, and _The Argus_ was restored to its original management, according to promise. As soon as the capture of Memphis was known at the North, there was an eager scramble to secure the trade of the long-blockaded port. Several boat-loads of goods were shipped from St. Louis and Cincinnati, and Memphis was so rapidly filled that the supply was far greater than the demand. Army and Treasury regulations were soon established, and many restrictions placed upon traffic. The restrictions did not materially diminish the quantity of goods, but they served to throw the trade into a few hands, and thus open the way for much favoritism. Those who obtained permits, thought the system an excellent one. Those who were kept "out in the cold," viewed the matter in a different light. A thousand stories of dishonesty, official and unofficial, were in constant circulation, and I fear that many of them came very near the truth. In our occupation of cities along the Mississippi, the Rebels found a ready supply from our markets. This was especially the case at Memphis. Boots and shoes passed through the lines in great numbers, either by stealth or by open permit, and were taken at once to the Rebel army. Cloth, clothing, percussion-caps, and similar articles went in the same direction. General Grant and other prominent officers made a strong opposition to our policy, and advised the suppression of the Rebellion prior to the opening of trade, but their protestations were of no avail. We chastised the Rebels with one hand, while we fed and clothed them with the other. After the capture of Memphis, Colonel Charles R. Ellet, with two boats of the ram fleet, proceeded to explore the river between Memphis and Vicksburg. It was not known what defenses the Rebels might have constructed along this distance of four hundred miles. Colonel Ellet found no hinderance to his progress, except a small field battery near Napoleon, Arkansas. When a few miles above Vicksburg, he ascertained that a portion of Admiral Farragut's fleet was below that point, preparing to attack the city. He at once determined to open communication with the lower fleet. Opposite Vicksburg there is a long and narrow peninsula, around which the Mississippi makes a bend. It is a mile and a quarter across the neck of this peninsula, while it is sixteen miles around by the course of the river. It was impossible to pass around by the Mississippi, on account of the batteries at Vicksburg. The Rebels were holding the peninsula with a small force of infantry and cavalry, to prevent our effecting a landing. By careful management it was possible to elude the sentinels, and cross from one side of the peninsula to the other. Colonel Ellet armed himself to make the attempt. He took only a few documents to prove his identity as soon as he reached Admiral Farragut. A little before daylight, one morning, he started on his perilous journey. He waded through swamps, toiled among the thick undergrowth in a portion of the forest, was fired upon by a Rebel picket, and narrowly escaped drowning in crossing a bayou. He was compelled to make a wide detour, to avoid capture, and thus extended his journey to nearly a half-dozen miles. On reaching the bank opposite one of our gun-boats, he found a yawl near the shore, by which he was promptly taken on board. The officers of this gun-boat suspected him of being a spy, and placed him under guard. It was not until the arrival of Admiral Farragut that his true character became known. After a long interview with that officer he prepared to return. He concealed dispatches for the Navy Department and for Flag-Officer Davis in the lining of his boots and in the wristbands of his shirt. A file of marines escorted him as far as they could safely venture, and then bade him farewell. Near the place where he had left his own boat, Colonel Ellet found a small party of Rebels, carefully watching from a spot where they could not be easily discovered. It was a matter of some difficulty to elude these men, but he did it successfully, and reached his boat in safety. He proceeded at once to Memphis with his dispatches. Flag-Officer Davis immediately decided to co-operate with Admiral Farragut, in the attempt to capture Vicksburg. Shortly after the capture of New Orleans, Admiral Farragut ascended the Mississippi as far as Vicksburg. At that time the defensive force was very small, and there were but few batteries erected. The Admiral felt confident of his ability to silence the Rebel guns, but he was unaccompanied by a land force to occupy the city after its capture. He was reluctantly compelled to return to New Orleans, and wait until troops could be spared from General Butler's command. The Rebels improved their opportunities, and concentrated a large force to put Vicksburg in condition for defense. Heavy guns were brought from various points, earth-works were thrown up on all sides, and the town became a vast fortification. When the fleet returned at the end of June, the Rebels were ready to receive it. Their strongest works were on the banks of the Mississippi. They had no dread of an attack from the direction of Jackson, until long afterward. Vicksburg was the key to the possession of the Mississippi. The Rebel authorities at Richmond ordered it defended as long as defense was possible. CHAPTER XIX. THE FIRST SIEGE OF VICKSBURG. From Memphis to Vicksburg.--Running the Batteries.--Our Inability to take Vicksburg by Assault.--Digging a Canal.--A Conversation with Resident Secessionists.--Their Arguments _pro_ and _con_, and the Answers they Received.--A Curiosity of Legislation.--An Expedition up the Yazoo.--Destruction of the Rebel Fleet.--The _Arkansas_ Running the Gauntlet.--A Spirited Encounter.--A Gallant Attempt.--Raising the Siege.--Fate of the _Arkansas_. On the 1st of July, I left Memphis with the Mississippi flotilla, and arrived above Vicksburg late on the following day. Admiral Farragut's fleet attempted the passage of the batteries on the 28th of June. A portion of the fleet succeeded in the attempt, under a heavy fire, and gained a position above the peninsula. Among the first to effect a passage was the flag-ship _Hartford_, with the "gallant old salamander" on board. The _Richmond, Iroquois_, and _Oneida_ were the sloops-of-war that accompanied the _Hartford_. The _Brooklyn_ and other heavy vessels remained below. The history of that first siege of Vicksburg can be briefly told. Twenty-five hundred infantry, under General Williams, accompanied the fleet from New Orleans, with the design of occupying Vicksburg after the batteries had been silenced by our artillery. Most of the Rebel guns were located at such a height that it was found impossible to elevate our own guns so as to reach them. Thus the occupation by infantry was found impracticable. The passage of the batteries was followed by the bombardment, from the mortar-schooners of Admiral Farragut's fleet and the mortar-rafts which Flag-Officer Davis had brought down. This continued steadily for several days, but Vicksburg did not fall. A canal across the peninsula was proposed and commenced. The water fell as fast as the digging progressed, and the plan of leaving Vicksburg inland was abandoned for that time. Even had there been a flood in the river, the entrance to the canal was so located that success was impossible. The old steamboat-men laughed at the efforts of the Massachusetts engineer, to create a current in his canal by commencing it in an eddy. Just as the canal project was agreed upon, I was present at a conversation between General Williams and several residents of the vicinity. The latter, fearing the channel of the river would be changed, visited the general to protest against the carrying out of his plan. The citizens were six in number. They had selected no one to act as their leader. Each joined in the conversation as he saw fit. After a little preliminary talk, one of them said: "Are you aware, general, there is no law of the State allowing you to make a cut-off, here?" "I am sorry to say," replied General Williams, "I am not familiar with the laws of Louisiana. Even if I were, I should not heed them. I believe Louisiana passed an act of secession. According to your own showing you have no claims on the Government now." This disposed of that objection. There was some hesitation, evidently embarrassing to the delegation, but not to General Williams. Citizen number one was silenced. Number two advanced an idea. "You may remember, General, that you will subject the parish of Madison to an expenditure of ninety thousand dollars for new levees." This argument disturbed General Williams no more than the first one. He promptly replied: "The parish of Madison gave a large majority in favor of secession; did it not?" "I believe it did," was the faltering response. "Then you can learn that treason costs something. It will cost you far more before the war is over." Citizen number two said nothing more. It was the opportunity for number three to speak. "If this cut-off is made, it will ruin the trade of Vicksburg. It has been a fine city for business, but this will spoil it. Boats will not be able to reach the town, but will find all the current through the short route." "That is just what we want," said the General. "We are digging the canal for the very purpose of navigating the river without passing near Vicksburg." Number three went to the rear. Number four came forward. "If you make this cut-off, all these plantations will be carried away. You will ruin the property of many loyal men." He was answered that loyal men would be paid for all property taken or destroyed, as soon as their loyalty was proved. The fifth and last point in the protest was next advanced. It came from an individual who professed to practice law in De Soto township, and was as follows: "The charter of the Vicksburg and Shreveport Railroad is perpetual, and so declared by act of the Louisiana Legislature. No one has any right to cut through the embankment." "That is true," was the quiet answer. "The Constitution of the United States is also a perpetual charter, which it was treason to violate. When you and your leaders have no hesitation at breaking national faith, it is absurd to claim rights under the laws of a State which you deny to be in the Union." This was the end of the delegation. Its members retired without having gained a single point in their case. They were, doubtless, easier in mind when they ascertained, two weeks later, that the canal enterprise was a failure. The last argument put forth on that occasion, to prevent the carrying out of our plans, is one of the curiosities of legislation. For a long time there were many parties in Louisiana who wished the channel of the Mississippi turned across the neck of the peninsula opposite Vicksburg, thus shortening the river fifteen miles, at least, and rendering the plantations above, less liable to overflow. As Vicksburg lay in another State, her interests were not regarded. She spent much money in the corrupt Legislature of Louisiana to defeat the scheme. As a last resort, it was proposed to build a railway, with a perpetual charter, from the end of the peninsula opposite Vicksburg, to some point in the interior. Much money was required. The capitalists of Vicksburg contributed the funds for lobbying the bill and commencing the road. Up to the time when the Rebellion began, it was rendered certain that no hand of man could legally turn the Mississippi across that peninsula. The first siege of Vicksburg lasted but twenty days. Our fleet was unable to silence the batteries, and our land force was not sufficient for the work. During the progress of the siege, Colonel Ellet, with his ram fleet, ascended the Yazoo River, and compelled the Rebels to destroy three of their gun-boats, the _Livingston, Polk_, and _Van Dorn_, to prevent their falling into our hands. The _Van Dorn_ was the only boat that escaped, out of the fleet of eight Rebel gun-boats which met ours at Memphis on the 6th of June. At the time of making this expedition, Colonel Ellet learned that the famous ram gun-boat _Arkansas_ was completed, and nearly ready to descend the river. He notified Admiral Farragut and Flag-Officer Davis, but they paid little attention to his warnings. This Rebel gun-boat, which was expected to do so much toward the destruction of our naval forces on the Mississippi, was constructed at Memphis, and hurried from there in a partially finished condition, just before the capture of the city. She was towed to Yazoo City and there completed. The _Arkansas_ was a powerful iron-clad steamer, mounting ten guns, and carrying an iron beak, designed for penetrating the hulls of our gun-boats. Her engines were powerful, though they could not be worked with facility at the time of her appearance. Her model, construction, armament, and propelling force, made her equal to any boat of our upper flotilla, and her officers claimed to have full confidence in her abilities. On the morning of the 15th of July, the _Arkansas_ emerged from the Yazoo River, fifteen miles above Vicksburg. A short distance up that stream she encountered two of our gun-boats, the _Carondelet_ and _Tyler_, and fought them until she reached our fleet at anchor above Vicksburg. The _Carondelet_ was one of our mail-clad gun-boats, built at St. Louis in 1861. The _Tyler_ was a wooden gun-boat, altered from an old transport, and was totally unfit for entering into battle. Both were perforated by the Rebel shell, the _Tyler_ receiving the larger number. The gallantry displayed by Captain Gwin, her commander, was worthy of special praise. Our fleet was at anchor four or five miles above Vicksburg--some of the vessels lying in midstream, while others were fastened to the banks. The _Arkansas_ fired to the right and left as she passed through the fleet. Her shot disabled two of our boats, and slightly injured two or three others. She did not herself escape without damage. Many of our projectiles struck her sides, but glanced into the river. Two shells perforated her plating, and another entered a port, exploding over one of the guns. Ten men were killed and as many wounded. The _Arkansas_ was not actually disabled, but her commander declined to enter into another action until she had undergone repairs. She reached a safe anchorage under protection of the Vicksburg batteries. A few days later, a plan was arranged for her destruction. Colonel Ellet, with the ram _Queen of the West_, was to run down and strike the _Arkansas_ at her moorings. The gun-boat _Essex_ was to join in this effort, while the upper flotilla, assisted by the vessels of Admiral Farragut's fleet, would shell the Rebel batteries. The _Essex_ started first, but ran directly past the _Arkansas_, instead of stopping to engage her, as was expected. The _Essex_ fired three guns at the _Arkansas_ while in range, from one of which a shell crashed through the armor of the Rebel boat, disabling an entire gun-crew. The _Queen of the West_ attempted to perform her part of the work, but the current was so strong where the _Arkansas_ lay that it was impossible to deal an effective blow. The upper flotilla did not open fire to engage the attention of the enemy, and thus the unfortunate _Queen of the West_ was obliged to receive all the fire from the Rebel batteries. She was repeatedly perforated, but fortunately escaped without damage to her machinery. The _Arkansas_ was not seriously injured in the encounter, though the completion of her repairs was somewhat delayed. On the 25th of July the first siege of Vicksburg was raised. The upper flotilla of gun-boats, mortar-rafts, and transports, returned to Memphis and Helena. Admiral Farragut took his fleet to New Orleans. General Williams went, with his land forces, to Baton Rouge. That city was soon after attacked by General Breckinridge, with six thousand men. The Rebels were repulsed with heavy loss. In our own ranks the killed and wounded were not less than those of the enemy. General Williams was among the slain, and at one period our chances, of making a successful defense were very doubtful. The _Arkansas_ had been ordered to proceed from Vicksburg to take part in this attack, the Rebels being confident she could overpower our three gun-boats at Baton Rouge. On the way down the river her machinery became deranged, and she was tied up to the bank for repairs. Seeing our gun-boats approaching, and knowing he was helpless against them; her commander ordered the _Arkansas_ to be abandoned and blown up. The order was obeyed, and this much-praised and really formidable gun-boat closed her brief but brilliant career. The Rebels were greatly chagrined at her loss, as they had expected she would accomplish much toward driving the National fleet from the Mississippi. The joy with which they hailed her appearance was far less than the sorrow her destruction evoked. CHAPTER XX. THE MARCH THROUGH ARKANSAS.--THE SIEGE OF CINCINNATI. General Curtis's Army reaching Helena.--Its Wanderings.--The Arkansas Navy.--Troops and their Supplies "miss Connection."--Rebel Reports.--Memphis in Midsummer.--"A Journey due North."--Chicago.--Bragg's Advance into Kentucky.--Kirby Smith in Front of Cincinnati.--The City under Martial Law.--The Squirrel Hunters.--War Correspondents in Comfortable Quarters.--Improvising an Army.--Raising the Siege.--Bragg's Retreat. About the middle of July, General Curtis's army arrived at Helena, Arkansas, ninety miles below Memphis. After the battle of Pea Ridge, this army commenced its wanderings, moving first to Batesville, on the White River, where it lay for several weeks. Then it went to Jacksonport, further down that stream, and remained a short time. The guerrillas were in such strong force on General Curtis's line of communications that they greatly restricted the receipt of supplies, and placed the army on very short rations. For nearly a month the public had no positive information concerning Curtis's whereabouts. The Rebels were continually circulating stories that he had surrendered, or was terribly defeated. The only reasons for doubting the truth of these stories were, first, that the Rebels had no force of any importance in Arkansas; and second, that our army, to use the expression of one of its officers, "wasn't going round surrendering." We expected it would turn up in some locality where the Rebels did not desire it, and had no fears of its surrender. General Curtis constructed several boats at Batesville, which were usually spoken of as "the Arkansas navy." These boats carried some six or eight hundred men, and were used to patrol the White River, as the army moved down its banks. In this way the column advanced from Batesville to Jacksonport, and afterward to St. Charles. Supplies had been sent up the White River to meet the army. The transports and their convoy remained several days at St. Charles, but could get no tidings of General Curtis. The river was falling, and they finally returned. Twelve hours after their departure, the advance of the lost army arrived at St. Charles. From St. Charles to Helena was a march of sixty miles, across a country destitute of every thing but water, and not even possessing a good supply of that article. The army reached Helena, weary and hungry, but it was speedily supplied with every thing needed, and put in condition to take the offensive. It was soon named in general orders "the Army of Arkansas," and ultimately accomplished the occupation of the entire State. During July and August there was little activity around Memphis. In the latter month, I found the climate exceedingly uncomfortable. Day after day the atmosphere was hot, still, stifling, and impregnated with the dust that rose in clouds from the parched earth. The inhabitants endured it easily, and made continual prophesy that the _hot_ weather "would come in September." Those of us who were strangers wondered what the temperature must be, to constitute "hot" weather in the estimation of a native. The thermometer then stood at eighty-five degrees at midnight, and ninety-eight or one hundred at noon. Few people walked the streets in the day, and those who were obliged to do so generally moved at a snail's pace. Cases of _coup-de-soleil_ were frequent. The temperature affected me personally, by changing my complexion to a deep yellow, and reducing my strength about sixty per cent. I decided upon "A Journey due North." Forty-eight hours after sweltering in Memphis, I was shivering on the shores of Lake Michigan. I exchanged the hot, fever-laden atmosphere of that city, for the cool and healthful air of Chicago. The activity, energy, and enterprise of Chicago, made a pleasing contrast to the idleness and gloom that pervaded Memphis. This was no place for me to exist in as an invalid. I found the saffron tint of my complexion rapidly disappearing, and my strength restored, under the influence of pure breezes and busy life. Ten days in that city prepared me for new scenes of war. At that time the Rebel army, under General Bragg, was making its advance into Kentucky. General Buell was moving at the same time toward the Ohio River. The two armies were marching in nearly parallel lines, so that it became a race between them for Nashville and Louisville. Bragg divided his forces, threatening Louisville and Cincinnati at the same time. Defenses were thrown up around the former city, to assist in holding it in case of attack, but they were never brought into use. By rapid marching, General Buell reached Louisville in advance of Bragg, and rendered it useless for the latter to fling his army against the city. Meantime, General Kirby Smith moved, under Bragg's orders, to the siege of Cincinnati. His advance was slow, and gave some opportunity for preparation. The chief reliance for defense was upon the raw militia and such irregular forces as could be gathered for the occasion. The hills of Covington and Newport, opposite Cincinnati, were crowned with fortifications and seamed with rifle-pits, which were filled with these raw soldiers. The valor of these men was beyond question, but they were almost entirely without discipline. In front of the veteran regiments of the Rebel army our forces would have been at great disadvantage. When I reached Cincinnati the Rebel army was within a few miles of the defenses. On the train which took me to the city, there were many of the country people going to offer their services to aid in repelling the enemy. They entered the cars at the various stations, bringing their rifles, which they well knew how to use. They were the famous "squirrel-hunters" of Ohio, who were afterward the subject of some derision on the part of the Rebels. Nearly twenty thousand of them volunteered for the occasion, and would have handled their rifles to advantage had the Rebels given them the opportunity. At the time of my arrival at Cincinnati, Major-General Wallace was in command. The Queen City of the West was obliged to undergo some of the inconveniences of martial law. Business of nearly every kind was suspended. A provost-marshal's pass was necessary to enable one to walk the streets in security. The same document was required of any person who wished to hire a carriage, or take a pleasant drive to the Kentucky side of the Ohio. Most of the able-bodied citizens voluntarily offered their services, and took their places in the rifle-pits, but there were some who refused to go. These were hunted out and taken to the front, much against their will. Some were found in or under beds; others were clad in women's garments, and working at wash-tubs. Some tied up their hands as if disabled, and others plead baldness or indigestion to excuse a lack of patriotism. All was of no avail. The provost-marshal had no charity for human weakness. This severity was not pleasant to the citizens, but it served an admirable purpose. When Kirby Smith arrived in front of the defenses, he found forty thousand men confronting him. Of these, not over six or eight thousand had borne arms more than a week or ten days. The volunteer militia of Cincinnati, and the squirrel-hunters from the interior of Ohio and Indiana, formed the balance of our forces. Our line of defenses encircled the cities of Covington and Newport, touching the Ohio above and below their extreme limits. Nearly every hill was crowned with a fortification. These fortifications were connected by rifle-pits, which were kept constantly filled with men. On the river we had a fleet of gun-boats, improvised from ordinary steamers by surrounding their vulnerable parts with bales of hay. The river was low, so that it was necessary to watch several places where fording was possible. A pontoon bridge was thrown across the Ohio, and continued there until the siege was ended. It had been a matter of jest among the journalists at Memphis and other points in the Southwest, that the vicissitudes of war might some day enable us to witness military operations from the principal hotels in the Northern cities. "When we can write war letters from the Burnet or the Sherman House," was the occasional remark, "there will be some personal comfort in being an army correspondent." What we had said in jest was now proving true. We could take a carriage at the Burnet House, and in half an hour stand on our front lines and witness the operations of the skirmishers. Later in the war I was enabled to write letters upon interesting topics from Detroit and St. Paul. The way in which our large defensive force was fed, was nearly as great a novelty as the celerity of its organization. It was very difficult to sever the red tape of the army regulations, and enable the commissary department to issue rations to men that belonged to no regiments or companies. The people of Cincinnati were very prompt to send contributions of cooked food to the Fifth Street Market-House, which was made a temporary restaurant for the defenders of the city. Wagons were sent daily through nearly all the streets to gather these contributed supplies, and the street-cars were free to all women and children going to or from the Market-House. Hundreds walked to the front, to carry the provisions they had prepared with their own hands. All the ordinary edibles of civilized life were brought forward in abundance. Had our men fought at all, they would have fought on full stomachs. The arrival of General Buell's army at Louisville rendered it impossible for Bragg to take that city. The defenders of Cincinnati were re-enforced by a division from General Grant's army, which was then in West Tennessee. This arrival was followed by that of other trained regiments and brigades from various localities, so that we began to contemplate taking the offensive. The Rebels disappeared from our front, and a reconnoissance showed that they were falling back toward Lexington. They burned the turnpike and railway bridges as they retreated, showing conclusively that they had abandoned the siege. As soon as the retirement of the Rebels was positively ascertained, a portion of our forces was ordered from Cincinnati to Louisville. General Buell's army took the offensive, and pursued Bragg as he retreated toward the Tennessee River. General Wallace was relieved, and his command transferred to General Wright. A change in the whole military situation soon transpired. From holding the defensive, our armies became the pursuers of the Rebels, the latter showing little inclination to risk an encounter. The battle of Perryville was the great battle of this Kentucky campaign. Its result gave neither army much opportunity for exultation. In their retreat through Kentucky and Tennessee, the Rebels gathered all the supplies they could find, and carried them to their commissary depot at Knoxville. It was said that their trains included more than thirty thousand wagons, all of them heavily laden. Large droves of cattle and horses became the property of the Confederacy. CHAPTER XXI. THE BATTLE OF CORINTH. New Plans of the Rebels.--Their Design to Capture Corinth,--Advancing to the Attack.--Strong Defenses.--A Magnificent Charge.--Valor _vs._ Breast-Works.--The Repulse.--Retreat and Pursuit.--The National Arms Triumphant. The Bragg campaign into Kentucky being barren of important results, the Rebel authorities ordered that an attempt should be made to drive us from West Tennessee. The Rebel army in Northern Mississippi commenced the aggressive late in September, while the retreat of Bragg was still in progress. The battle of Iuka resulted favorably to the Rebels, giving them possession of that point, and allowing a large quantity of supplies to fall into their hands. On the 4th of October was the famous battle of Corinth, the Rebels under General Van Dorn attacking General Rosecrans, who was commanding at Corinth. The Rebels advanced from Holly Springs, striking Corinth on the western side of our lines. The movement was well executed, and challenged our admiration for its audacity and the valor the Rebel soldiery displayed. It was highly important for the success of the Rebel plans in the Southwest that we should be expelled from Corinth. Accordingly, they made a most determined effort, but met a signal defeat. Some of the best fighting of the war occurred at this battle of Corinth. The Rebel line of battle was on the western and northern side of the town, cutting off our communications with General Grant at Jackson. The Rebels penetrated our line, and actually obtained possession of a portion of Corinth, but were driven out by hard, earnest work. It was a struggle for a great prize, in which neither party was inclined to yield as long as it had any strength remaining to strike a blow. The key to our position was on the western side, where two earth-works had been thrown up to command the approaches in that direction. These works were known as "Battery Williams" and "Battery Robbinette," so named in honor of the officers who superintended their erection and commanded their garrisons at the time of the assault. These works were on the summits of two small hills, where the ascent from the main road that skirted their base was very gentle. The timber on these slopes had been cut away to afford full sweep to our guns. An advancing force would be completely under our fire during the whole time of its ascent. Whether succeeding or failing, it must lose heavily. [Illustration: THE REBEL CHARGE AT CORINTH.] General Van Dorn gave Price's Division the honor of assaulting these works. The division was composed of Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas regiments, and estimated at eight thousand strong. Price directed the movement in person, and briefly told his men that the position must be taken at all hazards. The line was formed on the wooded ground at the base of the hills on which our batteries stood. The advance was commenced simultaneously along the line. As the Rebels emerged from the forest, our guns were opened. Officers who were in Battery Williams at the time of the assault, say the Rebels moved in splendid order. Grape and shell made frequent and wide gaps through their ranks, but the line did not break nor waver. The men moved directly forward, over the fallen timber that covered the ground, and at length came within range of our infantry, which had been placed in the forts to support the gunners. Our artillery had made fearful havoc among the Rebels from the moment they left the protection of the forest. Our infantry was waiting with impatience to play its part. When the Rebels were fairly within range of our small-arms, the order was given for a simultaneous volley along our whole line. As the shower of bullets struck the Rebel front, hundreds of men went down. Many flags fell as the color-bearers were killed, but they were instantly seized and defiantly waved. With a wild cheer the Rebels dashed forward up to the very front of the forts, receiving without recoil a most deadly fire. They leaped the ditch and gained the parapet. They entered a bastion of Battery Williams, and for a minute held possession of one of our guns. Of the dozen or more that gained the interior of the bastion, very few escaped. Nearly all were shot down while fighting for possession of the gun, or surrendered when the parapet was cleared of those ascending it. The retreat of the Rebels was hasty, but it was orderly. Even in a repulse their coolness did not forsake them. They left their dead scattered thickly in our front. In one group of seventeen, they lay so closely together that their bodies touched each other. An officer told me he could have walked along the entire front of Battery Williams, touching a dead or wounded Rebel at nearly every step. Two Rebel colonels were killed side by side, one of them falling with his hand over the edge of the ditch. They were buried where they died. In the attack in which the Rebels entered the edge of the town, the struggle was nearly as great. It required desperate fighting for them to gain possession of the spot, and equally desperate fighting on our part to retake it. All our officers who participated in this battle spoke in admiration of the courage displayed by the Rebels. Praise from an enemy is the greatest praise. The Rebels were not defeated on account of any lack of bravery or of recklessness. They were fully justified in retreating after the efforts they made. Our army was just as determined to hold Corinth as the Rebels were to capture it. Advantages of position turned the scale in our favor, and enabled us to repulse a force superior to our own. Just before the battle, General Grant sent a division under General McPherson to re-enforce Corinth. The Rebels had cut the railway between the two points, so that the re-enforcement did not reach Corinth until the battle was over. On the morning following the battle, our forces moved out in pursuit of the retreating Rebels. At the same time a column marched from Bolivar, so as to fall in their front. The Rebels were taken between the two columns, and brought to an engagement with each of them; but, by finding roads to the south, managed to escape without disorganization. Our forces returned to Corinth and Bolivar, thinking it useless to make further pursuit. Thus terminated the campaign of the enemy against Corinth. There was no expectation that the Rebels would trouble us any more in that quarter for the present, unless we sought them out. Their defeat was sufficiently serious to compel them to relinquish all hope of expelling us from Corinth. During the time of his occupation of West Tennessee, General Grant was much annoyed by the wandering sons of Israel, who thronged his lines in great numbers. They were engaged in all kinds of speculation in which money could be made. Many of them passed the lines into the enemy's country, and purchased cotton, which they managed to bring to Memphis and other points on the river. Many were engaged in smuggling supplies to the Rebel armies, and several were caught while acting as spies. On our side of the lines the Jews were Union men, and generally announced their desire for a prompt suppression of the Rebellion. When under the folds of the Rebel flag they were the most ardent Secessionists, and breathed undying hostility to the Yankees. Very few of them had any real sympathy with either side, and were ready, like Mr. Pickwick, to shout with the largest mob on all occasions, provided there was money to be made by the operation. Their number was very great. In the latter half of '62, a traveler would have thought the lost tribes of Israel were holding a reunion at Memphis. General Grant became indignant, and issued an order banishing the Jews from his lines. The order created much excitement among the Americans of Hebraic descent. The matter was placed before the President, and the obnoxious restriction promptly revoked. During the time it was in force a large number of the proscribed individuals were obliged to go North. Sometimes the Rebels did not treat the Jews with the utmost courtesy. On one occasion a scouting party captured two Jews who were buying cotton. The Israelites were robbed of ten thousand dollars in gold and United States currency, and then forced to enter the ranks of the Rebel army. They did not escape until six months later. In Chicago, in the first year of the war, a company of Jews was armed and equipped at the expense of their wealthier brethren. The men composing the company served their full time, and were highly praised for their gallantry. The above case deserves mention, as it is an exception to the general conduct of the Jews. CHAPTER XXII. THE CAMPAIGN FROM CORINTH. Changes of Commanders.--Preparations for the Aggressive.--Marching from Corinth.--Talking with the People.--"You-uns and We-uns."--Conservatism of a "Regular."--Loyalty and Disloyalty.--Condition of the Rebel Army.--Foraging.--German Theology for American Soldiers.--A Modest Landlord.--A Boy without a Name.--The Freedmen's Bureau.--Employing Negroes.--Holly Springs and its People.--An Argument for Secession. Two weeks after the battle of Corinth, General Rosecrans was summoned to the Army of the Cumberland, to assume command in place of General Buell. General Grant was placed at the head of the Thirteenth Army Corps, including all the forces in West Tennessee. Preparations for an aggressive movement into the enemy's country had been in progress for some time. Corinth, Bolivar, and Jackson were strongly fortified, so that a small force could defend them. The base of supply was at Columbus, Kentucky, eighty-five miles due north of Jackson, thus giving us a long line of railway to protect. On the first of November the movement began, by the advance of a column from Corinth and another from Bolivar. These columns met at Grand Junction, twenty-five miles north of Holly Springs, and, after lying there for two weeks, advanced to the occupation of the latter point. The Rebels evacuated the place on our approach, and after a day or two at Holly Springs we went forward toward the south. Abbeville and Oxford were taken, and the Rebels established themselves at Grenada, a hundred miles south of Memphis. From Corinth I accompanied the division commanded by General Stanley. I had known this officer in Missouri, in the first year of the war, when he claimed to be very "conservative" in his views. During the campaign with General Lyon he expressed himself opposed to a warfare that should produce a change in the social status at the South. When I met him at Corinth he was very "radical" in sentiment, and in favor of a thorough destruction of the "peculiar institution." He declared that he had liberated his own slaves, and was determined to set free all the slaves of any other person that might come in his way. He rejoiced that the war had not ended during the six months following the fall of Fort Sumter, as we should then have allowed slavery to exist, which would have rendered us liable to another rebellion whenever the Southern leaders chose to make it. We could only be taught by the logic of events, and it would take two or three years of war to educate the country to a proper understanding of our position. It required a war of greater magnitude than was generally expected at the outset. In 1861 there were few people who would have consented to interfere with "slavery in the States." The number of these persons was greater in 1862, but it was not until 1864 that the anti-slavery sentiment took firm hold of the public mind. In 1861 the voice of Missouri would have favored the retention of the old system. In 1864 that State became almost as radical as Massachusetts. The change in public sentiment elsewhere was nearly as great. During the march from Corinth to Grand Junction, I had frequent opportunity for conversing with the people along the route. There were few able-bodied men at home. It was the invariable answer, when we asked the whereabouts of any citizen, "He's away." Inquiry would bring a reluctant confession that he had gone to the Rebel army. Occasionally a woman would boast that she had sent her husband to fight for his rights and the rights of his State. The violation of State rights and the infringement upon personal prerogative were charged upon the National Government as the causes of the war. Some of the women displayed considerable skill in arguing the question of secession, but their arguments were generally mingled with invective. The majority were unable to make any discussion whatever. "What's you-uns come down here to fight we-uns for?" said one of the women whose husband was in the Rebel army. "We-uns never did you-uns no hurt." (This addition of a syllable to the personal pronouns of the second and third persons is common in some parts of the South, while in others it will not be heard.) "Well," said General Stanley, "we came down here because we were obliged to come. Your people commenced a war, and we are trying to help you end it." "We-uns didn't want to fight, no-how. You-uns went and made the war so as to steal our niggers." The woman acknowledged that neither her husband nor herself ever owned negroes, or ever expected to do so. She knew nothing about Fort Sumter, and only knew that the North elected one President and the South another, on the same occasion. The South only wanted its president to rule its own region, but the North wanted to extend its control over the whole country, so as to steal the negroes. Hence arose the war. Some of the poorer whites manifested a loyal feeling, which sprang from a belief that the establishment of the Confederacy would not better their condition. This number was not large, but it has doubtless increased with the termination of the war. The wealthier portion of the people were invariably in sympathy with the Rebel cause. After we reached Grand Junction, and made our camp a short distance south of that point, we were joined by the column from Bolivar. In the two columns General Grant had more than forty thousand men, exclusive of a force under General Sherman, about to move from Memphis. The Rebel army was at Holly Springs and Abbeville, and was estimated at fifty thousand strong. Every day found a few deserters coming in from the Rebels, but their number was not large. The few that came represented their army to be well supplied with shoes, clothing, and ammunition, and also well fed. They were nearly recovered from the effects of their repulse at Corinth, a month before. Our soldiers foraged at will on the plantations near our camp. The quantities of supplies that were brought in did not argue that the country had been previously visited by an army. Mules, horses, cattle, hogs, sheep, chickens, and other things used by an army, were found in abundance. The soldiers did not always confine their foraging to articles of necessity. A clergyman's library was invaded and plundered. I saw one soldier bending under the (avoirdupois) weight of three heavy volumes on theology, printed in the German language. Another soldier, a mere boy, was carrying away in triumph a copy of Scott's Greek Lexicon. In every instance when it came to their knowledge, the officers compelled the soldiers to return the books they had stolen. German theology and Greek Lexicons were not thought advantageous to an army in the field. One wing of our army was encamped at Lagrange, Tennessee, and honored with the presence of General Grant. Lagrange presented a fair example of the effects of secession upon the interior villages of the South. Before the war it was the center of a flourishing business. Its private residences were constructed with considerable magnificence, and evinced the wealth of their owners. There was a male and a female college; there was a bank, and there were several stores and commission houses. When the war broke out, the young men at the male college enlisted in the Rebel army. The young women in the female college went to their homes. The bank was closed for want of funds, the hotels had no guests, the stores had few customers, and these had no money, the commission houses could find no cotton to sell and no goods to buy. Every thing was completely stagnated. All the men who could carry muskets went to the field. When we occupied the town, there were not three men remaining who were of the arms-bearing age. I found in Lagrange a man who _could_ keep a hotel. He was ignorant, lazy, and his establishment only resembled the Fifth Avenue or the Continental in the prices charged to the guests. I staid several days with this Boniface, and enjoyed the usual fare of the interior South. Calling for my bill at my departure, I found the charges were only three dollars and fifty cents per day. My horse had been kept in a vacant and dilapidated stable belonging to the hotel, but the landlord refused to take any responsibility for the animal. He had no corn or hay, and his hostler had "gone to the Yankees!" During my stay I employed a man to purchase corn and give the desired attention to the horse. The landlord made a charge of one dollar per day for "hoss-keeping," and was indignant when I entered a protest. Outside of Newport and Saratoga, I think there are very few hotel-keepers in the North who would make out and present a bill on so small a basis as this. This taverner's wife and daughter professed an utter contempt for all white persons who degraded themselves to any kind of toil. Of course, their hostility to the North was very great. Beyond a slight supervision, they left every thing to the care of the negroes. A gentleman who was with me sought to make himself acquainted with the family, and succeeded admirably until, on one evening, he constructed a small toy to amuse the children. This was too much. He was skillful with his hands, and must therefore be a "mudsill." His acquaintance with the ladies of that household came to an end. His manual dexterity was his ruin. There was another hotel in Lagrange, a rival establishment, that bore the reputation of being much the worse in point of comfort. It was owned by a widow, and this widow had a son--a lank, overgrown youth of eighteen. His poverty, on one point, was the greatest I ever knew. He could have been appropriately selected as the hero of a certain popular novel by Wilkie Collins. No name had ever been given him by his parents. In his infancy they spoke of him as "the boy." When he grew large enough to appear on the street with other boys, some one gave him the _sobriquet_ of "Rough and Ready." From that time forward, his only praenomen was "Rough." I made several inquiries among his neighbors, but could not ascertain that he bore any other Christian appellative. The first comprehensive order providing for the care of the negroes in the Southwest, was issued by General Grant while his army lay at Lagrange and Grand Junction. Previous to that time, the negroes had been disposed of as each division and post commander thought best, under his general instructions not to treat them unkindly. Four months earlier, our authorities at Memphis had enrolled several hundred able-bodied negroes into an organization for service in the Quartermaster's Department, in accordance with the provisions of an order from District Head-Quarters. They threw up fortifications, loaded and unloaded steamboats, and performed such other labor as was required. In General Grant's army there was a pioneer corps of three hundred negroes, under the immediate charge of an overseer, controlled by an officer of engineers. No steps were then taken to use them as soldiers. The number of negroes at our posts and in our camps was rapidly increasing. Under the previous orders, they were registered and employed only on Government work. None but the able-bodied males were thus available. The new arrangements contemplated the employment of all who were capable of performing any kind of field labor. It was expected to bring some revenue to the Government, that would partially cover the expense of providing for the negroes. The following is the order which General Grant issued:-- HEAD-QUARTERS THIRTEENTH ARMY CORPS, DEPARTMENT OF THE TENNESSEE, LAGRANGE, TENNESSEE, _November_ 14, 1862. SPECIAL FIELD ORDER, NO. 4. I. Chaplain J. Eaton, Jr., of the Twenty-seventh Ohio Volunteers, is hereby appointed to take charge of all fugitive slaves that are now, or may from time to time come, within the military lines of the advancing army in this vicinity, not employed and registered in accordance with General Orders, No. 72, from head-quarters District of West Tennessee, and will open a camp for them at Grand Junction, where they will be suitably cared for, and organized into companies, and set to work, picking, ginning, and baling all cotton now outstanding in fields. II. Commanding officers of all troops will send all fugitives that come within the lines, together with such teams, cooking utensils, and other baggage as they may bring with them, to Chaplain J. Eaton, Jr., at Grand Junction. III. One regiment of infantry from Brigadier-General McArthur's Division will be temporarily detailed as guard in charge of such contrabands, and the surgeon of said regiment will be charged with the care of the sick. IV. Commissaries of subsistence will issue, on the requisitions of Chaplain Eaton, omitting the coffee ration, and substituting rye. By order of Major-General U.S. Grant. JNO. A. RAWLINS, A.A.G. Chaplain Eaton entered immediately upon the discharge of his duties. Many division and brigade commanders threw obstacles in his way, and were very slow to comply with General Grant's order. Some of the officers of the Commissary Department made every possible delay in filling Chaplain Eaton's requisitions. The people of the vicinity laughed at the experiment, and prophesied speedy and complete failure. They endeavored to insure a failure by stealing the horses and mules, and disabling the machinery which Chaplain Eaton was using. Failing in this, they organized guerrilla parties, and attempted to frighten the negroes from working in the field. They only desisted from this enterprise when some of their number were killed. All the negroes that came into the army lines were gathered at Grand Junction and organized, in compliance with the order. There were many fields of cotton fully ripened, that required immediate attention. Cotton-picking commenced, and was extensively prosecuted. The experiment proved a success. The cotton, in the immediate vicinity of Grand Junction and Lagrange was gathered, baled, and made ready for market. For once, the labors of the negro in the Southwest were bringing an actual return to the Government. The following year saw the system enlarged, as our armies took possession of new districts. In 1863, large quantities of cotton were gathered from fields in the vicinity of Lake Providence and Milliken's Bend, and the cultivation of plantations was commenced. In 1864, this last enterprise was still further prosecuted. Chaplain Eaton became Colonel Eaton, and the humble beginning at Grand Junction grew into a great scheme for demonstrating the practicability of free labor, and benefiting the negroes who-had been left without support by reason of the flight of their owners. As the army lay in camp near Lagrange for nearly four weeks, and the enemy was twenty-five miles distant, there was very little war correspondence to be written. There was an occasional skirmish near the front, but no important movement whatever. The monotony of this kind of life, and the tables of the Lagrange hotels, were not calculated to awaken much enthusiasm. Learning from a staff officer the probable date when the army would advance, I essayed a visit to St. Louis, and returned in season to take part in the movement into Mississippi. At the time General Grant advanced from Lagrange, he ordered General Sherman to move from Memphis, so that the two columns would unite in the vicinity of Oxford, Mississippi. General Sherman pushed his column as rapidly as possible, and, by the combined movement, the Rebels were forced out of their defenses beyond Oxford, and compelled to select a new line in the direction of Grenada. Our flag was steadily advancing toward the Gulf. Satisfied there would be no battle until our army had passed Oxford, I tarried several days at Holly Springs, waiting for the railway to be opened. I found the town a very pleasant one, finely situated, and bearing evidence of the wealth and taste of its inhabitants. When the war broke out, there were only two places in the State that could boast a larger population than Holly Springs. At the time of my arrival, the hotels of Holly Springs were not open, and I was obliged to take a room at a private house with one of the inhabitants. My host was an earnest advocate of the Rebel cause, and had the fullest confidence in the ultimate independence of the South. "We intend," said he, "to establish a strong Government, in which there will be no danger of interference by any abolitionists. If you had allowed us to have our own way, there would never have been any trouble. We didn't want you to have slavery in the North, but we wanted to go into the Territories, where we had a perfect right, and do as we pleased about taking our slaves there. The control of the Government belongs to us. The most of the Presidents have been from the South, as they ought to be. It was only when you elected a sectional President, who was sworn to break up slavery, that we objected. You began the war when you refused us the privilege of having a national President." This gentleman argued, further, that the half of all public property belonged to the South, and it was only just that the State authorities should take possession of forts and arsenals, as they did at the inception of the war. It was the especial right of the South to control the nation. Slavery was instituted from Heaven, for the especial good of both white and black. Whoever displayed any sympathy for the negro, and wished to make him free, was doing a great injustice to the slave and his master, particularly to the latter. Once he said the destruction of slavery would be unworthy a people who possessed any gallantry. "You will," he declared, "do a cruel wrong to many fine ladies. They know nothing about working with their hands, and consider such knowledge disgraceful. If their slaves are taken from them, these ladies will be helpless." This gentleman was the possessor of several negroes, though he lived in a house that he did not own. Of course, it was a great injustice to deprive him of his only property, especially as the laws of his State sanctioned such ownership. He declared he would not submit to any theft of that character. I do not think I ever saw a person manifest more passion than was exhibited by this individual on hearings one afternoon, that one of his slaves had taken refuge in our camp, with the avowed intention of going North. "I don't care for the loss," said he, "but what I do care for is, to be robbed by a nigger. I can endure an injury from a white man; to have a nigger defy me is too much." Unfortunate and unhappy man! I presume he is not entirely satisfied with the present status of the "Peculiar Institution." The cotton speculators at Holly Springs were guilty of some sharp transactions. One day a gentleman residing in the vicinity came to town in order to effect a sale of fifty bales. The cotton was in a warehouse a half-dozen miles away. Remaining over night in Holly Springs, and walking to the railway station in the morning, he found his cotton piled by the track and ready for shipment. Two men were engaged effacing the marks upon the bales. By some means they had obtained a sufficient number of Government wagons to remove the entire lot during the night. It was a case of downright theft. The offenders were banished beyond the lines of the army. In a public office at Holly Springs our soldiers found a great number of bills on the Northern Bank of Mississippi. They were in sheets, just as they had come from the press. None of them bore dates or signatures. The soldiers supplied all needed chirography, and the bills obtained a wide circulation. Chickens, pigs, and other small articles were purchased of the whites and negroes, and paid for with the most astonishing liberality. Counterfeits of the Rebel currency were freely distributed, and could only be distinguished from the genuine by their superior execution. Among the women in Holly Springs and its vicinity snuff was in great demand. The article is used by them in much the same way that men chew tobacco. The practice is known as "dipping," and is disgusting in the extreme. A stick the size of a common pencil is chewed or beaten at one end until the fibers are separated. In this condition it forms a brush. This brush is moistened with saliva, and plunged into the snuff. The fine powder which adheres is then rubbed on the gums and among the teeth. A species of partial intoxication is the result. The effect of continued "dipping" becomes apparent. The gums are inflamed, the teeth are discolored, the lips are shriveled, and the complexion is sallow. The throat is dry and irritated, and there is a constant desire to expectorate. I trust the habit will never become a Northern one. CHAPTER XXIII. GRANT'S OCCUPATION OF MISSISSIPPI. The Slavery Question.--A Generous Offer.--A Journalist's Modesty.--Hopes of the Mississippians at the Beginning of the War.--Visiting an Editress.--Literature under Difficulties.--Jacob Thompson and his Correspondence.--Plans for the Capture of Vicksburg.--Movements of General Sherman.--The Raid upon Holly Springs.--Forewarned, but not Forearmed.--A Gallant Fight. The people of Holly Springs were much excited over the slavery question. It was then early in December. The President's proclamation was to have its effect on all States, or portions of States, not represented in Congress on the first of January following. The slaveholders desired to have the northern district of Mississippi represented in Congress before the first of January. Three or four days after my arrival at Holly Springs I was with a small party of citizens to whom I had received introduction. The great question was being discussed. All were agreed that Northern Mississippi should be represented in Congress at whatever cost. "Grant has now been in Mississippi nearly two weeks," said the principal speaker; "we are clearly entitled to representation." "Certainly we are," responded another; "but who will represent us?" "Hold an election to-morrow, and choose our man." "Who will we send? None of us would be received. There isn't a man in the district who could swear he has taken no part in the Rebellion." "I have it," said the individual who first proposed an election. Turning to me, he made a somewhat novel proposition: "You can represent us in Congress. We've all been so d----d disloyal that we can't go; but that is no reason why we should not send a loyal men. Say yes, and we'll meet to-morrow, a dozen of us, and elect you." Here was an opportunity for glory. Only four days in a State from which I could go to Congress! I was offered all necessary credentials to insure my reception. My loyalty could be clearly and easily proved. My only duties would be to assist in fastening slavery upon my congressional district. Much as I felt honored at the offer of distinction, I was obliged to decline it. A similar proposition was made to another journalist. He, like myself, was governed by modesty, and begged to be excused from serving. The desire of this people to be represented in Congress, was a partial proof that they expected the national authority restored throughout the country. They professed to believe that our occupation would be temporary, but their actions did not agree with their words. They were greatly mortified at the inability of their army to oppose our advance, and frequently abused the Rebel Government without stint. They had anticipated an easy victory from the outset, and were greatly disappointed at the result, up to that time. "Just see how it is," said a Mississippian one day; "we expected to whip you without the slightest trouble. We threw the war into the Border States to keep it off our soil. Mississippi was very earnest for the Rebellion when Kentucky was the battle-ground. We no more expected you would come here, than that we should get to the moon. It is the fortune of war that you have driven us back, but it is very severe upon the cotton States." I ventured to ask about the possibilities of repudiation of the Rebel debt, in case the Confederacy was fairly established. "Of course we shall repudiate," was the response. "It would be far better for the Confederacy to do so than to attempt to pay the debt, or even its interest. Suppose we have a debt of a thousand millions, at eight per cent. This debt is due to our own people, and they have to pay the interest upon it. In twelve years and a half they would have paid another thousand millions, and still be as deeply in debt as ever. Now, if they repudiate the whole, the country will be a thousand millions richer at the end of twelve years and a half, than it otherwise would." In Mississippi, as well as in other Southern States, I frequently heard this argument. It is not surprising that the confidence of the people in their currency was shaken at a very early period. In its days of prosperity, Holly Springs boasted of two rival papers, each of them published weekly. One of these died just as the war broke out. The proprietor of the other, who was at the same time its editor, went, with his two sons, into the Rebel army, leaving the paper in charge of his wife. The lady wielded the pen for nearly a year, but the scarcity of printing-paper compelled her to close her office, a few months before our arrival. One afternoon, I accompanied Mr. Colburn, of _The World_, on a visit to the ex-editress. The lady received our cards and greeted us very cordially. She spoke, with evident pride, of her struggles to sustain her paper in war-time and under war prices, and hoped she could soon resume its publication. She referred to the absence of her husband and sons in the Rebel service, and was gratified that they had always borne a good record. She believed in the South and in the justness of its cause, but was prompt to declare that all the wrong was not on one side. She neither gave the South extravagant praise, nor visited the North with denunciation. She regretted the existence of the war, and charged its beginning upon the extremists of both sides. Slavery was clearly its cause, and she should look for its complete destruction in the event of the restoration of national authority. Through justice to itself, the North could demand nothing less, and the South must be willing to abide by the fortune of war. This woman respected and admired the North, because it was a region where labor was not degrading. She had always opposed the Southern sentiment concerning labor, and educated her children after her own belief. While other boys were idling in the streets, she had taught her sons all the mysteries of the printing-office, and made them able to care for themselves. She was confident they would vindicate the correctness of her theory, by winning good positions in life. She believed slavery had assisted the development of the South, but was equally positive that its effect upon the white race was ruinous in the extreme. She had no word of abuse for the Union, but spoke of it in terms of praise. At the same time she expressed an earnest hope for the success of the Rebellion. She saw the evil of slavery, but wished the Confederacy established. How she could reconcile all her views I was unable to ascertain. I do not believe she will take seriously to heart the defeat of the scheme to found a slaveholders' government. In the suppression of the Rebellion she will doubtless discover a brilliant future for "the land of the cypress and myrtle," and bless the day that witnessed the destruction of slavery. At Oxford, our forces found the residence of the ex-Hon. Jacob Thompson, who has since figured prominently as the Rebel agent in Canada. In his office a letter-book and much correspondence were secured--the letters showing that the design of a rebellion dated much further back than the first election of Mr. Lincoln. Some of this correspondence was given to the public at the time, and proved quite interesting. The balance was sent to the War Department, where it was expected to be of service. The books in Mr. Thompson's library found their way to various parts of the Union, and became scattered where it will be difficult for their owner to gather them, should he desire to restore his collection. If "misery loves company," it was doubtless gratifying to Mr. Thompson to know of the capture of the library and correspondence of Jefferson Davis, several months later. Our advance into Mississippi was being successfully pushed, early in December, 1862. There was a prospect that it would not accomplish the desired object, the capture of Vicksburg, without some counter-movement. A force was sent from Helena, Arkansas, to cut the railway in rear of the Rebel army. Though accomplishing its immediate object, it did not make a material change in the military situation. The Rebels continued to hold Grenada, which they had strongly fortified. They could only be forced from this position by a movement that should render Grenada of no practical value. General Grant detached the right wing of his army, with orders to make a rapid march to Memphis, and thence to descend the Mississippi by steamboats to Vicksburg. This expedition was commanded by General Sherman. While the movement was in progress, General Grant was to push forward, on the line he had been following, and attempt to join General Sherman at the nearest practicable point on the Yazoo River above Vicksburg. The fall of Vicksburg was thus thought to be assured, especially as General Sherman's attack was to be made upon the defenses in its rear. General Sherman moved, to Memphis with due celerity. The garrison of that city was reduced as much as possible to re-enforce his column. The Army of Arkansas, then at Helena, was temporarily added to his command. This gave a force exceeding twenty-eight thousand strong to move upon Vicksburg. It was considered sufficiently large to accomplish the desired object--the garrison of Vicksburg having been weakened to strengthen the army in General Grant's front. I was in Holly Springs when General Sherman began to move toward Memphis. Thinking there would be active work at Vicksburg, I prepared to go to Columbus by rail, and take a steamboat thence to Memphis. By this route it was nearly four hundred miles; but it was safer and more expeditious to travel in that way than to attempt the "overland" journey of fifty miles in a direct line. There were rumors that the Rebels contemplated a raid upon Holly Springs, for the purpose of cutting General Grant's communications and destroying the supplies known to be accumulated there. From the most vague and obscurely-worded hints, given by a Secessionist, I inferred that such a movement was expected. The Rebels were arranging a cavalry force to strike a blow somewhere upon our line of railway, and there was no point more attractive than Holly Springs. I attached no importance to the story, as I had invariably known the friends of the Rebels to predict wonderful movements that never occurred. Meeting the post-commandant shortly afterward, I told him what I had heard. He assured me there was nothing to fear, and that every thing was arranged to insure a successful defense. On this point I did not agree with him. I knew very well that the garrison was not properly distributed to oppose a dash of the enemy. There were but few men on picket, and no precautions had been taken against surprise. Our accumulation of stores was sufficiently large to be worth a strong effort to destroy them. As I was about ready to leave, I concluded to take the first train to Columbus. Less than forty-eight hours after my departure, General Van Dorn, at the head of five thousand men, entered Holly Springs with very slight opposition. He found every thing nearly as he could have arranged it had he planned the defense himself. The commandant, Colonel Murphy, was afterward dismissed the service for his negligence in preparing to defend the place after being notified by General Grant that the enemy was moving to attack him. The accumulation of supplies at the railway depot, and all the railway buildings, with their surroundings, were burned. Two trains of cars were standing ready to move, and these shared a similar fate. In the center of the town, a building we were using as a magazine was blown up. The most of the business portion of Holly Springs was destroyed by fire, communicated from this magazine. During the first year of the war, Holly Springs was selected as the site of a "Confederate States Arsenal," and a series of extensive buildings erected at great expense. We had converted these buildings into hospitals, and were fitting them up with suitable accommodations for a large number of sick and wounded. After ordering our surgeons to remove their patients, the Rebels set fire to the hospitals while the yellow flag was floating over them. General Grant subsequently denounced this act as contrary to the usages of war. The Rebels remained in Holly Springs until five o'clock in the afternoon of the day of their arrival. At their departure they moved in a northerly direction, evidently designing to visit Grand Junction. At Davis's Mill, about half-way between Holly Springs and Grand Junction, they found a small stockade, garrisoned by two companies of infantry, protecting the railway bridge. They sent forward a flag-of-truce, and demanded the instant surrender of the stockade. Their demand was not complied with. That garrison, of less than two hundred men, fought Van Dorn's entire command four hours, repulsed three successive charges, and finally compelled the Rebels to retreat. Van Dorn's northward movement was checked, and our stores at Grand Junction and Lagrange were saved, by the gallantry of this little force. General Grant subsequently gave special compliment to the bravery of these soldiers and their officers, in an order which was read to every regiment in the Army of the Tennessee. Our plans were completely deranged by this movement of the enemy. The supplies and ammunition we had relied upon were destroyed, and our communications severed. It was impossible to push further into Mississippi, and preparations were made for immediate retreat. The railway was repaired and the heavy baggage sent to the rear as speedily as possible. When this was accomplished the army began to fall back. Oxford, Abbeville, and Holly Springs were abandoned, and returned to the protection of the Rebel flag. Northern Mississippi again became the field for guerrilla warfare, and a source of supply to the Rebels in the field. The campaign for the capture of Vicksburg took a new shape from the day our lines were severed. A few days before the surrender of Vicksburg, General Grant, in conversation with some friends, referred to his position in Mississippi, six months before. Had he pressed forward beyond Grenada, he would have been caught in midwinter in a sea of mud, where the safety of his army might have been endangered. Van Dorn's raid compelled him to retreat, saved him from a possible heavier reverse, and prepared the way for the campaign in which Vicksburg finally capitulated. A present disaster, it proved the beginning of ultimate success. CHAPTER XXIV. THE BATTLE OF CHICKASAW BAYOU. Leaving Memphis.--Down the Great River.--Landing in the Yazoo.-- Description of the Ground..--A Night in Bivouac.--Plan of Attack.-- Moving toward the Hills.--Assaulting the Bluff.--Our Repulse.--New Plans.--Withdrawal from the Yazoo. On arriving at Memphis, I found General Sherman's expedition was ready to move toward Vicksburg. A few of the soldiers who escaped from the raid on Holly Springs had reached Memphis with intelligence of that disaster. The news caused much excitement, as the strength of the Rebels was greatly exaggerated. A few of these soldiers thought Van Dorn's entire division of fifteen or twenty thousand men had been mounted and was present at the raid. There were rumors of a contemplated attack upon Memphis, after General Sherman's departure. Unmilitary men thought the event might delay the movement upon Vicksburg, but it did not have that effect. General Sherman said he had no official knowledge that Holly Springs had been captured, and could do no less than carry out his orders. The expedition sailed, its various divisions making a rendezvous at Friar's Point, twelve miles below Helena, on the night of the 22d of December. From this place to the mouth of the Yazoo, we moved leisurely down the Mississippi, halting a day near Milliken's Bend, almost in sight of Vicksburg. We passed a portion of Christmas-Day near the mouth of the Yazoo. On the morning of the 26th of December, the fleet of sixty transports, convoyed by several gun-boats, commenced the ascent of the Yazoo. This stream debouches into the Mississippi, fifteen miles above Vicksburg, by the course of the current, though the distance in an airline is not more than six miles. Ten or twelve miles above its mouth, the Yazoo sweeps the base of the range of hills on which Vicksburg stands, at a point nearly behind the city. It was therefore considered a feasible route to the rear of Vicksburg. In a letter which I wrote on that occasion, I gave the following description of the country adjoining the river, and the incidents of a night bivouac before the battle:--"The bottom-land of the Yazoo is covered with a heavy growth of tall cypress-trees, whose limbs are everywhere interlaced. In many places the forest has a dense undergrowth, and in others it is quite clear, and affords easy passage to mounted men. These huge trees are heavily draped in the 'hanging moss,' so common in the Southern States, which gives them a most gloomy appearance. The moss, everywhere pendent from the limbs of the trees, covers them like a shroud, and in some localities shuts out the sunlight. In these forests there are numerous bayous that form a net-work converting the land into a series of islands. When separated from your companions, you can easily imagine yourself in a wilderness. In the wild woods of the Oregon there is no greater solitude." * * * * * "On the afternoon of the 27th, I started from the transports, and accompanied our left wing, which was advancing on the east side of Chickasaw Bayou. The road lay along the crest of the levee which had been thrown up on the bank of the bayou, to protect the fields on that side against inundation. This road was only wide enough for the passage of a single wagon. Our progress was very slow, on account of the necessity for removing heavy logs across the levee. When night overtook us, we made our bivouac in the forest, about three miles from the river. "I had taken with me but a single blanket, and a haversack containing my note-book and a few crackers. That night in bivouac acquainted me with some of the discomforts of war-making on the Yazoo. The ground was moist from recent rains, so that dry places were difficult to find. A fellow-journalist proposed that we unite our blankets, and form a double bed for mutual advantage. To this I assented. When my friend came forward, to rest in our combined couch, I found his 'blanket' was purely imaginary, having been left on the steamer at his departure. For a while we 'doubled,' but I was soon deserted, on account of the barrenness of my accommodations. "No fires were allowed, as they might reveal our position to the watchful enemy. The night was cold. Ice formed at the edge of the bayou, and there was a thick frost on the little patches of open ground. A negro who had lived in that region said the swamp usually abounded in moccasins, copperheads, and cane-snakes, in large numbers. An occasional rustling of the leaves at my side led me to imagine these snakes were endeavoring to make my acquaintance. "Laying aside my snake fancies, it was too cold to sleep. As fast as I would fall into a doze, the chill of the atmosphere would steal through my blanket, and remind me of my location. Half-sleeping and half-waking, I dreamed of every thing disagreeable. I had visions of Greenland's icy mountains, of rambles in Siberia, of my long-past midwinter nights in the snow-drifted gorges of Colorado, of shipwreck, and of burning dwellings, and of all moving accidents by flood and field! These dreams followed each other with a rapidity that far outstripped the workings of the electric telegraph. "Cold and dampness and snakes and fitful dreams were not the only bodily discomforts. A dozen horses were loose in camp, and trotting gayly about. Several times they passed at a careless pace within a yard of my head. Once the foremost of the _caballada_ jumped directly over me, and was followed by the rest. My comments on these eccentricities of that noble animal, the horse, provoked the derision rather than the sympathy of those who heard them. "A teamster, who mistook me for a log, led his mules over me. A negro, under the same delusion, attempted to convert me into a chair, and another wanted to break me up for fuel, to be used in making a fire after daylight. Each of these little blunders evoked a gentle remonstrance, that effectually prevented a repetition by the same individual. "A little past daylight a shell from the Rebel batteries exploded within twenty yards of my position, and warned me that it was time to rise. To make my toilet, I pulled the sticks and leaves from my hair and beard, and brushed my overcoat with a handful of moss. I breakfasted on a cracker and a spoonful of whisky. I gave my horse a handful of corn and a large quantity of leaves. The former he ate, but the latter he refused to touch. The column began to move, and I was ready to attend upon its fortunes." General Sherman's plan was to effect a landing on the Yazoo, and, by taking possession of the bluffs, sever the communication between Vicksburg and the interior. It was thought the garrison of Vicksburg had been greatly weakened to re-enforce the army in General Grant's front, so that our success would be certain when we once gained the bluffs. A portion of our forces effected a landing on the 26th, but the whole command was not on shore till the 27th. Fighting commenced on the 27th, and became more earnest on the 28th, as we crowded toward the bluffs. In moving from the steamboat landing to the base of the bluffs on the 28th, our army encountered the enemy at several points, but forced him back without serious loss on either side. It appeared to be the Rebel design not to make any resistance of magnitude until we had crossed the lower ground and were near the base of the line of hills protecting Vicksburg. Not far from the foot of the bluffs there was a bayou, which formed an excellent front for the first line of the Rebel defenses. On our right we attempted to cross this bayou with a portion of Morgan L. Smith's Division, but the Rebel fire was so severe that we were repulsed. On our extreme right a similar attempt obtained the same result. On our left the bayou was crossed by General Morgan's and General Steele's Divisions at two or three points, and our forces gained a position close up to the edge of the bluff. At eleven A. M. on the 29th, an assault was made by three brigades of infantry upon the works of the enemy on this portion of the line. General Blair and General Thayer from Steele's Division, pushed forward through an abatis which skirted the edge of the bayou, and captured the first line of Rebel rifle-pits. From this line the brigades pressed two hundred yards farther up the hillside, and temporarily occupied a portion of the second line. Fifty yards beyond was a small clump of trees, which was gained by one regiment, the Thirteenth Illinois, of General Blair's Brigade. [Illustration: GENERAL BLAIR'S BRIGADE ASSAULTING THE HILL AT CHICKASAW, BAYOU.] The Rebels massed heavily against these two brigades. Our assaulting force had not been followed by a supporting column, and was unable to hold the works it captured. It fell back to the bayou and re-formed its line. One of General Morgan's brigades occupied a portion of the rifle-pits at the time the hill was assaulted by the brigades from General Steele's Division. During the afternoon of the 29th, preparations were made for another assault, but the plan was not carried out. It was found the Rebels had been re-enforced at that point, so that we had great odds against us. The two contending armies rested within view of each other, throwing a few shells each hour, to give notice of their presence. After the assault, the ground between the contending lines was covered with dead and wounded men of our army. A flag-of-truce was sent out on the afternoon of the 29th, to arrange for burying the dead and bringing away the wounded, but the Rebels would not receive it. Sunrise on the 30th, noon, sunset, and sunrise again, and they lay there still. On the 31st, a truce of five hours was arranged, and the work of humanity accomplished. A heavy rain had fallen, rendering the ground unfit for the rapid moving of infantry and artillery, in front of the Rebel position. On the evening of the 31st, orders were issued for a new plan of attack at another part of the enemy's lines. A division was to be embarked on the transports, and landed as near as possible to the Rebel fortifications on Haines's Bluff, several miles up the Yazoo. The gun-boats were to take the advance, engage the attention of the forts, and cover the landing. Admiral Porter ordered Colonel Ellet to go in advance, with a boat of his ram fleet, to remove the obstructions the Rebels had placed in the river, under the guns of the fort. A raft was attached to the bow of the ram, and on the end of the raft was a torpedo containing a half ton of powder. Admiral Porter contended that the explosion of the torpedo would remove the obstructions, so that the fleet could proceed. Colonel Ellet expressed his readiness to obey orders, but gave his opinion that the explosion, while effecting its object, would destroy his boat and all on board. Some officers and civilians, who knew the admiral's antipathy to Colonel Ellet, suggested that the former was of the same opinion, and therefore desirous that the experiment should be made. Every thing was in readiness on the morning of the 1st of January, but a dense fog prevented the execution of our new plan. On the following day we withdrew from the Yazoo, and ended the second attack upon Vicksburg. Our loss was not far from two thousand men, in all casualties. General Sherman claimed to have carried out with exactness, the instructions from his superior officers respecting the time and manner of the attack. Van Dorn's raid upon General Grant's lines, previous to Sherman's departure from Memphis, had radically changed the military situation. Grant's advance being stopped, his co-operation by way of Yazoo City could not be given. At the same time, the Rebels were enabled to strengthen their forces at Vicksburg. The assault was a part of the great plan for the conquest of the Mississippi, and was made in obedience to positive orders. Before the orders were carried out, a single circumstance had deranged the whole plan. After the fighting was ended and the army had re-embarked, preparatory to leaving the Yazoo, General Sherman was relieved from command by General McClernand. The latter officer carried out the order for withdrawal. The fleet steamed up the Mississippi to Milliken's Bend, where it remained for a day or two. General McClernand directed that an expedition be made against Arkansas Post, a Rebel fortification on the Arkansas River, fifty miles above its mouth. After the first attack upon Vicksburg, in June, 1862, the Rebels strengthened the approaches in the rear of the city. They threw up defensive works on the line of bluffs facing the Yazoo, and erected a strong fortification to prevent our boats ascending that stream. Just before General Sherman commenced his assault, the gun-boat _Benton_, aided by another iron-clad, attempted to silence the batteries at Haines's Bluff, but was unsuccessful. Her sides were perforated by the Rebel projectiles, and she withdrew from the attack in a disabled condition. Captain Gwin, her commander, was mortally wounded early in the fight. Captain Gwin was married but a few weeks before this occurrence. His young wife was on her way from the East to visit him, and was met at Cairo with the news of his death. About two months before the time of our attack, an expedition descended the Mississippi from Helena, and suddenly appeared near the mouth of the Yazoo. It reached Milliken's Bend at night, surprising and capturing the steamer _Fairplay_, which was loaded with arms and ammunition for the Rebels in Arkansas. So quietly was the capture made, that the officers of the _Fairplay_ were not aware of the change in their situation until awakened by their captors. CHAPTER XXV. BEFORE VICKSBURG. Capture of Arkansas Post.--The Army returns to Milliken's Bend.--General Sherman and the Journalists.--Arrest of the Author.--His Trial before a Military Court.--Letter from President Lincoln.--Capture of Three Journalists. The army moved against Arkansas Post, which was captured, with its entire garrison of five thousand men. The fort was dismantled and the earth-works leveled to the ground. After this was accomplished, the army returned to Milliken's Bend. General Grant arrived a few days later, and commenced the operations which culminated in the fall of Vicksburg. Before leaving Memphis on the Yazoo expedition, General Sherman issued an order excluding all civilians, except such as were connected with the transports, and threatening to treat as a spy any person who should write accounts for publication which might give information to the enemy. No journalists were to be allowed to take part in the affair. One who applied for permission to go in his professional capacity received a very positive refusal. General Sherman had a strong antipathy to journalists, amounting almost to a mania, and he was determined to discourage their presence in his movements against Vicksburg. Five or six correspondents accompanied the expedition, some of them on passes from General Grant, which were believed superior to General Sherman's order, and others with passes or invitations from officers in the expedition. I carried a pass from General Grant, and had a personal invitation from an officer who held a prominent command in the Army of Arkansas. I had passed Memphis, almost without stopping, and was not aware of the existence of the prohibitory order until I reached the Yazoo. I wrote for _The Herald_ an account of the battle, which I directed to a friend at Cairo, and placed in the mail on board the head-quarters' boat. The day after mailing my letter, I learned it was being read at General Sherman's head-quarters. The General afterward told me that his mail-agent, Colonel Markland, took my letter, among others, from the mail, with his full assent, though without his order. I proceeded to rewrite my account, determined not to trust again to the head-quarters' mail. When I was about ready to depart, I received the letter which had been stolen, bearing evident marks of repeated perusal. Two maps which it originally contained were not returned. I proceeded to Cairo as the bearer of my own dispatches. On my return to Milliken's Bend, two weeks later, I experienced a new sensation. After two interviews with the indignant general, I received a tender of hospitalities from the provost-marshal of the Army of the Tennessee. The tender was made in such form as left no opportunity for declining it. A few days after my arrest, I was honored by a trial before a military court, consisting of a brigadier-general, four colonels, and two majors. General Sherman had made the following charges against me:-- First.--"_Giving information to the enemy._" Second.--"_Being a spy._" Third.--"_Disobedience of orders._" The first and second charges were based on my published letter. The third declared that I accompanied the expedition without proper authority, and published a letter without official sanction. These were my alleged offenses. My court had a protracted session. It decided there was nothing in my letter which violated the provisions of the order regulating war correspondence for the Press. It declared me innocent of the first and second charges. It could see nothing criminal in the manner of my accompanying the expedition. But I was guilty of something. There was a "General Order, Number 67," issued in 1861, of whose existence neither myself nor, as far as I could ascertain, any other journalist, was aware. It provided that no person should write, print, or cause to be printed "any information respecting military movements, without the authority and sanction of the general in command." Here was the rock on which I split. I had written a letter respecting military movements, and caused it to be printed, "without the sanction of the general in command." Correspondents everywhere had done the same thing, and continued to do it till the end of the war. "Order Number 67" was as obsolete as the laws of the Medes and Persians, save on that single occasion. Dispatches by telegraph passed under the eye of a Government censor, but I never heard of an instance wherein a letter transmitted by mail received any official sanction. My court was composed of officers from General Sherman's command, and was carefully watched by that distinguished military chieftain, throughout its whole sitting. It wavered in deciding upon the proper "punishment" for my offense. Should it banish me from that spot, or should I receive an official censure? It concluded to send me outside the limits of the Army of the Tennessee. During the days I passed in the care of the provost-marshal, I perused all the novels that the region afforded. When these were ended, I studied a copy of a well-known work on theology, and turned, for light reading, to the "Pirate's Own Book." A sympathizing friend sent me a bundle of tracts and a copy of the "Adventures of John A. Murrell." A volume of lectures upon temperance and a dozen bottles of Allsop's pale ale, were among the most welcome contributions that I received. The ale disappeared before the lectures had been thoroughly digested. The chambermaid of the steamboat displayed the greatest sympathy in my behalf. She declined to receive payment of a washing-bill, and burst into tears when I assured her the money was of no use to me. Her fears for my welfare were caused by a frightful story that had been told her by a cabin-boy. He maliciously represented that I was to be executed for attempting to purchase cotton from a Rebel quartermaster. The verdant woman believed the story for several days. It may interest some readers to know that the proceedings of a court-martial are made in writing. The judge-advocate (who holds the same position as the prosecuting attorney in a civil case) writes his questions, and then reads them aloud. The answers, as they are given, are reduced to writing. The questions or objections of the prisoner's counsel must be made in writing and given to the judge-advocate, to be read to the court. In trials where a large number of witnesses must be examined, it is now the custom to make use of "short-hand" writers. In this way the length of a trial is greatly reduced. The members of a court-martial sit in full uniform, including sash and sword, and preserve a most severe and becoming dignity. Whenever the court wishes to deliberate upon any point of law or evidence, the room is cleared, neither the prisoner nor his counsel being allowed to remain. It frequently occurs that the court is thus closed during the greater part of its sessions. With the necessity for recording all its proceedings, and frequent stoppages for deliberation, a trial by a military court is ordinarily very slow. In obedience to the order of the court, I left the vicinity of the Army of the Tennessee, and proceeded North. In departing from Young's Point, I could not obey a certain Scriptural injunction, as the mud of Louisiana adheres like glue, and defies all efforts to shake it off. Mr. Albert D. Richardson, of The Tribune, on behalf of many of my professional friends, called the attention of President Lincoln to the little affair between General Sherman and myself. In his recently published book of experiences during the war, Mr. Richardson has given a full and graphic account of his interview with the President. Mr. Lincoln unbent himself from his official cares, told two of his best stories, conversed for an hour or more upon the military situation, gave his reasons for the removal of General McClellan, and expressed his hope in our ultimate success. Declaring it his inflexible determination not to interfere with the conduct of any military department, he wrote the following document:-- EXECUTIVE MANSION, WASHINGTON, _March_ 20, 1863. WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: Whereas it appears to my satisfaction that Thomas W. Knox, a correspondent of _The New York Herald_, has been, by the sentence of a court-martial, excluded from the Military Department under command of Major-General Grant, and also that General Thayer, president of the court-martial, which rendered the sentence, and Major-General McClernand, in command of a corps of that department, and many other respectable persons, are of opinion that Mr. Knox's offense was technical, rather than willfully wrong, and that the sentence should be revoked: Now, therefore, said sentence is hereby so far revoked as to allow Mr. Knox to return to General Grant's head-quarters, to remain if General Grant shall give his express assent; and to again leave the department, if General Grant shall refuse such assent. A. LINCOLN With this letter I returned to the army. General Grant referred the question to General Sherman. In consideration of our quarrel, and knowing the unamiable character of the latter officer, I should have been greatly surprised had he given any thing else than a refusal. I had fully expected to return immediately when I left St. Louis, but, like most persons in a controversy, wished to carry my point. General Sherman long since retrieved his failure at Chickasaw Bayou. Throughout the war he was honored with the confidence and friendship of General Grant. The career of these officers was not marked by the jealousies that are too frequent in military life. The hero of the campaign from Chattanooga to Raleigh is destined to be known in history. In those successful marches, and in the victories won by his tireless and never vanquished army, he has gained a reputation that may well be enduring. Soon after my return from Young's Point, General Grant crossed the Mississippi at Grand Gulf, and made his daring and successful movement to attain the rear of Vicksburg. Starting with a force less than the one his opponent could bring against him, he cut loose from his communications and succeeded in severing the enemy's line of supplies. From Grand Gulf to Jackson, and from Jackson to the rear of Vicksburg, was a series of brilliant marches and brilliant victories. Once seated where he had his antagonist's army inclosed, General Grant opened his lines to the Yazoo, supplied himself with every thing desired, and pressed the siege at his leisure. With the fall of Vicksburg, and the fall, a few days later, of Port Hudson, "the Father of Waters went unvexed to the Sea." While the army was crossing the Mississippi at Grand Gulf, three well-known journalists, Albert D. Richardson and Junius H. Browne, of _The Tribune_, and Richard T. Colburn, of _The World_, attempted to run past the Rebel batteries at Vicksburg, on board a tug at midnight. The tug was blown up and destroyed; the journalists were captured and taken to the Rebel prison at Vicksburg. Thence they were removed to Richmond, occupying, while _en route_, the prisons of a half-dozen Rebel cities. Mr. Colburn was soon released, but the companions of his adventure were destined to pass nearly two years in the prisons of the Confederacy. By a fortunate escape and a midwinter march of nearly four hundred miles, they reached our lines in safety. In books and in lecture-rooms, they have since told the story of their captivity and flight. I have sometimes thought my little quarrel with General Sherman proved "a blessing in disguise," in saving me from a similar experience of twenty months in Rebel prisons. CHAPTER XXVI. KANSAS IN WAR-TIME. A Visit to Kansas.--Recollections of Border Feuds.--Peculiarities of Kansas Soldiers.--Foraging as a Fine Art.--Kansas and Missouri.--Settling Old Scores.--Depopulating the Border Counties.--Two Examples of Grand Strategy.--Capture of the "Little-More-Grape" Battery.--A Woman in Sorrow.--Frontier Justice.--Trial before a "Lynch" Court.--General Blunt's Order.--Execution of Horse-Thieves.--Auction Sale of Confiscated Property.--Banished to Dixie. In May, 1863, I made a hasty visit to Western Missouri and Kansas, to observe the effect of the war in that quarter. Seven years earlier the border warfare attracted much attention. The great Rebellion caused Kansas and its troubles to sink into insignificance. Since the first election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency, Kansas has been rarely mentioned. I passed through this young State in the summer of 1860. I was repeatedly told: "We have old grudges that we wish to settle; if the troubles ever break out again in any part of the United States, we hope to cross out our account." When the war opened, the people of Kansas saw their opportunity for "making square work," as they expressed it, with Missouri and the other slave States. They placed two regiments of volunteers in the field with as much celerity as was displayed in many of the older and more populous States. These regiments were followed by others until fully half the able-bodied population of Kansas was in the service. In some localities the proportion was even greater than this. The dash and daring of these Kansas soldiers became proverbial. At Wilson Creek, two regiments from Kansas had their first experience of battle, and bore themselves most nobly. The conduct of other Kansas soldiers, on other battle-fields, was equally commendable. Their bravery and endurance was only equaled by their ability in foraging. Horses, mules, cattle, and provisions have, in all times, been considered the legitimate spoils of war. The Kansas soldiers did not confine themselves to the above, but appropriated every thing portable and valuable, whether useful or useless. Their example was contagious, and the entire army soon learned to follow it. During General Grant's campaign in Mississippi in '62, the Seventh Kansas Cavalry obtained a reputation for ubiquity and lawlessness. Every man who engaged in plundering on his own account, no matter to what regiment he belonged, invariably announced himself a member of the Seventh Kansas. Every countryman who was robbed declared the robbery was committed by the Seventh Kansas "Jayhawkers." Uniting all the stories of robbery, one would conclude that the Seventh Kansas was about twenty thousand strong, and constantly in motion by fifty different roads, leading to all points of the compass. One day a soldier of the Second Illinois Cavalry gave me an account of his experience in horse-stealing. "Jim and I went to an old farmer's house, and told him we wanted his horses. He said he wanted to use them himself, and couldn't spare them. "'That don't make no sort of difference,' said I; 'we want your horses more than you do.' "'What regiment do you belong to?' "'Seventh Kansas Jayhawkers. The whole regiment talks of coming round here. I reckon I'll bring them.' "When I told him that," said the soldier, "he said I might take the horses, if I would only go away. He offered me a pint of whisky if I would promise not to bring the regiment there. Jim and me drank the whisky, and told him we would use our influence for him." Before the war was ended, the entire armies of the Southwest were able to equal the "Jayhawkers" in foraging. The march of Sherman's column through Mississippi, and afterward through Georgia and South Carolina, fully proved this. Particularly in the latter State, which originated the Rebellion, were the accomplishments of the foragers most conspicuously displayed. Our army left very little for another army to use. The desolation which was spread through the Southern States was among the most effective blows at the Rebellion. The Rebels were taught in the most practical manner, that insurrection was not to be indulged in with impunity. Those who suffered most were generally among the earliest to sue for peace. Sherman's terse answer to the mayor of Atlanta, when the latter protested against the banishment of the inhabitants, was appreciated by the Rebels after our final campaigns. "War is cruelty--you cannot refine it," speaks a volume in a few words. When hostilities commenced, the Kansas regiments were clamorous to be led into Missouri. During the border war of '55 and '56, Missourians invaded Kansas to control the elections by force of arms, and killed, often in cold blood, many of the quiet citizens of the Territory. The tier of counties in Missouri adjoining Kansas were most anxious to make the latter a slave State, and used every possible means to accomplish their object. The Kansas soldiers had their wish. They marched through Missouri. Those who had taken part in the outrages upon Kansas, five years earlier, were made to feel the hand of retribution. If they had burned the buildings of free-State settlers in '56, they found their own houses destroyed in '62. In the old troubles they contended for their right to make whatever warfare they chose, but were astounded and horrified in the latter days, when the tables were turned against them by those they had wronged. Along the frontier of Missouri the old system of warfare was revived. Guerrilla bands were formed, of which Quantrel and similar men were the leaders. Various incursions were made into Kansas by these marauders, and the depredations were worse than ever. They culminated in the burning of Lawrence and the massacre of its inhabitants. To break up these guerrilla bands, it became necessary to depopulate the western tier of counties in Missouri, from the Missouri River down to the thirty-eighth parallel of latitude. The most wealthy of these was Jackson County. Before the war it had a slave population of not far from four thousand, and its fields were highly productive. Two years after the war broke out it contained less than three hundred slaves, and its wealth had diminished in almost as great proportion. This was before any freedom had been officially declared to the slaves in the Border States. The order of depopulation had the desired effect. It brought peace to the border, though at a terrible cost. Missouri suffered greatly, and so did Kansas. The most prominent officer that Kansas furnished during the Rebellion, was Brigadier-General Blunt. At the beginning of the war he enlisted as a private soldier, but did not remain long in the ranks. His reputation in the field was that of a brave and reckless officer, who had little regard to military forms. His successes were due to audacity and daring, rather than to skill in handling troops, or a knowledge of scientific warfare. The battle of Cane Hill is said to have commenced by General Blunt and his orderlies attacking a Rebel picket. The general was surveying the country with his orderlies and a company of cavalry, not suspecting the enemy was as near as he proved to be. At the moment Blunt came upon the picket, the cavalry was looking in another direction. Firing began, and the picket was driven in and fell back to a piece of artillery, which had an infantry support. Blunt was joined by his cavalry, and the gun was taken by a vigorous charge and turned upon the Rebels. The latter were kept at bay until the main force was brought up and joined in the conflict. The Rebels believed we had a much larger number than we really possessed, else our first assault might have proved a sudden repulse. The same daring was kept up throughout the battle, and gave us the victory. At this battle we captured four guns, two of which bore a history of more than ordinary interest. They were of the old "Bragg's Battery" that turned the scale at Buena Vista, in obedience to General Taylor's mandate, "Give them a little more grape, captain." After the Mexican war they were sent to the United States Arsenal at Baton Rouge, whence they were stolen when the insurrection commenced. They were used against us at Wilson Creek and Pea Ridge. At another battle, whose name I have forgotten, our entire force of about two thousand men was deployed into a skirmish line that extended far beyond the enemy's flanks. The Rebels were nearly six thousand strong, and at first manifested a disposition to stand their ground. By the audacity of our stratagem they were completely deceived. So large a skirmish line was an indication of a proportionately strong force to support it. When they found us closing in upon their flanks, they concluded we were far superior in numbers, and certain to overwhelm them. With but slight resistance they fled the field, leaving much of their transportation and equipments to fall into our hands. We called in our skirmishers and pressed them in vigorous pursuit, capturing wagons and stragglers as we moved. A year after this occurrence the Rebels played the same trick upon our own forces near Fort Smith, Arkansas, and were successful in driving us before them. With about five hundred cavalry they formed a skirmish line that outflanked our force of two thousand. We fell back several miles to the protection of the fort, where we awaited attack. It is needless to say that no assault was made. Van Buren, Arkansas, was captured by eighteen men ten miles in advance of any support. This little force moved upon the town in a deployed line and entered at one side, while a Rebel regiment moved out at the other. Our men thought it judicious not to pursue, but established head-quarters, and sent a messenger to hurry up the column before the Rebels should discover the true state of affairs. The head of the column was five hours in making its appearance. When the circumstance became known the next day, one of our officers found a lady crying very bitterly, and asked what calamity had befallen her. As soon as she could speak she said, through her sobs: "I am not crying because you have captured the place. We expected that." Then came a fresh outburst of grief. "What _are_ you crying for, then?" asked the officer. "I am crying because you took it with only eighteen men, when we had a thousand that ran away from you!" The officer thought the reason for her sorrow was amply sufficient, and allowed her to proceed with her weeping. On the day of my arrival at Atchison there was more than ordinary excitement. For several months there had been much disregard of law outside of the most densely populated portions of the State. Robberies, and murders for the sake of robbery, were of frequent occurrence. In one week a dozen persons met violent deaths. A citizen remarked to me that he did not consider the times a great improvement over '55 and '56. Ten days before my arrival, a party of ruffians visited the house of a citizen about twelve miles from Atchison, for the purpose of robbery. The man was supposed to have several hundred dollars in his possession--the proceeds of a sale of stock. He had placed his funds in a bank at Leavenworth; but his visitors refused to believe his statement to that effect. They maltreated the farmer and his wife, and ended by hanging the farmer's son to a rafter and leaving him for dead. In departing, they took away all the horses and mules they could find. Five of these men were arrested on the following day, and taken to Atchison. The judge before whom they were brought ordered them committed for trial. On the way from the court-house to the jail the men were taken from the sheriff by a crowd of citizens. Instead of going to jail, they were carried to a grove near the town and placed on trial before a "Lynch" court. The trial was conducted with all solemnity, and with every display of impartiality to the accused. The jury decided that two of the prisoners, who had been most prominent in the outrage, should be hanged on that day, while the others were remanded to jail for a regular trial. One of the condemned was executed. The other, after having a rope around his neck, was respited and taken to jail. On the same day two additional arrests were made, of parties concerned in the outrage. These men were tried by a "Lynch" court, as their companions had been tried on the previous day. One of them was hanged, and the other sent to jail. For some time the civil power had been inadequate to the punishment of crime. The laws of the State were so loosely framed that offenders had excellent opportunities to escape their deserts by taking advantage of technicalities. The people determined to take the law into their own hands, and give it a thorough execution. For the good of society, it was necessary to put a stop to the outrages that had been so frequently committed. Their only course in such cases was to administer justice without regard to the ordinary forms. A delegation of the citizens of Atchison visited Leavenworth after the arrests had been made, to confer with General Blunt, the commander of the District, on the best means of securing order. They made a full representation of the state of affairs, and requested that two of the prisoners, then in jail, should be delivered to the citizens for trial. They obtained an order to that effect, addressed to the sheriff, who was holding the prisoners in charge. On the morning of the day following the reception of the order, people began to assemble in Atchison from all parts of the county to witness the trial. As nearly all the outrages had been committed upon the farmers who lived at distances from each other, the trial was conducted by the men from the rural districts. The residents of the city took little part in the affair. About ten o'clock in the forenoon a meeting was called to order in front of the court-house, where the following document was read:-- HEAD-QUARTERS DISTRICT OF KANSAS, FORT LEAVENWORTH, _May_ 22, 1863. TO THE SHERIFF OF ATCHISON COUNTY: SIR:--In view of the alarming increase of crime, the insecurity of life and property within this military district, the inefficiency of the civil law to punish offenders, and the small number of troops under my command making it impossible to give such protection to loyal and law-abiding citizens as I would otherwise desire; you will therefore deliver the prisoners, Daniel Mooney and Alexander Brewer, now in your possession, to the citizens of Atchison County, for trial and punishment by a citizens' court. This course, which in ordinary times and under different circumstances could not be tolerated, is rendered necessary for the protection of the property and lives of honest citizens against the lawless acts of thieves and assassins, who, of late, have been perpetrating their crimes with fearful impunity, and to prevent which nothing but the most severe and summary punishment will suffice. In conducting these irregular proceedings, it is to be hoped they will be controlled by men of respectability, and that cool judgment and discretion will characterize their actions, to the end that the innocent may be protected and the guilty punished. Respectfully, your obedient servant, JAMES G. BLUNT, _Major-General._ After the reading of the above order, resolutions indorsing and sustaining the action of General Blunt were passed unanimously. The following resolutions were passed separately, their reading being greeted with loud cheers. They are examples of strength rather than of elegance. "_Resolved_, That we pledge ourselves not to stop hanging until the thieves stop thieving. "_Resolved_, That as this is a citizens' court, we have no use for lawyers, either for the accused or for the people." A judge and jury were selected from the assemblage, and embraced some of the best known and most respected citizens of the county. Their selection was voted upon, just as if they had been the officers of a political gathering. As soon as elected, they proceeded to the trial of the prisoners. The evidence was direct and conclusive, and the prisoners were sentenced to death by hanging. The verdict was read to the multitude, and a vote taken upon its acceptance or rejection. Nineteen-twentieths of those present voted that the sentence should be carried into execution. The prisoners were taken from the court-house to the grove where the preceding executions had taken place. They were made to stand upon a high wagon while ropes were placed about their necks and attached to the limb of a large, spreading elm. When all was ready, the wagon was suddenly drawn from beneath the prisoners, and their earthly career was ended. A half-hour later the crowd had dispersed. The following morning showed few traces of the excitement of the previous day. The executions were effectual in restoring quiet to the region which had been so much disturbed. The Rebel sympathizers in St. Louis took many occasions to complain of the tyranny of the National Government. At the outset there was a delusion that the Government had no rights that should be respected, while every possible right belonged to the Rebels. General Lyon removed the arms from the St. Louis arsenal to a place of safety at Springfield, Illinois. "He had no constitutional right to do that," was the outcry of the Secessionists. He commenced the organization of Union volunteers for the defense of the city. The Constitution made no provision for this. He captured Camp Jackson, and took his prisoners to the arsenal. This, they declared, was a most flagrant violation of constitutional privileges. He moved upon the Rebels in the interior, and the same defiance of law was alleged. He suppressed the secession organ in St. Louis, thus trampling upon the liberties of the Rebel Press. General Fremont declared the slaves of Rebels were free, and thus infringed upon the rights of property. Numbers of active, persistent traitors were arrested and sent to military prisons: a manifest tyranny on the part of the Government. In one way and another the unfortunate and long-suffering Rebels were most sadly abused, if their own stories are to be regarded. It was forbidden to display Rebel emblems in public: a cruel restriction of personal right. The wealthy Secessionists of St. Louis were assessed the sum of ten thousand dollars, for the benefit of the Union refugees from Arkansas and other points in the Southwest. This was another outrage. These persons could not understand why they should be called upon to contribute to the support of Union people who had been rendered houseless and penniless by Rebels elsewhere. They made a most earnest protest, but their remonstrances were of no avail. In default of payment of the sums assessed, their superfluous furniture was seized and sold at auction. This was a violation of the laws that exempt household property from seizure. The auction sale of these goods was largely attended. The bidding was very spirited. Pianos, ottomans, mirrors, sofas, chairs, and all the adornments of the homes of affluence, were sold for "cash in United States Treasury notes." Some of the parties assessed declared they would pay nothing on the assessment, but they reconsidered their decisions, and bought their own property at the auction-rooms, without regard to the prices they paid. In subsequent assessments they found it better to pay without hesitation whatever sums were demanded of them. They spoke and labored against the Union until they found such efforts were of no use. They could never understand why they should not enjoy the protection of the flag without being called upon to give it material aid. In May, 1863, another grievance was added to the list. It became necessary, for the good of the city, to banish some of the more prominent Rebel sympathizers. It was a measure which the Rebels and their friends opposed in the strongest terms. These persons were anxious to see the Confederacy established, but could not consent to live in its limits. They resorted to every device to evade the order, but were not allowed to remain. Representations of personal and financial inconvenience were of no avail; go they must. The first exodus took place on the 13th of May. An immense crowd thronged the levee as the boat which was to remove the exiles took its departure. In all there were about thirty persons, half of them ladies. The men were escorted to the boat on foot, but the ladies were brought to the landing in carriages, and treated with every possible courtesy. A strong guard was posted at the landing to preserve order and allow no insult of any kind to the prisoners. One of the young women ascended to the hurricane roof of the steamer and cheered for the "Confederacy." As the boat swung into the stream, this lady was joined by two others, and the trio united their sweet voices in singing "Dixie" and the "Bonnie Blue Flag." There was no cheering or other noisy demonstration at their departure, though there was a little waving of handkerchiefs, and a few tokens of farewell were given. This departure was soon followed by others, until St. Louis was cleared of its most turbulent spirits. CHAPTER XXVII. GETTYSBURG. A Hasty Departure.--At Harrisburg.--_En route_ for the Army of the Potomac.--The Battle-Field at Gettysburg.--Appearance of the Cemetery.--Importance of the Position.--The Configuration of Ground.--Traces of Battle.--Round Hill.--General Meade's Head-Quarters.--Appearance of the Dead.--Through the Forests along the Line.--Retreat and Pursuit of Lee. While in St. Louis, late in June, 1863, I received the following telegram:-- "HERALD OFFICE, "NEW YORK, _June_ 28. "Report at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, at the earliest possible moment." Two hours later, I was traveling eastward as fast as an express train could carry me. The Rebel army, under General Lee, had crossed the Potomac, and was moving toward Harrisburg. The Army of the Potomac was in rapid pursuit. A battle was imminent between Harrisburg and Baltimore. Waiting a day at Harrisburg, I found the capital of the Keystone State greatly excited. The people were slow to move in their own behalf. Earth-works were being thrown up on the south bank of the Susquehanna, principally by the soldiers from other parts of Pennsylvania and from New York. When it was first announced that the enemy was approaching, only seventeen men volunteered to form a local defense. I saw no such enthusiasm on the part of the inhabitants as I had witnessed at Cincinnati during the previous autumn. Pennsylvania sent many regiments to the field during the war, and her soldiers gained a fine reputation; but the best friends of the State will doubtless acknowledge that Harrisburg was slow to act when the Rebels made their last great invasion. I was ordered to join the Army of the Potomac wherever I could find it. As I left Harrisburg, I learned that a battle was in progress. Before I could reach the field the great combat had taken place. The two contending armies had made Gettysburg historic. I joined our army on the day after the battle. I could find no person of my acquaintance, amid the confusion that followed the termination of three days' fighting. The army moved in pursuit of Lee, whose retreat was just commencing. As our long lines stretched away toward the Potomac, I walked over the ground where the battle had raged, and studied the picture that was presented. I reproduce, in part, my letter of that occasion:-- "Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, _July_ 6,1863. "To-day I have passed along the whole ground where the lines of battle were drawn. The place bears evidence of a fierce struggle. The shocks of those two great armies surging and resurging, the one against the other, could hardly pass without leaving their traces in fearful characters. At Waterloo, at Wagram, and at Jena the wheat grows more luxuriantly, and the corn shoots its stalks further toward the sky than before the great conflicts that rendered those fields famous. The broad acres of Gettysburg and Antietam will in future years yield the farmer a richer return than he has hithto received. "Passing out of Gettysburg by the Baltimore turnpike, we come in a few steps to the entrance of the cemetery. Little of the inclosure remains, save the gateway, from which the gates have been torn. The neat wooden fence, first thrown down to facilitate the movement of our artillery, was used for fuel, as the soldiers made their camp on the spot. A few scattered palings are all that remain. The cemetery was such as we usually find near thrifty towns like Gettysburg. None of the monuments and adornings were highly expensive, though all were neat, and a few were elaborate. There was considerable taste displayed in the care of the grounds, as we can see from the few traces that remain. The eye is arrested by a notice, prominently posted, forbidding the destruction or mutilation of any shrub, tree, or stone about the place, under severe penalties. The defiance that war gives to the civil law is forcibly apparent as one peruses those warning lines. "Monuments and head-stones lie everywhere overturned. Graves, which loving hands once carefully adorned, have been trampled by horses' feet until the vestiges of verdure have disappeared. The neat and well-trained shrubbery has vanished, or is but a broken and withered mass of tangled brushwood. On one grave lies the body of a horse, fast decomposing under the July sun. On another lie the torn garments of some wounded soldier, stained and saturated with blood. Across a small head-stone, bearing the words, 'To the memory of our beloved child, Mary,' lie the fragments of a musket shattered by a cannon-shot. "In the center of a space inclosed by an iron fence, and containing a half-dozen graves, a few rails are standing where they were erected by our soldiers to form their shelter in bivouac. A family shaft has been broken in fragments by a shell. Stone after stone felt the effects of the _feu d'enfer_ that was poured upon the crest of the hill. Cannon thundered, and foot and horse soldiers tramped over the resting-place of the dead. Other dead were added to those who are resting here. Many a wounded soldier lives to remember the contest above those silent graves. "The hill on which this cemetery is located was the center of our line of battle and the key to our position. Had the Rebels been able to carry this point, they would have forced us into retreat, and the battle would have been lost. To pierce our line in this locality was Lee's great endeavor, and he threw his best brigades against it. Wave after wave of living valor rolled up that slope, only to roll back again under the deadly fire of our artillery and infantry. It was on this hill, a little to the right of the cemetery, where the 'Louisiana Tigers' made their famous charge. It was their boast that they were never yet foiled in an attempt to take a battery; but on this occasion they suffered a defeat, and were nearly annihilated. Sad and dispirited, they mourn their repulse and their terrible losses in the assault. "From the summit of this hill a large portion of the battle-ground is spread out before the spectator. In front and at his feet lies the town of Gettysburg, containing, in quiet times, a population of four or five thousand souls. It is not more than a hundred yards to the houses in the edge of the village, where the contest with the Rebel sharp-shooters took place. To the left of the town stretches a long valley, bounded on each side by a gently-sloping ridge. The crest of each ridge is distant nearly a mile from the other. It was on these ridges that the lines of battle on the second and third days were formed, the Rebel line being on the ridge to the westward. The one stretching directly from our left hand, and occupied by our own men, has but little timber upon it, while that held by the rebels can boast of several groves of greater or less extent. In one of these the Pennsylvania College is embowered, while in another is seen the Theological Seminary. Half-way between the ridges are the ruins of a large brick building burned during the engagement. Dotted about, here and there, are various brick and frame structures. Two miles at our left rises a sharp-pointed elevation, known to the inhabitants of the region as Round Hill. Its sides are wooded, and the forest stretches from its base across the valley to the crest of the western ridge. "It must not be supposed that the space between the ridges is an even plain, shaven with, the scythe and leveled with the roller. It rises and falls gently, and with little regularity, but in no place is it steep of ascent. Were it not for its ununiformity and for the occasional sprinkling of trees over its surface, it could be compared to a patch of rolling prairie in miniature. To the southwest of the further ridge is seen the mountain region of Western Maryland, behind which the Rebels had their line of retreat. It is not a wild, rough mass of mountains, but a region of hills of the larger and more inaccessible sort. They are traversed by roads only in a few localities, and their passage, except through, the gaps, is difficult for a single team, and impossible for an army. "The Theological Seminary was the scene of a fierce struggle. It was beyond it where the First and Eleventh Corps contended with Ewell and Longstreet on the first day of the engagement. Afterward, finding the Rebels were too strong for them, they fell back to a new position, this building being included in the line. The walls of the Seminary were perforated by shot and shell, and the bricks are indented with numerous bullet-marks. Its windows show the effects of the musketry, and but little glass remains to shut out the cold and rain. The building is now occupied as a hospital by the Rebels. The Pennsylvania College is similarly occupied, and the instruction of its students is neglected for the present. "In passing from the cemetery along the crest of the ridge where our line of battle stood, I first came upon the position occupied by some of our batteries. This is shown by the many dead horses lying unburied, and by the mounds which mark where others have been slightly covered up. There are additional traces of an artillery fight. Here is a broken wheel of a gun-carriage, an exploded caisson, a handspike, and some of the accoutrements of the men. In the fork of a tree I found a Testament, with the words, 'Charles Durrale, Corporal of Company G,' written on the fly-leaf. The guns and the gunners, have disappeared. Some of the latter are now with the column moving in pursuit of the enemy, others are suffering in the hospitals, and still others are resting where the bugle's reveille shall never wake them. "Between the cemetery and the town and at the foot of the ridge where I stand, runs the road leading to Emmetsburg. It is not a turnpike, but a common dirt-road, and, as it leaves the main street leading into town, it makes a diagonal ascent of the hill. On the eastern side, this road is bordered by a stone wall for a short distance. Elsewhere on both sides there is only a rail fence. A portion of our sharp-shooters took position behind this wall, and erected traverses to protect them from a flanking fire, should the enemy attempt to move up the road from Gettysburg. These traverses are constructed at right angles to the wall, by making a 'crib' of fence-rails, two feet high and the same distance apart, and then filling the crib with dirt. Further along I find the rails from the western side of the road, piled against the fence on the east, so as to form a breast-work two or three feet in height--a few spadesful of dirt serve to fill the interstices. This defense was thrown up by the Rebels at the time they were holding the line of the roads. "Moving to the left, I find still more severe traces of artillery fighting. Twenty-seven dead horses on a space of little more than one acre is evidence of heavy work. Here are a few scattered trees, which were evidently used as a screen for our batteries. These trees did not escape the storm of shot and shell that was rained in that direction. Some of them were perforated by cannon-shot, or have been completely cut off in that peculiar splintering that marks the course of a projectile through green wood. Near the scene of this fighting is a large pile of muskets and cartridge-boxes collected from the field. Considerable work has been done in thus gathering the débris of the battle, but it is by no means complete. Muskets, bayonets, and sabers are scattered everywhere. "My next advance to the left carries me where the ground is thickly studded with graves. In one group I count a dozen graves of soldiers belonging to the Twentieth Massachusetts; near them are buried the dead of the One Hundred and Thirty-seventh New York, and close at hand an equal number from the Twelfth New Jersey. Care has been taken to place a head-board at each grave, with a legible inscription thereon, showing whose remains are resting beneath. On one board the comrades of the dead soldier had nailed the back of his knapsack, which bore his name. On another was a brass plate, bearing the soldier's name in heavily stamped letters. "Moving still to the left, I found an orchard in which the fighting appears to have been desperate in the extreme. Artillery shot had plowed the ground in every direction, and the trees did not escape the fury of the storm. The long bolts of iron, said by our officers to be a modification of the Whitworth projectile, were quite numerous. The Rebels must have been well supplied with this species of ammunition, and they evidently used it with no sparing hand. At one time I counted twelve of these bolts lying on a space not fifty feet square. I am told that many shot and shell passed over the heads of our soldiers during the action. "A mile from our central position at the cemetery, was a field of wheat, and near it a large tract, on which corn had been growing. The wheat was trampled by the hurrying feet of the dense masses of infantry, as they changed their positions during the battle. In the cornfield artillery had been stationed, and moved about as often as the enemy obtained its range. Hardly a hill of corn is left in its pristine luxuriance. The little that escaped the hoof or the wheel, as the guns moved from place to place, was nibbled by hungry horses during the bivouac subsequent to the battle. Not a stalk of wheat is upright; not a blade of corn remains uninjured; all has fallen long before the time of harvest. Another harvest, in which Death was the reaper, has been gathered above it. "On our extreme left the pointed summit of a hill, a thousand feet in elevation, rises toward the sky. Beyond it, the country falls off into the mountain region that extends to the Potomac and across it into Virginia. This hill is quite difficult of ascent, and formed a strong position, on which the left of our line rested. The enemy assaulted this point with great fury, throwing his divisions, one after the other, against it. Their efforts were of no avail. Our men defended their ground against every attack. It was like the dash of the French at Waterloo against the immovable columns of the English. Stubborn resistance overcame the valor of the assailants. Again and again they came to the assault, only to fall back as they had advanced. Our left held its ground, though it lost heavily. "On this portion of the line, about midway between the crests of the ridges, is a neat farm-house. Around this dwelling the battle raged, as around Hougoumont at Waterloo. At one time it was in the possession of the Rebels, and was fiercely attacked by our men. The walls were pierced by shot and shell, many of the latter exploding within, and making a scene of devastation. The glass was shattered by rifle bullets on every side, and the wood-work bears testimony to the struggle. The sharp-shooters were in every room, and added to the disorder caused by the explosion of shells. The soldiers destroyed what the missiles spared. The Rebels were driven from the house, and the position was taken by our own men. They, in turn, were dislodged, but finally secured a permanent footing in the place. "Retracing my steps from the extreme left, I return to the center of our position on Cemetery Hill. I do not follow the path by which I came, but take a route along the hollow, between the two ridges. It was across this hollow that the Rebels made their assaults upon our position. Much blood was poured out between these two swells of land. Most of the dead were buried where they fell, or gathered in little clusters beneath some spreading tree or beside clumps of bushes. Some of the Rebel dead are still unburied. I find one of these as I descend a low bank to the side of a small spring. The body is lying near the spring, as if the man had crawled there to obtain a draught of water. Its hands are outspread upon the earth, and clutching at the little tufts of grass beneath them. The soldier's haversack and canteen are still remaining, and his hat is lying not far away. "A few paces distant is another corpse, with its hands thrown upward in the position the soldier occupied when he received his fatal wound. The clothing is not torn, no blood appears upon the garments, and the face, though swollen, bears no expression of anguish. Twenty yards away are the remains of a body cut in two by a shell. The grass is drenched in blood, that the rain of yesterday has not washed away. As I move forward I find the body of a Rebel soldier, evidently slain while taking aim over a musket. The hands are raised, the left extended beyond the right, and the fingers of the former partly bent, as if they had just been grasping the stock of a gun. One foot is advanced, and the body is lying on its right side. To appearances it did not move a muscle after receiving its death-wound. Another body attracts my attention by its delicate white hands, and its face black as that of a negro. "The farm-house on the Emmetsburg road, where General Meade held his head-quarters during the cannonade, is most fearfully cut up. General Lee masked his artillery, and opened with one hundred and thirty pieces at the same moment. Two shells in every second of time fell around those head-quarters. They tore through the little white building, exploding and scattering their fragments in every direction. Not a spot in its vicinity was safe. One shell through the door-step, another in the chimney, a third shattering a rafter, a fourth carrying away the legs of a chair in which an officer was seated; others severing and splintering the posts in front of the house, howling through the trees by which the dwelling was surrounded, and raising deep furrows in the soft earth. One officer, and another, and another were wounded. Strange to say, amid all this iron hail, no one of the staff was killed. "Once more at the cemetery, I crossed the Baltimore turnpike to the hill that forms the extremity of the ridge, on which the main portion of our line of battle was located. I followed this ridge to the point held by our extreme right. About midway along the ridge was the scene of the fiercest attack upon that portion of the field. Tree after tree was scarred from base to limbs so thickly that it would have been impossible to place one's hand upon the trunk without covering the marks of a bullet. One tree was stripped of more than half its leaves; many of its twigs were partially severed, and hanging wilted and nearly ready to drop to the ground. The trunk of the tree, about ten inches in diameter, was cut and scarred in every part. The fire which struck these trees was that from our muskets upon the advancing Rebels. Every tree and bush for the distance of half a mile along these works was nearly as badly marked. The rocks, wherever they faced our breast-works, were thickly stippled with dots like snow-flakes. The missiles, flattened by contact with the rock, were lying among the leaves, giving little indication of their former character. "Our sharp-shooters occupied novel positions. One of them found half a hollow log, standing upright, with a hole left by the removal of a knot, which gave him an excellent embrasure. Some were in tree-tops, others in nooks among the rocks, and others behind temporary barricades of their own construction. Owing to the excellence of our defenses, the Rebels lost heavily." A few days after visiting this field, I joined the army in Western Maryland. The Rebels were between us and the Potomac. We were steadily pressing them, rather with a design of driving them across the Potomac without further fighting, than of bringing on an engagement. Lee effected his crossing in safety, only a few hundred men of his rear-guard being captured on the left bank of the Potomac. The Maryland campaign was ended when Lee was driven out. Our army crossed the Potomac further down that stream, but made no vigorous pursuit. I returned to New York, and once more proceeded to the West. Our victory in Pennsylvania was accompanied by the fall of Vicksburg and the surrender of Pemberton's army. A few days later, the capture of Port Hudson was announced. The struggle for the possession of the Mississippi was substantially ended when the Rebel fortifications along its banks fell into our hands. CHAPTER XXVIII. IN THE NORTHWEST. From Chicago to Minnesota.--Curiosities of Low-Water Navigation.--St. Paul and its Sufferings in Earlier Days.--The Indian War.--A Brief History of our Troubles in that Region.--General Pope's Expeditions to Chastise the Red Man.--Honesty in the Indian Department.--The End of the Warfare.--The Pacific Railway.--A Bold Undertaking.--Penetrating British Territory.--The Hudson Bay Company.--Peculiarities of a Trapper's Life. Early in September, 1863, I found myself in Chicago, breathing the cool, fresh air from Lake Michigan. From Chicago to Milwaukee I skirted the shores of the lake, and from the latter city pushed across Wisconsin to the Mississippi River. Here it was really the blue Mississippi: its appearance was a pleasing contrast to the general features of the river a thousand miles below. The banks, rough and picturesque, rose abruptly from the water's edge, forming cliffs that overtopped the table-land beyond. These cliffs appeared in endless succession, as the boat on which I traveled steamed up the river toward St. Paul. Where the stream widened into Lake Pepin, they seemed more prominent and more precipitous than elsewhere, as the larger expanse of water was spread at their base. The promontory known as "Maiden's Rock" is the most conspicuous of all. The Indians relate that some daughter of the forest, disappointed in love, once leaped from its summit to the rough rocks, two hundred feet below. Her lover, learning her fate, visited the spot, gazed from the fearful height, and, after a prayer to the Great Spirit who watches over the Red Man--returned to his friends and broke the heart of another Indian maid. Passing Lake Pepin and approaching St. Paul, the river became very shallow. There had been little rain during the summer, and the previous spring witnessed no freshet in that region. The effect was apparent in the condition of the Mississippi. In the upper waters boats moved with difficulty. The class that is said to steam wherever there is a heavy dew, was brought into active use. From St. Paul to a point forty miles below, only the lightest of the "stern-wheel" boats could make any headway. The inhabitants declared they had never before known such a low stage of water, and earnestly hoped it would not occur again. It was paralyzing much of the business of the State. Many flouring and lumber mills were lying idle. Transportation was difficult, and the rates very high. A railway was being constructed to connect with the roads from Chicago, but it was not sufficiently advanced to be of any service. Various stories were in circulation concerning the difficulties of navigation on the Upper Mississippi in a low stage of water. One pilot declared the wheels of his boat actually raised a cloud of dust in many places. Another said his boat could run easily in the moisture on the outside of a pitcher of ice-water, but could not move to advantage in the river between Lake Pepin and St. Paul. A person interested in the railway proposed to secure a charter for laying the track in the bed of the Mississippi, but feared the company would be unable to supply the locomotives with water on many portions of the route. Many other jests were indulged in, all of which were heartily appreciated by the people of St. Paul. The day after my arrival at St. Paul, I visited the famous Falls of the Minnehaha. I am unable to give them a minute description, my visit being very brief. Its brevity arose from the entire absence of water in the stream which supplies the fall. That fluid is everywhere admitted to be useful for purposes of navigation, and I think it equally desirable in the formation of a cascade. The inhabitants of St. Paul have reason to bless the founders of their city for the excellent site of the future metropolis of the Northwest. Overlooking and almost overhanging the river in one part, in another it slopes gently down to the water's edge, to the levee where the steamers congregate. Back from the river the limits of the city extend for several miles, and admit of great expansion. With a hundred years of prosperity there would still be ample room for growth. Before the financial crash in '57, this levee was crowded with merchandise from St. Louis and Chicago. Storage was not always to be had, though the construction of buildings was rapidly pushed. Business was active, speculation was carried to the furthest limit, everybody had money in abundance, and scattered it with no niggard hand. In many of the brokers' windows, placards were posted offering alluring inducements to capitalists. "Fifty per cent. guaranteed on investments," was set forth on these placards, the offers coming from parties considered perfectly sound. Fabulous sums were paid for wild land and for lots in apocryphal towns. All was prosperity and activity. By-and-by came the crash, and this well-founded town passed through a period of mourning and fasting. St. Paul saw many of its best and heaviest houses vanish into thin air; merchants, bankers, land-speculators, lumbermen, all suffered alike. Some disappeared forever; others survived the shock, but never recovered their former footing. Large amounts of property went under the auctioneer's hammer, "to be sold without limit." Lots of land which cost two or three hundred dollars in '56, were sold at auction in '58 for five or six dollars each. Thousands of people lost their all in these unfortunate land-speculations. Others who survived the crash have clung to their acres, hoping that prosperity may return to the Northwest. At present their wealth consists mainly of Great Expectations. Though suffering greatly, the capital and business center of Minnesota was by no means ruined. The speculators departed, but the farmers and other working classes remained. Business "touched bottom" and then slowly revived. St. Paul existed through all the calamity, and its people soon learned the actual necessities of Minnesota. While they mourn the departure of the "good times," many of them express a belief that those happy days were injurious to the permanent prosperity of the State. St. Paul is one of the few cities of the world whose foundation furnishes the material for their construction. The limestone rock on which it is built is in layers of about a foot in thickness, and very easy to quarry. The blocks require little dressing to fit them for use. Though very soft at first, the stone soon hardens by exposure to the air, and forms a neat and durable wall. In digging a cellar one will obtain more than sufficient stone for the walls of his house. At the time of my visit the Indian expedition of 1863 had just returned, and was camped near Fort Snelling. This expedition was sent out by General Pope, for the purpose of chastising the Sioux Indians. It was under command of General Sibley, and accomplished a march of nearly six hundred miles. As it lay in camp at Fort Snelling, the men and animals presented the finest appearance I had ever observed in an army just returned from a long campaign. The Sioux massacres of 1862, and the campaign of General Pope in the autumn of that year, attracted much attention. Nearly all the settlers in the valley of the Minnesota above Fort Snelling were killed or driven off. Other localities suffered to a considerable extent. The murders--like nearly all murders of whites by the Indians--were of the most atrocious character. The history of those massacres is a chronicle of horrors rarely equaled during the present century. Whole counties were made desolate, and the young State, just recovering from its financial misfortunes, received a severe blow to its prosperity. Various causes were assigned for the outbreak of hostilities on the part of the Sioux Indians. Very few residents of Minnesota, in view of the atrocities committed by the Indians, could speak calmly of the troubles. All were agreed that there could be no peace and security until the white men were the undisputed possessors of the land. Before the difficulties began, there was for some time a growing discontent on the part of the Indians, on account of repeated grievances. Just previous to the outbreak, these Indians were summoned to one of the Government Agencies to receive their annuities. These annuities had been promised them at a certain time, but were not forthcoming. The agents, as I was informed, had the money (in coin) as it was sent from Washington, but were arranging to pay the Indians in Treasury notes and pocket the premium on the gold. The Indians were kept waiting while the gold was being exchanged for greenbacks. There was a delay in making this exchange, and the Indians were put off from day to day with promises instead of money. An Indian knows nothing about days of grace, protests, insolvency, expansions, and the other technical terms with which Wall Street is familiar. He can take no explanation of broken promises, especially when those promises are made by individuals who claim to represent the Great Father at Washington. In this case the Sioux lost all confidence in the agents, who had broken their word from day to day. Added to the mental annoyance, there was great physical suffering. The traders at the post would sell nothing without cash payment, and, without money, the Indians were unable to procure what the stores contained in abundance. The annuities were not paid, and the traders refused to sell on credit. Some of the Indians were actually starving, and one day they forced their way into a store to obtain food. Taking possession, they supplied themselves with what they desired. Among other things, they found whisky, of the worst and most fiery quality. Once intoxicated, all the bad passions of the savages were let loose. In their drunken frenzy, the Indians killed one of the traders. The sight of blood made them furious. Other white men at the Agency were killed, and thus the contagion spread. From the Agency the murderers spread through the valley of the St. Peter's, proclaiming war against the whites. They made no distinction of age or sex. The atrocities they committed are among the most fiendish ever recorded. The outbreak of these troubles was due to the conduct of the agents who were dealing with the Indians. Knowing, as they should have known, the character of the red man everywhere, and aware that the Sioux were at that time discontented, it was the duty of those agents to treat them with the utmost kindness and generosity. I do not believe the Indians, when they plundered the store at the Agency, had any design beyond satisfying their hunger. But with one murder committed, there was no restraint upon their passions. Many of our transactions with the Indians, in the past twenty years, have not been characterized by the most scrupulous honesty. The Department of the Interior has an interior history that would not bear investigation. It is well known that the furnishing of supplies to the Indians often enriches the agents and their political friends. There is hardly a tribe along our whole frontier that has not been defrauded. Dishonesty in our Indian Department was notorious during Buchanan's Administration. The retirement of Buchanan and his cabinet did not entirely bring this dishonesty to an end. An officer of the Hudson Bay Company told me, in St. Paul, that it was the strict order of the British Government, enforced in letter and spirit by the Company, to keep full faith with the Indians. Every stipulation is most scrupulously carried out. The slightest infringement by a white man upon the rights of the Indians is punished with great severity. They are furnished with the best qualities of goods, and the quantity never falls below the stipulations. Consequently the Indian has no cause of complaint, and is kept on the most friendly terms. This officer said, "A white man can travel from one end to the other of our territory, with no fear of molestation. It is forty years since any trouble occurred between us and the Indians, while on your side of the line you have frequent difficulties." The autumn of '62 witnessed the campaign for the chastisement of these Indians. Twenty-five thousand men were sent to Minnesota, under General Pope, and employed against the Sioux. In a wild country, like the interior of Minnesota, infantry cannot be used to advantage. On this account, the punishment of the Indians was not as complete as our authorities desired. Some of the Indians were captured, some killed, and others surrendered. Thirty-nine of the captives were hanged. A hundred others were sent to prison at Davenport, Iowa, for confinement during life. The coming of Winter caused a suspension of hostilities. The spring of 1863 opened with the outfitting of two expeditions--one to proceed through Minnesota, under General Sibley, and the other up the Missouri River, under General Sully. These expeditions were designed to unite somewhere on the Missouri River, and, by inclosing the Indians between them, to bring them to battle. If the plan was successful, the Indians would be severely chastised. General Sibley moved across Minnesota, according to agreement, and General Sully advanced up the Missouri. The march of the latter was delayed on account of the unprecedented low water in the Missouri, which retarded the boats laden with supplies. Although the two columns failed to unite, they were partially successful in their primary object. Each column engaged the Indians and routed them with considerable loss. After the return of General Sibley's expedition, a portion of the troops composing it were sent to the Southwest, and attached to the armies operating in Louisiana. The Indian war in Minnesota dwindled to a fight on the part of politicians respecting its merits in the past, and the best mode of conducting it in the future. General Pope, General Sibley, and General Sully were praised and abused to the satisfaction of every resident of the State. Laudation and denunciation were poured out with equal liberality. The contest was nearly as fierce as the struggle between the whites and Indians. If epithets had been as fatal as bullets, the loss of life would have been terrible. Happily, the wordy battle was devoid of danger, and the State of Minnesota, her politicians, her generals, and her men emerged from it without harm. Various schemes have been devised for placing the Sioux Indians where they will not be in our way. No spot of land can be found between the Mississippi and the Pacific where their presence would not be an annoyance to somebody. General Pope proposed to disarm these Indians, allot no more reservations to them, and allow no traders among them. He recommended that they be placed on Isle Royale, in Lake Superior, and there furnished with barracks, rations, and clothing, just as the same number of soldiers would be furnished. They should have no arms, and no means of escaping to the main-land. They would thus be secluded from all evil influence, and comfortably housed and cared for at Government expense. If this plan should be adopted, it would be a great relief to the people of our Northwestern frontier. Minnesota has fixed its desires upon a railway to the Pacific. The "St. Paul and Pacific Railway" is already in operation about forty miles west of St. Paul, and its projectors hope, in time, to extend it to the shores of the "peaceful sea." It has called British capital to its aid, and is slowly but steadily progressing. In the latter part of 1858 several enterprising citizens of St. Paul took a small steamer in midwinter from the upper waters of the Mississippi to the head of navigation, on the Red River of the North. The distance was two hundred and fifty miles, and the route lay through a wilderness. Forty yoke of oxen were required for moving the boat. When navigation was open in the spring of 1859, the boat (the _Anson Northrup_) steamed down to Fort Garry, the principal post of the Hudson Bay Company, taking all the inhabitants by surprise. None of them had any intimation of its coming, and were, consequently, as much astonished as if the steamer had dropped from the clouds. The agents of the Hudson Bay Company purchased the steamer, a few hours after its arrival, for about four times its value. They hoped to continue their seclusion by so doing; but were doomed to disappointment. Another and larger boat was built in the following year at Georgetown, Minnesota, the spot where the _Northrup_ was launched. The isolation of the fur-traders was ended. The owners of the second steamer (the _International_) were the proprietors of a stage and express line to all parts of Minnesota. They extended their line to Fort Garry, and soon established a profitable business. From its organization in 1670, down to 1860, the Hudson Bay Company sent its supplies, and received its furs in return, by way of the Arctic Ocean and Hudson's Bay. There are only two months in the year in which a ship can enter or leave Hudson's Bay. A ship sailing from London in January, enters the Bay in August. When the cargo is delivered at York Factory, at the mouth of Nelson's River, it is too late in the season to send the goods to the great lakes of Northwestern America, where the trading posts are located. In the following May the goods are forwarded. They go by canoes where the river is navigable, and are carried on the backs of men around the frequent and sometimes long rapids. The journey requires three months. The furs purchased with these goods cannot be sent to York Factory until a year later, and another year passes away before they leave Hudson's Bay. Thus, returns for a cargo were not received in London until four years after its shipment from that port. Since American enterprise took control of the carrying trade, goods are sent from London to Fort Garry by way of New York and St. Paul, and are only four months in transit. Four or five months will be required to return a cargo of furs to London, making a saving of three years over the old route. Stupid as our English cousin sometimes shows himself, he cannot fail to perceive the advantages of the new route, and has promptly embraced them. The people of Minnesota are becoming well acquainted with the residents of the country on their northern boundary. Many of the Northwestern politicians are studying the policy of "annexation." The settlement at Pembina, near Pembina Mountain, lies in Minnesota, a few miles only from the international line. The settlers supposed they were on British soil until the establishment of the boundary showed them their mistake. Every year the settlement sends a train to St. Paul, nearly seven hundred miles distant, to exchange its buffalo-robes, furs, etc., for various articles of necessity that the Pembina region does not produce. This annual train is made up of "Red River carts"--vehicles that would be regarded with curiosity in New York or Washington. A Red River cart is about the size of a two-wheeled dray, and is built entirely of wood--not a particle of iron entering into its composition. It is propelled by a single ox or horse, generally the former, driven by a half-breed native. Sometimes, though not usually, the wheels are furnished with tires of rawhide, placed upon them when green and shrunk closely in drying. Each cart carries about a thousand pounds of freight, and the train will ordinarily make from fifteen to twenty miles a day. It was estimated that five hundred of these carts would visit St. Paul and St. Cloud in the autumn of 1863. The settlements of which Fort Garry is the center are scattered for several miles along the Red River of the North. They have schools, churches, flouring and saw mills, and their houses are comfortably and often luxuriously furnished. They have pianos imported from St. Paul, and their principal church, has an organ. At St. Cloud I saw evidences of extreme civilization on their way to Fort Garry. These were a whisky-still, two sewing-machines, and a grain-reaper. No people can remain in darkness after adopting these modern inventions. The monopoly which the Hudson Bay Company formerly held, has ceased to exist. Under its charter, granted by Charles II. in 1670, it had exclusive control of all the country drained by Hudson's Bay. In addition to its privilege of trade, it possessed the "right of eminent domain" and the full political management of the country. Crime in this territory was not punished by the officers of the British Government, but by the courts and officers of the Company. All settlements of farmers and artisans were discouraged, as it was the desire of the Company to maintain the territory solely as a fur preserve, from the Arctic Ocean to the United States boundary. The profits of this fur-trade were enormous, as the Company had it under full control. The furs were purchased of the Indians and trappers at very low rates, and paid for in goods at enormous prices. An industrious trapper could earn a comfortable support, and nothing more. Having full control of the fur market in Europe, the directors could regulate the selling prices as they chose. Frequently they issued orders forbidding the killing of a certain class of animals for several years. The fur from these animals would become scarce and very high, and at the same time the animals would increase in numbers. Suddenly, when the market was at its uppermost point, the order would be countermanded and a large supply brought forward for sale. This course was followed with all classes of fur in succession. The Company's dividends in the prosperous days would shame the best oil wells or Nevada silver mines of our time. Though its charter was perpetual, the Hudson Bay Company was obliged to obtain once in twenty-one years a renewal of its license for exclusive trade. From 1670 to 1838 it had no difficulty in obtaining the desired renewal. The last license expired in 1859. Though a renewal was earnestly sought, it was not attained. The territory is now open to all traders, and the power of the old Company is practically extinguished. The first explorations in Minnesota were made shortly after the discovery of the Mississippi River by Marquette and Hennepin. St. Paul was originally a French trading post, and the resort of the Indians throughout the Northwest. Fort Snelling was established by the United Suites Government in 1819, but no settlements were made until 1844. After the current of emigration began, the territory was rapidly filled. While Minnesota was a wilderness, the American Fur Company established posts on the upper waters of the Mississippi. The old trading-house below the Falls of St. Anthony, the first frame building erected in the territory, is yet standing, though it exhibits many symptoms of decay. At one time the emigration to Minnesota was very great, but it has considerably fallen off during the last eight years. The State is too far north to hold out great inducements to settlers. The winters are long and severe, and the productions of the soil are limited in character and quantity. In summer the climate is excellent, attracting large numbers of pleasure-seekers. The Falls of St. Anthony and the Minnehaha have a world-wide reputation. CHAPTER XXIX. INAUGURATION OF A GREAT ENTERPRISE. Plans for Arming the Negroes along the Mississippi.--Opposition to the Movement.--Plantations Deserted by their Owners.--Gathering Abandoned Cotton.--Rules and Regulations.--Speculation.--Widows and Orphans in Demand.--Arrival of Adjutant-General Thomas.--Designs of the Government. I have elsewhere alluded to the orders of General Grant at Lagrange, Tennessee, in the autumn of 1862, relative to the care of the negroes where his army was then operating. The plan was successful in providing for the negroes in Tennessee and Northern Mississippi, where the number, though large, was not excessive. At that time, the policy of arming the blacks was being discussed in various quarters. It found much opposition. Many persons thought it would be an infringement upon the "rights" of the South, both unconstitutional and unjust. Others cared nothing for the South, or its likes and dislikes, but opposed the measure on the ground of policy. They feared its adoption would breed discontent among the white soldiers of the army, and cause so many desertions and so much uneasiness that the importance of the new element would be more than neutralized. Others, again, doubted the courage of the negroes, and thought their first use under fire would result in disgrace and disaster to our arms. They opposed the experiment on account of this fear. In South Carolina and in Kansas the negroes had been put under arms and mustered into service as Union soldiers. In engagements of a minor character they had shown coolness and courage worthy of veterans. There was no valid reason why the negroes along the Mississippi would not be just as valuable in the army, as the men of the same race in other parts of the country. Our Government determined to try the experiment, and make the _Corps d'Afrique_ a recognized and important adjunct of our forces in the field. When General Grant encamped his army at Milliken's Bend and Young's Point, preparatory to commencing the siege of Vicksburg, many of the cotton plantations were abandoned by their owners. Before our advent nearly all the white males able to bear arms had, willingly or unwillingly, gone to aid in filling the ranks of the insurgents. On nearly every plantation there was a white man not liable to military service, who remained to look after the interests of the property. When our army appeared, the majority of these white men fled to the interior of Louisiana, leaving the plantations and the negroes to the tender mercy of the invaders. In some cases the fugitives took the negroes with them, thus leaving the plantations entirely deserted. When the negroes remained, and the plantations were not supplied with provisions, it became necessary for the Commissary Department to issue rations for the subsistence of the blacks. As nearly all the planters cared nothing for the negroes they had abandoned, there was a very large number that required the attention of the Government. On many plantations the cotton crop of 1862 was still in the field, somewhat damaged by the winter rains; but well worth gathering at the prices which then ruled the market. General Grant gave authority for the gathering of this cotton by any parties who were willing to take the contract. The contractors were required to feed the negroes and pay them for their labor. One-half the cotton went to the Government, the balance to the contractor. There was no lack of men to undertake the collection of abandoned cotton on these terms, as the enterprise could not fail to be exceedingly remunerative. This cotton, gathered by Government authority, was, with a few exceptions, the only cotton which could be shipped to market. There were large quantities of "old" cotton--gathered and baled in previous years--which the owners were anxious to sell, and speculators ready to buy. Numerous applications were made for shipping-permits, but nearly all were rejected. A few cases were pressed upon General Grant's attention, as deserving exception from the ordinary rule. There was one case of two young girls, whose parents had recently died, and who were destitute of all comforts on the plantation where they lived. They had a quantity of cotton which they wished to take to Memphis, for sale in that market. Thus provided with money, they would proceed North, and remain there till the end of the war. A speculator became interested in these girls, and plead with all his eloquence for official favor in their behalf. General Grant softened his heart and gave this man a written permit to ship whatever cotton belonged to the orphans. It was understood, and so stated in the application, that the amount was between two hundred and three hundred bales. The exact number not being known, there was no quantity specified in the permit. The speculator soon discovered that the penniless orphans could claim two thousand instead of two hundred bales, and thought it possible they would find three thousand bales and upward. On the strength of his permit without special limit, he had purchased, or otherwise procured, all the cotton he could find in the immediate vicinity. He was allowed to make shipment of a few hundred bales; the balance was detained. Immediately, as this transaction became known, every speculator was on the _qui vive_ to discover a widow or an orphan. Each plantation was visited, and the status of the owners, if any remained, became speedily known. Orphans and widows, the former in particular, were at a high premium. Never in the history of Louisiana did the children of tender years, bereft of parents, receive such attention from strangers. A spectator might have imagined the Millennium close at hand, and the dealers in cotton about to be humbled at the feet of babes and sucklings. Widows, neither young nor comely, received the warmest attention from men of Northern birth. The family of John Rodgers, had it then lived at Milliken's Bend, would have been hailed as a "big thing." Everywhere in that region there were men seeking "healthy orphans for adoption." The majority of the speculators found the widows and orphans of whom they were in search. Some were able to obtain permits, while others were not. Several officers of the army became interested in these speculations, and gave their aid to obtain shipping privileges. Some who were innocent were accused of dealing in the forbidden fiber, while others, guilty of the transaction, escaped without suspicion. The temptation was great. Many refused to be concerned in the traffic; but there were some who yielded. The contractors who gathered the abandoned cotton were enabled to accumulate small fortunes. Some of them acted honestly, but others made use of their contracts to cover large shipments of purchased or stolen cotton, baled two or three years before. The ordinary yield of an acre of ground is from a bale to a bale and a half. The contractors were sometimes able to show a yield of ten or twenty bales to the acre. About the first of April, Adjutant-General Thomas arrived at Milliken's Bend, bringing, as he declared, authority to regulate every thing as he saw fit. Under his auspices, arrangements were made for putting the able-bodied male negroes into the army. In a speech delivered at a review of the troops at Lake Providence, he announced the determination of the Government to use every just measure to suppress the Rebellion. The Rebels indirectly made use of the negroes against the Government, by employing them in the production of supplies for their armies in the field. "In this way," he said, "they can bring to bear against us all the power of their so-called Confederacy. At the same time we are compelled to retain at home a portion of our fighting force to furnish supplies for the men at the front. The Administration has determined to take the negroes belonging to disloyal men, and make them a part of the army. This is the policy that has been fixed and will be fully carried out." General Thomas announced that he brought authority to raise as many regiments as possible, and to give commissions to all proper persons who desired them. The speech was listened to with attention, and loudly cheered at its close. The general officers declared themselves favorable to the new movement, and gave it their co-operation. In a few days a half-dozen regiments were in process of organization. This was the beginning of the scheme for raising a large force of colored soldiers along the Mississippi. The disposition to be made of the negro women and children in our lines, was a subject of great importance. Their numbers were very large, and constantly increasing. Not a tenth of these persons could find employment in gathering abandoned cotton. Those that found such employment were only temporarily provided for. It would be a heavy burden upon the Government to support them in idleness during the entire summer. It would be manifestly wrong to send them to the already overcrowded camps at Memphis and Helena. They were upon our hands by the fortune of war, and must be cared for in some way. The plantations which their owners had abandoned were supposed to afford the means of providing homes for the negroes, where they could be sheltered, fed, and clothed without expense to the Government. It was proposed to lease these plantations for the term of one year, to persons who would undertake the production of a crop of cotton. Those negroes who were unfit for military service were to be distributed on these plantations, where the lessees would furnish them all needed supplies, and pay them for their labor at certain stipulated rates. The farming tools and other necessary property on the plantations were to be appraised at a fair valuation, and turned over to the lessees. Where the plantations were destitute of the requisite number of mules for working them, condemned horses and mules were loaned to the lessees, who should return them whenever called for. There were promises of protection against Rebel raids, and of all assistance that the Government could consistently give. General Thomas announced that the measure was fully decided upon at Washington, and should receive every support. The plantations were readily taken, the prospects being excellent for enormous profits if the scheme proved successful. The cost of producing cotton varies from three to eight cents a pound. The staple would find ready sale at fifty cents, and might possibly command a higher figure. The prospects of a large percentage on the investment were alluring in the extreme. The plantations, the negroes, the farming utensils, and the working stock were to require no outlay. All that was demanded before returns would be received, were the necessary expenditures for feeding and clothing the negroes until the crop was made and gathered. From five to thirty thousand dollars was the estimated yearly expense of a plantation of a thousand acres. If successful, the products for a year might be set down at two hundred thousand dollars; and should cotton appreciate, the return would be still greater. CHAPTER XXX. COTTON-PLANTING IN 1863. Leasing the Plantations.--Interference of the Rebels.--Raids.--Treatment of Prisoners.--The Attack upon Milliken's Bend.--A Novel Breast-Work.--Murder o four Officers.--Profits of Cotton-Planting.--Dishonesty of Lessees.--Negroes Planting on their own Account. It was late in the season before the plantations were leased and the work of planting commenced. The ground was hastily plowed and the seed as hastily sown. The work was prosecuted with the design of obtaining as much as possible in a single season. In their eagerness to accumulate fortunes, the lessees frequently planted more ground than they could care for, and allowed much of it to run to waste. Of course, it could not be expected the Rebels would favor the enterprise. They had prophesied the negro would not work when free, and were determined to break up any effort to induce him to labor. They were not even willing to give him a fair trial. Late in June they visited the plantations at Milliken's Bend and vicinity. They stripped many of the plantations of all the mules and horses that could be found, frightened some of the negroes into seeking safety at the nearest military posts, and carried away others. Some of the lessees were captured; others, having timely warning, made good their escape. Of those captured, some were released on a regular parole not to take up arms against the "Confederacy." Others were liberated on a promise to go North and remain there, after being allowed a reasonable time for settling their business. Others were carried into captivity and retained as prisoners of war until late in the summer. A Mr. Walker was taken to Brownsville, Texas, and there released, with the privilege of crossing to Matamoras, and sailing thence to New Orleans. It was six months from the time of his capture before he reached New Orleans on his return home. The Rebels made a fierce attack upon the garrison at Milliken's Bend. For a few moments during the fight the prospects of their success were very good. The negroes composing the garrison had not been long under arms, and their discipline was far from perfect. The Rebels obtained possession of a part of our works, but were held at bay by the garrison, until the arrival of a gun-boat turned the scale in our favor. The odds were against us at the outset, but we succeeded in putting the enemy to flight. In this attack the Rebels made use of a movable breast-work, consisting of a large drove of mules, which they kept in their front as they advanced upon the fort. This breast-work served very well at first, but grew unmanageable as our fire became severe. It finally broke and fled to the rear, throwing the Rebel lines into confusion. I believe it was the first instance on record where the defenses ran away, leaving the defenders uncovered. It marked a new, but unsuccessful, phase of war. An officer who was present at the defense of Milliken's Bend vouches for the truth of the story. The Rebels captured a portion of the garrison, including some of the white officers holding commissions in negro regiments. The negro prisoners were variously disposed of. Some were butchered on the spot while pleading for quarter; others were taken a few miles on the retreat, and then shot by the wayside. A few were driven away by their masters, who formed a part of the raiding force, but they soon escaped and returned to our lines. Of the officers who surrendered as prisoners of war, some were shot or hanged within a short distance of their place of capture. Two were taken to Shreveport and lodged in jail with one of the captured lessees. One night these officers were taken from the jail by order of General Kirby Smith, and delivered into the hands of the provost-marshal, to be shot for the crime of accepting commissions in negro regiments. Before morning they were dead. Similar raids were made at other points along the river, where plantations were being cultivated under the new system. At all these places the mules were stolen and the negroes either frightened or driven away. Work was suspended until the plantations could be newly stocked and equipped. This suspension occurred at the busiest time in the season. The production of the cotton was, consequently, greatly retarded. On some plantations the weeds grew faster than the cotton, and refused to be put down. On others, the excellent progress the weeds had made, during the period of idleness, rendered the yield of the cotton-plant very small. Some of the plantations were not restocked after the raid, and speedily ran to waste. In 1863, no lessee made more than half an ordinary crop of _cotton_, and very few secured even this return. Some obtained a quarter or an eighth of a bale to the acre, and some gathered only one bale where they should have gathered twelve or twenty. A few lost money in the speculation. Some made a fair profit on their investment, and others realized their expectations of an enormous reward. Several parties united their interest on three or four plantations in different localities, so that a failure in one quarter was offset by success in another. The majority of the lessees were unprincipled men, who undertook the enterprise solely as a speculation. They had as little regard for the rights of the negro as the most brutal slaveholder had ever shown. Very few of them paid the negroes for their labor, except in furnishing them small quantities of goods, for which they charged five times the value. One man, who realized a profit of eighty thousand dollars, never paid his negroes a penny. Some of the lessees made open boast of having swindled their negroes out of their summer's wages, by taking advantage of their ignorance. The experiment did not materially improve the condition of the negro, save in the matter of physical treatment. As a slave the black man received no compensation for his labor. As a free man, he received none. He was well fed, and, generally, well clothed. He received no severe punishment for non-performance of duty, as had been the case before the war. The difference between working for nothing as a slave, and working for the same wages under the Yankees, was not always perceptible to the unsophisticated negro. Several persons leased plantations that they might use them as points for shipping purchased or stolen cotton. Some were quite successful in this, while others were unable to find any cotton to bring out. Various parties united with the plantation-owners, and agreed to obtain all facilities from the Government officials, if their associates would secure protection against Rebel raids. In some cases this experiment was successful, and the plantations prospered, while those around them were repeatedly plundered. In others, the Rebels were enraged at the plantation-owners for making any arrangements with "the Yankees," and treated them with merciless severity. There was no course that promised absolute safety, and there was no man who could devise a plan of operations that would cover all contingencies. Every thing considered, the result of the free-labor enterprise was favorable to the pockets of the avaricious lessees, though it was not encouraging to the negro and to the friends of justice and humanity. All who had been successful desired to renew their leases for another season. Some who were losers were willing to try again and hope for better fortune. All the available plantations in the vicinity of Vicksburg, Milliken's Bend, and other points along that portion of the Mississippi were applied for before the beginning of the New Year. Application for these places were generally made by the former lessees or their friends. The prospects were good for a vigorous prosecution of the free-labor enterprise during 1864. In the latter part of 1863, I passed down the Mississippi, _en route_ to New Orleans. At Vicksburg I met a gentleman who had been investigating the treatment of the negroes under the new system, and was about making a report to the proper authorities. He claimed to have proof that the agents appointed by General Thomas had not been honest in their administration of affairs. One of these agents had taken five plantations under his control, and was proposing to retain them for another year. It was charged that he had not paid his negroes for their labor, except in scanty supplies of clothing, for which exorbitant prices were charged. He had been successful with his plantations, but delivered very little cotton to the Government agents. The investigations into the conduct of agents and lessees were expected to make a change in the situation. Up to that time the War Department had controlled the whole system of plantation management. The Treasury Department was seeking the control, on the ground that the plantations were a source of revenue to the Government, and should be under its financial and commercial policy. If it could be proved that the system pursued was an unfair and dishonest one, there was probability of a change. I pressed forward on my visit to New Orleans. On my return, two weeks later, the agents of General Thomas were pushing their plans for the coming year. There was no indication of an immediate change in the management. The duties of these agents had been enlarged, and the region which they controlled extended from Lake Providence, sixty miles above Vicksburg, to the mouth of Red River, nearly two hundred miles below. One of the agents had his office at Lake Providence, a second was located at Vicksburg, while the third was at Natchez. Nearly all the plantations near Lake Providence had been leased or applied for. The same was the case with most of those near Vicksburg. In some instances, there were several applicants for the same plantation. The agents announced their determination to sell the choice of plantations to the highest bidder. The competition for the best places was expected to be very active. There was one pleasing feature. Some of the applicants for plantations were not like the sharp-eyed speculators who had hitherto controlled the business. They seemed to be men of character, desirous of experimenting with free labor for the sake of demonstrating its feasibility when skillfully and honestly managed. They hoped and believed it would be profitable, but they were not undertaking the enterprise solely with a view to money-making. The number of these men was not large, but their presence, although in small force, was exceedingly encouraging. I regret to say that these men were outstripped in the struggle for good locations by their more unscrupulous competitors. Before the season was ended, the majority of the honest men abandoned the field. During 1863, many negroes cultivated small lots of ground on their own account. Sometimes a whole family engaged in the enterprise, a single individual having control of the matter. In other cases, two, three, or a half-dozen negroes would unite their labor, and divide the returns. One family of four persons sold twelve bales of cotton, at two hundred dollars per bale, as the result of eight months' labor. Six negroes who united their labor were able to sell twenty bales. The average was about one and a half or two bales to each of those persons who attempted the planting enterprise on their own account. A few made as high as four bales each, while others did not make more than a single bale. One negro, who was quite successful in planting on his own account, proposed to take a small plantation in 1864, and employ twenty or more colored laborers. How he succeeded I was not able to ascertain. The commissioners in charge of the freedmen gave the negroes every encouragement to plant on their own account. In 1864 there were thirty colored lessees near Milliken's Bend, and about the same number at Helena. Ten of these persons at Helena realized $31,000 for their year's labor. Two of them planted forty acres in cotton; their expenses were about $1,200; they sold their crop for $8,000. Another leased twenty-four acres. His expenses were less than $2,000, and he sold his crop for $6,000. Another leased seventeen acres. He earned by the season's work enough to purchase a good house, and leave him a cash balance of $300. Another leased thirteen and a half acres, expended about $600 in its cultivation, and sold his crop for $4,000. At Milliken's Bend the negroes were not as successful as at Helena--much of the cotton crop being destroyed by the "army worm." It is possible that the return of peace may cause a discontinuance of the policy of leasing land to negroes. The planters are bitterly opposed to the policy of dividing plantations into small parcels, and allowing them to be cultivated by freedmen. They believe in extensive tracts of land under a single management, and endeavor to make the production of cotton a business for the few rather than the many. It has always been the rule to discourage small planters. No aristocratic proprietor, if he could avoid it, would sell any portion of his estate to a man of limited means. In the hilly portions of the South, the rich men were unable to carry out their policy. Consequently, there were many who cultivated cotton on a small scale. On the lower Mississippi this was not the case. When the Southern States are fairly "reconstructed," and the political control is placed in the hands of the ruling race, every effort will be made to maintain the old policy. Plantations of a thousand or of three thousand acres will be kept intact, unless the hardest necessity compels their division. If possible, the negroes will not be permitted to possess or cultivate land on their own account. To allow them to hold real estate will be partially admitting their claim to humanity. No true scion of chivalry can permit such an innovation, so long as he is able to make successful opposition. I have heard Southern men declare that a statute law should, and would, be made to prevent the negroes holding real estate. I have no doubt of the disposition of the late Rebels in favor of such enactment, and believe they would display the greatest energy in its enforcement. It would be a labor of love on their part, as well as of duty. Its success would be an obstacle in the way of the much-dreaded "negro equality." CHAPTER XXXI. AMONG THE OFFICIALS. Reasons for Trying an Experiment.--Activity among Lessees.--Opinions of the Residents.--Rebel Hopes in 1863.--Removal of Negroes to West Louisiana.--Visiting Natchez.--The City and its Business.--"The Rejected Addresses." In my visit to Vicksburg I was accompanied by my fellow-journalist, Mr. Colburn, of _The World_. Mr. Colburn and myself had taken more than an ordinary interest in the free-labor enterprise. We had watched its inception eight months before, with many hopes for its success, and with as many fears for the result. The experiment of 1863, under all its disadvantages, gave us convincing proof that the production of cotton and sugar by free labor was both possible and profitable. The negro had proved the incorrectness of the slaveholders' assertion that no black man would labor on a plantation except as a slave. So much we had seen accomplished. It was the result of a single year's trial. We desired to see a further and more extensive test. While studying the new system in the hands of others, we were urged to bring it under our personal observation. Various inducements were held out. We were convinced of the general feasibility of the enterprise, wherever it received proper attention. As a philanthropic undertaking, it was commendable. As a financial experiment, it promised success. We looked at the matter in all its aspects, and finally decided to gain an intimate knowledge of plantation life in war-time. Whether we succeeded or failed, we would learn more about the freedmen than we had hitherto known, and would assist, in some degree, to solve the great problem before the country. Success would be personally profitable, while failure could not be disastrous. We determined to lease a plantation, but had selected none. In her directions for cooking a hare, Mrs. Glass says: "First, catch your hare." Our animal was to be caught, and the labor of securing it proved greater than we anticipated. All the eligible locations around Vicksburg had been taken by the lessees of the previous season, or by newly-arrived persons who preceded us. There were several residents of the neighboring region who desired persons from the North to join them in tilling their plantations. They were confident of obtaining Rebel protection, though by no means certain of securing perfect immunity. In each case they demanded a cash advance of a few thousands, for the purpose of hiring the guerrillas to keep the peace. As it was evident that the purchase of one marauding band would require the purchase of others, until the entire "Confederacy" had been bought up, we declined all these proposals. Some of these residents, who wished Northern men to join them, claimed to have excellent plantations along the Yazoo, or near some of its tributary bayous. These men were confident a fine cotton crop could be made, "if there were some Northern man to manage the niggers." It was the general complaint with the people who lived in that region that, with few exceptions, no Southern man could induce the negroes to continue at work. One of these plantation proprietors said his location was such that no guerrilla could get near it without endangering his life. An investigation showed that no other person could reach the plantation without incurring a risk nearly as great. Very few of these owners of remote plantations were able to induce strangers to join them. We procured a map of the Mississippi and the country bordering its banks. Whenever we found a good location and made inquiry about it at the office of the leasing agents, we were sure to ascertain that some one had already filed an application. It was plain that Vicksburg was not the proper field for our researches. We shook its dust from our feet and went to Natchez, a hundred and twenty-five miles below, where a better prospect was afforded. In the spring of 1863, the Rebels felt confident of retaining permanent possession of Vicksburg and Port Hudson, two hundred and fifty miles apart. Whatever might be the result elsewhere, this portion of the Mississippi should not be abandoned. In the belief that the progress of the Yankees had been permanently stopped, the planters in the locality mentioned endeavored to make as full crops as possible of the great staple of the South. Accordingly, they plowed and planted, and tended the growing cotton until midsummer came. On the fourth of July, Vicksburg surrendered, and opened the river to Port Hudson. General Herron's Division was sent to re-enforce General Banks, who was besieging the latter place. In a few days, General Gardner hauled down his flag and gave Port Hudson to the nation. "The Father of Waters went unvexed to the Sea." The rich region that the Rebels had thought to hold was, by the fortune of war, in the possession of the National army. The planters suspended their operations, through fear that the Yankees would possess the land. Some of them sent their negroes to the interior of Louisiana for safety. Others removed to Texas, carrying all their human property with them. On some plantations the cotton had been so well cared for that it came to maturity in fine condition. On others it had been very slightly cultivated, and was almost choked out of existence by weeds and grass. Nearly every plantation could boast of more or less cotton in the field--the quantity varying from twenty bales to five hundred. On some plantations cotton had been neglected, and a large crop of corn grown in its place. Everywhere the Rebel law had been obeyed by the production of more corn than usual. There was enough for the sustenance of our armies for many months. Natchez was the center of this newly-opened region. Before the war it was the home of wealthy slave-owners, who believed the formation of a Southern Confederacy would be the formation of a terrestrial paradise. On both banks of the Mississippi, above and below Natchez, were the finest cotton plantations of the great valley. One family owned nine plantations, from which eight thousand bales of cotton were annually sent to market. Another family owned seven plantations, and others were the owners of from three to six, respectively. The plantations were in the care of overseers and agents, and rarely visited by their owners. The profits were large, and money was poured out in profusion. The books of one of the Natchez banks showed a daily business, in the picking season, of two or three million dollars, generally on the accounts of planters and their factors. Prior to the Rebellion, cotton was usually shipped to New Orleans, and sold in that market. There were some of the planters who sent their cotton to Liverpool or Havre, without passing it through the hands of New Orleans factors. A large balance of the proceeds of such shipments remained to the credit of the shippers when the war broke out, and saved them from financial ruin. The business of Natchez amounted, according to the season, from a hundred thousand to three hundred thousand bales. This included a great quantity that was sent to New Orleans from plantations above and below the city, without touching at all upon the levee at Natchez. Natchez consists of Natchez-on-the-Hill and Natchez-under-the-Hill. A bluff, nearly two hundred feet high, faces the Mississippi, where there is an eastward bend of the stream. Toward the river this bluff is almost perpendicular, and is climbed by three roads cut into its face like inclined shelves. The French established a settlement at this point a hundred and fifty years ago, and erected a fortification for its defense. This work, known as Fort Rosalie, can still be traced with distinctness, though it has fallen into extreme decay. It was evidently a rectangular, bastioned work, and the location of the bastions and magazine can be readily made out. Natchez-under-the-Hill is a small, straggling village, having a few commission houses and stores, and dwellings of a suspicious character. It was once a resort of gamblers and other _chevaliers d'industrie_, whose livelihood was derived from the travelers along the Mississippi. At present it is somewhat shorn of its glory. Natchez-on-the-Hill is a pleasant and well-built city, of about ten thousand inhabitants. The buildings display wealth and good taste, the streets are wide and finely shaded, and the abundance of churches speaks in praise of the religious sentiment of the people. Near the edge of the bluff there was formerly a fine park, commanding a view of the river for several miles in either direction, and overlooking the plantations and cypress forests on the opposite shore. This pleasure-ground was reserved for the white people alone, no negro being allowed to enter the inclosure under severe penalties. A regiment of our soldiers encamped near this park, and used its fence for fuel. The park is now free to persons of whatever color. Natchez suffered less from the war than most other places of its size along the Mississippi. The Rebels never erected fortifications in or around Natchez, having relied upon Vicksburg and Port Hudson for their protection. When Admiral Farragut ascended the river, in 1862, after the fall of New Orleans, he promised that Natchez should not be disturbed, so long as the people offered no molestation to our gun-boats or army transports. This neutrality was carefully observed, except on one occasion. A party which landed from the gun-boat _Essex_ was fired upon by a militia company that desired to distinguish itself. Natchez was shelled for two hours, in retaliation for this outrage. From that time until our troops occupied the city there was no disturbance. When we arrived at Natchez, we found several Northern men already there, whose business was similar to our own. Some had secured plantations, and were preparing to take possession. Others were watching the situation and surveying the ground before making their selections. We found that the best plantations in the vicinity had been taken by the friends of Adjutant-General Thomas, and were gone past our securing. At Vidalia, Louisiana, directly opposite Natchez, were two fine plantations, "Arnuldia" and "Whitehall," which had been thus appropriated. Others in their vicinity had been taken in one way or another, and were out of our reach. Some of the lessees declared they had been forced to promise a division with certain parties in authority before obtaining possession, while others maintained a discreet silence on the subject. Many plantations owned by widows and semi-loyal persons, would not be placed in the market as "abandoned property." There were many whose status had not been decided, so that they were practically out of the market. In consequence of these various drawbacks, the number of desirable locations that were open for selection was not large. One of the leasing agents gave us a letter to a young widow who resided in the city, and owned a large plantation in Louisiana, fifteen miles from Natchez. We lost no time in calling upon the lady. Other parties had already seen her with a view to leasing her plantation. Though she had promised the lease to one of these visitors, she had no objections to treating with ourselves, provided she could make a more advantageous contract. In a few days we repeated our visit. Our rival had urged his reasons for consideration, and was evidently in favor. He had claimed to be a Secessionist, and assured her he could obtain a safeguard from the Rebel authorities. The lady finally consented to close a contract with him, and placed us in the position of discarded suitors. We thought of issuing a new edition of "The Rejected Addresses." CHAPTER XXXII. A JOURNEY OUTSIDE THE LINES. Passing the Pickets.--Cold Weather in the South.--Effect of Climate upon the Constitution.--Surrounded and Captured.--Prevarication and Explanation.--Among the Natives.--The Game for the Confederacy.--Courtesy of the Planters.--Condition of the Plantations.--The Return. Mr. Colburn went to St. Louis, on business in which both were interested, and left me to look out a plantation. I determined to make a tour of exploration in Louisiana, in the region above Vidalia. With two or three gentlemen, who were bound on similar business, I passed our pickets one morning, and struck out into the region which was dominated by neither army. The weather was intensely cold, the ground frozen solid, and a light snow falling. Cold weather in the South has one peculiarity: it can seem more intense than the same temperature at the North. It is the effect of the Southern climate to unfit the system for any thing but a warm atmosphere. The chill penetrates the whole body with a severity I have never known north of the Ohio River. In a cold day, the "Sunny South" possesses very few attractions in the eyes of a stranger. In that day's ride, and in the night which followed, I suffered more than ever before from cold. I once passed a night in the open air in the Rocky Mountains, with the thermometer ten degrees below zero. I think it was more endurable than Louisiana, with the mercury ten degrees above zero. On my plantation hunt I was thickly clad, but the cold _would_ penetrate, in spite of every thing. An hour by a fire might bring some warmth, but the first step into the open air would drive it away. Fluid extract of corn failed to have its ordinary effect. The people of the vicinity said the weather was unusually severe on that occasion. For the sake of those who reside there hereafter, I hope their statement was true. Our party stopped for the night at a plantation near Waterproof, a small village on the bank of the river, twenty-two miles from Natchez. Just as we were comfortably seated by the fire in the overseer's house, one of the negroes announced that a person at the door wished to see us. I stepped to the door, and found a half-dozen mounted men in blue uniforms. Each man had a carbine or revolver drawn on me. One of my companions followed me outside, and found that the strange party had weapons enough to cover both of us. It had been rumored that several guerrillas, wearing United States uniforms, were lurking in the vicinity. Our conclusions concerning the character of our captors were speedily made. Resistance was useless, but there were considerations that led us to parley as long as possible. Three officers, and as many soldiers, from Natchez, had overtaken us in the afternoon, and borne us company during the latter part of our ride. When we stopped for the night, they concluded to go forward two or three miles, and return in the morning. Supposing ourselves fairly taken, we wished to give our friends opportunity to escape. With this object in view, we endeavored, by much talking, to consume time. I believe it does not make a man eloquent to compel him to peer into the muzzles of a half-dozen cocked revolvers, that may be discharged at any instant on the will of the holders. Prevarication is a difficult task, when time, place, and circumstances are favorable. It is no easy matter to convince your hearers of the truth of a story you know to be false, even when those hearers are inclined to be credulous. Surrounded by strangers, and with your life in peril, the difficulties are greatly increased. I am satisfied that I made a sad failure on that particular occasion. My friend and myself answered, indiscriminately, the questions that were propounded. Our responses did not always agree. Possibly we might have done better if only one of us had spoken. "Come out of that house," was the first request that was made. We came out. "Tell those soldiers to come out." "There are no soldiers here," I responded. "That's a d--d lie." "There are none here." "Yes, there are," said the spokesman of the party. "Some Yankee soldiers came here a little while ago." "We have been here only a few minutes." "Where did you come from?" This was what the lawyers call a leading question. We did not desire to acknowledge we were from Natchez, as that would reveal us at once. We did not wish to say we were from Shreveport, as it would soon be proved we were not telling the truth. I replied that we had come from a plantation a few miles below. Simultaneously my companion said we had just crossed the river. Here was a lack of corroborative testimony which our captors commented upon, somewhat to our discredit. So the conversation went on, our answers becoming more confused each time we spoke. At last the leader of the group dismounted, and prepared to search the house. He turned us over to the care of his companions, saying, as he did so: "If I find any soldiers here, you may shoot these d--d fellows for lying." During all the colloquy we had been carefully covered by the weapons of the group. We knew no soldiers could be found about the premises, and felt no fear concerning the result of the search. Just as the leader finished his search, a lieutenant and twenty men rode up. "Well," said our captor, "you are saved from shooting. I will turn you over to the lieutenant." I recognized in that individual an officer to whom I had received introduction a day or two before. The recognition was mutual. We had fallen into the hands of a scouting party of our own forces. Each mistook the other for Rebels. The contemplated shooting was indefinitely postponed. The lieutenant in command concluded to encamp near us, and we passed the evening in becoming acquainted with each other. On the following day the scouting party returned to Natchez. With my two companions I proceeded ten miles further up the river-bank, calling, on the way, at several plantations. All the inhabitants supposed we were Rebel officers, going to or from Kirby Smith's department. At one house we found two old gentlemen indulging in a game of chess. In response to a comment upon their mode of amusement, one of them said: "We play a very slow and cautious game, sir. Such a game as the Confederacy ought to play at this time." To this I assented. "How did you cross the river, gentlemen?" was the first interrogatory. "We crossed it at Natchez." "At Natchez! We do not often see Confederates from Natchez. You must have been very fortunate to get through." Then we explained who and what we were. The explanation was followed by a little period of silence on the part of our new acquaintances. Very soon, however, the ice was broken, and our conversation became free. We were assured that we might travel anywhere in that region as officers of the Rebel army, without the slightest suspicion of our real character. They treated us courteously, and prevailed upon us to join them at dinner. Many apologies were given for the scantiness of the repast. Corn-bread, bacon, and potatoes were the only articles set before us. Our host said he was utterly unable to procure flour, sugar, coffee, or any thing else not produced upon his plantation. He thought the good times would return when the war ended, and was particularly anxious for that moment to arrive. He pressed us to pass the night at his house, but we were unable to do so. On the following day we returned to Natchez. Everywhere on the road from Vidalia to the farthest point of our journey, we found the plantations running to waste. The negroes had been sent to Texas or West Louisiana for safety, or were remaining quietly in their quarters. Some had left their masters, and were gone to the camps of the National army at Vicksburg and Natchez. The planters had suspended work, partly because they deemed it useless to do any thing in the prevailing uncertainty, and partly because the negroes were unwilling to perform any labor. Squads of Rebel cavalry had visited some of the plantations, and threatened punishment to the negroes if they did any thing whatever toward the production of cotton. Of course, the negroes would heed such advice if they heeded no other. On all the plantations we found cotton and corn, principally the latter, standing in the field. Sometimes there were single inclosures of several hundred acres. The owners were desirous of making any arrangement that would secure the tilling of their soil, while it did not involve them in any trouble with their neighbors or the Rebel authorities. They deplored the reverses which the Rebel cause had suffered, and confessed that the times were out of joint. One of the men we visited was a judge in the courts of Louisiana, and looked at the question in a legal light. After lamenting the severity of the storm which was passing over the South, and expressing his fear that the Rebellion would be a failure, he referred to his own situation. "I own a plantation," said he, "and have combined my planting interest with the practice of law. The fortune of war has materially changed my circumstances. My niggers used to do as I told them, but that time is passed. Your Northern people have made soldiers of our servants, and will, I presume, make voters of them. In five years, if I continue the practice of law, I suppose I shall be addressing a dozen negroes as gentlemen of the jury." "If you had a negro on trial," said one of our party, "that would be correct enough. Is it not acknowledged everywhere that a man shall be tried by his peers?" The lawyer admitted that he never thought of that point before. He said he would insist upon having negroes admitted into court as counsel for negroes that were to be tried by a jury of their race. He did not believe they would ever be available as laborers in the field if they were set free, and thought so many of them would engage in theft that negro courts would be constantly busy. Generally speaking, the planters that I saw were not violent Secessionists, though none of them were unconditional Union men. All said they had favored secession at the beginning of the movement, because they thought it would strengthen and perpetuate slavery. Most of them had lost faith in its ultimate success, but clung to it as their only hope. The few Union men among them, or those who claimed to be loyal, were friends of the nation with many conditions. They desired slavery to be restored to its former status, the rights of the States left intact, and a full pardon extended to all who had taken part in the Rebellion. Under these conditions they would be willing to see the Union restored. Otherwise, the war must go on. We visited several plantations on our tour of observation, and compared their respective merits. One plantation contained three thousand acres of land, but was said to be very old and worn out. Near it was one of twelve hundred acres, three-fourths covered with corn, but with no standing cotton. One had six hundred acres of cotton in the field. This place belonged to a Spaniard, who would not be disturbed by Government, and who refused to allow any work done until after the end of the war. Another had four hundred acres of standing cotton, but the plantation had been secured by a lessee, who was about commencing work. All had merits, and all had demerits. On some there was a sufficient force for the season's work, while on others there was scarcely an able field-hand. On some the gin-houses had been burned, and on others they were standing, but disabled. A few plantations were in good order, but there was always some drawback against our securing them. Some were liable to overflow during the expected flood of the Mississippi; others were in the hands of their owners, and would not be leased by the Government. Some that had been abandoned were so thoroughly abandoned that we would hesitate to attempt their cultivation. There were several plantations more desirable than others, and I busied myself to ascertain the status of their owners, and the probabilities concerning their disposal. Some of the semi-loyal owners of plantations were able to make very good speculations in leasing their property. There was an earnest competition among the lessees to secure promising plantations. One owner made a contract, by which he received five thousand dollars in cash and half the product of the year's labor. A week after the lessee took possession, he was frightened by the near approach of a company of Rebel cavalry. He broke his contract and departed for the North, forfeiting the five thousand dollars he had advanced. Another lessee was ready to make a new contract with the owner, paying five thousand dollars as his predecessor had done. Four weeks later, this lessee abandoned the field, and the owner was at liberty to begin anew. To widows and orphans the agents of the Government displayed a commendable liberality. Nearly all of these persons were allowed to retain control of their plantations, leasing them as they saw fit, and enjoying the income. Some were required to subscribe to the oath of allegiance, and promise to show no more sympathy for the crumbling Confederacy. In many cases no pledge of any kind was exacted. I knew one widow whose disloyalty was of the most violent character. On a visit to New Orleans she was required to take the oath of allegiance before she could leave the steamboat at the levee. She signed the printed oath under protest. A month later, she brought this document forward to prove her loyalty and secure the control of her plantation. CHAPTER XXXIII. OH THE PLANTATION. Military Protection.--Promises.--Another Widow.--Securing a Plantation.--Its Locality and Appearance.--Gardening in Louisiana.--How Cotton is Picked.--"The Tell-Tale."--A Southerner's Opinion of the Negro Character.--Causes and Consequences. Parties who proposed to lease and cultivate abandoned plantations were anxious to know what protection would be afforded them. General Thomas and his agents assured them that proper military posts would soon be established at points within easy distance of each other along the river, so that all plantations in certain limits would be amply protected. This would be done, not as a courtesy to the lessees, but as a part of the policy of providing for the care of the negroes. If the lessees would undertake to feed and clothe several thousand negroes, besides paying them for their labor, they would relieve the Government authorities of a great responsibility. They would demonstrate the feasibility of employing the negroes as free laborers. The cotton which they would throw into market would serve to reduce the prices of that staple, and be a partial supply to the Northern factories. All these things considered, the Government was anxious to foster the enterprise, and would give it every proper assistance. The agents were profuse in their promises of protection, and assured us it would be speedily forthcoming. There was a military post at Vidalia, opposite Natchez, which afforded protection to the plantations in which General Thomas's family and friends were interested. Another was promised at Waterproof, twenty miles above, with a stockade midway between the two places. There was to be a force of cavalry to make a daily journey over the road between Vidalia and Waterproof. I selected two plantations about two miles below Waterproof, and on the bank of the Mississippi. They were separated by a strip of wood-land half a mile in width, and by a small bayou reaching from the river to the head of Lake St. John. Both plantations belonged to the same person, a widow, living near Natchez. The authorities had not decided what they would do with these plantations--whether they would hold them as Government property, or allow the owner to control them. In consideration of her being a widow of fifteen years' standing, they at length determined upon the latter course. It would be necessary to take out a lease from the authorities after obtaining one from the owner. I proceeded at once to make the proper negotiations. Another widow! My first experience in seeking to obtain a widow's plantation was not encouraging. The first widow was young, the second was old. Both were anxious to make a good bargain. In the first instance I had a rival, who proved victorious. In the second affair I had no rival at the outset, but was confronted with one when my suit was fairly under way. Before he came I obtained a promise of the widow's plantations. My rival made her a better offer than I had done. At this she proposed to desert me. I caused the elder Weller's advice to be whispered to him, hoping it might induce his withdrawal. He did not retire, and we, therefore, continued our struggle. _He_ was making proposals on his own behalf; I was proposing for myself and for Mr. Colburn, who was then a thousand miles away. My widow (I call her mine, for I won at last) desired us to give her all the corn and cotton then on the plantations, and half of what should be produced under our management. I offered her half the former and one-fourth the latter. These were the terms on which nearly all private plantations were being leased. She agreed to the offer respecting the corn and cotton then standing in the field, and demanded a third of the coming year's products. After some hesitation, we decided upon "splitting the difference." Upon many minor points, such as the sale of wood, stock, wool, etc., she had her own way. A contract was drawn up, which gave Colburn and myself the lease of the two plantations, "Aquasco" and "Monono," for the period of one year. We were to gather the crops then standing in the field, both cotton and corn, selling all the former and such portion of the latter as was not needed for the use of the plantations. We were to cultivate the plantations to the best of our abilities, subject to the fortunes of flood, fire, and pestilence, and the operations of military and marauding forces. We agreed to give up the plantations at the end of the year in as good condition as we found them in respect to stock, tools, etc., unless prevented by circumstances beyond our control. We were to have full supervision of the plantations, and manage them as we saw fit. We were to furnish such stock and tools as might be needed, with the privilege of removing the same at the time of our departure. Our widow (whom I shall call Mrs. B.) was to have one-half the proceeds of the corn and cotton then on the plantations, and seven twenty-fourths of such as might be produced during the year. She was to have the privilege of obtaining, once a week, the supplies of butter, chickens, meal, vegetables, and similar articles she might need for her family use. There were other provisions in the contract, but the essential points were those I have mentioned. The two plantations were to be under a single management. I shall have occasion to speak of them jointly, as "the plantation." With this contract duly signed, sealed, and stamped, I went to the "Agent for Abandoned Plantations." After some delay, and a payment of liberal fees, I obtained the Government lease. These preliminaries concluded, I proceeded to the locality of our temporary home. Colburn had not returned from the North, but was expected daily. The bayou which I have mentioned, running through the strip of woods which separated the plantations, formed the dividing line between the parishes "Concordia" and "Tensas," in the State of Louisiana. Lake St. John lay directly in rear of "Monono," our lower plantation. This lake was five or six miles long by one in width, and was, doubtless, the bed of the Mississippi many years ago. On each plantation there were ten dwelling-houses for the negroes. On one they were arranged in a double row, and on the other in a single row. There was a larger house for the overseer, and there were blacksmith shops, carpenter shops, stables, corn-cribs, meat-houses, cattle-yards, and gin-houses. On Aquasco there was a dwelling-house containing five large rooms, and having a wide veranda along its entire front. This dwelling-house was in a spacious inclosure, by the side of a fine garden. Inside this inclosure, and not far from the dwelling, were the quarters for the house-servants, the carriage-house and private stable, the smoke-house and the kitchen, which lay detached from the main building, according to the custom prevailing in the South. Our garden could boast of fig and orange trees, and other tropical productions. Pinks and roses we possessed in abundance. Of the latter we had enough in their season to furnish all the flower-girls on Broadway with a stock in trade. Our gardener "made his garden" in February. By the middle of March, his potatoes, cabbages, beets, and other vegetables under his care were making fine progress. Before the jingle of sleigh-bells had ceased in the Eastern States, we were feasting upon delicious strawberries from our own garden, ripened in the open air. The region where plowing begins in January, and corn is planted in February or early March, impresses a New Englander with its contrast to his boyhood home. When I took possession of our new property, the state of affairs was not the most pleasing. Mrs. B. had sent the best of her negroes to Texas shortly after the fall of Vicksburg. Those remaining on the plantations were not sufficient for our work. There were four mules where we needed fifty, and there was not a sufficient supply of oxen and wagons. Farming tools, plows, etc., were abundant, but many repairs must be made. There was enough of nearly every thing for a commencement. The rest would be secured in due season. Cotton and corn were in the field. The former was to receive immediate attention. On the day after my arrival I mustered thirty-four laborers of all ages and both sexes, and placed them at work, under the superintendence of a foreman. During the afternoon I visited them in the field, to observe the progress they were making. It was the first time I had ever witnessed the operation, but I am confident I did not betray my inexperience in the presence of my colored laborers. The foreman asked my opinion upon various points of plantation management, but I deferred making answer until a subsequent occasion. In every case I told him to do for the present as they had been accustomed, and I would make such changes as I saw fit from time to time. Cotton-picking requires skill rather than strength. The young women are usually the best pickers, on account of their superior dexterity. The cotton-stalk, or bush, is from two to five or six feet high. It is unlike any plant with which we are familiar in the North. It resembles a large currant-bush more nearly than any thing else I can think of. Where the branches are widest the plant is three or four feet from side to side. The lowest branches are the longest, and the plant, standing by itself, has a shape similar to that of the Northern spruce. The stalk is sometimes an inch and a half in diameter where it leaves the ground. Before the leaves have fallen, the rows in a cotton-field bear a strong resemblance to a series of untrimmed hedges. When fully opened, the cotton-bolls almost envelop the plant in their snow-white fiber. At a distance a cotton-field ready for the pickers forcibly reminds a Northerner of an expanse covered with snow. Our Northern expression, "white as snow," is not in use in the Gulf States. "White as cotton" is the form of comparison which takes its place. The pickers walk between the rows, and gather the cotton from the stalks on either side. Each one gathers half the cotton from the row on his right, and half of that on his left. Sometimes, when the stalks are low, one person takes an entire row to himself, and gathers from both sides of it. A bag is suspended by a strap over the shoulder, the end of the bag reaching the ground, so that its weight may not be an inconvenience. The open boll is somewhat like a fully bloomed water-lily. The skill in picking lies in thrusting the fingers into the boll so as to remove all the cotton with a single motion. Ordinary-pickers grasp the boll with one hand and pluck out the cotton with the other. Skillful pickers work with both hands, never touching the bolls, but removing the cotton by a single dextrous twist of the fingers. They can thus operate with great rapidity. As fast as the bags are filled, they are emptied into large baskets, which are placed at a corner of the field or at the ends of the rows. When the day's work is ended the cotton is weighed. The amount brought forward by each person is noted on a slate, from which it is subsequently recorded on the account-book of the plantation. From one to four hundred pounds, according to the state of the plants, is the proper allowance for each hand per day. In the days of slavery the "stint" was fixed by the overseer, and was required to be picked under severe penalties. It is needless to say that this stint was sufficiently large to allow of no loitering during the entire day. If the slave exceeded the quantity required of him, the excess was sometimes placed to his credit and deducted from a subsequent day. This was by no means the universal custom. Sometimes he received a small present or was granted some especial favor. By some masters the stint was increased by the addition of the excess. The task was always regulated by the condition of the cotton in the field. Where it would sometimes be three hundred pounds, at others it would not exceed one hundred. At the time I commenced my cotton-picking, the circumstances were not favorable to a large return. The picking season begins in August or September, and is supposed to end before Christmas. In my case it was late in January, and the winter rain had washed much of the cotton from the stalks. Under the circumstances I could not expect more than fifty or seventy-five pounds per day for each person engaged. During the first few days I did not weigh the cotton. I knew the average was not more than fifty pounds to each person, but the estimates which the negroes made fixed it at two hundred pounds. One night I astonished them by taking the weighing apparatus to the field and carefully weighing each basket. There was much disappointment among all parties at the result. The next day's picking showed a surprising improvement. After that time, each day's work was tested and the result announced. The "tell-tale," as the scales were sometimes called, was an overseer from whom there was no escape. I think the negroes worked faithfully as soon as they found there was no opportunity for deception. I was visited by Mrs. B.'s agent a few days after I became a cotton-planter. We took an inventory of the portable property that belonged to the establishment, and arranged some plans for our mutual advantage. This agent was a resident of Natchez. He was born in the North, but had lived so long in the slave States that his sympathies were wholly Southern. He assured me the negroes were the greatest liars in the world, and required continual watching. They would take every opportunity to neglect their work, and were always planning new modes of deception. They would steal every thing of which they could make any use, and many articles that they could not possibly dispose of. Pretending illness was among the most frequent devices for avoiding labor, and the overseer was constantly obliged to contend against such deception. In short, as far as I could ascertain from this gentleman, the negro was the embodiment of all earthly wickedness. Theft, falsehood, idleness, deceit, and many other sins which afflict mortals, were the especial heritance of the negro. In looking about me, I found that many of these charges against the negro were true. The black man was deceptive, and he was often dishonest. There can be no effect without a cause, and the reasons for this deception and dishonesty were apparent, without difficult research. The system of slavery necessitated a constant struggle between the slave and his overseer. It was the duty of the latter to obtain the greatest amount of labor from the sinews of the slave. It was the business of the slave to perform as little labor as possible. It made no difference to him whether the plantation produced a hundred or a thousand bales. He received nothing beyond his subsistence and clothing. His labor had no compensation, and his balance-sheet at the end of the month or year was the same, whether he had been idle or industrious. It was plainly to his personal interest to do nothing he could in any way avoid. The negro displayed his sagacity by deceiving the overseer whenever he could do so. The best white man in the world would have shunned all labor under such circumstances. The negro evinced a pardonable weakness in pretending to be ill whenever he could hope to make the pretense successful. Receiving no compensation for his services, beyond his necessary support, the negro occasionally sought to compensate himself. He was fond of roasted pork, but that article did not appear on the list of plantation rations. Consequently some of the negroes would make clandestine seizure of the fattest pigs when the chance of detection was not too great. It was hard to convince them that the use of one piece of property for the benefit of another piece, belonging to the same person, was a serious offense. "You see, Mr. K----," said a negro to me, admitting that he had sometimes stolen his master's hogs, "you see, master owns his saddle-horse, and he owns lots of corn. Master would be very mad if I didn't give the horse all the corn he wanted. Now, he owns me, and he owns a great many hogs. I like hog, just as much as the horse likes corn, but when master catches me killing the hogs he is very mad, and he makes the overseer whip me." Corn, chickens, flour, meal, in fact, every thing edible, became legitimate plunder for the negroes when the rations furnished them were scanty. I believe that in nine cases out of ten the petty thefts which the negroes committed were designed to supply personal wants, rather than for any other purpose. What the negro stole was usually an article of food, and it was nearly always stolen from the plantation where he belonged. Sometimes there was a specially bad negro--one who had been caught in some extraordinary dishonesty. One in my employ was reported to have been shot at while stealing from a dwelling-house several years before. Among two hundred negroes, he was the only noted rascal. I did not attribute his dishonesty to his complexion alone. I have known worse men than he, in whose veins there was not a drop of African blood. The police records everywhere show that wickedness of heart "dwells in white and black the same." With his disadvantages of position, the absence of all moral training, and the dishonesty which was the natural result of the old system of labor, the negro could not be expected to observe all the rules prescribed for his guidance, but which were never explained. Like ignorant and degraded people everywhere, many of the negroes believed that guilt lay mainly in detection. There was little wickedness in stealing a pig or a chicken, if the theft were never discovered, and there was no occasion for allowing twinges of conscience to disturb the digestion. I do not intend to intimate, by the above, that all were dishonest, even in these small peculations. There were many whose sense of right and wrong was very clear, and whose knowledge of their duties had been derived from the instructions of the white preachers. These negroes "obeyed their masters" in every thing, and considered it a religious obligation to be always faithful. They never avoided their tasks, in the field or elsewhere, and were never discovered doing any wrong. Under the new system of labor at the South, this portion of the negro population will prove of great advantage in teaching their kindred the duties they owe to each other. When all are trained to think and act for themselves, the negroes will, doubtless, prove as correct in morals as the white people around them. Early in the present year, the authorities at Davies' Bend, below Vicksburg, established a negro court, in which all petty cases were tried. The judge, jury, counsel, and officers were negroes, and no white man was allowed to interfere during the progress of a trial. After the decisions were made, the statement of the case and the action thereon were referred to the superintendent of the Government plantations at that point. It was a noticeable feature that the punishments which the negroes decreed for each other were of a severe character. Very frequently it was necessary for the authorities to modify the sentences after the colored judge had rendered them. The cases tried by the court related to offenses of a minor character, such as theft, fraud, and various delinquencies of the freed negroes. The experiment of a negro court is said to have been very successful, though it required careful watching. It was made in consequence of a desire of the authorities to teach the freedmen how to govern themselves. The planters in the vicinity were as bitterly opposed to the movement as to any other effort that lifts the negro above his old position. At the present time, several parties in Vicksburg have leased three plantations, in as many localities, and are managing them on different plans. On the first they furnish the negroes with food and clothing, and divide the year's income with them. On the second they pay wages at the rate of ten dollars per month, furnishing rations free, and retaining half the money until the end of the year. On the third they pay daily wages of one dollar, having the money ready at nightfall, the negro buying his own rations at a neighboring store. On the first plantation, the negroes are wasteful of their supplies, as they are not liable for any part of their cost. They are inclined to be idle, as their share in the division will not be materially affected by the loss of a few days' labor. On the second they are less wasteful and more industrious, but the distance of the day of payment is not calculated to develop notions of strict economy. On the third they generally display great frugality, and are far more inclined to labor than on the other plantations. The reason is apparent. On the first plantation their condition is not greatly changed from that of slavery, except in the promise of compensation and the absence of compulsory control. In the last case they are made responsible both for their labor and expenses, and are learning how to care for themselves as freemen. CHAPTER XXXIV. RULES AND REGULATIONS UNDER THE OLD AND NEW SYSTEMS. The Plantation Record.--Its Uses.--Interesting Memoranda.--Dogs, Jail, and Stocks.--Instructions to the Overseer.--His Duties and Responsibilities.--The Order of General Banks.--Management of Plantations in the Department of the Gulf.--The two Documents Contrasted.--One of the Effects of "an Abolition War." Nearly every planter in the South required the manager of his plantation to keep a record of all events of importance. Books were prepared by a publishing house in New Orleans, with special reference to their use by overseers. These books had a blank for every day in the year, in which the amount and kind of work performed were to be recorded by the overseer. There were blanks for noting the progress during the picking season, and the amount picked by each person daily. There were blanks for monthly and yearly inventories of stock, tools, etc., statements of supplies received and distributed, lists of births and deaths (there were no blanks for marriages), time and amount of shipments of cotton, and for all the ordinary business of a plantation. In the directions for the use of this book, I found the following:-- "On the pages marked I, the planter himself will make a careful record of all the negroes upon the plantation, stating their ages as nearly as possible, and their cash value, at the commencement of the year. At the close, he will again enter their individual value at that time, adding the year's increase, and omitting those that may have died. The difference can then be transferred to the balance-sheet. The year's crop is chargeable with any depreciation in the value of the negroes, occasioned by overwork and improper management, in the effort, perhaps, to make an extra crop independent of every other consideration. On the other hand, should the number of children have greatly increased during the year; the strength and usefulness of the old been sustained by kind treatment and care; the youngsters taught to be useful, and, perhaps, some of the men instructed in trades and the women in home manufactures, the increased value of the entire force will form a handsome addition to the side of _profits_." On the pages where the daily incidents of the plantation were recorded, I frequently discovered entries that illustrated the "peculiar institution." Some of them read thus:-- _June 5th_. Whipped Harry and Sarah to-day, because they didn't keep up their rows. _July 7th_. Aleck ran away to the woods, because I threatened to whip him. _July 9th_. Got Mr. Hall's dogs and hunted Aleck. Didn't find him. Think he is in the swamp back of Brandon's. _July 12th_. Took Aleck out of Vidalia jail. Paid $4.50 for jail fees. Put him in the stocks when we got home. _July 30th_. Moses died this morning. Charles and Henry buried him. His wife was allowed to keep out of the field until noon. _August 10th_. Sent six mules and four negroes down to the lower plantation. They will come back to-morrow. _September 9th_. John said he was sick this morning, but I made him go to the field. They brought him in before noon. He has a bad fever. Am afraid he won't be able to go out again soon. _September 20th_. Whipped Susan, because she didn't pick as much cotton as she did yesterday. _September 29th_. Put William in the stocks and kept him till sunset, for telling Charles he wanted to run away. _October 8th_. William and Susan want to be married. Told them I should not allow it, but they might live together if they wanted to. (The above memorandum was explained to me by one of the negroes. The owner of the plantation did not approve of marriages, because they were inconvenient in case it was desired to sell a portion of the working force.) _October 1st_. Took an inventory of the negroes and stock. Their value is about the same as when the last inventory was taken. _December 3d_. Finished picking. Gave the negroes half a holiday. Nearly every day's entry shows the character and amount of work performed. Thus we have:-- _February 10th_. Fifteen plows running, five hands piling logs, four hands ditching, six hands in trash-gang. In the planting, hoeing, and picking seasons, the result of the labor was recorded in the same manner. Whippings were more or less frequent, according to the character of the overseer. Under one overseer I found that whippings were rare. Under other overseers they were of common occurrence. The individual who prepared the "_Plantation Record_" for the publishers, gave, in addition to directions for its use, instructions for the overseer's general conduct. I copy them below, preserving the author's language throughout. THE DUTIES OF AN OVERSEER. It is here supposed that the overseer is not immediately under his employer's eye, but is left for days or weeks, perhaps months, to the exercise of his own judgment in the management of the plantation. To him we would say-- Bear in mind, that you have engaged for a stated sum of money, to devote your time and energies, for an entire year, _to one object_--to carry out the orders of your employer, strictly, cheerfully, and to the best of your ability; and, in all things, to study his interests--requiring something more than your mere presence on the plantation, and that at such times as suits your own pleasure and convenience. On entering upon your duties, inform yourself thoroughly of the condition of the plantation, negroes, stock, implements, etc. Learn the views of your employer as to the general course of management he wishes pursued, and make up your mind to carry out these views fully, as far as in your power. If any objections occur to you, state them distinctly, that they may either be yielded to or overcome. Where full and particular directions are not given to you, but you are left, in a great measure, to the exercise of your own judgment, you will find the following hints of service. They are compiled from excellent sources--from able articles in the agricultural journals of the day, from Washington's Directions to his Overseers, and from personal experience. "I do, in explicit terms, enjoin it upon you to remain constantly at home (unless called off by unavoidable business, or to attend Divine worship), and to be constantly with your people when there. There is no other sure way of getting work well done, and quietly, by negroes; for when an overlooker's back is turned the most of them will slight their work, or be idle altogether. In which case correction cannot retrieve either, but often produces evils which are worse than the disease. Nor is there any other mode than this to prevent thieving and other disorders, the consequences of opportunities. You will recollect that your time is paid for by me, and if I am deprived of it, it is worse even than robbing my purse, because it is also a breach of trust, which every honest man ought to hold most sacred. You have found me, and you will continue to find me, faithful to my part of the agreement which was made with you, whilst you are attentive to your part; but it is to be remembered that a breach on one side releases the obligation on the other." Neither is it right that you should entertain a constant run of company at your house, incurring unnecessary expense, taking up your own time and that of the servants beyond what is needful for your own comfort--a woman to cook and wash for you, milk, make butter, and so on. More than this you have no claim to. Endeavor to take the same interest in every thing upon the place, as if it were your own; indeed, the responsibility in this case is greater than if it were all your own--having been intrusted to you by another. Unless you feel thus, it is impossible that you can do your employer justice. The health of the negroes under your charge is an important matter. Much of the usual sickness among them is the result of carelessness and mismanagement. Overwork or unnecessary exposure to rain, insufficient clothing, improper or badly-cooked food, and night rambles, are all fruitful causes of disease. A great majority of the cases you should be yourself competent to manage, or you are unfit for the place you hold; but whenever you find that the case is one you do not understand, send for a physician, if such is the general order of the owner. By exerting yourself to have their clothing ready in good season; to arrange profitable in-door employment in wet weather; to see that an abundant supply of wholesome, _well-cooked food_, including plenty of vegetables, be supplied to them _at regular hours_; that the sick be cheered and encouraged, and some extra comforts allowed them, and the convalescent not exposed to the chances of a relapse; that women, whilst nursing, be kept as near to the nursery as possible, but at no time allowed to suckle their children when overheated; that the infant be nursed three times during the day, in addition to the morning and evening; that no whisky be allowed upon the place at any time or under any circumstances; but that they have, whilst heated and at work, plenty of pure, _cool_ water; that care be taken to prevent the hands from carrying their baskets full of cotton on their head--a most injurious practice; and, in short, that such means be used for their comfort as every judicious, humane man will readily think of, you will find the amount of sickness gradually lessened. Next to the negroes, the stock on the place will require your constant attention. You can, however, spare yourself much trouble by your choice of a stock-minder, and by adopting and enforcing a strict system in the care of the stock. It is a part of their duty in which overseers are generally most careless. The horse and mule stock are first in importance. Unless these are kept in good condition, it is impossible that the work can go on smoothly, or your crop be properly tended. Put your stable in good order; and, if possible, inclose it so that it can be kept under lock. Place a steady, careful old man there as hostler, making him responsible for every thing, and that directly to yourself. The foreman of the plow-gang, and the hands under his care, should be made answerable to the hostler--whose business it is to have the feed cut up, ground, and ready; the stalls well littered and cleaned out at proper intervals; to attend to sick or maimed animals; to see that the gears are always hung in their proper place, kept in good order, and so on. It is an easy matter to keep horses or mules fat, with a full and open corn-crib and abundance of fodder. But that overseer shows his good management who can keep his teams fat at the least expense of corn and fodder. The waste of those articles in the South, through shameful carelessness and neglect, is immense; as food for stock, they are most expensive articles. Oats, millet, peas (vine and all), broadcast corn, Bermuda and crab-grass hay, are all much cheaper and equally good. Any one of these crops, fed whilst green--the oats and millet as they begin to shoot, the peas to blossom, and the corn when tasseling--with a feed of dry oats, corn, or corn-chop at noon, will keep a plow-team in fine order all the season. In England, where they have the finest teams in the world, this course _is invariably pursued_, for its economy. From eight to nine hours per day is as long as the team should be at actual work. They will perform more upon less feed, and keep in better order for a _push_ when needful, worked briskly in that way, than when kept dragging a plow all day long at a slow pace. And the hands have leisure to rest, to cut up feed, clean and repair gears, and so on. Oxen. No more work oxen should be retained than can be kept at all times in good order. An abundant supply of green feed during spring and summer, cut and fed as recommended above, and in winter well-boiled cotton-seed, with a couple of quarts of meal in it per head; turnips, raw or cooked; corn-cobs soaked twenty-four hours in salt and water; shucks, pea-vines, etc., passed through a cutting-box--any thing of the kind, in short, is cheaper food for them in winter, and will keep them in better order than dry corn and shucks or fodder. Indeed, the fewer cattle are kept on any place the better, unless the range is remarkably good. When young stock of any kind are stinted of their proper food, and their growth receives a check, they never can wholly recover it. Let the calves have a fair share of milk, and also as much of the cooked food prepared for the cows and oxen as they will eat; with at times a little dry meal to lick. When cows or oxen show symptoms of failing, from age or otherwise, fatten them off at once; and if killed for the use of the place, _save the hide carefully_--rubbing at least two quarts of salt upon it; then roll up for a day or two, when it may be stretched and dried. Hogs are generally sadly mismanaged. Too many are kept, and kept badly. One good brood sow for every five hands on a place, is amply sufficient--indeed, more pork will be cured from these than from a greater number. Provide at least two good grazing lots for them, with Bermuda, crab-grass, or clover, which does as well at Washington, Miss., as anywhere in the world, with two bushels of ground plaster to the acre, sowed over it. Give a steady, trusty hand no other work to do but to feed and care for them. With a large set kettle or two, an old mule and cart to haul his wood for fuel, cotton-seed, turnips, etc., for feed, and leaves for bedding, he can do full justice to one hundred head, old and young. They will increase and thrive finely, with good grazing, and a full mess, twice a day, of swill prepared as follows: Sound cotton-seed, with a gallon of corn-meal to the bushel, a quart of oak or hickory ashes, a handful of salt, and a good proportion of turnips or green food of any kind, even clover or peas; the whole thoroughly--mind you, _thoroughly_ cooked--then thrown into a large trough, and there allowed _to become sour before being fed_. Sheep may be under the charge of the stock-minder; from ten to twenty to the hand may be generally kept with advantage. Sick animals require close and judicious attention. Too frequently they are either left to get well or to die of themselves, or are bled and dosed with nauseous mixtures indiscriminately. Study the subject of the diseases of animals during your leisure evenings, which you can do from some of the many excellent works on the subject. _Think_ before you _act_. When your animal has fever, nature would dictate that all stimulating articles of diet or medicine should be avoided. Bleeding may be necessary to reduce the force of the circulation; purging, to remove irritating substances from the bowels; moist, light, and easily-digested food, that his weakened digestion may not be oppressed; cool drinks, to allay his thirst, and, to some extent, compensate for diminished secretions; rest and quiet, to prevent undue excitement in his system, and so on through the whole catalogue of diseases--but do nothing without a reason. Carry out this principle, and you will probably do much good--hardly great harm; go upon any other, and your measures are more likely to be productive of injury than benefit. The implements and tools require a good deal of looking after. By keeping a memorandum of the distribution of any set of tools, they will be much more likely to be forthcoming at the end of the month. Axes, hoes, and other small tools, of which every hand has his own, should have his number marked upon it with a steel punch. The strict enforcement of one single rule will keep every thing straight: "Have a place for every thing, and see that every thing is in its place." Few instances of good management will better please an employer than that of having all of the winter clothing spun and woven on the place. By having a room devoted to that purpose, under charge of some one of the old women, where those who may be complaining a little, or convalescent after sickness, may be employed in some light work, and where all of the women may be sent in wet weather, more than enough of both cotton and woolen yarn can be spun for the supply of the place. Of the principal staple crop of the plantation, whether cotton, sugar, or rice, we shall not here speak. Of the others--the provision crops--there is most commonly enough made upon most plantations for their own supply. Rarely, however, is it saved without great and inexcusable waste, and fed out without still greater. And this, to their lasting shame be it said, is too often the case to a disgraceful extent, when an overseer feels satisfied that he will not remain another year upon the place. His conduct should be the very opposite of this--an honorable, right-thinking man will feel a particular degree of pride in leaving every thing in thorough order, and especially an abundant supply of all kinds of feed. He thus establishes a character for himself which _must_ have its effect. Few plantations are so rich in soil as not to be improved by manure. Inform yourself of the best means, suited to the location and soil of the place under, your charge, of improving it in this and in every other way. When an opportunity offers, carry out these improvements. Rely upon it there are few employers who will not see and reward such efforts. Draining, ditching, circling, hedging, road-making, building, etc., may all be effected to a greater or less extent every season. During the long evenings of winter improve your own mind and the knowledge of your profession by reading and study. The many excellent agricultural periodicals and books now published afford good and cheap opportunities for this. It is indispensable that you exercise judgment and consideration in the management of the negroes under your charge. Be _firm_, and, at the same time, _gentle_ in your control. Never display yourself before them in a passion; and even if inflicting the severest punishment, do so in a mild, cool manner, and it will produce a tenfold effect. When you find it necessary to use the whip--and desirable as it would be to dispense with it entirely, it _is_ necessary at times--apply it slowly and deliberately, and to the extent you had determined, in your own mind, to be needful before you began. The indiscriminate, constant, and excessive use of the whip is altogether unnecessary and inexcusable. When it can be done without a too great loss of time, the stocks offer a means of punishment greatly to be preferred. So secured, in a lonely, quiet place, where no communication can be held with any one, nothing but bread and water allowed, and the confinement extending from Saturday, when they drop work, until Sabbath evening, will prove much more effectual in preventing a repetition of the offense, than any amount of whipping. Never threaten a negro, but if you have occasion to punish, do it at once, or say nothing until ready to do so. A violent and passionate threat will often scare the best-disposed negro to the woods. Always keep your word with them, in punishments as well as in rewards. If you have named the penalty for any certain offense, inflict it without listening to a word of excuse. Never forgive that in one that you would punish in another, but treat all alike, showing no favoritism. By pursuing such a course, you convince them that you act from principle and not from impulse, and will certainly enforce your rules. Whenever an opportunity is afforded you for rewarding continued good behavior, do not let it pass--occasional rewards have a much better effect than frequent punishments. Never be induced by a course of good behavior on the part of the negroes to relax the strictness of your discipline; but, when you have by judicious management brought them to that state, keep them so by the same means. By taking frequent strolls about the premises, including of course the quarter and stock yards, during the evening, and at least twice a week during the night, you will put a more effectual stop to any irregularities than by the most severe punishments. The only way to keep a negro honest, is not to trust him. This seems a harsh assertion; but it is, unfortunately, too true. You will find that an hour devoted, every Sabbath morning, to their moral and religious instruction, would prove a great aid to you in bringing about a better state of things among the negroes. It has been thoroughly tried, and with the most satisfactory results, in many parts of the South. As a mere matter of interest it has proved to be advisable--to say nothing of it as a point of duty. The effect upon their general good behavior, their cleanliness, and good conduct on the Sabbath, is such as alone to recommend it to both planter and overseer. In conclusion:--Bear in mind that _a fine crop_ consists, first, in an increase in the number, and a marked improvement in the condition and value, of the negroes; second, an abundance of provision of all sorts for man and beast, carefully saved and properly housed; third, both summer and winter clothing made at home; also leather tanned, and shoes and harness made, when practicable; fourth, an improvement in the productive qualities of the land, and in the general condition of the plantation; fifth, the team and stock generally, with the farming implements and the buildings, in fine order at the close of the year; and young hogs more than enough for next year's killing; _then_, as heavy a crop of cotton, sugar, or rice as could possibly be made under these circumstances, sent to market in good season, and of prime quality. The time has passed when the overseer is valued solely upon the number of bales of cotton, hogsheads of sugar, or tierces of rice he has made, without reference to other qualifications. In contrast with the instructions to overseers under the old management, I present the proclamation of General Banks, regulating the system of free labor in the Department of the Gulf. These regulations were in force, in 1864, along the Mississippi, from Helena to New Orleans. They were found admirably adapted to the necessities of the case. With a few changes, they have been continued in operation during the present year:-- HEAD-QUARTERS DEPARTMENT OF THE GULF, NEW ORLEANS, _February_ 3, 1864. GENERAL ORDERS, NO. 23. The following general regulations are published for the information and government of all interested in the subject of compensated plantation labor, public or private, during the present year, and in continuation of the system established January 30, 1863:-- I. The enlistment of soldiers from plantations under cultivation in this department having been suspended by order of the Government, will not be resumed except upon direction of the same high authority. II. The Provost-Marshal-General is instructed to provide for the division of parishes into police and school districts, and to organize from invalid soldiers a competent police for the preservation of order. III. Provision will be made for the establishment of a sufficient number of schools, one at least for each of the police and school districts, for the instruction of colored children under twelve years of age, which, when established, will be placed under the direction of the Superintendent of Public Education. IV. Soldiers will not be allowed to visit plantations without the written consent of the commanding officer of the regiment or post to which they are attached, and never with arms, except when on duty, accompanied by an officer. V. Plantation hands will not be allowed to pass from one place to another, except under such regulations as may be established by the provost-marshal of the parish. VI. Flogging and other cruel or unusual punishments are interdicted. VII. Planters will be required, as early as practicable after the publication of these regulations, to make a roll of persons employed upon their estates, and to transmit the same to the provost marshal of the parish. In the employment of hands, the unity of families will be secured as far as possible. VIII. All questions between the employer and the employed, until other tribunals are established, will be decided by the provost-marshal of the parish. IX. Sick and disabled persons will be provided for upon the plantations to which they belong, except such as may be received in establishments provided for them by the Government, of which one will be established at Algiers and one at Baton Rouge. X. The unauthorized purchase of clothing, or other property, from laborers, will be punished by fine and imprisonment. The sale of whisky or other intoxicating drinks to them, or to other persons, except under regulations established by the Provost-Marshal-General, will be followed by the severest punishment. XL The possession of arms, or concealed or dangerous weapons, without authority, will be punished by fine and imprisonment. XII. Laborers shall render to their employer, between daylight and dark, _ten_ hours in summer, and _nine_ hours in winter, of respectful, honest, faithful labor, and receive therefor, in addition to just treatment, healthy rations, comfortable clothing, quarters, fuel, medical attendance, and instruction for children, wages per month as follows, payment of one-half of which, at least, shall be reserved until the end of the year:-- For first-class hands..... $8.00 per month. For second-class hands.... 6.00 " " For third-class hands..... 5.00 " " For fourth-class hands.... 3.00 " " Engineers and foremen, when faithful in the discharge of their duties, will be paid $2 per month extra. This schedule of wages may be commuted, by consent of both parties, at the rate of one-fourteenth part of the net proceeds of the crop, to be determined and paid at the end of the year. Wages will be deducted in case of sickness, and rations, also, when sickness is feigned. Indolence, insolence, disobedience of orders, and crime will be suppressed by forfeiture of pay, and such punishments as are provided for similar offenses by Army Regulations. Sunday work will be avoided when practicable, but when necessary will be considered as extra labor, and paid at the rates specified herein. XIII. Laborers will be permitted to choose their employers, but when the agreement is made they will be held to their engagement for one year, under the protection of the Government. In cases of attempted imposition, by feigning sickness, or stubborn refusal of duty, they will be turned over to the provost-marshal of the parish, for labor upon the public works, without pay. XIV. Laborers will be permitted to cultivate land on private account, as herein specified, as follows: First and second class hands, with families..... 1 acre each. First and second class hands, without families.. 1/2 " " Second and third class hands, with families..... 1/2 " " Second and third class hands, without families.. 1/4 " " To be increased for good conduct at the discretion of the employer. The encouragement of independent industry will strengthen all the advantages which capital derives from labor, and enable the laborer to take care of himself and prepare for the time when he can render so much labor for so much money, which is the great end to be attained. No exemption will be made in this apportionment, except upon imperative reasons; and it is desirable that for good conduct the quantity be increased until faithful hands can be allowed to cultivate extensive tracts, returning to the owner an equivalent of product for rent of soil. XV. To protect the laborer from possible imposition, no commutation of his supplies will be allowed, except in clothing, which may be commuted at the rate of $3 per month for first-class hands, and in similar proportion for other classes. The crops will stand pledged, wherever found, for the wages of labor. XVI. It is advised, as far as practicable, that employers provide for the current wants of their hands, by perquisites for extra labor, or by appropriation of land for share cultivation; to discourage monthly-payments so far as it can be done without discontent, and to reserve till the full harvest the yearly wages. XVII. A FREE-LABOR BANK will be established for the safe deposit of all accumulations of wages and other savings; and in order to avoid a possible wrong to depositors, by official defalcation, authority will be asked to connect the bank with the Treasury of the United States in this department. XVIII. The transportation of negro families to other countries will not be approved. All propositions for this privilege have been declined, and application has been made to other departments for surplus negro families for service in this department. XIX. The last year's experience shows that the planter and the negro comprehend the revolution. The overseer, having little interest in capital, and less sympathy with labor, dislikes the trouble of thinking, and discredits the notion that any thing new has occurred. He is a relic of the past, and adheres to its customs. His stubborn refusal to comprehend the condition of things, occasioned most of the embarrassments of the past year. Where such incomprehension is chronic, reduced wages, diminished rations, and the mild punishments imposed by the army and navy, will do good. XX. These regulations are based upon the assumption that labor is a public duty, and idleness and vagrancy a crime. No civil or military officer of the Government is exempt from the operation of this universal rule. Every enlightened community has enforced it upon all classes of people by the severest penalties. It is especially necessary in agricultural pursuits. That portion of the people identified with the cultivation of the soil, however changed in condition by the revolution through which we are passing, is not relieved from the necessity of toil, which is the condition of existence with all the children of God. The revolution has altered its tenure, but not its law. This universal law of labor will be enforced, upon just terms, by the Government under whose protection the laborer rests secure in his rights. Indolence, disorder, and crime will be suppressed. Having exercised the highest right in the choice and place of employment, he must be held to the fulfillment of his engagements, until released therefrom by the Government. The several provost-marshals are hereby invested with plenary powers upon all matters connected with labor, subject to the approval of the Provost-Marshal-General and the commanding officer of the department. The most faithful and discreet officers will be selected for this duty, and the largest force consistent with the public service detailed for their assistance. XXI. Employers, and especially overseers, are notified, that undue influence used to move the marshal from his just balance between the parties representing labor and capital, will result in immediate change of officers, and thus defeat that regular and stable system upon which the interests of all parties depend. XXII. Successful industry is especially necessary at the present time, when large public debts and onerous taxes are imposed to maintain and protect the liberties of the people and the integrity of the Union. All officers, civil or military, and all classes of citizens who assist in extending the profits of labor, and increasing the product of the soil upon which, in the end, all national prosperity and power depends, will render to the Government a service as great as that derived from the terrible sacrifices of battle. It is upon such consideration only that the planter is entitled to favor. The Government has accorded to him, in a period of anarchy, a release from the disorders resulting mainly from insensate and mad resistance to sensible reforms, which can never be rejected without revolution, and the criminal surrender of his interests and power to crazy politicians, who thought by metaphysical abstractions to circumvent the laws of God. It has restored to him in improved, rather than impaired condition, his due privileges, at a moment when, by his own acts, the very soil was washed from beneath his feet. XXIII. A more majestic and wise clemency human history does not exhibit. The liberal and just conditions that attend it cannot be disregarded. It protects labor by enforcing the performance of its duty, and it will assist capital by compelling just contributions to the demands of the Government. Those who profess allegiance to other Governments will be required, as the condition of residence in this State, to acquiesce, without reservation, in the demands presented by Government as a basis of permanent peace. The non-cultivation of the soil, without just reason, will be followed by temporary forfeiture to those who will secure its improvement. Those who have exercised or are entitled to the rights of citizens of the United States, will be required to participate in the measures necessary for the re-establishment of civil government. War can never cease except as civil governments crush out contest, and secure the supremacy of moral over physical power. The yellow harvest must wave over the crimson field of blood, and the representatives of the people displace the agents of purely military power. XXIV. The amnesty offered for the past is conditioned upon an unreserved loyalty for the future, and this condition will be enforced with an iron hand. Whoever is indifferent or hostile, must choose between the liberty which foreign lands afford, the poverty of the Rebel States, and the innumerable and inappreciable blessings which our Government confers upon its people. May God preserve the Union of the States! By order of Major-General Banks. Official: GEORGE B. DRAKE, _Assistant Adjutant-General_. The two documents have little similarity. Both are appropriate to the systems they are intended to regulate. It is interesting to compare their merits at the present time. It will be doubly interesting to make a similar comparison twenty years hence. While I was in Natchez, a resident of that city called my attention to one of the "sad results of this horrid, Yankee war." "Do you see that young man crossing the street toward ----'s store?" I looked in the direction indicated, and observed a person whom I supposed to be twenty-five years of age, and whose face bore the marks of dissipation. I signified, by a single word, that I saw the individual in question. "His is a sad case," my Southern friend remarked. "Whisky, isn't it?" "Oh, no, I don't mean that. He does drink some, I know, but what I mean is this: His father died about five years ago. He left his son nothing but fourteen or fifteen niggers. They were all smart, young hands, and he has been able to hire them out, so as to bring a yearly income of two thousand dollars. This has supported him very comfortably. This income stopped a year ago. The niggers have all run away, and that young man is now penniless, and without any means of support. It is one of the results of your infernal Abolition war." I assented that it was a very hard case, and ought to be brought before Congress at the earliest moment. That a promising young man should be deprived of the means of support in consequence of this Abolition war, is unfortunate--for the man. CHAPTER XXXV. OUR FREE-LABOR ENTERPRISE IN PROGRESS. The Negroes at Work.--Difficulties in the Way.--A Public Meeting.--A Speech.--A Negro's Idea of Freedom.--A Difficult Question to Determine.--Influence of Northern and Southern Men Contrasted.--An Increase of Numbers.--"Ginning" Cotton.--In the Lint-Room.--Mills and Machinery of a Plantation.--A Profitable Enterprise. On each of the plantations the negroes were at work in the cotton-field. I rode from one to the other, as circumstances made it necessary, and observed the progress that was made. I could easily perceive they had been accustomed to performing their labor under fear of the lash. Some of them took advantage of the opportunity for carelessness and loitering under the new arrangement. I could not be in the field at all times, to give them my personal supervision. Even if I were constantly present, there was now no lash to be feared. I saw that an explanation of the new state of affairs would be an advantage to all concerned. On the first Sunday of my stay on the plantation, I called all the negroes together, in order to give them an understanding of their position. I made a speech that I adapted as nearly as possible to the comprehension of my hearers. My audience was attentive throughout. I made no allusions to Homer, Dante, or Milton; I did not quote from Gibbon or Macaulay, and I neglected to call their attention to the spectacle they were presenting to the crowned heads of Europe. I explained to them the change the war had made in their condition, and the way in which it had been effected. I told them that all cruel modes of punishment had been abolished. The negroes were free, but they must understand that freedom did not imply idleness. I read to them the regulations established by the commissioners, and explained each point as clearly as I was able. After I had concluded, I offered to answer any questions they might ask. There were many who could not understand why, if they were free, they should be restricted from going where they pleased at all times. I explained that it was necessary, for the successful management of the plantation, that I should always be able to rely upon them. I asked them to imagine my predicament if they should lose half their time, or go away altogether, in the busiest part of the season. They "saw the point" at once, and readily acknowledged the necessity of subordination. I found no one who imagined that his freedom conferred the right of idleness and vagrancy. All expected to labor in their new condition, but they expected compensation for their labor, and did not look for punishment. They expected, further, that their families would not be separated, and that they could be allowed to acquire property for themselves. I know there were many negroes in the South who expected they would neither toil nor spin after being set free, but the belief was by no means universal. The story of the negro at Vicksburg, who expected his race to assemble in New York after the war, "and have white men for niggers," is doubtless true, but it would find little credence with the great majority of the freedmen of the South. The schedule of wages, as established by the commissioners, was read and explained. The negroes were to be furnished with house-rent, rations, fuel, and medical attendance, free of charge. Able-bodied males were to receive eight dollars a month. Other classes of laborers would be paid according to the proportionate value of their services. We were required to keep on hand a supply of clothing, shoes, and other needed articles, which would be issued as required and charged on account. All balances would be paid as soon as the first installment of the cotton crop was sent to market. This was generally satisfactory, though some of the negroes desired weekly or monthly payments. One of them thought it would be better if they could be paid at the end of each day, and suggested that silver would be preferable to greenbacks or Confederate money. Most of them thought the wages good enough, but this belief was not universal. One man, seventy years old, who acted as assistant to the "hog-minder," thought he deserved twenty-five dollars per month, in addition to his clothing and rations. Another, of the same age, who carried the breakfast and dinner to the field, was of similar opinion. These were almost the only exceptions. Those whose services were really valuable acquiesced in the arrangement. On our plantation there was an old negress named "Rose," who attended the women during confinement. She was somewhat celebrated in her profession, and received occasional calls to visit white ladies in the neighborhood. After I had dismissed the negroes and sent them to their quarters, I was called upon by Rose, to ascertain the rate at which she would be paid. As she was regularly employed as one of the house-servants, I allowed her the same wages that the other women received. This was satisfactory, so far, but it was not entirely so. She wished to understand the matter of perquisites. "When I used to go out to 'tend upon white ladies," said Rose, "they gave me ten dollars. Mistress always took half and let me keep the other half." "Well, hereafter, you may keep the ten dollars yourself." "Thank you." After a pause, she spoke again: "Didn't you say the black people are free?" "Yes." "White people are free, too, ain't they?" "Yes." "Then why shouldn't you pay me ten dollars every time I 'tend upon the black folks on the plantation?" The question was evidently designed as a "corner." I evaded it by assuring Rose that though free, the negroes had not attained all the privileges that pertained to the whites, and I should insist on her professional services being free to all on the plantation. The negroes were frequently desirous of imitating the customs of white people in a manner that should evince their freedom. Especially did they desire to have no distinction in the payment of money, on account of the color of the recipient. After this Sunday talk with the negroes, I found a material improvement. Occasionally I overheard some of them explaining to others their views upon various points. There were several who manifested a natural indolence, and found it difficult to get over their old habits. These received admonitions from their comrades, but could not wholly forget the laziness which was their inheritance. With these exceptions, there was no immediate cause for complaint. During the earlier part of my stay in that region, I was surprised at the readiness with which the negroes obeyed men from the North, and believed they would fulfill their promises, while they looked with distrust on all Southern white men. Many owners endeavored in vain to induce their negroes to perform certain labor. The first request made by a Northern man to the same effect would be instantly complied with. The negroes explained that their masters had been in the habit of making promises which they never kept, and cited numerous instances to prove the truth of their assertion. It seemed to have been a custom in that region to deceive the negroes in any practicable manner. To make a promise to a negro, and fail to keep it, was no worse than to lure a horse into a stable-yard, by offering him a choice feed of corn, which would prove but a single mouthful. That the negroes had any human rights was apparently rarely suspected by their owners and overseers. The distrust which many of the negroes entertained for their former masters enabled the lessees to gain, at once, the confidence of their laborers. I regret to say that this confidence was abused in a majority of cases. I gave the negroes a larger ration of meat, meal, and potatoes than had been previously issued. As soon as possible, I procured a quantity of molasses, coffee, and tobacco. These articles had not been seen on the plantation for many months, and were most gladly received. As there was no market in that vicinity where surplus provisions could be sold, I had no fear that the negroes would resort to stealing, especially as their daily supply was amply sufficient for their support. It was the complaint of many overseers and owners that the negroes would steal provisions on frequent occasions. If they committed any thefts during my time of management, they were made so carefully that I never detected them. It is proper to say that I followed the old custom of locking the store-houses at all times. Very soon after commencing labor I found that our working force must be increased. Accordingly, I employed some of the negroes who were escaping from the interior of the State and making their way to Natchez. As there were but few mules on the plantation, I was particularly careful to employ those negroes who were riding, rather than walking, from slavery. If I could not induce these mounted travelers to stop with us, I generally persuaded them to sell their saddle animals. Thus, hiring negroes and buying mules, I gradually put the plantation in a presentable condition. While the cotton was being picked the blacksmith was repairing the plows, the harness-maker was fitting up the harnesses for the mules, and every thing was progressing satisfactorily. The gin-house was cleaned and made ready for the last work of preparing cotton for the market. Mr. Colburn arrived from the North after I had been a planter of only ten days' standing. He was enthusiastic at the prospect, and manifested an energy that was the envy of his neighbors. It required about three weeks to pick our cotton. Before it was all gathered we commenced "ginning" the quantity on hand, in order to make as little delay as possible in shipping our "crop" to market. The process of ginning cotton is pretty to look upon, though not agreeable to engage in. The seed-cotton (as the article is called when it comes from the field) is fed in a sort of hopper, where it is brought in contact with a series of small and very sharp saws. From sixty to a hundred of these saws are set on a shaft, about half an inch apart. The teeth of these saws tear the fiber from the seed, but do not catch the seed itself. A brush which revolves against the saws removes the fiber from them at every revolution. The position of the gin is generally at the end of a large room, and into this room the detached fiber is thrown from the revolving brush. This apartment is technically known as the "lint-room," and presents an interesting scene while the process of ginning is going on. The air is full of the flying lint, and forcibly reminds a Northerner of a New England snow-storm. The lint falls, like the snow-flakes, with most wonderful lightness, but, unlike the snow-flakes, it does not melt. When the cotton is picked late in the season, there is usually a dense cloud of dust in the lint-room, which settles in and among the fiber. The person who watches the lint-room has a position far from enviable. His lungs become filled with dust, and, very often, the fine, floating fiber is drawn into his nostrils. Two persons are generally permitted to divide this labor. There were none of the men on our plantation who craved it. Some of the mischievous boys would watch their opportunity to steal into the lint-room, where they greatly enjoyed rolling upon the soft cotton. Their amusement was only stopped by the use of a small whip. The machinery of a cotton-gin is driven by steam or horse power; generally the former. There is no water-power in the State of Louisiana, but I believe some of the lakes and bayous might be turned to advantage in the same way that the tide is used on the sea-coast. All the larger plantations are provided with steam-engines, the chimneys of which are usually carried to a height sufficient to remove all danger from sparks. There is always a corn-mill, and frequently a saw-mill attached to the gin, and driven by the same power. On every plantation, one day in the week is set apart for grinding a seven-days' supply of corn. This regulation is never varied, except under the most extraordinary circumstances. There is a universal rule in Louisiana, forbidding any person, white or black, smoking in the inclosure where the gin-house stands. I was told there was a legal enactment to this effect, that affixed heavy penalties to its infringement. For the truth of this latter statement I cannot vouch. With its own corn-mill, saw-mill, and smithery, each plantation is almost independent of the neighborhood around it. The chief dependence upon the outside world is for farming tools and the necessary paraphernalia for the various branches of field-work. I knew one plantation, a short distance from ours, whose owner had striven hard to make it self-sustaining. He raised all the corn and all the vegetables needed. He kept an immense drove of hogs, and cured his own pork. Of cattle he had a goodly quantity, and his sheep numbered nearly three hundred. Wool and cotton supplied the raw material for clothing. Spinning-wheels and looms produced cloth in excess of what was needed. Even the thread for making the clothing for the negroes was spun on the plantation. Hats were made of the palmetto, which grew there in abundance. Shoes were the only articles of personal wear not of home production. Plows, hoes, and similar implements were purchased in the market, but the plantation was provided with a very complete repair-shop, and the workmen were famous for their skill. The plantation, thus managed, yielded a handsome profit to its owner. The value of each year's cotton crop, when delivered on the bank of the river, was not less than forty thousand dollars. Including wages of the overseer, and all outlays for repairs and purchase of such articles as were not produced at home, the expenses would not exceed five or six thousand dollars. Cotton-planting was very profitable under almost any management, and especially so under a prudent and economical owner. Being thus profitable with slave labor, it was natural for the planters to think it could prosper under no other system. "You can't raise cotton without niggers, and you must own the niggers to raise it," was the declaration in all parts of the South. CHAPTER XXXVI. WAR AND AGRICULTURE. Official Favors.--Division of Labor.--Moral Suasion.--Corn-gathering in the South.--An Alarm.--A Frightened Irishman.--The Rebels Approaching.--An Attack on Waterproof.--Falstaff Redivivus.--His Feats of Arms.--Departure for New Orleans. Our cotton having been ginned and baled, we made preparations for shipping it to market. These preparations included the procurement of a permit from the Treasury agent at Natchez, a task of no small magnitude. An application for the permit required, in addition to my own signature, the names of two property-owning citizens, as security for payment of the duties on the cotton. This application being placed in the hands of the Treasury agent, I was requested to call in two hours. I did so, and was then put off two hours longer. Thus I spent two whole days in frequent visits to that official. His memory was most defective, as I was obliged to introduce myself on each occasion, and tell him the object of my call. A gentleman who had free access to the agent at all times hinted that he could secure early attention to my business on payment for his trouble. Many persons asserted that they were obliged to pay handsomely for official favors. I do not _know_ this to be true. I never paid any thing to the Treasury agent at Natchez or elsewhere, beyond the legitimate fees, and I never found any man who would give me a written statement that he had done so. Nevertheless, I had much circumstantial evidence to convince me that the Treasury officials were guilty of dishonorable actions. The temptation was great, and, with proper care, the chances of detection were small. Armed with my permit, I returned to the plantation. Mr. Colburn, in my absence, had organized our force, lately engaged in cotton-picking, into suitable parties for gathering corn, of which we had some three hundred acres standing in the field. In New England I fear that corn which had remained ungathered until the middle of February, would be of comparatively little value. In our case it was apparently as sound as when first ripened. Corn-gathering in the South differs materially from corn-gathering in the North. The negroes go through the field breaking the ears from the stalks without removing the husk. The ears are thrown into heaps at convenient distances from each other, and in regular rows. A wagon is driven between these rows, and the corn gathered for the crib. Still unhusked, it is placed in the crib, to be removed when needed. It is claimed that the husk thus remaining on the corn, protects it from various insects, and from the effect of the weather. Every body of laborers on a plantation is called a "gang." Thus we had "the picking-gang," "the corn-gang," "the trash-gang," "the hoe-gang," "the planting-gang," "the plow-gang," and so on through the list. Each gang goes to the field in charge of a head negro, known as the driver. This driver is responsible for the work of his gang, and, under the old _régime_, was empowered to enforce his orders with the whip, if necessary. Under our new dispensation the whip was laid aside, and a milder policy took its place. It was satisfactory with the adults; but there were occasions when the smaller boys were materially benefited by applications of hickory shrubs. Solomon's words about sparing the rod are applicable to children of one race as well as to those of another. We did not allow our drivers to make any bodily punishment in the field, and I am happy to say they showed no desire to do so. As I have before stated, our first organization was the picking-gang. Then followed the gin-gang and the press-gang. Our gin-gang was organized on principles of total abstinence, and, therefore, differed materially from the gin-gangs of Northern cities. Our press-gang, unlike the press-gangs of New York or Chicago, had nothing to do with morning publications, and would have failed to comprehend us had we ordered the preparation of a sensation leader, or a report of the last great meeting at Union Square. Our press-gang devoted its time and energies to putting our cotton into bales of the proper size and neatness. The corn-gang, the trash-gang, and the plow-gang were successively organized by Mr. Colburn. Of the first I have spoken. The duties of the second were to gather the corn-stalks or cotton-stalks, as the case might be, into proper heaps for burning. As all this débris came under the generic name of "trash," the appellation of the gang is readily understood. Our trash-gang did very well, except in a certain instance, when it allowed the fire from the trash to run across a field of dead grass, and destroy several hundred feet of fence. In justice to the negroes, I should admit that the firing of the grass was in obedience to our orders, and the destruction of the fence partly due to a strong wind which suddenly sprang up. The trash-gang is usually composed of the younger children and the older women. The former gather and pile the stalks which the latter cut up. They particularly enjoy firing the heaps of dry trash. It was on Saturday, the 13th of February, that our press-gang completed its labors. On the afternoon of that day, as we were hauling our cotton to the landing, the garrison at Waterproof, two miles distant, suddenly opened with its artillery upon a real or supposed enemy. A gun-boat joined in the affair, and for half an hour the cannonade was vigorous. We could see the flashes of the guns and the dense smoke rising through the trees, but could discover nothing more. When the firing ceased we were somewhat anxious to know the result. Very soon a white man, an Irishman, who had been a short time in the vicinity to purchase cotton, reached our place in a state of exhaustion. He told a frightful story of the surprise and massacre of the whole garrison, and was very certain no one but himself had escaped. He had fortunately concealed himself under a very small bridge while the fight was going on. He called attention to his clothes, which were covered with mud, to prove the truth of his statement. For a short time the situation had an unpleasant appearance. While we were deliberating upon the proper measures for safety, one of our negroes, who was in Waterproof during the firing, came to us with _his_ story. The fight had been on our side, some guerrillas having chased one of our scouting parties to a point within range of our guns. Our men shelled them with artillery, and this was the extent of the battle. The story of the Irishman, in connection with the true account of the affair, forcibly reminded me of the famous battle of Piketon, Kentucky, in the first year of the war. On the next day (Sunday) I rode to Waterproof, leaving Colburn on the plantation. Just as I arrived within the lines, I ascertained that an attack was expected. The most stringent orders had been issued against allowing any person to pass out. Ten minutes later a scout arrived, saying that a force of Rebels was advancing to attack the post. The gun-boat commenced shelling the woods in the rear of Waterproof, and the artillery on land joined in the work. The Rebels did not get near enough to make any serious demonstration upon the town. The day passed with a steady firing from the gun-boat, relieved by an occasional interval of silence. Toward night the small garrison was re-enforced by the arrival of a regiment from Natchez. On the following day a portion of General Ellet's Marine Brigade reached Waterproof, and removed all possibility of further attack. In the garrison of Waterproof, at the commencement of this fight, there was a certain officer who could have sat for the portrait of Falstaff with very little stuffing, and without great change of character. Early in the war he belonged to an Eastern regiment, but on that occasion he had no commission, though this fact was not generally known. Nearly as large as Hackett's Falstaff, he was as much a gascon as the hero of the Merry Wives of Windsor. He differed from Falstaff in possessing a goodly amount of bravery, but this bravery was accompanied with an entire absence of judgment. In the early part of the fight, and until he was too drunk to move, this _preux chevalier_ dashed about Waterproof, mounted on a small horse, which he urged to the top of his speed. In one hand he flourished a cane, and in the other a revolver. He usually allowed the reins to lie on his horse's neck, except when he wished to change his direction. With his abdomen protruding over the pommel of the saddle, his stirrups several inches too short, one boot-leg outside his pantaloons and the other inside, a very large hat pressed nearly to his eyes, and a face flushed with excitement and whisky, he was a study John Leech would have prized. Frequent and copious draughts of the cup which cheers and inebriates placed him _hors de combat_ before the close of the day. From the crest of the levee, he could at any time discover several lines of battle approaching the town. Frequently he informed the commandant that the Rebels were about to open upon us with a dozen heavy batteries, which they were planting in position for a long siege. If the enemy had been in the force that this man claimed, they could not have numbered less than fifty thousand. When unhorsed for the last time during the day, he insisted that I should listen to the story of his exploits. "I went," said he, "to the colonel, this morning, and told him, sir, to give me ten men, and I would go out and feel the enemy's position. He gave me the men, and I went. We found the enemy not less than a thousand strong, sir, behind Mrs. Miller's gin-house. They were the advance of the whole Rebel army, sir, and I saw they must be driven back. We charged, and, after a desperate fight, drove them. They opposed us, sir, every inch of the way for two miles; but we routed them. We must have killed at least a hundred of them, sir, and wounded as many more. They didn't hurt a man of us; but the bullets flew very thick, sir--very. I myself killed twelve of them with my own hand, sir. This is the way it was, sir. This revolver, you see, sir, has six barrels. I emptied it once, sir; I reloaded; I emptied it again, sir. Two times six are twelve, sir. I killed twelve of them with my own hand. Let it be recorded. "On my way back, sir, I set fire to the gin-house, so that it should no more be a shelter for those infernal Rebels. You yourself, sir, saw that building in flames, and can testify to the truth of my story." In this strain the warrior gave the history of his moments of glory. The portion I have written was true in some points. He found three men (instead of a thousand), and pursued them a few hundred yards. He discharged his revolver at very long range, but I could not learn that his shots were returned. He fired the gin-house "to cover his retreat," and gained the fortifications without loss. I do not know his locality at the present time, but presume he remained, up to the close of the war, where storms of shot and shell continually darkened the air, and where lines of battle were seen on every side. The siege being raised, I returned to the plantation. From Waterproof, during the fight, I could see our buildings with perfect distinctness. I had much fear that some Rebel scouting party might pay the plantation a visit while the attack was going on. I found, on my return, that Colburn had taken the matter very coolly, and prevented the negroes becoming alarmed. He declared that he considered the plantation as safe as Waterproof, and would not have exchanged places with me during the fight. The negroes were perfectly quiet, and making preparations for plowing. While the fight was in progress, my associate was consulting with the drivers about the details of work for the ensuing week, and giving his orders with the utmost _sang froid_. In consideration of the uncertainty of battles in general, and the possibility of a visit at any moment from a party of Rebel scouts, my partner's conduct was worthy of the highest commendation. Before leaving Waterproof I had arranged for a steamer to call for our cotton, which was lying on the river bank. Waterproof lay at one side of the neck of a peninsula, and our plantation was at the other side. It was two miles across this peninsula, and sixteen miles around it, so that I could start on horseback, and, by riding very leisurely, reach the other side, long in advance of a steamboat. The steamer came in due time. After putting our cotton on board, I bade Mr. Colburn farewell, and left him to the cares and perplexities of a planter's life. I was destined for New Orleans, to sell our cotton, and to purchase many things needed for the prosecution of our enterprise. On my way down the river, I found that steamboat traveling was not an entirely safe amusement. The boat that preceded me was fired upon near Morganzia, and narrowly escaped destruction. A shell indented her steam-pipe, and passed among the machinery, without doing any damage. Had the pipe been cut, the steam would have filled every part of the boat. I was not disturbed by artillery on the occasion of my journey, but received a compliment from small-arms. On the morning after leaving Natchez, I was awakened by a volley of musketry from the river-bank. One of the bullets penetrated the thin walls of the cabin and entered my state-room, within two inches of my head. I preserved the missile as a souvenir of travel. On the next day the Rebels brought a battery of artillery to the spot. A steamer received its greeting, but escaped with a single passenger wounded. A gentleman who was on this boat had a very narrow escape. He told me that he was awakened by the first shot, which passed through the upper works of the steamer. He was occupying the upper berth in a state-room on the side next the locality of the Rebels. His first impulse was to spring from his resting-place, and throw himself at full length upon the floor. He had hardly done so, when a shell entered the state-room, and traversed the berth in the exact position where my friend had been lying. Having narrowly escaped death, he concluded not to run a second risk. He returned to St. Louis by way of New York. Wishing to visit New Orleans some time later, he sailed from New York on the _Electric Spark_, and enjoyed the luxury of a capture by the pirates of the "Confederate" steamer _Florida_. After that occurrence, he concluded there was little choice between the ocean and river routes. CHAPTER XXXVII. IN THE COTTON MARKET. New Orleans and its Peculiarities.--Its Loss by the Rebellion.--Cotton Factors in New Orleans.--Old Things passed away.--The Northern Barbarians a Race of Shopkeepers.--Pulsations of the Cotton Market.--A Quarrel with a Lady.--Contending for a Principle.--Inharmony of the "Regulations."--An Account of Sales. The first impression that New Orleans gives a stranger is its unlikeness to Northern cities. It is built on ground that slopes downward from the Mississippi. As one leaves the river and walks toward the center of the city, he finds himself descending. New Orleans is a hundred miles from the mouth of the Mississippi and only six miles from Lake Pontchartrain, which is an arm of the sea. The river at the city is ten feet above Lake Pontchartrain, so that New Orleans is washed by water from the Mississippi and drained into the lake. The water in the gutters always runs from the river, no matter what may be its height. The steamers at the foot of Canal Street appear above the spectator, when he stands a mile or two from the landing. There is no earthy elevation of any kind, except of artificial construction, in the vicinity of New Orleans. The level surface of the streets renders the transportation of heavy bodies a work of the utmost ease. The greatest amount of merchandise that can be loaded upon four wheels rarely requires the efforts of more than two animals. The street-cars, unlike those of Northern cities, are drawn by a single mule to each car, and have no conductors. The cemeteries are above ground, and resemble the pigeon-holes of a post-office, magnified to a sufficient size for the reception of coffins. There is not a cellar in the entire city of New Orleans. Musquitos flourish during the entire winter. In the summer there are two varieties of these insects. The night-musquito is similar to the insect which disturbs our slumbers in Northern latitudes. The day-musquito relieves his comrade at sunrise and remains on duty till sunset. He has no song, but his bite is none the less severe. He disappears at the approach of winter, but his tuneful brother remains. Musquito nettings are a necessity all the year round. The public walks of New Orleans are justly the pride of the inhabitants. Canal Street is probably the prettiest street in America. Along its center is a double row of shade-trees, a promenade, and the tracks of the street railway. These shade-trees are inclosed so as to form a series of small parks for the entire length of the street. On each side of these parks is a carriage-way, as wide as the great thoroughfare of New York. Canal Street is the fashionable promenade of New Orleans. In the days of glory, before the Rebellion, it presented a magnificent appearance. Among the prettiest of the parks of New Orleans is Jackson Square, containing a fine equestrian statue of General Jackson. The pedestal of the statue is emblazoned with the words: "THE UNION--IT MUST AND SHALL BE PRESERVED." The French element in New Orleans is apparent on every side. The auctioneers cry their wares in mingled French and English, and the negroes and white laborers on the levee converse in a hybrid language. In the French quarter, every thing is French. The signs on the shops and the street corners, the conversation of the inhabitants and the shouts of the boys who play on the sidewalks, are in the vernacular of _La Belle France_. In Jackson Square, notices to warn visitors not to disturb the shrubbery, are posted in two languages, the French being first. On one poster I saw the sentence: "_Ne touche pas à les fleurs_," followed by the literal translation into English: "Don't touch to the flowers." I was happy to observe that the caution was very generally heeded. Before the war, New Orleans was a city of wonderful wealth. Situated at the outlet of the great valley, its trade in cotton, sugar, and other products of the West and South, was immense. Boats, which had descended from all points along the navigable portion of the Mississippi, discharged their cargoes upon its levee. Ships of all nations were at the wharves, receiving the rich freight that the steamers had brought down. The piles of merchandise that lay along the levee were unequaled in any other city of the globe. Money was abundant, and was lavishly scattered in all directions. With the secession of the Gulf States, the opening of hostilities, and the blockade of the Mississippi at its mouth and at Cairo, the prosperity of New Orleans disappeared. The steamers ceased to bring cotton and sugar to its wharves, and its levee presented a picture of inactivity. Many of the wealthy found themselves in straitened circumstances, and many of the poor suffered and died for want of food. For a whole year, while the Rebel flag floated over the city, the business of New Orleans was utterly suspended. With the passage of the forts and the capture of New Orleans by Admiral Farragut, the Rebel rule was ended. Very slowly the business of the city revived, but in its revival it fell into the hands of Northern men, who had accompanied our armies in their advance. The old merchants found themselves crowded aside by the ubiquitous Yankees. With the end of the war, the glory of the city will soon return, but it will not return to its old channels. More than any other city of the South, New Orleans will be controlled by men of Northern birth and sentiments. The day of slave-auctions in the rotunda of the St. Charles has passed away forever. New Orleans has a class of men peculiar to the South, whose business it is to sell cotton for the planters. These gentlemen are known as "factors," and, in former times, were numerous and successful. Whatever a planter needed, from a quire of paper to a steam-engine, he ordered his factor to purchase and forward. The factor obeyed the order and charged the amount to the planter, adding two and a half per cent, for commission. If the planter wanted money, he drew upon the factor, and that individual honored the draft. At the end of the season, it often occurred that the planter was largely in debt to the factor. But the cotton crop, when gathered, being consigned to the factor, canceled this indebtedness, and generally left a balance in the planter's favor. The factor charged a good commission for selling the cotton, and sometimes required interest upon the money he advanced. In the happy days before the war, the factor's business was highly lucrative. The advances to the planters, before the maturity of the cotton crop, often required a heavy capital, but the risk was not great. Nearly every planter was considerably indebted to his factor before his cotton went forward. In many cases the proceeds of the entire crop would but little more than cover the advances which had been made. In New Orleans nearly all cotton is sold "by sample." Certain men are licensed to "sample" cotton, for which they charge a specified sum per bale. A hole is cut in the covering of each bale, and from this hole a handful of cotton is pulled. Every bale is thus "sampled," without regard to the size of the lot. The samples are taken to the sales-room of the commission house, where they are open to the inspection of buyers. The quality of the cotton is carefully noted, the length of the fiber or staple, the whiteness of the sample, and its freedom from dust or fragments of cotton-stalks. Not one bale in twenty is ever seen by the buyers until after its purchase. Frequently the buyers transfer their cotton to other parties without once looking upon it Sometimes cotton is sold at auction instead of being offered at private sale, but the process of "sampling" is carried out in either case. In '63 and '64, New Orleans could boast of more cotton factors than cotton. The principal business was in the hands of merchants from the North, who had established themselves in the city soon after its occupation by the National forces. Nearly all cotton sent to market was from plantations leased by Northern men, or from purchases made of planters by Northern speculators. The patronage naturally fell into the hands of the new possessors of the soil, and left the old merchants to pine in solitude. The old cotton factors, most of them Southern men, who could boast of ten or twenty years' experience, saw their business pass into the hands of men whose arrival in New Orleans was subsequent to that of General Butler. Nearly all the old factors were Secessionists, who religiously believed no government could exist unless founded on raw cotton and slavery. They continually asserted that none but themselves could sell cotton to advantage, and wondered why those who had that article to dispose of should employ men unaccustomed to its sale. They were doomed to find themselves false prophets. The new and enterprising merchants monopolized the cotton traffic, and left the slavery-worshiping factors of the olden time to mourn the loss of their occupation. At the time I visited New Orleans, cotton was falling. It had been ninety cents per pound. I could only obtain a small fraction above seventy cents, and within a week the same quality sold for sixty. Three months afterward, it readily brought a dollar and a quarter per pound. The advices from New York were the springs by which the market in New Orleans was controlled. A good demand in New York made a good demand in New Orleans, and _vice versâ_. The New York market was governed by the Liverpool market, and that in turn by the demand at Manchester. Thus the Old World and the New had a common interest in the production of cotton. While one watched the demand, the other closely observed the supply. Some of the factors in New Orleans were fearful lest the attention paid to cotton-culture in other parts of the world would prove injurious to the South after the war should be ended. They had abandoned their early belief that their cotton was king, and dreaded the crash that was to announce the overthrow of all their hopes. In their theory that cotton-culture was unprofitable, unless prosecuted by slave labor, these men could only see a gloomy picture for years to come. Not so the new occupants of the land. Believing that slavery was not necessary to the production of sugar and cotton; believing that the country could show far more prosperity under the new system of labor than was ever seen under the old; and believing that commerce would find new and enlarged channels with the return of peace, they combated the secession heresies of the old residents, and displayed their faith by their works. New Orleans was throwing off its old habits and adopting the ideas and manners of Northern civilization. Mrs. B., the owner of our plantation, was in New Orleans at the time of my arrival. As she was to receive half the proceeds of the cotton we had gathered, I waited upon her to tell the result of our labors. The sale being made, I exhibited the account of sales to her agent, and paid him the stipulated amount. So far all was well; but we were destined to have a difference of opinion upon a subject touching the rights of the negro. Early in 1863 the Rebel authorities ordered the destruction of all cotton liable to fall into the hands of the National forces. The order was very generally carried out. In its execution, some four hundred bales belonging to Mrs. B. were burned. The officer who superintended the destruction, permitted the negroes on the plantation to fill their beds with cotton, but not to save any in bales. When we were making our shipment, Mr. Colburn proposed that those negroes who wished to do so, could sell us their cotton, and fill their beds with moss or husks. As we paid them a liberal price, they accepted our offer, and we made up three bales from our purchase. We never imagined that Mrs. B. would lay any claim to this lot, and did not include it in the quantity for which we paid her half the proceeds. After I had made the payment to her factor, I received a note from the lady in reference to the three bales above mentioned. She said the cotton in question was entirely her property; but, in consideration of our careful attention to the matter, she would consent to our retaining half its value. She admitted that she would have never thought to bring it to market; but since we had collected and baled it, she demanded it as her own. I "respectfully declined" to comply with her request. I believed the negroes had a claim to what was saved from the burning, and given to them by the Rebel authorities. Mrs. B. was of the opinion that a slave could own nothing, and therefore insisted that the cotton belonged to herself. Very soon after sending my reply, I was visited by the lady's factor. A warm, though courteous, discussion transpired. The factor was a Secessionist, and a firm believer in the human and divine right of slavery. He was a man of polished exterior, and was, doubtless, considered a specimen of the true Southern gentleman. In our talk on the subject in dispute, I told him the Rebels had allowed the negroes to fill their beds with cotton, and it was this cotton we had purchased. "The negroes had no right to sell it to you," said the factor; "neither had you any right to purchase it." "If it was given to them," I asked, "was it not theirs to sell?" "Certainly not. The negroes own nothing, and can own nothing. Every thing they have, the clothes they wear and the dishes they use, belongs to their owners. When we 'give' any thing to a negro, we merely allow it to remain in his custody, nothing more." "But in this case," said I, "the gift was not made by the owner. The cotton was to be destroyed by order of your Confederate Government. That order took it from Mrs. B.'s possession. When the officer came to burn the cotton, and gave a portion to the negroes to fill their beds, he made no gift to Mrs. B." "Certainly he did. The cotton became hers, when it was given to her negroes. If you give any thing to one of my negroes, that article becomes my property as much as if given to me." "But how is it when a negro, by working nights or Saturdays, manages to make something for himself?" "That is just the same. Whatever he makes in that way belongs to his master. Out of policy we allow him to keep it, but we manage to have him expend it for his own good. The negro is the property of his master, and can own nothing for himself." "But in this case," I replied, "I have promised to pay the negroes for the cotton. It would be unjust to them to fail to do so." "You must not pay them any thing for it. Whatever you have promised makes no difference. It is Mrs. B.'s property, not theirs. If you pay them, you will violate all our customs, and establish a precedent very bad for us and for yourself." I assured the gentleman I should feel under obligation to deal justly with the negroes, even at the expense of violating Southern precedent. "You may not be aware," I remarked, "of the magnitude of the change in the condition of the Southern negro during the two years just closed. The difference of opinion between your people and ourselves is, no doubt, an honest one. We shall be quite as persistent in pushing our views at the present time as you have been in enforcing yours in the past. We must try our theory, and wait for the result." We separated most amiably, each hoping the other would eventually see things in their true light. From present indications, the weight of public opinion is on my side, and constantly growing stronger. My sales having been made, and a quantity of plantation supplies purchased, I was ready to return. It was with much difficulty that I was able to procure permits from the Treasury agent at New Orleans to enable me to ship my purchases. Before leaving Natchez, I procured all the documents required by law. Natchez and New Orleans were not in the same "district," and consequently there was much discord. For example, the agent at Natchez gave me a certain document that I should exhibit at New Orleans, and take with me on my return to Natchez. The agent at New Orleans took possession of this document, and, on my expostulating, said the agent at Natchez "had no right" to give me instructions to retain it. He kept the paper, and I was left without any defense against seizure of the goods I had in transit. They were seized by a Government officer, but subsequently released. On my arrival at Natchez, I narrated the occurrence to the Treasury agent at that point. I was informed that the agent at New Orleans "could not" take my papers from me, and I should not have allowed him to do so. I was forcibly reminded of the case of the individual who was once placed in the public stocks. On learning his offense, a lawyer told him, "Why, Sir, they can't put you in the stocks for _that_." "But they have." "I tell you they can't do it." "But, don't you see, they have." "I tell you again they can't do any such thing." In my own case, each Treasury agent declared the other "could not" do the things which had been done. In consequence of the inharmony of the "regulations," the most careful shipper would frequently find his goods under seizure, from which they could generally be released on payment of liberal fees and fines. I do not know there was any collusion between the officials, but I could not rid myself of the impression there was something rotten in Denmark. The invariable result of these little quarrels was the plundering of the shippers. The officials never suffered. Like the opposite sides of a pair of shears, though cutting against each other, they only injured whatever was between them. Not a hundredth part of the official dishonesty at New Orleans and other points along the Mississippi will ever be known. Enough has been made public to condemn the whole system of permits and Treasury restrictions. The Government took a wise course when it abolished, soon after the suppression of the Rebellion, a large number of the Treasury Agencies in the South. As they were managed during the last two years of the war, these agencies proved little else than schools of dishonesty. There may have been some honest men in those offices, but they contrived to conceal their honesty. To show the variety of charges which attach to a shipment of cotton, I append the sellers' account for the three bales about which Mrs. B. and myself had our little dispute. These bales were not sold with the balance of our shipment. The cotton of which they were composed was of very inferior quality. _Account Sales of Three Bales of Cotton for Knox & Colburn._ By PARSLEY & WILLIAMS. ______________________________________________________________________ Mark, | 3 bales. || | || | "K. C."| Weight, } 1,349 @..............|| $0 | 60 || $809 | 40 | 533--406--410 } || | || | | Auctioneers' commission, 1 pr. ct.....|| 8 | 09 || | | Sampling .............................|| | 30 || | | Weighing .............................|| | 50 || | | Watching..............................|| | 50 || | | Tarpaulins ...........................|| | 50 || | | Freight, $10 pr. bale ................|| 30 | 00 || | | Insurance, $2.50 pr. bale ............|| 7 | 50 || | | 4 c. pr. lb. (tax) on 1,349 lb .......|| 53 | 96 || | | 1/2 c. " " " " ..........|| 6 | 74 || | | Permit and stamps ....................|| | 65 || | | Hospital fees, $5 pr. bale............|| 15 | 00 || | | Factors' commission, 1 pr. ct.........|| 8 | 09 || | | || -- | -- || 131 | 83 | || | || ---- | -- E.O.E. | Net proceeds......................|| | || $677 | 57 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NEW ORLEANS, La., _February 22_, 1864. It will be seen by the above that the charges form an important portion of the proceeds of a sale. The heaviest items are for Government and hospital taxes. The latter was levied before the war, but the former is one of the fruits of the Rebellion. It is likely to endure for a considerable time. I knew several cases in which the sales of cotton did not cover the charges, but left a small bill to be paid by the owner. Frequently, cotton that had been innocently purchased and sent to market was seized by Government officials, on account of some alleged informality, and placed in the public warehouses. The owner could get no hearing until he made liberal presents of a pecuniary character to the proper authorities. After much delay and many bribes, the cotton would be released. New charges would appear, and before a sale could be effected the whole value of the cotton would be gone. A person of my acquaintance was unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of the Philistines in the manner I have described above. At the end of the transaction he found himself a loser to the extent of three hundred dollars. He has since been endeavoring to ascertain the amount of traffic on a similar scale that would be needed to make him a millionaire. At last accounts he had not succeeded in solving the problem. CHAPTER XXXVIII. SOME FEATURES OF PLANTATION LIFE. Mysteries of Mule-trading.--"What's in a Name?"--Process of Stocking a Plantation.--An Enterprising White Man.--Stratagem of a Yankee.--Distributing Goods to the Negroes.--The Tastes of the African.--Ethiopian Eloquence.--A Colored Overseer.--Guerrillas Approaching.--Whisky _vs_. Guerrillas.--A Hint to Military Men. On my return from New Orleans to the plantation, I found that Colburn had been pushing our business with a rapidity and skill that secured the admiration of everyone around us. He had increased our working force, and purchased a goodly number of mules. We had seventeen plows in operation, and two teams engaged in gathering corn, on the day before my arrival. The "trash-gang" was busy, and other working parties were occupied with their various duties. We were looking to a brilliant future, and echoed the wish of Jefferson Davis, to be "let alone." The enterprise of a lessee at that time, and in that locality, was illustrated by his ability to supply his plantation with mules. There were many who failed in the effort, but my associate was not of the number. There were but few mules in the Natchez market--not enough to meet a tenth of the demand. Nearly every plantation had been stripped of working animals by one army or the other. Before our arrival the Rebels plundered all men suspected of lukewarmness in the cause. When the National army obtained possession, it took nearly every thing the Rebels had left. All property believed to belong to the Rebel Government was passed into the hands of our quartermaster. A planter, named Caleb Shields, had a large plantation near Natchez, which had not been disturbed by the Rebels. His mules were branded with the letters "C.S.," the initials of their owner. As these letters happened to be the same that were used by the Confederate Government, Mr. Shields found his mules promptly seized and "confiscated." Before he could explain the matter and obtain an order for their return, his animals were sent to Vicksburg and placed in the Government corral. If the gentleman had possessed other initials, it is possible (though not certain) he might have saved his stock. Mules being very scarce, the lessees exercised their skill in supplying themselves with those animals. On my first arrival at the plantation, I took care to hire those negroes who were riding from the interior, or, at all events, to purchase their animals. In one day I obtained two horses and four mules. An order had been issued for the confiscation of beasts of burden (or draught) brought inside the lines by negroes. We obtained permission to purchase of these runaway negroes whatever mules they would sell, provided we could make our negotiations before they reached the military lines. Immediately after my departure, Mr. Colburn stationed one of our men on the road near our house, with orders to effect a trade with every mounted negro on his way to Natchez. The plan was successful. From two to a half-dozen mules were obtained daily. During the two weeks of my absence nearly fifty mules were purchased, placing the plantation in good order for active prosecution of our planting enterprise. At the same time many lessees in our vicinity were unable to commence operations, owing to their inability to obtain working stock. The negroes discovered that the mule market was not well supplied, and some of the more enterprising and dishonest sons of Ham endeavored to profit by the situation. Frequently mules would be offered at a suspiciously low price, with the explanation that the owner was anxious to dispose of his property and return home. Some undertook nocturnal expeditions, ten or twenty miles into the interior, where they stole whatever mules they could find. A few of the lessees suffered by the loss of stock, which was sold an hour after it was stolen, and sometimes to the very party from whom it had been taken. We took every care to avoid buying stolen property, but were sometimes deceived. On one occasion I purchased a mule of a negro who lived at Waterproof. The purchase was made an hour before sunset, and the animal was stolen during the night. On the following morning, Colburn bought it again of the same party with whom I had effected my trade. After this occurrence, we adopted the plan of branding each mule as soon as it came into our hands. All the lessees did the same thing, and partially protected each other against fraud. White men were the worst mule-thieves, and generally instructed the negroes in their villainy. There were several men in Natchez who reduced mule-stealing to a science, and were as thoroughly skilled in it as Charley Bates or the Artful Dodger in the science of picking pockets. One of them had four or five white men and a dozen negroes employed in bringing stock to market. I think he retired to St. Louis, before the end of May, with ten or twelve thousand dollars as the result of three months' industry. Some of the lessees resorted to questionable methods for supplying their plantations with the means for plowing and planting. One of them occupied a plantation owned by a man who refused to allow his own stock to be used. He wished to be neutral until the war was ended. This owner had more than sixty fine mules, that were running loose in the field. One day the lessee told the owner that he had purchased a lot of mules at Natchez, and would bring them out soon. On the following night, while the owner slept, the lessee called some trusty negroes to his aid, caught seventeen mules from the field, sheared and branded them, and placed them in a yard by themselves. In the morning he called the owner to look at the "purchase." "You have bought an excellent lot," said the latter individual. "Where were they from?" "All from St. Louis." was the response. "They were brought down two days ago. I don't know what to do about turning them out. Do you think, if I put them with yours, there is any danger of their straying, on account of being on a strange place?" "None at all. I think there is no risk." The lessee took the risk, and expressed much delight to find that the new mules showed themselves at home on the plantation. Several days later the owner of the plantation discovered the loss of his mules, but never suspected what had become of them. Two weeks afterward, the Rebels came and asked him to designate the property of the lessee, that they might remove it. He complied by pointing out the seventeen mules, which the Rebels drove away, leaving the balance unharmed. I landed at the plantation one Sunday evening, with the goods I had purchased in New Orleans. I was met with the unwelcome information that the small force at Waterproof, after committing many depredations on the surrounding country, had been withdrawn, leaving us exposed to the tender mercies of the indignant chivalry. We were liable to be visited at any moment. We knew the Rebels would not handle us very tenderly, in view of what they had suffered from our own men. A party of guerrillas was reported seven miles distant on the day previous, and there was nothing to hinder their coming as near as they chose. Accordingly, we determined to distribute the goods among the negroes as early as possible. On Monday morning we commenced. There was some delay, but we succeeded in starting a very lively trade before seven o'clock. Shoes were in great demand, as the negroes had not been supplied with these articles for nearly three years. A hundred pairs were speedily issued, when the balance was laid aside for future consideration. There were some of the negroes whose feet were too large for any shoes we had purchased. It was a curious fact that these large-footed negroes were not above the ordinary stature. I remember one in particular who demanded "thirteens," but who did not stand more than five feet and five inches in his invisible stockings. After the shoes, came the material for clothing. For the men we had purchased "gray denims" and "Kentucky jeans;" for the women, "blue denims" and common calico. These articles were rapidly taken, and with them the necessary quantity of thread, buttons, etc. A supply of huge bandana kerchiefs for the head was eagerly called for. I had procured as many of these articles as I thought necessary for the entire number of negroes on the plantation; but found I had sadly miscalculated. The kerchiefs were large and very gaudy, and the African taste was at once captivated by them. Instead of being satisfied with one or two, every negro desired from six to a dozen, and was much disappointed at the refusal. The gaudy colors of most of the calicoes created a great demand, while a few pieces of more subdued appearance were wholly discarded. White cotton cloth, palm-leaf hats, knives and forks, tin plates, pans and dishes, and other articles for use or wear, were among the distributions of the day. Under the slave-owner's rule, the negro was entitled to nothing beyond his subsistence and coarse clothing. Out of a large-hearted generosity the master gave him various articles, amounting, in the course of a year, to a few dollars in value. These articles took the name of "presents," and their reception was designed to inspire feelings of gratitude in the breast of the slave. Most of the negroes understood that the new arrangements made an end of present-giving. They were to be paid for all their labor, and were to pay for whatever they received. When the plan was first announced, all were pleased with it; but when we came to the distribution of the goods, many of the negroes changed their views. They urged that the clothing, and every thing else we had purchased, should be issued as "presents," and that they should be paid for their labor in addition. Whatever little advantages the old system might have, they wished to retain and ingraft upon their new life. To be compensated for labor was a condition of freedom which they joyfully accepted. To receive "presents" was an apparent advantage of slavery which they did not wish to set aside. The matter was fully explained, and I am confident all our auditors understood it. Those that remained obstinate had an eye to their personal interests. Those who had been sick, idle, absent, or disabled, were desirous of liberal gifts, while the industrious were generally in favor of the new system, or made no special opposition to it. One negro, who had been in our employ two weeks, and whose whole labor in that time was less than four days, thought he deserved a hundred dollars' worth of presents, and compensation in money for a fortnight's toil. All were inclined to value their services very highly; but there were some whose moderation knew no bounds. A difficulty arose on account of certain promises that had been made to the negroes by the owner of the plantation, long before our arrival. Mrs. B. had told them (according to their version) that the proceeds of the cotton on the plantation should be distributed in the form of presents, whenever a sale was effected. She did not inform us of any such promise when we secured the lease of the plantation. If she made any agreement to that effect, it was probably forgotten. Those who claimed that this arrangement had been made desired liberal presents in addition to payment for their labor. Our non-compliance with this demand was acknowledged to be just, but it created considerable disappointment. One who had been her mistress's favorite argued the question with an earnestness that attracted my attention. Though past sixty years of age, she was straight as an arrow, and her walk resembled that of a tragedy queen. In her whole features she was unlike those around her, except in her complexion, which was black as ink. There was a clear, silvery tone to her voice, such as I have rarely observed in persons of her race. In pressing her claim, she grew wonderfully eloquent, and would have elicited the admiration of an educated audience. Had there been a school in that vicinity for the development of histrionic talent in the negro race, I would have given that woman a recommendation to its halls. During my absence, Mr. Colburn employed an overseer on our smaller plantation, and placed him in full charge of the work. This overseer was a mulatto, who had been fifteen years the manager of a large plantation about seven miles distant from ours. In voice and manner he was a white man, but his complexion and hair were those of the subject race. There was nothing about the plantation which he could not master in every point. Without being severe, he was able to accomplish all that had been done under the old system. He imitated the customs of the white man as much as possible, and it was his particular ambition to rank above those of his own color. As an overseer he was fully competent to take charge of any plantation in that locality. During all my stay in the South, I did not meet a white overseer whom I considered the professional equal of this negro. "Richmond" was the name to which our new assistant answered. His master had prevented his learning to read, but allowed him to acquire sufficient knowledge of figures to record the weight of cotton in the field. Richmond could mark upon the slate all round numbers between one hundred and four hundred; beyond this he was never able to go. He could neither add nor subtract, nor could he write a single letter of the alphabet. He was able, however, to write his own name very badly, having copied it from a pass written by his master. He had possessed himself of a book, and, with the help of one of our negroes who knew the alphabet, he was learning to read. His house was a model of neatness. I regret to say that he was somewhat tyrannical when superintending the affairs of his domicile. As the day of our distribution of goods was a stormy one, Richmond was called from the plantation to assist us. Under his assistance we were progressing fairly, interrupted occasionally by various causes of delay. Less than half the valuable articles were distributed, when our watches told us it was noon. Just as we were discussing the propriety of an adjournment for dinner, an announcement was made that banished all thoughts of the mid-day meal. One of our boys had been permitted to visit Waterproof during the forenoon. He returned, somewhat breathless, and his first words dropped like a shell among the assembled negroes: "_The Rebels are in Waterproof_." "How do you know?" "I saw them there, and asked a lady what they were. She said they were Harrison's Rebels." We told the negroes to go to their quarters. Richmond mounted his horse and rode off toward the plantation of which he had charge. In two minutes, there was not a negro in the yard, with the exception of the house-servants. Our goods were lying exposed. We threw some of the most valuable articles into an obscure closet. At the first alarm we ordered our horses brought out. When the animals appeared we desisted from our work. "The Rebels are coming down the road," was the next bulletin from the front. We sprang upon our horses and rode a hundred yards along the front of our "quarter-lot," to a point where we could look up the road toward Waterproof. There they were, sure enough, thirty or more mounted men, advancing at a slow trot. They were about half a mile distant, and, had we been well mounted, there was no doubt of our easy escape. "Now comes the race," said Colburn. "Twenty miles to Natchez. A single heat, with animals to go at will." We turned our horses in the direction of Natchez. "Stop," said I, as we reached the house again. "They did not see us, and have not quickened their pace. Strategy, my boy, may assist us a little." Throwing my bridle into Colburn's hand, I slid from my saddle and bounded into the dwelling. It was the work of a moment to bring out a jug and a glass tumbler, but I was delayed longer than I wished in finding the key of our closet. The jug contained five gallons of excellent whisky (so pronounced by my friends), and would have been a valuable prize in any portion of the Confederacy. Placing the jug and tumbler side by side on the veranda, in full view from the road, I remounted, just as the Rebels reached the corner of our quarter-lot. "We have pressing engagements in Natchez," said Colburn. "So we have," I replied; "I had nearly forgotten them. Let us lose no time in meeting them." As we rode off, some of the foremost Rebels espied us and quickened their pace. When they reached the house they naturally looked toward it to ascertain if any person was there. They saw the jug, and were at once attracted. One man rode past the house, but the balance stopped. The minority of one was prudent, and returned after pursuing us less than fifty yards. The whisky which the jug contained was quickly absorbed. With only one tumbler it required some minutes to drain the jug. These minutes were valuable. Whisky may have ruined many a man, but it saved us. Around that seductive jug those thirty guerrillas became oblivious to our escape. We have reason to be thankful that we disobeyed the rules of strict teetotalers by "keeping liquor in the house." I was well mounted, and could have easily kept out of the way of any ordinary chase. Colburn was only fairly mounted, and must have been run down had there been a vigorous and determined pursuit. As each was resolved to stand by the other, the capture of one would have doubtless been the capture of both. [Illustration: "STRATEGY, MY BOY!"] CHAPTER XXXIX. VISITED BY GUERRILLAS. News of the Raid.--Returning to the Plantation.--Examples of Negro Cunning.--A Sudden Departure and a Fortunate Escape.--A Second Visit.--"Going Through," in Guerrilla Parlance.--How it is Accomplished.--Courtesy to Guests.--A Holiday Costume.--Lessees Abandoning their Plantations.--Official Promises. As soon as satisfied we were not followed we took a leisurely pace, and in due time reached Natchez. Four hours later we received the first bulletin from the plantation. About thirty guerrillas had been there, mainly for the purpose of despoiling the plantation next above ours. This they had accomplished by driving off all the mules. They had not stolen _our_ mules, simply because they found as much cloth and other desirable property as they wished to take on that occasion. Besides, our neighbor's mules made as large a drove as they could manage. They promised to come again, and we believed they would keep their word. We ascertained that my strategy with the whisky saved us from pursuit. On the next day a messenger arrived, saying all was quiet at the plantation. On the second day, as every thing continued undisturbed, I concluded to return. Colburn had gone to Vicksburg, and left me to look after our affairs as I thought best. We had discussed the propriety of hiring a white overseer to stay on the plantation during our absence. The prospect of visits from guerrillas convinced us that _we_ should not spend much of our time within their reach. We preferred paying some one to risk his life rather than to risk our own lives. The prospect of getting through the season without serious interruption had become very poor, but we desired to cling to the experiment a little longer. Once having undertaken it, we were determined not to give it up hastily. I engaged a white man as overseer, and took him with me to the plantation. The negroes had been temporarily alarmed at the visit of the guerrillas, but, as they were not personally disturbed, their excitement was soon allayed. I found them anxiously waiting my return, and ready to recommence labor on the following day. The ravages of the guerrillas on that occasion were not extensive. They carried off a few bolts of cloth and some smaller articles, after drinking the whisky I had set out for their entertainment. The negroes had carefully concealed the balance of the goods in places where a white man would have much trouble in finding them. In the garden there was a row of bee-hives, whose occupants manifested much dislike for all white men, irrespective of their political sentiments. Two unused hives were filled with the most valuable articles on our invoice, and placed at the ends of this row. In a clump of weeds under the bench on which the hives stood, the negroes secreted several rolls of cloth and a quantity of shoes. More shoes and more cloth were concealed in a hen-house, under a series of nests where several innocent hens were "sitting." Crockery was placed among the rose-bushes and tomato-vines in the garden; barrels of sugar were piled with empty barrels of great age; and two barrels of molasses had been neatly buried in a freshly-ploughed potato-field. Obscure corners in stables and sheds were turned into hiding-places, and the cunning of the negro was well evinced by the successful concealment of many bulky articles. It was about two o'clock in the afternoon when I arrived at the plantation. I immediately recommenced the issue of goods, which was suspended so hastily three days before. From two o'clock until dark the overseer and myself were busily engaged, and distributed about two-thirds of our remaining stock. Night came. We suspended the distribution and indulged in supper. After giving the overseer directions for the morrow, I recollected an invitation to spend the night at the house of a friend, three miles away, on the road to Natchez. I ordered my horse, and in a few moments the animal was ready, at the door. I told the overseer where I was going, and bade him good-night. "Where are you going, Mr. K----?" said the negro who had brought out the horse, as he delivered the bridle into my hands. "If any one calls to see me," said I, "you can say I have gone to Natchez." With that I touched a spur to my horse and darted off rapidly toward my friend's house. A half-dozen negroes had gathered to assist in saddling and holding the horse. As I sprang into the saddle I heard one of them say: "I don't see why Mr. K---- starts off to Natchez at this time of night." Another negro explained the matter, but I did not hear the explanation. If he gave a satisfactory reason, I think he did better than I could have done. Immediately after my departure the overseer went to bed. He had been in bed about fifteen minutes when he heard a trampling of horses' feet around the house. A moment later there was a loud call for the door to be opened. Before the overseer could comply with the request, the door was broken in. A dozen men crowded into the house, demanding that a light be struck instantly. As the match gave its first flash of light, one of the visitors said: "Well, K----, we've got you this time." "That," said another, "is no K----; that is Walter Owen, who used to be overseer on Stewart's plantation." "What are you doing here?" demanded another. Mr. Owen, trembling in his night-clothes, replied that he had been engaged to stay there as overseer. "Where is K----, and where is Colburn?" "Mr. Colburn hasn't been here since last Monday. Mr. K---- has gone to Natchez." "That's a ---- lie," said one of the guerrillas. "We know he came here at two o'clock this afternoon, and was here at dark. He is somewhere around this house." In vain did Owen protest I was not there. Every room and every closet in the house was searched. A pile of bagging in a garret was overhauled, in the expectation that I was concealed within it. Even the chimneys were not neglected, though I doubt if the smallest of professional sweeps could pass through them. One of the guerrillas opened a piano, to see if I had not taken refuge under its cover. They looked into all possible and impossible nooks and corners, in the hope of finding me somewhere. At last they gave up the search, and contented themselves with promising to catch both Colburn and myself before long. "We want to go through those d--d Abolitionists, and we will do it, too. They may dodge us for a while, but we will have them by-and-by." Not being privileged to "go through" me as they had anticipated, the gentlemanly guerrillas went through the overseer. They took his money, his hat, his pantaloons, and his saddle. His horse was standing in the stable, and they took that also. They found four of our mules, and appropriated them to their own use. They frightened one of the negroes into telling where certain articles were concealed, and were thus enabled to carry off a goodly amount of plunder. They threatened Mr. Owen with the severest punishment, if he remained any longer on the plantation. They possessed themselves of a "protection" paper which Mrs. B. had received from the commander at Natchez several months before, and were half inclined to burn her buildings as a punishment for having sought the favor of the Yankees. Their stay was of only an hour's duration. From our plantation the robbers went to the one next above, where they were more fortunate in finding the lessees at home. They surrounded the house in the same manner they had surrounded ours, and then burst open the doors. The lessees were plundered of every thing in the shape of money, watches, and knives, and were forced to exchange hats and coats with their captors. One of the guerrillas observed an ivory-headed pencil, which he appropriated to his own use, with the remark: "They don't make these things back here in the woods. When they do, I will send this one back." These lessees were entertaining some friends on that evening, and begged the guerrillas to show them some distinction. "D--n your friends," said the guerrilla leader; "I suppose they are Yankees?" "Yes, they are; we should claim friendship with nobody else." "Then we want to see what they have, and go through them if it is worth the while." The strangers were unceremoniously searched. Their united contributions to the guerrilla treasury were two watches, two revolvers, three hundred dollars in money, and their hats and overcoats. Their horses and saddles were also taken. In consideration of their being guests of the house, these gentlemen were allowed to retain their coats. They were presented with five dollars each, to pay their expenses to Natchez. No such courtesy was shown to the lessees of the plantation. On the following morning, I was awakened at an early hour by the arrival of a negro from our plantation, with news of the raid. A little later, Mr. Owen made his appearance, wearing pantaloons and hat that belonged to one of the negroes. The pantaloons were too small and the hat too large; both had long before seen their best days. He was riding a mule, on which was tied an old saddle, whose cohesive powers were very doubtful. I listened to the story of the raid, and was convinced another visit would be made very soon. I gave directions for the overseer to gather all the remaining mules and take them to Natchez for safety. I stopped with my friend until nearly noon, and then accompanied him to Natchez. On the next morning, I learned that the guerrillas returned to our plantation while I was at my friend's house. They carried away what they were unable to take on the previous night They needed a wagon for purposes of transportation, and took one of ours, and with it all the mules they could find. Our house was stripped of every thing of any value, and I hoped the guerrillas would have no occasion to make subsequent visits. Several of our mules were saved by running them into the woods adjoining the plantation. These were taken to Natchez, and, for a time, all work on the prospective cotton crop came to an end. For nearly three weeks, the guerrillas had full and free range in the vicinity of the leased plantations. One after another of the lessees were driven to seek refuge at Natchez, and their work was entirely suspended. The only plantations undisturbed were those within a mile or two of Vidalia. As the son of Adjutant-General Thomas was interested in one of these plantations, and intimate friends of that official were concerned in others, it was proper that they should be well protected. The troops at Vidalia were kept constantly on the look-out to prevent raids on these favored localities. Nearly every day I heard of a fresh raid in our neighborhood, though, after the first half-dozen visits, I could not learn that the guerrillas carried away any thing, for the simple reason there was nothing left to steal. Some of the negroes remained at home, while others fled to the military posts for protection. The robbers showed no disposition to maltreat the negroes, and repeatedly assured them they should not be disturbed as long as they remained on the plantations and planted nothing but corn. It was declared that cotton should not be cultivated under any circumstances, and the negroes were threatened with the severest punishment if they assisted in planting that article. CHAPTER XL. PECULIARITIES OF PLANTATION LABOR. Resuming Operation.--Difficulties in the Way.--A New Method of Healing the Sick.--A Thief Discovered by his Ignorance of Arithmetic.--How Cotton is Planted.--The Uses of Cotton-Seed.--A Novel Sleeping-Room.--Constructing a Tunnel.--Vigilance of a Negro Sentinel. On the 24th of March a small post was established at Waterproof, and on the following day we recommenced our enterprise at the plantation. We were much crippled, as nearly all our mules were gone, and the work of replacing them could not be done in a day. The market at Natchez was not supplied with mules, and we were forced to depend upon the region around us. Three days after the establishment of the post we were able to start a half-dozen plows, and within two weeks we had our original force in the field. The negroes that had left during the raid, returned to us. Under the superintendence of our overseer the work was rapidly pushed. Richmond was back again on our smaller plantation, whence he had fled during the disturbances, and was displaying an energy worthy of the highest admiration. Our gangs were out in full force. There was the trash-gang clearing the ground for the plows, and the plow-gang busy at its appropriate work. The corn-gang, with two ox-teams, was gathering corn at the rate of a hundred bushels daily, and the fence-gang was patting the fences in order. The shelling-gang (composed of the oldest men and women) was husking and shelling corn, and putting it in sacks for market. The gardener, the stock-tenders, the dairy-maids, nurserymaids, hog-minders, and stable-keepers were all in their places, and we began to forget our recent troubles in the apparent prospect of success. One difficulty of the new system presented itself. Several of the negroes began to feign sickness, and cheat the overseer whenever it could be done with impunity. It is a part of the overseer's duty to go through the quarters every morning, examine such as claim to be sick, determine whether their sickness be real or pretended, and make the appropriate prescriptions. Under the old system the pretenders were treated to a liberal application of the lash, which generally drove away all fancied ills. Sometimes, one who was really unwell, was most unmercifully flogged by the overseer, and death not unfrequently ensued from this cause. As there was now no fear of the lash, some of the lazily-inclined negroes would feign sickness, and thus be excused from the field. The trouble was not general, but sufficiently prevalent to be annoying. We saw that some course must be devised to overcome this evil, and keep in the field all who were really able to be there. We procured some printed tickets, which the overseer was to issue at the close of each day. There were three colors--red, yellow, and white. The first were for a full day's work, the second for a half day, and the last for a quarter day. On the face of each was the following:-- AQUASCO & MONONO PLANTATIONS. 1864. These tickets were given each day to such as deserved them. They were collected every Saturday, and proper credit given for the amount of labor performed during the week. The effect was magical. The day after the adoption of our ticket system our number of sick was reduced one-half, and we had no further trouble with pretended patients. Colburn and myself, in our new character of "doctors," found our practice greatly diminished in consequence of our innovations. Occasionally it would happen that one who was not really able to work, would go to the field through a fear of diminished wages. One Saturday night, a negro whom we had suspected of thievish propensities, presented eight full-day tickets as the representative of his week's work. "Did you earn all these this week?" I asked. "Yes, sir," was the reply; "Mr. Owen gave them to me. I worked every day, straight along." "Can you tell me on which days he gave you each ticket?" "Oh, yes. I knows every one of them," said the negro, his countenance expressing full belief in his ability to locate each ticket. As I held the tickets in my hand, the negro picked them out. "Mr. Owen gave me this one Monday, this one Tuesday," and so on, toward the end of the week. As he reached Friday, and saw three tickets remaining, when there was only another day to be accounted for, his face suddenly fell. I pretended not to notice his embarrassment. "Which one did he give you to-day?" There was a stammer, a hesitation, a slight attempt to explain, and then the truth came out. He had stolen the extra tickets from two fellow-laborers only a few minutes before, and had not reflected upon the difficulties of the situation. I gave him some good advice, required him to restore the stolen tickets, and promise he would not steal any more. I think he kept the promise during the remainder of his stay on the plantation, but am by no means certain. Every day, when the weather was favorable, our work was pushed. Every mule that could be found was put at once into service, and by the 15th of April we had upward of five hundred acres plowed and ready for planting. We had planted about eighty acres of corn during the first week of April, and arranged to commence planting cotton on Monday, the 18th of the month. On the Saturday previous, the overseer on each plantation organized his planting-gangs, and placed every thing in readiness for active work. The ground, when plowed for cotton, is thrown into a series of ridges by a process technically known as "four-furrowing." Two furrows are turned in one direction and two in another, thus making a ridge four or five feet wide. Along the top of this ridge a "planter," or "bull-tongue," is drawn by a single mule, making a channel two or three inches in depth. A person carrying a bag of cotton seed follows the planter and scatters the seed into the channel. A small harrow follows, covering the seed, and the work of planting is complete. A planting-gang consists of drivers for the planters, drivers for the harrows, persons who scatter the seed, and attendants to supply them with seed. The seed is drawn from the gin-house to the field in ox-wagons, and distributed in convenient piles of ten or twenty bushels each. Cotton-seed has never been considered of any appreciable value, and consequently the negroes are very wasteful in using it. In sowing it in the field, they scatter at least twenty times as much as necessary, and all advice to use less is unheeded. It is estimated that there are forty bushels of seed to every bale of cotton produced. A plantation that sends a thousand bales of cotton to market will thus have forty thousand bushels of seed, for which there was formerly no sale. With the most lavish use of the article, there was generally a surplus at the end of the year. Cattle and sheep will eat cotton-seed, though not in large quantities. Boiled cotton-seed is fed to hogs on all plantations, but it is far behind corn in nutritious and fattening qualities. Cotton-seed is packed around the roots of small trees, where it is necessary to give them warmth or furnish a rich soil for their growth. To some extent it is used as fuel for steam-engines, on places where the machinery is run by steam. When the war deprived the Southern cities of a supply of coal for their gasworks, many of them found cotton seed a very good substitute. Oil can be extracted from it in large quantities. For several years, the Cotton-Seed Oil Works of Memphis carried on an extensive business. Notwithstanding the many uses to which cotton-seed can be applied, its great abundance makes it of little value. The planting-gang which we started on that Monday morning, consisted of five planters and an equal number of harrows, sowers, etc. Each planter passed over about six acres daily, so that every day gave us thirty acres of our prospective cotton crop. At the end of the week we estimated we had about a hundred and seventy acres planted. On the following week we increased the number of planters, but soon reduced them, as we found we should overtake the plows earlier than we desired. By the evening of Monday, May 2d, we had planted upward of four hundred acres. A portion of it was pushing out of the ground, and giving promise of rapid growth. During this period the business was under the direct superintendence of our overseers, Mr. Owen being responsible for the larger plantation, and Richmond for the smaller. Every day they were visited by Colburn or myself--sometimes by both of us--and received directions for the general management, which they carried out in detail. Knowing the habits of the guerrillas, we did not think it prudent to sleep in our house at the plantation. Those individuals were liable to announce their presence at any hour of the night, by quietly surrounding the house and requesting its inmates to make their appearance. When I spent the night at the plantation, I generally slept on a pile of cotton-seed, in an out-building to which I had secretly conveyed a pair of blankets and a flour-bag. This bag, filled with seed, served as my pillow, and though my bed lacked the elasticity of a spring mattress, it was really quite comfortable. My sleeping-place was at the foot of a huge pile of seed, containing many hundred bushels. One night I amused myself by making a tunnel into this pile in much the same way as a squirrel digs into a hillside. With a minute's warning I could have "hunted my hole," taking my blankets with me. By filling the entrance with seed, I could have escaped any ordinary search of the building. I never had occasion to use my tunnel. Generally, however, we staid in Waterproof, leaving there early in the morning, taking breakfast at the upper plantation, inspecting the work on both plantations, and, after dinner, returning to Waterproof. We could obtain a better dinner at the plantation than Waterproof was able to furnish us. Strawberries held out until late in the season, and we had, at all times, chickens, eggs, and milk in abundance. Whenever we desired roast lamb, our purveyor caused a good selection to be made from our flock. Fresh pork was much too abundant for our tastes, and we astonished the negroes and all other natives of that region, by our seemingly Jewish propensities. Pork and corn-bread are the great staples of life in that hot climate, where one would naturally look for lighter articles of food. Once I was detained on the plantation till after dark. As I rode toward Waterproof, expecting the negro sentinel to challenge and halt me, I was suddenly brought to a stand by the whistling of a bullet close to my ear, followed by several others at wider range. "Who comes there?" "A friend, with the countersign." "If that's so, come in. We thought you was the Rebels." As I reached the picket, the corporal of the guard explained that they were on duty for the first time, and did not well understand their business. I agreed with him fully on the latter point. To fire upon a solitary horseman, advancing at a walk, and challenge him afterward, was something that will appear ridiculous in the eyes of all soldiers. The corporal and all his men promised to do better next time, and begged me not to report them at head-quarters. When I reached the center of the town, I found the garrison had been alarmed at the picket firing, and was turning out to repel the enemy. On my assurance that I was the "enemy," the order to fall into line of battle was countermanded. CHAPTER XLI. THE NEGROES AT A MILITARY POST. The Soldiers at Waterproof.--The Black Man in Blue.--Mutiny and Desertion.--Their Cause and Cure.--Tendering a Resignation.--No Desire for a Barber.--Seeking Protection.--Falsehood and Truth.--Proneness to Exaggeration.--Amusing Estimates. The soldiers forming the garrison at Waterproof, at that time, were from a regiment raised by Colonel Eaton, superintendent of contrabands at Vicksburg. They were recruited in the vicinity of Vicksburg and Milliken's Bend, especially for local defense. They made, as the negro everywhere has made, excellent material for the army. Easily subordinate, prompt, reliable, and keenly alert when on duty (as their shooting at me will evince), they completely gave the lie to the Rebel assertion that the negro would prove worthless under arms. On one point only were they inclined to be mutinous. Their home ties were very strong, and their affection for their wives and children could not be overcome at once. It appeared that when this regiment was organized it was expected to remain at Milliken's Bend, where the families of nearly all the men were gathered. The order transferring them to Waterproof was unlooked for, and the men made some complaint. This was soon silenced, but after the regiment had been there three or four weeks, a half-dozen of the men went out of the lines one night, and started to walk to Milliken's Bend. They were brought back, and, after several days in the guardhouse, returned to duty. Others followed their example in attempting to go home, and for a while the camp was in a disturbed condition. Desertions were of daily occurrence. It was difficult to make them understand they were doing wrong. The army regulations and the intricacies of military law were unknown to them. They had never studied any of General Halleck's translations from the French, and, had they done so, I doubt if they would have been much enlightened. None of them knew what "desertion" meant, nor the duties of a soldier to adhere to his flag at all times. All intended to return to the post after making a brief visit to their families. Most of them would request their comrades to notify their captains that they would only be absent a short time. Two, who succeeded in eluding pursuit, made their appearance one morning as if nothing had happened, and assured their officers that others would shortly be back again. Gradually they came to understand the wickedness of desertion, or absence without leave, but this comprehension of their obligations was not easily acquired. A captain, commanding a company at Waterproof, told me an amusing story of a soldier "handing in his resignation." As the captain was sitting in front of his quarters, one of his men approached him, carrying his musket and all his accoutrements. Without a word the man laid his entire outfit upon the ground, in front of the captain, and then turned to walk away. "Come back here," said the officer; "what do you mean by this?" "I'se tired of staying here, and I'se going home," was the negro's answer, and he again attempted to move off. "Come back here and pick these things up," and the captain spoke in a tone that convinced the negro he would do well to obey. The negro told his story. He was weary of the war; he had been four weeks a soldier; he wanted to see his family, and had concluded to go home. If the captain desired it, he, would come back in a little while, but he was going home then, "_any how_." The officer possessed an amiable disposition, and explained to the soldier the nature of military discipline. The latter was soon convinced he had done wrong, and returned without a murmur to his duty. Does any soldier, who reads this, imagine himself tendering his resignation in the above manner with any prospect of its acceptance? When the first regiment of colored volunteers was organized in Kansas, it was mainly composed of negroes who had escaped from slavery in Missouri. They were easily disciplined save upon a single point, and on this they were very obstinate. Many of the negroes in Missouri, as in other parts of the South, wear their hair, or wool, in little knots or braids. They refused to submit to a close shearing, and threatened to return to their masters rather than comply with the regulation. Some actually left the camp and went home. The officers finally carried their point by inducing some free negroes in Leavenworth, whose heads were adorned with the "fighting cut," to visit the camp and tell the obstinate ones that long locks were a badge of servitude. The negroes on our plantation, as well as elsewhere, had a strong desire to go to Waterproof to see the soldiers. Every Sunday they were permitted to go there to attend church, the service being conducted by one of their own color. They greatly regretted that the soldiers did not parade on that day, as they missed their opportunities for witnessing military drills. To the negroes from plantations in the hands of disloyal owners, the military posts were a great attraction, and they would suffer all privations rather than return home. Some of them declared they would not go outside the lines under any consideration. We needed more assistance on our plantation, but it was next to impossible to induce negroes to go there after they found shelter at the military posts. Dread of danger and fondness for their new life were their reasons for remaining inside the lines. A portion were entirely idle, but there were many who adopted various modes of earning their subsistence. At Natchez, Vicksburg, and other points, dealers in fruit, coffee, lemonade, and similar articles, could be found in abundance. There were dozens of places where washing was taken in, though it was not always well done. Wood-sawing, house-cleaning, or any other kind of work requiring strength, always found some one ready to perform it. Many of those who found employment supported themselves, while those who could not or would not find it, lived at the expense of Government. The latter class was greatly in the majority. I have elsewhere inserted the instructions which are printed in every "Plantation Record," for the guidance of overseers in the olden time. "Never trust a negro," is the maxim given by the writer of those instructions. I was frequently cautioned not to believe any statements made by negroes. They were charged with being habitual liars, and entitled to no credence whatever. Mrs. B. constantly assured me the negroes were great liars, and I must not believe them. This assurance would be generally given when I cited them in support of any thing she did not desire to approve. _Per contrâ_, she had no hesitation in referring to the negroes to support any of her statements which their testimony would strengthen. This was not altogether feminine weakness, as I knew several instances in which white persons of the sterner sex made reference to the testimony of slaves. The majority of Southern men refuse to believe them on all occasions; but there are many who refer to them if their statements are advantageous, yet declare them utterly unworthy of credence when the case is reversed. I have met many negroes who could tell falsehoods much easier than they could tell the truth. I have met others who saw no material difference between truth and its opposite; and I have met many whose statements could be fully relied upon. During his whole life, from the very nature of the circumstances which, surround him, the slave is trained in deception. If he did not learn to lie it would be exceedingly strange. It is my belief that the negroes are as truthful as could be expected from their education. White persons, under similar experience and training, would not be good examples for the young to imitate. The negroes tell many lies, but all negroes are not liars. Many white persons tell the truth, but I have met, in the course of my life, several men, of the Caucasian race, who never told the truth unless by accident. I found in the plantation negroes a proneness to exaggeration, in cases where their fears or desires were concerned. One day, a negro from the back country came riding rapidly to our plantation, declaring that the woods, a mile distant, were "full of Rebels," and asking where the Yankee soldiers were. I questioned him for some time. When his fears were quieted, I ascertained that he had seen three mounted men, an hour before, but did not know what they were, or whether armed or not. When I took the plantations, Mrs. B. told me there were twenty bales of cotton already picked; the negroes had told her so. When I surveyed the place on the first day of my occupation, the negroes called my attention to the picked cotton, of which they thought there were twenty or twenty-five bales. With my little experience in cotton, I felt certain there would be not more than seven bales of that lot. When it was passed through the gin and pressed, there were but five bales. We wished to plant about fifty acres of corn on the larger plantation. There was a triangular patch in one corner that we estimated to contain thirty acres. The foreman of the plow-gang, who had lived twenty years on the place, thought there were about sixty acres. He was surprised when we found, by actual measurement, that the patch contained twenty-eight acres. Another spot, which he thought contained twenty acres, measured less than ten. Doubtless the man's judgment had been rarely called for, and its exercise, to any extent, was decidedly a new sensation. Any thing to which the negroes were unaccustomed became the subject of amusing calculations. The "hog-minder" could estimate with considerable accuracy the weight of a hog, either live or dressed. When I asked him how much he supposed his own weight to be, he was entirely lost. On my demanding an answer, he thought it might be three hundred pounds. A hundred and sixty would not have been far from the real figure. Incorrect judgment is just as prevalent among ignorant whites as among negroes, though with the latter there is generally a tendency to overestimate. Where negroes make wrong estimates, in three cases out of four they will be found excessive. With whites the variation will be diminutive as often as excessive. In judging of numbers of men, a column of troops, for example, both races are liable to exaggerate, the negro generally going beyond the pale-face. Fifty mounted men may ride past a plantation. The white inhabitants will tell you a hundred soldiers have gone by, while the negroes will think there were two or three hundred. I was often surprised at the ability of the negroes to tell the names of the steamboats plying on the river. None of the negroes could read, but many of them would designate the different boats with great accuracy. They recognized the steamers as they would recognize the various trees of the forest. When a new boat made its appearance they inquired its name, and forgot it very rarely. On one occasion a steamer came in sight, on her way up the river. Before she was near enough for me to make out the name on her side, one of the negroes declared it was the _Laurel Hill_. His statement proved correct. It was worthy of note that the boat had not passed that point for nearly a year previous to that day. CHAPTER XLII. THE END OF THE EXPERIMENT. The Nature of our "Protection."--Trade Following the Flag.--A Fortunate Journey.--Our Last Visit.--Inhumanity of the Guerrillas.--Driving Negroes into Captivity.--Killing an Overseer.--Our Final Departure.--Plantations Elsewhere. We did not look upon the post at Waterproof as a sure protection. There was no cavalry to make the promised patrol between Waterproof and the post next below it, or to hunt down any guerrillas that might come near. A few of the soldiers were mounted on mules and horses taken from the vicinity, but they were not effective for rapid movements. It was understood, and semi-officially announced, that the post was established for the protection of Government plantations. The commandant assured me he had no orders to that effect. He was placed there to defend the post, and nothing else. We were welcome to any protection his presence afforded, but he could not go outside the limits of the town to make any effort in our behalf. There was a store at Waterproof which was doing a business of two thousand dollars daily. Every day the wives, brothers, or sisters of men known to belong to the marauding bands in the vicinity, would come to the town and make any purchases they pleased, frequently paying for them in money which the guerrillas had stolen. A gentleman, who was an intimate friend of General Thomas, was one of the proprietors of this store, and a son of that officer was currently reported to hold an interest in it. After a time the ownership was transferred to a single cotton speculator, but the trading went on without hinderance. This speculator told me the guerrilla leader had sent him a verbal promise that the post should not be disturbed or menaced so long as the store remained there. Similar scenes were enacted at nearly all the posts established for the "protection" of leased plantations. Trading stores were in full operation, and the amount of goods that reached the Rebels and their friends was enormous. I have little doubt that this course served to prolong the resistance to our arms along the Mississippi River. If we had stopped all commercial intercourse with the inhabitants, we should have removed the inducement for Rebel troops to remain in our vicinity. As matters were managed, they kept close to our lines at all the military posts between Cairo and Baton Rouge, sometimes remaining respectfully quiet, and at others making occasional raids within a thousand yards of our pickets. The absence of cavalry, and there being no prospect that any would arrive, led us to believe that we could not long remain unmolested. We were "in for it," however, and continued to plow and plant, trusting to good fortune in getting safely through. Our misfortune came at last, and brought our free-labor enterprise to an untimely end. As I stated in the previous chapter, Colburn and myself made daily visits to the plantation, remaining there for dinner, and returning to Waterproof in the afternoon. On Monday, May 2d, we made our usual visit, and returned to the post. A steamer touched there, on its way to Natchez, just after our return, and we accepted the invitation of her captain to go to that place. Our journey to Natchez was purely from impulse, and without any real or ostensible business to call us away. It proved, personally, a very fortunate journey. On Tuesday evening, a neighbor of ours reached Natchez, bringing news that the guerrillas had visited our plantation on that day. I hastened to Waterproof by the first boat, and found our worst fears were realized. Thirty guerrillas had surrounded our house at the hour we were ordinarily at dinner. They called our names, and commanded us to come out and be shot. The house was empty, and as there was no compliance with the request, a half-dozen of the party, pistols in hand, searched the building, swearing they would kill us on the spot. Had we been there, I have no doubt the threat would have been carried out. Failing to find us, they turned their attention to other matters. They caught our overseer as he was attempting to escape toward Waterproof. He was tied upon his horse, and guarded until the party was ready to move. The teams were plowing in the field at the time the robbers made their appearance. Some of the negroes unloosed the mules from the plows, mounted them, and fled to Waterproof. Others, who were slow in their movements, were captured with the animals. Such of the negroes as were not captured at once, fled to the woods or concealed themselves about the buildings. Many of the negroes on the plantation were personally known to some of the guerrillas. In most cases these negroes were not disturbed. Others were gathered in front of the house, where they were drawn up in line and securely tied. Some of them were compelled to mount the captured mules and ride between their captors. Several children were thrown upon the mules, or taken by the guerrillas on their own horses, where they were firmly held. No attention was paid to the cries of the children or the pleadings of their mothers. Some of the latter followed their children, as the guerrillas had, doubtless, expected. In others, the maternal instinct was less than the dread of captivity. Among those taken was an infant, little more than eight months old. Delaying but a few moments, the captors and the captives moved away. Nineteen of our negroes were carried off, of whom ten were children under eleven years of age. Of the nineteen, five managed to make their escape within a few miles, and returned home during the night. One woman, sixty-five years old, who had not for a long time been able to do any work, was among those driven off. She fell exhausted before walking three miles, and was beaten by the guerrillas until she lay senseless by the roadside. It was not for several hours that she recovered sufficiently to return to the plantation and tell the story of barbarity. From a plantation adjoining ours, thirty negroes were carried away at the same time. Of these, a half-dozen escaped and returned. The balance, joined to the party from our own plantation, formed a mournful procession. I heard of them at many points, from residents of the vicinity. These persons would not admit that the guerrillas were treating the negroes cruelly. Those who escaped had a frightful story to tell. They had been beaten most barbarously with whips, sticks, and frequently with the butts of pistols; two or three were left senseless by the roadside, and one old man had been shot, because he was too much exhausted to go further. I learned, a few days later, that the captured negroes were taken to Winnsboro; a small town in the interior, and there sold to a party of Texas traders. From our plantation the guerrillas stole twenty-four mules at the time of their visit, and an equal number from our neighbors. These were sold to the same party of traders that purchased the negroes, and there was evidently as little compunction at speculating in the one "property" as in the other. Our overseer, Mr. Owen, had been bound upon his horse and taken away. This I learned from the negroes remaining on the plantation. I made diligent inquiries of parties who arrived from the direction taken by the guerrillas, to ascertain, if possible, where he had been carried. One person assured me, positively, that he saw Mr. Owen, a prisoner, twenty miles away. Mrs. Owen and five children were living at Waterproof, and, of course, were much alarmed on hearing of his capture. It was on Thursday, two days after the raid, that I visited the plantation. Our lower plantation had not been disturbed, but many of the negroes were gone, and all work was suspended. It was of no use to attempt to prosecute the planting enterprise, and we immediately prepared to abandon the locality. The remaining negroes were set at work to shell the corn already gathered. As fast as shelled, it was taken to Waterproof for shipment to market. The plows were left rusting in the furrows, where they were standing at the moment the guerrillas appeared. The heaps of cotton-seed and the implements used by the planting-gang remained in _statu quo_. The cotton we planted was growing finely. To leave four hundred acres thus growing, and giving promise of a fine harvest, was to throw away much labor, but there was no alternative. On Saturday, four days after the raid, the corporal of a scouting party came to our plantation and said the body of a white man had been found in the woods a short distance away. I rode with him to the spot he designated. The mystery concerning the fate of our overseer was cleared up. The man was murdered within a thousand yards of the house. From the main road leading past our plantation, a path diverged into the forest. This path was taken by some of the guerrillas in their retreat. Following it two hundred yards, and then turning a short distance to the left, I found a small cypress-tree, not more than thirty feet high. One limb of this tree drooped as it left the trunk, and then turned upward. The lowest part of the bend of this limb was not much higher than a tall man's head. It was just such a tree, and just such a limb, as a party bent on murder would select for hanging their victim. I thought, and still think, that the guerrillas turned aside with the design of using the rope as the instrument of death. Under this tree lay the remains of our overseer. The body was fast decomposing. A flock of buzzards was gathered around, and was driven away with difficulty. They had already begun their work, so that recognition under different circumstances would not have been easy. The skull was detached from the body, and lay with the face uppermost. A portion of the scalp adhered to it, on which a gray lock was visible. A bit of gray beard was clinging to the chin. In the centre of the forehead there was a perforation, evidently made by a pistol-bullet. Death must have been instantaneous, the pistol doing the work which the murderers doubtless intended to accomplish by other means. The body had been stripped of all clothing, save a single under-garment. Within a dozen yards lay a pair of old shoes, and close by their side a tattered and misshapen hat. The shoes and hat were not those which our overseer had worn, but were evidently discarded by the guerrillas when they appropriated the apparel of their victim. I caused a grave to be dug, and the remains placed in a rude coffin and buried. If a head-stone had been obtainable, I would have given the locality a permanent designation. The particulars of the murder we were never able to ascertain. Three days later we abandoned the plantation. We paid the negroes for the work they had done, and discharged them from further service. Those that lived on the plantation previous to our going there, generally remained, as the guerrillas had assured them they would be unmolested if they cultivated no cotton. A few of them went to Natchez, to live near their "missus." Those whom we had hired from other localities scattered in various directions. Some went to the Contraband Home at Davis's Bend, others to the negro quarters at Natchez, others to plantations near Vidalia, and a few returned to their former homes. Our "family" of a hundred and sixty persons was thus broken up. We removed the widow and children of our overseer to Natchez, and purchased for them the stock and goodwill of a boarding-house keeper. We sent a note to the leader of the guerrilla band that manifested such a desire to "go through" us, and informed him that we could be found in St. Louis or New York. Before the end of May we passed Vicksburg on our Journey Due North. Most of the plantations in the vicinity of Natchez, Vicksburg, and Milliken's Bend were given up. Probably a dozen lessees were killed, and the same number carried to Texas. Near Vicksburg, the chivalric guerrillas captured two lessees, and tortured them most barbarously before putting them to death. They cut off the ears of one man, and broke his nose by a blow from a club. Thus mutilated, he was compelled to walk three or four miles. When he fell, fainting from loss of blood, he was tied to a tree, and the privilege of shooting him was sold at auction. They required his companion to witness these brutalities. Whenever he turned away his eyes, his captors pressed the point of a saber into his cheek. Finally, they compelled him to take a spade and dig his own grave. When it was finished, they stripped him of his clothing, and shot him as he stood by the brink of the newly-opened trench. Blanchard and Robinson, two lessees near Natchez, both of them residents of Boston, were murdered with nearly the same fiendishness as exhibited in the preceding case. Their fate was for some time unknown. It was at length ascertained from a negro who was captured at the same time, but managed to escape. That "slavery makes barbarians" would seem to be well established by the conduct of these residents of Louisiana. In the vicinity of Baton Rouge and New Orleans there were but few guerrillas, and the plantations generally escaped undisturbed. In all localities the "army-worm" made its appearance in July and August, and swept away almost the entire crop. Many plantations that were expected to yield a thousand bales did not yield a hundred, and some of them made less than ten. The appearance of this destructive worm was very sudden. On some plantations, where the cotton was growing finely and without a trace of blight, the fields, three days later, appeared as if swept by fire. There was consequently but little cotton made during the season. The possibility of producing the great staples of the South by free labor was fully established. Beyond this there was little accomplished. My four months of cotton-planting was an experience I shall never regret, though I have no desire to renew it under similar circumstances. Agriculture is generally considered a peaceful pursuit. To the best of my recollection I found it quite the reverse. For the benefit of those who desire to know the process of cotton culture, from the planting season to the picking season, I give the following extract from an article written by Colonel T. B. Thorpe, of Louisiana, several years ago. After describing the process of preparing the ground and planting the seed, Colonel Thorpe says:-- If the weather be favorable, the young plant is discovered making its way through in six or ten days, and "the scraping" of the crop, as it is termed, now begins. A light plow is again called into requisition, which is run along the drill, throwing the _earth away from the plant;_ then come the laborers with their hoes, who dexterously cut away the superabundant shoots and the intruding weeds, and leave a single cotton-plant in little hills, generally two feet apart. Of all the labors of the field, the dexterity displayed by the negroes in "scraping cotton" is most calculated to call forth the admiration of the novice spectator. The hoe is a rude instrument, however well made and handled; the young cotton-plant is as delicate as vegetation can be, and springs up in lines of solid masses, composed of hundreds of plants. The field-hand, however, will single one delicate shoot from the surrounding multitude, and with his rude hoe he will trim away the remainder with all the boldness of touch of a master, leaving the incipient stalk unharmed and alone in its glory; and at nightfall you can look along the extending rows, and find the plants correct in line, and of the required distance of separation from each other. The planter, who can look over his field in early spring, and find his cotton "cleanly scraped" and his "stand" good, is fortunate; still, the vicissitudes attending the cultivation of the crop have only commenced. Many rows, from the operations of the "cut-worm," and from multitudinous causes unknown, have to be replanted, and an unusually late frost may destroy all his labors, and compel him to commence again. But, if no untoward accident occurs, in two weeks after the "scraping," another hoeing takes place, at which time the plow throws the furrow _on to the roots_ of the now strengthening plant, and the increasing heat of the sun also justifying the sinking of the roots deeper in the earth. The pleasant month of May is now drawing to a close, and vegetation of all kinds is struggling for precedence in the fields. Grasses and weeds of every variety, with vines and wild flowers, luxuriate in the newly-turned sod, and seem to be determined to choke out of existence the useful and still delicately-grown cotton. It is a season of unusual industry on the cotton plantations, and woe to the planter who is outstripped in his labors, and finds himself "overtaken by the grass." The plow tears up the surplus vegetation, and the hoe tops it off in its luxuriance. The race is a hard one, but industry conquers; and when the third working-over of the crop takes place, the cotton-plant, so much cherished and favored, begins to overtop its rivals in the fields--begins to cast _a chilling shade of superiority_ over its now intimidated groundlings, and commences to reign supreme. Through the month of July, the crop is wrought over for the last time; the plant, heretofore of slow growth, now makes rapid advances toward perfection. The plow and hoe are still in requisition. The "water furrows" between the cotton-rows are deepened, leaving the cotton growing as it were upon à slight ridge; this accomplished, the crop is prepared for the "rainy season," should it ensue, and so far advanced that it is, under any circumstances, beyond the control of art. Nature must now have its sway. The "cotton bloom," under the matured sun of July, begins to make its appearance. The announcement of the "first blossom" of the neighborhood is a matter of general interest; it is the unfailing sign of the approach of the busy season of fall; it is the evidence that soon the labor of man will, under a kind Providence, receive its reward. It should perhaps here be remarked, that the color of cotton in its perfection is precisely that of the blossom--a beautiful light, but warm cream-color. In buying cotton cloth, the "bleached" and "unbleached" are perceptibly different qualities to the most casual observer; but the dark hues and harsh look of the "unbleached domestic" comes from the handling of the artisan and the soot of machinery. If cotton, pure as it looks in the field, could be wrought into fabrics, they would have a brilliancy and beauty never yet accorded to any other material in its natural or artificial state. There cannot be a doubt but that, in the robes of the ancient royal Mexicans and Peruvians, this brilliant and natural gloss of cotton was preserved, and hence the surpassing value it possessed in the eyes of cavaliers accustomed to the fabrics of the splendid court of Ferdinand and Isabella. The cotton-blossom is exceedingly delicate in its organization. It is, if in perfection, as we have stated, of a beautiful cream-color. It unfolds in the night, remains in its glory through the morn--at meridian it has begun to decay. The day following its birth it has changed to a deep red, and ere the sun goes down, its petals have fallen to the earth, leaving inclosed in the capacious calyx a scarcely perceptible germ. This germ, in its incipient and early stages, is called "a form;" in its more perfected state, "a boll." The cotton-plant, like the orange, has often on one stalk every possible growth; and often, on the same limb, may sometimes be seen the first-opened blossom, and the bolls, from their first development as "forms," through every size, until they have burst open and scattered their rich contents to the ripening winds. The appearance of a well-cultivated cotton-field, if it has escaped the ravages of insects and the destruction of the elements, is of singular beauty. Although it may be a mile in extent, still it is as carefully wrought as is the mold of the limited garden of the coldest climate. The cotton-leaf is of a delicate green, large and luxuriant; the stalk indicates rapid growth, yet it has a healthy and firm look. Viewed from a distance, the perfecting plant has a warm and glowing expression. The size of the cotton-plant depends upon the accident of climate and soil. The cotton of Tennessee bears very little resemblance to the luxuriant growth of Alabama and Georgia; but even in those favored States the cotton-plant is not everywhere the same, for in the rich bottom-lands it grows to a commanding size, while in the more barren regions it is an humble shrub. In the rich alluvium of the Mississippi the cotton will tower beyond the reach of the tallest "picker," and a single plant will contain hundreds of perfect "bolls;" in the neighboring "piney-woods" it lifts its humble head scarcely above the knee, and is proportionably meager in its produce of fruit. The growing cotton is particularly liable to accidents, and suffers immensely in "wet seasons" from the "rust" and "rot." The first named affects the leaves, giving them a brown and deadened tinge, and frequently causes them to crumble away. The "rot" attacks the "boll." It commences by a black spot on the rind, which, increasing, seems to produce fermentation and decay. Worms find their way to the roots; the caterpillar eats into the "boll" and destroys the staple. It would be almost impossible to enumerate all the evils the cotton-plant is heir to, all of which, however, sink into nothingness compared with the scourge of the "army-worm." The moth that indicates the advent of the army-worm has a Quaker-like simplicity in its light, chocolate-colored body and wings, and, from its harmless appearance, would never be taken for the destroyer of vast fields of luxuriant and useful vegetation. The little, and, at first, scarcely to be perceived caterpillars that follow the appearance of these moths, can absolutely be seen to grow and swell beneath your eyes as they crawl from leaf to leaf. Day by day you can see the vegetation of vast fields becoming thinner and thinner, while the worm, constantly increasing in size, assumes at last an unctuous appearance most disgusting to behold. Arrived at maturity, a few hours only are necessary for these modern locusts to eat up all living vegetation that comes in their way. Leaving the localities of their birth, they will move from place to place, spreading a desolation as consuming as fire in their path. All efforts to arrest their progress or annihilate them prove unavailing. They seem to spring out of the ground, and fall from the clouds; and the more they are tormented and destroyed, the more perceptible, seemingly, is their power. We once witnessed the invasion of the army-worm, as it attempted to pass from a desolated cotton-field to one untouched. Between these fields was a wide ditch, which had been deepened, to prove a barrier to the onward march of the worm. Down the perpendicular sides of the trench the caterpillars rolled in untold millions, until its bottom, for nearly a mile in extent, was a foot or two deep in a living mass of animal life. To an immense piece of unhewn timber was attached a yoke of oxen, and, as this heavy log was drawn through the ditch, it seemed absolutely to float on a crushed mass of vegetable corruption. The following day, under the heat of a tropical sun, the stench arising from this decaying mass was perceptible the country round, giving a strange and incomprehensible notion of the power and abundance of this destroyer of the cotton crop. The change that has been effected by the result of the Rebellion, will not be confined to the social system alone. With the end of slavery there will be a destruction of many former applications of labor. Innovations have already been made, and their number will increase under the management of enterprising men. In Louisiana several planters were using a "drill" for depositing the cotton-seed in the ground. The labor of planting is reduced more than one-half, and that of "scraping" is much diminished. The saving of seed is very great--the drill using about a tenth of the amount required under the old system. One man is endeavoring to construct a machine that will pick cotton from the stalks, and is confident he will succeed. Should he do so, his patent will be of the greatest value. Owners of plantations have recently offered a present of ten thousand dollars to the first patentee of a successful machine of this character. CHAPTER XLIII. THE MISSISSIPPI AND ITS PECULIARITIES. Length of the Great River, and the Area it Drains.--How Itasca Lake obtained its Name.--The Bends of the Mississippi.--Curious Effect upon Titles to Real Estate.--A Story of Napoleon.--A Steamboat Thirty-five Years under Water.--The Current and its Variations.--Navigating Cotton and Corn Fields.--Reminiscences of the Islands. As railways are to the East, so are the rivers to the West. The Mississippi, with its tributaries, drains an immense region, traversed in all directions by steamboats. From the Gulf of Mexico one can travel, by water to the Rocky Mountains, or to the Alleghanies, at pleasure. It is estimated there are twenty thousand miles of navigable streams which find an outlet past the city of New Orleans. The Mississippi Valley contains nearly a million and a quarter square miles, and is one of the most fertile regions on the globe. To a person born and reared in the East, the Mississippi presents many striking features. Above its junction with the Missouri, its water is clear and its banks are broken and picturesque. After it joins the Missouri the scene changes. The latter stream is of a chocolate hue, and its current is very rapid. All its characteristics are imparted to the combined stream. The Mississippi becomes a rapid, tortuous, seething torrent. It loses its blue, transparent water, and takes the complexion of the Missouri. Thus "it goes unvexed to the sea." There is a story concerning the origin of the name given to the source of the Mississippi, which I do not remember to have seen in print. A certain lake, which had long been considered the head of the Great River, was ascertained by an exploring party to have no claim to that honor. A new and smaller lake was discovered, in which the Mississippi took its rise. The explorers wished to give it an appropriate name. An old _voyageur_ suggested that they make a name, by coining a word. "Will some of you learned ones tell me," said he, "what is the Latin word for _true_?" "_Veritas_," was the response. "Well, now, what is the Latin for _head_" "_Caput_, of course." "Now," suggested the _voyageur_, "write the two words together, by syllables." A strip of birch bark was the tablet on which "_ver-i-tas-ca-put_" was traced. "Read it out," was his next request. The five syllables were read. "Now, drop the first and last syllables, and you have a name for this lake." In the Indian vernacular, "Mississippi" is said to signify "Great Water." "Missouri," according to some authorities, is the Indian for "Mud River," a most felicitous appellation. It should properly belong to the entire river from St. Louis to the Gulf, as that stream carries down many thousand tons of mud every year. During the many centuries that the Mississippi has been sweeping on its course, it has formed that long point of land known as the Delta, and shallowed the water in the Gulf of Mexico for more than two hundred miles. Flowing from north to south, the river passes through all the varieties of climate. The furs from the Rocky Mountains and the cereals of Wisconsin and Minnesota are carried on its bosom to the great city which stands in the midst of orange groves and inhales the fragrance of the magnolia. From January to June the floods of its tributaries follow in regular succession, as the opening spring loosens the snows that line their banks. The events of the war have made the Mississippi historic, and familiarized the public with some of its peculiarities. Its tortuosity is well known. The great bend opposite Vicksburg will be long remembered by thousands who have never seen it. This bend is eclipsed by many others. At "Terrapin Neck" the river flows twenty-one miles, and gains only three hundred yards. At "Raccourci Bend" was a peninsula twenty-eight miles around and only half a mile across. Several years ago a "cut-off" was made across this peninsula, for the purpose of shortening the course of the river. A small ditch was cut, and opened when the flood was highest. An old steamboat-man once told me that he passed the upper end of this ditch just as the water was let in. Four hours later, as he passed the lower end, an immense torrent was rushing through the channel, and the tall trees were falling like stalks of grain before a sickle. Within a week the new channel became the regular route for steamboats. Similar "cut-offs" have been made at various points along the river, some of them by artificial aid, and others entirely by the action of the water. The channel of the Mississippi is the dividing line of the States between which it flows, and the action of the river often changes the location of real estate. There is sometimes a material difference in the laws of States that lie opposite each other. The transfer of property on account of a change in the channel occasionally makes serious work with titles. I once heard of a case where the heirs to an estate lost their title, in consequence of the property being transferred from Mississippi to Louisiana, by reason of the course of the river being changed. In the former State they were heirs beyond dispute. In the latter their claim vanished into thin air. Once, while passing up the Mississippi, above Cairo, a fellow-passenger called my attention to a fine plantation, situated on a peninsula in Missouri. The river, in its last flood, had broken across the neck of the peninsula. It was certain the next freshet would establish the channel in that locality, thus throwing the plantation into Illinois. Unless the negroes should be removed before this event they would become free. "You see, sir," said my informant, "that this great river is an Abolitionist." The alluvial soil through which the Mississippi runs easily yields to the action of the fierce current. The land worn away at one point is often deposited, in the form of a bar or tongue of land, in the concave of the next bend. The area thus added becomes the property of whoever owns the river front. Many a man has seen his plantation steadily falling into the Mississippi, year by year, while a plantation, a dozen miles below, would annually find its area increased. Real estate on the banks of the Mississippi, unless upon the bluffs, has no absolute certainty of permanence. In several places, the river now flows where there were fine plantations ten or twenty years ago. Some of the towns along the Lower Mississippi are now, or soon will be, towns no more. At Waterproof, Louisiana, nearly the entire town-site, as originally laid out, has been washed away. In the four months I was in its vicinity, more than forty feet of its front disappeared. Eighteen hundred and seventy will probably find Waterproof at the bottom of the Mississippi. Napoleon, Arkansas, is following in the wake of Waterproof. If the distance between them were not so great, their sands might mingle. In view of the character Napoleon has long enjoyed, the friends of morality will hardly regret its loss. The steamboat captains have a story that a quiet clergyman from New England landed at Napoleon, one morning, and made his way to the hotel. He found the proprietor superintending the efforts of a negro, who was sweeping the bar-room floor. Noticing several objects of a spherical form among the _débris_ of the bar-room, the stranger asked their character. "Them round things? them's _eyes_. The boys amused themselves a little last night. Reckon there's 'bout a pint-cup full of eyes this mornin'. Sometimes we gets a quart or so, when business is good." Curious people were those natives of Arkansas, ten or twenty years ago. Schools were rare, and children grew up with little or no education. If there was a "barbarous civilization" anywhere in the United States, it was in Arkansas. In 1860, a man was hung at Napoleon for reading _The Tribune_. It is an open question whether the character of the paper or the man's ability to read was the reason for inflicting the death penalty. The current of the Mississippi causes islands to be destroyed in some localities and formed in others. A large object settling at the bottom of the stream creates an eddy, in which the floating sand is deposited. Under favorable circumstances an island will form in such an eddy, sometimes of considerable extent. About the year 1820, a steamboat, laden with lead, was sunk in mid-channel several miles below St. Louis. An island formed over this steamer, and a growth of cotton-wood trees soon covered it. These trees grew to a goodly size, and were cut for fuel. The island was cleared, and for several successive years produced fine crops of corn. About 1855, there was a change in the channel of the river, and the island disappeared. After much search the location of the sunken steamer was ascertained. By means of a diving-bell, its cargo of lead, which had been lying thirty-five years under earth and under water, was brought to light. The entire cargo was raised, together with a portion of the engines. The lead was uninjured, but the engines were utterly worthless after their long burial. The numerous bends of the Mississippi are of service in rendering the river navigable. If the channel were a straight line from Cairo to New Orleans, the current would be so strong that no boat could stem it. In several instances, where "cut-offs" have been made, the current at their outlets is so greatly increased that the opposite banks are washed away. New bends are thus formed that may, in time, be as large as those overcome. Distances have been shortened by "cut-offs," but the Mississippi displays a decided unwillingness to have its length curtailed. From St. Louis to the Red River the current of the Mississippi is about three miles an hour. It does not flow in a steady, unbroken volume. The surface is constantly ruffled by eddies and little whirlpools, caused by the inequalities of the bottom of the river, and the reflection of the current from the opposite banks. As one gazes upon the stream, it half appears as if heated by concealed fires, and ready to break into violent ebullition. The less the depth, the greater the disturbance of the current. So general is this rule, that the pilots judge of the amount of water by the appearance of the surface. Exceptions occur where the bottom, below the deep water, is particularly uneven. From its source to the mouth of Red River, the Mississippi is fed by tributaries. Below that point, it throws off several streams that discharge no small portion of its waters into the Gulf of Mexico. These streams, or "bayous," are narrow and tortuous, but generally deep, and navigable for ordinary steamboats. The "Atchafalaya" is the first, and enters the Gulf of Mexico at the bay of the same name. At one time it was feared the Mississippi might leave its present bed, and follow the course of this bayou. Steps were taken to prevent such an occurrence. Bayou Plaquemine, Bayou Sara, Bayou La Fourche, Bayou Goula, and Bayou Teche, are among the streams that drain the great river. These bayous form a wonderful net-work of navigable waters, throughout Western Louisiana. If we have reason to be thankful that "great rivers run near large cities in all parts of the world," the people of Louisiana should be especially grateful for the numerous natural canals in that State. These streams are as frequent and run in nearly as many directions as railways in Massachusetts. During its lowest stages, the Mississippi is often forty feet "within its banks;" in other words, the surface is forty feet below the level of the land which borders the river. It rises with the freshets, and, when "bank full," is level with the surrounding lowland. It does not always stop at this point; sometimes it rises two, four, six, or even ten feet above its banks. The levees, erected at immense cost, are designed to prevent the overflowing of the country on such occasions. When the levees become broken from any cause, immense areas of country are covered with water. Plantations, swamps, forests, all are submerged. During the present year (1865) thousands of square miles have been flooded, hundreds of houses swept away, and large amounts of property destroyed. During the freshet of '63, General Grant opened the levee at Providence, Louisiana, in the hope of reaching Bayou Mason, and thence taking his boats to Red River. After the levee was cut an immense volume of water rushed through the break. Anywhere else it would have been a goodly-sized river, but it was of little moment by the side of the Mississippi. A steamboat was sent to explore the flooded region. I saw its captain soon after his return. "I took my boat through the cut," said he, "without any trouble. We drew nearly three feet, but there was plenty of water. We ran two miles over a cotton-field, and could see the stalks as our wheels tore them up. Then I struck the plank road, and found a good stage of water for four miles, which took me to the bayou. I followed this several miles, until I was stopped by fallen trees, when I turned about and came back. Coming back, I tried a cornfield, but found it wasn't as good to steam in as the cotton-field." A farmer in the Eastern or Middle States would, doubtless, be much astonished at seeing a steamboat paddling at will in his fields and along his roads. A similar occurrence in Louisiana does not astonish the natives. Steamers have repeatedly passed over regions where corn or cotton had been growing six months before. At St. Louis, in 1844, small boats found no difficulty in running from East St. Louis to Caseyville, nine miles distant. In making these excursions they passed over many excellent farms, and stopped at houses whose owners had been driven to the upper rooms by the water. Above Cairo, the islands in the Mississippi are designated by names generally received from the early settlers. From Cairo to New Orleans the islands are numbered, the one nearest the former point being "One," and that nearest New Orleans "One Hundred and Thirty-one." Island Number Ten is historic, being the first and the last island in the great river that the Rebels attempted to fortify. Island Number Twenty-eight was the scene of several attacks by guerrillas upon unarmed transports. Other islands have an equally dishonorable reputation. Fifty years ago several islands were noted as the resorts of robbers, who conducted an extensive and systematic business. Island Number Sixty-five (if I remember correctly) was the rendezvous of the notorious John A. Murrell and his gang of desperadoes. CHAPTER XLIV. STEAMBOATING ON THE MISSISSIPPI IN PEACE AND WAR. Attempts to Obstruct the Great River.--Chains, Booms, and Batteries.--A Novelty in Piloting.--Travel in the Days Before the Rebellion.--Trials of Speed.--The Great Race.--Travel During the War.--Running a Rebel Battery on the Lower Mississippi.--Incidents of the Occasion.--Comments on the Situation. No engineer has been able to dam the Mississippi, except by the easy process which John Phenix adopted on the Yuma River. General Pillow stretched a chain from Columbus, Kentucky, to the opposite shore, in order to prevent the passage of our gun-boats. The chain broke soon after being placed in position. Near Forts Jackson and Philip, below New Orleans, the Rebels constructed a boom to oppose the progress of Farragut's fleet. A large number of heavy anchors, with the strongest cables, were fixed in the river. For a time the boom answered the desired purpose. But the river rose, drift-wood accumulated, and the boom at length went the way of all things Confederate. Farragut passed the forts, and appeared before New Orleans; "Picayune Butler came to town," and the great city of the South fell into the hands of the all-conquering Yankees. Before steam power was applied to the propulsion of boats, the ascent of the Mississippi was very difficult. From New Orleans to St. Louis, a boat consumed from two to four months' time. Sails, oars, poles, and ropes attached to trees, were the various means of stemming the powerful current. Long after steamboats were introduced, many flat-boats, loaded with products of the Northern States, floated down the river to a market. At New Orleans, boats and cargoes were sold, and the boatmen made their way home on foot. Until twenty years ago, the boatmen of the Mississippi were almost a distinct race. At present they are nearly extinct. In the navigation of the Mississippi and its tributaries, the pilot is the man of greatest importance. He is supposed to be thoroughly familiar with the channel of the river in all its windings, and to know the exact location of every snag or other obstruction. He can generally judge of the depth of water by the appearance of the surface, and he is acquainted with every headland, forest, house, or tree-top, that marks the horizon and tells him how to keep his course at night. Professional skill is only acquired by a long and careful training. Shortly after the occupation of Little Rock by General Steele, a dozen soldiers passed the lines, without authority, and captured a steamboat eighteen miles below the city. Steam was raised, when the men discovered they had no pilot. One of their number hit upon a plan as novel as it was successful. The Arkansas was very low, having only three feet of water in the channel. Twenty-five able-bodied negroes were taken from a neighboring plantation, stretched in a line across the river, and ordered to wade against the current. By keeping their steamer, which drew only twenty inches, directly behind the negro who sank the deepest, the soldiers took their prize to Little Rock without difficulty. For ten years previous to the outbreak of the Rebellion, steamboating on the Mississippi was in the height of its glory. Where expense of construction and management were of secondary consideration, the steamboats on the great river could offer challenge to the world. It was the boast of their officers that the tables of the great passenger-boats were better supplied than those of the best hotels in the South. On many steamers, claret, at dinner, was free to all. Fruit and ices were distributed in the evening, as well as choice cups of coffee and tea. On one line of boats, the cold meats on the supper-table were from carefully selected pieces, cooked and cooled expressly for the cenatory meal. Bands of music enlivened the hours of day, and afforded opportunity for dancing in the evening. Spacious cabins, unbroken by machinery; guards of great width, where cigars and small-talk were enjoyed; well-furnished and well-lighted state-rooms, and tables loaded with all luxuries of the place and season, rendered these steamers attractive to the traveler. Passengers were social, and partook of the gayety around them. Men talked, drank, smoked, and sometimes gambled, according to their desires. The ladies practiced no frigid reserve toward each other, but established cordial relations in the first few hours of each journey. Among the many fine and fast steamers on the Western waters, there was necessarily much competition in speed. Every new boat of the first class was obliged to give an example of her abilities soon after her appearance. Every owner of a steamboat contends that _his_ boat is the best afloat. I have rarely been on board a Mississippi steamer of any pretensions whose captain has not assured me, "She is the fastest thing afloat, sir. Nothing can pass her. We have beaten the--, and the--, and the--, in a fair race, sir." To a stranger, seeking correct information, the multiplicity of these statements is perplexing. In 1853 there was a race from New Orleans to Louisville, between the steamers _Eclipse_ and _A.L. Shotwell_, on which seventy thousand dollars were staked by the owners of the boats. An equal amount was invested in "private bets" among outside parties. The two boats were literally "stripped for the race." They were loaded to the depth that would give them the greatest speed, and their arrangements for taking fuel were as complete as possible. Barges were filled with wood at stated points along the river, and dropped out to midstream as the steamers approached. They were taken alongside, and their loads of wood transferred without any stoppage of the engines of the boats. At the end of the first twenty-four hours the _Eclipse_ and _Shotwell_ were side by side, three hundred and sixty miles from New Orleans. The race was understood to be won by the _Eclipse_, but was so close that the stakes were never paid. In the palmy days of steamboating, the charges for way-travel were varied according to the locality. Below Memphis it was the rule to take no single fare less than five dollars, even if the passenger were going but a half-dozen miles. Along Red River the steamboat clerks graduated the fare according to the parish where the passenger came on board. The more fertile and wealthy the region, the higher was the price of passage. Travelers from the cotton country paid more than those from the tobacco country. Those from the sugar country paid more than any other class. With few exceptions, there was no "ticket" system. Passengers paid their fare at any hour of their journey that best suited them. Every man was considered honest until he gave proof to the contrary. There was an occasional Jeremy Diddler, but his operations were very limited. When the Rebellion began, the old customs on the Mississippi were swept away. The most rigid "pay-on-entering" system was adopted, and the man who could evade it must be very shrewd. The wealth along the Great River melted into thin air. The _bonhommie_ of travel disappeared, and was succeeded by the most thorough selfishness in collective and individual bodies. Scrambles for the first choice of state-rooms, the first seat at table, and the first drink at the bar, became a part of the new _régime_. The ladies were little regarded in the hurly-burly of steamboat life. Men would take possession of ladies' chairs at table, and pay no heed to remonstrances. I have seen an officer in blue uniform place his muddy boots on the center-table in a cabin full of ladies, and proceed to light a cigar. The captain of the boat suggested that the officer's conduct was in violation of the rules of propriety, and received the answer: "I have fought to help open the Mississippi, and, by ----, I am going to enjoy it." The careless display of the butt of a revolver, while he gave this answer, left the pleasure-seeker master of the situation. I am sorry to say that occurrences of a similar character were very frequent in the past three years. With the end of the war it is to be hoped that the character of Mississippi travel will be improved. In May, 1861, the Rebels blockaded the Mississippi at Memphis. In the same month the National forces established a blockade at Cairo. In July, '63, the capture of Vicksburg and Port Hudson removed the last Rebel obstruction. The _Imperial_ was the first passenger boat to descend the river, after the reopening of navigation. Up to within a few months of the close of the Rebellion, steamers plying on the river were in constant, danger of destruction by Rebel batteries. The Rebel Secretary of War ordered these batteries placed along the Mississippi, in the hope of stopping all travel by that route. His plan was unsuccessful. Equally so was the barbarous practice of burning passenger steamboats while in motion between landing-places. On transports fired upon by guerrillas (or Rebels), about a hundred persons were killed and as many wounded. A due proportion of these were women and children. On steamboats burned by Rebel incendiaries, probably a hundred and fifty lives were lost. This does not include the dead by the terrible disaster to the _Sultana_. It is supposed that this boat was blown up by a Rebel torpedo in her coal. It was my fortune to be a passenger on the steamer _Von Phul_, which left New Orleans for St. Louis on the evening of December 7th, 1863. I had been for some time traveling up and down the Mississippi, and running the gauntlet between Rebel batteries on either shore. There was some risk attending my travels, but up to that time I escaped unharmed. On the afternoon of the 8th, when the boat was about eight miles above Bayou Sara, I experienced a new sensation. Seated at a table in the cabin, and busily engaged in writing, I heard a heavy crash over my head, almost instantly followed by another. My first thought was that the chimneys or some part of the pilot-house had fallen, and I half looked to see the roof of the cabin tumbling in. I saw the passengers running from the cabin, and heard some one shout: "The guerrillas are firing on us." I collected my writing materials and sought my state-room, where I had left Mr. Colburn, my traveling companion, soundly asleep a few minutes before. He was sitting on the edge of his berth, and wondering what all the row was about. The crash that startled me had awakened him. He thought the occurrence was of little moment, and assented to my suggestion, that we were just as safe there as anywhere else on the boat. Gallantry prevented our remaining quiet. There were several ladies on board, and it behooved us to extend them what protection we could. We sought them, and "protected" them to the best of our united ability. Their place of refuge was between the cabin and the wheel-house, opposite the battery's position. A sheet of wet paper would afford as much resistance to a paving-stone as the walls of a steamboat cabin to a six-pound shot. As we stood among the ladies, two shells passed through the side of the cabin, within a few inches of our heads. The shots grew fewer in number, and some of them dropped in the river behind us. Just as we thought all alarm was over, we saw smoke issuing from the cabin gangway. Then, some one shouted, "_The boat is on fire_!" Dropping a lady who evinced a disposition to faint, I entered the cabin. A half-dozen men were there before me, and seeking the locality of the fire. I was first to discover it. A shell, in passing through a state-room, entered a pillow, and scattered the feathers through the cabin. A considerable quantity of these feathers fell upon a hot stove, and the smoke and odor of their burning caused the alarm. The ladies concluded not to faint. Three minutes after the affair was over, they were as calm as ever. The Rebels opened fire when we were abreast of their position, and did not cease until we were out of range. We were fifteen minutes within reach of their guns. [Illustration: RUNNING BATTERIES ON THE VON PHUL.] Our wheels seemed to turn very slowly. No one can express in words the anxiety with which we listened, after each shot, for the puffing of the engines. So long as the machinery was uninjured, there was no danger of our falling into Rebel hands. But with our engines disabled, our chances for capture would be very good. As the last shot fell astern of the boat and sent up a column of spray, we looked about the cabin and saw that no one had been injured. A moment later came the announcement from the pilot-house: "Captain Gorman is killed!" I ascended to the hurricane deck, and thence to the pilot-house. The pilot, with his hat thrown aside and his hair streaming in the wind, stood at his post, carefully guiding the boat on her course. The body of the captain was lying at his feet. Another man lay dying, close by the opening in which the wheel revolved. The floor was covered with blood, splinters, glass, and the fragments of a shattered stove. One side of the little room was broken in, and the other side was perforated where the projectiles made their exit. The first gun from the Rebels threw a shell which entered the side of the pilot-house, and struck the captain, who was sitting just behind the pilot. Death must have been instantaneous. A moment later, a "spherical-case shot" followed the shell. It exploded as it struck the wood-work, and a portion of the contents entered the side of the bar-keeper of the boat. In falling to the floor he fell against the wheel. The pilot, steering the boat with one hand, pulled the dying man from the wheel with the other, and placed him by the side of the dead captain. Though, apparently, the pilot was as cool and undisturbed as ever, his face was whiter than usual. He said the most trying moment of all was soon after the first shots were fired. Wishing to "round the bend" as speedily as possible, he rang the bell as a signal to the engineer to check the speed of one of the wheels. The signal was not obeyed, the engineers having fled to places of safety. He rang the bell once more. He shouted down the speaking-tube, to enforce compliance with his order. There was no answer. The engines were caring for themselves. The boat must be controlled by the rudder alone. With a dead man and a dying man at his feet, with the Rebel shot and shell every moment perforating the boat or falling near it, and with no help from those who should control the machinery, he felt that his position was a painful one. We were out of danger. An hour later we found the gun-boat _Neosho_, at anchor, eight miles further up the stream. Thinking we might again be attacked, the commander of the _Neosho_ offered to convoy us to Red River. We accepted his offer. As soon as the _Neosho_ raised sufficient steam to enable her to move, we proceeded on our course. Order was restored on the _Von Phul_. Most of the passengers gathered in little groups, and talked about the recent occurrence. I returned to my writing, and Colburn gave his attention to a book. With the gun-boat at our side, no one supposed there was danger of another attack. A half-hour after starting under convoy of the gun-boat, the Rebels once more opened fire. They paid no attention to the _Neosho_, but threw all their projectiles at the _Von Phul_. The first shell passed through the cabin, wounding a person near me, and grazing a post against which Colburn and myself were resting our chairs. This shell was followed by others in quick succession, most of them passing through the cabin. One exploded under the portion of the cabin directly beneath my position. The explosion uplifted the boards with such force as to overturn my table and disturb the steadiness of my chair. I dreaded splinters far more than I feared the pitiless iron. I left the cabin, through which the shells were pouring, and descended to the lower deck. It was no better there than above. We were increasing the distance between ourselves and the Rebels, and the shot began to strike lower down. Nearly every shot raked the lower deck. A loose plank on which I stood was split for more than half its length, by a shot which struck my foot when its force was nearly spent. Though the skin was not abraded, and no bones were broken, I felt the effect of the blow for several weeks. I lay down upon the deck. A moment after I had taken my horizontal position, two men who lay against me were mortally wounded by a shell. The right leg of one was completely severed below the knee. This shell was the last projectile that struck the forward portion of the boat. With a handkerchief loosely tied and twisted with a stick, I endeavored to stop the flow of blood from the leg of the wounded man. I was partially successful, but the stoppage of blood could not save the man's life. He died within the hour. Forty-two shot and shell struck the boat. The escape-pipe was severed where it passed between two state-rooms, and filled the cabin with steam. The safe in the captain's office was perforated as if it had been made of wood. A trunk was broken by a shell, and its contents were scattered upon the floor. Splinters had fallen in the cabin, and were spread thickly upon the carpet. Every person who escaped uninjured had his own list of incidents to narrate. Out of about fifty persons on board the _Von Phul_ at the time of this occurrence, twelve were killed or wounded. One of the last projectiles that struck the boat, injured a boiler sufficiently to allow the escape of steam. In ten minutes our engines moved very feebly. We were forced to "tie up" to the eastern bank of the river. We were by this time out of range of the Rebel battery. The _Neosho_ had opened fire, and by the time we made fast to the bank, the Rebels were in retreat. The _Neosho_ ceased firing and moved to our relief. Before she reached us, the steamer _Atlantic_ came in sight, descending the river. We hailed her, and she came alongside. Immediately on learning our condition, her captain offered to tow the _Von Phul_ to Red River, twenty miles distant. There we could lie, under protection of the gun-boats, and repair the damages to our machinery. We accepted his offer at once. I can hardly imagine a situation of greater helplessness, than a place on board a Western passenger-steamer under the guns of a hostile battery. A battle-field is no comparison. On solid earth the principal danger is from projectiles. You can fight, or, under some circumstances, can run away. On a Mississippi transport, you are equally in danger of being shot. Added to this, you may be struck by splinters, scalded by steam, burned by fire, or drowned in the water. You cannot fight, you cannot run away, and you cannot find shelter. With no power for resistance or escape, the sense of danger and helplessness cannot be set aside. A few weeks after the occurrence just narrated, the steamer _Brazil_, on her way from Vicksburg to Natchez, was fired upon by a Rebel battery near Rodney, Mississippi. The boat was struck a half-dozen times by shot and shell. More than a hundred rifle-bullets were thrown on board. Three persons were killed and as many wounded. Among those killed on the _Brazil_, was a young woman who had engaged to take charge of a school for negro children at Natchez. The Rebel sympathizers at Natchez displayed much gratification at her death. On several occasions I heard some of the more pious among them declare that the hand of God directed the fatal missile. They prophesied violent or sudden deaths to all who came to the South on a similar mission. The steamer _Black Hawk_ was fired upon by a Rebel battery at the mouth of Red River. The boat ran aground in range of the enemy's guns. A shell set her pilot-house on fire, and several persons were killed in the cabin. Strange to say, though aground and on fire under a Rebel battery, the _Black Hawk_ was saved. By great exertions on the part of officers and crew, the fire was extinguished after the pilot-house was burned away. A temporary steering apparatus was rigged, and the boat moved from the shoal where she had grounded. She was a full half hour within range of the Rebel guns. CHAPTER XLV. THE ARMY CORRESPONDENT. The Beginning and the End.--The Lake Erie Piracy.--A Rochester Story.--The First War Correspondent,--Napoleon's Policy.--Waterloo and the Rothschilds.--Journalistic Enterprise in the Mexican War.--The Crimea and the East Indian Rebellion.--Experiences at the Beginning of Hostilities.--The Tender Mercies of the Insurgents.--In the Field.--Adventures in Missouri and Kentucky.--Correspondents in Captivity.--How Battle-Accounts were Written.--Professional Complaints. Having lain aside my pen while engaged in planting cotton and entertaining guerrillas, I resumed it on coming North, after that experiment was finished. Setting aside my capture in New Hampshire, narrated in the first chapter, my adventures in the field commenced in Missouri in the earliest campaign. Singularly enough, they terminated on our Northern border. In the earlier days of the Rebellion, it was the jest of the correspondents, that they would, some time, find occasion to write war-letters from the Northern cities. The jest became a reality in the siege of Cincinnati. During that siege we wondered whether it would be possible to extend our labors to Detroit or Mackinaw. In September, 1864, the famous "Lake Erie Piracy" occurred. I was in Cleveland when the news of the seizure of the _Philo Parsons_ was announced by telegraph, and at once proceeded to Detroit. The capture of the _Parsons_ was a very absurd movement on the part of the Rebels, who had taken refuge in Canada. The original design was, doubtless, the capture of the gun-boat _Michigan_, and the release of the prisoners on Johnson's Island. The captors of the _Parsons_ had confederates in Sandusky, who endeavored to have the _Michigan_ in a half-disabled condition when the _Parsons_ arrived. This was not accomplished, and the scheme fell completely through. The two small steamers, the _Parsons_ and _Island Queen_, were abandoned after being in Rebel hands only a few hours. The officers of the _Parsons_ told an interesting story of their seizure. Mr. Ashley, the clerk, said the boat left Detroit for Sandusky at her usual hour. She had a few passengers from Detroit, and received others at various landings. The last party that came on board brought an old trunk bound with ropes. The different parties did not recognize each other, not even when drinking at the bar. When near Kelly's Island in Lake Erie, the various officers of the steamer were suddenly seized. The ropes on the trunk were cut, the lid flew open, and a quantity of revolvers and hatchets was brought to light. The pirates declared they were acting in the interest of the "Confederacy." They relieved Mr. Ashley of his pocket-book and contents, and appropriated the money they found in the safe. Those of the passengers who were not "in the ring," were compelled to contribute to the representatives of the Rebel Government. This little affair was claimed to be "belligerent" throughout. At Kelly's Island the passengers and crew were liberated on parole not to take up arms against the Confederacy until properly exchanged. After cruising in front of Sandusky, and failing to receive signals which they expected, the pirates returned to Canada with their prize. One of their "belligerent" acts was to throw overboard the cargo of the _Parsons_, together with most of her furniture. At Sandwich, near Detroit, they left the boat, after taking ashore a piano and other articles. Her Majesty's officer of customs took possession of this stolen property, on the ground that it was brought into Canada without the proper permits from the custom-house. It was subsequently recovered by its owners. The St. Albans raid, which occurred a few months later, was a similar act of belligerency. It created more excitement than the Lake Erie piracy, but the questions involved were practically the same. That the Rebels had a right of asylum in Canada no one could deny, but there was a difference of opinion respecting the proper limits to those rights. The Rebels hoped to involve us in a controversy with England, that should result in the recognition of the Confederacy. This was frequently avowed by some of the indiscreet refugees. After the capture of the _Parsons_ and the raid upon St. Albans, the Canadian authorities sent a strong force of militia to watch the frontier. A battalion of British regulars was stationed at Windsor, opposite Detroit, early in 1864, but was removed to the interior before the raids occurred. The authorities assigned as a reason for this removal, the desire to concentrate their forces at some central point. The real reason was the rapid desertion of their men, allured by the high pay and opportunity of active service in our army. In two months the battalion at Windsor was reduced fifteen per cent, by desertions alone. Shortly after the St. Albans raid, a paper in Rochester announced a visit to that city by a cricket-club from Toronto. The paragraph was written somewhat obscurely, and jestingly spoke of the Toronto men as "raiders." The paper reached New York, and so alarmed the authorities that troops were at once ordered to Rochester and other points on the frontier. The misapprehension was discovered in season to prevent the actual moving of the troops. * * * * * With the suppression of the Rebellion the mission of the war correspondent was ended. Let us all hope that his services will not again be required, in this country, at least, during the present century. The publication of the reports of battles, written on the field, and frequently during the heat of an engagement, was a marked feature of the late war. "Our Special Correspondent" is not, however, an invention belonging to this important era of our history. His existence dates from the days of the Greeks and Romans. If Homer had witnessed the battles which he described, he would, doubtless, be recognized as the earliest war correspondent. Xenophon was the first regular correspondent of which we have any record. He achieved an enduring fame, which is a just tribute to the man and his profession. During the Middle Ages, the Crusades afforded fine opportunities for the war correspondents to display their abilities. The prevailing ignorance of those times is shown in the absence of any reliable accounts of the Holy Wars, written by journalists on the field. There was no daily press, and the mail communications were very unreliable. Down to the nineteenth century, Xenophon had no formidable competitors for the honors which attached to his name. The elder Napoleon always acted as his own "Special." His bulletins, by rapid post to Paris, were generally the first tidings of his brilliant marches and victories. His example was thought worthy of imitation by several military officials during the late Rebellion. Rear-Admiral Porter essayed to excel Napoleon in sending early reports of battles for public perusal. "I have the honor to inform the Department," is a formula with which most editors and printers became intimately acquainted. The admiral's veracity was not as conspicuous as his eagerness to push his reports in print. At Waterloo there was no regular correspondent of the London press. Several volunteer writers furnished accounts of the battle for publication, whose accuracy has been called in question. Wellington's official dispatches were outstripped by the enterprise of a London banking-house. The Rothschilds knew the result of the battle eight hours before Wellington's courier arrived. Carrier pigeons were used to convey the intelligence. During the Rebellion, Wall Street speculators endeavored to imitate the policy of the Rothschilds, but were only partially successful. In the war between Mexico and the United States, "Our Special" was actively, though not extensively, employed. On one occasion, _The Herald_ obtained its news in advance of the official dispatches to the Government. The magnetic telegraph was then unknown. Horse-flesh and steam were the only means of transmitting intelligence. If we except the New Orleans _Picayune, The Herald_ was the only paper represented in Mexico during the campaigns of Scott and Taylor. During the conflict between France and England on the one hand, and Russia on the other, the journals of London and Paris sent their representatives to the Crimea. The London _Times,_ the foremost paper of Europe, gave Russell a reputation he will long retain. The "Thunderer's" letters from the camp before Sebastopol became known throughout the civilized world. A few years later, the East Indian rebellion once more called the London specials to the field. In giving the history of the campaigns in India, _The Times_ and its representative overshadowed all the rest. Just before the commencement of hostilities in the late Rebellion, the leading journals of New York were well represented in the South. Each day these papers gave their readers full details of all important events that transpired in the South. The correspondents that witnessed the firing of the Southern heart had many adventures. Some of them narrowly escaped with their lives. At Richmond, a crowd visited the Spottswood House, with the avowed intention of hanging a _Herald_ correspondent, who managed to escape through a back door of the building. A representative of _The Tribune_ was summoned before the authorities at Charleston, on the charge of being a Federal spy. He was cleared of the charge, but advised to proceed North as early as possible. When he departed, Governor Pickens requested him, as a particular favor, to ascertain the name of _The Tribune_ correspondent, on arrival in New York, and inform him by letter. He promised to do so. On reaching the North, he kindly told Governor Pickens who _The Tribune_ correspondent was. A _Times_ correspondent, passing through Harper's Ferry, found himself in the hands of "the Chivalry," who proposed to hang him on the general charge of being an Abolitionist. He was finally released without injury, but at one time the chances of his escape were small. The New Orleans correspondent of _The Tribune_ came North on the last passenger-train from Richmond to Aquia Creek. One of _The Herald's_ representatives was thrown into prison by Jeff. Davis, but released through the influence of Pope Walker, the Rebel Secretary of War. Another remained in the South until all regular communication was cut off. He reached the North in safety by the line of the "underground railway." When the Rebellion was fairly inaugurated, the various points of interest were at once visited by the correspondents of the press. Wherever our armies operated, the principal dailies of New York and other cities were represented. Washington was the center of gravity around which the Eastern correspondents revolved. As the army advanced into Virginia, every movement was carefully chronicled. The competition between the different journals was very great. In the West the field was broader, and the competition, though active, was less bitter than along the Potomac. In the early days, St. Louis, Cairo, and Louisville were the principal Western points where correspondents were stationed. As our armies extended their operations, the journalists found their field of labor enlarged. St. Louis lost its importance when the Rebels were driven from Missouri. For a long time Cairo was the principal rendezvous of the journalists, but it became less noted as our armies pressed forward along the Mississippi. Every war-correspondent has his story of experiences in the field. Gathering the details of a battle in the midst of its dangers; sharing the privations of the camp and the fatigues of the march; riding with scouts, and visiting the skirmishers on the extreme front; journeying to the rear through regions infested by the enemy's cavalry, or running the gauntlet of Rebel batteries, his life was far from monotonous. Frequently the correspondents acted as volunteer aids to generals during engagements, and rendered important service. They often took the muskets of fallen soldiers and used them to advantage. On the water, as on land, they sustained their reputation, and proved that the hand which wielded the pen was able to wield the sword. They contributed their proportion of killed, wounded, and captured to the casualties of the war. Some of them accepted commissions in the army and navy. During the campaign of General Lyon in Missouri, the journalists who accompanied that army were in the habit of riding outside the lines to find comfortable quarters for the night. Frequently they went two or three miles ahead of the entire column, in order to make sure of a good dinner before the soldiers could overtake them. One night two of them slept at a house three miles from the road which the army was following. The inmates of the mansion were unaware of the vicinity of armed "Yankees," and entertained the strangers without question. Though a dozen Rebel scouts called at the house before daylight, the correspondents were undisturbed. After that occasion they were more cautious in their movements. In Kentucky, during the advance of Kirby Smith upon Cincinnati, the correspondents of _The Gazette_ and _The Commercial_ were captured by the advance-guard of Rebel cavalry. Their baggage, money, and watches became the property of their captors. The correspondents were released, and obliged to walk about eighty miles in an August sun. A short time later, Mr. Shanks and Mr. Westfall, correspondents of _The Herald,_ were made acquainted with John Morgan, in one of the raids of that famous guerrilla. The acquaintance resulted in a thorough depletion of the wardrobes of the captured gentlemen. In Virginia, Mr. Cadwallader and Mr. Fitzpatrick, of _The Herald_, and Mr. Crounse, of _The Times_, were captured by Mosby, and liberated after a brief detention and a complete relief of every thing portable and valuable, down to their vests and pantaloons. Even their dispatches were taken from them and forwarded to Richmond. A portion of these reports found their way into the Richmond papers. Stonewall Jackson and Stuart were also fortunate enough to capture some of the representatives of the Press. At one time there were five correspondents of _The Herald_ in the hands of the Rebels. One of them, Mr. Anderson, was held more than a year. He was kept for ten days in an iron dungeon, where no ray of light could penetrate. I have elsewhere alluded to the capture of Messrs. Richardson and Browne, of _The Tribune_, and Mr. Colburn, of _The World_, in front of Vicksburg. The story of the captivity and perilous escape of these representatives of _The Tribune_ reveals a patience, a fortitude, a daring, and a fertility of resource not often excelled. Some of the most graphic battle-accounts of the war were written very hastily. During the three days' battle at Gettysburg, _The Herald_ published each morning the details of the fighting of the previous day, down to the setting of the sun. This was accomplished by having a correspondent with each corps, and one at head-quarters to forward the accounts to the nearest telegraph office. At Antietam, _The Tribune_ correspondent viewed the battle by day, and then hurried from the field, writing the most of his account on a railway train. From Fort Donelson the correspondents of _The World_ and _The Tribune_ went to Cairo, on a hospital boat crowded with wounded. Their accounts were written amid dead and suffering men, but when published they bore little evidence of their hasty preparation. I once wrote a portion of a letter at the end of a medium-sized table. At the other end of the table a party of gamblers, with twenty or thirty spectators, were indulging in "Chuck-a-Luck." I have known dispatches to be written on horseback, but they were very brief, and utterly illegible to any except the writer. Much of the press correspondence during the war was written in railway cars and on steamboats, and much on camp-chests, stumps, or other substitutes for tables. I have seen a half-dozen correspondents busily engaged with their letters at the same moment, each of them resting his port-folio on his knee, or standing upright, with no support whatever. On one occasion a fellow-journalist assured me that the broad chest of a slumbering _confrere_ made an excellent table, the undulations caused by the sleeper's breathing being the only objectionable feature. Sometimes a correspondent reached the end of a long ride so exhausted as to be unable to hold a pen for ten consecutive minutes. In such case a short-hand writer was employed, when accessible, to take down from rapid dictation the story of our victory or defeat. Under all the disadvantages of time, place, and circumstances, of physical exhaustion and mental anxiety, it is greatly to the correspondents' credit that they wrote so well. Battle-accounts were frequently published that would be no mean comparison to the studied pen-pictures of the famous writers of this or any other age. They were extensively copied by the press of England and the Continent, and received high praise for their vivid portrayal of the battle-field and its scenes. Apart from the graphic accounts of great battles, they furnished materials from which the historians will write the enduring records of the war. With files of the New York dailies at his side, an industrious writer could compile a history of the Rebellion, complete in all its details. It was a general complaint of the correspondents that their profession was never officially recognized so as to give them an established position in the army. They received passes from head-quarters, and could generally go where they willed, but there were many officers who chose to throw petty but annoying restrictions around them. As they were generally situated throughout the army, they were, to some extent, dependent upon official courtesies. Of course, this dependence was injurious to free narration or criticism when any officer had conducted improperly. If there is ever another occasion for the services of the war correspondent on our soil, it is to be hoped Congress will pass a law establishing a position for the journalists, fixing their status in the field, surrounding them with all necessary restrictions, and authorizing them to purchase supplies and forage from the proper departments. During the Crimean war, the correspondents of the French and English papers had a recognized position, where they were subject to the same rules, and entitled to the same privileges, as the officers they accompanied. When Sir George Brown, at Eupatoria, forbade any officer appearing in public with unshaven chin, he made no distinction in favor of the members of the Press. Notwithstanding their fierce competition in serving the journals they represented, the correspondents with our army were generally on the most friendly terms with each other. Perhaps this was less the case in the East than in the West, where the rivalry was not so intense and continuous. In the armies in the Mississippi Valley, the representatives of competing journals frequently slept, ate, traveled, and smoked together, and not unfrequently drank from the same flask with equal relish. In the early days, "Room 45," in the St. Charles Hotel at Cairo, was the resort of all the correspondents at that point. There they laid aside their professional jealousies, and passed their idle hours in efforts for mutual amusement. On some occasions the floor of the room would be covered, in the morning, with a confused mass of boots, hats, coats, and other articles of masculine wear, out of which the earliest riser would array himself in whatever suited his fancy, without the slightest regard to the owner. "Forty-five" was the neutral ground where the correspondents planned campaigns for all the armies of the Union, arranged the downfall of the Rebellion, expressed their views of military measures and military men, exulted over successes, mourned over defeats, and toasted in full glasses the flag that our soldiers upheld. Since the close of the war, many of the correspondents have taken positions in the offices of the journals they represented in the field. Some have established papers of their own in the South, and a few have retired to other civil pursuits. Some are making professional tours of the Southern States and recording the status of the people lately in rebellion. _The Herald_ has sent several of its _attachés_ to the European capitals, and promises to chronicle in detail the next great war in the Old World. CHAPTER XLVI. THE PRESENT CONDITION OF THE SOUTH. Scarcity of the Population,--Fertility of the Country.--Northern Men already in the South.--Kansas Emigrants Crossing Missouri.--Change of the Situation.--Present Disadvantages of Emigration.--Feeling of the People.--Property-Holders in Richmond.--The Sentiment in North Carolina.--South Carolina Chivalry.--The Effect of War.--Prospect of the Success of Free Labor.--Trade in the South. The suppression of the Rebellion, and the restoration of peace throughout the entire South, have opened a large field for emigration. The white population of the Southern States, never as dense as that of the North, has been greatly diminished in consequence of the war. In many localities more than half the able-bodied male inhabitants have been swept away, and everywhere the loss of men is severely felt. The breaking up of the former system of labor in the cotton and sugar States will hinder the progress of agriculture for a considerable time, but there can be little doubt of its beneficial effect in the end. The desolation that was spread in the track of our armies will be apparent for many years. The South will ultimately recover from all her calamities, but she will need the energy and capital of the Northern States to assist her. During the progress of the war, as our armies penetrated the fertile portions of the "Confederacy," many of our soldiers cast longing eyes at the prospective wealth around them. "When the war is over we will come here to live, and show these people something they never dreamed of," was a frequent remark. Men born and reared in the extreme North, were amazed at the luxuriance of Southern verdure, and wondered that the richness of the soil had not been turned to greater advantage. It is often said in New England that no man who has once visited the fertile West ever returns to make his residence in the Eastern States. Many who have explored the South, and obtained a knowledge of its resources, will be equally reluctant to dwell in the regions where their boyhood days were passed. While the war was in progress many Northern men purchased plantations on the islands along the Southern coast, and announced their determination to remain there permanently. After the capture of New Orleans, business in that city passed into the hands of Northerners, much to the chagrin of the older inhabitants. When the disposition of our army and the topography of the country made the lower portion of Louisiana secure against Rebel raids, many plantations in that locality were purchased outright by Northern speculators. I have elsewhere shown how the cotton culture was extensively carried on by "Yankees," and that failure was not due to their inability to conduct the details of the enterprise. Ten years ago, emigration to Kansas was highly popular. Aid Societies were organized in various localities, and the Territory was rapidly filled. Political influences had much to do with this emigration from both North and South, and many implements carried by the emigrants were not altogether agricultural in their character. The soil of Kansas was known to be fertile, and its climate excellent. The Territory presented attractions to settlers, apart from political considerations. But in going thither the emigrants crossed a region equally fertile, and possessing superior advantages in its proximity to a market. No State in the Union could boast of greater possibilities than Missouri, yet few travelers in search of a home ventured to settle within her limits. The reason was apparent. Missouri was a slave State, though bounded on three sides by free soil. Few Northern emigrants desired to settle in the midst of slavery. The distinction between the ruling and laboring classes was not as great as in the cotton States, but there was a distinction beyond dispute. Whatever his blood or complexion, the man who labored with his hands was on a level, or nearly so, with the slave. Thousands passed up the Missouri River, or crossed the northern portion of the State, to settle in the new Territory of Kansas. When political influences ceased, the result was still the same. The Hannibal and St. Joseph Railway threw its valuable lands into the market, but with little success. With the suppression of the late Rebellion, and the abolition of slavery in Missouri, the situation is materially changed. From Illinois, Ohio, and Indiana, there is a large emigration to Missouri. I was recently informed that forty families from a single county in Ohio had sent a delegation to Missouri to look out suitable locations, either of wild land or of farms under cultivation. There is every prospect that the State will be rapidly filled with a population that believes in freedom and in the dignity of labor. She has an advantage over the other ex-slave States, in lying west of the populous regions of the North. Hitherto, emigration has generally followed the great isothermal lines, as can be readily seen when we study the population of the Western States. Northern Ohio is more New Englandish than Southern Ohio, and the parallel holds good in Northern and Southern Illinois. There will undoubtedly be a large emigration to Missouri in preference to the other Southern States, but our whole migratory element will not find accommodation in her limits. The entire South will be overrun by settlers from the North. Long ago, _Punch_ gave advice to persons about to marry. It was all comprised in the single word, "DON'T." Whoever is in haste to emigrate to the South, would do well to consider, for a time, this brief, but emphatic counsel. No one should think of leaving the Northern States, until he has fairly considered the advantages and disadvantages of the movement. If he departs with the expectation of finding every thing to his liking, he will be greatly disappointed at the result. There will be many difficulties to overcome. The people now residing in the late rebellious States are generally impoverished. They have little money, and, in many cases, their stock and valuables of all kinds have been swept away. Their farms are often without fences, and their farming-tools worn out, disabled, or destroyed. Their system of labor is broken up. The negro is a slave no longer, and the transition from bondage to freedom will affect, for a time, the producing interests of the South. Though the Rebellion is suppressed, the spirit of discontent still remains in many localities, and will retard the process of reconstruction. The teachings of slavery have made the men of the South bitterly hostile to those of the North. This hostility was carefully nurtured by the insurgent leaders during the Rebellion, and much of it still exists. In many sections of the South, efforts will be made to prevent immigration from the North, through a fear that the old inhabitants will lose their political rights. At the time I am writing, the owners of property in Richmond are holding it at such high rates as to repel Northern purchasers. Letters from that city say, the residents have determined to sell no property to Northern men, when they can possibly avoid it. No encouragement is likely to be given to Northern farmers and artisans to migrate thither. A scheme for taking a large number of European emigrants directly from foreign ports to Richmond, and thence to scatter them throughout Virginia, is being considered by the Virginia politicians. The wealthy men in the Old Dominion, who were Secessionists for the sake of secession, and who gave every assistance to the Rebel cause, are opposed to the admission of Northern settlers. They may be unable to prevent it, but they will be none the less earnest in their efforts. This feeling extends throughout a large portion of Virginia, and exists in the other States of the South. Its intensity varies in different localities, according to the extent of the slave population in the days before the war, and the influence that the Radical men of the South have exercised. While Virginia is unwilling to receive strangers, North Carolina is manifesting a desire to fill her territory with Northern capital and men. She is already endeavoring to encourage emigration, and has offered large quantities of land on liberal terms. In Newbern, Wilmington, and Raleigh, the Northern element is large. Newbern is "Yankeeized" as much as New Orleans. Wilmington bids fair to have intimate relations with New York and Boston. An agency has been established at Raleigh, under the sanction of the Governor of the State, to secure the immediate occupation of farming and mining lands, mills, manufactories, and all other kinds of real estate. Northern capital and sinew is already on its way to that region. The great majority of the North Carolinians approve the movement, but there are many persons in the State who equal the Virginians in their hostility to innovations. In South Carolina, few beside the negroes will welcome the Northerner with open arms. The State that hatched the secession egg, and proclaimed herself at all times first and foremost for the perpetuation of slavery, will not exult at the change which circumstances have wrought. Her Barnwells, her McGraths, her Rhetts, and her Hamptons declared they would perish in the last ditch, rather than submit. Some of them have perished, but many still remain. Having been life-long opponents of Northern policy, Northern industry, and Northern enterprise, they will hardly change their opinions until taught by the logic of events. Means of transportation are limited. On the railways the tracks are nearly worn out, and must be newly laid before they can be used with their old facility. Rolling stock is disabled or destroyed. Much of it must be wholly replaced, and that which now remains must undergo extensive repairs. Depots and machine-shops have been burned, and many bridges are bridges no longer. On the smaller rivers but few steamboats are running, and these are generally of a poor class. Wagons are far from abundant, and mules and horses are very scarce. The wants of the armies have been supplied with little regard to the inconvenience of the people. Corn-mills, saw-mills, gins, and factories have fed the flames. Wherever our armies penetrated they spread devastation in their track. Many portions of the South were not visited by a hostile force, but they did not escape the effects of war. Southern Georgia and Florida suffered little from the presence of the Northern armies, but the scarcity of provisions and the destitution of the people are nearly as great in that region as elsewhere. Until the present indignation at their defeat is passed away, many of the Southern people will not be inclined to give any countenance to the employment of freed negroes. They believe slavery is the proper condition for the negro, and declare that any system based on free labor will prove a failure. This feeling will not be general among the Southern people, and will doubtless be removed in time. The transition from slavery to freedom will cause some irregularities on the part of the colored race. I do not apprehend serious trouble in controlling the negro, and believe his work will be fully available throughout the South. It is natural that he should desire a little holiday with his release from bondage. For a time many negroes will be idle, and so will many white men who have returned from the Rebel armies. According to present indications, the African race displays far more industry than the Caucasian throughout the Southern States. Letters from the South say the negroes are at work in some localities, but the whites are everywhere idle. Those who go to the South for purposes of traffic may or may not be favored with large profits. All the products of the mechanic arts are very scarce in the interior, while in the larger towns trade is generally overdone. Large stocks of goods were taken to all places accessible by water as soon as the ports were opened. The supply exceeded the demand, and many dealers suffered heavy loss. From Richmond and other points considerable quantities of goods have been reshipped to New York, or sold for less than cost. Doubtless the trade with the South will ultimately be very large, but it cannot spring up in a day. Money is needed before speculation can be active. A year or two, at the least, will be needed to fill the Southern pocket. So much for the dark side of the picture. Emigrants are apt to listen to favorable accounts of the region whither they are bound, while they close their ears to all stories of an unfavorable character. To insure a hearing of both sides of the question under discussion, I have given the discouraging arguments in advance of all others. Already those who desire to stimulate travel to the South, are relating wonderful stories of its fertility and its great advantages to settlers. No doubt they are telling much that is true, but they do not tell all the truth. Every one has heard the statement, circulated in Ireland many years since, that America abounded in roasted pigs that ran about the streets, carrying knives and forks in their mouths, and making vocal requests to be devoured. Notwithstanding the absurdity of the story, it is reported to have received credit. The history of every emigration scheme abounds in narratives of a brilliant, though piscatorial, character. The interior portions of all the Western States are of wonderful fertility, and no inhabitant of that region has any hesitation in announcing the above fact. But not one in a hundred will state frankly his distance from market, and the value of wheat and corn at the points of their production. In too many cases the bright side of the story is sufficient for the listener. I once traveled in a railway car where there were a dozen emigrants from the New England States, seeking a home in the West. An agent of a county in Iowa was endeavoring to call their attention to the great advantages which his region afforded. He told them of the fertility of the soil, the amount of corn and wheat that could be produced to the acre, the extent of labor needed for the production of a specified quantity of cereals, the abundance of timber, and the propinquity of fine streams, with many other brilliant and seductive stories. The emigrants listened in admiration of the Promised Land, and were on the point of consenting to follow the orator. I ventured to ask the distance from those lands to a market where the products could be sold, and the probable cost of transportation. The answer was an evasive one, but was sufficient to awaken the suspicions of the emigrants. My question destroyed the beautiful picture which the voluble agent had drawn. Those who desire to seek their homes in the South will do well to remember that baked pigs are not likely to exist in abundance in the regions traversed by the National armies. CHAPTER XLVII. HOW DISADVANTAGES MAY BE OVERCOME. Conciliating the People of the South.--Railway Travel and its Improvement.--Rebuilding Steamboats.--Replacing Working Stock.--The Condition of the Plantations.--Suggestions about Hasty Departures.--Obtaining Information.--The Attractions of Missouri. The hinderances I have mentioned in the way of Southern emigration are of a temporary character. The opposition of the hostile portion of the Southern people can be overcome in time. When they see there is no possible hope for them to control the National policy, when they fully realize that slavery is ended, and ended forever, when they discover that the negro will work as a free man with advantage to his employer, they will become more amiable in disposition. Much of their present feeling arises from a hope of compelling a return to the old relation of master and slave. When this hope is completely destroyed, we shall have accomplished a great step toward reconstruction. A practical knowledge of Northern industry and enterprise will convince the people of the South, unless their hearts are thoroughly hardened, that some good can come out of Nazareth. They may never establish relations of great intimacy with their new neighbors, but their hostility will be diminished to insignificance. Some of the advocates of the "last ditch" theory, who have sworn never to live in the United States, will, doubtless, depart to foreign lands, or follow the example of the Virginia gentleman who committed suicide on ascertaining the hopelessness of the Rebellion. Failing to do either of these things, they must finally acquiesce in the supremacy of National authority. The Southern railways will be repaired, their rolling stock replaced, and the routes of travel restored to the old status. All cannot be done at once, as the destruction and damage have been very extensive, and many of the companies are utterly impoverished. From two to five years will elapse before passengers and freight can be transported with the same facility, in all directions, as before the war. Under a more liberal policy new lines will be opened, and the various portions of the Southern States become accessible. During the war two railways were constructed under the auspices of the Rebel Government, that will prove of great advantage in coming years. These are the lines from Meridian, Mississippi, to Selma, Alabama, and from Danville, Virginia, to Greensborough, North Carolina. A glance at a railway map of the Southern States will show their importance. On many of the smaller rivers boats are being improvised by adding wheels and motive power to ordinary scows. In a half-dozen years, at the furthest, we will, doubtless, see the rivers of the Southern States traversed by as many steamers as before the war. On the Mississippi and its tributaries the destruction of steamboat property was very great, but the loss is rapidly being made good. Since 1862 many fine boats have been constructed, some of them larger and more costly than any that existed during the most prosperous days before the Rebellion. On the Alabama and other rivers, efforts are being made to restore the steamboat fleets to their former magnitude. Horses, mules, machinery, and farming implements must and will be supplied out of the abundance in the North. The want of mules will be severely felt for some years. No Yankee has yet been able to invent a machine that will create serviceable mules to order. We must wait for their production by the ordinary means, and it will be a considerable time before the supply is equal to the demand. Those who turn their attention to stock-raising, during the next ten or twenty years, can always be certain of finding a ready and remunerative market. The Southern soil is as fertile as ever. Cotton, rice, corn, sugar, wheat, and tobacco can be produced in their former abundance. Along the Mississippi the levees must be restored, to protect the plantations from floods. This will be a work of considerable magnitude, and, without extraordinary effort, cannot be accomplished for several years. Everywhere fences must be rebuilt, and many buildings necessary in preparing products for market must be restored. Time, capital, energy, and patience will be needed to develop anew the resources of the South. Properly applied, they will be richly rewarded. No person should be hasty in his departure, nor rush blindly to the promised land. Thousands went to California, in '49 and '50, with the impression that the gold mines lay within an hour's walk of San Francisco. In '59, many persons landed at Leavenworth, on their way to Pike's Peak, under the belief that the auriferous mountain was only a day's journey from their landing-place. Thousands have gone "West" from New York and New England, believing that Chicago was very near the frontier. Those who start with no well-defined ideas of their destination are generally disappointed. The war has given the public a pretty accurate knowledge of the geography of the South, so that the old mistakes of emigrants to California and Colorado are in slight danger of repetition, but there is a possibility of too little deliberation in setting out. Before starting, the emigrant should obtain all accessible information about the region he intends to visit. Geographies, gazetteers, census returns, and works of a similar character will be of great advantage. Much can be obtained from persons who traveled in the rebellious States during the progress of the war. The leading papers throughout the country are now publishing letters from their special correspondents, relative to the state of affairs in the South. These letters are of great value, and deserve a careful study. Information from interested parties should be received with caution. Those who have traveled in the far West know how difficult it is to obtain correct statements relative to the prosperity or advantages of any specified locality. Every man assures you that the town or the county where he resides, or where he is interested, is the best and the richest within a hundred miles. To an impartial observer, lying appears to be the only personal accomplishment in a new country. I presume those who wish to encourage Southern migration will be ready to set forth all the advantages (but none of the disadvantages) of their own localities. Having fully determined where to go and what to do, having selected his route of travel, and ascertained, as near as possible, what will be needed on the journey, the emigrant will next consider his financial policy. No general rule can be given. In most cases it is better not to take a large amount of money at starting. To many this advice will be superfluous. Bills of exchange are much safer to carry than ready cash, and nearly as convenient for commercial transactions. Beyond an amount double the estimated expenses of his journey, the traveler will usually carry very little cash. For the present, few persons should take their wives and children to the interior South, and none should do so on their first visit. Many houses have been burned or stripped of their furniture, provisions are scarce and costly, and the general facilities for domestic happiness are far from abundant. The conveniences for locomotion in that region are very poor, and will continue so for a considerable time. A man can "rough it" anywhere, but he can hardly expect his family to travel on flat cars, or on steamboats that have neither cabins nor decks, and subsist on the scanty and badly-cooked provisions that the Sunny South affords. By all means, I would counsel any young man on his way to the South not to elope with his neighbor's wife. In view of the condition of the country beyond Mason and Dixon's line, an elopement would prove his mistake of a lifetime. I have already referred to the resources of Missouri. The State possesses greater mineral wealth than any other State of the Union, east of the Rocky Mountains. Her lead mines are extensive, easily worked, very productive, and practically inexhaustible. The same may be said of her iron mines. Pilot Knob and Iron Mountain are nearly solid masses of ore, the latter being a thousand feet in height. Copper mines have been opened and worked, and tin has been found in several localities. The soil of the Northern portion of Missouri can boast of a fertility equal to that of Kansas or Illinois. In the Southern portion the country is more broken, but it contains large areas of rich lands. The productions of Missouri are similar to those of the Northern States in the same latitude. More hemp is raised in Missouri than in any other State except Kentucky. Much of this article was used during the Rebellion, in efforts to break up the numerous guerrilla bands that infested the State. Tobacco is an important product, and its culture is highly remunerative. At Hermann, Booneville, and other points, the manufacture of wine from the Catawba grape is extensively carried on. In location and resources, Missouri is without a rival among the States that formerly maintained the system of slave labor. CHAPTER XLVIII. THE RESOURCES OF THE SOUTHERN STATES. How the People have Lived.--An Agricultural Community.--Mineral and other Wealth of Virginia.--Slave-Breeding in Former Times.--The Auriferous Region of North Carolina.--Agricultural Advantages.--Varieties of Soil in South Carolina.--Sea-Island Cotton.--Georgia and her Railways.--Probable Decline of the Rice Culture.--The Everglade State.--The Lower Mississippi Valley.--The Red River.--Arkansas and its Advantages.--A Hint for Tragedians.--Mining in Tennessee.--The Blue-Grass Region of Kentucky.--Texas and its Attractions.--Difference between Southern and Western Emigration.--The End. Compared with the North, the Southern States have been strictly an agricultural region. Their few manufactures were conducted on a small scale, and could not compete with those of the colder latitudes. They gave some attention to stock-raising in a few localities, but did not attach to it any great importance. Cotton was the product which fed, clothed, sheltered, and regaled the people. Even with the immense profits they received from its culture, they did not appear to understand the art of enjoyment. They generally lived on large and comfortless tracts of land, and had very few cities away from the sea-coast. They thought less of personal comfort than of the acquisition of more land, mules, and negroes. In the greatest portion of the South, the people lived poorer than many Northern mechanics have lived in the past twenty years. The property in slaves, to the extent of four hundred millions of dollars, was their heaviest item of wealth, but they seemed unable to turn this wealth to the greatest advantage. With the climate and soil in their favor, they paid little attention to the cheaper luxuries of rational living, but surrounded themselves with much that was expensive, though utterly useless. On plantations where the owners resided, a visiter would find the women adorned with diamonds and laces that cost many thousand dollars, and feast his eyes upon parlor furniture and ornaments of the most elaborate character. But the dinner-table would present a repast far below that of a New England farmer or mechanic in ordinary circumstances, and the sleeping-rooms would give evidence that genuine comfort was a secondary consideration. Outside of New Orleans and Charleston, where they are conducted by foreigners, the South has no such market gardens, or such abundance and variety of wholesome fruits and vegetables, as the more sterile North can boast of everywhere. So of a thousand other marks of advancing civilization. Virginia, "the mother of Presidents," is rich in minerals of the more useful sort, and some of the precious metals. Her list of mineral treasures includes gold, copper, iron, lead, plumbago, coal, and salt. The gold mines are not available except to capitalists, and it is not yet fully settled whether the yield is sufficient to warrant large investments. The gold is extracted from an auriferous region, extending from the Rappahannock to the Coosa River, in Alabama. The coal-beds in the State are easy of access, and said to be inexhaustible. The Kanawha salt-works are well known, and the petroleum regions of West Virginia are attracting much attention. Virginia presents many varieties of soil, and, with a better system of cultivation, her productions can be greatly increased. (The same may be said of all the Southern States, from the Atlantic to the Rio Grande.) Her soil is favorable to all the products of the Northern States. The wheat and corn of Virginia have a high reputation. In the culture of tobacco she has always surpassed every other State of the Union, and was also the first State in which it was practiced by civilized man to any extent. Washington pronounced the central counties of Virginia the finest agricultural district in the United States, as he knew them. Daniel Webster declared, in a public speech in the Shenandoah Valley, that he had seen no finer farming land in his European travel than in that valley. Until 1860, the people of Virginia paid considerable attention to the raising of negroes for the Southern market. For some reason this trade has greatly declined within the past five years, the stock becoming unsalable, and its production being interrupted. I would advise no person to contemplate moving to Virginia with a view to raising negroes for sale. The business was formerly conducted by the "First Families," and if it should be revived, they will doubtless claim an exclusive privilege. North Carolina abounds in minerals, especially in gold, copper, iron, and coal. The fields of the latter are very extensive. The gold mines of North Carolina have been profitably worked for many years. A correspondent of _The World_, in a recent letter from Charlotte, North Carolina, says: In these times of mining excitement it should he more widely known that North Carolina is a competitor with California, Idaho, and Nebraska. Gold is found in paying quantities in the State, and in the northern parts of South Carolina and Georgia. For a hundred miles west and southwest of Charlotte, all the streams contain more or less gold-dust. Nuggets of a few ounces have been frequently found, and there is one well-authenticated case of a solid nugget weighing twenty-eight pounds, which was purchased from its ignorant owner for three dollars, and afterward sold at the Mint. Report says a still larger lump was found and cut up by the guard at one of the mines. Both at Greensboro, Salisbury, and here, the most reliable residents concur in pointing to certain farms where the owners procure large sums of gold. One German is said to have taken more than a million of dollars from his farm, and refuses to sell his land for any price. Negroes are and have been accustomed to go out to the creeks and wash on Saturdays, frequently bringing in two or three dollars' worth, and not unfrequently negroes come to town with little nuggets of the pure ore to trade. The iron and copper mines were developed only to a limited extent before the war. The necessities of the case led the Southern authorities, however, after the outbreak, to turn their attention to them, and considerable quantities of the ore were secured. This was more especially true of iron. North Carolina is adapted to all the agricultural products of both North and South, with the exception of cane sugar. The marshes on the coast make excellent rice plantations, and, when drained, are very fertile in cotton. Much of the low, sandy section, extending sixty miles from the coast, is covered with extensive forests of pitch-pine, that furnish large quantities of lumber, tar, turpentine, and resin, for export to Northern cities. When cleared and cultivated, this region proves quite fertile, but Southern energy has thus far been content to give it very little improvement. Much of the land in the interior is very rich and productive. With the exception of Missouri, North Carolina is foremost, since the close of the war, in encouraging immigration. As soon as the first steps were taken toward reconstruction, the "North Carolina Land Agency" was opened at Raleigh, under the recommendation of the Governor of the State. This agency is under the management of Messrs. Heck, Battle & Co., citizens of Raleigh, and is now (August, 1865) establishing offices in the Northern cities for the purpose of representing the advantages that North Carolina possesses. The auriferous region of North Carolina extends into South Carolina and Georgia. In South Carolina the agricultural facilities are extensive. According to Ruffin and Tuomey (the agricultural surveyors of the State), there are six varieties of soil: 1. Tide swamp, devoted to the culture of rice. 2. Inland swamp, devoted to rice, cotton, corn, wheat, etc. 3. Salt marsh, devoted to long cotton. 4. Oak and pine regions, devoted to long cotton, corn, and wheat. 5. Oak and hickory regions, where cotton and corn flourish. 6. Pine barrens, adapted to fruit and vegetables. The famous "sea-island cotton" comes from the islands along the coast, where large numbers of the freed negroes of South Carolina have been recently located. South Carolina can produce, side by side, the corn, wheat, and tobacco of the North, and the cotton, rice, and sugar-cane of the South, though the latter article is not profitably cultivated. Notwithstanding the prophecies of the South Carolinians to the contrary, the free-labor scheme along the Atlantic coast has proved successful. The following paragraph is from a letter written by a prominent journalist at Savannah:-- The condition of the islands along this coast is now of the greatest interest to the world at large, and to the people of the South in particular. Upon careful inquiry, I find that there are over two hundred thousand acres of land under cultivation by free labor. The enterprises are mostly by Northern men, although there are natives working their negroes under the new system, and negroes who are working land on their own account. This is the third year of the trial, and every year has been a success more and more complete. The profits of some of the laborers amount to five hundred, and in some cases five thousand dollars a year. The amount of money deposited in bank by the negroes of these islands is a hundred and forty thousand dollars. One joint, subscription to the seven-thirty loan amounted to eighty thousand dollars. Notwithstanding the fact that the troops which landed on the islands robbed, indiscriminately, the negroes of their money, mules, and supplies, the negroes went back to work again. General Saxton, who has chief charge of this enterprise, has his head-quarters at Beaufort. If these facts, and the actual prosperity of these islands could be generally known throughout the South, it would do more to induce the whites to take hold of the freed-labor system than all the general orders and arbitrary commands that General Hatch has issued. The resources of Georgia are similar to those of South Carolina, and the climate differs but little from that of the latter State. The rice-swamps are unhealthy, and the malaria which arises from them is said to be fatal to whites. Many of the planters express a fear that the abolition of slavery has ended the culture of rice. They argue that the labor is so difficult and exhaustive, that the negroes will never perform it excepting under the lash. Cruel modes of punishment being forbidden, the planters look upon the rice-lands as valueless. Time will show whether these fears are to be realized or not. If it should really happen that the negroes refuse to labor where their lives are of comparatively short duration, the country must consent to restore slavery to its former status, or purchase its rice in foreign countries. As rice is produced in India without slave labor, it is possible that some plan may be invented for its cultivation here. Georgia has a better system of railways than any other Southern State, and she is fortunate in possessing several navigable rivers. The people are not as hostile to Northerners as the inhabitants of South Carolina, but they do not display the desire to encourage immigration that is manifested in North Carolina. In the interior of Georgia, at the time I am writing, there is much suffering on account of a scarcity of food. Many cases of actual starvation are reported. Florida has few attractions to settlers. It is said there is no spot of land in the State three hundred feet above the sea-level. Men born with fins and webbed feet might enjoy themselves in the lakes and swamps, which form a considerable portion of Florida. Those whose tastes are favorable to timber-cutting, can find a profitable employment in preparing live-oak and other timbers for market. The climate is very healthy, and has been found highly beneficial to invalids. The vegetable productions of the State are of similar character to those of Georgia, but their amount is not large. In the Indian tongue, Alabama signifies "Here we rest." The traveler who rests in the State of that name, finds an excellent agricultural region. He finds that cotton is king with the Alabamians, and that the State has fifteen hundred miles of navigable rivers and a good railway system. He finds that Alabama suffered less by the visits of our armies than either Georgia or South Carolina. The people extend him the same welcome that he received in Georgia. They were too deeply interested in the perpetuation of slavery to do otherwise than mourn the failure to establish the Confederacy. Elsewhere I have spoken of the region bordering the lower portion of the Great River of the West, which includes Louisiana and Mississippi. In the former State, sugar and cotton are the great products. In the latter, cotton is the chief object of attention. It is quite probable that the change from slavery to freedom may necessitate the division of the large plantations into farms of suitable size for cultivation by persons of moderate capital. If this should be done, there will be a great demand for Northern immigrants, and the commerce of these States will be largely increased. Early in July, of the present year, after the dispersal of the Rebel armies, a meeting was held at Shreveport, Louisiana, at which resolutions were passed favoring the encouragement of Northern migration to the Red River valley. The resolutions set forth, that the pineries of that region would amply repay development, in view of the large market for lumber along Red River and the Mississippi. They further declared, that the cotton and sugar plantations of West Louisiana offered great attractions, and were worthy the attention of Northern men. The passage of these resolutions indicates a better spirit than has been manifested by the inhabitants of other portions of the Pelican State. Many of the people in the Red River region profess to have been loyal to the United States throughout the days of the Rebellion. The Red River is most appropriately named. It flows through a region where the soil has a reddish tinge, that is imparted to the water of the river. The sugar produced there has the same peculiarity, and can be readily distinguished from the sugar of other localities. Arkansas is quite rich in minerals, though far less so than Missouri. Gold abounds in some localities, and lead, iron, and zinc exist in large quantities. The saltpeter caves along the White River can furnish sufficient saltpeter for the entire Southwest. Along the rivers the soil is fertile, but there are many sterile regions in the interior. The agricultural products are similar to those of Missouri, with the addition of cotton. With the exception of the wealthier inhabitants, the people of Arkansas are desirous of stimulating emigration. They suffered so greatly from the tyranny of the Rebel leaders that they cheerfully accept the overthrow of slavery. Arkansas possesses less advantages than most other Southern States, being far behind her sisters in matters of education and internal improvement. It is to be hoped that her people have discovered their mistake, and will make earnest efforts to correct it at an early day. A story is told of a party of strolling players that landed at a town in Arkansas, and advertised a performance of "Hamlet." A delegation waited upon the manager, and ordered him to "move on." The spokesman of the delegation is reported to have said: "That thar Shakspeare's play of yourn, stranger, may do for New York or New Orleans, but we want you to understand that Shakspeare in Arkansas is pretty ---- well played out." Persons who wish to give attention to mining matters, will find attractions in Tennessee, in the deposits of iron, copper, and other ores. Coal is found in immense quantities among the Cumberland Mountains, and lead exists in certain localities. Though Tennessee can boast of considerable mineral wealth, her advantages are not equal to those of Missouri or North Carolina. In agriculture she stands well, though she has no soil of unusual fertility, except in the western portion of the State. Cotton, corn, and tobacco are the great staples, and considerable quantities of wheat are produced. Stock-raising has received considerable attention. More mules were formerly raised in Tennessee than in any other State of the Union. A large portion of the State is admirably adapted to grazing. Military operations in Tennessee, during the Rebellion, were very extensive, and there was great destruction of property in consequence. Large numbers of houses and other buildings were burned, and many farms laid waste. It will require much time, capital, and energy to obliterate the traces of war. The inhabitants of Kentucky believe that their State cannot be surpassed in fertility. They make the famous "Blue Grass Region," around Lexington, the subject of especial boast. The soil of this section is very rich, and the grass has a peculiar bluish tinge, from which its name is derived. One writer says the following of the Blue Grass Region:-- View the country round from the heads of the Licking, the Ohio, the Kentucky, Dick's, and down the Green River, and you have a hundred miles square of the most extraordinary country on which the sun has ever shone. Farms in this region command the highest prices, and there are very few owners who have any desire to sell their property. Nearly all the soil of the State is adapted to cultivation. Its staple products are the same as those of Missouri. It produces more flax and hemp than any other State, and is second only to Virginia in the quality and quantity of its tobacco. Its yield of corn is next to that of Ohio. Like Tennessee, it has a large stock-raising interest, principally in mules and hogs, for which there is always a ready market. Kentucky suffered severely during the campaigns of the Rebel army in that State, and from the various raids of John Morgan. A parody on "My Maryland" was published in Louisville soon after one of Morgan's visits, of which the first stanza was as follows:-- John Morgan's foot is on thy shore, Kentucky! O Kentucky! His hand is on thy stable door, Kentucky! O Kentucky! He'll take thy horse he spared before, And ride him till his back is sore, And leave him at some stranger's door, Kentucky! O Kentucky! Last, and greatest, of the lately rebellious States, is Texas. Every variety of soil can be found there, from the richest alluvial deposits along the river bottoms, down to the deserts in the northwestern part of the State, where a wolf could not make an honest living. All the grains of the Northern States can be produced. Cotton, tobacco, and sugar-cane are raised in large quantities, and the agricultural capabilities of Texas are very great. Being a new State, its system of internal communications is not good. Texas has the reputation of being the finest grazing region in the Southwest. Immense droves of horses, cattle, and sheep cover its prairies, and form the wealth of many of the inhabitants. Owing to the distance from market, these animals are generally held at very low prices. Shortly after its annexation to the United States, Texas became a resort for outcasts from civilized society. In some parts of the Union, the story goes that sheriffs, and their deputies dropped the phrase "_non est inventus_" for one more expressive. Whenever they discovered that parties for whom they held writs had decamped, they returned the documents with the indorsement "G.T.T." (gone to Texas). Some writer records that the State derived its name from the last words of a couplet which runaway individuals were supposed to repeat on their arrival:-- When every other land rejects us, This is the land that freely takes us. Since 1850, the character of the population of Texas has greatly improved, though it does not yet bear favorable comparison to that of Quaker villages, or of rural districts of Massachusetts or Connecticut. There is a large German element in Texas, which displayed devoted loyalty to the Union during the days of the Rebellion. An unknown philosopher says the world is peopled by two great classes, those who have money, and those who haven't--the latter being most numerous. Migratory Americans are subject to the same distinction. Of those who have emigrated to points further West during the last thirty years, a very large majority were in a condition of impecuniosity. Many persons emigrate on account of financial embarrassments, leaving behind them debts of varied magnitude. In some cases, Territories and States that desired to induce settlers to come within their limits, have passed laws providing that no debt contracted elsewhere, previous to emigration, could be collected by any legal process. To a man laboring under difficulties of a pecuniary character, the new Territories and States offer as safe a retreat as the Cities of Refuge afforded to criminals in the days of the ancients. Formerly, the West was the only field to which emigrants could direct their steps. There was an abundance of land, and a great need of human sinew to make it lucrative. When land could be occupied by a settler and held under his pre-emption title, giving him opportunity to pay for his possession from the products of his own industry and the fertility of the soil, there was comparatively little need of capital. The operations of speculators frequently tended to retard settlement rather than to stimulate it, as they shut out large areas from cultivation or occupation, in order to hold them for an advance. In many of the Territories a dozen able-bodied men, accustomed to farm labor and willing to toil, were considered a greater acquisition than a speculator with twenty thousand dollars of hard cash. Labor was of more importance than capital. To a certain extent this is still the case. Laboring men are greatly needed on the broad acres of the far-Western States. No one who has not traveled in that region can appreciate the sacrifice made by Minnesota, Iowa, and Kansas, when they sent their regiments of stalwart men to the war. Every arm that carried a musket from those States, was a certain integral portion of their wealth and prosperity. The great cities of the seaboard could spare a thousand men with far less loss than would accrue to any of the States I have mentioned, by the subtraction of a hundred. There is now a great demand for men to fill the vacancy caused by deaths in the field, and to occupy the extensive areas that are still uncultivated. Emigrants without capital will seek the West, where their stout arms will make them welcome and secure them comfortable homes. In the South the situation is different. For the present there is a sufficiency of labor. Doubtless there will be a scarcity several years hence, but there is no reason to fear it immediately. Capital and direction are needed. The South is impoverished. Its money is expended, and it has no present source of revenue. There is nothing wherewith to purchase the necessary stock, supplies, and implements for prosecuting agricultural enterprise. The planters are generally helpless. Capital to supply the want must come from the rich North. Direction is no less needed than capital. A majority of Southern men declare the negroes will be worthless to them, now that slavery is abolished. "We have," say they, "lived among these negroes all our days. We know them in no other light than as slaves. We command them to do what we wish, and we punish them as we see fit for disobedience. We cannot manage them in any other way." No doubt this is the declaration of their honest belief. A Northern man can give them an answer appealing to their reason, if not to their conviction. He can say, "You are accustomed to dealing with slaves, and you doubtless tell the truth when declaring you cannot manage the negroes under the new system. We are accustomed to dealing with freemen, and do not know how to control slaves. The negroes being free, our knowledge of freemen will enable us to manage them without difficulty." Every thing is favorable to the man of small or large capital, who desires to emigrate to the South. In consideration of the impoverishment of the people and their distrust of the freed negroes as laborers, lands in the best districts can be purchased very cheaply. Plantations can be bought, many of them with all the buildings and fences still remaining, though somewhat out of repair, at prices ranging from three to ten dollars an acre. A few hundred dollars will do far more toward securing a home for the settler in the South than in the West. Labor is abundant, and the laborers can be easily controlled by Northern brains. The land is already broken, and its capabilities are fully known. Capital, if judiciously invested and under proper direction, whether in large or moderate amounts, will be reasonably certain of an ample return. FINIS. 
27394	----	file was produced from images generously made available by The Kentuckiana Digital Library) A NEW GUIDE FOR EMIGRANTS TO THE WEST, CONTAINING SKETCHES OF OHIO, INDIANA, ILLINOIS, MISSOURI, MICHIGAN, WITH THE TERRITORIES OF WISCONSIN AND ARKANSAS, AND THE ADJACENT PARTS. BY J. M. PECK, A. M. OF ROCK SPRING, ILL BOSTON: GOULD, KENDALL & LINCOLN. FOR SALE BY THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED STATES. 1836. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1836, By GOULD, KENDALL & LINCOLN, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of Massachusetts. INDEX. CHAP. I. GENERAL VIEW OF THE VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI. Extent--Subdivisions--Population--Physical Features--Animal, Vegetable and Mineral Productions--History--Prospective Increase of Population, 11 CHAP. II. GENERAL VIEW, &C., CONTINUED. Productions, 32 CHAP. III. CLIMATE. Comparative View of the Climate with the Atlantic States--Diseases--Means of Preserving Health, 37 CHAP. IV. CHARACTER, MANNERS AND PURSUITS OF THE PEOPLE. Cotton and Sugar Planters--Farmers--Population of the large Towns and Cities--Frontier Class--Hunters and Trappers--Boatmen, 102 CHAP. V. PUBLIC LANDS. System of Surveys--Meridian and Base Lines--Townships--Diagram of a Township surveyed into Sections--Land Districts and Offices--Pre-emption Rights--Military and Bounty Lands--Taxes--Valuable Tracts of Country unsettled, 130 CHAP. VI. ABORIGINES. Conjecture respecting their former Numbers and Condition-- Present Number and State--Indian Territory appropriated as their Permanent Residence--Plan and Operations of the U. S. Government--Missionary Efforts and Stations--Monuments and Antiquities, 144 CHAP. VII. WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA. Face of the Country--Soil, Agriculture and Internal Improvements--Chief Towns--Pittsburg--Coal--Sulphur and Hot Springs--Wheeling, 163 CHAP. VIII. MICHIGAN. Extent--Situation--Boundaries--Face of the Country--Rivers--Lakes, &c.--Soil and Productions--Subdivisions--Counties--Towns-- Detroit--Education--Internal Improvements projected--Boundary Dispute--Outline of the Constitution, 179 CHAP. IX. OHIO. Boundaries--Divisions--Face of the Country--Soil and Productions--Animals--Minerals--Financial Statistics--Canal Fund--Expenditures--Land Taxes--School Fund--Statistics-- Canal Revenues--Population at different Periods--Internal Improvements--Manufactures--Cities and Towns--Cincinnati-- Columbus--Education--Form of Government--History, 193 CHAP. X. INDIANA. Boundaries and Extent--Counties--Population--Face of the Country, &c.--Sketch of each County--Form of Government-- Finances--Internal Improvements--Manufactures--Education-- History--General Remarks, 222 CHAP. XI. ILLINOIS. Boundaries and Extent--Face of the Country and Qualities of Soil--Inundated Land--River Bottoms, or Alluvion--Prairies-- Barrens--Forest, or timbered Land--Knobs, Bluffs, Ravines and Sink Holes--Rivers, &c.--Productions--Minerals--Lead, Coal, Salt, &c.--Vegetables--Animals--Manufactures--Civil Divisions--Tabular View of the Counties--Sketches of each County--Towns--Alton--Projected Improvements--Education-- Government--General Remarks, 251 CHAP. XII. MISSOURI. Extent and Boundaries--Civil Divisions--Population--Surface, Soil and Productions--Towns--St. Louis, 315 CHAP. XIII. ARKANSAS AND TERRITORIAL DISTRICTS. ARKANSAS.--Situation and Extent--Civil Divisions-- Rivers--Face of the Country--Soil--Water--Productions-- Climate--Minerals--State of Society. WISCONSIN. Boundaries and Extent--Rivers--Soil--Productions--Towns, &c., 323 CHAP. XIV. LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS FOR THE WEST. Colleges--Statistical Sketch of each Religious Denomination --Roman Catholics--Field for Effort, and Progress made-- Theological Institutions--Deaf and Dumb Asylums--Medical Institutions--Law Schools--Benevolent and Religious Societies--Periodical Press, 334 CHAP. XV. SUGGESTIONS TO EMIGRANTS. Modes of Travel--Canal, Steamboat and Stage Routes--Other Modes of Travel--Expenses--Roads, Distances, &c., 364 INTRODUCTION. Much has been published already about the WEST,--the GREAT WEST,--the VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI.--But no portion of this immense and interesting region, is so much the subject of inquiry, and so particularly excites the attention of the emigrant, as the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Michigan, with the adjacent territorial regions. All these States have come into existence as such, with the exception of Ohio, within the last twenty years; and much of the territory, now adorned by the hand of civilization, and spread over with an enterprising, industrious and intelligent people,--the field of public improvements in Canals and Railways,--of Colleges, Churches, and other institutions, was the hunting ground of the aborigines, and the scene of border warfare. These States have been unparalleled in their growth, both in the increase of population and property, and in the advance of intellectual and moral improvement. Such an extent of forest was never before cleared,--such a vast field of prairie was never before subdued and cultivated by the hand of man, in the same short period of time. Cities, and towns, and villages, and counties, and States never before rushed into existence, and made such giant strides, as upon this field. "_Who hath heard such a thing? Who hath seen such things? Shall the earth be made to bring forth in one day? or shall a nation be born at once?_" Isaiah, LXVI. 8. The rapid increase of population will be exhibited in a tabular form in the following pages, and other parts showing that the general improvement of the country, and the development of its physical, intellectual and moral resources have kept pace with the extension of settlements. And such are its admirable facilities for commerce by its numerous navigable rivers, and its lines of canals, some of which are finished, and many others commenced or projected,--such the richness of its soil, and the variety of its productions,--such the genial nature of its climate,--the enterprise of its population,--and the influence it must soon wield in directing the destinies of the whole United States, as to render the GREAT WEST an object of the deepest interest to the American patriot. To the philanthropist and christian, the character and manners,--the institutions, literature and religion of so wide a portion of our country, whose mighty energies are soon to exert a controlling influence over the character of the whole nation, and in some measure, of the world, are not less matters of momentous concern. "The West is a young empire of mind, and power, and wealth, and free institutions, rushing up to a giant manhood, with a rapidity and power never before witnessed below the sun. And if she carries with her the elements of her preservation, the experiment will be glorious,--the joy of the nation,--the joy of the whole earth, as she rises in the majesty of her intelligence and benevolence, and enterprise, for the emancipation of the world."--_Beecher._ Amongst the causes that have awakened the attention of the community in the Atlantic States, to this Great Valley, and excited the desires of multitudes to remove hither, may be reckoned the efforts of the liberal and benevolent to aid the West in the immediate supply of her population with the Bible, with Sunday Schools, with religious tracts, with the gospel ministry, and to lay the foundation for Colleges and other literary institutions. Hundreds of families, who might otherwise have remained in the crowded cities and densely populated neighborhoods of their ancestors, have had their attention directed to these States as a permanent home. And thousands more of virtuous and industrious families would follow, and fix their future residence on our prairies, and in our western forests, cultivate our wild lands,--aid in building up our towns and cities, and diffuse a healthful moral and intellectual influence through the mass of our present population, could they feel assured that they can reach some portion of the Western Valley without great risk and expense,--provide for their families comfortably, and not be swept off by sickness, or overwhelmed by suffering, beyond what is incident to any new country. The author's first book, "A GUIDE FOR EMIGRANTS," &c. was written in the winter and spring of 1831, to answer the pressing call then made for information of these western states, but more especially that of Illinois;--but many of its particulars, as to the character and usages of the people, manners and customs, modes of erecting buildings, general characteristics and qualities of soil, productions, &c. were applicable to the West generally. Since that period, brief as it has been, wide and rapid changes have been made, population has rapidly augmented, beyond that of any former period of the same extent;--millions of acres of the public domain, then wild and hardly explored, have been brought into market; settlements and counties have been formed, and populous towns have sprung up where, at that time, the Indian and wild beast had possession; facilities for intercommunication have been greatly extended, and distant places have been brought comparatively near; the desire to emigrate to the west has increased, and everybody in the Atlantic states has become interested and inquires about the Great Valley. That respectable place, so much the theme of declamation and inquiry abroad, "_The Far West_," has gone from this region towards the setting sun. Its exact locality has not yet been settled, but probably it may soon be found along the gulf of California, or near Nootka Sound. And if distance is to be measured by time, and the facility of intercourse, we are now several hundred miles nearer the Atlantic coast than twenty years since. Ten years more, and the facilities of railways and improved machinery will place the Mississippi within seven day's travel of Boston,--six days of Washington city, and five days of Charleston, S. C. To give a brief, and yet correct account of a portion of this Great Valley, its resources, the manners and customs of its inhabitants, its political subdivisions, cities, commercial and other important towns, colleges and other literary institutions, religious condition, public lands, qualities of soil and general features of each state and territory named in the title page, together with such information as may form a kind of manual for the emigrant and man of business, or which may aid him on his journey hither, and enable him to surmount successfully the difficulties of a new country, is the object of this new work. In accomplishing this task the author has aimed at _correctness_ and _brevity_. To condense the particular kind of information called for by the public mind in a small space, has been no easy task. Nor has it been a small matter to collect from so wide a range as five large states, and two extensive territories, with other large districts, the facts and statistical information often found in the compass of less than a page. It is an easy task to a belles-lettre scholar, sitting at his desk, in an easy chair, and by a pleasant fire, to write "Histories," and "Geographies," and "Sketches," and "Recollections," and "Views," and "Tours" of the Western Valley,--but it is quite another concern to explore these regions, examine public documents, reconcile contradictory statements, correspond with hundreds of persons in public and private life, read all the histories, geographies, tours, sketches, and recollections that have been published, and correct their numerous errors,--then collate, arrange, digest, and condense the facts of the country. Those who have read his former "GUIDE FOR EMIGRANTS," will find upon perusal, that this is radically a _new work_--rather than a new edition. Its whole plan is changed; and though some whole pages of the former work are retained, and many of its facts and particulars given in a more condensed form, much of that work being before the public in other forms, he has been directed, both by his own judgment, and the solicitude of the public mind in the Atlantic states, to give to the work its present form and features. There are three classes of persons in particular who may derive advantage from this Guide. 1. All those who intend to remove to the states and territories described. Such persons, whether citizens of the Atlantic states, or natives of Europe, will find in this small volume, much of that species of information for which they are solicitous. It has been a primary object of the author throughout this work, to furnish the outline of facts necessary for this class. He is aware also that much in detail will be desired and eagerly sought after, which the portable and limited size of this little work could not contain; but such information may be found in the larger works, by Hall, Flint, Darby, Schoolcraft, Long, and other authors and travellers. Those who desire more specific and detailed descriptions of Illinois, will be satisfied probably with the author's GAZETTEER of that State, published in 1834, and which can be had by application to the author, or to the publishers of this work. 2. This Guide is also designed for those, who, for either pleasure, health or business, intend to travel through the western States. Such are now the facilities of intercommunication between the eastern and western States, and to most points in the Valley of the Mississippi, that thousands are visiting some portions of this interesting region every month. Some knowledge of the routes that lead to different parts of this Valley, the lines of steamboats and stages, cities, towns, public institutions, manners and customs of the people, &c., is certainly desirable to all who travel. Such persons may expect a correct, and it is hoped, a pleasant Guide in this book. 3. There is a numerous class of persons in the Atlantic States, who desire to know more about the Great West and to have a book for reference, who do not expect to emigrate here. Many are deeply interested in its moral welfare. They have cheerfully contributed to establish and build up its literary and religious institutions, and yet from want of access to those facts which exist amongst us, their information is but partial and limited. The author in his travels in the Atlantic states has met with many persons, who, though well informed on other subjects, are surprisingly ignorant of the actual condition, resources, society, manners of the people, and even the geography of these states and territories. The author is aware of the difficulty of conveying entirely correct ideas of this region to a person who has never travelled beyond the borders of his native state. The laws and habits of associating ideas in the human mind forbid it. The chief source of information for those states that lie on the Mississippi, has been the personal observation of the author,--having explored most of the settlements in Missouri and Illinois, and a portion of Indiana and Ohio,--having spent more than eighteen years here, and seen the two former states, from an incipient territorial form of government, and a few scattered and detached settlements, arise to their present state of improvement, population, wealth and national importance. His next source of information has been from personal acquaintance and correspondence with many intelligent citizens of the states and territories he describes. Reference has also been had to the works of Hall, Flint, Darby, Breckenridge, Beck, Long, Schoolcraft, Lewis and Clarke, Mitchell's and Tanner's maps, Farmer's map of Michigan, Turnbull's map of Ohio, The Ohio Gazetteer, The Indiana Gazetteer, Dr. Drake's writings, Mr. Coy's Annual Register of Indian affairs, Ellicott's surveys, and several periodicals. J. M. P. _Rock Spring, Illinois, January, 1836._ CHAPTER I. GENERAL VIEW OF THE VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI. Its extent,--Subdivisions,--Population,--Physical features,--Animal, Vegetable and Mineral productions,--History,--Prospective increase of Population. The Valley of the Mississippi, in its proper geographical extent, embraces all that portion of the United States, lying between the Alleghany and Rocky Mountains, the waters of which are discharged into the gulf of Mexico, through the mouths of the Mississippi. I have embraced, however, under that general term, a portion of the country bordering on the northern lakes, including the north part of Ohio, the north-eastern portions of Indiana and Illinois, the whole of Michigan, with a considerable territorial district on the west side of lake Michigan, and around lake Superior. _Extent._ This great Valley is one of the largest divisions of the globe, the waters of which pass one estuary. To suppose the United States and its territory to be divided into three portions, the arrangement would be, the Atlantic slope--the Mississippi basin, or valley--and the Pacific slope. A glance on any map of North America, will show that this Valley includes about two thirds of the territory of the United States. The Atlantic slope contains about 390,000; the Pacific slope, about 300,000; which, combined, are 690,000 square miles: while the Valley of the Mississippi contains at least 1,300,000 square miles, or 833,000,000 acres. This Valley extends from the 29° to the 49° of N. latitude, or about 1400 miles from south to north; and from the 3° to the 35° of longitude west from Washington, or about 1470 miles from east to west. From the source of the Alleghany river to the sources of the Missouri, following the meanderings of the streams, is not less than 5000 miles. _Subdivisions._ The states and territories included, are a small section of New York watered by the heads of the Alleghany river, western Pennsylvania, western Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Territory of Arkansas, Indian Territory, the vast unsettled regions lying to the west and north of this Territory, the Wisconsin Territory including an extensive country west of the Mississippi and north of the state of Missouri, with the vast regions that lie towards the heads of the Mississippi, and around lake Superior.[1] _Population._ The following table, gives a comparative view of the population of the Valley of the Mississippi, and shows the proportional increase of the several States, parts of States, and Territories, from 1790 to the close of 1835, a period of 45 years. The column for 1835 is made up partly from the census taken in several states and territories, and partly by estimation. It is sufficiently accurate for general purposes. States, parts of | 1790 | 1800 | 1810 | 1820 | 1830 | 1835 States and | | | | | | Territories. | | | | | | ====================+=======+=======+=========+=========+=========+========== Western Pennsylvania| 75,000|130,000| 240,000 | 290,000| 380,000| 490,000 and a fraction of | | | | | | New York.} | | | | | | Western Virginia | 45,000| 75,000| 100,000| 147,178| 204,175| 230,000 Ohio | [_a_]45,000| 230,760| 581,434| 937,679|1,375,000 Indiana | | | 24,520| 147,178| 341,582| 600,000 Illinois | | | 12,282| 55,211| 157,575| 272,427 Missouri | | [_b_]20,845| 66,586| 140,074| 210,000 Michigan | | | 4,762| 8,896| 31,000| 83,000 Kentucky | 73,677|220,959| 406,511| 564,317| 688,844| 748,844 Tennessee | 35,691|105,602| 261,727| 422,813| 684,822| 735,000 Mississippi | [_c_]8,850| 40,352| 75,448| 136,806| 300,000 Louisiana | | | 76,556| 153,407| 214,693| 270,000 Arkansas Territory | | | | 14,273| 30,608| 51,809 [_e_]Wisconsin Ter. | | | | | | and New purchase | | | | [_d_]3,608| 15,000 --------------------+-------+-------+---------+---------+---------+--------- Total |229,368|585,411|1,418,315|2,526,741|3,951,466|5,381,080 ====================+=======+=======+=========+=========+=========+========= _a_ Including Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. _b_ Including Arkansas. _c_ Including Alabama. _d_ Included with Michigan in the census of 1830. _e_: The country west of the Mississippi, and north of the State of Missouri, was ceded by the Sauk Indians, Sept. 1832. It now contains about 6000 inhabitants. Probably there is no portion of the globe, of equal extent, that contains as much of soil fit for cultivation, and which is capable of sustaining and supplying with all the necessaries and conveniences, and most of the luxuries of life, so dense a population as this great Valley. Deducting one third of its surface for water and desert, which is a very liberal allowance, and there remains 866,667 square miles, or 554,666,880 acres of arable land. Let it become as populous as Massachusetts, which contains 610,014 inhabitants on an area of 7,800 square miles, or seventy-eight to every 640 acres, and the population of this immense region will amount to 67,600,000. The child is now born which will live to see this result. Suppose its population to become equally dense with England, including Wales, which contains 207 to the square mile, and its numbers will amount to 179,400,000. But let it become equal to the Netherlands, the most populous country on the globe, containing 230 to the square mile, and the Valley of the Mississippi teems with a population of 200 millions, a result which may be had in the same time that New England has been gathering its two millions. What reflections ought this view to present to the patriot, the philanthropist, and the christian. _Physical Features._ The physical features of this Valley are peculiar. 1. It includes two great inclined planes, one on its eastern, and the other on its western border, terminating with the Mississippi. 2. This river receives all the waters produced on these slopes, which are discharged by its mouths into the gulf of Mexico. 3. Every part of this vast region can be penetrated by steamboats, or other water craft; nor is there a spot in all this wide region, excepting a small district in the vast plains of Upper Missouri, that is more than one hundred miles from some navigable water. A boat may take in its lading on the banks of the Chatauque lake, in the State of New York; another may receive its cargo in the interior of Virginia; a third may start from the rice lakes at the head of the Mississippi; and a fourth may come laden with furs from the Chippewan mountains, 2,800 miles up the Missouri, and all meet at the mouth of the Ohio, and proceed in company to the ocean. 4. With the exception of its eastern and western borders, there are no mountains. Some portions are level, a large part is gently undulating, or what in the west is called "rolling," and the remainder is made up of abrupt hills, flint and limestone ridges, bluffs, and ravines. 5. It is divided into two great portions, the UPPER, and LOWER VALLEY, according to its general features, climate, staple productions, and habits of its population. The parallel of latitude that cuts the mouth of the Ohio river, will designate these portions with sufficient accuracy. North of this line the seasons are regularly divided into spring, summer, autumn, and winter. In the winter there is usually more or less snow, ice forms and frequently blocks up the rivers, navigation is obstructed, and cotton is not produced in sufficient quantity or quality to make it a staple for exportation. It is the region of furs, minerals, tobacco, hemp, live stock, and every description of grain and fruit that grows in New England. Its white population are mostly accustomed to labor. South of this line, cotton, tobacco, indigo, and sugar are staples. It has little winter, snow seldom covers the earth, ice never obstructs the rivers, and most of the labor is done by slaves. _Rivers._ The rivers are, the Mississippi and its tributaries, or more correctly, the Missouri and its tributaries. If we except the Amazon, no river can compare with this for length of its course, the number and extent of its tributaries, the vast country they drain, and their capabilities for navigation. Its tributaries generally issue either from the eastern or western mountains, and flow over this immense region, diffusing not only fertility to the soil, but affording facilities for commerce a great part of the year. The Missouri is unquestionably the main stream, for it is not only longer and discharges a larger volume of water than the Mississippi above its mouth, but it has branches, which, for the extent of country they drain, their length, and the volume of water they discharge, far exceed the upper Mississippi. The characteristics of these two rivers are each distinctly marked. The Missouri is turbid, violent in its motions, changing its currents; its navigation is interrupted or made difficult by snags, sawyers and planters, and it has many islands and sand-bars. Such is the character of the Mississippi below the mouth of the Missouri. But above its mouth, its waters are clear, its current gentle, while it is comparatively free from snags and sand-bars. The Missouri, which we have shown to be the principal stream, rises in the Chippewan, or Rocky mountains in latitude 44° north, and longitude about 35° west from Washington city. It runs a northeast course till after it receives the Yellow Stone, when it reaches past the 48° of latitude, thence an east, then a south, and finally a southeastern course, until it meets the current of the Mississippi, 20 miles above St. Louis, and in latitude 38° 45' north. Besides numerous smaller streams, the Missouri receives the Yellow Stone and Platte, which of themselves, in any other part of the world, would be called large rivers, together with the Sioux, Kansau, Grand, Chariton, Osage, and Gasconade, all large and navigable rivers. Its length, upon an entire comparative course, is 1870 miles, and upon a particular course, about 3000 miles. Lewis and Clark make the distance from the Mississippi to the great falls, 2580 miles. There are several things in some respects peculiar to this river, which deserve notice. 1. Its current is very rapid, usually at the rate of four or five miles an hour, when at its height; and it requires a strong wind to propel a boat with a sail against it. Steam overcomes its force, for boats ply regularly from St. Louis to the towns and landings on its banks within the borders of the state, and return with the produce of the country. Small steamboats have gone to the Yellow Stone for furs. Owing to the shifting of its current, and its snags and sand-bars, its navigation is less safe and pleasant than any other western river, but these difficulties are every year lessened by genius and enterprise. 2. Its water is always turbid, being of a muddy, ash color, though more so at its periodical rise than at other times. This is caused by extremely fine sand, received from the neighborhood of the Yellow Stone. During the summer flood, a tumbler of water taken from the Missouri, and precipitated, will produce about one fourth of its bulk in sediment. This sediment does not prevent its habitual use by hundreds who live on its banks, or move in boats over its surface. Some filtrate it, but many more drink it, and use it for culinary purposes, in its natural state. When entirely filtrated, it is the most limpid and agreeable river water I ever saw. Its specific gravity then, is about equal to rain water; but in its turbid state, it is much heavier than ordinary river water, for a boat will draw three or four inches less in it than in other rivers, with the same lading, and the human body will swim in it with but very little effort. It possesses some medicinal properties. Placed in an open vessel and exposed to the summer's sun, it remains pure for weeks. Eruptions on the skin and ulcerous sores are cured by wading or frequent bathings, and commonly it produces slight cathartic effects upon strangers upon its first use. The width of the Missouri river at St. Charles, is 550 yards. Its alluvial banks however are insecure, and are not unfrequently washed away for many yards at its annual floods. The bed of its channel is also precarious, and is elevated or depressed by the deposition or removal of its sandy foundation. Hence the elevation or depression of the surface of this river, affords no criterion of its depth, or of the volume of water it discharges at any one period. Undulatory motions, like the boiling of a pot, are frequently seen on its surface, caused by the shifting of the sand that forms its bed. The volume of water it ordinarily discharges into the Mississippi is vastly disproportionate to its length, or the number and size of its tributaries. I have seen less than six feet depth of water at St. Charles at a low stage, and it was once forded by a soldier, at Bellefontaine, four miles above its junction with the Mississippi. Evaporation takes up large quantities, but absorption throughout the porous soil of its wide bottoms consumes much more. In all the wells dug in the bottom lands of the Missouri, water is always found at the depth of the surface of the river, and invariably rises or sinks with the floods and ebbings of the stream. Volumes of sand frequently enter these wells as the river rises. Its periodical floods deserve notice. Ordinarily this river has three periods of rising and falling each year. The first rise is caused by the breaking up of winter on the Gasconade, Osage, Kansau, Chariton, Grand, and other branches of the lower Missouri, and occurs the latter part of February, or early in March. Its second rise is usually in April, when the Platte, Yellow Stone, and other streams pour into it their spring floods. But the flood that more usually attracts attention takes place from the 10th to the 25th of June, when the melting snows on the Chippewan mountains pour their contents into the Missouri. This flood is scarcely ever less than five, nor more than 20 feet at St. Louis, above the ordinary height of the river. On two occasions, however, since the country was known to the French, it has arisen to that height in the Mississippi as to flow over the American Bottom in Illinois, and drive the inhabitants of Cahokia and Kaskaskia from their villages to the bluffs. Rain in greater or less quantities usually falls during the rise of the river, and ceases when the waters subside. So uniform is this the case in Upper Missouri, the region beyond the boundary of the State, that the seasons are divided into wet and dry. Pumice stones and other volcanic productions occasionally float down its waters. _Mississippi River._ The extreme head of the longest branch of the Mississippi river, has been found in lake Itaska, or Lac la Biche, by Mr. Schoolcraft, who states it to be elevated 1500 feet above the Atlantic ocean, and distant 3,160 miles from the extreme outlet of the river at the gulf of Mexico. The outlet of Itaska lake, which is connected with a string of small lakes, is ten or twelve feet broad, and twelve or fifteen inches deep. This is in latitude about 48° north. From this it passes Cedar and several smaller lakes, and runs a winding course, 700 miles, to the falls of St. Anthony, where its waters are precipitated over a cataract of 16 or 17 feet perpendicular. It then continues a southeastern course to the Missouri, in N. lat, 38° 38', receiving the St. Croix, Chippewa, Wisconsin, Rock and Illinois rivers, with many smaller streams from the east, and the St. Peter's, Iowa, Des Moines, and Salt rivers, besides a number of smaller ones from the west. The current of the Missouri strikes that of the Mississippi at right angles, and throws it upon the eastern shore. When at a low stage, the waters of the two rivers are distinct till they pass St. Louis. The principal branch of the Upper Mississippi, is the St. Peter's, which rises in the great prairies in the northwest, and enters the parent stream ten miles below the falls of St. Anthony. Towards the sources of this river the quarries exist from which are made the red stone pipes of the Indians. This is sacred ground. Hostile tribes meet here, and part unmolested. Rock river drains the waters from the northern part of Illinois and Wisconsin, and enters the parent stream at 41° 30' north latitude. In latitude 39° comes in the Illinois, signifying the "River of Men;" and eighteen miles below this, it unites with, and is lost in the Missouri. Custom has fixed unalterably, the name _Mississippi_, to this united body of waters, that rolls its turbid waves towards the Mexican gulf; though, as has been intimated, it is but a continuation of the Missouri. Sixty miles below St. Louis, the Kaskaskia joins it, after a devious course of 400 miles. In 37° north latitude, the Ohio pours in its tribute, called by the early French explorers, "La Belle Rivière," the beautiful river. A little below 34°, the White river enters after a course of more than 1,000 miles. Thirty miles below that, the Arkansas, bringing its tribute from the confines of Mexico, pours in its waters. Above Natchez, the Yazoo from the east, and eighty miles below, the Red river from the west, unite their waters with the Mississippi. Red River takes its rise in the Mexican dominions, and runs a course of more than 2,000 miles. Hitherto, the waters in the wide regions of the west have been congregating to one point. The "Father of Waters," is now upwards of a mile in width, and several fathoms deep. During its annual floods, it overflows its banks below the mouth of the Ohio, and penetrates the numerous bayous, lakes, and swamps, and especially on its western side. In many places these floods extend thirty or forty miles into the interior. But after it receives the Red river, it begins to throw off its surplus waters, which flow in separate channels to the gulf, and never again unite with the parent stream. Several of these communications are held with the ocean at different and distant points. _Ohio River._ The Ohio river is formed by the junction of the Alleghany and Monongahela, at Pittsburg. The Alleghany river rises not far from the head of the western branch of the Susquehannah, in the highlands of McKean county, Pennsylvania. It runs north till it penetrates Cataraugus county, New York, then turns west, then southwest, and finally takes a southern course to Pittsburg. It receives a branch from the Chatauque lake, Chatauque county, New York. The Monongahela rises near the sources of the Kenhawa, in western Virginia, and runs north till it meets the Alleghany. The general course of the Ohio is southwest. Its current is gentle, and it receives a number of tributaries, which are noticed in the States where they run. The Valley of the Mississippi has been arranged by Mr. Darby, into four great subdivisions. 1. The _Ohio Valley_, length 750 miles, and mean width 261; containing 196,000 square miles. 2. _Mississippi Valley_, above Ohio, including the minor valley of Illinois, but exclusive of Missouri, 650 miles long, and 277 mean width, and containing 180,000 square miles. 3. _Lower Valley of the Mississippi_, including White, Arkansas, and Red river vallies, 1,000 miles long, and 200 wide, containing 200,000 square miles. 4. _Missouri proper_, including Osage, Kansau, Platte rivers, &c. 1,200 miles long, and 437 wide, containing 523,000 square miles. "The _Valley of the Ohio_ is better known than any of the others; has much fertile land, and much that is sterile, or unfit for cultivation, on account of its unevenness. It is divided into two unequal portions, by the Ohio river; leaving on the right or northwest side 80,000, and on the left or southeast side, 116,000 square miles. The eastern part of this valley is hilly, and rapidly acclivous towards the Appalachian mountains. Indeed its high hills, as you approach these mountains, are of a strongly marked mountainous character. Of course the rivers which flow into the Ohio--the Monongahela, Kenhawa, Licking, Sandy, Kentucky, Green, Cumberland, and Tennessee--are rapid, and abounding in cataracts and falls, which, towards their sources, greatly impede navigation. The western side of this Valley is, also, hilly for a considerable distance from the Ohio, but towards its western limit, it subsides to a remarkably level region. So that whilst the eastern line of this Valley lies along the high table land, on which the Appalachian mountains rest, and where the rivers of the eastern section of this Valley rise, which is at least 2,000 miles generally above the ocean level; the western line has not an elevation of much more than half of that amount on the north, and which greatly subsides towards the Kaskaskia. The rivers of the western section are Beaver, Muskingum, Hockhocking, Scioto, Miami, and Wabash. Along the Ohio, on each side, are high hills, often intersected with deep ravines, and sometimes openings of considerable extent, and well known by the appellation of "Ohio hills." Towards the mouth of the Ohio, these hills almost wholly disappear, and extensive level bottoms, covered with heavy forests of oak, sycamore, elm, poplar, and cotton wood, stretch along each side of the river. On the lower section of the river, the water, at the time of the spring floods, often overflows these bottoms to a great extent. This fine Valley embraces considerably more than one half of the whole population of the entire Valley of the West. The western parts of Pennsylvania and Virginia, the entire states of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, the larger part of Tennessee, and a smaller part of Illinois, are in the Valley of the Ohio." _The Upper Valley of the Mississippi_ possesses a surface far less diversified than the Valley of the Ohio. The country where its most northern branches take their rise, is elevated table land, abounding with marshes and lakes, that are filled with a graniferous vegetable called wild rice. It is a slim, shrivelled grain of a brownish hue, and gathered by the Indians in large quantities for food. There are tracts of arable land covered with elm, linden, pine, hemlock, cherry, maple, birch and other timber common to a northern climate. From the same plateau flow the numerous branches of Red river, and other streams that flow into lake Winnipeck, and thence into Hudson's bay. Here, too, are found some of the head branches of the waters of St. Lawrence, that enter the Lake of the Woods, and Superior. In the whole country of which we are speaking, there is nothing that deserves the name of mountain. Below the falls of St. Anthony the river bluffs are often abrupt, wild and romantic, and at their base and along the streams are thousands of quartz crystals, carnelians and other precious stones. But a short distance in the rear, you enter upon table land of extensive prairies, with clumps of trees, and groves along the streams. Further down, abrupt cliffs and overhanging precipices are frequently seen at the termination of the river alluvion. The whole country northwest of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi, as far north as the falls of St. Anthony, exhibits striking marks of a diluvial formation, by a gradual retiring of the waters. From the summit level that divides the waters of the lakes from those of the Mississippi, through Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, which is scarcely a perceptible ridge, to the south point of Illinois at the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi, appears to have once been a plane with an inclination equal to 12 or 15 inches per mile. The ravines and vallies appear to have been gradually scooped out by the abrasion of the waters. "The _Lower Mississippi Valley_, has a length of 1,200 miles, from northwest to southeast, considering the source of the Arkansas, and the mouth of the Mississippi river as extreme points; reaching from north latitude 29° to 42°, and without estimating mountains, ridges, or peaks, differs in relative elevation at least 500 feet. "The _Arkansas river_ rises near north latitude 42°, and longitude 32° west from Washington, and falls into the Mississippi at 33° 56', passing over eight degrees of latitude. "_Red River_ rises in the mountainous country of Mexico, north of Texas, in north latitude 34°; and west longitude 28° from Washington, and falls into the Mississippi in latitude 31°. They are both remarkable rivers for their extent, the number of their branches, the volume of their waters, the quantity of alluvion they carry down to the parent stream, and the color of their waters. Impregnated by saline particles, and colored with ocherous earth, the waters of these two rivers are at once brackish and nauseous to the taste, particularly near their mouths; that of Red river is so much so at Natchitoches at low water that it cannot be used for culinary purposes. "At a short distance below the mouth of the Red river, a large bayou, (as it is called,) or outlet, breaks from the Mississippi on the west; by which, it is believed, that as large a volume of water as the Red river brings to the parent river, is drained off, and runs to the gulf of Mexico, fifty miles from the mouth of the Mississippi. The name of this bayou is Atchafalaya, or as it is commonly called, _Chaffalio_. Below this bayou, another of large dimensions breaks forth on the same side, and finally falls into the Atchafalaya. This is the Placquemine. Still lower, at Donaldsonville, ninety miles above New Orleans, on the same side, the Lafourche bayou breaks out, and pursues a course parallel to the Mississippi, fifty miles west of the mouth of that river. On the east side, the Ibberville bayou drains off a portion of the waters of the Mississippi, into lakes Maurepas, Ponchartrain, Borgnes, and the gulf of Mexico, and thus forms the long and narrow island of Orleans. "In the lower Valley of the Mississippi there is a great extent of land of the very richest kind. There is also much that is almost always overflown with waters, and is a perpetual swamp. There are extensive prairies in this Valley; and towards the Rocky mountains; on the upper waters of the Arkansas and Red rivers, there are vast barren steppes or plains of sand, dreary and barren, like the central steppes of Asia. On the east of the Mississippi, are extensive regions of the densest forests, which form a striking contrast with the prairies which stretch on the west of that great river. "_The Valley of the Missouri_ extends 1200 miles in length, and 700 in width, and embraces 253,000 square miles. The Missouri river rises in the Chippewan mountains, through eight degrees, or nearly 600 miles. The Yellow Stone is its longest branch. The course of the Missouri, after leaving the Rocky mountains, is generally southeast, until it unites with the Mississippi. The principal branches flow from the southwest. They are the Osage, Kansas, Platte, &c. The three most striking features of this Valley are, 1st. The turbid character of its waters. 2d. The very unequal volumes of the right and left confluences. 3d. The immense predominance of the open prairies, over the forests which line the rivers. The western part of this Valley rises to an elevation towards the Chippewan mountains, equal to ten degrees of temperature. Ascending from the lower verge of this widely extended plain, wood becomes more and more scarce, until one naked surface spreads on all sides. Even the ridges and chains of the Chippewan, partake of these traits of desolation. The traveller, who has read the descriptions of central Asia, by Tooke or Pallas, will feel on the higher branches of the Missouri, a resemblance, at once striking and appalling; and he will acknowledge, if near to the Chippewan mountains in winter, that the utmost intensity of frost over Siberia and Mongolia, has its full counterpart in North America, on similar, if not on lower latitudes. There is much fertile land in the Valley of the Missouri, though much of it must be forever the abode of the buffalo and the elk, the wolf and the deer.[2] FOOTNOTES: [1] Why the names Huron, Mandan, Sioux, Osage, and _Ozark_ have been applied by Darby and other authors, to the extensive regions on the Upper Mississippi, the Upper Missouri, and the Arkansas rivers, I am not able to solve. _Osage_ is a French corruption of _Wos-sosh-ee_, and _Ozark_ is an awkward, illiterate corruption of Osage. _Sioux_ is another French corruption, the origin of which is not now easily ascertained. Carver and other travellers, call this nation of Indiana Nau-do-wes-sees. Chiefs of this nation have repeatedly disclaimed the name of Sioux, (pronounced Soos.) They sometimes call themselves Da-co-tah. [2] Darby. CHAPTER II. GENERAL VIEW OF THE VALLEY OF THE MISSISSIPPI. (CONTINUED.) Productions. _Minerals._--But few mines exist in the Lower Valley of the Mississippi. _Louisiana_, being chiefly alluvion, furnishes only two specimens, sulphuret of antimony, and meteoric iron ore. It is supposed that the pine barrens towards Texas, if explored, would add to the number. The only minerals in _Mississippi_, are amethyst, of which one crystal has been found; potter's clay, at the Chickasaw Bluffs, and near Natchez; sulphuret of lead in small quantities, about Port Gibson; and sulphate of iron. Petrified trunks of trees are found in the bed of the Mississippi, opposite Natchez. In Arkansas Territory are various species. Here may be found the native magnet, or magnetic oxide of iron, possessing strong magnetic power. Iron ores are very abundant. Sulphate of copper, sulphuret of zinc, alum, and aluminous slate are found about the cove of Washitau, and the Hot Springs. Buhr stone of a superior quality exists in the surrounding hills. The hot springs are interesting on account of the minerals around them, the heat of their waters, and as furnishing a retreat to valetudinarians from the sickly regions of the south. They are situated on the Washitau, a large stream that empties itself into Red river. The _lead mines_ of Missouri have been worked for more than a century. They are distributed through the country from thirty to one hundred miles southwest from St. Louis, and probably extend through the Gasconade country. Immense quantities of iron ore exist in this region. Lead is found in vast quantities in the northern part of Illinois, the south part of the Wisconsin Territory, and the country on the opposite side of the Mississippi. These mines are worked extensively. Native copper in large quantities is found in the same region. Large quantities of iron ore is found in the mountainous parts of Tennessee and Kentucky, where furnaces and forges have been erected. Also, in the hilly parts of Ohio, particularly at the falls of Licking four miles west of Zanesville, and in Adams and Lawrence counties near the Ohio river. With _iron ore_ the West is profusely supplied. _Bituminous coal_ exists in great profusion in various parts of the Western Valley. The hills around Pittsburg are inexhaustible. It extends through many portions of Ohio and Indiana. Nearly every county in Illinois is supplied with this valuable article. Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee have their share. Immense quantities are found in the mountains along the Kenhawa, in Western Virginia, and it is now employed in the manufacture of salt. The Cumberland mountains in Tennessee contain immense deposits. _Muriate of Soda_ or common salt, exists in most of the states and territories of this Valley. Near the sources of the Arkansas incrustations are formed by evaporation during the dry season, in the depressed portions of the immense prairies of that region. The celebrated salt rock is on the red fork of the Canadian, a branch of the Arkansas river. Jefferson lake has its water strongly impregnated with salt, and is of a bright red color. Beds of rock salt are in the mountains of this region. Several counties of Missouri have abundant salt springs. Considerable quantities of salt are manufactured in Jackson, Gallatin and Vermillion counties, Illinois. Saline springs, and "licks" as they are called, abound through Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, Ohio, Western Pennsylvania, and Western Virginia. Salt is manufactured in great abundance at the Kenhawa salines, 16 miles above Charlestown, Va., and brought down the Kenhawa river and carried to all the Western States. Much salt is made also on the Kiskiminitas, a branch of the Alleghany river, at the Yellow creek above Steubenville, and in the Scioto country in Ohio. The water is frequently obtained by boring through rock of different strata, several hundred feet deep. Copper, antimony, manganese, and several other minerals are found in different parts of the West, but are not yet worked. _Nitrate of potash_ is found in great abundance in the caverns of Kentucky and Tennessee, also in Missouri, from which large quantities of Saltpetre are manufactured. _Sulphate of Magnesia_ is found in Kentucky, Indiana, and perhaps other states. Sulphur and other mineral springs are very common in the western states. _Vegetable Productions._--_Trees, &c._ Almost every species of timber and shrub common to the Atlantic states is found in some part of the Western Valley. The cotton wood and sycamore are found along all the rivers below the 41° of N. latitude. The cypress begins near the mouth of the Ohio and spreads through the alluvion portions of the Lower Valley. The magnolia, with its large, beautiful flower, grows in Louisiana, and the long leaf pine flourishes in the uplands of the same region. The sugar maple abounds in the northern and middle portions. The chestnut is found in the eastern portion of the Valley as far as Indiana, but not a tree is known to exist in a natural state west of the Wabash river. Yellow or pitch pine, grows in several counties of Missouri, especially on the Gasconade, from whence large quantities of lumber are brought to St. Louis. White pine from the Alleghany river is annually sent to all the towns on the Ohio, and further down. Considerable quantities of white pine grow on the upper Mississippi, along the western shore of Michigan, about Green bay, and along the shores of lake Superior. The yellow poplar, (Liriodendron tulipifera) is a majestic tree, valuable for light boards, and may be found in some parts of most of the western states. The beech tree is frequently found in company. The live oak, so valuable in ship building, is found south of the 31°, and along the Louisiana coast. The orange, fig, olive, pine apple, &c. find a genial climate about New Orleans. High in the north we have the birch, hemlock, fir, and other trees peculiar to a cold region. Amongst our fruit bearing trees we may enumerate the walnut, hickory or shag bark, persimmon, pecan, mulberry, crab apple, pawpaw, wild plum, and wild cherry. The vine grows everywhere. Of the various species of oak, elm, ash, linden, hackberry, &c. it is unnecessary to speak. Where forests abound, the trees are tall and majestic. In the prairie country, the timber is usually found on the streams, or in detached groves. In the early settlement of Kentucky there were found, south of Green river, large tracts, with stunted scattering trees intermixed with hazel and brushwood. From this appearance it was inferred that the soil was of inferior quality, and these tracts were denominated "barrens." Subsequently, it was found that this land was of prime quality. The term "barrens" is now applied extensively in the West to the same description of country. It distinguishes an intermediate grade from forest and prairie. A common error has prevailed abroad that our prairie land is wet. _Prairie_ is a French word signifying _meadow_, and is applied to any description of surface, that is destitute of timber and brushwood, and clothed with grass. Wet, dry, level, and undulating, are terms of description merely, and apply to prairies in the same sense as they do to forests. The prairies in summer are clothed with grass, herbage and flowers, exhibit a delightful prospect, and furnish most abundant and luxuriant pasturage for stock. Much of the forest land in the Western Valley produces a fine range for domestic animals and swine. Thousands are raised, and the emigrant grows wealthy, from the bounties of nature, with but little labor. Of _animals_, _birds_ and _reptiles_, little need be said. The buffalo was in Illinois the beginning of the present century. They are not found now within three hundred miles of Missouri and Arkansas, and they are fast receding. Deer are found still in all frontier settlements. Wolves, foxes, wild cats, raccoons, opossums, and squirrels are plenty. The brown bear is still hunted in some parts of the western states. Col. Crockett was a famous bear hunter in Western Tennessee, The white bear, mountain sheep, antelope and beaver, are found in the defiles of the Rocky mountains. The elk is still found by the hunter contiguous to newly formed settlements. All the domestic animals of the United States flourish here. Nearly all the feathered tribe of the Atlantic slope are to be found in the Valley. Pelicans, wild geese, swans, cranes, ducks, paroquets, wild turkeys, prairie hens, &c. are found in different states, especially on the Mississippi. _Reptiles._ The rattlesnake, copperhead snake, moccasin snake, bull snake, and the various snakes usually found in the Atlantic states are here. Of the venomous kinds, multitudes are destroyed by the deer and swine. Chameleons and scorpions exist in the Lower Valley, and lizards everywhere. The alligator, an unwieldy and bulky animal, is found in the rivers and lakes south of 34° north latitude. He sometimes destroys calves and pigs, and very rarely, even young children. _History._--The honor of the discovery of this country is disputed by the Spanish, English, and French. It is probable that Sebastian Cabot sailed along the shores of what was afterwards called Florida, but a few years after Columbus discovered America. Spanish authors claim that Juan Ponce de Leon discovered and named Florida, in 1512. Narvaez, another Spanish commander, having obtained a grant of Florida in 1528, landed four or five hundred men, but was lost by shipwreck near the mouth of the Mississippi. Ferdinand de Soto was probably the first white man who saw the Mississippi river. He is said to have marched 1000 men from Florida, through the Chickasaw country, to the Mississippi, near the mouth of Red river, where he took sick and died. His men returned. Some writers suppose De Soto travelled as far north as Kentucky, or the Ohio river. This is not probable. The French were the first to explore and settle the West, and they held jurisdiction over the country of Illinois for 80 years, when it fell into the hands of the British upon the conquest of Canada. In 1564, Florida was settled by a colony of Huguenots, under Admiral Coligny, who were afterwards massacred by the Spaniards, because they were Protestant _heretics_. In 1608, Admiral Champlaine founded Quebec, from which French settlements spread through the Canadas. About 1670, the notion prevailed amongst the French that visited Canada, that a western passage to the Pacific ocean existed. They learned from the Indians that far in the west there was a great river; but of its course or termination they could learn nothing. They supposed that this river communicated with the western ocean. To investigate this question, P. Marquette, a Jesuit, and Joliet, were appointed by M. Talon, the Intendant of New France. Marquette was well acquainted with the Canadas, and had great influence with the Indian tribes. They conducted an expedition through the lakes, up Green bay and Fox river, to the Portage, where it approaches the Wisconsin, to which they passed, and descended that river to the Mississippi, which they reached the 17th of June, 1673. They found a river much larger and deeper than it had been represented by the Indians. Their regular journal was lost on their return to Canada; but from the account, afterwards given by Joliet, they found the natives friendly, and that a tradition existed amongst them of the residence of a "Mon-e-to," or spirit, near the mouth of the Missouri, which they could not pass. They turned their course up the Illinois, and were highly delighted with the placid stream, and the woodlands and prairies through which it flowed. They were hospitably received and kindly treated by the Illinois, a numerous nation of Indians who were destitute of the cruelty of savages. The word "Illinois," or "Illini," is said by Hennepin, to signify a "_full grown man_." This nation appears to have originally possessed the Illinois country, and also a portion west of the Mississippi. The nation was made up of eight tribes:--the Miamies, Michigamies, Mascotins, Kaskaskias, Kahokias, Peorias, Piankeshaws, and Tau-mar-waus. Marquette continued among these Indians with a view to christianize them; but Joliet returned to Canada and reported the discoveries he had made. Several years elapsed before any one attempted to follow up the discoveries of Marquette and Joliet. M. de La Salle, a native of Normandy, but who had resided many years in Canada, was the first to extend these early discoveries. He was a man of intelligence, talents, enterprise, and perseverance. After obtaining the sanction of the king of France, he set out on his projected expedition, in 1678, from Frontenac, with Chevalier Tonti, his lieutenant, and Father Hennepin, a Jesuit missionary, and thirty or forty men. He spent about one year in exploring the country bordering on the lakes, and in selecting positions for forts and trading posts, to secure the Indian trade to the French. After he had built a fort at Niagara, and fitted out a small vessel, he sailed through the lakes to Green bay, then called the "Bay of Puants." From thence he proceeded with his men in canoes towards the south end of lake Michigan, and arrived at the mouth of the "river of the Miamis" in November, 1679. This is thought to be the Milwaukee in Wisconsin Territory. Here he built a fort, left eight or ten men, and passed with the rest of his company across the country to the waters of the Illinois river, and descended that river a considerable distance, when he was stopped for want of supplies. This was occasioned by the loss of a boat which had been sent from his post on Green bay. He was now compelled by necessity to build a fort, which, on account of the anxiety of mind he experienced, was called _Creve-coeur_, or broken heart. The position of this fort cannot now be ascertained; but from some appearances, it is thought to have been near Spring bay, in the northeast part of Tazewell county. At this period the Illinois were engaged in a war with the Iroquois, a numerous, warlike, and cruel nation, with whom La Salle had traded, while on the borders of Canada. The former, according to Indian notions of friendship, expected assistance from the French; but the interests and safety of La Salle depended upon terminating this warfare, and to this object he directed his strenuous efforts. The suspicious Illinois construed this into treachery, which was strengthened by the malicious and perfidious conduct of some of his own men, and pronounced upon him the sentence of death. Immediately he formed and executed the bold and hazardous project of going alone and unarmed to the camp of the Illinois, and vindicating his conduct. He declared his innocence of the charges, and demanded the author. He urged that the war should be terminated, and that the hostile nations should live in peace. The coolness, bravery, and eloquence of La Salle filled the Indians with astonishment, and entirely changed their purposes. The calumet was smoked, presents mutually exchanged, and a treaty of amity concluded. The original project of discovery was now pursued. Father Hennepin started on the 28th of February, 1680, and having passed down the Illinois, ascended the Mississippi to the falls of St. Anthony. Here he was taken prisoner, robbed, and carried to the Indian villages, from which he made his escape, returned to Canada by the way of the Wisconsin, and from thence to France, where he published an account of his travels. La Salle visited Canada to obtain supplies, returned to Creve-coeur, and shortly after descended the Illinois, and then the Mississippi, where he built one or two forts on its banks, and took possession of the country in the name of the king of France, and in honor of him called it _Louisiana_. One of these forts is thought to have been built on the west side of the river, between St. Louis and Carondalet. After descending the Mississippi to its mouth, he returned to the Illinois, and on his way back left some of his companions to occupy the country. This is supposed to have been the commencement of the villages of Kaskaskia and Cahokia, in 1683. La Salle went to France, fitted out an expedition to form a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, sailed to the gulf of Mexico, but not being able to find the mouths of that river, he commenced an overland journey to his fort on the Illinois. On this journey he was basely assassinated by two of his own men.[3] After the death of La Salle, no attempts to discover the mouth of the Mississippi were made till about 1699, but the settlements in the Illinois country were gradually increased by emigrants from Canada. In 1712, the king of France, by letters patent, gave the whole country of Louisiana to M. Crosat, with the commerce of the country, with the profits of all the mines, reserving for his own use one fifth of the gold and silver. After expending large sums in digging and exploring for the precious metals without success, Crosat gave up his privilege to the king, in 1717. Soon after, the colony was granted to the Mississippi company, projected by Mr. Law, which took possession of Louisiana, and appointed M. Bienville governor. In 1719, La Harpe commanded a fort with French troops, not far from the mouth of the Missouri river. Shortly after, several forts were built within the present limits of Illinois, of which fort Chartres was the most considerable. By these means a chain of communication was formed from Canada to the mouth of the Mississippi. In 1699, M. Ibberville arrived in the gulf of Mexico with two frigates, and in March ascended the river in a felucca one hundred leagues, and returned by the bayou or outlet that bears his name, through lake Ponchartrain to the gulf. He planted his colony at Biloxi, a healthy but sterile spot between the Mobile and Mississippi rivers, and built a fortification. During several succeeding years much exploring was done, and considerable trade carried on with the Indians for peltries, yet these expeditions were a source of much expense to France. In January, 1702, the colony at Mobile was planted; several other settlements were soon after formed. The Catholics also commenced several missions amongst the Indians. Difficulties frequently occurred with their Spanish neighbors in Florida and Mexico. M. Ibberville died in 1706, and M. Bienville succeeded him in the government of Louisiana for many years. The city of New Orleans was founded, during his administration, in 1719. It is situated on the east bank of the Mississippi, one hundred and five miles from its mouth. From 1723 to 1730, the French had exterminating wars with the Natchez, a powerful nation of Indians. They had killed 700 French in 1723, and about 1730 the French exterminated the nation. Various wars took place subsequently with the Spanish and English. But over most of the Indians along the Mississippi, these French colonists gained extraordinary influence.--During this period emigrants continued to arrive from France, so that the colonists rapidly increased in numbers. The Mississippi land scheme, or "bubble" as it was called, originated with the celebrated John Law in 1717, which soon burst and spread ruin throughout the monied interests of France. The amount of stock created, was said to equal 310,000,000 of dollars. The whole proved an entire failure, but it served to increase greatly the population of Louisiana, so that from 1736, the colonies in the Lower Valley prospered. In 1754, the war commenced between France and England relative to the boundaries of the Canadas. At that period France claimed all the countries west of the Alleghany mountains, while England on the other hand had granted to Virginia, Connecticut and other colonies, charters which extended across the continent to the "South Sea," as the Pacific ocean was then called. A grant also was made by Virginia, and the crown of Great Britain, of 600,000 acres to a company called "The Ohio Company." The governor of New France, as Canada and Louisiana was then called, protested, erected forts on lake Erie, and at the present site of Pittsburg, and enlisted the Indians against the English and Americans. Pittsburg was then called Fort du Quesne. Then followed Braddock's war, as this contest is called in the west,--the mission of Major (afterward General) Washington,--the defeat of Braddock; and finally by the memorable victory of Wolfe at Quebec, and the lesser ones at Niagara and Ticonderoga, and by victories of the English fleet on the ocean, the French were humbled, and at the treaty of Paris, in 1763, surrendered all their claims to the country east of the Mississippi. Towards the close of the war, however, France, by a secret treaty, ceded all the country west of the Mississippi, and including New Orleans, to Spain, who held possession till 1803, when it was delivered to the French government under Napoleon, and by him ceded to the United States for 15,000,000 of dollars. The English held possession of the military posts, and exercised jurisdiction over the country of Illinois, and the adjacent regions, till 1778, during the revolutionary war; when by a secret expedition, without direct legislative sanction, but by a most enterprising, skilful, and hazardous military manoeuvre, the posts of Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Fort Chartres and Vincennes were captured by Gen. GEORGE ROGERS CLARK, with a small force of volunteer Americans, and that portion of the Valley fell under the jurisdiction of Virginia. The legislature of Virginia sanctioned the expedition of Clark, which the Executive, Patrick Henry and his council, with Thomas Jefferson, George Wythe, and George Mason, by written instructions, had agreed should be done, and a county called "Illinois" was organized the same year. In 1784, Virginia, in conjunction with other states, ceded all claims to the Great West, to the United States, reserving certain tracts for the payment of revolutionary claims. This cession laid the foundation for five new states northwest of Ohio, when each district should have 60,000 inhabitants, and even a less number, by consent of Congress. Two restrictions were peremptorily enjoined,--that each state should adopt a constitution with a republican form of government, and that slavery or involuntary servitude, should be forever prohibited. It is unnecessary here to enter into details of the settlement of each particular state,--the incessant attacks from the Indians,--the border wars that ensued,--the adventures of Boone and his associates in settling Kentucky,--the unfortunate campaigns of Harmar and St. Clair,--the victorious one of Wayne,--or the reminiscences and events of the war of 1812, and its termination in 1815. Some historical notices of each state may be found in their proper place. _Prospective increase of Population._ For a long period, in the states of the west, the increase of population was slow, and retarded by several causes. Difficulties of a formidable character had to be surmounted. The footsteps of the American emigrants were everywhere drenched in blood, shed by infuriated savage foes, and before 1790 more than 5,000 persons had been murdered, or taken captive and lost to the settlements. "It has been estimated, that in the short space of seven years, from 1783 to 1790, more than fifteen hundred of the inhabitants of Kentucky were either massacred or carried away into a captivity worse than death, by the Indians; and an equal number from Western Pennsylvania and Virginia, in the same period, met with a similar fate. The settlers on the frontiers were almost constantly, for a period of forty years, harassed either by actual attacks of the savages, or the daily expectation of them. The tomahawk and the scalping knife, were the objects of their fears by day and by night."[4] Hence, in suggesting reasons showing why the population of this Valley must increase in future in a far greater ratio than in the past, it will appear: 1. That the most perfect security is now enjoyed by all emigrants, both for their families and property. By the wise and beneficent arrangement of government, the Indian tribes have nearly all removed to the Territory specially allotted for their occupancy west of Missouri and Arkansas. The grand error committed in past times in relation to the Indians, and which has been the source of incalculable evils to both races, has been the want of definite, fixed and permanent lines of demarcation betwixt them. It will be seen under the proper head, that a system of measures is now in operation that will not only preserve peace between the frontier settlements and the Indian tribes, but that to a great extent, they are becoming initiated into the habits of civilized life. There is now no more danger to the population of these states and territories from _Indian_ depredations, than to the people of the Atlantic states. 2. The increased facilities of emigration, and the advantage of sure and certain markets for every species of production, furnishes a second reason why population will increase in the western Valley beyond any former period. Before the purchase of Louisiana, the western people had no outlet for their produce, and the chief mode of obtaining every description of merchandize,--even salt and iron,--was by the slow and expensive method of transportation by wagons and pack-horses, across almost impassible mountains and extremely difficult roads. Now, every convenience and luxury of life is carried with comparative ease, to every town and settlement throughout the Valley, and every species of produce is sent off in various directions, to every port on earth if necessary. And these facilities are multiplying and increasing every hour: Turnpike roads, rail roads, canals, and steamboat navigation have already provided such facilities for removing from the Atlantic to the Western States, that no family desirous of removing, need hesitate or make a single inquiry as to facilities of getting to this country. 3. The facilities of trade and intercourse between the different sections of the Valley, are now superior to most countries on earth, and are increasing every year. And no country on earth admits of such indefinite improvement either by land or water. More than twenty thousand miles of actual steamboat navigation, with several hundred miles of canal navigation, constructed or commenced, attest the truth of this statement. The first steamboat on the western waters was built at Pittsburg in 1811, and not more than seven or eight had been built, when the writer emigrated to this country in 1817. At this period, (January 1836,) there are several hundred boats on the western waters, and some of the largest size. In 1817, about twenty barges, averaging about one hundred tons each, performed the whole commercial business of transporting merchandize from New Orleans to Louisville and Cincinnati. Each performed one trip, going and returning within the year. About 150 keel boats performed the business on the Upper Ohio to Pittsburg. These averaged about 30 tons each, and were employed one month in making the voyage from Louisville to Pittsburg. Three days, or three days and a half is now the usual time occupied by the steam packets between the two places, and from seven to twelve days between Louisville and New Orleans. Four days is the time of passing from the former place to St. Louis. 4. A fourth reason why population will increase in future in a greater ratio than the past is derived from the increase of population in the Atlantic states, and the greater desire for removal to the west. At the close of the revolutionary war the population of the whole Union but little exceeded two millions. Vast tracts of wilderness then existed in the old states, which have since been subdued, and from whence thousands of enterprising citizens are pressing their way into the Great Valley. Two thirds of the territory of New York, large portions of New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, an extensive district in middle Pennsylvania, to say nothing of wide regions in the southern states, were comprised in this wilderness. These extensive regions have become populous, and are sending out vast numbers of emigrants to the west. Europe is in commotion, and the emigration to North America, in 1832, reached 200,000, a due proportion of which settle in the Western Valley. 5. A fifth reason will be founded upon the immense amount of land for the occupancy of an indefinite number of emigrants, much of which will not cost the purchaser over _one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre_. Without giving the extravagant estimates that have been made by many writers of the wide and uninhabitable desert between the Indian Territory west of Missouri and Arkansas, and the Rocky mountains, nor swampy and frozen regions at the heads of the Mississippi river, and around lake Superior, I will merely exhibit the amount of lands admitting of _immediate_ settlement and cultivation, within the boundaries of the new States and organized Territories. According to the report of the Secretary of the Treasury up to the 30th day of September, 1831, the estimated amount of unsold lands, on which the foreign and Indian titles had been extinguished, within the limits of the new States and Territories, was 227,293,884 acres;--and that the Indian title remained on 113,577,869 acres within the same limits.[5] The Commissioner of the General Land Office in December, 1827, estimated the public domain, beyond the boundaries of the new States and Territories, to be 750 millions of acres. Much of this however, is uninhabitable. According to the Report of 1831, there had been granted to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Alabama for internal Improvements, 2,187,665 acres;--for Colleges, Academies and Universities in the new States and Territories, 508,009;--for education, being the thirty-sixth part of the public lands appropriated to common schools, 7,952,538 acres;--and for seats of government to some of the new States and Territories, 21,589 acres. Up to January, 1826, there had been sold, from the commencement of the land system, only 19,239,412 acres. Since that period to the close of 1835, there have been sold, about 33 millions of acres, making in all sold, a little more than 52 millions. This statement includes Alabama and Florida, which we have not considered as strictly within the Valley. After a hasty and somewhat imperfect estimate of the public lands that are now in market, or will be brought into market within a few years, within the limits of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Michigan, and the Territory of Wisconsin, the amount may be put at 130 millions of acres. This amount admits of immediate settlement and cultivation, and much of it may be put under cultivation without the immense labor of clearing and subduing forest lands. The comparison between the amount of sales of public lands within the last ten years, and the preceding forty years, shows that emigration to the West is increasing at a ratio beyond what is ordinarily supposed, and that the next ten years will find a majority of the population of the United States within this Great Valley. Sales of land from 1786 to 1826, (40 years) 19,239,412 acres. " " from 1826 to 1835, (10 years) 33,000,000 acres. Three millions of families may find farms in the West. The extensive prairie lands of Illinois and Missouri present no obstacle to the settlement of the country. Already, prairies for many miles in extent have been turned into farms. 6. A sixth reason why the increase of the future population of the Valley will greatly exceed the past, is derived from the increased confidence of the community in the general health of the country. The most unreasonable notions have prevailed abroad relative to the health of the western states. All new settlements are more or less unfavorable to health, which, when cultivated and settled become healthy. As a separate chapter will be devoted to this subject, I only advert to the fact now of the increased confidence of the people in the Atlantic States, in the salubrity of our western climate, which already has tended to increase emigration; but which, from facts becoming more generally known, will operate to a much greater extent in future. 7. I will only add that there is already a great amount of intelligence, and of excellent society in all the settled portions of the Western Valley. "The idea is no longer entertained by Eastern people, that going to the West, or the 'Backwoods,' as it was formerly called, is to remove to a heathen land, to a land of ignorance and barbarism, where the people do nothing but rob, and fight, and gouge! Some parts of the West have obtained this character, but most undeservedly, from the _Fearons_, the [Basil] _Halls_, the _Trollopes_, and other ignorant and insolent travellers from England, who, because they were not allowed to insult and outrage as they pleased, with Parthian spirit, hurled back upon us their poisoned javelins and darts as they left us. There is indeed much destitution of moral influence and means of instruction in many, very many, neighborhoods of the West. But there is in all the principal towns a state of society, with which the most refined, I was going to say the most fastidious, of the eastern cities need not be ashamed to mingle."--_Baird._ The eastern emigrant will find, that wholesome legislation, and much of the influence of religion are enjoyed in the Valley of the Mississippi, extending to him all he can ask in the enjoyment of his rights, and the protection of his property. Common School systems have been commenced in some of the states,--others are following their example, and the subject of general education is receiving increasing attention every year. Colleges and other literary institutions are planted, and religious institutions and means of religious instruction are rapidly increasing. Noble and successful efforts are making by the Bible, Missionary, Tract, Sabbath School, Temperance, and other Societies in the West. Great and rapid changes are taking place, if not to the extent we desire, yet corresponding in a degree with the gigantic march of emigration and population. Many other reasons might be urged to show that its prospective increase of population will vastly exceed the ratio of its retrospective increase, but these are sufficient. FOOTNOTES: [3] La Salle appears to have discovered the Bay of St. Bernard, and formed a settlement on the western side of the Colorado, in 1685.--_See J. Q. Adams's Correspondence with Don Onis. Pub. Doc. first session 15th Congress, 1818._ [4] Baird. [5] See Mr. Clay's Report on the Public Lands, April 26, 1832, U. S. Papers. CHAPTER III. CLIMATE. Comparative view of the Climate with the Atlantic States. Diseases.--Means of preserving health. _Climate, &c._ In a country of such vast extent, through 15° of latitude, the climate must necessarily be various. Louisiana, Mississippi and the lower half of Arkansas, lie between the latitudes of 30° and 35°, and correspond with Georgia and South Carolina. Their difference of climate is not material. The northern half of Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky, lie west from North Carolina and the southern portion of Virginia. The climate varies from those states only as they are less elevated than the mountainous parts of Virginia and Carolina. Hence, the emigrant from the southern Atlantic states, unless he comes from a mountainous region, will experience no great change of climate, by emigrating to the Lower Mississippi Valley. Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, lie parallel with the northern half of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and so much of New York and New England as lies south of the 42° of north latitude. But several circumstances combine to produce variations in the climate. 1. Much of those Atlantic states are hilly, and in many parts mountainous, some of which are 2 and 3000 feet above the level of the ocean. The parallel western states have no mountains, and are not proportionably hilly. 2. The Atlantic states border on the ocean on the east, and feel the influence of the cold, damp winds from the northeast and east. Their rains are more copious and their snows deeper. The northern portions of the West, equally with New York and Vermont, are affected with the influence of the lakes, though not to the same extent. 5. "The courses of rivers, by changing in some degree the direction of the winds, exert an influence on the climate. In the Atlantic states, from New England to North Carolina, the rivers run more or less to the southeast, and increase the winds which blow from the northwest, while the great bed of the Mississippi exerts an equal influence in augmenting the number and steadiness of the winds which blow over it from the southwest; and there is another cause of difference in climate, chiefly perceptible, first, in the temperature, which, if no counteracting cause existed, they would raise in the west considerably above that of corresponding latitudes in the east; and, secondly, in the moisture of the two regions, which is generally greater west than east of the mountains, when the southwest wind prevails; as, much of the water with which it comes charged from the Gulf of Mexico, is deposited before it reaches the country east of the Alleghanies."--_Dr. Drake._ It is an error that our climate is more variable, or the summers materially hotter, than in a correspondent latitude in the Atlantic states. "The New Englander and New Yorker north of the mountains of West Point, should bear in mind that his migration is not to the _West_ but _South West_; and as necessarily brings him into a warmer climate, as when he seeks the shores of the Delaware, Potomac, or James' River." The settlers from Virginia to Kentucky, or those from Maryland and Pennsylvania to Ohio, or further west, have never complained of hotter summers than they had found in the land from whence they came. To institute a comparative estimate of temperature between the east and the west, we must observe: first, the thermometer; and, secondly, the flowering of trees, the putting forth of vegetation, and the ripening of fruits and grain in _correspondent latitudes_. This has not usually been done. Philadelphia and Cincinnati approach nearer to the same parallel, than any other places where such observations have been made. Cincinnati, however, is about 50' south of Philadelphia. The following remarks are from Dr. Daniel Drake of Cincinnati, to whose pen the west is much indebted. "From a series of daily observations in Cincinnati or its vicinity, for eight consecutive years, the mean annual temperature has been ascertained to be 54 degrees and a quarter. Dr. Rush states the mean temperature of Philadelphia at 52 degrees and a half; Dr. Coxe, from six years' observations, at 54° and a sixth; and Mr. Legaux, from seventeen years' observations, at Spring Mill, a few miles out of the city, at 53° and a third; the mean term of which results, 53° and a third, is but the fraction of a degree lower than the mean heat of Cincinnati, and actually less than should be afforded by the difference of latitude. "A reference to the temperatures of summer and winter, will give nearly the same results. From nine years' observations, (three at Spring Mill, by Mr. Legaux, and six in Philadelphia, by Dr. Coxe,) the mean summer heat of that part of Pennsylvania, appears to be 76 degrees and six-tenths. The mean summer heat at Cincinnati, for an equal number of years, was 74 degrees and four-tenths. The average number of days in which the thermometer rose to 90 degrees or upwards, during the same period, was fourteen each summer; and the greatest elevation observed was 98 degrees: all of which would bear an almost exact comparison with similar observations in Pennsylvania. Mr. Legaux states the most intense cold, at Spring Mill, from 1787 to 1806, to have been 17 and five-tenths degrees below cipher,--while within the same period it was 18° at Cincinnati. The average of extreme cold for several years, as observed by Mr. Legaux, was one and eight-tenths of a degree below cipher:--the same average at Cincinnati, was two degrees below. From all which we may conclude, that the banks of the Delaware and Ohio, in the same latitudes, have nearly the same temperature." The state of Illinois, extending as it does through five and a half degrees of latitude, has considerable variation in its climate. It has no mountains, and though undulating, it cannot be called hilly. Its extensive prairies, and level surface, give greater scope to the winds, especially in winter. In the southern part of the State, during the three winter months, snow frequently falls, but seldom lies long. In the northern part, the winters are as cold, but not so much snow falls, as in the same latitudes in the Atlantic States. The Mississippi at St. Louis is frequently frozen over, and is crossed on the ice, and occasionally for several weeks. The hot season is longer, though not more intense, than occasionally for a day or two in New England. During the years 1817-18-19, the Rev. Mr. Giddings, at St. Louis, made a series of observations upon Fahrenheit's thermometer. Deg. Hund. Mean temperature for 1817 55 52 Do. do. from the beginning of May, 1818, to the end of April, 1819 56 98 Mean temperature for 1820 56 18 The mean of these results is about fifty-six degrees and a quarter. The mean temperature of each month during the above years, is as follows: Deg. Hund. January 30 62 February 38 65 March 43 13 April 58 47 May 62 66 June 74 47 July 78 66 August 72 88 September 70 10 October 59 00 November 53 13 December 34 33 The mean temperature of the different seasons is as follows: Winter, 34.53--Spring, 54.74--Summer, 74.34--Autumn, 60.77. The greatest extremes of heat and cold during my residence of eighteen years, in the vicinity of St. Louis, is as follows: Greatest heat in July 1820, and July 1833, 100 degrees. Greatest cold January 3d, 1834, 18 degrees below zero,--February 8th, 1835, 22 degrees below zero. The foregoing facts will doubtless apply to about one half of Illinois. This climate also is subject to sudden changes from heat to cold; from wet to dry, especially from November to May. The heat of the summer below the 40° of latitude is more enervating, and the system becomes more easily debilitated than in the bracing atmosphere of a more northerly region. At Marietta, Ohio, in lat. 39° 25' N. and at the junction of the Muskingum river with the Ohio, the mean temperature for 1834, was 52 degrees, four-tenths; highest in August, 95 degrees,--lowest, January, at zero. Fair days 225,--cloudy days 110. At Nashville, Tenn. 1834, the mean temperature was 59 degrees and seventy-six-hundredths; maximum 97, minimum 4 above zero. The summer temperature of this place never reaches 100°. On January 26th, 1832, 18 degrees below zero. February 8th, 1835, 10° below zero. The putting forth of vegetation in the spring furnishes some evidence of the character of the climate of any country, though by no means entirely accurate. Other causes combine to advance or retard vegetation. A wet or dry season, or a few days of heat or cold at a particular crisis, will produce material changes. The following table is constructed from memoranda made at the various dates given, near the latitude of St. Louis, which is computed at 38° 30'. The observations of 1819 were made at St. Charles and vicinity, in the state of Missouri. Those of 1820, in St. Louis county, 17 miles N. W. from the city of St. Louis. The remainder at Rock Spring, Illinois, 18 miles east from St. Louis. It will be perceived, the years are not consecutive. In 1826, the writer was absent to the eastern states, and for 1828, his notes were too imperfect to answer the purpose. In the columns showing the times of the first snows, and the first and last frosts in the season, a little explanation may be necessary. A "light" snow means merely enough to whiten the earth, and which usually disappears in a few hours. Many of the frosts recorded "light" were not severe enough to kill ordinary vegetation. |Peach & |Strawberries|Blackberries|Apple |Apple | |Red bud |in |in |leaves |trees in | Year.|in blossom|blossom. |blossom. |begin to |blossom. | | | | |put forth| | | | | | | | =====+==========+============+============+=========+=========+ | | | | | | 1819 |April 4. |Not noted. |May 19. |April 15.|April 20.| | | | | | | -----+----------+------------+------------+---------+---------+ |April 14. | |May 10. | | | 1820 |No peach |April 2. |fall off |Mar. 25 |April 15.| |B. | |17. | | | -----+----------+------------+------------+---------+---------+ |April 26. | | | | | 1821 |No peach |April 30. |May 21. |April 24.|May 3. | |B. | | | | | -----+----------+------------+------------+---------+---------+ | | | | | | 1822 |April 5. |April 25. |May 10. |April 18.|April 22.| | | | | | | -----+----------+------------+------------+---------+---------+ | | | | | | 1823 |April 19. |April 26. |May 20. |April 15.|April 28.| | | | | | | -----+----------+------------+------------+---------+---------+ | | | | | | 1824 |April 20. |April 28. |May 18. |April 20.|April 29.| | | | | | | -----+----------+------------+------------+---------+---------+ | |April 3. | | | | 1825 |Mar. 25. |Ripe |May 8. |Mar. 30. |April 5. | | |May 17. | | | | -----+----------+------------+------------+---------+---------+ | | | | | | 1827 |April 4. |April 10. |May 15. |April 4. |April 13.| | | | | | | -----+----------+------------+------------+---------+---------+ | | | | | | 1829 |April 20. |April 24. |May 20. |April 20.|April 26.| | | | | | | -----+----------+------------+------------+---------+---------+ | | | | | | 1830 |April 1. |April 5. |May 9. |April 1. |April 9. | | | | | | | continued |Grass |Oaks and |First |Last |First |green in |other forest|snow on |frost in |frost in Year.|prairies.|trees |approach |Spring. |Autumn. | |put forth |of winter. | | | |leaves. | | | =====+=========+============+============+============+========== | | | | | 1819 |April 18.|Half size |Oct. 8. few |May 18, |Sept. 23. | |May 19. |flakes. |very light. | -----+---------+------------+------------+------------+---------- | |April 22. |Oct. 24. few|June 1, |Sept. 20. 1820 |April 10.|full size |flakes. Nov.|very light. |Oct. 8, | |May 7. |11 3 inches.| |ice. -----+---------+------------+------------+------------+---------- | |Ap. 26 to |Nov. 8. |April 18, | 1821 |April 26.|May 3. f. |2-½ in. |severe. |Oct. 8 | |grown 22 | |May 9, light| -----+---------+------------+------------+------------+---------- | |April 29. |Nov. 16, |April 16, | 1822 |April 10.|full size |light. |severe, ice.|Oct. 13. | |May 14. | | | -----+---------+------------+------------+------------+---------- | | | | | 1823 |April 10.|April 23. |Nov. 1, |April 24. |Sp. 21-2. | | |light. | |Ice 23. -----+---------+------------+------------+------------+---------- | | | | |Oct. 21. 1824 |April 14.|April 30. |Nov. 7. |May 5. |hard | | | | |freeze. -----+---------+------------+------------+------------+---------- | | |Dec. 11, |Feb. 22. |Oct. 2-3. 1825 |Mar. 16. |April 3. |3 inches. |Next. |27th, ice. | | | |Ap. 20, ice.| -----+---------+------------+------------+------------+---------- | |April 10. |Nov. 25, |May 7, |Sept. 23, 1827 |Mar. 25. |full size |light. |light. |light. | |April 30. | | | -----+---------+------------+------------+------------+---------- | | |Nov. 12, | | 1829 |April 24.|April 27. |4 inches. |Not noted. |Sept. 17. | | |sleet. | | -----+---------+------------+------------+------------+---------- | |begin Ap. | | | 1830 |April 1. |5. f. size | | | | |May 1. | | | These observations, upon a comparison with the same parallels of latitude in the eastern states, show that there is no material difference of climate between the two sections of our country, except that produced by local causes, as mountainous districts, contiguity to the ocean, &c. A similar error has existed in relation to sudden and extreme changes of weather in the West. People who emigrate to a new country have their curiosity awakened, and perhaps for the first time in their lives become quite observing of such changes. From habitually observing the weather the impression is produced on their minds that there is a marked difference in this climate. Dr. Rush declares that there is but _one_ steady trait in the character of the climate of Pennsylvania--and that is, _it is uniformly variable_, and he asserts that he has known the thermometer fall 20° in one hour and a half. March 26-27, 1818, the thermometer in St. Louis, fell 41° in 30 hours--from 83° to 42°. I have no record or recollection of a more sudden change in 18 years. Mr. Legaux saw it fall in the vicinity of Philadelphia, 47° in 24 hours, and Dr. Drake states that this is five degrees more than any impression ever observed in Cincinnati, in the same length of time. Emigrants from New England and the northern part of New York state, must not expect to find the same climate in the West, at 38 or 40 degrees; but let them remove to the same parallel of latitude in the West, to Wisconsin, or the northern part of Illinois, and they will probably find a climate far more uniform than the land of their birth. Prevailing winds modify and affect the climate of every country. Southwestwardly winds prevail along the Mississippi Valley. The following tabular view of observations made at Cincinnati, by Dr. D. Drake, for six succeeding years, with so few omissions, that they amount to 4200, will give further illustrations of this subject. They have been brought from eight points of the compass. OBSERVATIONS. MONTHS | S.E. | S. | S.W. | N.E. | N. | N.W. | E. | W. | CALM. ===========+======+====+======+======+====+======+====+====+======= January | 6 | 2 | 13 | 8 | 1 | 21 | 3 | 6 | 6 February | 5 | 1 | 13 | 8 | 1 | 14 | 0 | 5 | 8 March | 10 | 1 | 16 | 11 | 1 | 10 | 0 | 5 | 4 April | 7 | 0 | 24 | 10 | 1 | 8 | 1 | 3 | 5 May | 7 | 1 | 19 | 10 | 0 | 10 | 1 | 4 | 6 June | 9 | 1 | 23 | 12 | 5 | 7 | 1 | 2 | 3 July | 6 | 1 | 19 | 11 | 2 | 11 | 1 | 4 | 4 August | 6 | 1 | 23 | 10 | 1 | 12 | 1 | 1 | 6 September | 6 | 1 | 23 | 9 | 0 | 8 | 2 | 3 | 3 October | 9 | 1 | 24 | 6 | 1 | 10 | 2 | 4 | 3 November | 9 | 3 | 13 | 6 | 1 | 10 | 2 | 7 | 5 December | 7 | 1 | 11 | 5 | 0 | 15 | 2 | 6 | 9 -----------+------+----+------+------+----+------+----+----+------- Total | 87 | 14 | 221 | 106 | 14 | 136 | 16 | 50 | 62 The results of my own observations, made for twelve years, with the exception of 1826, and with some irregularity, from travelling in different parts of Missouri and Illinois during the time, do not vary in any material degree from the above table, excepting fewer east and northeast winds. Dr. Drake has given a table, setting forth the results of 4268 observations on the state of the weather at Cincinnati, from which it will be perceived that of the 365 days in a year, about 176 will be fair, 105 cloudy, and 84 variable. Dr. L. C. Beck made similar observations at St. Louis during the year 1820, which produced the result of 245 clear days, and cloudy, including variable days, 110. Years. |Clear days.|Cloudy days.|Variable days. ==============+===========+============+============== 1 | 180 | 107 | 68 2 | 158 | 112 | 91 3 | 187 | 78 | 85 4 | 152 | 106 | 107 5 | 185 | 111 | 68 6 | 172 | 112 | 74 --------------+-----------+------------+-------------- Total 6 years.| 1,034 | 626 | 493 --------------+-----------+------------+-------------- Mean terms. | 172.33 | 104.33 | 82.16 The following table shows the condition of the weather in each month of a mean year, for the above period. MONTHS. | Clear days. | Cloudy days. | Variable days. ==========+=============+==============+================ January | 9.8 | 13.1 | 7.8 February | 10.3 | 12.0 | 6.5 March | 13.5 | 9.1 | 8.3 April | 13.1 | 10.8 | 7.6 May | 15.0 | 8.5 | 7.5 June | 15.5 | 5.0 | 9.6 July | 19.0 | 5.5 | 6.0 August | 19.6 | 4.6 | 6.5 September | 19.5 | 5.3 | 6.1 October | 16.1 | 6.0 | 8.1 November | 9.5 | 13.5 | 5.5 December | 9.6 | 14.1 | 5.8 There would be some variations from the foregoing table in a series of observations in the country bordering upon the Upper Mississippi and Missouri. The weather in the states of Ohio and Kentucky, is doubtless more or less affected in autumn by the rains that fall on the Alleghany mountains, and the rise of the Ohio and its tributaries. So the weather in the months of April, May and June in Missouri, is affected by the spring floods of the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. The following table is constructed from a series of observations made at the Military posts in the West, by the Surgeons of the U. S. Army, for four years:--1822, 1823, 1824, and 1825. [See American Almanac for 1834, p. 81.] ------------------+--------------------------+---------+---------+---------- | | | | | | | | | | | | | |N. |Elevation|Mean Temp. Posts. | Situations. |Latitude.|above the|for four | |deg. m. |ocean. |years. ------------------+--------------------------+---------+---------+---------- Fort Brady, |Sault de St. Mary, outlet | 46 22 | 5 95 | 41 37 | of Lake Superior, | | | Fort Snelling, |Mouth of St. Peters, 10 m.| 46 39 | 7 80 | 45 00 | below Falls St. Anthony,| | | Fort Howard, |Green bay, Wisconsin T. | 45 00 | 6 00 | 44 50 Fort Crawford, |Prairie du Chien, W. Ter. | 43 25 | 5 80 | 45 52 Council Bluffs, |Upper Missouri, | 41 31 | 8 00 | 50 82 Cantonment Jessup,|On Red river, La. | | | 68 31 Baton Rouge, |Louisiana, | 30 32 | | 68 07 continued ------------------+--------+--------+------------+------------------------- | | | | Weather. | | | +------------------------- | | | | MONTHLY AVERAGE. | | | +-----+------+-----+------ Posts. | | |Range of |Fair |Cloudy|Rainy|Snow |Maximum.|Minimum.|Thermometer.|days.|d's |days.|days. ------------------+--------+--------+------------+-----+------+-----+------ Fort Brady, | 90 | -33 | 1 23 |13 30| 2 27 |7 83 |6 02 | | | | | | | Fort Snelling, | 96 | -29 | 1 25 |16 94| 5 50 |5 77 |2 22 | | | | | | | Fort Howard, | 1 00 | -38 | 1 38 |15 47| 7 98 |4 56 |2 42 Fort Crawford, | 96 | -28 | 1 24 |16 80| 6 29 |3 87 |1 32 Council Bluffs, | 1 08 | -21 | 1 29 |19 68| 6 54 |2 95 |1 25 Cantonment Jessup,| 97 | 7 | 90 |18 63| 4 49 |7 25 | 05 Baton Rouge, | 99 | 18 | 81 |20 16| 4 08 |6 16 | - _signifies below zero._ The times of observation at the above posts were 7 A. M., and 2 and 9, P. M. The mean of each month was deduced from 90 observations, and of each year from 1095 observations. The reader, who is desirous of following up this comparative view of the climate between the Atlantic states and the Valley of the Mississippi, can compare the observations recorded in these tables, with similar observations made in the same parallels of latitude. He will find the climate of the West quite as uniform, and the weather as little variable as in the Atlantic states. _Diseases_,--_Means of preserving health, &c._ Of the Lower Valley, I shall say but very little on this subject. Dr. Drake observes, "The diseases of this portion of the Great Valley are few, and prevail chiefly in summer and autumn. They are the offspring of the combined action of intense heat and marsh exhalation." They are generally remittent and intermittent bilious fevers. Emigrants most generally undergo a seasoning, or become acclimated. Many persons, however, from the northern and middle states, and from Europe, enjoy health. In sickly situations these fevers are apt to return, and often prove fatal. They frequently enfeeble the constitution, and produce chronic inflammation of the liver, enlargement of the spleen, or terminate in jaundice or dropsy, and disorder the digestive organs. When persons find themselves subject to repeated attacks, the only safe resource is an annual migration to a more northern climate during the summer. Many families from New Orleans, and other exposed situations, retire to the pine barrens of Louisiana, in the hot and sickly season, where limpid streams, flowing over a pebbly bed, and a terebinthine atmosphere are enjoyed. Eight months of the year, are pleasant and healthy in the Lower Mississippi Valley. The advice of Dr. Drake is, that "Those who migrate from a colder climate to the southern Mississippi states, should observe the following directions: First--To arrive there in autumn, instead of spring or summer. Second--If practicable, to spend the hottest part of the first two or three years, in a higher latitude. Third--To select the healthiest situations. Fourth--To live temperately. Fifth--To preserve a regular habit. Lastly--To avoid the heat of the sun from 10 in the morning till 4 in the afternoon, and above all the night air. By a strict attention to these rules, many would escape the diseases of the climate, who annually sink under its baleful influence." Those states and territories to which this work is intended more immediately as a GUIDE, do not differ very materially in salubrity. The same general features are found in each. There is but little diversity in climate,--their geological and physical structure coincide, and the experience of years shows that there is no great difference. Where autumnal fevers are common they are usually of similar character. The same causes for disease exist in Ohio as in Missouri, in Michigan as in Illinois, in Kentucky and Tennessee as in Indiana. All these states are much more infested with the maladies which depend on variations of temperature, than the states farther south. All have localities where intermittents and agues are found, and all possess extensive districts of country where health is enjoyed by a very large proportion of emigrants. There is some difference between a heavily timbered and a prairie country, in favor of the latter; other circumstances being equal. Changes favorable to continued health are produced by the settlement and cultivation of any particular portion of country. Of one fact I have long since satisfied my mind, that ordinary fevers are not caused by the use of the water of the West. Exceptions may be made in some few cases, where a vein of water is impregnated with some deleterious mineral substance. The use of a well, dug in the vicinity of a coal bed in Illinois, was supposed to have caused sickness in a family for two seasons. Any offensive property in water is readily detected by the taste. Cool, refreshing water is a great preservative of health. It is common for families, (who are too indifferent to their comfort to dig a well,) to use the tepid, muddy water of the small streams in the frontier states, during the summer, or to dig a shallow well and wall it with timber, which soon imparts an offensive taste to the water. Water of excellent quality may be found in springs, or by digging from 20 to 30 feet, throughout the western states. Most of the water thus obtained is hard water, from its limestone qualities, but it is most unquestionably healthy. Those persons who emigrate from a region of sandstone, or primitive rock, where water is soft, will find our limestone water to produce a slight affection of the bowels, which will prove more advantageous to health than otherwise, and which will last but a few weeks. Whenever disease prevails in the western states, it may generally be attributed to one or more of the following causes. 1st. _Variations of the temperature._ This cause, we have already shown, exists to as great extent in the same latitude east of the mountains. 2nd. _The rapid decomposition of vegetable matter._ In all our rich lands, there are vast quantities of vegetable matter mixed with the soil, or spread over the surface. Extreme hot weather, following especially a season of much rain, before the middle of July, will produce sickness. If the early part of summer be tolerably dry, although a hot season follows, sickness does not generally prevail. The year 1820 was an exception to this rule. It was throughout, a very dry, hot, sickly year through the West; indeed, throughout the world. A wet season, with a moderately cool atmosphere, has proved healthy. 3d. _Marsh exhalations._ These, combined with heat, will always generate fevers. Indeed, there is probably very little difference in the miasm thrown off from decomposed vegetable matter, and that produced from sluggish streams, standing waters and marshes. These, in the great Valley, abound with decayed vegetable matter. Hence, along the streams which have alluvial _bottoms_ (as low lands upon streams are called in the West,) some of which are annually overflowed, and where the timber and luxuriant vegetable growth are but partially subdued, the inhabitants are liable to fevers, dysenteries and agues. Situations directly under the bluffs adjacent to the bottom lands, that lie upon our large rivers, especially when the vegetation is unsubdued, have proved unhealthy. So have situations at the heads or in the slope of the ravines that put down from the bluffs towards the rivers. The principal diseases that prevail may be stated as follows. In the winter, and early in the spring, severe colds, inflammation of the lungs and pleurisies are most common. The genuine hereditary consumption of New-England is rare, and families and individuals predisposed to that disease might often be preserved by migration to this Valley. Acute inflammation of the brain, and inflammatory rheumatism are not unusual at that season. During the summer and autumn, cholera infantum with children in large towns, diarrhoea, cholera morbus, dysentery, intermittent and remittent bilious fevers prevail. The intermittent assumes various forms, and has acquired several names amongst the country people, where it prevails more generally than in large towns. It is called the "chill and fever,"--"ague,"--"dumb ague," &c., according to its form of attack. The remittent fever is the most formidable of our autumnal diseases, especially when of a highly bilious type. In most seasons, these diseases are easily managed, and yield to a dose or two of medicine. Sore eyes, especially in autumn, is a common complaint in the frontier settlements, and when neglected or improperly managed, have terminated in total blindness. The "milk sickness," as it is called, occasionally prevails in some localities, some particulars of which will be found in another place. There is a disease that afflicts many frontier people, called by some "sick stomach," by others, "water brash," from its symptoms of sudden nausea, with vomiting, especially after meals. In 1832, the cholera made its appearance in the West. In many places, its first approach was attended with great mortality, but its second visit to a place has been in a milder and more manageable form. It has visited various parts of the West on each returning season since, especially along the great rivers and about the steamboats. It appears to have changed somewhat the characteristics of our western diseases, and will probably become a modified and manageable disease. Since its visit, our fevers are more congestive, less bile is secreted, and the stomach more affected. The subject will doubtless be noticed by our physicians, and observations made, how far this new disease will become assimilated to the ordinary diseases of the country. We are satisfied, after a long course of observations, much travelling, and conversing with many hundreds of families with the view of arriving at correct conclusions on these subjects, _that there is no such operation as that of emigrants undergoing a seasoning, or becoming acclimated_, in the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Michigan, or the Wisconsin Territory. _Nor does it make the least difference from what part of the United States, or Europe, they come, nor whether they arrive here in the spring or autumn._ There is an erroneous notion prevailing in some of the Atlantic states on this subject, that should be corrected. When sickness prevails, there is just as much, and it is equally severe, amongst the old settlers, those born in the country, or who migrate from the Carolinas or Georgia, as those who come from the northern states. Families are just as liable to sickness, and are as often attacked for the first time, after residing several years in the country, as at any other time. A large proportion of the families and individuals, who remove from New England to the various parts of the Valley, north of the 37th degree of latitude have no sickness the first year. The impression has formerly existed abroad, that Illinois is less healthy than other western states. This is entirely erroneous. As in all countries, there are some localities, where the causes that produce sickness exist more than in others. This is not the fact with Illinois in general. That this state is as healthy as any other western state, can be abundantly supported by facts. Let a candid observer compare the health of the early settlers of New England, with that of the early settlers of the West, and he will find the scale to preponderate in favor of the latter. Unless there is some strange fatality attending Illinois, its population must be more healthy than the early settlers of a timbered region. But in no period of its history have sickness and death triumphed, in any respect equal to what they did two or three years since, in the lake country of New York. The year 1811, is recorded in the memoirs of the early settlers, as a season of unusual sickness near the banks of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. The latter river rose to an unusual height in June, the waters of the small creeks were backed up, and a large surface of luxuriant vegetation was covered and deadened. This was succeeded by hot and dry weather. Bilious and intermittent fevers prevailed extensively. The seasons of 1819, '20, and '21 were usually sickly in Illinois and Missouri. Emigrants, in shoals, had spread over a wide range of country within a year or two preceding. Multitudes were placed under circumstances the most unfavorable to the preservation of health, in new and open cabins of green timber, often using the stagnant water of creeks and ponds, with a luxuriant vegetation around them undergoing decomposition, and all the other evils attendant on the settlement of a new and unbroken country. Under such circumstances, can it be surprising that many were sick, and that many died? The summer of 1820 was the hottest and driest ever known in this country. For weeks in succession, the thermometer, in the shade at St. Louis, was up to 96° for hours in the day. Not a cloud came over the sun, to afford a partial relief from its burning influence. The fevers of that season were unusually rapid, malignant, and unmanageable. Almost every mark of the yellow fever, as laid down in the books, was exhibited in many cases, both in town and country. The bilious fever put on its most malignant type. Black, foetid matter was discharged from the stomach, and by stools. The writer and all his family suffered severely that season. He lived seventeen miles from St. Louis, on the road to St. Charles in Missouri, on a farm. The settlement had been called healthy. The Missouri bottom was one mile distant. Three miles west southwest, was the Creve-coeur lake, a body of water several miles in length and half a mile in width, connected by an outlet with the Missouri river. The water of this lake was entirely stagnant, covered with a thick scum, and sent forth a noisome smell. Fish in it died. My oldest son, a robust youth of ten years of age, and my brother-in-law, a hale and stout young man, sickened and died the first week in October. I was attacked the 5th day of July, came as near dying as a person could and recover. All my children were sick. While convalescent, in September, I took a long journey to Cape Girardeau country, 120 miles south, and back through the lead mine country to the Missouri river, 60 miles west of St. Louis, and in all the route found that sickness had prevailed to the same extent. At Vincennes and other parts of Indiana, disease triumphed. The country around Vincennes, on the east side of the Wabash, is a sandy plain. A gentleman who escaped the ravages of fever in that place, and who was much engaged in nursing the sick and consoling the dying, stated to me that nothing was so disheartening as the cloudless sky and burning sun that continued unchanged for weeks in succession. Mortality prevailed to a great extent along the banks of the Wabash. Hindostan, a town on the east fork of White river, 38 miles from Vincennes on the road to Louisville, was begun the preceding year. Seventy or eighty families had crowded in at the commencement of the year 1820. The heavy timber of poplar, (whitewood) oak and beech, had been cut down, the brush burned, and the logs left on the ground. By June the bark was loosened, an intolerable stench proceeded from the timber,--sickness followed, and about two thirds of the population died! And yet, to look about the place, there is no local cause that would indicate sickness. In the summer of 1821, sickness prevailed very extensively, but in a much milder form. Its type was intermittent, and usually yielded to ordinary remedies. During that year the number of deaths in St. Louis was 136--the population 5000. At least one third of that number were strangers and transient persons, who either arrived sick, or were taken sick within two or three days after arrival. St. Louis had then no _police_ regulations--the streets were filthy in the extreme--and the population were crowded into every hole and corner. This was the most sickly and dying season St. Louis ever knew, except when the cholera prevailed in October, 1832. The same years (1820-21) were noted for unusual sickness throughout the United States, and indeed the whole world. The bilious fever prevailed in the hilly and mountainous districts of Virginia and Pennsylvania, and even among the Green Mountains of Vermont. Very little general sickness (except cholera in 1832-'33) prevailed in 1830, '31, '32, or '33. In 1834, congestive fever, and dysentery, with some of the symptoms of cholera, existed in many places in the West, though not extensively fatal. In the month of June, were frequent sudden showers in Illinois and Missouri, with intervals of extreme heat. July and August very hot and dry. The disease began early in July and continued till September. The year 1835, was the most sickly year, for common intermittents, _which prevailed more amongst the old settlers, than the newly arrived emigrants_. In Illinois, and generally throughout the West, below the fortieth degree of latitude, it was sickly, though not fatal. Early in the spring, till the month of May, it was unusually dry, and vegetation was two weeks later than usual. May and a part of June were very wet, followed by a few days of extremely hot weather. Vegetation grew with great luxuriance. Newly ploughed ground sent forth a noxious effluvium, with a most offensive odour, and after a few days would be covered with a greenish coat, like the scum on stagnant water. Town situations, even along the banks of river, were comparatively healthy. In case of sickness, physicians are to be found in almost every county, and every season adds to their number. Charges are somewhat higher than in the northern states. Many families keep a few simple articles of medicine, and administer for themselves. Calomel is a specific; and is taken by multitudes without hesitation, or fear of danger. From fifteen to twenty grains are an ordinary dose for a cathartic. Whenever nausea of the stomach, pains in the limbs, and yawning, or a chill, indicate the approach of disease, a dose of calomel is taken at night, in a little apple honey, or other suitable substance, and followed up in the morning with a dose of castor oil, or salts, to produce a brisk purge. Sometimes an emetic is preferred. Either a cathartic or an emetic will leave the system under some debility. The mistake frequently made is, in not following up the evacuating medicine with tonics. This should be done invariably, unless the paroxysm of fever has commenced. A few doses of sulphate of quinine or Peruvian bark in its crude state, will restore the system to its natural tone. To prevent an attack of fever, medicine should be taken on the very first symptoms of a diseased stomach; it should not be tampered with, but taken in sufficient doses to relieve the system from morbid effects, and then followed up by tonics, to restore its vigor and prevent relapse. New comers will find it advantageous for protecting themselves from the damp atmosphere at night, to provide close dwellings; yet when the air is clear, to leave open doors and windows at night for free circulation, but not to sleep directly in the current of air; and invariably to wear thin clothing in the heat of the day, and put on thicker garments at night, and in wet and cloudy weather. I have observed that those families are seldom sick who live in comfortable houses, with tight floors, and well ventilated rooms; and who, upon change of weather, and especially in time of rains, make a little fire in the chimney, although the thermometer might not indicate the necessity. In fine, I am prepared to give my opinion, decidedly, in favor of the general health of this country and climate. I would not certainly be answerable for all the bad locations, the imprudences, and whims of all classes of emigrants, which may operate unfavorably to health. I only speak for myself and family. I decidedly prefer this climate, with all its miasm, to New-England, with its northeast winds, and damp, "raw" and pulmonary atmosphere. We very seldom have fogs in Illinois and Missouri. My memoranda, kept with considerable accuracy, for twelve years, give not more than half a dozen foggy mornings in a year. The following comparisons between St. Louis and several eastern cities, will afford some evidence of the opinions expressed above. I have remarked already, that 1821, was more sickly in St. Louis, than any preceding year, and deaths were more numerous in proportion to the population. Some cases of fever were more malignant in 1820, in that place, but deaths were more frequent the following season. I solemnized the marriage of a young lady of my acquaintance, who was under the age of fourteen years. In eight days she was a widow. At the funeral of a gentleman the same season, who left a widow under twenty years, there were present thirteen widows, all under twenty-four years of age, and all had lost their companions that season. Young men were victims more than any other age or condition. And yet I am prepared to show, that St. Louis, that summer, was not more sickly than several eastern cities were in 1820 and 1823. The population of St. Louis in 1821, varied but little from 5,000; the number of deaths during that year was one hundred and thirty-six. This account was taken by the Rev. Salmon Giddings, who was particular in collecting the facts. The proportion of the deaths to the population was one to thirty-five. In 1820, Boston contained a population of 43,893,--number of deaths 1,103; proportion one to thirty-nine and three fourths. New-York the same year contained a population of 123,000,--deaths 3,515; being a proportion of one to a fraction less than thirty-five. In Philadelphia, the population then was 108,000,--deaths 3,374; being a proportion of one to thirty-two. Baltimore had a population of 62,000,--deaths 1,625; being a proportion of one to thirty-eight. The aggregate population of these four cities in 1820, was 336,893; the aggregate number of deaths, 9,617; the proportion of one to thirty-five, the same as that of St. Louis. IN 1823. _Boston._ Population estimated at 45,000; number of deaths by official returns, 1,154; the proportion of one to thirty-nine. _New-York._ Population about 130,000,--deaths 3,444; proportion of one to thirty-seven and two thirds. _Philadelphia._ Population about 120,000,--deaths 4,600, proportion of one to twenty-six. [This was an uncommonly sickly season in Philadelphia.] _Baltimore._ Population estimated at 65,000; deaths were 2,108; proportion of one to thirty and two thirds. I have thus selected the mortality of St. Louis during the most sickly season since my residence in this country, and compared it with the bills of mortality of four eastern cities for two years, those of 1820 and 1823, and the result is favorable to the health of St. Louis, and by consequence, to the adjoining States. For ten years past, there has been no general sickness in St. Louis, during the summer and autumnal months, excepting the cholera in 1832. Some parts of Indiana and Ohio are unquestionably more subject to bilious attacks than Illinois. The reason is obvious. Much of that region is heavily timbered, and, upon cutting it away in spots, and letting in the rays of the sun upon vegetable matter undergoing decomposition, miasmata are generated. These regions will become comparatively healthy, when put under general cultivation. The story is told, that the late emperor of France lay encamped with one of his armies near a place reputed unhealthy, when one of his officers requested a furlough. The reason being asked, and given, that the place was unhealthy, and the applicant feared to die an inglorious death from fever: Napoleon replied, in his accustomed laconic style, "Go to your post; men die everywhere." If a family emigrate to a new and distant country, and any of the number sicken and die, we are apt to indulge in unavailing regret at the removal; whereas had the same afflictive event happened before removal, it would have been regarded in quite a different light. Let then, none come to Illinois who do not expect to be sick and to die, whenever Divine Providence shall see fit so to order events. The _milk sickness_ is a disease of a singular character, which prevails in certain places. It first affects animals, especially cows, and from them is communicated to the human system by eating the milk, or flesh. The symptoms of the disease indicate poison; and the patient is affected nearly in the same way, as when poisonous ingredients have been received into the system. Cattle, when attacked by it, usually die. In many instances it proves mortal in the human system; in others, if yields to the skill of the physician. Much speculation has been had upon its cause, which is still unknown. The prevailing idea is, that it is caused by some poisonous substance eaten by the cattle, but whether vegetable or mineral, remains undetermined. Physicians and others have attempted to ascertain the cause of this disease, but hitherto without success. It infests only particular spots, or small districts, and these are soon found out. There are places in Ohio, Indiana, and the southern states, where it exists. Its effects are more frequent in autumn than any other season; and to guard against it, the people either keep their cows in a pasture, or refuse to use their milk. Some have supposed this disease to be produced by the cattle feeding on the _cicuta virosa_, or water hemlock; as a similar disease once infested the cattle in the north of Europe, the cause of which was traced out by the great naturalist Linnæus; but it is not known that this species of plant exists amongst the botanical productions of Missouri and Illinois. Anxious to furnish all the information, on this very important subject, to persons desirous of emigrating to the West, I will prolong this chapter by inserting the following: "ADVICE TO EMIGRANTS, RECENT SETTLERS, AND TO THOSE VISITING THE SOUTHERN COUNTRY. "The outlines which have already been given will afford some information to emigrants from other sections of the Union, or from Europe. We will now offer a few cautionary remarks, particularly intended for such as are about to settle, or have recently settled in this section of the United States. "Of new comers, there are two tolerably distinct classes: the one comprising farmers, mechanics, and indeed all those who calculate on obtaining a subsistence by manual industry; the other is composed of professional men, tradesmen, and adventurers of every description. Towards the first class our attention is now directed, premising that throughout a great portion of the western country, except in large towns, almost every mechanic is almost necessarily a farmer; the population being in but few places sufficiently dense to support that designation of mechanical employments which is common in the eastern and middle states. "For the industrious and temperate of this class, our country holds forth inducements which are not generally known or understood. "The language of indiscriminate panegyric, which has been bestowed on its climate and soil, has conveyed little information, and is the source of many fears and suspicions in the minds of people at a distance. Other accounts have described the western country as uniformly sickly; but the habit of exaggeration in its favor has been most prevalent; neither need we wonder, when much of the information communicated, has been afforded by interested landholders, or speculators, and by travellers, whose views have been superficial, and whose journeys have been performed generally, either on the rivers or by post roads. "The first inquiry of a substantial farmer, from one of the old settled states, is mostly, for good land in the vicinity of a market; and afterwards, whether the situation be healthy. It is true that there are many places in the western country, affording the qualities expressed in this description, but they are perhaps all occupied; and it would be, in several respects, more advisable for a farmer, possessing even a considerable sum of money in hand, to inquire first for a healthy situation, and then good land. "The spirit of improvement throughout the United States, especially evidenced in canalling, and rail-roads, will, it is hoped, in a few years, open modes of communication, which as yet are wanting, with the markets. "The same remarks will apply to the poorer class of emigrants. If they value their own health, and that of their families, the main object of their attention will be to secure, if possible, a situation remote from the fogs that hover over the channels of large rivers, which become partly dry in summer, and from the neighborhood of swamps, marshes, ponds, and small lakes. "Every person, on coming from beyond the mountains, and especially from the eastern States, or Europe, will have to undergo some degree of change in his constitution, before it becomes naturalized to the climate; and all who move from a cold to a considerably warmer part of the western country will experience the same alteration; it will, therefore, be wisdom for the individual brought up in a more rigorous climate, that he seek a situation where the circulation of the air is unimpeded and free, and that he avoid those flat and marshy districts, which have been already described. "Those who settle in new countries are almost universally exposed to inconveniences which have an unfavorable influence on health. They are seldom able for a length of time to erect comfortable places of residence; and indeed, many postpone this important object of attention, even after their circumstances will permit them to build comfortable dwelling houses. "Wool is mostly a scarce article in new settlements, so that cotton and linen garments are too frequently worn in winter. There is another circumstance, which no doubt has an unfavorable influence on health, especially among the poorer class: it is the want, during the summer season particularly, of substantial food. This is sometimes owing to indolence or improvidence; but perhaps oftener, to the circumstances in which a few families are placed, at a distance from any established or opulent settlement. "Erroneous views are too generally entertained in relation to hardening the human system; and the analogies drawn from savage life, are altogether inconclusive. The manners of the North American Indians are essentially different from those of the whites. It is true, there is a portion of the latter, especially in Illinois and Missouri, who from infancy are educated almost in the habits of the aborigines. "We have frequently heard the example of savages referred to, as an argument in favor of attempting to strengthen the constitution by exposure.[6] There is plausibility in this; but might not the example of the negroes in the lower parts of South Carolina and Georgia, be also quoted as evidencing the propriety of living on corn meal and sweet potatoes, and working every day in the water of a rice field during the sickly season? They are generally more healthy than the whites who own them, and who reside on the plantations in the summer. The civilized man may turn to savage life perhaps with safety, as regards health; but then he must plunge with the Indian into the depths of the forest, and observe consistency in all his habits. These pages are not written, however, for such as are disposed to consider themselves beyond the pale of civilized society; but for the reflecting part of the community, who can estimate the advantages to be derived from a prudent care of health. "Much disease, especially in the more recently settled parts of this country, is consequent to neglecting simple and comfortable precautionary means; sometimes this neglect is owing to misdirected industry, and at others to laziness or evil habits. "To have a dry house, if it be a log one, with the openings between the logs well filled up, so that it may be kept warm in winter; to fill up all the holes in its vicinity which may contain stagnant water; to have a good clean spring or well, sufficient clothing, and a reasonable supply of provisions, should be the first object of a settler's attention: but frequently a little, wet, smoky cabin or hovel is erected, with the floor scarcely separated from the ground, and admitting the damp and unwholesome air. All hands that can work, are impelled, by the father's example, to labor beyond their strength, and more land is cleared and planted with corn than is well tended; for over-exertion, change in the manner of living, and the influence of other debilitating causes, which have been mentioned, bring sickness on at least a part of the family, before the summer is half over. "It is unnecessary for even the poorest emigrant to encounter these causes of distress, unless seduced by the misrepresentations of some interested landholder, or by the fantasies of his own brain, to an unhealthy and desolate situation, where he can neither help himself, nor be assisted by others. "Many persons on moving into the _back woods_, who have been accustomed to the decencies of life, think it little matter how they live, because _no one sees them_. Thus we have known a family of some opulence to reside for years in a cabin unfit for the abode of any human being, because they could not find time to build a house; and whenever it rained hard, the females were necessarily engaged in rolling the beds from one corner of the room to another, in order to save them from the water that poured in through the roof. This cabin was intended at first as only a very temporary residence, and was erected on the edge of a swamp, for the convenience of being near to a spring. How unreasonable must such people be, if they expect health! "Clothing for winter should be prepared in summer. It is a common, but very incorrect practice among many farmers, both west and east of the Alleghany mountains, to postpone wearing winter clothing until the weather has become extremely cold: this is a fruitful source of pulmonary diseases, of rheumatisms, and of fevers. "With regard to providing a sufficiency of nourishing food, no specific directions can be given, further than to recommend, what is much neglected--particular attention to a good garden spot; and to remark, that those who devote undivided attention to cultivating the soil, receive more uniform supplies of suitable nourishment than the more indolent, who spend a considerable portion of their time in hunting. "New settlers are not unfrequently troubled with diseases of the skin, which are often supposed to be the itch: for these eruptions they generally use repellant external applications; this plan of treatment is prejudicial. "The most proper time for the removal of families to this country from the Atlantic states, is early in the spring, while the rivers are full; or if the journey be made by land, as soon as the roads are sufficiently settled, and the waters abated. "Persons unaccustomed to the climate of the lower Mississippi country, are necessarily exposed, whilst there in the summer season, to many causes of disease. It will be advisable for such to have a prudent care of their health, and yet, a care distinct from that finical timidity which renders them liable to early attacks of sickness. "There is one important consideration, which perhaps has been somewhat overlooked by medical men, who have written on this subject. Natives of colder and healthier regions, when exposed in southern and sickly climates, experience, if they remain any length of time without evident and violent disease, an alteration in the condition of the liver, and of the secreted bile itself; when it passes through the bowels, its color being much darker than usual. Sometimes, indeed, it appears to be "locked up in the liver," the stools having an ashen appearance. This state of the biliary secretion is frequently accompanied, although the patient is otherwise apparently in tolerable health, by a pain over the eye-balls, particularly when the eyes are rolled upward. "The proper mode of treatment for such symptoms is, to take without delay, not less than twenty grains of calomel, and in eight hours a wine glass full of castor oil. The tone of the stomach should not be suffered to sink too much after the operation of the medicine, which, if necessary, may be repeated in twenty-four hours. Sulphate of quinine, or other tonics, with nutritive food, which is easy of digestion, should also be taken in moderate portions at a time. "Where diseases are rapid in their progress, and dangerous, no time is to be lost. The practice of taking salts and other aperients, when in exposed situations, and for the purpose of preventing disease, is injurious. It is sufficient, that the bowels be kept in a natural and healthy state; for all cathartics, even the mildest, have a tendency to nauseate the stomach, create debility, and weaken the digestive faculty. A reduction of tone in the system, which is always advantageous, will be more safely effected by using somewhat less than usual of animal food, and of spirituous, strong vinous, or fermented liquors. The robust will derive benefit from losing a little blood. "It ought to be well understood, that as we approximate tropical climates, the doses of medicine, when taken, should be increased in quantity, and repeated with less delay than is admissible in colder countries. Exposure to the night air is certainly prejudicial; so also is the intense heat of the sun, in the middle of the day. Violent exercise should also be avoided. Bathing daily in water of a comfortable temperature, is a very commendable practice; and cotton worn next the skin is preferable to linen. "It is impossible to prevent the influence of an atmosphere pregnant with the causes of disease; but the operation of those causes may generally be counteracted by attention to the rules laid down; and it is no small consolation to be aware, that on recovery from the first attack, the system is better adapted to meet and sustain a second of a similar nature. The reader will understand that we do not allude to relapses, occurring while the system is enfeebled by the consequences of disease." To the foregoing remarks, I add the following, from an address of Judge Hall to the "Antiquarian and Historical Society of Illinois," December 10, 1827. "The climate, particularly in reference to its influence on the human system, presents another subject of investigation. The western country has been considered unhealthy; and there have been writers, whose disturbed imaginations have misled them into a belief that the whole land was continually exposed to the most awful visitations of Providence, among which have been numbered the hurricane, the pestilence, and the earthquake. If we have been content to smile at such exaggerations, while few had leisure to attempt a serious refutation, and while the facts upon which any deliberate opinion must have been based, had not been sufficiently tested by experience, the time has now arrived when it is no longer excusable to submit in silence to the reproaches of ignorance or malice. It is proper, however, to remark, as well in extenuation of those who have assailed our country, as in the support of the confidential denial, which I feel authorized to make to their assertions, that a vast improvement in the article of health has taken place within a few years. Diseases are now mild which were once malignant, and their occurrence is annually becoming less frequent. This happy change affords strong authority for the belief, that although the maladies which have heretofore afflicted us, were partly imputable to the climate, other, and more powerful causes of disease must have existed, which have vanished. We who came to the frontier, while the axe was still busy in the forest, and when thousands of the acres which now yield abundance to the farmer, were unreclaimed and tenantless, have seen the existence of our fellow citizens assailed by other than the ordinary ministers of death. Toil, privation and exposure, have hurried many to the grave; imprudence and carelessness of life, have sent crowds of victims prematurely to the tomb. It is not to be denied that the margins of our great streams in general, and many spots in the vicinity of extensive marshes, are subject to bilious diseases; but it may be as confidently asserted, that the interior country is healthy. Yet the first settlers invariably selected the rich alluvion lands upon the navigable rivers, in preference to the scarcely less fertile soil of the prairies, lying in situations less accessible, and more remote from market. They came to a wilderness in which houses were not prepared for their reception, nor food, other than that supplied by nature, provided for their sustenance. They often encamped on the margin of the river exposed to its chilly atmosphere, without a tent to shelter, with scarcely a blanket to protect them. Their first habitations were rude cabins, affording scarcely a shelter from the rain, and too frail to afford protection from the burning heat of the noonday sun, or the chilling effects of the midnight blast. As their families increased, another and another cabin was added, as crazy and as cheerless as the first, until, admonished of the increase of their own substance, the influx of wealthier neighbors, and the general improvement of the country around them, they were allured by pride to do that to which they never would have been impelled by suffering. The gratuitous exposure to the climate, which the backwoodsman seems rather to court than avoid, is a subject of common remark. No extremity of weather confines him to the shelter of his own roof. Whether the object be business or pleasure, it is pursued with the same composure amid the shadows of the night, or the howling of the tempest, as in the most genial season. Nor is this trait of character confined to woodsmen or to farmers; examples of hardihood are contagious, and in this country all ranks of people neglect, or despise the ordinary precautions with respect to health. Judges and lawyers, merchants, physicians and ministers of the gospel, set the seasons at defiance in the pursuit of their respective callings. They prosecute their journeys regardless of weather; and learn at last to feel little inconvenience from the exposure, which is silently undermining their constitutions. Is it extraordinary that people thus exposed should be attacked by violent maladies? Would it not be more wonderful that such a careless prodigality of life could pass with impunity? These remarks might be extended; the food of the first settler, consisting chiefly of fresh meat without vegetables and often without salt; the common use of ardent spirits, the want of medical aid, by which diseases, at first simple, being neglected become dangerous; and other evils peculiar to a new country, might be noticed as fruitful sources of disease; but I have already dwelt sufficiently on this subject. That this country is decidedly healthy, I feel no hesitation in declaring; but neither argument nor naked assertions will convince the world. Let us collect such facts as amount to evidence, and establish the truth by undeniable demonstration." FOOTNOTES: [6] Uniform exposure to the weather is favorable to health. I can affirm this from long experience and observation. Our hunters, and surveyors, who uniformly spend their time for weeks in the woods and prairies, who wade in the water, swim creeks, are drenched in the rains and dews, and sleep in the open air or a camp at night, very rarely are attacked with fevers. I have known repeated instances of young men, brought up delicately in the eastern cities, accustomed, as clerks, to a sedentary life, with feeble constitutions,--I have known such repeatedly to enter upon the business of surveying the public lands, or in the hunting and trapping business, be absent for months, and return with robust health. It is a common thing for a frontier man, whose health is on the decline, and especially when indications of pulmonary affection appear, to engage in a hunting expedition to renovate his health. I state these facts, and leave it to the medical faculty to explain the _why and wherefore_. One circumstance may deserve attention. All these men, as do the Indians, _sleep with their feet towards the fire at night_. And it is a common notion with this class, that if the feet are kept hot through the night, however cold the atmosphere, or however much exposed the rest of the body, no evil consequences will ensue. I have passed many a night in this position, after fatiguing rides of thirty or forty miles in the day on our extreme frontiers, and through rains, and never experienced any inconvenience to health, if I could get a pallet on the cabin floor, and my feet to the fire. Those who are exposed to these hardships but occasionally, when compelled by necessity, and who endeavor to protect themselves at all other times, usually suffer after such exposure. I have observed that children, when left to run in the open air and weather, who go barefoot, and oftentimes with a single light garment around them, who sleep on the floor at night, are more healthy than those who are protected. CHAPTER IV. CHARACTER, MANNERS, AND PURSUITS OF THE PEOPLE. Cotton and Sugar Planters;--Farmers;--Population of the large towns and cities;--Frontier class;--Hunters and Trappers;--Boatmen. There is great diversity in the character and habits of the population of the Valley of the Mississippi. Those who have emigrated from the Atlantic states, as have a very large proportion of those persons who were not born in the Valley, of course do not differ essentially from the remaining population of those states. Some slight shades of difference are perceptible in such persons as have lived long enough in the country to become assimilated to the habits, and partake of the feelings, of western people. Emigrants from Europe have brought the peculiarities of the nations and countries from whence they have originated, but are fast losing their national manners, and feelings, and, to use a provincial term, will soon become "westernized." The march of emigration from the Atlantic border has been nearly in a line due west. Tennessee was settled by Carolinians, and Kentucky by Virginians. Ohio received the basis of its population from the states in the same parallel, and hence partakes of all the varieties from Maryland to New England. Michigan is substantially a child of New York. The planters of the south have gone to Mississippi, Louisiana, and the southern part of Arkansas. Kentucky and Tennessee have spread their sons and daughters over Indiana, Illinois and Missouri; but the two former states are now receiving great numbers of emigrants from all the northern states, including Ohio, and multitudes from the south, who desire to remove beyond the boundaries and influence of a slave population. Slavery in the west, keeps nearly in the same parallels as it holds in the east, and is receding south, as it does on the Atlantic coast. Many descendants of the Scotch, Irish and Germans, have come into the frontier states from Western Pennsylvania. We have European emigrants from Great Britain and Ireland. Those of the latter are more generally found about our large towns and cities, and along the lines of canalling. The French were the explorers and early settlers of the Valley immediately bordering on the Mississippi, 150 years since. They formed the basis of population of Louisiana a few years since, but are relatively diminishing before the emigration from other states of the Union. Their descendants show many of the peculiar and distinctive traits of that people in all countries. They possess mild vivacity, and gaiety, and are distinguished for their quiet, inoffensive, domestic, frugal, and unenterprising spirit and manners. The poorer class of French are rather peculiar and unique. Their ancestors were isolated from the rest of the world, had no object of excitement or ambition, cared little for wealth, or the accumulation of property, and were accustomed to hunt, make voyages in their canoes, smoke and traffic with the Indians. But few of them knew how to read and write. Accustomed from infancy to the life of huntsmen, trappers and boatmen, they make but indifferent farmers. They are contented to live in the same rude, but neatly whitewashed cabin, cultivate the same cornfields in the same mode, and drive the same rudely constructed horse cart their fathers did. In the neatness of their gardens, which are usually cultivated by the females, they excel the Americans. They are the _coureurs du bois_ of the West. The European Germans are now coming into the Valley by thousands, and, for a time, will retain their manners and language. _Cotton and Sugar Planters._--These people, found chiefly in Mississippi, Louisiana, and the southern part of Arkansas, have a great degree of similarity. They are noted for their high-mindedness, generosity, liberality, hospitality, sociability, quick sense of honor, resentment of injuries, indolence, and, in too many cases, dissipation. They are much addicted to the sports of the turf and the vices of the gaming table. Still there are many planters of strictly moral, and even religious habits. They are excessively jealous of their political rights, yet frank and open hearted in their dispositions, and carry the duties of hospitality to a great extent. Having overseers on most of their plantations, the labor being performed by slaves, they have much leisure, and are averse to much personal attention to business. They dislike care, profound thinking and deep impressions. The young men are volatile, gay, dashing and reckless spirits, fond of excitement and high life. There is a fatal propensity amongst the southern planters to decide quarrels, and even trivial disputes by duels. But there are also many amiable and noble traits of character amongst this class; and if the principles of the Bible and religion could be brought to exert a controlling influence, there would be a noble spirited race of people in the southwestern states. It cannot be expected that I should pass in entire silence the system of slaveholding in the lower Valley, or its influence on the manners and habits of the people. This state of society seems unavoidable at present, though I have no idea or expectation it will be perpetual. Opposite sentiments and feelings are spreading over the whole earth, and a person must have been a very inattentive observer of the tendencies and effects of the diffusion of liberal principles not to perceive that hereditary, domestic servitude must have an end. This is a subject, however, that from our civil compact, belongs exclusively to the citizens of the states concerned; and if not unreasonably annoyed, the farming slaveholding states, as Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri, will soon provide for its eventual termination. Doubtless, in the cotton and sugar growing states it will retain its hold with more tenacity, but the influence of free principles will roll onward until the evil is annihilated. The barbarous and unwise regulations in some of the planting states, _which prohibit the slaves from being taught to read_, are a serious impediment to the moral and religious instruction of that numerous and unfortunate class. Such laws display on the part of the law makers, little knowledge of human nature and the real tendency of things. To keep _slaves_ entirely ignorant of the rights of man, in this spirit-stirring age, is utterly impossible. Seek out the remotest and darkest corner of Louisiana, and plant every guard that is possible around the negro quarters, and the light of truth will penetrate. Slaves will find out, for they already know it, that they possess rights as men. And here is the fatal mistake now committed in the southern slaveholding states--legislating against the instruction of their slaves--to keep them from knowing their rights. They will obtain some loose, vague, and undefined notion of the doctrine of human rights, and the unrighteousness of oppression in this republican country. Being kept from all the moral and religious instruction which Sabbath schools, the Bible, and other good books are calculated to impart, and with those undefined notions of liberty, and without any moral principle, they are prepared to enter into the first insurrectionary movement proposed by some artful and talented leader. The same notion prevailed in the West Indies half a century since, and many of the planters resisted and persecuted the benevolent Moravians, who went there to instruct the blacks in the principles and duties of religion. A few of the planters reasoned justly. They invited these benevolent men on their plantations, and gave them full liberty on the Sabbath, and at other suitable seasons, to instruct their slaves. The happiest effects followed. On these plantations, where riot, misrule, and threatened insurrections, had once spread a panic through the colony, order, quietness and submission followed. Such would be the effects if the southern planter would invite the minister of the gospel and the Sunday school teacher to visit his plantation, allow his slaves to be instructed to read, and each to be furnished with a copy of the Scriptures. The southern planter hourly lives under the most terrific apprehensions. It is in vain to disguise the fact. As Mr. Randolph once significantly said in Congress, "_when the night bell rings, the mother hugs her infant closer to her breast_." Slavery, under any circumstances, is a bitter draught--equally bitter to him who tenders the cup, and to him who drinks it. But in all the northern slaveholding states, it is comparatively mild. Its condition would be much alleviated, and the planter might sleep securely if he would abolish his barbarous laws, more congenial with Asiatic despotism than American republicanism, and provide for his slaves the benefits of wholesome instruction. Philanthropy and interest unite in their demands upon every southern planter to provide Sunday school instruction for his slaves. The planting region of the lower Valley furnishes an immense market for the productions and manufactures of the upper Valley. Indirectly, the Louisiana sugar business is a source of profit to the farmer of Illinois and Missouri. Pork, beef, corn, corn-meal, flour, potatoes, butter, hay, &c. in vast quantities, go to supply these plantations. In laying in their stores, the sugar planters usually purchase one barrel of second or third quality of beef or pork per annum, for each laborer. Large drafts for sugar mills, engines and boilers, are made upon the Cincinnati and Pittsburg iron foundries. Mules and horses are driven from the upper country, or from the Mexican dominions, to keep up the supply. The commerce of the upper country that concentrates at New Orleans is amazing, and every year is rapidly increasing. Sixteen hundred arrivals of steamboats took place in 1832, and the estimated number in 1835 is 2,300. _Farmers._--In the northern half of the Valley the productions, and the modes of cultivation and living are such as to characterize a large proportion of the population as farmers. No country on earth has such facilities for agriculture. The soil is abundantly fertile, the seasons ordinarily favorable to the growth and maturity of crops, and every farmer in a few years, with reasonable industry, becomes comparatively independent. Tobacco and hemp are among the staple productions of Kentucky. Neat cattle, horses, mules and swine are its stock. Some stock growers have monopolized the smaller farms till they are surrounded with several thousand acres. Blue grass pastures furnish summer feed, and extensive fields of corn, cut up near the ground, and stacked in the fields, furnish stores for fattening stock in the winter. In some counties, raising of stock has taken place of all other business. The Scioto Valley, and other districts in Ohio, are famous for fine, well fed beef. Thousands of young cattle are purchased by the Ohio graziers, at the close of winter, of the farmers of Illinois and Missouri. The Miami and Whitewater sections of Ohio and Indiana, abound with swine. Cincinnati has been the great pork mart of the world. 150,000 head of hogs have been frequently slaughtered there in a season. About 75,000 is estimated to be the number slaughtered at that place the present season. This apparent falling off in the pork business, at Cincinnati, is accounted for by the vast increase of business at other places. Since the opening of the canals in Ohio, many provision establishments have been made along their line. Much business of the kind is now done at Terre Haute and other towns on the Wabash,--at Madison, Louisville, and other towns on the Ohio,--at Alton and other places in Illinois. The farmers of the West are independent in feeling, plain in dress, simple in manners, frank and hospitable in their dwellings, and soon acquire a competency by moderate labor. Those from Kentucky, Tennessee, or other states south of the Ohio river, have large fields, well cultivated, and enclosed with strong built rail or worm fences, but they often neglect to provide spacious barns and other outhouses for their grain, hay and stock. The influence of habit, is powerful. A Kentuckian would look with contempt upon the low fences of a New-Englander as indicating thriftless habits, while the latter would point at the unsheltered stacks of wheat, and dirty threshing floor of the former, as proof direct of bad economy and wastefulness. _Population of the Cities and large Towns._ The population of western towns does not differ essentially from the same class in the Atlantic states, excepting there is much less division into grades and ranks, less ignorance, low depravity and squalid poverty amongst the poor, and less aristocratic feeling amongst the rich. As there is never any lack of employment for laborers of every description, there is comparatively no suffering from that cause. And the hospitable habits of the people provide for the sick, infirm and helpless. Doubtless, our _circumstances_ more than any thing else, cause these shades of difference. The common mechanic is on a social equality with the merchant, the lawyer, the physician, and the minister. They have shared in the same fatigues and privations, partook of the same homely fare, in many instances have fought side by side in defence of their homes against the inroads of savages,--are frequently elected to the same posts of honor, and have accumulated property simultaneously. Many mechanics in the western cities and towns, are the owners of their own dwellings, and of other buildings, which they rent. I have known many a wealthy merchant, or professional gentleman occupy on rent, a building worth several thousand dollars, the property of some industrious mechanic, who, but a few years previous, was an apprentice lad, or worked at his trade as a journeyman. Any sober, industrious mechanic can place himself in affluent circumstances, and place his children on an equality with the children of the commercial and professional community, by migrating to any of our new and rising western towns. They will find no occasion here for combinations to sustain their interests, nor meet with annoyance from gangs of unprincipled foreigners, under the imposing names of "Trades Unions." Manufactures of various kinds are carried on in our western cities. Pittsburg has been characterized as the "Birmingham of America." The manufactures of iron, machinery and glass, and the building of steamboats, are carried on to a great extent. Iron and salt, are made in great quantities in Western Pennsylvania, and Western Virginia. Steamboats are built to a considerable extent at Fulton, two miles above Cincinnati, and occasionally at many other places on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. Alton offers great facilities for this business. Cotton bagging, bale ropes, and cordage, are manufactured in Tennessee and Kentucky. The following article from the Covington Enquirer, gives a few items of the industry and enterprise of Kentucky,--of the manufacture of Newport and Covington. Both of these thriving towns lie at the mouth of the Licking river, the one on the right bank, and the other on the left, and both in direct view of Cincinnati. MANUFACTURES IN COVINGTON AND NEWPORT. "Founding the calculation upon the actual manufactures of October, and the known power of their machinery, the Company will the ensuing year, give employment to more than four hundred operatives, and manufacture, 60,000 lbs. of Cotton Bagging, 84,000 do Cotton Yarns, 274,268 lbs. Bale Rope, 448,000 do Cordage, 44,592 yards Linseys, 63,588 do Cotton Plains, 97,344 do Kentucky Jeans, 548,530 do Cotton Bagging and Hemp. Estimating Bale Rope and Cotton Bagging at 33 per cent under the price at which the Company have sold these articles for the last six months, the manufactures of this Company during the ensuing year will amount to $358,548.44. Almost all the manufactures at Covington and Newport being exported to foreign markets, it will result that the annual exports from these points will, in round numbers, be from the Interior $750,000 Campbell County 150,000 Boone County 234,000 Covington 548,500 Newport 358,500 ---------- $2,041,000 The Newport Manufacturing Company has depended principally for its supply of Hemp, on the production of Mason county, of which Maysville is the market;--this season they have not been able to get a supply at Maysville, and it is a remarkable fact in the history of the Hemp manufactories in Kentucky, that this company, owing to the scarcity and high prices of Hemp in Kentucky, _has imported this season_ 354,201 lbs. _Russia Hemp_. Various manufactures are springing up in all the new states, which will be noticed under their proper heads. The number of merchants and traders is very great in the Valley of the Mississippi, yet mercantile business is rapidly increasing.--Thousands of the farmers of the West, are partial traders. They take their own produce, in their own flat boats, down the rivers to the market of the lower country. _Frontier class of Population._ The rough, sturdy habits of the backwoodsmen, living in that plenty which depends on God and nature, have laid the foundation of independent thought and feeling deep in the minds of western people. Generally, in all the western settlements, three classes, like the waves of the ocean, have rolled one after the other. First comes the Pioneer, who depends for the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation, called the "range," and the proceeds of hunting. His implements of agriculture are rude, chiefly of his own make, and his efforts directed mainly to a crop of corn, and a "truck patch." The last is a rude garden for growing cabbage, beans, corn for roasting ears, cucumbers and potatoes. A log cabin, and occasionally a stable and corn crib, and a field of a dozen acres, the timber girdled or "deadened," and fenced, are enough for his occupancy. It is quite immaterial whether he ever becomes the owner of the soil. He is the occupant for the time being, pays no rent, and feels as independent as the "lord of the manor." With a horse, cow, and one or two breeders of swine, he strikes into the woods with his family, and becomes the founder of a new county, or perhaps state. He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other families of similar taste and habits, and occupies till the range is somewhat subdued, and hunting a little precarious, or, which is more frequently the case, till neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow-room. The pre-emption law enables him to dispose of his cabin and cornfield, to the next class of emigrants, and, to employ his own figures, he "breaks for the high timber,"--"clears out for the New Purchase," or migrates to Arkansas or Texas, to work the same process over. The next class of emigrants purchase the lands, add "field to field," clear out the roads, throw rough bridges over the streams, put up hewn log houses, with glass windows, and brick or stone chimneys, occasionally plant orchards, build mills, school houses, court houses, &c., and exhibit the picture and forms of plain, frugal, civilized life. Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The "settler" is ready to sell out, and take the advantage of the rise of property,--push farther into the interior, and become himself, a man of capital and enterprise in time. The small village rises to a spacious town or city,--substantial edifices of brick, extensive fields, orchards, gardens--colleges and churches are seen. Broadcloths, silks, leghorns, crapes, and all the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities and fashions, are in vogue. Thus wave after wave is rolling westward--the real _el dorado_ is still farther on. A portion of the two first classes remain stationary amidst the general movement, improve their habits and condition, and rise in the scale of society. The writer has travelled much amongst the first class--the real pioneers. He has lived many years in connexion with the second grade, and now the third wave is sweeping over large districts of Indiana, Illinois and Missouri. Migration has become almost a habit in the west. Hundreds of men can be found, not fifty years of age, who have settled for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time on a new spot. To sell out and remove only a few hundred miles, makes up a portion of the variety of backwoods life and manners. But to return to the Frontier class. 1. _Dress._--The hunting shirt is universally worn. This is a kind of loose, open frock, reaching halfway down the thighs, with large sleeves, the body open in front, lapped over, and belted with a leathern girdle, held together with a buckle. The cape is large, and usually fringed with different colored cloth from that of the body. The bosom of this dress sometimes serves as a wallet for a "chunk" of bread, jerk or smoke-dried venison, and other articles. It is made either of dressed deer skins, linsey, coarse linen, or cotton. The shirt, waistcoat and pantaloons are of similar articles and of the customary form. Wrappers of cloth or dressed skins, called "leggins" are tied round the legs when travelling. Moccasins of deer skins, shoe packs, and rough shoes, the leather tanned and cobbled by the owner, are worn on the feet. The females' dress in a coarse gown of cotton, a bonnet of the same stuff, and denominated in the eastern states a "sun-bonnet." The latter is constantly worn through the day, especially when company is present. The clothing for both sexes is made at home. The wheel and loom are common articles of furniture in every cabin. 2. _Dwellings._--"Cabin" is the name for a plain, rough log-house, throughout the west. The spot being selected, usually in the timbered land, and near some spring, the first operation of the newly arrived emigrant is to cut about 40 logs of the proper size and length for a single cabin, or twice that number for a double one, and haul them to the spot. A large oak or other suitable timber, of straight grain, and free from limbs, is selected for clapboards for the roof. These are four feet in length, split with a froe six or eight inches wide, and half an inch thick. _Puncheons_ are used for the floor. These are made by splitting trees about eighteen inches in diameter into slabs, two or three inches in thickness, and hewn on the upper surface. The door way is made by cutting out the logs after raising, of a suitable width, and putting upright pieces of timber at the sides. The shutter is made of clapboards, pinned on cross pieces, hung by wooden hinges, and fastened by a wooden latch. A similar aperture, but is wider made at one end for the chimney. The men of the settlement, when notified, collect and raise the building. Four stout men with axes are placed on the corners to notch the logs together, while the rest of the company lift them up. After the roof is on the body of the building, it is slightly hewed down both out and inside. The roof is formed by shortening each end log in succession till one log forms the comb of the roof. The clapboards are put on so as to cover all cracks, and held down by poles or small logs. The chimney is built of sticks of wood, the largest at the bottom, and the smallest at the top, and laid up with a supply of mud or clay mortar. The interstices between the logs are chinked with strips of wood and daubed with mortar both outside and in. A double cabin consists of two such buildings with a space of 10 or 12 feet between, over which the roof extends. A _log house_, in western parlance, differs from a cabin in the logs being hewn on two sides to an equal thickness before raising,--in having a framed and shingled roof, a brick or stone chimney, windows, tight floors, and are frequently clapboarded on the outside and plastered within. A log house thus finished, costs more than a framed one. Cabins are often the temporary dwellings of opulent and highly respectable families. The axe, auger, froe, drawing knife, broad-axe, and crosscut saw are the only tools required in constructing these rude edifices;--sometimes the axe and auger only are employed. Not a nail or pane of glass is needed. Cabins are by no means as wretched for residences as their name imports. They are often roomy, comfortable and neat. If one is not sufficient to accommodate the family, another is added, and another until sufficient room is obtained. 3. _Furniture and mode of living._--The genuine backwoodsman makes himself and family comfortable and contented where those, unaccustomed to his mode of life, would live in unavailing regret, or make a thousand awkward apologies on the visit of a neighbor or traveller. A table is made of a split slab and supported by four round legs. Clapboards supported by pins stuck in the logs answer for shelves for table furniture. The bedstead is often made in the corner of the room by sticks placed in the logs, supported at the outward corner by a post, on which clapboards are laid, the ends of which enter the wall between the logs, and which support the bedding. On the arrival of travellers or visiters, the bed clothing is shared with them, being spread on the puncheon floor that the feet may project towards the fire. Many a night has the writer passed in this manner, after a fatiguing day's ride, and reposed more comfortably than on a bed of down in a spacious mansion. All the family of both sexes, with all the strangers who arrive, often lodge in the same room. In that case the under garments are never taken off, and no consciousness of impropriety or indelicacy of feeling is manifested. A few pins stuck in the wall of the cabin display the dresses of the women and the hunting shirts of the men. Two small forks or bucks-horns fastened to a joist are indispensable articles for the support of the rifle. A loose floor of clapboards, and supported by round poles, is thrown over head for a loft which furnishes a place to throw any articles not immediately wanted, and is frequently used for a lodging place for the younger branches of the family. A ladder planted in the corner behind the door answers the purpose of stairs. The necessary table and kitchen furniture are a few pewter dishes and spoons, knives and forks, (for which however, the common hunting knife is often a substitute,) tin cups for coffee or milk, a water pail and a small gourd or calabash for water, with a pot and iron Dutch oven, constitute the chief articles. Add to these a tray for wetting up meal for corn bread, a coffee pot and set of cups and saucers, a set of common plates, and the cabin is furnished. The hominy mortar and hand mill are in use in all frontier settlements. The first consists of a block of wood with an excavation burned at one end and scraped out with an iron tool, wide at top and narrow at the bottom that the action of the pestle may operate to the best advantage. Sometimes a stump of a large tree is excavated while in its natural position. An elastic pole, 20 or 30 feet in length, with the large end fastened under the ground log of the cabin, and the other elevated 10 or 15 feet and supported by two forks, to which a pestle 5 or 6 inches in diameter and 8 or 10 feet long is fixed on the elevated end by a large mortice, and a pin put through its lower end so that two persons can work it in conjunction. This is much used for pounding corn. A very simple instrument to answer the same purpose, is a circular piece of tin, perforated, and attached to a piece of wood like a grater, on which the ears of corn are rubbed for meal. The hand mill is in the same form as that used in Judea in the time of our Savior. Two circular stones, about 18 inches in diameter constructed like ordinary mill stones, with a staff let into the runner or upper stone near its outer edge, with the upper end inserted in a joist or board over head, and turned by the hands of two persons while one feeds it with corn. Horse mills follow the mortar and hand mill in the scale of improvement. They are constructed variously. A _hand_ mill is the most simple. A large upright post is placed on a gudgeon, with shafts extending horizontally 15 or 20 feet. Around the ends of these is a band of raw hide twisted, which passes around the trundle head and turns the spindle and communicates motion to the stone. A _cog_ mill is formed by constructing a rim with cogs upon the shafts, and a trundle head to correspond. Each person furnishes his own horses to turn the mill, performs his own grinding, and pays toll to the owner for use of the mill. Mills with the wheel on an inclined plane, and carried by oxen standing on the wheel, are much in use in those sections where water power is not convenient, but these indicate an advance to the second grade of society. Instead of bolting cloths, the frontier people use a sieve or as called here, a "search." This is made from a deer skin prepared to resemble parchment, stretched on a hoop and perforated full of holes with a hot wire. Every backwoodsman carries on all occasions, the means of furnishing his meat. The rifle, bullet pouch and horn, hunting knife, horse and dog are his constant companions when from home, and woe be to the wolf, bear, deer or turkey that comes within one hundred and fifty yards of his trail. With the first emigration there are few mechanics; hence every settler becomes expert in supplying his own necessaries. Besides clearing land, building cabins, and making fences, he stocks his own plough, repairs his wagon and his harness, tans his own leather, makes his shoes, tables, bedsteads, stools or seats, trays and a hundred other articles. These may be rudely constructed, but they answer his purpose very well. The following extracts from the graphic "SKETCHES OF THE WEST," by James Hall, Esq. completes this extended picture of backwoods manners. "The traveller, accustomed to different modes of life, is struck with the rude and uncomfortable appearance of every thing about this people,--the rudeness of their habitations, the carelessness of their agriculture, the unsightly coarseness of all their implements and furniture, the unambitious homeliness of all their goods and chattels, except the axe, the rifle, and the horse--these being invariably the best and handsomest which their means enable them to procure. But he is mistaken in supposing them indolent or improvident; and is little aware how much ingenuity and toil have been exerted in procuring the few comforts which they possess, in a country without arts, mechanics, money, or commercial intercourse. "The backwoodsman has many substantial enjoyments. After the fatigue of his journey, and a short season of privation and danger, he finds himself surrounded with plenty. His cattle, hogs, and poultry, supply his table with meat; the forest abounds in game; the fertile soil yields abundant crops; he has, of course, bread, milk, and butter; the rivers furnish fish, and the woods honey. For these various articles, there is, at first, no market, and the farmer acquires the generous habit of spreading them profusely on his table, and giving them freely to a hungry traveller and an indigent neighbor. "Hospitality and kindness are among the virtues of the first settlers. Exposed to common dangers and toils, they become united by the closest ties of social intercourse. Accustomed to arm in each other's defence, to aid in each other's labor, to assist in the affectionate duty of nursing the sick, and the mournful office of burying the dead, the best affections of the heart are kept in constant exercise; and there is, perhaps, no class of men in our country, who obey the calls of benevolence, with such cheerful promptness, or with so liberal a sacrifice of personal convenience. "We read marvellous stories of the ferocity of western men. The name of Kentuckian is constantly associated with the idea of fighting, dirking, and gouging. The people of whom we are now writing do not deserve this character. They live together in great harmony, with little contention and less litigation. The backwoodsmen are a generous and placable race. They are bold and impetuous; and when differences do arise among them, they are more apt to give vent to their resentment at once, than to brood over their wrongs, or to seek legal redress. But this conduct is productive of harmony; for men are always more guarded in their deportment to each other, and more cautious of giving offence, when they know that the insult will be quickly felt, and instantly resented, than when the consequences of an offensive action are doubtful, and the retaliation distant. We have no evidence that the pioneers of Kentucky were quarrelsome or cruel; and an intimate acquaintance with the same race, at a later period, has led the writer to the conclusion, that they are a humane people; bold and daring, when opposed to an enemy, but amiable in their intercourse with each other and with strangers, and habitually inclined to peace." In morals and the essential principles of religion, this class of people are by no means so defective as many imagine. The writer has repeatedly been in settlements and districts beyond the pale of civil and criminal law, where the people are a "law unto themselves," where courts, lawyers, sheriffs, and constables existed not, and yet has seen as much quiet and order, and more honesty in paying just debts, than where legal restraints operated in all their force. The turpitude of vice and the majesty of virtue, were as apparent as in older settlements. Industry, in laboring or hunting, bravery in war, candor, honesty, and hospitality were rewarded with the confidence and honor of the people. Regulating parties would exist, and thieves, rogues and counterfeiters were sure to receive a striped Jacket "worked nineteen to the dozen," and by this mode of operation, induced to "clear out;" but truth, uprightness, honesty and sincerity are always respected. Many of the frontier class are _illiterate_, but they are by no means _ignorant_. They are a shrewd, observing, thinking people. They may not have learned the black marks in books, but they have studied _men and things_, and have a quick insight into human nature. They are not inattentive to religion, though their opportunities of religious instruction are few, compared with old countries. They have prejudices and fears about many of the organized benevolent societies of the present age, yet there are no people more readily disposed to attend religious meetings, and whose hearts are more readily affected with the gospel than the backwoods people; and as large a proportion are orderly professors of religion as in any part of the Union. Ministers of the gospel and Missionaries, who can suit themselves to the circumstances and habits of frontier people,--who like Paul, can "become all things to all men,"--find pleasant and interesting fields of labor on all our frontiers. But let such persons show fastidiousness, affect superior intelligence and virtue, catechise the people for their plainness and simplicity of manners, and draw invidious comparisons, and they are sure to be "used up," or left without hearers, to deplore the "dark clouds" of ignorance and prejudice in the west. _Hunters and Trappers._ Entirely beyond the boundaries of civilization are many hundreds of a unique class, distinguished by the terms Hunters and Trappers. They are engaged in hunting buffalo and other wild game, and trapping for beaver. They are found upon the vast prairies of the West and Northwest,--in all the defiles and along the streams of the Rocky mountains, and in various parts of the Oregon Territory, to the peninsula of California. They are an enterprising and erratic race from almost every state, and are usually in the employ of persons of capital and enterprise, and who are concerned in the fur and peltry business. Expeditions for one, two, or three years, are fitted out from St. Louis, or some commercial point, consisting of companies, who ascend the rivers to the regions of fur. The hunters and trappers, receive a proportion of the profits of the expedition. Some become so enamored with this wandering and exposed life as to lose all desire of returning to the abodes of civilization, and remain for the rest of their lives in the American deserts. There are individuals, who are graduates of colleges, and who once stood high in the circles of refinement and taste, that have passed more than twenty years amongst the roaming tribes of the Rocky mountains, or on the western slope, till they have apparently lost all feelings towards civilized life. They have afforded an interesting but melancholy example of the tendencies of human nature towards the degraded state of savages. The improvement of the species is a slow and laborious process,--the deterioration is rapid, and requires only to be divested of restraint, and left to its own unaided tendencies. Many others have returned to the habits of civilization, and some with fortunes made from the woods and prairies. _Boatmen._ These are the fresh water sailors of the West, with much of the light hearted, reckless character of the sons of the Ocean, including peculiar shades of their own. Before the introduction of Steamboats on the western waters, its immense commerce was carried on by means of _keel boats_, and _barges_. The former is much in the shape of a canal boat, long, slim-built, sharp at each end, and propelled by setting poles and the cordelle or long rope. The barge is longer, and has a bow and stern. Both are calculated to ascend streams but by a very slow process. Each boat would require from ten to thirty hands, according to its size. A number of these boats frequently sailed in company. The boatmen were proverbially lawless at every town and landing, and indulged without restraint in every species of dissipation, debauchery and excess. But this race has become reformed, or nearly extinct;--yes, reformed by the mighty power of steam. A steamboat, with half the crew of a barge or keel, will carry ten times the burden, and perform six or eight trips in the time it took a keel boat to make one voyage. Thousands of flat boats, or "broad horns," as they are called, pass _down_ the rivers with the produce of the country, which are managed by the farmers of the West, but never return up stream. They are sold for lumber, and the owners, after disposing of the cargo, return by steam. The number of boatmen on the western waters is not only greatly reduced, but those that remain are fast losing their original character. CHAPTER V. PUBLIC LANDS. System of Surveys.--Meridian and Base Lines.--Townships.--Diagram of a township surveyed into Sections.--Land Districts and Offices. --Pre-emption rights.--Military Bounty Lands.--Taxes.--Valuable Tracts of country unsettled. In all the new states and territories, the lands which are owned by the general government, are surveyed and sold under one general system. Several offices, each under the direction of a surveyor general, have been established by acts of Congress, and districts, embracing one or more states, assigned them. The office for the surveys of all public lands in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and the Wisconsin country is located at Cincinnati. The one including the states of Illinois and Missouri, and the territory of Arkansas is at St. Louis. Deputy surveyors are employed to do the work at a stipulated rate per mile, generally from three to four dollars, who employ chain bearers, an axe, and flag man, and a camp-keeper. They are exposed to great fatigue and hardship, spending two or three months at a time in the woods and prairies, with slight, moveable camps for shelter. In the surveys, "_meridian_" lines are first established, running north from the mouth of some noted river. These are intersected with "_base_" lines. There are five principal meridians in the land surveys in the west. The "_First Principal Meridian_" is a line due north from the mouth of the Miami. The "_Second Principal Meridian_" is a line due north from the mouth of Little Blue river, in Indiana. The "_Third Principal Meridian_" is a line due north from the mouth of the Ohio. The "_Fourth Principal Meridian_" is a line due north from the mouth of the Illinois. The "_Fifth Principal Meridian_" is a line due north from the mouth of the Arkansas. Another Meridian is used for Michigan, which passes through the central part of the state. Its base line extends from about the middle of lake St. Clair, across the state west to lake Michigan. Each of these meridians has its own base line. The surveys connected with the third and fourth meridians, and a small portion of the second, embrace the state of Illinois. The base line for both the second and third principal meridians commences at Diamond Island, in Ohio, opposite Indiana, and runs due west till it strikes the Mississippi, a few miles below St. Louis. All the _townships_ in Illinois, south and east of the Illinois river, are numbered from this base line either north or south. The third principal meridian terminates with the northern boundary of the state. The fourth principal meridian commences in in the centre of the channel, and at the mouth of the Illinois river, but immediately crosses to the _east_ shore, and passes up on that side, (and at one place nearly fourteen miles distant) to a point in the channel of the river, seventy-two miles from its mouth. Here its base line commences and extends across the peninsula to the Mississippi, a short distance above Quincy. The fourth principal meridian is continued northward through the military tract, and across Rock river, to a curve in the Mississippi at the upper rapids, in township eighteen north, and about twelve or fifteen miles above Rock Island. It here crosses and passes up the _west_ side of the Mississippi river fifty-three miles, and recrosses into Illinois, and passes through the town of Galena to the northern boundary of the state. It is thence continued to the Wisconsin river and made the principal meridian for the surveys of the territory, while the northern boundary line of the state is constituted its base line for that region. Having formed a principal meridian with its corresponding base line, for a district of country, the next operation of the surveyor is to divide this into tracts of six miles square, called "_townships_." In numbering the townships _east_ or _west_ from a principal meridian, they are called "_ranges_," meaning a range of townships; but in numbering _north_ or _south_ from a base line, they are called "_townships_." Thus a tract of land is said to be situated in township four north in range three east, from the third principal meridian; or as the case may be. Townships are subdivided into square miles, or tracts of 640 acres each, called "_sections_." If near timber, trees are marked and numbered with the section, township, and range, near each sectional corner. If in a large prairie, a mound is raised to designate the corner, and a billet of charred wood buried, if no rock is near. Sections are divided into halves by a line north and south, and into quarters by a transverse line. In sales under certain conditions, quarters are sold in equal subdivisions of forty acres each, at one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre. Any person, whether a native born citizen, or a foreigner, may purchase forty acres of the richest soil, and receive an indisputable title, for fifty dollars. _Ranges_ are townships counted either east or west from meridians. _Townships_ are counted either north or south from their respective base lines. _Fractions_, are parts of quarter sections intersected by streams or confirmed claims. The parts of townships, sections, quarters, &c. made at the lines of either townships or meridians are called _excesses_ or _deficiencies_. _Sections_, or miles square are numbered, beginning in the northeast corner of the township, progressively west to the range line, and then progressively east to the range line, alternately, terminating at the southeast corner of the township, from one to thirty-six, as in the following diagram: +------+------+------+------+------+------+ | | | | | | | | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | | | | | | | | +------+------+------+------+------+------+ | | | | | | | | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | | | | | | | | +------+------+------+------+------+------+ | | | | | | | | 18 | 17 | 16[A]| 15 | 14 | 13 | | | | | | | | +------+------+------+------+------+------+ | | | | | | | | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | | | | | | | | +------+------+------+------+------+------+ | | | | | | | | 30 | 29 | 28 | 27 | 26 | 25 | | | | | | | | +------+------+------+------+------+------+ | | | | | | | | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | | | | | | | | +------+------+------+------+------+------+ [A] Appropriated for schools in the township. I have been thus particular in this account of the surveys of public lands, to exhibit the simplicity of a system, that to strangers, unacquainted with the method of numbering the sections, and the various subdivisions, appears perplexing and confused. All the lands of Congress owned in Ohio have been surveyed, and with the exceptions of some Indian reservations, have been brought into market. In Indiana, all the lands purchased of the Indians have been surveyed, and with the exception of about ninety townships and fractional townships, have been offered for sale. These, amounting to about two millions of acres, will be offered for sale the present year. In Michigan, nearly all the ceded lands have been surveyed and brought into market. The unsurveyed portion is situated in the neighborhood of Saginaw bay; a part of which may be ready for market within the current year. In the Wisconsin Territory, west of lake Michigan, all the lands in the Wisconsin district, which lies between the state of Illinois and the Wisconsin river, have been surveyed; and in addition to the lands already offered for sale in the Green Bay district, about 65 townships, and fractional townships, have been surveyed and are ready for market. The surveys of the whole country west of lake Michigan and south of the Wisconsin river, in Illinois and Wisconsin territory, will soon be surveyed and in market. Here are many millions of the finest lands on earth, lying along the Des Pleines, Fox, and Rock rivers, and their tributaries, well watered, rich soil, a healthy atmosphere, and facilities to market. A temporary scarcity of timber in some parts of this region will retard settlements, for a time; but this difficulty will be obviated, by the rapidity with which prairie land turns to a timbered region, wherever, by contiguous settlements, the wild grass becomes subdued, and by the discovery of coal beds. Much of it is a mineral region. In Illinois, the surveys are now completed in the Danville district, and in the southern part of the Chicago district. They are nearly completed along Rock river and the Mississippi. The unsurveyed portion is along Fox river, Des Pleines and the shore of lake Michigan, in the north-eastern part of the state. Emigrants, however, do not wait for surveys and sales. They are settling over this fine portion of the state, in anticipation of purchases. In Missouri, besides the former surveys, the exterior lines of 138 townships, and the subdivision into sections and quarters, 30 townships in the northern part of the state, and contracts for running the exterior lines of 189 townships on the waters of the Osage and Grand rivers have been made. A large portion of this state is now surveyed and in market. Surveys are progressing in Arkansas, and large bodies of land are proclaimed for sale in that district. I have no data before me that will enable me definitely to show the amount of public lands now remaining unsold, in each land office district. In another place I have already given an estimate of the amount of public lands, within the organized states and territories, remaining unsold, compared with the amount sold in past years. The following table exhibits the number of acres sold in the districts embraced more immediately within the range of this Guide, for 1834, and the three first quarters of 1835, with the names of each district in each state. It is constructed from the Report of the Commissioner of the General Land Office to the Treasury Department, December 5th, 1835. The sales of the last quarter of 1835, in Illinois, and probably in the other states, greatly exceeded either the other quarters, and which will be exhibited in the annual report of the Commissioner in December, 1836. _Statement of the amount of Public Lands, sold at the several Land Offices in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Arkansas, in 1834._ =====================+============== | _Acres and LAND OFFICES. | hundredths_ ---------------------+-------------- OHIO. Marietta district, 11,999.52 Zanesville do 33,877.23 Steubenville, do 4,349.19 Chillicothe, do 21,309.32 Cincinnati, do 27,369.52 Wooster, do 9,448.77 Wapaghkonetta do 125,417.13 Bucyrus do 245,078.56 ---------- Total for the State, 478,847.24 INDIANA. Jeffersonville district. 67,826.11 Vincennes do 56,765.80 Indianopolis do 204,526.63 Crawfordsville do 161,477.87 Fort Wayne do 96,350.30 La Porte do 86,709.73 ---------- Total for the State, 673,656.44 ILLINOIS. Shawneetown district. 6,904.24 Kaskaskia do 15,196.52 Edwardsville do 124,302.19 Vandalia do 20,207.61 Palestine do 22,135.69 Springfield do 66,804.25 Danville do 62,331.38 Quincy do 36,131.59 ---------- Total for the State, 354,013.47 MICHIGAN TERRITORY Detroit district. 136,410.69 Monroe do 233,768.30 White Pigeon Prairie } Bronson do } 128,244.47 ---------- Total for the Territory 498,423.46 WISCONSIN TERRITORY. Mineral Point dist. 14,336.67 MISSOURI. St. Louis district. 43,634.68 Fayette do 71,049.74 Palmyra do 76,241.35 Jackson do 18,882.11 Lexington do 43,983.80 ---------- Total for the State, 253,791.70 ARKANSAS TERRITORY. Batesville district. 8,051.31 Little Rock do 25,799.74 Washington do 65,145.88 Fayetteville do 24,514.94 Helena do 26,244.59 ---------- Total for the Territory 149,756.46 _Statement of the amount of Public Lands, sold at the several Land Offices in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Arkansas, from January 1st, to September 30th, 1835, including nine months._ =====================+============= | _Acres and LAND OFFICES. | hundredths_ ---------------------+------------- OHIO. Marietta Dist. 11,012.98 Zanesville do 42,978.36 Steubenville do 3,649.29 Chillicothe do 12,586.87 Cincinnati do 20,105.76 Wooster do 5,157.68 Wapaghkonetta} and Lima, } do 103,020.23 Bucyrus do 154,706.63 ---------- Total for the State, 353,217.80 INDIANA. Jeffersonville Dist. 44,634.81 Vincennes do 70,903.62 Indianapolis do 158,786.68 Crawfordsville do 108,055.22 Fort Wayne do 148,864.28 La Porte do 227,702.35 ---------- Total for the State, 758,946.96 ILLINOIS. Shawneetown Dist. 5,754.08 Kaskaskia do 13,814.38 Edwardsville do 123,638.07 Vandalia do 16,253.46 Palestine do 14,088.01 Springfield do 316,966.70 Danville do 94,491.35 Quincy do [A]40,274.58 Galena do [B]262,152.73 Chicago do 333,405.73 ------------ Total for the State, 1,220,838.76 MICHIGAN. Detroit Dist. 213,763.57 Brownson do 400,722.48 Monroe do 446,631.61 ------------ Total for Michigan} proper, } 1,061,127.66 WISCONSIN. Mineral Point Dist. 67,052.55 Green Bay do 68,365.53 ---------- Total for Wisconsin} Territory, } 135,418.08 MISSOURI. St. Louis Dist. 32,914.57 Fayette do 55,839.58 Palmyra do 101,018.00 Jackson do 28,995.19 Lexington do 42,801.45 Springfield do 320.00 ---------- Total for the State, 261,888.79 ARKANSAS. Batesville Dist. 2,021.22 Little Rock do 22,291.92 Washington do 43,360.81 Fayetteville do 8,723.72 Helena do 312,169.09 ---------- Total for the Territory 388,566.76 [A] Returns only to May 31st. [B] Returns only to July 31st. Since those periods, sales at these Offices have been immense The reader will perceive that the sales of the three first quarters of 1835, almost doubled those of the whole year of 1834. The inquiry was often made of the writer, while travelling in the Atlantic states in the summer of 1835, whether there was still opportunity for emigrants to purchase public lands in Indiana, Illinois, &c. where land offices had been opened for sale of lands many years. He found almost everywhere, wrong notions prevailing. The people were not aware of the immense extent of the public domain now in market, and ready to be sold at _one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre_, and even in as small tracts as forty acres. Take for example, the Edwardsville district, in which the writer resides. It extends south to the base line, east to the third principal meridian, north to the line that separates townships 13 and 14 north, and west to the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, and embraces all the counties of Madison, Clinton, Bond, Montgomery, Macouper, and Greene, a tier of townships on the south side of Morgan and Sangamon, five and a half townships from Fayette, and about half of St. Clair county. The lands for a part of this district have been in market for 18 or 20 years;--it contains some of the oldest American settlements in the state, and has also a number of confined claims never offered for sale. And yet the receiver of this office informed me in November last, that he had just made returns of all the lands sold in this district, and they amounted to just _one third_ of the whole quantity. Every man, therefore, may take it for granted that there will be land enough in market in all the new states, for his use, during the present generation. These are facts that should be known to all classes. The mania of land speculation and of monopolists would soon subside, were those concerned to sit down coolly, and after ascertaining the amount of public lands now in market, with the vast additional quantity that must soon come into market, use a few figures in common arithmetic, with the probable amount of emigration, and ascertain the probable extent of the demand for this article at any future period. The following information is necessary for those who are not acquainted with our land system. In each land office there are a Register and Receiver, appointed by the President and Senate for the term of four years, and paid by the government. After being surveyed, the land, by proclamation of the President, is offered for sale at public auction by half quarter sections, or tracts of 80 acres. If no one bids for it at one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre, or more, it is subject to private entry at any time after, upon payment of $1.25 cents per acre at the time of entry. _No credit in any case is allowed._ In many cases, Congress, by special statute, has granted to actual settlers, pre-emption rights, where settlements and improvements have been made on public lands previous to public sale. _Pre-emption rights_ confer the privilege only of purchasing the tract containing improvements at one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre, by the possessor, without the risk of a public sale. In Illinois and several other western states, all lands purchased of the general government, are exempted from taxation for five years after purchase. _Military Bounty lands._--These lands were surveyed and appropriated as bounties to the soldiers in the war with Great Britain in 1812-'15, to encourage enlistments. The selections were made in Illinois, Missouri, and Arkansas. The Bounty lands of Illinois lie between the Illinois and Mississippi rivers, in the counties of Calhoun, Pike, Adams, Schuyler, Macdonough, Warren, Mercer, Knox, Henry, Fulton, Peoria, and Putnam. Out of five millions of acres, 3,500,000 were selected, including about three-fifths of this tract. The remainder is disposed of in the manner of other public lands. The disposition of this fine country for military bounties has much retarded its settlement. It was a short-sighted and mistaken policy of government that dictated this measure. Most of the titles have long since departed from the soldiers for whose benefit the donations were made. Many thousand quarter sections have been sold for taxes by the state, have fallen into the hands of monopolists, and are now past redemption. The Bounty lands in Missouri, lie on the waters of Chariton and Grand rivers, north side of the Missouri river and in the counties of Chariton, Randolph, Carroll, and Ray, and include half a million of acres. The tract is generally fertile, undulating, a mixture of timber and prairie, but not as well watered as desirable. With the bounty lands of Arkansas I am not well acquainted. Their general character is good, and some tracts are rich cotton lands. _Taxes._--Lands bought of the U. S. government are exempted from taxation for five years after sale. All other lands owned by non-residents, equally with those of residents, are subject to taxation annually, either for state, or county purposes, or both. The mode and amount varies in each state. If not paid when due, costs are added, the lands sold, subject to redemption within a limited period;--generally two years. Every non-resident landholder should employ an agent within the state where his land lies, to look after it and pay his taxes, if he would not suffer the loss of his land. CHAPTER VI. ABORIGINES. Conjecture respecting their former numbers and condition. Present number and state.--Indian Territory appropriated as their permanent residence.--Plan and operations of the U. S. Government.--Missionary efforts and stations. Monuments and Antiquities. The idea is entertained, that the Valley of the Mississippi, was once densely populated by aborigines;--that here were extensive nations,--that the bones of many millions lie mouldering under our feet. It has become a common theory, that previous to the settlement of the country by people of European descent, there were _two_ successive races of men, quite distinct from each other;--that the first race, by some singular fatality, became exterminated, leaving no traditionary account of their existence. And the second race, the ancestors of the existing race of Indians, are supposed to have been once, far more numerous than the present white population of the Valley. Some parts of Mexico and South America, were found to be populous upon the first visits of the Spaniards; but I do not find satisfactory evidence that population was ever dense, in any part of the territory that now constitutes our Republic. Mr. Atwater supposes, from the mounds in Ohio, the Indian population far exceeded 700,000, at one time in that district. Mr. Flint says, "If we can infer nothing else from the mounds, we can clearly infer, that this country once had its millions." Hence, a principal argument assigned for the populousness of this country is, the millions buried in these tumuli, the bones of which, in a tolerable state of preservation, are supposed to be exhibited upon excavation. The writer has witnessed the opening of many of these mounds, and has seen the fragments of an occasional skeleton, found _near the surface_. Without stopping here to enter upon a disquisition on the hypothesis assumed, that these mounds, as they are termed, are as much the results of natural causes, as any other prominences on the surface of the globe: I will only remark, that it is a fact well known to frontier men, that the Indians have been in the habit of burying their dead on these ridges and hillocks, and that in our light, spongy soil, the skeleton decays surprisingly fast. This is not the place to exhibit the necessary data, that have led to the conviction, that not a human skeleton now exists in all the western Valley, (excepting in nitrous caves,) that was deposited in the earth before the discovery of the New World, by Columbus. The opinion that this Valley was once densely populous, is sustained from the supposed military works, distributed through the West. This subject, as well as that of mounds, wants re-examination. Probably, half a dozen enclosures, in a rude form, might have been used for military defence. The capabilities of the country to sustain a dense population, has been used to support the position, that it must have been once densely populated. This argues nothing without vestiges of agriculture and the arts. With the exception of a few small patches, around the Indian villages, for corn and pulse, the whole land was an unbroken wilderness. Strangers to the subject have imagined that our western prairies must once have been subdued by the hand of cultivation, because denuded of timber. Those who have long lived on them, have the evidences of observation, and their senses, to guide them. They know that the earth will not produce timber, while the surface is covered with a firm grassy sward, and that timber will spring up, as soon as this obstruction is removed. To all these theories, of the former density of the aboriginal population of the Valley, I oppose, first, the fact that but a scattered and erratic population was found here, on the arrival of the Europeans,--that the people were rude savages, subsisting chiefly by hunting, and that no savage people ever became populous,--that from time immemorial, the different tribes had been continually at war with each other,--that but a few years before the French explored it, the Iroquois, or Five nations, conquered all the country to the Mississippi, which they could not have done had it been populous, and that Kentucky, one of the finest portions of the Valley, was not inhabited by any people, but the common hunting and fighting grounds of both the northern and southern Indians, and hence called by them, _Kentuckee_, or the "Bloody ground."[7] That the Indian character has deteriorated, and the numbers of each tribe greatly lessened by contact with Europeans and their descendants, is not questioned; but many of the descriptions of the comforts and happiness of savage life and manners, before their country was possessed by the latter, are the exaggerated and glowing descriptions of poetic fancy. Evidence enough can be had to show that they were degraded and wretched, engaged in petty exterminating wars with each other, often times in a state of starvation, and leading a roving, indolent and miserable existence. Their government was anarchy.--Properly speaking, civil government had never existed amongst them. They had no executive, or judiciary power, and their legislation was the result of their councils held by aged and experienced men. It had no stronger claim upon the obedience of the people than advice. In Mexico, civilization had made progress, and there were populous towns and cities, and edifices for religious and other purposes. With the exception of some very rude structures, the ruins of which yet remain, and which upon too slight grounds, have been mistaken for military works, nothing is left as marks of the enterprise of the feeble bands of Indians of this Valley. Their implements, utensils, weapons of war, and water-craft, were of the most rude and simple construction, and yet prepared with great labor. Those who have written upon Indian manners, without personal and long acquaintance with their circumstances, have made extravagant blunders. The historian of America, Dr. Robertson, seems to suppose that the Indians cut down large trees, and dug out canoes with stone hatchets,--and that they cleared the timber from their small fields, by the same tedious process. Their stone axes or hatchets, were never used for _cutting_, but only for splitting and pounding. They burned down and hollowed out trees by fire, for canoes, and never chopped off the timber, but only deadened it, in clearing land. The condition of depraved man, unimproved by habits of civilization, and unblest with the influences and consolations of the gospel, is pitiable in the extreme. Such was the character and condition of the "Red skin," before his land was visited by the "Pale faces." I have often seen the aboriginal man in all his primeval wildness, when he first came in contact with the evils and benefits of civilization,--have admired his noble form and lofty bearing,--listened to his untutored and yet powerful eloquence, and yet have found in him the same humbling and melancholy proofs of his wretchedness and want, as is found in the remnants on our borders. The introduction of ardent spirits, and of several diseases, are the evils furnished the Indian race, by contact with the whites, while in other respects their condition has been improved. From the second number of the "_Annual Register of Indian Affairs, within the Indian (or western) Territory_," just published by the Rev. Isaac McCoy, the following particulars have been chiefly gleaned: Mr. McCoy has been devoted to the work of Indian reform for almost twenty years, first in Indiana, then in Michigan, and latterly in the Indian territory, west of Missouri and Arkansas. He is not only intimately acquainted with the peculiar circumstances of this unfortunate race, and with the country selected as their future residence by the government, but is ardently and laboriously engaged for their welfare. INDIAN TERRITORY. The Indian territory lies west and immediately adjacent to Missouri and Arkansas. It is about 600 miles long from north to south, extending from the Missouri river to the Red river, and running westwardly as far as the country is habitable, which is estimated to be about 200 miles. The almost destitution of timber, with extensive deserts, renders most of the country from this territory to the Rocky mountains uninhabitable. The dreams indulged by many, that the wave of white population is to move onward without any resisting barrier, till it reaches these mountains, and even overleap them to the Pacific ocean, will never be realized. Providence has thrown a desert of several hundred miles in extent, as an opposing barrier. As very contradictory accounts have gone abroad, prejudicial to the character of the country selected for the Indians, it becomes necessary to describe it with some particularity. The following, from Mr. McCoy (if it needed any additional support to its correctness,) is corroborated by the statements of many disinterested persons. "There is a striking similarity between all parts of this territory. In its general character, it is high and undulating, rather level than hilly; though small portions partly deserve the latter appellation. The soil is generally very fertile. It is thought that in no part of the world, so extensive a region of rich soil has been discovered as in this, of which the Indian territory is a central position. It is watered by numerous rivers, creeks and rivulets. Its waters pass through it eastwardly, none of which are favorable to navigation. There is less marshy and stagnant water in it than is usual in the western country. The atmosphere is salubrious, and the climate precisely such as is desirable, being about the same as that inhabited by the Indians on the east of the Mississippi. It contains much mineral coal and salt water, some lead, and some iron ore. Timber is too scarce, and this is a serious defect, but one which time will remedy, as has been demonstrated by the growth of timber in prairie countries which have been settled, where the grazing of stock, by diminishing the quantity of grass, renders the annual fires less destructive to the growth of wood. The prairie (i. e., land destitute of wood) is covered with grass, much of which is of suitable length for the scythe." The Chocktaws, Creeks, Cherokees, Osages, Kanzaus and Delawares, are entitled to lands westward of this territory for hunting grounds; some to the western boundary of the United States, others to the Rocky mountains. Mr. McCoy estimates the number of inhabitants of this territory at 47,733. INDIGENOUS TRIBES. Osage, about 5,510 Kanzau, " 1,684 Ottoe and Missourias, 1,600 O'Mahaus, 1,400 Pawnees, four tribes, 10,000 Puncahs, about 800 Quapaws, " 450 ------ 21,444 EMIGRANT TRIBES. Chocktaw, about 15,000 Cherokee, " 4,000 Creek, " 3,600 Seneca, Shawanoe of Neosho, 462 Wea, about 225 Piankeshau, 119 Peoria and Kaskaskias, 135 Ottawa, 81 Shawanoe of Kanzau river, 764 Delaware, 856 Kickapoo, 603 Putawatomie, 444 ------ Emigrants, 26,289 Indigenous, 21,444 ------ Total, 47,733 The estimate of the Chocktaws include about 400 negro slaves,--that of the Cherokees 500, and that of the Creeks about 450 slaves. _Chocktaws._ Their country adjoins Red river and the Province of Texas on the south, Arkansas on the east, and extends north to the Arkansas and Canadian rivers, being 150 miles from north to south, and 200 miles from east to west. Here are numerous salt springs. For civil purposes, their country is divided into three districts. _Cherokees._ The boundaries of their country commences on the Arkansas river, opposite the western boundary of Arkansas Territory;--thence northwardly along the line of Missouri, 8 miles to Seneca river;--thence west to the Neosho river;--thence up said river to the Osage lands;--thence west indefinitely, as far as habitable;--thence south to the Creek lands, and along the eastern line of the Creeks to a point 43 miles west of the Territory of Arkansas, and 25 miles north of Arkansas river;--thence to the Verdigris river, and down Arkansas river, to the mouth of the Neosho;--thence southwardly to the junction of the North Fork and Canadian rivers;--and thence down the Canadian and Arkansas rivers to the place of beginning. The treaty of 1828, secures to this tribe 7,000,000 of acres, and adds land westward for hunting grounds as far as the U. S. boundaries extend. The _Creeks_, or Muscogees, occupy the country west of Arkansas that lies between the lands of the Chocktaws and Cherokees. The _Senecas_ join the State of Missouri on the east, with the Cherokees south, the Neosho river west, and possess 127,500 acres. The _Osage_ (a French corruption of _Wos-sosh-ee_, their proper name, which has again been corrupted by Darby and others into _Ozark_) have their country north of the western portion of the Cherokee lands, commencing 25 miles west of the State of Missouri, with a width of 50 miles, and extending indefinitely west. About half the tribe are in the Cherokee country. The _Quapaws_ were originally connected with the Osages. They have migrated from the lower Arkansas, and have their lands adjoining the State of Missouri, immediately north of the Senecas. The _Putawatomies_ are on the north-eastern side of the Missouri river, but they are not satisfied, and the question of their locality is not fully settled. 444 Putawatomies are mingled with the Kickapoos, on the south-west side of the Missouri river. The Weas, Piankeshaws, Peorias and Kaskaskias are remnants of the great western confederacy, of which the Miamies were the most prominent branch. These and other tribes constituted the Illini, Oillinois, or Illinois nation, that once possessed the country now included in the great States of Indiana, Illinois, &c. Their lands lie west of the State of Missouri, and south-west of the Missouri river. The _Delawares_ occupy a portion of the country in the forks of the Kanzau river, (or, as written by the French, Kansas.) They are the remnants of another great confederacy, the _Lenni-Lenopi_, as denominated by themselves. The lands of the _Kickapoos_ lie north of the Delawares, and along the Missouri, including 768,000 acres. The _Ottoes_ occupy a tract of country between the Missouri and Platte rivers, but their land is said to extend south and below the Platte. The country of the _O'Mahaus_ has the Platte river on the south, and the Missouri north-east. The country of the _Pawnees_ lies to the westward of the Ottoes and O'Mahaus. The boundaries are not defined. The _Puncahs_ are a small tribe that originated from the Pawnees, and live in the northern extremity of the country spoken of as the Indian territory. _Present Condition._--The Chocktaws, Cherokees and Creeks are more advanced in civilized habits then any other tribes. They have organized local governments of their own, have enacted some wholesome laws, live in comfortable houses, raise horses, cattle, sheep and swine, cultivate the ground, have good fences, dress like Americans, and manufacture much of their own clothing. They have schools and religious privileges, by missionary efforts, to a limited extent. The Cherokees have a written language, perfect in its form, the invention of Mr. Guess, a full-blooded Indian. The Senecas, Delawares, and Shawanoes, also, are partially civilized, and live with considerable comfort from the produce of their fields and stock. The Putawatomies, Weas, Piankeshaws, Peorias, Kaskaskias, Ottawas, and Kickapoos, have partially adopted civilized customs. Some live in comfortable log cabins, fence and cultivate the ground, and have a supply of stock; others live in bark huts, and are wretched. The Osages or Wos-sosh-ees, Quapaws, Kanzaus, Ottoes, O'Mahaus, Pawnees and Puncahs have made much less improvement in their mode of living. A few have adopted civilized habits, and are rising in the scale of social and individual comforts, but the larger portion are yet _Indians_. Mr. McCoy estimates the whole number of aborigines in North America, including those of Mexico, at 1,800,000, of which 10,000 are so far improved as to be classed with civilized men, and amongst whom, there are as many pious Christians, as amongst the same amount of population in the United States. In addition to these, he estimates that there may be about 60,000 more, "which may have made advances toward civilization, some more and some less." For some years past, the policy of the government of the United States has been directed to the project of removing all the Indians from the country organized into States and Territories, and placing them sufficiently contiguous to be easily governed, and yet removed from direct contact and future interruption from white population. This project was recommended in the period of Mr. Monroe's administration, was further considered and some progress made under that of Mr. Adams, but has been carried into more successful execution within the last five years. It is much to be regretted that this project was not commenced earlier. The residence of small bands of Indians, with their own feeble and imperfect government, carried on within any organized state or territory, is ruinous. Those who argue that _because_ of the removal of the Indians from within the jurisdiction of the states, or an organized territory, _therefore_ they will be driven back from the country in which it is now proposed to place them, evince but a very partial and imperfect view of the subject. The present operation of government is an experiment, and it is one that ought to receive a fair and full trial. If it does not succeed, I know not of any governmental regulation that can result, with success, to the prosperity of the Indians. The project is to secure to each tribe, by patent, the lands allotted them,--to form them into a territorial government, with some features of the representative principle,--to have their whole country under the supervision of our government, as their guardian, for their benefit,--to allow no white men to pass the lines and intermix with the Indians, except those who are licensed by due authority,--to aid them in adopting civilized habits, provide for them schools and other means of improving their condition, and, through the agency of missionary societies, to instruct them in the principles of the gospel of Christ. _Missionary Efforts and Stations._--These are conducted by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions,--the Baptist Board of F. Missions,--the Methodist Epis. Missionary Society,--the Western Foreign Missionary Society,--and the Cumberland Presbyterians. Stations have been formed, and schools established, with most of these tribes. About 2,500 are members of Christian churches of different denominations. The particulars of these operations are to be found in the Reports of the respective societies, and the various religious periodicals. Of other tribes within the Valley of the Mississippi, and not yet within the Indian territory, the following estimate is sufficiently near the truth for practical purposes. Indians from New York, about Green Bay 725 Wyandots in Ohio and Michigan 623 Miamies 1,200 Winnebagoes 4,591 Chippeways, or O'Jibbeways 6,793 Ottawas and Chippeways of lake Michigan 5,300 Chippeways, Ottawas and Putawatomies 8,000 Putawatomies 1,400 Menominees 4,200 They are all east of the Mississippi, and chiefly found on the reservations in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, and in the country between the Wisconsin river and lake Superior. Those tribes west of the Mississippi river, and along the region of the upper Missouri river, are as follows: Sioux 27,500 Ioways 1,200 Sauks of Missouri 500 Sauks and Foxes 6,400 Assinaboines 8,000 Crees 3,000 Gros Ventres 3,000 Aurekaras 3,000 Cheyennes 2,000 Mandans 1,500 Black Feet 30,000 Camanches 7,000 Minatarees 1,500 Crows 4,500 Arrepahas and Kiawas 1,400 Caddoes 800 Snake and other tribes within the Rocky mountains 20,000 West of the Rocky mountains 80,000 The Camanches, Arrepahas, Kiawas and Caddoes roam over the great plains towards the sources of the Arkansas and Red rivers, and through the northern parts of Texas. The Black Feet are towards the heads of the Missouri. _Monuments and Antiquities._--Before dismissing the subject of the aborigines, I shall touch very briefly on the monuments and antiquities of the west,--with strong convictions that there has been much exaggeration on this subject. I have already intimated that the mounds of the west are natural formations, but I have not room for the circumstances and facts that go to sustain this theory. The number of objects considered as antiquities is greatly exaggerated. The imaginations of men have done much. The number of mounds on the American bottom in Illinois, adjacent to Cahokia creek, is stated by Mr. Flint at 200. The writer has counted all the elevations of surface for the extent of nine miles, and they amount to 72. One of these, Monk hill, is much too large, and three fourths of the rest are quite too small for human labor. The pigmy graves on the Merrimeek, Mo., in Tennessee, and other places, upon closer inspection, have been found to contain decayed skeletons of the ordinary size, but buried with the leg and thigh bones in contact. The _giant_ skeletons sometimes found, are the bones of buffalo. It is much easier for waggish laborers to deposit old horse shoes and other iron articles where they are at work, for the special pleasure of digging them up for credulous antiquarians, than to find proofs of the existence of the horses that wore them! There may, or may not, be monuments and antiquities that belong to a race of men of prior existence to the present race of Indians. All that the writer urges is, that this subject may not be considered as settled; that due allowance may be made for the extreme credulity of some, and the want of personal observation and examination of other writers on this subject. Gross errors have been committed, and exaggerations of very trivial circumstances have been made. The antiquities belonging to the Indian race are neither numerous or interesting, unless we except the remains of rude edifices and enclosures, the walls of which are almost invariably embankments of earth. They are rude axes and knives of stone, bottles and vessels of potter's ware, arrow and spear heads, rude ornaments, &c. Roman, French, Italian, German and English coins and medals, with inscriptions, have been found,--most unquestionably brought by Europeans,--probably by the Jesuits and other orders, who were amongst the first explorers of the west, and who had their religious houses here more than a century past. Copper and silver ornaments have been discovered in the mounds that have been opened. The calumet, or large stone pipe, is often found in Indian graves. Two facts deserve to be regarded by those who examine mounds and Indian cemeteries. First, that the Indians have been accustomed to bury their dead in these mounds. Secondly, that they were accustomed to place various ornaments, utensils, weapons, and other articles of value, the property of the deceased, in these graves, especially if a chieftain, or man of note. A third fact known to our frontier people, is the custom of several Indian tribes wrapping their dead in strips of bark, or encasing them with the halves of a hollow log, and placing them in the forks of trees. This was the case specially, when their deaths occurred while on hunting or war parties. At stated seasons these relics were collected, with much solemnity, brought to the common sepulchre of the tribe, and deposited with their ancestors. This accounts for the confused manner in which the bones are often found in mounds and Indian graveyards. Human skeletons, or rather mummies, have been discovered in the nitrous caves of Kentucky. The huge bones of the mammoth and other enormous animals, have been exhumed, at the Bigbone licks in Kentucky and in other places. FOOTNOTES: [7] See Pownal's Administration of the British Colonies,--Colden's History of the Five Nations,--New York Historical Collections, vol. II.,--Charlevoix Histoire de la Nouvelle France,--Hon. De Witt Clinton's Discourse before the N. Y. Historical Society, 1811,--Discovery of the Mississippi river, by Father Lewis Hennepin,--M. Tonti's Account of M. De La Salle's Expedition,--La Harpe's Journal, &c. CHAPTER VII. WESTERN PENNSYLVANIA. The portion of Pennsylvania lying west of the Alleghany ridge, contains the counties of Washington, Greene, Fayette, Westmoreland, Alleghany, Beaver, Butler, Armstrong, Mercer, Venango, Crawford, Erie, Warren, McKean, Jefferson, Indiana, Somerset, and a part of Cambria. _Face of the Country._--Somerset, and parts of Fayette, Westmoreland, Cambria, Indiana, Jefferson, and McKean are mountainous, with intervening vallies of rich, arable land. The hilly portions of Washington, and portions of Fayette, Westmoreland, and Alleghany counties are fertile, with narrow vales of rich land intervening. The hills are of various shapes and heights, and the ridges are not uniform, but pursue various and different directions. North of Pittsburg, the country is hilly and broken, but not mountainous, and the bottom lands on the water courses are wider and more fertile. On French creek, and other branches of the Alleghany river there are extensive tracts of rich bottom, or intervale lands, covered with beech, birch, sugar maple, pine, hemlock, and other trees common to that portion of the United States. The pine forests in Pennsylvania and New York, about the heads of the Alleghany river, produce vast quantities of lumber, which are sent annually to all the towns along the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. It is computed that not less than thirty million feet of lumber are annually sent down the Ohio from this source. _Soil, Agriculture, &c._--Portions of the country are excellent for farming. The _glade_ lands, as they are called, in Greene and other counties, produce oats, grass, &c., but are not so good for wheat and corn. Those counties which lie towards lake Erie are better adapted to grazing. Great numbers of cattle are raised here. Washington and other counties south of Pittsburg produce great quantities of wool. The Monongahela has been famous for its whiskey, but it is gratifying to learn that it is greatly on the decline, and that its manufacture begins to be regarded as it should be,--ruinous to society. A large proportion of the distilleries are reported to have been abandoned. Bituminous coal abounds in all the hills around Pittsburg, and over most parts of Western Pennsylvania. Iron ore is found abundantly in the counties along the Alleghany, and many furnaces and forges are employed in its manufactory. Salt springs abound on the Alleghany, and especially on the Conemaugh and Kiskiminitas, where salt, in large quantities, is manufactured. The natural advantages of Western Pennsylvania are great. Almost every knoll, hill and mountain can be turned to some good account, and its rivers, canals, rail and turnpike roads afford facilities for intercommunication, and for transportation of the productions to a foreign market. The advantages of this region for trade, agriculture, raising stock, and manufacturing, are great. The streams furnish abundant mill-seats, the air is salubrious, and the morals of the community good. Till recently, Pennsylvania has been neglectful to provide for common schools. A school system is now in successful operation, and has a strong hold on the confidence and affections of the people in this part of the State. _Internal Improvements._--Pennsylvania has undertaken an immense system of internal improvements, throughout the State. The Alleghany portage rail-road commences at Hollidaysburgh, on the Juniata river, at the termination of the eastern division of the great Pennsylvania canal, and crosses the Alleghany ridge at Blair's Gap, summit 37 miles, to Johnstown on the Conemaugh. Here it connects with the western division of the same canal. It ascends and descends the mountain by five inclined planes on each side, overcoming in ascent and descent 2570 feet, 1398 of which are on the eastern, and 1172 on the western side of the mountain. 563 feet are overcome by grading, and 2007 feet by the planes. On this line, also, are four extensive viaducts, and a tunnel 870 feet long, and 20 feet wide, through the staple bend of the Conemaugh river. The western division of the Pennsylvania canal commences at Johnstown, on the Conemaugh, pursues the course of that stream, and also that of the Kiskiminitas and Alleghany rivers, and finally terminates at Pittsburg. In its course from Johnstown it passes through the towns of Fairfield, Lockport, Blairsville, Saltzburg, Warren, Leechburg, and Freeport, most of which are small villages, but increasing in size and business. "The canal is 104 miles in length: lockage 471 feet, 64 locks, (exclusive of four on a branch canal to the Alleghany,) 10 dams, 1 tunnel, 16 aqueducts, 64 culverts, 39 waste-wiers, and 152 bridges. "The canal commissioners, in their reports to the legislature, strongly recommend the extension of this division to the town of Beaver, so as to unite with the Beaver division. By a recent survey, the distance was ascertained to be 25.065 miles, and the estimated cost of construction, $263,821. This, with a proposed canal from Newcastle to Akron, on the Ohio and Erie canal, will form a continuous inland communication between Philadelphia and New Orleans, of 2435 miles, with the exception of the passage over the Alleghany portage rail-road, of 36.69 miles in length.[8] It is 395 miles from Philadelphia to Pittsburg by this canal. The Beaver division of the Pennsylvania canal commences at the town of Beaver, on the Ohio river, at the junction of the Big Beaver river, 25-½ miles below Pittsburg, ascends the valley of that river, thence up the Chenango creek to its termination in Mercer county, a distance of 42.68 miles. This work, together with a feeder on French creek, and other works now in progress, are parts of a canal intended eventually to connect the Ohio river with lake Erie, at the town of Erie; which, when finished, will probably be about 130 miles in length. It is also proposed to construct a canal from Newcastle, on the Beaver division, 24.75 miles above the town of Beaver, along the valley of the Mahoning river, to Akron, near the portage summit of the Ohio and Erie canal, 85 miles in length, 8 miles of which are in Pennsylvania, and the residue in Ohio. Estimated cost, $764,372. The Cumberland, or National road, crosses the south-western part of Pennsylvania. It passes through Brownsville where it crosses the Monongahela river, and Washington, into a corner of Virginia to Wheeling, where it crosses the Ohio river, and from thence through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois to the Mississippi river, or perhaps to the western boundary of Missouri. _Chief Towns._--_Brownsville_, situated on the east side of the Monongahela river, is in a romantic country, surrounded with rich farms and fine orchards, and contains about 1200 inhabitants. It is at the head of steamboat navigation. _Washington_ is the county seat of Washington county, surrounded with a fertile but hilly country, contains about 2000 inhabitants, and has a respectable college. _Cannonsburgh_ is situated on the west side of Chartier's creek, 8 miles north of Washington. It also has a flourishing college, with buildings in an elevated and pleasant situation. _Uniontown_ is the county seat of Fayette, on the National road, and contains about 1500 inhabitants. _Greensburg_ is the seat of justice for Westmoreland county, on the great turnpike road from Philadelphia by Harrisburg to Pittsburg, and has about 850 inhabitants. _Beaver_ is situated at the mouth of Big Beaver, on the Ohio, with a population of 1000 or 1200, and is a place of considerable business. _Meadville_ is the seat of justice for Crawford county, situated near French creek, and has about 1200 inhabitants. Here is a college established by the Rev. Mr. Alden, some years since, to which the late Dr. Bentley of Salem, Mass., bequeathed a valuable library. It is now under the patronage of the Methodist Episcopal church. _Erie_ is a thriving town, situated on the south side of lake Erie, one hundred and twenty miles north of Pittsburg. Steamboats that pass up the lake from Buffalo, usually stop here, from whence stage routes communicate with Pittsburg, and many other towns in the interior. The portage from this place to the navigable waters of the Alleghany river is fifteen miles over a turnpike road. The population of Erie is from 1500 to 2000, and increasing. _Waterford_, the place where the Erie portage terminates, is situated on the north bank of the French creek; it is a place of considerable business. French creek is a navigable branch of the Alleghany river. _Franklin_, _Kittanning_, and _Freeport_, are respectable towns on the Alleghany river, between Pittsburg and Meadville. _Economy_ is the seat of the German colony, under the late Mr. Rapp, which emigrated from their former residence of Harmony on the Wabash river in Indiana. It is a flourishing town on the right bank of the Ohio, 18 miles below Pittsburg. It has several factories, a large church, a spacious hotel, and 800 or 900 inhabitants, living in a community form, under some singular regulations. The Economists, or Harmonists, as they were called, in Indiana, are an industrious, moral and enterprising community, with some peculiarities in their religious notions. There are many other towns and villages in Western Pennsylvania, of moral, industrious inhabitants, which the limits of this work will not permit me to notice. PITTSBURG is the emporium of Western Pennsylvania, and from its manufacturing enterprise, especially in iron wares, has been denominated the "Birmingham of the West." It stands on the land formed at the junction of the Monongahela and Alleghany rivers on a level alluvion deposit, but entirely above the highest waters, surrounded with hills. This place was selected as the site of a fort and trading depot by the French, about eighty years since, and a small stockade erected, and called Fort du Quesne, to defend the country against the occupancy of it by the English, and to monopolize the Indian trade. It came into the possession of the British upon the conquest of this country after the disastrous defeat of Gen. Braddock; and under the administration of the elder Pitt, a fort was built here under the superintendence of lord Stanwix, that cost more than $260,000, and called Fort Pitt. In 1760, a considerable town arose around the fort, surrounded with beautiful gardens and orchards, but it decayed on the breaking out of the Indian war, in 1763. The origin of the present town may be dated 1765. Its plan was enlarged and re-surveyed in 1784, and then belonged to the Penn family as a part of their hereditary manor. By them it was sold. The Indian wars in the West retarded its growth for several years after, but since, it has steadily increased, according to the following TABLE. 1800, 1,565 1810, 4,768 1820, 7,248 1830, 12,542 1835, _estimated_, 30,000 The estimate of 1835, includes the suburbs. The town is compactly built, and some streets are handsome; but the use of coal for culinary and manufacturing purposes, gives the town a most dingy and gloomy aspect. Its salubrity and admirable situation for commerce and manufactures ensure its future prosperity and increase of population. The exhaustless beds of coal in the bluffs of the Monongahela, and of iron ore, which is found in great abundance in all the mountainous regions of Western Pennsylvania, give it preëminence over other western cities for manufacturing purposes. It really stands at the head of steamboat navigation on the waters of the Ohio; for the Alleghany and Monongahela rivers are navigable only at high stages of water, and by the recent improvements in the channel of the Ohio, and the use of light draft boats, the navigation to Pittsburg is uninterrupted except in winter. The suburbs of Pittsburg are Birmingham, on the south bank of the Monongahela, Alleghany town, on the opposite side of the Alleghany river, and containing a population of about seven thousand, Lawrenceville, Northern and Eastern Liberties. MANUFACTURES. Nail Factories and Rolling Mills. Weight in lbs. Value. Union, 720,000 $43,200 Sligo, 400,000 32,000 Pittsburg, 782,887 86,544 Grant's Hill, 500,000 20,000 Juniata, 500,000 30,000 Pine Creek, 457,000 34,100 Miscellaneous factories, 360,000 28,200 The foregoing table was constructed in 1831. Doubtless this branch of business has greatly increased. The same year there were 12 foundries in and near Pittsburg, which converted 2963 tons of metal into castings, employed 132 hands, consumed 87,000 bushels of charcoal, and produced the value of $189,614. The following sketch of manufactures in Pittsburg and vicinity, is copied from Tanner's Guide, published in 1832: Steam engines 37, which employed 123 hands. Value, $180,400. Cotton factories 8, with 369 power-looms, 598 hands; value, $300,134. In the counties of Westmoreland and Alleghany, there are 5 cotton factories. In Pittsburg and the two counties just named, are 8 paper mills, valued at $165,000. In Pittsburg and vicinity are 5 steam mills, which employ 50 hands. Value of their products annually, $80,000. There are 5 brass foundries and 8 coppersmiths' shops. Value of the manufactures, $25,000. Within the limits of the city, there are 30 blacksmiths' shops, which employ 136 hands. There are also 4 gunsmiths, and 9 silversmiths and watch repairers. In Pittsburg and the counties of Westmoreland and Alleghany, there are 26 saddleries; and 41 tanneries, 64 brick yards, and 11 potteries. There are in the city 4 breweries, and 4 white lead manufactories, at which 7,400 kegs are made annually; value, $27,900. There are 6 printing-offices in Pittsburg, and 6 more in the two counties. The estimated value of the manufactures of every kind in Pittsburg, and the counties of Alleghany and Westmoreland, in 1831, was $3,978,469. Doubtless they have greatly increased since. _Coal._--The bituminous coal formations around Pittsburg are well deserving the attention of geologists. Coal Hill, on the west side of the Monongahela, and immediately opposite Pittsburg, is the great source of this species of fuel, and the miners, in some places, have perforated the hill to the distance of several hundred feet. It is found in strata from 6 inches to 10 or 12 feet in thickness, and often at the height of 300 feet above the bed of the river, in the hills around Pittsburg, and along the course of the Alleghany and Monongahela. Below this one stratum, which is of equal elevation, none is found till you reach the base of the hill below the bed of the river. Besides supplying Pittsburg, large quantities are sent down the river. There are in Pittsburg, (or _were_ two years since) three Baptist churches, or congregations, one of which is of Welch, four Presbyterian, four Methodist, one Episcopal, one Roman Catholic, (besides a cathedral on Grant's Hill,) one Covenanter, one Seceder, one German Reformed, one Unitarian, one Associate Reformed, one Lutheran, one African, and perhaps some others in the city or suburbs. Of the public buildings deserving notice, I will name the _Western University of Pennsylvania_, which stands on the Monongahela, near Grant's Hill;--the _Penitentiary_, in Alleghany town, which has cost the State an immense amount, and is conducted on the principle of solitary confinement;--the _Presbyterian Theological Seminary_ is also in Alleghany town;--the _Museum_;--the _United States Arsenal_, about two miles above the city, at Lawrenceville. It encloses four acres, and has a large depot for ordnance, arms, &c. The _City Water Works_ is a splendid monument of municipal enterprise. The water is taken from the Alleghany river, by a pipe, 15 inches in diameter, and carried 2,439 feet, and 116 feet elevation, to a reservoir on Grant's Hill, capable of receiving 1,000,000 gallons. The water is raised by a steam-engine of 84 horse power, and will raise 1,500,000 gallons in 24 hours. The aqueduct of the Pennsylvania canal, across the Alleghany river, is also deserving attention. The inhabitants of Pittsburg are a mixture of English, French, Scotch, Irish, German and Swiss artisans and mechanics, as well as of native born Americans, who live together in much harmony. Industry, sobriety, morality and good order generally prevail. Extensive revivals of religion prevailed here about a year since. The population of Western Pennsylvania is characterized for industry, frugality, economy and enterprise. Temperance principles have made considerable progress of late years. WESTERN VIRGINIA --Embraces all that part of Virginia that lies upon the western waters. The counties are Brooke, Ohio, Monongalia, Harrison, Randolph, Russell, Preston, Tyler, Wood, Greenbrier, Kenawha,[9] Mason, Lewis, Nicholas, Logan, Cabell, Monroe, Pocahontas, Giles, Montgomery, Wythe, Grayson, Tazewell, Washington, Scott and Lee:--26. Its principal river is the Kenawha and its tributaries. Of these, Gaula, New river and Greenbrier are the principal. New river is the largest, and rises in North Carolina. The Monongahela drains a large district;--the little Kenawha, Guyandotte, and Sandy are smaller streams. The latter separates Virginia from Kentucky for some distance. Much of Western Virginia is mountainous, lying in parallel ridges, which are often broken by streams. Some of the vallies are very fertile. The Kenawha Valley is narrow, but extends to a great distance. The salt manufactories extend from Charlestown up the Kenawha, the distance of 12 miles. They are 20 in number, and manufacture nearly two millions of bushels annually. The river is navigable for steamboats to this point at an ordinary depth of water. Coal is used in the manufactories, which is dug from the adjacent mountains, and brought to the works on wooden railways. Seven miles above Charlestown is the famous burning spring. Inflammable gas escapes, which, if ignited, will burn with great brilliancy for many hours, and even for several days, in a favorable state of the atmosphere. The State of Virginia has constructed a tolerably good turnpike road from the mouth of the Guyandotte, on the Ohio, to Staunton. It passes through Charlestown, and along the Kenawha river to the falls;--from thence it extends along the course of New river, and across Sewall's mountain by Louisburg to Staunton. The falls of Kenawha are in a romantic region, and merit the attention of the traveller. Marshall's pillar is a singular projecting rock that overhangs New river, 1015 feet above its bed. The stage road passes near its summit. This route is one of the great stage routes leading from the Ohio Valley to Washington city, and to all parts of old Virginia. The _White Sulphur_, _Red Sulphur_, _Hot_, _Warm_, _and Sweet Springs_, are in the mountainous parts of Virginia, and on this route. These are all celebrated as watering places, but the White Sulphur spring is the great resort of the fashionable of the Southern States. Let the reader imagine an extensive campground, a mile in circumference, the camps neat cottages, built of brick, or framed, and neatly painted. In the centre of this area are the springs, bath-houses, dining hall, and mansion of the proprietor. The cottages are intended for the accommodation of families, and contain two rooms each. This is by far the most extensive watering place in the Union. Of the effect of such establishments on _morals_ I shall say nothing. The reader will draw his own conclusions, when he understands that the card-table, roulette, wheel of fortune, and dice-box are amongst its principal amusements. Here, not unfrequently, cotton bales, negroes, and even plantations, change owners in a night. The scenery around is highly picturesque and romantic. Declivities and mountains, sprinkled over with evergreens, are scattered in wild confusion. A few miles from White Sulphur springs, you pass the dividing line--the Alleghany ridge, and pass from Western into Middle Virginia. _Chief Towns._--Wheeling is the principal commercial town, and a great thoroughfare, in Western Virginia. It has a large number of stores, and commission warehouses; and contains six or eight thousand inhabitants. It is 92 miles by water, and 55 miles by land, from Pittsburg. It has manufactures of cotton, glass, and earthenware. Boats are built here. The Cumberland or National road crosses the Ohio at this place, over which a bridge is about to be erected. The town is surrounded with bold, precipitous hills, which contain inexhaustible quantities of coal. At extreme low water, steamboats ascend no higher than Wheeling. Charlestown, Wellsburgh, Parkersburgh, Point Pleasant, Clarksburgh, Abington, Louisburg, and many others, are pleasant and thriving towns. The climate of Western Virginia is preeminently salubrious. The people, in their manners, have considerable resemblance to those of Western Pennsylvania. There are fewer slaves, less wealth, more industry and equality, than in the "Old Dominion," as Eastern Virginia is sometimes called. FOOTNOTES: [8] See "Mitchell's Compendium of the Internal Improvements in the United States," where much valuable information of the rail-roads and canals of the United States is found in a small space. [9] I have adopted the orthography of the legislature. CHAPTER VIII. MICHIGAN. Extent,--Situation,--Boundaries;----Face of the Country; Rivers, Lakes, &c., Soil and Productions;--Subdivisions, Counties;--Towns, Detroit;--Education;--Improvements projected;--Boundary Dispute;--Outline of the Constitution. Michigan is a large triangular peninsula, surrounded on the east, north and west, by lakes, and on the south by the States of Ohio and Indiana. Lake Erie, Detroit river, lake St. Clair, and St. Clair river, lie on the east for 140 miles; lake Huron on the north-east and north, the straits of Mackinaw on the extreme north-west, and lake Michigan on its western side. Its area is about 40,000 square miles. _Face of the Country._--Its general surface is level, having no mountains, and no very elevated hills. Still, much of its surface is undulating, like the swelling of the ocean. Along the shore of lake Huron, in some places, are high, precipitous bluffs, and along the eastern shore of Michigan are hills of pure sand, blown up by the winds from the lake. Much of the country bordering on lakes Erie, Huron, and St. Clair, is level,--somewhat deficient in good water, and for the most part heavily timbered. The interior is more undulating, in some places rather hilly, with much fine timber, interspersed with oak "openings," "plains," and "prairies." The "_plains_" are usually timbered, destitute of undergrowth, and are beautiful. The soil is rather gravelly. The "_openings_" contain scattering timber in groves and patches, and resemble those tracts called _barrens_ farther south. There is generally timber enough for farming purposes, if used with economy, while it costs but little labor to clear the land. For the first ploughing, a strong team of four or five yoke of oxen is required, as is the case with prairie. The _openings_ produce good wheat. The "_prairies_," will be described more particularly under the head of Illinois. In Michigan they are divided into wet and dry. The former possess a rich soil, from one to four feet deep, and produce abundantly all kinds of crops common to 42 degrees of N. latitude, especially those on St. Joseph river. The latter afford early pasturage for emigrants, hay to winter his stock, and with a little labor would be converted into excellent artificial meadows. Much of the land that now appears wet and marshy will in time be drained, and be the first rate soil for farming. A few miles back of Detroit is a flat, wet country for considerable extent, much of it heavily timbered,--the streams muddy and sluggish,--some wet prairies,--with dry, sandy ridges intervening. The timber consists of all the varieties found in the Western States; such as oaks of various species, walnut, hickory, maple, poplar, ash, beech, &c., with an intermixture of white and yellow pine. _Rivers and Lakes._--In general, the country abounds with rivers and small streams. They rise in the interior, and flow in every direction to the lakes which surround it. The northern tributaries of the Maumee rise in Michigan, though the main stream is in Ohio, and it enters the west end of lake Erie on the "debatable land." Proceeding up the lake, Raisin and then Huron occur. Both are navigable streams, and their head waters interlock with Grand river, or Washtenong, which flows into lake Michigan. River Rouge enters Detroit river, a few miles below the city of Detroit. Raisin rises in the county of Lenawee, and passes through Monroe. Huron originates amongst the lakes of Livingston, passes through Washtenaw, and a corner of Wayne, and enters lake Erie towards its north-western corner. Above Detroit is river Clinton, which heads in Oakland county, passes through Macomb, and enters lake St. Clair. Passing by several smaller streams, as Belle, Pine, and Black rivers, which fall into St. Clair river, and going over an immense tract of swampy, wet country, between lake Huron and Saginaw bay, in Sanilac county, we come to the Saginaw river. This stream is formed by the junction of the Tittibawassee, Hare, Shiawassee, Flint, and Cass rivers, all of which unite in the centre of Saginaw county, and form the Saginaw river, which runs north, and enters the bay of the same name. The Tittibawassee rises in the country west of Saginaw bay, runs first a south, and then a south-eastern course, through Midland county into Saginaw county, to its junction. Pine river is a branch of this stream, that heads in the western part of Gratiot county, and runs north-east into Midland. Hare, the original name of which is Waposebee, commences in Gratiot, and the N. W. corner of Shiawassee counties, and runs an east and north-east course. The heads of the Shiawassee, which is the main fork of the Saginaw, are found in the counties of Livingston and Oakland. Its course is northward. Flint river rises in the south part of Lapeer county, and runs a north-western course, some distance past the centre of the county, when it suddenly wheels to the south, then to the west, and enters Genesee county, through which it pursues a devious course towards its destination. Cass river rises in Sanilac county, and runs a western course. These rivers are formed of innumerable branches, and water an extensive district of country. Other smaller streams enter lake Huron, above Saginaw bay; but the whole country across to lake Michigan is yet a wilderness, and possessed by the Indians. Doubtless it will soon be purchased, surveyed and settled. On the western side of the State are Traverse, Ottawa, Betsey, Manistic, Pent, White, Maskegon, Grand, Kekalamazoo, and St. Joseph, all of which fall into lake Michigan. Those above Grand river are beyond the settled portion of the State. Grand river is the largest in Michigan, being 270 miles in length, its windings included. Its head waters interlock with the Pine, Hare, Shiawassee, Huron, Raisin, St. Joseph and Kekalamazoo. A canal project is already in agitation to connect it with the Huron, and open a water communication from lake Erie, across the peninsula, direct to lake Michigan. Grand river is now navigable for batteaux, 240 miles, and receives in its course, Portage, Red-Cedar, Looking-glass, Maple, Muscota, Flat, Thorn-Apple, and Rouge rivers, besides smaller streams. It enters lake Michigan 245 miles south-westerly from Mackinaw, and 75 north of St. Joseph;--is between 50 and 60 rods wide at its mouth, with 8 feet water over its bar. The Ottawa Indians own the country on its north side, for 60 miles up. Much of the land on Grand river and its tributaries, is excellent, consisting of six or seven thousand square miles;--and, considering its central position in the State,--the general fertility of its soil,--the good harbor at its mouth,--the numerous mill sites on its tributaries,--this region may be regarded as one of the most interesting portions of Michigan. The Kekalamazoo rises in Jackson and Eaton counties, passes through Calhoun, and the northern part of Kalamazoo, enters the south-eastern part of Allegan, and passes diagonally through it to the lake. There is much first-rate land, timber, prairie, and openings, on its waters, and is rapidly settling. The St. Joseph country is represented by some as the best country in Michigan. This stream has several heads in Branch, Hillsdale, Jackson, Calhoun, and Kalamazoo counties, which unite in St. Joseph county, through which it passes diagonally to the south-west, into Indiana,--thence through a corner of Elkhart county, into St. Joseph of that State, makes the "South Bend," and then runs north-westerly, into Michigan, through Berrian county, to the lake. The town of St. Joseph is at its mouth. It has Pigeon, Prairie, Hog, Portage, Christianna, Dowagiake, and Crooked rivers for tributaries, all of which afford good mill sites. In Cass and St. Joseph counties, are Four-mile, Beardsley, Townsend, McKenny, La Grange, Pokagon, Young, Sturges, Notta-wa-Sepee, and White Pigeon prairies, which are rich tracts of country, and fast filling up with inhabitants. Michigan abounds with small lakes and ponds. Some have marshy and unhealthy borders;--others are transparent fountains, surrounded with beautiful groves, an undulating country, pebbly and sandy shores, and teeming with excellent fish. The counties of Oakland, Livingston, Washtenaw, Jackson, Barry, and Kalamazoo, are indented with them. _Productions._--These are the same, in general, as those of Ohio and New York. Corn and wheat grow luxuriantly here. Rye, oats, barley, buckwheat, potatoes, and all the garden vegetables common to the climate, grow well. All the species of grasses are produced luxuriantly. Apples and other fruit abound in the older settlements, especially among the French about Detroit. It will be a great fruit country. _Subdivisions._--Michigan had been divided into 33 counties in 1835, some of which were attached to adjacent counties for judicial purposes. Other counties may have been formed since. The following organized counties show the population of the State, (then Territory,) at the close of 1834. =================================+================================= | _Dist. from COUNTIES. _Population._ | SEATS OF JUSTICE. Detroit._ ---------------------------------+--------------------------------- Berrian, 1,787 | Berrian, 180 Branch, 764 | Branch, 133 Calhoun, 1,714 | Eckford, 100 Cass, 3,280 | Cassopolis, 160 Jackson, 1,865 | Jacksonsburgh, 77 Kalamazoo, 3,124 | Bronson, 137 Lenawee, 7,911 | Tecumseh, 63 Macomb, 6,055 | Mount Clemens, 25 Monroe, 8,542 | Monroe, 36 Oakland, 13,844 | Pontiac, 26 St. Clair, 2,244 | St. Clair, 60 St. Joseph, 3,168 | White Pigeon, 135 Washtenaw, 14,920 | Ann Arbor, 42 Wayne, 16,638 | Detroit, ------ | _Total_, 85,856 | ---------------------------------+----------------------------- The other counties are Hillsdale, Van Buren, Allegan, Barry, Eaton, Ingham, Livingston, Lapeer, Genesee, Shiawassee, Clinton, Ionia, Kent, Ottawa, Oceana, Gratiot, Isabella, Midland, Saginaw, Sanilac, Gladwin and Arenac, the population of which are included in the counties given in the table. Doubtless, the population of Michigan now (Jan. 1836) exceeds one hundred thousand. The counties are subdivided into incorporated townships, for local purposes, the lines of which usually correspond with the land surveys. For the sales of public lands, the State is divided into three land districts, and land offices are established at Detroit, Monroe, and Bronson. _Chief Towns._--Detroit is the commercial and political metropolis. It is beautifully situated on the west side of the river Detroit, 18 miles above Malden in Canada, and 8 miles below the outlet of Lake St. Clair. A narrow street, on which the wharves are built, runs parallel with the river. After ascending the bench or bluff, is a street called Jefferson Avenue, on which the principal buildings are erected. The older dwellings are of wood, but many have been recently built of brick, with basements of stone, the latter material being brought from Cleveland, Ohio. The primitive forest approaches near the town. The table land extends 12 or 15 miles interior, when it becomes wet and marshy. Along Detroit river the ancient French settlements extend several miles, and the inhabitants exhibit all the peculiar traits of the French on the Mississippi. Their gardens and orchards are valuable. The public buildings of Detroit, are a state house, a council house, an academy, and two or three banking houses. There are five churches for as many different denominations, in which the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, and Roman Catholics worship. The Catholic congregation is the largest, and they have a large cathedral. Stores and commercial warehouses are numerous, and business is rapidly increasing. Town lots, rents, and landed property in the vicinity are rising rapidly. Lots have advanced, within two or three years, in the business parts of the city, more than one thousand per cent. Mechanics of all descriptions, and particularly those in the building line, are much wanted here, and in other towns in Michigan. The population is supposed to be about 10,000, and is rapidly increasing. This place commands the trade of all the upper lake country. _Monroe_, the seat of justice for Monroe county, is situated on the right bank of the river Raisin, opposite the site of old Frenchtown. Two years since, it had about 150 houses, of which 20 or 30 were of stone, and 1600 inhabitants. There were also two flouring and several saw-mills, a woollen factory, an iron foundry, a chair factory, &c., and an abundant supply of water power. The "Bank of the River Raisin," with a capital of $100,000, is established here. The Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Baptists, Methodists, and Roman Catholics have houses of worship and ministers here. It was at this place, or rather at Frenchtown in its vicinity, that a horrible massacre of American prisoners took place during the last war with Great Britain, by the Indians under Gen. Proctor. The sick and wounded were burned alive in the hospital, or shot as they ran shrieking through the flames! Of the 700 young men barbarously murdered here, many were students at law, young physicians, and merchants, the best blood of Kentucky! Mount Clemens, Brownstown, Ann Arbor, Pontiac, White Pigeon, Tecumseh, Jacksonsburgh, Niles, St. Joseph, Spring Arbor, and many others, are pleasant villages, and will soon become populous. _Education._--Congress has made the same donations of lands, as to other Western States, and will, doubtless, appropriate the same per centage on the sales of all public lands, when the State is admitted into the Union, as has been appropriated to the other new States. A respectable female academy is in operation at Detroit. The Presbyterian denomination are about establishing a college at Ann Arbor, the Methodists a seminary at Spring Arbor, the Baptists one in Kalamazoo county, and the Roman Catholics, it is said, have fixed their post at Bertrand, a town on the St. Joseph river, in the south-eastern corner of Berrian county, and near to the boundary line of Indiana. Much sentiment and feeling exists in favor of education and literary institutions, amongst the people. _Improvements projected._--A survey has been made for a rail-road across the peninsula of Detroit, through the counties of Wayne, Washtenaw, Jackson, Calhoun, Kalamazoo, Van Buren and Berrian, to the mouth of St. Joseph river. Another project is, to commence at or near Toledo on the Maumee river, and pass through the southern counties of Michigan into Indiana, and terminate at Michigan city. A third project is, to open a water communication from the navigable waters of Grand river, to Huron river, and, by locks and slack water navigation, enter lake Erie. A canal from the mouth of Maumee Bay to lake Michigan, has also been spoken of as a feasible project;--or one from the mouth of the river Raisin to the St. Joseph, would open a similar communication. It has also been suggested to improve the river Raisin by locks and slack water navigation. Doubtless not many years will elapse before some of these projects will prove realities. _Boundary Dispute._--This unpleasant dispute between Ohio and Michigan, relates to a strip of country about fifteen miles in width at its eastern, and seven miles at its western end, lying between the north-eastern part of Indiana and the Maumee Bay. A portion of the Wabash and Erie canal, now constructing by Indiana, and which is dependent for its completion on either Ohio or Michigan, passes over this territory. Michigan claims it by virtue of an ordinance of Congress, passed the 13th of July, 1787, organizing the "_North-Western Territory_," in which the boundaries of _three_ States were laid off, "Provided, that the boundaries of these three States shall be subject so far to be altered, that, if Congress shall hereafter find it expedient, they shall have authority to form one or two States in that part of the said territory _which lies north of an east and west line drawn through the southerly bend or extreme of lake Michigan_;"--Ohio claims it by possession, and because, by being received into the Union with this portion in possession, Congress virtually annulled that part of the former ordinance that fixed the south bend of lake Michigan as the boundary line, and by having run the line north of this. _Outlines of the Constitution._--A convention assembled at Detroit, on the 11th of May, 1835, and framed a constitution for a state government, which was submitted to, and ratified by vote of the people on the first Monday in October. The powers of the government are divided into three distinct departments;--the legislative,--the executive,--and the judicial. The legislative power is vested in a _Senate_ and _House of Representatives_. The representatives are to be chosen annually; and their number cannot be less than 48, nor more than 100. The senators are to be chosen every two years, one half of them every year, and to consist, as nearly as may be, of one third of the number of the representatives. The census is to be taken in 1837, and 1845, and every ten years after the latter period; and also after each census taken by the United States, the number of senators and representatives is to be apportioned anew among the several counties, according to the number of white inhabitants. The _legislature_ is to meet annually, on the first Monday in January. The executive power is to be vested in a governor, who holds his office for two years. Upon a vacancy, the lieutenant governor performs executive duties. The first election was held on the first Monday in October, 1835, and the governor and lieutenant governor hold their offices till the first Monday in January, 1838. The _judicial power_ is vested in one _Supreme Court_, and in such other courts as the legislature may, from time to time, establish. The judges of the Supreme Court are to be appointed by the governor, with the advice and consent of the Senate, for the term of seven years. Judges of all county courts, associate judges of circuit courts, and judges of probate, are to be elected by the people for the term of four years. Each township is authorized to elect four justices of the peace, who are to hold their offices for four years. In all elections, every white male citizen above the age of 21 years, having resided six months next preceding any election, is entitled to vote at such election. Slavery, lotteries, and the sale of lottery tickets, are prohibited. The seat of government is to be at Detroit, or such other place or places as may be prescribed by law until the year 1847, when it is to be permanently fixed by the legislature. OHIO --Is bounded on the north by lake Erie, and the State of Michigan, east by Pennsylvania and the Ohio river, south by the Ohio river, which separates it from Virginia and Kentucky, and west by Indiana. The meanderings of the Ohio river extend along the line of this State 436 miles. It is about 222 miles in extent, both from north to south, and from east to west. After excluding a section of lake Erie, which projects into its northern borders, Ohio contains about 40,000 square miles, or 25,000,000 acres of land. _Divisions._--Nature has divided this State into four departments,--according to its principal waters. 1. The Lake country, situated on lake Erie, and embracing all its northern part. Its streams all run into the lake, and reach the Atlantic ocean through the Gulf of St. Lawrence. 2. The Muskingum country, on the eastern side, and along the river of that name. 3. The Scioto country, in the middle,--and, 4. The Miami country, along the western side. For civil purposes, the State is divided into _seventy-five_ counties, and these are again subdivided into townships. Their names, date of organization, number of square miles, number of organized townships, seats of justice, and bearing and distance from Columbus, are exhibited in the following TABLE. ------------+----------+------+----------+-----------------+-------------- | | | | | Bearing And | When |Square| No. of | |Distance from COUNTIES. |organized.|Miles.|Townships.|SEATS OF JUSTICE.| Columbus. ------------+----------+------+----------+-----------------+-------------- Adams, | 1797 | 550 | 10 |West Union, |101 _s._ Allen, | 1831 | 542 | -- |Lima, |110 _n. w._ Ashtabula, | 1811 | 700 | 27 |Jefferson, |200 _n. w._ Athens, | 1805 | 740 | 19 |Athens, | 73 _s. e._ Belmont, | 1801 | 536 | 16 |St. Clairsville, |116 _e._ Brown, | 1818 | 470 | 14 |Georgetown, |104 _s._ Butler, | 1803 | 480 | 13 |Hamilton, |101 _s. w._ Carroll, | 1833 | [A] | [A] |Carrollton, |125 _e. n. e._ Champaign, | 1805 | 417 | 12 |Urbanna, | 50 _w. n. w._ Clark, | 1818 | 412 | 10 |Springfield, | 44 _w._ Clermont, | 1800 | 515 | 12 |Batavia, | 96 _s. w._ Clinton, | 1810 | 400 | 8 |Wilmington, | 60 _s. w._ Columbiana, | 1803 | [A] | [A] |New Lisbon, |150 _e. n. e._ Coshocton, | 1811 | 562 | 21 |Coshocton, | 68 _n. e._ Crawford, | 1826 | 594 | 12 |Bucyrus, | 60 _n._ Cuyahoga, | 1810 | 475 | 19 |Cleveland, |140 _n. n. e._ Dark, | 1817 | 660 | 10 |Greenville, | 93 _w._ Delaware, | 1808 | 610 | 23 |Delaware, | 24 _n._ Fairfield, | 1800 | 540 | 14 |Lancaster, | 28 _s. e._ Fayette, | 1810 | 415 | 7 |Washington, | 38 _s. w._ Franklin, | 1803 | 520 | 18 |COLUMBUS, | Gallia, | 1803 | 500 | 15 |Gallipolis, |102 _s. s. e._ Geauga, | 1805 | 600 | 23 |Chardon, |157 _n. e._ Greene, | 1803 | 400 | 8 |Xenia, | 56 _w. s. w._ Guernsey, | 1810 | 621 | 19 |Cambridge, | 76 _e._ Hamilton, | 1790 | 400 | 14 |Cincinnati, |110 _s. w._ Hancock, | 1828 | 576 | 5 |Findlay, | 90 _n. n. w._ Hardin, | 1833 | 570 | -- |Kenton, | 70 _n. n. w._ Harrison, | 1813 |[A]-- | 13 |Cadiz, |124 _e. n. e._ Henry, | -- | 744 | 2 |Napoleon, |161 _n. w._ Highland, | 1805 | 555 | 11 |Hillsborough, | 62 _s. s. w._ Hocking, | 1818 | 432 | 9 |Logan, | 46 _s. s. e._ Holmes, | 1825 | 422 | 14 |Millersburg, | 81 _n. e._ Huron, | 1815 | 800 | 29 |Norwalk, |106 _n._ Jackson, | 1816 | 490 | 13 |Jackson, | 73 _s. s. e._ Jefferson, | 1797 | 400 | 13 |Steubenville, |147 _e. n. e._ Knox, | 1808 | 618 | 24 |Mount Vernon, | 47 _n. n. e._ Lawrence, | 1817 | 430 | 12 |Burlington, |130 _s. s. e._ Licking, | 1808 | 666 | 25 |Newark, | 33 _e. n. e._ Logan, | 1818 | 425 | 9 |Bellefontaine, | 50 _n. w._ Lorain, | 1824 | 580 | 19 |Elyria, |130 _n. n. e._ Lucas,[B] | 1835 | | -- |Toledo, |150 _n. n. w._ Madison, | 1810 | 480 | 10 |London, | 25 _w. s. w._ Marion, | 1824 | 527 | 15 |Marion, | 45 _n._ Medina, | 1818 | 475 | 14 |Medina, |110 _n. n. e._ Meigs, | 1819 | 400 | 12 |Chester, | 94 _s. s. e._ Mercer, | 1824 | 576 | 4 |St Mary's, |111 _n. w._ Miami, | 1807 | 410 | 12 |Troy, | 68 _n. of w._ Monroe, | 1815 | 563 | 18 |Woodsfield, |120 _e. s. e._ Montgomery, | 1803 | 480 | 12 |Dayton, | 68 _w._ Morgan, | 1819 | 500 | 15 |M'Connelsville, | 75 _s. e._ Muskingum, | 1804 | 665 | 23 |Zanesville, | 52 _e._ Paulding,[C]| -- | 432 | 3 | |170 _n. w._ Perry, | 1818 | 402 | 12 |Somerset, | 46 _e. s. e._ Pickaway, | 1810 | 470 | 14 |Circleville, | 26 _s._ Pike, | 1815 | 421 | 9 |Piketon, | 64 _s._ Portage, | 1807 | 750 | 30 |Ravenna, |135 _n. e._ Preble, | 1808 | 432 | 12 |Eaton, | 50 _w._ Putnam,[C] | -- | 576 | 2 | |148 _n. w._ Richland, | 1813 | 900 | 25 |Mansfield, | 74 _n. n. e_ Ross, | 1798 | 650 | 16 |Chillicothe, | 45 _s._ Sandusky, | 1820 | 600 | 10 |Lower Sandusky, |105 _n._ Scioto, | 1803 | 700 | 14 |Portsmouth, | 90 _s._ Seneca, | 1824 | 540 | 11 |Tiffin, | 87 _n._ Shelby, | 1819 | 418 | 10 |Sidney, | 70 _n. w._ Stark, | 1809 | [A] | 16 |Canton, |116 _n. e._ Trumbull, | 1800 | 875 | 34 |Warren, |160 _n. e._ Tuscarawas, | 1808 | [A] | 19 |New Philadelphia,|100 _e. n. e._ Union, | 1820 | 450 | 9 |Marysville, | 30 _n. w._ Vanwert,[C] | -- | 432 | -- | |100 _n. w._ Warren, | 1803 | 400 | 9 |Lebanon, | 80 _s. w._ Washington, | 1788 | 713 | 19 |Marietta, |106 _s. e._ Wayne, | 1812 | 660 | 20 |Wooster, | 89 _n. e._ Williams, | 1824 | 600 | 10 |Defiance, |130 _n. w._ Wood, | 1820 | 750 | 7 |Perrysburg, |135 _n. w._ [A] Carroll county has been formed from Columbiana, Harrison, Stark and Tuscarawas since the edition of the Ohio Gazetteer of 1833 was published, from which the foregoing table has been constructed. Hence the townships in each are not given. [B] Lucas county has been recently formed from parts taken from Sandusky and Wood counties, and from the disputed country claimed by Michigan. [C] Paulding, Putnam, and Vanwert counties had not been organized at the period of our information. Much of the land in Vanwert is wet. The southern portion contains much swampy prairie. There are nineteen congressional districts in Ohio, which elect as many members of Congress, and twelve circuits for Courts of Common Pleas. _Face of the Country._--The interior and northern parts of the State bordering on lake Erie, are generally level, and, in some places, wet and marshy. The eastern and south-eastern parts bordering on the Ohio river, are hilly and broken, but not mountainous. In some counties the hills are abrupt and broken,--in others they form ridges, and are cultivated to their summits. Immediately on the banks of the Ohio and other large rivers are strips of rich alluvion soil. The country along the Scioto and two Miamies, furnish more extensive bodies of rich, fertile land, than any other part of the State. The prairie land is found in small tracts near the head waters of the Muskingum and Scioto, and between the sources of the two Miami rivers, and especially in the north-western part of the State. Many of the prairies in Ohio are low and wet;--some are elevated and dry, and exhibit the features of those tracts called "barrens" in Illinois. There are extensive plains, some of which are wet, towards Sandusky. _Soil and Productions._--The soil, in at least three fourths of the State, is fertile;--and some of it very rich. The _poorest_ portion of Ohio, is along the Ohio river, from 15 to 25 miles in width, and extending from the National road opposite Wheeling, to the mouth of the Scioto river. Many of the hills in this region are rocky. Among the forest trees are oak of various species, white and black walnut, hickory, maple of different kinds, beech, poplar, ash of several kinds, birch, buckeye, cherry, chestnut, locust, elm, hackberry, sycamore, linden, with numerous others. Amongst the under growth are spice-bush, dogwood, ironwood, pawpaw, hornbeam, black-haw, thorn, wild plum, grape vines, &c. The plains and wet prairies produce wild grass. The agricultural productions are such as are common to the Eastern and Middle States. Indian corn, as in other Western States, is a staple grain, raised with much ease, and in great abundance. More than 100 bushels are produced from an acre, on the rich alluvial soils of the bottom lands, though from 40 to 50 bushels per acre ought to be considered an average crop. The State generally has a fine soil for wheat, and flour is produced for exportation in great quantities. Rye, oats, buckwheat, barley, potatoes, melons, pumpkins, and all manner of garden vegetables, are cultivated to great perfection. No markets in the United States are more profusely and cheaply supplied with meat and vegetables than those of Cincinnati and other large towns in Ohio. Hemp is produced to some extent, and the choicest kinds of tobacco is raised and cured in some of the counties east of the Muskingum river. Fruits of all kinds are raised in great plenty, especially apples, which grow to a large size, and are finely flavored. The vine and the mulberry have been introduced, and with enterprise and industry, wine and silk might easily be added to its exports. _Animals._--Bears, wolves, and deer are still found in the forests and unsettled portions of the State. The domestic animals are similar to other States. Swine is one of the staple productions, and Cincinnati has been denominated the "pork market of the world." Other towns in the west, and in Ohio, are beginning to receive a share of this trade, especially along the lines of the Miami, and the Erie canals. 150,000 hogs have been slaughtered and prepared for market in one season in Cincinnati. About 75,000 is the present estimated number, from newspaper authority. Immense droves of fat cattle are sent every autumn from the Scioto valley and other parts of the State. They are driven to all the markets of the east and south. _Minerals._--The mineral deposits of Ohio, as yet discovered, consist principally in iron, salt, and bituminous coal, and are found chiefly along the south-eastern portion of the State. Let a line be drawn from the south-eastern part of Ashtabula county, in a south-western direction, by Northampton in Portage county, Wooster, Mount Vernon, Granville, Circleville, to Hillsborough, and thence south to the Ohio river in Brown county, and it would leave most of the salt, iron and coal on the eastern and south-eastern side. _Financial Statistics._--From the Auditor's Report to the Legislature now in session, (Jan. 1836,) the following items are extracted. The general revenue is obtained from moderate taxes on landed and personal property, and collected by the county treasurers,--from insurance, bank and bridge companies, from lawyers and physicians, &c. Collected in 1835, by the several county treasurers, $150,080, (omitting fractions): paid by banks, bridges, and insurance companies, $26,060;--by lawyers, and physicians, $1,598;--other sources, $24,028,--making an aggregate of $201,766. The disbursements are,--amount of deficit for 1834, $16,622;--bills redeemed at the treasury for the year ending Nov. 1835, $182,005;--interest paid on school funds, $33,101, &c., amounting to $235,365--and showing a deficit in the revenue of $33,590. CANAL FUNDS. These appear to be separate accounts from the general receipts and disbursements. _Miami Canal._--The amount of money arising from the sales of Miami canal lands up to the 15th of Nov., 1835, is $310,178. This sum has been expended in the extension of the canal north of Dayton. _Ohio Canal._--The amount of taxes collected for canal purposes for the year 1835, including tolls, sales of canal lands, school lands, balance remaining in the treasury of last year, &c., is $509,322. Only $38,242 of the general revenue were appropriated to canal purposes, of which $35,507 went to pay interest on the school funds borrowed by the State. The foreign debt is $4,400,000;--the legal interest of which is $260,000 per annum. The domestic debt of the State, arising from investing the different school funds, is $579,287;--the interest of which amounts to $34,757,--making an aggregate annual interest paid by the State on loans, $294,757. The canal tolls for the year 1835, amount to $242,357, and the receipts from the sale of Ohio canal lands, $64,549,--making an aggregate income to the canal fund of $306,906 per annum;--a sum more than sufficient to pay the interest on all loans for canal purposes. _Items of Expenditure._--Under this head the principal items of the expenditures of the State government are given. Members, and officers of the General Assembly, per annum, $43,987 Officers of government, 20,828 Keeper of the Penitentiary, 1,909 For new Penitentiary buildings, 46,050 State printing, 12,243 Paper and Stationary for use of the State, 4,478 Certificates for wolf scalps, 2,824 Adjutant, and Quarter Master Generals, and Brigade Inspectors, 2,276 Treasurer's mileage on settlement with the Auditor of State, 1,027 Deaf and Dumb Asylum, 5,700 Periodical works, &c. 400 Postage on documents, 545 Reporter to Court in Bank, 300 Members and clerks of the Board of Equalization, and articles furnished, 1,960 Paymaster General,--Ohio Militia, 2,000 The extra session of the legislature on the boundary line, in June, 1835, was $6,823. _Land Taxes._--The amount of lands taxed, and the revenue arising therefrom, at several different periods, are herewith given, to show the progressive advance of the farming and other interests of the State. --------+------------+---------------- Years. | Acres. | Taxes paid. --------+------------+---------------- 1809 | 9,924,033 | $63,991.87 cts 1810 | 10,479,029 | 67,501.60 1811 | 12,134,777 | 170,546.74 From 1811 to 1816, the average increase of the taxes, paid by the several counties, was $59,351. From 1816 the State rose rapidly in the scale of prosperity and the value of property. In 1820, the number of acres returned as taxable, exceeded a fraction of 13 millions, while the aggregate of taxes, was $205,346. The period of depression and embarrassment that followed throughout the west, prevented property from advancing in Ohio. In 1826, '27, '28, '29, '30, a material change in the amount of property taxable took place, from a few hundred thousands, to more than fifty millions. The total value of taxable property of the State for 1835, (exclusive of three counties from which returns had not been received,) amounts to the sum of _ninety-four millions, four hundred and thirty-seven thousand, nine hundred and fifty-one dollars_. _School Funds._--The amount of school funds loaned to the State, up to Nov. 15th, 1835, is-- Virginia Military land fund, $109,937 United States Military land fund, 90,126 Common School fund, 23,179 Athens University, 1,431 School section, No. 16, 453,000 Connecticut Western Reserve, 125,758 -------- Total, $803,432 The following tabular view of the acres of land, total amount of taxable property, and total amount of taxes paid for 1833, is taken from the Ohio Gazetteer. It should be noted that in all the Western States, lands purchased of the government of the United States, are exempted from taxation for _five_ years after sale. It is supposed that such lands are not included in the table. I have also placed the population of each county for 1830, from the census of that year;--reminding the reader that great changes have since been made. -----------------+------------+-------------+--------------+--------------- | | | Total Amount | | Population | Acres of | of taxable | Total Amount Counties. | 1830. | land. | property. | of Taxes paid. -----------------+------------+-------------+--------------+--------------- Adams | 12,231 | 234,822 | $832,565 | $6,995.41 Allen | 578 | 14,159 | 51,214 | 725.28 Ashtabula | 14,584 | 449,742 | 1,347,900 | 13,524.97 Athens | 9,787 | 365,348 | 481,579 | 5,820.90 Belmont | 28,627 | 301,511 | 1,591,716 | 11,590.33 Brown | 17,867 | 267,130 | 1,358,944 | 8,179.35 Butler | 27,142 | 257,989 | 2,514,007 | 20,111.55 Carroll | ---- | 185,942 | 529,575 | 6,876.92 Champaign | 12,131 | 233,493 | 908,571 | 5,956.66 Clark | 13,114 | 247,083 | 1,114,995 | 7,744.89 Clermont | 20,466 | 280,679 | 1,542,627 | 15,645.31 Clinton | 11,436 | 239,404 | 785,770 | 6,482.14 Columbiana | 35,592 | 317,796 | 1,491,099 | 14,217.28 Coshocton | 11,161 | 246,123 | 850,708 | 9,307.28 Crawford | 4,791 | 79,582 | 217,675 | 3,630.09 Cuyahoga | 10,373 | 292,252 | 1,401,591 | 18,122.96 Dark | 6,204 | 107,730 | 260,259 | 3,312.81 Delaware | 11,504 | 338,856 | 831,093 | 8,516.66 Fairfield | 24,786 | 308,163 | 1,992,697 | 13,716.97 Fayette | 8,182 | 234,432 | 544,539 | 6,428.98 Franklin | 14,741 | 325,155 | 1,663,315 | 13,247.34 Gallia | 9,733 | 205,727 | 427,962 | 4,826.55 Geauga | 15,813 | 381,380 | 1,427,869 | 15,832.65 Greene | 14,801 | 251,512 | 1,441,907 | 12,082.36 Guernsey | 18,036 | 275,652 | 908,109 | 9,855.72 Hamilton | 52,317 | 239,122 | 7,726,091 | 97,530.42 Hancock | 813 | 9,302 | 50,929 | 421.70 Harden | 210 | 125,607 | 118,425 | 1,291.43 Harrison | 20,916 | 22,412 | 1,025,210 | 12,400.97 Highland | 16,345 | 317,079 | 1,065,863 | 8,755.29 Hocking | 4,008 | 92,332 | 215,272 | 1,919.29 Holmes | 9,135 | 182,439 | 556,060 | 6,364.03 Huron | 13,346 | 504,689 | 1,512,655 | 15,490.88 Jackson | 5,941 | 57,874 | 197,932 | 2,239.69 Jefferson | 22,489 | 230,145 | 1,855,064 | 13,149.44 Knox | 17,085 | 313,823 | 1,252,294 | 13,329.41 Lawrence | 5,367 | 56,862 | 241,782 | 2,280.80 Licking | 20,869 | 393,205 | 2,101,495 | 17,370.83 Logan | 6,440 | 203,509 | 519,622 | 3,925.65 Lorain | 5,696 | 360,863 | 889,552 | 10,539.09 Madison | 6,190 | 256,421 | 600,578 | 4,643.91 Marion | 6,551 | 168,164 | 390,602 | 5,599.78 Medina | 7,560 | 296,257 | 931,599 | 10,198.31 Meigs | 6,158 | 229,004 | 380,172 | 5,111.58 Mercer | 1,110 | 12,688 | 54,118 | 714.30 Miami | 12,807 | 240,093 | 1,000,748 | 6,423.09 Monroe | 8,768 | 95,520 | 280,572 | 3,666.61 Montgomery | 24,362 | 267,349 | 2,293,419 | 14,649.12 Morgan | 11,800 | 169,135 | 452,991 | 4,945.02 Muskingum | 29,334 | 366,609 | 2,362,616 | 18,567.75 Perry | 13,970 | 175,123 | 729,241 | 6,116.55 Pickaway | 16,001 | 300,969 | 1,798,665 | 10,924.76 Pike | 6,024 | 129,153 | 521,109 | 4,114.37 Portage | 18,826 | 472,156 | 2,019,029 | 17,787.06 Preble | 16,291 | 246,678 | 1,086,322 | 7,441.82 Richland | 24,008 | 433,620 | 1,354,169 | 15,069.92 Ross | 24,068 | 328,765 | 2,897,605 | 17,474.81 Sandusky | 2,851 | 95,822 | 275,992 | 3,354.64 Scioto | 8,740 | 105,539 | 963,882 | 7,926.93 Seneca | 6,159 | 108,758 | 302,089 | 3,916.51 Stark | 26,588 | 374,101 | 1,854,967 | 16,361.36 Shelby | 3,671 | 66,863 | 194,468 | 1,961.26 Trumbull | 26,123 | 556,011 | 1,807,792 | 16,635.58 Tuscarawas | 14,298 | 237,337 | 902,778 | 8,955.75 Union | 3,192 | 259,101 | 380,535 | 5,193.68 Warren | 21,468 | 243,517 | 2,143,065 | 16,247.33 Washington | 11,731 | 282,498 | 681,301 | 7,463.12 Wayne | 23,333 | 382,254 | 1,451,996 | 14,584.77 Williams and | } 1,089 | 17,797 | 90,066 | 1,351.02 others not incor.| } | | | Wood | 1,102 | 17,981 | 127,862 | 1,572.22 -----------------+------------+-------------+--------------+--------------- Total | 937,903 | 17,133,481 | 78,019,526 | 730,010.75 OHIO STATISTICS--1836. From the Annual Report of the Auditor of State, it appears there were returned on the General List for Taxation, 17,819,631 acres of land, under the new valuation, made under the law of 1833-4. Lands, including buildings, valued at $58,166,821 Town Lots, including houses, mills, etc. 15,762,594 269,291 Horses, valued at $40 each, 10,491,640 455,487 Cattle, valued at $8 each, 4,043,896 Merchants' capital, and money at interest, 7,262,927 2,603 Pleasure Carriages, valued at 199,518 ----------- Total amount of taxable property, $94,438,016 On the value of taxable property, the following taxes were levied: State and Canal tax, $142,854.15 County and School tax, 396,505.80 Road tax, 66,482.16 Township tax, 102,991.65 Corporation, Jail, and Bridge tax, 51,276.89 Physicians' and Lawyers' tax, 3,144.19 School-House tax, 1,482.84 Delinquencies of former years, 13,044.37 ----------- Total taxes, $777,782.07 No returns were made from the counties of Crawford, Hancock, Jefferson and Williams. CANAL REVENUES. The total amount of receipts for tolls, for the year ending on the 31st of October, 1835, was as follows: OHIO CANAL. Cleaveland, $72,718.72 | Newark, $20,487.85 Akron, 6,362.90 | Columbus, 4,605.37 Massillon, 13,585.78 | Circleville, 9,651.44 Dover, 8,096.42 | Chillicothe, 12,134.75 Roscoe, 14,555.83 | Portsmouth, 23,118.78 ---------- ---------- 115,319.45 $69,998.00 115,319.45 ----------- Total, $185,317.45 MIAMI CANAL. Dayton, 14,016.75 Middleton, 8,747.19 Hamilton, 3,664.88 Cincinnati, 25,803.77 ---------- Total, 52,232.59 ---------- Total tolls received on both canals, $237,550.04 Deduct contingent expenses on Ohio canal, $5,836.05 Do. on Miami canal, 2,954.68--8,790.73 ------------ $228,759.31 Toll received on Lancaster Lat. Canal, 1,062.56 From water rents and sale of State Lots, 3,700.07 Arrearages paid of Tolls received in October, 1834, 7,835.26 ----------- $242,357.20 POPULATION OF OHIO AT DIFFERENT PERIODS. In Population. | From Increase. 1790, about 3,000 | 1790 to 1800, 42,365 1800, " 45,365 | 1800 " 1810, 185,395 1810, " 230,760 | 1810 " 1820, 350,674 1820, " 581,434 | 1820 " 1830, 356,469 1830, " 937,903 | 1830 " 1835, 437,097 1835, _estimated_, 1,375,000 | _Rivers._--The streams which flow into the Ohio river, are the Mahoninga branch of the Beaver, Little Beaver, Muskingum, Hockhocking, Scioto, Little Miami, and Great Miami. Those which flow from the northward into lake Erie, are the Maumee, Portage, Sandusky, Huron, Cuyahoga, Grand, and Ashtabula. Hence the State is divided into two unequal inclined planes, the longest of which slopes towards the Ohio, and the shortest towards the lake. The head waters of the Muskingum, Scioto and Miami, interlock with those of the Cuyahoga, Sandusky, and Maumee, so as to render the construction of canals not only practicable, but comparatively easy. All the large streams are now navigable for boats during the spring season. _Internal Improvements._--These consist of canals, rail-roads, turnpike roads, and the National road, now under the supervision of, and owned by, the State. The canalling is managed by a Board of Commissioners. The State canals were projected about 1823, and, considering the youthful character of the State, its want of funds and other circumstances, they are, undoubtedly, the greatest works ever executed in America. The _Ohio and Erie Canal_ connects lake Erie with the Ohio river. It commences at Cleaveland, at the mouth of the Cuyahoga, passes along that river and its tributaries, to the summit level, from thence to the waters of the Muskingum, and to the border of Muskingum county; from thence it strikes across the country past Newark, in Licking county, and strikes the Scioto, down the valley of which it proceeds to its mouth, at Portsmouth. The principal places on the canal are Akron, New Portage, Massillon, Bolivar, New Philadelphia, Coshocton, Newark, Bloomfield, Circleville, Chillicothe, Piketon, and Portsmouth. It was commenced on the 4th of July, 1825, and completed in 1832; and, together with the Miami canal to Dayton, cost about $5,500,000, and has greatly enriched the State and the people. Private property along its line has risen from five to ten fold. LENGTH OF OHIO AND ERIE CANAL. Miles. Main trunk from Cleaveland to Portsmouth, 310 Navigable feeder from main trunk to Columbus, 11 Navigable feeder from main trunk to Granville, 6 Muskingum side cut, from the Muskingum river at Dresden, 3 Navigable feeder from the Tuscarawas river, 3 Navigable feeder from the Walhonding river, 1 --- Total length of Ohio canal and branches, 334 The _Miami Canal_ commences at Cincinnati, and, passing through the towns of Reading, Hamilton, Middletown, Franklin, and Miamisburg, terminates at Dayton, 65 miles. It has been navigated from Dayton to the head of Main street, Cincinnati, since the spring of 1829. An extension of the work is now in progress, to be carried along the vallies of St. Mary's and Au Glaise rivers, and unite with the Wabash and Erie canal, at Defiance; distance from Cincinnati about 190 miles. An act passed the Ohio legislature in 1834, for continuing the Wabash and Erie canal, (now constructing in Indiana, by that State,) from the western boundary of Ohio, to the Maumee bay. Operations have been suspended by the boundary dispute with Michigan. The _Mahoning and Beaver Canal_ has already been noticed, under the head of Western Pennsylvania. It is proposed to carry it from Akron, on the Portage summit, along the valley of the Mahoning river, to Newcastle, on the Beaver division of the Pennsylvania canal. Distance in Ohio, 77 miles. The work is in progress. The _Sandy Creek and Little Beaver Canal_ is in progress by a chartered company. It commences near the town of Bolivar, on the Ohio and Erie canal, in Tuscarawas county, and passes along near the line of Stark and Carroll counties to the Little Beaver in Columbiana county, and from thence to the Ohio river. The _Mad River and Sandusky Rail-Road_ will extend from Dayton, on the Miami canal, to Sandusky, through Springfield, Urbanna, Bellefontaine, Upper Sandusky, Tiffin, and down the valley of the Sandusky river to lake Erie. The route is remarkably favorable for locomotive power. Length 153 miles; estimated cost, $11,000 per mile. The work was commenced in September, 1835. The _Erie and Ohio Rail-Road_ is intended to be constructed from Ashtabula on the lake, through Warren to Wellsville, on the Ohio river, a distance of 90 miles. Other rail-roads are in contemplation in this State, the most important of which is the _Great Western Rail-Road_, from Boston, by Worcester, Springfield, and Stockbridge, through New York, by Albany, Utica and Buffalo, along the summit ridge, dividing the northern from the southern waters, through Pennsylvania, Ohio, to intersect the Wabash and Erie canal at La Fayette, in Indiana. From thence provision is already made for it to pass to the eastern boundary of Illinois, from which, a company has been recently chartered to construct it across the State of Illinois by Danville, Shelbyville, Hillsborough, to Alton on the Mississippi. It must be some untoward circumstance that shall prevent this splendid work from being completed the whole length before 1850. The project of a rail-road from Cincinnati, to Charleston in South Carolina, has been entered upon with great spirit in the South, and in all the States more directly concerned in the enterprise. It will, undoubtedly, be carried into effect. The State of Ohio has incorporated a number of turnpike companies, some of which have gone into operation. The first is near the north-eastern corner of the State, from Pierpont, through Monroe and Salem townships to the mouth of Conneant creek, 16 miles long. The second is the Trumbull and Ashtabula turnpike, leading from Warren to Ashtabula, 48 miles. The third is from the town of Wooster, through Medina, to Cleaveland, 51 miles. The fourth is from Columbus to Sandusky, 106 miles, now in the course of construction. Another from Cincinnati, through Lebanon and Columbus, to Wooster, has been commenced on the McAdamized plan, but is not completed. A McAdam turnpike from Cincinnati to Chillicothe is in progress. The National road, constructed by the general government, and transferred to the State, passes from Wheeling, through Columbus to the Indiana line. _Manufactures._--The principal factory for woollen goods is at Steubenville. A number of cotton factories are in the towns along the Ohio river. Furnaces for smelting iron ore are in operation in the counties bordering on the Ohio, near the mouth of the Scioto. Glass is manufactured in several towns. Considerable salt is made on the Muskingum below Zanesville, on the Scioto, and on Yellow creek above Steubenville. About half a million of bushels were made in the State in 1830. Cincinnati rivals Pittsburg in the number, variety and extent of its manufacturing operations. In every town and village through the State, mechanics' shops are established for the manufacture of all articles of ordinary use. _Cities and Towns._--To enter upon minute descriptions, or even name all these, would much exceed the bounds of this work. CINCINNATI is the great commercial emporium of the State. It is pleasantly situated on the right or northern bank of the Ohio river, about equidistant from Pittsburg and its mouth, in N. lat. 39° 06', and W. lon. from Washington city 7° 25'. Directly fronting the city to the south, and on the opposite side of the Ohio river, are the flourishing manufacturing towns of Newport and Covington, which are separated by the Licking river, of Kentucky, which enters the Ohio directly opposite the Cincinnati landing. The wharf arrangements are the most convenient, for lading and unlading goods at all stages of the water, to be found on our western rivers. The town site is beautifully situated on the first and second banks of the river--the former of which is above ordinary high water, and the latter gently rises sixty or seventy feet higher, and spreads out into a semicircular plain, surrounded with elevated bluffs. Cincinnati was founded in 1789, but did not grow rapidly till about 1808. The progressive increase of population will appear from the following table: 1810, 2,320 | 1826, 16,230 1813, 4,000 | 1830, 26,515 1819, 10,000 | 1835, _estimated_, 31,000 1824, 12,016 | Add the adjoining towns of Covington and Newport, whose interests are identified, and the aggregate population will equal 35,000; and, in all reasonable probability, in 1850, these towns, with Cincinnati, will number 100,000 active, educated, and enterprising citizens. In 1826, according to the Picture of Cincinnati, by B. Drake, Esq. and E. D. Mansfield, Esq., the manufacturing industry alone, according to an accurate statistical examination, amounted to 1,800,000 dollars. At that time there were not more than fifteen steam engines employed in manufactures in the city. At the close of 1835, there were more than fifty in successful operation, besides four or five in Newport and Covington. "More than 100 steam engines, about 240 cotton gins, upwards of 20 sugar-mills, and 22 steamboats--many of them of the largest size--have been built or manufactured in Cincinnati, during the year 1835."[10] Hence the productive industry of Cincinnati, Covington and Newport, for 1835, may be estimated at 5,000,000 of dollars. By a laborious investigation, at the close of 1826, by the same writer, the exports of that year were about 1,000,000 of dollars in value. A similar inquiry induced him to place the exports of 1832 at 4,000,000. The estimate for 1835, is 6,000,000. To enumerate all the public and private edifices deserving notice, would extend this article to too great a length. The court house, four market houses, banks, college, Catholic Athenæum, two medical colleges, Mechanics' Institute, two museums, hospital and Lunatics' Asylum, Woodward high school, ten or twelve large edifices for free schools, hotels, and between twenty-five and thirty houses for public worship, some of which are elegant, deserve notice. The type foundry and printing-press manufactory, is one of the most extensive in the United States. Here is machinery, lately invented, for casting printer's types, exceeding, perhaps, anything in the world. Printing, and the manufacture of books, are extensively carried on in this city. Here are six large bookstores, several binderies, twelve or fifteen printing-offices, from which are issued ten weekly, four triweekly, four daily, four monthly, and one quarterly publications. Two medical publications, of a highly respectable character, are issued. The Western Monthly Magazine is too well known to need special notice here. The Cincinnati Mirror is a respectable literary periodical. The Presbyterians, Baptists, Methodists, Roman Catholics, and, perhaps, other sects, have each their weekly paper, respectable in size and character. During four months, in 1831, there were issued from the Cincinnati press, 86,000 volumes, of which 20,300 were original works. In the same period, the periodical press issued 243,200 printed sheets. The business has increased greatly since that time. The "_College of Professional Teachers_," is an institution formed at the convention of teachers, held in this city, in October, 1832. Its objects are to _unite_ the professional instructers of youth throughout the Western country in the cause in which they are engaged, and to elevate the character of the profession. Their meetings are held on the first Monday in October annually. Lectures are given, discussions held, reports made, and a respectable volume of transactions published annually. There is no doubt that much good will result to the cause of education in the West, from this annual convocation. _Law School._--An institution of this character has been organized, under the management of Hon. J. C. Wright, and other gentlemen of the bar. Of _Medical Schools_ there are two, at the heads of which are gentlemen of high character and attainments in their profession. The _Mechanics' Institute_ is designed for the diffusion of scientific knowledge among the mechanics and citizens generally, by means of popular lectures and mutual instruction. The _Cincinnati Lyceum_ was formed for the purpose of useful instruction and entertainment, by means of popular lectures and debates. The _Academic Institute_ is designed to aid the cause of education, and elevate the profession, amongst the teachers in Cincinnati. Its meetings are monthly. The _Athenæum_ is an institution under the management of Roman Catholic Priests. The college edifice is a splendid and permanent building, of great capacity. The _Woodward High School_ was founded by the late William Woodward. The fund yields an income of about $2000 annually. It is conducted by four professors, and has about one hundred and twenty students. The corporation has established a system of free schools, designed to extend the benefits of primary education to all classes, and ten or twelve large edifices have been erected for the purpose. I regret the want of documents to give particulars of this liberal and praiseworthy enterprise, which reflects much honor upon the city and its honorable corporation. In 1833, there were twenty public schools for males and females, and two thousand pupils. Many excellent private schools and seminaries, some of deserved celebrity, are sustained by individual enterprise. COLUMBUS, the political capital of the State, and nearly in the centre of the State, is a beautiful city, on the east bank of the Scioto river. In 1812, it was covered with a dense forest, when it was selected by the legislature for the permanent seat of government. The public buildings are a state house, a court house for the Supreme Court, a building for the public offices, a market house, &c., all of brick. The State penitentiary is here, for which a new substantial building is constructing, and an Asylum for the deaf and dumb, sustained by legislative aid. Chillicothe, Cleaveland, Zanesville, Steubenville, Circleville and many others, are large and flourishing towns. _Education._--Charters for eight or ten colleges and collegiate institutions have been granted. Congress has granted 92,800 acres of public land to this State, for colleges and academies. One township, (23,040 acres,) and a very valuable one, has been given to the Miami University, at Oxford. Two townships of land, (46,080 acres,) though of inferior quality, have been given to the Ohio University. Academies have been established in most of the principal towns. A common school system has been established by the legislature. Each township has been divided into school districts. Taxes are levied to the amount of three fourths of a mill upon the dollar of taxable property in the State, which, with the interest accruing from the different school funds already noticed, are applied towards the expenses of tuition. Five school examiners are appointed in each county, by the Court of Common Pleas, who are to examine teachers. The governor, in his recent Message, speaks of the common school system as languishing in proportion to other improvements. _Form of Government._--The legislative authority is vested in a Senate and House of Representatives; both of which, collectively, are styled the General Assembly. The members of both branches are chosen by counties, or by districts composed of counties, according to population. The representatives are chosen annually; the senators biennially. The General Assembly has the sole power of enacting laws; the signature or assent of the governor not being necessary in any case whatever. The judiciary system comprises three grades of courts:--the Supreme Court, Courts of Common Pleas, and Justices' Courts. The justices of the peace are chosen triennially, by the people. The executive authority is vested in a governor, who is elected biennially, and must be thirty years of age, and have resided in the State at least four years. He is commander-in-chief of all the militia, and commissions all officers in the State, both civil and military. Each free, white, male citizen of the United States, of twenty-one years of age, and a resident of the State one year preceding an election, is entitled to a vote in all elections. The following shows the professions, occupations, and nativity of the members of the legislature of Ohio, during the present winter, (1835-6,) and is about a proportionate estimate for other Western States:-- The members of the Ohio legislature, as to their occupations and professions, are:--farmers, 53; lawyers, 17; merchants, 13; doctors, 5; printers, 3; surveyors, 2; millers, 2; masons, 2; carpenters, 2; painter, 1; watch-maker, 1; blacksmith, 1; house joiner, 1. Their nativity is as follows:--Ohio, 7; Pennsylvania, 30; Virginia, 22; New England States, 17; Maryland, 8; New York, 7; New Jersey, 4; Kentucky, 3; Delaware, 2; North Carolina, 1; Ireland, 5; England, 1; Germany, 1. The youngest member in the Senate, is 33 years of age, and the oldest 56. In the House, the youngest 26; oldest 67. Under the Constitution, a senator must be 30; and a member of the House, 26. _Antiquities._--Much has been said about the antiquities of Ohio,--the fortifications, artificial mounds, and military works, supposed to indicate a race of civilized people, as the possessors of the country, anterior to the Indian nations. At Marietta, Circleville, Paint Creek, and some other places, are, doubtless, antiquities, that exhibited, upon their first discovery, strong marks of a military purpose. I have no doubt, however, that credulity and enthusiasm have greatly exaggerated many appearances in the West, and magnified them into works of vast enterprise and labor. Mounds of earth are found in every country on the globe, of all forms and sizes; and why should they not exist in the western valley? Mr. Flint states that he has seen a horse shoe dug up at the depth of thirty-five feet below the surface, with nails in it, and much eroded by rust. He mentions also a sword, which is _said_ to be preserved as a curiosity, but which he had not seen, found enclosed in the wood of the roots of a tree, which could not have been less than five hundred years old! Those who delight especially in the marvellous, may consult the "Description of the Antiquities discovered in the State of Ohio, and other Western States, by Caleb Atwater, Esq." _History._--The first permanent settlement of Ohio, was made at Marietta, on the 7th day of April, 1788, by 47 persons from Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut. This was the nucleus around which has grown up the populous State of Ohio. Amongst the most active promoters of this colony, were those called then "The Ohio Company." The next settlement was that of Symmes' purchase, made at Columbia, six miles above Cincinnati, in Nov. 1789, by Major Stiles and twenty-five others, under the direction of Judge Symmes. A colony of French emigrants settled at Gallipolis in 1791. In 1796 settlements were made by New England emigrants at Cleaveland and Conneant, on the southern shore of lake Erie. The intermediate country gradually filled up by emigration from various parts of the United States. Some slight diversity exists, in different sections of the State, in manners, customs, and feelings, amongst the people, in accordance with the States or countries from which they or their fathers emigrated. These shades of character will become blended, and the next generation will be _Ohians_, or, to use their own native cognomen, _Buckeyes_. In Sept., 1790, the first territorial legislature convened at Cincinnati. The governor having exercised his right of _veto_ in relation to the removal of a county seat, an unhappy collision followed, and, upon framing the State Constitution, in Nov., 1802, the convention prevented the governor of the State from ever exercising the _negative_ power upon acts of the legislature. DATE OF ORGANIZATION OF SOME OF THE OLDEST COUNTIES. Washington, July 27th, 1788 Hamilton, Jan. 2d, 1790 Adams, July 10th, 1797 Jefferson, July 29th, 1797 Ross, August 20th, 1798 Trumbull, July 10th, 1800 Clermont, December 6th, 1800 Belmont September 7th, 1801 These were all organized under the territorial government. INDIANA. Length 240, breadth 150 miles. Between 37° 48' N. latitude, and 7° 45' and 11° W. longitude. Bounded north by the State of Michigan and lake Michigan, east by Ohio, south by the Ohio river, which separates it from Kentucky, and west by Illinois. It contains about 37,000 square miles, equal to 23,680,000 acres. It is naturally subdivided into the hilly portion, bordering on the Ohio; the level, timbered portion, extending across the middle of the State; the Wabash country, on that river; and the northern portion bordering on the State of Michigan and the lake. The two last portions include nearly all the prairie country. For civil purposes, this State has been divided into counties, and those subdivided into townships. TABLE. ------------+----------+------+----------++-----------------+------------- | | | || |Bearing and | Date of |Square|Population|| |distance from COUNTIES. |Formation.|miles.| 1830. ||SEATS OF JUSTICE.|Indianopolis. ------------+----------+------+----------++-----------------+------------- Allen, | 1823 | 720 | 1,000 || Fort Wayne, | Bartholomew,| 1821 | 588 | 5,800 || Columbus, | Boon, | 1830 | 400 | 622 || Lebanon, | Carroll, | 1828 | 450 | 1,614 || Delphi, | Cass, | 1829 | 460 | 1,154 || Logansport, | Clark, | 1802 | 400 | 10,719 || Charlestown, | Clay, | 1825 | 360 | 1,616 || Bowling Green, | Clinton, | 1830 | 450 | 1,423 || Frankfort, | Crawford, | 1818 | 350 | 3,184 || Fredonia, | Daviess, | 1816 | 460 | 4,512 || Washington, | Dearborn, | 1802 | 448 | 14,573 || Lawrenceburgh, | Decatur, | 1821 | 400 | 5,854 || Greensburgh, | Delaware, | 1827 | 400 | 2,372 || Muncietown, | Dubois, | 1817 | 420 | 1,774 || Jasper, | Elkhart, | 1830 | 576 | 935 || Goshen, | Fayette, | 1818 | 200 | 9,112 || Connersville, | Floyd, | 1819 | 200 | 6,363 || New Albany, | Fountain, | 1825 | 400 | 7,644 || Covington, | Franklin, | 1810 | 400 | 10,199 || Brookville, | Gibson, | 1813 | 450 | 5,417 || Princeton, | Grant, | 1831 | 415 | ---- || Marion, | Greene, | 1821 | 540 | 4,250 || Bloomfield, | Hamilton, | 1823 | 400 | 1,705 || Noblesville, | Hancock, | 1828 | 340 | 1,569 || Greenfield, | Harrison, | 1808 | 470 | 10,288 || Corydon, | Hendricks, | 1823 | 420 | 3,967 || Danville, | Henry, | 1821 | 440 | 6,498 || Newcastle, | Huntington, | 1832 | 400 | ---- || | Jackson, | 1815 | 500 | 4,894 || Brownstown, | Jefferson, | 1809 | 400 | 11,465 || Madison, | Jennings, | 1816 | 400 | 3,950 || Vernon, | Johnson, | 1822 | 300 | 4,130 || Franklin, | Knox, | 1802 | 540 | 6,557 || Vincennes, | La Porte, | 1832 | 420 | ---- || La Porte, | Lagrange, | 1832 | 380 | ---- || Mongoquinon, | Lawrence, | 1818 | 460 | 9,237 || Bedford, | Madison, | 1823 | 420 | 2,442 || Andersontown, | Marion, | 1821 | 440 | 7,181 || INDIANOPOLIS, | Martin, | 1818 | 340 | 2,010 || Mount Pleasant, | Miami, | 1832 | 330 | ---- || Miamisport, | Monroe, | 1818 | 560 | 6,578 || Bloomington, | Montgomery, | 1822 | 500 | 7,376 || Crawfordsville, | Morgan, | 1821 | 530 | 5,579 || Martinsville, | Orange, | 1815 | 378 | 7,909 || Paoli, | Owen, | 1818 | 380 | 4,060 || Spencer, | Parke, | 1821 | 450 | 7,534 || Rockville, | Perry, | 1814 | 400 | 3,378 || Rome, | Pike, | 1816 | 430 | 2,464 || Petersburgh, | Posey, | 1814 | 500 | 6,883 || Mount Vernon, | Putnam, | 1821 | 490 | 8,195 || Greencastle, | Randolph, | 1818 | 440 | 3,912 || Winchester, | Ripley, | 1818 | 400 | 3,957 || Versailles, | Rush, | 1821 | 400 | 9,918 || Rushville, | Scott, | 1817 | 200 | 3,097 || Lexington, | Shelby, | 1821 | 430 | 6,294 || Shelbyville, | Spencer, | 1818 | 400 | 3,187 || Rockport, | St. Joseph, | 1830 | 740 | 287 || South Bend, | Sullivan, | 1816 | 430 | 4,696 || Merom, | Switzerland,| 1814 | 300 | 7,111 || Vevay, | Tippecanoe, | 1826 | 500 | 7,161 || La Fayette, | Union, | 1821 | 224 | 7,957 || Liberty, | Vanderburgh,| 1818 | 225 | 2,610 || Evansville, | Vermillion, | 1823 | 280 | 5,706 || Newport, | Vigo, | 1818 | 400 | 5,737 || Terre Haute, | Wabash, | 1832 | 380 | ---- || | Warren, | 1828 | 350 | 2,854 || Williamsport, | Warrick, | 1813 | 412 | 2,973 || Boonville, | Washington, | 1813 | 550 | 13,072 || Salem, | Wayne, | 1810 | 420 | 23,344 || Centerville, | The total population in 1830, was 341,582. The estimated population in the message of Gov. Noble to the legislature, December, 1835, was 600,000. The counties in which the population has not been given in the foregoing table, have been formed since 1830. Probably other new counties, along the waters of the Wabash and Kankakee, have been formed recently, of which no intelligence has been had by the author. The counties in the northern portion of the State have increased the most in population since 1830. For electing representatives to Congress, the State is divided into seven electoral districts. For judicial purposes, it is divided into eight circuits, in each of which there is a circuit judge, who, together with two associates in each county, holds the circuit courts. POPULATION AT DIFFERENT PERIODS. Population. | Increase. In 1800,(excluding Illinois,) 2,641 | From 1800 to 1810, 21,879 " 1810, 24,520 | " 1810 to 1820, 122,658 " 1820, 147,178 | " 1820 to 1825, 74,822 " 1825, 222,000 | " 1825 to 1830, 119,582 " 1830, 341,582 | " 1830 to 1835, 119,582 " 1835,(estimate,) 600,000 | In 1825, the number of voters was 36,977, and the number of paupers 217! _Face of the Country, &c._--The counties bordering on the Ohio river are hilly;--sometimes abrupt, precipitous, stony, occasionally degenerating into knobs and ravines. Commencing at the mouth of White river on the Wabash, and following up that stream on its east fork, and thence along the Muskakituck, through Jennings and Ripley counties to Lawrenceville, and you leave the rough and hilly portion of Indiana, to the right. Much of the country we have denominated hilly is rich, fertile land, even to the summits of the hills. On all the streams are strips of rich alluvion of exhaustless fertility. The interior, on the two White rivers and tributaries, is moderately undulating, tolerably rich soil, and much of it heavily timbered with oaks of various species, poplar, beech, sugar tree, walnuts, hickory, elm, and other varieties common to the West. There is much level, table land, between the streams. Along the Wabash, below Terre Haute, is an undulating surface, diversified with forest and prairie, with a soil of middling quality, interspersed with some very rich tracts. Along the Wabash and its tributaries above Terre Haute, the land in general is first rate,--a large proportion forest, interspersed with beautiful prairies. The timber consists of oaks of various species, poplar, ash, walnut, cherry, elm, sugar tree, buckeye, hickory, some beech, sassafras, lime, honey locust, with some cotton wood, sycamore, hackberry and mulberry on the bottom lands. The undergrowth is spice bush, hazel, plum, crab apple, hawthorn and vines. Along the northern part of the State are extensive prairies and tracts of barrens, with groves of various kinds of timber and skirts of burr oak. Towards lake Michigan, and along the Kankakee and St. Joseph rivers, are lakes, swamps and marshes. _Rivers._--The Ohio meanders along the southeastern and southern parts of the State for 350 miles. The east and west forks of White river, and their tributaries, water the interior counties for 100 miles in extent. They are both navigable streams for flat boats during the spring and autumn floods. The Wabash river has several heads, which interlock with the waters of the St. Joseph and St. Mary's, which form the Maumee of lake Erie. It runs a south-westwardly course across the State to Warren county,--thence southwardly to Vigo county, where it becomes the boundary between Indiana and Illinois, along which it meanders to the Ohio, which it enters 12 miles above Shawneetown. The St. Joseph of lake Michigan, already noticed under the State of Michigan, makes a curve into Elkhart and St. Joseph counties, forming what is called the _South Bend_. The Kankakee, which is the longest branch of Illinois river, rises in Indiana, near the South Bend. Some of its head waters interlock with those of Tippecanoe, a prominent tributary of the Wabash. SKETCH OF EACH COUNTY. The following sketch of each county,--its streams, surface, soil, and minerals,--has been made and collated with much labor, from an excellent Gazetteer of this State, published in 1833, by Douglass and Maguire of Indianopolis,--from personal observation of many of the older counties,--and from an extensive correspondence. ALLEN.--Streams; St. Joseph's and St. Mary's, which form the Maumee of lake Erie, navigable for small keel boats,--and numerous creeks; generally heavily timbered; soil, clay,--sandy on the rivers. BARTHOLOMEW.--Streams; Driftwood, Clifty, Flat Rock, and Salt Creeks,--all mill streams. Surface, level; soil, a rich loam, mixed with sand and gravel; the western part hilly, with clay soil. Minerals; limestone, coal, iron ore, red ochre. BOON.--Watered by the tributaries of Raccoon and Sugar Creeks. Surface, level,--soil rich. CARROLL.--Streams; Wabash river, Deer, Rock, and branches of Wildcat creeks. Considerable timber,--some prairies, of which Deer prairie is the largest and most beautiful. Considerable quantities of limestone on the surface; a remarkable spring near Delphi,--the water reddish. CASS.--Streams are Wabash and Eel rivers, which unite at Logansport,--the head of steamboat navigation of the Wabash, and termination of the W. and E. canal. Surface, generally level, rolling towards the rivers with abrupt bluffs; soil, near the rivers, a mixture of loam and sand; at a distance from them, flat and clayey. Large proportion, forest land,--some prairies. CLARK.--Silver and Fourteen Mile creeks furnish excellent mill sites. Ohio river on the south. Surface, rolling and hilly; soil, loam, mixed with sand. Minerals; limestone, gypsum, water lime, marble, salt, iron ore, copperas, alum. CLAY.--Eel river and tributaries. Surface moderately undulating; soil various, chiefly clay and loam, and a mixture of sand, in places; timber predominates,--some prairies. CLINTON.--Watered by the South, Middle, and Kilmore's Forks of Wildcat creek. Surface, moderately undulating, or level: Twelve Mile prairie extends from S. W. to N. E. 12 miles, and is three fourths of a mile wide. The remainder timbered land. Soil, a rich sandy loam, and exceedingly fertile. CRAWFORD.--Waters; the Ohio and Blue rivers,--plenty of water power, and excellent springs. Surface, hilly and broken; in places, tolerably productive; in others, soil thin and rocky. A timbered region, and abundance of limestone. DAVIESS.--Streams; Forks of White river, with its tributaries, Smother's, Prairie, Veal, Aikman's and Sugar creeks. Level bottoms on the rivers--sometimes inundated; undulating on the high grounds. Soil on the West Fork, sandy; much timber,--an extensive tract of sugar tree; some prairies. The county destitute of rock near the surface; plenty of lime and sandstone in the bed of West Fork of White river, at the rapids. Plenty of coal. DEARBORN.--Watered by the Great Miami, Whitewater, Laughery, Hogan's and Tanner's creeks. Surface, hilly and broken, with rich, level, bottom lands, on the Miami. Soil, one fourth first rate, one fourth second rate,--remainder inferior. A timbered region. DECATUR.--Flat Rock, Clifty, and Sand creeks, are all good mill streams. Surface, generally level,--some parts undulating; soil, loam, with a substratum of clay; well adapted to grain--timbered. Minerals; limestone, some iron ore and coal. DELAWARE.--Streams; Missisinawa, and West Fork of White river; surface tolerably level; soil, loam, mixed with sand. Minerals; some limestone, and granite bowlders scattered over the surface. DUBOIS.--Streams; East Fork of White river, Patoka and Anderson creeks. Surface rolling,--some parts hilly and broken,--some level tracts; soil rich and sandy loam near the streams. Minerals; sand rock and coal. ELKHART.--Watered by St. Joseph of lake Michigan, Elkhart and tributaries. Surface, generally level,--a portion undulating; soil various, but generally rich; forest and prairie, both wet and dry. FAYETTE.--Watered by the West Fork of Whitewater, and a small lake in the north. Surface, undulating; soil, on the high ground, clayey, and a mixture of sand,--on the bottom lands, a rich, sandy loam. Limestone found in masses and quarries. FLOYD.--Watered by the Ohio river, Silver creek, and some head branches of Big and Little Indian creeks. Surface various,--a range of knobs,--east of these knobs, it is gently undulating; soil inferior. Minerals; shale, soft sandstone, limestone, freestone, iron ore, and some traces of coal. A boiling spring, from which is emitted an inflammable gas. FOUNTAIN.--Watered by the Wabash river, and Coal and Shawnee creeks, with numerous mill sites. Surface, gently undulating; soil, a black loam, mixed with sand, and very rich. Minerals; coal, and some sandstone. FRANKLIN.--Watered by the East and West Forks of Whitewater. Surface, on the eastern part level,--western, rolling; soil, in the central and northern parts, a black loam,--in the south-west, thin and clayey. GIBSON.--Watered by the Wabash, White, and Patoka rivers. Surface, rolling and timbered; soil, generally a sandy loam, and productive. GRANT.--Watered by the Missisinawa and tributaries. Surface level,--generally heavily timbered; soil, clay and loam on the table lands,--sandy on the river bottoms. GREEN.--Watered by White and Eel rivers, and Richland creek; soil, on the rivers a rich loam,--on the bluffs, sandy,--east side, hilly,--west side, level. White river is navigable. Minerals; lime and sandstone, coal, and some iron ore. HAMILTON.--The streams are White river, and Cicero, Coal, Stoney, and Fall creeks. Generally forest,--some few prairies; soil, in places, clay,--more generally, a sandy loam. Minerals; lime, and some soft sand rock. HANCOCK.--Watered by Blue river, Sugar and Brandywine creeks, with excellent mill sites, and well supplied with springs. Surface, either level or gently undulating; soil, a rich loam, mixed with sand,--heavily timbered. HARRISON.--Watered by Big and Little Indian, and Buck creeks, and Blue river. Surface various,--some parts hilly and broken,--some parts undulating,--some parts level; soil, in the low grounds, a rich loam,--on the high grounds, calcareous and gravelly. A large tract of "barrens" in the west. Minerals; a quarry and several caves of black flint, salt licks, limestone. HENDRICKS.--The waters are White Lick, and branches of Eel river, with good mill sites. Surface, gently rolling, and timbered with the varieties of the Wabash country; soil, a mixture of clay, loam and sand. HENRY.--Watered by Blue river, Flat Rock and Fall creeks. Surface, in some places, broken,--in most parts, level; soil, a mixture of sand with loam and clay. Plenty of springs and mill sites. Mostly timbered, but several tracts of prairie. HUNTINGTON.--The streams are Salamania, Little river, and Wabash. Surface, on the rivers, level,--back, gently undulating; soil, loam and clay, with a slight mixture of sand. Several tracts of prairie, but generally forest land. JACKSON.--Watered by Indian, Driftwood, White, Muscatatack, and Gum creeks. Surface, rolling and in places hilly; soil, clay and loam, mixed with sand. In the forks of the creeks, sand predominates. On the west and north-west, inclined to clay. JEFFERSON.--Watered by the Ohio river, Indian, Kentucky and Big creeks. Surface various; along the river and creeks, low alluvion; soil, loam mixed with sand. The bottoms are bounded by precipitous bluffs, with towering cliffs of limestone. The table lands are undulating, and the soil inclined to clay. Timber various. Abounds with limestone, masses of freestone, and scattered granite bowlders. JOHNSON.--Watered on the eastern side by Blue river, and Sugar and Young's creeks,--on the western side by Indian, Crooked, and Stott's creeks. Surface, gently undulating; soil, a rich, black, sandy loam; timbered. Minerals; masses of freestone, and scattered granite bowlders. JENNINGS.--Watered by Graham's Fork, and the North Fork of the Muscatatack. Surface, in some parts level, some parts very hilly; soil, calcareous, rich and productive; timber of all varieties; abounds with limestone. KNOX.--The Wabash on the west side,--White river south,--the West Fork of White river east,--and Maria and Duchain creeks, interior. Surface undulating; soil, somewhat various,--a rich loam in places,--sandy in other places;--some tracts of prairie, but timber predominates. LAGRANGE.--Watered by Pigeon and Crooked rivers. Surface, gently rolling; northern part extensive prairies; southern portion chiefly forest; soil, loam and sand. LA PORTE.--Watered by the Kankakee, Galena, and Trail creek, at the mouth of which is Michigan city, and a harbor for lake Michigan commerce. Surface, gently undulating; abounds with large, rich prairies, with groves of timber, and lakes of clear water interspersed; soil, a sandy loam, rich and productive. LAWRENCE.--Watered by Salt, Indian, Guthrie's, Beaver, and Leatherwood creeks, and excellent springs. Surface, generally hilly,--some level lands;--soil, on the water courses, sandy,--back from the streams, loam and clay. Abounds with limestone. MADISON.--The West Fork of White river is navigable. The other streams are Killbuck, Pipe, Lick and Fall creeks. Surface, generally level, with some broken land near the streams; timbered, with a wet prairie, 7 miles long and three fourths of a mile wide; soil, sand, mixed with clay and loam,--productive. Minerals; lime and freestone, marble that polishes well, and some traces of iron ore. MARION.--West Fork of White river passes through it, on which is situated INDIANOPOLIS, the capital of the State. Fall creek is an excellent mill stream. Surface, chiefly level forest land; soil, a deep black loam, with a mixture of sand. Large granite bowlders are scattered over the surface. MARTIN.--The East Fork of White river passes through it, and receives Lost river from the left, and Indian and Flint creeks from the right. Surface, on the east side of White river, broken and hilly; soil, clay and loam; on the west side, level, or gently undulating, with portions of barrens and prairie land; soil, clay and loam, mixed with sand. Minerals; coal in large quantities, lime, sand and freestone. MIAMI.--The Wabash and Eel rivers pass through it, and the Missisinawa comes from the east, and enters the Wabash about the centre of the county. The Wabash and Erie canal passes through it. Surface, gently undulating and beautiful,--chiefly forest, and interspersed with small prairies; soil, the richest in the State, of loam, clay and sand intermixed. MONROE.--Streams; Salt, Clear, Indian, Raccoon, Richland, and Bean-blossom creeks,--pure springs. Surface, hilly and undulating; soil, second rate. Minerals; limestone rock, salt licks, with manufactories of salt. MONTGOMERY.--The heads of Shawnee and Coal creeks in the north-west,--Sugar creek in the centre,--and Big Raccoon on the southeastern part. Surface, gently undulating; the northern portion prairie, interspersed with groves, with a rich soil of black loam, mixed with sand,--the middle and southern portions timbered. Excellent quarries of rock in the middle,--granite bowlders in the northern parts. MORGAN.--White river, which is navigable. The mill streams are White Lick, Sycamore, Highland, and Lamb's creeks on the west side, and Crooked, Stott's, Clear, and Indian creeks on the east side. Surface, generally rolling,--some parts hilly; soil, calcareous and clayey,--on the bottoms, a rich sandy loam. Minerals; limestone, and some iron ore. ORANGE.--Streams; Lost river, French Lick, and Patoka. Surface, hilly and broken,--limestone rock,--springs of water, of which Half-moon and French Lick are curiosities. On the alluvial bottoms, the soil is loamy,--on the hills, calcareous, and inclined to clay. Excellent stones for grit, equal to the Turkey oil stones, are found in this county. OWEN.--Watered by the West Fork of White river, with its tributaries, Raccoon, Indian, Mill, Rattlesnake, and Fish creeks. The falls of Eel river furnish the best water power in the State. Surface rolling; soil, in some places a dark loam,--in others clayey and calcareous. Minerals; immense bodies of lime rock, and some iron ore. PARKE.--Watered by the Big and Little Raccoon, and Sugar creeks, (with excellent mill sites,) all of which enter the Wabash on its western side. Surface, generally level,--some beautiful prairies, but mostly forest land; soil, a loam mixed with sand and rich. Minerals; lime and sandstone, coal and iron ore. PERRY.--Watered by the Ohio river, with Anderson's, Bear, Poison, and Oil creeks interior. Some level land, with a rich, sandy loam, on the streams,--all the high lands very broken; hilly, with a clayey, sterile soil. Minerals; immense bodies of limestone, grindstone quarries, iron ore and coal. PIKE.--Has White river on the north, and Patoka creek through the centre. Surface all forest land and undulating; soil, eastern part clay and sand,--western, a rich, dark loam, mixed with sand,--some swampy land. Minerals, limestone and coal. POSEY.--In the forks of the Ohio and Wabash, with Big, Mill, and McFadden's creeks interior, and good springs. Surface, rolling, and all forest land; soil, a sandy loam, and produces well. Minerals; sand, and limestone and coal. PUTNAM.--Has Raccoon creek, and Eel river, with abundant water privileges, and fine springs. Surface, gently undulating; soil, in places calcareous and clayey,--in other places a rich loam; limestone. RANDOLPH.--Watercourses, the West Fork of White river and Missisinawa and their tributaries, which furnish good mill sites. Surface, either level or gently undulating; soil, a rich loam,--in some places marshy; a small quantity of limestone, with granite bowlders. RIPLEY.--Watered by Laughery and Graham's creek. Surface level, forest land; soil clay,--in some parts inclines to sand,--with limestone abundant. RUSH.--The streams are Big and Little Blue rivers, Big and Little Flat Rock, with excellent water power. Surface, moderately rolling, and heavily timbered; soil, loam on clay, with a slight mixture of sand. SCOTT.--Watered by tributaries of the Muscatatack. Surface rolling,--some flat lands inclining to marsh; soil, clay. Minerals; limestone, iron ore, salt, sulphur, and copperas. SHELBY.--Watered by Big and Little Blue rivers, Brandywine, and Sugar creeks, with good mill sites,--all heads of the East Fork of White river. Surface, generally level with forest land; soil, clay mixed with loam. SPENCER.--Ohio river, Anderson's, Little Pigeon, and Sandy creeks. Surface tolerably level, and forest land; soil, clay mixed with loam. Minerals; coal, and lime and sand rock. ST. JOSEPH.--St. Joseph's river, Kankakee, and Bobango, with some small creeks. Extensive marshes on the Kankakee, and near the South Bend of the St. Joseph. These marshes are of vegetable formation. Surface, in some parts level,--in others gently undulating; soil, a loam,--in some places sand. The north-west part chiefly prairies and barrens, including the large and fertile prairies of Portage and Terre Coupe. The north-eastern, barrens,--the south-eastern, forest. Minerals are granite bowlders, and bog iron ore. SULLIVAN.--Has the Wabash river on its western side, and Turman's, Busseron, and Turtle creeks interior. Surface rolling,--some prairies, but generally forest land,--some poor barrens; soil, loam and sand;--lime and sand rock and coal. SWITZERLAND.--The Ohio east and south,--Indian, Plum, Bryant's, Turtle, and Grant's creeks interior. Surface various,--bottom lands level, and rich,--then a range of precipitous bluffs, with cliffs of limestone,--the table land rolling with a calcareous and clayey soil. At Vevay are extensive vineyards. TIPPECANOE.--Watered by the Wabash river, and Wildcat, Wea, Burnett's, and Mill Branch creeks. The Wabash affords navigation, and the other streams excellent mill sites. Surface gently undulating, with extensive level tracts, and consists of one half prairie, one eighth barrens, and the remainder heavy forest land. The prairie soil is a rich, black loam,--the barrens cold, wet clay,--the forest a very rich loam and sand. UNION.--Streams; the East Fork of White river and its tributaries, Hanna's, Richland, and Silver creeks, all of which furnish excellent mill sites. Surface, moderately rolling; soil, a dark loam. VANDERBURGH.--Watered by the Ohio, and Great Pigeon creek. Surface, high, dry, rolling land, with good timber, and well watered; soil, clay and sand, of inferior quality. Minerals; lime and sandstone, salines, and a mineral spring. VERMILLION.--A long, narrow county, between the Wabash river and the State of Illinois. The streams are Wabash, Big and Little Vermillion, and their tributaries. Surface high, rolling land, with abrupt bluffs near the streams; a good proportion of prairie and timber; soil, rich, sandy loam, and very productive. Minerals; freestone and limestone, and large coal banks. VIGO.--The Wabash passes through it--navigable. The mill streams are Prairie, Honey, Otter, and Sugar creeks, but their waters fail in a dry season. Surface level, or gently undulating, with forest and prairies; soil, rich loam and sand,--first rate. Minerals; gray limestone, freestone, and inexhaustible beds of coal. WABASH.--The Wabash river, and W. and E. canal, pass through it, as does the Missisinawa, Eel, Bluegrass, and Salamania. Surface,--wide, rich bottoms on the streams,--bluffs and ravines adjoining,--table lands further back, either dry and rolling, or flat and wet, and abound with willow swamps. Limestone rock abundant, and many excellent springs of pure water. WARREN.--The Wabash on the S. E. border for thirty miles, and navigated by steamboats; interior streams, Rock, Redwood, and Big and Little Pine creeks, all of which afford good mill sites. Some pine and cedar timber. Surface generally level, with broken land on the bluffs of creeks; some forest, but the largest proportion prairie; soil, a rich and very fertile loam. Minerals; lime and excellent freestone for building purposes,--coal,--iron,--lead and copper,--with several old "diggings" and furnaces, where both copper and lead ore have been smelted in early times. WARRICK.--Watered by the Ohio river, Big and Little Pigeon, and Cypress. Surface, rolling and hilly; soil, a sandy loam on clay. Minerals; quarries of freestone, some limestone, and inexhaustible beds of coal. WASHINGTON.--Streams; Muscatatack on the north, Rush, Twin, Highland, Delany's, Elk, Bear, and Sinking creeks, and the heads of Blue and Lost rivers, with mill sites. Surface, diversified from gentle undulations, to lofty and precipitous hills; soil, in part, second rate, with much of inferior quality. Substratum of limestone, caves, hollows, and sink holes. WAYNE.--Streams, East and West Forks of Whitewater, with excellent water power for machinery. Surface, moderately hilly; heavy forest land; soil, a rich loam; substratum, clay. Minerals; generally, limestone, and excellent for buildings. _Form of Government._--This differs very little from that of Ohio. The Constitution provides that an enumeration be made every five years of all free white male inhabitants, above the age of twenty-one years; and the representation of both houses of the General Assembly is apportioned by such enumeration, in such ratio that the number of representatives shall never be less than 36, nor exceed 100, and the number of senators not exceeding one half, nor less than one third the number of representatives. Every free white male citizen, twenty-one years of age, who has resided in the State one year, is entitled to vote; "except such as shall be enlisted in the army of the U. S., or their allies." Elections are held annually, by ballot, on the first Monday in August. Senators, the governor, and lieutenant governor, hold their offices for three years. The judiciary is vested in a Supreme Court, in Circuit Courts, Probate Courts, and Justices of the peace. The Supreme Court consists of three judges, who are appointed by the governor, with the advice and consent of the senate, for the term of seven years, and have appellate jurisdiction. The Circuit Courts consist of a presiding judge in each judicial circuit, elected by joint ballot of both houses of the General Assembly, and two associate judges in each county, elected by the qualified voters in their respective counties, for a like term. The Probate Courts consist of one judge for each county, who is elected by the voters, for the same term. Justices of the peace are elected in each township, for the term of five years, and have jurisdiction in criminal cases throughout the county, but, in all civil cases, throughout the township. _Finances._--The Indiana Gazetteer, of 1833, estimates that the revenue for State purposes amounted to about $35,000 annually, and, for county purposes, to about half that sum. The aggregate receipts for 1835, according to the governor's message, of Dec. 1835, amounted to $107,714; expenditures for the same time, $103,901. Sales of canal lands for the same period, $175,740. The canal commissioners have borrowed $605,257, for canal purposes, on a part of which they obtained two per cent. premium, and, on another part, as high as seven per cent.; and have also borrowed $450,000 bank capital, for which they received four and a half per cent. premium. Three per cent. on all sales of U. S. lands within the State, is paid by the general government into the State treasury, to be expended in making roads. The receipts from this source, in 1835, amounted to $24,398. Sales and rents of saline lands, produced an income of $4,636. The proceeds of certain lands, donated by the general government towards the construction of a road from the Ohio river to lake Michigan, amounted to $33,030. _Internal Improvements._--This State has entered with great spirit upon a system of internal improvements. It consists of canalling, improving river navigation, rail-roads, and common turnpike roads. _Wabash and Erie Canal._--This work will extend from La Fayette, on the Wabash river, up the valley of that stream, to the Maumee and to the boundary of Ohio; distance, 105 miles. The cost of construction has been estimated at $1,081,970, and lands to the amount of 355,200 acres, have been appropriated by the general government, the proceeds of which will be sufficient to complete the canal to Fort Wayne. The middle division, 32 miles, was completed in July, 1835, and the remainder is in active progress. Its whole distance, through a part of Ohio to Maumee bay, at the west end of lake Erie, will be 187 miles. The _Whitewater Canal_, 76 miles in length, along the western branch of Whitewater, is intended to pass through Connorsville, Brookville, Somerset, and other towns, to Lawrenceburgh, on the Ohio river. Provision is made to improve the navigation of the Wabash river, in conjunction with Illinois, where it constitutes the boundary line, and, by this State alone, further up. _Rail-Roads._--From Evansville, on the Ohio, to La Fayette on the Wabash, 175 miles; from La Fayette to Michigan city, 90 miles; forming a line from the Ohio river to lake Michigan, 265 miles in length:--From Madison, on the Ohio, to Indianopolis, the seat of government, 85 miles; and several others were projected two years since. But at the session of the legislature of 1835-6, a bill was passed to borrow, in such instalments as should be needed, _ten millions_ of dollars; and a system of internal improvements, including canals, rail-roads, and the improvement of river navigation, was marked out. In a few years, this State will be prominent in this species of enterprise. _Synopsis of Canals surveyed by order of the Indiana Legislature during the Year 1835._ La Fayette and Terre Haute division of the Wabash and Erie canal. Length, 90 miles; total cost, $1,067,914.70; per mile, $11,865 79. Central canal, north of Indianopolis. Total length, from Indianopolis via Andersontown, Pipe creek summit to the Wabash and Erie canal at Wabash town, 103 miles 34 chains; total cost, $1,992,224.54; per mile, $17,106 51. Length, via Pipe creek summit to Peru, near the mouth of the Missisinawa, 114 miles 46 chains; total cost, $1,897,797.19; per mile, $14,871.85. Length, via Pipe creek summit (including lateral canal to Muncietown) to Wabash town, 124 miles 51 chains; total cost, $2,103,153.61; per mile, $15,873.83. Length, via Pipe creek summit (including lateral canal to Muncietown) to Peru, 185 miles 63 chains; total cost, $2,008,726.26; per mile, $14,793.12. Total length, from Indianopolis via Muncietown to the Wabash and Erie canal at Peru, 131 miles 41 chains; total cost, $2,058,929.41; per mile, $14.549 71. Central canal, south of Indianopolis. Total length, from Indianopolis to Evansville, 188 miles; total cost, $2,642,285.92; per mile, $14,054.71. Route down the valley of Main Pigeon. Length, 194 miles; total cost, $2,400,957.70; per mile, $12,376.02. Terre Haute and Eel river canal, which forms a connexion between the Wabash and Erie canal and White river or Central canal. Total length, 40-½ miles; total cost, $629,631 65; which, including a feeder, is $13,540.46 per mile. Wabash and Erie canal, eastern division, [east of Fort Wayne], Upper line: Length, 19 miles 30 chains; total cost, $154,113.13; per mile, $7,952.17.--Lower line: Total length, 20 miles 76-½ chains; total cost, $254,817.52; per mile, $11,159.04. The following are the works provided for in the Bill, and the sums appropriated for them: 1st. The White Water Canal, including a lateral canal or rail-road, to connect said canal with the Central or White river canal, $1,400,000 2d. Central or White river Canal, 3,500,000 3d. Extension of the Wabash and Erie Canal, 1,300,000 4th. Madison and La Fayette Rail-road, 1,300,000 5th. A M'Adamized turnpike road from New Albany to Vincennes, 1,150,000 6th. Turnpike or rail-road from New Albany to Crawfordsville, 1,300,000 7th. Removing obstructions in the Wabash, 50,000 ----------- $10,000,000 8th. The Bill gives the credit of the State to the Lawrenceburgh and Indianopolis Rail-road Company, for the sum of $500,000. _Manufactures._--Besides the household manufacture of cotton and flannels, common to the western people, at Vincennes, and probably other towns, machinery is employed in several establishments. It will be seen from the sketch of each county, already given, that in most parts of the State there is a supply of water power for manufacturing purposes. Both water and steam power, saw and grist mills, are already in operation in various parts of the State. _Education._--The same provision of one section of land in each township, or a thirty-sixth part of the public lands, has been made for the encouragement of common schools, as in other Western States. A law has been enacted providing for common schools, and the public mind has become measurably awakened to the subject of education. Some most extravagant and exaggerated statements have been made relative to an incredible number of children in this State, "who have no means of education." As in all new countries, the first class of emigrants, having to provide for their more immediate wants, have not done so much as is desirable to promote common school education; but we have no idea they will slumber on that subject, while they are wide awake to the physical wants and resources of the country. Academies have been established in several counties, and a college at Bloomington, from the encouragement of State funds, and other institutions are rising up, of which the Hanover Institution near the Ohio river, and Wabash College at Crawfordsville, promise to be conspicuous. _History._--This country was first explored by adventurers from Canada, with a view to the Indian trade, towards the close of the seventeenth century; and the place where Vincennes now stands is said to have been thus early occupied as a trading post. A company of French from Canada, made a settlement here in 1735. The country, in common with the Western Valley, was claimed by France, until it was ceded to Great Britain, at the treaty of peace in 1763, under whose jurisdiction it remained, until subdued by the American arms under the intrepid Gen. G. R. Clark, and his gallant band, in 1779. A territorial government was organized by Congress in 1787, including all the country north-west of the river Ohio, which was then called the North-western Territory. In 1802, when the State of Ohio was organized, all that part of the Territory lying west of a line due north from the mouth of the Great Miami, was organized into the Territory of Indiana,--which was divided, and from which Illinois Territory was formed in 1809. In June, 1816, a constitution was adopted, and at the ensuing session of Congress, Indiana was made a State. _General Remarks._--The importance of Indiana, as a desirable State for the attention of the emigrant to the West, has been too much overlooked. Though not possessing quite equal advantages with Illinois, especially in the quality and amount of prairie soil, it is far superior to Ohio, and fully equal,--nay, in our estimation, rather superior to Michigan. Almost every part is easy of access, and in a very few years the liberal system of internal improvements, adopted and in progress, will make almost every county accessible to public conveyances, and furnish abundant facilities to market. Along the wide, alluvion bottoms of the streams, and amidst a rank growth of vegetation, there is usually more or less autumnal fever, yet, in general, there is very little difference in any of the Western States as to prospects of health. Mechanics, school teachers, and laborers of every description, are much wanted in this State, as they are in all the States further west; and all may provide abundantly and easily, all the necessaries of living for a family, if they will use industry, economy and sobriety. FOOTNOTES: [10] See a valuable statistical article, by B. Drake, Esq., in the Western Monthly Magazine, for January, 1836, entitled, "_Cincinnati, at the close of 1835_." CHAPTER XI. ILLINOIS. Situation, Boundaries, and Extent. The State of Illinois is situated between 37° and 42°, 30´ N. latitude; and between 10° 25´, and 14°30´ W. longitude from Washington city. It is bounded on the north by Wisconsin Territory, north-east by lake Michigan, east by Indiana, south-east and south by Kentucky, and west by the State and Territory of Missouri. Its extreme length is 380 miles; and its extreme width, 220 miles; its average width, 150 miles. The area of the whole State, including a small portion of lake Michigan within its boundaries, is 59,300 square miles. The water area of the State is about 3,750 square miles. With this, deduct 5,550 square miles for irreclaimable wastes, and there remains 50,000 square miles, or 32 millions of acres of arable land in Illinois,--a much greater quantity than is found in any other State. In this estimate, inundated lands, submerged by high waters, but which may be reclaimed at a moderate expense, is included. _Face of the Country, and qualities of Soil._--The general surface is level, or moderately undulating; the northern and southern portions are broken, and somewhat hilly, but no portion of the State is traversed with ranges of hills or mountains. At the verge of the alluvial soil on the margins of rivers, there are ranges of "bluffs" intersected with ravines. The bluffs are usually from fifty to one hundred and fifty feet high, where an extended surface of table land commences, covered with prairies and forests of various shapes and sizes. When examined minutely, there are several varieties in the surface of this State, which will be briefly specified and described. 1. _Inundated Lands._ I apply this term to all those portions, which, for some part of the year, are under water. These include portions of the river bottoms, and portions of the interior of large prairies, with the lakes and ponds which, for half the year or more, are without water. The term "bottom" is used throughout the West, to denote the alluvial soil on the margin of rivers, usually called "intervales," in New England. Portions of this description of land are flowed for a longer or shorter period, when the rivers are full. Probably one eighth of the bottom lands are of this description; for, though the water may not stand for any length of time, it wholly prevents settlement and cultivation, though it does not interrupt the growth of timber and vegetation. These tracts are on the bottoms of the Wabash, Ohio, Mississippi, Illinois, and all the interior rivers. When the rivers rise above their ordinary height, the waters of the smaller streams, which are backed up by the freshets of the former, break over their banks, and cover all the low grounds. Here they stand for a few days, or for many weeks, especially towards the bluffs; for it is a striking fact in the geology of the western country, that all the river bottoms are higher on the margins of the streams than at some distance back. Whenever increase of population shall create a demand for this species of soil, the most of it can be reclaimed at comparatively small expense. Its fertility will be inexhaustible, and if the waters from the rivers could be shut out by dykes or levees, the soil would be perfectly dry. Most of the small lakes on the American bottom disappear in the summer, and leave a deposit of vegetable matter undergoing decomposition, or a luxuriant coat of weeds and grass. As our prairies mostly lie between the streams that drain the country, the interior of the large ones are usually level. Here are formed ponds and lakes after the winter and spring rains, which remain to be drawn off by evaporation, or absorbed by an adhesive soil. Hence the middle of our large, level prairies are wet, and for several weeks portions of them are covered with water. To remedy this inconvenience completely, and render all this portion of soil dry and productive, only requires a ditch or drain of two or three feet deep to be cut into the nearest ravine. In many instances, a single furrow with the plough, would drain many acres. At present, this species of inundated land offers no inconvenience to the people, except in the production of miasm, and even that, perhaps, becomes too much diluted with the atmosphere to produce mischief before it reaches the settlements on the borders of the prairie. Hence the inference is correct, that our inundated lands present fewer obstacles to the settlement and growth of the country, and can be reclaimed at much less expense, than the swamps and salt marshes of the Atlantic States. 2. _River Bottoms or Alluvion._ The surface of our alluvial bottoms is not entirely level. In some places it resembles alternate waves of the ocean, and looks as though the waters had left their deposit in ridges, and retired. The portion of bottom land capable of present cultivation, and on which the waters never stand, if, at an extreme freshet, it is covered, is a soil of exhaustless fertility; a soil that for ages past has been gradually deposited by the annual floods. Its average depth on the American bottom, is from twenty to twenty-five feet. Logs of wood, and other indications, are found at that depth. The soil dug from wells on these bottoms, produces luxuriantly the first year. The most extensive and fertile tract, of this description of soil, in this State, is the _American Bottom_, a name it received when it constituted the western boundary of the United States, and which it has retained ever since. It commences at the mouth of the Kaskaskia river, five miles below the town of Kaskaskia, and extends northwardly along the Mississippi to the bluffs at Alton, a distance of ninety miles. Its average width is five miles, and contains about 450 square miles, or 288,000 acres. Opposite St. Louis, in St. Clair county, the bluffs are seven miles from the river, and filled with inexhaustible beds of coal. The soil of this bottom is an argillaceous or a silicious loam, according as clay or sand happens to predominate in its formation. On the margin of the river, and of some of its lakes, is a strip of heavy timber, with a thick undergrowth, which extends from half a mile to two miles in width; but from thence to the bluffs, it is principally prairie. It is interspersed with sloughs, lakes, and ponds, the most of which become dry in autumn. The soil of the American bottom is inexhaustibly rich. About the French towns it has been cultivated, and produced corn in succession for more than a century, without exhausting its fertilizing powers. The only objection that can be offered to this tract is its unhealthy character. This, however, has diminished considerably within eight or ten years. The geological feature noticed in the last article--that all our bottoms are higher on the margin of the stream, than towards the bluffs, explains the cause why so much standing water is on the bottom land, which, during the summer, stagnates and throws off noxious effluvia. These lakes are usually full of vegetable matter undergoing decomposition, and which produces large quantities of miasm. Some of the lakes are clear and of a sandy bottom, but the most are of a different character. The French settled near a lake or a river, apparently in the most unhealthy places, and yet their constitutions are little affected, and they usually enjoy good health, though dwarfish and shrivelled in their form and features. "The villages of Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, and Cahokia, were built up by their industry in places where Americans would have perished. Cultivation has, no doubt, rendered this tract more salubrious than formerly; and an increase of it, together with the construction of drains and canals, will make it one of the most eligible in the States. The old inhabitants advise the emigrants not to plant corn in the immediate vicinity of their dwellings, as its rich and massive foliage prevents the sun from dispelling the deleterious vapors."[11] These lakes and ponds could be drained at a small expense, and the soil would be susceptible of cultivation. The early settlements of the Americans were either on this bottom, or the contiguous bluffs. Besides the American bottom, there are others that resemble it in its general character, but not in extent. In Union county, there is an extensive bottom on the borders of the Mississippi. Above the mouth of the Illinois, and along the borders of the counties of Calhoun, Pike, and Adams, there are a series of bottoms, with much good and elevated land; but the inundated grounds around, present objections to a dense population at present. The bottoms of Illinois, where not inundated, are equal in fertility, and the soil is less adhesive than most parts of the American bottom. This is likewise the character of the bottoms in the northern parts of the State. The bottoms of the Kaskaskia are generally covered with a heavy growth of timber, and in many places inundated when the river is at its highest floods. The extensive prairies adjoining, will create a demand for all this timber. The bottom lands on the Wabash are of various qualities. Near the mouth, much of it is inundated. Higher up it overflows in high freshets. These bottoms, especially the American are the best regions in the United States for raising stock, particularly horses, cattle, and swine. Seventy-five bushels of corn to the acre is an ordinary crop. The roots and worms of the soil, the acorns and other fruits from the trees, and the fish of the lakes, accelerate the growth of swine. Horses and cattle find exhaustless supplies of grass in the prairies; and pea vines, buffalo grass, wild oats, and other herbage in the timber, for summer range; and often throughout most of the winter. In all the rush bottoms, they fatten during the severe weather on rushes. The bottom soil is not so well adapted to the production of small grain, as of maize or Indian corn, on account of its rank growth, and being more subject to blast, or fall down before harvest, than on the uplands. 3. _Prairies._ Much the largest proportion is undulating, dry, and extremely fertile. Other portions are level, and the soil in some cases proves to be wet;--the water, not running off freely, is left to be absorbed by the soil, or evaporated by the sun. Crawfish throw up their hillocks in this soil, and the farmer who cultivates it, will find his labors impeded by the water. In the southern part, that is, south of the National road leading from Terre Haute to the Mississippi, the prairies are comparatively small, varying in size from those of several miles in width, to those which contain only a few acres. As we go northward, they widen and extend on the more elevated ground between the water courses to a vast distance, and are frequently from six to twelve miles in width. Their borders are by no means uniform. Long points of timber project into the prairies, and line the banks of the streams, and points of prairie project into the timber between these streams. In many instances are copses and groves of timber, from one hundred to two thousand acres, in the midst of prairies, like islands in the ocean. This is a common feature in the country between the Sangamon river and lake Michigan, and in the northern parts of the State. The lead mine region, both in this State and the Wisconsin territory, abounds with these groves. The _origin_ of these prairies has caused much speculation. We might as well dispute about the origin of forests, upon the assumption that the natural covering of the earth was grass. Probably one half of the earth's surface, in a state of nature, was prairies or barrens. Much of it, like our western prairies, was covered with a luxuriant coat of grass and herbage. The _steppes_ of Tartary, the _pampas_ of South America, the _savannas_ of the Southern, and the _prairies_ of the Western States, designate similar tracts of country. Mesopotamia, Syria, and Judea had their ancient prairies, on which the patriarchs fed their flocks. Missionaries in Burmah, and travellers in the interior of Africa, mention the same description of country. Where the tough sward of the prairie is once formed, timber will not take root. Destroy this by the plough, or by any other method, and it is soon converted into forest land. There are large tracts of country in the older settlements, where, thirty or forty years since, the farmers mowed their hay, that are now covered with a forest of young timber of rapid growth. The fire annually sweeps over the prairies, destroying the grass and herbage, blackening the surface, and leaving a deposit of ashes to enrich the soil. 4. _Barrens._ This term, in the western dialect, does not indicate _poor land_, but a species of surface of a mixed character, uniting forest and prairie. The timber is generally scattering, of a rough and stunted appearance, interspersed with patches of hazle and brushwood, and where the contest between the fire and timber is kept up, each striving for the mastery. In the early settlements of Kentucky, much of the country below and south of Green river presented a dwarfish and stunted growth of timber, scattered over the surface, or collected in clumps, with hazle and shrubbery intermixed. This appearance led the first explorers to the inference that the soil itself must necessarily be poor, to produce so scanty a growth of timber, and they gave the name of _barrens_ to the whole tract of country. Long since, it has been ascertained that this description of land is amongst the most productive soil in the State. The term _barren_ has since received a very extensive application throughout the West. Like all other tracts of country, the barrens present a considerable diversity of soil. In general, however, the surface is more uneven or rolling than the prairies, and sooner degenerates into ravines and sink-holes. Wherever timber barely sufficient for present purposes can be found, a person need not hesitate to settle in the barrens. These tracts are almost invariably healthy; they possess a greater abundance of pure springs of water, and the soil is better adapted for all kinds of produce, and all descriptions of seasons, wet and dry, than the deeper and richer mould of the bottoms and prairies. When the fires are stopped, these barrens produce timber, at a rate of which no northern emigrant can have any just conception. Dwarfish shrubs and small trees of oak and hickory are scattered over the surface, where for years they have contended with the fires for a precarious existence, while a mass of roots, sufficient for the support of large trees, have accumulated in the earth. As soon as they are protected from the ravages of the annual fires, the more thrifty sprouts shoot forth, and in ten years are large enough for corn cribs and stables. As the fires on the prairies become stopped by the surrounding settlements, and the wild grass is eaten out and trodden down by the stock, they begin to assume the character of barrens; first, hazle and other shrubs, and finally, a thicket of young timber, covers the surface. 5. _Forest, or timbered Land._ In general, Illinois is abundantly supplied with timber, and were it equally distributed through the State, there would be no part in want. The apparent scarcity of timber where the prairie predominates, is not so great an obstacle to the settlement of the country as has been supposed. For many of the purposes to which timber is applied, substitutes are found. The rapidity with which the young growth pushes itself forward, without a single effort on the part of man to accelerate it, and the readiness with which the prairie becomes converted into thickets, and then into a forest of young timber, shows that, in another generation, timber will not be wanting in any part of Illinois. The kinds of timber most abundant are oaks of various species, black and white walnut, ash of several kinds, elm, sugar maple, honey locust, hackberry, linden, hickory, cotton wood, pecan, mulberry, buckeye, sycamore, wild cherry, box elder, sassafras, and persimmon. In the southern and eastern parts of the State are yellow poplar, and beech; near the Ohio are cypress, and in several counties are clumps of yellow pine and cedar. On the Calamick, near the south end of lake Michigan, is a small forest of white pine. The undergrowth are redbud, pawpaw, sumach, plum, crab apple, grape vines, dogwood, spice bush, green brier, hazle, &c. The alluvial soil of the rivers produces cotton wood and sycamore timber of amazing size. For ordinary purposes there is now timber enough in most parts of the State, to say nothing about the artificial production of timber, which may be effected with little trouble and expense. The black locust, a native of Ohio and Kentucky, may be raised from the seed, with less labor than a nursery of apple trees. It is of rapid growth, and, as a valuable and lasting timber, claims the attention of our farmers. It forms one of the cleanliest and most beautiful shades, and when in blossom gives a rich prospect, and sends abroad a delicious fragrance. 6. _Knobs, Bluffs, Ravines, and Sink-holes._ Under these heads are included tracts of uneven country found in various parts of the State. _Knobs_ are ridges of flint limestone, intermingled and covered with earth, and elevated one or two hundred feet above the common surface. This species of land is of little value for cultivation, and usually has a sprinkling of dwarfish, stunted timber, like the barrens. The steep hills and natural mounds that border the alluvions have obtained the name of _bluffs_. Some are in long, parallel ridges, others are in the form of cones and pyramids. In some places precipices of limestone rock, from fifty to one or two hundred feet high, form these bluffs. _Ravines_ are formed amongst the bluffs, and often near the borders of prairies, which lead down to the streams. _Sink-holes_ are circular depressions in the surface, like a basin. They are of various sizes, from ten to fifty feet deep, and from ten to one or two hundred yards in circumference. Frequently they contain an outlet for the water received by the rains. Their existence shows that the substratum is secondary limestone, abounding with subterraneous cavities. There are but few tracts of _stony ground_ in the State; that is, where loose stones are scattered over the surface, and imbedded in the soil. Towards the northern part of the State, tracts of stony ground exist. Quarries of stone exist in the bluffs, and in the banks of the streams and ravines throughout the State. The soil is porous, easy to cultivate, and exceedingly productive. A strong team is required to break up the prairies, on account of the firm, grassy sward which covers them. But when subdued, they become fine, arable lands. _Rivers, &c._--This State is surrounded and intersected by navigable streams. The Mississippi, Ohio and Wabash rivers are on three sides,--the Illinois, Kaskaskia, Sangamon, Muddy, and many smaller streams are entirely within its borders,--and the Kankakee, Fox, Rock, and Vermillion of the Wabash, run part of their course within this State. The Mississippi meanders its western border for 700 miles. Its principal tributaries within Illinois, are Rock, Illinois, Kaskaskia, and Muddy rivers. The Illinois river commences at the junction of the Kankakee, which originates near the South Bend in Indiana, and the Des Plaines, which rises in the Wisconsin Territory. From their junction, the Illinois runs nearly a west course, (receiving Fox river at Ottawa, and Vermillion near the foot of the rapids,) to Hennepin, where it curves to the south and then to the south-west, receiving a number of tributaries, the largest of which are Spoon river from the right and Sangamon from the left, till it reaches Naples. Here it bends gradually to the south, and continues that course till within six miles of the Mississippi, when it curves to the south-east, and finally, to nearly an east course. Its length, (without reckoning the windings of the channel in navigation,) is about 260 miles, and is navigable for steamboats at a moderate stage of water to the foot of the rapids. The large streams on the eastern side of the State are Iroquois, a tributary to the Kankakee, Vermillion of the Wabash, which enters that river in Indiana, Embarras, that has its source near that of the Kaskaskia, runs south-easterly, and enters the Wabash 9 miles below Vincennes, and Little Wabash near its mouth. Along the Ohio, the only streams deserving note are the Saline and Bay creeks, and Cash river, the last of which enters the Ohio six miles above its confluence with the Mississippi. _Productions._--These are naturally classed into _mineral_, _animal_ and _vegetable_. _Minerals._ The northern portion of Illinois is inexhaustibly rich in mineral productions, while coal, secondary limestone, and sandstone, are found in every part. Iron ore has been found in the southern parts of the State, and is said to exist in considerable quantities in the northern parts. Native copper, in small quantities, has been found on Muddy river, in Jackson county, and back of Harrisonville, in the bluffs of Monroe county. Crystallized gypsum has been found in small quantities in St. Clair county. Quartz crystals exist in Gallatin county. Silver is supposed to exist in St. Clair county, two miles from Rock Spring, from whence Silver creek derives its name. In early times, a shaft was sunk here, by the French, and tradition tells of large quantities of the precious metals being obtained. In the southern part of the State, several sections of land have been reserved from sale, on account of the silver ore they are supposed to contain. _Lead_ is found in vast quantities in the northern part of Illinois, and the adjacent territory. Here are the richest lead mines hitherto discovered on the globe. This portion of country lies principally north of Rock river and south of the Wisconsin. Dubuque's, and other rich mines, are west of the Mississippi. Native copper, in large quantities, exists in this region, especially at the mouth of Plum creek, and on the Peek-a-ton-o-kee, a branch of Rock river. The following is a list of the principal diggings in that portion of the lead mine region that lies between Rock river and the Wisconsin, embracing portions of Illinois State, and Wisconsin Territory. Some of these diggings are, probably, relinquished, and many new ones commenced. Apple Creek, GALENA and vicinity, Cave Diggings, Buncombe, Natchez, Hardscrabble, New Diggings, Gratiot's Grove, Spulburg, W. S. Hamilton's, Cottle's, McNutt's, Menomonee Creek, Plattsville, CASSVILLE and vicinity, Madden's, Mineral Point, Dodgeville, Worke's Diggings, Brisbo's, Blue Mounds, Prairie Springs, Hammett & Campbell's, Morrison's, and many others. _Amount of Lead Manufactured._ For many years the Indians, and some of the French hunters and traders, had been accustomed to dig lead in these regions. They never penetrated much below the surface, but obtained considerable quantities of the ore which they sold to the traders. In 1823, the late Col. James Johnson, of Great Crossings, Ky., and brother to the Hon. R. M. Johnson, obtained a lease of the United States government, and made arrangements to prosecute the business of smelting, with considerable force, which he did the following season. This attracted the attention of enterprising men in Illinois, Missouri, and other States. Some went on in 1826, more followed in 1827, and in 1828 the country was almost literally filled with miners, smelters, merchants, speculators, gamblers, and every description of character. Intelligence, enterprise, and virtue, were thrown in the midst of dissipation, gaming, and every species of vice. Such was the crowd of adventurers in 1829, to this hitherto almost unknown and desolate region, that the lead business was greatly overdone, and the market for awhile nearly destroyed. Fortunes were made almost upon a turn of the spade, and lost with equal facility. The business has revived and is profitable. Exhaustless quantities of mineral exist here, over a tract of country two hundred miles in extent. The following table shows the amount of lead made annually at these diggings, from 1821, to Sept, 30, 1835: Lbs. of lead made from 1821, to Sept. 1823, 335,130 do. for the year ending Sept. 30, 1824, 175,220 do. do. do. 1825, 664,530 do. do. do. 1826, 958,842 do. do. do. 1827, 5,182,180 do. do. do. 1828, 11,105,810 do. do. do. 1829, 13,344,150 do. do. do. 1830, 8,323,998 do. do. do. 1831, 6,381,900 do. do. do. 1832, 4,281,876 do. do. do. 1833, 7,941,792 do. do. do. 1834, 7,971,579 do. do. do. 1835, 3,754,290 ---------- Total, 70,420,357 The rent accruing to government for the same period, is a fraction short of six millions of pounds. The government formerly received 10 per cent. in lead for rent. Now it is 6 per cent. A part of the mineral land in the Wisconsin Territory has been surveyed and brought into market, which will add greatly to the stability and prosperity of the mining business. _Coal._ Bituminous coal abounds in Illinois. It may be seen, frequently, in the ravines and gullies, and in the points of bluffs. Exhaustless beds of this article exist in the bluffs of St. Clair county, bordering on the American bottom, of which large quantities are transported to St. Louis, for fuel. There is scarce a county in the State, but what can furnish coal, in reasonable quantities. Large beds are said to exist, near the Vermillion of the Illinois, and in the vicinity of the rapids of the latter. _Agatized Wood._ A petrified tree, of black walnut, was found in the bed of the river Des Plaines, about forty rods above its junction with the Kankakee, imbedded in a horizontal position, in a stratum of sandstone. There is fifty-one and a half feet of the trunk visible,--eighteen inches in diameter at its smallest end, and probably three feet at the other end. _Muriate of Soda_, or common salt. This is found in various parts of the State, held in solution in the springs. The manufacture of salt by boiling and evaporation is carried on in Gallatin county, twelve miles west-north-west from Shawneetown; in Jackson county, near Brownsville; and in Vermillion county, near Danville. The springs and land are owned by the State, and the works leased. A coarse freestone, much used in building, is dug from quarries near Alton, on the Mississippi, where large bodies exist. Scattered over the surface of our prairies, are large masses of rock, of granitic formation, roundish in form, usually called by the people "_lost rocks_." They will weigh from one thousand to ten or twelve thousand pounds, and are entirely detached, and frequently are found several miles-distant from any quarry. Nor has there ever been a quarry of granite discovered in the State. These stones are denominated _bowlders_ in mineralogy. They usually lie on the surface, or are partially imbedded in the soil of our prairies, which is unquestionably of diluvial formation. How they came here is a question of difficult solution. _Medicinal Waters_, are found in different parts of the State. These are chiefly sulphur springs and chalybeate waters. There is said to be one well in the southern part of the State strongly impregnated with the sulphate of magnesia, or Epsom salts, from which considerable quantities have been made for sale, by simply evaporating the water, in a kettle, over a common fire. There are several sulphur springs in Jefferson county, to which persons resort for health. _Vegetable Productions._ The principal trees and shrubs of Illinois have been noticed under the head of "_Forest or timbered land_." Of oaks there are several species, as overcup, burr oak, swamp or water oak, white oak, red or Spanish oak, post oak, and black oak of several varieties, with the black jack, a dwarfish, gnarled looking tree, excellent for fuel, but good for nothing else. The black walnut is much used for building materials and cabinet work, and sustains a fine polish. In most parts of the State, grape vines, indigenous to the country, are abundant, which yield grapes that might advantageously be made into excellent wine. Foreign vines are susceptible of easy cultivation. These are cultivated to a considerable extent at Vevay, Switzerland county, Indiana, and at New Harmony on the Wabash. The indigenous vines are prolific, and produce excellent fruit. They are found in every variety of soil; interwoven in every thicket in the prairies and barrens; and climbing to the tops of the very highest trees on the bottoms. The French in early times, made so much wine as to export some to France; upon which the proper authorities prohibited the introduction of wine from Illinois, lest it might injure the sale of that staple article of the kingdom. I think the act was passed by the board of trade, in 1774. The editor of the Illinois Magazine remarks, "We know one gentleman who made twenty-seven barrels of wine in a single season, from the grapes gathered with but little labor, in his immediate neighborhood." The wild plum is found in every part of the State; but in most instances the fruit is too sour for use, unless for preserves. Crab apples are equally prolific, and make fine preserves with about double their bulk of sugar. Wild cherries are equally productive. The persimmon is a delicious fruit, after the frost has destroyed its astringent properties. The black mulberry grows in most parts, and is used for the feeding of silk-worms with success. They appear to thrive and spin as well as on the Italian mulberry. The gooseberry, strawberry, and blackberry, grow wild and in great profusion. Of our nuts, the hickory, black walnut, and pecan, deserve notice. The last is an oblong, thin shelled, delicious nut, that grows on a large tree, a species of the hickory, (the _Carya olivæ formis_ of Nuttall.) The pawpaw grows in the bottoms, and rich, timbered uplands, and produces a large, pulpy, and luscious fruit. Of domestic fruits, the apple and peach are chiefly cultivated. Pears are tolerably plenty in the French settlements, and quinces are cultivated with success by some Americans. Apples are easily cultivated, and are very productive. They can be made to bear fruit to considerable advantage in seven years from the seed. Many varieties are of fine flavor, and grow to a large size. I have measured apples, the growth of St. Clair county, that exceeded thirteen inches in circumference. Some of the early American settlers provided orchards. They now reap the advantages. But a large proportion of the population of the frontiers are content without this indispensable article in the comforts of a Yankee farmer. Cider is made in small quantities in the old settlements. In a few years, a supply of this beverage can be had in most parts of Illinois. Peach trees grow with great rapidity, and decay proportionably soon. From ten to fifteen years may be considered the life of this tree. Our peaches are delicious, but they sometimes fail by being destroyed in the germ by winter frosts. The bud swells prematurely. _Garden Vegetables_ can be produced here in vast profusion, and of excellent quality. That we have few of the elegant and well dressed gardens of gentlemen in the old states, is admitted; which is not owing to climate, or soil, but to the want of leisure and means. Our Irish potatoes, pumpkins and squashes are inferior, but not our cabbages, peas, beets, or onions. A cabbage head, two or three feet in diameter including the leaves, is no wonder on this soil. Beets often exceed twelve inches in circumference. Parsnips will penetrate our light, porous soil, to the depth of two or three feet. The _cultivated vegetable productions in the field_, are maize or Indian corn, wheat, oats, barley, buckwheat, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, rye for horse feed and distilleries, tobacco, cotton, hemp, flax, the castor bean, and every other production common to the Middle States. _Maize_ is a staple production. No farmer can live without it, and hundreds raise little else. This is chiefly owing to the ease with which it is cultivated. Its average produce is fifty bushels to the acre. I have oftentimes seen it produce seventy-five bushels to the acre, and in a few instances, exceed one hundred. _Wheat_ yields a good and sure crop, especially in the counties bordering on the Illinois river. It weighs upwards of 60 pounds per bushel; and flour from this region has preference in the New Orleans market, and passes better inspection than the same article from Ohio or Kentucky. In 1825, the weevil, for the first time, made its appearance in St. Clair and the adjacent counties, and has occasionally renewed its visits since. Latterly, some fields have been injured by the fly. A common, but slovenly practice amongst our farmers, is, to sow wheat amongst the standing corn, in September, and cover it by running a few furrows with the plough between the rows of corn. The dry stalks are then cut down in the spring, and left on the ground. Even by this imperfect mode, fifteen or twenty bushels of wheat to the acre are produced. But where the ground is duly prepared by fallowing, and the seed put in at the proper time, a good crop, averaging from twenty-five to thirty-five bushels per acre, rarely fails to be procured. The average price of wheat at present is a dollar per bushel, varying a little according to the competition of mills and facilities to market. In many instances a single crop of wheat will more than pay the expenses of purchasing the land, fencing, breaking the prairie, seed, putting in the crop, harvesting, threshing, and taking it to market. Wheat is now frequently sown on the prairie land as a first crop, and a good yield obtained. Flouring mills are now in operation in many of the wheat growing counties. Steam power is getting into extensive use both for sawing timber, and manufacturing flour. It is to be regretted, that so few of our farmers have erected barns for the security of their crops. No article is more profitable, and really more indispensable to a farmer, than a large barn. _Oats_ have not been much raised till lately. They are very productive, often yielding from forty to fifty bushels on the acre, and usually sell for twenty-five cents the bushel. The demand for the use of stage and travellers' horses is increasing. _Hemp_ is an indigenous plant in the southern part of this State, as it is in Missouri. It has not been extensively cultivated; but wherever tried, is found very productive, and of an excellent quality. It might be made a staple of the country. _Tobacco_, though a filthy and noxious weed, which no human being ought ever to use, can be produced in any quantity, and of the first quality, in Illinois. _Cotton_, for many years, has been successfully cultivated in this State for domestic use, and some for exportation. Two or three spinning factories are in operation, and produce cotton yarn from the growth of the country with promising success. This branch of business admits of enlargement, and invites the attention of eastern manufacturers with small capital. Much of the cloth made in families who have emigrated from States south of the Ohio is from the cotton of the country. _Flax_ is produced, and of a tolerable quality, but not equal to that of the Northern States. It is said to be productive and good in the northern counties. _Barley_ yields well, and is a sure crop. The _palma christi_, or castor oil bean, is produced in considerable quantities in Madison, Randolph, and other counties, and large quantities of oil are expressed and sent abroad. _Sweet Potatoes_ are a delicious root, and yield abundantly, especially on the American bottom, and rich sandy prairies. But little has been done to introduce cultivated grasses. The prairie grass looks coarse and unsavory, and yet our horses and cattle will thrive well on it. To produce timothy with success, the ground must be well cultivated in the summer, either by an early crop, or by fallowing, and the seed sown about the 20th of September, at the rate of _ten or twelve quarts of clean seed to the acre_, and lightly brushed in. If the season is in any way favorable, it will get a rapid start before winter. By the last week in June, it will produce two tons per acre, of the finest hay. It then requires a dressing of stable or yard manure, and occasionally the turf may be scratched with a harrow, to prevent the roots from binding too hard. By this process, timothy meadows may be made and preserved. There are meadows in St. Clair county, which have yielded heavy crops of hay in succession, for several years, and bid fair to continue for an indefinite period. Cattle, and especially horses, should never be permitted to run in meadows in Illinois. The fall grass may be cropped down by calves and colts. There is but little more labor required to produce a crop of timothy, than a crop of oats, and as there is not a stone or a pebble to interrupt, the soil may be turned up every third or fourth year for corn, and afterwards laid down to grass again. A species of blue grass is cultivated by some farmers for pastures. If well set, and not eaten down in summer, blue grass pastures may be kept green and fresh till late in autumn, or even in the winter. The English spire grass has been cultivated with success in the Wabash country. Of the trefoil, or clover, there is but little cultivated. A prejudice exists against it, as it is imagined to injure horses by affecting the glands of the mouth, and causing them to slaver. It grows luxuriantly, and may be cut for hay early in June. The white clover comes in naturally, where the ground has been cultivated, and thrown by, or along the sides of old roads and paths. Clover pastures would be excellent for swine. _Animals._ Of _wild animals_ there are several species. The buffalo is not found on this side the Mississippi, nor within several hundred miles of St. Louis. This animal once roamed at large over the prairies of Illinois, and was found in plenty, thirty-five years since. _Wolves_, _panthers_ and _wild cats_, still exist on the frontiers, and through the unsettled portions of the country, and annoy the farmer by destroying his sheep and pigs. _Deer_ are also very numerous, and are valuable, particularly to that class of our population which has been raised to frontier habits; the flesh affording them food, and the skins, clothing. Fresh venison hams usually sell for twenty-five cents each, and when properly cured, are a delicious article. Many of the frontier people dress their skins, and make them into pantaloons and hunting shirts. These articles are indispensable to all who have occasion to travel in viewing land, or for any other purpose, beyond the settlements, as cloth garments, in the shrubs and vines, would soon be in strings. It is a novel and pleasant sight to a stranger, to see the deer in flocks of eight, ten, or fifteen in number, feeding on the grass of the prairies, or bounding away at the sight of a traveller. The _brown bear_ is also an inhabitant of the unsettled parts of this State, although he is continually retreating before the advance of civilization. Foxes, raccoons, opossums, gophers, and squirrels, are also numerous, as are muskrats, otters, and occasionally beaver, about our rivers and lakes. Raccoons are very common, and frequently do mischief in the fall, to our corn. Opossums sometimes trouble the poultry. The _gopher_ is a singular little animal, about the size of a squirrel. It burrows in the ground, is seldom seen, but its _works_ make it known. It labors during the night, in digging subterranean passages in the rich soil of the prairies, and throws up hillocks of fresh earth, within a few feet distance from each other, and from twelve to eighteen inches in height. The gray and fox squirrels often do mischief in the cornfields, and the hunting of them makes fine sport for the boys. _Common rabbits_ exist in every thicket, and annoy nurseries and young orchards exceedingly. The fence around a nursery must always be so close as to shut out rabbits; and young apple trees must be secured, at the approach of winter, by tying straw or corn stalks around their bodies, for two or three feet in height, or the bark will be stripped off by these mischievous animals. _Wild horses_ are found ranging the prairies and forests in some parts of the State. They are small in size, of the Indian or Canadian breed, and very hardy. They are found chiefly in the lower end of the American Bottom, near the junction of the Kaskaskia and Mississippi rivers, called _the Point_. They are the offspring of the horses brought there by the first settlers, and which were suffered to run at large. The Indians of the West have many such horses, which are commonly called Indian ponies. _Domestic Animals._ These are the same as are found in other portions of the United States. But little has been done to improve the breed of horses amongst us. Our common riding or working horses average about fifteen hands in height. Horses are much more used here than in the Eastern States, and many a farmer keeps half a dozen or more. Much of the travelling throughout the Western country, both by men and women, is performed on horseback; and a large proportion of the land carriage is by means of large wagons, with from four to six stout horses for a team. A great proportion of the ploughing is performed by horse labor. Horses are more subject to diseases in this country than in the old States, which is thought to be occasioned by bad management, rather than by the climate. A good farm horse can be purchased for fifty dollars. Riding or carriage horses, of a superior quality, cost about seventy-five or eighty dollars. Breeding mares are profitable stock for every farmer to keep, as their annual expense in keeping is but trifling: their labor is always needed, and their colts, when grown, find a ready market. Some farmers keep a stallion, and eight or ten brood mares. _Mules_ are brought into Missouri, and find their way to Illinois, from the Mexican dominions. They are a hardy animal, grow to a good size, and are used by some, both for labor and riding. Our _neat cattle_ are usually inferior in size to those of the old States. This is owing entirely to bad management. Our cows are not penned up in pasture fields, but suffered to run at large over the commons. Hence _all_ the calves are preserved, without respect to quality, to entice the cows homeward at evening. In autumn their food is very scanty, and during the winter they are permitted to pick up a precarious subsistence amongst fifty or a hundred head of cattle. With such management, is it surprising that our cows and steers are much inferior to those of the old States? And yet, our beef is the finest in the world. It bears the best inspection of any in the New Orleans market. By the first of June, and often by the middle of May, our young cattle on the prairies are fit for market. They do not yield large quantities of tallow, but the fat is well proportioned throughout the carcass, and the meat tender and delicious. By inferiority, then, I mean the _size_ of our cattle in general, and the quantity and quality of the milk of cows. Common cows, if suffered to lose their milk in August, become sufficiently fat for table use by October. Fallow heifers and steers, are good beef, and fit for the knife at any period after the middle of May. Nothing is more common than for an Illinois farmer to go among his stock, select, shoot down, and dress a fine beef, whenever fresh meat is needed. This is often divided out amongst the neighbors, who in turn, kill and share likewise. It is common at camp and other large meetings, to kill a beef and three or four hogs for the subsistence of friends from a distance. Steers from three years old or more, have been purchased in great numbers in Illinois, by drovers from Ohio. Cattle are sometimes sent in flat boats down the Mississippi and Ohio, for the New Orleans market. We can hardly place limits upon the amount of beef cattle that Illinois is capable of producing. A farmer calls himself poor, with a hundred head of horned cattle around him. A cow in the spring is worth from seven to ten or fifteen dollars. Some of the best quality will sell higher. And let it be distinctly understood, once for all, that a poor man can always purchase horses, cattle, hogs, and provisions, for labor, either by the day, month, or job. Cows, in general, do not produce the same amount of milk, nor of as rich a quality as in older States. Something is to be attributed to the nature of our pastures, and the warmth of our climate, but more to causes already assigned. If ever a land was characterized justly, as "flowing with milk and honey," it is Illinois and the adjacent States. From the springing of the grass till September, butter is made in great profusion. It sells at that season in market for about ten cents. With proper care it can be preserved in tolerable sweetness for winter's use. Late in autumn and early in the winter, sometimes butter is not plenty. The feed becomes dry, the cows range further off, and do not come up readily for milking, and dry up. A very little trouble would enable a farmer to keep three or four good cows in fresh milk at the season most needed. Cheese is made by many families, especially in the counties bordering on the Illinois river. Good cheese sells for eight and sometimes ten cents, and finds a ready market. _Swine._ This species of stock may be called a staple in the provision of Illinois. Thousands of hogs are raised without any expense, except a few breeders to start with, and a little attention in hunting them on the range, and keeping them tame. Pork that is made in a domestic way and fatted on corn, will sell from three to four and five dollars, according to size, quality, and the time when it is delivered. With a pasture of clover or blue grass, a well-filled corn crib, a dairy, and slop barrel, and the usual care that a New Englander bestows on his pigs, pork may be raised from the sow, fatted, and killed, and weigh from two hundred to two hundred and fifty, within twelve months; and this method of raising pork would be profitable. Few families in the west and south put up their pork in salt pickle. Their method is to salt it sufficiently to prepare it for smoking, and then make bacon of hams, shoulders, and middlings or broadsides. The price of bacon, taking the hog round, is about seven and eight cents. Good hams command eight and ten cents in the St. Louis market. Stock hogs, weighing from sixty to one hundred pounds, alive, usually sell from one to two dollars per head. Families consume much more meat in the West in proportion to numbers, than in the old States. _Sheep_ do very well in this country, especially in the older settlements, where the grass has become short, and they are less molested by wolves. _Poultry_ is raised in great profusion,--and large numbers of fowls taken to market. Ducks, geese, swans, and many other aquatic birds, visit our waters in the spring. The small lakes and sloughs are often literally covered with them. Ducks, and some of the rest, frequently stay through the summer and breed. The prairie fowl is seen in great numbers on the prairies in the summer, and about the corn fields in the winter. This is the grouse of the New York market. They are easily taken in the winter. Partridges, (the quail of New England,) are taken with nets, in the winter, by hundreds in a day, and furnish no trifling item in the luxuries of the city market. _Bees._ These laborious and useful insects are found in the trees of every forest. Many of the frontier people make it a prominent business, after the frost has killed the vegetation, to hunt them for the honey and wax, both of which find a ready market. Bees are profitable stock for the farmer, and are kept to a considerable extent. _Silk-worms_ are raised by a few persons. They are capable of being produced to any extent, and fed on the common black mulberry of the country. _Manufactures._--In the infancy of a state, little can be expected in machinery and manufactures. And in a region so much deficient in water power as some parts of Illinois is, still less may be looked for. Yet Illinois is not entirely deficient in manufacturing enterprise. _Salt._ The principal salines of this State have been mentioned under the head of minerals. The principal works are at Gallatin, Big Muddy, and Vermillion salines. _Steam Mills_ for flouring and sawing are becoming very common, and in general are profitable. Some are now in operation with four run of stones, and which manufacture one hundred barrels of flour in a day. Mills propelled by steam, water, and animal power, are constantly increasing. Steam mills will become numerous, particularly in the southern and middle portions of the State, and it is deserving remark that, while these portions are not well supplied with durable water power, they contain, in the timber of the forest, and the inexhaustible bodies of bituminous coal, abundant supplies of fuel; while the northern portion, though deficient in fuel, has abundant water power. A good steam saw-mill with two saws can be built for $1,500; and a steam flouring mill with two run of stones, elevators, and other apparatus complete, and of sufficient force to turn out forty or fifty barrels of flour per day, may be built for from $3,500 to $5,000. Ox mills on an inclined plane, and horse mills by draught, are common through the country. _Castor Oil._ Considerable quantities of this article have been manufactured in Illinois from the palma christi, or castor bean. One bushel of the beans will make nearly two gallons of the oil. There are five or six castor oil presses in the State, in Madison, Randolph, Edwards, and perhaps in other counties. Mr. Adams of Edwardsville, in 1825, made 500 gallons, which then sold at the rate of two dollars fifty cents per gallon. In 1826, he made 800 gallons; in 1827, 1000 gallons,--the price then, one dollar seventy-five cents: in 1828, 1800 gallons, price one dollar. In 1830, he started two presses and made upwards of 10,000 gallons, which sold for from seventy-five to eighty-seven cents per gallon: in 1831, about the same quantity. That and the following season being unfavorable for the production of the bean, there has been a falling off in the quantity. The amount manufactured in other parts of the State has probably exceeded that made by Mr. Adams. _Lead._ In Jo Daviess county are eight or ten furnaces for smelting lead. The amount of this article made annually at the mines of the Upper Mississippi, has been given under the head of minerals. _Boat Building_ will soon become a branch of business in this State. Some steamboats have been constructed already within this State, along the Mississippi. It is thought that Alton and Chicago are convenient sites for this business. There is in this State, as in all the Western States, a large amount of domestic manufactures made by families. All the trades, needful to a new country, are in existence. Carpenters, wagon makers, cabinet makers, blacksmiths, tanneries, &c., may be found in every county and town, and thousands more are wanted. There has been a considerable falling off in the manufacture of whiskey within a few years, and it is sincerely hoped by thousands of citizens, that this branch of business, so decidedly injurious to the morals and happiness of communities and individuals, will entirely decline. Several companies for manufacturing purposes, have been incorporated by the legislature. _Civil Divisions._--There are 66 counties laid off in this State, 59 of which are organized for judicial purposes. The six last named in the following table were laid off at the recent session of the legislature, Jan. 1836. The county of _Will_ was formed from portions of Cook, Lasalle, and Iroquois, with the town of Juliet for its seat of justice, near the junction of the Kankakee and Des Plaines. In this State, there are no _civil_ divisions into townships as in Ohio, Indiana, &c. The township tracts of six miles square, in the public surveys, relate exclusively to the land system. The State is divided into _three_ districts to elect representatives to Congress, and into _six_ circuits for judicial purposes. TABULAR VIEW OF THE COUNTIES. ------------+----------+------+--------+----------+--------------+----------------- | | | | | |Distance & |Date of |Square|Votes |Population|SEATS OF |bearing from COUNTIES. |formation.|miles.|in 1834.| 1835. |JUSTICE. |Vandalia. ------------+----------+------+--------+----------+--------------+----------------- Adams, | 1825 | 820 | 728 | 7042 |Quincy, |175 _n. w._ Alexander, | 1819 | 375 | 249 | 2050 |Unity, |135 _s._ Bond, | 1817 | 360 | 519 | 3580 |Greenville, | 19 _w. s. w._ Calhoun, | 1825 | 260 | 151 | 1091 |Gilhead, |134 _w. n. w._ Champaign, | 1833 | 864 | 102 | 1045 |Urbanna, |103 _n. n. e._ Clark, | 1819 | 500 | 451 | 3413 |Darwin,[A] or | 82 _e. n. e._ | | | | | Marshall, | Clay, | 1824 | 620 | 172 | 1648 |Maysville, | 50 _s. e._ Clinton, | 1824 | 500 | 414 | 2648 |Carlyle, | 28 _s. s. w._ Crawford, | 1816 | 378 | 519 | 3540 |Palestine, |100 _e._ Coles, | 1830 | 1248 | 680 | 5125 |Charleston, | 75 _n. e._ Cook, | 1830 | [B] | 528 | 9826 |Chicago, |268 _n. n. e._ Edgar, | 1823 | 648 | 788 | 6668 |Paris, |100 _n. e._ Edwards, | 1814 | 200 | 239 | 2006 |Albion, | 96 _s. e._ Effingham, | 1831 | 486 | 129 | 1055 |Ewington, | 29 _e. n. e._ Fayette, | 1821 | 684 | 665 | 3638 |VANDALIA, | Franklin, | 1818 | 850 | 759 | 5551 |Frankfort, | 83 _s._ Fulton, | 1825 | 590 | 607 | 5917 |Lewistown, |135 _n. n. w._ Gallatin, | 1812 | 828 | 1312 | 8660 |Equality, |100 _s. s. e._ Greene, | 1821 | 912 | 1360 | 12274 |Carrollton, | 90 _w. n. w._ Hamilton, | 1821 | 378 | 460 | 2877 |McLeansboro', | 76 _s. s. e._ Hancock, | 1825 | 775 | 357 | 3249 |Carthage, |180 _n. w._ Henry (not | 1825 | 800 | -- | 118 | |210 _n. n. w._ organized,)| | | | | | Iroquois, | 1833 | [B] | 67 | 1164 |(Not |165 _n. n. e._ | | | | | established,)| Jackson, | 1816 | 576 | 354 | 2783 |Brownsville, | 96 _s. s. w._ Jasper, | 1831 | 288 | -- | 415 |Newton, | 60 _e._ Jefferson, | 1819 | 576 | 455 | 3350 |Mount Vernon, | 48 _s. s. e._ Jo Daviess, | 1827 | [B] | 492 | 4038 |Galena, (nnw) |300 _n. n. w._ Johnson, | 1812 | 486 | 316 | 2166 |Vienna, |120 _s._ Knox, | 1825 | 792 | 180 | 1600 |Knoxville, |182 _n. n. w._ Lasalle, | 1831 | [B] | 289 | 4754 |Ottawa, |187 _n._ Lawrence, | 1821 | 560 | 618 | 4450 |Lawrenceville,| 88 _e. s. e._ Macon, | 1829 | 404 | 292 | 3022 |Decatur, | 75 _n._ Madison, | 1812 | 750 | 1307 | 9016 |Edwardsville, | 58 _w._ Macoupen, | 1829 | 720 | 624 | 5554 |Carlinville, | 55 _w. n. w._ Marion, | 1823 | 576 | 372 | 2844 |Salem, | 25 _s. s. e._ McDonough | 1825 | 576 | 304 | 2883 |Macomb, |155 _n. w._ McLean, | 1830 | 1916 | 496 | 5311 |Bloomington, |120 _n._ Mercer, | 1825 | 558 | -- | 497 |New Boston, |209 _n. w._ Monroe, | 1816 | 360 | 449 | 2660 |Waterloo, | 72 _s. w._ Montgomery, | 1821 | 960 | 475 | 3740 |Hillsboro', | 28 _n. w._ Morgan, | 1823 | 1150 | 2717 | 19214 |Jacksonville, | 91 _n. w._ Peoria, | 1825 | 648 | 223 | 3220 |Peoria, |141 _n. n. w._ Perry, | 1827 | 446 | 273 | 2201 |Pinckneyville,| 71 _s. s. w._ Pike, | 1821 | 800 | 657 | 6037 |Pittsfield, |126 _w. n. w._ Pope, | 1816 | 576 | 444 | 3756 |Golconda, |130 _s. s. e._ Putnam, | 1825 | 1340 | 383 | 4021 |Hennepin, | 80 _n._ Randolph, | 1795 | 540 | 814 | 5695 |Kaskaskia, | 90 _s. s. w._ Rock Island,| 1831 | 377 | 83 | 616 |Stephenson, | 20 _n. w._ Sangamon, | 1821 | 1234 | 2219 | 17573 |Springfield, | 79 _n. n. w._ Schuyler, | 1825 | 864 | 680 | 6361 |Rushville, |128 _n. w._ Shelby, | 1827 | 1080 | 636 | 4848 |Shelbyville, | 40 _n. n. e._ St. Clair, | 1795 | 1030 | 1183 | 9055 |Belleville, | 64 _w. s. w._ Tazewell, | 1827 | 1130 | 433 | 5850 |Tremont, |131 _n._ Union, | 1818 | 396 | 545 | 4156 |Jonesboro', |120 _s._ Vermillion, | 1826 | 1000 | 1025 | 8103 |Danville, |135 _n. e._ Wabash, | 1824 | 180 | 441 | 3010 |Mount Carmel, | 95 _s. e._ Warren, | 1825 | 900 | 266 | 2623 |Monmouth, |184 _n. w._ Washington, | 1818 | 656 | 333 | 3292 |Nashville, | 48 _s. s. w._ Wayne, | 1819 | 576 | 471 | 2939 |Fairfield, | 76 _s. e._ White, | 1815 | 516 | 977 | 6489 |Carmi, |103 _s. e._ [A] It is expected the seat of justice of Clark county will be removed to _Marshall_, 10 miles N. W. from Darwin, and on the National Road. The distance is computed to Marshall. [B] These counties have been recently subdivided, and their superficial area is not known. -------------+----------+------+--------+----------+------------------------------- _New Counties| | | | | formed, Jan. |Date of |Square|Votes |Population|SEATS OF JUSTICE. 1836._ |formation.|miles.|in 1834.| 1835. | -------------+----------+------+--------+----------+------------------------------- Will, | 1836 | | | |Juliett. Whiteside, | " | | | | These counties were taken Kane, | " | | | |from Jo Daviess, Lasalle, Cook, Ogle, | " | | | |and Iroquois. The seats of McHenry, | " | | | |justice not established, and Winnebago, | " | | | |much of the land unsurveyed, +----------+------+--------+----------+though rapidly settling. _Total,_ | | | 34,102 | 272,427 | SKETCHES OF EACH COUNTY. ADAMS.--The streams are Bear creek and branches, Cedar, Tyrer, Mill, Fall, and Pigeon creeks, with the Mississippi river on its western border. Timber various, with equal portions of prairie. First rate county. ALEXANDER.--In the forks of the Ohio and Mississippi, with Cash river through it. All timbered,--half alluvion,--some inundated at high water,--lime and sandstone on the Ohio;--soil, generally rich. BOND.--Shoal creek and its branches through it, with Hurricane creek on the east side;--proportioned into timber and prairie;--rather level,--second rate. Sandstone, coal, and salt springs. CALHOUN.--Long and narrow, in the forks of the Illinois and Mississippi;--alluvial and sometimes inundated along the rivers;--broken bluffs and interior table land;--good soil;--prairies at the foot of the bluffs. Coal, lime and sandstone. CHAMPAIGN.--The streams are the heads of the Kaskaskia, Sangamon, Vermillion of Illinois, Salt Fork of the Vermillion of the Wabash, and the Embarras, all running in opposite directions. Extensive prairies, a little undulating and rich;--timber in groves;--many granite bowlders. CLARK.--North Fork of Embarras, Mill and Big creeks. Timber and prairie,--second rate soil. CLAY.--Watered by Little Wabash and tributaries. Two thirds prairie,--of inferior quality,--rather level and wet. CLINTON.--Kaskaskia river, with its tributaries, Crooked, Shoal, Beaver and Sugar creeks, pass through it. Equally proportioned into timber and prairie. Soil, second rate; surface, a little undulating. COLES.--The Kaskaskia, Embarras, and heads of the Little Wabash water it. Much excellent land,--much undulating, rich prairie;--some level and wet land in the southeastern part. Timber in sufficient quantities. COOK.--Adjoins Lake Michigan, and has the branches of Chicago, Des Plaines, Du Page, Au Sable and Hickory creeks. Surface, tolerably level; rich soil,--extensive prairies,--timber in groves;--a few swamps. Plenty of limestone, and the streams run over rocky beds. CRAWFORD.--The Wabash river on its eastern side, with Lamotte, Hudson, Raccoon and Sugar creeks. Some level prairies, rather sandy, with a full supply of timber. EDGAR.--Watered by Big, Clear, and Brulette's creeks on the eastern, and Little Embarras on its western side. Southern and eastern sides timbered; northern and western sides much prairie; some undulating,--some level and rather wet. Grand View is a delightful tract of country. EDWARDS.--The Little Wabash on its western, and Bon Pas on its eastern border. Several prairies, high, undulating, and bounded by heavy timber. Soil, second quality. EFFINGHAM.--Watered by the Little Wabash and its tributaries; due proportion of timber and prairie; tolerably level,--second rate. FAYETTE.--Kaskaskia river, Hurricane, Higgens', Ramsey's and Beck's creeks. The bottom lands on the Kaskaskia low, and inundated at high water; considerable prairie; much heavy timber; soil, second rate. FRANKLIN.--Watered by the Big Muddy and its branches, and the South Fork of Saline creek. The prairies small, fertile and level,--timber plenty,--soil rather sandy. FULTON.--The Illinois on the south-eastern side, with Spoon river and several small creeks through it. About half heavily timbered, with rich, undulating prairies; streams flow over a pebbly bed; soil, first rate. GALLATIN.--Joins the Wabash and Ohio rivers, and has the Saline and branches running through it. Soil, sandy, with sand rock, limestone, quartz crystals, excellent salines, &c. Timber of various kinds; no prairies. GREENE.--Has the Mississippi south, the Illinois west, with Otter, Macoupen and Apple creeks. Much excellent land, both timber and prairie, in due proportion, with abundance of lime and sandstone, and coal. HAMILTON.--Watered by branches of the Saline, and Little Wabash; a large proportion timbered land; soil, second and third rate, with some swamp in the northern part. Sandstone and some lime. HANCOCK.--Besides the Mississippi, it has a part of Bear, Crooked, and Camp creeks; large prairies; timber along the streams; rich, first rate land. HENRY.--Has Rock river north, with Winnebago swamp, and its outlet on Green river, and one of the heads of Spoon river, and Edwards river interior. Some rich, undulating prairies and groves, with considerable wet, swampy land. Not much population. IROQUOIS.--Kankakee, Iroquois and Sugar creek. Sand ridges and plains; much rich prairie; some timber, but deficient. It is found chiefly in groves and strips along the water courses. JACKSON.--Has the Mississippi on the southwest, and Muddy river running diagonally through it, with some of its tributaries. Some prairies in the north-eastern part,--much heavy timber,--some hilly and broken land,--with abundance of coal, saline springs, lime and sandstone. JASPER.--The Embarras runs through it, and the Muddy Fork of the Little Wabash waters its western side. Much of both the prairie and timbered land is level and rather wet; some fertile tracts. JEFFERSON.--Watered by several branches of the Big Muddy and Little Wabash. Soil, second rate; surface, a little undulating; one third prairie; several sulphur and other medicinal springs. JO DAVIESS.--Formerly embraced all the State north-west of Rock river, but recently divided into three or four counties. Besides the Mississippi, it has Fever river, Pekatonokee, Apple river, and Rush and Plum creeks. A rich county, both for agricultural and mining purposes. Timber scarce, and in groves; surface undulating,--in some places hilly; well watered by streams and springs, and has good mill sites. Copper and lead ore in abundance. JOHNSON.--The Ohio on the south, Cash river and Big Bay creek, and a series of lakes or ponds interior. A timbered country, tolerably level; soil sandy, with considerable quantities of second rate land. KNOX.--Watered by Henderson and Spoon rivers, and their tributaries. The prairies large, moderately undulating, and first quality of soil, with excellent timber along the water courses. LASALLE.--Besides the Illinois river, which passes through it, Fox river, Big and Little Vermillion, Crow, Au Sable, Indian, Mason, Tomahawk, and other creeks, water this county. They generally run on a bed of sand or lime rock, and have but little alluvial bottom lands. Deficient in timber, but has an abundance of rich, undulating prairie, beautiful groves, abundant water privileges, and extensive coal banks. LAWRENCE.--The Wabash east, Fox river west, and Embarras and Raccoon through it. An equal proportion of timber and prairie, some excellent, other parts inferior,--and some bad, miry swamps, called "_purgatories_." MACON.--South-east portion, watered by the Kaskaskia and tributaries; the middle and northern portions by the North Fork of Sangamon, and the north-western part by Salt creek. The prairies large, and in their interior, level and wet,--towards the timber, dry, undulating and rich. MADISON.--The Mississippi lies west; Cahokia and Silver creeks, and Wood river, run through it. A part of this county lies in the American bottom, and is a rich and level alluvion; but much of the county is high, undulating, and proportionably divided into timber and prairie. Well supplied with stone quarries and coal banks. MACOUPEN.--The Macoupen creek and branches water its central and western parts, the Cahokia the south-eastern, and the heads of Wood river and Piasau, the south-western parts. A large proportion of the county is excellent soil, well proportioned into timber and prairie, and slightly undulating. MARION.--Watered by the East Fork, and Crooked creek, tributaries of Kaskaskia river, on its western, and heads of Skillet Fork of Little Wabash on its eastern side. Much of the land of second quality, slightly undulating, about one third timbered,--some of the prairie land level, and inclined to be wet. MCDONOUGH.--Crooked creek and its branches water most of the county. The eastern side, for 8 or 10 miles in width, is prairie,--the western and middle parts suitably divided between prairie and forest land; surface, moderately undulating; soil, very rich. MCLEAN.--One third of the eastern, and a portion of the northern side, is one vast prairie. The timber is beautifully arranged in groves; the surface moderately undulating, and the soil dry and rich. The head waters of the Sangamon, Mackinau, and the Vermillion of the Illinois, are in this county. Its minerals are quarries of lime and sandstone, and granite bowlders, scattered over the prairies. MERCER.--Has the Mississippi on the west, and Pope and Edwards rivers interior, along which are fine tracts of timber; in its middle and eastern parts are extensive prairies; surface, generally undulating; soil, rich. MONROE.--Watered by Horse, Prairie de Long, and Fountain creeks. The American bottom adjacent to the Mississippi is rich alluvion, and divided into timber and prairie. On the bluffs are ravines and sink-holes, with broken land. Further interior is a mixture of timber and prairie. Abundance of limestone, coal, and some copper. MONTGOMERY.--Watered by Shoal creek and branches, and Hurricane Fork. Surface, high and undulating, and proportionably divided into timber and prairie. Soil, second rate. MORGAN.--A first rate county,--well proportioned into prairie and forest lands,--much of the surface undulating; watered by the Illinois river and Mauvaise-terre, Indian, Plum, Walnut, and Sandy creeks, and heads of Apple creek. Coal, lime and freestone. PEORIA.--Watered by the Illinois, Kickapoo, Copperas, Senatchwine, and heads of Spoon river. Surface, moderately rolling, rich soil, and proportionately divided into prairie and forest. PERRY.--Streams; Big Beaucoup, and Little Muddy; one third prairie, tolerably level, and second rate soil. PIKE.--Besides Mississippi and Illinois, which wash two sides, it has the Suycartee slough, running through its western border, and navigable for steamboats, and a number of smaller creeks. The land and surface various,--much of it excellent undulating soil,--some rich alluvion, inundated at high water,--large tracts of table land, high, rolling, and rich, with due proportion of timber and prairie. A large salt spring. POPE.--With the Ohio river east and south, it has Big Bay, Lusk's, and Big creeks interior. A timbered region, tolerably level, except at the bluffs, with good sandy soil, and sand and limestone. PUTNAM.--The Illinois runs through it,--Spoon river waters its north-western part, and Bureau, Crow, Sandy, and some other streams, water its middle portions. Here are beautiful groves of timber, and rich, undulating and dry prairies, fine springs, and good mill sites. Lime, sand and freestone, and bituminous coal. A few tracts of wet prairie, with some ponds and swamps, are in the north-western part. RANDOLPH.--Has the Mississippi along the western side; Kaskaskia river passes diagonally through it; soil, of every quality, from first rate to indifferent; surface, equally as various, with rocky precipices at the termination of the alluvial bottoms. ROCK ISLAND.--Is at the mouth of Rock river, which, with the Mississippi, and some minor streams, drain the county. Rich alluvion along the Mississippi, with much excellent table land,--both timber and prairie interior. Some wet, level prairie, south of Rock river. SANGAMON.--Watered by Sangamon river and its numerous branches. Much of the soil is of the richest quality, with due proportions of timber and prairie, moderately undulating, and a first rate county. SCHUYLER.--The south-eastern side has the Illinois, the interior has Crooked and Crane creeks, and the south-west has McKee's creek. Along the Illinois is much timber, with some inundated bottom lands. Interior, there is a due proportion of prairie and timber and rich soil, with an undulating surface. SHELBY.--Is watered by the Kaskaskia and tributaries; has a large amount of excellent land, both timber and prairie, with good soil, moderately undulating. ST. CLAIR.--The streams are Cahokia, Prairie du Pont, Ogle's, Silver, Richland, and Prairie de Long creeks, and Kaskaskia river. The land is various, much of which is good, first and second rate, and proportionably divided into timber, prairie, and barrens. The minerals are lime and sandstone, and extensive beds of coal, and shale. TAZEWELL.--Watered by the Illinois, Mackinau, and their tributaries. Much of the surface is undulating, soil rich; prairie predominates, but considerable timber, with some broken land about the bluffs of Mackinau, and some sand ridges and swamps in the southern part of the county. UNION.--Watered by the Mississippi, Clear creek, the heads of Cash, and some of the small tributaries of the Big Muddy. Much of the surface is rolling and hilly,--all forest land. Soil, second and third rate. Some rich alluvial bottom. VERMILLION.--Is watered by Big and Little Vermillion of the Wabash, with large bodies of excellent timber along the streams, and rich prairies interior. Surface, undulating and dry; soil, deep, rich, and calcareous. WABASH.--Has Wabash river on the east, Bon Pas on the west, and some small creeks central; surface rolling, and a mixture of timber and prairie; soil, generally second rate. Minerals; lime and sandstone. WARREN.--Besides the Mississippi, its principal stream is Henderson river, which passes through it, with Ellison, Honey, and Camp creeks. Much of the land on these streams is rich, undulating, deficient somewhat in timber, with excellent prairie. Along the Mississippi, and about the mouth of Henderson, the land is inundated in high water. WASHINGTON.--Has the Kaskaskia on its north-western side, with Elkhorn, Little Muddy, Beaucoup, and Little Crooked creeks interior. The prairies are rather level, and in places inclined to be wet; the timber, especially along the Kaskaskia, heavy. WAYNE.--The Little Wabash, with its tributaries, Elm river, and Skillet Fork, are its streams. It is proportionably interspersed with prairie and woodland, generally of second quality. WHITE.--The eastern side washed by the Big Wabash, along which is a low, inundated bottom; the interior is watered by the Little Wabash and its tributaries. Some prairie, but mostly timber. Soil and surface various. Some rich bottom prairies, with sandy soil. TOWNS. Vandalia is the seat of government till 1840, after which it is to be removed to Alton, according to a vote of the people in 1834, unless they should otherwise direct. It is situated on the right bank of the Kaskaskia river, in N. lat. 39° 0' 42", and 58 miles in a direct line, a little north of east from Alton. The public buildings are temporary. Population, about 750. _Alton._ Two towns of this name are distinguished as Alton, and Upper Alton. Alton is an incorporated town, situated on the bank of the Mississippi, two and a half miles above the mouth of the Missouri, and at the place where the curve of the Mississippi penetrates the furthest into Illinois, 18 miles below the mouth of the Illinois river. For situation, commerce, business of all kinds, health, and rapidity of growth, it far exceeds any other town on the east bank of the Mississippi, above New Orleans. The population is about 2000. The commercial business done here is already immense, and extends through more than half of Illinois, besides a large trade on the western side of the Mississippi. Five large mercantile establishments do wholesale business only, four do wholesale and retail, besides four wholesale and retail groceries, and fifteen or twenty retail stores and groceries; and yet many more mercantile houses are necessary for the business of the country. Great facilities for business of almost every description, especially for every kind of mechanics, are to be had here. It offers one of the best situations on the western waters for building and repairing steamboats. Town lots and lands adjacent have risen in value from 500 to 1000 per cent. within the last twelve months. Alton has respectable and well finished houses of worship for the Presbyterian, Methodist Protestant, and Baptist denominations; two good schools, a Lyceum, that holds weekly meetings, and two printing-offices. The population in general, is a moral, industrious, enterprising class. Few towns in the West have equalled this in contributions for public and benevolent objects, in proportion to age and population. Arrangements have been made for doing an extensive business in the slaughtering and packing of pork and beef. Four houses are engaged in that line, and have slaughtered about 25,000 hogs the present season. Many buildings will be erected the approaching season, amongst which will be an extensive hotel, which is much needed. The town is situated at the base, side, and top, of the first bluffs that extend to the river, above the mouth of the Kaskaskia. Adjacent to it, and which will eventually become amalgamated, is Middletown, laid off directly in the rear. _Upper Alton_ is from two and a half to three miles back from the river, and in the rear of Lower Alton, on elevated ground, and in every respect a very healthy situation. It has exceeding 120 families, and is rapidly improving. Adjacent to it, and forming now a part of the town plat, is "_Shurtleff College, of Alton, Illinois_," which bids fair to become an important and flourishing institution. Also "_Alton Theological Seminary_," which has commenced operations. Both these institutions have been gotten up under the influence and patronage of the Baptist denomination. A female seminary of a high order, under the name of the "_Alton Female Institute_," has been chartered, and a building is about to be erected for the purpose. The Baptists, Methodists and Presbyterians have congregations here, and two houses of worship are to be built the present year. _Chicago_ is the largest commercial town in Illinois. It is situated at the junction of North and South branches, and along the main Chicago, near its entrance into lake Michigan, on a level prairie, but elevated above the highest floods. A recent communication from a respectable mercantile house, gives the following statistics: "Fifty-one stores, 30 groceries, 10 taverns, 12 physicians, 21 attorneys, and 4,000 inhabitants. We have four churches, and two more building, one bank, a Marine and Fire Insurance company about to go into operation, and a brick hotel, containing 90 apartments. There were 9 arrivals and departures of steamboats in 1835, and 267 of brigs and schooners, containing 5,015 tons of merchandise and 9,400 barrels of salt, besides lumber, provisions, &c. The harbor now constructing by the U. S. government, will be so far completed in 1836, as to admit vessels and steamboats navigating the lakes. A few miles back of Chicago are extensive tracts of wet prairie. _Galena_ is the seat of justice for Jo Daviess county, situated on Fever river, in the midst of the mining district. It has about 20 stores, a dozen groceries, and about 1,000 inhabitants. _Springfield_ is near the geographical centre of the State, and in the midst of a most fertile region of country. It is a flourishing inland town, and contains about 2,000 inhabitants. _Jacksonville_, the county seat of Morgan county, has about the same population, and is equally delightful and flourishing. One mile west, on a most beautiful eminence, stands "_Illinois College_," founded under the auspices of the Presbyterian denomination, and bids fair to become a flourishing seat of learning. I have not room to name, much less describe, the many growing towns and villages in this State, that excite and deserve the attention of emigrants. On the Illinois river are Ottawa, and several eligible sites in its vicinity, where towns have commenced; Beardstown, a short distance below the mouth of Sangamon river, Peoria, at the foot of Peoria lake, (a most beautiful site, and containing 1,000 inhabitants,) Meredosia, Naples, Pekin, Hennepin, &c. On the Mississippi, are Quincy, Warsaw, New Boston, and Stephenson, the seat of justice for Rock Island county. Interior, are Bloomington, Decatur, Tremont, Shelbyville, Hillsboro', Edwardsville, Carlyle, Belleville, Carrollton, and many others. Towards the Wabash, are Danville, Paris, Lawrenceville, Carmi, and Mount Carmel, the last of which has an importance from being connected with the grand rapids of the Wabash. Shawneetown is the commercial depot for the south-eastern part of the State. On the Military Tract are Rushville, Pittsfield, Griggsville, Carthage, Macomb, Monmouth, Knoxville, Lewistown, Canton, &c., all pleasant sites, and having a population from two or three hundred to one thousand inhabitants. For a more particular description of each county, town, and settlement, with all other particulars of Illinois, the reader is referred to "A GAZETTEER OF ILLINOIS," by the author of this GUIDE. _Projected Improvements._--The project of uniting the waters of lake Michigan and the Illinois, by a canal, was conceived soon after the commencement of the Grand canal of New York, and a Board of commissioners, with engineers, explored the route and estimated the cost, in 1823. Provision, by a grant of each alternate section of land within five miles of the route, having been granted by Congress, another Board of commissioners was appointed in 1829, a new survey was made, and the towns of Chicago and Ottawa laid off, and some lots sold in 1830. Various movements have since been made, but nothing effectually done, until the recent special session of the legislature, when an act was passed to authorize the Governor to borrow funds upon the faith of the State; a new Board of commissioners has been organized, and this great work is about to be prosecuted with vigor to its completion. Funds, in part, have been provided, from the sales of certain saline lands belonging to the State, to improve the navigation of the Great Wabash, at the Grand Rapids, near the mouth of White river, in conjunction with the State of Indiana. From the same source, funds are to be applied to the clearing out of several navigable water-courses, and repairing roads, within the State. Charters have been granted to several rail-road companies, some of which have been surveyed and the stock taken. One from Alton to Springfield was surveyed last year, and the stock subscribed in December. Another from St. Louis, by the coal mines of St. Clair county, to Belleville, 13 miles, is expected to be made immediately. The project of a central railway from the termination of the Illinois and Michigan canal, at the foot of the rapids, a few miles below Ottawa,--through Bloomington, Decatur, Shelbyville, Vandalia, and on to the mouth of the Ohio river, has been entered upon with spirit. Another charter contemplates the continuance of a route, already provided for in Indiana, and noticed under Ohio, from La Fayette, Ia. by Danville, Shelbyville and Hillsboro,' to Alton, the nearest point from the east to the Mississippi. A rail-road charter was granted at a previous session of the legislature from Meredosia to Jacksonville, and another from Vincennes to Chicago. We have only room to mention the following charters, which have been recently granted, in addition to those already specified: One from Pekin to Tremont, in Tazewell county, 9 miles. One from the Wabash, by Peoria to Warsaw, in Hancock county. The Wabash and Mississippi rail-road company. The Mount Carmel and Alton rail-road company. The Rushville rail-road company. The Winchester, Lynville, and Jacksonville rail-road company. The Shawneetown and Alton rail-road company. The Pekin, Bloomington, and Wabash rail-road company. The Waverly and Grand Prairie rail-road company. The Galena and Chicago Union rail-road company. The Wabash and Mississippi Union rail-road company. The Mississippi, Carrollton and Springfield rail-road company. The _National Road_ is in progress through this State, and considerable has been made on that portion which lies between Vandalia and the boundary of Indiana. This road enters Illinois at the north-east corner of Clark county, and passes diagonally through Coles and Effingham counties in a south-westerly course to Vandalia, a distance of 90 miles. The road is established 80 feet wide, the central part 30 feet wide, raised above standing water, and not to exceed three degrees from a level. The base of all the abutments of bridges must be equal in thickness to one third of the height of the abutment. The road is not yet placed in a travelling condition. The line of the road is nearly direct, the loss in 90 miles being only the 88th part of one per cent. Between Vandalia and Ewington, for 23 miles, it does not deviate in the least from a direct line. From Vandalia westward, the road is not yet located, but it will probably pass to Alton. _Education._--The same provision has been made for this as other Western States, in the disposal of the public lands. The section numbered sixteen in each township of land, is sold upon petition of the people within the township, and the avails constitute a permanent fund, the interest of which is annually applied towards the expenses, in part, of the education of those who attend school, living within the township. A school system, in part, has been arranged by the legislature. The peculiar and unequal division of the country into timber and prairie lands, and the inequality of settlements consequent thereupon, will prevent, for many years to come, the organization of school districts with _defined geographical boundaries_. To meet this inconvenience, the legislature has provided that any number of persons can elect three trustees, employ a teacher in any mode they choose, and receive their proportion of the avails of the school funds. _In all cases, however, the teacher must keep a daily account of each scholar who attends school, and make out a schedule of the aggregate that each scholar attends, every six months_, and present it, certified by the trustees of the school, to the school commissioner of the county, who apportions the money accordingly. This State receives three per cent. on all the net avails of public lands sold in this State, which, with the avails of two townships sold, makes a respectable and rapidly increasing fund, the interest only of which can be expended, and that only to the payment of instructers. Good common school teachers, both male and female, are greatly needed, and will meet with ready employ, and liberal wages. Here is a most delightful and inviting field for Christian activity. Common school, with Sunday school instruction, calls for thousands of teachers in the West. Several respectable academies, are in operation, and the wants and feelings of the community call for many more. Besides the colleges at Jacksonville and Alton already noticed, others are projected, and several have been chartered. The Methodist denomination have a building erected, and a preparatory school commenced, at Lebanon, St. Clair county. The Episcopalians are about establishing a college at Springfield. One or more will be demanded in the northern and eastern portions of the State; and it may be calculated that, in a very brief period, the State of Illinois will furnish facilities for a useful and general education, equal to those in any part of the country. _Government._--The Constitution of Illinois was formed by a convention held at Kaskaskia, in August, 1818. It provides for the distribution of the powers of government into three distinct departments,--the legislative, executive, and judiciary. The legislative authority is vested in a general assembly, consisting of a senate and house of representatives. Elections are held biennially, as are the ordinary sessions of the legislature. Senators are elected for four years. The executive power is vested in the governor, who is chosen every fourth year, by the electors for representatives; but the same person is ineligible for the next succeeding four years. The lieutenant governor is also chosen every four years. The judicial power is vested in a supreme court, and such inferior courts as the general assembly from time to time shall establish. The supreme court consists of a chief justice and three associate judges. The governor and judges of the supreme court constitute a council of revision, to which all bills that have passed the assembly must be submitted. If objected to by the council of revision, the same may become a law by the vote of a majority of all the members elected to both houses. The right of suffrage is universal. All white male inhabitants, citizens of the United States, twenty-one years of age, and who have resided within the State six months next preceding the elections, enjoy the right of voting. Votes are given _viva voce_. The introduction of slavery is prohibited. The Constitution can only be altered by a convention. GENERAL REMARKS. 1. Farms somewhat improved, are almost daily exchanging owners, and a considerable spirit of enterprise has been awakened within a year or two past. The prices of farms and improvements vary greatly, and are influenced much by factitious and local circumstances. From St. Clair county northward, they average probably from five to ten dollars per acre, and are rising in value. In some counties, farms will cost from 2 to 5 dollars per acre. A _farm_ in Illinois, however, means a tract of land, much of it in a state of nature, with some cheap, and, frequently, log buildings, with 20, 40, 60, 80, or 100 acres, fenced and cultivated. Good dwellings of brick, stone, or wood, begin to be erected. Amongst the older residents, there have been but few barns made. The want of adequate supplies of lumber, and of mechanics, renders good buildings more expensive than in the new countries of New England or New York. 2. Merchant's goods, groceries, household furniture, and almost every necessary and comfort in house-keeping, can be purchased here; and many articles retail at about the same prices as in the Atlantic States. 3. The following table will exhibit the cost of 320 acres of land, at Congress price, and preparing 160 acres for cultivation or prairie land: Cost of 320 acres at $1,25 per acre, $400 Breaking up 160 acres prairie, $2 per acre, 320 Fencing it into four fields with a Kentucky fence of eight rails high, with cross stakes, 175 Add cost of cabins, corn cribs, stable, &c. 250 ----- Making the cost of the farm, $1145 In many instances, a single crop of wheat will pay for the land, for fencing, breaking up, cultivating, harvesting, threshing, and taking to market. 4. All kinds of mechanical labor, especially those in the building line, are in great demand; and workmen, even very coarse and common workmen, get almost any price they ask. Journeymen mechanics get $2 per day. A carpenter or brick mason wants no other capital, to do first rate business, and soon become independent, than a set of tools, and habits of industry, sobriety, economy and enterprise. 5. Common laborers on the farm obtain from $12 to $15 per month, including board. Any young man, with industrious habits, can begin here without a dollar, and in a very few years become a substantial farmer. A good cradler in the harvest field will earn from $1,50 to $2 per day. 6. Much that we have stated in reference to Illinois, will equally apply to Missouri, or any other Western State. Many general principles have been laid down, and particular facts exhibited, with respect to the general description of the State, soil, timber, kinds of land, and other characteristics, under Illinois, and, to save repetition, are omitted elsewhere. FOOTNOTES: [11] Beck. CHAPTER XII. MISSOURI. Length, 278; medium breadth, 235 miles: containing 64,500 square miles, and containing 41,280,000 acres. Bounded north by the Des Moines country, or New Purchase, attached to Wisconsin Territory, west by the Indian Territory, south by Arkansas, and east by the Mississippi river. Between 36° and 40° 37' N. latitude, and between 11° 15' and 17° 30' west longitude. _Civil Divisions._--It is divided into 50 counties, as follows:--Barry, Benton, Boone, Callaway, Cape Girardeau, Carroll, Chaviton, Clay, Clinton, Cole, Cooper, Crawford, Franklin, Gasconade, Green, Howard, Jackson, Jefferson, Johnson, La Fayette, Lewis, Lincoln, Madison, Marion, Munroe, Montgomery, Morgan, New Madrid, Perry, Pettis, Pike, Polk, Pulaski, Randolph, Ralls, Ray, Ripley, Rives, St. Francois, St. Genevieve, St. Charles, St. Louis, Saline, Scott, Shelby, Stoddart, Van Buren, Warren, Washington, and Wayne. POPULATION AT DIFFERENT PERIODS. _Population._ | _Increase._ 1810, (including Arkansas,) 19,833 | From 1810 to 1820, 46,753 1820, 66,586 | " 1820 " 1824, 14,500 1824, 80,000 | " 1824 " 1830, 60,455 1830, 140,455 | " 1830 " 1832, 35,820 1832, 176,276 | " 1832 " 1836, 33,724 1836, (estimated for Jan'y) 210,000 | The Constitution is similar to that of Illinois, in its broad features, excepting the holding of slaves is allowed, and the General Assembly has no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves, without the consent of their owners, or paying an equivalent. It is made the duty of the General Assembly "to oblige the owners of slaves to treat them with humanity, and to abstain from all injuries to them extending to life or limb." "Slaves shall not be deprived of an impartial trial by jury." In 1832, there were in the State, 32,184 slaves, and 661 free colored persons. Every free white male citizen has the right of suffrage, after a residence in the State of one year. _Surface, Soil and Productions._--The surface of this State is greatly diversified. South of Cape Girardeau, with the exception of some bluffs along the Mississippi, it is entirely alluvial, and a large proportion consists of swamp and inundated lands, the most of which are heavily timbered. From thence to the Missouri river, and westward to the dividing grounds between the waters of the Osage and Gasconade rivers, the country is generally timbered, rolling, and in some parts, quite hilly. No part of Missouri, however, is strictly mountainous. Along the waters of Gasconade and Black rivers the hills are frequently abrupt and rocky, with strips of rich alluvion along the water courses. Much of this region abounds with minerals of various descriptions. Lead, iron, coal, gypsum, manganese, zinc, antimony, cobalt, ochre of various kinds, common salt, nitre, plumbago, porphyry, jasper, chalcedony, buhrstone, marble, and freestone, of various qualities. The lead and iron ore are literally exhaustless, and of the richest quality. To say there is probably iron ore enough in this region to supply the United States with iron for one hundred thousand years to come, would not be extravagant. Here, too, is water power in abundance, rapid streams, with pebbly beds, forests of timber, and exhaustless beds of bituminous coal. The only difficulty of working this vast body of minerals is the inconvenience of getting its proceeds to the Mississippi. The streams that rise in this region, run different courses into the Missouri, the Mississippi, and the Arkansas, but they are too rapid and winding in their courses to afford safe and easy navigation. Were the rafts now lodged in the St. Francois, removed by the agency of government, as they have been in Red river, the lower section of the mineral country could be reached by steamboat navigation. The citizens of St. Louis, very recently, have entered upon the project of a railway from that city, through the heart of this country, to the fine farming lands in the south-western part of the State. Such a project, carried into effect, would open a boundless field of wealth in Missouri. The western part of the State is divided into prairie and forest land, much of which is fertile. Along the Osage, it is hilly, and the whole is undulating, and regarded as a healthy region, abounding with good water, salt springs, and limestone. North of the Missouri the face of the country is diversified, with a mixture of timber and prairie. From the Missouri to Salt river, good springs are scarce, and in several counties it is difficult to obtain permanent water by digging wells. Artificial wells, as they may be called, are made by digging a well forty or fifty feet deep, and replenishing it with a current of rain water from the roof of the dwelling house. Much of the prairie land in this part of the State is inferior to the first quality of prairie land in Illinois, as the soil is more clayey, and does not so readily absorb the water. Between Salt river and Des Moines, is a beautiful and rich country of land. The counties of Ralls, Marion, Monroe, Lewis and Shelby, are first rate. The counties of Warren, Montgomery, Callaway, Boone, Howard, and Chaviton, all lying on the north side of the Missouri river, are rolling,--in some places are bluffs and hills, with considerable good prairie, and an abundance of timbered land. Farther west, the proportion of prairie increases to the boundary line, as it does to the northward of Boone, Howard and Chaviton counties. After making ample deductions for inferior soil, ranges of barren hills, and large tracts of swamp, as in the south, the State of Missouri contains a vast proportion of excellent farming land. The people generally are enterprising, hardy and industrious, and most of those who hold slaves, perform labor with them. Emigrants from every State and several countries of Europe, are found here, but the basis of the population is from Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia. The natural productions of Missouri are similar to those States already described, and the agricultural productions are the same as in Illinois, except that more tobacco is produced in the middle, and considerable quantities of cotton in the southern counties. _Towns._--The city of Jefferson is the political capital of the State. It is situated on the right bank of the Missouri, a few miles above the mouth of the Osage, and about 138 miles from St. Louis. It is a small town, with little business, except what pertains to the government of the State. A state house, governor's house and penitentiary have been erected. St. Louis is the commercial capital, and the most important place in all this portion of the Valley of the Mississippi. It stands on the western bank of the Mississippi, 180 miles above the junction of the Ohio, 18 miles below that of the Missouri, and 38 miles below that of the Illinois. It is beautifully situated on ascending and elevated ground, which spreads out into an undulating surface to the west for many miles. Two streets are parallel with the river on the first bank, and the rest of the city stands on the second bank; but very little grading is necessary, to give the streets running back from the river, their proper inclination. The old streets, designed only for a French village, are too narrow for public convenience, but a large part of the city has been laid out on a liberal scale. The Indian and Spanish trade, the fur and peltry business, lead, government agencies, army supplies, surveys of government lands, with the regular trade of an extensive interior country, makes St. Louis a place of great business, in proportion to its population, which is about 10,000. The following, from the register of the wharf master, will exhibit the commerce for 1835: STEAMBOAT REGISTER. Number of different boats arrived, 121 Aggregate of tonnage, 15,470 Number of arrivals, 803 Wharfage collected, $4,573.60 _Wood and Lumber, liable to Wharfage._ Plank, joist, and scantling, 1,414,330 feet. Shingles, 148,000 Cedar posts, 7,706 Cords of fire-wood, 8,066 The proportionate increase of business will be seen by reference to the following registry for 1831: Different steamboats arrived, 60 Average amount of tonnage, 7,769 Number of entries, 532 The morality, intelligence and enterprise of this city is equal to any other in the West, in proportion to its size. The American population is most numerous, but there are many French, Irish and Germans. About one third of the inhabitants are Roman Catholics. The Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopalians have large congregations and houses of worship: the Baptists and Unitarians are rather small, and without public edifices. The Roman Catholic cathedral is a costly pile of buildings of freestone, and has a splendid chime of bells, sent over from Europe. St. Louis is a pleasant and healthy situation, and surrounded with a fertile country. We have not space to give particulars respecting many interesting and flourishing towns in Missouri. Cape Girardeau is a commercial depot for the southern part of the State. St. Genevieve stands a little back from the river, and is known only as an old French village. Selma is a landing and depot for the lead mine country, 38 miles below St. Louis. Clarksville, Hannibal, Saverton, and La Grange are commercial sites on the Mississippi, above the mouth of Missouri. Palmyra is a beautiful town, of about 1,000 inhabitants, and the seat of justice for Marion county. Along the Missouri are Portland, Rocheport, Boonville, Lexington, Independence, and many other places of various degrees of importance. Franklin formerly stood on the north bank of Missouri, but most of it has been removed, three miles interior, to the bluffs. Potosi is a central town, in the mineral district. Fulton, Columbia, and Fayette are the seats of justice for Callaway, Boone, and Howard counties, and are pleasant and flourishing towns. About the same provision for education has been made in this as in other Western States, and a disposition to encourage schools, academies and colleges is fast increasing. CHAPTER XIII. ARKANSAS, AND TERRITORIAL DISTRICTS. Arkansas, which has recently formed a constitution, lies between 33° and 36° 30' N. latitude, and between 13° 30' and 17° 45' W. longitude. Length, 235; medium breadth, 222 miles;--containing about 50,000 square miles, and 32,000,000 acres. _Civil Divisions._--The following are the counties, with the population, from the census taken in 1835: Counties. Population. Arkansas, 2,080 Carroll, 1,357 Chicot, 2,471 Conway, 1,214 Clark, 1,285 Crawford, 3,139 Crittenden, 1,407 Greene, 971 Hempstead, 2,955 Hot-Spring, 6,117 Independence, 2,653 Izard, 1,879 Jackson, 891 Jefferson, 1,474 Johnson, 1,803 La Fayette, 1,446 Lawrence, 3,844 Miller, 1,373 Mississippi, 600 Monroe, 556 Phillips, 1,518 Pike, 449 Pope, 1,318 Pulaski, 3,513 Scott, 100 Sevier, 1,350 St. Francis, 1,896 Union, 878 Van Buren, 855 Washington, 6,742 ------ Total, 58,212 Another table we have seen, makes out the population, as officially reported (with the exception of two counties, from which returns had not been made,) to be 51,809;--white males, 22,535; white females, 19,386;--total whites, 41,971: slaves, 9,629;--free persons of color, 209. The population, in 1830, 30,388;--in 1833, 40,660. The following graphical description of Arkansas, from the pen of a clergyman in that State, is corroborated by testimony in our possession, from various correspondents. It was written in 1835. _Letter from Rev. Harvey Woods, to the Editor of the Cincinnati Journal._ "Arkansas Territory is a part of that vast country ceded to the United States by France, in 1803. From the time of the purchase, till lately, the tide of emigration hardly reached thus far. In 1800, the population was 1052. Arkansas was erected into a Territory in 1819. At this time it is receiving a share of those who retire beyond the Mississippi. _Rivers._--The Territory is admirably intersected with navigable rivers. The Mississippi on the east, the Great Red river on the south. Between these, and running generally from N. W. to S. E. are the St. Francis, White, Arkansas, and Washitau rivers; all fine streams for steamboat navigation. _Face of the Country._--It is various. No country affords more diversified scenery. The country in the east, for 100 miles, is flat with marshes and swamps; in the middle, broken and hilly; and in the west, hilly and mountainous. There are some prairies, some thickly timbered land, some heavy timbered. The country is generally a timbered country. Some parts are sandy, some rocky, and some flinty. _Soil._--Should a man travel here, and expect to find all good land, he would be sadly disappointed. The best lands are generally contiguous to the rivers and creeks; and these are exceedingly fertile, not surpassed by any soil in the United States. Arkansas soil that is rich, has just sand enough to make it lively and elastic. Our best lands are covered with walnut, hackberry, mulberry, oak, ash, grape vines, &c. _Water._--The hilly and mountainous parts are well supplied with springs, limestone, and freestone. Also good streams for mills. In the flat country, good water is easily obtained by digging. _Productions._--Cotton and corn are the principal. The Arkansas cottons commanded the best price last season, in the Liverpool market. It is a country of unequalled advantages for raising horses, mules, cattle and hogs. _Climate._--It is mild, and from its difference in latitude, say from 32° 40' to 36° 30' N., and the difference in local situation, we would guess, and correctly too, that there is much difference in the health of different places; the high and northern parts healthy, and the flat and southern subject to agues and bilious fevers. The climate has been considered unhealthy to new settlers; but it is not more so than other new countries. _Minerals._--There are quantities of iron, lead, coal, salt, and, it is asserted by some, silver. There are many salt and sulphur springs. On the Arkansas river, beyond the limits of the Territory proper, is a section of country called the salt prairie, which, according to good authority, is covered for many miles, from four to six inches deep, with pure white salt. In the Hot Spring country, are the famous hot springs, much resorted to by persons of chronic and paralytic diseases. The temperature, in dry, hot weather, is at boiling point. _State of Society._--The general character of the people is brave, hardy, and enterprising--frequently without the polish of literature, yet kind and hospitable. The people are now rapidly improving in morals and intellect. They are as ready to encourage schools, the preaching of the gospel, and the benevolent enterprises of the age, as any people in new countries. The consequences of living here a long time without the opportunity of educating their children, and destitute of the means of grace, are, among this population, just what they always will be under similar circumstances. Ministers of all denominations are "few and far between." We have no need _here_ to build on other's foundation. I am living in Jackson county, on White river. This county has a larger quantity of good land than any one in the Territory. White river is always navigable for steamboats to this place, 350 miles from its mouth. Well-water is good,--some fine springs. Washington county, and some others, that have the reputation of better health, are more populous. We want settlers; and we have no doubt that vast numbers of families in the States, particularly the poor, and those in moderate circumstances, would better their situation by coming here, where they can get plenty of fertile and fresh land at government price, $1,25 per acre. They can have good range, and all the advantages of new countries. Emigrants, however, ought not to suffer themselves to expect all sunshine, and no winter. We have cloudy days and cold weather, even in Arkansas! If they have heard of the _honey pond_, where flitters grow on trees, they need not be surprised if they don't find it. Cabins cannot be built, wells dug, farms opened, rails made, and meeting-houses and school-houses erected, without work. It may be asked, "If Arkansas be so fine a country, why has it not been settled faster?" There are perhaps three reasons;--a fear of the Indians, a fear of sickness, a fear of bad roads. The Indians are now all peaceably situated beyond the Territory proper, and are blessed with the labors of a number of good pious missionaries, who are teaching them to read the Bible, and showing the tall sons of the forest the way that leads to heaven. Sickness is no more to be dreaded here than in Illinois and Missouri. The roads have indeed been bad.--For a long time, no one could venture through the Mississippi swamps, unless he was a Daniel Boone. But appropriations have been made by Congress for several roads. This summer, roads from Memphis to Little Rock, and to Litchfield and Batesville, and other points, will be completed. An appropriation of upwards of $100,000 has been made to construct a road through the Mississippi swamp. Again: we want settlers--we want physicians, lawyers, ministers, mechanics and farmers. We want such, however, and _only such_ as will make good neighbors. If any who think of coming to live with us, are gamblers, drunkards, Sabbath-breakers, profane swearers, or the like, we hope that when they leave their _old_ country, they will leave their _old_ habits." We have not seen the Constitution of this State, now pending before Congress for admission into the Union, but understand that its essential principles are the same as that of the other Western States. WISCONSIN TERRITORY. Under this name is now comprehended an extensive district of country, lying on both sides of the Mississippi river, above Illinois and Missouri, and extending indefinitely north. That portion lying betwixt the northern boundary of Illinois and the Wisconsin river, and from lake Michigan to the Mississippi, has the Indian title extinguished, and, in part, has been surveyed and brought into market. There is much excellent land in this part of the Territory, and it is well watered with perennial streams and springs. Offices are opened for the sale of public lands, at Mineral Point and Green Bay, and a large amount has been sold, and some at a high price. The country immediately bordering on lake Michigan, is well timbered, with various trees. Here are red, white, black and burr oaks, beech, ash, linden, poplar, walnut, hickory, sugar and white maple, elm, birch, hemlock, and pine, with many other kinds. The soil is not so deep and dark a mould as in the prairies of Illinois, but is fertile and easily cultivated; and sandy, especially about the town of Green Bay. Towards the lake, and near the body of water called Sturgeon Bay, connected with Green Bay, and between that and the lake, are extensive swamps and cranberry marshes. Wild rice, tamarisk, and spruce, grow here. About Rock river and from thence to the Mississippi, there is much excellent land, but a deficiency of timber. Lead and copper ore, and probably other minerals, abound in this part of the country. Along to the east and north of the Four lakes, are alternate quagmires and sand ridges, for 50 miles or more, called by the French _coureurs du bois_, "_Terre Tremblant_," (trembling land,) the character of which is sufficiently indicated by the name. There are several small lakes in the district of country we are now examining, the largest of which is Winnebago. It is situated 30 or 40 miles south of Green Bay,--is about ten miles long, and three broad, and is full of wild rice. Fox river passes through it. Kushkanong is six or eight miles in diameter, with some swamps and quagmires in its vicinity. It is on Rock river, between Catfish and Whitewater. The _Four lakes_ are strung along on a stream called Catfish, which enters Rock river 25 or 30 miles above the boundary of Illinois. They are 6 or 8 miles long, abounding with fish, and are surrounded with an excellent farming country. Green Bay settlement and village is 230 miles north of Chicago, 220 north-east from Galena, 120 from Fort Winnebago, and in N. latitude 44° 44'. _Navarino_ is a town recently commenced in this vicinity, with an excellent harbor, grows rapidly, and bids fair to become a place of importance. Property has risen the last year most astonishingly. Fort Winnebago is a military post, at the bend, and on the right bank of Fox river, opposite the portage. From thence to the Wisconsin, is a low wet prairie, of three fourths of a mile, through which, a company has been chartered to cut a canal. On this route, the first explorers reached the Mississippi in 1673. The Wisconsin river, however, without considerable improvement, is not navigable for steamboats, at ordinary stages of the water, without much trouble. It is full of bars, islands, rocks, and has a devious channel. The streams that rise in the eastern part of this Territory, and flow into lake Michigan, north of the boundary of Illinois, are in order as follows: Pipe creek, a small stream, but a few miles from the boundary,--Root river next,--then Milwaukee, 90 miles from Chicago. It rises in the swampy country, south of Winnebago lake, runs a south-easterly course, and, after receiving the Menomone, forms Milwaukee bay. Here is a town site, on both sides of the river, with a population of six or eight hundred, which promises to become a place of business. The soil up the Milwaukee is good, from 6 to 32 inches in depth, a black loam and sand. Passing northward down the lake is Oak creek, 9 miles below Milwaukee,--thence 21 miles is Sauk creek, a small stream. Seventy miles from Milwaukee is Shab-wi-wi-a-gun. Here is found white pine, maple, beech, birch and spruce, but very little oak: the surface level and sandy. Pigeon river is 15 or 20 miles further on, with excellent land on its borders;--timber,--maple, ash, beech, linden, elm, &c. Fifteen miles further down, is Manatawok. Here commences the hemlock, with considerable pine. This stream is about 40 or 50 miles from Green Bay settlement. Twin rivers are below Manatawok, with sandy soil, and good timber of pine and other varieties. From Milwaukee to Green Bay, by a surveyed route, is 112 miles;--by the Indian trail, commonly travelled, 135 miles. North of the Wisconsin river, is Crawford county, of which Prairie du Chien is the seat of justice. From the great bend at Fort Winnebago across towards the Mississippi is a series of abrupt hills, rising several hundred feet, and covered with a dense forest of elm, linden, oak, walnut, ash, sugar maple, &c. The soil is rich, but is too hilly and broken for agricultural purposes. There is no alluvial soil, or bottoms along the streams, or grass in the forests. The Wisconsin river rises in an unexplored country towards lake Superior. The _coureurs du bois_, and _voyageurs_ represent it as a cold, mountainous, dreary region, with swamps. West of the Mississippi, above Des Moines, and extending northward to a point some distance above the northern boundary of Illinois, and for 50 miles interior, is a valuable country, purchased of the Indians in 1832. Its streams rise in the great prairies, run an east or south-eastern course into the Mississippi. The most noted are Flint, Skunk, Wau-be-se-pin-e-con, Upper and Lower Iowa rivers, and Turkey, Catfish, and Big and Little Ma-quo-ka-tois, or Bear creeks. The soil, in general, is excellent, and very much resembles the military tract in Illinois. The water is excellent,--plenty of lime, sand and freestone,--extensive prairies, and a deficiency of timber a few miles interior. About Dubuque, opposite Galena, are extensive and rich lead mines. Burlington is a town containing a population of 700, at the Flint hills opposite Warren county, Illinois. Dubuque is situated on the Mississippi, on a sandy bottom, above high water, and 14 miles N. W. from Galena. It has about 60 stores and groceries, 2 taverns, 2 churches, and about 1000 inhabitants, and we have before us the prospectus for the "DUBUQUE VISITER," a weekly newspaper. Peru is in the vicinity, and contains about 500 inhabitants. The New Purchase, as this district of country is called, is divided into two counties, Dubuque, and Des Moines, and contains a population of 8 or 10,000. The whole Wisconsin Territory is estimated by its legislature, now in session, to contain 30,000 inhabitants. Hitherto, for civil purposes, this region has formed a part of Michigan Territory, and still its legislature acts under that name; but a bill is before Congress to organize a territorial government under the name of WISCONSIN, which doubtless will be effected in a few weeks. Not many years will elapse before two new States will be formed out of this district of country, the one on the eastern, and the other on the western, side of the Mississippi. CHAPTER XIV. LITERARY AND RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS FOR THE WEST. Colleges;--Statistical Sketches of each Denomination;--Roman Catholics;--Field for effort, and progress made. In giving a sketch of literary and religious institutions in the West, the very limited space remaining to be occupied in this work, compels me to throw together a few general facts only. The author has made some progress in collecting materials, and he designs to prepare another work soon, in which a variety of particulars and sketches will be given of the early history, progress of literary and religious institutions, colleges, seminaries, churches, Bible, Sunday school, education and other kindred societies in the Western Valley, with the present aspect of each denomination of Christians. The interest taken in the affairs of the West, and the anxiety evinced by the community for facts and particulars on those subjects, demand that they should be treated more in detail than the limits of this Guide will allow. I. COLLEGES. OHIO.--_Ohio University_, at Athens, was founded in 1802;--has an endowment of 46,030 acres of land, which yields $2,300 annually. A large and elegant edifice of brick was erected in 1817. The number of students about 90. _Miami University_, was founded in 1824, and is a flourishing institution at Oxford, Butler county, 37 miles from Cincinnati. It possesses the township of land in which it is situated, and from which it receives an income of about $5000. Number of students about 200. Patronized by Presbyterians. The _Cincinnati College_ was incorporated in 1819, continued to be sustained as a classical institution for some years, and then suspended operations. It has been revived and re-organized lately, and will probably be sustained. _Kenyon College_, at Gambier, Knox county, in a central part of the State, was established in 1828, through the efforts of Rev. Philander Chase, then bishop of the Ohio Diocess, who obtained about $30,000 in England to endow it. Its chief patrons were those excellent British noblemen, Lords Kenyon and Gambier. It is under Episcopal jurisdiction, and has a theological department, for the education of candidates for the ministry in the Episcopal church. It has about 150 students. _Western Reserve College_ is at Hudson. It was founded by Presbyterians and Congregationalists in 1826, and has 82 students in all its departments. _Franklin College_ is in New Athens, Harrison county, on the eastern side of the State, and has about 50 students. The _Granville Literary and Theological Institution_ originated under patronage of the Baptist denomination in 1831. It is designed to embrace four departments,--preparatory, English, collegiate, and theological. It is rapidly rising, and contains more than 100 students. _Oberlin Institute_ has been recently established in Lorain county, under the influence of "new measure" Presbyterians, with four departments, and has 276 students, as follows: In the theological department, 35; collegiate, 37; preparatory, 31; female, 73. The citizens of Cleveland have recently contributed to it $15,000, of which six persons gave $1000 each. The _Willibough Collegiate Institute_ is in the lake country of Ohio, and has been gotten up within a few years past. The _Marietta Collegiate Institute_ is said to be a flourishing and respectable institution, having a large number of students in various departments. INDIANA.--_Indiana college_ is a State institution, established at Bloomington, and commenced operations in 1828. Present number of students not known. In 1832 the number exceeded 50. _Hanover College_ is at South Hanover, six miles below the town of Madison, and near the Ohio river. It is a flourishing institution, with arrangements for manual labor, and is styled "South Hanover College and Indiana Theological Seminary." The number of students exceed 100. _Wabash College_, at Crawfordsville, has just commenced operations under auspicious circumstances. Under patronage of the Presbyterians. ILLINOIS.--_Illinois College_, near Jacksonville, commenced as a preparatory school in 1830, and has made rapid progress. Large funds for its endowment have been recently provided in the Eastern States. The number of students about 80. _Shurtleff College of Alton, Illinois_, was commenced under the efforts of Baptists at Alton in 1832, as a preparatory institution;--chartered as a college in February, 1835, and has been recently named in honor of a liberal patron, Dr. Benjamin Shurtleff, of Boston, Mass., who has presented the institution with $10,000. It has 60 students, and its prospects are encouraging. _McKendreean College_ has been chartered, a building erected, and a school commenced at Lebanon. It is connected with the Methodist Episcopal Church. Charters have been recently granted for other colleges in this State, and measures adopted to bring some of them into existence. The Rev. Philander Chase, whose persevering labors brought into existence and successful operation, Kenyon college in Ohio, and who is now bishop of Illinois, is at present in England, where, by recent advices, he has obtained $50,000 to invest in Illinois lands, and to establish a college for the interests of the Episcopal church. MISSOURI.--The Roman Catholics have two institutions of a collegiate character, established in this State, _St. Mary's College_, in Perry county, was established by Bishop Du Bourg, in 1822. It has 6,000 volumes in the library. Including the _nunnery_, and school for females, a seminary for the education of _priests_, a preparatory, and a primary school, the number of teachers and students are about 300. _St. Louis University_ was founded in 1829, and is conducted by the Fathers of the society of Jesuits. The edifice is 130 feet, by 40, of 4 stories, including the basement, and is situated on elevated and pleasant ground, on the confines of the city. For the Protestants, the following institutions have been established. _Columbia College_, adjacent to Columbia, Boon county. The institution opened in 1835, under encouraging circumstances. _Marion College_ is in a delightful tract of country, a prairie region, in the western part of Michigan county,--and has between 80 and 100 students. It is connected with the Presbyterian interests. The project as developed by some of its founders, is an immense one, including English, scientific, classical, theological, medical, agricultural, and law departments,--all to be sustained by manual labor, and the proceeds of extensive farms. Doubtless, by prudent and persevering efforts, a respectable college may be brought into successful operation. A _college_ at St. Charles, has been founded, principally by the liberality of George Collier, a merchant of St. Louis, and two or three other gentlemen, and a classical and scientific school has been commenced. ARKANSAS.--Efforts are making to establish a college by Presbyterian agency, at Cane Hill, in this newly formed State. Two or three collegiate institutions will soon be needed in this region. KENTUCKY.--_Transylvania University_, at Lexington, is the oldest collegiate institution in the West. It was commenced, by a grant of 8,000 acres of land by the legislature of Virginia, in 1783, and was then called "Transylvania Seminary." The "Kentucky Academy" was founded in 1794, and both institutions were united and incorporated in 1798, under the present name. It has classical, medical, law, and preparatory departments,--and including each, from 300 to 400 students. _Center College_, at Danville, was founded by the Presbyterian church, in 1818, for which the synod of Kentucky pledged $20,000. Number of students about 100. _Augusta College_ was founded in 1822, by the Ohio and Kentucky conferences of the Methodist Episcopal church. It adopted collegiate regulations in 1828. Number of students in the collegiate, academical and primary departments, about 200. _Cumberland College_ was incorporated in 1824, and is established at Princeton, in the western part of the State. It is under the patronage and jurisdiction of the Cumberland Presbyterians. A farm, including a tract of 5,000 acres of land, with workshops, furnish facilities for manual labor. It has about 80 students. _St. Joseph's College_ is a Roman Catholic institution, at Bardstown, with college buildings sufficient to accommodate 200 students, and valued at $60,000. It commenced with 4 students in 1820. In 1833 there were in the collegiate and preparatory departments, 120 students. The St. Thomas and St. Mary Seminaries are also under the charge of Roman Catholic priests, the one in Nelson county, four miles from Bardstown, and the other in Washington county. A college was founded by the Baptists at Georgetown in 1830, but from untoward circumstances, is probably relinquished by the denomination. TENNESSEE.--The _University of Nashville_ is a prominent institution. The laboratory is one of the finest in the United States, and the mineralogical cabinet, not exceeded, and this department, as well as every other in the college, is superintended with much talent. The number of students is about 100. _Greenville_, _Knoxville_ and _Washington_ colleges are in East Tennessee. _Jackson College_ is about to be removed from its present site, and located at Columbia. $25,000 have been subscribed for the purpose. A Presbyterian Theological Seminary is at Maryville. MISSISSIPPI.--_Jefferson College_ is at Washington, six miles from Natchez. It has not flourished as a college, and is now said to be conducted somewhat on the principle of a military academy. _Oakland College_ has been recently founded by Presbyterians, and bids fair to exert a beneficial influence upon religion and morals, much needed in that State. The Baptist denomination are taking measures to establish a collegiate institution in that State. LOUISIANA.--Has a college at Jackson, in the eastern part of the State, The Roman Catholics have a college at New Orleans. There is a respectable collegiate institution, under the fostering care of the Methodist Episcopal Church, at Lagrange, in the north-western part of ALABAMA. Academies have been established in various parts of the West, for both sexes, and there are female seminaries of character and standing at Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Granville, Louisville, Lexington, Nashville, and many other places. Several more colleges, and a large number of minor institutions, will be needed very shortly to supply the demands for education in the West. The public mind is awake to the subject of education, and much has already been done, though a greater work has yet to be accomplished to supply the wants of the West in literary institutions. An annual convention is held in Cincinnati, on the first Monday in October, denominated the "_Western Institute and College of Professional Teachers_." Its object, according to the constitution, is, "to promote by every laudable means, the diffusion of knowledge in regard to education, and especially by aiming at the elevation of the character of teachers, who shall have adopted instruction as their regular profession." The first meeting was held in 1831, under the auspices of the "Academic Institute," a previously existing institution, but of more limited operations. The second convention, in 1832, framed a constitution and chose officers, since which time regular meetings have been held by delegates or individuals from various parts of the West, and a volume of Transactions of 300 or 400 pages published annually. II. THEOLOGICAL INSTITUTIONS. The _Western Theological Seminary_ at Alleghany town, opposite Pittsburg, is under the jurisdiction of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. It commenced operations in 1829. At _Canonsburg_ is a seminary belonging to the Associate church, of which Dr. Ramsey is Professor. The Associate Reformed church have a theological school in Pittsburg, under charge of the Rev. John T. Pressly D. D. The Baptist denomination are now engaged in establishing a manual labor academy in the vicinity of Pittsburg, for both ministerial and general education. The theological departments of Oberlin, Granville, and other collegiate institutions, have been noticed already. _Lane Seminary_, near Cincinnati, was founded in 1830, by Messrs. E. & W. A. Lane, merchants, of New Orleans, who made a very liberal offer of aid. Its location is excellent, two and a half miles from Cincinnati, at Walnut Hills, and is under the charge of the Rev. Dr. Beecher, and a body of professors. Number of students about 40. The _Hanover Institution_ in Indiana, has been noticed already. In the theological department are three professors and 12 students. The Baptists in this State are about establishing a manual labor seminary for ministerial and general education. A valuable property has been purchased, adjoining Covington, Ky., opposite Cincinnati, and measures have been put in train to found a theological seminary by the Baptist denomination. The executive committee of the "_Western Baptist Education Society_," have this object in charge. The "_Alton Theological Seminary_," located at Upper Alton, Illinois, is under an organization distinct from that of _Shurtleff College_, already noticed. This institution has 50 acres of valuable land, and a stone edifice of respectable size, occupied at present in joint concern with the college, and a valuable library of several hundred volumes. Its organization has been but recently effected. Rev. L. Colby, is professor, with 8 students. Other institutions, having theological education, either in whole or in part, their object, are in contemplation. Two remarks, by way of explanation are here necessary. 1. Most of the colleges and theological schools of the Western Valley have facilities for manual labor, or are making that provision. In several, some of the students pay half, and even the whole of their expenses, by their own efforts. Public sentiment is awake to this subject, and is gaining ground. 2. In enumerating the students, the members of the preparatory departments are included, many of whom do not expect to pass through a regular collegiate course. The circumstances and wants of the country, from its rapid growth, seem to require the appendage of a large preparatory department to every college. It may be well to observe here, that a great and increasing demand exists in all the Western States, and especially those bordering on the Mississippi, for teachers of primary schools. Hundreds and thousands of moral, intelligent, and pious persons, male and female, would meet with encouragement and success in this department of labor. It is altogether unnecessary for such persons to write to their friends, to make inquiries whether there are openings, &c. If they come from the older States with the proper recommendations as to character and qualifications, they will not fail to meet with employment in almost any quarter to which they may direct their course. There is not a county in Missouri, Arkansas, Illinois, or Indiana, where persons would not meet with constant employment in teaching, and especially where teachers in Sabbath schools are needed. Persons desirous of such a field, of humble, yet useful labor, should come here with the fixed purpose to mix with, and conform to the usages of the Western population, to avoid fastidiousness, and to submit to the plain, frank, social, and hospitable manners of the people. III. DEAF AND DUMB ASYLUMS. There are two institutions of this description in the West,--one at Columbus, Ohio; the other at Danville, Ky. The one in Ohio contains about 50 pupils. IV. MEDICAL INSTITUTIONS. The medical department in Transylvania University, Kentucky, has six professors, and usually about 200 students to attend the lectures. Fees for an entire course, with matriculation and library, $110. Two medical institutions of respectable standing exist in Cincinnati,--one connected with the Miami university, the other with Cincinnati college. The _Ohio Reformed Medical School_, was established at Worthington, 9 miles north of Columbus, in 1830. No specified time is required for study, but when a student will pass examination, he is licensed to practice. V. LAW SCHOOLS. The law department of Transylvania University, is under the charge of two able professors, who hear recitations and deliver lectures. The average number of students is about 40. A law school was established at Cincinnati, in 1833, with four professors,--Messrs. John C. Wright, John M. Goodenow, Edward King, and Timothy Walker. The bar, the institution, and the city have recently sustained a severe loss in the decease of Mr. King. VI. BENEVOLENT AND RELIGIOUS SOCIETIES. To enumerate and give particulars of all these, would make a volume. We can but barely call the attention of the reader to some of the more prominent organizations, amongst the different Christian denominations in this great Valley, for doing good. The _Foreign Missionary Society of the Valley of the Mississippi_, is a prominent auxiliary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Its seat is Cincinnati, but by agencies and branches, it operates throughout the Valley. The Report of November, 1835, states that _eighteen thousand six hundred and fifty eight dollars_ had been received into the treasury the preceding year. An edition of 3000 copies of the Missionary Herald is republished in Cincinnati, for circulation in the West. The _Western Education Society_, connected with the American Education Society, has also its seat of operations at Cincinnati. Auxiliaries also exist in most of the Western States. 71 beneficiaries were under its charge at the last anniversary. The _American Tract Society_ has auxiliaries and agencies in most of the Western States. The operations of the _American Bible Society_, through its numerous auxiliaries, is felt to the remotest parts of the West. The _American Sunday School Union_ has recently established a central agency in Cincinnati, and is preparing to renew, and greatly enlarge its very important efforts for the benefit of the rising generation in the West. A series of very interesting anniversaries are held in Cincinnati, the first week in November, when all the great objects of Christian effort receive a renewed impulse. The _American Home Missionary Society_ has more than 200 missionaries, laboring in the States, west of the mountains. In 1835, they assisted 217 Presbyterian ministers in this field. The _Temperance Effort_ has not been neglected, and an interesting change is going forward, in a quiet and noiseless way, in the habits of the people, in reference to the use of intoxicating liquors. It is to be hoped that more prompt and vigorous efforts will be made to promote this cause, but even now, there are many thousands, who abstain from the use of spiritous liquors, without any formal pledge. The _Methodist Episcopal Church_, in addition to their regular system of circuits, are extending the influence of their denomination on the frontiers, by missionary operations, and their labors are prospered. The _Baptist denomination_ have made some important movements in the Western Valley within the last three years. Their Home Mission Society has nearly 100 missionaries in the West. In November, 1833, the "_General Convention of Western Baptists_," was organized by more than 100 ministers and brethren, assembled from various parts of the West. It is not an ecclesiastical body, claiming jurisdiction either over churches or ministers, nor is it strictly a missionary body. Its business, according to the constitution, is "to promote by all lawful means, the following objects, to wit:--Missions both foreign and domestic;--ministerial education, for such as may have first been licensed by the churches; Sunday schools, including Bible classes; religious periodicals; tract and temperance societies, as well as all others warranted by Christ in the gospel." At its second session, in 1834, the "_Western Baptist Education Society_" was formed. Its object is "the education of those who give evidence to the churches of which they are members, that God designs them for the ministry." The executive committee are charged temporarily, with establishing the Central Theological Seminary, already mentioned, at Covington, Ky. Many other interesting associations for humane, philanthropic, and religious purposes exist in the Valley, which are necessarily omitted. VII. THE PERIODICAL PRESS. The number of different periodicals published in the Valley of the Mississippi, must exceed 400, of which 12 or 15 are daily papers. There are 25 weekly periodicals in Mississippi, 116 in Ohio, 38 in Indiana, 19 in Illinois, 17 in Missouri, 3 and probably more, in Arkansas, 2 at least in Wisconsin Territory. The _Western Monthly Magazine_, edited by James Hall, Esq., and published at Cincinnati is well known. The _Western Journal of the Medical and Physical Sciences_, edited by Daniel Drake, M. D., Professor of Theory and Practice of Medicine in the Cincinnati College, is published quarterly, in Cincinnati. There are a number of religious weekly, semi-monthly, and monthly periodicals, devoted to the interests of the principal denominations through the Valley. There are known to be at least one in Western Virginia, 2 in Western Pennsylvania, 7 in Ohio, 4 in Kentucky, 4 in Tennessee, 2 in Illinois, 2 in Missouri, and one in New Orleans. Supposing the average number of copies of Western periodicals equalled 750, this, estimating the different periodicals at 400, would give 300,000. We see no marked and essential difference in the talent, with which the editorial press is conducted, betwixt the Eastern and Western States. The limits of this work will not allow me to add further evidence that our Western population is not all "illiterate," and that "not more than one person in ten can read," than the following epitome of the issues, of one of the publishing houses in Cincinnati, as exhibited in the Cincinnati Journal: "_Western Enterprise._--The enterprise of the West is not generally appreciated. As a specimen, we have procured from Messrs. Corey & Webster the following LIST OF BOOKS published by them within the last three years. These books, with the exception of the Life of Black-Hawk, are of sterling value. The Western Primer, 60,000; Webster's Spelling Book, 600,000; the Primary Reader, 7,500; the Elementary Reader, 37,000; Western Reader, 16,000; Webster's History of the United States, 4000; Miss Beecher's Geography, 15,000; Pocket Testament, 6,500; Watts' and Select Hymns, 8000; Dr. Beecher's Lectures on Scepticism, three editions, 1000 each; Prof. Stowe's Introduction to the Study of the Bible, 1500; the Christian Lyre, 2000; Mitchell's Chemistry, 1000; Eberle on the Diseases of Children, 2000; Ditto Notes of Practice, 1500; Young Lady's Assistant in Drawing, 1000;, Munsell's Map, 3,500; Chase's Statutes of Ohio, three volumes, 1000; Hammond's Reports, 6th vol. 500; total, _seven hundred and seventy eight thousand two hundred and fifty!!!_ Probably some of the many other publishers in the city have got out nearly or quite as many books. Truly, we are a book-making and book-reading nation." VIII. RELIGIOUS DENOMINATIONS. In exhibiting the following statistics, entire correctness is not attempted. In some of the States, the latest reports have been had,--in others, the author has taken data of two or three years date. Of the numbers of some of the numerous sects existing, the opinions of individuals have been the chief data he could obtain. 1. _Baptists._ ----------------------+-----------+------------+--------------- | Churches. | Ministers. | Communicants. ----------------------+-----------+------------+--------------- Western Pennsylvania, | 50 | 30 | 2,569 Western Virginia, | 89 | 48 | 3,306 Ohio, | 332 | 175 | 13,926 Michigan, | 60 | 30 | 1,700 Indiana, | 320 | 175 | 15,000 Illinois, | 240 | 163 | 6,741 Missouri, | 180 | 115 | 6,990 Arkansas, | 25 | 18 | 700 Louisiana, | 20 | 12 | 1,000 Mississippi, | 100 | 46 | 4,000 North Alabama, | 125 | 53 | 5,700 Tennessee, | 348 | 292 | 22,868 Kentucky, | 558 | 296 | 38,817 Total, 2447 churches, 1353 ministers, and 123,317 communicants. _Periodicals._--The _Cross and Journal_, weekly, and _Baptist Advocate_, monthly, at Cincinnati;--the _Baptist Banner_, weekly, at Shelbyville, Ky.;--the _Baptist_, a large monthly quarto, at Nashville, Ten.;--the _Pioneer_, semi-monthly, at Rock Spring, but shortly to be enlarged, removed to Upper Alton, and published weekly;--and the _Witness_, a small quarto, published weekly at Pittsburg. 2. _Methodists_, (_Episcopal._) This denomination is divided into Conferences, which are not arranged exactly with the boundaries of the States. A large book and printing-office is established at Cincinnati, where all the society's publications are kept for sale. Another depository is kept at Nashville. -----------------------+---------+--------+--------+--------+------------ |Circuit |White |Colored.|Indians.|Total number Conferences. |Preachers|members.| | |of members. |&c. | | | | -----------------------+---------+--------+--------+--------+------------ Mississippi, | 55 | 6,358 | 2,622 | 727 | 9,707 Alabama, (one District,| | | | | in the Valley,) | 16 | 3,051 | 492 | | 3,543 Pittsburg, | 156 | 40,155 | 296 | | 40,451 Ohio, | 204 | 62,686 | 544 | 217 | 63,447 Missouri, (including | | | | | Arkansas,) | 57 | 7,948 | 1,061 | 889 | 9,898 Kentucky, | 100 | 25,777 | 5,592 | | 31,369 Illinois, | 61 | 15,038 | 59 | | 15,097 Indiana, | 70 | 24,984 | 229 | | 25,213 Holston, | 62 | 21,559 | 2,478 | | 24,031 Tennessee, | 120 | 29,794 | 5,043 | 508 | 35,345 +---------+--------+--------+--------+------------ Total, | 901 |237,350 | 18,416 | 2,341 | 258,101 Allowing two _local_ to one _circuit_ preacher, which is rather under than over the proportion, would make 1802, which, added to the number of those whose names are on the Minutes of the Conferences, would make 2703 Methodist Episcopal ministers of the gospel in the Valley of the Mississippi. The Pittsburg Conference Journal, Western Christian Advocate, and Western Methodist, are their periodicals. 3. _Methodist Protestants._--There are two conferences of this denomination in the West,--the Pittsburg, and Ohio conferences, and their circuits, preaching stations and members extend through the States north of the Ohio river, with a few stations and churches south. _Pittsburg Conference_ has 28 circuits, and 85 local preachers and licentiates, 25 circuits, 4 stations, and 2 mission circuits, with 6,902 members in society. _Ohio Conference_, has 28 circuit, 90 local preachers, 22 circuits, 3 stations, 3 missionary circuits, and 3667 members. The Methodist Correspondent, a neat semi-monthly quarto periodical, published at Zanesville, Ohio, is devoted to their interests. 4. _Presbyterians._--The following table (with the exception of Illinois) is constructed from the returns to the General Assembly in 1834,--the Minutes of 1835, we understand, have not been printed. ------------------+-----------+------------+--------------- States and parts. | Churches. | Ministers. | Communicants. ------------------+-----------+------------+--------------- W. Pennsylvania | | | and W. Va. | 212 | 135 | 22,687 Michigan, | 32 | 20 | 1,397 Ohio, | 400 | 255 | 27,821 Indiana, | 99 | 55 | 4,339 Illinois, | 71 | 50 | 2,000 Missouri, | 33 | 29 | 1,549 Arkansas, | 12 | 9 | 390 Kentucky, | 120 | 83 | 8,378 Tennessee, | 121 | 90 | 9,926 North Alabama, | 15 | 12 | 725 Mississippi, | 33 | 24 | 761 Total, 56 Presbyteries, 1,148 churches, 753 ministers, and 79,973 communicants. _Periodicals._--The _Cincinnati Journal and Western Luminary_, published at Cincinnati;--_Christian Herald_, at Pittsburg;--_Ohio Observer_, at Hudson, Ohio;--_Western Presbyterian Herald_, at Louisville, Ky.;--_New Orleans Observer_, at New Orleans;--and _St. Louis Observer_, at St. Louis, Mo.,--all weekly;--and the _Missionary Herald_, republished at Cincinnati, monthly. 5. _Cumberland Presbyterians._--This sect originated from the Presbyterian church in 1804, in Kentucky, but did not increase much till 1810, or 12. They are spread through most of the Western States, and have 34 Presbyteries, 7 Synods, and one General Assembly. The Minutes of their General Assembly, now before me, are not sufficiently definite to give the number of congregations. These probably exceed 300. An intelligent member of that denomination states the number of ordained preachers to be 300, licentiates, 100, candidates for the ministry, 150, and communicants, 50,000. _Periodicals._--The _Cumberland Presbyterian_ is a weekly paper, published at Nashville, Tenn. Another has been recently started at Pittsburg. 6. _Congregationalists._--In Ohio, especially in the northern part, are a number of Congregational churches and some ministers, as there are in Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. There are 2 or 3 ministers, 12 or 15 congregations, and about 500 communicants in Illinois, who are organized into an association in Illinois. 7. _Protestant Episcopal Church._--This denomination has 7 Diocesses in the Western or south-western States, exclusive of Western Pennsylvania, and Western Virginia, which belong to the Diocesses of those States. They are, Ohio,--Michigan,--Illinois,--Kentucky,--Tennessee,--Mississippi, and Indiana, and Missouri. There are about 75 or 80 ministers, and twice as many churches in the West. Provision has been made in part, for the endowment of the theological seminary at Gambier, O., in England, and Bishop McIlvaine has obtained about $12,600, to be appropriated in the erection of a gothic edifice to be called "Bexley Hall," with three stories, and accommodations for fifty students. A weekly periodical is issued at the same place to support the interests of the denomination. 8. _German Lutherans._--We have no data to give the statistics of this denomination. There is a Synod in Ohio, another in Western Pennsylvania, and perhaps others. There are probably 50 or 60 ministers in the West, and 150 congregations. 9. _German Reformed Church._--There are 80 congregations in Ohio, 20 in Indiana, and probably 50 others in the West, with 40 or 50 ministers. 10. The _Tunkers_, or _Dunkards_, have 40 or 50 churches, and about half as many ministers in the Western States. 11. The _Shakers_ have villages in several places in Ohio, and Kentucky, but are losing ground. 12. The _Mormons_ have a large community at Kirkland, Ohio, where, under the direction of their prophet, Joseph Smith, they are building a vast temple. They have probably 200 preachers, and as many congregations in the West, and still make proselytes. 13. _Christian Sect_, or _Newlights_, have become to a considerable extent amalgamated with the "_Reformers_," or "_Campbellites_." I have not data on which to construct a tabular view of this sect,--but from general information, estimate the number of their "bishops," and "proclaimers," at 300, and their communicants at 10,000 or 12,000. They have three or four monthly periodicals. Alexander Campbell, who may be justly considered the leader of this sect, (though they disclaim the term _sect_,) is a learned, talented, and voluminous writer. He conducts their leading periodical, the _Millennial Harbinger_. 14. The "_United Brethren in Christ_," are a pious, moral and exemplary sect, chiefly in Ohio, but scattered somewhat in other Western States. They are mostly of German descent, and in their doctrinal principles and usages, very much resemble the Methodists. They have about 300 ministers in the West, and publish the _Religious Telescope_, a large weekly paper, of evangelical principles, and well conducted. It is printed at Circleville, Ohio. 15. _Reformed Presbyterians_, or _Covenanters_, have 20 or 30 churches, and as many ministers, but are much dispersed through the Northern Valley. 16. The _Associate Church_, or _Seceders_, are more numerous than the Covenanters. 17. The _Associate Reformed Church_. The Western Synod of this body still exists as a separate denomination. Their theological school, at Pittsburg, has already been noticed. I know not their numbers, but suppose they exceed considerably the _Associate Church_. 18. The _Friends_ or _Quakers_, have a number of societies in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, &c. 19. The _Unitarians_ have societies and ministers at Pittsburg, Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, and probably in other places. There are many other sects and fragments in the West. The Valley of the Mississippi, like all new countries, is a wide and fertile field for the propagation of error, as it is for the display of truth. IX. ROMAN CATHOLICS. The number of Papal Diocesses in the Valley, including the one at Mobile, is _seven_, of each of which a very brief sketch will be given, commencing with, 1. _Detroit_, including Michigan and the North-Western Territory,--1 bishop, with sub-officers, 18 priests, and as many chapels. At Detroit and vicinity, for 2 or 3 miles, including the French, Irish and Germans, Roman Catholic families make up one third of the population; probably 3,500, of all ages. At Ann Arbor, and in the towns of Webster, Scio, Northfield, Lima and Dexter are many. At and near Bert rand on the St. Joseph's river, adjoining Indiana, they have a school established and an Indian mission. Including the fur traders, and Indians, they may be estimated at 10,000 in this Diocess.[12] 2. _Cincinnati._--A large cathedral has been built in this place, and 15 or 520 chapels in the Diocess. Ten years ago, the late bishop Fenwick could not count up 500. The emigration of foreigners, and the laborers on the Ohio canals, and not a little success in proselyting, account for the increase. There are 25 congregations, and 18 priests. A literary institution, called the _Athenæum_, is established at Cincinnati, where the students are required to attend the forms of worship, and the Superior inspects all their letters. St. Peter's Orphan Asylum is under charge of 4 "Sisters of Charity." The number of Catholics in Cincinnati is variously estimated, the medium of which is 6000, and as many more dispersed through the State. 3. _Bardstown._--This includes the State of Kentucky, and has a bishop, with the usual subordinates, 27 congregations, and 33 priests, 11 of whom reside at Bardstown. A convent of 6 Jesuit priests at Lebanon; another of 5 Dominicans, called St. Rose, in Washington county; the college at Bardstown, already noticed, and St. Mary's Seminary in Washington county, for the education of priests. Of _female_ institutions, there are the _Female Academy of Nazareth_ at Bardstown, conducted by the "Sisters of Charity," and superintended by the bishop and professors of St. Joseph's college,--150 pupils; the female academy of Loretto, Washington county, with accommodation for 100 boarders, and directed by the "_Sisters of Mary at the foot of the cross_." This order have six other places for country schools, and are said to be 135 in number. The _Convent of Holy Mary_, and the _Monastery of St. Magdalene_, at St. Rose, Washington county, by Dominican nuns, 15 in number, and in 1831, 30 pupils. The Catholics have a female academy at Lexington with 100 pupils. I have no data to show the Roman Catholic population of this State, but it is by no means proportionate to the formidable machinery here exhibited. All this array of colleges, seminaries, monasteries, convents and nunneries is for the work of proselyting, and if they are not successful, it only shows that the current of popular sentiment sets strongly in another direction. 4. _Vincennes._--This is a new Diocess, recently carved out of Indiana and Illinois by the authority of an old gentleman, who lives in the city of Rome! It includes a dozen chapels, 4 or 5 priests, the St. Claire convent at Vincennes, with several other appendages. The Roman Catholic population of this State is not numerous, probably not exceeding 3000. Illinois has about 5000, a part of which is under the jurisdiction of St. Louis Diocess. In Illinois there are 10 churches, and 6 priests, a part of which are included in the Diocess of Indiana. A convent of nuns of the "_Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary_," at Kaskaskia, who conduct a female school, with a few boarders and about 30 or 40 day scholars. 5. _St. Louis._--This Diocess includes 18 congregations and 19 priests, with the following appendages: 1. _St. Louis University_, already noticed, with 6 priests for instructors, and 150 students, of which, about 80 are boarders. The rules require their attendance on morning and evening prayers, the catechism, and divine service on Sundays and holidays. 2. St. Mary's College, also noticed in our description of colleges. 3. Noviciate for _Jesuits under St. Stanislaus_, in St. Louis county. Of female institutions there are,--1. Convent of the "_Ladies of the Sacred Heart_," at St. Louis; 2. another of the same description, and their noviciate, at Florrissant;--3. another of the same order at St. Charles;--4. a female academy at Carondalet, six miles below St. Louis, by the "_Sisters of Charity_;"--5. a convent and academy of the "_Sisters of Loretto_," at New Madrid;--6. a convent and female academy at Frederickstown, under supervision of a priest;--7. a convent and female academy of the "_Sisters of Loretto_," in Perry county. The Roman Catholic population in Missouri does not exceed 15,000. Their pupils, of both sexes, may be estimated at 700. To the above may be added the hospital, and the asylum for boys, in St. Louis, under the management of the Sisters of Charity. Roman Catholic teachers, usually foreigners, disperse themselves through the country, and engage in teaching primary schools; availing themselves of intercourse with the families of their employers to instruct them in the dogmas of their religion. The greatest success that has attended the efforts of the priests in converting others, has been during the prevalence of the cholera, and especially after collapse and insensibility had seized the person! We know of more than 60 Roman Catholics who have been converted to the faith of Christ and joined Christian churches within 3 or 4 years past, in this State. 6. _New Orleans._--The Roman Catholics in Louisiana are numerous, probably including one third of the population. Relatively, Protestants are increasing, as a large proportion of the emigration from the other States, who care any thing about religion, are Protestants. There are 26 congregations, and 27 priests with several convents, female seminaries, asylums, &c. 7. _Mobile._--A splendid cathedral has been commenced here. This Diocess extends into Florida. FOOTNOTES: [12] The reader will note that our estimates of Roman Catholics include the whole family of every age. Whereas, our statistics of Protestant denominations included only communicants. CHAPTER XV. Suggestions to Emigrants--Canal, Steamboat and Stage Routes--Other Modes of Travel--Expenses--Roads, Distances, &c. &c. In the concluding chapter to this GUIDE, it is proposed to give such information as is always desirable to emigrants upon removing, or travelling for any purpose, to the West. 1. Persons in moderate circumstances, or who would save time and expense, need not make a visit to the West, to ascertain particulars previous to removal. A few general facts, easily collected from a hundred sources, will enable persons to decide the great question whether they will emigrate to the Valley. By the same means, emigrants may determine to what State, and to what part of that State, their course shall be directed. There are many things that a person of plain, common sense will take for granted without inquiry,--such as facilities for obtaining all the necessaries of life; the readiness with which property of any description may be obtained for a fair value, and especially farms and wild land; that they can live where hundreds of thousands of others of similar habits and feelings live; and above all, they should take it for granted, that there are difficulties to be encountered in every country, and in all business,--that these difficulties can be surmounted with reasonable effort, patience and perseverance, and that in every country, people sicken and die. 2. Having decided to what State and part of the State an emigrant will remove, let him then conclude to take as little furniture and other luggage as he can do with, especially if he comes by public conveyances. Those who reside within convenient distance of a sea port, would find it both safe and economical to ship by New Orleans, in boxes, such articles as are not wanted on the road, especially if they steer for the navigable waters of the Mississippi. Bed and other clothing, books, &c., packed in boxes, like merchants' goods, will go much safer and cheaper by New Orleans, than by any of the inland routes. I have received more than one hundred packages and boxes, from eastern ports, by that route, within 20 years, and never lost one. Boxes should be marked to the owner or his agent at the river port where destined, and to the charge of some forwarding house in New Orleans. The freight and charges may be paid when the boxes are received. 3. If a person designs to remove to the north part of Ohio, and Indiana, to Chicago and vicinity, or to Michigan, or Greenbay, his course would be by the New York canal, and the lakes. The following table, showing the time of the opening of the canal at Albany and Buffalo, and the opening of the lake, from 1827 to 1835, is from a report of a committee at Buffalo to the common council of that city. It will be of use to those who wish to take the northern route in the spring. ------+-----------------+-----------------+----------------- | Canal opened at | Canal opened at | Lake Erie opened Year. | Buffalo. | Albany. | at Buffalo. ------+-----------------+-----------------+----------------- 1827 | April 21 | April 21 | April 21 1828 | " 1 | " 1 | " 1 1829 | " 25 | " 29 | May 10 1830 | " 15 | " 20 | April 6 1831 | " 16 | " 16 | May 8 1832 | " 18 | " 25 | April 27 1833 | " 22 | " 22 | " 23 1834 | " 16 | " 17 | " 6 1835 | " 15 | " 15 | May 8 The same route will carry emigrants to Cleveland and by the Ohio canal to Columbus, or to the Ohio river at Portsmouth, from whence by steamboat, direct communications will offer to any river port in the Western States. From Buffalo, steamboats run constantly, (when the lake is open,) to Detroit, stopping at Erie, Ashtabula, Cleveland, Sandusky and many other ports from whence stages run to every prominent town. Transportation wagons are employed in forwarding goods. SCHEDULE FROM BUFFALO TO DETROIT BY WATER. Miles. Dunkirk, N. Y., 39 Portland, " 18-57 Erie, Pa., 35-92 Ashtabula, Ohio, 39-131 Fairport, " 32-163 Cleveland, Ohio, 30-193 Sandusky, " 54-247 Amherstburg, N. C. 52-299 Detroit, Mich., 18-317 _From thence to Chicago, Illinois._ Miles. St. Clair River, Michigan, 40 Palmer, 17-57 Fort Gratiot, 14-71 White Rock, 40-111 Thunder Island, 70-181 Middle Island, 25-206 Presque Isle, 65-271 Mackinaw, 58-329 Isle Brule, 75-404 Fort Howard, W. Territory, 100-504 Milwaukee, W. T. 310-814 Chicago, Ill., 90-904 _From Cleveland to Portsmouth, via. Ohio canal._ Miles. Cuyahoga Aqueduct, 22 Old Portage, 12-34 Akron, 4-38 New Portage, 5-43 Clinton, 11-54 Massillon, 11-65 Bethlehem, 6-71 Bolivar, 8-79 Zoar, 3-82 Dover, 7-89 New Philadelphia, 4-93 New-Comers' Town, 22-115 Coshocton, 17-132 Irville, 26-158 Newark, 13-171 Hebron, 10-181 Licking Summit, 5-186 Lancaster Canaan, 11-197 Columbus, side cut, 18-215 Bloomfield, 8-223 Circleville, 9-232 Chillicothe, 23-255 Piketon, 25-280 Lucasville, 14-294 Portsmouth, (Ohio river,) 13-307 The most expeditious, pleasant and direct route for travellers to the southern parts of Ohio and Indiana; to the Illinois river, as far north as Peoria; to the Upper Mississippi, as Quincy, Rock Island, Galena and Prairie du Chien; to Missouri; and to Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Natches and New Orleans is one of the southern routes. There are, 1st, from Philadelphia to Pittsburg by rail-roads and the Pennsylvania canal; 2nd, by Baltimore,--the Baltimore and Ohio rail-road,--and stages to Wheeling; or, 3dly, for people living to the south of Washington, by stage, via Charlottesville, Va., Staunton, the hot, warm, and white sulphur springs, Lewisburg, Charlestown, to Guyandotte, from whence a regular line of steamboats run 3 times a week to Cincinnati. Intermediate routes from Washington city to Wheeling; or to Harper's ferry, to Fredericksburg, and intersect the route through Virginia at Charlottesville. _From Philadelphia to Pittsburg, via rail-road and canal._ Miles. Columbia on the Susquehanna river by rail-road, daily, 81 By canal packets to Bainbridge, 11-92 Middletown, 17-109 Harrisburg, 10-119 Juniata river, 15-134 Millerstown, 17-151 Mifflin, 17-168 Lewistown, 13-171 Waynesburg, 14-195 Hamiltonville, 11-206 Huntingdon, 7-213 Petersburg, 8-221 Alexandria, 23-244 Frankstown and Hollidaysburgh, 3-247 From thence by rail-road across the mountain to Johnstown is 38-285 By canal to Blairsville, 35-320 Saltzburg, 18-338 Warren, 12-350 Alleghany river, 16-366 PITTSBURG, 28-394 The _Pioneer_ line on this route is exclusively for passengers, and professes to reach Pittsburg in _four_ days--but is sometimes behind several hours. Fare through, $10. Passengers pay for meals. _Leech's line_, called "_the Western Transportation line_," takes both freight and passengers. The packet boats advertise to go through to Pittsburg in _five_ days for $7. Midship and steerage passengers in the transportation line in six and a half days; merchandize delivered in 8 days. Generally, however, there is some delay. Emigrants must not expect to carry more than a small trunk or two on the packet lines. Those who take goods or furniture, and expect to keep with it, had better take the transportation lines with more delay. The price of meals on the boats is about 37-½ cents. On all the _steamboats_ on the Western waters, no additional charge is made to cabin passengers for meals,--and the tables are usually profusely supplied. Strict order is observed, and the waiters and officers are attentive. _Steamboat route from Pittsburg to the mouth of Ohio._ Miles. Middletown, Pa. 11 Economy, " 8-19 Beaver, " 10-29 Georgetown, " 13-42 Steubenville, Ohio, 27-69 Wellsburgh, Va., 7-76 Warren, Ohio, 6-82 _Wheeling_, Va., 10-92 Elizabethtown, " 11-103 Sistersville, " 34-137 Newport, Ohio, 27-164 _Marietta_, Ohio 14-178 Parkersburgh, Va., 11-189 Belpre, and Blennerhassett's Isl'd, O., 4-193 Troy, Ohio, 10-203 Belleville, Va., 7-210 Letart's Rapids, Va., 37-247 Point Pleasant, " 27-274 Gallipolis, Ohio, 4-278 _Guyandot_, Va., 27-305 Burlington, Ohio, 10-315 Greensburg, Ky., 19-334 Concord, Ohio, 12-346 _Portsmouth_, (Ohio, canal,) 7-353 Vanceburg, Ky., 20-373 Manchester, Ohio, 16-389 _Maysville_, Ky., 11-400 Charleston, " 4-404 Ripley, Ohio, 6-410 Augusta, Ky., 8-418 Neville, Ohio, 7-425 Moscow, " 7-432 Point Pleasant, Ohio 4-436 New Richmond, " 7-443 Columbia, " 15-458 Fulton, " 6-464 CINCINNATI, Ohio 2-466 North Bend, " 15-481 Lawrenceburgh, Ia., and mouth of the Miami, 8-489 Aurora, Ia., 2-491 Petersburg, Ky., 2-493 Bellevue, " 8-501 Rising Sun, Ia., 2-503 Fredericksburgh, Ky., 18-521 Vevay, Ia., and Ghent, Ky., 11-532 Port William, Ky., 8-540 Madison, In., 15-555 New London, In., 12-567 Bethlehem, " 8-575 Westport, Ky., 7-582 Transylvania, Ky., 15-597 LOUISVILLE, Ky., 12-609 Shippingsport thro' the canal, 2-½-611-½ New Albany, In., 1-½-613 Salt River, Ky., 23-636 Northampton, Ia., 18-654 Leavenworth, " 17-671 Fredonia, " 2-673 Rome, In., 32-705 Troy, " 25-730 Rockport, In., 16-746 Owenburgh, Ky., 12-758 _Evansville_, Ia., 36-794 Henderson, Ky., 12-806 Mount Vernon, Ia., 28-834 Carthage, Ky., 12-846 Wabash River, Ky., 7-853 Shawneetown, Ill., 11-864 Mouth of Saline, Ill., 12-876 Cave in Rock, " 10-886 Golconda, " 19-905 _Smithland_, mouth of the Cumberland River, Ky., 10-915 _Paducah_, mouth of the Tennessee River, Ky., 13-928 Caledonia, Ill., 31-959 Trinity, mouth of Cash River, Ill., 10-969 MOUTH OF THE OHIO RIVER, 6-975 Persons who wish to visit Indianopolis will stop at Madison, Ia., and take the stage conveyance. From Louisville, via Vincennes, to St. Louis by stage, every alternate day, 273 miles, through in three days and half. Fare $17. Stages run from Vincennes to Terre Haute and other towns up the Wabash river. At _Evansville_, Ia., stage lines are connected with Vincennes and Terre Haute; and at _Shawneetown_ twice a week to Carlyle, Ill., where it intersects the line from Louisville to St. Louis. From Louisville to Nashville by steamboats, passengers land at Smithland at the mouth of Cumberland river, unless they embark direct for Nashville. In the _winter_ both stage and steamboat lines are uncertain and irregular. Ice in the rivers frequently obstructs navigation, and high waters and bad roads sometimes prevent stages from running regularly. Farmers who remove to the West from the Northern and Middle States, will find it advantageous in many instances to remove with their own teams and wagons. These they will need on their arrival. Autumn, or from September till November, is the favorable season for this mode of emigration. The roads are then in good order, the weather usually favorable, and feed plenty. People of all classes from the States south of the Ohio river, remove with large wagons, carry and cook their own provisions, purchase their feed by the bushel, and invariably _encamp out at night_. Individuals who wish to travel through the interior of Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, &c., will find that the most convenient, sure, economical and independent mode is on horseback. Their expenses will be from 75 cents to $1.50 per day, and they can always consult their own convenience and pleasure as to time and place. Stage fare is usually 6 cents per mile in the West. Meals at stage houses, 37-½ cents. _Steamboat fare, including meals._ From Pittsburg to Cincinnati, $10 " Cincinnati to Louisville, 4 " Louisville to St. Louis, 12 And frequently the same from Cincinnati to St. Louis;--varying a little, however. A _deck_ passage, as it is called, may be rated as follows: From Pittsburg to Cincinnati, $3 " Cincinnati to Louisville, 1 " Louisville to St. Louis, 4 The _deck_ for such passengers is usually in the midship, forward the engine, and is protected from the weather. Passengers furnish their own provisions and bedding. They often take their meals at the cabin table, with the boat hands, and pay 25 cents a meal. Thousands pass up and down the rivers as deck passengers, especially emigrating families, who have their bedding, provisions, and cooking utensils on board. The whole expense of a single person from New York to St. Louis, via. Philadelphia and Pittsburg, with cabin passage on the river, will range between $40 and $45. Time from 12 to 15 days. Taking the transportation lines on the Pennsylvania canal, and a deck passage on the steamboat, and the expenses will range between 20 and $25, supposing the person buys his meals at 25 cents, and eats twice a day. If he carry his own provisions, the passage, &c., will be from 15 to $18. The following is from an advertisement of the _Western Transportation, or Leech's Line, from Philadelphia_: Miles. Days. Fare to Pittsburg, 400 6-½ $6.00 " " Cincinnati, 900 8-½ 8.50 " " Louisville, 1050 9-½ 9.00 " " Nashville, 1650 13-½ 13.00 " " St. Louis, 1750 14 13.00 The above does not include meals. _Packet Boats for Cabin Passengers, same line._ Miles. Days. Fare to Pittsburg, 400 5 $7 " " Cincinnati, 900 8 17 " " Louisville, 1050 9 19 " " Nashville, 1650 13 27 " " St. Louis, 1750 13 27 Emigrants and travellers will find it to their interest always to be a little sceptical relative to the statements of stage, steam and canal boat agents, to make some allowance in their own calculations for delays, difficulties and expenses, and above all, to _feel_ perfectly patient and in good humor with themselves, the officers, company, and the world, even if they do not move quite as rapid, and fare quite as well as they desire. ERRATA. Page 40, 8th line from the bottom, for _Tau-mar-wans_, read Tau-mar-waus. 41. For _Milwankee_, read Milwaukee. " For _Fonti_, read Tonti. GOULD, KENDALL & LINCOLN, PUBLISHERS, BOOKSELLERS, AND STATIONERS, 59 Washington St. Boston. G. K. & L. keep a general assortment of Books in the various departments of Literature, Science and Theology.--Among the many valuable works which they publish, are the following, for SCHOOLS: WAYLAND'S ELEMENTS OF MORAL SCIENCE. Abridged and adapted to the Use of Schools and Academies, by the Author, FRANCIS WAYLAND, D. D., President of Brown University, and Professor of Moral Philosophy. The publishers would respectfully request the attention of Teachers and School Committees to this valuable work; it has received the unqualified approbation of all who have examined it; and it is believed admirably calculated to exert a wholesome influence on the minds of the young. Such an influence as will be likely to lead them to the formation of correct moral principles. ROMAN ANTIQUITIES AND ANCIENT MYTHOLOGY. By CHARLES K. DILLAWAY, A. M., Principal in the Boston Public Latin School. Illustrated by elegant engravings. Third edition, improved. This work is rapidly going into use all over our country; it is already introduced into most of our High Schools and Academies, and many of our Colleges;--a new and beautiful edition has just been published. BLAKE'S NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, _New Edition_, Enlarged. Being Conversations on Philosophy, with the addition of Explanatory Notes, Questions for Examination, and a Dictionary of Philosophical Terms. With twenty-eight steel engravings. By Rev. J. L. BLAKE, A. M. Perhaps no work has contributed so much as this to excite a fondness for the study of Natural Philosophy in youthful minds. The familiar comparisons with which it abounds, awaken interest, and rivet the attention of the pupil. It is introduced, with great success into the Public Schools in Boston. BLAKE'S FIRST BOOK IN ASTRONOMY. Designed for the Use of Common Schools. Illustrated by steel plate engravings. By Rev. J. L. BLAKE, A. M. FIRST LESSONS IN INTELLECTUAL PHILOSOPHY; or, a Familiar Explanation of the Nature and Operations of the Human Mind. _Second Edition._ Edited by Rev. SILAS BLAISDALE. One volume, 12mo. 360 pages. YOUNG LADIES' CLASS BOOK. A Selection of Lessons for Reading, in Prose and Verse. By EBENEZER BAILEY, A. M., Principal of the Young Ladies' High School, Boston. Thirteenth stereotype edition. In order to give this work a more extended circulation;--notwithstanding its sale is now great,--the publishers have determined to REDUCE THE PRICE, in order to remove every obstacle in the way of its being introduced into _all our female schools_ throughout the country. PALEY'S THEOLOGY. _Eighth Edition_, illustrated by Forty Plates, and Selections from the Notes of Dr. Paxton, with additional Notes, original and selected, for this Edition, with a Vocabulary of Scientific Terms. Edited by an eminent Physician of Boston. THE CLASS BOOK OF NATURAL THEOLOGY; or, the Testimony of Nature to the Being, Perfections and Government of God. By the Rev. HENRY FERGUS; revised, enlarged, and adapted to Paxton's Illustrations; with Notes, selected and original, Biographical Notices, and a Vocabulary of Scientific Terms. By CHARLES HENRY ALDEN, A. M., Principal of the Philadelphia High School for Young Ladies. THE NATIONAL ARITHMETIC, combining the Analytic and Synthetic Methods, in which the Principles of Arithmetic are explained in a perspicuous and familiar manner; containing also, practical systems of Mensuration, Gauging, Geometry, and Book-Keeping, forming a complete Mercantile Arithmetic, designed for Schools and Academies in the United States. By BENJAMIN GREENLEAF, A. M., Preceptor of Bradford Academy. BALBI'S GEOGRAPHY. An Abridgment of Universal Geography, Modern and Ancient, chiefly compiled from the Abrégé de Geographie of ADRIAN BALBI. By T. G. BRADFORD; accompanied by a splendid Atlas, and illustrated by engravings. The above work contains 520 pages 12mo. and is the most copious School Geography yet offered to the public, and it is believed to be an important improvement, especially for the use of the higher schools and seminaries. It has received the sanction of all Teachers who have examined it, and has been favorably noticed in many of our public Journals. The Atlas accompanying this work, contains thirty-six maps and charts,--and is confidently recommended as superior, in every respect, to any thing of the kind now in use. _Religious Works._ THE COMPLETE WORKS OF THE REV. ANDREW FULLER, with a Memoir of his Life. By ANDREW GUNTON FULLER, in two volumes. With a correct likeness. This valuable work is now published in two large octavo volumes, on fair type and fine paper, at a very low price. The cost of former editions ($14) precluded many from possessing it. The publishers are gratified in being able to offer to the Christian public a work so replete with doctrinal arguments and _practical_ religion, at a price that every minister and student may possess it. No Christian can read Fuller, without having his impulses to action quickened; and every student ought to _study_ him, if he wishes to arm himself against every enemy. CAMPBELL AND FENELON ON ELOQUENCE. Comprising Campbell's Lectures on Systematic Theology and Pulpit Eloquence, &c. Edited by Prof. RIPLEY, of Newton Theological Institution. MORRIS'S MEMOIRS OF FULLER. The Life and Character of the Rev. Andrew Fuller Edited by Rev. RUFUS BABCOCK, Jr., President of Waterville College. FEMALE SCRIPTURE BIOGRAPHY. Including an Essay on what Christianity has done for Women. By F. A. COX, D. D., LL. D., of London. In 2 vols. This is a very interesting work, and should be in the hands of every female professor, and in every Church and Sabbath School Library in the land. REMAINS OF REV. 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The thousands still living, who have listened with rapture to the messages of salvation that flowed from his lips; those gentlemen, who have been trained up by his hand for usefulness in society, and especially those whose gifts in the church he aided and cherished by his instructions, as well as the Christian and literary public, will review his life with peculiar satisfaction. LIFE OF PHILIP MELANCTHON, comprising an account of the most important transactions of the REFORMATION. By F. A. COX, D. D. LL. D., of London. From the Second London edition, with important alterations, by the Author, for this edition. MEMOIR OF MRS. ANN H. JUDSON, late Missionary to Burmah. New and enlarged edition Including a History of the American Baptist Mission in the Burman Empire to the present time. By JAMES D. KNOWLES. Embellished with engravings. NEW AND IMPROVED EDITION, JUST PUBLISHED. MEMOIR OF GEORGE DANA BOARDMAN, late Missionary to Burmah, containing much intelligence relative to the Burman Mission. By Rev. ALONZO KING, of Northborough, Mass. With a Valuable Essay, by a distinguished Clergyman. The rapid sale of the large edition of this work first published,--the increasing demand for it,--and the evident good which its circulation has accomplished, have induced the publishers to bestow much expense and labor upon it, in order to present the present edition in as complete and attractive a form as possible, with a view to giving it a still wider and more rapid circulation. A valuable Essay of _thirty-five pages_, written at the request of the publishers has been added; and in addition to its having been handsomely stereotyped, a correct likeness of Mr. Boardman, taken on steel, from a painting in possession of the family, and a beautiful vignette representing the baptismal scene just before his death, have also been added. +-----------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the | | original document have been preserved. | | | | Errata mentioned on Page 374 have been | | corrected in the text. | | | | Typographical errors corrected in the text: | | | | Page vii hut changed to but | | Page x Mitchel's changed to Mitchell's | | Page 25 steril changed to sterile | | Page 31 Wos-sosh-e changed to Wos-sosh-ee | | Page 35 chesnut changed to chestnut | | Page 36 persimon changed to persimmon | | Page 36 paupau changed to pawpaw | | Page 36 pecaun changed to pecan | | Page 38 turkies changed to turkeys | | Page 44 steril changed to sterile | | Page 48 harrassed changed to harassed | | Page 61 Farenheit changed to Fahrenheit | | Page 70 Chein chanaged to Chien | | Page 75 occacasionally changed to occasionally | | Page 100 journies changed to journeys | | Page 114 Poineer chainged to Pioneer | | Page 135 Saginau changed to Saginaw | | Page 137 territoriesr changed to territories | | Page 138 Chilicothe changed to Chillicothe | | Page 138 Miueral changed to Mineral | | Page 139 Chilicothe changed to Chillicothe | | Page 156 Punchas changed to Puncahs | | Page 162 Fonti's changed to Tonti's | | Page 175 artizans changed to artisans | | Page 207 it changed to its | | Page 211 Considerble changed to Considerable | | Page 223 Bowlinggreen changed to Bowling Green | | Page 231 Missisinewa changed to Missisinawa | | Page 237 Missasinawa changed to Missisinawa | | Page 262 pecaun changed to pecan | | Page 273 pecaun changed to pecan | | Page 279 gophars changed to gophers | | Page 280 gophar changed to gopher | | Page 290 Macoupin changed to Macoupen | | Page 304 attornies changed to attorneys | | Page 337 Lorrain changed to Lorain | | Page 339 circumstanses changed to circumstances | | Page 360 accomodation changed to accommodation | | Page 367 Masillon changed to Massillon | | Page 368 Charlottsville changed to Charlottesville | | Page 368 Guiandotte changed to Guyandotte | | Page 368 Juniatta changed to Juniata | | Page 368 Holladaysburgh changed to Hollidaysburgh | | Page 377 Guaging changed to Gauging | +-----------------------------------------------------+ 
7193	----	THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER BY MARK TWAIN (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) Part 1 P R E F A C E MOST of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine. Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual--he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture. The odd superstitions touched upon were all prevalent among children and slaves in the West at the period of this story--that is to say, thirty or forty years ago. Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in. THE AUTHOR. HARTFORD, 1876. T O M S A W Y E R CHAPTER I "TOM!" No answer. "TOM!" No answer. "What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!" No answer. The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked THROUGH them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for "style," not service--she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear: "Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll--" She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat. "I never did see the beat of that boy!" She went to the open door and stood in it and looked out among the tomato vines and "jimpson" weeds that constituted the garden. No Tom. So she lifted up her voice at an angle calculated for distance and shouted: "Y-o-u-u TOM!" There was a slight noise behind her and she turned just in time to seize a small boy by the slack of his roundabout and arrest his flight. "There! I might 'a' thought of that closet. What you been doing in there?" "Nothing." "Nothing! Look at your hands. And look at your mouth. What IS that truck?" "I don't know, aunt." "Well, I know. It's jam--that's what it is. Forty times I've said if you didn't let that jam alone I'd skin you. Hand me that switch." The switch hovered in the air--the peril was desperate-- "My! Look behind you, aunt!" The old lady whirled round, and snatched her skirts out of danger. The lad fled on the instant, scrambled up the high board-fence, and disappeared over it. His aunt Polly stood surprised a moment, and then broke into a gentle laugh. "Hang the boy, can't I never learn anything? Ain't he played me tricks enough like that for me to be looking out for him by this time? But old fools is the biggest fools there is. Can't learn an old dog new tricks, as the saying is. But my goodness, he never plays them alike, two days, and how is a body to know what's coming? He 'pears to know just how long he can torment me before I get my dander up, and he knows if he can make out to put me off for a minute or make me laugh, it's all down again and I can't hit him a lick. I ain't doing my duty by that boy, and that's the Lord's truth, goodness knows. Spare the rod and spile the child, as the Good Book says. I'm a laying up sin and suffering for us both, I know. He's full of the Old Scratch, but laws-a-me! he's my own dead sister's boy, poor thing, and I ain't got the heart to lash him, somehow. Every time I let him off, my conscience does hurt me so, and every time I hit him my old heart most breaks. Well-a-well, man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble, as the Scripture says, and I reckon it's so. He'll play hookey this evening, * and [* Southwestern for "afternoon"] I'll just be obleeged to make him work, to-morrow, to punish him. It's mighty hard to make him work Saturdays, when all the boys is having holiday, but he hates work more than he hates anything else, and I've GOT to do some of my duty by him, or I'll be the ruination of the child." Tom did play hookey, and he had a very good time. He got back home barely in season to help Jim, the small colored boy, saw next-day's wood and split the kindlings before supper--at least he was there in time to tell his adventures to Jim while Jim did three-fourths of the work. Tom's younger brother (or rather half-brother) Sid was already through with his part of the work (picking up chips), for he was a quiet boy, and had no adventurous, troublesome ways. While Tom was eating his supper, and stealing sugar as opportunity offered, Aunt Polly asked him questions that were full of guile, and very deep--for she wanted to trap him into damaging revealments. Like many other simple-hearted souls, it was her pet vanity to believe she was endowed with a talent for dark and mysterious diplomacy, and she loved to contemplate her most transparent devices as marvels of low cunning. Said she: "Tom, it was middling warm in school, warn't it?" "Yes'm." "Powerful warm, warn't it?" "Yes'm." "Didn't you want to go in a-swimming, Tom?" A bit of a scare shot through Tom--a touch of uncomfortable suspicion. He searched Aunt Polly's face, but it told him nothing. So he said: "No'm--well, not very much." The old lady reached out her hand and felt Tom's shirt, and said: "But you ain't too warm now, though." And it flattered her to reflect that she had discovered that the shirt was dry without anybody knowing that that was what she had in her mind. But in spite of her, Tom knew where the wind lay, now. So he forestalled what might be the next move: "Some of us pumped on our heads--mine's damp yet. See?" Aunt Polly was vexed to think she had overlooked that bit of circumstantial evidence, and missed a trick. Then she had a new inspiration: "Tom, you didn't have to undo your shirt collar where I sewed it, to pump on your head, did you? Unbutton your jacket!" The trouble vanished out of Tom's face. He opened his jacket. His shirt collar was securely sewed. "Bother! Well, go 'long with you. I'd made sure you'd played hookey and been a-swimming. But I forgive ye, Tom. I reckon you're a kind of a singed cat, as the saying is--better'n you look. THIS time." She was half sorry her sagacity had miscarried, and half glad that Tom had stumbled into obedient conduct for once. But Sidney said: "Well, now, if I didn't think you sewed his collar with white thread, but it's black." "Why, I did sew it with white! Tom!" But Tom did not wait for the rest. As he went out at the door he said: "Siddy, I'll lick you for that." In a safe place Tom examined two large needles which were thrust into the lapels of his jacket, and had thread bound about them--one needle carried white thread and the other black. He said: "She'd never noticed if it hadn't been for Sid. Confound it! sometimes she sews it with white, and sometimes she sews it with black. I wish to geeminy she'd stick to one or t'other--I can't keep the run of 'em. But I bet you I'll lam Sid for that. I'll learn him!" He was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy very well though--and loathed him. Within two minutes, or even less, he had forgotten all his troubles. Not because his troubles were one whit less heavy and bitter to him than a man's are to a man, but because a new and powerful interest bore them down and drove them out of his mind for the time--just as men's misfortunes are forgotten in the excitement of new enterprises. This new interest was a valued novelty in whistling, which he had just acquired from a negro, and he was suffering to practise it undisturbed. It consisted in a peculiar bird-like turn, a sort of liquid warble, produced by touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth at short intervals in the midst of the music--the reader probably remembers how to do it, if he has ever been a boy. Diligence and attention soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet--no doubt, as far as strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, the advantage was with the boy, not the astronomer. The summer evenings were long. It was not dark, yet. Presently Tom checked his whistle. A stranger was before him--a boy a shade larger than himself. A new-comer of any age or either sex was an impressive curiosity in the poor little shabby village of St. Petersburg. This boy was well dressed, too--well dressed on a week-day. This was simply astounding. His cap was a dainty thing, his close-buttoned blue cloth roundabout was new and natty, and so were his pantaloons. He had shoes on--and it was only Friday. He even wore a necktie, a bright bit of ribbon. He had a citified air about him that ate into Tom's vitals. The more Tom stared at the splendid marvel, the higher he turned up his nose at his finery and the shabbier and shabbier his own outfit seemed to him to grow. Neither boy spoke. If one moved, the other moved--but only sidewise, in a circle; they kept face to face and eye to eye all the time. Finally Tom said: "I can lick you!" "I'd like to see you try it." "Well, I can do it." "No you can't, either." "Yes I can." "No you can't." "I can." "You can't." "Can!" "Can't!" An uncomfortable pause. Then Tom said: "What's your name?" "'Tisn't any of your business, maybe." "Well I 'low I'll MAKE it my business." "Well why don't you?" "If you say much, I will." "Much--much--MUCH. There now." "Oh, you think you're mighty smart, DON'T you? I could lick you with one hand tied behind me, if I wanted to." "Well why don't you DO it? You SAY you can do it." "Well I WILL, if you fool with me." "Oh yes--I've seen whole families in the same fix." "Smarty! You think you're SOME, now, DON'T you? Oh, what a hat!" "You can lump that hat if you don't like it. I dare you to knock it off--and anybody that'll take a dare will suck eggs." "You're a liar!" "You're another." "You're a fighting liar and dasn't take it up." "Aw--take a walk!" "Say--if you give me much more of your sass I'll take and bounce a rock off'n your head." "Oh, of COURSE you will." "Well I WILL." "Well why don't you DO it then? What do you keep SAYING you will for? Why don't you DO it? It's because you're afraid." "I AIN'T afraid." "You are." "I ain't." "You are." Another pause, and more eying and sidling around each other. Presently they were shoulder to shoulder. Tom said: "Get away from here!" "Go away yourself!" "I won't." "I won't either." So they stood, each with a foot placed at an angle as a brace, and both shoving with might and main, and glowering at each other with hate. But neither could get an advantage. After struggling till both were hot and flushed, each relaxed his strain with watchful caution, and Tom said: "You're a coward and a pup. I'll tell my big brother on you, and he can thrash you with his little finger, and I'll make him do it, too." "What do I care for your big brother? I've got a brother that's bigger than he is--and what's more, he can throw him over that fence, too." [Both brothers were imaginary.] "That's a lie." "YOUR saying so don't make it so." Tom drew a line in the dust with his big toe, and said: "I dare you to step over that, and I'll lick you till you can't stand up. Anybody that'll take a dare will steal sheep." The new boy stepped over promptly, and said: "Now you said you'd do it, now let's see you do it." "Don't you crowd me now; you better look out." "Well, you SAID you'd do it--why don't you do it?" "By jingo! for two cents I WILL do it." The new boy took two broad coppers out of his pocket and held them out with derision. Tom struck them to the ground. In an instant both boys were rolling and tumbling in the dirt, gripped together like cats; and for the space of a minute they tugged and tore at each other's hair and clothes, punched and scratched each other's nose, and covered themselves with dust and glory. Presently the confusion took form, and through the fog of battle Tom appeared, seated astride the new boy, and pounding him with his fists. "Holler 'nuff!" said he. The boy only struggled to free himself. He was crying--mainly from rage. "Holler 'nuff!"--and the pounding went on. At last the stranger got out a smothered "'Nuff!" and Tom let him up and said: "Now that'll learn you. Better look out who you're fooling with next time." The new boy went off brushing the dust from his clothes, sobbing, snuffling, and occasionally looking back and shaking his head and threatening what he would do to Tom the "next time he caught him out." To which Tom responded with jeers, and started off in high feather, and as soon as his back was turned the new boy snatched up a stone, threw it and hit him between the shoulders and then turned tail and ran like an antelope. Tom chased the traitor home, and thus found out where he lived. He then held a position at the gate for some time, daring the enemy to come outside, but the enemy only made faces at him through the window and declined. At last the enemy's mother appeared, and called Tom a bad, vicious, vulgar child, and ordered him away. So he went away; but he said he "'lowed" to "lay" for that boy. He got home pretty late that night, and when he climbed cautiously in at the window, he uncovered an ambuscade, in the person of his aunt; and when she saw the state his clothes were in her resolution to turn his Saturday holiday into captivity at hard labor became adamantine in its firmness. CHAPTER II SATURDAY morning was come, and all the summer world was bright and fresh, and brimming with life. There was a song in every heart; and if the heart was young the music issued at the lips. There was cheer in every face and a spring in every step. The locust-trees were in bloom and the fragrance of the blossoms filled the air. Cardiff Hill, beyond the village and above it, was green with vegetation and it lay just far enough away to seem a Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting. Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. Sighing, he dipped his brush and passed it along the topmost plank; repeated the operation; did it again; compared the insignificant whitewashed streak with the far-reaching continent of unwhitewashed fence, and sat down on a tree-box discouraged. Jim came skipping out at the gate with a tin pail, and singing Buffalo Gals. Bringing water from the town pump had always been hateful work in Tom's eyes, before, but now it did not strike him so. He remembered that there was company at the pump. White, mulatto, and negro boys and girls were always there waiting their turns, resting, trading playthings, quarrelling, fighting, skylarking. And he remembered that although the pump was only a hundred and fifty yards off, Jim never got back with a bucket of water under an hour--and even then somebody generally had to go after him. Tom said: "Say, Jim, I'll fetch the water if you'll whitewash some." Jim shook his head and said: "Can't, Mars Tom. Ole missis, she tole me I got to go an' git dis water an' not stop foolin' roun' wid anybody. She say she spec' Mars Tom gwine to ax me to whitewash, an' so she tole me go 'long an' 'tend to my own business--she 'lowed SHE'D 'tend to de whitewashin'." "Oh, never you mind what she said, Jim. That's the way she always talks. Gimme the bucket--I won't be gone only a a minute. SHE won't ever know." "Oh, I dasn't, Mars Tom. Ole missis she'd take an' tar de head off'n me. 'Deed she would." "SHE! She never licks anybody--whacks 'em over the head with her thimble--and who cares for that, I'd like to know. She talks awful, but talk don't hurt--anyways it don't if she don't cry. Jim, I'll give you a marvel. I'll give you a white alley!" Jim began to waver. "White alley, Jim! And it's a bully taw." "My! Dat's a mighty gay marvel, I tell you! But Mars Tom I's powerful 'fraid ole missis--" "And besides, if you will I'll show you my sore toe." Jim was only human--this attraction was too much for him. He put down his pail, took the white alley, and bent over the toe with absorbing interest while the bandage was being unwound. In another moment he was flying down the street with his pail and a tingling rear, Tom was whitewashing with vigor, and Aunt Polly was retiring from the field with a slipper in her hand and triumph in her eye. But Tom's energy did not last. He began to think of the fun he had planned for this day, and his sorrows multiplied. Soon the free boys would come tripping along on all sorts of delicious expeditions, and they would make a world of fun of him for having to work--the very thought of it burnt him like fire. He got out his worldly wealth and examined it--bits of toys, marbles, and trash; enough to buy an exchange of WORK, maybe, but not half enough to buy so much as half an hour of pure freedom. So he returned his straitened means to his pocket, and gave up the idea of trying to buy the boys. At this dark and hopeless moment an inspiration burst upon him! Nothing less than a great, magnificent inspiration. He took up his brush and went tranquilly to work. Ben Rogers hove in sight presently--the very boy, of all boys, whose ridicule he had been dreading. Ben's gait was the hop-skip-and-jump--proof enough that his heart was light and his anticipations high. He was eating an apple, and giving a long, melodious whoop, at intervals, followed by a deep-toned ding-dong-dong, ding-dong-dong, for he was personating a steamboat. As he drew near, he slackened speed, took the middle of the street, leaned far over to starboard and rounded to ponderously and with laborious pomp and circumstance--for he was personating the Big Missouri, and considered himself to be drawing nine feet of water. He was boat and captain and engine-bells combined, so he had to imagine himself standing on his own hurricane-deck giving the orders and executing them: "Stop her, sir! Ting-a-ling-ling!" The headway ran almost out, and he drew up slowly toward the sidewalk. "Ship up to back! Ting-a-ling-ling!" His arms straightened and stiffened down his sides. "Set her back on the stabboard! Ting-a-ling-ling! Chow! ch-chow-wow! Chow!" His right hand, meantime, describing stately circles--for it was representing a forty-foot wheel. "Let her go back on the labboard! Ting-a-lingling! Chow-ch-chow-chow!" The left hand began to describe circles. "Stop the stabboard! Ting-a-ling-ling! Stop the labboard! Come ahead on the stabboard! Stop her! Let your outside turn over slow! Ting-a-ling-ling! Chow-ow-ow! Get out that head-line! LIVELY now! Come--out with your spring-line--what're you about there! Take a turn round that stump with the bight of it! Stand by that stage, now--let her go! Done with the engines, sir! Ting-a-ling-ling! SH'T! S'H'T! SH'T!" (trying the gauge-cocks). Tom went on whitewashing--paid no attention to the steamboat. Ben stared a moment and then said: "Hi-YI! YOU'RE up a stump, ain't you!" No answer. Tom surveyed his last touch with the eye of an artist, then he gave his brush another gentle sweep and surveyed the result, as before. Ben ranged up alongside of him. Tom's mouth watered for the apple, but he stuck to his work. Ben said: "Hello, old chap, you got to work, hey?" Tom wheeled suddenly and said: "Why, it's you, Ben! I warn't noticing." "Say--I'm going in a-swimming, I am. Don't you wish you could? But of course you'd druther WORK--wouldn't you? Course you would!" Tom contemplated the boy a bit, and said: "What do you call work?" "Why, ain't THAT work?" Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered carelessly: "Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain't. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer." "Oh come, now, you don't mean to let on that you LIKE it?" The brush continued to move. "Like it? Well, I don't see why I oughtn't to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?" That put the thing in a new light. Ben stopped nibbling his apple. Tom swept his brush daintily back and forth--stepped back to note the effect--added a touch here and there--criticised the effect again--Ben watching every move and getting more and more interested, more and more absorbed. Presently he said: "Say, Tom, let ME whitewash a little." Tom considered, was about to consent; but he altered his mind: "No--no--I reckon it wouldn't hardly do, Ben. You see, Aunt Polly's awful particular about this fence--right here on the street, you know --but if it was the back fence I wouldn't mind and SHE wouldn't. Yes, she's awful particular about this fence; it's got to be done very careful; I reckon there ain't one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it's got to be done." "No--is that so? Oh come, now--lemme just try. Only just a little--I'd let YOU, if you was me, Tom." "Ben, I'd like to, honest injun; but Aunt Polly--well, Jim wanted to do it, but she wouldn't let him; Sid wanted to do it, and she wouldn't let Sid. Now don't you see how I'm fixed? If you was to tackle this fence and anything was to happen to it--" "Oh, shucks, I'll be just as careful. Now lemme try. Say--I'll give you the core of my apple." "Well, here--No, Ben, now don't. I'm afeard--" "I'll give you ALL of it!" Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart. And while the late steamer Big Missouri worked and sweated in the sun, the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by, dangled his legs, munched his apple, and planned the slaughter of more innocents. There was no lack of material; boys happened along every little while; they came to jeer, but remained to whitewash. By the time Ben was fagged out, Tom had traded the next chance to Billy Fisher for a kite, in good repair; and when he played out, Johnny Miller bought in for a dead rat and a string to swing it with--and so on, and so on, hour after hour. And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth. He had besides the things before mentioned, twelve marbles, part of a jews-harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through, a spool cannon, a key that wouldn't unlock anything, a fragment of chalk, a glass stopper of a decanter, a tin soldier, a couple of tadpoles, six fire-crackers, a kitten with only one eye, a brass doorknob, a dog-collar--but no dog--the handle of a knife, four pieces of orange-peel, and a dilapidated old window sash. He had had a nice, good, idle time all the while--plenty of company --and the fence had three coats of whitewash on it! If he hadn't run out of whitewash he would have bankrupted every boy in the village. Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it--namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign. The boy mused awhile over the substantial change which had taken place in his worldly circumstances, and then wended toward headquarters to report. CHAPTER III TOM presented himself before Aunt Polly, who was sitting by an open window in a pleasant rearward apartment, which was bedroom, breakfast-room, dining-room, and library, combined. The balmy summer air, the restful quiet, the odor of the flowers, and the drowsing murmur of the bees had had their effect, and she was nodding over her knitting --for she had no company but the cat, and it was asleep in her lap. Her spectacles were propped up on her gray head for safety. She had thought that of course Tom had deserted long ago, and she wondered at seeing him place himself in her power again in this intrepid way. He said: "Mayn't I go and play now, aunt?" "What, a'ready? How much have you done?" "It's all done, aunt." "Tom, don't lie to me--I can't bear it." "I ain't, aunt; it IS all done." Aunt Polly placed small trust in such evidence. She went out to see for herself; and she would have been content to find twenty per cent. of Tom's statement true. When she found the entire fence whitewashed, and not only whitewashed but elaborately coated and recoated, and even a streak added to the ground, her astonishment was almost unspeakable. She said: "Well, I never! There's no getting round it, you can work when you're a mind to, Tom." And then she diluted the compliment by adding, "But it's powerful seldom you're a mind to, I'm bound to say. Well, go 'long and play; but mind you get back some time in a week, or I'll tan you." She was so overcome by the splendor of his achievement that she took him into the closet and selected a choice apple and delivered it to him, along with an improving lecture upon the added value and flavor a treat took to itself when it came without sin through virtuous effort. And while she closed with a happy Scriptural flourish, he "hooked" a doughnut. Then he skipped out, and saw Sid just starting up the outside stairway that led to the back rooms on the second floor. Clods were handy and the air was full of them in a twinkling. They raged around Sid like a hail-storm; and before Aunt Polly could collect her surprised faculties and sally to the rescue, six or seven clods had taken personal effect, and Tom was over the fence and gone. There was a gate, but as a general thing he was too crowded for time to make use of it. His soul was at peace, now that he had settled with Sid for calling attention to his black thread and getting him into trouble. Tom skirted the block, and came round into a muddy alley that led by the back of his aunt's cow-stable. He presently got safely beyond the reach of capture and punishment, and hastened toward the public square of the village, where two "military" companies of boys had met for conflict, according to previous appointment. Tom was General of one of these armies, Joe Harper (a bosom friend) General of the other. These two great commanders did not condescend to fight in person--that being better suited to the still smaller fry--but sat together on an eminence and conducted the field operations by orders delivered through aides-de-camp. Tom's army won a great victory, after a long and hard-fought battle. Then the dead were counted, prisoners exchanged, the terms of the next disagreement agreed upon, and the day for the necessary battle appointed; after which the armies fell into line and marched away, and Tom turned homeward alone. As he was passing by the house where Jeff Thatcher lived, he saw a new girl in the garden--a lovely little blue-eyed creature with yellow hair plaited into two long-tails, white summer frock and embroidered pantalettes. The fresh-crowned hero fell without firing a shot. A certain Amy Lawrence vanished out of his heart and left not even a memory of herself behind. He had thought he loved her to distraction; he had regarded his passion as adoration; and behold it was only a poor little evanescent partiality. He had been months winning her; she had confessed hardly a week ago; he had been the happiest and the proudest boy in the world only seven short days, and here in one instant of time she had gone out of his heart like a casual stranger whose visit is done. He worshipped this new angel with furtive eye, till he saw that she had discovered him; then he pretended he did not know she was present, and began to "show off" in all sorts of absurd boyish ways, in order to win her admiration. He kept up this grotesque foolishness for some time; but by-and-by, while he was in the midst of some dangerous gymnastic performances, he glanced aside and saw that the little girl was wending her way toward the house. Tom came up to the fence and leaned on it, grieving, and hoping she would tarry yet awhile longer. She halted a moment on the steps and then moved toward the door. Tom heaved a great sigh as she put her foot on the threshold. But his face lit up, right away, for she tossed a pansy over the fence a moment before she disappeared. The boy ran around and stopped within a foot or two of the flower, and then shaded his eyes with his hand and began to look down street as if he had discovered something of interest going on in that direction. Presently he picked up a straw and began trying to balance it on his nose, with his head tilted far back; and as he moved from side to side, in his efforts, he edged nearer and nearer toward the pansy; finally his bare foot rested upon it, his pliant toes closed upon it, and he hopped away with the treasure and disappeared round the corner. But only for a minute--only while he could button the flower inside his jacket, next his heart--or next his stomach, possibly, for he was not much posted in anatomy, and not hypercritical, anyway. He returned, now, and hung about the fence till nightfall, "showing off," as before; but the girl never exhibited herself again, though Tom comforted himself a little with the hope that she had been near some window, meantime, and been aware of his attentions. Finally he strode home reluctantly, with his poor head full of visions. All through supper his spirits were so high that his aunt wondered "what had got into the child." He took a good scolding about clodding Sid, and did not seem to mind it in the least. He tried to steal sugar under his aunt's very nose, and got his knuckles rapped for it. He said: "Aunt, you don't whack Sid when he takes it." "Well, Sid don't torment a body the way you do. You'd be always into that sugar if I warn't watching you." Presently she stepped into the kitchen, and Sid, happy in his immunity, reached for the sugar-bowl--a sort of glorying over Tom which was wellnigh unbearable. But Sid's fingers slipped and the bowl dropped and broke. Tom was in ecstasies. In such ecstasies that he even controlled his tongue and was silent. He said to himself that he would not speak a word, even when his aunt came in, but would sit perfectly still till she asked who did the mischief; and then he would tell, and there would be nothing so good in the world as to see that pet model "catch it." He was so brimful of exultation that he could hardly hold himself when the old lady came back and stood above the wreck discharging lightnings of wrath from over her spectacles. He said to himself, "Now it's coming!" And the next instant he was sprawling on the floor! The potent palm was uplifted to strike again when Tom cried out: "Hold on, now, what 'er you belting ME for?--Sid broke it!" Aunt Polly paused, perplexed, and Tom looked for healing pity. But when she got her tongue again, she only said: "Umf! Well, you didn't get a lick amiss, I reckon. You been into some other audacious mischief when I wasn't around, like enough." Then her conscience reproached her, and she yearned to say something kind and loving; but she judged that this would be construed into a confession that she had been in the wrong, and discipline forbade that. So she kept silence, and went about her affairs with a troubled heart. Tom sulked in a corner and exalted his woes. He knew that in her heart his aunt was on her knees to him, and he was morosely gratified by the consciousness of it. He would hang out no signals, he would take notice of none. He knew that a yearning glance fell upon him, now and then, through a film of tears, but he refused recognition of it. He pictured himself lying sick unto death and his aunt bending over him beseeching one little forgiving word, but he would turn his face to the wall, and die with that word unsaid. Ah, how would she feel then? And he pictured himself brought home from the river, dead, with his curls all wet, and his sore heart at rest. How she would throw herself upon him, and how her tears would fall like rain, and her lips pray God to give her back her boy and she would never, never abuse him any more! But he would lie there cold and white and make no sign--a poor little sufferer, whose griefs were at an end. He so worked upon his feelings with the pathos of these dreams, that he had to keep swallowing, he was so like to choke; and his eyes swam in a blur of water, which overflowed when he winked, and ran down and trickled from the end of his nose. And such a luxury to him was this petting of his sorrows, that he could not bear to have any worldly cheeriness or any grating delight intrude upon it; it was too sacred for such contact; and so, presently, when his cousin Mary danced in, all alive with the joy of seeing home again after an age-long visit of one week to the country, he got up and moved in clouds and darkness out at one door as she brought song and sunshine in at the other. He wandered far from the accustomed haunts of boys, and sought desolate places that were in harmony with his spirit. A log raft in the river invited him, and he seated himself on its outer edge and contemplated the dreary vastness of the stream, wishing, the while, that he could only be drowned, all at once and unconsciously, without undergoing the uncomfortable routine devised by nature. Then he thought of his flower. He got it out, rumpled and wilted, and it mightily increased his dismal felicity. He wondered if she would pity him if she knew? Would she cry, and wish that she had a right to put her arms around his neck and comfort him? Or would she turn coldly away like all the hollow world? This picture brought such an agony of pleasurable suffering that he worked it over and over again in his mind and set it up in new and varied lights, till he wore it threadbare. At last he rose up sighing and departed in the darkness. About half-past nine or ten o'clock he came along the deserted street to where the Adored Unknown lived; he paused a moment; no sound fell upon his listening ear; a candle was casting a dull glow upon the curtain of a second-story window. Was the sacred presence there? He climbed the fence, threaded his stealthy way through the plants, till he stood under that window; he looked up at it long, and with emotion; then he laid him down on the ground under it, disposing himself upon his back, with his hands clasped upon his breast and holding his poor wilted flower. And thus he would die--out in the cold world, with no shelter over his homeless head, no friendly hand to wipe the death-damps from his brow, no loving face to bend pityingly over him when the great agony came. And thus SHE would see him when she looked out upon the glad morning, and oh! would she drop one little tear upon his poor, lifeless form, would she heave one little sigh to see a bright young life so rudely blighted, so untimely cut down? The window went up, a maid-servant's discordant voice profaned the holy calm, and a deluge of water drenched the prone martyr's remains! The strangling hero sprang up with a relieving snort. There was a whiz as of a missile in the air, mingled with the murmur of a curse, a sound as of shivering glass followed, and a small, vague form went over the fence and shot away in the gloom. Not long after, as Tom, all undressed for bed, was surveying his drenched garments by the light of a tallow dip, Sid woke up; but if he had any dim idea of making any "references to allusions," he thought better of it and held his peace, for there was danger in Tom's eye. Tom turned in without the added vexation of prayers, and Sid made mental note of the omission. 
7194	----	THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER BY MARK TWAIN (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) Part 2 CHAPTER IV THE sun rose upon a tranquil world, and beamed down upon the peaceful village like a benediction. Breakfast over, Aunt Polly had family worship: it began with a prayer built from the ground up of solid courses of Scriptural quotations, welded together with a thin mortar of originality; and from the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter of the Mosaic Law, as from Sinai. Then Tom girded up his loins, so to speak, and went to work to "get his verses." Sid had learned his lesson days before. Tom bent all his energies to the memorizing of five verses, and he chose part of the Sermon on the Mount, because he could find no verses that were shorter. At the end of half an hour Tom had a vague general idea of his lesson, but no more, for his mind was traversing the whole field of human thought, and his hands were busy with distracting recreations. Mary took his book to hear him recite, and he tried to find his way through the fog: "Blessed are the--a--a--" "Poor"-- "Yes--poor; blessed are the poor--a--a--" "In spirit--" "In spirit; blessed are the poor in spirit, for they--they--" "THEIRS--" "For THEIRS. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn, for they--they--" "Sh--" "For they--a--" "S, H, A--" "For they S, H--Oh, I don't know what it is!" "SHALL!" "Oh, SHALL! for they shall--for they shall--a--a--shall mourn--a--a-- blessed are they that shall--they that--a--they that shall mourn, for they shall--a--shall WHAT? Why don't you tell me, Mary?--what do you want to be so mean for?" "Oh, Tom, you poor thick-headed thing, I'm not teasing you. I wouldn't do that. You must go and learn it again. Don't you be discouraged, Tom, you'll manage it--and if you do, I'll give you something ever so nice. There, now, that's a good boy." "All right! What is it, Mary, tell me what it is." "Never you mind, Tom. You know if I say it's nice, it is nice." "You bet you that's so, Mary. All right, I'll tackle it again." And he did "tackle it again"--and under the double pressure of curiosity and prospective gain he did it with such spirit that he accomplished a shining success. Mary gave him a brand-new "Barlow" knife worth twelve and a half cents; and the convulsion of delight that swept his system shook him to his foundations. True, the knife would not cut anything, but it was a "sure-enough" Barlow, and there was inconceivable grandeur in that--though where the Western boys ever got the idea that such a weapon could possibly be counterfeited to its injury is an imposing mystery and will always remain so, perhaps. Tom contrived to scarify the cupboard with it, and was arranging to begin on the bureau, when he was called off to dress for Sunday-school. Mary gave him a tin basin of water and a piece of soap, and he went outside the door and set the basin on a little bench there; then he dipped the soap in the water and laid it down; turned up his sleeves; poured out the water on the ground, gently, and then entered the kitchen and began to wipe his face diligently on the towel behind the door. But Mary removed the towel and said: "Now ain't you ashamed, Tom. You mustn't be so bad. Water won't hurt you." Tom was a trifle disconcerted. The basin was refilled, and this time he stood over it a little while, gathering resolution; took in a big breath and began. When he entered the kitchen presently, with both eyes shut and groping for the towel with his hands, an honorable testimony of suds and water was dripping from his face. But when he emerged from the towel, he was not yet satisfactory, for the clean territory stopped short at his chin and his jaws, like a mask; below and beyond this line there was a dark expanse of unirrigated soil that spread downward in front and backward around his neck. Mary took him in hand, and when she was done with him he was a man and a brother, without distinction of color, and his saturated hair was neatly brushed, and its short curls wrought into a dainty and symmetrical general effect. [He privately smoothed out the curls, with labor and difficulty, and plastered his hair close down to his head; for he held curls to be effeminate, and his own filled his life with bitterness.] Then Mary got out a suit of his clothing that had been used only on Sundays during two years--they were simply called his "other clothes"--and so by that we know the size of his wardrobe. The girl "put him to rights" after he had dressed himself; she buttoned his neat roundabout up to his chin, turned his vast shirt collar down over his shoulders, brushed him off and crowned him with his speckled straw hat. He now looked exceedingly improved and uncomfortable. He was fully as uncomfortable as he looked; for there was a restraint about whole clothes and cleanliness that galled him. He hoped that Mary would forget his shoes, but the hope was blighted; she coated them thoroughly with tallow, as was the custom, and brought them out. He lost his temper and said he was always being made to do everything he didn't want to do. But Mary said, persuasively: "Please, Tom--that's a good boy." So he got into the shoes snarling. Mary was soon ready, and the three children set out for Sunday-school--a place that Tom hated with his whole heart; but Sid and Mary were fond of it. Sabbath-school hours were from nine to half-past ten; and then church service. Two of the children always remained for the sermon voluntarily, and the other always remained too--for stronger reasons. The church's high-backed, uncushioned pews would seat about three hundred persons; the edifice was but a small, plain affair, with a sort of pine board tree-box on top of it for a steeple. At the door Tom dropped back a step and accosted a Sunday-dressed comrade: "Say, Billy, got a yaller ticket?" "Yes." "What'll you take for her?" "What'll you give?" "Piece of lickrish and a fish-hook." "Less see 'em." Tom exhibited. They were satisfactory, and the property changed hands. Then Tom traded a couple of white alleys for three red tickets, and some small trifle or other for a couple of blue ones. He waylaid other boys as they came, and went on buying tickets of various colors ten or fifteen minutes longer. He entered the church, now, with a swarm of clean and noisy boys and girls, proceeded to his seat and started a quarrel with the first boy that came handy. The teacher, a grave, elderly man, interfered; then turned his back a moment and Tom pulled a boy's hair in the next bench, and was absorbed in his book when the boy turned around; stuck a pin in another boy, presently, in order to hear him say "Ouch!" and got a new reprimand from his teacher. Tom's whole class were of a pattern--restless, noisy, and troublesome. When they came to recite their lessons, not one of them knew his verses perfectly, but had to be prompted all along. However, they worried through, and each got his reward--in small blue tickets, each with a passage of Scripture on it; each blue ticket was pay for two verses of the recitation. Ten blue tickets equalled a red one, and could be exchanged for it; ten red tickets equalled a yellow one; for ten yellow tickets the superintendent gave a very plainly bound Bible (worth forty cents in those easy times) to the pupil. How many of my readers would have the industry and application to memorize two thousand verses, even for a Dore Bible? And yet Mary had acquired two Bibles in this way--it was the patient work of two years--and a boy of German parentage had won four or five. He once recited three thousand verses without stopping; but the strain upon his mental faculties was too great, and he was little better than an idiot from that day forth--a grievous misfortune for the school, for on great occasions, before company, the superintendent (as Tom expressed it) had always made this boy come out and "spread himself." Only the older pupils managed to keep their tickets and stick to their tedious work long enough to get a Bible, and so the delivery of one of these prizes was a rare and noteworthy circumstance; the successful pupil was so great and conspicuous for that day that on the spot every scholar's heart was fired with a fresh ambition that often lasted a couple of weeks. It is possible that Tom's mental stomach had never really hungered for one of those prizes, but unquestionably his entire being had for many a day longed for the glory and the eclat that came with it. In due course the superintendent stood up in front of the pulpit, with a closed hymn-book in his hand and his forefinger inserted between its leaves, and commanded attention. When a Sunday-school superintendent makes his customary little speech, a hymn-book in the hand is as necessary as is the inevitable sheet of music in the hand of a singer who stands forward on the platform and sings a solo at a concert --though why, is a mystery: for neither the hymn-book nor the sheet of music is ever referred to by the sufferer. This superintendent was a slim creature of thirty-five, with a sandy goatee and short sandy hair; he wore a stiff standing-collar whose upper edge almost reached his ears and whose sharp points curved forward abreast the corners of his mouth--a fence that compelled a straight lookout ahead, and a turning of the whole body when a side view was required; his chin was propped on a spreading cravat which was as broad and as long as a bank-note, and had fringed ends; his boot toes were turned sharply up, in the fashion of the day, like sleigh-runners--an effect patiently and laboriously produced by the young men by sitting with their toes pressed against a wall for hours together. Mr. Walters was very earnest of mien, and very sincere and honest at heart; and he held sacred things and places in such reverence, and so separated them from worldly matters, that unconsciously to himself his Sunday-school voice had acquired a peculiar intonation which was wholly absent on week-days. He began after this fashion: "Now, children, I want you all to sit up just as straight and pretty as you can and give me all your attention for a minute or two. There --that is it. That is the way good little boys and girls should do. I see one little girl who is looking out of the window--I am afraid she thinks I am out there somewhere--perhaps up in one of the trees making a speech to the little birds. [Applausive titter.] I want to tell you how good it makes me feel to see so many bright, clean little faces assembled in a place like this, learning to do right and be good." And so forth and so on. It is not necessary to set down the rest of the oration. It was of a pattern which does not vary, and so it is familiar to us all. The latter third of the speech was marred by the resumption of fights and other recreations among certain of the bad boys, and by fidgetings and whisperings that extended far and wide, washing even to the bases of isolated and incorruptible rocks like Sid and Mary. But now every sound ceased suddenly, with the subsidence of Mr. Walters' voice, and the conclusion of the speech was received with a burst of silent gratitude. A good part of the whispering had been occasioned by an event which was more or less rare--the entrance of visitors: lawyer Thatcher, accompanied by a very feeble and aged man; a fine, portly, middle-aged gentleman with iron-gray hair; and a dignified lady who was doubtless the latter's wife. The lady was leading a child. Tom had been restless and full of chafings and repinings; conscience-smitten, too--he could not meet Amy Lawrence's eye, he could not brook her loving gaze. But when he saw this small new-comer his soul was all ablaze with bliss in a moment. The next moment he was "showing off" with all his might --cuffing boys, pulling hair, making faces--in a word, using every art that seemed likely to fascinate a girl and win her applause. His exaltation had but one alloy--the memory of his humiliation in this angel's garden--and that record in sand was fast washing out, under the waves of happiness that were sweeping over it now. The visitors were given the highest seat of honor, and as soon as Mr. Walters' speech was finished, he introduced them to the school. The middle-aged man turned out to be a prodigious personage--no less a one than the county judge--altogether the most august creation these children had ever looked upon--and they wondered what kind of material he was made of--and they half wanted to hear him roar, and were half afraid he might, too. He was from Constantinople, twelve miles away--so he had travelled, and seen the world--these very eyes had looked upon the county court-house--which was said to have a tin roof. The awe which these reflections inspired was attested by the impressive silence and the ranks of staring eyes. This was the great Judge Thatcher, brother of their own lawyer. Jeff Thatcher immediately went forward, to be familiar with the great man and be envied by the school. It would have been music to his soul to hear the whisperings: "Look at him, Jim! He's a going up there. Say--look! he's a going to shake hands with him--he IS shaking hands with him! By jings, don't you wish you was Jeff?" Mr. Walters fell to "showing off," with all sorts of official bustlings and activities, giving orders, delivering judgments, discharging directions here, there, everywhere that he could find a target. The librarian "showed off"--running hither and thither with his arms full of books and making a deal of the splutter and fuss that insect authority delights in. The young lady teachers "showed off" --bending sweetly over pupils that were lately being boxed, lifting pretty warning fingers at bad little boys and patting good ones lovingly. The young gentlemen teachers "showed off" with small scoldings and other little displays of authority and fine attention to discipline--and most of the teachers, of both sexes, found business up at the library, by the pulpit; and it was business that frequently had to be done over again two or three times (with much seeming vexation). The little girls "showed off" in various ways, and the little boys "showed off" with such diligence that the air was thick with paper wads and the murmur of scufflings. And above it all the great man sat and beamed a majestic judicial smile upon all the house, and warmed himself in the sun of his own grandeur--for he was "showing off," too. There was only one thing wanting to make Mr. Walters' ecstasy complete, and that was a chance to deliver a Bible-prize and exhibit a prodigy. Several pupils had a few yellow tickets, but none had enough --he had been around among the star pupils inquiring. He would have given worlds, now, to have that German lad back again with a sound mind. And now at this moment, when hope was dead, Tom Sawyer came forward with nine yellow tickets, nine red tickets, and ten blue ones, and demanded a Bible. This was a thunderbolt out of a clear sky. Walters was not expecting an application from this source for the next ten years. But there was no getting around it--here were the certified checks, and they were good for their face. Tom was therefore elevated to a place with the Judge and the other elect, and the great news was announced from headquarters. It was the most stunning surprise of the decade, and so profound was the sensation that it lifted the new hero up to the judicial one's altitude, and the school had two marvels to gaze upon in place of one. The boys were all eaten up with envy--but those that suffered the bitterest pangs were those who perceived too late that they themselves had contributed to this hated splendor by trading tickets to Tom for the wealth he had amassed in selling whitewashing privileges. These despised themselves, as being the dupes of a wily fraud, a guileful snake in the grass. The prize was delivered to Tom with as much effusion as the superintendent could pump up under the circumstances; but it lacked somewhat of the true gush, for the poor fellow's instinct taught him that there was a mystery here that could not well bear the light, perhaps; it was simply preposterous that this boy had warehoused two thousand sheaves of Scriptural wisdom on his premises--a dozen would strain his capacity, without a doubt. Amy Lawrence was proud and glad, and she tried to make Tom see it in her face--but he wouldn't look. She wondered; then she was just a grain troubled; next a dim suspicion came and went--came again; she watched; a furtive glance told her worlds--and then her heart broke, and she was jealous, and angry, and the tears came and she hated everybody. Tom most of all (she thought). Tom was introduced to the Judge; but his tongue was tied, his breath would hardly come, his heart quaked--partly because of the awful greatness of the man, but mainly because he was her parent. He would have liked to fall down and worship him, if it were in the dark. The Judge put his hand on Tom's head and called him a fine little man, and asked him what his name was. The boy stammered, gasped, and got it out: "Tom." "Oh, no, not Tom--it is--" "Thomas." "Ah, that's it. I thought there was more to it, maybe. That's very well. But you've another one I daresay, and you'll tell it to me, won't you?" "Tell the gentleman your other name, Thomas," said Walters, "and say sir. You mustn't forget your manners." "Thomas Sawyer--sir." "That's it! That's a good boy. Fine boy. Fine, manly little fellow. Two thousand verses is a great many--very, very great many. And you never can be sorry for the trouble you took to learn them; for knowledge is worth more than anything there is in the world; it's what makes great men and good men; you'll be a great man and a good man yourself, some day, Thomas, and then you'll look back and say, It's all owing to the precious Sunday-school privileges of my boyhood--it's all owing to my dear teachers that taught me to learn--it's all owing to the good superintendent, who encouraged me, and watched over me, and gave me a beautiful Bible--a splendid elegant Bible--to keep and have it all for my own, always--it's all owing to right bringing up! That is what you will say, Thomas--and you wouldn't take any money for those two thousand verses--no indeed you wouldn't. And now you wouldn't mind telling me and this lady some of the things you've learned--no, I know you wouldn't--for we are proud of little boys that learn. Now, no doubt you know the names of all the twelve disciples. Won't you tell us the names of the first two that were appointed?" Tom was tugging at a button-hole and looking sheepish. He blushed, now, and his eyes fell. Mr. Walters' heart sank within him. He said to himself, it is not possible that the boy can answer the simplest question--why DID the Judge ask him? Yet he felt obliged to speak up and say: "Answer the gentleman, Thomas--don't be afraid." Tom still hung fire. "Now I know you'll tell me," said the lady. "The names of the first two disciples were--" "DAVID AND GOLIAH!" Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of the scene. CHAPTER V ABOUT half-past ten the cracked bell of the small church began to ring, and presently the people began to gather for the morning sermon. The Sunday-school children distributed themselves about the house and occupied pews with their parents, so as to be under supervision. Aunt Polly came, and Tom and Sid and Mary sat with her--Tom being placed next the aisle, in order that he might be as far away from the open window and the seductive outside summer scenes as possible. The crowd filed up the aisles: the aged and needy postmaster, who had seen better days; the mayor and his wife--for they had a mayor there, among other unnecessaries; the justice of the peace; the widow Douglass, fair, smart, and forty, a generous, good-hearted soul and well-to-do, her hill mansion the only palace in the town, and the most hospitable and much the most lavish in the matter of festivities that St. Petersburg could boast; the bent and venerable Major and Mrs. Ward; lawyer Riverson, the new notable from a distance; next the belle of the village, followed by a troop of lawn-clad and ribbon-decked young heart-breakers; then all the young clerks in town in a body--for they had stood in the vestibule sucking their cane-heads, a circling wall of oiled and simpering admirers, till the last girl had run their gantlet; and last of all came the Model Boy, Willie Mufferson, taking as heedful care of his mother as if she were cut glass. He always brought his mother to church, and was the pride of all the matrons. The boys all hated him, he was so good. And besides, he had been "thrown up to them" so much. His white handkerchief was hanging out of his pocket behind, as usual on Sundays--accidentally. Tom had no handkerchief, and he looked upon boys who had as snobs. The congregation being fully assembled, now, the bell rang once more, to warn laggards and stragglers, and then a solemn hush fell upon the church which was only broken by the tittering and whispering of the choir in the gallery. The choir always tittered and whispered all through service. There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred, but I have forgotten where it was, now. It was a great many years ago, and I can scarcely remember anything about it, but I think it was in some foreign country. The minister gave out the hymn, and read it through with a relish, in a peculiar style which was much admired in that part of the country. His voice began on a medium key and climbed steadily up till it reached a certain point, where it bore with strong emphasis upon the topmost word and then plunged down as if from a spring-board: Shall I be car-ri-ed toe the skies, on flow'ry BEDS of ease, Whilst others fight to win the prize, and sail thro' BLOODY seas? He was regarded as a wonderful reader. At church "sociables" he was always called upon to read poetry; and when he was through, the ladies would lift up their hands and let them fall helplessly in their laps, and "wall" their eyes, and shake their heads, as much as to say, "Words cannot express it; it is too beautiful, TOO beautiful for this mortal earth." After the hymn had been sung, the Rev. Mr. Sprague turned himself into a bulletin-board, and read off "notices" of meetings and societies and things till it seemed that the list would stretch out to the crack of doom--a queer custom which is still kept up in America, even in cities, away here in this age of abundant newspapers. Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it. And now the minister prayed. A good, generous prayer it was, and went into details: it pleaded for the church, and the little children of the church; for the other churches of the village; for the village itself; for the county; for the State; for the State officers; for the United States; for the churches of the United States; for Congress; for the President; for the officers of the Government; for poor sailors, tossed by stormy seas; for the oppressed millions groaning under the heel of European monarchies and Oriental despotisms; for such as have the light and the good tidings, and yet have not eyes to see nor ears to hear withal; for the heathen in the far islands of the sea; and closed with a supplication that the words he was about to speak might find grace and favor, and be as seed sown in fertile ground, yielding in time a grateful harvest of good. Amen. There was a rustling of dresses, and the standing congregation sat down. The boy whose history this book relates did not enjoy the prayer, he only endured it--if he even did that much. He was restive all through it; he kept tally of the details of the prayer, unconsciously --for he was not listening, but he knew the ground of old, and the clergyman's regular route over it--and when a little trifle of new matter was interlarded, his ear detected it and his whole nature resented it; he considered additions unfair, and scoundrelly. In the midst of the prayer a fly had lit on the back of the pew in front of him and tortured his spirit by calmly rubbing its hands together, embracing its head with its arms, and polishing it so vigorously that it seemed to almost part company with the body, and the slender thread of a neck was exposed to view; scraping its wings with its hind legs and smoothing them to its body as if they had been coat-tails; going through its whole toilet as tranquilly as if it knew it was perfectly safe. As indeed it was; for as sorely as Tom's hands itched to grab for it they did not dare--he believed his soul would be instantly destroyed if he did such a thing while the prayer was going on. But with the closing sentence his hand began to curve and steal forward; and the instant the "Amen" was out the fly was a prisoner of war. His aunt detected the act and made him let it go. The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod --and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving. Tom counted the pages of the sermon; after church he always knew how many pages there had been, but he seldom knew anything else about the discourse. However, this time he was really interested for a little while. The minister made a grand and moving picture of the assembling together of the world's hosts at the millennium when the lion and the lamb should lie down together and a little child should lead them. But the pathos, the lesson, the moral of the great spectacle were lost upon the boy; he only thought of the conspicuousness of the principal character before the on-looking nations; his face lit with the thought, and he said to himself that he wished he could be that child, if it was a tame lion. Now he lapsed into suffering again, as the dry argument was resumed. Presently he bethought him of a treasure he had and got it out. It was a large black beetle with formidable jaws--a "pinchbug," he called it. It was in a percussion-cap box. The first thing the beetle did was to take him by the finger. A natural fillip followed, the beetle went floundering into the aisle and lit on its back, and the hurt finger went into the boy's mouth. The beetle lay there working its helpless legs, unable to turn over. Tom eyed it, and longed for it; but it was safe out of his reach. Other people uninterested in the sermon found relief in the beetle, and they eyed it too. Presently a vagrant poodle dog came idling along, sad at heart, lazy with the summer softness and the quiet, weary of captivity, sighing for change. He spied the beetle; the drooping tail lifted and wagged. He surveyed the prize; walked around it; smelt at it from a safe distance; walked around it again; grew bolder, and took a closer smell; then lifted his lip and made a gingerly snatch at it, just missing it; made another, and another; began to enjoy the diversion; subsided to his stomach with the beetle between his paws, and continued his experiments; grew weary at last, and then indifferent and absent-minded. His head nodded, and little by little his chin descended and touched the enemy, who seized it. There was a sharp yelp, a flirt of the poodle's head, and the beetle fell a couple of yards away, and lit on its back once more. The neighboring spectators shook with a gentle inward joy, several faces went behind fans and handkerchiefs, and Tom was entirely happy. The dog looked foolish, and probably felt so; but there was resentment in his heart, too, and a craving for revenge. So he went to the beetle and began a wary attack on it again; jumping at it from every point of a circle, lighting with his fore-paws within an inch of the creature, making even closer snatches at it with his teeth, and jerking his head till his ears flapped again. But he grew tired once more, after a while; tried to amuse himself with a fly but found no relief; followed an ant around, with his nose close to the floor, and quickly wearied of that; yawned, sighed, forgot the beetle entirely, and sat down on it. Then there was a wild yelp of agony and the poodle went sailing up the aisle; the yelps continued, and so did the dog; he crossed the house in front of the altar; he flew down the other aisle; he crossed before the doors; he clamored up the home-stretch; his anguish grew with his progress, till presently he was but a woolly comet moving in its orbit with the gleam and the speed of light. At last the frantic sufferer sheered from its course, and sprang into its master's lap; he flung it out of the window, and the voice of distress quickly thinned away and died in the distance. By this time the whole church was red-faced and suffocating with suppressed laughter, and the sermon had come to a dead standstill. The discourse was resumed presently, but it went lame and halting, all possibility of impressiveness being at an end; for even the gravest sentiments were constantly being received with a smothered burst of unholy mirth, under cover of some remote pew-back, as if the poor parson had said a rarely facetious thing. It was a genuine relief to the whole congregation when the ordeal was over and the benediction pronounced. Tom Sawyer went home quite cheerful, thinking to himself that there was some satisfaction about divine service when there was a bit of variety in it. He had but one marring thought; he was willing that the dog should play with his pinchbug, but he did not think it was upright in him to carry it off. CHAPTER VI MONDAY morning found Tom Sawyer miserable. Monday morning always found him so--because it began another week's slow suffering in school. He generally began that day with wishing he had had no intervening holiday, it made the going into captivity and fetters again so much more odious. Tom lay thinking. Presently it occurred to him that he wished he was sick; then he could stay home from school. Here was a vague possibility. He canvassed his system. No ailment was found, and he investigated again. This time he thought he could detect colicky symptoms, and he began to encourage them with considerable hope. But they soon grew feeble, and presently died wholly away. He reflected further. Suddenly he discovered something. One of his upper front teeth was loose. This was lucky; he was about to begin to groan, as a "starter," as he called it, when it occurred to him that if he came into court with that argument, his aunt would pull it out, and that would hurt. So he thought he would hold the tooth in reserve for the present, and seek further. Nothing offered for some little time, and then he remembered hearing the doctor tell about a certain thing that laid up a patient for two or three weeks and threatened to make him lose a finger. So the boy eagerly drew his sore toe from under the sheet and held it up for inspection. But now he did not know the necessary symptoms. However, it seemed well worth while to chance it, so he fell to groaning with considerable spirit. But Sid slept on unconscious. Tom groaned louder, and fancied that he began to feel pain in the toe. No result from Sid. Tom was panting with his exertions by this time. He took a rest and then swelled himself up and fetched a succession of admirable groans. Sid snored on. Tom was aggravated. He said, "Sid, Sid!" and shook him. This course worked well, and Tom began to groan again. Sid yawned, stretched, then brought himself up on his elbow with a snort, and began to stare at Tom. Tom went on groaning. Sid said: "Tom! Say, Tom!" [No response.] "Here, Tom! TOM! What is the matter, Tom?" And he shook him and looked in his face anxiously. Tom moaned out: "Oh, don't, Sid. Don't joggle me." "Why, what's the matter, Tom? I must call auntie." "No--never mind. It'll be over by and by, maybe. Don't call anybody." "But I must! DON'T groan so, Tom, it's awful. How long you been this way?" "Hours. Ouch! Oh, don't stir so, Sid, you'll kill me." "Tom, why didn't you wake me sooner? Oh, Tom, DON'T! It makes my flesh crawl to hear you. Tom, what is the matter?" "I forgive you everything, Sid. [Groan.] Everything you've ever done to me. When I'm gone--" "Oh, Tom, you ain't dying, are you? Don't, Tom--oh, don't. Maybe--" "I forgive everybody, Sid. [Groan.] Tell 'em so, Sid. And Sid, you give my window-sash and my cat with one eye to that new girl that's come to town, and tell her--" But Sid had snatched his clothes and gone. Tom was suffering in reality, now, so handsomely was his imagination working, and so his groans had gathered quite a genuine tone. Sid flew down-stairs and said: "Oh, Aunt Polly, come! Tom's dying!" "Dying!" "Yes'm. Don't wait--come quick!" "Rubbage! I don't believe it!" But she fled up-stairs, nevertheless, with Sid and Mary at her heels. And her face grew white, too, and her lip trembled. When she reached the bedside she gasped out: "You, Tom! Tom, what's the matter with you?" "Oh, auntie, I'm--" "What's the matter with you--what is the matter with you, child?" "Oh, auntie, my sore toe's mortified!" The old lady sank down into a chair and laughed a little, then cried a little, then did both together. This restored her and she said: "Tom, what a turn you did give me. Now you shut up that nonsense and climb out of this." The groans ceased and the pain vanished from the toe. The boy felt a little foolish, and he said: "Aunt Polly, it SEEMED mortified, and it hurt so I never minded my tooth at all." "Your tooth, indeed! What's the matter with your tooth?" "One of them's loose, and it aches perfectly awful." "There, there, now, don't begin that groaning again. Open your mouth. Well--your tooth IS loose, but you're not going to die about that. Mary, get me a silk thread, and a chunk of fire out of the kitchen." Tom said: "Oh, please, auntie, don't pull it out. It don't hurt any more. I wish I may never stir if it does. Please don't, auntie. I don't want to stay home from school." "Oh, you don't, don't you? So all this row was because you thought you'd get to stay home from school and go a-fishing? Tom, Tom, I love you so, and you seem to try every way you can to break my old heart with your outrageousness." By this time the dental instruments were ready. The old lady made one end of the silk thread fast to Tom's tooth with a loop and tied the other to the bedpost. Then she seized the chunk of fire and suddenly thrust it almost into the boy's face. The tooth hung dangling by the bedpost, now. But all trials bring their compensations. As Tom wended to school after breakfast, he was the envy of every boy he met because the gap in his upper row of teeth enabled him to expectorate in a new and admirable way. He gathered quite a following of lads interested in the exhibition; and one that had cut his finger and had been a centre of fascination and homage up to this time, now found himself suddenly without an adherent, and shorn of his glory. His heart was heavy, and he said with a disdain which he did not feel that it wasn't anything to spit like Tom Sawyer; but another boy said, "Sour grapes!" and he wandered away a dismantled hero. Shortly Tom came upon the juvenile pariah of the village, Huckleberry Finn, son of the town drunkard. Huckleberry was cordially hated and dreaded by all the mothers of the town, because he was idle and lawless and vulgar and bad--and because all their children admired him so, and delighted in his forbidden society, and wished they dared to be like him. Tom was like the rest of the respectable boys, in that he envied Huckleberry his gaudy outcast condition, and was under strict orders not to play with him. So he played with him every time he got a chance. Huckleberry was always dressed in the cast-off clothes of full-grown men, and they were in perennial bloom and fluttering with rags. His hat was a vast ruin with a wide crescent lopped out of its brim; his coat, when he wore one, hung nearly to his heels and had the rearward buttons far down the back; but one suspender supported his trousers; the seat of the trousers bagged low and contained nothing, the fringed legs dragged in the dirt when not rolled up. Huckleberry came and went, at his own free will. He slept on doorsteps in fine weather and in empty hogsheads in wet; he did not have to go to school or to church, or call any being master or obey anybody; he could go fishing or swimming when and where he chose, and stay as long as it suited him; nobody forbade him to fight; he could sit up as late as he pleased; he was always the first boy that went barefoot in the spring and the last to resume leather in the fall; he never had to wash, nor put on clean clothes; he could swear wonderfully. In a word, everything that goes to make life precious that boy had. So thought every harassed, hampered, respectable boy in St. Petersburg. Tom hailed the romantic outcast: "Hello, Huckleberry!" "Hello yourself, and see how you like it." "What's that you got?" "Dead cat." "Lemme see him, Huck. My, he's pretty stiff. Where'd you get him ?" "Bought him off'n a boy." "What did you give?" "I give a blue ticket and a bladder that I got at the slaughter-house." "Where'd you get the blue ticket?" "Bought it off'n Ben Rogers two weeks ago for a hoop-stick." "Say--what is dead cats good for, Huck?" "Good for? Cure warts with." "No! Is that so? I know something that's better." "I bet you don't. What is it?" "Why, spunk-water." "Spunk-water! I wouldn't give a dern for spunk-water." "You wouldn't, wouldn't you? D'you ever try it?" "No, I hain't. But Bob Tanner did." "Who told you so!" "Why, he told Jeff Thatcher, and Jeff told Johnny Baker, and Johnny told Jim Hollis, and Jim told Ben Rogers, and Ben told a nigger, and the nigger told me. There now!" "Well, what of it? They'll all lie. Leastways all but the nigger. I don't know HIM. But I never see a nigger that WOULDN'T lie. Shucks! Now you tell me how Bob Tanner done it, Huck." "Why, he took and dipped his hand in a rotten stump where the rain-water was." "In the daytime?" "Certainly." "With his face to the stump?" "Yes. Least I reckon so." "Did he say anything?" "I don't reckon he did. I don't know." "Aha! Talk about trying to cure warts with spunk-water such a blame fool way as that! Why, that ain't a-going to do any good. You got to go all by yourself, to the middle of the woods, where you know there's a spunk-water stump, and just as it's midnight you back up against the stump and jam your hand in and say: 'Barley-corn, barley-corn, injun-meal shorts, Spunk-water, spunk-water, swaller these warts,' and then walk away quick, eleven steps, with your eyes shut, and then turn around three times and walk home without speaking to anybody. Because if you speak the charm's busted." "Well, that sounds like a good way; but that ain't the way Bob Tanner done." "No, sir, you can bet he didn't, becuz he's the wartiest boy in this town; and he wouldn't have a wart on him if he'd knowed how to work spunk-water. I've took off thousands of warts off of my hands that way, Huck. I play with frogs so much that I've always got considerable many warts. Sometimes I take 'em off with a bean." "Yes, bean's good. I've done that." "Have you? What's your way?" "You take and split the bean, and cut the wart so as to get some blood, and then you put the blood on one piece of the bean and take and dig a hole and bury it 'bout midnight at the crossroads in the dark of the moon, and then you burn up the rest of the bean. You see that piece that's got the blood on it will keep drawing and drawing, trying to fetch the other piece to it, and so that helps the blood to draw the wart, and pretty soon off she comes." "Yes, that's it, Huck--that's it; though when you're burying it if you say 'Down bean; off wart; come no more to bother me!' it's better. That's the way Joe Harper does, and he's been nearly to Coonville and most everywheres. But say--how do you cure 'em with dead cats?" "Why, you take your cat and go and get in the graveyard 'long about midnight when somebody that was wicked has been buried; and when it's midnight a devil will come, or maybe two or three, but you can't see 'em, you can only hear something like the wind, or maybe hear 'em talk; and when they're taking that feller away, you heave your cat after 'em and say, 'Devil follow corpse, cat follow devil, warts follow cat, I'm done with ye!' That'll fetch ANY wart." "Sounds right. D'you ever try it, Huck?" "No, but old Mother Hopkins told me." "Well, I reckon it's so, then. Becuz they say she's a witch." "Say! Why, Tom, I KNOW she is. She witched pap. Pap says so his own self. He come along one day, and he see she was a-witching him, so he took up a rock, and if she hadn't dodged, he'd a got her. Well, that very night he rolled off'n a shed wher' he was a layin drunk, and broke his arm." "Why, that's awful. How did he know she was a-witching him?" "Lord, pap can tell, easy. Pap says when they keep looking at you right stiddy, they're a-witching you. Specially if they mumble. Becuz when they mumble they're saying the Lord's Prayer backards." "Say, Hucky, when you going to try the cat?" "To-night. I reckon they'll come after old Hoss Williams to-night." "But they buried him Saturday. Didn't they get him Saturday night?" "Why, how you talk! How could their charms work till midnight?--and THEN it's Sunday. Devils don't slosh around much of a Sunday, I don't reckon." "I never thought of that. That's so. Lemme go with you?" "Of course--if you ain't afeard." "Afeard! 'Tain't likely. Will you meow?" "Yes--and you meow back, if you get a chance. Last time, you kep' me a-meowing around till old Hays went to throwing rocks at me and says 'Dern that cat!' and so I hove a brick through his window--but don't you tell." "I won't. I couldn't meow that night, becuz auntie was watching me, but I'll meow this time. Say--what's that?" "Nothing but a tick." "Where'd you get him?" "Out in the woods." "What'll you take for him?" "I don't know. I don't want to sell him." "All right. It's a mighty small tick, anyway." "Oh, anybody can run a tick down that don't belong to them. I'm satisfied with it. It's a good enough tick for me." "Sho, there's ticks a plenty. I could have a thousand of 'em if I wanted to." "Well, why don't you? Becuz you know mighty well you can't. This is a pretty early tick, I reckon. It's the first one I've seen this year." "Say, Huck--I'll give you my tooth for him." "Less see it." Tom got out a bit of paper and carefully unrolled it. Huckleberry viewed it wistfully. The temptation was very strong. At last he said: "Is it genuwyne?" Tom lifted his lip and showed the vacancy. "Well, all right," said Huckleberry, "it's a trade." Tom enclosed the tick in the percussion-cap box that had lately been the pinchbug's prison, and the boys separated, each feeling wealthier than before. When Tom reached the little isolated frame schoolhouse, he strode in briskly, with the manner of one who had come with all honest speed. He hung his hat on a peg and flung himself into his seat with business-like alacrity. The master, throned on high in his great splint-bottom arm-chair, was dozing, lulled by the drowsy hum of study. The interruption roused him. "Thomas Sawyer!" Tom knew that when his name was pronounced in full, it meant trouble. "Sir!" "Come up here. Now, sir, why are you late again, as usual?" Tom was about to take refuge in a lie, when he saw two long tails of yellow hair hanging down a back that he recognized by the electric sympathy of love; and by that form was THE ONLY VACANT PLACE on the girls' side of the schoolhouse. He instantly said: "I STOPPED TO TALK WITH HUCKLEBERRY FINN!" The master's pulse stood still, and he stared helplessly. The buzz of study ceased. The pupils wondered if this foolhardy boy had lost his mind. The master said: "You--you did what?" "Stopped to talk with Huckleberry Finn." There was no mistaking the words. "Thomas Sawyer, this is the most astounding confession I have ever listened to. No mere ferule will answer for this offence. Take off your jacket." The master's arm performed until it was tired and the stock of switches notably diminished. Then the order followed: "Now, sir, go and sit with the girls! And let this be a warning to you." The titter that rippled around the room appeared to abash the boy, but in reality that result was caused rather more by his worshipful awe of his unknown idol and the dread pleasure that lay in his high good fortune. He sat down upon the end of the pine bench and the girl hitched herself away from him with a toss of her head. Nudges and winks and whispers traversed the room, but Tom sat still, with his arms upon the long, low desk before him, and seemed to study his book. By and by attention ceased from him, and the accustomed school murmur rose upon the dull air once more. Presently the boy began to steal furtive glances at the girl. She observed it, "made a mouth" at him and gave him the back of her head for the space of a minute. When she cautiously faced around again, a peach lay before her. She thrust it away. Tom gently put it back. She thrust it away again, but with less animosity. Tom patiently returned it to its place. Then she let it remain. Tom scrawled on his slate, "Please take it--I got more." The girl glanced at the words, but made no sign. Now the boy began to draw something on the slate, hiding his work with his left hand. For a time the girl refused to notice; but her human curiosity presently began to manifest itself by hardly perceptible signs. The boy worked on, apparently unconscious. The girl made a sort of noncommittal attempt to see, but the boy did not betray that he was aware of it. At last she gave in and hesitatingly whispered: "Let me see it." Tom partly uncovered a dismal caricature of a house with two gable ends to it and a corkscrew of smoke issuing from the chimney. Then the girl's interest began to fasten itself upon the work and she forgot everything else. When it was finished, she gazed a moment, then whispered: "It's nice--make a man." The artist erected a man in the front yard, that resembled a derrick. He could have stepped over the house; but the girl was not hypercritical; she was satisfied with the monster, and whispered: "It's a beautiful man--now make me coming along." Tom drew an hour-glass with a full moon and straw limbs to it and armed the spreading fingers with a portentous fan. The girl said: "It's ever so nice--I wish I could draw." "It's easy," whispered Tom, "I'll learn you." "Oh, will you? When?" "At noon. Do you go home to dinner?" "I'll stay if you will." "Good--that's a whack. What's your name?" "Becky Thatcher. What's yours? Oh, I know. It's Thomas Sawyer." "That's the name they lick me by. I'm Tom when I'm good. You call me Tom, will you?" "Yes." Now Tom began to scrawl something on the slate, hiding the words from the girl. But she was not backward this time. She begged to see. Tom said: "Oh, it ain't anything." "Yes it is." "No it ain't. You don't want to see." "Yes I do, indeed I do. Please let me." "You'll tell." "No I won't--deed and deed and double deed won't." "You won't tell anybody at all? Ever, as long as you live?" "No, I won't ever tell ANYbody. Now let me." "Oh, YOU don't want to see!" "Now that you treat me so, I WILL see." And she put her small hand upon his and a little scuffle ensued, Tom pretending to resist in earnest but letting his hand slip by degrees till these words were revealed: "I LOVE YOU." "Oh, you bad thing!" And she hit his hand a smart rap, but reddened and looked pleased, nevertheless. Just at this juncture the boy felt a slow, fateful grip closing on his ear, and a steady lifting impulse. In that vise he was borne across the house and deposited in his own seat, under a peppering fire of giggles from the whole school. Then the master stood over him during a few awful moments, and finally moved away to his throne without saying a word. But although Tom's ear tingled, his heart was jubilant. As the school quieted down Tom made an honest effort to study, but the turmoil within him was too great. In turn he took his place in the reading class and made a botch of it; then in the geography class and turned lakes into mountains, mountains into rivers, and rivers into continents, till chaos was come again; then in the spelling class, and got "turned down," by a succession of mere baby words, till he brought up at the foot and yielded up the pewter medal which he had worn with ostentation for months. CHAPTER VII THE harder Tom tried to fasten his mind on his book, the more his ideas wandered. So at last, with a sigh and a yawn, he gave it up. It seemed to him that the noon recess would never come. The air was utterly dead. There was not a breath stirring. It was the sleepiest of sleepy days. The drowsing murmur of the five and twenty studying scholars soothed the soul like the spell that is in the murmur of bees. Away off in the flaming sunshine, Cardiff Hill lifted its soft green sides through a shimmering veil of heat, tinted with the purple of distance; a few birds floated on lazy wing high in the air; no other living thing was visible but some cows, and they were asleep. Tom's heart ached to be free, or else to have something of interest to do to pass the dreary time. His hand wandered into his pocket and his face lit up with a glow of gratitude that was prayer, though he did not know it. Then furtively the percussion-cap box came out. He released the tick and put him on the long flat desk. The creature probably glowed with a gratitude that amounted to prayer, too, at this moment, but it was premature: for when he started thankfully to travel off, Tom turned him aside with a pin and made him take a new direction. Tom's bosom friend sat next him, suffering just as Tom had been, and now he was deeply and gratefully interested in this entertainment in an instant. This bosom friend was Joe Harper. The two boys were sworn friends all the week, and embattled enemies on Saturdays. Joe took a pin out of his lapel and began to assist in exercising the prisoner. The sport grew in interest momently. Soon Tom said that they were interfering with each other, and neither getting the fullest benefit of the tick. So he put Joe's slate on the desk and drew a line down the middle of it from top to bottom. "Now," said he, "as long as he is on your side you can stir him up and I'll let him alone; but if you let him get away and get on my side, you're to leave him alone as long as I can keep him from crossing over." "All right, go ahead; start him up." The tick escaped from Tom, presently, and crossed the equator. Joe harassed him awhile, and then he got away and crossed back again. This change of base occurred often. While one boy was worrying the tick with absorbing interest, the other would look on with interest as strong, the two heads bowed together over the slate, and the two souls dead to all things else. At last luck seemed to settle and abide with Joe. The tick tried this, that, and the other course, and got as excited and as anxious as the boys themselves, but time and again just as he would have victory in his very grasp, so to speak, and Tom's fingers would be twitching to begin, Joe's pin would deftly head him off, and keep possession. At last Tom could stand it no longer. The temptation was too strong. So he reached out and lent a hand with his pin. Joe was angry in a moment. Said he: "Tom, you let him alone." "I only just want to stir him up a little, Joe." "No, sir, it ain't fair; you just let him alone." "Blame it, I ain't going to stir him much." "Let him alone, I tell you." "I won't!" "You shall--he's on my side of the line." "Look here, Joe Harper, whose is that tick?" "I don't care whose tick he is--he's on my side of the line, and you sha'n't touch him." "Well, I'll just bet I will, though. He's my tick and I'll do what I blame please with him, or die!" A tremendous whack came down on Tom's shoulders, and its duplicate on Joe's; and for the space of two minutes the dust continued to fly from the two jackets and the whole school to enjoy it. The boys had been too absorbed to notice the hush that had stolen upon the school awhile before when the master came tiptoeing down the room and stood over them. He had contemplated a good part of the performance before he contributed his bit of variety to it. When school broke up at noon, Tom flew to Becky Thatcher, and whispered in her ear: "Put on your bonnet and let on you're going home; and when you get to the corner, give the rest of 'em the slip, and turn down through the lane and come back. I'll go the other way and come it over 'em the same way." So the one went off with one group of scholars, and the other with another. In a little while the two met at the bottom of the lane, and when they reached the school they had it all to themselves. Then they sat together, with a slate before them, and Tom gave Becky the pencil and held her hand in his, guiding it, and so created another surprising house. When the interest in art began to wane, the two fell to talking. Tom was swimming in bliss. He said: "Do you love rats?" "No! I hate them!" "Well, I do, too--LIVE ones. But I mean dead ones, to swing round your head with a string." "No, I don't care for rats much, anyway. What I like is chewing-gum." "Oh, I should say so! I wish I had some now." "Do you? I've got some. I'll let you chew it awhile, but you must give it back to me." That was agreeable, so they chewed it turn about, and dangled their legs against the bench in excess of contentment. "Was you ever at a circus?" said Tom. "Yes, and my pa's going to take me again some time, if I'm good." "I been to the circus three or four times--lots of times. Church ain't shucks to a circus. There's things going on at a circus all the time. I'm going to be a clown in a circus when I grow up." "Oh, are you! That will be nice. They're so lovely, all spotted up." "Yes, that's so. And they get slathers of money--most a dollar a day, Ben Rogers says. Say, Becky, was you ever engaged?" "What's that?" "Why, engaged to be married." "No." "Would you like to?" "I reckon so. I don't know. What is it like?" "Like? Why it ain't like anything. You only just tell a boy you won't ever have anybody but him, ever ever ever, and then you kiss and that's all. Anybody can do it." "Kiss? What do you kiss for?" "Why, that, you know, is to--well, they always do that." "Everybody?" "Why, yes, everybody that's in love with each other. Do you remember what I wrote on the slate?" "Ye--yes." "What was it?" "I sha'n't tell you." "Shall I tell YOU?" "Ye--yes--but some other time." "No, now." "No, not now--to-morrow." "Oh, no, NOW. Please, Becky--I'll whisper it, I'll whisper it ever so easy." Becky hesitating, Tom took silence for consent, and passed his arm about her waist and whispered the tale ever so softly, with his mouth close to her ear. And then he added: "Now you whisper it to me--just the same." She resisted, for a while, and then said: "You turn your face away so you can't see, and then I will. But you mustn't ever tell anybody--WILL you, Tom? Now you won't, WILL you?" "No, indeed, indeed I won't. Now, Becky." He turned his face away. She bent timidly around till her breath stirred his curls and whispered, "I--love--you!" Then she sprang away and ran around and around the desks and benches, with Tom after her, and took refuge in a corner at last, with her little white apron to her face. Tom clasped her about her neck and pleaded: "Now, Becky, it's all done--all over but the kiss. Don't you be afraid of that--it ain't anything at all. Please, Becky." And he tugged at her apron and the hands. By and by she gave up, and let her hands drop; her face, all glowing with the struggle, came up and submitted. Tom kissed the red lips and said: "Now it's all done, Becky. And always after this, you know, you ain't ever to love anybody but me, and you ain't ever to marry anybody but me, ever never and forever. Will you?" "No, I'll never love anybody but you, Tom, and I'll never marry anybody but you--and you ain't to ever marry anybody but me, either." "Certainly. Of course. That's PART of it. And always coming to school or when we're going home, you're to walk with me, when there ain't anybody looking--and you choose me and I choose you at parties, because that's the way you do when you're engaged." "It's so nice. I never heard of it before." "Oh, it's ever so gay! Why, me and Amy Lawrence--" The big eyes told Tom his blunder and he stopped, confused. "Oh, Tom! Then I ain't the first you've ever been engaged to!" The child began to cry. Tom said: "Oh, don't cry, Becky, I don't care for her any more." "Yes, you do, Tom--you know you do." Tom tried to put his arm about her neck, but she pushed him away and turned her face to the wall, and went on crying. Tom tried again, with soothing words in his mouth, and was repulsed again. Then his pride was up, and he strode away and went outside. He stood about, restless and uneasy, for a while, glancing at the door, every now and then, hoping she would repent and come to find him. But she did not. Then he began to feel badly and fear that he was in the wrong. It was a hard struggle with him to make new advances, now, but he nerved himself to it and entered. She was still standing back there in the corner, sobbing, with her face to the wall. Tom's heart smote him. He went to her and stood a moment, not knowing exactly how to proceed. Then he said hesitatingly: "Becky, I--I don't care for anybody but you." No reply--but sobs. "Becky"--pleadingly. "Becky, won't you say something?" More sobs. Tom got out his chiefest jewel, a brass knob from the top of an andiron, and passed it around her so that she could see it, and said: "Please, Becky, won't you take it?" She struck it to the floor. Then Tom marched out of the house and over the hills and far away, to return to school no more that day. Presently Becky began to suspect. She ran to the door; he was not in sight; she flew around to the play-yard; he was not there. Then she called: "Tom! Come back, Tom!" She listened intently, but there was no answer. She had no companions but silence and loneliness. So she sat down to cry again and upbraid herself; and by this time the scholars began to gather again, and she had to hide her griefs and still her broken heart and take up the cross of a long, dreary, aching afternoon, with none among the strangers about her to exchange sorrows with. 
42322	----	Early Western Travels 1748-1846 Volume XXVI Early Western Travels 1748-1846 A Series of Annotated Reprints of some of the best and rarest contemporary volumes of travel, descriptive of the Aborigines and Social and Economic Conditions in the Middle and Far West, during the Period of Early American Settlement Edited with Notes, Introductions, Index, etc., by Reuben Gold Thwaites, LL.D. Editor of "The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents," "Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition," "Hennepin's New Discovery," etc. Volume XXVI Part I of Flagg's The Far West, 1836-1837 [Illustration] Cleveland, Ohio The Arthur H. Clark Company 1906 COPYRIGHT 1906, BY THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The Lakeside Press R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY CHICAGO CONTENTS OF VOLUME XXVI PREFACE TO VOLUMES XXVI AND XXVII. _The Editor_ 9 THE FAR WEST: OR, A TOUR BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS. Embracing Outlines of Western Life and Scenery; Sketches of the Prairies, Rivers, Ancient Mounds, Early Settlements of the French, etc. etc. (The first thirty-two chapters, being all of Vol. I of original, and pp. 1-126 of Vol. II.) _Edmund Flagg._ Copyright Notice 26 Author's Dedication 27 Author's Preface 29 Author's Table of Contents 33 Text (chapters i-xxxii; the remainder appearing in our volume xxvii) 43 ILLUSTRATIONS TO VOLUME XXVI Map of Oregon; drawn by H. J. Kelley, 1830 24 Facsimile of title-page to Vol. I of Flagg's _The Far West_ 25 PREFACE TO VOLUMES XXVI-XXVII These two volumes are devoted to reprints of Edmund Flagg's _The Far West_ (New York, 1838), and Father Pierre Jean de Smet's _Letters and Sketches, with a Narrative of a Year's Residence among the Indian Tribes of the Rocky Mountains_ (Philadelphia, 1843). Flagg's two-volume work occupies all of our volume xxvi and the first part of volume xxvii, the remaining portion of the latter being given to De Smet's book. Edmund Flagg was prominent among early American prose writers, and also ranked high among our minor poets. A descendant of the Thomas Flagg who came to Boston from England, in 1637, Edmund was born November 24, 1815, at Wescasset, Maine. Being graduated with distinction from Bowdoin College in 1835, in the same year he went with his mother and sister Lucy to Louisville, Kentucky. Here, in a private school, he taught the classics to a group of boys, and contributed articles to the Louisville _Journal_, a paper with which he was intermittently connected, either as editorial writer or correspondent, until 1861. The summer and autumn of 1836 found Flagg travelling in Missouri and Illinois, and writing for the _Journal_ the letters which were later revised and enlarged to form _The Far West_, herein reprinted. Tarrying at St. Louis in the autumn of 1836, our author began the study of law, and the following year was admitted to the bar; but in 1838 he returned to newspaper life, taking charge for a time of the St. Louis _Commercial Bulletin_. During the winter of 1838-39 he assisted George D. Prentice, founder of the Louisville _Journal_, in the work of editing the Louisville _Literary News Letter_. Finding, however, that newspaper work overtaxed his health, Flagg next accepted an invitation to enter the law office of Sergeant S. Prentiss at Vicksburg, Mississippi, where in addition to his legal duties he found time to edit the Vicksburg _Whig_. Having been wounded in a duel with James Hagan of the _Sentinel_ in that city, Flagg returned to the less excitable North and undertook editorial duties upon the _Gazette_ at Marietta, Ohio (1842-43), and later (1844-45) upon the St. Louis _Evening Gazette_. He also served as official reporter of the Missouri state constitutional convention the following year, and published a volume of its debates; subsequently (until 1849) acting as a court reporter in St. Louis. The three succeeding years were spent abroad; first as secretary to Edward A. Hannegan, United States minister to Berlin, and later as consul at Venice. In February, 1852, he returned to America, and during the presidential campaign of that year edited a Democratic journal at St. Louis, known as the _Daily Times_. Later, as a reward for political service, he was made superintendent of statistics in the department of state, at Washington--a bureau having special charge of commercial relations. Here he was especially concerned with the compilation of reports on immigration and the cotton and tobacco trade, and published a _Report on Commercial Relations of the United States with all Foreign Nations_ (4 vols., Washington, 1858). Through these reports, particularly the last named, Flagg's name became familiar to merchants in both the United States and Europe. From 1857 to 1860 he was Washington correspondent for several Western newspapers, and from 1861 to 1870 served as librarian of copyrights in the department of the interior. Having in 1862 married Kate Adeline, daughter of Sidney S. Gallaher, of Virginia, he moved to Highland View in that state (1870), and died there November 1, 1890. In addition to his labors in the public service and as a newspaper man, Flagg found time for higher literary work, and won considerable distinction in that field. His first book, _The Far West_, although somewhat stilted in style, possesses considerable literary merit. Encouraged by the success of his initial endeavor, he wrote the following year (1839) the _Duchess of Ferrara_ and _Beatrice of Padua_, two novels, each of which passed through at least two editions. The _Howard Queen_ (1848) and _Blanche of Artois_ (1850) were prize productions. _De Molai_ (1888), says the New York _Sun_ of the period, is "a powerful, dramatic tale which seems to catch the very spirit of the age of Philip of France. It is rare to find a story in which fact and invention are so evenly and adroitly balanced." Our author also wrote several dramas, which were staged in Louisville, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and New York; he also composed numerous poems for newspapers and magazines. His masterpiece, however, was a history dedicated to his lifelong friend and colleague, George D. Prentice, entitled _The City of the Sea_ (2 vols., New York, 1853). This work was declared by the _Knickerbocker_ to be "a carefully compiled, poetically-written digest of the history of the glorious old Venice--a passionate, thrilling, yet accurate and sympathetic account of the last struggle for independence." At the time of his death Flagg had in preparation a volume of reminiscences, developed from a diary kept during forty years, but this has never been published.[1] [1] For a list of Flagg's prose and poetical writings, contributions to periodicals, and editorial works, see "Annual Report of the Librarian of Bowdoin College for the year ending June 1, 1891," in Bowdoin College _Library Bulletin_ (Brunswick, Maine, 1895). "In hope of renovating the energies of a shattered constitution," we are told, Flagg started in the early part of June, 1836, on a journey to what was then known as the Far West. Taking a steamboat at Louisville, he went to St. Louis by way of the Ohio and the Mississippi, and after a brief delay ascended the latter to the mouth of the Illinois, and thence on to Peoria. Prevented by low water from proceeding farther, he returned by the same route to St. Louis, whence after three weeks' stay, spent either in the sick chamber or in making short trips about the city and its environs, the traveller crossed the Mississippi and struck out on horseback across the Illinois prairies, visiting Edwardsville, Alton, Carlinsville, Hillsborough, Carlisle, Lebanon, Belleville, and the American Bottoms. In July, after recrossing the Mississippi, he visited in like manner St. Charles, Missouri, by way of Bellefontaine and Florissant; crossed the Mississippi near Portage des Sioux, and passed through the Illinois towns of Grafton, Carrollton, Manchester, Jacksonville, Springfield, across Grand Prairie to Shelbyville, Mount Vernon, Pinkneyville, and Chester, and returned to St. Louis by way of the old French settlements of Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, and Cahokia. During this journey Flagg wrote for the Louisville _Journal_, as already stated, a series of letters describing the country through which he travelled. Hastily thrown together from the pages of his note book, this correspondence appeared anonymously under the title, "Sketches of a Traveller." They were, however, soon attributed to Flagg, and two years later were collected by the author and published in two small volumes by Harper and Brothers (New York, 1838), as _The Far West_. These volumes are in many respects the best description of the Middle West that had appeared up to the time they were written. Roughly following the journals of Michaux, Harris, and Cuming by forty, thirty, and twenty years respectively, Flagg skillfully shows the remarkable growth and development of the Western country. His descriptions of the Ohio, Mississippi, and Illinois rivers are still among the best in print, particularly from the artistic standpoint. His account of the steamboat traffic is valuable for the history of navigation on the Western rivers, and shows vividly the obstacles which still confronted merchants of that time. Chapters xi, xii, and xiii, dealing with St. Louis and its immediate vicinity, are the most detailed in our series, while the descriptions of St. Charles and the Illinois towns through which Flagg passed, are excellent. The modern reader cannot but wish that Flagg had devoted less space to his youthful philosophizing, but the atmosphere is at least wholesome. Unlike Harris, whose criticism of Western society was keen and acrid, Flagg was a man of broad sympathies, possessing an insight into human nature remarkable for so youthful a writer--for he was but twenty years of age at the time of his travels, and twenty-two when the book was published. Although mildly reproving the old French settlers for their lack of enterprise, he fully appreciates their domestic virtues, and gives a faithful picture of these pleasure-loving, contented, unprogressive people. His description of the once thriving villages of Kaskaskia, Prairie du Rocher, and Cahokia, are valuable historically, as showing the decay settling upon the French civilization after a few years of American occupation. Our author's interview with the Mormon convert, his conversations with early French and American settlers, his accounts of political meetings, his anecdotes illustrating Western curiosity, and particularly his carefully-recounted local traditions, throw much light on the beliefs, manners, and customs of the Western people of his time. _The Far West_ is thus not only a graphic and often forceful description of the interesting region through which the author travelled, but a sympathetic synopsis of its local annals, affording much varied information not otherwise obtainable. The present reprint, with annotations that seek to correct its errors, will, we think, prove welcome in our series. In the _Letters and Sketches_ of Father de Smet, we reprint another Western classic, related to the volumes of Flagg by their common terminus of travel at St. Louis. No more interesting or picturesque episode has occurred in the history of Christian missions in the New World, than the famous visit made in the autumn of 1831 to General William Clark at St. Louis by the Flathead chiefs seeking religious instruction for their people. Vigorously exploited in the denominational papers of the East, this delegation aroused a sentiment that led to the founding of Protestant missions in Oregon and western Idaho, and incidentally to the solution of the Oregon question. But in point of fact, the Flathead deputation was sent to secure a Catholic missionary; and not merely one but four such embassies embarked for St. Louis before the great desideratum, a "black robe" priest, could be secured for ministration to this far-distant tribe. Employed in the Columbian fur-trade were a number of Christian Iroquois from Canada, who had been carefully trained at St. Regis and Caughnawaga in all the observances of the Roman Catholic church. Upon the Pacific waterways and in the fastnesses of the Rockies, these Iroquois taught their fellow Indians the ordinances of the church and the commands of the white man's Great Spirit. John Wyeth (see our volume xxi) testifies to the honesty and humanity of the Flathead tribe: "they do not lie, steal, nor rob any one, unless when driven too near to starvation." He also testifies that they "appear to keep the Sabbath;" and that their word is "as good as the Bible." These were the neophytes who craved instruction, and to whom was assigned that remarkable Jesuit missionary, Father Jean Pierre de Smet. Born in Belgium in 1801, young De Smet was educated in a religious school at Malines. When twenty years of age he responded to an appeal to cross the Atlantic and carry the gospel to the red men of the Western continent. Arrived in Philadelphia (1821), the young Belgian was astonished to see a well-built town, travelled roads, cultivated farms, and other appurtenances of civilization; he had expected only a wilderness and savages. Two years were spent in the Jesuit novitiate in Maryland, before the zealous youth saw any traces of frontier life. Then the youthful novice was removed to Florissant, Missouri, not far from St. Louis, where the making of a log-cabin and the breaking of fresh soil furnished a mild foretaste of his future career. Still more years elapsed before the cherished project of missionary labor could be realized. In 1829 St. Louis University was founded, and herein the young priest, who had been ordained in 1827, was employed upon the instructional force. Later years (1833-37) were spent in Europe, while recruiting his health and securing supplies for the infant university. It was not until 1838 that the first missionary enterprise was undertaken by Father de Smet, when a chapel for the Potawatomi was built on the site of the modern Council Bluffs. There, in 1839, the fourth Flathead deputation rested after the long journey from their Rocky Mountain home; and at the earnest solicitation of the young missioner, he was in the spring of 1840, detailed by his superior to ascertain and report upon the prospects of a mission to the mountain Indians. Of the two tribesmen who had come down to St. Louis, Pierre the Left-handed (Gaucher) was sent back to his people with news of the success of the embassy, while his colleague Ignace was detained to serve as guide to the adventurous Jesuit who in April, 1840, set forth for the Flathead country with the annual fur-trade caravan. The route traversed was the well-known Oregon Trail as far as the Green River rendezvous; there the father was rejoiced to meet a deputation of ten Flatheads, sent to escort him to their habitat, and at Prairie de la Messe was celebrated for them the first mass in the Western mountains. The trail led them on through Jackson's and Pierre's Holes; and in the latter valley the waiting tribesmen to the number of sixteen hundred had collected, and received the "black robe" as a messenger from Heaven. Chants and prayers were heard on every side; "in a fortnight," reports the delighted missionary, "all knew their prayers." After two months spent among his "dear Flatheads," wandering with them across the divide, and encamping for some time at the Three Forks of the Missouri--where nearly forty years before Lewis and Clark first encountered the Western Indians--De Smet took leave of his neophytes. Protected by a strong guard through the hostile Blackfeet country, he arrived at last at the fur-trade post of Fort Union at the junction of the Missouri and the Yellowstone. Descending thence to St. Louis he arrived there on the last day of December, 1840. The remainder of the winter was occupied in preparations for a new journey, and in securing men and supplies for the equipment of the far-away mission begun under such favorable auspices. Once more the father departed from Westport--this time in May, 1841. The little company consisted, besides himself, of two other priests and three lay brothers, all of the latter being skilled mechanics. Among the members of the caravan were a number of California pioneers, one of whom has thus related his impressions of the young missionary: "He was genial, of fine presence, and one of the saintliest men I have ever known, and I cannot wonder that the Indians were made to believe him divinely protected. He was a man of great kindness and great affability under all circumstances; nothing seemed to disturb his temper."[2] [2] John Bidwell, "First Emigrant Train to California," in _Century Magazine_, new series, xix, pp. 113, 114. Father de Smet's letters describe in detail the scenery and incidents of the route from the eastern border of Kansas to Fort Hall, in Idaho, where the British factor received the travellers with abounding hospitality. Here some of the Flatheads were in waiting to convey the missionaries to the tribe, the chiefs of which met them in Beaver Head Valley, Montana, and testified their welcome with dignified simplicity. Passing over to the waters of the Columbia, they founded the mission of St. Mary upon the first Sunday in October, in the beautiful Bitter Root valley at the site of the later Fort Owen. Thence Father de Smet made a rapid journey in search of provisions to Fort Colville, on the upper Columbia, but was again at his mission stockade before the close of the year. In April a longer journey was projected, as far as Fort Vancouver, on the lower Columbia, where Dr. McLoughlin, the British factor, received the good priest with that cordial greeting for which he was already famous. During this journey the father narrowly escaped drowning in the turbulent rapids of the Columbia, where five of his boatmen perished. Returned to St. Mary's, the prospects for a harvest of souls both among the Flatheads and the neighboring tribes appeared so promising that the missionary determined to seek re-enforcement and further aid in Europe. Thereupon he left his companions in charge of the "new Paraguay" of his hopes, and once more undertook the long and adventurous journey to the settlements, this time by way of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers, arriving at St. Louis the last of October, 1842. At this point the journeys detailed in the volume here reprinted come to an end. The later career of Father de Smet and his subsequent journeyings will be detailed in the preface to volumes xxviii and xxix, in the latter of which will appear his _Oregon Missions_. Father de Smet's writings on missionary subjects ended only with his death, and were increasingly voluminous and detailed. The _Letters and Sketches_ were his first published work, with the exception of a portion of a compilation that appeared in 1841, on the Jesuit missions of Missouri. We find therefore, in the present reprint, the vitality and enthusiasm of the young traveller relating new scenes, and the abounding joy of the successful missionary uplifting a barbaric race. The book was written with the avowed purpose of creating interest in his newly-organized work, and securing contributions therefor. The freshness of description, the wholesome simplicity of the narrative, the frank presentation of wilderness life, charm the reader, and make this book a classic of early Western exploration. Cast in the form of letters, wherein there is more or less repetition of statement, it is nevertheless evident that these have been subjected to a certain editorial revision, and that literary quality has been considered. Aside from the interest evoked by the personality of the writer, and the events of his narrative, the work throws much light upon wilderness travel, the topography and scenery of the Rocky Mountain region, and above all upon the habits and customs, modes of thought, social standards, and religious conceptions of the important tribes of the interior. After the present series of reprints had been planned for, and announced in a detailed prospectus, there was issued from the press of Francis P. Harper of New York the important volumes edited by Major H. M. Chittenden and Alfred Talbot Richardson, entitled _Life, Letters, and Travels of Father Pierre Jean de Smet, S. J., 1801-73_. This publication contains much new material, derived from manuscript sources, which has been interwoven in chronological order with the missionary's several books; and to it all have been added an adequate biography and bibliography of De Smet. This scholarly work has been of great service to us in preparing for accurate reprint the original editions of the only two of Father de Smet's publications that fall within the chronological field of our series. In the preparation for the press of Flagg's _The Far West_, the Editor has had the assistance of Clarence Cory Crawford, A. M.; in editing Father de Smet's _Letters and Sketches_, his assistant has been Louise Phelps Kellogg, Ph.D. R. G. T. MADISON, WIS., April, 1906. PART I OF FLAGG'S THE FAR WEST, 1836-1837 Reprint of Volume I, and chapters xxiii-xxxii of Volume II, of original edition: New York, 1838 [Illustration: MAP OF OREGON.] THE FAR WEST: OR, A TOUR BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS. EMBRACING OUTLINES OF WESTERN LIFE AND SCENERY; SKETCHES OF THE PRAIRIES, RIVERS, ANCIENT MOUNDS, EARLY SETTLEMENTS OF THE FRENCH, ETC., ETC. "If thou be a severe, sour-complexioned man, then I here disallow thee to be a competent judge."--IZAAK WALTON. "I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, ''Tis all barren.'"--STERNE. "Chacun a son stile; le mien, comme vous voyez, n'est pas laconique."--ME. DE SEVIGNE. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. NEW-YORK: PUBLISHED BY HARPER & BROTHERS NO. 82 CLIFF-STREET. 1838. [Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1838, by HARPER & BROTHERS, in the Clerk's Office of the Southern District of New-York.] TO ONE-- AT WHOSE SOLICITATION THESE VOLUMES WERE COMMENCED, AND WITH WHOSE ENCOURAGEMENT THEY HAVE BEEN COMPLETED-- TO MY SISTER LUCY ARE THEY AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED. TO THE READER "He that writes Or makes a feast, more certainly invites His judges than his friends; there's not a guest But will find something wanting or ill dress'd." In laying before the majesty of the public a couple of volumes like the present, it has become customary for the author to disclaim in his preface all original design of _perpetrating a book_, as if there were even more than the admitted _quantum_ of sinfulness in the act. Whether or not such disavowals now-a-day receive all the credence they merit, is not for the writer to say; and whether, were the prefatory asseveration, as in the present case, diametrically opposed to what it often is, the reception would be different, is even more difficult to predict. The articles imbodied in the following volumes were, a portion of them, in their original, hasty production, _designed_ for the press; yet the author unites in the disavowal of his predecessors of all intention at that time of perpetrating _a book_. In the early summer of '36, when about starting upon a ramble over the prairies of the "Far West," in hope of renovating the energies of a shattered constitution, a request was made of the writer, by the distinguished editor of the Louisville Journal, to contribute {vi} to the columns of that periodical whatever, in the course of his pilgrimage, might be deemed of sufficient interest.[1] A series of articles soon after made their appearance in that paper under the title, "_Sketches of a Traveller_." They were, as their name purports, mere sketches from a traveller's _portfeuille_, hastily thrown upon paper whenever time, place, or opportunity rendered convenient; in the steamboat saloon, the inn bar-room, the log-cabin of the wilderness, or upon the venerable mound of the Western prairie. With such favour were these hasty productions received, and so extensively were they circulated, that the writer, on returning from his pilgrimage to "the shrine of health," was induced, by the solicitations of partial friends, to enter at his leisure upon the preparation for the press of a mass of MSS. of a similar character, written at the time, which had never been published; a thorough revision and enlargement of that which had appeared, united with _this_, it was thought, would furnish a passable volume or two upon the "Far West." Two years of residence in the West have since passed away; and the arrangement for the press of the fugitive sheets of a wanderer's sketch-book would not yet, perhaps, have been deemed of sufficient importance to warrant the necessary labour, had he not been daily reminded that his productions, whatever their merit, were already public property so far as could be the case, and at the mercy of every one who thought proper to assume paternity. "Forbearance ceased to be longer a virtue," and the result is now before the {vii} reader. But, while alluding to that aid which his labours may have rendered to others, the author would not fail fully to acknowledge his own indebtedness to those distinguished writers upon the West who have preceded him. To Peck, Hall, Flint, Wetmore, and to others, his acknowledgments are due and are respectfully tendered.[2] In extenuation of the circumstance that some portions of these volumes have already appeared, though in a crude state, before the public, the author has but to suggest that many works, with which the present will not presume to compare, have made their debut on the unimposing pages of a periodical. Not to dwell upon the writings of Addison and Johnson, and other classics of British literature, several of Bulwer's most polished productions, the elaborate Essays of Elia, Wirt's British Spy, Hazlitt's Philosophical Reviews, Coleridge's Friend, most of the novels of Captain Marryatt and Theodore Hook, and many of the most elegant works of the day, have been prepared for the pages of a magazine. And now, with no slight misgiving, does the author commit his firstborn bantling to the tender mercies of an impartial public. Criticism he does not deprecate, still less does he brave it; and farther than either is he from soliciting undue favour. Yet to the _reader_, as he grasps him by the hand in parting, would he commit his book, with the quaint injunction of a distinguished but eccentric old English writer upon an occasion somewhat similar: "I exhort all people, gentle and simple, men, {viii} women, and children, to buy, to read, to extol these labours of mine. Let them not fear to defend every article; for I will bear them harmless. I have arguments good store, and can easily confute, either logically, theologically, or metaphysically, all those who oppose me." E. F. New-York, Oct., 1838. CONTENTS I The Western Steamboat-landing--Western Punctuality--An Accident--Human Suffering--Desolation of Bereavement-- A Contrast--Sublimity--An Ohio Freshet--View of Louisville-- Early History--The Ohio Falls--Corn Island--The Last Conflict 43 II The Early Morn--"Sleep no more!"--The Ohio--"_La Belle Rivière!_"--Ohio Islands--A Cluster at Sunset--"Ohio Hills"-- The Emigrant's Clearing--Moonlight on the Ohio--A Sunset-scene-- The Peaceful Ohio--The Gigantic Forest-trees--The Bottom-lands-- Obstructions to Navigation--Classification--Removal--Dimensions of Snags--Peculiar difficulties on the Ohio--Leaning Trees-- Stone Dams--A Full Survey--The Result 52 III An Arrest--Drift-wood--Ohio Scenery--Primitive River-craft-- Early Scenes on the Western Waters--The Boatmen--Life and Character--_Annus Mirabilis_--The Steam-engine in the West-- The Freshet--The Comet--The Earthquakes--The first Steamboat-- The _Pinelore_--The Steam-engine--Prophecy of Darwin--Results-- Sublimity--Villages--A new Geology--Rivers--Islands--Forests-- The Wabash and its Banks--New Harmony--Site--Settlement-- Edifices--Gardens--Owen and the "Social System"--Theory and Practice--Mental Independence--Dissension--Abandonment-- Shawneetown--Early History--Settlement--Advancement--Site-- United States' Salines--Ancient Pottery 59 IV Geology of the Mississippi Valley--Ohio Cliffs--The Iron Coffin--"Battery Rock"--"Rock-Inn-Cave"--Origin of Name--{x} A Visit--Outlines and Dimensions--The Indian _Manito_--Island opposite--The Freebooters--"The Outlaw"--The Counterfeiters-- Their Fate--Ford and his Gang--Retributive Justice--"Tower Rock"--The Tradition--The Cave of Hieroglyphics--Islands-- Golconda--The Cumberland--Aaron Burr's Island--Paducah--Name-- Ruins of Fort Massac--The Legend--Wilkinsonville--The "Grand Chain"--Caledonia--A Storm--Sunset--"The Meeting of the Waters"--Characteristics of the Rivers--"Willow Point"--The place of Meeting--Disappointment--A Utopian City--America 70 V Darkness Visible--The "Father of Waters"--The Power of Steam-- The Current--"English Island"--The Sabbath--A Blessed Appointment--Its Quietude--The New-England Emigrant--His Privations--Sorrows--Loneliness--"The Light of Home"--Cape Girardeau--Site--Settlement--Effects of the Earthquakes-- A severer Shock--Staples of Trade--The Spiral Water-wheels-- Their Utility--"Tyowapity Bottom"--Potter's Clay-- A Manufactory--_Rivière au Vase_--Salines--Coal-beds-- "Fountain Bluff"--The "Grand Tower"--Parapet of Limestone-- Ancient Cataract--The Cliffs--Divinity of the Boatmen-- The "Devil's Oven"--The "Tea-table"--Volcanic and Diluvial Action--The Torrent overcome--A Race--Breathless Interest-- The Engineer--The Fireman--Last of the "Horse and Alligator" species--"Charon"--A Triumph--A Defeat 82 VI Navigation of the Mississippi--The First Appropriation-- Improvements of Capt. Shreve--Mississippi and Ohio Scenery contrasted--Alluvial Deposites--Ste. Genevieve--Origin--Site-- The _Haunted_ Ruin--The old "Common Field"--Inundation of '85--Minerals--Quarries--Sand-caves--Fountains--Salines-- Indians--Ancient Remains--View of Ste. Genevieve--Landing-- Outrage of a Steamer--Indignation--The Remedy--A Snag and a Scene--An Interview with "Charon"--Fort Chartres 93 {xi} VII The Hills! the Hills!--Trosachs of Loch Katrine--Alluvial Action--Bluffs of Selma and Herculaneum--Shot-towers--Natural Curiosities--The "Cornice Cliffs"--The Merrimac--Its Riches--Ancient Lilliputian Graves--Mammoth Remains--Jefferson Barracks--Carondelet--Cahokia--U. S. Arsenal--St. Louis in the Distance--Fine View--Uproar of the Landing--The Eternal River--Character--Features--Sublimity--Statistics--The Lower Mississippi--"Bends"--"Cut-offs"--Land-slips--The Pioneer Cabin 102 VIII "Once more upon the Waters!"--"Uncle Sam's Tooth-pullers"--Mode of eradicating a Snag--River Suburbs of North St. Louis--Spanish Fortifications--The Waterworks--The Ancient Mounds--Country Seats--The Confluence--Charlevoix's Description--A Variance-- A View--The Upper Mississippi--Alton in distant View--The Penitentiary and Churches--"Pomp and Circumstance"--The City of Alton--Advantages--Objections--Improvements--Prospects-- Liberality--Railroads--Alton Bluffs--"Departing Day"--The Piasa Cliffs--Moonlight Scene 113 IX The _Coleur de Rose_--The Piasa--The Indian Legend--Caverns-- Human Remains--The Illinois--Characteristic Features--The Canal--The Banks and Bottoms--Poisonous Exhalations--Scenes on the Illinois--The "Military Bounty Tract"--_Cape au Gris_--Old French Village--River Villages--Pekin--"An Unco Sight"--Genius of the Bacchanal--A "Monkey Show"--Nomenclature of Towns--The Indian Names 122 X An Emigrant Farmer--An Enthusiast--Peoria--The Old Village and the New--Early History--Exile of the French--Fort Clarke--Indian Hostilities--The Modern Village--Site--Advantages--Prospects-- Lake _Pinatahwee_--Fish--The Bluffs and Prairie--A Military Spectacle--The "Helen Mar"--Horrors of Steam!--A Bivouac--The Dragoon Corps--Military {xii} Courtesy--"Starved Rock"--The Legend--Remains--Shells--Intrenchments--Music--The Moonlight Serenade--A Reminiscence 132 XI Delay--"A Horse!"--Early French Immigration in the West--The Villages of the Wilderness--St. Louis--Venerable Aspect--Site of the City--A French Village City--South St. Louis--The Old Chateaux--The Founding of the City--The Footprints in the Rock-- The First House--Name of City--Decease of the Founders--Early Annals--Administration of St. Ange--The Common Field--Cession and Recession--"_L'Annee du Grand Coup_"--"_L'Annee des Grandes Eaux_"--Keel-boat Commerce--The Robbers Culbert and Magilbray-- "_L'Annee des Bateaux_"--The First Steamboat at St. Louis-- Wonder of the Indians--Opposition to Improvement--Plan of St. Louis--A View--Spanish Fortifications--The Ancient Mounds-- Position--Number--Magnitude--Outlines--Arrangement--Character-- Neglect--Moral Interest--Origin--The Argument of Analogy 142 XII View from the "Big Mound" at St. Louis--The Sand-bar--The Remedy--The "Floating Dry-dock"--The Western Suburbs--Country Seats--Game--Lakes--Public Edifices--Catholic Religion-- "Cathedral of St. Luke"--Site--Dimensions--Peal of Bells-- Porch--The Interior--Columns--Window Transparencies--The Effect--The Sanctuary--Galleries--Altar-piece--Altar and Tabernacle--Chapels--Paintings--Lower Chapel--St. Louis University--Medical School--The Chapel--Paintings--Library-- Ponderous Volumes--Philosophical Apparatus--The Pupils 160 XIII An Excursion of Pleasure--A fine Afternoon--Our Party--The Bridal Pair--South St. Louis--Advantages for Manufactures-- Quarries--Farmhouses--The "Eagle Powder-works"--Explosion-- The Bride--A Steeple-chase--A Descent--The Arsenal--Grounds-- Structures--Esplanade--Ordnance--Warlike Aspect--Carondelet-- Sleepy-Hollow--River-reach {xiii}--Time Departed--Inhabitants-- Structures--Gardens--Orchards--_Cabarets_--The Catholic Church--Altar-piece--Paintings--Missal--Crucifix--Evergreens-- Deaf and Dumb Asylum--Distrust of Villagers--Jefferson Barracks--Site--Extent--Buildings--View from the Terrace--The Burial Grounds--The Cholera--Design of the Barracks--_Corps de Reserve_--A remarkable Cavern--Our Guide--Situation of Cave--Entrance--Exploration--Grotesque Shapes--A Foot--Boat-- Coffin in Stone--The Bats--_Rivière des Pères_--An Ancient Cemetery--Antiquities--The Jesuit Settlers--Sulphur Spring-- A Cavern--A Ruin 170 XIV City and Country at Midsummer--Cosmorama of St. Louis--The American Bottom--Cahokia Creek--A Pecan Grove--The Ancient Mounds--First Group--Number--Resemblance--Magnitude--Outline--Railroad to the Bluffs--Pittsburg--The Prairie--Landscape--The "Cantine Mounds"--"Monk Hill"--First Impressions--Origin--The Argument--Workmanship of Man--Reflections suggested--Our Memory--The Craving of the Heart--The Pyramid-builders--The Mound-builders--A hopeless Aspiration--"Keep the Soul embalmed" 180 XV The Antiquity of Monk Mound--Primitive Magnitude--Fortifications of the Revolution--The Ancient Population--Two Cities--Design of the Mounds--The "Cantine Mounds"--Number--Size--Position-- Outline--Features of Monk Mound--View from the Summit--Prairie-- Lakes--Groves--Bluffs--Cantine Creek--St. Louis in distance-- Neighbouring Earth-heaps--The Well--Interior of the Mound-- The Monastery of La Trappe--Abbé Armand Rance--The Vows--A Quotation--Reign of Terror--Immigration of the Trappists-- Their Buildings--Their Discipline--Diet--Health--Skill--Asylum Seminary--Worldly Charity--Palliation--A strange Spectacle 187 {xiv} XVI Edwardsville--Site and Buildings--Land Mania--A "Down-east" Incident--Human Nature--The first Land Speculator--Castor-oil Manufacture--Outlines of Edwardsville--Collinsville--Route to Alton--Sultriness--The Alton Bluffs--A Panorama--Earth-heaps-- Indian Graves--Upper Alton--Shurtliff College--_Baptized_ Intelligence--Knowledge not Conservative--Greece--Rome-- France--England--The Remedy 197 XVII The Traveller's Whereabout--The Prairie in a Mist--Sense of Loneliness--The Backwoods Farmhouse--Structure--Outline-- Western Roads--A New-England Emigrant--The "Barrens"--Origin of Name--Soil--The "Sink-holes"--The Springs--Similar in Missouri and Florida--"Fount of Rejuvenescence"--Ponce de Leon--"Sappho's Fount"--The Prairies--First View--The Grass-- Flowers--Island-groves--A Contrast--Prairie-farms--A Buck and Doe--A Kentucky Pioneer--Events of Fifty Years--The "Order Tramontane"--Expedition of Gov. Spotswood--The Change-- A Thunderstorm on the Prairies--"A Sharer in the Tempest"-- Discretionary Valour 207 XVIII Morning after the Storm--The Landscape--The sprinkled Groves-- Nature in unison with the Heart--The Impress of Design-- Contemplation of grand Objects elevates--Nature and the Savage-- Nature and Nature's God--Earth praises God--Indifference and Ingratitude of Man--"All is very Good"--Influence of Scenery upon Character--The Swiss Mountaineer--Bold Scenery most Impressive--Freedom among the Alps--Caucasus--Himmalaya-- _Something_ to Love--Carlinville--"Grand Menagerie"--A Scene-- The Soil--The Inn--Macoupin Creek--Origin of Name--A Vegetable-- An Indian Luxury--Carlinville--Its Advantages and Prospects--A "Fourth-of-July" Oration--The thronging Multitudes--The huge Cart--A Thunder-storm--A Log-cabin--Women and Children--Outlines of the Cabin--The Roof and Floor--The Furniture and Dinner-pot-- A Choice of Evils--The _Pathless_ Prairie 219 {xv} XIX Ponce de Leon--The Fount of Youth--The "Land of Flowers"-- Ferdinand de Soto--"_El Padre de los Aguas_"--The Canadian Voyageurs--"_La Belle Rivière_"--Sieur La Salle--"A Terrestrial Paradise"--Daniel Boone--"Old Kentucke"--"The Pilgrim from the North"--Sabbath Morning--The Landscape--The Grass and Prairie-flower--Nature at Rest--Sabbath on the Prairie--Alluvial Aspect of the Prairies--The Soil--Lakes--Fish--The Annual Fires--Origin--A Mode of Hunting--Captain Smith--Mungo Park-- Hillsborough--Major-domo of the Hostelrie--His Garb and Proportions--The Presbyterian Church--_Picturesqueness_--The "_Luteran_ Church"--Practical Utility--The Dark Minister-- A Mistake--The Patriotic Dutchman--A Veritable Publican-- Prospects of Hillsborough--A Theological Seminary--Route to Vandalia--The Political Sabbath 230 XX The Race of Vagabonds--"Yankee Enterprise"--The Virginia Emigrant--The Western Creeks and Bridges--An Adventure in Botany--Unnatural Rebellion--Christian Retaliation--Vandalia-- "First Impressions"--The Patriotic Bacchanal--The High-priest-- A Distinction Unmerited--The Cause--Vandalia--Situation-- Public Edifices--Square--Church--Bank--Land-office--"Illinois Magazine"--Tardy Growth--Removal of Government--Adventures of the First Legislators--The Northern Frontier--Magic of Sixteen Years--Route to Carlisle--A Buck and Doe--An old Hunter-- "Hurricane Bottom"--Night on the Prairies--The Emigrant's Bivouac--The Prairie-grass--Carlisle--Site--Advantages-- Growth--"Mound Farm" 238 XXI The Love of Nature--Its Delights--The Wanderer's Reflections-- The Magic Hour--A Sunset on the Prairies--"The Sunny Italy"-- The Prairie Sunset--Route to Lebanon--Silver Creek--Origin of Name--The "Looking-glass Prairie"--The Methodist Village-- Farms--Country Seats--Maize-fields--Herds--M'Kendreean College-- "The Seminary!"--Route to Belleville--The Force of Circumstance-- A Contrast--Public {xvi} Buildings--A lingering Look--Route to St. Louis--The French Village--The Coal Bluffs--Discovery of Coal--St. Clair County--Home of Clouds--Realm of Thunder--San Louis 248 XXII Single Blessedness--Text and Comment--_En Route_--North St. Louis--A Delightful Drive--A Delightful Farm-cottage--The Catholic University--A Stately Villa--Belle Fontaine--A Town plat--A View of the Confluence--The _Human Tooth_--The Hamlet of Florissant--Former Name--Site--Buildings--Church--Seminary-- _Tonish_--_Owen's Station_--Scenery upon the Route-- _La Charbonnière_--The Missouri Bottom--The Forest-Colonnade-- The Missouri--Its Sublimity--Indian Names--Its Turbid Character--Cause--An Inexplicable Phenomenon--Theories-- Navigation Dangerous--Floods of the Missouri--Alluvions-- Sources of the Missouri and Columbia--Their Destinies--Human Life--The Ocean of Eternity--Gates of the Rocky Mountains-- Sublimity--A Cataract--The Main Stream--Claims stated 257 {iii} XXIII View of St. Charles and the Missouri--The Bluffs--"A stern round Tower"--Its Origin--The Windmill--A sunset Stroll--Rural Sights and Sounds--The River and Forest--The Duellist's Grave--The Hour and Scene--_Requiescat_--Reflections--Duelling--A sad Event-- Young B----.--His Request--His Monument--"Blood Island"--Its Scenes and Annals--A visit to "_Les Mamelles_"--The Forest-path-- Its Obscurity--Outlines of the Bluffs--Derivation of Name-- Position--Resemblance--The Missouri Bluffs--View from The Mamelle--The Missouri Bottom--The Mamelle Prairie--The distant Cliffs and Confluences--Extent of Plain--Alluvial Origin-- Lakes--Bed of the Rivers--An ancient Deposite 268 XXIV St. Charles--Its Origin--Peculiarities--Early Name--Spanish Rule--Heterogeneous Population--Germans--The Wizard Spell-- American Enterprise--Site of the Village--Prospects--The Baltimore Settlement--Catholic Religion and Institutions-- "St. Charles College"--The Race of Hunters--A Specimen--The Buffalo--Indian Atrocities--The "Rangers"--Daniel Boone-- "Too Crowded!"--The "Regulators"--Boone's Lick--His Decease-- His Memory--The Missouri Indians--The Stoccade Fort--Adventure of a Naturalist--Route from St. Charles--A Prairie without a Path--Enormous Vegetation--The Cliffs--The Column of Smoke-- Perplexity--A delightful Scene--A rare Flower--The Prairie Flora in Spring--In Summer--In Autumn--The Traveller loiters 276 {iv} XXV Novel Feature of the Mamelle Prairie--A Footpath--An old French Village--Bewilderment--Mystery--A Guide--_Portage des Sioux_-- Secluded Site--Advantages--"Common Field"--Garden-plats--A brick Edifice--A _courteous_ Welcome--An _amiable_ Personage--History of the Village--Origin--Earthquakes--Name--An Indian Legend-- Teatable Talk--_Patois_ of the French Villages--An Incident!-- A Scene!--A civil Hint--A Night of Beauty--The Flush of Dawn-- The weltering Prairie--The Forest--The river Scene--The Ferry-horn--Delay--Locale of Grafton--Advantages and Prospects 288 XXVI Cave in the Grafton Cliffs--Outlines--Human Remains--_Desecration_ of the Coopers--View from the Cave's Mouth--The Bluffs--Inclined Planes--The Railroad--A Stone-heap--A beautiful Custom--Veneration for the Dead--The Widow of Florida--The Canadian Mother--The Orientals--An extensive View--The River--The Prairie--The Emigrant Farm--The Illinois--A _tortuous_ Route--Macoupin Settlement-- Carrolton--Outlines of a Western Village--Religious Diversity--An agricultural Village--Whitehall--The Emigrant Family _en route_-- A Western Village--Its rapid Growth--Fit Parallels--Manchester-- The Scarcity of Timber not an insurmountable Obstacle-- Substitutes--Morgan County--Prospects--Soil of the Prairies-- Adaptation to _coarse_ Grains--Rapid Population--New-England Immigrants--The Changes of a few Years--Environs of Jacksonville--Buildings of "Illinois College"--The Public Square 295 XXVII Remark of Horace Walpole--A Word from the Author--Jacksonville-- Its rapid Advancement--Its Site--Suburbs--Public Square-- Radiating Streets--The Congregational Church--The Pulpit--A pleasant Incident--The "New-England of the West"--Immigrant Colonies--"Illinois College"--The Site--Buildings--"Manual Labour System"--The Founders--Their Success--Their Fame-- Jacksonville--Attractions for the Northern Emigrant--New England Character--A faithful {v} Transcript--"The Pilgrim Fathers"-- The "Stump"--Mr. W. and his Speech--Curious Surmisings--Internal Improvements--Route to Springfield--A "Baptist Circuit-rider"-- An Evening Prairie-rider 305 XXVIII The Nature of Man--Facilities for its Study--A Pilgrimage of Observation--Dissection of Character, Physical and Moral--The young Student--The brighter Features of Humanity--An unwitting Episode--Our World a _Ruin_--Sunrise on the Prairies-- Springfield--Its Location--Advantages--Structures--Society-- Prospects--The Sangamon River--Its Navigation--Bottom-lands-- Aged Forests--Cathedral Pomp--A splendid Phenomenon--Civic Honours--"_Sic itur ad astra!_"--A Morning Ride--"Demands of Appetite"--"Old Jim"--A tipsy Host--A revolting Exhibition-- Jacob's Cattle and the Prairie-wolves--An Illinois Table-- The Staples--A Tea Story--Poultry and Bacon--_Chicken Fixens_ and _Common Doins_--An Object of Commiseration 315 XXIX The Burial-ground--A _holy_ Spot--Our culpable Indifference-- Cemeteries in our Land--A sad Reflection--The last Petition-- Reverence for the Departed--Civilized and Savage Nations--The last Resting-place--Worthy of Thought--A touching Expression of the Heart--FRANKLIN--The Object of Admiration and _Love_-- The Burial-ground of Decatur--The dying Emigrant--The Spirit's Sympathy--A soothing Reflection to Friends--The "Grand Prairie"-- The "Lost Rocks"--Decatur--Site and Prospects--A sunset Scene-- The Prairie by Moonlight--The Log-cabin--The Exotic of the Prairie--The Heart--The Thank-offering--The Pre-emption Right-- The Mormonites--Their Customs--Millennial Anticipations--The Angelic Visitant--The _dénouément_--The Miracle!--The System of "New Light"--Its Rise and Fall--Aberrations of the Mind-- A melancholy Reflection--Absurdity of Mormonism 325 XXX A wild Night--An Illusion--Sleeplessness--Loneliness--A Storm-wind on the Prairies--A magnificent Scene--Beauty of {vi} the lesser Prairies--Nature's _chef d'oeuvre_--Loveliness lost in Grandeur--Waves of the Prairie--Ravines--Light and Shade--"Alone, alone, all, all alone!"--Origin of the Prairie-- Argument for _Natural_ Origin--Similar Plains--Derivation of "_Prairie_"--Absence of Trees accounted for--The _Diluvial_ Origin--Prairie Phenomena explained--The Autumnal Fires--An Exception--The Prairie _sui generis_--No Identity with other Plains--A Bed of the Ocean--A new Hypothesis--Extent of Prairie-surface--Characteristic Carelessness--Hunger and Thirst--A tedious Jaunt--Horrible Suggestions!--Land ho!-- A Log-cabin--Hog and Honey 338 XXXI Cis-atlantic Character--Avarice--Curiosity--A grand Propellant-- A Concomitant and Element of Mental Vigour--An Anglo-American Characteristic--Inspection and Supervision--"Uncle Bill"--The Quintessence of Inquisitiveness--A Fault "on Virtue's Side"-- The People of Illinois--A Hunting Ramble--A Shot--_Tempis fugit_--Shelbyville--Dame Justice _in Terrorem_--A Sulphur Spring--The Inn Register--Chill Atmosphere of the Forest-- Contrast on the Prairie--The "Green-head" Prairie-fly--Effect upon a Horse--Numerous in '35--The "Horse-guard"--The _Modus Bellandi_--_Cold Spring_--A _presuming_ Host--Musty Politics-- The Robin Redbreast--Ornithology of the West--The Turtle-dove-- Pathos of her Note--Paley's Remark--Eloquence of the Forest-bird--A Mormonite, _Zion_ward--A forensic Confabulation-- Mormonism Developed--The seduced Pedagogue--_Mount Zion_ Stock-- The Grand Tabernacle--Smith and Rigdom--The Bank--The Temple-- The School--Appearance of Smith--Of Rigdom--Their Disciples-- The National Road--Its Progress--Structure--_Terminus_--Its enormous Character--A Contrast--"Shooting a Beeve"--The Regulations--Salem--A New-England Seaport--The Location--The Village Singing-school--_The Major_ 348 XXXII Rest after Exertion--A Purpose--"Mine Ease in mine Inn"-- The "Thread of Discourse"--A Thunder-gust--Its Approach and Departure--A Bolt--A rifted Elm--An impressive {vii} Scene-- Gray's _Bard_--Mount Vernon--Courthouse--Site--Medicinal Water--A misty Morning--A _blind_ Route--"Muddy Prairie"-- Wild Turkeys--Something Diabolical!--The _direct_ Route-- A vexatious Incident--The unerring Guide--A _Tug_ for a _Fixen_--An evening Ride--Pinkneyville--Outlines and Requisites--The blood-red Jail--The _Traveller's Inn_-- "'Tis true, and Pity 'tis"--A "Soul in Purgatory"--An _unutterable_ Ill--_Incomparable_--An unpitied and unenviable Situation--A laughable Bewilderment--Host and Hostess--The Mischief of a Smile--A Retaliation 362 THE FAR WEST [PART I] I "I do remember me, that, in my youth, When I was wandering--" MANFRED. It was a bright morning in the early days of "leafy June." Many a month had seen me a wanderer from distant New-England; and now I found myself "once more upon the waters," embarked for a pilgrimage over the broad prairie-plains of the sunset West. A drizzly, miserable rain had for some days been hovering, with proverbial pertinacity, over the devoted "City of the Falls," and still, at intervals, came lazily pattering down from the sunlighted clouds, reminding one of a hoiden girl smiling through a shower of April tear-drops, while the quay continued to exhibit all that wild uproar and tumult, "confusion worse confounded," which characterizes the steamboat commerce of the Western Valley. The landing at the time was thronged with steamers, and yet the incessant "boom, boom, boom," of the high-pressure engines, the shrill hiss of scalding steam, and the fitful port-song of the negro firemen rising ever and anon upon the breeze, gave notice of a constant {14} augmentation to the number. Some, too, were getting under way, and their lower _guards_ were thronged by emigrants with their household and agricultural utensils. Drays were rattling hither and thither over the rough pavement; Irish porters were cracking their whips and roaring forth alternate staves of blasphemy and song; clerks hurrying to and fro, with fluttering note-books, in all the fancied dignity of "brief authority;" hackney-coaches dashing down to the water's edge, apparently with no motive to the nervous man but noise; while at intervals, as if to fill up the pauses of the Babel, some incontinent steamer would hurl forth from the valves of her overcharged boilers one of those deafening, terrible blasts, echoing and re-echoing along the river-banks, and streets, and among the lofty buildings, till the very welkin rang again. To one who has never visited the public wharves of the great cities of the West, it is no trivial task to convey an adequate idea of the spectacle they present. The commerce of the Eastern seaports and that of the Western Valley are utterly dissimilar; not more in the staples of intercourse than in the mode in which it is conducted; and, were one desirous of exhibiting to a friend from the Atlantic shore a picture of the prominent features which characterize commercial proceedings upon the Western waters, or, indeed, of Western character in its general outline, at a _coup d'oeil_, he could do no better than to place him in the wild uproar of the steamboat quay. Amid the "crowd, the hum, {15} the shock" of such a scene stands out Western peculiarity in all its stern proportion. Steamers on the great waters of the West are well known to indulge no violently conscientious scruples upon the subject of punctuality, and a solitary exception at our behest, or in our humble behalf, was, to be sure, not an event to be counted on. "There's dignity in being waited for;" hour after hour, therefore, still found us and left us amid the untold scenes and sounds of the public landing. It is true, and to the unending honour of all concerned be it recorded, very true it is our doughty steamer ever and anon would puff and blow like a porpoise or a narwhal; and then would she swelter from every pore and quiver in every limb with the ponderous labouring of her huge enginery, and the steam would shrilly whistle and shriek like a spirit in its confinement, till at length she united her whirlwind voice to the general roar around; and all this indicated, indubitably, an intention to be off and away; but a knowing one was he who could determine the _when_. Among the causes of our wearisome detention was one of a nature too melancholy, too painfully interesting lightly to be alluded to. Endeavouring to while away the tedium of delay, I was pacing leisurely back and forth upon the _guard_, surveying the lovely scenery of the opposite shore, and the neat little houses of the village sprinkled upon the plain beyond, when a wild, piercing shriek struck upon my ear. I was hurrying immediately forward to the spot whence it seemed to proceed, {16} when I was intercepted by some of our boat's crew bearing a mangled body. It was that of our second engineer, a fine, laughing young fellow, who had been terribly injured by becoming entangled with the flywheel of the machinery while in motion. He was laid upon the passage floor. I stood at his head; and never, I think, shall I forget those convulsed and agonized features. His countenance was ghastly and livid; beaded globules of cold sweat started out incessantly upon his pale brow; and, in the paroxysms of pain, his dark eye would flash, his nostril dilate, and his lips quiver so as to expose the teeth gnashing in a fearful manner; while a muttered execration, dying away from exhaustion, caused us all to shudder. And then that wild despairing roll of the eyeball in its socket as the miserable man would glance hurriedly around upon the countenances of the bystanders, imploring them, in utter helplessness, to lend him relief. Ah! it is a fearful thing to look upon these strivings of humanity in the iron grasp of a power it may in vain resist! From the quantity of blood thrown off, the oppressive fulness of the chest, and the difficult respiration, some serious pulmonary injury had evidently been sustained; while a splintered clavicle and limbs shockingly shattered racked the poor sufferer with anguish inexpressible. It was evident he believed himself seriously injured, for at times he would fling out his arms, beseeching those around him to "hold him back," as if even then he perceived the icy grasp of the death angel creeping over his frame. {17} Perhaps I have devoted more words to the detail of this melancholy incident than would otherwise have been the case, on account of the interest which some circumstances in the sufferer's history, subsequently received from the captain of our steamer, inspired. "Frank, poor fellow," said the captain, "was a native of Ohio, the son of a lone woman, a widow. He was all her hope, and to his exertions she was indebted for a humble support." Here, then, were circumstances to touch the sympathies of any heart possessed of but a tithe of the nobleness of our nature; and I could not but reflect, as they were recounted, how like the breath of desolation the first intelligence of her son's fearful end must sweep over the spirit of this lonely widow; for, like the wretched Constance, she can "never, never behold him more."[3] "Her life, her joy, her food, her all the world! Her widow-comfort, and her sorrow's cure!" While indulging in these sad reflections a gay burst of music arrested my attention; and, looking up, I perceived the packet-boat "Lady Marshall" dropping from her mooring at the quay, her decks swarming with passengers, and under high press of steam, holding her bold course against the current, while the merry dashing of the wheels, mingling with the wild clang of martial music, imparted an air almost of romance to the scene. How strangely did this contrast with that misery from which my eye had just turned! There are few objects more truly grand--I had {18} almost said sublime--than a powerful steamer struggling triumphantly with the rapids of the Western waters. The scene has in it a something of that power which we feel upon us in viewing a ship under full sail; and, in some respects, there is more of the sublime in the humbler triumph of man over the elements than in that more vast. Sublimity is a result, not merely of massive, extended, unmeasured greatness, but oftener, and far more impressively, does the sentiment arise from a _combination_ of vast and powerful objects. The mighty stream rolling its volumed floods through half a continent, and hurrying onward to mingle its full tide with the "Father of Waters," is truly sublime; its resistless power is sublime; the memory of its by-gone scenes, and the venerable moss-grown forests on its banks, are sublime; and, lastly, the noble fabric of man's workmanship struggling and groaning in convulsed, triumphant effort to overcome the resistance offered, completes a picture which demands not the heaving ocean-waste and the "oak leviathan" to embellish. It was not until the afternoon was far advanced that we found ourselves fairly embarked. A rapid freshet had within a few hours swollen the tranquil Ohio far beyond its ordinary volume and velocity, and its turbid waters were rolling onward between the green banks, bearing on their bosom all the varied spoils of their mountain-home, and of the rich region through which they had been flowing. The finest site from which to view the city we found to be the channel of the Falls upon the Indiana side of the stream, called the _Indian_ {19} chute, to distinguish it from two others, called the _Middle_ chute and the _Kentucky_ chute. The prospect from this point is noble, though the uniformity of the structures, the fewness of the spires, the unimposing character of the public edifices, and the depression of the site upon which the city stands, give to it a monotonous, perhaps a lifeless aspect to the stranger. It was in the year 1778 that a settlement was first commenced upon the spot on which the fair city of Louisville now stands.[4] In the early spring of that year, General George Rodgers Clarke, under authority of the State of Virginia, descended the Ohio with several hundred men, with the design of reducing the military posts of Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Fort Vincent, then held by British troops. Disembarking upon Corn Island at the Falls of the Ohio, opposite the present city, land sufficient for the support of six families, which were left, was cleared and planted with _corn_. From this circumstance the island received a name which it yet retains. General Clarke proceeded upon his expedition, and, in the autumn returning successful, the emigrants were removed to the main land, and a settlement was commenced where Louisville now stands. During the few succeeding years, other families from Virginia settled upon the spot, and in the spring of 1780 seven stations were formed upon Beargrass Creek,[5] which here empties into the Mississippi, and Louisville commenced its march to its present importance. The view of the city from the Falls, as I have remarked, is not at all imposing; the view of the {20} Falls from the city, on the contrary, is one of beauty and romance. They are occasioned by a parapet of limestone extending quite across the stream, which is here about one mile in width; and when the water is low the whole chain sparkles with bubbling foam-bells. When the stream is full the descent is hardly perceptible but for the increased rapidity of the current, which varies from ten to fourteen miles an hour.[6] Owing to the height of the freshet, this was the case at the time when we descended them, and there was a wild air of romance about the dark rushing waters: and the green woodlands upon either shore, overshadowed as they were by the shifting light and shade of the flitting clouds, cast over the scene a bewitching fascination. "_Corn Island_," with its legendary associations, rearing its dense clump of foliage as from the depths of the stream, was not the least beautiful object of the panorama; while the receding city, with its smoky roofs, its bustling quay, and the glitter and animation of an extended line of steamers, was alone necessary to fill up a scene for a limner.[7] And our steamer swept onward {21} over the rapids, and threaded their maze of beautiful islands, and passed along the little villages at their foot and the splendid steamers along their shore, till twilight had faded, and the dusky mantle of departed day was flung over forest and stream. _Ohio River._ II "How beautiful is this visible world! How glorious in its action and itself!" MANFRED. "The woods--oh! solemn are the boundless woods Of the great Western World when day declines, And louder sounds the roll of distant floods." HEMANS. Long before the dawn on the morning succeeding our departure we were roused from our rest by the hissing of steam and the rattling of machinery as our boat moved slowly out from beneath the high banks and lofty sycamores of the river-side, where she had in safety been moored for the night, to resume her course. Withdrawing the curtain from the little rectangular window of my stateroom, the dark shadow of the forest was slumbering in calm magnificence upon the waters; and glancing upward my eye, the stars were beaming out in silvery brightness; while all along the eastern horizon, where "The gray coursers of the morn Beat up the light with their bright silver hoofs And drive it through the sky," {22} rested a broad, low zone of clear heaven, proclaiming the coming of a glorious dawn. The hated clang of the bell-boy was soon after heard resounding far and wide in querulous and deafening clamour throughout the cabins, vexing the dull ear of every drowsy man in the terrible language of Macbeth's evil conscience, "sleep no more!" In a very desperation of self-defence I arose. The mists of night had not yet wholly dispersed, and the rack and fog floated quietly upon the placid bosom of the stream, or ascended in ragged masses from the dense foliage upon its banks. All this melted gently away like "the baseless fabric of a vision," and "the beauteous eye of day" burst forth in splendour, lighting up a scene of unrivalled loveliness. Much, very much has been written of "the beautiful Ohio;" the pens of an hundred tourists have sketched its quiet waters and its venerable groves; but there is in its noble scenery an ever salient freshness, which no description, however varied, can exhaust; new beauties leap forth to the eye of the man of sensibility, and even an humble pen may not fail to array them in the drapery of their own loveliness. There are in this beautiful stream features peculiar to itself, which distinguish it from every other that we have seen or of which we have read; features which render it truly and emphatically _sui generis_. It is not "the blue-rushing of the arrowy Rhone," with castled crags and frowning battlements; it is not the dark-rolling Danube, shadowy with the legend of departed time, upon whose banks armies have met and battled; it is not {23} the lordly Hudson, roaming in beauty through the ever-varying romance of the Catskill Highlands; nor is it the gentle wave of the soft-flowing Connecticut, seeming almost to sleep as it glides through the calm, "happy valley" of New-England: but it is that noble stream, bounding forth, like a young warrior of the wilderness, in all the joyance of early vigour, from the wild twin-torrents of the hills; rolling onward through a section of country the glory of a new world, and over the wooded heights of whose banks has rushed full many a crimson tide of Indian massacre. Ohio,[8] "_The River of Blood_," was its fearfully significant name from the aboriginal native; _La Belle Rivière_ was its euphonious distinction from the simple Canadian voyageur, whose light pirogue first glided on its blue bosom. "The Beautiful River!"--it is no misnomer--from its earliest commencement to the broad _embouchure_ into the turbid floods of the Mississippi, it unites every combination of scenic loveliness which even the poet's sublimated fancy could demand.[9] Now it sweeps along beneath its lofty bluffs in the conscious grandeur of resistless might; and then its clear, transparent waters glide in undulating ripples over the shelly bottoms and among the pebbly heaps of the white-drifted sand-bars, or in the calm magnificence of their eternal wandering, "To the gentle woods all night Sing they a sleepy tune." From either shore streams of singular beauty and euphonious names come pouring in their tribute {24} through the deep foliage of the fertile bottoms; while the swelling, volumed outlines of the banks, piled up with ponderous verdure rolling and heaving in the river-breeze like life, recur in such grandeur and softness, and such ever-varying combinations of beauty, as to destroy every approach to monotonous effect. From the source of the Ohio to its outlet its waters imbosom more than an hundred islands, some of such matchless loveliness that it is worthy of remark that such slight allusion has been made to them in the numerous pencillings of Ohio scenery. In the fresh, early summertime, when the deep green of vegetation is in its luxuriance, they surely constitute the most striking feature of the river. Most of them are densely wooded to the water's edge; and the wild vines and underbrush suspended lightly over the waters are mirrored in their bosom or swept by the current into attitudes most graceful and picturesque. In some of those stretched-out, endless reaches which are constantly recurring, they seem bursting up like beautiful _bouquets_ of sprinkled evergreens from the placid stream; rounded and swelling, as if by the teachings of art, on the blue bosom of the waters. A cluster of these "isles of light" I well remember, which opened upon us the eve of the second day of our passage. Two of the group were exceedingly small, mere points of a deeper shade in the reflecting azure; while the third, lying between the former, stretched itself far away in a narrow, well-defined strip of foliage, like a curving gash in the surface, parallel to the {25} shore; and over the lengthened vista of the waters gliding between, the giant branches bowed themselves, and wove their mingled verdure into an immense Gothic arch, seemingly of interminable extent, but closed at last by a single speck of crimson skylight beyond. Throughout its whole course the Ohio is fringed with wooded bluffs; now towering in sublime majesty hundreds of feet from the bed of the rolling stream, and anon sweeping inland for miles, and rearing up those eminences so singularly beautiful, appropriately termed "Ohio hills," while their broad alluvial plains in the interval betray, by their enormous vegetation, a fertility exhaustless and unrivalled. Here and there along the green bluffs is caught a glimpse of the emigrant's low log cabin peeping out to the eye from the dark foliage, sometimes when miles in the distance; while the rich maize-fields of the bottoms, the girdled forest-trees and the lowing kine betray the advance of civilized existence. But if the scenes of the Ohio are beautiful beneath the broad glare of the morning sunlight, what shall sketch their lineaments when the coarser etchings of the picture are mellowed down by the balmy effulgence of the midnight moon of summer! When her floods of light are streaming far and wide along the magnificent forest-tops! When all is still--still! and sky, and earth, and wood, and stream are hushed as a spirit's breathing! When thought is almost audible, and memory is busy with the past! When the distant bluffs, bathed in molten silver, gleam like beacon-lights, and the far-off vistas of the {26} meandering waters are flashing with the sheen of their ripples! When you glide through the endless maze, and the bright islets shift, and vary, and pass away in succession like pictures of the kaleidoscope before your eye! When imagination is awake and flinging forth her airy fictions, bodies things unseen, and clothes reality in loveliness not of earth! When a scene like this is developed, what shall adequately depict it? Not the pen. Such, such is the beautiful Ohio in the soft days of early summer; and though hackneyed may be the theme of its loveliness, yet, as the dying glories of a Western sunset flung over the landscape the mellow tenderness of its parting smile, "fading, still fading, as the day was declining," till night's dusky mantle had wrapped the "woods on shore" and the quiet stream from the eye, I could not, even at the hazard of triteness, resist an inclination to fling upon the sheet a few hurried lineaments of Nature's beautiful creations. There is not a stream upon the continent which, for the same distance, rolls onward so calmly, and smoothly, and peacefully as the Ohio. Danger rarely visits its tranquil bosom, except from the storms of heaven or the reckless folly of man, and hardly a river in the world can vie with it in safety, utility, or beauty. Though subject to rapid and great elevations and depressions, its current is generally uniform, never furious. The forest-trees which skirt its banks are the largest in North America, while the variety is endless; several sycamores were pointed out to us upon the shores from thirty to fifty feet in circumference. Its alluvial {27} bottoms are broad, deep, and exhaustlessly fertile; its bluffs are often from three to four hundred feet in height; its breadth varies from one mile to three, and its navigation, since the improvements commenced, under the authority of Congress, by the enterprising Shreve, has become safe and easy.[10] The classification of obstructions is the following: _snags_, trees anchored by their roots; fragments of trees of various forms and magnitude; _wreck-heaps_, consisting of several of these stumps, and logs, and branches of trees lodged in one place; _rocks_, which have rolled from the cliffs, and varying from ten to one hundred cubic feet in size; and _sunken boats_, principally flat-boats laden with coal. The last remains one of the most serious obstacles to the navigation of the Ohio. Many steamers have been damaged by striking the wrecks of the _Baltimore_, the _Roanoke_, the _William Hulburt_,[11] and other craft, which were themselves snagged; while keel and flat-boats without number have been lost from the same cause.[12] Several thousands of the obstacles mentioned have been removed since improvements were commenced, and accidents from this cause are now less frequent. Some of the snags torn up from the bed of the stream, where they have probably for ages been buried, are said to have exceeded a diameter of six feet at the root, and were upward of an hundred feet in length. The removal of these obstructions on the Ohio presents a difficulty and expense not encountered upon the Mississippi. In the latter stream, the root of the snag, when eradicated, is deposited in some deep {28} pool or bayou along the banks, and immediately imbeds itself in alluvial deposite; but on the Ohio, owing to the nature of its banks in most of its course, there is no opportunity for such a disposal, and the boatmen are forced to blast the logs with gunpowder to prevent them from again forming obstructions. The cutting down and clearing away of all leaning and falling trees from the banks constitutes an essential feature in the scheme of improvement; since the facts are well ascertained that trees seldom plant themselves far from the spot where they fall; and that, when once under the power of the current, they seldom anchor themselves and form snags. The policy of removing the leaning and fallen trees is, therefore, palpable, since, when this is once thoroughly accomplished, no material for subsequent formation can exist. The construction of stone dams, by which to concentrate into a single channel all the waters of the river, where they are divided by islands, or from other causes are spread over a broad extent, is another operation now in execution. The dams at "Brown's Island,"[13] the shoalest point on the Ohio, have been so eminently successful as fully to establish the efficiency of the plan. Several other works of a similar character are proposed; a full survey of the stream, hydrographical and topographical, is recommended; and, when all improvements are completed, it is believed that the navigation of the "beautiful Ohio" will answer every purpose of commerce and the traveller, from its source to its mouth, at the lowest stages of the water. _Ohio River._ III "The sure traveller, Though he alight sometimes, still goeth on." HERBERT. "A RACE-- Now like autumnal leaves before the blast Wide scattered." SPRAGUE. Thump, thump, crash! One hour longer, and I was at length completely roused from a troublous slumber by our boat coming to a dead stop. Casting a glance from the window, the bright flashing of moonlight showed the whole surface of the stream covered with drift-wood, and, on inquiry, I learned that the branches of an enormous oak, some sixty feet in length, had become entangled with one of the paddle-wheels of our steamer, and forbade all advance. We were soon once more in motion; the morning mists were dispersing, the sun rose up behind the forests, and his bright beams danced lightly over the gliding waters. We passed many pleasant little villages along the banks, and it was delightful to remove from the noise, and heat, and confusion below to the lofty _hurricane deck_, and lounge away hour after hour in gazing upon the varied and beautiful scenes which presented themselves in constant succession to the eye. Now we were gliding quietly on through the long island {30} chutes, where the daylight was dim, and the enormous forest-trees bowed themselves over us, and echoed from their still recesses the roar of our steam-pipe; then we were sweeping rapidly over the broad reaches of the stream, miles in extent; again we were winding through the mazy labyrinth of islets which fleckered the placid surface of the stream, and from time to time we passed the lonely cabin of the emigrant beneath the venerable and aged sycamores. Here and there, as we glided on, we met some relic of those ancient and primitive species of river-craft which once assumed ascendency over the waters of the West, but which are now superseded by steam, and are of too infrequent occurrence not to be objects of peculiar interest. In the early era of the navigation of the Ohio, the species of craft in use were numberless, and many of them of a most whimsical and amusing description. The first was the barge, sometimes of an hundred tons' burden, which required twenty men to force it up against the current a distance of six or seven miles a day; next the keel-boat, of smaller size and lighter structure, yet in use for the purposes of inland commerce; then the Kentucky flat, or broad-horn of the emigrant; the enormous ark, in magnitude and proportion approximating to that of the patriarch; the fairy pirogue of the French voyageur; the birch caïque of the Indian, and log skiffs, gondolas, and dug-outs of the pioneer without name or number.[14] But since the introduction of steam upon the Western waters, most of these unique and primitive contrivances {31} have disappeared; and with them, too, has gone that singular race of men who were their navigators. Most of the younger of the settlers, at this early period of the country, devoted themselves to this profession. Nor is there any wonder that the mode of life pursued by these boatmen should have presented irresistible seductions to the young people along the banks. Fancy one of these huge boats dropping lazily along with the current past their cabins on a balmy morning in June. Picture to your imagination the gorgeous foliage; the soft, delicious temperature of the atmosphere; the deep azure of the sky; the fertile alluvion, with its stupendous forests and rivers; the romantic bluffs sleeping mistily in blue distance; the clear waters rolling calmly adown, with the woodlands outlined in shadow on the surface; the boat floating leisurely onward, its heterogeneous crew of all ages dancing to the violin upon the deck, flinging out their merry salutations among the settlers, who come down to the water's edge to see the pageant pass, until, at length, it disappears behind a point of wood, and the boatman's bugle strikes up its note, dying in distance over the waters; fancy a scene like this, and the wild bugle-notes echoing and re-echoing along the bluffs and forest shades of the beautiful Ohio, and decide whether it must not have possessed a charm of fascination resistless to the youthful mind in these lonely solitudes. No wonder that the severe toils of agricultural life, in view of such scenes, should have become tasteless and irksome.[15] The lives of these {32} boatmen were lawless and dissolute to a proverb. They frequently stopped at the villages along their course, and passed the night in scenes of wild revelry and merriment. Their occupation, more than any other, subjected them to toil, and exposure, and privation; and, more than any other, it indulged them, for days in succession, with leisure, and ease, and indolent gratification. Descending the stream, they floated quietly along without an effort, but in ascending against the powerful current their life was an uninterrupted series of toil. The boat, we are told, was propelled by poles, against which the shoulder was placed and the whole strength applied; their bodies were naked to the waist, for enjoying the river-breeze and for moving with facility; and, after the labour of the day, they swallowed their whiskey and supper, and throwing themselves upon the deck of the boat, with no other canopy than the heavens, slumbered soundly on till the morning. Their slang was peculiar to the race, their humour and power of retort was remarkable, and in their frequent battles with the squatters or with their fellows, their nerve and courage were unflinching. It was in the year 1811 that the steam-engine commenced its giant labours in the Valley of the West, and the first vessel propelled by its agency glided along the soft-flowing wave of the beautiful river.[16] Many events, we are told, united to render this year a most remarkable era in the annals of Western history.[17] The spring-freshet of the rivers buried the whole valley from Pittsburgh to New-Orleans {33} in a flood; and when the waters subsided unparalleled sickness and mortality ensued. A mysterious spirit of restlessness possessed the denizens of the Northern forests, and in myriads they migrated towards the South and West. The magnificent comet of the year, seeming, indeed, to verify the terrors of superstition, and to "shake from its horrid hair pestilence and war," all that summer was beheld blazing along the midnight sky, and shedding its lurid twilight over forest and stream; and when the leaves of autumn began to rustle to the ground, the whole vast Valley of the Mississippi rocked and vibrated in earthquake-convulsion! forests bowed their heads; islands disappeared from their sites, and new one's rose; immense lakes and hills were formed; the graveyard gave up its sheeted and ghastly tenants; huge relics of the mastodon and megalonyx, which for ages had slumbered in the bosom of earth, were heaved up to the sunlight; the blue lightning streamed and the thunder muttered along the leaden sky, and, amid all the elemental war, the mighty current of the "Father of Waters" for hours rolled back its heaped-up floods towards its source! All this was the prologue to that mighty drama of _Change_ which, from that period to the present, has been sweeping over the Western Valley; it was the fearful welcome-home to that all-powerful agent which has revolutionized the character of half a continent; for at that epoch of wonders, and amid them all, the first steamboat was seen descending the great rivers, and the awe-struck Indian {34} on the banks beheld the _Pinelore_ flying through the troubled waters.[18] The rise and progress of the steam-engine is without a parallel in the history of modern improvement. Fifty years ago, and the prophetic declaration of Darwin was pardoned only as the enthusiasm of poetry; it is now little more than the detail of reality: "Soon shall thy arm, unconquer'd steam, afar Drag the slow barge or drive the rapid car; Or on wide-waving wings expanded bear The flying chariot through the fields of air; Fair crews triumphant, leaning from above, Shall wave their fluttering kerchiefs as they move, Or warrior bands alarm the gaping crowd, And armies shrink beneath the shadowy cloud."[19] The steam-engine, second only to the press in power, has in a few years anticipated results throughout the New World which centuries, in the ordinary course of cause and event, would have failed to produce. The dullest forester, even the cold, phlegmatic native of the wilderness, gazes upon its display of beautiful mechanism, its majestic march upon its element, and its sublimity of power, with astonishment and admiration. Return we to the incidents of our passage. During the morning of our third day upon the Ohio we {35} passed, among others, the villages of _Rome_, _Troy_, and Rockport.[20] The latter is the most considerable place of the three, notwithstanding _imposing_ titles. It is situated upon a green romantic spot, the summit of a precipitous pile of rocks some hundred feet in height, from which sweeps off a level region of country in the rear. Here terminates that series of beautiful bluffs commencing at the confluence of the mountain-streams, and of which so much has been said. A new geological formation commences of a bolder character than any before; and the face of the country gradually assumes those features which are found near the mouth of the river. Passing Green River with its emerald waters,[21] its "Diamond Island,"[22] the largest in the Ohio, and said to be _haunted_, and very many thriving villages, among which was Hendersonville,[23] for some time the residence of Audubon,[24] the ornithologist, we found ourselves near midday at the mouth of the smiling Wabash, its high bluffs crowned with groves of the walnut and pecan, the _carya olivoeformis_ of Nuttal, and its deep-died surface reflecting the yet deeper tints of its verdure-clad banks, as the far-winding stream gradually opened upon the eye, and then retreated in the distance. The confluence of the streams is at a beautiful angle; and, on observing the scene, the traveller will remark that the forests upon one bank are superior in magnitude to those on the other, though of the same species. The appearance is somewhat singular, and the fact is to be accounted for only from the reason that the soil {36} differs in alluvial character. It has been thought that no stream in the world, for its length and magnitude, drains a more fertile and beautiful country than the Wabash and its tributaries.[25] Emigrants are rapidly settling its banks, and a route has been projected for uniting by canal its waters with those of Lake Erie; surveys by authority of the State of Indiana have been made, and incipient measures taken preparatory to carrying the work into execution.[26] About one hundred miles from the mouth of the Wabash is situated the village of New-Harmony, far famed for the singular events of which it has been the scene.[27] It is said to be situated on a broad and beautiful plateau overlooking the stream, surrounded by a fertile and heavily-timbered country, and blessed with an atmosphere of health. It was first settled in 1814 by a religious sect of Germans called Harmonites, resembling the Moravians in their tenets, and under the control of George Rapp, in whose name the land was purchased and held. They were about eight hundred in number, and soon erected a number of substantial edifices, among which was a huge House of Assemblage an hundred feet square. They laid out their grounds with beautiful regularity, and established a botanic garden and an extensive greenhouse. For ten years the Harmonites continued to live and labour in love, in the land of their adoption, when the celebrated Robert Dale Owen,[28] of Scotland, came among them, and, at the sum of one hundred and ninety thousand dollars, purchased the establishment entire. His design was of rearing up a community {37} upon a plan styled by him the "Social System." The peculiar doctrines he inculcated were a perfect equality, moral, social, political, and religious. He held that the promise of never-ending love upon marriage was an absurdity; that children should become no impediment to separation, as they were to be considered members of the community from their second year; that the society should have no professed religion, each individual being indulged in his own faith, and that all temporal possessions should be held in common. On one night of every week the whole community met and danced; and on another they united in a concert of music, while the Sabbath was devoted to philosophical lectures. Many distinguished individuals are said to have written to the society inquiring respecting its principles and prospects, and expressing the wish at a future day to unite with it their destinies. Mr. Owen was sanguine of success. On the 4th of July, 1826, he promulgated his celebrated declaration of mental independence;[29] a document which, for absurdity, has never, perhaps, been paralleled. But all was in vain. Dissension insinuated itself among the members; one after another dropped off from the community, until at length Mr. Owen retired in disgust, and, at a vast sacrifice, disposed of the establishment to a wealthy Scotch gentleman by the name of M'Clure, a former coadjutor.[30] Thus was abandoned the far-famed _social system_, which for a time was an object of interest and topic of remark all over the United States and even in Europe. The Duke of Saxe Weimar passed here a {38} week in the spring of 1826, and has given a detailed and amusing description of his visit. About ten miles below the mouth of the Wabash is situated the village of Shawneetown, once a favourite dwelling-spot of the turbulent Shawnee Indian, the tribe of Tecumseh.[31] Quite a village once stood here; but, for some cause unknown, it was forsaken previous to its settlement by the French, and two small mounds are the only vestige of its existence which are now to be seen. A trading-post was established by the early Canadian voyageurs; but, on account of the sickliness of the site, was abandoned, and the spot was soon once more a wilderness. In the early part of 1812 a land-office was here located, and two years subsequent a town was laid off by authority of Congress, and the lots sold as other public lands. Since then it has been gradually becoming the commercial emporium of southern Illinois. The buildings, among which are a very conspicuous bank, courthouse, and a land-office for the southern district of Illinois, are scattered along upon a gently elevated bottom, swelling up from the river to the bluffs in the rear, but sometimes submerged. From this latter cause it has formerly been subject to disease; it is now considered healthy; is the chief commercial port in this section of the state, and is the principal point of debarkation for emigrants for the distant West. Twelve miles in its rear are situated the Gallatin Salines, from which the United States obtains some hundred thousands of bushels of salt annually.[32] It is manufactured by {39} the evaporation of salt water. This is said to abound over the whole extent of this region, yielding from one eighth to one twelfth of its weight in pure muriate of soda. In many places it bursts forth in perennial springs; but most frequently is obtained by penetrating with the augur a depth of from three to six hundred feet through the solid limestone substratum, when a copper tube is introduced, and the strongly-impregnated fluid gushes violently to the surface. In the vicinity of these salines huge fragments of earthenware, apparently of vessels used in obtaining salt, and bearing the impress of wickerwork, have been thrown up from a considerable depth below the surface. Appearances of the same character exist near Portsmouth, in the State of Ohio, and other places. Their origin is a mystery! the race which formed them is departed![33] _Ohio River._ IV "Who can paint Like Nature? Can imagination boast, Amid its gay creations, hues like hers? Or can it mix them with that matchless skill, And lose them in each other, as appears In every bud that blooms?" THOMSON. "Precipitous, black, jagged rocks, For ever shattered, and the same forever." COLERIDGE. It was near noon of the third day of our passage that we found ourselves in the vicinity of that singular series of massive rock formations, stretching along for miles upon the eastern bank of the stream. The whole vast plain, extending from the Northern Lakes to the mouth of the Ohio, and from the Alleghany slope to the boundless prairies of the far West, is said by geologists to be supported by a bed of horizontal limestone rock, whose deep strata have never been completely pierced, though penetrated many hundred feet by the augur. This limestone is hard, stratified, imbedding innumerable shells of the terebratulæ, encrinites, orthocerites, trilobites, productus, and other species. Throughout most of its whole extent it supports a stratum of bituminous coal, various metals, and saline impregnations: its constant decomposition has fertilized the soil, and its absorbent and cavernous nature has prevented swamps from accumulating upon the surface. Such, in general outline, is this vast limerock substratum {41} of the Western Valley. It generally commences but a few feet below the vegetable deposite; at other places its range is deeper, while at intervals it rises from the surface, and frowns in castellated grandeur over objects beneath. These huge masses of limestone sometimes exhibit the most picturesque and remarkable forms along the banks of the western rivers, and are penetrated in many places by vast caverns. The region we were now approaching was a locality of these singular formations, and for miles before reaching it, as has been remarked, a change in scenery upon the eastern bank is observed. Instead of the rounded wooded summits of the "Ohio hills" sweeping beautifully away in the distance, huge, ponderous rocks, heaped up in ragged masses, "Pelion upon Ossa," are beheld rearing themselves abruptly from the stream, and expanding their Briarean arms in every direction. Some of these cliffs present a uniform, jointed surface, as if of masonry, resembling ancient edifices, and reminding the traveller of the giant ruins of man's creations in another hemisphere, while others appear just on the point of toppling into the river. Among this range of crags is said to hang an _iron coffin_, suspended, like Mohammed's, between heaven and earth. It contains the remains of a man of singular eccentricity, who, previous to his decease, gave orders that they should be deposited thus; and the gloomy object at the close of the year, when the trees are stripped of their foliage, may be perceived, it is said, high up among the rocks from the deck of the passing {42} steamer. This story probably owes its origin to an event of actual occurrence somewhat similar, at a cliff called by the river-pilots "Hanging Rock."[34] It is situated in the vicinity of "Blennerhasset's Island."[35] The first of these singular cliffs, called "Battery Rock," stretches along the river-bank for half a mile, presenting a uniform and perpendicular façade upward of eighty feet in height. The appearance is striking, standing, as it does, distinct from anything of a kindred character for miles above and for some distance below. Passing several fine farms, which sweep down to the water's edge, a second range of cliffs are discovered, similar to those described in altitude and aspect; but near the base, through the dark cypresses skirting the water, is perceived the ragged entrance to a large cavernous fissure, penetrating the bluff, and designated by the name of "Rock-Inn-Cave."[36] It is said to have received this significant appellation from emigrants, who were accustomed to tarry with their families for weeks at the place when detained by stress of weather, stage of the river, or any other circumstance unfavourable to their progress. It was near noon of a beautiful day when the necessary orders for landing were issued to the pilot, and our boat rounded up to the low sand-beach just below this celebrated cavern. As we strolled along the shore beneath "the precipitous, black, jagged rocks" overhanging the winding and broken pathway towards the entrance, we could not but consider its situation wild and rugged enough to please the rifest fancy. The entrance, {43} at first view, is exceedingly imposing; its broad massive forehead beetling over the visiter for some yards before he finds himself within. The mouth of the cavern looks out upon the stream rushing along at the base of the cliff, and is delightfully shaded by a cluster of cypresses, rearing aloft their huge shafts, almost concealed in the luxuriant ivy-leaves clinging to their bark. The entrance is formed into a semi-elliptical arch, springing boldly to the height of forty feet from a heavy bench of rock on either side, and eighty feet in width at the base, throwing over the whole a massive roof of uniform concavity, verging to a point near the centre of the cave. Here may be seen another opening of some size, through which trickles a limpid stream, and forming an entrance to a second chamber, said to be more extensive than that below. The extreme length of this cavern is given by Schoolcraft[37] as one hundred and sixty feet, the floor, the roof, and the walls gradually tapering to a point. The rock is a secondary limestone, abounding with testacea and petrifactions, a fine specimen of which I struck from the ledge while the rest of our party were recording their names among the thousand dates and inscriptions with which the walls are defaced. Like all other curiosities of Nature, this cavern was, by the Indian tribes, deemed the residence of a _Manito_[38] or spirit, evil or propitious, concerning {44} whom many a wild legend yet lives among their simple-hearted posterity. They never pass this dwelling-place of the divinity without discharging their guns (an ordinary mark of respect), or making some other offering propitiatory of his favour. These tributary acknowledgments, however, are never of much value. The view of the stream from the left bench at the cave's mouth is most beautiful. Immediately in front extends a large and densely-wooded island, known by the name of the Cave, while the soft-gliding waters flow between, furnishing a scene of natural beauty worthy an Inman's pencil; and, if I mistake not, an engraving of the spot has been published, a ferocious-looking personage, pistol in hand, crouched at the entrance, eagerly watching an ascending boat. This design originated, doubtless, in the tradition yet extant, that in the latter part of the last century this cavern was the rendezvous of a notorious band of freebooters which then infested the region, headed by the celebrated Mason,[39] plundering the boats ascending from New-Orleans and murdering their crews. From these circumstances this cave has become the scene of a poem of much merit, called the "Outlaw," and has suggested a spirited tale from a popular writer. Many other spots in the vicinity were notorious, in the early part of the present century, for the murder and robbery of travellers, whose fate long remained enveloped in mystery. On the summit of a lofty bluff, not far from the "Battery Rock," was pointed out to us a solitary house, with a single chimney rising from its roof. Its {45} white walls may be viewed for miles before reaching the place on descending the river. It was here that the family of Sturdevant carried on their extensive operations as counterfeiters for many years unsuspected; and on this spot, in 1821, they expiated their crimes with their lives. A few miles below is a place called "Ford's Ferry,"[40] where murder, robbery, forgery, and almost every crime in the calendar were for years committed, while not a suspicion of the truth was awakened. Ford not only escaped unsuspected, but was esteemed a most exemplary man. Associated with him were his son and two other individuals, named Simpson and Shouse. They are all now gone to their account. The old man was mysteriously shot by some person who was never discovered, but was supposed to have been Simpson, between whom and himself a misunderstanding had arisen. If it were so, the murderer was met by fitting retribution, for _he_ fell in a similar manner. Shouse and the son of Ford atoned upon the gallows their crimes in 1833. Before reaching this spot the traveller passes a remarkable mass of limestone called "Tower Rock." It is perpendicular, isolated, and somewhat cylindrical in outline. It is many feet in altitude, and upon its summit tradition avers to exist the ruins of an antique tumulus; an altar, mayhap, of the ancient forest-sons, where "Garlands, ears of maize, and skins of wolf And shaggy bear, the offerings of the tribe Were made to the Great Spirit." In the vicinity of the cliff called "Tower Rock," and not far from Hurricane Island, is said to exist a {46} remarkable cavern of considerable extent. The cave is entered by an orifice nine feet in width and twelve feet high; a bench of rock is then ascended a few feet, and an aperture of the size of an ordinary door admits the visiter into a spacious hall. In the mouth of the cavern, on the façade of the cliff, at the altitude of twenty-five feet, are engraved figures resembling a variety of animals, as the bear, the buffalo, and even the lion and lioness. All this I saw nothing of, and am, of course, no voucher for its existence; but a writer in the Port Folio, so long since as 1816, states the fact, and, moreover, adds that the engraving upon the rock was executed in "a masterly style."[41] From this spot the river stretches away in a long delightful reach, studded with beautiful islands, among which "Hurricane Island," a very large one, is chief.[42] Passing the compact little village of Golconda with its neat courthouse, and the mouth of the Cumberland River with its green island, once the rendezvous of Aaron Burr and his chivalrous band, we next reached the town of Paducah, at the outlet of the Tennessee.[43] This is a place of importance,[44] though deemed unhealthy: it is said to have derived its name from a captive Indian woman, who was here sacrificed by a band of the Pawnees after having been assured of safety. About eight miles below Paducah are situated the ruins of Fort Massac, once a French military post of importance.[45] There is a singular legend respecting this fort still popular among the inhabitants of the neighbouring region, the outlines of which {47} are the following: The fortress was erected by the French while securing possession of the Western Valley, and, soon after, hostilities arising between them and the natives, the latter contrived a stratagem, in every respect worthy the craft and subtlety of the race, to obtain command of this stronghold. Early one morning a body of Indians, enveloped each in a bearskin, appeared upon the opposite bank of the Ohio. Supposing them the animal so faithfully represented, the whole French garrison in a mass sallied incontinently forth, anticipating rare sport, while the remnant left behind as a guard gathered themselves upon the glacis as spectators of the scene. Meanwhile, a large body of Indians, concealed in rear of the fort, slipped silently from their ambush, and few were there of the French who escaped to tell the tale of the scene that ensued. They were _massacred_ almost to a man, and hence the name of _Massac_ to the post. During the war of the revolution a garrison was stationed upon the spot for some years, but the structures are now in ruins. A few miles below is a small place consisting of a few farmhouses, called Wilkinsonville,[46] on the site where Fort Wilkinson once stood; just opposite, along the shore, commences the "Grand Chain" of rocks so famous to the Ohio pilot, extending four miles. The little village of Caledonia is here laid off among the bluffs. It has a good landing, and is the proposed site of a marine hospital. It was sunset when we arrived at the confluence of the rivers. In course of the afternoon we had been visited by a violent thunder-gust, accompanied {48} by hail. But sunset came, and the glorious "bow of the covenant" was hung out upon the dark bosom of the clouds, spanning woodland and waters with its beautiful hues. And yet, though the hour was a delightful one, the scene did not present that aspect of vastness and sublimity which was anticipated from the celebrity of the streams. For some miles before uniting its waters with the Mississippi, the Ohio presents a dull and uninteresting appearance. It is no longer the clear, sparkling stream, with bluffs and woodland painted on its surface; the volume of its channel is greatly increased by its union with two of its principal tributaries, and its waters are turbid; its banks are low, inundated, and clothed with dark groves of deciduous forest-trees, and the only sounds which issue from their depths to greet the traveller's ear are the hoarse croakings of frogs, or the dull monotony of countless choirs of moschetoes. Thus rolls on the river through the dullest, dreariest, most uninviting region imaginable, until it sweeps away in a direction nearly southeast, and meets the venerable Father of the West advancing to its embrace. The volume of water in each seems nearly the same; the Ohio exceeds a little in breadth, their currents oppose to each other an equal resistance, and the resultant of the forces is a vast lake more than two miles in breadth, where the united waters slumber quietly and magnificently onward for leagues in a common bed. On the right come rolling in the turbid floods of the Mississippi; and on looking upon it for the first time with preconceived ideas of the magnitude of the mightiest {49} river on the globe, the spectator is always disappointed. He considers only its breadth when compared with the Ohio, without adverting to its vast depth. The Ohio sweeps in majestically from the north, and its clear waters flow on for miles without an intimate union with its turbid conqueror. The characteristics of the two streams are distinctly marked at their junction and long after. The banks of both are low and swampy, totally unfit for culture or habitation. "Willow Point," which projects itself into the confluence, presents an elevation of twenty feet; yet, in unusual inundations, it is completely buried six feet below the surface, and the agitated waters, rolling together their masses, form an enormous lake. How strange it seemed, while gazing upon the view I have attempted to delineate, now fading away beneath the summer twilight--how very strange was the reflection that these two noble streams, deriving their sources in the pellucid lakes and the clear icy fountains of their highland-homes, meandering majestically through scenes of nature and of art unsurpassed in beauty, and draining, and irrigating, and fertilizing the loveliest valley on the globe--how strange, that the confluence of the waters of such streams, in their onward rolling to the deep, should take place at almost the only stage in their course devoid entirely of interest to the eye or the fancy; in the heart of a dreary and extended swamp, waving with the gloomy boughs of the cypress, and enlivened by not a sound but the croaking of bullfrogs, and the deep, surly misery note of {50} moschetoes! Willow Point is the property of a company of individuals, who announce it their intention to elevate the delta above the power of inundations, and here to locate a city.[47] There are as yet, however, but a few storehouses on the spot; and when we consider the incalculable expense the only plan for rendering it habitable involves, we can only deem the idea of a city here as the chimera of a Utopian fancy. For more than twelve miles above the confluence, the whole alluvion is annually inundated, and forbids all improvement; but were this site an elevated one, a city might here be founded which should command the immense commerce of these great rivers, and become the grand central emporium of the Western Valley. Upon the first elevated land above the confluence stands the little town called America. This is the proposed _terminus_ to the grand central railroad of the Internal Improvement scheme of Illinois, projected to pass directly through the state,[48] uniting its northern extremity with the southern. The town is said to have been much retarded in its advancement by the circumstance of a sand-bar obstructing the landing. It has been contemplated to cut a basin, extending from the Ohio to a stream called "Humphrey's Creek," which passes through the place, and thus secure a harbour. Could this plan be carried into execution, America would soon become a town of importance. _Ohio River._ V "The groves were God's first temples." BRYANT. "Oh! it's hame, and it's hame, it's hame wad I be, Hame, hame, hame, to my ain countrie." CUNNINGHAM. "Those Sabbath bells, those Sabbath bells, I hear them wake the hour of prime." LAMB. "She walks the waters like a thing of life." BYRON. It was late before we had passed the confluence of the Ohio with the dark-rolling tide of the "endless river," and the mellow gorgeousness of summer sunset had gently yielded to the duskiness of twilight, and that to the inky pall of night. The moon had not risen, and the darkness became gradually so dense that doubts were entertained as to the prudence of attempting to stem the mighty current of the Mississippi on such a night. These, however, were overruled; and, sweeping around the low peninsula of Cairo, our steamer met the torrent and quivered in every limb. A convulsed, motionless struggle ensued, in which the heavy labouring of the engine, the shrill whistle of the safety-valve, the quick, querulous crackling of the furnaces, the tumultuous rushing of the wheels, and the stern roar of the scape-pipe, gave evidence of the fearful power summoned up to overcome the flood. At length we began very slowly to ascend the stream. {52} Our speed was about five miles an hour, and the force of the current nearly the same, which so impedes advancement that it requires as long to ascend from the confluence to St. Louis as to descend to the same point from the Falls, though the distance is less than half. All night our steamer urged herself slowly onward against the current, and the morning found us threading a narrow channel amid a cluster of islands, from whose dense foliage the night-mists were rising and settling in dim confusion. Near the middle of the stream, above this collection, lays a very large island, comprising eight or ten thousand acres. It is called English Island;[49] is heavily timbered; huge vines of the wild grape are leaping like living things from branch to branch, and the wild pea flourishes all over the surface of the soil in most luxuriant profusion. The stream here expands itself to the breadth of four miles, and abounds with islands. As the morning advanced the sun burst gloriously forth from the mists; and as I gazed with tranquillized delight upon the beautiful scenery it unrolled, I remembered that it was the morning of the Sabbath--the peaceful Sabbath. It is a sweet thing to pass the hours of holy time amid the eloquent teachings of inanimate nature. It is pleasant to yield up for a season the sober workings of reason to the warm gushings of the heart, and to suffer the homage of the soul to go up before the Author of its being unfettered by the chill formalities, the bustling parade, the soulless dissembling of the unbending courtesies of ordinary life. Amid the {53} crowded assemblage, there is but little of that humbleness of spirit and that simple-hearted fervour of worship which it is in man to feel when communing within the shadowy solitudes of Nature with his God. There are moments, too, when the soul of man is called back from the heartlessness of life, and pours forth its emotions, gush upon gush, in all the hallowed luxuriance of its nature; when, from the fevered turmoil of daily existence, it retires to well up its sympathies alone beneath the covert of a lulled and peaceful bosom; and surely such a season is the calm, waveless hour of Sabbath sacredness. And it is a blessed appointment that, in a world whose quietude too often is disturbed by the untamed heavings of unholy feeling, there should yet be moments when the agitated events of the past are forgotten, when the apprehensions of the future are unthought of, and the generous emotions of the heart are no more repressed. Such moments are the crystal fount of the _oasis_, girt, indeed, by the sands and barrenness of the desert; yet laughing forth in tinkling melody amid its sprinkled evergreens, in all the sparkling freshness of mimic life, to bathe the languid lip of the weary one. Such moments are the mellow radiance of the departing sun when the trials of the day are over; and tenderly and softly do their influences descend upon the heart. Like the pure splendour of the star of even, how calmly does the sacred Sabbath-time beam out from the dark, unquiet firmament of life! 'Tis the blessed rainbow of promise and of consolation amid the rough storms of our pilgrimage, {54} and its holy influences elicit all the untold richness of the heart. It is a season soft as the memorial of buried affection, mild as the melody of departed years, pure as the prayer of feebleness from the lip of childhood, beautiful as yon floating islet sleeping in sunset radiance on the blue evening wave. "Gone, gone for ever!" Another Sabbath is over, and from its gathering shades it is good to cast back a glance of reflection. A company of emigrants, in course of the morning, were landed from our boat at a desolate-looking spot upon the Missouri shore; men, women, and little ones, with slaves, household stuff, pots, kettles, dogs, implements of husbandry, and all the paraphernalia of the backwood's farm heaped up promiscuously in a heterogeneous mass among the undergrowth beneath the lofty trees. A similar party from the State of Vermont were, during our passage, landed near the mouth of the Wabash, one of whom was a pretty, delicate female, with an infant boy in her arms. They had been _deck-passengers_, and we had seen none of them before; yet their situation could not but excite interest in their welfare. Poor woman! thought I, as our boat left them gazing anxiously after us from the inhospitable bank, little do you dream of the trials and the privations to which your destiny conducts, and the hours of bitter retrospection which are to come over your spirit like a blight, as, from these cheerless solitudes, you cast back many a lingering thought to your dear, distant home in New-England; whose very mountain-crags and fierce storms {55} of winter, harsh and unwelcome though they might seem to the stranger, were yet pleasant to you: "My native land! my native land! Though bare and bleak thou be, And scant and cold thy summer smile, Thou'rt all the world to me." A few years, and all this will have passed away. A new home and new ties will have sprung up in the wilderness to soothe the remembrance of the old. This broad valley will swarm with population; the warm breath of man will be felt upon the cheek, and his tread will be heard at the side; the glare of civilization and the confused hum of business will have violated these solitudes and broken in upon their gloom, and here empire shall have planted her throne; and then, perchance, that playful boy upon the bosom may rise to wield the destinies of his fellows. But many a year of toil and privation must first have passed away; and who shall record their annals? A thousand circumstances, all unlooked for, will seize upon the feelings of the emigrant; the harshness of strangers, the cold regard of recent acquaintance, the absence of relatives and of friends long cherished, the distance which separates him from his native home, and the dreary time which must elapse between all communications of the pen. And then the sweet chime of the Sabbath-bell of New-England, pealing out in "angels' music"[50] on the clear mountain-air, to usher in the hours of holy time, and to summon the soul of man to communion with its Maker; will this be heard amid the forest solitude? and all that quiet {56} intermingling of heart with heart which divests grief of half its bitterness by taking from it all its loneliness? And the hour of sickness, and of death, and of gushing tears, as they come to all, may not be absent here; and where are the soothing consolations of religious solemnity, and the sympathies of kindred souls, and the unobtrusive condolence of those who alone may enter the inner temple of the breast, where the stranger intermeddleth not? Yes, it must be--notwithstanding the golden anticipations indulged by every humble emigrant to this El Dorado of promise--it must be that there will arise in his bosom, when he finds himself for the first time amid these vast forest solitudes, attended only by his wife and children, a feeling of unutterable loneliness and desertion. Until this moment he has been sustained by the buoyancy of anticipated success, the excitement of change, the enlivening influences of new and beautiful scenes; and the effect of strange faces and strange customs has been to divert the attention, while the farewell pressure of affection yet has warmly lingered. All this is over now, and his spirit, left to its own resources, sinks within him. The sacred spot of his nativity is far, far away towards the morning sun; and there is the village church and the village graveyard, hallowed by many a holy remembrance; there, too, are the playmates and the scenes of his boyhood-days; the trysting-place of youthful love and of youthful friendship, spots around which are twined full many a tendril of his heart; and he has turned from them all _for ever_. Henceforth he is a wanderer, and a distant soil must {57} claim his ashes. He who, with such reflections, yearns not for the home of his fathers, is an alien, and no true son of New-England. It was yet early in the morning of our first day upon the Mississippi that we found ourselves beneath the stately bluff upon which stands the old village of Cape Girardeau.[51] Its site is a bold bank of the stream, gently sloping to the water's edge, upon a substratum of limerock. A settlement was commenced on this spot in the latter part of the last century. Its founders were of French and German extraction, though its structures do not betray their origin. The great earthquakes of 1811, which vibrated through the whole length of the Western Valley, agitated the site of this village severely; many brick houses were shattered, chimneys thrown down, and other damage effected, traces of the repairs of which are yet to be viewed. The place received a shock far more severe, however, in the removal of the seat of justice to another town in the county: but the landing is an excellent one; iron ore and other minerals are its staples of trade, and it is again beginning to assume a commercial character. The most remarkable objects which struck our attention in passing this place were several of those peculiarly novel mills put in motion by a spiral water-wheel, acted on by the current of the river. These screw-wheels float upon the surface parallel to the shore, rising or falling with the water, and are connected with the gearing in the millhouse upon the bank by a long shaft. The action of the current upon {58} the spiral thread of the wheel within its external casing keeps it in constant motion, which is communicated by the shaft to the machinery of the mills. The contrivance betrays much ingenuity, and for purposes where a _motive_ of inconsiderable power is required, may be useful; but for driving heavy millstones or a saw, the utility is more than problematical. In the vicinity of Cape Girardeau commences what is termed the "Tyowapity Bottom," a celebrated section of country extending along the Missouri side of the stream some thirty miles, and abounding with a peculiar species of potter's clay, unctuous in its nature, exceedingly pure and white, and plastic under the wheel.[52] This stratum of clay is said to vary from one foot to ten in depth, resting upon sandstone, and covered by limestone abounding in petrifactions. A manufactory is in operation at Cape Girardeau, in which this substance is the material employed. Near the northern extremity of this bottom the waters of the Muddy River enter the Mississippi from Illinois.[53] This stream was discovered by the early French voyageurs, and from them received the name of _Rivière au Vase_, or _Vaseux_. It is distinguished for the salines upon its banks, for its exhaustless beds of bituminous coal, for the fertility of the soil, and for a singularly-formed eminence among the bluffs of the Mississippi, a few miles from its mouth. Its name is "_Fountain Bluff_," derived from the circumstance that from its base gush out a number of limpid springs.[54] It is said to measure eight miles {59} in circumference, and to have an altitude of several hundred feet. Its western declivity looks down upon the river, and its northern side is a precipitous crag, while that upon the south slopes away to a fertile plain, sprinkled with farms. A few miles above the Big Muddy stands out from the Missouri shore a huge perpendicular column of limestone, of cylindrical formation, about one hundred feet in circumference at the base, and in height one hundred and fifty feet, called the "Grand Tower."[55] Upon its summit rests a thin stratum of vegetable mould, supporting a shaggy crown of rifted cedars, rocking in every blast that sweeps the stream, whose turbid current boils, and chafes, and rages at the obstruction below. This is the first of that celebrated range of heights upon the Mississippi usually pointed out to the tourist, springing in isolated masses from the river's brink upon either side, and presenting to the eye a succession of objects singularly grotesque. There are said to exist, at this point upon the Mississippi, indications of a huge parapet of limestone having once extended across the stream, which must have formed a tremendous cataract, and effectually inundated all the alluvion above. At low stages of the water ragged shelves, which render the navigation dangerous, are still to be seen. Among the other cliffs along this precipitous range which have received names from the boatmen are the "Devil's Oven," "Teatable," "Backbone," &c., which, with the "Devil's Anvil," "Devil's Island," &c., indicate pretty plainly the divinity most religiously propitiated {60} in these dangerous passes.[56] The "Oven" consists of an enormous promontory of rock, about one hundred feet from the surface of the river, with a hemispherical orifice scooped out of its face, probably by the action, in ages past, of the whirling waters now hurrying on below. It is situated upon the left bank of the stream, about one mile above the "Tower," and is visible from the river. In front rests a huge fragment of the same rock, and in the interval stands a dwelling and a garden spot. The "Teatable" is situated at some distance below, and the other spots named are yet lower upon the stream. This whole region bears palpable evidence of having been subjected, ages since, to powerful volcanic and diluvial action; and neither the Neptunian or Vulcanian theory can advance a superior claim. For a long time after entering the dangerous defile in the vicinity of the _Grand Tower_, through which the current rushes like a racehorse, our steamer writhed and groaned against the torrent, hardly advancing a foot. At length, as if by a single tremendous effort, which caused her to quiver and vibrate to her centre, an onward impetus was gained, the boat shot forward, the rapids were overcome, and then, by chance, commenced one of those perilous feats of rivalry, formerly, more than at present, frequent upon the Western waters, A RACE. Directly before us, a steamer of a large class, deeply laden, was roaring and struggling against the torrent under her highest pressure. During our passage we had several times passed and repassed each other, as either boat was delayed {61} at the various woodyards along the route; but now, as the evening came on, and we found ourselves gaining upon our antagonist, the excitement of emulation flushed every cheek. The passengers and crew hung clustering, in breathless interest, upon the galleries and the boiler deck, wherever a post for advantageous view presented; while the hissing valves, the quick, heavy stroke of the piston, the sharp clatter of the _eccentric_, and the cool determination of the pale engineer, as he glided like a spectre among the fearful elements of destruction, gave evidence that the challenge was accepted. But there was one humble individual, above all others, whose whole soul seemed concentrated in the contest, as from time to time, in the intervals of toil, his begrimed and working features were caught, glaring through the lurid light of the furnaces he was feeding. This was no less a personage than the doughty fireman of our steamer; a long, lanky individual, with a cute cast of the eye, a knowing tweak of the nose, and an interminable longitude of phiz. His checkered shirt was drenched with perspiration; a huge pair of breeches, begirdling his loins by means of a leathern belt, covered his nether extremities, and two sinewy arms of "whipcord and bone" held in suspension a spadelike brace of hands. During our passage, more than once did I avail myself of an opportunity of studying the grotesque, good-humoured visage of this _unique_ individual; and it required no effort of fancy to imagine I viewed before me some lingering remnant of that "horse and alligator race," now, like {62} the poor Indian, fast fading from the West before the march of steamboats and civilization, _videlicet_, "the Mississippi boatman." And, on the occasion of which I speak, methought I could catch no slight resemblance in my interesting fireman, as he flourished his ponderous limbs, to that faithful portraiture of his majesty of the Styx in Tooke's Pantheon! though, as touching this latter, I must confess me of much dubiety in boyhood days, with the worthy "gravedigger" Young, having entertained shrewd suspicions whether the "tyrant ever sat." But in my zeal for the honest Charon I am forgetting the exciting subject of the race. During my digression, the ambitious steamers have been puffing, and sweating, and glowing in laudable effort, to say nothing of stifled sobs said to have issued from their labouring bosoms, until at length a grim smile of satisfaction lighting up the rugged features of the worthy Charon, gave evidence that not in vain he had wielded his mace or heaved his wood. A dense mist soon after came on, and the exhausted steamers were hauled up at midnight beneath the venerable trees upon the banks of the stream. On the first breakings of dawn all was again in motion. But, alas! alas! in spite of all the strivings of our valorous steamer, it soon became but too evident that her mighty rival must prevail, as with distended jaws, like to some huge fish, she came rushing up in our wake, as if our annihilation were sure. But our apprehensions proved groundless; like a civil, well-behaved rival, she speeded on, hurling forth a triple bob-major of {63} curses at us as she passed, doubtless by way of salvo, and disappeared behind a point. When to this circumstance is added that a long-winded racer of a mail-boat soon after swept past us in her onward course, and left us far in the rear, I shall be believed when it is stated that the steamer on which we were embarked was distinguished for anything but speed; a circumstance by none regretted _less_ than by myself. _Mississippi River._ VI "I linger yet with Nature." MANFRED. "Onward still I press, Follow thy windings still, yet sigh for more." GOETHE. "God's my life, did you ever hear the like! What a strange man is this!" BEN JONSON. But a very few years have passed away since the navigation of the Mississippi was that of one of the most dangerous streams on the globe; but, thanks to the enterprising genius of the scientific Shreve, this may no longer with truth be said. In 1824 the first appropriation[57] was voted by Congress for improving the navigation of the Western rivers; and since that period thousands of snags, sawyers, {64} planters, sand-bars, sunken rocks, and fallen trees have been removed, until all that now remains is to prevent new obstacles from accumulating where the old have been eradicated. For much of its course in its lower sections, the Mississippi is now quite safe; and as the progress of settlements advances upon its banks, the navigation of this noble stream will doubtless become unobstructed in its whole magnificent journey from the falls of the "Laughing Water" to the Mexican Gulf. The indefatigable industry, the tireless perseverance, the indomitable enterprise, and the enlarged and scientific policy of Captain Shreve, the projector and accomplisher of the grand national operations upon the Western rivers, can never be estimated beyond their merit. The execution of that gigantic undertaking, the removal of the Red River Raft, has identified his history with that of the empire West;[58] his fame will endure so long as those magnificent streams, with which his name is associated, shall continue to roll on their volumed waters to the deep. These remarks have been suggested by scenes of constant recurrence to the traveller on the Mississippi. The banks, the forests, the islands all differ as much as the stream itself from those of the soft-gliding Ohio. Instead of those dense emerald masses of billowy foliage swelling gracefully up from the banks of "the beautiful river," those of the Mississippi throw back a rough, ragged outline; their sands piled with logs and uprooted trees, while heaps of wreck and drift-wood betray the wild ravages of the stream. In the midst of {65} the mass a single enormous sycamore often rears its ghastly limbs, while at its foot springs gracefully up a light fringe of the pensile willow. Sometimes, too, a huge sawyer, clinging upon the verge of the channel, heaves up its black mass above the surface, then falls, and again rises with the rush of the current. Against one of these sawyers is sometimes lodged a mass of drift-wood, pressing it firmly upon the bottom, till, by a constant accumulation, a foundation is gradually laid and a new island is formed: this again, by throwing the water from its course, causes a new channel, which, infringing with violence upon the opposite bank, undermines it with its colonnade of enormous trees, and thus new material in endless succession is afforded for obstructions to the navigation. The deposites of alluvion along the banks betray a similar origin of gradual accumulation by the annual floods. In some sections of the American Bottom,[59] commencing at its southern extremity with the Kaskaskia River, the mould, upward of thirty feet in depth, is made up of numerous strata of earth, which may be readily distinguished and counted by the colours. About twenty miles above the mouth of the Kaskaskia is situated Ste. Genevieve, grand deposite of the lead of the celebrated ancient mines _La Motte_, and _A'Burton_, and others, some thirty miles in the interior, and the market which supplies all the mining district of the vicinity.[60] It was first commenced about the year 1774 by the original settlers of Upper Louisiana; and the Canadian {66} French, with their descendants, constitute a large portion of its present inhabitants. The population does not now exceed eight hundred, though it is once said to have numbered two thousand inhabitants. Some of the villagers are advanced in years, and among them is M. Valle, one of the chief proprietors of _Mine la Motte_, who, though now some ninety years of age, is almost as active as when fifty.[61] Ste. Genevieve is situated about one mile from the Mississippi, upon a broad alluvial plain lying between the branches of a small stream called _Gabourie_. Beyond the first bottom rises a second steppe, and behind this yet a third, attaining an elevation of more than a hundred feet from the water's edge. Upon this elevated site was erected, some twenty years since, a handsome structure of stone, commanding a noble prospect of the river, the broad American Bottom on the opposite side, and the bluffs beyond the Kaskaskia. It was intended for a literary institution; but, owing to unfavourable reports with regard to the health of its situation, the design was abandoned, and the edifice was never completed. It is now in a state of "ruinous perfection," and enjoys the reputation, moreover, of being _haunted_. In very sooth, its aspect, viewed from the river at twilight, with its broken windows outlined against the western sky, is wild enough to warrant such an idea or any other. A courthouse and Catholic chapel constitute the public buildings. To the south of the village, and lying upon the river, is situated the common field, originally comprising {67} two thousand _arpens_; but it is now much less in extent, and is yearly diminishing from the action of the current upon the alluvial banks. These common fields were granted by the Spanish government, as well as by the French, to every village settled under their domination. A single enclosure at the expense of the villagers was erected and kept in repair, and the lot of every individual was separated from his neighbour's by a double furrow. Near this field the village was formerly located; but in the inundation of 1785, called by the old _habitans_ "_L'annee des grandes eaux_," so much of the bank was washed away that the settlers were forced to select a more elevated site. The Mississippi was at this time swelled to thirty feet above the highest water-mark before known; and the town of Kaskaskia and the whole American Bottom were inundated. Almost every description of minerals are to be found in the county, of which Ste. Genevieve is the seat of justice. But of all other species, iron ore is the most abundant. The celebrated _Iron Mountain_ and the _Pilot Knob_ are but forty miles distant.[62] Abundance of coal is found in the opposite bluffs in Illinois. About twelve miles from the village has been opened a quarry of beautiful white marble, in some respects thought not inferior to that of Carrara. There are also said to be immense caves of pure white sand, of dazzling lustre, quantities of which are transported to Pittsburg for the manufacture of flint glass. There are a number of beautiful fountains in the neighbourhood, one of which is said to be of surpassing loveliness. It is several {68} yards square, and rushes up from a depth of fifteen or twenty feet, enclosed upon three sides by masses of living rock, over which, in pensile gracefulness, repose the long glossy branches of the forest trees. The early French settlers manufactured salt a few miles from the village, at a saline formerly occupied by the aborigines, the remains of whose earthen kettles are yet found on the spot. About thirty years since a village of the Peoria Indians was situated where the French common field now stands;[63] and from the ancient mounds found in the vicinity, and the vast quantities of animal and human remains, and utensils of pottery exhumed from the soil, the spot seems to have been a favourite location of a race whose destiny, and origin, and history are alike veiled in oblivion. The view of Ste. Genevieve from the water is picturesque and beautiful, and its landing is said to be superior to any between the mouth of the Ohio and the city of St. Louis. The village has that decayed and venerable aspect characteristic of all these early French settlements. As we were passing Ste. Genevieve an accident occurred which had nearly proved fatal to our boat, if not to the lives of all on board of her. A race which took place between another steamer and our own has been noticed. In some unaccountable manner, this boat, which then passed us, fell again in the rear, and now, for the last hour, had been coming up in our wake under high steam. On overtaking us, she attempted, contrary to all rules and regulations {69} for the navigation of the river provided, to pass between our boat and the bank beneath which we were moving; an outrage which, had it been persisted in a moment longer than was fortunately the case, would have sent us to the bottom. For a single instant, as she came rushing on, contact seemed inevitable; and, as her force was far superior to our own, and the recklessness of many who have the guidance of Western steamers was well known to us all, the passengers stood clustering around upon the decks, some pale with apprehension, and others with firearms in their hands, flushed with excitement, and prepared to render back prompt retribution on the first aggression. The pilot of the hostile boat, from his exposed situation and the virulent feelings against him, would have met with certain death; and he, consequently, contrary to the express injunctions of the master, reversed the motion of the wheels just at the instant to avoid the fatal encounter. The sole cause for this outrage, we subsequently learned, was a private pique existing between the pilots of the respective steamers. One cannot restrain an expression of indignant feeling at such an exhibition of foolhardy recklessness. It is strange, after all the fearful accidents of this description upon the Western waters, and that terrible prodigality of human life which for years past has been constantly exhibited, there should yet be found individuals so utterly regardless of the safety of their fellow-men, and so destitute of every emotion of generous feeling, as to force their way heedlessly onward into {70} danger, careless of any issue save the paltry gratification of private vengeance. It is a question daily becoming of more startling import, How may these fatal occurrences be successfully opposed? Where lies the fault? Is it in public sentiment? Is it in legal enactment? Is it in individual villany? However this may be, our passage seemed fraught with adventure, of which this is but an incident. After the event mentioned, having composed the agitation consequent, we had retired to our berths, and were just buried in profound sleep, when crash--our boat's bow struck heavily against a snag, which, glancing along the bottom, threw her at once upon her beams, and all the passengers on the elevated side from their berths. No serious injury was sustained, though alarm and confusion enough were excited by such an unceremonious turn-out. The dismay and tribulation of some of our worthy company were entirely too ludicrous for the risibles of the others, and a hearty roar of cachinnation was heard even above the ejaculations of distress; a very improper thing, no doubt, and not at all to be recommended on such occasions, as one would hardly wish to make a grave "unknell'd and uncoffin'd" in the Mississippi, with a broad grin upon his phiz. In alluding to the race which took place during our passage, honourable mention was made of a certain worthy individual whose vocation was to feed the furnaces; and one bright morning, when all the others of our company had bestowed themselves in their berths because of the intolerable {71} heat, I took occasion to visit the sooty Charon in the purgatorial realms over which he wielded the sceptre. "Grievous work this building fires under a sun like that," was the salutation, as my friend the fireman had just completed the toilsome operation once more of stuffing the furnace, while floods of perspiration were coursing down a chest hairy as Esau's in the Scripture, and as brawny. Hereupon honest Charon lifted up his face, and drawing a dingy shirt sleeve with emphasis athwart his eyes, bleared with smut, responded, "Ay, ay, sir; it's a sin to Moses, such a trade;" and seizing incontinently upon a fragment of tin, fashioned by dint of thumping into a polygonal dipper of unearthly dimensions, he scooped up a quantity of the turbid fluid through which we were moving, and deep, deep was the potation which, like a succession of rapids, went gurgling down his throat. Marvellously refreshed, the worthy genius dilated, much to my edification, upon the glories of a fireman's life. "Upon this hint I spake" touching the topic of our recent race; and then were the strings of the old worthy's tongue let loose; and vehemently amplified he upon "our smart chance of a gallop" and "the slight sprinkling of steam he had managed to push up." "Ah, stranger, I'll allow, and couldn't I have teetotally obfusticated her, and right mightily used her up, hadn't it been I was sort of bashful as to keeping path with such a cursed old mud-turtle! But it's all done gone;" and the droughty Charon seized another swig from the unearthly dipper; and closing hermetically his lantern jaws, and resuming his _infernal_ {72} labours, to which those of Alcmena's son or of Tartarean Sysiphus were trifles, I had the discretion to betake myself to the upper world. During the night, after passing Ste. Genevieve, our steamer landed at a woodyard in the vicinity of that celebrated old fortress, Fort Chartres, erected by the French while in possession of Illinois; once the most powerful fortification in North America, but now a pile of ruins.[64] It is situated about three miles from _Prairie de Rocher_, a little antiquated French hamlet, the scene of one of Hall's Western Legends.[65] We could see nothing of the old fort from our situation on the boat; but its vast ruins, though now a shattered heap, and shrouded with forest-trees of more than half a century's growth, are said still to proclaim in their finished and ponderous masonry its ancient grandeur and strength. In front stretches a large island in the stream, which has received from the old ruin a name. It is not a little surprising that there exists no description of this venerable pile worthy its origin and eventful history. _Mississippi River._ VII "The hills! our mountain-wall, the hills!" _Alpine Omen._ "But thou, exulting and abounding river! Making thy waves a blessing as they flow Through banks whose beauty would endure for ever, Could man but leave thy bright creation so--" _Childe Harold._ There are few objects upon the Mississippi in which the geologist and natural philosopher may claim a deeper interest than that singular series of limestone cliffs already alluded to, which, above its junction with the Ohio, present themselves to the traveller all along the Missouri shore. The principal ridge commences a few miles above Ste. Genevieve; and at sunrise one morning we found ourselves beneath a huge battlement of crags, rising precipitously from the river to the height of several hundred feet. Seldom have I gazed upon a scene more eminently imposing than that of these hoary old cliffs, when the midsummer-sun, rushing upward from the eastern horizon, bathed their splintered pinnacles and spires and the rifted tree-tops in a flood of golden effulgence. The scene was not unworthy Walter Scott's graphic description of the view from the Trosachs of Loch Katrine, in the "Lady of the Lake:" "The _eastern_ waves of _rising_ day Roll'd o'er the _stream_ their level way; Each purple peak, each flinty spire, Was bathed in floods of living fire. * * * * * Their rocky summits, split and rent, Form'd turret, dome, or battlement, Or seem'd fantastically set With cupola or minaret, Wild crests as pagod ever decked Or mosque of eastern architect." {74} All of these precipices, not less than those on the Ohio, betray palpable indication of having once been swept by the stream; and the fantastic excavations and cavernous fissures which their bold escarpments expose would indicate a current far more furious and headstrong than that, resistless though it be, which now rolls at their base. The idea receives confirmation from the circumstance that opposite extends the broad American Bottom, whose alluvial character is undisputed. This tract once constituted our western border, whence the name. The bluffs of Selma and Herculaneum are distinguished for their beauty and grandeur, not less than for the practical utility to which they have been made subservient. Both places are great depositories of lead from the mines of the interior, and all along their cliffs, for miles, upon every eligible point, are erected tall towers for the manufacture of shot. Their appearance in distant view is singularly picturesque, perched lightly upon the pinnacles of towering cliffs, beetling over the flood, which rushes along two hundred feet below. Some of these shot manufactories have been in operation {75} for nearly thirty years.[66] Herculaneum has long been celebrated for those in her vicinity. The situation of the town is the mouth of Joachim Creek; and the singular gap at this point has been aptly compared to an enormous door, thrown open in the cliffs for the passage of its waters. A few miles west of this village is said to exist a great natural curiosity, in shape of a huge rock of limestone, some hundred feet in length, and about fifty feet high. This rock is completely honeycombed with perforations, and has the appearance of having been pierced by the mytilus or some other marine insect. A few miles above Herculaneum comes in the Platine Creek;[67] and here commence the "Cornice Rocks," a magnificent escarpment of castellated cliffs some two or three hundred feet in perpendicular altitude from the bed of the stream, and extending along the western bank a distance of eight or ten miles. Through the façade of these bluffs pours in the tribute of the Merrimac, a bright, sparkling, beautiful stream.[68] This river is so clear and limpid that it was long supposed to glide over sands of silver; but the idea has been abandoned, and given place to the certainty of an abundant store of lead, and iron, and salt upon its banks, while its source is shaded by extensive forests of the white pine, a material in this section of country almost, if not quite, as valuable.[69] Ancient works of various forms are also found upon the banks of the Merrimac. There is an immense cemetery near the village of Fenton, containing {76} thousands of graves of a pigmy size, the largest not exceeding four feet in length. This cemetery is now enclosed and cultivated, so that the graves are no longer visible; but, previous to this, it is said that headstones were to be seen bearing unintelligible hieroglyphical inscriptions.[70] Human remains, ancient pottery, arrow-heads, and stone axes are daily thrown up by the ploughshare, while the numerous mounds in the vicinity are literally composed of the same materials. Mammoth bones, such as those discovered on the Ohio and in the state of New-York, are said also to have been found at a salt-lick near this stream. It was a bright morning, on the fifth day of an exceedingly long passage, that we found ourselves approaching St. Louis. At about noon we were gliding beneath the broad ensign floating from the flagstaff of Jefferson Barracks.[71] The sun was gloriously bright; the soft summer wind was rippling the waters, and the clear cerulean of the heavens was imaged in their depths. The site of the quadrangle of the barracks enclosing the parade is the broad summit of a noble bluff, swelling up from the water, while the outbuildings are scattered picturesquely along the interval beneath; the view from the steamer cannot but strike the traveller as one of much scenic beauty. Passing the venerable village of Carondelet, with its whitewashed cottages crumbling with years, and old Cahokia buried in the forests on the opposite bank, the gray walls of the Arsenal next stood out before us in the rear of its beautiful esplanade.[72] A fine quay is erected upon the river in front, and the extensive grounds {77} are enclosed by a wall of stone. Sweeping onward, the lofty spire and dusky walls of St. Louis Cathedral, on rounding a river bend, opened upon the eye, the gilded crucifix gleaming in the sunlight from its lofty summit; and then the glittering cupolas and church domes, and the fresh aspect of private residences, mingling with the bright foliage of forest-trees interspersed, all swelling gently from the water's edge, recalled vividly the beautiful "Mistress of the North," as my eye has often lingered upon her from her magnificent bay. A few more spires, and the illusion would be perfect. For beauty of outline in distant view, St. Louis is deservedly famed. The extended range of limestone warehouses circling the shore give to the city a grandeur of aspect, as approached from the water, not often beheld; while the dense-rolling forest-tops stretching away in the rear, the sharp outline of the towers and roofs against the western sky, and the funereal grove of steamboat-pipes lining the quay, altogether make up a combination of features novel and picturesque. As we approached the landing all the uproar and confusion of a steamboat port was before us, and our own arrival added to the bustle. And now, perchance, having escaped the manifold perils of sawyer and snag, planter, wreck-heap, and sand-bar, it may not be unbecoming in me, like an hundred other tourists, to gather up a votive offering, and--if classic allusion be permissible on the waters of the wilderness West--hang it up before the shrine of the "Father of Floods." {78} It is surely no misnomer that this giant stream has been styled the "eternal river," the "terrible Mississippi;"[73] for we may find none other imbodying so many elements of the fearful and the sublime. In the wild rice-lakes of the far frozen north, amid a solitude broken only by the shrill clang of the myriad water-fowls, is its home. Gushing out from its fountains clear as the air-bell, it sparkles over the white pebbly sand-beds, and, breaking over the beautiful falls of the "Laughing Water,"[74] it takes up its majestic march to the distant deep. Rolling onward through the shades of magnificent forests, and hoary, castellated cliffs, and beautiful meadows, its volume is swollen as it advances, until it receives to its bosom a tributary, a rival, a conqueror, which has roamed three thousand miles for the meeting, and its original features are lost for ever. Its beauty is merged in sublimity! Pouring along in its deep bed the heaped-up waters of streams which drain the broadest valley on the globe; sweeping onward in a boiling mass, furious, turbid, always dangerous; tearing away, from time to time, its deep banks, with their giant colonnades of living verdure, and then, with the stern despotism of a conqueror, flinging them aside again; governed by no principle but its own lawless will, the dark majesty of its features summons up an emotion of the sublime which defies contrast or parallel. And then, when we think of its far, lonely course, journeying onward in proud, dread, solitary grandeur, {79} through forests dusk with the lapse of centuries, pouring out the ice and snows of arctic lands through every temperature of clime, till at last it heaves free its mighty bosom beneath the Line, we are forced to yield up ourselves in uncontrolled admiration of its gloomy magnificence. And its dark, mysterious history, too; those fearful scenes of which it has alone been the witness; the venerable tombs of a race departed which shadow its waters; the savage tribes that yet roam its forests; the germes of civilization expanding upon its borders; and the deep solitudes, untrodden by man, through which it rolls, all conspire to throng the fancy. Ages on ages and cycles upon cycles have rolled away; wave after wave has swept the broad fields of the Old World; an hundred generations have arisen from the cradle and flourished in their freshness, and, like autumn leaflets, have withered in the tomb; and the Pharaohs and the Ptolemies, the Cæsars and the Caliphs, have thundered over the nations and passed away; and here, amid these terrible solitudes, in the stern majesty of loneliness, and power, and pride, have rolled onward these deep waters to their destiny! "Who gave you your invulnerable life, Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy? God! let the torrents, like a shout of nations, Answer!" There is, perhaps, no stream which presents a greater variety of feature than the Mississippi, or phenomena of deeper interest, whether we regard the soil, productions, and climate of its valley, its individual character and that of its tributaries, or {80} the outline of its scenery and course. The confluents of this vast stream are numerous, and each one brings a tribute of the soil through which it has roamed. The Missouri pours out its waters heavily charged with the marl of the Rocky Mountains, the saffron sands of the Yellow Stone, and the chalk of the White River; the Ohio holds in its floods the vegetable mould of the Alleghanies, and the Arkansas and Red Rivers bring in the deep-died alluvion of their banks. Each tributary mingles the spoils of its native hills with the general flood. And yet, after the contributions of so many streams, the remarkable fact is observed that its breadth and volume seem rather diminished than increased.[75] Above the embouchure of the Missouri, fifteen hundred miles from the Mexican gulf, it is broader than at New-Orleans, with scarce one tenth of its waters; and at the foot of St. Anthony's Falls its breadth is but one third less. This forms a striking characteristic of the Western rivers, and owes, perhaps, its origin partially to the turbid character of their waters: as they approach their outlet they augment in volume, and depth, and impetuosity of current, but contract their expanse. None, however, exhibit these features so strikingly as the grand central stream; and while, for its body of water, it is the narrowest stream known, it is charged with heavier solutions and has broader alluvions than any other. The depth of the stream is constantly varying. At New-Orleans it exceeds one hundred feet. Its width is from half of one mile to two miles; the breadth of its valley {81} from six miles to sixty; the rapidity of its current from two miles to four; its mean descent six inches in a mile, and its annual floods vary from twelve feet to sixty, commencing in March and ending in May. Thus much for Statistics. Below its confluence with its turbid tributary, the Mississippi, as has been observed, is no longer the clear, pure, limpid stream, gushing forth from the wreathy snows of the Northwest; but it whirls along against its ragged banks a resistless volume of heavy, sweeping floods, and its aspect of placid magnificence is beheld no more. The turbid torrent heaves onward, wavering from side to side like a living creature, as if to overleap its bounds; rolling along in a deep-cut race-path, through a vast expanse of lowland meadow, from whose exhaustless mould are reared aloft those enormous shafts shrouded in the fresh emerald of their tasselled parasites, for which its alluvial bottoms are so famous. And yet the valley of the "endless river" cannot be deemed heavily timbered when contrasted with the forested hills of the Ohio. The sycamore, the elm, the linden, the cotton-wood, the cypress, and other trees of deciduous foliage, may attain a greater diameter, but the huge trunks are more sparse and more isolated in recurrence. But one of the most striking phenomena of the Mississippi, in common with all the Western rivers, and one which distinguishes them from those which disembogue their waters into the Atlantic, is the uniformity of its meanderings. The river, in its onward course, makes a semicircular sweep almost {82} with the precision of a compass, and then is precipitated diagonally athwart its channel to a curve of equal regularity upon the opposite shore. The deepest channel and most rapid current is said to exist in the bend; and thus the stream generally infringes upon the _bend-side_, and throws up a sandbar on the shore opposite. So constantly do these sinuosities recur, that there are said to be but three _reaches_ of any extent between the confluence of the Ohio and the Gulf, and so uniform that the boatmen and Indians have been accustomed to estimate their progress by the number of bends rather than by the number of miles. One of the sweeps of the Missouri is said to include a distance of forty miles in its curve, and a circuit of half that distance is not uncommon. Sometimes a "_cut-off_," in the parlance of the watermen, is produced at these bends, where the stream, in its headlong course, has burst through the narrow neck of the peninsula, around which it once circled. At a point called the "Grand Cut-off," steamers now pass through an isthmus of less than one mile, where formerly was required a circuit of twenty. The current, in its more furious stages, often tears up islands from the bed of the river, removes sandbars and points, and sweeps off whole acres of alluvion with their superincumbent forests. In the season of flood the settlers, in their log-cabins along the banks, are often startled from their sleep by the deep, sullen crash of a "land-slip," as such removals are called. The scenery of the Mississippi, below its confluence {83} with the Missouri, is, as has been remarked, too sublime for beauty; and yet there is not a little of the picturesque in the views which meet the eye along the banks. Towns and settlements of greater or less extent appear at frequent intervals; and then the lowly log-hut of the pioneer is not to be passed without notice, standing beneath the tall, branchless columns of the girdled forest-trees, with its luxuriant maize-fields sweeping away in the rear. One of these humble habitations of the wilderness we reached, I remember, one evening near twilight; and while our boat was delayed at the woodyard, I strolled up from the shore to the gateway, and entered easily into confabulation with a pretty, slatternly-looking female, with a brood of mushroom, flaxen-haired urchins at her apron-string, and an infant at the breast very quietly receiving his supper. On inquiry I learned that eighteen years had seen the good woman a denizen of the wilderness; that all the responsibilities appertained unto herself, and that her "man" was proprietor of some thousand acres of _bottom_ in the vicinity. Subsequently I was informed that the worthy woodcutter could be valued at not less than one hundred thousand! yet, _en verite_, reader mine, I do asseverate that my latent sympathies were not slightly roused at the first introduction, because of the seeming poverty of the dirty cabin and its dirtier mistress! _St. Louis._ VIII "Once more upon the waters, yet once more!" _Childe Harold._ "I believe this is the finest confluence in the world." CHARLEVOIX. "'Tis twilight now; The sovereign sun behind his western hills In glory hath declined." BLACKWOOD'S _Magazine_. A bright, sunny summer morning as ever smiled from the blue heavens, and again I found myself upon the waters. Fast fading in the distance lay the venerable little city of the French, with its ancient edifices and its narrow streets, while in anticipation was a journeying of some hundred miles up the Illinois. Sweeping along past the city and the extended line of steamers at the landing, my attention was arrested by that series of substantial stone mills situated upon the shore immediately above, and a group of swarthy little Tritons disporting themselves in the turbid waters almost beneath our paddle-wheels. Among other singular objects were divers of those nondescript inventions of Captain Shreve, yclept by the boatmen "Uncle Sam's Tooth-pullers;" and, judging from their ferocious physiognomy, and the miracles they have effected in the navigation of the great waters of the West, well do they correspond to the _soubriquet_. {85} The craft consists of two perfect hulls, constructed with a view to great strength; united by heavy beams, and, in those parts most exposed, protected by an armature of iron. The apparatus for eradicating the snags is comprised in a simple wheel and axle, auxiliary to a pair of powerful steam-engines, with the requisite machinery for locomotion, and a massive beam uniting the bows of the hulls, sheathed with iron. The _modus operandi_ in tearing up a snag, or sawyer, or any like obstruction from the bed of the stream, appears to be this: Commencing at some distance below, in order to gain an impetus as powerful as possible, the boat is forced, under a full pressure of steam, against the snag, the head of which, rearing itself above the water, meets the strong transverse beam of which I have spoken, and is immediately elevated a number of feet above the surface. A portion of the log is then severed, and the roots are torn out by the windlass, or application of the main strength of the engines; or, if practicable, the first operation is repeated until the obstacle is completely eradicated. The efficiency of this instrument has been tested by the removal of some thousand obstructions, at an average expense of about twelve or fifteen dollars each. Along the river-banks in the northern suburbs of the city lie the scattered ruins of an ancient fortification of the Spanish government, when it held domination over the territory; and one circular structure of stone, called "Roy's Tower," now occupied as a dwelling, yet remains entire. There is also an {86} old castle of stone in tolerable preservation, surrounded by a wall of the same material.[76] Some of these venerable relics of former time--alas! for the irreverence of the age--have been converted into limekilns, and into lime itself, for aught that is known to the contrary! The waterworks, General Ashley's beautiful residence, and that series of ancient mounds for which St. Louis is famous, were next passed in succession, while upon the right stretched out the long low outline of "Blood Island" in the middle of the stream.[77] For several miles above the city, as we proceeded up the river, pleasant villas, with their white walls and cultivated grounds, were caught from time to time by the eye, glancing through the green foliage far in the interior. It was a glorious day. Silvery cloudlets were floating along the upper sky like spiritual creations, and a fresh breeze was rippling the waters: along the banks stood out the huge spectral Titans of the forest, heaving aloft their naked limbs like monuments of "time departed," while beneath reposed the humble hut and clearing of the settler. It was nearly midday, after leaving St. Louis, that we reached the embouchure of the Missouri. Twenty miles before attaining that point, the confluent streams flow along in two distinct currents upon either shore, the one white, clayey, and troubled, the other a deep blue. The river sweeps along, indeed, in two distinct streams past the city of St. Louis, upon either side of Blood Island, nor does it unite its heterogeneous floods for many miles below. At intervals, as the huge mass rolls itself {87} along, vast whirls and swells of turbid water burst out upon the surface, producing an aspect not unlike the sea in a gusty day, mottled by the shadows of scudding clouds. Charlevoix,[78] the chronicler of the early French explorations in North America, with reference to this giant confluence, more than a century since thus writes: "I believe this is the finest confluence in the world. The two rivers are much of the same breadth, each about half a league, but the Missouri is by far the most rapid, and seems to enter the Mississippi like a conqueror, through which it carries its white waves to the opposite shore without mixing them. Afterward it gives its colour to the Mississippi, which it never loses again, but carries quite down to the sea." This account, with all due consideration for the venerable historian, accords not precisely with the scene of the confluence at the present day, at least not as it has appeared to myself. The Missouri, indeed, rolls in its heavy volume with the impetuosity and bearing of a "conqueror" upon the tranquil surface of its rival; but entering, as it does, at right angles, its waters are met in their headlong course, and almost rolled back upon themselves for an instant by the mighty momentum of the flood they strike. This is manifested by, and accounts for, that well-defined line of light mud-colour extending from bank to bank across its mouth, bounded by the dark blue of the Upper Mississippi, and flowing sluggishly along in a lengthened and dingy stain, like a fringe upon the western shore. The breadth of the embouchure is about one mile, and its {88} channel lies nearly in the centre, bounded by vast sand-bars--sediment of the waters--upon either side. The alluvial deposites, with which it is heavily charged, accumulate also in several islands near the confluence, while the rivers united spread themselves out into an immense lake. As the steamer glides along among these islands opposite the Missouri, the scene with its associations is grand beyond description. Far up the extended vista of the stream, upon a lofty bluff, stands out a structure which marks the site of the ancient military post of "Belle Fontaine;"[79] while on the opposite bank, stretching inland from the point heavily wooded, lies the broad and beautiful prairie of the "Mamelles."[80] Directly fronting the confluence stand a range of heights upon the Illinois shore, from the summit of which is spread out, like a painting, one of the most extraordinary views in the world. The Mississippi, above its junction with its turbid tributary, is, as has been remarked, a clear, sparkling, beautiful stream; now flashing in silvery brilliance over its white sand-bars, then retreating far into the deep indentations of its shady banks, and again spreading out its waters into a tranquil, lakelike basin miles in extent, studded with islets. The far-famed village of Alton, situated upon the Illinois shore a few miles above the confluence, soon rose before us in the distance. When its multiform declivities shall have been smoothed away by the hand of enterprise and covered with handsome edifices, it will doubtless present a fine appearance {89} from the water; as it now remains, its aspect is rugged enough. The Penitentiary, a huge structure of stone, is rather too prominent a feature in the scene. Indeed, it is the first object which strikes the attention, and reminds one of a gray old baronial castle of feudal days more than of anything else. The churches, of which there are several, and the extensive warehouses along the shore, have an imposing aspect, and offer more agreeable associations. As we drew nigh to Alton, the fireman of our steamer deemed proper, in testimonial of the dignity of our arrival, to let off a certain rusty old swivel which chanced to be on board; and to have witnessed the marvellous fashion in which this important manoeuvre was executed by our worthies, would have pardoned a smile on the visage of Heraclitus himself. One lanky-limbed genius held a huge dipper of gunpowder; another, seizing upon the extremity of a hawser, and severing a generous fragment, made use thereof for wadding; a third rammed home the charge with that fearful weapon wherewith he poked the furnaces; while a fourth, honest wight--all preparation being complete--advanced with a shovel of glowing coals, which, poured upon the touchhole, the old piece was briefly delivered of its charge, and the woods, and shores, and welkin rang again to the roar. If we made not our entrance into Alton with "pomp and circumstance," it was surely the fault of any one but our worthy fireman. The site of Alton, at the confluence of three large and navigable streams; its extensive back country {90} of great fertility; the vast bodies of heavy timber on every side; its noble quarries of stone; its inexhaustible beds of bituminous coal only one mile distant, and its commodious landing, all seem to indicate the design of Nature that here should arise a populous and wealthy town. The place has been laid off by its proprietors in liberal style; five squares have been reserved for public purposes, with a promenade and landing, and the corporate bounds extend two miles along the river, and half a mile into the interior. Yet Alton, with all its local and artificial advantages, is obnoxious to objections. Its situation, in one section abrupt and precipitous, while in another depressed and confined, and the extensive alluvion lying between the two great rivers opposite, it is believed, will always render it more or less unhealthy; and its unenviable proximity to St. Louis will never cease to retard its commercial advancement. The _city_ of Alton, as it is now styled by its charter, was founded in the year 1818 by a gentleman who gave the place his name;[81] but, until within the six years past, it could boast but few houses and little business. Its population now amounts to several thousands, and its edifices for business, private residence, or public convenience are large and elegant structures. Its stone churches present an imposing aspect to the visiter. The streets are from forty to eighty feet in width, and extensive operations are in progress to render the place as uniform as its site will admit. A contract has been recently entered upon to construct a culvert over the Little Piasa Creek, {91} which passes through the centre of the town, upon which are to be extended streets. The expense is estimated at sixty thousand dollars. The creek issues from a celebrated fountain among the bluffs called "Cave Spring." Alton is not a little celebrated for its liberal contribution to the moral improvements of the day. To mention but a solitary instance, a gentleman of the place recently made a donation of ten thousand dollars for the endowment of a female seminary at Monticello,[82] a village five miles to the north; and measures are in progress to carry the design into immediate execution. Two railroads are shortly to be constructed from Alton; one to Springfield, seventy miles distant, and the other to Mount Carmel on the Wabash. The stock of each has been mostly subscribed, and they cannot fail, when completed, to add much to the importance of the places. Alton is also a _proposed_ terminus of two of the state railroads, and of the Cumberland Road.[83] At Alton terminates the "American Bottom," and here commences that singular series of green, grassy mounds, rounding off the steep summits of the cliffs as they rise from the water, which every traveller cannot but have noticed and admired. It was a calm, beautiful evening when we left the village; and, gliding beneath the magnificent bluffs, held our way up the stream, breaking in upon its tranquil surface, and rolling its waters upon either side in tumultuous waves to the shore. The rich purple of departing day was dying the western heavens; the light gauzy haze of twilight was unfolding itself like a veil over the forest-tops; "Maro's shepherd {92} star" was stealing timidly forth upon the brow of night; the flashing fireflies along the underbrush were beginning their splendid illuminations, and the mild melody of a flute and a few fine voices floating over the shadowy waters, lent the last touching to a scene of beauty. A little French village, with its broad galleries, and steep roofs, and venerable church, in a few miles appeared among the underbrush on the left.[84] Upon the opposite shore the bluffs began to assume a singular aspect, as if the solid mass of limestone high up had been subjected to the excavation of rushing waters. The cliffs elevated themselves from the river's edge like a regular succession of enormous pillars, rendered more striking by their ashy hue. This giant colonnade--in some places exceeding an altitude of an hundred feet, and exhibiting in its façade the openings of several caves--extended along the stream until we reached Grafton,[85] at the mouth of the Illinois; the calm, beautiful, ever-placid Illinois; beautiful now as on the day the enthusiast voyageur first deemed it the pathway to a "paradise upon earth." The moon was up, and her beams were resting mellowly upon the landscape. Far away, even to the blue horizon, the mirror-surface of the stream unfolded its vistas to the eye; upon its bosom slumbered the bright islets, like spirits of the waters, from whose clear depths stood out the reflection of their forests, while to the left opened upon the view a glimpse of the "Mamelle Prairie," rolling its bright waves of verdure beneath the moonlight like a field of fairy land. For an hour we gazed upon this magnificent scene, and the bright {93} waves dashed in sparkles from our bow, retreating in lengthened wake behind us, until our steamer turned from the Mississippi, and we were gliding along beneath the deep shadows of the forested Illinois. _Illinois River._ IX "A tale of the times of old! The deeds of days of other years!" OSSIAN. "Thou beautiful river! Thy bosom is calm And o'er thee soft breezes are shedding their balm; And Nature beholds her fair features portray'd, In the glass of thy bosom serenely display'd." BENGAL ANNUAL. "Tam saw an unco sight." BURNS. It is an idea which has more than once occurred to me, while throwing together these hasty delineations of the beautiful scenes through which, for the past few weeks, I have been moving, that, by some, a disposition might be suspected to tinge every outline indiscriminately with the "_coleur de rose_." But as well might one talk of an exaggerated emotion of the sublime on the table-rock of Niagara, or amid the "snowy scalps" of Alpine scenery, or of a mawkish sensibility to loveliness amid the purple glories of the "_Campagna di Roma_," as of either, or of both combined, in the noble "valley beyond the mountains." Nor is the interest experienced {94} by the traveller for many of the spots he passes confined to their scenic beauty. The associations of by-gone times are rife in the mind, and the traditionary legend of the events these scenes have witnessed yet lingers among the simple forest-sons. I have mentioned that remarkable range of cliffs commencing at Alton, and extending, with but little interruption, along the left shore of the Mississippi to the mouth of the Illinois. Through a deep, narrow ravine in these bluffs flows a small stream called the Piasa. The name is of aboriginal derivation, and, in the idiom of the Illini, denotes "_The bird that devours men_." Near the mouth of this little stream rises a bold, precipitous bluff, and upon its smooth face, at an elevation seemingly unattainable by human art, is graven the figure of an enormous bird with extended pinions. This bird was by the Indians called the "_Piasa_;" hence the name of the stream. The tradition of the Piasa is said to be still extant, among the tribes of the Upper Mississippi, and is thus related:[86] "Many thousand moons before the arrival of the pale faces, when the great megalonyx and mastodon, whose bones are now thrown up, were still living in the land of the green prairies, there existed a bird of such dimensions that he could easily carry off in his talons a full-grown deer. Having obtained a taste of human flesh, from that time he would prey upon nothing else. He was as artful as he was powerful; would dart suddenly and unexpectedly upon an Indian, bear him off to one of the caves in the bluff, and devour him. Hundreds of warriors attempted for years to destroy him, but without success. {95} Whole villages were depopulated, and consternation spread throughout all the tribes of the Illini. At length _Owatoga_, a chief whose fame as a warrior extended even beyond the great lakes, separating himself from the rest of his tribe, fasted in solitude for the space of a whole moon, and prayed to the Great Spirit, the Master of Life, that he would protect his children from the _Piasa_. On the last night of his fast the Great Spirit appeared to him in a dream, and directed him to select twenty of his warriors, each armed with a bow and pointed arrows, and conceal them in a designated spot. Near the place of their concealment another warrior was to stand in open view as a victim for the _Piasa_, which they must shoot the instant he pounced upon his prey. When the chief awoke in the morning he thanked the Great Spirit, returned to his tribe, and told them his dream. The warriors were quickly selected and placed in ambush. _Owatoga_ offered himself as the victim, willing to die for his tribe; and, placing himself in open view of the bluff, he soon saw the _Piasa_ perched on the cliff, eying his prey. _Owatoga_ drew up his manly form to its utmost height; and, placing his feet firmly upon the earth, began to chant the death-song of a warrior: a moment after, the _Piasa_ rose in the air, and, swift as a thunderbolt, darted down upon the chief. Scarcely had he reached his victim when every bow was sprung and every arrow was sped to the feather into his body. The _Piasa_ uttered a wild, fearful scream, that resounded far over the opposite side of the river, and expired. _Owatoga_ was safe. {96} Not an arrow, not even the talons of the bird had touched him; for the Master of Life, in admiration of his noble deed, had held over him an invisible shield. In memory of this event, this image of the Piasa was engraved in the face of the bluff." Such is the Indian tradition. True or false, the figure of the bird, with expanded wings, graven upon the surface of solid rock, is still to be seen at a height perfectly inaccessible; and to this day no Indian glides beneath the spot in his canoe without discharging at this figure his gun. Connected with this tradition, as the spot to which the Piasa conveyed his human victims, is one of those caves to which I have alluded. Another, near the mouth of the Illinois, situated about fifty feet from the water, and exceedingly difficult of access, is said to be crowded with human remains to the depth of many feet in the earth of the floor. The roof of the cavern is vaulted. It is about twenty-five feet in height, thirty in length, and in form is very irregular. There are several other cavernous fissures among these cliffs not unworthy description. The morning's dawn found our steamer gliding quietly along upon the bright waters of the Illinois. The surface of the stream was tranquil; not a ripple disturbed its slumbers; it was currentless; the mighty mass of the Mississippi was swollen, and, acting as a dam across the mouth of its tributary, caused a _back-water_ of an hundred miles. The waters of the Illinois were consequently stagnant, tepid, and by no means agreeable to the taste. There was present, also, a peculiarly bitter twang, {97} thought to be imparted by the roots of the trees and plants along its banks, which, when motionless, its waters steep; under these circumstances, water is always provided from the Mississippi before entering the mouth of the Illinois. But, whatever its qualities, this stream, to the eye, is one of the most beautiful that meanders the earth. As we glided onward upon its calm bosom, a graceful little fawn, standing upon the margin in the morning sunlight, was bending her large, lustrous eyes upon the delicate reflection of her form, mirrored in the stream; and, like the fabled Narcissus, so enamoured did she appear with the charm of her own loveliness, that our noisy approach seemed scarce to startle her; or perchance she was the pet of some neighbouring log-cabin. The Illinois is by many considered the "_belle rivière_" of the Western waters, and, in a commercial and agricultural view, is destined, doubtless, to occupy an important rank. Tonti, the old French chronicler, speaks thus of it:[87] "The banks of that river are as charming to the eye as useful to life; the meadows, fruit-trees, and forests affording everything that is necessary for men and beasts." It traverses the entire length of one of the most fertile regions in the Union, and irrigates, by its tributary streams, half the breadth. Its channel is sufficiently deep for steamers of the larger class; its current is uniform, and the obstacles to its navigation are few, and may be easily removed. The chief of these is a narrow bar just below the town of Beardstown,[88] stretching like a wing-dam quite across to the western bank; and any boat which may pass this bar {98} can at all times reach the port of the Rapids. Its length is about three hundred miles, and its narrowest part, opposite Peru, is about eighty yards in width. By means of a canal, uniting its waters with those of Lake Michigan, the internal navigation of the whole country from New-York to New-Orleans is designed to be completed.[89] The banks of the Illinois are depressed and monotonous, liable at all seasons to inundation, and stretch away for miles to the bluffs in broad prairies, glimpses of whose lively emerald and silvery lakes, caught at intervals through the dark fringe of cypress skirting the stream, are very refreshing. The bottom lands upon either side, from one mile to five, are seldom elevated much above the ordinary surface of the stream, and are at every higher stage of water submerged to the depth of many feet, presenting the appearance of a stream rolling its tide through an ancient and gloomy forest, luxuriant in foliage and vast in extent. It is not surprising that all these regions should be subject to the visitations of disease, when we look upon the miserable cabin of the woodcutter, reared upon the very verge of the water, surrounded on every side by swamps, and enveloped in their damp dews and the poisonous exhalations rising from the seething decomposition of the monstrous vegetation around. The traveller wonders not at the sallow complexion, the withered features, and the fleshless, ague-racked limbs, which, as he passes, peep forth upon him from the luxuriant foliage of this region of sepulchres; his only astonishment is, that in such an atmosphere the human constitution {99} can maintain vitality at all. And yet, never did the poet's dream image scenery more enchanting than is sometimes unfolded upon this beautiful stream. I loved, on a bright sunny morning, to linger hours away upon the lofty deck, as our steamer thridded the green islets of the winding waters, and gaze upon the reflection of the blue sky flecked with cloudlets in the bluer wave beneath, and watch the startling splash of the glittering fish, as, in exhilarated joyousness, he flung himself from its tranquil bosom, and then fell back again into its cool depths. Along the shore strode the bluebacked wader; the wild buck bounded to his thicket; the graceful buzzard--vulture of the West--soared majestically over the tree-tops, while the fitful chant of the fireman at his toil echoed and re-echoed through the recesses of the forests. Upon the left, in ascending the Illinois, lie the lands called the "_Military Bounty Tract_," reserved by Congress for distribution among the soldiers of the late war with Great Britain.[90] It is comprehended within the peninsula of the Illinois and Mississippi Rivers, about an hundred and seventy miles in length and sixty broad, embracing twelve of the northwest counties of the state. This tract of country is said to be exceedingly fertile, abounding in beautiful prairies and lakes; but the delta or alluvial regions cannot but prove unhealthy. Its disposition for the purpose of military bounties has retarded its settlement behind that of any other quarter of the state; a very inconsiderable portion has been appropriated by the soldiers; most of the titles have {100} long since departed, and the land has been disposed of past redemption for taxes. Much is also held by non-residents, who estimate it at an exorbitant value; but large tracts can be obtained for a trifling consideration, the purchaser risking the title, and many flourishing settlements are now springing up, especially along the Mississippi. Near the southern extremity of the Military Tract, at a point where the river sweeps out a deep bend from its western bank, about fifty years since was situated the little French village of _Cape au Gris_, or Grindstone Point, so named from the neighbouring rocks. The French seem to have vied with the natives in rendering the "signification" conformable to the "thing signified," in bestowing names upon their explorations in the West. The village of _Cape au Gris_ was situated upon the bank of the river, and, so late as 1811, consisted of twenty or thirty families, who cultivated a "common field" of five hundred acres on the adjacent prairie, stretching across the peninsula towards the Mississippi. At the commencement of the late war they were driven away by the savages, and a small garrison from the cantonment of Belle Fontaine, at the confluence, was subsequently stationed near the spot by General Wilkinson. A few years after the close of the war American emigration commenced. This is supposed to have been the site, also, of one of the forts erected by La Salle on his second visit to the West.[91] As we ascended the Illinois, flourishing villages were constantly meeting the eye upon either bank of the stream. Among these were the euphonious {101} names of Monroe, Montezuma, Naples, and Havana! At Beardstown the rolling prairie is looked upon for the first time; it afterward frequently recurs. As our steamer drew nigh to the renowned little city of Pekin, we beheld the bluffs lined with people of all sexes and sizes, watching our approach as we rounded up to the landing.[92] Some of our passengers, surprised at such a gathering together in such a decent, well-behaved little settlement as Pekin, sagely surmised the loss of a day from the calendar, and began to believe it the first instead of the last of the week, until reflection and observation induced the belief that other rites than those of religion had called the multitude together. Landing, streets, tavern, and groceries--which latter, be it spoken of the renowned Pekin, were like anything but "angel's visits" in recurrence--all were swarmed by a motley assemblage, seemingly intent upon _doing nothing_, and that, too, in the noisiest way. Here a congregation of keen-visaged worthies were gathered around a loquacious land-speculator, beneath the shadow of a sign-post, listening to an eloquent holding-forth upon the merits, relative and distinctive, of prairie land and bluff; there a cute-looking personage, with a twinkle of the eye and sanctimoniousness of phiz, was vending his wares by the token of a flaunting strip of red baize; while lusty viragoes, with infants at the breast, were battering their passage through the throng, crowing over a "bargain" on which the "cute" pedler had cleared not _more_ than cent. per cent. And then there were sober men and men not sober; individuals half seas over and whole seas {102} over, all in as merry trim as well might be; while, as a sort of presiding genius over the bacchanal, a worthy wag, tipsy as a satyr, in a long calico gown, was prancing through the multitude, with infinite importance, on the skeleton of an unhappy horse, which, between _nicking_ and _docking_, a spavined limb and a spectral eye, looked the veritable genius of misery. The cause of all this commotion appeared to be neither more nor less than a redoubted "monkey show," which had wound its way over the mountains into the regions of the distant West, and reared its dingy canvass upon the smooth sward of the prairie. It was a spectacle by no means to be slighted, and "divers came from afar" to behold its wonders. For nothing, perhaps, have foreign tourists in our country ridiculed us more justly than for that pomposity of nomenclature which we have delighted to apply to the thousand and one towns and villages sprinkled over our maps and our land; instance whereof this same renowned representative of the Celestial Empire concerning which I have been writing. Its brevity is its sole commendation; for as to the taste or appropriateness of such a name for such a place, to say naught of the euphony, there's none. And then, besides Pekin, there are Romes, and Troys, and Palmyras, and Belgrades, Londons and Liverpools, Babels and Babylons _without account_, all rampant in the glories of log huts, with sturdy porkers forth issuing from their sties, by way, doubtless, of the sturdy knight-errants of yore caracoling from the sally-ports of their illustrious {103} namesakes. But why, in the name of all propriety, this everlasting plagiarizing of the Greek, Gothic, Gallic patronymics of the Old World, so utterly incongruous as applied to the backwoods settlements of the New! If in very poverty of invention, or in the meagerness of our "land's language," we, as a people, feel ourselves unequal to the task--one, indeed, of no ordinary magnitude--of christening all the newborn villages of our land with melodious and appropriate appellations, may it not be advisable either to nominate certain worthy dictionary-makers for the undertaking, or else to retain the ancient Indian names? Why discard the smooth-flowing, expressive appellations bestowed by the injured aborigines upon the gliding streams and flowery plains of this land of their fathers, only to supersede them by affixes most foreign and absurd? "Is this proceeding just and honourable" towards that unfortunate race? Have we visited them with so _many_ returns of kindness that this would overflow the cup of recompense? Why tear away the last and only relic of the past yet lingering in our midst? Have we too many memorials of the olden time? Why disrobe the venerable antique of that classic drapery which alone can befit the severe nobility of its mien, only to deck it out in the starched and tawdry preciseness of a degenerate taste? _Illinois River._ X "It is a goodly sight to see What Heaven hath done for this delicious land! What fruits of fragrance blush on every tree! What goodly prospects o'er the hills expand!" _Childe Harold._ "Good-evening, sir; a good-evening to ye, sir; pleased with our village, sir!" This was the frank and free salutation a genteel, farmer-looking personage, with a broad face, a broad-brimmed hat, and a broad-skirted coat, addressed to me as I stood before the inn door at Peoria, looking out upon her beautiful lake. On learning, in reply to his inquiry, "Whence do ye come, stranger?" that my birth spot was north of the Potomac, he hailed me with hearty greeting and warm grasp as a brother. "I am a Yankee, sir; yes, sir, I am a genuine export of the old 'Bay State.' Many years have gone since I left her soil; but I remember well the 'Mistress of the North,' with her green islands and blue waters. In my young days, sir, I wandered all over the six states, and I have not forgotten the valley of the Connecticut. I have seen the 'Emporium' with her Neapolitan bay, and I have looked on the 'city of the monuments and fountains;' but in all my journeyings, stranger, I have not found a spot so pleasant as this little quiet Peoria of the Western wilderness!" Whether to smile in admiration {105} or to smile at the oddity of this singular compound of truth and exaggeration, propounded, withal, in such grandiloquent style and language, I was at a loss; and so, just as every prudent man would have acted under the circumstances, _neither_ was done; and the quiet remark, "You are an enthusiast, sir," was all that betrayed to the worthy man the emotions of the sublime and ridiculous of which he had been the unwitting cause. But, truly, the little town with this soft Indian name is a beautiful place, as no one who has ever visited it has failed to remark. The incidents of its early history are fraught with the wild and romantic. The old village of Peoria was one of the earliest settlements of the French in the Mississippi Valley; and, many years before the memory of the present generation, it had been abandoned by its founders, a new village having been erected upon the present site, deemed less unhealthy than the former. The first house is said to have been built in new Peoria, or _La ville de Maillet_, as was its _nom de nique_, about the year 1778; and the situation was directly at the outlet of the lake, one mile and a half below the old settlement.[93] Its inhabitants consisted chiefly of that wild, semi-savage race of Indian traders, hunters, trappers, voyageurs, _couriers du bois_, and half-breeds, which long formed the sole link of union between the northern lakes and the southwest. After residing nearly half a century on this pleasant spot, in that happy harmony with their ferocious neighbours for which the early French were so remarkable, they were at length, in the {106} autumn of 1812, exiled from their ancient home by the militia of Illinois, on charge of conniving at Indian atrocities upon our people, a party having been fired on at night while anchored before the village in their boats. The villagers fled for refuge to their friends upon the Mississippi. In the autumn of the succeeding year, General Howard,[94] with 1400 men, ascended the Illinois; a fortress was constructed at Peoria in twelve days from timber cut on the opposite side of the lake. It was named Fort Clarke, and was occupied by a detachment of United States' troops. In course of a few weeks the whole frontier was swept of hostile Indians. On the termination of hostilities with Great Britain the fort was abandoned, and soon after was burned by the Indians, though the ruins are yet to be seen. The present settlement was commenced by emigrants but a few years since, and has advanced with a rapidity scarcely paralleled even in the West. Geographically, it is the centre of the state, and may at some future day become its seat of government. It is the shire town of a county of the same name; has a handsome courthouse of freestone; the neighbouring regions are fertile, and beds of bituminous coal are found in the vicinity. These circumstances render this spot, than which few can boast a more eventful history, one of the most eligible _locales_ in the state for the emigrant. Its situation is indescribably beautiful, extending along the lake of the same name, the Indian name of which was _Pinatahwee_, for several miles from its outlet. This water-sheet, which is little more than an expansion of the stream of from one to three miles, stretches away for about twenty, and is divided near its middle by a contraction called the _Narrows_. Its waters are exceedingly limpid, gliding gently over a pebbly bottom, and abounding in fish of fifty different species, from which an attempt for obtaining oil on a large scale was commenced a few years since, but was abandoned without success. Some of the varieties of these fish are said to be rare and curious. Several specimens of a species called the "Alligator Garr" have been taken. The largest was about seven feet in length, a yard in circumference, and encased in armour of hornlike scales of quadrilateral form, impenetrable to a rifle-ball. The weight was several hundred pounds; the form and the teeth--of which there were several rows--similar to those of the shark, and, upon the whole, the creature seemed not a whit less formidable. Another singular variety found is the "spoonfish," about four feet in length, with a black skin, and an extension of the superior mandible for two feet, of a thin, flat, shovel-like form, used probably for digging its food. The more ordinary species, pike, perch, salmon, trout, buffalo, mullet, and catfish, abound in the lake, while the surface is covered with geese, ducks, gulls, a species of water turkey, and, not unfrequently, swans and pelicans. Its bottom contains curious petrifactions and carnelions of a rare quality. From the pebbly shore of the lake, gushing out with fountains of sparkling water along its whole extent, rises a rolling bank, upon which now stands most of the village. A short distance and you ascend a second eminence, and beyond this you reach {108} the bluffs, some of them an hundred feet in height, gracefully rounded, and corresponding with the meandering of the stream below. From the summit of these bluffs the prospect is uncommonly fine. At their base is spread out a beautiful prairie, its tall grass-tops and bright-died flowerets nodding to the soft summer wind. Along its eastern border is extended a range of neat edifices, while lower down sleep the calm, clear waters of the lake, unruffled by a ripple, and reflecting from its placid bosom the stupendous vegetation of the wooded alluvion beyond. It was near the close of a day of withering sultriness that we reached Peoria. Passing the Kickapoo, or Red Bud Creek,[95] a sweep in the stream opened before the eye a panorama of that magnificent water-sheet of which I have spoken, so calm and motionless that its mirror surface seemed suspended in the golden mistiness of the summer atmosphere which floated over it. As we were approaching the village a few sweet notes of a bugle struck the ear; and in a few moments a lengthened troop of cavalry, with baggage-cars and military paraphernalia, was beheld winding over a distant roll of the prairie, their arms glittering gayly in the horizontal beams of the sinking sun as the ranks appeared, were lost, reappeared, and then, by an inequality in the route, were concealed from the view. The steamer "Helen Mar" was lying at the landing as we rounded up, most terribly shattered by the collapsing of the flue of one of her boilers a few days before in the vicinity. She had been swept by the death-blast from one extremity {109} to the other, and everything was remaining just as when the accident occurred, even to the pallets upon which had been stretched the mangled bodies, and the remedies applied for their relief. The disasters of steam have become, till of late, of such ordinary occurrence upon the waters of the West, that they have been thought of comparatively but little; yet in no aspect does the angel of death perform his bidding more fearfully. Misery's own pencil can delineate no scene of horror more revolting; humanity knows no visitation more terrible! The atmosphere of hell envelops the victim and sweeps him from the earth! Happening casually to fall in with several gentlemen at the inn who chanced to have some acquaintance with the detachment of dragoons I have mentioned, I accepted with pleasure an invitation to accompany them on a visit to the encampment a few miles from the town. The moon was up, and was flinging her silvery veil over the landscape when we reached the bivouac. It was a picturesque spot, a low prairie-bottom on the margin of the lake, beneath a range of wooded bluffs in the rear; and the little white tents sprinkled about upon the green shrubbery beneath the trees; the stacks of arms and military accoutrements piled up beneath or suspended from their branches; the dragoons around their tents, engaged in the culinary operations of the camp, or listlessly lolling upon the grass as the laugh and jest went free; the horses grazing among the thickets, while over the whole was resting the misty splendour of the moonlight, {110} made up a _tout ensemble_ not unworthy the crayon of a Weir.[96] The detachment was a small one, consisting of only one hundred men, under command of Captain S----, on an excursion from Camp des Moines, at the lower rapids of the Mississippi, to Fort Howard, on Green Bay, partially occasioned by a rumour of Indian hostilities threatened in that vicinity.[97] They were a portion of several companies of the first regiment of dragoons, levied by Congress a few years since for the protection of the Western frontier, in place of the "Rangers," so styled, in whom that trust had previously reposed. They were all Americans, resolute-looking fellows enough, and originally rendezvoused at Jefferson Barracks. The design of such a corps is doubtless an excellent one; but military men tell us that some unpardonable omissions were made in the provisions of the bill reported by Congress in which the corps had its origin; for, according to the present regulations, all approximation to discipline is precluded. Captain S---- received us leisurely reclining upon a buffalo-robe in his tent; and, in a brief interview, we found him possessed of all that gentlemanly _naïveté_ which foreign travellers would have us believe is, in our country, confined to the profession of arms. The night-dews of the lowlands had for some hours been falling when we reached the village drenched with their damps. Much to our regret, the stage of water in the Illinois would not permit our boat to ascend the stream, as had been the intention, to Hennepin, some twenty miles above, and Ottawa, at the foot of the rapids.[98] Nearly equidistant between these {111} flourishing towns, upon the eastern bank of the Illinois, is situated that remarkable crag, termed by the early French "_Le Rocher_," by the Indian traditions "_Starved Rock_," and by the present dwellers in its vicinity, as well as by Schoolcraft and the maps, "_Rockfort_." It is a tall cliff, composed of alternate strata of lime and sandstone, about two hundred and fifty feet in height by report, and one hundred and thirty-four by actual measurement. Its base is swept by the current, and it is perfectly precipitous upon three sides. The fourth side, by which alone it is accessible, is connected with the neighbouring range of bluffs by a natural causeway, which can be ascended only by a difficult and tortuous path. The summit of the crag is clothed with soil to the depth of several feet, sufficient to sustain a growth of stunted cedars. It is about one hundred feet in diameter, and comprises nearly an acre of level land. The name of "Starved Rock" was obtained by this inaccessible battlement from a legend of Indian tradition, an outline of which may be found in Flint's work upon the Western Valley, and an interesting story wrought from its incidents in Hall's "Border Tales." A band of the Illini having assassinated Pontiac, the Ottoway chieftain, in 1767, the tribe of the Pottawattamies made war upon them. The Illini, being defeated, fled for refuge to this rock, which a little labour soon rendered inaccessible to all the assaults of their enemy. At this crisis, after repeated repulse, the besiegers determined to reduce the hold by _starvation_, as the only method remaining. The tradition of this siege affords, perhaps, {112} as striking an illustration of Indian character as is furnished by our annals of the unfortunate race. Food in some considerable quantity had been provided by the besieged; but when, parched by thirst, they attempted during the night to procure water from the cool stream rushing below them by means of ropes of bark, the enemy detected the design, and their vessels were cut off by a guard in canoes. The last resource was defeated; every stratagem discovered; hope was extinguished; the unutterable tortures of thirst were upon them; a terrific death in anticipation; yet they yielded not; the speedier torments of the stake and a triumph to their foes was the alternative. And so they perished--all, with a solitary exception--a woman, who was adopted by the hostile tribe, and was living not half a century since. For years the summit of this old cliff was whitened by the bones of the victims; and quantities of remains, as well as arrow-heads and domestic utensils, are at the present day exhumed. Shells are also found, but their _whence_ and _wherefore_ are not easily determined. At the only accessible point there is said to be an appearance of an intrenchment and rampart. A glorious view of the Illinois, which, forming a curve, laves more than half of the column's base, is obtained from the summit. An ancient post of the French is believed to have once stood here.[99] Brightly were the moonbeams streaming over the blue lake Pinatahwee as our steamer glided from its waters. Near midnight, as we swept past Pekin, we were roused from our slumbers by the plaintive {113} notes of the "German Hymn," which mellowly came stealing from distance over the waters; and we almost pardoned the "Menagerie" its multifold transgressions because of that touching air. There is a chord in almost every bosom, however rough and unharmonious its ordinary emotions, which fails not to vibrate beneath the gentle influences of "sweet sounds." From this, as from the strings of the wind-harp, a zephyr may elicit a melody of feeling which the storm could never have awakened. There are seasons, too, when the nerves and fibres of the system, reposing in quietness, are most exquisitely attempered to the mysterious influences and the delicate breathings of harmony; and such a season is that calm, holy hour, when deep sleep hath descended upon man, and his unquiet pulsings have for an interval ceased their fevered beat. To be awakened then by music's cadence has upon us an effect unearthly! It calls forth from their depths the richest emotions of the heart. The moonlight serenade! Ah, its wild witchery has told upon the romance of many a young bosom! If you have a mistress, and you would woo her _not vainly_, woo her thus! I remember me, when once a resident of the courtly city of L----, to have been awakened one morning long before the dawn by a strain of distant music, which, swelling and rising upon the still night-air, came floating like a spirit through the open windows and long galleries of the building. I arose; all was calm, and silent, and deserted through the dim, lengthened streets of the city. Not a light gleamed from a casement; not a {114} footfall echoed from the pavement; not a breath broke the stillness save the crowing of the far-off cock proclaiming the morn, and the low rumble of the marketman's wagon; and then, swelling upon the night-wind, fitfully came up that beautiful gush of melody, wave upon wave, surge after surge, billow upon billow, winding itself into the innermost cells of the soul! "Oh, it came o'er my ear like the sweet South, That breathes upon a bank of violets, Stealing and giving odour." _Illinois River._ XI "You will excuse me if I do not strictly confine myself to narration, but now and then interpose such _reflections_ as may offer while I am writing."--NEWTON. "Each was a giant heap of mouldering clay; There slept the warriors, women, friends, and foes; There, side by side, the rival chieftains lay, And mighty tribes swept from the face of day." FLINT. More than three weeks ago I found myself, one bright morning at sunrise, before the city of St. Louis on descending the Illinois; and in that venerable little city have I ever since been a dweller. A series of those vexatious delays, ever occurring to balk the designs of the tourist, have detained me longer than could have been anticipated. Not the {115} most inconsiderable of these preventives to locomotion in this bustling, swapping, chaffering little city, strange as it may seem, has been the difficulty of procuring, at a conscionable outlay of dollars and cents, a suitable steed for a protracted jaunt. But, thanks to the civility or _selfism_ of a friend, this difficulty is at an end, and I have at length succeeded in securing the reversion of a tough, spirited little bay, which, by considerate usage and bountiful foddering, may serve to bear me, with the requisite quantum of speed and safety, over the prairies. A few days, therefore, when the last touch of _acclimation_ shall have taken its leave, and "I'm over the border and awa'." The city of San' Louis, now hoary with a century's years, was one of those early settlements planted by the Canadian French up and down the great valley, from the Northern Lakes to the Gulf, while the English colonists of Plymouth and Jamestown were wringing out a wretched subsistence along the sterile shores of the Atlantic, wearied out by constant warfare with the thirty Indian tribes within their borders. Attracted by the beauty of the country, the fertility of its soil, the boundless variety of its products, the exhaustless mineral treasures beneath its surface, and the facility of the trade in the furs of the Northwest, a flood of Canadian emigration opened southward after the discoveries of La Salle, and the little villages of Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Prairie du Po, Prairie du Rocher, St. Phillipe, St. Ferdinand, Peoria, Fort Chartres, Vuide Poche, Petites Cotes, now St. Charles, Pain Court, now St. Louis, and others, successively sprang up in {116} the howling waste. Over nearly all this territory have the Gaul, the Spaniard, the Briton, and the Anglo-American held rule, and a dash of the national idiosyncrasy of each may be detected. Especially true is this of St. Louis. There is an antiquated, venerable air about its narrow streets and the ungainly edifices of one portion of it; the steep-roofed stone cottage of the Frenchman, and the tall stuccoed-dwelling of the Don, not often beheld. A mellowing touch of time, which few American cities can boast, has passed over it, rendering it a spot of peculiar interest to one with the slightest spirit of the antiquary, in a country where all else is new. The modern section of the city, with its regular streets and lofty edifices, which, within the past fifteen years, has arisen under the active hand of the northern emigrant, presents a striking contrast to the old. The site of St. Louis is elevated and salubrious, lying for some miles along the Mississippi upon two broad plateaux or steppes swelling up gently from the water's edge. Along the first of these, based upon an exhaustless bed of limestone, which furnishes material for building, are situated the lower and central portions of the city, while that above sweeps away in an extensive prairie of stunted black-jack oaks to the west. The latter section is already laid out into streets and building-lots; elegant structures are rapidly going up, and, at no distant day, this is destined to become the most courtly and beautiful portion of the city. It is at a pleasant remove from the dust and bustle of the landing, {117} while its elevation affords a fine view of the harbour and opposite shore. Yet, with all its improvements of the past few years, St. Louis remains emphatically "a little _French_ city." There is about it a cheerful village air, a certain _rus in rube_, to which the grenadier preciseness of most of our cities is the antipodes. There are but few of those endless, rectilinear avenues, cutting each other into broad squares of lofty granite blocks, so characteristic of the older cities of the North and East, or of those cities of tramontane origin so rapidly rising within the boundaries of the valley. There yet remains much in St. Louis to remind one of its village days; and a stern _eschewal_ of mathematical, angular exactitude is everywhere beheld. Until within a few years there was no such thing as a row of houses; all were disjoined and at a considerable distance from each other; and every edifice, however central, could boast its humble _stoop_, its front-door plat, bedecked with shrubbery and flowers, and protected from the inroads of intruding man or beast by its own tall stoccade. All this is now confined to the southern or French section of the city; a right Rip Van Winkle-looking region, where each little steep-roofed cottage yet presents its broad piazza, and the cosey settee before the door beneath the tree shade, with the fleshy old burghers soberly luxuriating on an evening pipe, their dark-eyed, brunette daughters at their side. There is a delightful air of "old-fashioned comfortableness" in all this, that reminds us of nothing we have seen in our own country, but much of the antiquated villages of which we have {118} been told in the land beyond the waters. Among those remnants of a former generation which are yet to be seen in St. Louis are the venerable mansions of Auguste and Pierre Chouteau, who were among the founders of the city.[100] These extensive mansions stand upon the principal street, and originally occupied, with their grounds, each of them an entire square, enclosed by lofty walls of heavy masonry, with loopholes and watch-towers for defence. The march of improvement has encroached upon the premises of these ancient edifices somewhat; yet they are still inhabited by the posterity of their builders, and remain, with their massive walls of stone, monuments of an earlier era. The site upon which stands St. Louis was selected in 1763 by M. Laclede, a partner of a mercantile association at New-Orleans, to whom D'Abbadie, Director-general of the province of Louisiana, had granted the exclusive privilege of the commerce in furs and peltries with the Indian tribes of the Upper Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. By the treaty of that year France had ceded all her possessions east of the Mississippi to Great Britain, and there was on the western shore only the small village of Ste. Genevieve. This was subsequently deemed too distant from the mouth of the Mississippi to be a suitable depôt and post for the fur-trade; and Laclede, having surveyed all the neighbouring region, fixed upon the spot where St. Louis now stands as a more eligible site. Whether this site was selected by the flight of birds, by consultation of the entrails of beasts, or the voice of an oracle; whether by accident {119} or design, tradition averreth not. Yet sure is it, that under the concurrence of all these omens, a more favourable selection could not have been made than this has proved. It _is related_, however, that when the founder of the city first planted foot upon the shore, the imprint of a human foot, naked and of gigantic dimensions, was found enstamped upon the solid limestone rock, and continued in regular succession as if of a man advancing from the water's edge to the plateau above.[101] By a more superstitious age this circumstance would have been deemed an omen, and, as such, commemorated in the chronicles of the city. On the 15th of February, 1764, Colonel Auguste Chouteau, with a number of persons from Ste. Genevieve, Cahokia, and Fort Chartres, arrived at the spot, and commenced a settlement by felling a splendid grove of forest-trees which then reared itself upon the bank, and erecting a building where the market-house now stands. The town was then laid off, and named in honour of Louis XV., the reigning monarch of France, though the settlers were desirous of giving it the name of its founder: to this Laclede would not consent. He died at the post of Arkansas in 1778; Colonel Chouteau followed him in the month of February of 1829, just sixty-four years from the founding of the city. He had been a constant resident, had seen the spot merge from the wilderness, and had become one of its most opulent citizens. For many years St. Louis was called "_Pain_ {120} _Court_," from the scarcity of provisions, which circumstance at one period almost induced the settlers to abandon their design. In 1765 Fort Chartres was delivered to Great Britain, and the commandant, St. Ange, with his troops, only twenty-two in number, proceeded to St. Louis; and assuming the government, the place was ever after considered the capital of the province.[102] Under the administration of St. Ange, which is said to have been mild and patriarchal, the _common field_ was laid open, and each settler became a cultivator of the soil. This field comprised several thousand acres, lying upon the second steppe mentioned, and has recently been divided into lots and sold to the highest bidder. Three years after the arrival of St. Ange, Spanish troops under command of Don Rious took possession of the province agreeable to treaty;[103] but, owing to the dissatisfaction of the inhabitants, no official authority was exercised until 1770. Thirty years afterward the province was retroceded to France, and from that nation to the United States. In the spring of 1778 an attack was made upon the village by a large body of the northern Indians, at the instigation of the English. They were repulsed with a loss of about twenty of the settlers, and the year was commemorated as "_L'annee du grand coup_."[104] In the spring of 1785, the Mississippi rose thirty feet above the highest water-mark previously known, and the American Bottom was inundated. This year was remembered as "_L'annee des grandes eaux_." At that period commerce with New-Orleans, for {121} the purpose of obtaining merchandise for the fur trade, was carried on exclusively by keel-boats and barges, which in the spring started upon their voyage of more than a thousand miles, and in the fall of the year slowly returned against the current. This mode of transportation was expensive, tedious, and unsafe; and it was rendered yet more hazardous from the murders and robberies of a large band of free-booters, under two chiefs, Culburt and Magilbray, who stationed themselves at a place called Cotton Wood Creek, on the Mississippi, and captured the ascending boats. This band was dispersed by a little fleet of ten barges, which, armed with swivels, ascended the river in company. This year was remembered as "_L'annee des bateaux_."[105] All the inconvenience of this method of transportation continued to be experienced until the introduction of steam upon the Western waters; and the first boat of this kind which made its appearance at the port of St. Louis was the "General Pike," in 1814. This boat was commanded by Captain Jacob Reed, and, at the time of its arrival, a large body of a neighbouring Indian tribe chanced to have an encampment in the suburbs of the city. Their astonishment, and even _terror_, at first sight of the evolutions of the steamer, are said to have been indescribable. They viewed it as nothing less than a living thing; a monster of tremendous power, commissioned by the "Great Spirit" for their extermination, and their humiliation was proportional to their terror. Great opposition was raised against steamers by the boatmen, some thousands of whom, by their introduction, would {122} be thrown out of employment; but this feeling gradually passed away, and now vessels propelled by steam perform in a few days a voyage which formerly required as many months. A trip to the city, as New-Orleans, _par excellence_, was styled, then demanded weeks of prior preparation, and a man put his house and household in order before setting out: now it is an ordinary jaunt of pleasure. The same dislike manifested by the old French _habitans_ to the introduction of the steamer or _smoke-boat_, "bateau à vapeur," as they termed it, has betrayed itself at every advance of modern improvement. Erected, as St. Louis was, with no design of a city, its houses were originally huddled together with a view to nothing but convenience; and its streets were laid out too narrow and too irregular for the bustle and throng of mercantile operations. In endeavouring to correct this early error, by removing a few of the old houses and projecting balconies, great opposition has been encountered. Some degree of uniformity in the three principal streets parallel to the river has, however, by this method been attained. Water-street is well built up with a series of lofty limestone warehouses; but an irretrievable error has been committed in arranging them at so short a distance from the water. On some accounts this proximity to the river may be convenient; but for the sake of a broad arena for commerce; for the sake of a fresh and salubrious circulation of air from the water; for the sake of scenic beauty, or a noble promenade for pleasure, there should have been no encroachment upon the precincts {123} of the "eternal river." In view of the miserable _plan_ of St. Louis, if it may claim anything of the kind, and the irregular manner and singular taste with which it has been built, the regret has more than once been expressed, that, like Detroit,[106] a conflagration had not swept it in its earlier days, and given place to an arrangement at once more consistent with elegance and convenience. From the river bank to the elevated ground sweeping off in the rear of the city to the west is a distance of several hundred yards, and the height above the level of the water cannot be far from an hundred feet. The ascent is easy, however, and a noble view is obtained, from the cupola of the courthouse on its summit, of the Mississippi and the city below, of the broad American Bottom, with its bluffs in the distance, and a beautiful extent of natural scenery in the rear. Along the brow of this eminence once stood a line of military works, erected for the defence of the old town in 1780 by Don Francois de Cruzat, lieutenant governor "_de la partie occidentale des Illinois_," as the ancient chronicles style the region west of the Mississippi.[107] These fortifications consisted of several circular towers of stone, forty feet in diameter and half as many in altitude, planted at intervals in a line of stoccade, besides a small fort, embracing four demilunes and a parapet of mason-work. For many years these old works were in a dismantled and deserted state, excepting the fort, in one building of which was held {124} the court, and another superseded the necessity of a prison. Almost every vestige is now swept away. The great earthquakes of 1811 essentially assisted in toppling the old ruins to the ground. The whole city was powerfully shaken, and has since been subject to occasional shocks.[108] It is in the northern suburbs of the city that are to be seen those singular ancient mounds for which St. Louis is so celebrated; and which, with others in the vicinity, form, as it were, a connecting link between those of the north, commencing in the lake counties of Western New-York, and those of the south, extending deep within the boundaries of Mexico, forming an unbroken line from one extremity of the great valley to the other. Their position at St. Louis is, as usual, a commanding one, upon the second bank, of which I have spoken, and looking proudly down upon the Mississippi, along which the line is parallel. They stand isolated, or distinct from each other, in groups; and the outline is generally that of a rectangular pyramid, truncated nearly one half. The first collection originally consisted of ten tumuli, arranged as three sides of a square area of about four acres, and the open flank to the west was guarded by five other small circular earth-heaps, isolated, and forming the segment of a circle around {125} the opening. This group is now almost completely destroyed by the grading of streets and the erection of edifices, and the eastern border may alone be traced. North of the first collection of tumuli is a second, four or five in number, and forming two sides of a square. Among these is one of a very beautiful form, consisting of three stages, and called the "Falling Garden." Its elevation above the level of the second plateau is about four feet, and the area is ample for a dwelling and yard; from the second it descends to the first plateau along the river by three regular gradations, the first with a descent of two feet, the second of ten, and the lower one of five, each stage presenting a beautiful site for a house. For this purpose, however, they can never be appropriated, as one of the principal streets of the city is destined to pass directly through the spot, the grading for which is already commenced. The third group of mounds is situated a few hundred yards above the second, and consists of about a dozen eminences. A series extends along the west side of the street, through grounds attached to a classic edifice of brick, which occupies the principal one; while opposite rise several of a larger size, upon one of which is situated the residence of General Ashley, and upon another the reservoir which supplies the city with water, raised from the Mississippi by a steam force-pump upon its banks. Both are beautiful spots, imbowered in forest-trees; and the former, from its size and structure, is supposed to have been a citadel or place of defence. {126} In excavating the earth of this mound, large quantities of human remains, pottery, half-burned wood, &c., &c., were thrown up; furnishing conclusive evidence, were any requisite farther than regularity of outline and relative position, of the artificial origin of these earth-heaps. About six hundred yards above this group, and linked with it by several inconsiderable mounds, is situated one completely isolated, and larger than any yet described. It is upward of thirty feet in height, about one hundred and fifty feet long, and upon the summit five feet wide. The form is oblong, resembling an immense grave; and a broad terrace or apron, after a descent of a few feet, spreads out itself on the side looking down upon the river. From the extensive view of the surrounding region and of the Mississippi commanded by the site of this mound, as well as its altitude, it is supposed to have been intended as a vidette or watch-tower by its builders. Upon its summit, not many years ago, was buried an Indian chief. He was a member of a deputation from a distant tribe to the agency in St. Louis; but, dying while there, his remains, agreeable to the custom of his tribe, were deposited on the most commanding spot that could be found. This custom accounts for the circumstance urged against the antiquity and artificial origin of these works, that the relics exhumed are found near the surface, and were deposited by the present race. But the distinction between the remains found near the surface and those in the depths of the soil is too palpable and too {127} notorious to require argument. From the _Big Mound_, as it is called, a _cordon_ of tumuli stretch away to the northwest for several miles along the bluffs parallel with the river, a noble view of which they command. They are most of them ten or twelve feet high; many clothed with forest-trees, and all of them supposed to be tombs. In removing two of them upon the grounds of Col. O'Fallon,[109] immense quantities of bones were exhumed. Similar mounds are to be found in almost every county in the state, and those in the vicinity of St. Louis are remarkable only for their magnitude and the regularity of their relative positions. It is evident, from these monuments of a former generation, that the natural advantages of the site upon which St. Louis now stands were not unappreciated long before it was pressed by the first European footstep. It is a circumstance which has often elicited remark from those who, as tourists, have visited St. Louis, that so little interest should be manifested by its citizens for those mysterious and venerable monuments of another race by which on every side it is environed. When we consider the complete absence of everything in the character of a public square or promenade in the city, one would suppose that individual taste and municipal authority would not have failed to avail themselves of the moral interest attached to these mounds and the beauty of their site, to have formed in their vicinity one of the most attractive spots in the West. These ancient tumuli could, at no considerable expense, have been {128} enclosed and ornamented with shrubbery, and walks, and flowers, and thus preserved for coming generations. As it is, they are passing rapidly away; man and beast, as well as the elements, are busy with them, and in a few years they will quite have disappeared. The practical utility of which they are available appears the only circumstance which has attracted attention to them. One has already become a public reservoir, and measures are in progress for applying the larger mound to a similar use, the first being insufficient for the growth of the city. It need not be said that such indifference of feeling to the only relics of a by-gone race which our land can boast, is not well in the citizens of St. Louis, and should exist no longer; nor need allusion be made to that eagerness of interest which the distant traveller, the man of literary taste and poetic fancy, or the devotee of abstruse science, never fails to betray for these mysterious monuments of the past, when, in his tour of the Far West, he visits St. Louis; many a one, too, who has looked upon the century-mossed ruins of Europe, and to whose eye the castled crags of the Rhine are not unfamiliar. And surely, to the imaginative mind, there is an interest which attaches to these venerable beacons of departed time, enveloped as they are in mystery inscrutable; and from their origin, pointing, as they do, down the dim shadowy vista of ages of which the ken of man telleth not, there is an interest which hallows them even as the hoary piles of old Egypt are hallowed, and which feudal Europe, with all her {129} time-sustained battlements, can never boast. It is the mystery, the impenetrable mystery veiling these aged sepulchres, which gives them an interest for the traveller's eye. They are landmarks in the lapse of ages, beneath whose shadows generations have mouldered, and around whose summits a gone _eternity_ plays! The ruined tower, the moss-grown abbey, the damp-stained dungeon, the sunken arch, the fairy and delicate fragments of the shattered peristyle of a classic land, or the beautiful frescoes of Herculaneum and Pompeii--around _them_ time has indeed flung the silvery mantle of eld while he has swept them with decay; but _their_ years may be _enumerated_, and the circumstances, the authors, and the purposes of their origin, together with the incidents of their ruin, are chronicled on History's page for coming generations. But who shall tell the era of the origin of these venerable earth-heaps, the race of their builders, the purpose of their erection, the thousand circumstances attending their rise, history, desertion? Why now so lone and desolate? Where are the multitudes that once swarmed the prairie at their base, and vainly busied themselves in rearing piles which should exist the wonder of the men of other lands, and the sole monument of their own memory long after they themselves were dust? Has war, or famine, or pestilence brooded over these beautiful plains? or has the fiat of Omnipotence gone forth that as a race their inhabitants should exist no longer, and the death-angel been commissioned to sweep them from off the face of {130} the earth as if with destruction's besom? We ask: the inquiry is vain; we are answered not! Their mighty creations and the tombs of myriads heave up themselves in solemn grandeur before us; but from the depths of the dusky earth-heap comes forth no voice to tell us its origin, or object, or story! "Ye mouldering relics of a race departed, Your names have perished; not a trace remains, Save where the grassgrown mound its summit rears From the green bosom of your native plains." Ages since--long ere the first son of the Old World had pressed the fresh soil of the New; long before the bright region beyond the blue wave had been the object of the philosopher's revery by day and the enthusiast's vision by night--in the deep stillness and solitude of an unpeopled land, these vast mausoleums rose as now they rise, in lonely grandeur from the plain, and looked down, even as now they look, upon the giant flood rolling its dark waters at their base, hurrying past them to the deep. So has it been with the massive tombs of Egypt, amid the sands and barrenness of the desert. For ages untold have the gloomy pyramids been reflected by the inundations of the Nile; an hundred generations, they tell us, have arisen from the cradle and reposed beneath their shadows, and, like autumn leaves, have dropped into the grave; but from the deep midnight of by-gone centuries comes forth no daring spirit to claim these kingly sepulchres as his own! And shall the dusky piles on the plains of distant Egypt affect so deeply our reverence for the {131} departed, and these mighty monuments, reposing in dark sublimity upon our own magnificent prairies veiled in mystery more inscrutable than they, call forth no solitary throb? Is there no hallowing interest associated with these aged relics, these tombs, and temples, and towers of another race, to elicit emotion? Are they _indeed_ to us no more than the dull clods we tread upon? Why, then, does the wanderer from the far land gaze upon them with wonder and veneration? Why linger fondly around them, and meditate upon the power which reared them and is departed? Why does the poet, the man of genius and fancy, or the philosopher of mind and nature, seat himself at their base, and, with strange and undefined emotions, pause and ponder amid the loneliness which slumbers around? And surely, if the far traveller, as he wanders through this Western Valley, may linger around these aged piles and meditate upon a power departed, a race obliterated, an influence swept from the earth for ever, and dwell with melancholy emotions upon the destiny of man, is it not meet that those into whose keeping they seem by Providence consigned should regard them with interest and emotion? that they should gather up and preserve every incident relevant to their origin, design, or history which may be attained, and avail themselves of every measure which may give to them perpetuity, and hand them down, undisturbed in form or character, to other generations? The most plausible, and, indeed, the only plausible argument urged by those who deny the artificial {132} origin of the ancient mounds, is _their immense size_. There are, say they, "many mounds in the West that exactly correspond in _shape_ with these supposed antiquities, and yet, from their _size_, most evidently were not made by man;" and they add that "it would be well to calculate upon the ordinary labour of excavating canals, how many hands, with spades, wheelbarrows, and other necessary implements, it would take to throw up mounds like the largest of these within any given time."[110] We are told that in the territory of Wisconsin and in northern Illinois exist mounds to which these are molehills. Of those, Mount Joliet, Mount Charles, Sinsinewa, and the Blue Mounds vary from one to four hundred feet in height; while west of the Arkansas exists a range of earth-heaps ten or twelve miles in extent, and two hundred feet high: there also, it might be added, are the Mamelle Mountains, estimated at one thousand feet.[111] The adjacent country is prairie; farms exist on the summits of the mounds, which from their declivity are almost inaccessible, and _springs gush out from their sides_. With but one exception I profess to know nothing of these mounds from personal observation; and, consequently, can hazard no opinion of their character. The fact of the "gushing springs," it is true, {133} savours not much of artificialness; and in this respect, at least, do these mounds differ from those claimed as of artificial origin. The earth-heaps of which I have been speaking can boast no "springs of water gushing from their sides;" if they could, the fact would be far from corroborating the theory maintained. The analogy between these mounds is admitted to be strong, though there exist diversities; and were there _none_, even Bishop Butler says that we are not to infer a thing true upon slight presumption, since "there may be probabilities on both sides of a question." From what has been advanced relative to the character of the mounds spoken of, it is believed that the probabilities strongly preponderate in favour of their artificial origin, even admitting their _perfect_ analogy to those "from whose sides gush the springs." But more anon. _St. Louis._ XII "Where, through the long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, The pealing anthem swells the note of praise." GRAY. "Some men have been Who loved the church so well, and gave so largely to't, They thought it should have canopied their bones Till doomsday." There are few more delightful views in the vicinity of St. Louis of a fine evening than that commanded by the summit of the "Big Mound," of which I have spoken, in the northern suburbs of the city. Far away from the north comes the Mississippi, sweeping on in a broad, smooth sheet, skirted by woodlands; and the rushing of its waters along the ragged rocks of the shores below is fancied faintly to reach the ear. Nearly in the middle of the stream are stretched out the long, low, sandy shores of "Blood Island," a spot notorious in the annals of duelling. Upon the Illinois shore beyond it is contemplated erecting a pier, for the purpose of throwing the full volume of the current upon the western shore, and thus preserving a channel of deep water along the landing of the city. Within a few years past an extensive sand-bar has accumulated opposite the southern section of the city, which threatens, unless removed, greatly to obstruct, if not to destroy, the harbour. To remedy this, an appropriation {135} has been made by Congress, surveys have been taken, measures devised and their execution commenced.[112] Upon the river-bank opposite the island stands the "Floating Dry Dock," an ingenious contrivance, the invention of a gentleman of St. Louis, and owned by a company of patentees.[113] It consists of an indefinite number of floats, which may be increased or diminished at pleasure, each of them fourteen feet in breadth, and about four times that length, connected laterally together. After being sunk and suspended at the necessary depth in the water, the boat to be repaired is placed upon them, and they rise till her hull is completely exposed. As the spectator, standing upon the Mound, turns his eye to the south, a green grove lies before him and the smaller earth-heaps, over which are beheld the towers and roofs of the city rising in the distance; far beyond is spread out a smooth, rolling carpet of tree-tops, in the midst of which the gray limestone of the arsenal is dimly perceived. The extent between the northern suburbs of St. Louis and its southern extremity along the river curve is about six miles, and the city can be profitably extended about the same distance into the interior. The prospect in this direction is boundless for miles around, till the tree-tops blend with the western horizon. The face of the country is neither uniform nor broken, but undulates almost imperceptibly away, clothed in a dense forest of black-jack oak, interspersed with thickets of the wild-plum, the crab-apple, and the hazel. Thirty years ago, and this broad plain was a treeless, shrubless waste, {136} without a solitary farmhouse to break the monotony. But the annual fires were stopped; a young forest sprang into existence; and delightful villas and country seats are now gleaming from the dark foliage in all directions. To some of them are attached extensive grounds, adorned with groves, orchards, fish-ponds, and all the elegances of opulence and cultivated taste; while in the distance are beheld the glittering spires of the city rising above the trees. At one of these, a retired, beautiful spot, residence of Dr. F----, I have passed many a pleasant hour. The sportsman may here be indulged to his heart's desire. The woods abound with game of every species: the rabbit, quail, prairie-hen, wild-turkey, and the deer; while the lakes, which flash from every dell and dingle, are swarmed with fish. Most of these sheets of water are formed by immense springs issuing from _sink-holes_; and are supposed, like those in Florida, which suggested the wild idea of the _fountain of rejuvenescence_, to owe their origin to the subsidence of the bed of porous limestone upon which the Western Valley is based. Many of these springs intersect the region with rills and rivulets, and assist in forming a beautiful sheet of water in the southern suburbs of the city, which eventually pours out its waters into the Mississippi. Many years ago a dam and massive mill of stone was erected here by one of the founders of the city; it is yet standing, surrounded by aged sycamores, and is more valuable and venerable than ever. The neighbouring region is abrupt and broken, varied by a delightful vicissitude of hill and dale. The borders {137} of the lake are fringed with groves, while the steep bluffs, which rise along the water and are reflected in its placid bosom, recall the picture of Ben Venue and Loch Katrine:[114] "The mountain shadows on her breast Were neither broken nor at rest; In bright uncertainty they lie, Like future joys to Fancy's eye." This beautiful lake and its vicinity is, indeed, unsurpassed for scenic loveliness by any spot in the suburbs of St. Louis. At the calm, holy hour of Sabbath sunset, its quiet borders invite to meditation and retirement. The spot should be consecrated as the trysting-place of love and friendship. Some fine structures are rising upon the margin of the waters, and in a few years it will be rivalled in beauty by no other section of the city. St. Louis, like most Western cities, can boast but few public edifices of any note. Among those which are to be seen, however, are the large and commodious places of worship of the different religious denominations; an elegant courthouse, occupying with its enclosed grounds one of the finest squares in the city; two market-houses, one of which, standing upon the river-bank, contains on its second floor the City Hall; a large and splendid theatre, in most particulars inferior to no other edifice of the kind in the United States; and an extensive hotel, which is now going up, to be called the "St. Louis House," contracted for one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. The Cathedral of St. Luke, the University, Hospital, Orphan Asylum, and the {138} "Convent of the Sacred Heart," are Catholic Institutions, and well worthy of remark.[115] For many years after its settlement, the Roman Catholic faith prevailed exclusively in St. Louis. The founders of the city and its earliest inhabitants were of this religious persuasion; and their descendants, many of whom are now among its most opulent and influential citizens, together with foreign immigrants of a recent date, form a numerous and respectable body. The names of Chouteau, Pratte, Sarpy, Cabanné, Menard, Soulard, &c., &c., are those of early settlers of the city which yet are often heard.[116] The "Cathedral of St. Luke" is a noble structure of stone.[117] It was consecrated with great pomp in the autumn of '34, having occupied three years in its erection. The site is unfavourable, but it possessed an interest for many of the old citizens which no other spot could claim. Here had stood their ancient sanctuary, with which was associated the holy feelings of their earliest days; here had been the baptismal font and the marriage altar; while beneath reposed the sacred remains of many a being, loved and honoured, but passed away. The former church was a rude structure of logs. The dimensions of the present building are a length of about one hundred and forty feet, to a breadth of eighty and an altitude of forty, with a tower of upward of an hundred feet, surmounted by a lofty cross. The steeple contains a peal of six bells, the three larger of which were cast in Normandy, and chime very pleasantly; upon the four sides of the tower are the dial-plates of a clock, which strikes the hours upon {139} the bells. The porch of the edifice consists of four large columns of polished freestone, of the Doric order, with corresponding entablature, cornice, pediment, and frieze, the whole surface of the latter being occupied with the inscription "_In honorem S. Ludovici. Deo Uni et Trino, Dicatum, A. D. MDCCCXXXIV_," the letters elevated in _basso-relievo_. Over the entrances, which are three in number, are inscribed, in French and in English, passages from Scripture, upon tablets of Italian marble. The porch is protected from the street by battlements, surmounted by an iron railing, and adorned by lofty candelabra of stone. The body of the building is divided by two colonnades, of five pillars each, into three aisles. The columns, composed of brick, stuccoed to imitate marble, are of the Doric order, supporting a cornice and entablature, decorated with arabesques and medallions; and upon them reposes the arch of the elliptic-formed and panelled ceiling. Between the columns are suspended eight splendid chandeliers, which, when lighted at night, produce a magnificent effect. The walls are enriched by frescoes and arabesques, and the windows are embellished with transparencies, presenting the principal transactions of the Saviour's mission. This is said to be one of the first attempts at a substitute for the painted glass of the Middle Ages, and was executed, together with the other pictorial decorations of the edifice, by an artist named _Leon_, sent over for the purpose from France. The effect is grand. Even the garish sunbeams are mellowed down as they struggle dimly through the richly-coloured {140} hangings, and the light throughout the sacred pile seems tinged with rainbow hues. In the chancel of the church, at the bottom of the centre aisle, elevated by a flight of steps, and enclosed by a balustrade of the Corinthian order, is situated the sanctuary. Upon either side stand pilasters to represent marble, decorated with festoons of wheat-ears and vines, symbolical of the eucharist, and surmounted with caps of the Doric order. On the right, between the pilasters, is a gallery for the choir, with the organ in the rear, and on the left side is a veiled gallery for the "Sisters of Charity" connected with the convent and the other institutions of the church. The altar-piece at the bottom of the sanctuary represents the Saviour upon the cross, with his mother and two of his disciples at his feet; on either side rise two fluted Corinthian columns, with a broken pediment and gilded caps, supporting a gorgeous entablature. Above the whole is an elliptical window, hung with the transparency of a dove, emblematic of the Holy Ghost, shedding abroad rays of light. The high altar and the tabernacle stand below, and the decorations on festal occasions, as well as the vestments of the officiating priests, are splendid and imposing. Over the bishop's seat, in a side arch of the sanctuary, hangs a beautiful painting of St. Louis, titular of the cathedral, presented by the amiable Louis XVI. of France previous to his exile.[118] At the bottom of each of the side aisles of the church stand two chapels, at the same elevation with the sanctuary. Between two fluted columns of the Ionic order is suspended, in each chapel, an {141} altar-piece, with a valuable painting above. The piece on the left represents St. Vincent of Gaul engaged in charity on a winter's day, and the picture above is the marriage of the blessed Virgin. The altar-piece of the right represents St. Patrick of Ireland in his pontifical robes, and above is a painting of our Saviour and the centurion, said to be by Paul Veronese. At the opposite extremity of the building, near the side entrances, are two valuable pieces; one said to be by Rubens, of the Virgin and Child, the other the martyrdom of St. Bartholemew.[119] Above rise extensive galleries in three rows; to the right is the baptismal font, and a landscape of the Saviour's immersion in Jordan. Beneath the sanctuary of the church is the lower chapel, divided into three aisles by as many arches, supported by pilasters, which, as well as the walls, are painted to imitate marble. There is here an altar and a marble tabernacle, where mass is performed during the week, and the chapel is decorated by fourteen paintings, representing different stages of the Saviour's passion.[120] In the western suburbs of the city, upon an eminence, stand the buildings of the St. Louis University, handsome structures of brick.[121] The institution is conducted by Jesuits, and most of the higher branches of learning are taught. The present site has been offered for sale, and the seminary is to be removed some miles into the interior. Connected {142} with the college is a medical school of recent date. The chapel of the institution is a large, airy room, hung with antique and valuable paintings. Two of these, suspended on each side of the altar, said to be by Rubens, are master-pieces of the art. One of them represents Ignatius Loyola, founder of the order of Jesuits; the other is the full-length picture of the celebrated Francis Xavier, apostle to the Indies, who died at Goa while engaged in his benevolent labours. In an oratory above hangs a large painting by the same master; a powerful, though unfinished production. All the galleries of the buildings are decorated with paintings, some of which have but little to commend them to notice but their antiquity. The library embraces about twelve hundred volumes, mostly in the French language. The _Universal Geography_ of Braviara, a valuable work of eleven folios, brilliantly illuminated, and the _Actæ Sanctorum_, an enormous work of _forty-two_ folio volumes, chiefly attract the visiter's attention.[122] The philosophical apparatus attached to the institution is very insufficient. Most of the pupils of the institution are French, and they are gathered from all quarters of the South and West; a great number of them are from Louisiana, sons of the planters. _St. Louis._ XIII "Away! away! and on we dash! Torrents less rapid and less rash." _Mazeppa._ "Mark yon old mansion frowning through the trees, Whose hollow turret woos the whistling breeze." ROGERS. It was a pleasant afternoon when, in company with a number of friends, I left the city for an excursion into its southern suburbs, and a visit to the military works, a few miles distant. The atmosphere had that mild, mellowy mistiness which subdues the fierce glare of the sunbeams, and flings over every object a softened shade. A gentle breeze from the south was astir balmily and blandly among the leaves; in fine, it was one of those grateful, genial seasons, when the senses sympathize with the quietude of external creation, and there is no reason, earthly or unearthly, why the inward man should not sympathize with the man without; a season when you are at peace with yourself, and at peace with every object, animate, inanimate, or vegetable, about you. Our party consisted of eight precious souls, and "all agog to dash through thick and thin," if essential to a jovial jaunt. And now fain would I enumerate those worthy individuals, together with their several peculiarities and dispositions, good and bad, did not a certain delicacy forbid. {144} Suffice it to say, the excursion was devised in honour, and for the especial benefit, of a young and recently-married couple from "the city of monuments and fountains," who were enjoying their honey-moon in a trip to the Far West. Passing through the narrow streets and among the ancient edifices of the _old_ city, we came to that section called South St. Louis. This is destined to become the district of manufactures; large quantities of bituminous coal, little inferior to that of the Alleghanies, is here found; and railroads to the celebrated Iron Mountain, sixty miles distant, and to the coal-banks of the Illinois bluffs, as well as to the northern section of the city, are projected. The landing is good, the shore being composed of limestone and marble, of two different species, both of which admit a high degree of polish. There is also quarried in this vicinity a kind of freestone, which, when fresh from the bed, is soft, but, on exposure to the atmosphere, becomes dense and hard. We passed a number of commodious farmhouses as we ambled along; and now and then, at intervals through the trees, was caught a glimpse of the flashing sheen of the river gliding along upon our left. At a short distance from the road were to be seen the ruins of the "Eagle Powder-works," destroyed by fire in the spring of '36. They had been in operation only three years previous to their explosion, and their daily manufacture was three hundred pounds of superior powder. The report and concussion of the explosion was perceived miles around the country, and the loss sustained by the proprietors was estimated {145} at forty thousand dollars. The site of these works was a broad plain, over which, as our horses were briskly galloping, a circumstance occurred which could boast quite as much of reality as romance. To my own especial gallantry--gallant man--had been intrusted the precious person of the fair bride, and lightly and gracefully pressed her fairy form upon the back of a bright-eyed, lithe little animal, with a spirit buoyant as her own. The steed upon which I was myself mounted was a powerful creature, with a mouth as unyielding as the steel bit he was constantly champing. The lady prided herself, not without reason, upon her boldness and grace in horsemanship and her skill in the _manège_; and, as we rode somewhat in advance of our cavalcade, the proposal thoughtlessly dropped from her that we should elope and leave our companions in the lurch. Hardly had the syllables left her lip, than the reins were flung loose upon the horses' manes; they bounded on, and away, away, away the next moment were we skirring over the plain, like the steed of the Muses on a steeple-chase. A single shout of warning to my fair companion was returned by an ejaculation of terror, for her horse had become his own master. The race of John Gilpin or of Alderman Purdy were, either or both of them, mere circumstances to ours. For more than a mile our excited steeds swept onward in their furious course to the admiration of beholders; and how long the race might have been protracted is impossible to say, had not certain sons of Erin--worthy souls {146}--in the innocence of their hearts and the ignorance of their heads, and by way of perpetrating a notable exploit, thought proper to throw themselves from the roadside directly before us. The suddenness of the movement brought both our animals nearly upon their haunches, and the next minute saw the fair bride quietly seated in the dust beneath their feet. The shock had flung her from her seat, but she arose uninjured. To leap from my saddle and place the lady again in hers was the work of a moment; and when the cortége made its appearance, our runaway steeds were ambling along in a fashion the most discreet and exemplary imaginable. The situation of the Arsenal, upon a swelling bank of the river, is delightful. It is surrounded by a strong wall of stone, embracing extensive grounds, through which a green, shady avenue leads from the highway. The structures are composed chiefly of unhewn limestone, enclosing a rectangular area, and comprise about a dozen large buildings, while a number of lesser ones are perceived here and there among the groves. The principal structure is one of four stories, looking down upon the Mississippi, with a beautiful esplanade, forming a kind of natural glacis to the whole armory, sweeping away to the water. Upon the right and left, in the same line with the rectangle, are situated the dwellings of the officers; noble edifices of hewn stone, with cultivated garden-plats and fruit-trees. The view of the stream is here delightful, and the breeze came up from its surface fresh and free. A pair of pet deer were frolicking along the shore. Most of the remaining structures are offices and {147} workshops devoted to the manufacture of arms. Of these there were but few in the Arsenal, large quantities having been despatched to the South for the Florida war. It is designed, I am informed, to mount ordnance at these works--to no great extent, probably; there were several pieces of artillery already prepared. The slits and loop-holes in the deep walls, the pyramids of balls and bombshells, and the heavy carronades piled in tiers, give the place rather a warlike aspect for a peaceable inland fortress. A ride of a few miles brought us to the brow of a considerable elevation, from which we looked down upon the venerable little hamlet of Carondelet, or _Vuide Poche_, as it is familiarly termed; a _nom de nique_ truly indicative of the poverty of pocket and the richness of fancy of its primitive habitans. The village lies in a sleepy-looking hollow, scooped out between the bluffs and the water; and from the summit of the hill the eye glances beyond it over the lengthened vista of the river-reach, at this place miles in extent. Along the shore a deeply-laden steamer was toiling against the current on her passage to the city. Descending the elevation, we were soon thridding the narrow, tortuous, lane-like avenues of the old village. Every object, the very soil even, seemed mossgrown and hoary with time departed. More than seventy years have passed away since its settlement commenced; and now, as then, its inhabitants consist of hunters, and trappers, and river-boatmen, absent most of the year on their various excursions. The rude, crumbling tenements {148} of stone or timber, of peculiar structure, with their whitewashed walls stained by age; the stoccade enclosures of the gardens; the venerable aspect of the ancient fruit-trees, mossed with years, and the unique and singular garb, manner, and appearance of the swarthy villagers, all betoken an earlier era and a peculiar people. The little dark-eyed, dark-haired boys were busy with their games in the streets; and, as we paced leisurely along, we could perceive in the little _cabarets_ the older portion of the _habitans_, cosily congregated around the table near the open door or upon the balcony, apparently discussing the gossip of the day and the qualities of sundry potations before them. Ascending the hill in the rear of the village, we entered the rude chapel of stone reared upon its brow: the inhabitants are all Catholics, and to this faith is the edifice consecrated. The altar-piece, with its decorations, was characterized by simplicity and taste. Three ancient paintings, representing scenes in the mission of the Saviour, were suspended from the walls; the brass-plated missal reposed upon the tabernacle; the crucifix rose in the centre of the sanctuary, and candles were planted on either side. Evergreens were neatly festooned around the sanctuary, and every object betrayed a degree of taste. Attached to the church is a small burial-ground, crowded with tenants. The Sisters of Charity have an asylum for the Deaf and Dumb, in a prosperous condition. Our tarry was but a brief one, as the distrust with which our movements were regarded by the villagers was evident; nor is this {149} suspicion at all to be wondered at when we consider the numberless impostures of which, by immigrants, they have been made the victims. A few miles through groves of oaks brought us in view of that beautiful spot, Jefferson Barracks. The buildings, constructed of stone, are romantically situated on a bold bluff, the base of which is swept by the Mississippi, and were intended to garrison an entire regiment of cavalry for frontier service. Three sides of the quadrangle of the parade are bounded by the lines of galleried barracks, with fine buildings at the extremities for the residence of the officers; while the fourth opens upon a noble terrace overlooking the river. The commissary's house, the magazines, and extensive stables, lie without the parallelogram, beneath the lofty trees. From the terrace is commanded a fine view of the river, with its alluvial islands, the extensive woodlands upon the opposite side, and the pale cliffs of the bluffs stretching away beyond the bottom. In the rear of the garrison rises a grove of forest-trees, consisting of heavy oaks, with broad-spreading branches, and a green, smooth sward beneath. The surface is beautifully undulating, and the spot presents a specimen of park scenery as perfect as the country can boast. A neat burial-ground is located in this wood, and the number of its white wooden slabs gave melancholy evidence of the ravages of the cholera among that corps of fine fellows which, four years before, garrisoned the Barracks. Many a one has here laid away his bones to rest far from the home of his nativity. There is another cemetery {150} on the southern outskirts of the Barracks, where are the tombs of several officers of the army. The site of Jefferson Barracks was selected by General Atkinson as the station of a _corps de reserve_, for defence of the Southern, Western, and Northern frontiers. For the purpose of its design, experience has tested its efficiency. The line of frontier, including the advanced post of Council Bluffs on the Missouri,[123] describes the arch of a circle, the chord of which passes nearly through this point; and a reserve post here is consequently available for the entire line of frontier. From its central position and its proximity to the mouths of the great rivers leading into the interior, detachments, by means of steam transports, may be thrown with great rapidity and nearly equal facility into the garrison upon the Upper Mississippi, the Missouri, the Arkansas, Red, or Sabine Rivers. This was tested in the Black Hawk war, and, indeed, in every inroad of the Indian tribes, these troops have first been summoned to the field. When disengaged, the spot furnishes a salubrious position for the reserve of the Western army. By the latest scheme of frontier defence, a garrison of fifteen hundred troops is deemed necessary for this cantonment. A few miles below the Barracks, along the river-bank, is situated quite a remarkable cave.[124] I visited and explored it one fine afternoon, with a number of friends. With some difficulty, after repeated inquiry, we succeeded in discovering the object of our search, and from a neighbouring farmhouse {151} furnished ourselves with lights and a guide. The latter was a German, who, according to his own account, had been something of a hero in his way and day; he was with Napoleon at Moscow, and was subsequently taken prisoner by Blucher's Prussian Lancers at Waterloo, having been wounded in the knee by a musket-ball. To our edification he detailed a number of his "moving accidents by flood and field." A few steps from the farmhouse brought us to the mouth of the cavern, situated in the face of a ragged limestone precipice nearly a hundred feet high, and the summit crowned with trees and shrubbery; it forms the abrupt termination to a ravine, which, united to another coming in on the right, continues on to the river, a distance of several hundred yards, through a wood. The entrance to the cave is exceedingly rough and rugged, piled with huge fragments of the cliff which have fallen from above, and it can be approached only with difficulty. It is formed indeed, by the rocky bed of a stream flowing out from the cave's mouth, inducing the belief that to this circumstance the ravine owes its origin. The entrance is formed by a broad arch about twenty feet in altitude, with twice that breadth between the abutments. As we entered, the damp air of the cavern swept out around us chill and penetrating. An abrupt angle of the wall shut out the daylight, and we advanced by the light of our candles. The floor, and roof, and sides of the cavern became exceedingly irregular as we proceeded, and, after penetrating to the depth of several hundred yards, {152} the floor and ceiling approached each other so nearly that we were forced to pursue our way upon our hands and knees. In some chambers the roof and walls assumed grotesque and singular shapes, caused by the water trickling through the porous limestone. In one apartment was to be seen the exact outline of a human foot of enormous size; in another, that of an inverted boat; while the vault in a third assumed the shape of an immense coffin. The sole proprietors of the cavern seemed the bats, and of these the number was incredible. In some places the reptiles suspended themselves like swarms of bees from the roof and walls; and so compactly one upon the other did they adhere, that scores could have been crushed at a blow. After a ramble of more than an hour within these shadowy realms, during which several false passages upon either side, soon abruptly terminating, were explored, we at length once more emerged to the light and warmth of the sunbeams, thoroughly drenched by the dampness of the atmosphere and the water dripping from the roof. Ancient Indian tumuli and graves are often found in this neighbourhood. On the _Rivière des Pères_,[125] which is crossed by the road leading to the city, and about seven miles distant, there are a number of graves which, from all appearance, seem not to have been disturbed for centuries. The cemetery is situated on a high bluff looking down upon the stream, and is said to have contained skeletons of a gigantic size. Each grave consisted of a shallow basin, formed by flat stones {153} planted upon their edges; most of them, however, are mossed by age, or have sunk beneath the surface, and their tenants have crumbled to their original dust. Some years since, a Roman coin of a rare species was found upon the banks of the _Rivière des Pères_ by an Indian. This may, perhaps, be classed among the other antiquities of European origin which are frequently found. A number of Roman coins, bearing an early date of the Christian era, are said to have been discovered in a cave near Nashville, in the State of Tennessee, which at the time excited no little interest among antiquaries: they were doubtless deposited by some of the settlers of the country from Europe. Settlements on the _Rivière des Pères_ are said to have been commenced at an early period by the Jesuits, and one of them was drowned near its mouth: from this circumstance it derived its name. In the bed of this stream, about six miles from the city, is a sulphur spring, which is powerfully sudorific; and, when taken in any quantity, throws out an eruption over the whole body. A remarkable cavern is said to be situated on this river, by some considered superior to that below the Barracks. A short distance from _Vuide Poche_ are to be seen the remains of a pile of ruins, said to be those of a fort erected by La Salle when, on his second visit, he took possession of the country in the name of the King of France, and in honour of him called it Louisiana.[126] _St. Louis_. XIV "Here I have 'scaped the city's stifling heat, Its horrid sounds and its polluted air; And, where the season's milder fervours beat, And gales, that sweep the forest borders, bear The song of bird and sound of running stream, Have come a while to wander and to dream." BRYANT. "I lingered, by some soft enchantment bound, And gazed, enraptured, on the lovely scene; From the dark summit of an Indian mound I saw the plain outspread in living green; Its fringe of cliffs was in the distance seen, And the dark line of forests sweeping round." FLINT. There are few things more delightfully refreshing, amid the fierce fervour of midsummer, than to forsake the stifled, polluted atmosphere of the city for the cool breezes of its forest suburbs. A freshened elasticity seems gliding through the languid system, bracing up the prostrated fibres of the frame; the nerves thrill with renewed tensity, and the vital flood courses in fuller gush, and leaps onward with more bounding buoyancy in its fevered channels. Every one has experienced this; and it was under circumstances like these that I found myself one bright day, after a delay at St. Louis which began at length to be intolerably tedious, forsaking the sultry, sun-scorched streets of {155} the city, and crossing the turbid flood for a tour upon the prairies of Illinois. How delightful to a frame just freed from the feverish confinement of a sick-chamber, brief though it had been, was the fresh breeze which came careering over the water, rippling along the polished surface, and gayly riding the miniature waves of its own creation! The finest point from which to view the little "City of the French" is from beneath the enormous sycamores upon the opposite bank of the Mississippi. It is from this spot alone that anything approaching to a cosmorama can be commanded. The city, retreating as it does from the river's brink--its buildings of every diversity of form, material, and structure, promiscuously heaped the one upon the other, and the whole intermingled with the fresh green of forest-trees, may boast of much scenic beauty. The range of white limestone warehouses, circling like a crescent the shore, form the most prominent feature of the foreground, while the forest of shrub-oaks sweeps away in the rear. For some time I gazed upon this imposing view, and then, slowly turning my horse's head, was upon the dusty thoroughfare to Edwardsville. For the first time I found myself upon the celebrated "American Bottom," a tract of country which, for fertility and depth of soil, is perhaps unsurpassed in the world. A fine road of baked loam extended along my route. Crossing Cahokia Creek, which cuts its deep bed diagonally through the bottom from the bluffs some six miles distant, and threading a grove of the beautiful _pecan_, with its long trailing boughs and {156} delicate leaves, my path was soon winding gracefully away among those venerable monuments of a race now passed from the earth. The eye is struck at first by the number of these eminences, as well as by their symmetry of form and regularity of outline; and the most familiar resemblance suggested is that of gigantic hay-ricks sprinkled over the uniform surface of the prairie on every side. As you advance, however, into the plain, leaving the range of mounds upon the left, something of arrangement is detected in their relative position; and a design too palpable is betrayed to mistake them for the handiwork of Nature. Upward of one hundred of these mounds, it is stated, may be enumerated within seven miles of St. Louis, their altitude varying from ten to sixty feet, with a circumference at the base of about as many yards. One of these, nearly in the centre of the first collection, is remarked as considerably larger than those around, and from its summit is commanded an extensive view of the scene. The group embraces, perhaps, fifty tumuli, sweeping off from opposite the city to the northeast, in form of a crescent, parallel to the river, and at a distance from it of about one mile: they extend about the same distance, and a belt of forest alone obstructs their view from the city. When this is removed, and the prairie is under cultivation, the scene laid open must be beautiful. The outline of the mounds is ordinarily that of a gracefully-rounded cone of varying declivity, though often the form is oblong, approaching the rectangle or ellipse. In some instances {157} they are perfectly square, with a level area upon the summit sufficient for a dwelling and the necessary purlieus. Most of them are clothed with dense thickets and the coarse grass of the bottom; while here and there stands out an aged oak, rooted in the mould, tossing its green head proudly to the breeze, its rough bark shaggy with moss, and the pensile parasite flaunting from its branches. Some few of the tumuli, however, are quite naked, and present a rounded, beautiful surface from the surrounding plain. At this point, about half a mile from the river-bank, commencing with the first group of mounds, extends the railroad across the bottom to the bluffs. The expense of this work was considerable. It crosses a lake, into the bed of which piles were forced a depth of ninety feet before a foundation for the tracks sufficiently firm could be obtained. Coal is transported to St. Louis upon this railway direct from the mines; and the beneficial effects to be anticipated from it in other respects are very great. A town called _Pittsburg_ has been laid out at the foot of the coal bluffs.[127] Leaving the first collection of tumuli, the road wound away smooth and uniform through the level prairie, with here and there upon the left a slight elevation from its low surface, seeming a continuation of the group behind, or a link of union to those yet before. It was a sweet afternoon; the atmosphere was still and calm, and summer's golden haze was sleeping magnificently on the far-off bluffs. At intervals the soft breath of the "sweet South" {158} came dancing over the tall, glossy herbage, and the many-hued prairie-flowers flashed gayly in the sunlight. There was the _heliotrope_, in all its gaudy but magnificent forms; there the deep cerulean of the fringed _gentiana_, delicate as an iris; there the mellow gorgeousness of the _solidago_, in some spots along the pathway, spreading out itself, as it were, into a perfect "field of the cloth of gold;" and the balmy fragrance of the aromatic wild thyme or the burgamot, scattered in rich profusion over the plain, floated over all. Small coveys of the prairie-fowl, _tetrao pratensis_, a fine species of grouse, the ungainly form of the partridge, or that of the timid little hare, would appear for a moment in the dusty road, and, on my nearer approach, away they hurriedly scudded beneath the friendly covert of the bright-leaved sumach or the thickets of the rosebush. Extensive groves of the wild plum and the crab-apple, bending beneath the profusion of clustering fruitage, succeeded each other for miles along the path as I rode onward; now extending in continuous thickets, and then swelling up like green islets from the surface of the plain, their cool recesses affording a refreshing shade for the numerous herds. The rude farmhouse, too, with its ruder outbuildings, half buried in the dark luxuriance of its maize-fields, from time to time was seen along the route. After a delightful drive of half an hour the second group of eminences, known as the "Cantine Mounds," appeared upon the prairie at a distance of three or four miles, the celebrated "Monk Hill," largest monument of the kind yet discovered in North America, heaving up its giant, forest-clothed {159} form in the midst.[128] What are the reflections to which this stupendous earth-heap gives birth? What the associations which throng the excited fancy? What a field for conjecture! What a boundless range for the workings of imagination! What eye can view this venerable monument of the past, this mighty landmark in the lapse of ages, this gray chronicler of hoary centuries, and turn away uninterested? As it is first beheld, surrounded by the lesser heaps, it is mistaken by the traveller for an elevation of natural origin: as he draws nigh, and at length stands at the base, its stupendous magnitude, its lofty summit, towering above his head and throwing its broad shadow far across the meadow; its slopes ploughed with yawning ravines by the torrents of centuries descending to the plain; its surface and declivities perforated by the habitations of burrowing animals, and carpeted with tangled thickets; the vast size of the aged oaks rearing themselves from its soil; and, finally, the farmhouse, with its various structures, its garden, and orchard, and _well_ rising upon the broad area of the summit, and the carriage pathway winding up from the base, all confirm his impression that no hand but that of the Mightiest could have reared the enormous mass. At that moment, should he be assured that this vast earth-heap was of origin demonstrably artificial, he would smile; but credulity the most sanguine would fail to credit the assertion. But when, with jealous eye, slowly and cautiously, and with measured footsteps, he has circled its base; when he has surveyed its slopes and declivities from every position, and has {160} remarked the peculiar uniformity of its structure and the mathematical exactitude of its outline; when he has ascended to its summit, and looked round upon the piles of a similar character by which it is surrounded; when he has taken into consideration its situation upon a river-bottom of nature decidedly diluvial, and, of consequence, utterly incompatible with the _natural_ origin of such elevations; when he has examined the soil of which it is composed, and has discovered it to be uniformly, throughout the entire mass, of the same mellow and friable species as that of the prairie at its base; and when he has listened with scrutiny to the facts which an examination of its depths has thrown to light of its nature and its contents, he is compelled, however reluctantly, yet without a doubt, to declare that the gigantic pile is incontestibly the WORKMANSHIP OF MAN'S HAND. But, with such an admission, what is the crowd of reflections which throng and startle the mind? What a series of unanswerable inquiries succeed! When was this stupendous earth-heap reared up from the plain? By what race of beings was the vast undertaking accomplished? What was its purpose? What changes in its form and magnitude have taken place? What vicissitudes and revolutions have, in the lapse of centuries, rolled like successive waves over the plains at its base? As we reflect, we anxiously look around us for some tradition, some time-stained chronicle, some age-worn record, even the faintest and most unsatisfactory legend, upon which to repose our credulity, and relieve the inquiring solicitude of the mind. But {161} our research is hopeless. The present race of aborigines can tell nothing of these tumuli. To them, as to us, they are veiled in mystery. Ages since, long ere the white-face came, while this fair land was yet the home of his fathers, the simple Indian stood before this venerable earth-heap, and gazed, and wondered, and turned away. But there is another reflection which, as we gaze upon these venerable tombs, addresses itself directly to our feelings, and bows them in humbleness. It is, that soon _our_ memory and that of our _own_ generation will, like that of other times and other men, have passed away; that when these frail tenements shall have been laid aside to moulder, the remembrance will soon follow them to the land of forgetfulness. Ah, if there be an object in all the wide universe of human desires for which the heart of man yearns with an intensity of craving more agonizing and deathless than for any other, it is that the memory should live after the poor body is dust. It was this eternal principle of our nature which reared the lonely tombs of Egypt amid the sands and barrenness of the desert. For ages untold have the massive and gloomy pyramids looked down upon the floods of the Nile, and generation after generation has passed away; yet their very existence still remains a mystery, and their origin points down our inquiry far beyond the grasp of human ken, into the boiling mists, the "wide involving shades" of centuries past. And yet how fondly did they who, with the toil, and blood, and sweat, and misery of ages, upreared these stupendous piles, anticipate {162} an immortality for their name which, like the effulgence of a golden eternity, should for ever linger around their summits! So was it with the ancient tomb-builders of this New World; so has it been with man in every stage of his existence, from the hour that the giant Babel first reared its dusky walls from the plains of Shinar down to the era of the present generation. And yet how hopeless, desperately, eternally hopeless are such aspirations of the children of men! As nations or as individuals, our memory we can never embalm! A few, indeed, may retain the forlorn relic within the sanctuary of hearts which loved us while with them, and that with a tenderness stronger than death; but, with the great mass of mankind, our absence can be noticed only for a day; and then the ranks close up, and a gravestone tells the passing stranger that we lived and died: a few years--the finger of time has been busy with the inscription, and we are _as if we had never been_. If, then, it must be even so, "Oh, let keep the soul embalm'd, and pure In living virtue; that, when both must sever, Although corruption may our frame consume, Th' immortal spirit in the skies may bloom." _St. Clair Co., Illinois._ XV "Are they here, The dead of other days? And did the dust Of these fair solitudes once stir with life And burn with passion? All is gone; All, save the piles of earth that hold their bones, The platforms where they worship'd unknown gods, The barriers which they builded from the soil To keep the foe at bay." _The Prairies._ The antiquity of "Monk Mound" is a circumstance which fails not to arrest the attention of every visiter. That centuries have elapsed since this vast pile of earth was heaped up from the plain, no one can doubt: every circumstance, even the most minute and inconsiderable, confirms an idea which the venerable oaks upon its soil conclusively demonstrate. With this premise admitted, consider for a moment the destructive effects of the elements even for a limited period upon the works of our race. Little more than half a century has elapsed since the war of our revolution; but where are the fortifications, and parapets, and military defences then thrown up? The earthy ramparts of Bunker Hill were nearly obliterated long ago by the levelling finger of time, and scarce a vestige now remains to assist in tracing out the line of defence. The same is true with these works all over the country; and even those of the last war--those at Baltimore, for example {164}--are vanishing as fast as the elements can melt them away. Reflect, then, that this vast earth-heap of which I am writing is composed of a soil far more yielding in its nature than they; that its superfices are by no means compact; and then conceive, if you _can_, its stupendous character before it had bided the rains, and snows, and storm-winds of centuries, and before the sweeping floods of the "Father of Waters" had ever circled its base. Our thoughts are carried back by the reflection to the era of classic fiction, and we almost fancy another war of the Titans against the heavens-- "Conati imponere Pelio Ossam-- --atque Ossæ frondosum involvere Olympum," if a quotation from the sweet bard of Mantua, upon a topic like the present, may be pardoned. How large an army of labourers, without the use of iron utensils, as we have every reason to suppose was the case, would be required for scraping up from the prairie's surface this huge pile; and how many years would suffice for its completion? No one can doubt that the broad surface of the American Bottom, in its whole length and breadth, together with all the neighbouring region on either bank of the Mississippi, once swarmed with living men and animals, even as does now the depths of its soil with their remains. The collection of mounds which I have been attempting to describe would seem to indicate two extensive cities within the extent of five miles; and other groups of the same character may be seen upon a lower section of the bottom, to say nothing of those within the more immediate vicinity of St. {165} Louis. The design of these mounds, as has been before stated, was various, undoubtedly; many were sepulchres, some fortifications, some watch-towers or videttes, and some of the larger class, among which we would place Monk Hill, were probably devoted to the ceremonies of religion. The number of the earth-heaps known as the Cantine Mounds is about fifty, small and great. They lie very irregularly along the southern and eastern bank of Cahokia Creek, occupying an area of some miles in circuit. They are of every form and every size, from the mere molehill, perceptible only by a deeper shade in the herbage, to the gigantic Monk Mound, of which I have already said so much. This vast heap stands about one hundred yards from the creek, and the slope which faces it is very precipitous, and clothed with aged timber. The area of the base is about six hundred yards in circumference, and the perpendicular altitude has been estimated at from ninety to upward of a hundred feet. The form is that of a rectangle, lying north and south; and upon the latter extremity, which commands a view down the bottom, is spread out a broad terrace, or rather a steppe to the main body, about twenty feet lower than the summit, extending the whole length of the side, and is one hundred and fifty feet in breadth. At the left extremity of this terrace winds up the sloping pathway from the prairie to the summit of the mound. Formerly this road sloped up an inclined plane, projecting from the middle of the terrace, ten feet in breadth and twenty in extent, and seemed graded for that purpose at {166} the erection of the mound. This declivity yet remains, but now forms part of a corn-field. The view from the southern extremity of the mound, which is free from trees and underbrush, is extremely beautiful. Away to the south sweeps off the broad river-bottom, at this place about seven miles in width, its waving surface variegated by all the magnificent hues of the summer Flora of the prairies. At intervals, from the deep herbage is flung back the flashing sheen of a silvery lake to the oblique sunlight; while dense groves of the crab-apple and other indigenous wild fruits are sprinkled about like islets in the verdant sea. To the left, at a distance of three or four miles, stretches away the long line of bluffs, now presenting a surface naked and rounded by groups of mounds, and now wooded to their summits, while a glimpse at times may be caught of the humble farmhouses at their base. On the right meanders the Cantine Creek, which gives the name to the group of mounds, betraying at intervals its bright surface through the belt of forest by which it is margined. In this direction, far away in the blue distance, rising through the mist and forest, may be caught a glimpse of the spires and cupolas of the city, glancing gayly in the rich summer sun. The base of the mound is circled upon every side by lesser elevations of every form and at various distances. Of these, some lie in the heart of the extensive maize-fields, which constitute the farm of the proprietor of the principal mound, presenting a beautiful exhibition of light and shade, shrouded as they are in the dark, twinkling leaves. The most {167} remarkable are two standing directly opposite the southern extremity of the principal one, at a distance of some hundred yards, in close proximity to each other, and which never fail to arrest the eye. There are also several large square mounds covered with forest along the margin of the creek to the right, and groups are caught rising from the declivities of the distant bluffs. Upon the western side of Monk Mound, at a distance of several yards from the summit, is a well some eighty or ninety feet in depth; the water of which would be agreeable enough were not the presence of sulphur, in some of its modifications, so palpable. This well penetrates the heart of the mound, yet, from its depth, cannot reach lower than the level of the surrounding plain. I learned, upon inquiry, that when this well was excavated, several fragments of pottery, of decayed ears of corn, and other articles, were thrown up from a depth of sixty-five feet; proof incontestible of the artificial structure of the mound. The associations, when drinking the water of this well, united with its peculiar flavour, are not of the most exquisite character, when we reflect that the precious fluid has probably filtrated, part of it, at least, through the contents of a sepulchre. The present proprietor is about making a transfer, I was informed, of the whole tract to a gentleman of St. Louis, who intends establishing here a house of entertainment. If this design is carried into effect, the drive to this place will be the most delightful in the vicinity of the city. Monk Mound has derived its name and much of {168} its notoriety from the circumstance that, in the early part of the present century, for a number of years, it was the residence of a society of ecclesiastics, of the order _La Trappe_, the most ascetic of all the monastic denominations. The monastery of La Trappe was originally situated in the old province of Perche, in the territory of Orleannois, in France, which now, with a section of Normandy, constitutes the department of Orne. Its site is said to have been the loneliest and most desolate spot that could be selected in the kingdom. The order was founded in 1140 by Rotrou, count of Perche; but having fallen into decay, and its discipline having become much relaxed, it was reformed in 1664, five centuries subsequent, by the Abbé Armand Rance. This celebrated ecclesiastic, history informs us, was in early life a man of fashion and accomplishments; of splendid abilities, distinguished as a classical scholar and translator of Anacreon's Odes. At length, the sudden death of his mistress Montbazon, to whom he was extremely attached, so affected him that he forsook at once his libertine life, banished himself from society, and introduced into the monastery of La Trappe an austerity of discipline hitherto unknown.[129] The vows were chastity, poverty, obedience, and perpetual silence. The couch was a slab of stone, the diet water and bread once in twenty-four hours, and each member removed a spadeful of earth every day from the spot of his intended grave. The following passage relative to this monastery I find quoted from an old French author; and as the {169} language and sentiments are forcible, I need hardly apologize for introducing it entire. "_C'est la que se retirent, ceux qui out commis quelque crime secret, dont les remords les poursuivent; ceux qui sont tourmentes de vapeurs mélancoliques et religieuse; ceux qui ont oublie que Dieu est le plus miséricordieux des pères, et qui ne voient en lui, que le plus cruel des tyrans; ceux qui reduisent à vieu, les souffrances, la mort et la passion de Jesu Crist, et qui ne voient la religion que du cote effrayent et terrible: c'est la que sont pratique des austerite qui abregent la vie, et sont injure à la divinité._" During the era of the Reign of Terror in France, the monks of La Trappe, as well as all the other orders of priesthood, were dispersed over Europe. They increased greatly, however, notwithstanding persecution, and societies established themselves in England and Germany. From the latter country emigrated the society which planted themselves upon the American Bottom. They first settled in the State of Kentucky; subsequently they established themselves at the little French hamlet of Florisant, and in 1809 they crossed the Mississippi, and, strangely enough, selected for their residence the spot I have been describing.[130] Here they made a purchase of about four hundred acres, and petitioned Congress for a pre-emption right to some thousands adjoining. The buildings which they occupied were never of a very durable character, but consisted of about half a dozen large structures of logs, on the summit of the mound about fifty yards to the right {170} of the largest. This is twenty feet in height, and upward of a hundred and fifty feet square; a well dug by the Trappists is yet to be seen, though the whole mound is now buried in thickets. Their outbuildings, stables, granaries, &c., which were numerous, lay scattered about on the plain below. Subsequently they erected an extensive structure upon the terrace of the principal mound, and cultivated its soil for a kitchen-garden, while the area of the summit was sown with wheat. Their territory under cultivation consisted of about one hundred acres, divided into three fields, and embracing several of the mounds. The society of the Trappists consisted of about eighty monks, chiefly Germans and French, with a few of our own countrymen, under governance of one of their number called Father Urbain.[131] Had they remained, they anticipated an accession to their number of about two hundred monks from Europe. Their discipline was equally severe with that of the order in ancient times. Their diet was confined to vegetables, and of these they partook sparingly but once in twenty-four hours: the stern vow of perpetual silence was upon them; no female was permitted to violate their retreat, and they dug their own graves. Their location, however, they found by no means favourable to health, notwithstanding the severe simplicity of their habits. During the summer months fevers prevailed among them to an alarming extent; few escaped, and many died. Among the latter was Louis Antoine Langlois, a native of Quebec, more familiarly known as François {171} Marie Bernard, the name he assumed upon entering the monastery. He often officiated in the former Catholic church of St. Louis, and is still remembered by the older French inhabitants with warm emotions, as he was greatly beloved. The Trappists are said to have been extremely industrious, and some of them skilful workmen at various arts, particularly that of watchmaking; insomuch that they far excelled the same craft in the city, and were patronised by all the unruly timepieces in the region. They had also a laboratory of some extent, and a library; but the latter, we are informed, was of no marvellous repute, embracing chiefly the day-dreams of the Middle Ages, and the wondrous doings of the legion of saints, together with a few obsolete works on medicine. Connected with the monastery was a seminary for the instruction of boys; or, rather, it was a sort of asylum for the orphan, the desolate, the friendless, the halt, the blind, the deaf, and the dumb, and also for the aged and destitute of the male sex. They subjected their pupils to the same severe discipline which they imposed upon themselves. They were permitted to use their tongues but two hours a day, and then very _judiciously_: instead of exercising that "unruly member," they were taught by the good fathers to gesticulate with their fingers at each other in marvellous fashion, and thus to communicate their ideas. As to juvenile sports and the frolics of boyhood, it was a sin to dream of such things. They all received an apprenticeship to some useful trade, however, and were no doubt trained {172} up most innocently and ignorantly in the way they should go. The pupils were chiefly sons of the settlers in the vicinity; but whether they were fashioned by the worthy fathers into good American citizens or the contrary, tradition telleth not. Tradition doth present, however, sundry allegations prejudicial to the honest monks, which we are bold to say is all slander, and unworthy of credence. Some old gossips of the day hesitated not to affirm that the monks were marvellously filthy in their habits; others, that they were prodigiously keen in their bargains; a third class, that the younger members were not so obdurate towards the gentler part of creation as they _might have been_; while the whole community round about, _una voce_, chimed in, and solemnly declared that men who neither might, could, would, or should speak, were a little worse than dumb brutes, and ought to be treated accordingly. However this may have been, it is pretty certain, as is usually the case with our dear fellow-creatures where they are permitted to know nothing at all about a particular matter, the good people, in the overflowings of worldly charity, imagined all manner of evil against the poor Trappist, and seemed to think they had a perfect right to violate his property and insult his person whenever they, in their wisdom and kind feeling, thought proper to do so. But this was soon at an end. In 1813 the monks disposed of their personal property, and leaving fever and ague to their persecutors, and the old mounds to their primitive solitude, forsook the country and sailed for France. {173} Though it is not easy to palliate the unceremonious welcome with which the unfortunate Trappist was favoured at the hand of our people, yet we can readily appreciate the feelings which prompted their ungenerous conduct. How strange, how exceedingly strange must it have seemed to behold these men, in the garb and guise of a distant land, uttering, when their lips broke the silence in which they were locked, the unknown syllables of a foreign tongue; professing an austere, an ancient, and remarkable faith; denying themselves, with the sternest severity, the simplest of Nature's bounties; how strange must it have seemed to behold these men establishing themselves in the depths of this Western wilderness, and, by a fortuitous concurrence of events, planting their altars and hearths upon the very tombs of a race whose fate is veiled in mystery, and practising their austerities at the forsaken temple of a forgotten worship! How strange to behold the devotees of a faith, the most artificial in its ceremonies among men, bowing themselves upon the high places reared up by the hands of those who worshipped the Great Spirit after the simplest form of Nature's adoration! For centuries this singular order of men had figured upon the iron page of history; their legends had shadowed with mystery the bright leaf of poetry and romance, and with them were associated many a wild vision of fancy. And here they were, mysterious as ever, with cowl, and crucifix, and shaven head, and the hairy "crown of thorns" encircling; ecclesiastics the most severe of all the orders of monarchism. How strange must it all {174} have seemed! and it is hardly to be wondered at, unpopular as such institutions undoubtedly were and ever have been in this blessed land of ours, that a feeling of intolerance, and suspicion, and prejudice should have existed. It is not a maxim of _recent_ date in the minds of men, that "whatever is peculiar is false." _Madison County, Ill._ XVI "Let none our author rudely blame, Who from the story has thus long digress'd." DAVENANT. "Nay, tell me not of lordly halls! My minstrels are the trees; The moss and the rock are my tapestried walls, Earth sounds my symphonies." BLACKWOOD'S _Mag._ "Sorrow is knowledge; they who know the most Must mourn the deepest o'er the fatal truth; The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life." MANFRED. There are few lovelier villages in the Valley of the West than the little town of Edwardsville, in whose quiet inn many of the preceding observations have been sketched.[132] It was early one bright morning that I entered Edwardsville, after passing a sleepless night at a neighbouring farmhouse. The situation of the village is a narrow ridge of {175} land swelling abruptly from the midst of deep and tangled woods. Along this elevation extends the principal street of the place, more than a mile in length, and upon either side runs a range of neat edifices, most of them shaded by forest-trees in their front yards. The public buildings are a courthouse and jail of brick, neither of them worthy of farther mention, and two plain, towerless churches, imbosomed in a grove somewhat in the suburbs of the village. There is something singularly picturesque in the situation of these churches, and the structures themselves are not devoid of beauty and symmetrical proportion. At this place, also, is located the land-office for the district. On the morning of my arrival at the village, early as was the hour, the place was thronged with disappointed applicants for land; a lean and hungry-looking race, by-the-by, as it has ever been my lot to look upon. Unfortunately, the office had the evening before, from some cause, been closed, and the unhappy speculators were forced to trudge away many a weary mile, through dust and sun, with their heavy specie dollars, to their homes again. I remember once to have been in the city of Bangor, "away down East in the State of Maine," when the public lands on the Penobscot River were first placed in the market. The land mania had for some months been running high, but could hardly be said yet to have reached a crisis. From all quarters of the Union speculators had been hurrying to the place; and day and night, for the week past, the steamers had been disgorging upon the city their ravenous freights. The important {176} day arrived. At an early hour every hotel, and street, and avenue was swarming with strangers; and, mingling with the current of living bodies, which now set steadily onward to the place of sale, I was carried resistlessly on by its force till it ceased. A confused murmur of voices ran through the assembled thousands; and amid the tumult, the ominous words "_land--lumber--title-deed_," and the like, could alone be distinguished. At length, near noon, the clear tones of the auctioneer were heard rising above the hum of the multitude: all was instantly hushed and still; and gaining an elevated site, before me was spread out a scene worthy a Hogarth's genius and pencil. Such a mass of working, agitated features, glaring with the fierce passion of avarice and the basest propensities of humanity, one seldom is fated to witness. During that public land-sale, indeed, I beheld so much of the selfishness, the petty meanness, the detestable heartlessness of man's nature, that I turned away disgusted, sick at heart for the race of which I was a member. We are reproached as a nation by Europeans for the contemptible vice of avarice; is the censure unjust? Parson Taylor tells us that Satan was the first speculator in land, for on a certain occasion he took Jesus up into an exceedingly high mountain, and showed him all the kingdoms of the earth and the glory thereof, and said to him, "All these things will I give to thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me," when, in fact, the devil did not own one inch of land to give! "Think of the devil's brazen phiz, When not an inch of land was his!" {177} Yet it is to be apprehended that not a few in our midst would not hesitate to barter soul and body, and fall down in worship, were a sufficient number of _acres_ spread out before them as the recompense. Among other objects worthy the traveller's notice in passing through Edwardsville is a press for the manufacture of that well-known, agreeable liquid, _castor oil_: it is situated within the precincts of what is termed, for distinction, the "Upper Village." The apparatus, by means of which the oil is expressed from the bean and clarified, is extremely simple, consisting merely of the ordinary jack-screw. One bushel of the castor beans--_palma Christi_--yields nearly two gallons of the liquid. The only previous preparation to pressing is to dry the beans in an oven. This establishment[133] has been in operation upward of ten years, and has rendered its proprietor, Mr. Adams, a wealthy man.[134] He has a delightful villa, with grounds laid out with taste; and though many years have passed away since he left his native New-England, yet the generosity of his heart and the benevolence of his character tell truly that he has not yet ceased the remembrance of early principles and habits. The village of Edwardsville and its vicinity are said to be remarkably healthy; and the location in the heart of a fertile, well-watered, heavily-timbered section of country, tilled by a race of enterprising yeomanry, gives promise of rapid advancement. The town plat was first laid off in 1815; but the place advanced but little in importance until five years afterward, when a new {178} town was united to the old. About twelve miles southeast from Edwardsville is situated the delightful little hamlet of Collinsville, named from its founder, to which I paid a hasty visit during my ramble on the prairies.[135] It was settled many years ago, but till very recently had not assumed the dignity of a town. Its site is the broad, uniform surface of an elevated ridge, ascending gently from the American Bottom, beautifully shaded by forest-trees, and extending into the interior for several miles. It is almost entirely settled by northern emigrants, whose peculiarities are nowhere more strikingly exhibited. Much attention is bestowed upon religion and education; not a grocery exists in the place, nor, by the charter of the town, can one be established for several years. This little village presents a delightful summer-retreat to the citizens of St. Louis, only ten miles distant. The sun had not yet risen when I left Edwardsville, after a pleasant visit, and, descending into the Bottom, pursued my route over the plain to Alton. The face of the country, for a portion of the way, is broken, and covered with forests of noble trees, until the traveller finds himself on the deep sand-plains, stretching away for some miles, and giving support to a stunted, scragged growth of shrub-oaks. The region bears palpable evidence of having been, at no distant period, submerged; and the idea is confirmed by the existence, at the present time, of a lake of considerable extent on the southern border, which, from the character of the surface, a slight addition of water would spread for miles. I shall not {179} soon forget, I think, the day I entered Alton for the second time during my ramble in the West. It was near the noon after an exceedingly sultry morning; and the earth beneath my horse's hoofs was reduced by protracted drought to an impalpable powder to the depth of several inches. The blazing sunbeams, veiled by not a solitary cloud, reflected from the glassy surface of the Mississippi as from the face of an immense steely mirror and again thrown back by the range of beetling bluffs above, seemed converged into an intense burning focus along the scorched-up streets and glowing roofs of the village. I have endured heat, but none more intolerable in the course of my life than that of which I speak. In the evening, when the sultriness of the day was over, passing through the principal street of the town, I ascended that singular range of bluffs which, commencing at this point, extend along the river, and to which, on a former occasion, I have briefly alluded. The ascent is arduous, but the glorious view from the summit richly repays the visiter for his toil. The withering atmosphere of the depressed, sunburnt village at my feet was delightfully exchanged for the invigorating breezes of the hills, as the fresh evening wind came wandering up from the waters. It was the sunset hour. The golden, slanting beams of departing day were reflected from the undulating bosom of the river, as its bright waters stretched away among the western forests, as if from a sea of molten, gliding silver. On the left, directly at your feet, reposes the village of Alton, overhung by hills, with the gloomy, castellated {180} walls of the Penitentiary lifting up their dusky outline upon its skirts, presenting to the eye a perfect panorama as you look down upon the tortuous streets, the extensive warehouses of stone, and the range of steamers, alive with bustle, along the landing. Beyond the village extends a deep forest; while a little to the south sweep off the waters of the river, bespangled with green islands, until, gracefully expanding itself, a noble bend withdraws it from the view. It is at this point that the Missouri disgorges its turbid, heavy mass of waters into the clear floods of the Upper Mississippi, hitherto uncheckered by a stain. At the base of the bluffs, upon which you stand, at an elevation of a hundred and fifty feet, rushes with violence along the crags the current of the stream; while beyond, upon the opposite plain, is beheld the log hut of the emigrant couched beneath the enormous sycamores, and sending up its undulating thread of blue, curling smoke through the lofty branches. A lumber steam-mill is also here to be seen. Beyond these objects the eye wanders over an interminable carpet of forest-tops, stretching away till they form a wavy line of dense foliage circling the western horizon. By the aid of a glass, a range of hills, blue in the distance, is perceived outlined against the sky: they are the bluffs skirting the beautiful valley of the Missouri. The heights from which this view is commanded are composed principally of earth heaped upon a massive ledge of limerock, which elevates itself from the very bed of the waters. As the spectator gazes and reflects, he cannot but be amazed that the {181} rains, and snows, and torrents of centuries have not, with all their washings, yet swept these earth-heaps away, though the deep ravines between the mounds, which probably originated their present peculiar form, give proof conclusive that such diluvial action to some extent has long been going on. As is usually found to be the case, the present race of Indians have availed themselves of these elevated summits for the burial-spots of their chiefs. I myself scraped up a few decaying fragments of bones, which lay just beneath the surface. At sunrise of the morning succeeding my visit to the bluffs I was in the saddle, and clambering up those intolerably steep hills on the road leading to the village of Upper Alton, a few miles distant. The place is well situated upon an elevated prairie; and, to my own taste, is preferable far for private residence to any spot within the precincts of its rival namesake. The society is polished, and a fine-toned morality is said to characterize the inhabitants. The town was originally incorporated many years ago, and was then a place of more note than it has ever since been; but, owing to intestine broils and conflicting claims to its site, it gradually and steadily dwindled away, until, a dozen years since, it numbered only _seven_ families. A suit in chancery has happily settled these difficulties, and the village is now thriving well. A seminary of some note, under jurisdiction of the Baptist persuasion, has within a few years been established here, and now comprises a very respectable body of students.[136] It originated in a seminary {182} formerly established at Rock Spring in this state. About five years since a company of gentlemen, seven in number, purchased here a tract of several hundred acres, and erected upon it an academical edifice of brick; subsequently a stone building was erected, and a preparatory school instituted. In the year 1835, funds to a considerable amount were obtained at the East; and a donation of $10,000 from Dr. Benjamin Shurtliff, of Boston, induced the trustees to give to the institution his name. Half of this sum is appropriated to a college building, and the other half is to endow a professorship of belles lettres. The present buildings are situated upon a broad plain, beneath a walnut grove, on the eastern skirt of the village; and the library, apparatus, and professorships are worthy to form the foundation of a _college_, as is the ultimate design, albeit a Western college and a Northern college are terms quite different in signification. I visited this seminary, however, and was much pleased with its faculty, buildings, and design. All is as it should be. What reflecting mind does not hail with joy these temples of science elevating themselves upon every green hill and broad plain of the West, side by side with the sanctuaries of our holy religion! It is intelligence, _baptized intelligence_, which alone can save this beautiful valley, if indeed it is to be saved from the inroads of arbitrary rule and false religion; which is to hand down to another generation our civil and religious immunities unimpaired. In most of the efforts for the advancement of education in {183} the West, it is gratifying to perceive that this principle has not been overlooked. Nearly all those seminaries of learning which have been established profess for their design the culture of the _moral_ powers as well as those of the _intellect_. That _intelligence_ is an essential requisite, a prime constituent of civil and religious freedom, all will admit; that it is the _only_ requisite, the _sole_ constituent, may be questioned. "Knowledge," in the celebrated language of Francis Bacon, "is power;" ay! POWER; an engine of tremendous, incalculable energy, but blind in its operations. Applied to the cause of wisdom and virtue, the richest of blessings; to that of infidelity and vice, the greatest of curses. A lever to move the world, its influence cannot be over-estimated; as the bulwark of liberty and human happiness, its effect has been fearfully miscalculated. Were man inclined as fully to good as to evil, then might knowledge become the sovereign panacea of every civil and moral ill; as man by nature unhappily _is_, "the fruit of the tree" is oftener the stimulant to evil than to good. Unfold the sacred record of the past. Why did not intelligence save Greece? Greece! the land of intellect and of thought; the birthspot of eloquence, philosophy, and song! whose very populace were critics and bards! Greece, in her early day of pastoral ignorance, was free; but from the loftiest pinnacle of intellectual glory she fell; and science, genius, intelligence, all could not save her. The buoyant bark bounded beautifully over the blue-breasted billows; but the helm, the helm of {184} _moral_ culture was not there, and her broad-spread pinions hurried her away only to a speedier and more terrible destruction. Ancient Rome: in the day of her rough simplicity, _she_ was free; but from her proudest point of _intellectual_ development--the era of Augustus--we date her decline. France: who will aver that it was popular _ignorance_ that rolled over revolutionary France the ocean-wave of blood? When have the French, _as a people_, exhibited a prouder era of mind than that of their sixteenth Louis? The encyclopedists, the most powerful men of the age, concentrated all their vast energies to the diffusion of science among the people. Then, as now, the press groaned in constant parturition; and essays, magazines, tracts, treatises, libraries, were thrown abroad as if by the arm of Omnipotent power. Then, as now, the supremacy of human reason and of human society flitted in "unreal mockery" before the intoxicated fancy; and wildly was anticipated a career of upward and onward advancement during the days of all coming time. France was a nation of philosophers, and the great deep of mind began to heave; the convulsed labouring went on, and, from time to time, it burst out upon the surface. Then came the tornado, and France, refined, intelligent, scientific, etherealized France, was swept, as by Ruin's besom, of every green thing. Her own children planted the dagger in her bosom, and France was a nation of scientific, philosophic parricides! But "France was poisoned {185} by infidelity." Yes! so she was: but why was not the subtle element neutralized in the cup of _knowledge_ in which it was administered? Is not "knowledge omnipotent to preserve; the salt to purify the nations?" England: view the experiment there. It is a matter of parliamentary record, that within the last twenty years, during the philanthropic efforts of Lord Henry Brougham and his whig coadjutors, crime in England has more than tripled. If knowledge, pure, defecated knowledge, be a conservative principle, why do we witness these appalling results? What, then, shall be done? Shall the book of knowledge be taken from the hands of the people, and again be locked up in the libraries of the few? Shall the dusky pall of ignorance and superstition again be flung around the world, and a long starless midnight of a thousand years once more come down to brood over mankind? By no means. _Let_ the sweet streams of knowledge go forth, copious, free, to enrich and irrigate the garden of mind; but mingle with them the pure waters of that "fount which flows fast by the oracles of God," or the effect now will be, as it ever has been, only to intoxicate and madden the human race. There is nothing in cold, dephlegmated intellect to warm up and foster the energies of the moral system of man. Intellect, mere intellect, can never tame the passions or purify the heart. _Upper Alton, Ill._ XVII "The fourth day roll'd along, and with the night Came storm and darkness in their mingling might. Loud sung the wind above; and doubly loud Shook o'er his turret-cell the thunder-cloud." _The Corsair._ "These The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no name-- The prairies." BRYANT. Whoever will take upon himself the trouble to run his eye over the "Tourist's Pocket Map of Illinois," will perceive, stretching along the western border of the state, parallel with the river, a broad carriage highway, in a direction nearly north, to a little village called Carlinville; if then he glances to the east, he may trace a narrow pathway striking off at right angles to that section of the state. Well, it is here, upon this pathway, just on the margin of a beautiful prairie, sweeping away towards the town of Hillsborough,[137] that I find myself at the close of the day, after a long and fatiguing ride. The afternoon has been one of those dreary, drizzly, disagreeable seasons which relax the nerves and ride like an incubus upon the spirits; and my route has conducted me over a broad-spread, desolate plain; for, lovely as may appear the prairie when its bright flowerets and its tall grass-tops {187} are nodding in the sunlight, it is a melancholy place when the sky is beclouded and the rain is falling. There is a certain indescribable sensation of loneliness, which steals over the mind of the solitary traveller when he finds himself alone in the heart of these boundless plains, which he cannot away with; and the approach to a forest is hailed with pleasure, as serving to quiet, with the vague idea of _society_, this sense of dreariness and desertion. Especially is this the case when rack and mist are hovering along the border, veiling from the view those picturesque woodland-points and promontories, and those green island-groves which, when the sky is clear, swell out upon every side into the bosom of the plain. Then all is fresh and joyous to the eye as a vision: change the scene, and the grand, gloomy, misty magnificence of old ocean presents itself on every side. The relief to the picture afforded by the discovery of man's habitation can hardly be described. It was near nightfall, when, wearied by the fatigue of riding and drenched with mist, I reached the log-cabin of an old pioneer from Virginia, beneath whose lowly roof-tree I am seated at this present writing; and though hardly the most sumptuous edifice of which it has been my lot to be an inmate, yet with no unenviable anticipations am I looking forward to hearty refreshment and to sound slumber upon the couch by my side. There are few objects to be met with in the backwoods of the West more unique and picturesque than the dwelling of the emigrant. After selecting an elevated spot as {188} a site for building, a cabin or a log-house--which is somewhat of an improvement upon the first--is erected in the following manner. A sufficient number of straight trees, of a size convenient for removing, are felled, slightly hewn upon the opposite sides, and the extremities notched or mortised with the axe. They are then piled upon each other so that the extremities lock together; and a single or double edifice is constructed, agreeable to the taste or ability of the builder. Ordinarily the cabin consists of two quadrangular apartments, separated by a broad area between, connected by a common floor, and covered by a common roof, presenting a parallelogram triple the length of its width. The better of these apartments is usually appropriated to the entertainment of the casual guest, and is furnished with several beds and some articles of rude furniture to correspond. The open area constitutes the ordinary sitting and eating apartment of the family in fine weather; and, from its coolness, affords a delightful retreat. The intervals between the logs are stuffed with fragments of wood or stone, and plastered with mud or mortar, and the chimney is constructed much in the same manner. The roof is covered with thin clapboards of oak or ash, and, in lieu of nails, transverse pieces of timber retain them in their places. Thousands of cabins are thus constructed, without a particle of iron or even a common plank. The rough clapboards give to the roof almost the shaggy aspect of thatch at a little distance, but they render it impermeable to even the heaviest and {189} most protracted rain-storms. A rude gallery often extends along one or both sides of the building, adding much to its coolness in summer and to its warmth in winter by the protection afforded from sun and snow. The floor is constructed of short, thick planks, technically termed "puncheons," which are confined by wooden pins; and, though hardly smooth enough for a ballroom, yet well answer every purpose for a dwelling, and effectually resist moisture and cold. The apertures are usually cut with a view to free ventilation, and the chimneys stand at the extremities, outside the walls of the cabin. A few pounds of nails, a few boxes of glass, a few hundred feet of lumber, and a few days' assistance of a house-carpenter, would, of course, contribute not a little to the comfort of the _shieling_; but neither of these are indispensable. In rear of the premises rise the outbuildings; stables, corn-crib, meat-house, &c., all of them quite as perfect in structure as the dwelling itself, and quite as comfortable for residence. If to all this we add a well, walled up with a section of a hollow cotton-wood, a cellar or cave in the earth for a pantry, a zigzag rail fence enclosing the whole clearing, a dozen acres of Indian corn bristling up beyond, a small garden and orchard, and a host of swine, cattle, poultry, and naked children about the door, and the _tout ensemble_ of a backwoods farmhouse is complete. Minor circumstances vary, of course, with the peculiarities of the country and the origin of the settlers; but the principal features of the picture everywhere prevail. The present mode of cultivation {190} sweeps off vast quantities of timber; but it must soon be superseded. Houses of brick and stone will take the place of log-cabins; hedge-rows will supply that of rail enclosures, while coal for fuel will be a substitute for wood. At Upper Alton my visit was not a protracted one. In a few hours, having gathered up my _fixens_ and mounted my _creetur_, I was threading a narrow pathway through the forest. The trees, most of them lofty elms, in many places for miles locked together their giant branches over the road, forming a delightful screen from the sunbeams; but it was found by no means the easiest imaginable task, after once entering upon the direct route, to continue upon it. This is a peculiarity of Western roads. The commencement may be uniform enough, but the traveller soon finds his path diverging all at once in several different directions, like the radii of a circle, with no assignable cause therefor, and not the slightest reason presenting itself why he should select one of them in preference to half a dozen others, equally good or bad. And the sequel often shows him that there in reality existed no more cause of preference than was apparent; for, after a few tortuosities through the forest, for variety's sake, the paths all terminate in the same route. The obstacle of a tree, a stump, a decaying log, or a sand-bank often splits the path as if it were a flowing stream; and then the traveller takes upon him to exercise the reserved right of radiating to any point of the compass he {191} may think proper, provided always that he succeeds in clearing the obstruction. Passing many log-cabins, such as I have described, with their extensive maize-fields, the rude dwelling of a sturdy old emigrant from the far East sheltered me during the heat of noon; and having luxuriated upon an excellent dinner, prepared and served up in right New-England fashion, I again betook myself to my solitary route. But I little anticipated to have met, in the distant prairies of Illinois, the habitation of one who had passed his life in my own native state, almost in my own native village. Yet I know not why the occurrence should be a cause of surprise. Such emigrations are of constant occurrence. The farmer had been a resident eight years in the West; his farm was under that high cultivation characteristic of the Northern emigrant, and peace and plenty seemed smiling around. Yet was the emigrant satisfied? So far from it, he acknowledged himself a disappointed man, and sighed for his native northern home, with its bleak winds and barren hillsides. The region through which, for most of the day, I journeyed was that, of very extensive application in the West, styled "Barrens," by no means implying unproductiveness of soil, but a species of surface of heterogeneous character, uniting prairie with _timber_ or forest, and usually a description of land as fertile, healthy, and well-watered as may be found. The misnomer is said to have derived its origin from the early settlers of that section of Kentucky south of Green River, which, presenting {192} only a scanty, dwarfish growth of timber, was deemed of necessity _barren_, in the true acceptation of the term.[138] This soil there and elsewhere is now considered better adapted to every variety of produce and the vicissitudes of climate than even the deep mould of the prairies and river-bottoms. The rapidity with which a young forest springs forward, when the annual fires have once been stopped in this species of land, is said to be astonishing; and the first appearance of timber upon the prairies gives it the character, to some extent, of barrens. Beneath the trees is spread out a mossy turf, free from thickets, but variegated by the gaudy petals of the heliotrope, and the bright crimson buds of the dwarf-sumach in the hollows. Indeed, some of the most lovely scenery of the West is beheld in the landscapes of these barrens or "oak openings," as they are more appropriately styled. For miles the traveller wanders on, through a magnificence of park scenery on every side, with all the diversity of the slope, and swell, and meadow of human taste and skill. Interminable avenues stretch away farther than the eye can reach, while at intervals through the foliage flashes out the unruffled surface of a pellucid lake. There are many of these circular lakes or "sinkholes," as they are termed in Western dialect, which, as they possess no inlet, seem supplied by subterraneous springs or from the clouds. The outline is that of an inverted cone, as if formed by the action of whirling waters; and, as sinkholes exist in great numbers in the vicinity of the rivers, and possess an outlet {193} at the bottom through a substratum of porous limestone, the idea is abundantly confirmed. In the State of Missouri these peculiar springs are also observed. Some of them in Greene county burst forth from the earth and the fissures of the rocks with sufficient force to whirl a _run_ of heavy buhrstones, and the power of the fountains seems unaffected by the vicissitudes of rain or drought. These same sinkholes, circular ponds, and gushing springs are said to constitute one of the most remarkable and interesting features of the peninsula of Florida. There, as here, the substratum is porous limestone; and it is the subsidence of the layers which gives birth to the springs. The volume of water thrown up by these boiling fountains is said to be astonishingly great; many large ones, also, are known to exist in the beds of lakes and rivers. From the circumstance of the existence of these numerous springs originated, doubtless, the tradition which Spanish chroniclers aver to have existed among the Indians of Porto Rico and Cuba, that somewhere among the Lucayo Islands or in the interior of Florida there existed a fountain whose waters had the property of imparting _rejuvenescence_ and perpetuating perennial youth. Only twenty years after the discoveries of Columbus, and more than three centuries since, did the romantic Juan Ponce de Leon, an associate of the Genoese and subsequent governor of Porto Rico, explore the peninsula of Florida in search of this traditionary fountain; of the success of the enterprise we have no account. Among the other poetic founts of the "Land of {194} Flowers," we are _told_ of one situated but a few miles from Fort Gaines, called "Sappho's Fount,"[139] from the idea which prevails that its waters impart the power of producing sweet sounds to the voices of those who partake of them. It was near evening, when, emerging from the shades of the _barrens_, which, like everything else, however beautiful, had, by continuous succession, begun to become somewhat monotonous, my path issued rather unexpectedly upon the margin of a wide, undulating prairie. I was struck, as is every traveller at first view of these vast plains, with the grandeur, and novelty, and loveliness of the scene before me. For some moments I remained stationary, looking out upon the boundless landscape before me. The tall grass-tops waving in the billowy beauty in the breeze; the narrow pathway winding off like a serpent over the rolling surface, disappearing and reappearing till lost in the luxuriant herbage; the shadowy, cloud-like aspect of the far-off trees, looming up, here and there, in isolated masses along the horizon, like the pyramidal canvass of ships at sea; the deep-green groves besprinkled among the vegetation, like islets in the waters; the crimson-died prairie-flower flashing in the sun--these features of inanimate nature seemed strangely beautiful to one born and bred amid the bold mountain scenery of the North, and who now gazed upon them "for the first." "The prairies! I behold them for the first, And my heart swells, while the dilated sight Takes in the encircling vastness." {195} As I rode leisurely along upon the prairie's edge, I passed many noble farms, with their log-cabins couched in a corner beneath the forest; and, verily, would a farmer of Yankee-land "stare and gasp" to behold the prairie cornfield of the Western emigrant; and yet more would he be amazed to witness the rank, rustling luxuriance of the vegetable itself. Descending a swell of the prairie near one of these farms, a buck with his doe leaped out from a thicket beside my path, and away, away bounded the "happy pair" over the grass-tops, free as the wind. They are often shot upon the prairies, I was informed by an old hunter, at whose cabin, in the middle of the plain, I drew up at twilight, and with whom I passed the night. He was a pioneer from _the dark and bloody ground_, and many a time had followed the wild buck through those aged forests, where Boone, and Whitley, and Kenton once roved.[140] Only fifty years ago, and for the first time were the beautiful fields of Kentucky turned up by the ploughshare of the Virginia emigrant; yet their very descendants of the first generation we behold plunging deeper into the wilderness West. How would the worthy old Governor Spotswood stand astounded, could he now rear his venerable bones from their long resting-place, and look forth upon this lovely land, far away beyond the Blue Ridge of the Alleghany hills, the very passage of which he had deemed not unworthy "the horseshoe of gold" and "the order tramontane." "_Sic juvat transcendere montes._" Twenty years before Daniel Boone, "backwoodsman of Kentucky," was {196} born, Alexander Spotswood, governor of Virginia, undertook, with great preparation, a passage of the Alleghany ridge. For this expedition were provided a large number of horseshoes, an article not common in some sections of the "Old Dominion;" and from this circumstance, upon their return, though without a glimpse of the Western Valley, was instituted the "_Tramontane Order_, or _Knights of the Golden Horseshoe_," with the motto above. The badge of distinction for having made a passage of the Blue Ridge was a golden horseshoe worn upon the breast. Could the young man of that day have protracted the limits of life but a few years beyond his threescore and ten, what astonishment would not have filled him to behold _now_, as "the broad, the bright, the glorious West," the region _then_ regarded as the unknown and howling _wilderness beyond the mountains_! Yet even thus it is.[141] A long ride over a dusty road, beneath a sultry sun, made me not unwilling to retire to an early rest. But in a few hours my slumbers were broken in upon by the glare of lightning and the crash of thunder. For nearly five weeks had the prairies been refreshed by not a solitary shower; and the withered crops and the parched soil, baked to the consistency of stone or ground up to powder, betrayed alarming evidence of the consequence. Day had succeeded day. The scorching sun had gone up in the firmament, blazed from his meridian throne, and in lurid sultriness descended to his rest. The subtle fluid had been gathering and concentrating in the skies; and, early on the night of {197} which I speak, an inky cloud had been perceived rolling slowly up from the western horizon, until the whole heavens were enveloped in blackness. Then the tempest burst forth. Peal upon peal the hoarse thunder came booming over the prairies; and the red lightning would glare, and stream, and almost hiss along the midnight sky, like Ossian's storm-spirit riding on the blast. At length there was a hush of elements, and all was still--"still as the spirit's silence;" then came one prolonged, deafening, terrible crash and rattle, as if the concave of the firmament had been rent asunder, and the splintered fragments, hurled abroad, were flying through the boundlessness of space; the next moment, and the torrents came weltering through the darkness. I have witnessed thunder-storms on the deep, and many a one among the cliffs of my native hills; but a midnight thunder-gust upon the broad prairie-plains of the West is more terrible than they. A more sublimely magnificent spectacle have I never beheld than that, when one of these broad-sheeted masses of purple light would blaze along the black bosom of the cloud, quiver for an instant over the prairie miles in extent, flinging around the scene a garment of flame, and then go out in darkness. "Oh night, And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong, Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light Of a dark eye in woman!" "Most glorious night! Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be A sharer in thy fierce and far delight, A portion of the tempest and of thee!" {198} And a sharer in the tempest surely was "a certain weary pilgrim, in an upper chamber" of a certain log-cabin of the prairie. Unhappily for his repose or quiet, had he desired either, the worthy host, in laudable zeal for a window when erecting his hut, had thought proper to neglect or to forget one of the indispensables for such a convenience in shape of sundry panes of glass. Wherefore, as is easy to perceive, said aperture commanding the right flank of the pilgrim's dormitory, the warring elements without found abundant entrance for a by-skirmish within. Sad to relate, the pilgrim was routed, "horse, foot, and dragoons;" whereupon, agreeable to Falstaff's _discretionary_ views of valour, seizing upon personal effects, he beat a retreat to more hospitable realms. _Greene County, Ill._ XVIII "What earthly feeling unabash'd can dwell In Nature's mighty presence? mid the swell Of everlasting hills, the roar of floods, And frown of rocks and pomp of waving woods? These their own grandeur on the soul impress, And bid each passion feel its nothingness." HEMANS. "La grace est toujours unie à la magnificence, dans les scenes de la nature."--CHATEAUBRIAND'S "_Atala_." It was morning. The storm had passed away, and the early sunlight was streaming gloriously over the fresh landscape. The atmosphere, discharged of its electric burden, was playing cool and free among the grass-tops; the lark was carolling in the clouds above its grassy nest; the deer was rising from his sprinkled lair, and the morning mists were rolling heavily in masses along the skirts of the prairie woodlands, as I mounted my horse at the door of the cabin beneath whose roof I had passed the night. Before me at no great distance, upon the edge of the plain, rose an open park of lofty oaks, with a mossy turf beneath; and the whole scene, lighted up by the sunbeams breaking through the ragged mists, presented a most gorgeous spectacle. The entire wilderness of green; every bough, spray, leaf; every blade of grass, wild weed, and floweret, was hung with trembling {200} drops of liquid light, which, reflecting and refracting the sun-rays, threw back all the hues of the iris. It was indeed a morning of beauty after the tempest; and Nature seemed to have arrayed herself in her bridal robes, glittering in all their own matchless jewellery to greet its coming. Constituted as we all naturally are, there exist, bound up within the secresies of the bosom, certain emotions and sentiments, designed by our Creator to leap forth in joyousness in view of the magnificence of his works; certain springs of exquisite delicacy deep hidden in the chambers of the breast, but which, touched or breathed upon never so lightly, strike the keys of feeling and fill the heart with harmony. And I envy not the feelings of that man who, amid all "the glories of this visible world," can stand a passionless beholder; who feels not his pulses thrill with quickened vibration, and his heart to heave in fuller gush as he views the beneficence of his Maker in the magnificence of his works; who from all can turn calmly away, and in the chill, withering accents of Atheism, pronounce it the offspring of blind fatality, the resultant of meaningless chance! When we look abroad upon the panorama of creation, so palpable is the impress of an omnipotent hand, and so deeply upon all its features is planted the demonstration of design, that it would almost seem, in the absence of reason and revelation, we need but contemplate the scenery of nature to be satisfied of the existence of an all-wise, all-powerful Being, whose workmanship it is. The {201} firmament, with its marshalled and glittering hosts; the earth, spread out in boundlessness at our feet, now draperied in the verdant freshness of springtime, anon in the magnificent glories of summer sultriness, again teeming with the mellow beauty of autumnal harvesting, and then slumbering in the chill, cheerless desolation of winter, all proclaim a Deity eternal in existence, boundless in might. The mountain that rears its bald forehead to the clouds; the booming cataract; the unfathomed, mysterious sounding ocean; the magnificent sweep of the Western prairie; the eternal flow of the Western river, proclaim, in tones extensive as the universe--tones not to be misunderstood, that their CREATOR lives. It is a circumstance in the character of the human mind, which not the most careless or casual observer of its operations can fail to have remarked, that the contemplation of all grand and immeasurable objects has a tendency to enlarge and elevate the understanding, lend a loftier tone to the feelings, and, agreeable to the moral constitution of man, carry up his thoughts and his emotions directly to their Author, "from Nature up to Nature's God." The savage son of the wilderness, as he roams through his grand and gloomy forests, which for centuries have veiled the soil at their base from the sunlight, perceives a solemn awe stealing over him as he listens to the surges of the winds rolling among the heavy branches; and in Nature's simplicity, untaught but by her untutored promptings, he believes that "the Great Spirit is whispering in {202} the tree tops." He stands by the side of Niagara. With subdued emotions he gazes upon the majestic world of floods as they hurry on. They reach the barrier! they leap its precipice! they are lost in thunder and in foam! And, as the raging waters disappear in the black abyss; as the bow of the covenant, "like hope upon a deathbed," flings its irised arch in horrible beauty athwart the hell of elements, the bewildered child of nature feels his soul swell within his bosom; the thought rises solemnly upon him, "the Great Spirit is here;" and with timid solicitude he peers through the forest shades around him for some palpable demonstration of His presence. And such is the effect of all the grand scenes of nature upon the mind of the savage: they lead it up to the "Great Spirit." Upon this principle is the fact alone to be accounted for, that no race of beings has yet been discovered destitute of _all_ idea of a Supreme Intelligence to whom is due homage and obedience. It is _His_ voice they hear in the deep hour of midnight, when the red lightning quivers along the bosom of the cloud, and the thunder-peal rattles through the firmament. It is _He_ they recognise in the bright orb of day, as he blazes from the eastern horizon; or, "like a monarch on a funeral pile," sinks to his rest. _He_ is beheld in the pale queen of night, as in silvery radiance she walks the firmament, and in the beautiful star of evening as it sinks behind his native hills. In the soft breathing of the "summer wind" and in the terrible sublimity of the autumn tempest; in the gentle dew of heaven and {203} the summer torrent; in the sparkling rivulet and the wide, wild river; in the delicate prairie-flower and the gnarled monarch of the hills; in the glittering minnow and the massive narwhal; in the fairy humbird and the sweeping eagle; in each and in all of the creations of universal nature, the mind of the savage sees, feels, _realizes_ the presence of a Deity. "Earth with her thousand voices praises God!" is the beautiful sentiment of Coleridge's hymn in the Vale of Chamouni; and its truth will be doubted by no man of refined sensibility or cultivated taste. In viewing the grand scenery of nature, the mind of the savage and the poet alike perceive the features of Deity; on the bright page of creation, in characters enstamped by his own mighty hand, they read his perfections and his attributes; the vast volume is spread out to every eye; he who will may read and be wise. And yet, delightful and instructive as the study of Nature's creations cannot fail to be, it is a strange thing that, by many, so little regard is betrayed for them. How often do we gaze upon the orb of day, as he goes down the western heavens in glory to his rest; how often do we look away to the far-off star, as it pursues in beauty its lonely pathway, distinct amid the myriads that surround it; how often do we glance abroad upon the splendours of earth, and then, from all this demonstration of Omnipotent goodness turn away with not _one_ pulsation of gratitude to the Creator of suns and stars; with not one aspiration of feeling, one acknowledgment of regard to {204} the Lord of the universe? Yet surely, whatever repinings may at times imbitter the unsanctified bosom in view of the moral, the intellectual, or social arrangements of existence, there should arise but one emotion, and that--_praise_ in view of _inanimate_ nature. Here is naught but power and goodness; now, as at the dawn of Creation's morning, "all is very good." But these are scenes upon which the eye has turned from earliest infancy; and to this cause alone may we attribute the fact, that though their grandeur may never weary or their glories pall upon the sense, yet our gaze upon them is often that of coldness and indifferent regard. Still their influence upon us, though inappreciable, is sure. If we look abroad upon the race of man, we cannot but admit the conviction that natural scenery, hardly less than climate, government, or religion, lays its impress upon human character. It is where Nature exhibits herself in her loftiest moods that her influence on man is most observable. 'Tis there we find the human mind most chainlessly free, and the attachments of patriotic feeling most tenacious and exalted. To what influence more than to that of the gigantic features of nature around him, amid which he first opened his eyes to the light, and with which from boyhood days he has been conversant, are we to attribute that indomitable hate to oppression, that enthusiastic passion for liberty, and that wild idolatry of country which characterizes the Swiss mountaineer? _He_ would be free as the geyer-eagle of his native cliffs, whose eyrie hangs in the clouds, whose eye brightens in {205} the sunlight, whose wild shriek rises on the tempest, and whose fierce brood is nurtured amid crags untrodden by the footstep of man. To _his_ ear the sweep of the terrible _lauwine_, the dash of the mountain cataract, the sullen roar of the mountain forest, is a music for which, in a foreign land, he pines away and dies. And all these scenes have but one language--and that is chainless _independence_! It is a fact well established, and one to be accounted for upon no principle other than that which we advance, that the dwellers in mountainous regions, and those whose homes are amid the grandeur of nature, are found to be more attached to the spot of their nativity than are other races of men, and that they are ever more forward to defend their ice-clad precipices from the attack of the invader. For centuries have the Swiss inhabited the mountains of the Alps. They inhabit them still, and have never been entirely subdued. But "The free Switzer yet bestrides _alone_ His chainless mountains." Of what _other_ nation of Europe, if we except the Highlands of Scotland, may anything like the same assertion with truth be made? We are told that the mountains of Caucasus and Himmalaya, in Asia, still retain the race of people which from time immemorial have possessed them. The same accents echo along their "tuneful cliffs" as centuries since were listened to by the patriarchs; while at their base, chance, and change, and conquest, like successive floods, have swept the delta-plains of {206} the Ganges and Euphrates. These are but isolated instances from a multitude of similar character, which might be advanced in support of the position we have assumed. Nor is it strange that peculiarities like these should be witnessed. There must ever be _something_ to love, if the emotion is to be permanently called forth; it matters little whether it be in the features of inanimate nature or in those of man; and, alike in both cases, do the boldest and most prominent create the deepest impression. Just so it is with our admiration of character; there must exist bold and distinctive traits, good or bad, to arouse for it unusual regard. A monotony of character or of feeling is as wearisome as a monotony of sound or scenery. But to return from a digression which has become unconscionably long. After a brisk gallop of a few hours through the delightful scenery of the Barrens, I found myself approaching the little town of Carlinville. As I drew nigh to the village, I found it absolutely reeling under the excitement of the "Grand Menagerie." From all points of the compass, men, women, and children, emerging from the forest, came pouring into the place, some upon horses, some in farm-wagons, and troops of others on foot, slipping and sliding along in a fashion most distressing to behold. The soil in this vicinity is a black loam of surpassing fertility; and, when saturated with moisture, it adheres to the sole with most pertinacious tenacity, more like to an amalgam of soot and soap-grease than to any other substance that has ever come under my cognizance. The inn {207} was thronged by neighbouring farmers, some canvassing the relative and individual merits of the _Zebedee_ and the _Portimous_; others sagely dwelling upon the mooted point of peril to be apprehended from the great _sarpent_--_Boy Contractor_; while little unwashen wights did run about and dangerously prophecy on the recent disappearance of the big elephant. Carlinville is a considerable village, situated on the margin of a pleasant prairie, on the north side of Macoupin Creek, and is the seat of justice for the county. The name _Macoupin_ is said to be of aboriginal derivation, and by the early French chroniclers was spelled and pronounced _Ma-qua-pin_, until its present uncomely combination of letters became legalized on the statute-book. The term, we are told by Charlevoix, the French _voyageur_, is the Indian name of an esculent with a broad corolla, found in many of the ponds and creeks of Illinois, especially along the course of the romantic stream bearing its name. The larger roots, eaten raw, were poisonous, and the natives were accustomed to dig ovens in the earth, into which, being walled up with flat stones and heated, was deposited the vegetable. After remaining for forty-eight hours in this situation, the deleterious qualities were found extracted, and the root being dried, was esteemed a luxury by the Indians. The region bordering upon Carlinville is amazingly fertile, and proportionally divided into prairie and timber--a circumstance by no means unworthy of notice. There has been a design of establishing {208} here a Theological Seminary, but the question of its site has been a point easier to discuss than to decide.[142] My tarry at the village was a brief one, though I became acquainted with a number of its worthy citizens; and in the log-office of a young limb of _legality_, obtained, as a special distinction, a glance at a forthcoming "Fourth-of-July" oration, fruitful in those sonorous periods and stereotyped patriotics indispensable on such occasions, and, at all hazard, made and provided for them. As I was leaving the village I was met by multitudes, pouring in from all sections of the surrounding region, literally thronging the ways; mothers on horseback, with young children in their arms; fathers with daughters and wives _en croupe_, and at intervals an individual, in quiet possession of an entire animal, came sliding along in the mud, in fashion marvellously entertaining to witness. A huge cart there likewise was, which excited no small degree of admiration as it rolled on, swarmed with women and children. An aged patriarch, with hoary locks resting upon his shoulders, enacted the part of charioteer to this primitive establishment; and now, in zealous impatience to reach the scene of action, from which the braying horns came resounding loud and clear through the forest, he was wretchedly belabouring, by means of an endless whip, six unhappy oxen to augment their speed. I had travelled not many miles when a black cloud spread itself rapidly over the sky, and in a few moments the thunder began to bellow, the lightnings to flash, and the rain to fall in torrents. {209} Luckily enough for me, I found myself in the neighbourhood of man's habitation. Leaping hastily from my steed, and lending him an impetus with my riding whip which carried him safely beneath a hospitable shed which stood thereby, I betook myself, without ceremony or delay, to the mansion house itself, glad enough to find its roof above me as the first big raindrops came splashing to the ground. The little edifice was tenanted by three females and divers flaxen-pated, sun-bleached urchins of all ages and sizes, and, at the moment of my entrance, all in high dudgeon, because, forsooth, they were not to be permitted to drench themselves in the anticipated shower. Like Noah's dove, they were accordingly pulled within the ark, and thereupon thought proper to set up their several and collective _Ebenezers_. "Well!" was my exclamation, in true Yankee fashion, as I bowed my head low in entering the humble postern; "we're going to get pretty considerable of a sprinkling, I guess." "I reckon," was the sententious response of the most motherly-seeming of the three women, at the same time vociferating to the three larger of the children, "Oh, there, you Bill, Sall, Polly, honeys, get the gentleman a cheer! Walk in, sir; set down and take a seat!" This evolution of "setting down and taking a seat" was at length successfully effected, after sundry manoeuvrings by way of planting the three pedestals of the uncouth tripod upon the same plane, and avoiding the fearful yawnings in the _puncheon_ floor. When all was at length quiet, I {210} improved the opportunity of gazing about me to explore the curious habitation into which I found myself inserted. The structure, about twenty feet square, had originally been constructed of rough logs, the interstices stuffed with fragments of wood and stone, and daubed with clay; the chimney was built up of sticks laid crosswise, and plastered with the same material to resist the fire. Such had been the backwoodsman's cabin in its primitive prime; but time and the elements had been busy with the little edifice, and sadly had it suffered. Window or casement was there none, neither was there need thereof; for the hingeless door stood ever open, the clay was disappearing from the intervals between the logs, and the huge fireplace of stone exhibited yawning apertures, abundantly sufficient for all the purposes of light and ventilation to the single apartment of the building. The _puncheon_ floor I have alluded to, and it corresponded well with the roof of the cabin, which had never, in its best estate, been designed to resist the peltings of such a pitiless torrent as was now assailing it. The water soon began trickling in little rivulets upon my shoulders, and my only alternative was my umbrella for shelter. The furniture of the apartment consisted of two plank-erections designed for bedsteads, which, with a tall clothes-press, divers rude boxes, and a side-saddle, occupied a better moiety of the area; while a rough table, a shelf against the wall, upon which stood a water-pail, a gourd, and a few broken trenchers, completed the household paraphernalia {211} of this most unique of habitations. A half-consumed flitch of bacon suspended in the chimney, and a huge iron pot upon the fire, from which issued a savoury indication of the seething mess within, completes the "still-life" of the picture. Upon one of the beds reclined one of the females to avoid the rain; a second was alternating her attentions between her infant and her needle; while the third, a buxom young baggage, who, by-the-by, was on a visit to her sister, was busying herself in the culinary occupations of the household, much the chief portion of which consisted in watching the huge dinner-pot aforesaid, with its savoury contents. After remaining nearly two hours in the cabin, in hopes that the storm would abate, I concluded that, since my umbrella was no sinecure _within_ doors, it might as well be put in requisition _without_, and mounted my steed, though the rain was yet falling. I had proceeded but a few miles upon the muddy pathway when my compass informed me that I had varied from my route, a circumstance by no means uncommon on the Western prairies. During the whole afternoon, therefore, I continued upon my way across a broad pathless prairie, some twelve or eighteen miles in extent, and dreary enough withal, until nightfall, when I rejoiced to find myself the inmate of the comfortable farmhouse upon its edge from which my last was dated. _Hillsborough, Ill._ XIX "Skies softly beautiful, and blue As Italy's, with stars as bright; Flowers rich as morning's sunrise hue, And gorgeous as the gemm'd midnight. Land of the West! green Forest Land, Thus hath Creation's bounteous hand Upon thine ample bosom flung Charms such as were her gift when the green world was young!" GALLAGHER. "Go thou to the house of prayer, I to the woodlands will repair." KIRK WHITE. "There is religion in a flower; Its still small voice is as the voice of conscience." BELL. More than three centuries ago, when the romantic Ponce de Leon, with his chivalrous followers, first planted foot upon the southern extremity of the great Western Valley, the discovery of the far-famed "Fountain of Youth" was the wild vision which lured him on. Though disappointed in the object of his enterprise, the adventurous Spaniard was enraptured with the loveliness of a land which even the golden realms of "Old Castile" had never realized; and _Florida_,[143] "the Land of Flowers," was the poetic name it inspired. Twenty years, and the bold soldier Ferdinand de Soto, of Cuba, {213} the associate of Pizarro, with a thousand steel-clad warriors at his back, penetrated the valley to the far-distant post of Arkansas, and "_El padre de las aguas_" was the expressive name of the mighty stream he discovered, beneath the eternal flow of whose surges he laid his bones to their rest.[144] "_La Belle Rivière!_" was the delighted exclamation which burst from the lips of the Canadian voyageur, as, with wonder hourly increasing, he glided in his light pirogue between the swelling bluffs, and wound among the thousand isles of the beautiful Ohio. The heroic Norman, Sieur La Salle, when for the first time he beheld the pleasant hunting-grounds of the peaceful Illini, pronounced them a "Terrestrial Paradise." Daniel Boone, the bold pioneer of the West, fifty years ago, when standing on the last blue line of the Alleghanies, and at the close of a day of weary journeying, he looked down upon the beautiful fields of "Old Kentucke," now gilded by the evening sun, turned his back for ever upon the green banks of the Yadkin and the soil of his nativity, hailing the glories of a new-found home.[145] "Fair wert thou, in the dreams Of elder time, thou land of glorious flowers, And summer winds, and low-toned silvery streams, Dim with the shadows of thy laurel bowers." And thus has it ever been; and even yet the "pilgrim from the North" rejoices with untold joy over the golden beauties of the Valley beyond the Mountains. {214} It was a fine Sabbath morning when I mounted my steed at the gate of the log farmhouse where I had passed the night, to pursue my journey over the prairie, upon the verge of which it stood. The village of Hillsborough was but a few miles distant, and there I had resolved to observe the sacredness of the day. The showers of the preceding evening had refreshed the atmosphere, which danced over the plain in exhilarating gales, and rustled among the boughs of the green woodlands I was leaving. Before me was spread out a waving, undulating landscape, with herds of cattle sprinkled here and there in isolated masses over the surface; the rabbit and wild-fowl were sporting along the pathway, and the bright woodpecker, with his splendid plumage and querulous note, was flitting to and fro among the thickets. Far away along the eastern horizon stretched the dark line of forest. The gorgeous prairie-flower flung out its crimson petals upon the breeze, "blushing like a banner bathed in slaughter," and methought it snapped more gayly in the morning sunbeams than it was wont; the long grass rustled musically its wavy masses back and forth, and, amid the Sabbath stillness around, methought there were there notes of sweetness not before observed. The whole scene lay calm and quiet, as if Nature, if not man, recognised the Divine injunction _to rest_; and the idea suggested itself, that a solitary Sabbath on the wild prairie, in silent converse with the Almighty, might not be all unprofitable. {215} "Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright, The bridal of the earth and sky, Sweet dews shall weep thy fall to-night, For thou must die."[146] From the centre of the prairie the landscape rolled gracefully away towards the eastern timber, studded along its edge with farms. The retrospect from beneath the tall oaks of the prairie over which I had passed was exceedingly fine; the idea strikes the spectator at once, and with much force, that the whole plain was once a sheet of water. Indeed, were we to form our opinion from the _appearance_ of many of the prairies of Illinois, the idea would be irresistible, that this peculiar species of surface originated in a submersion of the whole state. There are many circumstances which lead us to the conclusion that these vast meadows once formed the bed of a body of water similar to the Northern lakes; and when the lowest point at the _Grand Tower_ on the Mississippi was torn away by some convulsion of nature, a uniform surface of fine rich mud was left. The ravines were ploughed in the soft soil by subsequent floods, and hence, while the elevated lands are fertile, those more depressed are far less so. The soil of the prairies is of a character decidedly alluvial, being composed of compact strata of loam piled upon each other, like that at the bottom of bodies of water long stagnant. The first stratum is a black, pliable mould, from two feet to five in depth; the second a red clay, amalgamated with sand, from {216} five to ten feet in thickness; the third a blue clay, mixed with pebbles, of beautiful appearance, unctuous to the feeling, and, when exposed to the atmosphere, of a fetid smell. Lakes are often found in the prairies abounding in fish, which, when the waters subside, are removed by cartloads. The origin of these vast prairie-plains is, after all, no easy matter to decide; but, whatever the cause, they have doubtless been perpetuated by the autumnal fires which, year after year, from an era which the earliest chronicles of history or tradition have failed to record, have swept their surface; for, as soon as the grass is destroyed by the plough, the winged seeds of the cotton-wood and sycamore take root, and a young growth of timber sprouts forth. The same is true along the margin of creeks and streams, or upon steril or wet prairies, where the vegetation does not become sufficiently heavy or combustible for conflagration to a great extent. These fires originated either in the friction of the sear and tinder-like underbrush, agitated by the high winds, or they were kindled by the Indians for the purpose of dislodging game. The mode of hunting by circular fires is said to have prevailed at the time when Captain Smith first visited the shores of Chesapeake Bay, where extensive prairies then existed. These plains, by cultivation, have long since disappeared. Mungo Park describes the annual fires upon the plains of Western Africa for a similar purpose and with the same result.[147] Tracts of considerable extent in {217} the older settlements of the country, which many years since were meadow, are clothed with forest. "Coot morning, shur! A pleashant tay, shur! Coome in, shur!" was the hospitable greeting of mine host, or rather of the major domo of the little brick hostelrie of Hillsborough as I drove up to the bar-room entrance. He was a comical-looking, bottle-shaped little personage, with a jolly red nose, all the brighter, doubtless, for certain goodly potations of his own goodly admixtures; with a brief brace of legs, inserted into a pair of inexpressibles _à la Turque_, a world too big, and a white capote a world too little, to complete the Sunday toilet. He could boast, moreover, that amazing lubricity of speech, and that oiliness of tongue wherewith sinful publicans have ever been prone to beguile unwary wayfarers, _taking in travellers_, forsooth! Before I was fully aware of the change in my circumstances, I found myself quietly dispossessed of horse and equipments, and placing my foot across the threshold. The fleshy little Dutchman, though now secure in his capture, proceeded to redouble his assiduities. "Anything to trink, shur? Plack your poots, shur? shave your face, shur?" and a host of farther interrogatories, which I at length contrived to cut short with, "Show me a chamber, sir!" The Presbyterian Church, at which I attended worship, is a neat little edifice of brick, in modern style, but not completed. The walls remained unconscious of plaster; the orchestra, a naked scaffolding; the pulpit, a box of rough boards; and, {218} more _picturesque_ than all, in lieu of pews, slips, or any such thing, a few coarse slabs of all forms and fashions, supported on remnants of timber and plank, occupied the open area for seats. And marvellously comfortless are such seats, to my certain experience. In the evening I attended the "Luteran Church," as my major domo styled it, at the special instance of one of its worthy members. This house of worship is designed for a large one--the largest in the state, I was informed--but, like its neighbour, was as yet but commenced. The external walls were quite complete; but the rafters, beams, studs, and braces within presented a mere skeleton, while a few loose boards, which sprang and creaked beneath the foot, were spread over the sleepers as an apology for a floor. There's practical utility for an economist! Because a church is unfinished is no good and sufficient reason why it should remain unoccupied! As we entered the building, my _cicerone_ very unexpectedly favoured me with an introduction to the minister. He was a dark, solemn-looking man, with a huge Bible and psalm-book choicely tucked under his left arm. After sundry glances at my dress and demeanour, and other sundry whisperings in the ear of my companion, the good man drew nigh, and delivered himself of the interrogatory, "Are you a clergyman, sir?" At this sage inquiry, so sagely administered, my rebellious lips struggled with a smile, which, I misdoubt me much, was not unobserved by the dark-looking minister; {219} for, upon my reply in the negative, he turned very unceremoniously away, and betook him to his pulpit. By-the-by, this had by no means been the first time I had been called to answer the same inquiry during my ramble in the West. On returning to our lodgings after service, we found quite a respectable congregation gathered around the signpost, to whom my pink of major domos was holding forth in no measured terms upon the propriety of "letting off the pig guns" at the dawning of the ever-memorable morrow,[148] "in honour of the tay when our old farders fought like coot fellows; they tid so, py jingoes; and I'll pe out at tree o'glock, py jingoes, I will so," raphsodied the little Dutchman, warming up under the fervour of his own eloquence. This subject was still the theme of his rejoicing when he marshalled me to my dormitory and wished me "pleashant treams." The first faint streak of crimson along the eastern heavens beheld me mounting at the door of the inn; and by my side was the patriotic domo, bowing, and ducking, and telling over all manner of kind wishes till I had evanished from view. A more precious relic of the true oldfashioned, swaggering, pot-bellied publican is rarely to be met, than that which I encountered in the person of the odd little genius whose peculiarities I have recounted: even the worthy old "Caleb of Ravenswood," that miracle of major domos, would not {220} have disowned my _Dutchy_ for a brother craftsman. The village of Hillsborough is a pleasant, healthy, thriving place; and being intersected by some of the most important state routes, will always remain a thoroughfare. An attempt has been made by one of its citizens to obtain for this place the location of the Theological Seminary now in contemplation in the vicinity rather than at Carlinville, and the offer he has made is a truly munificent one. The site proposed is a beautiful mound, rising on the prairie's edge south of the village, commanding a view for miles in every direction, and is far more eligible than any spot I ever observed in Carlinville. After crossing a prairie about a dozen miles in width, and taking breakfast with a farmer upon its edge, I continued my journey over the undulating plains until near the middle of the afternoon, when I reached my present stage. The whole region, as I journeyed through it, lay still and quiet: every farmhouse and log-cabin was deserted by its tenants, who had congregated to the nearest villages to celebrate the day; and, verily, not a little did my heart smite me at my own heedless desecration of the political Sabbath of our land. _Vandalia, Ill._ XX "There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes--" _Childe Harold._ "The sun in all his broad career Ne'er looked upon a fairer land, Or brighter skies or sweeter scenes." Ever since the days of that king of vagabonds, the mighty Nimrod of sacred story, and, for aught to the contrary, as long before, there has existed a certain roving, tameless race of wights, whose chief delight has consisted in wandering up and down upon the face of the earth, with no definite object of pursuit, and with no motive of peregrination save a kind of restless, unsatisfied craving after change; in its results much like the migratory instinct of passage-birds, but, unlike that periodical instinct, incessant in exercise. Now, whether it so be that a tincture of this same vagrant, Bohemian spirit is coursing my veins under the name of "Yankee enterprise," or whether, in my wanderings through these wild, unsettled regions, I have imbibed a portion thereof, is not for me to decide. Nevertheless, sure it is, not unfrequently are its promptings detected as I journey through this beautiful land. It is evening now, and, after the fatigues of a pleasant day's ride, I am seated beneath the piazza {222} of a neat farmhouse in the edge of a forest, through which, for the last hour, my path has conducted, and looking out upon a broad landscape of prairie. My landlord, a high-minded, haughty Virginia emigrant, bitterly complains because, forsooth, in the absence of slave-labour, he is forced to cultivate his own farm; and though, by the aid of a Dutchman, he has made a pretty place of it, yet he vows by all he loves to lay his bones within the boundaries of the "Ancient Dominion." My ride since noon has been delightful; over broad plains, intersected by deep creeks, with their densely-wooded bottoms. These streams constitute one of the most romantic features of the country. I have crossed very many during my tour, and all exhibit the same characteristics: a broad, deep-cut channel, with precipitous banks loaded with enormous trees, their trunks interwoven and matted with tangled underbrush and gigantic vegetation. As the traveller stands upon the arch of the bridge of logs thrown over these creeks, sometimes with an altitude at the centre of forty feet, he looks down upon a stream flowing in a deep, serpentine bed, and winding away into the dusky shades of the overhanging woods, until a graceful bend withdraws the dark surface of the waters from his view. In the dry months of summer, these creeks and ravines are either completely free of water, or contain but a mere rivulet; and the traveller is amazed at the depth and breadth of a channel so scantily supplied. But at the season of the spring or autumnal rains the scene is changed: a deep, turbid torrent rolls {223} wildly onward through the dark woods, bearing on its surface the trunks of trees and the ruins of bridges swept from its banks; and the stream which, a few weeks before, would scarcely have wet the traveller's sole, is now an obstacle in his route difficult and dangerous to overcome. Within a few miles of my present quarters an adventure transpired of some slight interest to _myself_, at least, as it afforded me a weary trudge beneath a broiling sun. As I was leisurely pursuing my way through the forest, I had chanced to spy upon the banks of the roadside a cluster of wild flowers of hues unusually brilliant; and, with a spirit worthy of Dr. Bat,[149] I at once resolved they should enrich my "_hortus siccus_." Alighting, therefore, and leaving my steed by the roadside, I at length succeeded, after most laudable scramblings for the advancement of science, in gathering up a bouquet of surpassing magnificence. Alas! alas! would it had been less so; for my youthful steed, all unused to such sights and actions, and possessing, moreover, a most sovereign and shameful indifference to the glories of botany, had long, with suspicious and sidelong glances, been eying the vagaries of his truant master; and now, no sooner did he draw nigh to resume his seat and journey, than the ungracious and ungrateful quadruped flung aloft his head, and away he careered through the green branches, mane streaming and saddle-bags flapping. In vain was the brute addressed in language the most mild and conciliatory that ever insinuated itself into horse's lug; in vain was he ordered, {224} in tones of stern mandate, to cease his shameless and unnatural rebellion, and to surrender himself incontinently and without delay to his liege: entreaty and command, remonstrance and menace, were alike unsuccessful; and away he flew, "with flowing tail and flying mane," in utter contempt of all former or future vassalage. At one moment he stood the attitude of humbleness and submission, coolly cropping the herbage of the high banks; and then, the instant the proximity of his much-abused master became perilous to his freedom, aloft flew mane and tail, and away, away, the animal was off, until an interval consistent with his new-gained license lay behind him. After an hour of vexatious toiling through dust and sun, a happily-executed manoeuvre once more placed the most undutiful of creatures in my power. And then, be ye sure, that in true Gilpin fashion, "whip and spur did make amends" for all arrears of unavenged misbehaviour. "Twas for your pleasure that I _walked_, Now you shall RUN for mine," was the very Christian spirit of retaliation which animated the few succeeding miles. "But something too much of this." Some pages back I was entering the capital of Illinois. The town is approached from the north, through a scattered forest, separating it from the prairies; and its unusually large and isolated buildings, few in number as they are, stationed here and there upon the eminences of the broken surface, give the place a singularly novel aspect viewed from the adjacent {225} heights. There is but little of scenic attraction about the place, and, to the traveller's eye, still less of the picturesque. Such huge structures as are here beheld, in a town so inconsiderable in extent, present an unnatural and forced aspect to one who has just emerged from the wild waste of the neighbouring prairies, sprinkled with their humble tenements of logs. The scene is not in keeping; it is not picturesque. Such, at all events, were my "first impressions" on entering the village, and _first_ impressions are not necessarily false. As I drew nigh to the huge white tavern, a host of people were swarming the doors; and, from certain uncouth noises which from time to time went up from the midst thereof, not an inconsiderable portion of the worthy multitude seemed to have succeeded in rendering themselves gloriously tipsy in honour of the glorious day. There was one keen, bilious-looking genius in linsey-woolsey, with a face, in its intoxicated state, like a red-hot tomahawk, whom I regarded with special admiration as high-priest of the bacchanal; and so fierce and high were his objurgations, that the idea with some force suggested itself, whether, in the course of years, he had not screamed his lean and hungry visage to its present hatchet-like proportions. May he forgive if I err. But not yet were my adventures over. Having effected a retreat from the abominations of the bar-room, I had retired to a chamber in the most quiet corner of the mansion, and had seated myself to endite an epistle, when a rap at the door announced the presence of mine host, leading along an old {226} yeoman whom I had noticed among the revellers; and, having given him a ceremonious introduction, withdrew. To what circumstance I was indebted for this unexpected honour, I was puzzling myself to divine, when the old gentleman, after a preface of clearings of the throat and scratchings of the head, gave me briefly to understand, much to my admiration, that I was believed to be neither more nor less than an "Agent for a Western Land Speculating Company of the North," etc., etc.: and then, in a confidential tone, before a syllable of negation or affirmation could be offered, that he "owned a certain tract of land, so many acres prairie, so many timber, so many cultivated, so many wild," etc., etc.: the sequel was anticipated by undeceiving the old farmer forthwith, though with no little difficulty. The cause of this mistake I subsequently discovered to be a very slight circumstance. On the tavern register in the bar-room I had entered as my residence my native home at the North, more for the novelty of the idea than for anything else; or because, being a sort of cosmopolitan, I might presume myself at liberty to appropriate any spot I thought proper as that of my departure or destination. As a matter of course, and with laudable desire to augment their sum of useful knowledge, no sooner had the traveller turned from the register than the sagacious host and his compeer brandy-bibbers turned towards it; and being unable to conceive any reasonable excuse for a man to be wandering so far from his home except for lucre's sake, the conclusion at once and irresistibly followed that {227} the stranger was a land-speculator, or something thereunto akin; and it required not many moments for such a wildfire idea to run through such an inflammable mass of curiosity. With the situation and appearance of Vandalia I was not, as I have expressed myself, much prepossessed; indeed, I was somewhat disappointed.[150] Though not prepared for anything very striking, yet in the capital of a state we always anticipate something, if not superior or equal, at least not inferior to neighbouring towns of less note. Its site is an elevated, undulating tract upon the west bank of the Kaskaskia, and was once heavily timbered, as are now its suburbs. The streets are of liberal breadth--some of them not less than eighty feet from kerb to kerb--enclosing an elevated public square nearly in the centre of the village, which a little expenditure of time and money might render a delightful promenade. The public edifices are very inconsiderable, consisting of an ordinary structure of brick for legislative purposes; a similar building originally erected as a banking establishment, but now occupied by the offices of the state authorities; a Presbyterian Church, with cupola and bell, besides a number of lesser buildings for purposes of worship and education. A handsome structure of stone for a bank is, however, in progress, which, when completed, with other public buildings in contemplation, will add much to the aspect of the place. Here also is a land-office for the district, and the Cumberland Road is permanently located and partially constructed to the {228} place. An historical and antiquarian society has here existed for about ten years, and its published proceedings evince much research and information. "The Illinois Magazine" was the name of an ably-conducted periodical commenced at this town some years since, and prosperously carried on by Judge Hall, but subsequently removed to Cincinnati.[151] Some of the articles published in this magazine, descriptive of the state, were of high merit. It is passing strange that a town like Vandalia, with all the natural and artificial advantages it possesses; located nearly twenty years ago, by state authority, expressly as the seat of government; situated upon the banks of a fine stream, which small expense would render navigable for steamers, and in the heart of a healthy and fertile region, should have increased and flourished no more than seems to have been the case. Vandalia will continue the seat of government until the year 1840; when, agreeable to the late act of Legislature, it is to be removed to Springfield, where an appropriation of $50,000 has been made for a state-house now in progress. The growth of Vandalia, though tardy, can perhaps be deemed so only in comparison with the more rapid advancement of neighbouring towns; for a few years after it was laid off it was unsurpassed in improvement by any other. We are told that the first legislators who assembled in session at this place sought their way through the neighbouring prairies as the mariner steers over the trackless ocean, by his knowledge of the cardinal points. {229} Judges and lawyers came pouring in from opposite directions, as wandering tribes assemble to council; and many were the tales of adventure and mishap related at their meeting. Some had been lost in the prairies; some had slept in the woods; some had been almost chilled to death, plunging through creeks and rivers. A rich growth of majestic oaks then covered the site of the future metropolis; tangled thickets almost impervious to human foot surrounded it, and all was wilderness on every side. Wonderful accounts of the country to the north; of rich lands, and pure streams, and prairies more beautiful than any yet discovered, soon began to come in by the hunters.[152] But over that country the Indian yet roved, and the adventurous pioneer neither owned the soil he cultivated, nor had the power to retain its possession from the savage. Only eight years after this, and a change, as if by magic, had come over the little village of Vandalia; and not only so, but over the whole state, which was now discovered to be a region more extensive and far more fertile than the "sacred island of Britain." The region previously the frontier formed the heart of the fairest portion of the state, and a dozen new counties were formed within its extent. Mail-routes and post-roads, diverging in all directions from the capital, had been established, and canals and railways had been projected. Eight years more, and the "Northern frontier" is the seat of power and population; and {230} here is removed the seat of government, because the older settlements have not kept pace in advancement. It was a fine mellow morning when I left Vandalia to pursue my journey over the prairies to Carlisle. For some miles my route lay through a dense clump of old woods, relieved at intervals by extended glades of sparser growth. This road is but little travelled, and so obscure that for most of the way I could avail myself of no other guide than the "_blaze_" upon the trees; and this mark in many places, from its ancient, weather-beaten aspect, seemed placed there by the axe of the earliest pioneer. Rank grass has obliterated the pathway, and overhanging boughs brush the cheek. It was in one of those extended glades I have mentioned that a nobly-antlered buck and his beautiful doe sprang out upon the path, and stood gazing upon me from the wayside until I had approached so near that a rifle, even in hands all unskilled in "gentle woodcraft," had not been harmless. I was even beginning to meditate upon the probable effect of a pistol-shot at twenty paces, when the graceful animals, throwing proudly up their arching necks, bounded off into the thicket. Not many miles from the spot I shared the rough fare of an old hunter, who related many interesting facts in the character and habits of this animal, and detailed some curious anecdotes in the history of his own wild life. He was just about leaving his lodge on a short hunting excursion, and the absence of a rifle alone prevented me from accepting a civil request to bear him company. {231} Most of the route from Vandalia to Carlisle is very tolerable, with the exception of one detestable spot, fitly named "Hurricane Bottom;" a more dreary, desolate, purgatorial region than which, I am very free to say, exists not in Illinois.[153] It is a densely-wooded swamp, composed of soft blue clay, exceedingly tenacious to the touch and fetid in odour, extending nearly two miles. A regular highway over this mud-hole can scarcely be said to exist, though repeated attempts to construct one have been made at great expense: and now the traveller, upon entering this "slough of despond," gives his horse the reins to slump, and slide, and plunge, and struggle through among the mud-daubed trees to the best of his skill and ability. Night overtook me in the very heart of a broad prairie; and, like the sea, a desolate place is the prairie of a dark night. It demanded no little exercise of the eye and judgment to continue upon a route where the path was constantly diverging and varying in all directions. A bright glare of light at a distance at length arrested my attention. On approaching, I found it to proceed from an encampment of tired emigrants, whose ponderous teams were wheeled up around the blazing fire; while the hungry oxen, released from the yoke, were browsing upon the tops of the tall prairie-grass on every side. This grass, though coarse in appearance, in the early stages of its growth resembles young wheat, and furnishes a rich and succulent food for cattle. It is even asserted that, when running at large in fields where the young wheat covers the {232} ground, cattle choose the prairie-grass in the margin of the field in preference to the wheat itself. A few scattered, twinkling lights, and the fresh-smelling air from the Kaskaskia, soon after informed me that I was not far from the village of Carlisle.[154] This is a pleasant, romantic little town, upon the west bank of the river, and upon the great stage-route through the state from St. Louis to Vincennes. This circumstance, and the intersection of several other state thoroughfares, give it the animated, business-like aspect of a market town, not often witnessed in a village so remote from the advantages of general commerce. Its site is elevated and salubrious, on the border of a fertile prairie: yet, notwithstanding all these advantages, Carlisle cannot be said to have increased very rapidly when we consider that twenty years have elapsed since it was first laid off for a town. It is the seat of justice for Clinton county, and can boast a wooden courthouse in "ruinous perfection." In its vicinity are some beautiful country-seats. One of these, named "Mound Farm," the delightful residence of Judge B----, imbowered in trees and shrubbery, and about a mile from the village, I visited during my stay. It commands from its elevated site a noble view of the neighbouring prairie, the village and river at its foot, and the adjacent farms. Under the superintendence of cultivated taste, this spot may become one of the loveliest retreats in Illinois. _Clinton County, Ill._ XXI "To him who, in the love of Nature, holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language." THANATOPSIS. "The sunny Italy may boast The beauteous tints that flush her skies, And lovely round the Grecian coast May thy blue pillars rise: I only know how fair they stand About my own beloved land." _The Skies._--BRYANT. To the man of cultivated imagination and delicate taste, the study of nature never fails to afford a gratification, refined as it is exquisite. In the pencilled petals of the flower as it bows to the evening breeze; in the glittering scales of the fish leaping from the wave; in the splendid plumage of the forest-bird, and in the music-tinklings of the wreathed and enamelled sea-shell rocked by the billow, he recognises an eloquence of beauty which he alone can appreciate. For him, too, the myriad forms of animate creation unite with inanimate nature in one mighty hymn of glory to their Maker, from the hum of the sparkling ephemeroid as he blithely dances away his little life in the beams of a summer sun, and the rustling music of the prairie-weed swept by the winds, to the roar of the shaggy woods upon the mountain-side, and the fierce, wild shriek of the ocean-eagle. To investigate {234} the more minute and delicate of Nature's workings is indeed a delightful task; and along this fairy and flowery pathway the cultivated fancy revels with unmingled gratification; but, as the mind approaches the vaster exhibitions of might and majesty, the booming of the troubled ocean, the terrible sublimity of the midnight storm, the cloudy magnificence of the mountain height, the venerable grandeur of the aged forest, it expands itself in unison till lost in the immensity of created things. Reflections like these are constantly suggesting themselves to the traveller's thoughts amid the grand scenery of the West; but at no season do they rise more vividly upon the mind than when the lengthened shadows of evening are stealing over the landscape, and the summer sun is sinking to his rest. This is the "magic hour" when "Bright clouds are gathering one by one, Sweeping in pomp round the dying sun; With crimson banner and golden pall, Like a host to their chieftain's funeral." There is not a more magnificent spectacle in nature than summer sunset on the Western prairie. I have beheld the orb of day, after careering his course like a giant through the firmament, go down into the fresh tumbling billows of ocean; and sunset on the prairies, which recalls that scene, is alone equalled by it. Near nightfall one evening I found myself in the middle of one of these vast extended plains, where the eye roves unconfined over the scene, for miles unrelieved by a stump, or a tree, or a thicket, and meets only the deep blue of the horizon on {235} every side, blending with the billowy foliage of the distant woodland. Descending a graceful slope, even this object is lost, and a boundless landscape of blue above and green below is unfolded to the traveller's vision; again, approaching the summit of the succeeding slope, the forest rises in clear outline in the margin of the vast panorama. For some hours the heavens had been so enveloped in huge masses of brassy clouds, that now, when the shadows deepened over sky and earth, one was at a loss to determine whether the sun had yet gone down, except for a broad zone of sapphire girding the whole western firmament. Upon the superior edge of this deep belt now glistened the luminary, gradually revealing itself to the eye, and blazing forth at length "like angels' locks unshorn," flinging a halo of golden effulgence far athwart the dim evening prairie. A metamorphosis so abrupt, so rapid, so unlooked for, seemed almost to realize the fables of enchantment. One moment, and the whole vast landscape lay veiled in shadowy dimness; the next, and every grass blade, and spray, and floweret, and nodding wild-weed seemed suffused in a flood of liquid effulgence; while far along, the uniform ridges of the heaving plain gleamed in the rich light like waves of a moonlit sea, sweeping away, roll upon roll, till lost in distance to the eye. Slowly the splendid disk went down behind the sea of waving verdure, until at length a single point of intense, bewildering brightness flamed out above the mass of green. An instant, this too was gone--as "An angel's wing through an opening cloud, Is seen and then withdrawn:"-- {236} and then those deep, lurid funeral fires of departing day streamed, flaring upward even to the zenith, flinging over the vast concave a robe of unearthly, terrible magnificence! Then, as the fount of all this splendour sank deeper and deeper beneath the horizon, the blood-red flames died gently away into the mellow glories of summer evening skylight, bathing the brow of heaven in a tender roseate, which hours after cheered the lonely traveller across the waste. The pilgrim wanderer in other climes comes back to tell us of sunnier skies and softer winds! The blue heavens of Italy have tasked the inspiration of an hundred bards, and the warm brush of her own Lorraine has swept the canvass with their gorgeous transcript! But what pencil has wandered over the grander scenes of the North American prairie? What bard has struck his lyre to the wild melody of loveliness of the prairie sunset? Yet who shall tell us that there exists not a glory in the scene, amid the untrod wastes of the wilderness West, which even the skies of "sunny Italy" might not blush anew to acknowledge? No wandering Harold has roamed on a pilgrimage of poetry over the sublime and romantic scenery of our land, to hymn its praise in breathing thoughts and glowing words; yet here as there, "Parting day Dies like the dolphin, whom each pang imbues With a new colour as it gasps away: The last still loveliest, till--'tis gone--and all is gray!" I cannot tell of the beauties of climes I have never seen; but I have gazed upon all the varied loveliness of my own fair, native land, from the rising {237} sun to its setting, and in vain have tasked my fancy to image a fairer. A pleasant day's ride directly west from Carlisle, over extensive and beautiful prairies, intersected by shady woods, with their romantic creeks, and the traveller finds himself in the quiet village of Lebanon. Its site is a commanding, mound-like elevation in the skirts of a forest, swelling gently up from the prairie on the west bank of Little Silver Creek.[155] This stream, with the larger branch, received its name from the circumstance that the early French settlers of the country, in the zeal of their faith and research for the precious metals, a long while mistook the brilliant specula of _horneblende_ which flow in its clear waters for silver, and were unwilling to be undeceived in their extravagant anticipations until the absence of the material in their purses aroused them from their error. In the neighbourhood of Rock Spring a shaft for a mine was sunk.[156] It was early one beautiful morning that I found myself approaching the village of Lebanon, though many miles distant in the adjacent plain; appropriately named for its loveliness the "Looking-glass Prairie." The rosy sunbeams were playing lightly over the pleasant country-seats and neat farmhouses, with their white palings, sprinkled along the declivity before me, imbowered in their young orchards and waving maize-fields; while flocks and herds, {238} gathered in isolated masses over the intervening meadow, were cropping the rich herbage. To the right and left, and in the rear, the prairie stretches away beyond the view. The body of the village is situated about one mile from these suburbs, and its character and history may be summed up in the single sentence, _a pleasant little Methodist country village_. The peculiarities of the sect are here strikingly manifested to the traveller in all the ordinary concerns and occupations of life, even in the every-day garb and conversation of its sober-browed citizens. It presents the spectacle, rare as it is cheering, of an entire community characterized by its reverence for religion. Located in its immediate vicinity is a flourishing seminary, called McKendreean College.[157] It is under the supervision of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and has at present two instructers, with about fifty pupils in the preparatory department. It has a commodious frame building, presenting from its elevated site an imposing view to the traveller. As is usually the case with these little out-of-the-world villages, when any object comes up in the midst around which the feelings and interests of all may cluster, upon this institution is centred the heart and soul of every man, to say not a word of all the women and children, in Lebanon; and everything not connected, either remotely or immediately, with its welfare, is deemed of very little, if of any importance. "_The Seminary! The Seminary!_" I defy a traveller to tarry two hours in the village without hearing rung all the changes upon that topic for his edification. The surrounding region is fertile, populous, {239} and highly cultivated; and for an inland, farming village, it is quite as bustling, I suppose, as should be expected; though, during my visit, its streets--which, by-the-by, are of very liberal breadth--maintained a most Sabbath-like aspect. The route from Lebanon to Belleville is, in fine weather, very excellent. Deep woods on either side of the hard, smooth, winding pathway, throw their boughs over the head, sometimes lengthening away into an arched vista miles in extent. It was a sultry afternoon when I was leisurely travelling along this road; and the shadowy coolness of the atmosphere, the perfume of wild flowers and aromatic herbs beneath the underbrush, and the profusion of summer fruit along the roadside, was indescribably delightful. Near sunset, a graceful bend of the road around a clump of trees placed before me the pretty little village of Belleville; its neat enclosures and white cottages peeping through the shrubbery, now gilded by the mellow rays of sunset in every leaf and spray.[158] Whether it was owing to this agreeable coincidence, or to the agreeable visit I here enjoyed, that I conceived such an attachment for the place, I cannot say; but sure it is, I fell in love with the little town at _first_ sight; and, what is more marvellous, was not, according to all precedent, cured at second, when on the following morning I sallied forth to reconnoitre its beauties "at mine own good leisure." Now it is to be presumed that, agreeable to the taste of six travellers in a dozen, I have passed through many a village in Illinois quite as attractive as this same Belleville: but to convince me of the fact would be no {240} easy task. "Man is the sport of circumstance," says the fatalist; and however this may be in the moral world, if any one feels disposed to doubt upon the matter in the item before us, let him disembark from a canal-boat at Pittsburgh on a rainy, misty, miserable morning; and then, unable to secure for his houseless head a shelter from the pitiless peltings, let him hurry away through the filthy streets, deluged with inky water, to a crowded Ohio steamer; and if "_circumstances_" do not force him to dislike Pittsburgh ever after, then his human nature is vastly more forbearing than my own. Change the picture. Let him enter the quiet little Illinois village at the gentle hour of sunset; let him meet warm hospitality, and look upon fair forms and bright faces, and if he fail to be pleased with that place, why, "he's not the man I took him for." The public buildings of Belleville are a handsome courthouse of brick, a wretched old jail of the same material, a public hall belonging to a library company, and a small framed Methodist house of worship. It is situated in the centre of "Turkey-hill Settlement," one of the oldest and most flourishing in the state, and has a fine timber tract and several beautiful country-seats in its vicinity. Leaving Belleville with some reluctance, and not a few "longing, lingering looks behind," my route continued westward over a broken region of alternating forest and prairie, sparsely sprinkled with trees, and yet more sparsely with inhabitants. At length, having descended a precipitous hill, the rounded summit of which, as well as the adjoining heights, commanded an immense expanse of level {241} landscape, stretching off from the base, I stood once more upon the fertile soil of the "_American Bottom_." The sharp, heavy-roofed French cottages, with low verandahs running around; the ungainly outhouses and enclosures; the curiously-fashioned vehicles and instruments of husbandry in the barnyards and before the doors; the foreign garb and dialect of the people; and, above all, the amazing fertility of the soil, over whose exhaustless depths the maize has rustled half a century, constitute the most striking characteristics of this interesting tract, in the section over which I was passing. This settlement, extending from the foot of the bluffs for several miles over the Bottom, was formed about forty years ago by a colony from Cahokia, and known by the name of "_Little French Village_;" it now comprises about twenty houses and a grogshop. In these bluffs lies an exhaustless bed of bituminous coal: vast quantities have been transported to St. Louis, and for this purpose principally is the railway to the river designed. This vein of coal is said to have been discovered by the rivulet of a spring issuing from the base of the bluffs. The stratum is about six feet in thickness, increasing in size as it penetrates the hill horizontally. Though somewhat rotten and slaty, it is in some particulars not inferior to the coal of the Alleghanies; and the vein is thought to extend from the mouth of the Kaskaskia to that of the Illinois. About three miles below the present shaft, a continuation of the bed was discovered by fire communicated from the root of a tree; the bank of coal burnt for upward of a {242} twelvemonth, and the conflagration was then smothered only by the falling in of the superincumbent soil. St. Clair county, which embraces a large portion of the American Bottom, is the oldest settlement in the state. In 1795 the county was formed by the Legislature of the Northwestern Territory, and then included all settlements in Illinois east of the Mississippi. I had just cleverly cleared the outskirts of the little antediluvian village beneath the bluffs, when a dark, watery-looking cloud came tumbling up out of the west; the thunder roared across the Bottom and was reverberated from the cliffs, and in a few moments down came the big rain-drops dancing in torrents from the clouds, and pattering up like mist along the plain. Verily, groaned forth the wo-begone traveller, this is the home of clouds and the realm of thunder! Never did hapless mortals sustain completer drenchings than did the traveller and his steed, notwithstanding upon the first onset they had plunged themselves into the sheltering depths of the wood. A half hour's gallop over the slippery bottom, and the stern roar of a steamer's 'scape-pipe informed me that I was not far from the "great waters." A few yards through the belt of forest, and the city of San Louis, with towers and roofs, stood before me. _St. Louis._ XXII "I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide for; a mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures, and how they play their parts."--_Anat. of Melancholy._ "Oh ye dread scenes, where Nature dwells alone, Serenely glorious on her craggy throne; Ye citadels of rock, gigantic forms, Veiled by the mists, and girdled by the storms; Ravines, and glens, and deep-resounding caves, That hold communion with the torrent waves." HEMANS. Ah, the single blessedness of the unmarried state! Such is the sentiment of an ancient worthy, quietly expressed in the lines which I have selected for a motto. After dozing away half his days and all his energies within the dusky walls of a university, tumbling over musty tomes and shrivelled parchments until his very brain had become cobwebbed as the alcoves he haunted, and the blood in his veins was all "adust and thin;" then, forsooth, the shameless old fellow issues forth with his vainglorious sentiment upon his lips! And yet, now that we consider, there is marvellous "method" in the old man's "madness!" In very truth and soberness, there is a blessedness which the bachelor can boast, _single_ though it be, in which the "man of family," though _doubly_ blessed, cannot share! To the former, life may be made one long holyday, and its path a varied and flowery one! while to the poor {244} victim of matrimonial toils, _wife and children_ are the Alpha and Omega of a weary existence! Of all travelling companionship, forfend us from that of a married man! Independence! He knows not of it! Such is the text and such the commentary: now for the practical application. It was a balmy July morning, and the flutelike melody of the turtle-dove was ringing through the woodlands. Leaving the pleasant villa of Dr. F. in the environs of North St. Louis, I found myself once more fairly _en route_, winding along that delightful road which sweeps the western bottom of the Mississippi. Circumstances not within my control, Benedict though I am, had recalled me, after a ramble of but a few weeks over the prairies, again to the city, and compelled me to relinquish my original design of a tour of the extreme Northwest. Ah, the despotism of circumstance! My delay, however, proved a brief, though pleasant one; and with a something of mingled _regret_ and anticipation it was that I turned from the bright eyes and dark locks of St. Louis--"forgive my folly"--and once again beheld its imposing structures fade in distance. By far the most delightful drive in the vicinity of St. Louis is that of four or five miles in its northern suburbs, along the river bottom. The road, emerging from the streets of the city through one of its finest sections, and leaving the "Big Mound" upon the right, sweeps off for several miles upon a succession of broad plateaux, rolling up from the water's edge. To the left lies an extensive range of heights, surmounted by ancient mounds and crowned with {245} groves of the shrub-oak, which afford a delightful shade to the road running below. Along this elevated ridge beautiful country-seats, with graceful piazzas and green Venitian blinds, are caught from time to time glancing through the shrubbery; while to the right, smooth meadows spread themselves away to the heavy belt of forest which margins the Mississippi. Among these pleasant villas the little white farm-cottage, formerly the residence of Mr. C., beneath the hills, surrounded by its handsome grounds, and gardens, and glittering fishponds, partially shrouded by the broad leaved catalpa, the willow, the acacia, and other ornamental trees, presents, perhaps, the rarest instance of natural beauty adorned by refined taste. A visit to this delightful spot during my stay at St. Louis informed me of the fact that, within as well as abroad, the hand of education and refinement had not been idle. Paintings, busts, medallions, Indian curiosities, &c., &c., tastefully arranged around the walls and shelves of an elegant library, presented a feast to the visiter as rare in the Far West as it is agreeable to a cultivated mind. Near this cottage is the intended site of the building of the St. Louis Catholic University, a lofty and commanding spot.[159] A considerable tract was here purchased, at a cost of thirty thousand dollars; but the design of removal from the city has for the present been relinquished. Immediately adjoining is situated the stately villa of Colonel O'Fallon, with its highly-cultivated gardens and its beautiful park sweeping off in the rear. In a very few years this must become one of the most delightful spots {246} in the West. For its elegant grounds, its green and hot houses, and its exotic and indigenous plants, it is, perhaps, already unequalled west of Cincinnati. No expense, attention, or taste will be wanting to render it all of which the spot is capable. Leaving the Bottom, the road winds gracefully off from the Mississippi, over the hard soil of the bluffs, through a region broken up by sink-holes, and covered with a meager growth of oaks, with small farms at intervals along the route, until at length the traveller finds himself at that beautiful spot on the Missouri, Belle Fontaine, fifteen miles from St. Louis. On account of the salubrity and beauty of the site, an army cantonment was located here by General Wilkinson in the early part of the present century, and fortifications consisting of palisade-work existed, and a line of log-barracks sufficient to quarter half a regiment. Nothing now remains but a pile of ruins. "The barracks have crumpled into dust, and the ploughshare has passed over the promenade of the sentinel." Jefferson Barracks, in the southern environs of the city, have superseded the old fortress, and the spot has been sold to a company, which has here laid off a town; and as most of the lots have been disposed of, and a turnpike-road from St. Louis has been chartered, a succeeding tourist may, at no distant period, pencil it in his notebook "a flourishing village." _Cold Water Creek_ is the name of a clear stream which empties itself into the Missouri just above, upon which are several mill-privileges; and from the base of the bluff itself gushes a fountain, on account {247} of which the place received its name from the French. The site for the new town is a commanding and beautiful one, being a bold, green promontory, rising from the margin of the stream about four miles above its confluence with the Mississippi. The view developed to the eye of the spectator from this spot on a fine day is one of mingled sublimity and beauty. For some miles these old giants of the West are beheld roaming along through their deep, fertile valleys, so different in character and aspect that one can hardly reconcile with that diversity the fact that their destiny is soon to become _one_ and unchangeably the same. And then comes the mighty "meeting of the waters," to which no pen can hope to render justice. There is a singular circumstance related of the discovery of a large _human tooth_ many years since at Belle Fontaine, in excavating a well, when at the depth of forty feet. This was the more extraordinary as the spot was not alluvion, and could have undergone no change from natural causes for centuries. Various strata of clay were passed through before the _tooth_ was thrown up; and this circumstance, together with the situation of the place, would almost preclude the possibility of a vein of subterraneous water having conveyed it to the spot. This is mysterious enough, certainly; but the fact is authentic. Returning at an angle of forty-five degrees with the road by which he approaches, a ride of a dozen miles up the Missouri places the traveller upon a bold roll of the prairie, from which, in the beautiful {248} valley below, rising above the forest, appear the steep roofs and tall chimneys of the little hamlet of Florissant.[160] Its original name was St. Ferdinand, titular saint of its church; and though one of the most advanced in years, it is by no means the most antique-looking of those ancient villages planted by the early French. Its site is highly romantic, upon the banks of a creek of the same name, and in the heart of one of the most fertile and luxuriant valleys ever subjected to cultivation.[161] The village now embraces about thirty or forty irregular edifices, somewhat modernized in style and structure, surrounded by extensive corn-fields, wandering flocks of Indian ponies, and herds of cattle browsing in the plain. Here also is a Catholic Church, a neat building of brick, with belfry and bell; connected with which is a convent of nuns, and by these is conducted a Seminary for young ladies of some note. This institution--if the Hibernian hostess of the little inn at which I dined is to be credited in her statements--is the most flourishing establishment in all the region far and near! and "_heducates_ the young _leddies_ in everything but religion!" For the redoubtable _Tonish_, who whilom figured so bravely on the prairies and in print, I made diligent inquiry. His cottage--the best in the village--and a dirty little brood of his posterity, were pointed out to me, but the old worthy himself was, as usual, in the regions of the Rocky Mountains: when last seen, he could still tell the stoutest lie with the steadiest muscles of any man in the village, while he and his {249} hopeful son could cover each other's trail so nicely that a lynx-eye would fail to detect them. In the vicinity of Florissant is a settlement called Owen's Station, formerly the site of a stoccade fort for defence against the Indians, and of a Spanish _station_ on account of a fine fountain in the vicinity.[162] The direct route from St. Louis to Florissant is an excellent one, over a high rolling prairie, and commands a noble sweep of scenery. From several elevated points, the white cliffs beyond the American Bottom, more than twenty miles distant, may be seen, while farmhouses and villas are beheld in all directions gleaming through the groves. Scenery of the same general character presents itself upon the direct route to St. Charles, with the exception of steeper hills and broader plains. Upon this route my path entered nearly at right angles soon after leaving the French village. Upon the right shore of the Missouri, not far above Florissant, is situated _La Charbonnière_, a name given to a celebrated coal-bank in a bluff about two hundred feet in altitude, and about twice as long.[163] The stratum of coal is about a dozen feet in thickness, and lies directly upon the margin of the river: the quantity in the bank is said to be immense, and it contains an unusual proportion of bitumen. Iron ore has also been discovered at this spot. The road over the Missouri Bottom was detestable, as never fails to be the case after a continued rain-storm, and my horse's leg sank to the middle in the black, unctuous loam almost at every step. Upon either side, like colonnades, rose up those {250} enormous shafts of living verdure which strike the solitary traveller upon these unfrequented bottoms with such awe and veneration; while the huge whirls of the writhing wild-vine hung dangling, like gigantic serpents, from the lofty columns around whose capitals they clung. On descending the bluffs to the bottom, the traveller crosses a bed of limestone, in which is said to exist a fissure perfectly fathomless. In a few moments, the boiling, turbid floods of the Missouri are beheld rolling majestically along at the feet, and to the stranger's eye, at first sight, always suggesting the idea of _unusual_ agitation; but so have they rolled onward century after century, age after age. The wild and impetuous character of this river, together with the vast quantities of soil with which its waters are charged, impart to it a natural sublimity far more striking, at first view, than that of the Mississippi. This circumstance was not unobserved by the Indian tribes, who appropriately named it the "_Smoky Water_:" by others it was styled the "_Mad River_," on account of the impetuosity of its current; and in all dialects it is called the "_Mother of Floods_," indicative of the immense volume of its waters. Various causes have been assigned for the turbid character of the Missouri: and though, doubtless, heavily charged by the volumes of sand thrown into its channel by the Yellow Stone--its longest tributary, equal to the Ohio--and by the chalky clay of the White River, yet we are told that it is characterized by the same phenomenon from its very source. At the gates of the Rocky Mountains, where, having torn {251} for itself a channel through the everlasting hills, it comes rushing out through the vast prairie-plains at their base, it is the same dark, wild torrent as at its turbid embouchure. And, strange to tell, after roaming thousands of miles, and receiving into its bosom streams equal to itself, and hundreds of lesser, though powerful tributaries, it still retains, unaltered, in depth or breadth, that volume which at last it rolls into its mighty rival! Torrent after torrent, river after river, pour in their floods, yet the giant stream rolls majestically onward unchanged! At the village of St. Charles its depth and breadth is the same as at the Mandan villages, nearly two thousand miles nearer its source.[164] The same inexplicable phenomenon characterizes the Mississippi, and, indeed, all the great rivers of the West; for _inexplicable_ the circumstance yet remains, however plausible the theories alleged in explanation. With regard to the Missouri, it is urged that the porous, sandy soil of its broad alluvions absorbs, on the principle of capillary attraction, much of its volume, conveying it by subterraneous channels to the Mississippi; and of this latter stream it is asserted that large quantities of its waters are taken up by the innumerable bayous, lakes, and lagoons intersecting the lower region of its course; and thus, unperceived, they find their way to the gulf. The navigation of the Missouri is thought to be the most hazardous and difficult of any of the Western rivers, owing to its mad, impetuous current, to the innumerable obstructions in its bed, and the incessant variation of its channel.[165] Insurance and pilotage {252} upon this river are higher than on others; the season of navigation is briefer, and steamers never pursue their course after dusk. Its vast length and numerous tributaries render it liable, also, to frequent floods, of which three are expected every year. The chief of these takes place in the month of June, when the heaped-up snows of the Rocky Mountains are melted, and, having flowed thousands of miles through the prairies, reach the Mississippi. The ice and snows of the Alleghanies, and the wild-rice lakes of the far Upper Mississippi, months before have reached their destination, and thus a general inundation, unavoidable had the floods been simultaneous, is prevented by Providence. The alluvions of the Missouri are said to be higher than, and not so broad as, those of the Mississippi; yet their extent is constantly varying by the violence of the current, even more than those of the latter stream. Many years ago the flourishing town of Franklin was completely torn away from its foundations, and its inhabitants were forced to flee to the adjacent heights; and the bottom opposite St. Charles and at numerous other places has, within the few years past, suffered astonishing changes.[166] Opposite the town now flow the waters of the river where once stood farms and orchards. The source of the Missouri and that of the Columbia, we are told, are in such immediate proximity, that a walk of but a few miles will enable the traveller to drink from the fountains of each. Yet how unlike their destiny! One passes off through a region of boundless prairie equal in extent to a {253} sixth of our globe; and, after a thousand wanderings, disembogues its troubled waters into the Mexican Gulf; the other, winding away towards the setting sun, rolls on through forests untrodden by human footstep till it sleeps in the Pacific Seas. Their destinies reach their fulfilment at opposite extremes of a continent! How like, how very like are the destinies of these far, lonely rivers to the destinies of human life! Those who, in the beautiful starlight of our boyhood, were our schoolmates and play-fellows, where are they when our sun of ripened maturity has reached its meridian? and what, and where are they and we, when evening's lengthening shadows are gathering over the landscape of life? Our paths diverged but little at first, but mountains, continents, half a world of waters may divide our destinies, and opposite extremes of "the great globe itself" witness their consummation. Yet, like the floods of the far-winding rivers, the streams of our existences will meet again, and mingle in the ocean--that ocean without a shore--_ETERNITY_! The gates of the Rocky Mountains, through which the waters of the Missouri rush forth into the prairies of the great Valley, are described as one of the sublimest spectacles in nature. Conceive the floods of a powerful mountain-torrent compressed in mid career into a width of less than one hundred and fifty yards, rushing with the speed of "the wild horse's wilder sire" through a chasm whose vast walls of Nature's own masonry rear themselves on either side from the raging waters to the precipitous {254} height of twelve hundred perpendicular feet; and then consider if imagination can compass a scene of darker, more terrible sublimity! And then sweep onward with the current, and within one hundred miles you behold a cataract, next to Niagara, from all description grandest in the world. Such are some of the mighty features of the stream upon which I was now standing. As to the much disputed question which of the great streams of the West is entitled to the name of the _Main River_, I shall content myself with a brief statement of the arguments alleged in support of the pretensions of either claimant. The volume of the Missouri at the confluence far exceeds that of its rival; the length of its course and the number and magnitude of its tributaries are also greater, and it imparts a character to the united streams. On the other hand, the Mississippi, geographically and geologically considered, is the grand Central River of the continent, maintaining an undeviating course from north to south; the valley which it drains is far more extensive and fertile than that of the Missouri; and from the circumstance of having first been explored, it has given a name to the great river of the Western Valley which it will probably ever retain, whatever the right. "_Sed non nostrum tantas componere lites._" _St. Charles, Mo._ XXIII "Say, ancient edifice, thyself with years Grown gray, how long upon the hill has stood Thy weather-braving tower?" HURDIS. "An _honourable_ murder, if you will; For naught he did in hate, but all in honour." "The whole broad earth is beautiful To minds attuned aright." ROBT. DALE OWEN. The view of St. Charles from the opposite bank of the Missouri is a fine one. The turbid stream rolls along the village nearly parallel with the interval upon which it is situated. A long line of neat edifices, chiefly of brick, with a few ruinous old structures of logs and plastering, relics of French or Spanish taste and domination, extend along the shore; beyond these, a range of bluffs rear themselves proudly above the village, crowned with their academic hall and a neat stone church, its spire surmounted by the cross. Between these structures, upon a spot somewhat more elevated, appears the basement section of "a stern round tower of former days," now a ruin; and, though a very peaceable {10} pile of limestone and mortar, well-fitted in distant view to conjure up a host of imaginings: like Shenstone's Ruined Abbey, forsooth, "Pride of ancient days; Now but of use to grace a rural scene, Or bound our vistas." The history of the tower, if tower it may be styled, is briefly this.[167] During the era of Spanish rule in this region, before its cession to France half a century since, this structure was erected as a watch-tower or magazine. Subsequently it was dismantled, and partially fell to ruins, when the novel project was started to plant a _windmill_ upon the foundation. This was done; but either the wind was too high or too low, too frequent or too rare, or neither; or there was no corn to grind, or the projector despaired of success, or some other of the fifty untoward circumstances which suggest themselves came to pass; the windmill ere long fell to pieces, and left the old ruin to the tender mercies of time and tempest, a monument of chance and change. The evening of my arrival at St. Charles I strolled off at about sunset, and, ascending the bluffs, approached the old ruin. The walls of rough limestone are massively deep, and the altitude cannot now be less than twenty feet. The view from the spot is noble, and peculiarly impressive at the sunset hour. Directly at your feet lies the village, from the midst of which come up the rural sounds of evening; the gladsome laugh of children at their sports; the whistle of the home-plodding labourer; the quiet hum of gossips around the open doors; {11} while upon the river's brink a huge steam-mill sends forth its ceaseless "boom, boom" upon the still air. Beneath the village ripples the Missouri, with a fine sweep both above and below the town not unlike the letter S; while beyond the stream extends its heavily-timbered bottom: one cluster of trees directly opposite are Titanic in dimensions. Upon the summit of the bluff, in the shadow of the ruin by your side, lies a sunken grave. It is the grave of a _duellist_. Over it trail the long, melancholy branches of a weeping willow. A neat paling once protected the spot from the wanderer's footstep, but it is gone now; only a rotten relic remains. All is still. The sun has long since gone down. One after another the evening sounds have died away in the village at the feet, and one after another the lights have twinkled forth from the casements. A fresh breeze is coming up from the water; the rushing wing of the night-hawk strikes fitfully upon the ear; and yonder sails the beautiful "boat of light," the pale sweet crescent. On that crescent is gazing many a distant friend! What a spot--what an hour to meditate upon the varying destinies of life! I seated myself upon the foot of the grave, which still retained some little elevation from the surrounding soil, and the night-wind sighed through the trailing boughs as if a requiem to him who slumbered beneath. _Requiescat in pace_, in no meaningless ceremony, might be pronounced over him, for his end was a troubled one. Unfortunate man! you have gone to your account; and that tabernacle in which once burned a beautiful flame has long since been mingling with the dust: {12} but I had rather be even as thou art, cold in an unhonoured grave, than to live on and wear away a miserable remnant of existence, that "guilty thing" with crimsoned hand and brow besprinkled with blood. To drag out a weary length of days and nights; to feel life a bitterness, and all its verdure scathed; to walk about among the ranks of men a being "Mark'd, And sign'd, and quoted for a deed of shame;" to feel a stain upon the palm which not all the waters of ocean could wash away; a smell of blood which not all the perfumes of Arabia could sweeten; ah! give me death rather than this! That the custom of duelling, under the present arrangements of society and code of honour, in some sections of our country, is necessary, is more than problematical; that its practice will continue to exist is certain; but, when death ensues, "'tis the surviver dies." The stranger has never, perhaps, stood upon the bluffs of St. Charles without casting a glance of anxious interest upon that lone, deserted grave; and there are associated with its existence circumstances of melancholy import. Twenty years ago, he who lies there was a young, accomplished barrister of superior abilities, distinguished rank, and rapidly rising to eminence in the city of St. Louis. Unhappily, for words uttered in the warmth of political controversy, offence was taken; satisfaction demanded; a meeting upon that dark and bloody ground opposite the city ensued; and poor B---- fell, in the sunshine of his spring, lamented by all {13} who had known him. Agreeable to his request in issue of his death, his remains were conveyed to this spot and interred. Years have since rolled away, and the melancholy event is now among forgotten things; but the old ruin, beneath whose shadow he slumbers, will long remain his monument; and the distant traveller, when he visits St. Charles, will pause and ponder over his lonely grave.[168] "But let no one reproach his memory. His life has paid the forfeit of his folly, Let that suffice." Ah! the valuable blood which has steeped the sands of that steril island in the Mississippi opposite St. Louis! Nearly thirty years ago a fatal encounter took place between Dr. F. and Dr. G., in which the latter fell: that between young B. and a Mr. C. I have alluded to, and several other similar combats transpired on the spot at about the same time. The bloody affair between Lieutenants Biddle and Pettis, and that between Lucas and Benton, are of more recent date, and, with several others, are familiar in the memory of all. The spot has been fitly named "Murder" or "Blood Island."[169] Lying in the middle of the stream, it is without the jurisdiction of either of the adjoining states; and deep is the curse which has descended upon its shores! {14} The morning star was beaming beautifully forth from the blue eastern heavens when I mounted my horse for a visit to that celebrated spot, "_Les Mamelles_." A pleasant ride of three miles through the forest-path beneath the bluffs brought me at sunrise to the spot. Every tree was wreathed with the wild rose like a rainbow; and the breeze was laden with perfume. It is a little singular, the difficulty with which visiters usually meet in finding this place. The Duke of Saxe Weimar, among other dignitaries, when on his tour of the West several years since, tells us that he lost his way in the neighbouring prairie by pursuing the river road instead of that beneath the bluffs. The natural eminences which have obtained the appropriate appellation of Mamelles, from their striking resemblance to the female breast, are a pair of lofty, conical mounds, from eighty to one hundred feet altitude, swelling up perfectly naked and smooth upon the margin of that celebrated prairie which owes to them a name. So beautifully are they paired and so richly rounded, that it would hardly require a Frenchman's eye or that of an Indian to detect the resemblance designated, remarkable though both races have shown themselves for bestowing upon objects in natural scenery significant names. Though somewhat resembling those artificial earth-heaps which form such an interesting feature of the West, these mounds are, doubtless, but a broken continuation of the Missouri bluffs, which at this point terminate from the south, while those of the Mississippi, commencing at the same point, stretch away at right angles to the west. {15} The mounds are of an oblong, elliptical outline, parallel to each other, in immediate proximity, and united at the extremities adjoining the range of highlands by a curved elevation somewhat less in height. They are composed entirely of earth, and in their formation are exceedingly uniform and graceful. Numerous springs of water gush out from their base. But an adequate conception of these interesting objects can hardly be conveyed by the pen; at all events, without somewhat more of the quality of patience than chances to be the gift of my own wayward instrument. In brief, then, imagine a huge _spur_, in fashion somewhat like to that of a militia major, with the enormous rowel stretching off to the south, and the heel-bow rounding away to the northeast and northwest, terminated at each extremity by a vast excrescence; imagine all this spread out in the margin of an extended prairie, and a tolerably correct, though inadequate idea of the outline of the Mamelles is obtained. The semicircular area in the bow of the spur between the mounds is a deep dingle, choked up with stunted trees and tangled underbrush of hazels, sumach, and wild-berry, while the range of highlands crowned with forest goes back in the rear. This line of heights extends up the Missouri for some distance, at times rising directly from the water's edge to the height of two hundred feet, rough and ragged, but generally leaving a heavily-timbered bottom several miles in breadth in the interval, and in the rear rolling off into high, undulating prairie. The bluffs of the Mississippi extend to the westward in a similar {16} manner, but the prairie interval is broader and more liable to inundation. The distance from the Mamelles to the confluence of the rivers is, by their meanderings, about twenty or thirty miles, and is very nearly divided into prairie and timber. The extremity of the point is liable to inundation, and its growth of forest is enormous. The view from the summit of the Mamelles, as the morning sun was flinging over the landscape his ruddy dyes, was one of eminent, surpassing loveliness. It is celebrated, indeed, as the most beautiful prairie-scene in the Western Valley, and one of the most romantic views in the country. To the right extends the Missouri Bottom, studded with farms of the French villagers, and the river-bank margined with trees which conceal the stream from the eye. Its course is delineated, however, by the blue line of bluffs upon the opposite side, gracefully curving towards the distant Mississippi until the trace fades away at the confluence. In front is spread out the lovely Mamelle Prairie, with its waving ocean of rich flowers of every form, and scent, and hue, while green groves are beheld swelling out into its bosom, and hundreds of cattle are cropping the herbage. In one direction the view is that of a boundless plain of verdure; and at intervals in the deep emerald is caught the gleam from the glassy surface of a lake, of which there are many scattered over the peninsula. All along the northern horizon, curving away in a magnificent sweep of forty miles to the west, rise the hoary cliffs of the Mississippi, in the opposite state, like towers and castles; while {17} the windings of the stream itself are betrayed by the heavy forest-belt skirting the prairie's edge. It is not many years since this bank of the river was perfectly naked, with not a fringe of wood. Tracing along the bold façade of cliffs on the opposite shore, enveloped in their misty mantle of azure, the eye detects the embouchure of the Illinois and of several smaller streams by the deep-cut openings. To the left extends the prairie for seventy miles, with an average breadth of five from the river, along which, for most of the distance, it stretches. Here and there in the smooth surface stands out a solitary sycamore of enormous size, heaving aloft its gigantic limbs like a monarch of the scene. Upward of fifty thousand acres are here laid open to the eye at a single glance, with a soil of exhaustless fertility and of the easiest culture. The whole plain spread out at the foot of the Mamelles bears abundant evidence of having once been submerged. The depth of the alluvion is upward of forty feet; and from that depth we are told that logs, leaves, coal, and a stratum of sand and pebbles bearing marks of the attrition of running waters, have been thrown up. Through the middle of the prairie pass several deep canals, apparently ancient channels of the rivers, and which now form the bed of a long irregular lake called _Marais Croche_; there is another lake of considerable extent called _Marais Temps Clair_.[170] This beautiful prairie once, then, formed a portion of that immense lake which at a remote period held possession of the American Bottom; and at the base of the graceful {18} Mamelles these giant rivers merrily mingled their waters, and then rolled onward to the gulf. That ages have since elapsed, the amazing depth of the alluvial and vegetable mould, and the ancient monuments reposing upon some portions of the surface, leave no room for doubt.[171] By heavy and continued deposites of alluvion, the vast peninsula gradually rose up from the waters; the Missouri was forced back to the bluff La Charbonnière, and the rival stream to the Piasa cliffs of Illinois. _St. Charles, Mo._ XXIV "Westward the star of empire holds its way." BERKELEY. "Travellers entering here behold around A large and spacious plain, on every side Strew'd with beauty, whose fair grassy ground, Mantled with green, and goodly beautified With all the ornaments of Flora's pride." "The flowers, the fair young flowers." "Ye are the stars of earth." Ten years ago, and the pleasant little village of St. Charles was regarded as quite the frontier-post of civilized life; now it is a flourishing town, and an early stage in the traveller's route to the Far West. Its origin, with that of most of the early settlements in this section of the valley, is French, and {19} some few of the peculiar characteristics of its founders are yet retained, though hardly to the extent as in some other villages which date back to the same era. The ancient style of some of the buildings, the singular costume, the quick step, the dark complexion, dark eyes and dark hair, and the merry, fluent flow of a nondescript idiom, are, however, at once perceived by the stranger, and indicate a peculiar people. St. Charles was settled in 1769, and for upward of forty years retained its original name, _Les Petites Cotes_. For some time it was under the Spanish government with the rest of the territory, and from this circumstance and a variety of others its population is made up of a heterogeneous mass of people, from almost every nation under the sun. Quite a flood of German emigration has, within six or seven years past, poured into the county. That wizard spell, however, under which all these early French settlements seem to have been lying for more than a century, St. Charles has not, until within a few years past, possessed the energy to throw off, though now the inroads of American enterprise upon the ancient order of things is too palpable to be unobserved or mistaken. The site of the town is high and healthy, upon a bed of limestone extending along the stream, and upon a narrow _plateau_ one or two miles in extent beneath the overhanging bluffs. Upon this interval are laid off five streets parallel with the river, only the first of which is lined with buildings. Below the village the alluvion stretches along the margin of the stream for three miles, until, reaching the termination of the {20} highlands at the Mamelles, it spreads itself out to the north and west into the celebrated prairie I have described. St. Charles has long been a great thoroughfare to the vast region west of the Missouri, and must always continue so to be: a railroad from St. Louis in this direction must pass through the place, as well as the national road now in progress. These circumstances, together with its eligible site for commerce; the exhaustless fertility of the neighbouring region, and the quantities of coal and iron it is believed to contain, must render St. Charles, before many years have passed away, a place of considerable mercantile and manufacturing importance. It has an extensive steam flouring-mill in constant operation; and to such an extent is the cultivation of wheat carried on in the surrounding country, for which the soil is pre-eminently suited, that in this respect alone the place must become important. About six miles south of St. Charles, upon the Booneslick road, is situated a considerable settlement, composed chiefly of gentlemen from the city of Baltimore.[172] The country is exceedingly beautiful, healthy, and fertile; the farms are under high cultivation, and the tone of society is distinguished for its refinement and intelligence. The citizens of St. Charles are many of them Catholics; and a male and female seminary under their patronage are in successful operation, to say nothing of a nunnery, beneath the shade of which such institutions invariably repose. "St. Charles College," a Protestant institute of two or three years' standing, is well supported, having four professors {21} and about a hundred students.[173] Its principal building is a large and elegant structure of brick, and the seminary will doubtless, ere long, become an ornament to the place. At no distant day it may assume the character and standing of its elder brothers east of the Alleghanies; and the muse that ever delights to revel in college-hall may strike her lyre even upon the banks of the far-winding, wilderness Missouri. Among the heterogeneous population of St. Charles are still numbered a few of those wild, daring spirits, whose lives and exploits are so intimately identified with the early history of the country, and most of whose days are now passed beyond the border, upon the broad buffalo-plains at the base of the Rocky Mountains. Most of them are trappers, hunters, _couriers du bois_, traders to the distant post of Santa Fé, or _engagés_ of the American Fur Company. Into the company of one of these remarkable men it was my fortune to fall during my visit at St. Charles; and not a little to my interest and edification did he recount many of his "hairbreadth 'scapes," his "most disastrous chances," "His moving accidents by flood and field." All of this, not to mention sundry sage items on the most approved method of capturing _deer_, _bar_, _buffalo_, and _painters_, I must be permitted to waive. I am no tale-teller, "but your mere traveller, believe me," as Ben Jonson has it. The proper home of the buffalo seems now to be the vast {22} plains south and west of the Missouri border, called the Platte country, compared with which the prairies east of the Mississippi are mere meadows in miniature. The latter region was, doubtless, once a favourite resort of the animal, and the banks of the "beautiful river" were long his grazing-grounds; but the onward march of civilization has driven him, with the Indian, nearer the setting sun. Upon the plains they now inhabit they rove in herds of thousands; they regularly migrate with change of season, and, in crossing rivers, many are squeezed to death. Dead bodies are sometimes found floating upon the Missouri far down its course. With the village and county of St. Charles are connected most of the events attending the early settlement of the region west of the Mississippi; and during the late war with Great Britain, the atrocities of the savage tribes were chiefly perpetrated here. Early in that conflict the Sacs and Foxes, Miamis, Pottawattamies, Iowas, and Kickapoo Indians commenced a most savage warfare upon the advanced settlements, and the deeds of daring which distinguished the gallant "rangers" during the two years in which, unaided by government, they sustained, single-handed, the conflict against a crafty foe, are almost unequalled in the history of warfare.[174] St. Charles county and the adjoining county of Booneslick were the principal scene of a conflict in which boldness and barbarity, courage and cruelty, contended long for the mastery. The latter county to which I have alluded {23} received its name from the celebrated Daniel Boone.[175] After being deprived, by the chicanery of law, of that spot for which he had endured so much and contended so boldly in the beautiful land of his adoption, we find him, at the close of the last century, journeying onward towards the West, there to pass the evening of his days and lay away his bones. Being asked "_why_ he had left that dear Kentucke, which he had discovered and won from the wild Indian, for the wilderness of Missouri," his memorable reply betrays the leading feature of his character, the _primum mobile_ of the man: "Too crowded! too crowded! I want elbow-room!" At the period of Boone's arrival in 1798, the only form of government which existed in this distant region was that of the "Regulators," a sort of military or hunters' republic, the chief of which was styled _commandant_. To this office the old veteran was at once elected, and continued to exercise its rather arbitrary prerogatives until, like his former home, the country had become subject to other laws and other councils. He continued here to reside, however, until the death of his much-loved wife, partner of all his toils and adventures, in 1813, when he removed to the residence of his son, some miles in the interior. Here he discovered a large and productive salt-lick, long and profitably worked, and which still continues to bear his name and give celebrity to the surrounding country. To this lick was the old hunter accustomed to repair in his aged days, when his sinews were unequal to the chase, and lie in wait for the deer {24} which frequented the spring. In this occupation and in that of trapping beavers he lived comfortably on until 1818, when he calmly yielded up his adventurous spirit to its God.[176] What an eventful life was that! How varied and wonderful its incidents! How numerous and pregnant its vicissitudes! How strange the varieties of natural character it developed! The name of Boone will never cease to be remembered so long as this Western Valley remains the pride of a continent, and the beautiful streams of his discovery roll on their teeming tribute to the ocean! Of the Indian tribe which formerly inhabited this pleasant region, and gave a name to the river and state, scarcely a vestige is now to be seen. The only associations connected with the savages are of barbarity and perfidy. Upon the settlers of St. Charles county it was that Black Hawk directed his first efforts;[177] and, until within a few years, a stoccade fort for refuge in emergency has existed in every considerable settlement. Among a variety of traditionary matter related to me relative to the customs of the tribe which formerly resided near St. Charles, the following anecdote from one of the oldest settlers may not prove uninteresting. "Many years ago, while the Indian yet retained a crumbling foothold upon this pleasant land of his fathers, a certain Cis-atlantic naturalist--so the story goes--overflowing with laudable zeal for the advancement of science, had succeeded in penetrating the wilds of Missouri in pursuit of his favourite study. Early one sunny morning a man in strange {25} attire was perceived by the simple natives running about their prairie with uplifted face and outspread palms, eagerly in pursuit of certain bright flies and insects, which, when secured, were deposited with manifest satisfaction into a capacious tin box at his girdle. Surprised at a spectacle so novel and extraordinary, a fleet runner was despatched over the prairie to catch the curious animal and conduct him into the village. A council of sober old chiefs was called to _sit upon_ the matter, who, after listening attentively to all the phenomena of the case, with a sufficiency of grunting, sagaciously and decidedly pronounced the pale-face a _fool_. It was in vain the unhappy man urged upon the assembled wisdom of the nation the distinction between a _natural_ and a naturalist. The council grunted to all he had to offer, but to them the distinction was without a difference; they could comprehend not a syllable he uttered. 'Actions speak louder than words'--so reasoned the old chiefs; and as the custom was to _kill_ all their own fools, preparation was forthwith commenced to administer this summary cure for folly upon the unhappy naturalist. At this critical juncture a prudent old Indian suggested the propriety, as the fool belonged to the 'pale faces,' of consulting their 'Great Father' at St. Louis on the subject, and requesting his presence at the execution. The sentence was suspended, therefore, for a few hours, while a deputation was despatched to General Clarke,[178] detailing all the circumstances of the case, and announcing the intention of killing the fool as soon as possible. {26} The old general listened attentively to the matter, and then quietly advised them, as the _fool_ was a _pale face_, not to kill him, but to conduct him safely to St. Louis, that he might dispose of him himself. This proposition was readily acceded to, as the only wish of the Indians was to rid the world of a _fool_. And thus was the worthy naturalist relieved from an unpleasant predicament, not, however, without the loss of his box of bugs; a loss he is said to have bewailed as bitterly as, in anticipation, he had bewailed the loss of his head." For the particulars of this anecdote I am no voucher; I give the tale as told me; but as it doubtless has its origin in fact, it may have suggested to the author of "The Prairie" that amusing character, "Obed Battius, M.D.," especially as the scene of that interesting tale lies in a neighbouring region.[179] It was a sultry afternoon when I left St. Charles. The road for some miles along the bottom runs parallel with the river, until, ascending a slight elevation, the traveller is on the prairie. Upon this road I had not proceeded many miles before I came fully to the conclusion, that the route I was then pursuing would never conduct me and my horse to the town of Grafton, Illinois, the point of my destination. In this idea I was soon confirmed by a half-breed whom I chanced to meet. Receiving a few general instructions, therefore, touching my route, all of which I had quite forgotten ten minutes after, I pushed forth into the pathless prairie, and was soon in its centre, almost buried, with my horse beneath me, in the monstrous vegetation. {27} Between the parallel rolls of the prairie, the size of the weeds and undergrowth was stupendous; and the vegetation heaved in masses heavily back and forth in the wind, as if for years it had flourished on in rank, undisturbed luxuriance. Directly before me, along the northern horizon, rose the white cliffs of the Mississippi, which, as they went up to the sheer height, in some places, of several hundred feet, presented a most mountain-like aspect as viewed over the level surface of the plain. Towards a dim column of smoke which curled lazily upward among these cliffs did I now direct my course. The broad disk of the sun was rapidly wheeling down the western heavens; my tired horse could advance through the heavy grass no faster than a walk; the pale bluffs, apparently but a few miles distant, seemed receding like an _ignis fatuus_ as I approached them; and there lay the swampy forest to ford, and the "terrible Mississippi" beyond to ferry, before I could hope for food or a resting-place. In simple verity, I began to meditate upon the yielding character of prairie-grass for a couch. And yet, of such surpassing loveliness was the scene spread out around me, that I seemed hardly to realize a situation disagreeable enough, but from which my thoughts were constantly wandering. The grasses and flowering wild-plants of the Mamelle Prairie are far-famed for their exquisite brilliancy of hue and gracefulness of form. Among the flowers my eye detected a species unlike to any I had yet met with, and which seemed indigenous only here. Its fairy-formed corolla {28} was of a bright enamelled crimson, which, in the depths of the dark herbage, glowed like a living coal. How eloquently did this little flower bespeak the being and attributes of its Maker. Ah! "There is religion in a flower; Mountains and oceans, planets, suns, and systems, Bear not the impress of Almighty power In characters more legible than those Which he has written on the tiniest flower Whose light bell bends beneath the dewdrop's weight." One who has never looked upon the Western prairie in the pride of its blushing bloom can hardly conceive the surpassing loveliness of its summer flora; and, if the idea is not easy to conceive, still less is it so to convey. The autumn flowers in their richness I have not yet beheld; and in the early days of June, when I first stood upon the prairies, the beauteous sisterhood of spring were all in their graves; and the sweet springtime of the year it is when the gentle race of flowers dance over the teeming earth in gayest guise and profusion. In the first soft days of April, when the tender green of vegetation begins to overspread the soil scathed by the fires of autumn, the _viola_, primrose of the prairie, in all its rare and delicate forms; the _anemone_ or wind-flower; the blue dewy harebell; the pale oxlip; the flowering _arbute_, and all the pretty family of the pinks and lilies lie sprinkled, as by the enchantment of a summer shower, or by the tripping footsteps of Titania with her fairies, over the landscape. The blue and the white then tint the perspective, from the most {29} limpid cerulean of an _iris_ to the deep purple of the pink; from the pearly lustre of the cowslip to the golden richness of the buttercup. In early springtime, too, the island groves of the prairies are also in flower; and the brilliant crimson of the _cercis canadensis_, or Judas-tree; the delightful fragrance of the _lonicera_ or honeysuckle, and the light yellow of the _jasimum_, render the forests as pleasant to the smell as to the eye. But spring-time passes away, and with her pass away the fair young flowers her soft breath had warmed into being. Summer comes over the prairies like a giant; the fiery dog-star rages, and forth leap a host of bright ones to greet his coming. The _heliotrope_ and _helianthus_, in all their rich variety; the wild rose, flinging itself around the shrub-oak like a wreath of rainbows; the _orchis_, the balmy thyme, the burgamot, and the asters of every tint and proportion, then prevail, throwing forth their gaudy, sunburnt petals upon the wind, until the whole meadow seems arrayed in the royal livery of a sunset sky. Scarcely does the summer begin to decline, and autumn's golden sunlight to stream in misty magnificence athwart the landscape, than a thousand gorgeous plants of its own mellow hue are nodding in stately beauty over the plain. Yellow is the garniture of the autumnal Flora of the prairies; and the haughty golden-rod, and all the splendid forms of the _gentiana_, commingling with the white and crimson _eupatorium_, and the red spire of the _liatris_, everywhere bespangle the scene; while the trumpet-formed corolla of the _bignonia radicans_ glitters {30} in the sunbeams, amid the luxuriant wreathing of ivy, from the tall capitals of the isolated trees. All the _solidago_ species are in their glory, and every variety of the _lobelia_; and the blood-red sumach in the hollows and brakes, and the _sagittaria_, or arrow-head, with its three-leaved calyx and its three white petals darting forth from the recesses of the dark herbage, and all the splendid forms of the aquatic plants, with their broad blossoms and their cool scroll-like leaves, lend a finished richness of hue to the landscape, which fails not well to harmonize with the rainbow glow of the distant forest. "----Such beauty, varying in the light Of gorgeous nature, cannot be portrayed By words, nor by the pencil's silent skill; But is the property of those alone Who have beheld it, noted it with care, And, in their minds, recorded it with love." What wonder, then, that, amid a scene like this, where the summer reigned, and young autumn was beginning to anticipate its mellow glories, the traveller should in a measure have forgotten his vocation, and loitered lazily along his way! _Portage des Sioux, Mo._ XXV "There's music in the forest leaves When summer winds are there, And in the laugh of forest girls That braid their sunny hair." HALLECK. "The forests are around him in their pride, The green savannas, and the mighty waves; And isles of flowers, bright floating o'er the tide That images the fairy world it laves." HEMANS. There is one feature of the Mamelle Prairie, besides its eminent beauty and its profusion of flowering plants, which distinguishes it from every other with which I have met. I allude to the almost perfect uniformity of its surface. There is little of that undulating, wavelike slope and swell which characterizes the peculiar species of surface called prairie. With the exception of a few lakes, abounding with aquatic plants and birds, and those broad furrows traversing the plain, apparently ancient beds of the rivers, the surface appears smooth as a lawn. This circumstance goes far to corroborate the idea of alluvial origin. And thus it was that, lost in a mazy labyrinth of grass and flowers, I wandered on over the smooth soil of the prairie, quite regardless of the whereabout my steps were conducting me. The sun was just going down when my horse entered a slight footpath leading into a point of woodland upon {32} the right. This I pursued for some time, heedlessly presuming that it would conduct me to the banks of the river; when, lo! to my surprise, on emerging from the forest, I found myself in the midst of a French village, with its heavy roofs and broad piazzas. Never was the lazy hero of Diedrich Knickerbocker--luckless Rip--more sadly bewildered, after a twenty years' doze among the Hudson Highlands, than was your loiterer at this unlooked-for apparition. To find one's self suddenly translated from the wild, flowery prairie into the heart of an aged, moss-grown village, of such foreign aspect, withal, was by no means easy to reconcile with one's notions of reality. Of the name, or even the existence of the village, I had been quite as ignorant as if it had never possessed either; and in vain was it that I essayed, in my perplexity, to make myself familiar with these interesting items of intelligence by inquiry of the primitive-looking beings whom I chanced to encounter, as I rode slowly on into the village through the tall stoccades of the narrow streets. Every one stared as I addressed him; but, shaking his head and quickening his pace, pointed me on in the direction I was proceeding, and left me to pursue it in ignorance and single blessedness. This mystery--for thus to my excited fancy did it seem--became at length intolerable. Drawing up my horse before the open door of a cottage, around which, beneath the galleries, were gathered a number of young people of both sexes, I very peremptorily made the demand _where I was_. All stared, and some few took it upon them, graceless youths, to {33} laugh; until, at length, a dark young fellow, with black eyes and black whiskers, stepped forward, and, in reply to my inquiry repeated, informed me that the village was called "_Portage des Sioux_;" that the place of my destination was upon the opposite bank of the Mississippi, several miles above--too distant to think of regaining my route at that late hour; and very politely the dark young man offered to procure for me accommodation for the night, though the village could boast no inn. Keeping close on the heels of my _conducteur_, I again began to thrid the narrow lanes of the hamlet, from the doors and windows of every cottage of which peeped forth an eager group of dark-eyed women and children, in uncontrolled curiosity at the apparition of a stranger in their streets at such an advanced hour of the day. The little village seemed completely cut off from all the world beside, and as totally unconscious of the proceedings of the community around as if it were a portion of another hemisphere. The place lies buried in forest except upon the south, where it looks out upon the Mamelle Prairie, and to the north is an opening in the belt of woods along the river-bank, through which, beyond the stream, rise the white cliffs in points and pinnacles like the towers and turrets of a castellated town, to the perpendicular altitude of several hundred feet. The scene was one of romantic beauty, as the moonbeams silvered the forest-tops and cliffs, flinging their broad shadows athwart the bosom of the waters, gliding in oily rippling at their base. The site of Portage des Sioux is about seven miles above {34} the town of Alton, and five below the embouchure of the Illinois. Its landing is good; it contains three or four hundred inhabitants, chiefly French; can boast a few trading establishments, and, as is invariably the case in the villages of this singular people, however inconsiderable, has an ancient Catholic church rearing its gray spire above the low-roofed cottages. Attached to it, also, is a "common field" of twelve hundred _arpens_--something less than as many acres--stretching out into the prairie. The soil is, of course, incomparably fertile. The garden-plats around each door were dark with vegetation, overtopping the pickets of the enclosures; and away to the south into the prairie swept the broad maize-fields nodding and rustling in all the gorgeous garniture of summer. My _conducteur_ stopped, at length, at the gate of a small brick tenement, the only one in the village, whose modern air contrasted strangely enough with the venerable aspect of everything else; and having made known my necessities through the medium of sundry Babel gibberings and gesticulations, he left me with the promise to call early in the morning and see me on my way. "What's your _name_, any how?" was the courteous salutation of mine host, as I placed my foot across his threshold, after attending to the necessities of the faithful animal which had been my companion through the fatigues of the day. He was a dark-browed, swarthy-looking man, with exceedingly black hair, and an eye which one might have suspected of Indian origin but for the genuine cunning {35}--the "lurking devil"--of its expression. Replying to the unceremonious interrogatory with a smile, which by no means modified the haughty moroseness of my landlord's visage, another equally civil query was proposed, to which I received the hurried reply, "Jean Paul de --." From this _amiable_ personage I learned, by dint of questioning, that the village of Portage des Sioux had been standing about half a century: that it was originally settled by a colony from Cahokia: that its importance now was as considerable as it ever had been: that it was terribly shaken in the great earthquakes of 1811, many of the old cottages having been thrown down and his own house rent from "turret to foundation-stone"--the chasm in the brick wall yet remaining--and, finally, that the village owed its name to the stratagem of a band of Sioux Indians, in an expedition against the Missouris. The legend is as follows: "The Sioux being at war with a tribe of the Missouris, a party descended the Upper Mississippi on an expedition for pillage. The Missouris, apprized of their approach, laid in ambush in the woods at the mouth of the river, intending to take their enemies by surprise as their canoes doubled the point to ascend. The Sioux, in the depths of Indian subtlety, apprehending such a manoeuvre, instead of descending to the confluence, landed at the portage, took their canoes upon their backs, and crossed the prairie to the Indian village on the Missouri, several miles above. By this stratagem the design of their expedition was accomplished, and they had returned to their canoes in safety with their plunder long {36} before the Missouris, who were anxiously awaiting them at their ambuscade, were aware of their first approach." Supper was soon served up, prepared in the neatest French fashion. While at table a circumstance transpired which afforded me some little diversion. Several of the villagers dropped in during the progress of the meal, who, having seated themselves at the board, a spirited colloquy ensued in the _patois_ of these old hamlets--a species of _gumbo-French_, which a genuine native of _La Belle France_ would probably manage to unravel quite as well as a Northern Yankee. From a few expressions, however, the meaning of which were obvious, together with sundry furtive glances to the eye, and divers confused withdrawals of the gaze, it was not very difficult to detect some pretty free remarks upon the stranger-guest. All this was suffered to pass with undisturbed _nonchalance_, until the meal was concluded; when the hitherto mute traveller, turning to the negro attendant, demanded in familiar French a glass of water. _Presto!_ the effect was electric. Such visages of ludicrous distress! such stealthy glancing of dark eyes! such glowing of sallow cheeks! The swarthy landlord at length hurriedly ejaculated, "_Parlez vous Français?_" while the dark-haired hostess could only falter "_Pardonnez moi!_" A hearty laugh on my own part served rather to increase than diminish the _empressement_, as it confirmed the suspicion that their guest had realized to the full extent their hospitable remarks. Rising from the table to put an end to rather an awkward {37} scene, I took my _portfeuille_ and seated myself in the gallery to sketch the events of the day. But the dark landlord looked with no favouring eye upon the proceeding; and, as he was by no means the man to stand for ceremony, he presently let drop a civil hint of the propriety of _retiring_; the propriety of complying with which civil hint was at once perceived, early as was the hour; and soon the whole house and village was buried in slumber. And then "the stranger within their gates" rose quietly from his couch, and in a few moments was luxuriating in the fresh night-wind, laden with perfumes from the flowerets of the prairie it swept. And beautifully was the wan moonlight playing over forest, and prairie, and rustling maize-field, and over the gray church spire, and the old village in its slumbering. And the giant cliffs rose white and ghastly beyond the dark waters of the endless river, as it rolled on in calm magnificence, "for ever flowing and the same for ever." And associations of the scene with other times and other men thronged "thick and fast" upon the fancy. The first vermeil flush of morning was firing the eastern forest-tops, when a single horseman was to be seen issuing from the narrow lanes of the ancient village of Portage des Sioux, whose inhabitants had not yet shaken off the drowsiness of slumber, and winding slowly along beneath the huge trees skirting the prairie's margin. After an hour of irregular wandering through the heavy meadow-grass, drenched and dripping in the dews, and glistening in the morning sunlight, he plunges into the {38} old woods on his right, and in a few moments stands beneath the vine-clad sycamores, with the brilliant, trumpet-formed flower of the _bignonia_ suspended from the branches upon the margin of a stream. It is the "Father of Waters," and beyond its bounding bosom lies the little hamlet of Grafton, slumbering in quiet beauty beneath the cliffs. The scene is a lovely one: the mighty river rolling calmly and majestically on--the moss-tasselled forest upon its bank--the isles of brightness around which it ripples--the craggy precipice, rearing its bald, broad forehead beyond--the smoking cottages at the base, and the balmy breath of morning, with fragrance curling the blue waters, are outlines of a portraiture which imagination alone can fill up. Blast after blast from the throat of a huge horn suspended from the limb of an aged cotton-wood, went pealing over the waters; but all the echoes in the surrounding forest had been awakened, and an hour was gone by, before a float, propelled by the sturdy sinews of a single brace of arms, had obeyed the summons. And so the traveller sat himself quietly down upon the bank beneath the tree-shade, and luxuriated on the feast of natural scenery spread out before him. The site of the town of Grafton is an elevated strip of bottom-land, stretching along beneath the bluffs, and in this respect somewhat resembling Alton, fifteen or twenty miles below. The _locale_ of the village is, however, far more delightful than that of its neighbour, whatever the relative advantages for commerce they may boast, though those of the {39} former are neither few nor small. Situated at the _mouth_ of the Illinois as to navigation; possessing an excellent landing for steamers, an extensive and fertile interior, rapidly populating, and inexhaustible quarries for the builder, the town, though recently laid off, is going on in the march of improvement; and, with an hundred other villages of the West, bids fair to become a nucleus of wealth and commerce. _Grafton, Ill._ XXVI "When breath and sense have left this clay, In yon damp vault, oh lay me not; But kindly bear my bones away To some lone, green, and sunny spot." "Away to the prairie! away! Where the sun-gilt flowers are waving, When awaked from their couch at the breaking of day, O'er the emerald lawn the gay zephyrs play, And their pinions in dewdrops are laving." On the morning of my arrival at Grafton, while my brisk little hostess was making ready for my necessities, I stepped out to survey the place, and availed myself of an hour of leisure to visit a somewhat remarkable cavern among the cliffs, a little below the village, the entrance of which had caught my attention while awaiting the movements of the ferryman on the opposite bank of the Mississippi. It is approached by a rough footpath along the {40} river-margin, piled up with huge masses of limestone, which have been toppled from the beetling crags above: these, at this point, as before stated, are some hundred feet in perpendicular height. The orifice of the cave is elliptical in outline, and somewhat regular, being an excavation by the whirling of waters apparently in the surface of the smooth escarpment; it is about twenty feet in altitude, and as many in width. Passing the threshold of the entrance, an immediate expansion takes place into a spacious apartment some forty or fifty feet in depth, and about the same in extreme height: nearly in the centre a huge perpendicular column of solid rock rears itself from the floor to the roof. From this point the cavern lengthens itself away into a series of apartments to the distance of several hundred feet, with two lesser entrances in the same line with that in the middle, and at regular intervals. The walls of the cave, like everything of a geological character in this region, are composed of a secondary limestone, abounding in testaceous fossils. The spot exhibits conclusive evidence of having once been subject to diluvial action; and the cavern itself, as I have observed, seems little else than an excavation from the heart of an enormous mass of marine petrifaction. Large quantities of human bones of all sizes have been found in this cavern, leaving little doubt that, by the former dwellers in this fair land, the spot was employed as a catacomb. I myself picked up the _sincipital_ section of a scull, which would have ecstasied a virtuoso beyond measure; and {41} several of the _lumbar vertebræ_, which, if they prove nothing else, abundantly demonstrate the aboriginal natives of North America to have been no pigmy race. The spot is now desecrated by the presence of a party of sturdy coopers, who could not, however, have chosen a more delightful apartment for their handicraft; rather more taste than piety, however, has been betrayed in the selection. The view of the water and the opposite forest from the elevated mouth of the cavern is very fine, and three or four broad-leafed sycamores fling over the whole a delightful shade. The waters of the river flow onward in a deep current at the base, and the fish throw themselves into the warm sunlight from the surface. What a charming retreat from the fiery fervour of a midsummer noon! The heavy bluffs which overhang the village, and over which winds the great road to the north, though not a little wearisome to surmount, command from the summit a vast and beautiful landscape. A series of inclined planes are talked of by the worthy people of Grafton to overcome these bluffs, and render their village less difficult of inland ingress and regress; and though the idea is not a little amusing, of rail-cars running off at an angle of forty-five degrees, yet when we consider that this place, if it ever becomes of _any_ importance, must become a grand thoroughfare and dépôt on the route from St. Louis and the agricultural regions of the Missouri to the northern counties of Illinois, the design seems less chimerical _than it might be_. A charter, indeed, for a railroad {42} from Grafton, through Carrolton to Springfield, has been obtained, a company organized, and a portion of the stock subscribed;[180] while another corporation is to erect a splendid hotel. The traveller over the bluffs, long before he stands upon their summit, heartily covets any species of locomotion other than the back of a quadruped. But the scenery, as he ascends, caught at glimpses through the forest, is increasingly beautiful. Upon one of the loftiest eminences to the right stand the ruins of a huge stone-heap; the tumulus, perchance, of some red-browed chieftain of other days. It was a beautiful custom of these simple-hearted sons of the wilderness to lay away the relics of their loved and honoured ones even upon the loftiest, greenest spots of the whole earth; where the freed spirit might often rise to look abroad over the glories of that pleasant forest-home where once it roved in the chase or bounded forth upon the path of war. And it is a circumstance not a little worthy of notice, that veneration for the dead is a feeling universally betrayed by uncivilized nations. The Indian widow of Florida annually despoils herself of her luxuriant tresses to wreathe the headstone beneath which reposes the bones of her husband. The Canadian mother, when her infant is torn from her bosom by the chill hand of death, and, with a heart almost breaking, she has been forced to lay him away beneath the sod, is said, in the touching intensity of her affection, to bathe the tombstone of her little one with that genial flood which Nature poured through her veins for his nourishment {43} while living. The Oriental nations, it is well known, whether civilized or savage, have ever, from deepest antiquity, manifested an eloquent solicitude for the sepulchres of their dead. The expiring Israelite, we are always told, "was gathered to his fathers;" and the tombs of the Jewish monarchs, some of which exist even to the present day, were gorgeously magnificent. The nations of modern Turkey and India wreathe the tombs of their departed friends with the gayest and most beautiful flowers of the season; while the very atmosphere around is refreshed by fountains. From the site of the stone-heap of which I have spoken, and which may or may _not_ have been erected to the memory of some Indian chieftain, a glorious cosmorama of the whole adjacent region, miles in circumference, is unfolded to the eye. At your feet, far below, flow on the checkered waters of the Mississippi, gliding in ripples among their emerald islands; while at intervals, as the broad stream comes winding on from the west, is caught the flashing sheen of its surface through the dense old woods that fringe its margin. Beyond these, to the south, lies spread the broad and beautiful Mamelle Prairie, even to its faint blue blending with the distant horizon laid open to the eye, rolling and heaving its heavy herbage in the breeze to the sunlight like the long wave of ocean. And the bright green island-groves, the cape-like forest-strips swelling out upon its bosom, the flashing surface of lakes and water-sheets, almost buried in the luxuriance of vegetation, with thousands of {44} aquatic birds wheeling their broad flight over them, all contribute to fill up the lineaments of a scene of beauty which fails not to enrapture the spectator. Now and then along the smooth meadow, a darker luxuriance of verdure, with the curling cabin-smoke upon its border, and vast herds of domestic cattle in its neighbourhood, betray the presence of man, blending _his_ works with the wild and beautiful creations of Nature. On the right, at a distance of two miles, come in the placid waters of the Illinois, from the magnificent bluffs in the back-ground stealing softly and quietly into the great river through the wooded islands at its mouth. The day was a sultry one; the atmosphere was like the breath of a furnace; but over the heights of the bluffs swept the morning air, fresh and cool from the distant prairie. For some miles, as is invariably the case upon the banks of the Western rivers, the road winds along among bluffs and sink-holes; and so constantly does its course vary and diverge, that a pocket compass is anything but a needless appendage. Indeed, all his calculations to the contrary notwithstanding, the traveller throughout the whole of this region describes with his route a complete Virginia fence. The road is not a little celebrated for its tortuosity. At length the traveller emerges upon a prairie. On its edge beneath the forest stands a considerable settlement, bordering on Macoupin Creek, from which it takes a name. In the latter part of 1816 this settlement was commenced, and was then the most northern location of whites in the Territory of Illinois.[181] {45} It was evening, at the close of a sultry day, that the village of Carrolton appeared before me among the trees.[182] I was struck with the quiet air of simple elegance which seemed to pervade the place, though its general outlines are those of every other Western village I have visited. One broad, regular street extends through the town, upon either side of which stand the stores and better class of private residences; while in the back-ground, scattered promiscuously along the transverse avenues, are log-cabins surrounded by cornfields, much like those in the villages of the French. Three sides of the town are bounded by forest, while the fourth opens upon the prairie called "String Prairie." In the centre of the village, upon the principal street, is reserved a square, in the middle of which stands the courthouse, with other public structures adjacent, and the stores and hotels along its sides. One thing in Carrolton which struck me as a little singular, was the unusual diversity of religious denominations. Of these there are not less than five or six; three of which have churches, and a fourth is setting itself in order to build; and all this in a village of hardly one thousand inhabitants. The courthouse is a handsome edifice of brick, two stories, with a neat spire. The neighbouring region is fertile and healthy; well proportioned with prairie and timber, well watered by the Macoupin and Apple Creeks,[183] and well populated by a sturdy, thriving race of yeomanry. This is, indeed, strictly an agricultural village; and, so far as my own observation {46} extended, little attention is paid or taste manifested for anything else. About a dozen miles north of Carrolton is situated the village of Whitehall, a flourishing settlement in the prairie's edge, from the centre of which, some miles distant, it may be seen.[184] Three years ago the spot was an uncultivated waste; the town has now two houses of worship, a school, an incorporation for a seminary, two taverns, six hundred inhabitants, and a steam mill to feed them withal. A few miles from this place, on the outskirts of another small settlement, I was met by a company of emigrants from Western New-York. The women and children were piled upon the top of the household stuff with about as much ceremony as if they constituted a portion thereof, in a huge lumbering baggage-wagon, around which dangled suspended pots and kettles, dutch-ovens and tin-kitchens, cheese-roasters and bread-toasters, all in admired confusion, jangling harsh discord. The cart-wheels themselves, as they gyrated upon the parched axles, like the gates of Milton's hell on their hinges, "grated harsh thunder." In the van of the cavalcade strode soberly on the patriarch of the family, with his elder sons, axe upon shoulder, rifle in hand, a veritable Israel Bush. For six weeks had the wanderers been travelling, and a weary, bedusted-looking race were they, that emigrant family. The rapidity with which a Western village goes forward, and begins to assume importance among the nations, after having once been born and {47} christened, is amazing. The mushrooms of a summer's night, the wondrous gourd of Jonah, the astonishing bean of the giant-killer, or the enchantments of the Arabian Nights, are but fit parallels to the growth of the prairie-village of the Far West. Of all this I was forcibly reminded in passing through quite a town upon my route named Manchester, where I dined, and which, if my worthy landlord was not incorrect, two years before could hardly boast a log-cabin.[185] It is now a thriving place, on the northern border of Mark's Prairie, from which it may be seen four or five miles before entering its streets; it is surrounded by a body of excellent timber, always the _magnum desideratum_ in Illinois. This scarcity of timber will not, however, be deemed such an insurmountable obstacle to a dense and early population of this state as may have been apprehended, when we consider the unexampled rapidity with which a young growth pushes itself forward into the prairies when once protected from the devastating effects of the autumnal fires; the exhaustless masses of bituminous coal which may be thrown up from the ravines, and creeks, and bluffs of nearly every county in the state; the facility of ditching, by the assistance of blue grass to bind the friable soil, and the luxuriance of hedge-rows for enclosures, as practised almost solely in England, France, and the Netherlands; and, finally, the convenience of manufacturing brick for all the purposes of building. There is not, probably, any quarter of the state destined to become more populous and powerful {48} than that section of Morgan county through which I was now passing. On every side, wherever the traveller turns his eye, beautiful farms unfold their broad, wavy prairie-fields of maize and wheat, indicative of affluence and prosperity. The _worst_ soil of the prairies is best adapted to wheat; it is _generally_ too fertile; the growth too rapid and luxuriant; the stalk so tall and the ear so heavy, that it is lodged before matured for the sickle. Illinois, consequently, can never become a celebrated wheat region, though for corn and coarser grains it is now unequalled. The rapidity with which this state has been peopled is wonderful, especially its northern counties. In the year 1821, that section of country embraced within the present limits of Morgan county numbered but twenty families; in 1830 its population was nearly fourteen thousand, and cannot now be estimated at less than seventeen thousand! Many of the settlers are natives of the New-England States; and with them have brought those habits of industrious sobriety for which the North has ever been distinguished. In all the enterprise of the age, professing for its object the amelioration of human condition and the advancement of civilization, religion, and the arts, Morgan county stands in advance of all others in the state. What a wonderful revolution have a few fleeting years of active enterprise induced throughout a region once luxuriating in all the savageness of nature; while the wild prairie-rose "blushed unseen," and the wilder forest-son pursued the deer! Fair villages, {49} like spring violets along the meadow, have leaped forth into being, to bless and to gladden the land, and to render even this beautiful portion of God's beautiful world--though for ages a profitless waste--at length the abode of intelligence, virtue, and peace. It was near the close of the day that the extent and frequency of the farms on either side, the more finished structure of the houses, the regularity of enclosures, the multitude of vehicles of every description by which I was encountered, and the dusty, hoof-beaten thoroughfare over which I was travelling, all reminded me that I was drawing nigh to Jacksonville, the principal town in Illinois. Passing "Diamond Grove," a beautiful forest-island of nearly a thousand acres, elevated above the surrounding prairie to which it gives a name,[186] and environed by flourishing farms, the traveller catches a view of the distant village stretching away along the northern horizon. He soon enters an extended avenue, perfectly uniform for several miles, leading on to the town. Beautiful meadows and harvest-fields on either side sweep off beyond the reach of the eye, their neat white cottages and palings peeping through the enamelled foliage. To the left, upon a swelling upland at the distance of some miles, are beheld the brick edifices of "Illinois College," relieved by a dark grove of oaks resting against the western sky.[187] These large buildings, together with the numerous other public structures, imposingly situated and strongly relieved, give to the place a dignified, city-like aspect in distant {50} view. After a ride of more than a mile within the immediate suburbs of the town, the traveller ascends a slight elevation, and the next moment finds himself in the public square, surrounded on every side by stores and dwellings, carts and carriages, market-people, horses, and hotels. _Jacksonville, Ill._ XXVII "What a large volume of adventures may be grasped in this little span of life by him who interests his heart in everything, and who, having his eyes to see what time and chance are perpetually holding out to him as he journeyeth on his way, misses nothing he can _fairly_ lay his hands on."--STERNE'S _Sentimental Journal_. "Take this in good part, whosoever thou be, And wish me no worse than I wish unto thee." TURNER. It was a remark of that celebrated British statesman, Horace Walpole, that the vicissitudes of no man's life were too slight to prove interesting, if detailed in the simple order of their occurrence. The idea originated with the poet Gray, if an idea which has suggested itself to the mind of every man may be appropriated by an individual. Assuming the sentiment as true, the author of these SKETCHES has alone presumed to lay his observations and adventures as a traveller before the _majesty of the public_; and upon this principle _solely_ must they rely for any interest they may {51} claim. A mere glance at those which have preceded must convince the reader that their object has been by no means exact geographical and statistical information. Errors and omissions have, doubtless, often occurred in the hasty view which has been taken: partially through negligence, sometimes through lack of knowledge, misinformation, or attempt at brevity, but never through aforethought or malice prepense. Upon the whole, the writer admits himself completely laid open to criticism; and, should any public-spirited worthy deem it his duty to rise up in judgment and avenge the wrongs of literature and the community, he has undoubted right so to do: nathless, he is most veritably forewarned that he will hardly gather up his "labour for his pains!" But _allons_. It is only ten or twelve years since the town site of Jacksonville, now, perhaps, the most flourishing inland village in Illinois, was first _laid off_; and it is but within the past five years that its present unprecedented advancement can be dated.[188] Its site is a broad elevated roll in the midst of a beautiful prairie; and, from whatever point it is approached, few places present a more delightful prospect. The spot seems marked and noted by Nature for the abode of man. The neighbouring prairie is undulating, and the soil uncommonly rich, even in this land of fertility. It is mostly under high cultivation, and upon its northern and western edge is environed by pleasant groves, watered by many a "sweet and curious brook." The public square in the centre of the town is of noble dimensions, {52} occupied by a handsome courthouse and a market, both of brick, and its sides filled up with dwelling-houses, stores, law-offices, a church, bank, and hotel. From this point radiate streets and avenues in all directions: one through each side of every angle near its vertex, and one through the middle of every side; so that the town-plat is completely cut up into rectangles. If I mistake not in my description, it will be perceived that the public square of Jacksonville may be entered at no less than twelve distinct avenues. In addition to the spacious courthouse, the public buildings consist of three or four churches. One of these, belonging to the Congregational order, betrays much correct taste; and its pulpit is the most simply elegant I remember ever to have seen. It consists merely of a broad platform in the chancel of the building, richly carpeted; a dark mahogany bar without drapery, highly polished; and a neat sofa of the same material in a plain back-ground. The outline and proportion are perfect; and, like the doctrines of the sect which worships here, there is an air of severe, dignified elegance about the whole structure, pleasing as it is rare. The number of Congregational churches in the West is exceedingly small; and as it is always pleasant for the stranger in a strange land to meet the peculiarities of that worship to which from childhood-days he has been attached, so it is peculiarly grateful to the New-England emigrant to recognise in this distant spot the simple faith and ceremony of the Pilgrims. Jacksonville is largely made up of emigrants from {53} the North; and they have brought with them many of their customs and peculiarities. The State of Illinois may, indeed, be truly considered the New-England of the West. In many respects it is more congenial than any other to the character and prejudices of the Northern emigrant. It is not a slave state; internal improvement is the grand feature of its civil polity; and measures for the universal diffusion of intellectual, moral, and religious culture are in active progression. In Henry county, in the northern section of the state, two town-plats have within the past year been laid off for colonies of emigrants from Connecticut, which intend removing in the ensuing fall, accompanied each by their minister, physician, lawyer, and with all the various artisans of mechanical labour necessary for such communities. The settlements are to be called Wethersfield and Andover.[189] Active measures for securing the blessings of education, religion, temperance, etc., have already been taken.[190] The edifices of "Illinois College," to which I have before alluded, are situated upon a beautiful eminence one mile west of the village, formerly known as "Wilson's Grove." The site is truly delightful. In the rear lies a dense green clump of oaks, and in front is spread out the village, with a boundless extent of prairie beyond, covered for miles with cultivation. Away to the south, the wildflower flashes as gayly in the sunlight, and {54} waves as gracefully when swept by the breeze, as centuries ago, when no eye of man looked upon its loveliness. During my stay at Jacksonville I visited several times this pleasant spot, and always with renewed delight at the glorious scenery it presented. Connected with the college buildings are extensive grounds; and students, at their option, may devote a portion of each day to manual labour in the workshop or on the farm. Some individuals have, it is said, in this manner defrayed all the expenses of their education. This system of instruction cannot be too highly recommended. Apart from the benefits derived in acquiring a knowledge of the use of mechanical instruments, and the development of mechanical genius, there are others of a higher nature which every one who has been educated at a public institution will appreciate. Who has not gazed with anguish on the sunken cheek and the emaciated frame of the young aspirant for literary distinction? Who has not beheld the funeral fires of intellect while the lamp of life was fading, flaming yet more beautifully forth, only to be dimmed for ever! The lyre is soon to be crushed; but, ere its hour is come, it flings forth notes of melody sweet beyond expression! Who does not know that protracted, unremitting intellectual labour is _always_ fatal, unaccompanied by corresponding physical exertion; and who cannot perceive that _any_ inducement, be it what it may, which can draw forth the student from his retirement, is invaluable. Such an inducement is the lively interest which the cultivated mind {55} always manifests in the operations of mechanical art. Illinois College has been founded but five or six years, yet it is now one of the most flourishing institutions west of the mountains. The library consists of nearly two thousand volumes, and its chymical apparatus is sufficient. The faculty are five in number, and its first class was graduated two years since. No one can doubt the vast influence this seminary is destined to exert, not only upon this beautiful region of country and this state, but over the whole great Western Valley. It owes its origin to the noble enterprise of seven young men, graduates of Yale College, whose names another age will enrol among our Harvards and our Bowdoins, our Holworthys, Elliots, and Gores, great and venerable as those names are. And, surely, we cannot but believe that "some divinity has shaped their ends," when we consider the character of the spot upon which a wise Providence has been pleased to succeed their design. From the Northern lakes to the gulf, where may a more eligible site be designated for an institution whose influence shall be wide, and powerful, and salutary, than that same beautiful grove, in that pleasant village of Jacksonville. To the left of the college buildings is situated the lordly residence of Governor Duncan, surrounded by its extensive grounds.[191] There are other fine edifices scattered here and there upon the eminence, among which the beautiful little cottage of Mr. C., brother to the great orator of the {56} West, holds a conspicuous station.[192] Society in Jacksonville is said to be superior to any in the state. It is of a cast decidedly moral, and possesses much literary taste. This is betrayed in the number of its schools and churches; its lyceum, circulating library, and periodicals. In fine, there are few spots in the West, and none in Illinois, which to the _Northern_ emigrant present stronger attractions than the town of Jacksonville and its vicinity. Located in the heart of a tract of country the most fertile and beautiful in the state; swept by the sweet breath of health throughout the year; tilled by a race of enterprising, intelligent, hardy yeomen; possessing a moral, refined, and enlightened society, the tired wanderer may here find his necessities relieved and his peculiarities respected: he may here find congeniality of feeling and sympathy of heart. And when his memory wanders, as it sometimes must, with melancholy musings, mayhap, over the loved scenes of his own distant New-England, it will be sweet to realize that, though he sees not, indeed, around him the beautiful romance of his native hills, yet many a kindly heart is throbbing near, whose emotions, like his own, were nurtured in their rugged bosom. "_Cælum non animum mutatur._" And is it indeed true, as they often tell us, that New-England character, like her own ungenial clime, is cold, penurious, and heartless; while to her brethren, from whom she is separated only by an imaginary boundary, may be ascribed all that is lofty, and honourable, and chivalrous in man! This is an old {57} calumny, the offspring of prejudice and ignorance, and it were time it were at rest. But it is not for me to contrast the leading features of Northern character with those of the South, or to repel the aspersions which have been heaped upon either. Yet, reader, believe them not; many are false as ever stained the poisoned lip of slander. It was Saturday evening when I reached the village of Jacksonville, and on the following Sabbath I listened to the sage instruction of that eccentric preacher, but venerable old man, Dr. P. of Philadelphia, since deceased, but then casually present. "_The Young Men of the West_" was a subject which had been presented him for discourse, and worthily was it elaborated. The good people of this little town, in more features than one, present a faithful transcript of New-England; but in none do they betray their Pilgrim origin more decidedly than in their devotedness to the public worship of the sanctuary. Here the young and the old, the great and small, the rich and poor, are all as steadily church-goers as were ever the pious husbandmen of Connecticut--men of the broad breast and giant stride--in the most "high and palmy day" of blue-laws and tything men. You smile, reader, yet "Noble deeds those iron men have done!" It was these same church-going, psalm-singing husbandmen who planted Liberty's fair tree within our borders, the leaves of which are now for the "healing of the nations," and whose broad branches are overshadowing the earth; and they watered it--ay, watered it with their blood! The Pilgrim Fathers!--{58} the elder yeomanry of New-England!--the Patriots of the American Revolution!--great names! they shall live enshrined in the heart of Liberty long after those of many a railer are as if they had never been. And happy, happy would it be for the fair heritage bequeathed by them, were not the present generation degenerate sons of noble sires. At Jacksonville I tarried only a few days; but during that short period I met with a few things of tramontane origin, strange enough to my Yankee notions. It was the season approaching the annual election of representatives for the state and national councils, and on one of the days to which I have alluded the political candidates of various creeds _addressed the people_; that is--for the benefit of the uninitiated be it stated--each one made manifest what great things he had done for the people in times past, and promised to do greater things, should the dear people, in the overflowing of their kindness, be pleased to let their choice fall upon him. This is a custom of universal prevalence in the Southern and Western states, and much is urged in its support; yet, sure it is, in no way could a Northern candidate more utterly defeat his election than by attempting to pursue the same. The charge of _self-electioneering_ is, indeed, a powerful engine often employed by political partisans. The candidates, upon the occasion of which I am speaking, were six or seven in number: and though I was not permitted to listen to the _eloquence_ of all, some of these harangues are said to have been powerful productions, especially that of Mr. S. The day {59} was exceedingly sultry, and Mr. W., candidate for the state Senate, was on the _stump_, in shape of a huge meat-block at one corner of the market-house, when I entered.[193] He was a broadfaced, farmer-like personage, with features imbrowned by exposure, and hands hardened by honourable toil; with a huge rent, moreover, athwart his left shoulder-blade--a badge of democracy, I presume, and either neglected or produced there for the occasion; much upon the same principle, doubtless, that Quintilian counselled his disciples to disorder the hair and tumble the toga before they began to speak. Now mind ye, reader, I do not accuse the worthy man of having followed the Roman's instructions, or even of acquaintance therewith, or any such thing; but, verily, he did, in all charity, seem to have hung on his worst rigging, and that, too, for no other reason than to demonstrate the democracy aforesaid, and his affection for the _sans-culottes_. His speech, though garnished with some little rhodomontade, was, upon the whole, a sensible production. I could hardly restrain a smile, however, at one of the worthy man's figures, in which he likened himself to "the _morning sun_, mounting a stump to scatter the mists which had been gathering around his fair fame." Close upon the heels of this _ruse_ followed a beautiful simile--"a people free as the wild breezes of their own broad prairies!" The candidates alternated according to their political creeds, and denounced each other in no very measured terms. The approaching election was found, indeed, to be the prevailing topic of thought and conversation all over the land; insomuch {60} that the writer, himself an unassuming wayfarer, was more than once, strangely enough, mistaken for a _candidate_ as he rode through the country, and was everywhere _catechumened_ as to the articles of his political faith. It would be an amusing thing to a solitary traveller in a country like this, could he always detect the curious surmisings to which his presence gives rise in the minds of those among whom he chances to be thrown; especially so when, from any circumstance, his appearance does not betray his definite rank or calling in life, and anything of mystery hangs around his movements. Internal Improvement seems now to be the order of the day in Northern Illinois. This was the hobby of most of the stump-speakers; and the projected railway from Jacksonville to the river was under sober consideration. I became acquainted, while here, with Mr. C., a young gentleman engaged in laying off the route. It was late in the afternoon when I at length broke away from the hustings, and mounted my horse to pursue my journey to Springfield. The road strikes off from the public square, in a direct line through the prairie, at right angles with that by which I entered, and, _like_ that, ornamented by fine farms. I had rode but a few miles from the village, and was leisurely pursuing my way across the dusty plain, when a quick tramping behind attracted my attention, and in a few moments a little, portly, red-faced man at my side, in linsey-woolsey and a broad-brimmed hat, saluted me frankly with the title of "friend," and forthwith announced himself a "Baptist {61} circuit-rider!" I became much interested in the worthy man before his path diverged from my own; and I flatter myself he reciprocated my regard, for he asked all manner of questions, and related all manner of anecdotes, questioned or not. Among other edifying matter, he gave a full-length biography of a "_billards fever_" from which he was just recovering; even from the premonitory symptoms thereof to the relapse and final convalescence. At nightfall I found myself alone in the heart of an extensive prairie; but the beautiful crescent had now begun to beam forth from the blue heavens; and the wild, fresh breeze of evening, playing among the silvered grass-tops, rendered the hour a delightful one to the traveller. "Spring Island Grove," a thick wood upon an eminence to the right, looked like a region of fairy-land as its dark foliage trembled in the moonlight. The silence and solitude of the prairie was almost startling; and a Herculean figure upon a white horse, as it drew nigh, passed me "on the other side" with a glance of suspicion at my closely-buttoned surtout and muffled mouth, as if to say, "this is too lone a spot to form acquaintance." A few hours--I had crossed the prairie, and was snugly deposited in a pretty little farmhouse in the edge of the grove, with a crusty, surly fellow enough for its master. _Springfield, Ill._ XXVIII "Hee is a rite gude creetur, and travels _all_ the ground over most faithfully." "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together."--SHAKESPEARE. It is a trite remark, that few studies are more pleasing to the inquisitive mind than that of the _nature of man_. But, however this may be, sure it is, few situations in life present greater facilities for watching its developments than that of the ordinary _wayfaring_ traveller. Though I fully agree with Edmund Burke, that "the age of chivalry has passed away," with all its rough virtues and its follies, yet am I convinced that, even in this degenerate era of sophisters, economists, and speculators, when a solitary individual, unconnected with any great movements of the day, throws himself upon his horse, and sallies fearlessly forth upon the arena of the world, whether in _quest_ of adventure or not, he will be quite sure to meet, at least, with some slight "inklings" thereof. A thousand exhibitions of human character will fling themselves athwart his pathway, inconsiderable indeed in themselves, yet which, as days of the year and seconds of the day, go to make up the lineaments of man; and which, from the observation of the pride, and pomp, and circumstance of wealth and equipage, would of necessity be veiled. Under the eye of the solitary {63} wanderer, going forth upon a pilgrimage of observation among the ranks of men--who is met but for once, and whose opinion, favourable or otherwise, can be supposed to exert but trifling influence--there is not that necessity for enveloping those petty weaknesses of our nature in the mantle of selfishness which would, under more imposing circumstances, exist. To the mind of delicate sensibility, unschooled in the ways of man, such exhibitions of human heartlessness might, perchance, be anything but _interesting_; but to one who, elevated by independence of character above the ordinary contingencies of situation and circumstance, can smile at the frailties of his race, even when exhibited at his own expense, they can but afford a fund of interest and instruction. The youthful student, when with fresh, unblunted feeling he for the first time enters the dissecting-room of medical science, turns with sickened, revolting sensibilities from the mutilated form stretched out upon the board before him, while the learned professor, with untrembling nerve, lays bare its secrecies with the crimsoned knife of science. Just so is it with the exhibitions of human nature; yet who will say that dissection of the moral character of man is not as indispensable to an intimate acquaintance with its phenomena, as that of his physical organization for a similar purpose. But, then, there are the brighter features of humanity, which sometimes hang across the wanderer's pathway like the beautiful tints of a summer evening bow; and which, as they are oftenest met reposing beneath the cool, sequestered shades of {64} retirement, where the roar and tumult of a busy world are as the heavy swing of the distant wave, so there, oftener than elsewhere, they serve to cheer the pilgrim traveller's heart. Ah! it is very sweet, from the dull Rembrandt shades of which human character presents but too much, to turn away and dwell upon these green, beautiful spots in the wastes of humanity; these _oases_ in a desert of barrenness; to hope that man, though indeed a depraved, unholy being, is not that _thing_ of utter detestation which a troubled bosom had sometimes forced us to believe. At such moments, worth years of coldness and distrust, how inexpressibly grateful is it to feel the young tendrils of the heart springing forth to meet the proffered affection; curling around our race, and binding it closer and closer to ourselves. But your pardon, reader: my wayward pen has betrayed me into an episode upon poor human nature most unwittingly, I do assure thee. I was only endeavouring to present a few ideas circumstances had casually suggested, which I was sure would commend themselves to every thinking mind, and which some incidents of my wayfaring may serve to illustrate, when lo! forth comes an essay on human nature. It reminds one of Sir Hudibras, who _told the clock by algebra_, or of Dr. Young's satirised gentlewoman, who _drank tea by stratagem_. "How little do men realize the loveliness of this visible world!" is an exclamation which has oftentimes involuntarily left my lips while gazing upon the surpassing splendour of a prairie-sunrise. This is at all times a glorious hour, but to a lonely traveller {65} on these beautiful plains of the departed Illini, it comes on with a charm which words are powerless to express. We call our world a RUIN. Ah! it _is_ one in all its moral and physical relations; but, like the elder cities of the Nile, how vast, how magnificent in its desolation! The astronomer, as he wanders with scientific eye along the sparkling galaxy of a summer's night, tells us that among those clustering orbs, far, far away in the clear realms of upper sky, he catches at times a glimpse of _another_ world! a region of untold, unutterable brightness! the high empyrean, veiled in mystery! And so is it with our own humbler sphere; the glittering fragment of a world _we_ have never known ofttimes glances before us, and then is gone for ever. Before the dawn I had left the farmhouse where I had passed the night, and was thridding the dark old forest on my route to Springfield. The dusky twilight of morning had been slowly stealing over the landscape; and, just as I emerged once more upon my winding prairie-path, the flaming sunlight was streaming wide and far over the opposite heavens. Along the whole line of eastern horizon reposed the purple dies of morning, shooting rapidly upward into broad pyramidal shafts to the zenith, till at last the dazzling orb came rushing above the plain, bathing the scene in an effulgence of light. The day which succeeded was a fine one, and I journeyed leisurely onward, admiring the mellow glories of woodland and prairie, until near noon, when a flashing cupola above the trees reminded me I was approaching {66} Springfield.[194] Owing to its unfavourable situation and the fewness of its public structures, this town, though one of the most important in the state, presents not that imposing aspect to the stranger's eye which some more inconsiderable villages can boast. Its location is the border of an extensive prairie, adorned with excellent farms, and stretching away on every side to the blue line of distant forest. This town, like Jacksonville, was laid out ten or twelve years since, but for a long while contained only a few scattered log cabins: all its present wealth or importance dates from the last six years. Though inferior in many respects to its neighbour and rival, yet such is its location by nature that it can hardly fail of becoming a place of extensive business and crowded population; while its geographically central situation seems to designate it as the capital of the state. An elegant state-house is now erecting, and the seat of government is to be located here in 1840. The public square, a green, pleasant lawn, enclosed by a railing, contains the courthouse and a market, both fine structures of brick: the sides are lined with handsome edifices. Most of the buildings are small, however, and the humble log cabin not unfrequently meets the eye. Among the public structures are a jail, and several houses of worship. Society is said to be excellent, and the place can boast much literary taste. The plan of Internal Improvement projected for the state, when carried out, cannot fail to render Springfield an important place. It was a cool, beautiful evening when I left Springfield and held my way over the prairie, rolling its {67} waving verdure on either side of my path. Long after the village had sunk in the horizon, the bright cupola continued to flame in the oblique rays of the setting sun. I passed many extensive farms on my route, and in a few hours had entered the forest and forded Sangamon _River_--so styled out of pure courtesy, I presume, for at the spot I crossed it seemed little more than a respectable creek, with waters clear as crystal, flowing over clean white sand.[195] At periods of higher stages, however, this stream has been navigated nearly to the confluence of its forks, a distance of some hundred miles; and in the spring of 1832 a boat of some size arrived within five miles of Springfield. An inconsiderable expense in removing logs and overhanging trees, it is said, would render this river navigable for keelboats half the year. The advantages of such a communication, through one of the richest agricultural regions on the globe, can hardly be estimated. The Sangamon bottom has a soil of amazing fertility, and rears from its deep, black mould a forest of enormous sycamores; huge, overgrown, unshapely masses, their venerable limbs streaming with moss. When the traveller enters the depths of these dark old woods, a cold chill runs over his frame, and he feels as if he were entering the sepulchre. A cheerless twilight reigns for ever through them: the atmosphere he inhales has an earthly smell, and is filled with floating greenish exhalations; the moist, black mould beneath his horse's hoofs, piled with vegetable decay for many feet, and upon whose festering bosom the cheering light of day has not smiled for {68} centuries, is rank and yielding: the enormous shafts leaning in all attitudes, their naked old roots enveloped in a green moss of velvet luxuriance, tower a hundred feet above his head, and shut out the heavens from his view: the huge wild-vine leaps forth at their foot and clasps them in its deadly embrace; or the tender ivy and pensile woodbine cluster around the aged giants, and strive to veil with their mantling tapestry the ravages of time. There is much cathedral pomp, much of Gothic magnificence about all this; and one can hardly fling off from his mind the awe and solemnity which gathers over it amid the chill, silent, and mysterious solitude of the scene. Emerging from the river-bottom, my pathway lay along a tract of elevated land, among beautiful forest-glades of stately oaks, through whose long dim aisles the yellow beams of summer sunset were now richly streaming. Once more upon the broad prairie, and the fragment of an iris was glittering in the eastern heavens: turning back, my eye caught a view of that singular but splendid phenomenon, seldom witnessed--a heavy, distant rain-shower between the spectator and the departing sun. Nightfall found me at the residence of Mr. D., an intelligent, gentlemanly farmer, with whom I passed an agreeable evening. I was not long in discovering that my host was a candidate for civic honours; and that he, with his friend Mr. L., whose speech I had subsequently the pleasure of perusing, had just returned from Mechanicsburg,[196] a small village in the vicinity, where they had been exerting themselves upon the stump to win the _aura popularis_ for the coming election. "_Sic itur ad astra!_" {69} Before sunrise I had crossed the threshold of my hospitable entertainer; and having wound my solitary way, partially by twilight, over a prairie fifteen miles in extent, "Began to feel, as well I might, The keen demands of appetite." Reining up my tired steed at the door of a log cabin in the middle of the plain, the nature and extent of my necessities were soon made known to an aged matron, who had come forth on my approach. "Some victuals you shall get, _stran-ger_; but you'll just take your _creetur_ to the crib and _gin_ him his feed; _bekase_, d'ye see, the old man is kind o' _drinkin_ to-day; yester' was 'lection, ye know." From the depths of my sympathetic emotions was I moved for the poor old body, who with most dolorous aspect had delivered herself of this message; and I had proceeded forthwith, agreeable to instructions, to satisfy the cravings of my patient animal, when who should appear but my tipsified host, _in propria persona_, at the door. The little old gentleman came tottering towards the spot where I stood, and, warmly squeezing my hand, whispered to me, with a most irresistible serio-comic air, "_that he was drunk_;" and "that he was four hours last night getting home from _'lection_," as he called it. "Now, stran-ger, you won't think hard on me," he continued, in his maudlin manner: "I'm a poor, drunken old fellow! but old Jim wan't al'ays so; old Jim wan't al'ays so!" he exclaimed, with bitterness, burying his face in his toilworn hands, as, having now regained the house, he seated himself with difficulty upon the {70} doorstep. "Once, my son, old Jim could knock down, drag out, whip, lift, or throw any man in all Sangamon, if he _was_ a _leetle_ fellow: but _now_--there's the receipt of his disgrace--there," he exclaimed, with vehemence, thrusting forth before my eyes two brawny, gladiator arms, in which the volumed muscles were heaving and contracting with excitement; ironed by labour, but shockingly mutilated. Expressing astonishment at the spectacle, he assured me that these wounds had been torn in the flesh by the teeth of infuriated antagonists in drunken quarrels, though the relation seemed almost too horrible to be true. Endeavouring to divert his mind from this disgusting topic, on which it seemed disposed to linger with ferocious delight, I made some inquiries relative to his farm--which was, indeed, a beautiful one, under high culture--and respecting the habits of the prairie-wolf, a large animal of the species having crossed my path in the prairie in the gray light of dawn. Upon the latter inquiry the old man sat silent a moment with his chin leaning on his hands. Looking up at length with an arch expression, he said, "Stran-ger, I _haint_ no _larnin_; I _can't_ read; but don't the Book say somewhere about old Jacob and the ring-streaked cattle?" "Yes." "Well, and how old Jake's ring-streaked and round-spotted _creeturs_, after a _leetle_, got the better of all the stock, and overrun the _univarsal_ herd; don't the Book say so?" "Something so." "Well, now for the wolves: they're all colours but ring-streaked and round-spotted; and if the sucker-farmers don't look to it, the prairie-wolves will get {71} the better of all the geese, turkeys, and _hins_ in the barnyard, speckled or no!" My breakfast was now on the table; a substantial fare of corn-bread, butter, honey, fresh eggs, _fowl_, and _coffee_, which latter are as invariably visitants at an Illinois table as is bacon at a Kentucky one, and that is saying no little. The exhilarating herb tea is rarely seen. An anecdote will illustrate this matter. A young man, journeying in Illinois, stopped one evening at a log cabin with a violent headache, and requested that never-failing antidote, _a cup of tea_. There was none in the house; and, having despatched a boy to a distant grocery to procure a pound, he threw himself upon the bed. In a few hours a beverage was handed him, the first swallow of which nearly excoriated his mouth and throat. In the agony of the moment he dashed down the bowl, and rushed half blinded to the fireplace. Over the blaze was suspended a huge iron kettle, half filled with an inky fluid, seething, and boiling, and bubbling, like the witches' caldron of unutterable things in Macbeth. The good old lady, in her anxiety to give her sick guest a _strong_ dish of tea, having never seen the like herself or drank thereof, and supposing it something of the nature of soup, very innocently and ignorantly poured the whole pound into her largest kettle, and set it a boiling. Poultry is the other standing dish of Illinois; and the poor birds seem to realize that their destiny is at hand whenever a traveller draws nigh, for they invariably hide their heads beneath the nearest covert. Indeed, so invariably are poultry and bacon visitants at an Illinois table, that {72} the story _may_ be true, that the first inquiry made of the guest by the village landlord is the following: "Well, stran-ger, what'll ye take: wheat-bread and _chicken fixens_, or corn-bread and _common doins_?" by the latter expressive and elegant soubriquet being signified bacon. Breakfast being over, my foot was once more in the stirrup. The old man accompanied me to the gateway, and shaking my hand in a boisterous agony of good-nature, pressed me to visit him again when he was _not drunk_. I had proceeded but a few steps on my way when I heard his voice calling after me, and turned my head: "Stran-ger! I say, stran-ger! what do you reckon of sending this young Jack Stewart to Congress?" "Oh, he'll answer." "Well, and that's what I'm a going to vote; and there's a heap o' people always thinks like old Jim does; and that's what made 'em get me groggy last night." I could not but commiserate this old man as I pursued my journey, reflecting on what had passed. He was evidently no common toper; for some of his remarks evinced a keenness of observation, and a depth and shrewdness of thought, which even the withering blight of drunkenness had not completely deadened; and which, with other habits and other circumstances, might have placed him far above the beck and nod of every demagogue. _Decatur, Ill._ XXIX "Ay, but to die, and go we know not where!" _Measure for Measure._ "Plains immense, interminable meads, And vast savannas, where the wand'ring eye, Unfix'd, is in a verdant ocean lost." THOMSON. "Ye shall have miracles; ay, sound ones too, Seen, heard, attested, everything but true." MOORE. "Call in the barber! If the tale be long, He'll cut it short, I trust." MIDDLETON. There are few sentiments of that great man Benjamin Franklin for which he is more to be revered than for those respecting the burial-place of the departed.[197] The grave-yard is, and should ever be deemed, a _holy_ spot; consecrated, not by the cold formalities of unmeaning ceremony, but by the solemn sacredness of the heart. Who that has committed to earth's cold bosom the relics of one dearer, perchance, than existence, can ever after pass the burial-ground with a careless heart. There is nothing which more painfully jars upon my own feelings--if I may except that wanton desecration of God's sanctuary in some sections of our land {74} for a public commitia--than to see the grave-yard slighted and abused. It is like wounding the memory of a buried friend. And yet it is an assertion which cannot be refuted, that, notwithstanding the reverence which, as a people, we have failed not to manifest for the memory of our dead, the same delicate regard and obsequy is not with us observed in the sacred rites as among the inhabitants of the Eastern hemisphere. If, indeed, we may be permitted to gather up an opinion from circumstances of daily notoriety, it would seem that the plat of ground appropriated as a cemetery in many of the villages of our land was devoted to this most holy of purposes solely because useless for every other; as if, after seizing upon every spot for the benefit of the living, this last poor _remnant_ was reluctantly yielded as a resting-place for the departed. And thus has it happened that most of the burial-grounds of our land have either been located in a region so lone and solitary, "You scarce would start to meet a spirit there," or they have been thrust out into the very midst of business, strife, and contention; amid the glare of sunshine, noise, and dust; "the gaudy, babbling, and remorseless day," with hardly a wall of stones to protect them from the inroads of unruly brutes or brutish men. It is as if the rites of sepulture were refused, and the poor boon of a resting-place in the bosom of our common mother denied to her offspring; as if, in our avarice of soul, we grudged even the last narrow house destined for all; and {75} fain would resume the last, the only gift our departed ones may retain. Who would not dread "_to die_" and have his lifeless clay deposited thus! Who would not, ere the last fleeting particle of existence had "ebbed to its finish," and the feeble breathing had forsaken its tenement for ever, pour forth the anguish of his spirit in the melancholy prayer, "When breath and sense have left this clay, In yon damp vault, oh lay me not! But kindly bear my bones away To some lone, green, and sunny spot." Reverence for the departed is ever a beautiful feature of humanity, and has struck us with admiration for nations of our race who could boast but few redeeming traits beside. It is, moreover, a circumstance not a little remarkable in the history of funeral obsequy, that veneration for the departed has prevailed in a ratio almost inverse to the degree of civilization. Without attempting to account for this circumstance, or to instance the multitude of examples which recur to every mind in its illustration, I would only refer to that deep religion of the soul which Nature has implanted in the heart of her simple child of the Western forests, teaching him to preserve and to honour the bones of his fathers! And those mysterious mausoleums of a former race! do they convey no meaning as they rise in lonely grandeur from our beautiful prairies, and look down upon the noble streams which for ages have dashed their dark floods along their base! {76} But a few years have passed away since this empire valley of the West was first pressed by the footstep of civilized man; and, if we except those aged sepulchres of the past, the cities of the dead hardly yet range side by side with the cities of the living. But this cannot _always_ be; even in this distant, beautiful land, death _must_ come; and here it doubtless has come, as many an anguished bosom can witness. Is it not, then, meet, while the busy tide of worldly enterprise is rolling heavily forth over this fair land, and the costly structures of art and opulence are rising on every side, as by the enchantment of Arabian fiction--is it _not_ meet that, amid the pauses of excitement, a solitary thought would linger around that spot, which must surely, reader, become the last resting-place of us all! I have often, in my wanderings through this pleasant land, experienced a thrill of delight which I can hardly describe, to behold, on entering a little Western hamlet, a neat white paling rising up beneath the groves in some green, sequestered spot, whose object none could mistake. Upon some of these, simple as they were, seemed to have been bestowed more than ordinary care; for they betrayed an elaborateness of workmanship and a delicacy of design sought for in vain among the ruder habitations of the living. This is, _surely_, as it should be; and I pity the man whose feelings cannot appreciate such a touching, beautiful expression of the heart. I have alluded to Franklin, and how pleasant it is to detect the kindly, household emotions of our nature throbbing beneath the {77} starred, dignified breast of philosophy and science. FRANKLIN, the statesman, the sage; he who turned the red lightnings from their wild pathway through the skies, and rocked the iron cradle of the mightiest democracy on the globe! we gaze upon him with awe and astonishment; involuntarily we yield the lofty motto presented by the illustrious Frenchman,[198] "_Eripuit fulmen coelo, mox sceptra tyrannis_." But when we behold that towering intellect descending from its throne, and intermingling its emotions even with those of the lowliest mind, admiration and reverence are lost in _love_. The preceding remarks, which have lengthened out themselves far beyond my design, were suggested by the loveliness of the site of the graveyard of the little village of Decatur. I was struck with its beauty on entering the place. It was near sunset; in the distance slept the quiet hamlet; upon my right, beneath the grove, peeped out the white paling through the glossy foliage; and as the broad, deep shadows of summer evening streamed lengthening through the trees wide over the landscape, that little spot seemed to my mind the sweetest one in the scene. And should not the burial-ground be ever thus! for who shall tell the emotions which may swell the bosom of many a dying emigrant who here shall find his long, last rest? In that chill hour, how will the thought of home, kindred, friendships, childhood-scenes, come rushing over the memory! and to lay his bones in the {78} quiet graveyard of his own native village, perchance may draw forth many a sorrowing sigh. But this now may never be; yet it will be consoling to the pilgrim-heart to realize that, though the resurrection morn shall find his relics far from the graves of his fathers, he shall yet sleep the long slumber, and at last come forth with those who were kind and near to him in a stranger-land; who laid away his cold clay in no "Potter's Field," but gathered it to their own household sepulchre. The human mind, whatever its philosophy, can never utterly divest itself of the idea that the spirit retains a consciousness of the lifeless body, sympathizing with its honour or neglect, and affected by all that variety of circumstance which may attend its existence: and who shall say how far this belief--superstition though it be--may smooth or trouble the dying pillow! How soothing, too, the reflection to the sorrow of distant friends, that their departed one peacefully and decently was gathered to his rest; that his dust is sleeping quietly in some sweet, lonely spot beneath the dark groves of the far-land; that his turf is often dewed by the teardrop of sympathy, and around his lowly headstone waves the wild-grass ever green and free! The son, the brother, the loved wanderer from his father's home, "Is in his grave! After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well." The route leading to Decatur from the west lies chiefly through a broad branch of the "Grand Prairie," an immense plain, sweeping diagonally, with {79} little interruption, through the whole State of Illinois, from the Mississippi to the Wabash. For the first time, in any considerable number, I here met with those singular granite masses, termed familiarly by the settlers "_lost rocks_"; in geology, _boulders_. They are usually of a mammillated, globular figure, the surface perfectly smooth, sometimes six hundred tons in weight, and always lying completely isolated, frequently some hundred miles from a quarry. They rest upon the surface or are slightly imbedded in the soil; and, so far as my own observation extends, are of distinct granitic formation, of various density and composition. Several specimens I obtained are as heavy as metal, and doubtless contain iron. Many of them, however, like those round masses dug from the ancient works in Ohio, are pyritous in character. There is a mystery about these "lost rocks" not easily solved, for no granite quarry has ever yet been discovered in Illinois. Their appearance, in the midst of a vast prairie, is dreary and lonely enough. The site of the town of Decatur is somewhat depressed, and in the heart of a grove of noble oaks.[199] Long before the traveller reaches it, the whole village is placed before his eye from the rounded summit of the hill, over which winds the road. The neighbouring region is well settled; the prairie high and rolling, and timber abundant. It is not a large place, however; and perhaps there are few circumstances which will render it otherwise for some years. It contains, nevertheless, a few handsome buildings; several trading establishments; a good tavern; is said to be healthy; and, upon the whole, is a far {80} prettier, neater little village than many others of loftier pretensions through which I have passed in Illinois. The village will be intersected by two of the principal railroads of the state, now projected, which circumstance cannot fail to place it in the first rank as an inland trading town. My visit at Decatur was a short one; and, after tea, just as the moon was beginning to silver the tops of the eastern oaks, I left the village and rode leisurely through the forest, in order to enter upon the prairie at dawn the following day. A short distance from Decatur I again forded the Sangamon; the same insignificant stream as ever; and, by dint of scrambling, succeeded in attaining the lofty summit of its opposite bank, from which the surrounding scenery of rolling forest-tops was magnificent and sublime. From this elevation the pathway plunged into a thick grove, dark as Erebus, save where lighted up by a few pale moonbeams struggling through a break in the tree-tops, or the deep-red gleamings of the evening sky streaming at intervals along the undergrowth. The hour was a calm and impressive one: its very loneliness made it sweeter; and that beautiful hymn of the Tyrolean peasantry at sunset, as versified by Mrs. Hemans, was forcibly recalled by the scene: "Come to the sunset tree! The day is past and gone; The woodman's axe lies free, And the reaper's work is done. Sweet is the hour of rest! Pleasant the wood's low sigh, And the gleaming of the west, And the turf whereon we lie." {81} After a ride of a few miles my path suddenly emerged from the forest upon the edge of a boundless prairie, from whose dark-rolling herbage, here and there along the distant swells, was thrown back the glorious moonlight, as if from the restless, heaving bosom of the deep. An extensive prairie, beneath a full burst of summer moonlight, is, indeed, a magnificent spectacle. One can hardly persuade himself that he is not upon the ocean-shore. And now a wild, fresh breeze, which all the day had been out playing among the perfumed flowers and riding the green-crested waves, came rolling in from the prairie, producing an undulation of its surface and a murmuring in the heavy forest-boughs perfect in the illusion. All along the low, distant horizon hung a thin mist of silvery gauze, which, as it rose and fell upon the dark herbage, gave an idea of mysterious boundlessness to the scene. Here and there stood out a lonely, weather-beaten tree upon the plain, its trunk shrouded in obscurity, but its leafy top sighing in the night-breeze, and gleaming like a beacon-light in the beams of the cloudless moon. There was a dash of fascinating romance about the scene, which held me involuntarily upon the spot until reminded by the chill dews of night that I had, as yet, no shelter. On casting around my eye, I perceived a low log cabin, half buried in vegetation, standing alone in the skirt of the wood. Although a miserable tenement, necessity compelled me to accept its hospitality, and I entered. It consisted of a single apartment, in which two beds, two stools, a cross-legged deal table, {82} and a rough clothes-press, were the only household furniture. A few indispensable iron utensils sat near the fire; the water-pail and gourd stood upon the shelf, and a half-consumed flitch of bacon hung suspended in the chimney; but the superlatives of andirons, shovel and tongs, etc., etc., were all unknown in this primitive abode. A pair of "lost rocks"--_lost_, indeed--supplied the first, and the gnarled branch of an oak was substituted for the latter. The huge old chimney and fireplace were, as usual, fashioned of sticks and bedaubed with clay; yet everything looked neat, yea, _comfortable_, in very despite of poverty itself. A young female with her child, an infant boy, in her arms, was superintending the preparation of the evening meal. Her language and demeanour were superior to the miserable circumstances by which she was surrounded; and though she moved about her narrow demesne with a quiet, satisfied air, I was not long in learning that _affection_ alone had transplanted this exotic of the prairie from a more congenial soil. What woman does not love to tell over those passages of her history in which the _heart_ has ruled lord of the ascendant? and how very different in this respect is our sex from hers! Man, proud man, "the creature of interest and ambition," often blushes to be reminded that he has a heart, while woman's cheek mantles with the very intensity of its pulsation! The husband in a few minutes came in from attending to my horse; the rough table was spread; a humble fare was produced; all were seated; and then, beneath that miserable roof, {83} around that meager board, before a morsel of the food, poor as it was, passed the lip of an individual, the iron hand of toil was reverently raised, and a grateful heart called down a blessing from the Mightiest! Ah! thought I, as I beheld the peaceful, satisfied air of that poor man, as he partook of his humble evening meal with gratefulness, little does the son of luxury know the calm contentment which fills his breast! And the great God, as he looks down upon his children and reads their hearts, does he not listen to many a warmer, purer thank-offering from beneath the lowly roof-tree of the wilderness, than from all the palaces of opulence and pride? So it has ever been--so it has _ever_ been--and so can it never cease to be while the heart of man remains attempered as it is. The humble repast was soon over; and, without difficulty, I entered into conversation with the father of the family. He informed me that he had been but a few years a resident of Illinois; that he had been unfortunate; and that, recently, his circumstances had become more than usually circumscribed, from his endeavours to save from speculators a pre-emption right of the small farm he was cultivating. This farm was his _all_; and, in his solicitude to retain its possession, he had disposed of every article of the household which would in any way produce money, even of a part of his own and his wife's wardrobe. I found him a man of considerable intelligence, and he imparted to me some facts respecting that singular sect styling themselves Mormonites of which I was previously hardly aware. Immense {84} crowds of these people had passed his door on the great road from Terre Haute, all with families and household effects stowed away in little one-horse wagons of peculiar construction, and on their journey to Mount Zion, the New Jerusalem, situated near Independence, Jackson county, Missouri! Their observance of the Sabbath was almost pharisaically severe, never permitting themselves to travel upon that day; the men devoting it to hunting, and the females to washing clothes, and other operations of the camp! It was their custom, likewise, to hold a preachment in every village or settlement, whether men would hear or forbear: the latter must have been the case with something of a majority, I think, since no one with whom I have ever met could, for the life of him, give a subsequent expose of _Mormonism_, "though often requested." "I never heard or could engage A person yet by prayers, or bribes, or tears, To name, define by speech, or write on page, The _doctrines_ meant precisely by that word, Which surely is exceedingly absurd." They assert that an angelic messenger has appeared to Joe Smith, announcing the millennial dawn at hand; that a glorious city of the faithful--the New Jerusalem, with streets of gold and gates of pearl--is about to be reared upon Mount Zion, Mo., where the Saviour will descend and establish a kingdom to which there shall be no end; ergo, argue these everlasting livers, it befits all good citizens to get to Independence, Jackson county, aforesaid, as fast as one-horse wagons will convey them![200] Large quantities of arms and ammunition have, moreover, been {85} forwarded, so that the item of "the sword being beaten into a ploughshare, and spear into pruning-hook," seems not of probable fulfilment according to these worthies. The truth of the case is, they anticipated a brush with the long-haired "pukes"[201] before securing a "demise, release, and for ever quitclaim" to Zion Hill, said _pukes_ having already at sundry times manifested a refractory spirit, and, from the following anecdote of my good man of the hut, in "rather a ridic'lous manner." I am no voucher for the story: I give it as related; "and," as Ben Jonson says, "what he has possessed me withal, I'll discharge it amply." "One Sabbath evening, when the services of the congregation of the Mormonites were over, the Rev. Joe Smith, priest and prophet, announced to his expectant tribe that, on the succeeding Sabbath, the baptismal sacrament would take place, when an angel would appear on the opposite bank of the stream. Next Sabbath came, and 'great was the company of the people' to witness the miraculous visitation. The baptism commenced, and was now wellnigh concluded: 'Do our eyes deceive us! can such things _be_! The prophecy! the angel!' were exclamations which ran through the multitude, as a fair form, veiled in a loose white garment, with flowing locks and long bright pinions, stood suddenly before the assembled multitude upon the opposite shore, and then disappeared! All was amazement, consternation, awe! But where is Joe Smith? In a few moments Joe Smith was with them, and their faith was confirmed. {86} "Again was a baptism appointed--again was the angel announced--a larger congregation assembled--and yet again did the angel appear. At that moment two powerful men sprang from a thicket, rushed upon the angelic visitant, and, amid mingling exclamations of horror and _execrations_ of piety from the spectators, tore away his long white wings, his hair and robe, and plunged him into the stream! By some unaccountable metamorphosis, the angel emerged from the river honest Joe Smith, priest of Mormon, finder of the golden plates, etc., etc., and the magi of the enchantment were revealed in the persons of two brawny _pukes_." Since then, the story concludes, not an angel has been seen all about Mount Zion! The miracle of walking upon water was afterward essayed, but failed by the removal, by some impious wags, of the _benches_ prepared for the occasion. It is truly astonishing to what lengths superstition has run in some sections of this same Illinois. Not long since, a knowing farmer in the county of Macon conceived himself ordained of heaven a promulgator to the world of a system of "New Light," so styled, upon "a plan entirely new." No sooner did the idea strike his fancy, than, leaving the plough in the middle of the furrow, away sallies he to the nearest village, and admonishes every one, everywhere, forthwith to be baptized by his heaven-appointed hands, and become a regenerate man on the spot. Many believed--was there ever faith too preposterous to obtain proselytes? the doctrine, in popular phrase, "took mightily;" and, it must be confessed, the whole world, men, women, and children, were {87} in a fair way for regeneration. Unfortunately for that desirable consummation, at this crisis certain simple-hearted people thereabouts, by some freak of fancy or other, took it into their heads that the priest himself manifested hardly that _quantum_ of the regenerated spirit that beseemed so considerable a functionary. Among other peccadilloes, he had unhappily fallen into a habit every Sabbath morning, when he rode in from his farmhouse--a neat little edifice which the good people had erected for his benefit in the outskirts of the village--of trotting solemnly up before the grocery-door upon his horse, receiving a glass of some dark-coloured liquid, character unknown, drinking it off with considerable gusto, dropping a _picayune_ into the tumbler, then proceeding to the pulpit, and, on the inspiration of the mysterious potation, holding vehemently forth. Sundry other misdeeds of the reverend man near about the same time came to light, so that at length the old women pronounced that terrible fiat, "the preacher was no _better_ than he should be;" which means, as everybody knows, that he was a good deal _worse_. And so the men, old and young, chimed in, and the priest was politely advised to decamp before the doctrine should get unsavoury. Thus ended the glorious discovery of New-lightism! It is a humiliating thing to review the aberrations of the human mind: and, believe me, reader, my intention in reviewing these instances of religious fanaticism has been not to excite a smile of transient merriment, nor for a moment to call in question the {88} reality of true devotion. My intention has been to show to what extremes of preposterous folly man may be hurried when he once resigns himself to the vagaries of fancy upon a subject which demands the severest deductions of reason. It is, indeed, a _melancholy_ consideration, that, in a country like our own, which we fondly look upon as the hope of the world, and amid the full-orbed effulgence of the nineteenth century, there should exist a body of men, more than twelve thousand in number, as is estimated, professing belief in a faith so unutterably absurd as that styled Mormonism; a faith which would have disgraced the darkest hour of the darkest era of our race.[202] But it is not for me to read the human _heart_. _Shelbyville, Ill._ XXX "The day is lowering; stilly black Sleeps the grim waste, while heaven's rack, Dispersed and wild, 'tween earth and sky Hangs like a shatter'd canopy!" _Fire-worshippers._ "Rent is the fleecy mantle of the sky; The clouds fly different; and the sudden sun By fits effulgent gilds the illumined fields, And black by fits the shadows sweep along." THOMSON. "The bleak winds Do sorely ruffle; for many miles about There's scarce a bush." _Lear, Act 2._ "These are the Gardens of the Desert." BRYANT. Merrily, merrily did the wild night-wind howl, and whistle, and rave around the little low cabin beneath whose humble roof-tree the traveller had lain himself to rest. Now it would roar and rumble down the huge wooden chimney, and anon sigh along the tall grass-tops and through the crannies like the wail of some lost one of the waste. The moonbeams, at intervals darkened by the drifting clouds and again pouring gloriously forth, streamed in long threads of silver through the shattered walls; while the shaggy forest in the back-ground, tossing its heavy branches against the troubled sky, {90} roared forth a deep chorus to the storm. It was a wild night, and so complete was the illusion that, in the fitful lullings of the tempest, one almost imagined himself on the ocean-beach, listening to the confused weltering of the surge. There was much of high sublimity in all this; and hours passed away before the traveller, weary as he was, could quiet his mind to slumber. There are seasons when every chord, and nerve, and sinew of the system seems wound up to its severest tension; and a morbid, unnatural excitement broods over the mind, forbidding all approach to quietude. Every one has _experienced_ this under peculiar circumstances; few can _describe_ it. The night wore tediously away, and at the dawn the traveller was again in the saddle, pushing forth like a "pilgrim-bark" upon the swelling ocean-waste, sweeping even to the broad curve of undulating horizon beyond. There is always something singularly unpleasant in the idea of going out upon one of these vast prairies _alone_; and such the sense of utter loneliness, that the solitary traveller never fails to cast back a lingering gaze upon the last low tenement he is leaving. The winds were still up, and the rack and clouds were scudding in wild confusion along the darkened sky; "Here, flying loosely as the mane Of a young war-horse in the blast; There, roll'd in masses dark and swelling, As proud to be the thunder's dwelling!" From time to time a heavy blast would come careering {91} with resistless fury along the heaving plain, almost tearing the rider from his horse. The celebrated "Grand Prairie," upon which I was now entering, stretched itself away to the south thirty miles, a vast, unbroken meadow; and one may conceive, not describe, the terrible fury of a storm-wind sweeping over a surface like this.[203] As the morning advanced, the violence of the tempest lulled into fitful gusts; and, as the centre of the vast amphitheatre was attained, a scene of grandeur and magnificence opened to my eye such as it never before had looked upon. Elevated upon a full roll of the prairie, the glance ranged over a scene of seemingly limitless extent; for upon every side, for the first time in my ramble, the deep blue line of the horizon and the darker hue of the waving verdure blended into one. The touching, delicate loveliness of the lesser prairies, so resplendent in brilliancy of hue and beauty of outline, I have often dwelt upon with delight. The graceful undulation of slope and swell; the exquisite richness and freshness of the verdure flashing in native magnificence; the gorgeous dies of the matchless and many-coloured flowers dallying with the winds; the beautiful woodland points and promontories shooting forth into the mimic sea; the far-retreating, shadowy _coves_, going back in long vistas into the green wood; the curved outline of the dim, distant horizon, caught at intervals through the openings of the forest; and the whole gloriously lighted up by the early radiance of morning, as with rosy footsteps she came dancing {92} over the dew-gemmed landscape; all these constituted a scene in which beauty unrivalled was the sole ingredient. And then those bright enamelled clumps of living emerald, sleeping upon the wavy surface like the golden Hesperides of classic fiction, or, like another cluster of Fortunate Isles in the dark-blue waters, breathing a fragrance as from oriental bowers; the wild-deer bounding in startled beauty from his bed, and the merry note of the skylark, whistling, with speckled vest and dew-wet wing, upon the resin-weed, lent the last touchings to Nature's _chef d'oeuvre_. "Oh, beautiful, still beautiful, Though long and lone the way." But the scene amid which I was now standing could boast an aspect little like this. Here, indeed, were the rare and delicate flowers; and life, in all its fresh and beautiful forms, was leaping forth in wild and sportive luxuriance at my feet. But all was vast, measureless, Titanic; and the loveliness of the picture was lost in its grandeur. Here was no magnificence of _beauty_, no _gorgeousness_ of vegetation, no _splendour_ of the wilderness; "Green isles and circling shores _ne'er_ blended here In wild reality!" All was bold and impressive, reposing in the stern, majestic solitude of Nature. On every side the earth heaved and rolled like the swell of troubled waters; now sweeping away in the long heavy wave of ocean, and now rocking and curling like the abrupt, broken bay-billow tumbling around the {93} crag. Between the lengthened parallel ridges stretch the ravines by which the prairie is drained; and, owing to the depth and tenacity of the soil, they are sometimes almost impassable. Ascending from these, the elevation swells so gradually as to be almost imperceptible to the traveller, until he finds himself upon the summit, and the immense landscape is spread out around him. "The clouds Sweep over with their shadows, and beneath, The surface rolls and fluctuates to the eye; Dark hollows seem to glide along and chase The sunny ridges." The diversity of light and shade upon the swells and depressions at the hour of sunrise, or when at midday clouds are drifting along the sky, is endless. A few points here and there are thrown into prominent relief; while others, deeply retreating, constitute an imaginary back-ground perfect in its kind. And then the sunlight, constantly changing its position, is received upon such a variety of angles, and these, too, so rapidly vary as the breeze rolls over the surface, that it gives the scene a wild and shifting aspect to the eye at times, barely reconcilable with the idea of reality. As the sun reached the meridian the winds went down, and then the stillness of death hung over the prairie. The utter desolateness of such a scene is indescribable. Not a solitary tree to intercept the vision or to break the monotony; not a sound to cheer the ear or relieve the desolation; not a living {94} thing in all that vast wild plain to tell the traveller that he was not "Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide, wide sea!" It is at such a season that the question presents itself with more than ordinary vehemence to the mind, _To what circumstance do these vast prairies owe their origin_? Amid what terrible convulsion of the elements did these great ocean-plains heave themselves into being? What mighty voice has rolled this heaped-up surface into tumult, and then, amid the storm and the tempest, bid the curling billows stand, and fixed them there? "The hand that built the firmament hath heaved And smooth'd these verdant swells." The origin of the prairie has given rise to much speculation. Some contend that we are to regard these vast plains in the same light as mountains, valleys, forests, and other grand features of Nature's workmanship. And, it is very true, plains of a character not dissimilar are to be met with all over our earth; at every degree of elevation of every extent, and of every stage of fertility, from the exhaustless fecundity of the delta of the Nile to the barren sterility of the sands of the desert. Northern Asia has her boundless _pastures_ and _steppes_, where the wild Tartar feeds his flock; Africa may boast her Bedouin _sands_, her _tablelands_, and her _karroos_; South America her grassy _llanos_ and _pampas_; Europe her purple _heather_; India her _jungles_; the southern sections of our own land their beautiful _savannas_; and wherefore not the {95} vast regions of the "Far West" their broad-rolling _prairies_? The word is of French derivation, signifying _meadow_; and is applied to every description of surface destitute of timber and clothed with grass. It was, then, upon their own fair prairies of Judea and Mesopotamia that the ancient patriarchs pitched their tents. The tough sward of the prairie, when firmly formed, it is well known, refuses to receive the forest; but, once broken into by the ploughshare or by any other cause, and protected from the autumnal flames, and all is soon rolling with green; and the sumach, the hazel, and the wild-cherry are succeeded by the oak. Such is the argument for the _natural_ origin of the prairie, and its cogency none will deny. But, assuming for a moment a _diluvial_ origin to these vast plains, as a thousand circumstances concur to indicate, and the phenomena are far more satisfactorily and philosophically resolved. In a soil so exhaustlessly fertile, the grasses and herbs would first secure possession of the surface. Even now, whenever the earth is thrown up, from whatever depth, it is immediately mossed with verdure by the countless embryos buried in its teeming bosom; a proof incontestable of secondary origin. After the grasses succeeded flowering shrubs; then the larger weeds; eventually, thickets were formed; the surface was baked and hardened by the direct rays of the sun, and the bosom of the soil, bound up as if by bands of brass and iron, utterly refused to receive or nourish the seeds of the forest now strewn over it. This is the unavoidable conclusion wherever natural {96} causes have held their sway. Upon the borders of rivers, creeks, and overflowing streams, or wherever the soil has become broken, this series of causes was interrupted, and the result we see in the numerous island-groves, and in the forests which invariably fringe the water-courses, great and small. The autumnal fires, too, aboriginal tradition informs us, have annually swept these vast plains from an era which the memory of man faileth to record, scathing and consuming every bush, shrub, or thicket which in the lapse of ages might have aspired to the dignity of a tree; a nucleus around which other trees might have clustered. Here and there, indeed, amid the heaving waste, a desolate, wind-shaken, flame-blackened oak rears its naked branches in the distance; but it is a stricken thing, and only confirms the position assumed. From a concurrence of fortuitous circumstances easily conceived, the solitary seed was received into a genial soil; the tender shrub and the sapling were protected from destruction, and at length it had struggled into the upper air, and defied alike the flames and blasts of the prairie. The argument of _analogy_ for the _natural origin_ of the prairie may also be fairly questioned, since careful examination of the subject must convince any unprejudiced mind that the similarity of feature between these plains and others with which we are acquainted is not sufficiently striking to warrant comparison. The _pampas_, the _steppes_, and the _sand-plains_, though not unlike in the more prominent characteristics, are yet widely different {97} in configuration, extent, and soil. The prairie combines characteristics of each, exhibiting features of all in _common_, of no one in _particular_. Who would institute comparison between the dark-rolling luxuriance of the North American prairie, and the gloomy moor of Northern Europe, with its heavy, funereal mantle of heather and _ling_. Could the rifest fancy conjure up the _weird sisters_, all "so withered and so wild in their attire," upon these beautiful plains of the departed Illini! Nor do we meet in the thyme-breathing downs of "merry England," the broad rich levels of France, the grape-clad highlands of Spain, or in the golden mellowness of the Italian _Campagna_, with a similitude of feature sufficiently striking to identify our own glorious prairies with them. Europe can boast, indeed, no peculiarity of surface assuming like configuration or exhibiting like phenomena. When, then, we reflect, that of all those plains which spread out themselves upon our globe, the North American prairie possesses characteristics peculiar to itself, and to be met with nowhere beside; when we consider the demonstrations of a soil of origin incontestably diluvial; when we wander over the heaving, billowy surface, and behold it strewed with the rocky offspring of another region, and, at intervals, encased in the saline crust of the ocean-sediment; when we dive into its fathomless bosom, and bring forth the crumbling relics of man and animal from sepulchres into which, for untold cycles, they have been entombed; and when we linger along those rolling streams by which they {98} are intersected, and behold upon their banks the mighty indications of whirling, subsiding floods, and behold buried in the heart of the everlasting rock productions only of the sea, the conviction is forced upon us, almost resistlessly, that here the broad ocean once heaved and roared. To what circumstance, indeed, but a revolution of nature like this, are we to refer that uniform deposition of earthy strata upon the alluvial bottom-land of every stream? to what those deep-cut race-paths which the great streams have, in the lapse of centuries, worn for themselves through the everlasting rock, hundreds of feet? to what those vast salt-plains of Arkansas? those rocky heaps of the same mineral on the Missouri, or those huge isolated masses of limestone, rearing themselves amid the lonely grandeur, a wonder to the savage? Or to what else shall we refer those collections of enormous seashells, heaped upon the soil, or thrown up to its surface from a depth of fifty feet? Many phenomena in the Valley of the Mississippi concur to confirm the idea that its vast delta-plains, when first forsaken by the waters of the ocean, were possessed by extensive canebrakes, covering, indeed, its entire surface. If, then, we suppose the Indians, who passed from Asia to America in the early centuries of the Christian era, to have commenced the fires in autumn when the reed was like tinder, and the conflagration would sweep over boundless regions, we at once have an hypothesis which accounts for the origin of the prairies. It is at least as plausible as some others. The occasions of the autumnal fires may have been {99} various. The cane-forests must have presented an insurmountable obstacle in travelling, hunting, agriculture, or even residence; while the friction caused by the tempestuous winds of autumn may have kindled numerous fires among the dry reeds. The surface peculiar to the prairie is first perceived in the State of Ohio. As we proceed north and west it increases in extent, until, a few hundred miles beyond the Mississippi, it rolls on towards the setting sun, in all the majesty and magnificence of boundlessness, to the base of the Rocky Mountains. Such are the beautiful prairies of the fair Far West; and if, gentle reader, my pen, all rapid though it be, has lingered tediously to thee along their fairy borders, it may yet prove no small consolation to thy weariness to reflect that its errings upon the subject are wellnigh ended. It was yet early in the day, as I have intimated, when I reached the centre of that broad branch of the Grand Prairie over which I was passing; and, mile after mile, the narrow pathway, almost obliterated here and there by the waving vegetation, continued to wind itself along. With that unreflecting carelessness which characterizes the inexperienced wayfarer, I had left behind me the last human habitation I was for hours to look upon, without the slightest refreshment; and now the demands of unappeased nature, sharpened by exercise, by the keen atmosphere of the prairies, and, probably, by the force of fancy, which never fails to aggravate privations which we know to be remediless, had become absolutely painful. The faithful animal beneath {100} me, also, from the total absence of water along our path, was nearly exhausted; and there, before and around, and on every side, not an object met the view but the broad-rolling, limitless prairie, and the dim, misty horizon in the distance. Above, the heavens were calm and blue, and the bright sun was careering on in his giant course as gloriously as if the storm-cloud had never swept his path. League after league the prairie lay behind me, and still swell upon swell, wave after wave, heaved up itself in endless succession before the wearied eye. There _is_ a point, reader, in physical, not less than in moral affairs, where forbearance ceases to be a virtue; and, veritably, suggestions bordering on the horrible were beginning to flit athwart the fancy, when, happily, a long, low, wavering cloud-like line was caught stretching itself upon the extremest verge of the misty horizon. My jaded animal was urged onward; and slowly, _very_ slowly, the dim outline undulated upward, and the green forest rose gradually before the gladdened vision! A few miles, the path plunged into the green, fresh woods; crossed a deep creek, which betrayed its meandering by the grove along its banks, and the hungry traveller threw himself from his horse before a log cabin imbowered in the trees. The spot was one of those luxuriant copses in the heart of the prairie, comprising several hundred acres, so common in the northern sections of Illinois. "_Victuals and drink!_" were, of course, the first demand from a female who showed herself at the door; and, "_I judge_" was the laconic but cheering {101} reply. She stared with uncontrolled curiosity at her stranger-guest. At the moment he must have looked a perfect incarnation of ferocity; a very genius of famine and starvation; but, all in good time, he was luxuriating over a huge fragment of swine's flesh, a bowl of honey, and a loaf of bread; and soon were his _miseries_ over. What! honey and hog's flesh not a luxury! Say ye so, reader! Verily, then, were ye never half starved in the heart of a Western prairie! _Salem, Ill._ XXXI "No leave take I, for I will ride As far as land will let me." "The long sunny lapse of a summer's daylight." "What fool is this!" _As You Like It._ Among that novel variety of feature which the perspicacity of European tourists in America has enabled them to detect of Cis-atlantic character, two traits seem ever to stand forth in striking relief, and are dwelt upon with very evident satisfaction: I allude to Avarice and Curiosity. Upon the former of these characteristics it is not my purpose to comment; though one can hardly have been a traveller, in any acceptation of the term, or in almost any section of our land, without having arrived at a pretty decided opinion upon the subject. Curiosity, {102} however, it will not, I am persuaded, be denied, _does_ constitute a feature, and no inconsiderable one, in our national character; nor would it, perhaps, prove a difficult task to lay the finger upon those precise circumstances in our origin and history as a people which have tended to superinduce a trait of this kind--a trait so disgusting in its ultra development; and yet, in its ultimate nature, so indispensably the mainspring of everything efficient in mind. "_Low vice_," as the author of Childe Harold has been pleased to stigmatize it; yet upon this single propellant may, in retrospect, be predicated the cause of more that contributes to man's happiness than perhaps upon any other. _Frailty of a little mind_, as it _may_ be, and is often deemed; yet not the less true is it that the omnipotent workings of this passion have ever been, and must, until the nature of the human mind is radically changed, continue to remain, at once the necessary concomitant and the essential element of a vigorous understanding. If it be, then, indeed true, as writers and critics beyond the waters would fain have us believe, that American national character is thus compounded, so far from blushing at the discovery, we would hail it as a leading cause of our unparalleled advancement as a people in the time past, and as an unerring omen of progression in future. My pen has been insensibly betrayed into these remarks in view of a series of incidents which, during my few months rambling, have from time to time transpired; and which, while they illustrate forcibly to my mind the position I have assumed, {103} have also demonstrated conclusively the minor consideration, that the passion, in all its _phenomena_, is by no means, as some would have us believe, restricted to any one portion of our land; that it _is_, in verity, a characteristic of the entire Anglo-American race! Thus much for _sage forensic_ upon "that low vice, curiosity." My last number left me luxuriating, with all the gusto of an amateur prairie-wolf fresh from his starving lair, upon the _fat_ and _honey_ of Illinois. During these blessed moments of trencher devotion, several inmates of the little cabin whose hospitality I was enjoying, who had been labouring in the field, successively made their appearance; and to each individual in turn was the traveller handed over, like a bale of suspected contraband merchandise, for supervision. The interrogatories of each were quite the same, embracing name and nativity, occupation, location, and destination, administered with all the formal exactitude of a county-court lawyer. With the inquiries of none, however, was I more amused than with those of a little corpulent old fellow ycleped "Uncle Bill," with a proboscis of exceeding rubicundity, and eyes red as a weasel's, to say nothing of a voice melodious in note as an asthmatic clarionet. The curiosity of the Northern Yankee is, in all conscience, unconscionable enough when aroused; but, for the genuine quintessence of inquisitiveness, commend your enemy, if you have one, to an army of starving gallinippers, or to a backwoods' family of the Far West, who see a traveller twice a year, and don't take the newspaper! Now {104} mark me, reader! I mention this not as a _fault_ of the worthy "Suckers:"[204] it is rather a misfortune; or, if otherwise, it surely "leans to virtue's side." A _peculiarity_, nevertheless, it certainly is; and a striking one to the stranger. Inquiries are constantly made with most unblushing effrontery, which, under ordinary circumstances, would be deemed but a single remove from insult, but at which, under those to which I refer, a man of sense would not for a moment take exception. It is _true_, as some one somewhere has said, that a degree of inquisitiveness which in the more crowded walks of life would be called impertinent, is perfectly allowable in the wilderness; and nothing is more conceivable than desire for its gratification. As to the people of Illinois, gathered as they are from every "kindred, and nation, and tribe, and language under heaven," there are traits of character among them which one could wish universally possessed. Kind, hospitable, open-hearted, and confiding have I ever found them, whether in the lonely log cabin of the prairie or in the overflowing settlement; and some noble spirits _I_ have met whose presence would honour any community or people. After my humble but delicious meal was concluded, mine host, a tall, well-proportioned, sinewy young fellow, taking down his rifle from the _beckets_ in which it was reposing over the rude mantel, very civilly requested me to accompany him on a hunting ramble of a few hours in the vicinity for deer. Having but a short evening ride before me, I readily consented; and, leaving the cabin, we strolled {105} leisurely through the shady woods, along the banks of the creek I have mentioned, for several miles; but, though indications of deer were abundant, without success. We were again returning to the hut, which was now in sight on the prairie's edge, when, in the middle of a remark upon the propriety of "_disposing of a part of his extensive farm_," the rifle of my companion was suddenly brought to his eye; a sharp crack, and a beautiful doe, which the moment before was bounding over the nodding wild-weeds like the summer wind, lay gasping at our feet. So agreeable did I find my youthful hunter, that I was wellnigh complying with his request to "tarry with him yet a few days," and try my own hand and eye, all unskilled though they be, in _gentle venerie_; or, at the least, to taste a steak from the fine fat doe. _Sed fugit, interea fugit, irreparabile tempus_; and when the shades of evening were beginning to gather over the landscape, I had passed over a prairie some eight miles in breadth; and, chilled and uncomfortable from the drenching of a heavy shower, was entering the village of Shelbyville through the trees.[205] This is a pleasant little town enough, situated on the west bank of the Kaskaskia River, in a high and heavily-timbered tract. It is the seat of justice for the county from which it takes its name, which circumstance is fearfully portended by a ragged, bleak-looking structure called a courthouse. Its shattered windows, and flapping doors, and weather-stained bricks, when associated with the object to which it is appropriated, perched up as it is in the {106} centre of the village, reminds one of a cornfield scarecrow, performing its duty by looking as hideous as possible. _In terrorem_, in sooth. Dame Justice seems indeed to have met with most shameful treatment all over the West, through her legitimate representative the courthouse. The most interesting object in the vicinity of Shelbyville is a huge sulphur-spring, which I did not tarry long enough to visit. "Will you be pleased, sir, to register your name?" was the modest request of mine host, as, having _settled the bill_, with foot in stirrup, I was about mounting my steed at the door of the little hostlerie of Shelbyville the morning after my arrival. Tortured by the pangs of a curiosity which it was quite evident must now or never be gratified, he had pursued his guest _beyond the threshold_ with this _dernier resort_ to elicit _a_ name and residence. "Register my name, sir!" was the reply. "And pray, let me ask, where do you intend that desirable operation to be performed?" The discomfited publican, with an expression of ludicrous dismay, hastily retreating to the bar-room, soon reappeared gallanting a mysterious-looking little blue-book, with "Register" in ominous characters portrayed upon the back thereof. _A_ name was accordingly soon despatched with a pencil, beneath about a dozen others, which the honest man had probably managed to _save_ in as many years; and, applying the spur, the last glance of the traveller caught the eager features of his host poring over this new accession to his treasure. {107} The early air of morning was intensely chilling as I left the village and pursued my solitary way through the old woods; but, as the sun went up the heavens, and the path emerged upon the open prairie, the transition was astonishing. The effect of emerging from the dusky shades of a thick wood upon a prairie on a summer day is delightful and peculiar. I have often remarked it. It impresses one like passing from the damp, gloomy closeness of a cavern into the genial sunshine of a flower-garden. For the first time during my tour in Illinois was my horse now severely troubled by that terrible insect, so notorious all over the West, the large green-bottle prairie-fly, called the "green-head." My attention was first attracted to it by observing several gouts of fresh blood upon the rein; and, glancing at my horse's neck, my surprise was great at beholding an orifice quite as large as that produced by the _fleam_ from which the dark fluid was freely streaming. The instant one of these fearful insects plants itself upon a horse's body, the rider is made aware of the circumstance by a peculiar restlessness of the animal in every limb, which soon becomes a perfect agony, while the sweat flows forth at every pore. The last year[206] was a remarkable one for countless swarms of these flies; many animals were _killed_ by them; and at one season it was even dangerous to venture across the broader prairies except before sunrise or after nightfall. In the early settlement of the county, these insects were so troublesome as in {108} a great measure to retard the cultivation of the prairies; but, within a few years, a yellow insect larger than the "green-head" has made its appearance wherever the latter was found, and, from its sweeping destruction of the annoying fly, has been called the "horse-guard." These form burrows by penetrating the earth to some depth, and there depositing the slaughtered "green-heads." It is stated that animals become so well aware of the relief afforded by these insects and of their presence, that the traveller recognises their arrival at once by the quiet tranquillity which succeeds the former agitation. Ploughing upon the prairies was formerly much delayed by these insects, and heavy netting was requisite for the protection of the oxen. At an inconsiderable settlement called _Cold Spring_, after a ride of a dozen miles, I drew up my horse for refreshment.[207] My host, a venerable old gentleman, with brows silvered over by the frosts of sixty winters, from some circumstance unaccountable, presumed his guest a political circuit-rider, and arranged his remarks accordingly. The old man's politics were, however, not a little musty. Henry Clay was spoken of rather as a young aspirant for distinction, just stepping upon the arena of public life, than as the aged statesman about resigning "the seals of office," and, hoary with honour, withdrawing from the world. Nathless, much pleased was I with my host. He was a native of Connecticut, and twenty years had seen him a resident in "the Valley." Resuming my route, the path conducted through {109} a high wood, and for the first time since my departure from New-England was my ear charmed by the sweet, melancholy note of the robin, beautiful songster of my own native North. A wanderer can hardly describe his emotions on an occurrence like this. The ornithology of the West, so far as a limited acquaintance will warrant assertion, embraces many of the most magnificent of the feathered creation. Here is found the jay, in gold and azure, most splendid bird of the forest; here the woodpecker, with flaming crest and snowy capote; the redbird; the cardinal grosbeak, with his mellow whistle, gorgeous in crimson dies; the bluebird, delicate as an iris; the mockbird, unrivalled chorister of our land; the thrush; the wishton-wish; the plaintive whippoorwill; and last, yet not the least, the turtle-dove, with her flutelike moaning. How often, on my solitary path, when all was still through the grove, and heaven's own breathings for a season seemed hushed, have I reined up my horse, and, with feelings not to be described, listened to the redundant pathos of that beautiful woodnote swelling on the air! Paley has somewhere[208] told us, that by nothing has he been so touchingly reminded of the benevolence of Deity as by the quiet happiness of the infant on its mother's breast. To myself there is naught in all Nature's beautiful circle which speaks a richer eloquence of praise to the goodness of our God than the gushing joyousness of the forest-bird! All day I continued my journey over hill and {110} dale, creek and ravine, woodland and prairie, until, near sunset, I reined up my weary animal to rest a while beneath the shade of a broad-boughed oak by the wayside, of whose refreshing hospitality an emigrant, with wagon and family, had already availed himself. The leader of the caravan, rather a young man, was reclining upon the bank, and, according to his own account, none the better for an extra dram. From a few remarks which were elicited from him, I soon discovered--what I had suspected, but which he at first had seemed doggedly intent upon concealing--that he belonged to that singular sect to which I have before alluded, styling themselves Mormonites, and that he was even then on his way to Mount Zion, Jackson county, Mo.! By contriving to throw into my observations a few of those tenets of the sect which, during my wanderings, I had gathered up, the worthy Mormonite was soon persuaded--pardon my insincerity, reader--that he had stumbled upon a veritable brother; and, without reserve or mental reservation, laid open to my cognizance, as we journeyed along, "the reasons of the faith that was in him," and the ultimate, proximate, and intermediate designs of the _party_. And such a chaotic fanfaronade of nonsense, absurdity, nay, madness, was an idle curiosity never before punished with. The most which could be gathered of any possible "_account_" from this confused, disconnected mass of rubbish, was the following: That Joe Smith, or Joe Smith's father, or the devil, or some other great personage, had somewhere dug up the golden {111} plates upon which were graven the "Book of Mormon:" that this all-mysterious and much-to-be-admired book embraced the chronicles of the lost kings of Israel: that it derived its cognomen from one Mormon, its principal hero, son of Lot's daughter, king of the Moabites: that Christ was crucified on the spot where Adam was interred: that the descendants of Cain were all now under the curse, and no one could possibly designate who they were: that the Saviour was about to descend in Jackson county, Missouri; the millennium was dawning, and that all who were not baptized by Joe Smith or his compeers, and forthwith repaired to Mount Zion, Missouri, aforesaid, would assuredly be cut off, and that without remedy. These may, perhaps, serve as a specimen of a host of wild absurdities which fell from the lips of my Mormonite; but, the instant argument upon any point was pressed, away was he a thousand miles into the fields of mysticism; or he laid an immediate embargo on farther proceedings by a barefaced _petitio principii_ on the faith of the golden plates; or by asserting that the stranger knew more upon the matter than he! At length the stranger, coming to the conclusion that he could at least boast as _much_ of Mormonism, he spurred up, and left the man still jogging onward, to Mount Zion. And yet, reader, with all his nonsense, my Mormonite was by no means an ignorant fanatic. He was a native of Virginia, and for fifteen years had been a pedagogue west of the Blue Ridge, from which edifying profession he had at length been {112} enticed by the eloquence of sundry preachers who had held forth in his schoolhouse. Thereupon taking to himself a brace of wives and two or three braces of children by way of stock in trade for the community at Mount Zion, and having likewise taken to himself a one-horse wagon, into which were bestowed the moveables, not forgetting a certain big-bellied stone bottle which hung ominously dangling in the rear; I say, having done this, and having, moreover, pressed into service a certain raw-boned, unhappy-looking horse, and a certain fat, happy-looking cow, which was driven along beside the wagon, away started he all agog for the promised land. The grand tabernacle of these fanatics is said to be at a place they call _Kirtland_, upon the shores of Lake Erie, some twenty miles from Cleveland, and numbers no less than four thousand persons. Their leader is Joe Smith, and associated with him is a certain shrewd genius named Sydney Rigdom, a quondam preacher of the doctrine of Campbell.[209] Under the control of these worthies as president and cashier, a banking-house was established, which issued about $150,000, and then deceased. The private residences are small, but the temple is said to be an elegant structure of stone, three stories in height, and nearly square in form. Each of its principal apartments is calculated to contain twelve hundred persons, and has six pulpits arranged gradatim, three at each extremity of the "Aaronic priesthood," and in the same manner with the "priesthood of Melchisedek." The {113} slips are so constructed as to permit the audience to face either pulpit at pleasure. In the highest seat of the "Aaronic priesthood" sits the venerable sire of the prophet, and below sit his hopeful Joe and Joe's prime minister, Sydney Rigdom. The attic of the temple is occupied for schoolrooms, five in number, where a large number of students are taught the various branches of the English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew languages. The estimated cost of this building is $60,000.[210] Smith is represented as a quiet, placid-seeming knave, with passionless features, perfectly composed in the midst of his heterogeneous multitude of dupes. Rigdom, on the contrary, has a face full of fire, a fine tenour voice, and a mild and persuasive eloquence of speech. Many of their followers are said to be excellent men. The circumstances of the origin, rise, and progress of this singular sect have been given to the public by the pen of an eccentric but polished writer, and there is nothing material to add. The close of the day found me once more upon the banks of the Kaskaskia; and early on the succeeding morning, fording the stream, I pursued my route along the great national road towards Terre Haute. This road is projected eighty feet in breadth, with a central carriage-path of thirty feet, elevated above all standing water, and in no instance to exceed three degrees from a perfect level. The work has been commenced along the whole {114} line, and is under various stages of advancement; for most of the way it is perfectly _direct_. The bridges are to be of limestone, and of massive structure, the base of the abutments being equal in depth to one third their altitude. The work was for a while suspended, for the purpose of investigating former operations, and subsequently through failure of an appropriation from Congress; but a grant has since been voted sufficient to complete the undertaking so far as it is now projected.[211] West of Vandalia the route is not yet located, though repeated surveys with reference to this object have been made. St. Louis, Alton, Beardstown, and divers other places upon the Mississippi and its branches present claims to become the favoured point of its destination. Upon this road I journeyed some miles; and, even in its present unfinished condition, it gives evidence of its enormous character. Compare this grand national work with the crumbling relics of the mound-builders scattered over the land, and remark the contrast: yet how, think you, reader, would an hundred thousand men regard an undertaking like this? My route at length, to my regret, struck off at right angles from the road, and for many a mile wound away among woods and creeks. As I rode along through the country I was somewhat surprised at meeting people from various quarters, who seemed to be gathering to some rendezvous, all armed with rifles, and with the paraphernalia of hunting suspended from their shoulders. At length, near noon, I passed a log-cabin, around which {115} were assembled about a hundred men: and, upon inquiry, learned that they had come together for the purpose of "shooting a beeve,"[212] as the marksmen have it. The regulations I found to be chiefly these: A bull's-eye, with a centre nail, stands at a distance variously of from forty to seventy yards; and those five who, at the close of the contest, have most frequently _driven the nail_, are entitled to a fat ox divided into five portions. Many of the marksmen in the vicinity, I was informed, could drive the nail twice out of every three trials. Reluctantly I was forced to decline a civil invitation to join the party, and to leave before the sport commenced; but, jogging leisurely along through a beautiful region of prairie and woodland interspersed, I reached near nightfall the village of Salem.[213] This place, with its dark, weather-beaten edifices, forcibly recalled to my mind one of those gloomy little seaports sprinkled along the iron-bound coast of New-England, over some of which the ocean-storm has roared and the ocean-eagle shrieked for more than two centuries. The town is situated on the eastern border of the Grand Prairie, upon the stage-route from St. Louis to Vincennes; and, as approached from one quarter, is completely concealed by a bold promontory of timber springing into the plain. It is a quiet, innocent, gossiping little place as ever was, no doubt; never did any harm in all its life, and probably never will do any. This sage conclusion is predicated upon certain items gathered at the village singing-school; at which, ever-notable place, the traveller, agreeable to invitation {116} attended, and carolled away most vehemently with about a dozen others of either sex, under the cognizance of a certain worthy personage styled _the Major_, whose vocation seemed to be to wander over these parts for the purpose of "_building up_" the good people in psalmody. To say that I was not more surprised than delighted with the fruits of the honest songster's efforts in Salem, and that I was, moreover, marvellously edified by the brisk airs of the "Missouri Harmony," from whose cheerful pages operations were performed, surely need not be done; therefore, prithee reader, question me not. _Mt. Vernon, Ill._ XXXII "After we are exhausted by a long course of application to business, how delightful are the first moments of indolence and repose! _O che bella coza di far niente!_"--STEWART. "Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn!" _Falstaff._ That distinguished metaphysician Dugald Stewart, in his treatise upon the "Active and Moral Powers," has, in the language of my motto, somewhere[214] observed, that leisure after continued exertion is a source of happiness perfect in its kind; and {117} surely, at the moment I am now writing, my own feelings abundantly testify to the force of the remark. For more than one month past have I been urging myself onward from village to village and from hamlet to hamlet, through woodland, and over prairie, river, and rivulet, with almost the celerity of an _avant courier_, and hardly with closer regard to passing scenes and events. My purpose, reader, for I may as well tell you, has been to accomplish, within a portion of time to some degree limited, a "tour over the prairies" previously laid out. This, within the prescribed period, I am now quite certain of fulfilling; and here am I, at length "taking mine ease in mine inn" at the ancient and venerable French village Kaskaskia. It is evening now. The long summer sunset is dying away in beauty from the heavens; and alone in my chamber am I gathering up the fragments of events scattered along the pathway of the week that is gone. Last evening at this hour I was entering the town of Pinkneyville, and my last number left me soberly regaling myself upon the harmonious _vocalities_ of the sombre little village of Salem. Here, then, may I well enough resume "the thread of my discourse." During my wanderings in Illinois I have more than once referred to the frequency and violence of the thunder-gusts by which it is visited. I had travelled not many miles the morning after leaving Salem when I was assailed by one of the most terrific storms I remember to have yet encountered. All the morning the atmosphere had been most oppressive, {118} the sultriness completely prostrating, and the livid exhalations quivered along the parched-up soil of the prairies, as if over the mouth of an enormous furnace. A gauzy mist of silvery whiteness at length diffused itself over the landscape; an inky cloud came heaving up in the northern horizon, and soon the thunder-peal began to bellow and reverberate along the darkened prairie, and the great raindrops came tumbling to the ground. Fortunately, a shelter was at hand; but hardly had the traveller availed himself of its liberal hospitality, when the heavens were again lighted up by the sunbeams; the sable cloud rolled off to the east, and all was beautiful and calm, as if the angel of desolation in his hurried flight had but for a moment stooped the shade of his dusky wing, and had then swept onward to accomplish elsewhere his terrible bidding. With a reflection like this I was about remounting to pursue my way, when a prolonged, deafening, terrible crash--as if the wild idea of heathen mythology was indeed about to be realized, and the thunder-car of Olympian Jove was dashing through the concave above--caused me to falter with foot in stirrup, and almost involuntarily to turn my eye in the direction from which the bolt seemed to have burst. A few hundred yards from the spot on which I stood a huge elm had been blasted by the lightning; and its enormous shaft towering aloft, torn, mangled, shattered from the very summit to its base, was streaming its long ghastly fragments on the blast. The scene was one startlingly impressive; one of those few scenes in a man's life the remembrance {119} of which years cannot wholly efface; which he never _forgets_. As I gazed upon this giant forest-son, which the lapse of centuries had perhaps hardly sufficed to rear to perfection, now, even though a ruin, noble, that celebrated passage of the poet Gray, when describing his _bard_, recurred with some force to my mind: in this description Gray is supposed to have had the painting of Raphael at Florence, representing Deity in the vision of Ezekiel, before him: "Loose his beard and hoary hair Stream'd, like a meteor, to the troubled air," &c. A ride of a few hours, after the storm had died away, brought me to the pleasant little town of Mt. Vernon.[215] This place is the seat of justice for Jefferson county, and has a courthouse of brick, decent enough to the eye, to be sure, but said to have been so miserably constructed that it is a perilous feat for his honour here to poise the scales. The town itself is an inconsiderable place, but pleasantly situated, in the edge of a prairie, if I forget not, and in every other respect is exactly what every traveller has seen a dozen times elsewhere in Illinois. Like Shelbyville, it is chiefly noted for a remarkable spring in its vicinity, said to be highly medicinal. How this latter item may stand I know not, but I am quite sure that all of the _pure element_ it was my own disagreeable necessity to partake of during my brief tarry savoured mightily of medicine or of something akin. Epsom salts and alum seemed the chief substances in solution; and with these minerals all the water in the region appeared heavily charged. {120} It was a misty, miserable morning when I left Mt. Vernon; and as my route lay chiefly through a dense timbered tract, the dank, heavy atmosphere exhaling from the soil, from the luxuriant vegetation, and from the dense foliage of the over-hanging boughs, was anything but agreeable. To endure the pitiless drenching of a summer-shower with equanimity demands but a brief exercise of stoicism: but it is not in the nature of man amiably to withstand the equally pitiless _drenching_ of a drizzling, penetrating, everlasting fog, be it of sea origin or of land. At length a thunder-gust--the usual remedy for these desperate cases in Illinois--dissipated the vapour, and the glorious sunlight streamed far and wide athwart a broad prairie, in the edge of which I stood. The route was, in the language of my director, indeed a _blind_ one; but, having received special instructions thereupon, I hesitated not to press onward over the swelling, pathless plain towards the _east_. After a few miles, having crossed an arm of the prairie, directions were again sought and received, by which the route became due _south_, pathless as before, and through a tract of woodland rearing itself from a bog perfectly Serbonian. "Muddy Prairie" indeed. On every side rose the enormous shafts of the cypress, the water-oak, and the maple, flinging from their giant branches that gray, pensile, parasitical moss, which, weaving its long funereal fibres into a dusky mantle, almost entangles in the meshes the thin threads of sunlight struggling down from above. It was here for the first time that I met in any considerable numbers {121} with that long-necked, long-legged, long-toed, long-tailed gentry called wild-turkeys: and, verily, here was a host ample to atone for all former deficiency, parading in ungainly magnificence through the forest upon every side, or peeping curiously down, with outstretched necks and querulous piping, from their lofty perches on the traveller below. It is by a skilful imitation of this same piping, to say nothing of the melodious gobble that always succeeds it, that the sportsman decoys these sentimental bipeds within his reach. The same method is sometimes employed in hunting the deer--an imitated bleating of the fawn when in distress--thus taking away the gentle mother's life through the medium of her most generous impulses; a most diabolical _modus operandi_, reader, permit me to say. Emerging at length, by a circuitous path, once more upon the prairie, instructions were again sought for the _direct_ route to Pinkneyville, and a course nearly _north_ was now pointed out. Think of that; _east_, _south_, _north_, in regular succession too, over a tract of country perfectly uniform, in order to run a _right_ line between two given points! This was past all endurance. To a moral certainty with me, the place of my destination lay away just southwest from the spot on which I was then standing. Producing, therefore, my pocket-map and pocket-compass, by means of a little calculation I had soon laid down the prescribed course, determined to pursue none other, the remonstrances, and protestations, and objurgations of men, women, and children to the contrary notwithstanding. Pushing {122} boldly forth into the prairie, I had not travelled many miles when I struck a path leading off in the direction I had chosen, and which _proved_ the direct route to Pinkneyville! Thus had I been forced to cross, recross, and cross again, a prairie miles in breadth, and to flounder through a swamp other miles in extent, to say nothing of the _depth_, and all because of the utter ignorance of the worthy souls who took upon them _to direct_. I have given this instance in detail for the special edification and benefit of all future wayfarers in Illinois. The only unerring guide on the prairies is the map and the compass. Half famished, and somewhat more than half vexed at the adventures of the morning, I found myself, near noon, at the cabin-door of an honest old Virginian, and was ere long placed in a fair way to relieve my craving appetite. With the little compass which hung at the safety-riband of my watch, and which had done me such rare service during my wanderings, the worthy old gentleman seemed heart-stricken at first sight, and warmly protested that he and the "_stranger_" must have "_a small bit of a tug_" for that _fixen_, a proposition which said stranger by no means as warmly relished. Laying, therefore, before the old farmer a slight outline of my morning's ramble, he readily perceived that with me the "_pretty leetle fixen_" was anything but a superlative. My evening ride was a delightful one along the edge of an extended prairie; but, though repeatedly assured by the worthy settlers upon the route that I could "_catch no diffick_ulty on my way no how," my compass was {123} my only safe guide. At length, crossing "Mud River" upon a lofty bridge of logs, the town of Pinkneyville was before me just at sunset.[216] Pinkneyville has but little to commend it to the passing traveller, whether we regard beauty of location, regularity of structure, elegance, size, or proportion of edifices, or the cultivation of the farms in its vicinage. It would, perhaps, be a pleasant town enough were its site more elevated, its buildings larger, and disposed with a little more of mathematical exactness, or its streets less lanelike and less filthy. As it is, it will require some years to give it a standing among its fellows. It is laid out on the roll of a small prairie of moderate fertility, but has quite an extensive settlement of enterprising farmers, a circumstance which will conduce far more to the ultimate prosperity of the place. The most prominent structure is a blood-red jail of brick, standing near the centre of the village; rather a savage-looking concern, and, doubtless, so designed by its sagacious architect for the purpose of frightening evil doers. Having taken these _observations_ from the tavern door during twilight, the traveller retired to his chamber, nothing loath, after a ride of nearly fifty miles, to bestow his tired frame to rest. But, alas! that verity compels him to declare it-- "'Tis true, and pity 'tis 'tis true," the "_Traveller's Inn_" was anything, nay, _every_thing but the comfort-giving spot the hospitable cognomen swinging from its signpost seemed to imply. Ah! the fond visions of quietude and repose, {124} of plentiful feeding and hearty sleeping, which those magic words, "_Traveller's Inn_," had conjured up in the weary traveller's fancy when they first delightfully swung before his eye. "But human pleasure, what art thou, in sooth! The torrent's smoothness ere it dash below!!" Well--exhausted, worn down, tired out, the traveller yet found it as utterly impossible quietly to rest, as does, doubtless, "a half-assoilzed soul in purgatory;" and, hours before the day had begun to break, he arose and ordered out his horse. Kind reader, hast ever, in the varyings of thy pilgrimage through this troublous world of ours, when faint, and languid, and weary with exertion, by any untoward circumstance, been forced to resist the gentle promptings of "quiet nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep," and to count away the tedious hours of the livelong night till thy very existence became a burden to thee; till thy brain whirled and thy nerves twanged like the tense harp-string? And didst thou not, then--didst thou not, from the very depths of thy soul, assever this ill, of all ills mortality is heir to, that one most utterly and unutterably intolerable patiently to endure? 'Tis no very pitiful thing, sure, to consume the midnight taper, "sickly" though it be: we commiserate the sacrifice, but we fail not to appreciate the reward. Around the couch of suffering humanity, who could not outwatch the stars? the recompense is not of _this_ world. "When youth and pleasure meet, To chase the glowing hours with flying feet," _who_ asks for "sleep till morn!" But when in weariness {125} of the flesh and in languidness of spirit, the overspent wayfarer has laid down his wearied frame to rest for the toils of the morrow, it is indeed a _bitter_ thing rudely to have that rest broken up! "The sleep of the _wayfaring_ man is sweet," and to have that slumber obtruded upon by causes too contemptible for a thought, is not in nature with equanimity to bear! Besides, the luckless sufferer meets with no _commiseration_: it is a matter all too ludicrous for pity; and as for fortitude, and firmness, and the like, what warrior ever achieved a laurel in such a war? what glory is to be gained over a host of starving--but I forbear. You are pretty well aware, kind reader, or ought to be, that the situation of your traveller just then was anything but an enviable one. Not so, however, deemed the worthy landlord on this interesting occasion. His blank bewilderment of visage may be better imagined than described, as, aroused from sleep, his eye met the vision of his stranger guest; while the comic amalgamation of distress and pique in the marvellously elongated features of the fair hostess was so truly laughable, that a smile flitted along the traveller's rebellious muscles, serving completely to disturb the serenity of her breast! The good lady was evidently not a little nettled at the _apparent_ mirthfulness of her guest under his manifold miseries--I do assure thee, reader, the mirthfulness was only _apparent_--and did not neglect occasion thereupon to let slip a sly remark impugning his "gentle breeding," because, forsooth, dame Nature, in throwing together her "cunning workmanship," had gifted it with a {126} nervous system not quite of steel. Meanwhile, the honest publican, agreeable to orders, having brought forth the horse, with folded hands all meekly listened to the eloquence of his spouse; but the good man was meditating the while a retaliation in shape of a most unconscionable bill of cost, which was soon presented and was as soon discharged. Then, leaving the interesting pair to their own cogitations, with the very _top_ of the morning the traveller flung himself upon his horse and was soon out of sight. _Kaskaskia, Ill._ FOOTNOTES: [1] George D. Prentice (1802-70), founder of the Louisville _Journal_, was graduated from Brown University in 1823. Two years later he became editor of the Connecticut _Mirror_ and in 1828-30 had charge of the _New England Weekly Review_. In the spring of 1830, at the earnest solicitation of several influential Connecticut Whigs, he went West to gather data for a life of Henry Clay. Once in Kentucky he threw all the force of his political genius in support of Clay's policy. On November 24, 1830, he issued the first number of the Louisville _Journal_, which through his able management was soon recognized as the chief Whig organ in the West. Wholly devoted to Clay's cause, its own reputation rose and declined with that of its champion. The _Journal_ maintained an existence till 1868, when Henry Watterson consolidated it with the Courier, under the title of _Courier-Journal_. Prentice is reputed to have been the originator of the short, pointed paragraph in journalism. His _Life of Henry Clay_ (Hartford, 1831) is well known. In 1859 he published a collection of poems under the name _Prenticeana_ (New York). It was reprinted in 1870 with a biography of the author by G. W. Griffin (Philadelphia).--ED. [2] John M. Peck, a Baptist minister, went as a missionary to St. Louis in 1817. After nine years of preaching in Missouri and Illinois, he founded (1826) the Rocky Spring Seminary for training teachers and ministers. It is said that he travelled more than six thousand miles collecting money for endowing this school. In 1828 Peck began publishing the _Western Pioneer_, the first official organ of the Baptist church in the West, and served as the corresponding secretary and financial agent of the American Baptist Publication Society from 1843 to 1845. He died at Rocky Springs, Illinois, in 1858. Peck made important contributions to the publications of the early historical societies in the Northwest. His chief independent works are: _A Guide for Emigrants_ (Boston, 1831), republished as _A New Guide for Emigrants_ (Boston, 1836); _Gazetteer of Illinois_ (Jacksonville, 1834 and 1837); _Father Clark or the Pioneer Preacher_ (New York, 1855); and "Life of Daniel Boone," in Jared Sparks, _American Biography_. Judge James Hall was born in Philadelphia (1793), and died near Cincinnati in 1868. He was a member of the Washington Guards during the War of 1812-15, was promoted to the 2nd United States artillery, and accompanied Decatur on his expedition to Algiers (1815). Resigning in 1818, he practiced law at Shawneetown, Illinois (1820-27), and filled the office of public prosecutor and judge of the circuit court. He moved to Vandalia (1827) and began editing the _Illinois Intelligencer_ and the _Illinois Monthly Magazine_. From 1836 to 1853 he was president of the commercial bank at Cincinnati, and acted as state treasurer. He published: _Letters from the West_ (London, 1828); _Legends of the West_ (1832); _Memoirs of the Public Services of General William Henry Harrison_ (Philadelphia, 1836); _Sketches of History, Life and Manners of the West_ (Philadelphia, 1835); _Statistics of the West at the Close of 1836_ (Cincinnati, 1836); _Notes on the Western States_ (Philadelphia, 1838); _History and Biography of the Indians of North America_ (3 volumes, 1838-44); _The West, its Soil, Surface, etc._ (Cincinnati, 1848); _The West, its Commerce and Navigation_ (Cincinnati, 1848); besides a few historical novels. For a contemporary estimate of the value of Hall's writings see _American Monthly Magazine_ (New York, 1835), v, pp. 9-15. For Timothy Flint, see Pattie's _Narrative_, in our volume xviii, p. 25, note 1. Major Alphonso Wetmore (1793-1849) was of much less importance as a writer on Western history than those above mentioned. He entered the 23rd infantry in 1812, and subsequently was transferred to the 6th. He served as paymaster for his regiment from 1815 to 1821, and was promoted to a captaincy (1819). In 1816 he moved with his family to Franklinton, Missouri, and later practiced law in St. Louis. His chief contribution to Western travel is a _Gazetteer of Missouri_ (St. Louis, 1837).--ED. [3] The reference is to Shakespeare's _King John_, III, iv.--ED. [4] For a brief sketch of the history of Louisville, see Croghan's _Journals_, in our volume i, p.136, note 106.--ED. [5] The seven stations formed on Beargrass Creek in the fall of 1779 and spring of 1780 were: Falls of the Ohio, Linnis, Sullivan's Old, Hoagland's, Floyd's, Spring, and Middle stations. Beargrass Creek, a small stream less than ten miles in length, flows in a northwestern trend and uniting with two smaller creeks, South and Muddy forks, enters the Ohio (not the Mississippi) immediately above the Falls of the Ohio (Louisville).--ED. [6] It is only at high stages of the river that boats even of a smaller class can pass over the Falls. At other times they go through the "Louisville and Portland Canal." In 1804 the Legislature of Kentucky incorporated a company to cut a canal around the falls. Nothing effectual, however, beyond surveys, was done until 1825, when on the 12th of January of that year the Louisville and Portland Canal Company was incorporated by an act of the legislature, with a capital of $600,000, in shares of $100 each, with perpetual succession. 3665 of the shares of the company are in the hands of individuals, about seventy in number, residing in the following states: New-Hampshire, Massachusetts, New-York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Ohio, Kentucky, and Missouri, and 2335 shares belong to the government of the United States. In December, 1825, contracts were entered into to complete the work of this canal within two years, for about $375,000, and under these contracts the work was commenced in March, 1826. Many unforeseen difficulties retarded the work until the close of the year 1828. At this time the contractors failed; new contracts were made at advanced prices, and the canal was finally opened for navigation December 5th, 1830. When completed it cost about $750,000. Owing to the advanced season at which it was opened, the deposites of alluvial earth at the lower extremity of the canal, or debouchure, could not be removed; and also from the action of the floods during the succeeding severe winter on the stones that had been temporarily deposited on the sides of the canal, causing them to be precipitated into the canal, it was not used to the extent that it otherwise would have been. During the year 1831, 406 steamboats, 46 keelboats, and 357 flatboats, measuring 76,323 tons, passed through the locks, which are about one fourth the number that would have passed if all the obstructions had been removed. The Louisville and Portland Canal is about two miles in length; is intended for steamboats of the largest class, and to overcome a fall of 24 feet, occasioned by an irregular ledge of limerock, through which the entire bed of the canal is excavated, a part of it, to the depth of 12 feet, is overlaid with earth. There is one guard and three lift locks combined, all of which have their foundation on the rock. One bridge of stone 240 feet long, with an elevation of 68 feet to top of the parapet wall, and three arches, the centre one of which is semi-elliptical, with a transverse diameter of 66, and a semi-conjugate diameter of 22 feet. The two side arches are segments of 40 feet span. The guard lock is 190 feet long in the clear, with semicircular heads of 26 feet in diameter, 50 feet wide, and 42 feet high, and contains 21,775 perches of mason-work. The solid contents of this lock are equal to 15 common locks, such as are built on the Ohio and New-York canals. The lift locks are of the same width with the guard lock, 20 feet high, and 183 feet long in the clear, and contain 12,300 perches of mason-work. The entire length of the walls, from the head of the guard lock to the end of the outlet lock, is 921 feet. In addition to the amount of mason-work above, there are three culverts to drain off the water from the adjacent lands, the mason-work of which, when added to the locks and bridge, give the whole amount of mason-work 41,989 perches, equal to about 30 common canal locks. The cross section of the canal is 200 feet at top of banks, 50 feet at bottom, and 42 feet high, having a capacity equal to that of 25 common canals; and if we keep in view the unequal quantity of mason-work compared to the length of the canal, the great difficulties of excavating earth and rock from so great a depth and width, together with the contingencies attending its construction from the fluctuations of the Ohio River, it may not be considered as extravagant in drawing the comparison between the work in this and in that of 70 or 75 miles of common canalling. In the upper sections of the canal, the alluvial earth to the average depth of twenty feet being removed, trunks of trees were found more or less decayed, and so imbedded as to indicate a powerful current towards the present shore, some of which were cedar, which is not now found in this region. Several _fireplaces_ of a rude construction, with partially burnt wood, were discovered near the rock, as well as the bones of a variety of small animals and several human skeletons; rude implements formed of bone and stone were frequently seen, as also several well-wrought specimens of hematite of iron, in the shape of plummets or sinkers, displaying a knowledge in the arts far in advance of the present race of Indians. The first stratum of rock was a light, friable slate, in close contact with the limestone, and difficult to disengage from it; this slate did not, however, extend over the whole surface of the rock, and was of various thicknesses, from three inches to four feet. The stratum next to the slate was a close, compact limestone, in which petrified seashells and an infinite variety of coralline formations were imbedded, and frequent cavities of crystalline incrustations were seen, many of which still contained petroleum of a highly fetid smell, which gives the name to this description of limestone. This description of rock is on an average of five feet, covering a substratum of a species of cias limestone of a bluish colour, imbedding nodules of hornstone and organic remains. The fracture of this stone has in all instances been found to be irregularly conchoidal, and on exposure to the atmosphere and subjection to fire, it crumbles to pieces. When burnt and ground, and mixed with a due proportion of silicious sand, it has been found to make a most superior kind of hydraulic cement or water-lime. The discovery of this valuable limestone has enabled the canal company to construct their masonry more solidly than any other known in the United States. A manufactory of this hydraulic cement or water-lime is now established on the bank of the canal, on a scale capable of supplying the United States with this much-valued material for all works in contact with water or exposed to moisture; the nature of this cement being to harden in the water; the grout used on the locks of the canal is already _harder_ than the _stone_ used in their construction. After passing through the stratum which was commonly called the water-lime, about ten feet in thickness, the workmen came to a more compact mass of primitive gray limestone, which, however, was not penetrated to any great depth. In many parts of the excavation masses of a bluish white flint and hornstone were found enclosed in or incrusting the fetid limestone. And from the large quantities of arrow-heads and other rude formations of this flint stone, it is evident that it was made much use of by the Indians in forming their weapons for war and hunting; in one place a magazine of arrow-heads was discovered, containing many hundreds of these rude implements, carefully packed together and buried below the surface of the ground. The existence of iron ore in considerable quantities was exhibited in the progress of the excavation of the canal, by numerous highly-charged chalybeate springs that gushed out, and continued to flow during the time that the rock was exposed, chiefly in the upper strata of limestone.--_Louisville Directory for 1835._--FLAGG. [7] A circumstance, too, which adds not a little of interest to the spot, is the old Indian tradition that here was fought the last battle between their race and the former dwellers in Kentucky--the _white mound-builders_--in which the latter were exterminated to a man. True or false, vast quantities of human remains have, at low stages of the Ohio, been found upon the shores of Sandy Island, one mile below, and an extensive graveyard once existed in the vicinity of Shipping-port.--FLAGG. [8] _Kentucke_ is said to have a similar meaning.--FLAGG. [9] Ohio is thought by some philologists to be a corruption of the Iroquois word, "Ohionhiio," meaning "beautiful river," which the French rendered as La Belle Rivière; see also Cuming's _Tour_, in our volume iv, p. 92, note 49.--ED. [10] At the age of twenty-five, Henry M. Shreve (1785-1854) was captain of a freight boat operating on the Ohio. In 1814 he ran the gauntlet of the British batteries at New Orleans, and carried supplies to Fort St. Phillip. The following year, in charge of the "Enterprise" he made the first successful steamboat trip from New Orleans to Louisville. Later he constructed the "Washington," making many improvements on the Fulton model. Fulton and Livingstone brought suit against him but lost in the action. May 24, 1824, at the instigation of J. C. Calhoun, then secretary of war, Congress appropriated seventy-five thousand dollars (not $105,000, as Flagg says) for the purpose of removing obstructions from the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. As early as 1821, Shreve had invented a device for removing snags and sawyers from river beds. But it was not until after two years' fruitless trials with a scheme devised by John Bruce of Kentucky, that Barbour, at Calhoun's suggestion, appointed Shreve superintendent of improvements on Western rivers (December 10, 1826). This position he held until September 11, 1841, when he was dismissed for political reasons. In the face of discouraging opposition Shreve constructed (1829) with government aid the snagboat "Heleopolis" with which he later wrought a marvellous improvement in navigation on the Ohio and Mississippi. From 1833 to 1838 he was engaged in removing the Red River "raft" for a distance of a hundred and sixty miles, thus opening that important river for navigation. For a good biography of Shreve, see the _Democratic Review_, xxii (New York, 1848), pp. 159-171, 241-251. A fair estimate of the importance of his work can be gained from the following statistics; from 1822-27 the loss from snags alone, of property on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, including steam and flat-boats and their cargoes, amounted to $1,362,500; the like loss from 1827-32 was reduced to $381,000, although the volume of business had greatly increased.--ED. [11] The "Baltimore" (73 tons) was built at Pittsburg in 1828; the "Roanoke" (100 tons), at Wheeling in 1835. It is reported that from 1831 to 1833, of the sixty-six steamboats which went out of service, twenty-four were snagged, fifteen burned, and five destroyed by collision with other boats. See James Hall, _Notes on the Western States_ (Philadelphia, 1838), p. 239.--ED. [12] The keel-boat Hindoo, with merchandise to the amount of $50,000, is a late instance.--FLAGG. [13] Brown's Island, two miles and a half long by half a mile at its greatest width, is located six or seven miles above Steubenville, Ohio, following the course of the river.--ED. [14] The keel-boat was usually from sixty to seventy feet long, and fifteen to eighteen broad at beam, with a keel extending from bow to stern, and had a draft of twenty to thirty inches. When descending the stream, the force of the current, with occasional aid from the pole, was the usual mode of locomotion. In ascending the stream, however, sails, poles, and almost every known device were used; not infrequently the vessel was towed by from twenty to forty men, with a rope several hundred feet in length attached to the mast. These boats were built in Pittsburg at a cost of two to three thousand dollars each. The barge was constructed for narrow, shallow water. As a rule it was larger than the keel-boat; but of less draft, and afforded greater accommodations for passengers. Broad-horn was a term generally applied to the Mississippi and Ohio flat-boat, which made its advent on the Western waters later than the barge or the keel-boat. It was a large, unwieldy structure, with a perfectly flat bottom, perpendicular sides, and usually covered its entire length. It was used only for descending the stream. "The earliest improvement upon the canoe was the pirogue, an invention of the whites. Like the canoe, this is hewed out of the solid log; the difference is, that the pirogue has greater width and capacity, and is composed of several pieces of timbers--as if the canoe was sawed lengthwise into two equal sections, and a broad flat piece of timber inserted in the middle, so as to give greater breadth of beam to the vessel." Hall, _Notes on the Western States_, p. 218.--ED. [15] Flint.--FLAGG. [16] For an account of the first steamboat on the Ohio, see Flint's _Letters_, in our volume ix, p. 154, note 76.--ED. [17] Latrobe.--FLAGG. _Comment by Ed._ Charles J. Latrobe (1801-75) visited the United States in 1832-33. His _Rambles in North America in 1832-3_ (New York, 1835) and _Rambles in Mexico_ (New York and London, 1836) have much value in the history of Western travel. [18] The first steamer upon the waters of the Red River was of a peculiar construction: her steam scape-pipe, instead of ascending perpendicularly from the hurricane deck, projected from the bow, and terminated in the form of a serpent's head. As this monster ascended the wilds of the stream, with her furnaces blazing, pouring forth steam with a roar, the wondering Choctaws upon the banks gave her the poetic and appropriate name of _Pinelore_, "the Fire-Canoe."--FLAGG. [19] This quotation is from _Botanic Gardens_, book i, chapter i, by Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802).--ED. [20] For Rome, see Maximilian's _Travels_, in our volume xxii, p. 160, note 77.--ED. [21] Green River, rising in central Kentucky, flows west through the coal fields to its junction with the Big Barren; thence it turns north, and empties into the Ohio nine miles above Evansville, Indiana. Beginning with 1808 the state legislature expended large sums of money for improving navigation on Green River. As a consequence small steamboats may ascend it to a distance of more than a hundred and fifty miles. The length of the stream is estimated at three hundred and fifty miles.--ED. [22] Diamond Island, densely wooded, is located thirty-six miles below the mouth of Green River, and seven miles above Mount Vernon. Its name is perhaps derived from its shape, being five miles long and one and a half wide.--ED. [23] For note on Hendersonville, see Cuming's _Tour_, in our volume iv, p. 267, note 175.--ED. [24] John J. Audubon, born in Louisiana (1780), was a son of a wealthy French naval officer; his mother was a Spanish Creole. Educated in France, he returned to America (1798) and settled near Philadelphia, devoting his time to the study of birds. In 1808 he went west and until 1824 made fruitless attempts to establish himself in business in Kentucky and Louisiana. He issued in London (1827-38) his noted publication on the _Birds of America_, which was completed in eighty-seven parts. During 1832-39 he published five volumes entitled _Ornithological Biographies_. Audubon died in 1851. See M. R. Audubon, _Audubon and his Journals_ (New York, 1897).--ED. [25] For the historical importance of the Wabash River, see Croghan's _Journals_, in our volume i, p. 137, note 107.--ED. [26] The Wabash and Erie Canal, which connects the waters of Lake Erie with the Ohio River by way of the Maumee and Wabash rivers, has played an active rôle in the development of Indiana, her most important cities being located upon its route. The Ohio section was constructed during the years 1837-43, and the Indiana section as far as Lafayette in 1832-40; the canal being later continued to Terre Haute and the Ohio River near Evansville. Although the federal government granted Indiana 1,505,114 acres for constructing the canal, the state was by this work plunged heavily in debt. After the War of Secession the canal lost much of its relative importance for commerce. June 14, 1880, Congress authorized the secretary of war to order a survey and estimate of cost and practicability of making a ship canal out of the old Wabash and Erie Canal. The survey and estimate were made, but the matter was allowed to drop. See _Senate Docs._, 46 Cong., 3 sess., iii, 55.--ED. [27] For an account of New Harmony and its founder, George Rapp, see Hulme's _Journal_, in our volume x, p. 50, note 22, and p. 54, note 25.--ED. [28] Flagg is evidently referring to Robert Owen, the active promoter of the scheme. A brief history of his activities is given in Hulme's _Journal_, in our volume x, p. 50, note 22. For Robert Dale Owen see Maximilian's _Travels_, in our volume xxiv, p. 133, note 128.--ED. [29] "Declaration of Mental Independence" delivered by Robert Owen (not Robert Dale Owen) on July 4, 1826, was printed in the New Harmony _Gazette_ for July 12, 1826. An extended quotation is given in George B. Lockwood, _The New Harmony Communities_ (Marion, Indiana, 1902), p. 163.--ED. [30] For an account of William Maclure, see Maximilian's _Travels_, in our volume xxii, p. 163, note 81. In reference to the Duke of Saxe Weimar, see Wyeth's _Oregon_, in our volume xxi, p. 71, note 47.--ED. [31] On Shawneetown and the Shawnee Indians see our volume i, p. 23, note 13, and p. 138, note 108.--ED. [32] For a brief statement on the salines, see James's _Long's Expedition_, in our volume xiv, p. 58, note 11.--ED. [33] An excellent account of the Mound Builders is given by Lucien Carr in Smithsonian Institution _Report_, 1891 (Washington, 1893), pp. 503-599; see also Cyrus Thomas, "Report on Mound Explorations" in United States Bureau of Ethnology _Report_ (1890-91).--ED. [34] Hanging Rock is the name given to a high sandstone escarpment on the right bank of the river, three miles below Ironton, Ohio.--ED. [35] Blennerhasset's Island is two miles below Parkersburg, West Virginia. For its history, see Cuming's _Tour_, in our volume iv, p. 129, note 89.--ED. [36] A brief description of Rock Inn Cave (or Cave-in-Rock) may be found in Cuming's _Tour_, in our volume iv, p. 273, note 180.--ED. [37] For Schoolcraft, see Gregg's _Commerce of the Prairies_, in our volume xx, p. 286, note 178.--ED. [38] It is a remarkable circumstance, that this term is employed to signify the _same_ thing by all the tribes from the Arkansas to the sources of the Mississippi; and, according to Mackenzie, throughout the Arctic Regions.--FLAGG. [39] See Cuming's _Tour_, in our volume iv, p. 268.--ED. [40] Ford's Ferry is today a small hamlet in Crittenden County, Kentucky, twenty-five miles below Shawneetown. Flagg is referring probably to the Wilson family. Consult Lewis Collins, _History of Kentucky_ (Covington, 1874), i. p. 147.--ED. [41] Since the remarks relative to "the remarkable cavern in the vicinity of _Tower Rock_, and not far from Hurricane Island," were in type, the subjoined notice of a similar cave, probably the same referred to, has casually fallen under my observation. The reader will recognise in this description the outlines of _Rock-Inn-Cave_, previously noticed. It is not a little singular that none of our party, which was a numerous one, observed the "hieroglyphics" here alluded to. The passage is from Priest's "American Antiquities." "_A Cavern of the West, in which are found many interesting Hieroglyphics, supposed to have been made by the Ancient Inhabitants._ "On the Ohio, twenty miles below the mouth of the Wabash, is a cavern in which are found many hieroglyphics and representations of such delineations as would induce the belief that their authors were indeed comparatively refined and civilized. It is a cave in a rock, or ledge of the mountain, which presents itself to view a little above the water of the river when in flood, and is situated close to the bank. In the early settlement of Ohio this cave became possessed by a party of Kentuckians called 'Wilson's Gang.' Wilson, in the first place, brought his family to this cave, and fitted it up as a spacious dwelling; erected a _signpost_ on the water side, on which were these words: 'Wilson's Liquor Vault and House of Entertainment.' The novelty of such a tavern induced almost all the boats descending the river to call for refreshments and amusement. Attracted by these circumstances, several idle characters took up their abode at the cave, after which it continually resounded with the shouts of the licentious, the clamour of the riotous, and the blasphemy of gamblers. Out of such customers Wilson found no difficulty in forming a band of robbers, with whom he formed the plan of murdering the crews of every boat that stopped at his tavern, and of sending the boats, manned by some of his party, to New-Orleans, and there sell their loading for cash, which was to be conveyed to the cave by land through the States of Tennessee and Kentucky; the party returning with it being instructed to murder and rob on all good occasions on the road. "After a lapse of time the merchants of the upper country began to be alarmed on finding their property make no returns, and their people never coming back. Several families and respectable men who had gone down the river were never heard of, and the losses became so frequent that it raised, at length, a cry of individual distress and general dismay. This naturally led to an inquiry, and large rewards were offered for the discovery of the perpetrators of such unparalleled crimes. It soon came out that Wilson, with an organized party of forty-five men, was the cause of such waste of blood and treasure; that he had a station at Hurricane Island to arrest every boat that passed by the mouth of the cavern, and that he had agents at Natchez and New-Orleans, of presumed respectability, who converted his assignments into cash, though they knew the goods to be stolen or obtained by the commission of murder. "The publicity of Wilson's transactions soon broke up his party; some dispersed, others were taken prisoners, and he himself was killed by one of his associates, who was tempted by the reward offered for the head of the captain of the gang. "This cavern measures about twelve rods in length and five in width; its entrance presents a width of eighty feet at its base and twenty-five feet high. The interior walls are smooth rock. The floor is very remarkable, being level through the whole length of its centre, the sides rising in stony grades, in the manner of seats in the pit of a theatre. On a diligent scrutiny of the walls, it is plainly discerned that the ancient inhabitants at a very remote period had made use of the cave as a house of deliberation and council. The walls bear many hieroglyphics well executed, and some of them represent animals which have no resemblance to any now known to natural history. "This cavern is a great natural curiosity, as it is connected with another still more gloomy, which is situated exactly above, united by an aperture of about fourteen feet, which, to ascend, is like passing up a chimney, while the mountain is yet far above. Not long after the dispersion and arrest of the robbers who had infested it, in the upper vault were found the skeletons of about sixty persons, who had been murdered by the gang of Wilson, as was supposed. "But the tokens of antiquity are still more curious and important than a description of the mere cave, which are found engraved on the sides within, an account of which we proceed to give: "The sun in different stages of rise and declension; the moon under various phases; a snake biting its tail, and representing an orb or circle; a viper; a vulture; buzzards tearing out the heart of a prostrate man; a panther held by the ears by a child; a crocodile; several trees and shrubs; a fox; a curious kind of hydra serpent; two doves; several bears; two scorpions; an eagle; an owl; some quails; _eight_ representations of animals which are now unknown. Three out of the eight are like the elephant in all respects except the tusk and the tail. Two more resemble the tiger; one a wild boar; another a sloth; and the last appears a creature of fancy, being a quadruman instead of a quadruped; the claws being alike before and behind, and in the act of conveying something to the mouth, which lay in the centre of the monster. Besides these were several fine representations of men and women, _not naked_, but clothed; not as the Indians, but much in the costume of Greece and Rome."--FLAGG. _Comment by Ed._ This same account is given by Collins (_op. cit._, in note 40), and is probably true. [42] Hurricane Island, four miles below Cave-in-Rock, is more than five miles in length. The "Wilson gang" for some time used this island for a seat of operation.--ED. [43] Golconda is the seat of Pope County, Illinois. See Woods's _English Prairie_, in our volume x, p. 327, note 77. On or just before Christmas, 1806, Aaron Burr came down the Cumberland River from Nashville and joined Blennerhasset, Davis Floyd, and others who were waiting for him at the mouth of the river, and together they started on Burr's ill-fated expedition (December 28, 1806). Their united forces numbered only nine batteaux and sixty men. See W. F. McCaleb, _Aaron Burr's Conspiracy_ (New York, 1903), p. 254 ff. For a short account of Paducah, see Maximilian's _Travels_, in our volume xxii, p. 203, note 110.--ED. [44] It has since been nearly destroyed by fire.--FLAGG. [45] On Fort Massac, see A. Michaux's _Travels_, in our volume iii, p. 73, note 139.--ED. [46] Wilkinsonville, named for General James Wilkinson, was a small hamlet located on the site of the Fort Wilkinson of 1812, twenty-two miles above Cairo. Two or three farm houses are today the sole relics of this place; see Thwaites, _On the Storied Ohio_, p. 291. Caledonia is still a small village in Pulaski County, Illinois. Its post-office is Olmstead.--ED. [47] For account of the attempt at settlements at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi, see Maximilian's _Travels_, in our volume xxii, p. 204, note 111.--ED. [48] For America see Ogden's _Letters_, our volume xix, p. 44, note 30, and Woods's _English Prairie_, our volume x, p. 327, note 77. The scheme known as the "Internal Improvement Policy" was authorized over the governor's veto by the Illinois general assembly on February 27, 1837, in response to the popular clamor for its adoption. The object was to open the country for immigration and hasten its natural development by constructing railroads and canals as yet not needed commercially. Ten million two hundred thousand dollars were appropriated by the act, including two hundred thousand dollars to be given directly to the counties not favored. Surveys were made, and speculation was rife. Then followed a collapse, and six million five hundred thousand dollars were added to the state debt. The scheme was later referred to as the General Insanity Bill.--ED. [49] The English Island of 1836 is probably the Power's Island of today. It is three miles long, and forms a part of Scott County, Missouri, more than twenty miles above Cairo.--ED. [50] Herbert.--FLAGG. [51] For a sketch of Cape Girardeau, see A. Michaux's _Travels_, in our volume iii, p. 80, note 154.--ED. [52] A superior quality of kaolin, or china clay, is mined in large quantities in Cape Girardeau County. Marble ninety-nine per cent pure, is procured in abundance.--ED. [53] "Muddy River," usually called "Big Muddy," is the English translation of the French _Rivière au Vase_, or _Vaseux_. Formed by the union of two branches rising in Jefferson County, Illinois, it flows in a southwesterly direction and empties into the Mississippi about twenty-five miles above Cape Girardeau. It is one hundred and forty miles long.--ED. [54] Fountain Bluff is six miles above the mouth of the Big Muddy. Flagg's descriptions are in the main accurate.--ED. [55] Grand Tower, seventy-five feet high, and frequently mentioned by early writers, is a mile above the island of the same name, at the mouth of the Big Muddy, and stands out some distance from the Missouri side. Grand Tower Island was an object of much dread to boatmen during the days of early navigation on the Mississippi. A powerful current sweeping around Devil's Oven, frequently seized frail or unwieldy craft to dash it against this rock. Usually the boatmen landed, and by means of long ropes towed their vessels along the Illinois side, past this perilous rock.--ED. [56] The Mississippi between the mouth of the Kaskaskia River and Cape Girardeau offered many obstructions to early navigation. As at Grand Tower, the boatmen frequently found it necessary to land and tow their boats past the dangerous points, and here the Indians would lie in ambush to fall upon the unfortunate whites. The peril of these places doubtless lent color to their nomenclature. Flagg's descriptions are fairly accurate except in the matter of dimensions, wherein he tends to exaggeration.--ED. [57] $105,000.--FLAGG. [58] For Red River raft, see James's Long's _Expedition_, in our volume xvii, p. 70, note 64.--ED. [59] In reference to the American Bottom, see Ogden's _Letters_, in our volume xix, p. 62, note 48.--ED. [60] For an account of Ste. Genevieve, see Cuming's _Tour_, in our volume iv, p. 266, note 174. According to Austin, cited below, La Motte (or La Mothe) Cadillac, governor of Louisiana, went on an expedition (1715) to the Illinois in search of silver, and found lead ore in a mine which had been shown him fifteen miles west of the Mississippi. It is believed by some authorities that this was the famous "Mine la Mothe," at the head of the St. Francis River. Schoolcraft, however, says that Philip Francis Renault, having received mining grants from the French government, left France in 1719, ascended the Mississippi, established himself the following year near Kaskaskia, and sent out small companies in search of precious metals; and that La Mothe, who had charge of one of these companies, soon discovered the mine that still bears his name. It was operated only at intervals, until after the American occupation, when its resources were developed. Under the Spanish domination (1762-1800), little was done to develop the mine. In 1763, however, Francis Burton discovered the "Mine à Burton," on a branch of Mineral Fork. Like the "Mine la Mothe," it was known to the Indians before the discovery by the whites, and both are still operated. Burton was said to have been alive in 1818, at the age of a hundred and six; see Colonel Thomas Benton's account of him in St. Louis _Enquirer_, October 16, 1818. For an account of primitive mining operations, see Thwaites, _Wisconsin Historical Collections_, xiii, pp. 271-292; Moses Austin, "Lead Mines of Ste. Geneviève and St. Louis Counties," _American State Papers_ (_Public Lands_), iii, pp. 609-613; and H. R. Schoolcraft, _Lead Mines of Missouri_ (New York, 1819).--ED. [61] From 1738 to 1744, the mines were considered as public property: but in the year last mentioned François Vallé received from the French government a grant of two thousand arpents of land (1,666 acres) including "Mine la Mothe," and eighteen years later twenty-eight thousand arpents (23,333 acres) additional. At Vallé's death the land passed to his sons, François and John, and Joseph Pratt, a transfer confirmed by Congress in 1827. The next year it was sold to C. C. Vallé, L. E. Linn, and Everett Pratt. In 1830 it was sold in part and the remainder leased. In 1868 the estate passed from the hands of the Vallés.--ED. [62] Pilot Knob is a conical-shaped hill, a mile in diameter, in Iron County, Missouri, seventy-five miles southwest of St. Louis, and is rich in iron ore. In the War of Secession it was the scene of a battle between General Sterling Price and General Hugh B. Ewing (September 26, 27, 1864). Iron Mountain is an isolated knob of the St. François Mountains in St. François County, eighty miles south of St. Louis. One of the richest and purest iron mines in the United States is found there.--ED. [63] The Peoria were one of the five principal tribes of the Illinois Confederation. They resided around the lake in the central portion of Illinois, which bears their name. In 1832 they were removed to Kansas, and in 1854 to Indian Territory, where, united with other tribes, they still reside.--ED. [64] For a short account of Fort Chartres, see A. Michaux's _Travels_, in our volume iii, p. 71, note 136.--ED. [65] For Prairie du Rocher see A. Michaux's _Travels_, in our volume iii, p. 70, note 133. The legend referred to is, "Michel de Couce" by James Hall, in his _Legends of the West_. Contrary to Flagg's statement that there exists no description of Fort Chartres worthy of its history, Philip Pittman, who visited the place in 1766, gives a good detailed description of the fort in his _Present State of the European Settlements on the Missisippi_ (London, 1770), pp. 45, 46.--ED. [66] For location and date of settlement of Herculaneum, see Maximilian's _Travels_, in our volume xxii, p. 212, note 122. On a perpendicular bluff, more than a hundred feet in height, in the vicinity of Herculaneum, J. Macklot erected (1809) what was probably the first shot-tower this side of the Atlantic. The next year one Austin built another tower at the same point. According to H. R. Schoolcraft in his _View of the Lead Mines of Missouri_ (New York, 1819), pp. 138, 139, there were in 1817 three shot-towers near Herculaneum, producing in the eighteen months ending June 1 of that year, 668,350 pounds of shot. From the top of small wooden towers erected on the edge of the bluff, the melted lead was poured through holes in copper pans or sieves.--ED. [67] For the location of the Platine (usually spelled Plattin), see Maximilian's _Travels_, in our volume xxii, p. 212, note 123. Lead mining has been carried on in this district, intermittently, since 1824.--ED. [68] See Maximilian's _Travels_, in our volume xxii, p. 212, note 123.--ED. [69] The following extract from the Journal of Charlevoix, one of the earliest historians of the West, with reference to the Mines upon the Merrimac, may prove not uninteresting. The work is a rare one. "On the 17th (Oct., 1721), after sailing five leagues farther, I left, on my right, the river Marameg, where they are at present employed in searching for a silver mine. Perhaps your grace may not be displeased if I inform you what success may be expected from this undertaking. Here follows what I have been able to collect about this affair, from a person who is well acquainted with it, and who has resided for several years on the spot. "In the year 1719, the Sieur de Lochon, being sent by the West India Company, in quality of founder, and having dug in a place which had been marked out to him, drew up a pretty large quantity of ore, a pound whereof, which took up four days in smelting, produced, as they say, two drachms of silver; but some have suspected him of putting in this quantity himself. A few months afterward he returned thither, and, without thinking any more of the silver, he extracted from two or three thousand weight of ore fourteen pounds of very bad lead, which stood him in fourteen hundred francs. Disgusted with a labour which was so unprofitable, he returned to France. "The company, persuaded of the truth of the indications which had been given them, and that the incapacity of the founder had been the sole cause of their bad success, sent, in his room, a Spaniard called Antonio, who had been taken at the siege of Pensacola; had afterward been a galley-slave, and boasted much of his having wrought in a mine at Mexico. They gave him very considerable appointments, but he succeeded no better than had done the Sieur de Lochon. He was not discouraged himself, and others inclined to believe that he had failed from his not being versed in the construction of furnaces. He gave over the search after lead, and undertook to make silver; he dug down to the rock, which was found to be eight or ten feet in thickness; several pieces of it were blown up and put into a crucible, from whence it was given out that he extracted three or four drachms of silver; but many are still doubtful of the truth of this fact. "About this time arrived a company of the King's miners, under the direction of one _La Renaudiere_, who, resolving to begin with the lead mines, was able to do nothing; because neither he himself nor any of his company were in the least acquainted with the construction of furnaces. Nothing can be more surprising than the facility with which the company at that time exposed themselves to great expenses, and the little precaution they took to be satisfied of the capacity of those they employed. La Renaudiere and his miners not being able to procure any lead, a private company undertook the mines of the Marameg, and Sieur Renault, one of the directors, superintended them with care. In the month of June last he found a bed of lead ore two feet in thickness, running to a great length over a chain of mountains, where he has now set his people to work. He flatters himself that there is silver below the lead. Everybody is not of his opinion, but will discover the truth."--FLAGG. [70] Flagg's account agrees with a much longer treatment by Lewis C. Beck, in his _Gazetteer of the States of Illinois and Missouri_ (Albany, 1823), with the exception that the latter says there were no inscriptions to be found on the gravestones. Beck himself makes extended quotations from the _Missouri Gazette_, November 6, 1818, and subsequent numbers. Though no doubt exaggerated, these accounts were probably based on facts, for a large number of prehistoric remains have been found in St. Louis County and preserved in the Peabody Museum at New Haven, Connecticut, and elsewhere.--ED. [71] For an account of Jefferson Barracks, see Townsend's _Narrative_, in our volume xxi, p. 122, note 2.--ED. [72] For the history of Carondelet, see Maximilian's _Travels_, in our volume xxii, p. 215, note 124. For reference to Cahokia, see A. Michaux's _Travels_, in our volume iii, p. 70, note 135. On May 20, 1826, Congress made an appropriation of fifteen thousand dollars to the secretary of war, for the purpose of purchasing the site for the erection of an arsenal in the vicinity of St. Louis. Lands now far within the southeastern limits of the city were purchased, and the buildings erected which were used for arsenals until January 16, 1871, when they were occupied as a depot for the general mounted recruiting service.--ED. [73] A name of Algonquin origin--_Missi_ signifying great, and _sepe_ a river.--FLAGG. [74] Indian name for the "Falls of St. Anthony."--FLAGG. [75] That the Mississippi, the Missouri, and, indeed, most of the great rivers of the West, are annually enlarging, as progress is made in clearing and cultivating the regions drained by them, scarcely admits a doubt. Within the past thirty years, the width of the Mississippi has sensibly increased; its overflows are more frequent, while, by the diminution of obstructions, it would seem not to have become proportionally shallow. In 1750, the French settlements began upon the river above New-Orleans, and for twenty years the banks were cultivated without a _levee_. Inundation was then a rare occurrence: ever since, from year to year, the river has continued to rise, and require higher and stronger embankments. A century hence, if this phenomenon continues, what a magnificent spectacle will not this river present! How terrific its freshets! The immense forest of timber which lies concealed beneath its depths, as evinced by the great earthquakes of 1811, demonstrates that, for centuries, the Mississippi has occupied its present bed.--FLAGG. [76] In 1764 Auguste Chouteau made tentative plans for the fortification of St. Louis. In obedience to an order by Don Francisco Cruzat, the lieutenant-governor, he made a survey in 1781 for the purpose of perfecting these earlier plans. In the same year the stockade was begun immediately south of the present site of the courthouse. In 1797 the round stone tower which Flagg mentions was constructed and preparations made for building four additional towers; the latter were never completed. From 1804 to 1806 these fortifications were used by the United States troops, and then abandoned for military purposes. The commandant's house served as a courthouse from 1806 to 1816; and the tower as a jail until 1819. For a detailed description of the plans, see J. F. Scharf, _St. Louis City and County_ (Philadelphia, 1883), p. 136 ff.--ED. [77] For a brief sketch of William H. Ashley see Maximilian's _Travels_, in our volume xxii, p. 250, note 198. He purchased (1826 or 1827) eight acres on the present site of Broadway, between Biddle and Bates streets, St. Louis, where he built a handsome residence. Bloody Island, now the Third Ward of East St. Louis, was formed about 1800 by the current cutting its way through the neck in a bend of the river. For a long time it was not determined to what state it belonged, and being considered neutral ground many duels were fought there, notably those between Thomas H. Benton and Charles Lucas (1817), United States District Attorney Thomas Rector and Joshua Barton (1823), and Thomas Biddle and Spencer Pettis (1830). The name was derived from these bloody associations.--ED. [78] For a sketch of Charlevoix, see Nuttall's _Journal_, in our volume xiii, p. 116, note 81.--ED. [79] D'Ulloa, the first Spanish governor of Louisiana, sent a detachment of soldiers to St. Louis in 1767. Later, these troops were transferred to the south bank of the Missouri, a few miles above its mouth, where "Old Fort St. Charles the Prince" was erected. General Wilkinson built Fort Bellefontaine on this site in 1805. From 1809 to 1815 this was the headquarters of the military department of Louisiana (including Forts Madison, Massac, Osage, and Vincennes). It was the starting point of the Pike, Long, and Atkinson expeditions. On July 10, 1826, it was abandoned for Jefferson Barracks, but a small arsenal of deposits was maintained here until 1834. The land was eventually sold by the government (1836). See Walter B. Douglas's note in Thwaites, _Original Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition_ (New York, 1905), v, pp. 392, 393.--ED. [80] North of Missouri River, twenty miles above its confluence with the Mississippi, where the bluffs of the two streams unite, two smooth, treeless, grass-covered mounds stand out from the main bluffs. These mounds, a hundred and fifty feet in height, were called by the early French "mamelles" from their fancied resemblance to the human breast.--ED. [81] Alton, twenty-five miles above St. Louis, is the principal city of Madison County, Illinois. In 1807 the French erected here a small trading post. Rufus Easton laid out the town (1818), and named it for his son. The state penitentiary was first built at Alton (1827), but the last prisoner was transferred (1860) to the new penitentiary at Joliet, begun in 1857. Alton was the scene of the famous anti-Abolitionist riot of November 7, 1837, when Elijah P. Lovejoy was killed.--ED. [82] Captain Benjamin Godfrey donated fifteen acres of land and thirty-five thousand dollars for the erection of a female seminary at Godfrey, Madison County, Illinois. The school was opened April 11, 1838, under the title of the Monticello Female Seminary, with Rev. Theron Baldwin for its first principal.--ED. [83] The plans mentioned here were probably being agitated when Flagg visited Alton in 1836. The act incorporating the first railroad in Illinois was approved January 17, 1835; it provided for the construction of a road from Chicago to a point opposite Vincennes. By the internal improvement act of February 27, 1837, a road was authorized to be constructed from Alton to Terre Haute, by way of Shelbyville, and another from Alton to Mount Carmel, by way of Salem, Marion County; but the act was repealed before the roads were completed. The Cumberland road was constructed only to Vandalia, Fayette County, though the internal improvement act contemplated its extension to St. Louis.--ED. [84] The French village is no doubt Portage des Sioux. In 1799 Francis Leseuer, a resident of St. Charles, visited the place, which was then an Indian settlement. Pleased with the location he returned to St. Charles, and secured a grant of the land from Don Carlos Dehault Delassus, lieutenant-governor of Upper Louisiana, organized a colony from among the French inhabitants of St. Charles and St. Louis, and occupied the place the same autumn.--ED. [85] Grafton, Jersey County, Illinois, was settled in 1832 by James Mason, and named by him in honor of his native place. It was laid out (1836) by Paris and Sarah Mason.--ED. [86] The Illinois Indians (from "Illini," meaning "men") were of Algonquian stock, and formerly occupied the state to which they gave the name. They were loyal to the French during their early wars, later aided the English, and were with great difficulty subdued by the United States government. Separate tribes of the Illinois Indians were the Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Michigami, Moingewena, Peoria, and Tamaroa. On a high bluff just above Alton there was formerly to be seen a huge painted image known among the Indians as the Piasa Bird. To the natives it was an object of much veneration, and in time many superstitions became connected therewith. First described in the _Journal_ of Father Jacques Marquette (1673) its origin was long a subject of speculation among early writers. Traces of this strange painting could be seen until 1840 or 1845, when they were entirely obliterated through quarrying. See P. A. Armstrong, _The Piasa or the Devil among the Indians_ (Morris, Illinois, 1887). The version of the tradition given by Flagg was probably from the pen of John Russell, who in 1837 began editing at Grafton, Illinois, the _Backwoodsman_, a local newspaper. Russell had in 1819 or 1820 published in the _Missourian_ an article entitled "Venomous Worm," which won for him considerable reputation. Russell admitted that the version was largely imaginative; nevertheless it had a wide circulation.--ED. [87] For a sketch of Tonty, see Nuttall's _Journal_, in our volume xiii, p. 117, note 85.--ED. [88] Beardstone, Cass County, Illinois, was laid out by Thomas Beard and Enoch Marsh (1827). During the Black Hawk War (1832), it was the principal supply base for the Illinois volunteers.--ED. [89] For an account of the Illinois Canal, see Flint's _Letters_, in our volume ix, p. 186, note 93.--ED. [90] By act of Congress approved May 6, 1812, three tracts of land, not exceeding on the whole six million acres, were authorized to be surveyed and used as a bounty for the soldiers engaged in the war begun with Great Britain in that year. The tract surveyed in Illinois Territory comprehended the land lying between the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, extending seven miles north of Quincy, on the former stream, and to the present village of De Pue, in southeastern Bureau County, on the latter; it embraced the present counties of Calhoun, Pike, Adams, Brown, Schuyler, Hancock, McDonough, Fulton, Peoria, Stark, Knox, Warren, Henderson, and Mercer, and parts of Henry, Bureau, Putnam, and Marshall.--ED. [91] Cap au Gris was a point of land on the Mississippi, in Calhoun County, Illinois, just above the mouth of the Illinois. J. M. Peck, in his _Gazetteer of Illinois_ (1837), from which Flagg derives his account of this place, says that a settlement had been formed there about forty years earlier. The town of this name is now in Lincoln County, Missouri. There is no foundation for the belief that La Salle had erected a fort here.--ED. [92] Montgomery, on the right bank of Illinois River, in Pike County, was laid out by an Alton Company, for a new landing. Naples is a small village in Scott County. Havana, founded in 1827, is the seat of justice for Mason County. Pekin is in Tazewell County.--ED. [93] Peoria, now the second largest city in Illinois, is situated a hundred and sixty miles southwest of Chicago, on the west bank and near the outlet of Lake Peoria, an expansion of the Illinois River. Its site was visited in 1680 by La Salle. Early in the eighteenth century a French settlement was made a mile and a half farther up, and named Peoria for the local Indian tribe. French missionaries were in this neighborhood as early as 1673-74. In 1788 or 1789 the first house was built on the present site of Peoria and by the close of the century the inhabitants of the old town, because of its more healthful location, moved to the new village of Peoria, which at first was called La Ville de Maillet, in honor of a French Canadian who commanded a company of volunteers in the War of the Revolution. Later the name was changed to its present form. At the opening of the War of 1812-15, the French inhabitants were charged with having aroused the Indians against the Americans in Illinois. Governor Ninian Edwards ordered Thomas E. Craig, captain of a company of Illinois militia, to proceed up the Illinois River and build a fort at Peoria. Under the pretense that his men had been fired upon by the inhabitants, when the former were peaceably passing in their boats, Craig burned half the town of Peoria in November, 1812, and transferred the majority of the population to below Alton. In the following year, Fort Clark--named in honor of General George Rogers Clark--was erected by General Benjamin Howard on this site; but after the close of the war the fort was burned by the Indians. After the affair of 1812, Peoria was not occupied, save occasionally, until 1819, when it was rebuilt by the Americans. The American Fur Company established a post there in 1824. See C. Ballance, _History of Peoria_ (Peoria, 1870).--ED. [94] Benjamin Howard (1760-1814) was elected to the state legislature of Kentucky (1800), to Congress (1807-10); appointed governor of Upper Louisiana Territory (1810), and in March, 1813, brigadier-general of the United States army in command of the 8th military department. He died at St. Louis, September, 1814.--ED. [95] Kickapoo Creek rises in Peoria County, flows southeasterly and enters Illinois River two miles below Peoria.--ED. [96] Robert Walter Weir (1803-89), after studying and painting in New York, Florence (1824-25), and Rome (1825-27), opened a studio in New York, and became an associate and later academician of the National Academy of Design. He was professor of drawing in the United States Military Academy at West Point from 1832 to 1874. Weir is best known for his historical paintings, prominent among which are "The Bourbons' Last March," "Landing of Hendric Hudson," "Indian Captives," and "Embarkation of the Pilgrims." He built and beautified the Church of Holy Innocents at Highland Falls, West Point. His two sons, John Ferguson and Julian Alden, became noted artists.--ED. [97] By order of the war department (May 19, 1834), Lieutenant-Colonel S. W. Kearny was sent with companies B, H, and I of the 1st United States dragoons to establish a fort near the mouth of Des Moines River. The present site of Montrose, Lee County, Iowa, at the head of the lower rapids of the Mississippi, was chosen. The barracks being completed by November, 1834, they were occupied until the spring of 1837, when the troops were transferred to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. As early as 1721 a French fort (La Baye) had been erected at Green Bay, on the left bank of Fox River, a half league from its mouth. After suffering many vicissitudes during the Fox wars it was later strengthened, and when occupied by English troops in 1761, was re-named Fort Edward Augustus. After the close of the War of 1812-15, the United States government determined to exercise a real authority over the forts on the upper Great Lakes, where, in spite of the provision of Jay's Treaty (1794), its power had been merely nominal. In 1815 John Bowyer, the first United States Indian agent for the Green Bay district, established a government trading post at Green Bay, and made an ineffectual attempt to control the fur trade of the region. The following year, Fort Howard, named in honor of General Benjamin Howard, was built on the site of the old French fort. With the exception of 1820-22, when the troops were transferred to Camp Smith, on the east shore, Fort Howard was continuously occupied until 1841, when its garrison was ordered to Florida and Mexico. Later, from 1849 to 1851, it was occupied by Colonel Francis Lee and Lieutenant-Colonel B. L. E. Bonneville, and then permanently abandoned as a garrison, although a volunteer company was stationed there for a short time during the War of Secession. Almost every trace of the old fort has been obliterated. Consult _Wisconsin Historical Collections_, xvi, xvii; also William L. Evans, "Military History of Green Bay," in Wisconsin Historical Society _Proceedings_, 1899, pp. 128-146.--ED. [98] Hennepin, on the east bank of the Illinois River, was laid out in 1831 and made the seat of justice for Putnam County. Ottawa, the county seat of La Salle, was laid off by the canal commissioners (1830) at the junction of the Fox and Illinois rivers.--ED. [99] Flagg's description of this noted bluff is accurate. After careful investigations, Francis Parkman, the historian, was convinced that _Le Rocher_ or Starved Rock is the site of Fort St. Louis, erected by La Salle in December, 1682. On his departure in the autumn of 1683, La Salle left the post in command of his lieutenant, Henri de Tonty, who was soon succeeded by De Baugis. In 1690 Tonty and La Forest were granted the proprietorship of the stronghold, but in 1702 it was abandoned by royal order. By 1718 it was again occupied by the French, although when Father Charlevoix passed three years later, it was once more deserted. The tradition which gave rise to the name Starved Rock was well known; see _Tales of the Border_ (Philadelphia, 1834); Osman Eaton, _Starved Rock, a Historical Sketch_ (Ottawa, Illinois, 1895); and Francis Parkman, _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West_ (Boston, 1869). Pontiac was assassinated in 1769 instead of 1767. For accounts of the Ottawa and Potawotami, see Croghan's _Journals_, in our volume i, p. 76, note 37, and p. 115, note 84, respectively.--ED. [100] For a biographical sketch of Pierre and Auguste Chouteau, the elders, see James's _Long's Expedition_, in our volume xvi, p. 275, note 127.--ED. [101] The imprint of a human foot is yet to be seen in the limestone of the shore not far from the landing at St. Louis. With reference to the _human footprints in the rock at St. Louis_, I have given the local tradition. Schoolcraft's detailed description, which I subjoin, varies from this somewhat. The print of a human foot is said to have been discovered also in the limestone at Herculaneum. Morse, in his _Universal Geography_, tells us of the tracks of an army of men and horses on a certain mountain in the State of Tennessee, fitly named the Enchanted Mountain. "Before leaving Harmony, our attention was particularly directed to a tabular mass of limestone, containing two apparent prints or impressions of the naked human foot. This stone was carefully preserved in an open area, upon the premises of Mr. Rappe, by whom it had previously been conveyed from the banks of the Mississippi, at St. Louis. The impressions are, to all appearance, those of a man standing in an erect posture, with the left foot a little advanced and the heels drawn in. The distance between the heels, by accurate measurement, is six and a quarter inches, and between the extremities of the toes thirteen and a half. But, by a close inspection, it will be perceived that these are not the impressions of feet accustomed to the European shoe; the toes being much spread, and the foot flattened in the manner that is observed in persons unaccustomed to the close shoe. The probability, therefore, of their having been imparted by some individual of a race of men who were strangers to the art of tanning skins, and at a period much anterior to that to which any traditions of the present race of Indians reaches, derives additional weight from this peculiar shape of the feet. "In other respects, the impressions are strikingly natural, exhibiting the muscular marks of the foot with great precision and faithfulness to nature. This circumstance weakens very much the supposition that they may, _possibly_, be specimens of antique sculpture, executed by any former race of men inhabiting this continent. Neither history nor tradition has preserved the slightest traces of such a people. For it must be recollected that, as yet, we have no evidence that the people who erected our stupendous Western tumuli possessed any knowledge of masonry, far less of sculpture, or that they had even invented a chisel, a knife, or an axe, other than those of porphyry, hornstone, or obsidian. "The average length of the human foot in the male subject may, perhaps, be assumed at ten inches. The length of each foot, in our subject, is ten and a quarter inches: the breadth, taken across the toes, at right angles to the former line, four inches; but the greatest spread of the toes is four and a half inches, which diminishes to two and a half at the heel. Directly before the prints, and approaching within a few inches of the left foot, is a well-impressed and deep mark, having some resemblance to a scroll, whose greatest length is two feet seven inches, and greatest breadth twelve and a half inches. "The rock containing these interesting impressions is a compact limestone of a grayish-blue colour. It was originally quarried on the left bank of the Mississippi at St. Louis, and is a part of the extensive range of calcareous rocks upon which that town is built. It contains very perfect remains of the encrinite, echinite, and some other fossil species. The rock is firm and well consolidated, as much so as any part of the stratum. A specimen of this rock, now before us, has a decidedly sparry texture, and embraces a mass of black blende. This rock is extensively used as a building material at St. Louis. On parting with its carbonic acid and water, it becomes beautifully white, yielding an excellent quick-lime. Foundations of private dwellings at St. Louis, and the military works erected by the French and Spaniards from this material sixty years ago, are still as solid and unbroken as when first laid. We cite these facts as evincing the compactness and durability of the stone--points which must essentially affect any conclusions, to be drawn from the prints we have mentioned, and upon which, therefore, we are solicitous to express our decided opinion."--FLAGG. [102] For the history of Fort Chartres, see A. Michaux's _Travels_, in our volume iii, p. 71, note 136. For a biographical sketch of St. Ange, see Croghan's _Journals_, in our volume i, p. 138, note 109.--ED. [103] At the close of 1767 Captain Francisco Rios arrived at St. Louis in pursuance of an order of D'Ulloa, governor of Louisiana. The following year he built Fort Prince Charles, and although at first coldly received, won the respect of the inhabitants by his tact and good judgment. After the expulsion of D'Ulloa in the revolution of 1768, Rios returned with his soldiers to New Orleans.--ED. [104] Spain retroceded Louisiana to France by the treaty of San Ildefonso (October 1, 1800). The latter transferred the territory to the United States by the treaty signed at Paris, April 30, 1803. The attack on St. Louis mentioned by Flagg, occurred May 26, 1780. The expedition, composed of Chippewa, Winnebago, Sioux, and other Indian tribes, with a Canadian contingent numbering about seven hundred and fifty, started from Mackinac. See R. G. Thwaites, _France in America_ (New York and London, 1905), p. 290; and "Papers from Canadian Archives," _Wisconsin Historical Collections_, xi, pp. 152-157.--ED. [105] Dangerous passes on the Mississippi were rendered doubly perilous to early navigators by the presence of bands of robbers. An incident occurred early in 1787, which led to a virtual extermination of these marauders. While ascending the river, Beausoliel, a wealthy merchant of New Orleans, was attacked near Cotton Wood Creek by the Culbert and Magilhay freebooters. After being captured, the merchants made good their escape through the strategy of a negro, killed many of their captors, and returned to New Orleans to report the state of affairs. The following year (1788) the governor issued a proclamation forbidding boats to proceed singly to St. Louis. Accordingly a fleet of ten boats ascended and destroyed the lair at Cotton Wood Creek, the remaining robbers having fled at their approach. This bloodless victory marks the close of the freebooting period. The year was afterwards known in local annals as _L'Annee des dix Bateaux_. See L. U. Reaves, _Saint Louis_ (St. Louis, 1875), pp. 21, 22; and Scharf, _St. Louis_, ii, p. 1092.--ED. [106] In 1805.--FLAGG. _Comment by Ed._ Every house save one was destroyed by fire on June 11, 1805. The memory of the disaster is preserved in the motto of the present seal of the city: _Resurget Cineribus_ (she arises from the ashes). [107] Lieutenant-Colonel Francisco Cruzat, who succeeded (May, 1775) Captain Don Pedro Piernas, the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Louisiana, followed the liberal policy of his predecessor and was highly esteemed by his people. He was followed in 1778 by Captain Fernando de Leyba, who was sadly lacking in tact and political ability; he was displaced for incompetency after the Indian attack of May 26, 1780. Cruzat was reappointed in September and served until November, 1787. One of the first acts of his second administration was to direct Auguste Chouteau to make plans for the fortification of St. Louis; see note 76, _ante_.--ED. [108] One, which occurred during the summer of the present year, was extensively felt. In the vicinity of this fortification, to the south, was an extensive burial-ground; and many of its slumbering tenants, in the grading of streets and excavating of cellars, have been thrown up to the light after a century's sleep.--FLAGG. [109] Colonel John O'Fallon (1791-1865), a nephew of George Rogers Clark, born near Louisville, served his military apprenticeship under General William Henry Harrison during the War of 1812-15. Resigning his position in the army (1818), he removed to St. Louis where he turned his attention to trade and accumulated a large fortune. He endowed the O'Fallon Polytechnic Institution, which was later made the scientific department of St. Louis University, contributed liberally to Washington University, and built a dispensary and medical college. It is estimated that he gave a million dollars for benevolent purposes.--ED. [110] This quotation is from the pen of an exceedingly accurate writer upon the West, and a worthy man; so far its sentiment is deserving of regard. I have canvassed the topic personally with this gentleman, and upon other subjects have frequently availed myself of a superior information, which more than twenty years of residence in the Far West has enabled him to obtain. I refer to the Rev. J. M. Peck, author of "Guide for Emigrants," &c.--FLAGG. [111] For recent scientific conclusions respecting the mounds and their builders, see citations in note 33, _ante_, p. 69. Mount Joliet, on the west bank of the Des Plaines River, in the southwestern portion of Cook County, Illinois; Mount St. Charles, in Jo Daviess County, Illinois; Sinsinawa, in Grant County, Wisconsin, and Blue Mounds, in Dane County, Wisconsin, are unquestionably of natural formation. For descriptions of the artificial mounds of Wisconsin, see I. A. Lapham, "Antiquities of Wisconsin," Smithsonian Institution _Contributions_, volume vii; Alfred Brunson, "Antiquities of Crawford County," and Stephen D. Peet, "Emblematic Mounds in Wisconsin," in _Wisconsin Historical Collections_, iii and ix, respectively.--ED. [112] About 1817, when the first steamboat arrived at St. Louis a sand-bar began forming at the lower end of the city; by 1837, this had extended as far north as Market street, forming an island more than two hundred acres in extent. Another sand-bar was formed at the upper end of the city, west of Blood Island. In 1833 the city authorities undertook the work of removal, and John Goodfellow was employed to plow up the bars with ox teams, in order that high waters might carry away the sand. After three thousand dollars had been expended without avail, the board of aldermen petitioned Congress (1835) for relief. Through the efforts of Congressman William H. Ashley, the federal government appropriated (July 4, 1836) fifteen thousand dollars--later (March 3, 1837) increased to fifty thousand dollars--for the purpose of erecting a pier to deflect the current of the river. The work was supervised by Lieutenant Robert E. Lee and his assistant, Henry Kayser. Begun in 1837, it was continued for two years, the result being that the current was turned back to the Missouri side and the sand washed out; but dikes were necessary to preserve the work that had been accomplished.--ED. [113] The dry floating dock was patented by J. Thomas, of St. Louis, March 26, 1834.--ED. [114] Three miles from the Mississippi, near the end of Laclede Avenue, St. Louis, is a powerful spring marking the source of Mill Creek (French, _La Petite Rivière_). Joseph Miguel Taillon went to St. Louis (1765), constructed a dam across this creek, and erected a mill near the intersection of Ninth and Poplar streets. Pierre Laclede Liguest bought the property in 1767, but at his death (1778), Auguste Chouteau purchased it at public auction and retained the estate until his own death in 1829. The latter built a large stone mill to take the place of Taillon's wooden structure, and later replaced it by a still larger stone mill. The mill to which Flagg probably refers was not demolished until 1863. Chouteau enlarged the pond formed by Taillon's dam and beautified it. This artificial lake, a half mile in length and three hundred yards in width, was long known as Chouteau's Pond, and a noted pleasure-resort. In 1853 it was sold to the Missouri Pacific Railroad, drained, and made the site of the union railway station and several manufacturing establishments.--ED. [115] N. M. Ludlow, assisted by Colonel Meriwether Lewis Clark and Colonel Charles Keemle, in 1835 secured subscriptions to the amount of thirty thousand dollars, later increased to sixty-five thousand, for the purpose of erecting a theatre on the southeast corner of Third and Olin streets. The first play was presented on July 3, 1837. Designed by George I. Barnett, the building was of Ionic architecture externally and internally Corinthian. It was used until July 10, 1851, when it was closed, the property having been purchased by the federal government as the site for a custom house; see Scharf, _St. Louis_, i, p. 970. The Planter's Hotel was probably the one Flagg referred to, instead of the St. Louis House. It was located between Chestnut and Vine streets, fronting Fourth street. The company was organized in 1836, the ground broken for construction in March, 1837, and the hotel opened for guests in 1841. Joseph Rosati (1789-1843) went to St. Louis in 1817 and was appointed bishop of the Roman Catholic diocese of St. Louis, created two years earlier. Active in benevolent work, he founded two colleges for men and three academies for young women, aided in establishing the order of Ladies of the Sacred Heart, and was the chief promoter in the organization of the Sisters' Hospital and the first orphan asylum. He was called to Rome in 1840, and at the Feast of St. Andrew, 1841, appointed Peter R. Kenrick as his coadjutor. Bishop Rosati died at Rome, in 1843.--ED. [116] John B. Sarpy and his two younger brothers, Gregoire B. and Silvestre D. came to America from France about the middle of the eighteenth century. After engaging in the mercantile business in New Orleans, John B. went to St. Louis (1766) and was one of its earliest merchants. After twenty years' residence there, he returned to New Orleans. His nephew of the same name, at the age of nineteen (1817) was a partner with Auguste Chouteau and was later a member of the firm of P. Chouteau Jr. and Company, one of the largest fur companies then in America. Pierre Menard (1766-1844) was in Vincennes as early as 1788. He later made his home at Kaskaskia, and held many positions of public trust in Illinois Territory. He was made major of the first regiment of the Randolph County militia (1795), was appointed judge of common pleas in the same county (1801), and United States sub-agent of Indian affairs (1813). He was also a member of several important commissions, notably of that appointed to make treaties with the Indians of the Northwest. His brothers, Hippolyte and Jean François, settled at Kaskaskia. The former was his brother's partner; the latter a well-known navigator on the Mississippi River. Michel Menard, nephew of Pierre, had much influence among the Indians and was chosen chief of the Shawnee. He founded the city of Galveston, Texas. Pierre Menard left ten children. Henry Gustavus Soulard, the second son of Antoine Pierre Soulard, was born in St. Louis (1801). Frederic Louis Billon, in his _Annals of St. Louis_ (1889), mentions him as the last survivor of all those who were born in St. Louis prior to the transfer of Louisiana to the United States (1803). For short sketches of the Chouteaus, see James's _Long's Expedition_, in our volume xvi, p. 275, note 127, and Maximilian's _Travels_, in our volume xxii, p. 235, note 168; for Pratte and Cabanné, see our volume xxii, p. 282, note 239, and p. 271, note 226, respectively.--ED. [117] Within six years after the founding of St. Louis, the first Catholic church was built. This log structure falling into ruins, was replaced in 1818 by a brick building. The corner-stone of the St. Louis cathedral (incorrectly written in Flagg as cathedral of St. Luke) was laid August 1, 1831, and consecrated October 26, 1834.--ED. [118] The painting of St. Louis was presented by Louis XVIII to Bishop Louis Guillaume Valentin Du Bourg, while the latter was in Europe (1815-17).--ED. [119] For the early appreciation of fine arts in St. Louis, see the chapter entitled "Art and Artists," written by H. H. Morgan and W. M. Bryant in Scharf, _St. Louis_, ii, pp. 1617-1627. Scharf, in speaking of the paintings in the St. Louis cathedral says, "of course the paintings of the old masters are copies, not originals."--ED. [120] In this outline of the Cathedral the author is indebted largely to a minute description by the Rev. Mr. Lutz, the officiating priest, published in the Missouri Gazetteer.--FLAGG. [121] In 1823, at the solicitation of the federal government, a band of Jesuit missionaries left Maryland and built a log school-house at Florissant, Missouri (1824) for educating the Indians. See sketch of Father de Smet in preface to this volume. The building was abandoned in 1828 and the white students transferred to the Jesuit college recently constructed at St. Louis. On December 28, 1832, the state legislature passed "an act to incorporate the St. Louis University." The faculty was organized on April 4, 1833.--ED. [122] We are informed by Rev. J. C. Burke, S.J., librarian of the St. Louis University, that the work referred to by Flagg is, _Atlas Major, sive, Cosmographia Blaviana, qua Solum, Salum, Coelum accuratissime describuntur_ (Amsterdami, Labore et Sumpibus Joannis Blaeu MDCLXXII), in 11 folio volumes. The _Acta Sanctorum_ (Lives of the Saints) were begun at the opening of the seventeenth century by P. Heribert Rosweyde, professor in the Jesuit college of Douai. The work was continued by P. Jean Bolland by instruction from his order, and later by a Jesuit commission known as Bollandists. Work was suspended at the time of the French invasion of Holland (1796) but resumed in 1836 under the auspices of Leopold I of Belgium. Volume lxvi was issued in 1902.--ED. [123] For accounts of General Henry Atkinson and of Council Bluffs, see Maximilian's _Travels_, in our volume xxii, p. 229, note 152, and p. 275, note 231, respectively.--ED. [124] The cave described here is Cliff or Indian Cave, more than two miles below Jefferson Barracks on the Missouri side.--ED. [125] River des Pères is a small stream rising in the central portion of St. Louis County, flowing southeast, and entering the Mississippi at the southern extremity of South St. Louis, formerly Carondelet.--ED. [126] This is an historical error. La Salle did not build a fort at this place, nor did he here take possession of Louisiana.--ED. [127] Pittsburg, laid out in 1836, is a hamlet in Cahokia Precinct, St. Clair County. A railroad six miles in length was constructed (1837) between Pittsburg and a point opposite St. Louis.--ED. [128] This group of Indian mounds, probably the most remarkable in America, is on the American Bottom, along the course of Canteen Creek, which rises in the southern portion of Madison County, Illinois, flows west, and enters Cahokia Creek. Monk, or Cahokia, Mound, about eight miles from St. Louis, is the most important of the group. William McAdams, who made a careful survey of this mound, wrote a good description of it in his _Records of Ancient Races in the Mississippi Valley_ (St. Louis, 1887); also E. G. Squier and E. H. Davis, "Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley, comprising the Result of extensive original Surveys and Explorations," in Smithsonian _Contributions_, i.--ED. [129] The monastery of La Trappe was founded in 1122 (sometimes incorrectly given as 1140). Originally affiliated with the order of Fontrevault, it was made a branch of the Cistercian order (1148). Contrary to Flagg's account, La Trappe did not have a separate existence until the time of Rançe, who was made abbot in 1664. The account of Rançe's conversion given here by Flagg, is recognized by historians as merely popular tradition. See Gaillardin, _Les Trappistes_ (Paris, 1844), and Pfaunenschmidt, _Geschichte der Trappisten_ (Paderborn, 1873).--ED. [130] The Trappists went to Gethsemane, Nelson County, Kentucky, in 1805. Three or four years later they moved to Missouri, but almost immediately recrossed the Mississippi and built the temporary monastery of Notre Dame de Bon Secours on Cahokia Mound, given to them by Major Nicholas Jarrot. For a description of this establishment by an eye witness, see H. M. Brackenridge, _Views of Louisiana_ (Pittsburg, 1814), appendix 5. New Melleray, a Trappist monastery twelve miles southwest of Dubuque, Iowa, was commenced in 1849 and completed in 1875. For its history, together with a short account of the Trappists' activity, see William Rufus Perkins, _History of the Trappist Abbey of New Melleray_ (Iowa City, 1892).--ED. [131] Father Urbain Guillet is recorded as having officiated several times in the Catholic church at St. Louis.--ED. [132] Thomas Kirkpatrick, of South Carolina, made the first settlement on the site of Edwardsville (1805). During the Indian troubles preceding the War of 1812-15, he built a block-house, known as Thomas Kirkpatrick's Fort. When Madison County was organized (1812), Kirkpatrick's farm was chosen as its seat. He made the survey for the town plat in 1816, and named the place in honor of Ninian Edwards. See W. R. Brink and Company, _History of Madison County, Illinois_ (Edwardsville, 1882).--ED. [133] In May, 1838, it was entirely consumed by fire.--FLAGG. [134] John Adams later retired from business, and was elected sheriff on the Whig ticket. Flagg's account seems to be considerably overdrawn.--ED. [135] Collinsville was platted May 12, 1837. Augustus, Anson, and Michael Collins, three brothers from Litchfield, Connecticut, had settled here a few years earlier and built an ox-mill for grinding and sawing, a distillery, tanning yards, and cooper and blacksmith shops. The town was first named Unionville, and John A. Cook made the first settlement about 1816.--ED. [136] Upper Alton, two and a half miles from Alton, was laid out in 1817 by Joseph Meacham, of Vermont, who came to Illinois in 1811; see _History of Madison County_, p. 396. The origin of Shurtleff College was the "Theological and High School" commonly known as the Rock Spring Seminary, established (1827) by John M. Peck, D. D. The latter was closed in 1831, and opened again the following year at Alton, under the name of Alton Seminary. In March, 1832, the state legislature incorporated the institution as "Alton College of Illinois." For religious reasons the charter was not accepted until 1835, when the terms of incorporation had been made more favorable. In January, 1836, the charter was amended, changing its title to Shurtleff College, in honor of Benjamin Shurtleff, M. D., who had donated ten thousand dollars to the institution. Although from the first emphasizing religious instruction, a theological department was not organized until 1863. The school is still under Baptist influence.--ED. [137] Hillsboro, the seat of Montgomery County, twenty-eight miles from Vandalia, was platted in 1823.--ED. [138] In his description of the barrens, Flagg follows quite closely J. M. Peck, _Gazetteer of Illinois_ (Jacksonville, 1837), pp. 11, 12. The term barrens, according to the _Century Dictionary_, is "a tract or region of more or less unproductive land partly or entirely treeless. The term is best known in the United States as the name of a district in Kentucky, 'The Barrens,' underlaid by the subcarboniferous limestone, but possessing a fertile soil, which was nearly or quite treeless when that state began to be settled by the whites, but which at present where not cultivated, is partly covered with trees." See a good description in our volume iii, pp. 217-224.--ED. [139] According to the War Department's _List of Military Forts, etc., established in the United States from its Earliest settlement to the present time_ (Washington, 1902), a Fort Gaines was at one time located at Gainesville, Alachua County, Florida. The town is now the seat of East Florida Seminary, a military school. Among the numerous lakes in the vicinity, Alachua, the largest, occupies what was formerly Payne's Prairie. Through this prairie a stream issuing from Newman's Lake flowed to a point near the middle of the district, where it suddenly fell into an unfathomed abyss named by the Indians Alachua (the bottomless pit). The whites gave this name to the county, and called the abyss "Big Sink." This place became a favorite pleasure resort until 1875, when the sink refused longer to receive the water, and Payne's Prairie, formerly a rich grazing land, was turned into a lake. Numerous tales connected with Big Sink were circulated, and it seems probable that Flagg is referring to this locality.--ED. [140] For a sketch of Daniel Boone, see Bradbury's _Travels_, in our volume v, p. 43, note 16; and for a more complete account consult Thwaites, _Daniel Boone_ (New York, 1902). Simon Kenton (1755-1836) having, as he supposed, killed a neighbor in a fight, fled from his home in Virginia to the headwaters of the Ohio River. He served as a scout in Dunmore's War (1774) and in 1775 with Boone, explored the interior of Kentucky. Captured by the Indians (1778), he was condemned to death and taken to the native village at Lower Sandusky, whence he made his escape. Later he served with distinction in campaigns under George Rogers Clark, and was second only to Daniel Boone as a frontier hero. In 1784, Kenton founded a settlement near Limestone (Maysville), Kentucky. He took part in Wayne's Campaign (1793-94), and was present at the Battle of the Thames (1813). In 1820 he moved to Logan County, Ohio, and sixteen years later died there in poverty, although before going to Ohio in 1802 he was reputed as one of the wealthiest men in Kentucky. See R. W. McFarland, "Simon Kenton," in Ohio State Archæological and Historical Society _Publications_ (1904), xiii, pp. 1-39; also Edward S. Ellis, _Life and Times of Col. Daniel Boone ... with sketches of Simon Kenton, Lewis Wetzel, and other Leaders in the Settlement of the West_ (Philadelphia, 1884). Colonel William Whitley (1749-1813), born in Virginia, set out for Kentucky about 1775, and built in 1786 or 1787 one of the first brick houses in the state, near Crab Orchard, in Lincoln County. A noted Indian fighter, he participated in the siege of Logan's fort (1777), and Clark's campaigns of 1782, and 1786. He also led several parties to recover white captives--his best known feat of this character being the rescue of Mrs. Samuel McClure (1784). In 1794 he was the active leader of the successful Nickajack expedition, directed against the Indians south of Tennessee River. He fell at the Battle of the Thames (1813), whereat it was maintained by some of his admirers, he killed the Indian chief Tecumseh. See Collins, _Kentucky_, ii, pp. 403-410; but this doubtful honor was also claimed by others.--ED. [141] Alexander Spotswood (1676-1740) was appointed governor of Virginia (1710). Taking a lively interest in the welfare of the colonists, he attained among them high popularity. Quite early, he conceived the idea of extending the Virginia settlement beyond the mountains, to intercept the French communications between Canada and the Gulf of Mexico; but he failed to secure the aid either of his province or of the mother country. In the summer of 1716 he organized and led an expedition for exploring the Appalachian Mountains, named two peaks George and Spotswood, and took possession of the Valley of Virginia in the name of George I. On his return, he established the order of "Tramontane," for carrying on further explorations, whose members were called "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe," for the reason which Flagg gives. For a contemporary account of this expedition, see "Journal of John Fontaine" in Anna Maury, _Memoirs of a Huguenot Family_ (New York, 1853). Spotswood was displaced as governor in 1722, but was later (1730) appointed deputy postmaster of the colonies.--ED. [142] Macoupin Creek flows southwesterly through the county of the same name, westerly through Greene County, and empties into Illinois River at the southwestern extremity of the latter county. It is now believed that Macoupin is derived from the Indian word for white potatoes, which were said to have been found growing in abundance along the course of this stream. Carlinville, named for Thomas Carlin, governor of the state in 1834-42, was settled about 1833. Gideon Blackburn, a Presbyterian minister, laid a plan in 1835 for founding a college to educate young men for the ministry. He entered land from the government at the price of one dollar and twenty-five cents an acre, and disposed of it to the friends of his cause at two dollars, reserving twenty-five cents for his expenses and turning over the remaining fifty cents to the proposed college. By May, 1837, he had entered over 16,656 acres. The people of Carlinville purchased eighty acres from him for the site of the school. The enterprise lay dormant until 1857, when the state chartered the school under the title of Blackburn University, which was opened in 1859.--ED. [143] Others say the peninsula was discovered on Easter-day; _Pasqua florida_, feast of flowers; whence the name.--FLAGG. [144] "In the year 1538, _Ferdinand de Soto_, with a commission from the Emperor _Charles V._, sailed with a considerable fleet for America. He was a Portuguese gentleman, and had been with _Pizarro_ in the conquest (as it is called) of Peru. His commission constituted him governor of Cuba and general of Florida. Although he sailed from St. Lucar in 1538, he did not land in Florida[A] until May 1539. With about 1000 men, 213 of whom were provided with horses, he undertook the conquest of Florida and countries adjacent. After cutting their way in various directions through numerous tribes of Indians, traversing nearly 1000 miles of country, losing a great part of their army, their general died upon the banks of the Mississippi, and the survivors were obliged to build vessels in which to descend the river; which, when they had done, they sailed for Mexico. This expedition was five years in coming to nothing, and bringing ruin upon its performers. A populous Indian town at this time stood at or near the mouth of the Mobile, of which _Soto's_ army had possessed themselves. Their intercourse with the Indians was at first friendly, but at length a chief was insulted, which brought on hostilities. A battle was fought, in which, it is said, 2000 Indians were killed and 83 Spaniards."--_Drake's Book of the Indians_, b. iv., c. 3.--FLAGG. _Comment by Ed._ Consult Edward G. Bourne (Ed.), _Career of Hernando de Soto_ (New York, 1904). [A] "So called because it was first discovered by the Spaniards on Palm Sunday, or, as the most interpret, Easter-day, which they called _Pasqua-Florida_, and not, as Thenet writeth, for the flourishing verdure thereof."--_Purchas_, p. 769. [145] "After a long and fatiguing journey through a mountainous wilderness, in a westward direction, I at last, from the top of an eminence, saw with pleasure the beautiful land of Kentucky. * * * It was in June; and at the close of day the gentle gales retired, and left the place to the disposal of a profound calm. Not a breeze shook the most tremulous leaf. I had gained the summit of a commanding ridge, and, looking round with astonishing delight, beheld the ample plains, the beauteous tracts below. * * * Nature was here a series of wonders and a fund of delight. Here she displayed her ingenuity and industry in a variety of flowers and fruits, beautifully coloured, elegantly shaped, and charmingly flavoured; and I was diverted with innumerable animals presenting themselves continually before my view. * * * The buffaloes were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browsing on the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage on these extensive plains, fearless because ignorant of man."--[Narrative of Colonel Daniel Boone, from his first arrival in Kentucky in 1769, to the year 1782.]--FLAGG. _Comment by Ed._ Boone's Narrative was actually written by John Filson, from interviews with the pioneer. The stilted style is of course far from being Boone's product. [146] George Herbert.--FLAGG. [147] Mungo Park, born in Scotland (1771), was engaged by the African Society (1795) to explore the course of the Niger, which he reached July 20, the following year. While on a subsequent tour he was drowned in that river (1805). See his _Travels in the interior district of Africa_ (London, 1816).--ED. [148] July 4.--FLAGG. [149] The Prairie.--FLAGG. [150] For an account of Vandalia, see Woods's _English Prairie_, in our volume x, p. 326, note 75.--ED. [151] The first number of the _Illinois Monthly Magazine_ was issued in October, 1830. Late in 1832 Hall removed to Cincinnati, when he soon began issuing the _Western Monthly Magazine_, or continuation of the former publication, whose subject matter was largely historical, dealing with the early settlement of the West. For an account of Judge James Hall see _ante_, p. 31, note 2.--ED. [152] Hall.--FLAGG. [153] Hurricane Creek rises near the line of Montgomery and Shelby counties, flows southerly through the western portion of Fayette County, and enters Kaskaskia River twelve miles below Vandalia. The banks of this creek were formerly heavily timbered, and the low bottoms were occasionally inundated. Flagg considerably exaggerated the actual condition of this region.--ED. [154] Carlyle, the seat of Clinton County, forty-eight miles east of St. Louis, was laid out in 1818. The Vincennes and St. Louis stage route passed through Lebanon, Carlyle, and Salem. At the last place, the road divided, one branch running south to Fairfield, the other passing through Maysville and both again uniting at Lawrenceville. Augustus Mitchell, in his _Illinois in 1837_ (Philadelphia, 1837), p. 66, says: "From Louisville, by the way of Vincennes to St. Louis, by stage, every alternate day, 273 miles through in three days and a half. Fare, seventeen dollars."--ED. [155] Lebanon was laid out by Governor William Kinney and Thomas Ray in July, 1825. Little Silver Creek rises in the northeastern portion of St. Clair County and flowing southwesterly joins Silver Creek two miles below Lebanon. The latter stream is about fifty miles in length, rises in the northern part of Madison County, runs south into St. Clair County, and enters Kaskaskia River.--ED. [156] _Tradition_ telleth of vast treasures here exhumed; and, on strength of this, ten years ago a company of fortune-seekers dug away for several months with an enthusiasm worthy of better success than awaited them.--FLAGG. _Comment by Ed._ Rock Spring was a mere settlement in St. Clair County, eighteen miles from St. Louis, on the Vincennes stage road, and about three miles southwest of Lebanon. Its name was derived from a series of springs issuing from a rocky ledge in the vicinity. John M. Peck selected this site (1820) for his permanent residence, and established the Rock Spring Theological Seminary and High School (1827), which four years later was transferred to Alton and made the foundation of Shurtleff College. In 1834 Rock Spring consisted of fourteen families. [157] Peter Cartwright is said to have suggested the idea of founding a Methodist college at Lebanon. After the citizens of the town had contributed $1,385, buildings were erected and instruction commenced in 1828. The college was named in honor of Bishop William McKendree, who made a liberal donation to the school (1830).--ED. [158] In March, 1814, a commission appointed by the state legislature the preceding year, selected the site of Belleville for the seat of St. Clair County. George Blair, whose farm was chosen as the site, platted and named the county seat. The town was incorporated in 1819. See _History of St. Clair County, Illinois_ (1881), pp. 183, 185.--ED. [159] For a brief history of the inception of St. Louis University, see _ante_, p. 169, note 121. At a meeting of the trustees on May 3, 1836, a commission was appointed to select a new site for the university. A farm of three hundred acres recently purchased, on the Bellefontaine road, three and a half miles from St. Louis, was chosen; plans were formulated, contracts made, and the foundations dug. On the death of the contractors, the enterprise was abandoned; but the land, sold a few years later, proved a valuable investment. See Scharf, _St. Louis_, i, pp. 860, 861.--ED. [160] For a note on Florissant, see Townsend's _Narrative_, in our volume xxi, p. 125, note 4.--ED. [161] This valley appears to have been the bed of an ancient lake.--FLAGG. [162] Bridgeton, still a village, about fifteen miles northwest of the St. Louis courthouse, was incorporated February 27, 1843. It was settled by French and Spanish families, about the time that St. Louis was established. A fort was built as a protection against the Indians, and William Owens was placed in command. In consequence the place was until the time of its incorporation generally known to the Americans as Owen's Station.--ED. [163] Until after the middle of the nineteenth century, St. Louis County ranked among the coal-producing districts of Missouri. Today no coal is mined there save for the fire-clay industry or other immediate local use. Dr. B. F. Shumard in his "Description of a Geological Section on the Mississippi River from St. Louis to Commerce," in Geological Survey of Missouri, _First and Second Annual Reports_ (Jefferson City, 1855), p. 176, describes _La Charbonnière_ mine; which appears to have been operated at that time. He reports the coal vein as being only about eighteen inches in thickness. On page 184 of the above report, an interesting map is given, showing the location of coal mines in St. Louis County.--ED. [164] For an account of St. Charles, see Bradbury's _Travels_, in our volume v, p. 39, note 9. For the Mandan villages, see Maximilian's _Travels_, in our volume xxii, p. 344, and note 316, and volume xxiii, p. 234, note 192.--ED. [165] The following extract from a letter dated September, 1819, addressed by Mr. Austin to Mr. Schoolcraft, respecting the navigation of the Missouri, well portrays the impetuous character of that river. It shows, too, the great improvements in the steam-engine during the past twenty years. "I regret to state that the expedition up the Missouri to the Yellow Stone has in part failed. The steamboats destined for the Upper Missouri, after labouring against the current for a number of weeks, were obliged to give up the enterprise. Every exertion has been made to overcome the difficulty of navigating the Missouri with the power of steam; but all will not do. The current of that river, from the immense quantity of sand moving down with the water, is too powerful for any boat yet constructed. The loss either to the government or to the contractor will be very great. Small steamboats of fifty tons burden, with proper engines, would, I think, have done much better. Boats like those employed, of twenty to thirty feet beam, and six to eight feet draught of water, must have _uncommon_ power to be propelled up a river, every pint of whose water is equal in weight to a quart of Ohio water, and moves with a velocity hardly credible. The barges fixed to move with wheels, worked by men, have answered every expectation; but they will only do when troops are on board, and the men can be changed every hour."--FLAGG. [166] For a sketch of Franklin, Missouri, see Gregg's _Commerce of the Prairies_ in our volume xix, p. 188, note 33.--ED. [167] The first settlement was made at St. Charles in 1769. La Chasseur Blanchette located the site, and established here a military post. The first mill in St. Charles County is said to have been built by Jonathan Bryan on a small branch emptying into Femme Osage Creek (1801). Francis Duquette (1774-1816), a French Canadian who came to St. Charles just before the close of the century, erected a mill on the site of the old round fort.--ED. [168] One year after the above was written, the author, on a visit to St. Charles, walked out to this spot. The willow was blasted; the relics of the paling were gone; the grave was levelled with the soil, but the old ruin was there still.--FLAGG. [169] For a description of Bloody Island, see _ante_, p. 115, note 77. The duel mentioned by Flagg is probably the one that occurred between Joshua Barton, United States district attorney, and Thomas Rector, on June 30, 1823. Barton had published in the _Missouri Republican_ a letter charging William Rector, surveyor general of Missouri, Illinois, and Arkansas, with corruption in office. The latter being absent, his brother Thomas issued the challenge. Barton's body was buried at St. Charles near the old round tower ruins. In the summer of 1817, Charles Lucas challenged Thomas H. Benton's vote at the polls. On the latter calling him an insolent puppy, Lucas challenged him to a duel. The affair took place August 12, 1817, and both parties were wounded. On September 27 of the same year, a second duel was fought, in which Lucas was mortally wounded. Joshua Barton was the latter's second. In the _Missouri Republican_ (St. Louis, March 15, 1882) there was printed an address by Thomas T. Gantt, delivered in Memorial Hall at St. Louis, on the celebration of the centennial birthday of Thomas H. Benton, in which the details of this deed were carefully reviewed. During the political canvass of 1830, a heated discussion was carried on in the newspaper press between Thomas Biddle and Spencer Pettis. Pettis challenged Biddle to a duel. Both fell mortally wounded, August 29, 1830.--ED. [170] Marais Croche (Crooked swamp) is located a few miles northeast of St. Charles, and Marais Temps-Clair (Clear-weather swamp), just southwest of Portage des Sioux. The former is often mentioned for its beauty.--ED. [171] "I cultivated a small farm on that beautiful prairie below St. Charles called 'The Mamelle,' or 'Point prairie.' In my enclosure, and directly back of my house, were two conical mounds of considerable elevation. A hundred paces in front of them was a high bench, making the shore of the 'Marais Croche,' an extensive marsh, and evidently the former bed of the Missouri. In digging a ditch on the margin of this bench, at the depth of four feet, we discovered great quantities of broken pottery, belonging to vessels of all sizes and characters. Some must have been of a size to contain four gallons. This must have been a very populous place. The soil is admirable, the prospect boundless; but, from the scanty number of inhabitants in view, rather lonely. It will one day contain an immense population again."--_Flint's Recollections_, p. 166.--FLAGG. [172] At the time Flagg wrote, St. Charles, like many other Western towns, entertained the hope that the Cumberland Road would eventually be extended thereto, thus placing them upon the great artery of Western travel. See Woods's _English Prairie_, in our volume x, p. 327, note 76. Also consult T. B. Searight, _The Old Pike_ (Uniontown, 1894), and A. B. Hulbert "Cumberland Road," in _Historic Highways of America_ (Cleveland, 1904). Boone's Lick Road, commencing at St. Charles, runs westward across Dardenne Creek to Cottleville, thence to Dalhoff post-office and Pauldingville, on the western boundary of the county. Its total length is twenty-six miles.--ED. [173] St. Charles College, founded by Mrs. Catherine Collier and her son George, was opened in 1836 under the presidency of Reverend John H. Fielding. The Methodist Episcopal church has directed the institution. Madame Duchesne, a companion of Mother Madeline Barral, founder of the Society of the Sacred Heart, started a mission at St. Charles in 1819; but the colony was soon removed to St. Louis. In 1828, however, she succeeded in establishing permanently at St. Charles the Academy of the Sacred Heart, with Madame Lucile as superior.--ED. [174] For sketches of the Potawotami, Miami, and Kickapoo, see Croghan's _Journals_, in our volume i, pp. 115, 122, 139, notes 84, 87, 111; for the Sauk and Fox, see J. Long's _Voyages_, in our volume ii, p. 185, note 85; for the Iowa, Brackenridge's _Journal_, in our volume vi, p. 51, note 13.--ED. [175] Flagg makes an error in speaking of Boone's Lick County, since there was none known by that name. He evidently had in mind Warren County, organized in 1833 from the western part of St. Charles County. Boone County created in November, 1820, with its present limits, named in honor of Daniel Boone, is in the fifth tier of counties west from Missouri River.--ED. [176] For an account of Daniel Boone and Boone's Lick, see Bradbury's _Travels_, in our volume v, pp. 43, 52, notes 16, 24, respectively. Daniel Boone arrived at the Femme Osage district in western St. Charles County, in 1798. He died September 26, 1820 (not 1818).--ED. [177] There seems to be little or no foundation for this statement. Consult J. B. Patterson, _Life of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak or Black Hawk_ (Boston, 1834), and R. G. Thwaites, "The Story of the Black Hawk War," in _Wisconsin Historical Collections_, xii, pp. 217-265.--ED. [178] For biographical sketch of General William Clark, see Bradbury's _Travels_, in our volume v, p. 254, note 143.--ED. [179] Obed Battius, M.D., is a character in James Fenimore Cooper's novel, _The Prairie_ (1826).--ED. [180] An Illinois legislative act approved January 16, 1836, granted to Paris Mason, Alfred Caverly, John Wyatt, and William Craig a charter to construct a railroad from Grafton, in Greene County, to Springfield, by way of Carrollton, Point Pleasant, and Millville, under the title of Mississippi and Springfield Railroad Company. The road was, however, not built.--ED. [181] For a description of Macoupin Creek, see _ante_, p. 226, note 142. Flagg draws his information concerning Macoupin Settlement from Peck, _Gazetteer of Illinois_. According to the latter the settlement was started by Daniel Allen, and John and Paul Harriford, in December, 1816. As regards Peck's statement that Macoupin Settlement was at the time of its inception the most northern white community in the Territory of Illinois, there is much doubt. Fort Dearborn (Chicago), built in 1804, and evacuated on August 15,1812, was rebuilt by Captain Hezekiah Bradley, who arrived with two companies on July 4, 1816, and a settlement sprang up here at once.--ED. [182] The first settler in Carrollton was Thomas Carlin, who arrived in the spring of 1819. In 1821 the place was chosen as the seat of Greene County, and surveyed the same year, although the records were not filed until July 30, 1825. See _History of Greene and Jersey Counties, Illinois_ (Springfield, 1885).--ED. [183] Apple Creek, a tributary of Illinois River, flows in a western trend through Greene County.--ED. [184] Whitehall, in Greene County, forty-five miles north of Alton, was laid out by David Barrow in 1832. Pottery was first made there in 1835, and has since become an important industry, contributing largely to the rapid progress of which Flagg speaks.--ED. [185] Manchester is in Scott County, midway between Carrollton and Jacksonville, being about fifteen miles from each. It was settled as early as 1828.--ED. [186] Diamond Grove Prairie, five miles in extent, is a fertile district in Morgan County, just south of Jacksonville. Diamond Grove was formerly a beautifully timbered tract situated in the middle of this prairie, two miles south of Jacksonville. It was some 700 or 800 acres in extent.--ED. [187] Illinois College was founded in 1829 through the effort of a group of Jacksonville citizens directed by the Reverend John M. Ellis and the Yale Band--the latter composed of seven men from that college who had pledged themselves to the cause of Christian education in the home missions of the West. The latter secured from the friends of the enterprise in the East a fund of $10,000. Late in 1829 the organization was completed and in December, 1830, Reverend Edward Beecher, elder brother of Henry Ward Beecher, was persuaded to leave his large church in Boston and accept the presidency of this institution. In 1903 the Jacksonville Female Academy, started in 1830, was merged with the Illinois College, which had from the first been dominated by the Presbyterian Church.--ED. [188] Jacksonville, the seat of Morgan County, was laid out in 1825 on land given to the county for that purpose by Thomas Armitt and James Dial. The town was largely settled by people from New England, who gave a characteristic tone to its society. Jacksonville is today the seat of several important state institutions.--ED. [189] In June, 1835, Ithamar Pillsbury, with two associates, sent out under the auspices of the New York Association, entered a large tract of land and selected a site for a town to be styled Andover, which was eventually platted in 1841, in the western portion of Henry County, fifty miles north and northwest of Peoria. The first settlers were principally from Connecticut, but soon several Swedish families migrated thither, and in time the settlement was composed primarily of that nationality. On returning East in the autumn of 1835, after planting the Andover colony, Pillsbury had an interview with Dr. Caleb J. Tenny, of Wethersfield, Connecticut. At the latter's instigation a meeting of Congregationalists was held, and a group of influential New Englanders organized themselves into the Connecticut Association. Shares were sold at $250 each, which entitled the holder to one hundred and sixty acres of prairie land, twenty acres of timber land, and a town lot in a proposed colony to be founded in Illinois. On May 7, 1836, the first entry was made by the committee of purchase. After the latter's return a new committee was sent out and the town of Wethersfield, in the southeastern corner of Henry County, was laid out in the spring of 1837. For an account of the founding of Andover and Wethersfield, and the names of persons serving on the various prospecting committees, see _History of Henry County, Illinois_ (Chicago, 1877), pp. 137-141, 524-526.--ED. [190] Since the above was written, the emigrants have removed.--FLAGG. [191] Joseph Duncan, born in Kentucky, was presented with a sword by Congress for his gallant defense of Fort Stephenson in the War of 1812-15. In 1818 he moved to Kaskaskia, was appointed major-general of the Illinois militia (1823), and elected state senator (1824). In 1827 he was sent to Congress by the Jacksonian Democrats. He resigned in 1834 to accept the governorship of Illinois, which he occupied until 1838. He is said to have erected the first frame building in Jacksonville. He moved to this place in 1829, dying there January 15, 1844.--ED. [192] Porter Clay (1779-1850), a brother of Henry Clay, was for many years a Baptist minister at Jacksonville.--ED. [193] Flagg is probably referring to William Weatherford, who served in the state senate (1834-38) from Morgan County.--ED. [194] The first settlement on the present site of Springfield was made by John Kelly (1819). In 1822 the lots were laid off, but not recorded until the following year, when the town was named. Soon after its incorporation in 1832, Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas, and Edward Baker began agitating the question of moving the state capital to Springfield from Vandalia. After a severe struggle, complicated with the internal improvement policy, their efforts succeeded in 1837. The legislative act of that year went into effect July 4, 1839, and the general assembly commenced its first session at Springfield in the following December.--ED. [195] Sangamon River is formed by the union, six miles east of Springfield, of its north and south forks. The former, rising in Champaign County, flows through Macon and a part of Sangamon counties; the latter intersects Christian County. The main stream runs in an easterly direction, forms the boundary of Cass County, and joins the Illinois River nine miles above Beardstown. The river is nearly two hundred and forty miles in length, including the north fork, and was named in honor of a local Indian chief.--ED. [196] Mechanicsburg, fifteen miles east of Springfield, was laid out and platted in November, 1832, by William S. Pickrell.--ED. [197] "I will never, if possible, pass a night in any place where the graveyard is neglected." Franklin has no monument!--FLAGG. [198] Turgot.--FLAGG. [199] Decatur, surveyed in 1829, is the seat of Macon County, thirty-nine miles from Springfield. It was named for Commodore Stephen Decatur.--ED. [200] For a later description of the Mormon settlement in Missouri, and an account of their stay at Nauvoo, Illinois, see Gregg's _Commerce of the Prairies_, in our volume xx, pp. 94-99 and accompanying notes. For a psychological treatment of Joseph Smith and bibliography of Mormonism, see Isaac W. Riley, _Founder of Mormonism_ (New York, 1902).--ED. [201] Missourians.--FLAGG. [202] For a year after the above was written, the cause of Mormonism seemed to have received a salutary check. It has since revived, and thousands during the past summer have been flocking to their Mount Zion on the outskirts of Missouri. The late Mormon difficulties in Missouri have been made too notorious by the public prints of the day to require notice.--FLAGG. [203] Grand Prairie, as described by Peck in his _Gazetteer of Illinois_, was a general term applied to the prairie country between the rivers which flow into the Mississippi and those which empty into the Wabash. "It is made up of continuous tracts, with long arms of prairie extending between the creeks and smaller streams. The southern points of the Grand prairie are formed in the northeastern parts of Jackson county and extend in a northeastern course between the streams of various widths, from one to ten or twelve miles, through Perry, Washington, Jefferson, Marion, the eastern part of Fayette, Effingham, through the western portion of Coles, into Champaign and Iroquois counties, where it becomes connected with the prairies that project eastward from the Illinois River and its tributaries. Much of the longest part of the Grand prairie is gently undulatory, but of the southern portion considerable tracts are flat and of rather inferior soil."--ED. [204] Illinoisians.--FLAGG. [205] Shelbyville, selected as the seat of Shelby County (1827), was named in honor of Isaac Shelby, early governor of Kentucky. It is located about thirty-two miles southeast of Decatur, and was incorporated in May, 1839.--ED. [206] 1835.--FLAGG. [207] Eight families from St. Clair County settled (1818) in the vicinity of certain noted perennial springs in the southwestern corner of what was later organized into Shelby County. For some time the colony was known as Wakefield's Settlement, for Charles Wakefield, who had made the first land entry in the county in 1821. John O. Prentis erected the first store there in 1828, and shortly afterwards secured a post-office under the name of Cold Springs.--ED. [208] Philosophy, vol. i.--FLAGG. [209] Sidney Rigdon (1793-1876), after having been a Baptist pastor at Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and later associated with the Disciples in Ohio, established a branch of the Mormon church with one hundred members at Kirtland, Ohio. Joseph Smith, who had founded the last-named church at Fayette, New York (April 6, 1830), went to Kirtland in February of the following year. Aided by Rigdon, Smith attempted to establish a mixed communistic and hierarchical organized community. Mormon tanneries, stores, and other enterprises were built, and the corner-stone of a $40,000 temple laid July 23, 1833. Through improvident financial management, the leaders soon plunged the community deeply in debt. The Kirtland Society Bank, reorganized as the Kirtland Anti-Bankers Company, after issuing notes to the amount of $200,000, failed, and Smith and Rigdon further embarrassed by an accumulation of troubles fled to Jackson County, Missouri, where Oliver Cowdery by the former's order had established the Far West settlement. Joseph Smith was assassinated by a mob (June 27, 1844) at Carthage, Illinois, and Brigham Young succeeded him. Sidney Rigdon, long one of Smith's chief advisers, and one of the three presidents of the Mormon church at Nauvoo, combated the doctrine of plurality of wives. He refused to recognize the authority of Young as Smith's successor, and returned to Pennsylvania, but held to the Mormon faith until his death in 1876. In 1848 the charter granted to the city of Nauvoo by the Illinois state legislature, was repealed. The Mormons thereupon selected Utah as the field of their future activity, save that a few members were left in Missouri for proselyting purposes. Alexander Campbell (1788-1866), educated at the University of Glasgow, came to the United States (1809) and joined the Presbyterian church. Refusing to recognize any teachings save those of the Bible, as he understood them, he and his father, Thomas Campbell, were dismissed (1812) and with a few followers formed a temporary union with the Baptist church. Disfellowshiped in 1827, they organized the Disciples of Christ, popularly known as the Campbellites. The son published the _Christian Baptist_, a monthly magazine, its name being changed (1830) to the _Millennial Harbinger_. He held several public offices in the state of Virginia, and in 1840 founded Bethany (Virginia) College.--ED. [210] Kirtland is now deserted, and the church is occupied for a school.--FLAGG. [211] See Woods's _English Prairie_, in our volume x, p. 327, note 76.--ED. [212] Or "_beef_."--FLAGG. [213] Salem, the seat of Marion County, was settled about 1823, when the county was organized.--ED. [214] Philosophy, b. i., chap. 1.--FLAGG. [215] Mount Vernon, a village seventy-seven miles southeast of St. Louis, was chosen as the seat of justice for Jefferson County, when the latter was organized in 1818.--ED. [216] Mud Creek rises in the northwestern part of Perry County, flows through the southwestern part of Washington and the southeastern part of St. Clair counties, and enters the Kaskaskia two miles below Fayetteville. In January, 1827, the state legislature in organizing Perry County appointed a commission to select a seat of justice to be known as Pinckneyville (Pinkneyville), its town site being located and platted in January, 1828.--ED. 
47262	----	Transcriber's note: Italic text has been marked with _underscores_. Please see the end of this book for further notes. Old Times on the Upper Mississippi [Illustration: MOUTH OF THE WISCONSIN RIVER. The ancient highway between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. This scene gives some idea of the multitude of islands which diversify both the Wisconsin and the Mississippi Rivers.] Old Times on the Upper Mississippi The Recollections of a Steamboat Pilot from 1854 to 1863 By George Byron Merrick [Illustration] Cleveland, Ohio The Arthur H. Clark Company 1909 Copyright 1908 George Byron Merrick All rights reserved Dedicated to the Memory of My Chiefs William H. Hamilton, Engineer, Charles G. Hargus, Clerk, Thomas Burns, Pilot, masters in their several professions. From each of them I learned something that has made life better worth living, the sum of which makes possible these reminiscences of a "cub" pilot. Contents Prelude 13 Chapter I EARLY IMPRESSIONS 15 Chapter II INDIANS, DUGOUTS, AND WOLVES 20 Chapter III ON THE LEVEE AT PRESCOTT 29 Chapter IV IN THE ENGINE-ROOM 38 Chapter V THE ENGINEER 46 Chapter VI THE "MUD" CLERK--COMPARATIVE HONORS 52 Chapter VII WOODING UP 59 Chapter VIII THE MATE 64 Chapter IX THE "OLD MAN" 71 Chapter X THE PILOTS AND THEIR WORK 78 Chapter XI KNOWING THE RIVER 92 Chapter XII THE ART OF STEERING 100 Chapter XIII AN INITIATION 106 Chapter XIV EARLY PILOTS 111 Chapter XV INCIDENTS OF RIVER LIFE 117 Chapter XVI MISSISSIPPI MENUS 126 Chapter XVII BARS AND BARKEEPERS 132 Chapter XVIII GAMBLERS AND GAMBLING 138 Chapter XIX STEAMBOAT RACING 143 Chapter XX MUSIC AND ART 152 Chapter XXI STEAMBOAT BONANZAS 161 Chapter XXII WILD-CAT MONEY AND TOWN-SITES 174 Chapter XXIII A PIONEER STEAMBOATMAN 184 Chapter XXIV A VERSATILE COMMANDER; A WRECK 190 Chapter XXV A STRAY NOBLEMAN 196 Chapter XXVI IN WAR TIME 206 Chapter XXVII AT FORT RIDGELEY 212 Chapter XXVIII IMPROVING THE RIVER 221 Chapter XXIX KILLING STEAMBOATS 229 Chapter XXX LIVING IT OVER AGAIN 240 Appendix A. LIST OF STEAMBOATS ON THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI RIVER, 1823-1863 257 B. OPENING OF NAVIGATION AT ST. PAUL, 1844-1862 295 C. TABLE OF DISTANCES FROM ST. LOUIS 296 D. IMPROVEMENT OF THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI, 1866-1876 299 E. INDIAN NOMENCLATURE AND LEGENDS 300 Index 305 Illustrations MOUTH OF THE WISCONSIN RIVER. The ancient highway between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. This scene gives some idea of the multitude of islands which diversify both the Wisconsin and the Mississippi Rivers Frontispiece PRESCOTT LEVEE IN 1876. Showing Steamer "Centennial" and the little Hastings ferry, "Plough Boy." The double warehouse, showing five windows in the second story and four in the third, was the building in which the author lived when a boy 32 PRESCOTT LEVEE IN 1908. But one business building, one of the old Merrick warehouses, left intact. Dunbar's Hall gutted by fire recently. The large steamboat warehouse next to it destroyed some years ago. All the shipping business gone to the railroad, which runs just back of the buildings shown 32 ALMA, WISCONSIN. A typical river town in the fifties 54 ABOVE TREMPEALEAU, WISCONSIN. In the middle foreground, at the head of the slough, is the site of the winter camp of Nicolas Perrot, in the winter of 1684-5, as identified in 1888 by Hon. B. F. Heuston and Dr. Reuben Gold Thwaites of the Wisconsin State Historical Society 68 DANIEL SMITH HARRIS. Steamboat Captain, 1833-1861 82 CAPTAIN THOMAS BURNS. Pilot on the Upper Mississippi River from 1856 to 1889. Inspector of Steamboats under President Cleveland and President McKinley 82 CHARLES G. HARGUS. Chief Clerk on the "Royal Arch," "Golden State," "Fanny Harris," "Kate Cassell" and many other fine steamers on the Upper Mississippi 82 GEORGE B. MERRICK. "Cub" Pilot, 1862 82 TYPICAL PORTION OF THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI. Map of the river between Cassville, Wis., and Guttenberg, Iowa, showing the characteristic winding of the stream 98 STEAMER "WAR EAGLE," 1852; 296 TONS 120 STEAMER "MILWAUKEE," 1856; 550 TONS 120 WINONA, MINNESOTA. The Levee in 1862 134 THE LEVEE AT ST. PAUL, 1859. Showing the Steamer "Grey Eagle" (1857; 673 tons), Capt. Daniel Smith Harris, the fastest and best boat on the Upper River, together with the "Jeanette Roberts" (1857; 146 tons), and the "Time and Tide" (1853; 131 tons), two Minnesota River boats belonging to Captain Jean Robert, an eccentric Frenchman and successful steamboatman. (Reproduced from an old negative in possession of Mr. Edward Bromley of Minneapolis, Minn.) 146 STEAMER "KEY CITY," 1857; 560 TONS 154 STEAMER "NORTHERN LIGHT," 1856; 740 TONS 154 FACSIMILES OF EARLY TICKETS AND BUSINESS CARD 166 MCGREGOR, IOWA. Looking north, up the river 178 ALTON, ILLINOIS. Looking down the river _facing p._ 188 RED WING, MINNESOTA. Showing Barn Bluff in the background, with a glimpse of the river on the left 198 BAD AXE (NOW GENOA), WISCONSIN. Scene of the last battle between the United States forces and the Indians under Chief Black Hawk, August 21, 1832. The steamer "Warrior," Captain Joseph Throckmorton, with soldiers and artillery from Fort Crawford, Prairie du Chien, took an active and important part in this battle 218 REED'S LANDING, MINNESOTA. At the foot of Lake Pepin. During the ice blockade in the Lake, in the spring of each year before the advent of railroads to St. Paul; all freight was unloaded at Reed's Landing, hauled by team to Wacouta, at the head of the Lake, where it was reloaded upon another steamboat for transportation to St. Paul and other ports above the Lake 236 STEAMER "MARY MORTON," 1876; 456 TONS. Lying at the levee, La Crosse, Wisconsin. (From a negative made in 1881.) 244 STEAMER "ARKANSAS," 1868; 549 TONS. With tow of four barges, capable of transporting 18,000 sacks--36,000 bushels of wheat per trip. The usual manner of carrying wheat in the early days, before the river traffic was destroyed by railroad competition 244 MAP OF THE MISSISSIPPI BETWEEN ST. LOUIS AND ST. PAUL _facing p._ 304 Prelude The majesty and glory of the Great River have departed; its glamour remains, fresh and undying, in the memories of those who, with mind's eye, still can see it as it was a half-century ago. Its majesty was apparent in the mighty flood which then flowed throughout the season, scarcely diminished by the summer heat; its glory, in the great commerce which floated upon its bosom, the beginnings of mighty commonwealths yet to be. Its glamour is that indefinable witchery with which memory clothes the commonplace of long ago, transfiguring the labors, cares, responsibilities, and dangers of steamboat life as it really was, into a Midsummer Night's Dream of care-free, exhilarating experiences, and glorified achievement. Of the river itself it may be said, that like the wild tribes which peopled its banks sixty years ago, civilization has been its undoing. The primeval forests which spread for hundreds of miles on either side, then caught and held the melting snows and falling rains of spring within spongy mosses which carpeted the earth; slowly, throughout the summer, were distilled the waters from myriad springs, and these, filling brooks and smaller rivers, feeders of the Great River, maintained a mighty volume of water the season through. Upon the disappearance of the forests, the melting snows and early rains having no holding grounds, are carried quickly to the river, which as quickly rises to an abnormal stage in the early part of the season, to be followed by a dearth which later reduces the Mississippi to the dimensions of a second-rate stream, whereon navigation is impossible for great steamers, and arduous, disheartening and unprofitable for boats of any class. To most men of our day, the life of those who manned the steamers of that once mighty fleet is legendary, almost mythical. Its story is unwritten. To the few participants who yet remain, it is but a memory. The boats themselves have disappeared, leaving no token. The masters and the mates, the pilots and the clerks, the engineers and the men of humbler station have likewise gone. Of the thousands who contributed to give life and direction to the vessels themselves, a meager score of short biographies is all that history vouchsafes. The aim of the present volume is to tell something of these men, and of the boats that they made sentient by their knowledge and power; to relate something of the incidents of river life as seen by a boy during eight years of residence by the riverside, or in active service on the river itself. While it may not literally be claimed, "All of which I saw," it is with satisfaction, not unmixed with pride, that the writer can truthfully assert, "A part of which I was." G. B. M. The several quotations from "Mark Twain" which herein appear are from _Life on the Mississippi_ (copyright, 1903), by Samuel L. Clemens, permission for the use of which is kindly granted for the present purpose by the publishers, Messrs. Harper & Brothers, New York. Chapter I _Early Impressions_ Descent from an ancestry whose members built and sailed ships from Salem, Newburyport, and Nantucket two hundred years ago, and even down to the early days of the nineteenth century, ought to give an hereditary bias toward a sailor's life, on waters either salt or fresh. A score-and-a-half of men of my name have "died with their boots on" at sea, from the port of Nantucket alone. They went for whales, and the whales got them. Perhaps their fate should have discouraged the sea-going instinct, but perversely it had the opposite effect. A hundred men are lost out of Gloucester every year, yet their boys are on the "Banks" before they are fairly weaned. I was born at Niles, Michigan, on the historic St. Joseph River, which in those days was of considerable importance commercially. Scores of keel boats plied between South Bend and the mouth of the river at St. Joseph, on Lake Michigan. Keel boats drifted down the river, and after unloading were towed back by little steamboats, about eighty feet long by eighteen feet beam. These were propelled by side wheels attached to a single shaft, driven by a horizontal engine of indifferent power. These steamers towed four "keels" upstream at the rate of five or six miles an hour. The former had no upper cabin answering to the "boiler deck" of the Mississippi River boats--only a roof covering the main deck, with the passenger cabin aft, and the quarters of the crew forward of the boiler and engine. It was, I suppose, a quarter of a mile from my birthplace to the river bank where we boys of the neighborhood went to see the steamboats pass. In the opposite direction, around a sharp bend and across the low-lying, alluvial land, which comprised the home farm, the river was discernible a mile away. When a boat was seen coming up river, the alarm was given, and we little shavers of the neighborhood raced for the nearest point of view, a high bank of blue clay, rising probably seventy-five feet above the river. We used to think it was as many hundreds of feet; and what I now know as the quarter mile, then stretched away into interminable distances as it was measured by the stubby yet sturdy little legs of six-year-old runners. On the edge of this blue-clay bank, I received my first impressions in river piloting. My teacher in these matters was a man whom I greatly envied. Kimball Lyon lived in a house three times as large as that in which I was born. His father had left a big farm and a bank account of fabulous dimensions. We knew it was large, because "Kim" never worked as other young men of twenty-five or thirty years did in those days. His mother always kept a "hired man", while Kim toiled not; but he spun. It was not his riches, however, nor his immunity from toil, that common lot of other men, which excited the envy of the six-year-olds. He could, and did, play on the accordion. Lying on his back in the shade and resting one corner of his instrument upon his bosom, with irresistible power and pathos he sang and played "A life on the ocean wave, A home on the rolling deep." It appealed to all the natural impulses of our being, and the dormant instincts inherited from generations of whale-hunting ancestors were aroused by the power of music, reinforced by the suggestive words of the song itself; and then and there we vowed that when we were men like Kimball Lyon, we too would own and play upon accordions, and do all else that he had done; for marvelous tales he told, of his experiences in great storms at sea and of deeds of aquatic prowess. We learned in after years that "Kim" once sailed from St. Joseph to Chicago in a sawed-off lumber hooker, when the wind was west nor'west, down the lake, and that he did actually lie on the deck, but not on his back, and that it was not music which he emitted, and that the sailors railed at him, and that he came back from Chicago by stage coach to Niles. But we didn't know this when he was awakening our viking instincts, as we lay on the banks of the old St. Joe in the sunny summer days of long ago. "Kim" Lyon knew all about steamboats, as well as about deep sea ships, and when we asked questions he could answer out of the fullness of his knowledge. We wondered what made the wheels go 'round, and he told us. I have forgotten _what_ made them go 'round, but my recollection is that it was a peculiar mechanical process of which I have never seen the like in any other service on river, lake or ocean. His answer to the query as to "what is the man in the little house on top of the boat doing?" I have never forgotten, as it afterward came more in my line of business. The man was twisting the wheel as all pilots before and since that time twist it, a spoke or two to port, a half dozen to starboard, hard up and hard down, there being a shallow piece of river just there, beset with big boulders and reefs of gravel, through which he was cautiously worming his boat and its kite-tail of keels. "That man," said Kimball, "is drawing water from a well in the bottom of the boat and emptying it into the boiler, just as your father draws water from his well with a rope, a bucket and a crank. If he should stop for a minute the boiler would burst for want of water, the boat would blow up, and we should all be killed by the explosion." This definition at once gave us a personal interest in the work of the man at the wheel; we all felt that our lives depended upon this man's devotion to his duty. Had he struck a piece of "easy water" at that time, and centred his wheel, there is no doubt that we would have scurried for home before the inevitable explosion should occur. That was my first lesson in piloting. Perhaps this childish concern that the man "drawing water for the boilers" should faithfully perform his duty, was but a prefigurement of the interest with which the writer, and hundreds of others, in later years, have watched the pilot work his boat through a tangled piece of river, knowing that the safety of all depended upon the knowledge and faithfulness of the "man at the wheel." The steamboats plying on the St. Joe were crude little affairs, and there were but four or five of them, all alike. I remember the name of but one, the "Algoma"; the others are quite forgotten. Doubtless they were commonplace, and did not appeal to the poetic side of the boy. But "Algoma"! The word has a rhythmical measure, and conjures up visions of wigwams, council fires, dusky maidens, and painted braves. An Indian name would stick when all the saints in the calendar were forgotten. The "Algoma" and her consorts have gone the way of all steamboats. The railroad came and killed their business, just as a few years later, it did on the Great River. A few years later I saw the Mississippi River for the first time, at Rock Island, Illinois; and through the kindness of another well-posted bystander to whom the then twelve-year-old boy appealed, I received my first impressions of a stern-wheel boat. There were two steamboats lying at the levee--the "Minnesota Belle", a side-wheeler, upon which we had taken passage, while just above lay the "Luella", a stern-wheeler. I knew about the former variety from observation on the St. Joe, but I had never seen even a picture of one of the latter sort, so it was a novelty. I wasn't certain that it was a steamboat at all, and after referring the matter to my stranger friend, I learned definitely that it wasn't. The "Luella's" wheel was slowly turning over as she lay at the levee, and as I did not comprehend the mechanical details of that kind of craft I began asking questions. My mentor assured me that the "Luella" was not a steamboat at all, but a water power sawmill. The big wheel then moving was driven by the current, and it in turn operated the sawmill machinery on the inside of the boat. As I could not figure any other use for a wheel out in the open, at the end of the boat, instead of on the side where it ought to be, and as I had no reason to doubt the statement of my informant, I readily accepted the sawmill explanation, and hastened to confide my newly-acquired knowledge to my brother and other members of the family. A few hours later both boats pulled out for St. Paul. After she had rounded the first point, ahead of us, we saw nothing more of the "Luella" until we met her coming down the river on her return trip. She was a heavily-powered boat, and showed her heels to the larger and slower "Minnesota Belle". The sight of the "Luella" kicking her way upstream at the rate of two miles to our one, not only dissipated the sawmill impression, but taught me not to accept at face value all information communicated by glib-tongued and plausible strangers. That steamboat trip from Rock Island to Prescott was one long holiday excursion for us two small and lively boys from Michigan. There was so much to see and in so many different directions at once, that it was impossible to grasp it all, although we scampered over the deck to get differing view points. We met dozens of boats, going back to St. Louis or Galena after further loads of immigrants and freight; and there were other boats which came up behind us, gaining slowly but surely, and finally passing the deeply-laden "Belle". There were landings to be made, and freight and passengers to be disembarked. There were strange Indians to be seen--we were familiar enough with Michigan tribesmen, having been born within a mile or two of old Pokagon's tribal village. There were boys with fish for sale, fish larger than any inhabiting the waters of Michigan streams, sturgeons only excepted, and this promised well for the fun in store when we should reach our journey's end. Finally, on a bright June day in the year 1854, the writer, then a boy of twelve, with his brother, three years younger, were fully transplanted from their Michigan birthplace to the row of stores and warehouses which fronted on the "levee" at Prescott, Wisconsin, where the waters of St. Croix River and Lake join the Mississippi. The town was then a typical frontier settlement. Two hundred white people were planted among five hundred Chippewa Indians; with as many more Sioux, of the Red Wing band, across the river in Minnesota, a few miles lower down the river. The not infrequent outbreaks of the hereditary enmity existing between these ancient foes, would expend itself on the streets of the town in war whoops, gunpowder, and scalping knives, enlivening the experience of the average citizen as he dodged behind the nearest cover to avoid stray bullets; while the city marshal was given an opportunity to earn his salary, by driving out both bands of hostiles at the point of his revolver. Chapter II _Indians, Dugouts, and Wolves_ In that early day when my acquaintance with the Mississippi began, Indians were numerous. Their dugouts lay at the levee by the dozen, the hunters retailing the ducks and geese, or venison and bear meat, which had fallen to their guns, while the squaws peddled catfish and pickerel that had been ensnared on the hooks and lines of the women and children of the party. Situated as Prescott was at the junction of the St. Croix with the Mississippi, its citizens were favored with visits both from the Chippewa, who hunted and fished along the former stream and its tributaries in Wisconsin, and the Sioux, who made the bottom lands on the Minnesota side of the river, between Hastings and Red Wing, their home and hunting ground. This was the boundary line which had existed for a hundred years or more; although the Sioux (or Dakota) laid claim to many thousand square miles of hunting grounds in Wisconsin, for which they actually received a million and a half dollars when they quit-claimed it to the United States. Their claim to any lands on the east side of the river had been disputed by the Chippewa from time out of mind; and these rival claims had occasionally been, as we have seen, referred to the only court of arbitration which the Indians recognized--that of the tomahawk and scalping knife. As a boy I have spent many an hour searching in the sands at the foot of the bluffs below Prescott, for arrowheads, rusted remnants of knives and hatchets, and for the well-preserved brass nails with which the stocks and butts of old-time trade muskets were plentifully ornamented. Just how many years ago that battle had been fought, does not appear to be a matter of historical record. That it was fiercely contested, is abundantly proven by the great amount of wreckage of the fight which the white lads of Prescott recovered to be sold to tourists on the steamboats which touched at our levee. The Indians themselves had a tradition that it was a bloody fight. Taking the word of a Chippewa narrator, one was easily convinced that hundreds of Sioux bit the sand on that eventful day. If the narrator happened to belong across the river, one felt assured, after listening to his version, that the Chippewa met their Marathon on this battle plain. In any case the treasure trove indicated a very pretty fight, whichever party won the field. Charlevoix, the French historian, relates that in 1689 Le Seuer established a fortified trading post on the west side of the Mississippi, about eight miles below the present site of Hastings. In speaking of this fort, he says: "The island has a beautiful prairie, and the French of Canada have made it a centre of commerce for the western parts, and many pass the winter here, because it is a good country for hunting." As a boy I have many a time visited the site of this ancient stronghold, and hobnobbed with the Indians then occupying the ground, descendants of those with whom the French fraternized two hundred years ago. At this point the islands are about four miles across from the main channel of the river; the islands being formed by Vermillion Slough, which heads at Hastings, reëntering the river about two and a half miles above Red Wing. Trudell Slough, which heads in the river about four miles below Prescott, joins Vermillion at the point at which was probably located Le Seuer's post. At the juncture of the two sloughs there was a beautiful little prairie of several acres. On the west, the bluffs rose several hundred feet to the level prairie which constitutes the upper bench. Just at this point there are three mounds rising fifty to seventy-five feet above the level of the prairie, and serving as a landmark for miles around. Whether they are of geological origin or the work of the Indians in their mound-building epoch, had not been determined in my day. There are other prominences of like character everywhere about, and it would seem that they were erected by the hand of man. On the north, east, and south the islands afforded good hunting grounds for the French and their allies. In 1854 and later (I think even yet), the site of this ancient fort was occupied by a band of Sioux Indians of Red Wing's tribe, under the sub-chieftaincy of a French half-breed named Antoine Mouseau (Mo'-sho). In Neill's history of the settlement of St. Paul he mentions Louis Mouseau as one of the first settlers occupying, in 1839, a claim lying at the lower end of Dayton Bluff, about two miles down the river from the levee. This Antoine Mouseau, a man about forty in 1854, was probably a son of the St. Paul pioneer and of a squaw of Red Wing's band. In the days when the white boys of Prescott made adventurous trips "down to Mo-sho's", the islands were still remarkably rich in game--deer, bear, wolves, 'coons, mink, muskrats, and other fur-bearing animals; and in spring and fall the extensive rice swamps literally swarmed with wild fowl. Two or three of the adventures which served to add spice to such visits as we made with the little red men of Mouseau's tribe, will serve to illustrate the sort of life which was led by all Prescott boys in those early days. They seemed to be a part of the life of the border, and were taken as a matter of course. Looking back from this distance, and from the civilization of to-day, it seems miraculous to me that all of those boys were not drowned or otherwise summarily disposed of. As a matter of fact none of them were drowned, and to the best of my knowledge none of them have as yet been hanged. Most of them went into the Union army in the War of Secession, and some of them are sleeping where the laurel and magnolia bend over their last resting places. The water craft with which the white boys and Indian boys alike traversed the river, rough or smooth, and explored every creek, bayou, and slough for miles around, were "dug-outs"--canoes hollowed out of white pine tree trunks. Some canoes were large and long, and would carry four or five grown persons. Those owned and used by the boys were from six to eight feet long, and just wide enough to take in a not too-well-developed lad; but then, all the boys were lean and wiry. It thus happened that the Blaisdells, the Boughtons, the Fifields, the Millers, the Merricks, the Schasers, the Smiths, and the Whipples, and several other pairs and trios ranging from fourteen years down to seven, were pretty generally abroad from the opening of the river in the spring until its closing in the fall, hunting, fishing and exploring, going miles away, up or down the river or lake, and camping out at night, often without previous notice to their mothers. With a "hunk" of bread in their pockets, some matches to kindle a fire, a gun and fishlines, they never were in danger of starvation, although always hungry. One of the incidents referred to, I accept more on the evidence of my brother than of my own consciousness of the situation when it occurred. He was eleven at the time, and I fourteen. We each had a little pine "dug-out", just large enough to carry one boy sitting in the stern, and a reasonable cargo of ducks, fish or fruit. With such a load the gunwales of the craft were possibly three or four inches above the water line. The canoe itself was round on the bottom, and could be rolled over and over by a boy lying flat along the edges, with his arms around it, as we often did for the amusement of passengers on the boats--rolling down under water and coming up on the other side, all the time holding fast to the little hollowed-out log. Such a craft did not appear to be very seaworthy, nor well calculated to ride over rough water. Indeed, under the management of a novice they would not stay right side up in the calmest water. For the boys who manned them, however, whether whites or Indians, they were as seaworthy as Noah's ark, and much easier to handle. A show piece much in vogue, was to stand on the edge of one of these little round logs (not over eight feet long), and with a long-handled paddle propel the thing across the river. This was not always, nor usually, accomplished without a ducking; but it often was accomplished by white boys without the ducking, and that even when there was some wind and little waves. The Indian lads would not try it in public. For one thing, it was not consonant with Indian dignity; for another, an Indian, big or little, dislikes being laughed at, and a ducking always brought a laugh when there were any spectators. I cannot, after all these years, get over an itching to try this experiment again. I believe that I could balance myself all right; but the difference between sixty pounds and a hundred and sixty might spoil the game. Some boys, more fortunate than others, were from time to time possessed of birch-bark canoes--small ones. Of all the craft that ever floated, the birch-bark comes nearer being the ideal boat than any other. So light is it, that it may be carried on the head and shoulders for miles without great fatigue; and it sits on the water like a whiff of foam--a veritable fairy craft. It was the custom of the boys who owned these little "birches" to shove them off the sand with a run, and when they were clear of the land to jump over the end, and standing erect, paddle away like the wind. This was another show piece, and was usually enacted for the benefit of admiring crowds of Eastern passengers on the steamboats. On one such occasion, a young man from the East who professed to be a canoeist, and who possibly was an expert with an ordinary canoe, came off the boat, and after crossing the palm of the birch-bark's owner with a silver piece, proposed to take a little paddle by himself. The boy was an honest boy, as boys averaged then and there, and although not averse to having a little fun at the expense of the stranger, in his capacity of lessor he deemed it his duty to caution his patron that a birch-bark was about as uncertain and tricky a proposition as any one would wish to tackle--especially such a little one as his own was. He proposed to hold it until his passenger had stepped in and sat down and was ready to be shoved off. This was the usual procedure, and it had its good points for the average tourist. But this one had seen the boys shoving the same canoe off the sand and jumping over the stern, and he proposed to do the same thing, because he was used to canoes himself. Against the cautions of the owner he _did_ shove off and jump, but he did not alight in the canoe. That elfish little piece of Indian deviltry was not there when he arrived; it slipped out from under him, sidewise, and with a spring which jumped it almost clear of the water it sailed away before the wind, while the canoeist went headfirst into six or eight feet of water, silk hat, good clothes and all, amid the howls of delight from the passengers on the steamer who had been watching him. He was game, however, and admitted that he had never imagined just how light and ticklish a birch-bark was; nor how much science it required to jump _squarely_ over the stern of such a fragile creation and maintain one's balance. Woodmen and canoeists familiar with "birches" will understand just how small a deviation is required to bring discomfiture. A little carelessness on the part of an old hand is often just as fatal as a little ignorance on the part of the tenderfoot. But I digress. On the trip concerning which I started to tell, my brother and I had been down to the Indian village and were on our way home. When we emerged from Trudell Slough we found a gale blowing from the south, against the current of the river, and great combing waves were running, through which it seemed impossible to ride in our little boats. However, we had to cross the river in order to get home, and we did not long debate the question. Being the oldest I took the lead, Sam following. He was but eleven years old, and had a boat all by himself to manage in that sea. But he could paddle a canoe as well as any Indian boy. I also could paddle, and being older, nearly fourteen, was supposed to have the wisdom of the ages in the matter of judgment in meeting and riding combers. Under these conditions, I started out to make the crossing. My brother has told me since that he never thought of any danger to himself; but he figured, a dozen times, that I was gone--in fact he lost three or four good bets that I would not come up again after going down out of sight. My canoe would go down into the trough of the sea at the same time that his did, thus he would lose track of me. He had to keep his eyes on the "combers" and meet them at just the right angle, or he himself would have been the "goner". Sometimes he would not locate me until he had met three or four big ones. Then he would rise over the tops of the waves at the same time and would be able to reassure himself that I was still right side up and paddling for life, and that he was out another bet. I do not know that I thought of the danger at all, as I simply had my canoe to look out for. Had Sam been in front I would have realized, as he did, that we were taking lots of chances, and would have learned from the diving of his craft just how great the danger really was, as he did. We shipped a good deal of water--that is, a good deal for the amount we could afford to take in and maintain any margin between the gunwales of our canoes and the water outside. Before we got across we were sitting in several inches of water, but a little baling cleared this out as soon as we reached the Wisconsin side, and we proceeded up the river, hugging the shore and keeping in the eddies and under the points, without further adventures. I do not think we mentioned the crossing as anything to brag of, as under the circumstances any of the boys would have done the same thing in the same way. One other incident in which the little canoe figured, involved the closest call to drowning I ever had as a boy. Again I was out with my brother, some ten miles down the river, near Diamond Bluff, fishing and scouting about in the customary manner. Sam was ahead of me, and had landed on a pile of driftwood lodged against a giant cottonwood which had been undermined by the eating away of the river bank. In falling, one or more of its branches had been so deeply driven into the bottom of the river that it held at right angles with the current, extending out fifty feet or more into the channel. Against this obstruction all sorts of logs, lumber, and other drift had lodged, forming a large raft. My brother had run in under the lower side of this and climbed out, preparatory to dropping his line for fish. I, doubtless carelessly, drifted down toward the upper side. One of the limbs which did not quite reach the surface so as to be seen, caught my little vessel and in an instant I was in the water, and under the raft. I thought I was surely gone, for I supposed that the driftwood was deep enough to catch and hold me. I had presence of mind enough left, however, to do the only thing which was left--dive as deeply as possible, and with open eyes steer clear of the many branches through which I had to find my way toward the open water on the lee side of the raft. Sam ran to the lower side to catch me if I came up--an expectation which he had little hope of realizing, thinking as I did that I would be caught like a rat in a trap, and never come up until dug out. Fortunately the drift was not deep, and the limbs not very close together, and I popped up as I cleared the last log, but with so little breath left that another ten feet would have drowned me. Sam caught me by the hand and "yanked" me out on the drift, where I lay and took in air for some minutes to fill out my collapsed lungs. In another ten minutes we were fishing as if nothing had happened. In these upsets which we were almost daily experiencing, our costumes played an important though passive part. The entire uniform of the average river lad of those days consisted of a pair of blue jean trousers, a calico shirt, a home-made straw hat, and sometimes a pair of "galluses". The last named item indicated an extravagant expenditure; one "gallus" was ample for all practical purposes; the second represented luxury and wanton extravagance. With such a costume a boy in the water was practically unhampered, and could and did swim with all the freedom of an unclothed cupid. One of the customary relaxations of the Prescott boys was to run down Orange Street when school "let out", in single file, dressed as above described, hats and all, and dive from the ledge of rocks fifteen feet high into water forty feet deep. It was on one of these excursions that I had the only real scare of my life. This may sound like braggadocio, but it is a fact. I have been in places since that time, where I thought death imminent, and knew that it was possible, if not probable, at any moment; but in such situations I have more or less successfully been able to conceal the fact of fear. In the case in question I did not attempt to conceal from myself the fact that I was sincerely alarmed. We had, late in the autumn, landed at a desolate _coulee_ several miles below Prescott. I had gone back about half a mile from the river, on to the prairie, leaving my brother at the canoe. Suddenly I heard the long-drawn hunting cry of a wolf. Looking in the direction of the sound I saw a big grey timber wolf loping toward me with the speed of a race horse. His cries were answered from a distance, and then I saw six other big wolves bounding over the prairie after me. I looked around for some place of safety and saw at some distance--a good deal less than a quarter of a mile, as I know it now, but it looked all of that at the time--a small burr oak, the only tree near enough to be available in this crisis. I knew enough about the big timber wolves to know that I would instantly be in ribbons after they were upon me. One alone might be kept off; but seven would have the courage of numbers, and would make short work of a single boy. Then I was scared. I could actually feel every hair upon my head standing straight on end, as stiff as Hamlet's "quills upon the fretful porcupine". It has been worth all that it cost, this hair-raising experience, as an interpretation of the much-quoted expression from the immortal Bard of Avon. A good runner, I had a full half mile the start of the leading wolf. I did not wait for him greatly to diminish the lead, but "lit out" for the little burr oak. I covered the ground in the shortest time I had ever devoted to a like distance, and although very nearly winded jumped for the lower limbs and pulled myself up just in time to escape the teeth of the forward beast. In another minute there were seven of them, leaping to within a few feet of my legs as I stood on a branch of the small tree, as high up as I dared to go. My brother had heard the cries of the wolves, and running to the top of the bank had watched the race with great interest. When the tree was safely reached he shouted to me to hold on and he would go for help, and he at once started for Prescott, four miles away, against the current. For some reason which I have never been able to explain, the wolves, after yelping and leaping for an hour or so, suddenly started off across the prairie, and when they had gone a mile away I climbed down and ran for home. In the meantime my hair had resumed its normal position, and never since, under any circumstances, have I experienced a like sensation. I presume that the thought of being torn to pieces by the wolves, a contingency which seemingly was quite probable, added a horror to the imminence of death which was not present at a time when there was an equal chance of being drowned. It was not because I did not know all about wolves, for I did. Their cries were familiar sounds in that wild country, and their ferocity had been proven time and again; but I had never heard nor seen them when it meant quite so much to me, nor when the chances seemed so slim. Chapter III _On the Levee at Prescott_ When we first knew it, Prescott was in many respects a typical river town. But in one, it differed from all others with the possible exception of Wacouta and Reed's Landing. "Towing through" had not then been inaugurated. The great rafts of logs and lumber from Stillwater and the upper St. Croix, were pushed to Prescott by towboats from Stillwater, at the head of the lake. From there to Lake Pepin they drifted. They were again pushed through that lake by other boats, and from Reed's Landing, at the foot of the lake, drifted to their destination at Winona, La Crosse, Clinton, Le Claire, or Hannibal. The necessary preparation for the trip down river was made at Prescott. Stores of pork, beans, flour, molasses, and whiskey were laid in. The hundreds of rough men who handled the great steering oars on these rafts spent their money in the saloons which lined the river front and adjacent streets, filling themselves with noxious liquors, and often ending their "sprees" with a free fight between rival crews. A hundred men would join in the fray, the city marshal sitting on a "snubbing post", revolver in hand, watching the affair with the enlightened eye of an expert and the enjoyment of a connoisseur. Prescott was also a transfer point for freight consigned to Afton, Lakeland, Hudson, Stillwater, Osceola, and St. Croix Falls. The large boats, unless they were heavily freighted for Stillwater and Hudson, did not make the run of thirty miles up the lake. The freight was put ashore at Prescott, and reshipped on the smaller boats plying between Prescott and St. Croix River points. This made necessary large warehouses in which to store the transshipped goods. My father, L. H. Merrick, engaged in this business of storing and transshipping, as well as dealing in boat-stores and groceries. Buying one warehouse on the levee, he started a store in the basement, which opened directly on to the levee. Moving his family into the two upper stories, he began at once the erection of a second and larger warehouse. These being insufficient for his business, he bought, in 1855, a third warehouse. These were filled, in summer, with goods in transit, and in winter with wheat awaiting the opening of navigation for shipment to Eastern markets, via Dunleith, Illinois, at that time the nearest railroad connection on the river. The name of this one-time prosperous city has, however, disappeared from the map, to be replaced by East Dubuque. From 1854 until 1858 the firm of L. H. Merrick & Co. (the company being William R. Gates, my brother-in-law) did all the transfer and storage business for the regular packets belonging to the Galena, Dubuque, Dunleith & St. Paul Packet Company, commonly shortened to Minnesota Packet Company, and also for such "wild" boats as did not make the run up the lake. The business was very profitable. Much of the freight consisted of pork and beef in barrels, whiskey, sugar in hogsheads (refined sugar was then scarcely known on the upper river), rice, soap, etc., which, if there was no boat ready to receive it, could be covered with tarpaulins on the levee, thus saving the cost of putting it in the warehouses. The perishable freight and household goods were of course stored under cover. A man was always on duty to meet incoming boats at night, and to watch the freight piled on the levee. Sometimes, when there was a large amount of such freight left outside, we boys spent the night skylarking about the piles, keeping our eyes open to see that the ubiquitous raftsmen did not surreptitiously transfer some of the packages to the everpresent rafts. The transfer agents paid the freight on the goods from the lower river points to Prescott, and charged a commission of from five to twenty-five per cent for such advance. In addition, a charge was made for storage, whether the freight was actually placed in the warehouse or simply covered and watched on the levee. If the goods were from Pittsburg or St. Louis, the freight bills were usually large, and a five per cent commission would produce a quite respectable income. If the cargo were divided into small lots, so much the better. No package, however small, escaped for less than a quarter ("two bits", as money was then reckoned); and in addition to the commission on the money advanced, there was an additional charge for storage, graduated, as I have before stated, upon the value and perishability of the freight handled. Altogether it was a very profitable occupation until the year 1858, when there appeared a new bidder for the business, knocking down the rates of commission and storage, as well as cutting the business in two by getting the agency of many of the boats, heretofore served by the old firm. My brother and myself "bunked" in the garret of the warehouse in which we had made our temporary home. There were two windows fronting the river, and I feel sure that at night no steamboat ever landed at the levee without having at least two spectators, carefully noting its distinguishing characteristics. Was she a side-wheel or stern-wheel? Was she large or small? Had she trimmings on her smokestack, or about the pilot house, and if so of what description? Had she a "Texas", or no "Texas"? Were the outside blinds painted white, red, or green? What was the sound of her whistle and bell? All of these points, and many others, were taken in, and indelibly impressed upon our memories, so that if the whistle or bell were again heard, perhaps months afterward, the name of the boat could be given with almost unfailing accuracy. It was a part of the education of the "levee rats", as the boys were called. A boy that could not distinguish by ear alone a majority of the boats landing at the levee from year to year, was considered as deficient in his education. Of course every boy in town could tell what craft was coming as soon as she whistled, if she was one of the regular "packets". Every boat had a whistle toned and tuned so that it might be distinguished from that of any other boat of the same line. The bells, which were always struck as the boat came into the landing, also differed widely in tone. There was one, the music of which will live in my memory so long as life lasts. The tone of the "Ocean Wave's" bell was deep, rich, sonorous, and when heard at a distance on a still, clear night, was concentrated sweetness. Were I rich I would, were it a possibility, find that bell and hang it in some bell-less steeple where I might hear again its splendid tones, calling not alone to worship, but summoning for me from the misty past pictures indelibly printed upon boyish senses. A picturesque and animated scene, was one of these night landings; the discharge and taking on of freight, the shouting of orders, the escaping of steam, and all the sights and sounds which for the time transformed the levee from its usual quietude and darkness, broken only by the faint glimmer of the watchman's lantern and the ripple of the water upon the beach, into life, light, and activity. The advent of the electric search-light has driven from the river one of the most picturesque of all the accessories to such scenes as we boys looked down upon, night after night, during the busy times of 1854 and 1855, before I myself became part and parcel of it all. The torch, by the light of which the work went on by night, was within an iron basket, about a foot in diameter and eighteen inches deep, swung loosely between the prongs of a forked iron bar or standard, which could be set in holes in the forward deck, leaning far out over the water, so as to allow live coals from the burning wood to fall into the river, and not upon deck. When a landing was to be made at a woodyard or a town, the watchman filled one or perhaps two of these torch baskets with split "light-wood", or "fat-wood"--Southern pine full of resinous sap, which would burn fiercely, making a bright light, illuminating the deck of the boat and the levee for hundreds of feet around. As the boat neared the landing the pine splinters were lighted at the furnace door, the torch being carried to place and firmly fixed in its socket. Then came out the attending demon who fed the burning, smoking "jack" with more pine fatwood, and from time to time with a ladle of pulverized rosin. The rosin would flare up with a fierce flame, followed by thick clouds of black smoke, the melted tar falling in drops upon the water, to float away, burning and smoking until consumed. This addition to the other sights and sounds served more than any other thing to give this night work a wild and weird setting. We boys decided, on many a night, that we would "go on the river" and feed powdered rosin and pine kindlings to torches all night long, as the coal-black and greasy, but greatly envied white lamp-boy did, night after night, in front of our attic windows on the levee at Prescott. The cleaner and brighter, but very commonplace electric light has driven the torch from the river; and if one is to be found at all in these degenerate days it will be as a curiosity in some historical museum. And thus we grew into the very life of the river as we grew in years. I finally attained an age when my services were worth something in the economy of a steamboat's crew. My first venture was made in company with one who afterward attained rank and honor in the civil service of the state--the Honorable Sam. S. Fifield, lieutenant-governor of Wisconsin. I have a letter written by Mr. Fifield since I began writing these sketches, in which he says that he recollects the writer as a "white-haired boy, full of all sorts of pranks". I presume this description of how I looked and what I did is correct; but forty years ago to have applied to him any such personal description of his thatch would have been a _casus belli_ for which nothing but blood could atone. It is white, now; at that time it was a subdued brindle, with leanings toward straw, and a subject not lightly to be discussed in the presence of its owner. The stern-wheel steamer "Kate Cassell" wintered above the lake--that is, above Lake Pepin--I think at Diamond Bluff, where at the close of navigation she was caught in the ice. In the spring her captain appeared, with an engineer, a pilot, a steward, and possibly some other officers, and picked up the remainder of officers and crew 'longshore. I remember that one of my schoolmates, Nat. Blaisdell, went as assistant engineer, Russ. Ruley as mate, and a number of longshoremen from Prescott as deck hands, while Sam Fifield and I were pantry boys. Sam got enough of it in a few trips between St. Paul and Rock Island. I stayed through the season. We both were printers. Sam went back to the case at once; I went to mine again in the fall, after the close of navigation, and stuck type during the winter, as I also did each returning season while on the river. The next spring I engaged with "Billy" Hamilton, as a "cub" engineer. Prior to starting out on the season's run the machinery of the boat ("Fanny Harris") had to be put in order. There was a regular blacksmith's forge on board. All river engineers were, perforce, good blacksmiths, able to make anything pertaining to the machinery which it was possible to make from wrought iron bars with an ordinary forge and anvil, with a twelve-pound striking hammer and a two-pound shaper. We made scores of extra "stirrups"--the double bolts, with nuts, that clamp the "buckets" to the wheel-arms. We made hog-chains and chimney guys, and, as needed, bent them into place. The boilers, engines, and "Doctor"--the steam pump for feeding water to the boilers, pumping out the steamer, etc.--were all overhauled and put in perfect order. The engines were leveled and "lined up"; the eccentrics were carefully adjusted and securely fastened; the "nigger" hoisting engine, for handling freight and warping the boat over sand-bars was fitted up, and a hundred other minor but important matters were attended to, so that when steam was raised and turned on, the wheel would "turn over", and the boat go. Some wheels did not at first turn over, and it was not to the credit of the man who had lined the engines and set the eccentrics. Billy Hamilton's wheel, however, turned over the first trial. Had I followed up this line of activity under Billy's tutelage, no doubt I would have become a capable engineer, for I liked the work and took a genuine delight in handling machinery, a liking which I have not yet outgrown. But there were decided drawbacks. The reversing gear of a Mississippi River steamboat, in old times, was like nothing else of its kind, anywhere under the sun. The engines were of the lever and poppet-valve order, and the reversing gear was heavy. The connecting-rod (cam-rod, we called it) weighed at least fifty pounds, even though it was attached to the "rock-shaft" at one end. In reversing, the end of the connecting-rod was lifted off its hook at the bottom, the lever thrown over, in which operation two heavy valve-levers were raised, the rod lifted about three feet, and dropped on to the upper hook. It was all right when you did this once or twice in making a landing; but in a piece of "crooked river", the boat dodging about among reefs and bars, with the bells coming faster than you could answer them, it was another matter, and became pretty trying work for a stripling boy; his arms could not keep the pace. Another drawback in the life of a "cub" engineer was the fact that when in port there was no let-up to the work. In fact, the worst part of it came then. As soon as the steamer reached her destination at Galena, the pilots were at liberty until the hour of sailing; not so with the engineers. We usually reached Galena Thursday evening or night, and left for up river Friday evening. As soon as the boat was made fast the "mud-valves" were opened, the fires drawn, the water let out of the boilers, and the process of cleaning began. Being a slim lad, one of my duties was to creep into the boilers through the manhole, which was just large enough to let me through; and with a hammer and a sharp-linked chain I must "scale" the boilers by pounding on the two large flues and the sides with the hammer, and sawing the chain around the flues until all the accumulated mud and sediment was loosened. It was then washed out by streams from the deck-hose, the force-pump being manned by the firemen, of whom there were eight on our four-boiler boat. Scaling boilers was what decided me not to persevere in the engineering line. To lie flat on one's stomach on the top of a twelve-inch flue, studded with rivet heads, with a space of only fifteen inches above one's head, and in this position haul a chain back and forth without any leverage whatever, simply by the muscles of the arm, with the thermometer 90° in the shade, was a practice well calculated to disillusionize any one not wholly given over to mechanics. While I liked mechanics I knew when I had enough, and therefore reached out for something one deck higher. The unexpected disability of our "mud clerk", as the second clerk is called on the river, opened the way for an ascent, and I promptly availed myself of it. [Illustration: PRESCOTT LEVEE IN 1876. Showing Steamer "Centennial" and the little Hastings ferry, "Plough Boy." The double warehouse, showing five windows in the second story and four in the third was the building in which the author lived when a boy.] [Illustration: PRESCOTT LEVEE IN 1908. But one business building--one of the old Merrick warehouses, left intact. Dunbar's Hall gutted by fire recently. The large steamboat warehouse next to it destroyed some years ago. All the shipping business gone to the railroad, which runs just back of the buildings shown.] Chapter IV _In the Engine-room_ Before leaving the main deck, with its savory scents of scorching oil, escaping steam, and soft-coal gas, let me describe some of the sights, sounds, and activities which impressed themselves upon the memory of the young "cub" during his brief career as an embryo engineer. The engine-room crew of a Mississippi steamer varies as the boat is a side-wheeler or a stern-wheeler. In my day, a stern-wheeler carried two engineers, a "first" and a "second". The former was chosen for his age and experience, to him being confided the responsibility of the boat's machinery. His knowledge, care, and oversight were depended upon to keep the engines, boilers, etc., in good repair, and in serviceable condition. The second engineer received less wages, and his responsibility ended in standing his watch, handling the engines, and in keeping enough water in the boilers to prevent the flues from burning, as well as to avoid an explosion. If a rival boat happened to be a little ahead or a little behind, or alongside, and the "second" was on watch, the margin of water between safety and danger in the boilers was usually kept nearer the minimum than it would have been were the "chief" in command. It is very much easier to get hot steam with little water than with much; and hot steam is a prime necessity when another boat is in sight, going the same direction as your own. On the "Fanny Harris", the pilots always depended upon Billy Hamilton when in a race, as he would put on the "blowers"--the forced draft, as it is called in polite, though less expressive language--and never let the water get above the second gauge, and never below the first, if he could help it. Sometimes it was a matter of doubt where the water really was, the steam coming pretty dry when tried by the "gauge-stick"--a broom handle, which, pushed against the gauges, of which there were three in the end of the boiler (three inches apart, vertically, the lower one situated just above the water-line over the top of the flues), opened the valve and permitted the steam and water to escape into a short tin trough beneath. If a stream of water ran from the first and second gauges when so tried, but not from the third, there was a normal and healthy supply of water in the boilers. If the water came from the first, but not from the second, the "Doctor" was started and the supply increased. When it reached the third gauge the supply was cut off. If, as I have seen it, there was, when tried, none in the first or lower gauge, there followed a guessing match as to just how far below the minimum the water really was, and what would be the result of throwing in a supply of cold water. The supply was always thrown in, and that quickly, as time counts in such cases. The pilot at the wheel, directly over the boilers, is in blissful ignorance of the vital question agitating the engineer. He may at times have his suspicions, as the escape pipes talk in a language which tells something of the conditions existing below decks; but if the paddle wheels are turning over with speed, he seldom worries over the possibilities which lie beneath him. His answer to the question, whether the water is below the safety point, comes as he feels the deck lifting beneath his feet, and he sails away to leeward amid the debris of a wrecked steamboat. Probably four-fifths of the boiler explosions which have taken place on the Mississippi River during the last eighty years--and there have been hundreds of such--were the result of these conditions: low water in the boilers, exposing the plates until red-hot, then throwing in water and "jumping" the steam pressure faster than the engines or safety-valve could release it, followed by the inevitable giving away of the whole fabric of the boiler, wrecking the steamer, and usually killing and scalding many of the passengers and crew. On a side-wheel boat the make-up of the engine crew is different. In addition to the first and second engineers there are two "cubs", or "strikers". The stern-wheeler has two engines, but they are both coupled to the same shaft, by a crank at each end. The throttle wheel is in the centre of the boat. One man operates the two engines, and assists at landings, but in a bad piece of river is helped by one of the firemen, who is called aft by a little bell controlled by a cord from the engine-room. This man "ships up" on the port side, while the engineer "ships up" on the starboard. "Shipping up" was the term used to describe the act of shifting the cam-rod from the lower pin on the reversing lever to the upper, or _vice versa_. If done at a sudden call, the engineer ran to one side and "shipped up", then across the deck to the other, and then back to the centre to "give her steam". That is all changed now by the adoption of an improved reversing gear, similar to that on a railway locomotive, the throwing of a lever at the centre of the boat operating the reversing gears on both engines at once. Instead of the old-time "short-link", or "cut-off hook", the equivalent of the "hooking-back" on a locomotive when under way is performed by the engineer at the centre of the boat by hooking back the reversing lever one, two, or three notches, exactly as on the locomotive. Fifty years ago this simple device had not been adopted on the river. On the side-wheel boat, to get back to my subject, the engines are independent--one engine to each wheel. One may be coming ahead while the other is backing, or they may both be reversing at the same time. A man is therefore required to operate each engine, hence the necessity for a "striker", or "cub", to take one engine while the engineer on watch takes the other. The engineer on duty, be he chief or assistant, takes the starboard engine and controls the running of the machinery and the feeding of the boilers during his watch; the "cub" takes the port engine and works under the direction of his superior on watch. As I have stated at the beginning of this chapter, the handling of these powerful engines was hard work, even for a grown man, when the river was low and the pilot was feeling his way over a crossing in a dark night, with both leads going, and the wheels doing much of the work of keeping the boat in the intricate channel between the reefs. Then it was that the bells came thick and fast--to stop, to back, to come ahead again, to slow, to come ahead full steam, and again to stop and back and come ahead. Then the cut-off hook was pulled up by a rope attached to the deck beams overhead, and the heavy cam-rod was lifted from the lower hook to the upper by main strength, or dropped from the upper to the lower with scant regard for the finish on the bright work, to be lifted again at the call of the next bell from the pilot, and all this a dozen times, or even more, in making one crossing. And all the time the "cub" was in deadly fear of getting his engine caught on the centre, a calamity in both material and moral sense, as a "centre" might mean the disablement of an engine at a critical moment, throwing the steamer out of the channel, and hanging her up for hours, or even for days, on a sand-bar. It might even have a more calamitous sequence, by running her on the rocks or snags and sinking her. Hence, for pressing reasons, the most acute alertness was necessary on the part of the "striker". The moral obloquy of "centring" an engine was so great among river men, especially among engineers, that no "cub" ever again held his head high after suffering such a mischance; and it was a proud boast among the embryo engineers if they could honestly claim that they had never "centred" their engine. On general principles they always boasted of it as a fact, until some one appeared who could testify to the contrary. I enter that claim here and now without fear of successful contradiction. All my confederates in that business are now out of commission. One of the beauties of the puppet-valve engine, with its long stroke[A] and consequent "purchase" on the shaft-crank, was that by the aid of a billet of wood, about two and a half inches square, with a handle whittled off on one end, and with a loop of cord to hang it up by, or to hang it on one's wrist (where it was usually found when the boat was navigating a crooked piece of river), an increase of fifty per cent of steam could be let into the cylinder by the simple device of inserting the club between the rocker-arm and the lever which lifted the inlet valve, as graphically described in the paper by Mr. Holloway, quoted in this chapter. If the valve were normally lifted four inches by the rocker-arm, the insertion of the club would increase the lift by its thickness. This additional power fed to the cylinder at the right moment would drive the wheel over the centre when reversed with the boat going upstream at a speed of eight or ten miles an hour, against a four-mile current, with almost absolute certainty. With a ten-foot wheel, and three buckets in the water, one submerged to its full width of three feet, and the other two perhaps two feet, it can readily be understood by an engineer that to turn such a wheel back against the current required a great expenditure of power at just the right time. The "club" of the Western steamboat engineer solved the question of additional power at the critical moment. No short-stroke engine would respond to such a call. While this service tried the cylinders to their utmost--many times a little beyond their utmost, with a consequent loss of a cylinder head, and worse yet, a scalded engineer--the use of the club was justified by experience; and results which, with finer and more perfect machinery would have been impossible, were, day after day, made possible by reason of the crudeness and roughness of this usage. [A] The "stroke" of an engine is the distance traveled by the cross-head of the piston in making a complete revolution of the wheel--equal to twice the length of the crank on the water-wheel shaft. If the crank is three feet long, the stroke will be six feet. The stroke of the "Grey Eagle" of the Minnesota Packet Company was seven feet; that of the "J. M. White", lower river boat, was eleven feet. The cylinders of course equaled the full stroke in length. The longer the crank the greater the purchase, but at a consequent loss in the number of revolutions of the wheel per minute. The great steamers plying on Long Island Sound attain a speed of twenty miles an hour, or even more. It is said that when under full speed it is possible to turn the wheels back over the centre within half a mile after steam has been shut off. Under ordinary conditions it is not necessary that they should be handled any faster. But think of the conditions under which a Mississippi River steamboat must stop and back, or suffer shipwreck. And imagine, if you can, the remarks a river pilot would make if the wheel were not turning back within thirty seconds after the bell was rung. I think five seconds would be nearer the limit for reversing and giving steam. In fact, on all side-wheel boats, the levers controlling the steam valves are attached to small tackles, and these are controlled by one lever, by which the steam levers may be raised in an instant, without closing the throttle at all, and the steam allowed to pass out through the escape pipes while the engine remains passive. Two ends are attained by this device: steam can instantly be shut off, or as quickly given to the cylinders, thus making a saving in time over the usual opening and closing of the steam ports by the throttle wheel. Another advantage is, that this device acts as a safety-valve; for, were the steam to be entirely shut off, and the safety-valve fail to work, an explosion would certainly follow. By opening all the valves at once, and permitting as much steam to escape through the exhaust pipes as when the engine is in motion, the danger of an explosion is minimized. At the call of the pilot the levers can instantly be dropped and full steam ahead or reversed given at once--of course at the expense of a good deal of a "jolt" to the engines and cylinders. But the river engines were built to be "jolted", hence their practical adaptation to the service in which they were used. J. F. Holloway, of St. Louis, who, in his own words, "was raised on the river, having filled every position from roustabout to master", in a paper read before the American Society of Mechanical Engineers at St. Louis in May, 1896, contributes the following description of a steamboat race as seen and heard in the engine-room--a point of view somewhat lacking, perhaps, in picturesqueness to the ordinary observer, but nevertheless very essential in winning a race. The writer is evidently as thoroughly at home in the engine-room as he is upon the roof: "The reason which induced the builders of engines for these Western river boats to adopt such peculiar construction could hardly be made clear without a careful description of the hull of the boats, and of the varying conditions to which both engines and hulls are subjected, and under which they must operate. The steam cylinders are placed on foundations as unstable as would be a raft, and the alignment is varied by the addition or removal of every ton of freight which the boats carry when afloat, and they are further distorted when aground, or when the boats are being dragged over sand bars having several inches less of water on them than is required to float the hull. While the calm study of the machinery of a Western river steamboat while at rest would be an interesting object lesson to any one at all interested in such matters, it can only be seen at its best at a time when some rival boat is striving with it for "the broom," and close behind is slowly gaining, with roaring furnaces, and chimneys belching out vast volumes of thick black smoke; when all on board, from the pilot above to the fireman below are worked up to the highest pitch of enthusiasm, and when engines, boilers, engineers and all concerned in the management of the boat, are called upon to show the stuff which is in them. I know of no more exciting scene than was often to be witnessed in the days of the old famous Ohio River ports, when a "ten-boiler" boat was trying to make a record, or take a wharf-boat landing away from some close-following rival steamer. To stand on the boiler deck at such a time on a big side-wheel boat, when in order to get ahead the pilot had made up his mind to close-shave a "tow-head," or take the dangerous chances of a new channel or a new "cut-off," and when all on board knew the risk he was taking, and standing by to help him through, or help _themselves_ if he failed, was exciting to a degree. Then it was that the two most skilful and daring engineers were called on watch, and took their stands alongside their respective engines, stripped like gladiators for the tussle which soon came as the clanging starboard bell rang out to "slow down," and as the hasty ringing of the "jingler" over the port engine meant "crack it to her." Then as the bow of the big boat swung, all too slow to suit the emergency or the impatience of the pilot, a stopping starboard bell would ring, quick followed by a backing one which would set the engineer to wrestling with his "hooks," one of which he hangs up with a cord, and the other he picks up seemingly from somewhere on the platform. As the suddenly stopped and quivering wheel in the swift-flowing current hangs for a moment poised on the centre, the engineer, grasping his ever-at-hand club of wood, quickly thrusts it between the uprising rocker-arm and the lever that lifts the inlet puppet valve, to which widened opening of the steam-valve port the engine responds with a noise of escaping steam not unlike the roar of an enraged elephant when prodded with the iron hook of his keeper. The battle of the bells thus begun, waxes more fierce as the excitement increases. There are bells to the right, and bells to the left, and amid their discordant jangle the engineers are working like mad as they clutch the throttle, open or close "the bleeder," hook her on "ahead," or stop and back, in such rapid succession as that soon neither they, nor any one else, can tell how far behind the bells of the pilot they are. Then soon amid the wild roar of the pent-up steam as it rushes out of the safety-valve pipes, the exploding exhausts of the engines which at the end of each stroke sound as if the cylinder-head had blown off, and to which is added the shrill noise of the warning bell which calls to the firemen to "throw open the furnace doors," there comes from out the huge trumpet shaped pipe above the head of the engineers, and which leads down from the pilot-house, a hoarse shout, heard above all else, partaking alike of command, entreaty, and adjectives, urging something or other to be done, and done quick, else the boat and all on board of her, in a brief time will land in a place which by reason of the reputed entire absence of water could not well be called a "port" (and certainly is no port mentioned in the boat's manifests). This battle of the bells and irons goes on until, if in a race, the rival boat is passed or crowded to the bank, or the narrow channel widens out into the broad river, when the discordant jangle of the bells ceases, the tired engineer drops on the quiet "cut-off hook," lays by his emergency wooden club, and wiping the sweat from his heated brow, comes down from the foot-board to catch a breath of the cool air which sweeps over the guards, and to formulate in his mind the story which he will have to tell of the race just over, or the perils just past. But the old-time flyers which before the war tore their way up and down through the muddy waters of these Western rivers are all gone, and the marvelously skilled pilots of those days have gone too; the men who, through the darkest hours of the darkest nights, knew to within a few feet just where their boats were, and what was on the right or on the left, or beneath them, which was to be shunned. The engineers too, who with a courage born and nurtured amid the vicissitudes of a backwoods life, and with an experience and skill the outgrowth of trials and dangers gone through, have also passed away, and to the generation of the present are unhonored and unknown, as are the men who designed and built the hulls, and the workmen who, with crude and scant tools, built for them the machinery which they so well planned and handled. Who they were, and where they lie, is known to but few, if any. Did I but know their final resting-place, I would, like "Old Mortality," wish to carve anew, and deep, the fading records of their life and death, which time has so nearly obliterated, and to herald abroad the praise and honor due them as the designers, builders, and engineers, of the old-time Western river steamboats." Chapter V _The Engineer_ It would be impossible to pick out any one man who handled an engine on the river fifty years ago, and in describing his habits and peculiarities claim him as a type of all river engineers of his time. The legendary engineer, such as Colonel Hay has given us, standing at the throttle of his engine on the ill-fated "Prairie Belle", waiting for signals from the pilot house, his boat a roaring furnace of fire, and whose spirit finally ascended with the smoke of his steamer, was a true type of one class, and possibly a large class, of old-time river engineers. Reckless, profane, combative; yet courageous, proud of their calling, and to be depended upon to do their duty under any and all circumstances; giving, if need be, their lives for the safety of the passengers and crew of the boat--such was one class. Another was composed of men equally courageous, equally to be depended upon in time of danger, but sober, quiet, religious, family men, who never used a profane word, never went on sprees ashore, never supported one wife at home and another at "Natchez under the Hill." On the boat upon which I gained the greater part of my river experience, we had the two types: George McDonald, chief, and Billy Hamilton, assistant. Either would have died at his post, the one with a prayer upon his lips, and the other with a jest; both alike alert, cool, efficient. McDonald was a Scotch Presbyterian, and might have been an elder in the church at home--perhaps he was. He was a religious man on board his boat, where religion was at a discount. He was a capable engineer; he could make anything that it was possible to make, on the portable forge in the steamer's smithy. He was always cool, deliberate, ready, and as chief was the captain's right-hand man in the engine-room. Billy Hamilton was his opposite in everything, save in professional qualifications. In these he was the equal of his chief, except in length of service, and consequent experience. The son of a Maryland slave owner, he was a "wild one" on shore, and a terror to the captain when on board and on duty. In a race with a rival boat his recklessness in carrying steam was always counted upon by the pilot on watch, to make up for any inherent difference in speed that might handicap our boat. He would put on the blower (forced draft) until solid chunks of live wood coals would be blown from the smokestacks. He would keep the water at the first gauge, or under it. He had a line rigged from the safety-valve lever, running aft to the engine-room. In times of peace the line was rove over a pulley fixed under the deck, above the safety-valve. A pull on the line in this position would raise the valve and allow the steam to escape. When another boat was in sight, going our way, the slack of the rope was hauled forward and the bight carried under a pulley fixed in a stanchion alongside the boiler, below the safety-valve, running thence up and over the upper pulley as before--but with all the difference in the world, for with the fifty-pound anvil hanging to the end of the line thus reversed in its leverage, the boilers might have blown up a hundred times before the safety-valve would have acted. I have often heard the signal which Billy had agreed upon with his fireman on the port side, and have seen the darky slip the line under the lower pulley, and then keep one eye on the boiler-deck companionway, watching for the captain. Should he be seen coming below, the line was as quickly slipped off the lower pulley and restored to its normal position; sometimes with a concurrent "blowing off" through the safety-valve, which was evidence enough for the captain, although he might not catch Billy in the act. It is no more than just to say that the visits of the captain below decks were not frequent. He was a New Orleans man, of French extraction, with a fine sense of honor which forbade any espionage of this nature, unless there seemed to be an especially flagrant case of steam-carrying on the part of his junior engineer. Billy had another device which greatly galled the captain, and later it was the cause of a serious affair. The captain had a private servitor, a colored man who cared for his rooms in the "Texas", served his lunches there, and ran errands about the boat as required. The captain used to send him down to the engine-room when he suspected Hamilton was carrying more steam than was nominated in the license, to look at the gauge and take readings. It was not long before Hamilton became aware of this surreptitious reading, and set himself to work to defeat it without the necessity of ordering the captain's man out of the engine-room. To this end he made a cap of sheet lead which covered the face of the dial, leaving only about two inches in the centre, showing the pivot and a small portion of the pointer. This balked the colored messenger completely, as he could not see the figures, and he was not well enough acquainted with the instrument to read it from the centre. On his last visit to the engine-room, Hamilton saw him coming. Pretending that he was going forward to try the water, but keeping his eye on the messenger, he saw him reach up and take off the cap. In an instant Hamilton turned and threw his shaping hammer, which he had in his hand, with such true aim that it struck the poor darky in the head and knocked him senseless. As he dropped to the deck Hamilton called one of his firemen, telling him to give his compliments to Captain Faucette and tell him to send some men and take away his (profanely described) nigger, as he had no use for him. The darky pulled through all right, I think. He was put ashore at the first landing and placed under the care of a doctor, and Hamilton paid his bills. His successor never came into the engine-room, and the cap on the steam gauge was laid aside as unnecessary. Whenever the mate had a "shindy" with the crew, which was composed of forty Irishmen, all the other officers of the boat were bound to "stand by" for trouble. Hamilton was always ready, if not anxious, for such occasions, and he and Billy Wilson, the mate, always supported each other so effectively that many an incipient mutiny was quickly quelled, the two jumping into a crowd and hitting every head in sight with whatever weapon happened to be at hand until order was restored. Usually, however, it was with bare hands, and the show which authority always makes in face of insubordination. At times, Billy's vagaries were of a grisly and gruesome character. I recall that at Point Douglass, on one of our trips, we found a "floater" (body of a drowned man) that had been in the water until it was impossible to handle it. To get it on shore it was necessary to slide a board beneath, and draw out board and body together. It was a malodorous and ghastly undertaking. Something said to this effect, Hamilton laughed at as being altogether too finicky for steamboatmen. To demonstrate that it need not affect either one's sensibilities or stomach, he stepped into the cook's galley for a sandwich, and sitting down on the end of the board, alongside the corpse, ate his lunch without a qualm. Another and rather more amusing incident took place while the "Fanny Harris" was in winter quarters at Prescott. The night before St. Patrick's day, Billy made up an effigy, which he hung between the smokestacks. As the manikin had a clay pipe in its mouth and a string of potatoes about its neck, it might have reference to the patron saint of the Old Sod. The loyal Irishmen of the town so interpreted it at least, and Billy had to stand off the crowd for several hours with a shot gun, and finally get the town marshal to guard the boat while he climbed up and removed the obnoxious image. He had a little iron cannon which he fired on all holidays, and sometimes when there was no holiday; in the latter case, at about three o'clock in the morning, just to remind people living in the vicinity of the levee that he was still "on watch". In retaliation for the effigy affair, his Irish friends slipped aboard the boat one evening while he was away and spiked his cannon by driving a rat-tail file into the vent; this was after he had carefully loaded it for a demonstration intended to come off the next morning. He discovered the trick when he attempted to fire the gun, and offered pertinent and forcible remarks, but unprintable in this narration. He lost no time in vain regrets, however. Lighting up his forge he made a screw and drew out the load. Then with the help of several chums he moved his forge to the bow of the boat (the foc'sle), rigged a crane so that he could swing his little cannon in a chain sling, from the capstan to the forge, and back again. When the time came for firing the salute he had his gun heated red-hot on the forge; it was then swung back on to the capstan-head, where it was lashed with a chain. A bucket of water was then thrown into the gun, and instantly a hardwood plug, made to fit, was driven home with his heavy striking hammer. In a minute the steam generated by this process caused an explosion that threw the plug almost across the river, fully a quarter of a mile, with a reasonably fair result in the way of noise. It was a risky piece of work, but "Billy" was in his element when there was a spice of risk mixed with his sports. Billy's humor was broad, but never malicious. He never missed an opportunity to play a practical joke on any one, save, perhaps, the captain himself. The deck hands who "soldiered" by sitting on the side of their bunks when they ought to be at work toting freight, were sometimes lifted several feet in the air by the insertion of two inches of a darning needle ingeniously attached to the under side of the board bench upon which they took their seat. It was operated from the engine-room by a fine wire and a stiff spring, the whole boxed in so securely by the carpenter that there was no possibility of its discovery by the enraged victim. He was one of the most open-handed and liberal of men in his givings, and in spite of his escapades a valuable officer. In 1862 he left the boat, as did all the crew, to enlist under the call for three hundred thousand troops, made in July of that year. In all discussions of the war he had asserted his determination to keep away from any place where there was shooting, as he was afraid of bullets of any size from an ounce up. As he was a Southern man, son of a slaveholder, we thought that this badinage was to cover his determination not to take any part in the war on the Union side; we never questioned his courage. He went into the navy as an acting assistant engineer, and was assigned to one of the "tin-clads" that Commodore Porter had improvised for service on the Mississippi and tributaries, and that did such heroic service in opening and keeping open the great river. Within a few months after his entry into the service, his old friends saw with pleasure, but not surprise, his name mentioned in general orders for gallantry in action. He had stood by his engine on the gunboat after a pipe had been cut by a shell from a Confederate shore battery, a number of men being killed and wounded, and the engine-room filled with escaping steam. Binding his coat over his face and mouth to prevent inhalation of the steam he handled his engines at the risk of his life, in response to the pilot's bells, until his boat was withdrawn from danger. It was in keeping with his known character; and his talk of being "afraid of guns" was only a part of the levity with which he treated all situations, grave or gay. I do not know Billy's ultimate fate. When he left the "Fanny Harris" for gunboat service, I also left to enlist in the infantry. After three years in the army I was mustered out in Washington, and soon went to New York where I remained for ten years or more. In the interim between 1862 and 1876, when I returned to the West, I completely lost sight of all my old river acquaintances. When, later, I made inquiries of those whom I did find, they either did not enlighten me as to his fate, or, if they did, I made so little note of it that it has escaped my memory. Chapter VI _The "Mud" Clerk_[B]--_Comparative Honors_ [B] "Mud" Clerk: Second clerk, whose duty it was to go out in all weathers, upon the unpaved levees and deliver or receive freight. As the levees were usually muddy in rainy weather, the name became descriptive of the work and condition of the second clerk. The transition from the "main deck" to the "boiler deck" marked an era in my experience. It opened a new chapter in my river life, and one from which I have greatly profited. When I went upon the river I was about as bashful a boy as could be found; that had been my failing from infancy. As pantry boy I had little intercourse with the passengers, the duties of that department of river industry requiring only the washing, wiping, and general care of dishes and silverware. A "cub" engineer slipped up to his stateroom, and donned presentable clothing in which to eat his meals in the forward cabin, at the officers' table, where all save the captain and chief clerk took their meals. After that, his principal business was to keep out of sight as much as possible until it was time to "turn in". He was not an officer, and passengers were not striving for his acquaintance. As second clerk all these conditions were changed. In the absence of the chief clerk, his assistant took charge of the office, answered all questions of passengers, issued tickets for passage and staterooms, showed people about the boat, and in a hundred ways made himself agreeable, and so far as possible ministered to their comfort and happiness while on board. The reputation of a passenger boat depended greatly upon the esteem in which the captain, clerks, and pilots were held by the travelling public. The fame of such a crew was passed along from one tourist to another, until the gentle accomplishments of a boat's _personnel_ were as well known as their official qualifications. Captain William Faucette was, as I have said, of French Creole stock, from New Orleans. In addition to being a good and capable officer on the roof, he was also highly endowed with the graces that commended him to the ladies and gentlemen who took passage with him. Polite in his address, a fine dancer, a good story-teller and conversationist, his personality went far toward attracting the public who travelled for pleasure--and that was the best-paying traffic, for which every first-class packet was bidding. Charles Hargus, chief clerk, was not far behind his chief in winning qualities. An educated man, he was also possessed of the address and the other personal qualities which were necessary to equip one for becoming a successful officer on a Mississippi passenger steamer. Such was the atmosphere into which the oily "cub" from the engine-room was ushered, when drafted into this service because of the serious illness of the second clerk. It was too late to get a man from the city, and the necessities of the case required an immediate filling of the vacancy. I was invited, or rather commanded, to go into the office for the trip, and do what I could to help out with the work until the return to Galena, where a man or boy could be found to fill the office until the sick officer returned. The boat was guard-deep with freight, and at night the cabin was carpeted with passengers sleeping on mattresses spread on the floor. The chief clerk simply had to have somebody to help out. On my part, it was the chance of my life. Without much prior business experience, what little I had was right in line. I had checked freight on the levee for the firm of L. H. Merrick & Co., was a good penman, fairly good at figures, and had made out freight bills in the transfer of freight at Prescott, which fact was known to the chief clerk. It is needless to add that I required no second order. While second clerks were not likely to get any shore leave at either end of the route, nor at any intermediate ports, it required no brilliancy of intellect to see that checking freight was comparatively cleaner than, and superlatively preferable to, boiler-scaling. Regarding my success in this new field, suffice it to say that the trip to St. Paul and return was made, and the freight checked out with surprisingly few errors for a beginner. The cargo of wheat, potatoes, etc., was correctly counted in, properly entered in the books, and correctly checked out at Prairie du Chien and Dunleith. The sick clerk did not rejoin the boat. The temporary appointment by the captain and chief clerk was made permanent by the secretary of the company at Dunleith, Mr. Blanchard, on the recommendation of Mr. Hargus, my chief. We ran into Galena on our regular Thursday afternoon time, and instead of creeping into a steaming, muddy boiler, I walked out on to the levee and was introduced to the great wholesalers who at that time made Galena their headquarters, as "Mr. Merrick, our new second clerk", and the work of loading for a new trip was taken up. While the office of second clerk was a decided promotion from my point of view, it was not so esteemed on the river. Leaving the engine-room was leaving the opportunity to learn the profession of engineering. Once learned, it was then assumed that the person so equipped was guaranteed employment so long as he willed, with a minimum amount of competition. Later developments revealed the fallacy of this conception. Within ten years thereafter, steamboating was practically dead on the upper Mississippi. The completion of one or more railroads into St. Paul, ended the river monopoly. Thereafter a dozen steamboats did the business formerly requiring a hundred. The wages of engineers and pilots dropped to a figure undreamed of in the flush times between 1850 and 1860; there were twenty men competing for every berth upon the river. My new berth was not silk-lined, however. There was an aristocracy in the official family above decks. The captain and the chief clerk represented the first class, and the mate and the second clerk the other. The line between these was represented by the watches into which all officers on the boat were divided for rounds of duty. The captain and his mate, and the chief clerk and his second stood watch and watch during the twenty-four hours (that is, six hours on and six hours off) all the season. The pilots and engineers interposed a "dog watch", to break the monotony. The captain and the chief clerk went on watch after breakfast, at seven in the morning, and stood until noon. At twelve o'clock they were relieved by the mate and the second clerk, who ran the steamboat and the business until six o'clock in the evening, when they were relieved. After supper, they turned in until midnight, when they were called and relieved the captain and the chief clerk, who retired and slept until morning. While each class of officers was on duty the same number of hours each day, the difference lay in the fact that the junior officers were compelled by this arrangement to turn out at midnight throughout the season. It was this turning out at midnight that made the mate's watch (the port watch) very undesirable so far as personal ease and comfort was concerned. A man can knock about until midnight very agreeably, after a short nap in the afternoon, provided he can have a sound sleep during the "dead hours" from midnight until six o'clock in the morning. To turn out at midnight every night and work until six is an entirely different matter. The pilots and engineers on our boat--and so far as my experience went, on all boats--stood a "dog-watch" from four in the morning until seven, thus making five watches during the twenty-four hours, bringing the men of the two watches on duty alternately at midnight, and shortening the "dead hours" from midnight to four o'clock, and from four until seven, so that one did not get so "dead" tired and sleepy as he would in standing a watch beginning every night at midnight. It was believed on the river that more people die between midnight and morning than during any other six hours in the twenty-four. I think that I have heard physicians confirm this. My own experience in going on watch at midnight continuously during six months is, that there is less vitality and ambition available in that period than in any other. In fact, I have no distinct recollection that there was any ambition at all mixed up in the process of writing up delivery books, checking out freight, measuring wood, and performing the hundred other duties that fell to the lot of the officer on watch, when done in the depressing atmosphere of early morning. It was a matter of duty, unmixed with higher motives. It was not only the turning out at unholy hours, that differentiated between first and second clerk. The second clerk must have his delivery book written up for all the landings to be made during his off-watch. The chief clerk then made the delivery from the book, upon which the receipts were taken. If, during the second clerk's off-watch, there was a particularly large manifest for any landing, the assistant was called to attend to the delivery, after which he could turn in again, if he chose. Of course it took a river man but a moment to go to sleep after touching his bunk; but his rest was broken, and in the course of the season this began to tell on every one. Under the stress of it, men became hollow-eyed and lost flesh and strength. When on watch, the second clerk not only attended to his own particular duties, but he also assumed for the time those of the chief clerk. He collected fares from passengers coming aboard during his watch; assigned rooms, provided there were any left to assign, or a mattress on the cabin floor if there chanced to be any space left on the floor, whereon to place another mattress; collected freight bills, paid for wood or coal, and performed any other duties ordinarily performed by the chief clerk when on watch. It was not considered good form to call the chief clerk during his off-watch; in fact, to do so would be a confession of ignorance or inability, which no self-respecting second clerk cared to exhibit, and but rarely did. Many the close conference with the chief mate, his companion as well as superior during the long night watches; and many the smiles evoked in after days when recalling the well-meant but somewhat impracticable advice tendered upon some such occasions by the good-hearted autocrat of the "roof" and fo' castle. [Illustration: ALMA, WISCONSIN. A typical river town in the fifties.] Chapter VII _Wooding Up_ As second clerk, I was early taught to hold my own with the pirates who conducted the woodyards scattered along the river, from which the greater part of the fuel used on old-time river boats was purchased. There was a great variety of wood offered for sale, and a greater diversity in the manner of piling it. It was usually ranked eight feet high, with a "cob-house" at each end of the rank. It was the rule on the river to measure but one of the end piles, if the whole rank was taken, or one-half of one end pile if but a part of the rank was bought. For convenience, the woodmen usually put twenty cords in a rank, and allowed enough to cover the shortage caused by cross-piling at the ends. Being piled eight feet high, ten lengths of the measuring stick (eight feet long) equalled twenty cords, if it were fairly piled. Woodmen who cared for their reputation and avoided a "scrap" with the clerks, captains, and mates of steamboats, usually made their twenty-cord ranks eighty-four feet long and eight feet high. Such dealers also piled their sticks parallel to each other in the ranks; they also threw out the rotten and very crooked ones. When the clerk looked over such a tier, after having run his stick over it, he simply invited the owner aboard and paid him his fifty or sixty dollars, according to the quality of the wood, took him across the cabin to the bar, and invited him to "have one on the boat", shook hands, and bade him good night. It took the "pirates" to start the music, however. When only scant eighty feet were found in the rank, with rotten and green wood sandwiched in, all through the tiers, and crooked limbs and crossed sticks in all directions, it became the duty of the clerk to estimate his discount. After running his rod over it, he would announce, before the first stick was taken off by the deck hands, the amount of wood in the rank--nineteen and a half cords, nineteen cords, eighteen and a half cords, or in extreme cases only eighteen. When the mate could stand behind the rank and see, through a cross-piled hole, more than half the length of the steamboat, it was deemed a rather acute case, calling for the eighteen-cord decision. When this decision was made and announced, it was, on our boat at least, always adhered to. We always took wood some time before our visible supply was exhausted, in order to meet just such emergencies. The owner might, and usually did, damn everybody and everything connected with the craft in the most lurid terms. But the one question he had to answer, and answer quickly, was: "Will you take it?" If "No", the bell was struck and the boat backed off, while the woodman and roustabouts exchanged a blue-streaked volley of vituperation. If, on the other hand, a sale was made, the owner usually took his money and the inevitable drink at the bar, and then went down to the main deck and had it out with the mate, who was always a match, and more than a match, for any merely local and provincial orator. His vocabulary was enriched with contributions from all ports between St. Louis and St. Paul, while that of the squatter was lacking in the elements of diversity necessary to give depth and breadth to the discussion. It would be unjust to class all woodyard men with squatters like the foregoing specimens, of whom there were hundreds scattered along the islands and lowlands bordering the river, cutting wood on government land, and moving along whenever the federal officers got on their trail. On the mainland were many settlers, opening up farms along the river, and the chance to realize ready money from the sale of wood was not to be neglected. In many places chutes had been built of heavy planks, descending from the top of the bluff, from one to two hundred feet above the river. The upland oak, cut into four-foot lengths, was shot down to the water's edge, where a level space was found to rank it up. These men were honest, almost without exception, and their wood always measured true. The upland wood was vastly superior to the lowland growth; steamboat captains not only paid the highest price for it, but further endeavored to contract for all the wood at certain yards. I remember one, run by a Mr. Smith, between Prescott and Diamond Bluff, and another near Clayton, Iowa, that always furnished the best dry oak wood, and gave full measure. It was at the latter place that I nearly lost my berth, through a difference with the "Old Man"--the captain. I had measured the rank and announced the amount of wood as twenty cords. The captain was on deck at the time, and watching the measurement. When the announcement was made he ordered the wood remeasured. I went over it carefully, measuring from the centre of the cross-pile at one end to the centre of the cross-pile at the other end of the rank, and again reported "twenty cords". Captain Faucette called down to "measure it again", with an inflection plainly intimating that I was to discount it, adding, "You measured both ends." The rank was full height, closely piled, and the best of split white oak, and I had already taken out one of the ends; further, I had already twice reported twenty cords in the hearing of all the crew and many passengers, who were now giving their undivided attention to this affair. I therefore did not feel like stultifying myself for the sake of stealing a cord or two of wood, and replied that I had already measured it twice, and that I had not measured both ends of the rank. The "Old Man" flew into a rage and ordered me to go to the office and get my money, and he would find a man who knew how to measure wood. There being nothing for it but to obey an order of this kind, I went aboard, hung up my measuring stick in its beckets, and reported at the office for my money. Mr. Hargus, my chief, was astonished, and asked for an explanation, which I gave him. He rushed out to the woodpile with the rod, ran over it in a flash, and reported to the captain on the roof, "Twenty cords, sir!" and came back to the office. He told me to go on with my work and say nothing, which I was ready enough to do. In the meantime, the crew were toting the wood aboard. When the boat backed off, the captain sent for Mr. Hargus to meet him in his private room in the "Texas", where they had it out in approved style. Hargus only replied to Captain Faucette that if Merrick was discharged he would also take his pay and go ashore with him. Faucette was a new man in the line, from the far South, and a comparative stranger, while Hargus was a veteran with the company, a stockholder in the line, and backed by all the Dubuque stockholders, as well as by the officers and directors of the company; so the captain thought better of it and dropped the whole matter, never deigning to speak to the second clerk, either in way of apology, which was not expected, or of caution "not to let it occur again", which would have been an insult. The affair was "dropped overboard", as Hargus said, and the wood-measuring was thereafter left to the proper officer, without comment or interference. With a crew of forty men looking on and hearing the whole colloquy, a change in the amount of wood reported at the suggestion of the captain, would have simply wiped out any respect they may have had for the authority of the boy officer; and his usefulness on that boat, if not on the river, would have ended then and there. It was one of the unwritten rules of the service that the officers were to stand by each other in every way; there was to be no interference while on duty, and each was held responsible for such duty. If there was cause for reprimand it was to be administered in the privacy of the captain's office, and not in the presence of the whole crew. It was not desirable to have either office or officer held in contempt. As the steamboat business developed, and as immigration into the new Territory of Minnesota increased, there was necessity for getting as many trips into a season as possible. This led to the adoption of every device that might lessen the running time of steamers between the lower ports and St. Paul. Not the least of these innovations was the use of the wood-boat for the more ready transfer of fuel from the bank to the deck of the steamer. Flatboats, or scows, capable of carrying twenty cords of wood, and even forty, were loaded at the woodyards in readiness for the expected steamer. As the wood was worth more loaded in the scow, a higher price was given by steamboatmen, and contracts were made ahead; the date of arrival of the boat was determined, and the wood-boat was in readiness, day or night, with two men on board. It was the work of a few minutes only to run alongside, make fast the towlines, and while the steamer was on her way up river, thirty or forty men pitched or carried the wood aboard. Ordinarily, the wood-boat was not in tow more than half an hour, which would take her five or six miles up river. When the wood was out, the towlines were cast off, a large sweep or steering oar was shipped up at each end of the scow, and it drifted back to be reloaded for the next customer. The steamboat, meanwhile, had lost practically no time in wooding, as the tow was so light as but slightly to impede her speed. The greatest danger in the transaction was that the great packet might swamp the scow by running at too great speed, towing her under by the head, as sometimes occurred. To avoid this contingency the wood was always taken first from the bow of the flatboat. As it was only the fast packets that patronized the wood-boats, this danger of towing under was always present, and the pilots were always very careful in the handling of their boats at such times. Flats were seldom towed downstream, for the reason that there was no way of getting them back, except to pay for a tow. And again, the packets were not in so much of a hurry when going down river, for then they had but few passengers to feed, and no fast freight. Chapter VIII _The Mate_ In writing of life on the main deck of a Mississippi River steamboat fifty years ago, a prefatory note may be in order. The reader must bear in mind that times have changed; and men, in the mass, have changed, and that for the better, in the years that have elapsed between 1860 and 1908. Slavery then held sway on the west bank of the river, from the Iowa line to the Gulf. On the east side in the State of Illinois even, the slavery idea predominated; and on the river there was no "other side" to the question. Slavery was an "institution", as much to be observed and venerated as any institution of the country. A black man was a "nigger", and nothing more. If he were the personal property of a white man in St. Louis, or below, he was worth from eight hundred to fifteen hundred dollars, and was therefore too valuable to be utilized in the make-up of a boat's crew running north. The inclemency of the weather, or the strenuousness of the mate, might result in serious physical deterioration that would greatly depreciate him as a chattel, to say nothing of the opportunities offered him by the northern trip to escape to Canada, and thus prove a total loss. Of free negroes there were not enough to man the hundreds of steamboats plying on the upper river. Thus it came about that the cabin crews on some boats, and the firemen on others, were colored, while the deck crews (roustabouts and stevedores) were white. So marked was this division of labor that it came to pass that no "nigger" was permitted by the white rousters to handle any freight, on any boat. The modern unions take no greater exception to a non-union workman than the white deck hands then expressed for a "nigger" as a freight handler. Another class distinction was, that nine-tenths of the deck crew were Irishmen. In that day the poorer sort of that nationality were the burden-bearers of this country. They dug the ditches, built the railroad embankments, and toted the freight on the river. Since that time they have wonderfully developed; in the present day, very few even of the emigrants handle pick and shovel, and none handle freight as river deck hands. They are the trainmen and policemen of the country, and their sons are our mayors and aldermen, our judges and law-makers. The dirt-handling on the railroads is passed on to the Italians and the Huns, while the river freight-handling, what little there is of it, is done by the lower class of negroes. The abolition of slavery has prodigiously increased their numbers, as well as amazingly cheapening them in value. All this has relevancy in describing an old-time mate and his work. There was a fellow feeling between the chief mate and the second clerk. For one thing, they were both in the second rank, officially, although that did not count for a great deal, I think, as neither of them thought of it in just that way. My recollection is, that both of them thought of it from the other point of view--they were over so many men, and in command of so many things and situations, rather than under the captain and the chief clerk. You will observe at once that this put an entirely different construction upon the question; and this was, after all, the only reasonable and practical view to take of it, and the one that came nearest to meeting all the conditions. In fact, no other view of the situation could be taken. When the captain and the chief clerk were off duty and asleep in their staterooms, or even off duty and awake, loitering about the boat, the responsibility was immediately shifted to their subordinates. Even though the captain might be sitting in the door of his room in the forward end of the "Texas", while the mate stood at the bell to make a landing, the amenities and traditions of river life put him out of the game as completely as though he were asleep in his berth. The same also was true of the chief clerk and his subordinate. The chief might be smoking his after-dinner cigar within ten feet of the office, or he might walk out on the levee and talk with the agent; but until asked, he never took any part in the distinctive business transactions of his subordinate, or in any way interfered with his manner of transacting the business. He might, later, if necessary, make suggestions looking to the betterment of the methods of his second; but that would be a purely personal, rather than an official, utterance. It followed, therefore, that my acquaintance with Billy Wilson was much closer than with the captain; and standing watch with him day after day and night after night during a long season's run, I came to know him intimately. He was born in Pennsylvania, the son of a "Pennsylvania Dutchman." Beginning his professional life on the Allegheny River, he worked down the Ohio, and when the great boom in upper Mississippi traffic began in 1854, engaged in that trade. A smooth-shaven, red-faced man, about five feet eight inches in height, he weighed probably a hundred and sixty pounds. Occasionally he took a drink of whiskey, as did all river men, but it was seldom. He was well read, and ordinarily, a very quiet man, therefore all the more to be feared and respected. He would hardly fill the bill as a traditional Mississippi River steamboat mate; and were his prototype shown on the stage it would be voted slow, uninteresting, and untrue to type. In the beginning of this chapter I endeavored to indicate what manner of men composed our deck crew. Ours numbered forty men. Almost without exception they were Irishmen of the lowest class, picked up alongshore at St. Louis, Galena, Dubuque, and St. Paul, from the riffraff of the levee. They would get drunk whenever they could get whiskey; and as the boat carried hundreds of barrels of this liquor each trip, it required eternal vigilance on the part of the mates and watchmen to prevent the crew broaching a barrel and getting fighting drunk and mutinous. When this happened, as now and then it did in spite of all precautions, Billy Wilson was turned in an instant from a quiet Pennsylvania Dutchman into a dangerous, if not devilish, driver. He carried, on most occasions, a paddle made from a pork barrel stave. This had a handle at one end, and the other, shaped something like a canoe paddle, was bored full of quarter-inch holes. When the case was one of mere sluggishness on the part of one of the hands, a light tap with the flat part of this instrument was enough to inspire activity. When the case was one of moroseness or incipient mutiny, the same flat side, applied by his powerful muscles, with a quick, sharp stroke, would leave a blood-blister for every hole in the paddle; and when a drunken riot was to be dealt with, the sharp edge of the paddle on a man's head left nothing more to be done with that man until he "came to." With a revolver in his left hand and his paddle in his right, he would jump into the middle of a gang of drunken, mutinous men, and striking right and left would intimidate or disable the crowd in less time than it takes to tell it. He never used his pistol, and to my knowledge never called for assistance, although that was ready if required, for all officers were usually at hand and ready in case of necessity. In a row that took place at Prairie du Chien one night, when the men had sent up town and smuggled in a jug of whiskey, one man who was hit on the head by the paddle went overboard on the upstream side of the boat. He was instantly sucked under by the swift current, and was never seen again. The coroner's jury in the case brought in a verdict of "accidental death", and Wilson came back to work after a week's sojourn with the sheriff, having won an added prestige that rendered less necessary the use of the paddle. Ordinarily his commands were given in a low tone of voice, unaccompanied with the profanity which legend and story considered due from the man and his office. When things went wrong, however, the wide range and profundity of his language was a revelation to the passengers who might chance to be within ear-shot. I recall an outbreak, one April morning at about four o'clock, at a woodyard, between Trempealeau and Winona. He had called, "All hands, wood up!" It was a cold and rainy night, and many of the men had crawled in under the boilers to dry their clothes and seek sleep. After the first round or two, he found that ten or fifteen men were missing--they were "soldiering." He went aft and ransacked the bunks without finding the truants. He then dove under the boilers with his paddle, striking in the dark, and feeling for some one to hit, at the same time pouring out a torrent of profanity that in ordinary walks of life, would be called monumental, but which in the more exacting conditions of river life, probably was not above medium grade. The next count found every man in line, toting his share of the wood. It may be and was asked by Eastern people, unused to river life, "Why do the men submit to such treatment? Why do they not throw the mate into the river?" The answer is, caste. They were used to being driven, and expected nothing else, and nothing better, and they would not work under any other form of authority. As I stated at the beginning, they were of the very lowest class. No self-respecting man would ship as a deck hand under the then existing conditions. One might now travel long and look in vain for a white crew driven as these men then were. Their places have been taken by the freed negro; he to-day is being driven as his white predecessors were then. There is this distinction, however; now, most of the drivers are Irishmen--the mates and watchmen on the river steamers. Then an Irishman was of little service as a mate. Those officers were, as a rule, Yankees or Southerners or Pennsylvania Dutchmen. We had for a time a second mate, Con Shovelin, an Irishman, as you might suspect from his name. He was six feet high, and big in every way, including his voice. He roared and swore at the crew all the time, but put very little spirit into them. A look out of the corner of Wilson's eye, and a politely worded request that they "Get a hump, now!" was worth a volume of Shovelin's exordiums. At that time an Irishman could not handle an Irish crew; now, he can handle a crew of free negroes with the expenditure of one-half the wind and oratory. If you wish to see for yourself, take a trip on the river to St. Louis and return, and see the Celt driving the Ethiopian, even as the Saxon drove the Celt, fifty years ago. [Illustration: ABOVE TREMPEALEAU, WISCONSIN. In the middle foreground, at the head of the slough, is the site of the winter camp of Nicolas Perrot, in the winter of 1684-5, as identified in 1888 by Hon. B. F. Heuston and Dr. Reuben Gold Thwaites of the Wisconsin State Historical Society.] Chapter IX _The "Old Man"_ It would be interesting to trace the origin of this term, which is universally applied to the captain in nautical circles, either on shipboard, among deep-sea sailors, on the great lakes, or on the inland waters. He may not be half as old as the speaker; still, in speaking of him, not to him, he is the "old man." It is used in no disrespectful sense; indeed, it is rather an endearing term. In speaking to him, however, it is always Captain, or Sir. But in detailing what the Captain has said or done the narrator says that the "old man" says so, or is about to do so, and his auditors, if river men, know of but one "old man" aboard the boat, although the steamer may be freighted with octogenarians. The captain usually reaches the "roof" from one of two directions, either going up from mate, or coming down from the pilot house. Occasionally he emerges from the clerk's office, or from the engine-room; but the line of promotion is usually drawn from mate or pilot to captain, these being also the normal lines of education for that post. Perhaps the greater number of captains serving on the river in the early days, down to 1860, began their careers on the river as pilots, very often combining the two offices in one person. The captain's official requirements are not altogether ornate. It is true that he must have sufficient polish to commend himself to his passengers. That is essential in popularizing his boat; but in addition he must thoroughly know a steamboat, from stem to stern, and know what is essential to its safety, the comfort of his passengers, and the financial satisfaction of its owners. Nearly every old-time captain on the river could, in case of necessity, pilot his boat from St. Paul to Galena. Every captain could, and of necessity did, handle the deck crew, with the second mate as go-between, during the captain's watch on deck. Some few might have gone into the engine-room and taken charge of the machinery, but these were exceptional cases. All were supposed to know enough about the business of the office to enable them to determine between profit and loss in the running of the steamer. After leaving port, the captain on the river was as autocratic as his compeer on the ocean. He might without notice discharge and order ashore any officer or man on board, and he could fill vacancies en route to any extent; but these appointments were subject to the approval of the owner or manager on arrival at the home port. Many, if not most, of the captains owned interests in the boats which they commanded. Many were sole owners, in which case they were amenable to no one for their actions, except to the civil authorities in case of legal technicalities, or to the unwritten laws of the service, which custom had made binding upon all. Such, for instance, was the rule that the captain was not to interfere with the pilots in the running of his boat, even if he might know, or think he knew, better than they the proper course to take in certain cases, or under certain conditions; even though he might himself have a pilot's license hanging in his stateroom. Neither was it considered good form to interfere with the duties of his mate, or the engineers, or the chief clerk, in the way of countermanding their orders when given in the line of duty. He might call them to account in his office, and not only caution, but command them not to repeat the error. Only in cases where such interference was necessary for the safety of the boat was it deemed permissible; and a captain who so far forgot himself as to interfere, lost caste among all classes of rivermen, high and low. Nevertheless, the "old man" had supreme power, and had the authority to interpose his veto on any command or any action, by any of his officers or men. This supremacy threw the burden of responsibility upon his shoulders, and set him apart as a man by himself. The seat of power was in the forward part of the "Texas", where a commodious and handsomely-furnished cabin served as office, audience-room, sitting-room, and whenever he so willed, as dining-room. Connected with it was a sleeping apartment, larger and better furnished than the ordinary staterooms in the passenger cabin. From the windows on the front and on two sides of his sitting-room he could look out ahead, or on either side, and see everything that was going on. It was here that he entertained favored guests when in relaxation, or hetcheled contumacious officers when in tenser moods. From his berth, directly under the pilot house, he could read the sounds of shuffling feet as the man on watch danced from side to side of his wheel; he could note the sounds of the bell-pulls, as signals were rung in the engine-room; and he could tell very nearly where the boat was at such times, and judge very cleverly as to the luck the pilot was having in running an ugly piece of river, or working out a crooked crossing. He could look out and see if his mate was asleep alongside the big bell, in the drowsy hours of the morning watch, if he cared to confirm a shrewd bet that the mate was asleep. He could tell by the roar of the forced draft in the tall chimneys in front of him, that there was another boat in sight, either ahead or behind, and that Billy Hamilton had the "blowers" on in response to a suggestion from Tommy Cushing, at the wheel, that an excess of steam was desirable, and that at once. This last was a perennial, or nocturnal, source of annoyance to our "Old Man", and one that wrung from him more protests than any other shortcoming under his command. It burned out more wood than was justified by the end attained; but what was of more serious import, it suggested the carrying of a greater head of steam than was consonant with perfect safety. At a time when boiler explosions were not infrequent on the Western rivers, any suggestion of extra steam-carrying was sufficient to put the "old man" on the alert; and this led to more interference with his officers than any other cause that came under my observation during my brief experience on the river. A scantily-clad apparition would appear on deck forward of the "Texas", and a request, "Mr. Cushing, please ask Mr. Hamilton to cut off the blowers", would be passed down the speaking tube to the engine-room. While it always came in the form of request, it carried with it the force of command--until it was concluded that the "old man" was again asleep, when the blowers were cautiously and gradually reopened. While it was not always expected that the captain should take the place of the engineer or pilot, it was required that he should be thoroughly acquainted with the handling of a steamboat under all circumstances. He must be a man possessed of nerve and courage, quick to see what was required, and as quick to give the necessary commands to his crew. As on deeper water, the code of honor on the river held that the captain must be the last to leave his sinking or burning boat; and many a brave commander has gone down to honorable death while upholding this code. In case of fire he must, with the pilot, instantly decide where lay the greatest chances of safety in beaching his boat. In case of snagging, or being cut down by ice, it is his first duty to save his boat, if possible, by stopping the break, at the same time providing for the safety of his passengers by beaching her on the nearest sand-bar. In case of grounding--"getting stuck on a sand-bar", as it is popularly known--all his knowledge of every expedient to extricate his vessel known to river men is called in play at once. An hour's time, or even a few minutes, lost in trying cheap experiments, is sufficient to pile up the shifting sands about the hull to such an extent as sometimes to consume days, or even weeks, in getting free. Our own boat, the "Fanny Harris", drifted upon a submerged bank on the lower side of the cut-off between Fevre River and Harris Slough, with a falling river. She did not get off that day, and within three days had less than a foot of water under some parts of her hull. Her freight had to be lightered, and then it took two steamboats, pulling on quadruple tackles, "luffed" together, to pull her into deep water. The power applied would have pulled her in two, had it come from opposite directions. "Sparring off" was a science in itself. Just how to place your spars; in what direction to shove the bow of the boat; or whether to "walk her over" by setting the spars at a "fore and aft" angle, one on each side, and thus push the boat straight ahead--these were questions to be answered as soon as reports were received from the pilot who was sent out in the yawl to sound the whole bar. To a landsman, the use to which were to be put the great sticks of straight-grained, flawless yellow (or Norway) pine, standing on either side of the gangway, was quite unknown until the boat brought up on the sandy bottom of the river. Then, if it was the first time these timbers had been called into play that season, the lashings were cut away with a sharp axe; the detail from the crew sent to the roof eased away on the falls, until the derricks leaned forward at an angle of forty-five degrees. The crew on the forecastle overhauled the great four-by-five, or five-by-six ply falls, and hooked the lower block into the iron ring under the steamer's quarter, just above the load-line. This ring was attached to the hull by massive bolts, extending through several feet of timbers on the inside of the sheathing--the timbers running back the length of the hull, in well-built boats, so that with sufficiently solid footing for the spars, and with sufficient power, the steamer might be lifted bodily off the bar, without "hogging" the boat--the technical term for bending or breaking the hull out of shape. When it was decided by a conference of the captain, the pilots, and the mate, or by the captain's judgment alone, in what direction the bow of the boat was to be thrown, the foot of the spar was shoved clear of the guards and lowered away by the derrick-fall until its foot was firmly fixed, and the spar at the proper angle, and in the proper direction. The hauling part of the tackle (or fall, as it is called) was then passed through a snatch-block and carried to the capstan, around the barrel of which six or seven turns were taken, and the best man in the crew given charge of the free end. If the case was a very bad one--if the boat was on hard--the double-purchase gear was put on the capstan, to give additional power, and steam was turned on the hoisting engine, (or "donkey") which also operated the capstan by a clutch gear. Ordinarily the boat quickly responded to all this application of power, was slowly pushed off the reef and headed for the channel, and the wheel was soon able to drive her ahead and away from the bar. This taking care of the free end of the tackle as it came from the capstan, was a work of more importance than might appear to the novice. The barrel of the capstan is concave; the line feeds on to it at the thickest part, either at the top or the bottom of the capstan. After it reaches a certain point all the turns must slip down to the narrowest part, and the work of winding upward begin over. The man who is handling the free end of the line must often slack a little--just enough to start the slipping--and then hold hard, so that it may go down easily, without giving any further slack. It looks easy, but it isn't. I have seen a careless man give so much slack to his line, when there was a very heavy strain upon it--in fact when the whole weight of the forward end of the steamer was pendant upon the spar--that the recoil of the tackle, though not over an inch or two, would let the hull drop with a force that would almost shake the chimneys out of her, and could be felt the length of the boat. It was also a post of some danger, as I have heard of instances in which the recoil snapped the tackle, and severely injured the men under and about the spar and capstan. The spars are shod with heavy iron points about a foot in length, which would grip the solid clay or gravel underlying the superficial layers of sand forming the bar. When there was "no bottom" to the sand, and the applied power, instead of lifting the steamer only shoved the spar into the quicksand, another footing was used--a block built of two three-inch sections of oak about eighteen inches in diameter, bound and crossed with iron, and having a hole in the centre through which the iron point of the spar was passed until the shoulder rested on the block. This block could not be driven deeply into the sand, and usually gave a secure footing. A rope attached to a ring in the block served to haul it out of the sand after the spar was hoisted aboard. The spectacle afforded by the "sparring off" process was always one of great interest to the passengers, and of excitement to the officers and crew. There were drawbacks to this interest, however, when the passengers were in a hurry, and the boat lay for hours, sometimes for days, before being released, the crew working day and night without sleep, and with little time even to eat. We once lay three days on Beef Slough bar; and the "War Eagle" was eight days on the same bar, having been caught on a falling river, being only released after passengers and freight were transferred to other and lighter boats. For the officers and crew, there was no halo about an incident of this kind. In low water, it was to some boats of almost daily occurrence, somewhere on the river, even with the most skilful pilots. The fact was, that there were places where there was not enough water in the channel for a boat to pass without striking; and if one got out of the channel by ever so little, it was of course still worse. There were several places where it was to be expected that the boat must be hauled over the reef by taking out an anchor ahead, or by hauling on a line attached to a tree on the bank, if the channel ran near enough to render the latter expedient possible. I have injected this description of sparring off into the chapter devoted to the "Old Man", not because the process necessarily devolved upon him alone; but because as captain his will was law in any disputed point, and because upon him rested the responsibility of navigating his boat. He naturally took an active interest in the work, and was always on hand when it was done. But quite often the mate knew more of the _finesse_ of poling a boat off a bar, than did the captain; and some captains were shrewd enough to give the mate practically full control, only standing on the roof for appearance sake, while the latter did the work. It was, however, every man's work, and if any one had a practical idea, or a practical suggestion, whether pilot, engineer, mate, or carpenter, it was quickly put to the test. The main thing was to get off the bar, and to get off "quick." Chapter X _The Pilots and Their Work_ We come now to the consideration of that part of river life of which I was an interested observer, rather than an active participant. Had not the great war burst upon the country, and the fever of railroad construction run so high, it is possible that I might have had my name enrolled in the list containing such masters of the profession as William Fisher, John King, Ed. West, Thomas Burns, Thomas Cushing, and a hundred others whose names were synonyms for courage, precision, coolness in danger, exact knowledge, ready resource, and all else necessary in the man who stood at the wheel and safely guided a great steamer through hundreds of miles of unlighted and uncharted river. Compared with those days, the piloting of to-day, while still a marvel to the uninitiated, is but a primer compared to the knowledge absolutely necessary to carry a steamboat safely through and around the reefs, bars, snags, and sunken wrecks which in the olden time beset the navigator from New Orleans to St. Paul. The pilot of that day was absolutely dependent upon his knowledge of and familiarity with the natural landmarks on either bank of the river, for guidance in working his way through and over the innumerable sand-bars and crossings. No lights on shore guided him by night, and no "diamond boards" gave him assurance by day. No ready search-light revealed the "marks" along the shore. Only a perspective of bluffs, sometimes miles away, showing dimly outlined against a leaden sky, guided the pilot in picking his way over a dangerous crossing, where there was often less than forty feet to spare on either side of the boat's hull, between safety and destruction. To "know the river" under those conditions meant to know absolutely the outline of every range of bluffs and hills, as well as every isolated knob or even tree-top. It meant that the man at the wheel must know these outlines absolutely, under the constantly changing point of view of the moving steamer; so that he might confidently point his steamer at a solid wall of blackness, and guided only by the shapes of distant hills, and by the mental picture which he had of them, know the exact moment at which to put his wheel over and sheer his boat away from an impending bank. To-day a thousand beacons are kindled every night to mark the dangerous or intricate crossings; by day, great white "diamond boards" spot the banks. At night the pilot has only to jingle a bell in the engine-room, the dynamo is started, and by pulling a line at either hand the search-light turns night into day, the big white board stands out in high relief against the leafy background, and the pilot heads for it, serene in the confidence that it is placed in line with the best water; for he knows that the government engineers have sounded every foot of the crossing within a date so recent as to make them cognizant of any change in its area or contour. Constantly patrolling the river, a dozen steamboats, fully equipped for sounding, measuring, and marking the channel, are in commission during the months of navigation, each being in charge of officers graduated from the most exacting military and technical school in the world, and having under them crews composed of men educated by practice to meet any emergency likely to arise. If a snag lodges in the channel it is reported at the nearest station, or to the first government steamer met, and within a few hours it is removed. Dams and shear-dykes direct the water in permanent, unshifting channels. Riprap holds dissolving banks, and overhanging trees are cut away. Millions of dollars have been spent in the work, and its preservation costs hundreds of thousands annually. All this outlay is to-day for the benefit of a scant score of steamboats between St. Louis and St. Paul. Forty years ago two hundred men, on a hundred boats, groped their way in darkness, amid known and unknown terrors, up and down the windings of the great river, without having for their guidance a single token of man's helpful invention. There are men now living who may see all this vast expenditure utilized, as it is not now. The building of the inter-oceanic canal across the isthmus is certain to give new direction to the commerce of the world. It is fair to presume that the Mississippi may again assert itself as one of the greatest arteries of commerce in the world, and that the products of the Minnesota and Dakota farms will find their way down the river to New Orleans, instead of across the continent to New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore tidewater. If this effect does follow the building of the canal, as many clear-headed students of economic problems predict, the Mississippi will again assume its old-time standing and influence as a great highway of commerce. The hope is at least father to this thought. As already stated, my personal experience as a pilot was limited. It was confined to a few seasons' study of the river under one of the best men who ever turned a wheel upon it--Thomas Burns. By an agreement with him, I was to retain my clerkship, but was to spend as much as possible of my time in the pilot house, while on watch or off, either with himself or his partner, Thomas Cushing, steering for them in turn, and receiving instruction from both. Later I was to give all of my time, and after becoming proficient was to receive their recommendation for a license. I was then to pay to Captain Burns five hundred dollars from my first earnings, after getting a berth as a full-fledged pilot. Under these terms I received instruction from both men, and as opportunity offered acted as their wheelsman relieving them of much hard work. This arrangement was ended by the breaking out of the War of Secession and the enlistment of Captain Burns in the army. He raised a company for the Forty-sixth Illinois Infantry, at Galena, taking about thirty men from the "Fanny Harris" alone. That was in August, 1861. Thomas Cushing then went down the river to try his fortune. Two new pilots came aboard, Jim Black and Harry Tripp, and I was left out of the pilot house. Later in the season the "Fanny Harris" was left so high on the bank of the cut-off between Fevre River and Harris Slough that the whole crew were discharged. It was necessary to build ways under the boat and launch her, in order to get her back into the water--a labor of weeks. After a short time spent on the "Golden Era" I went up river and engaged with Charley Jewell, on the "H. S. Allen", Captain S. E. Gray, running between Prescott and St. Croix Falls. After a few trips I graduated as a pilot for that run, and conditionally for the Galena and St. Paul run. When the call for three hundred thousand additional troops came in August, 1862, I decided that it was my duty to go to the front and "put down the rebellion", as the "boys" of that time put it. Acting upon this commendable resolve, I dropped off at Hudson, where I was well acquainted, and where several companies were organizing for the three years' service. I enlisted in a company intended for the Twenty-fifth Wisconsin Infantry, of which Jeremiah Rusk was lieutenant-colonel; but when we came to be mustered in we were assigned to the Thirtieth Wisconsin Infantry, as Company A. My idea was, that if I survived I would return and take up my work on the river where I left it. That was the boy idea. It was not realized. After three years of service I was mustered out in Washington, D. C. I married in the East, and entered the employ of a steamship company in New York as agent and superintendent, remaining there until 1876. Returning to Wisconsin in 1876 I found a half dozen railroads centring in St. Paul, and these were doing the business of the hundred steamboats that I had left running in 1862. A dozen boats, confined to two lines, were handling all the river business between St. Louis and St. Paul, and the profession of piloting was at an end. Of the hundred boats that I had known fourteen years before, not one remained. The average life of a river steamboat was but five years. Curiously enough, I had by this time lost all interest in river life, except the interest of a trained observer. I enjoyed watching the few boats that chanced to come under my observation, and could appreciate fully the dexterity of the men who were holding their wheels in the pilot houses; but all my ambitions to again be one of them appeared to have evaporated, for other lines of work had engrossed my attention. Engaging in the newspaper business, and later on adding the responsibility of the agency of a railroad company, I had enough to think about without pining for lost opportunities on the river. The work accomplished by the old-time Mississippi pilot while guiding his steamer through hundreds of miles of water beset by snags, wrecks, and reefs, has been so fully described by "Mark Twain" in his _Life on the Mississippi_, that it would be temerity in any one else to attempt to add to what he has so humorously, and yet so graphically delineated. It rarely occurs that a man combines a perfect knowledge of a profession so far removed from the world of letters as is that of piloting a steamboat with the literary skill to describe its details. It will probably never again happen that a great master in literature and humor will graduate from a pilot house. The experiences of a pilot were the same, however, whether he turned a wheel on the lower river, as described by "Mark Twain", or on the upper river. It will not be plagiarizing, therefore, to tell something of the acquirements necessary in a pilot, even though the narrative coincides very closely with what he has recorded of similar experiences on the lower reaches. Thomas Burns[C] had the reputation of being one of the most reliable pilots on the upper waters. He was a Scotchman, in middle life, without vices or failings of any kind, unless smoking may be a vice. It certainly wasn't so considered on the river, and for the sake of this story we will not consider it so here. He was conservative, and would not take any chances, even in a race, preferring to follow the deep water with safety, rather than cut corners involving risk to the boat and its cargo, even though a rival boat did pass him, or he was losing an opportunity to show off some fancy piloting. It was said of him that he was the only man who could and did steer a stern-wheel steamboat of four hundred tons through Coon Slough, downstream, without slowing or stopping the wheel--something requiring nerve and fine judgment. A side-wheel boat usually went around the sharp bend with one paddle wheel backing and the other going ahead. A stern-wheel boat was often compelled to "flank" around the elbow, by backing against the point and letting the current swing the bow around the bend. [C] Captain Thomas W. Burns was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1836. He removed with his parents to Galena, Illinois, in 1842, where he received his education in the public schools. After leaving school he went on the river as a "cub" pilot, and upon reaching the age of 21 years received his certificate as first-class pilot between St. Louis and St. Paul, in which capacity he served on many of the best boats of the Minnesota Packet Company, including the "War Eagle," "Key City," "Itasca," "Fanny Harris," "Kate Cassell," and others. In 1861 he recruited a company of steamboatmen at Galena, and was assigned to the 45th Illinois Infantry. He remained with his company until after the capture of Fort Henry, when he was discharged for disability. Upon his return to Galena he took up the work of piloting again, continuing until 1885, when he was appointed by President Cleveland to the office of United States Local Inspector of Steamboats, with headquarters at Galena. His long years of experience on the river, and his high sense of duty made him an excellent official, and upon the advent of a Republican administration he was reappointed to the office, in which he was serving at the time of his death, March 4, 1890. By the old reckoning, the distance from St. Louis to St. Paul, was eight hundred miles; from Rock Island to St. Paul, four hundred and fifty. The later survey, after straightening the channel by wing-dams and dikes, makes the distance seven hundred and twenty-nine miles from St. Louis, and three hundred and ninety-eight from Rock Island to St. Paul. It is safe to estimate a "crossing" in each and every mile of that river. Some miles may have missed their share, but others had a dozen, so the average was fully maintained. That was fifty years ago. There are less crossings now, but more dams and dikes--two hundred and fifty-one dams, dikes, and pieces of dikes in the little stretch of river between St. Paul and Prescott, a matter of thirty-six miles. If a pilot attempted to make a crossing now, where he made it fifty years ago, he would in five hundred different places butt his head into a dike instead of a reef. Tom Burns, and scores of others like him, knew every rod of this river better than the average man knows any one mile of sidewalk between his home and his office. He knew it by day and by night. He knew it upstream and downstream--and this amounted literally to knowing two rivers eight hundred miles long, for the instant you turn your boat's prow down river you have entered an entirely new country. Every mark is different; the bold outlines of bluffs with which you are familiar as you go up the river, are as strangers when viewed from the reverse side. You have to learn the stream over again, and worse yet, you have to learn to handle your boat differently. A novice in the business might take a steamer from St. Louis to St. Paul with very fair success, while the same man would hang his boat up effectually on the first bar he came to, if in going down river he handled his wheel in the same manner. Coming upstream he might feel of a reef with the bow of his boat, and if he did not strike the best water the first time he could back off and try again; but going downstream he must hit the channel the first time or he is gone. The current is all the time irresistibly pushing his boat down the river, and if he strikes he is immediately, with the most disastrous consequences, swung broadside on to the reef. Tom Burns knew his river so well that he could jump from his berth on the darkest night and before he reached the pilot house door could tell what part of the river the boat was in; the instant his eye caught the jack staff he knew to a certainty what crossing the steamer was making, and on what part of the crossing she was at the moment. This was what every first-class pilot must, and did know. I use Burns only as an illustration. It was courtesy for the relieved pilot to state the position of the boat as he relinquished the wheel to his partner: "Good morning, Mr. Cushing! A nasty night. She drags a little, to-night. Just making the upper Cassville crossing. Should have been farther up. Hope you'll have better luck." This was only a matter of form and politeness, and not at all necessary. Mr. Cushing or Mr. Burns knew at a glance that it was the upper Cassville crossing, and as he took the wheel from the hands of his retiring partner he did, the next instant, just what the other would have done had he continued. He saw the "swing" of the jack staff and met it; he felt the boat edging away from the reef, and coaxed her back, daintily but firmly, a spoke at a time, or possibly half a spoke. The continuity was not broken. The exact knowledge of the retiring pilot was simply carried along by the pilot coming on watch. In all the hundreds of miles of river traversed by the boat in its voyage up or down, there could be no other combination of marks just like the one which met the pilot's eye as he grasped the wheel. The problem for the "cub" was to learn the combination. In the day time it was not customary for the retiring partner to mention where the boat was at the time. That would have been stretching the point of courtesy too far. All this, however, was between equals. When the wheel was turned over to the "cub", it was generally a prime necessity that he be advised as to the exact position of the boat. Thus primed, if he was reasonably advanced, he could take the wheel and with the clue given the river would shape itself in his mind, and he would pass from one set of marks to the next with some degree of certitude. Without the clue, however, it was possible to imagine one's self in a hundred probable or improbable places. "All bluffs look alike to me", might under such circumstances be set to music and sung with feeling and expression by the learner. What the pilot must know to enable him to run the river at night, is strikingly suggested in the conversation between young "Mark Twain" and his chief, Mr. Bixby. When the boy had begun to take on airs as a pilot, his chief suddenly fired the question: "What is the shape of Walnut Bend?" Of course he did not know, and did not know that he must know. Mr. Bixby: "My boy, you've got to know the shape of the river, perfectly. It is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else is blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the night that it has in the daytime." "How on earth am I going to learn it, then?" "How do you follow a hall at home in the dark? Because you know the shape of it. You can't see it." "Do you mean to say I've got to know all the million trifling variations of the shape of the banks of this interminable river as well as I know the shape of the front hall at home?" "On my honor you've got to know them _better_ than any man ever did know the shapes of the halls in his own house... You see, this has got to be learned; there is no getting around it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you didn't know the shape of the shore perfectly, you would claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there's your pitch-dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. All shores seem straight lines then, and mighty dim ones, too; you'd run them for straight lines, only you know better. You boldly drive your boat into what seems to be a solid straight wall (you knowing very well that there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of those grizzly gray mists, and then there isn't _any_ particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of _moonlight_ change the shape of the river in different ways. You see--" But the cub had wilted. When he came to his chief reassured him somewhat by replying to his objections: "No! you only learn _the_ shape of the river; and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape. That's in your head, and never mind the one that's before your eyes." And that was approximately the case. The details of the river, once learned, were so indellibly printed on the mind of the pilot that it seemed as though eyes were almost superfluous. Of course Mr. Bixby stated the extreme case. While the pilot was running a bend "out of his head" in darkness that might be felt, there were always well-known landmarks to be seen--shapes of bluffs so indistinct as to seem but parts of the universal blackness. But these indistinct outlines were enough to confirm the judgment of the man at the wheel in the course he was steering. The man in the hall, in Mr. Bixby's illustration, could not see anything, and didn't know what hall he was in. He might just as well have been blind; and I never heard of a blind man running a steamboat, day or night. In the short experience that I had in the pilot house, I did not reach this perfection; but I have stood on one side of the wheel, mechanically following the orders of my chief, and listening to the churning of the wheel reëchoed from the banks not fifty feet away, when I could scarcely see the jack staff, and could not distinguish between the black of the woods and the all-pervading black of the night. Mr. Burns or Mr. Cushing would translate the situation, as the boat plowed along under a full head of steam, somewhat like this: "Now we're going down into the bend. Now we're opposite the big cottonwood. Now we must pull out a little, to avoid that nest of snags. Now we will let her begin to come out; the water begins to shoal here; we'll keep away from the point a little, and cross over into the west bend, and follow that down in the opposite direction." This in the way of instruction; and so far as my observation went he was drawing on his imagination for his facts, as I saw no big cottonwood, nor nest of snags, nor any point. The only thing that I could share with him in common was the fact that we were nearing the point and getting into shoaler water--the boat told me that. The floor under my feet seemed to hang back and drag; the motion of the paddle wheel was perceptibly retarded; the escape was hoarser from the pipes. I knew that there was shoal water on the point at the foot of the bend, and the boat herself told me when we had reached the point; but I had not seen it, either with my eyes, or in my head. Mr. Burns had it all in his head, and did not require to see it with his eyes. He simply ran the bend as he knew it to be; and he ran a hundred others in the same way. What might happen to any one who ran by sight, and not by faith, was illustrated in the case of a young pilot on the "Key City", of our line. He had his papers, and was standing watch alone in the pilot house. He was going downstream. In going into Lansing, Iowa, one runs a long bend on the left-hand shore. At Lansing the river turns sharply to the south, from a nearly westerly course. Just at the turn, and fronting the river toward the east, is a solid limestone bluff four hundred feet high. On a starlit night the shadow of this bluff is thrown out upon the river so far as totally to obliterate the water, and for several minutes one must point his boat straight into an apparently solid bluff before he "opens out" the turn to the left. On the night in question the young man forgot to run by what he knew to be the shape of the river, and trusted to what his eyes showed him. He lost his head completely, and instead of stopping both wheels and backing away from the impending doom, he put his wheel hard over and plumped the "Key City" into the alluvial bank of the island opposite, with such force as to snatch both chimneys out of her, and very nearly to make a wreck of the steamer. I have myself been tempted to run away from the same bluff; and but for confidence inspired by the presence of one of the pilots, might have done so. Mr. Burns drilled his "cubs" upon one point, however, which made for the safety of the boat: "When in doubt, ring the stopping bell and set her back." There was no place of safety to run to in a panic on the Mississippi, and a boat standing still was less likely to hurt herself or any one else than one in motion. In no other particular, perhaps, has the art of piloting been so revolutionized as in the adoption of the electric search-light for night running. Time and again have I heard the question asked by people new to the river: "Why don't you hang up two or three lanterns at the front end of the boat, so that you can see to steer?" It is easy to answer such a question convincingly. Go out into the woods on a very dark night with an ordinary lantern. How far can you see by such a light? Perhaps thirty feet; twenty feet would probably be nearer the mark. Until a light was discovered that could project its rays a half mile or more, and so concentrated as clearly to reveal landmarks at that distance, the other extreme, no light at all, was not only desirable, but positively necessary if the boat was to be kept going. After long usage, a pilot's eyes came to possess powers common to the cat family and other night prowlers. He could literally "see in the dark"; but he could not see in any half light, or any light artificial and close at hand. For this reason it was necessary to cover every light on the boat while running on a very dark night, save the red and green sidelights at the chimney-tops. To accomplish this, heavy canvas "shrouds" or "mufflers" were provided, which fitted snugly around the forward part of the boat, in front of the furnaces on the main deck; another set were placed around the boiler deck, in front of the cabin; and still another set to muffle the transom sky-lights on the hurricane deck. When these were properly fitted and triced up, there was not a ray of light projected forward, to break the dead blackness ahead. So delicate was this sense of night sight, that no one was permitted to smoke a pipe or cigar in the pilot house at such times, and even the mate, sitting by the bell down on the roof below, had to forego his midnight pipe. As for the pilot himself, a cigar in front of his nose would have shut off his sight as effectively as though he were blindfolded. Of course, were the pilot looking only ten feet, or even forty feet, ahead of his boat, the lights on board might not have interfered greatly, although they would not have assisted him in the slightest. You can not steer a boat by landmarks ten feet ahead of her. The pilot searches for landmarks a mile away, and must be able to distinguish between two kinds of blackness--the blackness of the night below, and the blackness of the sky above, and from the dividing line between the two must read his marks and determine his course. He does not see the woods on either side of him, and often close at hand. The least ray of artificial light would blind the pilot to the things which he must see under such conditions, hence the shrouding of the boat was a necessity, were she to be run at all on such a night. The coming of the electric search-light, and the transfer of the marks from distant bluffs to big white diamond boards planted low down on the banks where the light can be flashed upon them from a distance of half a mile or more, has greatly simplified the work of the pilot, and rendered obsolete the curtains which once so completely darkened the Mississippi steamboat on the blackest of nights. [Illustration: 1. DANIEL SMITH HARRIS. Steamboat Captain, 1833-1861. 2. CAPTAIN THOMAS BURNS. Pilot on the Upper Mississippi River from 1856 to 1889. Inspector of Steamboats under President Cleveland and President McKinley. 3. CHARLES G. HARGUS. Chief Clerk on the "Royal Arch," "Golden State," "Fanny Harris," "Kate Cassell" and many other fine steamers on the Upper Mississippi. 4. GEORGE B. MERRICK. "Cub" Pilot, 1862.] Chapter XI _Knowing the River_ To "know the river" fully, the pilot must not only know everything which may be seen by the eye, but he must also feel for a great deal of information of the first importance which is not revealed to the eye alone. Where the water warrants it, he reaches for this information with a lead line; as on the lower river, where the water is deeper, and the draft of boats correspondingly great. On the upper river, a twelve-foot pole answers instead. The performance is always one of great interest to the passengers; the results are often of greater interest to the man at the wheel. The manner in which the reports of the leadsman are received and digested by the pilot, is not usually known to or comprehended by the uninitiated. The proceeding is picturesque, and adds one more "feature" to the novelties of the trip. It is always watched with the greatest interest by the tourist, and is apparently always enjoyed by them, whatever the effect upon the pilot; whether he enjoys it or not depends on the circumstances. Soundings are not always necessarily for the immediate and present purpose of working the boat over any particular bar, at the particular time at which they are taken, although they may be taken for that purpose and no other. In general, during the season of low water, the leads are kept going in all difficult places as much for the purpose of comparison as for the immediate purpose of feeling one's way over the especial reef or bar where the soundings are taken. If it is suspected that a reef is "making down", the pilot wants to satisfy himself on that point, so that he may readjust his marks to meet the changed outlines. If a reef is "dissolving", he also wants to know that, and readjust his marks accordingly--only in the first place, his marks will be set lower down the river; in case of a dissolving reef, his marks will be set farther upstream, to follow the deep water which is always found close under the reef--that is, on the downstream side. The shallowest water is always on the crest of the reef, and it "tapers" back, upstream, very gradually, for rods--sometimes for half a mile or even more, until another reef is reached, with deep water under it, and another system of shallows above. This is where the perfection of the pilot's memory machine is demonstrated along another line. He has acquainted himself with every bluff, hill, rock, tree, stump, house, woodpile, and whatever else is to be noted along the banks of the river. He has further added to this fund of information a photographic negative in his mind, showing the shape of all the curves, bends, capes, and points of the river's banks, so that he may shut his eyes, yet see it all, and with such certainty that he can, on a night so perfectly black that the shore line is blotted out, run his boat within fifty feet of the shore and dodge snags, wrecks, overhanging trees, and all other obstacles by running the shape of the river as he knows it to be--not as he can see it. In sounding, he is mentally charting the bottom of the river as he has already charted the surface and its surroundings. As he approaches the crossing which he wishes to verify, he pulls the rope attached to the tongue of the big bell on the roof, and sounds one stroke, and an instant later two strokes. The captain or mate on watch sings out: "Starboard lead!" "Larboard lead!" and the men detailed for the duty are at their stations in a minute or less after the order is given. Then the cry, first from starboard and then from port, long-drawn and often musical: "No-o-o bottom; no-o-o bottom!" rises from the fo'c'sle, and is repeated by the captain or mate to the pilot. "Mar-r-k twain, mar-r-r-k twain!" indicates soundings the depth of the sounding pole--twelve feet, or two fathoms. This is of no interest to the pilot, for he knew there was "no bottom" and "two fathoms" before the soundings were taken. It is of the highest interest to the passengers, however, to whom the cry of "no bottom" seems a paradox, when the boat has been rubbing the bottom most of the way from Rock Island up. They have not yet been taught that this simply means no bottom with a twelve-foot pole, and does not indicate that the Mississippi is a bottomless stream at this or any other point. On the upper river, the cry of "ten feet, eight and a half", or even "six feet", does not strike any sensitive spot in the pilot's mental machinery, for upper river men are used to running "where there is a heavy dew". On such occasions he might listen to the latest story, detailed by a visiting comrade, and even take part in the conversation, apparently indifferent to the monotonous cries from the lower deck. But all the time his brain is fitting the leadsman's cries to the marks in which the cries have found his boat--not consciously, perhaps, but nevertheless surely. He has not only fitted the cry into the marks, but has mentally compared the present with the depth of water cried at the same spot last trip, and the trip before that, and noted the change, if any has taken place. Say the leadsman has sung "six feet", "six feet", "six feet", "six feet", "six feet", until you would think there was no other depth but six feet in the river; then in the same tone he sings "five-and-a-half", "six feet", "six feet", "six feet". The pilot is still talking with his visitor, watching his marks and turning his wheel; but he has picked out that "five-and-a-half" and stored it away for future reference, together with all the surroundings of his boat at the instant the call reached his ear--the marks ahead, astern, and on either side. The next trip, as the leadsman sings "six feet", "six feet", "six feet", he will be shocked and grievously disappointed if he does not find his "five-and-a-half" at just that point. And he will not be counting the "six feet" cries, nor, possibly, will he be aware that he is looking for the "five-and-a-half". When he drops into the marks where the "five-and-a-half" found him last week, if he hears only the "six feet", he will be in a similar frame of mind to the man who, coming into town, misses a prominent tree or house, and asks: "Where is that big tree that stood on the corner, when I was here last time"? The pilot does all this without realizing that he is making any mental effort. When he begins this sort of drill as a "cub", he realizes it fully; and if he is half sharp he will open an account with every shoal place between Rock Island and St. Paul, and set down in writing the soundings on the lowest place on each reef, and try to supply the marks in which his steamer lay when the cry was heard. As he grows in his studies he will rely less on his notebook and more upon his memory, until the mental picture of the bottom of the river becomes as vivid as that of the surface. Then, when his chief asks suddenly: "How much water was there on the middle crossing at Beef Slough last trip"? he can answer promptly: "Four feet on starboard, four feet scant on port". "How much trip before last?" "Four feet large, both sides." "Right, my boy; you're doing well." If that "cub" doesn't grow an inch in a minute, under these circumstances, he isn't the right kind of boy to have around. Naturally the boys studied the "nightmares", first of all. If they could get over Cassville, Brownsville, Trempealeau, Rolling-stone, Beef Slough, Prescott, Grey Cloud, and Pig's Eye, they could manage all the rest of the river. But the leads were kept going in fifty other places which, while not so bad, had enough possibilities to warrant the closest watching. The chiefs were making mental notes of all these places, and could tell you the soundings on every crossing where a lead had been cast, as readily as the "cubs" could recite the capital letter readings of Beef Slough and Pig's Eye. The miracle of it was, how they could do this without giving any apparent attention to the matter at the time. They struck the bell, the leadsman sang, the mate or captain repeated the cries mechanically, while the pilot appeared to pay little or no attention to the matter. When he had enough of the music he tapped the bell to lay in the leads, and nothing was said as to the results. Yet if asked at St. Paul by a brother pilot how much water he found on any one of a hundred crossings of average depth, he could tell, without hesitation, just where he found the lowest cast of the lead. In my experience as a printer I have stood at the case and set up an editorial out of my head (how "able" I will not pretend to say), at the same time keeping up a spirited argument on politics or religion with a visitor. The thinking appeared to be all devoted to the argument; it was probably the talking only. To set the type required no thought at all; that was purely mechanical; and to compose the editorial was the unconscious operation of the mind, accustomed to doing just this sort of thing, until the framing of words into sentences became more or less mechanical. Certainly the mental drill of a river pilot along a very few lines, developed a memory for the things pertaining to his profession which was wonderful, when you sit down and attempt to analyze it. To the men themselves it was not a wonder--it was the merest commonplace. It was among the things which you must acquire before you could pilot a steamboat; and for a consideration they would covenant to teach any boy of average mental ability and common sense all these things, provided always that he had the physical ability to handle a wheel, and provided also, that he demonstrated in time of trial that he had the "nerve" necessary for the business. A timid, cowardly, or doubting person had no business in the pilot house. If it were possible for him to acquire all the rest, and he lacked the nerve to steady him in time of danger, he was promptly dropped out of the business. I saw this illustrated in the case of a rapids pilot between St. Paul and St. Anthony. We always made this trip when a cargo of flour was offered by the one mill which in that early day represented all there was of that great interest which now dominates the business of Minneapolis. While our pilots were both capable of taking the boat to St. Anthony and back, the underwriters required that we should take a special pilot for the trip--one who made a specialty of that run. On the occasion in point we had taken an unusually heavy cargo, as the river was at a good stage. At that time the channel was very crooked, winding about between reefs of solid rock, with an eight to ten mile current. It required skilful manipulation of the wheel to keep the stern of the boat off the rocks. In going downstream it is comparatively easy to get the bow of a steamer around a crooked place; it is not easy to keep the stern from swinging into danger. In this case the stern of the steamer struck a rock reef with such force as to tear one of the wing rudders out by the roots, in doing which enough noise was made to warrant the belief that half the boat was gone. The special pilot was satisfied that such was the case, and exclaimed: "She is gone!" at the same time letting go the wheel and jumping for the pilot house door. She would have been smashed into kindlings in a minute if she had been left to herself, or had the engines been stopped even for an instant. Fortunately the rapids pilot was so scared by the noise of rending timbers and wheel-buckets that he did not have nerve enough left to ring a bell, and the engineer on watch was not going to stop until a bell was rung, as he knew that the drift of a minute in that white water, would pile us up on the next reef below. Fortunately for the "Fanny Harris", Tom Cushing was in the pilot house, as well as myself. When the other man dropped the wheel Cushing jumped for it, and fired an order to me to get hold of the other side of the wheel, and for the next six miles he turned and twisted among the reefs, under a full head of steam, which was necessary to give us steerageway in such a current. We never stopped until we reached St. Paul, where we ran over to the west shore, it being shallow, and beached the boat. When she struck land the captain took the special pilot by the collar and kicked him ashore, at the same time giving him the benefit of the strongest language in use on the river at that time. Beyond the loss of a rudder and some buckets from the wheel, the boat was not seriously damaged, and we continued the voyage to Galena as we were. Had Tom Cushing not been in the pilot house at the time, she would have been a wreck in the rapids a mile or so below St. Anthony Falls. The rapids pilot lost his certificate. [Illustration: TYPICAL PORTION OF THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI. Map of the river between Cassville, Wis., and Guttenberg, Iowa, showing the characteristic winding of the stream.] Chapter XII _The Art of Steering_ Every pilot must of necessity be a steersman; but not every steersman is of necessity a pilot. He may be studying to become a pilot, and not yet out of the steersman stage. "Cubs" begin their studies by steering for their chiefs. Many boys become quite expert in handling a boat, under the eyes of their chiefs, before they are sufficiently acquainted with the river to be trusted alone at the wheel for any length of time. At first thought, one might imagine a number of favorable conditions as prerequisite to the ideal in steering: a straight piece of river, plenty of water, and an average steamboat. These would indeed guarantee leaving a straight wake; but under such conditions a roustabout might accomplish this. The artistic quality is developed in the handling of a boat under the usual conditions--in making the multitudinous crossings, where the jack staff is continually swinging from side to side as the boat is dodging reefs and hunting the best water. In doing this, one man puts his wheel so hard down, and holds it so long, that he finds it necessary to put the wheel to the very opposite to check the swing of the boat and head it back to its proper course, in which evolution he has twice placed his rudder almost squarely across the stern of his boat. If this athletic procedure is persevered in at every change of course, it will materially retard the speed of the steamer and leave a wake full of acute angles, besides giving the steersman an unnecessary amount of work. The skilled steersman, combining his art with his exact knowledge of the bottom of the river, will give his boat only enough wheel to lay her into her "marks", closely shaving the points of the reefs and bars, and will "meet her" so gradually and so soon as to check the swing of the jack staff at the exact moment when the "marks" are reached. There is then no putting the wheel over to bring the boat back, after having overreached her marks, and the rudders have at no time been more than a quarter out of line with the hull of the boat. It is this delicate handling of the wheel, which differentiates between the artist and the athlete. Steamboats have their individuality, the same as pilots and steersmen. There are boats (or have been), that would almost steer themselves, while there are others so perverse and tricky that no one could feel sure of keeping them in the river for any consecutive two miles. The "Ocean Wave" was, perhaps, the most unreliable and tricky of all the craft on the upper river--or any river. In low water no one man ever thought of standing a watch alone at the wheel, and at times she would run away with two men at the wheel. She was short, "stubby", and narrow; and when she smelt a reef she would, unless very carefully handled, under a slow bell, run away from it, often with one paddle wheel backing while the other was coming ahead, and the rudder standing squarely across the stern. Many times she has plumped into the bank under these conditions, and nothing less than the bank would stop her. The "City Belle", the "Favorite", and the "Frank Steele" were built much like the "Ocean Wave", but were not quite so unreliable in steering. She was in a class by herself. On the other hand, the "Key City", one of the largest, longest, and finest of the up-river packets, was so well-balanced, and her hull so finely moulded, that it was a delight to handle her, even under otherwise unfavorable conditions, such as low water, or high winds. A stern-wheel boat going downstream when the wind was blowing up the river, was about as helpless a craft to handle as could well be imagined. After she was once "straightened down" she was all right; but in attempting to get her nose pointed down river, after having made a landing, there were more profane possibilities than the uninitiated ever dreamed of. The current, acting on the stern of the boat and the partially-submerged wheel, was all the time pulling that end of the boat downstream; while the wind, acting upon the tall chimneys and the pilot house and "Texas", was at the same time pushing the bow of the boat upstream; and the pilot was all the while endeavoring to reverse this position, and get the bow of his boat pointed in the direction in which he wished to go. It sometimes took hours to accomplish this, particularly if caught in places where the river was narrow and correspondingly swift, and the wind strong and contrary. The only way to swing a stern-wheel boat was, to put the steering wheel hard over, throwing the four rudders as far to one side as possible, and then back strongly against them. Under this leverage if there was no wind, the boat would swing easily and promptly, until her head was pointed downstream; and then by coming ahead and gaining steerageway, the boat was under perfect control. But when the wind was blowing upstream, it was often found impracticable to back fast and far enough to gain the necessary momentum to swing her in a narrow place; the engines would have to be stopped before the boat was swung to more than a right angle with the river, and then, before steerageway was gained after coming ahead, the bow of the boat would again be pointing upstream, and the same performance would have to be gone through with--sometimes a dozen or twenty times, before the boat would get under way in the proper direction. In 1881 I saw Henry Link, after having made a landing at Newport, back the "Mary Morton", of the Diamond Jo Line, more than five miles down the river, she having swung stern-down at that place. He see-sawed back and forth across the stream, first in one direction and then in another, and failed at last to swing his boat against the strong south wind which was blowing. He finally gave it up and ran ashore, and getting out a line to a big tree, backed his craft around until her bow was pointed downstream, and then made a start from a broadside position against the bank. I happened to be a passenger on the boat at the time. His remarks on that occasion were unprintable. A side-wheel boat, under the same conditions, would have backed out into the river, come ahead on one wheel while backing on the other, and in two or three minutes would have been going full speed ahead on the desired course. That is the beauty of the independent side-wheel system. It is a great saving of labor and morality for the steersman, and a great saving of time for the owners. It would seem that if you could get the bow of your boat clear of the bank, or of an overhanging tree, after pointing in pretty close, that the rest of the boat would follow the bow and likewise come out, without any undue intimacy with the trees or bank. It takes only one trial to disabuse a beginner of this notion. The balance of the boat does not follow the bow out of such a position; and while every pilot knows the immutable laws of physics which operate upon his boat under such circumstances, most of them, sooner or later, get caught, either through carelessness or recklessness, just as the green cub does through ignorance. In running downstream, when you point into the bank, and shave it closely, you pull the bow of the boat away, and then there are two forces over which you have no control with your steering wheel: the impetus of the after half of your boat is still in the direction of the bank, after the forward half has begun to swing away; which would also be the case in a perfectly dead lake. In the river, you have the second force in the current which is pressing against the whole of the hull, but more particularly against the after part, and this is pushing the boat in toward the bank after you have pulled her bow away from it. The result is, that while you may clear the bank with the bow of the boat, the stern swings in and gets the punishment. Because of these two laws of physics, it was almost impossible to run a stern-wheel boat around the sharp bend in Coon Slough, a feat which "Tom" Burns performed several times without stopping a wheel. "Jack" Harris tried it with the big side-wheeler, the "Northern Light", late in the fall, when the anchor ice was running. Her bow got around all right; but her stern swung into the ice which had lodged in the bend, with the result that the whole stern was torn away, and she sank in twenty feet of water. "Ned" West tried a similar experiment at Dayton Bluff, just below St. Paul, with the "Key City". He ran in very close to the rocky shore, under full headway. He got her head out in good shape, but the stern struck the rocks, tearing out the rudder and smashing the deadwood. He worked her back to St. Paul with the wheels alone, and there the damage was repaired. I doubt if he was even reprimanded, for he was the "fastest" pilot on the upper river, as well as one of the best, and getting eight hundred dollars a month for his services. He could get a boat over the course from St. Louis to St. Paul, in less time than any other pilot could take the same boat, and that of course carried with it the supposition that he knew the river as well as any man. I learned the lesson myself through inattention. I was well acquainted with the principle through precept, and had been very careful not to run too near the bank. Coming down from St. Croix Falls with the "H. S. Allen", on reaching the mouth of the Apple River, I saw a school of black bass lying on the white sandy bottom where the Apple River empties into the St. Croix. The inflow from Apple River sets almost squarely across the St. Croix, and when the former is in flood the current sets nearly across the channel. To meet it, it is necessary to point toward the incoming current, to prevent being thrown against the opposite bank. Being an ardent fisherman I was deeply interested in the scores of fine fish plainly distinguishable from the height of the pilot house. The result was inevitable. I neglected to point the bow of the boat sufficiently against the inflow, and she took a sheer for the opposite bank the instant she struck the cross current. I pulled the wheel hard over in an instant, and got the bow clear of the overhanging timber, but the stern went under, and when it came out the "H. S. Allen" lacked two escape pipes and half of the washroom and laundry. The stewardess herself was short about half her senses, and all her temper. The captain had seen the same trick performed by older and better pilots than myself, and was not unduly distressed. It took about one hundred dollars to make the boat presentable. I did not tell about the black bass for some time after the incident occurred--long enough after so that there would be no obvious connection between the fish and the missing laundry. The man who has once mastered the art of steering a steamboat on Western waters, never loses his love for it. Whatever may have been his occupation after leaving the river, his hands instinctively reach out for the wheel if fortune so favors him as to place the opportunity within his reach. I mean, of course, the man who sees and feels more than the mere turning of the wheel so many hours a day, for so much money to be paid at the completion of his task. It may be work, and hard work, for the enthusiast as well as for the hireling; but with the man who puts his spirit into the task, it is work ennobled by painstaking devotion, and glorified by the realization of work artistically and lovingly done. To such a man there is an exhilaration about the handling of a big steamboat in the crooked channels of the Great River, akin to that felt by the accomplished horseman when guiding a spirited team of roadsters, or that of the engineer, holding the throttle of a great locomotive rushing over the rails at a speed of sixty miles an hour. However long the hands of the horseman or the engineer may have been divorced from reins or throttle, there is the same longing to grasp the one or the other when the opportunity offers. It is a wholly natural craving of the inner being; and however inexplicable it may be, it is there. For forty years, since leaving the river for other pursuits, often harassing and full of care, I have dreamed, time and again, of holding a wheel on one of the old-time boats on which I served as a boy. In my sleep I have felt again the satisfaction in work well done, the mortification of failure, and have felt again the cares and responsibilities that weighed so heavily when beset with difficulties and dangers. It is all as real as though I again stood at the wheel, doing real work, and achieving real victories over besetting difficulties and dangers. Mere work, as a means of earning a living, would not take such hold upon one's nature. It is the soul of the artist incarnate in the pilot. Chapter XIII _An Initiation_ I have said that in addition to "knowing the river", and knowing that he knows it, the young pilot must also be fortified with a large measure of self-reliance, or all else will go for nothing. The time of trial comes to every one, sooner or later, and the manner in which it is met usually determines the standing of the young novitiate in the estimation of river men. The reputation of every man on the river is common property the length of his run, from St. Louis to St. Paul. It was proverbial that river men "talked shop" more than any others, in those early days, probably because they were more interested in their own business than they were in that of other men. Possibly because, as one government engineer stated it, they didn't know anything else. However, the doings of all the river men were pretty thoroughly discussed sooner or later, from the latest dare-devil exhibition of fancy piloting by "Ned" West, to the mistakes and mishaps of the youngest "cub". Sooner or later, each and all were served up at the casual meetings of river men, at whatever port they might foregather. My own "baptism"--not of "fire", but of water and lightning--came on the very first trip I made alone on a steamboat. I had been running with Charley Jewell on the "H. S. Allen", from Prescott to St. Croix Falls. Mr. Jewell fell sick and was laid off at Prescott. On the levee, the day he went home, was a steamboat load of rope, rigging, boats, and camp-equipage, together with a couple of hundred raftsmen landed from a down-river packet that did not care to make the run up the lake. The disembarked men were anxious to reach Stillwater with their cargo, that night. Our regular starting time, as a United States mail boat, was at 7 o'clock in the morning. They offered extra compensation if we would take them up that night, and the proposition was accepted by Captain Gray. All hands were set to work loading the stuff. I felt quite elated at the prospect, as it was a bright evening, and I felt sure of finding my way, for there were only three or four close places to run in the thirty miles of lake navigation between Prescott and Stillwater. We got everything aboard, and I backed her out and started up the lake. There had been some lightning in the north, where there was a bank of low-lying clouds. So far away were they, apparently, that no one thought of a storm, certainly not a serious one. We were running toward it, however, and as we soon discovered, it was coming to meet us at a rattling pace. We met when about six miles above Prescott. First a terrific wind out of the north, followed by torrents of rain, and incessant lightning, which took on the appearance of chain-mail as it shimmered and glittered on the falling rain drops. I put up the breast-board, and let down the head-board as far as I could and still leave room between to look out ahead; but the fierce wind drove the rain in sheets into the pilot house, and in a minute's time I was completely soaked. The lightning and thunder were terrifying in brilliancy and in sharpness of sound, the flash and the report coming so closely together as to leave no doubt that the bolts were getting seriously close to the smokestacks. The pilot house was not the place I would have chosen from which to enjoy these effects, had I my choice. The place I really longed for was somewhere down below, where I would have felt less conspicuous as a target. I managed to work my way around the Kinnickinnic bar, and made the run up to the Afton (or "Catfish") bar, around which the channel was quite narrow and wofully crooked. Thus far, the high banks had sheltered us somewhat from the wind. Here, however, the low-lying prairie came down to the water's edge. The sweep of the wind was terrific, while the downpour of rain was such that at times it was impossible to see any landmarks a hundred feet away. Captain Gray, wrapped in his storm clothes, who had, since the tempest broke, staid on the roof, one eye on the banks, when he could see them, and the other on the young man at the wheel, finally called up and wanted to know if I did not think we had better feel our way ashore and tie up until the storm abated, even at the risk of being late in getting back to Prescott to take up our regular trip in the morning. I was shivering so that my teeth chattered, and the captain would have been fully justified in assuming that I was shaking as much from fear as from cold. I had a deal of pride in those days, however, and a fair allowance of inherited courage, with perhaps a dash of pig-headedness. I did not wish to have it bulletined from one end of the river to the other that the first time I was left in charge of a steamboat, I had hunted a tree to tie up to because it happened to thunder and rain a little. That would have been the popular version of the incident, in any case. I replied, therefore, that if Captain Gray would send his waiter up with a glass of brandy, I would take the steamer to Hudson levee before taking out a line, and from there to Stillwater and back to Prescott in time for our morning run. The captain said nothing, then or thereafter, but sent his "boy" up with the brandy. This was applied inwardly, and served to take the chill off. Thus fortified--temperance people will please not be horrified at this depravity of a nineteen-year-old novice, under such extraordinary provocation--I worked around "Catfish" and followed along the west shore as far as Lakeland. From Lakeland across the lake to the Hudson levee, is about three-quarters of a mile. It was still blowing a gale, and the rain came down in torrents, so that the opposite shore could not be seen--in fact one could not distinguish an object ten rods ahead. I had felt my way along, sometimes under the "slow bell", until the present. I must now cut loose from the west shore, and make the crossing to Hudson. There was plenty of water everywhere; but I could not see any landmarks on the opposite side of the lake. I got a stern bearing, however, and headed across. In a minute's time I could see nothing, either ahead or astern, and having no compass I had to rely on the "feel" of the rudders to tell me which way she was swinging. As it turned out, this was of little value, owing to the strength of the wind. For five minutes I ran under full head, and then slowed, trying to get a glimpse of the east bank, and "find myself". When I did, the "H. S. Allen" was headed squarely down the lake, and fully a mile below the Hudson landing. The force of the wind on the chimneys had turned her bow down-wind and downstream. As the rain began to slacken and I could see my marks, it took but a few minutes to straighten her up and make the run to the landing. On leaving Hudson there were two ways of running the big bar opposite and below the mouth of Willow River. One, the longest, was to cross back to Lakeland and then run up the west shore--all of it straight work. The other, was to run squarely out into the middle of the lake, turn north and run half a mile, then quartering west-north-west across the lake to the opposite shore. This crossing saved a mile or more of steaming over the other course; but it was crooked and narrow, and the possibility of hanging up was much greater. Captain Gray asked me, when backing out, which crossing I would make. I replied that I was going to take the upper to save time. He said nothing, but again took his place by the bell. He made no suggestion, nor offered any opinion as to my decision. That was a part of the river etiquette, which he adhered to even in the case of a boy; for which I sincerely thanked him in my inner being, while accepting it outwardly quite as a matter of course--which it would have been, with an older and more experienced man at the wheel. I made the crossing without calling for leads, or touching bottom, and the rest of the way was easy. When we made Stillwater the stars were out, and the storm-clouds hung low on the southern horizon. I went below and got into dry clothes, and had a few hours sleep while the freight was being put ashore. Along about two o'clock in the morning I started back, with the mate on the roof. In confidence he confided to me the gratifying news that the "old man says you're all right. He says that you've got nerve enough to last you through". As "nerve" was one of the things needed in the business, I was certainly proud that my night's work, alone on a heavily-loaded boat, in one of the worst of storms, had given me a standing with the "old man"; and I felt reasonably certain that his report would carry weight among the river men who might chance to discuss the merits of the young "cub", and his equipment for serious work. I may, I hope, be pardoned for dwelling at such length upon an incident of such common occurrence on the river as to attract little or no attention when the man at the wheel was an old and experienced pilot. But this was my "trying-out" time, which made a difference. Even if no one else ever gave the incident a second thought, I should have felt the shame of it to this day, had I "craw-fished" on that first trial. I have never seen or heard anything to compare with the storms we used to have on the river. The river men had a theory of their own--not very scientific, and probably without foundation in fact--that the vapors from the lowlands and islands formed clouds which were more than ordinarily charged with electricity. _Why_ they should be more highly charged than vapors arising from lowlands or islands elsewhere, they did not attempt to explain, and could not had they attempted. The fact remains, that our thunder storms were something out of the ordinary, and were so regarded by people from the East who experienced them for the first time. Many steamboats were struck by lightning, but few were burned, the electrical bolt being diffused through the iron of the boilers and machinery, and finding ready escape through the water-wheel shafts into the river. I have heard it stated that engineers have often received serious shocks from bolts thus passing from the chimneys to the water, by way of the machinery, but I never heard of one being killed. I do know that when these pyrotechnics were going on, the engineers kept their hands off the throttle-wheel, except in cases of dire necessity. The pilot was seemingly in more, but really less danger than the engineers. However, under such circumstances, a man had to hang on to his nerve as well as his wheel; and I doubt if many pilots ever became so hardened as not to feel "creepy" when the storm was on. Chapter XIV _Early Pilots_ "How did the first steamboats find their way up the hundreds of miles of water heretofore unbroken by steam-driven wheel?" No voice out of the past will give an answer to this query. The imagination of the trained pilot, however, needs no written page to solve the problem of how it might have been done; and he can picture to himself the satisfaction, akin to joy, of the man at the wheel, picking his way amid the thousand islands and snag-infested channels innumerable, guided only by his power to read the face of the water, and his knowledge of the basic principles that govern the flow of all great rivers. Standing thus at his wheel, with new vistas of stream and wood and bluff opening to him as he rounded each successive bend, choosing on the instant the path as yet uncharted; unhampered by time-honored "landmarks", with "all the world to choose from", none might be so envied as he. But we will never know who had this pleasure all his own. In thus picturing the passage of pioneer steamboats up the Mississippi, there is danger that we may inject into the scene the image of the modern floating palace, with her three decks, her tall chimneys, her massive side-wheels, her "Texas", and her pilot house, fully equipped with spars, gang planks, jack staff, and all the paraphernalia of the beautiful and speedy "packets" of our day. Upon no such craft, however, did the early navigators pick their way into the solitudes of the upper river. Their boats were little better than the keel boats which they superseded--in fact they were keel boats operated by steam. The cargo-box afforded shelter for passengers, merchandise, and machinery. There was no pilot house in which to stand, fifty feet above the water, from that height to study the river bottom. The steersman stood at the stern, and manipulated his tiller by main strength and awkwardness, while the captain stood at the bow and studied the river, and gave his orders to "port" or "starboard", as the case required. As the boat drew less than three feet of water, the necessity for fine judgment in choosing the channel was not as necessary as in guiding a craft drawing twice as much. Nevertheless, it did call for judgment and decision; and these qualities were inherent in the men who made the navigation of Western waters their occupation in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Long years before the advent of steam, the fur-traders of the upper river were running their heavily-laden canoes, bateaux, and Mackinac boats from St. Anthony Falls to Prairie du Chien, and thence up the Wisconsin and down the Fox to Green Bay and Mackinac; or, farther down the Mississippi to St. Louis. To guide these boats, with their valuable cargoes of peltries, pilots were as necessary as on the larger craft that later were to supersede them. A man standing in the stern, with ready paddle in hand, was the forerunner of the pilot of civilization. In his veins the blood of sunny France mingled with that of a tawny mother from Huron, Chippewa, or Dakota wigwams. His eye was quick to read the dimpling waters, and his arm strong to turn the prow of his craft aside from threatening snag or sand-bar. The transition from bateaux paddle and sweep to the steamboat wheel was not great, and it followed that the names of the earliest recorded members of the profession are such as to leave no room for doubt as to nationality or pedigree. Louis DeMarah heads the list of upper Mississippi River pilots who handled steamboats prior to 1836. There were steamers running between St. Louis and Fort Snelling from the year 1823, with more or less regularity. The "Virginia" (Captain Crawford) was the first steamboat to reach Fort Snelling, May 10, 1823. While we have the name of the captain, we have no mention of her pilots and engineers. It is probable that the master did his own piloting. Nearly all historical references to the early navigation of the upper Mississippi or Missouri Rivers speak of the master as also the pilot of his craft. Occasionally, however, we read of a pilot, but do not learn his name, his office being his only individuality. Lumbering operations had already begun on the Black, Chippewa, and St. Croix Rivers prior to 1836, and pilots were in demand to run the timber rafts down the river. No doubt DeMarah began his professional life in this trade, if not in the earlier life of the _voyageur_. He is mentioned as being an old man in 1843, his home being then in Prairie du Chien, where, in the census of Crawford County, in the new Territory of Wisconsin, he is listed with a family of eight--probably a Chippewa wife and seven "breeds" of varying attenuations. With the phonetic freedom exercised by our forefathers, his name appears as Louis "Demerer". In connection with DeMarah's name there is associated in the earliest annals of the river that of Louis Moro (or Morrow), evidently a corruption of Moreau, a name not appearing on the census roll of Crawford County. Evidently a _protégé_ of DeMarah's, he probably was taught the science of piloting by the elder man, as the names are nearly always spoken of in connection. Evidently they were partners, so far as that was possible in the days when steamboats took but one pilot, running only by day, and lying at the bank at night. Captain Russell Blakeley, who began life on the river in the early '40's, speaks of these men as the first who engaged in steamboat piloting as a business. It may only be an accidental coincidence of names, and yet it is more than possible that Louis Moreau, of Prairie du Chien in 1836, was a descendant of the Pierre Moreau, the noted _courier du bois_, and adventurous trader who befriended Father Marquette, patron saint of Wisconsin, as he lay sick, slowly dying, in his squalid hut on the portage between the Chicago River and the Des Plaines, one hundred and fifty years earlier, as recorded in the pages of Parkman's _La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West_. Another of the earliest pilots was Pleasant Cormack, also a Frenchman with possibly a slight dash of Indian blood in his composition. He is in the records as an intelligent, trustworthy pilot, and held the wheels of many of the largest and finest of upper river boats during the flush times between 1850 and 1862. DeMarah and Moreau were so far ahead of my generation on the river, that I never saw either of them. My own acquaintance with the half-breed pilot of tradition, was confined to the person of Joe Guardapie, a St. Croix and Mississippi River raftsman. He filled the bill completely, however, and having seen and known him the type was fully identified. A lithe savage, about five feet ten inches in height, and a hundred and sixty-five or seventy pounds in weight, his color exhibited more of the traits of his Chippewa mother than of his French father. In facial expression, however, the mercurial disposition of his father's kindred supplanted the stolidity of his Indian forbears. As quick as a panther, and as strong in nerve and sinew, he could whip any member of his crew, single-handed. In case of necessity he could put to rout a dozen of them--else he could not have run a raft to St. Louis; in fact, had it been otherwise he could not have started a raft from the landing at Prescott. Several times he made the return trip from below on our boat, taking cabin passage while his crew went "deck passage". He loafed in the pilot house most of the time on the up trip, as was the custom of the craft, and occasionally took a trick at the wheel to relieve the regular pilots. I never heard of his doing regular steamboat work, however, his tastes and education tying him to rafting. It was interesting to listen to his broken English, freely mingled with borderland French, the whole seasoned with unmistakable Anglo-Saxon profanity. It is curious to note that the untutored Indian has no profanity at all; and that of the Frenchman is of such mild-mannered texture as to be quite innocuous. Any one acquainted with modern polite literature must have observed that the French brand of profanity is used to flavor popular novels treating of life in high society, and the _mon Dieus_ and _sacres_ are not considered at all harmful reading, even for boarding school misses. It follows that the Frenchman who wishes to lay any emphasis upon his orders to a mixed crew of all nationalities--English, Irish, Dutch, Yankee, and Norwegian, with a sprinkling of French and Indian, must resort to Anglo-Saxon for effective expressions. And even this must often be backed with a ready fist or a heavy boot, properly to impress the fellow to whom it is directed. Joe Guardapie had the whole arsenal with him, all the time, largely accounting, I fancy, for his success as a raft pilot. Another old-time raftsman was Sandy McPhail. He piloted log and lumber rafts from the Chippewa to Prairie du Chien, and further down, in the days when Jefferson Davis, as a lieutenant in the regular army, was a member of the garrison at Fort Crawford. Whether "Sandy" was the name conferred upon him at the baptismal font, or gratuitously bestowed by an appreciative following on account of the color of his hair and beard, which were unmistakably red, will never be known. He certainly had no other name on the river. He was a good pilot, and a great handler of men, as well, which made him a model raftsman. He never took to the milder lines of steamboat piloting, so far as there is any record to be found. Still another was Charles LaPointe, who ran rafts from the Chippewa to lower river ports prior to 1845--how much earlier, it is now impossible to learn. He also was of the typical French half-breed _voyageur_ pioneers of the West, and handed down a record as a competent navigator of rafts on the river when it was almost unknown and entirely undeveloped. When I was pantry boy on the "Kate Cassell", my first venture aboard, we had a pilot picked up "above the lake", when we started out in the spring, a raftsman named McCoy--J. B., I think he signed himself. He was from Stillwater, and made but few trips on the steamer before taking up his regular work in rafting. A Scotchman, very quiet and reserved, so far as his deportment went while on the "Kate Cassell", he had, nevertheless, the reputation of being exceedingly handy with his fists when on his native sawlogs. This reputation led to an impromptu prize fight, which was "pulled off" at a woodyard near Hastings, Minnesota. A St. Louis bruiser named Parker, who had fought several battles on Bloody Island, opposite that city, was on board. Having heard of McCoy's reputation as a fighter, he lost no opportunity to banter and insult him, especially when he (Parker) was in liquor, which was most of the time. This lasted for several days, from Galena to Hastings, where it reached a climax. McCoy told him he would settle it with him at the next woodpile, so that they might not go into St. Paul with the question in doubt. When the woodpile was reached the officers of the boat, with most of the passengers, and as many of the crew as could abandon their posts, adjourned to the woods a few rods from the landing. A ring was roped off, seconds were chosen, and bottle-holders and sponge-bearers detailed. The men stripped to their trousers and went in. There was not as much science exhibited, probably, as in some of our modern professional "mills", but there was plenty of good, honest slugging. Both men were well punished, especially about the head and face. So equally were they matched, that neither suffered a knock-out, and when the bell struck for starting they had to quit without either getting the decision. This happened in the days when the Heenan-Sayre international bout was one of the prime topics of public interest, and it was noticeable that any number of our men were well enough posted in the rules of the P. R. to serve as officials in all departments. McCoy lost no caste among crew or passengers on account of this incident. There were neither kid gloves nor silk stockings among the pioneers who were pushing into Minnesota in 1856, and an incident of this sort was diverting rather than deplorable. Other pilots whose names appear very early in the annals of steamboating on the upper river, and whose fame as masters of the art will ever remain green among members of the craft so long as pilots turn a wheel on the river, were William White, Sam Harlow, Rufus Williams, George Nichols, Alex. Gody, and Hugh White, all of whom appear to have been in service in 1850 or before. These were followed by John Arnold, Joseph Armstrong, John King, Rufus Williams, Edward A. West, E. V. Holcomb, Hiram Beadle, William Cupp, Jerome Smith, William Fisher, Stephen Dalton, Jackson Harris, Henry Gilpatrick, James Black, Thomas Burns, T. G. Dreming, Harry Tripp, William Tibbles, Seth Moore, Stephen Hanks, Charley Manning, Thomas Cushing, Peter Hall, and fifty others equally as good. All of those named, served in the Minnesota Packet Company in the days of its prosperity, some of them for many years. All were experts in their profession, and some of them, as "Ned" West and John King, were entitled to the highest encomium known on the river--that of being "lightning pilots". Chapter XV _Incidents of River Life_ Captain William Fisher, of Galena, Illinois, is probably the oldest living pilot of the upper Mississippi. At the time of this writing (1908), he is spending the closing years of his life in quiet comfort in a spot where he can look down upon the waters of "Fevre" River, once alive with steamboats, in the pilot houses of which he spent over thirty years in hard and perilous service. As a young man Captain Fisher had served five years on the Great Lakes on a "square rigger", at a time when full-rigged ships sailed the inland waters. Coming to Galena just as the great boom in steamboating commenced, and following the opening of Minnesota Territory to settlement, he naturally gravitated toward the life of a steamboatman, taking his first lessons in piloting in 1852, on the "Ben Campbell", under the tutelage of Captain M. W. Lodwick. The next season (1853), he worked on the "War Eagle", under William White and John King, two of the best pilots on the upper river. Under their teaching he soon obtained his license, and henceforth for thirty years he piloted many of the finest boats running between St. Louis and St. Paul. His crowning achievement was the taking of the "City of Quincy" from St. Louis to St. Paul, Captain Brock being his partner for the trip. The "City of Quincy" was a New Orleans packet, that had been chartered to take an excursion the length of the river. Of sixteen hundred tons burden, with a length of three hundred feet and fifty feet beam, she was the largest boat ever making the trip above Keokuk Rapids. Two or three incidents of his river life, among the many which he relates, are of interest as showing the dangers of that life. One, which he believes was an omen prophetic of the War of Secession, he relates as follows: "I'm going to tell you this just as it happened. I don't know whether you will believe me or not. I don't say that I would believe it if I had not seen it with my own eyes. If some one else had told it to me, I might have set it down as a 'yarn'. If they have never had any experiences on the river, some men would make yarns to order; it is a mighty sight easier to make them than it is to live them--and safer. "When this thing happened to me, I was entirely sober, and I was not asleep. If you will take my word for it, I have never been anything else but sober. If I had been otherwise, I would not be here now, telling you this, and eighty-two years old.[D] [D] This was told in 1903. "Whiskey always gets 'em before they see the eighty mark. And you know that a man can't run a steamboat while asleep--that is, very long. Of course he can for a little while, but when she hits the bank it wakes him up. "This story ought to interest you, because I was on your favorite boat when it happened. The "Fanny Harris" was sold in 1859, in May or June, to go South. She came back right away, not going below St. Louis, after all. I took her down to that port. Joseph Jones of Galena had just bought the bar for the season when she was sold, and lost thirty dollars in money by the boat being sold.[E] [E] Observe the minuteness with which the Captain remembers the small and insignificant details of this trip. It is a guarantee that his memory is not playing any tricks in his narrative of the more important happenings. "Captain W. H. Gabbert was in command, and I was pilot. We left Galena in the evening. It was between changes of the moon, and a beautiful starlight night--as fine as I ever saw. By the time we got down to Bellevue, the stars had all disappeared, and it had become daylight, not twilight, but broad daylight, so bright that you couldn't see even the brightest star, and from 11:30 to 12:30, a full hour, it was as bright as any day you ever saw when the sun was under a cloud. At midnight I was right opposite Savanna. Up to this time Captain Gabbert had been asleep in the cabin, although he was on watch. We were carrying neither passengers nor freight, for we were just taking the boat down to deliver her to her new owners. He woke up, or was called, and when he saw the broad daylight, yet saw by his watch that it was just midnight, he was surprised, and maybe scared, just as every one else was. He ran up on to the roof and called out: 'Mr. Fisher, land the boat, the world is coming to an end'! "I told him that if the world were coming to an end we might as well go in the middle of the river as at the bank, and I kept her going. It took just as long to get dark again as it took to get light--about half an hour. It began to get light at half-past eleven, and at twelve (midnight) it was broad daylight; then in another half hour it was all gone, and the stars had come out one by one, just as you see them at sunset--the big, bright ones first, and then the whole field of little ones. I looked for all the stars I knew by sight, and as they came back, one by one, I began to feel more confidence in the reality of things. I couldn't tell at all where the light came from; but it grew absolutely broad daylight. That one hour's experience had more to do with turning my hair white than anything that ever occurred to me, for it certainly did seem a strange phenomenon." "Was it worse than going into battle?" I asked. "Yes, a hundred times worse, because it was different. When you go into battle you know just what the danger is, and you nerve yourself up to meet it. It is just the same as bracing up to meet any known danger in your work--wind, lightning, storm. You know what to expect, and if you have any nerve you just hold yourself in and let it come. This was different. You didn't know what was coming next; but I guess we all thought just as the Captain did, that it was the end of the world. "I confess that I was scared, but I had the boat to look out for, and until the world really did come to an end I was responsible for her, and so stood by, and you know that helps to keep your nerves where they belong. I just hung on to the wheel and kept her in the river, but I kept one eye on the eastern sky to see what was coming next. I hope when my time comes I shall not be scared to death, and I don't believe I shall be. It will come in a natural way, and there won't be anything to scare a man. It is the unknown and the mysterious that shakes him, and this midnight marvel was too much for any of us. We had a great many signs before the war came, and I believe this marvel on the night in question, was one of them, only we didn't know how to read it." "How about the narrow escapes, Captain?" "Well, I have had a number of them. In 1871 I was running a towboat with coal barges. Twelve miles below Rock Island, we were struck by a cyclone. It took the cabin clean off the boat, and of course the pilot house went with it. My partner was with me in the pilot house, having seen the storm coming up, with heavy wind, so he came up to help me keep her in the river. At this time we were pushing a lumber raft downstream. Both of us were blown into the river. My partner got hold of the raft and pulled himself out, but I went under it. I thought that it was the end of piloting; but Providence was with me. I came up through an aperture where four cribs of lumber cornered--a little hole not over three feet square. My partner saw me and ran and pulled me out, and we both got back on the dismantled hull of our boat. I could not have helped myself, as I was too near strangled. The force of the cyclone must have stopped the current of the river for the time or I would never have come up where I did. The shock and the wetting laid me up for six weeks. "When I was able to resume work, Dan Rice happened to come along with his circus boat. He wanted a pilot to take his craft not only up the great river, but also, so far as possible, up such tributaries as were navigable, he wishing to give exhibitions at all the towns alongshore. I shipped with him for $300 a month and had an easy time during the rest of the season, running nights, mostly, and laying up daytimes while the show was exhibiting. "The next year I was engaged on the "Alex. Mitchell." We had left St. Paul at 11 o'clock in the forenoon, on Saturday, May 6, 1872. I am particular about this day and date, for the point of this story hinges on the day of the week (Sunday). In trying to run the Hastings bridge we were struck by a squall that threw us against the abutment, tearing off a portion of our starboard guard. We arrived at La Crosse, Sunday morning, and took on two hundred excursionists for Lansing. They wanted to dance, but it being Sunday Captain Laughton hesitated for some time about giving them permission, as it was contrary to the known wishes, if not the rules, of Commodore Davidson to have dancing or games on board of his boats on Sunday. The passengers were persistent, however, and at last Captain Laughton yielded, saying that he couldn't help it! Of course he might have helped it. What is a captain for, if not to run his boat, no matter if everybody else is against him? That was where he was weak. He finally yielded, however, and they danced all the way to Lansing. When we arrived there it was raining, and the excursionists chartered the boat for a run back to Victory, about ten miles, and they were dancing all the time. "Leaving them at Victory we proceeded on our way down the river. When about twelve miles above Dubuque, a little below Wells's Landing, at three o'clock Monday morning, we were struck by a cyclone. We lost both chimneys, the pilot house was unroofed, and part of the hurricane deck on the port side was blown off. Mr. Trudell, the mate, was on watch, and standing on the roof by the big bell. He was blown off, and landed on shore a quarter of a mile away, but sustained no serious injuries. The port lifeboat was blown a mile and a half into the country. Following so soon after the Sunday dancing, I have always felt that there was some connection between the two." Captain Fisher is a very conscientious man--a religious man, and he believes in observing Sunday--that is, keeping it as nearly as is possible on a steamboat running seven days in the week. The dancing was wholly unnecessary, if not in itself immoral, and its permission by Captain Laughton was in direct contravention of the known wishes if not orders of the owners. Hence the conclusion that Providence took a hand in the matter and meted out swift punishment for the misdoing. I did not argue the matter with the Captain; but I could not reconcile the unroofing of Commodore Davidson's steamboat, or the blowing away of Mr. Trudell, who had no voice in granting license to the ungodly dancers, with the ordinary conception of the eternal fitness of things. If it had blown Captain Laughton a mile and a half into the country, as it did the port lifeboat, or even a quarter of a mile, as it did Mr. Trudell, and had left Commodore Davidson's steamboat intact, the hand of Providence would have appeared more plainly in the case. As it was, Captain Laughton slept serenely in his berth while Mr. Trudell and the lifeboat were sailing into space, and he did not get out until all was over. It is pleasant to be able to relate that although Providence appears to have miscarried in dealing out retribution, Commodore Davidson did not. Captain Davis was put in charge of the "Alex. Mitchell" as soon as she struck the levee at St. Louis. William F. Davidson--"Commodore", from the fact that he was at the head of the greatest of upper river packet lines--had been converted after many years of strenuous river life. He was as strong a man, affirmatively, after he began living religiously, as he had been negatively before that time. He abolished all bars from his steamboats, at great pecuniary loss to himself and the other stockholders; forbade Sunday dancing and other forms of Sunday desecration; stopped all gambling, and instituted other reforms which tended to make his steamboats as clean and reputable as the most refined ladies or gentlemen could wish. The promptitude with which he cashiered Captain Laughton, on account of the foregoing incident, was in keeping with his character as a man and as a manager. It was an evidence that he meant all that he said or ordered in the ethical conduct of his steamboats. The Commodore had a brother, Payton S. Davidson, who had the well-earned reputation of being one of the best steamboatmen on the Mississippi. Superintendent of the Northwestern Line, he prided himself upon the regularity with which his boats arrived at or departed from landings on schedule time. He was a driver, and the captains and pilots who could not "make time" under any and all conditions of navigation, were _persona non grata_ to "Pate", and when they reached this stage they went ashore with scant notice. In other ways he was equally efficient. One of the Northwestern Line, the "Centennial", was caught in the great ice gorge at St. Louis, in 1876. She was a new boat, costing $65,000, just off the ways, and a beauty. She was stove and sank, as did a dozen other boats at the same time. All the others were turned over to the underwriters as they lay, and were a total loss. Not so the "Centennial". Superintendent Payton S. Davidson was on hand and declared that the beautiful new boat could and should be raised. Putting on a force of men--divers, wreckers, and other experts--under his personal supervision and direction, he did get her afloat, although in a badly damaged condition, and that at a cost of only $5,000. Twice she sank, after being brought to the surface; but the indomitable energy of Davidson, who worked night and day, sometimes in the water up to his middle, and in floating ice, finally saved the steamer. She was one of the finest boats that ever plied the upper river. Payton S. was famous for his pugnacity as well as his pertinacity, and there is no record of his repentance or conversion. He lived and died a typical steamboat captain of the olden time. [Illustration: STEAMER "WAR EAGLE," 1852; 296 tons.] [Illustration: STEAMER "MILWAUKEE," 1856; 550 tons.] Chapter XVI _Mississippi Menus_ It was a saying on the river that if you wished to save the meals a passenger was entitled to on his trip, you took him through the kitchen the first thing when he came aboard. The inference was, that after seeing the food in course of preparation he would give it a wide berth when it came on the table. It would be unfair to the memory of the average river steward to aver that this assertion was grounded upon facts; but it would be stretching the truth to assert that it was without foundation. Things must be done in a hurry when three meals a day are to be prepared and served to three or four hundred people; and all the work had to be accomplished in two kitchens, each ten by twenty-feet in area--one for meats and vegetables, and the other for pastry and desserts. The responsibility of providing for meals at stated times, with a good variety, cooked and served in a satisfactory manner, devolved upon the steward. Under him were two assistants, with meat cooks, vegetable cooks, pastry cooks, and bread makers, and a force of waiters and pantrymen conditioned upon the boat's capacity for passengers. While the steward was in the thought of outsiders rated as an officer of the second class, he was as a matter of fact in the first class. When the pay of the captain was three hundred dollars per month, and that of the mate two hundred, the average steward of any reputation also commanded two hundred, while a man with a large reputation commanded three hundred, the same as the captain, and his services were sought by the owners of a dozen boats. Likewise, he earned every cent of his salary, whatever it might be. Unlike the other officers he had no regular watch to stand, after which he might lay aside his responsibility and let the members of the other watch carry the load while he laid off and watched them sweat. He was on duty all the time, and when and how he slept is to this day a mystery to me. He might have slept in the morning, when the cooks were preparing breakfast, had he felt quite confident that the cooks were not likewise sleeping, instead of broiling beefsteaks and making waffles. This being a matter of some doubt, and of great concern, he was usually up as soon as the cooks, and quietly poking about to see that breakfast reached the table promptly at seven o'clock. If the floor of the cabin was covered with sleepers, it was the steward who must awaken them, and, without giving offense, induce them to vacate the premises that the tables might be set. This was a delicate piece of business. To send a "nigger" to perform that duty, would be to incur the risk of losing the "nigger". The steward also saw that the assistant in charge of the waiters was on hand with all his crew, to put the cabin to rights, set the tables, and prepare to serve breakfast, while the cabin steward and the stewardess, with their crews, were making up the berths, sweeping, dusting, and "tidying up". As soon as breakfast was out of the way, the menu for dinner was prepared and handed to the chief cook. Shortages in provisions were remedied at the first landing reached, and stocks of fish, game, fresh eggs, and fresh vegetables were bought as offered at the various towns. While there was a cold-storage room on all first-class packets, its capacity was limited, and with a passenger list of two hundred and fifty or three hundred in the cabin, it was often found necessary to lay in additional stocks of fresh meats between Galena and St. Paul. Often, a dozen lambs could be picked up, or a dozen "roaster" pigs, and these were killed and dressed on the boat by one of the assistant cooks. Live poultry was always carried in coops, and killed as wanted. Perhaps the poultry killing, if witnessed by the passenger, would come as near curing him of the dinner habit as anything else he might see about the cook's galley. A barrel of scalding hot water, drawn from the boiler, stands on the guard. A coop of chickens is placed near the master of ceremonies, and two or three assistants surround the barrel. The head dresser grasps a chicken by the head, gives it a swing from the coop to the barrel, bringing the chicken's neck on to the iron rim of the barrel. The body goes into hot water and the head goes overboard. Before the chicken is dead he is stripped of everything except a few pin feathers--with one sweep of the hand on each side of the body and a dozen pulls at the wing feathers. The yet jerking, featherless bodies are thrown to the pin-feather man, who picks out the thickest of the feathers, singes the fowls over a charcoal grate-fire and tosses them to one of the under-cooks who cuts them open, cuts them up, and pots them, all inside of two minutes from the coop. A team of three or four expert darkies will dispose of one hundred and fifty chickens in an hour. Are they clean? I never stopped to inquire. If they were _dead_ enough to stay on the platter when they got to the table that was all any reasonable steamboatman could ask. However, the live chicken business is about the worst feature of the cook-house operations. Of course the darkies are not the cleanest-appearing people aboard the boat, but if the steward is up in his business he sees to it that a reasonable degree of cleanliness is maintained, even in the starboard galley. On the opposite side of the steamer is the pastry-cook's domain, and that is usually the show place of the boat. Most stewards are shrewd enough to employ pastry cooks who are masters of their profession, men who take a pride not only in the excellence of their bread, biscuit, and pie crust, but also in the spotlessness of their workshops. They are proud to receive visits from the lady passengers, who can appreciate not only the output but the appearance of the galley. It is a good advertisement for a boat, and the steward himself encourages such visits, while discouraging like calls at the opposite side. In old, flush times in the steamboat business, pastry cooks generally planned to give a surprise to the passengers on each up trip of the steamer. I remember one such, when no less than thirteen different desserts were placed in front of each passenger as he finished the hearty preliminary meal. Six of these were served in tall and slender glass goblets--vases, would more nearly describe them--and consisted of custards, jellies, and creams of various shades and flavors; while the other seven were pies, puddings, and ice creams. The passenger was not given a menu card and asked to pick out those that he thought he would like, but the whole were brought on and arranged in a circle about his plate, leaving him to dip into each as he fancied, and leave such as did not meet his approval. It was necessary to carry an extra outfit of glass and china in order to serve this bewildering exhibition of the pastry cook's art, and it was seldom used more than once on each trip. Serving such a variety of delicacies, of which but a small portion was eaten by any person at the table, would seem like an inexcusable waste; but the waste on river steamers was really not as great in those days as it is in any great hotel of our day. Each steamer carried forty or more deck hands and "rousters". For them, the broken meat was piled into pans, all sorts in each pan, the broken bread and cake into other pans, and jellies and custards into still others--just three assortments, and this, with plenty of boiled potatoes, constituted the fare of the crew below decks. One minute after the cry of "Grub-pile"! one might witness the spectacle of forty men sitting on the bare deck, clawing into the various pans to get hold of the fragments of meat or cake which each man's taste particularly fancied. It certainly wasn't an appetizing spectacle. Only familiarity with it enabled an onlooker fully to appreciate its grotesqueness without allowing the equilibrium of his stomach to be disturbed. It usually had but one effect upon such lady passengers as had the hardihood to follow the cry of "Grub-pile"! and ascertain what the thing really was. Altogether the duties of the steward were arduous and tormenting. The passengers expected much; and after getting the best, if any slip occurred they were sure to enter complaint--a complaint so worded as to convey the impression that they never had anything fit to eat while on the boat, nor any service that white men were justified in tolerating. The fact was, that most of the passengers so served had never in all their lives lived so well as they did on the trip from Galena to St. Paul on one of the regular boats of the Minnesota Packet Company. Certainly, after reaching their destination in the Territory of Minnesota, the chances were that it would be many long years, in that era of beginnings, before they would again be so well fed and so assiduously cared for, even in the very best hotels of St. Paul. This chapter on Mississippi menus would be incomplete without some reference to the drinkables served on the steamboat tables. These were coffee, tea, and river water. Mark Twain has described the ordinary beverage used on the river, as it is found on the Missouri, or on the Mississippi below the mouth of the "Big Muddy": "When I went up to my room, I found there the young man called Rogers, crying. Rogers was not his name; neither was Jones, Brown, Baxter, Ferguson, Bascom, nor Thompson; but he answered to either of them that a body found handy in an emergency; or to any other name, in fact, if he perceived that you meant him. He said: "'What is a person to do here when he wants a drink of water? drink this slush?' "'Can't you drink it?' "'I would if I had some other water to wash it with.' "Here was a thing which had not changed; a score of years had not affected this water's mulatto complexion in the least; a score of centuries would succeed no better, perhaps. It comes out of the turbulent bank-caving Missouri, and every tumblerful of it holds nearly an acre of land in solution. I got this fact from the bishop of the diocese. If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate the land from the water as easy as Genesis; and then you will find them both good; the one good to eat, the other good to drink. The land is very nourishing, the water is thoroughly wholesome. The one appeases hunger, the other, thirst. But the natives do not take them separately, but together, as nature mixed them. When they find an inch of mud in the bottom of the glass, they stir it up, and then take the draught as they would gruel. It is difficult for a stranger to get used to this batter, but once used to it he will prefer it to water. This is really the case. It is good for steamboating, and good to drink; but it is worthless for all other purposes, except baptizing." The above sketch had not been written in 1860, as Mark Twain was himself piloting on the lower river at that time. It could not, therefore, have been this description which prejudiced many eastern people against Mississippi River water as a beverage. But that prejudice did exist, away back in the fifties, and the fame of the yellow tipple had reached even to the fastnesses of the Vermont hills at that early day. Many emigrants from the old New England states provided themselves with kegs, jugs or "demijohns", and before embarking at Rock Island or Dunleith for the river trip, would fill these receptacles with water from the nearest well, or even cistern, and drink such stuff, warm, and sometimes putrid, rather than drink the life-giving elixir which had welled up from springs nestled in the shadows of the everlasting hills, or had been distilled by the sun from the snowbanks and ice fields of the unspoiled prairies and azure lakes of the great northwest. One old Yankee would pin his faith to nothing less than the water from his own spring or well at home, away back in old Vermont, and brought, at infinite pains and labor, a five-gallon demijohn all the way from his native state, drinking it on the cars en route, and on the boat after reaching the river. It wasn't as bad as that. The river water was as pure and healthful as any water on the footstool--_then_. It may not be so now--it _isn't, now_. Then there were no great cities on the river banks, pouring thousands of gallons of sewage and all manner of corruption into the stream, daily. There was very little land under cultivation even, and few farmyards, the drainage from which might contaminate the feeders of the great river. It was good, clean, healthful, spring and snow water. Above the mouth of the Missouri, in any ordinary stage of water, especially with a falling river, the water was but slightly discolored with the yellow sediment with which the river itself is always tinged; and this sediment was so fine that there was no suspicion of grit about it. When properly stirred up and evenly mixed, as those to the manner born always took it, it was an invigorating potion, and like good old Bohea, it would cheer but not inebriate. Since the advent of sewage in the river and with it the popular superstition that everything, liquid or solid, is permeated with pernicious microbes, it is possible that it has lost something of its pristine purity, and it is certain that it has lost something of its reputation; but river men still drink it from preference, and passengers, unless they revert to the Yankee method, must drink it perforce, or go dry. Chapter XVII _Bars and Barkeepers_ In the old days on the river, whiskey was not classed as one of the luxuries. It was regarded as one of the necessities, if not the prime necessity, of life. To say that everybody drank would not be putting much strain upon the truth, for the exceptions were so few as scarcely to be worth counting. It was a saying on the river that if a man owned a bar on a popular packet, it was better than possessing a gold mine. The income was ample and certain, and the risk and labor slight. Men who owned life leases of steamboat bars willed the same to their sons, as their richest legacies. Ingenious and far-seeing men set about accumulating bars as other men invested in two, three, or four banks, or factories. "Billy" Henderson of St. Louis was the first financier to become a trust magnate in bars. He owned the one on the "Excelsior", on which boat he ran between St. Louis and St. Paul. Later, he bought the lease of the bar on the "Metropolitan", and still later, when the Northern Line was organized, he bought the bars on all the boats, putting trusty "bar-keeps" aboard each, he himself keeping a general oversight of the whole, and rigorously exacting a mean average of returns from each, based upon the number of passengers carried. This system of averages included men, women, and children, and "Indians not taxed", presupposing that a certain percentage of the passengers' money would find its way into his tills, regardless of age, sex, or color. What his judgment would have been had one of the craft been chartered to carry a Sunday school picnic from St. Louis to St. Paul, will never be known. Such an exigency never confronted him, in those days. The judgment rendered was, that he was not far off in his conclusions as to the average income from the average class of passengers carried. Ordinarily, the bartenders were young men "of parts". None of them, so far as I know, were college graduates; but then college graduates were then mighty few in the West in any calling--and there were bars in plenty. It was required by their employers that they be pleasant and agreeable fellows, well dressed, and well mannered. They must know how to concoct a few of the more commonplace fancy drinks affected by the small number of travellers who wished such beverage--whiskey cocktails for the Eastern trade, and mint juleps for the Southern. The plain, everyday Western man took his whiskey straight, four fingers deep, and seldom spoiled the effect of his drink by pouring water on top of it. The "chaser" had not, at that early day, become fashionable, and in times of extreme low water it was not permitted that water should be wasted in that manner when all was required for purposes of navigation. The barkeeper was also supposed to know how to manufacture a choice brand of French brandy, by the judicious admixture of burnt peach stones, nitric acid, and cod-liver oil, superimposed upon a foundation of Kentucky whiskey three weeks from the still. He did it, too; but judicious drinkers again took theirs straight, and lived the longest. I flatter myself that I can recall the name of but one bartender with whom I sailed. While I had no very strong scruples about drinking or selling liquor, I seldom patronized the bar beyond the purchase of cigars and an occasional soft drink. I remember one dispenser, however, from his short but exceedingly stormy experience on the "Fanny Harris". He was an Irish lad, about twenty or twenty-one years of age, and not very large. He was sent on board by the lessee of the bar, who lived in Dubuque. Charley Hargus, our chief clerk, did not like the Irish. He had personal reasons for disliking some member of that nationality, and this dislike he handed on to all its other members with whom he came in contact. There were no Irishmen among the officers of the "Fanny Harris", and when Donnelly came aboard to take charge of the bar Hargus strongly objected, but without avail. He then set himself about the task of making life so uncomfortable for the lad that he would be sure to transfer to some other boat, or quit altogether, an end accomplished within three months. The process afforded rare amusement to such witnesses as happened to see the fun, but there was no fun in it for Donnelly; and in later years, when I came to think it over, my sympathy went out to the poor fellow, who suffered numberless indignities at the hands of his tireless persecutor. If Donnelly--who was not at all a bad fellow, was earning his living honestly, and never did anything to injure Hargus--had had the spirit common to most river men in those days, he would have shot the chief clerk and few could have blamed him. Bars are not looked upon with the same favor in our day, as in the past. It is claimed that upon some of the boats plying upon the upper river there are now no bars at all. If a person thinks he must have liquor on the trip, he must take it with his baggage. It is further credibly asserted that many of the officers handling the steamers are teetotalers; further, that there is no more profit in the bar business, and that investors in that kind of property are becoming scarce. Modern business conditions are responsible for much of the change that has taken place, especially in the transportation business, within the last twenty-five years. Railroad and steamboat managers do not care to intrust their property to the care of drinking men, and it is becoming more and more difficult for such to secure positions of responsibility. As the display of liquor in an open bar might be a temptation to some men, otherwise competent and trusty officers, the owners are adopting the only consistent course, and are banishing the bar from their boats. This does not apply in all cases, however. A few years ago I took a trip from St. Paul to St. Louis on one of the boats of the Diamond Jo Line. There was a bar on the boat, but it seemed to depend for its patronage upon the colored deck crew. They were pretty constant patrons, although their drinking was systematically regulated. A side window, opening out upon the boiler deck promenade, was devoted to the deck traffic. If a rouster wanted a drink he must apply to one of the mates, who issued a brass check, good for a glass of whiskey, which the deck hand presented at the bar, and got his drink. When pay day came, the barkeeper in his turn presented his bundle of checks and took in the cash. How many checks were issued to each man on the trip from St. Louis to St. Paul and return, I do not know; but it is safe to say that the sum total was not permitted to exceed the amount of wages due the rouster. Some of the "niggers" probably had coming to them more checks than cash, at the close of the voyage. The regulation was effective in preventing excess, which would demoralize the men and render them less valuable in "humping" freight. The bartender always poured out the whiskey for the "coons", and for the latter it was not a big drink. It was, likewise, not a good drink for a white man, being a pretty tough article of made-up stuff, that would burn a hole in a sheet-iron stove. If it had been less fiery the rousters would have thought they were being cheated. While on this trip, I never saw an officer of the boat take a drink at the bar, or anywhere else, and but few of the passengers patronized it. It accentuated as much as any other one thing the fact that the "good old times" on the river were gone, and that a higher civilization had arisen. But peddling cheap whiskey to "niggers"! What would an old-time bartender have thought of that? The bare insinuation would have thrown him into a fit. But we are all on an equality now, black and white--before the bar. [Illustration: WINONA, MINNESOTA. The Levee in 1862.] Chapter XVIII _Gamblers and Gambling_ Volumes have been written, first and last, on the subject of gambling on the Mississippi. In them a small fraction of truth is diluted with a deal of fiction. The scene is invariably laid upon a steamboat on the lower Mississippi. The infatuated planter, who always does duty as the plucked goose, invariably stakes his faithful body servant, or a beautiful quadroon girl, against the gambler's pile of gold, and as invariably loses his stake. Possibly that may occasionally have happened on the lower river in ante-bellum days. I never travelled the lower river, and cannot therefore speak from actual observation. On the upper river, in early times, there were no nabobs travelling with body servants and pretty quadroons. Most of the travellers had broad belts around their waists, filled with good honest twenty-dollar gold pieces. It was these belts which the professional gamblers sought to lighten. Occasionally they did strike a fool who thought he knew more about cards than the man who made the game, and who would, after a generous baiting with mixed drinks, "set in" and try his fortune. There was, of course, but one result--the belt was lightened, more or less, according to the temper and judgment of the victim. So far as I know, gambling was permitted on all boats. On some, there was a cautionary sign displayed, stating that gentlemen who played cards for money did so at their own risk. The professionals who travelled the river for the purpose of "skinning suckers" were usually the "gentlemen" who displayed the greatest concern in regard to the meaning of this caution, and who freely expressed themselves in the hearing of all to the effect that they seldom played cards at all, still less for money; but if they did feel inclined to have a little social game it was not the business of the boat to question their right to do so, and if they lost their money they certainly would not call on the boat to restore it. After the expression of such manly sentiments, it was surprising if they did not soon find others who shared with them this independence. In order to convey a merited reproof to "the boat", for its unwarranted interference with the pleasure or habits of its patrons, they bought a pack of cards at the bar and "set in" to a "friendly game". In the posting of this inconspicuous little placard, "the boat" no doubt absolved itself from all responsibility in what might, and surely did follow in the "friendly games" sooner or later started in the forward cabin. Whether the placard likewise absolved the officers of the boat from all responsibility in the matter, is a question for the logicians. I cannot recollect that I had a conscience in those days; and if a "sucker" chose to invest his money in draw poker rather than in corner lots, it was none of my business. In that respect, indeed, there was little choice between "Bill" Mallen on the boat with his marked cards, and Ingenuous Doemly at Nininger, with his city lots on paper selling at a thousand dollars each, which to-day, after half a century, are possibly worth twenty-five dollars an acre as farming land. Ordinarily, the play was not high on the upper river. The passengers were not great planters, with sacks of money, and "niggers" on the side to fall back upon in case of a bluff. The operators, also, were not so greedy as their real or fictitious fellows of the lower river. If they could pick up two or three hundred dollars a week by honest endeavor they were satisfied, and gave thanks accordingly. Probably by some understanding among themselves, the fraternity divided themselves among the different boats running regularly in the passenger trade, and only upon agreement did they change their boats; nor did they intrude upon the particular hunting ground of others. The "Fanny Harris" was favored with the presence, more or less intermittently, of "Bill" Mallen, "Bill" and "Sam" Dove, and "Boney" Trader. "Boney" was short for Napoleon Bonaparte. These worthies usually travelled in pairs, the two Dove brothers faithfully and fraternally standing by each other, while Mallen and "Boney" campaigned in partnership. These men were consummate actors. They never came aboard the boat together, and they never recognized each other until introduced--generally through the good offices of their intended victims. In the preliminary stages of the game, they cheerfully lost large sums of money to each other; and after the hunt was up, one usually went ashore at Prescott, Hastings, or Stillwater, while the other continued on to St. Paul. At different times they represented all sorts and conditions of men--settlers, prospectors, Indian agents, merchants, lumbermen, and even lumber-jacks; and they always dressed their part, and talked it, too. To do this required some education, keen powers of observation, and an all-around knowledge of men and things. They were gentlemanly at all times--courteous to men and chivalrous to women. While pretending to drink large quantities of very strong liquors, they did in fact make away with many pint measures of quite innocent river water, tinted with the mildest liquid distillation of burned peaches. A clear head and steady nerves were prerequisites to success; and when engaged in business, these men knew that neither one nor the other came by way of "Patsey" Donnelly's "Choice wines and liquors". They kept their private bottles of colored water on tap in the bar, and with the uninitiated passed for heavy drinkers. The play was generally for light stakes, but it sometimes ran high. Five dollars ante, and no limit, afforded ample scope for big play, provided the players had the money and the nerve. The tables were always surrounded by a crowd of lookers-on, most of whom knew enough of the game to follow it understandingly. It is possible that some of the bystanders may have had a good understanding with the professionals, and have materially assisted them by signs and signals. The chief reliance of the gamblers, however, lay in the marked cards with which they played. No pack of cards left the bar until it had passed through the hands of the gambler who patronized the particular boat that he "worked". The marking was called "stripping". This was done by placing the high cards--ace, king, queen, jack, and ten-spot--between two thin sheets of metal, the edges of which were very slightly concaved. Both edges of the cards were trimmed to these edges with a razor; the cards so "stripped" were thus a shade narrower in the middle than those not operated upon; they were left full width at each end. The acutely sensitive fingers of the gamblers could distinguish between the marked and the unmarked cards, while the other players could detect nothing out of the way in them. "Bill" Mallen would take a gross of cards from the bar to his stateroom and spend hours in thus trimming them, after which they were returned to the original wrappers, which were carefully folded and sealed, and replaced in the bar for sale. A "new pack" was often called for by the victim when "luck" ran against him; and Mallen himself would ostentatiously demand a fresh pack if he lost a hand or two, as he always did at the beginning of the play. I never saw any shooting over a game, and but once saw pistols drawn. That was when the two Doves were holding up a "tenderfoot". There was a big pile of gold on the table--several hundred dollars in ten and twenty dollar pieces. The losers raised a row and would have smashed the two operators but for the soothing influence of a cocked Derringer in the hands of one of them. The table was upset and the money rolled in all directions. The outsiders decided where the money justly belonged, in their opinion, by promptly pocketing all they could reach while the principals were fighting. I found a twenty myself the next morning. I saw "Bill" Mallen for the last time under rather peculiar and unlooked-for circumstances. It was down in Virginia, in the early spring of 1865. There was a review of troops near Petersburg, preparatory to the advance on Lee's lines. General O. B. Wilcox and General Sam. Harriman had sent for their wives to come down to the front and witness the display. I was an orderly at headquarters of the First Brigade, First Division, Ninth Army Corps, and was detailed to accompany the ladies, who had an ambulance placed at their disposal. I was mounted, and coming alongside the vehicle began to instruct the driver where to go to get the best view of the parade. The fellow, who was quite under the influence of liquor, identified himself as Mallen, and sought to renew acquaintance with me. It went against the grain to go back on an old messmate, but the situation demanded prompt action. "Bill" was ordered to attend closely to his driving or he would get into the guardhouse, with the displeasure of the division commander hanging over him, which would not be a pleasant experience. He knew enough about usages at the front, at that time, to understand this, and finished his drive in moody silence. After the review was over he went back to the corral with his team, and I to headquarters. I never saw or heard of him again, the stirring incidents of the latter days of March, 1865, eclipsing everything else. I presume he was following the army, nominally as a mule driver, while he "skinned" the boys at poker as a matter of business. The whiskey had him down for the time being, however, otherwise I would have been glad to talk over former times on the river. Chapter XIX _Steamboat Racing_ It is popularly supposed that there was a great deal of racing on Western rivers in the olden time--in fact, that it was the main business of steamboat captains and owners, and that the more prosaic object, that of earning dividends, was secondary. There is a deal of error in such a supposition. At the risk of detracting somewhat from the picturesqueness of life on the upper Mississippi as it is sometimes delineated, it must in truth be said that little real racing was indulged in, as compared with the lower river, or even with the preconceived notion of what transpired on the upper reaches. While there were many so-called steamboat races, these were, for the most part, desultory and unpremeditated. On the upper river, there never was such a race as that between the "Robert E. Lee" and the "Natchez", where both boats were stripped and tuned for the trial, and where neither passengers nor freight were taken on board to hinder or encumber in the long twelve hundred miles between New Orleans and St. Louis, which constituted the running track. It is true, however, that whenever two boats happened to come together, going in the same direction, there was always a spurt that developed the best speed of both boats, with the result that the speediest boat quickly passed her slower rival, and out-footed her so rapidly as soon to leave her out of sight behind some point, not to be seen again, unless a long delay at some landing or woodyard enabled her to catch up. These little spurts were in no sense races, such as the historic runs on the lower waters. They were in most cases a business venture, rather than a sporting event, as the first boat at a landing usually secured the passengers and freight in waiting. Another boat, following so soon after, would find nothing to add to the profits of the voyage. Racing, as racing, was an expensive if not a risky business. Unless the boats were owned by their commanders, and thus absolutely under their control, there was little chance that permission would be obtained for racing on such a magnificent and spectacular scale as that usually depicted in fiction. The one contest that has been cited by every writer on upper river topics, that has ever come under my observation, was the one between the "Grey Eagle" (Captain D. Smith Harris), and the "Itasca" (Captain David Whitten); and that was not a race at all. It is manifestly unfair to so denominate it, when one of the captains did not know that he was supposed to be racing with another boat until he saw the other steamer round a point just behind him. Recognizing his rival as following him far ahead of her regular time, he realized that she was doing something out of the ordinary. He came to the conclusion that Captain Harris was attempting to beat him into St. Paul, in order to be the first to deliver certain important news of which he also was the bearer. When this revelation was made, both boats were within a few miles of their destination, St. Paul. Here are the details. In 1856, the first telegraphic message was flashed under the sea by the Atlantic cable--a greeting from Queen Victoria to President Buchanan. Captain D. Smith Harris had, the year before, brought out the "Grey Eagle", which had been built at Cincinnati at a cost of $60,000. He had built this boat with his own money, or at least a controlling interest was in his name. He had intended her to be the fastest boat on the upper river, and she was easily that. As her captain and practically her owner, he was at liberty to gratify any whim that might come into his head. In this case it occurred to him that he would like to deliver in St. Paul the Queen's message to the President ahead of any one else. There was at that time no telegraph line into St. Paul. Lines ran to Dunleith, where the "Grey Eagle" was taking in cargo for St. Paul, and also to Prairie du Chien, where the "Itasca" was loading. Both boats were to leave at six o'clock in the evening. Captain Harris had sixty-one miles farther to run than had Captain Whitten. But Harris knew that he was racing, and Whitten did not, which made all the difference in the world. Whitten soldiered along at his usual gait, stopping at every landing, putting off all cargo at each place, and taking on all that offered, and probably delayed to pass the compliments of the day with agents and other friends, as well as discuss the great message that he was bearing. The "Grey Eagle", on the contrary, stopped at only a few of the principal landings, and took on no freight after leaving Dunleith. She did not even put off freight that she was carrying, but took it through to St. Paul and delivered it on her return trip. She carried the mail, but in delivering it a man stood on the end of one of the long stages run out from the bow, from which he threw the sacks ashore, the boat in the meantime running along parallel with the levee, and not stopping completely at any landing. Running far ahead of her time, there were no mail sacks ready for her, and there was no reason for stopping. The "Grey Eagle" had the best of soft coal, reinforced by sundry barrels of pitch, from which the fires were fed whenever they showed any signs of failing. With all these points in her favor, in addition to the prime fact that she was by far the swiftest steamboat that ever turned a wheel on the upper river, it was possible for her to overtake the slower and totally unconcerned "Itasca", when only a few miles from St. Paul. The race proper began when Whitten sighted the "Gray Eagle" and realized that Harris was trying to beat him into St. Paul in order to be the first to deliver the Queen's message. Then the "Itasca" did all that was in her to do, and was beaten by less than a length, Harris throwing the message ashore from the roof, attached to a piece of coal, and thus winning the race by a handbreadth. The time of the "Grey Eagle" from Dunleith, was eighteen hours; the distance, two hundred and ninety miles; speed per hour, 16 1/9 miles. The "Itasca", ran from Prairie du Chien to St. Paul in eighteen hours; distance, two hundred and twenty-nine miles; speed, 12 2/3 miles per hour. The "Itasca" was far from being a slow boat, and had Whitten known that Harris was "racing" with him, the "Grey Eagle" would not have come within several hours of catching her. As a race against time, however, the run of the "Grey Eagle" was really something remarkable. A sustained speed of over sixteen miles an hour for a distance of three hundred miles, upstream, is a wonderful record for an inland steamboat anywhere, upper river or lower river; and the pride which Captain Harris had in his beautiful boat was fully justified. A few years later, she struck the Rock Island Bridge and sank in less than five minutes, a total loss. It was pitiful to see the old Captain leaving the wreck, a broken-hearted man, weeping over the loss of his darling, and returning to his Galena home, never again to command a steamboat. He had, during his eventful life on the upper river, built, owned, or commanded scores of steamboats; and this was the end. The "Northerner", of the St. Louis Line, was a fast boat, and an active contestant for the "broom". The boat that could, and did run away from, or pass under way, all other boats, signalized her championship by carrying a big broom on her pilot house. When a better boat passed her under way, the ethics of the river demanded that she pull the broom down and retire into seclusion until she in turn should pass the champion and thus regain her title. The struggle on the upper river lay between the "Northerner" and the "Key City". The "Grey Eagle" was in a class by herself, and none other disputed her claims, while actively disputing those of all others of the Minnesota Packet Company, of which the "Key City" was the champion and defender. The two rivals got together at Hudson, twenty miles up Lake St. Croix--whether by accident or agreement it is impossible to say, but probably by agreement. They had twenty miles of deep water, two miles wide, with only four close places to run. It was a fair field for a race, and they ran a fair and a fine one. For miles they were side by side. Sometimes a spurt would put one a little ahead; and again the other would get a trifle the most steam and the deepest water, and so creep ahead a little. When they came into Prescott, at the foot of the lake, the "Key City" was a clear length ahead, her engineers having saved a barrel or two of resin for the home stretch. With this lead she had the right of way to turn the point and head up the river. Ned West was at the wheel, with an assistant to "pull her down" for him, and he made a beautiful turn with his long and narrow craft; while the "Northerner" had to slow down and wait a minute or two before making the turn. In the meantime the "Key City's" whistles were blowing, her bell ringing, and her passengers and crew cheering, while a man climbed to the roof of the pilot house and lashed the broom to the finial at the top, the crown of laurels for the victor. The lower river stern-wheel steamer "Messenger" was also a very fast boat. On one occasion she came very near wresting the broom from the "Key City", in a race through Lake Pepin, where also there was plenty of water and sea room. The "Key City" had a barge in tow and thus was handicapped. The "Messenger" seemed, therefore, likely to win the race, as she had passed the former under way. Within four miles of the head of the lake, Captain Worden of the "Key City" ordered the barge cast adrift, having placed a few men on board of it, with an anchor and cable to use in case of necessity. Thus freed from the encumbrance, he put on steam and passed his rival before reaching Wacouta, in spite of the most strenuous efforts on the part of the latter to retain her lead. Running far enough ahead of the "Messenger" to render the maneuver safe, Worden crossed her bow, and circling around her ran back and picked up his barge. In this race, it was said by passengers who were on board the two boats, that the flames actually blazed from the tops of the tall chimneys on both craft; and on both, men were stationed on the roof playing streams of water from lines of hose on the chimney breechings, to prevent the decks from igniting. Under such conditions it is easy to see how a boat might catch fire and burn. And yet the passengers liked it. Had they been the owners of casks of hams, as legend relates of a passenger on a lower river boat under like circumstances, there is no doubt they would have made an oblation of them to the gods of heat and steam, rather than have the other boat win. The earliest recorded race run on the upper river was that between the "Nominee", owned and commanded by Captain Orren Smith, and the "West Newton" (Captain Daniel Smith Harris), in 1852. In this event but one boat actually ran, for Harris had no confidence in the ability of his boat to win, and not possessing the temper that would brook defeat, he declined to start. The "Nominee" completed the run from Galena to St. Paul and return, a distance of seven hundred miles, making all landings and handling all freight and passengers, in fifty-five hours and forty-nine minutes, an average rate of speed of 12-1/2 miles an hour, half of it against and half with the current. This was good running, for the boats of that time. As there was no other boat to compete for the honor, the "Nominee" carried the broom until she sank at Britt's Landing, below La Crosse, in 1854. Bunnell, in his very interesting _History of Winona_, says: "Captain Orren Smith was a very devout man; and while he might indulge in racing, for the honor of his boat, he believed in keeping the Sabbath; and as long as he owned the boats which he commanded he would not run a minute after twelve o'clock Saturday night, but would tie his boat to the bank, wherever it might be, and remain at rest until the night following at twelve o'clock, when he would resume the onward course of his trip. If a landing could be made near a village or settlement where religious services could be held, the people were invited on board on Sunday, and if no minister of the gospel was at hand, the zealous Captain would lead in such service as suited his ideas of duty. But the Captain's reverence and caution did not save his boat, and she sank below La Crosse in the autumn of 1854." Two of the boats on which I served, the "Kate Cassell" and the "Fanny Harris", while not of the slow class, yet were not ranked among the fast ones; consequently we had many opportunities to pass opposition boats under way, and to run away from boats that attempted to so humiliate us. There was a great difference in boats. Some were built for towing, and these were fitted with engines powerful enough, if driven to their full capacity, to run the boat under, when the boat had no barges in tow. Other boats had not enough power to pull a shad off a gridiron. It was the power that cost money. A boat intended solely for freighting, and which consequently could take all the time there was, in which to make the trip, did not require the boilers and engines of a passenger packet in which speed was a prime factor in gaining patronage. There is great satisfaction in knowing that the boat you are steering is just a little faster than the one ahead or behind you. There is still more satisfaction in feeling, if you honestly can, that you are just a little faster as a pilot than the man who is running the other boat. The two combined guarantee, absolutely, a proper ending to any trial of speed in which you may be engaged. Either one of them alone may decide the race, as a fast pilot is able to take his boat over a long course at a better rate of speed than a man not so well up in his business. If both men are equally qualified, then it is certain that the speediest boat will win. What conditions determine the speed of two boats, all observable terms being equal? Nobody knows. The "Key City" and the "Itasca" were built for twins. Their lines, length, breadth, and depth of hold were the same; they had the same number and size boilers, and the parts of their engines were interchangeable; yet the "Key City" was from one to three miles an hour the faster boat, with the same pilots at the wheel. It was a fruitful topic for discussion on the river; but experts never reached a more enlightening conclusion than, "Well, I don't know". They didn't. The boats of the old Minnesota Packet Company averaged better than those of a later era. In the run from Prairie du Chien to St. Paul, as noted above, the "Itasca" averaged twelve miles an hour, upstream, handling all her freight and passengers. The schedule for the Diamond Jo Line boats, in 1904, allowed eight miles an hour upstream, and eleven downstream, handling freight and passengers. [Illustration: THE LEVEE AT ST. PAUL, 1859. Showing the Steamer "Grey Eagle" (1857; 673 tons), Capt. Daniel Smith Harris, the fastest and best boat on the Upper River, together with the "Jeanette Roberts" (1857; 146 tons), and the "Time and Tide" (1853; 131 tons), two Minnesota River boats belonging to Captain Jean Robert, an eccentric Frenchman and successful steamboatman. (Reproduced from an old negative in possession of Mr. Edward Bromley of Minneapolis, Minn.)] Chapter XX _Music and Art_ In the middle of the nineteenth century, many an artist whose canvases found no market in the older cities, found ready bidders for his brush, to decorate the thirty-foot paddle-boxes of the big side-wheelers with figures of heroic size; or, with finer touch, to embellish the cabins of Western steamboats with oil paintings in every degree of merit and demerit. The boat carrying my father and his family from Rock Island to Prescott, upon my first appearance on the Father of Waters, was the "Minnesota Belle". Her paddle-boxes were decorated with pictures the same on each side, representing a beautiful girl, modestly and becomingly clothed, and carrying in her arms a bundle of wheat ten or twelve feet long, which she apparently had just reaped from some Minnesota field. In her right hand she carried the reaping-hook with which it was cut. All the "Eagles" were adorned with greater than life-size portraits of that noble bird. Apparently all were drawn from the same model, whether the boat be a Grey-, Black-, Golden-, War-, or Spread-Eagle. The "Northern Belle", also had a very good looking young woman upon her paddle-boxes. Evidently she exhibited herself out of pure self-satisfaction, for she had no sheaf of wheat, or any other evidence of occupation. She was pretty, and she knew it. The "General Brooke" showed the face and bust, in full regimentals, of the doughty old Virginian for whom it was named. Later, the "Phil Sheridan" boasted an heroic figure of Little Phil, riding in a hurry from Winchester to the front, the hoofs of his charger beating time to the double bass of the guns at Cedar Creek, twenty miles away. The "Minnesota" reproduced the coat-of-arms of the state whose name she bore--the ploughman, the Indian, and the motto "L'étoile du Nord". But the majority of the side-wheel boats boasted only a sunburst on the paddle-boxes, outside of which, on the perimeter of the wheel-house circle, was the legend showing to what line or company the boat belonged. The sunburst afforded opportunity for the artist to spread on colors, and usually the effect was pleasing and harmonious. It was the inside work wherein the artists in oil showed their skill. Certainly there were many panels that showed the true artistic touch. The "Northern Light", I remember, had in her forward cabin representations of Dayton Bluff, St. Anthony Falls, Lover's Leap, or Maiden Rock, drawn from nature, for which the artist was said to have been paid a thousand dollars. They were in truth fine paintings, being so adjudged by people who claimed to be competent critics. On the other hand there were hundreds of panels--thousands, perhaps, in the myriad of boats that first and last plied on the river--that were the veriest daubs. These were the handiwork of the house painters who thought they had a talent for higher things, and who had been given free hand in the cabin to put their ambitions on record. There was one case, however, which appealed to the humorous side of every one who was fortunate enough to see it. It was not intended that it should strike just this note. The artist who put it on the broad panel over the office window of the little stern-wheel "dinkey" from the Wabash, intended to convey a solemn note of warning to all who might look upon it to flee temptation. As the painting very nearly faced the bar, it required no very great stretch of imagination to read into the picture the warning to beware of the tempter, strong drink, particularly the brand served out on a Hoosier packet hailing from the Wabash. In the centre was a vividly-green apple tree, bearing big red fruit. Our beloved Mother Eve, attired in a white cotton skirt that extended from waist to knee, was delicately holding a red scarf over her left shoulder and bosom. Confronting her was a wofully weak-minded Adam, dressed in the conventional habit of a wealthy first century Hebrew. The Satanic snake, wearing a knowing grin on his face, balanced himself on the tip of his tail. Thirty years or more after the little boat from the Wabash introduced this artistic gem to travellers on the upper river, I saw a copper-plate engraving two centuries old, from which the Hoosier artist had painted his panel. It was all there, except the colors--the tree, the apples, Eve in her scarf and skirt, Adam as a respectable Hebrew gentleman, and Satan balanced on the turn of his tail and leering with a devilish grin at the young woman who wanted to know it all, and at the lily-livered Adam who then and there surrendered his captaincy and has been running as mate ever since. In the flush times on the river all sorts of inducements were offered passengers to board the several boats for the up-river voyage. First of all, perhaps, the speed of the boat was dwelt upon. It was always past my comprehension why any one who paid one fare for the trip, including board and lodging as long as he should be on the boat, and who had three good, if not "elegant", meals served each day without extra charge, should have been in such a hurry to get past the most beautiful scenery to be found anywhere under the sun. I would like nothing better than to take passage on the veriest plug that ever made three miles an hour, and having full passage paid, dawdle along for a week, and thus be enabled to enjoy in a leisurely manner, all the beauties of river, bluff, and island. After speed came elegance--"fast and elegant steamer"--was a favorite phrase in the advertisement. An opportunity to study Eve and her apple, instead of the wealth of beauty which the Almighty has strewn broadcast over the Mississippi Valley, was an inducement carrying weight with some. It was a matter of taste. After elegance came music, and this spoke for itself. The styles affected by river steamers ranged from a calliope on the roof to a stringed orchestra in the cabin. My recollection is, that most of us thought the name "calliope" was derived from some mechanical appliance in connection with music, with which we were as yet unfamiliar, the fame of Jupiter's daughter not yet having extended to the headwaters of the Mississippi. The question as to what relation this barbaric collection of steam whistles bears to the epic muse, that it should have appropriated her name, is still an open question. The "Excelsior", Captain Ward, was the first to introduce the "steam piano" to a long-suffering passenger list. Plenty of people took passage on the "Excelsior" in order to hear the calliope perform; many of them, long before they reached St. Paul, wished they had not come aboard, particularly if they were light sleepers. The river men did not mind it much, as they were used to noises of all kinds, and when they "turned in" made a business of sleeping. It was different with most passengers, and a steam piano solo at three o'clock in the morning was a little too much music for the money. After its introduction on the "Excelsior", several other boats armed themselves with this persuader of custom; but as none of them ever caught the same passenger the second time, the machine went out of fashion. Other boats tried brass bands; but while these attracted some custom they were expensive, and came to be dropped as unprofitable. The cabin orchestra was the cheapest and most enduring, as well as the most popular drawing card. A band of six or eight colored men who could play the violin, banjo, and guitar, and in addition sing well, was always a good investment. These men were paid to do the work of waiters, barbers, and baggagemen, and in addition were given the privilege of passing the hat occasionally, and keeping all they caught. They made good wages by this combination, and it also pleased the passengers, who had no suspicion that the entire orchestra was hired with the understanding that they were to play as ordered by the captain or chief clerk, and that it was a strictly business engagement. They also played for dances in the cabin, and at landings sat on the guards and played to attract custom. It soon became advertised abroad which boats carried the best orchestras, and such lost nothing in the way of patronage. Some of the older generation yet living, may have heard Ned Kendall play the cornet. If not, they may have heard of him, for his fame was at this time world-wide, as the greatest of all masters on his favorite instrument. Like many another genius, strong drink mastered him, and instead of holding vast audiences spell-bound in Eastern theatres, as he had done, he sold his art to influence custom on an Alton Line boat. It was my good fortune to have heard him two or three times, and his music appeals to me yet, through all the years that lie between. The witchery and the pathos of "Home, Sweet Home", "Annie Laurie", the "White Squall", and selections from operas of which I had then never even heard the names, cast such a spell that the boat on which he travelled was crowded every trip. Pity 'tis that one so gifted should fall into a slavery from which there was no redemption. He died in St. Louis, poor and neglected, a wreck infinitely more pitiable than that of the finest steamboat ever cast away on the Great River. One of the boats on which I served employed a sextet of negro firemen, whose duty, in addition to firing, was to sing to attract custom at the landings. This was not only a unique performance, but it was likewise good music--that is, good of its kind. There was nothing classic about it, but it was naturally artistic. They sang plantation melodies--real negro melodies; not the witless and unmusical inanities which under the name of "coon songs" pass with the present generation for negro minstrelsy. Of course these darkies were picked for their musical ability, and were paid extra wages for singing. The leader, Sam Marshall, received more than the others, because he was an artist. This term does not do him justice. In addition to a voice of rare sweetness and power, Sam was a born _improvisatore_. It was his part of the entertainment to stand on the capstan-head, with his chorus gathered about him, as the boat neared the landing. If at night, the torch fed with fatwood and resin threw a red glow upon his shining black face, as he lifted up his strong, melodious voice, and lined out his improvised songs, which recited the speed and elegance of this particular boat, the suavity and skill of its captain, the dexterity of its pilots, the manfulness of its mate, and the loveliness of Chloe, its black chambermaid. This latter reference always "brought down the house", as Chloe usually placed herself in a conspicuous place on the guards to hear the music, and incidentally the flatteries of her coal-black lover. As each line was sung by the leader the chorus would take up the refrain: De Captain stands on de upper deck; (Ah ha-a-a-ah! Oh ho-o-o-o-ho!) You nebber see 'nudder such gentlehem, _I_ 'spec; (Ah ha-a-a-ah, Oh ho-o-o-ho.) and then would follow, as an interlude, the refrain of some old plantation melody in the same key and meter, the six darkies singing their parts in perfect time and accord, and with a melody that cannot be bettered in all the world of music. De pilot he twisses he big roun' wheel; (Ah ha-a-a-ah, Oh ho-o-o-oh.) He sings, and he whissels, and he dance Virginia reel, (Ah ha-a-a-ah, Oh ho-o-o-ho),-- an undoubted reference to Tom Cushing, who, before his promotion to the pilot house was said to have been a tenor in grand opera in New York. He was a beautiful singer at any rate; could whistle like a New York newsboy, and dance like a coryphée. The "Old Man" would have been willing to take his oath that Cushing could and did do all three at the same time, in the most untimely hours of the morning watch, at the same time steering his steamboat in the most approved fashion. The next stanza was: "'Gineer in the engin' room listenn' fo' de bell; He boun' to beat dat oder boat or bus' 'em up to--_heb'n_," was accepted as a distinct reference to Billy Hamilton, as the manner of stating his intention to win out in a race was peculiar to the junior engineer, and the proposition was accepted without debate. "De Debbel he come in the middle of de night; Sam, dere, he scairt so he tuhn _mos'_ white--Jes like dat white man out dere on de lebbee", pointing at some one whom he deemed it safe to poke fun at, and of course raising a laugh at the expense of the individual so honored. "Des _look_ at dem white fokses standin' on de sho'; Dey la-a-aff, and dey la-a-aff, till dey cain't laff no mo'--ha-ha-ha-ha-ha", and Sam would throw back his head and laugh a regular contagion into the whole crowd--on the boat and "on de sho", opening a mouth which one of the darkies asserted was "de biggest mouf dis nigger ebber saw on any human bein' 'cept a aligator"; or, as the mate expressed it: "It was like the opening of navigation." "Dish yer nigger he fire at the middle do'; Shake 'em up libely for to make de boat go", was a somewhat ornate description of Mr. Marshall's own duties on board the boat. As a matter of fact he did very little firing, personally, although when a race was on he could shovel coal or pitch four-foot wood into the middle door with the best of them, at the same time, singing at the top of his voice. Upon ordinary occasions he let the other darkies pitch the cord wood while he exercised a general supervision over them, as became an acknowledged leader. To hear these darkies sing the real slave music, which was older than the singers, older than the plantation, as old as Africa itself, wherein the ancestors of some of them at least, might have been kings and princes as well as freemen, was better than the fo'c'sle comedies enacted for the amusement of the passengers. These minor chords carried a strain of heartbreak, as in the lines: "De night is dark, de day is long And we are far fum home, Weep, my brudders, weep!" And the closing lines: "De night is past, de long day done, An' we are going home, Shout, my brudders, shout!" were a prophecy of that day of freedom and rest, after centuries of toil and bondage, the dawn of which was even then discernible to those who, like Abraham Lincoln, were wise to read in the political heavens the signs of its coming. [Illustration: STEAMER "KEY CITY," 1857; 560 tons.] [Illustration: STEAMER "NORTHERN LIGHT," 1806; 740 tons.] Chapter XXI _Steamboat Bonanzas_ How it was possible to derive any profit from an investment of from $20,000 to $40,000, the principal of which had an average tenure of life of but five years, has puzzled a great many conservative business men from "down east", where "plants" lasted a lifetime, and the profits from which may have been sure, but were certain to be small. A man educated in such an atmosphere would hesitate long, before investing $25,000 in a steamboat that was foreordained to the scrap pile at the end of five summers; or where one out of every two was as certainly predestined to go up in smoke or down into the mud of the river bottom at the end of four years--these periods representing the ordinary life of a Mississippi River steamboat. From 1849 to 1862 the shipyards of the Ohio, where nine out of ten Western boats were built, could not keep up with the orders. Every available shipwright was employed, and on some boats gangs worked at night by the light of torches at double wages, so great was the demand. Every iron foundry was likewise driven to the limit to turn out engines, boilers, and other machinery with which to give life to the hulls that were growing as if by magic in every shipyard. If there had not been profit in the business, the captains and other river men who gave orders for these craft would not have given them. By far the greater number of boats were built for individual owners--practical river men who navigated the boats, and who knew just what they were about. Many of the orders were given to replace vessels that had been snagged or burned within the past twenty-four hours--for time was money, and a man could not afford to be without a steamboat many weeks, when twenty weeks or less represented a new boat in net earnings. These men knew from actual experience that if they could keep their craft afloat for two years they could build a new boat from the profits made with her, even if she sank or burned at the end of that time. If she kept afloat for four years, they could buy or build two or three new ones from the profits, even without the aid of insurance. As a matter of fact the boats carrying insurance in those days were the exceptions. It came high, and owners preferred to take their own chances rather than indulge to any great extent in that luxury. How such profits were earned and such results obtained, it will be the object of this chapter to disclose. In those days every boat made money. A big and fast one made a great deal; those small and slow made little as compared with their larger rivals, but plenty as compared with their own cost. Perhaps most vessel owners began on a small scale. A little boat might cost $5,000. She would run on some tributary of the Great River, and in the absence of any railroads might control all the traffic she was capable of handling, and at her own rates. In the course of two or three years her owner was able to build a bigger and a better boat. By combining with some other river man, the two might build one costing $25,000, and carrying from a hundred and fifty to two hundred tons of freight, and passengers in proportion. With such an equipment there was a fortune in sight at any time between 1849 and 1862, provided always that the boat was not snagged or burned on her first trip. The doctrine (or science) of averages, is peculiar. In order to get an average of four years for a steamboat's life, it is necessary to keep some of them afloat for nine or ten; while on the other hand you are certain to "kill" a lot of them within a year after they touch water. When the latter happens, the investment is lost and the owner is probably ruined. For purposes of illustration we will take as a sample one from the best class of money-makers on the upper river, in the flush times of 1857. Minnesota was organized as a territory in 1849, and admitted as a state in 1858. From 1852 to 1857 there were not boats enough to carry the people who were flocking into this newly-opened farmers' and lumbermen's paradise. There were over a hundred and twenty-five different steamboats registered at St. Paul in the latter year. The boats carrying good cargoes all through the season were the money-makers. Some of the larger ones were unable to get over the sand-bars after the midsummer droughts began. The stern-wheel boat of two hundred to three hundred tons was the one that could handle a good cargo on little water, and represented the highest type of profit-earning craft. Such a boat would be about 200 feet long, 30 feet beam, and five feet depth of hold. She would have three large iron boilers (steel not having entered largely into boiler construction at that time), and fairly large engines, giving her good speed without an excessive expenditure for fuel. She would cost from $25,000 to $30,000, and accommodate two hundred cabin passengers comfortably, with a hundred second-class people on deck. With such a boat furnished and ready for business, it is the duty of the captain to go out and hire his crew, and fit her out for a month's work. Such an investment in 1857, on the upper river, would approximate the following figures: _Per month_ Captain $ 300.00 Chief clerk 200.00 Second clerk 100.00 Chief mate 200.00 Second mate 100.00 Pilots (2 at $500.00) 1,000.00 Chief engineer 200.00 Second engineer 150.00 Firemen (8 at $50.00) 400.00 Steward 200.00 Carpenter 150.00 Watchman 50.00 Deck hands (40 at $50.00) 2,000.00 Cabin crew 800.00 Food supplies ($75.00 per day, 30 days) 2,250.00 Wood (25 cords per day, 30 days, at $2.50) 2,000.00 Sundries 1,400.00 --------- $11,500.00 With this wage-list and expense-account before them, the captain and his chief clerk, who may also be a part owner in the boat, are face to face with the problem of meeting such expenses from passenger and cargo lists, and at the same time providing a sinking fund with which to build another craft within four years. To the uninitiated this would seem a somewhat appalling problem; with these old hands, the question would no doubt resolve itself down to the number of round trips that they would have to make to pay for their boat. The question of years never enters their heads. In 1857 there were three principal points of departure on the upper river, above St. Louis. At that time St. Louis itself was the great wholesale centre, but it was not so important as an initial point for passengers for the upper Mississippi. The flood of immigration from St. Louis was for many reasons up the Missouri: furs and gold could be found in the mountains; there was a possible slave state in the farming regions below the mountains. The people who settled Minnesota and northern Wisconsin came from the East, and reached the river at three points--Rock Island, Dunleith (or Galena), and Prairie du Chien. Taking the point with which I am most familiar, we will start the new boat from Galena. At that time Galena was, next to St. Louis, the principal wholesale _entrepôt_ in the West. It was a poor trip for the boat which I have taken as a model, when she did not get a hundred tons of freight at Galena from the wholesale houses there. The balance was found at Dunleith, the terminus of what is now the Illinois Central Railway (then the Galena & Western Union); at Dubuque, which was also a big wholesale town; and at Prairie du Chien, the terminus of the Milwaukee & Mississippi Railway. The freight rates on the river ran from 25 cents per hundred for short distances, to $1.50 per hundred from Galena to Stillwater, or St. Paul. No package was taken at less than 25 cents, however small it was, or how short the distance. In order not to overstate, we will take fifty cents per hundred as the average, and three hundred tons of cargo as the capacity of the two hundred-ton boat.[F] This is relatively the capacity of a vessel of that tonnage after deducting for passengers and fuel, and the space occupied by deck passengers. This latter item did not seriously count, for the freight was usually taken first and the deck passengers were then piled on top of it. Their comfort or convenience was never taken into consideration. [F] A boat _measuring_ 200 tons would carry from 300 to 350 tons weight in cargo. The tonnage of all boats is given by measurement, while the cargo is always in hundredweights. The boat can carry two hundred cabin passengers, and a hundred on deck. We will assume that there is another boat competing for this trip, and we do not fill up to the capacity. The clerk studies the rate sheets in vogue in 1857, and finds the following: UP-STREAM RATES 30 miles or under (no charge less than 25c) 6c per mile 30 to 60 miles 5c per mile Over 60 miles 4c per mile GALENA OR DUNLEITH TO-- Miles Cabin passage Deck passage Cassville 30 $2.00 $1.25 Prairie du Chien 66 3.50 2.00 La Crosse 150 6.00 3.25 Red Wing 256 10.00 3.50 Stillwater and St. Paul 321 12.00 6.00 Galena or Dunleith to St. Paul 321 $12.00 $6.00 Prairie du Chien to St. Paul 255 10.00 5.00 La Crosse to St. Paul 175 7.00 4.00 In 1904, the cabin passage on the Diamond Jo Line boats from Dunleith to St. Paul, was $8.00; from Prairie du Chien, $6.75; from La Crosse, $4.75. This is in competition with six railroads practically paralleling the river. In 1857 there was no railroad competition, and practically none from steamboats. Every boat attained a full passenger list, and was at liberty to charge whatever the conscience of the captain dictated--assuming a conscience. I have known a boat to fill up at Dunleith at the rate of $16.00 to St. Paul, and contract that all the men should sleep on the cabin floor, leaving staterooms for the women. And the passengers were glad enough to accept such conditions, for a detention of two days at Dunleith would cost a far greater sum than the overcharge exacted by the steamboat officers. In the foregoing table I have included La Crosse, which, however, was not an active factor in river rates until 1859. Before then, hundreds of passengers were landed there from Rock Island, Dunleith, and Prairie du Chien; but as the railroad had not yet reached the river at that point, there were but few passengers from La Crosse for landings farther up the river. When our boat leaves Prairie du Chien, then, the following business is in sight: 150 passengers from Dunleith or Galena, at an average of $8.00 $1,200.00 50 deck passengers at an average of $5.00 250.00 300 tons freight, 6,000 cwts. at an average of 50c 3,000.00 -------- $4,450.00 A boat leaving Galena on Friday evening usually arrived at St. Paul in time to have her cargo all ashore and ready to start on the return trip sometime on Tuesday--usually about noon. At that time we shall find the chief clerk studying the downstream rate sheets. These differ somewhat from the upstream and are like this, a few principal points being taken to illustrate: DOWN-STREAM RATES 30 miles or under (no charge less than 25c.) 5c per mile 30 to 60 miles 4c per mile Over 60 miles 3c per mile ST. PAUL OR STILLWATER TO-- Miles Cabin passage Deck passage Hastings 32 $1.50 $1.00 Red Wing 65 2.50 2.00 Winona 146 4.50 2.50 La Crosse 175 5.00 3.00 Prairie du Chien 255 7.00 3.50 Dunleith or Galena 321 8.00 4.00 Downstream rates are somewhat less than the upstream, because, for one reason, it costs less to get a boat downstream. There is a four-mile current pushing the boat along, in addition to the applied power. Going upstream the boat had had this current to overcome before she gained an inch. A four-mile current is one-third of an average steamboat's progress. Again, the passengers do not get a chance to eat as much, and very often they were not served as well, on the down trip. Then, there were fewer people who wished to go down river, with the result that there were many boats bidding for the patronage of those who did make the trip. All these elements, with possibly others, entered into the cutting of the rates by about one-third on the down trip. The only item besides passengers to be depended upon on the return trip, was wheat. There may have been some potatoes or barley, or, if fortune favored, some tons of furs and buffalo robes from the "Red River train", or some flour from the one mill at St. Anthony (now Minneapolis), or perhaps woodenware from the same point. There was always a more or less assorted cargo, but the mainstay was wheat. We will assume, in order to simplify this illustration, that there was nothing but wheat in sight at the time. There was no question about getting it. Every boat got all the wheat it could carry, and the shippers begged, almost on bended knees, for a chance to ship five hundred sacks, or a hundred, or fifty--any amount would be considered a great favor. Wheat was shipped at that time in two-bushel sacks, each weighing a hundred and twenty pounds. Three hundred tons, dead weight, is a pretty good cargo for a two-hundred ton boat. Wheat is dead weight, and a boat goes down into the water fast, when that is the sole cargo. We get five thousand sacks, all of which is unloaded at Prairie du Chien. The down trip foots up somewhat like this: 80 passengers at $8.00 $ 640.00 5,000 sacks of wheat at 12c 600.00 -------- $1,240.00 Arriving in Galena Friday morning, the clerk figures up his receipts with the following result: Up trip $4,450.00 Down trip 1,240.00 -------- $5,690.00 The boat makes four trips during the month, leaving out the extra two or three days, which may have been spent on some sand-bar. At the end of the month the clerk again does some figuring, with this result: Income from four trips, at $5,690.00 $22,760.00 Less wages, fuel, provisions, etc. 11,500.00 --------- Net profit for month $11,260.00 A stern-wheel, light-draught boat such as we have taken for this illustration, was quite certain to get five months' service--between the middle of April and the middle of October. In order not to put too great tension upon the credulity of modern readers, we will assume that she gets only five months of navigation. At the close of the season the captain and his clerk figure up the receipts and expenses, and strike a balance like this: Receipts, 5 months, at $22,760.00 $113,800.00 Expenses, 5 months, at $11,500.00 57,500.00 ---------- Net earnings for the season $ 56,300.00 This is enough to buy a new boat, and have something over for pin money. No one knows better than the writer the elusiveness, not to say the mendacity, of figures. He has often figured out greater profits than this in the nebulous schemes which have from time to time seduced him from the straight and narrow path of six per cent investment--and had them come out the other way. In steamboating in the fifties, this occurred very often. The most careful captain, employing the highest-priced pilots and engineers, would often lose his boat the first season; a snag or a lighted match, or a little too much steam, dissipating the best-laid plans in a few minutes of time. But the figures given above are conservative--made so purposely. The truth lies at the opposite extreme. If the books of some of the boats of the old Minnesota Packet Company could be resurrected, they would show earnings and profits far greater than I have ventured to claim in my illustration. The "Fanny Harris", for instance, was a boat of 279 tons. Her wage-list and expense-account have been taken as a basis of the illustration above given, partly from recollection, and partly from figures which I made when I was second clerk, and which I have had before me in writing this chapter. We used to tow one barge all the time--most of the time two barges, and both boat and barges loaded to the water line, both ways, nearly every trip. Of course we sometimes missed it. We landed ten thousand sacks of wheat at Prairie du Chien on one trip. Instead of a hundred and fifty cabin passengers, she often carried three hundred, "sleeping them" on the cabin floor three deep--at stateroom rates; and under such conditions the fortunate winners of such a chance to get into the promised land have risen up and called the whole outfit blessed, when in fact it was the other thing. I have heard of other boats claiming that they had to tow an extra barge to carry the money which they took in on the trip. I have always thought that these men were slightly overstating the case--but maybe not. An item in one of the St. Paul papers of the time, states that the "Excelsior" arrived from St. Louis November 20, 1852, with two hundred and fifty cabin passengers, one hundred and fifty deck passengers, and three hundred tons of freight. For which freight she received "one dollar per hundred for any distance"; and the net profits of the up trip on freight alone were over $8,000. For two hundred and fifty cabin passengers she would receive $16 each, or $4,000; for the deck passengers, $8 each, or $1,200. These sums added to the $8,000 received for freight, would aggregate $13,200. The "Excelsior" cost not to exceed $20,000--probably not over $16,000. Two trips like this would build a better boat. As this was the last trip of the season, she probably did not get such another. Under that freight rate--"one dollar per hundred for any distance"--a shipment of a hundred pounds from Prescott to Point Douglass, one mile, would cost the shipper a dollar. There were possibilities in such conditions. Another item, also from a St. Paul paper, states that the "Lady Franklin" arrived May 8, 1855, from Galena, with five hundred passengers. She would accommodate a hundred and fifty cabin people, ordinarily. Figure this trip down to the probabilities, and the net result would be about as follows: 300 cabin passengers at $12 $3,600 200 deck passengers at $6 1,200 ------ $4,800 Or, reversing it: 200 cabin passengers at $12 $2,400 300 deck passengers at $6 1,800 ------ $4,200 The "Lady Franklin" cost about $20,000. Two months' work at this rate would buy a new and better boat. If I remember aright, the "Lady Franklin" was sunk in 1856 or 1857, but not until she had earned money enough to buy two new boats, each costing twice as much as she did. At the time she carried five hundred passengers she undoubtedly carried a full cargo of freight, worth at least two thousand dollars more to the boat. An item in a St. Louis paper of that date, announces the departure of the side-wheel steamer "Tishomingo" (Jenks, master), for St. Paul on April 14, 1857, with 465 cabin passengers, 93 deck passengers and 400 tons of assorted freight. This trip would figure somewhat like this: 465 cabin passengers at an average of $16 $ 7,440.00 93 deck passengers at an average of $8 744.00 400 tons freight at 75c per hundred 6,000.00 --------- $14,184.00 These rates are estimated at a very low figure. The regular cabin rate at that time, St. Louis to St. Paul, was, for cabin, $24; deck, $12; freight, $1.50 per hundredweight. It is not necessary to amplify at all. The "Tishomingo" had been bought in the spring of 1857, within a month, for $25,000. She paid one-half her purchase price on her first trip that season. I would not have it understood that all boats made these phenomenal earnings; but many boats did, and all those of the Minnesota Packet Company were in this favored class. There were several conditions precedent, which made these results possible with the boats of this line. It controlled, absolutely, the freighting from the Galena and Dubuque jobbing houses; it controlled, absolutely, the freight business of the Dunleith and Prairie du Chien railroads, and practically all the passenger business of the two roads, as steamboat tickets were sold on the train, good only on the boats of the Minnesota Packet Company. These conditions insured a full cargo for every boat, and a full passenger list every trip. Outside boats did not have such a "cinch", but each had a source of revenue of its own, equally satisfactory. Even the "wild" boats had no difficulty in getting cargoes, and every vessel in that busy era had all the business it could handle. The term "Company" was something of a misnomer. It was not at first a stock company, in the modern sense of the word. Each boat was owned by its captain, or a number of persons acting individually. In organizing the company, instead of capitalizing it with a certain amount of stock, the controlling parties simply put in their steamboats and pooled their earnings. Each boat had an equal chance with all the others for a cargo; and when the dividends were declared each one shared according to the earnings of his boat. A big boat could earn more than a smaller or slower one, and such a boat got a larger percentage than the latter. The particular advantage, in fact the only advantage, in pooling lay in securing a monopoly of the railroad and jobbing business. In order to do this it was necessary to have boats enough to handle the business at all times, and to have a general manager who would place the craft so as to give the most effective service. One of the beauties of the pooling system was, that if a captain or owner became dissatisfied and desired to pull out, he could take his boat and the share of profits due him, and leave at any time. A few years later the company was reorganized as a joint stock company. After that, if one wished to get out he was lucky if he could get clear with the clothes on his back. The financiers who controlled fifty-one per cent of the stock retained all the steamboats and all the profits. [Illustration: FACSIMILES OF EARLY TICKETS AND BUSINESS CARD.] Chapter XXII _Wild-cat Money and Town-sites_ Both of these specimens of natural history were bred, nurtured, and let loose in countless numbers to prey upon the people in the early days that witnessed the opening of the Northwestern territories to settlement. The wild-cat dollars waxed fat upon the blood and brawn of the settlers who had already arrived; wild-cat town-sites found ready victims in the thousands of Eastern people who desired to better their fortunes, and who lent ready ears to the golden tales of unscrupulous promoters, that told of wonderful cities in the West, whose only reality was that blazoned in the prospectuses scattered broadcast through the East. The younger generation, whose only acquaintance with the circulating symbols of wealth that we call "money", is confined to the decades since the close of the War of Secession, can have no idea of the laxity of banking laws of the fifties, in the Northwestern states and territories, nor of the instability of the so-called "money" that comprised nine-tenths of the medium of exchange then in use in the West. Nowadays, a bank bill stands for its face value in gold, if it be a National Bank issue. If a state bank--and bills of this sort are comparatively few in these days--they are also guaranteed, in a measure, by the laws of the state in which the bank is situated. In the days of which I am writing, and especially in the unsettled and troublesome times just before the war (from 1856 to 1862), the money that was handled on the river in the prosecution of business, except of course the small proportion of gold that was still in circulation, had little or no backing, either by federal or state enactments. A man went into an embryo city, consisting in that day of two or three thousand town lots, and from fifty to a hundred inhabitants, with an iron box costing twenty-five dollars. In this box he had ten, twenty, or thirty thousand "dollars" in new bank bills purporting to have been issued from two, three, or four banks doing business in other equally large, populous, and growing cities, situated elsewhere in Wisconsin, or preferably in Illinois, Indiana, or Michigan. How did he become possessed of all this wealth? Was it the savings of years? The iron box was, perhaps; perhaps he got trusted for that. The money was not usually the savings of any time at all; it was simply printed to order. Five or six persons desirous of benefitting their fellow men by assisting them in opening their farms and "moving their crops", would get together in Chicago, Cincinnati, or St. Louis, wherever there was an establishment capable of engraving and printing bank bills--and not very elegant or artistic printing was required, or desired. These men propose to start as many banks, in as many "cities" in the West. They have money enough, each of them, to buy a safe, an iron box into which any carpenter could bore with an ordinary brace and bit, and enough over to pay for the printing of twenty thousand dollars' worth of bills in denominations of one, two, five and ten dollars. The printing finished, each man would sign his own bills as president, and one of the others would add the final touch of authenticity by signing a fictitious name to the same bills as cashier. Then it was "money". But it would have been overloading the credulity of even the most gullible denizens of his adopted city to ask them to accept his own bills as legal tender; so a swap was made all around, and when the requisite amount of shuffling was completed, each man had his twenty thousand dollars in bills on four or five banks, but none of his own issue. There was a double incentive in this transaction: first, it inspired the utmost confidence in the minds of the men who were to borrow this money. How could this banker who had come among them for their good, have acquired this money by any other than legitimate transactions? If it were bills on his own bank that he proposed to put into circulation, there might be some question as to their guaranty; but he could not get this money by merely going to the printing office and ordering it, as he might in case of bills on his own institution. It certainly must be good money. Secondly, by distributing his bills in as many different localities as possible, the chances of its never being presented for redemption were greatly multiplied; it might be burned, or lost overboard, or worn out, in which case he would be just so much ahead, and no questions asked. The foregoing may be a somewhat fanciful statement of the way in which the bankers proceeded, but in essence it is a true picture. They may not have all met in Chicago, or anywhere else, to perfect these arrangements, but the arrangements were all perfected practically as stated: "You put my bills into circulation, and I will put out yours; and in each case the exchange will greatly assist each and all of us in hoodwinking our victims into the belief that it is money, and not merely printed paper which we are offering them". Equipped with these goods, and with a charter from the state in which he proposed to operate--a charter granted for the asking, and no questions raised--the banker transports himself and his box of money to his chosen field of operations. The newspaper which has already been located in the new city heralds the coming of Mr. Rothschild, our new banker, more or less definitely hinting at the great wealth lying behind the coming financier. A bank building is rented, a sign hung out, and he begins to loan his money at five per cent per month on the partially-improved farms of his neighbors, or the house and lot of his "city" friends. He is a liberal man, and if it is not convenient for you to pay the interest as it accrues, he will let it stand--but he does not forget to compound it every month. The result is inevitable. The debt mounts up with a rapidity that paralyzes the borrower, and in the end a foreclosure adds farm and improvements to the growing assets of the banker. Within a very few years he is the owner of eight or ten of the best farms in the county, and perhaps half a dozen houses and lots in the village, and all with the investment of less than a hundred dollars invested in printing, and an iron box, and without the expenditure of an ounce of energy or a legitimate day's work. And the victims break up and start anew for the still farther West, to take new farms, to be engulfed in the maws of other sharks. One may not greatly pity the men themselves, for men are born to work and suffer; but the women! God pity them. Worn, tired, broken-hearted, they must leave that which is dearest to them in all the world, their homes, and fare forth again into the wilderness, to toil and suffer, and at last, blessed release, to die. And the bankers? They were counted honest. If by any chance one of their bills came to hand and was presented for payment at the home counter, it was promptly redeemed, sometimes in gold or silver, but oftener with another bill on some other bank belonging to the syndicate. I personally knew some of these bankers. Some of them were freebooters without conscience and without shame. Under color of law, they robbed the settlers of their lands and improvements, and defied public opinion. Others put on a cloak of righteousness; they were leaders in the love-feasts and pillars in the church; and they also had their neighbors' lands and improvements. Their descendants are rich and respected to-day in the communities where their fathers plied their iniquitous trade; and these rule where their fathers robbed. As a clerk on the river, I had some experience in handling the wild-cat money. At Dunleith, before starting on the up-river trip, we were handed by the secretary of the company, a _Thompson's Bank Note Detector_, and with it a list of the bills that we might accept in payment for freight or passage. We were also given a list of those that we might not accept at all; and still another list upon which we might speculate, at values running from twenty-five to seventy-five per cent of their face denominations. Thus equipped we started upstream, and the trouble started with us. At McGregor we put off a lot of freight, and were tendered money. We consulted our lists and cast into outer darkness that which had upon it the anathema of Mr. Jones, the secretary. We accepted all on the list of the elect, and compromised upon enough more to balance our freight account. The agent at McGregor had a list of his own which partly coincided with ours but in general disagreed. In the meantime another boat of our line had arrived from up river, and we get from her clerk fifteen or twenty lists of bills which would be taken or rejected at as many landings above. This helps somewhat, as we see our way clear to get rid of some of our twenty-five per cent stuff at par in exchange for cord wood or stores on the upper river, and we sort our stock out into packages which are reported current at each landing. We also see an opportunity to swap at Dunleith some bills which are not current there at all, but which are taken at par at Prescott or Stillwater, for other bills which they do not want but which will be taken at the company's office at Dunleith in settlement of our trip. It required a long head to figure it out. Mine was long enough, but unfortunately it had the same dimensions both ways, and was not to be depended upon in these finer transactions. Mr. Hargus labored with the problem, studying lists until he came nigh to the point of insanity, with the result that when we "cashed in" on our return it was usually found that we had from five hundred to a thousand dollars that was not acceptable. This we kept, and the boat was debited with the amount on the company's books. On the next trip we would usually be able to work off some of this stuff. At the end of one season I recollect that we had some two thousand dollars, face estimate, of this paper on hand, which the treasurer would not accept, for the banks on which the bills were drawn had gone out of existence. The town-site industry was on the same plane of deception and robbery as the banking frauds, but it found its victims "back East", instead of close at hand. Being Easterners, who had been educated to suppose that integrity and honesty were the basis of all business confidence, and themselves practiced these old-fashioned virtues, they all too readily accepted the assurances of the land-sharks, and invested their money without seeing the property which was so glowingly described in the prospectuses sent out by the Western promoters. The result was, that they were "taken in and done for" by the hundreds of town-site sharks who were operating all along the river, between Dunleith and St. Paul. I shall refer to but one of which I had personal knowledge, and to another described to me by Captain Russell Blakeley. The city of Nininger, as delineated on the large and beautifully-engraved and printed maps issued by Ingenuous Doemly, was a well-built metropolis capable of containing ten thousand people. As delineated, it had a magnificent court house, this city being the county seat of Dakota County, Minnesota. Four or five church spires sprang a hundred feet each into the atmosphere. It had stores and warehouses, crowded with merchandise, and scores of drays and draymen were working with feverish energy to keep the levee clear of the freight being landed from half a dozen well-known steamboats belonging to the Minnesota Packet Company or the St. Louis & St. Paul Packet Company. An imposing brick structure with cut stone trimmings, four stories high, housed the plant of the Nininger _Daily Bugle_. This last-mentioned feature of the prospectus was the only one that had the remotest semblance of foundation in fact. There certainly was a _Daily Bugle_, issued once a week, or once in two or three weeks, depending upon the energy of the printer and his "devil", who jointly set the type, and the assiduity of the editors who furnished them with copy. This paper was printed upon the first power press that ever threw off a printed sheet in the Territory of Minnesota. It was a good press, and the paper printed upon it was a monument to the shrewdness and ingenuity of the honorable proprietor of the Nininger town-site. The sheet was filled with a wealth of local advertising--drygoods, groceries, hardware, millinery, shoe stores, blacksmith shops--every class of business found in a large and prosperous city, was represented in those columns. But every name and every business was fictitious, coined in the fertile brain of this chief of all promoters. It was enough to deceive the very elect--and it did. When the Eastern man read that there were six or eight lots, lying just west of Smith & Jones's drygoods store, on West Prairie Street, that could be had at a thousand dollars per lot if taken quickly, and that they were well worth twice that money on account of the advantageous situation, they were snapped up as a toad snaps flies on a summer day. The paper was filled with local reading matter, describing the rush at the opening of the latest emporium; that Brown had gone East to purchase his spring stock; that Mrs. Newbody entertained at her beautiful new residence on Park Avenue, and gave the names of fifty of her guests. The whole thing was the plan of a Napoleonic mind, being carried out to the minutest detail with painstaking care by a staff of able workers, with the result that the whole prairie for two miles back from the river was sold out at the rate of ten thousand dollars an acre or upwards, and that before the proprietor had himself perfected his legal rights to the land which he was thus retailing. Henry Lindergreen, the printer who did the mechanical work on the Nininger paper, was a chum of mine, we having set type in the same "alley" elsewhere, and that winter I went up to Nininger to help him out. The four-story brick block of the wood-cuts shrunk into a little frame building, the sides of which were made of inch boards set up on end and battened on the outside. Inside, it was further reinforced with tarred paper; and while I was there a pail of water ten feet from a red-hot stove, froze solid in a night, and the three printers had all they could do to feed the fire fast enough to keep themselves from freezing also, with the mercury down to forty degrees below zero. The editor who, in the absence of the promoter himself, in the East disposing of lots, was hired to improvise facts for the columns of this veracious sheet, lived in St. Paul, and sent his copy down to Hastings, as there was no postoffice at Nininger. If the editor or the proprietor had been found at Nininger in the following spring when the dupes began to appear, one or two of the jack oaks with which the city lots were plentifully clothed, would have borne a larger fruit than acorns. Even the printer who set the type, was forced to flee for his life. One of the boldest-faced swindles I ever heard of, was the so-called Rolling Stone colony. In the spring of 1852, some three or four hundred people, chiefly from New York city, came to seek their purchased lands in Rolling Stone. They brought with them beautiful maps and bird's-eye views of the place, showing a large greenhouse, lecture hall, and library. Each colonist was to have a house lot in town and a farm in the neighboring country. The colony had been formed by one William Haddock, and none of the members had the faintest shadow of experience in farming. Boarding steamers at Galena, they expected to be put off at the Rolling Stone levee, for the views represented large houses, a hotel, a big warehouse, and a fine dock. But the steamboat officers had never heard of such a place. Careful questioning, however, seemed to locate the site three miles above Wabasha Prairie, on land then belonging to the Sioux Indians. As they insisted on landing, they were put off at the log cabin of one John Johnson, the only white man within ten miles. They made sod houses for themselves, or dug shelter burrows in the river banks; sickness came; many died during the summer and autumn; and when winter set in the place was abandoned. The people suffered severely, and the story of Rolling Stone makes a sad chapter in the early history of Minnesota. While the craze was on, some made fortunes, while thousands of trusting men and women lost the savings of years. After the fever of speculation had burned itself out, the actual builders of the commonwealth came in and subdued the land. Nininger and Rolling Stone are still on the map, and that is about all there is of them--a name. La Crosse, Winona, St. Paul and Minneapolis have superseded them, and the population, wealth, and commerce of these are greater in reality than were the airy figments of the brain which they have supplanted. [Illustration: MCGREGOR, IOWA. Looking north, up the river.] Chapter XXIII _A Pioneer Steamboatman_ The same year and the same month in the year that witnessed the advent of the first steamboat on the Upper Mississippi, likewise witnessed the arrival in Galena of one who was destined to become the best known of all the upper river steamboatmen. In April, 1823, James Harris[G] accompanied by his son, Daniel Smith Harris, a lad of fifteen, left Cincinnati on the keel boat "Colonel Bumford", for the Le Fevre lead mines (now Galena), where they arrived June 20, 1823, after a laborious voyage down the Ohio and up the Mississippi. [G] Captain Daniel Smith Harris was born in the state of Ohio in 1808. He came with his parents to Galena, Ill., in 1823, where he attended the frontier schools, and worked in the lead mines until 1836, when he commenced his career as a steamboatman, which was developed until he should become known as the greatest of all the upper river steamboat owners and captains. In the year 1836, in company with his brother, R. Scribe Harris, who was a practical engineer, he built the steamer "Frontier," which he commanded that season. In 1837 the two brothers brought out the "Smelter," which was commanded by Daniel Smith Harris, Scribe Harris running as chief engineer. In 1838 they built the "Pre-Emption," which was also run by the two brothers. In 1839 they built the "Relief," and in 1840 the "Sutler," both of which he commanded. In 1841 they brought out the "Otter," which Captain Harris commanded until 1844, when the two brothers built the "War Eagle" (first), which he commanded until 1847. In 1848 he commanded the "Senator"; in 1849 the "Dr. Franklin No. 2"; in 1850 and 1851 the "Nominee"; in 1852 the "Luella," "New St. Paul" and "West Newton"; in 1853 the "West Newton"; 1854, 1855 and 1856 the "War Eagle" (second), which he built. (See picture of "War Eagle" on page 120.) In 1857 Captain Harris built the "Grey Eagle," the largest, fastest and finest boat on the upper river up to that time, costing $63,000. He commanded the "Grey Eagle" until 1861, when she was lost by striking the Rock Island Bridge, sinking in five minutes. Captain Harris then retired from the river, living in Galena until his death in 189-. As a young man he took part, as a Lieutenant of Volunteers, in the battle of Bad Axe, with the Indians under Chief Black Hawk. A word in passing, regarding the keel boat. Few of the men now living know from actual observation what manner of craft is suggested by the mere mention of the name. None of this generation have seen it. A canal boat comes as near it in model and build as any craft now afloat; and yet it was not a canal boat. In its day and generation it was the clipper of the Western river to which it was indigenous. Any sort of craft might go downstream; rafts, arks, broadhorns, and scows were all reliable downstream sailers, dependent only upon the flow of the current, which was eternally setting toward the sea. All of this sort of craft did go down, with every rise in the Ohio, in the early days of the nineteenth century, from every port and landing between Pittsburg and Cairo, to New Orleans. They were laden with adventurers, with pioneers, with settlers, or with produce of the farms already opened along the Ohio and its tributaries; corn, wheat, apples, live-stock--"hoop-poles and punkins", in the slang of the day--in fact anything of value to trade for the merchandise of civilization which found its _entrepôt_ at New Orleans from Europe or the Indies. The craft carrying this produce was itself a part of the stock in trade, and when unloaded was broken up and sold as lumber for the building of the city, or for export to Cuba or other West Indian ports. The problem was to get back to the Ohio with the cargo of merchandise bought with the produce carried as cargo on the down trip. The broad horns and arks were an impossibility as upstream craft, and thus it came about in the evolution of things required for specific purposes, that the keel boat came into being. This boat was built to go upstream as well as down. It was a well-modelled craft, sixty to eighty feet long, and fifteen to eighteen feet wide, sharp at both ends, and often with fine lines--clipper-built for passenger traffic. It had usually about four feet depth of hold. Its cargo box, as it was called, was about four feet higher, sometimes covered with a light curved deck; sometimes open, with a "gallows-frame" running the length of the hold, over which tarpaulins were drawn and fastened to the sides of the boat for the protection of the freight and passengers in stormy weather. At either end of the craft was a deck for eight or ten feet, the forward or forecastle deck having a windlass or capstan for pulling the boat off bars, or warping through swift water or over rapids. Along each side of the cargo box ran a narrow walk, about eighteen inches in width, with cleats nailed to the deck twenty-eight or thirty inches apart, to prevent the feet of the crew from slipping when poling upstream. Of the motive power of these boats, Captain H. M. Chittenden, U. S. A., in a recent work on the navigation of the Missouri River in early days, says: "For the purposes of propulsion the boat was equipped with nearly all the power appliances known to navigation, except steam. The cordelle was the main reliance. This consists of a line nearly a thousand feet long, fastened to the top of a mast which rose from the centre of the boat to the height of nearly thirty feet. The boat was pulled along with this line by men on shore. In order to hold the boat from swinging around the mast, the line was connected with the bow of the boat by means of a "bridle", a short auxiliary line fastened to a loop in the bow, and to a ring through which the cordelle was passed. The bridle prevented the boat from swinging under force of wind or current when the speed was not great enough to accomplish this purpose by means of the rudder. The object in having so long a line was to lessen the tendency to draw the boat toward the shore; and the object in having it fastened to the top of the mast was to keep it from dragging, and to enable it to clear the brush along the bank. It took from twenty to forty men to cordelle the keel boat along average stretches of the river [the Missouri], and the work was always one of great difficulty." For poling the men were provided with tough ash poles, eighteen or twenty feet long, with a wooden or iron shoe or socket to rest on the bottom of the river, and a crutch or knob for the shoulder. In propelling the boat, ten or a dozen men on each side thrust the foot of their poles into the bottom of the river, and with the other end against their shoulders, walked toward the stern of the boat, pushing it upstream at the same rate of speed with which they walked toward the stern. As each pair--one on each side of the boat--reached the stern, they quickly recovered their poles, leaped to the roof of the cargo box, and running forward jumped to the deck and replanted their poles for a new turn of duty. By this means an even speed was maintained, as in a crew of twenty there were always sixteen men applying motive power, while four others were returning to the bow for a new start. The writer, in his childhood, has stood for hours on the banks of the St. Joseph River, in Niles, Michigan, watching the crews of keel boats thus laboriously pushing their craft up the river from St. Joseph, on the lake, to Niles, South Bend, and Mishawaka. They were afterward to float back, laden with flour in barrels, potatoes and apples in sacks, and all the miscellaneous merchandise of the farm, destined for Detroit, Buffalo, and the East, by way of the Great Lakes. In addition to cordelling, as described above, the long line was also used in warping the boat around difficult places where the men could not follow the bank. This was accomplished by carrying the line out ahead in the skiff as far as possible or convenient, and making it fast to trees or rocks. The men on the boat then hauled on the line, pulling the boat up until it reached the object to which the line was attached. The boat was then moored to the bank, or held with the poles until the line was again carried ahead and made fast, when the process was repeated. In this manner the greatest of up-river steamboatmen, Captain Daniel Smith Harris, prosecuted his first voyage from Cincinnati to Galena, in the year 1823. It probably required no more than four or five days to run down the Ohio, on the spring flood, to Cairo; from Cairo to Galena required two months of cordelling, poling, and warping. About the time the keel boat "Colonel Bumford" was passing St. Louis, the steamer "Virginia" departed for the upper river with a load of supplies for the United States military post at Fort Snelling. She had among her passengers Major John Biddle and Captain Joseph P. Russell, U. S. A., and Laurence Talliaferro, United States Indian Agent for the Territory of Minnesota. The "Virginia" arrived at Fort Snelling May 10, 1823, the first boat propelled by steam to breast the waters of the upper Mississippi. She was received with a salute of cannon from the fort, and carried fear and consternation to the Indians, who watched the smoke rolling from her chimney, the exhaust steam shooting from her escape pipe with a noise that terrified them. The "Virginia" was scarcely longer than the largest keel boat, being about a hundred and twenty feet long, and twenty-two feet beam. She had no upper cabin, the accommodations for the passengers being in the hold, in the stern of the boat, with the cargo-box covering so common to the keel boats of which she herself was but an evolution. What did the young steamboatman see on his voyage from Cairo to Galena in 1823? In his later years, in speaking of this trip, he said that where Cairo now stands there was but one log building, a warehouse for the accommodation of keel-boat navigators of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. Cape Girardeau, St. Genevieve, and Herculaneum were small settlements averaging a dozen families each. St. Louis, which was built almost entirely of frame buildings, had a population of about five thousand. The levee was a ledge of rocks, with scarcely a fit landing place on the whole frontage. Alton, Clarksville, and Louisiana were minor settlements. What is now Quincy consisted of one log cabin only, which was built and occupied by John Woods, who afterwards became lieutenant-governor of the State of Illinois, and acting governor. This intrepid pioneer was "batching it", being industriously engaged in clearing a piece of land for farming purposes. The only settler at Hannibal was one John S. Miller, a blacksmith, who removed to Galena in the autumn of 1823. In later years, Hannibal was to claim the honor of being the birthplace of "Mark Twain", the historian of the lower Mississippi pilot clans. The last farm house between St. Genevieve and Galena was located at Cottonwood Prairie (now Canton), and was occupied by one Captain White, who was prominently identified with the early development of the Northwest. There was a government garrison at Keokuk, which was then known as Fort Edwards, and another at Fort Armstrong, now Rock Island. The settlement at Galena consisted of about a dozen log cabins, a few frame shanties, and a smelting furnace. If he were looking only for the evidence of an advancing civilization, the above probably covers about all he saw on his trip. Other things he saw, however. The great river, flowing in its pristine glory, "unvexed to the sea"; islands, set like emeralds in the tawny flood, the trees and bushes taking on their summer dress of green in the warm May sunshine; prairies stretching away in boundless beauty, limited only by his powers of vision. Later, as his craft stemmed the flood and advanced up the river, he saw the hills beginning to encroach upon the valley of the river, narrowing his view; later, the crags and bastions of the bluffs of the upper river, beetling over the very channel itself, and lending an added grandeur to the simple beauty of the banks already passed. His unaccustomed eyes saw the wickyups and tepees of the Indians scattered among the islands and on the lowlands, the hunters of the tribe exchanging the firelock for the spear and net as they sought to reap the water for its harvest of returning fish. It was all new to the young traveller, who was later to become the best known steamboatman of the upper river, the commander of a greater number of different steamboats than any of his compeers, and who was to know the river, in all its meanderings and in all its moods, better than any other who ever sailed it--Daniel Smith Harris, of Galena, Illinois. [Illustration: ALTON, ILLINOIS. Looking down the river.] Chapter XXIV _A Versatile Commander; Wreck of the "Equator"_ While some men were to be found on the Mississippi in the sixties who did not hesitate to avow themselves religious, and whose lives bore witness that they were indeed Christians, the combination of a Methodist preacher and a steamboat captain was one so incongruous that it was unique, and so far as I know, without a parallel on the river. There appeared to be no great incompatibility between the two callings, however, as they were represented in the person of Captain Asa B. Green. He was a good commander, as I had personal opportunity of observing at the time of the incident described in this chapter; and a few years later, when the great drama of the Civil War was on, I again had an opportunity to observe Captain Green in his alternate rôle of minister of the gospel, he having been appointed chaplain of the Thirtieth Wisconsin Infantry in which I served as a private soldier. In this capacity he showed rare good sense and practical wisdom. He preached to the boys when a favorable opportunity offered on a Sunday, when there was not too much else going on; but his sermons were short, and as practical as was the man himself. Of his conversion, or early life, on the river as a missionary, little seemed to be known by any one whom I ever met. He ran the Chippewa in the early days, during the summer months, and in the winter did missionary work among the lumbermen, following them to their camps in the woods, preaching and ministering to them; not as an alien, and in an academic fashion, but as one "to the manner born". It is likely that his young manhood was passed on the river and in the lumber camps, and when he was converted his thoughts turned naturally to the needs of these particular classes, for none knew better than he just how great their needs were. Of how or where he was ordained to preach I know nothing; but as he was in good standing with the Methodist conference there is no question as to the regularity of his commission. His master's certificate authorizing him to command a steamboat certified to his standing as a river man. Probably he divided his time between commanding a steamboat and preaching the gospel, two callings so dissimilar, because the river work was quite remunerative, financially, while the other was quite the reverse. It probably took all the money he earned during the summer to support himself and his philanthropies during the winter. If his expenditures among the boys in the lumber camps were as free-handed as were his gifts to poor, sick, wounded, and homesick soldiers during his service with the Thirtieth Wisconsin during the war, it would easily require the seven months' pay of a river captain to sustain the other five months' liberality of the quondam preacher. Certain it is, that after three years' service as chaplain he came out as poor as he went in--in money. If the respect and high regard of his brother officers were worth anything; or better yet, if the love and gratitude of hundreds of plain boys in blue, privates in the ranks, might be counted as wealth, then Captain Green was rich indeed. And that was what he did count as real wealth. To be hugged by one of his "boys" at a Grand Army reunion, one whom he had nursed back to life in an army hospital by his optimistic cheerfulness and Christian hope and comfort--was to him better than gold or silver. He has gone to his reward; and whether he now is telling the "old, old story" to other men in other spheres, or pacing the deck of a spectre steamboat on the River of Life--whichever may be his work--beyond a peradventure he is doing that work well. In the spring of 1858, in April, in his capacity as captain, Asa B. Green was commanding the steamer "Equator". She was a stern-wheel boat of about a hundred and twenty tons, plying on the St. Croix between Prescott and St. Croix Falls. The lake opened early that season, but the opening was followed by cold and stormy weather, with high winds. There was some sort of celebration at Stillwater, and as was customary in those days an excursion was organized at Hastings and Prescott to attend the "blow-out". About three hundred people crowded the little steamer, men, women, and children. She started off up the lake in the morning, fighting her way against a high wind right out of the north. Charley Jewell was pilot, the writer was "cub", John Lay was chief engineer. I have forgotten the name of the mate, but whatever may have been his name or nationality, he was the man for the place. He was every inch a man, as was the captain on the roof, and so in fact was every officer on the boat. Everything went well until we had cleared Catfish bar, at Afton. From there to Stillwater is about twelve miles, due north. The wind had full sweep the whole length of this reach. The lake is two and a half miles wide just above Catfish bar. The sweep of the wind had raised a great sea, and the heavily-laden boat crawled ahead into the teeth of the blizzard--for it began to snow as well as blow. We had progressed very slowly, under an extra head of steam, for about three miles above the bar, when the port "rock-shaft", or eccentric rod, broke with a snap, and the wheel stopped instantly; in fact, John Lay had his hand on the throttle wheel when the rod broke, and in an instant had shut off steam to save his cylinders. As soon as the wheel stopped the boat fell off into the trough of the sea. The first surge caught her on the quarter, before she had fully exposed her broadside, but it rolled her lee guards under water, and made every joint in her upper works creak and groan. The second wave struck her full broadside on. The tables had just been set for dinner. As the boat rolled down, under stress of wind and wave, the tables were thrown to leeward with a crash of broken glass and china that seemed to be the end of all things with the "Equator". Women and children screamed, and many women fainted. Men turned white, and some went wild, scrambling and fighting for life preservers. Several persons--they could hardly be called men--had two, and even three, strapped about their bodies, utterly ignoring the women and children in their abjectly selfish panic. The occasion brought out all the human nature there was in the crowd, and some that was somewhat baser than human. As a whole, however, the men behaved well, and set about doing what they could to insure the safety of the helpless ones before providing for their own safety. It has always been a satisfaction to me that I had this opportunity, while a boy, to witness and take part in an accident which, while it did not result in the loss of a single life, had every element of great danger, and the imminent probability of the loss of hundreds of lives. It was an object lesson in what constituted manhood, self-reliant courage, official faithfulness, and the prompt application of ready expedients for the salvation of the boat. When the crash came, Mr. Lay called up through the speaking-tube, stating the nature and extent of the accident. Mr. Jewell reported it to Captain Green, who ordered him to go to the cabin and attempt to allay the fright of the passengers, and to prevent a panic. As he started, Jewell ordered me to remain in the pilot house and listen for calls from the engine-room. In the meantime the deck hands, or many of them, were in a panic, some of them on their knees on the forecastle, making strong vows of religious reformation should they come safe to land. This was a commendable attitude, both of body and spirit, had there been nothing else to do. In this particular province it would seem that much might have been expected from a captain who was also a preacher. On the contrary his manner of meeting the exigency was decidedly and profoundly out of drawing with preconceived notions of what might be expected from such a combination. An old man from Prescott, the richest man in town, and also one of the meanest, nearly seventy years old, crept up the companion way to the upper deck, and clasping Captain Green about the legs cried: "Save me! for God's sake save me! and I will give you a thousand dollars"! "Get away you d----d cowardly old cur. Let go of me and get down below or I will throw you overboard", was Captain Green's exhortation as he yanked him to his feet by his collar and kicked him to the stairway. Both the language and the action were uncanonical in the extreme; but then, he was acting for the time in his capacity as captain, and not as preacher. I didn't laugh at the time, for I was doing some thinking on my own hook about the salvation business; and my estimate of the chances for getting to the shore, two miles away, in that wind and sea, was not flattering. I have laughed many times since, however, and wondered what the old miser thought of the orthodoxy of Chaplain Green when he answered his prayer. The deck hands also met with a surprise from the mate, and that in less than a minute. Men think fast in such an emergency, especially those schooled amid dangers and quickened in mind and body by recurring calls for prompt action. A dozen seas had not struck the "Equator" before the mate was on the forecastle, driving the panic-stricken deck hands to work. Dropping the two long spars to the deck, with the assistance of the carpenter and such men as had gathered their wits together, he lashed them firmly together at each end. Then bending on a strong piece of line extending from end to end, and doubled, he made fast the main hawser, or snubbing line, to the middle, or bight of the rope attached to the spars, and then launched the whole overboard, making a "sea-anchor" that soon brought the bow of the vessel head to sea, and eased the racking roll of the hull, steadying the craft so that there was little further danger of her sinking. In the ten or fifteen minutes that it had taken to get the drag built and overboard, the waves had swept over the lower deck and into the hold, until there was a foot of water weighing her down, which the bilge pumps operated by the "doctor" were unable to throw out as fast as it came in. Had it continued to gain for fifteen minutes longer, the boat would have gone to the bottom with all on board. The drag saved the vessel; the coolness and quickness of the mate and carpenter were the salvation of the steamer and its great load of people. In the meantime other incidents were occurring, that made a lasting impression upon my mind. I did not witness them myself, but I learned of them afterwards. All this time I stood at the side of the useless wheel in the pilot house, listening for sounds from the engine-room. Mr. Lay was doing all that was possible to remedy the break. He cut off the steam from the useless cylinder, and with his assistant and the firemen, was at work disconnecting the pitman, with the intent to try to work the wheel with one cylinder, which would have been an impossibility in that sea. In fact it would have been impossible under any circumstances, for the large wheel of a stern-wheel boat is built to be operated by two engines; there is not power enough in either one alone to more than turn it over, let alone driving the steamboat. When the crash came, Engineer Lay's wife, who was on board as a passenger, ran immediately to the engine-room to be with her husband when the worst should come. He kissed her as she came, and said: "There's a dear, brave, little woman. Run back to the cabin and encourage the other women. I must work. Good-bye". And the "little woman"--for she was a little woman, and a brave little woman, also--without another word gave her husband a good-bye kiss, and wiping away the tears, went back to the cabin and did more than all the others to reassure the frightened, fainting women and little children--the very antithesis of the craven old usurer who had crept on his knees begging for a little longer lease of a worthless life. It took an hour or more to drift slowly, stern first, diagonally across and down the lake to the shore above Glenmont, on the Wisconsin side, where she struck and swung broadside onto the beach. The men carried the women ashore through four feet of water, and in another hour the cabin was blown entirely off the sunken hull, and the boat was a total wreck. Her bones are there to-day, a striking attestation of the power of wind and wave, even upon so small a body of water as Lake St. Croix. Big fires were built from the wreckage to warm the wet and benumbed people. Runners were sent to nearby farm houses for teams, as well as to Hudson, seven or eight miles way. Many of the men walked home to Prescott and Hastings. Captain Green, who owned the boat, stayed with his crew to save what he could from the wreck, in which he lost his all; but he had only words of thanksgiving that not a life had been lost while under his charge. Through it he was cool and cheerful, devoting himself to reassuring his passengers, as soon as the drag was in place, and giving orders for getting the women and children ashore as soon as the boat should strike. His only deviation from perfect equipoise was exhibited in his treatment of the old man, a notoriously mean, and exacting money-lender, with whom he had no sympathy at any time, and no patience at a time like this. Chapter XXV _A Stray Nobleman_ Of the many men whom it was my good fortune to meet while on the river as a boy, or as a young man, there was none who came nearer to filling the bill as a nobleman than Robert C. Eden, whose memory suggests the title of this chapter. Just what constitutes a nobleman in the college of heraldry, I am not qualified to assert. "Bob" Eden, as his friends fondly called him--Captain Eden, as he was known on the river, or Major Eden as he was better known in the closing days of the War of Secession--was the son of an English baronet. There were several other sons who had had the luck to be born ahead of "Bob", and his chance for attaining to the rank and title of baronet was therefore extremely slim. However, his father was able to send him to Oxford, from which ancient seat of learning he was graduated with honors. As a younger son he was set apart for the ministry, where he finally landed after sowing his wild oats, which he did in a gentlemanly and temperate manner that comported well with the profession for which he was destined, all his studies having been along theological lines. The _wanderlust_ was in his blood, however, and he declined taking holy orders until he had seen something of the unholy world outside. Accordingly he took the portion due him, or which his father gave him, and departed for Canada. Not finding things just to his taste in that British appanage, possibly not rapid enough for a divinity student, he promptly crossed the line and began making himself into a Yankee, in all except citizenship. In his wanderings he finally reached Oshkosh, attracted no doubt by the euphony of the name, which has made the little "saw dust city of the Fox" one of the best known towns, by title, in the world. If there was any one place more than another calculated to educate and instruct an embryo clergyman in the ways of the world, and a particularly wicked world at that, it was Oshkosh before the war. That he saw some of the "fun" which the boys enjoyed in those days was evidenced by the fund of stories relating to that place and that era, which he had in stock in later years. I do not know how long he remained there on his first visit. When I made his acquaintance he was journeying up the river by easy stages on a little side-wheel steamer, having both wheels on a single shaft--a type of steamboat which I had known on the St. Joseph River in Michigan, but which was not common on the Mississippi. This class was used on the Fox and Wolf Rivers, and on Lake Winnebago. Captain Eden had bought this little steamboat, of perhaps eighty tons burden, for the purpose of exploring at his leisure the upper Mississippi and its tributaries. He had sailed up the Fox River to Portage, through the canal to the Wisconsin, and down that stream to the Mississippi, and had reached Prescott, where I met him. He wanted to go up the St. Croix to the Falls, stopping at all the towns, and at places where there were no towns, at his own sweet will. First-class pilots were getting six hundred dollars a month wages in those days. Eden's boat was not worth two months' pay of such a pilot, and he was on the lookout for a cheaper man when he found me. His crew consisted of himself, acting in the capacity of captain and first and second mates; an engineer and fireman in one person; a deck hand, and a cook. The cook is named last, but he was by no means the least personage aboard the "Enterprise". As this was a sort of holiday excursion, the cook was about the most important official about the boat. He was fully up in his business, and could cook all kinds of game and fish to perfection, as well as the ordinary viands of civilization. It was a privilege to be catered to by this master of his art. The captain had under him, therefore, three men, in addition to the pilot for temporary service from time to time as he journeyed up the river. The "Enterprise" was not a speedy boat. She could make four or five miles an hour upstream if the current was not too strong, and double that downstream if the current was strong enough. She had no upper cabin answering to the "boiler deck" of the river boats--only a little box of a pilot house on the roof, big enough to contain a little wheel and the man who turned it. This wheel was only about a third the diameter of a real steamboat wheel, and instead of wheel-ropes it had chains, large enough for a man-of-war. When the wheel was put hard up or hard down, the chains responded with a series of groans and squeaks not unmusical, but new and novel to one used only to the noiseless operation of the well-oiled wheel-ropes of the river steamers. The chains were part of the fire-proof outfit required by regulations on the great lakes. The "Enterprise" was from Winnebago. To pull the little three-foot wheel hard down, and hold the stumpy little steamer up to a reef from which she wanted to run away, required the expenditure of as much muscle as was demanded to cramp a four-hundred ton steamer over the same bar by the use of the larger wheel and easier-running wheel-ropes. The cabin of the "Enterprise" was all aft of the paddle-boxes. It was so divided as to afford sleeping quarters for the crew at the forward part, next the engine, while Captain Eden occupied the after part, which was fitted up as a boudoir, with a little side niche, in which he slept. His pointer dog and his retriever also slept in the same niche. There was a fine library in the cabin--not a great number of books, but the best books, some English, some French, some German, and several Greek and Latin, for Captain Eden was a polyglot in his reading. There was also a gun rack with several rifles, three or four shot guns of big and little calibre, and a pair of duelling pistols. Likewise there were rods, reels, landing nets, and fly-hooks without number, rubber boots and mackintoshes for rough weather, and all the paraphernalia of a gentleman sportsman. It was evident at a glance that Captain Eden was not in financial straits, and it was equally evident that he was not steamboating for profit. As I knew the St. Croix River well enough to navigate it with a far larger boat than Captain Eden's, and in addition knew also a great deal more about the haunts of bear, deer, prairie chickens, brook trout, and indeed all species of fish inhabiting the waters of the Mississippi River and its tributaries; and further, had a speaking and dining acquaintance with sundry red men, both Sioux and Chippewa, with whom Captain Eden also wished to become acquainted for purposes of original investigation and study, I was deemed a valuable acquisition. On my side a reasonable salary as pilot, with a free run of the guns, fishing tackle, and books was an attractive presentation of the case, and it took but a short time to arrange the details of an engagement. A day's work on this model craft consisted in steering the boat five or six miles up or down the river or lake to the most inviting hunting or fishing grounds, or to the vicinity of an Indian camp, finding a sheltered place in which to tie up, and then taking a tramp of ten or a dozen miles after deer, bear, or prairie chickens, or a walk of three or four miles up some favorite trout stream, and fishing back to the boat. In that day bear and deer abounded within a very few miles of Prescott, Hudson, or other points. Indeed, as late as 1876 bears were quite common about River Falls, one or two having come right into the village to pick up young pigs and lambs; and deer were also numerous within a few miles of the same place. This in itself was an ideal occupation. But added to it was the privilege of an intimate association with, and the conversation of, a man from across the ocean, whose father was a baronet, who had himself been schooled in Oxford, who had lived in London, and Paris, and Berlin, and had seen men and things of whom and which I had read in books, but which were all very far removed from the backwoods farm of Michigan where I was born, and from the still wilder surroundings of the upper Mississippi in the middle fifties. I had been a persistent reader from the time I had learned my letters, and was now seventeen years old. The volumes to which I had had access were principally school books, with here and there a history or biography, and an occasional novel. At one period only, while working in the printing office, had I the run of a well-chosen library belonging to the lawyer-editor. Here, however, was something better than books. I could question this man on points that the books might have passed over, and he could answer. His mind was quick, his powers of observation trained, his brain well stored with the lore of books--history, poetry, eloquence, and in addition he had seen much of the world which lay so far beyond and outside the life of a Western-bred country lad. It was better than any school I had ever attended, and he was a rare teacher. He didn't realize that he was teaching, but I did. It was not a case of absorption alone on my part, however. In my own field I had much to communicate--the lore of woods and streams, the ways of the red men, the moods and legends of the Great River, matters which seemed of little value to me, but which this stranger from an older civilization was as solicitous to hear about as I was to listen to the stories of his larger life. While I deemed myself fortunate indeed in making the acquaintance of this cosmopolitan man of the world, I was pleased to know that there were some things that I knew better than my more widely-travelled employer. One of these things, insignificant in itself, was the fact that the pilot could catch ten trout to the captain's one, after giving him all possible advantages of first chances at good "holes", and likely riffles, and the first chance in wading ahead down the stream. This was for a long time one of the mysteries to the captain--why a trout would not bite at one man's hook just as readily as at another's, when they were exactly alike as to lures, whether natural or artificial. The fact remains that there is a difference in the manner in which you approach them with the temptation; until you get the "hang of the thing" you will not catch the trout that the more astute disciple of the good Walton catches out of the same stream, in the same hour. Thrown together as we both were on board the boat and on these excursions, the relation of employer and servant was soon forgotten, and the closer and more intimate relation of friend to friend was established, a relation which lasted as long as Captain Eden remained in America. Two months were passed in idling along the St. Croix, in hunting, fishing, exploring, studying the beautiful, if not grand, rock formations of the Dalles, and in visiting the Indians in their haunts around Wood Lake and the upper St. Croix. Then Captain Eden turned the prow of his little steamboat toward home, descending the river to Prairie du Chien, ascending the Wisconsin, portaging through the canal to the Fox, and thence steaming down to Oshkosh. Disposing of his steamboat there, he entered the office of the _Northwestern_ newspaper, first as a reporter and later as an editorial writer. Not many suburban newspapers fifty years ago could boast of an Oxonian among their editorial writers. But very few people outside of his immediate friends ever knew that the quiet man who represented the _Northwestern_ was either an Oxonian or the son of an English baronet. In the autumn of 1863 the men of the North were gathering themselves together for the mightiest struggle of modern times--the battle summer of 1864. In Wisconsin, the Thirty-seventh Regiment of Infantry was in process of enrollment, and the whilom Englishman was one of those engaged in recruiting for this regiment, putting his money as well as his time into the work. Captain Eden was so successful in enlisting men for the service, that when the regiment was organized he was commissioned as major. In the strenuous days immediately following the battle of Cold Harbor the writer again met his old employer. The difference in rank between the enlisted man and the commissioned officer was no bar to the recognition of the former friendship existing between the steamboat captain and his pilot--friendship broadened and strengthened by companionship in woods and along streams by mutual interest and respect. Major Robert C. Eden, or "Bob" Eden, as he was called at the front, was a model officer. His family had for generations been furnishing officers for the British army, and the fighting blood ran in his veins. His regiment was in the hottest of the fight at the Petersburg mine disaster, and he was at the head of his men. Through all the long siege following the first repulse, from June, 1864, until April, 1865, constantly under fire, he proved the metal that was in his composition. When he left England to seek his fortune, he was engaged to a Scotch lassie from one of the old families of the borderland. After a summer's experience of Yankee warfare, pitted against the "Johnnies" under Lee, Longstreet, Gordon, and Wise--men of equal courage, tenacity, and fighting ability--"Bob" concluded that another summer of the same sort as the last might prove too much for him, and that he might lose the number of his mess, as hundreds of his comrades had in the summer just closed. If he hoped or wished to leave a widow when he was called, he had better clinch the contract at once. And so he did. His fiancée, who also came of fighting stock, promptly responded to the challenge and came overseas to meet her hero. They were married across a stump in the rear of Fort Haskell (Fort Hell, the boys called it, as opposed to Fort Damnation, immediately opposite, in the Confederate line of works). Chaplain Hawes read the full Church of England service for the occasion, the regiment formed in hollow square about them, and the brigade band played the wedding march, while an occasional shell from the Confederate works sang overhead. Major-General O. B. Wilcox, commanding the division, gave away the bride, and all went merry despite the warlike surroundings. After the war, Major Eden returned to Oshkosh and resumed his editorial labors, in which he persisted for several years. Finally the home hunger came upon him, or perhaps more strongly upon his wife. The wild Western society of the swiftest town of its size in the state was not so much to her liking as that of the slower but more refined surroundings of the land of her birth. Severing all ties, business and otherwise, they returned to England. Once there the influence of English kin and early associations was too strong to permit of his return to Yankee land, and Major "Bob" assumed the canonical robes which had so long awaited his broad shoulders. "And now, instead of mounting barbéd steeds To fright the souls of fearful adversaries", he ministers at the altar of the Prince of Peace, the calling toward which his early education tended. His excursion into the wilds of the Northwest, his steamboat trip up the Great River, his experience as the editor of a frontier newspaper, and his service in an alien army--all must have had an influence in broadening his view and enriching his preaching. One incident which occurred in our rambles was somewhat amusing. We had tied up in the mouth of the Kinnickinnic River, and had walked up the stream some eight or ten miles to the little village of River Falls, where I was very well acquainted, and where the trout fishing was excellent. It had been Eden's request that I should introduce him simply as Captain Eden, without going into any particulars of parentage, education, or nationality. As he wore a suit of Scotch tweeds somewhat the worse for wear from numerous excursions after deer, prairie chickens, and trout, there was nothing suggestive of the Oxonian about him. In River Falls lived the only really educated man of that locality--a graduate from Yale, both in law and divinity. We called upon him and while discussing the country, its beauty, its game, and its fishing, Captain Eden was toying with a book of Greek tragedies, that lay open on the table. His apparent interest in the strange characters in which the book was printed tempted the scholar to remark, possibly with a slightly ironical inflection: "I presume you read Greek on the river, Captain?" "Oh, yes", was Captain Eden's response, "I am very fond of the Greek tragedies, and I have read a good deal to keep in practice. I like this passage that you were reading when we came in." Taking the book, Captain Eden read in a beautifully modulated voice, and with probably a perfect accent, the passage which the scholar had marked, and which he had been reading when we called. I say, "probably perfect accent". I had never seen a printed page of Greek before, much less had I ever heard it read as fluently as I could read English. The _amende_ which the scholar instantly made, and the praises which he bestowed on the marine prodigy who captained a little steamboat on the river, wore rough clothes, and read Greek like a native, convinced me that his ministerial preparation had been laid upon solid foundations, and that his accent was above criticism, out in that country at least. It was during this visit to River Falls that Captain Eden made the acquaintance of Ellsworth Burnett, another nobleman, born among the hills of Vermont, at whose farm we were guests while loading our baskets with trout from the south fork of the Kinnickinnic, which flowed through his farm and past his door. The friendship thus begun undoubtedly led to Eden's going into the army, for Burnett was largely instrumental in raising one of the companies of the regiment in which Major Eden was commissioned, himself going out as a captain, and returning at the close of the war as major. [Illustration: RED WING, MINNESOTA. Showing Barn Bluff in the background, with a glimpse of the river on the left.] Chapter XXVI _In War Time_ In the early spring of 1861 the "Fanny Harris" was chartered by the United States government to go to Fort Ridgeley, up the Minnesota River, and bring down the battery of light artillery stationed at that post, known as the Sherman Battery, Major T. W. Sherman having been in command long enough to have conferred his name upon the organization, and by that it was known at the time of which I write. It is three hundred miles from St. Paul to Fort Ridgeley by the river; as a crow flies, the distance is about half of that. A little more than one year after our visit there was business at and near the fort for many crows--the gruesome occupation of picking the bones of a thousand white people (men, women, and children) murdered by the crafty Sioux, who saw in the withdrawal of the troops an opportunity to avenge all their wrongs, real or imaginary, and to regain the lands which had been sold under treaty, or which had been stolen from them by the fast encroaching white population of the state. The Minnesota River is the worst twisted water course in the West. No other affluent of the Mississippi can show as many bends to the mile throughout its course. It is a series of curves from start to finish, the river squirming its way through an alluvial prairie from Beaver Falls, the head of navigation, to Mendota at its mouth. Up this crooked stream it was the problem to force the largest boat that had ever navigated it, and a stern-wheeler at that. At the time the trip was made, there was a nineteen-foot rise in the river, resulting from the melting of the snow after an exceptionally hard winter. This precluded any danger of touching bottom anywhere, but it added ten fold to the difficulties of navigating a two hundred-foot steamboat around the short bends for the reason that the water did not follow the regular channel, but cut right across bends and points, so that most of the time the current was setting squarely across the river, catching the steamer broadside on, and driving her into the woods, and when there holding her as in a vise. Being a stern-wheeler it was impossible, by going ahead on one wheel and backing on the other, as would have been done by a side-wheeler, to keep her head clear of the bank. All this work had to be done by the men at the wheel, and they very soon found their work cut out for them, in handling the boat by the steering wheel and rudders alone. We had a Minnesota River pilot on board to assist our men in steering; it was an impossibility to lose one's self, so that his services were confined almost exclusively to steering, and not to piloting, in its true sense. We also had an army officer from Fort Snelling on board, to see that all possible speed was made. His orders were to "push her through" at whatever cost, regardless of damage. The boat was coaled at St. Paul for the round trip, for the woodyards were all under water, and the cord wood was adrift on its way to St. Louis, derelict. From the time we entered the river at Fort Snelling, two men were at the wheel all the time. I was sent to the engine-room, my experience as a "cub" engineer rendering my services there of more importance for the time being than in the pilot house. I stood at one engine all day, while one of the firemen detailed for the purpose stood at the other, to "ship up", to back, or come ahead. There were no unnecessary bells rung. If we were going ahead and the stopping bell rang, followed by the backing bell we threw the rods on to their "hooks", and the engineer gave her full steam astern. This was usually followed by a crash forward, as the boat was thrown broadside, with almost full speed ahead, into the woods, after having struck one of the cross currents either unguardedly, or else one which was too strong in any case for the wheelsmen to meet and overcome by the rudder alone. If it chanced that the bank was overhung by trees, the forward cabin lost an additional portion of its ornamentation. In nearly every such instance it was necessary to get the yawl overboard, and with four men at the oars and a steersman sculling astern, pull to the opposite side of the river and get a line fast to a tree. The line was then taken to the steam capstan and the boat would be hauled out of a position from which it would have been impossible to release her by the engines and wheel alone. This work was kept up from daylight until dark, and when the four men came down from the pilot house they were apt to be so exhausted that they could scarcely stand. The boat tied up where night overtook her. In the engine-room, as soon as the day's run was ended, all hands set to work--engineers, "strikers" and firemen--to replace the lost and broken wheel-arms and buckets. This was a hard and dangerous job, for the water ran a raging torrent, six or eight miles an hour, and the nights were dark and rainy. It was precarious business, this getting out on the fantails, with only the dim light of half a dozen lanterns, unscrewing refractory nuts and bolts with a big monkey-wrench, and in the meantime holding on by one's legs only, over such a mill tail. Everybody engaged in this work understood fully that if he ever fell into the water it was the end of all things to him, for he would have been swept away in the darkness and drowned in a minute. There was no dry land for him to reach in any direction, the river sweeping across the country five or ten feet deep in every direction. It was usually far past midnight when the temporary and necessary repairs were completed, and then the engine-room force "turned in" to get three or four hours sleep before beginning another day as full of work and danger as the preceding. All this time the army man either stood on the roof with the captain, dodging falling spars, chimneys, or limbs of trees, or at the wheel with the pilots, or paced the engine-room, and urged speed, speed, speed. "The United States will put a new cabin on your boat. Never mind that. Keep your wheel turning and your machinery in working order. We must have troops in Washington at once, or there will be no United States." It is fair to say that every man on the boat worked as though his life depended upon his exertions. Whatever may have been their political sympathies, there was nothing on the surface to indicate other than the determination to get that battery to La Crosse in the shortest possible time. That army officer was the epitome of concentrated energy. He was a captain and quartermaster, and representing the United States, was practically supreme on board. He had his limitations as a steamboatman, but thanks to the splendid equipment which his government had given him at West Point, coupled with the experience he had gained during many years' service in the West in moving troops, Indians, and supplies by steamboat, he had a pretty good idea of what needed to be done, and could judge very clearly whether the men in charge were competent, and were doing things in the right way and to the best advantage. Under ordinary circumstances such a close censorship of the officers and crew would not have been maintained, nor would it have been tolerated if suggested. But at this time everything was at white heat. Fort Sumter had fallen. Men were stirred as never before in this country, and officers of the regular army particularly, who knew better than any others the gravity of the impending conflict, were keyed up to the highest tension by the responsibility placed upon them. On the other hand the officers of our boat were likewise burdened with the responsibility of safely taking a big vessel hundreds of miles up a narrow and crooked river, just now covered with floating drift of every description, with undermined trees falling at every mile. They were spurred on by the thought that the difference of a day, or even of a few hours, might determine the loss of the nation's capital. Under these circumstances the insistence of the army man was passed by as a matter of course. Near Belle Plaine a council was called to decide whether an attempt should be made to force a passage through the thin strip of timber that fringed the river bank. If successful, this would permit of sailing the boat a straight course for ten miles across a submerged prairie, thus cutting off twenty miles of crooked and arduous navigation. The Minnesota River pilot was sure that we would meet with no obstacles after passing the fringe of timber--not a house, barn, or haystack, as all that somewhat unusual class of obstructions to a steamboat had been carried away by the great flood. After discussing the plan in all its bearings, it was decided to try it as soon as a narrow and weak place could be found in the timber belt. Such a place, where the willows and cottonwoods were the thinnest and smallest in diameter, was chosen for the attempt. The boat, by reason of its length, could not be pointed straight at the "hurdle", as the pilots facetiously dubbed it, but a quartering cut was decided upon. The jack staff had long ago been carried away; the spars and derricks were housed below, and a large portion of the forward roof was already missing. It was decided, therefore, that a little more banging would count for nothing. Everybody was cautioned to stand clear of the guards, and look out for himself. A big head of steam was accumulated, and then with two men at the wheel and everybody hanging on, the "Fanny Harris" was pointed at the opposite shore, with its lining of woods, and the throttle thrown wide open. She jumped across the river in a minute and dove into the young timber, crushing trees six inches in diameter flat on either side; the water-soaked, friable soil affording no secure holding ground for the roots, which added greatly to our chances of success. The boat plunged through all right, with little damage, until the wheel came in over the bank. Then there was music. Many of the trees were only bent out of perpendicular, and when the hull passed clear these trees rebounded to more or less perpendicular positions--enough so as to get into the wheel and very nearly strip it of its buckets, together with a dozen of the wheel-arms. The pilots heard the crash and rang to stop. The engineers knew more about the damage than the pilots, but would not have stopped the engine of their own accord had the whole stern of the boat gone with it. It wasn't their business to stop without orders, and they knew their business. When the wheel stopped turning, the boat stopped. The problem then was, to get the boat through the remaining hundred feet or more. This was done by carrying the big anchor ahead, and taking the cable to the steam capstan. The boat was dragged "out of the woods", and all hands turned to replace the smashed buckets. As soon as they were in place we steamed gaily up the current, over the prairie, clean-swept of fences, stacks, and barns, only a few isolated houses, built on the higher knolls, having escaped the flood. At the upper end of the prairie a weak place was found, and with a clear start in the open water the boat was driven through the fringe of timber, clear into the open channel, without stopping, and this time with but little injury to the wheel. Couriers had been sent ahead from Fort Snelling, by pony express, to the commanding officer of the fort, to have his battery ready to embark as soon as the boat should arrive. It had taken us four days to run the three hundred miles, and it was a dilapidated steamboat that at last made fast at the landing place at the foot of the bluff, under the shadow of Fort Ridgeley. The fort was ideally situated for defense against Indian attacks, for which, of course, it was alone built. It would appear, however, that its builders had little idea that it would ever be put to the test--such a test as it was subjected to a little more than a year after our visit. It was located on a sort of promontory formed by the bluff on the side next the river, and a deep ravine on the other. On the third side of the triangle lay the open prairie, stretching away for miles, with only a slight sprinkling of scrub oaks to obstruct the view. The barracks, stables, and storehouse (frame structures) were built up solidly on two sides of this triangle, next the ravines, the windowless backs of the buildings forming the walls of the fort. Toward the prairie, the most vulnerable face, the buildings did not fully cover the front, there being two or three wide openings between those that formed that side of the defenses. These openings were covered by cannon of the battery which garrisoned the fort. When the battery embarked for the East there were left only two or three small howitzers in charge of a sergeant of artillery, and it was these little pieces that saved the garrison from massacre in August, 1862, when the fort was for many days beleaguered by eight hundred Sioux Indians under the chief, Little Crow, leader of the uprising in Minnesota in that year. Undoubtedly the respect that Indians have for any sort of cannon had as much to do with their repulse as did the actual punishment inflicted by the howitzers, however well-served they may have been. I have a letter somewhere, written by a distant cousin who was a colonel in the Confederate army, relating that they had several thousand Indians in the Confederate army upon going into the battle of Prairie Grove, and from them they expected great things. When the "Yanks" opened with their artillery the sound alone brought the Indian contingent to a stand. When the gunners got the range and began to drop shells among them, the red men remembered that they had pressing business in the Indian Territory, and it is Colonel Merrick's opinion that they did not stop running until they reached their tepees. It is his opinion also that as soldiers, for use in war where Anglo-Saxons are debating grave questions of state with twelve pounders, they are not worth a red copper. Chapter XXVII _At Fort Ridgeley_ The officer in command of the battery when it left Fort Ridgeley was Captain and Brevet Major John C. Pemberton, U. S. A. He had won his brevet by gallant services in action at Monterey and Molino del Rey. He accompanied the battery as far as Washington, where he resigned (April 29, 1861), and tendered his sword to the Confederacy. He was rapidly promoted until he reached a major-generalcy in that army, and had the distinguished honor to surrender his army of thirty thousand men at Vicksburg to Major General Ulysses S. Grant, July 3, 1863. Pemberton was born in Pennsylvania, being appointed to the army from that state, so that he had not even the flimsy excuse of serving his state in thus betraying his country. The battery was known as the Buena Vista Battery, or still better as Sherman's. But Major Sherman, although long its commander, was not with it at the time we transferred it down the river. Major Sherman rendered distinguished service during the war, and retired (December 31, 1870) with the rank of major-general. Two other officers were with the battery--First Lieutenant Romeyn Ayres, and Second Lieutenant Beekman Du Barry. The battery was known in the Army of the Potomac as Ayres's Battery, and under that name won a wide reputation for efficiency. Ayres himself was a major general of volunteers before the close of the war, and Lieutenant Du Barry was (May, 1865) brevetted lieutenant-colonel for distinguished services. At the time of our visit there was a large number of Indians encamped on the prairie in front of the fort--estimated at seven or eight hundred by those best versed in their manners and customs. They had come down from the Lower Sioux Agency, sixteen miles farther up the river. They were alive to the situation, and on the alert to learn all they could of the "white man's war", which they had already heard of as being fought in some far-away place, the location of which was not clear to them, and for which they cared nothing so long as it promised to be a contest that was likely to draw away soldiers from the fort, and especially the "big guns", which they feared more than they did the "dough boys". One of the best posted of the frontiersmen, a "squaw man", who had the ear of the tribal council, told our officers that there would be trouble when the battery was withdrawn, for they felt themselves able successfully to fight and exterminate the few companies of infantry left to garrison the fort. How true this prediction was, the uprising of August, 1862, and the Indian war in Minnesota, with its massacre at New Ulm and outlying regions, abundantly verified. As soon as we were made fast, the work was begun of loading cannon, caissons, battery wagons, ammunition, and stores, as well as horses and men. By the light of torches, lanterns, and huge bonfires built on the bank, the work was rushed all night long, while the engineers labored to put the engines and particularly the wheel, in the best possible condition; and the carpenter, aided by artisans from the fort, put on new guards forward, and strengthened the weak places for the inevitable pounding that we knew must attend the downstream trip. With the raging river pressing on the stern of the boat as she descended, there was ample reason for anticipating much trouble in handling the steamer. The teamsters, with their six-mule teams, hurried the stores and ammunition down the narrow roadway cut in the side of the bluff, running perhaps half a mile along the side in making the perpendicular descent of two hundred feet. Whatever time we had from our duties on the boat was spent either in the fort, out in the Indian village, or on the side hill watching the teams come down the bluff, one after the other. Not being able to pass on the hill, they went down together, and all went back empty at the same time. The two hind wheels of the big army wagon were chained, so that they slid along the ground, instead of revolving. Then the three riders, one on each "near" mule, started the outfit down the hill, the off mules being next the bluff, while the legs of the drivers hung out over space on the other side. In places the wagons would go so fast, in spite of the drag, that the mules would have to trot to keep out of the way. This was exciting and interesting to the spectators, who were expecting to see a team go over the precipice. The drivers did not seem to care anything about the matter, and were no doubt well pleased to become the centre of attraction. Those of the spectators who had time and patience to continue the watch were finally rewarded for their persistence, and justified in their predictions by seeing one of these teams, with its load of fixed ammunition, roll for a hundred feet down the bluff--men, mules, and ammunition in one wild mix-up, rolling and racing for the bottom. The fringe of timber alone saved the cortege from plunging into the river. Those who saw the trip made, were betting that neither a man nor a mule would come out alive. They all came out alive. Some of the mules were badly scratched and banged, but not a leg was broken among the six. The men were also badly bruised, but they also brought all their bones out whole. One mule had his neck wound around the wagon-tongue, his own tongue hanging out about the length of that of the wagon, and all hands were certain of one dead mule, at least. But when the troopers ran in and cut away the harness the mule jumped to his feet, took in a few long breaths to make good for the five minutes' strangulation, and then started up the roadway, dodging the down-coming teams by a hair's-breadth, and never stopping until he reached his corral, where he began munching hay as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The next morning everything was stowed aboard. With a salute from the little howitzers in the fort, and the cheers of the "dough boys", who wanted to go but could not, the "Fanny Harris" backed into the stream, "straightened up", and began her downstream trip. I shall not attempt to follow her down, in all her situations. With the heavy load, and the stream behind her, it was possible to check her speed in a measure at the bends, but totally impossible to stop her and back her up against the current. The result was, that she "flanked" around points that raked her whole length, and then plunged into timber, bows on, on the opposite side of the river, ripping the ginger-bread work, and even the guards, so that it would seem as though the boat were going to destruction. Some of the artillerymen were sure of it, and all of them would sooner have risked a battle than the chance of drowning that at times seemed so imminent. We made good time, however, and ran the three hundred miles in two running days of daylight, laying up nights, and repairing damages as far as possible against the next day's run. When we rounded to at Fort Snelling landing we had one chimney about ten feet high above deck; the other was three feet--just one joint left above the breeching. Both escape pipes and the jack staff were gone--we lost the latter the first day, going up. The stanchions on both sides of the boiler deck were swept clean away, together with liberal portions of the roof itself. The boat looked like a wreck, but her hull was sound. The officers and crew were game to the last. Many of them had been hurt more or less, and all had been working until they were scarcely able to move. It was war time, however. Fort Sumter had fallen, and the president had called for seventy-five thousand men. We were doing our part with a will, in hastening forward a battery that was to give a good account of itself from Bull Run to Appomattox. At Fort Snelling we lost two of our firemen and a number of our deck crew, who deserted while we were lying at that place, taking on additional stores and men. We thought it a cowardly thing to do, under the circumstances. A few weeks later, however, we saw the two firemen going to the front with a volunteer company from Prescott, afterwards Company "B", 6th Wisconsin Infantry, in which "Whiskey Jim", the Irishman, and Louis Ludloff, the "Dutchman", distinguished themselves for valor in battle. Richardson gave his life for his country at the Wilderness, while Ludloff fought all the way through, rising from private to corporal, sergeant, and first sergeant, and being wounded at Antietam and the Wilderness. In talking with Ludloff in later years, I learned that the reason they deserted the steamer, leaving behind their accrued wages and even their clothes, was because they feared that they would not be able to get in among the seventy-five thousand if they lost any time in formalities and details. There were others, higher up in the world than the humble firemen, who also miscalculated the length of the impending war--by four years. Distinguished editors and statesmen, and even soldiers, made this error. And there were a good many who failed to "get in" even then. We ran to La Crosse with our pieces of chimneys, which the artisans at the Fort had helped our engineers to piece together so that the smoke would clear the pilot house. It did not give the best of draught; but we were going downstream on a flood, and we might have drifted five miles an hour without any steam at all. We delivered the battery at La Crosse, and immediately went into dry dock, where a hundred men made short work of the repairs. The United States paid our owners, the Minnesota Packet Company, eight thousand dollars for the week's work. The officers and crew who earned the money for the company were not invited to assist in its division. It was the hardest week's work that most of us had ever known--certainly the hardest I had ever experienced up to that time. A year or so later I got into work fully as hard, and it lacked the pleasant accessories of good food and a soft bed, that accompanied the strenuous days and nights spent on the Fort Ridgeley excursion. An incident remotely connected with this trip, offers an excellent opportunity to philosophize on the smallness of the planet we inhabit, and the impossibility of escaping from, or avoiding people whom we may once have met. At a meeting of Congregationalists held in a city far removed from the fort that stood guard on the bluffs overhanging the Minnesota River in 1861, the writer was introduced to Mr. Henry Standing Bear, secretary of the Young Men's Christian Association of Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Standing Bear is a graduate of Carlisle College, an educated and intelligent and a full-blood Sioux Indian. In conversation with him it transpired that he was one of the children who stared open-eyed at the steamboat lying at the landing place below the fort in 1861, and that he was an interested spectator of the embarkation of Sherman's Battery. He there listened to the talk of the braves who were already planning what they would do when the soldiers should all be withdrawn to fight the "white man's war" in the South. Standing Bear's own father took part in the "massacre", as we called it. Standing Bear says they themselves called it a war. Indians may go about their killings with somewhat more of ferocity and cruelty than do we whites, but it is their way of making war. In either case it is "hell", as "Old Tecump" said, and the distinctions that we draw after all make little difference in the results. We do not have to seek very far through the pages of history to find instances where white men have massacred helpless Indian women and children. A talk with Henry Standing Bear, or any other educated Indian born amid surroundings such as his, will throw new light and new coloring upon the Indian situation as it existed in 1861. They saw the whites steadily encroaching upon their hunting grounds, appropriating the best to their own use, ravishing their women, killing their men, and poisoning whole tribes with their "fire-water". Against their wills they were driven from their ancient homes--"removed", was the word--after having been tricked into signing treaties that they did not understand, couched in legal terms that they could not comprehend, receiving in exchange for their lands a lot of worthless bric-a-brac that vanished in a week.[H] If they protested or resisted, they were shot down like so many wolves, and with as little mercy. What man is there among the whites who would not fight under such circumstances? Our forefathers fought under less provocation and their cause has been adjudged a righteous cause. [H] This is a pretty wild statement on the part of Standing Bear, probably made through ignorance of the facts in the case rather than a wilful misrepresentation. In the treaty made with the Sioux Indians at Traverse des Sioux, July 2-3, 1851, the United States covenanted to pay $1,665,000 for such rights and title as were claimed by the Sisseton and Wahpeton tribes or bands in lands lying in Iowa and Minnesota. In another treaty, made with the M'day-wa-kon-ton and Wak-pay-koo-tay bands, also of the Sioux nation, the United States agreed to pay the further sum of $1,410,000 for the rights of these two bands in lands lying in Iowa and Minnesota. In addition the Sioux had already been paid a large sum for their rights in lands lying on the east side of the Mississippi, in Wisconsin--lands in which they really had no right of title at all, as they had gained whatever rights they claimed simply by driving back the Chippewa from the country which they had occupied for generations. The Sioux themselves did not, and could not, avail themselves of the rights so gained, and the territory was a debatable land for years--a fighting ground for the rival nations of the Sioux and Chippewa. This is the Indian's view-point as stated by a civilized tribesman. His fathers fought, and are dead. He was adopted by the nation, educated, and started upon a higher plane of living, as he is free to confess; but it is doubtful if he can be started upon a higher plane of thinking than that upon which his blanketed forbears lived, in spite of the cruelties to which they were born and educated. While I am no sentimentalist on the Indian question, when I fall into the hands of a Standing Bear I am almost persuaded that the Indian, within his lights, is as much of a patriot as many of his bleached brethren. As to his manhood there is no question. In the long struggle that has taken place between himself and the white invaders, he has always backed his convictions with his life, if need be; and such men, if white, we call "patriots." [Illustration: BAD AXE (NOW GENOA), WISCONSIN. Scene of the last battle between the United States forces and the Indians under Chief Black Hawk, August 21, 1832. The Steamer "Warrior," Captain Joseph Throckmorton, with soldiers and artillery from Fort Crawford, Prairie du Chien, took an active and important part in this battle.] Chapter XXVIII _Improving the River_ It was not until commerce on the upper river was practically a thing of the past, that any effort was made to improve the channel for purposes of navigation. A number of interests united to bring about this good work when it did come--some meritorious, others purely selfish. The steamboatmen, what was left of them, entertained the fallacious idea that if the river were straightened, deepened, lighted, and freed from snags and other hindrances to navigation, there would still be some profit in running their boats, despite the railroad competition that had so nearly ruined their business. This was a mistaken supposition, and they were disabused of the idea only by experience. The mill owners of the upper river and its tributaries, who had by this time begun to "tow through"--that is, push their rafts of logs and lumber with a steamboat from Stillwater to St. Louis, instead of drifting--were assured of quicker trips and greater safety if the river was dressed up somewhat, insuring greater profits upon their investments. Both of these parties in interest were engaged in legitimate trade, and while there was no intention of dividing the profits that might inure to them from an investment of several millions of dollars of other people's money, precedent had legitimatized the expenditure in other localities and upon other rivers. They were well within the bounds of reason, in asking that their own particular business might be made more profitable through the aid of government. A greater influence than any arguments drawn from commercial necessities was found in the political interest involved. For years, members of congress elected from districts in which there was a harbor or a river which by any fiction might be legislated into a "navigable stream", had been drawing from the federal treasury great sums of money for the improvement of these streams and harbors; yet some of these never floated anything larger than the government yawls in which the engineers who did the work reached the scene of their duties. At the same time, country members from the interior of the great West drew nothing. The rapid settlement of the Northwestern territories, in the year immediately following the close of the Civil War, had an effect that was felt in the enhanced influence exerted by members of congress representing the new commonwealths. It followed that when the biennial distribution of "pork", as it is expressively but inelegantly called nowadays, came up, these members were in a position to demand their share, and get it, or defeat the distribution _in toto_. The war was over. The Union soldiers who had fought in it were either dead, or if alive were hustling for a living. Hundreds of thousands of them were found in Iowa, Minnesota, Kansas, and Nebraska, opening up farms and developing the country. The contractors who had fattened on their blood were hanging like leeches to every department of the national government, clamoring for more contracts to further inflate their already plethoric bank accounts. The river improvement appealed strongly to this class of men. The influences that they could bring to bear, backed by the legitimate demands of steamboatmen and mill owners, convinced the most conscientious congressmen that their duty lay in getting as large an appropriation as possible for the work of river regeneration. The result was, that the river which had given employment to three or four hundred steamboats, manned by fifteen thousand men, without having a dollar expended in ameliorating its conditions, suddenly became the centre of the greatest concern to congress--and to the contractors--and all for the benefit of a dozen steamboats in regular traffic, and perhaps a hundred boats used in towing the output of a score of mills owned by millionaire operators. From 1866 to 1876 there was spent on the river between the mouth of the Missouri and St. Paul, a distance of 700 miles, the sum of $5,200,707. That was for the ten years at the rate of $7,429 for each mile of the river improved. It cost at that rate $742.90 per mile per year during the decade quoted. It is doubtful if the few steamboats engaged in traffic during that time were able to show aggregate gross earnings of $742.90 per mile per annum. It seems a pity that the benefit resulting from this expenditure could not have been participated in by the great flotilla that covered the river in the preceding decade, from 1856 to 1866. In this expenditure we find $59,098 charged to the eleven miles of river between St. Paul and St. Anthony Falls. It is doubtful if a dozen trips a year were made to St. Anthony Falls during the time noted. It was a hard trip to make against the rapid current below the falls, and a dangerous trip to make downstream. It would seem, however, that with the expenditure of $5,909 per year for ten years, over only eleven miles of river, every rock (and it is all rocks) might have been pulled ashore, and a perfect canal built up. Possibly that is the result of all this work; I haven't been over that piece of river since the work was completed--for one reason, among others, that no steamboats ever go to St. Anthony Falls, now that the river is put in order. From St. Paul to Prescott, thirty-two miles, there was expended $638,498 in ten years. I can readily understand why so much money was planted in that stretch of river. Beginning at Prescott and going toward St. Paul, there were to be found five or six of the worst bars there are anywhere on the river; and between the accentuated bars--bars of sufficient importance to merit names of their own--the rest of the river was bad enough to merit at least some of the language expended upon it by pilots who navigated it before the improvements came. At Prescott, at the head of Puitt's Island (now Prescott Island) or Point Douglass bar, at Nininger, at Boulanger's Island, at Grey Cloud, at Pig's Eye, and at Frenchman's, were bars that were the terror of all pilots and the dread of all owners and stockholders. I will eliminate the "terror" as expressing the feelings of the pilots. "Resignation" would perhaps be the better word. They all knew pretty well where to go to find the best water on any or all of the bars named; but they also knew that when they found the best water it would be too thin to float any boat drawing over three and a half feet. With a four-foot load line it simply meant that the steamboat must be hauled through six inches of sand by main strength and awkwardness, and that meant delay, big wood bills, bigger wage-lists, wear and tear of material, and decreased earnings. A big packet not loaded below the four-foot line, was not laden to the money-making point. After the work of regeneration began, it was a constant fight on the part of the engineers to maintain a four and a half foot channel on either one of the bars named. The expenditure of the great sums of money placed in this district is therefore easily accounted for. The work of improvement was, and still is carried on under the direction of competent engineers, detailed for the service by the chief of engineers of the United States army. No more highly trained men in their profession can be found in the world than these choice graduates of the most perfect institution of instruction in the world--West Point Military Academy. Their scientific, perhaps academic, knowledge of the laws governing the flow of water and the shifting of sands, the erosion of banks and the silting up into islands and continents, which are among the vagaries of the great river, is supplemented by the practical, if unscientific, knowledge of men who have gained their acquaintance with the river from years of service as pilots or masters of river steamboats. The government is shrewd enough to secure the services of such men to complement the science of its chosen representatives. These two classes, in pairs or by companies, have made an exhaustive study of conditions surrounding each of the more difficult and troublesome bars, as well as all others of lesser note, in order to decide what was needed, what kind of work, and how to be placed to lead, or drive the water into the most favorable channels, and there retain it under varying conditions of flood or drought, ice jams, or any and all the conditions contributing to the changes forever going on in the river. These points determined, an estimate is made of the cost of the necessary improvements, details of construction are drawn, specifications submitted, and bids on the proposed work invited. There were, and are, plenty of contractors, provided with boats, tackle, stone quarries, and all else required in the prosecution of the work. It would not be safe, however, to assume that the government always reaped the benefit of so much competition as might be assumed from the number of men engaged in the business. It would be unsafe to assume that such competition has always been free from collusion, although possibly it has been. On the other hand, each contractor has his "beat", from which all other bidders have religiously kept off. Not in an ostentatious manner, however, for that might invite suspicion; but in a business-like and gentlemanly manner, by putting in a bid just a few cents per cubic foot higher than the man upon whose territory the work was to be done, and whose figures have been secretly consulted before the bids were submitted. There have been suspicions that such has been the case, more than once, and that the work sometimes cost the government more than a fair estimate had provided for. The contracts have been let, however, and within the thirty years last past there have been built along the river between Prescott and St. Paul two hundred and fifty-one dikes, dams, revetments, and other works for controlling the flow of water within that short stretch of thirty-two miles. Some of these dams are long, strong, and expensive; others are embryonic, a mere suggestion of a dam or dyke, a few feet in length, for the protection of a particular small portion of the bank, or for the diverting of the current. All these works, great and small, are intended as suggestions to the mighty river that in future it must behave itself in a seemly manner. Generally the river does take the hint, and behaves well in these particular cases. At other times it asserts itself after the old fashion, and wipes out a ten thousand dollar curb in a night, and chooses for itself a new and different channel, just as it did in the days of its savagery, fifty years earlier. A peculiar feature attending this work for the betterment of the river was, that in its incipient stages it met with little or no encouragement from any of the men personally engaged in navigating steamboats on the river. Some deemed the proposition visionary and impracticable, while others, fearing its success, and magnifying the results to be obtained, threw every obstacle possible in the way of the engineers who had the work in charge. They even went so far as to petition Congress to abandon the work, and recall the engineers who had been detailed to prosecute it. This opposition was particularly true of work on the lower rapids, where the great ship canal now offers a ready and safe passage around rapids always difficult to navigate. Sometimes, when the water had reached an unusually low stage, they were positively impracticable for large boats. Captain Charles J. Allen, Corps of Engineers, U. S. A., who was in charge of the preliminary work on the lower rapids, calls attention, in his report, to this hostility, and incidentally records his opinion of river pilots in general, and rapids pilots in particular, in the following far from flattering terms: "Most of the river pilots are possessed of but little knowledge beyond that required in turning the wheel; and their obstinacy in refusing to recognize and take advantage of good channels cut for them has been the experience of more than one engineer engaged in improving rivers. The rapids pilots in particular, who may lose employment, seemed to be the most hostile." The last-named class were certainly sound in their conclusions that the deepening, straightening and lighting of the rapids would take away their business. There is, therefore, little wonder that they were not enthusiastic in their support of the proposed improvements, which were, if successful, to deprive them of the means of livelihood. Perhaps the gentlemen of the engineer corps would not be enthusiastic over a proposition to disband the United States army, and muster out all its officers. The results justified the fears of the rapids pilots. Any pilot could take his boat over, after the improvements were completed, and rapids piloting, as a distinctive business, was very nearly wiped out. The slur of the West Pointer loses its point, however, with any one who has known many Mississippi River pilots. They knew a great many things besides "turning the wheel." Even had they known only that, they carried around under their hats special knowledge not to be sneezed at, even by a West Pointer. Later, all the men on the river came to recognize the benefits accruing from the work of the Mississippi River Commission, and none more heartily testified to the success of the work than the pilots and masters of the river craft. There were, indeed, none so well qualified to judge of results as they. The work once begun was prosecuted with vigor. The voice of the great Northwest was potent in Washington, and in the ten years from 1866 to 1876 more than five millions of dollars were expended between Minneapolis and the mouth of the Missouri.[I] [I] See Appendix D. The first thought of the government engineers to whom was entrusted the duty of improving the river, was naturally in the direction of securing and maintaining a greater depth of water. This was to be accomplished by so curbing and controlling the flow that it would follow the channel decided upon, at all times and under all conditions. The dikes and wing dams, which were built by the hundred, served this purpose in a degree, and the flow of water was controlled to a fairly satisfactory extent. Then the menaces to navigation were considered, and measures taken for their elimination. Of the two hundred and ninety-five recorded steamboat wrecks on the Missouri River between 1842 and 1895, a hundred and ninety-three, or about two-thirds of all, were by snagging. I presume this proportion would be maintained on the upper Mississippi, if a similar compilation were at hand to decide the point. The problem was to get rid of this greatest of all dangers to steamboats. There was but one way, and that was to pull them out and carry them away, or cut them up and so dispose of them that the same snag would not have to be pulled out at each recurring rise of water, from other parts of the river. Having no steamboats fitted for the business in that early day (1866), the contract system was resorted to. This was found to be costly and unsatisfactory. Contractors agreed to remove snags at so much per snag, within certain lengths and estimated weights, they furnishing the steamboats and machinery necessary for the work. In order to make the business pay, they had to find snags, somewhere. When they were not to be found in or near the channel, they were obtained in any place--chutes, bayous, and sloughs where no steamboat ever ran, or ever would run. After a trip or two up and down the river, there were not enough snags left to make the pulling profitable, and of course the work was given over. But the first rise brought down a new supply of snags to lodge in the channel of the falling river, and pilots set to dodging them, just as they had done before the pulling began. To be of the highest efficiency, the work must be continuous. This was deemed impossible under the contract system, and the engineers in charge recommended the purchase of two suitable steamboats for the upper river, to be fitted with improved machinery for lifting and disposing of the snags fished out of the river. These boats were to be manned and officered by the government, and placed in charge of an engineer detailed by the War Department. They were continuously to patrol the river during the season of navigation, removing every snag as soon as located, assisting steamboats in distress, cutting overhanging trees, placing guide-boards and crossing lights where needed, maintaining the same after being established, and giving their whole time and attention to the work of river improvement. This suggestion was carried into effect, and two steamboats purchased and fitted for the work. In 1866 Colonel Dodge, of the Corps of Engineers, who had had large experience in the work of river improvement, realizing the necessity for dredging the shoalest places, in addition to directing the water by dikes and dams, invented a dredge to be attached to a steamboat, and operated by steam machinery, for the purpose of plowing out and scraping away the sand as it accumulated on the worst bars and reefs. Two or three experimental machines were built by a St. Paul mechanic upon the order of the United States officials, and under their supervision. These were attached to derricks, placed on the bows of the steamboats secured for the work, suspended by stout chains, and operated by steam. The boat, headed up river, was run to the head of the reef; the dredge was then lowered, and the boat backed downstream in the line of the channel. The dredge, twenty feet wide, stirred up the sand, and the scraper attachment drew it down to the foot of the reef, where the dredge was hoisted up and the current carried away the released sand into deep water. The boat was again run to the head of the reef and the operation repeated, each "scrape" being about the width of the dredge, the pilot so placing his boat each time as exactly to match the last preceding draft, without going over the same ground a second time. The machine was found to work to perfection, and to be of even greater practical utility in keeping open a navigable channel than the dikes and wing dams, as there is a constant filling in of sand at the foot of every channel artificially formed by contracting the flow of water. The dredge hauls this sand away as it accumulates, and by deepening the water in the channel does much toward attracting the steady flow of water to the particular lines so dredged. Chapter XXIX _Killing Steamboats_ The upper Mississippi has always been, comparatively, a remarkably healthy stream for steamboats. A great proportion of the craft ending their days there, have died of old age, and have been decorously consigned to the scrap pile instead of meeting the tragic end usually assigned them by writers. In many cases where it is supposed or known that a steamboat of a certain name met destruction by fire or snag, the historian who attempts to verify such statement will have great difficulty in deciding just which boat bearing the name was the victim of that particular casualty. The fact is, that the same name was conferred, time after time, on boats built to take the place of those sunk, burned, or otherwise put out of commission. As early as 1840 there was the "Pike No. 8" on the lower river, indicating that there had been a procession of "Pikes." There was also, at the same time, the "Ben Franklin No. 7." Boats thus named were called simply "Pike" or "Ben Franklin", the number not appearing on the wheelhouses, save in rare cases. All the other "Pikes" having gone to the bottom, there was but one "Pike" afloat. When reference was ordinarily made to the boat by that name, the auditors knew at once that the speaker referred to the boat then in commission. But should you mention that "When the "Pike" or the "Ben Franklin" was snagged, or burned, or blew up", in order fully to be understood you must designate the particular "Pike", and add such other details, as would leave no room for doubt which boat by that name you referred to, thus: "Pike No. 6 snagged at such a tow-head, or on such a bend; or burned in the year 1839 at Hannibal." Steamboat owners and captains seem to have had no superstitious objections to thus naming or commanding a successor to the unfortunate one gone before. Before the first was comfortably settled in the mud of the Mississippi, an order had gone on to the shipyard, and in less than a week the keel was on the stocks for its successor. If the first was a "Galena", or a "War Eagle", the second also was a "Galena" or a "War Eagle". This was before the fashion came into vogue of naming boats after persons, instead of impersonal objects. There were not names enough to go around, and thus it came about that the "Warriors", "Post Boys", "Telegraphs", and "War Eagles" were worked overtime, to the great confusion of any one attempting to localize a disaster that had happened to one of that name in times past. It was possible to read to-day of the total loss of the "War Eagle", for instance; yet a month or more hence you might hear of the arrival of the "War Eagle" at St. Paul with a full cargo and passenger list. The boats might go to the bottom, but the names went on forever. "Post Boy" was another favorite name handed down from boat to boat, until seven or eight "Post Boys" had been launched, run their appointed courses, and met their fate, all within the span of less than forty years--an average of about five years to the boat--which was a good average for old-time steamers. On the upper river there were, among others, three "Burlingtons", two "Chippewas", two "Danubes", two "Denmarks", two "Dr. Franklins", three "Dubuques", two "Galenas", three "St. Pauls", three "War Eagles", and many others, doublets and triplets. All of which tends much to confuse one who is attempting to run down and locate the history and final disposition of boats bearing those names. So far as I can learn, there is no reliable record of all the losses on the upper river, giving the name of the boat, where, when, and how lost. It is possible that the final disposition of boats lost above St. Louis, is as fully covered in the list appended to the end of this book, as anywhere else extant. Such a record has been made for the Missouri River by Captain M. H. Chittenden, of the United States Engineers--a very complete and historically valuable statement of the losses on that stream. Other records are too comprehensive, attempting to give all the losses through the entire length of the river, from New Orleans to St. Paul. While covering so much more, territorially, they lack in the detail that makes the compilation of real worth. Most writers attach particular stress to boiler explosions, probably from the fact that they are more spectacular, and the consequent loss of life usually greater. When a boat is snagged, it is generally possible to run her ashore in time to save the passengers and crew, although the vessel itself may prove a total loss. When a boiler explodes, the boat becomes immediately helpless, so that it cannot be run ashore, which occasions the considerable loss of life. In cases of explosion, also, the boat almost invariably burns in the middle of the river, and there is little chance for escape; for it is next to impossible to reach the lifeboats carried on the roof, and if reached it is seldom found possible to launch them. Before considering the reported losses on all the Western waters it will be interesting to locate, as far as possible, the casualties on the Mississippi between St. Louis and St. Paul, the division or section of the river usually denominated as "upper". In my list of upper-river boats,[J] there are noted all losses of which I have found any record. The list comprises about three hundred and sixty steamers that have made one or more trips above Rock Island. The boats plying above St. Louis, but not going above the upper rapids, have not been included in this list, thus excluding all the Alton Line vessels, and the Illinois River craft. Of the three hundred and sixty boats so listed, there are to be found records of seventy-three losses between St. Louis and St. Paul, including the port of St. Louis, which has been a veritable graveyard for steamboats. About a dozen other boats were lost after going into the Missouri River trade, but these are not included in the number stated. The record extends over the period between 1823 and 1863, inclusive. An analysis of the causes of such losses shows that thirty-two boats were snagged and sunk (total losses only are included; those raised, are not counted as losses); sixteen were burned; ten were sunk by ice; five were stove in by hitting rocks, and sank; three sank by striking bridges; three were sunk by Confederate batteries during the war; two were lost from boiler explosions; one was torn to pieces by a tornado, and one struck a wreck of another boat and sank on top of the first wreck. [J] See Appendix: "Upper Mississippi River Steamboats, 1823-1863." What became of the other boats included in the list, I am unable to learn. The United States government appears never to have printed a report (or reports) showing the fate of the hundreds of steamboats over which it maintained an official watch-care while they were in active service. It would seem to have paid more attention to boiler explosions than to any other cause of disaster; for the reason, possibly, that it is supposed to have held itself, through its inspectors, more or less responsible for the condition of steam boilers. Still, as it also, through another set of inspectors, looks after the hulls of all steamboats, there would seem to be no reason why the loss of boats by snagging, or other similar causes affecting the hulls, should not also have been reported. It will be observed that nearly one-half the known losses on the upper river between 1823 and 1863 were the result of snagging. Captain Chittenden, in his report on steamboat losses on the Missouri from 1842 to 1897, gives the snags credit for catching 193 boats out of a total loss of 295, or two-thirds of all known losses. Owing to its alluvial banks, and the consequent eating away of wooded points and islands by the ever changing current of that most erratic of rivers, the bed of the stream was literally sown with snags. The wonder of it is, that a pilot was able ever to take a boat up and back a thousand miles, without hitting a snag and losing his boat. They did it, however, although the record of losses from that cause serves to show how imminent the danger was at all times, and how many came to grief, however sharp the eyes of the pilot, or however skilled in reading the surface of the water and locating the danger. The upper Mississippi has more miles of rock bluffs--in fact, is lined with such bluffs from Keokuk to St. Paul; thus the wear and tear of its banks is not so great as on the Missouri. Still, the great number of islands, heavily wooded, furnish many sunken trees, and one-half of the steamboat loss on this river is also directly traceable to snags. Next to the snags, which are forever reaching out their gnarled arms to impale the unfortunate, fire is the greatest enemy of steamboat property on Western waters. Built of the lightest and most combustible pine, soaked with oil paint, the upper works are like tinder when once alight, and danger of this is ever present in a hundred different forms. A little explosion in the furnaces, throwing live coals over the deck; over-heated smokestacks, communicating a blaze to the roof; careless passengers or crew, throwing half-burned matches on deck or into inflammable merchandise in the freight; or the mass of sparks, cinders, and live coals continuously falling from the stacks, especially when burning wood in the furnaces: all these are a constant menace, and with a blaze once started the chances are a hundred to one that the boat is lost. A lighted match thrown into a haymow can scarcely bring quicker results than a little blaze in the upper works of a steamboat. It flashes up in an instant, and the draft generated by the progress of the boat instantly carries it the length of the cabin. In fifteen minutes the upper works are gone. Sixteen Mississippi boats out of seventy were burned; twenty-five of 295, on the Missouri. As in losses from ice, so also by fire, St. Louis has been the storm centre, and for the same reason namely, the great number of boats there, both summer and winter. Several visitations from this most dreaded and dreadful enemy of steamboats are recorded in the history of river navigation, in which two or more boats were lost while at the St. Louis landing. But the one which is known far and wide on Western waters was of such magnitude, and the property loss so great, as to earn for it the title of the "Great Fire". This, the most disastrous of all calamities which ever occurred in the history of navigation in the West, commenced at about 10 o'clock in the evening of May 17, 1849, and continued until 7 o'clock the next morning. Captain Chittenden, the historian of the Missouri River, says, in describing this catastrophe: "Fire alarms had been heard several times early in the evening, but nothing had come of them, until about the hour above-mentioned, when it was found that fire had broken out in earnest on the steamer "White Cloud", which lay at the wharf between Wash and Cherry Streets. The "Endors" lay just above her and the "Edward Bates" below. Both caught fire. At this time a well-intended but ill-considered, effort to stop the progress of the fire was made by some parties, who cut the "Edward Bates's" moorings and turned her into the stream. The boat was soon caught by the current and carried down the river; but a strong northeast wind bore it constantly in shore, and every time it touched it ignited another boat. An effort was now made to turn other boats loose before the "Edward Bates" could reach them, but a fatality seemed to attend every effort. The burning boat outsped them all, and by frequent contacts set fire to many more. These in turn ignited the rest, until in a short time the river presented the spectacle of a vast fleet of burning vessels, drifting slowly along the shore. The fire next spread to the buildings, and before it could be arrested had destroyed the main business portion of the city. It was the most appalling calamity that had ever visited St. Louis; and followed as it was by the great cholera scourge of 1849, it was a terrible disaster. At the levee there were destroyed twenty-three steamboats, three barges, and one small boat. The total valuation of boats and cargoes was estimated at about $440,000, and the insurance was but $225,000; but this was not all paid, for the fire broke up several of the insurance companies." Ice also plays an important part in the game of steamboat killing. The season on the upper river is short at best. An early start in the spring, before the railroads had yet reached St. Paul, brought the greatest financial returns to the daring and successful captains who, bringing their boats through all the dangers, arrived safely in harbor at the head of navigation. Great chances were taken in the fifties, in trying to get through Lake Pepin before it was clear of ice. The river above and below was usually clear two weeks before the ice was out of the lake sufficiently to enable a boat to force its way through. During the last week of such embargo, boats were constantly butting the ice at either end of the lake, trying to get up or down, or were perilously coasting along the shore, where, from the shallowness of the water and the inflow from the banks, the ice had rotted more than in the centre of the lake. A change of wind, or a sudden freshening, catching a boat thus coasting along the shore, would shove her on to the rocks or sand, and crush her hull as though it were an eggshell. The "Falls City" was thus caught and smashed. I myself saw the "Fire Canoe" crushed flat, in the middle of the lake, a little below Wacouta, Minn., she having run down a mile or more in the channel which we had broken with the "Fanny Harris". We had just backed out, for Captain Anderson had seen signs of a rising wind out of the west, that would shut the ice into our track. This result did follow after the other boat had gone in, despite the well-meant warnings of Anderson, who hailed the other boat and warned them of the rising wind and the danger to be apprehended. This caution was ignored by the "Fire Canoe's" captain, who ran his boat down into the channel that we had broken. The ice did move as predicted, slowly, so slowly as to be imperceptible unless you sighted by some stationary object. But it was as irresistible as fate, and it crushed the timbers of the "Fire Canoe" as though they were inch boards instead of five-inch planks. The rending of her timbers was plainly heard two miles away. The upper works were left on the ice, and later we ran down and picked the crew and passengers off the wreck. When the wind changed and blew the other way, the cabin was turned over and ground to splinters amid the moving cakes. In 1857 the "Galena" was the first boat through the lake (April 30th). There were twelve other boats in sight at one time, all butting the ice in the attempt to force a passage and be the first to reach St. Paul. Of the boats lost on the Missouri River between 1842 and 1897, twenty-six were lost from ice; on the upper Mississippi, up to 1863, ten boats succumbed to the same destroyer. Not only in Lake Pepin, in the early spring, was this danger to be apprehended; but in autumn also, in the closing days of navigation, when the young "anchor ice" was forming, and drifting with the current, before it had become attached to the banks, and formed the winter bridge over the river. This was a most insidious danger. The new ice, just forming under the stress of zero weather, cut like a knife; and while the boat might feel no jar from meeting ice fields and solitary floating cakes, all the time the ice was eating its way through the firm oak planking, and unless closely watched the bow of the boat would be ground down so thin that an extra heavy ice floe, striking fairly on the worn planking, would stave the whole bow in, and the boat would go to the bottom in spite of all attempts to stop the leak. The "Fanny Harris" was thus cut down by floating ice and sank in twenty feet of water, opposite Point Douglass, being a total loss. Ordinarily, boats intending to make a late trip to the north were strengthened by spiking on an extra armor sheathing of four-inch oak plank at the bow, and extending back twenty or thirty feet. It is a singular fact that the greatest damage from ice was not experienced at the far north of the upper river, but at the southern extremity of the run; although many other boats were lost on the upper reaches, at wide intervals of time and place. St. Louis was a veritable killing place for steamboats, from the ice movements. This may be accounted for from the reason that so many boats wintered at St. Louis. When a break-up of extraordinary magnitude or unseasonableness did occur, it had a large number of boats to work upon. Again, the season of cold, while long and severe on the upper river, was distinctly marked as to duration. There was no thawing and freezing again. When the river closed in November, it stayed closed until the latter end of March, or the early days of April. Then, when the ice went out, that ended the embargo; there was no further danger to be feared. Boats did not usually leave their snug-harbors until the ice had run out; and when they did start, they had only Lake Pepin to battle with. At St. Louis, on the contrary, the most disastrous break-ups came unseasonably and unexpectedly, with the result that the great fleet of boats wintering there were caught unprepared to meet such an emergency, and many were lost. Two such disastrous movements of the ice were experienced at St. Louis, the first in 1856, the other in 1876. The former "break-up" occurred February 27, and resulted in the destruction of a score of the finest boats in the St. Louis trade, and the partial wrecking of as many more. It put out of commission in a few hours nearly forty boats, a catastrophe unequalled in magnitude, either before or since, in the annals of the river. The disaster was not caused in the usual way, by the thawing of the ice. In that case it would not have been so disastrous, if indeed to be feared at all, that being the usual and normal manner of clearing the river in the spring. The winter had been very cold, the ice was two or three feet thick, and the water very low. In this case the movement of the ice was caused by a sudden rise in the river from above, which caused the ice to move before it was much, if any, disintegrated. It was an appalling and terrible exhibition of the power of the Great River when restrained in its course. The following account is from a St. Louis paper, printed at the time: "The ice at first moved very slowly and without any perceptible shock. The boats lying above Chestnut Street were merely shoved ashore. Messrs. Eads & Nelson's Submarine boat No. 4, which had just finished work on the wreck of the "Parthenia", was almost immediately capsized, and became herself a hopeless wreck. Here the destruction commenced. The "Federal Arch" parted her fastenings and became at once a total wreck. Lying below her were the steamers "Australia", "Adriatic", "Brunette", "Paul Jones", "Falls City", "Altoona", "A. B. Chambers", and the "Challenge", all of which were torn away from shore as easily as if they had been mere skiffs, and floated down with the immense fields of ice. The shock and the crashing of these boats can better be imagined than described. All their ample fastenings were as nothing against the enormous flood of ice, and they were carried down apparently fastened and wedged together. The first obstacles with which they came in contact were a large fleet of wood-boats, flats, and canal boats. These small fry were either broken to pieces, or were forced out on to the levee in a very damaged condition. There must have been at least fifty of these smaller water craft destroyed, pierced by the ice, or crushed by the pressure of each against the other. "In the meantime some of the boats lying above Chestnut Street fared badly. The "F. X. Aubrey" was forced into the bank and was considerably damaged. The noble "Nebraska", which was thought to be in a most perilous position, escaped with the loss of her larboard wheel and some other small injuries. A number of the upper river boats lying above Chestnut Street, were more or less damaged. Both the Alton wharf-boats were sunk and broken in pieces. The old "Shenandoah" and the "Sam Cloon" were forced away from the shore and floated down together, lodging against the steamer "Clara", where they were soon torn to pieces and sunk by a collision with one of the ferry-boats floating down upon them. The Keokuk wharf-boat maintained its position against the flood and saved three boats, the "Polar Star", "Pringle", and "Forest Rose", none of which were injured. "After running about an hour the character of the ice changed and it came down in a frothy, crumbled condition, with an occasional solid piece. At the end of two hours it ran very slowly, and finally stopped at half past five o'clock, P. M. Just before the ice stopped and commenced to gorge, huge piles, twenty and thirty feet in height were forced up by the current on every hand, both on the shore and at the lower dike, where so many boats had come to a halt. In fact these boats seemed to be literally buried in ice. "The levee on the morning after the day of the disaster presented a dreary and desolate spectacle, looking more like a scene in the polar regions than in the fertile and beautiful Mississippi Valley. The Mississippi, awakened from her long sleep, was pitching along at a wild and rapid rate of speed, as if to make up for lost time. The ice-coat of mail was torn into shreds, which lay strewn along the levee, and was in some places heaped up to a height of twenty feet above the level of the water. Where the boats had lain in crowds only a few hours before, nothing was to be seen save this high bulwark of ice, which seemed as if it had been left there purposely to complete the picture of bleak desolation. The whole business portion of the levee was clear of boats, except the two wrecked Alton wharf-boats, which were almost shattered to pieces, and cast like toys upon the shore in the midst of the ridge of ice. There was not a single boat at the levee which entirely escaped injury by the memorable breaking up of the ice on February 27, 1856." [Illustration: REED'S LANDING, MINNESOTA. At the foot of Lake Pepin. During the ice blockade in the Lake, in the spring of each year before the advent of railroads to St. Paul, all freight was unloaded at Reed's Landing, hauled by team to Wacouta, at the head of the Lake, where it was reloaded upon another steamboat for transportation to St. Paul and other ports above the Lake.] Chapter XXX _Living It Over Again_ One day in the spring of 1881, after having finished the business that had called me to St. Paul from my home in River Falls, Wisconsin (where I was a railway agent and newspaper proprietor combined), I was loafing about the Grand Central Station, killing time until my train should be ready to start. The big whistle of a big boat drew me to the adjacent wharf of the Diamond Jo Line. The craft proved to be the "Mary Morton". As soon as the lines were fast, the stages in position, and the first rush of passengers ashore, I walked aboard and up to the office. A small man, past middle life, his hair somewhat gray, was writing in a big book which I recognized as the passenger journal. By the same token I realized that I was in the presence of the chief clerk, even if I had not already seen the "mud" clerk hard at work on the levee, checking out freight. I spoke to the occupant of the office, and after a few questions and counter questions I learned that he was Charley Mathers, who had been on the river before 1860 as chief clerk, and he in turn learned my name and former standing on the river. From him I learned that the chief pilot of the steamer was Thomas Burns. It did not take a great while to get up to the pilot house. I would not have known my old chief had I not been posted in advance by Mr. Mathers. This man was grey instead of brown, and had big whiskers, which the old Tom did not have. He was sitting on the bench, smoking his pipe and reading a book. He looked up as I entered, and questioned with his eyes what the intrusion might mean, but waited until I should state my business. It took some minutes to establish my identity; but when I did I received a cordial welcome. And then we talked of old times and new, and war times too--for he had gone out as captain in an Illinois regiment at the same time that I went out as a Wisconsin soldier. From a pilot's view point the old times were simply marvelous as compared with the present. A hundred and fifty dollars a month, now, as against six hundred then; and a "wild" pilot, picking up seventeen hundred dollars in one month as was done by one man in 1857. Now he couldn't catch a wild boat if he waited the season through--there are none. We went over the river, the steamboats, and the men as we knew them in 1860; and then we went down below and hunted up George McDonald, the good old Scotchman, who never swore at you through the speaking tube, no matter how many bells you gave him in a minute, and who never got rattled, however fast you might send them; who never carried more steam than the license called for, and who never missed a day's duty. The same banter had to be gone through with, with the same result--he had forgotten the slim youth who "shipped up" for him twenty years ago, but whom he promptly recalled when given a clue. And then, it being train time, we all walked across to the station and Burns invited me to take a trip with him, next time, down to St. Louis and back, and work my way at the wheel. I knew that I had not yet been weaned from the spokes, and doubted if I ever should be. I said that I would try, and I did. I filed an application for the first leave of absence I had ever asked for from the railroad company, and it was granted. I found a man to assist the "devil" in getting out my paper, he doing the editing for pure love of editing, if not from love of the editor. We set our house in order, packed our trunk and grips, and when the specified fortnight was ended, we (my wife, my daughter, and myself) were comfortably bestowed in adjoining staterooms in the ladies' cabin of the "Mary Morton", and I was fidgeting about the boat, watching men "do things" as I had been taught, or had seen others do, twenty years ago or more. The big Irish mate bullied his crew of forty "niggers", driving them with familiar oaths, to redoubled efforts in getting in the "last" packages of freight, which never reached the last. Among the rest, in that half hour, I saw barrels of mess pork--a whole car load of it, which the "nigger" engine was striking down into the hold. Shades of Abraham! pork _out_ of St. Paul! Twenty years before, I had checked out a whole barge load (three hundred barrels) through from Cincinnati, by way of Cairo. Cincinnati was the great porkopolis of the world, while Chicago was yet keeping its pigs in each back yard, and every freeholder "made" his own winter's supply of pork for himself. The steward in charge of the baggage was always in the way with a big trunk on the gangway, just as of old. The engineers were trying their steam, and slowly turning the wheel over, with the waste cocks open, to clear the cylinders of water. The firemen were coaxing the beds of coal into fiercer heats. The chief clerk compared the tickets which were presented by hurrying passengers, with the reservation sheet, and assigned rooms, all "the best", to others who had no reservations. The "mud" clerk checked his barrels and boxes, and scribbled his name fiercely and with many flourishes to last receipts. The pilot on watch, Mr. Burns, sat on the window ledge in the pilot house, and waited. The captain stood by the big bell, and listened for the "All ready, Sir!" of the mate. As the words were spoken, the great bell boomed out one stroke, the lines slacked away and were thrown off the snubbing posts. A wave of the captain's hand, a pull at one of the knobs on the wheel-frame, the jingle of a bell far below, the shiver of the boat as the great wheel began its work, and the bow of the "Mary Morton" swung to the south; a couple of pulls at the bell-ropes, and the wheel was revolving ahead; in a minute more the escape pipes told us that she was "hooked up", and with full steam ahead we were on our way to St. Louis. And I was again in the pilot house with my old chief, who bade me "show us what sort of an education you had when a youngster". Despite my forty years I was a boy again, and Tom Burns was the critical chief, sitting back on the bench with his pipe alight, a comical smile oozing out of the corners of mouth and eyes, for all the world like the teacher of old. The very first minute I met the swing of the gang-plank derrick (there is no jack staff on the modern steamboat, more's the pity), with two or three spokes when one would have been a plenty, yawing the boat round "like a toad in a hailstorm", as I was advised. I could feel the hot blood rushing to my cheeks, just as it did twenty years before under similar provocation, when the eye of the master was upon me. I turned around and found that Mr. Burns had taken it in, and we both laughed like boys--as I fancy both of us were for the time. But I got used to it very soon, getting the "feel of it", and as the "Mary Morton" steered like a daisy I lined out a very respectable wake; although Tom tried to puzzle me a good deal with questions as to the landmarks, most of which I had forgotten save in a general way. When eight bells struck, Mr. Link, Mr. Burns's partner, came into the pilot house; that let me out, and after an introduction by Mr. Burns, Mr. Link took the wheel. He was a young man, of perhaps thirty years of age. We lingered a few minutes to watch him skilfully run Pig's Eye, and then went down to dinner, and had introductions all around--to Captain Boland, Mr. Mathers, Mr. McDonald, and other officers. I took the wheel again, later in the afternoon. It was easy steering, and there was no way of getting out of the channel, for a time; and later I found that some things were taking on a familiar look--that I had not forgotten all of the river, and things were shaping themselves, as each new point or bend was reached, so that very little prompting was necessary. I had the wheel from Pine Bend to Hastings, where I was given permission to step on the end of a board lever fixed in the floor of the pilot house, on one side of the wheel, and give the signal of the Diamond Jo Line for the landing--two long blasts, followed by three short ones. Here was another innovation. In old times you had to hold your wheel with one hand while you pulled a rope to blow for a landing, which was sometimes a little awkward. This was a very little thing, but it went with the landing-stage derrick, the electric search-light, and a score of other improvements that had come aboard since I walked ashore two decades before. A mile or two below Hastings I saw the "break" on the surface of the water which marked the resting-place of the "Fanny Harris", on which I had spent so many months of hard work, but which, looked back upon through the haze of twenty years, now seemed to have been nothing but holiday excursions. At Prescott I looked on the familiar water front, and into the attic windows where with my brother I had so often in the night watches studied the characteristics of boats landing at the levee. Going ashore I met many old-time friends, among whom was Charles Barnes, agent of the Diamond Jo Line, who had occupied the same office on the levee since 1858, and had met every steamboat touching the landing during all those years. He was the Nestor of the profession, and was one of the very few agents still doing business on the water front who had begun such work prior to 1860. Since then, within a few years past, he also has gone, and that by an accident, while still in the performance of duties connected with the steamboat business. Dropping rapidly down the river, we passed Diamond Bluff without stopping, but rounded to at Red Wing for passengers and freight, and afterward headed into a big sea on Lake Pepin, kicked up by the high south wind that was still blowing. We landed under the lee of the sand-spit at Lake City, and after getting away spent the better part of an hour in picking up a barge load of wheat, that was anchored out in the lake. By a wise provision of the rules for the government of pilots, adopted since I left the river, no one is permitted in the pilot house except the pilot on watch, or his partner, after the sidelights have been put up. For this reason I could not occupy my chosen place at the wheel after sunset; but I found enough to occupy my time down below in the engine-room, watching the great pitman walk out and in, to and from the crank-shaft, listening to the rush of the water alongside as it broke into a great wave on either side, and to the churning of the wheel, and all the while discussing old times with George McDonald. As the wind was still high and the water rough, I had an opportunity to see Mr. McDonald answer bells, which came thick and furious for a good while before we were well fast to the levee at Reed's Landing. There was no excitement, however, and no rushing from side to side as in the old days, to "ship up". He stood amidship, his hand on the reversing bar, just as a locomotive engineer sits with his hand on the bar of his engine. When the bell rang to set her back, he pulled his lever full back, and then opened his throttle without moving a step. After getting started, and under full way, he simply "hooked her back" three or four notches, and the old-time "short link" operation had been performed without taking a step. A great advance in twenty years! But why wasn't it thought of fifty years ago? I don't know. The same principle had been in use on locomotives from the start. It is simple enough now, on steamboat engines. Perhaps none of the old-timers thought of it. I turned in at an early hour, and lay in the upper berth, listening to the cinders skating over the roof a couple of feet above my face, and translating the familiar sounds that reached me from engine-room and roof--the call for the draw at the railroad bridge, below the landing; the signal for landing at Wabasha; the slow bell, the stopping-bell, the backing-bell, and a dozen or twenty unclassified bells, before the landing was fully accomplished; the engineer trying the water in the boilers; the rattle of the slice-bars on the sides of the furnace doors as the firemen trimmed their fires; and one new and unfamiliar sound from the engine-room--the rapid exhaust of the little engine driving the electric generator, the only intruder among the otherwise familiar noises, all of which came to my sleepy senses as a lullaby. I listened for anything which might indicate the passage of the once dreaded Beef Slough bar, but beyond the labored breathing of the engines, that at times indicated shoaling water, there was nothing by which to identify our old-time enemy. So listening, I fell asleep. "Breakfast is ready, sah", was the pleasant proclamation following a gentle rapping on the stateroom door. Very refreshing, this, compared with the sharp manifesto of the olden-days watchman: "Twelve o'clock; turn out"! The "Morton" was ploughing along between Victory and De Soto. By the time justice had been done to the well-cooked and well-served meal, the boat had touched at the latter port and taken on a few sacks of barley (potential Budweiser), consigned to one of the big St. Louis breweries. Mr. Link was at the wheel, and as a good understanding had been reached the day before, there was no question as to who was going to do the steering. Mr. Link took the bench and talked river as only a lover could talk, while I picked out the course by the aid of diamond boards and ancient landmarks, without asking many questions. A suggestion now and then: "Let her come in a little closer". "Now you may cross over". "Look out for the snag in the next bend", and like cautions were all that was necessary. And the pleasure of it! The beautiful morning in June, the woods alive with songbirds; the bluffs and islands a perfect green; the river dimpling under the caresses of a gentle breeze, and blushing rosy under the ardent gaze of the morning sun--a picture of loveliness not to be outdone anywhere in the wide world. And then the sense of power that comes to one who has learned to handle a steamboat with a touch of the wheel, in taking a long bend, a mile or more in length, without moving the wheel an inch, the rudders so slightly angled as to guide the boat along the arc of a circle which would be ten miles in diameter, could it be extended to completion, and leaving a wake as true as if drawn by a pair of dividers! We did not go into Prairie du Chien, but with the glasses the old French town could be discerned across the island and the slough; it claims to be two hundred years old, and it looked its age. Time was when Prairie du Chien, the terminus of the railroad nearest to St. Paul and the upper river, gave promise of being a big city, the outlet and _entrepôt_ for the trade of a great territory. Her people believed in her, and in her great future. A dozen steamboats might be seen, on many occasions, loading merchandise from the railroad, or unloading grain and produce, in sacks and packages, destined to Milwaukee and Chicago. When I was second clerk I once checked out twenty thousand sacks of wheat in something over thirty-six hours, the cargo of boat and two barges. The wheat now goes through in bulk, in box cars loaded in Iowa and Minnesota, and they do not even change engines at Prairie du Chien, the roundhouse and division terminal being located at McGregor, on the west side of the Mississippi. At McGregor I saw Joseph Reynolds, at that time owner of five fine steamers, and manager of the Diamond Jo Line. Captain Burns pointed out a man dressed in a dark business suit, sitting on a snubbing post, lazily and apparently indifferently watching the crew handling freight, or looking over the steamer as if it were an unusual and curious sight. He did not speak to any of the officers while we were watching him, and Mr. Burns thought it very unlikely that he would. He did not come on board the boat at all, but sat and whittled the head of the post until we backed out and left him out of sight behind. Mr. Burns allowed that "Jo" was doing a heap of thinking all the time we were watching him, and that he probably did not think of the boat, as a present object of interest, at all. Joseph Reynolds began his river experience in 1867 with one small boat, carrying his own wheat, and towing a barge when the steamer could not carry it all. When we saw him holding down a snubbing post at McGregor he owned and operated, under the title of the "Diamond Jo Line", the "Mary Morton", "Libbie Conger", "Diamond Jo", "Josephine", and "Josie", all well equipped and handsome steamers. Later, he added the "Sidney", the "Pittsburg", the "St. Paul", and the "Quincy", still larger and better boats. That night I witnessed for the first time the operation of the electric search-light as an aid to navigation. The night came on dark and stormy, a thunder shower breaking over the river as we were running the devious and dangerous Guttenburg channel, about five or six miles below the town by that name. Instead of straining his eyes out of his head, hunting doubtful landmarks miles away, as we used to do, Mr. Link tooted his little whistle down in the engine-room, and instantly the light was switched on to the lantern at the bow of the boat. Lines running from the pilot house gave perfect control of the light, and it was flashed ahead until it lighted up the diamond boards and other shore-marks by which the crossings were marked and the best water indicated to the pilot. Under a slow bell he worked his way down the ugly piece of river without touching. He had the leads two or three times, just to assure himself, but apparently he could have made it just as well without them. A mile and a half above the mouth of Turkey River, in the very worst place of all, we found a big log raft in trouble, hung up on the sand, with a steamboat at each end working at it. They occupied so much of the river that it took Mr. Link over an hour to get past the obstruction, the search-light in the meantime turning night into day, and enabling him to look down on the timber and see just where the edge of the raft was. By backing and flanking he finally squeezed past, but not without scraping the sand and taking big chances of getting hung up himself. Coming back, we did hang up for an hour or more in the same place, a mile above the foot of Cassville Slough. Without the aid of the search-light it would have been impossible to have worked the steamer past the raft until daylight came. It is a wonderful aid to navigation, and it is as easy to run crooked places by night as by day, with its assistance. In St. Louis, after seeing Shaw's Garden and tasting the old French market, the best thing you can do is to go back to the levee and watch the river, the big Eads bridge, the boats, and the darkies. There may be no boats other than the one you came on and are going back upon, but you will not miss seeing the bridge, and you must not miss seeing the darkies. They are worth studying--much better than even imported shrubbery. There was an Anchor Line boat moored just below us the day we were there, a big side-wheeler, in the New Orleans trade, sixteen hundred tons. The "Mary Morton" was four hundred and fifty, and had shrunk perceptibly since the big liner came alongside. There were two or three other boats, little ones, ferries and traders, sprinkled along the three miles of levee. In 1857 I have seen boats lying two deep, in places, and one deep in every place where it was possible to stick the nose of a steamboat into the levee--boats from New Orleans, from Pittsburg, from the upper Mississippi, from the Missouri, from the Tennessee and the Cumberland, the Red River and the Illinois, loaded with every conceivable description of freight, and the levee itself piled for miles with incoming or outgoing cargoes. Now, it was enough to make one sick at heart. It seemed as if the city had gone to decay. The passage of a train over the bridge every five minutes or less, each way, reassured one on that point, however, and indicated that there was still plenty of traffic, and that it was only the river that was dead, and not the city. In old times the steamboat crews were comprised principally of white men--that is, deck hands and roustabouts (or stevedores). The firemen may have been darkies, and the cabin crews were more than likely to have been, but the deck crews were generally white. Now, the deck crews are all colored men. They are a happy-go-lucky set, given to strong drink and craps, not to mention some other forms of vice. In old times the crews were hired by the month. The members of a modern deck crew never make two trips consecutively on the same boat. The boat does not lay long enough in St. Louis to give them time to spend ten days' wages, and then get sober enough, or hungry enough, to reship for another trip. Therefore, as soon as the last package of freight is landed, the crew marches to the window of the clerk's office opening out onto the guards, and gets what money is coming to each individual after the barkeeper's checks have been deducted. With this wealth in hand the fellow makes a straight wake for one of the two or three score dives, rum-holes, and bagnios that line the levee. He seldom leaves his favorite inn until his money is gone and he is thrown out by the professional "bouncer" attached to each of these places of entertainment. The boat does not remain without a crew, however. While one of the clerks is paying off the old crew, another has gone out on the levee with a handful of pasteboard tickets, one for each man he desires to ship for the next round trip to St. Paul. Mounting the tallest snubbing post at hand, he is instantly surrounded by a shouting, laughing, pushing, and sometimes fighting mass of negroes, with an occasional alleged white man. This mob of men are clothed in every conceivable style of rags and tatters, and all are trying to get near the man on the post. After a minute's delay the clerk cries out: "All set! Stand by"! and gives his handful of tickets a whirl around his head, loosening them a few at a time, and casting them to every point of the compass so as to give all a fair chance to draw a prize. The crowd of would-be "rousters" jump, grab, wrestle, and fight for the coveted tickets, and the man who secures one and fights his way victoriously to the gang plank is at once recorded in the mate's book as one of the crew. The victorious darky comes up the gang plank showing every tooth in his head. It is the best show to be seen in St. Louis. "Why do they not go out and pick out the best men and hire them in a business-like and Christian-like manner?" inquires the unacclimated tourist. "Because this is a better and very much quicker way", says the mate, who knows whereof he speaks. "The nigger that can get a ticket, and keep it until he gets to the gang plank, is the nigger for me. He is the 'best man'; if he wasn't he wouldn't get here at all. Some of 'em don't get here--they carry 'em off to the hospital to patch 'em up; sometimes they carry 'em off and plant 'em. There wasn't much of a rush to-day. You ought to see 'em in the early spring, when they are pretty hungry after a winter's freezing and fasting, and they want to get close to a steamboat boiler to get warm. There was not more'n three hundred niggers out there to-day. Last April there was a thousand, and they everlastingly scrapped for a chance to get close to the post. Some of 'em got their 'razzers', and sort of hewed their way in. The clerk got a little shaky himself. He was afraid they might down him and take the whole pack." "I shouldn't think that you would care to ship the men with 'razzers' as you call them." "Oh, I don't mind that if they can tote well. Anyway, they all have 'em. They don't use them much on white men, anyhow. And then we look out for them. After we back out from here they will get enough to do to keep them busy. They don't carry any life insurance, and they don't want to fool with white folks, much." Having watched the mates handling the crew on the down trip one could form a pretty clear judgment why the "niggers" were not solicitous to "fool with" the white men with whom they were in contact while on the river. That night we steamed across to East St. Louis and took on three thousand kegs of nails for different ports on the upper river. These were carried on the shoulders of the newly-hired deck crew a distance of at least two hundred feet from the railroad freight house to the boat; every one of the forty men "toting" seventy-five kegs, each weighing a hundred and seven pounds. At the conclusion of this exercise it is safe to say that they were glad enough to creep under the boilers so soon as the boat pulled out from the landing. The next morning we were well on our way up the river. I steered most of the daylight watches for Mr. Link all the way upstream. He had a terrible cough, and was very weak, but had the hopefulness which always seems to accompany that dread disease (consumption), that he "would soon get over it". I was glad to relieve him of some hard work, and I was also greatly pleased again to have an opportunity to handle a big boat. Poor fellow, his hopefulness was of no avail. He died at his home in Quincy within two years of that time. We arrived at St. Paul on schedule time, with no mishaps to speak of, and I parted with regret from old and new friends on the boat, none of whom I have ever seen since that parting twenty-five years ago. Thomas Burns, Henry Link, George McDonald, and Captain Boland are all dead. Charles Mathers, the chief clerk, was living a few years ago at Cairo, an old man, long retired from active service. As we started to leave the boat, we were arrested by an outcry, a pistol shot, and the shouting of the colored deck hands, followed by the rush of the mate and the fall of one of the men, whom he had struck with a club or billet. Still another colored man lay groaning on the wharf, and a white man was binding up an ugly gash in his neck made by the slash of a razor. In a few minutes the clang of the patrol wagon gong was heard, as it responded to the telephone call, and two darkies were carried off, one to the hospital and the other to the jail. The slightly-interrupted work of toting nail kegs was then resumed. Thus the last sights and sounds were fit illustrations of river life as it is to-day, and as it was a half a century ago--strenuous and rough, indeed, but possessing a wonderful fascination to one who has once fallen under the influence of its spell. [Illustration: STEAMER "MARY MORTON," 1876; 456 tons. Lying at the levee, La Crosse, Wisconsin. (From a negative made in 1881.)] [Illustration: STEAMER "ARKANSAS," 1868; 549 tons. With tow of four barges, capable of transporting 18,000 sacks--36,000 bushels of wheat per trip. The usual manner of carrying wheat in the early days, before the river traffic was destroyed by railroad competition.] Appendix Appendix A _List of Steamboats on the Upper Mississippi River, 1823-1863_ In the following compilation I have endeavored to give as complete a history as possible of every boat making one or more trips on the upper Mississippi River--that is to say, above the upper rapids--prior to 1863, not counting boats engaged exclusively in the rafting business. Owing to the repetition of names as applied to different steamers, which were built, ran their course, and were destroyed, only to be followed by others bearing the same name, it is altogether likely that some have escaped notice. Others that may have made the trip have left no sign. In nearly every case the record is made either at St. Paul or at Galena. Whenever possible, the names of the master and clerk are given. Where boats were running regularly in the trade but one notation is made: "St. Paul, 1852; 1854; etc.", which might include twenty trips during the season. The record covers the period from 1823, when the first steamer, the "Virginia", arrived at St. Peters from St. Louis, with government stores for Fort Snelling, up to 1863, one year after the writer left the river. ADELIA--Stern-wheel; built at California, Pa., 1853; 127 tons; St. Paul, 1855; 1856; 1857--Capt. Bates, Clerk Worsham. ADMIRAL--Side-wheel; built at McKeesport, Pa., 1853; 245 tons; 169 feet long, 26 feet beam; in St. Paul trade 1854--Capt. John Brooks; went into Missouri River trade; was snagged and sunk October, 1856, at head of Weston Island, in shallow water; had very little cargo at time; was raised and ran for many years thereafter in Missouri River trade. ADRIATIC--Side-wheel; built at Shousetown, Pa., 1855; 424 tons; was in great ice jam at St. Louis, February, 1856. ADVENTURE--In Galena trade 1837--Capt. Van Houten. A. G. MASON--Stern-wheel; built at West Brownsville, Pa., 1855; 170 tons; in St. Paul trade 1855; 1856; 1857--Captain Barry, Clerk Pearman. ALBANY--Very small boat; in Minnesota River trade 1861. ALEX. HAMILTON--Galena and St. Paul trade 1848--Captain W. H. Hooper. ALHAMBRA--Stern-wheel; built at McKeesport, Pa., 1854; 187 tons; Minnesota Packet Company, St. Paul trade 1855--Captain McGuire; 1856--Captain W. H. Gabbert; 1857--Captain McGuire; same trade 1858; 1859; 1860; 1861; 1862, in Dunleith Line, Captain William Faucette. ALICE--Stern-wheel; built at California, Pa., 1853; 72 tons; at St. Paul 1854. ALPHIA--Galena and St. Louis trade 1837. ALTOONA--Stern-wheel; built at Brownsville, Pa., 1853; 66 tons; was in great ice jam at St. Louis, February, 1856; at St. Paul 1857; sunk at Montgomery tow-head 1859. AMARANTH--(First)--Galena trade 1842--Captain G. W. Atchinson; sunk at head of Amaranth Island 1842. AMARANTH--(Second)--At Galena, from St. Louis, April 8, 1845. AMERICA--Sunk 1852, opposite Madison, Iowa. AMERICAN EAGLE--Cossen, master, burned at St. Louis, May 17, 1849; loss $14,000. AMERICUS--Stern-wheel; at St. Paul 1856. AMULET--At Galena, from St. Louis, April 9, 1846. ANGLER--St. Paul 1859. ANNIE--At Galena, on her way to St. Peters, April 1, 1840. ANSON NORTHRUP--Minnesota River boat; was taken to pieces and transported to Moorhead in 1859, where she was put together again and run on the Red River of the North by Captain Edwin Bell for J. C. Burbank & Co., proprietors of the Great Northwestern stage lines. ANTELOPE--Minnesota River packet 1857; 1858; 1860; 1861. One hundred and ninety-eight tons burden. ANTHONY WAYNE--Side-wheel; built 1844; in Galena & St. Louis trade 1845, 1846, and 1847--Captain Morrison first, later Captain Dan Able; 1850--Captain Able; went up to the Falls of St. Anthony 1850, first boat to make the trip; made a trip up the Minnesota River into the Indian country, as far as Traverse des Sioux with a large excursion party from St. Paul in 1850; went into Missouri River trade and sank March 25, 1851, three miles above Liberty Landing, Mo., being a total loss. ARCHER--At Galena, from St. Louis, Sept. 8, 1845; sunk by collision with steamer "Di Vernon", in chute between islands 521 and 522, five miles above mouth of Illinois River, Nov. 27, 1851; was cut in two, and sunk in three minutes, with a loss of forty-one lives. ARCOLA--St. Croix River boat, at St. Paul 1856; sunk in Lake Pepin 1857, cut down by ice. ARGO--Galena and St. Peters trade, 1846--Captain Kennedy Lodwick; 1847--Captain M. W. Lodwick, Clerk Russell Blakeley; regular packet between Galena and St. Paul, including Stillwater and Fort Snelling; at Galena from St. Croix Falls 1847, with 100 passengers; sunk fall of 1847 at foot of Argo Island, above Winona, Minn. ARIEL--(First)--At Fort Snelling and St. Peters June 20, 1838; August 27, 1838; Sept. 29, 1838, from Galena; 1839--Captain Lyon, at Fort Snelling April 14; made three other trips to Fort Snelling that season. She was built by Captain Thurston. ARIEL--(Second)--Built at Cincinnati, Ohio, 1854; 169 tons; Minnesota River packet 1861. ARIZONA--Stern-wheel--Captain Herdman, from Pittsburg, at St. Paul, 1857. ASIA--Stern-wheel; St. Paul trade 1853; made twelve trips between St. Louis and St. Paul during season. ATLANTA--At St. Paul, from St. Louis, Captain Woodruff, 1857; again 1858. ATLANTIC--At St. Paul 1856--Captain Isaac M. Mason. ATLAS--Side-wheel; new at Galena, 1846--Captain Robert A. Riley; at St. Peters, from Galena, 1846; sunk near head of Atlas Island. AUDUBON--Stern-wheel; built at Murraysville, Pa., 1853; 191 tons; St. Paul trade 1855; Captain William Fisher made his initial trip as an independent pilot on this boat. AUNT LETTY--Side-wheel; built at Elizabeth, Pa., 1855; 304 tons; in Northern Line, St. Louis and St. Paul, 1857--Captain C. G. Morrison; 1859, same. BADGER STATE--Built at California, Pa., 1850; 127 tons; St. Paul trade 1855 and 1856; sunk at head of Montgomery tow-head 1856. BALTIMORE--Sunk, 1859, at Montgomery tow-head; hit wreck of "Badger State" and stove. Wreck of "Baltimore" lies on top of wreck of "Badger State". BANGOR--St. Paul 1857; 1859. BANJO--Show boat--first of the kind in the river; was at St. Paul in 1856; with a "nigger show". Was seated for an audience, and stopped at all landings along the river, giving entertainments. Captain William Fisher was pilot on her part of one season. BELFAST--At St. Paul 1857; 1859. BELLE GOLDEN--Stern-wheel; built at Brownsville, Pa., 1854; 189 tons; at St. Paul 1855--Captain I. M. Mason. BELMONT--At Galena, from St. Louis, April 9, 1846; again May 22, 1847. BEN BOLT--Side-wheel; built at California, Pa., 1853; 228 tons; at St. Paul, from St. Louis, 1855--Captain Boyd; at St. Paul, 1856; 1857. BEN CAMPBELL--Side-wheel; built at Shousetown, Pa., 1852; 267 tons; in Galena & Minnesota Packet Co., 1852--Captain M. W. Lodwick; rather slow, and too deep in water for upper river; at St. Paul 1853--Capt. M. W. Lodwick; at St. Paul 1859. BEN COURSIN--Stern-wheel; built at Cincinnati, Ohio, 1854; 161 tons; at St. Paul 1856; 1857; sunk above mouth of Black River, near La Crosse, fall of 1857. BEN WEST--Side-wheel; at St. Paul, from St. Louis, spring 1855; went into Missouri River trade; struck bridge and sank near Washington, Mo., August, 1855. BERLIN--At St. Paul 1855; 1856; 1859. BERTRAND--Rogers, master, at Galena 1846; regular St. Louis packet; advertised for pleasure trip to St. Peters June 19, 1846. BLACKHAWK--Captain M. W. Lodwick, 1852; bought that year by the Galena Packet Co., for a low water boat; ten trips to St. Paul 1853; Captain R. M. Spencer, opening season 1854, later O. H. Maxwell; 1855, Minnesota River packet, Capt. O. H. Maxwell; at St. Paul 1859. BLACK ROVER--Eleventh steamboat to arrive at Fort Snelling, prior to 1827. BON ACCORD--At Galena, from St. Louis, Captain Hiram Bersie, August 31, 1846; in Galena and upper river trade, same captain, 1847; in St. Louis and Galena trade 1848, same captain. BRAZIL--(First)--Captain Orren Smith, at Galena April 4, 1838; at Fort Snelling June 15, 1838; advertised for pleasure excursion from Galena to Fort Snelling, July 21, 1839; advertised for pleasure excursion from Galena to Fort Snelling, 1840; sunk in upper rapids, Rock Island, 1841, and total loss. BRAZIL--(Second)--Captain Orren Smith, new, arrived at Galena Sept. 24, 1842; 160 feet long, 23 feet beam; arrived at Galena from St. Peters, Minn., June 5, 1843. BRAZIL--(Third)--Stern-wheel; built at McKeesport, Pa., 1854; 211 tons; at St. Paul 1856; 1857--Captain Hight, from St. Louis; at St. Paul 1858. BRIDGEWATER--At Galena, from St. Louis, April 11, 1846. BROWNSVILLE--Snagged and sunk in Brownsville Chute, 1849. BURLINGTON--(First)--At Galena, from St. Peters, June 17, 1837; at Fort Snelling, Captain Joseph Throckmorton, May 25, 1838, and again June 13, 1838; third trip that season, arrived at the Fort June 28, 1836, with 146 soldiers from Prairie du Chien, for the Fort. BURLINGTON--(Second)--Sunk at Wabasha, prior to 1871; in Northern Line; built 1860. BURLINGTON--(Third)--Large side-wheel, in Northern Line, 1875; St. Louis and St. Paul Packet. CALEB COPE--Galena & St. Paul Packet Company; in St. Paul 1852. CALEDONIA--In Galena trade, 1837. CAMBRIDGE--At St. Paul 1857. CANADA--Side-wheel, with double rudders; Northern Line Packet Co., Captain James Ward, 1857; 1858; 1859, as St. Louis and St. Paul packet; Captain J. W. Parker, 1860, 1861, same trade; 1862, same trade. CARRIE--Stern-wheel; 267 tons; went into Missouri River trade and was snagged two miles above Indian Mission, August 14, 1866; boat and cargo total loss; boat valued at $20,000. CARRIER--Side-wheel; 215 feet long, 33 feet beam; 267 tons; at St. Paul 1856; snagged at head of Penn's Bend, Missouri River, Oct. 12, 1858; sank in five feet of water; boat valued at $30,000; was total loss. CASTLE GARDEN--At St. Paul 1858. CAVALIER--At Galena April 9, 1836, for St. Louis; in Galena trade 1837. CAZENOVIA--At St. Paul 1858. CECILIA--Capt. Jos. Throckmorton, at St. Peters 1845. Bought by the captain for Galena & St. Peters trade. Same trade 1846, regular. CEYLON--Stern-wheel; at St. Paul 1858. CHALLENGE--Built at Shousetown, Pa., 1854; 229 tons; at St. Paul 1858. CHART--At St. Paul 1859. CHAS. WILSON--At St. Paul 1859. CHIPPEWA--(First)--Capt. Griffith, in Galena trade 1841; arrived at Galena from St. Peters May 2, 1843. CHIPPEWA--(Second)--Capt. Greenlee, from Pittsburg, at St. Paul, 1857; in Northwestern Line, Capt. W. H. Crapeta, St. Louis and St. Paul trade 1858; 1859; burned fifteen miles below Poplar River, on the Missouri, in May, 1861; fire discovered at supper time on a Sunday evening; passengers put on shore and boat turned adrift, she having a large amount of powder on board; boat drifted across the river and there blew up; fire caused by deck hands going into hold with lighted candle to steal whiskey. She was a stern-wheel, 160 feet long, 30 feet beam. CHIPPEWA FALLS--Captain L. Fulton, in Chippewa River trade, 1859; stern-wheel. CITY BELLE--Side-wheel; built at Murraysville, Pa., 1854; 216 tons; Minnesota Packet Co., Galena & St. Paul trade 1856--Captain Kennedy Lodwick; 1857--Captain A. T. Champlin, for part of the season; 1858; burned on the Red River in 1862, while in government service; was a very short boat and very hard to steer, especially in low water. CLARA--Stern-wheel, of St. Louis; 567 tons burden, 250 horse-power engines; at St. Paul 1858. CLARIMA--At St. Paul 1859. CLARION--(First)--Went to Missouri River, where she was burned, at Guyandotte, May 1, 1845. CLARION--(Second)--Stern-wheel; built at Monongahela, Pa., 1851; 73 tons; made 25 trips up Minnesota River from St. Paul, 1853; same trade 1855; 1856--Captain Hoffman; 1857; 1858; had a very big whistle, in keeping with her name--so large that it made her top heavy. COL. MORGAN--At St. Paul 1855; 1858. COMMERCE--At St. Paul, from St. Louis, 1857--Captain Rowley. CONESTOGA--St. Louis and St. Paul trade 1857--Captain James Ward, who was also the owner. CONEWAGO--Stern-wheel; built at Brownsville, Pa., 1854; 186 tons; St. Louis and St. Paul Packet Co., 1855; 1856; 1857--Capt. James Ward; 1858; 1859. CONFIDENCE--At Galena, from St. Louis, Nov. 7, 1845; same April 11, 1846; same March 30, 1847. CONVOY--Stern-wheel; built at Freedom, Pa., 1854; 123 tons; at St. Paul 1857. CORA--Side-wheel; single engine; two boilers; hull built by Captain Jos. Throckmorton at Rock Island; 140 feet long, 24 feet beam, five feet hold; engine 18 inches by 5 feet stroke, built at St. Louis. At Galena, on first trip, Sept. 30, 1846, Captain Jos. Throckmorton, in Galena and St. Peters trade; first boat at Fort Snelling 1847, Captain Throckmorton; Galena and St. Peters trade 1848, same captain, also running to St. Croix Falls. Sold to go into Missouri River trade fall of 1848; snagged and sunk below Council Bluffs, May 5, 1850, drowning fifteen people. CORNELIA--Sunk, 1855, in Chain of Rocks, lower rapids; hit rock and stove. COURIER--Built at Parkersburg, Va., 1852; 165 tons; owned by W. E. Hunt; in St. Paul trade 1857. CREMONA--Stern-wheel; built at New Albany, Ind., 1852; 266 tons; in Minnesota River trade 1857--Captain Martin. CUMBERLAND VALLEY--At Galena August 2, 1846; broke shaft three miles above Burlington, Aug. 18, 1846. DAISY--Small stern-wheel; St. Paul 1858. DAMSEL--Stern-wheel; 210 tons; in St. Paul trade 1860; 1864, Farley, clerk; chartered as a circus boat, Charles Davis, pilot; snagged at head of Onawa Bend, Missouri River, 1876; had on board the circus company, which was taken off by Captain Joseph La Barge, in the steamer "John M. Chambers"; no lives lost; boat total loss. DAN CONVERSE--Stern-wheel; built at McKeesport, Pa., 1852; 163 tons; at St. Paul 1855, and at other times; went into Missouri River trade and was snagged Nov. 15, 1858, ten miles above St. Joseph, Mo.; total loss. DANIEL HILLMAN--At Galena May 25, 1847, from St. Louis. DANUBE--(First)--Sunk, 1852, below Campbell's Chain, Rock Island Rapids; hit rock and stove. DANUBE--(Second)--Stern-wheel; at St. Paul 1858. DAVENPORT--Side-wheel; built 1860; in Northern Line; sunk by breaking of ice gorge at St. Louis, Dec. 13, 1876, but raised at a loss of $4,000. DENMARK--(First)--Sunk, 1840, at head of Atlas Island, by striking sunken log. DENMARK--(Second)--Side-wheel, double-rudder boat; Captain R. C. Gray, in Northern Line, St. Louis & St. Paul, 1857, 1858, 1859, 1860; 1861, same line, Captain John Robinson; 1862, same line. DES MOINES VALLEY--St. Paul 1856. DEW DROP--Stern-wheel; 146 tons; at St. Paul 1857; 1858; Capt. W. N. Parker, 1859, in Northern Line; went into Missouri River trade and was burned at mouth of Osage River, June, 1860. DIOMED--St. Paul 1856. DI VERNON--(Second)--Built at St. Louis, Mo., 1850; cost $49,000; at St. Paul June 19, 1851; in collision with steamer "Archer" Nov. 27, 1851, five miles above mouth of Illinois River. (See "Archer".) DR. FRANKLIN--(First)--First boat of the Galena & Minnesota Packet Co.; bought 1848; owned by Campbell & Smith, Henry L. Corwith, H. L. Dousman, Brisbois & Rice; M. W. Lodwick, Captain, Russell Blakeley, Clerk, Wm. Meyers, Engineer; first boat to have steam whistle on upper river; Captain Lodwick 1849; 1850; in Galena and St. Paul trade; Capt. Lodwick in 1851; took a large party on pleasure excursion from Galena to the Indian treaty grounds at Traverse des Sioux, Minnesota River; 1852, Captain Russell Blakeley, Clerk Geo. R. Melville; out of commission 1853; sunk at the foot of Moquoketa Chute 1854; total loss. DR. FRANKLIN--(Second)--Called "No. 2"; bought of Capt. John McClure, at Cincinnati, in the winter of 1848, by Harris Brothers--D. Smith, Scribe and Meeker--to run in opposition to "Dr. Franklin No. 1"; Smith Harris, Captain; Scribe Harris, Engineer; 1850 went up to St. Anthony Falls; in 1851 was the last boat to leave St. Paul, Nov. 20; the St. Croix was closed and heavy ice was running in the river; Capt. Smith Harris 1852; made 28 trips to St. Paul in 1853; Capt. Preston Lodwick, 1854. DUBUQUE--(First)--At Galena April 9, 1836, for St. Louis, Captain Smoker; lost, 1837; exploded boiler at Muscatine Bar, eight miles below Bloomington. DUBUQUE--(Second)--At Galena April 20, 1847, Captain Edward H. Beebe; 162 feet long, 26 feet beam, 5 feet hold; on her first trip; regular St. Louis, Galena and Dubuque trade; same 1848; at Galena July 29, 1849, Captain Edward H. Beebe, loading for Fort Snelling; sunk above Mundy's Landing 1855. DUBUQUE--(Third)--Side-wheel, 603 tons; in Northern Line, St. Louis & St. Paul 1871. EARLIA--At St. Paul 1857. ECLIPSE--Eighth steamboat to arrive at Fort Snelling prior to 1827. EDITOR--Side-wheel; built at Brownsville, Pa., 1851; 247 tons; very fast; St. Louis & St. Paul 1854--Capt. Smith; same trade 1855--Capt. J. F. Smith; 1856; 1857--Captain Brady, Clerks R. M. Robbins and Charles Furman. EFFIE AFTON--At St. Paul 1856; small stern-wheel; hit Rock Island Bridge and sank, 1858; total loss. EFFIE DEANS--St. Paul 1858; Captain Joseph La Barge; burnt at St. Louis 1865. ELBE--In Galena trade 1840. ELIZA STEWART--At Galena May 26, 1848, from St. Louis, with 350 tons freight. Left for St. Louis, with 100 tons freight from Galena. EMERALD--In Galena trade 1837; sunk or burned 1837. EMILIE--(First)--Side-wheel, Capt. Joseph La Barge, American Fur Company, at St. Peters, 1841; snagged, 1842, in Emilie Bend, Missouri River. ENDEAVOR--Stern-wheel; built at Freedom, Pa., 1854; 200 tons; at St. Paul 1857. ENTERPRISE--(First)--Small stern-wheel; twelfth boat to arrive at Fort Snelling, prior to 1827; again at the Fort June 27, 1832; sunk at head of Enterprise Island, 1843. ENTERPRISE--(Second)--Small side-wheel boat from Lake Winnebago; owned and captained by Robert C. Eden, son of an English baronet, on an exploring and hunting expedition; Geo. B. Merrick piloted for him for two months on the upper river and the St. Croix. ENTERPRISE--(Third)--Built in 1858, above the Falls of St. Anthony, to run between St. Anthony and Sauk Rapids. Work superintended by Capt. Augustus R. Young. Before the work was completed the boat was sold to Thomas Moulton, and when finished she was run above the Falls during 1859, 1860, and 1861. She was officered by four brothers--Augustus R. Young, Captain and Pilot; Jesse B. Young, Mate; Josiah Young, First Engineer, and Leonard Young, Second Engineer. Thomas Moulton and I. N. Moulton took turns in running as clerk. In 1863 she was sold to W. F. and P. S. Davidson, who moved her around St. Anthony Falls on skids, and launched her in the river below. She ran as freight boat in the Davidson Line between La Crosse and St. Paul for several years, and was then sold to go south. She was a stern-wheel boat, 130 feet long, and 22 feet beam. The Youngs are dead, with the exception of Leonard. Captain I. N. Moulton is living (1908) at La Crosse, where he is engaged in the coal business. ENVOY--(First)--In Galena trade 1857. ENVOY--(Second)--Stern-wheel; built at West Elizabeth, Pa., 1852; 197 tons; at St. Paul 1857--Capt. Martin, Clerk E. Carlton; at St. Paul 1858. EOLIAN--Stern-wheel; built at Brownsville, Pa., 1855; 205 tons; in Minnesota River trade 1857--Captain Troy; same trade 1858; 1859. EQUATOR--Stern-wheel; built at Beaver, Pa., 1853; 162 tons; in St. Paul trade 1855, 1856; Minnesota River 1857--Captain Sencerbox; wrecked in great storm on Lake St. Croix April 1858--Captain Asa B. Green, pilots Charles Jewell, Geo. B. Merrick; Engineer John Lay; Mate Russel Ruley. EXCELSIOR--Side-wheel; built at Brownsville, Pa., 1849; 172 tons; St. Louis & St. Paul trade 1850; Captain James Ward, owner and captain; same 1852; arrived at St. Paul Nov. 20, 1852, with 350 tons of freight, taken at $1.00 per hundredweight for any distance; over $8,000 in the trip. In 1853 made 13 round trips from St. Louis to St. Paul; "Billy" Henderson owned the bar on this boat and sold oranges and lemons, wholesale, along the river; 1854, Captain Owen; 1855, Capt. James Ward; 1856, Capt. Kingman; 1857, Capt. Conway, in St. Paul trade. EXPRESS--One of the first boats to reach Fort Snelling prior to 1827. FALCON--Capt. Legrand Morehouse, St. Louis, Galena, Dubuque & Potosi regular packet 1845; same 1846; in August, in Galena and St. Peters trade, reports very low water at St. Peters; 1847, Capt. Morehouse, St. Louis and Galena regular packet. FALLS CITY--Stern-wheel; built 1855, at Wellsville, Ohio, by St. Anthony Falls merchants, who ran her to the foot of the Falls in order to show that the river was navigable to that point; 155 feet long, 27 feet beam, 3 boilers; Captain Gilbert, 1855; in St. Louis trade 1856, and got caught in great ice jam at St. Louis that year; Capt. Jackins, 1857; wintered above the lake and was sunk by ice in Lake Pepin in April, 1857. 183 tons. FAIRY QUEEN--At St. Paul 1856. FANNY HARRIS--Stern-wheel; 279 tons; built at Cincinnati, and owned by Dubuque merchants; put into St. Paul trade in 1855, from Dubuque and Dunleith, Capt. Jones Worden, Clerk Charles Hargus; same 1856; 1857, Capt. Anderson, Clerk Chas. Hargus, Second Clerk Geo. B. Merrick, in Galena, Dunleith & St. Paul Packet Co.; same 1858, 1859; Capt. W. H. Gabbert 1860; wintered at Prescott; 1861, Capt. William Faucette, Clerks Hargus and Merrick, Engineers McDonald and William Hamilton, Pilots James McCoy, Harry Tripp, James Black, Thomas Burns and Thomas Cushing, Mate "Billy" Wilson; went up Minnesota River in April, three hundred miles to bring down Sherman's Battery; Thos. Burns raised a company for the 45th Illinois in 1861; Capt. Faucette in command 1862; Merrick left her for the war in August, 1862; she was sunk by the ice at Point Douglass in 1863; Charles Hargus died at Dubuque, August 10, 1878. FANNY LEWIS--Of St. Louis, at St. Paul. FAVORITE--Side-wheel; Minnesota River packet 1859; same 1860, Capt. P. S. Davidson; transferred to La Crosse trade in 1860; Capt. P. S. Davidson, 1861, in La Crosse trade; Minnesota River trade 1862; 252 tons burden. FAYETTE--At Fort Snelling May 11, 1839; reported at St. Croix Falls May 12, 1839. FIRE CANOE--Stern-wheel; built at Lawrence, Ohio, 1854; 166 tons; at St. Paul May, 1855--Captain Baldwin; 1856; 1857--Captain Spencer; in Minnesota River trade 1858; sunk by ice in Lake Pepin, three miles below Wacouta, April, 1861; passengers and crew were taken off by "Fanny Harris", which was near her when she sank. FLEETWOOD--At St. Paul June 26, 1851. FLORA--Stern-wheel; built at California, Pa., 1855; 160 tons; St. Paul trade 1855; Dubuque and St. Paul 1856, in Dubuque and St. Paul Packet Co. FOREST ROSE--Built at California, Pa., 1852; 205 tons; at St. Paul 1856. FORTUNE--Bought by Captain Pierce Atchison in April, 1845, at Cincinnati at a cost of $6,000, for St. Louis & Galena trade; same trade 1846; same 1847; sunk, Sept., 1847, on upper rapids. FRANK STEELE--Small side-wheel; length 175 feet; beam 28 feet; Capt. W. F. Davidson, in Minnesota River trade 1857; same 1858; same trade, Capt. J. R. Hatcher, 1859, and spring of 1860; transferred to La Crosse & St. Paul trade 1860, in Davidson's Line; same 1861; Minnesota River 1862. FRED LORENZ--Stern-wheel; built at Belle Vernon, Pa., 1855; 236 tons; Capt. Parker, St. Louis & St. Paul Line, 1857, 1858, 1859; in Northern Line Packet Co., St. Louis & St. Paul, Captain I. N. Mason, 1860, 1861. FREIGHTER--In Minnesota River trade 1857, 1858; Captain John Farmer, 1859. She was sold, 1859, to Captain John B. Davis, who took a cargo for the Red River of the North, and attempted to run her via Lake Traverse and Big Stone Lake, and over the portage to Red River. His attempt was made too late in the season, on a falling river, with the result that the "Freighter" was caught about ten miles from Big Stone Lake and was a total loss. Her timbers remained for many years a witness to Captain Davis's lack of caution. FRONTIER--New 1836; built by D. S. and R. S. Harris, of Galena; Captain D. Smith Harris, Engineer R. Scribe Harris, arrived at Fort Snelling May 29, 1836. FULTON--Tenth steamboat to arrive at Fort Snelling prior to 1827; at Galena, advertised for St. Peters, June, 1827. G. B. KNAPP--Small stern-wheel; 105 tons, built and commanded by Geo. B. Knapp, of Osceola, Wisconsin; ran in the St. Croix River trade most of the time. G. H. WILSON--Small stern-wheel; built for towboat, and powerfully engined; 159 tons; at St. Paul first 1857; afterward in Northern Line as low water boat; sunk opposite Dakota, Minnesota, 1862. G. W. SPARHAWK--Side-wheel; built at Wheeling, Va., 1851; 243 tons; in St. Paul trade 1855; sunk one mile below Nininger, Minnesota. GALENA--(First)--Built at Cincinnati for Captain David G. Bates; Scribe Harris went from Galena to Cincinnati and brought her out as engineer, David G. Bates, Captain; at Galena 1829, 1835, 1836, 1837. GALENA--(Second)--Captain P. Connolly, at Galena, in Galena & St. Peters trade; nearly wrecked in great wind storm on Lake Pepin in June, 1845; J. W. Dinan, clerk, August 12, 1845; at Dubuque Nov. 28, 1845, at which time she reports upper river clear of ice, although Fever River is frozen so that boats cannot make that port; 1846, Captain Goll, Clerk John Stephens. GALENA--(Third)--Side-wheel; 296 tons; built 1854 at Cincinnati for Galena & Minnesota Packet Company; in St. Paul trade, D. B. Morehouse, 1854; Captain Russell Blakeley 1855; Captain Kennedy Lodwick, 1856; Captain W. H. Laughton, 1857; first boat through lake 1857, arriving at St. Paul at 2 A. M., May 1; passed "Golden State" and "War Eagle" under way between Lake Pepin and St. Paul; there were twelve boats in sight when she got through; burned and sunk at Red Wing in 1857, the result of carelessness, a deck passenger having dropped a lighted match into some combustible freight; several lives lost; had 46 staterooms. GALENIAN--At Galena March 30, 1846. GENERAL BROOKE--Side-wheel; built 1842; Captain Joseph Throckmorton, at Galena, from St. Peters, May 26, 1842; seven trips Galena to St. Peters, 1843; at Galena 1845; sold to Captain Joseph La Barge, of St. Louis, in 1845, for $12,000, to run on the Missouri; continued in that trade until 1849, when she was burned at St. Louis levee. GENERAL PIKE--Side-wheel; built at Cincinnati, Ohio, 1852; 245 tons; at St. Paul 1857; 1859. GIPSEY--(First)--In Galena trade, 1837; at Galena, for St. Peters, 1838; at Fort Snelling with treaty goods for Chippewa Indians, Oct. 21, 1838; Captain Gray, at Fort Snelling, May 2, 1839. GIPSEY--(Second)--Stern-wheel; built at California, Pa., 1855; 132 tons; at St. Paul, 1855; 1856. GLAUCUS--Captain G. W. Atchison, in Galena trade, 1839; at Fort Snelling, May 21, 1839, and again June 5, 1839. GLENWOOD--At St. Paul 1857. GLOBE--Captain Haycock, in Minnesota River trade, 1854, 1855, 1856. GOLDEN EAGLE--At St. Paul 1856. GOLDEN ERA--Side-wheel; built at Wheeling, Va., 1852; 249 tons; in Minnesota Packet Company; Captain Hiram Bersie, 1852; Captain Pierce Atchison, at St. Paul, from Galena, May, 1855; later in season Captain J. W. Parker, Dawley, clerk; Captain Parker, 1856; Captain Sam Harlow and Captain Scott in 1857, in Galena, Dunleith & St. Paul Line; same line 1858; Captain Laughton, in La Crosse & St. Paul Line 1859; Captain Laughton, in Dunleith Line 1860; Captain W. H. Gabbert, in Dunleith Line 1861. GOLDEN STATE--Side-wheel; built at McKeesport, Pa., 1852; 298 tons; 1856--Captain N. F. Webb, Chas. Hargus, clerk; 1857, Captain Scott, Clerk Frank Ward, in Galena, Dunleith & St. Paul Line; at St. Paul 1859. GOODY FRIENDS--At St. Paul 1859. GOSSAMER--At St. Paul 1856. GOV. BRIGGS--At Galena July 23, 25, and 28, 1846, in Galena & Potosi run. GOV. RAMSEY--Built by Captain John Rawlins, above the Falls of St. Anthony, to run between St. Anthony and Sauk Rapids; machinery built in Bangor, Maine, and brought by way of New Orleans and up the Mississippi River. GRACE DARLING--At St. Paul 1856. GRAND PRAIRIE--Side-wheel; built at Gallipolis, Ohio, 1852; 261 tons; made three trips from St. Louis to St. Paul 1853; in St. Paul trade 1856. GRANITE STATE--Side-wheel; built at West Elizabeth, Pa., 1852; 295 tons; in Minnesota Packet Company, 1856--Captain J. Y. Hurd; 1857--Captain W. H. Gabbert, Galena, Dunleith & St. Paul Line. GREEK SLAVE--Side-wheel; Captain Louis Robert, 1852; made 18 trips Rock Island to St. Paul in 1853; St. Paul trade 1854; Captain Wood 1855; St. Paul trade 1856. GREY CLOUD--Side-wheel; built at Elizabeth, Ky., 1854; 246 tons; St. Louis & St. Paul trade 1854; 1855. GREY EAGLE--Large side-wheel; built at Cincinnati, Ohio, by Captain D. Smith Harris, for the Minnesota Packet Company; cost $63,000; length 250 feet; beam 35 feet; hold 5 feet; four boilers, 42 inches diameter, 16 feet long; cylinders 22 inches diameter, 7 feet stroke; wheels 30 feet diameter, 10 feet buckets, 3 feet dip; 673 tons burden; launched spring of 1857; Captain D. Smith Harris, Clerks John S. Pim and F. M. Gleim; Engineers Hiram Hunt and William Briggs; in Galena, Dunleith & St. Paul trade 1857, 1858 and 1859; in St. Louis and St. Paul trade 1860, 1861; sunk by striking Rock Island Bridge, May 9, 1861, at 5 o'clock in the evening going downstream. Captain Harris was in the pilot house with the rapids pilot when a sudden gust of wind veered her from her course and threw her against the abutment; she sank in less than five minutes, with the loss of seven lives. Captain Harris sold out all his interest in the Packet Company and retired from the river, broken-hearted over the loss of his beautiful steamer, which was the fastest boat ever in the upper river. She had made the run from Galena to St. Paul at an average speed of 16-1/2 miles per hour, delivering her mail at all landings during the run. H. S. ALLEN--Small stern-wheel; Minnesota River boat 1856, 1857, 1858, 1859; after 1860 went into St. Croix River trade as regular packet between Prescott and St. Croix Falls, Captain William Gray, Pilots Chas. Jewell, Geo. B. Merrick. H. T. YEATMAN--Stern-wheel; built at Freedom, Pa., 1852; 165 tons; wintered above lake, at Point Douglass, 1856-7; left St. Paul for head of Lake, April 10, 1857, and was sunk at Hastings by heading into rocks at levee, staving hole in bow; drifted down and lodged on bar one-half mile below landing; in Minnesota River trade 1855, 1856. H. M. RICE--Minnesota River packet 1855. HAMBURG--Large side-wheel; Captain J. B. Estes, Clerk Frederick K. Stanton, Dubuque and St. Paul packet, 1855; Captain Rowe, St. Louis & St. Paul trade 1856, 1857; at St. Paul 1858. HANNIBAL CITY--Sunk, 1855, at foot of Broken Chute. HARMONIA--Stern-wheel; Captain Allen, at St. Paul, from Fulton City, Iowa, 1857. HASTINGS--At St. Paul 1859. HAWKEYE STATE--Large side-wheel; in Northern Line; at St. Paul 1859; same trade, Captain R. C. Gray, 1860, 1861, St. Louis & St. Paul; same line 1862; 523 tons; made 14 trips St. Louis to St. Paul 1866. HAZEL DELL--At St. Paul 1858. HEILMAN--Sunk 1856, half way between Missouri Point and second ravine below Grafton, Mo. HELEN--At Galena April 11, 1846, from St. Louis. HENRIETTA--Stern-wheel; built at California, Pa., 1853; 179 tons; 2 trips to St. Paul, 1853; 1854--Captain C. B. Goll; St. Paul trade 1855, 1856, 1858, 1859. HENRY CLAY--New 1857; in Northern Line; Captain Campbell 1857; Captain Chas. Stephenson 1858; at St. Paul 1859; Captain Chas. Stephenson 1860; Captain C. B. Goll 1861; sunk by Confederate batteries at Vicksburg 1863. HENRY GRAFF--Stern-wheel; built at Belle Vernon, Pa., 1855; 250 tons; St. Paul 1856; 1857--Captain McClintock, Clerk Stewart, at St. Paul from St. Louis. HERALD--At Galena July 11, 1845, from St. Louis. HERMIONE--Captain D. Smith Harris, at Galena, prior to 1852. HEROINE--In Galena trade 1837; sunk or burned same year. HIBERNIAN--At Galena, for St. Peters, 1844; same 1845, Captain Miller, Clerk Hopkins. HIGHLANDER--In upper river trade, burnt at the levee, at St. Louis, May 1, 1849; valued at $14,000. HIGHLAND MARY--(First)--Sunk, 1842, at foot of Thomas Chute. HIGHLAND MARY--(Second)--Galena & St. Paul trade 1848, Captain Joseph Atchison; arrived at St. Paul April 19, 1850, together with the "Nominee", first arrivals of the season, Captain Atchison in command; she was sold to Captain Joseph La Barge to run on the Missouri in 1852; was greatly damaged by fire at St. Louis July 27, 1853. (Captain Jos. Atchison died of cholera, which was very prevalent on the river in 1850, and his boat was temporarily withdrawn from service.) HINDOO--Two trips to St. Paul, from St. Louis, in 1853. HUDSON--(First)--Upper River trade about 1830, at which time she was at Fort Snelling; sunk one mile below Guttenburg Landing, Iowa. HUDSON--(Second)--Stern-wheel; 176 tons; still running, 1868. HUMBOLDT--Eleven trips to St. Paul 1853; in St. Paul trade 1854. HUNTRESS--In Galena trade 1846. HUNTSVILLE--At Galena May 6 and May 17, 1846, from St. Louis; Clerk Hopkins. IDA MAY--St. Paul 1859. ILLINOIS--Captain McAllister, in Galena trade 1841. IMPERIAL--Large side-wheel; burned at the levee at St. Louis in 1861 by rebel emissary, as is supposed. INDIANA--Fifth steamboat at Fort Snelling prior to 1827; Captain Fay, at Galena, 1828. INDIAN QUEEN--Captain Saltmarsh, at Galena 1840. IOLA--Made five trips to St. Paul 1853; in St. Paul trade 1854, 1855. IONE--In Galena trade 1840; made pleasure trip Galena to St. Peters, 1840; Captain LeRoy Dodge, in Galena trade 1842, also 1845. (Captain James Ward, afterward one of the most successful steamboatmen from St. Louis, was carpenter on this boat.) IOWA--Captain Legrand Morehouse, Clerk Hopkins, in Galena trade 1842; same captain, in Galena and St. Peters trade 1844, 1845. She was a side-wheel steamboat of 249 tons burden, and cost her captain $22,000 to build. Snagged and sunk at Iowa Island Sept. 10, 1845, in her third year; total loss. IRENE--At Galena, for St. Peters, June, 1837. IRON CITY--At Galena Nov. 7, 1844, from Pittsburg; at Galena Oct. 24, 1845; last boat out of Galena Nov. 28, 1845, at which date Fevre River closed; at Galena April 11, 1846, from St. Louis, Captain J. C. Ainsworth; same trade and same captain 1847, 1848; crushed and sunk by ice at St. Louis, Dec. 31, 1849, killing the cook and steward. ISAAC SHELBY--At St. Paul Nov. 14, 1857; in Minnesota River trade 1858, 1859. ITASCA--Side-wheel; new 1857; sister boat to "Key City"; 230 feet long, 35 feet beam; 560 tons; cylinders 22-inch, seven feet stroke; wheels 28 feet diameter, 10 feet buckets; Captain David Whitten, Clerks Chas. Horton and W. S. Lewis, 1857; Prairie du Chien and St. Paul 1857, 1858, 1859, Captain Whitten; St. Louis & St. Paul, Captain Whitten, 1860; Dunleith & St. Paul 1861, 1862, Captain J. Y. Hurd; burned at La Crosse Nov. 25, 1878. J. BISSEL--Captain Bissell, from Pittsburg, 1857; in Minnesota River trade 1857, 1858. J. B. GORDON--Minnesota River boat 1855. J. M. MASON--Stern-wheel; sunk 1852, above Duck Creek Chain, Rock Island Rapids; hit rock and stove. JACOB POE--St. Paul 1857. JACOB TRABER--Large stern-wheel; had double wheels, operated by independent engines; very slow; at St. Paul 1856, 1857, 1858. JAMES LYON--Stern-wheel; built at Belle Vernon, Pa., 1853; 190 tons; at St. Paul, from St. Louis, 1855, 1856; 1857--Captain Blake; 1858; went into Missouri River trade, and was snagged and sunk at Miami Bend, Missouri River, 1858; total loss. JASPER--Made seven trips Galena to St. Peters, Minn., 1843. JAMES RAYMOND--Stern-wheel; built at Cincinnati, Ohio, 1853; 294 tons; show boat; at St. Paul 1858; William Fisher piloted her for one season. JEANETTE ROBERTS--Small stern-wheel; Captain Louis Robert 1857, 1858, in Minnesota River trade; Captain F. Aymond 1859, same trade; same trade 1860, 1861, 1862; 146 tons. JENNIE WHIPPLE--Small stern-wheel boat, built for Chippewa River trade; at St. Paul 1857. JENNY LIND--Stern-wheel; built at Zanesville, Ohio, 1852; 107 tons; one trip to St. Paul 1853; at St. Paul 1859. JO DAVIESS--Captain D. Smith Harris, in Galena and St. Peters trade prior to 1850. JOHN HARDIN--Built at Pittsburg 1845, for St. Louis, Galena and upper river trade. JOHN P. LUCE--At St. Paul 1856. JOHN RUMSEY--Stern-wheel; Captain Nathaniel Harris, Chippewa River boat 1859. JOSEPHINE--(First)--Ninth steamboat to reach Fort Snelling; arrived there 1827; at Galena 1828, Capt. J. Clark; in Galena & St. Louis trade 1829, Captain J. Clark. JOSEPHINE--(Second)--Stern-wheel; St. Paul trade 1856, 1857, 1858. JULIA--(First)--Side-wheel; snagged in Bellefontaine Bend, Missouri River, about 1849. JULIA--(Second)--In Upper River trade 1862. JULIA DEAN--Small stern-wheel, at St. Paul 1855, 1856. KATE CASSELL--Stern-wheel; built at California, Pa., 1854; 167 tons; at St. Paul 1855; wintered above the lake; 1856--Captain Sam. Harlow, Clerk Chas. Hargus; Geo. B. Merrick and Sam. Fifield made their first appearance on the river as pantry boys on this boat this season; Russell Ruley mate, Nat. Blaisdell, engineer; at St. Paul 1859. KATE FRENCH--Captain French, at St. Paul 1857, from St. Louis. KENTUCKY--Side-wheel; Captain W. H. Atchison, at Galena April 3, 1847, from St. Louis; in Sept. same year, Captain Montgomery, running from Galena to the Rapids, and connecting there with the "Anthony Wayne" and "Lucy Bertram" for St. Louis, not being able to run the rapids on account of low water. KENTUCKY NO. 2--Side-wheel; built at Evansville, Ind., 1851; 149 tons; at St. Paul 1855; owned by Captain Rissue, of Prescott; at St. Paul 1857; sunk on bar at foot of Puitt's Island, one mile below Prescott, 1858. KEOKUK--Side-wheel; St. Paul trade 1858, 1859; Captain E. V. Holcomb, in Minnesota Packet Company, La Crosse & St. Paul, 1860, 1861; Davidson's Line, La Crosse & St. Paul, 1861; first boat at Winona, April 2, 1862, Captain J. R. Hatcher; 300 tons. KEY CITY--Side-wheel; new 1857; built for the Minnesota Packet Co.; sister boat to "Itasca"; length 230 feet, beam 35 feet, 560 tons burden; very fast; Captain Jones Worden, Clerk George S. Pierce, 1857, Galena, Dunleith & St. Paul run; same 1858, 1859; same captain, in St. Louis & St. Paul run, 1860, 1861; same captain, in Dunleith & St. Paul run, 1862. "Ned" West was pilot of the "Key City" every season, I think, from 1857 to 1862. He was one of the very best pilots on the upper river. He died at St. Paul in 1904. KEY STONE--Side-wheel; built at Brownsville, Pa., 1853; 307 tons. KEY WEST--At St. Paul 1857. KNICKERBOCKER--At Fort Snelling June 25, 1839. LACLEDE--(First)--Built at St. Louis in 1844, for the Keokuk Packet Co.; burned at St. Louis August 9, 1848. LACLEDE--(Second)--Stern-wheel; built at California, Pa., 1855; 197 tons; at St. Paul 1855, 1856, 1857--Captain Vorhies at St. Paul from St. Louis; St. Paul 1858. LA CROSSE--At St. Paul, from Pittsburg, 1857--Captain Brickle; again 1861. LADY FRANKLIN--Side-wheel; built at Wheeling, Va., 1850; 206 tons; at St. Paul June 19, 1851, for first time; in Minnesota Packet Company; at St. Paul, from St. Louis, May 5, 1855, with 800 passengers--Captain J. W. Malin, Clerks Ed. W. Halliday, Orren Smith; 1856--Captain M. E. Lucas, at St. Paul; sunk at foot of Coon Slough fall of 1856--snagged. LADY MARSHALL--In St. Louis & Galena trade 1837. LADY WASHINGTON--Captain Shellcross, at Galena, loading for Fort Snelling, 1829. LAKE CITY--Stern-wheel; built at Pittsburg 1857; Captain Sloan, at St. Paul 1857; in St. Paul trade 1858, 1859; burned by guerrillas at Carson's Landing, Mo., 1862. LAKE OF THE WOODS--At Galena, from St. Louis, June 5, 1847. LAMARTINE--First trip to St. Paul 1850; went up to Falls of St. Anthony 1850; at St. Paul June 19, 1851. LASALLE--At Galena from St. Louis, April 19, 1845. LATROBE--Stern-wheel; built at Brownsville, Pa., 1853; 159 tons; at St. Paul from St. Louis, 1855. LAWRENCE--Sixth steamboat to reach Fort Snelling; arrived there in 1826. LEWIS F. LYNN--Captain S. M. Kennett, at St. Peters, from Galena, 1844. LIGHT FOOT--In company with "Time and Tide" took excursion from St. Louis to Fort Snelling in 1845; Captain M. K. Harris, first boat at Galena from St. Louis April 20, 1847; at Galena Sept. 25, 1846. LINN--At Galena, for St. Anthony Falls, May, 1846. (Possibly intended for "Lewis F. Lynn".) LITTLE DOVE--Captain H. Hoskins, regular Galena & St. Peters packet, season 1846. LLOYD HANNA--Advertised for a pleasure excursion from Galena to St. Peters, summer of 1840. LUCIE MAY--Stern-wheel; built at West Brownsville, Pa., 1855; 172 tons; in St. Louis & St. Paul trade 1856, 1857; 1858--Captain J. B. Rhodes, same trade; 1859, Northwestern Line, St. Louis & St. Paul; sunk five miles below Lagrange, Mo., 1860. LUCY BERTRAM--Running from St. Louis to the foot of rapids, summer of 1847, in connection with "Kentucky", running above rapids, forming a low water line from St. Louis to Galena. LUELLA--Stern-wheel; built at Nashville, Tenn., 1851; 162 tons; first trip to St. Paul fall of 1852--Captain D. Smith Harris; seven trips to St. Paul 1853, 1854, 1855--Captain Sam. Harlow, Galena & St. Paul run; 1856; had boilers and engines of a much larger boat which had been sunk, and was consequently very fast; dismantled at Dunleith. LYNX--At Galena from St. Louis, 1844, Captain W. H. Hooper; Captain John Atchison, Galena & St. Peters trade 1845, Mr. Barger, clerk; Captain Atchison, in Galena & St. Peters trade 1846, 1847; sunk at head of Atlas Island 1849; first through lake 1846. MAID OF IOWA--At Galena June 15, 1845; running to Fort Winnebago (now Portage, Wis.) on Wisconsin River, in connection with steamer "Enterprise" on Fox River, the two forming a line from Green Bay to Galena; Captain Peter Hotelling master and owner. MALTA--Side-wheel; Captain Joseph Throckmorton, at Fort Snelling July 22, 1839; advertised at Galena in summer of 1840 for pleasure trip to St. Peters; went into Missouri River trade, where she was snagged in Malta Bend, August, 1841, and sank in 15 feet of water, in little more than a minute after striking a snag; boat and cargo total loss; no lives lost; Captain Throckmorton was in command at the time and owned nearly all or quite all of the boat. MANDAN--Side-wheel; fourth boat to arrive at Fort Snelling prior to 1827; snagged at mouth of Gasconade River, on the Missouri, sometime in the forties; Captain Phil Hanna, master at the time. MANSFIELD--Stern-wheel; built at Belle Vernon, Pa., 1854; 166 tons; St. Paul 1856, 1857--Captain Owens; Clerk Bryant. MARTHA NO. 2--Built at Shousetown, Pa., 1849; 180 tons; at St. Paul April 24, 1851, from St. Louis; 1852. MARY BLANE--Captain J. C. Smith, regular St. Louis and Galena Packet, 1848. MARY C--At St. Paul 1853. MATTIE WAYNE--Side-wheel; built at Cincinnati, Ohio, 1852; 335 tons; at St. Paul 1856; greatly damaged by fire at St. Louis 1855. MEDORA--Owned in St. Paul by William Constans, 1857; Captain Ed. McLagan, in Minnesota River trade 1858. MENDOTA--Captain Robert A. Reilly, at St. Peters, from Galena, 1844; same captain, in St. Louis & Galena trade 1845; Captain Starnes, in St. Louis & Galena trade 1846; snagged opposite Cat Island October, 1847, but raised. MERMAID--Side-wheel; in collision with Steamer "St. Croix", near Quincy, April 11, 1845; larboard wheel and cook's galley knocked off. MESSENGER--Large stern-wheel; built at Pittsburg, Pa., 1855; 406 tons; very fast, in St. Paul trade in opposition to Minnesota Packet Company, 1857, from St. Louis; raced with "Key City" for championship of Upper River and was defeated. METROPOLITAN--Very large side-wheel; St. Louis & St. Paul trade 1856; Captain Thos. B. Rhodes, same trade 1857; Northwestern Line, same captain, 1858, 1859; Captain J. B. Jenks 1860; Captain Thos. B. Buford 1861; sunk at St. Louis by breaking of ice jams, Dec. 16, 1865; valued at $18,000. MILWAUKEE--Large side-wheel; one of the crack boats of the Minnesota Packet Company, built at Cincinnati winter of 1856; 240 feet long, 33 feet beam; 550 tons burden; Captain Stephen Hewitt, in Prairie du Chien & St. Paul run 1857, 1858, 1859; Captain John Cochrane, in Dunleith & St. Paul run 1860, 1861; Captain E. V. Holcombe, in Dunleith run 1862. MINNESOTA--(First)--Stern-wheel; built at Elizabethtown, Ky., 1849; at St. Paul, from Galena, 1849--Captain R. A. Riley; at St. Paul June 25, 1851; 1857, 1858, Captain Hay, in Minnesota River trade. MINNESOTA BELLE--Side-wheel; built at Belle Vernon, Pa., 1854; 226 tons; 1854, 1855, 1856--Captain Humbertson, in St. Louis & St. Paul trade; 1857--Captain Thos. B. Hill, same trade; 1859, in Northern Line, St. Louis & St. Paul, Captain Hill. MINNESOTA VALLEY--At St. Paul 1856. MISSOURI FULTON--Captain Culver, first part 1828; at Galena for St. Peters, Captain Clark later in 1828; arrived at Fort Snelling May 8, 1836, Captain Orren Smith; same captain, in Galena & St. Peters trade 1837. MOHAWK--Sunk 1859, at head of Clarkesville Island. MONDIANA--At Galena, from St. Louis, June 6, 1847. MONITOR--Small stern-wheel, 99 tons, from Pittsburg, at St. Paul, 1857. MONONA--At Galena from St. Louis March 10, 1845, Captain Nick Wall; sunk opposite Little Washington, Missouri River, Oct. 30, 1846; raised; in Galena & St. Peters trade, Captain E. H. Gleim, 1846; at Galena, from St. Louis, April 3, 1847, Captain Ludlow Chambers. MONTAUK--(First)--At Galena Oct. 18, 1847, from St. Louis; at Galena, from St. Louis 1848, Captain John Lee; regular packet. MONTAUK--(Second)--Stern-wheel; built at California, Pa., 1853; 237 tons; at St. Paul from St. Louis, 1855; 1856--Captain Parker, from St. Louis; 1857--Captain Burke, Clerks Mullen and Ditto, from St. Louis. MONTELLO--Small stern-wheel from Fox River, Wis., in Minnesota River trade 1855; built over hull of barge--no boiler deck. MOSES McLELLAN--Side-wheel; built at Cincinnati, Ohio, 1855; 400 tons; Captain Martin, in Davidson Line, La Crosse & St. Paul, 1862. MOUNT DEMING--At St. Paul 1857. MUNGO PARK--At Galena from St. Louis April 16, 1845; regular packet. MUSCODA--Captain J. H. Lusk, in Galena trade 1841. NAVIGATOR--Large stern-wheel; Captain A. T. Champlin, in St. Louis & St. Paul trade 1854; same trade 1855; 300 tons; built at Pittsburg, by William Dean. NEIVILLE--Second steamboat to arrive at Fort Snelling prior to 1827. NELLIE KENT--Small stern-wheel, built at Osceola, Wis., by Captain Kent, to run between Prescott and St. Croix Falls. NEW HAVEN--At Galena, for St. Louis, Nov. 5, 1844; regular St. Louis, Galena, Dubuque & Potosi Packet, 1845, Captain Geo. L. King; at Galena June 12, 1846. NEW ST. PAUL--Side-wheel; built at New Albany, Ind., 1852; 225 tons; Captain James Bissell; went into Missouri River trade, and was snagged and sunk at St. Albert's Island, Aug. 19, 1857; boat and cargo total loss; boat cost $25,000. NEW YORK--At St. Paul 1856. NIMROD--At Galena from St. Louis, June 14, 1845; American Fur Company boat; went into Missouri River trade. NOMINEE--Side-wheel; built at Shousetown, Pa., 1848; 213 tons; Captain D. Smith Harris, arrived at St. Paul, April 19, 1850, in company with "Highland Mary", first boats through lake; in Minnesota Packet Co.; Captain Orren Smith, at St. Paul April 16, 1852, 8 P. M., first boat through lake; Captain Russell Blakeley, 29 trips Galena to St. Paul, 1853; Captain Russell Blakeley, first boat at St. Paul April 8, 1854; sunk below Britt's Landing, 1854; Mr. Maitland was clerk in 1852. NORTHERNER--Side-wheel; built at Cincinnati, Ohio, 1853; 400 tons; very fast; contested with "Key City" for championship of Upper River, but was beaten; in Northern Line, St. Louis & St. Paul; Captain Pliny A. Alford, commanded her 1858, 1859, 1860, 1861, 1862; burned at St. Louis prior to 1871. NORTHERN BELLE--Side-wheel; 498 tons; built at Cincinnati, under supervision of Captain Preston Lodwick in 1856, for Minnesota Packet Co.; 226 feet long, 29 feet beam, light draft and very handsomely finished, outside and in; Galena & St. Paul Line 1856, Captain Preston Lodwick; Captain J. Y. Hurd, Dunleith Line, 1858; same captain, in La Crosse Line 1859; same captain, in Dunleith Line, 1860; in La Crosse Line, Captain W. H. Laughton, 1861; took five companies of the First Minnesota Infantry Volunteers from St. Paul to La Crosse, June 22, 1861; Captain W. H. Laughton, in Davidson's La Crosse Line, 1862. NORTHERN LIGHT--Large side-wheel; built at Cincinnati for Minnesota Packet Co., winter of 1856; length 240 feet, beam 40 feet, hold 5 feet; 740 tons; cylinders 22 inches, seven feet stroke; 8 boilers, 46 inches diameter, 17 feet long; wheels 31 feet diameter, 9 feet buckets, 30 inches dip; came out in the spring of 1857 with Captain Preston Lodwick, Clerks J. D. DuBois and K. C. Cooley; Engineers James Kinestone and Geo. Radebaugh; Mate James Morrison; had oil paintings of St. Anthony Falls, Dayton Bluffs and Maiden Rock in panels in the cabin; paddle boxes had paintings of _aurora borealis_; Captain P. Lodwick, in Galena, Dunleith & St. Paul Line 1857, 1858, 1859; same captain, in St. Louis & St. Paul Line 1860; Captain John B. Davis, St. Louis Line 1861; Captain Gabbert, in Dunleith Line 1862; sunk in first bend below head of Coon Slough, by Jackson Harris, pilot, who swung stern of boat into solid shore ice in making fast turn of the bend, tearing out the stern of the boat and sinking her in 30 feet of water in a few minutes. NORTH STAR--Built above the Falls of St. Anthony by Captain John Rawlins in 1855; running from St. Anthony to Sauk Rapids until 1857. NUGGET--Stern-wheel; snagged April 22, 1866, abreast Dacota City, Nebr., on Missouri River; boat and cargo total loss; boat valued at $20,000. OAKLAND--Stern-wheel; built at California, Pa., 1853; 142 tons; Captain C. S. Morrison, at St. Paul, 1855; at St. Paul from St. Louis 1856, 1857, 1858. OCEAN WAVE--Side-wheel; built at Elizabeth, Ky., 1854; 235 tons; very short boat and very hard to steer; cost $17,000; in Minnesota Packet Company, Captain E. H. Gleim 1856; 1857, Captain Andrews in spring, and Captain James in fall, in Galena & St. Paul Line; 1858, 1859--Captain Scott, in Prairie du Chien Line; 1860, Captain N. F. Webb, in Dunleith Line; 1861, Captain Webb, in La Crosse Line. ODD FELLOW--Cline, master, at Galena 1848. OHIO--Captain Mark Atchison, in Galena trade 1842; at Galena for St. Louis, Nov. 5, 1844. OLIVE BRANCH--Captain Strother, at Galena, for St. Louis, April 9, 1836. OMEGA--At Galena for St. Peters, Minnesota, spring of 1840, Captain Joseph Sire, Pilot Joseph La Barge; owned by American Fur Co.; went into the Missouri River trade. ORB--Stern-wheel; built at Wheeling, Va., 1854; 226 tons; at St. Paul from St. Louis, 1857, Captain Spencer. OSCEOLA--Small stern-wheel boat, built for St. Croix River trade; at St. Paul 1855. OSPREY--In St. Louis & Galena trade 1842, Captain N. W. Parker; same trade 1845, 1846. OSWEGO--At St. Paul Nov. 13, 1851. OTTER--Built and owned by Harris Brothers; D. Smith Harris, captain; R. Scribe Harris, engineer; in Galena and St. Peters trade 1841, 1842; 7 trips to St. Peters in 1843; Captain Scribe Harris, in same trade 1844, 1845; arrived at Galena from St. Peters, April 8, 1845, having passed through lake on up trip; in same trade 1846, 1847; Harris Bros, sold her in 1848; her engines were taken out and placed in the "Tiger" prior to 1852. PALMYRA--Captain Cole, arrived at Fort Snelling June 1, 1836, with a pleasure excursion consisting of some 30 ladies and gentlemen from Galena; in Galena & St. Peters trade 1837, Captain Middleton; arrived at Fort Snelling July 14, 1838, bringing the official notice of the Sioux treaty, opening of St. Croix Valley to settlers; also brought machinery for sawmill to be built on St. Croix, and Mr. Calvin Tuttle, millwright, with a number of workers to erect the mill. PANOLA--At St. Paul 1858. PARTHENIA--Stern-wheel; built at California, Pa., 1854; 154 tons; in St. Paul trade 1856, 1857. PAVILION--Captain Lafferty, at Galena for St. Peters, June 1, 1837. PEARL--At Galena for St. Louis, March 16, 1845; same October, 1847, Montgomery, master; regular Galena & St. Peters trade 1848; also for St. Croix Falls. PEMBINA--Side-wheel; in Northwestern Line and Northern Line; Captain Thos. H. Griffith, St. Louis & St. Paul 1857, 1858, 1859; Captain John B. Hill, same trade 1860, 1861. PENNSYLVANIA--Captain Stone, at St. Paul June 1, 1839. PIKE--At Galena, on her way up the river, Sept. 3, 1839; arrived at Fort Snelling with troops Sept. 9, 1839; arrived again Sept. 17, 1839; in same trade 1840. PILOT--At Galena from St. Louis, Sept. 6, 1846. PIZARRO--At Galena, new 1838; built by Captain R. Scribe Harris; 133 feet long, 20 feet beam, 144 tons burden; in Galena trade 1840. PLANET--At Galena from St. Louis May 21, 1847. PLOW BOY--Side-wheel; 275 tons; snagged above Providence, Mo., on Missouri River, 1853. POMEROY--Minnesota River boat, Captain Bell 1861. POTOSI--Collapsed flue at Quincy, Ill., October 4, 1844, killing two passengers; at Galena, Ill., from St. Louis, April 11, 1846. PRAIRIE BIRD--Captain Nick Wall, in Galena, St. Louis & St. Peters trade 1846; at Galena April 11, 1846; at Galena, April 3, 1847, Captain Nick Wall, same trade; 213 tons burden; cost $17,000; sunk above Keithsburg, Iowa, 1852. PRAIRIE ROSE--Stern-wheel; built at Brownsville, Pa., 1854; 248 tons; in St. Louis and St. Paul trade, 1855, Captain Maratta. PRAIRIE STATE--(First)--One of the early boats on the Upper River; exploded boilers at Pekin, Ill., April 25, 1852, killing 20 of the deck passengers and crew. PRAIRIE STATE--(Second)--Stern-wheel; 281 tons; 59 horse power; Captain Truett, St. Louis & St. Paul Packet, 1855. PRE-EMPTION--Built by Harris Bros., of Galena; Captain D. Smith Harris, some time prior to 1852. PROGRESS--Stern-wheel; built at Shousetown, Pa., 1854; 217 tons; Captain Goodell, at St. Paul, loading for St. Louis, 1857. QUINCY--In Galena trade 1840. RARITAN--Captain Rogers, at Galena 1846. REBUS--St. Paul trade 1854. RED ROVER--Captain Throckmorton, in Galena trade 1828, 1829, 1830. RED WING--(First)--Side-wheel; 24 feet beam; new 1846; Captain Berger, in St. Louis & St. Peters regular trade, 1846; at Galena April, 1846; Clerk Green; Captain Berger, St. Louis & St. Peters, 1847, 1848. RED WING--(Second)--Side-wheel; at St. Paul 1855; Captain Woodburn, at St. Paul 1857; Captain Ward, latter part 1857; Captain Ward, at St. Paul 1858. RED WING--(Third)--In Northwestern Line, 1879-1880; side-wheel, 670 tons burden. REGULATOR--Stern-wheel; built at Shousetown, Pa., 1851; 156 tons; in St. Louis & St. Paul trade 1855. RELIEF--Captain D. Smith Harris, prior to 1852. RESCUE--Stern-wheel; built at Shousetown, Pa., 1853; 169 tons; built for towboat; very fast; Captain Irvine, at St. Paul from Pittsburg, 1857. RESERVE--At St. Paul 1857. RESOLUTE--Stern-wheel (towboat); very powerful engines; 316 tons; owned by Capt. R. C. Gray, of Pittsburg Tow-boat Line. REVEILLE--Small stern-wheel; wintered above the lake 1855; St. Paul trade 1855, 1856, 1857. REVEILLE--At Galena, from St. Louis, April 18, 1846; regular packet in that trade; (do not know whether it is the same as above). REVENUE--Captain Turner, in Galena trade 1847; burned on Illinois River, May 24, 1847. REVENUE CUTTER--Captain McMahan and Oliver Harris, owners, McMahan, master, at Galena, from St. Louis, May 9, 1847; in Galena & St. Peters trade; bought to take place of steamer "Cora" sold to go into Missouri River trade. ROBERT FULTON--At St. Paul July 3, 1851. ROCHESTER--Built at Belle Vernon, Pa., 1855; 199 tons; at St. Paul 1856. ROCKET--At St. Paul from St. Louis, 1857. ROCK RIVER--Small boat, owned and commanded by Augustin Havaszthy, Count de Castro, an Hungarian exile; in Galena and upper river trade 1841; made trips between Galena & St. Peters once in two weeks during season of 1842; in same trade 1843, 1844; laid up for winter at Wacouta, head of lake, in fall of 1844, her cook and several others of the crew walking on the ice to La Crosse; the captain and two or three others remained on board all winter, and in the spring, as soon as the ice was out of the lake, went south with the boat, which ran on some lower river tributary, and the Count was lost sight of. ROLLA--At Galena for St. Peters, June 18, 1837; had on board Major Tallaferro, U. S. A., with a party of Indians; arrived at Fort Snelling Nov. 10, 1837, bringing delegations of chiefs who had been to Washington to make a treaty whereby the St. Croix Valley was opened to settlers; collapsed a flue and burned near Rock Island, Ill., November, 1837, killing one fireman and severely scalding the engineer on watch. ROSALIE--(First)--In Galena and St. Louis trade 1839. ROSALIE--(Second)--Stern-wheel; built at Brownsville, Pa., 1854; 158 tons; Captain Rounds, from Pittsburg, with stoves and hardware, sunk below St. Paul 1857; was raised and continued in St. Paul trade, 1858, 1859. ROYAL ARCH--Side-wheel; built at West Elizabeth, Pa., 1852; 213 tons; Captain E. H. Gleim, in Minnesota Packet Co., 1854; 1855; 1856, same line; sunk opposite Nine Mile Island 1858. RUFUS PUTNAM--Third steamboat to reach Fort Snelling; arrived there in 1825. RUMSEY--Small Minnesota River boat; sunk on mud flat opposite levee at St. Paul. SAM GATY--Large side-wheel; built at St. Louis, Mo., 1853; 367 tons, 288 horse-power engines; Captain Vickers, at St. Paul 1855; went into Missouri River trade; struck a bluff bank at point opposite Arrow Rock, Mo., knocked her boilers down and set fire to boat, burned and sank, June 27, 1867. She had been a money-maker for many years, both on the Mississippi and on the Missouri. SAM KIRKMAN--At St. Paul 1858. SAM. YOUNG--Built at Shousetown, Pa., 1855; 155 tons; at St. Paul 1856; Captain Reno, from Pittsburg, at St. Paul 1857. SANGAMON--Stern-wheel; built at New Albany, Ind., 1853; 86 tons; Captain R. M. Spencer, at St. Paul 1854. SARACEN--New 1856; built at New Albany, Ind., Captain H. B. Stran, Clerk Casey, at St. Paul 1857. SARAH ANN--Captain Lafferty, in Galena trade 1841; sunk, 1841, at head of Island 500; raised; regular St. Louis & Galena packet. SAXON--At St. Paul 1859. SCIENCE--Running between St. Louis and Fort Winnebago, on the Wisconsin (now Portage); made three trips to the Fort in 1837 with troops and government supplies. SCIOTA--Seventeenth steamboat to arrive at Fort Snelling prior to 1827. SENATOR--At Galena, from St. Louis, April 20, 1847, first; Captain E. M. McCoy; in Galena and upper river trade 1847; bought by Harris Brothers 1848; Captain D. Smith Harris, in Galena & St. Peters trade 1848; arrived at Galena, from St. Peters April 13, reporting heavy ice in Lake Pepin, but was able to get through; Captain Orren Smith, 1849, 1850, in Galena & St. Paul trade. She was the second boat owned by the Minnesota Packet Company, the "Dr. Franklin" being the first. SHENANDOAH--Made five trips to St. Paul, from St. Louis, in 1853; same trade 1855; was in great ice gorge at St. Louis, February, 1856. SILVER WAVE--Stern-wheel; built at Glasgow, Ohio, 1855; 245 tons; in upper river trade 1856. SKIPPER--At St. Paul 1857. SMELTER--Captain D. Smith Harris, Engineer Scribe Harris, Galena & St. Peters trade 1837; was one of the first boats on the upper river to be built with a cabin answering to the "boiler deck" of modern steamboats. SNOW DROP--At St. Paul 1859. STATESMAN--Built at Brownsville, Pa., 1851; 250 tons; at St. Paul 1855. STELLA WHIPPLE--Stern-wheel; Captain Haycock, Minnesota River trade, 1861; built for the Chippewa River. ST. ANTHONY--Side-wheel; 157 feet long, 24 feet beam, 5 feet hold; 30 staterooms; small boat, but highly finished and furnished for that time; hull built by S. Speer, of Belle Vernon, Pa., engines by Stackhouse & Nelson, of Pittsburg, modeled by Mr. King; Captain A. G. Montford, in Galena & St. Peters trade 1846, regularly. ST. CROIX--Side-wheel; built by Hiram Bersie, William Cupps, James Ryan and James Ward; Captain Hiram Bersie, Mate James Ward, 1844, in St. Louis, Galena & St. Peters trade; in collision with "Mermaid", near Quincy, April 11, 1845, losing her barge; damaged by fire May 13, 1845; in upper river trade 1845, 1846, 1847, Captain Bersie, master. ST. LOUIS--Stern-wheel; built at Brownsville, Pa., 1855; 192 tons; at St. Paul 1856, 1859. ST. LOUIS OAK--Side-wheel; Captain Coones, St. Louis, Galena & Dubuque trade 1845; snagged and lost at head of Howard's Bend, Missouri River, 1847, Captain Dozier in command. ST. PAUL--Side-wheel; built at Wheeling, Va., 1852, for Harris Bros., Galena, Ill.; 1852, Captain M. K. Harris, in Galena & St. Paul trade; was very slow, and drew too much water for upper river trade; 1854, Captain Bissell, at St. Paul for St. Louis; at St. Paul 1855. ST. PETERS--(First)--Captain Joseph Throckmorton, at St. Peters and Fort Snelling July 2, 1836; brought as one of her passengers Nicollet, who came to explore the Northwest Territory. ST. PETERS--(Second)--Built and owned by Captain James Ward (formerly mate of the "St. Croix"), who commanded her; burned at St. Louis May 17, 1849; valued at $2,000. SUCKER STATE--Side-wheel; in Northern Line; Captain Thos. B. Rhodes, in St. Louis & St. Paul Line, 1859, 1860, 1861; Captain James Ward, in same line, 1862; was burned at Alton Slough, together with three or four other boats, while lying in winter quarters. SUTLER--Captain D. Smith Harris, prior to 1850. TEMPEST--(First)--Regular St. Louis, Galena, Dubuque & Potosi packet; at Galena April 11, 1846, Captain John Smith. TEMPEST--(Second)--Side-wheel; went into Missouri River trade and was snagged and lost about 1865, at Upper Bonhomme Island. THOS. SCOTT--Large side-wheel; at St. Paul, from St. Louis, 1856. TIGER--Had engines of old "Otter"; Captain Maxwell, in St. Paul trade 1850; same captain, in Minnesota River trade 1851, 1852; 104 tons, 52 horse power; very slow. TIGRESS--Large stern-wheel; 356 tons; Ohio River towboat; powerful engines and very fast; at St. Paul 1858; sunk by Confederate batteries at Vicksburg 1863. TIME--At Galena May 15, 1845; regular St. Louis & Galena packet; at Galena April 11, 1846, from St. Louis, Captain Wm. H. Hooker, in regular trade; snagged and sunk one-half mile below Pontoosuc, Ia., August, 1846. TIME AND TIDE--(First)--Captain D. Smith Harris, Keeler Harris, engineer, brought excursion party to Fort Snelling, in company with steamer "Light Foot", in 1845; at Galena April 13, 1847, E. W. Gould, master, in regular St. Louis, Galena & St. Peters trade. TIME AND TIDE--(Second)--Stern-wheel; built at Freedom, Pa., 1853; 131 tons; Captain Louis Robert, at St. Paul 1855, 1856; same captain, in Minnesota River trade 1857, 1858; Captain Nelson Robert, same trade 1859. TISHOMINGO--Side-wheel; built at New Albany, Ind., 1852; 188 tons; very fast boat; bought by one Johnson, of Winona, Minn., from lower river parties, to run in opposition to Minnesota Packet Company; was in St. Paul trade 1856, but lost money and was sold for debt at Galena in winter of 1856; bought for $25,000 by Captain Sargent; reported as having left St. Louis April 14, 1857, Jenks, master, for St. Paul with 465 cabin passengers and 93 deck passengers, besides a full cargo of freight, worth to the boat about $14,000. TUNIS--At St. Paul 1857. TWIN CITY--Side-wheel; built at California, Pa., 1853; 170 tons; in St. Paul trade 1855; burned at St. Louis Dec. 7, 1855. UNCLE TOBY--Captain Geo. B. Cole, at St. Peters, from St. Louis, 1845; at Galena April 9, 1846, from St. Louis Captain Geo. B. Cole; regular St. Louis, Galena & Dubuque packet for season; 1847, Captain Henry R. Day, regular St. Louis & St. Peters packet; in same trade 1851; arrived at Point Douglass, Minn., Nov. 20, 1851, and there unloaded and had freight hauled by team to St. Paul on account of floating ice; put back from Point Douglass to St. Louis. U. S. MAIL--At St. Paul 1855. VALLEY FORGE--Advertised a pleasure trip from Galena to St. Peters, 1840. VERSAILLES--Arrived at Fort Snelling May 12, 1832, from Galena. VIENNA--Stern-wheel; built at Monongahela, Pa., 1853; 170 tons; in St. Louis & St. Paul trade 1855, 1856. VIOLET--At St. Paul 1856. VIRGINIA--At St. Louis April, 1823, with government stores for Fort Snelling, John Shellcross, master; arrived at Fort May 10, 1823; built at Pittsburg; 118 feet long, 22 feet beam, 160 tons. VIXEN--Stern-wheel; built at St. Paul; from Pittsburg, 1857, 1858, 1859. VOLANT--Thirteenth steamboat to arrive at Fort Snelling, prior to 1827. W. G. WOODSIDE--Built at Moundsville, Va., 1855; 197 tons; at St. Paul 1856. W. H. DENNY--Side-wheel; built at California, Pa., 1855; 276 tons; Captain Lyons, at St. Paul from St. Louis, 1857; sunk opposite head of Fabius Island 1857. WM. L. EWING--Large side-wheel; Captain Smith, St. Louis & St. Paul, 1857; in Northwestern Line, Captain Green, 1858; same 1859; Northern Line 1860, 1861, Captain J. H. Rhodes, St. Louis & St. Paul. W. S. NELSON--Captain Jameson, at St. Paul 1857; at St. Paul 1859. WAR EAGLE--(First)--Built by Harris Brothers for Galena & St. Peters trade in 1845; 156 tons burden; commanded by Captain D. Smith Harris, Scribe Harris, engineer; in Galena & St. Peters trade 1845, 1846, 1847; St. Louis & St. Peters 1848; in 1848 Harris Bros. sold her and bought the "Senator", in order to get a faster boat. WAR EAGLE--(Second)--Built at Cincinnati, winter of 1853-4; side-wheel; 219 feet long, 29 feet beam, 296 tons; had 46 staterooms; 3 boilers, 14 feet long; in Minnesota Packet Company, Captain D. Smith Harris, Galena & St. Paul, 1854, 1855, 1856; made the run from Galena to St. Paul, 1855, in 44 hours, handling all way freight; 1857, Captain Kingman, Clerks Coffin and Ball, in Dunleith & St. Paul Line; Captain W. H. Gabbert, 1858, same line; La Crosse Line 1859; Captain J. B. Davis, 1860, in La Crosse Line; spring of 1861 started out from La Crosse with following roster of officers: Captain A. Mitchell, Clerk Sam Cook, Second Clerk E. A. Johnson, Pilots Jackson Harris, and William Fisher; Engineers Troxell and Wright; Steward Frank Norris; later in the season Captain Mitchell was succeeded by Captain Chas. L. Stephenson and ran in Dunleith Line; June 22, 1861, left St. Paul with five companies of the First Minnesota Infantry Volunteers, the "Northern Belle" having the other five companies, which were landed at La Crosse and transferred to the railroad for transportation to Washington; 1862, in Dunleith Line, Captain N. F. Webb; in St. Paul trade 1862, 1863; Thomas Cushing, master in latter year; burnt, La Crosse (year not learned). WARRIOR--Built in 1832 by Captain Joseph Throckmorton, for upper river trade; took part in the battle of Bad Axe, where the Indians under Blackhawk were defeated and dispersed, Captain Throckmorton in command of boat, E. H. Gleim, clerk, William White, pilot; arrived at Fort Snelling on first trip of the season, June 24, 1835, having among her passengers General Geo. W. Jones, U. S. A., Captain Day and Lieut. Beech, U. S. A., and Catlin, the artist, on his way to study the Indians of the northwest; at Fort again July 16, 1835; at Galena advertised for Pittsburg, Nov. 7, 1835; in Galena & St. Peters trade 1836. WAVE--Small stern-wheel; Captain Maxwell, in Minnesota River trade, 1857, 1858. At Galena, from St. Louis, 1845. (Possibly another boat.) WENONA--Stern-wheel; built at Belle Vernon, Pa., 1855; 171 tons; Captain L. Brown, in Minnesota River trade; also in St. Croix River trade for a time; at St. Paul 1859. WEST NEWTON--Captain D. Smith Harris, 1852, in Galena & St. Paul trade; first boat at St. Paul 1853, Captain Harris; made 27 trips between Galena and St. Paul 1853; sunk at foot of West Newton Chute, below Alma, in Sept., 1853. WHITE BLUFF--At St. Paul 1856. WHITE CLOUD--(First)--Burnt at St. Louis May 17, 1849. WHITE CLOUD--(Second)--Side-wheel; very fast; had double rudders; Captain Alford, from St. Louis at St. Paul, 1857; sunk at St. Louis, Feb. 13, 1867, by ice; total loss. WINNEBAGO--Built 1830, by Captain George W. Atchison and Captain Joseph Throckmorton; in Galena & St. Louis trade, Jos. Throckmorton, master; also visited Fort Snelling with government stores. WINONA--Side-wheel; Captain J. R. Hatcher, Davidson Line, La Crosse & St. Paul, 1861. WIOTA--New 1845; built and owned by Captain R. A. Reilly, Corwith Bros., and Wm. Hempstead, of Galena; side-wheel, 180 feet long, 24 feet beam, 5 feet hold; double engines, 18 inch diameter, 7 feet stroke, 3 boilers, wheels 22 feet diameter, 10 feet buckets; gangway to boiler deck in front, instead of on the side as had been customary; in St. Louis & Galena trade, R. A. Reilly, master. WISCONSIN--Captain Flaherty, at Galena, for St. Louis, April 9, 1836. WYANDOTTE--Captain Pierce, Dubuque & St. Paul Line, 1856. WYOMING--In Galena & St. Louis trade 1837. YANKEE--Stern-wheel, 145 feet long, 200 tons burden, at St. Paul Sept. 27, 1849; August 1, 1850, started on trip of 300 miles up the Minnesota River with a party of ladies and gentlemen, on an exploring expedition; Captain M. K. Harris, Clerk G. R. Girdon, Pilot J. S. Armstrong, Engineers G. W. Scott and G. L. Sargent; reached a point many miles further up the river than had heretofore been reached by steamboats; at St. Paul June 26, 1851, Captain Orren Smith. YORK STATE--Side-wheel; built at Brownsville, Pa., 1852; 247 tons; Captain Griffiths, in St. Louis & St. Paul trade 1855; at St. Paul 1856--Captain James Ward, who also owned her. Appendix B _Opening of Navigation at St. Paul, 1844-1862_ =====+===============+==========+==============+===========+=====+========= | | | |Length of | No. | Total | | | |Season (No.| of | No. of Year | First Boat | Date | River Closed |of Days) |Boats| Arrivals -----+---------------+----------+--------------+-----------+-----+--------- 1844 | Otter | April 6 | November 23 | 231 | 6 | 41 1845 | Otter | April 6 | November 23 | 234 | 7 | 48 1846 | Lynx | March 31 | December 5 | 245 | 9 | 24 1847 | Cora | April 7 | November 29 | 236 | 7 | 47 1848 | Senator | April 7 | December 4 | 241 | 6 | 63 1849 | Highland Mary | April 9 | December 7 | 242 | 8 | 85 1850 | Highland Mary | April 19 | December 4 | 229 | 9 | 104 1851 | Nominee | April 4 | November 8 | 218 | 10 | 119 1852 | Nominee | April 16 | November 18 | 216 | 6 | 171 1853 | West Newton | April 11 | November 30 | 233 | 17 | 235 1854 | Nominee | April 8 | November 27 | 223 | 23 | 310 1855 | War Eagle | April 17 | November 20 | 217 | 68 | 536 1856 | Lady Franklin | April 18 | November 10 | 212 | 79 | 759 1857 | Galena | May 1 | November 14 | 198 | 99 | 965 1858 | Grey Eagle | March 25 | November 15 | 236 | 62 | 1090 1859 | Key City | March 19 | November 27 | 222 | 54 | 802 1860 | Milwaukee | March 28 | November 23 | 240 | 45 | 776 1861 | Ocean Wave | March 8 | November 26 | 203 | 32 | 977 1862 | Keokuk | March 18 | November 15 | 212 | 18 | 846 -----+---------------+----------+--------------+-----------+-----+--------- Appendix C _Table of Distances from St. Louis_ =========================+==========+=========+========== | |DISTANCE |GOVERNMENT LANDING |ESTIMATED,|BETWEEN |SURVEY, |1858 |PORTS |1880 -------------------------+----------+---------+---------- Alton, Ill. | 25 | -- | 23 Grafton, Ill. | -- | 16 | 39 Cap au Gris, Mo. | 65 | 27 | 66 Hamburg, Ill. | -- | 22 | 88 Clarkesville, Mo. | 102 | 14 | 102 Louisiana, Mo. | 114 | 10 | 112 Hannibal, Mo. | 144 | 29 | 141 Quincy, Ill. | 164 | 20 | 161 La Grange, Mo. | 176 | 10 | 171 Canton, Mo. | 184 | 7 | 178 Alexandria, Mo. | 204 | 19 | 197 Warsaw, Ill. | 204 | -- | 197 Keokuk, Iowa | 208 | 5 | 202 Montrose, Iowa | 220 | 12 | 214 Nauvoo, Ill. | 223 | 3 | 217 Fort Madison, Iowa | 232 | 8 | 225 Pontoosuc, Ill. | 238 | 7 | 232 Dallas, Ill. | 240 | 2 | 234 Burlington, Iowa | 255 | 14 | 248 Oquawaka, Ill. | 270 | 13 | 261 Keithsburg, Ill. | 282 | 12 | 273 New Boston, Ill. | 289 | 6 | 279 Port Louisa, Iowa | 294 | 9 | 288 Muscatine, Iowa | 317 | 14 | 302 Buffalo, Iowa | -- | 19 | 321 Rock Island, Ill. | 347 | 10 | 331 Davenport, Iowa | 348 | 1 | 332 Hampton, Ill. | -- | 10 | 342 -------------------------+----------+---------+---------- =========================+==========+=========+========== | |DISTANCE |GOVERNMENT LANDING |ESTIMATED,|BETWEEN |SURVEY, |1858 |PORTS |1880 -------------------------+----------+---------+---------- Le Claire, Iowa | 365 | 6 | 348 Port Byron, Ill. | 365 | -- | 348 Princeton, Iowa | 371 | 6 | 354 Cordova, Ill. | 372 | 1 | 355 Camanche, Iowa | 381 | 9 | 364 Albany, Ill. | 384 | 2 | 366 Clinton, Iowa | 390 | 5 | 371 Fulton, Ill. | 392 | 2 | 373 Lyons, Iowa | 393 | 1 | 374 Sabula, Ill. | 412 | 17 | 391 Savanna, Ill. | 415 | 2 | 393 Bellevue, Iowa | 438 | 21 | 414 Galena, Ill. | 450 | 12 | 426 Dubuque, Iowa | 470 | 12 | 438 Dunleith, Ill. | 471 | 1 | 439 Wells' Landing, Iowa | 485 | 13 | 452 Cassville, Wis. | 500 | 16 | 468 Guttenberg, Iowa | 510 | 10 | 478 Glen Haven, Wis. | -- | 1 | 479 Clayton, Iowa | 522 | 7 | 486 Wisconsin River, Wis. | -- | 7 | 493 McGregor, Iowa | 533 | 4 | 497 Prairie du Chien, Wis. | 536 | 3 | 500 Lynxville, Wis. | 553 | 17 | 517 Lansing, Iowa | 566 | 12 | 529 De Soto, Wis. | 577 | 5 | 534 Victory, Wis. | 582 | 7 | 541 Bad Axe, Wis. | 589 | 8 | 549 Warner's Landing, Wis. | -- | 5 | 554 Brownsville, Minn. | 591 | 8 | 562 La Crosse, Wis. | 617 | 10 | 572 Dresbach, Minn. | 627 | 8 | 580 Trempealeau, Wis. | 632 | 11 | 591 Winona, Minn. | 645 | 13 | 604 Fountain City, Wis. | 655 | 7 | 611 Mount Vernon, Minn. | 666 | 9 | 620 Minneiska, Minn. | 669 | 3 | 623 Buffalo City, Wis. | 676 | -- | -- Alma, Wis. | 684 | 10 | 633 -------------------------+----------+---------+---------- =========================+==========+=========+========== | |DISTANCE |GOVERNMENT LANDING |ESTIMATED,|BETWEEN |SURVEY, |1858 |PORTS |1880 -------------------------+----------+---------+---------- Wabasha, Minn. | 693 | 9 | 642 Reed's Landing, Minn. | 696 | 3 | 645 North Pepin, Wis. | 701 | 4 | 649 Lake City, Minn. | 708 | 6 | 655 Florence, Minn. | 713 | -- | -- Frontenac, Minn. | 719 | -- | -- Maiden Rock, Wis. | -- | 10 | 665 Wacouta, Minn. | 723 | -- | -- Stockholm, Wis. | -- | 3 | 668 Red Wing, Minn. | 726 | 8 | 676 Trenton, Wis. | -- | 4 | 680 Diamond Bluff, Wis. | 741 | 6 | 686 Prescott, Wis. | 756 | 13 | 699 Point Douglass, Minn. | 757 | 1 | 700 Hastings, Minn. | 759 | 2 | 702 Nininger, Minn. | 764 | 5 | 707 Pine Bend, Minn. | 775 | -- | -- Newport, Minn. | 782 | 13 | 720 St. Paul, Minn. | 791 | 9 | 729 St. Anthony Falls, Minn. | 805 | 12 | 741 -------------------------+----------+---------+---------- Appendix D _Improvement of the Upper Mississippi, 1866-1876_ The following table gives in detail the different divisions into which the river was divided for convenience in letting contracts, and prosecuting the work of improvement, the number of miles covered in each division, and the amount expended in each in the ten years from 1866 to 1876: ============================================+=======+============== DIVISION | MILES | AMT. EXPENDED --------------------------------------------+-------+-------------- St. Anthony Falls to St. Paul | 11 | $ 59,098.70 St. Paul to Prescott | 32 | 638,498.56 Prescott to Head Lake Pepin | 29 | 111,409.17 Harbor at Lake City | -- | 16,091.62 Foot Lake Pepin to Alma | 12 | 341,439.26 Alma to Winona | 29 | 365,394.25 Winona to La Crosse | 31 | 236,239.39 La Crosse to McGregor | 72 | 308,311.07 McGregor to Dubuque | 59 | 137,236.65 Dubuque to Clinton | 67 | 131,905.29 Clinton to Rock Island | 40 | 228,298.99 Rock Island to Keithsburg | 58 | 70,071.85 Keithsburg to Des Moines Rapids | 60 | 515,971.20 Keokuk to Quincy | 40 | 355,263.71 Quincy to Clarksville | 60 | 552,051.47 Clarksville to Cap au Gris | 43 | 389,959.31 Cap au Gris to Illinois River | 27 | 137,116.97 Illinois River to Mouth of Missouri River | 25 | 70,688.77 Miscellaneous, maintenance of Snag-Boats, | | Dredges, wages, provisions, etc. | | 549,760.92 | --- | ------------- | 695 | $5,200,707.25 --------------------------------------------+-------+-------------- Appendix E _Indian Nomenclature and Legends_ The name Mississippi is an amelioration of the harsher syllables of the Indian tongue from which it sprang. Dr. Lafayette H. Bunnell, late of Winona, Minnesota, a personal friend and old army comrade, is my authority for the names and spelling given below, as gleaned by him during many years' residence among the Chippewa of Wisconsin and the Sioux (or Dakota) of Minnesota. Dr. Bunnell spoke both languages fluently, and in addition made a scholarly study of Indian tongues for literary purposes. His evidence is conclusive, that so far as the northern tribes were concerned the Mississippi was in the Chippewa language, from which the name is derived: _Mee-zee_ (great), _see'-bee_ (river)--Great River. The Dakota called it _Wat-pah-tah'-ka_ (big river). The Sauk, Foxes, and Potawatomi, related tribes, all called it: _Mee-chaw-see'-poo_ (big river). The Winnebago called it: _Ne-scas-hut'-ta-ra_ (the bluff-walled river). Thus six out of seven tribes peopling its banks united in terming it the "Great River". Dr. Bunnell disposes of the romantic fiction that the Indians called it the "Great Father of Waters", by saying that in Chippewa this would be: _Miche-nu-say'-be-gong_--a term that he never heard used in speaking of the stream; and old Wah-pa-sha, chief of the Dakota living at Winona, assured the Doctor that he had never heard an Indian use it. The Chippewa did, however, have a superlative form of the name: _Miche-gah'-see-bee_ (great, endless river), descriptive of its (to them) illimitable length. Dr. Bunnell suggests the derivation of the name Michigan, as applied to the lake and state. The Chippewa term for any great body of water, like Lakes Michigan, Superior, or Huron, is: _Miche-gah'-be-gong_ (great, boundless waters). It was very easy for the white men who first heard this general term as applied to the lake, to accept it as a proper name, and to translate the Indian term into Michigan, as we have it to-day. It is a source of gratification that the names applied to the Great River by the Jesuit fathers who first plied their birch-bark canoes upon its surface, did not stick. They were wonderful men, those old missionaries, devoted and self-sacrificing beyond belief; but when it came to naming the new-found lands and rivers, there was a monotony of religious nomenclature. Rivière St. Louis and Rivière de la Conception are neither of them particularly descriptive of the Great River. In this connection it must be said, however, that there was something providential in the zeal of the good missionaries in christening as they did, the ports at either end of the upper river run. The mention of St. Louis and St. Paul lent the only devotional tinge to steamboat conversation in the fifties. Without this there would have been nothing religious about that eight hundred miles of Western water. Even as it was, skepticism crept in with its doubts and questionings. We all know who St. Paul was, and his manner of life; but it is difficult to recall just what particular lines of holiness were followed by Louis XIV to entitle him to canonization. Trempealeau Mountain, as it is called, situated two miles above Trempealeau Landing, Wisconsin, is another marvel of nature that attracted the attention of the Indians. It is an island of limestone, capped with sandstone, rising four hundred feet above the level of the river. Between the island and the mainland is a slough several hundred feet wide, which heads some five or six miles above. The Winnebago gave it a descriptive name: _Hay-me-ah'-shan_ (Soaking Mountain). In Dakota it was _Min-nay-chon'-ka-hah_ (pronounced Minneshon'ka), meaning Bluff in the Water. This was translated by the early French voyageurs into: _Trempe à l'eau_--the Mountain that bathes its feet in the water. There is no other island of rock in the Mississippi above the upper rapids; none rising more than a few feet above the water. It is but natural that the Indians who for centuries have peopled the banks of the Mississippi, should have many legends attaching to prominent or unusual features of the river scenery. Where the Indians may have failed, imaginative palefaces have abundantly supplied such deficiencies. There is one legend, however, that seems to have had its foundation in fact--that of the tragedy at Maiden Rock, or Lover's Leap, the bold headland jutting out into Lake Pepin on the Wisconsin side, some six or eight miles below the head of the lake. Dr. Bunnell devoted much study to this legend, and his conclusion is that it is an historic fact. Divested of the multiplicity of words and metaphor with which the Indian story-teller, the historian of his tribe, clothes his narrative, the incident was this: In the days of Wah-pa-sha the first, chief of the Dakota band of that name, there was, in the village of Keoxa, near the site of the present Minnesota city of Winona, in the latter part of the eighteenth century, a maiden whose name was Winona (_Wi-no-na_: first-born daughter). She had formed an attachment for a young hunter of the tribe, which was fully reciprocated by the young man. They had met often, and agreed to a union, on which all their hopes of happiness centered. But on applying to her family, the young suitor was curtly dismissed with the information that the girl had been promised to a warrior of distinction who had sued for her hand. Winona, however, persisted in her preference for the hunter; whereupon the father took measures to drive him out of the village, and the family began to use harsh measures to coerce the maiden into a union with the warrior whom they had chosen for her husband. She was finally assured that she was, with or without her consent, to be the bride of the man of their choice. About this time a party was formed to go to Lake Pepin to lay in a store of blue clay, which they used as a pigment. Winona, with her family, was of the party. Arriving at their destination the question of her marriage with the warrior again came up, and she was told that she would be given to him that very day. Upon hearing this final and irrevocable decree the girl withdrew, and while the family were preparing for the wedding festival she sought the top of the bluff now known as Maiden Rock. From this eminence she called down to her family and friends, telling them that she preferred death to a union with one she did not love, and began singing her death song. Many of the swiftest runners of the tribe, with the warrior to whom she had been sold, immediately ran for the summit of the cliff in order to restrain her; but before they reached her she jumped headlong from the height, and was dashed to pieces on the jagged rocks a hundred and fifty feet below. This story was in 1817 related to Major Long, of the United States Army, by a member of Wahpasha's tribe, Wa-ze-co-to, who claimed to have been an eyewitness of the tragedy. Wazecoto was an old man at the time, and his evident feeling as he related the tale went far toward convincing Major Long that the narrator was reciting the tale of an actual occurrence. Maiden Rock itself is a bluff about four hundred feet in height. One hundred and fifty feet of it is a sheer precipice; the other two hundred and fifty is a steep bluff covered with loose rocks, and grown up to straggling scrub oaks. Some versions of the legend state that Winona in her grief leaped from the bluff into the waters of the lake and was drowned. On my only visit to the top of the Leap, in company with Mr. Wilson, the mate, we found it somewhat difficult to throw a stone into the water from the top of the bluff. If Winona made it in one jump she must have been pretty lithe, even for an Indian. I hope that I may not be dubbed an iconoclast, in calling attention to the fact that Indian stories similar to this have been localized all over our country. Lovers' Leaps can be counted by the score, being a part of the stock in trade of most summer resorts. Another difficulty with the tale is, that the action of the young pair does not comport with the known marriage customs of Indians. [Illustration: MAP OF THE MISSISSIPPI BETWEEN ST. LOUIS AND ST. PAUL.] Index Index A. B. CHAMBERS: steamboat, 238. Able, Capt. Dan: 259. Accordion: 16. Adriatic: steamboat, 238. Africa: 161. Afton (Catfish) Bar: 107. Agents, transfer: 30. Ainsworth, Capt. J. C.: 275. Alex. Mitchell: steamboat, 122, 124. Alford, Capt. Pliny A.: 282, 293. Algoma: steamboat, 18. Allegheny River: 66. Allen, Capt. Charles J.: 225, 226, 273. Alma, Wis.: 293. Alton, Ill.: 29, 188. Alton Line. _See_ Steamboats. Alton Slough: 290. Altoona: steamboat, 238. Amaranth Island: 258. American Fur Co.: 266, 282, 284. American Society of Mechanical Engineers: 43. Anchor Line. _See_ Steamboats. Anderson, Capt. ----: 234, 268. Andrews, Capt. ----: 284. Anglo-Saxons: 70, 114, 211. Anthony Wayne: steamboat, 277. Antietam: battle of, 215. Appendices: 257-303. Apple River: 104. Appomattox Ct. House: battle of, 215. Archer: steamboat, 265. Argo Island: 259. Armstrong, Joseph: pilot, 116, 294. Army: 80, 83, 84, 114, 115, 141, 190, 191, 204-206, 209, 212-214, 224, 226, 241, 283, 285, 288, 292. Arnold, John: pilot, 116. Arrowheads: 20. Arrow Rock, Mo.: 288. Art and artists: 152, 155, 283, 293. Assault: 48. Atchinson, Capt. G. W.: 258, 271, 277, 293. Atchison, Capt. John: 279. Atchison, Capt. Joseph: 274. Atchison, Capt. Mark: 284. Atchison, Capt. Pierce: 269, 271. Atlas Island: 259, 264, 279. Australia: steamboat, 238. Aymond, Capt. F.: 276. Ayres, Lieut. Romeyn, U. S. A.: 212. BADGER STATE: steamboat, 260. Baldwin, Capt. ----: 269. Ball, ----: clerk, 292. Baltimore, Md.: 80. Bangor, Maine: 272. Banks (Newfoundland): 15. Banks, bankers, and banking: 174-180. Barbers: 157. Barger, ----: clerk, 279. Barkeepers: 132, 135. Barley: 169, 247. Barnes, Charles: 246. Barry, Capt. ----: 258. Bass, black: 104. Bateaux. _See_ Ships. Bates, Capt. ----: 257. Bates, David G.: 270. Battles: 20, 21 (Indian), 184, 203, 211, 212, 215, 293. Bayous: 22, 227. Beadle, Hiram: pilot, 116. Beans: 29. Bears: 22. Beaver, Pa.: 267. Beaver Falls: 206. Beebe, Capt. Edward H.: 265. Beech, Lieut. ----, U. S. A.: 293. Beef Slough: 76, 95, 247. Bell, Capt. Edwin: 258, 285. Bellefontaine Bend: 276. Belle Plaine, Minn.: 209. Belle Vernon, Pa.: 269, 274, 276, 279, 287, 289, 293. Bellevue, Iowa: 118. Ben Campbell: steamboat, 117. Ben Franklin: name for steamboats, 229. Berger, Capt. ----: 286. Berlin, Ger.: 201. Bersie, Capt. Hiram: 271, 289. Biddle, Maj. John: 187. Big Stone Lake: 269. Bissell, Capt. James: 275, 282, 289. Black, James (Jim): pilot, 80, 116, 268. Black Hawk: Indian chief, 184, 293. Black River: 113, 260. Blacksmiths: 35, 188. Blaisdell: family in Prescott, 22. Blaisdell, Nathaniel: 35, 277 (engineer). Blake, Capt. ----: 276. Blakeley, Capt. Russell: 113, 180, 259, 265, 270, 282. Blanchard, Mr. ----: 56. Bloody Island: 115. Bloomington, Iowa: 265. Boats. _See_ Ships. Boilers: 39; how cleaned, 37. _See also_ Engines. Boland, Capt. ----: 245, 253. Books: 200. Boston, Mass.: 80, 84. Boughton: family in Prescott, 22. Boulanger's Island: 223. Boyd, Capt. ----: 260. Brady, Capt. ----: 266. Brandy: 108, 135. Brickie, Capt. ----: 278. Bridges: 148, 189, 250, 260, 266, 272. Briggs, William: engineer, 272. Brisbois & Rice: 265. Britt's Landing, Tenn.: 150, 282. Brock, Capt. ----: pilot, 117. Broken Chute: 273. Brooks, Capt. John: 257. Brown, Capt. L.: 293. Brownsville, Pa.: 95, 258, 260, 263, 266, 267, 277, 278, 285, 287, 289, 294. Brownsville Chute: 261. Brunette: steamboat, 238. Bryant, ----: clerk, 279. Buchanan, Pres. James: 144. Buffalo, N. Y.: 187. Buford, Capt. Thomas B.: 280. Bull Run: battle of, 215. Bunnell, Dr. Lafayette: _Hist. of Winona_, cited, 150, 300, 302. Burbank & Co., J. C.: 258. Burke, Capt. ----: 281. Burlington, Iowa: 264. Burlington: name for steamboats, 230. Burnett, Ellsworth: 205. Burns, Thomas (Tom): pilot, 78, 80-88, 103, 116, 240-242, 245, 248, 249, 253, 268. CABLES: 144. Cairo, Ill.: 185, 187, 188, 242, 253. California, Pa.: ships built at, 257, 260, 269, 271, 273, 276, 277, 281, 283, 284, 291, 292. Campbell, Capt. ----: 273. Campbell & Smith (Steamboat Co.): 265. Campbell's Chain: 264. Canada: 21, 64, 196. Canals: 79, 199, 223, 225. Canoes. _See_ Ships. Cape Girardeau, Mo.: 188. Captains (of steamboats): 59, 93, 95, 99, 112, 124, 126, 143, 144, 157, 161, 163, 167, 170, 173, 193, 199, 229. Cards, Playing: 139-141. Carlisle College: 216. Carlton, E.: clerk, 267. Carpenters: 50, 163, 175, 194, 213, 275. Carson's Landing, Mo.: 278. Casey, ----: clerk, 288. Cassville, Wis.: 167. Cassville Crossing: 86, 95. Cassville Slough: 250. Casualties: 69, 74, 76, 96, 103, 104, 172, 192-195, 210, 211, 214, 215, 227, 229-239, 257-293. Catfish Bar (Reef): 107, 108, 192. _See also_ Afton. Cat Island: 280. Catlin, George: artist, 293. Cedar Creek, Va.: 152. Celts: 70. _See also_ Irish. Centennial: steamboat, 124. Chain of Rocks: 264. Challenge: steamboat, 238. Chambers, Capt. Ludlow: 281. Champlin, Capt. A. T.: 263, 282. Channels: in river, how kept, 40. Charlevoix, Pierre François Xavier de, S. J.: _Hist._, cited, 21. Charters, bank: 176. Chicago, Ill.: 16, 175, 176, 242, 248. Chicago River: 113. Chickens: 127, 128. Chippewa: name for steamboats, 230. _See also_ Indians. Chippewa River: 113-115, 190, 263, 276, 289. Chittenden, Capt. H. M., U. S. A.: cited, 186, 230, 232, 233. Cholera: 274. Cincinnati, Ohio: 144, 175, 184, 187, 242, 259, 265, 268, 269-272, 276, 280-283, 292. City Belle: steamboat, 101. City of Quincy: steamboat, 117. Clara: steamboat, 239. Clark, Capt. J.: 276, 281. Clarkesville, Ind.: 188. Clarkesville Island: 281. Clayton, Iowa: 60. Clerks (on steamboats): 14, 37, 59, 71, 167, 179, 251, 252, 267, 270, 275, 276, 278, 279, 281-283, 286, 288, 292-294; first or chief, 52, 55-57, 65, 72, 136, 157, 163, 170, 240, 242, 268; second or "mud," 52, 57, 58, 61, 65, 163, 170, 240, 242, 248, 268. Cleveland, Pres. Grover: 84. Cline, ----: 284. Clinton, Iowa: 29. Clothing: 26. Cochrane, Capt. John: 280. Coffin, ----: clerk, 292. Cold Harbor, Va.: 203. Cole, Capt. George B.: 284, 291. Colonel Bumford: steamboat, 184, 187. Commerce: large on Mississippi, 13; on St. Joseph River, 15; trading posts, 21; lines of, 79, 80 (_see also_ Steamboats); Mississippi may regain, 80; lessens on Mississippi, 221. Commissions, shipping: 30. Confederates: 50, 211, 212, 231, 273, 290. Congregationalists: 216. Congress: 221, 222, 225. Connolly, Capt. P.: 270. Constans, William: 280. Contractors: 222-225, 227. Conway, Capt. ----: 267. Cook, Samuel: clerk, 292. Cooks: 126, 128, 199. Cooley, K. C.: clerk, 283. Coones, Capt. ----: 289. Coon Slough: 84, 103, 278, 283. Cora: steamboat, 287. Cormack, Pleasant: pilot, 113. Corwith Bros.: 294. Corwith, Henry L.: 265. Cossen, ----: 258. Cottonwood Prairie (_now_ Canton): 188. Council Bluffs, Iowa: 264. _Coureur du bois_: 113. Crawford, Capt. ----: 112. Crawford County: 113. Creeks: 22. Crows: 206. Cuba: 185. Culver, Capt. ----: 281. Cumberland River: 250. Cupp, William: pilot, 116. Cupps, William: 289. Cushing, Thomas (Tommy, Tom): pilot, 73, 78, 80, 86, 88, 99, 116, 159, 268, 293. DACOTA CITY, Nebr.: 283. Daily Bugle: newspaper, 180, 181. Dakota, territory: 80. Dakota, Minn.: 270. Dakota Co., Minn.: 180. Dalles, Wis.: 202. Dalton, Stephen: pilot, 116. Dams: 85, 225, 227, 228. Danube: name for steamboats, 230. Davidson, Payton S.: 124, 125, 267, 268. Davidson, Com. William F.: 122-124, 267, 269. Davidson Line. _See_ Steamboats. Davis, Capt. ----: 124. Davis, Charles: pilot, 264. Davis, Jefferson: 114. Davis, Capt. John B.: 269, 283, 292. Dawley, ----: clerk, 271. Day, Capt. ----, U. S. A.: 293. Day, Capt. Henry R.: 291. Dayton Bluff: 103, 155, 283. Dean, William: 282. Deck hands: 163, 193, 194, 215, 250, 262. Deer: 22. DeMarah (Demerer--corruption), Louis: earliest steamboat pilot of upper Mississippi, 112, 113. Demerer, Louis. _See_ DeMarah. Denmark: name for steamboats, 230. De Soto, Hernando: 247. Des Plaines River: 113. Detroit, Mich.: 187. Diamond Bluff: 26, 35, 60, 246. Diamond Jo Line. _See_ Steamboats. Dikes: 85, 225, 227, 228, 239. Dinan, J. W.: clerk, 270. Ditto, ----: clerk, 281. Di Vernon: steamboat, 259. Divers: 124. Dr. Franklin: name for steamboats, 184, 230, 288. Dodge, Col. ----: U. S. Engineer, 228. Doemly, Ingenuous: 139, 180. Dogs: 200. Donnelly, Patsey: barkeeper, 135, 136, 140. Dousman, H. L.: 265. Dove, Bill: gambler, 139, 141. Dove, Sam: gambler, 139, 141. Dozier, Capt. ----: 289. Dredges: 228. Dreming, T. G.: pilot, 116. Du Barry, Lieut. Beekman: 212. DuBois, J. D.: clerk, 283. Dubuque, Iowa: 61, 66, 123, 135, 164, 172, 265, 268, 269, 270, 291. Dubuque: name for steamboats, 230. Dubuque & St. Paul Packet Co. _See_ Steamboats. Duck Creek Chain: 275. Ducks: 23. Dunleith, Ill. (_now_ E. Dubuque): 30, 56, 130, 144, 147, 164, 167, 168, 172, 179, 180, 258, 268, 271, 279, 280, 283, 292. Dutch: 114; Pennsylvania, 66, 70. Dynamos: 79. EADS & NELSON: 238. East Dubuque, Ill.: its former name, 30. Eden, Capt. and Maj. Robert (Bob) C.: son of English baronet, 196-205, 266. Editors: 182, 196. Edward Bates: steamboat, 233. Electricity: 34, 89, 245, 247, 249. Elizabeth, Ky.: 272, 283. Elizabeth, Pa.: 260. Elizabethtown, Ky.: 280. Emigrants: 65. Emilie Bend: 266. Endors: steamboat, 233. Engineers (generally of steamboats, although at times army and civil): 14, 35, 42, 56, 57, 72, 73, 79 (govt.), 96, 105, 110, 112, 148, 163, 170, 184, 199, 207, 208, 210, 213, 216, 222, 224-227, 230, 242, 246, 247, 265, 268, 270, 272, 277, 283, 284, 287, 289, 290, 292, 294; assistant or "cub," 39, 50, 52; two types, 46; description and duties, 35-40, 43-51. Engine-room, of ship: 38-45, 193, 207, 246. Engines (of steamboats): 51, 75, 96, 97, 102, 150, 151, 163, 194, 207-209, 213, 246, 248, 263, 276, 279, 289; described, 36, 38, 39, 47; of stern-wheelers, 39 (two); on side-wheelers, 40-43; poppet-valve, 41, 44; repaired, 36; danger of centering, 41; stroke, defined, 41; how power of, increased, 41, 42. England: 203, 204. English: 114. Enterprise: steamboat, 199, 200, 279. Enterprise Island: 266. Equator: steamboat, 191, 194. Estes, Capt. J. B.: 273. Ethiopians: 70. _See also_ Negroes. Europe: 185. Excelsior: steamboat, 132, 156, 157, 177. Explosions (on steamboats): 39, 73, 230-232, 262, 265; cause, 39, 42, 43, 47. FALLS CITY: steamboat, 234, 238. Fanny Harris: steamboat, 35, 38, 49, 51, 74, 80, 84, 99, 118, 120, 135, 139, 150, 206, 210, 214, 234, 237, 245, 269. Farley, ----: clerk, 264. Farmer, Capt. John: 269. Farms: 60, 80, 176, 185, 187, 195, 222. Father of Waters: 152. _See_ Mississippi River. Faucette, Capt. William: 48, 55, 61, 258, 268. Favorite: steamboat, 101. Fay, Capt. ----: 274. Federal Arch: steamboat, 238. Fevre River: 74, 80, 117, 270, 275. Fifield: family in Prescott, 22. Fifield, Hon. Samuel S.: lieut.-gov. of Wis., 35, 276. Firearms: 20, 200, 201, 211, 213, 214. Fire Canoe: steamboat, 234. Firemen: 47, 48, 158, 194, 199, 208, 215, 242, 247, 250, 287. Fires: 232-234, 262, 263, 265. Fish: 19, 23, 104, 189, 199. Fisher, Capt. William: pilot, 78, 116, 117, 121, 123, 260, 276, 292. Fishing tackle: 200. Flaherty, Capt. ----: 294. Floods: 13, 207-211, 216, 238. Flour: 29, 96, 169. Forest Rose: steamboat, 239. Forges: 35. Fort Armstrong: 188. Fort Crawford: 114, 115. Fort Edwards, Ill.: 188. Fort Haskell: 203. Fort Henry: 84. Fort Ridgeley, Minn.: 206, 211-220. Fort Snelling, Minn.: 112, 187, 207, 210, 215, 257, 259, 261, 263, 265, 266, 269, 270, 271, 274, 276-279, 281, 282, 284, 285, 287-291, 293. Fort Sterling: 268. Fort Sumter, S. C.: 209, 213. Fort Winnebago (_now_ Portage, _q. v._), Wis.: 279, 288. Foundries: 161. Fowl, wild: 22. Fox River: 112, 196, 199, 202, 279, 281. France: 112. Frank Steele: steamboat, 101. Frauds: bank and land, 174-183. Freedom, Pa.: 263, 266, 273. Freight: 19, 29, 30, 33, 34, 52, 55, 57, 64, 65, 74, 76, 109, 137, 143, 147, 149, 151, 162, 164, 167-169, 171-173, 179, 185, 233, 240, 241, 246, 248, 250, 252, 266, 267, 270, 291, 292. French: 21, 113, 114, 301. Frenchman's: sand bar, 223. Frontier: steamboat, 184. Fruit: 23. Fuel: on river boats, 59-63. Fulton, Capt. L.: 263. Fulton City, Iowa: 273. Furman, Charles: clerk, 266. Furs: 22, 164, 169. Fur-traders: 112. F. X. Aubrey: steamboat, 239. GABBERT, CAPT. W. H.: 118, 258, 268, 271, 272, 283, 292. Galena, Ill.: 19, 36, 37, 55, 56, 66, 71, 80, 83, 84, 99, 115, 117, 118, 127, 129, 148, 149, 164, 167-169, 172, 182, 184, 187-189, 237, 257-294. Galena: name for steamboats, 230. Galena, etc., Packet Co. _See_ Steamboats. Gallipolis, O.: 272. Gambling: 124, 138-142. Game: 22, 199, 201. Gasconade River: 279. Gates, William R., brother-in-law of G. B. Merrick: 30. Gauge, steam: 48. General Brooke: steamboat, 152. Gilbert, Capt. ----: 268. Gilpatrick, Henry: pilot, 116. Girdon, G. R.: clerk, 294. Glasgow, O.: 289. Gleim, Capt. E. H.: 281, 284, 287, 293. Gleim, F. M.: clerk, 272. Glenmont, Wis.: 195. Gloucester, Mass.: 15. Gody, Alex.: pilot, 116. Gold: in mountains near Missouri River, 164. Golden Era: steamboat, 80. Golden State: steamboat, 270. Goll, Capt. C. B.: 270, 273. Goodell, Capt. ----: 286. Gordon, Gen. ----: 203. Grafton, Mo.: 273. Grant, Maj.-Gen. Ulysses S.: 212. Gray, Capt. ----: 107, 108, 109, 271. Gray, Capt. R. C.: 264, 273, 286. Gray, Capt. S. E.: 80. Gray, Capt. William: 273. Great Northwestern Stage Lines: 258. Great River: appellation of Mississippi (_q. v._), 13. Green, ----: clerk, 286. Green, Capt. Asa B.: 190-195, 267, 292. Green Bay, Wis.: 112, 279. Greenlee, Capt. ----: 262. Grey Cloud: sand bar, 95, 223. Grey Eagle: steamboat, 41, 144, 147, 148, 152, 184. Griffith, Capt. Thomas H.: 262, 285. Griffiths, Capt. ----: 294. Guardapie, Joe: pilot, 113, 114. Guttenburg Channel: 249. Guttenburg Landing, Iowa: 274. Guyandotte: 263. HADDOCK, WILLIAM: 182. Half-breeds: 112, 113, 115. _See also_ Indians. Hall, Peter: pilot, 116. Halliday, Edward W.: clerk, 278. Hamilton, William ("Billy"): engineer, 35, 38, 46-51, 73, 159, 268. Hanks, Stephen: pilot, 116. Hanna, Capt. Phil: 279. Hannibal, Mo.: 29, 188, 229. Hardman, Capt. ----: 259. Hargus, Charles (Charley): clerk, 55, 56, 61, 62, 135, 180, 268, 271, 276. Harlow, Capt. ----: 271. Harlow, Samuel (Sam): pilot, 116, 276, 279. Harriman, Gen. Samuel: 141. Harris Bros.: 265. Harris, Capt. Daniel Smith: 144, 148, 149, 184, 187, 189, 265, 270, 272, 274, 276, 282, 284, 286, 288-290, 292, 293. Harris, Jackson (Jack): pilot, 103, 116, 283, 292. Harris, James: 184. Harris, Keeler: engineer, 290. Harris, Meeker K.: 265, 278, 289, 294. Harris, Capt. Nathaniel: 276. Harris, Oliver: 287. Harris, R. Scribe: 184, 265, 270, 284, 285, 289, 292. Harris Slough: 74, 80. Hastings, Minn.: 20, 21, 115, 122, 140, 168, 191, 195, 245, 273. Hatcher, Capt. J. R.: 269, 277, 293. Havaszthy, Augustin: Count de Castro, 287. Hawes, Chaplain ----: officiates at wedding, 204. Hay, Capt. ----: 281. Hay, Col. John: cited, 46. Haycock, Capt. ----: 271, 289. Hempstead, William: 294. Henderson, Billy: 132, 267. Herculaneum, Mo.: 188. Hewitt, Capt. Stephen: 280. Highland Mary: steamboat, 282. Hight, Capt. ----: 261. Hill, Capt. John B.: 285. Hill, Capt. Thomas B.: 281. Hoffman, Capt. ----: 263. Holcomb, E. V.: pilot, 116, 277, 280. Holloway, J. F.: describes steamboat race, 41, 43-45. Hooper, Capt. William H.: 258, 279, 290. Hopkins, ----: clerk, 274. Horton, Charles: clerk, 275. Hoskins, Capt. H.: 278. Hotelling, Capt. Peter: 279. Howard's Bend: 289. H. S. Allen: steamboat, 80, 104, 106, 108. Hudson, Wis.: 29, 83, 108, 109, 148, 195, 201. Humbertson, Capt. ----: 281. Hungarians: 65. Hunt, Hiram: engineer, 272. Hunt, W. E.: 264. Hunters: 20. Hurd, Capt. J. Y.: 272, 283. Huron, Lake: 300. ICE: steamboats crushed in, 234, 237, 238, 239, 257, 258. Illinois, state: 18, 30, 64, 80, 84, 175, 188. Illinois River: 231, 250, 259, 265. Immigrants and immigration: 19, 62. Improvements: cost of, 222, 223, 226; on upper Mississippi (1866-76), 297. Indiana, state: 175. Indian Mission: 262. Indians: 13, 18-28, 113, 114, 184, 187, 189, 201, 202, 209, 211-213, 219, 220, 287, 293; numerous about Mississippi River, 20; chiefs, 21, 22; squaws, 22; characteristics, 23; nomenclature and legends, 300-303. Various tribes-- Chippewa, 19, 20, 21, 112-114, 200, 219, 271, 300; Dakota (Dakotah), 20, 112, 300-302 (_see also below_ Sioux); Hurons, 112; Sioux, 19, 20, 21, 22 (Red Wing band), 82, 182, 200, 206, 211, 212 (agency), 216, 219 (various bands), 284; Winnebago, 301. Indian Territory: 211. Indies: 185. Industries: 29, 30, 113, 161, 162. Insurance: 162, 234. Intoxication: 66, 115, 140, 141, 157. Iowa, state: 64, 89, 219, 248. Iowa Island: 275. Irish: 48, 49, 65, 66, 69, 70, 114, 135, 215, 241. Iron and steel: 163. Irvine, Capt. ----: 286. Islands: 21, 22, 110, 111, 188, 189, 223, 224, 232, 248, 257-259. Italians: 65. Itasca: steamboat, 84, 144, 147, 151, 277. JACKINS, CAPT. ----: 268. James, Capt. ----: 284. Jameson, Capt. ----: 292. Jenks, ----: 172, 291. Jenks, Capt. J. B.: 280. Jesuits: 301. Jewell, Charles (Charley): pilot, 80, 106, 192, 193, 267, 273. J. M. White: steamboat, 41. John M. Chambers: steamboat, 264. Johnson, ----: 291. Johnson, E. A.: clerk, 292. Johnson, John: 182. Jones, Gen. George W., U. S. A.: 293. Jones, Joseph: 118. Josephine: steamboat, 249. Josie: steamboat, 249. KANSAS, STATE: 222. Kate Cassell: steamboat, 35, 84, 115, 150. Keithsburg, Iowa: 285. Kendall, Ned: musician, 157. Kennett, Capt. S. M.: 278. Kent, Capt. ----: 282. Kentucky: steamboat, 279. Keokuk, Iowa: 188, 232, 239. _See also_ Steamboats. Keokuk Rapids: 117. Keoxa: Indian village, 302. Key City: steamboat, 84, 89, 101, 103, 148, 149, 151, 275, 277, 280, 282. Kinestone, James: engineer, 283. King, ----: 289. King, Capt. George L.: 282. King, John: pilot, 78, 116. Kingman, Capt. ----: 267, 292. Kinnickinnic Bar: 107. Kinnickinnic River: 204, 205. Knapp, Geo. B.: 270. LA BARGE, CAPT. JOSEPH: 264, 266, 271, 274, 284. La Crosse, Wis.: 29, 112, 150, 167, 183, 208, 216, 260, 267-269, 271, 275, 281, 283, 284, 287, 292, 293. Lady Franklin: steamboat, 171. Lafferty, Capt. ----: 285, 288. Lagrange, Mo.: 279. Lake City, Minn.: 246. Lakeland, Minn.: 29, 108. Lakes: 19, 29; Great, 117, 187, 200, 300. Lambs: 127. Land: government, 60; frauds, 180-183. Lansing, Iowa: 89, 122, 123. La Pointe, Charles: pilot, 115. Laughton, Capt. W. H.: 122-124, 270, 271, 283. Lawrence, O.: 269. Laws, banking: 174. Lay, John: engineer, 192, 193, 194, 195, 267. Leadlines: 92, 95. Le Claire, Iowa: 29. Lee, Capt. John: 281. Lee, Gen. Robert E.: 141, 203. Le Fevre (_now_ Galena, _q. v._), Ill.: 184. Le Seuer, Pierre Charles: French explorer and trader, 21. Lewis, W. S.: clerk, 275. Libbie Conger: steamboat, 249. Liberty Landing, Mo.: 259. Limestone: 301. Lincoln, Abraham: 161, 215. Lindergreen, Henry: printer, 181. Link, Henry: pilot, 102, 245, 247, 252, 253. Liquors: 66, 108, 130-137, 140. Little Crow: Sioux chief, 211. Little Washington, on Missouri River: 281. Locomotives: reversing gear of, 40. _See also_ Railroads. Lodwick, Capt. Kennedy: 259, 263, 270. Lodwick, Capt. M. W.: 259, 260, 261, 265. Lodwick, Capt. Preston: 265, 282, 283. London, Eng.: 201. Long, Maj. ----, U. S. A.: 303. Long Island Sound: 42. Longstreet, Gen. James: 203. Louis XIV: king of France, 301. Louisiana, Mo.: 18, 188. Lover's Leap: 155, 302 (Legend). _See also_ Maiden Rock. Lucas, Capt. M. E.: 278. Lucy Bertram: steamboat, 277. Ludloff, Louis: 215. Luella: steamboat, 18, 184. Lumber and lumbering: 29, 113, 114, 162, 185, 190, 191, 221. Lusk, Capt. J. H.: 281. Lynn, Lewis F.: 278. Lyon, Capt. ----: 259. Lyon, Kimball (Kim): 16, 17. Lyons, Capt. ----: 292. MCALLISTER, CAPT. ----: 274. McClintock, Capt. ----: 274. McClure, Capt. John: 265. McCoy, Capt. E. M.: 288. McCoy, James B.: pilot, 115, 116, 268. McDonald, George: engineer, 46, 241, 245, 246, 253, 268. McGregor, Iowa: 179, 248, 249. McGuire, Capt. ----: 258. McKeesport, Pa.: 257, 258, 261, 264, 271. McLagan, Capt. Ed.: 280. McMahan, Capt. ----: 286, 287. McPhail, Sandy: raftsman, 114, 115. Machinery: 35, 36, 72, 110, 111, 227, 272, 284. Mackinac, Mich.: 112. Madison, Iowa: 258. Maiden Rock (near Winona): 155, 283, 302, 303. Mail: 147. Maitland, ----: clerk, 282. Malin, Capt. J. W.: 278. Mallen, Bill: 139, 141. Malta Bend: 279. Manning, Charley: pilot, 116. Maratta, Capt. ----: 285. Marquette, Jacques, S. J.: 113. Marshall, Sam: musician, 158, 159. Martin, Capt. ----: 264, 267, 281. Maryland, state: 47. Mary Morton: steamboat, 102, 240-242, 245, 247, 249, 250. Mason, Capt. Isaac M.: 259, 260, 269. Massacres, Indian: 206, 213. Mates (on steamboats): 64-73, 75, 77, 93, 95, 126, 136, 194, 251, 253, 277; first, 163; second, 71, 72, 163. Mathers, Charles (Charley): clerk, 240, 245, 253. Maxwell, Capt. O. H.: 261, 290, 293. Melville, Geo. R.: clerk, 265. Mendota, Minn.: 206. Mermaid: steamboat, 289. Merrick: family in Prescott, 22. Merrick, Col. ----: 211. Merrick, George B. (author): ancestry, 15; birthplace, 15; early impressions, 15-19; first glance of Mississippi River, 18; escapes from drowning, 26; chased by wolves, 27, 28; enters river service, 35; becomes ship pantry boy, 35, 276; printer, 35, 181; second or "mud" clerk, 37, 52-58, 268; second engineer, 38-45; never centered his engine, 41; bashful, 52; appointment as clerk becomes permanent, 56; threatened with loss of position, 61; pilot, 80, 266, 267, 273; his initiation as pilot, 106-110; on "Golden Era," 80; on "Equator," 192; accident to his boat, 104; engaged by Eden, 199; his experience with wild-cat money, 179; knows game haunts, 200; great reader, 201; visits Maiden Rock, 303; enlists and serves during Civil War, 51, 83, 190, 268; marries, 83; agent and superintendent of N. Y. Steamship Co., 83; railroad agent, 83, 240; newspaper man, 83; his trip on "Mary Morton," 240-253. Merrick, L. H., father of G. B. M.: 29, 30. Merrick & Co., L. H.: 30-33, 55. Merrick, Samuel, brother of G. B. M.: 25, 26. Messenger: steamboat, 149. Methodists: 190, 191. Metropolitan: steamboat, 132. Mexico, Gulf of: 64. Miami Bend: 276. Michigan, state: 15, 19, 175, 186, 199, 201; possible etymology of, 300, 301. Michigan, Lake: 300, 301. Middleton, Capt. ----: 284. Miller: family in Prescott, 22. Miller, Capt. ----: 274. Miller, John S.: 188. Mills: 18, 169, 221, 222, 284. Milwaukee, Wis.: 248. Mines, lead: 184. Minks: 22. Minneapolis, Minn.: 96, 169, 183, 226. _See also_ St. Anthony. Minnesota, territory and state: 19, 20, 62, 80, 116, 117, 129, 152, 155, 162, 164, 180-182, 206, 211, 213, 219, 222, 248. Minnesota Packet Co. _See_ Steamboats. Minnesota River: 206, 207, 209, 216, 258, 259, 261, 264, 265, 267-269, 271, 273, 275, 276, 280, 281, 285, 288-290, 293, 294. Minnesota: steamboat, 152. Minnesota Belle, steamboat: 18, 19, 152. Mishawaka, Mich.: 187. Missionaries: 190, 301. Mississippi River: its former glory, 13; navigation impaired, 13, 56; diminished in size, 13; boats of, compared to others, 15; railroads lessen traffic on, 18, 83; traffic of, dead, 221, 250; great traffic on, 19; tributaries to, 19, 20, 199, 206; Indians numerous near, 20, 219, 301; islands in, 21, 110, 111, 188, 223, 232, 248, 258, 259, 264, 266, 277, 279-281, 287, 288, 290, 301; sloughs in, 21, 283, 301; description of banks and valley, 21, 88, 89, 156, 188, 189, 239; trading posts and towns on, 21, 29, 30; storms on, 25, 110, 122, 123, 231, 249; saloons along, 29; warehouses on, 30, 33; sand bars and reefs in, 36, 41, 74, 76, 85, 92, 93, 223, 224; steamboats of, described, 36, 42; explosions on, frequent, 39; channels, 40; Com. Porter opens, 50; requirements necessary for offices on ships of, 55; woodyards along, 59; farms along, 60; slavery on west bank of, 64; beginning of its trade boom, 66; change in character of crews on, 69, 70; code of honor of, 74; accidents during low water, 74, 76; obstructions in, 78; piloting and navigation on (difficulties, etc.), 78-99, 101-103, 111-116, 223, 224; improvements on, 79, 221-228, 299; may regain prestige in commerce, 79, 80; boats aground in, 80; Twain's _Life on the Miss._, cited, 83; numerous turns in, 85; dams and dikes in, 85, 225; difficulties of paddling on, 85-91; pilots must know, 86-88; "knowing" it, 92-109; official etiquette on, 109; pioneer steamboats of, 111, 112, 187, 257; modern boats, 110; fur-traders on, 112; raftsmen on, 113, 114; incidents of river life on, 117-125; steamboatmen on, 124; morals on, 125, 251; menus of boats on, 126-131; water of, used as beverage, 129-131; contaminated by sewage, 131; gambling on, 138-142; life of steamboats on, 161; duration of navigation, 170; keel boats on, 188; legends of, 302; floods on, 216, 225, 238; mills along, 221, 222; commission, 226; wrecks on, 227; snags removed from, 227; dredging in, 228; losses of steamboats on, 229-239; reliving old days on, 240-253; steamboats on upper, before 1863, 257-294; rapids in, 257; origin and etymology of name, 300; its French names, 301. Missouri Point: 273. Missouri River: 112, 130, 131, 164, 186, 222, 226, 227, 230-233, 237, 250, 257, 259, 260, 262-266, 271, 274, 276, 279, 281-285, 287-290. Mitchell, Capt. A.: 292. Molasses: 29. Molino del Rey, Mex.: battle of, 212. Money: wild-cat, 174-180. Monongahela, Pa.: 263, 291. Monopolies: 56, 173. Monterey, Mex.: battle of, 212. Montford, Capt. A. G.: 289. Montgomery, Capt. ----: 277, 285. Montgomery, Mo. (?): 258, 260. Moore, Seth: pilot, 116. Moorhead, Minn.: 258. Moquoketa Chute: 265. Morals: along Mississippi, 114, 124, 251. Moreau, Louis: 113. _See also_ Moro. Morehouse, D. B.: 270. Morehouse, Capt. Legrand: 268. Moro (Morrow, Moreau), Louis: pilot, 113. Morrison, Capt. ----: 258, 259. Morrison, Capt. C. S.: 283. Morrison, Capt. G. G.: 260. Morrison, James: mate, 283. Moulton, I. N.: 267. Moulton, Thomas: 266, 267. Mounds: near Mississippi, 21. Moundsville, Va.: 292. Mountains: 301. Mouseau (Mo'-sho), Antoine: half-breed Indian chief, 22. Mouseau, Louis: pioneer of St. Paul, 22. Mules: 213, 214. Mullen, ----: clerk, 281. Mundy's Landing: 265. Murraysville, Pa.: 259, 263. Muscatine Bar: 265. Music: 16. _See also_ Steamboats. Musicians: 157. Muskrats: 22. Mutinies: on ships, 48, 66, 69. NANTUCKET, R. I.: 15. Nashville, Tenn.: 279. Natchez: steamboat, 143. Navigation: lessened on Mississippi, 13; difficulties of, 206, 207; improvements in, 221-228; greatest disaster in western, 234, 235; opening at St. Paul (1844-62), 295. Nebraska, state: 222. Nebraska: steamboat, 239. Negroes (darkies): 47, 48, 64, 65, 70, 127, 128, 136, 157-160, 241, 250-253, 260. New Albany, Ind.: 264, 282, 288, 291. Newburyport, Mass.: 15. New England: 130, 131. New Orleans, La.: 47, 78, 80, 117, 143, 185, 230, 250, 272. Newport, Minn.: 102. New St. Paul: steamboat, 184. Newspapers: 202, 203, 238. New Ulm, Minn.: 213. New York City: 51, 80, 83, 159, 182. Nichols, George: 116. Nicollet, ----: explorer, 290. Niles, Mich.: 15, 17, 186, 187. Nine Mile Island: 287. Nininger, Minn.: land frauds at, 139, 180-183, 223, 270. Nobleman, stray: 196-205. Nominee: steamboat, 149, 150, 184, 274. Norris, Frank: steward, 292. Northern Belle: steamboat, 152, 292. Northerner: steamboat, 148. Northern Light: steamboat, 103, 155. Northern Line. _See_ Steamboats. Northwestern Line. _See_ Steamboats. Northwestern: newspaper, 202. Northwest Territories: 174, 222, 290. Norwegian: 114. OAK: 60, 61, 76, 303. Ocean Wave: steamboat, 33, 101. Ohio River: 43, 66, 161, 185, 187, 188, 290. Ohio, state: 184. Onawa Bend: 264. Orchestras: 157. Osage River: 265. Osceola, Wis.: 29, 270, 282. Oshkosh, Wis.: 196, 199, 202, 204. Otter: steamboat, 290. Oxford Univ.: 196, 201. Owen, Capt. ----: 267. Owens, Capt. ----: 279. PANAMA, ISTHMUS OF: 79. Pantry boy: 52, 115. Paris, France: 201. Parker, ----: 115, 116. Parker, Capt. ----: 269, 281. Parker, Capt. J. W.: 262, 271. Parker, Capt. N. W.: 284. Parker, Capt. W. N.: 265. Parkersburg, Va.: 264. Parkman, Francis: _La Salle and Disc. of Gt. West_, cited, 113. Parthenia: steamboat, 238. Paul Jones: steamboat, 238. Pearman, ----: clerk, 258. Pekin, Ill.: 285. Peltries: 112. _See also_ Furs. Pemberton, Capt. John C.: 212. Penn's Bend: 262. Pennsylvania, state: 66, 212. Pepin, Lake: 29, 35, 149, 234, 237, 238, 246, 259, 268-270, 288, 302. Petersburg, Va.: 141, 203. Philadelphia, Pa.: 80. Phil Sheridan: steamboat, 152. Physicians: 57. Pictures. _See_ Steamboats. Pierce, George S.: clerk, 277. Pigs: 127. Pig's Eye: bad crossing on Mississippi, 95, 223, 245. Pike: name for steamboats, 229. Pilots: 14, 17, 35, 36, 38-40, 42-44, 47, 51, 52, 56, 57, 63, 71-74, 76, 80, 83, 84, 100, 101, 103-105, 110, 112, 115, 116, 122, 124, 130, 150, 151, 163, 170, 188, 199, 202, 207, 209, 210, 223, 224, 226-228, 232, 240-242, 246, 260, 264, 267, 268, 273, 277, 284, 292, 294; duties and responsibilities, 78-99; early, 111-116; oldest of upper Mississippi, 117. Pim, John S.: clerk, 272. Pine Bend: 245. Pine Ridge, S. Dak.: 216. Pine trees and wood: 22, 34, 74, 232. Pioneers: 185, 188. Pitch: 147. Pittsburg, Pa.: 30, 185, 250, 259, 262, 275, 276, 278, 280-282, 286-289, 291, 293. Pittsburg: steamboat, 249. Planters: 138. Point Douglass: 49, 171, 237, 268, 273, 291. Pokagon: Indian chief, 19. Polar Star: steamboat, 239. Pontoosuc, Ill.: 290, 296. Poplar River: 262. Population: 19, 188. Pork: 29, 30, 241. Portage, Wis.: 197, 279, 288. Portages: 113. Porter, Com. ----: 50. Post Boy: name for steamboat, 230. Potatoes: 56, 169. Potosi, Wis.: 268, 282, 290. Prairie Belle: steamboat, 46. Prairie du Chien, Wis.: 56, 69, 112-114, 144, 147, 151, 164, 167-169, 171, 172, 202, 248, 261, 275, 280, 284. Prairie Grove: battle of, 211. Prairies: 21, 27, 28, 107, 188, 209-211. Preachers: 190, 193. Pre-Emption: steamboat, 184. Presbyterians: 46. Prescott, Wis.: 19, 20, 21, 22, 27-29, 34, 49, 55, 60, 80, 85, 95, 106-108, 114, 140, 148, 152, 171, 179, 191, 193, 195, 199, 201, 215, 223, 225, 245, 268, 273, 282; typical river town, 29; transfer and shipping point, 29, 30. Prescott Island: 223. Prices and values: 59, 62, 64, 65, 80, 124, 139, 144, 155, 161-164, 167-169, 171, 172, 181, 184, 216, 219, 222, 223, 225, 226, 234, 262, 265, 267, 269, 271, 272, 274, 275, 280, 282, 289-291. Pringle: steamboat, 239. Printers: 35, 95, 181, 182. Prize fights: 115, 116. Profits: 170-172. Providence, Mo.: 285. Provisions: 29, 30, 127, 128, 149, 163, 185. Puitt's Island: 223, 277. Pumps: 36. QUINCY, ILL.: 188, 252, 280, 285, 289. Quincy: steamboat, 249. Quicksand: 76. RACCOONS: 22. Radebaugh, George: engineer, 283. Rafts: 26, 114, 122, 185, 221, 249, 250; men, 30, 106, 113, 114. _See also_ Ships. Railroads: 56, 83, 105, 162, 164, 167, 173, 221, 234, 240, 241, 248, 292; kill traffic on rivers, 18; Various lines--Dunleith, 172; Galena & Western Union, 164; Illinois Central, 164; Milwaukee & Mississippi, 164; Prairie du Chien, 172. Rapids: 186, 225, 231, 257, 261, 264, 269, 275, 279, 301. Rawlins, Capt. John: 272, 283. Red River of the North: 250, 258, 263, 269. Red Wing, Minn.: 19-21, 167-169, 246, 270. Red Wing: Sioux chief, 19-22. Reed's Landing, Minn.: 29, 246. Reefs, 36, 40, 92-94, 96, 99, 100, 109, 200. _See also_ Sand bars. Reilly (Riley), Capt. Robert A.: 259, 280, 281, 294. Relief: steamboat, 184. Reno, Capt. ----: 288. Resin: 148. Reynolds, Joseph: 248, 249. Rhodes, Capt. J. B.: 278. Rhodes, Capt. J. H.: 292. Rhodes, Capt. Thomas B.: 280, 290. Rice: 30; wild, 22. Rice, Dan: circus man, 122. Richardson, ----: deserts ship to join army, 215. Riley, Capt. Robert A. _See_ Reilly. Rissue, Capt. ----: 277. River Falls, Wis.: 201, 204, 205, 240. Rivers: 13, 19; improvements on, 221-223. Rivière de la Conception: appellation of Mississippi, 301. Rivière St. Louis: appellation of Mississippi, 301. Robbins, R. M.: clerk, 266. Robert E. Lee: steamboat, 143. Robert, Capt. Louis: 272, 276, 290. Robert, Capt. Nelson: 290. Robinson, Capt. John: 264. Rock Island, Ill.: 18, 19, 35, 85, 93, 122, 130, 148, 152, 164, 168, 184, 188, 261, 263, 266, 272, 275, 287; rapids, 264. _See also_ Bridges. Rogers, ----: 260. Rogers, Capt. ----: 286. Rolling Stone, Minn.: 95, 182, 183. Rosin: 34. Rounds, Capt. ----: 287. Roustabouts. _See_ Deck hands. Rowe, Capt. ----: 273. Rowley, Capt. ----: 263. Ruley, Russel: mate, 35, 267, 277. Rusk, Jeremiah (gov. of Wis.): 83. Russell, Capt. Joseph, U. S. A.: 187. Ryan, Capt. ----: 289. ST. ALBERT'S ISLAND: 282. St. Anthony, Minn.: 96, 169, 272. _See also_ Minneapolis (with which it is incorporated). St. Anthony Falls, Minn.: 99, 112, 155, 223, 265, 266, 268, 272, 278, 283. St. Croix, Minn.: 285; Falls, 29, 80, 104, 106, 191, 199, 259, 263, 264, 269, 273, 282, 285; Lake, 19, 105, 148, 191, 192, 195, 267; River, 19, 20, 29, 113, 191, 199, 200, 202, 259, 265, 266, 270, 273, 284, 293; valley, 284, 287; steamboat, 280, 290. St. Genevieve, Mo.: 188. St. Joseph, Mich.: 16, 187, 264; river (St. Joe), 15, 17, 18, 186, 199. St. Louis, Mo.: 19, 30, 43, 60, 64, 66, 70, 79, 83-85, 103, 106, 112, 114, 115, 117, 118, 124, 132, 136, 143, 158, 172, 175, 186, 188, 207, 221, 230, 231, 233, 234, 237, 241, 247, 250-252, 257-294, 301; table of distances from, 296-298. St. Paul, Minn.: 18, 22, 35, 55, 56, 60, 62, 66, 71, 78, 79, 83-85, 93, 96, 99, 103, 106, 115, 117, 122, 127, 129, 132, 136, 140, 144, 147, 149, 151, 157, 162, 164, 167, 168, 171, 172, 180, 182, 206, 207, 222, 223, 225, 228, 230-232, 234, 240-242, 248, 251, 253, 257-294, 301; opening of navigation at (1844-62), 295. St. Paul: name for steamboats, 230, 249. St. Peters, Minn.: 257-260, 262, 266, 268, 270, 271, 274-276, 278-281, 284-289, 291, 292. Salem, Mass.: 15. Saloons: 29. _See also_ Intoxication; _and_ Liquors. Saltmarsh, Capt. ----: 275. Sam Cloon: steamboat, 239. Sand bars: 74-77, 112, 163, 169, 170, 186, 223, 224, 228, 247, 249, 273; danger of, 41. _See also_ Reefs. Sargent, Capt. ----: 291. Sargent, G. L.: engineer, 294. Sauk Rapids: 266, 272, 283. Savanna, Ill.: 118. Schaser: family in Prescott, 22. Schools: 84, 184. Scotchman: 84, 115. Scott, Capt. ----: 271, 284. Scott, G. W.: engineer, 294. Search-lights: 89, 245, 249, 250. Senator: steamboat, 184, 292. Sencerbox, Capt. ----: 267. Settlers: 60, 174, 179, 185, 222. Shaw Botanical Garden: in St. Louis, 250. Shellcross, Capt. John: 278, 291. Shenandoah: steamboat, 239. Sherman, Tecumseh W.: 206, 212, 216, 217, 268. Ships and water craft: shipyards and shipbuilding, 15, 161, 230; captains (masters), 14, 35, 46, 47, 52, 71-77; crews, 48, 64, 69, 70; watches on, 56, 57; caste on, 69, 70; shipping methods, 29, 30, 33; cargoes carried by, 30 (_see also_ Freight); competition in shipping, 33; "shipping up" defined, 40. Various kinds of water craft: Arks, 185. Barges, 149, 150, 171, 246, 248, 289. Bateaux, 112. Broadhorns, 185. Canal-boats, 185, 239. Canoes, 22-27, 112, 301. Circus-boat, 122. Dugouts, 20, 23. Flatboats, 62, 239. Gunboats, 50. Keel boats, 15, 185-187. Lifeboats, 123, 231. Lumber hooker, 16. Mackinac boats, 112. Packets (_see below_ Steamboats). Sailing, 117. Scows, 62, 63, 185. Steamboats--13-18, 24, 33, 117; stern-wheelers, 18, 33, 39, 40, 84, 85, 101-103, 155, 163, 170, 191, 194, 199, 206, 207, 258-294; side-wheelers, 18, 33, 39-42, 85, 102, 152, 155, 199, 250, 257-294; night landings, 33, 34; Merrick enters service of, 35; close of navigation for, 35; machinery on, 35, 36; described, 35, 36, 43, 44, 74-76; duties of engineers on, 35-37; engine-room, 38-45, 73, 79; rate of speed, 42; racing, 43-45, 143-151; become fewer on Mississippi, 56, 222; wooding up, 59, 62, 63; official etiquette on, 62; captain must know thoroughly, 71, 73, 74; captains own interest in, 72; cabins, 72; how handled in accidents, 74-77; sparring off, 74-76; hogging, 75; spars, 74-76; how hauled over bars, 76, 77; patrol Mississippi, 79; forced out by railroads, 83; lights covered at night, 90; art of steering, 100-105; early, 111, 112, 187, 257; list of, on upper Mississippi (before 1863), 257-294; early pilots on, 111-116; size, 117, 163, 164, 169, 199, 200, 206, 250, 257-294; bars (abolished) and beverages on, 124, 129-137; cost, 124 (_see also_ Prices); kitchen, 126; menus on, 126-131; "grub-pile," 129; gambling on, 138-142; music and art on, 152-160; bonanzas, 161-173; few insured, 162; passenger accommodations, 167, 171; passenger rates, 167-169; pioneer steamboatmen, 184-189; wrecks and accidents, 192-195, 229-239, 257-293; desertions from, 215; logs towed by, 221; U. S. Govt. procures, 227, 228; dredges worked by, 228; many with same name, 229, 230; U. S. inspection of, 232; improvements on, 245-247, 249, 250; where built, 257-293. Steamship lines (some same company under various names)--Alton, 157, 231, 239; Anchor, 250; Davidson, 267, 269, 277, 281, 283, 293; Diamond Jo, 136, 151, 167, 240, 245, 246, 248, 249; Dubuque & St. Paul Packet Co., 269; Galena, Dubuque, Dunleith & St. Paul Packet Co. (Galena and Minn. Packet Co.), 30, 261, 265, 268, 270-272 (_see also below_ Minn. Packet Co.); Keokuk Packet Co., 277; Minnesota Packet Co., 30, 41, 84, 116, 129, 148, 151, 170, 172, 180, 216, 258, 260, 263, 271, 272, 277, 278, 280, 282-284, 287, 288, 291, 292; N. Y. Steamship Co., 83; Northern Line, 132, 260-262, 264-266, 269, 270, 273, 281, 282, 285, 290, 292; Northwestern Line, 124, 279, 280, 285, 286; St. Louis & St. Paul Packet Co., 180, 263, 264, 266, 269; St. Louis Line, 148. Towboats, 122. Submarine boats, 238. "Wild" boats, 30. Woodboats, 63, 239. Yawls, 74, 207, 222. Shousetown, Pa.: 257, 260, 262, 280, 282, 286, 288. Shovelin, Con: second mate, 70. Sidney: steamboat, 249. Sire, Capt. Joseph: 284. Slaves and slavery: 47, 50, 64, 65, 164. _See also_ Negroes. Sloughs: 21, 22, 227, 248, 301. Smelter: steamboat, 184. Smith: family in Prescott, 22. Smith, Mr. ----: owns woodyard, 60. Smith, Capt. ----: 266, 292. Smith, Capt. J. C.: 280. Smith, Capt. J. F.: 266. Smith, Jerome: pilot, 116. Smith, Capt. John: 290. Smith, Capt. Orren: 149, 150, 261, 278, 281, 282, 288, 294. Smoker, Capt. ----: 265. Soap: 30. Soldiers: 191, 222, 241, 261. South Bend, Mich.: 15, 187. Speer, S.: 289. Spencer, Capt. R. M.: 261, 269, 284, 288. Stackhouse & Nelson: 289. Standing Bear, Henry (Sioux): 216, 219, 220. Stanton, Frederick K.: clerk, 273. Starnes, Capt. ----: 280. Statistics: of casualties to steamboats, 229, 259. Steamboats. _See_ Ships. Stephens, John: clerk, 270. Stephenson, Capt. Charles L.: 273, 292. Stewards (on steamboats): 35, 126-129, 163, 242. Stewart, ----: clerk, 274. Stillwater, Minn.: 29, 106-109, 115, 140, 164, 167, 168, 179, 191, 192, 221, 259. Stone, Capt. ----: 285. Storms: 107-110, 122, 123, 191, 192, 231, 234, 249. Stran, Capt. H. B.: 288. Strother, Capt. ----: 284. Sturgeons, fish: 19. Sugar: in cargo, 30. Superior, Lake: 300. Sutler: steamboat, 184. Swamp, wild rice: 22. TALLIAFERRO, Laurence: Indian agent, 187. Talliaferro, Maj. ----, U. S. A.: 287. Telegraph: name for steamboat, 230. Tennessee River: 250. Thomas, Chute: 274. Thompson's _Bank Note Detector_: 179. Throckmorton, Capt. Joseph: 261, 262, 263, 271, 279, 286, 289, 293. Thurston, Capt. ----: 259. Tibbles, Henry: pilot, 116. Tiger: steamboat, 284. Time and Tide: steamboat, 278. Tishomingo: steamboat, 172. Tools: 20, 35, 36. Torches: 34. Trader, Boney (Napoleon Bonaparte): gambler, 139. Transportation. _See_ Railroads; _and_ Ships. Traverse, Lake: 269. Traverse des Sioux, Dakota: 219, 259, 265. Treaties: Indian, 206, 219, 284, 287. Trees: 22, 26, 34, 74, 232. Trempealeau, Wis.: 69, 95; Landing, 301; Mountain, 301. Tripp, Harry: pilot, 80, 116, 268. Trout: 202, 205. Troxell, ----: engineer, 292. Troy, Capt. ----: 267. Trudell, ----: mate, 123. Trudell Slough: 21, 25. Truett, Capt. ----: 286. Turkey River: 249. Turner, Capt. ----: 286. Tuttle, Calvin: millwright, 285. Twain, Mark (S. L. Clemens): _Life on Lower Miss._, cited, 83, 84, 87, 130, 188. UNIONS: 64. United States: 20, 206, 219; federal officers, 60; inspects steamboats, 84, 231, 232; danger to govt., 208; charters vessel, 216; war dept., 227. Upper Bonhomme Island: 290. VAN HOUTEN, Capt. ----: 258. Vermillion Slough: 21. Vermont, state: 205. Vickers, Capt. ----: 288. Vicksburg, Miss.: 212, 273, 290. Victoria, Queen: 144, 147. Victory, Wis.: 123, 247. Virginia, state: 141. Virginia: steamboat, 112, 187, 257. Vorhies, Capt. ----: 277. Voyageurs: 113, 115, 301. WABASHA: 247, 261; Prairie, 182. Wabash River: 155. Wacouta, Minn.: 29, 149, 234, 269, 287. Wages: 56, 103, 122, 126, 137, 157, 158, 163, 199, 201, 215, 224, 241, 251. Wah-pa-sha: Dakota chief, 300, 302, 303. Waiters: on boats, 157. Wall, Capt. Nick: 281, 285. Ward, Frank: clerk, 271. Ward, Capt. James: 156, 262, 263, 267, 275, 286, 289, 290, 293. War Eagle: steamboat, 76, 84, 184, 230, 270. Warehouses: 19, 29, 30, 33, 182, 188. Warrior: name for steamboats, 230. Wars: Civil (Secession), 22, 50, 51, 78, 80, 117, 174, 190, 196, 197, 203, 206-211, 215, 216, 222, 231; Indian, 213, 216; Mexican, 212. Washington, D. C.: 51, 83, 208, 226, 287, 292. Washington, Mo.: 260. Wa-ze-co-to: Dakota Indian, 303. Webb, Capt. N. F.: 271, 284, 292. Wells's Landing: 123. Wellsville, O.: 268. West, Edward (Ed., Ned) A.: pilot, 78, 103, 106, 116, 148, 277. West Brownsville, Pa.: 258, 278. West Elizabeth, Pa.: 267, 272, 287. West Newton: steamboat, 149, 184. West Newton Chute: 293. Weston Island: 257. West Point Mil. Acad.: 79, 209, 224, 226. Whales and whalers: 15, 16. Wheat: 30, 56, 152, 169, 171, 246, 248, 249. Wheeling, Va. (_now_ W. Va.): 270, 271, 278, 284, 289. Whipple: family in Prescott, 22. Whiskey: 29, 30, 135, 136. "Whiskey Jim:" appellation of deck hand, 215. White, Capt. ----: 188. White, Hugh: pilot, 116. White, William: pilot, 116, 293. White Cloud: steamboat, 233. Whitten, Capt. David: 144, 147, 275. Wilcox, Gen. O. B.: 141, 204. Wilderness: battle of, 215. Williams, Rufus: pilot, 116. Willow River: 109. Wilson, Billy, mate: 48, 66-70, 268, 303. Winnebago, Wis.: 202; Lake, 197, 266. Winona: Indian maiden, 302, 303. Winona, Minn.: 29, 69, 168, 183, 259, 277, 291, 300, 302. Wisconsin: River, 112, 199, 202, 279, 288; territory and state, 19, 20, 25, 35, 83, 113, 164, 175, 190, 195, 203, 219, 300. Wise, Gen. ----: 203. Wolf River: 197. Wolves: 22, 27. Wood and woodyards: 57, 59-63, 69, 115, 143, 163, 179. Wood Lake: 202. Woodburn, Capt. ----: 286. Woodruff, Capt. ----: 259. Woods, John: 188. Worden, Capt. Jones: 149, 268, 277. Worsham, ----: clerk, 257. Wrecks: 78, 93, 124, 192-195, 227. Wright, ----: engineer, 292. YALE UNIVERSITY: 204. Yankees: 70, 114, 131, 196, 211. Young, Capt. Augustus R.: 266, 267. Young, Jesse B.: mate, 267. Young, Josiah: engineer, 267. Young, Leonard: engineer, 267. Young Men's Christian Association: 216. ZANESVILLE, O.: 276. Transcriber's notes Italic text has been marked with _underscores_. Words changed: - rythmical to rhythmical (Chapter I) "... "Algoma"! The word has a rythmical measure, and ..." - Francois to François (Index) "... Charlevoix, Pierre Francois Xavier de,..." - Appendix E refers to Louis XIV; the city of St. Louis was in fact named after Louis IX. 
47351	----	PILOTS OF THE REPUBLIC THE ROMANCE OF THE PIONEER PROMOTER IN THE MIDDLE WEST _UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME_ THE GLORY SEEKERS: The Romance of Would-be Founders of Empire in the Early Days of the Great Southwest. By WILLIAM HORACE BROWN. With sixteen portraits, and illustrative initials to chapters. 12mo. $1.50 _net_ A. C. McCLURG & CO., CHICAGO [Illustration: ZEISBERGER PREACHING TO THE INDIANS] PILOTS OF THE REPUBLIC THE ROMANCE OF THE PIONEER PROMOTER IN THE MIDDLE WEST BY ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT _Author of "Historic Highways of America," "Washington and the West," etc._ WITH SIXTEEN PORTRAITS, AND ILLUSTRATIVE INITIALS BY WALTER J. ENRIGHT [Illustration] CHICAGO A. C. McCLURG & CO. 1906 COPYRIGHT A. C. MCCLURG & CO. 1906 Published October 29, 1906 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, U. S. A. To CHARLES G. DAWES, Esq. THIS VOLUME IS INSCRIBED IN TOKEN OF THE AUTHOR'S APPRECIATION OF A MODERN PROMOTER WHOSE IDEALS AND CHIVALRY TAKE RANK WITH THOSE OF THE OLDEN TIME PREFACE The student of European history is not surprised to find that individuals stand out prominently in every activity that occupied man's attention; that even though there be under consideration great popular movements, such as the Crusades or the Reformation or French Revolution, attention centres around significant personalities. In the day of monarchies and despotisms, individual initiative very naturally led the way in outlining policies, selecting lieutenants, finding ways and means. It is singular to what a great extent this is true in the history of democratic America, preëminently the land where the people have ruled and where the usurper of power has had, comparatively, no opportunity whatever. And yet it is not too much to say that the history of our nation may be suggested in a skeleton way by a mere list of names, as, for instance, the history of the fourteenth century in Europe might easily be sketched. While we are proud to proclaim that America has given all men an equal opportunity, that the most humble may rise to the proudest position known among us, it yet remains singular that in this land where the popular voice has ruled as nowhere else almost every national movement or phase of development may be signified by the name of one man. This comes with appealing force to one who has attempted to make a catalogue of the men who have in a personal sense _led_ the Star of Empire across this continent; men who have, in a way, pooled issues with their country in the mutual hope of personal advantage and national advance. It then becomes plain to the investigator, if he never realized it before, that, at times, the nation has waited, even halted in its progress, for a single man, or a set of men, to plan what may have seemed an entirely selfish adventure and which yet has proved to be a great national advantage. In certain instances there was a clear and fair understanding between such promoters and the reigning administration, looking toward mutual benefit. At times the movement was in direct defiance of law and order, with a resulting effect of immeasurable moment for good. Again, there may have been no thought of national welfare or extension; personal gain and success may have been the only end; and the resultant may have been a powerful national stimulus. Perhaps the most remarkable feature that appears on an examination of American history along these lines (compared, for instance, with that of European powers) is that comparatively few leaders of military campaigns are to be classed among promoters who advanced national ends in conjunction with personal ambitions. In the Old World numberless provinces came into the possession of military favorites after successful campaigns. In the many expeditions to the westward of the Alleghanies in America what commanders turned their attention later to the regions subdued? Forbes, the conqueror of Fort Duquesne, never saw the Ohio Valley again; Bouquet, the other hero, with Gladwin, of Pontiac's Rebellion, never returned to the Muskingum, nor did Gladwin come back to Detroit; Lewis, the victor at Point Pleasant, led no colony to the Ohio again; "Mad Anthony" Wayne never had other than military interest in the beautiful Maumee Valley, where, in the cyclone's path, he crushed the dream of a powerful Indian confederacy lying on the flanks of the new Republic. To a singular degree the leaders of the military vanguard across the continent had really little to do personally with the actual social movement that made the wilderness blossom as the rose. True, bounty lands were given to commanders and men in many instances, as in the case of Washington and George Rogers Clark; but it was the occupation of such tracts by the rank and file of the armies that actually made for advancement and national growth, and in perhaps only one case was the movement appreciably accelerated by the course of action pursued in a civil way by those who had been the leaders of a former military expansion. How are we to explain the interesting fact that none of the generals who led into the West the armies that won it for America are to be found at the head, for instance, of the land companies that later attempted to open the West to the flood-tide of immigration? Did they know too well the herculean toils that such work demanded? Why should General Rufus Putnam, General Moses Cleaveland, General Benjamin Tupper, General Samuel Holden Parsons, Colonel Abraham Whipple,--famous leader of the night attack on the _Gaspee_ in the pre-Revolutionary days,--Judge John Cleve Symmes, Colonel Richard Henderson, lead companies of men to settle in the region which Andrew Lewis, Arthur St. Clair, Joseph Harmar, Anthony Wayne, and William Henry Harrison had learned so well? Of course more than one reason, or one train of reasons, exist for these facts; but it is not to be denied that those best acquainted with the existing facts, those having the clearest knowledge of the trials, dangers, and risks, both as regards health and finances, were not in any degree prominent in the later social movements. Many, of course, were soldiers by profession, and itched not in the least for opportunity to increase their possessions by investment and speculation in a hazardous undertaking. But, had there been certain assurance of success, these men, or some of them, would, without doubt, have found ways and means of taking a part. Had one attempt proven successful, an impetus would have been given to other like speculations; yet one will look in vain for a really profitable outcome to any undertaking described in these studies. The judgment of those best posted, therefore, was fully justified. But at the same time the American nation was greatly in the debt of the men who made these poor investments; and, in one way or another, it came about that no great hardship resulted. This was no secret when these propositions were under consideration, and the men interested were influenced not a little by the fact that their adventure would result in benefit to the cause of national advance. There was a kind of patriotism then shown that is to be remembered by all who care to think of the steps taken by a weak, hopeful Republic; in some ways the same body politic is still weak, and vastly in need of a patriotism not less warm than that shown in those early days of wonderment and anxiety. The reader of the succeeding pages may conceive that the author has not taken up each study in the same method, and judged the performances of each so-called "Pilot" by the same rule and standard. In the present instance the writer has considered that such treatment would be highly incongruous, there being almost nothing in common between the various exploits here reviewed, save only those that were incidental and adventitious. Each chapter may seem an independent study, related to that one following only through the general title that covers them all; this, in the author's opinion, is better far than to attempt to emphasize a likeness, or over-color apparent resemblances, until each event may seem a natural sequence from a former. A babe's steps are seldom alike; one is long and inaccurate, another short and sure, with many a misstep and tumble, and the whole a characterless procedure bespeaking only weakness and lack both of confidence and knowledge. Such, in a measure, was the progress of young America in the early days of her national existence. A. B. H. MARIETTA COLLEGE, MARIETTA, OHIO, May 31, 1906. CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE INTRODUCTORY: THE BROTHER OF THE SWORD 19 CHAPTER II WASHINGTON: THE PROMOTER OF WESTERN INVESTMENTS 37 CHAPTER III RICHARD HENDERSON: THE FOUNDER OF TRANSYLVANIA 81 CHAPTER IV RUFUS PUTNAM: THE FATHER OF OHIO 103 CHAPTER V DAVID ZEISBERGER: HERO OF "THE MEADOW OF LIGHT" 129 CHAPTER VI GEORGE ROGERS CLARK: FOUNDER OF LOUISVILLE 149 CHAPTER VII HENRY CLAY: PROMOTER OF THE FIRST AMERICAN HIGHWAY 179 CHAPTER VIII MORRIS AND CLINTON: FATHERS OF THE ERIE CANAL 207 CHAPTER IX THOMAS AND MERCER: RIVAL PROMOTERS OF CANAL AND RAILWAY 233 CHAPTER X LEWIS AND CLARK: EXPLORERS OF LOUISIANA 257 CHAPTER XI ASTOR: THE PROMOTER OF ASTORIA 279 CHAPTER XII MARCUS WHITMAN: THE HERO OF OREGON 299 CHAPTER XIII THE CAPTAINS OF "THE AMERICAN SYSTEM" 339 INDEX 363 LIST OF PORTRAITS PAGE ZEISBERGER Preaching to the Indians at Coshocton, Ohio, in 1773 _Frontispiece_ DANIEL BOONE 30 GEORGE WASHINGTON 68 RUFUS PUTNAM, Leader of the Founders of Marietta, Ohio 106 REV. MANASSEH CUTLER, Ohio Pioneer 113 JOHN HECKEWELDER, Missionary to the Indians 142 REV. DAVID JONES, Companion of George Rogers Clark 165 HENRY CLAY, Statesman and Abolitionist 184 ALBERT GALLATIN, Promoter of the Cumberland Road 190 GENERAL ARTHUR ST. CLAIR, Appointed Governor of Ohio by Congress 205 GOUVERNEUR MORRIS, Promoter of the Erie Canal 212 DE WITT CLINTON, Friend of the Erie Canal Project 230 MERIWETHER LEWIS, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition 262 WILLIAM CLARK, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition 274 JOHN JACOB ASTOR, Founder of Astoria 288 PRESIDENT JAMES K. POLK 344 CHAPTER I _The Part played in American History by the Pioneer's Axe.--Several Classes of Leaders in the Conquest of the Wilderness.--Patriotism even in those that were Self-seeking.--The Achievements of Cleaveland, Henderson, Putnam, Morris, and Astor, respectively.--Feebleness of the Republic in its Infancy.--Its need of Money.--The Pioneers were of all Races.--Other Leaders besides these Captains of Expansion accused of Self-seeking.--Washington as the Father of the West.--His great Acquisitions of Land.--His Influence on other Land-seekers.--Results of Richard Henderson's Advance into Kentucky.--Zeisberger's Attempt to form a Settlement of Christian Indians thwarted by the Revolution.--Rufus Putnam as a Soldier and a Pioneer.--As Leader of the Ohio Company of Associates, he makes a Settlement Northwest of the Ohio.--Three Avenues of Westward Migration: Henry Clay's Cumberland Road; the Erie Canal; the Baltimore and Ohio Railway.--These Avenues not laid between Cities, but into the Western Wilderness._ INTRODUCTORY: THE BROTHER OF THE SWORD [Illustration] THERE is some ground for the objection that is raised against allowing the history of America to remain a mere record of battles and campaigns. The sword had its part to play, a glorious part and picturesque, but the pioneer's axe chanted a truer tune than ever musket crooned or sabre sang. And with reference to the history of our Central West, for instance, it were a gross impartiality to remember the multicolored fascinating story of its preliminary conquest to the exclusion of the marvellous sequel--a great free people leaping into a wilderness and compelling it, in one short century, to blossom as the rose. To any one who seriously considers the magic awakening of that portion of the American Nation dwelling between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, there must sooner or later come the overpowering realization that the humble woodsman's broadaxe--that famous "Brother of the Sword"--has a story that is, after all, as fascinating and romantic as any story ever told. Lo, 'tis myself I sing, Feller of oak and ash! Brother am I to the Sword, Red-edged slayer of men! Side by side we have hewn Paths for the pioneer From sea to sun-smitten sea. It must be remembered that the sword made many conquests in this West, while the broadaxe made but one. France, and then England, possessed the West, but could not hold it, for the vital reason that this brother of the sword did not march in unison with those armies. In fact, both France and England attempted to keep the axe-bearing, home-building people back in order that the furs and the treasure yielded by the forests might not be withheld. But when the sword of a free people came across the Alleghanies the axe of the pioneer came with it, and a miracle was wrought in a century's time beside which the Seven Wonders of the Old World must forever seem commonplace. Of the men who led this army of real conquerors of the West to the scenes of their labors there were many. Some were leaders because of the inspiration they gave to others, some were leaders because they in person showed the way, enduring the toil, the privation, the pestilence, and the fate of pioneers. In whatever class these men may be placed, they were in reality patriots and heroes, even though at the time they were accused of seeking private gain and private fortune. But through the perspective of the years it seems clear that whatever may have been their private ends,--good, bad, or indifferent,--they were extremely important factors in the progress of their age. Whether seeking lands as a private speculation, or founding land companies or transportation companies in conjunction with others, they turned a waiting people's genius in a new direction and gave force and point to a social movement that was of more than epoch-making importance. Whether it was a Cleaveland founding a Western Reserve on the Great Lakes, a Henderson establishing a Transylvania in Kentucky, a Putnam building a new New England on the Ohio River, a Morris advocating an Erie Canal, or an Astor founding an Astoria on the Pacific Sea, the personal ambition and hope of gain, so prominent at the time, does not now stand preëminent; in this day we see what the efforts of these men meant to a country whose destiny they almost seemed unwittingly to hold in their hands. It will ever be difficult to realize what a critical moment it was when, for a brief space of time, only Providence could tell whether the young American Republic was equal to the tremendous task of proving that it could live by growing. The wisest men who watched its cradle wondered if that babe, seemingly of premature birth, would live. But that was not the vital question; the vital question was, Could it grow? The infant Republic possessed a mere strip of land on the seaboard; the unanswerable argument of its enemies was that a weakling of such insignificant proportions, surrounded by the territories of England and Spain, could not live unless it could do more than merely exist; after winning (by default) a war for liberty, it must now fight and win or lose a war of extermination. And where were the millions of money, the men, and the arms to come from that should prevent final annihilation? The long war had prostrated the people; the land had been overrun with armies, farms despoiled, trade ruined, cities turned into barracks, money values utterly dissipated. Just here it was that the mighty miracle was wrought; a strange army began to rendezvous, and it was armed with that weapon which was to make a conquest the sword could never have made. It was the army of pioneers with axes on their shoulders. So spontaneously did it form and move away, so commonplace was every humble detail of its organization and progress, so quietly was its conquest made, so few were its prophets and historians, that it has taken a century for us to realize its wonder and its marvel. America here and now gave the one proof of life--growth. Not from one point in particular, but from every point, the ranks of this humble army were filled; not one sect or race gave those rough and shaggy regiments their men, but every sect and every racial stock. That army had its leaders, though they wore only the uncouth regimentals of the rank and file. It is of certain of these Pilots of the Republic that these pages treat,--men who were moved by what were very generally called selfish motives in their days. Yet against what human motive may not the accusation of self-interest be cast? It has been hurled against almost every earnest man since Christ was crucified in ignominy nineteen centuries ago. Scan the list of men herein treated, and you will not find a single promoter of the Central West who was not accused of harboring an ulterior motive, if not of downright perfidy. Some of the best of these leaders of the expansion movement were most bitterly maligned; the heroic missionaries who forgot every consideration of health, comfort, worldly prosperity, home, and friends were sometimes decried as plotting ambassadors of scheming knaves. The pure and upright Washington, looking westward with clearer eye and surer faith than any of his generation, was besmirched by the accusations of hypocritical self-aggrandizement. Yet he must stand first and foremost in the category of men who influenced and gave efficiency to that vital westward movement. This man, as will be shown, was more truly the "Father of the West" than he ever was "Father of his Country." A decade before the Revolution was precipitated in sturdy Massachusetts, he had become fascinated with the commercial possibilities of the trans-Alleghany empire. He explored the Ohio and Great Kanawha rivers, and conceived what the future would bring forth; he took up large tracts of lands. Before he died he owned many patents to land in what is now New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, and Florida, as well as his home farms along the Potomac. He had a keen business sense, and demanded his full rights; he forcibly ousted from his lands men who knowingly usurped them; and all through the years he was accused of using his preponderating influence to further selfish plans; he was called a land-shark and a robber. It is interesting to know that his own private conclusion was that his investments had not paid; his words were that they had resulted more "in vexation than profit." And when he spoke those words he was master of between twenty and thirty thousand of the most fertile acres in the Ohio River basin. Yet Washington had marvellously influenced the nation's destiny by these "unprofitable" investments. The very position he occupied and which he was accused of misusing had powerfully stimulated the army that was carrying the broadaxe westward. In countless ways this man had given circulation to ideas that were inspiring and hopeful, and just so far as he believed he had failed as a private speculator, he had in reality triumphed mightily as the leading exponent of a growing Republic which was called upon to prove that it could grow. Richard Henderson stands out prominently as an honest leader of this army of conquerors. We can never read without a thrill the sentence in that letter of Daniel Boone's to Henderson in which the bold woodsman pleads the necessity of Henderson's hastening into Kentucky in 1775. All that Kentucky was and all that it did during the Revolution seems to have hung suspended on the advance of Richard Henderson's party through Cumberland Gap in that eventful April; and those words of the guide and trail-blazer, Boone, imploring that there be no delay, and emphasizing the stimulating effect that Henderson's advance would have on the various parties of explorers, have a ring of destiny in them. True, Virginia and North Carolina both repudiated Henderson's Indian purchase, and the promoter of historic Transylvania was decried and defamed; but his advance into the valley of the Kentucky gave an inspiration to the scattered parties of vagrant prospectors that resulted in making a permanent settlement in that key-stone State of the West, which was of untold advantage to the nation at large. And later Virginia and North Carolina made good the loss the founder of Transylvania had suffered because of their earlier repudiation. In Washington and Henderson we have two important factors in the advance of the pioneer army into the old Southwest--the region between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi south of the Ohio River. [Illustration: DANIEL BOONE] Turning to the rich empire lying north of that river, a chapter belongs to that resolute herald of religious and social betterment, David Zeisberger, who led his faithful Moravians from Pennsylvania to found an ideal settlement in central Ohio. The marvellous story of the indomitable Catholic missionaries in America has been receiving something of its share of attention by the reading world, a story so noble and inspiring that it is one of the precious heritages of the past; that of the equally noble Protestant missionaries in the Middle and Far West has not yet received its due. The Moravian Brethren received the first acre of land ever legally owned by white men in Ohio. Here, in "the Meadow of Light" on the Tuscarawas River, Zeisberger and his noble comrade, John Heckewelder, attempted to found a civilized colony of Christian Indians. But for the Revolution, he would doubtless have succeeded. The story of his temporary success is of great romantic interest and of moment especially by way of comparison. A legal right to land was secured by this migrating colony of Indians under the leadership of white missionaries; it was to be, to all intents and purposes, a white man's settlement, and agriculture was to be the colony's means of support. Laws and rules of conduct were formulated, and for five interesting years a great degree of success attended the effort. Then came war, despoliation, and a thrilling period of wandering. But never was the fact of legal ownership ignored; when the United States first enacted laws for the disposal of land in the Northwest Territory it excepted the district "formerly" allotted to the Moravian Brethren. Again, the history of the Middle West contains no sturdier or sweeter character than Rufus Putnam, the head of the Ohio Company of Associates who made the first settlement in the Northwest Territory at Marietta. As evidence of what he was in time of danger, his long record in the old French War, the Revolution, and the Indian War in the West is open to all men; what he was in days of peace--how he was the mainstay of his fellow officers in their attempt to obtain their dues from Congress, how he cheered westward that little company which he led in person, how for two decades he was the unselfish friend of hundreds of this struggling army of pioneers--is a story great and noble. As we shall see, General Washington, in a secret document never intended for other eyes than his own, describes Putnam as little known outside of a definite circle of friends. If this militated against his being appointed commander-in-chief of the American armies (for which honor General "Mad" Anthony Wayne was named), it made the man the more beloved and helpful. Not seeking in convivial ways the friendship of the notables of his time, Rufus Putnam went about the commonplace affairs of his conscientious life, doing good; yet in the most critical hour in the history of the Northwest it was to Putnam that Washington turned in confidence and hope. In the formation of the Ohio Company, in the emigration from New England, in the hard experiences of hewing out homes and clearings on the Ohio, and in the humble, wearing vicissitudes of life on the tumultuous frontier, the resolution, tact, and patient charity of this plain hero made him one of the great men in the annals of our western land. This Ohio Company of Associates made the first settlement in the territory northwest of the River Ohio, from which were created the five great States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. In the actual peopling of that region no one man, perhaps, exerted the influence of Rufus Putnam; and though, as a company, the Associates never were able to keep their contract with the Government, the great value of the movement led by Putnam was recognized, as Virginia and North Carolina recognized Henderson's influence to the southward, and Congress agreed to an easy settlement. The empire of the Ohio Basin being thrown open to the world by the armies of pioneers inspired by Washington and led by such men as Henderson and Putnam, a great factor in its occupation were the men who succeeded Washington in carrying out his plan for opening avenues of immigration. Three great routes to the West, and their projectors, call for notice in this phase of our study. The rise of Henry Clay's famous National Road running from Cumberland, Maryland, almost to St. Louis was a potent factor in the awakening of the West. It was the one great American highway; it took millions of men and wealth into the West, and, more than any material object, "served to cement and save the Union." Three canals were factors in this great social movement, especially the Erie Canal, which was conceived by the inspiration of Morris and achieved by the patient genius of Clinton. As a promoter of the West, Thomas, father of our first railway, must be accounted of utmost importance. Is it not of interest that the famed Cumberland Road was not built to connect two large Eastern cities, or a seaport or river with a city? It was built from the East into the Western wilderness--from a town but little known to an indefinite destination where the towns were hardly yet named. Its promoters were men of faith in the West, hopeful of its prosperity and anxious as to its loyalty. Now the same was singularly true of our first three great canals, the Erie, the Chesapeake and Ohio, and the Pennsylvania. These were not built as avenues of commerce between great Eastern cities, but rather from the East to the awakening West, to the infant hamlets of Buffalo and Pittsburg. And, still more remarkable, our first railways were not laid out between large Eastern cities, but from the East into that same country of the setting sun where the forests were still spreading and little villages were here and there springing up. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was distinctly promoted in the hope that Baltimore might retain the trade of the West which the canals then building seemed to be likely to take from her. It was their faith in the West that inspired all these men to the tasks they severally conceived and enthusiastically completed. It would hardly be possible to emphasize sufficiently the part played in the history of early America by this supremely momentous intuition of the westward advance of the Republic, the divine logic of that advance, and its immeasurable consequences. CHAPTER II _Washington's Prescience of the Increased Value of Land in the West.--Diary of his Tour in the Basin of the Ohio.--His Plans for the Commercial Development of the West.--His Character as manifested in his Letters, Diaries, and Memoranda.--His Military Advancement by the Influence of Lord Fairfax.--He serves at Fort Necessity, "The Bloody Ford," and Fort Duquesne.--Marriage and Settlement at Mount Vernon.--His Device for taking up more Land than the Law allowed to one Man.--Washington not connected with any of the great Land Companies.--His Efforts to secure for his Soldiers the Bounty-land promised them.--His sixth Journey to view his own Purchases.--The Amount of his Landed Property.--His Leniency toward Poor Tenants.--The Intensity of his Business Energy.--The Present Value of his Lands.--His Dissatisfaction with the Results of his Land Speculations.--His Plan of American Internal Improvements.--The Treaty that secured to Virginia the Territory South of the Ohio.--Washington's Personal Inspection of the Basins of the Ohio and Potomac.--He becomes President of the Potomac Company.--A Waterway secured from the Ohio to the Potomac.--The National Road from Cumberland, Md., to Wheeling on the Ohio._ WASHINGTON: THE PROMOTER OF WESTERN INVESTMENTS [Illustration] WHAT story of personal endeavor that had a part in building up a new nation on this continent can appeal more strongly to us of the Middle West than that of George Washington's shrewd faith which led him first to invest heavily in Western lands and signally champion that region as a field for exploitation? Indeed the record of that man's prescience in realizing what the West would become, how it would be quickly populated, and how rapidly its acres would increase in value, is one of the most remarkable single facts in his history. It is only because Washington became well known to a continent and a world as the leader of a people to freedom, that it has been easy to forget what a great man he still would have been had there been no Revolution and no Independence Day. How well known, for instance, is it that Washington was surveying lands on the Great Kanawha and Ohio rivers only four years before he received that remarkable ovation on his way to take command of the Continental Army under the Cambridge Elm? And how much attention has been given to Washington's tour into the Ohio Basin the very next year after the Revolutionary War to attempt to mark out a commercial route between the Virginia tide-water rivers and the Great Lakes by way of the Ohio and its tributaries? Yet the diary of that trip is not only the longest single literary production we have in our first President's handwriting, but on examination it is found to be almost a State paper, pointing out with wonderful sagacity the line of national expansion and hinting more plainly than any other document, not excepting the famous Ordinance, of the greatness of the Republic that was to be. Washington was possibly the richest man in America, and half his wealth lay west of the Alleghanies; it has not seemed to be easy to remember that this statesman had a better knowledge of the West than any man of equal position and that he spent a large portion of his ripest years in planning minutely for the commercial development of a territory then far less known to the common people of the country than Alaska is to us of to-day. To few men's private affairs has a nation had more open access than we have had to George Washington's. His journals, diaries, letters, and memoranda have been published broadcast, and the curious may learn, if they choose, the number of kerchiefs the young surveyor sent to his washerwoman long before his name was known outside his own county, or what the butter bill was for a given month at the Executive Mansion during the administration of our first President. Many men noted for their strength of personality and their patriotism have suffered some loss of character when their private affairs have been subjected to a rigid examination. Not so with Washington. It is a current legend in the neighborhood where he resided that he was exceedingly close-handed. This is not borne out in a study of his land speculations. Here is one of the interesting phases of the story of his business life, his generosity and his thoughtfulness for the poor who crowded upon his far-away choice lands. Beyond this the study is of importance because it touches the most romantic phase of Western history, the mad struggle of those who participated in that great burst of immigration across the Alleghanies just before and just after the Revolutionary War. The hand of Providence cannot be more clearly seen in any human life than in Washington's when he was turned from the sea and sent into the Alleghanies to survey on the south branch of the Potomac for Lord Fairfax, in 1748; it seemed unimportant, perhaps, at the moment whether the youth should follow his brother under Admiral Vernon or plunge into the forests along the Potomac. But had his mother's wish not been obeyed our West would have lost a champion among a thousand. As it was, Washington, in the last two years of the first half of the eighteenth century, began to study the forests, the mountains, and the rivers in the rear of the colonies. The mighty silences thrilled the young heart, the vastness of the stretching wilderness made him sober and thoughtful. He came in touch with great problems at an early and impressionable age, and they became at once life-problems with him. The perils and hardships of frontier life, the perplexing questions of lines and boundaries, of tomahawk and squatter claims, the woodland arts that are now more than lost, the ways and means of life and travel in the borderland, the customs of the Indians and their conceptions of right and wrong, all these and more were the problems this tall boy was fortunately made to face as the first step toward a life of unparalleled activity and sacrifice. The influence of Lord Fairfax, whom he served faithfully, now soon brought about Washington's appointment as one of four adjutant-generals of Virginia. In rapid order he pushed to the front. In 1753 his governor sent him on the memorable journey to the French forts near Lake Erie, and in the following year he led the Virginia regiment and fought and lost the Fort Necessity campaign. The next year he marched with Braddock to the "Bloody Ford" of the Monongahela. For three years after this terrible defeat Washington was busy defending the Virginia frontier, and in 1758 he went to the final conquest of Fort Duquesne with the dying but victorious Forbes. Having married Martha Custis, the young colonel now settled down at Mount Vernon, and his diary of 1760 shows how closely he applied himself to the management of his splendid estate. But the forests in and beyond the Alleghanies, which he had visited on five occasions before he was twenty-six years of age, were closely identified with his plans, and it is not surprising that as early as 1767 we find the young man writing a hasty letter concerning Western investments to William Crawford, a comrade-in-arms in the campaign of 1758, who lived near the spot where Braddock's old road crossed the Youghiogheny River. From this letter, written September 21, 1767, it is clear that Washington had determined to make heavy investments. "My plan is to secure a good deal of land," he wrote. He desired land in Pennsylvania as near Pittsburg as possible; if the law did not allow one man to take up several thousand acres, Crawford was requested to make more than one entry, the total to aggregate the desired amount. As to quality, Washington was to the point. "It will be easy for you to conceive that ordinary or even middling lands would never answer my purpose or expectation; ... a tract to please me must be rich ... and, if possible, level." As to location, he was not concerned: "For my own part, I should have no objection to a grant of land upon the Ohio, a good way below Pittsburg, but would first willingly secure some valuable tracts nearer at hand." Washington correctly estimated the purpose and effectiveness of the King's proclamation of 1763. This proclamation, at the close of Pontiac's rebellion, declared that no land should be settled beyond the heads of the Atlantic waters. In the same letter he said: "I can never look upon that proclamation in any other light (but I say this between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians.... Any person, therefore, who neglects the present opportunity of hunting out good lands, and in some measure marking and distinguishing them for his own, in order to keep others from settling them, will never regain it." Washington was first and foremost in the field and intended to make the most of his opportunities. He wrote: "If the scheme I am now proposing to you were known, it might give alarm to others, and by putting them upon a plan of the same nature, before we could lay a proper foundation for success ourselves, set the different interests clashing, and, probably, in the end overturn the whole. All this may be avoided by a silent management, and the operation carried on by you under the guise of hunting game." Crawford accordingly took tracts for Washington near his own lands on the Youghiogheny, costing "from a halfpenny to a penny an acre." Note that at this early day (1767), almost all the land between the Youghiogheny and Monongahela rivers--the country through which Braddock's Road ran--was already taken up. A large tract on Chartier's Creek was secured by Crawford for his friend. Within five years Washington had come into the additional possession of the historic tract of two hundred and thirty-seven acres known as Great Meadows,--whereon he had fought his first battle and signed the first and only capitulation of his life,--and the splendid river-lands known to-day as "Washington's Bottoms," on the Ohio near Wheeling and Parkersburg, West Virginia, and below. It is a very interesting fact that Washington did not belong to any of the great land companies which, one after another, sought to gain and hold great tracts of land, except the Mississippi Company which did not materialize. His brothers were members of the Ohio Company which in 1749 secured a grant of two hundred thousand acres between the Monongahela and Kanawha rivers. The company was never able to people and hold its territory, and the proprietors each lost heavily. It is a little strange that Washington had nothing to do with Walpole's Grant, the Transylvania Company, or the later Ohio, Scioto, and Symmes companies. What might be considered an exception to this rule was the body of men (among whom Washington was a generous, fearless leader) which sought to secure for the Virginia soldiers of the Fort Necessity campaign the bounty-land promised them by Governor Dinwiddie in 1754. Year after year, for twenty years, Washington was continually besieged by the soldiers he led West in 1754 or their relatives, who implored his aid in securing the grant of land promised, and there is no more interesting phase of his life during these years than his patient persistence in compelling Virginia to make good her solemn pledge. To impatient and impertinent men such as Colonel Mercer he wrote scathing rebukes; to helpless widows and aged veterans he sent kind messages of hope and cheer. The trouble was that everybody was claiming the land beyond the Alleghanies; the Ohio Company was fighting for its rights until the London agent questionably formed a merger with the Walpole Grant speculators. This company had claimed all the land between the Monongahela and the Kanawha. Washington, accordingly, had attempted to secure the two hundred thousand acres for his Fort Necessity comrades on the western shore of the Kanawha. In 1770 he made his sixth western journey in order to view his own purchases and make a beginning in the business of securing the soldiers' lands. He left Mount Vernon October 5 and reached William Crawford's, on the Youghiogheny, on the thirteenth. On the sixteenth Washington visited his sixteen-hundred acre tract near by and was pleased with it. On the third of November he blazed four trees on the Ohio, near the mouth of the Great Kanawha. He wrote: "At the beginning of the bottom above the junction of the rivers, and at the mouth of a branch on the east side, I marked two maples, an elm, and hoop-wood tree, as a corner of the soldiers' land (if we can get it), intending to take all the bottom from hence to the rapids in the Great Bend into one survey. I also marked at the mouth of another run lower down on the west side, at the lower end of the long bottom, an ash and hoop-wood for the beginning of another of the soldiers' surveys, to extend up so as to include all the bottom in a body on the west side." From this time on Crawford was busy surveying for Washington, either privately or in behalf of the soldiers' lands, until the outbreak of Dunmore's War in 1774. For these bounty-land surveys, Washington was particularly attentive, writing Crawford frequently "in behalf of the whole officers and soldiers, and beg of you to be attentive to it, as I think our interest is deeply concerned in the event of your dispatch." When Walpole's Grant was confirmed by King George, Washington greatly feared the loss of the lands promised to himself and his comrades of 1754. His own share was five thousand acres, and he had purchased an equal amount from others who, becoming hopeless, offered their claims for sale. This grant was bounded on the west by the old war-path which ran from the mouth of the Scioto River to Cumberland Gap. Accordingly, in September, 1773, Washington wrote Crawford to go down the Ohio below the Scioto. Washington did not know then that the purchasers of Walpole's Grant had agreed to set apart two hundred thousand acres for the heroes of 1754. It is significant that he was particular to avoid all occasion for conflicting claims; he originally wanted the soldiers' surveys to be made beyond the Ohio Company's Grant; later beyond the Walpole Grant. And while war and other causes put a disastrous end to the work of the promoters of all the various land companies with which Washington had nothing to do, the soldiers' lands were saved to them, and all received their shares. Washington also retained his private lands surveyed by Crawford, and owned most of them in 1799, when he died. In 1784, Washington had patents for thirty thousand acres and surveys for ten thousand more. Briefly, his possessions may be described as ten thousand acres on the south bank of the Ohio between Wheeling and Point Pleasant, West Virginia, and twenty thousand acres in the Great Kanawha Valley, beginning three miles above its mouth, "on the right and left of the river, and bounded thereby forty-eight miles and a half." Washington's ethics and his enterprise with reference to his Western speculations were both admirable, but we can only hint of them here. He was strict with himself and with others, but he knew how to be lenient when leniency would not harm the recipient. To his later agent, Thomas Freeman (Crawford was captured and put to death by the Indians in 1782), he wrote in 1785: "Where acts of Providence interfere to disable a tenant, I would be lenient in the exaction of rent, but when the cases are otherwise, I will not be put off; because it is on these my own expenditures depend, and because an accumulation of undischarged rents is a real injury to the tenant." While his agents were ordered to use all legal precautions against allowing his lands to be usurped by others, Washington was particular that needy people, stopping temporarily, should not be driven off; and he was exceedingly anxious from first to last that no lands should be taken up for him that were anywise claimed by others. It is a fact that Washington had few disputes in a day when disputes over lands and boundaries were as common as sunrise and sunset. No landholder in the West had so little trouble in proportion to the amount of land owned. The intensity of Washington's business energy is not shown more plainly than by his enterprise in finding and exploiting novelties. One day he was studying the question of rotation of crops; the next found him laboring all day with his blacksmith fashioning a newfangled plough. The next day he spent, perhaps, in studying a plan of a new machine invented in Europe to haul trees bodily out of the ground, an invention which meant something to a man who owned thirty thousand acres of primeval forest. He ordered his London agent to send on one of these machines regardless of cost, if they were really able to do the feats claimed. Again he was writing Tilghman at Philadelphia concerning the possibility and advisability of importing palatines from Europe, with which to settle his Western farms. Now he was examining veins of coal along the Youghiogheny and experimenting with it, or studying the location of salt-springs and the manufacture of salt, which in the West was twice dearer than flour. A whole essay could be devoted to Washington's interest in mineral springs at Saratoga, Rome, New York, and in the West, and to his plan outlined to the president of the Continental Congress to have the United States retain possession of all lands lying immediately about them. We do not know who built the first grist-mill west of the Alleghanies, but it is doubtful if there was another save Washington's at Perryopolis, Fayette County, Pennsylvania, before the Revolutionary War. "I assure you," wrote Crawford, "it is the best mill I ever saw anywhere, although I think one of a less value would have done as well." It is the boast of Ohioans that the millstones for the first mill in the old Northwest were "packed" over the mountains from Connecticut. Washington might have boasted, a score of years earlier, that he had found his millstones right in the Alleghanies, and they were "equal to English burr," according to his millwright. The mill which is still in operation on Washington's Run is on the original site of the one built by him in 1775. Portions of the original structure remain in the present mill, and it is known far and wide by the old name. The water-power, which is no longer relied upon except during wet seasons, still follows the same mill-race used in Revolutionary days, and the reconstructed dam is on the old site. The improvements on Washington's plantation here, overseer's house, slave quarters, etc., were situated near Plant No. 2 of the Washington Coal and Coke Company. It is known that Washington became interested in the coal outcropping here, but it is safe to say that he little dreamed that the land he purchased with that lying contiguous to it would within a century be valued at twenty million dollars. In view of the enormous value of this territory, it is exceedingly interesting to know that Washington was its first owner, and that he found coal there nearly a century and a half ago. In 1784 Washington issued a circular offering his Western lands to rent: "These lands may be had on three tenures: First, until January, 1790, and no longer. Second, until January, 1795, renewable every ten years for ever. Third, for nine hundred and ninety-nine years." The conditions included clearing five new acres every year for each hundred leased and the erection of buildings within the time of lease. The staple commodity was to be medium of exchange. The seventh condition is interesting: "These conditions &c. being common to the leases of three different tenures, the rent of the first, will be Four Pounds per annum, for every hundred acres contained in the lease, and proportionably for a greater or lesser quantity; of the second, One Shilling for every acre contained in the lease until the year 1795, One Shilling and Sixpence for the like quantity afterwards till the year 1815, and the like increase per acre for every ten years, until the rent amounts to and shall have remained at Five Shillings for the ten years next ensuing, after which it is to increase Threepence per acre every ten years for ever; of the Third, Two Shillings for every acre therein contained, at which it will stand for nine hundred and ninety-nine years, the term for which it is granted." Five years before his death Washington resolved to dispose of his Western lands. The investments had not been so profitable as he had hoped. As early as June 16, 1794, he wrote Presley Neville: "From the experience of many years, I have found distant property in land more pregnant of perplexities than profit. I have therefore resolved to sell all I hold on the Western waters, if I can obtain the prices which I conceive their quality, their situation, and other advantages would authorize me to expect." A circular advertising his Western lands was issued in Philadelphia, dated February 1, 1796. It described 32,317 acres in Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky for sale; the terms were one-fourth payment down, and the remainder to be paid in five years with interest "annually and punctually paid." With this story of Washington's acquaintance with the West and his speculations there in mind, it is now possible to take up, knowingly, the great result to which they led--the first grand plan of American internal improvements, of which Washington was the father. As early as 1754, Washington, then just come of age, made a detailed study of the Potomac River, and described in a memorandum all the difficulties and obstructions to be overcome in rendering that river navigable from tide-water to Fort Cumberland (Cumberland, Maryland). At the time of Washington's entrance into the House of Burgesses in 1760, the matter of a way of communication between the colonies and the territory then conquered from France beyond the Alleghanies was perhaps uppermost in his mind, but various circumstances compelled a postponement of all such plans, particularly the outrageous proclamation of 1763, which was intended to repress the Western movement. By 1770 conditions were changed. In 1768 the Treaty of Fort Stanwix had nominally secured to Virginia all the territory south of the Ohio River, the very land from which the proclamation of 1763 excluded her. On July 20 of this year, Washington wrote to Thomas Johnson, the first State Governor of Maryland, suggesting that the project of opening the Potomac River be "recommended to the public notice upon a more enlarged plan [_i. e._, including a portage to the Ohio Basin] and as a means of becoming the channel of conveyance of the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire." Johnson had written Washington concerning the navigation of the Potomac; in this reply Washington prophesied the failure of any plan to improve the Potomac that did not include a plan to make it an avenue of communication between the East and the West. He also prophesied that, if this were not done, Pennsylvania or New York would improve the opportunity of getting into commercial touch with that "rising empire" beyond the Alleghanies, "a tract of country which," he wrote, "is unfolding to our view, the advantages of which are too great, and too obvious, I should think, to become the subject of serious debate, but which, through ill-timed parsimony and supineness, may be wrested from us and conducted through other channels, such as the Susquehanna." These words of Washington's had a significance contained in no others uttered in that day, hinting of a greater America of which few besides this man were dreaming. They sounded through the years foretelling the wonder of our time, the making of the empire of the Mississippi Basin. Far back in his youth, this man had sounded the same note of alarm and enthusiasm: "A pusillanimous behavior now will ill suit the times," he cried to Governor Dinwiddie just after Braddock's defeat, when a red tide of pillage and murder was setting over the mountains upon Virginia and Pennsylvania. During the fifteen years now past Washington had visited the West, and understood its promise and its needs, and now the binding of the East and the West became at once his dearest dream. Believing the time had come Washington, in 1774, brought before the Virginia House of Burgesses a grand plan of communication which called for the improvement of the Potomac and the building of a connection from that river to one of the southwest tributaries of the Ohio. Only the outbreak of the Revolution could have thwarted the measure; in those opening hours of war it was forgotten, and it was not thought of again until peace was declared seven years later. We know something of Washington's life in those years--his ceaseless application to details, his total abandonment of the life he had learned to know and love on the Mount Vernon farms, the thousand perplexities, cares, and trials which he met so patiently and nobly. But in those days of stress and hardship the cherished plan of youth and manhood could not be forgotten. Even before peace was declared, Washington left his camp at Newburg, and at great personal risk made a tour though the Mohawk Valley, examining the portages between the Mohawk and Wood Creek, at Rome, New York, and between Lake Otsego and the Mohawk at Canajoharie. These routes by the Susquehanna and Mohawk to the Lakes were the rival routes of the James and Potomac westward, and Washington was greatly interested in them. He was no narrow partisan. Returning from this trip, he wrote the Chevalier de Chastellux from Princeton, October 12, 1783: "Prompted by these actual observations, I could not help taking a more extensive view of the vast inland navigation of these United States and could not but be struck with the immense extent and importance of it, and with the goodness of that Providence which has dealt its favors to us with so profuse a hand. Would to God we may have wisdom enough to improve them! I shall not rest contented till I have explored the western country, and traversed those lines, or great part of them, which have given bounds to a new empire." There is something splendid suggested by these words. Though he knew, perhaps better than any man, the pitiful condition of the country, there is here no note of despair, but rather a cry of enthusiasm. The leader of the armies was now to become a leader of a people, and at the outset his eye is uplifted and his faith great. With prophetic genius his face, at the close of his exhausting struggle, is turned toward the West. It is certain that Washington could not have known what a tremendous influence the new West was to have in the perplexing after hours of that critical period of our history. Perhaps he judged better what it would be partly for the reason that its very existence had furnished a moral support to him in times of darkness and despair; he always remembered those valleys and open meadows where the battles of his boyhood had been fought, and the tradition that he would have led the Continental army thither in case of final defeat may not be unfounded. Whether he knew aught of the wholesome part the West was to play in our national development or not, two things are very clear to-day: the West, and the opportunity to occupy it, were the "main chance" of the spent colonies at the end of that war; and if Washington had known all that we know at this day, he certainly could not have done much more than he did to bring about the welding and cementing of the East and the West, which now meant to each other more than ever before. He again utters practically the old cry of his youth: "A pusillanimous behavior now will ill suit the times." And the emphasis is on the "now." It is not surprising, therefore, to find that Washington, soon after reaching Mount Vernon, at the close of the war, determined on another western journey. The ostensible reason for the trip was to look after his lands, but from the journal of the traveller it is easy to see that the important result of the trip was a personal inspection of the means of communication between the various branches of the Ohio and the Potomac, which so nearly interlock in southwestern Pennsylvania and northeastern West Virginia. It must be remembered that in that day river navigation was considered the most practical form of transportation. All the rivers of Virginia, great and small, were the highways of the tobacco industry; the rivers of any colony were placed high in an inventory of the colony's wealth, not only because they implied fertility, but because they were the great avenues of trade. The first important sign of commercial awakening in the interior of the colonies was the improvement of the navigable rivers and the highways. In less than thirty-three days Washington travelled nearly seven hundred miles on horseback in what is now Pennsylvania and West Virginia.[1] That he did not confine his explorations to the travelled ways is evident from his itinerary through narrow, briery paths, and his remaining for at least one night upon a Virginian hillside, where he slept, as in earlier years, beside a camp-fire and covered only by his cloak. His original intention was to go to the Great Kanawha, where much of his most valuable land lay, and after transacting his business, to return by way of the New River into Virginia. But it will be remembered that after the Revolutionary War closed in the East, the bloodiest of battles were yet to be fought in the West; and even in 1784, such was the condition of affairs on the frontier, it did not seem safe for Washington to go down the Ohio. He turned, therefore, to the rough lands at the head of the Monongahela, in the region of Morgantown, West Virginia, and examined carefully all evidence that could be secured touching the practicability of opening a great trunk line of communication between East and West by way of the Potomac and Monongahela rivers. The navigation of the headwaters of the two streams was the subject of special inquiry, and then, in turn, the most practicable route for a portage or a canal between them. From any point of view this hard, dangerous tour of exploration must be considered most significant. Washington had led his ragged armies to victory, England had been fought completely to a standstill, and the victor had returned safely to the peace and quiet of his Mount Vernon farms amid the applause of two continents. And then, in a few weeks, we find the same man with a single attendant beating his way through the tangled trails in hilly West Virginia, inspecting for himself and making diligent inquiry from all he met concerning the practicability of the navigation of the upper Monongahela and the upper Potomac. Russia can point to Peter's laboring in the Holland shipyards with no more pride than that with which we can point to Washington pushing his tired horse through the wilderness about Dunkard's Bottom on the Cheat River in 1784. If through the knowledge and determination of Peter the Russian Empire became strong, then as truly from the clear-visioned inspiration of Washington came the first attempts to bind our East and West into one--a union on which depended the very life of the American Republic. Here and now we find this man firmly believing truths and theories which became the adopted beliefs of a whole nation but a few years later. [Illustration: GEORGE WASHINGTON] Returning to Mount Vernon, Washington immediately penned one of the most interesting and important letters written in America during his day and generation,--"that classic, Washington's Letter to Benjamin Harrison, 1784," as it is styled in the "Old South Leaflets." In this letter he voices passionately his plea for binding a fragmentary nation together by the ties of interstate communion and commerce. His plan included the improvement of the Potomac and one of the heads of the Monongahela, and building a solid portage highway between these waterways. His chief argument was that Virginia ought to be the first in the field to secure the trade of the West; with keener foresight than any other man of his day, Washington saw that the trans-Alleghany empire would be filled with people "faster than any other ever was, or any one would imagine." Not one of all the prophecies uttered during the infancy of our Republic was more marvellously fulfilled. The various means by which this was accomplished changed more rapidly than any one could have supposed, but every change brought to pass more quickly that very marvel which he had foretold to a wondering people only half awake to its greater duty. His final argument was prophetically powerful: he had done what he could to lead his people to freedom from proprietaries and lords of trade. How free now would they be? He wrote: "No well informed Mind need be told, that the flanks and rear of the United territory are possessed by other powers, and formidable ones too--nor how necessary it is to apply the cement of interest to bind all parts of it together, by one indissoluble bond--particularly the middle states with the Country immediately back of them--for what ties let me ask, should we have upon those people; and how entirely unconnected sho{d} we be with them if the Spaniards on their right or great Britain on their left, instead of throwing stumbling blocks in their way as they now do, should invite their trade and seek alliances with them?--What, when they get strength, which will be sooner than is generally imagined (from the emigration of Foreigners who can have no predeliction for us, as well as from the removal of our own Citizens) may be the consequence of their having formed such connections and alliances, requires no uncommon foresight to predict. "The Western Settlers--from my own observation--stand as it were on a pivet--the touch of a feather would almost incline them any way--they looked down the Mississippi until the Spaniards (very impolitically I think for themselves) threw difficulties in the way, and for no other reason that I can conceive than because they glided gently down the stream, without considering perhaps the tedeousness of the voyage back, & the time necessary to perform it in;--and because they have no other means of coming to us but by a long land transportation & unimproved Roads. "A combination of circumstances make the present conjuncture more favorable than any other to fix the trade of the Western Country to our Markets.--The jealous & untoward disposition of the Spaniards on one side, and the private views of some individuals coinciding with the policy of the Court of G. Britain on the other, to retain the posts of Oswego, Niagara, Detroit &c{a} (which tho' done under the letter of the treaty is certainly an infraction of the Spirit of it, & injurious to the Union) may be improved to the greatest advantage by this State if she would open her arms, & embrace the means which are necessary to establish it--The way is plain, & the expense, comparitively speaking deserves not a thought, so great would be the prize--The Western Inhabitants would do their part towards accomplishing it,--weak, as they now are, they would, I am persuaded meet us half way rather than be _driven_ into the arms of, or be in any wise dependent upon, foreigners; the consequences of which would be, a separation, or a War.-- "The way to avoid both, happily for us, is easy, and dictated by our clearest interest.--It is to open a wide door, and make a smooth way for the Produce of that Country to pass to our Markets before the trade may get into another channel--this, in my judgment, would dry up the other Sources; or if any part should flow down the Mississippi, from the Falls of the Ohio, in Vessels which may be built--fitted for Sea--& sold with their Cargoes, the proceeds I have no manner of doubt, will return this way; & that it is better to prevent an evil than to rectify a mistake none can deny--commercial, connections, of all others, are most difficult to dissolve--if we wanted proof of this, look to the avidity with which we are renewing, after a _total_ suspension of eight years, our correspondence with Great Britain;--So, if we are supine, and suffer without a struggle the Settlers of the Western Country to form commercial connections with the Spaniards, Britons, or with any of the States in the Union we shall find it a difficult matter to dissolve them altho' a better communication should, thereafter, be presented to them--time only could effect it; such is the force of habit!-- "Rumseys discovery of working Boats against stream, by mechanical powers principally, may not only be considered as a fortunate invention for these States in general but as one of those circumstances which have combined to render the present epoche favorable above all others for securing (if we are disposed to avail ourselves of them) a large portion of the produce of the Western Settlements, and of the Fur and Peltry of the Lakes, also.--the importation of which alone, if there were no political considerations in the way, is immense.-- "It may be said, perhaps, that as the most direct Routs from the Lakes to the Navigation of Potomack are through the State of Pennsylvania;--and the inter{t} of that State opposed to the extension of the Waters of Monongahela, that a communication cannot be had either by the Yohiogany or Cheat River;--but herein I differ.--an application to this purpose would, in my opinion, place the Legislature of that Commonwealth in a very delicate situation.--That it would not be pleasing I can readily conceive, but that they would refuse their assent, I am by no means clear in.--There is, in that State, at least one hundred thousand Souls West of the Laurel hill, who are groaning under the inconveniences of a long land transportation.--They are wishing, indeed looking, for the extension of inland Navigation; and if this can not be made easy for them to Philadelphia--at any rate it must be lengthy--they will seek a Mart elsewhere; and none is so convenient as that which offers itself through Yohiogany or Cheat River.--the certain consequences therefore of an attempt to restrain the extension of the Navigation of these Rivers, (so consonant with the interest of these people) or to impose any extra: duties upon the exports, or imports, to, or from another State, would be a separation of the Western Settlers from the old & more interior government; towards which there is not wanting a disposition at this moment in the former." Thus the old dream of the youth is brought forward again by the thoughtful, sober man; these words echo the spirit of Washington's whole attitude toward the West--its wealth of buried riches, its commercial possibilities, its swarming colonies of indomitable pioneers. Here was the first step toward solving that second most serious problem that faced the young nation: How can the great West be held and made to strengthen the Union? France and England had owned and lost it. Could the new master, this infant Republic, "one nation to-day, thirteen to-morrow," do better? Ay, but England and France had no seer or adviser so wise as this man. This letter from Washington to Harrison was our nation's pioneer call to the vastly better days (poor as they now seem) of improved river navigation, the first splendid economic advance that heralded the day of the canal and the national highway. For fifty years, until President Jackson vetoed the Maysville Road Bill, the impetus of this appeal, made in 1784, was of vital force in forming our national economic policies. This letter has frequently been pointed to as the inspiring influence which finally gave birth to the Erie Canal and the Cumberland National Road. The immediate result of this agitation was the formation of the celebrated Potomac Company under joint resolutions passed by Virginia and Maryland. Washington was at once elected to the presidency of this company, an office he filled until his election to the presidency of the United States five years later (1789). The plan of the Potomac Company was to improve the navigation of the Potomac to the most advantageous point on its headwaters and build a twenty-mile portage road to Dunkard's Bottom on the Cheat River. With the improvement of the Cheat and Monongahela rivers, a waterway, with a twenty-mile portage, was secured from the Ohio to tide-water on the Potomac. Washington's plan, however, did not stop here. This proposed line of communication was not to stop at the Ohio, but the northern tributaries of that river were to be explored and rendered navigable, and portage roads were to be built between them and the interlocking streams which flowed into the Great Lakes. With the improvement of these waterways, in their turn, a complete trunk line of communication was thus established from the Lakes to the sea. Washington spent no little time in endeavoring to secure the best possible information concerning the nature of the northern tributaries of the Ohio, the Beaver, the Muskingum, the Scioto, and the Miami, and of the lake streams, the Grand, the Cuyahoga, the Sandusky, and the Maumee. It was because of such conceptions as these that all the portage paths of the territory northwest of the Ohio River were declared by the famous Ordinance of 1787, "common highways forever free." The Potomac Company fared no better than the other early companies which attempted to improve the lesser waterways of America before the method of slackwater navigation was discovered. It made, however, the pioneer effort in a cause which meant more to its age than we can readily imagine to-day, and in time it built the great and successful Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, as the early attempts to render the Mohawk River navigable were the first chapters in the history of the famed Erie Canal. These efforts of Washington's constitute likewise the first chapter of the building of our one great national road. This highway, begun in 1811, and completed to the Ohio River in 1818, was practically the portage path which was so important a link in Washington's comprehensive plan. Its starting point was Cumberland, Maryland, on the Potomac, and it led to Brownsville, Pennsylvania, on the Monongahela, and Wheeling on the Ohio. All of these points were famous ports in the days when that first burst of immigration swept over the Alleghanies. Washington's plan for a bond of union between East and West was also the first chapter of the story of throwing the first railway across the Alleghanies. "I consider this among the most important acts of my life," said Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, when with the stroke of a pen he laid the first foundation for the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, "second only to my signing the Declaration of Independence, if even it be second to that." Washington's dream of an empire of united States bound together by a "chain of federal union" was enlarged and modified by the changing needs of a nation, but in its vital essence it was never altered. "It would seem," wrote the late Herbert B. Adams, "as though, in one way or another, all lines of our public policy lead back to Washington, as all roads lead to Rome." And yet, after all, I believe there are other words which sound a note that should never die in the ears of his people, and those are his own youthful words, "A pusillanimous behavior now will ill suit the times." It is not easy to pass this subject without referring to Washington's remarkably wise foresight with reference to the West and national growth which his experience with that part of the country gave him. True, he made some miscalculations, as when he expressed the opinion that New York would not improve her great route to the West (Mohawk River route) until the British had given up their hold on the Great Lakes; he however pointed to that route as one of the most important in America and hardly expected more from it than has been realized. In all phases of the awakening of the West--the Mississippi question, the organization of the Northwest Territory, the formulating of the Ordinance of 1787 ("the legal outcome of Maryland's successful policy in advocating National Sovereignty over the Western Lands"), the ceding of lands to the National Government, the handling of the Indian problem--Washington's influence and knowledge were of paramount usefulness. Take these instances of his prescience as yet unmentioned: he suggested, in connection with the Potomac improvement, the policy of exploration and surveys which our government has steadily adhered to since that day; the Lewis and Clark expedition was a result of this policy advocated first by Washington. Again, note Washington's singularly wise opinion on the separation of Kentucky from Virginia. Writing to Jefferson in 1785, he affirms that the general opinion in his part of Virginia is unfavorable to the separation. "I have uniformly given it as mine," he wrote, "to meet them upon their own ground, draw the best line, and make the best terms we can, and part good friends." And again, it is to the point to notice Washington's far-seeing view of the progress and enterprise of the West in relation to commerce. Who before him ever had the temerity to suggest that ships would descend the Ohio River and sail for foreign ports?[2] Yet he said this in 1784 and had the audacity to add that, if so, the return route of the proceeds of all sales thus resulting would be over the Alleghany routes, which prophecy was fulfilled to the very letter. FOOTNOTES: [1] Washington's diary of this journey is printed in full in Hulbert, "Washington and the West," 27-105. [2] Hulbert, "Washington and the West," 195-6. CHAPTER III _After Examination Henderson is licensed to practise Law.--Defeat of the Shawnees by the Virginians who claimed the Land south of the Ohio.--The Attention of Settlers directed to the Land beyond the Alleghanies.--Henderson resolves to form a Transylvania Company and colonize Ken-ta-kee.--Buys from the Cherokees twenty million Acres for ten thousand Pounds Sterling, March, 1775.--Bands of Earlier Kentucky Settlers, fleeing from the Indians, meet Henderson's Colonists.--His Advance, led by Daniel Boone, attacked by Indians.--Henderson appeals in vain to the Fugitives to return with him.--Arrival of the Colonists at the Site of Boonesborough.--Henderson's Anxiety regarding Virginia's Attitude toward his Purchase.--The Governor of Virginia sends a Force which overthrows the Colony.--Actual Settlers on the Purchase permitted to remain in Title.--Grants of Land made to the Company by Virginia and North Carolina in Return for their Outlay.--The Moral Effect of this Proof that the West could be successfully colonized._ RICHARD HENDERSON: THE FOUNDER OF TRANSYLVANIA [Illustration] IN early days in North Carolina, the young man who desired to practise law was compelled to get a certificate from the Chief Justice of the colony and to present this to the Governor; the latter examined the candidate, and, becoming satisfied as to his attainments, granted him a license. Almost a century and a half ago a youth presented himself to the Governor of that colony with the proper credentials and asked that he be examined for admission to the bar. His name, he affirmed, was Richard Henderson. His father, Samuel Henderson, had moved from Virginia in 1745, Richard's tenth year, and was now Sheriff of Granville County. Richard had assisted his father "in the business of the sherifftry," and, with a few books, had picked up his knowledge of law. All this the Governor of North Carolina learned with indifference, we can imagine, as he looked the broad-shouldered lad up and down. It may be that North Carolina had now a surplus of pettifoggers; at any rate the Governor was not granting licenses with a free hand to-day. The youth was not voluble, though his firm square jaw denoted both sturdiness and determination; perhaps he was somewhat abashed, as he well may have been, in the presence of the chief executive of the colony. "How long have you read law?" asked the Governor. "A twelve-month," answered the lad. "And what books have you read?" We can fancy there was the tinge of a sneer in these words. Henderson named his books. If the sneer was hidden until now, it instantly appeared as the young applicant was bluntly told that it was nonsense for him to appear for an examination after such a short period of study of such a limited number of books. The firm jaws were clinched and the gray eyes snapped as the rebuke was administered. Despite his homely exterior and unpolished address the boy was already enough of a jurist to love justice and fair play; if silent under many circumstances, he could speak when the time demanded speech. "Sir," he replied,--and it can be believed there was a ring to the words,--"I am an applicant for examination: it is your duty to examine me; if I am found worthy, I should be granted a license, and if not, I should be refused one, not before." We can be sure that the Governor bristled up at hearing his duty outlined to him from the lips of a country boy; and it is no less probable that as he began an examination it was wholly with the intention of demoralizing utterly the spirit of the youth who had spoken so boldly. The answers did not come so rapidly, probably, as the questions were asked, nor were they formulated with equal nicety; but the substance was there, of sufficient quantity and sturdy quality, and in short order the Governor, who was a gentleman, found himself admiring the cool, discerning lad who had the confidence of his convictions. The license was granted and with it a bountiful degree of honest praise. Young Henderson immediately began the practice of law and was increasingly successful; before the outbreak of the Revolution he was judge on the bench of the Superior Court of North Carolina. As early as 1774 North Carolina was convulsed in the Revolutionary contest, and in that year the Colonial government was abolished there. The student will search in vain to find the earliest motive which led Judge Henderson to turn his eyes to the westward at this juncture. Yet since he had come of age he had witnessed important events: the French and Indian War had been fought and won; Pontiac's rebellion had been put down; the famous treaty of Fort Stanwix, which gave Virginia all the territory between the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, had been signed; and now in 1774, when North Carolina was in the throes of revolution, Governor Dunmore of Virginia and General Andrew Lewis defeated the savage Shawnees who had attempted to challenge Virginia's right to the land south of the Ohio. The stories of the first explorers of the hinterland beyond the Alleghanies--Walker, Gist, Washington, and Boone--were now attracting more attention as people began to believe that the Indians could, after all, be made to keep their treaty pledges. As the Revolutionary fires raged in North Carolina, many turned their eyes to the fresh green lands beyond the mountains of which the "Long Hunters" and Boone had told. Were those dreams true? Was there a pleasant land beyond dark Powell's Valley and darker Cumberland Gap where the British would cease from troubling, and honest men, as well as criminals and debtors, would be at rest? The hope in one man's breast became a conviction, and the conviction a firm purpose. Judge Henderson resolved to form a Transylvania Company, secure a large tract of land, and lead a colony into the sweet meadows of Ken-ta-kee. It is not known when or how Judge Henderson learned that the Cherokees would sell a portion of their Western hunting grounds. It may have been only a borderland rumor; perhaps it came directly from the wigwams of the Indians at the mouth of a "Long Hunter," possibly a Boone or a Harrod. Somehow it did come, and Henderson resolved immediately to make a stupendous purchase and follow it up with a remarkable emigration. It will be proper to add at once that there is as little probability that the Cherokees had a legal right to sell as that Henderson had to buy; but neither party stood on technicalities. Virginia's sweeping claims, made good by daring politics at the treaty of Fort Stanwix, covered all the territory between the Ohio and the Tennessee. A Virginian law forbade the private purchase of land from the Indians, though Virginia herself had acquired it by flagrantly evading the plain meaning of the King's proclamation of 1763 in making such a purchase from the Six Nations. And the claim of the Six Nations to possession of the Old Southwest was less substantial than that of the Cherokees who still hunted there. Passing, then, these technicalities as lightly as Virginia and Henderson did (a common failing in the rough old days when this region was but a moaning forest), let us look quickly to the West. Henderson's plan was admirably laid. He at once took into his service the cool and trusty Daniel Boone. The latter was posted off to that most distant of borderland communities, the Watauga Settlement, to arrange a meeting between the officers of the Transylvania Company and the chiefs of the Cherokees. And here, at the famed Sycamore Shoals on this Watauga tributary of the Tennessee, on the 17th of March, 1775, Richard Henderson signed the treaty of Fort Watauga. His business associates were Judge John Williams, Leonard Henley Bullock, James Hogg, Nathaniel Thomas, David Hart, John Luttrell, and William Johnstone. But even the well-informed Boone could not make all things move smoothly, and there were delays ere the vast tract of twenty million acres lying south of the Kentucky River was satisfactorily secured. The Cherokee chieftain, Oconostota, opposed the treaty, and the stipulation named, ten thousand pounds sterling in goods; he made, it is said, one of the "most eloquent orations that ever fell from red man's lips," against Boone and Henderson. At the close the quiet promoter, who "could be silent in English and two Indian languages," met the Indian orator apart and alone. No one ever knew what passed between them, but the treaty of Fort Watauga was duly signed. All was ready now for the advance movement, and Henderson immediately employed Daniel Boone to move forward to mark the path to the Kentucky River, where the settlement was to be made. Felix Walker was one of the band of woodsmen assembled by Boone to assist in this task of marking out for white men the Indian path through Cumberland Gap. "Colonel Boone ... was to be our pilot," Walker records, "through the wilderness, to the promised land." Kentucky was a promised land; it was promised by the Cherokees, and none knew better than the savage Shawnees that Cherokee promises were worth no more than their own. In 1773 and 1774 numbers of the half-civilized pioneers had been pressing into Kentucky, and in the latter year cabins had been raised in many quarters. Whether or not there was any sign of genuine permanency in these beginnings, Dunmore's War, which broke out in 1774, put everything at hazard; the Kentucky movement was seemingly destroyed for the time being. For this reason it is that the Henderson purchase at Fort Watauga in March, 1775, was of as precious moment and providential timeliness as perhaps any other single private enterprise in our early history. As will be seen, the Ohio Company played a most important role in the history of the West in 1787, by making possible the famous Ordinance; but the filling of Kentucky in 1775 was more important at that hour than any other social movement at any other hour in Western history. For Henderson "meant business": this was not a get-rich-quick scheme that he was foisting upon others. He came to Watauga in the expectation of proceeding onward to the farlying land he would buy--a man willing to make great personal as well as financial risk in a venture more chimerical in its day than the incorporation of an airship freight line would be to-day. And by the twentieth of March, Henderson was ready to push westward, along that winding line of wounded trees, up hill and down valley, to the Gap and beyond into the wilderness which lay between the Cumberland Mountains and the meadow lands of Kentucky. Leaving Fort Watauga March 20, the party, chief of which were Henderson, Hart, and Luttrell, reached Captain Joseph Martin's station in Powell's Valley on the thirtieth. Of the experiences of these men, recounted so interestingly in Henderson's little yellow diary, nothing is so significant as the parties of pioneers which they soon began to meet retreating from Kentucky. The first of these hurrying bands of fugitives was encountered as early as April 7, and between that date and April 19 at least seventy-six fugitives from the "dark and bloody ground" met and passed Henderson's little colony of forty. Lewis's victory of the Summer before had embittered the savages beyond all words; and now, as the Spring of 1775 dawned in the lonely mountain valleys, these first adventurers into Kentucky were hurrying eastward. And this dread of Indian hostility was not a chimera; even as Boone's party was hacking its route to the Kentucky River, it was ambushed in camp by an Indian horde, which assailed it when night was darkest, just before dawn; one man was killed and two were wounded, one of them fatally. Now it was that Boone sent Henderson those thrilling words which can be understood only when we realize that the Indian marauders were driving out of Kentucky the entire van which came there and began settling in 1774. "My advice to you, Sir," wrote Boone from that bloody battleground on the trail, "is to come or send as soon as possible. Your company is desired greatly, for the people are very uneasy, but are willing to stay and venture their lives with you, and now is the time to frustrate the intentions of the Indians, and keep the country whilst we are in it. If we give way to them now, it will ever be the case." There is, unfortunately, no portrait of Richard Henderson in existence; if one picture by some magic art could be secured, those who are proudest of his memory could surely prefer no scene to this: a man a little above average height, broad of shoulders but not fleshy, clad in the rough garb of the typical pioneer, standing in Boone's trail on a ragged spur of the gray-grained Cumberlands, pleading with a pale-faced, disheartened Kentucky pioneer, to turn about, join his company, and return to the Kentucky River. For this was the mission of his life--to give heart to that precious movement into Kentucky at this critical first hour of her history. A beginning had been made, but it was on the point of being swept from its feet. The Transylvania Company, led with courage and confidence by Boone and Henderson, ignored the fears of fugitives and triumphed splendidly in the face of every known and many unknown fears. At noon of Saturday, April 8, Henderson and his followers were toiling up the ascent into Cumberland Gap. On this day a returning party as large as Henderson's was encountered. "Met about 40 persons returning from the Cantuckey," wrote Henderson in his diary. "On Acct. of the Late Murder by the Indians, could prevail one [on] one only to return. Memo. Several Virginians who were with us returned." On the twelfth another company of fugitives was met on Richmond Creek; William Calk, one of Henderson's party, jotted this down in his journal: "There we met another Company going back [to Virginia]; they tell such News Abram and Drake is afraid to go aney further." This "Abram" was Abraham Hanks, uncle of Nancy Hanks, the mother of Abraham Lincoln. But pushing bravely on, Henderson and his daring associates reached the site of the new Boonesborough (Fort Boone, Henderson called it) on the twentieth of April. From this it is well to date the founding of a genuine settlement in Kentucky, one day after the rattle of that running fire of muskets at Lexington and Concord which rang around the world. In an indefinite sense, there were settlements in Kentucky before this; but no promoter-friend of Kentucky ever coaxed back over the Cumberland Mountains any of the founders of Boonesborough! True, Boonesborough itself did not exist permanently; but not because the land was deserted. Boonesborough was not on the direct line from Cumberland Gap to the "Falls of the Ohio" (Louisville), and did not play the part in later Kentucky history that Harrodsburg and Crab Orchard did. It was, however, the first important fortified Kentucky station, and its builders, chief of whom was Richard Henderson, received their heroic inspiration from no persons or parties in existence in Kentucky when they came thither. Henderson's determination to hold the ground gained is seen in the following letter written in July, 1775, to Captain Martin, in Powell's Valley, who had just given the Indians a bloody check: "... Your spirited conduct gives me great pleasure. Keep your men in heart if possible; now is your time, the Indians must not drive us." A touch of the loneliness of Judge Henderson's situation is sensed in another letter to Martin: "I long much to hear from you," he writes from the banks of the far-away Kentucky, "pray write me at large, how the matter goes with you in the valley, as well as what passes in Virginia." Little wonder he was anxious concerning Virginia's attitude toward his purchase and the bold advance of his party of colonizers, from which several Virginians had deserted. There could be no doubt of Virginia's opinion of these North Carolinians who had taught that colony what could be done in the West by brave, determined men. Henderson's purchase was annulled, and Henderson and his compatriots were described as vagabond interlopers, in a governor's anathema. Before this was known, Henderson issued a regular call for a meeting of the colonists to take the initial steps of forming a State government. But all that Henderson planned is not to our purpose here. A rush of Virginians through the doorway in Cumberland Gap, which Boone and Henderson had opened, swept the inchoate state of Transylvania from record and almost from memory. The Transylvania Company never survived the Virginia governor's proclamation, North Carolina joining Virginia in repudiating the private purchase. Actual settlers on Henderson's purchase, however, were permitted to remain in title; and, in return for the money expended by Henderson and his associates, Virginia granted his company two hundred thousand acres of land in the vicinity of Henderson, Kentucky; and North Carolina granted an equal amount in Carter's Valley near the Cumberland Mountains. In each case the actual acreage was about double that mentioned in the grant. But this appropriation of nearly a million acres to the Henderson Company cannot be viewed at this day as other than a payment for great value received. From any standpoint Richard Henderson's brave advance into Kentucky, in April, 1775, must be considered one of the most heroic displays of that typical American spirit of comprehensive aggrandizement of which so much is heard to-day. Its great value may be guessed from the moral effect of the founding of Fort Boone at the critical hour when the Revolutionary flames, so long burning in secret, burst forth to enlighten the world. It meant much to the East that Henderson and Boone should prove that a settlement on the lower Ohio Basin could be made and maintained; it meant everything to the infant West that Kentucky should so soon begin to fill with men, women, and children. The debt of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to Kentucky can never be paid and probably never will be appropriately recognized. The lands north of the Ohio were freed from savage dominion largely by the raiding Kentuckians. It is certain that the most spectacular campaign in Western history, Clark's conquest of Illinois, would never have taken place in 1778 if Henderson and Boone had not placed the possibility of successful Kentucky immigration beyond a reasonable doubt in 1775. Judge Henderson returned to North Carolina upon the failure of the Transylvania Company, no doubt depressed and disappointed. The later allotment of land to the Transylvania Company by Virginia and North Carolina in part annulled the severe early defamatory charges of the Virginia governor. He lived to a peaceful old age, and lies buried near his old colonial mansion near Williamstown, North Carolina. Boonesborough is well remembered as Boone's Fort; but it is unjust to forget that Boone was acting in the employ of Richard Henderson, the founder of Transylvania. CHAPTER IV _A Movement among the Colonies to seize the Unoccupied Land Northwest of the Ohio.--Putnam's Hardy Training in Boyhood.--His Training in the Old French War.--His Achievements in the Revolutionary War.--He and Many Soldiers petition Congress for Western Land, as promised at the Beginning of the War.--The Ohio Company of Associates, by its Agent, Mr. Cutler, persuades Congress to pass the Ordinance of 1787.--March of the Founders of Ohio from Ipswich, Mass., to the Site of West Newton, Pa.--Putnam prepares to descend the Youghiogheny, Monongahela, and Ohio to Fort Harmar.--Fears of the Travellers that the Indians driven from Kentucky would attack them.--The Party found Marietta at the Mouth of the Muskingum.--Inauguration of the Governor of the Territory.--Contrast between Conditions, North of the Ohio and South of it.--Other Settlements on the Ohio in the Eighteenth Century.--Putnam's Beautiful Character.--Washington's Opinion of him._ RUFUS PUTNAM: THE FATHER OF OHIO [Illustration] OVER the beginning of great movements, whether social or political, there often hangs a cloud of obscurity. No event of equal importance in our history is more clear than the founding and first settlement of the territory northwest of the Ohio River, from which the five imperial commonwealths of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin sprang. It occurred at that crucial moment when Washington was calling upon Virginia, and all the colonies, to seize the West and the hope it offered, when the West was another name for opportunity to the spent colonies at the close of the Revolutionary struggle. [Illustration: RUFUS PUTNAM _Leader of the Founders of Marietta, Ohio_] The hero of the movement, General Rufus Putnam, was one of those plain, sturdy, noble men whom it is a delight to honor. He was born at Sutton, Massachusetts, April 9, 1738, and was thus six years younger than Washington, who always honored him. With little education, save that gained from a few books bought with pennies earned by blacking boots and running errands for guests at his illiterate stepfather's inn, he became a self-made man of the best type,--the man who seizes every advantage from book and friend to reach a high plane and scan a wider horizon. The Old French War was the training school for the Revolutionary conflict; and here, with Gates and Mercer and Washington and St. Clair and Wayne and Gladwin and Gibson, Rufus Putnam learned to love his country as only those can who have been willing to risk and wreck their all in her behalf. Then came the Revolution. In the first act of the glorious yet pitiful drama Rufus Putnam stands out conspicuously; for "we take no leaf from the pure chaplet of Washington's fame," affirmed Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, "when we say that the success of the first great military operation of the Revolution was due to Rufus Putnam." The story is of intrinsic interest. On a winter's evening in 1776, Rufus Putnam was invited to dine at the headquarters of the Commander-in-chief in the camp before Boston. After the dinner party had broken up, Washington detained him with questions concerning the proper policy to be pursued with reference to the future plan of campaign. As is well known, Washington favored an entrenchment on Dorchester Heights which would bring on a second Bunker Hill with a fair chance of victory, rather than the alternative of marching upon the city across the ice-bound waters. But the frozen state of the ground was a serious handicap in any entrenchment plan at that moment. Putnam was asked in short how the equivalent of entrenchments could be erected; the solving of the question meant the deliverance of Massachusetts from the burden of British occupation. This son of the State was equal to the moment, and his own simple account of the means adopted is exceptionally interesting: "I left headquarters in company with another gentleman, and on our way came by General Heath's. I had no thoughts of calling until I came against his door, and then I said, 'Let us call on General Heath,' to which he agreed. I had no other motive but to pay my respects to the general. While there, I cast my eye on a book which lay on the table, lettered on the back 'Müller's Field Engineer.' I immediately requested the general to lend it to me. He denied me. I repeated my request. He again refused, and told me he never lent his books. I then told him that he must recollect that he was one who, at Roxbury, in a measure compelled me to undertake a business which, at the time, I confessed I never had read a word about, and that he must let me have the book. After some more excuses on his part and close pressing on mine I obtained the loan of it." "In looking at the table of contents," writes Senator Hoar, "his eye was caught by the word 'chandelier,' a new word to him. He read carefully the description and soon had his plan ready. The chandeliers were made of stout timbers, ten feet long, into which were framed posts, five feet high and five feet apart, placed on the ground in parallel lines and the open spaces filled in with bundles of fascines, strongly picketed together, thus forming a movable parapet of wood instead of earth, as heretofore done. The men were immediately set to work in the adjacent apple orchard and woodlands, cutting and bundling up the fascines and carrying them with the chandeliers on to the ground selected for the work. They were put in their place in a single night. "When the sun went down on Boston on the 4th of March, Washington was at Cambridge, and Dorchester Heights were as nature or the husbandman had left them in the autumn. When Sir William Howe rubbed his eyes on the morning of the 5th, he saw through the heavy mists, the entrenchments, on which, he said, the rebels had done more work in a night than his whole army would have done in a month. He wrote to Lord Dartmouth that it must have been the employment of at least twelve thousand men. His own effective force, including seamen, was but about eleven thousand. Washington had but fourteen thousand fit for duty. 'Some of our officers,' said the 'Annual Register,'--I suppose Edmund Burke was the writer,--'acknowledged that the expedition with which these works were thrown up, with their sudden and unexpected appearance, recalled to their minds the wonderful stories of enchantment and invisible agency which are so frequent in the Eastern Romances.' Howe was a man of spirit. He took the prompt resolution to attempt to dislodge the Americans the next night before their works were made impregnable. Earl Percy, who had learned something of Yankee quality at Bunker Hill and Lexington, was to command the assault. But the Power that dispersed the Armada, baffled all the plans of the British general. There came 'a dreadful storm at night,' which made it impossible to cross the bay until the American works were perfected. The Americans, under Israel Putnam, marched into Boston, drums beating and colors flying. The veteran British army, aided by a strong naval force, soldier and sailor, Englishman and Tory, sick and well, bag and baggage, got out of Boston before the strategy of Washington, the engineering of Putnam, and the courage of the despised and untried yeomen, from whose leaders they withheld the usual titles of military respect. 'It resembled,' said Burke, 'more the emigration of a nation than the breaking up of a camp.'" His later solid achievements during the war made him, in Washington's estimation, the best engineer in the army, whether French or American, and "to be a great engineer with only such advantages of education as Rufus Putnam enjoyed, is to be a man of consummate genius." A sober, brave man of genius was required to lead to a successful issue the great work to which Rufus Putnam was now providentially called. The vast territory between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi came into the possession of the United States at the close of the Revolution. Then it was made possible for Congress to grant the bounty-lands promised to soldiers at the beginning of the war, and likewise to redeem its worthless script in Western lands. This a grateful government was willing to do, but the question was vast and difficult. If occupied, the territory must be governed. Few more serious problems faced the young Republic. The question was practically solved by two men, Rufus Putnam and that noble clergyman, Manasseh Cutler, pastor of the Congregational church at Ipswich, Massachusetts. Through Putnam, a large body of officers and men had petitioned Congress urgently for Western land: "Ten years ago you promised bounties in lands," was Putnam's appeal now to Congress through General Washington; "we have faithfully performed our duty, as history will record. We come to you now and ask that, in redemption of your promise, you give us homes in that Western wilderness. We will hew down the forests, and therein erect temples to the living God, raise and educate our children to serve and love and honor the nation for which their fathers fought, cultivate farms, build towns and cities, and make that wilderness the pride and glory of the nation." The Ohio Company of Associates was organized at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern, in Boston, March 1, 1786, by the election of Rufus Putnam, chairman, and Winthrop Sargent, secretary. As the agent of this organization, Dr. Cutler hastened to New York, while the famous Ordinance of 1787 was pending. This instrument had been before Congress for three years, but was passed within twelve days after this hero-preacher and skilled diplomat came to New York. The Ordinance organized, from lands ceded to the general government by the several States, the magnificent tract known as the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio. The delay had been caused by the hazard of erecting a great Territory, to be protected at heavy expense, without having it occupied by a considerable number of worthy citizens. The Ohio Company of Associates had offered to take a million and a half acres. This was unsatisfactory to the delegates in Congress. It was a mere clearing in all that vast tract stretching from the Alleghany to the Wisconsin. Dr. Cutler hastened to New York to reconcile the parties interested. [Illustration: REV. MANASSEH CUTLER _Ohio Pioneer_] The situation was prophetically unique. The Northwest Territory could not be organized safely without the very band of colonizers which Cutler represented and of which Putnam was the leader. On the other hand, the Ohio Company could not secure Western land without being assured that it was to be an integral part of the country for which they had fought. Putnam's appeal read: "All we ask is that it shall be consecrated to us and our children forever, with the blessing of that Declaration which, proclaimed to the world and sustained by our arms, established as self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed." Thus the famed Ordinance and the Ohio Company's purchase went hand in hand; each was impossible without the other. In order to realize the hope of his clients on the one hand, and satisfy the demands of the delegates in Congress on the other, Dr. Cutler added to the grant of the Ohio Company an additional one of three and a half million acres for a Scioto Company. Thus, by a stupendous speculation (so unhappy in its result, though compromising in no way the Ohio Company or its agents), and by shrewdly, though without dissimulation, making known his determination to buy land privately from one of the individual States if Congress would not now come to terms, Dr. Cutler won a signal victory. The Ordinance of 1787 was passed, corrected to the very letter of his own amendments, and the United States entered into the largest private contract it had ever made. With the passing of the Ordinance and the signing of the indented agreement for the Ohio Company by Cutler and Sargent on the 27th of October of that most memorable year in our documentary annals, a new era of Western history dawned. Up to that moment, there had been only illegal settlements between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes--Zeisberger's Moravians on the Tuscarawas. On numerous occasions troops had been sent from Pittsburg (Fort Pitt) to drive away from the northern side of the Ohio settlers who had squatted on the Seven Ranges, which Congress had caused to be surveyed westward from the Pennsylvania line. It being difficult to reach these squatters from Pittsburg, Fort Harmar was erected at the mouth of the Muskingum, in 1785, where troops were kept to drive off intruders, protect the surveyors, and keep the Indians in awe. The Ohio Company's purchase extended from the seventh through the seventeenth range, running northward far enough to include the necessary amount of territory. It was natural, then, that the capital of the new colony should be located at the mouth of the Muskingum, under the guns of the fort. The New Englanders who formed the Ohio Company were not less determined in their venture than were the North Carolinians who formed the Transylvania Company thirteen years before; and, though the founders of Marietta, Ohio, ran no such risk (it has been said) as did the founders of Boonesborough, Kentucky, we of to-day can have no just appreciation of the toil and the wearing years which these founders of the Old Northwest now faced. Yet danger and fear were no novelty to them. How fitting it was that these men, who first entered the portals of the Northwest, bearing in their hands the precious Ordinance and guided by the very star of empire, should have been in part the heroes of the two wars which saved this land from its enemies. One cannot look unmoved upon that body of travellers who met at daybreak, December 6, 1787, before Dr. Cutler's home at Ipswich, to receive his blessing before starting. Theirs was no idle ambition. No Moravian, no Jesuit with beads and rosary, ever faced the Western wilderness with a fairer purpose. In Kentucky, the Virginians had gained, and were holding with powerful grasp, the fair lands of _Ken-ta-kee_; elsewhere the Black Forest loomed dark and foreboding. Could the New Englanders do equally well? Their earnestness was a prophecy of their great success. In December the first party of carpenters and boat-builders, under Major Hatfield White, started on the westward journey, and in January 1788 the remainder of the brave vanguard, under Colonel Ebenezer Sproat and General Rufus Putnam, followed. These were the forty-eight "Founders of Ohio." The rigors of a northern winter made the long journey over Forbes's, or the Pennsylvania Road, a most exhaustive experience. This road through Lancaster, Carlisle, Shippensburg, and Bedford was from this time forward a connecting link between New England and Ohio. It was a rough gorge of a road ploughed deep by the heavy wheels of many an army wagon. Near Bedford, Pennsylvania, the road forked; the northern fork ran on to Pittsburg; the southern, struck off southwestwardly to the Youghiogheny River and the lower Ohio. This branch the New England caravan followed to Sumrill's Ferry on the Youghiogheny, the present West Newton, Pennsylvania. Here Putnam planned to build a rude flotilla and descend the Youghiogheny, Monongahela, and Ohio to Fort Harmar. The severe winter prevented immediate building of this fleet, but by April all was in readiness. The main boat was a covered galley, forty-five feet long, which was most appropriately named the "Adventure Galley." The heavy baggage was carried on a flat boat and a large canoe. Of the men who formed Putnam's company what more can be said--or what less--than what Senator Hoar has left in his eloquent centennial oration at Marietta in 1888? "The stately figures of illustrious warriors and statesmen, the forms of sweet and comely matrons, living and real as if you had seen them yesterday, rise before you now. Varnum, than whom a courtlier figure never entered the presence of a queen,--soldier, statesman, scholar, orator,--whom Thomas Paine, no mean judge, who had heard the greatest English orators in the greatest days of English eloquence, declared the most eloquent man he had ever heard speak; Whipple, gallant seaman as ever trod a deck,--a man whom Farragut or Nelson would have loved as a brother, first of the glorious procession of American naval heroes, first to fire an American gun at the flag of England on the sea, first to unfurl the flag of his own country on the Thames, first pioneer of the river commerce of the Ohio to the Gulf; Meigs, hero of Sagg Harbor, of the march to Quebec, of the storming of Stony Point, the Christian gentleman and soldier, whom the Cherokees named the White Path, in token of the unfailing kindness and inflexible faith which had conveyed to their darkened minds some not inadequate conception of the spirit of Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life; Parsons, soldier, scholar, judge, one of the strongest arms on which Washington leaned, who first suggested the Continental Congress, from the story of whose life could almost be written the history of the Northern War; the chivalric and ingenious Devol, said by his biographer to be 'the most perfect figure of a man to be seen amongst a thousand'; the noble presence of a Sproat; the sons of Israel Putnam and Manasseh Cutler; Fearing, and Greene, and Goodale, and the Gilmans; Tupper, leader in Church and State, the veteran of a hundred exploits, who seems, in the qualities of intellect and heart, like a twin brother of Rufus Putnam; the brave and patriotic, but unfortunate St. Clair, first Governor of the Northwest, President of the Continental Congress;--the mighty shades of these heroes and their companions pass before our eyes, beneath the primeval forest, as the shades of the Homeric heroes before Ulysses in the Land of Asphodel." It did not argue that the New Englanders on the Ohio could hold their ground simply because the Kentucky movement had been for over a decade such a marvellous success. Its very success was the chief menace of the Kentucky problem. The eyes of five thousand Indians were fastened there, for from Kentucky had come army after army, driving the savages northward out of the valleys of the Muskingum, Scioto, and Miami Rivers, until now they hovered about the western extremity of Lake Erie. By a treaty signed at Fort McIntosh in 1786, the Indians had sold to the United States practically all of eastern and southern Ohio. And so the settlement at the mouth of the Muskingum at this critical moment was in every sense a test settlement. There was a chance that the savages would forget the Kentuckians who had driven them back to the Lakes and made possible the Ohio Company settlement and turn upon the New Englanders themselves who now landed at the mouth of the Muskingum on the 7th of April, 1788, and began their home-building on the opposite bank of the Muskingum from Fort Harmar. Here sprang up the rude pioneer settlement which was to be, for more than a year, the capital of the great new Territory--forever the historic portal of the Old Northwest. These Revolutionary soldiers under Putnam combined the two names Marie Antoinette, and named their capital Marietta in memory of the faithfulness of Frenchmen and France to the patriot cause. Here arose the stately forest-castle, the Campus Martius, and near it was built the office of the Ohio Company, where General Putnam carried on, in behalf of the Ohio Company, the important business of the settlement. In July, 1788, Governor St. Clair arrived, and with imposing ceremony the great Territory was formally established and its governor inaugurated. Putnam's brave dream had come true. The best blood and brain of New England were now on the Ohio to shape forever the Old Northwest and the great States to be made from it. The soldiers were receiving the promised bounties, and an almost worthless half-a-million dollars had been redeemed in lands worth many millions. The scheme of colonization, which was but a moment before a thing of words and paper, became a living, moving influence of immense power. Another New England on the Ohio arose full-armed from the specifications of the great Ordinance and the daring confidence of Rufus Putnam and his colony. South of the Ohio, the miserable Virginia system of land ownership by tomahawk-claim was in force from the Monongahela to the Tennessee; north of the Ohio, the New England township system prevailed. South of the Ohio, slavery was permitted and encouraged; to the northward, throughout the wide empire included within the Ordinance, slavery was forever excluded. Two more fundamental differences could not have existed. And to these might be added the encouragement given by the Ordinance to religion and education. The coming of the Ohio Company to Marietta meant many things to many men, but the one great fundamental fact is of most importance. The founding of Marietta by Rufus Putnam in reality made possible the Ordinance of 1787--of which Daniel Webster said, "I doubt whether one single law of any lawgiver, ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct, marked, and lasting character." The heroic movement which has justly given Rufus Putnam the title "Father of Ohio" has been one of the marvellous successes of the first century of our national expansion. Three other settlements were made on the Ohio in 1788 near Cincinnati by sons of New Jersey. Within ten years, Connecticut sent a brave squad of men through the wilderness of New York to found Cleveland; Virginia sent of her brain and blood to found one of the most important settlements in Ohio in the fair Scioto valley. These four settlements, before 1800, in the Black Forest of Ohio were typically cosmopolitan and had a significant mission in forming, so far west as Lake Erie and so far south as the lower Ohio, the cosmopolitan American State par excellence. But of all these early prompters--Symmes, Cleaveland, Massie, and Putnam--the last is the most lovable, and the movement he led is the most significant and interesting. Our subject is so large in all its leading features, that the personality of Putnam can only be touched upon. As manager for the Ohio Company, a thousand affairs of both great and trifling moment were a part of his tiresome routine. Yet the heart of the colony's leader was warm to the lowliest servant. Many a poor tired voyager descending the Ohio had cause to know that the founder of Marietta was as good as a whole nation knew he was brave. In matters concerning the founding of the "Old Two-Horn," the first church in the Old Northwest,--and in the organizing of the little academy in the block-house of the fort, to which Marietta College proudly traces her founding, the private formative influence of Putnam is seen to clear advantage. Noble in a great crisis, he was noble still in the lesser wearing duties of that pioneer colony of which he was the hope and mainstay. Now called upon by Washington to make the long journey, in the dark days of 1792 after St. Clair's terrible defeat, to represent the United States in a treaty with the Illinois Indians on the Wabash; again, with sweet earnestness settling a difficulty arising between a tippling clergyman and his church; now, with absolute fairness and generosity, criticising his brave but high-strung governor for actions which he regarded as too arbitrary, the character of Rufus Putnam appeals more and more as a remarkable example of that splendid simplicity which is the proof and crown of greatness. A yellow manuscript in Washington's handwriting is preserved in the New York State Library, which contains his private opinion of the Revolutionary officers. It is such a paper as Washington would not have left for the public to read, as it expresses an inside view. Relatives of a number of these Revolutionary heroes would not read its simple sentences with pleasure, but the descendants of Rufus Putnam may remember it with pride: Putnam had not been accused of securing certificates from his soldiers by improper means; he was not, like Wayne, "open to flattery--vain"; the odor of a whiskey flask was not suggested by his name; on the contrary, "he possesses a strong mind and is a discreet man." Considering the nature and purpose of this high encomium, it is not less than a hearty "Well done" to a good and faithful servant. CHAPTER V _The Grave of David Zeisberger, Moravian Missionary to the Indians.--The Great Length of his Service.--His Flight from Moravia to Saxony.--Arrival at Bethlehem, Pa.--He studies the Mohawk Language.--Visits the Land of the Iroquois and is captured as a French Spy.--Imprisoned by Governor Clinton and freed by Parliament.--The Iroquois place in his Mission-house the Archives of their Nation.--He converts Many Delawares in Western Pennsylvania.--His Work interrupted by Pontiac's Rebellion.--The Delawares invite him to the Black Forest of Ohio.--He takes with him Two Whole Villages of Christian Indians.--Their Unfortunate Location between Fort Pitt and Fort Detroit in the Revolutionary War.--They are removed by the British to Sandusky.--One Hundred of them, being permitted to return, are murdered by the Americans.--The Remnant, after Many Hardships, rest for Six Years in Canada, and return to Ohio.--Zeisberger's Death._ DAVID ZEISBERGER: HERO OF "THE MEADOW OF LIGHT" [Illustration] IN the centre of the old Black Forest of America, near New Philadelphia, Ohio, a half-forgotten Indian graveyard lies beside the dusty country road. You may count here several score of graves by the slight mounds of earth that were raised above them a century or so ago. At one extremity of this plot of ground an iron railing incloses another grave, marked by a plain, marble slab, where rest the mortal remains of a hero, the latchets of whose shoes few men of his race have been worthy to unloose. And those of us who hold duty a sacred trust, and likeness unto the Nazarene the first and chiefest duty, will do well to make the acquaintance of this daring and faithful hero, whose very memory throws over the darkest period of our history the light that never was on sea or land. The grave is that of David Zeisberger, the Moravian missionary to the Indians in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Canada for fifty active years, who was buried at this spot at his dying request, that he might await the Resurrection among his faithful Indians. His record is perhaps unequalled in point of length of service, by the record of any missionary of any church or sect in any land at any time. Among stories of promotion and daring in early America, this one is most unique and most uplifting. On a July night in 1726 a man and his wife fled from their home in Austrian Moravia toward the mountains on the border of Saxony for conscience' sake. They took with them nothing save their five-year-old boy, who ran stumbling between them, holding to their hands. The family of three remained in Saxony ten years. Then the parents emigrated to America, leaving the son of fifteen years in Saxony to continue his education. But within a year he took passage for America and joined his parents in Georgia, just previous to their removal to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The lad soon became interested in the study of the Delaware Indian language among the natives of that tribe living along the Susquehanna, and at once showed great proficiency. Appreciating his talent, the fathers of the Moravian Church determined to send the young man to Europe, that in the best universities he might secure the finest training. He went as far as New York. There, just as his ship was to sail, he pleaded with tears and on his knees to be allowed to return to the woods of Pennsylvania and the school of the red men there. The words of the wise were overcome by those of the youth, and an earnest soul, as brave as it was earnest, was saved to a life of unparalleled sacrifice and devotion. On returning to Bethlehem Zeisberger joined a class that was studying the Mohawk tongue, the language of that most powerful tribe of the Iroquois nation which practically controlled, by tomahawk and threat, all the territory between the colonies and the Mississippi. Soon the looked-for opportunity of visiting the Iroquois land came, and the young student was told off to accompany the heroic Frederick Christian Post. This was in the dark year 1744, only a few months previous to the outbreak of the Old French War. The lad was now in his twenty-third year. In February of the next year, after these two men entered the shadow of New York, the report was circulated in New York City that two spies had been captured among the Iroquois, who were guilty of attempting to win that nation over to the French. Such a charge at this time was the most serious imaginable, for the contest for the friendship of the Iroquois between the French on the St. Lawrence and the English on the Atlantic was now of great importance. Upon that friendship, and the support it guaranteed, seemed to hang the destiny of the continent. The report created endless consternation, and the spies were hurried on to Governor Clinton, who demanded that the younger be brought before him instantly. "Why do you go among the Indians?" asked Clinton, savagely. It was David Zeisberger to whom he spoke, a youth not daunted by arrogance and bluster. "To learn their language," he replied, calmly. "And what use will you make of their language?" "We hope," replied the lad, "to get the liberty to preach among the Indians the Gospel of our crucified Saviour, and to declare to them what we have personally experienced of His grace in our hearts." The Governor was taken aback. This was a strange answer to have come from a spy's lips. Yet he drove on rough-shod, taking it for granted that the lad was lying, and that there was an ulterior motive for the dangerous journey at such a time. Remembering the fort the English had built near the present site of Rome, New York, and by which they hoped to command the Mohawk Valley and the portage path to Wood Creek and Lake Oneida, he continued: "You observed how many cannon were in Fort William, and how many soldiers and Indians in the castle?" "I was not so much as in the fort, nor did I count the soldiers or Indians." Balked and angry, as well as nonplussed, Governor Clinton insisted: "Our laws require that all travellers in this government of New York shall swear allegiance to the King of England and have a license from the Governor." Governor Clinton's name would certainly not adorn a license for these men. Whether or not the youth saw the trap, he was as frank as his interrogator: "I never before heard of such a law in any country or kingdom in the world," replied Zeisberger. "Will you not take the oath?" roared Governor Clinton, amazed. "I will not," said the prisoner, and he was straightway cast into a prison, where he and his companion lay for six weeks, until freed by an ordinance passed by Parliament exempting the missionaries of the Moravian Church from taking oath to the British crown. Back into the Iroquois land journeyed the liberated prisoner, and for ten doubtful years, until 1755, Zeisberger was engaged in learning the languages of the various tribes of the Six Nations, and in active missionary service. His success was very great. Perhaps in all the history of these famous Indians there was no other man, with the exception of Sir William Johnson, whom they trusted as much as they trusted David Zeisberger. Cheated on the one hand by the Dutch of New York, and robbed on the other by agents of the French and the English, the Iroquois became suspicious of all men; and it is vastly more than a friendly compliment to record that in his mission-house at Onondaga they placed the entire archives of their nation, comprising the most valuable collection of treaties and letters from colonial governors ever made by an Indian nation on this continent. But war now drove the missionary away, as throughout his life war was ever to dash his fondest dreams and ever to drive him back. At the close of the Old French War, the missionaries of the Moravian Church were out again upon the Indian trails that led to the North and West. The first to start was Zeisberger, now in the prime of life, forty-two years old. But he did not turn northward. A call that he could not ignore had come to him from the friends of his boyhood days, the Delawares, who lived now in Western Pennsylvania. With a single companion he pushed outward to them. Taking up his residence in what is now Bradford County, Pennsylvania, he soon began to repeat the successes he had achieved in the Iroquois land, many being converted, and the whole nation learning to love and trust the earnest preacher. Then came Pontiac's terrible rebellion. Compelled to hurry back to the settlements again, Zeisberger awaited the end of that bloody storm, which swept away every fort in the West save only Fort Pitt and Fort Detroit. At last the way was again open, and Zeisberger soon faced the wilderness. The Church fathers now came to the conclusion that it was best to extend missionary labor farther than ever before. The entire West had been saved to England, and the future was bright. It was Zeisberger to whom they looked, and not for a moment did the veteran flinch. "Whither is the white man going?" asked an old Seneca chieftain of Zeisberger. "To the Alleghany River," was the reply. "Why does the paleface travel such unknown roads? This is no road for white people, and no white man has come this trail before." "Seneca," said the pale man, "the business I am on is different from that of other white men, and the roads I travel are different too. I am come to bring the Indian great and good words." The work now begun in Potter County, and later extended to Lawrence County, on the Beaver River, in the province of Pennsylvania, was not less successful than Zeisberger's work in New York. "You are right," said the bravest Indian of the nation to his Indian chieftain; "I have joined the Moravians. Where they go I will go; where they lodge I will lodge; their God shall be my God." His faith was soon tested, as was that of all Zeisberger's converts. For there was yet a farther West. Beyond the Beaver, the Delaware nation had spread throughout the Black Forest that covered what is now Ohio to the dots of prairie land on the edge of what is Indiana. Somewhere here the prairie fires had ceased their devastation. Between the Wabash and the crest of the Alleghanies lay the heaviest forest of the old New World. Of its eastern half the Delawares were now masters, with their capital at Goschgoschunk on the Muskingum, the present Coshocton, Ohio. The fame of Zeisberger had come even here, and the grand council of the Delawares sent him a call to bring his great and good words into the Black Forest. It was an irresistible appeal. Yet the Moravian Church could not allow Zeisberger to leave the congregations in Pennsylvania, for no one could take his place. The brave man gave his answer quickly: "I will take them with me." He kept his word, and in the Spring of 1772 the heroic man could have been seen floating down the Beaver and Ohio rivers with two whole villages of Christian Indians, seeking a new home in the Black Forest on the Upper Muskingum. Here they founded three settlements in all, Schönbrunn (Beautiful Spring), Lichtenau (Meadow of Light), Gnadenhütten (Tents of Grace), where the fabled wanderer is made by the poet to extend his search for Evangeline. Here the Moravian missionaries, Zeisberger and his noble assistant, Heckewelder, spent five marvellously successful years, in what is known as the first settlements of whites in the present State of Ohio, excepting such French as had lived in the Lake region. The settlements were governed by a complete set of published laws, and in many respects the experiment was an ideality fully achieved. The good influence of the orderly and devout colony spread throughout the Central West at a time when every influence was bad and growing rapidly worse. For five or six years Zeisberger here saw the richest fruit of his life; here also he was doomed to see what was undoubtedly the most disgraceful and dastardly crime ever committed in the name of freedom on this continent. [Illustration: JOHN HECKEWELDER _Missionary to the Indians_] The Revolutionary War now broke out, as if to despoil wantonly this aged hero's last and happiest triumph. The Moravians determined upon the impossible role of neutrality, with their settlements just beside the hard, wide war-path which ran between Fort Pitt and Fort Detroit; these were the strongholds, respectively, of the Americans and the British, who were quarrelling bitterly for the allegiance of the savages in the Black Forest between them. The policy was wholly disastrous. For some time the Christian Indians, because the influence of the past few years had been so uplifting, escaped unharmed. But as the conflict grew, bitter suspicion arose among both the Americans in Western Pennsylvania and the British at Sandusky and Detroit. The British first took action. In 1781 three hundred Indians under a British officer appeared and ordered the inhabitants of the three villages to leave the valley they loved and go to Sandusky, where a stricter watch might be kept over them. Like sheep they were driven northward, the aged Zeisberger toiling at the head of the broken-hearted company. As Winter came down from the north, there being very little food, a company of one hundred Christian Indians obtained permission to return to their former homes to harvest corn which had been left standing in the fields. It was an unfortunate moment for the return, and the borderers on the ravaged Pennsylvania frontier looked upon the movement with suspicion. It is said that a party of British Indians, returning from a Pennsylvania raid, left here a sign of their bloody triumph. Be that as it may, a posse of Americans suddenly appeared on the scene. The entire company of Moravian sufferers was surrounded and taken captive. The question was raised, "Shall we take our prisoners to Pittsburg, or kill them?" The answer of the majority was, "Kill." The men were hurried into one building and the women into another, and the murderers went to work. "My arm fails me," said one desperado, as he knocked his fourteenth bound victim on the head. "I think I have done pretty well. Go on in the same way." And that night, as the moon arose above the Tuscarawas, the wolves and panthers fought in the moonlight for the bodies of ninety Christian Indians most foully murdered. Had each been his own child, the great grief of the aged Zeisberger could not have been more heartrending. After the storm had swept over him and a shadow of the old peace came back to his stricken heart, Zeisberger called his children about him and offered a most patient prayer. The record of Zeisberger's resolute faithfulness to the remnant of his church from this time onward is almost incredible. Like a Moses he led them always, and first to a temporary home in Macomb County, Michigan. From there they were in four years driven by the Chippewas. The forlorn pilgrims now set sail in two sloops on Lake Erie; they took refuge from a terrible storm in the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. For a time they rested at a temporary home in Independence Township, Cuyahoga County. Famine drove them in turn from here. Setting out on foot, Zeisberger led them next along the shore of Lake Erie westward to the present site of Milan, Erie County, Ohio. Here they resided until the outbreak of the savage Indian War of 1791. To escape from this, Zeisberger secured from the British government a tract of land twelve miles long and six miles wide for the Moravian Indians along the Grand River in Canada. Here the pilgrims remained six years. But with the close of the Indian War, it was possible for them to return to their beloved home in the Tuscarawas Valley. The United States had given to the Moravian Church two tracts of land here, embracing the sites of the three towns formerly built, containing in all twelve thousand acres. Back to the old home the patriarch Zeisberger brought his little company in the year 1798. His first duty in the gloomy Gnadenhütten was not forgotten. With a bowed head and heavy heart the old man and one assistant gathered from beneath the dense mass of bush and vine, whither the wild beasts had carried them, the bones of the ninety and more sacrificed Christians, and over their present resting-place one of the proudest of monuments now rises. For full ten years more this hero labored in the shadow of the forests where his happiest days had been spent, and only as the Winter of 1808 came down upon the valley from the lakes did his great heart cease beating and his spirit pass through the heavenly gates. The dust of this true hero lies, as he requested, surrounded by the remains of those "brown brethren" whom he led and loved so long, when all the world reviled them and persecuted them and said all manner of evil against them falsely. In 1908 the memory of this man will have blessed us for a full century. Shall not a more appropriate token of our esteem replace the little slab that now marks that hallowed grave? And yet no monument can be raised to the memory of David Zeisberger so valuable or so significant as the little pile of his own manuscripts collected by Edward Everett and deposited by him under lock and key, in a special case in the library of Harvard University. Here are fourteen manuscripts, including a Delaware Indian dictionary, a hymn book, a harmony of the Gospels, a volume of litanies and liturgies, and a volume of sermons to children. CHAPTER VI _Clark's Birth and Parentage.--Wholesomeness of the Family's Home Life.--Achievements of George and his Five Brothers.--George's Lack of Book-learning.--How he became a Surveyor.--Great Opportunities enjoyed by Surveyors in his Day.--His Introduction to the West.--Learns of George Washington's Great Acquisitions of Land.--How Clark acquired his Craving for Liquor.--His Acquaintance with the Rev. David Jones, Missionary to the Shawnees.--Their Encampment near the Site of Wheeling, W. Va.--A Trip to Pittsburg.--His Claim for a Piece of Land on the Ohio.--Takes Service in Dunmore's War.--His Work as a Surveyor in Kentucky.--Becomes a Leader of Pioneers into Kentucky.--The Conflict between Clark and the Transylvania Company.--He becomes the Leader of the Kentucky Movement.--His Brilliant Military Leadership in the Conquest of Illinois.--The Founding of Louisville.--Clark draws a Plan of the Future City.--His Efforts to induce Immigration to the Lower Ohio.--He is discarded by the State of Virginia._ GEORGE ROGERS CLARK: FOUNDER OF LOUISVILLE [Illustration] ABOUT two miles east of Charlottesville, Virginia, and more than a mile south of Thomas Jefferson's famous homestead, Monticello, on a sunny knoll by the little Rivianna River, stood the humble farmer's home in which George Rogers Clark was born, November 19, 1752. The baby's father and mother, John Clark and Ann Rogers Clark, had moved into Albemarle County two years before from King-and-Queen County, Virginia, where they had been married in 1749. Their first child was born August 1, 1750, and was given his grandfather's name, Jonathan; this second son was given the name George Rogers, from one of his mother's brothers--as though his parents had looked with prophetic vision through the long years to a time when the baby should become the idol and savior of Kentucky, and had named him from a Kentucky pioneer. It was a busy farmer's home to which the young child came and in which he received the first hard lessons of life. His parents were sturdy, hard-working people, like their ancestors as far back as the records went, even to the first John Clark, who came from England to Virginia about the same time that the Puritans came to Plymouth Rock, or to Giles Rogers, on his mother's side, who also came from England at very nearly the same time. Giles Rogers's son John married Mary Byrd of the well-known Virginian Byrd family, and George Rogers Clark's mother was the second daughter of that union. Who the boy's playmates may have been we cannot know; his brother Jonathan was two years his elder, and the two were probably comrades together on the nursery floor and on the green lawn before the farmhouse. When George was three years of age his sister Ann was born; and two years after that, in 1757, his brother John was born. It has been said that George Clark may have had Thomas Jefferson as a playmate by the Rivianna, but there is some doubt as to this, though the friendship of the two in later life was undoubtedly warmer because of the proximity of their boyhood homes. George's father's land ran down and adjoined that of Randolph Jefferson--Thomas Jefferson's father. If the two boys who were to become so famous met and played together it was probably at the Jefferson Mill, where, it is said, George Clark used to be sent with grist. As the Clark family moved away from this neighborhood in 1757, when George was only five years old, it does not seem likely that he was sent to mill with grist very often. Soon after John Clark, Jr., was born, George's father and mother determined upon removing from the Rivianna farm to land patented and surveyed by Mrs. Clark's father in Caroline County, Virginia, on the headwaters of York River and just south of the upper Rappahannock. So, late in the year 1757, we find the father and mother and the four children, with all their worldly possessions, on their eastward journey to their new home. The Rivianna farm had been sold for fifteen hundred dollars, and the family can probably be said to have been in comfortable circumstances for those days. None of the four children were of an age to share in the hardships of this removal, but for the two eldest it must have been an epoch-making event. Jonathan and George were old enough to enjoy the novelty of the long journey,---the scenes along the busy roads, the taverns where all was bustle and confusion, the villages with their shops and stores, the cities where the children must have felt swallowed up in noise. But at last the new home was reached, and the family was busily at work preparing for the next year's crops. Of the Caroline County home of the Clarks we know little save the happy record of births of children; yet this in itself gives us a large picture of the merry household, its great joys, and the host of little troubles which intensified the gladness and hallowed it. Within three years Richard Clark was born; Edmund was born September 25, 1762; Lucy, September 15, 1765; Elizabeth, February 11, 1768; William, August 1, 1770, his brother Jonathan's twentieth birthday; and Frances, January 20, 1773. Jonathan and George were soon old enough to be little fathers to the younger children, and Ann must have been able to help her mother to mend the clothes for her rollicking brothers at a comparatively early age; and I do not doubt for a moment that there was a good deal of mending to be done for these boys, for in later life we know they loved adventure, and they must have had many a boyish contest of strength and speed with little thought of how many stitches it would take to make things whole again. This was a fine farmer's family to look in at of a summer's morning or a winter's night--just such a family as old Virginia was to depend upon in the hard days of the Revolution now drawing on apace. And though you looked the Colonies through from Northern Maine to Southern Georgia, you could not have found by another fireside six boys in one family who were to gain so much fame in their country's service as these six. Jonathan was one of the first men to enter the American army, and he became a lieutenant-colonel with a splendid record before the war was ended. His brothers John and Edmund, and perhaps Richard, were in the Revolutionary armies; all four were recipients of Virginia bounty lands at the close of the war. George Rogers Clark in the meantime became the hero of the most famous military expedition in Western history,--the capture of Vincennes and its British fort and Governor; and William, the next to the youngest in that merry crowd of ten children, was to write his name high on the pillar of fame as joint leader of the memorable Lewis and Clark Expedition through the Louisiana Territory to the Pacific Ocean in 1804. It was surely no accident that these lads grew into daring, able men, for good blood will tell; and Virginia in that day was giving the world her richest treasures lavishly on the altar of liberty. I know of no picture of the father of these six boys; but the pictures of George and William are remarkably similar, showing a strong mark which must have come directly from one of the grandfathers, either on the Clark or Rogers side of the family. We may be sure Farmer Clark and his wife exerted, a strong, wise influence on their children, and Jonathan and George were called upon at an early age to assist in the management of the children, to settle disputes, to tie up injured fingers, to reprimand, and to praise. And in the school of the home and the family circle these boys received the best and about the only education they ever had; and it would be well if many a boy nowadays would learn more in the home of patient, wise parents and a little less from books. The Clark boys, at least George Clark, would have been benefited by a little more schooling in books, especially a speller. It is quite sure that George did not take full advantage of even the few school privileges that he did have; but while all his letters of later life are poorly spelled, that may have been his principal weakness, and in other branches he may have succeeded much better; we know he did in one. For nine months he was under the instruction of Donald Robertson, under whom James Madison, afterwards President of the United States, studied at about the same time. Strangely enough this boy, who would not learn to be careful with letters, became proficient in the matter of figures and did well in that most difficult of studies, mathematics. In Clark's day a boy proficient in mathematics did not have to look far for a profession which was considered both honorable and lucrative, and that was the surveyor's profession. It was doubly enticing to a youth of brains and daring; the call for surveyors to go out into the rich empire beyond the Alleghanies was loud and continuous, and had been since Lord Fairfax sent that young Virginia surveyor into the singing forests of the Upper Potomac before the outbreak of the Old French War; and from George Washington down, you may count many boys who went into the West as surveyors and became the first men of the land. The surveyor had many, if not all, the experiences of the soldier; and every boy in Virginia envied the soldier of the French War. The surveyor found the good lands, and here and there surveyed a tract for himself; this, in time, would become of great value. The surveyor knew the Indians and their trails; he knew where the best hunting-grounds and salt-licks were located; he knew where the swamps lay, and the fever-fogs that clung to them; he knew the rivers, their best fishing-pools, and how far up and down they were navigable; he was acquainted with everything a man would wish to know, and he knew of things which every man wished to escape,--floods, famines, skulking redskins, fevers. For these reasons the surveyors became the men needed by generals to guide the armies, by the great land-companies to point out right fields for speculation, by transportation companies and quartermasters and traders to designate the best paths to follow through the black forests. The tried, experienced surveyor was in an admirable position to secure a comfortable fortune for his labor. While Washington (the largest landholder in America in Clark's day--and half his lands in the West) selected in person much of his own land, yet, as we have seen, the time came when he employed William Crawford to find new lands for him. Perhaps young Clark came but slowly to a realization that he could enter the fine profession of a surveyor; but when the time came to decide he seized upon the opportunity and the opening with utmost enthusiasm and energy. Both of his grandfathers had been surveyors to a greater or less extent; possibly their old instruments were in his father's possession. If so, these were taken out and dusted, and the boy was set to work surveying, probably, his father's farm. Its dimensions were well known, and the boy could be sure of the accuracy or inaccuracy of his experiments. In time George probably was called upon to do odd pieces of surveying in the neighborhood in which he lived; thus the days and the years went by, each one fitting the lad for his splendid part on the world's stage of action. The first act in the drama was Clark's introduction to the West--the land of which he had so often dreamed, and which he now in his twentieth year went to see. We cannot be sure just when young Clark set out from his home, but we find him in the little town of Pittsburg early in the summer of 1772, and we can well suppose he made the long trip over Braddock's Road from Virginia with some friends or neighbors from Caroline County, with whom he joined himself for the purpose of looking at the land of which he had heard so much, and possibly picking out a little tract of land in the Ohio Valley for himself. As a surveyor of some experience he was in a position to offer his services to any one desiring them, and thus turn an honest penny in the meantime. Of the wars and bloody skirmishes fought around this town every Virginia boy had heard; through all of George Rogers Clark's youth great questions were being debated here in these sunny Alleghany meadows or in the shadowy forests--and the arguments were of iron and lead. The French had come down the rivers from the Great Lakes to seize the Ohio Valley; the colonists had pushed slowly across the Alleghanies to occupy the same splendid land. Nothing but war could have settled such a bitter quarrel; and, as the Clark boy now looked for the first time upon the relics of those small but savage battles, his heart no doubt warmed to his Virginian patriots who had saved the West to America. How little did the lad know that there was another savage war to be fought for this Ohio Valley, and that he himself was to be its hero! All along the route to Pittsburg the boy and his comrades, whoever they may have been, kept their eyes open for good farm sites; perhaps they were surprised to find that all the land beside and adjacent to Braddock's Road was already "taken up." Washington himself had acquired that two-hundred-and-thirty-two-acre tract in Great Meadows where Fort Necessity stood; not far from Stewart's Crossing (Connellsville, Pa.) Washington had the other piece of land with the mill on it. Everywhere Clark went in the West he found land which had been taken up by the shrewd Mount Vernon farmer or his agents. I do not believe Clark begrudged Washington a single acre, but was, on the other hand, pleased to know that the Colonel was to receive some good return for all his hard campaigning in the West in addition to his paltry pay as an officer. Clark passed as a young gentleman among the strange, rough populace of infant Pittsburg, where fighting, drinking, and quarrelling were going on in every public place; I can see the boy as he went about the rude town and listened to the talk of the traders and the loungers who filled the taverns and stores. It might have been at this time that the boy first began to satisfy an honest thirst with dishonest liquids, which would in time become his worst enemy and sadly dull the lustre of as bright a name as any man could win. Of course we must remember that at that day it was highly polite and gentlemanly to take an "eye-opener" every morning and a "night-cap" every night, and drink the health of friends often between times; yet no young man but was injured by this awakening of an unknown craving, and, in the case of our hero, it was to prove a craving that would cost him almost all the great honors that he should win. The lad looked with wide-open eyes, no doubt, at the remains of old Fort Duquesne, where many brave Virginians had lost their lives; for many had been fiendishly put to death by savages driven to bitter hatred by French taunts and made inhuman by French brandy. He must have been greatly interested in little Fort Pitt, which had withstood the wild attacks of Pontiac's most desperate hell-hounds of war, the Shawnees. Here, if anywhere on the continent, men had been brave; here, if anywhere, men had dropped into deathless graves. He was greatly interested in the future, though the ringing notes of the past must have stirred his heart deeply; and I can see the lad with bended head listening to catch every word of a speaker who would talk of the present feeling of the dreaded Shawnees, who refused to acknowledge that the Six Nations had any right to sell to white men their fine hunting-grounds between the Ohio and the Tennessee. [Illustration: REV. DAVID JONES _Companion of George Rogers Clark_] When we hear directly of Clark in Pittsburg he was in admirably good company and well spoken of; he had fallen in with the Rev. David Jones, the enterprising Baptist missionary from New Jersey, who had come into the West on a joint mission concerning both the possibilities of missionary service among the Shawnees on the Scioto, and Franklin's proposed settlement on the eastern bank of the Ohio River. He was, therefore, a prospector for land and for missionary openings--a good man for the lad Clark to know. Mr. Jones was thirty-six years of age, enthusiastic and brave, or he would not have been on the Ohio in 1772. He was old enough to remember well the story of the Old French War, as well as Pontiac's Rebellion, and the story of the West from that day down. Of this, no doubt, the two talked freely. Mr. Jones kept a diary, and his record for Tuesday, June 9, reads: "... Left Fort Pitt in company with Mr. George Rogers Clark, and several others, who were disposed to make a tour through this new world." Gliding on down the Ohio, the canoe and its adventurous pilgrims were glad to get safely by the Mingo town near Steubenville, Ohio, whose Indian inhabitants (remnants of the Iroquois Indians, in the West known as Mingoes) were desperate savages, canoe plundering being the least harm that might be expected from them. Farther down, at the mouth of Grave Creek, near where Wheeling, West Virginia, now stands, the party camped; here Mr. Jones's interpreter, David Owens, joined them, having come across country from the Monongahela River. This spot was to become an important point on the Upper Ohio; it was to become well known to the young adventurer, who now looked upon it for the first time; it was soon to become his first home in the West. But for the present he went on with Mr. Jones. The party proceeded as far down as the mouth of the Little Kanawha River, where Parkersburg, West Virginia, now stands. Returning up the river June 24, they reached Grave Creek within two weeks; the party, including at least Higgins and the interpreter Owens together with Jones and Clark, started on an overland trip to the Monongahela. Jones records: "... Therefore moved up to Grave Creek, leaving there our canoes; crossed the desert (wilderness) to Ten Mile Creek, which empties into [the] Monongahela.... The season was very warm; all except myself had loads to carry, so that on the 2d day of July, with much fatigue we arrived to the inhabitants [at the settlements], faint, weak, weary, and hungry--especially Mr. Clark and myself." The size of the settlement can be judged from the fact that on the second Sunday of Mr. Jones's stay on George's Creek he preached to a congregation of about two hundred. On July 14 the four travellers set out again overland for Fort Pitt. They reached the fort on Wednesday, July 22, and the Virginia boy was probably glad to leave the forests and the river for a while and rest quietly in the little village of Pittsburg. For one thing, he had some letters to write, and we can imagine how anxious the friends at home were to hear from him. Would he like the country? Would he wish to stay in the West? Would he want the other members of the family to emigrate there too? These were some of the questions his parents and brothers and sisters were asking in the old home in Caroline County as the summer days went by. We are certain that Clark was immensely pleased with all he had seen; whether it was pushing a canoe down the rivers, or sleeping on a river's shore with the water babbling beside him, or carrying a pack over the "blind" trails of the old Southwest, he loved the land, its freshness, the freedom of its forests, the air of hope and adventure which pervaded everything and everybody. All this appealed to him and fascinated him. After a good rest he hurried on home in the wake of his glowing letters, to enforce them, and if possible to induce the home people to come quickly to obtain the good lands before they were all taken. Before he went it is probable that he entered his claim for a piece of land on the Ohio near the mouth of Fish Creek, some thirty miles below the present site of Wheeling. How interesting must have been that home-coming! What a fine picture that would be, if we could see the young lad, who was to be the hero of the West, sitting before his father's doorstep, describing to a silent audience of relatives and neighbors the grandeur and greatness of the West, the crowds of immigrants, the growing villages, the conflicts between the white and the red men! Perhaps he drew a rough map of the Ohio in the sand at the foot of the front doorsteps, showing where his claim was located, and where Washington's rich tracts were located. Then he told of the Ohio, its islands and its fierce eddies, of the Indian trails that wound along on the "hog-backs" from settlement to settlement, of the great mounds which the ancient giants (as people once thought the mound-building Indians were) built beside the Ohio. And then at last he told of his purpose to return and live in that country and grow up with it. The records of the next few years were very much confused. Young Clark visited various portions of the West, perhaps remaining longest at a claim he took up near the mouth of Grave Creek, on the present site of Moundsville, West Virginia, from which point he addressed letters to his brother Jonathan, January 9, 1773. In the Spring of the next year he formed one of Captain Cressap's party assembled at Wheeling in readiness for service in Dunmore's War. In this war Clark saw considerable service, following Dunmore's wing of the army, but not participating in the battle at Point Pleasant, which was fought by General Lewis. In the Spring of the year following, 1775, we find Clark returning again to his original mission in the West,--that of surveying land and securing tracts for himself. "I have engaged," he wrote his brother Jonathan from Stewart's Crossing, "as a deputy surveyor under Cap'n Hancock Lee, for to lay out lands on ye Kentuck, for ye Ohio company, at ye rate of 80£ pr. year, and ye privilege of taking what land I want." Midsummer found him at Leestown, a mile below Frankfort, seventy miles up the Kentucky River, where he said fifty families would be living by Christmas time. The public, however, needed the service of the young man, and it is plain that his experience in the war had been serviceable, for he was made commander of the scattered militia of Kentucky. During the next Winter, however, we find him again in Virginia; it is probable that his constant moving about had brought advantages, though his private affairs may have suffered more or less from neglect. The Spring of the next year he was back in Kentucky, and soon, in no uncertain way, the leader of the busy swarms of pioneers. "He was brave, energetic, bold," writes William H. English, "prepossessing in appearance, of pleasing manners, and in fact with all the qualities calculated to win from a frontier people. The unorganized and chaotic condition of the company needed such a man, and the man had come." It is interesting to notice the conflict which was precipitated between Clark as leader of the pioneers and Richard Henderson's Transylvania Company, and a pleasure to note that Clark never seemed to speak or act in a vindictive way with reference to Henderson's questionable purchase; in fact he wrote to his brother in 1775: "Colonel Henderson is here and claims all ye country below Kentucke. If his claim should be good, land may be got reasonable enough, and as good as any in ye world. My father talked of seeing this land in August. I shall not advise him whether to come or not; but I am convinced that if he once sees ye country he will never rest until he gets on it to live. I am ingrossing all ye land I possibly can, expecting him." It is plain from this quotation that Richard Henderson was the friend of the Kentucky pioneer. But there was a very important question to be settled immediately; did Kentucky belong to Virginia or was it independent? What was its political status? It was decided to get at the facts of the case, and Clark was instrumental before all others in calling a mass meeting of Kentucky pioneers at Harrodstown, June 6, 1776, where he expected that two or more "agents" would be selected by the people with general power to consult Virginia as to the legal status of "Transylvania." Clark arrived late at this meeting, and on arrival found that he himself, and John Gabriel Jones, had been selected, not as agents, but as actual "members of the Virginia Legislature," to represent a County of Kentucky. The Transylvania Company had performed its important mission, and Richard Henderson was reimbursed for any losses incurred. George Rogers Clark now steps into the position occupied by Henderson as the leader and sustainer of the Kentucky movement. The brilliancy of Clark's military leadership during the next few years, while he was effecting a conquest of Illinois, has entirely put into shade the genuine influence and merit of his service previously rendered. No herald of empire in the Middle West who was especially prominent in military affairs did more to accelerate and assure the victory of the army of axe-bearing pioneers than did George Rogers Clark in these critical years, 1775, 1776, and 1777. He fell heir, though a mere boy, to a day's responsibility and taxing toils relinquished by Richard Henderson; and it would not be too much to say, perhaps, that were we to omit the humble, less spectacular services that were performed in these three years, or the renowned service heroically performed in 1778 and 1779, the nation could more easily spare those of the later period. But as Clark now went eastward as a delegate to the Virginia Legislature, he appreciated more and more that the danger of Kentucky lay in the two British forts at Kaskaskia and Vincennes; not because of the proximity of the troops there located, but because of the baneful influence exerted upon all the neighboring Indian tribes by English officers and American renegades who occupied them. The campaign in Illinois, prosecuted with so much brilliancy and renown, had for its vital motive not the conquest of thousands of forest-strewn miles of wilderness, but rather the salvation of the pioneer settlers in _Ken-ta-kee_. Any other view of the matter would be a serious error. The proud city of Louisville dates its founding from Clark's famous Illinois campaign, for while descending the Ohio River he left some twenty families on Corn Island, May 27, 1778, who were the first of their race to make a permanent home within the sound of the chattering waters of the historic Falls of Ohio, first visited by La Salle over a hundred years before. In less than a year the settlement was moved to the Kentucky shore, and a fort was built at the foot of what is now Twelfth Street, in what was then the town of Falls of Ohio, the present Louisville. General Clark may be justly called the founder of that city, as it was his decision that made "The Falls" the rendezvous and metropolis of the Lower Ohio. "This action," writes Mr. English, "and the security given by the forts he caused to be built there, attracted the first settlers and fixed the future destiny of Louisville, Jeffersonville, and New Albany.... Clark undoubtedly gave the matter much thought, and looked far into the future in making this selection. He expected two great cities to arise some day at the Falls; first Louisville, to be followed later, as the country became populous, by one on the other side of the river, which he hoped would bear his name. But, until Virginia made the grant for Clarksville, the plan of what he expected would be a great city at Louisville absorbed his attention." One of his first acts was to draw a map of the future city, marking the public and private divisions of land as he would have had them located; in this plan he left a number of vacant spaces for public parks, and it is one of the vain regrets of the citizens of the present city that the plan of General Clark in this respect could not have been remembered. It is important to notice that Clark believed that the best way to maintain the conquest of Illinois was by inducing immigration to the Lower Ohio and the building up of a strong pioneer colony, not in Illinois, but along the river. "Our only chance at present," he wrote to Colonel John Todd, the Governor of Illinois County, "to save that country is by encouraging the families; but I am sensible nothing but land will do it. I should be exceedingly cautious in doing anything that would displease the Government [Virginia], but their present interest, in many respects obvious to us here, calls so loudly for it, that I think, sir, that you might even venture to give a deed for forty or fifty thousand acres of land at said place at the price that Government may demand for it." The place referred to here is not Louisville, but near the mouth of the Ohio River. In fact it is very plain from many sources that Clark was the prime mover in the settlement of the Lower Ohio up to the year 1783, when he was wantonly and ignominiously turned adrift by the State of Virginia, which then owed him thirty thousand dollars, with only four shillings in its treasury. The latter portion of Clark's life is not one which we are proud to remember, but he never sank so low that the nation has been able to forget his brilliant and persistent courage. There was ground for his bitter cry: "I have given the United States half the territory they possess, and for them to suffer me to remain in poverty, in consequence of it, will not redound much to their honor." It is little comfort that nearly thirteen years after his death the sum justly owed to the man was paid to his heirs. The memory of Clark's leadership of the army that bore the sword is a precious inheritance; the facts respecting his equally important enthusiasm and earnestness in leading the scattered cohorts of the army bearing the broadaxe should likewise have a place in history. CHAPTER VII _Importance of the Cumberland Road.--Expected to be a Bond of Union between East and West.--Roads of Former Days only Indian Trails.--The Cumberland Road made between 1806 and 1840.--Promoted by Gallatin and Clay.--Undertaken by Congress, 1802.--The Road a Necessity for the Stream of Immigration after the Revolution.--Open for Traffic to the Ohio, 1818.--Other Internal Improvements now undertaken.--The first Macadamized Roads earlier than this Cumberland Road.--The Great Cost of Macadamizing this Road.--Disputes as to the Government's Constitutional Right to build it.--Ohio demands that the Road be continued, according to the Act admitting her to Statehood.--The Road's Progress to Vandalia.--Unanimity of Western Members in Favor of the Road.--Toll-gates are erected.--Lively Scenes on the Road in Old Times.--Sums appropriated for it by Congress.--Why Henry Clay championed the Undertaking._ HENRY CLAY: PROMOTER OF THE FIRST AMERICAN HIGHWAY [Illustration] IT may be said without fear of contradiction that the subject of the Panama and Nicaragua canals has not received more popular attention in this day and generation than our first and greatest national highway--legally known as the Cumberland Road, from its starting point--received in the first generation of the nineteenth century. For it was clear to the blindest that the great empire west of the Alleghanies, of which Washington dreamed and planned, where Zeisberger labored and built the first home, and to which brave Henderson and Putnam led their colonies of patriots, must soon be bound to the Union by something stronger than Indian trails. France and England had owned this West and lost it; could the little Republic born in the fierce fires of 1775 hold what they--proud kingdoms--had lost? Could it mock the European doctrine that, in time, mountains inevitably become boundaries of empires? Those little States of which Berkeley sang, placed by the hand of God as rebukes to lustful and universal dominion--were they needed in the destinies of America? Such questions were asked freely in those hard days which succeeded the Revolution. Then the whole world looked upon the East and the West as realms as distinct as Italy and France, and for the same geographical reason. England and Spain had their vast "spheres of influence" marked out as plainly in America then as Germany and France and Russia have theirs marked in the China of to-day. Kentucky became a hotbed of foreign emissaries, and the whirl of politics in that pivotal region a decade after the Revolution will daunt even the student of modern Kentucky politics. So patriotic and so faithful is that eastern West to-day that it is difficult to believe by what a fragile thread it hung to the trembling Republic on the Atlantic slope--"one nation to-day, thirteen to-morrow"--in those black days when Wilkinson and Burr and even George Rogers Clark "played fast and loose with conspiracy." The Indian trails were the threads which first bound the East and the West. Soon a large number of these threads were twisted, so to speak, into a few cords--hard, rough pioneer roadways which wound in and out among the great trees and morasses in the forest shades. Then came a few great, well-built (for their day) roadways which meant as much commercially and politically, in their age, as the steel hawsers which in our time have bound and welded a great people so closely together. The greatest of these old-time highways was that wide avenue opened from Cumberland, Maryland, through Pennsylvania, the "Panhandle," and on across Ohio, between 1806 and 1840. It is popularly known as the Old National Road; its legal name was the Cumberland Road. It was the logical result of Washington's cherished plan of binding the trans-Alleghany region firmly to the East. It was largely promoted by Albert Gallatin, who in 1806 made a report, as Secretary of the Treasury, strongly urging such works of internal improvement. But its best friend and stanchest champion was Henry Clay; and beside it stands to-day a monument to his memory near the little hamlet which bears his name--Claysville, Pennsylvania. [Illustration: HENRY CLAY _Statesman and Abolitionist_] This great road was born in the Act of Congress of 1802, which enabled the State of Ohio to enter the Union. Section VII of that act decreed that the money received from the sale of one-twentieth of the public lands in Ohio should be applied to building roads from the navigable waters of Atlantic streams to and within the new State "under the authority of Congress." The matter was put in charge of the War Department, and soon commissioners appointed by the President of the United States were surveying a route for a national road from East to West. The first government appropriation was dated 1806, and was thirty thousand dollars. Words cannot describe the intense wave of enthusiasm which swept over the West when it was known that this mighty new power in Western life was actually to come into existence. Our government never carried out a more timely or popular measure, for it was as timely as it was popular. When the Revolutionary War was over, a great stream of immigration poured into the West, but the Indian War of 1790-95 severely checked it. With the treaty of Greenville the great social movement again began, and the War of 1812, in turn, again interfered to postpone the genuine settlement of the old Northwest. This national road was begun at Cumberland, Maryland, in 1811, and, even in the dark days of the war, was slowly pushed along over the Alleghanies by way of Uniontown and Washington, Pennsylvania, toward Wheeling on the Ohio River. When the war was over it was nearing its destination, and in 1818 was open for traffic to the Ohio. If studied closely, the last three years of the second decade of the nineteenth century are fascinating years to a student of our national expansion. The beginning of successful steam navigation on the Ohio and its tributaries, and the completion of the Cumberland National Road to the Ohio, were largely responsible for this. Such impressive material advances, coming at the time when both Great Britain and the Indians had been effectually disposed of (so far as national growth was concerned), gave enthusiasm to the eager spirit of the time. Great deeds were proposed; great economic questions began to be faced and fought out as never before. The many-sided question of internal improvements, the beginning of the Erie Canal, the opening of the Lehigh coal fields, the problem of applying the power of steam to vehicles as well as vessels, the difficult problem solved later by the Missouri Compromise, and the one involved in Birkbeck's English Prairie settlement in Illinois, the problem of steam navigation on the Great Lakes,--all these and many more like them were the topics of the hour when this Cumberland Road, the first of all our great feats of improvement, reached and then threw itself across the Ohio River. Measured by the hopes it inspired and not by miles, judged by the power it was expected to exert in national life and not by the ruins that now mark its ancient track, this road from the Potomac to the Mississippi must be considered a most significant monument to those wild but splendid years when as a people we were first facing some of the most fundamental questions of existence. There comes in every boy's life a period when he shoots suddenly out and up to the stature of a man. Young America sprang up like that in those momentous years. Nearly a score of years before the Cumberland Road was built, the first macadamized road in the United States, the Lancaster Turnpike, was constructed by a private company between Philadelphia and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania had macadamized portions of her highway across the mountains by way of Chambersburg and Bedford to Pittsburg. But on no highway was the principle of macadamization carried so far as on the Cumberland Road. The cost was found to be prodigious. Between Cumberland, Maryland, and Uniontown, Pennsylvania, it was $9745 per mile instead of $6000, which the commissioners estimated, without bridging. Between Uniontown and Wheeling the cost ran up to the startling average of about $13,000 per mile--within $800 of the estimated cost per mile of the Erie Canal. Too liberal contracts accounted, in part, at least, for this extravagance. The stones used were reduced to four ounces each and spread in three layers, traffic being permitted for a time over each layer in succession. No covering was laid until these layers had become comparatively solid. Catch-water drains, with a gradual curvature, were located at proper distances. Several of the officers in charge of the work stand high in the estimation of their countrymen. There was McKee, who fell at Buena Vista, and Williams, who gave his life to his country at Monterey; there were Gratiot, Delafield, Bliss, Bartlett, Hartzell, Colquit, Cass, Vance, Pickell; and there was Mansfield, who, as major-general, fell at Antietam. Among the names in one of the surveying corps is recorded that of Joseph E. Johnston. This national road rested legally upon an interpretation of the Constitution held by those who favored internal improvement as a means of investing the Government's surplus. A great plan had been outlined in 1806 by Albert Gallatin, then Secretary of the Treasury. The Constitution gives the Government the right to regulate post-roads and the mails. This implied the right, the promoters of internal improvement argued, to build roads, with the sanction of the States through which such roads passed. There were those who opposed the theory, and even from the very beginning there was strong opposition by strict constructionists to the road appropriations. The very first vote on the first appropriation was 66 to 50, showing that at the start there was almost an even division on the legality of the question. The opposition increased as greater and still greater sums were asked of the Treasury each year. Three hundred thousand dollars was asked in 1816, and more in 1818. In the next year the tremendous amount of $535,000 was asked for and voted. It is little wonder that Congress was staggered by the amount of money absorbed by this one road. What if other national roads proposed--through the South and northward from Washington to Buffalo--should demand equally large sums? It was easily to be seen that the entire revenue of the Government could readily be spent in filling up the bog-holes of American roads with limestone. [Illustration: ALBERT GALLATIN _Promoter of the Cumberland Road_] Yet the policy of internal improvements was a popular one, advocated by politicians and applauded by the people; and every year, despite the same Constitutional arguments advanced, and though at times the opposing forces had their way, the Cumberland Road bills came back for reconsideration, and were at last passed. But it finally appeared that the matter of getting the road repaired when once it was built was a more serious question than the mere building problem. Members of Congress who had been persuaded to give their vote for the initial expense bolted outright on voting money each year to extend the road farther westward and also repair the portions already built. The matter was precipitated in 1822, when a bill was presented to the House and Senate providing that toll-gates be erected and that the Government should charge travellers for the use of the road. The bill passed both branches of Congress, but it was vetoed immediately by President Monroe on the ground that the national Government could not collect toll unless, as sovereign, it owned the ground that the road occupied. This was an interesting question, and one of great importance, bringing as it did upon Congress an earnest discussion bordering on the intricate problem of States Rights. Mr. Clay urged that if the Government had a right to build the road it had the right to preserve it from falling into decay. Of course there was now, as always, a strong opposition to the road on the general ground of Constitutionality; but those who were aware that their objections to the road would be overruled by the majority, in any event, took the consistent ground that if they could not prevent the enactments of laws they could, by passing laws creating toll-gates, relieve the Government at least from the expense of repairing the road. As President Monroe, however, did not agree with or believe in the original right to build the road, he was compelled to deny the Government's right to charge toll on roads in the various States. He outlined his conclusions and returned the bill vetoed. A cry which shook the country went up from the West. In the act which admitted Ohio to the Union, five per cent of money received from the sale of lands was, as before noted, to be applied by the Government to the building of roads to and in the West. Of this five per cent, three was to be devoted to building roads within the State of Ohio, and two per cent toward the expense of building a road from Atlantic tide-water to Ohio, according to a supplementary law passed March 3, 1803. By allowing the Cumberland Road to stop at Ohio's eastern boundary, the Government was "breaking faith" with the West. This must not be, and therefore in 1824 President Monroe found an excuse to sign another Cumberland Road bill. The technicality honestly raised by Monroe was against the spirit of the times and the genius of the age. Legal technicalities were put aside, and the great road swept on westward; it was ordered to be projected through the capitals of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to Jefferson, Missouri. It reached Columbus in 1833, and Indianapolis about 1840. It was graded to Vandalia, then the capital of Illinois, and marked out to Jefferson, Missouri, but was never completed under national auspices. It is to be observed that the Cumberland Road went forward largely because of the compact between the State of Ohio and the national Government. Knowing, as we now do, that the road was one of the most important material items in our national growth, it must seem fortunate from any point of view that the Ohio compact was made when and as it was. By its terms the Government was to build a road with the money accruing from a certain source. The originators of the compact seemed to have no real knowledge of the questions at issue, either concerning the amount of money needed for the purpose of building the road from tide-water to the Ohio River, or of the amount that was likely to accrue from the source indicated. What if the fund produced from the sales of land was not sufficient to build the road? For some time the appropriations were made on the theory that the money would eventually come back into the treasury from the land sales; but it soon became plain that there was not a hope left that even fifty per cent of the amount expended would return from the expected source. When this fact became patent, the friends of the road were put to their utmost to maintain its cause; some interesting points were raised that could not but weigh heavily with men of generous good sense, such as this: surveys had been made outlining the course of the road far in advance of the portion that was being actually built, and some of the States were planning all their roads with reference to this great Appian Way that was to be the main highway across the continent. Large preparations had been made here and there along the proposed route by those owning property, in the way of building taverns and road houses, not to speak of villages that sprang up in a night at points where it seemed certain the road would meet important branch roads. Throughout the years when the Cumberland Road bills were under discussion it is of particular interest to note how men were influenced by the greater, more fundamental human arguments, rather than by mere technical or legal points. Of course the Western members were without a dissenting voice in favor of the road. And when Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri were successively admitted to the Union, a similar provision concerning the sale of public lands and road-building was inserted as in the case of Ohio; and though it is not clear that any one believed the source of income was equal to the object to be benefited, yet the magnanimous legislation went on without a pause through the twenties and into the thirties. In the Senate, for instance, the opposition to the road bills could usually depend on two solid votes from North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and New York; and one vote, ordinarily, from Maine, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Alabama. On minor points other votes could be temporarily secured, but on the main question there was always a safe majority in favor of the enterprise. However, it is plain the opposition to the road was sectional only in the sense that it came from the States not to be directly benefited. Though two or more New England votes could be depended upon in the Senate to be thrown against a Cumberland Road bill, yet such a man as Edward Everett said in an address at Lexington, Kentucky, in 1829: "The State of which I am a citizen [Massachusetts] has already paid between one and two thousand dollars toward the construction and repair of that road; and I doubt not she is prepared to contribute her proportion toward its extension to the place of its destination." But, it must be remembered, Everett was one who caught as few others did the spirit of our genius for expansion, the man who in 1835 uttered the marvellous words: "Intercourse between the mighty interior West and the seacoast is the great principle of our commercial prosperity." If there is one practical lesson in all the peculiar history of the one national road that America built (for the others proposed were never constructed), it is with reference to the repairing of the road. At first it seemed that the great question was merely to obtain funds for the first cost of making the road. But it soon appeared that the far greater question was to operate and repair the road; it was well enough that the Government build the road, seemingly, but it was early realized that a local power must control the road and see to its repairs, or an enormous waste of public money would result. The experience of those years brought home the lesson that the problem of maintenance and operation is far more serious than the problem of original cost. The objection raised to the Government's erecting toll-gates and collecting tolls, as implying sovereignty over the land occupied by the road, was at last silenced by allowing each State through which the road passed to accept it from the Government as fast as it was completed, and to take charge of its operation and control. Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio accepted completed portions between 1831 and 1834. Toll-gates were immediately erected by State authorities, and tolls collected. From her twelve toll-gates Pennsylvania received over $37,000 in the twenty months following May 1, 1843. In the most prosperous year in Ohio, 1839, the treasurer of that State received $62,496.10 from the National Road tolls. What per cent received by toll-gate keepers was actually turned in cannot be discussed, as those were the "good old days." Each toll-gate keeper, it must be observed, retained two hundred dollars per annum as salary, and five per cent of all receipts above one thousand dollars at this time. This fast and loose system was the means of discovering some great rascals. Between 1831 and 1877 Ohio received $1,139,795.30 from the Cumberland Road in tolls. These sober statistics give only a hint of those gay, picturesque days when this highway was a teeming thoroughfare, lined with towns of national importance that are now forgotten, and with thousands of taverns and road-houses, even the foundation-stones of which have vanished from the old-time sites. Great stagecoach lines operated here, known as widely in their day as the railways are now, their proprietors boasting over rival lines in points of speed, safety, and appointments. The largest company on the Cumberland Road was the National Road Stage Company, with headquarters at Uniontown, Pennsylvania. The Ohio National Stage Company was the most important west of the Ohio River. There were the "Good Intent" line, and the "Landlords," "Pioneer," "June Bug," and "Pilot" lines. Fine coaches bore names as aristocratic as our Pullman cars do to-day. There were "trusts" and "combinations," quarrels and lawsuits, worthy of the pen of any sensational magazine-writer or novelist. The advertisement of an "opposition" stagecoach line of 1837 is of interest on several accounts: OPPOSITION! DEFIANCE FAST LINE COACHES DAILY FROM WHEELING, VA., to Cincinnati, O., via Zanesville, Columbus, Springfield, and intermediate points. Through in less time than any other line. "_By opposition the people are well served._" The Defiance Fast Line connects at Wheeling, Va., with Reside & Co.'s Two Superior daily lines to Baltimore, McNair and Co.'s Mail Coach line, via Bedford, Chambersburg, and the Columbia and Harrisburg Rail Roads to Philadelphia being the only direct line from Wheeling--: also with the only coach line from Wheeling to Pittsburg, via Washington, Pa., and with numerous cross lines in Ohio. The proprietors having been released on the 1st inst. from burthen of carrying the great mail (which will retard any line), are now enabled to run through in a shorter time than any other line on the road. They will use every exertion to accommodate the travelling public. With stock infinitely superior to any on the road, they flatter themselves they will be able to give general satisfaction; and believe the public are aware, from past experience, that a liberal patronage to the above line will prevent impositions in high rates of fare by any stage monopoly. The proprietors of the Defiance Fast Line are making the necessary arrangements to stock the Sandusky and Cleveland Routes also from Springfield to Dayton--which will be done during the month of July. All baggage and parcels only received at the risk of the owners thereof. JNO. W. WEAVER & CO., GEO. W. MANYPENNY, JNO. YONTZ, _From Wheeling to Columbus, Ohio_. JAMES H. BACON, WILLIAM RIANHARD, F. M. WRIGHT, WILLIAM H. FIFE, _From Columbus to Cincinnati_. The Cumberland Road became instantly a great mail-route to Cincinnati and St. Louis; from these points mails were forwarded by packets to Louisville, Huntsville, Alabama, Nashville, Tennessee, and all Mississippi points. Mails from Washington reached the West in 1837 as follows: Washington to Wheeling 30 hours Washington to Columbus 45-1/2 hours Washington to Indianapolis 65-1/2 hours Washington to Vandalia 85-1/2 hours Washington to St. Louis 94 hours Nashville was reached from Louisville by packet in twenty-one hours, Mobile in eighty hours, and New Orleans in one hundred and sixty-five hours. Some of the larger appropriations for the Cumberland Road were: 1813 $140,000 1816 300,000 1819 535,000 1830 215,000 1833 459,000 1834 750,000 1835 646,186 1836 600,000 1838 459,000 The total of thirty-four appropriations from March 29, 1806, to June 17, 1844, was $6,824,919.33. The old road was well built; nothing proves this so well as the following advertisement for bids for repairing it in Ohio in 1838: "Sealed proposals will be received at Toll-gate No. 4, until the 6th day of March next, for repairing that part of the road lying between the beginning of the 23rd and end of the 42nd mile, and if suitable bids are obtained, and not otherwise, contracts will be made at Bradshaw's hotel in Fairview, on the 8th. Those who desire contracts are expected to attend in person, in order to sign their bonds. "On this part of the Road three hundred rods or upwards (82-1/2 cubic feet each) will be required on each mile, of the best quality of limestone, broken evenly into blocks not exceeding four ounces in weight each; and specimens of the material proposed must be furnished, in quantity not less than six cubic inches, broken and neatly put up in a box, and accompanying each bid; which will be returned and taken as the standard, both as it regards the quality of the material and the preparation of it at the time of measurement and inspection. "The following conditions will be mutually understood as entering into, and forming a part of the contract, namely: The 23, 24, and 25 miles to be ready for measurement and inspection on the 25th of July; the 26, 27, and 28 miles on the 1st of August; the 29, 30, and 31 miles on the 15th of August; the 32, 33, and 34 miles on the 1st of September; the 35, 36, 37 miles on the 15th of September; the 38, 39, and 40 miles on the 1st of October; and the 41 and 42 miles, if let, will be examined at the same time. "Any failure to be ready for inspection at the time above specified, will incur a penalty of five per cent for every two days' delay, until the whole penalty shall amount to 25 per cent on the contract paid. All the piles must be neatly put up for measurement and no pile will be measured on this part of the work containing less than five rods. Whenever a pile is placed upon deceptive ground, whether discovered at the time of measurement or afterward, half its contents shall in every case be forfeited for the use of the road. "Proposals will also be received at the American Hotel in Columbus, on the 15th of March, for hauling broken materials from the penitentiary east of Columbus. Bids are solicited on the 1, 2, and 3 miles counting from a point near the Toll-gate towards the city. Bids will also be received at the same time and place, for collecting and breaking all the old stone that lies along the roadside, between Columbus and Kirkersville, neatly put in piles of not less than two rods, and placed on the outside of the ditches." [Illustration: GENERAL ARTHUR ST. CLAIR _Appointed Governor of Ohio by Congress_] The dawning of the era of slackwater navigation and of the locomotive brought the public to the realization, however, that a macadamized road was not in 1838 all the wonder that it was thought to be in 1806. But in its day the Cumberland Road was a tremendous power in opening a new country, in giving hope to a brave but secluded people who had won and held the West for the Union. This was why Henry Clay championed the movement, and why he should be remembered therefor. As a Kentuckian he knew the Western problem, and with the swiftness of genius he caught the true intent and deeper meaning of a great national work such as the building of such a material bond of union. Nothing has done so much for civilization, after the alphabet and the printing press, Macaulay has said, as the inventions which have abridged distance. In those years, quick with hopes and vast with possibility at the opening of the nineteenth century, the Cumberland Road, stretching its yellow coils out across the Alleghanies and into the prairies, advanced civilization as no other material object did or could have done. "If there is any kind of advancement going on," wrote Bushnell, "if new ideas are abroad and new hopes rising, then you will see it by the roads that are building." This old road, worn out and almost forgotten, its milestones tottering, its thousand taverns silent where once all was life and merriment, is a great monument of days when advancement was a new word, when great hopes were rising and great ideas were abroad. As such it shall be remembered and honored as one of the greatest and most timely acts of promotion our young Government executed. CHAPTER VIII _Gouverneur Morris's Day-dream of the Coming Blessings of Liberty.--He predicts Artificial Channels from the Lakes to the Hudson.--The Sight of the Caledonian Canal enables him to foresee Wealth for the Interior of America.--Seeing Ships on Lake Erie, he predicts that Ocean Vessels will soon sail on the Lakes.--Inland Navigation a Great Factor in this Country's Development.--Many Rivers not made Navigable for Lack of Engineering Skill.--President Jefferson recommends that the Surplus in the Treasury be used for Internal Improvements.--Jesse Hawley writes Articles in Behalf of an Erie Canal.--A Bill in the New York Legislature for the Same Object.--Hindrances to the Execution of the Project.--Names of Some Notable Friends of the Undertaking.--Erie Canal Bill passed by the New York Legislature, 1817.--Lack of Good Roads necessitates Transportation of Materials for the Canal in Winter only.--Other Difficulties.--Clearing away the Timber and laying out the Track from Albany to Buffalo.--Imported Machinery used for uprooting Trees and Stumps.--Neighboring States urged to Contribute.--Cost and Profits both Greater than Estimated.--Rejoicings at the Opening of the Canal.--The Success of this Canal leads to other Enterprises._ MORRIS AND CLINTON: FATHERS OF THE ERIE CANAL [Illustration] AS we survey the early period of the nation's history, there appear a number of famous conventions of notables which will ever live in the memory of thoughtful Americans. There are, however, a number of such gatherings that are not familiar to many, and it is at one of these that any story of the far-famed Erie Canal must begin. In the year 1777 General Schuyler's army was at Fort Edward, New York, during its slow and sullen retreat before Burgoyne's advancing redcoats. Gouverneur Morris was sent to the army at Fort Edward, and on a certain evening, amid a company of army officers, that brilliant man told a day-dream before the flickering camp-fire. The dream concerned the future of America when once the foreign yoke should be thrown off. In language consonant with the fascinating nature of his theme the speaker described in some detail what would be the result on the minds and hearts of men when liberty for all had been secured, and the inspiring advance in arts and letters, in agriculture and commerce, that would come. He was a dreamer, but his dream became a realization and the wonder of young America. A comrade that night heard his words. "He announced," wrote that person, Governor Morgan Lewis, then Quartermaster-General, "in language highly poetic, and to which I cannot do justice, that at no very distant day the waters of the great Western inland seas would, by the aid of man, break through their barriers and mingle with those of the Hudson. I recollect asking him how they were to break through these barriers. To which he replied, that numerous streams passed them through natural channels, and that artificial ones might be conducted by the same routes." A number of eminent authorities, such as James Geddes, Simeon de Witt, and Elkanah Watson, all leave evidence that the idea of a canal from Lake Erie to the Hudson was first brought to men's attention by the man who told his vision to those sleepy Revolutionary officers at Fort Edward. In his diary of a journey in Scotland in 1795 Morris thus exclaims at the sight of the Caledonian Canal, "When I see this, my mind opens to a view of wealth for the interior of America, which hitherto I had rather conjectured than seen." Six years later he wrote to a friend, after seeing ships on Lake Erie: "Hundreds of large ships will, at no distant period, bound on the billows of these inland seas.... Shall I lead your astonishment up to the verge of incredulity? I will. Know then that one-tenth of the expense borne by Great Britain in the last campaign would enable ships to sail from London through Hudson's River into Lake Erie." Simeon de Witt said in 1822: "The merit of first starting the idea of a direct communication by water between Lake Erie and Hudson's River unquestionably belongs to Mr. Gouverneur Morris. The first suggestion I had of it was from him. In 1803 I accidentally met with him at Schenectady. We put up for the night at the same inn and passed the evening together. He then mentioned the project of 'tapping Lake Erie,' as he expressed it himself, and leading its water in an artificial river, directly across the country to Hudson's River." James Geddes first heard of the early canal idea from Mr. Morris in 1804. "The idea," he said, "of saving so much lockage by not descending to Lake Ontario made a very lively impression on my mind." [Illustration: GOUVERNEUR MORRIS _Promoter of the Erie Canal_] Looking back over the colonial history of America it is very interesting to note the part that was played in our country's development by inland navigation. Practically all the commerce of the colonies was moved in canoes, sloops, and schooners; the large number of Atlantic seaboard rivers were the roads of the colonies, and there were no other roads. In Pennsylvania and Georgia a few highways were in existence; in the province of New York there were only twelve miles of land carriage. Villages, churches, and courthouses in Maryland and Virginia were almost always placed on the shore of the rivers, for it was only by boat that the people could easily go to meeting or to court. Indeed the capital of the country, Washington, was located upon the Potomac River, partly for the reason that its founders believed that the Potomac was to be the great commercial highway of the eastern half of the continent. As roads were the arteries of trade and travel it was natural for our forefathers to hold the opinion that to increase the commerce of the country it was necessary only to increase the number of navigable miles of the rivers. The story of the struggle to improve the navigation of the two rivers, Mohawk and Hudson, upon which the attention of our earliest engineers centred, occupies other pages of this volume; and it is for us to note here the fact merely in passing that, beginning with 1786, strenuous efforts were made to render these waterways, and a large number of less important rivers, navigable. The efforts failed of success, the reason being that engineering skill was not of a grade high enough to master the problem. And consequently, when the nineteenth century dawned, we may say with fair regard to truth that the campaigns that had been waging in a number of the States for the betterment of America's navigation by means of improved rivers had failed and were discarded. Then it was that public attention was turned to the subject of making artificial water channels, or canals. Generations before this, the great Forth and Clyde Canal in Scotland had been completed by Smeaton; the Royal Canal in Ireland was finished in 1792; the Schuylkill and Susquehanna Canal in Pennsylvania had been surveyed in 1762, and a few miles of it had been dug in 1794; the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, though surveyed as early as 1764, was not begun until 1804. It was natural, therefore, that the idea of a canal between the Hudson and Lake Erie should have presented itself forcibly to New Yorkers at this time, and all the latent possibilities were aroused to activity in 1807 by the recommendation made by President Jefferson in his message to Congress in October, that the surplus money in the Treasury of the United States be used for undertaking a large number of internal improvements. Whether or not Jefferson's recommendation or some other preliminary proposal of this kind may have inspired it, a New Yorker named Jesse Hawley was now preparing a series of articles advocating a canal between the Hudson and the Lakes. Before these articles, to which the name of "Hercules" was signed, were ready to appear in print, Mr. Hawley changed his place of residence to Pittsburg, and, oddly enough, it was in "The Commonwealth," a Pittsburg paper, that the first published broadside in behalf of an Erie canal appeared; this was on the fourteenth day of January, 1807. This series of articles, as a whole, appeared in "The Genesee Messenger," of Canandaigua, weekly from October, 1807, to March, 1808. The author had studied the problem with great earnestness, though the Mohawk River was to be used as a part of the system. In February of the following year the idea gained added impetus and circulation by a bill offered in the New York Legislature; its author was Joshua Forman, a member from Onondaga County, and it read as follows: "Whereas the President of the United States by his message to Congress, delivered at their meeting in October last, did recommend that the surplus money in the treasury, over and above such sums as could be applied to the extinguishment of the national debt, be appropriated to the great national objects of opening canals and making turnpike roads; And whereas the State of New York, holding the first commercial rank in the United States, possesses within herself the best route of communication between the Atlantic and Western waters, by means of a canal between the tide-waters of the Hudson River and Lake Erie, through which the wealth and trade of that large portion of the United States bordering on the upper lakes would for ever flow to our great commercial emporium; And whereas the Legislatures of several of our sister States have made great exertions to secure to their own States the trade of that wide-extended country west of the Alleghanies to those of this State; And whereas it is highly important that these advantages should as speedily as possible be improved, both to preserve and increase the commerce and national importance of this State: Resolved (if the honourable the Senate concur herein), that a joint committee be appointed to take into consideration the propriety of exploring, and causing an accurate survey to be made of, the most eligible and direct route for a canal to open a communication between the tide-waters of the Hudson River and Lake Erie; to the end that Congress may be enabled to appropriate such sums as may be necessary to the accomplishment of that great national object." For a number of years the great project was held in abeyance by a series of unforeseen events. First among these was the War of 1812, during which the State of New York was the frontier and saw a number of the most important campaigns. Then, too, the inherent difficulties of the project--the vast amount of ground necessarily to be covered, the low plane of engineering science at that day, the immeasurable difficulties of gaining access to the interior of a heavily wooded country, the low ebb of the financial condition of the State--all combined to strengthen the opposition to the canal. But its friends grew in number and steadily grew in power. First among them was Governor Clinton, who was so closely allied with the great undertaking that its enemies frequently called it "Clinton's Ditch"; Gouverneur Morris, Fulton, and Livingston (who were just now succeeding in their steamboat enterprise), Simeon de Witt, Thomas Eddy, General Philip Schuyler, Chancellor Kent, and Judges Yates and Platt are remembered as the most influential promoters of America's first great work of internal improvement. Strangely enough, one of the most serious hindrances to the beginning of the work proved in the end to be the great argument in its favor, and that was the War of 1812. The act which gave birth to the canal was passed by the New York Legislature April 15, 1817, and then went before the Council of Revision. "The ordeal this bill met with in the Council of Revision," writes M. S. Hawley in his valuable pamphlet,[3] "came near being fatal to it; it could not have received a two-thirds vote after a veto. The Council was composed of Lieutenant-Governor John Taylor,--acting Governor, as President of the Council,--Chief Justice Thompson, Chancellor Kent, and Judges Yates and Platt. Acting Governor Taylor was openly opposed to the whole scheme. The Chief Justice was also opposed to this bill. Chancellor Kent was in favor of the canal, but feared it was too early for the State to undertake this gigantic work. Judges Yates and Platt were in favor of the bill; but it was likely to be lost by the casting vote of the acting Governor. Vice-President Tompkins (recently the Governor) entered the room at this stage of the proceedings, and, in an informal way, joined in conversation upon the subject before the Council, and in opposition to this bill. He said: 'The late peace with Great Britain was a mere truce, and we will undoubtedly soon have a renewed war with that country; and instead of wasting the credit and resources of the State in this chimerical project, we ought to employ all our revenue and credit in preparing for war.' "'Do you think so, sir?' said Chancellor Kent. "'Yes, sir,' replied the Vice-President; 'England will never forgive us for our victories, and, my word for it, we shall have another war with her within two years.' "The Chancellor, then rising from his seat, with great animation declared, "'If we must have war ... I am in favor of the canal, and I vote for the bill.' "With that vote the bill became a law." It is difficult for us to-day to realize what a tremendous undertaking it was to try to throw this great "Ditch" of Clinton's across those hundreds of miles of forest and swamp which, for so many generations, had been known as the "Long House of the Iroquois." As you fly through that beautiful territory watered by the Mohawk, Seneca, and Onondaga rivers to-day, it is hardly possible to re-create, with any measure of truth, the old-time appearance of the land. It was well into the nineteenth century before a good road was ever built in Central New York; indeed, during the years while the Erie Canal was being built, the necessary materials for the building, and provisions for the builders, were transported thither in the winter season because at that time only was it accessible by any known means of transportation. Think what it meant, then, to dig a great trench through the heavily wooded region where even the road-builders had not had the temerity to go. It was the forest growth that held back the road-maker; the tangled forest, the heavily wooded overgrowth that bound the heavy trees inextricably together. The canal-builder had all that the road-maker found to combat with above the ground,--the tangled mesh of bush, vine, and tree,--but he had also what was far more difficult to attack and conquer, namely, the tremendous labyrinth of roots that lay beneath the ground. Thus, his task was double that of the road-maker; and look as far as you will through our early history, you will not find an enterprise launched on this continent by any man or any set of men that will compare in daring with the promotion of this great work of interior improvement to which New York now set herself. For there was no hesitating. Within a very few days of the passing of the act creating the Erie Canal you could have seen surveyors and chainmen pushing out into the shadowy forest-land, driving five lines of stakes across New York toward the setting sun. These men, like those who sent them, were ridiculed everywhere they went by some of the people; but still the ringing blows grew fainter and fainter as those five lines of stakes crept on up the Mohawk, along the Seneca, through poisonous swamps, on the banks of running rivers, around the shores of the still-lying lakes. Those who ridiculed prophesied that next we would be building a bridge across the Atlantic, and then a tunnel to China beneath the Pacific; but the sneers and ridicule of that portion of the people that will be fools all the time could not stop those earnest stake-drivers or the small army of men, mostly Americans, who came in and worked with pick, shovel, and wheelbarrow. The two outer lines of stakes were sixty feet apart; this indicated the space from which the forest was to be cleared. Two lines of stakes within these, measuring forty feet apart, represented the exact width of the proposed canal; and the remaining single line of stakes located its mathematical centre. The whole distance of the canal from Albany to Buffalo was divided into three sections, and these sections were subdivided into very small portions, which were let to contractors. The first contract was signed June 27, 1817, and work was begun at historic Rome, New York, on the following Fourth of July, with appropriate ceremony. After a short address by one of the commissioners, Samuel Young, and amid a burst of artillery, Judge Richardson, the first contractor, threw out the first spadeful of earth. To present-day readers acquainted with so many wonderful feats of engineering of modern days, the history of the building of this canal must seem commonplace; the marvellous thing about it, after all, was its conception and the campaign of education which brought about its realization. One of the romantic phases of the story, that will forever be of interest to those of us who can never know a primeval forest, was the experience of the engineering corps crashing their way through the New York forests, where the surveyors' stakes could hardly be seen in the dense gloom. Machinery unknown in America at the time was called upon to perform this arduous labor of grubbing and clearing this sixty-foot aisle. One machine, working on the principle of an endless screw connected with a cable, a wheel, and a crank, enabled a single man to haul down a tree of the largest size without any cutting. The machine being located at a distance of one hundred feet from the foot of the tree, the cable was attached to the trunk fifty or sixty feet from the ground, a crank was turned, the screw revolved, and the tree was soon prostrated, as the force which could be exerted by this principle was irresistible. A machine for hauling out stumps was constructed and operated as follows: "Two strong wheels, sixteen feet in diameter, are made and connected together by a round axle-tree, twenty inches thick and thirty feet long; between these wheels, and with its spokes inseparably framed into their axle-tree, another wheel is placed, fourteen feet in diameter, round the rim of which a rope is several times passed, with one end fastened through the rim, and with the other end loose, but in such a condition as to produce a revolution of the wheel whenever it is pulled. This apparatus is so moved as to have the stump, on which it is intended to operate, midway between the largest wheels, and nearly under the axle-tree; and these wheels are so braced as to remain steady. A very strong chain is hooked, one end to the body of the stump, or its principal root, and the other to the axle-tree. The power of horses or oxen is then applied to the loose end of the rope above mentioned, and as they draw, rotary motion is communicated, through the smallest wheel, to the axle-tree, on which, as the chain hooked to the stump winds up, the stump itself is gradually disengaged from the earth in which it grew. After this disengagement is complete, the braces are taken from the large wheels, which then afford the means of removing that stump out of the way, as well as of transporting the apparatus where it may be made to bear on another." An implement devised for the underground work demanded on the Erie Canal was a peculiar plough having a very heavy blade by which the roots of the trees were cut; two yoke of oxen could draw this plough through any mesh of roots none of which exceeded two inches in diameter. The middle section of the canal, from Rome to Lockport, was completed in 1819, twenty-seven miles being navigable in that year. By 1823 the canal was opened from Rochester to Schenectady. Water was admitted into the canal between Schenectady and Albany in October of that year; and by September, 1824, the line was completed from Lockport to Black Rock Harbor on Lake Erie. In evidence of what the promoters of the Erie Canal expected that highway would be to the Central West we find this interesting fact: Ohio, and even Kentucky, were called upon officially to aid in raising the funds for its building. Indeed, the commissioners in 1817 went so far as to utter a threat against the States lying on each side of New York in case they should not be willing to contribute to the building of this commercial route, which was to be for their common benefit; this consisted in a threat to charge high duties on articles transported to and from those States and the Territories of the United States. It would seem as though New York never expected to be compelled to finance, unassisted, the great work of improvement which she began in 1817. Agents went canvassing for her both in Vermont on the east and in Ohio on the west for the purpose of raising contributions to the canal fund. Agents also were sent to the national Government at Washington, and it was believed that national aid could perhaps be secured from the sale of the public lands in Michigan, very much in the same way as the old National Road was paid for in part by the sale of lands in Ohio a decade before. Though assurances of interest and sympathy were forthcoming from the Government and from all the interested States, there is no evidence at hand to show that New York was aided to the extent of a single penny from any extraneous source. To this fact, we shall see in another chapter, may be charged the opposition of New York delegates in Congress to many government-aid propositions that came up in the era of internal improvements. As is usually the case, the expense of this great work exceeded all the scheduled estimates; but, as has seldom if ever been the case with works of this character, the receipts from the tolls on the Erie Canal also exceeded all estimates. In only eight years following the completion of the canal the receipts from it exceeded all estimates by nearly two and one-quarter millions of dollars, whereas the total cost of the canal, including the amount required for completion and payment of all claims at the close of the year 1824, was only $7,700,000. Indeed, the success of the canal was so great that it was hardly completed before plans for an enlargement were necessary. Yet on its completion a great celebration was held, which probably was the most picturesque pageant ever seen on this continent to that time. For many days previous to the completion of the work, committees in all the cities and villages throughout the route of the canal were preparing to do honor to Governor Clinton as he should make a triumphal tour from end to end in the first boat that made the journey. Looking back through the years, the scene presented of the Governor of that State sailing in a little flotilla of canal boats from Buffalo to Albany, the violent rejoicing of political friends along the route, the demonstrations and orations by the score, the transparencies, illuminations, and jollifications, stand without a parallel in the early history of our country. At the moment when Clinton's boats weighed anchor at Buffalo, a burst of artillery sent the message eastward; cannon located along the route took up the message, and in comparatively few moments it was passed across the State to the metropolis. When Clinton reached New York, the canal boats having been towed down the Hudson, a spectacular ceremony was performed off Sandy Hook, where a keg of Lake Erie water was poured into the sea in commemoration of the wedding of the ocean and the lakes. The procession in New York City was the greatest, it is said, that had ever formed in America up to that time. The illuminations were in harmony with the whole scale of the celebration, as was true of the grand ball in Lafayette Amphitheatre in Laurens Street; here, in order to secure necessary floor space, a circus building on one side and a riding-school on the other were temporarily united to make the largest ballroom in America. [Illustration: DE WITT CLINTON _Friend of the Erie Canal Project_] The Erie Canal was of tremendous national importance in more ways than it is possible to trace. The hopes and dreams of its promoters were based on such sound principles, and the work they planned was so well executed, that the success of their adventure gave inspiration to hundreds of other enterprises throughout the length and breadth of the country. That was the Erie Canal's great mission. It is hardly necessary to say that the State of New York reaped a great benefit from the successful prosecution of the work. But it was not New York alone that benefited; for the Erie Canal was the one great early school of civil engineers in the United States, and in all parts of the country, from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Baltimore to the Portland Canal at far-away Louisville, Kentucky, the men who engineered New York's great canal found valuable work to do. It is most remarkable that now, at the beginning of another century, the people of New York should be planning a new Erie Canal; and perhaps the most significant fact in connection with the one-thousand-ton barge canal now projected is the fact that wherever rivers are available, as for instance the Mohawk, these are to be taken advantage of, showing that modern engineering science approves the early theory entertained by Washington and Morris of the canalization of rivers. The old Erie Canal cost upwards of eight millions, which was deemed an immense sum at that day. It is difficult always to measure by any monetary standard the great changes that the passing years have brought; but the new canal now to be built is to cost one hundred and one millions, which is in our time a comparatively moderate sum. The influence of the building of the old canal spread throughout the nation, and scores of canals were projected in the different States; it seems now that the influence of the promotion of the new Erie Canal will likewise be felt throughout the country. New York again leads the way. FOOTNOTE: [3] "The Origin of the Erie Canal." CHAPTER IX _The Demand for Canals and Navigable Rivers.--Washington's Search for a Route for a Canal or Road to bind the East and West.--Much Money spent in the Attempt to make Certain Rivers Navigable.--Failure of the Potomac Company to improve Navigation on the Potomac.--The Need for a Potomac and Ohio Canal to withhold the Western Trade from the Erie.--The Potomac Canal Company, re-named the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company.--Apparent Impossibility of building a Canal from the Potomac to Baltimore.--Philip E. Thomas conceives the Idea of a Railroad from Baltimore to the West.--The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company's Jealousy of this Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company.--Both the Canal and the Railroad started.--Difficulties in the Way of Both.--The Canal's Exclusive Right of Way up the Potomac to be now shared with the Railroad.--The Railroad completed to the Ohio, 1853.--A Canal from Philadelphia to Pittsburg built rapidly.--The Alleghany Portage Railway opened for Traffic in Three Years.--Washington's Efforts to accomplish the Same End.--The Railways to a Large Extent supersede the Canals._ THOMAS AND MERCER: RIVAL PROMOTERS OF CANAL AND RAILWAY [Illustration] ALTHOUGH the Cumberland National Road proved a tremendous boon to the young West and meant to the East commercially all that its promoters hoped, other means of transportation were being hailed loudly as the nineteenth century dawned. Improved river-navigation was one of these, and canals were another. When it was fully realized how difficult was the transportation of freight across the Alleghanies on even the best of roads, the cry was raised, "Cannot waterways be improved or cut from Atlantic tide-water to the Ohio River?" In our story of Washington as promoter and prophet it was seen that at the close of the Revolution the late commander gave himself up at once to the commercial problem of how the Potomac River might be made to hold the Middle West in fee. Passing westward in the Fall of 1784, he spent a month in the wilds of Northern Virginia seeking for a pathway for canal or road from the South Branch of the Potomac to the Cheat River. The result of his explorations was the classic letter to Harrison in 1784, calling Virginia to her duty in the matter of binding the East and West with those strongest of all bonds--commercial routes bringing mutual benefit. The immediate result was the formation of the Potomac Company, which proposed to improve the navigation of the Potomac from tide-water, at Washington, D. C., to the highest practicable point, to build a road from that point to the nearest tributary of the Ohio River, and, in turn, to improve the navigation of that tributary. One stands aghast at the amount of money spent by our forefathers in the sorry attempt to improve hundreds of unnavigable American rivers. You can count numbers of them, even between the Mohawk and Potomac, which were probably the poorest investments made by early promoters in the infant days of our Republic. When, in the Middle Ages, river improvement was common in Europe, it was proposed to make an unnavigable Spanish river navigable. The plan was stopped by a stately decree of an august Spanish council on the following grounds: "If it had pleased God that these rivers should have been navigable, He would not have wanted human assistance to have made them such; but that, as He has not done it, it is plain that He did not think it proper that it should be done. To attempt it, therefore, would be to violate the decree of His providence, and to mend these imperfections which He designedly left in His works." It is certain that stockholders in companies formed to improve the Potomac, Mohawk, Lehigh, Susquehanna, and scores of other American streams would have heartily agreed that it was, in truth, a sacrilege thus to violate the decrees of Providence. With Washington as its president, however, the Potomac Company set to work in 1785 to build a canal around the Great Falls of the Potomac, fifteen miles above Washington, D. C., and blast out a channel in the rocky rapids at Seneca Falls and Shenandoah Falls. Even during Washington's presidency, which lasted until his election as President of the United States in 1788, there was great difficulty in getting the stockholders to remit their assessments. Other troubles, such as imperfect surveys, mismanagement, jealousy of managers, and floods, tended to delay and discourage. The act of incorporation demanded that the navigation from tide-water to Cumberland, Maryland, be completed in three years. Nearly a dozen times the Legislatures of Maryland and Virginia, under whose auspices the work was jointly done, postponed the day of reckoning. By 1820 nearly a million dollars had been emptied into the Potomac River, and a commission then appointed to examine the Company's affairs reported that the capital stock and all tolls had been expended, a large debt incurred, and that "the floods and freshets nevertheless gave the only navigation that was enjoyed." By this time the Erie Canal had been partly formed, and it was clear that it would prove a tremendous success; its operation was no longer a theory, and freight rates on merchandise across New York had dropped from one hundred dollars to ten dollars a ton. Of the many canals (which were now proposed by the score) the Potomac Canal, which should connect tide-water with the Ohio River by way of Cumberland and the Monongahela River, was considered of prime importance. Virginia and Maryland (in other words, Alexandria and Baltimore) had held, by means of the roads they had built and promoted, the trade of the West for half a century. The Erie Canal seemed about to deprive them of it all; the Potomac Canal must restore it! So the Virginians believed, and on this belief they quickly acted. The Potomac Canal Company--soon re-named the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company--was formed, and chartered by Virginia. Maryland hesitated; could Baltimore be connected by canal with the Potomac Valley? Before this doubt was banished a national commission had investigated the country through which the proposed canal was to run, and reported that its cost (the Company was capitalized at six millions) would exceed twenty millions! The seventy miles between the Potomac and the head of the Youghiogheny alone would cost nearly twice as much as the entire capital of the Company! And soon it became clear that it was impossible to build a connecting canal between the Potomac and Baltimore. The situation now became intensely exciting. A resurvey of the canal route lowered the previous high estimate, and the Virginians and Marylanders (outside of Baltimore) believed fully that the Ohio and the Potomac could be connected, and that the Erie Canal would not, after all, monopolize the trade of the West. Alexandria and Georgetown would then become the great trade centres of the continental waterway from tide-water to the Mississippi basin,--in fact, secure the position Baltimore had held for nearly a century. Baltimore had been a famous market for Western produce during the days of the turnpike and "freighter"; the rise of the easy-gliding canal-boat, it seemed, was to put an end to those prosperous days. Trade already had become light; Philadelphia was forging ahead, and even New York seemed likely to become a rival of Baltimore's. A Baltimore bank president--whose name must be enrolled high among those of the great promoters of early America--sat in his office considering the gloomy situation. That he saw it clearly there is no doubt; very likely his books showed with irresistible logic that things were not going well in the Maryland metropolis. This man was Philip Evan Thomas, president of the Mechanics' Bank. Before many days he conceived the idea of building a railroad from Baltimore to the West, which would bring back the trade that had been slipping away since the turnpike roads had been eclipsed by the canal. Baltimore's position necessitated her relying on roads; so far as the West was concerned there were no waterways of which she could avail herself. Railroads had been proving successful; one in Massachusetts three miles long served the purposes of a common road to a quarry advantageously. At Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, a railroad nine miles long connected a coal mine and the Lehigh River. Heavy loads could be deposited on the cars used on these roads, and on a level or on an upgrade horses could draw them with ease. If a short road was practicable, why not a long one? A three-hundred-mile railroad was as possible as a nine-mile road. Mr. Thomas admitted to his counsels Mr. George Brown; each had brothers in England who forwarded much information concerning the railway agitation abroad. On the night of February 12, 1826, an invited company of Baltimore merchants met at Mr. Thomas's home, and the plan was outlined. A committee was appointed to review the situation critically and report in one week. On February 19 the report was made, unanimously urging the formation of a Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company. The intense rivalry of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal Company and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company forms of itself a historical novel. The name "Ohio" in their legal titles signifies the root of jealousy. The trade of the "Ohio country," which included all the trans-Alleghany empire, was the prize both companies would win. The story is the more interesting because in the long, bitter struggle which to its day was greater than any commercial warfare of our time, the seemingly weaker company, handicapped at every point by its stronger rival, and also held back because of the slow advance of the discoveries and improvements necessary to its success, at last triumphed splendidly in the face of every difficulty. The first act in the drama was to hold rival inaugural celebrations. Accordingly, on July 4, 1828, two wonderful pageants were enacted, one at Baltimore and the other at Washington. At Baltimore the aged Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, laid the "cornerstone" of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. At Washington, President John Quincy Adams, amid the cheering of thousands, lifted the first spadeful of earth in the great work of digging a canal from Washington to Cumberland. The fact that the spade struck a root was in no wise considered an ill omen. Redoubling his efforts, President Adams again drove the implement into the ground. The root held stoutly. Whereupon the President threw off his coat, amid the wildest cheering, and, with a powerful effort, sent the spade full length downward and turned out its hallowed contents upon the ground. Washington, Georgetown, and Alexandria were represented by dignified officials. Baltimore, so long mistress of the commerce of the West, was now to be distanced by the Potomac Valley cities. And it was soon seen that the Canal Company did hold the key to the situation. Having inherited the debts and assets of the old Potomac Company, it also inherited something of more value,--that priceless right of way up the Potomac Valley, the only possible Western route through Maryland for either a canal or a railroad. The railroad struck straight from Baltimore toward Harper's Ferry and the Point of Rocks, on the Potomac; the Canal Company immediately stopped its work by an injunction. The only terms on which it agreed to permit its rival to build to Harper's Ferry was that a promise should be given that the Railroad Company would not build any part of the road onward to Cumberland, Maryland, until the canal should have been completed to that point. Could it have been realized at the time, this blow was not wholly unfortunate. There were problems before this first railroad company in America more difficult than the gaining of a right of way to Cumberland. Every feature of its undertaking was in most primitive condition,--road-bed, tracks, rails, sleepers, ties, cars, all, were most simple. The road was an ordinary macadamized pathway; the cars were common stagecoaches, on smaller, heavier wheels. More than all else, the motor force was an intrinsically vital problem. Horses and mules were now being used; a car with a sail was invented, but was, of course, useless in calm weather, or when the wind was not blowing in the right direction. In the meantime the steam locomotive was being perfected, and Peter Cooper's "Tom Thumb" settled the question in 1830, on these tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. For a number of years the ultimate practicability of the machine was in question, but when the railroad was in a position to expand westward, in 1836, the locomotive as a motor force was acknowledged on every hand to be a success. In all other departments, likewise, the railroad had been improving. The six years had seen a vast change. With the canal, on the other hand, these had been discouraging years. Though master of the legal situation, money came to it slowly, labor became more costly, unexpected physical difficulties were encountered, floods delayed operations. Again and again aid from Maryland had been invoked successfully; and now, in 1836, it was reported that three millions more was necessary to complete the canal to Cumberland. Maryland now passed her famous "Eight-million-dollar Bill," giving the railroad and canal each three million dollars, with a condition imposed on the Canal Company that the two companies should have an equal right of way up the Potomac to Cumberland. Though the directors of the Canal Company objected bitterly at thus being compelled to resign control of the situation, the needs of the Company were such that acquiescence was imperatively necessary. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal was completed to Cumberland in 1851, at a cost of over eleven million dollars, the root of Maryland's great State debt. The passage of this epoch-making law was the turning-point in this long and fierce conflict. It marked the day when the city of Baltimore at last conquered the State of Maryland,--when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad mastered the situation, of which in 1832 the canal was master. The panic of 1837 delayed temporarily the sweep of the railway up the Potomac to Cumberland, but it reached that strategic point in 1842. Work on the route across the mountains was begun at various points, and the whole line was opened almost simultaneously. The first division, from Cumberland to Piedmont, was opened in June, 1851; by the next June the road was completed to Fairmount on the Monongahela River; and on the night of January 12, 1853, a banquet-board was spread in the city of Wheeling to celebrate the completion of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad to the Ohio River. Of the five regular toasts of the evening none was so typical or so welcome as that to the president under whose auspices this first railway had been thrown across the Alleghanies,--"Thomas Swann: standing upon the banks of the Ohio, and looking back upon the mighty peaks of the Alleghanies, surmounted by his efforts, he can proudly exclaim, 'Veni, vidi, vici.'" The story of the building of the Pennsylvania Canal, and later the Pennsylvania Railway, a little to the north of the two Maryland works, is not a story of bitter rivalry, but is remarkable in point of enterprise and swift success; it also shows another of the results of the successful operation of the Erie Canal. In 1824 the Pennsylvania Legislature authorized the appointment of a commission to select a route for a canal from Philadelphia to Pittsburg. The success of New York's canal (now practically completed) impressed the Pennsylvanians as forcefully as it did Marylanders and Virginians; Philadelphia desired to control the trade of the West as much as New York or Baltimore. The earnestness of the Pennsylvanians could not be more clearly shown than by the rapid building of their canal. The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal up the Potomac Valley was over twenty-five years in building; within ten years of the time the above commission was appointed, canal-boats could pass from Philadelphia to Pittsburg. The route, at first, was by the Schuylkill to the Union Canal, which entered the Susquehanna at Middletown; this was nominally the eastern division of the Pennsylvania Canal, it having been completed in 1827. The central division extended from Middletown (later from Columbia) up the Susquehanna and Juniata rivers to Hollidaysburg. This division was completed in 1834, at a cost of nearly five and one-half millions. The western division ran from Johnstown down the Conemaugh, Kiskiminetas, and Alleghany valleys; it was completed to Pittsburg in 1830, at a cost of a little over three millions. As stated, canal-boats could traverse this course as early as 1834, and the uninformed must wonder how a canal-boat could vault the towering crest lying between Hollidaysburg and Johnstown, which the Pennsylvania Railway crosses with difficulty at Gallitzin, more than two thousand feet above sea-level. The answer to this introduces us to the Alleghany Portage Railway, a splendid piece of early engineering, which deserves mention in any sketch of early deeds of expansion and promotion in America. The feat was accomplished by means of inclined planes; the idea was not at all new, but, under the circumstances, it was wholly an experiment. The plan was to build a railway which could contain eleven sections with heavy grades, and between them ten inclined planes. A canal-boat having been run into a submerged car in the basin on either side of the mountain, it could be drawn over the level by horses or locomotives, and sent over the summit, 1,441 feet above Hollidaysburg, on the inclines by means of stationary engines. The scheme was first advanced early in the history of the canal, but it was not finally adopted until 1831, and in three years the portage railway was opened for traffic. The ten planes averaged about 2,000 feet in length and about 200 feet in elevation. They were numbered from west to east. Certain of the levels were quite long, that between Planes No. 1 and No. 2 being thirteen miles in length; the total length of the road was thirty-six miles. It was built through the primeval forests, and an aisle of one hundred and twenty feet in width (twice as wide as that made for the Erie Canal) was cleared, so that the structure would not be in danger of the falling trees which were continually blocking early highways and demolishing pioneer bridges. Two names should be remembered in connection with this momentous work,--Sylvester Welch and Moncure Robinson, the chief and the consulting engineer who erected it. It was in October, 1834, that the first boat, the "Hit or Miss" from the Lackawanna, was sent over the Alleghany Portage Railway intact. According to a local newspaper, it "rested at night on the top of the mountain [Blair's Gap], like Noah's Ark on Ararat, and descended the next morning into the valley of the Mississippi and sailed for St. Louis." Fifty years before, to the month, the pioneer expansionist, Washington, was floundering along in Dunkard Bottom seeking a way for a boat to do what the "Hit or Miss" did in those October days of 1834. It is a far cry, measured by hopes and dreams, back to Washington, but one feature of the picture is of great interest: in Washington's famous appeal to Governor Harrison in 1784 he said of the young West: "The Western inhabitants would do their part [in forming a route of communication].... Weak as they are, they would meet us halfway." What a splendid comment on Washington's wisdom and foresight it is to record that the ten stationary engines on the Alleghany Portage Railway, which hauled the first load of freight that ever crossed the crest of the Alleghanies by artificial means, were made in the young West, in Pittsburg! The West was certainly ready to meet the East halfway when their union was to be perfected. But no sooner was the Pennsylvania Canal in working order than the success of railways was conceded on every hand. At first the eastern section of the canal was superseded by the Philadelphia and Columbia Railway, a portage railway from the Schuylkill to the Susquehanna. Then, in 1846 the Pennsylvania Railroad Company was organized. The old route was found to be the best. The advance was rapid. In two years the road was open to Lewisburg in the Juniata Valley; the western division from Pittsburg to Johnstown was also built rapidly, and in 1852 communication was possible between Pittsburg and Philadelphia, the Alleghany Portage Railway still serving to connect Hollidaysburg and Johnstown. In 1854 this cumbersome method was superseded by the railway over the mountain by way of Gallitzin. The Pennsylvania Canal, instead of delaying the Pennsylvania Road, assisted it, for the latter was encouraged by the State, and the State owned the canal. In 1857 the railway bought both the canal and its portage railway. The latter was closed almost immediately; the canal has been operated by a separate company under the direction of the Pennsylvania Railroad. But the whole western division from Pittsburg to Johnstown was closed in 1864, and the portion in the Juniata Valley was abandoned in 1899, and that in the Susquehanna Valley in 1900. Two magnificent railways, standing prominent among the great railways of the world, have succeeded the old canals and that old-time Alleghany Portage Railway. But these great successes are not their richest possessions; they still own, we may well believe, that spirit which wrought success out of difficulty,--the persistent, irresistible ambition to better present conditions and overcome present difficulties, which is the very essence of American genius and the great secret of America's progress. If you wish a painting that will portray the secret of America's marvellous growth, ask that the artist's brush draw Philip Evan Thomas in his bank office at Baltimore, struggling with the problem how his city could retain the trade of the West; or draw Sylvester Welch struggling with his plans for the inclined planes of the Alleghany Portage Railway. There, in those eager, unsatisfied, and hopeful men, you will find the typical American. CHAPTER X _Ignorance of the American People regarding the Territory called New France and that called Louisiana.--Civilization's Cruel March into Louisiana.--Lewis and Clark, Leaders of the Expedition to the Far West, already Trained Soldiers.--Its Aim not Conquest, but the Advancement of Knowledge and Trade.--Some Previous Explorers.--The Make-up of Lewis and Clark's Party.--Fitness of the Leaders for the Work.--The Winter of 1804-1805 spent at Fort Mandan.--First Encounter with the Grizzly Bear.--Portage from the Missouri to the Columbia, 340 Miles.--Down the Columbia to the Coast near Point Adams.--The Return Journey begun, March, 1806.--British Traders blamed for the Indians' Hatred of Americans.--The Americans thus driven to Deeds which made them despised by the British.--Arrival of the Explorers at St. Louis.--News of this Exploration starts the Rush of Emigrants to the West.--Zebulon M. Pike's Ascent of the Mississippi, 1805.--He explores the Leech Lake Region.--Ordered to the Far West, he reaches the Republican and Arkansas Rivers.--Sufferings of his Party travelling toward the Rio Grande.--He sets up the American Flag on Spanish Territory and is sent away.--The West regarded as the Home of Patriotism._ LEWIS AND CLARK: EXPLORERS OF LOUISIANA [Illustration] WHEN the vast region known as Louisiana was purchased by President Jefferson, a century ago, the American people knew as little about it as the American colonies knew about the great territory called New France which came under English sovereignty at the end of the French War, fifty years earlier. But however great Louisiana was, and whatever its splendid stretch of gleaming waterway or rugged mountain range, it was sure that the race which now became its master would not shirk from solving the tremendous problems of its destiny. In 1763 the same race had taken quiet possession of New France, including the whole empire of the Great Lakes and all the eastern tributaries of the Mississippi River; in the half-century since that day this race had proved its vital powers of successful exploitation of new countries. In those fifty years a Tennessee, a Kentucky, an Ohio, and an Indiana and Illinois had sprung up out of an unknown wilderness as if a magician's wand had touched, one by one, the falling petals of its buckeye blossoms. Thus, New France had been acquired by a great kingdom, but the power of assimilation lay in the genius of the common people of England's seaboard colonies for home-building and land-clearing. Soon the era of brutal individualism passed from the Middle West and the old Northwest; weak as it was, the young American Republic, in the person of such men as Richard Henderson and Rufus Putnam, threw an arm about the wilderness, while George Rogers Clark, "Mad Anthony" Wayne, and William Henry Harrison settled the question of sovereignty with the red-skinned inhabitants of the land. Civilization often marched rough-shod into the American Middle West, bringing, however, better days and ideals than those which it harshly crushed. After Anthony Wayne's conquest of Northwestern Indiana at Fallen Timber (near Toledo, Ohio) in 1794 the burst of population westward from Pittsburg and Kentucky to the valley of the Mississippi was marvellous; by the time of the purchase of Louisiana in 1803 the rough vanguard of the race which had so swiftly opened Kentucky and Ohio and Tennessee to the world was crowding the banks of the Mississippi, ready to leap forward to even greater conquests. What these irrepressible pioneers had done they could do again. Those who affirmed that the purchase of Louisiana must prove a failure had counted without their host. Nothing is of more interest in the great Government expedition of exploration which President Jefferson now sent into the unknown territory beyond the Mississippi than this very fact of vital connection between the leaders of the former movement into the eastern half of the Mississippi Basin and this present movement into its tremendous western half. In a previous story we have shown that the founders of the old Northwest were largely heroes of the French and Indian and the Revolutionary wars; it is now interesting indeed to note that these leaders in Far Western exploration--Meriwether Lewis and William Clark--were in turn heroes of the British and Indian wars, both of them survivors of bloody Fallen Timber, where, on the cyclone's path, Anthony Wayne's hard-trained soldiers made sure that Indian hostility was never again to be a national menace on the American continent. [Illustration: MERIWETHER LEWIS _Of the Lewis and Clark Expedition_] The proposed exploration of Louisiana by Lewis and Clark is interesting also as the first scientific expedition ever promoted by the American Government. For it was a tour of exploration only; the party did not carry leaden plates such as Céloron de Bienville brought fifty years back in those days of gold interwoven with purple, to bury along the tributaries of the Ohio as a claim to land for his royal master and the mistresses of France. There was here no question of possession; Lewis and Clark were, on the contrary, to report on the geography, physiography, and zoölogy of the land, designate proper sites for trading stations, and give an account of the Indian nations. It is remarkable that little was known of Louisiana on these heads. Of course the continent had been crossed, though not by way of the Missouri River route, which had become the great highway for the fur trade. Mackenzie had crossed the continent in the Far North, and Hearne had passed over the Barren Grounds just under the Arctic Circle. To the southward from the Missouri the Spaniards had run to and from the Pacific for two centuries. The commanding position of St. Louis showed that the Missouri route was of utmost importance; the portage to the half-known Columbia was of strategic value, and a knowledge of that river indispensable to sane plans, commercial and political, in the future. In May, 1804, the explorers were ready to start from St. Louis. They numbered twenty-seven men and the two leading spirits, Lewis and Clark; fourteen of the number were regular soldiers from the United States army; there were nine adventurous volunteers from Kentucky; a half-breed interpreter; two French voyageurs and Clark's negro servant completed the roster. The party was increased by the addition of sixteen men, soldiers and traders, whose destination was the Mandan villages on the Missouri, where the explorers proposed to spend the first Winter. There is something of the simplicity of real grandeur in the commonplace records of the leaders of this expedition. "They were men with no pretensions to scientific learning," writes Roosevelt, "but they were singularly close and accurate observers and truthful narrators. Very rarely have any similar explorers described so faithfully not only the physical features, but the animals and plants of a newly discovered land. ... Few explorers who did and saw so much that was absolutely new have written of their deeds with such quiet absence of boastfulness, and have drawn their descriptions with such complete freedom from exaggeration." The very absence of incident in the story is significant to one who remembers the countless dangers that beset Lewis and Clark as they fared slowly on up the long, tiresome stretches of the Missouri; surprises, accidents, misunderstandings, miscalculations, and mutinies might have been the order of the day; a dozen instances could be cited of parties making journeys far less in extent than that now under consideration where the infelicities of a single week surpassed those known throughout those three years. These splendid qualities, which can hardly be emphasized save in a negative way, make this expedition as singular as it was auspicious in our national annals. Good discipline was kept without engendering hatred; the leaders worked faithfully with their men at the hardest and most menial tasks; in suffering, risking, laboring, they set examples to all of their party. In dealing with the Indians good judgment was used; even in the land of the fierce Dakotas they escaped harm because of great diplomacy, presenting a more bold and haughty front than could perhaps have been maintained if once it had been challenged. With all Indian nations conferences were held, at which the purchase of Louisiana from France was officially announced, and proper presents were distributed in sign of the friendship of the United States. The Winter of 1804-1805 was spent at Fort Mandan, on the Missouri River, sixteen hundred miles from its junction with the Mississippi. In the Spring the party, now thirty-two strong, pressed on up the Missouri, which now turned in a decidedly westward direction. Between the Little Missouri and the upper waters of the Missouri proper, game was found in very great quantities, this region having been famous in that respect until the present generation. One game animal with which white men had not been acquainted was now encountered,--the grizzly bear. Bears in the Middle West were, under ordinary circumstances, of no danger; these grizzlies of the upper Missouri were very bold and dangerous. Few Indians were encountered on the upper Missouri. Fall had come ere the party had reached the difficult portage from the Missouri to the Columbia; the distance from the Mississippi to the Falls of the Missouri, at the mouth of the Portage River, the point near which the land journey began, was 2,575 miles. The Portage to the Columbia was 340 miles in length. Having obtained horses from the Shoshones, the Indians on the portage, the explorers accomplished the hard journey through the Bitter Root Mountains. The strange white men were received not unkindly by the not less strange Indians of the great Columbia Valley, though it needed a bold demeanor, in some instances, to maintain the ground gained. Yet on the men went down the river and encamped for the Winter on the coast near Point Adams,--the end of a journey of over four thousand miles. Here the brave Captain Gray of Boston, thirteen years before, had discovered the mouth of the Columbia and given the river the name of his good ship. The Winter was spent hereabouts, the explorers suffering somewhat for lack of food until they learned to relish dog-flesh, the taste for which had to be acquired. By March, 1806, they were ready to pull up stakes and begin the long homeward journey. This was almost as barren of adventure as the outward passage, though a savage attack by a handful of Blackfeet,--henceforward to be the bitter foes of Rocky Mountain traders and pioneers,--and the accidental wounding of Lewis by one of his party, were unpleasant interruptions in the monotony of the steady marching, paddling, and hunting. It is remarkable that, throughout the western expansion of the United States after the Revolution, our northern pioneers from Pennsylvania to Oregon should have felt--in many cases bitterly--the tricky, insulting hatred of British traders and their Indian allies. As Washington in 1790 laid at the door of British instigators the cause of the long war ended by Wayne at Fallen Timber, so, all the way across the continent our pioneers had to contend with the same despicable influence, and were driven by it to deeds which made them, in turn, equally despised by their northern rivals. "I was in hopes," wrote an early pioneer, "that the British Indian traders had some bounds to their rapacity ... that they were completely saturated with our blood. But it appears not to have been the case. Like a greedy wolf, not satisfied with the flesh, they quarrelled over the bones.... Alarmed at the individual enterprise of our people ... they furnished [the Indians] with ... the instruments of death and a passport [horses] to our bosom." Even at the very beginning these first Americans on the Columbia and the Bitter Root range had a taste of Indian hatred from both the Blackfeet and the Crows. On the way back to the Mandan villages the explorers had an experience which was by no means insignificant. As they were dropping down the upper Missouri, one day two men came into view; they proved to be American hunters, Dickson and Hancock by name, from Illinois. They had been plundered by the fierce Sioux, and one of them had been wounded; it can be imagined how glad they were to fall in with a party large enough to ward off the insults of the Sioux. The hunters did remain with Lewis and Clark until the Mandan villages were reached, but no longer. Obtaining a fresh start, the two turned back toward the Rockies, and one of Lewis and Clark's own soldiers, Colter (later the Yellowstone pioneer), went back with them. These three led the van of all the pioneer host under whose feet the western half of the continent was soon to tremble. Holding the Sioux safely at bay during the passage down the Missouri, Lewis and Clark in September were once again on the straggling streets of the little village of St. Louis, then numbering perhaps a thousand inhabitants. From any standpoint this expedition must rank high among the tours of the world's greatest explorers; a way to the Pacific through Louisiana, which had just been purchased, was now assured. Knowing as we do so well to-day of Russia's determined effort to secure an outlet for her Asiatic pioneers and commerce on the Pacific Ocean, we can realize better the national import of Lewis's message to President Jefferson giving assurance that there was a practicable route from the Mississippi Basin to the Pacific by way of the tumbling Columbia. Without guides, save what could be picked up on the way, these men had crossed the continent; and as the story told by returning Kentucky hunters to wondering pioneers in their Alleghany cabins set on foot the first great burst of immigration across the Alleghanies into the Ohio Basin, so in turn the story of Lewis and Clark and Gass and the others set on foot the movement which resulted in the entire conquest of the Rockies and the Great West. But as the stories of others besides Kentuckians played a part in the vaulting of the first great America "divide," so, too, others besides Lewis and Clark influenced the early movement into the Farthest West. One of these, who stands closest to the heroes of the Missouri and Columbia, was Zebulon M. Pike, a son of a Revolutionary officer from New Jersey, the State from which the pioneers of Cincinnati and southwestern Ohio had come. During Lewis and Clark's adventure this hardy explorer ascended the Mississippi, August, 1805, in a keel-boat, with twenty regular soldiers. The Indians of the Minnesota country were not openly hostile, but their conduct was anything but friendly. The Winter was spent at the beautiful Falls of St. Anthony, at Minneapolis. Pike explored the Leech Lake region but did not reach Lake Itasca. He found the British flag floating over certain small forts built by British traders, which he in every case ordered down. An American flag was raised in each instance, and the news of the Louisiana purchase was noised abroad. The British traders treated Pike's band with all the kindness and respect that their well-armed condition demanded. The expedition came down the Mississippi in April, 1806, to St. Louis. There were other regions, however, in Louisiana where the United States flag ought to go now, and General Wilkinson, who had sent Pike to the North, now ordered him into the Far West. Pike's route was up the Osage and overland to the Pawnee Republic on Republican River. His party numbered twenty-three, and with him went fifty Osages, mostly women and children, who had been captured in savage war by the Pottawattomies. The diplomatic return of these forlorn captives of course determined the attitude of the Osage nation toward Pike's company and his claims of American sovereignty over the land. And it was time for America to extend her claim and make it good. Already a Spanish expedition had passed along the frontier distributing bright Spanish flags and warning the Indians that the Spanish boast of possession was still good and would be made better. Pike travelled in the wake of this band of interlopers, neutralizing the effect of its influence and raising the American flag everywhere in place of the Spanish. [Illustration: WILLIAM CLARK _Of the Lewis and Clark Expedition_] Reaching the Arkansas, Pike ascended that river late in the Fall, and when Winter set in the brave band was half lost in the mountains near the towering peak which was forever to stand a dazzling monument to the hardihood and resolution of its leader. At the opening of the new year, near Canyon City, where deer were found wintering, a log fort was built in which a portion of the party remained with the pack animals, while Pike with twelve soldiers essayed the desperate journey to the Rio Grande. "Their sufferings were terrible. They were almost starved, and so cold was the weather that at one time no less than nine of the men froze their feet.... In the Wet Mountain Valley, which they reached in mid-January, ... starvation stared them in the face. There had been a heavy snow-storm; no game was to be seen; and they had been two days without food. The men with frozen feet, exhausted by hunger, could no longer travel. Two of the soldiers went out to hunt but got nothing. At the same time Pike [and a comrade] ... started, determined not to return at all unless they could bring back meat. Pike wrote that they had resolved to stay out and die by themselves, rather than to go back to camp 'and behold the misery of our poor lads.' All day they tramped wearily through the heavy snow. Towards evening they came on a buffalo, and wounded it; but faint and weak from hunger, they shot badly, and the buffalo escaped; a disappointment literally as bitter as death. That night they sat up among some rocks, all night long, unable to sleep because of the intense cold, shivering in their thin rags; they had not eaten for three days. But ... they at last succeeded, after another heartbreaking failure, in killing a buffalo. At midnight they staggered into camp with the meat, and all the party broke their four days' fast."[4] Pike at length succeeded in his design of reaching the Rio Grande, and here he built a fort and threw out to the breeze an American flag, though knowing well that he was on Spanish territory now. The Louisiana boundary was ill defined, but in a general way it ran up the Red River, passed a hundred miles northeast of Santa Fé and just north of Salt Lake, thence it struck straight west to the Pacific. By any interpretation the Rio Grande was south of the line. The Spaniards, who came suddenly upon the scene, diplomatically assumed that the daring explorer had lost his way; he suffered nothing from their hands, and was sent home through Chihuahua and Texas. All the hopes of the purchasers of Old Louisiana and of its flag-planters have come true, and, with them, dreams the most feverish brain of that day could not fashion. History has repeated itself significantly as our standard-bearers have gone westward. When the old Northwest was carved out of a wilderness, there was no fear in the hearts of our forefathers that was not felt when Louisiana was purchased. The great fear in each case was the same--the British at the north and the Spaniard at the south. And in each case the leaven of the East was potent to leaven the whole lump. Great responsibilities steady nations as well as men; the very fact of a spreading frontier and a widening sphere of influence--bringing alarm to some and fear to many--was of appealing force throughout a century to the conscience and honor of American statesmen. As, in the dark days of the Revolution, the wary Washington determined, in case of defeat, to lead the fragment of his armies across the Alleghanies and fight the battles over again in the Ohio Basin, where he knew the pioneers would forever keep pure the spirit of independence, so men in later years have looked confidently to the Greater West, to the Mississippi Basin and old Louisiana, for as pure a patriotism (though it might appear at times in a rough guise) as ever was breathed at Plymouth Rock. FOOTNOTE: [4] Theodore Roosevelt, "The Winning of the West," IV, 337, 338. CHAPTER XI _Fur Trade the Leading Business in the Northwest.--Rise of the Astor Family.--The U. S. Government fails as a Rival of the Northwest Company of Montreal, in the Fur Trade.--John Jacob Astor sees the Possibilities of the American Fur Trade.--He ships Furs from Montreal to London.--Irving's Opinion of Astor.--Astor plans to establish a Line of Trading-posts up the Missouri and down the Columbia.--The Scheme a Failure, but indirectly Valuable.--Astor's Enterprise helpful toward the Americanization of Louisiana.--He establishes the Pacific Fur Company, 1810.--This Company and the Northwest Company both seeking to occupy the Mouth of the Columbia; the Former arrives First.--In the War of 1812 the British take Possession of the Place.--Benefits to America from Astor's Example.--Like him, some Other Promoters failed to achieve the Particular Ends in View._ ASTOR: THE PROMOTER OF ASTORIA [Illustration] THE brave explorations of Lewis and Clark and Pike opened up the vast Territory of Louisiana for occupation and commerce. The one great business in the Northwest had been the fur trade, and for a long period it was yet to be the absorbing theme of promoters and capitalists, the source of great rivalries, great disappointments, and great fortunes. No story of American promotion is more unique than that of the rise of the Astor family from obscurity to a position of power and usefulness, and this story has its early setting in the fur-trading camps of the Far Northwest, where Astoria arose beside the Pacific Sea. The tale is most typically American: Its hero, John Jacob Astor, was of foreign parentage; he came to America poor; he seized upon an opening which others had passed over; he had the support of a self-confidence that was not blind; he fought undauntedly all obstacles and scorned all rivalry; and at last he secured America's first princely fortune. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the fur trade of the Northwest was in the hands of the powerful Northwest Company of Montreal, a race of merchant princes about whose exploits such a true and brilliant sheen of romance has been thrown. But the United States Government was not content that Canadian princes alone should get possession of the wealth of the Northern forests, and as early as 1796 it sent agents westward to meet the Indians and to erect trading-houses. The plan was a failure, as any plan must have been "where the dull patronage of Government is counted upon to outvie the keen activity of private enterprise." In almost every one of our preceding stories of America's captains of expansion, save that of the Lewis and Clark expedition only, a private enterprise has been our study, and each story has been woven around a personality. Even in the case of the exception noted, it was the personal interest and daring of Lewis and Clark that made their splendid tour a success, though it was promoted by the Government. The quiet little village of Waldorf near Heidelberg, Germany, was the birthplace of John Jacob Astor, and the name is preserved to-day in the princely splendor of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The young man, who never believed that he would become a merchant prince, spent his first years in the most rural simplicity. It is marvellous how America has imperiously called upon so many distant heaths for men with a genius for hard work and for daring dreams; it called St. Clair from Scotland, Zeisberger from Moravia, and Gallatin and Bouquet from Switzerland; and now a German peasant boy, inheriting blood and fibre, felt early in his veins this same mystic call, and saw visions of a future possible only in a great and free land. At an early age he went to London, where he remained in an elder brother's employ until the close of the Revolutionary War; now, in 1783, at twenty years of age, he left London for America with a small stock of musical instruments with which his brother had supplied him. At this time one of those strange providential miracles in human lives occurred in the life of this lad, who himself had had a large faith since childhood days; by mere chance, on the ocean voyage, or in the ice-jam at Hampton Roads, his mind was directed to the great West and its fur trade. From just what point the leading came strongest is not of great importance, but the fact remains that upon his arrival at New York young Astor disposed of his musical instruments and hastened back to London with a consignment of furs. The transaction proved profitable, and the youth turned all his energies to the problem of the fur trade. He studied the British market, and went to the continent of Europe and surveyed conditions there. He returned to New York and began in the humblest way to found his great house. All imaginable difficulties were encountered; the fur trade had been confined almost wholly to the Canadian companies, who brooked no competition; in the Atlantic States it had been comparatively unimportant and insignificant. At the close of the war of separation England had refused to give up many of her important posts on the American side of the Great Lakes,--a galling hindrance to all who sought to interest themselves in the fur trade. Again, the importation of furs from Canada to the United States was prohibited. The young merchant soon began making trips to Montreal, at which point he purchased furs and shipped them direct to London. In this fight for position and power young Astor showed plainly the great characteristics of the successful merchant,--earnestness and faith. He showed, too, some of the rashness of genius, which at times is called insanity; but search in the biographies of our great Americans, and how many will you find who did not early in their careers have some inkling of their great successes,--some whisper of fortune which rang in the young heart? The successes of John Jacob Astor were not greater than some of his day-dreams. "I'll build one day or other," he once said to himself on Broadway, "a greater house than any of these, in this very street." Irving writes of Astor: "He began his career, of course, on the narrowest scale; but he brought to the task a persevering industry, rigid economy, and strict integrity. To these were added an inspiring spirit that always looked upward; a genius, bold, fertile, and expansive; a sagacity quick to grasp and convert every circumstance to its advantage; and a singular and never-wavering confidence of signal success." It was the reports of Lewis and Clark that inspired Astor in his daring dream of securing a commercial control of the great Northwest which, by the help and protection of the American Government, would give impetus to the expansion of the American people into a great empire. The key to Astor's plan was to open an avenue of intercourse between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and form regular establishments or settlements across the continent from one headquarters on the Atlantic to another on the Pacific. Sir Alexander Mackenzie had conceived this idea in 1793, but it involved such herculean labors that it was not attempted; the business sinews of the Hudson Bay Company and the Northwest Company were so strong, and their long-cherished jealousies were so deep-rooted, that Mackenzie's plan of coalescence was impossible. In the meantime Lewis and Clark had found a route through Louisiana to the Pacific, and Captain Gray of Boston had anchored in the mouth of the Columbia. By land and water the objective point had been reached, and Astor entered upon the great task of his life with ardor and enthusiasm. The very obstacles in his way seemed to augment his courage, and every repulse fired him to increased exertion. [Illustration: JOHN JACOB ASTOR _Founder of Astoria_] It is a remarkable fact that at this time the principal market for American furs was in China. The British Government had awarded the monopoly of the China trade to the powerful East India Company, and neither the Hudson Bay Company nor the Northwest Company was allowed to ship furs westward across the Pacific to China. Astor planned to take full advantage of this ridiculous handicap under which the Canadian fur companies labored. He planned to erect a line of trading posts up the Missouri and down the Columbia, at whose mouth a great emporium was to be established; and to this the lesser posts which were to be located in the interior would all be tributary. A coastwise trade would be established, with the Columbia post as headquarters. Each year a ship was to be sent from New York to the Columbia, loaded with reënforcements and supplies. Upon unloading, this ship was to take the year's receipt of furs and sail to Canton, trading off its rich cargo there for merchandise; the voyage was to be continued to New York, where the Chinese cargo was to be turned into money. It is not because of the success of this intrepid promoter that the founding of Astoria occupies such a unique position among the great exploits in the history of American expansion. His attempt to secure the fur trade was not a success; but, considering the day in which it was conceived, the tremendous difficulties to be overcome, the rivalry of British and Russian promoters in the North and Northwest, and the inability of others to achieve it, the founding of Astoria on the Columbia must be considered typically American in the optimism of its conception and the daring of its accomplishment. If there is a good sense in which the words can be used, America has been made by a race of gamblers the like of which the world has never seen before. We have risked our money as no race risked money before our day. Astor was perhaps the first great "plunger" of America; his enthusiasm carried everything before it and influenced the spread of American rights and interests. The failure of the Astoria scheme did not check certain more fundamental movements toward the Pacific; the questions of boundaries and territorial and international rights were brought to the fore because of Astor's attempt. This promoter's lifelong enterprise was a highly important step, after the Lewis and Clark expedition, toward the Americanization of the newly purchased Louisiana; it hastened the settlement of questions which had to be faced and solved before Louisiana was ours in fact as well as on paper. Lewis and Clark found a way thither and announced to the Indian nations American possession; Astor, by means of a private enterprise, precipitated the questions of boundaries and rights which America and England must have settled sooner or later. One of the first interesting developments of an international nature followed close upon a diplomatic manoeuvre by which Astor attempted to thwart rivalry by seeking to have the Northwest Company become interested to the extent of a one-third share in his American company. The wily Canadians delayed their decision, and at last answered by attempting to secure the mouth of the Columbia before Astor's party could reach the spot. Astor pushed straight ahead, however, and on June 23, 1810, the Pacific Fur Company was organized, with Mr. Astor, Duncan McDougal, Donald McKenzie, and Wilson Price Hunt as chief operators. The stock in this newly formed company was to be divided into one hundred equal shares, fifty of which were to be at the disposal of Mr. Astor, the remaining fifty to be divided among the partners and associates. Mr. Astor was immediately placed at the head of the Company, to manage its business in New York. He was to furnish all vessels, provisions, ammunition, goods, arms, and all requisites for the enterprise, provided they did not involve a greater advance than four hundred thousand dollars. To Mr. Astor was given the privilege of introducing other persons into the Company as partners. None of them should be entitled to more than two shares, and two, at least, must be conversant with the Indian trade. Annually a general meeting of the Company was to be held at the Columbia River, at which absent members might be represented and, under certain specified conditions, might vote by proxy. The association was to continue twenty years if successful; should it be found unprofitable, however, the parties concerned had full power to dissolve it at the end of the first five years. For this trial period of five years Mr. Astor volunteered to bear all losses incurred, after which they were to be borne by the partners proportionally to the number of shares they held. Wilson Price Hunt was chosen to act as agent for the Company for a term of five years. He was to reside at the principal establishment on the West coast; should the interests of the association at any time require his absence from this post, a person was to be appointed in general meeting to take his place. The two campaigns now inaugurated, one by land and one by sea, aimed at the coveted point on the Pacific Coast. The "Tonquin" was fitted out in September, 1810, and sent under Captain Thorn around Cape Horn, and Hunt was sent from Montreal with the land expedition. The "Tonquin" arrived at the mouth of the Columbia March 22, 1811, and on April 12 the little settlement, appropriately named Astoria, was founded on Point George. In the race for the Columbia the Americans had beaten the Canadians. Hunt had gone to Montreal in July, 1810, and, setting out from that point by way of the Ottawa, reached Mackinaw July 22. Having remained at this point nearly three weeks, he reached St. Louis by way of the Green Bay route on September 3. The party was not on its way again until October 21, and it wintered at the mouth of the Nodowa on the Missouri, four hundred and fifty miles from its mouth. Proceeding westward in April, the party gained the Columbia on the 21st of January, 1812, after a terrible journey, and on the fifteenth of February Astoria was reached. Astor's great plan was now well under way toward successful operation; the promoter could not know for many days the fate of either the "Tonquin" or the overland expedition. But his resolute persistence never wavered; he fitted out a second ship, the "Beaver," which sailed October 10, 1811, for the Sandwich Islands and the Columbia. The months dragged on; there came no word from the "Tonquin"; no word from Hunt or Astoria; no word from the "Beaver"; thousands of dollars had been invested, and no hint was received concerning its safety, to say nothing of profit. Rumors of the hostility of the Northwest Company were circulated, and of their appeal to the British Government, protesting against the operation of this American fur company. Then came the War of 1812, and the darkest days for the promoter of Astoria. In 1813, despite the lack of all good news, Astor fitted out a third ship, and the "Lark" sailed from New York March 6, 1813. The ship had been gone only two weeks when news came justifying Astor's fears for the safety of his Pacific colony. A second appeal of the Northwest Company to the British Government had gained the ear of the ministry, and a frigate was ordered to the mouth of the Columbia to destroy any American settlement there and raise the British flag over the ruins. Astor appealed to the American Government for assistance; the frigate "Adams" was detailed to protect American interests on the Pacific. Astor fitted out a fourth ship, the "Enterprise," which was to accompany the "Adams." Now by way of St. Louis came the news of the safe arrival of both Hunt and the "Beaver" at Astoria, and of the successful formation of that settlement. Hope was high, and Astor said, "I felt ready to fall upon my knees in a transport of gratitude." Dark news came quickly upon the heels of the good. The crew of the "Adams" was needed on the Great Lakes, and the ship could not go to the Pacific. Astor's hopes fell, but he determined to send the "Enterprise" alone. Then the British blockaded New York, and the last hope of giving help to Astoria was lost. By the "Lark" Astor sent directions to Hunt to guard against British surprise. "Were I on the spot," he wrote with fire, "and had the management of affairs, I would defy them all; but, as it is, everything depends upon you and your friends about you. Our enterprise is grand, and deserves success, and I hope in God it will meet it. If my object was merely gain of money, I should say, 'Think whether it is best to save what we can, and abandon the place; but the very idea is like a dagger to my heart.'" The fate of Astoria is well known; McDougal, Astor's agent, fearing the arrival of a British man-of-war, capitulated, on poor financial terms, to agents of the Northwest Company, which was in occupation when the British sloop-of-war "Raccoon" arrived, November 30. On December 12 Captain Block with his officers entered the fort, and, breaking a bottle of wine, took possession in the name of his Britannic Majesty. The failure of Astoria did not by any means ruin its sturdy promoter, though it meant a great monetary loss. Astor's fortune kept swelling with the years until it reached twenty millions; portions of it are of daily benefit to many thousands of his countrymen in such public gifts as the Astor Library. But these material benefits never did a greater good than the influence Astor exerted in turning the minds and hearts of men to the Northwest. In many of our stories of early American promotion the particular end in view was never achieved. No hope of Washington's (after his desire for independence) was more vital than his hope of a canal between the Potomac and the Ohio. The plan was not realized, yet through his hoping for it and advocating it both the East and the West received lasting benefits. But of the stories of broken dreams, that of Astoria stands alone and in many ways unsurpassed. The indomitable spirit which Astor showed has been the making of America. The risks he ran fired him to heartier endeavor, as similar risks have incited hundreds of American promoters since his day; he stands, in failure and in success, as the early type of the American promoter and successful merchant prince. CHAPTER XII _Seeds of Christianity sown among the Indians by the Lewis and Clark Band.--A Deputation of Nez Percés to General Clark, requesting that the Bible be taught in their Nation.--The Methodists establish a Mission on the Willamette, but pass by the Nez Percés.--Interest in the New Field for Explorers and Missionaries is now awakened.--Marcus Whitman suited by Early Training to become an Explorer and a Missionary.--Becomes a Medical Practitioner and afterwards makes a Business Venture in a Sawmill.--His Character and Physique.--His First Trip to the West, in Company with Mr. Parker.--The Nez Percés and the Flatheads receive them gladly.--His Marriage at Prattsburg, N. Y., and Return to the West.--A Demand for Missionaries and Immigrants that Oregon may be occupied and held by the United States.--Whitman goes East to stimulate the Mission Board and to direct Immigration into Oregon.--Whitman publishes a Pamphlet on the Desirableness of Oregon for American Colonists.--Numerous Influences that brought about the Emigration of 1843.--Whitman's Outlook for the Future Prosperity of the Immigrants.--His Death and that of his Wife in the Massacre of 1847._ MARCUS WHITMAN: THE HERO OF OREGON [Illustration] THERE is probably not another example of the springing to life of the seeds of Christianity more interesting than in the case of the Lewis and Clark expedition into that far country where rolls the Oregon. To what extent the scattering of this seed was performed with any serious expectation of success is not to be discovered; but it seems that wherever that strange-looking band of explorers and scientists fared and was remembered by the aborigines that came under its influence, so widely had there gone the legend of the white man's Saviour. The Indians heard that the white man had a "Book from Heaven" which told them the way to walk in order to know happiness and reach the happy hunting-grounds; with this race, which lived forever on the verge of starvation, the expression "happy hunting grounds"--land where there was always game to be obtained--meant far more than the hackneyed expression does to us to-day. A book giving explicit directions for reaching a place where there was always something to eat was a thing to be sought for desperately and long; they did not appreciate the argument, once advanced with no little acumen by a Wyandot Indian, that, since the Indian knew neither the art of writing nor that of book-making, the Great Spirit could never have meant them to find the way of life in a book. On the contrary, these western Indians--Flatheads and Nez Percés--held a great meeting, probably in the early Spring of 1832, and appointed two old men and two young men to go back and visit their "Father," General Clark, at St. Louis. "I came to you," one of them is reported to have said to Clark when at last they reached St. Louis, "over a trail of many moons from the setting sun. You were the friend of my fathers, who have all gone the long way. I came with one eye partly open, for more light for my people who sit in darkness.... I am going back the long, sad trail to my people of the dark land. You make my feet heavy with burdens of gifts, and my moccasins will grow old in carrying them, but the Book is not among them. When I tell my poor blind people, after one more snow, in the Big Council, that I did not bring the Book, no word will be spoken by our old men or by our young braves. One by one they will rise up and go out in silence. My people will die in darkness, and they will go on the long path to the other hunting ground. No white men will go with them and no white man's Book to make the way plain." Two of the four Indians died in St. Louis, and the surviving two went West in the same caravan with George Catlin, the famous portrait painter, who included their portraits, it is said, in his collection,--Numbers 207 and 209 in the Catlin Collection of the Smithsonian Institution. The first missionary effort in the Far West was put forth by the Methodist General Conference, which sent the Rev. Jason Lee westward, starting overland from Fort Independence in April, 1834. The mission was located seventy miles up the Willamette River, and, singularly enough, the Nez Percés, who had sent emissaries to the "men near to God," who had the "Book from Heaven," were passed by. In the Spring of the same year the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, including then both Congregationalists and Presbyterians, became interested in the new field for explorers and in this strange call that had come ringing across the vast prairies and rugged mountains of the unknown West, as, in a previous study, we have noticed that the Moravian Brethren became interested in the call that came half a century before across the Alleghanies from the Delawares on the Muskingum. Nor was the David Zeisberger, fearless, patient, and devoted, found to be wanting in the present instance, for the call came through a channel now difficult to trace to a young man who was able to endure and dare. Two years after the beginning of the nineteenth century Marcus Whitman was born at Rushville, New York, of New England parentage, strong both morally and intellectually. His early life was spent in a typical pioneer home, where he knew the toil, the weariness, and the hearty humble joys of that era,--a home in which independence and general strength of character were formed and confirmed. The loss of his father when he was at the age of eight laid upon the shoulders of the growing lad responsibilities which made him old beyond his years. All this certainly had its part in preparing him for the sublimely humble work, as it seemed, that he was to be called upon to do; and little could he have known that there were to come those days of agony and exhaustion which demanded all his latent accumulation of iron strength and courage of steel,--days that would demand all his stores of resourceful foresight. Whitman's education was probably indifferent,--at least it was not above the average of the day. Converted at the age of seventeen, he did not join a church until he was twenty-two, which may be taken as showing the reticent or, rather, unobtrusive character of the man. An early purpose to prepare for the ministry was thwarted by physical weakness, and the young man proceeded to study medicine in the Berkshire Medical College at Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The first years of practice were spent in Canada; returning then to New York, his attention was unexpectedly absorbed in a business venture with his brother in a sawmill. How difficult it must have been for any one to read this leading aright, so seemingly adverse was it to the prescribed course that was customary among practitioners. Yet the same knowledge of business, perhaps, would not have come to Whitman in any other way, and it was providentially to stand him in good stead. "Dr. Whitman was a strong man, earnest, decided, aggressive. He was sincere and kind, generous to a fault.... He was fearless of danger, strong in purpose, resolute and unflinching in the face of difficulties. At times he became animated and earnest in argument or conversation, but in general he would be called a man of reticence. He was above medium height, rather spare than otherwise, had deep blue eyes, a large mouth, and, in middle life, hair that would be called iron-gray." Of Miss Prentiss of Prattsburg, New York, who soon became Mrs. Whitman, Mrs. Martha J. Lamb has said: "She was a graceful blonde, stately and dignified in her bearing, without a particle of affectation. When he was preparing to leave for Oregon, the church held a farewell service and the minister gave out the well-known hymn: Yes, my native land, I love thee, * * * * * Can I bid you all farewell? The whole congregation joined heartily in the singing, but before the hymn was half through, one by one they ceased singing, and audible sobs were heard in every part of the great audience. The last stanza was sung by the sweet voice of Mrs. Whitman alone, clear, musical, and unwavering." Whitman's first Western trip was a hurried tour of observation made in company with the Rev. Samuel Parker, a graduate of Williams. Leaving St. Louis in the Spring of 1835, they reached the country of the Nez Percés and Flatheads in August. It is interesting to note that these men crossed the Great Divide by way of the South Pass, concerning which Mr. Parker made an astounding prophecy, as follows: "Though there are some elevations and depressions in this valley, yet, comparatively speaking, it is level, and the summit, where the waters divide which flow into the Atlantic and into the Pacific, is about six thousand feet above the level of the ocean. There would be no difficulty in the way of constructing a railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. There is no greater difficulty in the whole distance than has already been overcome in passing the Green Mountains between Boston and Albany; and probably the time may not be far distant when trips will be made across the continent, as they have been made to the Niagara Falls, to see Nature's wonders." The interviews with the Indians were uniform in character, and showed that the missionaries would receive hospitality at the hands of the Nez Percés and Flatheads. Wrote Mr. Parker: "We laid before them the object of our appointment, and explained to them the benevolent desires of Christians concerning them. We then inquired whether they wished to have teachers come among them, and instruct them in the knowledge of God, His worship, and the way to be saved; and what they would do to aid them in their labors. The oldest chief arose, and said he was old, and did not expect to know much more; he was deaf and could not hear, but his heart was made glad, very glad, to see what he had never seen before, a man near to God,--meaning a minister of the Gospel." It took only ten days in the country of the Indians to assure the men of the rich promise offered by the field; whereupon Dr. Whitman turned his face eastward, to make his report and be ready in the following Spring to return with reënforcements with a caravan of the American Fur Company. A great enthusiasm had seized him. He wrote to Miss Prentiss, "I have a strong desire for that field of labor.... I feel greatly encouraged to go on in every sense, only, I feel my unfitness for the work; but I know in whom I have trusted, and with whom are the fountains of wisdom.... You need not be anxious especially for your health or safety, but for your usefulness to the cause of Missions and the souls of our benighted fellow-men." Dr. Whitman was married early in 1836, and the couple were driven by sleigh from Elmira, New York, to Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania, where they took a canal-boat over the Alleghany Portage Railway on their way westward. Their principal companions were the Rev. Henry H. Spaulding, a graduate of Western Reserve College,--two or three years Whitman's junior,--and wife, and Mr. William H. Gray; there were also two teamsters and two Indian boys, whom Dr. Whitman had brought East with him. Joining the caravan of the American Fur Company at Council Bluffs, they reached Fort Laramie early in June, and the South Pass on the following Fourth of July, where six years later Fremont raised an American flag and gained the immortal name of "Pathfinder." It is difficult to emphasize sufficiently the historic importance and significance of the advent of these women into the country beyond the Great Divide in Whitman's light wagon and cart; true, Ashley, Bridger, and Bonneville had taken wagons into the Rockies and left them there, but it was for this sturdy and determined physician to take a woman across the mountains in 1836, showing at once the practicability of a wagon road from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But the wagon seemed hardly less wonderful than the patient women in it. Rough mountaineers who had come to the rendezvous of the American Fur Company just westward of the "divide" were dumbfounded at the sight of the first white women on whom they had laid eyes since they had reached the States; tears came to the eyes of some of them as they shook hands with the first white women that ever crossed the Rocky Mountains; Mrs. Spaulding had been very ill, and the rough devotion of these men and their Indian wives gave her new hope and courage for the work. On the other hand, "From that day," one of these men said, "I was a better man." But it was for an old trapper to see the real national significance of the advent of these women into that far-flung country. "There," he said, pointing to the women, "is something which the honorable Hudson Bay Company cannot get rid of. They cannot send these women out of the country. They had come to stay." Dr. Whitman chose his station at Waiilatpu, near Walla Walla, Washington, while Spaulding went a hundred miles and more eastward among the Nez Percés of the Clearwater Valley. A quart of wheat brought with them, cherished as were the twelve potatoes brought around Cape Horn by the pioneers of Astoria a quarter of a century before, was planted amid hopes and fears, and yielded, in less than a dozen years, nearly thirty thousand bushels in a season. Their few cows multiplied to a herd; gardens and orchards were laid out; a printing press and sheep were secured from the Hawaiian Islands, and upon the press was printed a code of laws, differing in no great degree from those issued in Zeisberger's sweet "Meadow of Light" on the Muskingum half a century before. Mrs. Spaulding's school numbered five hundred pupils, and a church had grown to a membership of one hundred. It is not possible here to trace with faithfulness the brave successes now achieved, for we are seeking but one of the many lessons to be found in the Whitman story. There was labor and success for all, and trial for all as well; there were some differences of opinion among the workers, to be settled as the field grew large, for these men were independent thinkers, each one a man among his fellows. And then there was the rivalry with the missionaries to the northward, the Catholic priests located at Vancouver and extending their influence wherever the Hudson Bay Company, in turn, extended its interests. The priests, it should be observed, had been called in by the Company to take the place of the missionary of the Church of England, whom the Company had sent home. We cannot discuss here the tangled Oregon question and the tactics of America's rivals for that beautiful stretch of country. Two things stand fairly plain in it all: to be held, Oregon must have a strong American quota of settlers, and these missionaries were on the ground when the matter was precipitated. The conquest of Oregon was to be made, if made at all, at the hands of an army of men with broadaxes on their shoulders; not elsewhere in our national annals does this appear more clearly than in the case of Oregon. In the military sense there was no conquest to be effected; an enterprising fur company, controlled by men of principle but served by perfectly unprincipled agents, sought the land for its wealth of skins, and would not have wished it "opened," in any sense, to the world. The case is quite parallel to the attitude of England at the close of the Old French War, described on a previous page[5]; the proclamation of 1763, permitting no pioneer to erect a cabin beyond the head-springs of the Atlantic rivers, because, if populated, the land would not pour its treasures into the coffers of a spendthrift king, was as idle a selfish dream as was ever conceived with reference to Oregon by a Hudson Bay Company's _engagé_. In the case of no other distinct region in our entire domain, perhaps, was it equally plain that the first people to really occupy would be, in all likelihood, the people that would control and at last possess it. It was like so many early military campaigns in America, as, for instance, Forbes's march on Fort Duquesne and Clark's advance to Vincennes,--to reach the destination was of itself the chief hardship; for if in the case of Forbes that great army could be once thrown across the Alleghanies where lay Braddock's mouldering bones, the capitulation of Fort Duquesne would be but a commonplace consequent. What might have been the result had not this fragile missionary movement into the empire of Oregon (including, of course, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming) taken place cannot now be determined, but the rival interests were hurrying emigrants from Red River and from Canada in the full belief that to hold would mean to have. A counter action was that put forth by the American missionaries of all denominations in Oregon, chief of whom was Marcus Whitman. It seems as though some writers have believed that there can be a line drawn between what these first Americans did to promote missionary success and that done to advance what may be called American political interests in Oregon; to the present writer this seems impossible. What helped the one helped the other, whether the motive comprehended the larger interests at stake or not. That the missionaries desired that the Americans coming into Oregon should be men of sobriety and character should not in the least argue that they did not desire them at the same time to be good patriotic citizens, eager for their country's welfare. It is hardly fair to imply that these men were poor patriots in proportion as they were good missionaries; nor can the proposition be more reasonably entertained that these brave men desired to promote emigration thither in order to secure more assistance or success in the missionary work in which they were engaged. In all these considerations the hope of missionary success was inextricably bound up with national extension and national growth. Were the mission stations to be increased, it was of national moment; were they to be decreased, it was an ominous sign so far as possible American dominion was concerned. Unfortunate internal trouble among the missionaries, due to differences of opinion on policies and ways and means, caused the American Board to decide to eliminate a portion of the mission stations. Just what steps were to be taken is not important to us here; the important thing is the influence of this curtailing of the work of the American missionary. Was it to strengthen or weaken America's claim to the empire of Oregon? Was it to hinder or help the occupation of the land on the part of rival spirits? Those who might hold that the question was one of missionary policy totally apart from national politics take a view of the matter in which the present writer cannot share. These men were Americans; it is difficult to believe that with the Oregon question to the front these missionaries (who were on the spot) confined their attention solely to the missionary problem heedless of the national problem, which must have embraced and included all others in any analysis. The missionaries met to consider the order of the American Board late in the Fall of 1842. Marcus Whitman was granted leave of absence to visit the East and persuade the officers of the Board to rescind their action. Wrote one of the missionaries of the Board immediately after Whitman's departure concerning his plan: "I have no doubt that if his plan succeeds it will be one of great good to the mission and country. It is to be expected that a Romish influence will come in.... To meet this influence a few religious settlers around a station would be invaluable."[6] This contemporary document, written just as Whitman was leaving, ought to be good evidence, first, that he had a definite errand, and, secondly, that it concerned new emigrants. The friends of Whitman have gone very far in an attempt to maintain that he left Oregon hurriedly on the brave ride he now undertook in order to reach Washington in time to accomplish a specific political errand; if nothing more, such a sweeping assertion was sure to be called into question, and when this was done the querists were likely to be unable to keep from going to the other extreme of denying that Whitman ever went to Washington or had any political motive in coming East.[7] A brief but careful view of the documents in the case has inclined us to the view that Whitman came East as he did in order to be in time to have a part in arousing interest in and directing the course of the large emigration that it was felt would turn toward Oregon in the Spring of 1843. We are the more inclined to this opinion for the reason that this was the most important thing by far that could have occupied the man's mind, however one views the question; what could more have benefited the mission cause than a flood-tide of American pioneers into Oregon with axes to sing that old home-loving song sung long ago in the Alleghanies, in Ohio, in Kentucky, and beyond? And what more, pray, could be done than this to advance the interests of the United States hereabouts? In point of fact the nation had depended on the conquest of Oregon by pioneers, if it was to be conquered at all; treaties could be made and broken, but a conquest by the axe-bearing army would be final. "The policy," writes Justin Winsor, "which the United States soon after developed was one in which Great Britain could hardly compete, and this was to possess the [Oregon] country by settlers as against the nominal occupancy of the fur-trading company directed from Montreal. By 1832 this movement of occupation was fully in progress. By 1838 the interest was renewed in Congress, and a leading and ardent advocate of the American rights, Congressman Linn of Missouri, presented a report to the Senate and a bill for the occupation of Oregon, June 6, 1838. A report by Caleb Cushing coming from the Committee on Foreign Affairs respecting the Territory of Oregon, accompanied by a map, was presented in January and February in 1839: "'It was not till 1842 that the movements of aggression began to become prominent in politics, and immigration was soon assisted by Fremont's discovery of the pass over the Rocky Mountains at the head of the La Platte.[8] Calhoun in 1845 took the position that the tide of immigration was solving the difficulty and it was best to wait that issue and not force a conflict.'" It seems perfectly certain that Whitman was concerned especially with this "tide of immigration." He left home October 3; in eleven days Fort Hall was reached, four hundred miles away. Finding it best, he struck southward on the old Santa Fé Trail, by way of Fort Wintah, Fort Uncompahgre, and Fort Taos. From Santa Fé the course was in part by the old Santa Fé Trail to Bent's Fort and Independence. Bent's Fort was left January 7, 1843, but the date of reaching Westport (Kansas City), Missouri, is not definitely known; it was probably the last of January, and here he was busy for some little time helping to shape things up for the much talked of emigration of 1843. Indeed, there is evidence that he did not leave Westport until at least the 15th of February. Possibly it was here that he prepared and published a pamphlet describing Oregon, the soil, climate, and its desirableness for American colonists, and said that "he had crossed the Rocky Mountains that winter principally to take back that season a train of wagons to Oregon." The Doctor assured his countrymen that wagons could be taken to the Columbia River. "It was this assurance of the missionary," wrote one emigrant, "that induced my father and several of his neighbors to sell out and start at once for this country."[9] If this line of investigation is followed steadily with reference to Dr. Whitman's Eastern visit, the result is eminently satisfactory from any point of view. It is well and good to believe that he attempted to right the minds of some eminent men on the Oregon question, but he probably accomplished more by some plain talks with a score of frontiersmen at Westport and by his pamphlet on the subject than by visiting ten thousand men in high authority. What was to save Oregon was the emigration movement,--the rank and file of the army with the broadaxe,--not Whitman or Webster or a President or a congressman or a hundred congressmen. This Oregon missionary was a plain, straightforward, brave, modest man, not seeking notoriety, come eastward to have a part in inducing emigration that must start, if at all, _in the Spring months_. There you have an explanation for the Winter's ride. Pressing on eastward, Whitman went to Washington; this has been questioned because none of the public prints of the city noised abroad his coming or his presence. This proves he was not there as much as the absence of his foot-prints on those streets to-day proves it; so far as it indicates anything, it only shows the man was not seeking notoriety and cheap advertisement. A year afterwards, in June, 1844, the Hon. James M. Porter, Secretary of War, received a letter from Marcus Whitman which began, "In compliance with the request you did me the honor to make last winter, while in Washington, I herewith transmit to you the synopsis of a bill." Another sentence runs, "I have, since our interview, been," etc.,[10] making, in all, two definite statements in his own hand to the effect that Whitman visited the Secretary of War in Washington, and that while there he talked with the Secretary of War concerning the national character of the Oregon movement. Any who might incline to the view that Whitman came East solely on a mission errand must pay small attention to this letter, which proves that the Secretary of War and Whitman must have talked of a bill relative to Oregon emigration. Whitman certainly conversed with Porter along the lines of their subsequent correspondence, which resulted in the missionary's sending in a bill authorizing the President of the United States to establish a line of "agricultural posts or farming stations, extending at intervals from the present and most usual crossing of the Kansas River, west of the western boundary of the State of Missouri, thence ascending the Platte River on the southern border, thence through the valley of the Sweetwater to Fort Hall, and thence to settlements of the Willamette in the Territory of Oregon. Which said posts will have for their object to set examples of civilized industry to the several Indian tribes, to keep them in proper subjection to the laws of the United States, to suppress violent and lawless acts along the said line of the frontier, to facilitate the passage of troops and munitions of war into and out of the said Territory of Oregon, and the transportation of the mail as hereinafter provided." Whitman reached Boston probably March 30. There seems to be no question that his chief errand here with the officers of the American Board was to interest them in a plan to induce emigration for the sake of preserving the missions. On his return to Oregon he wrote Secretary Greene of the Board: "A [Catholic] bishop is set over this part of the work, whose seat, as the name indicates, will be at Walla Walla. He, I understand, is styled Bishop of Walla Walla. It will be well for you to know that from what we can learn, their object will be to colonize around them. I cannot blame myself that the plan I laid down when I was in Boston was not carried out. If we could have had good families, say two and three together, to have placed in select spots among the Indians, the present crisis, which I feared, would not have come. Two things, and it is true those which were the most important, were accomplished by my return to the States. By means of the establishment of the wagon road, which is due to that effort alone, the immigration was secured and saved from disaster in the Fall of forty-three. Upon that event the present acquired rights of the U. States by her citizens hung. And not less certain is it that upon the result of immigration to this country the present existence of this mission and of Protestantism in general hung also. It is a matter of surprise to me that so few pious men are ready to associate together and come to this country, when they could be so useful in setting up and maintaining religious society and establishing the means of education. It is indeed so that some of the good people of the East can come to Oregon for the double purpose of availing themselves of the Government bounty of land and of doing good to the country." This quotation undoubtedly contains in outline the fundamental purpose of Dr. Whitman's journey eastward through the Winter's snows; the American missions in Oregon were evidently on the point of being actually crowded out by the threatened emigrants from the North; to hold the ground gained, a rival emigration from the States was an imperative necessity, and that was the thing for which Whitman was working. So closely bound were the real interests, then, of the missions and the territorial interests of the United States, that for one to attempt a technical separation is to do an injustice to both. Read as widely as you will the few manuscripts left us in Dr. Whitman's hand, and the impression grows stronger with each word that the man was exceptionally clear-sighted and sane; and while a great deal of nonsense is and has been put into circulation about him, so far as Whitman himself is concerned we find his attention given to roads and trails, forage and provisions, axle grease and water; in all he wrote (and there is sufficient for a very fair guess at his purpose and plans) we find almost no reference whatever to the greater national work which he was actually doing,--a fact that cannot but be forever enjoyed by those to whom his splendid life work will appeal. On May 12 Whitman was again in St. Louis writing Secretary Greene, "I hope no time will be lost in seizing every favorable means of inducing good men to favor the interest of the Oregon." We should say here that, while in Boston, Whitman induced the officers of the American Board to rescind their action abolishing certain of the mission stations in Oregon. Now once more on the frontier, Whitman found that his hope of a large American emigration to Oregon was in a fair way of being realized; as George Rogers Clark came back to Virginia from Kentucky at an opportune moment to urge Patrick Henry to authorize the far-famed Illinois campaign, so now Marcus Whitman had come East at an opportune moment to add what weight he could in the interests of an Oregon campaign. But as in the case of Clark's visit to Virginia, so now, far more important causes had been at work to bring the desired result than the mere coming of a messenger. It would indeed be impossible to estimate the large number of forces that had been at work to bring about the famous emigration of 1843, but among them should be remembered the long debates in Congress on the Ashburton Treaty, the Linn Bill concerning Oregon lands, Greenhow's "Memoir," and Lieutenant Wilkes's report, as well as the missionary efforts of the various denominations, and the Whitman pamphlet, before referred to. As a result, as singular and interesting an army as ever bore the broadaxe westward now began to rendezvous in May near Independence, Kansas, just beyond the Missouri line. It would probably have gathered there to go forth to its brave conquest though there had been no Marcus Whitman or Daniel Webster, or any other man or set of men that ever lived; the saying that Whitman "saved Oregon" is just as false as the saying that Washington was the "Father of his Country," or that Thomas was the "Rock of Chickamauga," or Webster the "Defender of the Constitution"--and just as true; it is a boast, a toast, an idle fable to those who disbelieve it, a precious legend of heroism and magnetism to those who glory in it. On the 18th of May a committee of the emigrants was appointed to go to Independence and inquire of Whitman concerning the "practicability of the road," as one of the party (George Wilkes) wrote; another pioneer (Peter H. Burnett) said that on the twentieth he attended a meeting with Colonels Thornton and Bartleson, Mr. Rickman and Dr. Whitman, at which meeting rules and regulations for the "Oregon Emigrating Society" were adopted. There is no doubt that Whitman's advice was of considerable importance. Any man who had taken a wagon over the Rockies would have been of prime importance to these emigrants, irrespective of any other considerations. On the 22d of May the vanguard of the army started, with John Gant as guide, and the Kansas River was reached on the 26th, and wholly crossed on the last day of May. On the 30th of May we find him writing to Secretary Greene in the following strain: "You will be surprised to see that we are not yet started. Lieutenant Fremont left this morning. The emigrants have some of them just gone, and others have been gone a week, and some are yet coming on. I shall start to-morrow. I regret I could not have spent some of the time spent here in suspense with my friends at the East. "I have only a lad of thirteen, my nephew, with me. I take him to have some one to stay with Mrs. Whitman. I cannot give you much of an account of the emigrants until we get on the road. It is said that there are over two hundred men besides women and children. They look like a fair representative of a country population. Few, I conclude, are pious. Fremont intends to return by land, so as to be back early in winter. Should he succeed in doing so we may be able to send you an account of the Mission and country at that time. We do not ask you to become the patrons of emigration to Oregon, but we desire you to use your influence that, in connection with all the influx into the country, there may be a fair proportion of good men of our own denomination who shall avail themselves of the advantages of the country in common with others. Also that ministers should come out as citizens or under the Home Missionary Society. We think agents of the Board and of the Home Missionary Society, as also ministers and good men in general, may do much to send a share of good, pious people to that country. We cannot feel it to be at all just that we do nothing, while worldly men and Papists are doing so much.... I wish to say a few words about manufactures in Oregon, that I may remove an impression that they cannot compete with the English. First, let us take the operatives and the raw material from the Pacific Islands. It matters not at how much labor the Islander cleans the cotton, for it gives him employment, and for that he gets goods, and then for his coffee and sugar and salt and cotton, etc., etc., he gets goods also. This is all an exchange trade that only a population and manufacturers in Oregon can take advantage of, because they alone will want the articles of exchange which the Islander can give. The same will hold good in relation to Indians whenever they shall have sheep, and I intend to try and have the Government give them sheep instead of money, a result not likely to be delayed long. A good man or company can now select the best mill sites and spots, and likely would find a sawmill profitable at once. I think our greatest hope for having Oregon at least part Protestant now lies in encouraging a proper intention of good men to go there while the country is open. I want to call your attention to the operation of Farnham of Salem and the Bensons of New York in Oregon. I am told credibly that secretly Government aids them with the secret service fund. Captain Howard of Maine is also in expectation of being employed by Government to take out emigrants by ship should the Oregon Bill pass." Those who love the memory of this brave missionary must hold this letter exceedingly precious; it has, in addition to its enthusiasm and patriotism, that sane and practical outlook on the future that pervades so much of Washington's writings, especially the letters to William Crawford. Here is another man looking, on the Pacific slope, for such important commonplace things as mill sites in 1843, just as Washington was looking for mill sites in the Ohio Valley in 1770, and between the two it would be difficult to say which was the more seriously optimistic, though the influence of both must have been strong, in their respective days, on the advancing pioneer. For all the daring of the hardy Winter's journey that Whitman made[11] we look upon this other journey, with this splendid army of nearly a thousand Oregon pioneers and home-builders, as the one of supremest importance. Ay, here was Whitman's Ride,--not sung, perhaps, so widely as the one in the Winter's snows, and yet the one ride which Oregon could not have missed, and the one she can never forget! Let the fruitless debate go on as to the exact measure of this unpretentious missionary's influence in shaping Government policies and moulding public opinion; it is enough for me to know that he viewed the whole question as keenly as his few letters prove he unquestionably did, and then to know that when the great emigration started he was there to direct and inspire; that he could do the humblest duty and say the least about it, and at the same time show Fremont where to go if he would gain the immortal title of "Pathfinder." Whitman has suffered at the hands of his friends, who have been over-jealous touching matters concerning which his own lovable modesty and reticence would not allow him to speak; they have made claims and inferences unwarranted by the known facts of the case. His Winter's ride has been compared with Sheridan's from Winchester, and tasted no better in some mouths than does the ballad of Sheridan's Ride in the mouths of Crook's men, who knew their leader had, an hour back, given and carried out the order Sheridan is said (in the poem) to have given when he dashed upon the scene, when, in fact, he merely came to Crook and asked him what he had done.[12] And yet Reid's poem is as true to the spirit of the indomitable Sheridan as Butterfield's is true of Whitman. We have compared Whitman on the Walla Walla to Zeisberger on the Muskingum; and the terrible massacre of November 29, 1847, in which the brave hero of Oregon, with his wife and twelve others, gave their lives, belongs in history with the awful Gnadenhütten tragedy. The murder of these brave pioneers by Indians, to whom they had given the best of their lives and all their strength and prayers, is quite as fiendishly incongruous as the destruction of the Moravian band of corn-huskers by frenzied Monongahela frontiersmen; in each case the murderers knew not what they did. But Whitman's work was done, for we have it in his own hand that he would be contented if posterity would remember, not that he had influenced a President or a Congress or saved an Empire, but merely, as he wrote, that he was "one of the first to take white women across the mountains and prevent the disaster and reaction which would have occurred by the breaking up of the present emigration, and establishing the first wagon road across to the border of the Columbia."[13] And yet when you study this boast you will find that it contains in its essence all that any boast for Whitman could hold; for it was an army of axe-bearers that was to save Oregon; and if Meade won Gettysburg or Wolfe captured Quebec, then Whitman and the Americans who went in his track won for America the northern Pacific slope. FOOTNOTES: [5] See p. 46. [6] Dr. Cushing Eells's letter in archives of A. B. C. F. M., Boston. [7] "The Legend of Whitman's Ride," by Prof. E. G. Bourne, _American Historical Review_, January, 1901. [8] Dr. Whitman's route, as we have seen, in 1836. [9] "Letter of John Zachrey," _Senate Ex. Doc. No. 37_, Forty-first Congress, Third Session. [10] Letter file, office of Secretary of War, received June 22, 1844. [11] Friends of Whitman have unfortunately exaggerated this Winter's ride; though a daring feat, it has many parallels in the annals of the old Salt Lake Trail, on which Jim Bridger built the fort that bore his name as early as 1837. [12] The report of a worthy eyewitness of the Thirty-sixth Ohio. [13] Whitman to Secretary Greene, Nov. 1, 1843; Mowry, _Marcus Whitman_, 267. CHAPTER XIII _Captains of American Expansion always to be found in the National Legislature.--Great National Advance in the Second and Third Decades of the Nineteenth Century.--Definition of "The American System."--The Doctrine that Public Surplus should be used for Internal Improvements held for only a Short Time.--Party Struggles regarding Cumberland Road Legislation.--Inconsistent Resolutions of Congress on this Matter.--The Drift of Public Sentiment toward putting Works of Improvement under the Care of the Government.--Numerous Competitors for National Aid toward Local Improvements.--Mutual Jealousy of Various Localities with Regard to the Distribution of Government Aid.--Disputes as to the Comparative Usefulness of Canals and Railroads.--Polk's Sarcasm on the Abuse of the Word "National" as applied to the Route of a Proposed Road from the Lakes to the Gulf.--Several Beneficial Measures passed by Congress in Spite of Strong Opposition.--Sums granted for Education, Road-building, and Canal-building.--Beneficial Influence of the Government's Liberal Gifts as Encouragement to States and to Private Investors._ PILOTS OF "THE AMERICAN SYSTEM" [Illustration] AS we have reviewed from a more or less personal standpoint some of the exploits which definitely made for the growth and expansion of the young American Republic, it may have occurred to the reader that here was another great power at work helping, encouraging, and guiding the movement,--Pilots of the Republic in the halls of national legislation at Washington. Not that we refer specifically to any one man; some men, like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, can be pointed to at certain periods as men who occupied this position, who in a sense fathered, against all opposition, great measures that we see now were of tremendous advantage; if the position was abdicated by one man it was filled by another; and so down through the century and a quarter of our national existence there has been a power at work in our councils that has been optimistic, and at the same time true to the genius of America's geographical position and her high calling among the nations of the earth. It is not because this has been marvellously illustrated since the outbreak of the Spanish-American War that reference is made to it here, though the illustration is apposite and fair; but if we look back down the decades from the day that Congress signed that contract with Rufus Putnam and his Revolutionary patriots, or the day when Jefferson dared to effect the Louisiana Purchase, we shall continually find men sitting in the Congressional seats at the capital who had the courage to try new paths, to assume common-sense views of the Constitution, and who believed in their country and wished to see it shirk no great responsibility. Such men as these were as truly captains of our expansion as was Putnam or Henderson or Astor. The age in our history to which our attention is turned on this subject is more particularly that lying between the beginning of the second and the ending of the third decade of last century. Much that was proposed before the opening of the nineteenth century, in the way of material national advance, was forgotten in the taxing days of 1811-1815. Chief among these was the Erie Canal proposition, and it is perhaps not too much to say that had the war with England not come as it did, possibly the Government would, by means of the money accruing from the sale of Michigan lands, have invested in the Erie Canal project; the Cumberland Road was one of the great works that went on despite the war. The moral effect of the victories of Perry and Jackson, one to the north and the other to the south, was very great; with the triumphant ending of the war the little victorious nation sprang into a strength and a passion for power that well-nigh frightened those acquainted with the policy and conservatism of the ante-bellum days. We have touched slightly on one of the great questions of this most wonderful period of American history, that of the constitutionality of the appropriations for the Cumberland Road, and Henry Clay's championship of the measure. But this was only one of a score of propositions in a campaign of internal improvements, and Clay was but one of a hundred champions who assisted a weak nation to take on the elements of strength by encouraging agriculture and manufactures, and binding a far-flung land by means of communication and intercourse. [Illustration: PRESIDENT JAMES K. POLK] At the beginning of the second generation in the century the problem of internal improvements came to the fore as on no previous occasion, backed by the strongest men then in the public eye,--Clay, Calhoun, Adams, and Webster. The Cumberland Road had been making its way westward, but had not yet thrown its tawny length over the Ohio River and into the States beyond. But the argument for this great national work was not to be gainsaid, for the original compact with Ohio had been reiterated on the admission of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri, respectively, and a part of the sales of the public lands in those States was already pledged to this object. As one of the fruits of the much discussed "American System," championed by Henry Clay, the Cumberland Road was a popular success, though there was never a time when any measure concerning it could not secure a strong following in the House and the Senate. The American System stood for a use of the public surplus for works of internal improvement; it was not a popular policy for a long time, but while in vogue it was of immeasurable benefit to the expanding country, its champions being veritable captains of the country's advance. The most interesting features of the history of this doctrine are the vehemence with which it was advocated for a few critical years when nothing else would have equally aided the national advance, the questionable basis on which the doctrine rested, and the readiness with which it was abandoned when its providential mission was effected. Even before the real internal improvement era came it was foreshadowed by the historic position of the two parties toward the object, as shown in Cumberland Road legislation. The bitterness of the struggle could not be shown better than by the repudiations of Congress in 1817 in its votes on this subject. In that year Congress passed the following inconsistent resolutions: (1) Congress has the power to build public roads and military roads, and to improve waterways; (2) Congress has _not_ power to construct post roads or military roads; (3) Congress has _not_ power to construct roads or canals to carry commerce between the States; (4) Congress has _not_ power to construct military roads. "Thus we see," said a triumphant enemy of the so-called American System, "by the solemn decision of this House in 1817, all power over this subject was repudiated in every form and shape." Despite these inconsistencies the movement was ever a forward movement, until at last, in 1824, it assumed gigantic proportions, alarming to some degree the very men who had urged it forward. The revenue of the Government at this time was about twenty-five millions, and the running expenses--including interest on the slight remaining debt--about half that sum. To what better use could the ten or twelve surplus million dollars be devoted than to the internal improvement of the land, as Gallatin and Jefferson had advocated twenty years before? Here the contest shifted to the tariff, a reduction of which would do away with the necessity of finding a way to employ a surplus. The drift of public sentiment, however, was largely in favor of turning the fostering care of the Government to works of improvement, either by direct appropriation, or by taking stock in local companies, or by devoting to their use the proceeds of the sale of public lands; in any way the result would be the same, and the nation as a whole would feel the benefit. The policy swept a large part of the country like wildfire, and ten thousand dreams, many of them chimerical to the last degree, were conceived. As a rule the result was, without question, bitter disappointment; but amid all the dangers that were in the way, and all the possibilities of untold harm, an influence was put to work that did more for the awakening of the young land than anything that had ever preceded it. Over a hundred and twenty-five claimants for national aid were considered by squads of engineers sent out by the Government. In the sarcastic words of one of the opposers of the system (and on this subject there was a chance for sarcasm that seldom came to Congressmen) every creek and mill-race in the United States was being surveyed by engineers sent out by the chief executive. It was asserted, and not without some plausibility, that such surveying expeditions were used very craftily to influence votes, being sent to view rivers and roads in disputed regions where the information was circulated that, unless the champions of internal improvement were put in power, great local blessings would be lost to these districts. But this was not by any means the chief danger in the campaign. As was most forcefully argued by the opposition, the influence of this paternal policy on the part of the Government would be to awaken hostility and set one part of the nation against the other, for in no way could the division of the surplus be made equal. It could not be made on the basis of population even if this were admitted to be constitutional, for some parts of the country needed help far more than others; a naturally impregnable harbor did not need a fourth of the money expended on it that a comparatively defenceless harbor did. Again, the division could not, for the same reason, be made on the basis of receipts; the States of the seaboard, in which the great part of the Government's revenue was raised, would then be almost the only beneficiaries; the West would receive nothing. The accusation of favoritism came with piercing force. Suppose, for instance, New York and Mississippi should come at the same time to Congress, the one asking for the improvement of the Erie Canal, and the other for the improvement of the Mississippi River. Which party would Congress listen to if the public treasury was not in a position to satisfy both applicants? It was urged that this procedure destroyed the whole principle of representative responsibility. Take the case of New York and her great canal,--the most important material improvement in the fifty years of the nation's life; New York came to the Government when the project was first broached, asking for aid. The cause was a good one; in peace it would be a benefit to at least six States, and in war it would be a national advantage of untold moment; in fact, as we have seen, the possibility of another war with England along the Lakes was the very argument that turned the scale and caused the canal to be built. The project was discouraged at Washington, and not a cent of Government treasure went into the undertaking. Why now, a score of years later, should New York representatives vote money from the national treasury for objects no less national or needful than the Erie Canal? Several neighboring States (Ohio, for instance) had declined to invest funds in the Erie Canal venture when it was first promoted; why now should New York representatives vote national funds (such a large part of which came from New York ports) for improvements in these States, whose delegates in Congress refused aid to the Erie Canal in its dark hours? On the other hand it was urged that even the Erie Canal, the most famous work of internal improvement promoted by any of the States, had done "nothing toward the extinguishment of its debt," up to 1830; if this great work did not reimburse the treasury which built it, though operated by a purely local authority well acquainted with all conditions and able to take advantage of all circumstances, how would it be with works promoted by the national Government, in distant parts of the country, with little or no knowledge of local circumstances or conditions? Another argument, more powerful than was realized at the time, was that which prophesied the swift advance of the locomotive and the railroad, and the consequent decay and disuse of the common road and the canal. Said a member of Congress in debate on the floor of the House, "The honorable gentleman from Virginia [Mr. Mercer, the father of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal], Sir, must hear the appalling, the heartrending fact, that this mighty monument [the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal] which, for years, he has been laboring with zeal and exertion to erect to his memory, and which, no doubt, he had fondly hoped would transmit his name down to the latest posterity, must fall, and must give place to the superior improvement of railroads." On the proposed national road from Buffalo to New Orleans by way of Washington the opposition poured out its vials of sarcasm and ridicule. To the arguments of the friends of the measure, that the road was needed as a commercial and military avenue and for the use of the Post-office department, the reply was a denial so sweeping, from such reliable and informed parties, that there was no hope for the measure. Perhaps the strongest argument for the negative was advanced by James K. Polk, who was little less than withering in his fire, piling up ridicule on top of sarcasm to a degree seldom seen in Congress. Polk found that twenty-one routes between Washington and Buffalo had been outlined by engineers for this road "in the rage for engineering, surveying, reconnoitring, and electioneering." He alleged that the entire population in a space of territory one hundred miles in width between the two cities had been made to expect the road, and the surveys had been conducted in the heat of a political campaign. "The certain effect of this system, as exemplified by this road, is, first, to excite hopes; second, to produce conflicts of section arrayed against section; and lastly, dissatisfaction and heart-burnings amongst all who are not accommodated." The speaker exhausted his keen-edged sarcasm on the word "national" and the uses to which the word was put by the defenders of the improvement bills. He affirmed that he was sure a number of men who proposed to support the Buffalo-New Orleans Road Bill would not consider it sufficiently "national" if it were known that it was not to pass through their districts; he affirmed that every catfish in the Ohio River was a "national" catfish as truly as the Cumberland Road was a national road; he challenged the friends of the bill to decide definitely upon a route for the proposed road from the Lakes to the Gulf, and then hold true to the measure representatives from districts through which the road was not to pass. Polk affirmed that the many various surveys were made merely to ally with the friends of the measure the representatives of all districts touched by these alternative courses. "This same national road was mounted as a political hobby in my district," said the Tennessean; "for a time the people seemed to be carried away with the prospect of having millions of public money expended among them. We were to have a main route and cross routes intersecting the district in every direction. It was to run down every creek, and pass through almost every neighborhood in the district. As soon as there was time for reason to assume her seat the delusion passed off." These points of opposition to the improvement campaign have been outlined at some length to show the strength of the opposition and the ground it took. No measure went through Congress for any kind of Government aid without the strongest kind of opposition; in fact, the Virginia delegates worked and voted against the Dismal Swamp Canal in their own State in order to be consistent with their oft-expressed views on such questions. Yet, one by one, a considerable number of important measures of internal improvement went through Congress and received the signatures of the different Presidents; the effect of these measures was inestimably beneficial, giving a marked impetus to national development, and awakening in men's minds a dim conception of the growth that was to be the one great wonder of the century. From the adoption of the Constitution to the year 1828 the following sums were granted by the general Government for purposes either of education or road-building or canal-building: Maine, $9,500; New York, $4,156; Tennessee, $254,000; Arkansas, $45,000; Michigan, $45,000; Florida, $83,417; Ohio, $2,527,404; Illinois, $1,725,959; Indiana, $1,513,161; Missouri, $1,462,471; Mississippi, $600,667; Alabama, $1,534,727; Louisiana, $1,166,361. In addition to this the Government built, or assisted in building, five great works of improvement from among the scores that were proposed. For the Delaware and Chesapeake Canal $300,000 was advanced; for the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, $10,000; for the Dismal Swamp Canal, $150,000; for the Louisville and Portland Canal, $90,000; for the Cumberland Road, $2,230,903; for western and southwestern State roads, $76,595, making a total appropriation of $13,838,886. The danger of the system was in making the national purse an object of plunder for Congressmen, and the consequent danger of unholy alliances and combinations for looting the public treasury. It is interesting that for so long a period as it was in vogue there were so slight symptoms of this sort of thing; and men little knew that, by acting on liberal lines at the time, despite the dangers and risks, they were exerting a power to shape the new nation, to incite private investment, to encourage State and private works of promotion, and to aid the commercial awakening of a people to an activity and an enterprise whose possibilities cannot at the present day be estimated. Take the Portland Canal around the historic "falls of the Ohio" at Louisville; this was a work for no one State in particular to perform, not even Kentucky; it was a detriment to Louisville itself, for it destroyed the old portage business, as the Erie Canal ruined the overland carrying trade between Schenectady and Albany. All the States bordering on the Ohio were benefited by this improvement, as was equally true respecting the Government's improvement of the Ohio River itself, which began in 1825. The Portland Canal was one of the important investments which tended to prove the financial benefit of such investments. The Government's total subscription of stock was $233,500; when the affairs of the Company were closed in 1874 by the purchase of the canal by the Government, it was found that the national profit (in mere interest) had been $257,778. This was due to exorbitant tolls charged by the Company, which resulted, finally, in the purchase of the canal and throwing it open toll-free. The men who labored for this era of improvement are practically unknown, with the exception of two or three who became prominent because of special ability or renown gained in other lines of activity, like Clay and Calhoun. It is not important here to attempt to catalogue them; the work they did by voting for the so-called American System was of critical importance; but, still greater, in so doing they were showing a braver, more optimistic, more American spirit and a high faith in the fundamental good judgment of the people. It was, without doubt, a dangerous extreme to approach, possible of wanton violation in unprincipled hands, and a precedent of very questionable tendencies. But it was of immeasurable importance that such moral support as just such acts as these afforded should have come at just this time; and, could we read the result aright, it would be seen, possibly, that much of our commercial success found its origin at this very moment, and came into being because a number of men at this crucial time gave an impetus to private adventure and private investment that was almost providential in its ultimate effect on our national life. Losing their individual identity in the common promotion of temporary measures of infinite national advantage, they will be remembered only in a vague, impersonal way as men who honored their country by trusting in its destiny and believing in the genius of its growth. INDEX "ADAMS," 295 Adams, Herbert B., 78 Adams, John Quincy, 244, 344 "Adventure Galley," 119 Alleghany Portage Railway, 251-255 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, 304, 317, 318, 329 American Fur Company, 310, 311 _American Historical Review_, 320 "American System," 345-358 Ashburton Treaty, 330 Ashley, --, 311 Astor, John Jacob, 282-297, 343 Astoria, 282, 289-296 BACON, James H., 201 Baltimore, 36, 241-244, 248, 255 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 36, 77, 243-245, 248 Bartleson, Colonel, 331 Bartlett, --, 189 "Beautiful Spring" (Schönbrunn), 141 "Beaver," 294, 295 Bensons, The, in Oregon, 333 Bethlehem, Pa., 133, 134 Bliss, --, 189 Block, Captain, 296 Bonneville, --, 311 Boone, Daniel, 29, 30, 89-101 Boonesborough, Ky., 96, 101, 116 Bouquet, --, 284 Bourne, Prof. E. G., 320 Bradford County, Pa., 138 Bridger, James, 311, 335 Brown, George, 242 Buffalo-New Orleans Road, 352-354 Bullock, Leonard Henley, 90 Bunch of Grapes Tavern, Boston, 112 Burnett, Peter H., 331 Bushnell, --, 206 Butterfield, --, 336 CALHOUN, John C., 322, 344, 358 Calk, William, 96 Canals, 35, 36, 209-232, 239-245, 247, 249-254 Carroll, Charles, 77, 244 Carter's Valley, 99 Cass, --, 189 Catholic missionaries in Oregon, 314, 319, 326, 333 Catlin, George, 304 Chastellux, Chevalier de, 62 Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, 76, 215, 240, 243-245, 247-249, 352, 356 Clark, George Rogers, 100, 151-178, 261, 329 Clark, Jonathan, 153-157 Clark, William, 156, 157, 262-272, 281, 283, 287, 290, 303 Clarksville, 176 Clay, Henry, 184, 192, 205, 342, 344-346, 358 Claysville, Pa., 184 Cleaveland, Moses, 124 Cleveland, Ohio, 124 Clinton, Gov. De Witt, 35, 135-137, 218, 229, 230 "Clinton's Ditch," 218, 221 Coal, 54, 56 Colquit, --, 189 Colter, --, 270 _Commonwealth, The_ (Pittsburg), 216 Congregational missions to Indians, 304 Congress, Powers of, 346 Connellsville, Pa., 163 Coshocton, Ohio, 141 Crab Orchard, Ky., 97 Crawford, William, 45-47, 49-52, 55, 334 Cressap, Captain, 170 Cumberland Gap, 98 Cumberland Road, 35, 74, 77, 181-206, 228, 235, 343-345, 356 Cushing, Caleb, 321 Cutler, Rev. Manasseh, 111-115, 117; his son, 120 "DEFIANCE" stage line, 200, 201 Delafield, --, 189 Delaware and Chesapeake Canal, 356 Devol, --, 120 DeWitt, Simeon, 211, 212, 218 Dickson, --, 270 Dismal Swamp Canal, 355, 356 Dunmore, Governor, 87 Dunmore's War, 91, 170 EAST India Company, 288 Eddy, Thomas, 218 Eells, Dr. Cushing, quoted, 319 English, William H., quoted, 171, 176 "Enterprise," 295 Erie Canal, 35, 74, 76, 209-232, 239, 249, 343, 350, 351, 357 Everett, Edward, 147, 196, 197 "FALLS of the Ohio" (Louisville), 97, 175, 176 Farnham, --, 333 "Father of Ohio," 124 Fearing, --, 120 Fife, William H., 201 Forbes's Road, 118 Forman, Joshua, 216 Fort Boone, 96, 99, 101 Fort Detroit, 139, 143 Fort Duquesne, 164, 315, 316 Fort Edward, N. Y., 210, 211 Fort Harmar, 116, 121 Fort Necessity, 163 Fort Pitt, 115, 139, 143, 164 Fort William, N. Y., 136 "Founders of Ohio," 118 Freeman, Thomas, 52 Fremont, John C., 311, 321, 332, 335 Fulton, Robert, 218 Fur trade, 281, 282, 284-296, 314, 315 GALLATIN, Albert, 184, 189, 284, 347 Gant, John, 331 Geddes, James, 211, 212 _Genesee Messenger, The_, 216 Gilmans, The, 120 Gnadenhütten, Ohio, 141, 146, 336 "Good Intent" stage line, 200 Goodale, --, 120 Government ownership, 191, 198 Gratiot, --, 189 Gray, Captain, 268, 287 Gray, William H., 310 Great Meadows, 47, 163 Greene, --, 120 Greene, --, of American Board of Foreign Missions, 326, 329, 331, 337 Greenhow's "Memoir," 330 Grist-mill, First west of Alleghanies, 55 HANCOCK, --, 270 Hanks, Abraham, 96 Harrison, William Henry, 261 Harrodsburg, Ky., 97 Harrodstown, Ky., 173 Hart, David, 90, 93 Hartzell, --, 189 Hawley, Jesse, 215, 216 Hawley, M. S., 219 Heath, General, 108 Heckewelder, John, 31, 142 Henderson, Ky., 99 Henderson, Richard, 29, 30, 83-101, 172-174, 182, 260, 343 "Hercules" (Jesse Hawley), 215 Higgins, --, 167, 168 "Hit or Miss," 252, 253 Hoar, Senator, quoted, 107-110, 119, 120 Hogg, James, 90 Howard, Captain, 334 Hudson Bay Company, 287, 288, 312, 314 Hunt, Wilson Price, 291-295 ILLINOIS, 100, 105, 174, 175, 177 Independence Township, Cuyahoga Co., Ohio, 145 Indiana, 100, 105 Indians, 31, 87, 121, 131-146, 164-166, 302, 303, 309 Irving, Washington, quoted, 286 JEFFERSON, Thomas, 79, 153, 215, 259, 262, 342, 347 Jeffersonville, Ky., 176 Johnson, Thomas, 59 Johnson, Sir William, 137 Johnston, Joseph E., 189 Johnstone, William, 90 Jones, Rev. David, 165-168 Jones, John Gabriel, 173 "June Bug" stage line, 200 KANSAS City (Westport), 322 Kent, Chancellor, 218-220 Ken-ta-kee, Kentucky, 117-175 Kentucky, 29, 30, 79, 91-100, 171-176, 183 LAMB, Mrs. Martha J., quoted, 307 Lancaster Turnpike, 187, 188 "Landlords" stage line, 200 Lands, Western, 28, 39-58, 66, 163 "Lark," 294 Lawrence County, Pa., 140 Lawyer's examination, 83-86 Lee, Capt. Hancock, 171 Lee, Rev. Jason, 304 Leestown, on Kentucky River, 171 "Legend of Whitman's Ride, The," 320 "Letter of John Zachrey," 323 Lewis and Clark Expedition, 79, 157, 262-272, 281, 283, 287, 290, 301 Lewis, Gen. Andrew, 87 Lewis, Meriwether, 262-272, 281, 283, 287, 290 Lewis, Gov. Morgan, 210, 211 Lichtenau, Ohio, 141 Linn, Lewis F., 321, 330 Livingston, Robert R., 218 Locomotives, 246 "Long Hunters," 87, 88 Louisiana Territory, 259-277, 281, 290 Louisville, Ky., 97, 175, 176 Louisville and Portland Canal, 356-358 Luttrell, John, 90, 93 MACKENZIE, Sir Alexander, 287 Macomb County, Mich., 145 Madison, James, 158 Mansfield, --, 189 Manufactures in Oregon, 333 Manypenny, Geo. W., 201 "Marcus Whitman," 337 Marietta, O., 116, 121-125 Marietta College, 125 Martin, Captain Joseph, 93, 97 Maryland, 239-248 Massie, --, 124 Mauch Chunk, Pa., 242 Maysville Road Bill, 74 McDougal, Duncan, 291, 296 McKee, --, 189 McKenzie, Donald, 291 "Meadow of Light" (Lichtenau), 31, 141, 313 Meigs, --, 119 "Memoir" (Greenhow), 330 Mercer, Colonel, 49 Mercer, --, of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, 352 Methodist missions to Indians, 304 Michigan, 105 Milan, Erie Co., Ohio, 145 Millstones from Alleghanies, 55 Missionaries to Indians, 304, 309-319, 326-328, 332, 333 Mohawk Valley route, 62, 76, 78, 214 Monroe, President, 191-193 Moravian Brethren, 31, 115, 131-146, 304, 305 Morris, Gouverneur, 35, 210-212, 218 Mounds in Ohio Valley, 170 Moundsville, W. Va., 170 Mowry, William A., 337 NATIONAL Road Stage Company, 199 Neville, Presley, 57 New Albany, Ky., 176 New Philadelphia, Ohio, 131 New York City, 241 North Carolina, 30, 87, 98-100 Northwest Company of Montreal, 282, 287, 288, 290, 294, 296 OCONOSTOTA, Cherokee chief, 90 Ohio, 30, 31, 76, 100, 105, 113-147, 243 Ohio Company, 48, 49, 92, 113-125 Ohio National Stage Company, 199 "Old Two-Horn," 125 Ordinance of 1787, 41, 79, 92, 112-115, 117, 123 "Oregon Emigrating Society," 331 Oregon Territory, 301-338 "Origin of the Erie Canal, The," 219 Owens, David, 166-168 PACIFIC Fur Company, 291, 292 Parker, Rev. Samuel, 308, 309 Parkersburg, W. Va., 167 Parsons, --, 120 Pennsylvania Canal, 249-254 Pennsylvania Railway, 249, 250, 254 Pennsylvania Road, 118 Perryopolis, Fayette Co., Pa., 55 Philadelphia, 241 Philadelphia and Columbia Railway, 253 Pickell, --, 189 Pike, Zebulon M., 272-277, 281 "Pilot" stage line, 200 "Pioneer" stage line, 200 Pittsburg, 115, 163, 168 Platt, Judge, 218, 219 Polk, James K., 353, 354 Porter, Hon. James M., 324, 325 Post, Frederick Christian, 134-137 Potomac Company, 74-76, 236-240, 245 Potomac River Improvements, 58-61, 65-68, 72, 75, 79, 213, 236-240, 297 Potter County, Pa., 140 Prentiss, Miss (Mrs. Whitman), 307, 310 Presbyterian missions to Indians, 304 Putnam, Gen. Rufus, 106-114, 118-127, 182, 260, 342, 343 "RACCOON," 296 Railroads, 242-246, 248-255 Read, Thomas B., author "Sheridan's Ride," 336 Rianhard, William, 201 Richardson, Judge, 224 Rickman, --, 331 River improvement, 237 Road-building, 35, 77, 181-206, 352-356 Robertson, Donald, 158 Robinson, Moncure, 252 Rome, N. Y., 136, 223 Roosevelt, Theodore, quoted, 264, 275 SANDUSKY, Ohio, 143 Sargent, Winthrop, 112, 115 Schönbrunn, Ohio, 141 Schuyler, Gen. Philip, 218 Schuylkill and Susquehanna Canal, 215 Scioto Company, 114 Sheridan, Philip, 336 "Sheridan's Ride," 336 Slavery, 123 Soldiers' lands, 48-52, 111, 112, 122 South Pass, 308, 322 Spaulding, Rev. Henry H., and wife, 310-313 Sproat, Col. Ebenezer, 118, 120 Stagecoach lines, 199-202 St. Clair, Gov. Arthur, 120, 122, 125, 126, 284 Steamboats, 72, 218 Steubenville, Ohio, 166 Stewart's Crossing (Connellsville, Pa.), 163, 171 St. Louis, 263, 270 Surplus for internal improvements, 347 Surveyors, 158-160 Swann, Thomas, 248 TAYLOR, Lieut.-Gov. John, 219 "Tents of Grace" (Gnadenhütten), 141 Territory Northwest of the River Ohio, 113 Thomas, Nathaniel, 90 Thomas, Philip Evan, 35, 241-243, 255 Thompson, Chief Justice, 219 Thorn, Captain, 292 Thornton, Col., 331 Todd, Col. John, 177 Toledo, Ohio, 261 "Tom Thumb," Peter Cooper's locomotive, 246 Tompkins, Governor, 219, 220 "Tonquin," 292-294 Transylvania Company, 88-91, 98-100, 116, 172, 173 Treaty of Fort Mclntosh, 121 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, 59, 87-89 Treaty of Fort Watauga, 90 Tupper, --, 120 UNIONTOWN, Pa., 199 VANCE, --, 189 Varnum, --, 119 Virginia, 30, 59, 79, 87-89, 98-100, 173, 176, 177, 239, 240 WALKER, Felix, 91 Walpole Grant, 49, 51 "Washington and the West" (Hulbert), 65, 80 Washington Coal and Coke Company, 56 Washington, George, 27-30, 39-80, 106-108, 126, 159, 160, 163, 182, 236, 238, 252, 253, 297, 334 Washington State, Settlement of, 312, 316 Washington's Bottoms, 47 Washington's Letter to Benjamin Harrison, 1784, 68-74, 236, 253 Washington's Run mill, 55 Watauga Settlement, 89-92 Watson, Elkanah, 211 Wayne, Anthony, 126, 261 Weaver, Jno. W. & Co., 201 Webster, Daniel, 123, 330, 342, 344 Welch, Sylvester, 252, 255 West Newton, Pa., 118 Westport (Kansas City), 322 Wheeling, W. Va., 166 Whipple, --, 119 White, Major Hatfield, 117 Whitman, Marcus, 305-338 Whitman, Mrs., 307, 310-312 Wilkes, Lieutenant, 330, 331 Wilkinson, General, 273 Williams, --, 189 Williams, Judge John, 90 "Winning of the West, The," 275 Winsor, Justin, quoted, 321 Wisconsin, 105 Women in the Northwest, 311, 312 Wright, F. M., 201 YATES, Judge, 218, 219 Yontz, Jno., 201 Young, Samuel, 224 ZEISBERGER, David, 31, 115, 131-147, 182, 284, 305, 336 _Uniform with "Pilots of the Republic"_ THE GLORY SEEKERS THE ROMANCE OF WOULD-BE FOUNDERS OF EMPIRE IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE SOUTHWEST BY WILLIAM HORACE BROWN _Illustrated with portraits, and with original drawings by W. J. Enright. Price $1.50 net._ "Here is a history that reads like sheer romance. Mr. Brown tells in a delightful way the story of those who dreamed dreams of empire in the far West.... The book, typographically, is a fine sample of McClurg work. It is profusely illustrated."--_Toledo Times Bee._ "It is a pleasure to assure the reader that one may have as much fun reading 'The Glory Seekers' as William Horace Brown had writing it. Few historical books are written in such sprightly vein, and few informative books of any sort are so leavened with humor."--_St. Louis Post Dispatch._ "When romance and history, adventure and fact, are combined in readable style, and the history happens to be a field with which we are not all familiar, but in which we are much interested, a book is produced that will be irresistible to many.... Thrilling adventure is plentiful in these pages, and it has the added interest of its political significance. Written in a pleasant, familiar style, not without sharp and illuminating comment, 'The Glory Seekers' is a book to be read with keen delight by the student of history and the lover of romance."--_Des Moines Mail and Times._ "A volume which will find an honorable place among Americana.... Mr. Brown's style is detailed and explicit. He indulges in keen character delineation. He makes these hardy adventurers offer their specious apologies. They cease to be the dim and menacing figures of our national history and become comprehensible, if fatal, figures. The book is one which fills a vacancy in history."--_Chicago Tribune._ "His effort has been rather to scrape off the successive coats of whitewash which local historians have liberally applied to the darker side of their deeds, and, while giving the would-be empire builders full credit for their personal bravery and physical prowess, to show forth their ambitions and exploits in their true colors."--_New York Tribune._ "A book that reads like a novel.... It is not a story to make 'every American's cheek flush with pride,' but, 'The Glory Seekers' is a strong and vivid depiction of the true history of the Southwest, colored with incident and anecdote, and suffused with the enthusiastic Americanism which the most cynical attitude cannot hide."--_Butte Inter Mountain._ "A unique, interesting, and valuable story of the early days of the Southwest, when adventurous spirits tried at various times to establish an empire there. Mr. Brown has made an exhaustive study of his subject, and has the facts, which are presented with a cleverness of narration that makes them most delightful reading."--_Pittsburg Dispatch._ "Very unconventional in its style, lively and highly entertaining."--_The Churchman._ "The author of this excellent and exceedingly interesting work has made a thorough study of the various efforts to found local governments in Texas, independent of Mexico, at an early day.... He is to be congratulated for his excellent work in this historical summary of events in that great region."--_Salt Lake Tribune._ "The work is well done. The narratives are lively and well told, and while not highly important episodes, they are all worth preserving as correctives to the too partial story of the colonial patriots as served up in the usual United States histories, if for nothing else."--_New York American._ "The romantic story of conquest is brilliantly told."--_Portland Oregonian._ A. C. McCLURG & CO., _Publishers_ Volumes of Pioneer History By REUBEN GOLD THWAITES HOW GEORGE ROGERS CLARK WON THE NORTHWEST AND OTHER ESSAYS IN WESTERN HISTORY _With maps and illustrations_ The majority of the eight essays contained in the volume were first delivered as lectures, and were later accorded magazine publication. For the present publication they have been radically revised and brought down to date, and comprise an exceptionally interesting collection of papers covering a wide range of topics under the one general head. The titles of the essays are as follows: "How George Rogers Clark Won the Northwest," "The Division of the Northwest into States," "The Black Hawk War," "The Story of the Mackinac," "The Story of La Pointe," "A Day on Braddock's Road," "Early Lead Mining on the Upper Mississippi," "The Draper Manuscripts." ON THE STORIED OHIO _An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo. With new Preface and full-page illustrations from photographs._ This trip was undertaken by Mr. Thwaites some years ago, with the idea of gathering local color for his studies of Western history. The Ohio River was an important factor in the development of the West. The voyage is described with much charm and humor, and with a constant realization of the historical traditions on every side. For the better understanding of these references, the author has added a brief sketch of the settlement of the Ohio Valley. A selected list of journals of previous travellers has also been included. DOWN HISTORIC WATERWAYS _Six Hundred Miles of Canoeing upon Illinois and Wisconsin Rivers. Second Edition, revised, with new Preface, and eight full-page illustrations from photographs._ Mr. Thwaites' book is not only a charming account of a summer canoe trip, but an excellent guide for any one who is contemplating a similar "inland voyage." The course followed by the canoeist is described with a practical accuracy that makes it of great assistance, but in an engaging style that will appeal strongly to every lover of outdoor life. "It is a book to be read to get the spirit of the woods and rivers and streams and lakes."--_Worcester Spy._ _Uniform Binding. Each 12mo, $1.20 net._ A. C. McCLURG & CO., _Publishers_ MRS. DYE'S FAMOUS BOOKS ON THE NORTHWEST McDONALD OF OREGON By EVA EMERY DYE. A Tale of Two Shores. Illustrations by Walter J. Enright. 12mo, $1.50. The chance casting away of a party of Japanese on the Oregon coast many years ago inspired McDonald, a fully historical personage, to enact a similar drama in his own proper self with the characters and continents reversed. Landing on the shores of Japan he was passed from governor to governor until he reached the capital. There he was permitted to establish a school, and it was actually his pupils who acted as interpreters during the negotiations with Commodore Perry, generally supposed to be the first of Americans to enter Japan. Mrs. Dye has long been aware of the facts in McDonald's unusual career, having obtained them largely from his own lips; but she deferred publication until his papers finally reposed in her hands. It will be remembered that the hero of this new book entered largely into her story of "McLoughlin and Old Oregon," to which this later volume is in a sense a sequel. THE CONQUEST By EVA EMERY DYE. Being the True Story of Lewis and Clark. _Third Edition_, with frontispiece in full color by Charlotte Weber. 12mo, $1.50. No book published in recent years has more of tremendous import between its covers, and certainly no recent novel has in it more of the elements of a permanent success. A historical romance which tells with accuracy and inspiring style of the bravery of the pioneers in winning the western continent should have a lasting place in the esteem of every American. "No one who wishes to know the true story of the conquest of the greater part of this great nation can afford to pass by this book."--_Cleveland Leader._ "A vivid picture of the Indian wars preceding the Louisiana purchase, of the expedition of Lewis and Clark, and of events following the occupation of Oregon."--_The Congregationalist._ "It may not be the great American novel we have been waiting for so long, but it certainly looks as though it would be very near it."--_Rochester Times._ "The characters that are assembled in 'The Conquest' belong to the history of the United States; their story is a national epic."--_Detroit Free Press._ McLOUGHLIN AND OLD OREGON By EVA EMERY DYE. A Chronicle. _Fifth Edition._ 12mo, $1.50. This is a most graphic and interesting chronicle of the movement which added to the United States that vast territory, previously a British possession, of which Oregon formed a part, and how Dr. John McLoughlin, then chief factor of the Hudson's Bay Company for the Northwest, by his fatherly interest in the settlers, displeased the Hudson's Bay Company and aided in bringing this about. The author has gathered her facts at first hand, and as a result the work is vivid and picturesque and reads like a romance. "A spirited narrative of what life in the wilderness meant in the early days, a record of heroism, self-sacrifice, and dogged persistence; a graphic page of the story of the American pioneer."--_New York Mail and Express._ A. C. McCLURG & CO., _Publishers_ +----------------------------------------------------------------- + | Transcriber's Note: | | | | Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note. | | | | Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant | | form was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed. | | | | Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained. | | | | Mid-paragraph illustrations have been moved between paragraphs | | and some illustrations have been moved closer to the text that | | references them. The List of Illustrations paginations were | | changed accordingly. | | | | Italicized words are surrounded by underline characters, | | _like this_. | | | | Superscripts are enclosed in brackets like this 2{nd}. | | | | Duplicated section headings have been omitted. | | | |Footnotes were moved to the end of chapters and numbered in one | |continuous sequence. | +------------------------------------------------------------------+ 
53648	----	TRIP TO THE WEST AND TEXAS. COMPRISING A JOURNEY OF EIGHT THOUSAND MILES, THROUGH NEW-YORK, MICHIGAN, ILLINOIS, MISSOURI, LOUISIANA AND TEXAS, IN THE AUTUMN AND WINTER OF 1834-5. INTERSPERSED WITH ANECDOTES, INCIDENTS AND OBSERVATIONS. WITH A BRIEF SKETCH OF THE TEXIAN WAR. BY A.A. PARKER, ESQ. Second Edition. CONCORD, N.H.: PUBLISHED BY WILLIAM WHITE. BOSTON: BENJAMIN B. MUSSEY. 1836. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1835, BY WHITE & FISHER, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of New-Hampshire. PREFACE. The author of this work, unknown to fame, and unacquainted with the art of book-making, has endeavored, in the following pages, to give some account of the great WESTERN AND SOUTHERN COUNTRY. In performing this task, he has not attempted the regions of fancy and fiction; but has told his own story--"a plain unvarnished tale," in his own way. And although it may not indicate much depth of research, or possess all the graces of polished diction and charms of novelty, yet he hopes it may be found to contain information sufficient to repay a perusal. He spent five months on his journey, and examined the country through which he passed, as much as time would permit:--Its soil, climate and productions--the manners, customs and health of the inhabitants--the animals, reptiles and insects--in short, all things favorable and unfavorable in the NEW WORLD. He has freely spoken of the country just as it appeared to him; and he believes the information this work purports to give, may be safely relied upon. But if it should be found to contain errors of fact, or of opinion, he is confident they will be deemed unintentional. It would have been quite easy to make a much larger book of the author's travels; and had he followed the example set him by some of the journalists of the day, he should have done so. But his object was not to make a large and expensive volume. He has given in a concise form, such descriptions, incidents and anecdotes only, as he believes may instruct and amuse, and enable the public to form a correct opinion of the country. How he has succeeded in his undertaking, others, of course, will judge for themselves; he hopes this little work may be found not entirely destitute of useful and entertaining matter, and prove an acceptable offering to his friends and fellow-citizens. In the appendix, will be found a particular description of MICHIGAN, and a BRIEF SKETCH of the TEXIAN REVOLUTIONARY WAR. In this sketch, the author has consulted all the accounts given of this sanguinary war, and he believes it will be found correct in all its essential particulars: but he does not wish to conceal the fact, that amidst the hurry and bustle of a Revolution perfect accuracy is hardly attainable. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Objects of the Trip--Albany, situation and appearance--Erie canal basin--western travellers--rail road--canal boats, packets, line boats and scows--accommodations--number of boats--mode of passing each other--tow-pathbridges--accident in crossing--Erie canal--Villages and grog-shops--Trenton falls--Ithaca falls--Taghcanic falls--Rochester--canal aqueduct--Genesee falls--Sam Patch's last leap--flouring mills--Lockport--double canal locks--deep cut--arrival at Buffalo. Page, 13 CHAPTER II. The city of Buffalo--steamboat on the Niagara river--Fort Erie--Black Rock--visit to Niagara falls--Canada shore--Manchester--State of New-York--emigration--return to Buffalo--different routes to the West--passage in steamboat--Cleaveland--Maumee--Monroe--number of emigrants--vessels on the lake--Detroit--the Canada shore--ferry boats. 25 CHAPTER III. Travelling by stage to the mouth of St. Joseph river--miry roads--Ann Arbor--Upsilanti--oak openings--prairies and woodland--Michigan, level, clear water, but not pure---Jackson--Marshall--Gull lake and prairie--Kalamazoo river--Bronson--Pawpaw river--St. Joseph village--lake Michigan--misfortune of an emigrant--crossing the lake--Michigan city--stage road on the beach. 35 CHAPTER IV. Chicago, a general description thereof--Pottawattomie tribe of Indians, their appearance and actions--the land back of Chicago--the lakes and their original outlet through the Illinois river--character of the inhabitants of Chicago--house rent and provisions. 43 CHAPTER V. Trip to Fox river--fellow travellers--river Oplane--Du Page river and Naper's settlement--big and little woods--pleasant settlement of emigrants--Fox river--upper house--lost in a prairie at night--log house--travelling towards Rock river--gravel hills--Walker's grove. 51 CHAPTER VI. General description of the north part of Illinois--various kinds of trees--prairies--excellent coal--government grant of land--unsurveyed land settled upon--pre-emption right--not subject to fever and ague--wild game--prairie wolves and mode of killing them--prairie rattle snakes, blackbirds and squirrels--manner of judging of a new country--anecdote of a Vermont emigrant--New-Hampshire emigrant--statements of settlers and landholders not always to be credited. 57 CHAPTER VII. Holderman's Grove--Ottawa--junction of Fox and Illinois rivers--Hennipen--Princeton--present and past situation of an emigrant--massacre of Elijah Philips by the Indians, and the fortunate escape of his companions. 66 CHAPTER VIII. Peoria--beauty of the surrounding country--fever and ague--scholars studying aloud in school--stages from Peoria--anecdote of a tavern keeper--Illinois river--passage down it in a steamboat--narrow lakes--high bluffs--Pekin--Beardstown--Naples--arrival at upper Alton. 74 CHAPTER IX. General description of the state of Illinois--streams skirted with timber--more than half prairie--a level State--generally rich soil--American bottom--military bounty lands--beautiful region of Sangamon river--the best tracts of land in the State--more good land than any other State--cause of the existence of prairies--country once inhabited by a civilized race anterior to the Indians--its rivers, Kankakee, Oplane, Du Page, Fox, Illinois, Rock, Spoon, Kaskaskia, Wabash, &c.--lead mines--productions--milk-sickness--chief towns--schools, &c. 79 CHAPTER X. Burning of the prairies--backwoodsmen--society--meeting-houses and school-houses--what kind of goods an emigrant ought to take with him--cheapness of provisions--manner of commencing a settlement--ploughing the prairies--guarding the improvements against the prairie fires--junction of the Missouri with the Mississippi--arrival at St. Louis--a description of the town--steam ferry boat. 92 CHAPTER XI. General description of the state of Missouri--south part generally barren, or wet and unhealthy--soil not muddy--prairie on the Mississippi--banks of the Missouri--large prairies destitute of wood and water--productions--prairie blossoms--wild animals, snakes, &c.--dryness and purity of the atmosphere--diseases--mildness of the winter--lead mines and minerals--chief towns. 99 CHAPTER XII. Voyage down the Mississippi in a steamboat--high bluffs--screw auger grist mills--shot towers--curiosities--dangers of the Mississippi navigation--narrow escape--run aground on a sand bar--mouth of the Ohio--cargo of the boat--amusements on board--history of one of the ladies--"Queen of the Nile"--description of the steamboat--price of passage--wooding the boat--ludicrous fracas on board--noise of the boats, &c.--peculiarities of expression of the western people--names of money. 107 CHAPTER XIII. Independent frankness of the western people--eastern people--towns on the river--great earthquake at New Madrid--bluffs on the river--woodcutters--serpentine course of the Mississippi--negro slaves on board--one died of the cholera--benefit of steamboat navigation--flat boats still in use. 119 CHAPTER XIV. Arrival at Natchez--description of the city--starts for Texas with another traveller--cotton plantations--description of the cotton plant--passage through the great Mississippi swamp--cypress knees, water and mud--Tensaw river--overtaken by night in the swamp--gloomy situation--lake Lovelace--planter's house on Indian mound--mildness of the weather--good accommodations--travelling in a right spirit--anecdote of a testy traveller. 125 CHAPTER XV. Outlet of the lake--Washita river--Harrisonburg--pine woods--description of a planter--Red River rightly named--changes at its mouth--arrival at Alexandria and description of the place--race-course and horses--death of a gambler--fruit trees and vegetables--moschetoes. 134 CHAPTER XVI. Bayou Rapide--fine cotton plantations--stream running in opposite directions--accompanied by another traveller--pine woods--planter's house--price of meals, &c.--Spanish moss--bottom land covered with dense forest--pine woods--the widow's house--manner of lodging travellers--inquisitiveness of the people--emigrants to Texas--Sabine river. 139 CHAPTER XVII. Arrival in Texas--oak openings and prairies--plantations of corn and cotton--St. Augustine--arrival at Nacogdoches--its grotesque appearance--Indian trade in deer pelts--Galveston bay and Texas land company--four leagues of land for a dog--pine woods--Indian mounds--mounds in Ohio, Missouri and Illinois--Monastery near a mound--their origin and use--Neches river--new made bridge. 149 CHAPTER XVIII. Leave the pine woods--wet prairie--Trinity river--planter's house--death of an emigrant's wife--perplexities of emigration--an emigrant lost his money--breach of trust in a hired man--beautiful prairies--muddy streams--red cedar--petrified wood--mode of grinding corn--living from hand to mouth--beautiful prospect--Indians on horseback--massacre of twenty Polanders--muddy swamp--Brazos river--Spanish trader--Indians more friendly to Americans than Spaniards--prairie country--Cole's settlement--live oak--Colorado river. 160 CHAPTER XIX. GENERAL VIEW OF TEXAS--herds of buffalo and wild horses--mustangs, manner of catching--seacoast flat--Galveston bay and Texas land company--burning of the prairies--fine grazing country--wildgame--deer-hunting--shooting deer in the night--productions of the soil--list of forest trees--Spanish moss--health of the country and climate. 169 CHAPTER XX. Rivers of Texas--seacoast--mill-seats--land grants--number of inhabitants--exports--inhabitants indolent--cheapness of land and manner of obtaining it--reptiles and animals--panther--flies--moschetoes--Indian tribes--water too warm. 182 CHAPTER XXI. Towns in Texas--Spanish villages--Mexican garrisons--Texas--mechanics--Texas and Cohahuila united--courts of law--professional men--unlawful punishments--salt lake--negroes indented--boundaries of Texas--general appearance of the country--rainy season--roads and carriages--emigration. 196 CHAPTER XXII. Emigrants unhappy--Mexican republic unsettled--Col. Austin--imprisonment--Texians slandered--healthy portions of the country--what an emigrant ought to take with him--price of stock--mail routes--currency--best spot in Texas--emigrant puzzled--how property may be acquired. 204 CHAPTER XXIII. Arrival at San Felipe--billiard room--gambler shot--bloody affray about a lady--ten men to one woman in the country--arrival at Columbia and Bell's landing--started down river in a canoe--Brazoria--went on board a vessel--hunting excursion of the mate--Brazos river--Velasco--sandy beach. 213 CHAPTER XXIV. Passed over the bar and left Texas--reasons for emigrating in the fall--means for going to Texas--speculation--passengers on board--sea sickness--vessel run aground--Mississippi steam tow-boats--sugar plantations and negroes--making sugar. 222 CHAPTER XXV. City of New-Orleans--vessels in port--muddy streets and filthy gutters--houses of dissipation--character of the inhabitants--resort of knaves and vagabonds--ship yards--canal and railroad--no wharves. 228 CHAPTER XXVI. Start down the river--nunnery--battle-ground--negro slavery--the situation of the negroes--general views on the subject. 235 CHAPTER XXVII. GENERAL DESCRIPTION of the MISSISSIPPI RIVER--its source--its tributaries--Wisconsin and Illinois--Missouri, its source and tributaries--gates of the Rocky mountains--Ohio river, its general character and appearance--White, Arkansas and Red rivers--outlets of the Mississippi--falls of St. Anthony--Dacota Indian woman--river banks--width of the stream and depth of water--Mississippi swamp--serpentine course--color of the waters--the most interesting river in the world. 246 CHAPTER XXVIII. Sail for Boston--sea voyage disagreeable to a landsman--change of scenery--Chatham, Boston--arrival at home. 262 CHAPTER XXIX. RETROSPECTIVE GLANCE at the GREAT MISSISSIPPI VALLEY--character, appearance and natural productions--conclusion. 266 APPENDIX. MICHIGAN, 285--population, 285--face of the country, 286--Wayne county, 292--Monroe county, 294--Washtenaw county, 295--Macomb county, 297--Oakland county, 299--St. Clair county, 301--St. Joseph county, 302--Cass county, 304--Berrien county, 306--Lapeer and Saginaw counties, 308--Shiawassee county, 309--Calhoun county, 309--Kalamazoo county, 310--Branch and Hillsdale counties, 311--Lenawee county, 312--Barry, Eaton and Ingham counties on grand river, 312. TEXIAN REVOLUTION. FIRST CAMPAIGN. Introductory remarks, 323--causes of the war, 324--parallel case, 326--Col. Austin released and sent to Texas, 329--capture of the armed schooner Correo, 330--first battle on land at Gonzales, 331--capture of Goliad, 333--Col. Milam, 335--army marched towards San Antonio, 339--San Antonio besieged, 340--Commissioners to the United States appointed, 340--San Antonio stormed and taken, 341--the brave Col. Milam killed, and sketch of his life, 342. Gen. Mexia's expedition, 345--28 men shot at Tampico, 347--volunteers from the United States--Col. Stanley's regiment, 348--General Council convened, and citizens of Goliad make a declaration of independence, 349--state of affairs in Mexico, decree of Santa Anna, 351--embargo laid, 352--Indians called to aid Santa Anna, 353--flag of Texas, 354--post-offices and mail routes, 354--Mexicans preparing for another campaign, 355--situation of Texas, 356. SECOND CAMPAIGN. The Mexican army arrive in Texas, commanded by Santa Anna in person, 358--Situation of San Antonio, 359--capture and massacre of Col. Johnson's party, 360--second attack upon the fort, 361--the fort attacked at midnight, taken and the garrison all slain, 362--Gen. Cos, 365--Declaration of Independence, 366--officers of the government, 368--Goliad abandoned, and Col. Fanning party attacked in the prairie, 369--Col. Fanning surrenders, and his party massacred, 370. Gen. Houston retreats to the Brazos, 371--the inhabitants become alarmed and flee, 371--massacre at Copano, 372--skirmish at sea, 372--Gen. Gaines marches to the frontier of Texas, 372--Indians on the western prairies, 373--CAPTURE OF SANTA ANNA, 375--the Independence of Texas certain, 378--Texian Independence agitated in U.S. Congress, 378--Table of the Chief Towns in Texas and distances from San Felipe, 380. ADVERTISEMENT. The public approbation of this work, so fully manifested by a rapid and entire sale of the first edition, has induced the publishers to issue another, much enlarged and improved edition. The broad expanse of country, stretching from the Alleghany mountains to the Pacific ocean, much of which is unsurveyed, unsettled and unexplored, is an interesting portion of the United States. It is believed, there are two hundred million acres of public lands yet unsurveyed in Wisconsin Territory--fifty millions in Michigan--and 800 millions in Missouri, Mississippi, and Arkansas. To all these, are to be added the illimitable tracts, hardly yet trodden by the foot of civilized man, which lie in the unpeopled immensity, on both sides of the rocky mountains. The value of this vast domain, at the minimum government price, defies all calculation. What a source of revenue for the present and the future! But when the boundless resources that now lie hidden in its hills and mountains shall have become developed--when the vast plains shall have been settled--and towns, villages and farm houses arise in the lonely wilderness, and the teeming soil be cultivated--who then will be able to estimate the value of this great territory of the West? In ten years, the West will have a majority in the United States Congress; in a century, a large portion of it will contain a population as dense, perhaps, as that of the Atlantic States. Public attention, within a few years, has been directed to this section of our country--emigration has received a new impulse--government lands are sought for with avidity, and the whole country is rapidly settling. To the emigrant, speculator, and indeed, the whole people of the United States as joint owners of the public domain, any book giving information upon this subject, must be acceptable and of real value. The publishers, therefore, anticipate a rapid sale of the present edition. TRIP TO THE WEST AND TEXAS. CHAPTER I. In September, 1834, I left Exeter, New-Hampshire, for the purpose of visiting the Western States and Texas. Although public attention had been for some time directed thither, by various published sketches and frequent emigration, yet so little was definitely known, that I was induced to travel through these sections of the country to learn their actual situation and condition. My object was not to visit the settled regions of the country, a full knowledge of which may be obtained from books, but to see some portion of the unknown and unsettled regions of the West and the South. My particular attention was, therefore, directed to Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Louisiana and Texas. But so rapidly are some portions of this new country settling; so constantly are new villages springing up in the wilderness; and so continually are improvements making, that history must continue to lag behind the reality. To keep any thing like an even pace with population, and the public constantly informed of the actual condition of the country, would require, like an almanac, an annual revision and publication of its history. I took passage on board the stage, through Brattleborough and Bennington, to Albany. About twelve years ago, I travelled over this route, and was gratified to find so many improvements in the villages, farms, and especially in the stage road, since I had travelled it before. In passing through Vermont, I found a new road had been made to avoid the high hills over which it formerly passed, so that now, I believe this is the easiest and safest route across the Green Mountains. Two opposition turnpikes were almost completed from Bennington to Troy--one entering at the upper, the other at the lower part of the city. The public have been badly accommodated in this quarter. The old road is rough, hilly and circuitous. One of the turnpikes would have been abundantly sufficient; but if Troy chooses to make two, the travelling public will not probably object. Opposition seems to be the order of the day; and although it has caused much improvement in the ease and facility of travelling, yet it is often troublesome and annoying. As we drove up to the door of the stage house in Albany, an agent of one of the steamboats, thrust in his head and gave us a handbill of a boat--enquired if we were going down the river, and without waiting for an answer, said it was a good boat, swift, low pressure engine, start at nine in the morning, fare to New-York city only _fifty cents_. In the bar-room, we had to pass through the same ceremony with the agent of another boat; and I had to take a third edition in the street next morning. The Erie canal terminates in a large basin, immediately on the banks of the Hudson river, so that the freight of the canal boats can be conveniently transferred to the river boats. Western travellers can here take passage on board the canal boat, or go on the railroad to Schenectady and take a boat there. But as the canal is twice the distance of the railroad, travellers generally choose the latter. Travellers from the North, when accompanied by their families and baggage, usually stop at Troy, and take a canal boat there, for the West. The ancient city of Albany has the appearance of much business and wealth; and some portions of it are pleasant, especially in the region of the State House and other public buildings. From the river, the ground rapidly rises, so that the city stands upon the side of a hill, and makes a fine appearance, when viewed from the opposite shore. The railroad commences in State street, a short distance below the State House yard; and so steep is the ascent, that the cars are drawn for a mile by horses. Here a steam engine was hitched on, and we started off at a rapid rate. The distance from Albany to Schenectady is sixteen miles, and we travelled it over in less than an hour. Here we were assailed by the agents and captains of the canal boats, and those who could make the most noise and bustle, and obtain the most passengers, were the best fellows. There are three kinds of boats in general use on the canal. The Packet boats, drawn by three horses, and go at the rate of about five miles an hour. They are fitted up in good style, intended exclusively for passengers and their baggage--having elegant cabins, drawing-rooms, berths, &c. Fare, five cents a mile and found. The Line boats--designed for freight and passengers also. These are drawn by two horses, and travel at the rate of two and a half or three miles an hour. The fare is one cent a mile for passage only; and one and a half cents addition per mile, for board. Families travelling to the West, generally take the Line boats. They can travel much cheaper than in any other mode. They furnish their own provisions, and have the privilege of cooking on board the boat. Provisions are plenty and cheap, and can be bought at almost every stopping place, along the whole line of the canal. And the Scows, used exclusively for grain, flour, lumber, &c., which are employed by the farmers to carry their own produce to market. These are drawn by two horses; and many of them have two sets of horses, and stalls made on board to keep one set, while the other draws the boat; and at regular intervals, relieve each other. By this means, they keep the boat continually going, night and day. The Packet boats ply between the large towns on the canal, from Schenectady to Utica; from Utica to Rochester, &c., so that a traveller, in going through the whole route, must shift his baggage and himself from one boat to another, three or four times. But the Line boats run the whole length of the canal, from Albany or Troy to Buffalo.--These boats are furnished with horses by a company, who have them stationed at regular intervals of about twelve miles the whole distance. All the boats, at night, carry two brilliant lights in the bow, so as to enable the helmsman to steer, and avoid other boats when they meet. I took passage on board one of the Troy and Erie line. I found good accommodations, and good company. In the forward part of the boat, were the gentlemen's and ladies' cabins; in the stern, the dining and cook rooms; and in the centre the place for freight. It was about seventy feet long, and twelve or fourteen feet in width. Three other passengers, besides myself, went the whole route; a lady and her daughter from Pennsylvania, and a Dr. Warren of Rhode Island; and way-passengers were continually coming aboard, and leaving the boat, at our several stopping places. I found travelling on the canal pleasant, and in fine weather, delightful. We were continually passing villages, farms, locks, viaducts, or boats; and these, with the company aboard, afforded an agreeable variety. When I wished for exercise, I would jump ashore, and take a walk along the hard trod tow-path. I was really surprised to find so many boats on the canal. We met them almost every mile, and sometimes, three or four together. The Line boats are owned by companies; and the captain told me that forty-five boats belonged to his line. When one happens to run aground, which is sometimes the case, when deeply laden and the water low, it is of course, in the centre of the canal; so that boats cannot pass on either side; in such an event, twenty or thirty boats will be congregated in a few hours. The boats pass each other on the left hand side, and without trouble or delay. The whole process of passing belongs to the outside boat; or the one the farthest from the tow-path. All the inside boat has to do, is to steer near the tow-path, and keep on as usual. The outside boat hauls one way, and their horses the other, and lets the tow-rope slack, so that the inside horses and boat can pass over it, between them. The tow-path sometimes changes from one side to the other of the canal; and the horses are transferred by means of a bridge. They pass underneath the bridge, and turn up on to it the further side; so as to keep the tow-rope clear of it. The riders display their horsemanship by whipping over these bridges at full speed. Accidents, however, sometimes occur. One day, the Packet boat passed us, a short distance from a tow-path bridge; and as the horses were going at full speed across it, the forward one slipped, fell over the railing, and drew the others after him. The rider saved himself by leaping from the horse to the bridge. The two forward horses fell into the water, and came out uninjured; but the rear one fell across the edge of the tow-path and was killed on the spot. The Erie canal is a great and noble work; and has gained a niche in the temple of fame, for its great founder. It has been of incalculable benefit to New-York, and the rising States in the West; and must continue to be, in all time to come. Now it is completed, and in successful operation, men may cease to wonder; but so improbable was it generally thought to be, to make such a long line of canal, on a route so difficult and expensive, that an intelligent gentleman informed me, when he was asked by one of the surveyors, if he should not admire to see boats passing before his door; emphatically replied, if life were guaranteed till that event, he would then willingly resign it. A few years only passed, before the event did happen, but he is not yet _quite_ willing to die. It was indeed a great undertaking. None but a man of a gigantic mind, of steady purpose and firm resolution, could have conceived, planned and executed it. It all along bears the marks of so much labor and expense, that a common mind would have been deterred from making the attempt. The canal passes over an extent of country much more rough, broken and hilly than I had supposed. Long levels of canal are found to be sure; but they are made at great expense, by filling up deep gullies, winding round the side of hills, or deep cuts through them; and by walling up the side of streams, or aqueducts over them. Every few miles, the canal passes through a village. Many of these have sprung into existence, since the completion of the canal; and others have much increased in size, wealth and beauty. They are all _ornamented_ with grog-shops, containing, among other miscellaneous matter, an abundant supply of "boat-stores." New-York has a great variety of romantic scenery. It has more beautiful and stupendous water-falls than any other State in the Union; and the lover of nature's choicest works might very pleasantly spend months in viewing them. Trenton Falls, on the West Canada Creek, a large stream that empties into the Mohawk, are situated about twenty-four miles above its mouth. They consist of several _chutes_ for the distance of two miles, commencing near Black river road, and terminating at Conrad's mills. The upper fall is about twenty feet; and the descent above, for two miles, is not less than sixty feet. The water, here compressed into a narrow space, is received into a large basin, rolls down a precipitous ravine a hundred feet in depth, and presents to the eye the most romantic peculiarities.--Some of the topmost crags overhanging the stream; and here and there, a hardy tree, having gained a foot-hold in the crevices of the rock, throws its branches athwart the abyss. There are six distinct falls. The next below, are two pitches, called the Cascades; where the water falls eighteen feet--the Mill Dam Fall, of thirteen feet. The High Falls, consisting of three pitches--one of forty-eight, the second of eleven, and the third, of thirty-seven feet--Sherman's Falls, of thirty-five feet. The last fall is at Conrad's mills, and is only six feet; but the descent of water, from the top of the upper fall to the lower one, is three hundred and eighty-seven feet--and the whole forms as wild and romantic a scene as the enthusiastic lover of nature's most eccentric works could desire. Organic remains have been found in the ravine in abundance, and Mr. Sherman has a cabinet of them, which are exhibited to the curious. Ithaca Falls are situated at the head of Cayuga Lake. The high fall of Fall river is the first that strikes the eye, in going from the steamboat landing to the village, and is one hundred and sixteen feet in height. Two immense piles of rocks enclose the stream. On the right hand high up the bluff, a mill-race is seen winding around a point in the bank, suspended in mid air; and sometimes an adventurous visitor, may be seen cautiously wending his way along the dizzy path on the verge of the abyss. The mill-race was built, by letting a man down over the giddy steep by a rope fastened to a tree above, who dug holes in the bluff, in which to fasten its principal supports. A short distance from this, up the rocky bed of the creek, is another splendid fall--not so high as the first, but more wild and beautiful. Above these, are three more falls, the upper one of which is the highest fall of water of any, and is the most grand and imposing. These four falls have a descent of four hundred and thirty-eight feet in the short distance of a mile, and present to the eye as great a variety of the romantic and beautiful in nature, as earth affords. There are Cascadilla, Six Mile Creek, Buttermilk Creek, &c. &c. many romantic scenes and splendid falls; but it would interfere with the design of this work to stop to describe them. I cannot, however, leave the high falls on Taghcanic Creek without a passing notice. They are eight miles from Ithaca, near a landing place called Goodwin's point; and are two hundred and thirty-eight feet perpendicular! Who shall attempt to describe such a magnificent exhibition as this; or the effect it produces on the mind! This is said to be the favorite resort of parties of pleasure and lovers of the picturesque. And who, but the real invalid, would ignobly spend his time at Saratoga, when scenes like these await him in the interior of New-York. After passing many fine villages, we at last arrived at the city of Rochester. It is indeed, a large and flourishing city. It is situated on both sides of the Genesee river, is well built, mostly of brick, and contains over thirteen thousand inhabitants. Near the upper part of the city, the canal crosses the river, by a splendid aqueduct of red free-stone, eight hundred and four feet in length, having eleven arches, and elevated fourteen feet above the common level of the water. While the boat stopped, I went down the river to see the great falls. They are about eighty rods below where the canal crosses, and are ninety-seven feet perpendicular. Here _Sam Patch_ made his last leap in the autumn of 1829. In the centre of the river, and at the verge of the precipice over which the water falls, is a ledge of rocks, called Table Rock, about six or seven feet in height above the water. On this Table Rock, a scaffold was erected, about twenty-five feet high, so that from the top of the scaffold to the bottom of the falls, the perpendicular height was one hundred and twenty-five feet. From this giddy height, Sam Patch made his "last jump," in the presence of a vast multitude of people, who had assembled to witness this daring feat, and, as it proved, fatal leap. Sam never rose from the boiling flood below; but his body was carried by the current to the mouth of the river at the lake, and was there found, the next spring. Who will be the biographer of _Sam Patch_? What a pity it is some phrenologist had not examined his head. He must have had a tremendous _jumping bump_. For myself, I could not stand on the dizzy brink of the river, and look down into the awful chasm below, with any tolerable degree of composure. These things, however, much depend upon practice. A sailor would have thought nothing of standing on the most projecting rock; or of walking along the highest precipice. In 1811, the site of Rochester was a wilderness; now it is a large city. Its great staple of trade is flour. It contains eleven flouring mills with fifty-three run of stones; and can grind twelve thousand bushels of wheat in twenty-four hours. After travelling from this place sixty-three miles, we found ourselves at Lockport, on the _mountain ridge_. At this place, the canal has a double row of locks adjacent to each other; five for ascending, and five for descending; each twelve feet deep, making the ascent sixty feet. This is the most admirable work of the whole canal. Between the two rows of locks, are stone steps, guarded on each side by iron railings. In 1821, there were here but two houses; now, it contains four hundred, and is a pleasant village. Passengers for Niagara Falls, leave the canal here, as they are as near them, at this place, as they would be at Buffalo. After travelling nineteen miles, the first three of which, was through a deep cut of limestone, from twenty to thirty feet in depth, we came in full view of the majestic Niagara river. On the margin of this stream, the canal passes by the village of Black Rock, to its termination at the city of Buffalo. CHAPTER II. The city of Buffalo is beautifully situated on lake Erie, near its outlet; and possesses the advantages of a lake and canal navigation. It is built chiefly of brick, containing many elegant buildings, and has ten or twelve thousand inhabitants. In the harbor lay many vessels, steamboats and canal boats, and it exhibited all the show, stir and bustle of a maritime city. From this place, you have a fine view of the lake, Canada shore, and the surrounding country. I was, at this time, only twenty-three miles from the celebrated Falls of Niagara, and I could not pass so near without going to view them. After spending a day in Buffalo, I took a steamboat down Niagara river, to visit the falls. On the Canada side, you have a view of the small village of Waterloo, near which, are the ruins of fort Erie, the theatre of several severe battles during the late war. On the American side, three miles below Buffalo, is Black Rock, a pleasant village, having much romantic scenery around it. Niagara river, above the falls, is of various breadths, from a mile and a half, to three or four miles. After passing Grand island, I beheld the spray arising like a cloud, from the falls; and could hear the roaring of the water. I landed from the boat, about two miles above them on the American side, and took a stage. Immediately on alighting at the hotel, I walked down to the river, and beheld for the first time, the celebrated Falls of Niagara. Such a vast body of water, falling into so deep a chasm, with a noise like thunder, and with such power that it shakes the ground on which you stand, strikes one with wonder and awe! One is inclined to stand still, and gaze in silence. Other falls and deep chasms I had seen; but this presented itself on such a gigantic scale, and so much out of proportion to other objects of the kind, that it appeared to my unpractised eye incomprehensible. Other and abler pens have given the world many minute descriptions of these falls; and were it otherwise, I have not the vanity to suppose any description I could give would enable any one to form a full and just conception of them. Nature has here laid out her work upon a large scale, and with a master hand. A mighty river, the outpourings of the great lakes above, tumbling rapidly along for a mile over its rocky bed, here leaps quietly down one hundred and sixty feet into the awful chasm below. Above the falls, the banks slope gently down to the water's edge; so that you can stand on the brink of the precipice, and put your foot into the water where it rolls over it--below, the bank immediately rises, and forms a chasm three hundred feet in depth. Eight or ten rods below the falls, is the passage down to the ferry; composed, most of the way, of enclosed wooden steps; and the remainder, of steps made in the rocky cliff. I went down these steps, crossed over in the boat, tossed to and fro by the boiling, raging flood; and liberally sprinkled with the spray of the falls. On the Canada side, the bank is not perpendicular, so that a zigzag road has been made for passengers to travel up and down it. On this side, is the Table Rock, near the falls; and here you have the best view of them. At this spot a flight of steps lead to the bottom; and from this point a person can go one hundred and fifty-three feet under the sheet of water. Dresses and a guide are furnished to those who have the curiosity to enter. On my return to the American side, I walked over the bridge to Bath island, and from that to Goat island. This last island contains perhaps twelve acres, is covered with a fine growth of wood, has a walk near the water, all around it, and benches and summer house to rest the weary traveller. It divides the falls, and is probably twenty rods wide on the cliff, over which the water pitches. At the foot of this island, a circular enclosed stairway has been built by N. Biddle, Esq. President of the U.S. Bank, by which a person can descend down the cliff, between the two sheets of water. And here it was that Sam Patch leaped one hundred and eighteen feet from a platform, made by ladders. The trees on the island are covered with names; and the register at the hotel not only contains names, but sentiments also. I spent an evening very pleasantly in conning them over. On the Canada side there are one large hotel and some few dwelling houses; on the American side, are two large hotels, and a fine village, called Manchester. After spending two days at the falls, I took a seat in the stage for Buffalo. New-York, I believe, possesses more of the sublime and beautiful, than all the remainder of the United States. It has its mountains, lakes, springs, rivers, water-falls, canals, railroads and edifices.--Other States can shew some of these, in a greater or less degree; but as a whole, New-York must bear the palm. Its resources are vast--it is a nation of itself. But notwithstanding its attractive scenery and rich lands, the "western fever" rages here as violent as on the sterile hills of New-Hampshire. I found more families from New-York at the West and moving thither, than from all the New-England States. They, too, seek a better country; and some would undoubtedly be discontented if they lived in paradise. At Detroit, I saw a man who said he had just made a purchase of a tract of land near Pontiac, about thirty miles distant in a northwest direction. He lived near Rochester, had a fine farm, raised from five hundred to one thousand bushels of wheat a year; a ready market and the average price one dollar a bushel; clear of debt, and growing rich; but the lands were cheap at the West, so he sold his farm, and was moving into the wilderness! The man was about sixty years of age: so if he has good luck, by the time he gets a farm well cleared, a good house and improvements, he will be too old to enjoy earthly possessions. But just the same feeling is manifested in Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana. And even in Illinois itself, some I found, seeking a better country farther west! Persons travelling to Illinois, or farther west, can take passage in a vessel or steamboat from Buffalo to Chicago. The distance by water is one thousand miles; for they must go through lake Erie, St. Clair, Huron and lake Michigan. The distance by land is not so far by one half; but the water passage is the cheapest, attended with less hardship, and much the best way to convey goods. There are two other routes to Chicago. Take a steamboat at Buffalo for Monroe, in Michigan Territory; and from thence, there is a good stage route, through Tecumseh, Niles, Michigan city, and along the south end of the lake Michigan to Chicago--or take a steamboat to Detroit; from thence the stage to the mouth of St. Joseph, and cross the lake in a schooner to Chicago. My object was to see something of Michigan; so I took passage in a steamboat for Detroit. On board this boat, there were probably two hundred passengers; besides a number of horses and oxen, wagons, household furniture and baggage.--Most of them were emigrants, chiefly destined to some part of Michigan. The cabin passage is eight dollars--deck three dollars. Of the whole number not more than ten took the cabin passage. We stopped at Portland, Erie, Ashtabula, Fairport, Cleaveland and Sandusky, and arrived at Detroit in two days--distance three hundred and five miles. Cleaveland is the most important place on the south shore of lake Erie. The Ohio canal here enters the lake, so that a person can go down this canal into the Ohio river; and from thence take steamboat conveyance to the western States. It is quite a large town; containing five thousand inhabitants, and has three spacious houses for public worship, a seamen's chapel, and two banks. There are three newspapers published here, and it shows all the stir and bustle of business and trade. This place has rapidly increased within a few years: and if it continues to improve in the same ratio, it will soon take its station alongside of Buffalo and Cincinnati. Its inhabitants are very spirited and enterprising. They have contributed, as I am informed, fifteen thousand dollars for the purpose of levelling down some of the high bluffs between the village and harbor, and grading the streets. The flood of emigration, constantly pouring onward, to the far West, is immense. In the year 1833, about sixty thousand emigrants left Buffalo, to go to the West by water; and in 1834, not less than eighty thousand there embarked, besides those who took passage from other ports. No calculation can be made, of the number that have passed along the south shore of the lake by land; but, I was informed, a gentleman counted two hundred and fifty wagons in one day! The western world is all alive. The lakes, the streams, the prairies, and forests, are all teeming with life, and exhibit all the noise and bustle of human industry and enterprise. In 1825 there were but one steamboat and a few small schooners on lake Erie; now there are thirty steamboats, and one hundred and fifty schooners and two large brigs! And the birds and beasts of the forest are continually alarmed at the sight of human habitations and villages, so suddenly arising, within their own exclusive haunts and pleasure grounds! Monroe, in Michigan, is pleasantly situated on the river Raisin, opposite to Frenchtown, and is six miles from its mouth. It is forty miles, by water, south of Detroit, and is the county seat for Monroe county, has a court house, jail, land office, three hotels, twenty-six stores, and probably two thousand inhabitants. It is situated in a fertile district, and has a number of mills and distilleries in its vicinity. A beautiful large steamboat, called the Monroe, was built here, the past season, and made its first trip down the lake while I was at Buffalo. As this town is nearer on a direct line from Buffalo to the West than Detroit, it will shortly become the great thoroughfare of travel to the western country. A new town has recently been laid out, on the north bank of the Maumee river. It takes the name of the river; and is situated on a plat of table land elevated forty feet above the stream, at the foot of the falls, and ten miles from lake Erie. The river is deep and navigable for all vessels sailing on the lake. The falls are about thirty feet, and afford an immense water power--equal to that of Lowell. It has now fifty dwelling houses, three stores, one tavern, a saw and grist mill; and preparations are making to erect a large number of buildings the ensuing season, among which are four taverns. Two doctors are already settled here; and a limb of the law was on the track to join them. A glance at the map will at once show its favorable location, for a large and flourishing town. The Wabash and Erie canal, and the Cincinnati, Dayton and Erie canal, will both terminate at this place. It is situated in the disputed territory, claimed by both Ohio and Michigan; but if it should prove to be healthy, it will soon take rank with Cleaveland and Detroit. It is thirty miles south of Monroe; and about the same distance west of Lower Sandusky. A large steamboat is now building here, to run on the lake. On the opposite side of the river, and about a mile above, is the village of Perrysburg, of a hundred houses and twelve stores; but as its site is low, and on the shoal side of the river, its location is not therefore so favorable as that of Maumee. There are large tracts of flat land, both to the east and west of this place, covered with a heavy growth of timber. Detroit is on the river, twenty-five miles above lake Erie, and seven below lake St. Clair. The river is about a mile wide, and the current sets down at the rate of from two to three miles an hour. It contains about three thousand inhabitants; many of whom are French and some negroes and Indians. Much business is done here; and it will probably be one of the most important frontier towns; as it possesses a safe harbor and steamboat navigation to Buffalo, Michilimackinac, Green Bay, Chicago, &c. It is well laid out, and has some fine streets and buildings. Its public buildings are a court house, jail, academy, council house, two banks; a Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Methodist, Baptist and Catholic churches; arsenal, magazine and commissary store house. The streets near the water are dirty, generally having mean buildings, rather too many grog shops among them, and a good deal too much noise and dissipation. The taverns are not generally under the best regulations, although they were crowded to overflowing. I stopped at the steamboat hotel, and I thought enough grog was sold at that bar to satisfy any reasonable demand for the whole village.--When the bell rang for dinner, I hardly knew what it meant. All in and about the house jumped and run as if the house had been on fire; and I thought that to have been the case. I followed the multitude, and found they were only going into the hall to dinner. It was a rough and tumble game at knife and fork--and whoever got seated first, and obtained the best portion of dinner, was the best fellow. Those who came after, must take care of themselves the best way they could; and were not always able to obtain a very abundant supply. At night, I was obliged to sleep in a small room, having three beds in it, take a companion and a dirty bed. In travelling, I am always disposed to make the best of every thing, and complain of nothing if it can be avoided. And in starting on this journey, I was aware that I might suffer some hardships and inconveniences; and I had determined to bear with patience every thing that was bearable; but I had not expected to be put to the test in the old settled town of Detroit. The house is large enough, and servants enough, but there was a plentiful lack of decent accommodations, in and about it. The upper streets make a fine appearance, and are pleasant and ornamented with some fine buildings. Two steam ferry boats ply constantly between this, and a small village called Sandwich, on the Canada side of the river. On a pleasant afternoon, I crossed the river, and walked three or four miles on the pleasant Canada shore. From this position, Detroit shows to advantage. Detroit has suffered much by disease. Fevers, ague and cholera, swept off its hundreds. But it is difficult to discover any other cause for the great number of deaths, than the filthiness of the place, and the dissipation and exposure of many of its inhabitants. It needs reform; and I was informed that the subject had arrested the attention of its best citizens, and they had commenced the work in good earnest. CHAPTER III. After spending two days at Detroit, I took the stage for the mouth of St. Joseph river, on lake Michigan--fare $9,50. The old road leads down the river, five or six miles, and then inclines to the right into the interior. The first forty miles is a level, heavily timbered country; a deep, clayey soil, and a most execrable road. Sometimes the coach became fast stuck in the deep sloughs; and we had to get out the best way we could, and help dig it out. At others, we found logs laid across the road for some distance, and the coach jolted so violently over them, that it was impossible to keep our seat. We started early in the morning from Detroit, and at ten miles stopped at a decent hotel to breakfast. It was a framed house, and of sufficient size for a common country tavern. In this day's travel, we found some good dwellings, and one brick hotel. Late at night, "wearied and worn," we arrived at Ann Arbor, a flourishing little village on Huron river, which empties into the head of lake Erie, and is a large clear mill stream. The tavern house is a large, three story building, finished and painted. A long block of buildings for stores, a number of mills on the stream, and a few other buildings, complete the village. In the morning we crossed the river, on a very good bridge, and half a mile further, entered the upper village of Ann Arbor, much larger than the lower one; having two taverns, a number of stores, dwelling houses, and a court house. It is the seat of justice for Washtenaw county. Ten miles below this, on the Huron river, is situated Upsilanti, a pleasant village. The turnpike road from Detroit to Chicago passes through it; on which a stage runs, carrying the U.S. mail. Soon after leaving this village, we came to the "oak openings." There are three kinds of land in the western country--prairie land, entirely destitute of timber, and covered with grass; oak openings, land thinly covered with timber, like a northern apple orchard; and the timber land, having a dense forest of trees. All these diversities of appearance, we found from Detroit to the mouth of the St. Joseph; although the bur and white oak openings seemed to predominate. Michigan is a level country; there are no mountains in it. It is gently undulating, for the most part; sometimes, too level and wet. It is abundantly watered and timbered, and a great deal of excellent timber. I wish I could say as much of the quality of the water. The rivers, little lakes, (and there are many of them,) streams, springs, and wells, contain clear, pellucid, transparent water. It is indeed, too clear to be agreeable to the eye; but it is all impregnated with lime, or iron, or copperas, or something disagreeable to the taste; and is in many places, very unhealthy. I do believe there is not a drop of pure, soft water, in all Michigan. I saw none and could hear of none; and I made much inquiry, examined every river, lake, or spring, that I passed, and the result was, I found no pure water that would wash with soap, or was pleasant to the palate. It contains much good land, many pleasant villages, fine situations, and is settling fast; but I cannot say that it is, generally, healthy. It is probable, earth does not afford more rich and beautiful prairies than are found on the route from Monroe to Michigan city. And there are fine cultivated farms, mills and villages, and scattered settlements, all along the southern part of the territory. But I did not find the ruddy face and vigorous step of the East. The meagre and pale visage, and shaking frame, spoke a language not to be mistaken. We passed Jackson, the seat of justice for Jackson county, near Grand river, and Marshall, the seat of justice for Calhoun county, on the bank of the Kalamazoo river, both flourishing villages. In this section of the country, mill seats are plenty, and there is an abundant supply of timber. At the outlet of Gull lake, I saw a well built mill, on as fine a privilege as any one could desire. At the lake, there was a dam, which raised the water four or five feet, and made an abundant supply in the driest season--and fifty rods below where the mill was erected, there was a good fall of water. Soon after leaving this mill, we came to Gull prairie. This was the first prairie of much extent that I had seen; and its elegant appearance afforded me not a little pleasure. On this prairie there is a small village, and a beautiful prospect around it. The roads had become so bad, that we left the stage coach, after two day's ride, and took a wagon, without any spring seats; and I found it so fatiguing to ride, that I often preferred walking. When we arrived at this little village, it was late in the evening, but we had still twelve miles to go that night. It was past midnight when we crossed the Kalamazoo river, at the rope ferry, and entered the town of Bronson. This is the seat of justice, or as the term is here, county seat, for Kalamazoo county. The land office, for the southern part of the territory, is also kept here. We found a large tavern house and good accommodations, a pleasant village, and pleasant people. Our route now lay through an undulating, open country for twenty miles, when we came to a house and mill on Pawpaw river where we "ate our breakfast for our dinner." We now crossed the stream, and travelled a new road, generally through timbered land, passed seven or eight small lakes, for twenty-eight miles before we came to a house. Here, we found two log houses adjoining each other. It had now become night, and at this place we were to stay till the next day. I went in, and asked the woman, if she could get us something to eat. She said, if we would accept of such fare as she had, she would try. When we went in to supper, I never was more agreeably surprised in my life. We found a table neatly set; and upon it, venison steaks, good warm wheat bread, good butter, wild honey in the white comb, and a good cup of tea--better fare than we had found in Michigan, and as good as could be obtained anywhere. Our accommodations at this log house in the woods, show what people may do if they choose. And I wish some tavern keepers of our large towns, might happen to call there, and learn a lesson which they seem too much disinclined to learn at home. Our bill was so moderate, we added a dollar to it, and hardly thought we had fully paid our hostess then. Twelve miles further, brought us to the river St. Joseph, about a mile above where it empties into the lake. The river here is thirty rods wide. We crossed it in a ferry boat, and after ascending a high bluff, we came in full view of lake Michigan and the St. Joseph village. This village is pleasantly situated on a high bluff, on the south side of the river, and facing the lake; and contains sixty or seventy houses, two taverns, some half dozen stores, two large warehouses, and a light house. One tavern, the stores, and a few dwelling houses, are built underneath the bluff, on the bank of the river. A steamboat plies between this place and Niles, fifty miles up the river, as it runs, but only twenty-five miles by land. Just above the village, is a steam saw mill, which does a good deal of business. This place carries on considerable trade with the interior; the staple of which is wheat. St. Joseph is very unhealthy. At the tavern, I found three persons sick, and one dangerously so. I called upon the doctor, and he was sick abed; I called upon the baker, and he was sick abed--and I passed by another house, where the whole family, consisting of a man, his wife, and five children, were all sick abed, and so completely helpless, that the neighbors had to take care of them! This is no fiction. The man's name is Emerson; from the State of New-York. Last spring he came on to this part of the country with his family and goods in a wagon. And when he came to Pawpaw river, where we breakfasted, he found no road direct to St. Joseph. He accordingly cut out the road that we had travelled to this place, and was the first who came through with a wagon, a distance of about fifty miles. Soon after his arrival, his eldest son, a promising youth of fifteen, accidentally was drowned in the river. The family, one by one, were taken sick; and now, all were sick and helpless. The man possessed great vigor of mind and body; had bought him a farm at some distance from the village on the road he had made, and commenced some improvements, and made great efforts to persevere and clear it up. But who can withstand the iron grasp of disease, or the "bold demands of death!" He beheld his family wasting away and to all appearance, hastening to the grave; and himself, as sick and helpless as they. A sad catastrophe this, in his prospect of wealth and bliss in the new world! A schooner, called the Philip, plies regularly between this, and Chicago across the lake; but I had to wait here three days before its return. I spent the time in traversing the woods and the lake shore. This lake is a clear, beautiful sheet of water, having a soft sandy shore, and surrounded by high sandy hills. The river makes a good harbor, but there is a sand bar at its mouth, on which there is not more than five or six feet of water. The average width of the lake is sixty miles. The distance from Detroit to St. Joseph is two hundred miles, and we had been five days and a half in travelling it. The road was as good as could be expected in a country so new, and so thinly inhabited. The land generally is good, and will support a dense population. The southern part of the territory is thought to contain the best land, and there are indeed some beautiful prairies. Prairie Round is among the most beautiful. It contains a number of thousand acres of high, level, and smooth land; and in the centre there are a hundred acres of higher land, covered with a beautiful growth of trees. The best part of Indiana is on the border of Michigan, and extending south, on the Wabash river. The southern part of the State contains a good deal of hilly, rocky and sandy land, unfit for cultivation. A territorial road has been laid out from Detroit to St. Joseph; and a survey of a railroad has been made, nearly on the line of the road, between the two places; but some time will elapse, before either are completed. Wild game is plenty; deer, ducks, bears, wolves and squirrels are in sufficient quantity to keep the hunter awake. Upon the whole, if good water and good health could be found, Michigan would be a very desirable country in which to reside. As soon as the vessel was ready to depart, I took passage in her. We sailed round the south end of the lake, and stopped at Michigan city, a village of twenty or thirty houses, and twelve stores, situated on the corner of Indiana, among the sand hills of the lake. A small stream here empties into the lake but affords no harbor for vessels. Some enterprising citizens have determined to make it a large town; but nature does not seem much to have seconded their efforts. It is forty miles from St. Joseph, and just the same distance from Chicago. The stage road, from Michigan city to Chicago, is, most of the way, on the sandy beach. CHAPTER IV. Chicago makes a fine appearance when viewed from the water. It has a light house, fort and barracks in which a garrison is kept, and many elegant buildings. It is regularly laid out, on the south side of Chicago river; the streets running parallel with it, and others crossing them at right angles. The harbor being too much exposed, a breakwater is building, so as to render it secure and safe for the shipping. The town is already compactly built, for more than a mile in length, and about half that distance in width; and there are a dozen houses on the north side of the river, with which it is connected by an elegant bridge. It has thirty-six stores, some of which are large and elegant, and built of brick; and seven large taverns, filled with guests to overflowing. It is now, about the size of Exeter, in New-Hampshire, and is rapidly increasing. Vessels and steamboats come here from Buffalo, laden with goods and merchandize; and it is the great thoroughfare for travel to the western country. The trade of all the upper country centres here; and when the canal is completed, connecting the lake with the waters of the Illinois river, it must become the largest town in the State. It is built on a level prairie, open in full view to the lake, and the soil is enough mixed with sand to prevent its being very muddy. The lake supplies the town with good, wholesome water, and as far as I could judge, it is quite healthy. While I was at Chicago, the Pottawattomie tribe of Indians, came there to receive their annuity from the United States government. I could not accurately ascertain their number, but probably, there were between one and two thousand, men, women and children. I had before seen the small remnants of Indian tribes at the north; but never had I seen such a large body of western Indians assembled together. I had much curiosity to see them, and learn something of the Indian character. In this I was fully gratified. Those who have formed high notions of the stateliness and chivalry of the Indian character, might gain some new ideas, by witnessing, day after day, the actions and movements of the Pottawattomies. It is painful to state it, but truth compels me to say, their appearance was, with but few exceptions, that of a drunken set of miserable vagabonds. They were generally mounted on horseback, men, women and children; some had small bells for their horses--some had blankets on, and others had coats and pantaloons, similar to the whites; and many of them, had jewels in the nose and ears, and the face painted in various colors and forms, so as to give them either a ludicrous, or a terrific appearance. To all this, perhaps, no one has a right seriously to object. It is merely a matter of taste; and if they choose to exhibit themselves in the various hues of the rainbow, or in the terrific aspect of a warrior, I am willing they should be gratified. But their actions were beneath the dignity of man, or of beast. They encamped near the town, on the border of the lake; and above it, on the margin of the river. I walked all through their encampment, and saw them frequently in the streets. I found them, generally, bickering, quarrelling, or fighting; or running their horses through the town, and displaying all the antics of madmen. Day after day, and night after night, they were carousing, shouting and fighting. On the lake shore, one of them killed his wife, by splitting her head open with a hatchet, and then fled! I did not learn what became of him. They are also much addicted to theft. Too lazy to work, they had rather steal whatever they desire, that comes in their way; and this propensity and practice has been a fruitful source of the border wars, between the whites and Indians. I have seen hundreds of negroes together on their holidays; when they had free access to intoxicating liquor if they chose; when they gave themselves up to pastime and pleasure; and I do say, they appeared much more civil and decent to themselves and to others, than the Indians. They did not seem, like the Indians, to lose _all_ self respect. The negroes generally appear to possess amiable dispositions; and are faithful friends; are much more pliant and teachable; and if I must dwell with either negroes or Indians, give me the negroes. If the former mode of paying the government annuity to the chief of a tribe, were objectionable, the present mode of paying each individual, seems to me to be equally, if not more objectionable. I was informed that the gross sum of seventy thousand dollars was paid to them individually; each one an equal portion of that amount. But after spending a few days in carousing at Chicago, they left the town as they will finally leave the world--carrying nothing with them! It appears to me, some different regulations, respecting the Indians, ought to be adopted. The money now paid them, upon the whole, seems to do them more hurt than good. Might not the government pay them in specific articles, instead of money, such as blankets, clothing, implements of husbandry, &c. There would not be then quite so much inducement for speculators to prey upon them. As to civilization, I am not so sanguine as some are, that it can be done. The Indians seem to be naturally averse to the restraints and labor of civilized life. To beg or steal is much more agreeable to them, than to labor for subsistence. Any thing that looks like work, they despise. In all cases, where they have come in contact with the whites, it has been death to the Indian. At the approach of civilization, they wither away and die; and the remnants of tribes must flee away to the fastnesses of the wilderness, or perish in the withering grasp of civilized man. They are to be pitied; but their unprovoked murders and savage cruelties have steeled the heart against them. Their cold-blooded murders, in the late war in Illinois, of men, women and children, and their indecent mutilation and exposure of their bodies when dead, cannot soon be forgotten or forgiven. Black Hawk, the cold-blooded instigator and leader in this war, dared not return from his trip to the East through Chicago, and the theatre of his cruelties. He probably will never again set his foot on the eastern shore of the Mississippi. The country back of Chicago, for the distance of twelve miles, is a smooth, level prairie; producing an abundance of grass, but too low and wet for cultivation. The Chicago river is formed by two branches, which meet at the upper end of the village. The branches come from exactly opposite directions, and after running some distance, parallel with the lake, and about a mile from it, here meet each other, and turning at right angles, flow in a regular straight channel, like a canal, into the lake. On each side of the town, between these branches and the lake shore, there is, for some distance, a good growth of wood and timber. On the lake shore, there are naked sand hills; and these are found all around the lake. This world has undergone great changes since its original creation. In examining the western country, I came to the conclusion, that a large portion of it was once under water; and that the lakes formerly discharged their waters into the sea, through the Illinois and Mississippi rivers. The lakes Michigan, Huron, St. Clair and Erie, are now about twenty-five feet lower than lake Superior. The falls of St. Mary, at the outlet of the upper lake, are nothing more than rapids. The water descends twenty-two feet in the distance of three quarters of a mile; and although canoes can pass them either way, yet they are impassable to steamboats and vessels. Some years ago, a large vessel did go down them in safety. It was built on lake Superior, by the north-western Fur Company, but was found to be too large to be useful in their trade. It was taken to the falls of St. Mary, and some Indians were hired to take it down the rapids. They happened to go down in safety; and the vessel was afterwards sold at Buffalo. Now, the probability is, that these lower lakes were once nearly on a level with lake Superior; and their outlet was at the south end of lake Michigan, instead of the Niagara river. Eight or ten miles from the present limits of lake Erie, there is a regular, well defined shore, once washed by the water; plainly indicating that the lake was once about twenty feet higher than it now is. If lake Michigan were ten feet higher than its present level, its waters would flow into the Illinois river. The Oplane, a branch of the Illinois, approaches within twelve miles of the lake; and the land between is low and level. When the water is high, boats now pass from the lake to the river. At a time of high water, a steamboat attempted to pass from the Illinois to the lake. After running a day from Ottawa up the river, the water began to subside, the captain became alarmed, lest his boat might run aground, and returned. The valley of the Illinois river, plainly indicates that a much larger stream once run there. Had its channel been formed by its present quantity of water, it would have been not more than forty rods wide; but now, it carries a breadth of from fifty rods to more than a mile; it is, therefore, full of shoals and sand bars. The high banks all along down the stream, are about two miles apart; and the space between them not occupied by the river, is either a low marsh or a narrow lake. When the lakes were high, aided probably by a strong west wind, the water broke through in the direction of Niagara river; and in process of time, wore a deep channel, drained the lakes to their present level, and dried up their outlet, at the south end of lake Michigan. This is my theory; and whoever will examine the country around the lakes, may not deem it so wild and extravagant a one, as has been advanced and believed by mankind. Many of the inhabitants of Chicago are from the eastern part of the country--civil, enterprising and active. I found good society here--much better than I had expected in a place so new, and of such rapid growth. House rent is high, and provisions are dear. Last spring, potatoes were sold for a dollar and a half a bushel; and this fall the current price is a dollar. All this is owing to the rapid increase of the place, and the immense travel through it. When more houses are built, and the country back of it becomes settled, living will, undoubtedly, be cheap. To the man of enterprise and business, it affords as good a location as any in the western country. CHAPTER V. At Chicago I found three young men from New-England, who were travelling to see the western country. We hired two horses and a wagon, at seventy-five cents a day, and started together into the interior of Illinois, west of Chicago. It was past the middle of October; the air was mild and clear, and the earth dry. The prairie, which in the spring of the year is so wet and muddy as to be difficult to pass, we found dry, and a good smooth road over it; so we travelled merrily on. At the distance of twelve miles the ground became elevated a few feet, and we found a fine grove of timber, a few log houses, and the Oplane river. At this place the roads fork--one goes south, to Ottawa on the Illinois river--the other goes in a westerly direction, to Galena on the Mississippi. Stages run from Chicago, over each of these roads to both places, carrying the U.S. mail. The roads in this country are in a state of nature. But the ground is so smooth, and so entirely free from stones, that when the earth is dry, you do not find better roads at the north. Indeed, you can travel in a carriage over most part of the country, woods and all. We took the Galena road, forded the river, a stream about four rods wide, and passed on, over a beautiful, open, prairie country, here and there a log house, a small grove of timber, or small stream of water; the land high, dry and rich, and arrived at night at Naper's settlement, on the Du Page river, thirty-seven miles from Chicago. Naper was the first settler here. He keeps a public house, very decent accommodations; has a store and mills, and is forming a village around him. Here is a large grove of good timber. We now left the Galena road and took a course more northerly to the _big_ and _little woods_, on Fox river. In travelling twelve miles we came to the settlement at the lower end of "little woods." In the space of three miles, we found about twenty families, all in comfortable log houses; fields fenced and cultivated; a school house erecting, and a master hired to keep two months. And among the whole number only one family had been there two years; the remainder had none of them been there quite a year. The houses were built near the timber, and a beautiful rich prairie opened before them. The man who had been here two years, had a hundred acres under fence; raised a large crop of corn and wheat, and had sold at Chicago, only thirty miles distant in a straight line, two hundred and twenty bushels of potatoes for as many dollars. He had built a weir across the river to catch fish, which I walked down to see. He took his boat, went out to the pen, and dipped out with a small net half a boat load of fish. This is a land of plenty sure enough; and if a man cannot here find the luxuries of the city, he can obtain all the necessaries of life in abundance. Fox river is a clear stream of water, about twenty rods wide, having a hard limestone bottom, from two to three feet deep, a brisk current, and generally fordable. On its banks, and on some other streams, we occasionally found ledges of limestone; but other than that, we found no rocks in the State. We here forded the river, and travelled all day on its western bank. We found less timber on this side of the river. On the east side, it is generally lined with timber to the depth of a mile or more; but the west side is scarcely skirted with it. It is somewhat singular and unaccountable, but we found it universally to be the fact, that the east side of all the streams had much the largest portion of timber. We passed a number of log houses, all of which had been built the present season, and came at last to the upper house on the river. The man told us, he had been here with his family only three days.--In attempting to get at the head of population, we more than once thought of the story of the Ohio pumpkin vine; and concluded if we accomplished it, we should be obliged to run our horses. He said, in the morning, his was the upper house on the river; but a man had made a location above him, and perhaps had already built him a house. We went a few miles above this, forded the river, passed through the woods into the open prairie, and started down the east side. We travelled on, until it became dark. We were in an open prairie, without any road, a cloudy night, and had no means of directing our course. It was a great oversight, but we had no fire works with us, and the wolves began to howl around at a distance. We concluded, we should be obliged to stay out that night, and without any fire. A man accustomed to the new country, would probably have thought nothing of it; but to me, who had never lodged out doors in my life, to be obliged to camp out in a new country, and among the wolves, and such other wild animals as chose to come along, it was not quite so pleasant. I confess I began to have some misgivings in my own mind, whether this new world ought, in fact, to be called a paradise. We knew that if there were any houses in that region, they would be near the woods; we accordingly obliqued to the right, and after some time travelling saw a light, which led us to a house. These log houses generally have one large room, in which the family cook, eat and lodge; and if any strangers come, they lodge in the same room with the family, either in a bed or on the floor, as may be the most convenient. They are built of logs locked together at the corners; the interstices filled with timber split like rails, and plastered over with clay. The roofs are covered with shingles about four feet long; the chimneys are built on the outside, with wood, and lined with clay; and the floor is made of split timber. Many of them are quite neat and warm. The next day, we passed a few miles down the river, crossed it, and travelled twenty or thirty miles west, towards Rock river. Our whole course lay through an open prairie. We could see timber on either hand. This day we found a number of gravel hills, the tops of which were coarse, naked gravel, and looked white at a distance. They were from ten to twenty feet high. We walked up to the top of the highest one, and had an extended view of the surrounding country. From this elevation, we could see the timber on the border of Rock river. We obliqued more to the south, came to a grove of timber and a house. Here we stayed that night. The next day we took a southeasterly direction, passed one house, and came to Fox river, where the Galena road crosses it. We forded the river, and travelling over an open rolling prairie twenty miles in a southeasterly direction, came to Walker's grove, on the Du Page river, forty miles south of Chicago. Here we found a tavern, saw and grist mill, and something of a village, having two or three framed houses among the log huts. The U.S. mail stage passes from Chicago through this place, Ottawa, Peoria and Springfield to St. Louis; and agreeably to our previous arrangement, I here left my companions, who returned to Chicago; and I took the stage for the south. I had travelled with them just long enough to be fully sensible of the great loss I sustained at parting. Thus it is with the traveller. He forms acquaintances and finds friends; but it is only to part with them, probably forever. Before I go into the lower part of the State, I shall stop here, and say a few words of the appearance, present condition and future prospects of the northern part of Illinois. I feel in some degree qualified to do this, not only from my own observation, but from information obtained from intelligent and respectable sources. CHAPTER VI. The northern part of Illinois is beautifully diversified with groves of timber and rolling prairies. The timber consists of the various kinds of oak, rock and white maple, beach, locust, walnut, mulberry, plum, elm, bass wood, buckeye, hackberry, sycamore, spice wood, sassafras, haws, crab apple, cherry, cucumber, pawpaw, &c. There is some cedar, but little pine. The shores of Michigan have a large supply of pine timber, and from this source the lumber for buildings at Chicago is obtained. The prairies are sometimes level, sometimes gently undulating, and sometimes hilly; but no where mountainous. The soil is three or four feet deep; then you come to a bed of clay two or three feet in depth, and then gravel. The soil is a rich, black loam; and when wet, it sticks to the feet like clay. Manure has no beneficial effect upon it; but where it has been cultivated, it produces an abundant crop, the first year, not quite as good as succeeding years; and it seems to be quite inexhaustible. The prairies are covered with a luxuriant growth of native grass, which, when it gets its full growth is generally about as high as a man's shoulders.--They are destitute of trees, shrubs, or stones; and although the surface may be undulating, yet it is so smooth, that they can be mown as well as the smoothest old field in New-England. In the spring of the year, a great variety of beautiful flowers shoot up among the grass; so that the face of nature exhibits the appearance of an extended flower garden. The prairie grass is unlike any kind I have seen at the north; but it affords excellent fodder for horses, neat cattle and sheep. A finer grazing country I had never seen. The grass appears to have more nourishment in it, than at the north. I saw beef cattle, fatted on the prairie grass alone, and I challenge Brighton to produce fatter beef, or finer flavored. Towards the lake, the land is gently undulating; farther west, on Fox and Rock rivers, it is rolling; and as you approach Galena on the Mississippi, it becomes more hilly and broken. All this country seems to lack, is timber and water. There are rivers enough, but not many small streams and springs. But both of these defects can in a good measure be remedied. Good water can be obtained almost any where by digging wells from twenty to thirty feet in depth; and fuel must be supplied by the coal, which is found generally in abundance throughout the State. Bricks can be used for building; and hedge rows for fences. The coal is excellent for the grate. It burns free, and emits such a brilliant light, that any other in a room is hardly necessary. It is now used in many places, in preference to wood, although that is now plenty. Blacksmiths use it for the forge; and at one shop, the man told me he could dig and haul enough in half a day to last him a month. The government of the United States granted to the State of Illinois a tract of land ten miles in width and eighty miles in length, extending from Chicago to Ottawa, for the purpose of making a canal to connect the waters of the lake with the Illinois river, and within these limits, it is supposed the canal will pass. This tract has been surveyed, put into market and much of it sold; but most of the land in the northern part of the State had not even been surveyed when I was there. Not a survey had been made on Fox river. The settlers took as much land as they pleased, and where they pleased; and as there was an abundance for all, none found fault. Before this time, I presume, the land has been surveyed; and the peace and quietness of the Fox river settlement, may have been a little disturbed by the _carelessness_ of the United States' surveyors, in running lines somewhat diverging from the stakes and fences which its early settlers had set up as the bounds of their farms. But a large portion of the northern half of the State, is not in the market, and perhaps may not be for two years to come. This very land, however, is settling every day. All a man has to do, is to select his land and settle down upon it. By this act he gains a _pre-emption right_ to one hundred and sixty acres; and before the auction sale, enters his land at the land office, pays a dollar and a quarter an acre, and receives his title. When land has once been through the auction and not sold, it can be taken at any time, by paying a dollar and a quarter an acre, and receive a title. Upon the whole, I think the upper part of Illinois offers the greatest inducements to the emigrant, especially from the northern States. It is a high, healthy, beautiful country; and there are now plenty of good locations to be made. A young man, with nothing but his hands to work, may in a few years obtain a competency. The whole country produces great crops of wheat, corn and potatoes, and all the fruits and vegetables of the north. Apple and peach trees grow faster and more vigorous here than at the east; and there is a native plum tree, which bears excellent fruit. I took much pains to ascertain whether it was subject to the fever and ague; and from the inquiries I made, and the healthy appearance of the people, I am persuaded it is not. I found only one person sick with that disease, in all the upper country, and she was an old woman from Indiana; and she told me she had it before she left that State.--There is plenty of game--the prairie hen, about the size of the northern hen, deer, ducks, wild turkies, and squirrels; also an abundance of wild honey. There is another reason why the northern part of the State is preferable. Chicago of itself is, and will be, something of a market for produce; but it is the best spot in the whole State, to carry produce to be transported to a northern market. From this, it is carried all the way by water to New-York city; and the distance is no greater than from the middle and lower parts of the State to New-Orleans, and the expense of transportation the same. But after all, there is no such place as a perfect elysium on earth; and to this bright picture of the new world, there must be added some slight shades. In the first place there are many prairie wolves all over the country, so that it is almost impossible to keep sheep. In travelling over the country, I have started half a dozen in a day; they did not appear to be very wild; but they seldom or never attack a man, unless retreat is cut off, or sorely pressed by hunger. They are of a brown color, and of the size of a large dog. The men have a good deal of sport in running them down, and killing them.--They take a stick, mount a fleet horse, soon come up with them, and knock them on the head. A man on Fox river told me he made a wolf pen over a cow that got accidentally killed, and caught twelve wolves in one week! As the country becomes settled they will disappear. There are but few bears; the country is too open for them. I had one or two meals of bear meat, but it is not at all to my taste. Then, there are the prairie rattlesnakes, about a foot long. Their bite is not considered very dangerous. There is a weed, growing universally on the prairie, that is a certain cure for it. They are not, however, plenty. Men told me, that they had passed a whole year without seeing one. Then, to prey upon the fields of the husbandman, there are the blackbirds and squirrels. They are the same in kind with those of the north, and their rapacity seems to have lost nothing, by living at the west. The blackbird is not a bird of the forest; it only follows close upon the heels of population. The winters are as cold, perhaps, as at the north, but of shorter duration. They commence later and end earlier. The Indians make their poneys get their living in the winter; and cattle will live if they can have a range in the woods; but the farmer can have as much hay as he chooses, only for the cutting; the good husbandman will, therefore, have enough to keep his cattle in good heart during the winter. Men are apt to judge of a new country by the impulse of feeling. The enthusiastic admirer of nature, when he beholds the extended prairies, lofty groves and pellucid streams, represents it as a perfect paradise. But those who think more of good roads, good coaches, good houses and good eating, than they do of the beauties of nature, curse the whole country and quit it in disgust. But to prevent all mistakes, be it known to all whom it may concern, that in this new country, fields do not grow ready fenced and planted, and elegant houses beside them; pancakes are not found on trees, or roasted pigs, running about squealing to be eaten. The jaundiced eye sees nothing in its true light. ----"The diff'rence is as great between The optics seeing, as the object seen; Or fancy's beam enlarges, multiplies, Contracts, inverts, and gives a thousand dyes." Many anecdotes were told me, of the different views the same individual would have of the same place, under different circumstances. An emigrant from Vermont, with his wife, children and goods, started for the western world in a wagon. The country was new, and the roads so bad that their progress was slow and fatiguing. At length, after enduring many privations and hardships in a journey of twelve hundred miles, they safely arrived in Illinois, and located themselves on a fine, rich spot of ground, in the interior. He hastily threw up a temporary hut for their present accommodation; but they were all too much wearied and worn, vigorously to exert themselves. He became sad himself; his wife, unable to restrain her feelings, began to sob aloud, and the children joined the concert. They could not divert their thoughts from the home, neighbors and friends they had left. The prairie and wild wood had no charms for them. After three or four days of despondency, they picked up their goods, loaded their wagon, and trudged all the way back again to Vermont. Vermont had, however, lost _some_ of its charms. It did not appear quite so fine as they had expected. After spending another cold winter there, they began to think Illinois, upon the whole, was the better place; and that they had been very foolish in leaving it. So, they picked up their duds again, returned to the same spot they had left, and were satisfied, contented and happy. The man has now an excellent farm, good house, and an abundance of the necessaries and conveniences of life. In short, he is an independent farmer, and would not now, upon any consideration, return to Vermont. An instance, in some respects similar to this, occurred some years ago, in an emigrant from the western part of the State of New-Hampshire.--He sold his farm, and started for Ohio. His wife and children, and a portion of his furniture, he put into a large wagon, drawn by three or four yoke of oxen; and three cows of a peculiar breed, he also took with him. They proceeded on about five hundred miles, probably as far as Buffalo, when they all became weary, and so excessively fatigued with their journey, that they lost all relish for the western country, and wished themselves back again. At this time, they held a council, and agreed, without a dissenting voice, to return to New-Hampshire. They accordingly wheeled about, cows and all, and trudged back to the town they had left; having performed a journey of a thousand miles with an ox-team, at great expense, and apparently to no beneficial purpose whatever. He did not, however, like the Vermonter, again return. But the result of the trip was not so disastrous as had been anticipated. At the very time of their return, a much better farm than the one he had left was offered for sale for ready money. He bought it at a reduced price, and immediately settled upon it. He then made a calculation upon his present and former condition; and after taking into consideration the expenses of his journey, the sale of one farm and purchase of another, he found himself worth at least a thousand dollars more than he was previous to the transaction! And here, I would give a caution to the emigrant who intends to settle in the western country, not to place implicit confidence in what the inhabitants of one section may say of other portions of it. If they mean to be honest in giving an opinion, self-interest as in other places, strangely warps their judgment. Land holders and actual settlers are anxious to build up their own village and neighborhood; and therefore, they praise their own section and decry the others. At Detroit, we are told that Monroe is a very sickly place; at Monroe, Detroit is unhealthy; and both will concur that Chicago is too unhealthy for an emigrant to think of enjoying life in it. In Michigan, that is the most healthy, pleasant and best portion of the West; in Illinois, that becomes the promised land. Indeed, so contradictory are their statements, that little reliance ought to be placed upon them; and the better way for the emigrant is, if he cannot obtain the necessary information from disinterested travellers, to go and examine for himself. Eastern people, who travel no farther than Michigan, generally form an unfavorable opinion of Chicago and Illinois; but were they to travel over that State, they would soon change their opinion. CHAPTER VII. But I have dwelt long enough on the upper country. I took the stage and travelled twenty-five miles over an open prairie, passing only one house, and arrived at night at Holderman's grove. This is a pleasant grove of excellent timber, having by its side a number of good houses and large cultivated fields. The next morning, we rode fifteen miles to Ottawa, where we breakfasted. Here the Illinois and Fox rivers join, and appear to be nearly of equal size, both about twenty rods wide. The village is on the east side of the Illinois river, which we crossed in a ferry boat. A tavern, some houses and stores are built on a small flat under the hill, and a number of houses on a bluff, two hundred feet above the river. Steamboats come up as high as this place, unless the water be quite low. If it be not a sickly place, I am much mistaken. The fever and ague seems to be the prevailing disease. I have observed that situations on the western rivers are generally unhealthy. The river diverges to the west, and the road down the country immediately leaves it. In travelling twenty-five miles, I found myself fourteen from the river. Here, I left the stage, and went to Hennipen, a small village on the Illinois river. It is regularly laid out on a high, level prairie, which extends three miles back, and consists of two taverns, four stores, a dozen dwelling houses and a court house--it being the seat of justice for Putnam county. I found a number of people sick in this place with the fever and ague. Here I crossed the river, about fifty rods wide, in a ferry boat, and found on the other side about two miles of heavy timbered bottom land, subject to overflow. From this, I ascended a high bluff, passed three or four miles of oak openings, and then came into the open prairie. Ten miles from the river, a new town, called Princeton, is laid out in the prairie, on the stage road leading from Peoria to Galena. Three buildings, one of which is a store where the post office is kept, had been erected when I was there; but as it is in a healthy situation, and surrounded by a beautiful rich country, it may in time become a large village. I travelled some distance in a northerly direction, between great and little Bureau rivers. The larger stream has a number of mills upon it. The country around here, is too similar to the upper part of the State to need a particular description. High rolling prairies, skirted with timber, every where abound in this region, and present to the eye a most beautiful landscape. It is mostly settled by people from New-England; and they appeared healthy, contented and happy--and are in fact, becoming rich and independent farmers. One northern man I called upon, whose past and present condition may be similar to many others. I will state it for the edification of those who live on the rocky soil of New-England. While at the north, he lived on a hilly and rocky farm; had a large family, and was obliged to work hard and use the strictest economy, to support them, and meet the current expenses of the year. Tired of severe labor and small gains, he sold his farm and moved to the State of Illinois. He had been here two years; has now one hundred acres under fence; raised the present season fifteen hundred bushels of corn, three hundred of wheat; has seventy head of neat cattle and sixty hogs. He has a fine timber lot near his house, in which is an abundance of the sugar maple. He had killed, the present season, four beef cattle, the last one just before I called upon him; and fatter and better flavored beef I never saw. All the cattle grow exceedingly fat on the prairie grass; so much so that corn will add nothing to it. A saw and grist mill are within seven miles of him. He was getting out timber, and intended to put up a two story house in the spring. I enquired particularly as to the health of his family and neighborhood. He informed me it had been very healthy; his own family had not any of them been sick abed a day, since they came into the country. Two of his daughters are well married, and settled on farms near him. Let every farmer at the north, who has to tug and toil on the sterile and rocky soil of New-England, to support his family, judge for himself, whether it is better to go to the West, or stay where he is. Whether, in fact, it is better to struggle for existence, and feel the cold grasp of poverty, or to roll in plenty and live at ease. This region was somewhat the theatre of Indian cruelties in the last war with the whites. One northern man became their victim in this settlement. His name was Elijah Philips, of New-Hampshire. When he was at the age of twenty-one, he took his pack on his back, travelled to the West, and located himself in what is called the Yankee Settlement, on the Bureau river. He was a persevering, hardy son of the North. He built a house, fenced in a field, obtained some stock and a few hogs; and was in a fair way to gain a competency and become an independent farmer. Just at this time, the Indian war broke out, with the blood-thirsty Black Hawk as a leader. Murders having been committed above them, the settlers deemed their situation insecure, and fled to the east side of the Illinois river. After remaining there awhile, the war still raging, and its termination uncertain, seven of the settlers armed themselves with guns and bayonets, took a wagon, and went to the settlement to bring away such articles of household furniture and husbandry as they could; fearing the Indians might destroy them. They spent the day in collecting their articles together. At night, they left them and the wagon where they were, and concluded to go themselves to a house half a mile below, which was deemed more secure. Here they slept quietly all night, opened the door early in the morning, looked all around, but saw no signs of Indians. Philips and another young man said they would go up to the other house and commence loading the wagon. They started off together. In about twenty rods from the house, the path led along by a point of timber that made out into the prairie; and when they had gone about half way to this point, the other young man stopped, returned back, and Philips passed on alone. He had just got into the house, when he heard a piercing cry of alarm from Philips, and in a moment after, the report of two guns. On running to the door, he saw Philips prostrate on the ground, and twenty or thirty Indians leaping out of the thicket. He rallied his companions, as they had not all yet risen, caught two guns, handed one to a man near him, and by the time they reached the door, the Indians were coming round the corner of the house. On seeing the guns with fixed bayonets, they dodged back. In a moment, they were all at the ends and rear of the house, rending the air with their astounding war cry, flourishing their tomahawks in menace and defiance; but took special care not to come in front of the door. The settlers were all young men--the onset had been so sudden and boisterous, that they were taken entirely by surprise, and hardly knew what they did. On a moment's reflection, they concluded, if they contended manfully, there might be some chance for life. Although the number of Indians might be ten to one of theirs, yet they had the advantage of being within a well built log house, impenetrable by balls. Spirited and prompt action saved them. While the Indians were hovering round, in doubt what course to take to dislodge them, they dug out a chink between the logs in the rear, and thrust out their guns. The moment this was done, the Indians changed the tone of their yells, leaped for the woods, fell flat on their faces and crawled unperceived away. They now felt relieved from immediate danger. They knew there was a company of horse at Hennipen, fifteen miles distant; and their only safe course seemed to be, to send for them if they could. They had a horse with them, and he was feeding on the prairie about thirty rods from the house, nearly on the opposite side from the spot where the Indians entered the woods; but as they could not know where they might be, none deemed it prudent to go out to catch him. They called the horse, however, and although he was one generally hard to catch, he now started at once, came to the door, thrust in his head and stood still while the bridle was put on. One of their number mounted, and rode express to Hennipen. In the afternoon, the troop arrived; reconnoitered the neighborhood; found the Indian trail; followed it a number of miles; but they had gone beyond their reach. On a further examination of the woods, it was apparent, the Indians had been hovering around them all the day before while at work; but were too cowardly to attack them, although they knew the smallness of their number. The situation of affairs at night they also knew full well. They truly supposed that _all_ would pass the spot where they lay in ambush, in the morning. But accidentally, _one_ passed alone, and discovered them, and was undoubtedly the cause of saving the lives of all the rest. But had the other young man passed on instead of returning, and why he did not, he never could tell, although the question was asked him immediately after the transaction, he also would have been killed; and in that event, probably all the others would have been sacrificed; for it was quite early in the morning, and they had not risen. On examining Philips, they discovered that two musket balls had entered his body--one in the region of the heart, so that he must have died immediately. His remains were carried to Hennipen for interment; and when I passed that way, I stopped at his grave to show, what I felt, respect to his memory. On a small eminence in the open prairie, half a mile east of the village, repose the remains of Elijah Philips. And although no monumental inscription tells the spot where he so suddenly started for eternity, or "storied urn" adorns his grave; although of humble birth, yet he was a young man of much vigor and enterprise, and bid fair to become a useful member of society. Let his memory live "in story and in song," and be handed down to posterity with that of the other victims of savage cruelty. No apprehensions are now entertained by the settlers, of attacks by the Indians. Black Hawk and his followers have gone beyond the Mississippi, and only a few remnants of Indian tribes remain in the whole State. Years will not efface the memory of the many deeds of extreme cruelty, committed by the Indians in this short, yet bloody war. Acts of cruelty and outrage were perpetrated, too horrid and indecent to mention; and so perfectly useless as it respected the result of the war, that they could have been committed only to glut a most fiend-like and savage vengeance. I cannot admire the Indian character. They are sullen, gloomy and obstinate, unless powerfully excited, and then, they exhibit all the antics of madmen. CHAPTER VIII. After spending a few days viewing the country in this vicinity, I again crossed the river at Hennipen, and passed on to the stage road. The next day, I took the stage, and went to Peoria, the county seat of Peoria county, which stands on the site of fort Clark. This is quite a village. It is regularly laid out on a beautiful prairie, on the western bank of the Illinois river; has a brick court house, two taverns, a dozen stores, and about twenty dwelling houses, some of them quite elegant. It is eighty miles from Ottawa, one hundred and sixty from Chicago, one hundred and fifty from Galena, one hundred and fifty by land and two hundred by water from St. Louis. The river here swells out to more than a mile in width, and the opposite shore is low, marshy land. Peoria seems to be subject to bilious fevers and the fever and ague; but I could perceive no cause for its being unhealthy, unless it was the river and marshy land on the other side. The water is brought to the village in an aqueduct, from a high bluff, half a mile back of it, and appeared to be excellent. A number of deaths had occurred, previous to my arrival; and I saw a number of pale-faced invalids. In coming to this place, I passed over a fine country, much more settled, with larger fields and more extensive improvements than I found in the upper part of the State; but still it was diversified with rolling prairies and groves of timber. While the mail was changing at one of the post offices, I passed on and came to a log school house, where all the scholars studied aloud. This was quite a novelty to me. More discordant sounds never grated on the ear; and if the master had a musical one, he must have been severely punished. I asked him, if his scholars commonly studied in that manner; and he said they did, although he thought they now hollowed a little louder than usual. This inconvenient practice of some of our ancient schools, I supposed had been entirely done away; but on enquiry, I was informed it still held its sway to some extent in many of the western States. Stages run from Peoria (through Springfield), to St. Louis, to Galena, and to Chicago. There is a rope ferry just below the village, where the river is narrow. It is a place of a good deal of business, quite a thoroughfare for travellers; and it is supposed by some that it will shortly become the seat of the State government. I spent three days here, then took passage on board a steamboat for St. Louis. I have often remarked, that the amount taxed by taverners, is, generally, in an inverse proportion to their accommodations; that is, the less they furnish their guests, the more they charge. In my present trip, I have more than once been reminded of an anecdote related to me some time ago, of a tavern keeper at the south. A gentleman with his family, travelling in the westerly part of Virginia, was obliged one night to put up at one of the small country taverns, more suited to the accommodation of the teamster who sleeps in his wagon, than to the entertainment of gentlemen and ladies. They were furnished with the best the house afforded, but it was mean in kind and badly prepared. Some of them were obliged to sleep on the floor, and those that were accommodated with beds, were exceedingly annoyed by the insects they contained. The gentleman arose early, ordered his carriage and asked the landlord the amount of his bill. He told him, _thirty dollars_! The gentleman stared; but at length asked him, what he had had to the amount of thirty dollars, or even five dollars. The landlord very politely assured him that his was a reasonable charge, for says he, I hire this establishment at the annual rent of thirty dollars, and this I must charge to my customers; the year is almost out, and you are the only available guest I have had; therefore I have charged the whole amount to you. The gentleman laughed heartily; and considering it too good a joke to be spoiled by any fault on his part, very pleasantly handed him over the thirty dollars. He that travels much in the world, may have occasion to fear the _rent day_ is near at hand. This frank explanation of the Virginia landlord has furnished an easy solution to _some_ tavern bills I have paid, that otherwise would have been entirely inexplicable; and perhaps it may be equally useful to other travellers. The Illinois river is a wide, sluggish stream; clear water, but generally, hardly any perceivable current. It is a very shoal river, having many sand bars.--Our boat did not draw more than two feet of water, yet was continually running aground. I should think the lead was thrown a quarter part of the time; and it used to amuse me, sometimes, to hear the leadsman sing out "_two feet and a half_"--"_two feet large_"--"_two feet_"--"_two feet scant_,"--and then aground; and perhaps it would be half a day before we could get afloat again. We were seven days going to St. Louis--rather slow travelling, and somewhat vexatious; we thought, however, we might as well be merry as sad, so we made the best of it. The captain had as much reason as any of us to complain; for we took a cabin passage, and he had to board us, however long the passage might be. All along down, the country is rather low, except some bluffs on the river--and where we found a bluff on one side, there would be either a low marsh or a lake on the other. Probably, there are twenty lakes below Peoria, on one side or the other of the river. They were all long and narrow, and often had an outlet into the river. They appeared more like former beds of the stream, than any thing else. Pekin is twenty miles below Peoria, on a high bluff, the east side of the river, having two taverns, thirty houses, and a large steam flour mill. Sixty miles below this, on the same side of the river, is a large village called Beardstown. Here are large flour mills, saw mill, &c. all carried by steam.--Twenty miles below this, is a small village called Naples. As we approached the Mississippi, we saw a good many stately bluffs on the right hand bank, composed of limestone, and rising almost perpendicular, from two to three hundred feet high. Some of them are really grand and beautiful. At length, with no small degree of pleasure, we came in full view of the majestic Mississippi river. The moment our boat entered the stream, it felt its power, and started off with new life and vigor. It seemed something like travelling, after leaving the sand bars and sluggish current of the Illinois, to be hurried down the Mississippi at the rate of eight or ten miles an hour. We soon reached Upper Alton, a large flourishing village of recent origin. Here, are large steam flour mills, and large warehouses; and in the centre of business is located the State Prison! There is no accounting for taste; but it appeared to me rather singular, to see a prison of convicts brought forward into the centre of a village to be exhibited as its most prominent feature. The reason may have been, to keep it constantly in _view_ as a "terror to evil doers." This is the last town we stopped at in Illinois--and on taking leave of the State, I may be allowed to add a few words respecting it. CHAPTER IX. Illinois is three hundred and fifty miles in length; one hundred and eighty in breadth; and lies between thirty-seven and a half, and forty-two and a half degrees north latitude. It contains fifty thousand square miles--equal to forty millions of acres. It is divided into fifty-five counties, and, probably, now contains more than two hundred thousand inhabitants. All the streams, lakes and marshes are lined with a fine growth of timber, sometimes a mile or two in width, and sometimes merely a narrow strip. And as the southern part of the State contains the most low, wet land, it has also the most timber. The high land is generally prairie; but there are some exceptions to this. I found quite a number of beautiful groves of timber on high land; sometimes there were only scattering trees, called oak openings. It is probably as level as any State in the Union. At the northwest of Shawneetown, there is a range of hills; and high bluffs are seen along the banks of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. In the mineral regions at the northwest corner of the State, there are high hills, and the land is somewhat broken; but the largest portion of the State is composed of gently rolling prairies. These prairies are some of them level and wet, but generally, they are high, dry and gently undulating. They all have an exceedingly fertile soil, and are covered with tall coarse grass and a great variety of beautiful flowers. The soil is a rich, black loam, entirely inexhaustible, and produces abundant crops without the aid of manure. In some of the old settled towns at the lower part of the State, the same spot of ground has been cultivated with Indian corn for a hundred years, and it now produces equally as well as it did at first. In the time of strawberries, thousands of acres are reddened with this delicious fruit. But this country, which so delightfully strikes the eye, and has millions of acres that invite the plough, wants timber for fuel, building and fences. It wants good water in many places, and in too many instances, the inhabitants want health. These evils will probably all be remedied by the expedients of cultivation. Bricks will be used for building; coal and peat will be used for fuel; hedges and ditches will be made for fences; forests will be made to grow on the prairies; and deep wells will be sunk for pure water. There is a fine tract of rich level land extending along the eastern shore of the Mississippi about eighty miles in length, and from three to six miles in width. It commences near New-Alton, and terminates a little below Kaskaskia. About half of its width bordering on the river, is covered with a heavy growth of timber; the remainder is a level prairie; and in the rear it is bordered by a stately bluff of limestone. It is undoubtedly the richest land in the world. Settlements have been made upon it to some extent, but it is not very healthy. It is called the American Bottom. A bottom very similar to this, either on one side or the other, marks the whole course of the Illinois river. More than five millions of acres have been surveyed, between the Mississippi and Illinois rivers, and assigned by Congress for military bounty lands. These lands embrace all the varieties of soil found in the State--rich bottoms, swamps, prairies, timbered lands, high bluffs and barrens. The northeast part of it is deemed the most pleasant and healthy. On Rock river, the Kaskaskia, Wabash, Fox, Du Page, Macoupin and Sangamon are large tracts of first rate land. And very similar to this, are Grand prairie, Mound prairie, the Marine Settlement prairie, and the one occupied by the New-England Christians. In the region of Sangamon river, nature has delighted to bring together her happiest combinations of landscape; being beautifully variegated with woodland and lawn, like sunshine and shade. It is generally a level country; the prairies are not too extensive, and timber abounds in sufficient quantity to support a dense population. In this beautiful section of the new world, more than two hundred families, from New-England, New-York and North Carolina, fixed their habitations before it was surveyed. The land is exceedingly rich and easily cultivated. It now constitutes a number of counties and is probably as thickly settled as any part of the State. The Sangamon itself is a fine boatable river, and has throughout its whole course, pure, transparent water and a sandy bottom. It enters the Illinois river on the easterly side, about one hundred and forty miles above its mouth. The Kaskaskia river has a long course in the central part of the State, and the lands upon its borders are happily diversified with hill, vale, prairie and forest. On its banks are Kaskaskia, the former seat of government, and Vandalia, the present metropolis. The region of Rock and Fox rivers is a beautiful and healthy portion of the State. The land is rich; the prairies are high, dry and gently undulating and surrounded by excellent timber. The only faults are, the prairies are too large for the quantity of timber, and there are not a sufficient number of springs and small streams of water. But it is a very pleasant and desirable portion of the country, and I believe more emigrants are now directing their course thither, than to any other portion of the State. It has one advantage over all the western section of country, it is more healthy. I believe it is as healthy as any portion of the United States. Although there are some bodies of sterile and broken land in the State, yet as a whole, it contains a greater proportion of first rate land than any other State in the Union; and probably as great according to its extent as any country on the face of the globe. One of the inconveniences attending this extensive rich country, is too great a proportion of prairies. They cover more than half of the whole State.--But the prevalence of coal and peat, and the ease with which forest trees may be raised, will render even these extensive prairies habitable. The original cause of these extensive prairies in all the western and southern country is altogether a matter of conjecture. There is no natural impediment in the soil to the growth of forest trees over the whole extent of the country. It is certain that the fire is the cause of continuing them in existence; for where the fire is kept out, trees spring up in them, in a few years, and their growth is vigorous and rapid. There are many reasons for the belief, that this western country was once inhabited by a more civilized race of beings, than the present hordes of wild Indians. Specimens of fine pottery and implements of husbandry have been found in various parts of the country; and brick foundations of a large city have lately been discovered in the territory of Arkansas. These, together with the stately mounds and remains of extensive fortifications, indicate that the country was once inhabited by a race of men, who cultivated the soil for a subsistence, and were well acquainted with the mechanic arts. From whence this race of beings came, or whither they went, is alike unknown to us. Since they left, the fire has made the cleared land much more extensive. The fire, in very dry weather, and accompanied by a high wind, after scouring over the prairies, takes to the woodland and destroys the timber. Last fall, I saw hundreds of acres of woodland, so severely burnt over, that I had no doubt the trees were generally killed. But in some places, the forest gradually gains upon the prairie; and could the fire be kept within proper bounds, the western country would soon have an abundant supply of timber. But this cannot well be done. The Indian sets the prairie afire, for the conveniency of hunting--the emigrant sets it afire, so that the fresh grass may spring up for his cattle; and so between them both, they all get burnt over. And when once kindled, the fire goes where the wind happens to drive. This State has great advantages for inland navigation by means of its rivers. On the east, it is washed by the Michigan lake and Wabash river; on the south, by the Ohio, and on the west, by the Mississippi. The most important river within the State is the Illinois. It rises near the south end of lake Michigan, runs in a southerly direction about three hundred miles, and falls into the Mississippi, thirty miles above St. Louis. Its two chief head branches are the Kankakee and Oplane; this latter river runs within twelve miles of the lake, and the space between is a low, wet prairie, so that it might easily be connected with its waters. From the north, comes in the Du Page, a larger stream than the Oplane. At Ottawa, eighty miles south of Chicago, comes in Fox river. This is by far the largest tributary of the Illinois, and at their junction is nearly equal to it in size. In all descriptions of the State, mention is hardly made of Fox river; but it is the next in size to the Illinois and Rock rivers, and is one of the most beautiful streams in the whole State. It rises in the territory west of lake Michigan, runs with a lively current, in a very straight channel, from its source to its mouth. It heads in a lake, and this accounts for the fact, that it is not, like other streams, subject to freshets. It is generally fordable--the water is not more than about three feet deep, and the bottom is sand and pebbles. It is a clear stream, abounding in fish, and withal, passes through the most healthy part of the State. On the west side, nearly opposite Hennipen, comes in the Bureau river. This is a good mill stream, and is composed of two branches, the one called Great and the other Little Bureau; and these branches join about five miles west of the Illinois. These branches, on the maps, bear the names of Robertson's and James' river, but for what reason I know not. On this river is a large settlement of northern people, and many families from the State of New-Hampshire. Below this, the most material tributaries are the Vermillion and Sangamon from the east, and Spoon river from the west. Whatever others may say, I cannot call the Illinois a pleasant stream. It has a marsh on one side or the other from its mouth to its source, and is full of shoals and sand bars. I passed down the river in a boat that drew less than two feet water, but it often run aground. The worst bar is just below Beardstown. We had to lighten the boat of its freight, water in the boiler, and passengers, before we could pass this bar; and then, the hands had to jump into the water and push the boat over. For about two hundred miles from its mouth, it has many long and narrow lakes, of about the width of the river itself; and probably they were formerly its channel. These lakes generally have an outlet into the river, and these so much resemble it, that a person not well acquainted with the stream, would be puzzled to know what channel to take. The river occupies too much ground for its quantity of water, and for about half of the year, it is a difficult stream to navigate. Rock river rises beyond the northern limits of the State in the high lands which separate the waters of the Mississippi from those of lake Michigan. It is a large, beautiful stream, has a lively current, and enters the Mississippi fifty miles below Galena. In the Mississippi near its mouth, is a beautiful island, on which is situated fort Armstrong. The other principal streams which enter the Mississippi are Fever river, Parasaw, Kaskaskia, and Cahokia. No large streams enter the Ohio or the Wabash, from this State; but some of them are navigable by keel boats. In the region of Galena are the richest lead mines in the world. Copper ore has also been discovered. The State abounds in mineral coal, which is excellent for the grate. It burns freer than the Pennsylvania coal, and emits much more light. Salt is made in large quantities at the salt works, near Shawneetown. In the southern part of the State, cotton will grow in a favorable year, and it is cultivated to some extent for family use. This conclusively shows a milder climate than in New-England. In the northern section, in the region of the vast prairies and lakes, the wind sometimes blows strong and keen in the winter. It is not subject to the strong chilly easterly winds so severely felt along the Atlantic coast. During the year, the climate is undoubtedly more mild than that of New-England. Apple, pear and peach trees grow vigorously and produce abundantly. In the spring of the year the air becomes fragrant with the blossoms of fruit trees and wild flowers. The soil and the climate are well suited to the production of wheat, Indian corn, potatoes, and all garden vegetables. The crops are abundant and of an excellent quality. The prairies every where abound in wild grass, and afford an inexhaustible range for cattle, horses and sheep. The grass is very nutricious, and it may with truth be said, there is not a finer grazing country in the world. The most prevalent diseases are bilious fevers and the fever and ague. These are caused by stagnant water and swamps. Removed from these, good health is generally enjoyed. The consumption, the scourge of New-England, is never known in all the western country. In some parts of the lower section of the State, the inhabitants have been afflicted with a disease called _milk sickness_. It, in the first place, affects the cattle, and never occurs until the frosts of autumn. These frosts kill the grass on the high prairies, and induce the cattle to go into the low bottoms and woods, where vegetation remains green. It has been discovered that the disease is caused by the cattle's eating a poisonous vine which grows luxuriantly in these bottoms. After eating this vine, the animal appears weary and faint, travels with difficulty, droops, and at length dies. If men or animals partake of the milk of the cows, when they are thus disordered, they are affected in the same manner. Men, however, sometimes recover. This disease is not confined to Illinois. Near the rich bottom lands in Indiana and Missouri, animals and men have been affected with it. In the northern half of the State, I was informed, that not an instance of milk sickness had ever been known. There are no _large_ towns in Illinois, but quite a number of flourishing villages. Danville, near the eastern line of the State, is quite a flourishing town; and here the land office for the northern section is kept. It is one hundred and thirty miles south of Chicago, and it is supposed, that the office will shortly be removed to that place. Springfield, situated on a branch of the Sangamon river, is near the centre of the State, and is a large, flourishing village. It is sixty miles south of Peoria, about thirty east of the Illinois river; and it is highly probable that it will become, shortly, the seat of the State government. The most important towns on the Mississippi river, are Galena, Quincy, Alton, Edwardsville, and Kaskaskia; on the Ohio river, are Trinity, America and Shawneetown; on the Wabash, are Palmyra, Lawrenceville, Palestine, Sterling, &c. and in the interior, besides those we have before mentioned, are Vandalia, the present seat of the State government, Jacksonville, Maysville, Hillsborough, Salem, and many other small villages; besides quite a number of _paper towns_, that may in time have a "local habitation," in addition to their high sounding names. Chicago is now the largest town in the State; and as it is favorably situated for trade, it will probably continue to take the lead in time to come.--Vandalia, the present seat of government, is pleasantly situated on a high bank of the Kaskaskia river. Respectable buildings for the accommodation of the government and the courts have been erected. The village contains about a hundred houses; some of them, built of brick and elegant. Kaskaskia is the oldest town in the State. It is pleasantly situated on an extensive plain upon the bank of the river of the same name, and eleven miles from its mouth. It was settled as early as Philadelphia, by the French, and once contained seven thousand inhabitants; but now it numbers not more than one thousand. This was formerly the seat of government; it was removed to Edwardsville, then to Vandalia; but it will probably be destined to take one more remove, either to Springfield or Peoria. Galena, on the Mississippi, near the northwest corner of the State, began to be settled in 1826. It is three hundred and fifty miles north of St. Louis, and about one hundred and fifty west of Chicago. It now contains between one and two thousand inhabitants, forty-two stores and warehouses, and two hundred houses. It is the seat of justice for the county, and has ten thousand inhabitants in its vicinity. The same provisions here for schools have been made as in the other western States. In addition to one thirty-sixth part of all the public lands, three per cent. on all the sales is added to the school fund. It is in contemplation to establish an university. For this purpose a sixth part of the school fund and two entire townships have been appropriated. Rock Spring theological school, under the superintendence of the Baptists, is a respectable academy in the Turkey Hills' Settlement, seventeen miles east of St. Louis. It has fifty students.[1] Primary schools are found in the villages and populous neighborhoods; but in many places there is much need of them. The representatives and senators are chosen once in two years; the governor and lieutenant governor in four years. The judiciary consists of a supreme court and other county courts. All free white male citizens, who have resided in the State six months, are entitled to the right of suffrage; and they vote at elections _viva voce_. [Footnote 1: This school has recently been removed to Alton.] CHAPTER X. The prairies in the western country are all burnt over once a year, either in spring or fall, but generally in the fall; and the fire is, undoubtedly, the true cause of the continuance of them. In passing through the State I saw many of them on fire; and in the night, it was the grandest exhibition I ever saw. A mountain of flame, thirty feet high, and of unknown length, moving onward, roaring like "many waters"--in a gentle, stately movement, and unbroken front--then impelled by a gust of wind, suddenly breaks itself to pieces, here and there shooting ahead, whirling itself high in air--all becomes noise, and strife, and uproar, and disorder. Well might Black Hawk look with indifference on the puny exhibition of fireworks in New-York, when he had so often seen fireworks displayed, on such a gigantic scale, on his own native prairies. A prairie storm of fire is indeed terrific. Animals and men flee before it, in vain. When impelled by a strong breeze, the wave of fire passes on, with the swiftness of the wind; and the utmost speed of the horse lingers behind. It then assumes a most appalling aspect; roars like a distant cataract, and destroys every thing in its course. Man takes to a tree, if he fortunately can find one; sets a back fire; or, as a last resort, dashes through the flame to windward, and escapes with life; although often severely scorched; but the deer and the wolf continue to flee before it, and after a hot pursuit, are run down, overwhelmed and destroyed. Much caution should be used, in travelling over an open prairie country, in the fall of the year, when the grass is dry. Instances were told me, of the entire destruction of the emigrant and his family by fire, while on the road to their destined habitation. I had heard much of the _backwoodsmen_, and supposed, of course, I should find many of them in Illinois; but after diligent search, I found none that merited the appellation. The race has become extinct. Who are the inhabitants of Illinois? A great portion of them, from the north, recently settled there, and of course, possessing the same hospitality, sobriety and education as the northern people. They went out from us; but they are still of us. A person will find as good society there, as here; only not so much of it. The upper house on Fox river settlement, was occupied by an intelligent and refined family, recently from Massachusetts. Meeting houses and school houses are rare, owing to the sparseness of the inhabitants; but the country is settling rapidly, and these deficiencies will soon be supplied. Indeed, so rapidly is the country settling, that in writing this account of it, I sometimes feel like the man who hurried home with his wife's bonnet, lest it should be out of date, before I could get it finished. Emigrants, going to settle at the West, with their families, would do well to take their beds, bedding, a moderate supply of culinary utensils, the most essential of their farming tools, and a good supply of clothing. These articles are all high there, and somewhat difficult to be obtained. The more cumbersome of household furniture, such as chairs, tables, bedsteads, &c. are not so essential; because their place can be supplied by the ruder articles of domestic manufacture. In the new settlements, most of the families had chairs or benches, tables and bedsteads, made on the spot by the husbandmen. Provisions are cheap, but vary in price according to the demand. Corn, at Beardstown, is worth twelve and a half cents a bushel; at Hennipen, twenty-five cents; and on Fox river, fifty cents; and other articles in proportion. When the settler arrives at his location, his first business is to build a log house, which is soon done; then fence in a field, and it is ready for the plough. The prairie breaks up hard at first, requiring four yoke of oxen; but after the first breaking, a single horse can plough it. A good crop is produced the first year; but better in succeeding years. He had better hoe his Indian corn. It keeps the ground clear of weeds, and increases the crop; but half of the cornfields are not hoed at all. In the fall of the year, he must take especial care that his crops, stacks of hay, fences, &c. are not burnt, in the general conflagration of the prairies. To prevent this, as good a method as any is to plough two or three furrows around his improvements, and at a distance of about two rods plough as many more; and in a mild day, when the grass is dry, burn over the space between. If he neglects this, he must keep a good look out in a dry and windy day. If he sees a smoke to windward, it will not do to wait until he can see the fire; he must summon all hands, and set a back fire. With a strong breeze, fire will sometimes run over the dry prairies faster than a horse. The inhabitants are often too negligent in this particular. While I was there, a number of stacks of hay and grain, and two or three houses were burnt, from the mere negligence of their owners. But I must bid adieu to the beautiful State of Illinois. To the practical husbandman, and to the enthusiastic admirer of the beauties of nature, it is alike attractive; and in which, they both will find ample scope for the exercise of the powers of body and of mind. After two or three hours stay at Alton, we started down the stream; and in seven miles, came to the mouth of the turbid Missouri. Here, two mighty rivers join their forces, and rolling on with irresistible power, for thirteen hundred miles, mingle with the waters of the ocean. The great Missouri, after traversing a vast extent of country, in various directions, here bears directly down upon the Mississippi; but the latter, like a coy maiden, shrinks back, recoils at his approach, and seems to decline the rude embrace; and they travel on together for forty miles, before the Missouri can unite its muddy waters with those of the clear and transparent Mississippi. Here, the Missouri, having at length gained the complete mastery, holds throughout its undisputed sway; and gives its own peculiar complexion to the united stream. The appearance is, indeed, quite singular; to see the two rivers passing along, side by side, in the same channel, such a long distance, without mingling their waters; and the line, between the muddy and clear water, is so well defined and distinctly marked, that it can readily be seen from the shore. On the western bank of the river, seventeen miles below the mouth of the Missouri, is the town of ST. LOUIS. The view was fine and imposing, as we approached it by water; and it is the most pleasantly situated of any town on the banks of the Mississippi. It stands on an elevated plain, which gradually rises from the water, to its western extremity. Back of it, there is a level and extensive prairie, and above the village, are a number of stately Indian mounds. St. Louis is the most important town in all the western country; and there is not a town in the world, such a distance from the sea, that in commercial advantages can at all compare with it. When we consider its situation, near the junction of two mighty rivers, the one navigable twenty-five hundred miles, the other one thousand, and the large navigable branches of each, and see that this place must be the centre of trade for the whole, it requires not the gift of prophecy to designate this spot, as the site of the greatest city of the West. It is now a large town, chiefly built of brick; has a brisk trade; and probably contains seven or eight thousand inhabitants. There was a time, when the only craft on the river was keel boats, and the transportation of goods, arduous and expensive. Then, this place struggled slowly into existence, and sometimes remained stationary, or rather declined; but the introduction of steamboats started it into newness of life and vigor. Its trade is now daily extending itself, and the town is continually increasing in population and buildings. A dozen steamboats were lying at the landing--some bound high up on the rivers; others, to Pittsburgh and New-Orleans. This seems to be a sort of "half way house," between the upper and lower country; being a place of general deposit for goods, destined either way. And St. Louis will never have to contend with a rival; for there is no other suitable spot near the junction of the two rivers, to locate a city. She will, therefore, continue to increase in size, wealth and beauty, and remain in all time to come, the undisputed "Queen of the West." There is a land office kept at St. Louis; and plenty of government land to be obtained for a dollar and a quarter an acre. It is chiefly settled by Americans; but French settlers are found, and in St. Louis there are a large number. Considerable trade in peltries is carried on with the Indians, who come to the principal towns and exchange their skins for goods. They are continually seen in the streets of St. Louis. St. Louis has a theatre, and we attended it.--Quite a decent edifice, a tolerable play, and a full and fashionable audience. I could perceive no essential difference between this assembly and those of Boston or New-York. Good society is found here. The streets at night were quiet; or only disturbed by the sound of the violin on board the flat boats, or the merry boatman's song. The sky was serene, the air mild, and we had many a pleasant walk through the town and its environs. Indeed, there is a peculiar balmy softness in the air, grateful to the feelings, not to be found in our northern climate. St. Louis is a pleasant place; and were it not for the stacks of bar lead on the shore, and some slight peculiarities in the customs of its inhabitants, it could hardly be distinguished from an eastern city. A steam ferry boat plies between this place and the opposite shore, and affords a large profit to its owner. CHAPTER XI. Missouri contains sixty thousand square miles, being two hundred and seventy miles in length and two hundred and twenty in breadth. It lies on the west side of the Mississippi river, between thirty-six and forty degrees north latitude. It now contains, probably, one hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, of whom thirty thousand are slaves. A large tract of this State, commencing at its south end, extending up the Mississippi river above the mouth of the Ohio, and running into the interior, possesses rich alluvial soil, but is low, swampy, full of lakes, and much of it, subject to overflow. Beyond this to the west, the country is broken and hilly; sometimes covered with a small species of oak, and sometimes naked sandy hills and plains.--The whole southerly half of the State, offers but small inducements to the farmer. Where the soil is rich, it is too low and unhealthy; where it is high, dry and healthy, it is too barren and sterile to be cultivated. The best portion of the State lies between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. This section is the most settled of any part of the State. Its surface is delightfully variegated and rolling, and possesses large tracts of rich alluvial and high prairies. The soil contains a greater proportion of sand, than that of the other western States; so that it is easily cultivated, and is never disagreeably muddy. There are spots where we find the stiff clayey soil of Ohio and New-York; but they are not extensive. No part of the globe, in a state of nature, can so easily be travelled over in carriages as this. Even in spring, the roads cannot be called muddy or difficult to pass. There are two extensive tracts of heavily timbered upland, similar to those of Ohio and Kentucky--the one is called the Bellevue, the other the Boone's Lick Settlement. The surface rolls gently and almost imperceptibly. In this region are many springs of good water, and it is said to be healthy. The Mississippi is skirted with a prairie, commencing ten miles above the mouth of the Missouri, for the distance of seventy miles. It is about five miles in width, and possesses an excellent soil. There are no prairies of any considerable size on the borders of the Missouri, within the limits of the State; but its banks are generally covered with a beautiful growth of tall, straight forest trees. The bottom land on this river is about four miles in width, is sufficiently mixed with sand to prevent its being muddy, and is not subject to be overflowed. There are no bayous, ponds or marshes on the margin of the Missouri. The bottoms are now considerably settled for four hundred miles above its mouth. Charaton, over two hundred miles up the river, is the highest compact settlement. But the largest and most populous settlement in the State is Boone's Lick, in Franklin county. This is one hundred and eighty miles above the mouth of the river. Scattered settlements are, however, found along the river banks for six hundred miles, to the Council Bluffs. Above the Platte, which is the largest tributary of the Missouri, the prairies come quite in to the banks of the river, and extend on either hand, farther than can be measured by the eye. This is the general complexion of the river banks until you reach the Rocky mountains. As far as the limits of this State extend, the river is capable of supporting a dense population for a considerable distance from its banks. Above these limits, it is generally too destitute of wood and water to become habitable by any people, except hunters and shepherds. All the tributaries of the Missouri are generally copies of the parent stream, and one general remark will apply to the whole. They all have narrow margins of excellent bottom land; and as the country recedes from these, it becomes more and more sandy, barren and destitute of water, until it resembles the deserts of Arabia. Wheat and corn are generally the chief productions, and the soil is excellent for both. The whole western country is remarkable for withstanding the severest droughts. A crop has never been known to fail in the driest seasons. From twenty-five to thirty bushels to the acre is an average crop of wheat, and from fifty to seventy-five, of corn.--The good lands in Missouri produce corn in as great perfection as in any part of the world. It is warm, loamy land, and so mellow that it is easily cultivated. Even where the sand appears to predominate, great crops are produced. The soil, in the vicinity of the Missouri, is more pliant, and less inclined to be muddy, than that on the banks of the Mississippi. Rye, barley, oats, flax, hemp, tobacco, melons, pumpkins, squashes and all garden vegetables flourish remarkably well. Peaches, pears, plums, cherries, &c. grow to great perfection. The land seems well adapted to the use of plaster, and this is found of excellent quality, in inexhaustible quantities, on the banks of the Missouri. Beyond all countries, this is the land of blossoms. Every prairie is an immense flower garden. In the spring, their prevailing tint is that of the peach blossom--in summer, of a deeper red--then a yellow--and in autumn, a brilliant golden hue. The natural productions of the soil are abundant. The red and yellow prairie plum, crab apples, pawpaws, persimons, peccans, hazelnuts and walnuts are generally found in perfection and abundance. Wild hops cover whole prairies; and two or three species of grapes are found in various parts of the State. The heats of summer and dryness of the atmosphere render this suitable for the cultivation of the vine. Silk might also be raised in great abundance, as the mulberry tree is every where found among the trees of the forest. Near New-Madrid, cotton is cultivated. Bears, wolves and panthers are found here. The prairie wolf is the most numerous and mischievous. Deer, as the Indians retire, grow more plenty, and are frequently seen in flocks feeding near the herds of cattle. There is a species of mole found here, and indeed in all the western and southern country, called gopher. These animals live in communities, and build small eminences of a circular form and about a foot high. They are mischievous in potatoe fields and gardens. Rattlesnakes, copper heads, and ground vipers are found in the unsettled regions; especially, near flint knobs and ledgy hills. They are not so common as in more timbered regions. It is probable that the burning of the prairie destroys great numbers of them. The waters are covered with ducks, geese, swans, brants, pelicans, cranes and many other smaller birds. The prairie hen and turtle dove are numerous. The domestic animals are the same as in other States. This State and Illinois have decided natural advantages for the rearing of cattle, horses, hogs and sheep. A distinguishing feature in the climate, is in the dryness and purity of the atmosphere. The average number of cloudy days in a year is not more than fifty, and not more than half that number are rainy. The quantity of rain is not more than eighteen inches. The sky in summer and autumn is generally cloudless. There are no northeast continued rains as in the Atlantic States. The longest storms are from the southwest. The usual diseases are intermittent and bilious fevers. Sometimes pleurisy and lung fevers prevail in winter. Pulmonic complaints, attended with cough, are seldom; and consumption, that scourge of the East, is unknown. The summers are quite warm, and sometimes oppressive; but generally, a refreshing breeze prevails. The winters are sometimes cold, and the wind blows sharp and keen. The Missouri is frozen sufficiently strong to bear loaded teams. But days are found even in January, when it is agreeable to sit at an open window. A few inches of snow occasionally fall, but there is hardly any good sleighing. This State is known to be rich in minerals, although a large portion remains yet unexplored. Lead has been found in abundance. The principal "diggings" are included in a district fifteen miles by thirty in extent; the centre of which is sixty miles southwest from St. Louis, and about half that distance from Herculaneum, on the Mississippi. The earth is of a reddish yellow, and the ore is found embedded in rock and hard gravel. Fifty diggings are now occupied, from which three millions of pounds of lead are annually sent to market. It is transported from the mines in wagons, either to Herculaneum or St. Genevieve, and from thence by water to New-Orleans. Stone coal abounds, especially in the region of St. Louis and St. Charles. Plaster, pipe clay, manganese, zinc, antimony, red and white chalk, ochres, flint, common salt, nitre, plumbago, porphyry, jasper, porcelain clay, iron, marble and the blue limestone of an excellent quality for lime, have already been discovered in this State. Iron, lead, plaster and coal are known to exist in inexhaustible quantities. St. Louis is much the largest town in the State. It is not only the most pleasantly situated, but has the most favorable location for trade of any town on the Mississippi above New-Orleans. It has, however, been sufficiently described. St. Genevieve is situated about a mile west of the Mississippi on the upper extremity of a beautiful prairie. It is principally settled by the French and contains about fifteen hundred inhabitants. It is an old town, and has not increased for the last thirty years. Jackson, the seat of justice for Cape Girardeau county, is twelve miles west of the Mississippi, contains one hundred houses, some of them built of brick and handsome. The town of Cape Girardeau is situated on a high bluff of the Mississippi, fifty miles above the mouth of the Ohio. It has a fine harbor for boats, and commands an extensive view of the river above and below. It exhibits marks of decay. Potosi is the county town of Washington. It is situated in the centre of the mining district, in a pleasant valley sixty-five miles southwest from St. Louis. St Michael is an old French town among the mines. There are some other small villages in the vicinity of the mining district. Herculaneum is situated among the high bluffs of the river, thirty miles below St. Louis. There are a number of shot towers in its vicinity. New-Madrid is fifty miles below the mouth of the Ohio. Carondolet is a small French village six miles below St. Louis; and four miles below this, is the garrison, called Jefferson Barracks. The public buildings are extensive, and a large number of soldiers are generally stationed here. There are no large villages on the Mississippi above the mouth of the Missouri. Palmyra is probably as large as any. The others are Louisianaville, Troy and Petersburg. There are a number of fine villages on the banks of the Missouri; the largest of which is St. Charles, twenty miles from the mouth, and just the same distance from St. Louis by land. It is situated on a high bank of solid limestone, has one street of good brick houses; and in its rear, an extensive elevated prairie. It contains a protestant and a catholic church, was once the seat of government, and numbers twelve hundred inhabitants; a third of whom are French. It has finely cultivated farms in its neighborhood, and has as interesting scenery as any village in the western country. Jefferson City is the present seat of government, but being thought to be an unfavorable location has not improved as was expected. It is situated on the south bank of the Missouri, nine miles above the mouth of the Osage river, and one hundred and fifty-four by water from St. Louis. Fifty miles above this, is the town of Franklin. It is situated on the north bank of the river, contains two hundred houses and one thousand inhabitants. It is surrounded by the largest body of rich land in the State; and is the centre of fine farms and rich farmers. Boonville is on the opposite bank of the river and was originally settled by Col. Boone, the patriarch of Kentucky. Bluffton, two hundred and twenty-nine miles by water from St. Louis, is the last village within the limits of this State. CHAPTER XII. When we were ready to start, not finding a steamboat bound to New-Orleans, which would go under a day or two, we took passage, as far as the mouth of the Ohio, in one bound to Pittsburgh. On the eastern side of the river, to the mouth of the Ohio, it is a level country, (with only one exception) called the "American Bottom," and is as fine, rich land as earth affords; but is somewhat subject to overflow, and is supposed not to be very healthy. Settlements are, however, making upon it. On the west side we found a number of stately bluffs of limestone, rising from the water perpendicular two or three hundred feet. I was much amused to see the "screw auger grist mills" on the bank of the river. A place is selected where the current sets strong along the shore; and a log seventy feet long, three or four feet in diameter, having a board float a foot in width from stem to stern, in a spiral form, like a coarse threaded screw, is thrown into the river. To the upper end of the log, by an universal joint, is attached a cable, and the other end, extended in a diagonal direction to a shaft in the mill on the bank. The log wheel floats in the water parallel with the shore, about a third of it above the surface; is held in its position by sticks at each end extending to the bank, and the cable itself prevents its going down stream. The current of the river turns the wheel, and the mill clatters merrily on the bank. These high banks are not altogether without their use. They furnish elegant sites for shot towers; and probably half a dozen of them are thus occupied. The greatest natural curiosity on the river, is what is called the "Towers." High pillars of limestone are seen on both sides of the stream, and one solid rock rises almost in the middle of the river, thirty feet high. Some of the most striking curiosities have particular, if not appropriate names given them; such as "the grand tower," "the devil's candlestick," "the devil's bake-oven," &c. The navigation of the Mississippi in steamboats has its dangers. Snags and sawyers are scattered along down the river; and it requires great attention in the pilot, to avoid them. But there are other dangers beside this. As we came along down, we passed a steamboat that had burst her boiler; blown the upper part of it to pieces and killed a number of persons; and further down the Mississippi, the "Boonslick" run into the "Missouri Belle," sunk her in eighty feet of water, and drowned a number of passengers. As we came down opposite the mouth of the Ohio, we had our courage put to the test. It was about twilight, and cloudy; but objects could well be discerned for some distance. We saw a steamboat coming up the river, and apparently intending to pass us on the left hand. When within a short distance of us, the boat "took a sheer," stood on the other tack, to pass us on the right. Our captain sung out, "the boat is coming right into us; back the engine." Then was a scene of confusion and dismay on board; "and the boldest held his breath for a time." If the boats came in contact, one or both would undoubtedly sink; and it appeared unavoidable. I ran up on the upper deck, and stood beside the flag staff, to wait the event. It was soon decided. By backing our boat and putting the steam on the other, we passed without striking at the distance of a few feet only. This was, indeed, a fortunate escape. I thought the pilot of the other boat must have been at fault; but the captain told me he was not at all. A cross current from the Ohio struck the bow of his boat, and veered her round in spite of the helm; and then, the only chance was to go ahead with all the speed he could. It now became quite dark, and in attempting to go across into the Ohio channel, the boat run aground on a sand bar. All the boat hands were employed till past midnight to get her off, but without success. They all turned in, to rest and wait till daylight. When the captain arose in the morning, he found the boat adrift. On examination, it appeared the force of the current alone had washed away the sand bar, and drove the boat across from the Mississippi side into the Ohio channel. He put the steam on, and we run to the landing place on the Illinois side, and a short distance up the river. Here we found half a dozen steamboats, exchanging with each other goods and passengers. The mouth of the Ohio is a general stopping place for all boats running up and down either river; and would be a fine situation for a town, if the land were suitable to build upon. Although the shore appeared to be thirty feet above the then low stage of water, yet in a freshet, the whole is laid eight or ten feet under water. We found here a large tavern house and grocery; both stuck up on stilts; the latter, standing nearest the bank, had a breakwater, to keep it from being carried away by the flood and floating timber. We stopped an hour or more; went to the tavern, and found dissipation in a flourishing condition. Those acquainted with the place, told us it was as much as a man's life was worth, to stay there. Rioting, robbing, gambling and fighting were the general order of things, day after day, and night after night. For the honor of the human race, I hope this account is exaggerated. But I must confess, appearances are against it. Here, we left our boat, and took passage on board another, bound to New-Orleans. These Mississippi steamboats are of gigantic size, and look like a floating castle--I was about to say the ancient ark; and although it might fall some short of that ancient vessel, in quantity and quality of lading, yet when its size and great variety of cargo are taken into consideration, the comparison might not be deemed a bad one. In one particular, it would be exact. We had aboard a number of "_creeping things_." Our boat was laden with barrels of pork, kegs of lard, hogsheads of hams, bags of corn, bars of lead, bales of cotton, coops of chickens, horses, men, women, children, and negro slaves; men of gentlemanly deportment and of good character; and gamblers, horse-jockeys, and negro dealers; and women, of good fame, ill fame, and no particular fame at all. This was, surely, variety enough for one boat. The untravelled man might obtain some new ideas of the world, by taking a trip in a Mississippi steamboat. It seemed like a world in miniature. Singing, fiddling, dancing, card playing, gambling, and story telling, were among the pastimes of the passage. Mere pastimes, to relieve the tedium of the voyage, for those who have no other resources at command, may not be the subject of censure; but there were some practices on board this boat, which ought not to be thus lightly passed over. One woman, in the garb and mien of a lady, and whose person still wore the bloom of youth, but whose conduct was far from being unexceptionable, appeared, sometimes, pensive and sad. She appeared as though she had seen other and better days; and that her present course of life was not, even to herself, entirely satisfactory. I had some curiosity to learn something of her history, and one day in a talkative mood, she gave me the outlines of it. She said, she was the daughter of rich parents in the State of Delaware. Her father died while she was quite young; leaving her with an ample fortune, and in the care of an indulgent mother. She had always been kept at school; learned music, drawing and dancing; read novels; attended parties, and was caressed and flattered. In short, she was a giddy girl, and knew nothing of the world. At this critical time of life, she was flattered by a young man of prepossessing appearance, but of worthless character, who offered her marriage. She knew her mother would, at her tender years, object to the match; and therefore, at the early age of fifteen, she clandestinely jumped out of the window of her boarding house in the night, and was married! This was a sore affliction to her mother; and although she herself was not entirely discarded, her husband was never permitted to enter the parental mansion. Her husband obtained her fortune, spent it "in riotous living," and after awhile, left her with two small children, and fled to Cincinnati. She, in her distress, applied to her mother; she would receive her, but not her children. She then took her children, and went after her husband. She found him; but they lived but a short time together, before he abused her in such a manner, she was obliged to quit him; and not much caring whither she went, she took passage on board a boat for St. Louis. At this place she supported herself and children as long as she could, by selling her trinkets and superfluous clothing, and then was left destitute. She had never been accustomed to labor; her hands were as delicate as those of a child--she "could not work, and to beg she was ashamed." As a last resort, (could a virtuous woman think so?) she became an inmate of a house not of the _strictest morals_. After staying there awhile, she became acquainted with some of the hands of the boat, who persuaded her to try her fortune at the city of New-Orleans. She was now only about twenty! She was miserable, and expected to be so. Vice carried with it its own punishment. I tried to induce her to return to her mother; but in vain. Her conduct had been such, she was ashamed to return. A sad termination this, to the bright hopes, and fond anticipations of an indulgent mother. So true it is, that one improvident step in life, often leads to destruction. Another female who figured somewhat conspicuously, was one who came on board at the mouth of the Ohio from the steamboat Nile; and from that circumstance, was called by the passengers the "Queen of the Nile." She was from the State of Ohio, possessed a fine person, and in her days of innocence, must have been handsome and fascinating. She was the daughter of respectable parents, and commenced life with high hopes and brilliant expectations; but she had been "disappointed in love." Abandoned by her "cruel spoiler," she gave herself up to dissipation and crime. The bloom of her cheeks began to fade, and the sad aspect, sometimes so conspicuously depicted in her countenance, plainly indicated a mind ill at ease and a heart painfully sad. She travelled without object, other than to revel in dissipation and kill time. But her course of life had made serious inroads upon her health, and it was apparent enough that her days must be "evil and few." I sometimes observed her sitting on the guard of the boat for hours all alone, gazing in sadness at the peaceful forest and cottages as they passed in rapid review before her, the tears fast flowing from her eyes, and her face exhibiting such anguish as may not be expressed by words. She kept on in the boat to New-Orleans, and I afterwards was informed by a gentleman who was a fellow passenger, that she became mistress to a Frenchman in that city. How mistaken mankind are! Crime never did cure the heart ache, or dissipation ever dispel sorrow. The steamboats are constructed like a long two story house, having large windows and green blinds. The hold is to stow away their heavy freight; on the first deck, is the gentlemen's cabin, and the dining room, where all the cabin passengers take their meals; in the centre, is the engine, cook room, &c.--and forward, are the boilers and wood. On the next deck, is the ladies' cabin aft, and forward is the place for deck passengers, having berths but no bedding. Over this, is what is called the "hurricane deck." A cabin passage from St. Louis to New-Orleans, is twenty-five dollars; and a deck passage seven dollars--the passenger finding his own bedding and meals. Cooking stoves are provided, so that families often lay in their own provisions and cook their own meals. Boats burn a good deal of wood--ours consumed a cord an hour; and it is no small job to bring the wood aboard from the slippery banks of the Mississippi. As an inducement to the deck passengers to help wood the boat, two dollars are deducted to those who agree to wood; so in that case they only pay five dollars. Thirty or forty of our passengers agreed to wood, but the mate and clerk had much difficulty to make them fulfil their engagements. It was sometimes really laughable, to see the expedients resorted to, to get rid of wooding; especially when the boat rounded to, by the side of a wood-pile in the night. The clerk would sing out, "Wood-pile, wood-pile, where are the wooders?" But they, like some characters in high places, were more inclined to "dodge the question," than to walk up manfully and perform their duty. Some feigned themselves sick; some hid under the baggage, or beneath the berths; others went on shore and skulked in the woods, until the wooding was over. So that with all their coaxing and driving, they would not be able to bring to the work more than half of the wood hands. One fracas was ludicrous, although I could not but regret the result. It is well known, that the inhabitants of the several western States are called by certain _nicknames_. Those of Michigan are called _wolverines_; of Indiana, _hooshers_; of Illinois, _suckers_; of Ohio, _buckeyes_; of Kentucky, _corn-crackers_; of Missouri, _pukes_, &c. To call a person by his right nickname, is always taken in good part, and gives no offence; but nothing is more offensive than to mis-nickname--that is, were you to call a hoosher a wolverine, his blood would be up in a moment, and he would immediately show fight.--Now it so happened that the mate, who was a regular built buckeye, had a dispute with a wood hand, who was about half drunk, and refused to wood. The mate stood on the lower deck, and he on the deck above; and in the course of the wrangle, he had called him some terrible hard names, which he bore with becoming fortitude and forbearance. At length, the wood hand called him a "d--d old puke!" This was too much--unendurable. He fired in a moment--rushed up and floored him in a twinkling--dragged him down by his collar, thrust him ashore, and left him in the woods. But the steamboat, the steamboat! For noise and confusion, give me the Mississippi steamboat. They all have powerful high-pressure engines; the escape pipe is large, and at every breath they make a tremendous noise. They "talk big," and swiftly dash through the water. It is indeed a grand display, to see the steamboats pass. In "a voice of thunder" they come--the wheels lash the water--and the prows cut the stream--and the waves roll in violent commotion for hundreds of yards behind them. And then, the noise of the engine, and hurry and bustle of the passengers within:--an excellent place to cure one of the ennui. On board our boat, we had a number of very intelligent and agreeable gentlemen--Kentuckians, Tennesseans, Mississippians, &c. I wish these western people would be a little more exact in speaking the English language. Some inaccuracies I observed; and if this book ever reaches them, they will not be offended, but obliged to me for these suggestions. In the first place, they use the word _which_ instead of _what_. Ask a question, and if they do not understand you, they reply "_which?_"--Another phrase, "I have _saw_," instead of "I have _seen_," is often used. Then there is "a right smart chance," applied to almost every thing; and "tote in the plunder," instead of "bring in the baggage." But the word _heap_ has too much by far _heaped_ upon its shoulders. "A _heap_ better," "a _heap_ easier," and "a _heap_ of ladies," are phrases often heard. I may be a little sensitive, but the word _heap_ is very disagreeable, and I wish it was expunged from the English vocabulary. All these expressions are not used by many literary men in this country, but they are indeed, quite too common. They have some peculiarities in the calling of money. A New-England _ninepence_ is called _a bit_; and the four-pence-half-penny bears the name of _pickaroon_. In travelling from New-Hampshire to Virginia some years ago, I was somewhat amused at the different names given to the same piece of money. My four-pence-half-penny became at New-York a _sixpence_, at Philadelphia a _fip_, and at Virginia it became a four-pence-half-penny again. But all these singularities and inconveniences will soon be done away, and money will universally bear its legal title, dollars and cents. CHAPTER XIII. There is an independent frankness in these western people that I admire. It is a kind of individuality of character--every one appears to act out himself, without reference to others. At the north, people are too apt to follow the multitude, or a particular file leader; and by them, shape their opinions and actions. In order to tell whether they will do a particular act, they must look about them, and ascertain what others will say of it. The politician must conform to the usages of his party, whatever they may be. He must think as they think, and act as they act, whether it be agreeable to the dictates of his own conscience or not. The pious lady must be exactly in the fashion--conform to certain leaders--be charitable by rule--and kind, in the most approved mode. If any one has the boldness to take an independent course, in fashion, politics or religion, he is looked upon with suspicion, as a dangerous innovator, and must not be tolerated. The dogs of war are let loose upon him, and he is hunted down for entertaining an opinion of his own. In this manner, individual character becomes swallowed up and lost in that of the multitude. But in this region, nature is true to herself. The useless and cumbersome shackles of custom and party are thrown aside with disdain; and the individual walks forth in his own native freedom and independence. He does not shape his course by what his neighbors may say, do or think; but acts according to the dictates of his own heart, and from his own opinion of right and wrong. He is charitable, kind and hospitable--not in a grudging, supercilious manner; or in a way calculated to display himself; but with such an air of open-hearted welcome, as to make the recipient feel at ease, and doubles the value of the kindness bestowed. How can man be niggardly and mean, among the teeming prairies and stately forests of the West, where nature herself, by showering down her blessings with a bountiful hand, teaches him also to be liberal! And I have often to myself reversed the question and asked, how can northern people be other than inhospitable and niggardly, living in such a crabbed climate, and on such a barren soil. They cannot, in general, afford to be liberal; and were it otherwise, the severe labor and economy--the continual dealing in small things--the constant rack of brains, to find some method to turn a penny to advantage--that must be gone through with, to gain a large estate, seem to drive out of the head of the possessor all notions of liberality, and tend to steel the heart against noble acts of kindness. That which costs much, and is rarely obtained, is highly valued, and not lightly parted with. We are not well educated in the school of hospitality. We awkwardly perform its teachings--seldom with gracefulness and a hearty welcome. Among our passengers, there were twenty-three negro slaves, men and women; bought in Kentucky by negro speculators, to be transported to Natchez, where the market is high, to be sold. One of them was taken with the cholera, and in twelve hours died. He was put into a rough box, and when we stopped to wood, buried on shore. This was the only case we had, and the only one I ever witnessed. It is a dreadful disease; but has been too often professionally described, for me to attempt it. These negroes are singular beings. Although one of their number had died; and although they were slaves, and going to be sold to, they knew not whom, or what hardships they might be made to endure, yet they were always merry--talking, laughing, singing, dancing, in one continued round. At every place we stopped, they would run on shore, and while one sung, clapped his hands, and beat time with his foot, the others would foot it merrily on the smooth ground. Knowing their destination, their thoughtless gayety sometimes produced disagreeable sensations. There are some situations, however, where ignorance and thoughtlessness are a blessing. They were not confined at all, but appeared to be kindly treated, and to enjoy every liberty they might, consistent with their situation. The banks of the Mississippi look high enough at low water; probably thirty feet; presenting a raw edge next the stream, and generally covered with a dense forest of lofty trees; yet at high water, they are generally overflowed, except at the high bluffs. The most prominent of these, are what are called the Iron Banks, Chickasaw Bluffs, Walnut Hills, and the site of the city of Natchez--all these are on the east side of the river. I do not remember of seeing a single high bluff on the west side, below the mouth of the Ohio. There are occasionally small elevations over which the river does not flow; and villages erected on them. But every few miles without regard to overflows, log houses are erected in the wilderness, inhabited by woodcutters; and their only employment seems to be, to supply the steamboats with wood. Although wood is cheap, being generally $1,50 a cord, above the mouth of the Ohio, and from there to Natchez $2,00, yet the demand is so great, and the forest so near, they make quite a lucrative business of it. The river is very crooked, sometimes going five miles to gain one; has many islands, and some places, full of snags. There are two or three snag boats employed on the river, and when they get them chiefly out, the Missouri, which seems to take upon itself the chief regulation of the stream, brings down at high water a reinforcement equal to the first supply; so that to keep the river clear of snags, is like the labor of Sisyphus, who was doomed to roll a stone up a hill, and the moment he got it near the top, it would roll down again. The introduction of steamboats on the western waters, has revolutionized the country. They have opened the deep recesses of the West, to the free access of mankind, and let in the light of day upon them. The half-horse and half-alligator race are no longer to be found; but the inhabitants of this part of creation look, and talk, and act, and live--very much like human beings. The refinements, elegancies and luxuries of life are not so generally found here, as in the Atlantic States; but all the necessaries are every where abundant. In Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, and all along the river Mississippi, I found the inhabitants civil and kind; and in no one instance did I ask for a meal of victuals in vain. It might, sometimes, be a homely one, and once I recollect, it consisted of meat and bread; but those who have such a mawkish sensibility that they cannot relish the simple fare of the forrester, ought never to set a foot on the western world. The flat boats are still in use on the river. We passed hundreds of them; some loaded with live stock, others with corn, cotton, &c. They have hardly any resemblance of a boat. They are sixty or seventy feet long, ten wide, having corner posts and a square form like a house, and a flat roof. The current floats them down the stream to the destined port, the cargoes and boats are both sold, and the hands take passage on board the steamboats, home. We stopped at all the villages and towns of any size on the river, to take and leave passengers and freight; but books give such an accurate description of them, as to render any particular notice here unnecessary. Memphis is the most pleasant, Vicksburg the most flourishing, and Natchez the largest--all on the east side of the river. There are no large towns on the west side of the river below the mouth of the Ohio. As prominent as any, perhaps, is New-Madrid, situated just within the southern border of the State of Missouri. It was once a much larger village than at present. It is memorable for the romantic history of its origin under General Morgan, and for the great earthquakes in 1811 and 1812. Mr. Flint says that these earthquakes were more severe than any known in our part of the continent. The shocks were felt more or less throughout the whole western country; but they were more severe and produced the most disastrous effects in the region of New-Madrid.--The grave yard of the village, with all its sleeping tenants was precipitated into the river--the trees were violently thrown against each other, bent in various directions or prostrated--the earth burst in many places, and earth, sand and water were thrown high into the air--thousands of acres were sunk and many ponds formed--the river became dammed up and flowed backwards--islands sunk in the stream, and boats as they passed shared the same fate--the birds of the air became terrified, descended to the earth and flew into the arms of man to shelter themselves from the commotion of nature--the whole country for a time became inundated, but as it was thinly inhabited few lives only were lost. History does not record an earthquake attended with more terrific circumstances and threatening a more exterminating war with man and nature, than this. The thriving country about the village was made desolate, but now it is slowly regaining its former condition. In this region the country is rich and beautiful, but the many ponds made by the earthquake render it unhealthy. New-Madrid is, however, quite a village, transacts much business and is the most noted landing place for steamboats on the west side of the river below St. Louis. CHAPTER XIV. At Natchez, I left the boat, and stopped a day or two, to make the necessary preparations to go over land on horseback to Texas. There is a steamboat that plies regularly between this place and Alexandria on Red River; and we should rather have travelled by water as far as that place, and avoided crossing the Mississippi swamp by land; but the boat had gone, and would not return under a number of days. Natchez is an incorporated city, containing about three thousand inhabitants. That part of it which lies under the bluff near the river, is muddy, looks old and disagreeable; but the main part of the city is situated on a high bank, two hundred feet above the river; chiefly built of brick, quite pleasant, and makes quite a show of business. The ground back of it, is full of gullies, and is unpleasant. It is an old town, but has much improved within a few years. Many people going to Texas continue on down the river to New-Orleans, and there take a passage on board a vessel to some port in the province; but my desire was to see the country, and therefore, I chose to travel over land. A pleasant and companionable gentleman from the State of New-York, who came down in the boat with me, agreed to bear me company. Some acquaintances of his, with their families, were on the road to Texas, and he like myself wished to see the country. Having provided ourselves with horses, portmanteaus, fireworks, &c. and obtained the necessary directions, we took an early start; crossed the Mississippi in a ferry boat, for which we were taxed half a dollar each; and took the road to Alexandria. We had some ill-forbodings about the great Mississippi swamp; for just as we were about to cross the river a gentleman, of whom we made some enquires respecting the route, told us he thought it now impossible to travel through it in consequence of the rains which had recently fallen. But we were all equipped to go by land, and this, our only route; and therefore, we determined, at all events, to push forward. There is a road from the mouth of Red River, along its bank to Alexandria, and this, we were afterwards informed, is the best route; but it was seventy miles below us; and whoever takes it, must go down in a boat. Our route lay, for the first six miles, up the river near its bank; and then we turned more to the west. We passed half a dozen cotton plantations, some quite large, and saw an army of negroes picking it. The cotton plant grows about as high as a man's head, has blossoms about as big as that of a small rose, and resembling in appearance the hollyhock, but more extensive branches. The pod is about the size and shape of the outer covering of a walnut; and when ripe, it opens in quarters, and presents the cotton in full view. A negro takes a basket or a bag, and swings it at his side, and with his thumb and finger picks out the cotton, almost as fast as a hen picks up corn. It grows from the seed, is planted every year in hills like corn, and cultivated in the same manner. A field of cotton in full blossom, makes a fine appearance. After it is picked, it is laid on a rack to dry; then ginned to take out the seed, and put up in bales for the market. The rope and bagging used, are the manufacture of Kentucky; or at least it brings more into market than all the other States. I was told that one prime hand on good land would _make_ ten bales of cotton a year, and raise corn enough to support himself. The average worth of these bales is five hundred dollars. From enquiries I afterwards made, I believe the plantations generally make about seven bales to the hand. No wonder negroes are valuable in a cotton-growing country. Our route now lay through a dense forest--and the ground generally so miry that we could only ride on a walk. Sometimes we came to the thick canebrakes, about twenty feet high, and overhanging our narrow path. Sometimes, we found the palmetto, which exactly resembles a large green, open fan, standing on a stem a foot high, and so thick that we could hardly ride through them, or see any path at all. Sometimes we came to a sheet of water a hundred yards wide, in which a horse would plunge to the saddle skirts, and for a while, become stuck fast; and again, we would find a cypress swamp, full of cypress knees and mud. Indeed it is the worst swamp I ever travelled over, before or since; and sometimes, I thought our horses were stuck too fast ever to move again. These cypress knees are quite a curiosity. They start from the roots of the tree, grow from two to four feet high, about the size of a man's arm, but rather larger at the bottom, and are smooth, without leaf or branch. They look like a parcel of small posts with the bark growing over the top end; and are so thick, that it is troublesome to ride among them. The cause or use of this anomaly in nature I cannot divine. Eighteen miles from Natchez, we came to two log houses and a small stream, called the Tensaw. We crossed the ferry, about twice the length of the boat in width, and paid half a dollar each for ferriage. We had now twelve miles to go to find a stopping place for the night, and all the way, through a dense forest of lofty trees; and it was three o'clock in the afternoon. The first half of the distance was decent travelling, although we could not ride much of the way faster than a walk. Then we came to a wet and miry road. It began to grow dark in the woods. The trees were quite thick, and hung full of Spanish moss; and there was no moon in the sky. The wolf, the wildcat, and the owl, had pitched their tune for the night; and soon, thick darkness shrouded around our path. The heavens were clear; yet so dense were the foliage and moss, that it was seldom I could find a loop hole, through which a star might cast its rays upon us. I never had been in such a gloomy situation before. We were in a path, to us untravelled; and by its appearance, seldom travelled by man. We had shoals of muddy water to cross, and sloughs of mud to wallow through. And then the night was so dark, and the track so faint, we frequently lost it, and found it again with difficulty. It was ten o'clock at night when we arrived on the shore of the lake, and saw a light on the other side. We raised the ferryman after a while, and he came out and took us over. This lake is about a mile wide, and twelve long, and must have once been the channel of the Mississippi. The ferriage here was half a dollar each. On the other side, we found a good house, and a genteel family within. They soon provided for us an excellent supper, which was very acceptable after a ride of thirty miles over such an execrable road. Not being much used to travelling on horseback, I felt excessively fatigued and retired immediately to bed. My companion and myself had each of us a good bed, and we slept soundly until after sunrise. The morning was fine, so we walked awhile along the shore of the lake, before breakfast. It was about the twentieth of November, yet the air felt as mild as a morning in June. The winter was following hard after me, yet I had travelled to the southward and westward faster than the cold weather. The coldest weather I had found on my route, was in the State of New-York. There is a softness in the atmosphere of the western States that is very grateful to the feelings, and is not found in our northern climate. In going westward on the same parallel of latitude, the air becomes sensibly more mild and bland. The air is very clear, so here as in Illinois, I could discern objects much further than at the North. I could see a house so far off, that it would not look larger than a bee-hive. There had been no frost here, and nature wore her livery of green. This gentleman has a fine cotton plantation of rich alluvial land. His house is built facing the lake, on an Indian mound, levelled down to the height of about six feet. We took breakfast with the family in a large portico on the back side of the house. It was a good breakfast, on a neat spread table, and the lady at the head performed the honors of it, with an ease and grace seldom equalled. We performed our parts to a charm, both in eating the breakfast and complimenting the hostess. This family were from the State of Virginia, and had been settled here in Louisiana seven years.--The gentleman informed me they had generally enjoyed good health, although they had sometimes been afflicted with the fever and ague. It is refreshing to the weary traveller, when far away from his home, to find a spot in his path, where he can renew his strength, and repose in peace. At such a spot he lingers, leaves it with regret, and treasures it up in his memory. I have often thought, that many persons do not travel in a right spirit. They start on their journey with a full belief that all the customs and modes of life they find, differing from those they have been accustomed to, are all wrong, and proper subjects of censure and dislike. They see nothing in its true light, enjoy nothing, find fault with everything; and are continually running their heads against a post. They are always on the rack; and probably punish themselves as much as they do every one around them. But such a course betrays a gross ignorance. Who can read the outpourings of madame Trollope's brain, without being convinced that she had too gross conceptions, and too strong prejudices, to write the history of any people, whose manners were different from her own. She saw nothing, only through a jaundiced eye; and she had too narrow and contracted a mind, ever to make the important discovery, that the fault might be in herself, and not in the objects with which she was surrounded. Some prefer to be mere scavengers; and when they find anything gross or impure, delight to exhibit it to the gaze of the world. I have often thought of the severe reply of Dr. Johnson to a lady, who told him she liked his dictionary, because he had no indelicate words in it. O, says the doctor, I did not trouble _my_ head about them, but I see _you_ have been looking for them. Other travellers think, the more fault they find, the more they will be noticed; and they will be treated with the more deference and respect. I once happened to ride in the stage with the venerable Chief Justice Marshall. He was affable and polite, at peace with himself, and displeased at nothing. In the same stage, as if nature intended to exhibit two beings, in bold relief, and make the contrast the more striking, was a testy young man, who found fault with every thing, and was pleased with nothing. He cursed the driver, the stage and the road; and the country through which we travelled was too execrable to live in. At the hotel, where we stopped to dine, he keeps the house in a continual uproar. The dinner bell rang, and we set down at the table. For some reason, he did not come in immediately; and when he made his appearance, the table was entirely full. This was too much for him to bear. He cursed the waiter for not saving a place for him. The waiter, as quick as possible, provided him a place at a side table. But he was determined not to be thrown into the shade in this manner. The Judge ate his dinner in silence; but this _side table_ gentleman kept a continual cry for something. "I say, waiter"--bring me this, and bring me that.--His vociferations became quite annoying. At length, he cried out with rather increased vehemence, "I say, waiter, bring me a _fresh_ potatoe." The moment this was uttered, one of the gentleman at our table said, "Waiter, give that gentleman a _fresh_ chair, I am sure he has set in that one long enough." This was a damper. It caused quite a laugh at the young man's expense. He became silent, and after dinner, we saw no more of him. CHAPTER XV. "Behold us mounted once again,"--and immediately after leaving this gentleman's plantation, we again passed into a dense forest and found a muddy path. In about six miles we found some sandy land and pine timber, and here we left what is called the Mississippi swamp. We soon came to the outlet of the lake, which we had to ford. The water was deep, and the shore deep mud. It was a difficult job to make a horse wallow through. We were told that a horse got swamped and died in the mud, a few feet from the spot where we crossed. We came to the banks of Washita river, followed it down three miles, and crossed over to Harrisonburg. The town is built on a level plain on the west bank of the river; but it contains not more than twenty houses. This river empties into Red River, and is navigable for steamboats a long distance above the village. It is forty-two miles west of Natchez. On this river are the lands where the famous Aaron Burr _talked_ of establishing a colony; but unless the land above and below is better than in this region, it might not have been very flourishing. The soil is too sandy and poor. We rode twenty-five miles over a rolling sandy country, generally covered with pine woods; and stopped at night with a gentleman who had been one of Burr's party. He did not seem inclined to say much of that ill-fated expedition. Here we were kindly treated, and fared well. He had been there nineteen years; had cleared a large plantation; raised cotton, corn and cattle; had eight or ten negroes, and possessed the necessaries of life in abundance. But he still lived in a log house, without a glass window in it. I asked him, why he did not have windows. He said, the house was well enough; if the hole cut for a window did not make it light enough, he opened the door. It was not just such a house as I should be contented in, for nineteen years, and possessing the wealth he had.--It, however, was to his taste; and for aught I could see, he was as happy as those who live in much better houses. To-day we travelled thirty-three miles to Alexandria, just one hundred miles from Natchez. The first forty was Mississippi swamp, excellent land, but a good deal of it too low for cultivation; the last sixty miles was, with few exceptions, hilly, sandy, pitch pine woods. We passed only a few good plantations. Occasionally, we found a small prairie of poor soil, and a deserted log house. It was indeed the most dreary road I ever travelled. In the last day's travel, we passed two small rivers; one we crossed in a ferry boat; and to our special wonder, we found quite a decent bridge over the other. Red River is rightly named; it is almost as red as blood, caused by the red soil through which it passes. It is quite a large stream; but the water is too brackish to drink, or for culinary purposes. The only resource of the inhabitants of Alexandria is to catch rain water for which they have enormous large cisterns. We crossed the river opposite the town in a ferry boat, and found the current about as strong as that of the Mississippi. It is navigable for steamboats, in a moderate stage of water, as high up as "the raft," and when the removal of that is completed, for a long distance into the country. About a mile above the town, there is a short rapid which boats cannot pass when the water is low. The mouth of Red River has probably undergone some changes. It is almost certain, that in by-gone years, Red River had its own separate channel to the Gulf of Mexico; but in process of time, the ever changing Mississippi river took a long turn that way; struck into its channel, and after appropriating its waters and three miles of its bed to its own use, wheeled round to the left, and pursued its own course to the ocean. In this state of the case, the upper part of Red River became a tributary of the Mississippi, and the lower part a mere waste-way to pass off its superfluous waters. But the inconstant Mississippi, a short time ago, cut out for itself a new, strait channel across the bend, and left Red River to itself. This cut-off, however, proved of incalculable advantage to that section of country. It let off the Mississippi waters so freely, that a large tract of most excellent land does not now overflow; and this is sought for with avidity, and settling fast. Alexandria is pleasantly situated on a level plain, the south side of Red River, one hundred and four miles from its mouth, and three hundred and twenty-nine from New-Orleans. It is regularly laid out in squares; has a court house, three hotels, eight or ten stores, two or three groceries, and a number of good dwelling houses. Its chief export is cotton, and that of the first quality. Red River cotton commands the highest price in market. I saw a large number of bales piled on the river bank, and wagon loads coming in. Gentlemen and ladies, in pleasure carriages and on horseback, were riding through the streets; and the hotels were full of guests. It appears to be a place of business and of pleasure; of much wealth, and in a rich neighborhood. This place and Natchitoches, seventy-five miles above it, are the only towns of any size in this section of the country. At the upper end of the town, there is a regular laid out race-course, of a circular form, and a mile in extent. Here, the speed of horses is frequently put to the test, and extensive bets made on the result. This seems to be the favorite sport of this country--of more absorbing interest than any other; and about which the people talk more than on any other one subject. Good race-horses are of great value, and almost any price will be given for them. Although the race-course may have its great attractions--it may exhilarate the feelings, to see that noble animal, the horse, with mettle high, and lofty bearing, spurn the dust beneath his feet, and skim along the plain with the swiftness of the wind; and although it may have a tendency to improve the breed of horses; yet upon the whole, may it not be said, that it is purchasing improvement and pleasure, at a great expense of time and money; and, independent of its moral effect upon society, productive of more evil than good. Gambling is too much the order of the day. A large billiard room faces the main street in this village, and seems never to lack for customers. In this room one man killed another by striking him on the head with the _cue_, and his trial was just finished as I arrived. He was convicted of manslaughter, and sentenced to ten years confinement in the State Prison. The result of the trial gave general dissatisfaction among the people. They thought he ought to have been convicted of murder and suffered its penalty. Not much attention is paid to the cultivation of vegetables or fruit. The peach and fig-tree were the only fruit trees I saw, and but few of them.--The fig-tree much resembles our northern quince tree, but grows some larger in size. The only vegetables we had at table, were turnips and sweet potatoes. The northern potatoe will not produce a crop unless new seed is obtained every year. All the beds in this region are surrounded with thin curtains, or as they are termed here, moscheto-bars, to protect the inmate from that pestiferous, anti-sleeping insect, the moscheto. Of all insects this world produces, the moscheto is the most troublesome and annoying. To lie down without a bar, as I sometimes did, and fight the moschetoes all night long is dreadful. Too tired and sleepy to keep awake, I would fall into a drowse, only to be aroused in a moment by half a dozen dabbing into my face, and singing in my ears. They are indeed, too familiar by half; and the only chance to cut their acquaintance is to flee. I would not spend my days in the region of moschetoes for the sake of wealth, for I should only possess splendid misery. CHAPTER XVI. About a mile above this place, we left Red River, and travelled the road on the bank of Bayou Rapide for twenty-five miles, to the mansion house of a Mr. Henderson, where we stayed over night. In this day's ride, we passed over as rich land as I ever saw, covered with extensive cotton plantations. It is all river-bottom land of a red clayey soil; and all along the road, as we passed, we saw clouds of negroes with bags and baskets at their sides, picking cotton. The land produces an abundant and a profitable crop, and the planters appear to have grown rich. But it seems not exactly to be a paradise, if there be indeed, any such a place on earth. It is excessively annoyed by moschetoes, and is very unhealthy. During the warm, sickly summer months, the planters with their families flee to the pine woods, where the air is fine and salubrious; and leave their overseers and negroes to battle with disease and moschetoes, the best way they can. They are very companionable, hospitable and kind, and their style of living is much the same as that of the southern planters generally. About half way up, we crossed the stream over a bridge to the right hand side; and just before we arrived at Mr. Henderson's, we crossed it again. Soon after we crossed it the first time, I happened to cast my eyes towards the stream, and found it running the other way! We had certainly been travelling all along up the stream; and now, without any apparent cause, either in the "lay of the land," or direction of the channel, it was just as certain its current was with us. I enquired of our host the meaning of all this. He pleasantly observed, that the streams in this part of the country, were very accommodating; they could go almost any way. He, however, explained the phenomenon. He said, the channel of the stream, by the side of which we had travelled, was, undoubtedly, once the bed of Red River. Ten miles above him, the river had taken a straight course to Alexandria, and left its former circuitous route. The water, which we now saw running, is supplied by a stream from the lake, enters the old channel on the opposite side from where we were travelling, then divides itself, one half running down and entering the river near Alexandria, and the other running up the old bed, and entering the river ten miles above. When the river is high, a portion of it flows round in its old bed, and drives the upper current along with it. So that by this house the stream runs about half of the year one way, and the other half in the opposite direction! A rather difficult stream I should think, to build a mill upon. This is indeed quite a curiosity; but to the explanation one objection may be urged. If this be in fact the old bed of Red River, and from examination I am satisfied it is, one might naturally suppose it would be all along descending _one way_; and, therefore, the stream which enters it would not divide itself, but the _whole_ of it run in the _same direction_ that the river formerly did. The answer to this is, the stream coming in, carried sand with it, and for a considerable distance somewhat filled up the old channel, so as to make a descent each way; but not so much as to prevent Red River when high, from sweeping round, in its former course. A curiosity, in some respects similar to this, is found in Arkansas territory. White river and Arkansas river enter the Mississippi ten miles apart; and about twenty miles above, there is a direct water communication between them; which is a large navigable stream; the water of which runs, sometimes one way and sometimes the other, according to the comparative height of each river; so that a person living on its bank, could make no sort of calculation which way the stream might run, from day to day. Mr. Henderson has a large house pleasantly situated on a sandy hill near the pine woods, and commands an extensive view in front of the river flatland, and cotton plantations. We here fared well; and as Mr. Henderson has ample accommodations, his house may be safely recommended as a stopping place for the traveller. Our route now lay through the pine woods. Our object was to strike the road from Natchitoches to Mexico, at the nearest point practicable; and this spot, we were told, was at the garrison, fort Jessup. This fort is situated half way between Natchitoches and the Sabine river, the line between the United States and Texas; being twenty-five miles from each. Natchitoches being twenty-five miles north of our route, we concluded not to pass through it; but when Red River is high, travellers to Texas often take a passage on board a steamboat from Natchez to that place, and from thence, take the Mexican road. From Mr. Henderson's an intelligent gentleman, well acquainted with the country, travelled with us three or four days on our route; and from whom we obtained much information. This day, we travelled forty miles through an unbroken forest of pitch pine. The land is sandy, gently undulating, but seldom rocky. The trees were of good size, but not so thick together as to prevent the grass from growing beneath them; or the traveller from seeing a great distance as he passes along. About half way, we found a small log house, in which a white man lived with a black wife. With some people, I suppose this would be commendable; but I confess it gave me unpleasant feelings to see half a dozen of _half-bloods_ running about the house. He professed to keep a sort of tavern, but all the refreshment we obtained was bread and meat. At night, we came to the house of a planter, near a small river. He had a hundred acres cleared of river bottom land, which had been planted with cotton and corn; a large stock of cattle and hogs, which ranged in the woods. He had lived here twelve years, was worth twenty thousand dollars; yet still lived in a log house with only two rooms, and without a window in it. Our supper was fried beef, fried greens, sweet potatoes, corn bread and a cup of coffee, without milk or sugar; which we ate by the light of the fire, as he had neither a candle or a lamp. Our fellow traveller told us that we had now got out of the region of what we should call comfortable fare; and we might expect to find it worse, rather than better, all the way through Texas. Our lodging was on a comfortable bed made of Spanish moss; and our breakfast exactly like our supper, which we ate with the doors open to give us light. Our bill was a dollar each, for supper, breakfast, lodging and horsekeeping; and this, I found to be the general price, in all country places throughout Texas. After passing the river and about a mile of bottom land, we came to the pine woods again. I could always tell when we approached a stream, by the trees being covered with Spanish moss. The first I saw, was on the Mississippi, about a hundred miles above Natchez; and in all the region south of that, it is found hanging to the limbs of the trees near streams of water. It is of a silver-grey color, hanging straight down from the limbs three or four feet, like a horse's mane. It looks, perhaps, more like dressed flax than any thing else; and some of the trees were so completely covered with it that we could scarcely discover any thing but the moss. It does not strongly attach itself to the limb I used to pull off handfulls of it, as we passed along, to examine. It is but the work of a few minutes to gather enough for a bed. The only preparation necessary is to scald it in hot water, or to let it remain awhile in cold water, to rot like hemp. It then looks like fine long hair, and a dark brown color. When dry, it is whipped, and put into the tick. It makes a very good, cheap bed, and lasts a long time. Of this material most of the beds in this country are made, and sometimes a mattress of the kind is found at the north. All the river bottom lands at the south, are covered with a dense, heavy growth of trees, among which are many kinds not found at the north. The cotton-wood grows very large, somewhat resembling the whitewood of the western States. The magnolia, celebrated for its large, splendid blossom, is an evergreen, having a dark, green leaf an inch and a half wide, and two and a half long, and of the size of the maple--the peccan, a tree resembling the walnut, and bearing a round nut an inch long, equal to the hickory-nut--the hackberry, about the size and much resembling the beach--the holly, a small evergreen, having a small thick leaf--the chinquopin, a mere shrub, resembling the chestnut tree, and bearing a similar but smaller nut. We frequently found the grape vine of large size running high up the trees; and occasionally, a spot of cane-brake. This day's travel was through the pine woods, except at some few places where we found a small clearing and a log house, near some small stream. We did not go by fort Jessup. Our companion knew of a nearer route, and we took it. About the middle of the afternoon, we came out on the Mexican road, three miles south of the garrison. It appeared to be a road a good deal travelled by wagons, as well as on horseback; some places running through swamps and muddy; occasionally, a bridge over the most miry streams; but generally in a state of Nature. The land became some better, and we passed more settlements. At night we stopped at a log house kept by a widow. She had, living with her, two sons and one daughter. The house had no windows, and but one room in it. Near it, was a small kitchen where a negro woman did the cooking. Our fare was very similar to that of the night before, except the old lady had a candle on the table at supper. There were four beds in the room where we all slept--the old lady and her daughter in one bed--her two sons in another--and we three travellers in the other two. I hope the delicate nerves of my fair readers may not greatly be disturbed at this; if they are, they must close the book, and read no further; for If I must tell "the whole truth," I shall be obliged to state, that during the thirty following nights, I often slept in the same room with one or more ladies! The old lady had about twenty acres cleared and cultivated with corn; but the land is not the first rate. The fact is, all along Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana, after you get sixty or seventy miles west of the Mississippi river, you come to light, sandy, hilly land; generally covered with pitch pine; excepting a narrow strip on the margin of the streams; so that half of Missouri, three-fourths of Arkansas, and half of Louisiana, are poor land, hardly fit for cultivation. This is not what I had supposed; but from my own observations, and the information of travellers, I believe this to be the fact. We took an early start, and travelled on. The northern people have been accused of being very inquisitive; but I am sure I would turn out the people here against them on a wager. As a general rule, we were inquired of, "where from"--"where going," &c. &c. To-day, a man, twenty rods distant from the road, came running up, and asked us, where we were from. I thought this was carrying inquisitiveness too far; and so I took the yankee privilege of answering his question by asking another, viz:--If it was out of mere curiosity, or for the sake of obtaining information beneficial to himself, that induced him to enquire. He said he was from Kentucky himself, and did not know but we might be from there also; and in that case, he wished to inquire the news. I told him we were none of us from Kentucky. But this did not satisfy him; he insisted upon knowing where we were from; and appeared quite vexed that he could not obtain the information from any of us. We passed a number of covered waggons, generally with four horses, loaded with goods and families bound to Texas. They invariably lodge out doors over night. They carry their own provisions with them, and select some spot where there is plenty of wood and water, build up a fire, cook their meals, turn their horses or oxen loose to feed on the prairie, or in the woods, and camp down on the grass by the side of the fire. I saw some who had been thirty and forty and sixty days on the road; from Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, &c. and said they had not put up at a house for a single night. Some of them looked quite "wearied and worn;" and if they do indeed find rest at last, it must be confessed, that "through great tribulation," they enter the promised land. About noon to-day, we came to the Sabine river, the dividing line between the United States and Texas. We had now travelled from Natchez two hundred and twenty-five miles on horseback; and this, the seventh day since we started. I had now become used to the saddle; and saving the muddy roads and miry streams which we sometimes found, I enjoyed the trip very well. I was surprised to find the Sabine so small a river. I should think it was not more than one third as large as Red River. It is a deep muddy stream, and gentle current. We were paddled across the river by a woman, who was a "right smart" one, and landed at last on the shore of TEXAS. CHAPTER XVII. I had read and heard so many fine descriptions of Texas--its pleasant streams, beautiful prairies, mild climate, and extensive herds of buffalo, wild horses and cattle, that it was with no small degree of enthusiasm, I set foot, for the first time, on its territory. I cast my eyes back for a moment on the United States; then turned to the "fairy land," with high hopes and bright anticipations. The Sabine has two or three miles of good bottom land on each side, heavily timbered; but it is too much subject to inundation to be cultivated.--After we passed the river bottom, we came to gentle swells, of red clayey soil, covered with oak, hickory, &c. called oak openings. Sometimes we passed a small prairie; and occasionally, a log house and a small field. Thus we passed ten miles; and here, our fellow traveller, having arrived to the end of his journey, left us. He had travelled a hundred miles with us; was an intelligent man, well acquainted with the country, and we became too much interested in him, not to feel serious regret at parting. This is one of the disagreeable things in travelling; we form acquaintances only to leave them. We now found cotton fields, as well as corn; more extensive plantations, and better houses. We passed two race-courses by the road side, and stopped for the night, at a very decent looking double log house, having a wide portico in front, and a wide avenue through the centre. Here, we found good accommodations. The house contained three or four rooms, and had about the same number of glass windows in it. We had for supper, venison, sweet potatoes, corn bread, coffee, butter and milk. Back of the house, I observed a small orchard of apple trees, the only one I found in all Texas. The trees looked thrifty, and had just begun to bear fruit. In front, near the road, was as fine a spring of good, clear, soft water, as I ever saw; but it was hardly cold enough for a northern man. Here were extensive fields of cotton and corn. This planter had a cotton gin and press. The cotton was sent by land to Natchitoches; to be transported from thence to New-Orleans by water. Six miles from this, we came to an entirely new village, called St. Augustine, near a stream called the Ayish Bayou. About two years ago, it was laid out; and now it contains two large taverns, three stores, a court house, and ten or a dozen dwelling houses. There is a good school kept here, to which scholars are sent from some distance. It would be tedious, however, to relate the particulars of this, and the two succeeding days--it would only be the same story over again. Our fare was rather poor--the meals, better than the lodging. One night, we slept in a new framed house, one side all open to the weather; and the other, we slept in a log house, the interstices between the logs not filled up, so that you might thrust your arm out almost any where. This night we had a smart shower, accompanied by a strong wind, and the rain beat in so liberally, I was obliged to haul my bed eight or ten feet to leeward. We passed quite a number of log houses, small plantations, through oak openings and pine plains, and, at length, came to the ancient town of Nacogdoches. I could not but smile at the odd and grotesque appearance of Nacogdoches, as I entered the principal street of the town. In by-gone days, the Spaniards built a town of log houses; generally having the logs standing perpendicular at the sides and ends, and the space between them filled with mud; with chimneys made of the same materials. These look old and woe-begone. In modern times, the Americans have erected a number of elegant, framed houses, well finished and painted white; and these are scattered along among these ancient hovels. The contrast is very striking, and somewhat ludicrous. Before me, stood an ancient Roman Catholic church, built in true Spanish style, with perpendicular logs and mud; now falling to decay, and presenting to the eye a hideous mass of ruins. The town stands on a beautiful plain; having a small stream of water on each side; is very healthy; and when American industry shall have removed these dark spots from its surface, will be a most desirable place in which to reside. It has two public houses; and the one we put up at, had very respectable accommodations. There are a number of stores, which carry on a brisk trade with the country people and Indians. The chief article the Indians have to sell is deer pelts; and in the course of the year, they bring in a large number. These are done up in bales, and sent by land to the United States.--These skins are bought of the Indians by weight, and, I was told, the average amount was about fifty cents apiece. I observed a number of Indians in town on horseback; and this is the general mode of travelling for all the western and southern Indians. Nacogdoches is the head quarters of the "GALVESTON BAY AND TEXAS LAND COMPANY." The lands of this Company embrace three grants; that of Xavala, Burnet and Vehlein, and are bounded on the northeast by the Sabine River; on the northwest by a small river called the St. Jacinta; on the south by the gulf of Mexico--about one hundred and seventy miles in width, and running northwest nearly three hundred; equal to fifty-one thousand square miles. I shall now continue my journal, and give hereafter a description of this Company's lands in my general view of Texas. While at this place, I frequently saw Maj. NIXON, the agent of the Company for giving titles to the grants. He is quite an agreeable and intelligent man, and very readily gave me all the information respecting the country that I requested. No more than a league of land is granted to foreigners; but to the Spaniards, a number of leagues are frequently given. The Spaniards, however, place but little value upon land. They sometimes have large flocks of cattle and horses; but are too indolent to cultivate the soil. Quite a number of them reside at Nacogdoches; some very respectable families; but a good many are poor and indolent. They are of a darker complexion than the Americans, and are readily designated at first sight. An instance of the little value placed upon land was stated to me while here. An American had a fine looking dog that a Spaniard took a fancy to; he asked the price and was told a _hundred dollars_. The Spaniard replied, he had no money, but would give him a scrip for _four leagues of land_! The bargain was immediately closed; and the land could now be sold for $10,000. Truly, the old adage, "_dog cheap_," ought to be reversed. Immediately after leaving the town, we came into pine woods again; to all appearance, the same we had already passed over--rolling, sandy soil; the trees straight and tall, but standing so far apart, that a carriage might go almost anywhere among them. The grass grew beneath them, and we could see a great distance as we passed along. And thus it continued, for about twenty miles, with hardly a house on the way. I thought, we never should have done with pine woods. We had travelled about three hundred miles from Natchez; and two-thirds of the way had been pine woods; and here, they made their appearance again. To ride a short distance in them, is not unpleasant; but to continue on, day after day, is too monotonous--there is no change of scenery. In twenty miles, we came to an elegant house, painted white, a large portico in front; a neat paling round the yard, and large fields beside the road. A saw and grist mill were building on a small stream, about a mile from the house. We passed a small river over a bridge, having split rails for a covering, instead of plank, and through pine woods, oak woods and small prairies, and put up at a house near the bank of the river Neches, forty miles from Nacogdoches. By the side of the road near his house, I saw a race-course, and the gentleman told me there were frequent races on it. He had himself won twelve hundred dollars on a bet, a short time before. His house was made of hewn logs and clapboarded, having three rooms in it, but as usual in this country, no windows. We had our common fare, beef, corn bread and coffee. On a large prairie in front of his house, I saw two Indian mounds, and as I had a little leisure before breakfast, I went out to examine them. I had seen many of the Indian mounds in the western States and Louisiana; and these were similar to them. The largest one was about twenty feet high and ten in diameter. I was puzzled to find where the dirt was taken from to make them, as the ground was a perfect level a long distance around; but my host showed me the spot about half a mile distant, and from the size of the excavation, I thought he was right. No reason can be given, however, why the dirt was carried to such a distance. Throughout the western and southern country, are found mounds of earth of different sizes, shapes and heights--some, of a conical form; others, of an oblong shape; and occasionally, much resembling fortifications. They are first seen along the southern shore of Lake Erie; they increase in number and size in Ohio, Indiana and Illinois; are scattered over the Mississippi Valley; and are often found on the plains of Texas, and along the Gulf of Mexico. They are generally found on level prairies, or on rich and level woodland, and near lakes, ponds, or streams of navigable water. A very interesting essay might be written upon these Indian Mounds; but I shall notice only some of the most remarkable. The largest mound in the state of Ohio, is on the level bottom land of Grave Creek, near its entrance into the Ohio river, and fourteen miles below Wheeling. It is 350 feet in diameter at the base, sixty feet across at the top, and seventy-five feet in height. The area at the top is slightly concave, and from its centre, arises a stately oak, in a straight shaft, like a flag-staff. One of these mounds has been entirely demolished, and upon its site, is built the town of Chillicothe. The town of Circleville is principally laid out within the limits of two contiguous mounds--the one of a circular form; the other, of an oblong square. The circular mound is much the largest, and from which, the name of the town is derived. In the state of Missouri, a little north of St. Louis, are gigantic and interesting mounds. These enormous stacks of earth lift their tall heads high in the air, and show to advantage on approaching St. Louis from the upper country. But the most numerous group of Indian mounds, is found in the state of Illinois. They are situated on the American Bottom, and are said to exceed two hundred in number. The largest and most remarkable of these, stands near the bank of Cahokia creek. It is in the shape of an oblong square, is eight hundred yards in circumference, and ninety feet in height. On its south side, is an extensive and beautiful terrace, which was formerly cultivated by the monks of La Trappe as a garden. These monks had a monastery near the base of this mound; and probably the earth could not afford a spot more in keeping with the doctrines they professed. Near them, a stately monument of by-gone ages, reared its tall head far above their rude dwelling--around them, a solitary prairie, bounded in the distance, either by stately trees of the forest, or perpendicular cliffs of solid limestone. No human habitations were within the bounds of vision; and it was indeed a spot, sufficiently lonely and retired for those who chose to abstract themselves from the busy scenes of active life, enjoy undisturbed the solitude of the wilderness, and hold communion only with the God of Nature. It has often been asked, who built these mounds, and for what purpose were they erected? These are questions of difficult solution, and, perhaps, at this late stage of the world, of useless discussion. Some have supposed them to be places of interment; others believe them to be sentry stations, upon which guards were placed to watch the movements of the enemy. Although decayed bones have been found in some of them, yet it is not probable that they were all erected simply as monuments for the dead. Who built them? Their origin and use may never be certainly known; but I am fully persuaded, the ancestors of the present race of Indians did _not_ erect them. The Indians, now upon the stage, know nothing about them--make no use of them--and build none like them. Now, if their ancestors built these stately mounds all over the country, it is utterly impossible to believe that all tradition would have been lost of such prominent monuments, that passed in review before the eyes of their nation, from day to day, and year to year. In addition to this, many of these mounds are of gigantic dimensions, and show much more labor in their erection, than the present race of Indians have ever been known to perform. The earth, of which they are composed, is generally brought from a distance, and some of them must have taken a thousand men a number of months to complete them. We found the Neches to be quite a river; clayey banks and muddy water. We saw a boat on the other side; and a house half a mile distant, through the woods. We could not tell whether it was fordable or not; but after calling a few times for the ferryman, my companion concluded to plunge in. I thought in that case, discretion was the better part of valor; so I waited to see what became of him, before starting myself. He had a good horse, and although the stream was deep, and quite a current, he came safely out on the other bank; sustaining no other damage than being decently wet. He was good enough, however, to loose the boat, come over and take me across; remarking that there was no great pleasure in fording streams like that. We now passed through ten miles of pine woods; then prairies of a mile or so in extent, and post-oak openings. This was the thirtieth day of November. The day was warm and mild, although somewhat cloudy. As we were passing through the woods, it became quite dark. On casting my eyes on the sun, I found it was under an eclipse. It was here almost total. I thought it hardly lacked a digit of being entirely covered. We stopped at night at a small log house on the side of an extensive prairie. We found only a young woman at home. She said, she was from the east part of Texas, had been married only a week, and moved there a few days previous. Her husband soon returned. He had been to spend the day, it appeared, at a neighbor's, seven miles distant, and left the new made bride at home alone. All we obtained here to eat, was meat and corn bread, and water to drink; and that not very good. He had sixty or seventy head of cattle, twenty cows; but no milk, butter, or cheese. He had quite a large field under cultivation, in which he raised corn only. He had a hired man to help him take care of the flocks and the field, and to accompany him in his hunting excursions. A number of skins were stretched out on the sides of his buildings, as the trophies of his prowess and success; among which, I noticed the skin of a large panther. In the morning, his wife went a quarter of a mile for water, picked up wood and built a fire; and the two men looked on and did nothing. What young lady would not marry, if she could pass such a honey-moon as this! CHAPTER XVIII. The next day, we passed three houses, a number of prairies and post-oak openings; but found no more pine woods. Immediately on this side of the Trinity, we passed over a low, wet prairie, four miles in extent; where a horse would sink in to the fetlock joint; and then, half a mile of heavy timber. The Trinity is a large stream; but not quite as large as Red River--deep, navigable, and muddy water. We stopped at the house of an intelligent farmer on the other bank of the river. Here, our accommodations were very good. He had a house of hewn logs, three rooms, no windows, a portico in front and rear, and an avenue through the middle. The front yard was fenced in; and a kitchen and smoke house were in the back yard. He had a large field cultivated with corn, and perhaps, half a dozen negroes. I here found a young man who deserved commiseration. He was from Missouri. With his young wife and two small children, the youngest not quite a year old, he started in a wagon for Texas. He had been two months on the road; encamped out in the woods every night, although they had some wet and chilly weather. The fatigues of such a long journey, and the many attentions such small children required at the hands of the wife while on the route, were more than her constitution could endure. She became worn down almost to a skeleton; and grew daily more enfeebled; but as they were approaching the end of the journey, she kept up a good heart, and exerted herself to the utmost. But "tired nature" could do no more. She sickened and died--and left her husband in a distant land, with two infant children. Those who have endured the agony of a parting scene like this, although surrounded by relatives and friends, may form some estimate of the measure of pity due to him! There are many hardships, perplexities and sufferings, necessarily attendant upon a removal to a new and distant country; and any accident or misfortune is more severely felt, because a person has no chance of remedying the evil. I do think, a single family ought not to go to a new country alone; but a number in company; and then they can assist each other in all their hardships and trials. At the mouth of Red River, a gentleman, moving on to Texas with his family, lost his pocket-book, containing about four hundred dollars. He carried it in the breast pocket of his coat; and in unlading some of his goods from the steamboat, he stepped forward to assist, pulled off his coat, threw it across the railing, and the pocket-book dropped out into the water and sunk. It would have swam on the water, had it not contained three or four dollars in specie. Search was made for it; but the stream was so deep and muddy, they were foiled in all their attempts to find it. This was, at such a time and in his situation, a severe misfortune. On the road, two thousand miles from the place he started from, and five hundred more to travel; his family with him, and all his money gone. A family of his acquaintance happened to be in company with him, and through their assistance, he was enabled to proceed. Another case was stated to me, more aggravating than this, because it was not the effect of accident but of knavery. A gentleman, moving from Michigan to Texas, brought down in the boat a valuable horse worth three hundred dollars. On board, he became acquainted with a young man, who wished employment, and he hired him. When they arrived at the mouth of Red River, he concluded to send his horse by the young man across the country by land, and he and his family would go round by water. He, accordingly, equipped the horse with a new, elegant saddle, bridle, martingale and saddle bags; and supplied the young man with a good greatcoat, and twenty dollars in money, and started him off. And that was the last time he saw man, horse or equippage! He incidentally heard, that a man answering his description, gambled away a horse and equippage at Alexandria. For ten miles after leaving Trinity river, we passed over some most beautiful rolling prairies. Although it was December, yet the air was mild and serene, and the grass as green as in June. These prairies much resemble those of Illinois; and on some of them, we saw large herds of cattle feeding. We passed some miry swamps and deep muddy streams. The most disagreeable part of the whole trip, was the fording of streams. The banks were generally steep down into the water; and so slippery, we had sometimes to dismount, hold on to a tree, and let the horse slide down; then pull the horse beside us, mount him in the water, and ride across. I would sometimes take my saddle bags off, send my horse over by himself, and find a tree or a log on which to pass myself. The water was very muddy, so that we could not see the bottom, or form hardly any idea how deep it might be, until we forded. One stream was a very bad one. There were logs in the bottom, embedded in the mud about the middle of the river; and when our horses passed them, they struck into a channel where the water was about two feet deeper; their heads were suddenly plunged under water, and we came very near being thrown into the stream. Among the trees in the swamps, I noticed the red cedar, to-day, for the first time. It grows to quite a large tree, and is very good timber for building, boards, posts, &c. To-day, we found by the side of the path a number of petrified limbs of trees; and in one place, there was a log about a foot in diameter, turned into stone. We broke off some pieces which plainly showed the grains of wood; and on one side the bark remained and was petrified also. It might probably be manufactured into good hones, although it was coarser grained, and of a lighter shade, than those usually found at our stores. We passed only two houses this day, and put up for the night at a miserable log house occupied by a widow woman. She had a large stock of fine looking cattle, but no milk. Our fare was not of the best kind, although the old lady tried to accommodate us as well as she could. There are few mills of any kind in the whole country. The corn is ground in a steel mill, like a coffee mill, although much larger, and having a crank on each side. This is commonly nailed to a tree before the door. The corn is often left standing in the field, and gathered only as fast as they wish to use it. It used to amuse me, when we rode up to a house at night, and called for a meal, to hear the woman sing out to a boy, "Run to the field and bring two or three ears of corn--I want to make some bread for the gentlemen's supper." So we had to wait until the corn was gathered, ground, kneaded and baked, before we could have bread to eat. I suppose this is the true method of "living from hand to mouth." We took an early start next morning, and after passing swamps, streams and woods, came out into a fine prairie country. Our path led over the top of one, somewhat elevated above the general level of the country, and from which we could see many miles all around. It was a prospect too grand and imposing to be adequately described. As we passed along by the side of an extensive prairie, we saw two Indians horseback, on an elevated spot, about half a mile distant, with guns in their hands, and looking at the country beyond them. On seeing us, they wheeled their horses and came at full speed down upon us. We were a little startled at first; but they halted within a few rods of us, stared a moment, and then civilly passed the time of day, and enquired in broken English, the distance to a house on the road we had come. I never was an enthusiastic admirer of the Indian character. They may have done some noble deeds of daring, and performed some generous acts of disinterested friendship; but they possess and practice the art of deception so well, that no one can know, with any degree of certainty, when these acts may occur. When I see Indians approaching, I hardly know whether it is for good or for evil; and therefore, never feel entirely at ease in their society. The Romans, in the days of their prosperity, prided themselves in being called a _Roman citizen_; and this was generally, a sufficient protection from depredation and insult, when travelling among the more barbarous nations around them. Like the Romans, I felt not a little pleasure in the thought, that I was an _American citizen_, and that this was a protection from outrage and insult in the presence of the savage Indian. Since my return, I have seen an account of twenty Polanders, while on their way from New-Orleans to Mexico, who were attacked by the Indians in Texas, and all killed except one, who was fortunate enough to escape and tell the story. Had not the Indians readily discovered by our personal appearance, that we were _American_ citizens, we might have shared the same fate. We passed a muddy swamp, in many places the water standing in the road a foot or two in depth; densely covered with timber, and four miles in extent. As we emerged from this, we came upon the bank of the Brazos river, at Hall's ferry. This is a stream of the size and complexion of Red River. In crossing in a boat, we found a strong current. On the other side there is a high bank on which a town has been laid out; but now contains only three dwelling houses and one store. Here we stayed over night. Late in the afternoon, a Spanish trader arrived and put up for the night. He had two men, five mules and one horse and wagon with him. His goods were bought at Natchitoches, and he was transporting them to St. Antonio in the interior of Texas. They were made up into convenient bundles, hung across the mules' backs and stowed in the wagon. They were all armed with guns; and the trader himself had a pistol at each side. He could not well talk English and we conversed but little with him. He had a strong dislike to the Indians, and was afraid of being robbed by them. Of this ill-will, the Indians have their full share. In hunting parties composed of both Americans and Spaniards, when attacked by the Indians in their excursions along the Rocky Mountains, they have been known to spare the Americans, when they have killed all the Spaniards. The next day's ride was through a most beautiful open prairie country. We crossed some small streams, skirted with timber and small groves on the highland; but generally, we found high, rolling prairie. The live-oak made its appearance to-day. This is an evergreen and a beautiful tree. We saw them growing in an open prairie, sometimes, one standing by itself, about the size, and at a distance, of the appearance of the northern apple tree. On a fine high prairie, we observed quite a number of elegant houses, a store, a tavern, &c. and some fine farms. This is called Cole's Settlement; and from the beautiful scenery around, and the respectable appearance of the inhabitants, I inferred that it is a desirable neighborhood. We stopped for the night at a house half way between the Brazos and Colorado rivers; being thirty-five miles from each. A few years ago, a town was lotted out in this place, but still it shows only one decent farm house. Here is a gristmill turned by horses, and does a good deal of business; and profitable too, for the rule is to take one sixth part for toll. In the neighborhood, I saw a very good looking house, built of limestone. From this place to the Colorado river, we passed only two houses; a distance of thirty-five miles; and the complexion of the country was similar in all respects to that of the day before. At a very decent farm house on an extensive prairie, by the side of the river, we put up for the night; and remained here and in the neighborhood, a number of the succeeding days. And now from this central position, I propose to take a more general view of the country. I stayed more than a month in Texas, traversed the country in various directions, conversed with the inhabitants, and gained what information I could within that time. I feel therefore, somewhat qualified to speak of the country. And this I shall do fearlessly; yet I hope, in sincerity and in truth. I am aware that many articles have been written concerning this country, of various import and meaning; but I shall speak for myself only, without reference to others. I do not propose to write its geography or history. Had I the means and ability accurately to do this, the limits of this work would not allow of it. I only propose to give the information I obtained from inspection, examination and enquiry, in a concise form and tangible shape. CHAPTER XIX. GENERAL VIEW OF TEXAS. From whatever point you approach Texas, its aspect is unfavorable. If it be by sea, you are met by a low, sandy beach and a marshy, flat country, as far as the eye can reach. If by land, through Louisiana and Red River, its first appearance is that of a poor country of hilly land, chiefly covered with wood, and presenting to the eye a weak soil, alternately of sand and of clay. But when you pass the border towards the interior, the scene becomes entirely changed. You behold a beautiful country of rich soil, rounded by the hand of nature into the most fanciful forms, covered with eternal verdure, and begirt with forests of stately trees. Earth may not afford a more beautiful prospect than is obtained from the summit of an elevated prairie. On such a spot I have stood, and gazed with admiration. The scene extends all around as far as the eye can reach, and presents the varied aspect of wood land and lawn, like sunshine and shade. Its appearance is so much that of a country nicely cultivated by the hand of man, that one can hardly believe himself to be in an uninhabited region; but he looks in vain, to catch a glimpse of the husbandman's cottage, and his herds of cattle feeding on the green fields. The din of human industry and civilized life strikes not his ear, and the unwelcome truth is forced upon him at last, that he is only in the solitude of the wilderness; and the scene before him, with all its beauties, is left "to waste its sweetness on the desert air!" The scenes of Texas have so much of fascination about them, that one is disinclined to come down to the details of a common-place description of the country. But the whole truth must be told. The public have a right, and in fairness ought to know, the true state of the case. The emigrant cannot live on air, or by admiring the beauties of the country. It is of importance to him to know, what facilities the country offers, for obtaining the necessaries and conveniences of life; and what the prospect may be of enjoying them, when obtained. [Illustration] In the first place, I shall strike off from the list of the resources of the country, "the immense herds of buffalo and wild horses." They are often paraded in the many published descriptions of Texas, as a most prominent feature in the bright picture exhibited; and as one of the many inducements to the emigrants to remove thither. But they are no sort of benefit to the settler at all. They generally keep ahead of population, some small herds only are ever seen near the settlements; and there is not inducement enough for the husbandman to leave his farm, and go far into the interior, to catch the wild horse and kill the buffalo, among tribes of hostile Indians; as the prospect of gain would not equal the hardship, risk and expense. The wild horse is an animal hard to catch; and when caught, it is difficult and troublesome to tame him, and render him gentle and kind in harness and under the saddle. It would be as well for the farmer if the fact of their existence were not known; as it is easier to raise the animal in this country of evergreen pasture, than to catch and tame the wild one. There is one point of view, in which a knowledge of the existence of these animals may be of some importance to the emigrant; it is proof positive of the natural luxuriance of the soil, and of the mildness of the climate. The wild horses are called by the Spaniards, _mustangs_. I saw some small herds of them prancing at random over the plains. They are quite wild, you can seldom approach very near them. They are of various colors and of rather smaller size than the American horse. The Spaniards are fond of good horses, and are good horsemen. Some of them make a business of catching and breaking the mustangs. This is done by building a fence in the shape of a harrow, with a strong pen at the small end, and driving them into it; or mounting a fleet horse, get as near as they can unperceived, then start after them at full speed, throw a rope with a slip-noose at one end, and the other fastened to the saddle, around the neck, haul out at right angles with their course, and choke them down. When caught, they put the bridle on, take them into a large, soft prairie, mount them at once, flog them with the greenhide, and let them plunge and rear until they become fatigued and subdued. After undergoing a few more operations of this kind, they are deemed "fit for use." They are sold at various prices, from six to twelve dollars; but unless they are caught when young, they never become gentle as other horses. Texas appears like the State of Illinois. To the southward and westward of Trinity river, it is generally an open prairie country. All the streams have more or less bottom land, covered with a dense forest of timber; and occasionally, a grove of post oak openings will be found on the moist high land. The soil in these bottoms is very rich, but some of them are too wet, or too subject to be overflowed to admit of cultivation. A strip of land, bordering on the bays and sea coast, and sixty or seventy miles in width, is flat, generally approaching to a dead level, in the spring and fall very wet, and sometimes impassable. Beyond this, comes the high, dry, rolling country, having no swamps except immediately on the borders of the rivers. "The Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company" have a good deal of good land, in pleasant and healthy situations; and much of it, not yet settled; but they have also a good deal of poor land. In their grant, are large tracts of pine woods and post-oak plains; among which, are found some spots of good land, but generally, it is of a weak and sandy soil. The pine woods are not without their use. Their resinous qualities give a salubrity to the air about them, and thereby render a situation in their neighborhood healthy; and the trees themselves furnish an inexhaustible supply of the first rate of timber. On the Sabine and Galveston Bays, there are large prairies of good land, but low and flat; in the region of Nacogdoches, are small prairies, large tracts of wood, good soil of red clay, black marle, sandy land, and all the varieties of soil imaginable. Higher up in the country, there are alternately prairies and woodland, and an excellent soil. This Company's grant lies contiguous to the United States, and except on the bay, is as healthy as any part of the country; but it cannot be called the most pleasant and beautiful portion of Texas. The prairies are all burnt over twice a year--in midsummer, and about the first of winter. Immediately after the burning, the grass springs up again; so that there is an abundant supply all the year round. No country in the world can be compared to this, in the ease and facility of raising stock. All the herdsman has to do, is to look after them, so they may not stray away, and some portion of the year, yard them to prevent their growing wild. The prairie grass is of a peculiar species, unlike any thing we have at the north; but it is of so nutricious a quality, that it keeps the cattle fat, all the year round. They grow large and handsome. I never saw better looking herds in my life. The horse does equally as well on grass, but if worked hard, requires some grain. Hogs keep in good flesh all the year; and in autumn, when the nuts fall from the trees, grow fat. Horses, cattle and hogs can, therefore, be kept in this country without any more trouble than merely looking after them to prevent their straying away. And then, there is plenty of game. First in the list, is the deer. I hardly supposed there were as many deer on the continent, as I saw in Texas.--They were continually crossing my path, or were seen in flocks feeding on the prairies. I recollect that from an elevated spot, I counted five flocks of deer in sight at the same time! In some parts of the country, a man may about as certainly kill a deer if he choose, as a northern farmer can kill a sheep from his flock. Their meat is excellent, and their skins valuable. Deer-hunting is not very systematically practiced here, as it is in some parts of the world. Indeed, they are so plenty, that it does not require much method, or concert of action among a number of individuals to kill them. The deer is a gregarious animal. You never find one alone, unless it be accidentally strayed away from the flock. Sometimes a number of hunters resort to a favorite haunt of the deer, and while a part arouse them with the dogs in their retreat, and cause them to flee, others will remain in ambush, near their usual crossing places at the streams and swamps, and shoot them as they pass. In the night they are decoyed by fire and killed. A hunter fixes a blazing torch in his hat, or has another person to carry one just before him; the deer will stand gazing at the light while he approaches, and by the brilliancy of their eyes and space between them, calculates his distance and takes his deadly aim. He must take especial care, however, that the shadow of a tree or of any thing else does not fall upon the deer; for in that event, he starts and is off in a moment. [Illustration] Then there are the bear, Mexican hog, wild geese, rabbits, and a great variety of ducks. The prairie hen is not so plenty here as in Illinois. An emigrant, may, therefore, easily supply himself with meat. All he has to do is "to kill and eat." Let us now glance at the soil, and see what that will produce. This subject I attended to, somewhat critically. It will produce cotton, sugar cane, Indian corn, rye, barley, oats, rice, buckwheat, peas, beans, sweet potatoes and all common garden vegetables. The cabbage does not form a compact head as it does at the north. Wheat will _not_ grow in this country. The stalk will run up rank, but the ear will not fill with plump kernels. Last December, while I was there, flour sold on the river Brazos, for ten dollars a barrel; and in the interior, it sold for fourteen. Corn grows well, and is quite a sure crop when planted early--about the first of February. I saw a very good crop which had been planted in June. I found one man, who, with the aid of a boy ten years old, raised and gathered fifteen hundred bushels of corn. Perhaps I am severely taxing the credulity of my readers; but if there be any reliance on human testimony, the fact is as I have stated. And when it is considered that the ground is only ploughed, a small portion, if any, hoed at all, and then it gets ripe early, and he can gather it at his leisure--the statement may not appear at all incredible. Tobacco will grow, but it has too thin a leaf to be valuable. But it is emphatically a cotton country. It produces a larger quantity to the acre, and of a better quality than any portion of the United States--not excepting the bottom lands on Red River. This is my belief from an examination of the growing crop and gathered cotton. And I found this to be an admitted fact by the most experienced cotton growers. The following is as perfect a list of the forest trees, shrubs, vines, &c., as I can make--to wit:--Red, black, white, willow, post and live oaks; pine, cedar, cotton-wood, mulberry, hickory, ash, elm, cypress, box-wood, elder, dog-wood, walnut, pecan, moscheto--a species of locust, holly, haws, hackberry, magnolia, chincopin, wild peach, suple jack, cane-brake, palmetto, various kinds of grape vines, creeper, rushes, Spanish-moss, prairie grass, and a great variety of flowers. The live oak, magnolia, holly, pine and cedar are evergreens. The Spanish-moss, so profusely hanging on all the trees near streams of water, gives them an antique and venerable appearance. It is of a silver grey color; and, if trees may be compared with men, they appear like the long grey bearded sages of the antedeluvian world. When the tree dies, the moss soon withers, and becomes dry. I used to amuse myself by setting fire to the dry moss in the night. It burnt like tinder, and would sometimes throw a grand column of flame a hundred and fifty feet into the air, and brilliantly illuminate the scene, a great distance around. Of fruit trees, I saw only the peach, the fig and the orange trees; excepting one small cluster of apple trees. I think it is too warm throughout the year for the apple tree to produce much fruit; but the others will become abundant. As to the health of the country, the fact seems to be, that in all the low country, and on the streams of water, the inhabitants are more or less afflicted with the fever and ague. It much resembles Illinois in this particular, as well as in many others. In other situations, I believe it is as healthy as any portion of the United States. The climate is fine; the air, generally clear and salubrious. It is neither so hot in the summer, or so cold in the winter, as it is in New-England. The country lies between the Gulf of Mexico and the snow-capped Cordillera mountains, so that it is fanned by a refreshing breeze, which ever way the wind may blow. Sometimes, in winter, the northwest wind sweeps over the plain, strong and keen; and the thin-clad southerner sensibly feels its effects upon his system; and I was informed, instances had been known of their being chilled to death, when obliged to encamp out in the open air without a fire. It is sometimes cold enough to make thin ice; but, generally, it is mild and pleasant all winter. The hottest days of summer, are not as warm and oppressive, as we find them at the North. Individuals originally from Maine and New-Hampshire, said they had found no night so warm, that it was disagreeable to sleep under a woollen blanket. CHAPTER XX. The rivers are navigable to some extent, whether great or small. The following are the names of the principal, to wit:--Sabine, Ayish Bayou, Atoyac, Angelina, Neches, Trinity, St. Jacinta, Buffalo Bayou, Navasota, Brazos, Bernard, Canebrake, Colorado, Navedad, La Baca, Guadalupe, San Antonio, Aransaso, Neuces and Rio Grande or Rio del Norte. The streams are all muddy and unpleasant, until you reach the Colorado; this, and those to the south are, generally, clear and beautiful. About ten miles from the mouth of the Colorado, a raft two miles in extent, obstructs the navigation; when that is removed, boats may go some distance into the country. The Brazos is navigable at high water, to the falls, about two hundred and fifty miles from its mouth. A steamboat is now running upon it, as high up as St. Felipe, over a hundred miles. The Sabine, Neches and Trinity are respectively three hundred and fifty, three hundred, and four hundred and ten miles in length, and are navigable some distance into the country for a considerable portion of the year. The San Bernard is navigable sixty miles. It has about four feet of water on the bar at its mouth. The Colorado rises in the high prairies near the mountains, pursues quite a direct course six hundred miles and falls into Metagorda Bay. Above the raft, which is situated ten or twelve miles above its mouth, it is navigable three hundred miles. It has as strong a current as that of the Mississippi. But the Rio del Norte is much the largest and longest river in this region. It rises high up among the mountains, and is estimated to be seventeen hundred miles in length. For two thirds of its course it runs nearly south; it then changes to the southeast, and empties into the Gulf of Mexico, near the southern boundary of Texas. It has been ascended by a steamboat two hundred miles to Loredo; and it is stated by those acquainted with the stream, that it is navigable five hundred miles further. Texas has a seacoast of three hundred and fifty miles; and in a commercial point of view is favorably situated. Its many navigable streams afford great facilities for transporting the rich products of its luxuriant soil to the United States and the rest of the world. It will shortly be settled, its rich lands will become valuable, and it will soon be a great and powerful state. Mill seats are not plenty. Although the streams run with a lively current, yet there are not many falls suitable for mills; especially in the lower part of the territory. On the sides of the streams, are occasionally found ledges of limestone; but none of any kind are seen scattered over the country.--The prairies are free from rocks, brambles, bushes, and every thing except grass. They look like a finely cultivated old field, well set in grass; sometimes flat, sometimes rolling, but invariably having a surface entirely smooth and unbroken. A carriage can run any where over them. Clay is found all over the country, of an excellent quality for brick. In some places, coal and iron ore are said to have been discovered. Such are the situation and resources of the country. Let us now look, for a moment, at the inhabitants, and see how they are improved. The Spaniards are not an agricultural people. They are more fond of raising stock, than cultivating the land. They are also a very social people, and fond of society. They are seldom found on farms alone, and at a distance from neighbors. They formed some small villages in Texas, and left the remainder of the country entirely unsettled. Some ten years ago, the system of grants commenced; allowing an individual, under certain regulations, to introduce and colonize foreigners. There are now thirteen of these Grants, including a large portion of Texas, to wit: Zavala, Burnet and Vehlein--now formed into the Galveston Bay company--Austin's, Milam's, Robertson's, Cameron's, Dewitt's, De Leon's, Felisola's, McMullen's and McGloin's, Powers' and Beal's. On all these Grants, more or less settlements have been made, and therefore, the population is scattered over an extent of country out of all proportion to their numbers. The large tract granted to each individual, tends to the same result. In riding through regions called settled, a person may not find a house in thirty or forty miles; but generally from ten to twenty. I believe there are from forty to fifty thousand inhabitants in Texas; and a large proportion of them are Americans. A person may travel all day; and day after day, and find Americans only. He can hardly make himself believe that he is not still in the United States. The exports of Texas are cotton, live-stock and peltries. The cotton and peltries are sent either by Natchitoches, or by shipping through the Gulf of Mexico, to New-Orleans. The live-stock--cattle, horses and mules, are driven by land across the country to Natchez or New-Orleans. The cost of driving is trifling. Plenty of grass is found all the way for the stock; and the drivers carry their provisions, shoot game, &c. and camp down near wood and water by the side of a fire, and cook their meals. In this manner, a fellow traveller and myself camped out two or three nights. It was quite a novelty to me to sleep in the open air; but the people here think nothing of it. The wolves made rather too much noise, for me to sleep quietly. One night, they awaked me out of a sound sleep, by their discordant yells; I jumped up, dashed a club or two at them, and off they went over the prairies. Our provisions were what they sought, I presume, and not us. The inhabitants are, many of them, what our northern people would call rather indolent. Occasionally, I found a good farm, large plantation and fine herds of cattle, and all the comforts of life within their dwellings; but more generally, the traveller only finds the log house, built in an open, rude manner, with only one room, where he and the family lodge together; and perhaps only corn-bread, meat and sweet potatoes to eat. I called at some places where they had twenty or thirty cows, and could get neither butter, cheese, or milk. They let the calves run with the cows, and seldom milk them at all. I did not find butter at half of the places where I called; and obtained cheese only once in Texas. At only three places I found wheat bread. Although the climate is suitable to the production of Indian corn, yet it is not cultivated to any extent. The reason is, stock is raised with less trouble, and cotton is thought to be a more profitable crop. There is hardly enough corn raised for the consumption of the inhabitants; it, therefore, bears a high price. At St. Felipe, it was a dollar a bushel; and at Velasco on the mouth of the Brazos river, I saw a bushel of shelled corn sold for two dollars! Thus it is; man seems disinclined to "till the ground," and by "the sweat of his face," to obtain his bread. It often happens, where the earth produces in abundance with little labor, that little is indifferently performed, so that all the comforts and conveniences of life are less enjoyed, than in more sterile soils, and unpropitious climes. Man will "'mid flowing vineyards die of thirst." Where nature has done almost all, and scattered her favors without stint, man will not stretch forth his hand, and gather her rich bounties. It is not universally so. There are many exceptions to this in Texas. In many instances, the comforts of life are enjoyed there to perfection. Man may not be censured, for not performing severe bodily labor, if he can well provide for himself and those dependent upon him, without it; but life could not have been given, to be spent in listless idleness. A vast field of usefulness is open to the active man; and he may do much good in his day and generation, other than toil for gain. But another inducement is held out to the emigrant to settle in Texas, besides the beauty of the country and productiveness of the soil. It is the cheapness of the land. This is no small consideration. A man with a family obtains a Spanish league of land, amounting to four thousand four hundred and twenty-eight English acres, by paying the expense of surveying it, office fees, &c. These expenses amount to one hundred and eleven dollars, with the addition of thirty dollars to the government. So that a man with a family has four thousand four hundred and twenty-eight acres of land for the small sum of one hundred and forty-one dollars. He must make application to an officer, called an empressario, and obtain his consent; which is given in the form of a certificate, stating the name of the family and the quantity of land allowed. This certificate is presented to another officer, called a commissioner, who orders a survey; and when completed, makes a deed from the government to the emigrant. The only condition is, that the land shall be settled upon, within a limited time. The emigrant may make his own selection out of any lands, not previously granted. A single man obtains one quarter of that quantity, with the privilege of having three quarters more, when he is married. And provision is made, that a foreigner, marrying a Mexican woman, may have a league and one third. These terms are, certainly, very liberal. A man here obtains good land, at a cheaper rate, than in any other part of the world. But the government have lately adopted another method of disposing of their land. A regular land law has been enacted, and various offices have been established for the sale of all the vacant land in the province. A person desirous of purchasing public land, goes to the land office in the district where the land is situated, files a petition for a sale, and obtains an order for a survey. This land is laid off into what is called _labors_ of one hundred and seventy-seven acres each, and an individual may purchase as many labors as he pleases, up to two hundred and seventy-five, which is about equal to fifty thousand English acres. The minimum price is fixed at ten dollars per labor, the purchaser paying the expense of surveying in addition. One third of the purchase money is payable at the time of sale; the remainder in two equal annual instalments; and the new settlers are exempt from the payment of taxes for the term of ten years. But Texas has some evils, which will be deemed greater or less, according to the particular section of the country the emigrant may happen to come from. But still, they ought in fairness to be stated, that all may judge for themselves. And in the first place there are three kinds of venomous snakes--the great rattlesnake, the moccason snake, and the prairie rattlesnake. The large rattlesnake is not very plenty, and is seldom seen far out in the open prairie. A gentleman who had lived in the country ten years told me he had killed only two in the time. The moccason snake, deemed as poisonous as the rattlesnake, seems to be more plenty; but they are not found except in or near wet, marshy land. A gentleman told me, he had a small marsh near his house which seemed to be a haunt for them, as occasionally he found some near it, and in his door yard. He set half a dozen of his servants to cut down the weeds, and dig a ditch to drain off the water; and in one day they killed _forty-three_ moccason snakes; and he pleasantly added, it was not a very good snake day neither. Perhaps this will be set down as another "snake story;" but my authority is Mr. Elisha Roberts, living on the main road, five miles north of St. Augustine; a very respectable man as I was informed. The prairie rattlesnake is a small one, about a foot in length, similar to that of Illinois. I saw only one in all my wanderings through the country. There are other snakes, not venomous, such as the coach-whip snake, the large black snake, which is here called the "chicken snake," because it sometimes robs hen's nests; the glass snake, which if you strike it, will break in a number of places, and some others. Then, there is the tarantula, a large spider; and the stinging lizard, a species of the scorpion, of a reddish color, and about two inches long. The bite of the tarantula and stinging lizard is, in pain and effect, similar to the sting of a bee. There is a weed here, growing all over the country, which is a certain cure for the bite of all these venomous reptiles. The alligator is found in the rivers of Texas. I saw three, one large one; the other two, small ones. They sometimes catch hogs, as they go down to the water to drink. They will attack a man in the water. A man was seized by one on Little river, while I was in the country, who was swimming across; but he was beaten off by a person near him, on a raft. Of the animals, there are many--the panther, wolf, wildcat, tiger cat, bear, Mexican hog, antelope, &c. The wolves are the most numerous, and are quite bold and mischievous. I frequently saw them in the day time, and often heard their discordant howl in the night. One day, as I was riding along alone in the open woods, a panther came out of a small thicket, into the path before me! I knew that retreat would be dangerous; and, therefore, I boldly sung out and pushed forward towards him. He was not disposed to give battle, but leaped off at once into the woods. I was a good deal startled at this sudden appearance of such a powerful, uncaged beast of the forest; but as he appeared to be the most frightened of the two, I ought to be content. The panther is an animal of the size and color of a full grown lioness, but too cowardly to attack his prey in the open field. Like the Indian, he lies in ambush, or sits perched on the branch of a tree, and seizes his victim unawares. Even a small dog has been known to chase him into his favorite retreat on a tree. The bears, generally, take to the dense forest of trees and cane-brake. They catch the full grown hogs, and the wolves take the pigs. Flies, of various kinds, are found here; and are more troublesome to animals in the warm summer months, than at the north. I saw large sores, caused by them, on cattle, dogs and hogs. An application of mercury is sometimes found necessary to cure them. There is also a wood tick, resembling that on sheep, which fastens itself on animals, but does not appear to do any essential injury. But last, although not least, in the list of evils, is the ever active moscheto. In the flat country, bordering on the sea and bays, they are indeed dreadful to a northern man. When I was at the mouth of the Brazos, towards the last of December, whether on the beach, in the house, on board the vessel, day and night without cessation, the moschetoes were excessively annoying. Give me a general assortment of alligators, snakes and lizards, rather than subject me to the eternal buzz, and stinging bite of the ever busy moscheto. Other animals may be successfully combatted and subdued; but to fight the moscheto is like "beating the air;" give a blow in front and he is in the rear; brush the rear, and he is in front--and so on all day long. And when you have done, you have only excessively fatigued and perplexed yourself, and left him the uninjured master of the field. The only chance to get rid of such a keen tormentor as this, is to hang yourself, or run away. In the high rolling country, there are less flies and no moschetoes. There are few remnants of tribes of Indians in the settled region of Texas. They are generally said to be harmless and inoffensive; doing nothing worse than stealing a hog or so, in a neighborly way; so that they may not be entirely forgotten. A woman where I stopped one night, told me that about twenty Indians encamped at the spring near her house; came to the house for meal, and she gave them all she could spare. In the morning, after they were gone, she found they had robbed the yard of all the melons, and taken the fattest shoat she had. While I was in the country a man was shot at and wounded by an Indian, near Jones' ferry on the Colorado river. As he was riding along alone over the prairie, he saw a number of Indians by the side of a wood, who beckoned for him to approach. When he had come quite near, happening to cast his eyes towards the wood, he saw an Indian, partly concealed behind a tree, with a gun drawn up in the act of firing. He had only time to throw himself back on his horse, and the ball made a slight flesh wound on his breast. He wheeled, put spurs to his horse and escaped. Whether these were Indians belonging to the settled or unsettled regions of Texas, could not be ascertained. Between the settlements and the Rocky Mountains, are large tribes of Indians; and detached parties from them, sometimes come down to the border plantations, and steal a few horses. They consider the Spaniards lawful game; but do not care about fighting the Americans. They say, the Americans are a brave people and fight most desperately; and from them, they obtain their chief supplies. Perhaps my readers may think this rather a formidable array of animals and reptiles. It may appear more so on paper, and at a distance, than in the region where they are found. People of Mississippi, Alabama and Florida, would find themselves at home among them; but to a northern man they might be found somewhat disagreeable at first.--They would, however, soon become so much accustomed to them, that in a short time they would hardly regard them at all. The inhabitants here, from whatever quarter they may have come, do not think they form any serious objection to settling in the country. While I remained in Texas, I found no serious trouble from the animals, reptiles or insects, except that general enemy to repose, the moscheto, and that only in the lowlands. On the open prairies, there are but few noxious animals, except the wolves. This is owing a good deal, undoubtedly, to the fire running over them twice a year. As the country becomes more settled, they will be less numerous; and some of them will become entirely extinct. The water, generally, is very good for a southern country. I found many fine springs of pure soft water in various parts of Texas; and in the rolling prairies, good water is obtained by digging. The only objection to it is in its temperature. To me, it was universally too warm to be agreeable. "A cup of _cold_ water" is nowhere to be found in the territory; and to a northern man, in a warm day, it is so refreshing, reviving, invigorating--so readily slakes the thirst, and cools the body, it is almost indispensable to his comfort and enjoyment. Warm water is the common drink of the inhabitants. In the towns, I found the various kinds of spirits and wine; but in the country, I found no spirits, (except very seldom, whiskey) wine, beer, or cider; but only water--_warm water_. It must be admitted, that the people are very temperate, _if not to drink the ardent_ be a sure indication of temperance. CHAPTER XXI. There are no large towns in Texas. Bexar, or as it is commonly called, St. Antonio, is the capital, and contains about thirty-five hundred inhabitants--the other villages are small, varying from one hundred to one thousand souls. St. Antonio, like all the Spanish towns, is composed of houses built of logs and mud, and makes a squalid appearance. It is situated about twenty miles east of San Antonio river. The principal towns are, Nacogdoches, St. Augustine; and on Galveston Bay, Harrisburg and Lynchburg: on the Brazos--Velasco, Brazoria, Columbia, St. Felipe, and a new town in Robinson's colony at the falls: Cole's Settlement, fifteen miles west of the Brazos: on the Colorado--Metagorda, Montezuma, Electra, Bastrap, or Mina: on the Gaudalupe--Gonsales: on the San Antonio--Goliad, (formerly Bahia,) and BEXAR: in Powell's Grant--St. Patrick: on the Rio Grande, or Rio del Norte--Refugio, Metamoras, Reinosa, Camargo, Mier, Revilla, Laredo, Presidio and the city of Doloros. A new town is laid out at the falls on the Brazos river in Robinson's colony, about two hundred and fifty miles from its mouth. This is the place where the land office is kept for this colony, and will become quite a village. But the country is not now settled enough to make or support large towns. It must be the work of time. Although men may lay out a town, and commence building it, yet it cannot prematurely be forced into existence. It must have a back settlement to support it. The merchant and mechanic cannot sell, unless there are some inhabitants to buy. The Spaniards, more than one hundred and fifty years ago, built some small towns in Texas, the principal of which are St. Antonio, Nacogdoches and La Bahia. These became something of villages; but for twenty years their population has continually diminished; and the country at large does not contain half the Spanish inhabitants that it did at that time. They, like the Indians, dwindle away, or flee before the settlements of the Americans. The Mexican government had three garrisons of soldiers stationed in Texas--one at Nacogdoches, one on Galveston Bay, and one at Velasco, at the mouth of the Brazos. Some of the commanders of these garrisons, attempted to exercise despotic powers, in seizing Americans who had become obnoxious to them, and putting them in prison. About two years ago, their conduct became so oppressive, that the citizens rose _en masse_, killed some of the soldiers, and took the remainder prisoners. The Mexican government then recalled all the officers and soldiers, and there has not been a Mexican garrison in Texas since. The inhabitants of the country pay no taxes at all. It is said that the lands are exempt from taxation for ten years to come. All articles imported for the private use of the emigrant, are free of duty; and in fact, a great portion of the merchandize pays none. When I left the Brazos river, there was no custom house officer upon it; and a number of vessel loads of goods were landed, without being required to pay any duty. Almost all kinds of goods afford a good profit and a ready sale in Texas; especially domestic cottons, boots, shoes, hats and ready made clothing. Coffee is used in large quantities, but I did not find hardly a cup of tea in the whole country. It is not a good place for mechanics. Manufactured articles of all kinds are brought from the north, and sold cheaper than they can be made here; and the country is too thinly settled, and the raw material is too scarce, to give much employment to artisans of what is called custom work, such as shoemakers, tailors, &c. Blacksmiths, however, are an exception to this. They are indispensable, although there are now but few of them. The price charged for shoeing a horse is from three to four dollars. Texas is connected with Cohahuila, and both form one province of the Mexican Confederacy. But lately, they have been made into separate judicial districts; each having its own courts and officers. In Texas their proceedings in court and the records, are in the English language; but land titles are still written in the Spanish. The laws are liberal; they guarantee the freedom of religious opinion and a trial by jury. Courts are held in St. Felipe, Nacogdoches, St. Augustine, Bastrap, &c. The government is elective and republican. I attended an election of sheriff and other county officers. They vote _viva voce_, as the practice is in many of our southern States. To be an inhabitant of the country, is all the qualification necessary to become a voter. Physicians are occasionally found in the country, and there are a small number of lawyers located in the principal towns. There are but few preachers of the gospel, and I believe no meeting houses, except some decayed Roman Catholic churches. The country needs more professional men. It opens a fine field for enterprising men in any profession. The wheels of government in Texas move quietly along. The storms which agitate and distract the city of Mexico and its vicinity, spend their force before they reach that province. I think, the government forms no serious objection to forming a settlement in the country. But in a new and thinly settled country, the laws, however wise and good, cannot always be enforced. Magistrates and executive officers are few, and courts often at a distance. The new settlers, therefore, sometimes take the law into their own hands; and although they may not inflict the same punishment the law enjoins, I believe they generally do substantial justice. As an instance of the kind, I will state a case that happened on the bank of the Colorado river. A man settled there, who proved to be a notorious thief. He stole cattle, horses, hogs, or any thing he could lay his hands on. His neighbors resolved to endure his depredations no longer, and gave him notice to depart from that section of the country, or abide the consequences. After waiting awhile, and learning that he intended to remain, some half dozen of his neighbors went to his house in the evening, took him to a tree, and gave him thirty-nine lashes, well laid on. They then told him that the punishment should be repeated every week, as long as he remained in the neighborhood. Before a week came round, he left that section of the country, and has not been heard of since. In the interior of the country, there is a salt lake, from which a load of fine salt may be obtained in a short time; and appears to be inexhaustible. A small stream runs from this to the Brazos river, and sometimes renders its waters too brackish for use. By the laws, slavery is not allowed in the province; but this law is evaded by binding the negroes by indenture for a term of years. You will, therefore, find negro servants, more or less, all over the country; but more, on the lowlands, towards the bays and seacoast. Large cotton plantations, in this section of the country, are cultivated by negroes; and here also are found some good houses and rich farmers. Texas lies between the twenty-seventh and thirty-fourth degrees of north latitude; and between sixteen degrees thirty minutes, and twenty-seven degrees west longitude from Washington; and contains probably about one hundred and fifty thousand square miles--as large as all New-England and the State of New-York. It is bounded, east by the Sabine river and a line drawn due north from its head waters to Red River--south, by the Gulf of Mexico--west, by the river Neuces, Rio del Norte, and the Cordillera mountains--north, by the Red River, until it hits its eastern boundary. More than half of the country is prairie. The margin of the streams and the moist highlands are covered with a fine growth of timber. All the seacoast and on the bays, there is a strip of low, level land, extending seventy miles into the country. The prairies are here very rich, but too level to be pleasant or healthy. The remainder of Texas is high, dry and gently undulating; but not mountainous. Between the rivers Sabine and Trinity, are extensive, gently undulating, sandy plains, generally covered with a good growth of pitch pine; but occasionally covered with post-oaks, hickory, &c. Among these, are interspersed small prairies of good land; sometimes having a black soil, but generally of a reddish cast, and occasionally of a deep red. From the river Trinity to the western line of the State, are high, rolling, beautiful prairies of all sizes and shapes imaginable. So beautiful are these prairies, that the imagination cannot paint a more delightful scene. Cultivation, however nicely performed, will rather mar, than add to their beauty. They are surrounded with a dense forest of trees; sometimes two or three miles in depth, and sometimes only of a few yards. On the highlands, or elevated plains, are frequently found oak-openings, similar to those of Michigan and Illinois. Texas, with the exception of the pine plains, may with truth be said to possess a deep, rich soil of black marl. That portion of the country lying between the Colorado river and Louisiana, is subject to powerful rains in the fall and spring; but as you go southward and westward towards the city of Mexico, the rains become less frequent, and not so abundant. About two months in summer, it is generally quite dry; sometimes, so severe is the drought that vegetation withers, and the grass on the prairies becomes dry. To the southward of Texas, the Spaniards irrigate their lands to make them produce a more abundant crop. The planting season is so early, (from the first to the middle of February,) that all the crops, except cotton and sugar cane, come to maturity before the dry weather commences; and these get such a vigorous start in this luxuriant soil, that they are seldom materially injured by the drought. The roads are all in a state of nature; yet so smooth is the surface, and so gently undulating is the face of the country, that in dry weather, better roads are not found any where. A person, however, often meets with moist bottom land, and streams difficult to pass. In the wet season, travelling is more disagreeable and difficult; and sometimes impracticable, on account of the swollen, rapid streams of water. Although carriages run without difficulty all over the country, yet the inhabitants have not yet introduced pleasure carriages. The mode of travelling is on horseback; but women and children often go in a baggage wagon drawn by oxen. Baggage wagons are quite numerous, but I found only one pleasure carriage in the whole province, and that was a gig-wagon. Emigrants are continually pouring into Texas, both by sea and by land, and from every section of the United States. The southerners generally choose the lowlands bordering on the bays and Gulf; but the northern people prefer the high lands in the interior. If emigration continues, it will soon contain a very respectable population. CHAPTER XXII. I found some of the emigrants disappointed, discontented and unhappy; and I met one man on his return to the land from whence he came. He was from Tennessee, had moved into Texas with his family and a small portion of his goods in a wagon; but they all did not like the country so well as the one they had left, and unanimously agreed to return. It was a tedious and expensive journey, but not altogether useless. It will teach them more highly to prize their own country, neighborhood and privileges, and induce them to spend the remainder of their days with contented minds. Before a man with a family makes up his mind to emigrate to a new, unsettled and distant country, he ought well to consider of the subject. Emigration, like matrimony, ought to be fully considered; as a bad move in this particular, is attended by many evils, and cannot well be remedied. In the first place, it is the best way to "let well enough alone." If an individual be well settled in life, has profitable employment, well supports himself and family and gains a little every year, dwells in an agreeable neighborhood, has the privilege of sending his children to school, and of attending public worship, why should he wish to remove? Why should he wish to go into the wilderness, endure the fatigues of a long journey, and the many hardships and deprivations, necessarily attendant upon a removal to the most favored spot in the new world? This life is too short and uncertain to be spent in making doubtful experiments. It is wise, to live where we can be the most useful and happy ourselves, and where we have the fairest prospect of rendering others so, with whom we are connected. But the young man who has no lucrative employment, and the married man who has to labor hard to gain a scanty subsistence for himself and family, would do well to go to the rich prairies of the south or west. He ought to be careful not to be too much elated with the prospect before him, for disappointment, fatigue and suffering most assuredly await him. It is not "a light thing" to travel with a family of goods two or three thousand miles.--He ought to accustom his mind to dwell upon hardship and suffering, before he commences his journey. Young says-- "Our only lesson is to learn to suffer; And he who knows not that, was born for nothing." But on his arrival at his location in the new world, however fine, rich and elegant the situation may be, he will feel disappointed and sad. This is perfectly natural; and although some may have too much pride to acknowledge it, yet they all have a strangeness of feeling pervading their breasts, that is sometimes painful in the extreme. Perhaps the emigrant had never before travelled far from the smoke of his father's dwelling, and had spent his life hitherto in the neighborhood where he was born, and where his early and innocent attachments were formed. He now finds himself in a new country, far away from the ever-to-be-remembered scenes of his childhood, and he looks abroad upon the world around him, in sadness of heart; for it is a world, however beautiful it may be, that is a stranger to him, and with which he has no sympathy. Not to feel, under such circumstances as these, indicates something more or less than man. And this strange, lonely feeling is hardly softened down and mitigated, by the well known fact, that his new location is far superior to the one he has left. The inhabitants of Nantucket are proverbially attached to that island of sand, and are discontented and unhappy in the most fertile towns and beautiful villages on the continent. The emigrant ought to think of all these things, before he leaves his native village. But when he has become located in the new world, it will not do to shrink back and despond. He must brace himself to the task before him, and cheer up his family, who in fact need some cheering, for exchanging a well built house and pleasant associates, for the rude log hut and wild beasts of the forests. They will all soon become acquainted with the new world and form new associations. A well built house will shortly take the place of the rude cabin, and emigrants will settle near them, to whom they will become attached. The rich fields will produce an abundant harvest, and large herds of cattle will be seen feeding on the luxuriant grass. He will soon gain a competency, live at ease, and become contented and happy. The inhabitants have a strong belief that Texas will at some future day become one of the United States; but I think this, extremely doubtful. It is more probable, that it will in time become an independent sovereignty. It is now one of the Mexican States, and the seat of the general government is in the city of Mexico. The confederacy is composed of quite a number of States, and Texas sends its due proportion of representatives to the general Congress, to make laws for the whole. These States have never been well agreed in their form of government, or in the men for rulers. Revolutions, and counter-revolutions, have been the order of the day at the seat of the general government; but Texas is too much settled by Americans, and is too far removed from these intestine commotions to be much affected by them. Col. Stephen F. Austin, to whom the first colony was granted, and who has been the indefatigable pioneer in the settlement of Texas, has generally been its representative in the general government. In the spring of 1834, he was at the seat of government, but so great were the divisions that little business could be done. He considered the country in a state of revolution, and wrote home to a friend of his, that he believed Texas had better take care of itself and form a government of its own. This friend proved treacherous, enclosed his letter to the President, and sent it to the city of Mexico. It was received just after Col. Austin had left the city on his return home. He was pursued, arrested, brought back and put in prison. He was for awhile kept in close confinement; and then, let out on his giving bonds to confine himself to the limits of the city. When I was in Texas, it was believed, he would shortly be liberated, and was daily expected home; but I have since learned, that he was not liberated until some months after my return. It requires not the gift of prophecy to tell what the end of these things will be. Texas will become tired of belonging to such a discordant confederacy; and when their population shall have sufficiently increased to insure success, will throw off the yoke, and form a government of their own. But at all events, it will soon be disjoined from Cohahuila, establish its own State government, and elect its own officers. The seat of government will probably be San Felipe, on the Brazos river. In some publications the people of Texas have been slandered. They have been called a set of robbers and murderers, screening themselves from justice, by fleeing from their own country and coming to this. It would be strange, indeed, if there were not such instances; but whoever travels over the country, will find them as pleasant, obliging and kind as any people in the United States. In the towns, you generally find a billiard room; and near it, a race-course. At these resorts, are found the favorite amusements of the inhabitants. I went all through the country, unarmed and unharmed; nor did I at any time feel in jeopardy of life or limb. Their most prominent fault is, in being too fond of pastime and hunting, to the neglect of tilling the land, building decent houses, and procuring the conveniences of life. The most healthy and pleasant portions of Texas are in the regions of Nacogdoches; in the rolling country between the Brazos and Colorado; and southward and westward of the latter river--in Beal's Grant, near the Rio del Norte; and high up on the Brazos and its branches, in Robinson's colony. But neither Galveston Bay, nor the flat country all along the seacoast, is the place for a northern man. It is too much infested with alligators, moccason snakes and moschetoes. It is more suitable for southern planters, to be cultivated by the blacks. But whoever emigrates with his family to Texas, let him, at all events, carry with him bread stuffs to last six months; for there is no wheat raised in the country, and only a small crop of corn for the supply of its own inhabitants. Of course, bread stuffs are always dear, and sometimes unattainable at any price. Cattle and hogs are plenty, and wild game abundant, so that he could supply himself with meat in this country. The emigrant had better buy his cattle and horses here; for those brought from a more northern climate do not thrive well, and often die. A good serviceable horse may be bought for, from twenty to thirty dollars; a cow with a calf by her side, for ten dollars; and a yoke of oxen for about thirty dollars. The land is ploughed by oxen, horses and mules; but journeys for the transportation of merchandize are performed by oxen. There is a mail running from the city of Mexico, through St. Felipe, as far as Nacogdoches; but as the United States mail goes no farther than Fort Jessup, the two mails do not meet each other, by seventy-five miles. There is, therefore, no mail connection between the United States and Texas. This is a serious inconvenience, and must shortly be remedied. The only chance to send a letter either way, is by a private conveyance. This is generally done by the captains of vessels. The currency is silver and gold coin, bills of the United States Bank and those of New Orleans.--Copper coins are not found in circulation at the south and west. Texas has no bank of its own. Thus much for my general view of Texas. I have endeavored to give a true account of the country as it appeared to me. Perhaps it may not be altogether acceptable to landholders and speculators. Be that as it may, I believe I have performed an acceptable service to the emigrant, by giving him a fair account of the country; and one that he will find to be a true one, in all its essential particulars, on his arrival. Live stock, cotton and sugar are and will be the great staples of the country--grain will be of secondary consideration. What, then, is the conclusion of the whole matter? Is Texas a desirable place for a northern man? My opinion is, that if a northern man would locate himself in the highlands of the country, he would enjoy health as well as at the north; procure all the necessaries and conveniences of life much easier; and might, in time, become independently rich. I do think he would find the climate more pleasant, and more congenial to his feelings, than a northern one; and his life probably attended by more enjoyments. I have been frequently asked, what particular spot in Texas is the most desirable for an emigrant to settle in? My answer is, I cannot tell. And whoever travels over the country, will be as much puzzled to tell as I am. The fact is, there are hundreds of places offering about the same inducements--all pleasant, healthy and agreeable. Among them, it is quite immaterial what particular one the emigrant may select. I saw an emigrant who had been in the country almost a year, and he had been riding over it the chief part of the time, and still was unable to make a selection. He said there were so many fine situations, so nearly alike, that he found it difficult to give a decided preference to any particular one. When he will be able to make up his mind, and decide the question, I know not. The last time I saw him, he was still on the wing; and for aught I know, he may keep in motion as long as the far-famed Boston traveller, _Peter Rugg_, or the _Flying Dutchman_, and never be able to find a spot of ground for a permanent abode! But this emigrant is not to be "sneezed at." Questions of far less importance have agitated the world; and who knows, but that the destiny of the country, as well as his own, eminently depends upon his particular location! Again--I have been enquired of, what can a man do to make property in Texas? I answer, he can go into trade in some of the villages, and make large profits upon his goods. He can go on to a plantation, and raise cotton, sugar, corn, or stock--any or all of these are easily raised, and find a ready market. This is what he _may_ do; but what he _will_ do, is altogether uncertain. He may become as indolent and inattentive to business, as many of the inhabitants of the country. He may spend his time in hunting, at the race-course, and at the billiard table. _Here_, at the north, the great anxiety is, how we shall live--wherewithal we shall be clothed, and how we can turn a penny to "get gain;" _there_, the great concern is, how they shall employ themselves to kill time. _Here_, we struggle hard to live; _there_, they strive hard not to live. _Here_, we live in spite of nature; _there_, nature makes them live in spite of themselves. Could an emigrant know what course he would take on settling in Texas, he could then tell, whether it would be better to go or remain. I have spread the country open before him; let him judge for himself. And fortunate is he, who gives heed to the experience of others, and makes a wise choice. CHAPTER XXIII. I concluded to return to the north by water. I procured a conveyance from the interior to St. Felipe on horseback; and here I learnt that there was a schooner sixty miles down the river at Columbia, bound to New-Orleans, which would sail in a few days. I could find no conveyance to Columbia, either by land or water. I found a wagon going down for merchandize, on which I put my baggage; and in company with another gentleman, whom I found in the same predicament with myself, started off on foot. St. Felipe is the head quarters of Austin's colony. It is a small village, on a high prairie, immediately on the south bank of the Brazos river, nearly one hundred miles from the sea. It stands on the first high land you come to on the river; and at this spot the high rolling country commences. Its situation is beautiful and commanding. It has two taverns, four or five stores, a court house, and perhaps twenty dwelling houses; but there are only two or three good looking buildings in the place. The opposite side of the river is low, and covered with a heavy growth of timber. St. Felipe, like most of the southern villages, is not without its billiard room; and its usual, I might say invariable accompaniment, the grog shop.--Billiards is a pleasant and manly game enough; and good exercise for a sedentary man; and if indulged in only for amusement, is as innocent as any recreation whatever. It is a game much played in the middle and southern portions of the United States; and men of the first respectability are found at the table. But in this section of the country, it cannot be recommended as a safe place for recreation. It is generally used as a mere gambling apparatus; and a person meets with a class of society not the most civil, sober and peaceable. Not long since, a young man played with an old gambler, until he became tired, and started off. The gambler came out at the door, and called him back; but finding he could not induce him to return, out of mere wantonness and sport, commenced throwing brickbats at him. The young man was a cripple, and could neither run, nor successfully contend with his athletic opponent. He bore it as long as he could, then drew a pistol and shot him through the body. He fell dead upon the spot, without uttering a word. He had been an overbearing, troublesome fellow, and his death was the cause of joy rather than sorrow. One night, while I was at St. Felipe, two young men returned from a bloody affray, thirty miles down the river. Early the next morning, two other men, fully armed, entered the town in pursuit, and paraded the streets in hostile array. I enquired into the history of the case, and found the following particulars. Sometime previous, one of the young men paid his addresses to a young lady, and was engaged to be married. He went to the north on some mercantile business; and during his absence, another young man by the name of Thompson, commenced his particular attentions to the young lady; and the match was strongly advocated by his father. On his return from the north, he and another young man who had married a sister of the lady in question, payed a visit to her father's--stayed all night, and started in the forenoon, to return to St. Felipe. One of them was in a light gig-wagon, the other on horseback. They had proceeded but a few miles when they heard the clattering of horses' feet, at full speed, behind them. On looking round, they saw young Thompson's father, and a doctor of the neighborhood, in close pursuit, with pistols in hand. The young men were also armed; and immediately shots were exchanged by both parties. But such was the hurry and agitation of the moment, that none took effect. They all dismounted at once, and at it they went, in a desperate contest for life and death. The doctor, not liking this part of the game, or not feeling exactly brave on the occasion, was contented to stand aloof, and see the battle rage. Old Thompson was a powerful man, and about an equal match for both of his opponents. He laid about him like a giant; and sometimes had one grounded, and then the other; and apparently, would shortly gain the victory over them both. At length, he knocked one down, and seemed determined to despatch him at once. He seized him by the throat, and called upon the doctor for a knife. The other young man saw at a glance the critical state of the contest--he jumped to the wagon, took out a loaded gun, just in time to stop the doctor, by his threats, from handing the knife, then took deliberate aim at Thompson, and shot him through the body. Thompson fell back, said he was a dead man, and expired in a few minutes. The doctor ran to his horse, mounted and fled with all convenient speed. The young men, having been rather roughly handled, were considerably bruised, although not seriously injured. They picked up the deadly weapons of the battle-field, as trophies of victory, and made the best of their way to St. Felipe. In a short time, the doctor, young Thompson and some others, came to the battle-ground, and carried home the dead body; and without waiting to attend the funeral, young Thompson and the doctor started after the young men, to avenge his death. It caused no small stir at St. Felipe, when they arrived, and paraded the streets fully armed, and breathing out threatenings. The young men took to a store, and with arms in their hands, awaited the result. The civil authority, however, interfered. The young men gave themselves up to the custody of the law, and Thompson and the doctor were persuaded to go home, and abide a trial by jury. It is no pleasure to me to give an account of such lawless battles; but as a faithful chronicler of events I could not pass them over in silence. Texas, however, is not more the theatre of them, than many places in the United States. If the value of an article is enhanced in proportion to its scarcity, it is more excusable to fight for a lady here, than elsewhere; for, according to the best estimate I could make, there are ten men to one woman in the country. And could the surplus maiden population of New-England be induced to emigrate to Texas, they would meet with a cordial reception; and it might prove, not only advantageous to themselves, but highly beneficial to the country. In two miles from the town, we came to the flat, low country. It was, generally, muddy and very disagreeable and fatiguing to travel over. It was all an open prairie country, except a small skirt of timber immediately on the banks of the little streams; and almost a dead level, except in one place, twelve miles from Columbia. Here, a hundred acres or more rise thirty or forty feet above the general level of the country, and by way of distinction, is called "the mound." Near the streams, the ground was a little elevated; and at such places, we found houses, and some small improvements, probably, in eight or ten miles of each other. We saw a great many herds of deer, and flocks of wild geese and ducks. We were almost four days in performing the route; and were excessively fatigued, when we entered the small village of Columbia. This is a new village, having two or three stores, a tavern, and half a dozen dwelling houses. It is situated on a level prairie, two miles from the river, and ten above Brazoria. There is a small village immediately on the bank of the river, called Bell's Landing; and the space between the two, is low bottom land, heavily covered with timber. At this landing, vessels come up and unload their merchandize, destined for the upper country. It has a tavern, two stores, a large warehouse, and three or four dwelling houses. Here I was informed, the schooner had dropped down the stream. I stopped over night, and rather than walk, I obtained a log canoe, and a man to paddle me down to Brazoria. The tide sets up a little further than Bell's Landing, and our boat, having the advantage of its ebb and the current also, floated us down in two hours. Brazoria is quite a large village. I found some very good buildings, public houses, stores, and as usual, a billiard room. A newspaper is published here, called the Brazoria Gazette; and I believe is the only one printed in all Texas. The situation of the town is low and unpleasant; and subject to the fever and ague. I found a steamboat here, going up the river; but the vessel had gone further down; so we started in the canoe after her; and rowing fifteen miles we found her by the side of the river, taking in bales of cotton. I was glad to get on board the vessel, and be relieved at once from the tediousness and fatigue of pursuit, and from the uncertainty of obtaining a passage to the United States. The vessel remained here, until the next day, when we sailed with a light breeze down the stream. The river is very crooked, so that it is twice as far from Brazoria to its mouth by water, as it is by land. We had to tie the vessel up to a tree at night, as it was too dark to proceed. The next day in the afternoon, we hauled up again, on account of a head wind. The mate stept ashore to spend the time in hunting. The river is lined with timber on both sides, about a mile in width; and then, the country is generally an open, level prairie. The mate became entirely bewildered and lost; could not find his way back to the vessel; and was obliged to camp out for the night. In the morning, the captain sent scouts in various directions after him; but they all returned without success. The captain concluded he must have gone towards the mouth of the river; so he hoisted sail and started on. Nearly noon, the mate made his appearance on the river bank, nearly opposite the vessel; and the captain sent his boat for him. He was quite exhausted.--He had wandered about almost the whole time, and could neither find a house, road or river. He said he never had been used to hunting; but he could not conceive why people were so fond of it, as it was much more pain than pleasure to him. 'Every one to his trade.' A hunter would have found as little pleasure on the ocean, as the sailor did on the land. This hunting expedition afforded no little merriment to the captain and crew, at his expense, during the voyage. The timber on the river banks became less, as we descended; and for five miles above the mouth, there is none at all. A small town called Velasco is situated on the sandy beach, at the river's mouth--containing one public house, two stores, four or five dwelling houses, and the ruins of an old Spanish fort. We stayed two days here, waiting for a fair wind to cross the bar. I frequently amused myself by walking for miles on the sandy beach, and picking up some of the pretty shells among the millions that lay scattered along. It is as fine a walk as a pensive maiden, in contemplative mood, could desire. On the one hand, is the ever-toiling ocean, whose waves break upon the sand bars, and in giddy globes of foam, lash the shore, and spend their force beneath your feet: on the other, a low, sandy bluff, and then an extended lawn, stretching far away into the interior, and its utmost verge skirted with stately forest trees; and the pathway itself, smooth, hard and level, and bedecked with countless beautiful shells of various sizes, shapes and hues. The Brazos is an unpleasant stream. Its waters are at all times muddy; its banks are generally low and present a raw edge to the eye as you pass along; and in many places the navigation is rendered difficult, by reason of the many snags. At its mouth, there is a bar, generally having not more than five or six feet of water; and the channel so narrow that a vessel can only pass through with a fair wind. Three vessels had been wrecked on the coast the past season. The remains of two of them, lay in sight partly buried in the sand. In the spring, the waters of all the streams in Texas are high, and bring down from the upper country, large quantities of timber. The mouth of the Brazos, and a long distance on the seashore, is lined with large masses of trees; and from this source the inhabitants of Velasco obtain their fuel. CHAPTER XXIV. One morning, near the last of December, the captain announced a fair wind. He weighed anchor, hoisted sail, and with a stiff breeze pushed out to sea. The vessel only drew five feet water, yet she touched three or four times on the bar; but did no apparent damage. I stood upon the deck, until the land, trees and houses faded away in the distance. Texas, like a beautiful damsel, has many charms and attractions, but is not entirely faultless. Indeed, there is no such place as a perfect elysium on earth. And those who have formed their opinion of the country from some of the many late publications concerning it, will feel some disappointment on their arrival. But its many beauties will hide a multitude of faults; or render them light and easily borne. I must say of Texas, as Cowper said of England, "with all its faults, I like it still;" and although I had experienced some hardships and inconveniences while in the country, yet its mild climate, pleasant streams, and enchanting "fields of living green," I left at last with serious regret. The fall of the year is the best time to move into Texas; or into any of the western States. There are four good reasons to give for this preference: 1st. It is then better travelling; both on account of the dryness of the roads, and the mild temperature of the weather--neither too hot or too cold. 2d. It is more healthy on the road--not so much danger of contracting disease on the way; and to be there at the opening of the spring, and become accustomed to the climate and warm weather by degrees, there will be a fairer prospect of continued health. 3d. It is the time of the year when provisions are the most plenty and cheapest; an emigrant can, therefore, the more readily supply himself on the road, and after his arrival. 4th. It is the shortest time a person can be in the country, and raise a crop the ensuing season. To arrive in October, or the first of November, he will have plenty of time to build a log house, split out rails and fence in a field by the coming spring, so as to raise a crop.--Were he to go in the spring, he would be obliged to support himself and family a whole year before he could get a crop into the ground. To go from the north to Texas, the better way is to take a passage on board a vessel bound to Galveston Bay, the river Brazos, or the Colorado. But if a vessel cannot readily be found, going direct to Texas, a passage may be taken to New-Orleans; and from thence, a person can go up the Red River to Natchitoches, and across the country; or by water through the Gulf, to almost any port on the bays and rivers. The distance from Boston by water, is three thousand miles; by land, it is not quite so far. From the city of New-York, vessels frequently may be found going direct to Texas. The most convenient places for landing in Texas are Harrisburg, on Galveston Bay; Velasco, at the mouth of the Brazos, and Metagorda at the mouth of the Colorado. It would be advisable to get a protection, more especially, if a person goes by water. Speculation--ever busy, active speculation, pervades the world. It rages with violence in Maine, disturbs the quiet villages of New-England, keeps the western world alive, and visits the shores of Texas. I was at a loss to know how speculation could get hold of Texas lands; for they are only granted to the actual settler and only one grant given to each. Human ingenuity has devised a plan. When an emigrant arrives in the country, he is met by a land speculator, who tells him he knows of a good location, and if he will go and settle on it, he shall have one half of the league for nothing. The land is entered at the land office in the emigrant's name, the speculator pays the fees, and takes a deed of one half, from the emigrant. This is not the worst kind of speculation in the world. It, probably, may prove beneficial to both parties. The emigrant at least, seems to have no cause for complaint. He gets twenty three hundred acres of land, as much as he can ever cultivate, and pays nothing at all for it. We had four passengers on board; two of whom were afflicted with that lingering disease called the fever and ague. They had resided a few months in the lowlands of Texas, and became so severely afflicted, they were returning to the United States for health. The other was a physician, who had gone up the river as far as Columbia; did not like the country and was on his return home to Tennessee. I informed him, he had not seen the most desirable portion of the country. And such was the fact.--But he had read some of the descriptions of the "beautiful river Brazos and the fine country adjacent," and was thereby completely deceived. A sea voyage is always unpleasant to me. The wind blew a strong breeze, the waves rolled high, and made our vessel dance over them like a feather. We all became dreadfully sea sick. It is a terrible feeling; and those afflicted with it, probably endure as much excruciating pain and distress, as the human system is capable of sustaining. In two days, the wind abated in a measure, and the sea became comparatively smooth. We crawled out upon deck, our sickness abated, and soon left us entirely. On the fifth day, just at night, we saw the light at the southwest pass of the Mississippi. It soon became dark, and the captain in attempting to enter the mouth of the river, run the vessel aground near the shore. A scene here occurred, that somewhat startled us. We were in the cabin and felt the vessel strike and heard the waves dash against her.--We ran up on deck, and there saw the captain seated upon the windlass, writhing in agony, and groaning like one in despair! The idea struck us in a moment, that the captain saw our danger to be imminent, the vessel would dash in pieces, and we must all perish. But we were immediately relieved from our apprehensions. In the darkness of the night, and hurry of the moment, the captain had been thrown across the pump, and severely injured; and it was from actual pain of body, rather than anguish of mind that made him groan so bitterly. We did not, however, feel entirely at ease. We were exposed to the open sea; and if the wind should rise, and blow hard on shore, the vessel must be dashed to pieces, and we escape the best way we could. But we were highly favored. The wind died away and the sea became quite calm. We retired to our berths, and slept quietly. In the morning, we carried out an anchor; at flood tide, hauled the vessel off; a steamboat took us in tow, and at the dinner hour, we were gallantly gliding up the river. So change the scenes of life. The Mississippi steam tow-boats have engines of immense power. Our boat had six vessels in tow, and it carried us along at the rate of four miles an hour, against the strong current of the river. From the mouth of the Mississippi to New-Orleans is one hundred and fifteen miles, and we performed the trip in about twenty-eight hours. The price charged for towing up the river is a dollar a ton; and the amount the boat received from all the vessels was about five hundred dollars. The vessels are towed down stream for half price and sometimes less. Fifteen miles from the sea, the Mississippi divides itself into three channels, each having a lighthouse near the mouth; but the southwest pass is the only one in which ships can enter when loaded. The river continually pushes its banks further out to sea. They are formed of mud and logs, and soon become covered with a rank growth of rushes. The banks of the river are low, and too wet for cultivation, for fifty miles from the sea. Soon after passing fort Jackson, which is about forty miles up the river, we came to sugar plantations on both sides, and these continued to the city of New-Orleans. On many of these large plantations we saw elegant houses, surrounded by orange trees, loaded with fruit. In the rear, sugar houses, and steam mills for grinding the cane, and long rows of neat looking negro houses; and large stacks of rice standing near them. The planters were all busily engaged in making sugar; and we saw armies of negroes in the fields, cutting and transporting the cane to the mills. January had already commenced, yet there had been no frost to destroy vegetation, and the cane looked as green as in midsummer. The crop of sugar was unusually large, and of an excellent quality. The sugar cane, in size, stalk and leaf very much resembles the southern corn. It has, however, no spindles at the top like a corn stalk, but terminates in a tuft of long leaves. It does not appear to produce any seed in this country but the crop is annually renewed, by planting short slips of the stalk. Its juice is sweet, pleasant and nutritious.--The negroes are very fond of chewing the stalk; and I saw some bundles of it at the vegetable market in New-Orleans for sale. When the cane comes to maturity, it is cut up and ground with smooth nuts, which in fact only compress the stalk, and force out the juice. This is caught in a large trough underneath, and undergoes the same process of boiling in large kettles, as the sap of a northern maple, when made into sugar. When the boiling is completed, the sugar is put into a large cistern full of holes in the bottom, where it remains a number of days, that all the molasses that will, may drain out. It is then put into hogsheads and sent to market. CHAPTER XXV. On the eastern bank of the Mississippi, stands the city of New-Orleans. It is regularly laid out, chiefly built of brick, has many fine blocks of buildings, large houses and handsome streets; but its site is too low for it to appear to advantage, or to render it pleasant and agreeable. It stretches two miles along the river bank; and for that distance, the levee is lined with triple and quadruple rows of vessels, steamboats and flat-boats; all having their particular location by themselves. The trade of New-Orleans is immense. By the weekly shipping register, it appeared there were two hundred and thirty-four vessels in port. The levee is loaded with bales of cotton, barrels of pork and flour, hogsheads of hams, kegs of lard and hogsheads of sugar and molasses. It is a place of great business, bustle and blandishment; and of dissipation, disease and death. As I passed along by its muddy pavements and putrid gutters, and saw the many gambling houses, grog shops, oyster shops, and houses of riot and debauchery, surely, thought I, there are many things here exceedingly offensive, both to the physical and moral man. And when I saw the motley throngs, hurrying on to these haunts of vice, corruption and crime, I almost instinctively exclaimed, in the words of the immortal bard-- "Broad is the road that leads to death, And thousands walk together there!" But here, the career of the debauchee is short.--The poisonous atmosphere soon withers and wastes away his polluted life's blood. Death follows close upon the heels of crime; and one need stand but a short time at the charnel house, to behold cartloads of his victims, hurried on, "unwept, unhonored and unsung," to their last home! Life seems to be valued by its possessor, in proportion to the strength of the tenure by which it is held. When danger becomes imminent, and life's termination apparently near, instead of making the most of its short duration, man improvidently throws it away, as of no value; or suppresses all apprehension of the future, by rushing headlong into the wildest excesses of dissipation and crime. This is sometimes exemplified in the sailor. When perils thicken around and death stares him in the face, instead of summoning all his powers into action, and bravely contending to the last, he attempts to shut his eyes upon impending ruin, by stupifying the body, and ignobly surrenders life without a struggle. On no other principle, can I account for the excesses of New-Orleans. In its best estate, it is emphatically a place of disease and death. Its atmosphere is pestiferous. It is felt so to be, and so considered by its citizens. One might suppose, amid the ravages of disease and death, a man would think seriously and live soberly. That if his days were to be very few, he would make them all count, and tell to the greatest advantage. But the inhabitants of New-Orleans, instead of attempting to deprive death of his power, are enlisted on his side--they put poisoned arrows in his quiver, and add new terrors to his name! The sanctions of law and religion are set at nought, the Sabbath profaned, and they give themselves up to hilarity, dissipation and crime. Is this denied? The fact is too apparent and notorious, successfully to be concealed or denied. Could the many victims of debauchery and crime speak, they might "unfold a tale" that would cause "the hair of the flesh to stand up," and make the boldest turn pale. Shall I be asked to particularize? Take the Criminal Code, and there read its long list of enormities and crimes. Censures are painful, and comparisons are deemed invidious; but I must say New-Orleans does not show that order, neatness and sobriety, found in other large cities of the Union. Murders, robberies, thefts and riots, are too common hardly to elicit a passing notice. Man here seems to have become reckless of life. It is taken and given for "trifles light as air," with an indifference truly astonishing. The police is inefficient or shamefully negligent.--The authorities of the city appear to stand aloof, and see the populace physically and morally wallowing in the mire. It does appear to me, that if all in authority, and all the virtuous portion of the citizens would brace themselves to the work, the city might be greatly improved in health and in morals. Let the strong arm of the law be put forth fearlessly--let the streets be cleared of mud and filth, and the gutters of their putrid water--let the police be active and take into custody the disorderly knaves and vagabonds--let gambling houses be put down, and Sunday theatres and circuses be suppressed, and New-Orleans would wear a different aspect. Then might its streets be walked without fear of life or limb; and the great wealth flowing in, by canal, railroad and river, be fully enjoyed. This may be thought by some to be an exaggerated account of the city. For the honor of our country and of human nature, I wish it might be. But it is, indeed, too true; and whoever happens to visit it, that places a decent value upon life, or the goods of this life, will be glad, like me, to escape without the injury or loss of either. Although the vessel I came in was robbed of money and wearing apparel; one of its sailors knocked down and his money taken from him; and a companion of mine had his pocket book cut from his pocket; yet, I fortunately escaped. I could not, however, feel at ease among such a set of plunderers and robbers. I am fully aware, that a large portion of the populace is made up of all nations, tongues and languages; that their residence here is often transient; that many enormities are incidental to all large cities of such a mixed population; and that the many worthy citizens ought not to be held responsible for all the crimes that may be committed, unless they make themselves accessory to them, by indifferently looking on, and taking no energetic measure to prevent them. But it does appear to me they are culpably negligent in this particular. The city authorities need not sanction crime, by licensing gambling houses and houses of ill-fame. By so doing, they take from themselves the power of frowning upon crime, or of effectually punishing the criminal; but leave him to assume an unblushing boldness in society, not elsewhere witnessed, that is truly alarming. If crime may not be entirely prevented, it can be rendered disgraceful; and those who have a decent respect for the opinion of mankind, if they have none for themselves, will then be deterred from committing evil. But as long as New-Orleans is believed to be a place, where crimes may be committed with impunity, and without incurring the censure or disapprobation of its citizens; so long will it be the general haunt for the knaves and vagabonds of the Union, and of the world.--They will centre here; give countenance and support to each other; draw within their deadly grasp the unsuspecting, the vicious and the idle; and, like the rolling snow-ball, at every impulse enlarge their circle, and gain additional force and power. It is time, high time for all the sober minded and well disposed to awake, look about them, and see their true condition. Theirs is the sleep of death. Like Jonah of old, they slumber amid the whirlwind and storm. New-Orleans needs reform; and in a righteous cause, small means may effect much. Ten men may chase a thousand. Can the result be doubtful? ----"Our doubts are traitors And make us lose the good we oft might win, By fearing to attempt." But I have done with the health and moral condition of New-Orleans. I am told it has improved, and is improving. And yet there is room--an ample field for the philanthropist to exercise the utmost stretch of his powers, to improve the physical and moral condition of its citizens. A particular description of the city is not necessary. Its favorable location for foreign and domestic trade, and vast resources, are well known. One thing was new to me. It contains about half a dozen large cotton presses, entirely occupied in compressing bales of cotton. Those intended for a foreign market, are made to occupy one half of their original space; so that a vessel can carry double the quantity it otherwise might. The large number of bales shipped from this port, makes this an extensive business. The charge for compressing is seventy-five cents a bale. Bales designed for the northern ports, do not undergo this operation, but are shipped as they come from the hands of the planter. New-Orleans has three extensive markets; two for flesh, and one for vegetables. I walked through them all, and thought the city was abundantly supplied with provisions, and of a good quality. Although it was January, the vegetable market was supplied with melons, green peas, radishes, lettuce, &c. And boats frequently landed, with cart loads of oranges, fresh from the trees. Fish are neither abundant nor of a fine flavor. On the opposite side of the river, are the shipyards; but they seem to be more occupied in repairs, than in building new vessels. Here is a small village of a dozen houses, a grog shop and a tavern. A steam ferry boat constantly plies across the river, and appears to have a plenty of business. The city is connected with lake Pontchartrain, by a canal for small vessels, and a railroad. The distance is five miles. Steamboats regularly run from the end of the railroad, to Mobile and other ports. New-Orleans has no wharves. It would be more convenient in loading vessels to have them; but they cannot be built on a foundation sufficiently firm to withstand the strong current of the Mississippi. A few years ago a wharf was built; but it was soon undermined, and sunk in the stream. CHAPTER XXVI. After remaining in the city four days, I procured a passage on board a brig bound to Boston, and sailed down the river. In about two miles, we passed the nunnery--a pleasant looking building, surrounded by an extensive grove of orange trees. Five miles from the city, we came to the famous battle ground, where Gen. Jackson, and his brave associates "planted a British colony." But this is a matter of history. All the indications of a battle now remaining, are scars of balls on one or two trees. The large plantations, on both sides of the river, were all alive with negroes, cutting cane and transporting it to the steam mills to make sugar. It appears to me, that slavery sits lighter on the negro race, than it would on any other human beings.--They are, generally, cheerful, and appear to be inclined to make the best of their situation. Much injustice, and many wrongs have been done to the African race. They were torn from their homes, their friends, and their country--carried to a distant land, and sold to hopeless, irremediable slavery. The original kidnappers have much to answer for. But the case is now somewhat changed. Neither the masters nor the slaves, now upon the stage, are the parties to the original transaction. Slavery has existed for a long series of years; and the present owners of slaves obtained possession of them either by descent, or by purchase. They came into their possession, slaves; they did not change their condition. The only fault, therefore, they are justly chargeable with, is the continuance of slavery.--How far culpable the slaveholder may be in this particular, I shall not undertake to decide, any more than I would the degree of guilt justly chargeable to a Mussulman, for believing Mahomet to be a true prophet. In all the publications and lectures which I have seen and heard upon slavery, it appears to me, that in regard to the present owners of slaves, the subject is not viewed in its true light. Slavery is stated to be a great evil; and therefore, slaveholders are great criminals. However well this may sound in logic, it does not sound well in morals. But there is another inference drawn from the premises--that it is the duty of the inhabitants in the non-slaveholding States, to get up a crusade against the slaveholders. Not with swords and guns to be sure; but to give them a bad name, render them odious in the estimation of mankind, and to continue a general warfare upon their characters. This is, indeed, the worst kind of warfare. Better take property or life; for what of value has a man left when deprived of his "good name?" To this, I shall be answered, that it is proper to call things by their right names--a spade ought to be called a spade; and a criminal ought to be called a criminal. So far as it applies to slavery, I have two plain replies to make. In the first place, it is assuming too much to call a slaveholder a criminal, under the peculiar circumstances of the case; and secondly, if the fact were so, it is not always good policy to bring accusations against an individual, if the object be to reform him. It is a good maxim in law, and in religion too, that even the truth is only to be spoken from a good motive and a justifiable end. For the peace and well-being of society, facts are not to be stated, merely to outrage the feelings of another, and to gratify the spleen of the speaker. Now, I would respectfully ask, what good can come of picking up all the tales concerning cruelty to slaves whether true or false, and proclaiming them in the most imposing form upon the house top, to a non-slaveholding audience? Every new case of cruelty is seized upon with avidity, and exultingly paraded before the public. This looks a little too pharisaical. 'Lord I thank thee that I am not as other men are; nor like unto these wicked slaveholders,' seems to beam from some men's countenances. Is it not in accordance with the christian religion, if a brother offend, to go _privately to him_, and tell him his fault? Now, if the object be to emancipate the slaves, _go to the slaveholder himself_, and endeavor to satisfy _him_ that slavery in itself is evil; and, on a view of the whole ground, it is safe, practicable, and beneficial to the slaves to be set free.--To the objection, that it would be unsafe to go among slaveholders for such a purpose, I reply, that missionaries are sent among the Indians of the West, the heathen of the East, and in the islands of the sea; and can it be deemed more dangerous to go among the slaveholding citizens of the United States, than among them? It cannot be pretended. The fact is a man may travel through the slaveholding States with perfect safety, provided he carry the deportment of a gentleman, and discuss the subject of slavery, as all such subjects ought to be, in a decent and respectful manner. Of this, I cannot doubt, from my own experience in the matter. During a residence of three years in a slaveholding State, and in my various excursions among the planters, I uniformly found hospitable and kind treatment; and a readiness to discuss the subject of slavery with the same freedom that they would any other. It would be a very good plan for our lecturers on slavery, to travel through the southern States, and see for themselves the true condition of the master and slave. Their censures of their southern brethren might be softened down a little; and they would sometimes feel more inclined to pity than upbraid. They would find the emancipation of slaves not new, or unthought of, by the people of the South; that it is a subject, which has engaged their anxious thoughts, and caused much private and public discussion. The southerners are more willing to emancipate their slaves, than our northern people generally suppose; but the great question is, how can it with safety be done? Some of our northern people would decide this off hand. Only say "_be free_," and it is done. But the slaveholder believes, there are many things to be taken into consideration--self preservation, good order of society and the condition of the emancipated slave, are all to be regarded and weighed, before freedom is granted. But I believe the slaveholders do injustice to the character of the negroes in one particular. If they were all emancipated to-day, I believe there would be no attempts made to murder the whites, as has been supposed. They are naturally a friendly, confiding race--neither ungrateful, nor insensible to kind treatment. When they have a good master, and there are many such, they become very much attached to him; and would unhesitatingly, risk their lives in his defence. I have been in the fields, where hundreds of slaves were at work, and conversed with them.--They appeared to be well clothed and fed, and had an easy task. I thought them to be as lively, gay and happy as any set of beings on earth. They are very fond of music, and display a good deal of ingenuity, in adapting songs to their various kinds of work and recreations. Many a night, I have raised my window, sat down and listened for hours, to the melody of their voices, in singing their harvest songs, around a pile of corn. But the danger lies, in turning loose upon the world, a race of beings, without houses, lands, or any kind of property; who are ignorant, gay and thoughtless, and entirely unused to provide for themselves. How preposterous the idea! What rational man would think of it? They must beg, steal, plunder, or starve. If the slaves be emancipated, it must be the work of time; and provision must be made, temporarily at least, for their support. But it is urged, that holding in bondage a human being, is wrong, and therefore, he ought to be set at liberty _immediately_. A person cannot do right, or repent of evil, too soon. As this applies to the slave, it may be false reasoning from just premises. Although it might be wrong for the eagle to catch the mole, and bear him aloft into the air, yet would it be right, then to let him go, when he knew the fall would dash him to pieces? The setting at liberty in such a case, would only be inevitable destruction. It would therefore be right, and not _wrong_, to retain possession, until liberty could be granted in safety. That many individuals are justly chargeable with cruelty to their slaves, there can be no doubt.--Their condition is better in the old, than in the new States. But it appeared to me, that many of the acts of cruelty were negligently suffered by the master to be done, rather than inflicted by him. They are too apt to entrust their servants in the hands of ignorant overseers, who punish without judgment or mercy. A planter informed me, he was riding along by his field one day, and observing the overseer was preparing to flog a negro, he rode up to enquire into the cause of the punishment. He was informed the negro would not work, alleging he was sick.--He asked the overseer if he had ascertained that the negro was _not_ sick. He replied no; for he presumed it was only a pretence to get rid of work. He went up to the negro, examined his pulse and tongue, and found he had a high fever. He told the negro to take a horse from the plough, and ride home, and he would come directly and see he was properly attended to. He then turned to the overseer, and told him he was not a suitable man to have the care of human beings--and discharged him on the spot. In Texas, I saw a negro chained in a baggage wagon, for the purpose of carrying him home to his master. He told me he ran away from him, three months previous, and had all that time lived in the woods, and obtained his food by hunting. He said his master was a cruel man, flogged him unmercifully, made him work hard, and did not feed or clothe him well. At night, an axe _happened_ to be left in the wagon, and he liberated himself and escaped. On enquiry, I found the negro's story to be true.--The master was all he had represented him to be, and his conduct was generally reprobated by the people. As I was walking on the sea shore, I again came across the negro. He recognized me at once; came to me, and begged that I would take him with me; and said he would willingly labor for me all the days of his life; but he could not return to his master. This I could not do; but was obliged to leave the negro to his fate. There are many hardships and cruelties incidental to a state of slavery; but the cruel master is as much despised and reprobated in his own immediate neighborhood, as elsewhere. It is now unpopular every where, to ill-treat the slave. His condition has generally improved; and the yoke is often made to sit so light, that it is neither felt nor thought of. But still slavery in its mildest form is attended with many moral, as well as physical evils; is wrong in principle, and contrary to the spirit of our free institutions: and I earnestly hope, that this dark spot on Freedom's bright banner may soon be blotted out forever. But to effect such a great object as this, will require the wisdom and aid of the North and the South combined. Let "the North give up and the South keep not back;" let them amicably take counsel together; and devise some plan in which the rights, interests and feelings of all parties are nicely balanced and duly regarded. But I see no way in which slavery can be abolished without the aid of the slaveholders. This kind of property is guaranteed to them by the supreme law of the land, and to give it up, must be a voluntary act. It appears to me, the course things are now taking at the North, instead of winning the aid of the South, tends directly to brace them against emancipation. It appears to the South, as an officious interference in their affairs, in the most offensive form. What would we think, if the South should employ a scavenger, to pick up all the private and public acts of cruelty of the northern people; such as the whipping of the boy by Arnold, the starving to death of another by Fernald, &c. &c. &c.; and then, set up a press, expressly to blazon forth these cruelties; and hire itinerant lecturers to go about and proclaim to a southern audience, in the highest strains of impassioned eloquence, the wickedness, corruptions and enormities of the citizens of the North! And say, they "had waited forty years" for the northern people to reform themselves; which was time enough, and they would wait no longer. They, therefore, were justified in holding them up to the scorn and reproach of all human kind! When the North knew, and all the world knew, they were no better than they should be at home; that they had work of reform enough near at hand; and that they had no legal right to interfere, and could have no legal action upon the subject. And although the avowed object was the reform of the northern people, yet they kept aloof from them, and hurled their poisoned arrows at a distance, alleging that they might in their patriotic zeal, so much arouse their indignation, that it would be unsafe to go near them. What would northern people say to all this! Should we say, go on, brethren! God speed! Or should we say, this is mean, cowardly business--empty boasting--gasconade! These people may not, indeed, be guilty of this particular thing of which they accuse us; and that is the very reason why they choose this subject for accusation--why they walk so proudly erect--ring all the changes and make the most of it. It is to triumph over us, and build up themselves on our ruins. There is in truth, a worse kind than negro slavery--when a man becomes a slave to his own unhallowed, vindictive passions. Much injustice has been done the southern people. Those who have travelled and dwelt among them, bear testimony to their high-mindedness, kindness and hospitality. They scorn to do an act of meanness; or to enter upon the broad field of scandal. And although their strong sensibility may sometimes lead them into error, yet in all the virtues which ennoble man, they might not suffer in a comparison with the North. If we choose to bring railing accusations against them; they may not descend to recriminate but leave us the undisputed occupants of the ground we have chosen. And we may have the sore mortification at last to find, we have uttered anathemas in vain; and brought nothing to any desirable result--that we have toiled hard, and effected nothing, but our own humiliation and disgrace. But I must leave the subject of negro slavery.--Perhaps I have dwelt too long upon it already to comport with the design of this book. It is a great and an important subject; and to do it justice would require a volume. It is my solemn conviction however, that for the northern people to effect any thing, towards the freedom of the African race, much prudence must be exercised, and conciliatory measures adopted; so as to enlist the undivided energies of the South in the great work of emancipation. CHAPTER XXVII. The river Mississippi, which imparts a name and character to the great valley of the West, deserves something more than a mere passing notice.--When the fertility and extent of the region through which it passes, are taken into consideration, together with the magnitude of itself and its numerous branches, it way well be pronounced the noblest river on the face of the globe. Contrary to the general analogy of other large rivers, it directs its course from north to south. It rises in about the forty-eighth degree of north latitude, in a region having the aspect of a vast marshy valley. Its commencement is in many streams, issuing principally from wild rice lakes, and proceeds but a short distance before it becomes a large river. Sometimes, it moves silently and imperceptibly along, over a wide and muddy channel--at others, it glides briskly onward, over a sandy bottom, its waters almost as transparent as air--and again it becomes compressed to a narrow channel between high and hoary limestone cliffs, and it foams and roars, as it violently lashes the projecting rocks, and struggles through. The falls of St. Anthony, following the meanders of the stream, are three hundred miles from its source. At this place, the river is about half a mile wide, and falls in a perpendicular and unbroken sheet, between seventeen and eighteen feet.--Above the mouth of the Missouri, it receives many large tributaries, the most considerable of which are the Ouisconsin and Illinois from the east, and the Des Moines, from the west. A little below thirty nine degrees, comes in the mighty Missouri from the west, which is a longer stream, and carries more water than the Mississippi itself. This is the largest tributary stream in the world; and from the facts, that it has a longer course, carries more water than the Mississippi, and gives its own peculiar character to the stream below their junction, many have supposed it ought to have given its name to the united stream and to the valley. In opposition to this claim, it may be stated, that the valley of the Missouri, in the grand scale of conformation, appears to be secondary to that of the Mississippi--it has not the general direction of that river, but joins it nearly at right angles--the Mississippi valley is wider than that of the Missouri, and the river is broader, and the direction of the valley and river is the same above and below the junction. From these considerations, it appears to me, that the Mississippi rightfully gives its name to the united stream, and to the great valley, from its source to the sea. The Missouri rises in the Rocky Mountains, nearly in the same parallel with the Mississippi. It is formed by three branches, which unite near the base of the principal ranges of mountains, which severally bear the names of Jefferson, Gallatin and Madison. The head waters of some of these, are so near to those of the Columbia on the other side of the mountains, that a person may drink of the waters of each, in travelling not more than a mile. After the junction of these three streams, the river continues on a foaming mountain torrent. It then spreads into a broader stream, and comparatively of a gentler current, and is full of islands. The river, then, passes through what are called "The Gates of the Rocky Mountains." The river appears to have torn for itself a passage through the mountain. For the distance of six miles, perpendicular cliffs of dark colored rock, rise twelve hundred feet above the stream which washes their base! The chasm is not more than three hundred feet wide, and the deep, foaming waters rush through, with the speed of a race-horse. In no situation in life, does man so keenly feel his own imbecility and nothingness, as when viewing such terrible results of a war between the elements of nature. This is the most imposing and grand spectacle of the kind, to be found on the globe; and in the deep solitude of the wilderness, its aspect is peculiarly awful and terrific. The mountain scenery on the Hudson near West Point; and the passage of the Potomac through the Blue Ridge, sink into utter insignificance, when compared to the rush of the Missouri, through "The Gates of the Rocky Mountains."--The mountains here, have an aspect of inexpressible loneliness and grandeur. Their summits are covered with a stinted growth of pines and cedars, among which, are seen mountain sheep, bounding along at heights apparently inaccessible. For the distance of seventeen miles, the stream then becomes almost a continued cataract. The whole perpendicular descent in this distance, is three hundred and sixty-two feet. The first fall is ninety-eight feet--the second, nineteen--the third, forty-seven--and the fourth, twenty-six. The river continues rapid, a number of miles below; it then assumes its distinctive character--sweeps briskly along in regular curves, by limestone bluffs, boundless prairies and dense forests, to its junction with the Mississippi. It has a current of four miles an hour; but is navigable for steamboats the distance of twenty-five hundred miles. The tributaries of Missouri are many important and large rivers; but our space will not permit a particular description of them. The most considerable of them, are the Yellow Stone, La Platte and the Osage. The Yellow Stone rises in the same range of mountains with the main river, to which it has many points of resemblance. It enters the Missouri from the south, eighteen hundred miles above its mouth, and is eight hundred and fifty yards wide. It is a broad deep river, sixteen hundred miles in length, boatable, one thousand; and at the junction, appears to be the larger stream. Its shores are heavily timbered, its bottoms are wide, and of the richest soil. Its entrance has been selected by the government, as a suitable spot for a military post, and an extensive settlement. The La Platte also rises in the Rocky mountains, enters from the south, and, measured by its meanders, has a course of two thousand miles. It is nearly a mile wide at its mouth; but, as its name imports, is a shallow stream, and not navigable, except at the high floods. The Osage enters from the south and is a large and important stream of the Missouri. It is boatable for six hundred miles, and its head waters interlock with those of the Arkansas. The Gasconade enters from the south also, is not a large river, but is boatable for sixty miles, and is important for having on its banks extensive pine forests, from which St. Louis and St. Charles are supplied with lumber. The Missouri is a longer river than the Mississippi, measured from its highest source to the Gulf of Mexico; and although it carries less than half the breadth of that stream, it brings down a larger quantity of water. It is at all times turbid; and its prodigious length of course, impetuous current, the singular and wild character of the country through which it runs, impart to it a natural grandeur, truly sublime. In latitude thirty-six and a half degrees, the Mississippi receives from the east, the celebrated and beautiful Ohio. This is, by far, the largest eastern tributary of the Mississippi; and at the junction, and a hundred miles above, it is as wide as the parent stream. If the Mississippi rolls along its sweeping and angry waters, in more majesty--the Ohio far exceeds it in beauty, and in its calm, unbroken course. No river in the world moves along the same distance, in such an uniform, smooth and peaceful current. The river is formed by the junction of the Alleghany and Monongahela at Pittsburgh. The Ohio, at this place, is about six hundred yards wide, and it immediately assumes a broad and beautiful aspect which continues in its whole course, to the Mississippi. Beautiful and romantic streams come in, at nearly equal distances--its bottoms are of an extraordinary depth and fertility--and the configuration on its banks, has all that softness, grandeur and variety, still changing and recurring in such endless combinations, as to render a voyage down it, at all times pleasant and delightful. From Pittsburgh to the Mississippi, the distance is eleven hundred and fifty miles; and between these points, are more than a hundred islands; some of which, are of exquisite beauty, and afford most pleasant situations for cottages and farms. The valley of the Ohio is deep, varying from two to ten miles; and is bounded in the whole distance by bluffs, sometimes towering sublimely from the river bank; at others, receding two or three miles from them. Beyond these, are a singular line of hills, more or less precipitous, which are familiarly called the "Ohio hills." The bottoms of the Ohio are heavily timbered, and there are no where on its banks the slightest indications of prairie. It would be difficult to decide at what season of the year, the Ohio has the most interesting and beautiful appearance--in the spring, when its high floods sweep along with irresistible power, and the red-bud and other early blossoms enliven its banks--or in autumn, when it passes quietly along, showing its broad and clean sand bars, and its pebbly bottom, through waters transparent as air--and when the withering leaves of the forest are painted in golden and scarlet colors along its shores. It is at all times, an interesting river, and probably, no other stream in the world can vie with it, both in utility and beauty. Below the Ohio, the most important tributaries of the Mississippi, are White river, Arkansas and Red Rivers--all entering the stream from the west. White river rises in the Black mountains, which separate its waters from those of the Arkansas; and after traversing a distance of twelve hundred miles, enters the Mississippi by a mouth, nearly four hundred yards wide. The Arkansas next to the Missouri, the largest tributary from the west, is twenty-five hundred miles in length, and is five hundred yards wide at its mouth. Its waters are at all times turbid, and when the river is full, are of a dark flame color. Eighty miles below Natchez, comes in Red River; and although it is not generally so wide as the Arkansas, yet it has as long a course, and probably, carries as much water. Its waters are always turbid, and of a deeper red than those of the Arkansas. After receiving Red River, the Mississippi carries its greatest volume of water. This, however, continues but for a short distance. Three or four miles below the mouth of Red River, and on the same side, is the first outlet of the Mississippi. This is called Atchafalaya; and probably it carries off as much water as the Red River brings in.--But one small river enters the Mississippi below its first outlet. This is on the east side, and is called the Bayou Sarah. The only eastern outlet is a short distance below Baton Rouge. This is called Ibberville, and it passes off the waters of the Mississippi into lake Maurepas. On the west side are two more considerable outlets, called Bayou Plaquemine, and Bayou La Fourche. The Mississippi, then, passes on by New-Orleans, between unbroken banks, and discharges the remainder of its waters, through four mouths, into the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi is navigable for steamboats to the falls of St. Anthony--a distance of twenty-two hundred miles. These falls, although they have not the slightest claim to be compared with the celebrated Niagara, in sublimity and grandeur; yet they are interesting and impressive in the solitude and loneliness of the wilderness. As the traveller gazes at the romantic scenery around him, and listens to the solemn roar of the falls, as it echoes along the shores of the river, and dies away in the distant forest; a thrilling story is told him of the love and tragical end of a young Dacota Indian woman, whose husband had deserted her, and taken another squaw for his wife. Being a woman of keen sensibility and unconquerable attachment, in a moment of anguish and despair, she took her little children with her in a canoe, and chanted her song of love and broken vows, until they were swept over the falls, and engulfed in the waters below.--The Indians are too fond of romance, not to make the most of such an affecting incident as this.--They believe her spirit still hovers round the spot, and that her fair form is seen on bright sunny mornings, pressing her babes to her bosom, and that her voice is heard, mourning the inconstancy of her husband, amid the roaring of the waters! Below these falls, the river swells to half a mile in width and becomes a placid, gentle and clear stream, with clean sand bars, and wide and fertile bottoms. There is a rapid of nine miles, commencing just below the entrance of the river Des Moines. This impedes the progress of large steamboats, during low stages of the water. Below this rapid, the Mississippi obtains its full width, being a mile from bank to bank; and it carries this width to the mouth of the Missouri. The Mississippi, above the junction, is a more beautiful stream even than the Ohio, somewhat more gentle in its current and a third wider. At every little distance, the traveller finds a beautiful island; and sometimes two or three, parallel to each other. Altogether, in its alternate bluffs and prairies--the calmness and transparency of its waters--the vigor and grandeur of the vegetation on its banks--it has an aspect of amenity and magnificence, which does not belong in the same extent to any other stream. The Missouri enters by a mouth not more than half a mile wide; and the medial width of the united stream to the entrance of the Ohio, is about three quarters of a mile, from thence to the sea the medial width is a mile. This mighty tributary, rather diminishes than adds to its width; but it perceptibly increases its depth; and what is to be regretted, wholly changes its character. The Mississippi is the gentle, clear and beautiful stream no more. It borders more on the terrible and sublime, than the serene and beautiful, from the junction to its mouth. The Mississippi flows gently onward, at the rate of not more than two miles an hour--the turbid Missouri pours down upon it its angry flood, at the rate of four miles an hour, and adds its own speed and peculiar character to the united stream. The Mississippi then becomes a turbid and furious mass of sweeping waters; having a boiling current, sliding banks and jagged shores. A person, who merely takes a cursory view of the river, hardly forms an adequate idea of the amount of water it carries. Were he to descend from the falls of St. Anthony, and behold the Mississippi swallowing up the mighty Missouri, the broad Ohio, the St. Francis, White, Arkansas, and Red River, together with a hundred other large rivers of great length of course and depth of waters, without apparently increasing its size, he begins to estimate rightly the increased depth, and vast volume of water, that must roll on, in its deep channel to the sea. In the spring floods, the usual rise of the river above the mouth of the Missouri, is fifteen feet; from that point to the mouth of the Ohio, it is twenty-five feet; below the Ohio, it is fifty feet; and, sometimes, even sixty. In the region of Natchez, the flood begins to subside. At Baton Rouge, it seldom exceeds thirty feet; and at New-Orleans it is only twelve. This declination of the flood, towards the mouth of the river, is caused by the many outlets which take off much of its surplus water, and conduct it in separate channels to the sea. Were it not for this free egress of the Mississippi floods, the whole country below Baton Rouge, would become too much inundated to be habitable. Respecting the face of the country through which the river passes, it may be remarked, that, from its source to the falls of St. Anthony, it moves on through wild rice lakes, limestone bluffs and craggy hills; and occasionally, through deep pine forests and beautiful prairies. For more than a hundred miles above the mouth of the Missouri, it would be difficult to convey a just idea of the beauty of the prairies which skirt the stream. They strike the eye as a perfect level; covered, in summer, with a luxuriant growth of tall grass, interwoven with a great variety of beautiful flowers; without a tree or shrub in their whole extent. When this deep prairie comes in to the river, on one side, a heavy timbered bottom bounds it on the other.--From the smallest elevation, the sweep of the bluffs, generally corresponding to the curves of the river, are seen in the distance, mixing with the blue arch of the sky. The medial width of the river bottoms, above the mouth of the Missouri, is six miles; thence, to the entrance of the Ohio, it is about eight miles; and from this point to New-Orleans, the Mississippi swamp varies from thirty to fifty miles. The last stone bluffs, seen in descending the river, are thirty miles above the mouth of the Ohio. Below the Ohio, the high banks are generally composed of a reddish clay. The river almost invariably, keeps the nearest to the eastern shore, leaving much the largest portion of its swamp on its west side; but, sometimes, on the east, the river is about twenty miles from the high bank on that side. It continually moves in a circle; alternately sweeping to the right, and then to the left. These sections of circles, measured from point to point, vary from six to twelve miles; but it sometimes makes almost a complete circle. In one instance, it sweeps round the distance of thirty miles, and comes within a mile of completing the circle, and meeting its own channel again. Although the stream hurries on with the speed of a giant, yet it does not seem to be really in earnest to "go ahead." It appears to be more disposed to gambol about, and display its power in its own ample bottom, than to pass directly on, to its destined port. Like an overgrown and froward child, its sportiveness is dangerous and destructive. It makes terrible havoc with every thing with which it comes in contact. It tears up large quantities of earth in one place, and deposites it in another. It undermines its own bank, and lets acres of stately forest trees slide into its deep channel--it wears away its deep bends, so as to make its course still more and more circuitous--and again, as if it were tired of its own sportiveness in harrassing the forest, it cuts through the small segment of a circle remaining, leaves a long bend of still water, and its jaded shores at rest. The river, in its serpentine course, hits the high bank at twelve different places, on the eastern shore. These are, at the Iron banks, Chalk banks, the three Chickasaw bluffs, Memphis, Walnut hills, Grand and Petit gulf, Natchez, Loftus heights, and Baton Rouge. At only one place, it comes in contact with the high bluff on the western side; and this is at the St. Francis hills. Although the river is a mile in width, yet it is so serpentine in its course, that a person travelling upon it, can see but a few miles ahead. The strongest current is next the concave shore; and here also is the deepest water. A third part of the river measured in a direct line across it, would average eighty feet in depth, from thence it grows more and more shoal to the other shore. In the spring flood, the Mississippi overflows the whole bottom, so that then, it becomes a stream fifty miles in width. It shows a breadth of a mile only, and the remainder is concealed from the eye, by the dense forest which broods over it. The mud and sand, brought down by the flood, deposites itself the most freely, near the river; so that the highest part of the bottom will be next the stream. In the time of the flood, the water barely covers the immediate shore of the river; from thence the water becomes deeper and deeper towards the bluff which bounds the bottom. The depth of the flood, then, may be thus stated--the channel, one hundred and thirty feet--its immediate bank barely covered with water, and next to the bluffs, which may be twenty miles from the channel, from twelve to twenty feet in depth. When the flood in a measure subsides, the sad havoc its waters have made begins to appear. Huge piles of flood wood, wrecks of flat boats, and occasionally, of animals, are thrown together in one promiscuous mass. The stream is filled with snags and sawyers. And the destruction of its immediate banks is still going on. The deep and solemn sound of land slips are often heard. Acres of the stately forest are precipitated into the river, new channels are made, many islands are formed; and the steamboat pilot, who had become a complete master of the intricate mazes of the channel, finds, that he must learn his lesson over again. All of the hundred rivers that form the Mississippi, at the time of high water, are more or less turbid; but at low water some of them are clear.--The Upper Mississippi is quite transparent, but its waters are slightly of a blackish color. The Missouri is at all times turbid. It is of a whitish color, resembling water mixed with fresh ashes; and it gives its own color to the stream below its mouth. The Ohio is clear, but its waters have the appearance of being slightly tinged with green. The Arkansas and Red River are at all times as turbid as the Missouri, but their waters are of a bright redish color. After the Mississippi has received these two rivers, it loses something of its whiteness, and becomes slightly tinged with red. The Mississippi, in show of surface, will hardly compare with the St. Lawrence; but, undoubtedly, it carries the greatest mass of water, according to its width, of any river on the face of the globe.--From the large quantity of earth it holds in suspension, and continually deposites along its banks, it will always be confined within a narrow and deep channel. Were it a clear stream, it would soon scoop out for itself a wide channel, from bluff to bluff. In common with most of its great tributaries, it widens as it ascends; being wider above the mouth of the Missouri, with a tenth part of its water, than it is in the region of New-Orleans. In the same manner, Arkansas and Red River are wider, a thousand miles up their streams, than they are at their mouths. No thinking mind can view with indifference, the mighty Mississippi, as it sweeps round its bends from point to point, and rolls on its resistless wave, through dark forests, in lonely grandeur to the sea. The hundred shores laved by its waters--the long course of its tributaries; some of which are already the abodes of cultivation, and others pursuing an immense course without a solitary dwelling of civilized man--the numerous tribes of savages that now roam on their borders--the affecting and imperishable traces of generations that are gone, leaving no other memorials of their existence, but their stately mounds, which rise at frequent intervals along the valley--the dim, but glorious anticipations of the future--these are subjects of deep thought and contemplation, inseparably connected with a view of this wonderful river. CHAPTER XXVIII. We were three days sailing down the river. Just at night the pilot came aboard, took us over the bar at the southwest pass, and we put out to sea, with a strong fair wind from the northwest. The muddy waters of the Mississippi are seen far out to sea, even after you lose sight of the land. There was another passenger besides myself; and the violent rolling of the vessel soon made us dreadfully seasick. This, with me, lasted but three days; but the other passenger was sick during the whole voyage, and suffered incalculable pain and distress. There are many things disagreeable to a landsman in a voyage at sea. And in the first place, the rolling of the vessel. This is always disagreeable, but often it is so vehement that you cannot stand, walk or sit without much caution and trouble. While food is eaten, you must hold on to the plate with one hand, and wield the knife with the other, and this is often done at the imminent hazard of "marring the corners" of the mouth. Sometimes, in spite of all exertion, a sudden lurch will throw you off the balance, and you get a bowl of hot coffee in your lap. And then, at night, you are tossed to and fro in the berth, so that you cannot soundly sleep, and arise in the morning more fatigued than when you laid down. And this motion of the vessel produces seasickness--an affliction exceedingly grievous to be borne. I had been seasick ten or a dozen times in my life, and this was the third time on my present tour; and I tried all the precautionary means I had ever heard of, but without any beneficial effect. Could any effectual remedy be discovered, it would save a vast amount of human distress. The shoreless ocean, seen day after day, affords but a dull and barren prospect to a landsman. The only variety seems to be, when a storm arises; and then it puts on such a terrific form, that the sublimity of the scene cannot be fully enjoyed. We had a severe blow off the coast of Florida; but the shivering of sails, and the mountains of foam dashing over our frail bark, caused fear to predominate over every other sensation. The complete and rapid change of the scene at sea, is sometimes very striking. We would be quietly sailing along with a gentle breeze, just enough to fill the sails, and keep the vessel in motion on her course; when all at once a violent squall arises, suddenly strikes the ship, whizzes through the rigging, fills the sails to bursting, and drives her rapidly on, through billows of foam. The captain stands upon the quarter-deck, gives his orders through the speaking trumpet--the sailors run aloft, cling to the yards and take in sail. The contrast is indeed great. One moment, all is calm and quiet; the next, all is uproar and confusion; and could one feel entirely at ease, it would be a great source of amusement, during a long voyage. But a sailor's life is one of care, hardship, watchfulness and anxiety. Our captain would walk the deck for hours, anxiously watching the whole circle of the horizon--the appearance of the clouds and the direction of the wind. Of a sudden, he would stop short, call all hands, order the light sails taken in, and close-reefed those that remained; when to my unpractised eye, there was no cause of alarm, or appearance of a change of weather. But the result would invariably show the correctness of his opinion. In no one instance, did he prematurely take in sail, nor did the squall ever come and "catch him napping." The third day out, from the mouth of the river, we saw the highlands of Cuba. On the fifth, the Sand Key lighthouse, on the Florida shore. We saw no other land on the voyage, except a small island on the Little Bahama Banks, until we came in full view of the village of Chatham, fifty miles south of Boston. The wind became fair, the weather thick and rainy. The next day, twenty miles out, the pilot came aboard, and we run safely into Boston harbor. We had been just twenty-five days from New-Orleans--a distance of twenty-five hundred miles. We had experienced all the varieties of a sea voyage--light winds, calms, strong breezes and storms--and now, with no small degree of pleasure, I again set my foot on _terra firma_. The following day, I took the stage and arrived home at Exeter; having been absent about five months, and having travelled by land and water the distance of eight thousand miles. I passed over the whole route without arms, and at no time did I feel the need of any. I was uniformly well treated; and often received kind attentions, and formed many acquaintances whom I left with regret, and shall remember with gratitude. The weather had generally been mild and pleasant. The greatest indication of cold weather I found on the whole trip, was a slight frost. On returning at once to the region of severe cold weather, I found it exceedingly oppressive. Our northern winters are indeed long, severe and crabbed; and were the people as crabbed as the climate, life would become altogether intolerable. But the southern and western climate is far more bland and mild, and much more grateful to the feelings, than ours; and this, together with the facility of obtaining all the necessaries and conveniences of life, induces me to believe that a much greater amount of comfort and happiness may there be enjoyed. CHAPTER XXIX. And now, from this spot, I may be allowed to take a hasty, retrospective glance at the great WESTERN COUNTRY. It stretches from the Gulf of Mexico to the northern limits of the United States; and from the Alleghany, to the Rocky mountains--a distance of three thousand miles; showing a broad surface of earth, equal in extent to the Atlantic ocean itself. Between these bold and primitive barriers, a country is exhibited, every where bearing the marks of a secondary formation. The valleys, bluffs and hills--the regular lamina of stone, strata of marine shells,--and, indeed, all the physical aspects of the country, wear the appearance of once having been the bed of a vast lake, or an inland sea. From this circumstance of its recent formation, and the large quantities of decomposed lime stone mixed with the soil, result another attribute of this valley--its character of uncommon fertility. It is not indeed every where alike fertile. There are here, as else where, infinite varieties of soil, from the richest alluvions, to the most sterile flint knobs--from the impervious cane brakes, to the sandy pine hills. There are, too, towards the Rocky mountains, large tracts that have a surface of sterile sands, or covered only with a scanty vegetation of weeds and coarse grass. But of the country in general, the most cursory observer must have remarked, that, compared with lands in other regions apparently of the same character, these show marks of singular fertility. The most ordinary oak lands, will bring successive crops of Indian corn and wheat, without manuring, and with but little care of cultivation. The pine lands, which appear so sterile to the eye, have in many places, produced good crops for years, without the aid of manure. There is another remarkable trait in the soil of this valley--its power to support vegetation under the severest drought. It is a fact so notorious that it has become proverbial, that if there be moisture enough to make the corn germinate and come up, there will be a good crop, if no rain fall until harvest. The eastern emigrant witnesses with astonishment, the steady advance of his crop to vigorous maturity, under a pressure of drought, and a cloudless ardor of sun, that must have parched up the fields, and destroyed vegetation at the East. The Alleghany mountains, which form the eastern boundary of this great valley, are composed of many ridges, which run parallel to each other with remarkable regularity. The middle ridge is generally the most elevated, and separates the waters of the Atlantic, from those that flow into the Mississippi. Soon after passing the summit of the principal mountains, the waters of the Ohio begin to be heard, as they dash along over a precipitous and rocky channel, seeking a spot to escape from the craggy hills, to the plains below. After descending the last mountain ridge towards the valley, the country is still a succession of high hills, generally rounded smoothly down their sides, having more or less table land on their summits.--Those portions of Pennsylvania and Virginia, which belong to the Mississippi Valley; the eastern parts of Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee, are generally hilly, and sometimes even mountainous. In Alabama, the hills begin to subside. The features of the country too, begin, manifestly to change. The landscape wears a different aspect. Instead of the oaks, whitewood and sycamore, we begin to hear the breeze among the tops of long leaved pines.--A long succession of pine hills and fertile valleys succeed each other; the timber becoming less and less, until we meet the extensive prairies, or savannas of Florida. Approaching the lakes, the country becomes quite level. At the northern sections of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, near the borders of the lakes, the surface, in some places, becomes so marshy and low, as to be covered, in winter and spring, with water from three or four inches to a foot in depth. The eastern part of Ohio is hilly, but the western portion sensibly becomes more and more level. The Ohio river originally rolled on in its whole course, through an unbroken forest; but as we approach the eastern boundary of Indiana, we begin to discover the first indications of prairie. In the western part of the State of Ohio, small and detached prairies are only found. In Indiana, the proportion of prairie is far greater, and in Illinois it far exceeds the timbered land. North of the State of Illinois, pine hills, ponds, marshes, woodland and prairie, alternate to the head waters of the Mississippi. The surface of the country west of the Mississippi, is generally much more level than the valley east of it. There are bluffs to be sure, often high and precipitous, near the courses of the large rivers; and some portion of the country, near the Mississippi, is covered with flint knobs--singular hills of a conical shape, which, with a base of not more than a third of a mile in diameter, sometimes rise to the height of four or five hundred feet; and are covered with coarse gravel and flint stones. There are also, as in the country between the St. Francis and White rivers, high hills, which might well be called mountains. A spur of the Alleghany mountains, seems to come in to the Mississippi at the Chickasaw bluffs, and to be continued to the west of the river, in the St. Francis hills. But between the Mississippi and the Rocky mountains, a distance of twenty-five hundred miles, the general surface of the country is one vast plain, probably the largest on the face of the globe. Except the bluffs of the rivers, and flint knobs, the whole surface is entirely free from stones. On the lower courses of the Missouri, St. Francis, White, Arkansas and Red rivers, we find extensive bottoms of inexhaustible fertility covered with a dense forest; and occasionally a rich prairie, teeming with vegetation. But as we ascend these rivers, the timber becomes less and less, until, at last, we find the prairies coming in to the river banks. As the traveller recedes from the narrow and fertile belt on the streams, he finds the prairies becoming more and more dry and sterile--destitute of wood and water, and, sometimes, of all vegetation. He finds himself on a boundless waste of prairies; stretching out before him, far beyond the reach of vision; and here, he may wander for days, without finding either wood or water, and whichever way he may turn his eyes, he beholds an ocean of grass bounding the horizon. In advancing westward, he, at length, catches a glimpse of the Rocky mountains, pencilled like clouds on the blue arch of the sky. These mountains rise in lofty grandeur, twelve thousand feet above the grassy plains at their base; and some of the peaks, are supposed to be eighteen thousand feet above the level of the sea. They appear at a distance, to present an unbroken front, and to form an insuperable barrier between the Mississippi valley, and the shores of the Pacific ocean. On a nearer inspection, they are found to be, like the Alleghany mountains composed of a number of parallel ridges; and following up the streams, as they escape from the mountains, tolerable paths are found to cross them. A late traveller crossed these mountains, by following up the river Platte to its source; and from thence, down the stream that falls into Lake Bueneventura, on the western side. He states that the ascent was no where any greater than on the National road, over the Cumberland mountains. He even asserts, that the ascent was not more than three degrees; and that nature has provided a practical and good road, quite down to the plains of the Columbia. These ranges of mountains cover a wide extent of country; and here, the principal rivers that fall into the Mississippi, have their sources. Some of these rivers wind three or four hundred miles among the mountains, before they find a passage to the plains below. The ranges at the sources of the Arkansas, and extending southward towards the Gulf of Mexico, bear the name of the Masserne mountains. A single peak of this ridge, seen at immense distances over the adjacent plains, rising into the blue atmosphere above the region of clouds, is called mount Pike. Near this mountain, the Colorado of the Pacific, the Rio del Norte of the Gulf of Mexico, the Yellow Stone of the Missouri, and the Arkansas and Red rivers of the Mississippi, have their sources. Mount Pike must therefore, be the highest point of land of this part of North America. The Rocky mountains are at present too little known to be accurately and particularly described. They are hundreds of miles beyond the limits of cultivation, and the usual haunts of civilized man. They will for ages only attract the gaze and astonishment of wandering hunters, and adventurous travellers, who will thread the mazes of their deep gullies, as they pursue their journey to the western sea. Many of the ranges, and peaks are black, ragged and precipitous; and around their bases are strewn huge fragments of rock, detached by earthquakes and the hand of time. From this iron bound and precipitous character, they probably received the appellation of "Rocky mountains." The general surface of the Mississippi Valley may be classed under three distinct heads--the dense forest, the barrens, or oak openings, and the prairies. In the first division, every traveller must have remarked, as soon as he descends to this valley, a grandeur in the form and size of the trees, a depth of verdure in the foliage, and a magnificent prodigality of growth, that distinguishes this, from every other country. The trees are large and straight, and rise aloft in stately columns, free from branches, to a great height. In the rich bottoms, they are generally wreathed with a drapery of ivy and grape vines; and these vines have sometimes trunks as large as the human body. Frequently, these forests are as free from any undergrowth as an orchard of apple trees. Sometimes the only shrub seen among the tall trees, is the beautiful pawpaw, with its splendid foliage and graceful stems. In the rich alluvions of the southern section, impenetrable cane brakes, tangles of brambles, and a rank growth of weeds, are often found beneath the forest trees; and their lofty branches are hung with large festoons of Spanish moss. These are the safe retreats of the bears, panthers, and other wild beasts of the forest. Such forest trees only will be noted, as are not found in our northern climate. It may be proper to remark, that the white pine of New-England is only found in the upper section of the Mississippi valley--the pitch pine is found in various places on the high lands, throughout its whole extent; although not on the banks of the streams of water. The cypress is seen on overflowed and swampy land from the mouth of the Ohio to the gulf of Mexico. It is strikingly singular in its appearance. Under its deep shade, arise a multitude of cone shaped posts, called 'cypress knees.' They are of various sizes and heights. The largest generally seen are about a foot in diameter at the bottom, two or three inches at the top, and six feet in height. The bark is smooth, and grows over the top end the same as at the sides. The ground, in a cypress swamp, looks as though tapering posts of all imaginable sizes had been set there at random; and are sometimes so thick that it is difficult to ride among them. It has been supposed that these knees are but the commencement of large trees, and there is some reason for this belief; for the tree itself has a buttress that looks exactly like an enlarged cypress knee. A full sized cypress is ten feet in diameter at the ground, but it tapers so rapidly that in ascending eight feet, it is not more than about two feet in diameter; from thence, it rises in a straight smooth column, eighty feet, without any apparent diminution of its size; it then branches off at once in all directions, and forms a level surface of foliage at the top. A forest of cypress looks like a scaffolding of deep green verdure suspended in the air.--The timber is clear of knots, easily wrought, durable, and is the most valuable timber tree in all the southern country. The live oak is only found near the sea coast. It does not grow tall, but runs out into long lateral branches, looking like an immense spread umbrella. The leaf is small and evergreen. It bears an abundance of acorns, which are small, long and a good deal tapering at each end. Its timber is hard to cut, and will immediately sink in water. The peccan is of beautiful form and appearance, and makes excellent timber for building and rails. It bears a round nut about an inch and a half long and half an inch in diameter. It excels all other nuts in the delicacy of its flavor. The black locust is an excellent timber tree, and is much used in the building of steamboats. Its blossoms yield an exquisite perfume. The white locust is similar to that of the north. The black walnut is a splendid tree and grows to a great size. It is much used in finishing houses and in cabinet furniture. It produces a nut very similar to the northern butternut; but the meat is not very palatable. The white walnut is also plenty, as are the various kinds of hickory. The sycamore is the largest tree of the western forest. One of these trees near Marietta measures fifteen feet in diameter. Judge Tucker of Missouri fitted up a hollow section of a sycamore for an office. The yellow poplar is a splendid tree and next in size to the sycamore. Its timber is very useful for building and rails. Its blossoms are gaudy bell-shaped cups, and the leaves are of beautiful forms. The cotton-wood is universally found in all the southern country below the mouth of the Ohio. It is a tree of the poplar class, and somewhat resembles the whitewood of the more northern regions. It is a large stately tree and sometimes measures twelve feet in diameter. One tree has been known to make more than a thousand rails. It derives its name from the circumstance, that when its blossoms fall, it scatters on the ground something much resembling, in feeling and appearance, short ginned cotton. The catalpa is found in the region of the cotton-wood. It is remarkable for the great size of its deep green leaves, and its rounded tuft of beautiful blossoms of unequalled fragrance. Its seed is contained in a pod about two feet in length, much resembling a bean pod. As an ornamental tree it is unrivalled. In gracefulness of form, grandeur of its foliage, and rich, ambrosial fragrance of its blossom, it is incomparably superior to all the trees of the western world. The magnolia has been much overrated, both as to the size of the tree and blossom also. It grows up tall and slim; the largest, about two feet in diameter; smooth whitish bark; and slightly resembling the northern beech. Its leaves are of a deep green, small and evergreen. Its blossom is of a pure white, much resembling, although twice the size, of a northern pond lilly. The fragrance is indeed powerful, but rather disagreeable. There are half a dozen species of laurels; the most beautiful of which, is the laurel almond. It grows to the size of the pear tree; the leaves resemble those of the peach; its blossoms yield a most delicious perfume; and its foliage continues green all the year. It is found in the valley of the Red River. There is a striking and beautiful tree found on the head waters of the Washita and in the interior of Arkansas, called bow-wood, from the circumstance that the Indians use it for bows. It bears a large fruit of most inviting appearance, much resembling a very large orange. But although beautiful to the eye, it is bitter to the taste. It has large and beautiful leaves, in form and appearance much like those of the orange, but much larger. The wood is yellow like fustic, and it produces a similar dye. It is hard, heavy and durable, and is supposed to be more incorruptible than live oak, mulberry, cypress, or cedar. Above the raft on Red River, the hulk of a steamboat has been built entirely of its timber. The China tree is not a native of this country, but is much cultivated in the southern regions of the valley for ornament and shade. It has fine long spiked leaves, eight or ten inches in length, set in pairs on each side of a stem two feet long. In the flowering season, the tree is completely covered with blossoms. It bears a small reddish berry, which continues on the tree a long time after the leaves have fallen, and gives it, even then, an interesting appearance. It is a tree of more rapid growth than any known in this country. The pawpaw is not only the most graceful and pleasing in appearance of all the wild fruit-bearing shrubs, but throws into the shade those cultivated by the hand of man. The leaves are long, of a rich green color, and much resemble the leaves of the tobacco plant. The stem is straight, white, and of unrivalled beauty. The fruit resembles the cucumber, but smoother and more pointed at the ends.--There are from two to five in a cluster; and when ripe are of a rich beautiful yellow. The fruit contains from two to six seeds, double the size of the tamarind. The pulp resembles egg custard. It has precisely the same feeling in the mouth, and unites the taste of eggs, cream, sugar, and spice. It is a natural custard; but too rich and highly seasoned to be much relished by most people. So many whimsical and unexpected tastes are compounded in the fruit, that a person of the most sober face, when he first tastes of it, unconsciously relaxes into a smile. The persimon is found in Missouri, and in the region to the south of it. Its leaves resemble those of the wild cherry, and it grows about the size of the pear tree. The fruit is of the size of a common grape, in which are similar small seeds. It ripens about the middle of autumn. The fruit is of a yellowish purple color, and it is too sweet to be agreeable to many people. In the middle regions, on some of the prairies, large tracts are covered with the crab-apple tree.--Their appearance is like the cultivated apple tree, although the fruit and the tree are much smaller.--It makes good cider and preserves, but is too tart to be eaten in its natural state. The white and black mulberry are both found in the Mississippi valley, but the black is by far the most common. It has been satisfactorily proved, however, that the silk worm will thrive and produce well, upon the black mulberry. Cane brake is seen on the banks of the Mississippi soon after you leave the mouth of the Ohio. It generally grows from fifteen to twenty feet in height; but in the rich bottoms near Natchez it sometimes attains the height of thirty feet. It is five years coming to maturity, and then produces an abundant crop of seed, on heads much resembling broom corn. It is an evergreen. The leaves are three or four inches long, but narrow and sharp pointed. It is much used for reeds and fishing rods. They grow so very thick that it is difficult for a man to make head way among them. When they are cut down and become dry, they burn freely.--The negroes have fine sport in burning them. The heat rarifies the air in the hollow between the joints and causes them to burst with a noise like a gun; so that when a large quantity of them are set on fire, the noise is like a continued discharge of musketry. The "barrens" have a distinct and peculiar configuration. The surface is generally undulating with gentle hills--sometimes of a conical form, but generally, running in parallel ridges. The soil is of a clayey texture, of a reddish or greyish color, and is covered with tall coarse grass. The trees are neither large nor very small; and are scattered over the surface, at the distance of two or three rods from each other. They are chiefly of the different kinds of oaks, and from this circumstance, these barrens are, in many places, called "oak openings." The soil never exceeds second rate, and is often only third rate; but it will produce good crops of corn and wheat for many years, without the aid of manure. There are large tracts of this kind of land in Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama. They are common in Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas and Texas; and, indeed, they are seen with more or less frequency over a large portion of the Mississippi valley. The 'pine barrens' are covered with a beautiful growth of long leaved pines. They run up tall, in a straight shaft, generally about two feet in diameter, and are excellent for timber. The surface is gently undulating; sometimes, approaching a dead level, and is covered with a scanty growth of weeds and grass. The soil is sandy, but sometimes slightly tinged with reddish clay. It is supposed to be weak and unproductive; but some of these 'barrens' have produced two or three good crops of grain, without being enriched by manure. Large districts of this kind of land are found in Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas; and they are common in Florida, and in some sections of Louisiana and Texas. The remaining, and by far the most extensive surface of the valley, is that of the prairies. Although they have not much diversity of aspect, yet they may be classed under three general heads--the alluvial, or wet, the bushy, and the dry prairies. The bushy prairies seem to be of an intermediate character between the alluvial prairies and the barrens. They have springs of water, covered with hazel and furzy bushes, small sassafras shrubs and grape vines. Acres of this shrubbery are sometimes found covered with the common hop vine. Prairies of this description are very common in Indiana, Illinois and Missouri; and they alternate among the other prairies, for some distance towards the Rocky mountains. The wet prairies form the smallest division. They are generally found on the margin of streams; but sometimes, they occur, with all their distinctive features, far from the spot where waters now run. They are generally basins, as it regards the adjacent regions, and possess a deep, black soil of exhaustless fertility. They are the best soils for wheat and Indian corn; but, ordinarily, too tender and loamy for the cultivated grasses. In a native state, they are covered with grass and weeds of astonishing height and luxuriance. They are often higher than a man's head, when mounted on horse back. An exact account of the size and rankness of the weeds, flowering plants, and wild grass on the rich alluvial prairies of Illinois and Missouri, would appear to those who have never seen them, like an idle tale. Still more than the rolling prairies, they strike the eye as a dead level, but they generally have a slight inclination, sufficient to carry off the water. The dry prairies are generally destitute of springs and bushes, but are covered with weeds, flowering plants and wild grass. The roundings of their undulations are so gentle, that to the eye, taking in a large surface at a single view, they appear as a dead level; but in travelling over them their undulations fully appear. The ravines and gullies occasionally found, fully indicate, that they have a sufficient inclination to communicate a quick motion to the waters, which fall upon them. This is by far the largest class of prairies in the western country. Prairies of this description are frequently found in Illinois; the largest of which, called "grand prairie," is a hundred miles in length, by fifty in breadth. They are often found in Indiana, Missouri and Texas; but they appear displayed on a magnificent scale, between the western border of the State of Missouri, and the Rocky mountains. Here, are the appropriate ranges for the buffalo, wild cattle and horses. Here are the plains, without wood or water, where the traveller may wander for days, and see the sun rise and set in an ocean of grass. Here he may travel, day after day, under a cloudless ardor of the sun, and not find a stream of water to slake his thirst, or a solitary tree for shelter and shade. The general aspect of the Mississippi valley, in regard to woodland and prairies, may in a summary manner, be thus stated:--The surface, in a state of nature, from the Alleghany mountains to the western border of Ohio, is covered with a dense forest. Here, are the first indications of prairies. Proceeding westward through Indiana, Illinois and Missouri, the prairies become larger and more frequent, until at last, it becomes all prairie to the base of the Rocky mountains. It is a fact, beyond all question, that more than half of the great Mississippi valley is smooth prairie, entirely destitute of timber. Large portions of the valley will support a dense population, and become inhabited; but the larger prairies will remain uncultivated for ages. They are fit haunts only for the adventurous hunter, or the wandering shepherd. During the season of vegetation, no adequate idea can be conveyed by description, of the number, forms, varieties, scents and hues of the flowering plants on the western prairies. The violet, and the more humble and modest kinds of flowers, which show their blossoms in early spring, not being able to compete with the rank grass and weeds around them, soon become choked and lost to the view; but the taller and more hardy kinds, successfully struggle for display, and rear their heads high enough to be seen. They have tall and arrowy stems, spiked or tassellated heads, and the blossoms are of great size, grandeur and splendor, but not much delicacy of fragrance. As the season advances, distinct successions of dominant hues prevail. In spring, the prevalent color of the prairie flowers, is bluish purple--in midsummer, red, slightly tinged with yellow--in autumn, yellow. At this season of the year, the flowers are very large, generally, of the sunflower form, and they are so profusely scattered over the prairies, as to present to the imagination an immense surface of gilding. And this country of dense forests and rich prairies, is intersected with large and navigable rivers. These, alive as they are with their steamboats, keel and flat boats, afford great facilities for travelling, and for the transportation of merchandize and produce. The prairies and woodland also, present great facilities for travelling, and the transportation of goods. They are often, in a state of nature, so smooth, so gently undulating, and of such an unbroken surface, that carriages may run over them without interruption or delay. Such are the general outlines and features of the great Mississippi valley; but a complete description would require volumes. Nature has laid off her work here, upon a magnificent scale, and finished it with a liberal hand. Its natural productions are rich and abundant. Its waters abound with fish--its soil teems with an exuberance of trees, plants and blossoms--rich mines lie emboweled beneath the surface--and wild game are profusely scattered over its prairies, woodland and rivers. To the husbandman, it presents itself in a more attractive aspect, than the granite hills and rocky soil of New-England. It has increased in population and wealth, incomparably greater than any other section of the world; and ere long, it will contain a majority of the population of the United States. And now, it only remains, most respectfully to take leave of my readers. Those who have traced the TRIP TO THE WEST AND TEXAS through the foregoing pages, I hope, may have enjoyed all its pleasures, without incurring its attendant hardships and fatigue. APPENDIX. Territory of Michigan. This Territory is bounded by the national boundary line on the east and north, by the Mississippi river on the west, and by the States of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio on the south. These boundaries include a vast extent of territory; but as that portion of it which lies to the north and west of Lake Michigan and the State of Illinois is for the most part a wilderness, having only some small settlements on Green Bay, the Milwake and Mississippi, my remarks will be confined to that part of it commonly called the peninsula, lying between lakes Erie and Michigan. _Population._--This territory is estimated by good judges to contain between thirty-five and forty thousand inhabitants. The rapid and increasing tide of emigration into it, induces the belief that it will soon be admitted as a State into the Union. Its present and increasing importance may be in a great measure attributed to the enterprising, active and energetic talents of its late governor, Lewis Cass, the present Secretary of War. His personal exertions and enlightened policy, not only facilitated its settlement, but developed its vast and various resources. A large portion of its inhabitants are from New-York and the Eastern States, and are as active and industrious as those are in the sections of country from which they came. They make rapid improvements; and in a few years, the country will not be behind the flourishing State of Ohio, in farms and villages. _Face of the Country._--That part immediately bordering on lakes Erie, St. Clair and Huron, and their connecting waters, is generally rather level and heavily timbered, but somewhat deficient in good water. In the interior, it becomes gently undulating, occasionally well timbered, and interspersed with oak openings, plains and prairies. The plains are frequently covered with such a regular, beautiful and thrifty growth of timber, so free from underbrush, as to wear the aspect of a cultivated forest. They are more easily improved than the heavy timbered land, and produce full as well. The openings are often rather deficient in timber, though they are not unfrequently skirted with plains, or contain patches of woodland, from which an ample supply may be obtained, not only for fuel, but for building, fencing and all other fanning purposes, if used with economy. They usually require but little, and sometimes no labor to prepare them for the plough; three or four yoke of cattle are found to be amply sufficient to break them up the first time, after which they are cultivated with nearly as much ease as old improved lands. They are found to be excellent for wheat, to improve by cultivation, and usually to produce a good crop of corn the first season. The prairies generally support a heavy growth of grass--are free from timber, and may be divided into two classes. One is called dry, and the other is denominated wet prairies. The former possess a rich soil, are easily cultivated, and generally yield in rich abundance almost every kind of produce which might be expected to flourish in forty-two degrees north latitude, especially those on St. Joseph's river. And the latter often prove serviceable, not only in affording early pasture, but in supplying the emigrant with the means of wintering his cattle; and may with a little labor, frequently be made to yield an abundant supply of excellent hay. The interior of the territory is well watered with rivers, creeks and small lakes; many of which contain an unusual quantity of fish. There are several salt springs, which have not yet been tried nor improved, situated in different parts of the territory, all of which have been reserved by the United States; but it is not certain that any of them will prove very valuable. By boring a number of feet, the water would improve, and might, in some cases at least, not only justify the erection of extensive works for the manufacture of salt, but prove also a source of revenue to the United States, as well as afford to the manufacturer the means of accumulating wealth. The surveyed part of the territory is laid out by the United States into townships of six miles square, which are divided into thirty-six sections or square miles, containing each six hundred and forty acres. These are subdivided, by imaginary lines, into quarter and half quarter sections; the latter of which contain each eighty acres, is the smallest quantity sold by the United States, and may, as well as the larger tracts, be selected by the purchaser. Though there is a small tract of land which proves rather unhealthy at the mouth of Huron, Saginaw and Rouge rivers, as well as at the mouth of Brownstown and Swan creeks, owing to the sluggishness of the water at the outlet of these streams, yet the climate of the surveyed part of the territory is mild, lying between forty-one degrees thirty-nine minutes, and forty-two degrees thirty-four minutes north latitude. The air is salubrious, and the water generally clear. The soil, which produces in rich abundance wheat rye, barley, oats, peas, beans, Indian corn, and potatoes, as well as all kinds of vegetables usually cultivated in the same latitude, consists of such a variety, that it cannot fail to suit the choice of almost every person in the pursuit of agriculture. Fruit, of course, has not yet been tested in the interior, for the want of time, except peaches, which do exceedingly well; but if I may be permitted to draw an inference, from the quality of the various kinds which grow in great abundance on the French plantations, along the margin of Detroit river, as well as on other parts of the great chain of navigable waters, then I presume I shall be allowed to say, that the soil of Michigan is equal, for the production of fruit, to that of any State in the Union. The pear trees along this river, which were planted in the early settlement by the French, are remarkably large, very tall, and extremely thrifty and beautiful, and bear a most delicious fruit, which generally sells from two to four shillings per bushel. Apples, at Detroit, vary from twelve to fifty cents, and may generally be procured by the bushel, for the latter price, even in winter. Cider, in the fall, is from one and a half to two dollars per barrel, for the juice. Currants, blackberries, black and red raspberries and cherries bring from three to four cents per quart; though the earliest of these, as well as whortle berries and strawberries, command sixpence. Plumbs are scarce, because they have not been generally cultivated, though they are likewise found to do well. The price of unsold wild land is fixed and uniform, being one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre, the terms ready money, and the title indisputable, as it comes direct from the United States, under the seal of the President. The richest, most fertile, and perhaps more beautiful part of the territory, is generally thought to be adjacent to the St. Joseph's river and its various branches; which, from present appearances, bids fair to become speedily settled; settlements began to form on it a year before it was offered for sale. It only came in market in May, 1834, and such has been the influx of emigration to this part of the territory, that the Legislature in October last, formed twelve new counties, mostly thereon, and organized two of that number. This part of the territory possesses several copious mill streams, particularly Hog-creek, the Dowagiake, Christianna, Pigeon, Crooked and Portage rivers, a few of which have already been improved, by the erection of saw and grist mills. The climate of this part of the territory, though mild, is apparently more subject to wind than the valley of the Ohio river. The prevailing wind is the southwest; and as it crosses a large tract of prairie country in Illinois and Indiana, comes here with much force, and in winter is somewhat piercing. Considerable snow falls; nevertheless it is very favorable to wheat, rye, potatoes and turnips, and though not very adverse, yet not so congenial as the valley of the Ohio river, to southern corn and the more tender grains and esculents. Fruits, of course, have not yet been cultivated here, except a few apples and peaches, by the French which appear to do well. The prairies in this quarter are of the richest soil, and may be ploughed in two days after the frost leaves the ground in the spring. They usually produce thirty or forty bushels of wheat to the acre; and from thirty to eighty of corn have been raised from the same quantity of ground, in all the prairies that have as yet been occupied: four hundred acres of corn were cultivated on Beardsley's prairie last year, which having been improved the year before averaged fifty bushels to the acre. These prairies not unfrequently produce thirty or forty bushels of corn to the acre, the first season, without being ploughed or hoed after planting. The surveyed part of the territory is divided into three United States land districts, containing each one land office; one of which is at Detroit, one at Monroe and one at Bronson, in the county of Kalamazoo. The rivers Grand, St. Joseph, Raisin, Huron, Clinton, Rouge, Kalamazoo and Shiawassee, interlocking in different parts of the territory, not only irrigate the country in a beautiful manner, but offer unparalleled inducements for canaling, and with comparatively but little expense, as there would be no mountains, nor probably rock strata to cut through. It is already in contemplation, by means of the Grand river and Clinton, or the St. Joseph's and Raisin, to open a water communication across the peninsula, by means of a canal, which would terminate at Detroit or Monroe; and probably at no distant period, it will not only be undertaken, but will be accomplished in such a manner as to accommodate both these places in this respect. A company was incorporated, by an act of the Legislature, last fall, under the title of the "Summit Portage Canal and Road Company," with a capital of ten thousand dollars, to be divided into one thousand shares of ten dollars each, for the purpose of cutting a canal west of Lake Michigan, to connect the Fox and Ouisconsin rivers at what is usually termed the Portage of the Ouisconsin, and to construct a turnpike road on said Portage, parallel to said canal; and also to construct another turnpike road from the lower extremity of the rapids of the Kaukauin, on the east side of the Fox river, on the most direct and eligible route to Winnebago lake, and for the erection of piers, wharves, warehouses and other public buildings and improvements, in and about said canal and turnpike, for commercial purposes.--Michigan extends at present west to the Mississippi river; but it is expected the territory will shortly be divided, and a new territory set off west of Lake Michigan; and organized by the name of Ouisconsin or Huron. The territory was originally owned and occupied by emigrants from France; consequently the old inhabitants or first settlers are mostly French. WAYNE COUNTY--contains about seven thousand inhabitants, many of whom are French. Its seat of justice is Detroit. Hamtranck, Detroit and Springwells. These towns, which lie in the northeast part of the country, border on Detroit river, and are rather level, and but poorly supplied with water. The northern part of the two latter is somewhat broken by marsh and wet prairie; but near the centre of Springwells is a tract, containing some excellent arable land not yet entered, lying within from six to ten miles of Detroit, where a new settlement has recently been formed, and through which a road has lately been opened, leading from Detroit to Farmington. The towns of Pekin, Nankin and Plymouth are well supplied with water by the river Rouge and its various branches, which afford several eligible mill sites, and which have already been advantageously improved by the erection thereon of saw and grist mills. Pekin is heavily timbered with white and black ash, white and black oak, beech, maple and sugar tree. The land is rolling, and the soil rich and fertile, consisting of sand, loam and some clay. The northern and southern part of the town of Nankin has much the same appearance as Pekin, though the soil is more sandy, and requires less labor to cultivate it; yet it yields quite as well; but the middle is plains and openings, of an inferior quality and soil. Plymouth has likewise a similar appearance to Pekin, though the northern part is more rolling, yet even here the timber is the same, with the addition of black walnut; but the soil is generally of a superior quality. _Huron._--This town is watered by a delightsome river, of the same name, whose waters are very transparent and abound with fish. It runs through the town diagonally, exhibiting in many places rich bottom lands, often bounded on one or both sides, by high sloping banks, and not unfrequently skirted with beautiful plains. Though a great proportion of this town is rather destitute of running streams, yet the soil in general is fertile, and for the most part easily cultivated. The eastern part is oak openings and plains of a good quality, interspersed with groves of heavy timber which often contain a small black ash swamp, and sometimes a wet or dry prairie; but the south part is heavily timbered with white and black ash, white oak, beech and maple, with occasionally a whitewood. The southwest corner is low land, and contains a large wet prairie. _Brownstown_ is watered by the Huron river, Muddy and Brownstown creeks. The north-western part of this town is but poorly watered, and exhibits alternately oak openings, plains and prairies, occasionally interspersed with groves of heavy timber. The southeastern part is rather level and heavily timbered, except small tracts at the mouths of Huron river and Brownstown creek, which consist of prairies that are more or less inundated with water. _Montguagon_ embraces Gross' Isle, and is situate on Detroit river. It is gently undulating, possesses a fine quarry of limestone, and a rich soil, supporting a thrifty and heavy growth of white oak, hickory, beech, maple, white and black ash. MONROE COUNTY--contains a population of about four thousand, many of whom are French. There are three villages in this county, namely, Monroe, Frenchtown and Port Lawrence. The first of these, which is the seat of justice for the county, is a flourishing village, situate on the river Raisin, about six miles from lake Erie, and thirty-six from Detroit. The United States' turnpike, from the latter place to the Ohio State line, passes through it, and here was situated the bank of Monroe. It possesses an ample supply of water power for propelling hydraulic machinery, a part of which has already been converted to the use of saw and grist mills, as well as to the use of machines for carding and dressing cloth. The United States have made a survey of Plaisance Bay harbor, at the mouth of the river, with a view of improving the same. Monroe is now the second village in the peninsula, as it regards population; and should they succeed in forming a good harbor at the mouth of the river, as it possesses water power, it may yet equal, if not rival Detroit. The county is generally well watered; the north-eastern part is rather level and heavily timbered; but the western and southern part is rolling land, alternately abounding in prairies, openings, or heavy groves of timber. The soil of this county is uniformly rich, and of a very superior quality. WASHTENAW COUNTY--contains about four thousand inhabitants, who are, with a few exceptions, Americans. Its seat of justice is Ann Arbor, a village of five years' growth, situate on the river Huron, forty miles west of Detroit, containing about ninety dwelling houses. Ypsilanti, the second village in the county as to population, is likewise situate on the Huron, about ten miles below Ann Arbor, at the place where the United States' turnpike, from Detroit to Chicago, crosses it. This county contains twelve mercantile establishments, three distilleries, one fanning mill factory, one oil factory, one gunsmith, one wagon maker, five flouring mills, thirteen saw mills, and two machines for carding and dressing cloth. It abounds in select and common schools, and contains many mechanics. Its surface is gently undulating and beautiful; and its soil prolific, consisting of a deep black sand, loam and some clay. It exhibits in succession, beautiful prairies, oak openings, and heavy groves of timber, consisting of white, red and black oak, beech, walnut, whitewood, bass, elm, maple and butternut, with almost all other kinds that usually grow in forty-two degrees north latitude, evergreen excepted. The river Huron, of lake Erie, meanders through the centre of it north and south; is navigable for boats and rafts to the lake, and with its several branches water the middle; the head waters of the Shiawassee the north, and the rivers Raisin and Saline and their branches, the south part of said county. It has numerous and extensive water privileges for facilitating manufactures. MACOMB COUNTY--contains about two thousand five hundred inhabitants, a considerable number of whom are French. The north-eastern and eastern part of this county is in general rather level, and for the most part heavily timbered; yet it is sufficiently uneven to drain off and leave no stagnant waters; but the western part is rolling land, somewhat broken, being very hilly and uneven, and consisting of oak openings, plains, and some prairie land. The plains are remarkably free from underbrush, and are, as well as the prairies and openings, very rich and fertile, producing not only wheat, but every other kind of grain in rich abundance. The Clinton river, together with its numerous tributaries, irrigate this county in a beautiful manner. It possesses advantages over many of the peninsular counties, on account of its proximity to the great chain of navigable waters. It fronts on lake St. Clair; and the river Clinton, which runs through the entire county, nearly in the centre, may easily be rendered navigable for batteaux, as high up as Rochester. And for the accomplishment of which a company has already been formed and were incorporated last fall by an act of the Legislature. This river is now navigable to Mt. Clemens, for vessels of considerable burthen; and when the obstructions at the mouth of the river are removed, for which object an application has been made to Congress for an appropriation, then any vessels or steamboats on the lake may come up to the village, a distance of six miles, by water. This county is very well supplied with water power, it has now in operation seven saw mills, and two grist mills, and embraces four stores, three distilleries, two asheries, and six blacksmith shops. Its seat of justice is Mt. Clemens, a flourishing village situate on the Clinton river, at the place where the United States' road from Detroit to fort Gratiot crosses it. It lies four and a half miles from the lake, by land, and twenty northeastwardly from Detroit. _Washington_ lies in the northwest corner of the county, and consists principally of oak openings and plains, though it has some prairie land. The openings and plains are extremely free from underbrush and prove to be excellent for the cultivation of wheat. The south part of the town is rolling land, exhibiting a rich, and for the most part a sandy soil, though it is sometimes composed of sand and loam intermixed; but the north part is what is commonly called broken land, being very hilly and uneven, and not unfrequently exhibits granitic boulders in great plenty. _Shelby and Ray_ consist principally of gentle undulating and heavy timbered land, interspersed occasionally with oak openings. They are well watered and possess a very productive soil. _Harrison_ is in general rather level, and the north part though somewhat swampy is susceptible of being converted into excellent meadow. _Clinton_ possesses generally a rich soil, is heavily timbered and embraces a marsh or wet prairie of considerable extent on its eastern border adjacent to the lake shore, the greater part of which, however, if properly ditched, would prove to be good natural meadow. The northern part of the town is gently undulating and well supplied with water, of which the southern part is too deficient, being rather level. OAKLAND COUNTY--contains about six thousand inhabitants, all Americans. It has three villages, each with a mill on its border, namely, Pontiac, Auburn and Rochester; the first of which is the seat of justice for the county, and is situated twenty-eight miles northwest of Detroit, on the Clinton river, where the United States' road from Detroit to Saginaw crosses it. This county presents a great variety of soil, and upon examination will be found to suit the choice of almost every person in the pursuit of agriculture. The rivers Clinton, Rouge and Huron, interlocking in different parts extend their many branches, and irrigate the county in a beautiful manner. _Troy_ embraces townships one and two south in range eleven east, is situate in the southeast quarter of the county, and is principally timbered land; township two in this town is entirely of this description, is heavily wooded with black and white walnut, linden, white, red and black oak, and the westerly half is of that description usually denominated rolling timbered land, and in quality of soil, is not surpassed by any in the territory; but township one of that description called plains, interspersed with marshes, and is of an inferior quality. _Bloomfield_ presents a variety of soil, which may be divided into three classes, oak openings, plains and timbered land. The country in the neighborhood of the lakes is oak openings, not so good for grass, but producing wheat in rich abundance--I would mention that two farmers in the vicinity of Wing lake, harvested one hundred and thirty acres of excellent wheat the last season. The north of Bloomfield is of this description, but the south part is timbered land. _Pontiac_ is generally oak openings of a good quality, but inferior to the lands of Bloomfield. _Oakland._--The south part of this town is timbered land with a rich soil, and the north part plains and openings of a good quality. The town of Troy is watered by a branch of the Rouge, and the branches of Red river which empty into the Clinton. Bloomfield is watered by three branches of the Rouge, which, meandering through the county, enable every farmer to partake of their privileges. The towns of Pontiac and Oakland are watered by the Clinton river, Paint and Stony creeks and the extreme branches of the Huron. All these streams possess great privileges for hydraulic machinery. The towns of Pontiac and Oakland now contain twelve saw mills, four flouring mills, three fulling mills, three carding machines and one woollen factory. In Bloomfield are four saw mills and one grist mill. In Farmington two saw mills and one grist mill. Perhaps no country of like extent so level possesses more water power. ST. CLAIR COUNTY--possesses great commercial advantages, as it lies on the great chain of navigable waters. It is bounded east by lake Huron and the river St. Clair, which separates it from Canada; south by lake St. Clair and the county of Macomb, west by the counties of Macomb and Lapeer, and north by Sanilac. Black, Pine and Belle rivers, Mill creek and their branches, as well as several smaller streams water this country. The first of these streams is navigable for vessels of considerable burthen, as far up as Mill creek; but Belle and Pine rivers are ascended only a very short distance in batteaux. This country is generally rather level, the eastern and southern part is gently undulating, rich, fertile and most heavily timbered, though there is occasionally some prairie land on the border of lake St. Clair, and along the southern margin of St. Clair river. The northern and western part of this country is comparatively of a light, and for the most part sandy soil, though tolerably productive, and interspersed with swamps and lowland. A great proportion of the timber in this quarter is pine, though it is often intermixed with hard wood and not unfrequently interspersed with groves of tamerack, in some instances with spruce, and often on the shore of lake Huron, with red and white cedar. There are now in operation in this county, several of the most extensive saw mills in the territory, which are constantly engaged in manufacturing pine boards, planks, &c. and which, together with shingles, constitute at present the principal article of trade in the country. And as lumber may be conveyed from this county by water to any port, not only on the great lakes, but on their connecting waters, therefore the pine timber must ultimately become very valuable. Almost all the pine now used at Detroit for building, comes from this county, as it is the only one in the surveyed part of the territory that is well supplied with this valuable building material. The United States' road from Detroit to fort Gratiot runs through the centre of this county, and about twelve miles west of the village of Palmer, which is the seat of justice for the county; and which is situate at the junction of Pine and St. Clair rivers, about twelve miles south of fort Gratiot, and sixty by water northeast of Detroit. ST. JOSEPH'S COUNTY--is perhaps the best in the territory, both as to water privileges and the fertility of its soil. It is watered by the St. Joseph's river and its various branches, many of which afford numerous water privileges, particularly Hog creek, Pigeon, Portage and Crooked rivers, which may be considered copious and excellent mill streams. A saw mill has already been put in operation on Crooked river, and several others have been commenced on the same creek and about Pigeon prairie. The water in this county is uniformly pure and healthy, the climate mild, and the face of the country moderately undulating; consisting principally of oak openings and prairies. There is however a sufficiency of timber in it generally, and from the Grand Traverse on the northwest side of the river St. Joseph's, as high up I believe as Portage river, is a belt of excellent timbered land which is well supplied with water. The principal prairies in this county are Sturges, Nottawa Sapee and White Pigeon. The first of these, Sturges prairie, has a beautiful appearance, and is exuberant in fertility, but is not convenient for water and but tolerably so to good timber--a few families are located on it. Nottawa Sapee, part of which is embraced within the Indian reserve, is an excellent prairie, and settlements have commenced on it. But Pigeon prairie is the most valuable one in the St. Joseph's country, as well as the most densely peopled, and perhaps it will not be deemed invidious to say it is the best settlement in the St. Joseph's country, whether we regard the number of its inhabitants or their intelligence and wealth. The soil of these prairies may be considered equal to that of any land in the United States. The usual mode of cultivating these, as well as all other prairies in the vicinity of the river St. Joseph's, is to break up the soil immediately with the plough at the same time dropping the corn on the edge of the furrow in such a manner that it may be covered by the succeeding one; in this manner without any other cultivation, they often produce thirty to fifty bushels of corn to the acre the first season, though sometimes it becomes necessary to go through and cut down some of the rankest weeds. The counties of Branch, Barry and Eaton, and all the country north of township four, north; west of the principal meridian, south of the county of Michilimackinac, and east of the line between ranges twelve and thirteen west, and of lake Michigan is attached to St. Joseph's. CASS COUNTY---contains a population of two thousand, and is likewise watered by the St. Joseph's river and its branches, several of which afford good mill privileges, particularly the Dowagiake and Christianna, which are rapid and durable streams. A mill has already been erected and is now in operation on the Christianna, near Young's prairie. The face of this county is similar to that of St. Joseph's county; though some parts are undulating, yet in general it is level, sufficiently uneven however to drain off and leave no stagnant waters. The timber is principally oak, ash, elm, sugar tree, cherry, black and white walnut and hickory, with a variety of other kinds intermixed. The country is generally open, and you can ride with a wheel carriage through the wood land with almost the same ease you can over the prairies, being not in the least interrupted with underbrush. In every part of the county the roads are good. Though some parts of it are but thinly timbered, yet along the Dowagiake from its source to its mouth there is a broad belt of excellent timbered and very rich land, from one to several miles wide, also along the upper portion of the Christianna, extending north of its source, and thence across to the Dowagiake is a fine belt of woodland. This county includes within its boundaries the following prairies, namely, Four Mile, Beardsley, Townsend's, McKenney's, La Grange, Pokagon and Young's, besides several small ones, not however known by any particular name. The prairies here are of the richest quality of soil; may be ploughed in two days after the frost leaves the ground in spring, and frequently produce thirty or forty bushels of corn to the acre the first season, without being ploughed or hoed after planting. The three last mentioned prairies are conveniently situate to mill streams, and principally surrounded with heavy timbered land, but they are nearly all taken up by purchasers. Four Mile prairie is not so happily situate with regard to mills or timbered land; but nevertheless is fast filling up. From thirty to eighty bushels of corn and forty of wheat are usually raised from an acre in all the prairies where the soil has been subdued by previous cultivation. Every other kind of grain as well as vegetables are produced in about the same proportion. The only town yet laid out in this county is Edwardsburgh, which is the temporary county seat. It is situate on the border of Pleasant lake, and on the northeast corner of Beardsley's prairie. The United States' road from Detroit to Chicago passes through it, as well as the road from fort Wayne to Pokagon, to Niles', to Young's and to Townsend's prairies, and to Coquillard in Indiana. All these places except fort Wayne are situate within ten miles of it. From the town platte, or village, you have a view not only of the prairie, but also of Pleasant lake.--The prairie is four miles in extent and the lake covers about one hundred acres. Fish are abundant in all the streams and small lakes--forty three that would weigh from one to three pounds were caught with a hook and line in Pleasant lake by two persons in thirty minutes. The water in this lake is very pure, you can see the bottom where the depth of water is fifteen feet. The country is healthy, several large families who settled here before the land was offered for sale, and who have resided here for three years, have not had a case of fever nor any other kind of sickness, except what has resulted from accident. The counties of Berrien and Van Buren and all the country north of the same to lake Michigan is attached at present to Cass county. BERRIEN COUNTY, not organized, has in it a large proportion of superior timbered land, but has no prairies of much importance. The settlements in this county, though few, are scattered along the river, and the population does not exceed thirty-five families. But from the nature of the country, I am inclined to believe it will be the most populous county on the St. Joseph's. The rich timbered land, though now avoided for the prairies, will ultimately be in demand, and will afford many dense and excellent settlements.--Through the timbered land in this county run several small creeks, which, with their numerous branches afford an additional convenience to the farmer which he cannot enjoy in the prairies nor in the barrens. Besides the heavy timbered and prairie land, there are large tracts of what are here called barrens, being of a light soil comparatively speaking, though very productive, and which are thinly covered with white and black oak, sometimes of stinted growth, but mostly of a handsome and useful size. The soil is generally a fine sand, mixed with decayed vegetables and sometimes gravelly, with here and there a granitic boulder. The soil of the timbered land is of a loose sandy nature, black with fertility, and eminently adapted to culture. That of the prairies is nearly of the same nature after the sod has been reduced by repeated ploughing. In the timbered land we find white and black walnut, several kinds of ash, also oak, poplar, lynn, beech, elm, hickory, sugar tree, &c. The southeast part of this county is well supplied with water, and possesses several mill sites, some of which have already been improved. Ford's saw and grist mill, on the Dowagiake, have been for some time in operation. There is also a saw mill just ready to commence operation at the mouth of the Dowagiake, and several others have been commenced on the same stream. There is but one village regularly laid out in this county, which is called Niles. It is situate on the St. Joseph's, a short distance above the confluence of the Dowagiake with that river. The first framed house in it was erected in December, 1833. Next summer it is expected there will be considerable building there. Last season, though there were no accommodations, yet by far the greatest portion of merchandize, &c. destined for the St. Joseph's country, when conveyed by water was landed there.--Next spring will be built two warehouses, there are now two stores and a post office. Post offices have been established at the mouth of the St. Joseph's called Saranac, at Pokagon, southwest corner of town six south in range sixteen west, at Lagrange in the middle of town six south of range fifteen west, at Pigeon prairie, at Sturgis' prairie, and at the Grand Traverse. LAPEER, SHIAWASSEE AND SAGINAW.--These counties are not yet organized, but attached to Oakland county. There are no inhabitants in Lapeer, and but few settlers at present in Saginaw and Shiawassee. The face of these two counties is very similar to Oakland. SAGINAW--is watered by the Shiawassee, Flint, Cass, Tittibawassee and Hare rivers. The most of these streams are navigable for boats; their junction forms the Saginaw river which is navigable for sloops twenty miles to the village which bears the same name, and which is to be the seat of justice for said county. The United States have established a cantonment here, and laid out a road from this place to Detroit, which is not yet finished. When this is completed, it is more than probable that it will settle as speedily as any county in the territory, as the soil is very favorable to agriculture. SHIAWASSEE.--The soil of this county is rich, and the face of the country gently undulating, in some instances rolling, exhibiting oak openings and heavy groves of timber. The Shiawassee river which is a beautiful, meandering stream, and navigable for boats and rafts to the lake, with its several branches, waters the middle and southeast part. The head branches of Grand and Looking Glass rivers, the southwest part, and Swartz's creek, the Flint and Mistegayock rivers, the northeast part of said county. CALHOUN.--This county has lately been organized and its seat of justice is the town of Marshall, pleasantly situated on the north bank of the Kalamazoo river. This river and its branches afford many fine mill privileges. The soil is rich and gently undulating, consisting principally of burr oak openings, which are frequently interspersed with prairies. In the southwest part of the county is a small tract of pine timber. JACKSON--has lately been organized and its seat of justice is the town of Jackson, situated near Grand river. The west half of it is undulating, and consists principally of burr and white oak openings, interspersed occasionally with prairies. It abounds in springs and possesses a fertile soil. The northeast part is heavily timbered and somewhat intersected with marshes and small lakes. The soil, however, of this part, is rich and well adapted for meadow. Grand river is an excellent stream of pure water, quick, yet navigable for canoes from its junction with its south branch, quite through the county and to lake Michigan. KALAMAZOO.--This is one of the newly organized counties. Its seat of justice is the town of Bronson, pleasantly situated on the south bank of the Kalamazoo river. The land office has lately been removed to this place from St. Joseph. The face of this county in general is moderately undulating, though sometimes rolling. It exhibits principally burr oak openings, interspersed with rich fertile and dry prairies, and not unfrequently intersected with groves of first rate timbered land. The character of the soil is in general either a black sand or a rich loam. In the southeast corner of this county is an excellent tract of woodland, covered with a heavy but beautiful grove of sugar maple. Gull and Round prairies are the two largest in this county, and are equal to any in the territory for beauty and fertility. The first of these, Gull prairie, is situate in the vicinity of a beautiful lake, as well as adjacent to the margin of a romantic creek, both of which bear the same name. This lake is about four miles long, and its waters which are very transparent are said to contain white fish. The creek is very rapid and affords hydraulic privileges equal to any in the territory. Prairie Round, which lies in the southwest part of the county, is about four miles broad, and is principally surrounded with woodland; near its centre there is a beautiful grove of timber of about a mile in diameter, consisting of sugar maple, black walnut and hickory. This county is well supplied with water. The Kalamazoo river which runs through it is a rapid meandering stream, yet navigable for boats. Its surface is frequently chequered with islands and its banks occasionally broken. BRANCH.--This county is attached to St. Joseph's. A large portion of it, particularly the southern part, is heavily timbered land, consisting principally of black and white walnut, sugar maple, whitewood, lynn, and some other kinds in smaller quantities. The Chicago road which runs through the northern part of this county, passes principally through oak openings, which are occasionally intersected with prairies. HILLSDALE.--This county is attached to Lenawee. The north part of it is principally oak openings of a good quality, but the southern part is heavily wooded with sugar maple, whitewood, beech, black walnut, ash, &c. The face of this county is rather uneven and the soil in general consists of a rich black loam. The southern part is timbered land. This county is well supplied with water. The St. Joseph's of lake Michigan, as well as the St. Joseph's of Maumee, the Grand river, Tiffin's and the river Raisin all head in this county, and with their numerous branches water it in a beautiful manner. LEANEWEE COUNTY--contains at present about fifteen hundred inhabitants. The northern part of this county has much the same appearance as Washtenaw, but the southern part is principally timbered land. It contains a tamerack swamp of considerable extent in the southeast corner, yet notwithstanding, the character of its soil and climate is, generally, very inviting. It is principally watered by the Ottawa creek, Tiffin's and Raisin rivers and their branches. It contains two villages each with a mill on their borders, namely, Tecumseh and Adrian--the former of which is the seat of justice for the county. It is situate at the junction of Landman's creek with the river Raisin, and lies about fifty-five miles southwest of Detroit. BARRY, EATON AND INGHAM COUNTIES--lie on Grand river and its tributaries. This is the largest river in the peninsula. It empties into lake Michigan, two hundred and forty-five miles south of Michilimackinac, and forty-five miles north of the mouth of St. Joseph, is sixty rods wide at its mouth, and has sufficient depth of water to admit vessels drawing eight feet. On its south bank, near its entrance into the lake, is a pleasant situation for a town, the land being excellent, and gently inclining to the north and west, giving at the same time a fine view of the river and lake; but the opposite shore at the same place has a sandy, sterile appearance. For about sixty miles up this river, on the north side, the Ottawas hold possession. There are between eight and nine hundred of these people living along Grand river and its tributaries, but many of their most populous villages are on land now belonging to the United States. This river is the largest stream that waters the west part of the peninsula of Michigan, being two hundred and seventy miles in length, its windings included, and navigable two hundred and forty miles for batteaux; receiving in its course a great number of tributary streams, among which are Portage, Red Cedar, Looking Glass, Soft Maple, Muscota, Flat, Rouge and Thorn Apple rivers. All of these, except the last named, put in on the right bank of the Grand river. Its south branch rises in the open country, near the source of the Raisin, and after pursuing a winding course of thirty miles, meets with the Portage river, which comes in from the east and intersects the above branch in town two south of range one west. Portage river, which has its course through a chain of low marshy prairies, is a deep, muddy stream, about fifteen yards wide at its mouth. Its branches interlock with those of the Huron of lake Erie, and the Indians pass from the former into the latter, with their canoes, by crossing a portage of one mile and a half. It is probable that at no distant period, a canal will be constructed near the route of these two rivers, so as to afford a safe and easy inland communication between lakes Erie and Michigan. The distance from Detroit to the mouth of Grand river, by way of Michilimackinac, is five hundred and sixty miles. This route in the spring and fall is attended with much uncertainty; and, in case of a war with the English, the navigation of the straits of Detroit and St. Clair would be rendered doubly dangerous. These difficulties would be obviated by a communication by water, through the interior. The land at the Portage rises forty or fifty feet above the level of the streams on each side; but a level prairie two or three miles to the west of that place, is said to extend from one river to the other. From the junction of the Portage and south branches, this river pursues a northwest course till it meets with Soft Maple river, in town seven north of range six west; receiving in that distance Red Cedar and Looking Glass rivers from the east, and Grindstone, Red and Sebewa creeks from the south and southwest. Grindstone creek, so named from a sandstone ledge through which it runs, empties into the river about twenty miles below the mouth of the Portage branch. It is twenty miles long, affording several good sites for mills, and runs mostly through an open beautiful country; but is in some instances skirted with bottoms of heavy timbered land. From the mouth of this creek to that of Looking Glass river, a distance of forty-five miles in a direct line, the Grand river runs through a tract of timbered land, which is several miles in extent on each side, abounding in creeks and springs of water, and bearing a growth of maple, basswood, cherry, oak, ash, whitewood, elm, black walnut, butternut, and some other kinds in lesser quantities. Below Looking Glass river, for forty or fifty miles, tracts of open land are found along the banks, but extensive forests immediately in the rear. The river bottoms are from a quarter of a mile to one mile in width, and the timbered lands are covered with a rank growth of rushes, (Equisetum hyemale) on which the Indians keep their horses during the winter. It is found that cattle and horses do better on these rushes, than when kept on hay; and it would seem from their abundance, that nature here intended them as a substitute for that article. The surface of the land after leaving the river bottoms is rolling; and it rises sufficiently high to give rapidity to the numerous creeks that so abundantly irrigate this part of the country. Red Cedar river is thirty-five yards wide, and puts in about midway between Grindstone creek and Looking Glass river. It rises in Washtenaw and Shiawassee counties, and can be ascended in small boats twenty-five or thirty miles. A few miles below the mouth of this stream, is a ledge of sandstone, which forms a perpendicular wall of twenty-five or thirty feet in height, on each side of the river. This ledge consists of square blocks of stone, of a suitable size to be used in building, and which are rendered more valuable, from the circumstance of their being on the banks of a large navigable river, which with its tributaries, will facilitate its transportation to various sections of the territory. A bed of iron ore has been discovered in the northeast bank of the river immediately below this ledge; and, indeed, many of the stones in the lower part of the ledge, have a great resemblance to blocks of cast iron--presenting a rusty surface, very dense, and when broken, have, in a striking degree, the color and appearance of iron itself. Four miles above the mouth of the Looking Glass river, is the village of P'Shimnacon, (Apple land,) which is inhabited by eight or ten Ottawa families, who have a number of enclosed fields in which they raise corn, potatoes, and other vegetables usually cultivated by the Indians. The village receives its name from Pyrus Coronaria, (Crab Apple,) which grows in great abundance on the rich bottoms in its vicinity. Sebewa creek puts into the river on the southwest side, one mile above this village. It is about twenty miles long, sufficiently large for mills, and for the last four miles is very rapid, with a hard, stony bottom. Looking Glass river which is about forty yards wide, rises in Shiawassee county, and can be ascended in canoes almost to its source. The country near this river, for fifteen miles above its mouth, is what may be termed first rate timbered land; but above that point it is of an inferior quality, more open, and abounding in tamerack swamps and wet prairies. It is about eight miles by land from the mouth of Looking Glass to that of Soft Maple river, which is about sixty yards wide at its entrance into Grand river. It heads in Shiawassee and Saginaw counties, and runs nearly a due west course until it unites with Grand river, at the Indian village of Chigau-mish-kene. This village consists of twenty-five houses, and has a population of near two hundred souls under the noted chief Cocoose. Here is about one thousand acres of bottom land, of a deep, black soil, that has been cleared by the Indians; a part of which they still occupy as planting ground; but the land at this village, as well as that at P'Shimnacon, has been ceded to the United States, and will no doubt, in a short time, be occupied by an industrious white population. There is a large trail leading from this village, by way of Shiawassee to Detroit, a distance of one hundred and thirty miles. The Grand river here changes its course; and with the exception of twelve miles in length, below Rouge river, runs nearly a west course to lake Michigan. Two miles further down, is the entrance of Muscota river, (River of the Plains,) which comes in from the north, with a rapid current, and is about forty feet wide. The country through which it runs is but little known, as no lands have been surveyed north of Grand river, below Soft Maple. It is eighteen miles by land from the mouth of Muscota to that of Co-cob-au-gwosh, or Flat river, with several considerable creeks putting into Grand river, on each side, in the intermediate distance. Ke-wa-goosh-cum's Indian village is situate immediately below the mouth of Flat river, and consists of sixteen lodges. It is supposed that the line between the United States and the Indian lands will intersect the Grand river near this place. Flat river is a shallow stream, about eight rods wide; and in ascending has a general course of north by northeast. Of the country along this river, but little is at present known. It is reported, however, to be of a hilly, broken aspect; and many places near its source, to abound in lakes and swamps. There is a small lake that discharges its waters into this river, about sixty miles above its mouth, in which it is said by the Indians, that white fish are found in great numbers--a circumstance that is rendered more extraordinary, from the fact that this fish has never been seen near the mouth of Grand river, although it is often taken near the entrances of most of the other tributaries of lake Michigan. It is ten miles from Flat to Thorn Apple river, which comes in from the south, and, with its numerous tributaries, waters a large extent of country. Its main branch rises in town two and three north of range three west, and after running a westerly course for more than forty miles, it takes a northward direction, in which it continues until it empties into Grand river, in the south part of town seven north of range two west. There is a suitable proportion both of open and timber land along this stream, and a great part of each kind may be termed first rate. Two Indian villages are situated at the distance of twenty and twenty-six miles up this river, and another at its mouth, under the Ottawa chief Nong-gee. The last mentioned village is inhabited by twelve or fourteen families who are by far the most industrious and respectable band that reside in that part of the country. Rouge river, is twenty miles, including the meanderings, northwest of Thorn Apple river. It is about forty miles long, rising near the sources of the Maskegon, and has its banks shaded by lofty forests of white pine. From this place to Muck-a-ta-sha's village, a distance of twelve miles, the Grand river pursues a south direction; after which it runs nearly a due west course to lake Michigan. Six miles above the mouth of the last mentioned inlet, is a rapid of one mile in length, where the river, which is here fifty-two rods wide, is supposed to fall twenty-five feet. The banks at the head of the rapid, are not more than four feet above the level of the river, and they keep a horizontal level until you arrive at the foot of the rapid, where they are nearly thirty feet above the water; and consequently afford convenient opportunities for profitably appropriating a part of the river, by means of a canal or sluice, to the use of mills or machinery. There is a missionary establishment, (the Thomas station) at this place, under the superintendence of the Rev. I. M'Coy. The mission family at present consists of a school teacher, a blacksmith, and two or three agriculturists. The school was open in the winter of 1827, and now has about thirty Indian children, who receive their board, clothing and tuition at the expense of the establishment. There is a trail leading southwest from the rapids to the Kalamazoo river, and thence to the rivers Raisin and Huron. Another leads directly to the mouth of Thorn Apple river, a distance of only ten miles on the trail, but twenty-five round the curve of the river. The country within this bend, excepting immediately along the river, is of a rough, hilly character, a great part consisting of oak openings, of a barren appearance, with a few scattering groves of white pine. Most of the land, however, in the neighborhood of this tract, is of a good quality and timbered with all kinds that usually grow on rich alluvial soils. There is a salt spring four miles below the rapids, which rises out of the ground about half a mile from the river on the east side. The water is said to be, both as to quantity and quality, sufficient to warrant the establishment of works for the manufacturing of that useful article. Near this place is also a bed of gypsum, of a fine quality, which will probably, in time, be of great importance to agriculturists in many of the western parts of Michigan. Muck-a-ta-sha, or Blackskin's village, is six miles below the rapids, and is near the bend of the river, on an elevated prairie. There is also another village twenty miles lower down the river. From the rapids to the lake, a distance of thirty-six miles, the river is no where less than four feet deep. The current at the former place is too powerful to be ascended with loaded boats. The country along the river for the first fifteen or twenty miles above the lake is generally level, and in many instances swampy, with lofty forests, of various kinds of timber, and bearing an almost impenetrable thicket of undergrowth. The country watered by the Grand river, consists of between six and seven thousand square miles; and considering its central position in the territory, the general fertility of the soil on the several branches of that stream, the convenience of a safe and good harbor at its mouth, together with its many other important natural advantages, we may be fully justified in the opinion, that it will, at no very distant period, become one of the most important sections of Michigan. SKETCH OF THE TEXIAN REVOLUTION. First Campaign. As the inhabitants of Texas are chiefly emigrants from the United States, and have buckled on their armor in a contest for liberty and independence, it is natural that Americans should feel a strong sympathy in their behalf. The sons of freedom can never be indifferent and unconcerned, in a struggle between liberty and despotic power, however remote the theatre of action; but when such a war is waged by their neighbors and friends, and Freedom the prize to be lost or won, the deep feeling pervading American breasts, cannot be suppressed. When Centralism was established, the State governments annihilated, and Santa Anna, by aid of the priests and the army, proclaimed himself monarch of Mexico, united Texas arose as one man, to oppose the usurpation. Although an infant of but yesterday, and but slightly armed for battle, yet she has a vigorous arm, and a heart that will never quail before the minions of despotic power. Relying upon the justice of her cause, and calling upon the friends of liberty for aid, she goes forth undismayed, to meet the giant strength of Mexico combined.--Her call for aid, has been heard throughout the Mississippi valley, and along the whole Atlantic coast, and has been fully answered. Soldiers, arms, ammunition and treasure have poured into Texas from all quarters; and in number and quantity, equal to the exigency of the case. Texas has gloriously triumphed. The invading foe has been completely routed--her first campaign is ended, and not a hostile band is found upon her soil. In order to understand the situation of Texas, and the causes of the present civil war, it is necessary briefly to advert to the history of the Mexican Republic. It is well known, that the Province of Mexico had a long and severe struggle to throw off the Spanish yoke, and to become independent of Old Spain. At length, a constitution was formed, after the model of that of the United States, and a Republican government established. In 1824, Iturbide overthrew this Republican government, established an Empire, and placed himself at its head.--His reign was of but short duration. The army, under the lead and direction of three military chieftains, named Victoria, Bravo and Santa Anna, the very person who is now playing the game of Emperor, made a prisoner of Iturbide, banished him with an annuity of twenty-five thousand dollars, and restored the constitution. After passing a year in Europe, Iturbide returned to Mexico to recover his Empire, but was taken prisoner and shot. The republic was continued with frequent commotions and revolutions. On one occasion Pedrassa, a civilian, was fairly elected President, in a contest with Gen. Guerrero. Guerrero denounced Pedrassa, placed himself at the head of the army, succeeded in expelling Pedrassa from the country, and was made President by the force of his bayonets. The people soon became discontented, insurrection spread over the country, Guerrero was in turn compelled to yield, and was finally taken prisoner, condemned and shot as a traitor. The succeeding faction of Bustamente was in turn put down, and after various commotions by contending factions, Santa Anna contrived, with the aid of the Army and Clergy to unite the interests of Church and State, and to place himself at the head of the government. The old constitution was annulled, and Santa Anna was acknowledged as Chief of a Central Government. The State Governments were merged in Centralism, and Santa Anna is to all intents and purposes Monarch of Mexico. At this conjuncture of affairs, all the States and Territories submitted to the overwhelming power of the Dictator, but Texas. This province having been peopled by emigrants from the United States, by a people accustomed to free institutions,--revolted at the idea of despotism, and they nobly resolved not to come under the yoke, but to establish an independent Government of their own. This is a simple statement of the case, and their cause is one that is calculated to enlist the sympathies of the people of this country. Since the determination of the people of Texas has been known, it is understood that several other Mexican States have shown disaffection to the Central Government, and, judging from the vicissitudes of the past, it may be safely predicted, that in the course of another year or two, Santa Anna himself will be expelled, or shot, and the Constitution restored. But lest the cause in which the Texians are now engaged, may not be fully understood, let us state a parallel case. Suppose that the President and Congress should abrogate the constitution of the United States, abolish all the State governments, and establish Romanism as the religion of the country: and if the governor of any State attempted to exercise any authority, send an armed force to arrest and imprison him. What would the people of the several States say to this? Would they tamely submit, as though they had no cause of complaint; or would they not rather, rise _en masse_, assert their rights, and put down these high-handed usurpers, at the point of the bayonet? Most assuredly they would. Many of the States have been thrown into violent commotion, and even resorted to arms, for causes immeasurably less, than that of the Texians. The State of Maine were aroused to a man, because the British Government attempted to exercise jurisdiction over a strip of the wilderness and a few log houses, on her eastern border. The State of New-Hampshire called an army into the field, to support her doubtful title, to the unimportant settlement of Indian Stream. The State of Georgia rose to arms, because the Indians did not give up their lands, quite so soon as they expected. The States of Ohio and Michigan have long been in a feverish excitement, and have resorted to arms, on a simply legal question, which State shall exercise jurisdiction over a few thousand acres of land. And the people of the whole United States were thrown into a violent commotion, on the question, whether slavery should be tolerated in the State of Missouri. And can it be thought strange by Americans, so jealous of their own rights, that the Texians are alarmed to see their constitution annulled, their State government subverted, and all the dearest rights which civilized man holds dear, put in jeopardy? Is it a matter of wonder, that they have appealed to arms, cast an anxious look to American freemen, and sent forth their spirit-stirring appeals for aid? To such an appeal, Americans cannot turn a deaf ear; nor will they stand with folded arms, and see the battle rage. Under the constitution of 1824, Mexico was a confederated republic, after the model of the United States, having a President, Vice President, Senate and House of Representatives, as a central government, and separate governments for each State, and provincial governments for certain Territories, in all material respects similar to the institutions of this country. Under this organization, Texas and Coahuila were formed into one State of the Mexican Confederacy; but as the one was settled by Americans, and the other by Spaniards, there never has been much harmony and good feeling between them. It has long been an object of strong desire among the people of Texas, to be disjoined from Coahuila, and formed into a separate State. To accomplish this desirable object, Col. Austin was appointed an agent to the Congress at Mexico, near the close of 1833. After spending some months at the seat of government, and making various efforts to have Texas formed into an integral State, separate from Coahuila, despairing of being able to accomplish it, in the then distracted state of affairs, he started to return home. He had not proceeded far, before he was arrested on a charge of high treason, carried back to Mexico, and imprisoned. For a time, he was kept in close confinement; and then, let out under bonds to keep within the limits of the city. He had been a prisoner more than a year, being unable to obtain either a trial or a release, when the government was subverted, and Centralism established. Santa Anna, becoming alarmed at the public meetings, and show of opposition in Texas, concluded to release Col. Austin, and send him as a special messenger, to allay the excitement. He requested him to state to the Texians, that he felt deeply interested in their welfare; and that in the new organization of the government, he would use his influence to give to the people of Texas, such laws and regulations as were suited to their habits and situation. Col. Austin faithfully delivered this message to the people of Texas, at a public dinner given to welcome his return, on the eighth of October last. But it was now too late to listen to the fair promises of Santa Anna. The country was in a state of extraordinary excitement, and on the eve of a revolution. Santa Anna, it seems, could threaten and punish, as well as conciliate and persuade. He arrested the Governor of Coahuila and Texas,--threatened an invasion--the confiscation and sale of a large tract of settled territory--and an imposition of heavy taxes upon the commerce of the country. The people of Texas aroused to the defence of their constitutional rights, and to resist oppression. They held to the constitution of 1824, and refused to adopt Centralism. Public meetings were held in all the principal towns and villages. At Columbia, Harrisburg, Velasco, Brazoria and San Felipe, resolutions were adopted, expressive of indignation at the proceedings of Santa Anna and the General Government, and of a determination to resist them. Committees of safety were appointed, and a general convention called. By the aid of Col. Austin and Gen. Houston of St. Augustine, forces were organized to repel the threatened invasion. Col. Austin by the assistance of others, raised a regiment of six or seven hundred riflemen; and Gen. Houston, by the aid of volunteers from the United States, was soon enabled to take the field, at the head of as many more. Santa Anna, in the mean time, was not idle.--He concentrated his forces at Saltillo under the command of General Cos. After the army had become organized and in sufficient force, Gen. Cos marched to San Antonio, and took possession of the town. Another force was stationed at Goliad, sixty miles south of San Antonio. To enforce the revenue laws, Santa Anna sent an armed schooner, called the Correo, under the command of Capt. Thompson, to the mouth of the Brazos river. This schooner, joined by a small armed sloop, attacked the schooner San Felipe, a regular trader between the Brazos and New-Orleans commanded by Capt. Hurd. This was about the first of September. It appears from a statement signed by the passengers of the San Felipe, that the Correo had fired at a steamboat while engaged in lighting the American brig Tremont, lying at anchor off the bar, previously to her attack on the San Felipe. As soon as the steamboat had gone inside the bar, the Correo was joined by a small armed sloop, and both stood for the San Felipe, and opened fire upon her without ceremony, the moment they arrived within shot. But Captain Hurd, suspecting their intention to be of a hostile nature, from their first appearance, and having arms on board, gallantly gave battle and put them to flight, after a combat which lasted nearly an hour. The next morning, the Correo was discovered about five miles distant, upon which she was chased by the San Felipe, (towed by the steamboat,) and overtaken and obliged to surrender. The first battle fought on the land was on the second day of October 1835, near the town of Gonzales; and from this circumstance, it has obtained the enviable distinction, of being the Lexington of Texas. The circumstances attending the commencement of hostilities, ought to be stated with some minuteness. Some years since, when Gonzales, the capital of De Witt's Colony, was exposed to the depredations of the Indians, the people there applied to the authorities of San Antonio for a piece of artillery to protect that frontier. The application was granted; and they obtained a brass six pounder. This was kept for defence until the settlement became strong--and afterwards it lay about the streets upon the ground, (unmounted) and served to make a noise whenever the people got into a merry frolic. The military commandant of San Antonio, (Col. Ugartechea,) two or three weeks previous, feeling sufficiently strong to make an attack upon the Colonies, demanded the gun. The people took the matter into consideration. The gun was once the property of the King of Spain; and he lost it with the sovereignty of the country. The Federal Republic of Mexico became the owner. The people of Gonzales returned for answer, in substance, that the gun was the property of the Confederation which they acknowledged, and not of the Central government, which they did not acknowledge; and they would not give it up to any officer of the Central Government. Ugartechea ordered a detachment of his troops to march seventy-six miles, and take the gun by force. The colonies assembled to oppose him. Expresses were despatched to all parts of the country. The news flew with the speed of the race horse. The people rose to arms--and marched for the battle field. Gonzales is situated on the eastern bank of the river Gaudaloupe, 150 miles west of San Felipe; and on the twentieth of September, the detachment of troops from San Antonio, about two hundred in number, made their appearance on the western bank of the river, opposite the town. They attempted the passage of the river, but after a sharp skirmish, were repulsed by eighteen men, the whole force then at Gonzales. The enemy retired a short distance, and encamped on the mound at De Witt's. On the first of October, about 12 o'clock, they took up their march and encamped about seven miles above this place, in a very strong position. Suspecting that their object in this movement was either to wait for a reinforcement from San Antonio, or to cross at the upper crossing, about fifteen miles above, it was determined to attack them before their plans could be carried into execution. Accordingly, on the same night, the whole force on foot, amounting then to about one hundred and sixty men, from the Gaudaloupe, Colorado, and La Baca, commanded by Col. J.H. Moore, crossed the river, attacked the enemy about day break, and put them to flight without the loss of a single man.--Thirty or forty of the enemy were reported to have been killed and wounded. This was a brilliant commencement of the Texian Revolutionary War. The next, and more important battle, took place on the ninth of October, and resulted in the capture of the fort and town of Goliad. The attacking party were a company of volunteers, from the fertile banks of the Caney, and from the town of Matagorda--a place destined to become an important city, situated at the mouth of the Colorado river. Before this party entered the field, most of the volunteers were at Gonzales--and fearing that the harvest of honors would be reaped before they could arrive there--they struck off from La Baca with the daring determination of taking Goliad by surprise. Goliad is situated on the southwest side of the San Antonio river, thirty leagues below Bexar, and it is fifteen leagues from Copano, the landing place of Aransas bay, and about the same distance from the La Baca and of Matagorda bay. The fort is built upon the point of a very steep hill, formed of rocks, with a deep ravine upon one side and a low prairie upon the opposite--while a broad elevated prairie extends towards the southwest. The walls of the fort are of stone and lime, and bear in many places the marks of the storms of an hundred winters, but are still proof against any thing less than the batterings of heavy artillery. A long forced march brought the van guard of the colonists to the San Antonio river ford, below the town, at 11 o'clock on the night of the ninth of October. Here they halted for the main body, and to make arrangements for the attack. A very small party were sent into the town, and they brought out, with the utmost secrecy, a worthy citizen friendly to the constitution of 1824. And by his assistance guides were produced perfectly acquainted with the place. The main body of the colonists missed their road in the night, and before they found out their mistake, were at the upper ford, immediately opposite the town. They then struck across, for a short cut, to the position occupied by the van guard. The route lay through a muskeet thicket. The muskeet is a tree of the locust family, full of thorns, and at a short distance resembles the common peach tree in size and appearance. While the parties were treading their way in this thicket, the horse of one of them started in affright at an object beneath a bush. The rider checked his horse and said, who's there? A voice answered in Spanish. One of the party supposed that he recognized in the voice an old acquaintance of Goliad, asked if it was not he, mentioning his name. "No," was the reply, "my name is Milam." Col. Milam is a native of Kentucky. At the commencement of the Mexican war of independence, he engaged in the cause, and assisted in establishing the independence of the country. When Iturbide assumed the purple, Milam's republican principles placed him in fetters--dragged him to the city of Mexico, and confined him in prison until the usurper was dethroned. When Santa Anna assumed the dictatorship, the republican Milam was again thrust into the prison at Monterry. But his past services and sufferings wrought upon the sympathies of his hard-hearted jailors. They allowed him the luxury of the bath. He profited by the indulgence and made arrangements with an old compatriot, to place a fleet horse suitably equipped upon the bank of the stream, at a time appointed. The colonel passed the sentinel as he was wont to go into the water--walked quietly on--mounted the horse and fled. Four hundred miles would place him in safety. The noble horse did his duty, and bore the colonel clear of all pursuit to the place where the party surprised him. At first he supposed himself in the power of his enemy--but the English language soon convinced him, that he was in the midst of his countrymen. He had never heard that Texas was making an effort to save herself. No whisper of the kind had been allowed to pass the grates of his prison.--When he learned the object of the party, his heart was full. He could not speak for joy. When the company arrived at the lower ford, they divided themselves into four parties of twelve men each. One party remained as a guard with the horses. The other three, each with a guide, marched by different routes to the assault. Their axes hewed down the door where the colonel commanding the place slept--and he was taken a prisoner from his bed. A sentinel hailed, and fired. A rifle ball laid him dead upon the spot.--The discharge of fire arms and the noise of human voices now became blended. The Mexican soldiers fired from their quarters, and the blaze of their guns served as targets for the colonist riflemen. The garrison were called to surrender, and the call was translated by a gentleman present, who spoke the language. They asked for terms. The interpreter now became the chief speaker. 'No,' answered he. 'They say they will massacre every one of you, unless you come out immediately and surrender. Come out--come out quick--I cannot keep them back--come out, if you wish to save your lives--I can keep them back no longer.' 'O, do for God's sake keep them back,' answered the Mexicans in their own language. 'We will come out and surrender immediately,'--and they rushed out with all possible speed and laid down their arms. And thus was the fort of Goliad taken--a fort which, with a garrison of three hundred and fifty patriots in the war of 1812-13, withstood the siege of an army of more than two thousand Spanish troops, and forced them to retire, discomfited. At the capture of the fort, three Mexican soldiers were killed and seven wounded; and one colonel, one captain, one lieutenant, with twenty-one petty officers and privates were made prisoners--others of the garrison escaped in the dark and fled. In the fort were found two pieces of brass cannon, five hundred muskets and carbines, six hundred spears, with ammunition and provisions. One of the colonists, only, was wounded in the shoulder. Col. Milam assisted in the capture of the fort, and then he spoke:--"I assisted Mexico to gain her independence; I have spent more than twenty years of my life in her service; I have endured heat and cold, hunger and thirst; I have borne losses and suffered persecutions; I have been a tenant of every prison between this and Mexico--but the events of this night have compensated me for all my losses and all my sufferings." The colonists were commanded by Gen. M. Collingsworth--but it would be difficult to find in the company, a man not qualified for the command. Goliad is of vastly more importance in a military point of view, than San Antonio, as the latter is in a valley upon the banks of the river, and commanded by the hills on each side, and is therefore indefensible. The news of the capture of Goliad was hailed with enthusiastic joy throughout Texas. A general enthusiasm prevailed. Col. Austin, elected General of the volunteer forces, made his head quarters at Gonzales, one hundred and fifty miles west of San Felipe, and seventy-five miles east of San Antonio. A declaration of rights under the constitution of 1824 was published, and circulated throughout the country. On the thirteenth of October, Gen. Austin, as commander-in-chief, left Gonzales with the main army, for San Antonio. On the twentieth, a division arrived at Salada, within five miles of San Antonio. On their march, they came in contact with the advanced guard of the enemy, who retired at their approach. On the twenty-seventh, a detachment of Gen. Cos' cavalry, out on a foraging expedition, were attacked by a party of Texians, and by them defeated with the loss of thirty-five horses, and suffering in killed and wounded to the number of fifty men. The loss of the Texians, three men slightly wounded. Cos' detachment of cavalry consisted of about one hundred and fifty men, which, before the engagement was concluded, were re-inforced by one hundred and fifty infantry; the party of Texians employed in the assault amounting to about the same number. On the twenty-eighth, a detachment of ninety men, under the command of Col. Jas. Bowie and Capt. Fanning, advanced and took possession of a church, within a mile and a half of San Antonio. The Mexicans to the number of three hundred cavalry and one hundred infantry, under the command of Col. Utartacher, sallying out from the city, made an attack upon Bowie's forces, and after an engagement of three hours duration, were repulsed with the loss of one piece of artillery and forty muskets, leaving eighteen men dead upon the field. The only loss on the side of the Texians, was one man mortally wounded, and a few horses. The main body of the army came up soon after the enemy had retired. Gen. Austin, that there might be no mistake respecting the principles upon which he acted, sent a communication to Gen. Cos, by a Mexican, stating that he was supporting the principles of the constitution of 1824, and inquiring how his flag would be received? His reply was, "disband your forces, return home peaceably, and then perhaps I will listen to your petitions; at present I can only regard you as rebels and traitors." In the mean time, something like a regular army, composed of Texians and volunteer companies from the United States, was organized, and Gen. Houston, formerly Governor of Tennessee, and for some years a resident in Texas, was appointed the commander. On his arrival at Gonzales, the force under his command amounted to about a thousand men. The Texian army, at length, concentrated their forces, and besieged the town of San Antonio.--This is a walled town, containing three thousand five hundred inhabitants. Gen. Cos found himself in a critical situation. His army amounted to about a thousand men, but the besieging army pressed him so close, he was obliged to keep within the walls of the town. He soon became in want of provisions, but he was too closely watched to obtain a supply. The besiegers believing he would be forced to surrender without a battle, concluded patiently to wait the event. In this state of the case, it was thought advisable to send commissioners to the United States, with plenary power to negotiate loans, &c., in preparation for another campaign. Gen. Austin and Messrs. Archer and Wharton were accordingly appointed. Edward Burlisson was elected to fill the vacancy occasioned by the resignation of Gen. Austin, and W.H. Jack was promoted to the second in command. The commissioners immediately left the army, and proceeded to the United States. They arrived at New-Orleans on the third day of January, and succeeded in effecting a loan there of two hundred thousand dollars. They then started up the Mississippi river, intending to visit the seat of government at Washington. The Texian army besieged San Antonio more than a month; during which time, the Mexican forces were confined strictly within the walls of the city. The moment a sentinel ventured without, he was shot by some of the riflemen. The garrison became almost destitute of provisions, and the surrender of the place was anticipated daily. At this juncture, news arrived, that a large reinforcement of Mexican troops were near at hand, to relieve the garrison. This determined the besieging army to storm the city immediately. It was on the sixth day of December last, when the assault commenced. The brave Col. Milam, at the head of three hundred choice troops, led the attack.--The assault was so sudden and vehement, that neither walls nor men could successfully oppose it. After a sharp conflict, in which the assailants performed wonders, the city was gallantly taken, and the garrison made prisoners. This had hardly been accomplished, when the Mexican reinforcement came up, just in time to lay down their arms to the victors. By this victory, twelve hundred men were made prisoners; and the Texians obtained two thousand stands of arms, thirty pieces of cannon, and a large amount of military stores, camp-equipments and horses, estimated to be worth five hundred thousand dollars. The loss of the enemy in killed and wounded, we have never seen stated;--on the part of the Texians, fifteen were wounded, and the brave Col. Milam and four others, killed. Col. Milam was mainly instrumental in the complete success of the assault, and fell a victim to his own zeal and intrepidity. The death of this estimable man, turned the joy of victory into sadness. Like the lamented Warren of Bunker Hill, he fell early in his country's struggle for independence;--and like him, his untimely exit was deeply deplored. A native of Kentucky, he possessed in an eminent degree, the chivalry and noble bearing, so conspicuous in the land of his birth. In early life, he left his native State. He was the intrepid commander of the steamboat, that first threaded the mazes of Red river, beyond the great raft. At the commencement of the severe contest in Mexico, to throw off the Spanish yoke, he was engaged in her cause. In the many sanguinary battles with the armies of Spain and savage Indians, during that long and bloody war, he was engaged, and shone conspicuous. A noble spirited and an unyielding patriot himself, he found at last, to his sorrow and regret, that the people, whom he aided to establish independence, were unworthy of the cause in which they were engaged. They did not understand the true principles of liberty, and knew not the value of its blessings. No sooner were they freed from foreign oppression, than anarchy and confusion reigned at home. Revolutions and counter-revolutions rapidly succeeded each other; and the unyielding Milam, alternately became a favorite and a prisoner. He had so many times been arrested and released, that he had been a tenant of every prison, from Texas to the city of Mexico. When restored to favor, by a fortunate turn of the revolutionary wheel, rewards were offered him. But his sufferings only were real; his rewards but mocked his vision. Like the rainbow in the heavens, they fled at his approach. Years ago, he obtained a grant for a colony, on the south bank of the beautiful Colorado, a hundred miles from its mouth; but before he could make arrangements for its settlement, the grant was annulled, and he imprisoned. Misfortune seems to have marked him for her game. For a series of years, as if the intention were to mock and tantalize him, his grant would be alternately cancelled and confirmed. Near the close of the year 1834, when the writer of this sketch saw him in Texas, his grant had been renewed under favorable auspices, and the prospect before him appeared unusually flattering. But it was only the calm, bright sunshine, that precedes the tempest. He had hardly made arrangements to people his colony, and settle down in quiet repose, after so many years of disappointment, toil and suffering, when another revolution brought Santa Anna into power, and the patriot Milam was again arrested and thrust into the prison of Monterry! But in all the changes of fortune, whether favorable or adverse, he never abjured his principles.--The unconquerable love of liberty, that animated him throughout his whole career, never once forsook him. His spirit never quailed before the minions of power--his courage never abated--and his vigorous arm never tired. By stratagem, he escaped from his prison, just in time to render efficient aid in the capture of Goliad; and then, he hastened on to San Antonio, where he gloriously fell in the arms of victory--a martyr to the cause he had, with a steady aim, so nobly espoused and ably defended. But his memory will live in the hearts of a gallant people; and, in after times, his name will be duly honored in the celebration of their victories, and in their songs of triumph. The capture of San Antonio completed the triumph of the Texian arms. Not an armed Mexican soldier could then be found in her territory.--Gen. Cos was released on his parole of honor, not to serve during the war, unless regularly exchanged; the other officers and soldiers were retained prisoners of war. We have now given an account of all the battles fought within the limits of Texas; but it may be proper to add some account of Gen. Mexia's expedition against Tampico. On the sixth day of November last, one hundred and thirty men, chiefly Americans, embarked at New-Orleans on board the schooner Mary Jane for Texas. It was understood, that this vessel had been chartered by a committee, to convey emigrants to that country; and on their arrival, it was to be optional with them, whether they joined the Texian army, or not. Gen. Mexia and his staff were on board this vessel: but no intimation was given to the passengers, that the vessel had any other destination than Texas, until they arrived off the port of Tampico. They were then told, by Capt. Hawkins, one of Gen. Mexia's aids, that the object was to capture Tampico--and the passengers were urged to join the General's standard. About fifty only, most of whom were French and Creoles of New-Orleans, were induced to join his standard. A steamboat took the vessel in tow, but, in attempting to run into the port in the night, they both struck the north breakers. In this critical situation, efforts were made to land the passengers, which at much risk was at length effected, during the latter part of the night and early in the morning. The fort, at the mouth of the harbor, surrendered without an attack. Arms and ammunition were then tendered to the party. Some took them from curiosity, some from necessity, and others on compulsion. Most of the Americans, on account of the deception practiced upon them, in landing at Tampico instead of Texas, were determined not to fight, but to surrender themselves prisoners the first opportunity. The next day, the party, to the number of one hundred and eighty, marched to attack the town; but meeting with a warmer reception than they expected, they retreated to the fort. Here they found about thirty missing--all but two or three having deserted on the retreat. The General, deeming it advisable to leave the place, embarked with his men on board the schooner Halcyon, bound to Brazoria in Texas. The deserters were taken prisoners the next day, by a company of horse, and imprisoned. After remaining in prison about a month, they were tried by a court martial; and although all these facts appeared at the trial, they were all condemned to be shot! Some attempts were made to avert their fate. A petition, signed by the prisoners and a number of Mexicans, was sent to the Commandant of the place, but it availed nothing. The sentence of death was promulgated to these hapless victims of treachery, on the afternoon of Saturday; and at sunrise the succeeding Monday, which was the fourteenth day of December, they were all brought out of prison, and shot! Twenty-eight men, many of them mere youths, in a distant land, far away from friends, at a few hours notice, butchered in cold blood! Humanity recoils at the perpetration of such barbarous deeds as this. Such summary proceedings, dictated by savage vengeance, cannot, on any ground, be either justified or excused. But such has been the character of the wars in South America, ever since the Spanish Colonies strove to shake off the yoke of dependence, for more than a quarter of a century. A war of extermination was carried on by the Spaniards and the Patriots--no quarter was granted in the field--the blood of prisoners was shed like water--and a recital of the wanton cruelties and barbarities committed by both parties, during this state of protracted hostility, would cause even the savage to shudder with horror. These circumstances, as well as the whole course of conduct of the Spaniards, in relation to the inhabitants of the Leeward Islands, Mexico and Peru, are enough to establish their character as the most cruel and sanguinary people on earth. We have mentioned that a large number of volunteers from the United States had gone to Texas, to aid the people in their struggle for independence. Three companies, numbering more than five hundred men, went from New-Orleans. Cincinnati, Natchez and Mobile, each furnished a company.--And travellers state that they met small parties of volunteers, continually on the road, hurrying on to assist the Texians. Many of these arrived in time to be of much service in the last campaign; but one company, from the city of New-York, owing to the misconduct of a portion of them, were detained on the way; and, probably, have not arrived in Texas. This party was Col. Stanly's regiment of volunteers, amounting to about two hundred men. They started from New-York in the brig Madawaska, about the middle of November. After ten day's sail, they found themselves among the Bahama banks and islands. The Captain of the brig, never having sailed the route before, became bewildered among the islands. At length he made a harbor at the island of Eleuthera, and sent a boat on shore containing seventeen men. On the island, they found the inhabitants to consist principally of blacks. Having indulged themselves pretty freely in spirits, and finding the inhabitants rather weak and ignorant, they commenced hostilities upon their effects, such as fowls, pigs, Indian meal, &c., and so terrified the people, that they would do whatever they required. They commanded them with loaded pistols at their heads, and threatened them with instant death if they disobeyed. This indiscreet conduct of course occasioned an excited feeling, on being made known at the English naval station at Nassau, and two gun ships were immediately sent in pursuit, with strict orders to board and put all to death, if any resistance was made. After cruising about a week, one of the ships came up with the Madawaska, and made them all prisoners, on a charge of piracy. They were carried into the port of Nassau in New-Providence, and there put in prison. In the course of a week, the matter was fully investigated, which resulted in the discharge of all but Col. Stanley and ten others, who were detained to await their trial for felony. The result of this trial is not now known; but if found guilty, the punishment by the English laws is known to be severe. The remaining incidents worthy of note, connected with the Texian Revolution, may be stated in a few words. The General Consultation convened at San Felipe on the fifteenth of October.--An address to the people of the United States was adopted, appealing to our citizens for aid. Strong appeals were also made by the Council to the patriotism of the people of Texas. The Council then adjourned to the first of November; but the people were so much engaged on the frontier, that no meeting was held at that time. On the twenty-second day of December, a document was published at Goliad, signed by a great number of persons, chiefly Americans, declaring Texas "_a free, sovereign and independent State_." The declaration enters somewhat at length into the condition of Texas, deplores the leniency of the Texian government in permitting Cos to capitulate, and affirms that many of the officers, civil and military, are more ambitious of emoluments, than the good of the country. It is furthermore stated, that there is more danger from the corrupting influence of Santa Anna's gold, than from his bayonets. The necessity of forming an independent sovereign State immediately, in order that all her energies may be concentrated, is pointed out with great force. On the twenty-sixth of December, a decree of the provincial Government was published, calling a Convention of Delegates from each municipality, clothed with ample powers to adopt a permanent form of government. The Delegates to be elected by the people; all free white males, and Mexicans opposed to a central government, being entitled to vote; and the volunteers in the army being allowed to vote by proxy. The whole number of Delegates to be fifty-six, and the Convention to be held at the town of Washington on the first of March. The Texians have been very active in raising an army to commence another campaign; and it is believed, Gen. Houston was able to take the field on the first of March, at the head of five or six thousand men. The Texians, it is said, are in regular correspondence with the large party in Mexico opposed to centralism. The whole republic seems to be in a ferment. Gen. Mexia, who set out for Matamoras some weeks ago, at the head of a considerable force, intending to invade the Mexican territory, was believed to have made himself master of Tampico, whence he would act in concert with the Texians on the north, and the revolting Mexicans on the south. It was currently reported at Metamoras, that several of the most influential officers in the Mexican army, had openly denounced centralism, and the state of things in the republic was such, that Santa Anna would either be obliged to return to the federal system, or abandon all hopes of power in Mexico. The true state of affairs in Mexico, however, it is difficult to ascertain. There are only twenty-seven newspapers in the country, all of which are in a state of subjection to Santa Anna. The only two opposition journals were suppressed: the editor of one was banished to California, to enjoy "the wolf's loud howl on Onolaska's shore;" the other, Santangele, in spite of his name, was sent to the United States. The Supreme Government, under date of the thirtieth of December, caused the following decree to be published and circulated in every district of the Republic. "ART. 1. All foreigners that may land in any port of the Republic, or shall make their way into the interior, armed and with the intention of attacking her territory, shall be regarded and punished as pirates, considering that they do not belong to any nation at war with the Republic, and that they do not act under any recognized flag. "ART. 2. Foreigners that land in any of our ports, or seek to introduce arms and ammunition by land through any channel in a state of insurrection against the government of the nation, and with the avowed object of placing such implements of war in the hands of her enemies, shall be treated and punished in the same manner." This decree will not be worth, to Santa Anna, the paper on which it is written. It will not deter a single individual from carrying arms and ammunition into Texas, or of joining its army. The sanguinary character of the Spaniards is too well known and established, to ask or expect any thing like clemency at their hands. The Americans needed not a decree under hand and seal, to apprise them of the true character of the Mexicans, when the history of the last twenty-five years is fresh in remembrance. An embargo has also been laid, by order of the Mexican government, on the ports of Tampico and Metamoras, against Mexican vessels; and on all the ports of Mexico against American ships. No ingress nor egress from the ports is now permitted. The foolish expedition planned by Mexia may have led to this resort, as well as the state of affairs in Texas. Santa Anna, believing that the permanency of his own power depends upon the subjugation of Texas, is actively engaged in raising troops for another campaign. It is reported that three or four thousand men, under the command of Gen. Urrea, are on their way to the frontier. It is also reported, that he has called to his aid the Comanches and other tribes of Indians; and persuaded them to declare war against Texas; and has promised them the territory of Texas as a reward. The Indians have known the Spaniards too long to place any reliance upon their promises. They may, indeed, excite them to a war; but it is as likely to prove as disastrous to themselves, as to the Texians. The Indians are unsafe allies. Like the war-elephants of ancient times, they often injure friends more than foes. It is certain, that a deadly hatred has existed for a long series of years, between the Spaniards and Indians; and it is believed, no permanent friendship or alliance can be formed between them. They have much more friendship for the Americans, than for the Spaniards; and if they call them into action, it may prove disastrous only to themselves. The Indians are as hard to direct and control, as a fire on their own boundless prairies. The fire, uncontrolled by him who kindles it, sweeps over the plain, where the wind happens to drive; so the wild Indian, regardless of friend or foe, hurries on to kill and plunder, where his savage fury happens to impel him. But on another ground, Santa Anna had better take heed. Exciting the Indians to kill and plunder, is a game that two can play at. The Texians have greater rewards to offer. They can promise them _all Mexico_, with its many victims and much plunder. In conformity to the custom of nations, the Texians have adopted a flag. It contains a number of stripes, and but a single star; and has inscribed upon it the significant word, 'INDEPENDENCE.' On the twenty-second day of January, the New-Orleans Greys paraded at their encampment, near the mouth of the Brazos river, to display and honor their flag. At the discharge of a signal gun, William Walker, of Portsmouth, N.H., who signalized himself at the capture of San Antonio, had the honor of running it up, for the first time, on a stately flag-staff. The company presented arms, and fired a salute. Just at this time, a volunteer company, on board the steamboat Yellow Stone, from New-Orleans, came up the river, hailed the waving banner, fired a salute, and gave three cheers as they passed. The arrival of such efficient aid, at the moment the national flag was first unfurled, was deemed a happy omen; and that it may continue to wave over Texas, _independent_ and _free_, is the fervent wish of every true son of freedom. Post offices and mail routes have been established, and a Post Master General appointed. The length of all these mail routes, taken together, amount to about eight hundred miles. For a number of years, there has been no mail connection between the United States and Texas; but as the communication is now so great, regular mails will be established between them. Texas is in a critical situation; but it is believed, her cause is far from being desperate. Were Mexico united, and could she bring all her force to bear upon the contest, with the activity and zeal of American freemen, Texas would be crushed at a blow. Santa Anna's journals do indeed say, that the whole country is united in the present form of government, and perfect tranquillity prevails; but private letters contradict this statement altogether. They inform us, that Generals Bravo and Alvarez had united, taken the important town of Acapulco, on the Pacific, denounced Santa Anna, and declared for the constitution. In consequence of this movement, one hundred and fifty mules loaded with money and ammunition, and five hundred men left the city of Mexico for that quarter, about the last of January. It was believed, this news would bring Santa Anna from Saltillo to the seat of government. From all accounts, it appears certain, that the Mexican army, three thousand strong, have left their encampment at Saltillo, for the frontier of Texas. It is formed into two divisions, the one commanded by Sesma; the other, by Cos, and the chief in command is Gen. Urrea. It is reported that a simultaneous attack upon Goliad and San Antonio, is meditated. It is highly probable, the Texians are fully prepared for their reception, and will be able to give a good account of them. The thin settled State of Texas, with a population of some fifty thousand, comparatively, without arms and resources, and having no organized government, engaging in a war with sixteen States, with a population of eight millions, reminds one of the stripling David, going out in the valley of Elah, to give battle to the Philistine of Gath. It requires an unusual degree of boldness and daring, to form the resolution, and to commence a war, with such an immense disparity of force. But the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. The Texians, and the gallant spirits that have hastened to their aid and rescue, compared in number with their enemy, are indeed but a handful of men; but, like the Spartan band of former times, they have lion-hearts and vigorous arms. What men dare, they dare! They have staked their all upon the issue. They have drawn the sword, and thrown away the scabbard. Exterminated they may be, but not subdued. Before such a band, numbers are of no avail; before such opponents, well may tyrants tremble. The first campaign has ended in the complete overthrow of the Mexican force, in Texas. The whole course of the campaign has been signally marked by a series of battles, and almost bloodless victories, on the part of the Texians; and by continued defeat, loss and discomfiture on the part of their enemy. The Mexicans have lost much, in men, arms and treasure; and have won nothing but disgrace. Of honor, they had none to lose. Santa Anna has thousands of men at his command, but they do not possess the chivalrous spirit of the sons of freedom. Judging from the past, _his_ career may be short; but as his subjects know not the value of liberty, and are not sufficiently educated for its rational enjoyment, a long list of tyrants may rapidly succeed him. But light begins to break in upon that benighted corner of the earth. The goddess of liberty, who in former times tried her infant voice in the halls and on the hills of New-England, utters it now, with a power that seems to wake the dead, on the plains of Mexico, and along the sides of the Andes. On the part of the Texians, the struggle may be long and severe. They may be compelled to fight battle after battle, and obtain victory after victory; and suffer also, many reverses and defeats, before the scene of this awful tragedy closes. But it is confidently believed, that they will finally succeed in their effort, to become an independent nation, and to establish a free, elective government, based upon the equal rights of the people. Second Campaign. The second campaign commenced much sooner than was generally expected. It was believed by the Texians, that after the complete and signal overthrow of the Mexican forces in the first campaign, Santa Anna would not be able to raise another invading army, and make his appearance in Texas, before midsummer. In this, they were mistaken. Santa Anna, believing that the stability of his own government depended upon a vigorous prosecution of the war, by extraordinary exertions, raised an army of five thousand men, and by forced marches was enabled to make his appearance in Texas about the twentieth of February. This early and unexpected appearance of an invading army, accounts for the fact, that the Texians were so illy prepared for their reception. On the twenty third of February, Santa Anna, who, contrary to general expectation, commanded in person, appeared before the town of San Antonio, at the head of the advanced division of his army, amounting to a thousand men. At this time, less than two thousand Texians were in arms in the whole province. Of these, only a hundred and fifty men, under the command of Col. W.B. Travis, were stationed at San Antonio--five hundred men, under Col. Fanning, were at Goliad, a hundred and twenty-five miles to the south; and one thousand men, under Gen. Houston, at Gonzales, sixty miles to the east of this position. San Antonio de Bexar is situated on a branch of the San Antonio river, which is here but a small stream, that can easily be crossed by slight wooden bridges. Most of the dwelling houses are on the west side of the river, but the fort is on the east side. This fort, called the Alamo, or Elm Tree fort, covers two acres of ground, and is surrounded by a thick stone wall, twenty feet high. Its position was injudiciously selected. It is situated in a valley, having elevated positions in the rear, from which balls may be thrown directly into the fort. It may therefore, be deemed an indefensible fortress. On the arrival of this division, Santa Anna took possession of the town, and demanded an unconditional surrender of the fort, or the whole garrison would indiscriminately be put to the sword. The intrepid Col. Travis answered this demand by a cannon shot. Immediately, a bombardment from a five inch howitzer, and a heavy cannonade commenced, which was continued for twenty-four hours. This was sustained by the Texians without the loss of a single man, while they made a terrible slaughter in the ranks of their besiegers. From five to six hundred of the enemy are reported to have been killed and wounded. About this time, a party of seventy men, under the command of Col. Johnson, while reconnoitering to the westward of San Patricio, were surrounded in the night, by a large body of Mexican troops. In the morning, the commander sent in a summons to surrender at discretion, which was refused; but an offer was made to surrender as prisoners of war. This was acceded to by the Mexican officer; but no sooner had the party marched out of their encampment, and stacked their arms, than the mean, cowardly, blood-thirsty Mexicans commenced a general fire upon the defenceless prisoners! An attempt was made to escape by flight--three only effected it, among whom was Col. Johnson--the others were shot down and basely murdered. On the twenty-fifth of February, an assault was made upon the fort, an account of which, we give in the words of Col. Travis' despatch to Gen. Houston:-- "To-day at ten o'clock, A.M. some two or three hundred crossed the river below, and came up under cover of the houses, until they arrived within point blank shot, when we opened a heavy discharge of grape and canister on them, together with a well directed fire from small arms, which forced them to halt and take shelter in the houses about eighty or a hundred rods from our batteries. The action continued to rage for about two hours, when the enemy retreated in confusion, dragging off their dead and wounded. During the action, the enemy kept up a continual bombardment, and discharge of balls, grape and canister. We know from observation, that many of the enemy were killed and wounded--while we, on our part, have not lost a man. Two or three of our men have been slightly scratched by pieces of rock, but not disabled. I take great pleasure in stating, that both officers and men, conducted themselves with firmness and bravery.--Lieut. Simmons of the Cavalry, acting as Infantry, and Captains Carey and Dickerson and Blair of the Artillery, rendered essential services, and Chas. Despallier and Robert Brown, gallantly sallied out and set fire to the houses, which afforded the enemy shelter, in the face of the enemy's fire. Indeed the whole of the men, who were brought into action, conducted themselves with such undaunted heroism, that it would be injustice to discriminate. The Hon. David Crockett was seen at all points, animating the men to do their duty. Our numbers are few, and the enemy still continues to approximate his works to ours. I have every reason to apprehend an attack from his whole force very soon. But I shall hold out to the last extremity." On the first of March, thirty-two men from Gonzales, forced their way through the enemy's lines, and entered the fort--increasing the number to one hundred and eighty-two. Between the twenty-fifth of February and the fifth of March, the Mexicans were employed in erecting breastworks around the fort, bombarding the place and battering the walls. On the second of March, Col. Travis wrote, that more than two hundred shells had been thrown into the fort without injuring a man. In the mean time, the Mexicans continued to receive re-enforcements. The whole force amounted to about forty-five hundred men. It consisted of forty companies of Infantry, numbering about seventy men each, under Generals Sesma and Cos; and fifteen hundred Cavalry, under Gen. Felisolas; and the whole commanded by Santa Anna in person. On the sixth of March, about midnight, a general assault was made upon the fort by the entire Mexican force. The walls were weak, the balls from the batteries had passed through them, and, in some places, had become somewhat dilapidated. The cavalry surrounded the fort, and the infantry, well supplied with scaling ladders attempted to enter the fort on all sides at the same time. The Texians fought desperately until daylight, when seven only of the garrison were found alive. We regret to say, that Col. David Crockett and his companion Mr. Benton, also the gallant Col. Benham of South-Carolina, were of the number who cried for quarter, but they were told that there was no mercy for them. They then continued fighting until the whole were butchered. One woman (Mrs. Dickinson) and a wounded negro servant of Col. Travis, were the only persons in the Alamo whose lives were spared. Col. Bowie was murdered in his bed, sick and helpless. Gen. Cos, on entering the fort ordered Col. Travis' servant to point out to him the body of his master; he did so, when Cos drew his sword and mangled his face and limbs with the malignant feeling of a savage. The bodies of the slain were thrown into a heap in the centre of the Alamo and burned. On Col. Bowie's body being brought out, Gen. Cos said that he was too brave a man to be burned like a dog; then added,--never mind, throw him in. The loss of the Mexicans in storming the place was estimated at no less than one thousand men killed and mortally wounded, and as many more disabled--making, with their loss in the first assault, between two and three thousand killed and wounded. It is worthy of remark that the flag of Santa Anna's army at Bexar was a _blood red one_, in place of the old constitutional tri-colored flag. Immediately after the capture of the place, Gen. Santa Anna sent Mrs. Dickinson and Col. Travis' servant to Gen. Houston's camp, accompanied by a Mexican with a flag, who was bearer of a note from Santa Anna, offering the Texians peace and a general amnesty, if they would lay down their arms and submit to his government. Gen. Houston's reply was, "True sir, you have succeeded in killing some of our brave men, but the Texians are not yet conquered." Thus fell the brave defenders of San Antonio. Among the heroes, who perished in the unequal conflict, were Col. W.B. Travis, Col. Jas. Bowie and Col. David Crockett, formerly a member of Congress from the State of Tennessee--every one of whom was himself a host. By a comparison of dates, it appears that this little garrison of one hundred and eighty-two men, held out eleven days against the repeated attacks of an army amounting at last, by constant re-enforcements, to five thousand men. All that the most determined bravery could achieve, was accomplished by the besieged. Although worn down by fatigue and want of sleep, which the continual alarms and discharges of artillery rendered nearly impossible, while the more numerous besiegers could relieve each other, the brave band in the fort did not die unavenged. In the various attacks from first to last, it is probable that they destroyed of the enemy, eight or ten times their own number. The history of their achievements and sufferings, in this memorable siege, may never be known in detail; but enough is revealed to immortalize the names of these martyrs in the cause of liberty, and to stamp with eternal infamy and disgrace their remorseless besiegers. Something of the chivalrous spirit that animated and sustained this truly Spartan band during this trying occasion, may be seen by the despatch of Col. Travis, addressed to his fellow citizens and compatriots, during the siege. He says, "I shall defend myself to the last extremity, and die as becomes a soldier. I never intend to retreat or surrender. VICTORY OR DEATH." This was the first victory obtained by the Mexicans; and the slaughter of the whole garrison confirmed, what was before suspected, that the contest on their part, was to be a war of extermination. No quarter is to be given, or only granted to be violated. The bloody butcheries of defenceless prisoners, as might have been expected, had the opposite effect intended. Instead of striking terror and dismay into the ranks of the Texians, and palsying their efforts, it only served to arouse and awaken them into more vigorous action. Every man, capable of bearing arms, shouldered his rifle, and marched in double quick time to the theatre of war. The news caused a general excitement throughout the United States. New-Orleans exhibited all the hurry and bustle of a camp; and the western and southern riflemen, by hundreds and fifties, hurried on to the scene of slaughter, to avenge the death of their murdered countrymen. The character of Gen. Cos stands out in bold relief, as the meanest of the mean. When he and his command were made prisoners of war by the Texians on this very spot of his present savage triumphs, they were humanely treated, and suffered to return home on their parole of honor. This solemn pledge, universally acknowledged and observed by all civilized nations, and all honorable men, Cos has seen fit to disregard. He again appears in arms, and has forfeited his parole of honor. He now stands before the world, in the character of an outlaw. But, as if this were not sufficient to brand his name with infamy, he seemed determined that his actions should be in perfect keeping with his degraded sense of honor; so as to exhibit to the world, the humiliating spectacle of a character entirely perfect in treachery and baseness. Therefore, instead of waging war according to the rules of civilized nations, he basely murdered the sick in their beds, and mutilated the bodies of the slain; and instead of decently burying the dead, he threw their bodies into a heap and burnt them like dogs! A fit instrument, in the hands of Santa Anna, to teach the people of Texas, the blessings of Centralism! But it does not require much forecast to predict, that the Mexicans have kindled a flame at St. Antonio, that many waters will not be able to quench,--that the day of severe retribution and bloody vengeance is nigh. And when it shall have arrived, where will be the voice to plead for such remorseless murderers as these! On the second day of March, the people of Texas, by their delegates, made a declaration of Independence. It is called, "the unanimous declaration of Independence, made by the Delegates of the People of Texas, in General Convention, made at the town of Washington, on the second day of March, 1836." It is an able state paper, written with much spirit and vigor; but, in gracefulness of style and force of expression, it does not equal its model--the celebrated Declaration of Independence of the United States, from the polished pen of a Jefferson. It contains a statement of grievances, which is submitted to an impartial world, in justification of the hazardous but unavoidable step, of severing their connection with the Mexican people, and of assuming an independent attitude among the nations of the earth. As it is too long to be inserted in this sketch, the following extract, which of itself contains a sufficient reason for the 'hazardous step' taken, must suffice. "The Mexican government, by its colonization laws, invited and induced the Anglo-American population of Texas, to colonize the wilderness, under the pledged faith of a written constitution, that they should continue to enjoy that constitutional liberty and republican government to which they had been habituated in the land of their birth, the United States of America. In this expectation, they have been cruelly disappointed--as the Mexican nation has acquiesced in the late changes made in the government by General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna; who, having overturned the constitution of this country, now offers us the cruel alternative, either to abandon our own homes, acquired by so many privations, or submit to the most intolerable of all tyranny, the combined despotism of the sword and the priesthood." Of this convention, Richard Ellis was President, and W.S. Kimball, Secretary. When the news of the fall of San Antonio arrived at the Convention, a powerful appeal to the people of the United States, was immediately adopted, and sent to New-Orleans to be published in the newspapers. A constitution was formed, and the officers of government appointed as follows:-- DAVID G. BURNET, Pres. of the Republic of Texas. LORENZO D. ZAVALLA, Vice President. SAMUEL P. CARSON, Secretary of State. THOMAS I. RUSH, Secretary of War. BAILEY HARDMAN, Secretary of the Treasury. ROBERT POTTER, Secretary of the Navy. DAVID THOMAS, Attorney General. I.R. JONES, Postmaster General. President Burnet is a native of Newark in New-Jersey, by profession a lawyer--a gentleman of education, accomplished manners and of the purest integrity. Immediately after the capture of San Antonio, Goliad was besieged by the enemy under the command of Gen. Urrea. Colonel Fanning, contrary to his own judgment, but in obedience to positive instructions from Gen. Houston, blew up the fort and commenced a retreat to the main army. His force amounted to about three hundred and fifty men, and seven pieces of artillery. They had proceeded about eight miles to the eastward of the fort, when they were surrounded in a large prairie, by two thousand Mexicans, consisting of infantry and cavalry. The advance guard of twenty-five men under Col. Wharton were, by this movement cut off from the main force; and believing it to be a mere waste of life to return, they continued on, and escaped. Col. Fanning evacuated the fort on the nineteenth of March; and it was about four o'clock, in the afternoon of the same day, that the attack commenced, and lasted until sometime into night. The cavalry made many charges upon them in rapid succession, but were repulsed with great slaughter. Col. Fanning continued fighting and retreating, until he gained a small grove of post-oaks in the midst of the prairie. This afforded him a sufficient protection from the charges of the cavalry, and the battle ceased. Col. Fanning's loss was inconsiderable, but one hundred and ninety of the enemy were ascertained to have been slain, and as many more wounded. This grove was immediately surrounded by the enemy, and a renewal of the battle was expected in the morning. Col. Fanning, well knowing escape to be impossible, entrenched himself during the night and was resolved not to die unavenged. In the morning, however, the enemy showed a white flag, and Col. Fanning went out to meet the Mexican General. A capitulation was made with the usual forms of honorable warfare; Col. Fanning was to lay down his arms, and march back to Goliad, where they were to remain six or eight days as prisoners of war, to be shipped to New-Orleans from Copano. They surrendered on these conditions; on the sixth day after their arrival at Goliad, they were assured that a vessel was ready to receive them at Copano, to embark for New-Orleans, and Col. Fanning marched out in file, the Mexicans each side of him. They were marched down about five miles, when the order was given to fire upon them. At the first fire, nearly every man fell--a Mr. Haddin of Texas and three others succeeded in reaching some bushes about one hundred yards distant. They were pursued by the enemy into the high grass, where they lost sight of them. Haddin remained in the grass all night; in the morning he succeeded in making his escape. It is difficult to speak of such cowardly and more than savage massacres, with any tolerable degree of composure. The deeds of Santa Anna are written in blood, and every triumph but deepens the stain. If the first campaign was all victory, the second has hitherto been all defeat. The affairs of Texas appear to have been badly managed. San Antonio, being an indefensible position, ought to have been abandoned at once; but Goliad, the strongest fortress in Texas, ought to have been maintained to the last. It would have kept the southern division in check, and given time to the Texians to have received re-enforcements, so that they could have prosecuted the war with vigor and success. Gen. Houston, after the capture of San Antonio, retreated from Gonzales to the Colorado, and then, to the Brazos river. The southern half of Texas, being thus left destitute of any armed force, the invading army had nothing to do but to march forward into the interior, and to make war upon unarmed citizens and travellers, and defenceless women and children. The Mexican army proceeded in two divisions of about two thousand men each; the one, on the line of the sea coast; the other, about one hundred miles in the interior towards San Felipe; and troops of horse scoured the country in various directions between them. A general alarm and dismay seized the inhabitants. On the north the Indians, incited by Santa Anna, were reported to have embodied in force, and were proceeding into the country, to plunder and slaughter; from the south, approached the Mexican army, more savage than the Indians, waging a war of extermination! Before such merciless foes, the inhabitants fled, like clouds of dust before the storm. The peril was so imminent, that they were obliged to abandon all their possessions and flee for life. Some went to the sea coast and embarked on board vessels for New-Orleans; others crossed the Sabine river into Louisiana. The settlements of Texas, to the south of the Brazos, were entirely broken up, and the whole country became the theatre of armies, battles, murders and massacres. Among the inhuman massacres committed, we shall notice two only. The first is that of seventy-three emigrants, who left New-Orleans in a schooner, for Copano. They were landed unarmed at that port, trusting themselves to the power of the Mexicans; but in less than two hours, they were all butchered by the soldiers in sight of the vessel! The schooner escaped to Matagorda. The other case is that of Dr. Harrison, the son of Gen. Harrison of Ohio. He was travelling with three other American gentlemen, when they were all taken, their bodies horridly mutilated, their bowels torn out, and then left in that situation a prey to the vultures! Some small skirmishes took place at sea, in which the Texians were successful. They captured one schooner loaded with ammunition and supplies for the Mexican army; and sunk another, after a running fight with the Invincible. But neither party have much of a naval force. At this critical juncture of alarm and distress, Gen. Gaines, the commander of the United States troops at fort Jessup, marched to the line of Texas to keep the Indians in check, and to prevent their joining the Mexican forces; and for the purpose of carrying his plans into complete effect, he called upon the Governors of the adjacent States for a number of regiments of mounted men. This was a wise and humane movement. The Indians in the upper regions of Texas and on the frontiers of the United States, are numerous and warlike; and when engaged in war, they neither respect territorial lines, nor the rules of civilized nations. They inhabit the country from latitude thirty-four degrees north on Red River, to the Rio del Norte, extending to the road that leads from St. Louis (Mo.) to Santa Fe; south to the head waters of Trinity, Guadaloupe, Brazos and Colorado rivers of Texas--a country in length six hundred miles, and breadth from two hundred and fifty to four hundred miles, mostly prairie. The different tribes are Camanches, Kyawas, Towash or Southern Pawnees, Caddoes, Wacoes and Skiddies. They number about thirty-five thousand in all, and can muster from seven to eight thousand restless warriors in this great Western Prairie. The reported movements of the Indians, however, proved to be greatly exaggerated. Some small parties started for the theatre of the war, but were induced by the prompt action and warning of Gen. Gaines, to return home and be quiet. Being assured that the Indians would remain peaceable, Gen. Gaines countermanded his call upon the States for mounted volunteers, and marched his forces back to fort Jessup and Nachitoches. The affairs of Texas, at this time wore a gloomy aspect. All the expeditions into Mexico, beyond the limits of Texas, proved disastrous and unsuccessful. The people of the Mexican States proved to be more united in Centralism than was expected. The aid, which many so sanguinely anticipated from that quarter, proved a mere illusion. It now became manifest, that the Texians, with such aid as they could obtain from the United States, must fight her own battles single handed, against the combined forces of all the Mexican provinces. Gen. Houston, after remaining sometime at his encampment on the Brazos river, retreated about thirty miles further, and crossed the San Jacinta. Santa Anna, with one division of his army, crossed the Brazos fifteen miles below San Felipe, and took the road to Harrisburg. The object of Gen. Houston seems to have been, to retire before the invading army, until it arrived into the centre of the country, and then, give them battle. Although by this course, he left half of the State to the ravages of the enemy, yet he deemed this step unavoidable. His force was too small to hazard _all_, upon the issue of a battle, far away from reinforcements and supplies. On the nineteenth of April, General Houston's scouts took a courier, who gave information that the Mexican Army were near at hand, on the west side of the San Jacinta river. Immediately, General Houston, at the head of about seven hundred effective men, took up the line of march and arrived in sight of the enemy on the morning of the twentieth. The day was spent in reconnoitering the enemy, and exchanging a few shots between the artillery without much effect on either side. But the particulars of this battle and glorious victory, which resulted in the CAPTURE OF SANTA ANNA, and the entire division under his command, we shall give in the words of a number of individuals who were in the contest. "On the morning of the twenty-first, the enemy commenced manoeuvering, and we expected to be attacked in our camp, as they had received a reinforcement of five hundred men, which made them twelve hundred strong; but they settled down and continued throwing up a breast work, which they had commenced at the first news of our approach. We commenced the attack upon them at half past four o'clock, P.M. by a hot fire from our artillery, consisting of two ordinary four pounders. The enemy returned our fire with a long brass nine pounder. The contest was a regular battle. The Texians, notwithstanding the great disparity of force, positively demanded of Gen. Houston to fight. Consequently, he ordered an advanced guard against the Mexican; yet enjoined them not to attack, but retreat, to bring the enemy into a defile. This being accomplished, Houston immediately flanked and attacked him in front and on both sides--opening first with artillery, which, on the second fire, dispersed to atoms the powder boxes of the Mexicans; and then with rifles. The Texians then rushed in from their ambuscade, with pistols, knives and hatchets, and completed the work of destruction. The fight lasted about fifteen minutes, when Santa Anna ordered a retreat. The Mexican soldiers then threw down their arms, most of them without firing! and begged for quarters. The officers broke and endeavored to escape. The mounted riflemen, however, soon overtook all but one, who distanced the rest; him they ran fifteen miles, when his horse bogged down in the prairie near the Brazos timber; he then made for the timber on foot. His pursuers in the eagerness of the chase, dashed into the same bog, and continued the pursuit on foot, following the trail of the fugitive, which was very plain, owing to the recent rains, until they reached the timber, where it was lost. The pursuers then spread themselves and searched the woods for a long time in vain, when it occurred to an _old Hunter_ that the chase might, like a hard pressed bear, have taken a tree. The tree tops were then examined, when lo, the game was discovered snugly ensconced in the forks of a large live oak. The captors did not know who the prisoner was, until they reached the camp, when the Mexican soldiers exclaimed, "El General, El General Santa Anna!"" Never was a victory more decisive and complete. Six hundred of the enemy were left dead upon the field, and as many more taken prisoners. Among the killed were, Gen. Cos, who was recognized by a soldier after the battle, and immediately shot; Gen. Castrillion, Col. Batnes, Col. Trivino, Col. Don Jose Maria Remero, Lieut. Col. Castillo. Among the prisoners were Gen. ANTONIO LOPEZ DE SANTA ANNA, his five aids, six Colonels, five Captains, and twelve Lieutenants. Houston was wounded in the ancle by a musket ball in the early part of the engagement; but remained on his horse until it terminated. On the part of the Texians, only six men were killed and twenty wounded! The history of war does not furnish a parallel to this splendid victory; but Gen. Houston did not tarnish the laurels so gallantly won, by following the example of the Mexicans, in shooting his prisoners of war. They were removed to Galveston Island; and Gen. Santa Anna and his officers were put on board of an armed schooner, and anchored off the shore. Gen. Santa Anna made a proposition that all his army in Texas should lay down their arms--the Independence of Texas acknowledged--the expense of the war to be paid by Mexico, and himself to remain as a hostage. These were to be the terms of peace; but, unfortunately, he does not possess the power to fulfil them. Mexico will not probably, either agree to pay the expense of the war, or to acknowledge the Independence of Texas. The Texian war is national in Mexico; and Santa Anna continued his power solely by directing the popular fury against Texas. His death would give general satisfaction through the Mexican republic; and the Texian war will enable some other brave to rise into power in Mexico. Although this signal victory may not terminate the war in Texas, as there are still nearly three thousand Mexicans there, under Generals Ardrade, Urrea and Sesma; and about five thousand more at Saltillo, ready to enter; yet we believe, it fully settles the question of Texian Independence. The capture of Santa Anna will cause a new revolution in Mexico, and a new organization of government. The Texians will gain time to prepare for the contest. Aid, effective and sufficient, will be received from the United States; and it is not probable that another general will be found, to prosecute the war with the experience and vigor of Santa Anna. The question respecting the acknowledgement of the independence of Texas by the United States, has been moved and discussed in Congress. There seems to be a diversity of opinion among our citizens, whether it would be preferable to acknowledge its independence, or to have it annexed to the United States. Our opinion is, that for all the useful purposes of a good government, the territorial limits of the United States are already sufficiently extensive. If more territory were added, the nation would become too unwieldly to be well managed, and in time would fall to pieces. Texas, of itself, has larger territorial limits than many of the nations of Europe; and when it shall have gained its independence, if wise heads and pure hearts take the lead in its government, it will soon be settled and become a powerful nation. San Felipe is the head quarters of Austin's Colony. It is situated on the south bank of the Brazos river, a hundred miles from the sea. It is three hundred miles southwest from Natchitoches, and five hundred miles west of New-Orleans. The following table shows the distance and bearing of the principal towns in Texas from San Felipe, the names of the rivers and bays upon which they are situated, and their distance from the sea coast. Those accessable to sea vessels, have a star prefixed. +-------------+-------------+----------+---------------------+-----------+ |Distance from| |River or Bay on |Distance from Towns. |San Felipe. |Direction.|which it is situated.|the sea. +-------------+-------------+----------+---------------------+-----------+ San Antonio, 170 W. San Antonio, 200 St. Augustine, 250 N.E. Ayish Bayou, 150 *Anahuac, 120 E. Galveston Bay, 50 *Brazoria, 75 S.E. Brazos, 30 *Bolivar, 50 S.E. Brazos, 55 Bastrap, 100 N.W. Colorado, 180 *Columbia, 65 S.E. Brazos, 40 Cole's Settlement, 40 N. Prairie, 140 *Copano, 150 S.W. Aransaso, 25 Electra, 45 N.W. Colorado, 150 Goliad, 125 S.W. San Antonio, 75 Gonzales, 125 W. Guadalupe, 180 *Harrisburg, 65 E. Galveston Bay, 75 Liberty, 125 N.E. Trinity, 55 *Linchburg, 75 N.E. Galveston Bay, 75 *Matagorda, 100 S. Colorado, 20 Montezuma, 35 W. Colorado, 130 *Matamoras, 280 S.W. Rio del Norte, 45 Monclova, 390 S.W. On Prairie, 280 Nacogdoches, 245 N.E. On Prairie, 150 *Orazimba, 55 S.E. Brazos, 50 *Refugio, 290 S. Rio del Norte, 1 San Patrick, 180 S.W. Neuces, 50 Tinoxtitlan, 100 N.W. Brazos, 200 *Velasco, 100 S.E. Brazos, O Victoria, 100 S.W. Guadalupe, 75 Zavallas, 200 N.E. Neches, 80 Transcribers note: Apart from a few obvious printers errors original spelling has been retained. 
7195	----	THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER BY MARK TWAIN (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) Part 3 CHAPTER VIII TOM dodged hither and thither through lanes until he was well out of the track of returning scholars, and then fell into a moody jog. He crossed a small "branch" two or three times, because of a prevailing juvenile superstition that to cross water baffled pursuit. Half an hour later he was disappearing behind the Douglas mansion on the summit of Cardiff Hill, and the schoolhouse was hardly distinguishable away off in the valley behind him. He entered a dense wood, picked his pathless way to the centre of it, and sat down on a mossy spot under a spreading oak. There was not even a zephyr stirring; the dead noonday heat had even stilled the songs of the birds; nature lay in a trance that was broken by no sound but the occasional far-off hammering of a woodpecker, and this seemed to render the pervading silence and sense of loneliness the more profound. The boy's soul was steeped in melancholy; his feelings were in happy accord with his surroundings. He sat long with his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, meditating. It seemed to him that life was but a trouble, at best, and he more than half envied Jimmy Hodges, so lately released; it must be very peaceful, he thought, to lie and slumber and dream forever and ever, with the wind whispering through the trees and caressing the grass and the flowers over the grave, and nothing to bother and grieve about, ever any more. If he only had a clean Sunday-school record he could be willing to go, and be done with it all. Now as to this girl. What had he done? Nothing. He had meant the best in the world, and been treated like a dog--like a very dog. She would be sorry some day--maybe when it was too late. Ah, if he could only die TEMPORARILY! But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time. Tom presently began to drift insensibly back into the concerns of this life again. What if he turned his back, now, and disappeared mysteriously? What if he went away--ever so far away, into unknown countries beyond the seas--and never came back any more! How would she feel then! The idea of being a clown recurred to him now, only to fill him with disgust. For frivolity and jokes and spotted tights were an offense, when they intruded themselves upon a spirit that was exalted into the vague august realm of the romantic. No, he would be a soldier, and return after long years, all war-worn and illustrious. No--better still, he would join the Indians, and hunt buffaloes and go on the warpath in the mountain ranges and the trackless great plains of the Far West, and away in the future come back a great chief, bristling with feathers, hideous with paint, and prance into Sunday-school, some drowsy summer morning, with a bloodcurdling war-whoop, and sear the eyeballs of all his companions with unappeasable envy. But no, there was something gaudier even than this. He would be a pirate! That was it! NOW his future lay plain before him, and glowing with unimaginable splendor. How his name would fill the world, and make people shudder! How gloriously he would go plowing the dancing seas, in his long, low, black-hulled racer, the Spirit of the Storm, with his grisly flag flying at the fore! And at the zenith of his fame, how he would suddenly appear at the old village and stalk into church, brown and weather-beaten, in his black velvet doublet and trunks, his great jack-boots, his crimson sash, his belt bristling with horse-pistols, his crime-rusted cutlass at his side, his slouch hat with waving plumes, his black flag unfurled, with the skull and crossbones on it, and hear with swelling ecstasy the whisperings, "It's Tom Sawyer the Pirate!--the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main!" Yes, it was settled; his career was determined. He would run away from home and enter upon it. He would start the very next morning. Therefore he must now begin to get ready. He would collect his resources together. He went to a rotten log near at hand and began to dig under one end of it with his Barlow knife. He soon struck wood that sounded hollow. He put his hand there and uttered this incantation impressively: "What hasn't come here, come! What's here, stay here!" Then he scraped away the dirt, and exposed a pine shingle. He took it up and disclosed a shapely little treasure-house whose bottom and sides were of shingles. In it lay a marble. Tom's astonishment was boundless! He scratched his head with a perplexed air, and said: "Well, that beats anything!" Then he tossed the marble away pettishly, and stood cogitating. The truth was, that a superstition of his had failed, here, which he and all his comrades had always looked upon as infallible. If you buried a marble with certain necessary incantations, and left it alone a fortnight, and then opened the place with the incantation he had just used, you would find that all the marbles you had ever lost had gathered themselves together there, meantime, no matter how widely they had been separated. But now, this thing had actually and unquestionably failed. Tom's whole structure of faith was shaken to its foundations. He had many a time heard of this thing succeeding but never of its failing before. It did not occur to him that he had tried it several times before, himself, but could never find the hiding-places afterward. He puzzled over the matter some time, and finally decided that some witch had interfered and broken the charm. He thought he would satisfy himself on that point; so he searched around till he found a small sandy spot with a little funnel-shaped depression in it. He laid himself down and put his mouth close to this depression and called-- "Doodle-bug, doodle-bug, tell me what I want to know! Doodle-bug, doodle-bug, tell me what I want to know!" The sand began to work, and presently a small black bug appeared for a second and then darted under again in a fright. "He dasn't tell! So it WAS a witch that done it. I just knowed it." He well knew the futility of trying to contend against witches, so he gave up discouraged. But it occurred to him that he might as well have the marble he had just thrown away, and therefore he went and made a patient search for it. But he could not find it. Now he went back to his treasure-house and carefully placed himself just as he had been standing when he tossed the marble away; then he took another marble from his pocket and tossed it in the same way, saying: "Brother, go find your brother!" He watched where it stopped, and went there and looked. But it must have fallen short or gone too far; so he tried twice more. The last repetition was successful. The two marbles lay within a foot of each other. Just here the blast of a toy tin trumpet came faintly down the green aisles of the forest. Tom flung off his jacket and trousers, turned a suspender into a belt, raked away some brush behind the rotten log, disclosing a rude bow and arrow, a lath sword and a tin trumpet, and in a moment had seized these things and bounded away, barelegged, with fluttering shirt. He presently halted under a great elm, blew an answering blast, and then began to tiptoe and look warily out, this way and that. He said cautiously--to an imaginary company: "Hold, my merry men! Keep hid till I blow." Now appeared Joe Harper, as airily clad and elaborately armed as Tom. Tom called: "Hold! Who comes here into Sherwood Forest without my pass?" "Guy of Guisborne wants no man's pass. Who art thou that--that--" "Dares to hold such language," said Tom, prompting--for they talked "by the book," from memory. "Who art thou that dares to hold such language?" "I, indeed! I am Robin Hood, as thy caitiff carcase soon shall know." "Then art thou indeed that famous outlaw? Right gladly will I dispute with thee the passes of the merry wood. Have at thee!" They took their lath swords, dumped their other traps on the ground, struck a fencing attitude, foot to foot, and began a grave, careful combat, "two up and two down." Presently Tom said: "Now, if you've got the hang, go it lively!" So they "went it lively," panting and perspiring with the work. By and by Tom shouted: "Fall! fall! Why don't you fall?" "I sha'n't! Why don't you fall yourself? You're getting the worst of it." "Why, that ain't anything. I can't fall; that ain't the way it is in the book. The book says, 'Then with one back-handed stroke he slew poor Guy of Guisborne.' You're to turn around and let me hit you in the back." There was no getting around the authorities, so Joe turned, received the whack and fell. "Now," said Joe, getting up, "you got to let me kill YOU. That's fair." "Why, I can't do that, it ain't in the book." "Well, it's blamed mean--that's all." "Well, say, Joe, you can be Friar Tuck or Much the miller's son, and lam me with a quarter-staff; or I'll be the Sheriff of Nottingham and you be Robin Hood a little while and kill me." This was satisfactory, and so these adventures were carried out. Then Tom became Robin Hood again, and was allowed by the treacherous nun to bleed his strength away through his neglected wound. And at last Joe, representing a whole tribe of weeping outlaws, dragged him sadly forth, gave his bow into his feeble hands, and Tom said, "Where this arrow falls, there bury poor Robin Hood under the greenwood tree." Then he shot the arrow and fell back and would have died, but he lit on a nettle and sprang up too gaily for a corpse. The boys dressed themselves, hid their accoutrements, and went off grieving that there were no outlaws any more, and wondering what modern civilization could claim to have done to compensate for their loss. They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever. CHAPTER IX AT half-past nine, that night, Tom and Sid were sent to bed, as usual. They said their prayers, and Sid was soon asleep. Tom lay awake and waited, in restless impatience. When it seemed to him that it must be nearly daylight, he heard the clock strike ten! This was despair. He would have tossed and fidgeted, as his nerves demanded, but he was afraid he might wake Sid. So he lay still, and stared up into the dark. Everything was dismally still. By and by, out of the stillness, little, scarcely perceptible noises began to emphasize themselves. The ticking of the clock began to bring itself into notice. Old beams began to crack mysteriously. The stairs creaked faintly. Evidently spirits were abroad. A measured, muffled snore issued from Aunt Polly's chamber. And now the tiresome chirping of a cricket that no human ingenuity could locate, began. Next the ghastly ticking of a deathwatch in the wall at the bed's head made Tom shudder--it meant that somebody's days were numbered. Then the howl of a far-off dog rose on the night air, and was answered by a fainter howl from a remoter distance. Tom was in an agony. At last he was satisfied that time had ceased and eternity begun; he began to doze, in spite of himself; the clock chimed eleven, but he did not hear it. And then there came, mingling with his half-formed dreams, a most melancholy caterwauling. The raising of a neighboring window disturbed him. A cry of "Scat! you devil!" and the crash of an empty bottle against the back of his aunt's woodshed brought him wide awake, and a single minute later he was dressed and out of the window and creeping along the roof of the "ell" on all fours. He "meow'd" with caution once or twice, as he went; then jumped to the roof of the woodshed and thence to the ground. Huckleberry Finn was there, with his dead cat. The boys moved off and disappeared in the gloom. At the end of half an hour they were wading through the tall grass of the graveyard. It was a graveyard of the old-fashioned Western kind. It was on a hill, about a mile and a half from the village. It had a crazy board fence around it, which leaned inward in places, and outward the rest of the time, but stood upright nowhere. Grass and weeds grew rank over the whole cemetery. All the old graves were sunken in, there was not a tombstone on the place; round-topped, worm-eaten boards staggered over the graves, leaning for support and finding none. "Sacred to the memory of" So-and-So had been painted on them once, but it could no longer have been read, on the most of them, now, even if there had been light. A faint wind moaned through the trees, and Tom feared it might be the spirits of the dead, complaining at being disturbed. The boys talked little, and only under their breath, for the time and the place and the pervading solemnity and silence oppressed their spirits. They found the sharp new heap they were seeking, and ensconced themselves within the protection of three great elms that grew in a bunch within a few feet of the grave. Then they waited in silence for what seemed a long time. The hooting of a distant owl was all the sound that troubled the dead stillness. Tom's reflections grew oppressive. He must force some talk. So he said in a whisper: "Hucky, do you believe the dead people like it for us to be here?" Huckleberry whispered: "I wisht I knowed. It's awful solemn like, AIN'T it?" "I bet it is." There was a considerable pause, while the boys canvassed this matter inwardly. Then Tom whispered: "Say, Hucky--do you reckon Hoss Williams hears us talking?" "O' course he does. Least his sperrit does." Tom, after a pause: "I wish I'd said Mister Williams. But I never meant any harm. Everybody calls him Hoss." "A body can't be too partic'lar how they talk 'bout these-yer dead people, Tom." This was a damper, and conversation died again. Presently Tom seized his comrade's arm and said: "Sh!" "What is it, Tom?" And the two clung together with beating hearts. "Sh! There 'tis again! Didn't you hear it?" "I--" "There! Now you hear it." "Lord, Tom, they're coming! They're coming, sure. What'll we do?" "I dono. Think they'll see us?" "Oh, Tom, they can see in the dark, same as cats. I wisht I hadn't come." "Oh, don't be afeard. I don't believe they'll bother us. We ain't doing any harm. If we keep perfectly still, maybe they won't notice us at all." "I'll try to, Tom, but, Lord, I'm all of a shiver." "Listen!" The boys bent their heads together and scarcely breathed. A muffled sound of voices floated up from the far end of the graveyard. "Look! See there!" whispered Tom. "What is it?" "It's devil-fire. Oh, Tom, this is awful." Some vague figures approached through the gloom, swinging an old-fashioned tin lantern that freckled the ground with innumerable little spangles of light. Presently Huckleberry whispered with a shudder: "It's the devils sure enough. Three of 'em! Lordy, Tom, we're goners! Can you pray?" "I'll try, but don't you be afeard. They ain't going to hurt us. 'Now I lay me down to sleep, I--'" "Sh!" "What is it, Huck?" "They're HUMANS! One of 'em is, anyway. One of 'em's old Muff Potter's voice." "No--'tain't so, is it?" "I bet I know it. Don't you stir nor budge. He ain't sharp enough to notice us. Drunk, the same as usual, likely--blamed old rip!" "All right, I'll keep still. Now they're stuck. Can't find it. Here they come again. Now they're hot. Cold again. Hot again. Red hot! They're p'inted right, this time. Say, Huck, I know another o' them voices; it's Injun Joe." "That's so--that murderin' half-breed! I'd druther they was devils a dern sight. What kin they be up to?" The whisper died wholly out, now, for the three men had reached the grave and stood within a few feet of the boys' hiding-place. "Here it is," said the third voice; and the owner of it held the lantern up and revealed the face of young Doctor Robinson. Potter and Injun Joe were carrying a handbarrow with a rope and a couple of shovels on it. They cast down their load and began to open the grave. The doctor put the lantern at the head of the grave and came and sat down with his back against one of the elm trees. He was so close the boys could have touched him. "Hurry, men!" he said, in a low voice; "the moon might come out at any moment." They growled a response and went on digging. For some time there was no noise but the grating sound of the spades discharging their freight of mould and gravel. It was very monotonous. Finally a spade struck upon the coffin with a dull woody accent, and within another minute or two the men had hoisted it out on the ground. They pried off the lid with their shovels, got out the body and dumped it rudely on the ground. The moon drifted from behind the clouds and exposed the pallid face. The barrow was got ready and the corpse placed on it, covered with a blanket, and bound to its place with the rope. Potter took out a large spring-knife and cut off the dangling end of the rope and then said: "Now the cussed thing's ready, Sawbones, and you'll just out with another five, or here she stays." "That's the talk!" said Injun Joe. "Look here, what does this mean?" said the doctor. "You required your pay in advance, and I've paid you." "Yes, and you done more than that," said Injun Joe, approaching the doctor, who was now standing. "Five years ago you drove me away from your father's kitchen one night, when I come to ask for something to eat, and you said I warn't there for any good; and when I swore I'd get even with you if it took a hundred years, your father had me jailed for a vagrant. Did you think I'd forget? The Injun blood ain't in me for nothing. And now I've GOT you, and you got to SETTLE, you know!" He was threatening the doctor, with his fist in his face, by this time. The doctor struck out suddenly and stretched the ruffian on the ground. Potter dropped his knife, and exclaimed: "Here, now, don't you hit my pard!" and the next moment he had grappled with the doctor and the two were struggling with might and main, trampling the grass and tearing the ground with their heels. Injun Joe sprang to his feet, his eyes flaming with passion, snatched up Potter's knife, and went creeping, catlike and stooping, round and round about the combatants, seeking an opportunity. All at once the doctor flung himself free, seized the heavy headboard of Williams' grave and felled Potter to the earth with it--and in the same instant the half-breed saw his chance and drove the knife to the hilt in the young man's breast. He reeled and fell partly upon Potter, flooding him with his blood, and in the same moment the clouds blotted out the dreadful spectacle and the two frightened boys went speeding away in the dark. Presently, when the moon emerged again, Injun Joe was standing over the two forms, contemplating them. The doctor murmured inarticulately, gave a long gasp or two and was still. The half-breed muttered: "THAT score is settled--damn you." Then he robbed the body. After which he put the fatal knife in Potter's open right hand, and sat down on the dismantled coffin. Three --four--five minutes passed, and then Potter began to stir and moan. His hand closed upon the knife; he raised it, glanced at it, and let it fall, with a shudder. Then he sat up, pushing the body from him, and gazed at it, and then around him, confusedly. His eyes met Joe's. "Lord, how is this, Joe?" he said. "It's a dirty business," said Joe, without moving. "What did you do it for?" "I! I never done it!" "Look here! That kind of talk won't wash." Potter trembled and grew white. "I thought I'd got sober. I'd no business to drink to-night. But it's in my head yet--worse'n when we started here. I'm all in a muddle; can't recollect anything of it, hardly. Tell me, Joe--HONEST, now, old feller--did I do it? Joe, I never meant to--'pon my soul and honor, I never meant to, Joe. Tell me how it was, Joe. Oh, it's awful--and him so young and promising." "Why, you two was scuffling, and he fetched you one with the headboard and you fell flat; and then up you come, all reeling and staggering like, and snatched the knife and jammed it into him, just as he fetched you another awful clip--and here you've laid, as dead as a wedge til now." "Oh, I didn't know what I was a-doing. I wish I may die this minute if I did. It was all on account of the whiskey and the excitement, I reckon. I never used a weepon in my life before, Joe. I've fought, but never with weepons. They'll all say that. Joe, don't tell! Say you won't tell, Joe--that's a good feller. I always liked you, Joe, and stood up for you, too. Don't you remember? You WON'T tell, WILL you, Joe?" And the poor creature dropped on his knees before the stolid murderer, and clasped his appealing hands. "No, you've always been fair and square with me, Muff Potter, and I won't go back on you. There, now, that's as fair as a man can say." "Oh, Joe, you're an angel. I'll bless you for this the longest day I live." And Potter began to cry. "Come, now, that's enough of that. This ain't any time for blubbering. You be off yonder way and I'll go this. Move, now, and don't leave any tracks behind you." Potter started on a trot that quickly increased to a run. The half-breed stood looking after him. He muttered: "If he's as much stunned with the lick and fuddled with the rum as he had the look of being, he won't think of the knife till he's gone so far he'll be afraid to come back after it to such a place by himself --chicken-heart!" Two or three minutes later the murdered man, the blanketed corpse, the lidless coffin, and the open grave were under no inspection but the moon's. The stillness was complete again, too. CHAPTER X THE two boys flew on and on, toward the village, speechless with horror. They glanced backward over their shoulders from time to time, apprehensively, as if they feared they might be followed. Every stump that started up in their path seemed a man and an enemy, and made them catch their breath; and as they sped by some outlying cottages that lay near the village, the barking of the aroused watch-dogs seemed to give wings to their feet. "If we can only get to the old tannery before we break down!" whispered Tom, in short catches between breaths. "I can't stand it much longer." Huckleberry's hard pantings were his only reply, and the boys fixed their eyes on the goal of their hopes and bent to their work to win it. They gained steadily on it, and at last, breast to breast, they burst through the open door and fell grateful and exhausted in the sheltering shadows beyond. By and by their pulses slowed down, and Tom whispered: "Huckleberry, what do you reckon'll come of this?" "If Doctor Robinson dies, I reckon hanging'll come of it." "Do you though?" "Why, I KNOW it, Tom." Tom thought a while, then he said: "Who'll tell? We?" "What are you talking about? S'pose something happened and Injun Joe DIDN'T hang? Why, he'd kill us some time or other, just as dead sure as we're a laying here." "That's just what I was thinking to myself, Huck." "If anybody tells, let Muff Potter do it, if he's fool enough. He's generally drunk enough." Tom said nothing--went on thinking. Presently he whispered: "Huck, Muff Potter don't know it. How can he tell?" "What's the reason he don't know it?" "Because he'd just got that whack when Injun Joe done it. D'you reckon he could see anything? D'you reckon he knowed anything?" "By hokey, that's so, Tom!" "And besides, look-a-here--maybe that whack done for HIM!" "No, 'taint likely, Tom. He had liquor in him; I could see that; and besides, he always has. Well, when pap's full, you might take and belt him over the head with a church and you couldn't phase him. He says so, his own self. So it's the same with Muff Potter, of course. But if a man was dead sober, I reckon maybe that whack might fetch him; I dono." After another reflective silence, Tom said: "Hucky, you sure you can keep mum?" "Tom, we GOT to keep mum. You know that. That Injun devil wouldn't make any more of drownding us than a couple of cats, if we was to squeak 'bout this and they didn't hang him. Now, look-a-here, Tom, less take and swear to one another--that's what we got to do--swear to keep mum." "I'm agreed. It's the best thing. Would you just hold hands and swear that we--" "Oh no, that wouldn't do for this. That's good enough for little rubbishy common things--specially with gals, cuz THEY go back on you anyway, and blab if they get in a huff--but there orter be writing 'bout a big thing like this. And blood." Tom's whole being applauded this idea. It was deep, and dark, and awful; the hour, the circumstances, the surroundings, were in keeping with it. He picked up a clean pine shingle that lay in the moonlight, took a little fragment of "red keel" out of his pocket, got the moon on his work, and painfully scrawled these lines, emphasizing each slow down-stroke by clamping his tongue between his teeth, and letting up the pressure on the up-strokes. [See next page.] "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer swears they will keep mum about This and They wish They may Drop down dead in Their Tracks if They ever Tell and Rot." Huckleberry was filled with admiration of Tom's facility in writing, and the sublimity of his language. He at once took a pin from his lapel and was going to prick his flesh, but Tom said: "Hold on! Don't do that. A pin's brass. It might have verdigrease on it." "What's verdigrease?" "It's p'ison. That's what it is. You just swaller some of it once --you'll see." So Tom unwound the thread from one of his needles, and each boy pricked the ball of his thumb and squeezed out a drop of blood. In time, after many squeezes, Tom managed to sign his initials, using the ball of his little finger for a pen. Then he showed Huckleberry how to make an H and an F, and the oath was complete. They buried the shingle close to the wall, with some dismal ceremonies and incantations, and the fetters that bound their tongues were considered to be locked and the key thrown away. A figure crept stealthily through a break in the other end of the ruined building, now, but they did not notice it. "Tom," whispered Huckleberry, "does this keep us from EVER telling --ALWAYS?" "Of course it does. It don't make any difference WHAT happens, we got to keep mum. We'd drop down dead--don't YOU know that?" "Yes, I reckon that's so." They continued to whisper for some little time. Presently a dog set up a long, lugubrious howl just outside--within ten feet of them. The boys clasped each other suddenly, in an agony of fright. "Which of us does he mean?" gasped Huckleberry. "I dono--peep through the crack. Quick!" "No, YOU, Tom!" "I can't--I can't DO it, Huck!" "Please, Tom. There 'tis again!" "Oh, lordy, I'm thankful!" whispered Tom. "I know his voice. It's Bull Harbison." * [* If Mr. Harbison owned a slave named Bull, Tom would have spoken of him as "Harbison's Bull," but a son or a dog of that name was "Bull Harbison."] "Oh, that's good--I tell you, Tom, I was most scared to death; I'd a bet anything it was a STRAY dog." The dog howled again. The boys' hearts sank once more. "Oh, my! that ain't no Bull Harbison!" whispered Huckleberry. "DO, Tom!" Tom, quaking with fear, yielded, and put his eye to the crack. His whisper was hardly audible when he said: "Oh, Huck, IT S A STRAY DOG!" "Quick, Tom, quick! Who does he mean?" "Huck, he must mean us both--we're right together." "Oh, Tom, I reckon we're goners. I reckon there ain't no mistake 'bout where I'LL go to. I been so wicked." "Dad fetch it! This comes of playing hookey and doing everything a feller's told NOT to do. I might a been good, like Sid, if I'd a tried --but no, I wouldn't, of course. But if ever I get off this time, I lay I'll just WALLER in Sunday-schools!" And Tom began to snuffle a little. "YOU bad!" and Huckleberry began to snuffle too. "Consound it, Tom Sawyer, you're just old pie, 'longside o' what I am. Oh, LORDY, lordy, lordy, I wisht I only had half your chance." Tom choked off and whispered: "Look, Hucky, look! He's got his BACK to us!" Hucky looked, with joy in his heart. "Well, he has, by jingoes! Did he before?" "Yes, he did. But I, like a fool, never thought. Oh, this is bully, you know. NOW who can he mean?" The howling stopped. Tom pricked up his ears. "Sh! What's that?" he whispered. "Sounds like--like hogs grunting. No--it's somebody snoring, Tom." "That IS it! Where 'bouts is it, Huck?" "I bleeve it's down at 'tother end. Sounds so, anyway. Pap used to sleep there, sometimes, 'long with the hogs, but laws bless you, he just lifts things when HE snores. Besides, I reckon he ain't ever coming back to this town any more." The spirit of adventure rose in the boys' souls once more. "Hucky, do you das't to go if I lead?" "I don't like to, much. Tom, s'pose it's Injun Joe!" Tom quailed. But presently the temptation rose up strong again and the boys agreed to try, with the understanding that they would take to their heels if the snoring stopped. So they went tiptoeing stealthily down, the one behind the other. When they had got to within five steps of the snorer, Tom stepped on a stick, and it broke with a sharp snap. The man moaned, writhed a little, and his face came into the moonlight. It was Muff Potter. The boys' hearts had stood still, and their hopes too, when the man moved, but their fears passed away now. They tiptoed out, through the broken weather-boarding, and stopped at a little distance to exchange a parting word. That long, lugubrious howl rose on the night air again! They turned and saw the strange dog standing within a few feet of where Potter was lying, and FACING Potter, with his nose pointing heavenward. "Oh, geeminy, it's HIM!" exclaimed both boys, in a breath. "Say, Tom--they say a stray dog come howling around Johnny Miller's house, 'bout midnight, as much as two weeks ago; and a whippoorwill come in and lit on the banisters and sung, the very same evening; and there ain't anybody dead there yet." "Well, I know that. And suppose there ain't. Didn't Gracie Miller fall in the kitchen fire and burn herself terrible the very next Saturday?" "Yes, but she ain't DEAD. And what's more, she's getting better, too." "All right, you wait and see. She's a goner, just as dead sure as Muff Potter's a goner. That's what the niggers say, and they know all about these kind of things, Huck." Then they separated, cogitating. When Tom crept in at his bedroom window the night was almost spent. He undressed with excessive caution, and fell asleep congratulating himself that nobody knew of his escapade. He was not aware that the gently-snoring Sid was awake, and had been so for an hour. When Tom awoke, Sid was dressed and gone. There was a late look in the light, a late sense in the atmosphere. He was startled. Why had he not been called--persecuted till he was up, as usual? The thought filled him with bodings. Within five minutes he was dressed and down-stairs, feeling sore and drowsy. The family were still at table, but they had finished breakfast. There was no voice of rebuke; but there were averted eyes; there was a silence and an air of solemnity that struck a chill to the culprit's heart. He sat down and tried to seem gay, but it was up-hill work; it roused no smile, no response, and he lapsed into silence and let his heart sink down to the depths. After breakfast his aunt took him aside, and Tom almost brightened in the hope that he was going to be flogged; but it was not so. His aunt wept over him and asked him how he could go and break her old heart so; and finally told him to go on, and ruin himself and bring her gray hairs with sorrow to the grave, for it was no use for her to try any more. This was worse than a thousand whippings, and Tom's heart was sorer now than his body. He cried, he pleaded for forgiveness, promised to reform over and over again, and then received his dismissal, feeling that he had won but an imperfect forgiveness and established but a feeble confidence. He left the presence too miserable to even feel revengeful toward Sid; and so the latter's prompt retreat through the back gate was unnecessary. He moped to school gloomy and sad, and took his flogging, along with Joe Harper, for playing hookey the day before, with the air of one whose heart was busy with heavier woes and wholly dead to trifles. Then he betook himself to his seat, rested his elbows on his desk and his jaws in his hands, and stared at the wall with the stony stare of suffering that has reached the limit and can no further go. His elbow was pressing against some hard substance. After a long time he slowly and sadly changed his position, and took up this object with a sigh. It was in a paper. He unrolled it. A long, lingering, colossal sigh followed, and his heart broke. It was his brass andiron knob! This final feather broke the camel's back. CHAPTER XI CLOSE upon the hour of noon the whole village was suddenly electrified with the ghastly news. No need of the as yet undreamed-of telegraph; the tale flew from man to man, from group to group, from house to house, with little less than telegraphic speed. Of course the schoolmaster gave holiday for that afternoon; the town would have thought strangely of him if he had not. A gory knife had been found close to the murdered man, and it had been recognized by somebody as belonging to Muff Potter--so the story ran. And it was said that a belated citizen had come upon Potter washing himself in the "branch" about one or two o'clock in the morning, and that Potter had at once sneaked off--suspicious circumstances, especially the washing which was not a habit with Potter. It was also said that the town had been ransacked for this "murderer" (the public are not slow in the matter of sifting evidence and arriving at a verdict), but that he could not be found. Horsemen had departed down all the roads in every direction, and the Sheriff "was confident" that he would be captured before night. All the town was drifting toward the graveyard. Tom's heartbreak vanished and he joined the procession, not because he would not a thousand times rather go anywhere else, but because an awful, unaccountable fascination drew him on. Arrived at the dreadful place, he wormed his small body through the crowd and saw the dismal spectacle. It seemed to him an age since he was there before. Somebody pinched his arm. He turned, and his eyes met Huckleberry's. Then both looked elsewhere at once, and wondered if anybody had noticed anything in their mutual glance. But everybody was talking, and intent upon the grisly spectacle before them. "Poor fellow!" "Poor young fellow!" "This ought to be a lesson to grave robbers!" "Muff Potter'll hang for this if they catch him!" This was the drift of remark; and the minister said, "It was a judgment; His hand is here." Now Tom shivered from head to heel; for his eye fell upon the stolid face of Injun Joe. At this moment the crowd began to sway and struggle, and voices shouted, "It's him! it's him! he's coming himself!" "Who? Who?" from twenty voices. "Muff Potter!" "Hallo, he's stopped!--Look out, he's turning! Don't let him get away!" People in the branches of the trees over Tom's head said he wasn't trying to get away--he only looked doubtful and perplexed. "Infernal impudence!" said a bystander; "wanted to come and take a quiet look at his work, I reckon--didn't expect any company." The crowd fell apart, now, and the Sheriff came through, ostentatiously leading Potter by the arm. The poor fellow's face was haggard, and his eyes showed the fear that was upon him. When he stood before the murdered man, he shook as with a palsy, and he put his face in his hands and burst into tears. "I didn't do it, friends," he sobbed; "'pon my word and honor I never done it." "Who's accused you?" shouted a voice. This shot seemed to carry home. Potter lifted his face and looked around him with a pathetic hopelessness in his eyes. He saw Injun Joe, and exclaimed: "Oh, Injun Joe, you promised me you'd never--" "Is that your knife?" and it was thrust before him by the Sheriff. Potter would have fallen if they had not caught him and eased him to the ground. Then he said: "Something told me 't if I didn't come back and get--" He shuddered; then waved his nerveless hand with a vanquished gesture and said, "Tell 'em, Joe, tell 'em--it ain't any use any more." Then Huckleberry and Tom stood dumb and staring, and heard the stony-hearted liar reel off his serene statement, they expecting every moment that the clear sky would deliver God's lightnings upon his head, and wondering to see how long the stroke was delayed. And when he had finished and still stood alive and whole, their wavering impulse to break their oath and save the poor betrayed prisoner's life faded and vanished away, for plainly this miscreant had sold himself to Satan and it would be fatal to meddle with the property of such a power as that. "Why didn't you leave? What did you want to come here for?" somebody said. "I couldn't help it--I couldn't help it," Potter moaned. "I wanted to run away, but I couldn't seem to come anywhere but here." And he fell to sobbing again. Injun Joe repeated his statement, just as calmly, a few minutes afterward on the inquest, under oath; and the boys, seeing that the lightnings were still withheld, were confirmed in their belief that Joe had sold himself to the devil. He was now become, to them, the most balefully interesting object they had ever looked upon, and they could not take their fascinated eyes from his face. They inwardly resolved to watch him nights, when opportunity should offer, in the hope of getting a glimpse of his dread master. Injun Joe helped to raise the body of the murdered man and put it in a wagon for removal; and it was whispered through the shuddering crowd that the wound bled a little! The boys thought that this happy circumstance would turn suspicion in the right direction; but they were disappointed, for more than one villager remarked: "It was within three feet of Muff Potter when it done it." Tom's fearful secret and gnawing conscience disturbed his sleep for as much as a week after this; and at breakfast one morning Sid said: "Tom, you pitch around and talk in your sleep so much that you keep me awake half the time." Tom blanched and dropped his eyes. "It's a bad sign," said Aunt Polly, gravely. "What you got on your mind, Tom?" "Nothing. Nothing 't I know of." But the boy's hand shook so that he spilled his coffee. "And you do talk such stuff," Sid said. "Last night you said, 'It's blood, it's blood, that's what it is!' You said that over and over. And you said, 'Don't torment me so--I'll tell!' Tell WHAT? What is it you'll tell?" Everything was swimming before Tom. There is no telling what might have happened, now, but luckily the concern passed out of Aunt Polly's face and she came to Tom's relief without knowing it. She said: "Sho! It's that dreadful murder. I dream about it most every night myself. Sometimes I dream it's me that done it." Mary said she had been affected much the same way. Sid seemed satisfied. Tom got out of the presence as quick as he plausibly could, and after that he complained of toothache for a week, and tied up his jaws every night. He never knew that Sid lay nightly watching, and frequently slipped the bandage free and then leaned on his elbow listening a good while at a time, and afterward slipped the bandage back to its place again. Tom's distress of mind wore off gradually and the toothache grew irksome and was discarded. If Sid really managed to make anything out of Tom's disjointed mutterings, he kept it to himself. It seemed to Tom that his schoolmates never would get done holding inquests on dead cats, and thus keeping his trouble present to his mind. Sid noticed that Tom never was coroner at one of these inquiries, though it had been his habit to take the lead in all new enterprises; he noticed, too, that Tom never acted as a witness--and that was strange; and Sid did not overlook the fact that Tom even showed a marked aversion to these inquests, and always avoided them when he could. Sid marvelled, but said nothing. However, even inquests went out of vogue at last, and ceased to torture Tom's conscience. Every day or two, during this time of sorrow, Tom watched his opportunity and went to the little grated jail-window and smuggled such small comforts through to the "murderer" as he could get hold of. The jail was a trifling little brick den that stood in a marsh at the edge of the village, and no guards were afforded for it; indeed, it was seldom occupied. These offerings greatly helped to ease Tom's conscience. The villagers had a strong desire to tar-and-feather Injun Joe and ride him on a rail, for body-snatching, but so formidable was his character that nobody could be found who was willing to take the lead in the matter, so it was dropped. He had been careful to begin both of his inquest-statements with the fight, without confessing the grave-robbery that preceded it; therefore it was deemed wisest not to try the case in the courts at present. CHAPTER XII ONE of the reasons why Tom's mind had drifted away from its secret troubles was, that it had found a new and weighty matter to interest itself about. Becky Thatcher had stopped coming to school. Tom had struggled with his pride a few days, and tried to "whistle her down the wind," but failed. He began to find himself hanging around her father's house, nights, and feeling very miserable. She was ill. What if she should die! There was distraction in the thought. He no longer took an interest in war, nor even in piracy. The charm of life was gone; there was nothing but dreariness left. He put his hoop away, and his bat; there was no joy in them any more. His aunt was concerned. She began to try all manner of remedies on him. She was one of those people who are infatuated with patent medicines and all new-fangled methods of producing health or mending it. She was an inveterate experimenter in these things. When something fresh in this line came out she was in a fever, right away, to try it; not on herself, for she was never ailing, but on anybody else that came handy. She was a subscriber for all the "Health" periodicals and phrenological frauds; and the solemn ignorance they were inflated with was breath to her nostrils. All the "rot" they contained about ventilation, and how to go to bed, and how to get up, and what to eat, and what to drink, and how much exercise to take, and what frame of mind to keep one's self in, and what sort of clothing to wear, was all gospel to her, and she never observed that her health-journals of the current month customarily upset everything they had recommended the month before. She was as simple-hearted and honest as the day was long, and so she was an easy victim. She gathered together her quack periodicals and her quack medicines, and thus armed with death, went about on her pale horse, metaphorically speaking, with "hell following after." But she never suspected that she was not an angel of healing and the balm of Gilead in disguise, to the suffering neighbors. The water treatment was new, now, and Tom's low condition was a windfall to her. She had him out at daylight every morning, stood him up in the woodshed and drowned him with a deluge of cold water; then she scrubbed him down with a towel like a file, and so brought him to; then she rolled him up in a wet sheet and put him away under blankets till she sweated his soul clean and "the yellow stains of it came through his pores"--as Tom said. Yet notwithstanding all this, the boy grew more and more melancholy and pale and dejected. She added hot baths, sitz baths, shower baths, and plunges. The boy remained as dismal as a hearse. She began to assist the water with a slim oatmeal diet and blister-plasters. She calculated his capacity as she would a jug's, and filled him up every day with quack cure-alls. Tom had become indifferent to persecution by this time. This phase filled the old lady's heart with consternation. This indifference must be broken up at any cost. Now she heard of Pain-killer for the first time. She ordered a lot at once. She tasted it and was filled with gratitude. It was simply fire in a liquid form. She dropped the water treatment and everything else, and pinned her faith to Pain-killer. She gave Tom a teaspoonful and watched with the deepest anxiety for the result. Her troubles were instantly at rest, her soul at peace again; for the "indifference" was broken up. The boy could not have shown a wilder, heartier interest, if she had built a fire under him. Tom felt that it was time to wake up; this sort of life might be romantic enough, in his blighted condition, but it was getting to have too little sentiment and too much distracting variety about it. So he thought over various plans for relief, and finally hit pon that of professing to be fond of Pain-killer. He asked for it so often that he became a nuisance, and his aunt ended by telling him to help himself and quit bothering her. If it had been Sid, she would have had no misgivings to alloy her delight; but since it was Tom, she watched the bottle clandestinely. She found that the medicine did really diminish, but it did not occur to her that the boy was mending the health of a crack in the sitting-room floor with it. One day Tom was in the act of dosing the crack when his aunt's yellow cat came along, purring, eying the teaspoon avariciously, and begging for a taste. Tom said: "Don't ask for it unless you want it, Peter." But Peter signified that he did want it. "You better make sure." Peter was sure. "Now you've asked for it, and I'll give it to you, because there ain't anything mean about me; but if you find you don't like it, you mustn't blame anybody but your own self." Peter was agreeable. So Tom pried his mouth open and poured down the Pain-killer. Peter sprang a couple of yards in the air, and then delivered a war-whoop and set off round and round the room, banging against furniture, upsetting flower-pots, and making general havoc. Next he rose on his hind feet and pranced around, in a frenzy of enjoyment, with his head over his shoulder and his voice proclaiming his unappeasable happiness. Then he went tearing around the house again spreading chaos and destruction in his path. Aunt Polly entered in time to see him throw a few double summersets, deliver a final mighty hurrah, and sail through the open window, carrying the rest of the flower-pots with him. The old lady stood petrified with astonishment, peering over her glasses; Tom lay on the floor expiring with laughter. "Tom, what on earth ails that cat?" "I don't know, aunt," gasped the boy. "Why, I never see anything like it. What did make him act so?" "Deed I don't know, Aunt Polly; cats always act so when they're having a good time." "They do, do they?" There was something in the tone that made Tom apprehensive. "Yes'm. That is, I believe they do." "You DO?" "Yes'm." The old lady was bending down, Tom watching, with interest emphasized by anxiety. Too late he divined her "drift." The handle of the telltale teaspoon was visible under the bed-valance. Aunt Polly took it, held it up. Tom winced, and dropped his eyes. Aunt Polly raised him by the usual handle--his ear--and cracked his head soundly with her thimble. "Now, sir, what did you want to treat that poor dumb beast so, for?" "I done it out of pity for him--because he hadn't any aunt." "Hadn't any aunt!--you numskull. What has that got to do with it?" "Heaps. Because if he'd had one she'd a burnt him out herself! She'd a roasted his bowels out of him 'thout any more feeling than if he was a human!" Aunt Polly felt a sudden pang of remorse. This was putting the thing in a new light; what was cruelty to a cat MIGHT be cruelty to a boy, too. She began to soften; she felt sorry. Her eyes watered a little, and she put her hand on Tom's head and said gently: "I was meaning for the best, Tom. And, Tom, it DID do you good." Tom looked up in her face with just a perceptible twinkle peeping through his gravity. "I know you was meaning for the best, aunty, and so was I with Peter. It done HIM good, too. I never see him get around so since--" "Oh, go 'long with you, Tom, before you aggravate me again. And you try and see if you can't be a good boy, for once, and you needn't take any more medicine." Tom reached school ahead of time. It was noticed that this strange thing had been occurring every day latterly. And now, as usual of late, he hung about the gate of the schoolyard instead of playing with his comrades. He was sick, he said, and he looked it. He tried to seem to be looking everywhere but whither he really was looking--down the road. Presently Jeff Thatcher hove in sight, and Tom's face lighted; he gazed a moment, and then turned sorrowfully away. When Jeff arrived, Tom accosted him; and "led up" warily to opportunities for remark about Becky, but the giddy lad never could see the bait. Tom watched and watched, hoping whenever a frisking frock came in sight, and hating the owner of it as soon as he saw she was not the right one. At last frocks ceased to appear, and he dropped hopelessly into the dumps; he entered the empty schoolhouse and sat down to suffer. Then one more frock passed in at the gate, and Tom's heart gave a great bound. The next instant he was out, and "going on" like an Indian; yelling, laughing, chasing boys, jumping over the fence at risk of life and limb, throwing handsprings, standing on his head--doing all the heroic things he could conceive of, and keeping a furtive eye out, all the while, to see if Becky Thatcher was noticing. But she seemed to be unconscious of it all; she never looked. Could it be possible that she was not aware that he was there? He carried his exploits to her immediate vicinity; came war-whooping around, snatched a boy's cap, hurled it to the roof of the schoolhouse, broke through a group of boys, tumbling them in every direction, and fell sprawling, himself, under Becky's nose, almost upsetting her--and she turned, with her nose in the air, and he heard her say: "Mf! some people think they're mighty smart--always showing off!" Tom's cheeks burned. He gathered himself up and sneaked off, crushed and crestfallen. 
40143	----	+----------------------------------------------------------------+ | Transcriber's Note: | | | | * Obvious punctuation and spelling errors repaired. | | Original spelling and its variations were not harmonized. | | | | * Footnotes were moved to the ends of the chapters in which | | they belonged and numbered in one continuous sequence. | | The pagination in index entries which referred to these | | footnotes was not changed to match their new locations | + and is therefore incorrect. | +----------------------------------------------------------------+ Francis Parkman's Works. NEW LIBRARY EDITION. Vol. III. FRANCIS PARKMAN'S WORKS. New Library Edition. Pioneers of France in the New World 1 vol. The Jesuits in North America 1 vol. La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West 1 vol. The Old Régime in Canada 1 vol. Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV. 1 vol. A Half Century of Conflict 2 vols. Montcalm and Wolfe 2 vols. The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada 2 vols. The Oregon Trail 1 vol. [Illustration] _La Salle Presenting a Petition to Louis XIV._ Drawn by Adrien Moreau. La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, _Frontispiece_ LA SALLE AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE GREAT WEST. FRANCE AND ENGLAND IN NORTH AMERICA. Part Third. BY FRANCIS PARKMAN. BOSTON: LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. 1908. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by Francis Parkman, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1879, by Francis Parkman, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. _Copyright, 1897,_ By Little, Brown, and Company. _Copyright, 1897,_ By Grace P. Coffin and Katharine S. Coolidge. _Copyright, 1907,_ By Grace P. Coffin. Printers S. J. Parkhill & Co., Boston, U. S. A. TO THE CLASS OF 1844, Harvard College, THIS BOOK IS CORDIALLY DEDICATED BY ONE OF THEIR NUMBER. PREFACE OF THE ELEVENTH EDITION. When the earlier editions of this book were published, I was aware of the existence of a collection of documents relating to La Salle, and containing important material to which I had not succeeded in gaining access. This collection was in possession of M. Pierre Margry, director of the Archives of the Marine and Colonies at Paris, and was the result of more than thirty years of research. With rare assiduity and zeal, M. Margry had explored not only the vast depository with which he has been officially connected from youth, and of which he is now the chief, but also the other public archives of France, and many private collections in Paris and the provinces. The object of his search was to throw light on the career and achievements of French explorers, and, above all, of La Salle. A collection of extraordinary richness grew gradually upon his hands. In the course of my own inquiries, I owed much to his friendly aid; but his collections, as a whole, remained inaccessible, since he naturally wished to be the first to make known the results of his labors. An attempt to induce Congress to furnish him with the means of printing documents so interesting to American history was made in 1870 and 1871, by Henry Harrisse, Esq., aided by the American minister at Paris; but it unfortunately failed. In the summer and autumn of 1872, I had numerous interviews with M. Margry, and at his desire undertook to try to induce some American bookseller to publish the collection. On returning to the United States, I accordingly made an arrangement with Messrs. Little, Brown & Co., of Boston, by which they agreed to print the papers if a certain number of subscriptions should first be obtained. The condition proved very difficult; and it became clear that the best hope of success lay in another appeal to Congress. This was made in the following winter, in conjunction with Hon. E. B. Washburne; Colonel Charles Whittlesey, of Cleveland; O. H. Marshall, Esq., of Buffalo; and other gentlemen interested in early American history. The attempt succeeded. Congress made an appropriation for the purchase of five hundred copies of the work, to be printed at Paris, under direction of M. Margry; and the three volumes devoted to La Salle are at length before the public. Of the papers contained in them which I had not before examined, the most interesting are the letters of La Salle, found in the original by M. Margry, among the immense accumulations of the Archives of the Marine and Colonies and the Bibliothèque Nationale. The narrative of La Salle's companion, Joutel, far more copious than the abstract printed in 1713, under the title of "Journal Historique," also deserves special mention. These, with other fresh material in these three volumes, while they add new facts and throw new light on the character of La Salle, confirm nearly every statement made in the first edition of the Discovery of the Great West. The only exception of consequence relates to the causes of La Salle's failure to find the mouth of the Mississippi in 1684, and to the conduct, on that occasion, of the naval commander, Beaujeu. This edition is revised throughout, and in part rewritten with large additions. A map of the country traversed by the explorers is also added. The name of La Salle is placed on the titlepage, as seems to be demanded by his increased prominence in the narrative of which he is the central figure. Boston, 10 December, 1878. * * * * * Note.--The title of M. Margry's printed collection is "Découvertes et Établissements des Français dans l'Ouest et dans le Sud de l'Amérique Septentrionale (1614-1754), Mémoires et Documents originaux." I., II., III. Besides the three volumes relating to La Salle, there will be two others, relating to other explorers. In accordance with the agreement with Congress, an independent edition will appear in France, with an introduction setting forth the circumstances of the publication. PREFACE OF THE FIRST EDITION. The discovery of the "Great West," or the valleys of the Mississippi and the Lakes, is a portion of our history hitherto very obscure. Those magnificent regions were revealed to the world through a series of daring enterprises, of which the motives and even the incidents have been but partially and superficially known. The chief actor in them wrote much, but printed nothing; and the published writings of his associates stand wofully in need of interpretation from the unpublished documents which exist, but which have not heretofore been used as material for history. This volume attempts to supply the defect. Of the large amount of wholly new material employed in it, by far the greater part is drawn from the various public archives of France, and the rest from private sources. The discovery of many of these documents is due to the indefatigable research of M. Pierre Margry, assistant director of the Archives of the Marine and Colonies at Paris, whose labors as an investigator of the maritime and colonial history of France can be appreciated only by those who have seen their results. In the department of American colonial history, these results have been invaluable; for, besides several private collections made by him, he rendered important service in the collection of the French portion of the Brodhead documents, selected and arranged the two great series of colonial papers ordered by the Canadian government, and prepared with vast labor analytical indexes of these and of supplementary documents in the French archives, as well as a copious index of the mass of papers relating to Louisiana. It is to be hoped that the valuable publications on the maritime history of France which have appeared from his pen are an earnest of more extended contributions in future. The late President Sparks, some time after the publication of his Life of La Salle, caused a collection to be made of documents relating to that explorer, with the intention of incorporating them in a future edition. This intention was never carried into effect, and the documents were never used. With the liberality which always distinguished him, he placed them at my disposal, and this privilege has been kindly continued by Mrs. Sparks. Abbé Faillon, the learned author of "La Colonie Française en Canada," has sent me copies of various documents found by him, including family papers of La Salle. Among others who in various ways have aided my inquiries are Dr. John Paul, of Ottawa, Ill.; Count Adolphe de Circourt, and M. Jules Marcou, of Paris; M. A. Gérin Lajoie, Assistant Librarian of the Canadian Parliament; M. J. M. Le Moine, of Quebec; General Dix, Minister of the United States at the Court of France; O. H. Marshall, of Buffalo; J. G. Shea, of New York; Buckingham Smith, of St. Augustine; and Colonel Thomas Aspinwall, of Boston. The smaller map contained in the book is a portion of the manuscript map of Franquelin, of which an account will be found in the Appendix. The next volume of the series will be devoted to the efforts of Monarchy and Feudalism under Louis XIV. to establish a permanent power on this continent, and to the stormy career of Louis de Buade, Count of Frontenac. Boston, 16 September, 1869. CONTENTS. Page INTRODUCTION 3 CHAPTER I. 1643-1669. CAVELIER DE LA SALLE. The Youth of La Salle: his Connection with the Jesuits; he goes to Canada; his Character; his Schemes; his Seigniory at La Chine; his Expedition in Search of a Western Passage to India. 7 CHAPTER II. 1669-1671. LA SALLE AND THE SULPITIANS. The French in Western New York.--Louis Joliet.--The Sulpitians on Lake Erie; at Detroit; at Saut Ste. Marie.--The Mystery of La Salle: he discovers the Ohio; he descends the Illinois; did he reach the 19 Mississippi? CHAPTER III. 1670-1672. THE JESUITS ON THE LAKES. The Old Missions and the New.--A Change of Spirit.--Lake Superior and the Copper-mines.--Ste. Marie.--La Pointe.--Michilimackinac.--Jesuits on Lake Michigan.--Allouez and Dablon.--The Jesuit Fur-trade. 36 CHAPTER IV. 1667-1672. FRANCE TAKES POSSESSION OF THE WEST. Talon.--Saint-Lusson.--Perrot.--The Ceremony at Saut Ste. Marie.--The Speech of Allouez.--Count Frontenac. 48 CHAPTER V. 1672-1675. THE DISCOVERY OF THE MISSISSIPPI. Joliet sent to find the Mississippi.--Jacques Marquette.--Departure.--Green Bay.--The Wisconsin.--The Mississippi.--Indians.--Manitous.--The Arkansas.--The Illinois.--Joliet's Misfortune.--Marquette at Chicago: his Illness; his Death. 57 CHAPTER VI. 1673-1678. LA SALLE AND FRONTENAC. Objects of La Salle.--Frontenac favors him.--Projects of Frontenac.--Cataraqui.--Frontenac on Lake Ontario.--Fort Frontenac.--La Salle and Fénelon.--Success of La Salle: his Enemies. 83 CHAPTER VII. 1678. PARTY STRIFE. La Salle and his Reporter.--Jesuit Ascendency.--The Missions and the Fur-trade.--Female Inquisitors.--Plots against La Salle: his Brother the Priest.--Intrigues of the Jesuits.--La Salle poisoned: he exculpates the Jesuits.--Renewed Intrigues. 106 CHAPTER VIII. 1677, 1678. THE GRAND ENTERPRISE. La Salle at Fort Frontenac.--La Salle at Court: his Memorial.--Approval of the King.--Money and Means.--Henri de Tonty.--Return to Canada. 120 CHAPTER IX. 1678-1679. LA SALLE AT NIAGARA. Father Louis Hennepin: his Past Life; his Character.--Embarkation.--Niagara Falls.--Indian Jealousy.--La Motte and the Senecas.--A Disaster.--La Salle and his Followers. 131 CHAPTER X. 1679. THE LAUNCH OF THE "GRIFFIN." The Niagara Portage.--A Vessel on the Stocks.--Suffering and Discontent.--La Salle's Winter Journey.--The Vessel launched.--Fresh Disasters. 144 CHAPTER XI. 1679. LA SALLE ON THE UPPER LAKES. The Voyage of the "Griffin."--Detroit.--A Storm.--St. Ignace of Michilimackinac.--Rivals and Enemies.--Lake Michigan.--Hardships.--A Threatened Fight.--Fort Miami.--Tonty's Misfortunes.--Forebodings. 151 CHAPTER XII. 1679, 1680. LA SALLE ON THE ILLINOIS. The St. Joseph.--Adventure of La Salle.--The Prairies.--Famine.--The Great Town of the Illinois.--Indians.--Intrigues.--Difficulties.-- Policy of La Salle.--Desertion.--Another Attempt to poison La Salle. 164 CHAPTER XIII. 1680. FORT CRÈVECOE]UR. Building of the Fort.--Loss of the "Griffin."--A Bold Resolution.--Another Vessel.--Hennepin sent to the Mississippi.--Departure of La Salle. 180 CHAPTER XIV. 1680. HARDIHOOD OF LA SALLE. The Winter Journey.--The Deserted Town.--Starved Rock.--Lake Michigan.--The Wilderness.--War Parties.--La Salle's Men give out.--Ill Tidings.--Mutiny.--Chastisement of the Mutineers. 189 CHAPTER XV. 1680. INDIAN CONQUERORS. The Enterprise renewed.--Attempt to rescue Tonty.--Buffalo.--A Frightful Discovery.--Iroquois Fury.--The Ruined Town.--A Night of Horror.--Traces of the Invaders.--No News of Tonty. 202 CHAPTER XVI. 1680. TONTY AND THE IROQUOIS. The Deserters.--The Iroquois War.--The Great Town of the Illinois.--The Alarm.--Onset of the Iroquois.--Peril of Tonty.--A Treacherous Truce.--Intrepidity of Tonty.--Murder of Ribourde.--War upon the Dead. 216 CHAPTER XVII. 1680. THE ADVENTURES OF HENNEPIN. Hennepin an Impostor: his Pretended Discovery; his Actual Discovery; captured by the Sioux.--The Upper Mississippi. 242 CHAPTER XVIII. 1680, 1681. HENNEPIN AMONG THE SIOUX. Signs of Danger.--Adoption.--Hennepin and his Indian Relatives.--The Hunting Party.--The Sioux Camp.--Falls of St. Anthony.--A Vagabond Friar: his Adventures on the Mississippi.--Greysolon Du Lhut.--Return to Civilization. 259 CHAPTER XIX. 1681. LA SALLE BEGINS ANEW. His Constancy; his Plans; his Savage Allies; he becomes Snow-blind.--Negotiations.--Grand Council.--La Salle's Oratory.--Meeting with Tonty.--Preparation.--Departure. 283 CHAPTER XX. 1681-1682. SUCCESS OF LA SALLE. His Followers.--The Chicago Portage.--Descent of the Mississippi.--The Lost Hunter.--The Arkansas.--The Taensas.--The Natchez.--Hostility.--The Mouth of the Mississippi.--Louis XIV. proclaimed Sovereign of the Great West. 295 CHAPTER XXI. 1682, 1683. ST. LOUIS OF THE ILLINOIS. Louisiana.--Illness of La Salle: his Colony on the Illinois.--Fort St. Louis.--Recall of Frontenac.--Le Febvre de la Barre.--Critical Position of La Salle.--Hostility of the New Governor.--Triumph of the Adverse Faction.--La Salle sails for France. 309 CHAPTER XXII. 1680-1683. LA SALLE PAINTED BY HIMSELF. Difficulty of knowing him; his Detractors; his Letters; vexations of his Position; his Unfitness for Trade; risks of Correspondence; his Reported Marriage; alleged Ostentation; motives of Action; charges of Harshness; intrigues against him; unpopular Manners; a Strange Confession; his Strength and his Weakness; contrasts of his Character. 328 CHAPTER XXIII. 1684. A NEW ENTERPRISE. La Salle at Court: his Proposals.--Occupation of Louisiana.--Invasion of Mexico.--Royal Favor.--Preparation.--A Divided Command.--Beaujeu and La Salle.--Mental Condition of La Salle: his Farewell to his Mother. 343 CHAPTER XXIV. 1684, 1685. THE VOYAGE. Disputes with Beaujeu.--St. Domingo.--La Salle attacked with Fever: his Desperate Condition.--The Gulf of Mexico.--A Vain Search and a Fatal Error. 366 CHAPTER XXV. 1685. LA SALLE IN TEXAS. A Party of Exploration.--Wreck of the "Aimable."--Landing of the Colonists.--A Forlorn Position.--Indian Neighbors.--Friendly Advances of Beaujeu: his Departure.--A Fatal Discovery. 378 CHAPTER XXVI. 1685-1687. ST. LOUIS OF TEXAS. The Fort.--Misery and Dejection.--Energy of La Salle: his Journey of Exploration.--Adventures and Accidents.--The Buffalo.--Duhaut.--Indian Massacre.--Return of La Salle.--A New Calamity.--A Desperate Resolution.--Departure for Canada.--Wreck of the "Belle."--Marriage.--Sedition.--Adventures of La Salle's Party.--The Cenis.--The Camanches.--The Only Hope.--The Last Farewell. 391 CHAPTER XXVII. 1687. ASSASSINATION OF LA SALLE. His Followers.--Prairie Travelling.--A Hunters' Quarrel.--The Murder of Moranget.--The Conspiracy.--Death of La Salle: his Character. 420 CHAPTER XXVIII. 1687, 1688. THE INNOCENT AND THE GUILTY. Triumph of the Murderers.--Danger of Joutel.--Joutel among the Cenis.--White Savages.--Insolence of Duhaut and his Accomplices.--Murder of Duhaut and Liotot.--Hiens, the Buccaneer.--Joutel and his Party: their Escape; they reach the Arkansas.--Bravery and Devotion of Tonty.--The Fugitives reach the Illinois.--Unworthy Conduct of Cavelier.--He and his Companions return to France. 435 CHAPTER XXIX. 1688-1689. FATE OF THE TEXAN COLONY. Tonty attempts to rescue the Colonists: his Difficulties and Hardships.--Spanish Hostility.--Expedition of Alonzo de Leon: he reaches Fort St. Louis.--A Scene of Havoc.--Destruction of the French.--The End. 464 APPENDIX. I. Early Unpublished Maps of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes 475 II. The Eldorado of Mathieu Sâgean 485 INDEX 491 [Illustration: COUNTRIES traversed by MARQUETTE, HENNEPIN AND LA SALLE. G.W. Boynton, Sc.] LA SALLE AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE GREAT WEST. INTRODUCTION. The Spaniards discovered the Mississippi. De Soto was buried beneath its waters; and it was down its muddy current that his followers fled from the Eldorado of their dreams, transformed to a wilderness of misery and death. The discovery was never used, and was well-nigh forgotten. On early Spanish maps, the Mississippi is often indistinguishable from other affluents of the Gulf. A century passed after De Soto's journeyings in the South, before a French explorer reached a northern tributary of the great river. This was Jean Nicollet, interpreter at Three Rivers on the St. Lawrence. He had been some twenty years in Canada, had lived among the savage Algonquins of Allumette Island, and spent eight or nine years among the Nipissings, on the lake which bears their name. Here he became an Indian in all his habits, but remained, nevertheless, a zealous Catholic, and returned to civilization at last because he could not live without the sacraments. Strange stories were current among the Nipissings of a people without hair or beard, who came from the West to trade with a tribe beyond the Great Lakes. Who could doubt that these strangers were Chinese or Japanese? Such tales may well have excited Nicollet's curiosity; and when, in 1635, or possibly in 1638, he was sent as an ambassador to the tribe in question, he would not have been surprised if on arriving he had found a party of mandarins among them. Perhaps it was with a view to such a contingency that he provided himself, as a dress of ceremony, with a robe of Chinese damask embroidered with birds and flowers. The tribe to which he was sent was that of the Winnebagoes, living near the head of the Green Bay of Lake Michigan. They had come to blows with the Hurons, allies of the French; and Nicollet was charged to negotiate a peace. When he approached the Winnebago town, he sent one of his Indian attendants to announce his coming, put on his robe of damask, and advanced to meet the expectant crowd with a pistol in each hand. The squaws and children fled, screaming that it was a manito, or spirit, armed with thunder and lightning; but the chiefs and warriors regaled him with so bountiful a hospitality that a hundred and twenty beavers were devoured at a single feast. From the Winnebagoes, he passed westward, ascended Fox River, crossed to the Wisconsin, and descended it so far that, as he reported on his return, in three days more he would have reached the sea. The truth seems to be that he mistook the meaning of his Indian guides, and that the "great water" to which he was so near was not the sea, but the Mississippi. It has been affirmed that one Colonel Wood, of Virginia, reached a branch of the Mississippi as early as the year 1654, and that about 1670 a certain Captain Bolton penetrated to the river itself. Neither statement is sustained by sufficient evidence. It is further affirmed that, in 1678, a party from New England crossed the Mississippi, reached New Mexico, and, returning, reported their discoveries to the authorities of Boston,--a story without proof or probability. Meanwhile, French Jesuits and fur-traders pushed deeper and deeper into the wilderness of the northern lakes. In 1641, Jogues and Raymbault preached the Faith to a concourse of Indians at the outlet of Lake Superior. Then came the havoc and desolation of the Iroquois war, and for years farther exploration was arrested. In 1658-59 Pierre Esprit Radisson, a Frenchman of St. Malo, and his brother-in-law, Médard Chouart des Groseilliers, penetrated the regions beyond Lake Superior, and roamed westward till, as Radisson declares, they reached what was called the Forked River, "because it has two branches, the one towards the west, the other towards the south, which, we believe, runs towards Mexico,"--which seems to point to the Mississippi and its great confluent the Missouri. Two years later, the aged Jesuit Ménard attempted to plant a mission on the southern shore of Lake Superior, but perished in the forest by famine or the tomahawk. Allouez succeeded him, explored a part of Lake Superior, and heard, in his turn, of the Sioux and their great river the "Messipi." More and more, the thoughts of the Jesuits--and not of the Jesuits alone--dwelt on this mysterious stream. Through what regions did it flow; and whither would it lead them,--to the South Sea or the "Sea of Virginia;" to Mexico, Japan, or China? The problem was soon to be solved, and the mystery revealed. CHAPTER I 1643-1669. CAVELIER DE LA SALLE. The Youth of La Salle: his Connection with the Jesuits; he goes to Canada; his Character; his Schemes; his Seigniory at La Chine; his Expedition in Search of a Western Passage to India. Among the burghers of Rouen was the old and rich family of the Caveliers. Though citizens and not nobles, some of their connections held high diplomatic posts and honorable employments at Court. They were destined to find a better claim to distinction. In 1643 was born at Rouen Robert Cavelier, better known by the designation of La Salle.[1] His father Jean and his uncle Henri were wealthy merchants, living more like nobles than like burghers; and the boy received an education answering to the marked traits of intellect and character which he soon began to display. He showed an inclination for the exact sciences, and especially for the mathematics, in which he made great proficiency. At an early age, it is said, he became connected with the Jesuits; and, though doubt has been expressed of the statement, it is probably true.[2] [Sidenote: LA SALLE AND THE JESUITS.] La Salle was always an earnest Catholic; and yet, judging by the qualities which his after-life evinced, he was not very liable to religious enthusiasm. It is nevertheless clear that the Society of Jesus may have had a powerful attraction for his youthful imagination. This great organization, so complicated yet so harmonious, a mighty machine moved from the centre by a single hand, was an image of regulated power, full of fascination for a mind like his. But if it was likely that he would be drawn into it, it was no less likely that he would soon wish to escape. To find himself not at the centre of power, but at the circumference; not the mover, but the moved; the passive instrument of another's will, taught to walk in prescribed paths, to renounce his individuality and become a component atom of a vast whole,--would have been intolerable to him. Nature had shaped him for other uses than to teach a class of boys on the benches of a Jesuit school. Nor, on his part, was he likely to please his directors; for, self-controlled and self-contained as he was, he was far too intractable a subject to serve their turn. A youth whose calm exterior hid an inexhaustible fund of pride; whose inflexible purposes, nursed in secret, the confessional and the "manifestation of conscience" could hardly drag to the light; whose strong personality would not yield to the shaping hand; and who, by a necessity of his nature, could obey no initiative but his own,--was not after the model that Loyola had commended to his followers. La Salle left the Jesuits, parting with them, it is said, on good terms, and with a reputation of excellent acquirements and unimpeachable morals. This last is very credible. The cravings of a deep ambition, the hunger of an insatiable intellect, the intense longing for action and achievement, subdued in him all other passions; and in his faults the love of pleasure had no part. He had an elder brother in Canada, the Abbé Jean Cavelier, a priest of St. Sulpice. Apparently, it was this that shaped his destinies. His connection with the Jesuits had deprived him, under the French law, of the inheritance of his father, who had died not long before. An allowance was made to him of three or (as is elsewhere stated) four hundred livres a year, the capital of which was paid over to him; and with this pittance he sailed for Canada, to seek his fortune, in the spring of 1666.[3] [Sidenote: LA SALLE AT MONTREAL.] Next, we find him at Montreal. In another volume, we have seen how an association of enthusiastic devotees had made a settlement at this place.[4] Having in some measure accomplished its work, it was now dissolved; and the corporation of priests, styled the Seminary of St. Sulpice, which had taken a prominent part in the enterprise, and, indeed, had been created with a view to it, was now the proprietor and the feudal lord of Montreal. It was destined to retain its seignorial rights until the abolition of the feudal tenures of Canada in our own day, and it still holds vast possessions in the city and island. These worthy ecclesiastics, models of a discreet and sober conservatism, were holding a post with which a band of veteran soldiers or warlike frontiersmen would have been better matched. Montreal was perhaps the most dangerous place in Canada. In time of war, which might have been called the normal condition of the colony, it was exposed by its position to incessant inroads of the Iroquois, or Five Nations, of New York; and no man could venture into the forests or the fields without bearing his life in his hand. The savage confederates had just received a sharp chastisement at the hands of Courcelle, the governor; and the result was a treaty of peace which might at any moment be broken, but which was an inexpressible relief while it lasted. The priests of St. Sulpice were granting out their lands, on very easy terms, to settlers. They wished to extend a thin line of settlements along the front of their island, to form a sort of outpost, from which an alarm could be given on any descent of the Iroquois. La Salle was the man for such a purpose. Had the priests understood him,--which they evidently did not, for some of them suspected him of levity, the last foible with which he could be charged,--had they understood him, they would have seen in him a young man in whom the fire of youth glowed not the less ardently for the veil of reserve that covered it; who would shrink from no danger, but would not court it in bravado; and who would cling with an invincible tenacity of gripe to any purpose which he might espouse. There is good reason to think that he had come to Canada with purposes already conceived, and that he was ready to avail himself of any stepping-stone which might help to realize them. Queylus, Superior of the Seminary, made him a generous offer; and he accepted it. This was the gratuitous grant of a large tract of land at the place now called La Chine, above the great rapids of the same name, and eight or nine miles from Montreal. On one hand, the place was greatly exposed to attack; and, on the other, it was favorably situated for the fur-trade. La Salle and his successors became its feudal proprietors, on the sole condition of delivering to the Seminary, on every change of ownership, a medal of fine silver, weighing one mark.[5] He entered on the improvement of his new domain with what means he could command, and began to grant out his land to such settlers as would join him. Approaching the shore where the city of Montreal now stands, one would have seen a row of small compact dwellings, extending along a narrow street, parallel to the river, and then, as now, called St. Paul Street. On a hill at the right stood the windmill of the seigniors, built of stone, and pierced with loopholes to serve, in time of need, as a place of defence. On the left, in an angle formed by the junction of a rivulet with the St. Lawrence, was a square bastioned fort of stone. Here lived the military governor, appointed by the Seminary, and commanding a few soldiers of the regiment of Carignan. In front, on the line of the street, were the enclosure and buildings of the Seminary, and, nearly adjoining them, those of the Hôtel-Dieu, or Hospital, both provided for defence in case of an Indian attack. In the hospital enclosure was a small church, opening on the street, and, in the absence of any other, serving for the whole settlement.[6] Landing, passing the fort, and walking southward along the shore, one would soon have left the rough clearings, and entered the primeval forest. Here, mile after mile, he would have journeyed on in solitude, when the hoarse roar of the rapids, foaming in fury on his left, would have reached his listening ear; and at length, after a walk of some three hours, he would have found the rude beginnings of a settlement. It was where the St. Lawrence widens into the broad expanse called the Lake of St. Louis. Here, La Salle had traced out the circuit of a palisaded village, and assigned to each settler half an arpent, or about the third of an acre, within the enclosure, for which he was to render to the young seignior a yearly acknowledgment of three capons, besides six deniers--that is, half a sou--in money. To each was assigned, moreover, sixty arpents of land beyond the limits of the village, with the perpetual rent of half a sou for each arpent. He also set apart a common, two hundred arpents in extent, for the use of the settlers, on condition of the payment by each of five sous a year. He reserved four hundred and twenty arpents for his own personal domain, and on this he began to clear the ground and erect buildings. Similar to this were the beginnings of all the Canadian seigniories formed at this troubled period.[7] [Sidenote: LA CHINE.] That La Salle came to Canada with objects distinctly in view, is probable from the fact that he at once began to study the Indian languages,--and with such success that he is said, within two or three years, to have mastered the Iroquois and seven or eight other languages and dialects.[8] From the shore of his seigniory, he could gaze westward over the broad breast of the Lake of St. Louis, bounded by the dim forests of Chateauguay and Beauharnois; but his thoughts flew far beyond, across the wild and lonely world that stretched towards the sunset. Like Champlain, and all the early explorers, he dreamed of a passage to the South Sea, and a new road for commerce to the riches of China and Japan. Indians often came to his secluded settlement; and, on one occasion, he was visited by a band of the Seneca Iroquois, not long before the scourge of the colony, but now, in virtue of the treaty, wearing the semblance of friendship. The visitors spent the winter with him, and told him of a river called the Ohio, rising in their country, and flowing into the sea, but at such a distance that its mouth could only be reached after a journey of eight or nine months. Evidently, the Ohio and the Mississippi are here merged into one.[9] In accordance with geographical views then prevalent, he conceived that this great river must needs flow into the "Vermilion Sea;" that is, the Gulf of California. If so, it would give him what he sought, a western passage to China; while, in any case, the populous Indian tribes said to inhabit its banks might be made a source of great commercial profit. [Sidenote: SCHEMES OF DISCOVERY.] La Salle's imagination took fire. His resolution was soon formed; and he descended the St. Lawrence to Quebec, to gain the countenance of the governor for his intended exploration. Few men were more skilled than he in the art of clear and plausible statement. Both the governor Courcelle and the intendant Talon were readily won over to his plan; for which, however, they seem to have given him no more substantial aid than that of the governor's letters patent authorizing the enterprise.[10] The cost was to be his own; and he had no money, having spent it all on his seigniory. He therefore proposed that the Seminary, which had given it to him, should buy it back again, with such improvements as he had made. Queylus, the Superior, being favorably disposed towards him, consented, and bought of him the greater part; while La Salle sold the remainder, including the clearings, to one Jean Milot, an iron-monger, for twenty-eight hundred livres.[11] With this he bought four canoes, with the necessary supplies, and hired fourteen men. Meanwhile, the Seminary itself was preparing a similar enterprise. The Jesuits at this time not only held an ascendency over the other ecclesiastics in Canada, but exercised an inordinate influence on the civil government. The Seminary priests of Montreal were jealous of these powerful rivals, and eager to emulate their zeal in the saving of souls and the conquering of new domains for the Faith. Under this impulse, they had, three years before, established a mission at Quinté, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, in charge of two of their number, one of whom was the Abbé Fénelon, elder brother of the celebrated Archbishop of Cambray. Another of them, Dollier de Casson, had spent the winter in a hunting-camp of the Nipissings, where an Indian prisoner, captured in the Northwest, told him of populous tribes of that quarter living in heathenish darkness. On this, the Seminary priests resolved to essay their conversion; and an expedition, to be directed by Dollier, was fitted out to this end. [Sidenote: DEPARTURE.] He was not ill suited to the purpose. He had been a soldier in his youth, and had fought valiantly as an officer of cavalry under Turenne. He was a man of great courage; of a tall, commanding person; and of uncommon bodily strength, which he had notably proved in the campaign of Courcelle against the Iroquois, three years before.[12] On going to Quebec to procure the necessary outfit, he was urged by Courcelle to modify his plans so far as to act in concert with La Salle in exploring the mystery of the great unknown river of the West. Dollier and his brother priests consented. One of them, Galinée, was joined with him as a colleague, because he was skilled in surveying, and could make a map of their route. Three canoes were procured, and seven hired men completed the party. It was determined that La Salle's expedition and that of the Seminary should be combined in one,--an arrangement ill suited to the character of the young explorer, who was unfit for any enterprise of which he was not the undisputed chief. Midsummer was near, and there was no time to lose. Yet the moment was most unpropitious, for a Seneca chief had lately been murdered by three scoundrel soldiers of the fort of Montreal; and, while they were undergoing their trial, it became known that three other Frenchmen had treacherously put to death several Iroquois of the Oneida tribe, in order to get possession of their furs. The whole colony trembled in expectation of a new outbreak of the war. Happily, the event proved otherwise. The authors of the last murder escaped; but the three soldiers were shot at Montreal, in presence of a considerable number of the Iroquois, who declared themselves satisfied with the atonement; and on this same day, the sixth of July, the adventurers began their voyage. FOOTNOTES: [1] The following is the _acte de naissance_, discovered by Margry in the _registres de l'état civil_, Paroisse St. Herbland, Rouen: "Le vingt-deuxième jour de novembre, 1643, a été baptisé Robert Cavelier, fils de honorable homme Jean Cavelier et de Catherine Geest; ses parrain et marraine honorables personnes Nicolas Geest et Marguerite Morice." La Salle's name in full was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. La Salle was the name of an estate near Rouen, belonging to the Caveliers. The wealthy French burghers often distinguished the various members of their families by designations borrowed from landed estates. Thus, François Marie Arouet, son of an ex-notary, received the name of Voltaire, which he made famous. [2] Margry, after investigations at Rouen, is satisfied of its truth (_Journal Général de l'Instruction Publique_, xxxi. 571.) Family papers of the Caveliers, examined by the Abbé Faillon, and copies of some of which he has sent to me, lead to the same conclusion. We shall find several allusions hereafter to La Salle's having in his youth taught in a school, which, in his position, could only have been in connection with some religious community. The doubts alluded to have proceeded from the failure of Father Felix Martin, S. J., to find the name of La Salle on the list of novices. If he had looked for the name of Robert Cavelier, he would probably have found it. The companion of La Salle, Hennepin, is very explicit with regard to this connection with the Jesuits, a point on which he had no motive for falsehood. [3] It does not appear what vows La Salle had taken. By a recent ordinance (1666), persons entering religious orders could not take the final vows before the age of twenty-five. By the family papers above mentioned, it appears, however, that he had brought himself under the operation of the law, which debarred those who, having entered religious orders, afterwards withdrew, from claiming the inheritance of relatives who had died after their entrance. [4] The Jesuits in North America, chap. xv. [5] _Transport de la Seigneurie de St. Sulpice_, cited by Faillon. La Salle called his new domain as above. Two or three years later, it received the name of La Chine, for a reason which will appear. [6] A detailed plan of Montreal at this time is preserved in the Archives de l'Empire, and has been reproduced by Faillon. There is another, a few years later, and still more minute, of which a fac-simile will be found in the Library of the Canadian Parliament. [7] The above particulars have been unearthed by the indefatigable Abbé Faillon. Some of La Salle's grants are still preserved in the ancient records of Montreal. [8] _Papiers de Famille._ He is said to have made several journeys into the forests, towards the North, in the years 1667 and 1668, and to have satisfied himself that little could be hoped from explorations in that direction. [9] According to Dollier de Casson, who had good opportunities of knowing, the Iroquois always called the Mississippi the Ohio, while the Algonquins gave it its present name. [10] _Patoulet à Colbert, 11 Nov., 1669._ [11] _Cession de la Seigneurie; Contrat de Vente_ (Margry, i. 103, 104). [12] He was the author of the very curious and valuable _Histoire de Montréal_, preserved in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, of which a copy is in my possession. The Historical Society of Montreal has recently resolved to print it. CHAPTER II. 1669-1671. LA SALLE AND THE SULPITIANS. The French in Western New York.--Louis Joliet.--The Sulpitians on Lake Erie; at Detroit; at Saut Ste. Marie.--The Mystery of La Salle: he discovers the Ohio; he descends the Illinois; did he reach the Mississippi? La Chine was the starting-point; and the combined parties, in all twenty-four men with seven canoes, embarked on the Lake of St. Louis. With them were two other canoes, bearing the party of Senecas who had wintered at La Salle's settlement, and who were now to act as guides. Father Galinée recounts the journey. He was no woodsman: the river, the forests, the rapids, were all new to him, and he dilates on them with the minuteness of a novice. Above all, he admired the Indian birch canoes. "If God," he says, "grants me the grace of returning to France, I shall try to carry one with me." Then he describes the bivouac: "Your lodging is as extraordinary as your vessels; for, after paddling or carrying the canoes all day, you find mother earth ready to receive your wearied body. If the weather is fair, you make a fire and lie down to sleep without further trouble; but if it rains, you must peel bark from the trees, and make a shed by laying it on a frame of sticks. As for your food, it is enough to make you burn all the cookery books that ever were written; for in the woods of Canada one finds means to live well without bread, wine, salt, pepper, or spice. The ordinary food is Indian corn, or Turkey wheat as they call it in France, which is crushed between two stones and boiled, seasoning it with meat or fish, when you can get them. This sort of life seemed so strange to us that we all felt the effects of it; and before we were a hundred leagues from Montreal, not one of us was free from some malady or other. At last, after all our misery, on the second of August, we discovered Lake Ontario, like a great sea with no land beyond it." [Sidenote: THE SENECA VILLAGES.] Thirty-five days after leaving La Chine, they reached Irondequoit Bay, on the south side of the lake. Here they were met by a number of Seneca Indians, who professed friendship and invited them to their villages, fifteen or twenty miles distant. As this was on their way to the upper waters of the Ohio, and as they hoped to find guides at the villages to conduct them, they accepted the invitation. Dollier, with most of the men, remained to guard the canoes; while La Salle, with Galinée and eight other Frenchmen, accompanied by a troop of Indians, set out on the morning of the twelfth, and reached the principal village before evening. It stood on a hill, in the midst of a clearing nearly two leagues in compass.[13] A rude stockade surrounded it; and as the visitors drew near they saw a band of old men seated on the grass, waiting to receive them. One of these veterans, so feeble with age that he could hardly stand, made them an harangue, in which he declared that the Senecas were their brothers, and invited them to enter the village. They did so, surrounded by a crowd of savages, and presently found themselves in the midst of a disorderly cluster of large but filthy abodes of bark, about a hundred and fifty in number, the most capacious of which was assigned to their use. Here they made their quarters, and were soon overwhelmed by Seneca hospitality. Children brought them pumpkins and berries from the woods; and boy messengers came to summon them to endless feasts, where they were regaled with the flesh of dogs and with boiled maize seasoned with oil pressed from nuts and the seed of sunflowers. La Salle had flattered himself that he knew enough Iroquois to hold communication with the Senecas; but he failed completely in the attempt. The priests had a Dutch interpreter, who spoke Iroquois fluently, but knew so little French, and was withal so obstinate, that he proved useless; so that it was necessary to employ a man in the service of the Jesuit Fremin, whose mission was at this village. What the party needed was a guide to conduct them to the Ohio; and soon after their arrival a party of warriors appeared, with a young prisoner belonging to one of the tribes of that region. Galinée wanted to beg or buy him from his captors; but the Senecas had other intentions. "I saw," writes the priest, "the most miserable spectacle I ever beheld in my life." It was the prisoner tied to a stake and tortured for six hours with diabolical ingenuity, while the crowd danced and yelled with delight, and the chiefs and elders sat in a row smoking their pipes and watching the contortions of the victim with an air of serene enjoyment. The body was at last cut up and eaten, and in the evening the whole population occupied themselves in scaring away the angry ghost by beating with sticks against the bark sides of the lodges. La Salle and his companions began to fear for their own safety. Some of their hosts wished to kill them in revenge for the chief murdered near Montreal; and as these and others were at times in a frenzy of drunkenness, the position of the French became critical. They suspected that means had been used to prejudice the Senecas against them. Not only could they get no guides, but they were told that if they went to the Ohio the tribes of those parts would infallibly kill them. Their Dutch interpreter became disheartened and unmanageable, and, after staying a month at the village, the hope of getting farther on their way seemed less than ever. Their plan, it was clear, must be changed; and an Indian from Otinawatawa, a kind of Iroquois colony at the head of Lake Ontario, offered to guide them to his village and show them a better way to the Ohio. They left the Senecas, coasted the south shore of the lake, passed the mouth of the Niagara, where they heard the distant roar of the cataract, and on the twenty-fourth of September reached Otinawatawa, which was a few miles north of the present town of Hamilton. The inhabitants proved friendly, and La Salle received the welcome present of a Shawanoe prisoner, who told them that the Ohio could be reached in six weeks, and that he would guide them to it. Delighted at this good fortune, they were about to set out; when they heard, to their astonishment, of the arrival of two other Frenchmen at a neighboring village. [Sidenote: LOUIS JOLIET.] One of the strangers was destined to hold a conspicuous place in the history of western discovery. This was Louis Joliet, a young man of about the age of La Salle. Like him, he had studied for the priesthood; but the world and the wilderness had conquered his early inclinations, and changed him to an active and adventurous fur-trader. Talon had sent him to discover and explore the copper-mines of Lake Superior. He had failed in the attempt, and was now returning. His Indian guide, afraid of passing the Niagara portage lest he should meet enemies, had led him from Lake Erie, by way of Grand River, towards the head of Lake Ontario; and thus it was that he met La Salle and the Sulpitians. This meeting caused a change of plan. Joliet showed the priests a map which he had made of such parts of the Upper Lakes as he had visited, and gave them a copy of it; telling them, at the same time, of the Pottawattamies and other tribes of that region in grievous need of spiritual succor. The result was a determination on their part to follow the route which he suggested, notwithstanding the remonstrances of La Salle, who in vain reminded them that the Jesuits had preoccupied the field, and would regard them as intruders. They resolved that the Pottawattamies should no longer sit in darkness; while, as for the Mississippi, it could be reached, as they conceived, with less risk by this northern route than by that of the south. La Salle was of a different mind. His goal was the Ohio, and not the northern lakes. A few days before, while hunting, he had been attacked by a fever, sarcastically ascribed by Galinée to his having seen three large rattle-snakes crawling up a rock. He now told his two colleagues that he was in no condition to go forward, and should be forced to part with them. The staple of La Salle's character, as his life will attest, was an invincible determination of purpose, which set at naught all risks and all sufferings. He had cast himself with all his resources into this enterprise; and, while his faculties remained, he was not a man to recoil from it. On the other hand, the masculine fibre of which he was made did not always withhold him from the practice of the arts of address, and the use of what Dollier de Casson styles _belles paroles_. He respected the priesthood, with the exception, it seems, of the Jesuits; and he was under obligations to the Sulpitians of Montreal. Hence there can be no doubt that he used his illness as a pretext for escaping from their company without ungraciousness, and following his own path in his own way. [Sidenote: SEPARATION.] On the last day of September, the priests made an altar, supported by the paddles of the canoes laid on forked sticks. Dollier said mass; La Salle and his followers received the sacrament, as did also those of his late colleagues; and thus they parted, the Sulpitians and their party descending the Grand River towards Lake Erie, while La Salle, as they supposed, began his return to Montreal. What course he actually took we shall soon inquire; and meanwhile, for a few moments, we will follow the priests. When they reached Lake Erie, they saw it tossing like an angry ocean. They had no mind to tempt the dangerous and unknown navigation, and encamped for the winter in the forest near the peninsula called the Long Point. Here they gathered a good store of chestnuts, hickory-nuts, plums, and grapes, and built themselves a log cabin, with a recess at the end for an altar. They passed the winter unmolested, shooting game in abundance, and saying mass three times a week. Early in spring, they planted a large cross, attached to it the arms of France, and took formal possession of the country in the name of Louis XIV. This done, they resumed their voyage, and, after many troubles, landed one evening in a state of exhaustion on or near Point Pelée, towards the western extremity of Lake Erie. A storm rose as they lay asleep, and swept off a great part of their baggage, which, in their fatigue, they had left at the edge of the water. Their altar-service was lost with the rest,--a misfortune which they ascribed to the jealousy and malice of the Devil. Debarred henceforth from saying mass, they resolved to return to Montreal and leave the Pottawattamies uninstructed. They presently entered the strait by which Lake Huron joins Lake Erie, and landing near where Detroit now stands, found a large stone, somewhat suggestive of the human figure, which the Indians had bedaubed with paint, and which they worshipped as a manito. In view of their late misfortune, this device of the arch-enemy excited their utmost resentment. "After the loss of our altar-service," writes Galinée, "and the hunger we had suffered, there was not a man of us who was not filled with hatred against this false deity. I devoted one of my axes to breaking him in pieces; and then, having fastened our canoes side by side, we carried the largest piece to the middle of the river, and threw it, with all the rest, into the water, that he might never be heard of again. God rewarded us immediately for this good action, for we killed a deer and a bear that same day." [Sidenote: AT STE. MARIE DU SAUT.] This is the first recorded passage of white men through the Strait of Detroit; though Joliet had, no doubt, passed this way on his return from the Upper Lakes.[14] The two missionaries took this course, with the intention of proceeding to the Saut Ste. Marie, and there joining the Ottawas, and other tribes of that region, in their yearly descent to Montreal. They issued upon Lake Huron; followed its eastern shores till they reached the Georgian Bay, near the head of which the Jesuits had established their great mission of the Hurons, destroyed, twenty years before, by the Iroquois;[15] and, ignoring or slighting the labors of the rival missionaries, held their way northward along the rocky archipelago that edged those lonely coasts. They passed the Manitoulins, and, ascending the strait by which Lake Superior discharges its waters, arrived on the twenty-fifth of May at Ste. Marie du Saut. Here they found the two Jesuits, Dablon and Marquette, in a square fort of cedar pickets, built by their men within the past year, and enclosing a chapel and a house. Near by, they had cleared a large tract of land, and sown it with wheat, Indian corn, peas, and other crops. The new-comers were graciously received, and invited to vespers in the chapel; but they very soon found La Salle's prediction made good, and saw that the Jesuit fathers wanted no help from St. Sulpice. Galinée, on his part, takes occasion to remark, that, though the Jesuits had baptized a few Indians at the Saut, not one of them was a good enough Christian to receive the Eucharist; and he intimates that the case, by their own showing, was still worse at their mission of St. Esprit. The two Sulpitians did not care to prolong their stay; and, three days after their arrival, they left the Saut,--not, as they expected, with the Indians, but with a French guide, furnished by the Jesuits. Ascending French River to Lake Nipissing, they crossed to the waters of the Ottawa, and descended to Montreal, which they reached on the eighteenth of June. They had made no discoveries and no converts; but Galinée, after his arrival, made the earliest map of the Upper Lakes known to exist.[16] [Sidenote: LA SALLE'S DISCOVERIES.] We return now to La Salle, only to find ourselves involved in mist and obscurity. What did he do after he left the two priests? Unfortunately, a definite answer is not possible; and the next two years of his life remain in some measure an enigma. That he was busied in active exploration, and that he made important discoveries, is certain; but the extent and character of these discoveries remain wrapped in doubt. He is known to have kept journals and made maps; and these were in existence, and in possession of his niece, Madeleine Cavelier, then in advanced age, as late as the year 1756; beyond which time the most diligent inquiry has failed to trace them. Abbé Faillon affirms that some of La Salle's men, refusing to follow him, returned to La Chine, and that the place then received its name, in derision of the young adventurer's dream of a westward passage to China.[17] As for himself, the only distinct record of his movements is that contained in a paper, entitled "Histoire de Monsieur de la Salle." It is an account of his explorations, and of the state of parties in Canada previous to the year 1678,--taken from the lips of La Salle himself, by a person whose name does not appear, but who declares that he had ten or twelve conversations with him at Paris, whither he had come with a petition to the Court. The writer himself had never been in America, and was ignorant of its geography; hence blunders on his part might reasonably be expected. His statements, however, are in some measure intelligible; and the following is the substance of them. After leaving the priests, La Salle went to Onondaga, where we are left to infer that he succeeded better in getting a guide than he had before done among the Senecas. Thence he made his way to a point six or seven leagues distant from Lake Erie, where he reached a branch of the Ohio, and, descending it, followed the river as far as the rapids at Louisville,--or, as has been maintained, beyond its confluence with the Mississippi. His men now refused to go farther, and abandoned him, escaping to the English and the Dutch; whereupon he retraced his steps alone.[18] This must have been in the winter of 1669-70, or in the following spring; unless there is an error of date in the statement of Nicolas Perrot, the famous _voyageur_, who says that he met him in the summer of 1670, hunting on the Ottawa with a party of Iroquois.[19] [Sidenote: THE RIVER ILLINOIS.] But how was La Salle employed in the following year? The same memoir has its solution to the problem. By this it appears that the indefatigable explorer embarked on Lake Erie, ascended the Detroit to Lake Huron, coasted the unknown shores of Michigan, passed the Straits of Michilimackinac, and, leaving Green Bay behind him, entered what is described as an incomparably larger bay, but which was evidently the southern portion of Lake Michigan. Thence he crossed to a river flowing westward,--evidently the Illinois,--and followed it until it was joined by another river flowing from the northwest to the southeast. By this, the Mississippi only can be meant; and he is reported to have said that he descended it to the thirty-sixth degree of latitude; where he stopped, assured that it discharged itself not into the Gulf of California, but into the Gulf of Mexico, and resolved to follow it thither at a future day, when better provided with men and supplies.[20] [Sidenote: THE MISSISSIPPI.] The first of these statements,--that relating to the Ohio,--confused, vague, and in great part incorrect, as it certainly is, is nevertheless well sustained as regards one essential point. La Salle himself, in a memorial addressed to Count Frontenac in 1677, affirms that he discovered the Ohio, and descended it as far as to a fall which obstructed it.[21] Again, his rival, Louis Joliet, whose testimony on this point cannot be suspected, made two maps of the region of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. The Ohio is laid down on both of them, with an inscription to the effect that it had been explored by La Salle.[22] That he discovered the Ohio may then be regarded as established. That he descended it to the Mississippi, he himself does not pretend; nor is there reason to believe that he did so. With regard to his alleged voyage down the Illinois, the case is different. Here, he is reported to have made a statement which admits but one interpretation,--that of the discovery by him of the Mississippi prior to its discovery by Joliet and Marquette. This statement is attributed to a man not prone to vaunt his own exploits, who never proclaimed them in print, and whose testimony, even in his own case, must therefore have weight. But it comes to us through the medium of a person strongly biassed in favor of La Salle, and against Marquette and the Jesuits. [Sidenote: LA SALLE'S DISCOVERIES.] Seven years had passed since the alleged discovery, and La Salle had not before laid claim to it; although it was matter of notoriety that during five years it had been claimed by Joliet, and that his claim was generally admitted. The correspondence of the governor and the intendant is silent as to La Salle's having penetrated to the Mississippi, though the attempt was made under the auspices of the latter, as his own letters declare; while both had the discovery of the great river earnestly at heart. The governor, Frontenac, La Salle's ardent supporter and ally, believed in 1672, as his letters show, that the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of California; and, two years later, he announces to the minister Colbert its discovery by Joliet.[23] After La Salle's death, his brother, his nephew, and his niece addressed a memorial to the king, petitioning for certain grants in consideration of the discoveries of their relative, which they specify at some length; but they do not pretend that he reached the Mississippi before his expeditions of 1679 to 1682.[24] This silence is the more significant, as it is this very niece who had possession of the papers in which La Salle recounts the journeys of which the issues are in question.[25] Had they led him to the Mississippi, it is reasonably certain that she would have made it known in her memorial. La Salle discovered the Ohio, and in all probability the Illinois also; but that he discovered the Mississippi has not been proved, nor, in the light of the evidence we have, is it likely. FOOTNOTES: [13] This village seems to have been that attacked by Denonville in 1687. It stood on Boughton Hill, near the present town of Victor. [14] The Jesuits and fur-traders, on their way to the Upper Lakes, had followed the route of the Ottawa, or, more recently, that of Toronto and the Georgian Bay. Iroquois hostility had long closed the Niagara portage and Lake Erie against them. [15] The Jesuits in North America. [16] See Appendix. The above narrative is from _Récit de ce qui s'est passé de plus remarquable dans le Voyage de MM. Dollier et Galinée_. (Bibliothèque Nationale.) [17] Dollier de Casson alludes to this as "cette transmigration célèbre qui se fit de la Chine dans ces quartiers." [18] The following is the passage relating to this journey in the remarkable paper above mentioned. After recounting La Salle's visit with the Sulpitians to the Seneca village, and stating that the intrigues of the Jesuit missionary prevented them from obtaining a guide, it speaks of the separation of the travellers and the journey of Galinée and his party to the Saut Ste. Marie, where "les Jésuites les congédièrent." It then proceeds as follows: "Cependant Mr. de la Salle continua son chemin par une rivière qui va de l'est à l'ouest; et passe à Onontaqué [_Onondaga_], puis à six ou sept lieues au-dessous du Lac Erié; et estant parvenu jusqu'au 280me ou 83me degré de longitude, et jusqu'au 41me degré de latitude, trouva un sault qui tombe vers l'ouest dans un pays bas, marescageux, tout couvert de vielles souches, dont il y en a quelques-unes qui sont encore sur pied. Il fut donc contraint de prendre terre, et suivant une hauteur qui le pouvoit mener loin, il trouva quelques sauvages qui luy dirent que fort loin de là le mesme fleuve qui se perdoit dans cette terre basse et vaste se réunnissoit en un lit. Il continua donc son chemin, mais comme la fatigue estoit grande, 23 ou 24 hommes qu'il avoit menez jusques là le quittèrent tous en une nuit, regagnèrent le fleuve, et se sauvèrent, les uns à la Nouvelle Hollande et les autres à la Nouvelle Angleterre. Il se vit donc seul à 400 lieues de chez luy, où il ne laisse pas de revenir, remontant la rivière et vivant de chasse, d'herbes, et de ce que luy donnèrent les sauvages qu'il rencontra en son chemin." [19] Perrot, _Mémoires_, 119, 120. [20] The memoir--after stating, as above, that he entered Lake Huron, doubled the peninsula of Michigan, and passed La Baye des Puants (_Green Bay_)--says: "Il reconnut une baye incomparablement plus large; au fond de laquelle vers l'ouest il trouva un très-beau havre et au fond de ce havre un fleuve qui va de l'est à l'ouest. Il suivit ce fleuve, et estant parvenu jusqu'environ le 280me degré de longitude et le 39me de latitude, il trouva un autre fleuve qui se joignant au premier coulait du nordouest au sudest, et il suivit ce fleuve jusqu'au 36me degré de latitude." The "très-beau havre" may have been the entrance of the river Chicago, whence, by an easy portage, he might have reached the Des Plaines branch of the Illinois. We shall see that he took this course in his famous exploration of 1682. The intendant Talon announces, in his despatches of this year that he had sent La Salle southward and westward to explore. [21] The following are his words (he speaks of himself in the third person): "L'année 1667, et les suivantes, il fit divers voyages avec beaucoup de dépenses, dans lesquels il découvrit le premier beaucoup de pays au sud des grands lacs, et _entre autres la grande rivière d'Ohio_; il la suivit jusqu'à un endroit où elle tombe de fort haut dans de vastes marais, à la hauteur de 37 degrés, après avoir été grossie par une autre rivière fort large qui vient du nord; et toutes ces eaux se dêchargent selon toutes les apparences dans le Golfe du Mexique." This "autre rivière," which, it seems, was above the fall, may have been the Miami or the Scioto. There is but one fall on the river, that of Louisville, which is not so high as to deserve to be described as "fort haut," being only a strong rapid. The latitude, as will be seen, is different in the two accounts, and incorrect in both. [22] One of these maps is entitled _Carte de la découverte du Sieur Joliet_, 1674. Over the lines representing the Ohio are the words, "Route du sieur de la Salle pour aller dans le Mexique." The other map of Joliet bears, also written over the Ohio, the words, "Rivière par où descendit le sieur de la Salle au sortir du lac Erié pour aller dans le Mexique." I have also another manuscript map, made before the voyage of Joliet and Marquette, and apparently in the year 1673, on which the Ohio is represented as far as to a point a little below Louisville, and over it is written, "Rivière Ohio, ainsy appellée par les Iroquois à cause de sa beauté, par où le sieur de la Salle est descendu." The Mississippi is not represented on this map; but--and this is very significant, as indicating the extent of La Salle's exploration of the following year--a small part of the upper Illinois is laid down. [23] _Lettre de Frontenac au Ministre, 14 Nov., 1674._ He here speaks of "la grande rivière qu'il [_Joliet_] a trouvée, qui va du nord au sud, et qui est aussi large que celle du Saint-Laurent vis-à-vis de Québec." Four years later, Frontenac speaks slightingly of Joliet, but neither denies his discovery of the Mississippi, nor claims it for La Salle, in whose interest he writes. [24] _Papiers de Famille; Mémoire présenté au Roi._ The following is an extract: "Il parvient ... jusqu'à la rivière des Illinois. Il y construisit un fort situé à 350 lieues au-delà du fort de Frontenac, et suivant ensuite le cours de cette rivière, il trouva qu'elle se jettoit dans un grand fleuve appellé par ceux du pays Mississippi, c'est à dire _grande eau_, environ cent lieues au-dessous du fort qu'il venoit de construire." This fort was Fort Crèvecoeur, built in 1680, near the site of Peoria. The memoir goes on to relate the descent of La Salle to the Gulf, which concluded this expedition of 1679-82. [25] The following is an extract, given by Margry, from a letter of the aged Madeleine Cavelier, dated 21 Février, 1756, and addressed to her nephew, M. Le Baillif, who had applied for the papers in behalf of the minister, Silhouette: "J'ay cherché une occasion sûre pour vous anvoyé les papiers de M. de la Salle. Il y a des cartes que j'ay jointe à ces papiers, qui doivent prouver que, en 1675, M. de Lasalle avet déja fet deux voyages en ces decouverte, puisqu'il y avet une carte, que je vous envoye, par laquelle il est fait mention de l'androit auquel M. de Lasalle aborda près le fleuve de Mississipi; un autre androit qu'il nomme le fleuve Colbert; en un autre il prans possession de ce pais au nom du roy et fait planter une crois." The words of the aged and illiterate writer are obscure, but her expression "aborda près" seems to indicate that La Salle had not reached the Mississippi prior to 1675, but only approached it. Finally, a memorial presented to Seignelay, along with the official narrative of 1679-81, by a friend of La Salle, whose object was to place the discoverer and his achievements in the most favorable light, contains the following: "Il [_La Salle_] a esté le premier à former le dessein de ces descouvertes, qu'il communiqua, il y a plus de quinze ans, à M. de Courcelles, gouverneur, et à M. Talon, intendant du Canada, qui l'approuvèrent. Il a fait ensuite plusieurs voyages de ce costé-là, et un entr'autres en 1669 avec MM. Dolier et Galinée, prestres du Séminaire de St. Sulpice. _Il est vray que le sieur Jolliet, pour le prévenir, fit un voyage in 1673, à la rivière Colbert_; mais ce fut uniquement pour y faire commerce." See Margry, ii. 285. This passage is a virtual admission that Joliet reached the Mississippi (_Colbert_) before La Salle. Margry, in a series of papers in the _Journal Général de l'Instruction Publique_ for 1862, first took the position that La Salle reached the Mississippi in 1670 and 1671, and has brought forward in defence of it all the documents which his unwearied research enabled him to discover. Father Tailhan, S.J., has replied at length, in the copious notes to his edition of Nicolas Perrot, but without having seen the principal document cited by Margry, and of which extracts have been given in the notes to this chapter. CHAPTER III. 1670-1672. THE JESUITS ON THE LAKES. The Old Missions and the New.--A Change of Spirit.--Lake Superior and the Copper-mines.--Ste. Marie.--La Pointe.--Michilimackinac.--Jesuits on Lake Michigan.--Allouez and Dablon.--The Jesuit Fur-trade. What were the Jesuits doing? Since the ruin of their great mission of the Hurons, a perceptible change had taken place in them. They had put forth exertions almost superhuman, set at naught famine, disease, and death, lived with the self-abnegation of saints and died with the devotion of martyrs; and the result of all had been a disastrous failure. From no short-coming on their part, but from the force of events beyond the sphere of their influence, a very demon of havoc had crushed their incipient churches, slaughtered their converts, uprooted the populous communities on which their hopes had rested, and scattered them in bands of wretched fugitives far and wide through the wilderness.[26] They had devoted themselves in the fulness of faith to the building up of a Christian and Jesuit empire on the conversion of the great stationary tribes of the lakes; and of these none remained but the Iroquois, the destroyers of the rest,--among whom, indeed, was a field which might stimulate their zeal by an abundant promise of sufferings and martyrdoms, but which, from its geographical position, was too much exposed to Dutch and English influence to promise great and decisive results. Their best hopes were now in the North and the West; and thither, in great part, they had turned their energies. [Sidenote: REPORTS OF THE JESUITS.] We find them on Lake Huron, Lake Superior, and Lake Michigan, laboring vigorously as of old, but in a spirit not quite the same. Now, as before, two objects inspired their zeal,--the "greater glory of God," and the influence and credit of the Order of Jesus. If the one motive had somewhat lost in power, the other had gained. The epoch of the saints and martyrs was passing away; and henceforth we find the Canadian Jesuit less and less an apostle, more and more an explorer, a man of science, and a politician. The yearly reports of the missions are still, for the edification of the pious reader, filled with intolerably tedious stories of baptisms, conversions, and the exemplary deportment of neophytes,--for these have become a part of the formula; but they are relieved abundantly by more mundane topics. One finds observations on the winds, currents, and tides of the Great Lakes; speculations on a subterranean outlet of Lake Superior; accounts of its copper-mines, and how we, the Jesuit fathers, are laboring to explore them for the profit of the colony; surmises touching the North Sea, the South Sea, the Sea of China, which we hope ere long to discover; and reports of that great mysterious river of which the Indians tell us,--flowing southward, perhaps to the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps to the Vermilion Sea,--and the secrets whereof, with the help of the Virgin, we will soon reveal to the world. The Jesuit was as often a fanatic for his Order as for his faith; and oftener yet the two fanaticisms mingled in him inextricably. Ardently as he burned for the saving of souls, he would have none saved on the Upper Lakes except by his brethren and himself. He claimed a monopoly of conversion, with its attendant monopoly of toil, hardship, and martyrdom. Often disinterested for himself, he was inordinately ambitious for the great corporate power in which he had merged his own personality; and here lies one cause, among many, of the seeming contradictions which abound in the annals of the Order. Prefixed to the _Relation_ of 1671 is that monument of Jesuit hardihood and enterprise, the map of Lake Superior,--a work of which, however, the exactness has been exaggerated, as compared with other Canadian maps of the day. While making surveys, the priests were diligently looking for copper. Father Dablon reports that they had found it in greatest abundance on Isle Minong, now Isle Royale. "A day's journey from the head of the lake, on the south side, there is," he says, "a rock of copper weighing from six hundred to eight hundred pounds, lying on the shore where any who pass may see it;" and he further speaks of great copper boulders in the bed of the river Ontonagan.[27] [Sidenote: STE. MARIE DU SAUT.] There were two principal missions on the Upper Lakes, which were, in a certain sense, the parents of the rest. One of these was Ste. Marie du Saut,--the same visited by Dollier and Galinée,--at the outlet of Lake Superior. This was a noted fishing-place; for the rapids were full of white-fish, and Indians came thither in crowds. The permanent residents were an Ojibwa band, whom the French called Sauteurs, and whose bark lodges were clustered at the foot of the rapids, near the fort of the Jesuits. Besides these, a host of Algonquins, of various tribes, resorted thither in the spring and summer,--living in abundance on the fishery, and dispersing in winter to wander and starve in scattered hunting-parties far and wide through the forests. The other chief mission was that of St. Esprit, at La Pointe, near the western extremity of Lake Superior. Here were the Hurons, fugitives twenty years before from the slaughter of their countrymen; and the Ottawas, who, like them, had sought an asylum from the rage of the Iroquois. Many other tribes--Illinois, Pottawattamies, Foxes, Menomonies, Sioux, Assiniboins, Knisteneaux, and a multitude besides--came hither yearly to trade with the French. Here was a young Jesuit, Jacques Marquette, lately arrived from the Saut Ste. Marie. His savage flock disheartened him by its backslidings; and the best that he could report of the Hurons, after all the toil and all the blood lavished in their conversion, was, that they "still retain a little Christianity;" while the Ottawas are "far removed from the kingdom of God, and addicted beyond all other tribes to foulness, incantations, and sacrifices to evil spirits."[28] [Sidenote: MARQUETTE AND ANDRÉ.] Marquette heard from the Illinois--yearly visitors at La Pointe--of the great river which they had crossed on their way,[29] and which, as he conjectured, flowed into the Gulf of California. He heard marvels of it also from the Sioux, who lived on its banks; and a strong desire possessed him to explore the mystery of its course. A sudden calamity dashed his hopes. The Sioux--the Iroquois of the West, as the Jesuits call them--had hitherto kept the peace with the expatriated tribes of La Pointe; but now, from some cause not worth inquiry, they broke into open war, and so terrified the Hurons and Ottawas that they abandoned their settlements and fled. Marquette followed his panic-stricken flock, who, passing the Saut Ste. Marie, and descending to Lake Huron, stopped at length,--the Hurons at Michilimackinac, and the Ottawas at the Great Manitoulin Island. Two missions were now necessary to minister to the divided bands. That of Michilimackinac was assigned to Marquette, and that of the Manitoulin Island to Louis André. The former took post at Point St. Ignace, on the north shore of the Straits of Michilimackinac, while the latter began the mission of St. Simon at the new abode of the Ottawas. When winter came, scattering his flock to their hunting-grounds, André made a missionary tour among the Nipissings and other neighboring tribes. The shores of Lake Huron had long been an utter solitude, swept of their denizens by the terror of the all-conquering Iroquois; but now that these tigers had felt the power of the French, and learned for a time to leave their Indian allies in peace, the fugitive hordes were returning to their ancient abodes. André's experience among them was of the roughest. The staple of his diet was acorns and _tripe de roche_,--a species of lichen, which, being boiled, resolved itself into a black glue, nauseous, but not void of nourishment. At times, he was reduced to moss, the bark of trees, or moccasins and old moose-skins cut into strips and boiled. His hosts treated him very ill, and the worst of their fare was always his portion. When spring came to his relief, he returned to his post of St. Simon, with impaired digestion and unabated zeal. [Sidenote: THE GREEN BAY MISSION.] Besides the Saut Ste. Marie and Michilimackinac, both noted fishing-places, there was another spot, no less famous for game and fish, and therefore a favorite resort of Indians. This was the head of the Green Bay of Lake Michigan.[30] Here and in adjacent districts several distinct tribes had made their abode. The Menomonies were on the river which bears their name; the Pottawattamies and Winnebagoes were near the borders of the bay; the Sacs, on Fox River; the Mascoutins, Miamis, and Kickapoos, on the same river, above Lake Winnebago; and the Outagamies, or Foxes, on a tributary of it flowing from the north. Green Bay was manifestly suited for a mission; and, as early as the autumn of 1669, Father Claude Allouez was sent thither to found one. After nearly perishing by the way, he set out to explore the destined field of his labors, and went as far as the town of the Mascoutins. Early in the autumn of 1670, having been joined by Dablon, Superior of the missions on the Upper Lakes, he made another journey, but not until the two fathers had held a council with the congregated tribes at St. François Xavier; for so they named their mission of Green Bay. Here, as they harangued their naked audience, their gravity was put to the proof; for a band of warriors, anxious to do them honor, walked incessantly up and down, aping the movements of the soldiers on guard before the governor's tent at Montreal. "We could hardly keep from laughing," writes Dablon, "though, we were discoursing on very important subjects; namely, the mysteries of our religion, and the things necessary to escaping from eternal fire."[31] The fathers were delighted with the country, which Dablon calls an earthly paradise; but he adds that the way to it is as hard as the path to heaven. He alludes especially to the rapids of Fox River, which gave the two travellers great trouble. Having safely passed them, they saw an Indian idol on the bank, similar to that which Dollier and Galinée found at Detroit,--being merely a rock, bearing some resemblance to a man, and hideously painted. With the help of their attendants, they threw it into the river. Dablon expatiates on the buffalo, which he describes apparently on the report of others, as his description is not very accurate. Crossing Winnebago Lake, the two priests followed the river leading to the town of the Mascoutins and Miamis, which they reached on the fifteenth of September.[32] These two tribes lived together within the compass of the same enclosure of palisades,--to the number, it is said, of more than three thousand souls. The missionaries, who had brought a highly colored picture of the Last Judgment, called the Indians to council and displayed it before them; while Allouez, who spoke Algonquin, harangued them on hell, demons, and eternal flames. They listened with open ears, beset him night and day with questions, and invited him and his companion to unceasing feasts. They were welcomed in every lodge, and followed everywhere with eyes of curiosity, wonder, and awe. Dablon overflows with praises of the Miami chief, who was honored by his subjects like a king, and whose demeanor towards his guests had no savor of the savage. Their hosts told them of the great river Mississippi, rising far in the north and flowing southward,--they knew not whither,--and of many tribes that dwelt along its banks. When at length they took their departure, they left behind them a reputation as medicine-men of transcendent power. [Sidenote: THE CROSS AMONG THE FOXES.] In the winter following, Allouez visited the Foxes, whom he found in extreme ill-humor. They were incensed against the French by the ill-usage which some of their tribe had lately met when on a trading visit to Montreal; and they received the Faith with shouts of derision. The priest was horror-stricken at what he saw. Their lodges, each containing from five to ten families, seemed in his eyes like seraglios; for some of the chiefs had eight wives. He armed himself with patience, and at length gained a hearing. Nay, he succeeded so well, that when he showed them his crucifix they would throw tobacco on it as an offering; and, on another visit which he made them soon after, he taught the whole village to make the sign of the cross. A war-party was going out against their enemies, and he bethought him of telling them the story of the Cross and the Emperor Constantine. This so wrought upon them that they all daubed the figure of a cross on their shields of bull-hide, set out for the war, and came back victorious, extolling the sacred symbol as a great war-medicine. "Thus it is," writes Dablon, who chronicles the incident, "that our holy faith is established among these people; and we have good hope that we shall soon carry it to the famous river called the Mississippi, and perhaps even to the South Sea."[33] Most things human have their phases of the ludicrous; and the heroism of these untiring priests is no exception to the rule. [Sidenote: TRADING WITH INDIANS.] The various missionary stations were much alike. They consisted of a chapel (commonly of logs) and one or more houses, with perhaps a store-house and a workshop; the whole fenced with palisades, and forming, in fact, a stockade fort, surrounded with clearings and cultivated fields. It is evident that the priests had need of other hands than their own and those of the few lay brothers attached to the mission. They required men inured to labor, accustomed to the forest life, able to guide canoes and handle tools and weapons. In the earlier epoch of the missions, when enthusiasm was at its height, they were served in great measure by volunteers, who joined them through devotion or penitence, and who were known as _donnés_ or "given men." Of late, the number of these had much diminished; and they now relied chiefly on hired men, or _engagés_. These were employed in building, hunting, fishing, clearing, and tilling the ground, guiding canoes, and (if faith is to be placed in reports current throughout the colony) in trading with the Indians for the profit of the missions. This charge of trading--which, if the results were applied exclusively to the support of the missions, does not of necessity involve much censure--is vehemently reiterated in many quarters, including the official despatches of the governor of Canada; while, so far as I can discover, the Jesuits never distinctly denied it, and on several occasions they partially admitted its truth.[34] FOOTNOTES: [26] See "The Jesuits in North America." [27] He complains that the Indians were very averse to giving information on the subject, so that the Jesuits had not as yet discovered the metal _in situ_, though they hoped soon to do so. The Indians told him that the copper had first been found by four hunters, who had landed on a certain island, near the north shore of the lake. Wishing to boil their food in a vessel of bark, they gathered stones on the shore, heated them red hot, and threw them in, but presently discovered them to be pure copper. Their repast over, they hastened to re-embark, being afraid of the lynxes and the hares, which, on this island, were as large as dogs, and which would have devoured their provisions, and perhaps their canoe. They took with them some of the wonderful stones; but scarcely had they left the island, when a deep voice, like thunder, sounded in their ears, "Who are these thieves who steal the toys of my children?" It was the God of the Waters, or some other powerful manito. The four adventurers retreated in great terror; but three of them soon died, and the fourth survived only long enough to reach his village, and tell the story. The island has no foundation, but floats with the movement of the wind; and no Indian dares land on its shores, dreading the wrath of the manito. Dablon, _Relation_, 1670, 84. [28] _Lettre du Père Jacques Marquette au R. P. Supérieur des Missions;_ in _Relation_, 1670, 87. [29] The Illinois lived at this time beyond the Mississippi, thirty days' journey from La Pointe; whither they had been driven by the Iroquois, from their former abode near Lake Michigan. Dablon (_Relation_, 1671, 24, 25) says that they lived seven days' journey beyond the Mississippi, in eight villages. A few years later, most of them returned to the east side, and made their abode on the river Illinois. [30] The Baye des Puants of the early writers; or, more correctly, La Baye des Eaux Puantes. The Winnebago Indians, living near it, were called Les Puans, apparently for no other reason than because some portion of the bay was said to have an odor like the sea. Lake Michigan, the "Lac des Illinois" of the French, was, according to a letter of Father Allouez, called "Machihiganing" by the Indians. Dablon writes the name "Mitchiganon." [31] _Relation_, 1671, 43. [32] This town was on the Neenah or Fox River, above Lake Winnebago. The Mascoutins, Fire Nation, or Nation of the Prairie, are extinct or merged in other tribes. See "The Jesuits in North America." The Miamis soon removed to the banks of the river St. Joseph, near Lake Michigan. [33] _Relation_, 1672, 42. [34] This charge was made from the first establishment of the missions. For remarks on it, see "The Jesuits in North America" and "The Old Régime in Canada." CHAPTER IV. 1667-1672. FRANCE TAKES POSSESSION OF THE WEST. Talon.--Saint-Lusson.--Perrot.--The Ceremony at Saut Ste. Marie.--The Speech of Allouez.--Count Frontenac. Jean Talon, intendant of Canada, was full of projects for the good of the colony. On the one hand, he set himself to the development of its industries, and, on the other, to the extension of its domain. He meant to occupy the interior of the continent, control the rivers, which were its only highways, and hold it for France against every other nation. On the east, England was to be hemmed within a narrow strip of seaboard; while, on the south, Talon aimed at securing a port on the Gulf of Mexico, to keep the Spaniards in check, and dispute with them the possession of the vast regions which they claimed as their own. But the interior of the continent was still an unknown world. It behooved him to explore it; and to that end he availed himself of Jesuits, officers, fur-traders, and enterprising schemers like La Salle. His efforts at discovery seem to have been conducted with a singular economy of the King's purse. La Salle paid all the expenses of his first expedition made under Talon's auspices; and apparently of the second also, though the intendant announces it in his despatches as an expedition sent out by himself.[35] When, in 1670, he ordered Daumont de Saint-Lusson to search for copper mines on Lake Superior, and at the same time to take formal possession of the whole interior for the King, it was arranged that he should pay the costs of the journey by trading with the Indians.[36] [Sidenote: SAINT-LUSSON AND PERROT.] Saint-Lusson set out with a small party of men, and Nicolas Perrot as his interpreter. Among Canadian _voyageurs_, few names are so conspicuous as that of Perrot; not because there were not others who matched him in achievement, but because he could write, and left behind him a tolerable account of what he had seen.[37] He was at this time twenty-six years old, and had formerly been an _engagé_ of the Jesuits. He was a man of enterprise, courage, and address,--the last being especially shown in his dealings with Indians, over whom he had great influence. He spoke Algonquin fluently, and was favorably known to many tribes of that family. Saint-Lusson wintered at the Manitoulin Islands; while Perrot, having first sent messages to the tribes of the north, inviting them to meet the deputy of the governor at the Saut Ste. Marie in the following spring, proceeded to Green Bay, to urge the same invitation upon the tribes of that quarter. They knew him well, and greeted him with clamors of welcome. The Miamis, it is said, received him with a sham battle, which was designed to do him honor, but by which nerves more susceptible would have been severely shaken.[38] They entertained him also with a grand game of _la crosse_, the Indian ball-play. Perrot gives a marvellous account of the authority and state of the Miami chief, who, he says, was attended day and night by a guard of warriors,--an assertion which would be incredible, were it not sustained by the account of the same chief given by the Jesuit Dablon. Of the tribes of the Bay, the greater part promised to send delegates to the Saut; but the Pottawattamies dissuaded the Miami potentate from attempting so long a journey, lest the fatigue incident to it might injure his health; and he therefore deputed them to represent him and his tribesmen at the great meeting. Their principal chiefs, with those of the Sacs, Winnebagoes, and Menomonies, embarked, and paddled for the place of rendezvous, where they and Perrot arrived on the fifth of May.[39] Saint-Lusson was here with his men, fifteen in number, among whom was Louis Joliet;[40] and Indians were fast thronging in from their wintering grounds, attracted, as usual, by the fishery of the rapids or moved by the messages sent by Perrot,--Crees, Monsonis, Amikoués, Nipissings, and many more. When fourteen tribes, or their representatives, had arrived, Saint-Lusson prepared to execute the commission with which he was charged. [Sidenote: CEREMONY AT THE SAUT.] At the foot of the rapids was the village of the Sauteurs, above the village was a hill, and hard by stood the fort of the Jesuits. On the morning of the fourteenth of June, Saint-Lusson led his followers to the top of the hill, all fully equipped and under arms. Here, too, in the vestments of their priestly office, were four Jesuits,--Claude Dablon, Superior of the Missions of the lakes, Gabriel Druilletes, Claude Allouez, and Louis André.[41] All around the great throng of Indians stood, or crouched, or reclined at length, with eyes and ears intent. A large cross of wood had been made ready. Dablon, in solemn form, pronounced his blessing on it; and then it was reared and planted in the ground, while the Frenchmen, uncovered, sang the _Vexilla Regis_. Then a post of cedar was planted beside it, with a metal plate attached, engraven with the royal arms; while Saint-Lusson's followers sang the _Exaudiat_, and one of the Jesuits uttered a prayer for the King. Saint-Lusson now advanced, and, holding his sword in one hand, and raising with the other a sod of earth, proclaimed in a loud voice,-- "In the name of the Most High, Mighty, and Redoubted Monarch, Louis, Fourteenth of that name, Most Christian King of France and of Navarre, I take possession of this place, Sainte Marie du Saut, as also of Lakes Huron and Superior, the Island of Manitoulin, and all countries, rivers, lakes, and streams contiguous and adjacent thereunto,--both those which have been discovered and those which may be discovered hereafter, in all their length and breadth, bounded on the one side by the seas of the North and of the West, and on the other by the South Sea: declaring to the nations thereof that from this time forth they are vassals of his Majesty, bound to obey his laws and follow his customs; promising them on his part all succor and protection against the incursions and invasions of their enemies: declaring to all other potentates, princes, sovereigns, states, and republics,--to them and to their subjects,--that they cannot and are not to seize or settle upon any parts of the aforesaid countries, save only under the good pleasure of His Most Christian Majesty, and of him who will govern in his behalf; and this on pain of incurring his resentment and the efforts of his arms. _Vive le Roi_."[42] The Frenchmen fired their guns and shouted "Vive le Roi," and the yelps of the astonished Indians mingled with the din. What now remains of the sovereignty thus pompously proclaimed? Now and then the accents of France on the lips of some straggling boatman or vagabond half-breed,--this, and nothing more. [Sidenote: ALLOUEZ'S HARANGUE.] When the uproar was over, Father Allouez addressed the Indians in a solemn harangue; and these were his words: "It is a good work, my brothers, an important work, a great work, that brings us together in council to-day. Look up at the cross which rises so high above your heads. It was there that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, after making himself a man for the love of men, was nailed and died, to satisfy his Eternal Father for our sins. He is the master of our lives; the ruler of Heaven, Earth, and Hell. It is he of whom I am continually speaking to you, and whose name and word I have borne through all your country. But look at this post to which are fixed the arms of the great chief of France, whom we call King. He lives across the sea. He is the chief of the greatest chiefs, and has no equal on earth. All the chiefs whom you have ever seen are but children beside him. He is like a great tree, and they are but the little herbs that one walks over and tramples under foot. You know Onontio,[43] that famous chief at Quebec; you know and you have seen that he is the terror of the Iroquois, and that his very name makes them tremble, since he has laid their country waste and burned their towns with fire. Across the sea there are ten thousand Onontios like him, who are but the warriors of our great King, of whom I have told you. When he says, 'I am going to war,' everybody obeys his orders; and each of these ten thousand chiefs raises a troop of a hundred warriors, some on sea and some on land. Some embark in great ships, such as you have seen at Quebec. Your canoes carry only four or five men, or, at the most, ten or twelve; but our ships carry four or five hundred, and sometimes a thousand. Others go to war by land, and in such numbers that if they stood in a double file they would reach from here to Mississaquenk, which is more than twenty leagues off. When our King attacks his enemies, he is more terrible than the thunder: the earth trembles; the air and the sea are all on fire with the blaze of his cannon: he is seen in the midst of his warriors, covered over with the blood of his enemies, whom he kills in such numbers that he does not reckon them by the scalps, but by the streams of blood which he causes to flow. He takes so many prisoners that he holds them in no account, but lets them go where they will, to show that he is not afraid of them. But now nobody dares make war on him. All the nations beyond the sea have submitted to him and begged humbly for peace. Men come from every quarter of the earth to listen to him and admire him. All that is done in the world is decided by him alone. "But what shall I say of his riches? You think yourselves rich when you have ten or twelve sacks of corn, a few hatchets, beads, kettles, and other things of that sort. He has cities of his own, more than there are of men in all this country for five hundred leagues around. In each city there are store-houses where there are hatchets enough to cut down all your forests, kettles enough to cook all your moose, and beads enough to fill all your lodges. His house is longer than from here to the top of the Saut,--that is to say, more than half a league,--and higher than your tallest trees; and it holds more families than the largest of your towns."[44] The father added more in a similar strain; but the peroration of his harangue is not on record. Whatever impression this curious effort of Jesuit rhetoric may have produced upon the hearers, it did not prevent them from stripping the royal arms from the post to which they were nailed, as soon as Saint-Lusson and his men had left the Saut; probably, not because they understood the import of the symbol, but because they feared it as a charm. Saint-Lusson proceeded to Lake Superior, where, however, he accomplished nothing, except, perhaps, a traffic with the Indians on his own account; and he soon after returned to Quebec. Talon was resolved to find the Mississippi, the most interesting object of search, and seemingly the most attainable, in the wild and vague domain which he had just claimed for the King. The Indians had described it; the Jesuits were eager to discover it; and La Salle, if he had not reached it, had explored two several avenues by which it might be approached. Talon looked about him for a fit agent of the enterprise, and made choice of Louis Joliet, who had returned from Lake Superior.[45] But the intendant was not to see the fulfilment of his design. His busy and useful career in Canada was drawing to an end. A misunderstanding had arisen between him and the governor, Courcelle. Both were faithful servants of the King; but the relations between the two chiefs of the colony were of a nature necessarily so critical, that a conflict of authority was scarcely to be avoided. Each thought his functions encroached upon, and both asked for recall. Another governor succeeded; one who was to stamp his mark, broad, bold, and ineffaceable, on the most memorable page of French-American History,--Louis de Buade, Count of Palluau and Frontenac. FOOTNOTES: [35] At least, La Salle was in great need of money, about the time of his second journey. On the sixth of August, 1671, he had received on credit, "dans son grand besoin et nécessité," from Branssac, fiscal attorney of the Seminary, merchandise to the amount of four hundred and fifty livres; and on the eighteenth of December of the following year he gave his promise to pay the same sum, in money or furs, in the August following. Faillon found the papers in the ancient records of Montreal. [36] In his despatch of 2d Nov., 1671, Talon writes to the King that "Saint-Lusson's expedition will cost nothing, as he has received beaver enough from the Indians to pay him." [37] _Moeurs, Coustumes, et Relligion des Sauvages de l'Amérique Septentrionale._ This work of Perrot, hitherto unpublished, appeared in 1864, under the editorship of Father Tailhan, S.J. A great part of it is incorporated in La Potherie. [38] See La Potherie, ii. 125. Perrot himself does not mention it. Charlevoix erroneously places this interview at Chicago. Perrot's narrative shows that he did not go farther than the tribes of Green Bay; and the Miamis were then, as we have seen, on the upper part of Fox River. [39] Perrot, _Mémoires_, 127. [40] _Procès Verbal de la Prise de Possession, etc., 14 Juin, 1671._ The names are attached to this instrument. [41] Marquette is said to have been present; but the official act just cited, proves the contrary. He was still at St. Esprit. [42] _Procès Verbal de la Prise de Possession._ [43] The Indian name of the governor of Canada. [44] A close translation of Dablon's report of the speech. See _Relation_, 1671, 27. [45] _Lettre de Frontenac au Ministre, 2 Nov., 1672._ In the Brodhead Collection, by a copyist's error, the name of the Chevalier de Grandfontaine is substituted for that of Talon. CHAPTER V. 1672-1675. THE DISCOVERY OF THE MISSISSIPPI. Joliet sent to find the Mississippi.--Jacques Marquette.--Departure.--Green Bay.--The Wisconsin.--The Mississippi.--Indians.--Manitous.--The Arkansas.--The Illinois.--Joliet's Misfortune.--Marquette at Chicago: his Illness; his Death. If Talon had remained in the colony, Frontenac would infallibly have quarrelled with him; but he was too clear-sighted not to approve his plans for the discovery and occupation of the interior. Before sailing for France, Talon recommended Joliet as a suitable agent for the discovery of the Mississippi, and the governor accepted his counsel.[46] Louis Joliet was the son of a wagon-maker in the service of the Company of the Hundred Associates,[47] then owners of Canada. He was born at Quebec in 1645, and was educated by the Jesuits. When still very young, he resolved to be a priest. He received the tonsure and the minor orders at the age of seventeen. Four years after, he is mentioned with especial honor for the part he bore in the disputes in philosophy, at which the dignitaries of the colony were present, and in which the intendant himself took part.[48] Not long after, he renounced his clerical vocation, and turned fur-trader. Talon sent him, with one Péré, to explore the copper-mines of Lake Superior; and it was on his return from this expedition that he met La Salle and the Sulpitians near the head of Lake Ontario.[49] In what we know of Joliet, there is nothing that reveals any salient or distinctive trait of character, any especial breadth of view or boldness of design. He appears to have been simply a merchant, intelligent, well educated, courageous, hardy, and enterprising. Though he had renounced the priesthood, he retained his partiality for the Jesuits; and it is more than probable that their influence had aided not a little to determine Talon's choice. One of their number, Jacques Marquette, was chosen to accompany him. [Sidenote: MARQUETTE.] He passed up the lakes to Michilimackinac, and found his destined companion at Point St. Ignace, on the north side of the strait, where, in his palisaded mission-house and chapel, he had labored for two years past to instruct the Huron refugees from St. Esprit, and a band of Ottawas who had joined them. Marquette was born in 1637, of an old and honorable family at Laon, in the north of France, and was now thirty-five years of age. When about seventeen, he had joined the Jesuits, evidently from motives purely religious; and in 1666 he was sent to the missions of Canada. At first, he was destined to the station of Tadoussac; and to prepare himself for it, he studied the Montagnais language under Gabriel Druilletes. But his destination was changed, and he was sent to the Upper Lakes in 1668, where he had since remained. His talents as a linguist must have been great; for within a few years he learned to speak with ease six Indian languages. The traits of his character are unmistakable. He was of the brotherhood of the early Canadian missionaries, and the true counterpart of Garnier or Jogues. He was a devout votary of the Virgin Mary, who, imaged to his mind in shapes of the most transcendent loveliness with which the pencil of human genius has ever informed the canvas, was to him the object of an adoration not unmingled with a sentiment of chivalrous devotion. The longings of a sensitive heart, divorced from earth, sought solace in the skies. A subtile element of romance was blended with the fervor of his worship, and hung like an illumined cloud over the harsh and hard realities of his daily lot. Kindled by the smile of his celestial mistress, his gentle and noble nature knew no fear. For her he burned to dare and to suffer, discover new lands and conquer new realms to her sway. He begins the journal of his voyage thus: "The day of the Immaculate Conception of the Holy Virgin; whom I had continually invoked since I came to this country of the Ottawas to obtain from God the favor of being enabled to visit the nations on the river Mississippi,--this very day was precisely that on which M. Joliet arrived with orders from Count Frontenac, our governor, and from M. Talon, our intendant, to go with me on this discovery. I was all the more delighted at this good news, because I saw my plans about to be accomplished, and found myself in the happy necessity of exposing my life for the salvation of all these tribes,--and especially of the Illinois, who, when I was at Point St. Esprit, had begged me very earnestly to bring the word of God among them." [Sidenote: DEPARTURE.] The outfit of the travellers was very simple. They provided themselves with two birch canoes, and a supply of smoked meat and Indian corn; embarked with five men, and began their voyage on the seventeenth of May. They had obtained all possible information from the Indians, and had made, by means of it, a species of map of their intended route. "Above all," writes Marquette, "I placed our voyage under the protection of the Holy Virgin Immaculate, promising that if she granted us the favor of discovering the great river, I would give it the name of the Conception."[50] Their course was westward; and, plying their paddles, they passed the Straits of Michilimackinac, and coasted the northern shores of Lake Michigan, landing at evening to build their camp-fire at the edge of the forest, and draw up their canoes on the strand. They soon reached the river Menomonie, and ascended it to the village of the Menomonies, or Wild-rice Indians.[51] When they told them the object of their voyage, they were filled with astonishment, and used their best ingenuity to dissuade them. The banks of the Mississippi, they said, were inhabited by ferocious tribes, who put every stranger to death, tomahawking all new-comers without cause or provocation. They added that there was a demon in a certain part of the river, whose roar could be heard at a great distance, and who would engulf them in the abyss where he dwelt; that its waters were full of frightful monsters, who would devour them and their canoe; and, finally, that the heat was so great that they would perish inevitably. Marquette set their counsel at naught, gave them a few words of instruction in the mysteries of the Faith, taught them a prayer, and bade them farewell. The travellers next reached the mission at the head of Green Bay; entered Fox River; with difficulty and labor dragged their canoes up the long and tumultuous rapids; crossed Lake Winnebago; and followed the quiet windings of the river beyond, where they glided through an endless growth of wild rice, and scared the innumerable birds that fed upon it. On either hand rolled the prairie, dotted with groves and trees, browsing elk and deer.[52] On the seventh of June, they reached the Mascoutins and Miamis, who, since the visit of Dablon and Allouez, had been joined by the Kickapoos. Marquette, who had an eye for natural beauty, was delighted with the situation of the town, which he describes as standing on the crown of a hill; while, all around, the prairie stretched beyond the sight, interspersed with groves and belts of tall forest. But he was still more delighted when he saw a cross planted in the midst of the place. The Indians had decorated it with a number of dressed deer-skins, red girdles, and bows and arrows, which they had hung upon it as an offering to the Great Manitou of the French; a sight by which Marquette says he was "extremely consoled." [Sidenote: THE WISCONSIN RIVER.] The travellers had no sooner reached the town than they called the chiefs and elders to a council. Joliet told them that the governor of Canada had sent him to discover new countries, and that God had sent his companion to teach the true faith to the inhabitants; and he prayed for guides to show them the way to the waters of the Wisconsin. The council readily consented; and on the tenth of June the Frenchmen embarked again, with two Indians to conduct them. All the town came down to the shore to see their departure. Here were the Miamis, with long locks of hair dangling over each ear, after a fashion which Marquette thought very becoming; and here, too, the Mascoutins and the Kickapoos, whom he describes as mere boors in comparison with their Miami townsmen. All stared alike at the seven adventurers, marvelling that men could be found to risk an enterprise so hazardous. The river twisted among lakes and marshes choked with wild rice; and, but for their guides, they could scarcely have followed the perplexed and narrow channel. It brought them at last to the portage, where, after carrying their canoes a mile and a half over the prairie and through the marsh, they launched them on the Wisconsin, bade farewell to the waters that flowed to the St. Lawrence, and committed themselves to the current that was to bear them they knew not whither,--perhaps to the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps to the South Sea or the Gulf of California. They glided calmly down the tranquil stream, by islands choked with trees and matted with entangling grape-vines; by forests, groves, and prairies, the parks and pleasure-grounds of a prodigal Nature; by thickets and marshes and broad bare sand-bars; under the shadowing trees, between whose tops looked down from afar the bold brow of some woody bluff. At night, the bivouac,--the canoes inverted on the bank, the flickering fire, the meal of bison-flesh or venison, the evening pipes, and slumber beneath the stars; and when in the morning they embarked again, the mist hung on the river like a bridal veil, then melted before the sun, till the glassy water and the languid woods basked breathless in the sultry glare.[53] [Sidenote: THE MISSISSIPPI.] On the seventeenth of June they saw on their right the broad meadows, bounded in the distance by rugged hills, where now stand the town and fort of Prairie du Chien. Before them a wide and rapid current coursed athwart their way, by the foot of lofty heights wrapped thick in forests. They had found what they sought, and "with a joy," writes Marquette, "which I cannot express," they steered forth their canoes on the eddies of the Mississippi. Turning southward, they paddled down the stream, through a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man. A large fish, apparently one of the huge cat-fish of the Mississippi, blundered against Marquette's canoe, with a force which seems to have startled him; and once, as they drew in their net, they caught a "spade-fish," whose eccentric appearance greatly astonished them. At length the buffalo began to appear, grazing in herds on the great prairies which then bordered the river; and Marquette describes the fierce and stupid look of the old bulls, as they stared at the intruders through the tangled mane which nearly blinded them. [Sidenote: THE ILLINOIS INDIANS.] They advanced with extreme caution, landed at night, and made a fire to cook their evening meal; then extinguished it, embarked again, paddled some way farther, and anchored in the stream, keeping a man on the watch till morning. They had journeyed more than a fortnight without meeting a human being, when, on the twenty-fifth, they discovered footprints of men in the mud of the western bank, and a well-trodden path that led to the adjacent prairie. Joliet and Marquette resolved to follow it; and leaving the canoes in charge of their men, they set out on their hazardous adventure. The day was fair, and they walked two leagues in silence, following the path through the forest and across the sunny prairie, till they discovered an Indian village on the banks of a river, and two others on a hill half a league distant.[54] Now, with beating hearts, they invoked the aid of Heaven, and, again advancing, came so near, without being seen, that they could hear the voices of the Indians among the wigwams. Then they stood forth in full view, and shouted to attract attention. There was great commotion in the village. The inmates swarmed out of their huts, and four of their chief men presently came forward to meet the strangers, advancing very deliberately, and holding up toward the sun two calumets, or peace-pipes, decorated with feathers. They stopped abruptly before the two Frenchmen, and stood gazing at them without speaking a word. Marquette was much relieved on seeing that they wore French cloth, whence he judged that they must be friends and allies. He broke the silence, and asked them who they were; whereupon they answered that they were Illinois, and offered the pipe; which having been duly smoked, they all went together to the village. Here the chief received the travellers after a singular fashion, meant to do them honor. He stood stark naked at the door of a large wigwam, holding up both hands as if to shield his eyes. "Frenchmen, how bright the sun shines when you come to visit us! All our village awaits you; and you shall enter our wigwams in peace." So saying, he led them into his own, which was crowded to suffocation with savages, staring at their guests in silence. Having smoked with the chiefs and old men, they were invited to visit the great chief of all the Illinois, at one of the villages they had seen in the distance; and thither they proceeded, followed by a throng of warriors, squaws, and children. On arriving, they were forced to smoke again, and listen to a speech of welcome from the great chief, who delivered it standing between two old men, naked like himself. His lodge was crowded with the dignitaries of the tribe, whom Marquette addressed in Algonquin, announcing himself as a messenger sent by the God who had made them, and whom it behooves them to recognize and obey. He added a few words touching the power and glory of Count Frontenac, and concluded by asking information concerning the Mississippi, and the tribes along its banks, whom he was on his way to visit. The chief replied with a speech of compliment; assuring his guests that their presence added flavor to his tobacco, made the river more calm, the sky more serene, and the earth more beautiful. In conclusion, he gave them a young slave and a calumet, begging them at the same time to abandon their purpose of descending the Mississippi. A feast of four courses now followed. First, a wooden bowl full of a porridge of Indian meal boiled with grease was set before the guests; and the master of ceremonies fed them in turn, like infants, with a large spoon. Then appeared a platter of fish; and the same functionary, carefully removing the bones with his fingers, and blowing on the morsels to cool them, placed them in the mouths of the two Frenchmen. A large dog, killed and cooked for the occasion, was next placed before them; but, failing to tempt their fastidious appetites, was supplanted by a dish of fat buffalo-meat, which concluded the entertainment. The crowd having dispersed, buffalo-robes were spread on the ground, and Marquette and Joliet spent the night on the scene of the late festivity. In the morning, the chief, with some six hundred of his tribesmen, escorted them to their canoes, and bade them, after their stolid fashion, a friendly farewell. [Sidenote: A REAL DANGER.] Again they were on their way, slowly drifting down the great river. They passed the mouth of the Illinois, and glided beneath that line of rocks on the eastern side, cut into fantastic forms by the elements, and marked as "The Ruined Castles" on some of the early French maps. Presently they beheld a sight which reminded them that the Devil was still lord paramount of this wilderness. On the flat face of a high rock were painted, in red, black, and green, a pair of monsters, each "as large as a calf, with horns like a deer, red eyes, a beard like a tiger, and a frightful expression of countenance. The face is something like that of a man, the body covered with scales; and the tail so long that it passes entirely round the body, over the head and between the legs, ending like that of a fish." Such is the account which the worthy Jesuit gives of these manitous, or Indian gods.[55] He confesses that at first they frightened him; and his imagination and that of his credulous companions was so wrought upon by these unhallowed efforts of Indian art, that they continued for a long time to talk of them as they plied their paddles. They were thus engaged, when they were suddenly aroused by a real danger. A torrent of yellow mud rushed furiously athwart the calm blue current of the Mississippi, boiling and surging, and sweeping in its course logs, branches, and uprooted trees. They had reached the mouth of the Missouri, where that savage river, descending from its mad career through a vast unknown of barbarism, poured its turbid floods into the bosom of its gentler sister. Their light canoes whirled on the miry vortex like dry leaves on an angry brook. "I never," writes Marquette, "saw anything more terrific;" but they escaped with their fright, and held their way down the turbulent and swollen current of the now united rivers.[56] They passed the lonely forest that covered the site of the destined city of St. Louis, and, a few days later, saw on their left the mouth of the stream to which the Iroquois had given the well-merited name of Ohio, or the "Beautiful River."[57] Soon they began to see the marshy shores buried in a dense growth of the cane, with its tall straight stems and feathery light-green foliage. The sun glowed through the hazy air with a languid stifling heat, and by day and night mosquitoes in myriads left them no peace. They floated slowly down the current, crouched in the shade of the sails which they had spread as awnings, when suddenly they saw Indians on the east bank. The surprise was mutual, and each party was as much frightened as the other. Marquette hastened to display the calumet which the Illinois had given him by way of passport; and the Indians, recognizing the pacific symbol, replied with an invitation to land. Evidently, they were in communication with Europeans, for they were armed with guns, knives, and hatchets, wore garments of cloth, and carried their gunpowder in small bottles of thick glass. They feasted the Frenchmen with buffalo-meat, bear's oil, and white plums; and gave them a variety of doubtful information, including the agreeable but delusive assurance that they would reach the mouth of the river in ten days. It was, in fact, more than a thousand miles distant. [Sidenote: THE LOWER MISSISSIPPI.] They resumed their course, and again floated down the interminable monotony of river, marsh, and forest. Day after day passed on in solitude, and they had paddled some three hundred miles since their meeting with the Indians, when, as they neared the mouth of the Arkansas, they saw a cluster of wigwams on the west bank. Their inmates were all astir, yelling the war-whoop, snatching their weapons, and running to the shore to meet the strangers, who, on their part, called for succor to the Virgin. In truth, they had need of her aid; for several large wooden canoes, filled with savages, were putting out from the shore, above and below them, to cut off their retreat, while a swarm of headlong young warriors waded into the water to attack them. The current proved too strong; and, failing to reach the canoes of the Frenchmen, one of them threw his war-club, which flew over the heads of the startled travellers. Meanwhile, Marquette had not ceased to hold up his calumet, to which the excited crowd gave no heed, but strung their bows and notched their arrows for immediate action; when at length the elders of the village arrived, saw the peace-pipe, restrained the ardor of the youth, and urged the Frenchmen to come ashore. Marquette and his companions complied, trembling, and found a better reception than they had reason to expect. One of the Indians spoke a little Illinois, and served as interpreter; a friendly conference was followed by a feast of sagamite and fish; and the travellers, not without sore misgivings, spent the night in the lodges of their entertainers.[58] [Sidenote: THE ARKANSAS.] Early in the morning, they embarked again, and proceeded to a village of the Arkansas tribe, about eight leagues below. Notice of their coming was sent before them by their late hosts; and as they drew near they were met by a canoe, in the prow of which stood a naked personage, holding a calumet, singing, and making gestures of friendship. On reaching the village, which was on the east side,[59] opposite the mouth of the river Arkansas, they were conducted to a sort of scaffold, before the lodge of the war-chief. The space beneath had been prepared for their reception, the ground being neatly covered with rush mats. On these they were seated; the warriors sat around them in a semi-circle; then the elders of the tribe; and then the promiscuous crowd of villagers, standing, and staring over the heads of the more dignified members of the assembly. All the men were naked; but, to compensate for the lack of clothing, they wore strings of beads in their noses and ears. The women were clothed in shabby skins, and wore their hair clumped in a mass behind each ear. By good luck, there was a young Indian in the village, who had an excellent knowledge of Illinois; and through him Marquette endeavored to explain the mysteries of Christianity, and to gain information concerning the river below. To this end he gave his auditors the presents indispensable on such occasions, but received very little in return. They told him that the Mississippi was infested by hostile Indians, armed with guns procured from white men; and that they, the Arkansas, stood in such fear of them that they dared not hunt the buffalo, but were forced to live on Indian corn, of which they raised three crops a year. During the speeches on either side, food was brought in without ceasing,--sometimes a platter of sagamite or mush; sometimes of corn boiled whole; sometimes a roasted dog. The villagers had large earthen pots and platters, made by themselves with tolerable skill, as well as hatchets, knives, and beads, gained by traffic with the Illinois and other tribes in contact with the French or Spaniards. All day there was feasting without respite, after the merciless practice of Indian hospitality; but at night some of their entertainers proposed to kill and plunder them,--a scheme which was defeated by the vigilance of the chief, who visited their quarters, and danced the calumet dance to reassure his guests. The travellers now held counsel as to what course they should take. They had gone far enough, as they thought, to establish one important point,--that the Mississippi discharged its waters, not into the Atlantic or sea of Virginia, nor into the Gulf of California or Vermilion Sea, but into the Gulf of Mexico. They thought themselves nearer to its mouth than they actually were, the distance being still about seven hundred miles; and they feared that if they went farther they might be killed by Indians or captured by Spaniards, whereby the results of their discovery would be lost. Therefore they resolved to return to Canada, and report what they had seen. They left the Arkansas village, and began their homeward voyage on the seventeenth of July. It was no easy task to urge their way upward, in the heat of midsummer, against the current of the dark and gloomy stream, toiling all day under the parching sun, and sleeping at night in the exhalations of the unwholesome shore, or in the narrow confines of their birchen vessels, anchored on the river. Marquette was attacked with dysentery. Languid and well-nigh spent, he invoked his celestial mistress, as day after day, and week after week, they won their slow way northward. At length, they reached the Illinois, and, entering its mouth, followed its course, charmed, as they went, with its placid waters, its shady forests, and its rich plains, grazed by the bison and the deer. They stopped at a spot soon to be made famous in the annals of western discovery. This was a village of the Illinois, then called "Kaskaskia;" a name afterwards transferred to another locality.[60] A chief, with a band of young warriors, offered to guide them to the Lake of the Illinois; that is to say, Lake Michigan. Thither they repaired; and, coasting its shores, reached Green Bay at the end of September, after an absence of about four months, during which they had paddled their canoes somewhat more than two thousand five hundred miles.[61] [Sidenote: RETURN TO CANADA.] Marquette remained to recruit his exhausted strength; but Joliet descended to Quebec, to bear the report of his discovery to Count Frontenac. Fortune had wonderfully favored him on his long and perilous journey; but now she abandoned him on the very threshold of home. At the foot of the rapids of La Chine, and immediately above Montreal, his canoe was overset, two of his men and an Indian boy were drowned, all his papers were lost, and he himself narrowly escaped.[62] In a letter to Frontenac, he speaks of the accident as follows: "I had escaped every peril from the Indians; I had passed forty-two rapids; and was on the point of disembarking, full of joy at the success of so long and difficult an enterprise, when my canoe capsized, after all the danger seemed over. I lost two men and my box of papers, within sight of the first French settlements, which I had left almost two years before. Nothing remains to me but my life, and the ardent desire to employ it on any service which you may please to direct."[63] [Sidenote: MARQUETTE'S MISSION.] Marquette spent the winter and the following summer at the mission of Green Bay, still suffering from his malady. In the autumn, however, it abated; and he was permitted by his Superior to attempt the execution of a plan to which he was devotedly attached,--the founding, at the principal town of the Illinois, of a mission to be called the "Immaculate Conception," a name which he had already given to the river Mississippi. He set out on this errand on the twenty-fifth of October, accompanied by two men, named Pierre and Jacques, one of whom had been with him on his great journey of discovery. A band of Pottawattamies and another band of Illinois also joined him. The united parties--ten canoes in all--followed the east shore of Green Bay as far as the inlet then called "Sturgeon Cove," from the head of which they crossed by a difficult portage through the forest to the shore of Lake Michigan. November had come. The bright hues of the autumn foliage were changed to rusty brown. The shore was desolate, and the lake was stormy. They were more than a month in coasting its western border, when at length they reached the river Chicago, entered it, and ascended about two leagues. Marquette's disease had lately returned, and hemorrhage now ensued. He told his two companions that this journey would be his last. In the condition in which he was, it was impossible to go farther. The two men built a log hut by the river, and here they prepared to spend the winter; while Marquette, feeble as he was, began the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius, and confessed his two companions twice a week. Meadow, marsh, and forest were sheeted with snow, but game was abundant. Pierre and Jacques killed buffalo and deer, and shot wild turkeys close to their hut. There was an encampment of Illinois within two days' journey; and other Indians, passing by this well-known thoroughfare, occasionally visited them, treating the exiles kindly, and sometimes bringing them game and Indian corn. Eighteen leagues distant was the camp of two adventurous French traders,--one of them, a noted _coureur de bois_, nicknamed La Taupine;[64] and the other, a self-styled surgeon. They also visited Marquette, and befriended him to the best of their power. [Sidenote: THE MISSION AT KASKASKIA.] Urged by a burning desire to lay, before he died, the foundation of his new mission of the Immaculate Conception, Marquette begged his two followers to join him in a _novena_, or nine days' devotion to the Virgin. In consequence of this, as he believed, his disease relented; he began to regain strength, and in March was able to resume the journey. On the thirtieth of the month, they left their hut, which had been inundated by a sudden rise of the river, and carried their canoe through mud and water over the portage which led to the Des Plaines. Marquette knew the way, for he had passed by this route on his return from the Mississippi. Amid the rains of opening spring, they floated down the swollen current of the Des Plaines, by naked woods and spongy, saturated prairies, till they reached its junction with the main stream of the Illinois, which they descended to their destination, the Indian town which Marquette calls "Kaskaskia." Here, as we are told, he was received "like an angel from Heaven." He passed from wigwam to wigwam, telling the listening crowds of God and the Virgin, Paradise and Hell, angels and demons; and, when he thought their minds prepared, he summoned them all to a grand council. It took place near the town, on the great meadow which lies between the river and the modern village of Utica. Here five hundred chiefs and old men were seated in a ring; behind stood fifteen hundred youths and warriors, and behind these again all the women and children of the village. Marquette, standing in the midst, displayed four large pictures of the Virgin; harangued the assembly on the mysteries of the Faith, and exhorted them to adopt it. The temper of his auditory met his utmost wishes. They begged him to stay among them and continue his instructions; but his life was fast ebbing away, and it behooved him to depart. [Sidenote: BURIAL OF MARQUETTE.] A few days after Easter he left the village, escorted by a crowd of Indians, who followed him as far as Lake Michigan. Here he embarked with his two companions. Their destination was Michilimackinac, and their course lay along the eastern borders of the lake. As, in the freshness of advancing spring, Pierre and Jacques urged their canoe along that lonely and savage shore, the priest lay with dimmed sight and prostrated strength, communing with the Virgin and the angels. On the nineteenth of May, he felt that his hour was near; and, as they passed the mouth of a small river, he requested his companions to land. They complied, built a shed of bark on a rising ground near the bank, and carried thither the dying Jesuit. With perfect cheerfulness and composure, he gave directions for his burial, asked their forgiveness for the trouble he had caused them, administered to them the sacrament of penitence, and thanked God that he was permitted to die in the wilderness, a missionary of the Faith and a member of the Jesuit brotherhood. At night, seeing that they were fatigued, he told them to take rest, saying that he would call them when he felt his time approaching. Two or three hours after, they heard a feeble voice, and, hastening to his side, found him at the point of death. He expired calmly, murmuring the names of Jesus and Mary, with his eyes fixed on the crucifix which one of his followers held before him. They dug a grave beside the hut, and here they buried him according to the directions which he had given them; then, re-embarking, they made their way to Michilimackinac, to bear the tidings to the priests at the mission of St. Ignace.[65] In the winter of 1676, a party of Kiskakon Ottawas were hunting on Lake Michigan; and when, in the following spring, they prepared to return home, they bethought them, in accordance with an Indian custom, of taking with them the bones of Marquette, who had been their instructor at the mission of St. Esprit. They repaired to the spot, found the grave, opened it, washed and dried the bones and placed them carefully in a box of birch-bark. Then, in a procession of thirty canoes, they bore it, singing their funeral songs, to St. Ignace of Michilimackinac. As they approached, priests, Indians, and traders all thronged to the shore. The relics of Marquette were received with solemn ceremony, and buried beneath the floor of the little chapel of the mission.[66] FOOTNOTES: [46] _Lettre de Frontenac au Ministre, 2 Nov., 1672; Ibid., 14 Nov., 1674_. [47] See "The Jesuits in North America." [48] "Le 2 Juillet (1666) les premières disputes de philosophie se font dans la congrégation avec succès. Toutes les puissances s'y trouvent; M. l'Intendant entr'autres y a argumenté très-bien. M. Jolliet et Pierre Francheville y ont très-bien répondu de toute la logique."--_Journal des Jésuites._ [49] Nothing was known of Joliet till Shea investigated his history. Ferland, in his _Notes sur les Registres de Notre-Dame de Québec_; Faillon, in his _Colonie Française en Canada_; and Margry, in a series of papers in the _Journal Général de l'Instruction Publique_,--have thrown much new light on his life. From journals of a voyage made by him at a later period to the coast of Labrador, given in substance by Margry, he seems to have been a man of close and intelligent observation. His mathematical acquirements appear to have been very considerable. [50] The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, sanctioned in our own time by the Pope, was always a favorite tenet of the Jesuits; and Marquette was especially devoted to it. [51] The Malhoumines, Malouminek, Oumalouminek, or Nation des Folles-Avoines, of early French writers. The _folle-avoine_, wild oats or "wild rice" (_Zizania aquatica_), was their ordinary food, as also of other tribes of this region. [52] Dablon, on his journey with Allouez in 1670, was delighted with the aspect of the country and the abundance of game along this river. Carver, a century later, speaks to the same effect, saying that the birds rose up in clouds from the wild-rice marshes. [53] The above traits of the scenery of the Wisconsin are taken from personal observation of the river during midsummer. [54] The Indian villages, under the names of Peouaria (_Peoria_) and Moingouena, are represented in Marquette's map upon a river corresponding in position with the Des Moines; though the distance from the Wisconsin, as given by him, would indicate a river farther north. [55] The rock where these figures were painted is immediately above the city of Alton. The tradition of their existence remains, though they are entirely effaced by time. In 1867, when I passed the place, a part of the rock had been quarried away, and, instead of Marquette's monsters, it bore a huge advertisement of "Plantation Bitters." Some years ago, certain persons, with more zeal than knowledge, proposed to restore the figures, after conceptions of their own; but the idea was abandoned. Marquette made a drawing of the two monsters, but it is lost. I have, however, a fac-simile of a map made a few years later, by order of the Intendant Duchesneau, which is decorated with the portrait of one of them, answering to Marquette's description, and probably copied from his drawing. St. Cosme, who saw them in 1699, says that they were even then almost effaced. Douay and Joutel also speak of them,--the former, bitterly hostile to his Jesuit contemporaries, charging Marquette with exaggeration in his account of them. Joutel could see nothing terrifying in their appearance; but he says that his Indians made sacrifices to them as they passed. [56] The Missouri is called "Pekitanouï" by Marquette. It also bears, on early French maps, the names of "Rivière des Osages," and "Rivière des Emissourites," or "Oumessourits." On Marquette's map, a tribe of this name is placed near its banks, just above the Osages. Judging by the course of the Mississippi that it discharged into the Gulf of Mexico, he conceived the hope of one day reaching the South Sea by way of the Missouri. [57] Called, on Marquette's map, "Ouabouskiaou." On some of the earliest maps, it is called "Ouabache" (Wabash). [58] This village, called "Mitchigamea," is represented on several contemporary maps. [59] A few years later, the Arkansas were all on the west side. [60] Marquette says that it consisted at this time of seventy-four lodges. These, like the Huron and Iroquois lodges, contained each several fires and several families. This village was about seven miles below the site of the present town of Ottawa. [61] The journal of Marquette, first published in an imperfect form by Thevenot, in 1681, has been reprinted by Mr. Lenox, under the direction of Mr. Shea, from the manuscript preserved in the archives of the Canadian Jesuits. It will also be found in Shea's _Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley_, and the _Relations Inédites_ of Martin. The true map of Marquette accompanies all these publications. The map published by Thevenot and reproduced by Bancroft is not Marquette's. The original of this, of which I have a fac-simile, bears the title _Carte de la Nouvelle Découverte que les Pères Jésuites ont faite en l'année 1672, et continuée par le Père Jacques Marquette, etc._ The return route of the expedition is incorrectly laid down on it. A manuscript map of the Jesuit Raffeix, preserved in the Bibliothèque Impériale, is more accurate in this particular. I have also another contemporary manuscript map, indicating the various Jesuit stations in the West at this time, and representing the Mississippi, as discovered by Marquette. For these and other maps, see Appendix. [62] _Lettre de Frontenac au Ministre, Québec, 14 Nov., 1674._ [63] This letter is appended to Joliet's smaller map of his discoveries. See Appendix. Compare _Détails sur le Voyage de Louis Joliet_ and _Relation de la Descouverte de plusieurs Pays situez au midi de la Nouvelle France, faite en 1673_ (Margry, i. 259). These are oral accounts given by Joliet after the loss of his papers. Also, _Lettre de Joliet, Oct. 10, 1674_ (Harrisse). On the seventh of October, 1675, Joliet married Claire Bissot, daughter of a wealthy Canadian merchant, engaged in trade with the northern Indians. This drew Joliet's attention to Hudson's Bay; and he made a journey thither in 1679, by way of the Saguenay. He found three English forts on the bay, occupied by about sixty men, who had also an armed vessel of twelve guns and several small trading-craft. The English held out great inducements to Joliet to join them; but he declined, and returned to Quebec, where he reported that unless these formidable rivals were dispossessed, the trade of Canada would be ruined. In consequence of this report, some of the principal merchants of the colony formed a company to compete with the English in the trade of Hudson's Bay. In the year of this journey, Joliet received a grant of the islands of Mignan; and in the following year, 1680, he received another grant, of the great island of Anticosti in the lower St. Lawrence. In 1681 he was established here, with his wife and six servants. He was engaged in fisheries; and, being a skilful navigator and surveyor, he made about this time a chart of the St. Lawrence. In 1690, Sir William Phips, on his way with an English fleet to attack Quebec, made a descent on Joliet's establishment, burnt his buildings, and took prisoners his wife and his mother-in-law. In 1694 Joliet explored the coasts of Labrador, under the auspices of a company formed for the whale and seal fishery. On his return, Frontenac made him royal pilot for the St. Lawrence; and at about the same time he received the appointment of hydrographer at Quebec. He died, apparently poor, in 1699 or 1700, and was buried on one of the islands of Mignan. The discovery of the above facts is due in great part to the researches of Margry. [64] Pierre Moreau, _alias_ La Taupine, was afterwards bitterly complained of by the Intendant Duchesneau, for acting as the governor's agent in illicit trade with the Indians. [65] The contemporary _Relation_ tells us that a miracle took place at the burial of Marquette. One of the two Frenchmen, overcome with grief and colic, bethought him of applying a little earth from the grave to the seat of pain. This at once restored him to health and cheerfulness. [66] For Marquette's death, see the contemporary _Relation_, published by Shea, Lenox, and Martin, with the accompanying _Lettre et Journal_. The river where he died is a small stream in the west of Michigan, some distance south of the promontory called the "Sleeping Bear." It long bore his name, which is now borne by a larger neighboring stream, Charlevoix's account of Marquette's death is derived from tradition, and is not supported by the contemporary narrative. In 1877, human bones, with fragments of birch-bark, were found buried on the supposed site of the Jesuit chapel at Point St. Ignace. In 1847, the missionary of the Algonquins at the Lake of Two Mountains, above Montreal, wrote down a tradition of the death of Marquette, from the lips of an old Indian woman, born in 1777, at Michilimackinac. Her ancestress had been baptized by the subject of the story. The tradition has a resemblance to that related as fact by Charlevoix. The old squaw said that the Jesuit was returning, very ill, to Michilimackinac, when a storm forced him and his two men to land near a little river. Here he told them that he should die, and directed them to ring a bell over his grave and plant a cross. They all remained four days at the spot; and, though without food, the men felt no hunger. On the night of the fourth day he died, and the men buried him as he had directed. On waking in the morning, they saw a sack of Indian corn, a quantity of bacon, and some biscuit, miraculously sent to them, in accordance with the promise of Marquette, who had told them that they should have food enough for their journey to Michilimackinac. At the same instant, the stream began to rise, and in a few moments encircled the grave of the Jesuit, which formed, thenceforth, an islet in the waters. The tradition adds, that an Indian battle afterwards took place on the banks of this stream, between Christians and infidels; and that the former gained the victory, in consequence of invoking the name of Marquette. This story bears the attestation of the priest of the Two Mountains that it is a literal translation of the tradition, as recounted by the old woman. It has been asserted that the Illinois country was visited by two priests, some time before the visit of Marquette. This assertion was first made by M. Noiseux, late Grand Vicar of Quebec, who gives no authority for it. Not the slightest indication of any such visit appears in any contemporary document or map, thus far discovered. The contemporary writers, down to the time of Marquette and La Salle, all speak of the Illinois as an unknown country. The entire groundlessness of Noiseux's assertion is shown by Shea, in a paper in the "Weekly Herald," of New York, April 21,1855. CHAPTER VI. 1673-1678. LA SALLE AND FRONTENAC. Objects of La Salle.--Frontenac favors him.--Projects of Frontenac.--Cataraqui.--Frontenac on Lake Ontario.--Fort Frontenac.--La Salle and Fénelon.--Success of La Salle: his Enemies. We turn from the humble Marquette, thanking God with his last breath that he died for his Order and his Faith; and by our side stands the masculine form of Cavelier de la Salle. Prodigious was the contrast between the two discoverers: the one, with clasped hands and upturned eyes, seems a figure evoked from some dim legend of mediæval saintship; the other, with feet firm planted on the hard earth, breathes the self-relying energies of modern practical enterprise. Nevertheless, La Salle's enemies called him a visionary. His projects perplexed and startled them. At first, they ridiculed him; and then, as step by step he advanced towards his purpose, they denounced and maligned him. What was this purpose? It was not of sudden growth, but developed as years went on. La Salle at La Chine dreamed of a western passage to China, and nursed vague schemes of western discovery. Then, when his earlier journeyings revealed to him the valley of the Ohio and the fertile plains of Illinois, his imagination took wing over the boundless prairies and forests drained by the great river of the West. His ambition had found its field. He would leave barren and frozen Canada behind, and lead France and civilization into the valley of the Mississippi. Neither the English nor the Jesuits should conquer that rich domain: the one must rest content with the country east of the Alleghanies, and the other with the forests, savages, and beaver-skins of the northern lakes. It was for him to call into light the latent riches of the great West. But the way to his land of promise was rough and long: it lay through Canada, filled with hostile traders and hostile priests, and barred by ice for half the year. The difficulty was soon solved. La Salle became convinced that the Mississippi flowed, not into the Pacific or the Gulf of California, but into the Gulf of Mexico. By a fortified post at its mouth, he could guard it against both English and Spaniards, and secure for the trade of the interior an access and an outlet under his own control, and open at every season. Of this trade, the hides of the buffalo would at first form the staple, and along with furs would reward the enterprise till other resources should be developed. Such were the vast projects that unfolded themselves in the mind of La Salle. Canada must needs be, at the outset, his base of action, and without the support of its authorities he could do nothing. This support he found. From the moment when Count Frontenac assumed the government of the colony, he seems to have looked with favor on the young discoverer. There were points of likeness between the two men. Both were ardent, bold, and enterprising. The irascible and fiery pride of the noble found its match in the reserved and seemingly cold pride of the ambitious burgher. Each could comprehend the other; and they had, moreover, strong prejudices and dislikes in common. An understanding, not to say an alliance, soon grew up between them. [Sidenote: PROJECTS OF FRONTENAC.] Frontenac had come to Canada a ruined man. He was ostentatious, lavish, and in no way disposed to let slip an opportunity of mending his fortune. He presently thought that he had found a plan by which he could serve both the colony and himself. His predecessor, Courcelle, had urged upon the King the expediency of building a fort on Lake Ontario, in order to hold the Iroquois in check and intercept the trade which the tribes of the Upper Lakes had begun to carry on with the Dutch and English of New York. Thus a stream of wealth would be turned into Canada, which would otherwise enrich her enemies. Here, to all appearance, was a great public good, and from the military point of view it was so in fact; but it was clear that the trade thus secured might be made to profit, not the colony at large, but those alone who had control of the fort, which would then become the instrument of a monopoly. This the governor understood; and, without doubt, he meant that the projected establishment should pay him tribute. How far he and La Salle were acting in concurrence at this time, it is not easy to say; but Frontenac often took counsel of the explorer, who, on his part, saw in the design a possible first step towards the accomplishment of his own far-reaching schemes. [Sidenote: EXPEDITION OF FRONTENAC.] Such of the Canadian merchants as were not in the governor's confidence looked on his plan with extreme distrust. Frontenac, therefore, thought it expedient "to make use," as he expresses it, "of address." He gave out merely that he intended to make a tour through the upper parts of the colony with an armed force, in order to inspire the Indians with respect, and secure a solid peace. He had neither troops, money, munitions, nor means of transportation; yet there was no time to lose, for, should he delay the execution of his plan, it might be countermanded by the King. His only resource, therefore, was in a prompt and hardy exertion of the royal authority; and he issued an order requiring the inhabitants of Quebec, Montreal, Three Rivers, and other settlements to furnish him, at their own cost, as soon as the spring sowing should be over, with a certain number of armed men, besides the requisite canoes. At the same time, he invited the officers settled in the country to join the expedition,--an invitation which, anxious as they were to gain his good graces, few of them cared to decline. Regardless of murmurs and discontent, he pushed his preparation vigorously, and on the third of June left Quebec with his guard, his staff, a part of the garrison of the Castle of St. Louis, and a number of volunteers. He had already sent to La Salle, who was then at Montreal, directing him to repair to Onondaga, the political centre of the Iroquois, and invite their sachems to meet the governor in council at the Bay of Quinté on the north of Lake Ontario. La Salle had set out on his mission, but first sent Frontenac a map, which convinced him that the best site for his proposed fort was the mouth of the Cataraqui, where Kingston now stands. Another messenger was accordingly despatched, to change the rendezvous to this point. Meanwhile, the governor proceeded at his leisure towards Montreal, stopping by the way to visit the officers settled along the bank, who, eager to pay their homage to the newly risen sun, received him with a hospitality which under the roof of a log hut was sometimes graced by the polished courtesies of the salon and the boudoir. Reaching Montreal, which he had never before seen, he gazed, we may suppose, with some interest at the long row of humble dwellings which lined the bank, the massive buildings of the Seminary, and the spire of the church predominant over all. It was a rude scene, but the greeting that awaited him savored nothing of the rough simplicity of the wilderness. Perrot, the local governor, was on the shore with his soldiers and the inhabitants, drawn up under arms and firing a salute to welcome the representative of the King. Frontenac was compelled to listen to a long harangue from the judge of the place, followed by another from the syndic. Then there was a solemn procession to the church, where he was forced to undergo a third effort of oratory from one of the priests. _Te Deum_ followed, in thanks for his arrival; and then he took refuge in the fort. Here he remained thirteen days, busied with his preparations, organizing the militia, soothing their mutual jealousies, and settling knotty questions of rank and precedence. During this time, every means, as he declares, was used to prevent him from proceeding; and among other devices a rumor was set on foot that a Dutch fleet, having just captured Boston, was on its way to attack Quebec.[67] [Sidenote: FRONTENAC'S JOURNEY.] Having sent men, canoes, and baggage, by land, to La Salle's old settlement of La Chine, Frontenac himself followed on the twenty-eighth of June. Including Indians from the missions, he now had with him about four hundred men and a hundred and twenty canoes, besides two large flat-boats, which he caused to be painted in red and blue, with strange devices, intended to dazzle the Iroquois by a display of unwonted splendor. Now their hard task began. Shouldering canoes through the forest, dragging the flat-boats along the shore, working like beavers,--sometimes in water to the knees, sometimes to the armpits, their feet cut by the sharp stones, and they themselves well-nigh swept down by the furious current,--they fought their way upward against the chain of mighty rapids that break the navigation of the St. Lawrence. The Indians were of the greatest service. Frontenac, like La Salle, showed from the first a special faculty of managing them; for his keen, incisive spirit was exactly to their liking, and they worked for him as they would have worked for no man else. As they approached the Long Saut, rain fell in torrents; and the governor, without his cloak, and drenched to the skin, directed in person the amphibious toil of his followers. Once, it is said, he lay awake all night, in his anxiety lest the biscuit should be wet, which would have ruined the expedition. No such mischance took place, and at length the last rapid was passed, and smooth water awaited them to their journey's end. Soon they reached the Thousand Islands, and their light flotilla glided in long file among those watery labyrinths, by rocky islets, where some lonely pine towered like a mast against the sky; by sun-scorched crags, where the brown lichens crisped in the parching glare; by deep dells, shady and cool, rich in rank ferns, and spongy, dark-green mosses; by still coves, where the water-lilies lay like snow-flakes on their broad, flat leaves,--till at length they neared their goal, and the glistening bosom of Lake Ontario opened on their sight. Frontenac, to impose respect on the Iroquois, now set his canoes in order of battle. Four divisions formed the first line, then came the two flat-boats; he himself, with his guards, his staff, and the gentlemen volunteers, followed, with the canoes of Three Rivers on his right, and those of the Indians on his left, while two remaining divisions formed a rear line. Thus, with measured paddles, they advanced over the still lake, till they saw a canoe approaching to meet them. It bore several Iroquois chiefs, who told them that the dignitaries of their nation awaited them at Cataraqui, and offered to guide them to the spot. They entered the wide mouth of the river, and passed along the shore, now covered by the quiet little city of Kingston, till they reached the point at present occupied by the barracks, at the western end of Cataraqui bridge. Here they stranded their canoes and disembarked. Baggage was landed, fires lighted, tents pitched, and guards set. Close at hand, under the lee of the forest, were the camping sheds of the Iroquois, who had come to the rendezvous in considerable numbers. [Sidenote: FRONTENAC AT CATARAQUI.] At daybreak of the next morning, the thirteenth of July, the drums beat, and the whole party were drawn up under arms. A double line of men extended from the front of Frontenac's tent to the Indian camp; and, through the lane thus formed, the savage deputies, sixty in number, advanced to the place of council. They could not hide their admiration at the martial array of the French, many of whom were old soldiers of the regiment of Carignan; and when they reached the tent they ejaculated their astonishment at the uniforms of the governor's guard who surrounded it. Here the ground had been carpeted with the sails of the flat-boats, on which the deputies squatted themselves in a ring and smoked their pipes for a time with their usual air of deliberate gravity; while Frontenac, who sat surrounded by his officers, had full leisure to contemplate the formidable adversaries whose mettle was hereafter to put his own to so severe a test. A chief named Garakontié, a noted friend of the French, at length opened the council, in behalf of all the five Iroquois nations, with expressions of great respect and deference towards "Onontio;" that is to say, the governor of Canada. Whereupon Frontenac, whose native arrogance where Indians were concerned always took a form which imposed respect without exciting anger, replied in the following strain:-- "Children! Mohawks, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas. I am glad to see you here, where I have had a fire lighted for you to smoke by, and for me to talk to you. You have done well, my children, to obey the command of your Father. Take courage: you will hear his word, which is full of peace and tenderness. For do not think that I have come for war. My mind is full of peace, and she walks by my side. Courage, then, children, and take rest." With that, he gave them six fathoms of tobacco, reiterated his assurances of friendship, promised that he would be a kind father so long as they should be obedient children, regretted that he was forced to speak through an interpreter, and ended with a gift of guns to the men, and prunes and raisins to their wives and children. Here closed this preliminary meeting, the great council being postponed to another day. During the meeting, Raudin, Frontenac's engineer, was tracing out the lines of a fort, after a predetermined plan; and the whole party, under the direction of their officers, now set themselves to construct it. Some cut down trees, some dug the trenches, some hewed the palisades; and with such order and alacrity was the work urged on, that the Indians were lost in astonishment. Meanwhile, Frontenac spared no pains to make friends of the chiefs, some of whom he had constantly at his table. He fondled the Iroquois children, and gave them bread and sweetmeats, and in the evening feasted the squaws to make them dance. The Indians were delighted with these attentions, and conceived a high opinion of the new Onontio. [Sidenote: FRONTENAC AND THE INDIANS.] On the seventeenth, when the construction of the fort was well advanced, Frontenac called the chiefs to a grand council, which was held with all possible state and ceremony. His dealing with the Indians on this and other occasions was truly admirable. Unacquainted as he was with them, he seems to have had an instinctive perception of the treatment they required. His predecessors had never ventured to address the Iroquois as "Children," but had always styled them "Brothers;" and yet the assumption of paternal authority on the part of Frontenac was not only taken in good part, but was received with apparent gratitude. The martial nature of the man, his clear, decisive speech, and his frank and downright manner, backed as they were by a display of force which in their eyes was formidable, struck them with admiration, and gave tenfold effect to his words of kindness. They thanked him for that which from another they would not have endured. Frontenac began by again expressing his satisfaction that they had obeyed the commands of their Father, and come to Cataraqui to hear what he had to say. Then he exhorted them to embrace Christianity; and on this theme he dwelt at length, in words excellently adapted to produce the desired effect,--words which it would be most superfluous to tax as insincere, though doubtless they lost nothing in emphasis because in this instance conscience and policy aimed alike. Then, changing his tone, he pointed to his officers, his guard, the long files of the militia, and the two flat-boats, mounted with cannon, which lay in the river near by. "If," he said, "your Father can come so far, with so great a force, through such dangerous rapids, merely to make you a visit of pleasure and friendship, what would he do, if you should awaken his anger, and make it necessary for him to punish his disobedient children? He is the arbiter of peace and war. Beware how you offend him!" And he warned them not to molest the Indian allies of the French, telling them, sharply, that he would chastise them for the least infraction of the peace. From threats he passed to blandishments, and urged them to confide in his paternal kindness, saying that, in proof of his affection, he was building a store-house at Cataraqui, where they could be supplied with all the goods they needed, without the necessity of a long and dangerous journey. He warned them against listening to bad men, who might seek to delude them by misrepresentations and falsehoods; and he urged them to give heed to none but "men of character, like the Sieur de la Salle." He expressed a hope that they would suffer their children to learn French from the missionaries, in order that they and his nephews--meaning the French colonists--might become one people; and he concluded by requesting them to give him a number of their children to be educated in the French manner, at Quebec. [Sidenote: TREATY WITH THE INDIANS.] This speech, every clause of which was reinforced by abundant presents, was extremely well received; though one speaker reminded him that he had forgotten one important point, inasmuch as he had not told them at what prices they could obtain goods at Cataraqui. Frontenac evaded a precise answer, but promised them that the goods should be as cheap as possible, in view of the great difficulty of transportation. As to the request concerning their children, they said that they could not accede to it till they had talked the matter over in their villages; but it is a striking proof of the influence which Frontenac had gained over them, that, in the following year, they actually sent several of their children to Quebec to be educated,--the girls among the Ursulines, and the boys in the household of the governor. Three days after the council, the Iroquois set out on their return; and as the palisades of the fort were now finished, and the barracks nearly so, Frontenac began to send his party homeward by detachments. He himself was detained for a time by the arrival of another band of Iroquois, from the villages on the north side of Lake Ontario. He repeated to them the speech he had made to the others; and, this final meeting over, he embarked with his guard, leaving a sufficient number to hold the fort, which was to be provisioned for a year by means of a convoy then on its way up the river. Passing the rapids safely, he reached Montreal on the first of August. His enterprise had been a complete success. He had gained every point, and, in spite of the dangerous navigation, had not lost a single canoe. Thanks to the enforced and gratuitous assistance of the inhabitants, the whole had cost the King only about ten thousand francs, which Frontenac had advanced on his own credit. Though in a commercial point of view the new establishment was of very questionable benefit to the colony at large, the governor had, nevertheless, conferred an inestimable blessing on all Canada by the assurance he had gained of a long respite from the fearful scourge of Iroquois hostility. "Assuredly," he writes, "I may boast of having impressed them at once with respect, fear, and good-will."[68] He adds that the fort at Cataraqui, with the aid of a vessel now building, will command Lake Ontario, keep the peace with the Iroquois, and cut off the trade with the English; and he proceeds to say that by another fort at the mouth of the Niagara, and another vessel on Lake Erie, we, the French, can command all the Upper Lakes. This plan was an essential link in the schemes of La Salle; and we shall soon find him employed in executing it. A curious incident occurred soon after the building of the fort on Lake Ontario. Frontenac, on his way back, quarrelled with Perrot, the governor of Montreal, whom, in view of his speculations in the fur-trade, he seems to have regarded as a rival in business; but who, by his folly and arrogance, would have justified any reasonable measure of severity. Frontenac, however, was not reasonable. He arrested Perrot, threw him into prison, and set up a man of his own as governor in his place; and as the judge of Montreal was not in his interest, he removed him, and substituted another on whom he could rely. Thus for a time he had Montreal well in hand. The priests of the Seminary, seigniors of the island, regarded these arbitrary proceedings with extreme uneasiness. They claimed the right of nominating their own governor; and Perrot, though he held a commission from the King, owed his place to their appointment. True, he had set them at nought, and proved a veritable King Stork; yet nevertheless they regarded his removal as an infringement of their rights. During the quarrel with Perrot, La Salle chanced to be at Montreal, lodged in the house of Jacques Le Ber, who, though one of the principal merchants and most influential inhabitants of the settlement, was accustomed to sell goods across his counter in person to white men and Indians, his wife taking his place when he was absent. Such were the primitive manners of the secluded little colony. Le Ber, at this time, was in the interest of Frontenac and La Salle; though he afterwards became one of their most determined opponents. Amid the excitement and discussion occasioned by Perrot's arrest, La Salle declared himself an adherent of the governor, and warned all persons against speaking ill of him in his hearing. [Sidenote: ABBÉ FÉNELON.] The Abbé Fénelon, already mentioned as half-brother to the famous Archbishop, had attempted to mediate between Frontenac and Perrot, and to this end had made a journey to Quebec on the ice, in midwinter. Being of an ardent temperament, and more courageous than prudent, he had spoken somewhat indiscreetly, and had been very roughly treated by the stormy and imperious Count. He returned to Montreal greatly excited, and not without cause. It fell to his lot to preach the Easter sermon. The service was held in the little church of the Hôtel-Dieu, which was crowded to the porch, all the chief persons of the settlement being present. The curé of the parish, whose name also was Perrot, said High Mass, assisted by La Salle's brother, Cavelier, and two other priests. Then Fénelon mounted the pulpit. Certain passages of his sermon were obviously levelled against Frontenac. Speaking of the duties of those clothed with temporal authority, he said that the magistrate, inspired with the spirit of Christ, was as ready to pardon offences against himself as to punish those against his prince; that he was full of respect for the ministers of the altar, and never maltreated them when they attempted to reconcile enemies and restore peace; that he never made favorites of those who flattered him, nor under specious pretexts oppressed other persons in authority who opposed his enterprises; that he used his power to serve his king, and not to his own advantage; that he remained content with his salary, without disturbing the commerce of the country, or abusing those who refused him a share in their profits; and that he never troubled the people by inordinate and unjust levies of men and material, using the name of his prince as a cover to his own designs.[69] [Sidenote: LA SALLE AND FÉNELON.] La Salle sat near the door; but as the preacher proceeded he suddenly rose to his feet in such a manner as to attract the notice of the congregation. As they turned their heads, he signed to the principal persons among them, and by his angry looks and gesticulation called their attention to the words of Fénelon. Then meeting the eye of the curé, who sat beside the altar, he made the same signs to him, to which the curé replied by a deprecating shrug of the shoulders. Fénelon changed color, but continued his sermon.[70] This indecent proceeding of La Salle, and the zeal with which throughout the quarrel he took the part of the governor, did not go unrewarded. Henceforth, Frontenac was more than ever his friend; and this plainly appeared in the disposition made, through his influence, of the new fort on Lake Ontario. Attempts had been made to induce the king to have it demolished; but it was resolved at last that, being built, it should be allowed to stand; and, after long delay, a final arrangement was made for its maintenance, in the manner following: In the autumn of 1674, La Salle went to France, with letters of strong recommendation from Frontenac.[71] He was well received at Court; and he made two petitions to the King,--the one for a patent of nobility, in consideration of his services as an explorer; and the other for a grant in seigniory of Fort Frontenac, for so he called the new post, in honor of his patron. On his part, he offered to pay back the ten thousand francs which the fort had cost the King; to maintain it at his own charge, with a garrison equal to that of Montreal, besides fifteen or twenty laborers; to form a French colony around it; to build a church, whenever the number of inhabitants should reach one hundred; and, meanwhile, to support one or more Récollet friars; and, finally, to form a settlement of domesticated Indians in the neighborhood. His offers were accepted. He was raised to the rank of the untitled nobles; received a grant of the fort and lands adjacent, to the extent of four leagues in front and half a league in depth, besides the neighboring islands; and was invested with the government of the fort and settlement, subject to the orders of the governor-general.[72] La Salle returned to Canada, proprietor of a seigniory which, all things considered, was one of the most valuable in the colony. His friends and his family, rejoicing in his good fortune and not unwilling to share it, made him large advances of money, enabling him to pay the stipulated sum to the King, to rebuild the fort in stone, maintain soldiers and laborers, and procure in part, at least, the necessary outfit. Had La Salle been a mere merchant, he was in a fair way to make a fortune, for he was in a position to control the better part of the Canadian fur-trade. But he was not a mere merchant; and no commercial profit could content his ambition. Those may believe, who will, that Frontenac did not expect a share in the profits of the new post. That he did expect it, there is positive evidence; for a deposition is extant, taken at the instance of his enemy the Intendant Duchesneau, in which three witnesses attest that the governor, La Salle, his lieutenant La Forest, and one Boisseau, had formed a partnership to carry on the trade of Fort Frontenac. [Sidenote: ENEMIES OF LA SALLE.] No sooner was La Salle installed in his new post than the merchants of Canada joined hands to oppose him. Le Ber, once his friend, became his bitter enemy; for he himself had hoped to share the monopoly of Fort Frontenac, of which he and one Bazire had at first been placed provisionally in control, and from which he now saw himself ejected. La Chesnaye, Le Moyne, and others of more or less influence took part in the league, which, in fact, embraced all the traders in the colony except the few joined with Frontenac and La Salle. Duchesneau, intendant of the colony, aided the malcontents. As time went on, their bitterness grew more bitter; and when at last it was seen that, not satisfied with the monopoly of Fort Frontenac, La Salle aimed at the control of the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi, and the usufruct of half a continent, the ire of his opponents redoubled, and Canada became for him a nest of hornets, buzzing in wrath and watching the moment to sting. But there was another element of opposition, less noisy, but not less formidable; and this arose from the Jesuits. Frontenac hated them; and they, under befitting forms of duty and courtesy, paid him back in the same coin. Having no love for the governor, they would naturally have little for his partisan and _protégé_; but their opposition had another and a deeper root, for the plans of the daring young schemer jarred with their own. [Sidenote: PURPOSES OF THE JESUITS.] We have seen the Canadian Jesuits in the early apostolic days of their mission, when the flame of their zeal, fed by an ardent hope, burned bright and high. This hope was doomed to disappointment. Their avowed purpose of building another Paraguay on the borders of the Great Lakes[73] was never accomplished, and their missions and their converts were swept away in an avalanche of ruin. Still, they would not despair. From the lakes they turned their eyes to the Valley of the Mississippi, in the hope to see it one day the seat of their new empire of the Faith. But what did this new Paraguay mean? It meant a little nation of converted and domesticated savages, docile as children, under the paternal and absolute rule of Jesuit fathers, and trained by them in industrial pursuits, the results of which were to inure, not to the profit of the producers, but to the building of churches, the founding of colleges, the establishment of warehouses and magazines, and the construction of works of defence,--all controlled by Jesuits, and forming a part of the vast possessions of the Order. Such was the old Paraguay;[74] and such, we may suppose, would have been the new, had the plans of those who designed it been realized. I have said that since the middle of the century the religious exaltation of the early missions had sensibly declined. In the nature of things, that grand enthusiasm was too intense and fervent to be long sustained. But the vital force of Jesuitism had suffered no diminution. That marvellous _esprit de corps_, that extinction of self and absorption of the individual in the Order which has marked the Jesuits from their first existence as a body, was no whit changed or lessened,--a principle, which, though different, was no less strong than the self-devoted patriotism of Sparta or the early Roman Republic. The Jesuits were no longer supreme in Canada; or, in other words, Canada was no longer simply a mission. It had become a colony. Temporal interests and the civil power were constantly gaining ground; and the disciples of Loyola felt that relatively, if not absolutely, they were losing it. They struggled vigorously to maintain the ascendency of their Order, or, as they would have expressed it, the ascendency of religion; but in the older and more settled parts of the colony it was clear that the day of their undivided rule was past. Therefore, they looked with redoubled solicitude to their missions in the West. They had been among its first explorers; and they hoped that here the Catholic Faith, as represented by Jesuits, might reign with undisputed sway. In Paraguay, it was their constant aim to exclude white men from their missions. It was the same in North America. They dreaded fur-traders, partly because they interfered with their teachings and perverted their converts, and partly for other reasons. But La Salle was a fur-trader, and far worse than a fur-trader: he aimed at occupation, fortification, and settlement. The scope and vigor of his enterprises, and the powerful influence that aided them, made him a stumbling-block in their path. He was their most dangerous rival for the control of the West, and from first to last they set themselves against him. [Sidenote: SPIRIT OF LA SALLE.] What manner of man was he who could conceive designs so vast and defy enmities so many and so powerful? And in what spirit did he embrace these designs? We will look hereafter for an answer. FOOTNOTES: [67] _Lettre de Frontenac à Colbert, 13 Nov., 1673._ This rumor, it appears, originated with the Jesuit Dablon. _Journal du Voyage du Comte de Frontenac au lac Ontario_. The Jesuits were greatly opposed to the establishment of forts and trading-posts in the upper country, for reasons that will appear hereafter. [68] _Lettre de Frontenac au Ministre, 13 Nov., 1673._ [69] Faillon, _Colonie Française_, iii. 497, and manuscript authorities there cited. I have examined the principal of these. Faillon himself is a priest of St. Sulpice. Compare H. Verreau, _Les Deux Abbés de Fénelon_, chap. vii. [70] _Information faicte par nous, Charles le Tardieu, Sieur de Tilly, et Nicolas Dupont, etc., etc., contre le Sr. Abbé de Fénelon._ Tilly and Dupont were sent by Frontenac to inquire into the affair. Among the deponents is La Salle himself. [71] In his despatch to the minister Colbert, of the fourteenth of November, 1674, Frontenac speaks of La Salle as follows: "I cannot help, Monseigneur, recommending to you the Sieur de la Salle, who is about to go to France, and who is a man of intelligence and ability, more capable than anybody else I know here to accomplish every kind of enterprise and discovery which may be intrusted to him, as he has the most perfect knowledge of the state of the country, as you will see, if you are disposed to give him a few moments of audience." [72] _Mémoire pour l'entretien du Fort Frontenac, par le Sr. de la Salle, 1674. Petition du Sr. de la Salle au Roi. Lettres patentes de concession, du Fort de Frontenac et terres adjacentes au profit du Sr. de la Salle; données à Compiègne le 13 Mai, 1675. Arrêt qui accepte les offres faites par Robert Cavelier Sr. de la Salle; à Compiègne le 13 Mai, 1675. Lettres de noblesse pour le Sr. Cavelier de la Salle; données à Compiègne le 13 Mai, 1675. Papiers de Famille. Mémoire au Roi._ [73] This purpose is several times indicated in the _Relations_. For an instance, see "The Jesuits in North America," 245. [74] Compare Charlevoix, _Histoire de Paraguay_, with Robertson, _Letters on Paraguay_. CHAPTER VII. 1678. PARTY STRIFE. La Salle and his Reporter.--Jesuit Ascendency.--The Missions and the Fur-trade.--Female Inquisitors.--Plots against La Salle: his Brother the Priest.--Intrigues Of the Jesuits.--La Salle poisoned: he exculpates the Jesuits.--Renewed Intrigues. [Sidenote: LA SALLE'S MEMOIR.] One of the most curious monuments of La Salle's time is a long memoir, written by a person who made his acquaintance at Paris in the summer of 1678, when, as we shall soon see, he had returned to France in prosecution of his plans. The writer knew the Sulpitian Galinée,[75] who, as he says, had a very high opinion of La Salle; and he was also in close relations with the discoverer's patron, the Prince de Conti.[76] He says that he had ten or twelve interviews with La Salle; and, becoming interested in him and in that which he communicated, he wrote down the substance of his conversation. The paper is divided into two parts: the first, called "Mémoire sur Mr. de la Salle," is devoted to the state of affairs in Canada, and chiefly to the Jesuits; the second, entitled "Histoire de Mr. de la Salle," is an account of the discoverer's life, or as much of it as the writer had learned from him.[77] Both parts bear throughout the internal evidence of being what they profess to be; but they embody the statements of a man of intense partisan feeling, transmitted through the mind of another person in sympathy with him, and evidently sharing his prepossessions. In one respect, however, the paper is of unquestionable historical value; for it gives us a vivid and not an exaggerated picture of the bitter strife of parties which then raged in Canada, and which was destined to tax to the utmost the vast energy and fortitude of La Salle. At times, the memoir is fully sustained by contemporary evidence; but often, again, it rests on its own unsupported authority. I give an abstract of its statements as I find them. The following is the writer's account of La Salle: "All those among my friends who have seen him find him a man of great intelligence and sense. He rarely speaks of any subject except when questioned about it, and his words are very few and very precise. He distinguishes perfectly between that which he knows with certainly and that which he knows with some mingling of doubt. When he does not know, he does not hesitate to avow it; and though I have heard him say the same thing more than five or six times, when persons were present who had not heard it before, he always said it in the same manner. In short, I never heard anybody speak whose words carried with them more marks of truth."[78] [Sidenote: JESUIT ASCENDENCY.] After mentioning that he is thirty-three or thirty-four years old, and that he has been twelve years in America, the memoir declares that he made the following statements: that the Jesuits are masters at Quebec; that the bishop is their creature, and does nothing but in concert with them;[79] that he is not well inclined towards the Récollets,[80] who have little credit, but who are protected by Frontenac; that in Canada the Jesuits think everybody an enemy to religion who is an enemy to them; that, though they refused absolution to all who sold brandy to the Indians, they sold it themselves, and that he, La Salle, had himself detected them in it;[81] that the bishop laughs at the orders of the King when they do not agree with the wishes of the Jesuits; that the Jesuits dismissed one of their servants named Robert, because he told of their trade in brandy; that Albanel,[82] in particular, carried on a great fur-trade, and that the Jesuits have built their college in part from the profits of this kind of traffic; that they admitted that they carried on a trade, but denied that they gained so much by it as was commonly supposed.[83] [Sidenote: FEMALE INQUISITORS.] The memoir proceeds to affirm that they trade largely with the Sioux at Ste. Marie, and with other tribes at Michilimackinac, and that they are masters of the trade of that region, where the forts are in their possession.[84] An Indian said, in full council, at Quebec, that he had prayed and been a Christian as long as the Jesuits would stay and teach him, but since no more beaver were left in his country, the missionaries were gone also. The Jesuits, pursues the memoir, will have no priests but themselves in their missions, and call them all Jansenists, not excepting the priests of St. Sulpice. The bishop is next accused of harshness and intolerance, as well as of growing rich by tithes, and even by trade, in which it is affirmed he has a covert interest.[85] It is added that there exists in Quebec, under the auspices of the Jesuits, an association called the Sainte Famille, of which Madame Bourdon[86] is superior. They meet in the cathedral every Thursday, with closed doors, where they relate to each other--as they are bound by a vow to do--all they have learned, whether good or evil, concerning other people, during the week. It is a sort of female inquisition, for the benefit of the Jesuits, the secrets of whose friends, it is said, are kept, while no such discretion is observed with regard to persons not of their party.[87] Here follow a series of statements which it is needless to repeat, as they do not concern La Salle. They relate to abuse of the confessional, hostility to other priests, hostility to civil authorities, and over-hasty baptisms, in regard to which La Salle is reported to have made a comparison, unfavorable to the Jesuits, between them and the Récollets and Sulpitians. [Sidenote: PLOTS AGAINST LA SALLE.] We now come to the second part of the memoir, entitled "History of Monsieur de la Salle." After stating that he left France at the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, with the purpose of attempting some new discovery, it makes the statements repeated in a former chapter, concerning his discovery of the Ohio, the Illinois, and possibly the Mississippi. It then mentions the building of Fort Frontenac, and says that one object of it was to prevent the Jesuits from becoming undisputed masters of the fur-trade.[88] Three years ago, it pursues, La Salle came to France, and obtained a grant of the fort; and it proceeds to give examples of the means used by the party opposed to him to injure his good name and bring him within reach of the law. Once, when he was at Quebec, the farmer of the King's revenue, one of the richest men in the place, was extremely urgent in his proffers of hospitality, and at length, though he knew La Salle but slightly, persuaded him to lodge in his house. He had been here but a few days when his host's wife began to enact the part of the wife of Potiphar, and this with so much vivacity that on one occasion La Salle was forced to take an abrupt leave, in order to avoid an infringement of the laws of hospitality. As he opened the door, he found the husband on the watch, and saw that it was a plot to entrap him.[89] Another attack, of a different character, though in the same direction, was soon after made. The remittances which La Salle received from the various members and connections of his family were sent through the hands of his brother, Abbé Cavelier, from whom his enemies were, therefore, very eager to alienate him. To this end, a report was made to reach the priest's ears that La Salle had seduced a young woman, with whom he was living in an open and scandalous manner at Fort Frontenac. The effect of this device exceeded the wishes of its contrivers; for the priest, aghast at what he had heard, set out for the fort, to administer his fraternal rebuke, but on arriving, in place of the expected abomination, found his brother, assisted by two Récollet friars, ruling with edifying propriety over a most exemplary household. Thus far the memoir. From passages in some of La Salle's letters, it may be gathered that Abbé Cavelier gave him at times no little annoyance. In his double character of priest and elder brother, he seems to have constituted himself the counsellor, monitor, and guide of a man who, though many years his junior, was in all respects incomparably superior to him, as the sequel will show. This must have been almost insufferable to a nature like that of La Salle, who, nevertheless, was forced to arm himself with patience, since his brother held the purse-strings. On one occasion his forbearance was put to a severe proof, when, wishing to marry a damsel of good connections in the colony, Abbé Cavelier saw fit for some reason to interfere, and prevented the alliance.[90] [Sidenote: INTRIGUES OF THE JESUITS.] To resume the memoir. It declares that the Jesuits procured an ordinance from the Supreme Council prohibiting traders from going into the Indian country, in order that they, the Jesuits, being already established there in their missions, might carry on trade without competition. But La Salle induced a good number of the Iroquois to settle around his fort; thus bringing the trade to his own door, without breaking the ordinance. These Iroquois, he is further reported to have said, were very fond of him, and aided him in rebuilding the fort with cut stone. The Jesuits told the Iroquois on the south side of the lake, where they were established as missionaries, that La Salle was strengthening his defences with the view of making war on them. They and the intendant, who was their creature, endeavored to embroil the Iroquois with the French in order to ruin La Salle; writing to him at the same time that he was the bulwark of the country, and that he ought to be always on his guard. They also tried to persuade Frontenac that it was necessary to raise men and prepare for war. La Salle suspected them; and seeing that the Iroquois, in consequence of their intrigues, were in an excited state, he induced the governor to come to Fort Frontenac to pacify them. He accordingly did so; and a council was held, which ended in a complete restoration of confidence on the part of the Iroquois.[91] At this council they accused the two Jesuits, Bruyas and Pierron,[92] of spreading reports that the French were preparing to attack them. La Salle thought that the object of the intrigue was to make the Iroquois jealous of him, and engage Frontenac in expenses which would offend the King. After La Salle and the governor had lost credit by the rupture, the Jesuits would come forward as pacificators, in the full assurance that they could restore quiet, and appear in the attitude of saviors of the colony. La Salle, pursues his reporter, went on to say that about this time a quantity of hemlock and verdigris was given him in a salad; and that the guilty person was a man in his employ named Nicolas Perrot, otherwise called Jolycoeur, who confessed the crime.[93] The memoir adds that La Salle, who recovered from the effects of the poison, wholly exculpates the Jesuits. This attempt, which was not, as we shall see, the only one of the kind made against La Salle, is alluded to by him in a letter to a friend at Paris, written in Canada when he was on the point of departure on his great expedition to descend the Mississippi. The following is an extract from it: [Sidenote: LA SALLE EXCULPATES THE JESUITS.] "I hope to give myself the honor of sending you a more particular account of this enterprise when it shall have had the success which I hope for it; but I have need of a strong protection for its support. It traverses the commercial operations of certain persons, who will find it hard to endure it. They intended to make a new Paraguay in these parts, and the route which I close against them gave them facilities for an advantageous correspondence with Mexico. This check will infallibly be a mortification to them; and you know how they deal with whatever opposes them. _Nevertheless, I am bound to render them the justice to say that the poison which was given me was not at all of their instigation._ The person who was conscious of the guilt, believing that I was their enemy because he saw that our sentiments were opposed, thought to exculpate himself by accusing them, and I confess that at the time I was not sorry to have this indication of their ill-will; but having afterwards carefully examined the affair, I clearly discovered the falsity of the accusation which this rascal had made against them. I nevertheless pardoned him, in order not to give notoriety to the affair; as the mere suspicion might sully their reputation, to which I should scrupulously avoid doing the slightest injury unless I thought it necessary to the good of the public, and unless the fact were fully proved. Therefore, Monsieur, if anybody shared the suspicion which I felt, oblige me by undeceiving him."[94] This letter, so honorable to La Salle, explains the statement made in the memoir, that, notwithstanding his grounds of complaint against the Jesuits, he continued to live on terms of courtesy with them, entertained them at his fort, and occasionally corresponded with them. The writer asserts, however, that they intrigued with his men to induce them to desert,--employing for this purpose a young man named Deslauriers, whom they sent to him with letters of recommendation. La Salle took him into his service; but he soon after escaped, with several other men, and took refuge in the Jesuit missions.[95] The object of the intrigue is said to have been the reduction of La Salle's garrison to a number less than that which he was bound to maintain, thus exposing him to a forfeiture of his title of possession. [Sidenote: RENEWED INTRIGUES.] He is also stated to have declared that Louis Joliet was an impostor,[96] and a _donné_ of the Jesuits,--that is, a man who worked for them without pay; and, further, that when he, La Salle, came to court to ask for privileges enabling him to pursue his discoveries, the Jesuits represented in advance to the minister Colbert that his head was turned, and that he was fit for nothing but a mad-house. It was only by the aid of influential friends that he was at length enabled to gain an audience. Here ends this remarkable memoir, which, criticise it as we may, does not exaggerate the jealousies and enmities that beset the path of the discoverer. FOOTNOTES: [75] _Ante_, p. 17. [76] Louis-Armand de Bourbon, second Prince de Conti. The author of the memoir seems to have been Abbé Renaudot, a learned churchman. [77] Extracts from this have already been given in connection with La Salle's supposed discovery of the Mississippi. _Ante_, p. 29. [78] "Tous ceux de mes amis qui l'ont vu luy trouve beaucoup d'esprit et un très-grand sens; il ne parle guère que des choses sur lesquelles on l'interroge; il les dit en très-peu de mots et très-bien circonstanciées; il distingue parfaitement ce qu'il scait avec certitude, de ce qu'il scait avec quelque mélange de doute. Il avoue sans aucune façon ne pas savoir ce qu'il ne scait pas, et quoyque je luy aye ouy dire plus de cinq ou six fois les mesme choses à l'occasion de quelques personnes qui ne les avaient point encore entendues, je les luy ay toujours ouy dire de la mesme manière. En un mot je n'ay jamais ouy parler personne dont les paroles portassent plus de marques de vérité." [79] "Il y a une autre chose qui me déplait, qui est l'entière dépendence dans laquelle les Prêtres du Séminaire de Québec et le Grand Vicaire de l'Evêque sont pour les Pères Jésuites, car il ne fait pas la moindre chose sans leur ordre; ce qui fait qu'indirectement ils sont les maîtres de ce qui regarde le spirituel, qui, comme vous savez, est une grande machine pour remuer tout le reste."--_Lettre de Frontenac à Colbert, 2 Nov., 1672._ [80] "Ces réligieux [_les Récollets_] sont fort protégés partout par le comte de Frontenac, gouverneur du pays, et à cause de cela assez maltraités par l'évesque, parceque la doctrine de l'évesque et des Jésuites est que les affaires de la Réligion chrestienne n'iront point bien dans ce pays-là que quand le gouverneur sera créature des Jésuites, ou que l'évesque sera gouverneur."--_Mémoire sur Mr. de la Salle_. [81] "Ils [_les Jésuites_] refusent l'absolution à ceux qui ne veulent pas promettre de n'en plus vendre [_de l'eau-de-vie_], et s'ils meurent en cet étât, ils les privent de la sépulture ecclésiastique; au contraire ils se permettent à eux-mêmes sans aucune difficulté ce mesme trafic quoique toute sorte de trafic soit interdite à tous les ecclésiastiques par les ordonnances du Roy, et par une bulle expresse du Pape. La Bulle et les ordonnances sont notoires, et quoyqu'ils cachent le trafic qu'ils font d'eau-de-vie, M. de la Salle prétend qu'il ne l'est pas moins; qu'outre la notoriété il en a des preuves certaines, et qu'il les a surpris dans ce trafic, et qu'ils luy ont tendu des pièges pour l'y surprendre.... Ils ont chassé leur valet Robert à cause qu'il révéla qu'ils en traitaient jour et nuit."--_Ibid._ The writer says that he makes this last statement, not on the authority of La Salle, but on that of a memoir made at the time when the intendant, Talon, with whom he elsewhere says that he was well acquainted, returned to France. A great number of particulars are added respecting the Jesuit trade in furs. [82] Albanel was prominent among the Jesuit explorers at this time. He is best known by his journey up the Saguenay to Hudson's Bay in 1672. [83] "Pour vous parler franchement, ils [_les Jésuites_] songent autant à la conversion du Castor qu'à celle des âmes."--_Lettre de Frontenac à Colbert, 2 Nov., 1672_. In his despatch of the next year, he says that the Jesuits ought to content themselves with instructing the Indians in their old missions, instead of neglecting them to make new ones in countries where there are "more beaver-skins to gain than souls to save." [84] These forts were built by them, and were necessary to the security of their missions. [85] François Xavier de Laval-Montmorency, first bishop of Quebec, was a prelate of austere character. His memory is cherished in Canada by adherents of the Jesuits and all ultramontane Catholics. [86] This Madame Bourdon was the widow of Bourdon, the engineer (see "The Jesuits in North America," 297). If we may credit the letters of Marie de l'Incarnation, she had married him from a religious motive, in order to charge herself with the care of his motherless children; stipulating in advance that he should live with her, not as a husband, but as a brother. As may be imagined, she was regarded as a most devout and saint-like person. [87] "Il y a dans Québec une congrégation de femmes et de filles qu'ils [_les Jésuites_] appellent la sainte famille, dans laquelle on fait voeu sur les Saints Evangiles de dire tout ce qu'on sait de bien et de mal des personnes qu'on connoist. La Supérieure de cette compagnie s'appelle Madame Bourdon; une Mde. d'Ailleboust est, je crois, l'assistante et une Mde. Charron, la Trésorière. La Compagnie s'assemble tous les Jeudis dans la Cathédrale, à porte fermée, et là elles se disent les unes aux autres tout ce qu'elles ont appris. C'est une espèce d'Inquisition contre toutes les personnes qui ne sont pas unies avec les Jésuites. Ces personnes sont accusées de tenir secret ce qu'elles apprennent de mal des personnes de leur party et de n'avoir pas la mesme discretion pour les autres."--_Mémoire sur M^r. de la Salle_. The Madame d'Ailleboust mentioned above was a devotee like Madame Bourdon, and, in one respect, her history was similar. See "The Jesuits in North America," 360. The association of the Sainte Famille was founded by the Jesuit Chaumonot at Montreal in 1663. Laval, Bishop of Quebec, afterwards encouraged its establishment at that place; and, as Chaumonot himself writes, caused it to be attached to the cathedral. _Vie de Chaumonot_, 83. For its establishment at Montreal, see Faillon, _Vie de Mlle. Mance_, i. 233. "Ils [_les Jésuites_] ont tous une si grande envie de savoir tout ce qui se fait dans les familles qu'ils ont des Inspecteurs à gages dans la Ville, qui leur rapportent tout ce qui se fait dans les maisons," etc., etc.--_Lettre de Frontenac au Ministre, 13 Nov., 1673._ [88] Mention has been made (p. 88, _note_) of the report set on foot by the Jesuit Dablon, to prevent the building of the fort. [89] This story is told at considerable length, and the advances of the lady particularly described. [90] Letter of La Salle, in possession of M. Margry. [91] Louis XIV. alludes to this visit, in a letter to Frontenac, dated 28 April, 1677. "I cannot but approve," he writes, "of what you have done, in your voyage to Fort Frontenac, to reconcile the minds of the Five Iroquois Nations, and to clear yourself from the suspicions they had entertained, and from the motives that might induce them to make war." Frontenac's despatches of this year, as well as of the preceding and following years, are missing from the archives. In a memoir written in November, 1680, La Salle alludes to "le désir que l'on avoit que Monseigneur le Comte de Frontenac fit la guerre aux Iroquois." See Thomassy, _Géologie Pratique de la Louisiane_, 203. [92] Bruyas was about this time stationed among the Onondagas. Pierron was among the Senecas. He had lately removed to them from the Mohawk country. _Relation des Jésuites, 1673-79_, 140 (Shea). Bruyas was also for a long time among the Mohawks. [93] This puts the character of Perrot in a new light; for it is not likely that any other can be meant than the famous _voyageur_. I have found no mention elsewhere of the synonyme of Jolycoeur. Poisoning was the current crime of the day, and persons of the highest rank had repeatedly been charged with it. The following is the passage:-- "Quoiqu'il en soit, Mr. de la Salle se sentit quelque temps après empoisonné d'une salade dans laquelle on avoit meslé du ciguë, qui est poison en ce pays là, et du verd de gris. Il en fut malade à l'extrémité, vomissant presque continuellement 40 ou 50 jours après, et il ne réchappa que par la force extrême de sa constitution. Celuy qui luy donna le poison fut un nommé Nicolas Perrot, autrement Jolycoeur, l'un de ses domestiques.... Il pouvait faire mourir cet homme, qui a confessé son crime, mais il s'est contenté de l'enfermer les fers aux pieds."--_Histoire de Mr. de la Salle._ [94] The following words are underlined in the original: "_Je suis pourtant obligé de leur rendre une justice, que le poison qu'on m'avoit donné n'éstoit point de leur instigation."--Lettre de La Salle au Prince de Conti, 31 Oct., 1678._ [95] In a letter to the King, Frontenac mentions that several men who had been induced to desert from La Salle had gone to Albany, where the English had received them well. _Lettre de Frontenac au Roy, 6 Nov., 1679._ The Jesuits had a mission in the neighboring tribe of the Mohawks and elsewhere in New York. [96] This agrees with expressions used by La Salle in a memoir addressed by him to Frontenac in November, 1680. In this, he intimates his belief that Joliet went but little below the mouth of the Illinois, thus doing flagrant injustice to that brave explorer. CHAPTER VIII. 1677, 1678. THE GRAND ENTERPRISE. La Salle at Fort Frontenac.--La Salle at Court: his Memorial.--Approval of the King.--Money and Means.--Henri de Tonty.--Return to Canada. "If," writes a friend of La Salle," he had preferred gain to glory, he had only to stay at his fort, where he was making more than twenty-five thousand livres a year."[97] He loved solitude and he loved power; and at Fort Frontenac he had both, so far as each consisted with the other. The nearest settlement was a week's journey distant, and he was master of all around him. He had spared no pains to fulfil the conditions on which his wilderness seigniory had been granted, and within two years he had demolished the original wooden fort, replacing it by another much larger, enclosed on the land side by ramparts and bastions of stone, and on the water side by palisades. It contained a range of barracks of squared timber, a guard-house, a lodging for officers, a forge, a well, a mill, and a bakery. Nine small cannon were mounted on the walls. Two officers and a surgeon, with ten or twelve soldiers, made up the garrison; and three or four times that number of masons, laborers, and canoe-men were at one time maintained at the place. [Sidenote: LA SALLE AT FORT FRONTENAC.] Along the shore south of the fort was a small village of French families, to whom La Salle had granted farms, and, farther on, a village of Iroquois, whom he had persuaded to settle here. Near these villages were the house and chapel of two Récollet friars, Luc Buisset and Louis Hennepin. More than a hundred French acres of land had been cleared of wood, and planted in part with crops; while cattle, fowls, and swine had been brought up from Montreal. Four vessels, of from twenty-five to forty tons, had been built for the lake and the river; but canoes served best for ordinary uses, and La Salle's followers became so skilled in managing them that they were reputed the best canoe-men in America. Feudal lord of the forests around him, commander of a garrison raised and paid by himself, founder of the mission, and patron of the church, he reigned the autocrat of his lonely little empire.[98] [Sidenote: LA SALLE'S MEMORIAL.] It was not solely or chiefly for commercial gain that La Salle had established Fort Frontenac. He regarded it as a first step towards greater things; and now, at length, his plans were ripe and his time was come. In the autumn of 1677 he left the fort in charge of his lieutenant, descended the St. Lawrence to Quebec, and sailed for France. He had the patronage of Frontenac and the help of strong friends in Paris. It is said, as we have seen already, that his enemies denounced him, in advance, as a madman; but a memorial of his, which his friends laid before the minister Colbert, found a favorable hearing. In it he set forth his plans, or a portion of them. He first recounted briefly the discoveries he had made, and then described the country he had seen south and west of the great lakes. "It is nearly all so beautiful and so fertile; so free from forests, and so full of meadows, brooks, and rivers; so abounding in fish, game, and venison, that one can find there in plenty, and with little trouble, all that is needful for the support of flourishing colonies. The soil will produce everything that is raised in France. Flocks and herds can be left out at pasture all winter; and there are even native wild cattle, which, instead of hair, have a fine wool that may answer for making cloth and hats. Their hides are better than those of France, as appears by the sample which the Sieur de la Salle has brought with him. Hemp and cotton grow here naturally, and may be manufactured with good results; so there can be no doubt that colonies planted here would become very prosperous. They would be increased by a great number of western Indians, who are in the main of a tractable and social disposition; and as they have the use neither of our weapons nor of our goods, and are not in intercourse with other Europeans, they will readily adapt themselves to us and imitate our way of life as soon as they taste the advantages of our friendship and of the commodities we bring them, insomuch that these countries will infallibly furnish, within a few years, a great many new subjects to the Church and the King. "It was the knowledge of these things, joined to the poverty of Canada, its dense forests, its barren soil, its harsh climate, and the snow that covers the ground for half the year, that led the Sieur de la Salle to undertake the planting of colonies in these beautiful countries of the West." Then he recounts the difficulties of the attempt,--the vast distances, the rapids and cataracts that obstruct the way; the cost of men, provisions, and munitions; the danger from the Iroquois, and the rivalry of the English, who covet the western country, and would gladly seize it for themselves. "But this last reason," says the memorial, "only animates the Sieur de la Salle the more, and impels him to anticipate them by the promptness of his action." He declares that it was for this that he had asked for the grant of Fort Frontenac; and he describes what he had done at that post, in order to make it a secure basis for his enterprise. He says that he has now overcome the chief difficulties in his way, and that he is ready to plant a new colony at the outlet of Lake Erie, of which the English, if not prevented, might easily take possession. Towards the accomplishment of his plans, he asks the confirmation of his title to Fort Frontenac, and the permission to establish at his own cost two other posts, with seigniorial rights over all lands which he may discover and colonize within twenty years, and the government of all the country in question. On his part, he proposes to renounce all share in the trade carried on between the tribes of the Upper Lakes and the people of Canada. La Salle seems to have had an interview with the minister, in which the proposals of his memorial were somewhat modified. He soon received in reply the following patent from the King:-- [Sidenote: THE KING'S APPROVAL.] "Louis, by the grace of God King of France and Navarre, to our dear and well-beloved Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, greeting. We have received with favor the very humble petition made us in your name, to permit you to labor at the discovery of the western parts of New France; and we have the more willingly entertained this proposal, since we have nothing more at heart than the exploration of this country, through which, to all appearance, a way may be found to Mexico.... For this and other causes thereunto moving us, we permit you by these presents, signed with our hand, to labor at the discovery of the western parts of our aforesaid country of New France; and, for the execution of this enterprise, to build forts at such places as you may think necessary, and enjoy possession thereof under the same clauses and conditions as of Fort Frontenac, conformably to our letters patent of May thirteenth, 1675, which, so far as needful, we confirm by these presents. And it is our will that they be executed according to their form and tenor: on condition, nevertheless, that you finish this enterprise within five years, failing which, these presents shall be void, and of no effect; that you carry on no trade with the savages called Ottawas, or with other tribes who bring their peltries to Montreal; and that you do the whole at your own cost and that of your associates, to whom we have granted the sole right of trade in buffalo-hides. And we direct the Sieur Count Frontenac, our governor and lieutenant-general, and also Duchesneau, intendant of justice, police, and finance, and the officers of the supreme council of the aforesaid country, to see to the execution of these presents; for such is our pleasure. "Given at St. Germain en Laye, this 12th day of May, 1678, and of our reign the 35th year." This patent grants both more and less than the memorial had asked. It authorizes La Salle to build and own, not two forts only, but as many as he may see fit, provided that he do so within five years; and it gives him, besides, the monopoly of buffalo-hides, for which at first he had not petitioned. Nothing is said of colonies. To discover the country, secure it by forts, and find, if possible, a way to Mexico, are the only object set forth; for Louis XIV. always discountenanced settlement in the West, partly as tending to deplete Canada, and partly as removing his subjects too far from his paternal control. It was but the year before that he refused to Louis Joliet the permission to plant a trading station in the Valley of the Mississippi.[99] La Salle, however, still held to his plan of a commercial and industrial colony, and in connection with it to another purpose, of which his memorial had made no mention. This was the building of a vessel on some branch of the Mississippi, in order to sail down that river to its mouth, and open a route to commerce through the Gulf of Mexico. It is evident that this design was already formed; for he had no sooner received his patent, than he engaged ship-carpenters, and procured iron, cordage, and anchors, not for one vessel, but for two. [Sidenote: MONEY AND MEANS.] What he now most needed was money; and having none of his own, he set himself to raising it from others. A notary named Simonnet lent him four thousand livres; an advocate named Raoul, twenty-four thousand; and one Dumont, six thousand. His cousin François Plet, a merchant of Rue St. Martin, lent him about eleven thousand, at the interest of forty per cent; and when he returned to Canada, Frontenac found means to procure him another loan of about fourteen thousand, secured by the mortgage of Fort Frontenac. But his chief helpers were his family, who became sharers in his undertaking. "His brothers and relations," says a memorial afterwards addressed by them to the King, "spared nothing to enable him to respond worthily to the royal goodness;" and the document adds, that, before his allotted five years were ended, his discoveries had cost them more than five hundred thousand livres (francs).[100] La Salle himself believed, and made others believe, that there was more profit than risk in his schemes. Lodged rather obscurely in Rue de la Truanderie, and of a nature reserved and shy, he nevertheless found countenance and support from personages no less exalted than Colbert, Seignelay, and the Prince de Conti. Others, too, in stations less conspicuous, warmly espoused his cause, and none more so than the learned Abbé Renaudot, who helped him with tongue and pen, and seems to have been instrumental in introducing to him a man who afterwards proved invaluable. This was Henri de Tonty, an Italian officer, a _protégé_ of the Prince de Conti, who sent him to La Salle as a person suited to his purposes, Tonty had but one hand, the other having been blown off by a grenade in the Sicilian wars.[101] His father, who had been governor of Gaeta, but who had come to France in consequence of political disturbances in Naples, had earned no small reputation as a financier, and had invented the form of life insurance still called the Tontine. La Salle learned to know his new lieutenant on the voyage across the Atlantic; and, soon after reaching Canada, he wrote of him to his patron in the following terms: "His honorable character and his amiable disposition were well known to you; but perhaps you would not have thought him capable of doing things for which a strong constitution, an acquaintance with the country, and the use of both hands seemed absolutely necessary. Nevertheless, his energy and address make him equal to anything; and now, at a season when everybody is in fear of the ice, he is setting out to begin a new fort, two hundred leagues from this place, and to which I have taken the liberty to give the name of Fort Conti. It is situated near that great cataract, more than a hundred and twenty _toises_ in height, by which the lakes of higher elevation precipitate themselves into Lake Frontenac [Ontario]. From there one goes by water, five hundred leagues, to the place where Fort Dauphin is to be begun; from which it only remains to descend the great river of the Bay of St. Esprit, to reach the Gulf of Mexico."[102] [Sidenote: RETURN TO CANADA.] Besides Tonty, La Salle found in France another ally, La Motte de Lussière, to whom he offered a share in the enterprise, and who joined him at Rochelle, the place of embarkation. Here vexatious delays occurred. Bellinzani, director of trade, who had formerly taken lessons in rascality in the service of Cardinal Mazarin, abused his official position to throw obstacles in the way of La Salle, in order to extort money from him; and he extorted, in fact, a considerable sum, which his victim afterwards reclaimed. It was not till the fourteenth of July that La Salle, with Tonty, La Motte, and thirty men, set sail for Canada, and two months more elapsed before he reached Quebec. Here, to increase his resources and strengthen his position, he seems to have made a league with several Canadian merchants, some of whom had before been his enemies, and were to be so again. Here, too, he found Father Louis Hennepin, who had come down from Fort Frontenac to meet him.[103] FOOTNOTES: [97] _Mémoire pour Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignelay sur les Descouvertes du Sieur de la Salle_, 1682. [98] _État de la dépense faite par Mr. de la Salle, Gouverneur du Fort Frontenac. Récit de Nicolas de la Salle. Revue faite au Fort de Frontenac, 1677; Mémoire sur le Projet du Sieur de la Salle_ (Margry, i. 329). Plan of Fort Frontenac, published by Faillon, from the original sent to France by Denonville in 1685. _Relation des Découvertes du Sieur de la Salle._ When Frontenac was at the fort in September, 1677, he found only four _habitants_. It appears, by the _Relation des Découvertes du Sieur de la Salle_, that, three or four years later, there were thirteen or fourteen families. La Salle spent 34,426 francs on the fort. _Mémoire au Roy, Papiers de Famille._ [99] _Colbert à Duchesneau, 28 Avril, 1677._ [100] _Mémoire au Roy, présenté sous la Régence; Obligation du Sieur de la Salle envers le Sieur Plet; Autres Emprunts de Cavelier de la Salle_ (Margry, i. 423-432). [101] Tonty, _Mémoire_, in Margry, _Relations et Mémoires inédits_, 5. [102] _Lettre de La Salle, 31 Oct., 1678._ Fort Conti was to have been built on the site of the present Fort Niagara. The name of Lac de Conti was given by La Salle to Lake Erie. The fort mentioned as Fort Dauphin was built, as we shall see, on the Illinois, though under another name. La Salle, deceived by Spanish maps, thought that the Mississippi discharged itself into the Bay of St. Esprit (Mobile Bay). Henri de Tonty signed his name in the Gallicized, and not in the original Italian form _Tonti_. He wore a hand of iron or some other metal, which was usually covered with a glove. La Potherie says that he once or twice used it to good purpose when the Indians became disorderly, in breaking the heads of the most contumacious or knocking out their teeth. Not knowing at the time the secret of the unusual efficacy of his blows, they regarded him as a "medicine" of the first order. La Potherie erroneously ascribes the loss of his hand to a sabre-cut received in a _sortie_ at Messina. [103] _La Motte de Lussière à----, sans date; Mémoíre de la Salle sur les Extorsions commises par Bellinzani; Société formée par La Salle; Relation de Henri de Tonty_, 1684 (Margry, i. 338, 573; ii. 2, 25). CHAPTER IX. 1678-1679. LA SALLE AT NIAGARA. Father Louis Hennepin: his Past Life; his Character.--Embarkation.--Niagara Falls.--Indian Jealousy.--La Motte and the Senecas.--A Disaster.--La Salle and his Followers. Hennepin was all eagerness to join in the adventure; and, to his great satisfaction, La Salle gave him a letter from his Provincial, Father Le Fèvre, containing the coveted permission. Whereupon, to prepare himself, he went into retreat at the Récollet convent of Quebec, where he remained for a time in such prayer and meditation as his nature, the reverse of spiritual, would permit. Frontenac, always partial to his Order, then invited him to dine at the château; and having visited the bishop and asked his blessing, he went down to the Lower Town and embarked. His vessel was a small birch canoe, paddled by two men. With sandalled feet, a coarse gray capote, and peaked hood, the cord of St. Francis about his waist, and a rosary and crucifix hanging at his side, the father set forth on his memorable journey. He carried with him the furniture of a portable altar, which in time of need he could strap on his back like a knapsack. He slowly made his way up the St. Lawrence, stopping here and there, where a clearing and a few log houses marked the feeble beginning of a parish and a seigniory. The settlers, though good Catholics, were too few and too poor to support a priest, and hailed the arrival of the friar with delight. He said mass, exhorted a little, as was his custom, and on one occasion baptized a child. At length he reached Montreal, where the enemies of the enterprise enticed away his two canoe-men. He succeeded in finding two others, with whom he continued his voyage, passed the rapids of the upper St. Lawrence, and reached Fort Frontenac at eleven o'clock at night of the second of November, where his brethren of the mission, Ribourde and Buisset, received him with open arms.[104] La Motte, with most of the men, appeared on the eighth; but La Salle and Tonty did not arrive till more than a month later. Meanwhile, in pursuance of his orders, fifteen men set out in canoes for Lake Michigan and the Illinois, to trade with the Indians and collect provisions, while La Motte embarked in a small vessel for Niagara, accompanied by Hennepin.[105] [Illustration] _Father Hennepin Celebrating Mass._ Drawn by Howard Pyle. La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, 132. [Sidenote: HENNEPIN.] This bold, hardy, and adventurous friar, the historian of the expedition, and a conspicuous actor in it, has unwittingly painted his own portrait with tolerable distinctness. "I always," he says, "felt a strong inclination to fly from the world and live according to the rules of a pure and severe virtue; and it was with this view that I entered the Order of St. Francis."[106] He then speaks of his zeal for the saving of souls, but admits that a passion for travel and a burning desire to visit strange lands had no small part in his inclination for the missions.[107] Being in a convent in Artois, his Superior sent him to Calais, at the season of the herring-fishery, to beg alms, after the practice of the Franciscans. Here and at Dunkirk he made friends of the sailors, and was never tired of their stories. So insatiable, indeed, was his appetite for them, that "often," he says, "I hid myself behind tavern doors while the sailors were telling of their voyages. The tobacco smoke made me very sick at the stomach; but, notwithstanding, I listened attentively to all they said about their adventures at sea and their travels in distant countries. I could have passed whole days and nights in this way without eating."[108] He presently set out on a roving mission through Holland; and he recounts various mishaps which befell him, "in consequence of my zeal in laboring for the saving of souls," "I was at the bloody fight of Seneff," he pursues, "where so many perished by fire and sword, and where I had abundance of work in comforting and consoling the poor wounded soldiers. After undergoing great fatigues, and running extreme danger in the sieges of towns, in the trenches, and in battles, where I exposed myself freely for the salvation of others while the soldiers were breathing nothing but blood and carnage, I found myself at last in a way of satisfying my old inclination for travel."[109] He got leave from his superiors to go to Canada, the most adventurous of all the missions, and accordingly sailed in 1675, in the ship which carried La Salle, who had just obtained the grant of Fort Frontenac. In the course of the voyage, he took it upon him to reprove a party of girls who were amusing themselves and a circle of officers and other passengers by dancing on deck. La Salle, who was among the spectators, was annoyed at Hennepin's interference, and told him that he was behaving like a pedagogue. The friar retorted, by alluding--unconsciously, as he says--to the circumstance that La Salle was once a pedagogue himself, having, according to Hennepin, been for ten or twelve years teacher of a class in a Jesuit school. La Salle, he adds, turned pale with rage, and never forgave him to his dying day, but always maligned and persecuted him.[110] On arriving in Canada, he was sent up to Fort Frontenac, as a missionary. That wild and remote post was greatly to his liking. He planted a gigantic cross, superintended the building of a chapel for himself and his colleague Buisset, and instructed the Iroquois colonists of the place. He visited, too, the neighboring Indian settlements,--paddling his canoe in summer, when the lake was open, and journeying in winter on snow-shoes, with a blanket slung at his back. His most noteworthy journey was one which he made in the winter,--apparently of 1677,--with a soldier of the fort. They crossed the eastern extremity of Lake Ontario on snow-shoes, and pushed southward through the forests, towards Onondaga,--stopping at evening to dig away the snow, which was several feet deep, and collect wood for their fire, which they were forced to replenish repeatedly during the night, to keep themselves from freezing. At length, they reached the great Onondaga town, where the Indians were much amazed at their hardihood. Thence they proceeded eastward to the Oneidas, and afterwards to the Mohawks, who regaled them with small frogs, pounded up with a porridge of Indian corn. Here Hennepin found the Jesuit Bruyas, who permitted him to copy a dictionary of the Mohawk language[111] which he had compiled; and here he presently met three Dutchmen, who urged him to visit the neighboring settlement of Orange, or Albany,--an invitation which he seems to have declined.[112] They were pleased with him, he says, because he spoke Dutch. Bidding them farewell, he tied on his snow-shoes again, and returned with his companion to Fort Frontenac. Thus he inured himself to the hardships of the woods, and prepared for the execution of the grand plan of discovery which he calls his own,--"an enterprise," to borrow his own words, "capable of terrifying anybody but me."[113] When the later editions of his book appeared, doubts had been expressed of his veracity. "I here protest to you, before God," he writes, addressing the reader, "that my narrative is faithful and sincere, and that you may believe everything related in it."[114] And yet, as we shall see, this reverend father was the most impudent of liars; and the narrative of which he speaks is a rare monument of brazen mendacity. Hennepin, however, had seen and dared much; for among his many failings fear had no part, and where his vanity or his spite was not involved, he often told the truth. His books have their value, with all their enormous fabrications.[115] La Motte and Hennepin, with sixteen men, went on board the little vessel of ten tons, which lay at Fort Frontenac. The friar's two brethren, Buisset and Ribourde, threw their arms about his neck as they bade him farewell; while his Indian proselytes, learning whither he was bound, stood with their hands pressed upon their mouths, in amazement at the perils which awaited their ghostly instructor. La Salle, with the rest of the party, was to follow as soon as he could finish his preparations. It was a boisterous and gusty day, the eighteenth of November. The sails were spread; the shore receded,--the stone walls of the fort, the huge cross that the friar had reared, the wigwams, the settlers' cabins, the group of staring Indians on the strand. The lake was rough; and the men, crowded in so small a craft, grew nervous and uneasy. They hugged the northern shore, to escape the fury of the wind, which blew savagely from the northeast; while the long gray sweep of naked forests on their right betokened that winter was fast closing in. On the twenty-sixth, they reached the neighborhood of the Indian town of Taiaiagon,[116] not far from Toronto, and ran their vessel, for safety, into the mouth of a river,--probably the Humber,--where the ice closed about her, and they were forced to cut her out with axes. On the fifth of December, they attempted to cross to the mouth of the Niagara; but darkness overtook them, and they spent a comfortless night, tossing on the troubled lake, five or six miles from shore. In the morning, they entered the mouth of the Niagara, and landed on the point at its eastern side, where now stand the historic ramparts of Fort Niagara. Here they found a small village of Senecas, attracted hither by the fisheries, who gazed with curious eyes at the vessel, and listened in wonder as the voyagers sang _Te Deum_ in gratitude for their safe arrival. [Sidenote: NIAGARA FALLS.] Hennepin, with several others, now ascended the river in a canoe to the foot of the mountain ridge of Lewiston, which, stretching on the right hand and on the left, forms the acclivity of a vast plateau, rent with the mighty chasm, along which, from this point to the cataract, seven miles above, rush, with the fury of an Alpine torrent, the gathered waters of four inland oceans. To urge the canoe farther was impossible. He landed, with his companions, on the west bank, near the foot of that part of the ridge now called Queenstown Heights, climbed the steep ascent, and pushed through the wintry forest on a tour of exploration. On his left sank the cliffs, the furious river raging below; till at length, in primeval solitudes unprofaned as yet by the pettiness of man, the imperial cataract burst upon his sight.[117] The explorers passed three miles beyond it, and encamped for the night on the banks of Chippewa Creek, scraping away the snow, which was a foot deep, in order to kindle a fire. In the morning they retraced their steps, startling a number of deer and wild turkeys on their way, and rejoined their companions at the mouth of the river. [Sidenote: LA MOTTE AND THE SENECAS.] La Motte now began the building of a fortified house, some two leagues above the mouth of the Niagara.[118] Hot water was used to soften the frozen ground; but frost was not the only obstacle. The Senecas of the neighboring village betrayed a sullen jealousy at a design which, indeed, boded them no good. Niagara was the key to the four great lakes above; and whoever held possession of it could, in no small measure, control the fur-trade of the interior. Occupied by the French, it would in time of peace intercept the trade which the Iroquois carried on between the western Indians and the Dutch and English at Albany, and in time of war threaten them with serious danger. La Motte saw the necessity of conciliating these formidable neighbors, and, if possible, cajoling them to give their consent to the plan. La Salle, indeed, had instructed him to that effect. He resolved on a journey to the great village of the Senecas, and called on Hennepin, who was busied in building a bark chapel for himself, to accompany him. They accordingly set out with several men well armed and equipped, and bearing at their backs presents of very considerable value. The village was beyond the Genesee, southeast of the site of Rochester.[119] After a march of five days, they reached it on the last day of December. They were conducted to the lodge of the great chief, where they were beset by a staring crowd of women and children. Two Jesuits, Raffeix and Julien Garnier, were in the village; and their presence boded no good for the embassy. La Motte, who seems to have had little love for priests of any kind, was greatly annoyed at seeing them; and when the chiefs assembled to hear what he had to say, he insisted that the two fathers should leave the council-house. At this, Hennepin, out of respect for his cloth, thought it befitting that he should retire also. The chiefs, forty-two in number, squatted on the ground, arrayed in ceremonial robes of beaver, wolf, or black-squirrel skin. "The senators of Venice," writes Hennepin, "do not look more grave or speak more deliberately than the counsellors of the Iroquois." La Motte's interpreter harangued the attentive conclave, placed gift after gift at their feet,--coats, scarlet cloth, hatchets, knives, and beads,--and used all his eloquence to persuade them that the building of a fort on the banks of the Niagara, and a vessel on Lake Erie, were measures vital to their interest. They gladly took the gifts, but answered the interpreter's speech with evasive generalities; and having been entertained with the burning of an Indian prisoner, the discomfited embassy returned, half-famished, to Niagara. Meanwhile, La Salle and Tonty were on their way from Fort Frontenac, with men and supplies, to join La Motte and his advance party. They were in a small vessel, with a pilot either unskilful or treacherous. On Christmas eve, he was near wrecking them off the Bay of Quinté. On the next day they crossed to the mouth of the Genesee; and La Salle, after some delay, proceeded to the neighboring town of the Senecas, where he appears to have arrived just after the departure of La Motte and Hennepin. He, too, called them to a council, and tried to soothe the extreme jealousy with which they regarded his proceedings. "I told them my plan," he says, "and gave the best pretexts I could, and I succeeded in my attempt."[120] More fortunate than La Motte, he persuaded them to consent to his carrying arms and ammunition by the Niagara portage, building a vessel above the cataract, and establishing a fortified warehouse at the mouth of the river. [Sidenote: JEALOUSIES.] This success was followed by a calamity. La Salle had gone up the Niagara to find a suitable place for a ship-yard, when he learned that the pilot in charge of the vessel he had left had disobeyed his orders, and ended by wrecking it on the coast. Little was saved except the anchors and cables destined for the new vessel to be built above the cataract. This loss threw him into extreme perplexity, and, as Hennepin says, "would have made anybody but him give up the enterprise."[121] The whole party were now gathered at the palisaded house which La Motte had built, a little below the mountain ridge of Lewiston. They were a motley crew of French, Flemings, and Italians, all mutually jealous. La Salle's enemies had tampered with some of the men; and none of them seemed to have had much heart for the enterprise. The fidelity even of La Motte was doubtful. "He served me very ill," says La Salle; "and Messieurs de Tonty and de la Forest knew that he did his best to debauch all my men."[122] His health soon failed under the hardships of these winter journeyings, and he returned to Fort Frontenac, half-blinded by an inflammation of the eyes.[123] La Salle, seldom happy in the choice of subordinates, had, perhaps, in all his company but one man whom he could fully trust; and this was Tonty. He and Hennepin were on indifferent terms. Men thrown together in a rugged enterprise like this quickly learn to know each other; and the vain and assuming friar was not likely to commend himself to La Salle's brave and loyal lieutenant. Hennepin says that it was La Salle's policy to govern through the dissensions of his followers; and, from whatever cause, it is certain that those beneath him were rarely in perfect harmony. FOOTNOTES: [104] Hennepin, _Description de la Louisiane_ (1683), 19; Ibid., _Voyage Curieux_ (1704), 66. Ribourde had lately arrived. [105] _Lettre de La Motte de la Lussière, sans date; Relation de Henri de Tonty écrite de Québec, le 14 Novembre, 1684_ (Margry, i. 573). This paper, apparently addressed to Abbé Renaudot, is entirely distinct from Tonty's memoir of 1693, addressed to the minister Ponchartrain. [106] Hennepin, _Nouvelle Découverte_ (1697), 8. [107] Ibid., _Avant Propos_, 5. [108] Ibid., _Voyage Curieux_ (1704), 12. [109] Hennepin, _Voyage Curieux_ (1704), 18. [110] Ibid. _Avis au Lecteur._ He elsewhere represents himself as on excellent terms with La Salle; with whom, he says, he used to read histories of travels at Fort Frontenac, after which they discussed together their plans of discovery. [111] This was the _Racines Agnières_ of Bruyas. It was published by Mr. Shea in 1862. Hennepin seems to have studied it carefully; for on several occasions he makes use of words evidently borrowed from it, putting them into the mouths of Indians speaking a dialect different from that of the Agniers, or Mohawks. [112] Compare Brodhead in _Hist. Mag._, x. 268. [113] "Une enterprise capable d'épouvanter tout autre que moi."--Hennepin, _Voyage Curieux, Avant Propos_ (1704). [114] "Je vous proteste ici devant Dieu, que ma Relation est fidèle et sincère," etc.--Ibid., _Avis au Lecteur_. [115] The nature of these fabrications will be shown hereafter. They occur, not in the early editions of Hennepin's narrative, which are comparatively truthful, but in the edition of 1697 and those which followed. La Salle was dead at the time of their publication. [116] This place is laid down on a manuscript map sent to France by the Intendant Duchesneau, and now preserved in the Archives de la Marine, and also on several other contemporary maps. [117] Hennepin's account of the falls and river of Niagara--especially his second account, on his return from the West--is very minute, and on the whole very accurate. He indulges in gross exaggeration as to the height of the cataract, which, in the edition of 1683, he states at five hundred feet, and raises to six hundred in that of 1697. He also says that there was room for four carriages to pass abreast under the American Fall without being wet. This is, of course, an exaggeration at the best; but it is extremely probable that a great change has taken place since his time. He speaks of a small lateral fall at the west side of the Horse Shoe Fall which does not now exist. Table Rock, now destroyed, is distinctly figured in his picture. He says that he descended the cliffs on the west side to the foot of the cataract, but that no human being can get down on the east side. The name of Niagara, written _Onguiaahra_ by Lalemant in 1641, and _Ongiara_ by Sanson, on his map of 1657, is used by Hennepin in its present form. His description of the falls is the earliest known to exist. They are clearly indicated on the map of Champlain, 1632. For early references to them, see "The Jesuits in North America," 235, _note_. A brief but curious notice of them is given by Gendron, _Quelques Particularitez du Pays des Hurons_, 1659. The indefatigable Dr. O'Callaghan has discovered thirty-nine distinct forms of the name Niagara. _Index to Colonial Documents of New York_, 465. It is of Iroquois origin, and in the Mohawk dialect is pronounced Nyàgarah. [118] Tonty, _Relation_, 1684 (Margry, i. 573). [119] Near the town of Victor. It is laid down on the map of Galinée, and other unpublished maps. Compare Marshall, _Historical Sketches of the Niagara Frontier_, 14. [120] _Lettre de La Salle à un de ses associés_ (Margry, ii. 32). [121] _Description de la Louisiane_ (1683), 41. It is characteristic of Hennepin that, in the editions of his book published after La Salle's death, he substitutes, for "anybody but him," "anybody but those who had formed so generous a design,"--meaning to include himself, though he lost nothing by the disaster, and had not formed the design. On these incidents, compare the two narratives of Tonty, of 1684 and 1693. The book bearing Tonty's name is a compilation full of errors. He disowned its authorship. [122] _Lettre de La Salle, 22 Août, 1682_ (Margry, ii. 212). [123] _Lettre de La Motte, sans date._ CHAPTER X. 1679. THE LAUNCH OF THE "GRIFFIN." The Niagara Portage.--A Vessel on the Stocks.--Suffering and Discontent.--La Salle's Winter Journey.--The Vessel launched.--Fresh Disasters. [Sidenote: THE NIAGARA PORTAGE.] A more important work than that of the warehouse at the mouth of the river was now to be begun. This was the building of a vessel above the cataract. The small craft which had brought La Motte and Hennepin with their advance party had been hauled to the foot of the rapids at Lewiston, and drawn ashore with a capstan, to save her from the drifting ice. Her lading was taken out, and must now be carried beyond the cataract to the calm water above. The distance to the destined point was at least twelve miles, and the steep heights above Lewiston must first be climbed. This heavy task was accomplished on the twenty-second of January. The level of the plateau was reached, and the file of burdened men, some thirty in number, toiled slowly on its way over the snowy plains and through the gloomy forests of spruce and naked oak-trees; while Hennepin plodded through the drifts with his portable altar lashed fast to his back. They came at last to the mouth of a stream which entered the Niagara two leagues above the cataract, and which was undoubtedly that now called Cayuga Creek.[124] Trees were felled, the place cleared, and the master-carpenter set his ship-builders at work. Meanwhile, two Mohegan hunters, attached to the party, made bark wigwams to lodge the men. Hennepin had his chapel, apparently of the same material, where he placed his altar, and on Sundays and saints' days said mass, preached, and exhorted; while some of the men, who knew the Gregorian chant, lent their aid at the service. When the carpenters were ready to lay the keel of the vessel, La Salle asked the friar to drive the first bolt; "but the modesty of my religious profession," he says, "compelled me to decline this honor." Fortunately, it was the hunting-season of the Iroquois, and most of the Seneca warriors were in the forests south of Lake Erie; yet enough remained to cause serious uneasiness. They loitered sullenly about the place, expressing their displeasure at the proceedings of the French. One of them, pretending to be drunk, attacked the blacksmith and tried to kill him; but the Frenchman, brandishing a red-hot bar of iron, held him at bay till Hennepin ran to the rescue, when, as he declares, the severity of his rebuke caused the savage to desist.[125] The work of the ship-builders advanced rapidly; and when the Indian visitors beheld the vast ribs of the wooden monster, their jealousy was redoubled. A squaw told the French that they meant to burn the vessel on the stocks. All now stood anxiously on the watch. Cold, hunger, and discontent found imperfect antidotes in Tonty's energy and Hennepin's sermons. [Sidenote: SUFFERING AND DISCONTENT.] La Salle was absent, and his lieutenant commanded in his place. Hennepin says that Tonty was jealous because he, the friar, kept a journal, and that he was forced to use all manner of just precautions to prevent the Italian from seizing it. The men, being half-starved, in consequence of the loss of their provisions on Lake Ontario, were restless and moody; and their discontent was fomented by one of their number, who had very probably been tampered with by La Salle's enemies.[126] The Senecas refused to supply them with corn, and the frequent exhortations of the Récollet father proved an insufficient substitute. In this extremity, the two Mohegans did excellent service,--bringing deer and other game, which relieved the most pressing wants of the party, and went far to restore their cheerfulness. La Salle, meanwhile, had gone down to the mouth of the river, with a sergeant and a number of men; and here, on the high point of land where Fort Niagara now stands, he marked out the foundations of two blockhouses.[127] Then, leaving his men to build them, he set out on foot for Fort Frontenac, where the condition of his affairs demanded his presence, and where he hoped to procure supplies to replace those lost in the wreck of his vessel. It was February, and the distance was some two hundred and fifty miles, through the snow-encumbered forests of the Iroquois and over the ice of Lake Ontario. Two men attended him, and a dog dragged his baggage on a sledge. For food, they had only a bag of parched corn, which failed them two days before they reached the fort; and they made the rest of the journey fasting. [Sidenote: THE SHIP FINISHED.] During his absence, Tonty finished the vessel, which was of about forty-five tons' burden.[128] As spring opened, she was ready for launching. The friar pronounced his blessing on her; the assembled company sang _Te Deum_; cannon were fired; and French and Indians, warmed alike by a generous gift of brandy, shouted and yelped in chorus as she glided into the Niagara. Her builders towed her out and anchored her in the stream, safe at last from incendiary hands; and then, swinging their hammocks under her deck, slept in peace, beyond reach of the tomahawk. The Indians gazed on her with amazement. Five small cannon looked out from her portholes; and on her prow was carved a portentous monster, the Griffin, whose name she bore, in honor of the armorial bearings of Frontenac. La Salle had often been heard to say that he would make the griffin fly above the crows, or, in other words, make Frontenac triumph over the Jesuits. They now took her up the river, and made her fast below the swift current at Black Rock. Here they finished her equipment, and waited for La Salle's return; but the absent commander did not appear. The spring and more than half of the summer had passed before they saw him again. At length, early in August, he arrived at the mouth of the Niagara, bringing three more friars; for, though no friend of the Jesuits, he was zealous for the Faith, and was rarely without a missionary in his journeyings. Like Hennepin, the three friars were all Flemings. One of them, Melithon Watteau, was to remain at Niagara; the others, Zenobe Membré and Gabriel Ribourde, were to preach the Faith among the tribes of the West. Ribourde was a hale and cheerful old man of sixty-four. He went four times up and down the Lewiston heights, while the men were climbing the steep pathway with their loads. It required four of them, well stimulated with brandy, to carry up the principal anchor destined for the "Griffin." La Salle brought a tale of disaster. His enemies, bent on ruining the enterprise, had given out that he was embarked on a harebrained venture, from which he would never return. His creditors, excited by rumors set afloat to that end, had seized on all his property in the settled parts of Canada, though his seigniory of Fort Frontenac alone would have more than sufficed to pay all his debts. There was no remedy. To defer the enterprise would have been to give his adversaries the triumph that they sought; and he hardened himself against the blow with his usual stoicism.[129] FOOTNOTES: [124] It has been a matter of debate on which side of the Niagara the first vessel on the Upper Lakes was built. A close study of Hennepin, and a careful examination of the localities, have convinced me that the spot was that indicated above. Hennepin repeatedly alludes to a large detached rock, rising out of the water at the foot of the rapids above Lewiston, on the west side of the river. This rock may still be seen immediately under the western end of the Lewiston suspension-bridge. Persons living in the neighborhood remember that a ferry-boat used to pass between it and the cliffs of the western shore; but it has since been undermined by the current and has inclined in that direction, so that a considerable part of it is submerged, while the gravel and earth thrown down from the cliff during the building of the bridge has filled the intervening channel. Opposite to this rock, and on the east side of the river, says Hennepin, are three mountains, about two leagues below the cataract. (_Nouveau Voyage_ (1704), 462, 466.) To these "three mountains," as well as to the rock, he frequently alludes. They are also spoken of by La Hontan, who clearly indicates their position. They consist in the three successive grades of the acclivity: first, that which rises from the level of the water, forming the steep and lofty river-bank; next, an intermediate ascent, crowned by a sort of terrace, where the tired men could find a second resting-place and lay down their burdens, whence a third effort carried them with difficulty to the level top of the plateau. That this was the actual "portage," or carrying place of the travellers, is shown by Hennepin (1704), 114, who describes the carrying of anchors and other heavy articles up these heights in August, 1679. La Hontan also passed the Falls by way of the "three mountains" eight years later. La Hontan (1703), 106. It is clear, then, that the portage was on the east side, whence it would be safe to conclude that the vessel was built on the same side. Hennepin says that she was built at the mouth of a stream (_rivière_) entering the Niagara two leagues above the Falls. Excepting one or two small brooks, there is no stream on the west side but Chippewa Creek, which Hennepin had visited and correctly placed at about a league from the cataract. His distances on the Niagara are usually correct. On the east side there is a stream which perfectly answers the conditions. This is Cayuga Creek, two leagues above the Falls. Immediately in front of it is an island about a mile long, separated from the shore by a narrow and deep arm of the Niagara, into which Cayuga Creek discharges itself. The place is so obviously suited to building and launching a vessel, that, in the early part of this century, the government of the United States chose it for the construction of a schooner to carry supplies to the garrisons of the Upper Lakes. The neighboring village now bears the name of La Salle. In examining this and other localities on the Niagara, I have been greatly aided by my friend O. H. Marshall, Esq., of Buffalo, who is unrivalled in his knowledge of the history and traditions of the Niagara frontier. [125] Hennepin (1704), 97. On a paper drawn up at the instance of the Intendant Duchesneau, the names of the greater number of La Salle's men are preserved. These agree with those given by Hennepin: thus, the master-carpenter, whom he calls Maître Moyse, appears as Moïse Hillaret; and the blacksmith, whom he calls La Forge, is mentioned as--(illegible) dit la Forge. [126] "This bad man," says Hennepin, "would infallibly have debauched our workmen, if I had not reassured them by the exhortations which I made them on fête-days and Sundays, after divine service." (1704), 98. [127] _Lettre de La Salle, 22 Août, 1682_ (Margry, ii. 229); _Relation de Tonty_, 1684 (Ibid., i. 577). He called this new post Fort Conti. It was burned some months after, by the carelessness of the sergeant in command, and was the first of a succession of forts on this historic spot. [128] Hennepin (1683), 46. In the edition of 1697, he says that it was of sixty tons. I prefer to follow the earlier and more trustworthy narrative. [129] La Salle's embarrassment at this time was so great that he purposed to send Tonty up the lakes in the "Griffin," while he went back to the colony to look after his affairs; but suspecting that the pilot, who had already wrecked one of his vessels, was in the pay of his enemies, he resolved at last to take charge of the expedition himself, to prevent a second disaster. (_Lettre de La Salle, 22 Août, 1682_; Margry, ii. 214.) Among the creditors who bore hard upon him were Migeon, Charon, Giton, and Peloquin, of Montreal, in whose name his furs at Fort Frontenac had been seized. The intendant also placed under seal all his furs at Quebec, among which is set down the not very precious item of two hundred and eighty-four skins of _enfants du diable_, or skunks. CHAPTER XI. 1679. LA SALLE ON THE UPPER LAKES. The Voyage of the "Griffin."--Detroit.--A Storm.--St. Ignace of Michilimackinac.--Rivals and Enemies.--Lake Michigan.--Hardships.--A Threatened Fight.--Fort Miami.--Tonty's Misfortunes.--Forebodings. The "Griffin" had lain moored by the shore, so near that Hennepin could preach on Sundays from the deck to the men encamped along the bank. She was now forced up against the current with tow-ropes and sails, till she reached the calm entrance of Lake Erie. On the seventh of August, La Salle and his followers embarked, sang _Te Deum_, and fired their cannon. A fresh breeze sprang up; and with swelling canvas the "Griffin" ploughed the virgin waves of Lake Erie, where sail was never seen before. For three days they held their course over these unknown waters, and on the fourth turned northward into the Strait of Detroit. Here, on the right hand and on the left, lay verdant prairies, dotted with groves and bordered with lofty forests. They saw walnut, chestnut, and wild plum trees, and oaks festooned with grape-vines; herds of deer, and flocks of swans and wild turkeys. The bulwarks of the "Griffin" were plentifully hung with game which the men killed on shore, and among the rest with a number of bears, much commended by Hennepin for their want of ferocity and the excellence of their flesh. "Those," he says, "who will one day have the happiness to possess this fertile and pleasant strait, will be very much obliged to those who have shown them the way." They crossed Lake St. Clair,[130] and still sailed northward against the current, till now, sparkling in the sun, Lake Huron spread before them like a sea. [Sidenote: ST. IGNACE.] For a time they bore on prosperously. Then the wind died to a calm, then freshened to a gale, then rose to a furious tempest; and the vessel tossed wildly among the short, steep, perilous waves of the raging lake. Even La Salle called on his followers to commend themselves to Heaven. All fell to their prayers but the godless pilot, who was loud in complaint against his commander for having brought him, after the honor he had won on the ocean, to drown at last ignominiously in fresh water. The rest clamored to the saints. St. Anthony of Padua was promised a chapel to be built in his honor, if he would but save them from their jeopardy; while in the same breath La Salle and the friars declared him patron of their great enterprise.[131] The saint heard their prayers. The obedient winds were tamed; and the "Griffin" plunged on her way through foaming surges that still grew calmer as she advanced. Now the sun shone forth on woody islands, Bois Blanc and Mackinaw and the distant Manitoulins,--on the forest wastes of Michigan and the vast blue bosom of the angry lake; and now her port was won, and she found her rest behind the point of St. Ignace of Michilimackinac, floating in that tranquil cove where crystal waters cover but cannot hide the pebbly depths beneath. Before her rose the house and chapel of the Jesuits, enclosed with palisades; on the right, the Huron village, with its bark cabins and its fence of tall pickets; on the left, the square compact houses of the French traders; and, not far off, the clustered wigwams of an Ottawa village.[132] Here was a centre of the Jesuit missions, and a centre of the Indian trade; and here, under the shadow of the cross, was much sharp practice in the service of Mammon. Keen traders, with or without a license, and lawless _coureurs de bois_, whom a few years of forest life had weaned from civilization, made St. Ignace their resort; and here there were many of them when the "Griffin" came. They and their employers hated and feared La Salle, who, sustained as he was by the governor, might set at nought the prohibition of the King, debarring him from traffic with these tribes. Yet, while plotting against him, they took pains to allay his distrust by a show of welcome. The "Griffin" fired her cannon, and the Indians yelped in wonder and amazement. The adventurers landed in state, and marched under arms to the bark chapel of the Ottawa village, where they heard mass. La Salle knelt before the altar, in a mantle of scarlet bordered with gold. Soldiers, sailors, and artisans knelt around him,--black Jesuits, gray Récollets, swarthy _voyageurs_, and painted savages; a devout but motley concourse. As they left the chapel, the Ottawa chiefs came to bid them welcome, and the Hurons saluted them with a volley of musketry. They saw the "Griffin" at her anchorage, surrounded by more than a hundred bark canoes, like a Triton among minnows. Yet it was with more wonder than good-will that the Indians of the mission gazed on the "floating fort," for so they called the vessel. A deep jealousy of La Salle's designs had been infused into them. His own followers, too, had been tampered with. In the autumn before, it may be remembered, he had sent fifteen men up the lakes to trade for him, with orders to go thence to the Illinois and make preparation against his coming. Early in the summer, Tonty had been despatched in a canoe from Niagara to look after them.[133] It was high time. Most of the men had been seduced from their duty, and had disobeyed their orders, squandered the goods intrusted to them, or used them in trading on their own account. La Salle found four of them at Michilimackinac. These he arrested, and sent Tonty to the Falls of Ste. Marie, where two others were captured, with their plunder. The rest were in the woods, and it was useless to pursue them. [Sidenote: RIVALS AND ENEMIES.] Anxious and troubled as to the condition of his affairs in Canada. La Salle had meant, after seeing his party safe at Michilimackinac, to leave Tonty to conduct it to the Illinois, while he himself returned to the colony. But Tonty was still at Ste. Marie, and he had none to trust but himself. Therefore, he resolved at all risks to remain with his men; "for," he says, "I judged my presence absolutely necessary to retain such of them as were left me, and prevent them from being enticed away during the winter." Moreover, he thought that he had detected an intrigue of his enemies to hound on the Iroquois against the Illinois, in order to defeat his plan by involving him in the war. Early in September he set sail again, and passing westward into Lake Michigan,[134] cast anchor near one of the islands at the entrance of Green Bay. Here, for once, he found a friend in the person of a Pottawattamie chief, who had been so wrought upon by the politic kindness of Frontenac that he declared himself ready to die for the children of Onontio.[135] Here, too, he found several of his advance party, who had remained faithful and collected a large store of furs. It would have been better had they proved false, like the rest. La Salle, who asked counsel of no man, resolved, in spite of his followers, to send back the "Griffin" laden with these furs, and others collected on the way, to satisfy his creditors.[136] It was a rash resolution, for it involved trusting her to the pilot, who had already proved either incompetent or treacherous. She fired a parting shot, and on the eighteenth of September set sail for Niagara, with orders to return to the head of Lake Michigan as soon as she had discharged her cargo. La Salle, with the fourteen men who remained, in four canoes deeply laden with a forge, tools, merchandise, and arms, put out from the island and resumed his voyage. [Sidenote: POTTAWATTAMIES.] The parting was not auspicious. The lake, glassy and calm in the afternoon, was convulsed at night with a sudden storm, when the canoes were midway between the island and the main shore. It was with difficulty that they could keep together, the men shouting to each other through the darkness. Hennepin, who was in the smallest canoe with a heavy load, and a carpenter for a companion who was awkward at the paddle, found himself in jeopardy which demanded all his nerve. The voyagers thought themselves happy when they gained at last the shelter of a little sandy cove, where they dragged up their canoes, and made their cheerless bivouac in the drenched and dripping forest. Here they spent five days, living on pumpkins and Indian corn, the gift of their Pottawattamie friends, and on a Canada porcupine brought in by La Salle's Mohegan hunter. The gale raged meanwhile with relentless fury. They trembled when they thought of the "Griffin." When at length the tempest lulled, they re-embarked, and steered southward along the shore of Wisconsin; but again the storm fell upon them, and drove them for safety to a bare, rocky islet. Here they made a fire of drift-wood, crouched around it, drew their blankets over their heads, and in this miserable plight, pelted with sleet and rain, remained for two days. At length they were afloat again; but their prosperity was brief. On the twenty-eighth, a fierce squall drove them to a point of rocks covered with bushes, where they consumed the little that remained of their provisions. On the first of October they paddled about thirty miles, without food, when they came to a village of Pottawattamies, who ran down to the shore to help them to land; but La Salle, fearing that some of his men would steal the merchandise and desert to the Indians, insisted on going three leagues farther, to the great indignation of his followers. The lake, swept by an easterly gale, was rolling its waves against the beach, like the ocean in a storm. In the attempt to land, La Salle's canoe was nearly swamped. He and his three canoe-men leaped into the water, and in spite of the surf, which nearly drowned them, dragged their vessel ashore with all its load. He then went to the rescue of Hennepin, who with his awkward companion was in woful need of succor. Father Gabriel, with his sixty-four years, was no match for the surf and the violent undertow. Hennepin, finding himself safe, waded to his relief, and carried him ashore on his sturdy shoulders; while the old friar, though drenched to the skin, laughed gayly under his cowl as his brother missionary staggered with him up the beach.[137] When all were safe ashore, La Salle, who distrusted the Indians they had passed, took post on a hill, and ordered his followers to prepare their guns for action. Nevertheless, as they were starving, an effort must be risked to gain a supply of food; and he sent three men back to the village to purchase it. Well armed, but faint with toil and famine, they made their way through the stormy forest bearing a pipe of peace, but on arriving saw that the scared inhabitants had fled. They found, however, a stock of corn, of which they took a portion, leaving goods in exchange, and then set out on their return. Meanwhile, about twenty of the warriors, armed with bows and arrows, approached the camp of the French to reconnoitre. La Salle went to meet them with some of his men, opened a parley with them, and kept them seated at the foot of the hill till his three messengers returned, when on seeing the peace-pipe the warriors set up a cry of joy. In the morning they brought more corn to the camp, with a supply of fresh venison, not a little cheering to the exhausted Frenchmen, who, in dread of treachery, had stood under arms all night. [Sidenote: HARDSHIPS.] This was no journey of pleasure. The lake was ruffled with almost ceaseless storms; clouds big with rain above, a turmoil of gray and gloomy waves beneath. Every night the canoes must be shouldered through the breakers and dragged up the steep banks, which, as they neared the site of Milwaukee, became almost insurmountable. The men paddled all day, with no other food than a handful of Indian corn. They were spent with toil, sick with the haws and wild berries which they ravenously devoured, and dejected at the prospect before them. Father Gabriel's good spirits began to fail. He fainted several times from famine and fatigue, but was revived by a certain "confection of Hyacinth" administered by Hennepin, who had a small box of this precious specific. At length they descried at a distance, on the stormy shore, two or three eagles among a busy congregation of crows or turkey buzzards. They paddled in all haste to the spot. The feasters took flight; and the starved travellers found the mangled body of a deer, lately killed by the wolves. This good luck proved the inauguration of plenty. As they approached the head of the lake, game grew abundant; and, with the aid of the Mohegan, there was no lack of bear's meat and venison. They found wild grapes, too, in the woods, and gathered them by cutting down the trees to which the vines clung. [Sidenote: ENCOUNTER WITH INDIANS.] While thus employed, they were startled by a sight often so fearful in the waste and the wilderness,--the print of a human foot. It was clear that Indians were not far off. A strict watch was kept, not, as it proved, without cause; for that night, while the sentry thought of little but screening himself and his gun from the floods of rain, a party of Outagamies crept under the bank, where they lurked for some time before he discovered them. Being challenged, they came forward, professing great friendship, and pretending to have mistaken the French for Iroquois. In the morning, however, there was an outcry from La Salle's servant, who declared that the visitors had stolen his coat from under the inverted canoe where he had placed it; while some of the carpenters also complained of being robbed. La Salle well knew that if the theft were left unpunished, worse would come of it. First, he posted his men at the woody point of a peninsula, whose sandy neck was interposed between them and the main forest. Then he went forth, pistol in hand, met a young Outagami, seized him, and led him prisoner to his camp. This done, he again set out, and soon found an Outagami chief,--for the wigwams were not far distant,--to whom he told what he had done, adding that unless the stolen goods were restored, the prisoner should be killed. The Indians were in perplexity, for they had cut the coat to pieces and divided it. In this dilemma they resolved, being strong in numbers, to rescue their comrade by force. Accordingly, they came down to the edge of the forest, or posted themselves behind fallen trees on the banks, while La Salle's men in their stronghold braced their nerves for the fight. Here three Flemish friars with their rosaries, and eleven Frenchmen with their guns, confronted a hundred and twenty screeching Outagamies. Hennepin, who had seen service, and who had always an exhortation at his tongue's end, busied himself to inspire the rest with a courage equal to his own. Neither party, however, had an appetite for the fray. A parley ensued: full compensation was made for the stolen goods, and the aggrieved Frenchmen were farther propitiated with a gift of beaver-skins. Their late enemies, now become friends, spent the next day in dances, feasts, and speeches. They entreated La Salle not to advance farther, since the Illinois, through whose country he must pass, would be sure to kill him; for, added these friendly counsellors, they hated the French because they had been instigating the Iroquois to invade their country, Here was another subject of anxiety. La Salle was confirmed in his belief that his busy and unscrupulous enemies were intriguing for his destruction. He pushed on, however, circling around the southern shore of Lake Michigan, till he reached the mouth of the St. Joseph, called by him the Miamis. Here Tonty was to have rejoined him with twenty men, making his way from Michilimackinac along the eastern shore of the lake; but the rendezvous was a solitude,--Tonty was nowhere to be seen. It was the first of November; winter was at hand, and the streams would soon be frozen. The men clamored to go forward, urging that they should starve if they could not reach the villages of the Illinois before the tribe scattered for the winter hunt. La Salle was inexorable. If they should all desert, he said, he, with his Mohegan hunter and the three friars, would still remain and wait for Tonty. The men grumbled, but obeyed; and, to divert their thoughts, he set them at building a fort of timber on a rising ground at the mouth of the river. They had spent twenty days at this task, and their work was well advanced, when at length Tonty appeared. He brought with him only half of his men. Provisions had failed; and the rest of his party had been left thirty leagues behind, to sustain themselves by hunting. La Salle told him to return and hasten them forward. He set out with two men. A violent north wind arose. He tried to run his canoe ashore through the breakers. The two men could not manage their vessel, and he with his one hand could not help them. She swamped, rolling over in the surf. Guns, baggage, and provisions were lost; and the three voyagers returned to the Miamis, subsisting on acorns by the way. Happily, the men left behind, excepting two deserters, succeeded, a few days after, in rejoining the party.[138] [Sidenote: FOREBODINGS.] Thus was one heavy load lifted from the heart of La Salle. But where was the "Griffin"? Time enough, and more than enough, had passed for her voyage to Niagara and back again. He scanned the dreary horizon with an anxious eye. No returning sail gladdened the watery solitude, and a dark foreboding gathered on his heart. Yet further delay was impossible. He sent back two men to Michilimackinac to meet her, if she still existed, and pilot her to his new fort of the Miamis, and then prepared to ascend the river, whose weedy edges were already glassed with thin flakes of ice.[139] FOOTNOTES: [130] They named it Sainte Claire, of which the present name is a perversion. [131] Hennepin (1683), 58. [132] There is a rude plan of the establishment in La Hontan, though in several editions its value is destroyed by the reversal of the plate. [133] _Relation de Tonty, 1684; Ibid., 1693_. He was overtaken at the Detroit by the "Griffin." [134] Then usually known as Lac des Illinois, because it gave access to the country of the tribes so called. Three years before, Allouez gave it the name of Lac St. Joseph, by which it is often designated by the early writers. Membré, Douay, and others, call it Lac Dauphin. [135] "The Great Mountain," the Iroquois name for the governor of Canada. It was borrowed by other tribes also. [136] In the license of discovery granted to La Salle, he is expressly prohibited from trading with the Ottawas and others who brought furs to Montreal. This traffic on the lakes was, therefore, illicit. His enemy, the Intendant Duchesneau, afterwards used this against him. _Lettre de Duchesneau au Ministre, 10 Nov., 1680._ [137] Hennepin (1683), 79. [138] Hennepin (1683), 112; _Relation de Tonty_, 1693. [139] The official account of this journey is given at length in the _Relation des Découvertes et des Voyages du Sieur de la Salle_, 1679-1681. This valuable document, compiled from letters and diaries of La Salle, early in the year 1682, was known to Hennepin, who evidently had a copy of it before him when he wrote his book, in which he incorporated many passages from it. CHAPTER XII. 1679, 1680. LA SALLE ON THE ILLINOIS. The St. Joseph.--Adventure of La Salle.--The Prairies.--Famine.--The Great Town of the Illinois.--Indians.--Intrigues.--Difficulties.--Policy of la Salle.--Desertion.--Another Attempt to poison La Salle. [Sidenote: LA SALLE'S ADVENTURE.] On the third of December the party re-embarked, thirty-three in all, in eight canoes,[140] and ascended the chill current of the St. Joseph, bordered with dreary meadows and bare gray forests. When they approached the site of the present village of South Bend, they looked anxiously along the shore on their right to find the portage or path leading to the headquarters of the Illinois. The Mohegan was absent, hunting; and, unaided by his practised eye, they passed the path without seeing it. La Salle landed to search the woods. Hours passed, and he did not return. Hennepin and Tonty grew uneasy, disembarked, bivouacked, ordered guns to be fired, and sent out men to scour the country. Night came, but not their lost leader. Muffled in their blankets and powdered by the thick-falling snow-flakes, they sat ruefully speculating as to what had befallen him; nor was it till four o'clock of the next afternoon that they saw him approaching along the margin of the river. His face and hands were besmirched with charcoal; and he was further decorated with two opossums which hung from his belt, and which he had killed with a stick as they were swinging head downwards from the bough of a tree, after the fashion of that singular beast. He had missed his way in the forest, and had been forced to make a wide circuit around the edge of a swamp; while the snow, of which the air was full, added to his perplexities. Thus he pushed on through the rest of the day and the greater part of the night, till, about two o'clock in the morning, he reached the river again, and fired his gun as a signal to his party. Hearing no answering shot, he pursued his way along the bank, when he presently saw the gleam of a fire among the dense thickets close at hand. Not doubting that he had found the bivouac of his party, he hastened to the spot. To his surprise, no human being was to be seen. Under a tree beside the fire was a heap of dry grass impressed with the form of a man who must have fled but a moment before, for his couch was still warm. It was no doubt an Indian, ambushed on the bank, watching to kill some passing enemy. La Salle called out in several Indian languages; but there was dead silence all around. He then, with admirable coolness, took possession of the quarters he had found, shouting to their invisible proprietor that he was about to sleep in his bed; piled a barricade of bushes around the spot, rekindled the dying fire, warmed his benumbed hands, stretched himself on the dried grass, and slept undisturbed till morning. The Mohegan had rejoined the party before La Salle's return, and with his aid the portage was soon found. Here the party encamped. La Salle, who was excessively fatigued, occupied, together with Hennepin, a wigwam covered in the Indian manner with mats of reeds. The cold forced them to kindle a fire, which before daybreak set the mats in a blaze; and the two sleepers narrowly escaped being burned along with their hut. [Sidenote: THE KANKAKEE.] In the morning, the party shouldered their canoes and baggage and began their march for the sources of the river Illinois, some five miles distant. Around them stretched a desolate plain, half-covered with snow and strewn with the skulls and bones of buffalo; while, on its farthest verge, they could see the lodges of the Miami Indians, who had made this place their abode. As they filed on their way, a man named Duplessis, bearing a grudge against La Salle, who walked just before him, raised his gun to shoot him through the back, but was prevented by one of his comrades. They soon reached a spot where the oozy, saturated soil quaked beneath their tread. All around were clumps of alder-bushes, tufts of rank grass, and pools of glistening water. In the midst a dark and lazy current, which a tall man might bestride, crept twisting like a snake among the weeds and rushes. Here were the sources of the Kankakee, one of the heads of the Illinois.[141] They set their canoes on this thread of water, embarked their baggage and themselves, and pushed down the sluggish streamlet, looking, at a little distance, like men who sailed on land. Fed by an unceasing tribute of the spongy soil, it quickly widened to a river; and they floated on their way through a voiceless, lifeless solitude of dreary oak barrens, or boundless marshes overgrown with reeds. At night, they built their fire on ground made firm by frost, and bivouacked among the rushes. A few days brought them to a more favored region. On the right hand and on the left stretched the boundless prairie, dotted with leafless groves and bordered by gray wintry forests, scorched by the fires kindled in the dried grass by Indian hunters, and strewn with the carcasses and the bleached skulls of innumerable buffalo. The plains were scored with their pathways, and the muddy edges of the river were full of their hoof-prints. Yet not one was to be seen. At night, the horizon glowed with distant fires; and by day the savage hunters could be descried at times roaming on the verge of the prairie. The men, discontented and half-starved, would have deserted to them had they dared. La Salle's Mohegan could kill no game except two lean deer, with a few wild geese and swans. At length, in their straits, they made a happy discovery. It was a buffalo bull, fast mired in a slough. They killed him, lashed a cable about him, and then twelve men dragged out the shaggy monster, whose ponderous carcass demanded their utmost efforts. The scene changed again as they descended. On either hand ran ranges of woody hills, following the course of the river; and when they mounted to their tops, they saw beyond them a rolling sea of dull green prairie, a boundless pasture of the buffalo and the deer, in our own day strangely transformed,--yellow in harvest-time with ripened wheat, and dotted with the roofs of a hardy and valiant yeomanry.[142] [Sidenote: THE ILLINOIS TOWN.] They passed the site of the future town of Ottawa, and saw on their right the high plateau of Buffalo Rock, long a favorite dwelling-place of Indians. A league below, the river glided among islands bordered with stately woods. Close on their left towered a lofty cliff,[143] crested with trees that overhung the rippling current; while before them spread the valley of the Illinois, in broad low meadows, bordered on the right by the graceful hills at whose foot now lies the village of Utica. A population far more numerous then tenanted the valley. Along the right bank of the river were clustered the lodges of a great Indian town. Hennepin counted four hundred and sixty of them.[144] In shape, they were somewhat like the arched top of a baggage-wagon. They were built of a framework of poles, covered with mats of rushes closely interwoven; and each contained three or four fires, of which the greater part served for two families. [Sidenote: HUNGER RELIEVED.] Here, then, was the town; but where were the inhabitants? All was silent as the desert. The lodges were empty, the fires dead, and the ashes cold. La Salle had expected this; for he knew that in the autumn the Illinois always left their towns for their winter hunting, and that the time of their return had not yet come. Yet he was not the less embarrassed, for he would fain have bought a supply of food to relieve his famished followers. Some of them, searching the deserted town, presently found the _caches_, or covered pits, in which the Indians hid their stock of corn. This was precious beyond measure in their eyes, and to touch it would be a deep offence. La Salle shrank from provoking their anger, which might prove the ruin of his plans; but his necessity overcame his prudence, and he took thirty _minots_ of corn, hoping to appease the owners by presents. Thus provided, the party embarked again, and resumed their downward voyage. On New Year's Day, 1680, they landed and heard mass. Then Hennepin wished a happy new year to La Salle first, and afterwards to all the men, making them a speech, which, as he tells us, was "most touching."[145] He and his two brethren next embraced the whole company in turn, "in a manner," writes the father, "most tender and affectionate," exhorting them, at the same time, to patience, faith, and constancy. Four days after these solemnities, they reached the long expansion of the river then called Pimitoui, and now known as Peoria Lake, and leisurely made their way downward to the site of the city of Peoria.[146] Here, as evening drew near, they saw a faint spire of smoke curling above the gray forest, betokening that Indians were at hand. La Salle, as we have seen, had been warned that these tribes had been taught to regard him as their enemy; and when, in the morning, he resumed his course, he was prepared alike for peace or war. The shores now approached each other; and the Illinois was once more a river, bordered on either hand with overhanging woods.[147] At nine o'clock, doubling a point, he saw about eighty Illinois wigwams, on both sides of the river. He instantly ordered the eight canoes to be ranged in line, abreast, across the stream,--Tonty on the right, and he himself on the left. The men laid down their paddles and seized their weapons; while, in this warlike guise, the current bore them swiftly into the midst of the surprised and astounded savages. The camps were in a panic. Warriors whooped and howled; squaws and children screeched in chorus. Some snatched their bows and war-clubs; some ran in terror; and, in the midst of the hubbub, La Salle leaped ashore, followed by his men. None knew better how to deal with Indians; and he made no sign of friendship, knowing that it might be construed as a token of fear. His little knot of Frenchmen stood, gun in hand, passive, yet prepared for battle. The Indians, on their part, rallying a little from their fright, made all haste to proffer peace. Two of their chiefs came forward, holding out the calumet; while another began a loud harangue, to check the young warriors who were aiming their arrows from the farther bank. La Salle, responding to these friendly overtures, displayed another calumet; while Hennepin caught several scared children and soothed them with winning blandishments.[148] The uproar was quelled; and the strangers were presently seated in the midst of the camp, beset by a throng of wild and swarthy figures. [Sidenote: ILLINOIS HOSPITALITY.] Food was placed before them; and, as the Illinois code of courtesy enjoined, their entertainers conveyed the morsels with their own hands to the lips of these unenviable victims of their hospitality, while others rubbed their feet with bear's grease. La Salle, on his part, made them a gift of tobacco and hatchets; and when he had escaped from their caresses, rose and harangued them. He told them that he had been forced to take corn from their granaries, lest his men should die of hunger; but he prayed them not to be offended, promising full restitution or ample payment. He had come, he said, to protect them against their enemies, and teach them to pray to the true God. As for the Iroquois, they were subjects of the Great King, and therefore brethren of the French; yet, nevertheless, should they begin a war and invade the country of the Illinois, he would stand by them, give them guns, and fight in their defence, if they would permit him to build a fort among them for the security of his men. It was also, he added, his purpose to build a great wooden canoe, in which to descend the Mississippi to the sea, and then return, bringing them the goods of which they stood in need; but if they would not consent to his plans and sell provisions to his men, he would pass on to the Osages, who would then reap all the benefits of intercourse with the French, while they were left destitute, at the mercy of the Iroquois.[149] This threat had its effect, for it touched their deep-rooted jealousy of the Osages. They were lavish of promises, and feasts and dances consumed the day. Yet La Salle soon learned that the intrigues of his enemies were still pursuing him. That evening, unknown to him, a stranger appeared in the Illinois camp. He was a Mascoutin chief, named Monso, attended by five or six Miamis, and bringing a gift of knives, hatchets, and kettles to the Illinois.[150] The chiefs assembled in a secret nocturnal session, where, smoking their pipes, they listened with open ears to the harangue of the envoys. Monso told them that he had come in behalf of certain Frenchmen, whom he named, to warn his hearers against the designs of La Salle, whom he denounced as a partisan and spy of the Iroquois, affirming that he was now on his way to stir up the tribes beyond the Mississippi to join in a war against the Illinois, who, thus assailed from the east and from the west, would be utterly destroyed. There was no hope for them, he added, but in checking the farther progress of La Salle, or, at least, retarding it, thus causing his men to desert him. Having thrown his fire-brand, Monso and his party left the camp in haste, dreading to be confronted with the object of their aspersions.[151] [Sidenote: FRESH INTRIGUES.] In the morning, La Salle saw a change in the behavior of his hosts. They looked on him askance, cold, sullen, and suspicious. There was one Omawha, a chief, whose favor he had won the day before by the politic gift of two hatchets and three knives, and who now came to him in secret to tell him what had taken place at the nocturnal council. La Salle at once saw in it a device of his enemies; and this belief was confirmed, when, in the afternoon, Nicanopé, brother of the head chief, sent to invite the Frenchmen to a feast. They repaired to his lodge; but before dinner was served,--that is to say, while the guests, white and red, were seated on mats, each with his hunting-knife in his hand, and the wooden bowl before him which was to receive his share of the bear's or buffalo's meat, or the corn boiled in fat, with which he was to be regaled,--while such was the posture of the company, their host arose and began a long speech. He told the Frenchmen that he had invited them to his lodge less to refresh their bodies with good cheer than to cure their minds of the dangerous purpose which possessed them, of descending the Mississippi. Its shores, he said, were beset by savage tribes, against whose numbers and ferocity their valor would avail nothing; its waters were infested by serpents, alligators, and unnatural monsters; while the river itself, after raging among rocks and whirlpools, plunged headlong at last into a fathomless gulf, which would swallow them and their vessel forever. [Sidenote: LA SALLE AND THE INDIANS.] La Salle's men were for the most part raw hands, knowing nothing of the wilderness, and easily alarmed at its dangers; but there were two among them, old _coureurs de bois_, who unfortunately knew too much; for they understood the Indian orator, and explained his speech to the rest. As La Salle looked around on the circle of his followers, he read an augury of fresh trouble in their disturbed and rueful visages. He waited patiently, however, till the speaker had ended, and then answered him, through his interpreter, with great composure. First, he thanked him for the friendly warning which his affection had impelled him to utter; but, he continued, the greater the danger, the greater the honor; and even if the danger were real, Frenchmen would never flinch from it. But were not the Illinois jealous? Had they not been deluded by lies? "We were not asleep, my brother, when Monso came to tell you, under cover of night, that we were spies of the Iroquois. The presents he gave you, that you might believe his falsehoods, are at this moment buried in the earth under this lodge. If he told the truth, why did he skulk away in the dark? Why did he not show himself by day? Do you not see that when we first came among you, and your camp was all in confusion, we could have killed you without needing help from the Iroquois? And now, while I am speaking, could we not put your old men to death, while your young warriors are all gone away to hunt? If we meant to make war on you, we should need no help from the Iroquois, who have so often felt the force of our arms. Look at what we have brought you. It is not weapons to destroy you, but merchandise and tools for your good. If you still harbor evil thoughts of us, be frank as we are, and speak them boldly. Go after this impostor Monso, and bring him back, that we may answer him face to face; for he never saw either us or the Iroquois, and what can he know of the plots that he pretends to reveal?"[152] Nicanopé had nothing to reply, and, grunting assent in the depths of his throat, made a sign that the feast should proceed. The French were lodged in huts, near the Indian camp; and, fearing treachery, La Salle placed a guard at night. On the morning after the feast, he came out into the frosty air and looked about him for the sentinels. Not one of them was to be seen. Vexed and alarmed, he entered hut after hut and roused his drowsy followers. Six of the number, including two of the best carpenters, were nowhere to be found. Discontented and mutinous from the first, and now terrified by the fictions of Nicanopé, they had deserted, preferring the hardships of the midwinter forest to the mysterious terrors of the Mississippi. La Salle mustered the rest before him, and inveighed sternly against the cowardice and baseness of those who had thus abandoned him, regardless of his many favors. If any here, he added, are afraid, let them but wait till the spring, and they shall have free leave to return to Canada, safely and without dishonor.[153] [Sidenote: LA SALLE AGAIN POISONED.] This desertion cut him to the heart. It showed him that he was leaning on a broken reed; and he felt that, on an enterprise full of doubt and peril, there were scarcely four men in his party whom he could trust. Nor was desertion the worst he had to fear; for here, as at Fort Frontenac, an attempt was made to kill him. Tonty tells us that poison was placed in the pot in which their food was cooked, and that La Salle was saved by an antidote which some of his friends had given him before he left France. This, it will be remembered, was an epoch of poisoners. It was in the following month that the notorious La Voisin was burned alive, at Paris, for practices to which many of the highest nobility were charged with being privy, not excepting some in whose veins ran the blood of the gorgeous spendthrift who ruled the destinies of France.[154] In these early French enterprises in the West, it was to the last degree difficult to hold men to their duty. Once fairly in the wilderness, completely freed from the sharp restraints of authority in which they had passed their lives, a spirit of lawlessness broke out among them with a violence proportioned to the pressure which had hitherto controlled it. Discipline had no resources and no guarantee; while those outlaws of the forest, the _coureurs de bois_, were always before their eyes, a standing example of unbridled license. La Salle, eminently skilful in his dealings with Indians, was rarely so happy with his own countrymen; and yet the desertions from which he was continually suffering were due far more to the inevitable difficulty of his position than to any want of conduct on his part. FOOTNOTES: [140] _Lettre de Duchesneau à----, 10 Nov., 1680._ [141] The Kankakee was called at this time the Theakiki, or Haukiki (Marest); a name which, as Charlevoix says, was afterwards corrupted by the French to Kiakiki whence, probably, its present form. In La Salle's time, the name "Theakiki" was given to the river Illinois through all its course. It was also called the Rivière Seignelay, the Rivière des Macopins, and the Rivière Divine, or Rivière de la Divine. The latter name, when Charlevoix visited the country in 1721, was confined to the northern branch. He gives an interesting and somewhat graphic account of the portage and the sources of the Kankakee, in his letter dated _De la Source du Theakiki, ce dix-sept Septembre_, 1721. Why the Illinois should ever have been called the "Divine," it is not easy to see. The Memoirs of St. Simon suggest an explanation. Madame de Frontenac and her friend Mademoiselle d'Outrelaise, he tells us, lived together in apartments at the Arsenal, where they held their _salon_ and exercised a great power in society. They were called at court _les Divines_. (St. Simon, v. 335: Cheruel.) In compliment to Frontenac, the river may have been named after his wife or her friend. The suggestion is due to M. Margry. I have seen a map by Raudin, Frontenac's engineer, on which the river is called "Rivière de la Divine ou l'Outrelaise." [142] The change is very recent. Within the memory of men not yet old, wolves and deer, besides wild swans, wild turkeys, cranes, and pelicans, abounded in this region. In 1840, a friend of mine shot a deer from the window of a farmhouse, near the present town of La Salle. Running wolves on horseback was his favorite amusement in this part of the country. The buffalo long ago disappeared; but the early settlers found frequent remains of them. Mr. James Clark, of Utica, Ill., told me that he once found a large quantity of their bones and skulls in one place, as if a herd had perished in the snowdrifts. [143] "Starved Rock." It will hold, hereafter, a conspicuous place in the narrative. [144] _La Louisiane_, 137. Allouez (_Relation_, 1673-79) found three hundred and fifty-one lodges. This was in 1677. The population of this town, which embraced five or six distinct tribes of the Illinois, was continually changing. In 1675, Marquette addressed here an auditory composed of five hundred chiefs and old men, and fifteen hundred young men, besides women and children. He estimates the number of fires at five or six hundred. (_Voyages du Père Marquette_, 98: Lenox.) Membré, who was here in 1680, says that it then contained seven or eight thousand souls. (Membré in Le Clerc, _Premier Établissement de la Foy_, ii. 173.) On the remarkable manuscript map of Franquelin, 1684, it is set down at twelve hundred warriors, or about six thousand souls. This was after the destructive inroad of the Iroquois. Some years later, Rasle reported upwards of twenty-four hundred families. (_Lettre à son Frère, in Lettres Édifiantes._) At times, nearly the whole Illinois population was gathered here. At other times, the several tribes that composed it separated, some dwelling apart from the rest; so that at one period the Illinois formed eleven villages, while at others they were gathered into two, of which this was much the larger. The meadows around it were extensively cultivated, yielding large crops, chiefly of Indian corn. The lodges were built along the river-bank for a distance of a mile, and sometimes far more. In their shape, though not in their material, they resembled those of the Hurons. There were no palisades or embankments. This neighborhood abounds in Indian relics. The village graveyard appears to have been on a rising ground, near the river immediately in front of the town of Utica. This is the only part of the river bottom, from this point to the Mississippi, not liable to inundation in the spring floods. It now forms part of a farm occupied by a tenant of Mr. James Clark. Both Mr. Clark and his tenant informed me that every year great quantities of human bones and teeth were turned up here by the plough. Many implements of stone are also found, together with beads and other ornaments of Indian and European fabric. [145] "Les paroles les plus touchantes."--_Hennepin_ (1683), 139. The later editions add the modest qualification, "que je pus." [146] Peoria was the name of one of the tribes of the Illinois. Hennepin's dates here do not exactly agree with those of La Salle (_Lettre du 29 Sept., 1680_), who says that they were at the Illinois village on the first of January, and at Peoria Lake on the fifth. [147] At least, it is so now at this place. Perhaps, in La Salle's time, it was not wholly so; for there is evidence, in various parts of the West, that the forest has made considerable encroachments on the open country. [148] Hennepin (1683), 142. [149] Hennepin (1683), 144-149. The later editions omit a part of the above. [150] "Un sauvage, nommé Monso, qui veut dire Chevreuil_."--La Salle._ Probably Monso is a misprint for Mouso, as _mousoa_ is Illinois for _chevreuil_, or deer. [151] Hennepin (1683), 151, (1704), 205; Le Clerc, ii. 157; _Mémoire du Voyage de M. de la Salle_. This is a paper appended to Frontenac's Letter to the Minister, 9 Nov., 1680. Hennepin prints a translation of it in the English edition of his later work. It charges the Jesuit Allouez with being at the bottom of the intrigue. Compare _Lettre de La Salle, 29 Sept., 1680_ (Margry, ii. 41), and _Mémoire de La Salle_, in Thomassy, _Géologie Pratique de la Louisiane_, 203. The account of the affair of Monso, in the spurious work bearing Tonty's name, is mere romance. [152] The above is a paraphrase, with some condensation, from Hennepin, whose account is substantially identical with that of La Salle. [153] Hennepin (1683), 162. _Déclaration faite par Moyse Hillaret, charpentier de barque, cy devant au service du Sr. de la Salle._ [154] The equally noted Brinvilliers was burned four years before. An account of both will be found in the Letters of Madame de Sévigné. The memoirs of the time abound in evidence of the frightful prevalence of these practices, and the commotion which they excited in all ranks of society. CHAPTER XIII. 1680. FORT CRÈVEC[OE]UR. Building of the Fort.--Loss of the "Griffin."--A Bold Resolution.--Another Vessel.--Hennepin sent to the Mississippi.--Departure of La Salle. [Sidenote: BUILDING OF THE FORT.] La Salle now resolved to leave the Indian camp, and fortify himself for the winter in a strong position, where his men would be less exposed to dangerous influence, and where he could hold his ground against an outbreak of the Illinois or an Iroquois invasion. At the middle of January, a thaw broke up the ice which had closed the river; and he set out in a canoe, with Hennepin, to visit the site he had chosen for his projected fort. It was half a league below the camp, on a low hill or knoll, two hundred yards from the southern bank. On either side was a deep ravine, and in front a marshy tract, overflowed at high water. Thither, then, the party was removed. They dug a ditch behind the hill, connecting the two ravines, and thus completely isolating it. The hill was nearly square in form. An embankment of earth was thrown up on every side: its declivities were sloped steeply down to the bottom of the ravines and the ditch, and further guarded by _chevaux-de-frise_; while a palisade, twenty-five feet high, was planted around the whole. The lodgings of the men, built of musket-proof timber, were at two of the angles; the house of the friars at the third; the forge and magazine at the fourth; and the tents of La Salle and Tonty in the area within. Hennepin laments the failure of wine, which prevented him from saying mass; but every morning and evening he summoned the men to his cabin to listen to prayers and preaching, and on Sundays and fête-days they chanted vespers. Father Zenobe usually spent the day in the Indian camp, striving, with very indifferent success, to win them to the Faith, and to overcome the disgust with which their manners and habits inspired him. Such was the first civilized occupation of the region which now forms the State of Illinois. La Salle christened his new fort Fort Crèvecoeur. The name tells of disaster and suffering, but does no justice to the iron-hearted constancy of the sufferer. Up to this time he had clung to the hope that his vessel, the "Griffin," might still be safe. Her safety was vital to his enterprise. She had on board articles of the last necessity to him, including the rigging and anchors of another vessel which he was to build at Fort Crèvecoeur, in order to descend the Mississippi and sail thence to the West Indies. But now his last hope had well-nigh vanished. Past all reasonable doubt, the "Griffin" was lost; and in her loss he and all his plans seemed ruined alike. Nothing, indeed, was ever heard of her. Indians, fur-traders, and even Jesuits, have been charged with contriving her destruction. Some say that the Ottawas boarded and burned her, after murdering those on board; others accuse the Pottawattamies; others affirm that her own crew scuttled and sunk her; others, again, that she foundered in a storm.[155] As for La Salle, the belief grew in him to a settled conviction that she had been treacherously sunk by the pilot and the sailors to whom he had intrusted her; and he thought he had found evidence that the authors of the crime, laden with the merchandise they had taken from her, had reached the Mississippi and ascended it, hoping to join Du Lhut, a famous chief of _coureurs de bois_, and enrich themselves by traffic with the northern tribes.[156] [Sidenote: LA SALLE'S ANXIETIES.] But whether her lading was swallowed in the depths of the lake, or lost in the clutches of traitors, the evil was alike past remedy. She was gone, it mattered little how. The main-stay of the enterprise was broken; yet its inflexible chief lost neither heart nor hope. One path, beset with hardships and terrors, still lay open to him. He might return on foot to Fort Frontenac, and bring thence the needful succors. La Salle felt deeply the dangers of such a step. His men were uneasy, discontented, and terrified by the stories with which the jealous Illinois still constantly filled their ears, of the whirlpools and the monsters of the Mississippi. He dreaded lest, in his absence, they should follow the example of their comrades, and desert. In the midst of his anxieties, a lucky accident gave him the means of disabusing them. He was hunting, one day, near the fort, when he met a young Illinois on his way home, half-starved, from a distant war excursion. He had been absent so long that he knew nothing of what had passed between his countrymen and the French. La Salle gave him a turkey he had shot, invited him to the fort, fed him, and made him presents. Having thus warmed his heart, he questioned him, with apparent carelessness, as to the countries he had visited, and especially as to the Mississippi,--on which the young warrior, seeing no reason to disguise the truth, gave him all the information he required. La Salle now made him the present of a hatchet, to engage him to say nothing of what had passed, and, leaving him in excellent humor, repaired, with some of his followers, to the Illinois camp. Here he found the chiefs seated at a feast of bear's meat, and he took his place among them on a mat of rushes. After a pause, he charged them with having deceived him in regard to the Mississippi; adding that he knew the river perfectly, having been instructed concerning it by the Master of Life. He then described it to them with so much accuracy that his astonished hearers, conceiving that he owed his knowledge to "medicine," or sorcery, clapped their hands to their mouths in sign of wonder, and confessed that all they had said was but an artifice, inspired by their earnest desire that he should remain among them.[157] On this, La Salle's men took heart again; and their courage rose still more when, soon after, a band of Chickasa, Arkansas, and Osage warriors, from the Mississippi, came to the camp on a friendly visit, and assured the French not only that the river was navigable to the sea, but that the tribes along its banks would give them a warm welcome. [Sidenote: ANOTHER VESSEL.] La Salle had now good reason to hope that his followers would neither mutiny nor desert in his absence. One chief purpose of his intended journey was to procure the anchors, cables, and rigging of the vessel which he meant to build at Fort Crèvecoeur, and he resolved to see her on the stocks before he set out. This was no easy matter, for the pit-sawyers had deserted. "Seeing," he writes, "that I should lose a year if I waited to get others from Montreal, I said one day, before my people, that I was so vexed to find that the absence of two sawyers would defeat my plans and make all my trouble useless, that I was resolved to try to saw the planks myself, if I could find a single man who would help me with a will." Hereupon, two men stepped forward and promised to do their best. They were tolerably successful, and, the rest being roused to emulation, the work went on with such vigor that within six weeks the hull of the vessel was half finished. She was of forty tons' burden, and was built with high bulwarks, to protect those on board from Indian arrows. La Salle now bethought him that, in his absence, he might get from Hennepin service of more value than his sermons; and he requested him to descend the Illinois, and explore it to its mouth. The friar, though hardy and daring, would fain have excused himself, alleging a troublesome bodily infirmity; but his venerable colleague Ribourde, himself too old for the journey, urged him to go, telling him that if he died by the way, his apostolic labors would redound to the glory of God. Membré had been living for some time in the Indian camp, and was thoroughly out of humor with the objects of his missionary efforts, of whose obduracy and filth he bitterly complained. Hennepin proposed to take his place, while he should assume the Mississippi adventure; but this Membré declined, preferring to remain where he was. Hennepin now reluctantly accepted the proposed task. "Anybody but me," he says, with his usual modesty, "would have been very much frightened at the dangers of such a journey; and, in fact, if I had not placed all my trust in God, I should not have been the dupe of the Sieur de la Salle, who exposed my life rashly."[158] On the last day of February, Hennepin's canoe lay at the water's edge; and the party gathered on the bank to bid him farewell. He had two companions,--Michel Accau, and a man known as the Picard du Gay,[159] though his real name was Antoine Auguel. The canoe was well laden with gifts for the Indians,--tobacco, knives, beads, awls, and other goods, to a very considerable value, supplied at La Salle's cost; "and, in fact," observes Hennepin, "he is liberal enough towards his friends."[160] [Sidenote: DEPARTURE OF HENNEPIN.] The friar bade farewell to La Salle, and embraced all the rest in turn. Father Ribourde gave him his benediction. "Be of good courage and let your heart be comforted," said the excellent old missionary, as he spread his hands in benediction over the shaven crown of the reverend traveller. Du Gay and Accau plied their paddles; the canoe receded, and vanished at length behind the forest. We will follow Hennepin hereafter on his adventures, imaginary and real. Meanwhile, we will trace the footsteps of his chief, urging his way, in the storms of winter, through those vast and gloomy wilds,--those realms of famine, treachery, and death,--that lay betwixt him and his far-distant goal of Fort Frontenac. On the first of March,[161] before the frost was yet out of the ground, when the forest was still leafless, and the oozy prairies still patched with snow, a band of discontented men were again gathered on the shore for another leave-taking. Hard by, the unfinished ship lay on the stocks, white and fresh from the saw and axe, ceaselessly reminding them of the hardship and peril that was in store. Here you would have seen the calm, impenetrable face of La Salle, and with him the Mohegan hunter, who seems to have felt towards him that admiring attachment which he could always inspire in his Indian retainers. Besides the Mohegan, four Frenchmen were to accompany him,--Hunaut, La Violette, Collin, and Dautray.[162] His parting with Tonty was an anxious one, for each well knew the risks that environed both. Embarking with his followers in two canoes, he made his way upward amid the drifting ice; while the faithful Italian, with two or three honest men and twelve or thirteen knaves, remained to hold Fort Crèvecoeur in his absence. FOOTNOTES: [155] Charlevoix, i. 459; La Potherie, ii. 140; La Hontan, _Memoir on the Fur-Trade of Canada_. I am indebted for a copy of this paper to Winthrop Sargent, Esq., who purchased the original at the sale of the library of the poet Southey. Like Hennepin, La Hontan went over to the English; and this memoir is written in their interest. [156] _Lettre de La Salle à La Barre, Chicagou, 4 Juin, 1683._ This is a long letter, addressed to the successor of Frontenac in the government of Canada. La Salle says that a young Indian belonging to him told him that three years before he saw a white man, answering the description of the pilot, a prisoner among a tribe beyond the Mississippi. He had been captured with four others on that river, while making his way with canoes, laden with goods, towards the Sioux. His companions had been killed. Other circumstances, which La Salle details at great length, convinced him that the white prisoner was no other than the pilot of the "Griffin." The evidence, however, is not conclusive. [157] _Relation des Découvertes et des Voyages du Sr. de la Salle, Seigneur et Gouverneur du Fort de Frontenac, au delà des grands Lacs de la Nouvelle France, faits par ordre de Monseigneur Colbert_, 1679, 80 et 81. Hennepin gives a story which is not essentially different, except that he makes himself a conspicuous actor in it. [158] All the above is from Hennepin; and it seems to be marked by his characteristic egotism. It appears, from La Salle's letters, that Accau was the real chief of the party; that their orders were to explore not only the Illinois, but also a part of the Mississippi; and that Hennepin volunteered to go with the others. Accau was chosen because he spoke several Indian languages. [159] An eminent writer has mistaken "Picard" for a personal name. Du Gay was called "Le Picard," because he came from the province of Picardy. [160] (1683), 188. This commendation is suppressed in the later editions. [161] Tonty erroneously places their departure on the twenty-second. [162] _Déclaration faite par Moyse Hillaret, charpentier de barque._ CHAPTER XIV. 1680. HARDIHOOD OF LA SALLE. The Winter Journey.--The Deserted Town.--Starved Rock.--Lake Michigan.--The Wilderness.--War Parties.--La Salle's Men give out.--Ill Tidings.--Mutiny.--Chastisement of the Mutineers. La Salle well knew what was before him, and nothing but necessity spurred him to this desperate journey. He says that he could trust nobody else to go in his stead, and that unless the articles lost in the "Griffin" were replaced without delay, the expedition would be retarded a full year, and he and his associates consumed by its expenses. "Therefore," he writes to one of them, "though the thaws of approaching spring greatly increased the difficulty of the way, interrupted as it was everywhere by marshes and rivers, to say nothing of the length of the journey, which is about five hundred leagues in a direct line, and the danger of meeting Indians of four or five different nations through whose country we were to pass, as well as an Iroquois army which we knew was coming that way; though we must suffer all the time from hunger; sleep on the open ground, and often without food; watch by night and march by day, loaded with baggage, such as blanket, clothing, kettle, hatchet, gun, powder, lead, and skins to make moccasins; sometimes pushing through thickets, sometimes climbing rocks covered with ice and snow, sometimes wading whole days through marshes where the water was waist-deep or even more, at a season when the snow was not entirely melted,--though I knew all this, it did not prevent me from resolving to go on foot to Fort Frontenac, to learn for myself what had become of my vessel, and bring back the things we needed."[163] The winter had been a severe one; and when, an hour after leaving the fort, he and his companions reached the still water of Peoria Lake, they found it sheeted with ice from shore to shore. They carried their canoes up the bank, made two rude sledges, placed the light vessels upon them, and dragged them to the upper end of the lake, where they encamped. In the morning they found the river still covered with ice, too weak to bear them and too strong to permit them to break a way for the canoes. They spent the whole day in carrying them through the woods, toiling knee-deep in saturated snow. Rain fell in floods, and they took shelter at night in a deserted Indian hut. In the morning, the third of March, they dragged their canoes half a league farther; then launched them, and, breaking the ice with clubs and hatchets, forced their way slowly up the stream. Again their progress was barred, and again they took to the woods, toiling onward till a tempest of moist, half-liquid snow forced them to bivouac for the night. A sharp frost followed, and in the morning the white waste around them was glazed with a dazzling crust. Now, for the first time, they could use their snow-shoes. Bending to their work, dragging their canoes, which glided smoothly over the polished surface, they journeyed on hour after hour and league after league, till they reached at length the great town of the Illinois, still void of its inhabitants.[164] [Sidenote: THE DESERTED TOWN.] It was a desolate and lonely scene,--the river gliding dark and cold between its banks of rushes; the empty lodges, covered with crusted snow; the vast white meadows; the distant cliffs, bearded with shining icicles; and the hills wrapped in forests, which glittered from afar with the icy incrustations that cased each frozen twig. Yet there was life in the savage landscape. The men saw buffalo wading in the snow, and they killed one of them. More than this: they discovered the tracks of moccasins. They cut rushes by the edge of the river, piled them on the bank, and set them on fire, that the smoke might attract the eyes of savages roaming near. On the following day, while the hunters were smoking the meat of the buffalo, La Salle went out to reconnoitre, and presently met three Indians, one of whom proved to be Chassagoac, the principal chief of the Illinois.[165] La Salle brought them to his bivouac, feasted them, gave them a red blanket, a kettle, and some knives and hatchets, made friends with them, promised to restrain the Iroquois from attacking them, told them that he was on his way to the settlements to bring arms and ammunition to defend them against their enemies, and, as the result of these advances, gained from the chief a promise that he would send provisions to Tonty's party at Fort Crèvecoeur. After several days spent at the deserted town, La Salle prepared to resume his journey. Before his departure, his attention was attracted to the remarkable cliff of yellow sandstone, now called Starved Rock, a mile or more above the village,--a natural fortress, which a score of resolute white men might make good against a host of savages; and he soon afterwards sent Tonty an order to examine it, and make it his stronghold in case of need.[166] On the fifteenth the party set out again, carried their canoes along the bank of the river as far as the rapids above Ottawa, then launched them and pushed their way upward, battling with the floating ice, which, loosened by a warm rain, drove down the swollen current in sheets. On the eighteenth they reached a point some miles below the site of Joliet, and here found the river once more completely closed. Despairing of farther progress by water, they hid their canoes on an island, and struck across the country for Lake Michigan. [Sidenote: LA SALLE'S JOURNEY.] It was the worst of all seasons for such a journey. The nights were cold, but the sun was warm at noon, and the half-thawed prairie was one vast tract of mud, water, and discolored, half-liquid snow. On the twenty-second they crossed marshes and inundated meadows, wading to the knee, till at noon they were stopped by a river, perhaps the Calumet. They made a raft of hard-wood timber, for there was no other, and shoved themselves across. On the next day they could see Lake Michigan dimly glimmering beyond the waste of woods; and, after crossing three swollen streams, they reached it at evening. On the twenty-fourth they followed its shore, till, at nightfall, they arrived at the fort which they had built in the autumn at the mouth of the St. Joseph. Here La Salle found Chapelle and Leblanc, the two men whom he had sent from hence to Michilimackinac, in search of the "Griffin."[167] They reported that they had made the circuit of the lake, and had neither seen her nor heard tidings of her. Assured of her fate, he ordered them to rejoin Tonty at Fort Crèvecoeur; while he pushed onward with his party through the unknown wild of Southern Michigan. "The rain," says La Salle, "which lasted all day, and the raft we were obliged to make to cross the river, stopped us till noon of the twenty-fifth, when we continued our march through the woods, which was so interlaced with thorns and brambles that in two days and a half our clothes were all torn, and our faces so covered with blood that we hardly knew each other. On the twenty-eighth we found the woods more open, and began to fare better, meeting a good deal of game, which after this rarely failed us; so that we no longer carried provisions with us, but made a meal of roast meat wherever we happened to kill a deer, bear, or turkey. These are the choicest feasts on a journey like this; and till now we had generally gone without them, so that we had often walked all day without breakfast. [Sidenote: INDIAN ALARMS.] "The Indians do not hunt in this region, which is debatable ground between five or six nations who are at war, and, being afraid of each other, do not venture into these parts except to surprise each other, and always with the greatest precaution and all possible secrecy. The reports of our guns and the carcasses of the animals we killed soon led some of them to find our trail. In fact, on the evening of the twenty-eighth, having made our fire by the edge of a prairie, we were surrounded by them; but as the man on guard waked us, and we posted ourselves behind trees with our guns, these savages, who are called Wapoos, took us for Iroquois, and thinking that there must be a great many of us because we did not travel secretly, as they do when in small bands, they ran off without shooting their arrows, and gave the alarm to their comrades, so that we were two days without meeting anybody." La Salle guessed the cause of their fright; and, in order to confirm their delusion, he drew with charcoal, on the trunks of trees from which he had stripped the bark, the usual marks of an Iroquois war-party, with signs for prisoners and for scalps, after the custom of those dreaded warriors. This ingenious artifice, as will soon appear, was near proving the destruction of the whole party. He also set fire to the dry grass of the prairies over which he and his men had just passed, thus destroying the traces of their passage. "We practised this device every night, and it answered very well so long as we were passing over an open country; but on the thirtieth we got into great marshes, flooded by the thaws, and were obliged to cross them in mud or water up to the waist; so that our tracks betrayed us to a band of Mascoutins who were out after Iroquois. They followed us through these marshes during the three days we were crossing them; but we made no fire at night, contenting ourselves with taking off our wet clothes and wrapping ourselves in our blankets on some dry knoll, where we slept till morning. At last, on the night of the second of April, there came a hard frost, and our clothes, which were drenched when we took them off, froze stiff as sticks, so that we could not put them on in the morning without making a fire to thaw them. The fire betrayed us to the Indians, who were encamped across the marsh; and they ran towards us with loud cries, till they were stopped halfway by a stream so deep that they could not get over, the ice which had formed in the night not being strong enough to bear them. We went to meet them, within gun-shot; and whether our fire-arms frightened them, or whether they thought us more numerous than we were, or whether they really meant us no harm, they called out, in the Illinois language, that they had taken us for Iroquois, but now saw that we were friends and brothers; whereupon, they went off as they came, and we kept on our way till the fourth, when two of my men fell ill and could not walk." In this emergency, La Salle went in search of some watercourse by which they might reach Lake Erie, and soon came upon a small river, which was probably the Huron. Here, while the sick men rested, their companions made a canoe. There were no birch-trees; and they were forced to use elm-bark, which at that early season would not slip freely from the wood until they loosened it with hot water. Their canoe being made, they embarked in it, and for a time floated prosperously down the stream, when at length the way was barred by a matted barricade of trees fallen across the water. The sick men could now walk again, and, pushing eastward through the forest, the party soon reached the banks of the Detroit. [Sidenote: THE JOURNEY'S END.] La Salle directed two of the men to make a canoe, and go to Michilimackinac, the nearest harborage. With the remaining two, he crossed the Detroit on a raft, and, striking a direct line across the country, reached Lake Erie not far from Point Pelée. Snow, sleet, and rain pelted them with little intermission: and when, after a walk of about thirty miles, they gained the lake, the Mohegan and one of the Frenchmen were attacked with fever and spitting of blood. Only one man now remained in health. With his aid, La Salle made another canoe, and, embarking the invalids, pushed for Niagara. It was Easter Monday when they landed at a cabin of logs above the cataract, probably on the spot where the "Griffin" was built. Here several of La Salle's men had been left the year before, and here they still remained. They told him woful news. Not only had he lost the "Griffin," and her lading of ten thousand crowns in value, but a ship from France, freighted with his goods, valued at more than twenty-two thousand livres, had been totally wrecked at the mouth of the St. Lawrence; and of twenty hired men on their way from Europe to join him, some had been detained by his enemy, the Intendant Duchesneau, while all but four of the remainder, being told that he was dead, had found means to return home. His three followers were all unfit for travel: he alone retained his strength and spirit. Taking with him three fresh men at Niagara, he resumed his journey, and on the sixth of May descried, looming through floods of rain, the familiar shores of his seigniory and the bastioned walls of Fort Frontenac. During sixty-five days he had toiled almost incessantly, travelling, by the course he took, about a thousand miles through a country beset with every form of peril and obstruction,--"the most arduous journey," says the chronicler, "ever made by Frenchmen in America." Such was Cavelier de la Salle. In him, an unconquerable mind held at its service a frame of iron, and tasked it to the utmost of its endurance. The pioneer of western pioneers was no rude son of toil, but a man of thought, trained amid arts and letters.[168] He had reached his goal; but for him there was neither rest nor peace. Man and Nature seemed in arms against him. His agents had plundered him; his creditors had seized his property; and several of his canoes, richly laden, had been lost in the rapids of the St. Lawrence.[169] He hastened to Montreal, where his sudden advent caused great astonishment; and where, despite his crippled resources and damaged credit, he succeeded, within a week, in gaining the supplies which he required and the needful succors for the forlorn band on the Illinois. He had returned to Fort Frontenac, and was on the point of embarking for their relief, when a blow fell upon him more disheartening than any that had preceded. [Sidenote: THE MUTINEERS.] On the twenty-second of July, two _voyageurs_, Messier and Laurent, came to him with a letter from Tonty, who wrote that soon after La Salle's departure nearly all the men had deserted, after destroying Fort Crèvecoeur, plundering the magazine, and throwing into the river all the arms, goods, and stores which they could not carry off. The messengers who brought this letter were speedily followed by two of the _habitants_ of Fort Frontenac, who had been trading on the lakes, and who, with a fidelity which the unhappy La Salle rarely knew how to inspire, had travelled day and night to bring him their tidings. They reported that they had met the deserters, and that, having been reinforced by recruits gained at Michilimackinac and Niagara, they now numbered twenty men.[170] They had destroyed the fort on the St. Joseph, seized a quantity of furs belonging to La Salle at Michilimackinac, and plundered the magazine at Niagara. Here they had separated, eight of them coasting the south side of Lake Ontario to find harborage at Albany, a common refuge at that time of this class of scoundrels; while the remaining twelve, in three canoes, made for Fort Frontenac along the north shore, intending to kill La Salle as the surest means of escaping punishment. [Sidenote: CHASTISEMENT.] He lost no time in lamentation. Of the few men at his command he chose nine of the trustiest, embarked with them in canoes, and went to meet the marauders. After passing the Bay of Quinté, he took his station with five of his party at a point of land suited to his purpose, and detached the remaining four to keep watch. In the morning, two canoes were discovered approaching without suspicion, one of them far in advance of the other. As the foremost drew near, La Salle's canoe darted out from under the leafy shore,--two of the men handling the paddles, while he, with the remaining two, levelled their guns at the deserters, and called on them to surrender. Astonished and dismayed, they yielded at once; while two more, who were in the second canoe, hastened to follow their example. La Salle now returned to the fort with his prisoners, placed them in custody, and again set forth. He met the third canoe upon the lake at about six o'clock in the evening. His men vainly plied their paddles in pursuit. The mutineers reached the shore, took post among rocks and trees, levelled their guns, and showed fight. Four of La Salle's men made a circuit to gain their rear and dislodge them, on which they stole back to their canoe and tried to escape in the darkness. They were pursued, and summoned to yield; but they replied by aiming their guns at their pursuers, who instantly gave them a volley, killed two of them, and captured the remaining three. Like their companions, they were placed in custody at the fort, to await the arrival of Count Frontenac.[171] FOOTNOTES: [163] _Lettre de La Salle à un de ses associés_ (Thouret?), _29 Sept., 1680_ (Margry, ii. 50). [164] Membré says that he was in the town at the time; but this could hardly have been the case. He was, in all probability, among the Illinois, in their camp near Fort Crèvecoeur. [165] The same whom Hennepin calls Chassagouasse. He was brother of the chief, Nicanopé, who, in his absence, had feasted the French on the day after the nocturnal council with Monso. Chassagoac was afterwards baptized by Membré or Ribourde, but soon relapsed into the superstitions of his people, and died, as the former tells us, "doubly a child of perdition." See Le Clerc, ii. 181. [166] Tonty, _Mémoire_. The order was sent by two Frenchmen, whom La Salle met on Lake Michigan. [167] _Déclaration de Moyse Hillaret; Relation des Découvertes._ [168] A Rocky Mountain trapper, being complimented on the hardihood of himself and his companions, once said to the writer, "That's so; but a gentleman of the right sort will stand hardship better than anybody else." The history of Arctic and African travel and the military records of all time are a standing evidence that a trained and developed mind is not the enemy, but the active and powerful ally, of constitutional hardihood. The culture that enervates instead of strengthening is always a false or a partial one. [169] Zenobe Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 202. [170] When La Salle was at Niagara, in April, he had ordered Dautray, the best of the men who had accompanied him from the Illinois, to return thither as soon as he was able. Four men from Niagara were to go with him and he was to rejoin Tonty with such supplies as that post could furnish. Dautray set out accordingly, but was met on the lakes by the deserters, who told him that Tonty was dead, and seduced his men. (_Relation des Découvertes._) Dautray himself seems to have remained true; at least, he was in La Salle's service immediately after, and was one of his most trusted followers. He was of good birth, being the son of Jean Bourdon, a conspicuous personage in the early period of the colony; and his name appears on official records as Jean Bourdon, Sieur d'Autray. [171] La Salle's long letter, written apparently to his associate Thouret, and dated 29 Sept., 1680, is the chief authority for the above. The greater part of this letter is incorporated, almost verbatim, in the official narrative called _Relation des Découvertes_. Hennepin, Membré, and Tonty also speak of the journey from Fort Crèvecoeur. The death of the two mutineers was used by La Salle's enemies as the basis of a charge of murder. CHAPTER XV. 1680. INDIAN CONQUERORS. The Enterprise renewed.--Attempt to rescue Tonty.--Buffalo.--A Frightful Discovery.--Iroquois Fury.--The Ruined Town.--A Night of Horror.--Traces of the Invaders.--No News of Tonty. [Sidenote: ANOTHER EFFORT.] And now La Salle's work must be begun afresh. He had staked all, and all had seemingly been lost. In stern, relentless effort he had touched the limits of human endurance; and the harvest of his toil was disappointment, disaster, and impending ruin. The shattered fabric of his enterprise was prostrate in the dust. His friends desponded; his foes were blatant and exultant. Did he bend before the storm? No human eye could pierce the depths of his reserved and haughty nature; but the surface was calm, and no sign betrayed a shaken resolve or an altered purpose. Where weaker men would have abandoned all in despairing apathy, he turned anew to his work with the same vigor and the same apparent confidence as if borne on the full tide of success. His best hope was in Tonty. Could that brave and true-hearted officer and the three or four faithful men who had remained with him make good their foothold on the Illinois, and save from destruction the vessel on the stocks and the forge and tools so laboriously carried thither, then a basis was left on which the ruined enterprise might be built up once more. There was no time to lose. Tonty must be succored soon, or succor would come too late. La Salle had already provided the necessary material, and a few days sufficed to complete his preparations. On the tenth of August he embarked again for the Illinois. With him went his lieutenant La Forest, who held of him in fief an island, then called Belle Isle, opposite Fort Frontenac.[172] A surgeon, ship-carpenters, joiners, masons, soldiers, _voyageurs_ and laborers completed his company, twenty-five men in all, with everything needful for the outfit of the vessel. His route, though difficult, was not so long as that which he had followed the year before. He ascended the river Humber; crossed to Lake Simcoe, and thence descended the Severn to the Georgian Bay of Lake Huron; followed its eastern shore, coasted the Manitoulin Islands, and at length reached Michilimackinac. Here, as usual, all was hostile; and he had great difficulty in inducing the Indians, who had been excited against him, to sell him provisions. Anxious to reach his destination, he pushed forward with twelve men, leaving La Forest to bring on the rest. On the fourth of November[173] he reached the ruined fort at the mouth of the St. Joseph, and left five of his party, with the heavy stores, to wait till La Forest should come up, while he himself hastened forward with six Frenchmen and an Indian. A deep anxiety possessed him. The rumor, current for months past, that the Iroquois, bent on destroying the Illinois, were on the point of invading their country had constantly gained strength. Here was a new disaster, which, if realized, might involve him and his enterprise in irretrievable wreck. He ascended the St. Joseph, crossed the portage to the Kankakee, and followed its course downward till it joined the northern branch of the Illinois. He had heard nothing of Tonty on the way, and neither here nor elsewhere could he discover the smallest sign of the passage of white men. His friend, therefore, if alive, was probably still at his post; and he pursued his course with a mind lightened, in some small measure, of its load of anxiety. [Sidenote: BUFFALO.] When last he had passed here, all was solitude; but now the scene was changed. The boundless waste was thronged with life. He beheld that wondrous spectacle, still to be seen at times on the plains of the remotest West, and the memory of which can quicken the pulse and stir the blood after the lapse of years: far and near, the prairie was alive with buffalo; now like black specks dotting the distant swells; now trampling by in ponderous columns, or filing in long lines, morning, noon, and night, to drink at the river,--wading, plunging, and snorting in the water; climbing the muddy shores, and staring with wild eyes at the passing canoes. It was an opportunity not to be lost. The party landed, and encamped for a hunt. Sometimes they hid under the shelving bank, and shot them as they came to drink; sometimes, flat on their faces, they dragged themselves through the long dead grass, till the savage bulls, guardians of the herd, ceased their grazing, raised their huge heads, and glared through tangled hair at the dangerous intruders. The hunt was successful. In three days the hunters killed twelve buffalo, besides deer, geese, and swans. They cut the meat into thin flakes, and dried it in the sun or in the smoke of their fires. The men were in high spirits,--delighting in the sport, and rejoicing in the prospect of relieving Tonty and his hungry followers with a plentiful supply. They embarked again, and soon approached the great town of the Illinois. The buffalo were far behind; and once more the canoes glided on their way through a voiceless solitude. No hunters were seen; no saluting whoop greeted their ears. They passed the cliff afterwards called the Rock of St. Louis, where La Salle had ordered Tonty to build his stronghold; but as he scanned its lofty top he saw no palisades, no cabins, no sign of human hand, and still its primeval crest of forests overhung the gliding river. Now the meadow opened before them where the great town had stood. They gazed, astonished and confounded: all was desolation. The town had vanished, and the meadow was black with fire. They plied their paddles, hastened to the spot, landed; and as they looked around their cheeks grew white, and the blood was frozen in their veins. [Sidenote: A NIGHT OF HORROR.] Before them lay a plain once swarming with wild human life and covered with Indian dwellings, now a waste of devastation and death, strewn with heaps of ashes, and bristling with the charred poles and stakes which had formed the framework of the lodges. At the points of most of them were stuck human skulls, half picked by birds of prey.[174] Near at hand was the burial-ground of the village. The travellers sickened with horror as they entered its revolting precincts. Wolves in multitudes fled at their approach; while clouds of crows or buzzards, rising from the hideous repast, wheeled above their heads, or settled on the naked branches of the neighboring forest. Every grave had been rifled, and the bodies flung down from the scaffolds where, after the Illinois custom, many of them had been placed. The field was strewn with broken bones and torn and mangled corpses. A hyena warfare had been waged against the dead. La Salle knew the handiwork of the Iroquois. The threatened blow had fallen, and the wolfish hordes of the five cantons had fleshed their rabid fangs in a new victim.[175] Not far distant, the conquerors had made a rude fort of trunks, boughs, and roots of trees laid together to form a circular enclosure; and this, too, was garnished with skulls, stuck on the broken branches and protruding sticks. The _caches_, or subterranean store-houses of the villagers, had been broken open and the contents scattered. The cornfields were laid waste, and much of the corn thrown into heaps and half burned. As La Salle surveyed this scene of havoc, one thought engrossed him: where were Tonty and his men? He searched the Iroquois fort: there were abundant traces of its savage occupants, and, among them, a few fragments of French clothing. He examined the skulls; but the hair, portions of which clung to nearly all of them, was in every case that of an Indian. Evening came on before he had finished the search. The sun set, and the wilderness sank to its savage rest. Night and silence brooded over the waste, where, far as the raven could wing his flight, stretched the dark domain of solitude and horror. Yet there was no silence at the spot where La Salle and his companions made their bivouac. The howling of the wolves filled the air with fierce and dreary dissonance. More dangerous foes were not far off, for before nightfall they had seen fresh Indian tracks; "but, as it was very cold," says La Salle, "this did not prevent us from making a fire and lying down by it, each of us keeping watch in turn. I spent the night in a distress which you can imagine better than I can write it; and I did not sleep a moment with trying to make up my mind as to what I ought to do. My ignorance as to the position of those I was looking after, and my uncertainty as to what would become of the men who were to follow me with La Forest if they arrived at the ruined village and did not find me there, made me apprehend every sort of trouble and disaster. At last, I decided to keep on my way down the river, leaving some of my men behind in charge of the goods, which it was not only useless but dangerous to carry with me, because we should be forced to abandon them when the winter fairly set in, which would be very soon." [Sidenote: FEARS FOR TONTY.] This resolution was due to a discovery he had made the evening before, which offered, as he thought, a possible clew to the fate of Tonty and the men with him. He thus describes it: "Near the garden of the Indians, which was on the meadows, a league from the village and not far from the river, I found six pointed stakes set in the ground and painted red. On each of them was the figure of a man with bandaged eyes, drawn in black. As the savages often set stakes of this sort where they have killed people, I thought, by their number and position, that when the Iroquois came, the Illinois, finding our men alone in the hut near their garden, had either killed them or made them prisoners. And I was confirmed in this, because, seeing no signs of a battle, I supposed that on hearing of the approach of the Iroquois, the old men and other non-combatants had fled, and that the young warriors had remained behind to cover their flight, and afterwards followed, taking the French with them; while the Iroquois, finding nobody to kill, had vented their fury on the corpses in the graveyard." Uncertain as was the basis of this conjecture, and feeble as was the hope it afforded, it determined him to push forward, in order to learn more. When daylight returned, he told his purpose to his followers, and directed three of them to await his return near the ruined village. They were to hide themselves on an island, conceal their fire at night, make no smoke by day, fire no guns, and keep a close watch. Should the rest of the party arrive, they, too, were to wait with similar precautions. The baggage was placed in a hollow of the rocks, at a place difficult of access; and, these arrangements made, La Salle set out on his perilous journey with the four remaining men, Dautray, Hunaut, You, and the Indian. Each was armed with two guns, a pistol, and a sword; and a number of hatchets and other goods were placed in the canoe, as presents for Indians whom they might meet. Several leagues below the village they found, on their right hand close to the river, a sort of island, made inaccessible by the marshes and water which surrounded it. Here the flying Illinois had sought refuge with their women and children, and the place was full of their deserted huts. On the left bank, exactly opposite, was an abandoned camp of the Iroquois. On the level meadow stood a hundred and thirteen huts, and on the forest trees which covered the hills behind were carved the totems, or insignia, of the chiefs, together with marks to show the number of followers which each had led to the war. La Salle counted five hundred and eighty-two warriors. He found marks, too, for the Illinois killed or captured, but none to indicate that any of the Frenchmen had shared their fate. [Sidenote: SEARCH FOR TONTY.] As they descended the river, they passed, on the same day, six abandoned camps of the Illinois; and opposite to each was a camp of the invaders. The former, it was clear, had retreated in a body; while the Iroquois had followed their march, day by day, along the other bank. La Salle and his men pushed rapidly onward, passed Peoria Lake, and soon reached Fort Crèvecoeur, which they found, as they expected, demolished by the deserters. The vessel on the stocks was still left entire, though the Iroquois had found means to draw out the iron nails and spikes. On one of the planks were written the words: "_Nous sommes tous sauvages: ce 15, 1680_,"--the work, no doubt, of the knaves who had pillaged and destroyed the fort. La Salle and his companions hastened on, and during the following day passed four opposing camps of the savage armies. The silence of death now reigned along the deserted river, whose lonely borders, wrapped deep in forests, seemed lifeless as the grave. As they drew near the mouth of the stream they saw a meadow on their right, and on its farthest verge several human figures, erect, yet motionless. They landed, and cautiously examined the place. The long grass was trampled down, and all around were strewn the relics of the hideous orgies which formed the ordinary sequel of an Iroquois victory. The figures they had seen were the half-consumed bodies of women, still bound to the stakes where they had been tortured. Other sights there were, too revolting for record.[176] All the remains were those of women and children. The men, it seemed, had fled, and left them to their fate. Here, again, La Salle sought long and anxiously, without finding the smallest sign that could indicate the presence of Frenchmen. Once more descending the river, they soon reached its mouth. Before them, a broad eddying current rolled swiftly on its way; and La Salle beheld the Mississippi,--the object of his day-dreams, the destined avenue of his ambition and his hopes. It was no time for reflections. The moment was too engrossing, too heavily charged with anxieties and cares. From a rock on the shore, he saw a tree stretched forward above the stream; and stripping off its bark to make it more conspicuous, he hung upon it a board on which he had drawn the figures of himself and his men, seated in their canoe, and bearing a pipe of peace. To this he tied a letter for Tonty, informing him that he had returned up the river to the ruined village. His four men had behaved admirably throughout, and they now offered to continue the journey if he saw fit, and follow him to the sea; but he thought it useless to go farther, and was unwilling to abandon the three men whom he had ordered to await his return. Accordingly, they retraced their course, and, paddling at times both day and night, urged their canoe so swiftly that they reached the village in the incredibly short space of four days.[177] [Sidenote: THE COMET.] The sky was clear, and as night came on the travellers saw a prodigious comet blazing above this scene of desolation. On that night, it was chilling with a superstitious awe the hamlets of New England and the gilded chambers of Versailles; but it is characteristic of La Salle, that, beset as he was with perils and surrounded with ghastly images of death, he coolly notes down the phenomenon, not as a portentous messenger of war and woe, but rather as an object of scientific curiosity.[178] He found his three men safely ensconced upon their island, where they were anxiously looking for his return. After collecting a store of half-burnt corn from the ravaged granaries of the Illinois, the whole party began to ascend the river, and on the sixth of January reached the junction of the Kankakee with the northern branch. On their way downward they had descended the former stream; they now chose the latter, and soon discovered, by the margin of the water, a rude cabin of bark. La Salle landed and examined the spot, when an object met his eye which cheered him with a bright gleam of hope. It was but a piece of wood; but the wood had been cut with a saw. Tonty and his party, then, had passed this way, escaping from the carnage behind them. Unhappily, they had left no token of their passage at the fork of the two streams; and thus La Salle, on his voyage downward, had believed them to be still on the river below. With rekindled hope, the travellers pursued their journey, leaving their canoes, and making their way overland towards the fort on the St. Joseph. "Snow fell in extraordinary quantities all day," writes La Salle, "and it kept on falling for nineteen days in succession, with cold so severe that I never knew so hard a winter, even in Canada. We were obliged to cross forty leagues of open country, where we could hardly find wood to warm ourselves at evening, and could get no bark whatever to make a hut, so that we had to spend the night exposed to the furious winds which blow over these plains. I never suffered so much from cold, or had more trouble in getting forward; for the snow was so light, resting suspended as it were among the tall grass, that we could not use snow-shoes. Sometimes it was waist deep; and as I walked before my men, as usual, to encourage them by breaking the path, I often had much ado, though I am rather tall, to lift my legs above the drifts, through which I pushed by the weight of my body." [Sidenote: FORT MIAMI.] At length they reached their goal, and found shelter and safety within the walls of Fort Miami. Here was the party left in charge of La Forest; but, to his surprise and grief, La Salle heard no tidings of Tonty. He found some amends for the disappointment in the fidelity and zeal of La Forest's men, who had restored the fort, cleared ground for planting, and even sawed the planks and timber for a new vessel on the lake. And now, while La Salle rests at Fort Miami, let us trace the adventures which befell Tonty and his followers, after their chief's departure from Fort Crèvecoeur. FOOTNOTES: [172] _Robert Cavelier, Sr. de la Salle, à François Daupin, Sr. de la Forest, 10 Juin, 1679._ [173] This date is from the _Relation_. Membré says the twenty-eighth; but he is wrong, by his own showing, as he says that the party reached the Illinois village on the first of December, which would be an impossibility. [174] "Il ne restoit que quelques bouts de perches brulées qui montroient quelle avoit été l'étendue du village, et sur la plupart desquelles il y avoit des têtes de morts plantées et mangées des corbeaux."--_Relation des Découvertes du Sr. de la Salle._ [175] "Beaucoup de carcasses à demi rongées par les loups, les sépulchres démolis, les os tirés de leurs fosses et épars par la campagne; ... enfin les loups et les corbeaux augmentoient encore par leurs hurlemens et par leurs cris l'horreur de ce spectacle."--_Relation des Découvertes du Sr. de la Salle._ The above may seem exaggerated; but it accords perfectly with what is well established concerning the ferocious character of the Iroquois and the nature of their warfare. Many other tribes have frequently made war upon the dead. I have myself known an instance in which five corpses of Sioux Indians placed in trees, after the practice of the Western bands of that people, were thrown down and kicked into fragments by a war party of the Crows, who then held the muzzles of their guns against the skulls, and blew them to pieces. This happened near the head of the Platte, in the summer of 1846. Yet the Crows are much less ferocious than were the Iroquois in La Salle's time. [176] "On ne sçauroit exprimer la rage de ces furieux ni les tourmens qu'ils avoient fait souffrir aux misérables Tamaroa [_a tribe of the Illinois_]. Il y en avoit encore dans des chaudières qu'ils avoient laissées pleines sur les feux, qui depuis s'étoient éteints," etc., etc.--_Relation des Découvertes._ [177] The distance is about two hundred and fifty miles. The letters of La Salle, as well as the official narrative compiled from them, say that they left the village on the second of December, and returned to it on the eleventh, having left the mouth of the river on the seventh. [178] This was the "Great Comet of 1680." Dr. B. A. Gould writes me: "It appeared in December, 1680, and was visible until the latter part of February, 1681, being especially brilliant in January." It was said to be the largest ever seen. By observations upon it, Newton demonstrated the regular revolutions of comets around the sun. "No comet," it is said, "has threatened the earth with a nearer approach than that of 1680." (_Winthrop on Comets, Lecture II_. p. 44.) Increase Mather, in his _Discourse concerning Comets_, printed at Boston in 1683, says of this one: "Its appearance was very terrible; the Blaze ascended above 60 Degrees almost to its Zenith." Mather thought it fraught with terrific portent to the nations of the earth. CHAPTER XVI. 1680. TONTY AND THE IROQUOIS. The Deserters.--The Iroquois War.--The Great Town of the Illinois.--The Alarm.--Onset of the Iroquois.--Peril of Tonty.--A Treacherous Truce.--Intrepidity of Tonty.--Murder of Ribourde.--War upon the Dead. When La Salle set out on his rugged journey to Fort Frontenac, he left, as we have seen, fifteen men at Fort Crèvecoeur,--smiths, ship-carpenters, house-wrights, and soldiers, besides his servant L'Espérance and the two friars Membré and Ribourde. Most of the men were ripe for mutiny. They had no interest in the enterprise, and no love for its chief. They were disgusted with the present, and terrified at the future. La Salle, too, was for the most part a stern commander, impenetrable and cold; and when he tried to soothe, conciliate, and encourage, his success rarely answered to the excellence of his rhetoric. He could always, however, inspire respect, if not love; but now the restraint of his presence was removed. He had not been long absent, when a fire-brand was thrown into the midst of the discontented and restless crew. It may be remembered that La Salle had met two of his men, La Chapelle and Leblanc, at his fort on the St. Joseph, and ordered them to rejoin Tonty. Unfortunately, they obeyed. On arriving, they told their comrades that the "Griffin" was lost, that Fort Frontenac was seized by the creditors of La Salle, that he was ruined past recovery, and that they, the men, would never receive their pay. Their wages were in arrears for more than two years; and, indeed, it would have been folly to pay them before their return to the settlements, as to do so would have been a temptation to desert. Now, however, the effect on their minds was still worse, believing, as many of them did, that they would never be paid at all. [Sidenote: THE DESERTERS.] La Chapelle and his companion had brought a letter from La Salle to Tonty, directing him to examine and fortify the cliff so often mentioned, which overhung the river above the great Illinois village. Tonty, accordingly, set out on his errand with some of the men. In his absence, the malcontents destroyed the fort, stole powder, lead, furs, and provisions, and deserted, after writing on the side of the unfinished vessel the words seen by La Salle, "_Nous sommes tous sauvages_."[179] The brave young Sieur de Boisrondet and the servant L'Espérance hastened to carry the news to Tonty, who at once despatched four of those with him, by two different routes, to inform La Salle of the disaster.[180] Besides the two just named, there now remained with him only one hired man and the Récollet friars. With this feeble band, he was left among a horde of treacherous savages, who had been taught to regard him as a secret enemy. Resolved, apparently, to disarm their jealousy by a show of confidence, he took up his abode in the midst of them, making his quarters in the great village, whither, as spring opened, its inhabitants returned, to the number, according to Membré, of seven or eight thousand. Hither he conveyed the forge and such tools as he could recover, and here he hoped to maintain himself till La Salle should reappear. The spring and the summer were past, and he looked anxiously for his coming, unconscious that a storm was gathering in the east, soon to burst with devastation over the fertile wilderness of the Illinois. [Sidenote: THE IROQUOIS WAR.] I have recounted the ferocious triumphs of the Iroquois in another volume.[181] Throughout a wide semi-circle around their cantons, they had made the forest a solitude; destroyed the Hurons, exterminated the Neutrals and the Eries, reduced the formidable Andastes to helpless insignificance, swept the borders of the St. Lawrence with fire, spread terror and desolation among the Algonquins of Canada; and now, tired of peace, they were seeking, to borrow their own savage metaphor, new nations to devour. Yet it was not alone their homicidal fury that now impelled them to another war. Strange as it may seem, this war was in no small measure one of commercial advantage. They had long traded with the Dutch and English of New York, who gave them, in exchange for their furs, the guns, ammunition, knives, hatchets, kettles, beads, and brandy which had become indispensable to them. Game was scarce in their country. They must seek their beaver and other skins in the vacant territories of the tribes they had destroyed; but this did not content them. The French of Canada were seeking to secure a monopoly of the furs of the north and west; and, of late, the enterprises of La Salle on the tributaries of the Mississippi had especially roused the jealousy of the Iroquois, fomented, moreover, by Dutch and English traders.[182] These crafty savages would fain reduce all these regions to subjection, and draw thence an exhaustless supply of furs, to be bartered for English goods with the traders of Albany. They turned their eyes first towards the Illinois, the most important, as well as one of the most accessible, of the western Algonquin tribes; and among La Salle's enemies were some in whom jealousy of a hated rival could so far override all the best interests of the colony that they did not scruple to urge on the Iroquois to an invasion which they hoped would prove his ruin. The chiefs convened, war was decreed, the war-dance was danced, the war-song sung, and five hundred warriors began their march. In their path lay the town of the Miamis, neighbors and kindred of the Illinois. It was always their policy to divide and conquer; and these forest Machiavels had intrigued so well among the Miamis, working craftily on their jealousy, that they induced them to join in the invasion, though there is every reason to believe that they had marked these infatuated allies as their next victims.[183] [Sidenote: THE ILLINOIS TOWN.] Go to the banks of the Illinois where it flows by the village of Utica, and stand on the meadow that borders it on the north. In front glides the river, a musket-shot in width; and from the farther bank rises, with gradual slope, a range of wooded hills that hide from sight the vast prairie behind them. A mile or more on your left these gentle acclivities end abruptly in the lofty front of the great cliff, called by the French the Rock of St. Louis, looking boldly out from the forests that environ it; and, three miles distant on your right, you discern a gap in the steep bluffs that here bound the valley, marking the mouth of the river Vermilion, called Aramoni by the French.[184] Now stand in fancy on this same spot in the early autumn of the year 1680. You are in the midst of the great town of the Illinois,--hundreds of mat-covered lodges, and thousands of congregated savages. Enter one of their dwellings: they will not think you an intruder. Some friendly squaw will lay a mat for you by the fire; you may seat yourself upon it, smoke your pipe, and study the lodge and its inmates by the light that streams through the holes at the top. Three or four fires smoke and smoulder on the ground down the middle of the long arched structure; and, as to each fire there are two families, the place is somewhat crowded when all are present. But now there is breathing room, for many are in the fields. A squaw sits weaving a mat of rushes; a warrior, naked except his moccasins, and tattooed with fantastic devices, binds a stone arrow-head to its shaft, with the fresh sinews of a buffalo. Some lie asleep, some sit staring in vacancy, some are eating, some are squatted in lazy chat around a fire. The smoke brings water to your eyes; the fleas annoy you; small unkempt children, naked as young puppies, crawl about your knees and will not be repelled. You have seen enough; you rise and go out again into the sunlight. It is, if not a peaceful, at least a languid scene. A few voices break the stillness, mingled with the joyous chirping of crickets from the grass. Young men lie flat on their faces, basking in the sun; a group of their elders are smoking around a buffalo-skin on which they have just been playing a game of chance with cherry-stones. A lover and his mistress, perhaps, sit together under a shed of bark, without uttering a word. Not far off is the graveyard, where lie the dead of the village, some buried in the earth, some wrapped in skins and laid aloft on scaffolds, above the reach of wolves. In the cornfields around, you see squaws at their labor, and children driving off intruding birds; and your eye ranges over the meadows beyond, spangled with the yellow blossoms of the resin-weed and the Rudbeckia, or over the bordering hills still green with the foliage of summer.[185] This, or something like it, one may safely affirm, was the aspect of the Illinois village at noon of the tenth of September.[186] In a hut apart from the rest, you would probably have found the Frenchmen. Among them was a man, not strong in person, and disabled, moreover, by the loss of a hand, yet in this den of barbarism betraying the language and bearing of one formed in the most polished civilization of Europe. This was Henri de Tonty. The others were young Boisrondet, the servant L'Espérance, and a Parisian youth named Étienne Renault. The friars, Membré and Ribourde, were not in the village, but at a hut a league distant, whither they had gone to make a "retreat" for prayer and meditation. Their missionary labors had not been fruitful; they had made no converts, and were in despair at the intractable character of the objects of their zeal. As for the other Frenchmen, time, doubtless, hung heavy on their hands; for nothing can surpass the vacant monotony of an Indian town when there is neither hunting, nor war, nor feasts, nor dances, nor gambling, to beguile the lagging hours. [Sidenote: THE ALARM.] Suddenly the village was wakened from its lethargy as by the crash of a thunderbolt. A Shawanoe, lately here on a visit, had left his Illinois friends to return home. He now reappeared, crossing the river in hot haste, with the announcement that he had met, on his way, an army of Iroquois approaching to attack them. All was panic and confusion. The lodges disgorged their frightened inmates; women and children screamed, startled warriors snatched their weapons. There were less than five hundred of them, for the greater part of the young men had gone to war. A crowd of excited savages thronged about Tonty and his Frenchmen, already objects of their suspicion, charging them, with furious gesticulation, with having stirred up their enemies to invade them. Tonty defended himself in broken Illinois, but the naked mob were but half convinced. They seized the forge and tools and flung them into the river, with all the goods that had been saved from the deserters; then, distrusting their power to defend themselves, they manned the wooden canoes which lay in multitudes by the bank, embarked their women and children, and paddled down the stream to that island of dry land in the midst of marshes which La Salle afterwards found filled with their deserted huts. Sixty warriors remained here to guard them, and the rest returned to the village. All night long fires blazed along the shore. The excited warriors greased their bodies, painted their faces, befeathered their heads, sang their war-songs, danced, stamped, yelled, and brandished their hatchets, to work up their courage to face the crisis. The morning came, and with it came the Iroquois. Young warriors had gone out as scouts, and now they returned. They had seen the enemy in the line of forest that bordered the river Aramoni, or Vermilion, and had stealthily reconnoitred them. They were very numerous,[187] and armed for the most part with guns, pistols, and swords. Some had bucklers of wood or raw-hide, and some wore those corselets of tough twigs interwoven with cordage which their fathers had used when fire-arms were unknown. The scouts added more, for they declared that they had seen a Jesuit among the Iroquois; nay, that La Salle himself was there, whence it must follow that Tonty and his men were enemies and traitors. The supposed Jesuit was but an Iroquois chief arrayed in a black hat, doublet, and stockings; while another, equipped after a somewhat similar fashion, passed in the distance for La Salle. But the Illinois were furious. Tonty's life hung by a hair. A crowd of savages surrounded him, mad with rage and terror. He had come lately from Europe, and knew little of Indians, but, as the friar Membré says of him, "he was full of intelligence and courage," and when they heard him declare that he and his Frenchmen would go with them to fight the Iroquois, their threats grew less clamorous and their eyes glittered with a less deadly lustre. [Sidenote: TONTY'S MEDIATION.] Whooping and screeching, they ran to their canoes, crossed the river, climbed the woody hill, and swarmed down upon the plain beyond. About a hundred of them had guns; the rest were armed with bows and arrows. They were now face to face with the enemy, who had emerged from the woods of the Vermilion, and were advancing on the open prairie. With unwonted spirit, for their repute as warriors was by no means high, the Illinois began, after their fashion, to charge; that is, they leaped, yelled, and shot off bullets and arrows, advancing as they did so; while the Iroquois replied with gymnastics no less agile and howlings no less terrific, mingled with the rapid clatter of their guns. Tonty saw that it would go hard with his allies. It was of the last moment to stop the fight, if possible. The Iroquois were, or professed to be, at peace with the French; and, taking counsel of his courage, he resolved on an attempt to mediate, which may well be called a desperate one. He laid aside his gun, took in his hand a wampum belt as a flag of truce, and walked forward to meet the savage multitude, attended by Boisrondet, another Frenchman, and a young Illinois who had the hardihood to accompany him. The guns of the Iroquois still flashed thick and fast. Some of them were aimed at him, on which he sent back the two Frenchmen and the Illinois, and advanced alone, holding out the wampum belt.[188] A moment more, and he was among the infuriated warriors. It was a frightful spectacle,--the contorted forms, bounding, crouching, twisting, to deal or dodge the shot; the small keen eyes that shone like an angry snake's; the parted lips pealing their fiendish yells; the painted features writhing with fear and fury, and every passion of an Indian fight,--man, wolf, and devil, all in one.[189] With his swarthy complexion and his half-savage dress, they thought he was an Indian, and thronged about him, glaring murder. A young warrior stabbed at his heart with a knife, but the point glanced aside against a rib, inflicting only a deep gash. A chief called out that, as his ears were not pierced, he must be a Frenchman. On this, some of them tried to stop the bleeding, and led him to the rear, where an angry parley ensued, while the yells and firing still resounded in the front. Tonty, breathless, and bleeding at the mouth with the force of the blow he had received, found words to declare that the Illinois were under the protection of the King and the governor of Canada, and to demand that they should be left in peace.[190] [Sidenote: PERIL OF TONTY.] A young Iroquois snatched Tonty's hat, placed it on the end of his gun, and displayed it to the Illinois, who, thereupon thinking he was killed, renewed the fight; and the firing in front clattered more angrily than before. A warrior ran in, crying out that the Iroquois were giving ground, and that there were Frenchmen among the Illinois, who fired at them. On this, the clamor around Tonty was redoubled. Some wished to kill him at once; others resisted. "I was never," he writes, "in such perplexity; for at that moment there was an Iroquois behind me, with a knife in his hand, lifting my hair as if he were going to scalp me. I thought it was all over with me, and that my best hope was that they would knock me in the head instead of burning me, as I believed they would do." In fact, a Seneca chief demanded that he should be burned; while an Onondaga chief, a friend of La Salle, was for setting him free. The dispute grew fierce and hot. Tonty told them that the Illinois were twelve hundred strong, and that sixty Frenchmen were at the village, ready to back them. This invention, though not fully believed, had no little effect. The friendly Onondaga carried his point; and the Iroquois, having failed to surprise their enemies, as they had hoped, now saw an opportunity to delude them by a truce. They sent back Tonty with a belt of peace: he held it aloft in sight of the Illinois; chiefs and old warriors ran to stop the fight; the yells and the firing ceased; and Tonty, like one waked from a hideous nightmare, dizzy, almost fainting with loss of blood, staggered across the intervening prairie, to rejoin his friends. He was met by the two friars, Ribourde and Membré, who in their secluded hut, a league from the village, had but lately heard of what was passing, and who now, with benedictions and thanksgiving, ran to embrace him as a man escaped from the jaws of death. The Illinois now withdrew, re-embarking in their canoes, and crossing again to their lodges; but scarcely had they reached them, when their enemies appeared at the edge of the forest on the opposite bank. Many found means to cross, and, under the pretext of seeking for provisions, began to hover in bands about the skirts of the town, constantly increasing in numbers. Had the Illinois dared to remain, a massacre would doubtless have ensued; but they knew their foe too well, set fire to their lodges, embarked in haste, and paddled down the stream to rejoin their women and children at the sanctuary among the morasses. The whole body of the Iroquois now crossed the river, took possession of the abandoned town, building for themselves a rude redoubt or fort of the trunks of trees and of the posts and poles forming the framework of the lodges which escaped the fire. Here they ensconced themselves, and finished the work of havoc at their leisure. Tonty and his companions still occupied their hut; but the Iroquois, becoming suspicious of them, forced them to remove to the fort, crowded as it was with the savage crew. On the second day, there was an alarm. The Illinois appeared in numbers on the low hills, half a mile behind the town; and the Iroquois, who had felt their courage, and who had been told by Tonty that they were twice as numerous as themselves, showed symptoms of no little uneasiness. They proposed that he should act as mediator, to which he gladly assented, and crossed the meadow towards the Illinois, accompanied by Membré, and by an Iroquois who was sent as a hostage. The Illinois hailed the overtures with delight, gave the ambassadors some refreshment, which they sorely needed, and sent back with them a young man of their nation as a hostage on their part. This indiscreet youth nearly proved the ruin of the negotiation; for he was no sooner among the Iroquois than he showed such an eagerness to close the treaty, made such promises, professed such gratitude, and betrayed so rashly the numerical weakness of the Illinois, that he revived all the insolence of the invaders. They turned furiously upon Tonty, and charged him with having robbed them of the glory and the spoils of victory. "Where are all your Illinois warriors, and where are the sixty Frenchmen that you said were among them?" It needed all Tonty's tact and coolness to extricate himself from this new danger. [Sidenote: IROQUOIS TREACHERY.] The treaty was at length concluded; but scarcely was it made, when the Iroquois prepared to break it, and set about constructing canoes of elm-bark, in which to attack the Illinois women and children in their island sanctuary. Tonty warned his allies that the pretended peace was but a snare for their destruction. The Iroquois, on their part, grew hourly more jealous of him, and would certainly have killed him, had it not been their policy to keep the peace with Frontenac and the French. Several days after, they summoned him and Membré to a council. Six packs of beaver-skins were brought in; and the savage orator presented them to Tonty in turn, explaining their meaning as he did so. The first two were to declare that the children of Count Frontenac--that is, the Illinois--should not be eaten; the next was a plaster to heal Tonty's wound; the next was oil wherewith to anoint him and Membré, that they might not be fatigued in travelling; the next proclaimed that the sun was bright; and the sixth and last required them to decamp and go home.[191] Tonty thanked them for their gifts, but demanded when they themselves meant to go and leave the Illinois in peace. At this, the conclave grew angry; and, despite their late pledge, some of them said that before they went they would eat Illinois flesh. Tonty instantly kicked away the packs of beaver-skins, the Indian symbol of the scornful rejection of a proposal, telling them that since they meant to eat the governor's children he would have none of their presents. The chiefs, in a rage, rose and drove him from the lodge. The French withdrew to their hut, where they stood all night on the watch, expecting an attack, and resolved to sell their lives dearly. At daybreak, the chiefs ordered them to begone. [Sidenote: MURDER OF RIBOURDE.] Tonty, with admirable fidelity and courage, had done all in the power of man to protect the allies of Canada against their ferocious assailants; and he thought it unwise to persist further in a course which could lead to no good, and which would probably end in the destruction of the whole party. He embarked in a leaky canoe with Membré, Ribourde, Boisrondet, and the remaining two men, and began to ascend the river. After paddling about five leagues, they landed to dry their baggage and repair their crazy vessel; when Father Ribourde, breviary in hand, strolled across the sunny meadows for an hour of meditation among the neighboring groves. Evening approached, and he did not return. Tonty, with one of the men, went to look for him, and, following his tracks, presently discovered those of a band of Indians, who had apparently seized or murdered him. Still, they did not despair. They fired their guns to guide him, should he still be alive; built a huge fire by the bank, and then, crossing the river, lay watching it from the other side. At midnight, they saw the figure of a man hovering around the blaze; then many more appeared, but Ribourde was not among them. In truth, a band of Kickapoos, enemies of the Iroquois, about whose camp they had been prowling in quest of scalps, had met and wantonly murdered the inoffensive old man. They carried his scalp to their village, and danced round it in triumph, pretending to have taken it from an enemy. Thus, in his sixty-fifth year, the only heir of a wealthy Burgundian house perished under the war-clubs of the savages for whose salvation he had renounced station, ease, and affluence.[192] [Sidenote: ATTACK OF THE IROQUOIS.] Meanwhile, a hideous scene was enacted at the ruined village of the Illinois. Their savage foes, balked of a living prey, wreaked their fury on the dead. They dug up the graves; they threw down the scaffolds. Some of the bodies they burned; some they threw to the dogs; some, it is affirmed, they ate.[193] Placing the skulls on stakes as trophies, they turned to pursue the Illinois, who, when the French withdrew, had abandoned their asylum and retreated down the river. The Iroquois, still, it seems, in awe of them, followed them along the opposite bank, each night encamping face to face with them; and thus the adverse bands moved slowly southward, till they were near the mouth of the river. Hitherto, the compact array of the Illinois had held their enemies in check; but now, suffering from hunger, and lulled into security by the assurances of the Iroquois that their object was not to destroy them, but only to drive them from the country, they rashly separated into their several tribes. Some descended the Mississippi; some, more prudent, crossed to the western side. One of their principal tribes, the Tamaroas, more credulous than the rest, had the fatuity to remain near the mouth of the Illinois, where they were speedily assailed by all the force of the Iroquois. The men fled, and very few of them were killed; but the women and children were captured to the number, it is said, of seven hundred.[194] Then followed that scene of torture of which, some two weeks later, La Salle saw the revolting traces.[195] Sated, at length, with horrors, the conquerors withdrew, leading with them a host of captives, and exulting in their triumphs over women, children, and the dead. After the death of Father Ribourde, Tonty and his companions remained searching for him till noon of the next day, and then in despair of again seeing him, resumed their journey. They ascended the river, leaving no token of their passage at the junction of its northern and southern branches. For food, they gathered acorns and dug roots in the meadows. Their canoe proved utterly worthless; and, feeble as they were, they set out on foot for Lake Michigan. Boisrondet wandered off, and was lost. He had dropped the flint of his gun, and he had no bullets; but he cut a pewter porringer into slugs, with which he shot wild turkeys by discharging his piece with a fire-brand, and after several days he had the good fortune to rejoin the party. Their object was to reach the Pottawattamies of Green Bay. Had they aimed at Michilimackinac, they would have found an asylum with La Forest at the fort on the St. Joseph; but unhappily they passed westward of that post, and, by way of Chicago, followed the borders of Lake Michigan northward. The cold was intense; and it was no easy task to grub up wild onions from the frozen ground to save themselves from starving. Tonty fell ill of a fever and a swelling of the limbs, which disabled him from travelling, and hence ensued a long delay. At length they neared Green Bay, where they would have starved, had they not gleaned a few ears of corn and frozen squashes in the fields of an empty Indian town. [Sidenote: FRIENDS IN NEED.] This enabled them to reach the bay, and having patched an old canoe which they had the good luck to find, they embarked in it; whereupon, says Tonty, "there rose a northwest wind, which lasted five days, with driving snow. We consumed all our food; and not knowing what to do next, we resolved to go back to the deserted town, and die by a warm fire in one of the wigwams. On our way, we saw a smoke; but our joy was short, for when we reached the fire we found nobody there. We spent the night by it; and before morning the bay froze. We tried to break a way for our canoe through the ice, but could not; and therefore we determined to stay there another night, and make moccasins in order to reach the town. We made some out of Father Gabriel's cloak. I was angry with Étienne Renault for not finishing his; but he excused himself on account of illness, because he had a great oppression of the stomach, caused by eating a piece of an Indian shield of raw-hide, which he could not digest. His delay proved our salvation; for the next day, December fourth, as I was urging him to finish the moccasins, and he was still excusing himself on the score of his malady, a party of Kiskakon Ottawas, who were on their way to the Pottawattamies, saw the smoke of our fire, and came to us. We gave them such a welcome as was never seen before. They took us into their canoes, and carried us to an Indian village, only two leagues off. There we found five Frenchmen, who received us kindly, and all the Indians seemed to take pleasure in sending us food; so that, after thirty-four days of starvation, we found our famine turned to abundance." This hospitable village belonged to the Pottawattamies, and was under the sway of the chief who had befriended La Salle the year before, and who was wont to say that he knew but three great captains in the world,--Frontenac, La Salle, and himself.[196] THE ILLINOIS TOWN. The Site of the Great Illinois Town.--This has not till now been determined, though there have been various conjectures concerning it. From a study of the contemporary documents and maps, I became satisfied, first, that the branch of the river Illinois, called the "Big Vermilion," was the _Aramoni_ of the French explorers; and, secondly, that the cliff called "Starved Rock" was that known to the French as _Le Rocher_, or the Rock of St. Louis. If I was right in this conclusion, then the position of the Great Village was established; for there is abundant proof that it was on the north side of the river, above the Aramoni, and below Le Rocher. I accordingly went to the village of Utica, which, as I judged by the map, was very near the point in question, and mounted to the top of one of the hills immediately behind it, whence I could see the valley of the Illinois for miles, bounded on the farther side by a range of hills, in some parts rocky and precipitous, and in others covered with forests. Far on the right was a gap in these hills, through which the Big Vermilion flowed to join the Illinois; and somewhat towards the left, at the distance of a mile and a half, was a huge cliff, rising perpendicularly from the opposite margin of the river. This I assumed to be _Le Rocher_ of the French, though from where I stood I was unable to discern the distinctive features which I was prepared to find in it. In every other respect, the scene before me was precisely what I had expected to see. There was a meadow on the hither side of the river, on which stood a farmhouse; and this, as it seemed to me, by its relations with surrounding objects, might be supposed to stand in the midst of the space once occupied by the Illinois town. On the way down from the hill I met Mr. James Clark, the principal inhabitant of Utica, and one of the earliest settlers of this region. I accosted him, told him my objects, and requested a half hour's conversation with him, at his leisure. He seemed interested in the inquiry, and said he would visit me early in the evening at the inn, where, accordingly, he soon appeared. The conversation took place in the porch, where a number of farmers and others were gathered. I asked Mr. Clark if any Indian remains were found in the neighborhood. "Yes," he replied, "plenty of them." I then inquired if there was any one spot where they were more numerous than elsewhere. "Yes," he answered again, pointing towards the farmhouse on the meadow; "on my farm down yonder by the river, my tenant ploughs up teeth and bones by the peck every spring, besides arrow-heads, beads, stone hatchets, and other things of that sort." I replied that this was precisely what I had expected, as I had been led to believe that the principal town of the Illinois Indians once covered that very spot. "If," I added, "I am right in this belief, the great rock beyond the river is the one which the first explorers occupied as a fort; and I can describe it to you from their accounts of it, though I have never seen it, except from the top of the hill where the trees on and around it prevented me from seeing any part but the front." The men present now gathered around to listen. "The rock," I continued, "is nearly a hundred and fifty feet high, and rises directly from the water. The front and two sides are perpendicular and inaccessible; but there is one place where it is possible for a man to climb up, though with difficulty. The top is large enough and level enough for houses and fortifications." Here several of the men exclaimed: "That's just it." "You've hit it exactly." I then asked if there was any other rock on that side of the river which could answer to the description. They all agreed that there was no such rock on either side, along the whole length of the river. I then said: "If the Indian town was in the place where I suppose it to have been, I can tell you the nature of the country which lies behind the hills on the farther side of the river, though I know nothing about it except what I have learned from writings nearly two centuries old. From the top of the hills, you look out upon a great prairie reaching as far as you can see, except that it is crossed by a belt of woods, following the course of a stream which enters the main river a few miles below." (See _ante_, p. 221, _note_.) "You are exactly right again," replied Mr. Clark; "we call that belt of timber the 'Vermilion Woods,' and the stream is the Big Vermilion." "Then," I said, "the Big Vermilion is the river which the French called the Aramoni; 'Starved Rock' is the same on which they built a fort called St. Louis, in the year 1682; and your farm is on the site of the great town of the Illinois." I spent the next day in examining these localities, and was fully confirmed in my conclusions. Mr. Clark's tenant showed me the spot where the human bones were ploughed up. It was no doubt the graveyard violated by the Iroquois. The Illinois returned to the village after their defeat, and long continued to occupy it. The scattered bones were probably collected and restored to their place of burial. FOOTNOTES: [179] For the particulars of this desertion, Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 171, _Relation des Découvertes_; Tonty, _Mémoire_, 1684, 1693; _Déclaration faite par devant le Sr. Duchesneau, Intendant en Canada, par Moyse Hillaret, charpentier de barque cy-devant au service du Sr. de la Salle, Aoust, 1680_. Moyse Hillaret, the "Maître Moyse" of Hennepin, was a ring-leader of the deserters, and seems to have been one of those captured by La Salle near Fort Frontenac. Twelve days after, Hillaret was examined by La Salle's enemy, the intendant; and this paper is the formal statement made by him. It gives the names of most of the men, and furnishes incidental confirmation of many statements of Hennepin, Tonty, Membré, and the _Relation des Découvertes_. Hillaret, Leblanc, and Le Meilleur, the blacksmith nicknamed La Forge, went off together, and the rest seem to have followed afterwards. Hillaret does not admit that any goods were wantonly destroyed. There is before me a schedule of the debts of La Salle, made after his death. It includes a claim of this man for wages to the amount of 2,500 livres. [180] Two of the messengers, Laurent and Messier, arrived safely. The others seem to have deserted. [181] The Jesuits in North America. [182] Duchesneau, in _Paris Docs._, ix. 163. [183] There had long been a rankling jealousy between the Miamis and the Illinois. According to Membré, La Salle's enemies had intrigued successfully among the former, as well as among the Iroquois, to induce them to take arms against the Illinois. [184] The above is from notes made on the spot. The following is La Salle's description of the locality in the _Relation des Découvertes_, written in 1681: "La rive gauche de la rivière, du coté du sud, est occupée par un long rocher, fort étroit et escarpé presque partout, à la réserve d'un endroit de plus d'une lieue de longueur, situé vis-à-vis du village, ou le terrain, tout couvert de beaux chênes, s'étend par une pente douce jusqu'au bord de la rivière. Au delà de cette hauteur est une vaste plaine, qui s'étend bien loin du coté du sud, et qui est traversée par la rivière Aramoni, dont les bords sont couverts d'une lisière de bois peu large." The Aramoni is laid down on the great manuscript map of Franquelin, 1684, and on the map of Coronelli, 1688. It is, without doubt, the Big Vermilion. _Aramoni_ is the Illinois word for "red," or "vermilion." Starved Rock, or the Rock of St. Louis, is the highest and steepest escarpment of the _long rocher_ above mentioned. [185] The Illinois were an aggregation of distinct though kindred tribes,--the Kaskaskias, the Peorias, the Kahokias, the Tamaroas, the Moingona, and others. Their general character and habits were those of other Indian tribes; but they were reputed somewhat cowardly and slothful. In their manners, they were more licentious than many of their neighbors, and addicted to practices which are sometimes supposed to be the result of a perverted civilization. Young men enacting the part of women were frequently to be seen among them. These were held in great contempt. Some of the early travellers, both among the Illinois and among other tribes, where the same practice prevailed, mistook them for hermaphrodites. According to Charlevoix (_Journal Historique_, 303), this abuse was due in part to a superstition. The Miamis and Piankishaws were in close affinities of language and habits with the Illinois. All these tribes belonged to the great Algonquin family. The first impressions which the French received of them, as recorded in the _Relation_ of 1671, were singularly favorable; but a closer acquaintance did not confirm them. The Illinois traded with the lake tribes, to whom they carried slaves taken in war, receiving in exchange guns, hatchets, and other French goods. Marquette in _Relation_, 1670, 91. [186] This is Membré's date. The narratives differ as to the day, though all agree as to the month. [187] The _Relation des Découvertes_ says, five hundred Iroquois and one hundred Shawanoes. Membré says that the allies were Miamis. He is no doubt right, as the Miamis had promised their aid, and the Shawanoes were at peace with the Illinois. Tonty is silent on the point. [188] Membré says that he went with Tonty: "J'étois aussi à côté du Sieur de Tonty." This is an invention of the friar's vanity. "Les deux pères Récollets étoient alors dans une cabane à une lieue du village, où ils s'étoient retirés pour faire une espèce de retraite, et ils ne furent avertis de l'arrivée des Iroquois que dans le temps du combat."--_Relation des Découvertes_. "Je rencontrai en chemin les pères Gabriel et Zenobe Membré, qui cherchoient de mes nouvelles."--Tonty, _Mémoire_, 1693. This was on his return from the Iroquois. The _Relation_ confirms the statement, as far as concerns Membré: "II rencontra le Père Zenobe [_Membré_], qui venoit pour le secourir, aiant été averti du combat et de sa blessure." The perverted _Dernières Découvertes_, published without authority, under Tonty's name, says that he was attended by a slave, whom the Illinois sent with him as interpreter. In his narrative of 1684, Tonty speaks of a Sokokis (Saco) Indian who was with the Iroquois and who spoke French enough to serve as interpreter. [189] Being once in an encampment of Sioux when a quarrel broke out, and the adverse factions raised the war-whoop and began to fire at each other, I had a good, though for the moment a rather dangerous, opportunity of seeing the demeanor of Indians at the beginning of a fight. The fray was quelled before much mischief was done, by the vigorous intervention of the elder warriors, who ran between the combatants. [190] "Je leur fis connoistre que les Islinois étoient sous la protection du roy de France et du gouverneur du pays, que j'estois surpris qu'ils voulussent rompre avec les François et qu'ils voulussent _attendre_ [_sic_] à une paix."--Tonty, _Mémoire_, 1693. [191] An Indian speech, it will be remembered, is without validity if not confirmed by presents, each of which has its special interpretation. The meaning of the fifth pack of beaver, informing Tonty that the sun was bright,--"que le soleil étoit beau," that is, that the weather was favorable for travelling,--is curiously misconceived by the editor of the _Dernières Découvertes_, who improves upon his original by substituting the words "par le cinquième paquet _ils nous exhortoient à adorer le Soleil_." [192] Tonty, _Mémoire_; Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 191. Hennepin, who hated Tonty, unjustly charges him with having abandoned the search too soon, admitting, however, that it would have been useless to continue it. This part of his narrative is a perversion of Membré's account. [193] "Cependant les Iroquois, aussitôt après le départ du Sr. de Tonty, exercèrent leur rage sur les corps morts des Ilinois, qu'ils déterrèrent ou abbattèrent de dessus les échafauds où les Ilinois les laissent longtemps exposés avant que de les mettre en terre. Ils en brûlèrent la plus grande partie, ils en mangèrent même quelques uns, et jettèrent le reste aux chiens. Ils plantèrent les têtes de ces cadavres à demi décharnés sur des pieux," etc.--_Relation des Découvertes_. [194] _Relation des Découvertes_; Frontenac to the King, _N. Y. Col. Docs._, ix. 147. A memoir of Duchesneau makes the number twelve hundred. [195] "Ils [_les Illinois_] trouvèrent dans leur campement des carcasses de leurs enfans que ces anthropophages avoient mangez, ne voulant même d'autre nourriture que la chair de ces infortunez."--_La Potherie_, ii. 145, 146. Compare _note, ante_, p. 211. [196] Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 199. The other authorities for the foregoing chapter are the letters of La Salle, the _Relation des Découvertes_, in which portions of them are embodied, and the two narratives of Tonty, of 1684 and 1693. They all agree in essential points. In his letters of this period, La Salle dwells at great length on the devices by which, as he believed, his enemies tried to ruin him and his enterprise. He is particularly severe against the Jesuit Allouez, whom he charges with intriguing "pour commencer la guerre entre les Iroquois et les Illinois par le moyen des Miamis qu'on engageoit dans cette négociation afin ou de me faire massacrer avec mes gens par quelqu'une de ces nations ou de me brouiller avec les Iroquois."--_Lettre (à Thouret?), 22 Août, 1682_. He gives in detail the circumstances on which this suspicion rests, but which are not convincing. He says, further, that the Jesuits gave out that Tonty was dead in order to discourage the men going to his relief, and that Allouez encouraged the deserters, "leur servoit de conseil, bénit mesme leurs balles, et les asseura plusieurs fois que M. de Tonty auroit la teste cassée." He also affirms that great pains were taken to spread the report that he was himself dead. A Kiskakon Indian, he says, was sent to Tonty with a story to this effect; while a Huron named Scortas was sent to him (La Salle) with false news of the death of Tonty. The latter confirms this statement, and adds that the Illinois had been told "que M. de la Salle estoit venu en leur pays pour les donner à manger aux Iroquois." CHAPTER XVII. 1680. THE ADVENTURES OF HENNEPIN. Hennepin an Impostor: his Pretended Discovery; his Actual Discovery; Captured by the Sioux.--The Upper Mississippi. It was on the last day of the winter that preceded the invasion of the Iroquois that Father Hennepin, with his two companions, Accau and Du Gay, had set out from Fort Crèvecoeur to explore the Illinois to its mouth. It appears from his own later statements, as well as from those of Tonty, that more than this was expected of him, and that La Salle had instructed him to explore, not alone the Illinois, but also the Upper Mississippi. That he actually did so, there is no reasonable doubt; and could he have contented himself with telling the truth, his name would have stood high as a bold and vigorous discoverer. But his vicious attempts to malign his commander and plunder him of his laurels have wrapped his genuine merit in a cloud. Hennepin's first book was published soon after his return from his travels, and while La Salle was still alive. In it he relates the accomplishment of the instructions given him, without the smallest intimation that he did more.[197] Fourteen years after, when La Salle was dead, he published another edition of his travels,[198] in which he advanced a new and surprising pretension. Reasons connected with his personal safety, he declares, before compelled him to remain silent; but a time at length had come when the truth must be revealed. And he proceeds to affirm, that, before ascending the Mississippi, he, with his two men, explored its whole course from the Illinois to the sea,--thus anticipating the discovery which forms the crowning laurel of La Salle. [Sidenote: HENNEPIN'S RESOLUTION.] "I am resolved," he says, "to make known here to the whole world the mystery of this discovery, which I have hitherto concealed, that I might not offend the Sieur de la Salle, who wished to keep all the glory and all the knowledge of it to himself. It is for this that he sacrificed many persons whose lives he exposed, to prevent them from making known what they had seen, and thereby crossing his secret plans.... I was certain that if I went down the Mississippi, he would not fail to traduce me to my superiors for not taking the northern route, which I was to have followed in accordance with his desire and the plan we had made together. But I saw myself on the point of dying of hunger, and knew not what to do; because the two men who were with me threatened openly to leave me in the night, and carry off the canoe and everything in it, if I prevented them from going down the river to the nations below. Finding myself in this dilemma, I thought that I ought not to hesitate, and that I ought to prefer my own safety to the violent passion which possessed the Sieur de la Salle of enjoying alone the glory of this discovery. The two men, seeing that I had made up my mind to follow them, promised me entire fidelity; so, after we had shaken hands together as a mutual pledge, we set out on our voyage."[199] He then proceeds to recount at length the particulars of his alleged exploration. The story was distrusted from the first.[200] Why had he not told it before? An excess of modesty, a lack of self-assertion, or a too sensitive reluctance to wound the susceptibilities of others, had never been found among his foibles. Yet some, perhaps, might have believed him, had he not in the first edition of his book gratuitously and distinctly declared that he did not make the voyage in question. "We had some designs," he says, "of going down the river Colbert [Mississippi] as far as its mouth; but the tribes that took us prisoners gave us no time to navigate this river both up and down."[201] [Sidenote: HENNEPIN AN IMPOSTOR.] In declaring to the world the achievement which he had so long concealed and so explicitly denied, the worthy missionary found himself in serious embarrassment. In his first book, he had stated that on the twelfth of March he left the mouth of the Illinois on his way northward, and that on the eleventh of April he was captured by the Sioux near the mouth of the Wisconsin, five hundred miles above. This would give him only a month to make his alleged canoe-voyage from the Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, and again upward to the place of his capture,--a distance of three thousand two hundred and sixty miles. With his means of transportation, three months would have been insufficient.[202] He saw the difficulty; but, on the other hand, he saw that he could not greatly change either date without confusing the parts of his narrative which preceded and which followed. In this perplexity he chose a middle course, which only involved him in additional contradictions. Having, as he affirms, gone down to the Gulf and returned to the mouth of the Illinois, he set out thence to explore the river above; and he assigns the twenty-fourth of April as the date of this departure. This gives him forty-three days for his voyage to the mouth of the river and back. Looking further, we find that having left the Illinois on the twenty-fourth he paddled his canoe two hundred leagues northward, and was then captured by the Sioux on the twelfth of the same month. In short, he ensnares himself in a hopeless confusion of dates.[203] Here, one would think, is sufficient reason for rejecting his story; and yet the general truth of the descriptions, and a certain verisimilitude which marks it, might easily deceive a careless reader and perplex a critical one. These, however, are easily explained. Six years before Hennepin published his pretended discovery, his brother friar, Father Chrétien Le Clerc, published an account of the Récollet missions among the Indians, under the title of "Établissement de la Foi." This book, offensive to the Jesuits, is said to have been suppressed by order of government; but a few copies fortunately survive.[204] One of these is now before me. It contains the journal of Father Zenobe Membré, on his descent of the Mississippi in 1681, in company with La Salle. The slightest comparison of his narrative with that of Hennepin is sufficient to show that the latter framed his own story out of incidents and descriptions furnished by his brother missionary, often using his very words, and sometimes copying entire pages, with no other alterations than such as were necessary to make himself, instead of La Salle and his companions, the hero of the exploit. The records of literary piracy may be searched in vain for an act of depredation more recklessly impudent.[205] Such being the case, what faith can we put in the rest of Hennepin's story? Fortunately, there are tests by which the earlier parts of his book can be tried; and, on the whole, they square exceedingly well with contemporary records of undoubted authenticity. Bating his exaggerations respecting the Falls of Niagara, his local descriptions, and even his estimates of distance, are generally accurate. He constantly, it is true, magnifies his own acts, and thrusts himself forward as one of the chiefs of an enterprise to the costs of which he had contributed nothing, and to which he was merely an appendage; and yet, till he reaches the Mississippi, there can be no doubt that in the main he tells the truth. As for his ascent of that river to the country of the Sioux, the general statement is fully confirmed by La Salle, Tonty, and other contemporary writers.[206] For the details of the journey we must rest on Hennepin alone, whose account of the country and of the peculiar traits of its Indian occupants afford, as far as they go, good evidence of truth. Indeed, this part of his narrative could only have been written by one well versed in the savage life of this northwestern region.[207] Trusting, then, to his own guidance in the absence of better, let us follow in the wake of his adventurous canoe. [Sidenote: HIS VOYAGE NORTHWARD.] It was laden deeply with goods belonging to La Salle, and meant by him as presents to Indians on the way, though the travellers, it appears, proposed to use them in trading on their own account. The friar was still wrapped in his gray capote and hood, shod with sandals, and decorated with the cord of St. Francis. As for his two companions, Accau[208] and Du Gay, it is tolerably clear that the former was the real leader of the party, though Hennepin, after his custom, thrusts himself into the foremost place. Both were somewhat above the station of ordinary hired hands; and Du Gay had an uncle who was an ecclesiastic of good credit at Amiens, his native place. In the forests that overhung the river the buds were feebly swelling with advancing spring. There was game enough. They killed buffalo, deer, beavers, wild turkeys, and now and then a bear swimming in the river. With these, and the fish which they caught in abundance, they fared sumptuously, though it was the season of Lent. They were exemplary, however, at their devotions. Hennepin said prayers at morning and night, and the _angelus_ at noon, adding a petition to Saint Anthony of Padua that he would save them from the peril that beset their way. In truth, there was a lion in the path. The ferocious character of the Sioux, or Dacotah, who occupied the region of the Upper Mississippi, was already known to the French; and Hennepin, with excellent reason, prayed that it might be his fortune to meet them, not by night, but by day. [Sidenote: CAPTURED BY THE SIOUX.] On the eleventh or twelfth of April, they stopped in the afternoon to repair their canoe; and Hennepin busied himself in daubing it with pitch, while the others cooked a turkey. Suddenly, a fleet of Sioux canoes swept into sight, bearing a war-party of a hundred and twenty naked savages, who on seeing the travellers raised a hideous clamor; and, some leaping ashore and others into the water, they surrounded the astonished Frenchmen in an instant.[209] Hennepin held out the peace-pipe; but one of them snatched it from him. Next, he hastened to proffer a gift of Martinique tobacco, which was better received. Some of the old warriors repeated the name _Miamiha_, giving him to understand that they were a war-party, on the way to attack the Miamis; on which, Hennepin, with the help of signs and of marks which he drew on the sand with a stick, explained that the Miamis had gone across the Mississippi, beyond their reach. Hereupon, he says that three or four old men placed their hands on his head, and began a dismal wailing; while he with his handkerchief wiped away their tears, in order to evince sympathy with their affliction, from whatever cause arising. Notwithstanding this demonstration of tenderness, they refused to smoke with him in his peace-pipe, and forced him and his companions to embark and paddle across the river; while they all followed behind, uttering yells and howlings which froze the missionary's blood. On reaching the farther side, they made their camp-fires, and allowed their prisoners to do the same. Accau and Du Gay slung their kettle; while Hennepin, to propitiate the Sioux, carried to them two turkeys, of which there were several in the canoe. The warriors had seated themselves in a ring, to debate on the fate of the Frenchmen; and two chiefs presently explained to the friar, by significant signs, that it had been resolved that his head should be split with a war-club. This produced the effect which was no doubt intended. Hennepin ran to the canoe, and quickly returned with one of the men, both loaded with presents, which he threw into the midst of the assembly; and then, bowing his head, offered them at the same time a hatchet with which to kill him, if they wished to do so. His gifts and his submission seemed to appease them. They gave him and his companions a dish of beaver's flesh; but, to his great concern, they returned his peace-pipe,--an act which he interpreted as a sign of danger. That night the Frenchmen slept little, expecting to be murdered before morning. There was, in fact, a great division of opinion among the Sioux. Some were for killing them and taking their goods; while others, eager above all things that French traders should come among them with the knives, hatchets, and guns of which they had heard the value, contended that it would be impolitic to discourage the trade by putting to death its pioneers. Scarcely had morning dawned on the anxious captives, when a young chief, naked, and painted from head to foot, appeared before them and asked for the pipe, which the friar gladly gave him. He filled it, smoked it, made the warriors do the same, and, having given this hopeful pledge of amity, told the Frenchmen that, since the Miamis were out of reach, the war-party would return home, and that they must accompany them. To this Hennepin gladly agreed, having, as he declares, his great work of exploration so much at heart that he rejoiced in the prospect of achieving it even in their company. [Sidenote: SUSPECTED OF SORCERY.] He soon, however, had a foretaste of the affliction in store for him; for when he opened his breviary and began to mutter his morning devotion, his new companions gathered about him with faces that betrayed their superstitious terror, and gave him to understand that his book was a bad spirit with which he must hold no more converse. They thought, indeed, that he was muttering a charm for their destruction. Accau and Du Gay, conscious of the danger, begged the friar to dispense with his devotions, lest he and they alike should be tomahawked; but Hennepin says that his sense of duty rose superior to his fears, and that he was resolved to repeat his office at all hazards, though not until he had asked pardon of his two friends for thus imperilling their lives. Fortunately, he presently discovered a device by which his devotion and his prudence were completely reconciled. He ceased the muttering which had alarmed the Indians, and, with the breviary open on his knees, sang the service in loud and cheerful tones. As this had no savor of sorcery, and as they now imagined that the book was teaching its owner to sing for their amusement, they conceived a favorable opinion of both alike. These Sioux, it may be observed, were the ancestors of those who committed the horrible but not unprovoked massacres of 1862, in the valley of the St. Peter. Hennepin complains bitterly of their treatment of him, which, however, seems to have been tolerably good. Afraid that he would lag behind, as his canoe was heavy and slow,[210] they placed several warriors in it to aid him and his men in paddling. They kept on their way from morning till night, building huts for their bivouac when it rained, and sleeping on the open ground when the weather was fair,--which, says Hennepin, "gave us a good opportunity to contemplate the moon and stars." The three Frenchmen took the precaution of sleeping at the side of the young chief who had been the first to smoke the peace-pipe, and who seemed inclined to befriend them; but there was another chief, one Aquipaguetin, a crafty old savage, who having lost a son in war with the Miamis, was angry that the party had abandoned their expedition, and thus deprived him of his revenge. He therefore kept up a dismal lament through half the night; while other old men, crouching over Hennepin as he lay trying to sleep, stroked him with their hands, and uttered wailings so lugubrious that he was forced to the belief that he had been doomed to death, and that they were charitably bemoaning his fate.[211] [Sidenote: THE CAPTIVE FRIAR.] One night, the captives were, for some reason, unable to bivouac near their protector, and were forced to make their fire at the end of the camp. Here they were soon beset by a crowd of Indians, who told them that Aquipaguetin had at length resolved to tomahawk them. The malcontents were gathered in a knot at a little distance, and Hennepin hastened to appease them by another gift of knives and tobacco. This was but one of the devices of the old chief to deprive them of their goods without robbing them outright. He had with him the bones of a deceased relative, which he was carrying home wrapped in skins prepared with smoke after the Indian fashion, and gayly decorated with bands of dyed porcupine quills. He would summon his warriors, and placing these relics in the midst of the assembly, call on all present to smoke in their honor; after which, Hennepin was required to offer a more substantial tribute in the shape of cloth, beads, hatchets, tobacco, and the like, to be laid upon the bundle of bones. The gifts thus acquired were then, in the name of the deceased, distributed among the persons present. On one occasion, Aquipaguetin killed a bear, and invited the chiefs and warriors to feast upon it. They accordingly assembled on a prairie, west of the river, where, after the banquet, they danced a "medicine-dance." They were all painted from head to foot, with their hair oiled, garnished with red and white feathers, and powdered with the down of birds. In this guise they set their arms akimbo, and fell to stamping with such fury that the hard prairie was dented with the prints of their moccasins; while the chief's son, crying at the top of his throat, gave to each in turn the pipe of war. Meanwhile, the chief himself, singing in a loud and rueful voice, placed his hands on the heads of the three Frenchmen, and from time to time interrupted his music to utter a vehement harangue. Hennepin could not understand the words, but his heart sank as the conviction grew strong within him that these ceremonies tended to his destruction. It seems, however, that, after all the chief's efforts, his party was in the minority, the greater part being adverse to either killing or robbing the three strangers. Every morning, at daybreak, an old warrior shouted the signal of departure; and the recumbent savages leaped up, manned their birchen fleet, and plied their paddles against the current, often without waiting to break their fast. Sometimes they stopped for a buffalo-hunt on the neighboring prairies; and there was no lack of provisions. They passed Lake Pepin, which Hennepin called the Lake of Tears, by reason of the howlings and lamentations here uttered over him by Aquipaguetin, and nineteen days after his capture landed near the site of St. Paul. The father's sorrows now began in earnest. The Indians broke his canoe to pieces, having first hidden their own among the alder-bushes. As they belonged to different bands and different villages, their mutual jealousy now overcame all their prudence; and each proceeded to claim his share of the captives and the booty. Happily, they made an amicable distribution, or it would have fared ill with the three Frenchmen; and each taking his share, not forgetting the priestly vestments of Hennepin, the splendor of which they could not sufficiently admire, they set out across the country for their villages, which lay towards the north in the neighborhood of Lake Buade, now called Mille Lac. [Sidenote: A HARD JOURNEY.] Being, says Hennepin, exceedingly tall and active, they walked at a prodigious speed, insomuch that no European could long keep pace with them. Though the month of May had begun, there were frosts at night; and the marshes and ponds were glazed with ice, which cut the missionary's legs as he waded through. They swam the larger streams, and Hennepin nearly perished with cold as he emerged from the icy current. His two companions, who were smaller than he, and who could not swim, were carried over on the backs of the Indians. They showed, however, no little endurance; and he declares that he should have dropped by the way, but for their support. Seeing him disposed to lag, the Indians, to spur him on, set fire to the dry grass behind him, and then, taking him by the hands, ran forward with him to escape the flames. To add to his misery, he was nearly famished, as they gave him only a small piece of smoked meat once a day, though it does not appear that they themselves fared better. On the fifth day, being by this time in extremity, he saw a crowd of squaws and children approaching over the prairie, and presently descried the bark lodges of an Indian town. The goal was reached. He was among the homes of the Sioux. FOOTNOTES: [197] _Description de la Louisiane, nouvellement découverte_, Paris, 1683. [198] _Nouvelle Découverte d'un très grand Pays situé dans l'Amérique_, Utrecht, 1697. [199] _Nouvelle Découverte_, 248, 250, 251. [200] See the preface of the Spanish translation by Don Sebastian Fernandez de Medrano, 1699, and also the letter of Gravier, dated 1701, in Shea's _Early Voyages on the Mississippi_. Barcia, Charlevoix, Kalm, and other early writers put a low value on Hennepin's veracity. [201] _Description de la Louisiane_, 218. [202] La Salle, in the following year, with a far better equipment, was more than three months and a half in making the journey. A Mississippi trading-boat of the last generation, with sails and oars, ascending against the current, was thought to do remarkably well if it could make twenty miles a day. Hennepin, if we believe his own statements, must have ascended at an average rate of sixty miles, though his canoe was large and heavily laden. [203] Hennepin here falls into gratuitous inconsistencies. In the edition of 1697, in order to gain a little time, he says that he left the Illinois on his voyage southward on the eighth of March, 1680; and yet in the preceding chapter he repeats the statement of the first edition, that he was detained at the Illinois by floating ice till the twelfth. Again, he says in the first edition that he was captured by the Sioux on the eleventh of April; and in the edition of 1697 he changes this date to the twelfth, without gaining any advantage by doing so. [204] Le Clerc's book had been made the text of an attack on the Jesuits. See _Reflexions sur un Livre intitulé Premier Établissement de la Foi_. This piece is printed in the _Morale Pratique des Jésuites_. [205] Hennepin may have copied from the unpublished journal of Membré, which the latter had placed in the hands of his Superior; or he may have compiled from Le Clerc's book, relying on the suppression of the edition to prevent detection. He certainly saw and used it; for he elsewhere borrows the exact words of the editor. He is so careless that he steals from Membré passages which he might easily have written for himself; as, for example, a description of the opossum and another of the cougar,--animals with which he was acquainted. Compare the following pages of the _Nouvelle Découverte_ with the corresponding pages of Le Clerc: Hennepin, 252, Le Clerc, ii. 217; H. 253, Le C. ii. 218; H. 257, Le C. ii. 221; H. 259, Le C. ii. 224; H. 262, Le C. ii. 226; H. 265, Le C. ii. 229; H. 267, Le C. ii. 233; H. 270, Le C. ii. 235; H. 280, Le C. ii. 240; H. 295, Le C. ii. 249; H. 296, Le C. ii. 250; H. 297, Le C. ii. 253; H. 299, Le C. ii. 254; H. 301, Le C. ii. 257. Some of these parallel passages will be found in Sparks's _Life of La Salle_, where this remarkable fraud was first fully exposed. In Shea's _Discovery of the Mississippi_, there is an excellent critical examination of Hennepin's works. His plagiarisms from Le Clerc are not confined to the passages cited above; for in his later editions he stole largely from other parts of the suppressed _Établissement de la Foi_. [206] It is certain that persons having the best means of information believed at the time in Hennepin's story of his journeys on the Upper Mississippi. The compiler of the _Relation des Découvertes_, who was in close relations with La Salle and those who acted with him, does not intimate a doubt of the truth of the report which Hennepin on his return gave to the Provincial Commissary of his Order, and which is in substance the same which he published two years later. The _Relation_, it is to be observed, was written only a few months after the return of Hennepin, and embodies the pith of his narrative of the Upper Mississippi, no part of which had then been published. [207] In this connection, it is well to examine the various Sioux words which Hennepin uses incidentally, and which he must have acquired by personal intercourse with the tribe, as no Frenchman then understood the language. These words, as far as my information reaches, are in every instance correct. Thus, he says that the Sioux called his breviary a "bad spirit,"--_Ouackanché_. _Wakanshe_, or _Wakanshecha_, would express the same meaning in modern English spelling. He says elsewhere that they called the guns of his companions _Manzaouackanché_, which he translates, "iron possessed with a bad spirit." The western Sioux to this day call a gun _Manzawakan_, "metal possessed with a spirit." _Chonga (shonka)_, "a dog," _Ouasi (wahsee)_, "a pine-tree," _Chinnen (shinnan)_, "a robe," or "garment," and other words, are given correctly, with their interpretations. The word _Louis_, affirmed by Hennepin to mean "the sun," seems at first sight a wilful inaccuracy, as this is not the word used in general by the Sioux. The Yankton band of this people, however, call the sun _oouee_, which, it is evident, represents the French pronunciation of _Louis_, omitting the initial letter. This Hennepin would be apt enough to supply, thereby conferring a compliment alike on himself, Louis Hennepin, and on the King, Louis XIV., who, to the indignation of his brother monarchs, had chosen the sun as his emblem. Various trivial incidents touched upon by Hennepin, while recounting his life among the Sioux, seem to me to afford a strong presumption of an actual experience. I speak on this point with the more confidence, as the Indians in whose lodges I was once domesticated for several weeks belonged to a western band of the same people. [208] Called Ako by Hennepin. In contemporary documents, it is written Accau, Acau, D'Accau, Dacau, Dacan, and D'Accault. [209] The edition of 1683 says that there were thirty-three canoes; that of 1697 raises the number to fifty. The number of Indians is the same in both. The later narrative is more in detail than the former. [210] And yet it had, by his account, made a distance of thirteen hundred and eighty miles from the mouth of the Mississippi upward in twenty-four days! [211] This weeping and wailing over Hennepin once seemed to me an anomaly in his account of Sioux manners, as I am not aware that such practices are to be found among them at present. They are mentioned, however, by other early writers. Le Sueur, who was among them in 1699-1700, was wept over no less than Hennepin. See the abstract of his journal in La Harpe. CHAPTER XVIII. 1680, 1681. HENNEPIN AMONG THE SIOUX. Signs of Danger.--Adoption.--Hennepin and his Indian Relatives.--The Hunting Party.--The Sioux Camp.--Falls of St. Anthony.--A Vagabond Friar: his Adventures on the Mississippi.--Greysolon du Lhut.--Return to Civilization. As Hennepin entered the village, he beheld a sight which caused him to invoke Saint Anthony of Padua. In front of the lodges were certain stakes, to which were attached bundles of straw, intended, as he supposed, for burning him and his friends alive. His concern was redoubled when he saw the condition of the Picard Du Gay, whose hair and face had been painted with divers colors, and whose head was decorated with a tuft of white feathers. In this guise he was entering the village, followed by a crowd of Sioux, who compelled him to sing and keep time to his own music by rattling a dried gourd containing a number of pebbles. The omens, indeed, were exceedingly threatening; for treatment like this was usually followed by the speedy immolation of the captive. Hennepin ascribes it to the effect of his invocations, that, being led into one of the lodges, among a throng of staring squaws and children, he and his companions were seated on the ground, and presented with large dishes of birch-bark, containing a mess of wild rice boiled with dried whortleberries,--a repast which he declares to have been the best that had fallen to his lot since the day of his captivity.[212] [Sidenote: THE SIOUX.] This soothed his fears; but, as he allayed his famished appetite, he listened with anxious interest to the vehement jargon of the chiefs and warriors, who were disputing among themselves to whom the three captives should respectively belong; for it seems that, as far as related to them, the question of distribution had not yet been definitely settled. The debate ended in the assigning of Hennepin to his old enemy Aquipaguetin, who, however, far from persisting in his evil designs, adopted him on the spot as his son. The three companions must now part company. Du Gay, not yet quite reassured of his safety, hastened to confess himself to Hennepin; but Accau proved refractory, and refused the offices of religion, which did not prevent the friar from embracing them both, as he says, with an extreme tenderness. Tired as he was, he was forced to set out with his self-styled father to his village, which was fortunately not far off. An unpleasant walk of a few miles through woods and marshes brought them to the borders of a sheet of water, apparently Lake Buade, where five of Aquipaguetin's wives received the party in three canoes, and ferried them to an island on which the village stood. At the entrance of the chief's lodge, Hennepin was met by a decrepit old Indian, withered with age, who offered him the peace-pipe, and placed him on a bear-skin which was spread by the fire. Here, to relieve his fatigue,--for he was well-nigh spent,--a small boy anointed his limbs with the fat of a wild-cat, supposed to be sovereign in these cases by reason of the great agility of that animal. His new father gave him a bark-platter of fish, covered him with a buffalo-robe, and showed him six or seven of his wives, who were thenceforth, he was told, to regard him as a son. The chief's household was numerous; and his allies and relatives formed a considerable clan, of which the missionary found himself an involuntary member. He was scandalized when he saw one of his adopted brothers carrying on his back the bones of a deceased friend, wrapped in the chasuble of brocade which they had taken with other vestments from his box. [Sidenote: HENNEPIN AS A MISSIONARY.] Seeing their new relative so enfeebled that he could scarcely stand, the Indians made for him one of their sweating baths,[213] where they immersed him in steam three times a week,--a process from which he thinks he derived great benefit. His strength gradually returned, in spite of his meagre fare; for there was a dearth of food, and the squaws were less attentive to his wants than to those of their children. They respected him, however, as a person endowed with occult powers, and stood in no little awe of a pocket compass which he had with him, as well as of a small metal pot with feet moulded after the face of a lion. This last seemed in their eyes a "medicine" of the most formidable nature, and they would not touch it without first wrapping it in a beaver-skin. For the rest, Hennepin made himself useful in various ways. He shaved the heads of the children, as was the custom of the tribe; bled certain asthmatic persons, and dosed others with orvietan, the famous panacea of his time, of which he had brought with him a good supply. With respect to his missionary functions, he seems to have given himself little trouble, unless his attempt to make a Sioux vocabulary is to be regarded as preparatory to a future apostleship. "I could gain nothing over them," he says, "in the way of their salvation, by reason of their natural stupidity." Nevertheless, on one occasion, he baptized a sick child, naming it Antoinette in honor of Saint Anthony of Padua. It seemed to revive after the rite, but soon relapsed and presently died, "which," he writes, "gave me great joy and satisfaction." In this he was like the Jesuits, who could find nothing but consolation in the death of a newly baptized infant, since it was thus assured of a paradise which, had it lived, it would probably have forfeited by sharing in the superstitions of its parents. With respect to Hennepin and his Indian father, there seems to have been little love on either side; but Ouasicoudé, the principal chief of the Sioux of this region, was the fast friend of the three white men. He was angry that they had been robbed, which he had been unable to prevent, as the Sioux had no laws, and their chiefs little power; but he spoke his mind freely, and told Aquipaguetin and the rest, in full council, that they were like a dog who steals a piece of meat from a dish and runs away with it. When Hennepin complained of hunger, the Indians had always promised him that early in the summer he should go with them on a buffalo hunt, and have food in abundance. The time at length came, and the inhabitants of all the neighboring villages prepared for departure. To each band was assigned its special hunting-ground, and he was expected to accompany his Indian father. To this he demurred; for he feared lest Aquipaguetin, angry at the words of the great chief, might take this opportunity to revenge the insult put upon him. He therefore gave out that he expected a party of "Spirits"--that is to say, Frenchmen--to meet him at the mouth of the Wisconsin, bringing a supply of goods for the Indians; and he declares that La Salle had in fact promised to send traders to that place. Be this as it may, the Indians believed him; and, true or false, the assertion, as will be seen, answered the purpose for which it was made. [Sidenote: CAMP OF SAVAGES.] The Indians set out in a body to the number of two hundred and fifty warriors, with their women and children. The three Frenchmen, who though in different villages had occasionally met during the two months of their captivity, were all of the party. They descended Rum River, which forms the outlet of Mille Lac, and which is called the St. Francis by Hennepin. None of the Indians had offered to give him passage; and, fearing lest he should be abandoned, he stood on the bank, hailing the passing canoes and begging to be taken in. Accau and Du Gay presently appeared, paddling a small canoe which the Indians had given them; but they would not listen to the missionary's call, and Accau, who had no love for him, cried out that he had paddled him long enough already. Two Indians, however, took pity on him, and brought him to the place of encampment, where Du Gay tried to excuse himself for his conduct; but Accau was sullen, and kept aloof. After reaching the Mississippi, the whole party encamped together opposite to the mouth of Rum River, pitching their tents of skin, or building their bark-huts, on the slope of a hill by the side of the water. It was a wild scene, this camp of savages among whom as yet no traders had come and no handiwork of civilization had found its way,--the tall warriors, some nearly naked, some wrapped in buffalo-robes, and some in shirts of dressed deer-skin fringed with hair and embroidered with dyed porcupine quills, war-clubs of stone in their hands, and quivers at their backs filled with stone-headed arrows; the squaws, cutting smoke-dried meat with knives of flint, and boiling it in rude earthen pots of their own making, driving away, meanwhile, with shrill cries, the troops of lean dogs, which disputed the meal with a crew of hungry children. The whole camp, indeed, was threatened with starvation. The three white men could get no food but unripe berries,--from the effects of which Hennepin thinks they might all have died, but for timely doses of his orvietan. [Sidenote: FALLS OF ST. ANTHONY.] Being tired of the Indians, he became anxious to set out for the Wisconsin to find the party of Frenchmen, real or imaginary, who were to meet him at that place. That he was permitted to do so was due to the influence of the great chief Ouasicoudé, who always befriended him, and who had soundly berated his two companions for refusing him a seat in their canoe. Du Gay wished to go with him; but Accau, who liked the Indian life as much as he disliked Hennepin, preferred to remain with the hunters. A small birch-canoe was given to the two adventurers, together with an earthen pot; and they had also between them a gun, a knife, and a robe of beaver-skin. Thus equipped, they began their journey, and soon approached the Falls of St. Anthony, so named by Hennepin in honor of the inevitable Saint Anthony of Padua.[214] As they were carrying their canoe by the cataract, they saw five or six Indians, who had gone before, and one of whom had climbed into an oak-tree beside the principal fall, whence in a loud and lamentable voice he was haranguing the spirit of the waters, as a sacrifice to whom he had just hung a robe of beaver-skin among the branches.[215] Their attention was soon engrossed by another object. Looking over the edge of the cliff which overhung the river below the falls, Hennepin saw a snake, which, as he avers, was six feet long,[216] writhing upward towards the holes of the swallows in the face of the precipice, in order to devour their young. He pointed him out to Du Gay, and they pelted him with stones till he fell into the river, but not before his contortions and the darting of his forked tongue had so affected the Picard's imagination that he was haunted that night with a terrific incubus. [Sidenote: ADVENTURES.] They paddled sixty leagues down the river in the heats of July, and killed no large game but a single deer, the meat of which soon spoiled. Their main resource was the turtles, whose shyness and watchfulness caused them frequent disappointments and many involuntary fasts. They once captured one of more than common size; and, as they were endeavoring to cut off his head, he was near avenging himself by snapping off Hennepin's finger. There was a herd of buffalo in sight on the neighboring prairie; and Du Gay went with his gun in pursuit of them, leaving the turtle in Hennepin's custody. Scarcely was he gone when the friar, raising his eyes, saw that their canoe, which they had left at the edge of the water, had floated out into the current. Hastily turning the turtle on his back, he covered him with his habit of St. Francis, on which, for greater security, he laid a number of stones, and then, being a good swimmer, struck out in pursuit of the canoe, which he at length overtook. Finding that it would overset if he tried to climb into it, he pushed it before him to the shore, and then paddled towards the place, at some distance above, where he had left the turtle. He had no sooner reached it than he heard a strange sound, and beheld a long file of buffalo--bulls, cows, and calves--entering the water not far off, to cross to the western bank. Having no gun, as became his apostolic vocation, he shouted to Du Gay, who presently appeared, running in all haste, and they both paddled in pursuit of the game. Du Gay aimed at a young cow, and shot her in the head. She fell in shallow water near an island, where some of the herd had landed; and being unable to drag her out, they waded into the water and butchered her where she lay. It was forty-eight hours since they had tasted food. Hennepin made a fire, while Du Gay cut up the meat. They feasted so bountifully that they both fell ill, and were forced to remain two days on the island, taking doses of orvietan, before they were able to resume their journey. Apparently they were not sufficiently versed in woodcraft to smoke the meat of the cow; and the hot sun soon robbed them of it. They had a few fishhooks, but were not always successful in the use of them. On one occasion, being nearly famished, they set their line, and lay watching it, uttering prayers in turn. Suddenly, there was a great turmoil in the water. Du Gay ran to the line, and, with the help of Hennepin, drew in two large cat-fish.[217] The eagles, or fish-hawks, now and then dropped a newly caught fish, of which they gladly took possession; and once they found a purveyor in an otter which they saw by the bank, devouring some object of an appearance so wonderful that Du Gay cried out that he had a devil between his paws. They scared him from his prey, which proved to be a spade-fish, or, as Hennepin correctly describes it, a species of sturgeon, with a bony projection from his snout in the shape of a paddle. They broke their fast upon him, undeterred by this eccentric appendage. [Sidenote: THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI.] If Hennepin had had an eye for scenery, he would have found in these his vagabond rovings wherewith to console himself in some measure for his frequent fasts. The young Mississippi, fresh from its northern springs, unstained as yet by unhallowed union with the riotous Missouri, flowed calmly on its way amid strange and unique beauties,--a wilderness, clothed with velvet grass; forest-shadowed valleys; lofty heights, whose smooth slopes seemed levelled with the scythe; domes and pinnacles, ramparts and ruined towers, the work of no human hand. The canoe of the voyagers, borne on the tranquil current, glided in the shade of gray crags festooned with honeysuckles; by trees mantled with wild grape-vines; dells bright with the flowers of the white euphorbia, the blue gentian, and the purple balm; and matted forests, where the red squirrels leaped and chattered. They passed the great cliff whence the Indian maiden threw herself in her despair;[218] and Lake Pepin lay before them, slumbering in the July sun,--the far-reaching sheets of sparkling water, the woody slopes, the tower-like crags, the grassy heights basking in sunlight or shadowed by the passing cloud; all the fair outline of its graceful scenery, the finished and polished master-work of Nature. And when at evening they made their bivouac fire and drew up their canoe, while dim, sultry clouds veiled the west, and the flashes of the silent heat-lightning gleamed on the leaden water, they could listen, as they smoked their pipes, to the mournful cry of the whippoorwills and the quavering scream of the owls. Other thoughts than the study of the picturesque occupied the mind of Hennepin when one day he saw his Indian father, Aquipaguetin, whom he had supposed five hundred miles distant, descending the river with ten warriors in canoes. He was eager to be the first to meet the traders, who, as Hennepin had given out, were to come with their goods to the mouth of the Wisconsin. The two travellers trembled for the consequences of this encounter; but the chief, after a short colloquy, passed on his way. In three days he returned in ill-humor, having found no traders at the appointed spot. The Picard was absent at the time, looking for game; and Hennepin was sitting under the shade of his blanket, which he had stretched on forked sticks to protect him from the sun, when he saw his adopted father approaching with a threatening look, and a war-club in his hand. He attempted no violence, however, but suffered his wrath to exhale in a severe scolding, after which he resumed his course up the river with his warriors. If Hennepin, as he avers, really expected a party of traders at the Wisconsin, the course he now took is sufficiently explicable. If he did not expect them, his obvious course was to rejoin Tonty on the Illinois, for which he seems to have had no inclination; or to return to Canada by way of the Wisconsin,--an attempt which involved the risk of starvation, as the two travellers had but ten charges of powder left. Assuming, then, his hope of the traders to have been real, he and Du Gay resolved, in the mean time, to join a large body of Sioux hunters, who, as Aquipaguetin had told them, were on a stream which he calls Bull River, now the Chippeway, entering the Mississippi near Lake Pepin. By so doing, they would gain a supply of food, and save themselves from the danger of encountering parties of roving warriors. [Sidenote: HE REJOINS THE INDIANS.] They found this band, among whom was their companion Accau, and followed them on a grand hunt along the borders of the Mississippi. Du Gay was separated for a time from Hennepin, who was placed in a canoe with a withered squaw more than eighty years old. In spite of her age, she handled her paddle with great address, and used it vigorously, as occasion required, to repress the gambols of three children, who, to Hennepin's annoyance, occupied the middle of the canoe. The hunt was successful. The Sioux warriors, active as deer, chased the buffalo on foot with their stone-headed arrows, on the plains behind the heights that bordered the river; while the old men stood sentinels at the top, watching for the approach of enemies. One day an alarm was given. The warriors rushed towards the supposed point of danger, but found nothing more formidable than two squaws of their own nation, who brought strange news. A war-party of Sioux, they said, had gone towards Lake Superior, and had met by the way five "Spirits;" that is to say, five Europeans. Hennepin was full of curiosity to learn who the strangers might be; and they, on their part, were said to have shown great anxiety to know the nationality of the three white men who, as they were told, were on the river. The hunt was over; and the hunters, with Hennepin and his companion, were on their way northward to their towns, when they met the five "Spirits" at some distance below the Falls of St. Anthony. They proved to be Daniel Greysolon du Lhut, with four well-armed Frenchmen. [Sidenote: DE LHUT'S EXPLORATIONS.] This bold and enterprising man, stigmatized by the Intendant Duchesneau as a leader of _coureurs de bois_, was a cousin of Tonty, born at Lyons. He belonged to that caste of the lesser nobles whose name was legion, and whose admirable military qualities shone forth so conspicuously in the wars of Louis XIV. Though his enterprises were independent of those of La Salle, they were at this time carried on in connection with Count Frontenac and certain merchants in his interest, of whom Du Lhut's uncle, Patron, was one; while Louvigny, his brother-in-law, was in alliance with the governor, and was an officer of his guard. Here, then, was a kind of family league, countenanced by Frontenac, and acting conjointly with him, in order, if the angry letters of the intendant are to be believed, to reap a clandestine profit under the shadow of the governor's authority, and in violation of the royal ordinances. The rudest part of the work fell to the share of Du Lhut, who with a persistent hardihood, not surpassed perhaps even by La Salle, was continually in the forest, in the Indian towns, or in remote wilderness outposts planted by himself, exploring, trading, fighting, ruling lawless savages and whites scarcely less ungovernable, and on one or more occasions varying his life by crossing the ocean to gain interviews with the colonial minister Seignelay, amid the splendid vanities of Versailles. Strange to say, this man of hardy enterprise was a martyr to the gout, which for more than a quarter of a century grievously tormented him; though for a time he thought himself cured by the intercession of the Iroquois saint, Catharine Tegahkouita, to whom he had made a vow to that end. He was, without doubt, an habitual breaker of the royal ordinances regulating the fur-trade; yet his services were great to the colony and to the crown, and his name deserves a place of honor among the pioneers of American civilization.[219] When Hennepin met him, he had been about two years in the wilderness. In September, 1678, he left Quebec for the purpose of exploring the region of the Upper Mississippi, and establishing relations of friendship with the Sioux and their kindred the Assiniboins. In the summer of 1679 he visited three large towns of the eastern division of the Sioux, including those visited by Hennepin in the following year, and planted the King's arms in all of them. Early in the autumn he was at the head of Lake Superior, holding a council with the Assiniboins and the lake tribes, and inducing them to live at peace with the Sioux. In all this, he acted in a public capacity, under the authority of the governor; but it is not to be supposed that he forgot his own interests or those of his associates. The intendant angrily complains that he aided and abetted the _coureurs de bois_ in their lawless courses, and sent down in their canoes great quantities of beaver-skins consigned to the merchants in league with him, under cover of whose names the governor reaped his share of the profits. In June, 1680, while Hennepin was in the Sioux villages, Du Lhut set out from the head of Lake Superior, with two canoes, four Frenchmen, and an Indian, to continue his explorations.[220] He ascended a river, apparently the Burnt Wood, and reached from thence a branch of the Mississippi, which seems to have been the St. Croix. It was now that, to his surprise, he learned that there were three Europeans on the main river below; and fearing that they might be Englishmen or Spaniards encroaching on the territories of the King, he eagerly pressed forward to solve his doubts. When he saw Hennepin, his mind was set at rest; and the travellers met with mutual cordiality. They followed the Indians to their villages of Mille Lac, where Hennepin had now no reason to complain of their treatment of him. The Sioux gave him and Du Lhut a grand feast of honor, at which were seated a hundred and twenty naked guests; and the great chief Ouasicoudé, with his own hands, placed before Hennepin a bark dish containing a mess of smoked meat and wild rice. Autumn had come, and the travellers bethought them of going home. The Sioux, consoled by their promises to return with goods for trade, did not oppose their departure; and they set out together, eight white men in all. As they passed St. Anthony's Falls, two of the men stole two buffalo-robes which were hung on trees as offerings to the spirit of the cataract. When Du Lhut heard of it he was very angry, telling the men that they had endangered the lives of the whole party. Hennepin admitted that in the view of human prudence he was right, but urged that the act was good and praiseworthy, inasmuch as the offerings were made to a false god; while the men, on their part, proved mutinous, declaring that they wanted the robes and meant to keep them. The travellers continued their journey in great ill-humor, but were presently soothed by the excellent hunting which they found on the way. As they approached the Wisconsin, they stopped to dry the meat of the buffalo they had killed, when to their amazement they saw a war-party of Sioux approaching in a fleet of canoes. Hennepin represents himself as showing on this occasion an extraordinary courage, going to meet the Indians with a peace-pipe, and instructing Du Lhut, who knew more of these matters than he, how he ought to behave. The Sioux proved not unfriendly, and said nothing of the theft of the buffalo-robes. They soon went on their way to attack the Illinois and Missouris, leaving the Frenchmen to ascend the Wisconsin unmolested. [Sidenote: THE RETURN.] After various adventures, they reached the station of the Jesuits at Green Bay; but its existence is wholly ignored by Hennepin, whose zeal for his own Order will not permit him to allude to this establishment of the rival missionaries.[221] He is equally reticent with regard to the Jesuit mission at Michilimackinac, where the party soon after arrived, and where they spent the winter. The only intimation which he gives of its existence consists in the mention of the Jesuit Pierson, who was a Fleming like himself, and who often skated with him on the frozen lake, or kept him company in fishing through a hole in the ice.[222] When the spring opened, Hennepin descended Lake Huron, followed the Detroit to Lake Erie, and proceeded thence to Niagara. Here he spent some time in making a fresh examination of the cataract, and then resumed his voyage on Lake Ontario. He stopped, however, at the great town of the Senecas, near the Genesee, where, with his usual spirit of meddling, he took upon him the functions of the civil and military authorities, convoked the chiefs to a council, and urged them to set at liberty certain Ottawa prisoners whom they had captured in violation of treaties. Having settled this affair to his satisfaction, he went to Fort Frontenac, where his brother missionary, Buisset, received him with a welcome rendered the warmer by a story which had reached him that the Indians had hanged Hennepin with his own cord of St. Francis. From Fort Frontenac he went to Montreal; and leaving his two men on a neighboring island, that they might escape the payment of duties on a quantity of furs which they had with them, he paddled alone towards the town. Count Frontenac chanced to be here, and, looking from the window of a house near the river, he saw approaching in a canoe a Récollet father, whose appearance indicated the extremity of hard service; for his face was worn and sunburnt, and his tattered habit of St. Francis was abundantly patched with scraps of buffalo-skin. When at length he recognized the long-lost Hennepin, he received him, as the father writes, "with all the tenderness which a missionary could expect from a person of his rank and quality." He kept him for twelve days in his own house, and listened with interest to such of his adventures as the friar saw fit to divulge. [Sidenote: LA SALLE'S LETTERS.] And here we bid farewell to Father Hennepin. "Providence," he writes, "preserved my life that I might make known my great discoveries to the world." He soon after went to Europe, where the story of his travels found a host of readers, but where he died at last in a deserved obscurity.[223] FOOTNOTES: [212] The Sioux, or Dacotah, as they call themselves, were a numerous people, separated into three great divisions, which were again subdivided into bands. Those among whom Hennepin was a prisoner belonged to the division known as the Issanti, Issanyati, or, as he writes it, _Issati_, of which the principal band was the Meddewakantonwan. The other great divisions, the Yanktons and the Tintonwans, or Tetons, lived west of the Mississippi, extending beyond the Missouri, and ranging as far as the Rocky Mountains. The Issanti cultivated the soil; but the extreme western bands subsisted on the buffalo alone. The former had two kinds of dwelling,--the _teepee_, or skin-lodge, and the bark-lodge. The teepee, which was used by all the Sioux, consists of a covering of dressed buffalo-hide, stretched on a conical stack of poles. The bark-lodge was peculiar to the Eastern Sioux; and examples of it might be seen, until within a few years, among the bands on the St. Peter's. In its general character, it was like the Huron and Iroquois houses, but was inferior in construction. It had a ridge roof, framed of poles, extending from the posts which formed the sides; and the whole was covered with elm-bark. The lodges in the villages to which Hennepin was conducted were probably of this kind. The name Sioux is an abbreviation of _Nadouessioux_, an Ojibwa word, meaning "enemies." The Ojibwas used it to designate this people, and occasionally also the Iroquois, being at deadly war with both. Rev. Stephen B. Riggs, for many years a missionary among the Issanti Sioux, says that this division consists of four distinct bands. They ceded all their lands east of the Mississippi to the United States in 1837, and lived on the St. Peter's till driven thence in consequence of the massacres of 1862, 1863. The Yankton Sioux consist of two bands, which are again subdivided. The Assiniboins, or Hohays, are an offshoot from the Yanktons, with whom they are now at war. The Tintonwan, or Teton Sioux, forming the most western division and the largest, comprise seven bands, and are among the bravest and fiercest tenants of the prairie. The earliest French writers estimate the total number of the Sioux at forty thousand; but this is little better than conjecture. Mr. Riggs, in 1852, placed it at about twenty-five thousand. [213] These baths consist of a small hut, covered closely with buffalo-skins, into which the patient and his friends enter, carefully closing every aperture. A pile of heated stones is placed in the middle, and water is poured upon them, raising a dense vapor. They are still (1868) in use among the Sioux and some other tribes. [214] Hennepin's notice of the falls of St. Anthony, though brief, is sufficiently accurate. He says, in his first edition, that they are forty or fifty feet high, but adds ten feet more in the edition of 1697. In 1821, according to Schoolcraft, the perpendicular fall measured forty feet. Great changes, however, have taken place here, and are still in progress. The rock is a very soft, friable sandstone, overlaid by a stratum of limestone; and it is crumbling with such rapidity under the action of the water that the cataract will soon be little more than a rapid. Other changes equally disastrous, in an artistic point of view, are going on even more quickly. Beside the falls stands a city, which, by an ingenious combination of the Greek and Sioux languages, has received the name of Minneapolis, or City of the Waters, and which in 1867 contained ten thousand inhabitants, two national banks, and an opera-house; while its rival city of St. Anthony, immediately opposite, boasted a gigantic water-cure and a State university. In short, the great natural beauty of the place is utterly spoiled. [215] Oanktayhee, the principal deity of the Sioux, was supposed to live under these falls, though he manifested himself in the form of a buffalo. It was he who created the earth, like the Algonquin Manabozho, from mud brought to him in the paws of a musk-rat. Carver, in 1766, saw an Indian throw everything he had about him into the cataract as an offering to this deity. [216] In the edition of 1683. In that of 1697 he had grown to seven or eight feet. The bank-swallows still make their nests in these cliffs, boring easily into the soft sandstone. [217] Hennepin speaks of their size with astonishment, and says that the two together would weigh twenty-five pounds. Cat-fish have been taken in the Mississippi, weighing more than a hundred and fifty pounds. [218] The "Lover's Leap," or "Maiden's Rock" from which a Sioux girl, Winona, or the "Eldest Born," is said to have thrown herself, in the despair of disappointed affection. The story, which seems founded in truth, will be found, not without embellishments, in Mrs. Eastman's _Legends of the Sioux_. [219] The facts concerning Du Lhut have been gleaned from a variety of contemporary documents, chiefly the letters of his enemy Duchesneau, who always puts him in the worst light, especially in his despatch to Seignelay of 10 Nov., 1679, where he charges both him and the governor with carrying on an illicit trade with the English of New York. Du Lhut himself, in a memoir dated 1685 (see Harrisse, _Bibliographie_, 176), strongly denies these charges. Du Lhut built a trading fort on Lake Superior, called Cananistigoyan (La Hontan), or Kamalastigouia (Perrot). It was on the north side, at the mouth of a river entering Thunder Bay, where Fort William now stands. In 1684 he caused two Indians, who had murdered several Frenchmen on Lake Superior, to be shot. He displayed in this affair great courage and coolness, undaunted by the crowd of excited savages who surrounded him and his little band of Frenchmen. The long letter, in which he recounts the capture and execution of the murderers, is before me. Duchesneau makes his conduct on this occasion the ground of a charge of rashness. In 1686 Denonville, then governor of the colony, ordered him to fortify the Detroit; that is, the strait between Lakes Erie and Huron. He went thither with fifty men and built a palisade fort, which he occupied for some time. In 1687 he, together with Tonty and Durantaye, joined Denonville against the Senecas, with a body of Indians from the Upper Lakes. In 1689, during the panic that followed the Iroquois invasion of Montreal, Du Lhut, with twenty-eight Canadians, attacked twenty-two Iroquois in canoes, received their fire without returning it, bore down upon them, killed eighteen of them, and captured three, only one escaping. In 1695 he was in command at Fort Frontenac. In 1697 he succeeded to the command of a company of infantry, but was suffering wretchedly from the gout at Fort Frontenac. In 1710 Vaudreuil, in a despatch to the minister Ponchartrain, announced his death as occurring in the previous winter, and added the brief comment, "c'était un très-honnête homme." Other contemporaries speak to the same effect. "Mr. Dulhut, Gentilhomme Lionnois, qui a beaucoup de mérite et de capacité."--_La Hontan_, i. 103 (1703). "Le Sieur du Lut, homme d'esprit et d'expérience."--_Le Clerc_, ii. 137. Charlevoix calls him "one of the bravest officers the King has ever had in this colony." His name is variously spelled Du Luc, Du Lud, Du Lude, Du Lut, Du Luth, Du Lhut. For an account of the Iroquois virgin, Tegahkouita, whose intercession is said to have cured him of the gout, see Charlevoix, i. 572. On a contemporary manuscript map by the Jesuit Raffeix, representing the routes of Marquette, La Salle, and Du Lhut, are the following words, referring to the last-named discoverer, and interesting in connection with Hennepin's statements: "Mr. du Lude le premier a esté chez les Sioux en 1678, et a esté proche la source du Mississippi, et ensuite vint retirer le P. Louis [_Hennepin_] qui avoit esté fait prisonnier chez les Sioux." Du Lhut here appears as the deliverer of Hennepin. One of his men was named Pepin; hence, no doubt, the name of Lake Pepin. [220] _Memoir on the French Dominion in Canada, N. Y. Col. Docs._, ix. 781. [221] On the other hand, he sets down on his map of 1683 a mission of the Récollets at a point north of the farthest sources of the Mississippi, to which no white man had ever penetrated. [222] He says that Pierson had come among the Indians to learn their language; that he "retained the frankness and rectitude of our country" and "a disposition always on the side of candor and sincerity. In a word, he seemed to me to be all that a Christian ought to be" (1697), 433. [223] Since the two preceding chapters were written, the letters of La Salle have been brought to light by the researches of M. Margry. They confirm, in nearly all points, the conclusions given above; though, as before observed (_note_, 186), they show misstatements on the part of Hennepin concerning his position at the outset of the expedition. La Salle writes: "J'ay fait remonter le fleuve Colbert, nommé par les Iroquois Gastacha, par les Outaouais Mississipy par un canot conduit par deux de mes gens, l'un nommé Michel Accault et l'autre Picard, auxquels le R. P. Hennepin se joignit pour ne perdre pas l'occasion de prescher l'Évangile aux peuples qui habitent dessus et qui n'en avoient jamais oui parler." In the same letter he recounts their voyage on the Upper Mississippi, and their capture by the Sioux in accordance with the story of Hennepin himself. Hennepin's assertion, that La Salle had promised to send a number of men to meet him at the mouth of the Wisconsin, turns out to be true. "Estans tous revenus en chasse avec les Nadouessioux [_Sioux_] vers Ouisconsing [_Wisconsin_], le R. P. Louis Hempin [_Hennepin_] et Picard prirent résolution de venir jusqu'à l'emboucheure de la rivière où j'avois promis d'envoyer de mes nouvelles, comme j'avois fait par six hommes que les Jésuistes desbauchèrent en leur disant que le R. P. Louis et ses compagnons de voyage avoient esté tuez." It is clear that La Salle understood Hennepin; for, after speaking of his journey, he adds: "J'ai cru qu'il estoit à propos de vous faire le narré des aventures de ce canot parce que je ne doute pas qu'on en parle; et si vous souhaitez en conférer avec le P. Louis Hempin, Récollect, qui est repassé en France, il faut un peu le connoistre, car il ne manquera pas d'exagérer toutes choses, c'est son caractère, et à moy mesme il m'a escrit comme s'il eust esté tout près d'estre bruslé, quoiqu'il n'en ait pas esté seulement en danger; mais il croit qu'il luy est honorable de le faire de la sorte, et _il parle plus conformément à ce qu'il veut qu'à ce qu'il scait_."--_Lettre de la Salle, 22 Août, 1682_ (1681?), Margry, ii. 259. On his return to France, Hennepin got hold of the manuscript, _Relation des Découvertes_, compiled for the government from La Salle's letters, and, as already observed, made very free use of it in the first edition of his book, printed in 1683. In 1699 he wished to return to Canada; but, in a letter of that year, Louis XIV. orders the governor to seize him, should he appear, and send him prisoner to Rochefort. This seems to have been in consequence of his renouncing the service of the French crown, and dedicating his edition of 1697 to William III. of England. More than twenty editions of Hennepin's travels appeared, in French, English, Dutch, German, Italian, and Spanish. Most of them include the mendacious narrative of the pretended descent of the Mississippi. For a list of them, see _Hist. Mag._, i. 346; ii. 24. CHAPTER XIX. 1681. LA SALLE BEGINS ANEW. His Constancy; his Plans; his Savage Allies; he becomes Snow-blind.--Negotiations.--Grand Council.--La Salle's Oratory.--Meeting with Tonty.--Preparation.--Departure. In tracing the adventures of Tonty and the rovings of Hennepin, we have lost sight of La Salle, the pivot of the enterprise. Returning from the desolation and horror in the valley of the Illinois, he had spent the winter at Fort Miami, on the St. Joseph, by the borders of Lake Michigan. Here he might have brooded on the redoubled ruin that had befallen him,--the desponding friends, the exulting foes; the wasted energies, the crushing load of debt, the stormy past, the black and lowering future. But his mind was of a different temper. He had no thought but to grapple with adversity, and out of the fragments of his ruin to build up the fabric of success. He would not recoil; but he modified his plans to meet the new contingency. His white enemies had found, or rather perhaps had made, a savage ally in the Iroquois. Their incursions must be stopped, or his enterprise would come to nought; and he thought he saw the means by which this new danger could be converted into a source of strength. The tribes of the West, threatened by the common enemy, might be taught to forget their mutual animosities and join in a defensive league, with La Salle at its head. They might be colonized around his fort in the valley of the Illinois, where in the shadow of the French flag, and with the aid of French allies, they could hold the Iroquois in check, and acquire in some measure the arts of a settled life. The Franciscan friars could teach them the Faith; and La Salle and his associates could supply them with goods, in exchange for the vast harvest of furs which their hunters could gather in these boundless wilds. Meanwhile, he would seek out the mouth of the Mississippi; and the furs gathered at his colony in the Illinois would then find a ready passage to the markets of the world. Thus might this ancient slaughter-field of warring savages be redeemed to civilization and Christianity; and a stable settlement, half-feudal, half-commercial, grow up in the heart of the western wilderness. This plan was but a part of the original scheme of his enterprise, adapted to new and unexpected circumstances; and he now set himself to its execution with his usual vigor, joined to an address which, when dealing with Indians, never failed him. [Sidenote: INDIAN FRIENDS.] There were allies close at hand. Near Fort Miami were the huts of twenty-five or thirty savages, exiles from their homes, and strangers in this western world. Several of the English colonies, from Virginia to Maine, had of late years been harassed by Indian wars; and the Puritans of New England, above all, had been scourged by the deadly outbreak of King Philip's war. Those engaged in it had paid a bitter price for their brief triumphs. A band of refugees, chiefly Abenakis and Mohegans, driven from their native seats, had roamed into these distant wilds, and were wintering in the friendly neighborhood of the French. La Salle soon won them over to his interests. One of their number was the Mohegan hunter, who for two years had faithfully followed his fortunes, and who had been four years in the West. He is described as a prudent and discreet young man, in whom La Salle had great confidence, and who could make himself understood in several western languages, belonging, like his own, to the great Algonquin tongue. This devoted henchman proved an efficient mediator with his countrymen. The New-England Indians, with one voice, promised to follow La Salle, asking no recompense but to call him their chief, and yield to him the love and admiration which he rarely failed to command from this hero-worshipping race. New allies soon appeared. A Shawanoe chief from the valley of the Ohio, whose following embraced a hundred and fifty warriors, came to ask the protection of the French against the all-destroying Iroquois. "The Shawanoes are too distant," was La Salle's reply; "but let them come to me at the Illinois, and they shall be safe." The chief promised to join him in the autumn, at Fort Miami, with all his band. But, more important than all, the consent and co-operation of the Illinois must be gained; and the Miamis, their neighbors and of late their enemies, must be taught the folly of their league with the Iroquois, and the necessity of joining in the new confederation. Of late, they had been made to see the perfidy of their dangerous allies. A band of the Iroquois, returning from the slaughter of the Tamaroa Illinois, had met and murdered a band of Miamis on the Ohio, and had not only refused satisfaction, but had intrenched themselves in three rude forts of trees and brushwood in the heart of the Miami country. The moment was favorable for negotiating; but, first, La Salle wished to open a communication with the Illinois, some of whom had begun to return to the country they had abandoned. With this view, and also, it seems, to procure provisions, he set out on the first of March, with his lieutenant La Forest, and fifteen men. The country was sheeted in snow, and the party journeyed on snow-shoes; but when they reached the open prairies, the white expanse glared in the sun with so dazzling a brightness that La Salle and several of the men became snow-blind. They stopped and encamped under the edge of a forest; and here La Salle remained in darkness for three days, suffering extreme pain. Meanwhile, he sent forward La Forest and most of the men, keeping with him his old attendant Hunaut. Going out in quest of pine-leaves,--a decoction of which was supposed to be useful in cases of snow-blindness,--this man discovered the fresh tracks of Indians, followed them, and found a camp of Outagamies, or Foxes, from the neighborhood of Green Bay. From them he heard welcome news. They told him that Tonty was safe among the Pottawattamies, and that Hennepin had passed through their country on his return from among the Sioux.[224] [Sidenote: ILLINOIS ALLIES.] A thaw took place; the snow melted rapidly; the rivers were opened; the blind men began to recover; and launching the canoes which they had dragged after them, the party pursued their way by water. They soon met a band of Illinois. La Salle gave them presents, condoled with them on their losses, and urged them to make peace and alliance with the Miamis. Thus, he said, they could set the Iroquois at defiance; for he himself, with his Frenchmen and his Indian friends, would make his abode among them, supply them with goods, and aid them to defend themselves. They listened, well pleased, promised to carry his message to their countrymen, and furnished him with a large supply of corn.[225] Meanwhile he had rejoined La Forest, whom he now sent to Michilimackinac to await Tonty, and tell him to remain there till he, La Salle, should arrive. Having thus accomplished the objects of his journey, he returned to Fort Miami, whence he soon after ascended the St. Joseph to the village of the Miami Indians, on the portage, at the head of the Kankakee. Here he found unwelcome guests. These were three Iroquois warriors, who had been for some time in the place, and who, as he was told, had demeaned themselves with the insolence of conquerors, and spoken of the French with the utmost contempt. He hastened to confront them, rebuked and menaced them, and told them that now, when he was present, they dared not repeat the calumnies which they had uttered in his absence. They stood abashed and confounded, and during the following night secretly left the town and fled. The effect was prodigious on the minds of the Miamis, when they saw that La Salle, backed by ten Frenchmen, could command from their arrogant visitors a respect which they, with their hundreds of warriors, had wholly failed to inspire. Here, at the outset, was an augury full of promise for the approaching negotiations. There were other strangers in the town,--a band of eastern Indians, more numerous than those who had wintered at the fort. The greater number were from Rhode Island, including, probably, some of King Philip's warriors; others were from New York, and others again from Virginia. La Salle called them to a council, promised them a new home in the West under the protection of the Great King, with rich lands, an abundance of game, and French traders to supply them with the goods which they had once received from the English. Let them but help him to make peace between the Miamis and the Illinois, and he would insure for them a future of prosperity and safety. They listened with open ears, and promised their aid in the work of peace. [Sidenote: GRAND COUNCIL.] On the next morning, the Miamis were called to a grand council. It was held in the lodge of their chief, from which the mats were removed, that the crowd without might hear what was said. La Salle rose and harangued the concourse. Few men were so skilled in the arts of forest rhetoric and diplomacy. After the Indian mode, he was, to follow his chroniclers, "the greatest orator in North America."[226] He began with a gift of tobacco, to clear the brains of his auditory; next, for he had brought a canoe-load of presents to support his eloquence, he gave them cloth to cover their dead, coats to dress them, hatchets to build a grand scaffold in their honor, and beads, bells, and trinkets of all sorts, to decorate their relatives at a grand funeral feast. All this was mere metaphor. The living, while appropriating the gifts to their own use, were pleased at the compliment offered to their dead; and their delight redoubled as the orator proceeded. One of their great chiefs had lately been killed; and La Salle, after a eulogy of the departed, declared that he would now raise him to life again; that is, that he would assume his name and give support to his squaws and children. This flattering announcement drew forth an outburst of applause; and when, to confirm his words, his attendants placed before them a huge pile of coats, shirts, and hunting-knives, the whole assembly exploded in yelps of admiration. Now came the climax of the harangue, introduced by a further present of six guns:-- "He who is my master, and the master of all this country, is a mighty chief, feared by the whole world; but he loves peace, and the words of his lips are for good alone. He is called the King of France, and he is the mightiest among the chiefs beyond the great water. His goodness reaches even to your dead, and his subjects come among you to raise them up to life. But it is his will to preserve the life he has given; it is his will that you should obey his laws, and make no war without the leave of Onontio, who commands in his name at Quebec, and who loves all the nations alike, because such is the will of the Great King. You ought, then, to live at peace with your neighbors, and above all with the Illinois. You have had causes of quarrel with them; but their defeat has avenged you. Though they are still strong, they wish to make peace with you. Be content with the glory of having obliged them to ask for it. You have an interest in preserving them; since, if the Iroquois destroy them, they will next destroy you. Let us all obey the Great King, and live together in peace, under his protection. Be of my mind, and use these guns that I have given you, not to make war, but only to hunt and to defend yourselves."[227] [Sidenote: THE CHIEFS REPLY.] So saying, he gave two belts of wampum to confirm his words; and the assembly dissolved. On the following day, the chiefs again convoked it, and made their reply in form. It was all that La Salle could have wished. "The Illinois is our brother, because he is the son of our Father, the Great King." "We make you the master of our beaver and our lands, of our minds and our bodies." "We cannot wonder that our brothers from the East wish to live with you. We should have wished so too, if we had known what a blessing it is to be the children of the Great King." The rest of this auspicious day was passed in feasts and dances, in which La Salle and his Frenchmen all bore part. His new scheme was hopefully begun. It remained to achieve the enterprise, twice defeated, of the discovery of the mouth of the Mississippi,--that vital condition of his triumph, without which all other success was meaningless and vain. To this end he must return to Canada, appease his creditors, and collect his scattered resources. Towards the end of May he set out in canoes from Fort Miami, and reached Michilimackinac after a prosperous voyage. Here, to his great joy, he found Tonty and Zenobe Membré, who had lately arrived from Green Bay. The meeting was one at which even his stoic nature must have melted. Each had for the other a tale of disaster; but when La Salle recounted the long succession of his reverses, it was with the tranquil tone and cheerful look of one who relates the incidents of an ordinary journey. Membré looked on him with admiration. "Any one else," he says, "would have thrown up his hand and abandoned the enterprise; but, far from this, with a firmness and constancy that never had its equal, I saw him more resolved than ever to continue his work and push forward his discovery."[228] Without loss of time they embarked together for Fort Frontenac, paddled their canoes a thousand miles, and safely reached their destination. Here, in this third beginning of his enterprise, La Salle found himself beset with embarrassments. Not only was he burdened with the fruitless costs of his two former efforts, but the heavy debts which he had incurred in building and maintaining Fort Frontenac had not been wholly paid. The fort and the seigniory were already deeply mortgaged; yet through the influence of Count Frontenac, the assistance of his secretary Barrois, a consummate man of business, and the support of a wealthy relative, he found means to appease his creditors and even to gain fresh advances. To this end, however, he was forced to part with a portion of his monopolies. Having first made his will at Montreal, in favor of a cousin who had befriended him,[229] he mustered his men, and once more set forth, resolved to trust no more to agents, but to lead on his followers, in a united body, under his own personal command.[230] [Sidenote: THE TORONTO PORTAGE.] At the beginning of autumn he was at Toronto, where the long and difficult portage to Lake Simcoe detained him a fortnight. He spent a part of it in writing an account of what had lately occurred to a correspondent in France, and he closes his letter thus: "This is all I can tell you this year. I have a hundred things to write, but you could not believe how hard it is to do it among Indians. The canoes and their lading must be got over the portage, and I must speak to them continually and bear all their importunity, or else they will do nothing I want. I hope to write more at leisure next year, and tell you the end of this business, which I hope will turn out well: for I have M. de Tonty, who is full of zeal; thirty Frenchmen, all good men, without reckoning such as I cannot trust; and more than a hundred Indians, some of them Shawanoes, and others from New England, all of whom know how to use guns." It was October before he reached Lake Huron. Day after day and week after week the heavy-laden canoes crept on along the lonely wilderness shores, by the monotonous ranks of bristling moss-bearded firs; lake and forest, forest and lake; a dreary scene haunted with yet more dreary memories,--disasters, sorrows, and deferred hopes; time, strength, and wealth spent in vain; a ruinous past and a doubtful future; slander, obloquy, and hate. With unmoved heart, the patient voyager held his course, and drew up his canoes at last on the beach at Fort Miami. FOOTNOTES: [224] _Relation des Découvertes._ Compare _Lettre de La Salle_ (Margry, ii. 144). [225] This seems to have been taken from the secret repositories, or _caches_, of the ruined town of the Illinois. [226] "En ce genre, il étoit le plus grand orateur de l'Amérique Septentrionale."--_Relation des Découvertes._ [227] Translated from the _Relation_, where these councils are reported at great length. [228] Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 208. Tonty, in his memoir of 1693, speaks of the joy of La Salle at the meeting. The _Relation_, usually very accurate, says, erroneously, that Tonty had gone to Fort Frontenac. La Forest had gone thither, not long before La Salle's arrival. [229] _Copie du Testament du deffunt Sr. de la Salle, 11 Août, 1681._ The relative was François Plet, to whom he was deeply in debt. [230] "On apprendra à la fin de cette année, 1682, le succès de la découverte qu'il étoit résolu d'achever, au plus tard le printemps dernier ou de périr en y travaillant. Tant de traverses et de malheurs toujours arrivés en son absence l'ont fait résoudre à ne se fier plus à personne et à conduire lui-même tout son monde, tout son équipage, et toute son entreprise, de laquelle il espéroit une heureuse conclusion." The above is a part of the closing paragraph of the _Relation des Découvertes_, so often cited. CHAPTER XX. 1681-1682. SUCCESS OF LA SALLE. His Followers.--The Chicago Portage.--Descent of the Mississippi.--The Lost Hunter.--The Arkansas.--The Taensas.--The Natchez.--Hostility.--The Mouth of the Mississippi.--Louis XIV. proclaimed Sovereign of the Great West. The season was far advanced. On the bare limbs of the forest hung a few withered remnants of its gay autumnal livery; and the smoke crept upward through the sullen November air from the squalid wigwams of La Salle's Abenaki and Mohegan allies. These, his new friends, were savages whose midnight yells had startled the border hamlets of New England; who had danced around Puritan scalps, and whom Puritan imaginations painted as incarnate fiends. La Salle chose eighteen of them, whom he added to the twenty-three Frenchmen who remained with him, some of the rest having deserted and others lagged behind. The Indians insisted on taking their squaws with them. These were ten in number, besides three children; and thus the expedition included fifty-four persons, of whom some were useless, and others a burden. On the 21st of December, Tonty and Membré set out from Fort Miami with some of the party in six canoes, and crossed to the little river Chicago.[231] La Salle, with the rest of the men, joined them a few days later. It was the dead of winter, and the streams were frozen. They made sledges, placed on them the canoes, the baggage, and a disabled Frenchman; crossed from the Chicago to the northern branch of the Illinois, and filed in a long procession down its frozen course. They reached the site of the great Illinois village, found it tenantless, and continued their journey, still dragging their canoes, till at length they reached open water below Lake Peoria. [Sidenote: PRUDHOMME.] La Salle had abandoned for a time his original plan of building a vessel for the navigation of the Mississippi. Bitter experience had taught him the difficulty of the attempt, and he resolved to trust to his canoes alone. They embarked again, floating prosperously down between the leafless forests that flanked the tranquil river; till, on the sixth of February, they issued upon the majestic bosom of the Mississippi. Here, for the time, their progress was stopped; for the river was full of floating ice. La Salle's Indians, too, had lagged behind; but within a week all had arrived, the navigation was once more free, and they resumed their course. Towards evening they saw on their right the mouth of a great river; and the clear current was invaded by the headlong torrent of the Missouri, opaque with mud. They built their camp-fires in the neighboring forest; and at daylight, embarking anew on the dark and mighty stream, drifted swiftly down towards unknown destinies. They passed a deserted town of the Tamaroas; saw, three days after, the mouth of the Ohio;[232] and, gliding by the wastes of bordering swamp, landed on the twenty-fourth of February near the Third Chickasaw Bluffs.[233] They encamped, and the hunters went out for game. All returned, excepting Pierre Prudhomme; and as the others had seen fresh tracks of Indians, La Salle feared that he was killed. While some of his followers built a small stockade fort on a high bluff[234] by the river, others ranged the woods in pursuit of the missing hunter. After six days of ceaseless and fruitless search, they met two Chickasaw Indians in the forest; and through them La Salle sent presents and peace-messages to that warlike people, whose villages were a few days' journey distant. Several days later Prudhomme was found, and brought into the camp, half-dead. He had lost his way while hunting; and to console him for his woes La Salle christened the newly built fort with his name, and left him, with a few others, in charge of it. Again they embarked; and with every stage of their adventurous progress the mystery of this vast New World was more and more unveiled. More and more they entered the realms of spring. The hazy sunlight, the warm and drowsy air, the tender foliage, the opening flowers, betokened the reviving life of Nature. For several days more they followed the writhings of the great river on its tortuous course through wastes of swamp and cane-brake, till on the thirteenth of March[235] they found themselves wrapped in a thick fog. Neither shore was visible; but they heard on the right the booming of an Indian drum and the shrill outcries of the war-dance. La Salle at once crossed to the opposite side, where, in less than an hour, his men threw up a rude fort of felled trees. Meanwhile the fog cleared; and from the farther bank the astonished Indians saw the strange visitors at their work. Some of the French advanced to the edge of the water, and beckoned them to come over. Several of them approached, in a wooden canoe, to within the distance of a gun-shot. La Salle displayed the calumet, and sent a Frenchman to meet them. He was well received; and the friendly mood of the Indians being now apparent, the whole party crossed the river. [Sidenote: THE ARKANSAS.] On landing, they found themselves at a town of the Kappa band of the Arkansas, a people dwelling near the mouth of the river which bears their name. "The whole village," writes Membré to his superior, "came down to the shore to meet us, except the women, who had run off. I cannot tell you the civility and kindness we received from these barbarians, who brought us poles to make huts, supplied us with firewood during the three days we were among them, and took turns in feasting us. But, my Reverend Father, this gives no idea of the good qualities of these savages, who are gay, civil, and free-hearted. The young men, though the most alert and spirited we had seen, are nevertheless so modest that not one of them would take the liberty to enter our hut, but all stood quietly at the door. They are so well formed that we were in admiration at their beauty. We did not lose the value of a pin while we were among them." Various were the dances and ceremonies with which they entertained the strangers, who, on their part, responded with a solemnity which their hosts would have liked less if they had understood it better. La Salle and Tonty, at the head of their followers, marched to the open area in the midst of the village. Here, to the admiration of the gazing crowd of warriors, women, and children, a cross was raised bearing the arms of France. Membré, in canonicals, sang a hymn; the men shouted _Vive le Roi_; and La Salle, in the King's name, took formal possession of the country.[236] The friar, not, he flatters himself, without success, labored to expound by signs the mysteries of the Faith; while La Salle, by methods equally satisfactory, drew from the chief an acknowledgement of fealty to Louis XIV.[237] [Sidenote: THE TAENSAS.] After touching at several other towns of this people, the voyagers resumed their course, guided by two of the Arkansas; passed the sites, since become historic, of Vicksburg and Grand Gulf; and, about three hundred miles below the Arkansas, stopped by the edge of a swamp on the western side of the river.[238] Here, as their two guides told them, was the path to the great town of the Taensas. Tonty and Membré were sent to visit it. They and their men shouldered their birch canoe through the swamp, and launched it on a lake which had once formed a portion of the channel of the river. In two hours, they reached the town; and Tonty gazed at it with astonishment. He had seen nothing like it in America,--large square dwellings, built of sun-baked mud mixed with straw, arched over with a dome-shaped roof of canes, and placed in regular order around an open area. Two of them were larger and better than the rest. One was the lodge of the chief; the other was the temple, or house of the Sun. They entered the former, and found a single room, forty feet square, where, in the dim light,--for there was no opening but the door,--the chief sat awaiting them on a sort of bedstead, three of his wives at his side; while sixty old men, wrapped in white cloaks woven of mulberry-bark, formed his divan. When he spoke, his wives howled to do him honor; and the assembled councillors listened with the reverence due to a potentate for whom, at his death, a hundred victims were to be sacrificed. He received the visitors graciously, and joyfully accepted the gifts which Tonty laid before him.[239] This interview over, the Frenchmen repaired to the temple, wherein were kept the bones of the departed chiefs. In construction, it was much like the royal dwelling. Over it were rude wooden figures, representing three eagles turned towards the east. A strong mud wall surrounded it, planted with stakes, on which were stuck the skulls of enemies sacrificed to the Sun; while before the door was a block of wood, on which lay a large shell surrounded with the braided hair of the victims. The interior was rude as a barn, dimly lighted from the doorway, and full of smoke. There was a structure in the middle which Membré thinks was a kind of altar; and before it burned a perpetual fire, fed with three logs laid end to end, and watched by two old men devoted to this sacred office. There was a mysterious recess, too, which the strangers were forbidden to explore, but which, as Tonty was told, contained the riches of the nation, consisting of pearls from the Gulf, and trinkets obtained, probably through other tribes, from the Spaniards and other Europeans. The chief condescended to visit La Salle at his camp,--a favor which he would by no means have granted, had the visitors been Indians. A master of ceremonies and six attendants preceded him, to clear the path and prepare the place of meeting. When all was ready, he was seen advancing, clothed in a white robe and preceded by two men bearing white fans, while a third displayed a disk of burnished copper,--doubtless to represent the Sun, his ancestor, or, as others will have it, his elder brother. His aspect was marvellously grave, and he and La Salle met with gestures of ceremonious courtesy. The interview was very friendly; and the chief returned well pleased with the gifts which his entertainer bestowed on him, and which, indeed, had been the principal motive of his visit. [Sidenote: THE NATCHEZ.] On the next morning, as they descended the river, they saw a wooden canoe full of Indians; and Tonty gave chase. He had nearly overtaken it, when more than a hundred men appeared suddenly on the shore, with bows bent to defend their countrymen. La Salle called out to Tonty to withdraw. He obeyed; and the whole party encamped on the opposite bank. Tonty offered to cross the river with a peace-pipe, and set out accordingly with a small party of men. When he landed, the Indians made signs of friendship by joining their hands,--a proceeding by which Tonty, having but one hand, was somewhat embarrassed; but he directed his men to respond in his stead. La Salle and Membré now joined him, and went with the Indians to their village, three leagues distant. Here they spent the night. "The Sieur de la Salle," writes Membré, "whose very air, engaging manners, tact, and address attract love and respect alike, produced such an effect on the hearts of these people that they did not know how to treat us well enough."[240] The Indians of this village were the Natchez; and their chief was brother of the great chief, or Sun, of the whole nation. His town was several leagues distant, near the site of the city of Natchez; and thither the French repaired to visit him. They saw what they had already seen among the Taensas,--a religious and political despotism, a privileged caste descended from the sun, a temple, and a sacred fire.[241] La Salle planted a large cross, with the arms of France attached, in the midst of the town; while the inhabitants looked on with a satisfaction which they would hardly have displayed had they understood the meaning of the act. [Sidenote: HOSTILITY.] The French next visited the Coroas, at their village two leagues below; and here they found a reception no less auspicious. On the thirty-first of March, as they approached Red River, they passed in the fog a town of the Oumas, and three days later discovered a party of fishermen, in wooden canoes, among the canes along the margin of the water. They fled at sight of the Frenchmen. La Salle sent men to reconnoitre, who, as they struggled through the marsh, were greeted with a shower of arrows; while from the neighboring village of the Quinipissas,[242] invisible behind the cane-brake, they heard the sound of an Indian drum and the whoops of the mustering warriors. La Salle, anxious to keep the peace with all the tribes along the river, recalled his men, and pursued his voyage. A few leagues below they saw a cluster of Indian lodges on the left bank, apparently void of inhabitants. They landed, and found three of them filled with corpses. It was a village of the Tangibao, sacked by their enemies only a few days before.[243] And now they neared their journey's end. On the sixth of April the river divided itself into three broad channels. La Salle followed that of the west, and Dautray that of the east; while Tonty took the middle passage. As he drifted down the turbid current, between the low and marshy shores, the brackish water changed to brine, and the breeze grew fresh with the salt breath of the sea. Then the broad bosom of the great Gulf opened on his sight, tossing its restless billows, limitless, voiceless, lonely as when born of chaos, without a sail, without a sign of life. La Salle, in a canoe, coasted the marshy borders of the sea; and then the reunited parties assembled on a spot of dry ground, a short distance above the mouth of the river. Here a column was made ready, bearing the arms of France, and inscribed with the words, "Louis Le Grand, Roy De France Et De Navarre, Règne; Le Neuvième Avril, 1682." The Frenchmen were mustered under arms; and while the New England Indians and their squaws looked on in wondering silence, they chanted the _Te Deum_, the _Exaudiat_, and the _Domine salvum fac Regem_. Then, amid volleys of musketry and shouts of _Vive le Roi_, La Salle planted the column in its place, and, standing near it, proclaimed in a loud voice,-- [Sidenote: POSSESSION TAKEN.] "In the name of the most high, mighty, invincible, and victorious Prince, Louis the Great, by the grace of God King of France and of Navarre, Fourteenth of that name, I, this ninth day of April, one thousand six hundred and eighty-two, in virtue of the commission of his Majesty, which I hold in my hand, and which may be seen by all whom it may concern, have taken, and do now take, in the name of his Majesty and of his successors to the crown, possession of this country of Louisiana, the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and all the nations, peoples, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams, and rivers, within the extent of the said Louisiana, from the mouth of the great river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio, ... as also along the river Colbert, or Mississippi, and the rivers which discharge themselves thereinto, from its source beyond the country of the Nadouessioux ... as far as its mouth at the sea, or Gulf of Mexico, and also to the mouth of the River of Palms, upon the assurance we have had from the natives of these countries that we are the first Europeans who have descended or ascended the said river Colbert; hereby protesting against all who may hereafter undertake to invade any or all of these aforesaid countries, peoples, or lands, to the prejudice of the rights of his Majesty, acquired by the consent of the nations dwelling herein. Of which, and of all else that is needful, I hereby take to witness those who hear me, and demand an act of the notary here present."[244] Shouts of _Vive le Roi_ and volleys of musketry responded to his words. Then a cross was planted beside the column, and a leaden plate buried near it, bearing the arms of France, with a Latin inscription, _Ludovicus Magnus regnat_. The weather-beaten voyagers joined their voices in the grand hymn of the _Vexilla Regis_:-- "The banners of Heaven's King advance, The mystery of the Cross shines forth;" and renewed shouts of _Vive le Roi_ closed the ceremony. On that day, the realm of France received on parchment a stupendous accession. The fertile plains of Texas; the vast basin of the Mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders of the Gulf; from the woody ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains,--a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts, and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath the sceptre of the Sultan of Versailles; and all by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile. FOOTNOTES: [231] La Salle, _Relation de la Découverte_, 1682, in Thomassy, _Géologie Pratique de la Louisiane 9; Lettre du Père Zenobe Membré, 3 Juin, 1682; Ibid., 14 Août, 1682_; Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 214; Tonty, 1684, 1693; _Procès Verbal de la Prise de Possession de la Louisiane, Feuilles détachées d'une Lettre de La Salle_ (Margry, ii. 164); _Récit de Nicolas de la Salle_ (Ibid., i. 547). The narrative ascribed to Membré and published by Le Clerc is based on the document preserved in the Archives Scientifiques de la Marine, entitled _Relation de la Découverte de l'Embouchure de la Rivière Mississippi faite par le Sieur de la Salle, l'année passée_, 1682. The writer of the narrative has used it very freely, copying the greater part verbatim, with occasional additions of a kind which seem to indicate that he had taken part in the expedition. The _Relation de la Découverte_, though written in the third person, is the official report of the discovery made by La Salle, or perhaps for him by Membré. [232] Called by Membré the Ouabache (Wabash). [233] La Salle, _Relation de la Découverte de l'Embouchure, etc._; Thomassy, 10. Membré gives the same date; but the _Procès Verbal_ makes it the twenty-sixth. [234] Gravier, in his letter of 16 Feb., 1701, says that he encamped near a "great bluff of stone, called Fort Prudhomme, because M. de La Salle, going on his discovery, intrenched himself here with his party, fearing that Prudhomme, who had lost himself in the woods, had been killed by the Indians, and that he himself would be attacked." [235] La Salle, _Relation_; Thomassy, 11. [236] _Procès Verbal de la Prise de Possession du Pays des Arkansas, 14 Mars, 1682._ [237] The nation of the Akanseas, Alkansas, or Arkansas, dwelt on the west bank of the Mississippi, near the mouth of the Arkansas. They were divided into four tribes, living for the most part in separate villages. Those first visited by La Salle were the Kappas, or Quapaws, a remnant of whom still subsists. The others were the Topingas, or Tongengas; the Torimans; and the Osotouoy, or Sauthouis. According to Charlevoix, who saw them in 1721, they were regarded as the tallest and best-formed Indians in America, and were known as _les Beaux Hommes_. Gravier says that they once lived on the Ohio. [238] In Tensas County, Louisiana. Tonty's estimates of distance are here much too low. They seem to be founded on observations of latitude, without reckoning the windings of the river. It may interest sportsmen to know that the party killed several large alligators, on their way. Membré is much astonished that such monsters should be born of eggs like chickens. [239] Tonty, 1684, 1693. In the spurious narrative, published in Tonty's name, the account is embellished and exaggerated. Compare Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 227. La Salle's statements in the _Relation_ of 1682 (Thomassy, 12) sustain those of Tonty. [240] Membré in Le Clerc, ii. 232. [241] The Natchez and the Taensas, whose habits and customs were similar, did not, in their social organization, differ radically from other Indians. The same principle of clanship, or _totemship_, so widely spread, existed in full force among them, combined with their religious ideas, and developed into forms of which no other example, equally distinct, is to be found. (For Indian clanship, see "The Jesuits in North America," _Introduction_.) Among the Natchez and Taensas, the principal clan formed a ruling caste; and its chiefs had the attributes of demi-gods. As descent was through the female, the chief's son never succeeded him, but the son of one of his sisters; and as she, by the usual totemic law, was forced to marry in another clan,--that is, to marry a common mortal,--her husband, though the destined father of a demi-god, was treated by her as little better than a slave. She might kill him, if he proved unfaithful; but he was forced to submit to her infidelities in silence. The customs of the Natchez have been described by Du Pratz, Le Petit, Penecaut, and others. Charlevoix visited their temple in 1721, and found it in a somewhat shabby condition. At this time, the Taensas were extinct. In 1729 the Natchez, enraged by the arbitrary conduct of a French commandant, massacred the neighboring settlers, and were in consequence expelled from their country and nearly destroyed. A few still survive, incorporated with the Creeks; but they have lost their peculiar customs. [242] In St. Charles County, on the left bank, not far above New Orleans. [243] Hennepin uses this incident, as well as most of those which have preceded it, in making up the story of his pretended voyage to the Gulf. [244] In the passages omitted above, for the sake of brevity, the Ohio is mentioned as being called also the _Olighin_-(Alleghany) _Sipou_, and _Chukagoua_; and La Salle declares that he takes possession of the country with the consent of the nations dwelling in it, of whom he names the Chaouanons (Shawanoes), Kious, or Nadouessious (Sioux), Chikachas (Chickasaws), Motantees (?), Illinois, Mitchigamias, Arkansas, Natchez, and Koroas. This alleged consent is, of course, mere farce. If there could be any doubt as to the meaning of the words of La Salle, as recorded in the _Procès Verbal de la Prise de Possession de la Louisiane_, it would be set at rest by Le Clerc, who says: "Le Sieur de la Salle prit au nom de sa Majesté possession de ce fleuve, _de toutes les rivières qui y entrent, et de tous les pays qu'elles arrosent_." These words are borrowed from the report of La Salle (see Thomassy, 14). A copy of the original _Procès Verbal_ is before me. It bears the name of Jacques de la Metairie, Notary of Fort Frontenac, who was one of the party. CHAPTER XXI. 1682, 1683. ST. LOUIS OF THE ILLINOIS. Louisiana.--Illness of La Salle: his Colony on the Illinois.--Fort St. Louis.--Recall of Frontenac.--Le Febvre de la Barre.--Critical Position of la Salle.--Hostility Of the New Governor.--Triumph of the Adverse Faction.--La Salle sails for France. Louisiana was the name bestowed by La Salle on the new domain of the French crown. The rule of the Bourbons in the West is a memory of the past, but the name of the Great King still survives in a narrow corner of their lost empire. The Louisiana of to-day is but a single State of the American republic. The Louisiana of La Salle stretched from the Alleghanies to the Rocky Mountains; from the Rio Grande and the Gulf to the farthest springs of the Missouri.[245] La Salle had written his name in history; but his hard-earned success was but the prelude of a harder task. Herculean labors lay before him, if he would realize the schemes with which his brain was pregnant. Bent on accomplishing them, he retraced his course, and urged his canoes upward against the muddy current. The party were famished. They had little to subsist on but the flesh of alligators. When they reached the Quinipissas, who had proved hostile on their way down, they resolved to risk an interview with them, in the hope of obtaining food. The treacherous savages dissembled, brought them corn, and on the following night made an attack upon them, but met with a bloody repulse. The party next revisited the Coroas, and found an unfavorable change in their disposition towards them. They feasted them, indeed, but during the repast surrounded them with an overwhelming force of warriors. The French, however, kept so well on their guard, that their entertainers dared not make an attack, and suffered them to depart unmolested.[246] [Sidenote: ILLNESS OF LA SALLE.] And now, in a career of unwonted success and anticipated triumph, La Salle was arrested by a foe against which the boldest heart avails nothing. As he ascended the Mississippi, he was seized by a dangerous illness. Unable to proceed, he sent forward Tonty to Michilimackinac, whence, after despatching news of their discovery to Canada, he was to return to the Illinois. La Salle himself lay helpless at Fort Prudhomme, the palisade work which his men had built at the Chickasaw Bluffs on their way down. Father Zenobe Membré attended him; and at the end of July he was once more in a condition to advance by slow movements towards Fort Miami, which he reached in about a month. In September he rejoined Tonty at Michilimackinac, and in the following month wrote to a friend in France: "Though my discovery is made, and I have descended the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, I cannot send you this year either an account of my journey or a map. On the way back I was attacked by a deadly disease, which kept me in danger of my life for forty days, and left me so weak that I could think of nothing for four months after. I have hardly strength enough now to write my letters, and the season is so far advanced that I cannot detain a single day this canoe which I send expressly to carry them. If I had not feared being forced to winter on the way, I should have tried to get to Quebec to meet the new governor, if it is true that we are to have one; but in my present condition this would be an act of suicide, on account of the bad nourishment I should have all winter in case the snow and ice stopped me on the way. Besides, my presence is absolutely necessary in the place to which I am going. I pray you, my dear sir, to give me once more all the help you can. I have great enemies, who have succeeded in all they have undertaken. I do not pretend to resist them, but only to justify myself, so that I can pursue by sea the plans I have begun here by land." This was what he had proposed to himself from the first; that is, to abandon the difficult access through Canada, beset with enemies, and open a way to his western domain through the Gulf and the Mississippi. This was the aim of all his toilsome explorations. Could he have accomplished his first intention of building a vessel on the Illinois and descending in her to the Gulf, he would have been able to defray in good measure the costs of the enterprise by means of the furs and buffalo-hides collected on the way and carried in her to France. With a fleet of canoes, this was impossible; and there was nothing to offset the enormous outlay which he and his associates had made. He meant, as we have seen, to found on the banks of the Illinois a colony of French and Indians to answer the double purpose of a bulwark against the Iroquois and a place of storage for the furs of all the western tribes; and he hoped in the following year to secure an outlet for this colony and for all the trade of the valley of the Mississippi, by occupying the mouth of that river with a fort and another colony. This, too, was an essential part of his original design. But for his illness, he would have gone to France to provide for its execution. Meanwhile, he ordered Tonty to collect as many men as possible, and begin the projected colony on the banks of the Illinois. A report soon after reached him that those pests of the wilderness the Iroquois were about to renew their attacks on the western tribes. This would be fatal to his plans; and, following Tonty to the Illinois, he rejoined him near the site of the great town. [Sidenote: "STARVED ROCK."] The cliff called "Starved Rock," now pointed out to travellers as the chief natural curiosity of the region, rises, steep on three sides as a castle wall, to the height of a hundred and twenty-five feet above the river. In front, it overhangs the water that washes its base; its western brow looks down on the tops of the forest trees below; and on the east lies a wide gorge or ravine, choked with the mingled foliage of oaks, walnuts, and elms; while in its rocky depths a little brook creeps down to mingle with the river. From the trunk of the stunted cedar that leans forward from the brink, you may drop a plummet into the river below, where the cat-fish and the turtles may plainly be seen gliding over the wrinkled sands of the clear and shallow current. The cliff is accessible only from behind, where a man may climb up, not without difficulty, by a steep and narrow passage. The top is about an acre in extent. Here, in the month of December, La Salle and Tonty began to intrench themselves. They cut away the forest that crowned the rock, built store-houses and dwellings of its remains, dragged timber up the rugged pathway, and encircled the summit with a palisade.[247] [Sidenote: LA SALLE'S COLONY.] [Illustration: LA SALLE'S COLONY on the Illinois, FROM THE MAP OF FRANQUELIN, 1684] Thus the winter passed, and meanwhile the work of negotiation went prosperously on. The minds of the Indians had been already prepared. In La Salle they saw their champion against the Iroquois, the standing terror of all this region. They gathered round his stronghold like the timorous peasantry of the middle ages around the rock-built castle of their feudal lord. From the wooden ramparts of St. Louis,--for so he named his fort,--high and inaccessible as an eagle's nest, a strange scene lay before his eye. The broad, flat valley of the Illinois was spread beneath him like a map, bounded in the distance by its low wall of woody hills. The river wound at his feet in devious channels among islands bordered with lofty trees; then, far on the left, flowed calmly westward through the vast meadows, till its glimmering blue ribbon was lost in hazy distance. There had been a time, and that not remote, when these fair meadows were a waste of death and desolation, scathed with fire, and strewn with the ghastly relics of an Iroquois victory. Now all was changed. La Salle looked down from his rock on a concourse of wild human life. Lodges of bark and rushes, or cabins of logs, were clustered on the open plain or along the edges of the bordering forests. Squaws labored, warriors lounged in the sun, naked children whooped and gambolled on the grass. Beyond the river, a mile and a half on the left, the banks were studded once more with the lodges of the Illinois, who, to the number of six thousand, had returned, since their defeat, to this their favorite dwelling-place. Scattered along the valley, among the adjacent hills, or over the neighboring prairie, were the cantonments of a half-score of other tribes and fragments of tribes, gathered under the protecting ægis of the French,--Shawanoes from the Ohio, Abenakis from Maine, Miamis from the sources of the Kankakee, with others whose barbarous names are hardly worth the record.[248] Nor were these La Salle's only dependants. By the terms of his patent, he held seigniorial rights over this wild domain; and he now began to grant it out in parcels to his followers. These, however, were as yet but a score,--a lawless band, trained in forest license, and marrying, as their detractors affirm, a new squaw every day in the week. This was after their lord's departure, for his presence imposed a check on these eccentricities. La Salle, in a memoir addressed to the Minister of the Marine, reports the total number of the Indians around Fort St. Louis at about four thousand warriors, or twenty thousand souls. His diplomacy had been crowned with a marvellous success,--for which his thanks were due, first to the Iroquois, and the universal terror they inspired; next, to his own address and unwearied energy. His colony had sprung up, as it were, in a night; but might not a night suffice to disperse it? The conditions of maintaining it were twofold: first, he must give efficient aid to his savage colonists against the Iroquois; secondly, he must supply them with French goods in exchange for their furs. The men, arms, and ammunition for their defence, and the goods for trading with them, must be brought from Canada, until a better and surer avenue of supply could be provided through the entrepôt which he meant to establish at the mouth of the Mississippi. Canada was full of his enemies; but as long as Count Frontenac was in power, he was sure of support. Count Frontenac was in power no longer. He had been recalled to France through the intrigues of the party adverse to La Salle; and Le Febvre de la Barre reigned in his stead. [Sidenote: LA SALLE AND LA BARRE.] La Barre was an old naval officer of rank, advanced to a post for which he proved himself notably unfit. If he was without the arbitrary passions which had been the chief occasion of the recall of his predecessor, he was no less without his energies and his talents. He showed a weakness and an avarice for which his age may have been in some measure answerable. He was no whit less unscrupulous than his predecessor in his secret violation of the royal ordinances regulating the fur-trade, which it was his duty to enforce. Like Frontenac, he took advantage of his position to carry on an illicit traffic with the Indians; but it was with different associates. The late governor's friends were the new governor's enemies; and La Salle, armed with his monopolies, was the object of his especial jealousy.[249] Meanwhile, La Salle, buried in the western wilderness, remained for the time ignorant of La Barre's disposition towards him, and made an effort to secure his good-will and countenance. He wrote to him from his rock of St. Louis, early in the spring of 1683, expressing the hope that he should have from him the same support as from Count Frontenac; "although," he says, "my enemies will try to influence you against me." His attachment to Frontenac, he pursues, has been the cause of all the late governor's enemies turning against him. He then recounts his voyage down the Mississippi; says that, with twenty-two Frenchmen, he caused all the tribes along the river to ask for peace; and speaks of his right under the royal patent to build forts anywhere along his route, and grant out lands around them, as at Fort Frontenac. "My losses in my enterprises," he continues, "have exceeded forty thousand crowns. I am now going four hundred leagues south-southwest of this place, to induce the Chickasaws to follow the Shawanoes and other tribes, and settle, like them, at St. Louis. It remained only to settle French colonists here, and this I have already done. I hope you will not detain them as _coureurs de bois_, when they come down to Montreal to make necessary purchases. I am aware that I have no right to trade with the tribes who descend to Montreal, and I shall not permit such trade to my men; nor have I ever issued licenses to that effect, as my enemies say that I have done."[250] Again, on the fourth of June following, he writes to La Barre, from the Chicago portage, complaining that some of his colonists, going to Montreal for necessary supplies, have been detained by his enemies, and begging that they may be allowed to return, that his enterprise may not be ruined. "The Iroquois," he pursues, "are again invading the country. Last year, the Miamis were so alarmed by them that they abandoned their town and fled; but at my return they came back, and have been induced to settle with the Illinois at my fort of St. Louis. The Iroquois have lately murdered some families of their nation, and they are all in terror again. I am afraid they will take flight, and so prevent the Missouris and neighboring tribes from coming to settle at St. Louis, as they are about to do. "Some of the Hurons and French tell the Miamis that I am keeping them here for the Iroquois to destroy. I pray that you will let me hear from you, that I may give these people some assurances of protection before they are destroyed in my sight. Do not suffer my men who have come down to the settlements to be longer prevented from returning. There is great need here of reinforcements. The Iroquois, as I have said, have lately entered the country; and a great terror prevails. I have postponed going to Michilimackinac, because, if the Iroquois strike any blow in my absence, the Miamis will think that I am in league with them; whereas, if I and the French stay among them, they will regard us as protectors. But, Monsieur, it is in vain that we risk our lives here, and that I exhaust my means in order to fulfil the intentions of his Majesty, if all my measures are crossed in the settlements below, and if those who go down to bring munitions, without which we cannot defend ourselves, are detained under pretexts trumped up for the occasion. If I am prevented from bringing up men and supplies, as I am allowed to do by the permit of Count Frontenac, then my patent from the King is useless. It would be very hard for us, after having done what was required, even before the time prescribed, and after suffering severe losses, to have our efforts frustrated by obstacles got up designedly. "I trust that, as it lies with you alone to prevent or to permit the return of the men whom I have sent down, you will not so act as to thwart my plans. A part of the goods which I have sent by them belong not to me, but to the Sieur de Tonty, and are a part of his pay. Others are to buy munitions indispensable for our defence. Do not let my creditors seize them. It is for their advantage that my fort, full as it is of goods, should be held against the enemy. I have only twenty men, with scarcely a hundred pounds of powder; and I cannot long hold the country without more. The Illinois are very capricious and uncertain.... If I had men enough to send out to reconnoitre the enemy, I would have done so before this; but I have not enough. I trust you will put it in my power to obtain more, that this important colony may be saved."[251] While La Salle was thus writing to La Barre, La Barre was writing to Seignelay, the Marine and Colonial Minister, decrying his correspondent's discoveries, and pretending to doubt their reality. "The Iroquois," he adds, "have sworn his [La Salle's] death. The imprudence of this man is about to involve the colony in war."[252] And again he writes, in the following spring, to say that La Salle was with a score of vagabonds at Green Bay, where he set himself up as a king, pillaged his countrymen, and put them to ransom, exposed the tribes of the West to the incursions of the Iroquois, and all under pretence of a patent from his Majesty, the provisions of which he grossly abused; but, as his privileges would expire on the twelfth of May ensuing, he would then be forced to come to Quebec, where his creditors, to whom he owed more than thirty thousand crowns, were anxiously awaiting him.[253] Finally, when La Barre received the two letters from La Salle, of which the substance is given above, he sent copies of them to the Minister Seignelay, with the following comment: "By the copies of the Sieur de la Salle's letters, you will perceive that his head is turned, and that he has been bold enough to give you intelligence of a false discovery, and that, instead of returning to the colony to learn what the King wishes him to do, he does not come near me, but keeps in the backwoods, five hundred leagues off, with the idea of attracting the inhabitants to him, and building up an imaginary kingdom for himself, by debauching all the bankrupts and idlers of this country. If you will look at the two letters I had from him, you can judge the character of this personage better than I can. Affairs with the Iroquois are in such a state that I cannot allow him to muster all their enemies together and put himself at their head. All the men who brought me news from him have abandoned him, and say not a word about returning, _but sell the furs they have brought as if they were their own_; so that he cannot hold his ground much longer."[254] Such calumnies had their effect. The enemies of La Salle had already gained the ear of the King; and he had written in August, from Fontainebleau, to his new governor of Canada: "I am convinced, like you, that the discovery of the Sieur de la Salle is very useless, and that such enterprises ought to be prevented in future, as they tend only to debauch the inhabitants by the hope of gain, and to diminish the revenue from beaver-skins."[255] In order to understand the posture of affairs at this time, it must be remembered that Dutch and English traders of New York were urging on the Iroquois to attack the western tribes, with the object of gaining, through their conquest, the control of the fur-trade of the interior, and diverting it from Montreal to Albany. The scheme was full of danger to Canada, which the loss of the trade would have ruined. La Barre and his associates were greatly alarmed at it. Its complete success would have been fatal to their hopes of profit; but they nevertheless wished it such a measure of success as would ruin their rival, La Salle. Hence, no little satisfaction mingled with their anxiety when they heard that the Iroquois were again threatening to invade the Miamis and the Illinois; and thus La Barre, whose duty it was strenuously to oppose the intrigue of the English, and use every effort to quiet the ferocious bands whom they were hounding against the Indian allies of the French, was, in fact, but half-hearted in the work. He cut off La Salle from all supplies; detained the men whom he sent for succor; and, at a conference with the Iroquois, told them that they were welcome to plunder and kill him.[256] [Sidenote: A NEW ALARM.] The old governor, and the unscrupulous ring with which he was associated, now took a step to which he was doubtless emboldened by the tone of the King's letter, in condemnation of La Salle's enterprise. He resolved to seize Fort Frontenac, the property of La Salle, under the pretext that the latter had not fulfilled the conditions of the grant, and had not maintained a sufficient garrison.[257] Two of his associates, La Chesnaye and Le Ber, armed with an order from him, went up and took possession, despite the remonstrances of La Salle's creditors and mortgagees; lived on La Salle's stores, sold for their own profit, and (it is said) that of La Barre, the provisions sent by the King, and turned in the cattle to pasture on the growing crops. La Forest, La Salle's lieutenant, was told that he might retain the command of the fort if he would join the associates; but he refused, and sailed in the autumn for France.[258] Meanwhile La Salle remained at the Illinois in extreme embarrassment, cut off from supplies, robbed of his men who had gone to seek them, and disabled from fulfilling the pledges he had given to the surrounding Indians. Such was his position, when reports came to Fort St. Louis that the Iroquois were at hand. The Indian hamlets were wild with terror, beseeching him for succor which he had no power to give. Happily, the report proved false. No Iroquois appeared; the threatened attack was postponed, and the summer passed away in peace. But La Salle's position, with the governor his declared enemy, was intolerable and untenable; and there was no resource but in the protection of the court. Early in the autumn, he left Tonty in command of the rock, bade farewell to his savage retainers, and descended to Quebec, intending to sail for France. On his way, he met the Chevalier de Baugis, an officer of the King's dragoons, commissioned by La Barre to take possession of Fort St. Louis, and bearing letters from the governor ordering La Salle to come to Quebec,--a superfluous command, as he was then on his way thither. He smothered his wrath, and wrote to Tonty to receive De Baugis well. The chevalier and his party proceeded to the Illinois, and took possession of the fort,--De Baugis commanding for the governor, while Tonty remained as representative of La Salle. The two officers could not live in harmony; but, with the return of spring, each found himself in sore need of aid from the other. Towards the end of March the Iroquois attacked their citadel, and besieged it for six days, but at length withdrew discomfited, carrying with them a number of Indian prisoners, most of whom escaped from their clutches.[259] [Sidenote: LA SALLE SAILS FOR FRANCE.] Meanwhile, La Salle had sailed for France. FOOTNOTES: [245] The boundaries are laid down on the great map of Franquelin, made in 1684, and preserved in the Dépôt des Cartes of the Marine. The line runs along the south shore of Lake Erie, and thence follows the heads of the streams flowing into Lake Michigan. It then turns northwest, and is lost in the vast unknown of the now British Territories. On the south, it is drawn by the heads of the streams flowing into the Gulf, as far west as Mobile, after which it follows the shore of the Gulf to a little south of the Rio Grande; then runs west, northwest, and finally north, along the range of the Rocky Mountains. [246] Tonty, 1684, 1693. [247] "Starved Rock" perfectly answers, in every respect, to the indications of the contemporary maps and documents concerning "Le Rocher," the site of La Salle's fort of St. Louis. It is laid down on several contemporary maps, besides the great map of La Salle's discoveries, made in 1684. They all place it on the south side of the river; whereas Buffalo Rock, three miles above, which has been supposed to be the site of the fort, is on the north. The latter is crowned by a plateau of great extent, is but sixty feet high, is accessible at many points, and would require a large force to defend it; whereas La Salle chose "Le Rocher," because a few men could hold it against a multitude. Charlevoix, in 1721, describes both rocks, and says that the top of Buffalo Rock had been occupied by the Miami village, so that it was known as _Le Fort des Miamis_. This is confirmed by Joutel, who found the Miamis here in 1687. Charlevoix then speaks of "Le Rocher," calling it by that name; says that it is about a league below, on the left or south side, forming a sheer cliff, very high, and looking like a fortress on the border of the river. He saw remains of palisades at the top, which, he thinks, were made by the Illinois (_Journal Historique, Let._ xxvii.), though his countrymen had occupied it only three years before. "The French reside on the rock (Le Rocher), which is very lofty and impregnable." (_Memoir on Western Indians_, 1718, _in N. Y. Col. Docs._, ix. 890.) St. Cosme, passing this way in 1699, mentions it as "Le Vieux Fort," and says that it is "a rock about a hundred feet high at the edge of the river, where M. de la Salle built a fort, since abandoned." (_Journal de St. Cosme._) Joutel, who was here in 1687, says, "Fort St. Louis is on a steep rock, about two hundred feet high, with the river running at its base." He adds that its only defences were palisades. The true height, as stated above, is about a hundred and twenty-five feet. A traditional interest also attaches to this rock. It is said that, in the Indian wars that followed the assassination of Pontiac, a few years after the cession of Canada, a party of Illinois, assailed by the Pottawattamies, here took refuge, defying attack. At length they were all destroyed by starvation, and hence the name of "Starved Rock." For other proofs concerning this locality, see _ante_, 239. [248] This singular extemporized colony of La Salle, on the banks of the Illinois, is laid down in detail on the great map of La Salle's discoveries, by Jean Baptiste Franquelin, finished in 1684. There can be no doubt that this part of the work is composed from authentic data. La Salle himself, besides others of his party, came down from the Illinois in the autumn of 1683, and undoubtedly supplied the young engineer with materials. The various Indian villages, or cantonments, are all indicated, with the number of warriors belonging to each, the aggregate corresponding very nearly with that of La Salle's report to the minister. The Illinois, properly so called, are set down at 1,200 warriors; the Miamis, at 1,300; the Shawanoes, at 200; the Ouiatnoens (Weas), at 500; the Peanqhichia (Piankishaw) band, at 150; the Pepikokia, at 160; the Kilatica, at 300; and the Ouabona, at 70,--in all, 3,880 warriors. A few others, probably Abenakis, lived in the fort. The Fort St. Louis is placed, on the map, at the exact site of Starved Rock, and the Illinois village at the place where, as already mentioned (see 239), Indian remains in great quantities are yearly ploughed up. The Shawanoe camp, or village, is placed on the south side of the river, behind the fort. The country is here hilly, broken, and now, as in La Salle's time, covered with wood, which, however, soon ends in the open prairie. A short time since, the remains of a low, irregular earthwork of considerable extent were discovered at the intersection of two ravines, about twenty-four hundred feet behind, or south of, Starved Rock. The earthwork follows the line of the ravines on two sides. On the east, there is an opening, or gateway, leading to the adjacent prairie. The work is very irregular in form, and shows no trace of the civilized engineer. In the stump of an oak-tree upon it, Dr. Paul counted a hundred and sixty rings of annual growth. The village of the Shawanoes (Chaouenons), on Franquelin's map, corresponds with the position of this earthwork. I am indebted to the kindness of Dr. John Paul and Col. D. F. Hitt, the proprietor of Starved Rock, for a plan of these curious remains and a survey of the neighboring district. I must also express my obligations to Mr. W. E. Bowman, photographer at Ottawa, for views of Starved Rock and other features of the neighboring scenery. An interesting relic of the early explorers of this region was found a few years ago at Ottawa, six miles above Starved Rock, in the shape of a small iron gun, buried several feet deep in the drift of the river. It consists of a welded tube of iron, about an inch and a half in calibre, strengthened by a series of thick iron rings, cooled on, after the most ancient as well as the most recent method of making cannon. It is about fourteen inches long, the part near the muzzle having been burst off. The construction is very rude. Small field-pieces, on a similar principle, were used in the fourteenth century. Several of them may be seen at the Musée d'Artillerie at Paris. In the time of Louis XIV., the art of casting cannon was carried to a high degree of perfection. The gun in question may have been made by a French blacksmith on the spot. A far less probable supposition is, that it is a relic of some unrecorded visit of the Spaniards; but the pattern of the piece would have been antiquated, even in the time of De Soto. [249] The royal instructions to La Barre, on his assuming the government, dated at Versailles, 10 May, 1682, require him to give no further permission to make journeys of discovery towards the Sioux and the Mississippi, as his Majesty thinks his subjects better employed in cultivating the land. The letter adds, however, that La Salle is to be allowed to continue his discoveries, if they appear to be useful. The same instructions are repeated in a letter of the Minister of the Marine to the new intendant of Canada, De Meules. [250] _Lettre de La Salle à La Barre, Fort St. Louis, 2 Avril, 1683._ The above is condensed from passages in the original. [251] _Lettre de La Salle à La Barre, Portage de Chicagou, 4 Juin, 1683._ The substance of the letter is given above, in a condensed form. A passage is omitted, in which La Salle expresses his belief that his vessel, the "Griffin," had been destroyed, not by Indians, but by the pilot, who, as he thinks, had been induced to sink her, and then, with some of the crew, attempted to join Du Lhut with their plunder, but were captured by Indians on the Mississippi. [252] _Lettre de La Barre au Ministre, 14 Nov., 1682._ [253] _Lettre de La Barre au Ministre, 30 Avril, 1683._ La Salle had spent the winter, not at Green Bay, as this slanderous letter declares, but in the Illinois country. [254] _Lettre de La Barre au Ministre, 4 Nov., 1683._ [255] _Lettre du Roy à La Barre, 5 Août, 1683._ [256] _Mémoire pour rendre compte à Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignelay de l'État où le Sieur de Lasalle a laissé le Fort Frontenac pendant le temps de sa découverte._ On La Barre's conduct, see "Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV.," chap. v. [257] La Salle, when at Mackinaw, on his way to Quebec, in 1682, had been recalled to the Illinois, as we have seen, by a threatened Iroquois invasion. There is before me a copy of a letter which he then wrote to Count Frontenac, begging him to send up more soldiers to the fort, at his (La Salle's) expense. Frontenac, being about to sail for France, gave this letter to his newly arrived successor, La Barre, who, far from complying with the request, withdrew La Salle's soldiers already at the fort, and then made its defenceless state a pretext for seizing it. This statement is made in the memoir addressed to Seignelay, before cited. [258] These are the statements of the memorial addressed in La Salle's behalf to the minister, Seignelay. [259] Tonty, 1684, 1693; _Lettre de La Barre au Ministre, 5 Juin, 1684; Ibid., 9 Juillet, 1684_. CHAPTER XXII. 1680-1683. LA SALLE PAINTED BY HIMSELF. Difficulty of knowing him; his Detractors; his Letters; vexations of his Position; his Unfitness for Trade; risks Of Correspondence; his Reported Marriage; alleged Ostentation; motives of Action; charges of Harshness; intrigues against him; unpopular Manners; a Strange Confession; his Strength and his Weakness; contrasts of his Character. We have seen La Salle in his acts. While he crosses the sea, let us look at him in himself. Few men knew him, even of those who saw him most. Reserved and self-contained as he was, with little vivacity or gayety or love of pleasure, he was a sealed book to those about him. His daring energy and endurance were patent to all; but the motive forces that urged him, and the influences that wrought beneath the surface of his character, were hidden where few eyes could pierce. His enemies were free to make their own interpretations, and they did not fail to use the opportunity. The interests arrayed against him were incessantly at work. His men were persuaded to desert and rob him; the Iroquois were told that he was arming the western tribes against them; the western tribes were told that he was betraying them to the Iroquois; his proceedings were denounced to the court; and continual efforts were made to alienate his associates. They, on their part, sore as they were from disappointment and loss, were in a mood to listen to the aspersions cast upon him; and they pestered him with letters, asking questions, demanding explanations, and dunning him for money. It is through his answers that we are best able to judge him; and at times, by those touches of nature which make the whole world kin, they teach us to know him and to feel for him. [Sidenote: CHARGES AGAINST LA SALLE.] The main charges against him were that he was a crack-brained schemer, that he was harsh to his men, that he traded where he had no right to trade, and that his discoveries were nothing but a pretence for making money. No accusations appear that touch his integrity or his honor. It was hard to convince those who were always losing by him. A remittance of good dividends would have been his best answer, and would have made any other answer needless; but, instead of bills of exchange, he had nothing to give but excuses and explanations. In the autumn of 1680, he wrote to an associate who had demanded the long-deferred profits: "I have had many misfortunes in the last two years. In the autumn of '78, I lost a vessel by the fault of the pilot; in the next summer, the deserters I told you about robbed me of eight or ten thousand livres' worth of goods. In the autumn of '79, I lost a vessel worth more than ten thousand crowns; in the next spring, five or six rascals stole the value of five or six thousand livres in goods and beaver-skins, at the Illinois, when I was absent. Two other men of mine, carrying furs worth four or five thousand livres, were killed or drowned in the St. Lawrence, and the furs were lost. Another robbed me of three thousand livres in beaver-skins stored at Michilimackinac. This last spring, I lost about seventeen hundred livres' worth of goods by the upsetting of a canoe. Last winter, the fort and buildings at Niagara were burned by the fault of the commander; and in the spring the deserters, who passed that way, seized a part of the property that remained, and escaped to New York. All this does not discourage me in the least, and will only defer for a year or two the returns of profit which you ask for this year. These losses are no more my fault than the loss of the ship 'St. Joseph' was yours. I cannot be everywhere, and cannot help making use of the people of the country." He begs his correspondent to send out an agent of his own. "He need not be very _savant_, but he must be faithful, patient of labor, and fond neither of gambling, women, nor good cheer; for he will find none of these with me. Trusting in what he will write you, you may close your ears to what priests and Jesuits tell you. [Sidenote: VEXATIONS OF HIS POSITION.] "After having put matters in good trim for trade I mean to withdraw, though I think it will be very profitable; for I am disgusted to find that I must always be making excuses, which is a part I cannot play successfully. I am utterly tired of this business; for I see that it is not enough to put property and life in constant peril, but that it requires more pains to answer envy and detraction than to overcome the difficulties inseparable from my undertaking." And he makes a variety of proposals, by which he hopes to get rid of a part of his responsibility to his correspondent. He begs him again to send out a confidential agent, saying that for his part he does not want to have any account to render, except that which he owes to the court, of his discoveries. He adds, strangely enough for a man burdened with such liabilities, "I have neither the habit nor the inclination to keep books, nor have I anybody with me who knows how." He says to another correspondent, "I think, like you, that partnerships in business are dangerous, on account of the little practice I have in these matters." It is not surprising that he wanted to leave his associates to manage business for themselves: "You know that this trade is good; and with a trusty agent to conduct it for you, you run no risk. As for me, I will keep the charge of the forts, the command of posts and of men, the management of Indians and Frenchmen, and the establishment of the colony, which will remain my property, leaving your agent and mine to look after our interests, and drawing my half without having any hand in what belongs to you." La Salle was a very indifferent trader; and his heart was not in the commercial part of his enterprise. He aimed at achievement, and thirsted after greatness. His ambition was to found another France in the West; and if he meant to govern it also,--as without doubt he did,--it is not a matter of wonder or of blame. His misfortune was, that, in the pursuit of a great design, he was drawn into complications of business with which he was ill fitted to grapple. He had not the instinct of the successful merchant. He dared too much, and often dared unwisely; attempted more than he could grasp, and forgot, in his sanguine anticipations, to reckon with enormous and incalculable risks. Except in the narrative parts, his letters are rambling and unconnected,--which is natural enough, written, as they were, at odd moments, by camp-fires and among Indians. The style is crude; and being well aware of this, he disliked writing, especially as the risk was extreme that his letters would miss their destination. "There is too little good faith in this country, and too many people on the watch, for me to trust anybody with what I wish to send you. Even sealed letters are not too safe. Not only are they liable to be lost or stopped by the way, but even such as escape the curiosity of spies lie at Montreal, waiting a long time to be forwarded." [Sidenote: HIS LETTERS INTERCEPTED.] Again, he writes: "I cannot pardon myself for the stoppage of my letters, though I made every effort to make them reach you. I wrote to you in '79 (in August), and sent my letters to M. de la Forest, who gave them in good faith to my brother. I don't know what he has done with them. I wrote you another, by the vessel that was lost last year. I sent two canoes, by two different routes; but the wind and the rain were so furious that they wintered on the way, and I found my letters at the fort on my return. I now send you one of them, which I wrote last year to M. Thouret, in which you will find a full account of what passed, from the time when we left the outlet of Lake Erie down to the sixteenth of August, 1680. What preceded was told at full length in the letters my brother has seen fit to intercept." This brother was the Sulpitian priest, Jean Cavelier, who had been persuaded that La Salle's enterprise would be ruinous, and therefore set himself sometimes to stop it altogether, and sometimes to manage it in his own way. "His conduct towards me," says La Salle, "has always been so strange, through the small love he bears me, that it was clear gain for me when he went away; since while he stayed he did nothing but cross all my plans, which I was forced to change every moment to suit his caprice." There was one point on which the interference of his brother and of his correspondents was peculiarly annoying. They thought it for their interest that he should remain a single man; whereas, it seems that his devotion to his purpose was not so engrossing as to exclude more tender subjects. He writes:-- "I am told that you have been uneasy about my pretended marriage. I had not thought about it at that time; and I shall not make any engagement of the sort till I have given you reason to be satisfied with me. It is a little extraordinary that I must render account of a matter which is free to all the world. "In fine, Monsieur, it is only as an earnest of something more substantial that I write to you so much at length. I do not doubt that you will hereafter change the ideas about me which some persons wish to give you, and that you will be relieved of the anxiety which all that has happened reasonably causes you. I have written this letter at more than twenty different times; and I am more than a hundred and fifty leagues from where I began it. I have still two hundred more to get over, before reaching the Illinois. I am taking with me twenty-five men to the relief of the six or seven who remain with the Sieur de Tonty." This was the journey which ended in that scene of horror at the ruined town of the Illinois. [Sidenote: CHARGED WITH OSTENTATION.] To the same correspondent, pressing him for dividends, he says: "You repeat continually that you will not be satisfied unless I make you large returns of profit. Though I have reason to thank you for what you have done for this enterprise, it seems to me that I have done still more, since I have put everything at stake; and it would be hard to reproach me either with foolish outlays or with the ostentation which is falsely imputed to me. Let my accusers explain what they mean. Since I have been in this country, I have had neither servants nor clothes nor fare which did not savor more of meanness than of ostentation; and the moment I see that there is anything with which either you or the court find fault, I assure you that I will give it up,--for the life I am leading has no other attraction for me than that of honor; and the more danger and difficulty there is in undertakings of this sort, the more worthy of honor I think they are." His career attests the sincerity of these words. They are a momentary betrayal of the deep enthusiasm of character which may be read in his life, but to which he rarely allowed the faintest expression. "Above all," he continues, "if you want me to keep on, do not compel me to reply to all the questions and fancies of priests and Jesuits. They have more leisure than I; and I am not subtle enough to anticipate all their empty stories. I could easily give you the information you ask; but I have a right to expect that you will not believe all you hear, nor require me to prove to you that I am not a madman. That is the first point to which you should have attended, before having business with me; and in our long acquaintance, either you must have found me out, or else I must have had long intervals of sanity." To another correspondent he defends himself against the charge of harshness to his men: "The facility I am said to want is out of place with this sort of people, who are libertines for the most part; and to indulge them means to tolerate blasphemy, drunkenness, lewdness, and a license incompatible with any kind of order. It will not be found that I have in any case whatever treated any man harshly, except for blasphemies and other such crimes openly committed. These I cannot tolerate: first, because such compliance would give grounds for another accusation, much more just; secondly, because, if I allowed such disorders to become habitual, it would be hard to keep the men in subordination and obedience, as regards executing the work I am commissioned to do; thirdly, because the debaucheries, too common with this rabble, are the source of endless delays and frequent thieving; and, finally, because I am a Christian, and do not want to bear the burden of their crimes. [Sidenote: INTRIGUES AGAINST HIM.] "What is said about my servants has not even a show of truth; for I use no servants here, and all my men are on the same footing. I grant that as those who have lived with me are steadier and give me no reason to complain of their behavior, I treat them as gently as I should treat the others if they resembled them, and as those who were formerly my servants are the only ones I can trust, I speak more openly to them than to the rest, who are generally spies of my enemies. The twenty-two men who deserted and robbed me are not to be believed on their word, deserters and thieves as they are. They are ready enough to find some pretext for their crime; and it needs as unjust a judge as the intendant to prompt such rascals to enter complaints against a person to whom he had given a warrant to arrest them. But, to show the falsity of these charges, Martin Chartier, who was one of those who excited the rest to do as they did, was never with me at all; and the rest had made their plot before seeing me." And he proceeds to relate, in great detail, a variety of circumstances to prove that his men had been instigated first to desert, and then to slander him; adding, "Those who remain with me are the first I had, and they have not left me for six years." "I have a hundred other proofs of the bad counsel given to these deserters, and will produce them when wanted; but as they themselves are the only witnesses of the severity they complain of, while the witnesses of their crimes are unimpeachable, why am I refused the justice I demand, and why is their secret escape connived at? "I do not know what you mean by having popular manners. There is nothing special in my food, clothing, or lodging, which are all the same for me as for my men. How can it be that I do not talk with them? I have no other company. M. de Tonty has often found fault with me because I stopped too often to talk with them. You do not know the men one must employ here, when you exhort me to make merry with them. They are incapable of that; for they are never pleased, unless one gives free rein to their drunkenness and other vices. If that is what you call having popular manners, neither honor nor inclination would let me stoop to gain their favor in a way so disreputable: and, besides, the consequences would be dangerous, and they would have the same contempt for me that they have for all who treat them in this fashion. "You write me that even my friends say that I am not a man of popular manners. I do not know what friends they are. I know of none in this country. To all appearance they are enemies, more subtle and secret than the rest. I make no exceptions; for I know that those who seem to give me support do not do it out of love for me, but because they are in some sort bound in honor, and that in their hearts they think I have dealt ill with them. M. Plet will tell you what he has heard about it himself, and the reasons they have to give.[260] I have seen it for a long time; and these secret stabs they give me show it very plainly. After that, it is not surprising that I open my mind to nobody, and distrust everybody. I have reasons that I cannot write. "For the rest, Monsieur, pray be well assured that the information you are so good as to give me is received with a gratitude equal to the genuine friendship from which it proceeds; and, however unjust are the charges made against me, I should be much more unjust myself if I did not feel that I have as much reason to thank you for telling me of them as I have to complain of others for inventing them. [Sidenote: HIS MANNERS.] "As for what you say about my look and manner, I myself confess that you are not far from right. But _naturam expellas_; and if I am wanting in expansiveness and show of feeling towards those with whom I associate, _it is only through a timidity which is natural to me, and which has made me leave various employments, where without it I could have succeeded_. But as I judged myself ill-fitted for them on account of this defect, I have chosen a life more suited to my solitary disposition; which, nevertheless, does not make me harsh to my people, though, joined to a life among savages, it makes me, perhaps, less polished and complaisant than the atmosphere of Paris requires. I well believe that there is self-love in this; and that, knowing how little I am accustomed to a more polite life, the fear of making mistakes makes me more reserved than I like to be. So I rarely expose myself to conversation with those in whose company I am afraid of making blunders, and can hardly help making them. Abbé Renaudot knows with what repugnance I had the honor to appear before Monseigneur de Conti; and sometimes it took me a week to make up my mind to go to the audience,--that is, when I had time to think about myself, and was not driven by pressing business. It is much the same with letters, which I never write except when pushed to it, and for the same reason. It is a defect of which I shall never rid myself as long as I live, often as it spites me against myself, and often as I quarrel with myself about it." [Sidenote: HIS STRENGTH AND WEAKNESS.] Here is a strange confession for a man like La Salle. Without doubt, the timidity of which he accuses himself had some of its roots in pride; but not the less was his pride vexed and humbled by it. It is surprising that, being what he was, he could have brought himself to such an avowal under any circumstances or any pressure of distress. Shyness; a morbid fear of committing himself; and incapacity to express, and much more to simulate, feeling,--a trait sometimes seen in those with whom feeling is most deep,--are strange ingredients in the character of a man who had grappled so dauntlessly with life on its harshest and rudest side. They were deplorable defects for one in his position. He lacked that sympathetic power, the inestimable gift of the true leader of men, in which lies the difference between a willing and a constrained obedience. This solitary being, hiding his shyness under a cold reserve, could rouse no enthusiasm in his followers. He lived in the purpose which he had made a part of himself, nursed his plans in secret, and seldom asked or accepted advice. He trusted himself, and learned more and more to trust no others. One may fairly infer that distrust was natural to him; but the inference may possibly be wrong. Bitter experience had schooled him to it; for he lived among snares, pitfalls, and intriguing enemies. He began to doubt even the associates who, under representations he had made them in perfect good faith, had staked their money on his enterprise, and lost it, or were likely to lose it. They pursued him with advice and complaint, and half believed that he was what his maligners called him,--a visionary or a madman. It galled him that they had suffered for their trust in him, and that they had repented their trust. His lonely and shadowed nature needed the mellowing sunshine of success, and his whole life was a fight with adversity. All that appears to the eye is his intrepid conflict with obstacles without; but this, perhaps, was no more arduous than the invisible and silent strife of a nature at war with itself,--the pride, aspiration, and bold energy that lay at the base of his character battling against the superficial weakness that mortified and angered him. In such a man, the effect of such an infirmity is to concentrate and intensify the force within. In one form or another, discordant natures are common enough; but very rarely is the antagonism so irreconcilable as it was in him. And the greater the antagonism, the greater the pain. There are those in whom the sort of timidity from which he suffered is matched with no quality that strongly revolts against it. These gentle natures may at least have peace, but for him there was no peace. Cavelier de La Salle stands in history like a statue cast in iron; but his own unwilling pen betrays the man, and reveals in the stern, sad figure an object of human interest and pity.[261] FOOTNOTES: [260] His cousin, François Plet, was in Canada in 1680, where, with La Salle's approval, he carried on the trade of Fort Frontenac, in order to indemnify himself for money advanced. La Salle always speaks of him with esteem and gratitude. [261] The following is the character of La Salle, as drawn by his friend, Abbé Bernou, in a memorial to the minister Seignelay: "Il est irréprochable dans ses moeurs, réglé dans sa conduite, et qui veut de l'ordre parmy ses gens. Il est savant, judicieux, politique, vigilant, infatigable, sobre, et intrépide. Il entend suffisament l'architecture civile, militaire, et navale ainsy que l'agriculture; il parle ou entend quatre ou cinq langues des Sauvages, et a beaucoup de facilité pour apprendre les autres. Il sçait toutes leurs manières et obtient d'eux tout ce qu'il veut par son adresse, par son éloquence, et parce qu'il est beaucoup estimé d'eux. Dans ses voyages il ne fait pas meilleure chère que le moindre de ses gens et se donne plus de peine que pas un pour les encourager, et il y a lieu de croire qu'avec la protection de Monseigneur il fondera des colonies plus considérables que toutes celles que les François ont établies jusqu'à présent."--_Mémoire pour Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignelay_, 1682 (Margry, ii. 277). The extracts given in the foregoing chapter are from La Salle's long letters of 29 Sept., 1680, and 22 Aug., 1682 (1681?). Both are printed in the second volume of the Margry collection, and the originals of both are in the Bibliothèque Nationale. The latter seems to have been written to La Salle's friend, Abbé Bernou; and the former, to a certain M. Thouret. CHAPTER XXIII. 1684. A NEW ENTERPRISE. La Salle at Court: his Proposals.--Occupation of Louisiana.--Invasion of Mexico.--Royal Favor.--Preparation.--A Divided Command.--Beaujeu and La Salle.--Mental Condition of La Salle: his Farewell to his Mother. When La Salle reached Paris, he went to his old lodgings in Rue de la Truanderie, and, it is likely enough, thought for an instant of the adventures and vicissitudes he had passed since he occupied them before. Another ordeal awaited him. He must confront, not painted savages with tomahawk and knife, but--what he shrank from more--the courtly throngs that still live and move in the pages of Sévigné and Saint-Simon. The news of his discovery and the rumor of his schemes were the talk of a moment among the courtiers, and then were forgotten. It was not so with their master. La Salle's friends and patrons did not fail him. A student and a recluse in his youth, and a backwoodsman in his manhood, he had what was to him the formidable honor of an interview with royalty itself, and stood with such philosophy as he could command before the gilded arm-chair, where, majestic and awful, the power of France sat embodied. The King listened to all he said; but the results of the interview were kept so secret that it was rumored in the ante-chambers that his proposals had been rejected.[262] On the contrary, they had met with more than favor. The moment was opportune for La Salle. The King had long been irritated against the Spaniards, because they not only excluded his subjects from their American ports, but forbade them to enter the Gulf of Mexico. Certain Frenchmen who had sailed on this forbidden sea had been seized and imprisoned; and more recently a small vessel of the royal navy had been captured for the same offence. This had drawn from the King a declaration that every sea should be free to all his subjects; and Count d'Estrées was sent with a squadron to the Gulf, to exact satisfaction of the Spaniards, or fight them if they refused it.[263] This was in time of peace. War had since arisen between the two crowns, and brought with it the opportunity of settling the question forever. In order to do so, the minister Seignelay, like his father Colbert, proposed to establish a French port on the Gulf, as a permanent menace to the Spaniards and a basis of future conquest. It was in view of this plan that La Salle's past enterprises had been favored; and the proposals he now made were in perfect accord with it. [Sidenote: LA SALLE'S PROPOSALS.] These proposals were set forth in two memorials. The first of them states that the late Monseigneur Colbert deemed it important for the service of his Majesty to discover a port in the Gulf of Mexico; that to this end the memorialist, La Salle, made five journeys of upwards of five thousand leagues, in great part on foot; and traversed more than six hundred leagues of unknown country, among savages and cannibals, at the cost of a hundred and fifty thousand francs. He now proposes to return by way of the Gulf of Mexico and the mouth of the Mississippi to the countries he has discovered, whence great benefits may be expected: first, the cause of God may be advanced by the preaching of the gospel to many Indian tribes; and, secondly, great conquests may be effected for the glory of the King, by the seizure of provinces rich in silver mines, and defended only by a few indolent and effeminate Spaniards. The Sieur de la Salle, pursues the memorial, binds himself to be ready for the accomplishment of this enterprise within one year after his arrival on the spot; and he asks for this purpose only one vessel and two hundred men, with their arms, munitions, pay, and maintenance. When Monseigneur shall direct him, he will give the details of what he proposes. The memorial then describes the boundless extent, the fertility and resources of the country watered by the river Colbert, or Mississippi; the necessity of guarding it against foreigners, who will be eager to seize it now that La Salle's discovery has made it known; and the ease with which it may be defended by one or two forts at a proper distance above its mouth, which would form the key to an interior region eight hundred leagues in extent. "Should foreigners anticipate us," he adds, "they will complete the ruin of New France, which they already hem in by their establishments of Virginia, Pennsylvania, New England, and Hudson's Bay."[264] The second memorial is more explicit. The place, it says, which the Sieur de la Salle proposes to fortify, is on the river Colbert, or Mississippi, sixty leagues above its mouth, where the soil is very fertile, the climate very mild, and whence we, the French, may control the continent,--since, the river being narrow, we could defend ourselves by means of fire-ships against a hostile fleet, while the position is excellent both for attacking an enemy or retreating in case of need. The neighboring Indians detest the Spaniards, but love the French, having been won over by the kindness of the Sieur de la Salle. We could form of them an army of more than fifteen thousand savages, who, supported by the French and Abenakis, followers of the Sieur de la Salle, could easily subdue the province of New Biscay (the most northern province of Mexico), where there are but four hundred Spaniards, more fit to work the mines than to fight. On the north of New Biscay lie vast forests, extending to the river Seignelay[265] (Red River), which is but forty or fifty leagues from the Spanish province. This river affords the means of attacking it to great advantage. In view of these facts, pursues the memorial, the Sieur de la Salle offers, if the war with Spain continues, to undertake this conquest with two hundred men from France. He will take on his way fifty buccaneers at St. Domingo, and direct the four thousand Indian warriors at Fort St. Louis of the Illinois to descend the river and join him. He will separate his force into three divisions, and attack at the same time the centre and the two extremities of the province. To accomplish this great design, he asks only for a vessel of thirty guns, a few cannon for the forts, and power to raise in France two hundred such men as he shall think fit, to be armed, paid, and maintained six months at the King's charge. And the Sieur de la Salle binds himself, if the execution of this plan is prevented for more than three years, by peace with Spain, to refund to his Majesty all the costs of the enterprise, on pain of forfeiting the government of the ports he will have established.[266] [Sidenote: LA SALLES'S PLANS.] Such, in brief, was the substance of this singular proposition. And, first, it is to be observed that it is based on a geographical blunder, the nature of which is explained by the map of La Salle's discoveries made in this very year. Here the river Seignelay, or Red River, is represented as running parallel to the northern border of Mexico, and at no great distance from it,--the region now called Texas being almost entirely suppressed. According to the map, New Biscay might be reached from this river in a few days; and, after crossing the intervening forests, the coveted mines of Ste. Barbe, or Santa Barbara, would be within striking distance.[267] That La Salle believed in the possibility of invading the Spanish province of New Biscay from Red River there can be no doubt; neither can it reasonably be doubted that he hoped at some future day to make the attempt; and yet it is incredible that a man in his sober senses could have proposed this scheme with the intention of attempting to execute it at the time and in the manner which he indicates.[268] This memorial bears some indications of being drawn up in order to produce a certain effect on the minds of the King and his minister. La Salle's immediate necessity was to obtain from them the means for establishing a fort and a colony within the mouth of the Mississippi. This was essential to his own plans; nor did he in the least exaggerate the value of such an establishment to the French nation, and the importance of anticipating other powers in the possession of it. But he thought that he needed a more glittering lure to attract the eyes of Louis and Seignelay; and thus, it may be, he held before them, in a definite and tangible form, the project of Spanish conquest which had haunted his imagination from youth,--trusting that the speedy conclusion of peace, which actually took place, would absolve him from the immediate execution of the scheme, and give him time, with the means placed at his disposal, to mature his plans and prepare for eventual action. Such a procedure may be charged with indirectness; but there is a different explanation, which we shall suggest hereafter, and which implies no such reproach.[269] Even with this madcap enterprise lopped off, La Salle's scheme of Mississippi trade and colonization, perfectly sound in itself, was too vast for an individual,--above all, for one crippled and crushed with debt. While he grasped one link of the great chain, another, no less essential, escaped from his hand; while he built up a colony on the Mississippi, it was reasonably certain that evil would befall his distant colony of the Illinois. [Sidenote: LA BARRE REBUKED.] The glittering project which he now unfolded found favor in the eyes of the King and his minister; for both were in the flush of an unparalleled success, and looked in the future, as in the past, for nothing but triumphs. They granted more than the petitioner asked, as indeed they well might, if they expected the accomplishment of all that he proposed to attempt. La Forest, La Salle's lieutenant, ejected from Fort Frontenac by La Barre, was now at Paris; and he was despatched to Canada, empowered to reoccupy, in La Salle's name, both Fort Frontenac and Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. The King himself wrote to La Barre in a strain that must have sent a cold thrill through the veins of that official. "I hear," he says, "that you have taken possession of Fort Frontenac, the property of the Sieur de la Salle, driven away his men, suffered his land to run to waste, and even told the Iroquois that they might seize him as an enemy of the colony." He adds, that, if this is true, La Barre must make reparation for the wrong, and place all La Salle's property, as well as his men, in the hands of the Sieur de la Forest, "as I am satisfied that Fort Frontenac was not abandoned, as you wrote to me that it had been."[270] Four days later, he wrote to the intendant of Canada, De Meules, to the effect that the bearer, La Forest, is to suffer no impediment, and that La Barre is to surrender to him without reserve all that belongs to La Salle.[271] Armed with this letter, La Forest sailed for Canada.[272] A chief object of his mission, as it was represented to Seignelay, was, not only to save the colony at the Illinois from being broken up by La Barre, but also to collect La Salle's scattered followers, muster the savage warriors around the rock of St. Louis, and lead the whole down the Mississippi, to co-operate in the attack on New Biscay. If La Salle meant that La Forest should seriously attempt to execute such a scheme, then the charges of his enemies that his brain was turned were better founded than he would have us think.[273] [Sidenote: PREPARATION.] He had asked for two vessels,[274] and four were given to him. Agents were sent to Rochelle and Rochefort to gather recruits. A hundred soldiers were enrolled, besides mechanics and laborers; and thirty volunteers, including gentlemen and burghers of condition, joined the expedition. And, as the plan was one no less of colonization than of war, several families embarked for the new land of promise, as well as a number of girls, lured by the prospect of almost certain matrimony. Nor were missionaries wanting. Among them was La Salle's brother, Cavelier, and two other priests of St. Sulpice. Three Récollets were added,--Zenobe Membré, who was then in France, Anastase Douay, and Maxime Le Clerc. The principal vessel was the "Joly," belonging to the royal navy, and carrying thirty-six guns. Another armed vessel of six guns was added, together with a store-ship and a ketch. La Salle had asked for sole command of the expedition, with a subaltern officer, and one or two pilots to sail the vessels as he should direct. Instead of complying, Seignelay gave the command of the vessels to Beaujeu, a captain of the royal navy,--whose authority was restricted to their management at sea, while La Salle was to prescribe the route they were to take, and have entire control of the troops and colonists on land.[275] This arrangement displeased both parties. Beaujeu, an old and experienced officer, was galled that a civilian should be set over him,--and he, too, a burgher lately ennobled; nor was La Salle the man to soothe his ruffled spirit. Detesting a divided command, cold, reserved, and impenetrable, he would have tried the patience of a less excitable colleague. Beaujeu, on his part, though set to a task which he disliked, seems to have meant to do his duty, and to have been willing at the outset to make the relations between himself and his unwelcome associate as agreeable as possible. Unluckily, La Salle discovered that the wife of Beaujeu was devoted to the Jesuits. We have seen the extreme distrust with which he regarded these guides of his youth, and he seems now to have fancied that Beaujeu was their secret ally. Possibly, he suspected that information of his movements would be given to the Spaniards; more probably, he had undefined fears of adverse machinations. Granting that such existed, it was not his interest to stimulate them by needlessly exasperating the naval commander. His deportment, however, was not conciliating; and Beaujeu, prepared to dislike him, presently lost temper. While the vessels still lay at Rochelle; while all was bustle and preparation; while stores, arms, and munitions were embarking; while boys and vagabonds were enlisting as soldiers for the expedition,--Beaujeu was venting his disgust in long letters to the minister. [Sidenote: BEAUJEU AND LA SALLE.] "You have ordered me, Monseigneur, to give all possible aid to this undertaking, and I shall do so to the best of my power; but permit me to take great credit to myself, for I find it very hard to submit to the orders of the Sieur de la Salle, whom I believe to be a man of merit, but who has no experience of war except with savages, and who has no rank, while I have been captain of a ship thirteen years, and have served thirty by sea and land. Besides, Monseigneur, he has told me that in case of his death you have directed that the Sieur de Tonty shall succeed him. This, indeed, is very hard; for, though I am not acquainted with that country, I should be very dull, if, being on the spot, I did not know at the end of a month as much of it as they do. I beg, Monseigneur, that I may at least share the command with them; and that, as regards war, nothing may be done without my knowledge and concurrence,--for, as to their commerce, I neither intend nor desire to know anything about it." Seignelay answered by a rebuff, and told him to make no trouble about the command. This increased his irritation, and he wrote: "In my last letter, Monseigneur, I represented to you the hardship of compelling me to obey M. de la Salle, who has no rank, and _never commanded anybody but school-boys_; and I begged you at least to divide the command between us. I now, Monseigneur, take the liberty to say that I will obey without repugnance, if you order me to do so, having reflected that there can be no competition between the said Sieur de la Salle and me. "Thus far, he has not told me his plan; and he changes his mind every moment. He is a man so suspicious, and so afraid that one will penetrate his secrets, that I dare not ask him anything. He says that M. de Parassy, commissary's clerk, with whom he has often quarrelled, is paid by his enemies to defeat his undertaking; and many other things with which I will not trouble you.... "He pretends that I am only to command the sailors, and have no authority over the volunteer officers and the hundred soldiers who are to take passage in the 'Joly;' and that they are not to recognize or obey me in any way during the voyage.... "He has covered the decks with boxes and chests of such prodigious size that neither the cannon nor the capstan can be worked." La Salle drew up a long list of articles, defining the respective rights and functions of himself and Beaujeu, to whom he presented it for signature. Beaujeu demurred at certain military honors demanded by La Salle, saying that if a marshal of France should come on board his ship, he would have none left to offer him. The point was referred to the naval intendant; and the articles of the treaty having been slightly modified, Beaujeu set his name to it. "By this," he says, "you can judge better of the character of M. de la Salle than by all I can say. He is a man who wants smoke [form and ceremony]. I will give him his fill of it, and, perhaps, more than he likes. "I am bound to an unknown country, to seek what is about as hard to find as the philosopher's stone. It vexes me, Monseigneur, that you should have been involved in a business the success of which is very uncertain. M. de la Salle begins to doubt it himself." While Beaujeu wrote thus to the minister, he was also writing to Cabart de Villermont, one of his friends at Paris, with whom La Salle was also on friendly terms. These letters are lively and entertaining, and by no means suggestive of any secret conspiracy. He might, it is true, have been more reserved in his communications; but he betrays no confidence, for none was placed in him. It is the familiar correspondence of an irritable but not ill-natured veteran, who is placed in an annoying position, and thinks he is making the best of it. La Salle thought that the minister had been too free in communicating the secrets of the expedition to the naval intendant at Rochefort, and through him to Beaujeu. It is hard to see how Beaujeu was to blame for this; but La Salle nevertheless fell into a dispute with him. "He could hardly keep his temper, and used expressions which obliged me to tell him that I cared very little about his affairs, and that the King himself would not speak as he did. He retracted, made excuses, and we parted good friends.... "I do not like his suspiciousness. I think him a good, honest Norman; but Normans are out of fashion. It is one thing to-day, another to-morrow. It seems to me that he is not so sure about his undertaking as he was at Paris. This morning he came to see me, and told me he had changed his mind, and meant to give a new turn to the business, and go to another coast. He gave very poor reasons, to which I assented, to avoid a quarrel. I thought, by what he said, that he wanted to find a scapegoat to bear the blame, in case his plan does not succeed as he hopes. For the rest, I think him a brave man and a true; and I am persuaded that if this business fails, it will be because he does not know enough, and will not trust us of the profession. As for me, I shall do my best to help him, as I have told you before; and I am delighted to have him keep his secret, so that I shall not have to answer for the result. Pray do not show my letters, for fear of committing me with him. He is too suspicious already; and never was Norman so Norman as he, which is a great hinderance to business." Beaujeu came from the same province and calls himself jocularly _un bon gros Normand_. His good-nature, however, rapidly gave way as time went on. "Yesterday," he writes, "this Monsieur told me that he meant to go to the Gulf of Mexico. A little while ago, as I said before, he talked about going to Canada. I see nothing certain in it. It is not that I do not believe that all he says is true; but not being of the profession, and not liking to betray his ignorance, he is puzzled what to do. "I shall go straight forward, without regarding a thousand whims and _bagatelles_. His continual suspicion would drive anybody mad except a Norman like me; but I shall humor him, as I have always done, even to sailing my ship on dry land, if he likes." [Sidenote: AN OPEN QUARREL.] A few days later, there was an open quarrel. "M. de la Salle came to me, and said, rather haughtily and in a tone of command, that I must put provisions for three months more on board my vessel. I told him it was impossible, as she had more lading already than anybody ever dared to put in her before. He would not hear reason, but got angry and abused me in good French, and found fault with me because the vessel would not hold his three months' provisions. He said I ought to have told him of it before. 'And how would you have me tell you,' said I, 'when you never tell me what you mean to do?' We had still another quarrel. He asked me where his officers should take their meals. I told him that they might take them where he pleased; for I gave myself no trouble in the matter, having no orders. He answered that they should not mess on bacon, while the rest ate fowls and mutton. I said that if he would send fowls and mutton on board, his people should eat them; but, as for bacon, I had often ate it myself. At this, he went off and complained to M. Dugué that I refused to embark his provisions, and told him that he must live on bacon. I excused him as not knowing how to behave himself, having spent his life among school-boy brats and savages. Nevertheless, I offered to him, his brother, and two of his friends, seats at my table and the same fare as myself. He answered my civility by an impertinence, saying that he distrusted people who offered so much and seemed so obliging. I could not help telling him that I saw he was brought up in the provinces." This was touching La Salle on a sensitive point. Beaujeu continues: "In fact, you knew him better than I; for I always took him for a gentleman (_honnête homme_). I see now that he is anything but that. Pray set Abbé Renaudot and M. Morel right about this man, and tell them he is not what they take him for. Adieu. It has struck twelve: the postman is just going." Bad as was the state of things, it soon grew worse. Renaudot wrote to La Salle that Beaujeu was writing to Villermont everything that happened, and that Villermont showed the letters to all his acquaintance. Villermont was a relative of the Jesuit Beschefer; and this was sufficient to suggest some secret machination to the mind of La Salle. Villermont's fault, however, seems to have been simple indiscretion, for which Beaujeu took him sharply to task. "I asked you to burn my letters; and I cannot help saying that I am angry with you, not because you make known my secrets, but because you show letters scrawled in haste, and sent off without being even read over. M. de la Salle not having told me his secret, though M. de Seignelay ordered him to tell me, I am not obliged to keep it, and have as good a right as anybody to make my conjectures on what I read about it in the _Gazette de Hollande_. Let Abbé Renaudot glorify M. de la Salle as much as he likes, and make him a Cortez, a Pizarro, or an Almagro,--that is nothing to me; but do not let him speak of me as an obstacle in his hero's way. Let him understand that I know how to execute the orders of the court as well as he.... [Sidenote: LA SALLE'S INDISCRETION.] "You ask how I get on with M. de la Salle. Don't you know that this man is impenetrable, and that there is no knowing what he thinks of one? He told a person of note whom I will not name that he had suspicions about our correspondence, as well as about Madame de Beaujeu's devotion to the Jesuits. His distrust is incredible. If he sees one of his people speak to the rest, he suspects something, and is gruff with them. He told me himself that he wanted to get rid of M. de Tonty, who is in America." La Salle's claim to exclusive command of the soldiers on board the "Joly" was a source of endless trouble. Beaujeu declared that he would not set sail till officers, soldiers, and volunteers had all sworn to obey him when at sea; at which La Salle had the indiscretion to say, "If I am not master of my soldiers, how can I make him [Beaujeu] do his duty in case he does not want to do it?" Beaujeu says that this affair made a great noise among the officers at Rochefort, and adds: "_There are very few people who do not think that his brain is touched._ I have spoken to some who have known him twenty years. They all say that he was always rather visionary." It is difficult not to suspect that the current belief at Rochefort had some foundation; and that the deadly strain of extreme hardship, prolonged anxiety, and alternation of disaster and success, joined to the fever which nearly killed him, had unsettled his judgment and given a morbid development to his natural defects. His universal suspicion, which included even the stanch and faithful Henri de Tonty; his needless provocation of persons whose good-will was necessary to him; his doubts whether he should sail for the Gulf or for Canada, when to sail to Canada would have been to renounce, or expose to almost certain defeat, an enterprise long cherished and definitely planned,--all point to one conclusion. It may be thought that his doubts were feigned, in order to hide his destination to the last moment; but if so, he attempted to blind not only his ill wishers, but his mother, whom he also left in uncertainty as to his route. [Sidenote: AN OVERWROUGHT BRAIN.] Unless we assume that his scheme of invading Mexico was thrown out as a bait to the King, it is hard to reconcile it with the supposition of mental soundness. To base so critical an attempt on a geographical conjecture, which rested on the slightest possible information, and was in fact a total error; to postpone the perfectly sound plan of securing the mouth of the Mississippi, to a wild project of leading fifteen thousand savages for an unknown distance through an unknown country to attack an unknown enemy,--was something more than Quixotic daring. The King and the minister saw nothing impracticable in it, for they did not know the country or its inhabitants. They saw no insuperable difficulty in mustering and keeping together fifteen thousand of the most wayward and unstable savages on earth, split into a score and more of tribes, some hostile to each other and some to the French; nor in the problem of feeding such a mob, on a march of hundreds of miles; nor in the plan of drawing four thousand of them from the Illinois, nearly two thousand miles distant, though some of these intended allies had no canoes or other means of transportation, and though, travelling in such numbers, they would infallibly starve on the way to the rendezvous. It is difficult not to see in all this the chimera of an overwrought brain, no longer able to distinguish between the possible and the impossible. Preparation dragged slowly on; the season was growing late; the King grew impatient, and found fault with the naval intendant. Meanwhile, the various members of the expedition had all gathered at Rochelle. Joutel, a fellow-townsman of La Salle, returning to his native Rouen, after sixteen years in the army, found all astir with the new project. His father had been gardener to Henri Cavelier, La Salle's uncle; and being of an adventurous spirit he volunteered for the enterprise, of which he was to become the historian. With La Salle's brother the priest, and two of his nephews, one of whom was a boy of fourteen, Joutel set out for Rochelle, where all were to embark together for their promised land.[276] [Sidenote: A PARTING LETTER.] La Salle wrote a parting letter to his mother at Rouen:-- Rochelle, 18 July, 1684. Madame my Most Honored Mother,-- At last, after having waited a long time for a favourable wind, and having had a great many difficulties to overcome, we are setting sail with four vessels, and nearly four hundred men on board. Everybody is well, including little Colin and my nephew. We all have good hope of a happy success. We are not going by way of Canada, but by the Gulf of Mexico. I passionately wish, and so do we all, that the success of this voyage may contribute to your repose and comfort. Assuredly, I shall spare no effort that it may; and I beg you, on your part, to preserve yourself for the love of us. You need not be troubled by the news from Canada, which are nothing but the continuation of the artifices of my enemies. I hope to be as successful against them as I have been thus far, and to embrace you a year hence with all the pleasure that the most grateful of children can feel with so good a mother as you have always been. Pray let this hope, which shall not disappoint you, support you through whatever trials may happen, and be sure that you will always find me with a heart full of the feelings which are due to you. Madame my Most Honored Mother, from your most humble and most obedient servant and son, De la Salle. My brother, my nephews, and all the others greet you, and take their leave of you. This memorable last farewell has lain for two hundred years among the family papers of the Caveliers.[277] FOOTNOTES: [262] _Lettres de l'Abbé Tronson, 8 Avril, 10 Avril, 1684_ (Margry, ii. 354). [263] _Lettres du Roy et du Ministre sur la Navigation du Golfe du Mexique, 1669-1682_ (Margry, iii. 3-14). [264] _Mémoire du Sr. de la Salle, pour rendre compte à Monseigneur de Seignelay de la découverte qu'il a faite par l'ordre de sa Majesté._ [265] This name, also given to the Illinois, is used to designate Red River on the map of Franquelin, where the forests above mentioned are represented. [266] _Mémoire du Sr. de la Salle sur l'Entreprise qu'il a proposé à Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignelay sur une des provinces de Mexique._ [267] Both the memorial and the map represent the banks of Red River as inhabited by Indians, called Terliquiquimechi, and known to the Spaniards as _Indios bravos_, or _Indios de guerra_. The Spaniards, it is added, were in great fear of them, as they made frequent inroads into Mexico. La Salle's Mexican geography was in all respects confused and erroneous; nor was Seignelay better informed. Indeed, Spanish jealousy placed correct information beyond their reach. [268] While the plan, as proposed in the memorial, was clearly impracticable, the subsequent experience of the French in Texas tended to prove that the tribes of that region could be used with advantage in attacking the Spaniards of Mexico, and that an inroad on a comparatively small scale might have been successfully made with their help. In 1689, Tonty actually made the attempt, as we shall see, but failed, from the desertion of his men. In 1697, the Sieur de Louvigny wrote to the Minister of the Marine, asking to complete La Salle's discoveries, and invade Mexico from Texas. (_Lettre de M. de Louvigny, 14 Oct., 1697._) In an unpublished memoir of the year 1700, the seizure of the Mexican mines is given as one of the motives of the colonization of Louisiana. [269] Another scheme, with similar aims, but much more practicable, was at this very time before the court. Count Peñalossa, a Spanish Creole, born in Peru, had been governor of New Mexico, where he fell into a dispute with the Inquisition, which involved him in the loss of property, and for a time of liberty. Failing to obtain redress in Spain, he renounced his allegiance in disgust, and sought refuge in France, where, in 1682, he first proposed to the King the establishment of a colony of French buccaneers at the mouth of Rio Bravo, on the Gulf of Mexico. In January, 1684, after the war had broken out, he proposed to attack the Spanish town of Panuco, with twelve hundred buccaneers from St. Domingo; then march into the interior, seize the mines, conquer Durango, and occupy New Mexico. It was proposed to combine his plan with that of La Salle; but the latter, who had an interview with him, expressed distrust, and showed characteristic reluctance to accept a colleague. It is extremely probable, however, that his knowledge of Peñalossa's original proposal had some influence in stimulating him to lay before the court proposals of his own, equally attractive. Peace was concluded before the plans of the Spanish adventurer could be carried into effect. [270] _Lettre du Roy à La Barre, Versailles, 10 Avril, 1684._ [271] _Lettre du Roy à De Meules, Versailles, 14 Avril, 1684._ Seignelay wrote to De Meules to the same effect. [272] On La Forest's mission,--_Mémoire pour representer à Monseigneur le Marquis de Seignelay la nécessité d'envoyer le Sr. de la Forest en diligence à la Nouvelle France; Lettre du Roy à La Barre, 14 Avril, 1684; Ibid., 31 Oct., 1684._ There is before me a promissory note of La Salle to La Forest, of 5,200 livres, dated at Rochelle, 17 July, 1684. This seems to be pay due to La Forest, who had served as La Salle's officer for nine years. A memorandum is attached, signed by La Salle, to the effect that it is his wish that La Forest reimburse himself, "_par préférence_," out of any property of his (La Salle's) in France or Canada. [273] The attitude of La Salle, in this matter, is incomprehensible. In July, La Forest was at Rochefort, complaining because La Salle had ordered him to stay in garrison at Fort Frontenac. _Beaujeu à Villermont, 10 July, 1684_. This means an abandonment of the scheme of leading the warriors at the rock of St. Louis down the Mississippi; but, in the next month, La Salle writes to Seignelay that he is afraid La Barre will use the Iroquois war as a pretext to prevent La Forest from making his journey (to the Illinois), and that in this case he will himself try to go up the Mississippi, and meet the Illinois warriors; so that, in five or six months from the date of the letter, the minister will hear of his departure to attack the Spaniards. (_La Salle à Seignelay, Août, 1684._) Either this is sheer folly, or else it is meant to delude the minister. [274] _Mémoire de ce qui aura esté accordé au Sieur de la Salle._ [275] _Lettre au Roy à La Salle, 12 Avril, 1684; Mémoire pour servir d'Instruction au Sieur de Beaujeu, 14 Avril, 1684._ [276] Joutel, _Journal Historique_, 12. [277] The letters of Beaujeu to Seignelay and to Cabart de Villermont, with most of the other papers on which this chapter rests, will be found in Margry, ii. 354-471. This indefatigable investigator has also brought to light a number of letters from a brother officer of Beaujeu, Machaut-Rougemont, written at Rochefort, just after the departure of the expedition from Rochelle, and giving some idea of the views there entertained concerning it. He says: "L'on ne peut pas faire plus d'extravagances que le Sieur de la Salle n'en a fait sur toutes ses prétentions de commandement. Je plains beaucoup le pauvre Beaujeu d'avoir affaire à une humeur si saturnienne.... Je le croy beaucoup visionnaire ... Beaujeu a une sotte commission." CHAPTER XXIV. 1684, 1685. THE VOYAGE. Disputes with Beaujeu.--St. Domingo.--La Salle Attacked with Fever: his Desperate Condition.--The Gulf Of Mexico.--A Vain Search and a Fatal Error. The four ships sailed from Rochelle on the twenty-fourth of July. Four days after, the "Joly" broke her bowsprit, by design as La Salle fancied. They all put back to Rochefort, where the mischief was quickly repaired; and they put to sea again. La Salle, and the chief persons of the expedition, with a crowd of soldiers, artisans, and women, the destined mothers of Louisiana, were all on board the "Joly." Beaujeu wished to touch at Madeira, to replenish his water-casks. La Salle refused, lest by doing so the secret of the enterprise might reach the Spaniards. One Paget, a Huguenot, took up the word in support of Beaujeu. La Salle told him that the affair was none of his; and as Paget persisted with increased warmth and freedom, he demanded of Beaujeu if it was with his consent that a man of no rank spoke to him in that manner. Beaujeu sustained the Huguenot. "That is enough," returned La Salle, and withdrew into his cabin.[278] This was not the first misunderstanding; nor was it the last. There was incessant chafing between the two commanders; and the sailors of the "Joly" were soon of one mind with their captain. When the ship crossed the tropic, they made ready a tub on deck to baptize the passengers, after the villanous practice of the time; but La Salle refused to permit it, at which they were highly exasperated, having promised themselves a bountiful ransom, in money or liquor, from their victims. "Assuredly," says Joutel, "they would gladly have killed us all." [Sidenote: ST. DOMINGO.] When, after a wretched voyage of two months the ships reached St. Domingo, a fresh dispute occurred. It had been resolved at a council of officers to stop at Port de Paix; but Beaujeu, on pretext of a fair wind, ran by that place in the night, and cast anchor at Petit Goave, on the other side of the island. La Salle was extremely vexed; for he expected to meet at Port de Paix the Marquis de Saint-Laurent, lieutenant-general of the islands, Bégon the intendant, and De Cussy, governor of La Tortue, who had orders to supply him with provisions and give him all possible aid. The "Joly" was alone: the other vessels had lagged behind. She had more than fifty sick men on board, and La Salle was of the number. He sent a messenger to Saint-Laurent, Bégon, and Cussy, begging them to come to him; ordered Joutel to get the sick ashore, suffocating as they were in the hot and crowded ship; and caused the soldiers to be landed on a small island in the harbor. Scarcely had the voyagers sung _Te Deum_ for their safe arrival, when two of the lagging vessels appeared, bringing tidings that the third, the ketch "St. François," had been taken by Spanish buccaneers. She was laden with provisions, tools, and other necessaries for the colony; and the loss was irreparable. Beaujeu was answerable for it; for had he anchored at Port de Paix, it would not have occurred. The lieutenant-general, with Bégon and Cussy, who presently arrived, plainly spoke their minds to him.[279] [Sidenote: ILLNESS OF LA SALLE.] La Salle's illness increased. "I was walking with him one day," writes Joutel, "when he was seized of a sudden with such a weakness that he could not stand, and was obliged to lie down on the ground. When he was a little better, I led him to a chamber of a house that the brothers Duhaut had hired. Here we put him to bed, and in the morning he was attacked by a violent fever."[280] "It was so violent that," says another of his shipmates, "his imagination pictured to him things equally terrible and amazing."[281] He lay delirious in the wretched garret, attended by his brother, and one or two others who stood faithful to him. A goldsmith of the neighborhood, moved at his deplorable condition, offered the use of his house; and Abbé Cavelier had him removed thither. But there was a tavern hard by, and the patient was tormented with daily and nightly riot. At the height of the fever, a party of Beaujeu's sailors spent a night in singing and dancing before the house; and, says Cavelier, "The more we begged them to be quiet, the more noise they made." La Salle lost reason and well-nigh life; but at length his mind resumed its balance, and the violence of the disease abated. A friendly Capucin friar offered him the shelter of his roof; and two of his men supported him thither on foot, giddy with exhaustion and hot with fever. Here he found repose, and was slowly recovering, when some of his attendants rashly told him the loss of the ketch "St. François;" and the consequence was a critical return of the disease.[282] There was no one to fill his place. Beaujeu would not; Cavelier could not. Joutel, the gardener's son, was apparently the most trusty man of the company; but the expedition was virtually without a head. The men roamed on shore, and plunged into every excess of debauchery, contracting diseases which eventually killed them. [Sidenote: COMPLAINTS OF BEAUJEU.] Beaujeu, in the extremity of ill-humor, resumed his correspondence with Seignelay. "But for the illness of the Sieur de la Salle," he writes, "I could not venture to report to you the progress of our voyage, as I am charged only with the navigation, and he with the secrets; but as his malady has deprived him of the use of his faculties, both of body and mind, I have thought myself obliged to acquaint you with what is passing, and of the condition in which we are." He then declares that the ships freighted by La Salle were so slow that the "Joly" had continually been forced to wait for them, thus doubling the length of the voyage; that he had not had water enough for the passengers, as La Salle had not told him that there were to be any such till the day they came on board; that great numbers were sick, and that he had told La Salle there would be trouble if he filled all the space between decks with his goods, and forced the soldiers and sailors to sleep on deck; that he had told him he would get no provisions at St. Domingo, but that he insisted on stopping; that it had always been so,--that whatever he proposed La Salle would refuse, alleging orders from the King; "and now," pursues the ruffled commander, "everybody is ill; and he himself has a violent fever, as dangerous, the surgeon tells me, to the mind as to the body." The rest of the letter is in the same strain. He says that a day or two after La Salle's illness began, his brother Cavelier came to ask him to take charge of his affairs; but that he did not wish to meddle with them, especially as nobody knows anything about them, and as La Salle has sold some of the ammunition and provisions; that Cavelier tells him that he thinks his brother keeps no accounts, wishing to hide his affairs from everybody; that he learns from buccaneers that the entrance of the Mississippi is very shallow and difficult, and that this is the worst season for navigating the Gulf; that the Spaniards have in these seas six vessels of from thirty to sixty guns each, besides row-galleys; but that he is not afraid, and will perish, or bring back an account of the Mississippi. "Nevertheless," he adds, "if the Sieur de la Salle dies, I shall pursue a course different from that which he has marked out; for I do not approve his plans." "If," he continues, "you permit me to speak my mind, M. de la Salle ought to have been satisfied with discovering his river, without undertaking to conduct three vessels with troops two thousand leagues through so many different climates, and across seas entirely unknown to him. I grant that he is a man of knowledge, that he has reading, and even some tincture of navigation; but there is so much difference between theory and practice, that a man who has only the former will always be at fault. There is also a great difference between conducting canoes on lakes and along a river, and navigating ships with troops on distant oceans."[283] While Beaujeu was complaining of La Salle, his followers were deserting him. It was necessary to send them on board ship, and keep them there; for there were French buccaneers at Petit Goave, who painted the promised land in such dismal colors that many of the adventurers completely lost heart. Some, too, were dying. "The air of this place is bad," says Joutel; "so are the fruits; and there are plenty of women worse than either."[284] It was near the end of November before La Salle could resume the voyage. He was told that Beaujeu had said that he would not wait longer for the store-ship "Aimable," and that she might follow as she could.[285] Moreover, La Salle was on ill terms with Aigron, her captain, who had declared that he would have nothing more to do with him.[286] Fearing, therefore, that some mishap might befall her, he resolved to embark in her himself, with his brother Cavelier, Membré, Douay, and others, the trustiest of his followers. On the twenty-fifth they set sail; the "Joly" and the little frigate "Belle" following. They coasted the shore of Cuba, and landed at the Isle of Pines, where La Salle shot an alligator, which the soldiers ate; and the hunter brought in a wild pig, half of which he sent to Beaujeu. Then they advanced to Cape St. Antoine, where bad weather and contrary winds long detained them. A load of cares oppressed the mind of La Salle, pale and haggard with recent illness, wrapped within his own thoughts, and seeking sympathy from none. [Sidenote: A VAIN SEARCH.] At length they entered the Gulf of Mexico, that forbidden sea whence by a Spanish decree, dating from the reign of Philip II., all foreigners were excluded on pain of extermination.[287] Not a man on board knew the secrets of its perilous navigation. Cautiously feeling their way, they held a north-westerly course, till on the twenty-eighth of December a sailor at the mast-head of the "Aimable" saw land. La Salle and all the pilots had been led to form an exaggerated idea of the force of the easterly currents; and they therefore supposed themselves near the Bay of Appalache, when, in fact, they were much farther westward. On New Year's Day they anchored three leagues from the shore. La Salle, with the engineer Minet, went to explore it, and found nothing but a vast marshy plain, studded with clumps of rushes. Two days after there was a thick fog, and when at length it cleared, the "Joly" was nowhere to be seen. La Salle in the "Aimable," followed closely by the little frigate "Belle," stood westward along the coast. When at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1682, he had taken its latitude, but unhappily could not determine its longitude; and now every eye on board was strained to detect in the monotonous lines of the low shore some tokens of the great river. In fact, they had already passed it. On the sixth of January, a wide opening was descried between two low points of land; and the adjacent sea was discolored with mud. "La Salle," writes his brother Cavelier, "has always thought that this was the Mississippi." To all appearance, it was the entrance of Galveston Bay.[288] But why did he not examine it? Joutel says that his attempts to do so were frustrated by the objections of the pilot of the "Aimable," to which, with a facility very unusual with him, he suffered himself to yield. Cavelier declares, on the other hand, that he would not enter the opening because he was afraid of missing the "Joly." But he might have entered with one of his two vessels, while the other watched outside for the absent ship. From whatever cause, he lay here five or six days, waiting in vain for Beaujeu;[289] till, at last, thinking that he must have passed westward, he resolved to follow. The "Aimable" and the "Belle" again spread their sails, and coasted the shores of Texas. Joutel, with a boat's crew, tried to land; but the sand-bars and breakers repelled him. A party of Indians swam out through the surf, and were taken on board; but La Salle could learn nothing from them, as their language was unknown to him. Again Joutel tried to land, and again the breakers repelled him. He approached as near as he dared, and saw vast plains and a dim expanse of forest, buffalo running with their heavy gallop along the shore, and deer grazing on the marshy meadows. [Sidenote: THE SHORES OF TEXAS.] Soon after, he succeeded in landing at a point somewhere between Matagorda Island and Corpus Christi Bay. The aspect of the country was not cheering, with its barren plains, its reedy marshes, its interminable oyster-beds, and broad flats of mud bare at low tide. Joutel and his men sought in vain for fresh water, and after shooting some geese and ducks returned to the "Aimable." Nothing had been seen of Beaujeu and the "Joly;" the coast was trending southward; and La Salle, convinced that he must have passed the missing ship, turned to retrace his course. He had sailed but a few miles when the wind failed, a fog covered the sea, and he was forced to anchor opposite one of the openings into the lagoons north of Mustang Island. At length, on the nineteenth, there came a faint breeze; the mists rolled away before it, and to his great joy he saw the "Joly" approaching. "His joy," says Joutel, "was short." Beaujeu's lieutenant, Aire, came on board to charge him with having caused the separation, and La Salle retorted by throwing the blame on Beaujeu. Then came a debate as to their position. The priest Esmanville was present, and reports that La Salle seemed greatly perplexed. He had more cause for perplexity than he knew; for in his ignorance of the longitude of the Mississippi, he had sailed more than four hundred miles beyond it. Of this he had not the faintest suspicion. In full sight from his ship lay a reach of those vast lagoons which, separated from the sea by narrow strips of land, line this coast with little interruption from Galveston Bay to the Rio Grande. The idea took possession of him that the Mississippi discharged itself into these lagoons, and thence made its way to the sea through the various openings he had seen along the coast, chief among which was that he had discovered on the sixth, about fifty leagues from the place where he now was.[290] [Sidenote: PERPLEXITY OF LA SALLE.] Yet he was full of doubt as to what he should do. Four days after rejoining Beaujeu, he wrote him the strange request to land the troops, that he "might fulfil his commission;" that is, that he might set out against the Spaniards.[291] More than a week passed, a gale had set in, and nothing was done. Then La Salle wrote again, intimating some doubt as to whether he was really at one of the mouths of the Mississippi, and saying that, being sure that he had passed the principal mouth, he was determined to go back to look for it.[292] Meanwhile, Beaujeu was in a state of great irritation. The weather was stormy, and the coast was dangerous. Supplies were scanty; and La Salle's soldiers, still crowded in the "Joly," were consuming the provisions of the ship. Beaujeu gave vent to his annoyance, and La Salle retorted in the same strain. According to Joutel, he urged the naval commander to sail back in search of the river; and Beaujeu refused, unless La Salle should give the soldiers provisions. La Salle, he adds, offered to supply them with rations for fifteen days; and Beaujeu declared this insufficient. There is reason, however, to believe that the request was neither made by the one nor refused by the other so positively as here appears. FOOTNOTES: [278] _Lettre (sans nom d'auteur) écrite de St. Domingue, 14 Nov., 1684_ (Margry, ii. 492); _Mémoire autographe de l'Abbé Jean Cavelier sur le Voyage de 1684_. Compare Joutel. [279] _Mémoire de MM. de Saint-Laurens et Bégon_ (Margry, ii. 499); Joutel, _Journal Historique_, 28. [280] _Relation de Henri Joutel_ (Margry, iii. 98). [281] _Lettre (sans nom d'auteur), 14 Nov., 1684_ (Margry, ii. 496). [282] The above particulars are from the memoir of La Salle's brother, Abbé Cavelier, already cited. [283] _Lettre de Beaujeu au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1684._ [284] _Relation de Henri Joutel_ (Margry, iii. 105). [285] _Mémoire autographe de l'Abbé Jean Cavelier._ [286] _Lettre de Beaujeu au Ministre, 20 Oct., 1684._ [287] _Letter of Don Luis de Onis to the Secretary of State_ (American State Papers, xii, 27-31). [288] "La hauteur nous a fait remarquer ... que ce que nous avions vu le sixième janvier estoit en effet la principale entrée de la rivière que nous cherchions."--_Lettre de La Salle au Ministre, 4 Mars, 1687._ [289] _Mémoire autographe de l'Abbé Cavelier._ [290] "Depuis que nous avions quitté cette rivière qu'il croyoit infailliblement estre le fleuve Colbert _[Mississippi]_ nous avions fait environ 45 lieues ou 50 au plus." (Cavelier, _Mémoire_.) This, taken in connection with the statement of La Salle that this "principale entrée de la rivière que nous cherchions" was twenty-five or thirty leagues northeast from the entrance of the Bay of St. Louis (Matagorda Bay), shows that it can have been no other than the entrance of Galveston Bay, mistaken by him for the chief outlet of the Mississippi. It is evident that he imagined Galveston Bay to form a part of the chain of lagoons from which it is in fact separated. He speaks of these lagoons as "une espèce de baye fort longue et fort large, _dans laquelle le fleuve Colbert se décharge_." He adds that on his descent to the mouth of the river in 1682 he had been deceived in supposing that this expanse of salt water, where no shore was in sight, was the open sea. _Lettre de La Salle au Ministre, 4 Mars, 1685._ Galveston Bay and the mouth of the Mississippi differ little in latitude, though separated by about five and a half degrees of longitude. [291] _Lettre de La Salle à Beaujeu, 23 Jan., 1685_ (Margry, ii. 526). [292] This letter is dated, "De l'emboucheure d'une rivière que _je crois estre_ une des descharges du Mississipy" (Margry, ii. 528). CHAPTER XXV. 1685. LA SALLE IN TEXAS. A Party of Exploration--Wreck of the "Aimable."--Landing of the Colonists.--A Forlorn Position.--Indian Neighbors.--Friendly Advances of Beaujeu: his Departure.--A Fatal Discovery. Impatience to rid himself of his colleague and to command alone no doubt had its influence on the judgment of La Salle. He presently declared that he would land the soldiers, and send them along shore till they came to the principal outlet of the river. On this, the engineer Minet took up the word,--expressed his doubts as to whether the Mississippi discharged itself into the lagoons at all; represented that even if it did, the soldiers would be exposed to great risks; and gave as his opinion that all should reimbark and continue the search in company. The advice was good, but La Salle resented it as coming from one in whom he recognized no right to give it. "He treated me," complains the engineer, "as if I were the meanest of mankind."[293] He persisted in his purpose, and sent Joutel and Moranget with a party of soldiers to explore the coast. They made their way northeastward along the shore of Matagorda Island, till they were stopped on the third day by what Joutel calls a river, but which was in fact the entrance of Matagorda Bay. Here they encamped, and tried to make a raft of drift-wood. "The difficulty was," says Joutel, "our great number of men, and the few of them who were fit for anything except eating. As I said before, they had all been caught by force or surprise, so that our company was like Noah's ark, which contained animals of all sorts." Before their raft was finished, they descried to their great joy the ships which had followed them along the coast.[294] [Sidenote: LANDING OF LA SALLE.] La Salle landed, and announced that here was the western mouth of the Mississippi, and the place to which the King had sent him. He said further that he would land all his men, and bring the "Aimable" and the "Belle" to the safe harborage within. Beaujeu remonstrated, alleging the shallowness of the water and the force of the currents; but his remonstrance was vain.[295] The Bay of St. Louis, now Matagorda Bay, forms a broad and sheltered harbor, accessible from the sea by a narrow passage, obstructed by sand-bars and by the small island now called Pelican Island. Boats were sent to sound and buoy out the channel, and this was successfully accomplished on the sixteenth of February. The "Aimable" was ordered to enter; and, on the twentieth, she weighed anchor. La Salle was on shore watching her. A party of men, at a little distance, were cutting down a tree to make a canoe. Suddenly some of them ran towards him with terrified faces, crying out that they had been set upon by a troop of Indians, who had seized their companions and carried them off. La Salle ordered those about him to take their arms, and at once set out in pursuit. He overtook the Indians, and opened a parley with them; but when he wished to reclaim his men, he discovered that they had been led away during the conference to the Indian camp, a league and a half distant. Among them was one of his lieutenants, the young Marquis de la Sablonnière. He was deeply vexed, for the moment was critical; but the men must be recovered, and he led his followers in haste towards the camp. Yet he could not refrain from turning a moment to watch the "Aimable," as she neared the shoals; and he remarked with deep anxiety to Joutel, who was with him, that if she held that course she would soon be aground. [Sidenote: WRECK OF THE "AIMABLE".] They hurried on till they saw the Indian huts. About fifty of them, oven-shaped, and covered with mats and hides, were clustered on a rising ground, with their inmates gathered among and around them. As the French entered the camp, there was the report of a cannon from the seaward. The startled savages dropped flat with terror. A different fear seized La Salle, for he knew that the shot was a signal of disaster. Looking back, he saw the "Aimable" furling her sails, and his heart sank with the conviction that she had struck upon the reef. Smothering his distress,--she was laden with all the stores of the colony,--he pressed forward among the filthy wigwams, whose astonished inmates swarmed about the band of armed strangers, staring between curiosity and fear. La Salle knew those with whom he was dealing, and, without ceremony, entered the chief's lodge with his followers. The crowd closed around them, naked men and half-naked women, described by Joutel as of singular ugliness. They gave buffalo meat and dried porpoise to the unexpected guests, but La Salle, racked with anxiety, hastened to close the interview; and having without difficulty recovered the kidnapped men, he returned to the beach, leaving with the Indians, as usual, an impression of good-will and respect. When he reached the shore, he saw his worst fears realized. The "Aimable" lay careened over on the reef, hopelessly aground. Little remained but to endure the calamity with firmness, and to save, as far as might be, the vessel's cargo. This was no easy task. The boat which hung at her stern had been stove in,--it is said, by design. Beaujeu sent a boat from the "Joly," and one or more Indian pirogues were procured. La Salle urged on his men with stern and patient energy, and a quantity of gunpowder and flour was safely landed. But now the wind blew fresh from the sea; the waves began to rise; a storm came on; the vessel, rocking to and fro on the sand-bar, opened along her side, and the ravenous waves were strewn with her treasures. When the confusion was at its height, a troop of Indians came down to the shore, greedy for plunder. The drum was beat; the men were called to arms; La Salle set his trustiest followers to guard the gunpowder, in fear, not of the Indians alone, but of his own countrymen. On that lamentable night, the sentinels walked their rounds through the dreary bivouac among the casks, bales, and boxes which the sea had yielded up; and here, too, their fate-hunted chief held his drearier vigil, encompassed with treachery, darkness, and the storm. Not only La Salle, but Joutel and others of his party, believed that the wreck of the "Aimable" was intentional. Aigron, who commanded her, had disobeyed orders and disregarded signals. Though he had been directed to tow the vessel through the channel, he went in under sail; and though little else was saved from the wreck, his personal property, including even some preserved fruits, was all landed safely. He had long been on ill terms with La Salle.[296] All La Salle's company were now encamped on the sands at the left side of the inlet where the "Aimable" was wrecked.[297] "They were all," says the engineer Minet, "sick with nausea and dysentery. Five or six died every day, in consequence of brackish water and bad food. There was no grass, but plenty of rushes and plenty of oysters. There was nothing to make ovens, so that they had to eat flour saved from the wreck, boiled into messes of porridge with this brackish water. Along the shore were quantities of uprooted trees and rotten logs, thrown up by the sea and the lagoon." Of these, and fragments of the wreck, they made a sort of rampart to protect their camp; and here, among tents and hovels, bales, boxes, casks, spars, dismounted cannon, and pens for fowls and swine, were gathered the dejected men and homesick women who were to seize New Biscay, and hold for France a region large as half Europe. The Spaniards, whom they were to conquer, were they knew not where. They knew not where they were themselves; and for the fifteen thousand Indian allies who were to have joined them, they found two hundred squalid savages, more like enemies than friends. In fact, it was soon made plain that these their neighbors wished them no good. A few days after the wreck, the prairie was seen on fire. As the smoke and flame rolled towards them before the wind, La Salle caused all the grass about the camp to be cut and carried away, and especially around the spot where the powder was placed. The danger was averted; but it soon became known that the Indians had stolen a number of blankets and other articles, and carried them to their wigwams. Unwilling to leave his camp, La Salle sent his nephew Moranget and several other volunteers, with a party of men, to reclaim them. They went up the bay in a boat, landed at the Indian camp, and, with more mettle than discretion, marched into it, sword in hand. The Indians ran off, and the rash adventurers seized upon several canoes as an equivalent for the stolen goods. Not knowing how to manage them, they made slow progress on their way back, and were overtaken by night before reaching the French camp. They landed, made a fire, placed a sentinel, and lay down on the dry grass to sleep. The sentinel followed their example, when suddenly they were awakened by the war-whoop and a shower of arrows. Two volunteers, Oris and Desloges, were killed on the spot; a third, named Gayen, was severely wounded; and young Moranget received an arrow through the arm. He leaped up and fired his gun at the vociferous but invisible foe. Others of the party did the same, and the Indians fled. [Sidenote: BEAUJEU AND LA SALLE.] It was about this time that Beaujeu prepared to return to France. He had accomplished his mission, and landed his passengers at what La Salle assured him to be one of the mouths of the Mississippi. His ship was in danger on this exposed and perilous coast, and he was anxious to find shelter. For some time past, his relations with La Salle had been amicable, and it was agreed between them that Beaujeu should stop at Galveston Bay, the supposed chief mouth of the Mississippi; or, failing to find harborage here, that he should proceed to Mobile Bay, and wait there till April, to hear from his colleague. Two days before the wreck of the "Aimable," he wrote to La Salle: "I wish with all my heart that you would have more confidence in me. For my part, I will always make the first advances; and I will follow your counsel whenever I can do so without risking my ship. I will come back to this place, if you want to know the results of the voyage I am going to make. If you wish, I will go to Martinique for provisions and reinforcements. In fine, there is nothing I am not ready to do: you have only to speak." La Salle had begged him to send ashore a number of cannon and a quantity of iron, stowed in the "Joly," for the use of the colony; and Beaujeu replies: "I wish very much that I could give you your iron, but it is impossible except in a harbor; for it is on my ballast, and under your cannon, my spare anchors, and all my stowage. It would take three days to get it out, which cannot be done in this place, where the sea runs like mountains when the slightest wind blows outside. I would rather come back to give it to you, in case you do not send the 'Belle' to Baye du St. Esprit [Mobile Bay] to get it.... I beg you once more to consider the offer I make you to go to Martinique to get provisions for your people. I will ask the intendant for them in your name; and if they are refused, I will take them on my own account."[298] To this La Salle immediately replied: "I received with singular pleasure the letter you took the trouble to write me; for I found in it extraordinary proofs of kindness in the interest you take in the success of an affair which I have the more at heart, as it involves the glory of the King and the honor of Monseigneur de Seignelay. I have done my part towards a perfect understanding between us, and have never been wanting in confidence; but even if I could be so, the offers you make are so obliging that they would inspire complete trust." He nevertheless declines them,--assuring Beaujeu at the same time that he has reached the place he sought, and is in a fair way of success if he can but have the cannon, cannonballs, and iron stowed on board the "Joly."[299] Directly after he writes again, "I cannot help conjuring you once more to try to give us the iron." Beaujeu replies: "To show you how ardently I wish to contribute to the success of your undertaking, I have ordered your iron to be got out, in spite of my officers and sailors, who tell me that I endanger my ship by moving everything in the depth of the hold on a coast like this, where the seas are like mountains. I hesitated to disturb my stowage, not so much to save trouble as because no ballast is to be got hereabout; and I have therefore had six cannon, from my lower deck battery, let down into the hold to take the place of the iron." And he again urges La Salle to accept his offer to bring provisions to the colonists from Martinique. [Sidenote: DEPARTURE OF BEAUJEU.] On the next day, the "Aimable" was wrecked. Beaujeu remained a fortnight longer on the coast, and then told La Salle that being out of wood, water, and other necessaries, he must go to Mobile Bay to get them. Nevertheless, he lingered a week more, repeated his offer to bring supplies from Martinique, which La Salle again refused, and at last set sail on the twelfth of March, after a leave-taking which was courteous on both sides.[300] La Salle and his colonists were left alone. Several of them had lost heart, and embarked for home with Beaujeu. Among these was Minet the engineer, who had fallen out with La Salle, and who when he reached France was imprisoned for deserting him. Even his brother, the priest Jean Cavelier, had a mind to abandon the enterprise, but was persuaded at last to remain, along with his nephew the hot-headed Moranget, and the younger Cavelier, a mere school-boy. The two Récollet friars, Zenobe Membré and Anastase Douay, the trusty Joutel, a man of sense and observation, and the Marquis de la Sablonnière, a debauched noble whose patrimony was his sword, were now the chief persons of the forlorn company. The rest were soldiers, raw and undisciplined, and artisans, most of whom knew nothing of their vocation. Add to these the miserable families and the infatuated young women who had come to tempt fortune in the swamps and cane-brakes of the Mississippi. La Salle set out to explore the neighborhood. Joutel remained in command of the so-called fort. He was beset with wily enemies, and often at night the Indians would crawl in the grass around his feeble stockade, howling like wolves; but a few shots would put them to flight. A strict guard was kept; and a wooden horse was set in the enclosure, to punish the sentinel who should sleep at his post. They stood in daily fear of a more formidable foe, and once they saw a sail, which they doubted not was Spanish; but she happily passed without discovering them. They hunted on the prairies, and speared fish in the neighboring pools. On Easter Day, the Sieur le Gros, one of the chief men of the company, went out after the service to shoot snipes; but as he walked barefoot through the marsh, a snake bit him, and he soon after died. Two men deserted, to starve on the prairie, or to become savages among savages. Others tried to escape, but were caught; and one of them was hung. A knot of desperadoes conspired to kill Joutel; but one of them betrayed the secret, and the plot was crushed. La Salle returned from his exploration, but his return brought no cheer. He had been forced to renounce the illusion to which he had clung so long, and was convinced at last that he was not at the mouth of the Mississippi. The wreck of the "Aimable" itself was not pregnant with consequences so disastrous. [Sidenote: CONDUCT OF BEAUJEU.] Note.--The conduct of Beaujeu, hitherto judged chiefly by the printed narrative of Joutel, is set in a new and more favorable light by his correspondence with La Salle. Whatever may have been their mutual irritation, it is clear that the naval commander was anxious to discharge his duty in a manner to satisfy Seignelay, and that he may be wholly acquitted of any sinister design. When he left La Salle on the twelfth of March, he meant to sail in search of the Bay of Mobile (Baye du St. Esprit),--partly because he hoped to find it a safe harbor, where he could get La Salle's cannon out of the hold and find ballast to take their place; and partly to get a supply of wood and water, of which he was in extreme need. He told La Salle that he would wait there till the middle of April, in order that he (La Salle) might send the "Belle" to receive the cannon; but on this point there was no definite agreement between them. Beaujeu was ignorant of the position of the bay, which he thought much nearer than it actually was. After trying two days to reach it, the strong head-winds and the discontent of his crew induced him to bear away for Cuba; and after an encounter with pirates and various adventures, he reached France about the first of July. He was coldly received by Seignelay, who wrote to the intendant at Rochelle: "His Majesty has seen what you wrote about the idea of the Sieur de Beaujeu, that the Sieur de la Salle is not at the mouth of the Mississippi. He seems to found this belief on such weak conjectures that no great attention need be given to his account, especially as _this man_ has been prejudiced from the first against La Salle's enterprise." (_Lettre de Seignelay à Arnoul, 22 Juillet, 1685._ Margry, ii. 604.) The minister at the same time warns Beaujeu to say nothing in disparagement of the enterprise, under pain of the King's displeasure. The narrative of the engineer, Minet, sufficiently explains a curious map, made by him, as he says, not on the spot, but on the voyage homeward, and still preserved in the Archives Scientifiques de la Marine. This map includes two distinct sketches of the mouth of the Mississippi. The first, which corresponds to that made by Franquelin in 1684, is entitled "Embouchure de la Rivière comme M. de la Salle la marque dans sa Carte." The second bears the words, "Costes et Lacs par la Hauteur de sa Rivière, comme nous les avons trouvés." These "Costes et Lacs" are a rude representation of the lagoons of Matagorda Bay and its neighborhood, into which the Mississippi is made to discharge, in accordance with the belief of La Salle. A portion of the coast-line is drawn from actual, though superficial observation. The rest is merely conjectural. FOOTNOTES: [293] _Relation de Minet; Lettre de Minet à Seignelay, 6 July, 1685_ (Margry, ii. 591, 602). [294] Joutel, _Journal Historique_, 68; _Relation_ (Margry, iii. 143-146) Compare _Journal d'Esmanville_ (Margry, ii. 510). [295] _Relation de Minet_ (Margry, ii. 591). [296] _Procès Verbal du Sieur de la Salle sur le Naufrage de la Flûte l'Aimable_; _Lettre de La Salle à Seignelay, 4 Mars, 1685_; _Lettre de Beaujeu à Seignelay, sans date_. Beaujeu did his best to save the cargo. The loss included nearly all the provisions, 60 barrels of wine, 4 cannon, 1,620 balls, 400 grenades, 4,000 pounds of iron, 5,000 pounds of lead, most of the tools, a forge, a mill, cordage, boxes of arms, nearly all the medicines, and most of the baggage of the soldiers and colonists. Aigron returned to France in the "Joly," and was thrown into prison, "comme il paroist clairement que cet accident est arrivé par sa faute."--_Seignelay au Sieur Arnoul, 22 Juillet, 1685_ (Margry, ii. 604). [297] A map, entitled _Entrée du Lac où on a laisse le Sr. de la Salle_, made by the engineer Minet, and preserved in the Archives de la Marine, represents the entrance of Matagorda Bay, the camp of La Salle on the left, Indian camps on the borders of the bay, the "Belle" at anchor within, the "Aimable" stranded at the entrance, and the "Joly" anchored in the open sea. [298] _Lettre de Beaujeu à La Salle, 18 Fév., 1685_ (Margry, ii. 542). [299] _Lettre de La Salle à Beaujeu, 18 Fév., 1685_ (Margry, ii. 546). [300] The whole of this correspondence between Beaujeu and La Salle will be found in Margry, ii. CHAPTER XXVI. 1685-1687. ST. LOUIS OF TEXAS. The Fort.--Misery and Dejection.--Energy of La Salle: his Journey of Exploration.--Adventures and Accidents.--The Buffalo.--Duhaut.--Indian Massacre.--Return Of La Salle.--A New Calamity.--A Desperate Resolution.--Departure for Canada.--Wreck of the "Belle."--Marriage.--Sedition.--Adventures Of la Salle's Party.--The Cenis.--The Camanches.--The Only Hope.--The Last Farewell. Of what avail to plant a colony by the mouth of a petty Texan river? The Mississippi was the life of the enterprise, the condition of its growth and of its existence. Without it, all was futile and meaningless,--a folly and a ruin. Cost what it might, the Mississippi must be found. But the demands of the hour were imperative. The hapless colony, cast ashore like a wreck on the sands of Matagorda Bay, must gather up its shattered resources and recruit its exhausted strength, before it essayed anew its pilgrimage to the "fatal river." La Salle during his explorations had found a spot which he thought well fitted for a temporary establishment. It was on the river which he named the La Vache,[301] now the Lavaca, which enters the head of Matagorda Bay; and thither he ordered all the women and children, and most of the men, to remove; while the rest, thirty in number, remained with Joutel at the fort near the mouth of the bay. Here they spent their time in hunting, fishing, and squaring the logs of drift-wood which the sea washed up in abundance, and which La Salle proposed to use in building his new station on the Lavaca. Thus the time passed till midsummer, when Joutel received orders to abandon his post, and rejoin the main body of the colonists. To this end, the little frigate "Belle" was sent down the bay. She was a gift from the King to La Salle, who had brought her safely over the bar, and regarded her as a main-stay of his hopes. She now took on board the stores and some of the men, while Joutel with the rest followed along shore to the post on the Lavaca. Here he found a state of things that was far from cheering. Crops had been sown, but the drought and the cattle had nearly destroyed them. The colonists were lodged under tents and hovels; and the only solid structure was a small square enclosure of pickets, in which the gunpowder and the brandy were stored. The site was good, a rising ground by the river; but there was no wood within the distance of a league, and no horses or oxen to drag it. Their work must be done by men. Some felled and squared the timber; and others dragged it by main force over the matted grass of the prairie, under the scorching Texan sun. The gun-carriages served to make the task somewhat easier; yet the strongest men soon gave out under it. Joutel went down to the first fort, made a raft and brought up the timber collected there, which proved a most seasonable and useful supply. Palisades and buildings began to rise. The men labored without spirit, yet strenuously; for they labored under the eye of La Salle. The carpenters brought from Rochelle proved worthless; and he himself made the plans of the work, marked out the tenons and mortises, and directed the whole.[302] [Sidenote: MISERY AND DEJECTION.] Death, meanwhile, made withering havoc among his followers; and under the sheds and hovels that shielded them from the sun lay a score of wretches slowly wasting away with the diseases contracted at St. Domingo. Of the soldiers enlisted for the expedition by La Salle's agents, many are affirmed to have spent their lives in begging at the church doors of Rochefort, and were consequently incapable of discipline. It was impossible to prevent either them or the sailors from devouring persimmons and other wild fruits to a destructive excess. Nearly all fell ill; and before the summer had passed, the graveyard had more than thirty tenants.[303] The bearing of La Salle did not aid to raise the drooping spirits of his followers. The results of the enterprise had been far different from his hopes; and, after a season of flattering promise, he had entered again on those dark and obstructed paths which seemed his destined way of life. The present was beset with trouble; the future, thick with storms. The consciousness quickened his energies; but it made him stern, harsh, and often unjust to those beneath him. Joutel was returning to camp one afternoon with the master-carpenter, when they saw game; and the carpenter went after it. He was never seen again. Perhaps he was lost on the prairie, perhaps killed by Indians. He knew little of his trade, but they nevertheless had need of him. Le Gros, a man of character and intelligence, suffered more and more from the bite of the snake received in the marsh on Easter Day. The injured limb was amputated, and he died. La Salle's brother, the priest, lay ill; and several others among the chief persons of the colony were in the same condition. Meanwhile, the work was urged on. A large building was finished, constructed of timber, roofed with boards and raw hides, and divided into apartments for lodging and other uses. La Salle gave the new establishment his favorite name of Fort St. Louis, and the neighboring bay was also christened after the royal saint.[304] The scene was not without its charms. Towards the southeast stretched the bay with its bordering meadows; and on the northeast the Lavaca ran along the base of green declivities. Around, far and near, rolled a sea of prairie, with distant forests, dim in the summer haze. At times, it was dotted with the browsing buffalo, not yet scared from their wonted pastures; and the grassy swells were spangled with the flowers for which Texas is renowned, and which now form the gay ornaments of our gardens. [Sidenote: LA SALLE'S EXPLORATIONS.] And now, the needful work accomplished, and the colony in some measure housed and fortified, its indefatigable chief prepared to renew his quest of the "fatal river," as Joutel repeatedly calls it. Before his departure he made some preliminary explorations, in the course of which, according to the report of his brother the priest, he found evidence that the Spaniards had long before had a transient establishment at a spot about fifteen leagues from Fort St. Louis.[305] [Sidenote: LIFE AT THE FORT.] It was the last day of October when La Salle set out on his great journey of exploration. His brother Cavelier, who had now recovered, accompanied him with fifty men; and five cannon-shot from the fort saluted them as they departed. They were lightly equipped; but some of them wore corselets made of staves, to ward off arrows. Descending the Lavaca, they pursued their course eastward on foot along the margin of the bay, while Joutel remained in command of the fort. It was two leagues above the mouth of the river; and in it were thirty-four persons, including three Récollet friars, a number of women and girls from Paris, and two young orphan daughters of one Talon, a Canadian, who had lately died. Their live-stock consisted of some hogs and a litter of eight pigs, which, as Joutel does not forget to inform us, passed their time in wallowing in the ditch of the palisade; a cock and hen, with a young family; and a pair of goats, which, in a temporary dearth of fresh meat, were sacrificed to the needs of the invalid Abbé Cavelier. Joutel suffered no man to lie idle. The blacksmith, having no anvil, was supplied with a cannon as a substitute. Lodgings were built for the women and girls, and separate lodgings for the men. A small chapel was afterwards added, and the whole was fenced with a palisade. At the four corners of the house were mounted eight pieces of cannon, which, in the absence of balls, were loaded with bags of bullets.[306] Between the palisades and the stream lay a narrow strip of marsh, the haunt of countless birds; and at a little distance it deepened into pools full of fish. All the surrounding prairies swarmed with game,--buffalo, deer, hares, turkeys, ducks, geese, swans, plover, snipe, and grouse. The river supplied the colonists with turtles, and the bay with oysters. Of these last, they often found more than they wanted; for when in their excursions they shoved their log canoes into the water, wading shoeless through the deep, tenacious mud, the sharp shells would cut their feet like knives; "and what was worse," says Joutel, "the salt water came into the gashes, and made them smart atrociously." He sometimes amused himself with shooting alligators. "I never spared them when I met them near the house. One day I killed an extremely large one, which was nearly four feet and a half in girth, and about twenty feet long." He describes with accuracy that curious native of the southwestern plains, the "horned frog," which, deceived by its uninviting appearance, he erroneously supposed to be venomous. "We had some of our animals bitten by snakes; among the others, a bitch that had belonged to the deceased Sieur le Gros. She was bitten in the jaw when she was with me, as I was fishing by the shore of the bay. I gave her a little theriac [an antidote then in vogue], which cured her, as it did one of our sows, which came home one day with her head so swelled that she could hardly hold it up. Thinking it must be some snake that had bitten her, I gave her a dose of the theriac mixed with meal and water." The patient began to mend at once. "I killed a good many rattle-snakes by means of the aforesaid bitch, for when she saw one she would bark around him, sometimes for a half hour together, till I took my gun and shot him. I often found them in the bushes, making a noise with their tails. When I had killed them, our hogs ate them." He devotes many pages to the plants and animals of the neighborhood, most of which may easily be recognized from his description. [Sidenote: THE BUFFALO.] With the buffalo, which he calls "our daily bread," his experiences were many and strange. Being, like the rest of the party, a novice in the art of shooting them, he met with many disappointments. Once, having mounted to the roof of the large house in the fort, he saw a dark moving object on a swell of the prairie three miles off; and rightly thinking that it was a herd of buffalo, he set out with six or seven men to try to kill some of them. After a while, he discovered two bulls lying in a hollow; and signing to the rest of his party to keep quiet, he made his approach, gun in hand. The bulls presently jumped up, and stared through their manes at the intruder. Joutel fired. It was a close shot; but the bulls merely shook their shaggy heads, wheeled about, and galloped heavily away. The same luck attended him the next day. "We saw plenty of buffalo. I approached several bands of them, and fired again and again, but could not make one of them fall." He had not yet learned that a buffalo rarely falls at once, unless hit in the spine. He continues: "I was not discouraged; and after approaching several more bands,--which was hard work, because I had to crawl on the ground, so as not to be seen,--I found myself in a herd of five or six thousand, but, to my great vexation, I could not bring one of them down. They all ran off to the right and left. It was near night, and I had killed nothing. Though I was very tired, I tried again, approached another band, and fired a number of shots; but not a buffalo would fall. The skin was off my knees with crawling. At last, as I was going back to rejoin our men, I saw a buffalo lying on the ground. I went towards it, and saw that it was dead. I examined it, and found that the bullet had gone in near the shoulder. Then I found others dead like the first. I beckoned the men to come on, and we set to work to cut up the meat,--a task which was new to us all." It would be impossible to write a more true and characteristic sketch of the experience of a novice in shooting buffalo on foot. A few days after, he went out again, with Father Anastase Douay; approached a bull, fired, and broke his shoulder. The bull hobbled off on three legs. Douay ran in his cassock to head him back, while Joutel reloaded his gun; upon which the enraged beast butted at the missionary, and knocked him down. He very narrowly escaped with his life. "There was another missionary," pursues Joutel, "named Father Maxime Le Clerc, who was very well fitted for such an undertaking as ours, because he was equal to anything, even to butchering a buffalo; and as I said before that every one of us must lend a hand, because we were too few for anybody to be waited upon, I made the women, girls, and children do their part, as well as him; for as they all wanted to eat, it was fair that they all should work." He had a scaffolding built near the fort, and set them to smoking buffalo meat, against a day of scarcity.[307] [Sidenote: RETURN OF DUHAUT.] Thus the time passed till the middle of January; when late one evening, as all were gathered in the principal building, conversing perhaps, or smoking, or playing at cards, or dozing by the fire in homesick dreams of France, a man on guard came in to report that he had heard a voice from the river. They all went down to the bank, and descried a man in a canoe, who called out, "Dominic!" This was the name of the younger of the two brothers Duhaut, who was one of Joutel's followers. As the canoe approached, they recognized the elder, who had gone with La Salle on his journey of discovery, and who was perhaps the greatest villain of the company. Joutel was much perplexed. La Salle had ordered him to admit nobody into the fort without a pass and a watchword. Duhaut, when questioned, said that he had none, but told at the same time so plausible a story that Joutel no longer hesitated to receive him. As La Salle and his men were pursuing their march along the prairie, Duhaut, who was in the rear, had stopped to mend his moccasins, and when he tried to overtake the party, had lost his way, mistaking a buffalo-path for the trail of his companions. At night he fired his gun as a signal, but there was no answering shot. Seeing no hope of rejoining them, he turned back for the fort, found one of the canoes which La Salle had hidden at the shore, paddled by night and lay close by day, shot turkeys, deer, and buffalo for food, and, having no knife, cut the meat with a sharp flint, till after a month of excessive hardship he reached his destination. As the inmates of Fort St. Louis gathered about the weather-beaten wanderer, he told them dreary tidings. The pilot of the "Belle," such was his story, had gone with five men to sound along the shore, by order of La Salle, who was then encamped in the neighborhood with his party of explorers. The boat's crew, being overtaken by the night, had rashly bivouacked on the beach without setting a guard; and as they slept, a band of Indians had rushed in upon them, and butchered them all. La Salle, alarmed by their long absence, had searched along the shore, and at length found their bodies scattered about the sands and half-devoured by wolves.[308] Well would it have been, if Duhaut had shared their fate. Weeks and months dragged on, when, at the end of March, Joutel, chancing to mount on the roof of one of the buildings, saw seven or eight men approaching over the prairie. He went out to meet them with an equal number, well armed; and as he drew near recognized, with mixed joy and anxiety, La Salle and some of those who had gone with him. His brother Cavelier was at his side, with his cassock so tattered that, says Joutel, "there was hardly a piece left large enough to wrap a farthing's worth of salt. He had an old cap on his head, having lost his hat by the way. The rest were in no better plight, for their shirts were all in rags. Some of them carried loads of meat, because M. de la Salle was afraid that we might not have killed any buffalo. We met with great joy and many embraces. After our greetings were over, M. de la Salle, seeing Duhaut, asked me in an angry tone how it was that I had received this man who had abandoned him. I told him how it had happened, and repeated Duhaut's story. Duhaut defended himself, and M. de la Salle's anger was soon over. We went into the house, and refreshed ourselves with some bread and brandy, as there was no wine left."[309] [Sidenote: LA SALLE'S ADVENTURES.] La Salle and his companions told their story. They had wandered on through various savage tribes, with whom they had more than one encounter, scattering them like chaff by the terror of their fire-arms. At length they found a more friendly band, and learned much touching the Spaniards, who, they were told, were universally hated by the tribes of that country. It would be easy, said their informants, to gather a host of warriors and lead them over the Rio Grande; but La Salle was in no condition for attempting conquests, and the tribes in whose alliance he had trusted had, a few days before, been at blows with him. The invasion of New Biscay must be postponed to a more propitious day. Still advancing, he came to a large river, which he at first mistook for the Mississippi; and building a fort of palisades, he left here several of his men.[310] The fate of these unfortunates does not appear. He now retraced his steps towards Fort St. Louis, and, as he approached it, detached some of his men to look for his vessel, the "Belle," for whose safety, since the loss of her pilot, he had become very anxious. On the next day these men appeared at the fort, with downcast looks. They had not found the "Belle" at the place where she had been ordered to remain, nor were any tidings to be heard of her. From that hour, the conviction that she was lost possessed the mind of La Salle. Surrounded as he was, and had always been, with traitors, the belief now possessed him that her crew had abandoned the colony, and made sail for the West Indies or for France. The loss was incalculable. He had relied on this vessel to transport the colonists to the Mississippi, as soon as its exact position could be ascertained; and thinking her a safer place of deposit than the fort, he had put on board of her all his papers and personal baggage, besides a great quantity of stores, ammunition, and tools.[311] In truth, she was of the last necessity to the unhappy exiles, and their only resource for escape from a position which was fast becoming desperate. La Salle, as his brother tells us, now fell dangerously ill,--the fatigues of his journey, joined to the effects upon his mind of this last disaster, having overcome his strength, though not his fortitude. "In truth," writes the priest, "after the loss of the vessel which deprived us of our only means of returning to France, we had no resource but in the firm guidance of my brother, whose death each of us would have regarded as his own."[312] [Sidenote: DEPARTURE FOR CANADA.] La Salle no sooner recovered than he embraced a resolution which could be the offspring only of a desperate necessity. He determined to make his way by the Mississippi and the Illinois to Canada, whence he might bring succor to the colonists, and send a report of their condition to France. The attempt was beset with uncertainties and dangers. The Mississippi was first to be found, then followed through all the perilous monotony of its interminable windings to a goal which was to be but the starting-point of a new and not less arduous journey. Cavelier his brother, Moranget his nephew, the friar Anastase Douay, and others to the number of twenty, were chosen to accompany him. Every corner of the magazine was ransacked for an outfit. Joutel generously gave up the better part of his wardrobe to La Salle and his two relatives. Duhaut, who had saved his baggage from the wreck of the "Aimable," was required to contribute to the necessities of the party; and the scantily-furnished chests of those who had died were used to supply the wants of the living. Each man labored with needle and awl to patch his failing garments, or supply their place with buffalo or deer skins. On the twenty-second of April, after mass and prayers in the chapel, they issued from the gate, each bearing his pack and his weapons, some with kettles slung at their backs, some with axes, some with gifts for Indians. In this guise, they held their way in silence across the prairie; while anxious eyes followed them from the palisades of St. Louis, whose inmates, not excepting Joutel himself, seem to have been ignorant of the extent and difficulty of the undertaking.[313] [Sidenote: WRECK OF THE "BELLE."] "On May Day," he writes, "at about two in the afternoon, as I was walking near the house, I heard a voice from the river below, crying out several times, _Qui vive?_ Knowing that the Sieur Barbier had gone that way with two canoes to hunt buffalo, I thought that it might be one of these canoes coming back with meat, and did not think much of the matter till I heard the same voice again. I answered, _Versailles_, which was the password I had given the Sieur Barbier, in case he should come back in the night. But, as I was going towards the bank, I heard other voices which I had not heard for a long time. I recognized among the rest that of M. Chefdeville, which made me fear that some disaster had happened. I ran down to the bank, and my first greeting was to ask what had become of the 'Belle.' They answered that she was wrecked on the other side of the bay, and that all on board were drowned except the six who were in the canoe; namely, the Sieur Chefdeville, the Marquis de la Sablonnière, the man named Teissier, a soldier, a girl, and a little boy."[314] From the young priest Chefdeville, Joutel learned the particulars of the disaster. Water had failed on board the "Belle"; a boat's crew of five men had gone in quest of it; the wind rose, their boat was swamped, and they were all drowned. Those who remained had now no means of going ashore; but if they had no water, they had wine and brandy in abundance, and Teissier, the master of the vessel, was drunk every day. After a while they left their moorings, and tried to reach the fort; but they were few, weak, and unskilful. A violent north wind drove them on a sand-bar. Some of them were drowned in trying to reach land on a raft. Others were more successful; and, after a long delay, they found a stranded canoe, in which they made their way to St. Louis, bringing with them some of La Salle's papers and baggage saved from the wreck. These multiplied disasters bore hard on the spirits of the colonists; and Joutel, like a good commander as he was, spared no pains to cheer them. "We did what we could to amuse ourselves and drive away care. I encouraged our people to dance and sing in the evenings; for when M. de la Salle was among us, pleasure was often banished. Now, there is no use in being melancholy on such occasions. It is true that M. de la Salle had no great cause for merry-making, after all his losses and disappointments; but his troubles made others suffer also. Though he had ordered me to allow to each person only a certain quantity of meat at every meal, I observed this rule only when meat was rare. The air here is very keen, and one has a great appetite. One must eat and act, if he wants good health and spirits. I speak from experience; for once, when I had ague chills, and was obliged to keep the house with nothing to do, I was dreary and down-hearted. On the contrary, if I was busy with hunting or anything else, I was not so dull by half. So I tried to keep the people as busy as possible. I set them to making a small cellar to keep meat fresh in hot weather; but when M. de la Salle came back, he said it was too small. As he always wanted to do everything on a grand scale, he prepared to make a large one, and marked out the plan." This plan of the large cellar, like more important undertakings of its unhappy projector, proved too extensive for execution, the colonists being engrossed by the daily care of keeping themselves alive. [Sidenote: MATRIMONY.] A gleam of hilarity shot for an instant out of the clouds. The young Canadian, Barbier, usually conducted the hunting-parties; and some of the women and girls often went out with them, to aid in cutting up the meat. Barbier became enamoured of one of the girls; and as his devotion to her was the subject of comment, he asked Joutel for leave to marry her. The commandant, after due counsel with the priests and friars, vouchsafed his consent, and the rite was duly solemnized; whereupon, fired by the example, the Marquis de la Sablonnière begged leave to marry another of the girls. Joutel, the gardener's son, concerned that a marquis should so abase himself, and anxious at the same time for the morals of the fort, which La Salle had especially commended to his care, not only flatly refused, but, in the plenitude of his authority, forbade the lovers all further intercourse. Father Zenobe Membré, superior of the mission, gave unwilling occasion for further merriment. These worthy friars were singularly unhappy in their dealings with the buffalo, one of which, it may be remembered, had already knocked down Father Anastase. Undeterred by his example, Father Zenobe one day went out with the hunters, carrying a gun like the rest. Joutel shot a buffalo, which was making off, badly wounded, when a second shot stopped it, and it presently lay down. The father superior thought it was dead; and, without heeding the warning shout of Joutel, he approached, and pushed it with the butt of his gun. The bull sprang up with an effort of expiring fury, and, in the words of Joutel, "trampled on the father, took the skin off his face in several places, and broke his gun, so that he could hardly manage to get away, and remained in an almost helpless state for more than three months. Bad as the accident was, he was laughed at nevertheless for his rashness." The mishaps of the friars did not end here. Father Maxime Le Clerc was set upon by a boar belonging to the colony. "I do not know," says Joutel, "what spite the beast had against him, whether for a beating or some other offence; but, however this may be, I saw the father running and crying for help, and the boar running after him. I went to the rescue, but could not come up in time. The father stooped as he ran, to gather up his cassock from about his legs; and the boar, which ran faster than he, struck him in the arm with his tusks, so that some of the nerves were torn. Thus, all three of our good Récollet fathers were near being the victims of animals."[315] In spite of his efforts to encourage them, the followers of Joutel were fast losing heart. Father Maxime Le Clerc kept a journal, in which he set down various charges against La Salle. Joutel got possession of the paper, and burned it on the urgent entreaty of the friars, who dreaded what might ensue, should the absent commander become aware of the aspersions cast upon him. The elder Duhaut fomented the rising discontent of the colonists, played the demagogue, told them that La Salle would never return, and tried to make himself their leader. Joutel detected the mischief, and, with a lenity which he afterwards deeply regretted, contented himself with a rebuke to the offender, and words of reproof and encouragement to the dejected band. [Sidenote: ADVENTURES OF THE TRAVELLERS.] He had caused the grass to be cut near the fort, so as to form a sort of playground; and here, one evening, he and some of the party were trying to amuse themselves, when they heard shouts from beyond the river, and Joutel recognized the voice of La Salle. Hastening to meet him in a wooden canoe, he brought him and his party to the fort. Twenty men had gone out with him, and eight had returned. Of the rest, four had deserted, one had been lost, one had been devoured by an alligator; and the others, giving out on the march, had probably perished in attempting to regain the fort. The travellers told of a rich country, a wild and beautiful landscape,--woods, rivers, groves, and prairies; but all availed nothing, and the acquisition of five horses was but an indifferent return for the loss of twelve men. After leaving the fort, they had journeyed towards the northeast, over plains green as an emerald with the young verdure of April, till at length they saw, far as the eye could reach, the boundless prairie alive with herds of buffalo. The animals were in one of their tame or stupid moods; and they killed nine or ten of them without the least difficulty, drying the best parts of the meat. They crossed the Colorado on a raft, and reached the banks of another river, where one of the party, named Hiens, a German of Würtemberg, and an old buccaneer, was mired and nearly suffocated in a mud-hole. Unfortunately, as will soon appear, he managed to crawl out; and, to console him, the river was christened with his name. The party made a bridge of felled trees, on which they crossed in safety. La Salle now changed their course, and journeyed eastward, when the travellers soon found themselves in the midst of a numerous Indian population, where they were feasted and caressed without measure. At another village they were less fortunate. The inhabitants were friendly by day and hostile by night. They came to attack the French in their camp, but withdrew, daunted by the menacing voice of La Salle, who had heard them approaching through the cane-brake. La Salle's favorite Shawanoe hunter, Nika, who had followed him from Canada to France, and from France to Texas, was bitten by a rattlesnake; and, though he recovered, the accident detained the party for several days. At length they resumed their journey, but were stopped by a river, called by Douay, "La Rivière des Malheurs." La Salle and Cavelier, with a few others, tried to cross on a raft, which, as it reached the channel, was caught by a current of marvellous swiftness. Douay and Moranget, watching the transit from the edge of the cane-brake, beheld their commander swept down the stream, and vanishing, as it were, in an instant. All that day they remained with their companions on the bank, lamenting in despair for the loss of their guardian angel, for so Douay calls La Salle.[316] It was fast growing dark, when, to their unspeakable relief, they saw him advancing with his party along the opposite bank, having succeeded, after great exertion, in guiding the raft to land. How to rejoin him was now the question. Douay and his companions, who had tasted no food that day, broke their fast on two young eagles which they knocked out of their nest, and then spent the night in rueful consultation as to the means of crossing the river. In the morning they waded into the marsh, the friar with his breviary in his hood to keep it dry, and hacked among the canes till they had gathered enough to make another raft; on which, profiting by La Salle's experience, they safely crossed, and rejoined him. Next, they became entangled in a cane-brake, where La Salle, as usual with him in such cases, took the lead, a hatchet in each hand, and hewed out a path for his followers. They soon reached the villages of the Cenis Indians, on and near the river Trinity,--a tribe then powerful, but long since extinct. Nothing could surpass the friendliness of their welcome. The chiefs came to meet them, bearing the calumet, and followed by warriors in shirts of embroidered deer-skin. Then the whole village swarmed out like bees, gathering around the visitors with offerings of food and all that was precious in their eyes. La Salle was lodged with the great chief; but he compelled his men to encamp at a distance, lest the ardor of their gallantry might give occasion of offence. The lodges of the Cenis, forty or fifty feet high, and covered with a thatch of meadow-grass, looked like huge bee-hives. Each held several families, whose fire was in the middle, and their beds around the circumference. The spoil of the Spaniards was to be seen on all sides,--silver lamps and spoons, swords, old muskets, money, clothing, and a bull of the Pope dispensing the Spanish colonists of New Mexico from fasting during summer.[317] These treasures, as well as their numerous horses, were obtained by the Cenis from their neighbors and allies the Camanches, that fierce prairie banditti who then, as now, scourged the Mexican border with their bloody forays. A party of these wild horsemen was in the village. Douay was edified at seeing them make the sign of the cross in imitation of the neophytes of one of the Spanish missions. They enacted, too, the ceremony of the mass; and one of them, in his rude way, drew a sketch of a picture he had seen in some church which he had pillaged, wherein the friar plainly recognized the Virgin weeping at the foot of the cross. They invited the French to join them on a raid into New Mexico; and they spoke with contempt, as their tribesmen will speak to this day, of the Spanish creoles, saying that it would be easy to conquer a nation of cowards who make people walk before them with fans to cool them in hot weather.[318] Soon after leaving the Cenis villages, both La Salle and his nephew Moranget were attacked by fever. This caused a delay of more than two months, during which the party seem to have remained encamped on the Neches, or possibly the Sabine. When at length the invalids had recovered sufficient strength to travel, the stock of ammunition was nearly spent, some of the men had deserted, and the condition of the travellers was such that there seemed no alternative but to return to Fort St. Louis. This they accordingly did, greatly aided in their march by the horses bought from the Cenis, and suffering no very serious accident by the way,--excepting the loss of La Salle's servant, Dumesnil, who was seized by an alligator while attempting to cross the Colorado. [Sidenote: DEJECTION.] The temporary excitement caused among the colonists by their return soon gave place to a dejection bordering on despair. "This pleasant land," writes Cavelier, "seemed to us an abode of weariness and a perpetual prison." Flattering themselves with the delusion, common to exiles of every kind, that they were objects of solicitude at home, they watched daily, with straining eyes, for an approaching sail. Ships, indeed, had ranged the coast to seek them, but with no friendly intent. Their thoughts dwelt, with unspeakable yearning, on the France they had left behind, which, to their longing fancy, was pictured as an unattainable Eden. Well might they despond; for of a hundred and eighty colonists, besides the crew of the "Belle," less than forty-five remained. The weary precincts of Fort St. Louis, with its fence of rigid palisades, its area of trampled earth, its buildings of weather-stained timber, and its well-peopled graveyard without, were hateful to their sight. La Salle had a heavy task to save them from despair. His composure, his unfailing equanimity, his words of encouragement and cheer, were the breath of life to this forlorn company; for though he could not impart to minds of less adamantine temper the audacity of hope with which he still clung to the final accomplishment of his purposes, the contagion of his hardihood touched, nevertheless, the drooping spirits of his followers.[319] [Sidenote: TWELFTH NIGHT.] The journey to Canada was clearly their only hope; and, after a brief rest, La Salle prepared to renew the attempt. He proposed that Joutel should this time be of the party; and should proceed from Quebec to France, with his brother Cavelier, to solicit succors for the colony, while he himself returned to Texas. A new obstacle was presently interposed. La Salle, whose constitution seems to have suffered from his long course of hardships, was attacked in November with hernia. Joutel offered to conduct the party in his stead; but La Salle replied that his own presence was indispensable at the Illinois. He had the good fortune to recover, within four or five weeks, sufficiently to undertake the journey; and all in the fort busied themselves in preparing an outfit. In such straits were they for clothing, that the sails of the "Belle" were cut up to make coats for the adventurers. Christmas came, and was solemnly observed. There was a midnight mass in the chapel, where Membré, Cavelier, Douay, and their priestly brethren stood before the altar, in vestments strangely contrasting with the rude temple and the ruder garb of the worshippers. And as Membré elevated the consecrated wafer, and the lamps burned dim through the clouds of incense, the kneeling group drew from the daily miracle such consolation as true Catholics alone can know. When Twelfth Night came, all gathered in the hall, and cried, after the jovial old custom, "The King drinks," with hearts, perhaps, as cheerless as their cups, which were filled with cold water. [Sidenote: THE LAST FAREWELL.] On the morrow, the band of adventurers mustered for the fatal journey.[320] The five horses, bought by La Salle of the Indians, stood in the area of the fort, packed for the march; and here was gathered the wretched remnant of the colony,--those who were to go, and those who were to stay behind. These latter were about twenty in all,--Barbier, who was to command in the place of Joutel; Sablonnière, who, despite his title of marquis, was held in great contempt;[321] the friars, Membré and Le Clerc,[322] and the priest Chefdeville, besides a surgeon, soldiers, laborers, seven women and girls, and several children, doomed, in this deadly exile, to wait the issues of the journey, and the possible arrival of a tardy succor. La Salle had made them a last address, delivered, we are told, with that winning air which, though alien from his usual bearing, seems to have been at times a natural expression of this unhappy man.[323] It was a bitter parting, one of sighs, tears, and embracings,--the farewell of those on whose souls had sunk a heavy boding that they would never meet again.[324] Equipped and weaponed for the journey, the adventurers filed from the gate, crossed the river, and held their slow march over the prairies beyond, till intervening woods and hills shut Fort St. Louis forever from their sight. FOOTNOTES: [301] Called by Joutel, Rivière aux Boeufs. [302] Joutel, _Journal Historique_, 108; _Relation_ (Margry, iii. 174); _Procès Verbal fait au poste de St. Louis, le 18 Avril, 1686_. [303] Joutel, _Journal Historique_, 109. Le Clerc, who was not present, says a hundred. [304] The Bay of St. Louis, St. Bernard's Bay, or Matagorda Bay,--for it has borne all these names,--was also called Espiritu Santo Bay by the Spaniards, in common with several other bays in the Gulf of Mexico. An adjoining bay still retains the name. [305] Cavelier, in his report to the minister, says: "We reached a large village, enclosed with a kind of wall made of clay and sand, and fortified with little towers at intervals, where we found the arms of Spain engraved on a plate of copper, with the date of 1588, attached to a stake. The inhabitants gave us a kind welcome, and showed us some hammers and an anvil, two small pieces of iron cannon, a small brass culverin, some pike-heads, some old sword-blades, and some books of Spanish comedy; and thence they guided us to a little hamlet of fishermen, about two leagues distant, where they showed us a second stake, also with the arms of Spain, and a few old chimneys. All this convinced us that the Spaniards had formerly been here." (Cavelier, _Relation du Voyage que mon frère entreprit pour découvrir l'embouchure du fleuve de Missisipy_.) The above is translated from the original draft of Cavelier, which is in my possession. It was addressed to the colonial minister, after the death of La Salle. The statement concerning the Spaniards needs confirmation. [306] Compare Joutel with the Spanish account in _Carta en que se da noticia de un viaje hecho á la Bahia de Espíritu Santo y de la poblacion que tenian ahi los Franceses; Coleccion de Varios Documentos_, 25. [307] For the above incidents of life at Fort St. Louis, see Joutel, _Relation_ (Margry, iii. 185-218, _passim_). The printed condensation of the narrative omits most of these particulars. [308] Joutel, _Relation_ (Margry, iii. 206). Compare Le Clerc, ii. 296. Cavelier, always disposed to exaggerate, says that ten men were killed. La Salle had previously had encounters with the Indians, and punished them severely for the trouble they had given his men. Le Clerc says of the principal fight: "Several Indians were wounded, a few were killed, and others made prisoners,--one of whom, a girl of three or four years, was baptized, and died a few days after, as the first-fruit of this mission, and a sure conquest sent to heaven." [309] Joutel, _Relation_ (Margry, iii. 219). [310] Cavelier says that he actually reached the Mississippi; but, on the one hand, the abbé did not know whether the river in question was the Mississippi or not; and, on the other, he is somewhat inclined to mendacity. Le Clerc says that La Salle thought he had found the river. According to the _Procès Verbal_ of 18 April, 1686, "il y arriva le 13 Février." Joutel says that La Salle told him "qu'il n'avoit point trouvé sa rivière." [311] _Procès Verbal fait au poste de St. Louis, le 18 Avril, 1686._ [312] Cavelier, _Relation du Voyage pour découvrir l'Embouchure du Fleuve de Missisipy_. [313] Joutel, _Journal Historique_, 140; Anastase Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 303; Cavelier, _Relation_. The date is from Douay. It does not appear, from his narrative, that they meant to go farther than the Illinois. Cavelier says that after resting here they were to go to Canada. Joutel supposed that they would go only to the Illinois. La Salle seems to have been even more reticent than usual. [314] Joutel, _Relation_ (Margry, iii. 226). [315] Joutel, _Relation_ (Margry, iii. 244, 246). [316] "Ce fût une desolation extrême pour nous tous qui desesperions de revoir jamais nostre Ange tutélaire, le Sieur de la Salle.... Tout le jour se passa en pleurs et en larmes."--_Douay in Le Clerc_, ii. 315. [317] Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 321; Cavelier, _Relation_. [318] Douay in Le Clerc, ii. 324, 325. [319] "L'égalité d'humeur du Chef rassuroit tout le monde; et il trouvoit des resources à tout par son esprit qui relevoit les espérances les plus abatues."--Joutel, _Journal Historique_, 152. "Il seroit difficile de trouver dans l'Histoire un courage plus intrepide et plus invincible que celuy du Sieur de la Salle dans les évenemens contraires; il ne fût jamais abatu, et il espéroit toujours avec le secours du Ciel de venir à bout de son entreprise malgré tous les obstacles qui se présentoient."--_Douay in Le Clerc_, ii. 327. [320] I follow Douay's date, who makes the day of departure the seventh of January, or the day after Twelfth Night. Joutel thinks it was the twelfth of January, but professes uncertainty as to all his dates at this time, as he lost his notes. [321] He had to be kept on short allowance, because he was in the habit of bargaining away everything given to him. He had squandered the little that belonged to him at St. Domingo, in amusements "indignes de sa naissance," and in consequence was suffering from diseases which disabled him from walking. (_Procès Verbal, 18 Avril, 1686._) [322] Maxime le Clerc was a relative of the author of _L'Établissement de la Foi_. [323] "Il fit une Harangue pleine d'éloquence et de cet air engageant qui luy estoit si naturel: toute la petite Colonie y estoit presente et en fût touchée jusques aux larmes, persuadée de la nécessité de son voyage et de la droiture de ses intentions."--_Douay in Le Clerc_, ii, 330. [324] "Nous nous separâmes les uns des autres, d'une manière si tendre et si triste qu'il sembloit que nous avions tous le secret pressentiment que nous ne nous reverrions jamais."--Joutel, _Journal Historique_, 158. CHAPTER XXVII. 1687. ASSASSINATION OF LA SALLE. His Followers.--Prairie Travelling--A Hunters' Quarrel--The Murder of Moranget.--The Conspiracy.--Death of La Salle: his Character. [Sidenote: LA SALLE'S FOLLOWERS.] The travellers were crossing a marshy prairie towards a distant belt of woods that followed the course of a little river. They led with them their five horses, laden with their scanty baggage, and, with what was of no less importance, their stock of presents for Indians. Some wore the remains of the clothing they had worn from France, eked out with deer-skins, dressed in the Indian manner; and some had coats of old sail-cloth. Here was La Salle, in whom one would have known, at a glance, the chief of the party; and the priest, Cavelier, who seems to have shared not one of the high traits of his younger brother. Here, too, were their nephews, Moranget and the boy Cavelier, now about seventeen years old; the trusty soldier Joutel; and the friar Anastase Douay. Duhaut followed, a man of respectable birth and education; and Liotot, the surgeon of the party. At home, they might perhaps have lived and died with a fair repute; but the wilderness is a rude touchstone, which often reveals traits that would have lain buried and unsuspected in civilized life. The German Hiens, the ex-buccaneer, was also of the number. He had probably sailed with an English crew; for he was sometimes known as _Gemme Anglais_, or "English Jem."[325] The Sieur de Marie; Teissier, a pilot; L'Archevêque, a servant of Duhaut; and others, to the number in all of seventeen,--made up the party; to which is to be added Nika, La Salle's Shawanoe hunter, who, as well as another Indian, had twice crossed the ocean with him, and still followed his fortunes with an admiring though undemonstrative fidelity. They passed the prairie, and neared the forest. Here they saw buffalo; and the hunters approached, and killed several of them. Then they traversed the woods; found and forded the shallow and rushy stream, and pushed through the forest beyond, till they again reached the open prairie. Heavy clouds gathered over them, and it rained all night; but they sheltered themselves under the fresh hides of the buffalo they had killed. [Sidenote: PRAIRIE TRAVELLING.] It is impossible, as it would be needless, to follow the detail of their daily march.[326] It was such an one, though with unwonted hardship, as is familiar to the memory of many a prairie traveller of our own time. They suffered greatly from the want of shoes, and found for a while no better substitute than a casing of raw buffalo-hide, which they were forced to keep always wet, as, when dry, it hardened about the foot like iron. At length they bought dressed deer-skin from the Indians, of which they made tolerable moccasins. The rivers, streams, and gullies filled with water were without number; and to cross them they made a boat of bull-hide, like the "bull boat" still used on the Upper Missouri. This did good service, as, with the help of their horses, they could carry it with them. Two or three men could cross in it at once, and the horses swam after them like dogs. Sometimes they traversed the sunny prairie; sometimes dived into the dark recesses of the forest, where the buffalo, descending daily from their pastures in long files to drink at the river, often made a broad and easy path for the travellers. When foul weather arrested them, they built huts of bark and long meadow-grass; and safely sheltered lounged away the day, while their horses, picketed near by, stood steaming in the rain. At night, they usually set a rude stockade about their camp; and here, by the grassy border of a brook, or at the edge of a grove where a spring bubbled up through the sands, they lay asleep around the embers of their fire, while the man on guard listened to the deep breathing of the slumbering horses, and the howling of the wolves that saluted the rising moon as it flooded the waste of prairie with pale mystic radiance. They met Indians almost daily,--sometimes a band of hunters, mounted or on foot, chasing buffalo on the plains; sometimes a party of fishermen; sometimes a winter camp, on the slope of a hill or under the sheltering border of a forest. They held intercourse with them in the distance by signs; often they disarmed their distrust, and attracted them into their camp; and often they visited them in their lodges, where, seated on buffalo-robes, they smoked with their entertainers, passing the pipe from hand to hand, after the custom still in use among the prairie tribes. Cavelier says that they once saw a band of a hundred and fifty mounted Indians attacking a herd of buffalo with lances pointed with sharpened bone. The old priest was delighted with the sport, which he pronounces "the most diverting thing in the world." On another occasion, when the party were encamped near the village of a tribe which Cavelier calls Sassory, he saw them catch an alligator about twelve feet long, which they proceeded to torture as if he were a human enemy,--first putting out his eyes, and then leading him to the neighboring prairie, where, having confined him by a number of stakes, they spent the entire day in tormenting him.[327] Holding a northerly course, the travellers crossed the Brazos, and reached the waters of the Trinity. The weather was unfavorable, and on one occasion they encamped in the rain during four or five days together. It was not an harmonious company. La Salle's cold and haughty reserve had returned, at least for those of his followers to whom he was not partial. Duhaut and the surgeon Liotot, both of whom were men of some property, had a large pecuniary stake in the enterprise, and were disappointed and incensed at its ruinous result. They had a quarrel with young Moranget, whose hot and hasty temper was as little fitted to conciliate as was the harsh reserve of his uncle. Already at Fort St. Louis, Duhaut had intrigued among the men; and the mild admonition of Joutel had not, it seems, sufficed to divert him from his sinister purposes. Liotot, it is said, had secretly sworn vengeance against La Salle, whom he charged with having caused the death of his brother, or, as some will have it, his nephew. On one of the former journeys this young man's strength had failed; and, La Salle having ordered him to return to the fort, he had been killed by Indians on the way. [Sidenote: MURDER OF MORANGET.] The party moved again as the weather improved, and on the fifteenth of March encamped within a few miles of a spot which La Salle had passed on his preceding journey, and where he had left a quantity of Indian corn and beans in _cache_; that is to say, hidden in the ground or in a hollow tree. As provisions were falling short, he sent a party from the camp to find it. These men were Duhaut, Liotot,[328] Hiens the buccaneer, Teissier, L'Archevêque, Nika the hunter, and La Salle's servant Saget. They opened the _cache_, and found the contents spoiled; but as they returned from their bootless errand they saw buffalo, and Nika shot two of them. They now encamped on the spot, and sent the servant to inform La Salle, in order that he might send horses to bring in the meat. Accordingly, on the next day, he directed Moranget and De Marle, with the necessary horses, to go with Saget to the hunters' camp. When they arrived, they found that Duhaut and his companions had already cut up the meat, and laid it upon scaffolds for smoking, though it was not yet so dry as, it seems, this process required. Duhaut and the others had also put by, for themselves, the marrow-bones and certain portions of the meat, to which, by woodland custom, they had a perfect right. Moranget, whose rashness and violence had once before caused a fatal catastrophe, fell into a most unreasonable fit of rage, berated and menaced Duhaut and his party, and ended by seizing upon the whole of the meat, including the reserved portions. This added fuel to the fire of Duhaut's old grudge against Moranget and his uncle. There is reason to think that he had harbored deadly designs, the execution of which was only hastened by the present outbreak. The surgeon also bore hatred against Moranget, whom he had nursed with constant attention when wounded by an Indian arrow, and who had since repaid him with abuse. These two now took counsel apart with Hiens, Teissier, and L'Archevêque; and it was resolved to kill Moranget that night. Nika, La Salle's devoted follower, and Saget, his faithful servant, must die with him. All of the five were of one mind except the pilot Teissier, who neither aided nor opposed the plot. Night came: the woods grew dark; the evening meal was finished, and the evening pipes were smoked. The order of the guard was arranged; and, doubtless by design, the first hour of the night was assigned to Moranget, the second to Saget, and the third to Nika. Gun in hand, each stood watch in turn over the silent but not sleeping forms around him, till, his time expiring, he called the man who was to relieve him, wrapped himself in his blanket, and was soon buried in a slumber that was to be his last. Now the assassins rose. Duhaut and Hiens stood with their guns cocked, ready to shoot down any one of the destined victims who should resist or fly. The surgeon, with an axe, stole towards the three sleepers, and struck a rapid blow at each in turn. Saget and Nika died with little movement; but Moranget started spasmodically into a sitting posture, gasping and unable to speak; and the murderers compelled De Marle, who was not in their plot, to compromise himself by despatching him. The floodgates of murder were open, and the torrent must have its way. Vengeance and safety alike demanded the death of La Salle. Hiens, or "English Jem," alone seems to have hesitated; for he was one of those to whom that stern commander had always been partial. Meanwhile, the intended victim was still at his camp, about six miles distant. It is easy to picture, with sufficient accuracy, the features of the scene,--the sheds of bark and branches, beneath which, among blankets and buffalo-robes, camp-utensils, pack-saddles, rude harness, guns, powder-horns, and bullet-pouches, the men lounged away the hour, sleeping or smoking, or talking among themselves; the blackened kettles that hung from tripods of poles over the fires; the Indians strolling about the place or lying, like dogs in the sun, with eyes half-shut, yet all observant; and, in the neighboring meadow, the horses grazing under the eye of a watchman. [Sidenote: SUSPENSE.] It was the eighteenth of March. Moranget and his companions had been expected to return the night before; but the whole day passed, and they did not appear. La Salle became very anxious. He resolved to go and look for them; but not well knowing the way, he told the Indians who were about the camp that he would give them a hatchet if they would guide him. One of them accepted the offer; and La Salle prepared to set out in the morning, at the same time directing Joutel to be ready to go with him. Joutel says: "That evening, while we were talking about what could have happened to the absent men, he seemed to have a presentiment of what was to take place. He asked me if I had heard of any machinations against them, or if I had noticed any bad design on the part of Duhaut and the rest. I answered that I had heard nothing, except that they sometimes complained of being found fault with so often; and that this was all I knew; besides which, as they were persuaded that I was in his interest, they would not have told me of any bad design they might have. We were very uneasy all the rest of the evening." [Sidenote: THE FATAL SHOT.] In the morning, La Salle set out with his Indian guide. He had changed his mind with regard to Joutel, whom he now directed to remain in charge of the camp and to keep a careful watch. He told the friar Anastase Douay to come with him instead of Joutel, whose gun, which was the best in the party, he borrowed for the occasion, as well as his pistol. The three proceeded on their way,--La Salle, the friar, and the Indian. "All the way," writes the friar, "he spoke to me of nothing but matters of piety, grace, and predestination; enlarging on the debt he owed to God, who had saved him from so many perils during more than twenty years of travel in America. Suddenly, I saw him overwhelmed with a profound sadness, for which he himself could not account. He was so much moved that I scarcely knew him." He soon recovered his usual calmness; and they walked on till they approached the camp of Duhaut, which was on the farther side of a small river. Looking about him with the eye of a woodsman, La Salle saw two eagles circling in the air nearly over him, as if attracted by carcasses of beasts or men. He fired his gun and his pistol, as a summons to any of his followers who might be within hearing. The shots reached the ears of the conspirators. Rightly conjecturing by whom they were fired, several of them, led by Duhaut, crossed the river at a little distance above, where trees or other intervening objects hid them from sight. Duhaut and the surgeon crouched like Indians in the long, dry, reed-like grass of the last summer's growth, while L'Archevêque stood in sight near the bank. La Salle, continuing to advance, soon saw him, and, calling to him, demanded where was Moranget. The man, without lifting his hat, or any show of respect, replied in an agitated and broken voice, but with a tone of studied insolence, that Moranget was strolling about somewhere. La Salle rebuked and menaced him. He rejoined with increased insolence, drawing back, as he spoke, towards the ambuscade, while the incensed commander advanced to chastise him. At that moment a shot was fired from the grass, instantly followed by another; and, pierced through the brain, La Salle dropped dead. The friar at his side stood terror-stricken, unable to advance or to fly; when Duhaut, rising from the ambuscade, called out to him to take courage, for he had nothing to fear. The murderers now came forward, and with wild looks gathered about their victim. "There thou liest, great Bashaw! There thou liest!"[329] exclaimed the surgeon Liotot, in base exultation over the unconscious corpse. With mockery and insult, they stripped it naked, dragged it into the bushes, and left it there, a prey to the buzzards and the wolves. Thus in the vigor of his manhood, at the age of forty-three, died Robert Cavelier de la Salle, "one of the greatest men," writes Tonty, "of this age;" without question one of the most remarkable explorers whose names live in history. His faithful officer Joutel thus sketches his portrait: "His firmness, his courage, his great knowledge of the arts and sciences, which made him equal to every undertaking, and his untiring energy, which enabled him to surmount every obstacle, would have won at last a glorious success for his grand enterprise, had not all his fine qualities been counterbalanced by a haughtiness of manner which often made him insupportable, and by a harshness towards those under his command which drew upon him an implacable hatred, and was at last the cause of his death."[330] [Sidenote: HIS CHARACTER.] The enthusiasm of the disinterested and chivalrous Champlain was not the enthusiasm of La Salle; nor had he any part in the self-devoted zeal of the early Jesuit explorers. He belonged not to the age of the knight-errant and the saint, but to the modern world of practical study and practical action. He was the hero not of a principle nor of a faith, but simply of a fixed idea and a determined purpose. As often happens with concentred and energetic natures, his purpose was to him a passion and an inspiration; and he clung to it with a certain fanaticism of devotion. It was the offspring of an ambition vast and comprehensive, yet acting in the interest both of France and of civilization. Serious in all things, incapable of the lighter pleasures, incapable of repose, finding no joy but in the pursuit of great designs, too shy for society and too reserved for popularity, often unsympathetic and always seeming so, smothering emotions which he could not utter, schooled to universal distrust, stern to his followers and pitiless to himself, bearing the brunt of every hardship and every danger, demanding of others an equal constancy joined to an implicit deference, heeding no counsel but his own, attempting the impossible and grasping at what was too vast to hold,--he contained in his own complex and painful nature the chief springs of his triumphs, his failures, and his death. It is easy to reckon up his defects, but it is not easy to hide from sight the Roman virtues that redeemed them. Beset by a throng of enemies, he stands, like the King of Israel, head and shoulders above them all. He was a tower of adamant, against whose impregnable front hardship and danger, the rage of man and of the elements, the southern sun, the northern blast, fatigue, famine, disease, delay, disappointment, and deferred hope emptied their quivers in vain. That very pride which, Coriolanus-like, declared itself most sternly in the thickest press of foes, has in it something to challenge admiration. Never, under the impenetrable mail of paladin or crusader, beat a heart of more intrepid mettle than within the stoic panoply that armed the breast of La Salle. To estimate aright the marvels of his patient fortitude, one must follow on his track through the vast scene of his interminable journeyings,--those thousands of weary miles of forest, marsh, and river, where, again and again, in the bitterness of baffled striving, the untiring pilgrim pushed onward towards the goal which he was never to attain. America owes him an enduring memory; for in this masculine figure she sees the pioneer who guided her to the possession of her richest heritage.[331] [Sidenote: DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE.] FOOTNOTES: [325] Tonty also speaks of him as "un flibustier anglois." In another document, he is called "James." [326] Of the three narratives of this journey, those of Joutel, Cavelier, and Anastase Douay, the first is by far the best. That of Cavelier seems the work of a man of confused brain and indifferent memory. Some of his statements are irreconcilable with those of Joutel and Douay; and known facts of his history justify the suspicion of a wilful inaccuracy. Joutel's account is of a very different character, and seems to be the work of an honest and intelligent man. Douay's account if brief; but it agrees with that of Joutel, in most essential points. [327] Cavelier, _Relation_. [328] Called Lanquetot by Tonty. [329] "Te voilà, grand Bacha, te voilà!"--Joutel, _Journal Historique_, 203. [330] _Ibid._ [331] On the assassination of La Salle, the evidence is fourfold: 1. The narrative of Douay, who was with him at the time. 2. That of Joutel, who learned the facts, immediately after they took place, from Douay and others, and who parted from La Salle an hour or more before his death. 3. A document preserved in the Archives de la Marine, entitled _Relation de la Mort du Sr. de la Salle, suivant le rapport d'un nommé Couture à qui M. Cavelier l'apprit en passant au pays des Akansa, avec toutes les circonstances que le dit Couture a apprises d'un François que M. Cavelier avoit laissé aux dits pays des Akansa, crainte qu'il ne gardât pas le secret_. 4. The authentic memoir of Tonty, of which a copy from the original is before me, and which has recently been printed by Margry. The narrative of Cavelier unfortunately fails us several weeks before the death of his brother, the remainder being lost. On a study of these various documents, it is impossible to resist the conclusion that neither Cavelier nor Douay always wrote honestly. Joutel, on the contrary, gives the impression of sense, intelligence, and candor throughout. Charlevoix, who knew him long after, says that he was "un fort honnête homme, et le seul de la troupe de M. de la Salle, sur qui ce célèbre voyageur pût compter." Tonty derived his information from the survivors of La Salle's party. Couture, whose statements are embodied in the _Relation de la Mort de M. de la Salle_, was one of Tonty's men, who, as will be seen hereafter, were left by him at the mouth of the Arkansas, and to whom Cavelier told the story of his brother's death. Couture also repeats the statements of one of La Salle's followers, undoubtedly a Parisian boy, named Barthelemy, who was violently prejudiced against his chief, whom he slanders to the utmost of his skill, saying that he was so enraged at his failures that he did not approach the sacraments for two years; that he nearly starved his brother Cavelier, allowing him only a handful of meal a day; that he killed with his own hand "quantité de personnes," who did not work to his liking; and that he killed the sick in their beds, without mercy, under the pretence that they were counterfeiting sickness in order to escape work. These assertions certainly have no other foundation than the undeniable rigor of La Salle's command. Douay says that he confessed and made his devotions on the morning of his death, while Cavelier always speaks of him as the hope and the staff of the colony. Douay declares that La Salle lived an hour after the fatal shot; that he gave him absolution, buried his body, and planted a cross on his grave. At the time, he told Joutel a different story; and the latter, with the best means of learning the facts, explicitly denies the friar's printed statement. Couture, on the authority of Cavelier himself, also says that neither he nor Douay was permitted to take any step for burying the body. Tonty says that Cavelier begged leave to do so, but was refused. Douay, unwilling to place upon record facts from which the inference might easily be drawn that he had been terrified from discharging his duty, no doubt invented the story of the burial, as well as that of the edifying behavior of Moranget, after he had been struck in the head with an axe. The locality of La Salle's assassination is sufficiently clear, from a comparison of the several narratives; and it is also indicated on a contemporary manuscript map, made on the return of the survivors of the party to France. The scene of the catastrophe is here placed on a southern branch of the Trinity. La Salle's debts, at the time of his death, according to a schedule presented in 1701 to Champigny, intendant of Canada, amounted to 106,831 livres, without reckoning interest. This cannot be meant to include all, as items are given which raise the amount much higher. In 1678 and 1679 alone, he contracted debts to the amount of 97,184 livres, of which 46,000 were furnished by Branssac, fiscal attorney of the Seminary of Montreal. This was to be paid in beaver-skins. Frontenac, at the same time, became his surety for 13,623 livres. In 1684, he borrowed 34,825 livres from the Sieur Pen, at Paris. These sums do not include the losses incurred by his family, which, in the memorial presented by them to the King, are set down at 500,000 livres for the expeditions between 1678 and 1683, and 300,000 livres for the fatal Texan expedition of 1684 These last figures are certainly exaggerated. CHAPTER XXVIII. 1687, 1688. THE INNOCENT AND THE GUILTY. Triumph of the Murderers.--Danger of Joutel.--Joutel among the Cenis.--White Savages.--Insolence of Duhaut and his Accomplices.--Murder of Duhaut and Liotot.--Hiens, the Buccaneer.--Joutel and his Party: their Escape; they reach the Arkansas.--Bravery and Devotion of Tonty.--The Fugitives reach the Illinois.--Unworthy Conduct of Cavelier.--He and his Companions return to France. Father Anastase Douay returned to the camp, and, aghast with grief and terror, rushed into the hut of Cavelier. "My poor brother is dead!" cried the priest, instantly divining the catastrophe from the horror-stricken face of the messenger. Close behind came the murderers, Duhaut at their head. Cavelier, his young nephew, and Douay himself, all fell on their knees, expecting instant death. The priest begged piteously for half an hour to prepare for his end; but terror and submission sufficed, and no more blood was shed. The camp yielded without resistance; and Duhaut was lord of all. In truth, there were none to oppose him; for, except the assassins themselves, the party was now reduced to six persons,--Joutel, Douay, the elder Cavelier, his young nephew, and two other boys, the orphan Talon and a lad called Barthelemy. [Sidenote: DOUBT AND ANXIETY.] Joutel, for the moment, was absent; and L'Archevêque, who had a kindness for him, went quietly to seek him. He found him on a hillock, making a fire of dried grass in order that the smoke might guide La Salle on his return, and watching the horses grazing in the meadow below. "I was very much surprised," writes Joutel, "when I saw him approaching. When he came up to me he seemed all in confusion, or, rather, out of his wits. He began with saying that there was very bad news. I asked what it was. He answered that the Sieur de la Salle was dead, and also his nephew the Sieur de Moranget, his Indian hunter, and his servant. I was petrified, and did not know what to say; for I saw that they had been murdered. The man added that, at first, the murderers had sworn to kill me too. I easily believed it, for I had always been in the interest of M. de la Salle, and had commanded in his place; and it is hard to please everybody, or prevent some from being dissatisfied. I was greatly perplexed as to what I ought to do, and whether I had not better escape to the woods, whithersoever God should guide me; but, by bad or good luck, I had no gun and only one pistol, without balls or powder except what was in my powder-horn. To whatever side I turned, my life was in great peril. It is true that L'Archevêque assured me that they had changed their minds, and had agreed to murder nobody else, unless they met with resistance. So, being in no condition, as I just said, to go far, having neither arms nor powder, I abandoned myself to Providence, and went back to the camp, where I found that these wretched murderers had seized everything belonging to M. de la Salle, and even my personal effects. They had also taken possession of all the arms. The first words that Duhaut said to me were, that each should command in turn; to which I made no answer. I saw M. Cavelier praying in a corner, and Father Anastase in another. He did not dare to speak to me, nor did I dare to go towards him till I had seen the designs of the assassins. They were in furious excitement, but, nevertheless, very uneasy and embarrassed. I was some time without speaking, and, as it were, without moving, for fear of giving umbrage to our enemies. "They had cooked some meat, and when it was supper-time they distributed it as they saw fit, saying that formerly their share had been served out to them, but that it was they who would serve it out in future. They, no doubt, wanted me to say something that would give them a chance to make a noise; but I managed always to keep my mouth closed. When night came and it was time to stand guard, they were in perplexity, as they could not do it alone; therefore they said to M. Cavelier, Father Anastase, me, and the others who were not in the plot with them, that all we had to do was to stand guard as usual; that there was no use in thinking about what had happened,--that what was done was done; that they had been driven to it by despair, and that they were sorry for it, and meant no more harm to anybody. M. Cavelier took up the word, and told them that when they killed M. de la Salle they killed themselves, for there was nobody but him who could get us out of this country. At last, after a good deal of talk on both sides, they gave us our arms. So we stood guard; during which, M. Cavelier told me how they had come to the camp, entered his hut like so many madmen, and seized everything in it." Joutel, Douay, and the two Caveliers spent a sleepless night, consulting as to what they should do. They mutually pledged themselves to stand by each other to the last, and to escape as soon as they could from the company of the assassins. In the morning, Duhaut and his accomplices, after much discussion, resolved to go to the Cenis villages; and, accordingly, the whole party broke up their camp, packed their horses, and began their march. They went five leagues, and encamped at the edge of a grove. On the following day they advanced again till noon, when heavy rains began, and they were forced to stop by the banks of a river. "We passed the night and the next day there," says Joutel; "and during that time my mind was possessed with dark thoughts. It was hard to prevent ourselves from being in constant fear among such men, and we could not look at them without horror. When I thought of the cruel deeds they had committed, and the danger we were in from them, I longed to revenge the evil they had done us. This would have been easy while they were asleep; but M. Cavelier dissuaded us, saying that we ought to leave vengeance to God, and that he himself had more to revenge than we, having lost his brother and his nephew." [Sidenote: JOURNEY TO THE CENIS.] The comic alternated with the tragic. On the twenty-third, they reached the bank of a river too deep to ford. Those who knew how to swim crossed without difficulty, but Joutel, Cavelier, and Douay were not of the number. Accordingly, they launched a log of light, dry wood, embraced it with one arm, and struck out for the other bank with their legs and the arm that was left free. But the friar became frightened. "He only clung fast to the aforesaid log," says Joutel, "and did nothing to help us forward. While I was trying to swim, my body being stretched at full length, I hit him in the belly with my feet; on which he thought it was all over with him, and, I can answer for it, he invoked Saint Francis with might and main. I could not help laughing, though I was myself in danger of drowning." Some Indians who had joined the party swam to the rescue, and pushed the log across. The path to the Cenis villages was exceedingly faint, and but for the Indians they would have lost the way. They crossed the main stream of the Trinity in a boat of raw hides, and then, being short of provisions, held a council to determine what they should do. It was resolved that Joutel, with Hiens, Liotot, and Teissier, should go in advance to the villages and buy a supply of corn. Thus, Joutel found himself doomed to the company of three villains, who, he strongly suspected, were contriving an opportunity to kill him; but, as he had no choice, he dissembled his doubts, and set out with his sinister companions, Duhaut having first supplied him with goods for the intended barter. [Sidenote: JOUTEL AND THE CENIS.] They rode over hills and plains till night, encamped, supped on a wild turkey, and continued their journey till the afternoon of the next day, when they saw three men approaching on horseback, one of whom, to Joutel's alarm, was dressed like a Spaniard. He proved, however, to be a Cenis Indian, like the others. The three turned their horses' heads, and accompanied the Frenchmen on their way. At length they neared the Indian town, which, with its large thatched lodges, looked like a cluster of gigantic haystacks. Their approach had been made known, and they were received in solemn state. Twelve of the elders came to meet them in their dress of ceremony, each with his face daubed red or black, and his head adorned with painted plumes. From their shoulders hung deer-skins wrought with gay colors. Some carried war-clubs; some, bows and arrows; some, the blades of Spanish rapiers, attached to wooden handles decorated with hawk's bells and bunches of feathers. They stopped before the honored guests, and, raising their hands aloft, uttered howls so extraordinary that Joutel could hardly preserve the gravity which the occasion demanded. Having next embraced the Frenchmen, the elders conducted them into the village, attended by a crowd of warriors and young men; ushered them into their town-hall, a large lodge, devoted to councils, feasts, dances, and other public assemblies; seated them on mats, and squatted in a ring around them. Here they were regaled with sagamite or Indian porridge, corn-cake, beans, bread made of the meal of parched corn, and another kind of bread made of the kernels of nuts and the seed of sunflowers. Then the pipe was lighted, and all smoked together. The four Frenchmen proposed to open a traffic for provisions, and their entertainers grunted assent. Joutel found a Frenchman in the village. He was a young man from Provence, who had deserted from La Salle on his last journey, and was now, to all appearance, a savage like his adopted countrymen, being naked like them, and affecting to have forgotten his native language. He was very friendly, however, and invited the visitors to a neighboring village, where he lived, and where, as he told them, they would find a better supply of corn. They accordingly set out with him, escorted by a crowd of Indians. They saw lodges and clusters of lodges scattered along their path at intervals, each with its field of corn, beans, and pumpkins, rudely cultivated with a wooden hoe. Reaching their destination, which was four or five leagues distant, they were greeted with the same honors as at the first village, and, the ceremonial of welcome over, were lodged in the abode of the savage Frenchman. It is not to be supposed, however, that he and his squaws, of whom he had a considerable number, dwelt here alone; for these lodges of the Cenis often contained eight or ten families. They were made by firmly planting in a circle tall, straight young trees, such as grew in the swamps. The tops were then bent inward and lashed together; great numbers of cross-pieces were bound on; and the frame thus constructed was thickly covered with thatch, a hole being left at the top for the escape of the smoke. The inmates were ranged around the circumference of the structure, each family in a kind of stall, open in front, but separated from those adjoining it by partitions of mats. Here they placed their beds of cane, their painted robes of buffalo and deer-skin, their cooking utensils of pottery, and other household goods; and here, too, the head of the family hung his bow, quiver, lance, and shield. There was nothing in common but the fire, which burned in the middle of the lodge, and was never suffered to go out. These dwellings were of great size, and Joutel declares that he has seen some of them sixty feet in diameter.[332] It was in one of the largest that the four travellers were now lodged. A place was assigned them where to bestow their baggage; and they took possession of their quarters amid the silent stares of the whole community. They asked their renegade countryman, the Provençal, if they were safe. He replied that they were; but this did not wholly reassure them, and they spent a somewhat wakeful night. In the morning, they opened their budgets, and began a brisk trade in knives, awls, beads, and other trinkets, which they exchanged for corn and beans. Before evening, they had acquired a considerable stock; and Joutel's three companions declared their intention of returning with it to the camp, leaving him to continue the trade. They went, accordingly, in the morning; and Joutel was left alone. On the one hand, he was glad to be rid of them; on the other, he found his position among the Cenis very irksome, and, as he thought, insecure. Besides the Provençal, who had gone with Liotot and his companions, there were two other French deserters among this tribe, and Joutel was very desirous to see them, hoping that they could tell him the way to the Mississippi; for he was resolved to escape, at the first opportunity, from the company of Duhaut and his accomplices. He therefore made the present of a knife to a young Indian, whom he sent to find the two Frenchmen and invite them to come to the village. Meanwhile he continued his barter, but under many difficulties; for he could only explain himself by signs, and his customers, though friendly by day, pilfered his goods by night. This, joined to the fears and troubles which burdened his mind, almost deprived him of sleep, and, as he confesses, greatly depressed his spirits. Indeed, he had little cause for cheerfulness as to the past, present, or future. An old Indian, one of the patriarchs of the tribe, observing his dejection and anxious to relieve it, one evening brought him a young wife, saying that he made him a present of her. She seated herself at his side; "but," says Joutel, "as my head was full of other cares and anxieties, I said nothing to the poor girl. She waited for a little time; and then, finding that I did not speak a word, she went away."[333] [Sidenote: WHITE SAVAGES.] Late one night, he lay between sleeping and waking on the buffalo-robe that covered his bed of canes. All around the great lodge, its inmates were buried in sleep; and the fire that still burned in the midst cast ghostly gleams on the trophies of savage chivalry--the treasured scalp-locks, the spear and war-club, and shield of whitened bull-hide--that hung by each warrior's resting-place. Such was the weird scene that lingered on the dreamy eyes of Joutel, as he closed them at last in a troubled sleep. The sound of a footstep soon wakened him; and, turning, he saw at his side the figure of a naked savage, armed with a bow and arrows. Joutel spoke, but received no answer. Not knowing what to think, he reached out his hand for his pistols; on which the intruder withdrew, and seated himself by the fire. Thither Joutel followed; and as the light fell on his features, he looked at him closely. His face was tattooed, after the Cenis fashion, in lines drawn from the top of the forehead and converging to the chin; and his body was decorated with similar embellishments. Suddenly, this supposed Indian rose and threw his arms around Joutel's neck, making himself known, at the same time, as one of the Frenchmen who had deserted from La Salle and taken refuge among the Cenis. He was a Breton sailor named Ruter. His companion, named Grollet, also a sailor, had been afraid to come to the village lest he should meet La Salle. Ruter expressed surprise and regret when he heard of the death of his late commander. He had deserted him but a few months before. That brief interval had sufficed to transform him into a savage; and both he and his companion found their present reckless and ungoverned way of life greatly to their liking. He could tell nothing of the Mississippi; and on the next day he went home, carrying with him a present of beads for his wives, of which last he had made a large collection. In a few days he reappeared, bringing Grollet with him. Each wore a bunch of turkey-feathers dangling from his head, and each had wrapped his naked body in a blanket. Three men soon after arrived from Duhaut's camp, commissioned to receive the corn which Joutel had purchased. They told him that Duhaut and Liotot, the tyrants of the party, had resolved to return to Fort St. Louis, and build a vessel to escape to the West Indies,--"a visionary scheme," writes Joutel, "for our carpenters were all dead; and even if they had been alive, they were so ignorant that they would not have known how to go about the work; besides, we had no tools for it. Nevertheless, I was obliged to obey, and set out for the camp with the provisions." On arriving, he found a wretched state of affairs. Douay and the two Caveliers, who had been treated by Duhaut with great harshness and contempt, had been told to make their mess apart; and Joutel now joined them. This separation restored them their freedom of speech, of which they had hitherto been deprived; but it subjected them to incessant hunger, as they were allowed only food enough to keep them from famishing. Douay says that quarrels were rife among the assassins themselves,--the malcontents being headed by Hiens, who was enraged that Duhaut and Liotot should have engrossed all the plunder. Joutel was helpless, for he had none to back him but two priests and a boy. [Sidenote: SCHEMES OF ESCAPE.] He and his companions talked of nothing around their solitary camp-fire but the means of escaping from the villanous company into which they were thrown. They saw no resource but to find the Mississippi, and thus make their way to Canada,--a prodigious undertaking in their forlorn condition; nor was there any probability that the assassins would permit them to go. These, on their part, were beset with difficulties. They could not return to civilization without manifest peril of a halter; and their only safety was to turn buccaneers or savages. Duhaut, however, still held to his plan of going back to Fort St. Louis; and Joutel and his companions, who with good reason stood in daily fear of him, devised among themselves a simple artifice to escape from his company. The elder Cavelier was to tell him that they were too fatigued for the journey, and wished to stay among the Cenis; and to beg him to allow them a portion of the goods, for which Cavelier was to give his note of hand. The old priest, whom a sacrifice of truth even on less important occasions cost no great effort, accordingly opened the negotiation, and to his own astonishment and that of his companions, gained the assent of Duhaut. Their joy, however, was short; for Ruter, the French savage, to whom Joutel had betrayed his intention, when inquiring the way to the Mississippi, told it to Duhaut, who on this changed front and made the ominous declaration that he and his men would also go to Canada. Joutel and his companions were now filled with alarm; for there was no likelihood that the assassins would permit them, the witnesses of their crime, to reach the settlements alive. In the midst of their trouble, the sky was cleared as by the crash of a thunderbolt. [Sidenote: THE CRISIS.] Hiens and several others had gone, some time before, to the Cenis villages to purchase horses; and here they had been detained by the charms of the Indian women. During their stay, Hiens heard of Duhaut's new plan of going to Canada by the Mississippi; and he declared to those with him that he would not consent. On a morning early in May he appeared at Duhaut's camp, with Ruter and Grollet, the French savages, and about twenty Indians. Duhaut and Liotot, it is said, were passing the time by practising with bows and arrows in front of their hut. One of them called to Hiens, "Good-morning;" but the buccaneer returned a sullen answer. He then accosted Duhaut, telling him that he had no mind to go up the Mississippi with him, and demanding a share of the goods. Duhaut replied that the goods were his own, since La Salle had owed him money. "So you will not give them to me?" returned Hiens. "No," was the answer. "You are a wretch!" exclaimed Hiens; "you killed my master."[334] And drawing a pistol from his belt he fired at Duhaut, who staggered three or four paces and fell dead. Almost at the same instant Ruter fired his gun at Liotot, shot three balls into his body, and stretched him on the ground mortally wounded. Douay and the two Caveliers stood in extreme terror, thinking that their turn was to come next. Joutel, no less alarmed, snatched his gun to defend himself; but Hiens called to him to fear nothing, declaring that what he had done was only to avenge the death of La Salle,--to which, nevertheless, he had been privy, though not an active sharer in the crime. Liotot lived long enough to make his confession, after which Ruter killed him by exploding a pistol loaded with a blank charge of powder against his head. Duhaut's myrmidon, L'Archevêque, was absent, hunting, and Hiens was for killing him on his return; but the two priests and Joutel succeeded in dissuading him. The Indian spectators beheld these murders with undisguised amazement, and almost with horror. What manner of men were these who had pierced the secret places of the wilderness to riot in mutual slaughter? Their fiercest warriors might learn a lesson in ferocity from these heralds of civilization. Joutel and his companions, who could not dispense with the aid of the Cenis, were obliged to explain away, as they best might, the atrocity of what they had witnessed.[335] Hiens, and others of the French, had before promised to join the Cenis on an expedition against a neighboring tribe with whom they were at war; and the whole party having removed to the Indian village, the warriors and their allies prepared to depart. Six Frenchmen went with Hiens; and the rest, including Joutel, Douay, and the Caveliers, remained behind, in the lodge where Joutel had been domesticated, and where none were now left but women, children, and old men. Here they remained a week or more, watched closely by the Cenis, who would not let them leave the village; when news at length arrived of a great victory, and the warriors soon after returned with forty-eight scalps. It was the French guns that won the battle, but not the less did they glory in their prowess; and several days were spent in ceremonies and feasts of triumph.[336] When all this hubbub of rejoicing had subsided, Joutel and his companions broke to Hiens their plan of attempting to reach home by way of the Mississippi. As they had expected, he opposed it vehemently, declaring that for his own part he would not run such a risk of losing his head; but at length he consented to their departure, on condition that the elder Cavelier should give him a certificate of his entire innocence of the murder of La Salle, which the priest did not hesitate to do. For the rest, Hiens treated his departing fellow-travellers with the generosity of a successful free-booter; for he gave them a good share of the plunder he had won by his late crime, supplying them with hatchets, knives, beads, and other articles of trade, besides several horses. Meanwhile, adds Joutel, "we had the mortification and chagrin of seeing this scoundrel walking about the camp in a scarlet coat laced with gold which had belonged to the late Monsieur de la Salle, and which he had seized upon, as also upon all the rest of his property." A well-aimed shot would have avenged the wrong, but Joutel was clearly a mild and moderate person; and the elder Cavelier had constantly opposed all plans of violence. Therefore they stifled their emotions, and armed themselves with patience. [Sidenote: JOUTEL AND HIS PARTY.] Joutel's party consisted, besides himself, of the Caveliers (uncle and nephew), Anastase Douay, De Marle, Teissier, and a young Parisian named Barthelemy. Teissier, an accomplice in the murders of Moranget and La Salle, had obtained a pardon, in form, from the elder Cavelier. They had six horses and three Cenis guides. Hiens embraced them at parting, as did the ruffians who remained with him. Their course was northeast, toward the mouth of the Arkansas,--a distant goal, the way to which was beset with so many dangers that their chance of reaching it seemed small. It was early in June, and the forests and prairies were green with the verdure of opening summer. They soon reached the Assonis, a tribe near the Sabine, who received them well, and gave them guides to the nations dwelling towards Red River. On the twenty-third, they approached a village, the inhabitants of which, regarding them as curiosities of the first order, came out in a body to see them; and, eager to do them honor, they required them to mount on their backs, and thus make their entrance in procession. Joutel, being large and heavy, weighed down his bearer, insomuch that two of his countrymen were forced to sustain him, one on each side. On arriving, an old chief washed their faces with warm water from an earthen pan, and then invited them to mount on a scaffold of canes, where they sat in the hot sun listening to four successive speeches of welcome, of which they understood not a word.[337] At the village of another tribe, farther on their way, they met with a welcome still more oppressive. Cavelier, the unworthy successor of his brother, being represented as the chief of the party, became the principal victim of their attentions. They danced the calumet before him; while an Indian, taking him, with an air of great respect, by the shoulders as he sat, shook him in cadence with the thumping of the drum. They then placed two girls close beside him, as his wives; while, at the same time, an old chief tied a painted feather in his hair. These proceedings so scandalized him that, pretending to be ill, he broke off the ceremony; but they continued to sing all night, with so much zeal that several of them were reduced to a state of complete exhaustion. [Sidenote: ARRIVAL AT THE ARKANSAS.] At length, after a journey of about two months, during which they lost one of their number,--De Marle, accidentally drowned while bathing,--the travellers approached the river Arkansas, at a point not far above its junction with the Mississippi. Led by their Indian guides, they traversed a rich district of plains and woods, and stood at length on the borders of the stream. Nestled beneath the forests of the farther shore, they saw the lodges of a large Indian town; and here, as they gazed across the broad current, they presently descried an object which nerved their spent limbs, and thrilled their homesick hearts with joy. It was a tall, wooden cross; and near it was a small house, built evidently by Christian hands. With one accord they fell on their knees, and raised their hands to Heaven in thanksgiving. Two men, in European dress, issued from the door of the house and fired their guns to salute the excited travellers, who on their part replied with a volley. Canoes put out from the farther shore and ferried them to the town, where they were welcomed by Couture and De Launay, two followers of Henri de Tonty.[338] That brave, loyal, and generous man, always vigilant and always active, beloved and feared alike by white men and by red,[339] had been ejected, as we have seen, by the agent of the governor, La Barre, from the command of Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. An order from the King had reinstated him; and he no sooner heard the news of La Salle's landing on the shores of the Gulf, and of the disastrous beginnings of his colony,[340] than he prepared, on his own responsibility and at his own cost, to go to his assistance. He collected twenty-five Frenchmen and eleven Indians, and set out from his fortified rock on the thirteenth of February, 1686;[341] descended the Mississippi, and reached its mouth in Holy Week. All was solitude, a voiceless desolation of river, marsh, and sea. He despatched canoes to the east and to the west, searching the coast for some thirty leagues on either side. Finding no trace of his friend, who at that moment was ranging the prairies of Texas in no less fruitless search of his "fatal river," Tonty wrote for him a letter, which he left in the charge of an Indian chief, who preserved it with reverential care, and gave it, fourteen years after, to Iberville, the founder of Louisiana.[342] Deeply disappointed at his failure, Tonty retraced his course, and ascended the Mississippi to the villages of the Arkansas, where some of his men volunteered to remain. He left six of them; and of this number were Couture and De Launay.[343] [Sidenote: A HOSPITABLE RECEPTION.] Cavelier and his companions, followed by a crowd of Indians, some carrying their baggage, some struggling for a view of the white strangers, entered the log cabin of their two hosts. Rude as it was, they found in it an earnest of peace and safety, and a foretaste of home. Couture and De Launay were moved even to tears by the story of their disasters, and of the catastrophe that crowned them. La Salle's death was carefully concealed from the Indians, many of whom had seen him on his descent of the Mississippi, and who regarded him with prodigious respect. They lavished all their hospitality on his followers; feasted them on corn-bread, dried buffalo meat, and watermelons, and danced the calumet before them, the most august of all their ceremonies. On this occasion, Cavelier's patience failed him again; and pretending, as before, to be ill, he called on his nephew to take his place. There were solemn dances, too, in which the warriors--some bedaubed with white clay, some with red, and some with both; some wearing feathers, and some the horns of buffalo; some naked, and some in painted shirts of deer-skin, fringed with scalp-locks, insomuch, says Joutel, that they looked like a troop of devils--leaped, stamped, and howled from sunset till dawn. All this was partly to do the travellers honor, and partly to extort presents. They made objections, however, when asked to furnish guides; and it was only by dint of great offers that four were at length procured. [Sidenote: THE MISSISSIPPI.] With these, the travellers resumed their journey in a wooden canoe, about the first of August,[344] descended the Arkansas, and soon reached the dark and inexorable river, so long the object of their search, rolling, like a destiny, through its realms of solitude and shade. They launched their canoe on its turbid bosom, plied their oars against the current, and slowly won their way upward, following the writhings of this watery monster through cane-brake, swamp, and fen. It was a hard and toilsome journey, under the sweltering sun of August,--now on the water, now knee-deep in mud, dragging their canoe through the unwholesome jungle. On the nineteenth, they passed the mouth of the Ohio; and their Indian guides made it an offering of buffalo meat. On the first of September, they passed the Missouri, and soon after saw Marquette's pictured rock, and the line of craggy heights on the east shore, marked on old French maps as "the Ruined Castles." Then, with a sense of relief, they turned from the great river into the peaceful current of the Illinois. They were eleven days in ascending it, in their large and heavy wooden canoe; when at length, on the afternoon of the fourteenth of September, they saw, towering above the forest and the river, the cliff crowned with the palisades of Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. As they drew near, a troop of Indians, headed by a Frenchman, descended from the rock, and fired their guns to salute them. They landed, and followed the forest path that led towards the fort, when they were met by Boisrondet, Tonty's comrade in the Iroquois war, and two other Frenchmen, who no sooner saw them than they called out, demanding where was La Salle. Cavelier, fearing lest he and his party would lose the advantage they might derive from his character of representative of his brother, was determined to conceal his death; and Joutel, as he himself confesses, took part in the deceit. Substituting equivocation for falsehood, they replied that La Salle had been with them nearly as far as the Cenis villages, and that, when they parted, he was in good health. This, so far as they were concerned, was, literally speaking, true; but Douay and Teissier, the one a witness and the other a sharer in his death, could not have said so much without a square falsehood, and therefore evaded the inquiry. Threading the forest path, and circling to the rear of the rock, they climbed the rugged height, and reached the top. Here they saw an area, encircled by the palisades that fenced the brink of the cliff, and by several dwellings, a store-house, and a chapel. There were Indian lodges too; for some of the red allies of the French made their abode with them.[345] Tonty was absent, fighting the Iroquois; but his lieutenant, Bellefontaine, received the travellers, and his little garrison of bush-rangers greeted them with a salute of musketry, mingled with the whooping of the Indians. A _Te Deum_ followed at the chapel; "and, with all our hearts," says Joutel, "we gave thanks to God, who had preserved and guided us." At length, the tired travellers were among countrymen and friends. Bellefontaine found a room for the two priests; while Joutel, Teissier, and young Cavelier were lodged in the store-house. [Sidenote: THE JESUIT ALLOUEZ.] The Jesuit Allouez was lying ill at the fort; and Joutel, Cavelier, and Douay went to visit him. He showed great anxiety when told that La Salle was alive, and on his way to the Illinois; asked many questions, and could not hide his agitation. When, some time after, he had partially recovered, he left St. Louis, as if to shun a meeting with the object of his alarm.[346] Once before, in 1679, Allouez had fled from the Illinois on hearing of the approach of La Salle. The season was late, and they were eager to hasten forward that they might reach Quebec in time to return to France in the autumn ships. There was not a day to lose. They bade farewell to Bellefontaine, from whom, as from all others, they had concealed the death of La Salle, and made their way across the country to Chicago. Here they were detained a week by a storm; and when at length they embarked in a canoe furnished by Bellefontaine, the tempest soon forced them to put back. On this, they abandoned their design, and returned to Fort St. Louis, to the astonishment of its inmates. [Sidenote: CONDUCT OF CAVELIER.] It was October when they arrived; and, meanwhile, Tonty had returned from the Iroquois war, where he had borne a conspicuous part in the famous attack on the Senecas by the Marquis de Denonville.[347] He listened with deep interest to the mournful story of his guests. Cavelier knew him well. He knew, so far as he was capable of knowing, his generous and disinterested character, his long and faithful attachment to La Salle, and the invaluable services he had rendered him. Tonty had every claim on his confidence and affection. Yet he did not hesitate to practise on him the same deceit which he had practised on Bellefontaine. He told him that he had left his brother in good health on the Gulf of Mexico, and drew upon him, in La Salle's name, for an amount stated by Joutel at about four thousand livres, in furs, besides a canoe and a quantity of other goods, all of which were delivered to him by the unsuspecting victim.[348] This was at the end of the winter, when the old priest and his companions had been living for months on Tonty's hospitality. They set out for Canada on the twenty-first of March, reached Chicago on the twenty-ninth, and thence proceeded to Michilimackinac. Here Cavelier sold some of Tonty's furs to a merchant, who gave him in payment a draft on Montreal, thus putting him in funds for his voyage home. The party continued their journey in canoes by way of French River and the Ottawa, and safely reached Montreal on the seventeenth of July. Here they procured the clothing of which they were wofully in need, and then descended the river to Quebec, where they took lodging,--some with the Récollet friars, and some with the priests of the Seminary,--in order to escape the questions of the curious. At the end of August they embarked for France, and early in October arrived safely at Rochelle. None of the party were men of especial energy or force of character; and yet, under the spur of a dire necessity, they had achieved one of the most adventurous journeys on record. [Sidenote: THE COLONISTS ABANDONED.] Now, at length, they disburdened themselves of their gloomy secret; but the sole result seems to have been an order from the King for the arrest of the murderers, should they appear in Canada.[349] Joutel was disappointed. It had been his hope throughout that the King would send a ship to the relief of the wretched band at Fort St. Louis of Texas. But Louis XIV. hardened his heart, and left them to their fate. FOOTNOTES: [332] The lodges of the Florida Indians were somewhat similar. The winter lodges of the now nearly extinct Mandans, though not so high in proportion to their width, and built of more solid materials, as the rigor of a northern climate requires, bear a general resemblance to those of the Cenis. The Cenis tattooed their faces and some parts of their bodies, by pricking powdered charcoal into the skin. The women tattooed the breasts; and this practice was general among them, notwithstanding the pain of the operation, as it was thought very ornamental. Their dress consisted of a sort of frock, or wrapper of skin, from the waist to the knees. The men, in summer, wore nothing but the waist-cloth. [333] _Journal Historique_, 237. [334] "Tu es un misérable. Tu as tué mon maistre."--Tonty, _Mémoire_. Tonty derived his information from some of those present. Douay and Joutel have each left an account of this murder. They agree in essential points; though Douay says that when it took place, Duhaut had moved his camp beyond the Cenis villages, which is contrary to Joutel's statement. [335] Joutel, _Relation_ (Margry, iii. 371). [336] These are described by Joutel. Like nearly all the early observers of Indian manners, he speaks of the practice of cannibalism. [337] These Indians were a portion of the Cadodaquis, or Caddoes, then living on Red River. The travellers afterwards visited other villages of the same people. Tonty was here two years afterwards, and mentions the curious custom of washing the faces of guests. [338] Joutel, _Journal Historique_, 298. [339] _Journal de St. Cosme_, 1699. This journal has been printed by Mr. Shea, from the copy in my possession. St. Cosme, who knew Tonty well, speaks of him in the warmest terms of praise. [340] In the autumn of 1685, Tonty made a journey from the Illinois to Michilimackinac, to seek news of La Salle. He there learned, by a letter of the new governor, Denonville, just arrived from France, of the landing of La Salle, and the loss of the "Aimable," as recounted by Beaujeu, on his return. He immediately went back on foot to Fort St. Louis of the Illinois, and prepared to descend the Mississippi, "dans l'espérance de lui donner secours." _Lettre de Tonty au Ministre, 24 Aoust, 1686; Ibid., à Cabart de Villermont, même date_; _Mémoire de Tonty_; _Procès Verbal de Tonty, 13 Avril, 1686._ [341] The date is from the _Procès Verbal_. In the _Mémoire_, hastily written long after, he falls into errors of date. [342] Iberville sent it to France, and Charlevoix gives a portion of it. (_Histoire de la Nouvelle France_, ii. 259.) Singularly enough, the date, as printed by him, is erroneous, being 20 April, 1685, instead of 1686. There is no doubt whatever, from its relations with concurrent events, that this journey was in the latter year. [343] Tonty, _Mémoire; Ibid., Lettre à Monseigneur de Ponchartrain_, 1690. Joutel, _Journal Historique_, 301. [344] Joutel says that the Parisian boy, Barthelemy, was left behind. It was this youth who afterwards uttered the ridiculous defamation of La Salle mentioned in a preceding note. The account of the death of La Salle, taken from the lips of Couture, was received by him from Cavelier and his companions, during their stay at the Arkansas. Couture was by trade a carpenter, and was a native of Rouen. [345] The condition of Fort St. Louis, at this time, may be gathered from several passages of Joutel. The houses, he says, were built at the brink of the cliff, forming, with the palisades, the circle of defence. The Indians lived in the area. [346] Joutel adds that this was occasioned by "une espèce de conspiration qu'on a voulu faire contre les interests de Monsieur de la Salle."--_Journal Historique_, 350. "Ce Père appréhendoit que le dit sieur ne l'y rencontrast, ... suivant ce que j'en ai pu apprendre, les Pères avoient avancé plusieurs choses pour contrebarrer l'entreprise et avoient voulu détacher plusieurs nations de Sauvages, lesquelles s'estoient données à M. de la Salle. Ils avoient esté mesme jusques à vouloir destruire le fort Saint-Louis, en ayant construit un à Chicago, où ils avoient attiré une partie des Sauvages, ne pouvant en quelque façon s'emparer du dit fort. Pour conclure, le bon Père ayant eu peur d'y estre trouvé, aima mieux se précautionner en prenant le devant.... Quoyque M. Cavelier eust dit au Père qu'il pouvoit rester, il partit quelques sept ou huit jours avant nous."--_Relation_ (Margry, iii. 500). La Salle always saw the influence of the Jesuits in the disasters that befell him. His repeated assertion, that they wished to establish themselves in the valley of the Mississippi, receives confirmation from a document entitled _Mémoire sur la proposition à faire par les R. Pères Jésuites pour la découverte des environs de la rivière du Mississipi et pour voir si elle est navigable jusqu'à la mer_. It is a memorandum of propositions to be made to the minister Seignelay, and was apparently put forward as a feeler, before making the propositions in form. It was written after the return of Beaujeu to France, and before La Salle's death became known. It intimates that the Jesuits were entitled to precedence in the valley of the Mississippi, as having first explored it. It affirms that _La Salle had made a blunder, and landed his colony, not at the mouth of the river, but at another place_; and it asks permission to continue the work in which he has failed. To this end, it petitions for means to build a vessel at St. Louis of the Illinois, together with canoes, arms, tents, tools, provisions, and merchandise for the Indians; and it also asks for La Salle's maps and papers, and for those of Beaujeu. On their part, it pursues, the Jesuits will engage to make a complete survey of the river, and return an exact account of its inhabitants, its plants, and its other productions. [347] Tonty, Du Lhut, and Durantaye came to the aid of Denonville with a hundred and eighty Frenchmen, chiefly _coureurs de bois_, and four hundred Indians from the upper country. Their services were highly appreciated; and Tonty especially is mentioned in the despatches of Denonville with great praise. [348] "Monsieur Tonty, croyant M. de la Salle vivant, ne fit pas de difficulté de luy donner pour environ quatre mille liv. de pelleterie, de castors, loutres, un canot, et autres effets."--Joutel, _Journal Historique_, 349. Tonty himself does not make the amount so great: "Sur ce qu'ils m'assuroient qu'il étoit resté au Golfe de Mexique en bonne santé, je les reçus comme si ç'avoit esté lui mesme et luy prestay [_à Cavelier_] plus de 700 francs."--Tonty, _Mémoire_. Cavelier must have known that La Salle was insolvent. Tonty had long served without pay. Douay says that he made the stay of the party at the fort very agreeable, and speaks of him, with some apparent compunction, as "ce brave gentilhomme, toujours inséparablement attaché aux intérêts du Sieur de la Salle, dont nous luy avons caché la déplorable destinée." Couture, from the Arkansas, brought word to Tonty, several months after, of La Salle's death, adding that Cavelier had concealed it, with no other purpose than that of gaining money or supplies from him (Tonty), in his brother's name. Cavelier had a letter from La Salle, desiring Tonty to give him supplies, and pay him 2,652 livres in beaver. If Cavelier is to be believed, this beaver belonged to La Salle. [349] _Lettre du Roy à Denonville, 1 Mai, 1689._ Joutel must have been a young man at the time of the Mississippi expedition; for Charlevoix saw him at Rouen, thirty-five years after. He speaks of him with emphatic praise; but it must be admitted that his connivance in the deception practised by Cavelier on Tonty leaves a shade on his character, as well as on that of Douay. In other respects, everything that appears concerning him is highly favorable, which is not the case with Douay, who, on one or two occasions, makes wilful misstatements. Douay says that the elder Cavelier made a report of the expedition to the minister Seignelay. This report remained unknown in an English collection of autographs and old manuscripts, whence I obtained it by purchase, in 1854, both the buyer and seller being at the time ignorant of its exact character. It proved, on examination, to be a portion of the first draft of Cavelier's report to Seignelay. It consists of twenty-six small folio pages, closely written in a clear hand, though in a few places obscured by the fading of the ink, as well as by occasional erasures and interlineations of the writer. It is, as already stated, confused and unsatisfactory in its statements; and all the latter part has been lost. On reaching France, he had the impudence to tell Abbé Tronson, Superior of St. Sulpice, "qu'il avait laissé M. de la Salle dans un très-beau pays avec M. de Chefdeville en bonne santé."--_Lettre de Tronson à Mad. Fauvel-Cavelier, 29 Nov., 1688._ Cavelier addressed to the King a memorial on the importance of keeping possession of the Illinois. It closes with an earnest petition for money in compensation for his losses, as, according to his own statement, he was completely _épuisé_. It is affirmed in a memorial of the heirs of his cousin, François Plet, that he concealed the death of La Salle some time after his return to France, in order to get possession of property which would otherwise have been seized by the creditors of the deceased. The prudent abbé died rich and very old, at the house of a relative, having inherited a large estate after his return from America. Apparently, this did not satisfy him; for there is before me the copy of a petition, written about 1717, in which he asks, jointly with one of his nephews, to be given possession of the seigniorial property held by La Salle in America. The petition was refused. Young Cavelier, La Salle's nephew, died some years after, an officer in a regiment. He has been erroneously supposed to be the same with one De la Salle, whose name is appended to a letter giving an account of Louisiana, and dated at Toulon, 3 Sept., 1698. This person was the son of a naval official at Toulon, and was not related to the Caveliers. CHAPTER XXIX. 1688-1689. FATE OF THE TEXAN COLONY. Tonty attempts to rescue the Colonists: his Difficulties and Hardships.--Spanish Hostility.--Expedition of Alonzo de Leon: he reaches Fort St. Louis.--A Scene of Havoc.--Destruction of the French.--The End. [Sidenote: COURAGE OF TONTY.] Henri De Tonty, on his rock of St. Louis, was visited in September by Couture and two Indians from the Arkansas. Then, for the first time, he heard with grief and indignation of the death of La Salle, and the deceit practised by Cavelier. The chief whom he had served so well was beyond his help; but might not the unhappy colonists left on the shores of Texas still be rescued from destruction? Couture had confirmed what Cavelier and his party had already told him, that the tribes south of the Arkansas were eager to join the French in an invasion of northern Mexico; and he soon after received from the governor, Denonville, a letter informing him that war had again been declared against Spain. As bold and enterprising as La Salle himself, Tonty resolved on an effort to learn the condition of the few Frenchmen left on the borders of the Gulf, relieve their necessities, and, should it prove practicable, make them the nucleus of a war-party to cross the Rio Grande, and add a new province to the domain of France. It was the revival, on a small scale, of La Salle's scheme of Mexican invasion; and there is no doubt that, with a score of French musketeers, he could have gathered a formidable party of savage allies from the tribes of Red River, the Sabine, and the Trinity. This daring adventure and the rescue of his suffering countrymen divided his thoughts, and he prepared at once to execute the double purpose.[350] [Sidenote: TONTY MISREPRESENTED.] He left Fort St. Louis of the Illinois early in December, in a pirogue, or wooden canoe, with five Frenchmen, a Shawanoe warrior, and two Indian slaves; and, after a long and painful journey, he reached the villages of the Caddoes on Red River on the twenty-eighth of March. Here he was told that Hiens and his companions were at a village eighty leagues distant; and thither he was preparing to go in search of them, when all his men, excepting the Shawanoe and one Frenchman, declared themselves disgusted with the journey, and refused to follow him. Persuasion was useless, and there was no means of enforcing obedience. He found himself abandoned; but he still pushed on, with the two who remained faithful. A few days after, they lost nearly all their ammunition in crossing a river. Undeterred by this accident, Tonty made his way to the village where Hiens and those who had remained with him were said to be; but no trace of them appeared, and the demeanor of the Indians, when he inquired for them, convinced him that they had been put to death. He charged them with having killed the Frenchmen, whereupon the women of the village raised a wail of lamentation; "and I saw," he says, "that what I had said to them was true." They refused to give him guides; and this, with the loss of his ammunition, compelled him to forego his purpose of making his way to the colonists on the Bay of St. Louis. With bitter disappointment, he and his two companions retraced their course, and at length approached Red River. Here they found the whole country flooded. Sometimes they waded to the knees, sometimes to the neck, sometimes pushed their slow way on rafts. Night and day it rained without ceasing. They slept on logs placed side by side to raise them above the mud and water, and fought their way with hatchets through the inundated cane-brakes. They found no game but a bear, which had taken refuge on an island in the flood; and they were forced to eat their dogs. "I never in my life," writes Tonty, "suffered so much." In judging these intrepid exertions, it is to be remembered that he was not, at least in appearance, of a robust constitution, and that he had but one hand. They reached the Mississippi on the eleventh of July, and the Arkansas villages on the thirty-first. Here Tonty was detained by an attack of fever. He resumed his journey when it began to abate, and reached his fort of the Illinois in September.[351] [Sidenote: A SCENE OF HAVOC.] While the King of France abandoned the exiles of Texas to their fate, a power dark, ruthless, and terrible was hovering around the feeble colony on the Bay of St. Louis, searching with pitiless eye to discover and tear out that dying germ of civilization from the bosom of the wilderness in whose savage immensity it lay hidden. Spain claimed the Gulf of Mexico and all its coasts as her own of unanswerable right, and the viceroys of Mexico were strenuous to enforce her claim. The capture of one of La Salle's four vessels at St. Domingo had made known his designs, and in the course of the three succeeding years no less than four expeditions were sent out from Vera Cruz to find and destroy him. They scoured the whole extent of the coast, and found the wrecks of the "Aimable" and the "Belle;" but the colony of St. Louis,[352] inland and secluded, escaped their search. For a time, the jealousy of the Spaniards was lulled to sleep. They rested in the assurance that the intruders had perished, when fresh advices from the frontier province of New Leon caused the Viceroy, Galve, to order a strong force, under Alonzo de Leon, to march from Coahuila, and cross the Rio Grande. Guided by a French prisoner, probably one of the deserters from La Salle, they pushed their way across wild and arid plains, rivers, prairies, and forests, till at length they approached the Bay of St. Louis, and descried, far off, the harboring-place of the French.[353] As they drew near, no banner was displayed, no sentry challenged; and the silence of death reigned over the shattered palisades and neglected dwellings. The Spaniards spurred their reluctant horses through the gateway, and a scene of desolation met their sight. No living thing was stirring. Doors were torn from their hinges; broken boxes, staved barrels, and rusty kettles, mingled with a great number of stocks of arquebuses and muskets, were scattered about in confusion. Here, too, trampled in mud and soaked with rain, they saw more than two hundred books, many of which still retained the traces of costly bindings. On the adjacent prairie lay three dead bodies, one of which, from fragments of dress still clinging to the wasted remains, they saw to be that of a woman. It was in vain to question the imperturbable savages, who, wrapped to the throat in their buffalo-robes, stood gazing on the scene with looks of wooden immobility. Two strangers, however, at length arrived.[354] Their faces were smeared with paint, and they were wrapped in buffalo-robes like the rest; yet these seeming Indians were L'Archevêque, the tool of La Salle's murderer Duhaut, and Grollet, the companion of the white savage Ruter. The Spanish commander, learning that these two men were in the district of the tribe called Texas,[355] had sent to invite them to his camp under a pledge of good treatment; and they had resolved to trust Spanish clemency rather than endure longer a life that had become intolerable. From them the Spaniards learned nearly all that is known of the fate of Barbier, Zenobe Membré, and their companions. Three months before, a large band of Indians had approached the fort, the inmates of which had suffered severely from the ravages of the small-pox. From fear of treachery, they refused to admit their visitors, but received them at a cabin without the palisades. Here the French began a trade with them; when suddenly a band of warriors, yelling the war-whoop, rushed from an ambuscade under the bank of the river, and butchered the greater number. The children of one Talon, together with an Italian and a young man from Paris named Breman, were saved by the Indian women, who carried them off on their backs. L'Archevêque and Grollet, who with others of their stamp were domesticated in the Indian villages, came to the scene of slaughter, and, as they affirmed, buried fourteen dead bodies.[356] [Sidenote: THE SURVIVORS.] L'Archevêque and Grollet were sent to Spain, where, in spite of the pledge given them, they were thrown into prison, with the intention of sending them back to labor in the mines. The Indians, some time after De Leon's expedition, gave up their captives to the Spaniards. The Italian was imprisoned at Vera Cruz. Breman's fate is unknown. Pierre and Jean Baptiste Talon, who were now old enough to bear arms, were enrolled in the Spanish navy, and, being captured in 1696 by a French ship of war, regained their liberty; while their younger brothers and their sister were carried to Spain by the Viceroy.[357] With respect to the ruffian companions of Hiens, the conviction of Tonty that they had been put to death by the Indians may have been well founded; but the buccaneer himself is said to have been killed in a quarrel with his accomplice Ruter, the white savage; and thus in ignominy and darkness died the last embers of the doomed colony of La Salle. * * * * * [Sidenote: FRUIT OF EXPLORATIONS.] Here ends the wild and mournful story of the explorers of the Mississippi. Of all their toil and sacrifice, no fruit remained but a great geographical discovery, and a grand type of incarnate energy and will. Where La Salle had ploughed, others were to sow the seed; and on the path which the undespairing Norman had hewn out, the Canadian D'Iberville was to win for France a vast though a transient dominion. FOOTNOTES: [350] Tonty, _Mémoire_. [351] Two causes have contributed to detract, most unjustly, from Tonty's reputation,--the publication, under his name, but without his authority, of a perverted account of the enterprises in which he took part; and the confounding him with his brother, Alphonse de Tonty, who long commanded at Detroit, where charges of peculation were brought against him. There are very few names in French-American history mentioned with such unanimity of praise as that of Henri de Tonty. Hennepin finds some fault with him; but his censure is commendation. The despatches of the governor, Denonville, speak in strong terms of his services in the Iroquois war, praise his character, and declare that he is fit for any bold enterprise, adding that he deserves reward from the King. The missionary, St. Cosme, who travelled under his escort in 1699, says of him: "He is beloved by all the _voyageurs_.... It was with deep regret that we parted from him: ... he is the man who best knows the country; ... he is loved and feared everywhere.... Your grace will, I doubt not, take pleasure in acknowledging the obligations we owe him." Tonty held the commission of captain; but, by a memoir which he addressed to Ponchartrain in 1690, it appears that he had never received any pay. Count Frontenac certifies the truth of the statement, and adds a recommendation of the writer. In consequence, probably, of this, the proprietorship of Fort St. Louis of the Illinois was granted in the same year to Tonty, jointly with La Forest, formerly La Salle's lieutenant. Here they carried on a trade in furs. In 1699, a royal declaration was launched against the _coureurs de bois_; but an express provision was added in favor of Tonty and La Forest, who were empowered to send up the country yearly two canoes, with twelve men, for the maintenance of this fort. With such a limitation, this fort and the trade carried on at it must have been very small. In 1702, we find a royal order, to the effect that La Forest is henceforth to reside in Canada, and Tonty on the Mississippi; and that the establishment at the Illinois is to be discontinued. In the same year, Tonty joined D'Iberville in Lower Louisiana, and was sent by that officer from Mobile to secure the Chickasaws in the French interest. His subsequent career and the time of his death do not appear. He seems never to have received the reward which his great merit deserved. Those intimate with the late lamented Dr. Sparks will remember his often-expressed wish that justice should be done to the memory of Tonty. Fort St. Louis of the Illinois was afterwards reoccupied by the French. In 1718, a number of them, chiefly traders, were living here; but three years later it was again deserted, and Charlevoix, passing the spot, saw only the remains of its palisades. [352] Fort St. Louis of Texas is not to be confounded with Fort St. Louis of the Illinois. [353] After crossing the Del Norte, they crossed in turn the Upper Nueces, the Hondo (Rio Frio), the De Leon (San Antonio), and the Guadalupe, and then, turning southward, descended to the Bay of St. Bernard.... Manuscript map of "Route que firent les Espagnols, pour venir enlever les Français restez à la Baye St. Bernard ou St. Louis, après la perte du vaisseau de Mr. de la Salle en 1689." (Margry's collection.) [354] May 1st. The Spaniards reached the fort April 22. [355] This is the first instance in which the name occurs. In a letter written by a member of De Leon's party, the Texan Indians are mentioned several times. (See _Coleccion de Varios Documentos_, 25.) They are described as an agricultural tribe, and were, to all appearance, identical with the Cenis. The name Tejas, or Texas, was first applied as a local designation to a spot on the river Neches, in the Cenis territory, whence it extended to the whole country. (See Yoakum, _History of Texas_, 52.) [356] _Derrotero de la Jornada que hizo el General Alonso de Leon para el descubrimiento de la Bahia del Espíritu Santo, y poblacion de Franceses. Ano de 1689._--This is the official journal of the expedition, signed by Alonzo de Leon. I am indebted to Colonel Thomas Aspinwall for the opportunity of examining it. The name of Espiritu Santo was, as before mentioned, given by the Spaniards to St. Louis, or Matagorda Bay, as well as to two other bays of the Gulf of Mexico. _Carta en que se da noticia de un viaje hecho à la Bahia de Espíritu Santo y de la poblacion que tenian ahi los Franceses. Coleccion de Varios Documentos para la Historia de la Florida_, 25.--This is a letter from a person accompanying the expedition of De Leon. It is dated May 18, 1689, and agrees closely with the journal cited above, though evidently by another hand. Compare Barcia, _Ensayo Cronologico_, 294. Barcia's story has been doubted; but these authentic documents prove the correctness of his principal statements, though on minor points he seems to have indulged his fancy. The Viceroy of New Spain, in a report to the King, 1690, says that, in order to keep the Texas and other Indians of that region in obedience to his Majesty, he has resolved to establish eight missions among them. He adds that he has appointed as governor, or commander, in that province, Don Domingo Teran de los Rios, who will make a thorough exploration of it, carry out what De Leon has begun; prevent the further intrusion of foreigners like La Salle, and go in pursuit of the remnant of the French, who are said still to remain among the tribes of Red River. I owe this document to the kindness of Mr. Buckingham Smith. [357] _Mémoire sur lequel on a interrogé les deux Canadiens [Pierre et Jean Baptiste Talon] qui sont soldats dans la Compagnie de Feuguerolles. A Brest, 14 Février, 1698._ _Interrogations faites à Pierre et Jean Baptiste Talon à leur arrivée de la Veracrux._--This paper, which differs in some of its details from the preceding, was sent by D'Iberville, the founder of Louisiana, to Abbé Cavelier. Appended to it is a letter from D'Iberville, written in May, 1704, in which he confirms the chief statements of the Talons, by information obtained by him from a Spanish officer at Pensacola. APPENDIX. I. EARLY UNPUBLISHED MAPS OF THE MISSISSIPPI AND THE GREAT LAKES. Most of the maps described below are to be found in the Dépôt des Cartes de la Marine et des Colonies, at Paris. Taken together, they exhibit the progress of western discovery, and illustrate the records of the explorers. 1. The map of Galinée, 1670, has a double title,--_Carte du Canada et des Terres découvertes vers le lac Derié, and Carte du Lac Ontario et des habitations qui l'environnent ensemble le pays que Messrs. Dolier et Galinée, missionnaires du seminaire de St. Sulpice, ont parcouru_. It professes to represent only the country actually visited by the two missionaries. Beginning with Montreal, it gives the course of the Upper St. Lawrence and the shores of Lake Ontario, the river Niagara, the north shore of Lake Erie, the Strait of Detroit, and the eastern and northern shores of Lake Huron. Galinée did not know the existence of the peninsula of Michigan, and merges Lakes Huron and Michigan into one, under the name of "Michigané, ou Mer Douce des Hurons." He was also entirely ignorant of the south shore of Lake Erie. He represents the outlet of Lake Superior as far as the Saut Ste. Marie, and lays down the river Ottawa in great detail, having descended it on his return. The Falls of the Genesee are indicated, as also the Falls of Niagara, with the inscription, "Sault qui tombe au rapport des sauvages de plus de 200 pieds de haut." Had the Jesuits been disposed to aid him, they could have given him much additional information, and corrected his most serious errors; as, for example, the omission of the peninsula of Michigan. The first attempt to map out the Great Lakes was that of Champlain, in 1632. This of Galinée may be called the second. 2. The map of Lake Superior, published in the Jesuit Relation of 1670, 1671, was made at about the same time with Galinée's map. Lake Superior is here styled "Lac Tracy, ou Supérieur." Though not so exact as it has been represented, this map indicates that the Jesuits had explored every part of this fresh-water ocean, and that they had a thorough knowledge of the straits connecting the three Upper Lakes, and of the adjacent bays, inlets, and shores. The peninsula of Michigan, ignored by Galinée, is represented in its proper place. 3. Three years or more after Galinée made the map mentioned above, another, indicating a greatly increased knowledge of the country, was made by some person whose name does not appear. This map, which is somewhat more than four feet long and about two feet and a half wide, has no title. All the Great Lakes, through their entire extent, are laid down on it with considerable accuracy. Lake Ontario is called "Lac Ontario, ou de Frontenac." Fort Frontenac is indicated, as well as the Iroquois colonies of the north shore. Niagara is "Chute haute de 120 toises par où le Lac Erié tombe dans le Lac Frontenac." Lake Erie is "Lac Teiocha-rontiong, dit communément Lac Erié." Lake St. Clair is "Tsiketo, ou Lac de la Chaudière." Lake Huron is "Lac Huron, ou Mer Douce des Hurons." Lake Superior is "Lac Supérieur." Lake Michigan is "Lac Mitchiganong, ou des Illinois." On Lake Michigan, immediately opposite the site of Chicago, are written the words, of which the following is the literal translation: "The largest vessels can come to this place from the outlet of Lake Erie, where it discharges into Lake Frontenac [Ontario]; and from this marsh into which they can enter there is only a distance of a thousand paces to the River La Divine [Des Plaines], which can lead them to the River Colbert [Mississippi], and thence to the Gulf of Mexico." This map was evidently made after that voyage of La Salle in which he discovered the Illinois, or at least the Des Plaines branch of it. The Ohio is laid down with the inscription, "River Ohio, so called by the Iroquois on account of its beauty, which the Sieur de la Salle descended." (_Ante_, 32, _note_.) 4. We now come to the map of Marquette, which is a rude sketch of a portion of Lakes Superior and Michigan, and of the route pursued by him and Joliet up the Fox River of Green Bay, down the Wisconsin, and thence down the Mississippi as far as the Arkansas. The river Illinois is also laid down, as it was by this course that he returned to Lake Michigan after his memorable voyage. He gives no name to the Wisconsin. The Mississippi is called "Rivière de la Conception;" the Missouri, the Pekitanoui; and the Ohio, the Ouabouskiaou, though La Salle, its discoverer, had previously given it its present name, borrowed from the Iroquois. The Illinois is nameless, like the Wisconsin. At the mouth of a river, perhaps the Des Moines, Marquette places the three villages of the Peoria Indians visited by him. These, with the Kaskaskias, Maroas, and others, on the map, were merely sub-tribes of the aggregation of savages known as the Illinois. On or near the Missouri he places the Ouchage (Osages), the Oumessourit (Missouris), the Kansa (Kanzas), the Paniassa (Pawnees), the Maha (Omahas), and the Pahoutet (Pah-Utahs?). The names of many other tribes, "esloignées dans les terres," are also given along the course of the Arkansas, a river which is nameless on the map. Most of these tribes are now indistinguishable. This map has recently been engraved and published. 5. Not long after Marquette's return from the Mississippi, another map was made by the Jesuits, with the following title: _Carte de la nouvelle decouverte que les peres Iesuites ont fait en l'année 1672, et continuée par le P. Iacques Marquette de la mesme Compagnie accompagné de quelques françois en l'année 1673, qu'on pourra nommer en françois la Manitoumie_. This title is very elaborately decorated with figures drawn with a pen, and representing Jesuits instructing Indians. The map is the same published by Thevenot, not without considerable variations, in 1681. It represents the Mississippi from a little above the Wisconsin to the Gulf of Mexico, the part below the Arkansas being drawn from conjecture. The river is named "Mitchisipi, ou grande Rivière." The Wisconsin, the Illinois, the Ohio, the Des Moines(?), the Missouri, and the Arkansas are all represented, but in a very rude manner. Marquette's route, in going and returning, is marked by lines; but the return route is incorrect. The whole map is so crude and careless, and based on information so inexact, that it is of little interest. 6. The Jesuits made also another map, without title, of the four Upper Lakes and the Mississippi to a little below the Arkansas. The Mississippi is called "Riuiere Colbert." The map is remarkable as including the earliest representation of the Upper Mississippi, based, perhaps, on the reports of Indians. The Falls of St. Anthony are indicated by the word "Saut." It is possible that the map may be of later date than at first appears, and that it may have been drawn in the interval between the return of Hennepin from the Upper Mississippi and that of La Salle from his discovery of the mouth of the river. The various temporary and permanent stations of the Jesuits are marked by crosses. 7. Of far greater interest is the small map of Louis Joliet made and presented to Count Frontenac after the discoverer's return from the Mississippi. It is entitled _Carte de la decouverte du Sr. Jolliet ou l'on voit La Communication du fleuve St. Laurens avec les lacs frontenac, Erié, Lac des Hurons et Ilinois_. Then succeeds the following, written in the same antiquated French, as if it were a part of the title: "Lake Frontenac [Ontario] is separated by a fall of half a league from Lake Erié, from which one enters that of the Hurons, and by the same navigation, into that of the Illinois [Michigan], from the head of which one crosses to the Divine River [Rivière Divine; _i. e._, the Des Plaines branch of the river Illinois], by a portage of a thousand paces. This river falls into the river Colbert [Mississippi], which discharges itself into the Gulf of Mexico." A part of this map is based on the Jesuit map of Lake Superior, the legends being here for the most part identical, though the shape of the lake is better given by Joliet. The Mississippi, or "Riuiere Colbert," is made to flow from three lakes in latitude 47°; and it ends in latitude 37°, a little below the mouth of the Ohio, the rest being apparently cut off to make room for Joliet's letter to Frontenac (_ante_, 76), which is written on the lower part of the map. The valley of the Mississippi is called on the map "Colbertie, ou Amerique Occidentale." The Missouri is represented without name, and against it is a legend, of which the following is the literal translation: "By one of these great rivers which come from the west and discharge themselves into the river Colbert, one will find a way to enter the Vermilion Sea (Gulf of California). I have seen a village which was not more than twenty days' journey by land from a nation which has commerce with those of California. If I had come two days sooner, I should have spoken with those who had come from thence, and had brought four hatchets as a present." The Ohio has no name, but a legend over it states that La Salle had descended it. (See _ante_, 32, _note_). 8. Joliet, at about the same time, made another map, larger than that just mentioned, but not essentially different. The letter to Frontenac is written upon both. There is a third map, of which the following is the title: _Carte generalle de la France septentrionale contenant la descouuerte du pays des Illinois, faite par le Sr. Jolliet_. This map, which is inscribed with a dedication by the Intendant Duchesneau to the minister Colbert, was made some time after the voyage of Joliet and Marquette. It is an elaborate piece of work, but very inaccurate. It represents the continent from Hudson's Strait to Mexico and California, with the whole of the Atlantic and a part of the Pacific coast. An open sea is made to extend from Hudson's Strait westward to the Pacific. The St. Lawrence and all the Great Lakes are laid down with tolerable correctness, as also is the Gulf of Mexico. The Mississippi, called "Messasipi," flows into the Gulf, from which it extends northward nearly to the "Mer du Nord." Along its course, above the Wisconsin, which is called "Miskous," is a long list of Indian tribes, most of which cannot now be recognized, though several are clearly sub-tribes of the Sioux. The Ohio is called "Ouaboustikou." The whole map is decorated with numerous figures of animals, natives of the country, or supposed to be so. Among them are camels, ostriches, and a giraffe, which are placed on the plains west of the Mississippi. But the most curious figure is that which represents one of the monsters seen by Joliet and Marquette, painted on a rock by the Indians. It corresponds with Marquette's description (_ante_, 68). This map, which is an early effort of the engineer Franquelin, does more credit to his skill as a designer than to his geographical knowledge, which appears in some respects behind his time. 9. _Carte de l'Amérique Septentrionale depuis l'embouchure de la Rivière St. Laurens jusques au Sein Mexique._ On this curious little map, the Mississippi is called "Riuiere Buade" (the family name of Frontenac); and the neighboring country is "La Frontenacie." The Illinois is "Riuiere de la Diuine ou Loutrelaise," and the Arkansas is "Riuiere Bazire." The Mississippi is made to head in three lakes, and to discharge itself into "B. du S. Esprit" (Mobile Bay). Some of the legends and the orthography of various Indian names are clearly borrowed from Marquette. This map appears to be the work of Raudin, Frontenac's engineer. I owe a tracing of it to the kindness of Henry Harrisse, Esq. 10. _Carte des Parties les plus occidentales du Canada, par le Père Pierre Raffeix_, S. J. This rude map shows the course of Du Lhut from the head of Lake Superior to the Mississippi, and partly confirms the story of Hennepin, who, Raffeix says in a note, was rescued by Du Lhut. The course of Joliet and Marquette is given, with the legend "Voyage et première descouverte du Mississipy faite par le P. Marquette et Mr. Joliet en 1672." The route of La Salle in 1679, 1680, is also laid down. 11. In the Dépôt des Cartes de la Marine is another map of the Upper Mississippi, which seems to have been made by or for Du Lhut. Lac Buade, the "Issatis," the "Tintons," the "Houelbatons," the "Poualacs," and other tribes of this region appear upon it. This is the map numbered 208 in the _Cartographie_ of Harrisse. 12. Another map deserving mention is a large and fine one, entitled _Carte de l'Amérique Septentrionale et partie de la Meridionale ... avec les nouvelles découvertes de la Rivière Missisipi, ou Colbert_. It appears to have been made in 1682 or 1683, before the descent of La Salle to the mouth of the Mississippi was known to the maker, who seems to have been Franquelin. The lower Mississippi is omitted, but its upper portions are elaborately laid down; and the name _La Louisiane_ appears in large gold letters along its west side. The Falls of St. Anthony are shown, and above them is written "Armes du Roy gravées sur cet arbre l'an 1679." This refers to the _acte de prise de possession_ of Du Lhut in July of that year, and this part of the map seems made from data supplied by him. 13. We now come to the great map of Franquelin, the most remarkable of all the early maps of the interior of North America, though hitherto completely ignored by both American and Canadian writers. It is entitled _Carte de la Louisiane ou des Voyages du Sr. de la Salle et des pays qu'il a découverts depuis la Nouvelle France jusqu'au Golfe Mexique les années 1679, 80, 81, et 82, par Jean Baptiste Louis Franquelin, l'an 1684. Paris._ Franquelin was a young engineer, who held the post of hydrographer to the King, at Quebec, in which Joliet succeeded him. Several of his maps are preserved, including one made in 1681, in which he lays down the course of the Mississippi,--the lower part from conjecture,--making it discharge itself into Mobile Bay. It appears from a letter of the governor, La Barre, that Franquelin was at Quebec in 1683, engaged on a map which was probably that of which the title is given above, though had La Barre known that it was to be called a map of the journeys of his victim La Salle, he would have been more sparing of his praises. "He" (Franquelin), writes the governor, "is as skilful as any in France, but extremely poor and in need of a little aid from his Majesty as an Engineer; he is at work on a very correct map of the country, which I shall send you next year in his name; meanwhile, I shall support him with some little assistance."--_Colonial Documents of New York_, IX. 205. The map is very elaborately executed, and is six feet long and four and a half wide. It exhibits the political divisions of the continent, as the French then understood them; that is to say, all the regions drained by streams flowing into the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi are claimed as belonging to France, and this vast domain is separated into two grand divisions, La Nouvelle France and La Louisiane. The boundary line of the former, New France, is drawn from the Penobscot to the southern extremity of Lake Champlain, and thence to the Mohawk, which it crosses a little above Schenectady, in order to make French subjects of the Mohawk Indians. Thence it passes by the sources of the Susquehanna and the Alleghany, along the southern shore of Lake Erie, across Southern Michigan, and by the head of Lake Michigan, whence it sweeps northwestward to the sources of the Mississippi. Louisiana includes the entire valley of the Mississippi and the Ohio, besides the whole of Texas. The Spanish province of Florida comprises the peninsula and the country east of the Bay of Mobile, drained by streams flowing into the Gulf; while Carolina, Virginia, and the other English provinces, form a narrow strip between the Alleghanies and the Atlantic. The Mississippi is called "Missisipi, ou Rivière Colbert;" the Missouri, "Grande Rivière des Emissourittes, ou Missourits;" the Illinois, "Rivière des Ilinois, ou Macopins;" the Ohio, which La Salle had before called by its present name, "Fleuve St. Louis, ou Chucagoa, ou Casquinampogamou;" one of its principal branches is "Ohio, ou Olighin" (Alleghany); the Arkansas, "Rivière des Acansea;" the Red River, "Rivière Seignelay," a name which had once been given to the Illinois. Many smaller streams are designated by names which have been entirely forgotten. The nomenclature differs materially from that of Coronelli's map, published four years later. Here the whole of the French territory is laid down as "Canada, ou La Nouvelle France," of which "La Louisiane" forms an integral part. The map of Homannus, like that of Franquelin, makes two distinct provinces, of which one is styled "Canada" and the other "La Louisiane," the latter including Michigan and the greater part of New York. Franquelin gives the shape of Hudson's Bay, and of all the Great Lakes, with remarkable accuracy. He makes the Mississippi bend much too far to the West. The peculiar sinuosities of its course are indicated; and some of its bends--as, for example, that at New Orleans--are easily recognized. Its mouths are represented with great minuteness; and it may be inferred from the map that, since La Salle's time, they have advanced considerably into the sea. Perhaps the most interesting feature in Franquelin's map is his sketch of La Salle's evanescent colony on the Illinois, engraved for this volume. He reproduced the map in 1688, for presentation to the King, with the title _Carte de l'Amérique Septentrionale, depuis le 25 jusq'au 65 degré de latitude et environ 140 et 235 degrés de longitude, etc._ In this map, Franquelin corrects various errors in that which preceded. One of these corrections consists in the removal of a branch of the river Illinois which he had marked on his first map,--as will be seen by referring to the portion of it in this book,--but which does not in fact exist. On this second map, La Salle's colony appears in much diminished proportions, his Indian settlements having in good measure dispersed. Two later maps of New France and Louisiana, both bearing Franquelin's name, are preserved in the Dépôt des Cartes de la Marine, as well as a number of smaller maps and sketches, also by him. They all have more or less of the features of the great map of 1684, which surpasses them all in interest and completeness. The remarkable manuscript map of the Upper Mississippi by Le Sueur belongs to a period later than the close of this narrative. These various maps, joined to contemporary documents, show that the Valley of the Mississippi received, at an early date, the several names of Manitoumie, Frontenacie, Colbertie, and La Louisiane. This last name, which it long retained, is due to La Salle. The first use of it which I have observed is in a conveyance of the Island of Belleisle made by him to his lieutenant, La Forest, in 1679. II. THE ELDORADO OF MATHIEU SÂGEAN. Father Hennepin had among his contemporaries two rivals in the fabrication of new discoveries. The first was the noted La Hontan, whose book, like his own, had a wide circulation and proved a great success. La Hontan had seen much, and portions of his story have a substantial value; but his account of his pretended voyage up the "Long River" is a sheer fabrication. His "Long River" corresponds in position with the St. Peter, but it corresponds in nothing else; and the populous nations whom he found on it--the Eokoros, the Esanapes, and the Gnacsitares, no less than their neighbors the Mozeemlek and the Tahuglauk--are as real as the nations visited by Captain Gulliver. But La Hontan did not, like Hennepin, add slander and plagiarism to mendacity, or seek to appropriate to himself the credit of genuine discoveries made by others. Mathieu Sâgean is a personage less known than Hennepin or La Hontan; for though he surpassed them both in fertility of invention, he was illiterate, and never made a book. In 1701, being then a soldier in a company of marines at Brest, he revealed a secret which he declared that he had locked within his breast for twenty years, having been unwilling to impart it to the Dutch and English, in whose service he had been during the whole period. His story was written down from his dictation, and sent to the minister Ponchartrain. It is preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and in 1863 it was printed by Mr. Shea. He was born, he declares, at La Chine in Canada, and engaged in the service of La Salle about twenty years before the revelation of his secret; that is, in 1681. Hence, he would have been, at the utmost, only fourteen years old, as La Chine did not exist before 1667. He was with La Salle at the building of Fort St. Louis of the Illinois, and was left here as one of a hundred men under command of Tonty. Tonty, it is to be observed, had but a small fraction of this number; and Sâgean describes the fort in a manner which shows that he never saw it. Being desirous of making some new discovery, he obtained leave from Tonty, and set out with eleven other Frenchmen and two Mohegan Indians. They ascended the Mississippi a hundred and fifty leagues, carried their canoes by a cataract, went forty leagues farther, and stopped a month to hunt. While thus employed, they found another river, fourteen leagues distant, flowing south-southwest. They carried their canoes thither, meeting on the way many lions, leopards, and tigers, which did them no harm; then they embarked, paddled a hundred and fifty leagues farther, and found themselves in the midst of the great nation of the Acanibas, dwelling in many fortified towns, and governed by King Hagaren, who claimed descent from Montezuma. The King, like his subjects, was clothed with the skins of men. Nevertheless, he and they were civilized and polished in their manners. They worshipped certain frightful idols of gold in the royal palace. One of them represented the ancestor of their monarch armed with lance, bow, and quiver, and in the act of mounting his horse; while in his mouth he held a jewel as large as a goose's egg, which shone like fire, and which, in the opinion of Sâgean, was a carbuncle. Another of these images was that of a woman mounted on a golden unicorn, with a horn more than a fathom long. After passing, pursues the story, between these idols, which stand on platforms of gold, each thirty feet square, one enters a magnificent vestibule, conducting to the apartment of the King. At the four corners of this vestibule are stationed bands of music, which, to the taste of Sâgean, was of very poor quality. The palace is of vast extent, and the private apartment of the King is twenty-eight or thirty feet square; the walls, to the height of eighteen feet, being of bricks of solid gold, and the pavement of the same. Here the King dwells alone, served only by his wives, of whom he takes a new one every day. The Frenchmen alone had the privilege of entering, and were graciously received. These people carry on a great trade in gold with a nation, believed by Sâgean to be the Japanese, as the journey to them lasts six months. He saw the departure of one of the caravans, which consisted of more than three thousand oxen, laden with gold, and an equal number of horsemen, armed with lances, bows, and daggers. They receive iron and steel in exchange for their gold. The King has an army of a hundred thousand men, of whom three fourths are cavalry. They have golden trumpets, with which they make very indifferent music; and also golden drums, which, as well as the drummer, are carried on the backs of oxen. The troops are practised once a week in shooting at a target with arrows; and the King rewards the victor with one of his wives, or with some honorable employment. These people are of a dark complexion and hideous to look upon, because their faces are made long and narrow by pressing their heads between two boards in infancy. The women, however, are as fair as in Europe; though, in common with the men, their ears are enormously large. All persons of distinction among the Acanibas wear their fingernails very long. They are polygamists, and each man takes as many wives as he wants. They are of a joyous disposition, moderate drinkers, but great smokers. They entertained Sâgean and his followers during five months with the fat of the land; and any woman who refused a Frenchman was ordered to be killed. Six girls were put to death with daggers for this breach of hospitality. The King, being anxious to retain his visitors in his service, offered Sâgean one of his daughters, aged fourteen years, in marriage; and when he saw him resolved to depart, promised to keep her for him till he should return. The climate is delightful, and summer reigns throughout the year. The plains are full of birds and animals of all kinds, among which are many parrots and monkeys, besides the wild cattle, with humps like camels, which these people use as beasts of burden. King Hagaren would not let the Frenchmen go till they had sworn by the sky, which is the customary oath of the Acanibas, that they would return in thirty-six moons, and bring him a supply of beads and other trinkets from Canada. As gold was to be had for the asking, each of the eleven Frenchmen took away with him sixty small bars, weighing about four pounds each. The King ordered two hundred horsemen to escort them, and carry the gold to their canoes; which they did, and then bade them farewell with terrific howlings, meant, doubtless, to do them honor. After many adventures, wherein nearly all his companions came to a bloody end, Sâgean, and the few others who survived, had the ill luck to be captured by English pirates, at the mouth of the St. Lawrence. He spent many years among them in the East and West Indies, but would not reveal the secret of his Eldorado to these heretical foreigners. Such was the story, which so far imposed on the credulity of the minister Ponchartrain as to persuade him that the matter was worth serious examination. Accordingly, Sâgean was sent to Louisiana, then in its earliest infancy as a French colony. Here he met various persons who had known him in Canada, who denied that he had ever been on the Mississippi, and contradicted his account of his parentage. Nevertheless, he held fast to his story, and declared that the gold mines of the Acanibas could be reached without difficulty by the river Missouri. But Sauvolle and Bienville, chiefs of the colony, were obstinate in their unbelief; and Sâgean and his King Hagaren lapsed alike into oblivion. INDEX. Abenakis, the, 285, 295, 316, 346. Acanibas, the, great nation of, description of, 487-489; gold mines of, 489. "Acansea" (Arkansas) River, the, 484. Accau, Michel, 186, 187, 249, 251, 253, 261, 265, 266, 273. African travel, history of, 198. Agniers (Mohawks), the, 136. Aigron, Captain, on ill-terms with La Salle, 372, 382, 383. Ailleboust, Madame d', 111. "Aimable," La Salle's store-ship, 372, 373, 374, 375, 379, 380, 381, 405, 454, 468. Aire, Beaujeu's lieutenant, 375. Akanseas, nation of the, 300. See also _Arkansas Indians, the_. Albanel, prominent among the Jesuit explorers, 109; his journey up the Saguenay to Hudson's Bay, 109. Albany, 118, 200, 220. Algonquin Indians, the, Jean Nicollet among, 3; at Ste. Marie du Saut, 39; the Iroquois spread desolation among, 219. Alkansas, nation of the, 300. See also _Arkansas Indians, the_. Alleghany Mountains, the, 84, 308, 309, 483. Alleghany River, the, 307, 483, 484. Allouez, Father Claude, explores a part of Lake Superior, 6; name of Lake Michigan, 42, 155; sent to Green Bay to found a mission, 43; joined by Dablon, 43; among the Mascoutins and the Miamis, 44; among the Foxes, 45; at Saut Ste. Marie, 51; addresses the Indians at Saut Ste. Marie, 53; population of the Illinois Valley, 169; intrigues against La Salle, 175, 238; at Fort St. Louis of the Illinois, 458; his fear of La Salle, 459. Allumette Island, 3. Alton, city of, 68. America, debt due La Salle from, 432. "Amerique Occidentale" (Mississippi Valley), 479. Amikoués, the, at Saut Ste. Marie, 51. Andastes, reduced to helpless insignificance by the Iroquois, 219. André, Louis, mission of the Manitoulin Island assigned to, 41; makes a missionary tour among the Nipissings, 41; his experiences among them, 42; at Saut Ste. Marie, 51. Anthony, St., of Padua, the patron of La Salle's great enterprise, 152, 250, 259. Anticosti, great island of, granted to Joliet, 76. Appalache, Bay of, 373. Aquipaguetin, Chief, 254; plots against Hennepin, 255, 261, 262, 264, 271, 272. Aramoni River, the, 221, 225, 239. Arctic travel, history of, 198. Arkansas Indians, the, Joliet and Marquette among, 72, 184; La Salle among, 299; various names of, 300; tallest and best-formed Indians in America, 300, 308; villages of, 466. Arkansas River, the, 71; Joutel's arrival at, 453; Joutel descends, 456; 478, 484. Arnoul, Sieur, 383, 390. Arouet, François Marie, see _Voltaire_. Aspinwall, Col. Thomas, 471. Assiniboins, the, at the Jesuit mission of St. Esprit, 40, 261; Du Lhut among, 276. Assonis, the, Joutel among, 451; Tonty among, 452. Atlantic coast, the, 480. Atlantic Ocean, the, 74. Auguel, Antoine, 186. See also _Du Gay, Picard_. Autray, Sieur d', 200. Bancroft, 75. Barbier, Sieur, 406; marriage of, 408, 418; fate of, 470. Barcia, 244, 471. Barrois, secretary of Count Frontenac, 293. Barthelemy, 433, 451, 456. Baugis, Chevalier de, 326, 327. Bazire, 101. Beauharnois, forest of, 14. Beaujeu, Madame de, devotion to the Jesuits, 361. Beaujeu, Sieur de, divides with La Salle the command of the new enterprise, 353; lack of harmony between La Salle and, 354-361; letters to Seignelay, 354-356; letters to Cabart de Villermont, 357-360; sails from Rochelle, 366; disputes with La Salle, 366; the voyage, 368; complaints of, 370; La Salle waiting for, 374; meeting with La Salle, 375; in Texas, 381; makes friendly advances to La Salle, 385; departure of, 387; conduct of, 389; coldly received by Seignelay, 389, 454. "Beautiful River" (Ohio), the, 70. Bégon, the intendant, 367, 368. "Belle," La Salle's frigate, 372, 373, 374, 379, 383, 386, 389, 392, 401, 404, 406, 407, 416, 417, 468. Bellefontaine, Tonty's lieutenant, 458, 460. Belle Isle, 203. Belleisle, Island of, 485. Bellinzani, 129. Bernon, Abbé, on the character of La Salle, 342. Bibliothèque Mazarine, the, 17. Bienville, 489. Big Vermilion River, the, 221, 239, 241. Bissot, Claire, her marriage to Louis Joliet, 76. Black Rock, 149. Boeufs, Rivière aux, 392. Bois Blanc, Island of, 153. Boisrondet, Sieur de, 218, 223, 227, 233, 236, 457. Boisseau, 101. Bolton, Captain, reaches the Mississippi, 5. Boston, 5; rumored that the Dutch fleet had captured, 88. Boughton Hill, 21. Bourbon, Louis Armand de, see, _Conti, Prince de_. Bourdon, the engineer, 111. Bourdon, Jean, 200. See also _Dautray_. Bourdon, Madame, superior of the Sainte Famille, 111. Bowman, W. E., 317. Branssac, loans merchandise to La Salle, 49, 434. Brazos River, the, 424. Breman, fate of, 471, 472. Brest, 486. Brinvilliers, burned alive, 179. British territories, the, 309. Brodhead, 136. Bruyas, the Jesuit, 115; among the Onondagas and the Mohawks, 115, 135; the "Racines Agnières" of, 136. Buade, Lake, 257, 262, 481. Buade, Louis de, see _Frontenac, Count_. Buade, Rivière (Mississippi), 481. Buffalo, the, 205, 398. Buffalo Rock, 169, 314; occupied by the Miami village, 314; described by Charlevoix, 314. Buisset, Luc, the Récollet, 121; at Fort Frontenac, 132, 135, 137, 280. Bull River, 272. Burnt Wood River, the, 277. Caddoes, the, 452; villages of, 465. Cadodaquis, the, 452. California, Gulf of, 15, 31, 41, 63, 74, 84, 480. California, State of, 480. Camanches, the, 414. Cambray, Archbishop of, 16. Canada, 10; Frontenac's treaty with the Indians confers an inestimable blessing on all, 95; no longer merely a mission, 104, 484. Canadian Parliament, Library of, the, 13. Cananistigoyan, 275. Carignan, regiment of, 12, 91. Carolina, 483. Carver, 62, 267. "Casquinampogamou" (St. Louis) River, the, 484. Casson, Dollier de, 15; among the Nipissings, 16; leads an expedition of conversion, 16; combines his expedition with that of La Salle, 17; journey of, 19, 20; _belles paroles_ of La Salle, 25; discoveries of La Salle, 29, 475. Cataraqui Bridge, the, 90. Cataraqui River, the, 87; Frontenac at, 90; fort built on the banks of, 92. Cavelier, nephew of La Salle, 420, 435, 438, 446, 449, 451, 458, 463. Cavelier, Henri, uncle of La Salle, 7, 363. Cavelier, Jean, father of La Salle, 7. Cavelier, Abbé Jean, brother of La Salle, 9; at Montreal, 98; La Salle defamed to, 113; causes La Salle no little annoyance, 114, 333, 353, 367, 369, 370, 371, 372, 374, 376, 388, 394, 396, 402, 405, 406, 412, 415, 416, 417, 420, 421, 423; unreliable in his writings, 433, 435, 436; doubt and anxiety, 437, 438, 446; plans to escape, 447; the murder of Duhaut, 449; sets out for home, 450, 451; among the Assonis, 452, 453; on the Arkansas, 455; at Fort St. Louis of the Illinois, 457; visit to Father Allouez, 459; conceals La Salle's death, 460; reaches Montreal, 462; embarks for France, 462; his report to Seignelay, 462, 463; his memorial to the King, 463, 464. Cavelier, Madeleine, 28, 34. Cavelier, René Robert, see _La Salle, Sieur de_. Cayuga Creek, 145, 146. Cayugas, the, Frontenac's address to, 91. Cenis, the, La Salle among, 413; villages of, 415; Duhaut's journey to, 438; Joutel among, 440-445; customs of, 443; joined by Hiens on a war-expedition, 450. Champigny, Intendant of Canada, 434. Champlain, Lake, 483. Champlain, Samuel de, dreams of the South Sea, 14; map of, 139; his enthusiasm compared with that of La Salle, 431; first to map out the Great Lakes, 476. Chaouanons (Shawanoes), the, 307, 317. Charlevoix, 50; death of Marquette, 82; 103; the names of the Illinois River, 167; the loss of the "Griffin," 182; the Illinois Indians, 223; doubted veracity of Hennepin, 244; the Iroquois virgin, Tegahkouita, 275; the Arkansas nation, 300; visits the Natchez Indians, 304; describes "Starved Rock" and Buffalo Rock, 314; speaks of "Le Rocher," 314; character of La Salle, 433, 454; the remains of Fort St. Louis of the Illinois, 468. Charon, creditor of La Salle, 150. Charron, Madame, 111. Chartier, Martin, 337. Chassagoac, chief of the Illinois, meeting with La Salle, 192. Chassagouasse, Chief, 192. Chateauguay, forest of, 14. "Chaudière, Lac de la" (Lake St. Clair), 476. Chaumonot, the Jesuit, founds the association of the Sainte Famille, 111. Chefdeville, M. de, 406, 407, 418, 463. Cheruel, 167. Chicago, 50, 236, 460, 462, 477. Chicago Portage, the, 320. Chicago River, the, 31; Marquette on, 78, 296. Chickasaw Bluffs, the, 311. Chickasaw Indians, the, 184, 296, 307, 320, 468. Chikachas (Chickasaws), the, 307. China, 6, 14, 29. China, Sea of, 38, 83. Chippewa Creek, 139, 145. Chippeway River, the, 272. "Chucagoa" (St. Louis) River, the, 484. Chukagoua (Ohio) River, the, 307. Clark, James, 169, 170; the site of the Great Illinois Town, 239. Coahuila, 469. Colbert, the minister, Joliet's discovery of the Mississippi announced to, 34; Frontenac's despatch, recommending La Salle, 99; La Salle defamed to, 119; a memorial of La Salle laid before, 122, 344, 345, 480. Colbert River (Mississippi), the, 35, 244, 307, 346, 376, 477, 479, 482. "Colbertie" (Mississippi Valley), 479. Collin, 187. Colorado River, the, 411, 415. Comet of 1680, the Great, 213. "Conception, Rivière de la" (Mississippi River), 477. Conti, Fort, 128; location of, 129, 148. Conti, Lac de (Lake Erie), 129. Conti, Prince de (second), patron of La Salle, 106; letter from La Salle, 118. Copper mines of Lake Superior, 23; Joliet attempts to discover, 23; the Jesuits labor to explore, 38; Indian legends concerning, 39; Saint-Lusson sets out to discover, 49. Coroas, the, visited by the French, 305, 310. Coronelli, map made by, 221, 484. Corpus Christi Bay, 375. Cosme, St., 69, 314, 454; commendation of Tonty, 467. Courcelle, Governor, 11, 15, 17, 35; quarrel with Talon, 56; schemes to protect French trade in Canada, 85. Couture, the assassination of La Salle, 433; welcomes Joutel, 453, 455, 456, 461, 464. Creeks, the, 304. Crees, the, at Saut Ste. Marie, 51. Crèvecoeur, Fort, 34; built by La Salle, 180; La Salle at, 180-188; destroyed by the mutineers, 199; La Salle finds the ruins of, 211. Crow Indians, the, make war upon the dead, 207. Cuba, 372, 389. Cussy, De, governor of La Tortue, 367, 368. Dablon, Father Claude the Jesuit, at Ste. Marie du Saut, 27, 51; reports the discovery of copper, 38; the location of the Illinois Indians, 41; the name of Lake Michigan, 42; joins Father Allouez at the Green Bay Mission, 43; among the Mascoutins and the Miamis, 44; the Cross among the Foxes, 45; the authority and state of the Miami chief, 50; Allouez's harangue at Saut Ste. Marie, 55; rumors of the Dutch fleet, 88, 112. Dacotah (Sioux) Indians, the, 260. Dauphin, Fort, 128; location of, 129. Dauphin, Lac (Lake Michigan), 155. Daupin, François, 203. Dautray, 187, 199, 210, 306. De Launay, see _Launay, De_. De Leon, see _Leon, Alonzo de_. De Leon (San Antonio), the, 469. Del Norte, the, 469. De Marle, see _Marle, De_. Denonville, Marquis de, 21, 121, 275, 454; in the Iroquois War, 460; announces war against Spain, 464; commendation of Tonty, 467. Des Groseilliers, Médard Chouart, reaches the Mississippi, 5. Deslauriers, 118. Desloges, 384. Des Moines, 65. Des Moines River, the, 477, 478. De Soto, Hernando, buried in the Mississippi, 3. Des Plaines River, the, 79, 477, 479. Detroit, 26. Detroit River, the, 31, 197, 279. Detroit, the Strait of, first recorded passage of white men through, 26; the "Griffin" in, 151; Du Lhut ordered to fortify, 275, 475. Divine, the Rivière de la, 167, 479. Dollier, see _Casson, Dollier de_. Douay, Anastase, 69, 155; joins La Salle's new enterprise, 353, 372; in Texas, 388; at Fort St. Louis, 399, 405, 406, 412, 413, 414, 415, 416, 417, 418, 420, 421, 422, 428; the assassination of La Salle, 432; unreliable in his writings, 433, 435; doubt and anxiety, 437, 446; the murder of Duhaut, 448, 449; sets out for home, 451, 458; visit to Father Allouez, 459; character of, 462. Druilletes, Gabriel, at Saut Ste. Marie, 51; teaches Marquette the Montagnais language, 59. Duchesneau, the intendant, 69, 78, 101, 102, 125, 126, 138, 156, 164, 197, 217, 218, 219, 235, 274, 275, 480. Du Gay, Picard, 186, 187, 250, 251, 253; among the Sioux, 259, 261, 265, 266, 268, 269, 270, 272, 273. Duhaut, the brothers, 368, 400. Duhaut, the elder, return of, 401; at Fort St. Louis, 405; plots against La Salle, 410, 420, 424; quarrel with Moranget, 425; murders Moranget, Saget, and Nika, 426; assassinates La Salle, 429; triumph of, 435; journey to the Cenis villages, 438; resolves to return to Fort St. Louis, 446; quarrel with Hiens, 446; plans to go to Canada, 448; murder of, 448. Du Lhut, Daniel Greysolon, 182; meeting with Hennepin, 273; sketch of, 274; exploits of, 275, 276; route of, 276; explorations of, 276-278; among the Assiniboins and the Sioux, 276; joined by Hennepin, 278; reaches the Green Bay Mission, 279, 322; in the Iroquois War, 460, 481, 482. Dumesnil, La Salle's servant, 415. Dumont, La Salle borrows money from, 127. Duplessis, attempts to murder La Salle, 166. Dupont, Nicolas, 99. Du Pratz, customs of the Natchez, 304. Durango, 350. Durantaye, 275; in the Iroquois War, 460. Dutch, the, trade with the Indians, 219; encourage the Iroquois to fight, 324. Dutch fleet, the, rumored to have captured Boston, 88. East Indies, the, 489. Eastman, Mrs., legend of Winona, 271. "Emissourites, Rivière des" (Missouri), 70. English, the, hold out great inducements to Joliet to join them, 76; French company formed to compete at Hudson's Bay with, 76; trade with the Indians, 219; encourage the Iroquois to fight, 324. "English Jem," 421. Eokoros, the, 486. Erie, Lake, 23, 25, 26, 29, 31, 96, 124, 141, 146, 151, 196, 197, 275, 279, 309, 333, 475, 476, 477, 479, 483. Eries, the, exterminated by the Iroquois, 219. Esanapes, the, 486. Esmanville, the priest, 375, 379. Espiritu Santo Bay, 394, 471. Estrées, Count d', 344. Faillon, Abbé, connection of La Salle with the Jesuits, 8; the seigniory of La Salle, 12, 13; detailed plan of Montreal, 13; La Salle's discoveries, 29; La Salle in need of money, 49; throws much light on the life of, 58, 98; on the establishment of the association of the Sainte Famille, 112; plan of Fort Frontenac, 121. Fauvel-Cavelier, Mme., 463. Fénelon, Abbé, 16; attempts to mediate between Frontenac and Perrot, 97; preaches against Frontenac at Montreal, 98. Ferland, throws much light on the life of Joliet, 58. Fire Nation, the, 44. Five Nations, the, 11. Florida, 483. Florida Indians, the, lodges of, 442. Folles-Avoines, Nation des, 61. Forked River (Mississippi), the, 5. Fox River, the, 4, 43, 50, 62, 477. Foxes, the at the Jesuit mission of St. Esprit, 40; location of, 43; Father Allouez among, 45; incensed against the French, 45; the Cross among, 45, 287. France, takes possession of the West, 52; receives on parchment a stupendous accession, 308. Francheville, Pierre, 58. Francis, St., 249. Franciscans, the, 133. Franquelin, Jean Baptiste Louis, manuscript map made by, 169, 221, 309, 316, 317, 347, 390, 481, 482, 483, 484, 485. Fremin, the Jesuit, 21. French, the, Hurons the allies of, 4; in western New York, 19-23; the Iroquois felt the power of, 42; the Foxes incensed against, 45; the Jesuits seek to embroil the Iroquois with, 115; seeking to secure a monopoly of the furs of the north and west, 219; in Texas, 348; reoccupy Fort St. Louis of the Illinois, 468. French River, 28, 462. Frontenac, Count, La Salle addresses a memorial to, 32; announces Joliet's discovery of the Mississippi to Colbert, 34; speaks slightingly of Joliet, 34; succeeds Courcelle as governor, 56, 57, 60, 67; letter from Joliet to, 76; favorably disposed to La Salle, 85; comes to Canada a ruined man, 85; schemes of, 86; at Montreal, 87; his journey to Lake Ontario, 88; faculty for managing the Indians, 89; reaches Lake Ontario, 89; at Cataraqui, 90; addresses the Indians, 91; admirable dealing with the Indians, 92, 93; his enterprise a complete success, 95; confers an inestimable benefit on all Canada, 95; his plan to command the Upper Lakes, 96; quarrel with Perrot, 96; arrests Perrot, 96; has Montreal well in hand, 96; the Abbé Fénelon attempts to mediate between Perrot and, 97; the Abbé Fénelon preaches against, 98; championed by La Salle, 99; recommends La Salle to Colbert, 99; expects to share in profits of La Salle's new post, 101; hatred of the Jesuits, 102; protects the Récollets, 109; intrigues of the Jesuits, 118, 125, 201, 232, 235, 238, 274; entertains Father Hennepin, 280, 292; recalled to France, 318; obligations of La Salle to, 434; commendation of Tonty, 467, 479, 480, 481. Frontenac, Fort, 34; granted to La Salle, 100; rebuilt by La Salle, 101, 112; La Salle at, 120; plan of, 121; not established for commercial gain alone, 122, 148, 203, 292; La Barre takes possession of, 325; restored to La Salle by the King, 351, 476. Frontenac (Ontario), Lake, 128, 476, 477, 479. Frontenac, Madame de, 167. "Frontenacie, La," 481. Fur-trade, the, the Jesuits accused of taking part in, 109, 110; the Jesuits seek to establish a monopoly in, 114. Gabriel, Father, 158, 159, 227, 237. Gaeta, 128. Galinée, Father, 17; recounts the journey of La Salle and the Sulpitians, 19, 20, 26; cruelty of the Senecas, 22; the work of the Jesuits, 28; makes the earliest map of the Upper Lakes, 28, 106, 140, 475. Galve, Viceroy, 469. Galveston Bay, 374, 376, 385. Garakontié, Chief, 91. Garnier, Julien, 59; among the Senecas, 141. Gayen, 384. Geest, Catherine mother of La Salle, 7; La Salle's farewell to, 364. Geest, Nicolas, 7. Gendron, 139. Genesee, the Falls of the, 476. Genesee River, the, 140, 142, 279. Georgian Bay of Lake Huron, 27, 203. Giton, La Salle borrows money from, 150. Gnacsitares, the, 486. Gould, Dr. B. A., on the "Great Comet of 1680," 213. Grandfontaine, Chevalier de, 56. Grand Gulf, 300. Grand River, 23, 25. Gravier, 244, 297; the Arkansas nation, 300. Great Lakes, the, 4; Joliet makes a map of the region of, 32; early unpublished maps of, 475-485; Champlain makes the first attempt to map out, 476. Great Manitoulin Island, the, 41. "Great Mountain," the Indian name for the governor of Canada, 156. Green Bay of Lake Michigan, the, 4, 31, 42, 43, 75; La Salle at, 155; 236. Green Bay Mission, the, Father Allouez sent to found, 43; Marquette at, 62; Father Hennepin and Du Lhut reach, 279. "Griffin," the, building of, 144-148; finished, 149; voyage of, 151-153; at St. Ignace of Michilimackinac, 154; set sail for Niagara laden with furs, 156; La Salle's forebodings concerning, 163; loss of, 181, 322. Grollet, 445, 446, 448, 470, 471; sent to Spain, 472. Guadalupe, the, 469. Gulliver, Captain, 486. Hagaren, King of the Acanibas, 487-489. Hamilton, town of, 23. Harrisse, Henry, 76, 481, 482. Haukiki (Marest) River, the, 167. Hennepin, Louis, connection of La Salle with the Jesuits, 8; at Fort Frontenac, 121; meets La Salle on his return to Canada, 130; receives permission to join La Salle, 131; his journey to Fort Frontenac, 132; sets out with La Motte for Niagara, 132; portrait of, 133; his past life, 133; sails for Canada, 134; relations with La Salle, 134, 135; work among the Indians, 135; the most impudent of liars, 136; daring of, 137; embarks on the journey, 137; reaches the Niagara, 138; account of the falls and river of Niagara, 139; among the Senecas, 140, 141; at the Niagara Portage, 145-147; the launch of the "Griffin," 148, 149; on board the "Griffin," 151; St. Anthony of Padua the patron saint of La Salle's great enterprise, 152; the departure of the "Griffin" for Niagara, 157; La Salle's encounter with the Outagamies, 161; La Salle rejoined by Tonty, 163; La Salle's forebodings concerning the "Griffin," 163; population of the Illinois Valley, 169; among the Illinois, 173, 174; the story of Monso, 177; La Salle's men desert him, 178; at Fort Crèvecoeur, 181; sent to the Mississippi, 185; the journey from Fort Crèvecoeur, 201; the mutineers at Fort Crèvecoeur, 218; 234; sets out to explore the Illinois River, 242; his claims to the discovery of the Mississippi, 243; doubted veracity of, 244; captured by the Sioux, 245; proved an impostor, 245; steals passages from Membré and Le Clerc, 247; his journey northward, 249; suspected of sorcery, 253; plots against, 255; a hard journey, 257; among the Sioux, 259-282; adopted as a son by the Sioux, 261; sets out for the Wisconsin, 266; notice of the Falls of St. Anthony, 267; rejoins the Indians, 273; meeting with Du Lhut, 273; joins Du Lhut, 278; reaches the Green Bay Mission, 279; reaches Fort Frontenac, 280; goes to Montreal, 280; entertained by Frontenac, 280; returns to Europe, 280; dies in obscurity, 281; Louis XIV. orders the arrest of, 282; various editions of the travels of, 282; finds fault with Tonty, 467, 479, 481; rivals of, 485, 486. Hiens, the German, 411, 421, 425; murders Moranget, Saget, and Nika, 426; quarrel with Duhaut and Liotot, 446; murders Duhaut, 448; joins the Cenis on a war expedition, 450, 465; fate of, 472. Hillaret Moïse, 147, 178, 187, 193, 217, 218. Hitt, Col. D. F., 317. Hohays, the, 261. Homannus, map made by, 484. Hondo (Rio Frio), the, 469. Horse Shoe Fall, the, 139. Hôtel-Dieu at Montreal, the, 13, 98. Hudson's Bay, Joliet's voyage to, 76; Albanel's journey to, 109, 346, 484. Hudson's Strait, 480. Humber River, the, 138, 203. Hunaut, 187, 210, 287. Hundred Associates, Company of the, 57. Huron Indians, the, quarrel with the Winnebagoes, 4; allies of the French, 4; at the Jesuit mission of St. Esprit, 40; Marquette among, 40; terrified by the Sioux, 41; destroyed by the Iroquois, 219. Huron, Lake, 26, 27, 31; the Jesuits on, 37, 41; Saint-Lusson takes possession for France of, 52; La Salle on, 152, 475, 476, 479. Huron Mission, the, 27. Huron River, the, 196. "Hyacinth, confection of," 159. Iberville, the founder of Louisiana, 455; joined by Tonty, 467, 472, 473. Ignatius, Saint, 78. Illinois, Great Town of the, 170; deserted, 191; La Salle at, 205; description of, 221; Tonty in, 223; abandoned to the Iroquois, 230; site of, 239. Illinois Indians, the, at the Jesuit mission of St. Esprit, 40; location of, 40, 41, 60; Joliet and Marquette among, 66, 77, 78, 154, 155, 161; La Salle among, 171-173; hospitality of, 173; deep-rooted jealousy of the Osages, 174, 203; war with the Iroquois, 210, 220; the Miamis join the Iroquois against, 220; rankling jealousy between the Miamis and, 220; an aggregation of kindred tribes, 223; characteristics of, 223; Tonty intercedes for, 228; treaty made with the Iroquois, 231; attacked by the Iroquois, 235; become allies of La Salle, 287, 307; at "Starved Rock," 314; join La Salle's colony, 315, 316; very capricious and uncertain, 322, 477. Illinois, Lake of the (Lake Michigan), 42, 75, 155, 477, 479. Illinois River, the, 31, 33, 34; discovered by La Salle, 35; Joliet and Marquette on, 74, 132; La Salle on, 168; various names of, 16, 204; ravaged granaries of, 213, 220; Father Hennepin sets out to explore, 242, 245, 296; La Salle's projected colony on the banks of, 313, 315, 316, 405, 406; Joutel on, 457, 477, 478, 481, 484. Illinois, State of, first civilized occupation of, 181. Illinois, Valley of the, population of, 169. Immaculate Conception, the, doctrine of, a favorite tenet of the Jesuits, 61. Immaculate Conception, Mission of the, Marquette sets out to found, 77. Incarnation, Marie de l', 111. Indians, the, Father Jogues and Raymbault preach among, 5; ferocity of, 11; manitous of, 26, 44, 68; their game of la crosse, 50; the tribes meet at Saut Ste. Marie to confer with Saint-Lusson, 51-56; reception to Joliet and Marquette, 63; lodges of, 75; reception to Frontenac, 90; Frontenac's admirable dealing with, 92, 93; Alphabetical list of tribes referred to:-- Abenakis, Acanibas, Agniers, Akanseas, Algonquins, Alkansas, Amikoués, Andastes, Arkansas, Assiniboins, Assonis, Caddoes, Cadodaquis, Camanches, Cenis, Chaouanons, Chickasaws, Chikachas, Coroas, Creeks, Crees, Crows, Dacotah, Eries, Fire Nation, Five Nations, Floridas, Foxes, Hohays, Hurons, Illinois, Iroquois, Issanti, Issanyati, Issati, Kahokias, Kanzas, Kappas, Kaskaskias, Kickapoos, Kilatica, Kious, Kiskakon Ottawas, Knisteneaux, Koroas, Malhoumines, Malouminek, Mandans, Maroas, Mascoutins, Meddewakantonwan, Menomonies, Miamis, Mitchigamias, Mohawks, Mohegans, Moingona, Monsonis, Motantees, Nadouessioux, Natchez, Nation des Folles-Avoines, Nation of the Prairie, Neutrals, Nipissings, Ojibwas, Omahas, Oneidas, Onondagas, Osages, Osotouoy, Ottawas, Ouabona, Ouiatenons, Oumalouminek, Oumas, Outagamies, Pah-Utahs, Pawnees, Peanqhichia, Peorias, Pepikokia, Piankishaws, Pottawattamies, Quapaws, Quinipissas, Sacs, Sauteurs, Sauthouis, Senecas, Shawanoes, Sioux, Sokokis, Taensas, Tamaroas, Tangibao, Terliquiquimechi, Tetons, Texas, Tintonwans, Tongengas, Topingas, Torimans, Wapoos, Weas, Wild-rice, Winnebagoes, Yankton Sioux. Irondequoit Bay, 20. Iroquois Indians, the, 11; alone remain, 37; felt the power of the French, 42; the "Beautiful River," 70; Onondaga the political centre of, 87; the Jesuits seek to embroil them with the French, 115; ferocious character of, 207; war with the Illinois, 210; ferocious triumphs of, 219; break into war, 219; trade with the Dutch and the English, 219; jealous of La Salle, 219; joined by the Miamis against the Illinois, 220; attack on the Illinois village, 225; grant a truce to Tonty, 230; take possession of the Illinois village, 230; make a treaty with the Illinois, 231; treachery of, 231; Tonty departs from, 233; attack on the dead, 234; attack on the Illinois, 235, 320; encouraged to fight by the Dutch and English traders, 324; attack Fort St. Louis, 327. Iroquois War, the, havoc and desolation of, 5, 219; a war of commercial advantage, 219; the French in, 460. Isle of Pines, the, 372. Issanti, the, 260. Issanyati, the, 260. Issati, the, 260. "Issatis," the, 481. Jacques, companion of Marquette, 78, 80. Jansenists, the, 110. Japan, 6, 14. Japanese, the, 487. Jesuitism, no diminution in the vital force of, 103. Jesuits, the, their thoughts dwell on the Mississippi, 6; La Salle's connection with, 8; La Salle parts with, 9; influence exercised by, 16; want no help from the Sulpitians, 27; a change of spirit, 36, 37; their best hopes in the North and West, 37; on the Lakes, 37; labor to explore the copper mines of Lake Superior, 38; a mixture of fanaticism, 38; claimed a monopoly of conversion, 38; make a map of Lake Superior, 38; the missionary stations, 46; trading with the Indians, 47; doctrine of the Immaculate Conception a favorite tenet of, 61; greatly opposed to the establishment of forts and trading-posts in the upper country, 88; opposition to Frontenac and La Salle, 102; Frontenac's hatred of, 102; turn their eyes towards the Valley of the Mississippi, 103; no longer supreme in Canada, 104; La Salle their most dangerous rival for the control of the West, 104; masters at Quebec, 108; accused of selling brandy to the Indians, 109; accused of carrying on a fur-trade, 109, 110; comparison between the Récollets and Sulpitians and, 112; seek to establish a monopoly in the fur-trade, 114; intrigues against La Salle, 115; seek to embroil the Iroquois with the French, 115; exculpated by La Salle from the attempt to poison him, 116; induce men to desert from La Salle, 118; have a mission among the Mohawks, 118; plan against La Salle, 459; maps made by, 478. Jesus, Order of, 37. Jesus, Society of, see _Society of Jesus_. Jogues, Father Isaac, preaches among the Indians, 5, 59. Joliet, Louis, destined to hold a conspicuous place in history of western discovery, 23; early life of, 23; sent to discover the copper mines of Lake Superior, 23, 58; his failure, 23; meeting with La Salle and the Sulpitians, 23; passage through the Strait of Detroit, 27; makes maps of the region of the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, 32; claims the discovery of the Mississippi, 33; Frontenac speaks slightingly of, 34; at Saut Ste. Marie, 51; sent by Talon to discover the Mississippi, 56; early history of, 57; characteristics of, 58; Shea first to discover history of, 58; Ferland, Faillon, and Margry throw much light on the life of, 58; Marquette chosen to accompany him on his search for the Mississippi, 59; the departure, 60; the Mississippi at last, 64; on the Mississippi, 65; meeting with the Illinois, 66; at the mouth of the Missouri, 69; on the lower Mississippi, 71; among the Arkansas Indians, 72; determines that the Mississippi discharges into the Gulf of Mexico, 74; resolves to return to Canada, 74; serious accident to, 75; letter to Frontenac, 76; smaller map of his discoveries, 76; marriage to Claire Bissot, 76; journey to Hudson's Bay, 76; the English hold out great inducements to, 76; receives grants of land, 76; engages in fisheries, 76; makes a chart of the St. Lawrence, 77; Sir William Phips makes a descent on the establishment of, 77; explores the coast of Labrador, 77; made royal pilot for the St. Lawrence by Frontenac, 77; appointed hydrographer at Quebec, 77; death of, 77; said to be an impostor, 118; refused permission to plant a trading station in the Valley of the Mississippi, 126, 477; maps made by, 479, 480, 481, 482. Joliet, town of, 193. "Joly," the vessel, 353, 366, 367, 372, 373, 374, 375, 377, 381, 383, 385. Jolycoeur (Nicolas Perrot), 116. Joutel, Henri, 69, 314, 363, 367, 368, 372, 374, 375, 377, 379, 380, 382, 388, 389, 392, 393, 395, 396, 397, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 406, 407, 409, 410, 411, 416, 417, 418, 419, 420, 421, 422, 428; sketches the portrait of La Salle, 430; the assassination of La Salle, 432, 433; danger of, 436; friendship of L'Archevêque for, 436; doubt and anxiety, 437, 438; among the Cenis Indians, 440-445; plans to escape, 445-447; the murder of Duhaut, 448, 449; sets out for home, 450; his party, 451; among the Assonis, 451-453; arrival at the Arkansas, 453; friendly reception, 455; descends the Arkansas, 456; on the Illinois, 457; at Fort St. Louis of the Illinois, 457; visit to Father Allouez, 459; reaches Montreal, 462; embarks for France, 462; character of, 462. Kahokias, the, 223. Kalm, 244. Kamalastigouia, 275. Kankakee, the sources of, 167, 204, 288, 316. Kansa (Kanzas), the, 478. Kanzas, the, 478. Kappa band, the, of the Arkansas, 299. "Kaskaskia," Illinois village of, 74; the mission at, 79. Kaskaskias, the, 223, 477. Kiakiki River, the, 167. Kickapoos, the, location of 43; join the Mascoutins and Miamis, 62; murder Father Ribourde, 233. Kilatica, the, join La Salle's colony, 316. King Philip's War, 285. Kingston, 87, 90. Kious (Sioux), the, 307. Kiskakon Ottawas, the, 81, 237. Knisteneaux, the, at the Jesuit mission of St. Esprit, 40. Koroas, the, 308. La Barre, Le Febvre de, 182; succeeds Frontenac as governor, 318; weakness and avarice of, 318; royal instructions to, 319; letters from La Salle, 319-322; defames La Salle to Seignelay, 322-324; plots against La Salle, 325; takes possession of Fort Frontenac and Fort St. Louis, 325-327; ordered by the King to make restitution, 351, 482. Labrador, coasts of, 58; explored by Joliet, 77. La Chapelle, 193; takes false reports of La Salle to Fort Crèvecoeur, 217. La Chesnaye, 102, 326. La Chine, the seigniory of La Salle at, 12; La Salle lays the rude beginnings of a settlement at, 13; La Salle and the Sulpitians set out from, 19; origin of the name, 29, 88, 486. La Chine Rapids, the, 75. La Crosse, Indian game of, 50. La Divine River, the (Des Plaines River), 477, 481. La Forest, La Salle's lieutenant, 101, 143, 203, 204, 208, 215, 236, 286, 287, 292, 326, 333, 351, 352, 467, 485. La Forge, 147, 218. La Harpe, 255. La Hontan, 145, 153; loss of the "Griffin," 182, 275, 276, 485, 486. Lakes, Upper, 24, 27; Galinée, makes the earliest map of, 28, 38; Jesuit missions on, 39; Marquette on, 59, 85; Frontenac's plan to command, 96; first vessel on, 145; La Salle on, 151-163. Lalemant, 139. La Metairie, Jacques de, 308. La Motte, see _Lussière, La Motte de_. Lanquetot, see _Liotot_. Laon, 59. La Pointe, Jesuit mission of St. Esprit at, 40. La Potherie, 49; reception of Saint-Lusson by the Miamis, 50; Henri de Tonty's iron hand, 129; loss of the "Griffin," 182; the Iroquois attack on the Illinois, 235. L'Archevêque, 421, 425; murders Moranget, Saget, and Nika, 426; the assassination of La Salle, 429; friendship for Joutel, 436; danger of, 449, 470, 471; sent to Spain, 472. La Sablonnière, Marquis de, 380, 388, 407, 409, 418. La Salle, Sieur de, birth of, 7; origin of his name, 7; connection with the Jesuits, 8; characteristics of, 9; parts with the Jesuits, 9; sails for Canada, 10; at Montreal, 10; schemes of, 11; his seigniory at La Chine, 12; begins to study Indian languages, 14; plans of discovery, 14, 15; sells his seigniory, 16; joins his expedition to that of the seminary priests, 17; sets out from La Chine, 19; journey of, 19, 20; hospitality of the Senecas, 21; fears for his safety, 22; meeting with Joliet, 23; _belles paroles_ of, 25; parts with the Sulpitians, 25; obscurity of his subsequent work, 28; goes to Onondaga, 29; deserted by his men, 30; meeting with Perrot, 30; reported movements of, 31; Talon claims to have sent him to explore, 31; affirms that he discovered the Ohio, 32; discovery of the Mississippi, 33; discovered the Illinois River, 35; pays the expenses of his expeditions, 49; in great need of money, 49; borrows merchandise from the Seminary, 49; contrasted with Marquette, 83; called a visionary, 83; projects of, 84; Frontenac favorably disposed towards, 85; faculty for managing the Indians, 89; at Montreal, 97; champions Frontenac, 99; goes to France, 99; recommended to Colbert by Frontenac, 99; petitions for a patent of nobility and a grant of Fort Frontenac, 100; his petition granted, 100; returns to Canada, 101; oppressed by the merchants of Canada, 101; Le Ber becomes the bitter enemy of, 101; aims at the control of the valleys of the Ohio and the Mississippi, 102; opposed by the Jesuits, 102; the most dangerous rival of the Jesuits for the control of the West, 104; the Prince de Conti the patron of, 106; the Abbé Renaudot's memoir of, 106, 107; account of, 107; not well inclined towards the Récollets, 108; plots against, 113; caused no little annoyance by his brother, 114; Jesuit intrigues against, 115; attempt to poison, 116; exculpates the Jesuits, 116; letter to the Prince de Conti, 118; the Jesuits induce men to desert from, 118; defamed to Colbert, 119; at Fort Frontenac, 120; sails again for France, 122; his memorial laid before Colbert, 122; urges the planting of colonies in the West, 123; receives a patent from Louis XIV., 124; forbidden to trade with the Ottawas, 125; given the monopoly of buffalo-hides, 126; makes plans to carry out his designs, 126; assistance received from his friends, 127; invaluable aid received from Henri de Tonty, 127; joined by La Motte de Lussière, 129; sails for Canada, 129; makes a league with the Canadian merchants, 129; met by Father Hennepin on his return to Canada, 130; joined by Father Hennepin, 131; relations with Father Hennepin, 134, 135; sets out to join La Motte, 141; almost wrecked, 142; treachery of his pilot, 142; pacifies the Senecas, 142; delayed by jealousies, 143; returns to Fort Frontenac, 143; unfortunate in the choice of subordinates, 143; builds a vessel above the Niagara cataract, 144; jealousy and discontent, 147; lays foundation for blockhouses at Niagara, 148; the launch of the "Griffin," 149; his property attached by his creditors, 150; on Lake Huron, 152; commends his great enterprise to St. Anthony of Padua, 152; at St. Ignace of Michilimackinac, 153; rivals and enemies, 154; on Lake Michigan, 155; at Green Bay, 155; finds the Pottawattamies friendly, 155; sends the "Griffin" back to Niagara laden with furs, 156; trades with the Ottawas, 156; hardships, 158; encounter with the Outagamies, 160, 161; rejoined by Tonty, 162; forebodings concerning the "Griffin," 163; on the St. Joseph, 164; lost in the forest, 165; on the Illinois, 166; Duplessis attempts to murder, 166; the Illinois town, 169, 170; hunger relieved, 171; Illinois hospitality, 173; still followed by the intrigues of his enemies, 175; harangues the Indians, 177; deserted by his men, 178; another attempt to poison, 178; builds Fort Crèvecoeur, 180; loss of the "Griffin," 181; anxieties of, 183; a happy artifice, 184; builds another vessel, 185; sends Hennepin to the Mississippi, 185; parting with Tonty, 188; hardihood of, 189-201; his winter journey to Fort Frontenac, 189; the deserted town of the Illinois, 191; meeting with Chief Chassagoac, 192; "Starved Rock," 192; Lake Michigan, 193; the wilderness, 193, 194; Indian alarms, 195; reaches Niagara, 197; man and nature in arms against, 198; mutineers at Fort Crèvecoeur, 199; chastisement of the mutineers, 201; strength in the face of adversity, 202; his best hope in Tonty, 202; sets out to succor Tonty, 203; kills buffalo, 205; a night of horror, 207; fears for Tonty, 209; finds the ruins of Fort Crèvecoeur, 211; beholds the Mississippi, 212; beholds the "Great Comet of 1680," 213; returns to Fort Miami, 215; jealousy of the Iroquois of, 219, 238; route of, 276; Margry brings to light the letters of, 281; begins anew, 283; plans for a defensive league, 284; Indian friends, 285; hears good news of Tonty, 287; Illinois allies, 287; calls the Indians to a grand council, 289; his power of oratory, 289; his harangue, 289; the reply of the chiefs, 291; finds Tonty, 292; parts with a portion of his monopolies, 293; at Toronto, 293; reaches Lake Huron, 294; at Fort Miami, 294; on the Mississippi, 297; among the Arkansas Indians, 299; takes formal possession of the Arkansas country, 300; visited by the chief of the Taensas, 302; visits the Coroas, 305; hostility, 305; the mouth of the Mississippi, 306; takes possession of the Great West for France, 306; bestows the name of "Louisiana" on the new domain, 309; attacked by the Quinipissas, 310; revisits the Coroas, 310; seized by a dangerous illness, 310; rejoins Tonty at Michilimackinac, 311; his projected colony on the banks of the Illinois, 313; intrenches himself at "Starved Rock," 313; gathers his Indian allies at Fort St. Louis, 315; his colony on the Illinois, 316; success of his colony, 318; letters to La Barre, 319-322; defamed by La Barre to Seignelay, 322-324; La Barre plots against, 325; La Barre takes possession of Fort Frontenac and Fort St. Louis, 325-327; sails for France, 327; painted by himself, 328-342; difficulty of knowing him, 328; his detractors, 329; his letters, 329-331; vexations of his position, 331; his unfitness for trade, 332; risks of correspondence, 332; his reported marriage, 334; alleged ostentation, 335; motives of actions, 335; charges of harshness, 336; intrigues against him, 337; unpopular manners, 337, 338; a strange confession, 339; his strength and his weakness, 340, 341; contrasts of his character, 341, 342; at court, 343; received by the King, 344; new proposals of, 345-347; small knowledge of Mexican geography, 348; plans of, 349; his petitions granted, 350; Forts Frontenac and St. Louis restored by the King to, 351; preparations for his new enterprise, 353; divides his command with Beaujeu, 353; lack of harmony between Beaujeu and, 354-361; indiscretion of, 361; overwrought brain of, 362; farewell to his mother, 364; sails from Rochelle, 366; disputes with Beaujeu, 366; the voyage, 368; his illness, 368; Beaujeu's complaints of, 370; resumes his journey, 372; enters the Gulf of Mexico, 373; waiting for Beaujeu, 374; coasts the shores of Texas, 374; meeting with Beaujeu, 375; perplexity of, 375-377; lands in Texas, 379; attacked by the Indians, 380; wreck of the "Aimable," 381; forlorn position of, 383; Indian neighbors, 384; Beaujeu makes friendly advances to, 385; departure of Beaujeu, 387; at Matagorda Bay, 391; misery and dejection, 393; the new Fort St. Louis, 394; explorations of, 395; adventures of, 402; again falls ill, 404; departure for Canada, 405; wreck of the "Belle," 407; Maxime Le Clerc makes charges against, 410; Duhaut plots against, 410; return to Fort St. Louis, 411; account of his adventures, 411-413; among the Cenis Indians, 413; attacked with hernia, 417; Twelfth Night at Fort St. Louis, 417; his last farewell, 418; followers of, 420; prairie travelling, 423; Liotot swears vengeance against, 424; the murder of Moranget, Saget, and Nika, 426; his premonition of disaster, 428; murdered by Duhaut, 429; character of, 430; his enthusiasm compared with that of Champlain, 431; his defects, 431; America owes him an enduring memory, 432; the marvels of his patient fortitude, 432; evidences of his assassination, 432; undeniable rigor of his command, 433; locality of his assassination, 434; his debts, 434; Tonty's plan to assist, 453-455; fear of Father Allouez for, 459; Jesuit plans against, 459, 477, 479, 480, 481, 482, 483, 484, 485, 486. La Salle, village of, 146, 167. La Taupine (Pierre Moreau), 78. La Tortue, 367. Launay, De, 453, 455. Laurent, 199, 218. Lavaca River, the, 392, 395, 396. La Vache River, the, 392. Laval-Montmorency, François Xavier de, first bishop of Quebec, 110; accused of harshness and intolerance, 110; encourages the establishment of the association of the Sainte Famille, 111. La Violette, 187. La Voisin, burned alive at Paris, 179. Le Baillif, M., 34. Le Ber, Jacques, 97; becomes La Salle's bitter enemy, 101, 326. Leblanc, 193; takes false reports of La Salle to Fort Crèvecoeur, 217, 218. Le Clerc, Father Chrétien, 169, 175, 192, 198, 217, 234, 238; his account of the Récollet missions among the Indians, 246; Hennepin steals passages from, 247; character of Du Lhut, 276; energy of La Salle, 292, 296; Louis XIV. becomes the sovereign of the Great West, 308; misery and dejection at Matagorda Bay, 393, 403, 406, 413, 414, 415, 416, 417. Le Clerc, Maxime, joins La Salle's new enterprise, 353; in Texas, 400; adventure with a boar, 410; makes charges against La Salle, 410, 418. Le Fèvre, Father, 131. Le Gros, Simon, 388, 394, 398. Le Meilleur, 218. Le Moyne, 102. Lenox, Mr., the Journal of Marquette, 75; death of Marquette, 81, 169. Leon, Alonzo de, 469, 471. Le Petit, customs of the Natchez, 304. L'Espérance, 216, 218, 223. Le Sueur, map made by, 225, 485. Le Tardieu, Charles, 99. Lewiston, mountain ridge of, 138, 143; rapids at, 144. Liotot, La Salle's surgeon, 420; swears vengeance against La Salle, 424, 425; murders Moranget, Saget, and Nika, 426; the assassination of La Salle, 429, 430; resolves to return to Fort St. Louis, 446; quarrels with Hiens, 446; murder of, 449. Long Point, 25; the Sulpitians spend the winter at, 25. "Long River," the, 485. Long Saut, the, 89. Louis XIV. becomes the sovereign of the Great West, 308; misery and dejection at Matagorda Bay, 393, 403, 406, 413, 414, 415, 416, 417. Louis XIV., of France, 26, 52, 115; grants a patent to La Salle, 124; orders the arrest of Hennepin, 282; proclaimed by La Salle the sovereign of the Great West, 306; receives La Salle, 344; irritated against the Spaniards, 344; grants La Salle's petitions, 350; abandons the colonists, 463; Cavelier's memorial to, 463. Louisiana, country of, 307; name bestowed by La Salle, 309; vast extent of, 309; boundaries of, 309; Iberville the founder of, 455, 483, 484, 485, 489. Louisville, 29, 32. Louvigny, Sieur de, 274, 349. "Lover's leap," the, 271. Loyola, Disciples of, losing ground in Canada, 104. Lussière, La Motte de, joins La Salle, 129, 132; embarks on the journey, 137; reaches the Niagara, 138; begins to build fortifications, 140; jealousy of the Senecas, 140; seeks to conciliate the Senecas, 140, 141; fidelity to La Salle doubtful, 143. Machaut-Rougemont, 365. Mackinaw, La Salle at, 325. Mackinaw, Island of, 153. Macopins, Rivière des (Illinois River), 167, 483. Madeira, 366. Maha (Omahas), the, 478. "Maiden's Rock," the, 271. "Malheurs, La Rivière des," 402. Malhoumines, the, 61. Malouminek, the, 61. Manabozho, the Algonquin deity, 267. Mance, Mlle., 112. Mandans, the, winter lodges of, 442. Manitoulin Island, Mission of, 41; assigned to André, 41. Manitoulin Islands, Saint-Lusson winters at, 50; Saint-Lusson takes possession for France of, 52, 153, 203. Manitoulins, the, 27. Manitoumie (Mississippi Valley), 485. Manitous, 26, 44, 68. Maps, Champlain's map (the first) of the Great Lakes, 476; Coronelli's map, 221, 484; manuscript map of Franquelin, 169, 221, 316, 317, 347, 390, 481, 482, 483, 484, 485; map of Galinée, 475; map of Lake Superior, 476; map of the Great Lakes, 476; map of Marquette, 477; maps of the Jesuits, 478; small maps of Joliet, 479, 480; Raudin's map, 481; rude map of Father Raffeix, 481; Franquelin's map of Louisiana, 482; the great map of Franquelin, 482; map of Le Sueur, 481, 485; map of Homannus, 484. Margry, birth of La Salle, 7; La Salle's connection with the Jesuits, 8; La Salle sells his seigniory, 16; La Salle's claims to the discovery of the Mississippi, 34, 35; throws much light on the life of Joliet, 58, 77; La Salle's marriage prevented by his brother, 114; La Salle at Fort Frontenac, 121; assistance given to La Salle, 127; Henri de Tonty, 128, 130, 132; La Motte at Niagara, 140; La Salle pacifies the Senecas, 142; La Salle at Niagara, 148; La Salle attached by his creditors, 150; the names of the Illinois, 167; intrigues against La Salle, 175; brings to light the letters of La Salle, 281, 296, 342; letters of Beaujeu to Seignelay and to Cabart de Villermont, 365; La Salle's disputes with Beaujeu, 366; illness of La Salle, 368; La Salle resumes his voyage, 372; La Salle lands in Texas, 379; Beaujeu makes friendly advances to La Salle, 386, 387; misery and dejection at Matagorda Bay, 393; life at Fort St. Louis, 400; the murder of Duhaut and Liotot, 449; Allouez's fear of La Salle, 459. Marle, Sieur de, 421; murders Moranget, 427; sets out for home, 451; drowned, 453. Maroas, the, 477. Marquette, Jacques, the Jesuit, at Ste. Marie du Saut, 27; voyage of, 32; discovery of the Mississippi, 33; among the Hurons and the Ottawas, 40; at the Jesuit mission of St. Esprit, 40; the mission of Michilimackinac assigned to, 41, 51; chosen to accompany Joliet in his search for the Mississippi, 59; early life of, 59; on the Upper Lakes, 59; great talents as a linguist, 59; traits of character, 59; journal of his voyage to the Mississippi, 60; especially devoted to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, 61; at the Green Bay Mission, 62; among the Mascoutins and Miamis, 62; on the Wisconsin River, 63; the Mississippi at last, 64; on the Mississippi, 65; map drawn by, 65; meeting with the Illinois, 66; affrighted by the Indian manitous, 68; at the mouth of the Missouri, 69; on the lower Mississippi, 71; among the Arkansas Indians, 72; determines that the Mississippi discharges into the Gulf of Mexico, 74; resolves to return to Canada, 74; illness of, 74; remains at Green Bay, 75; journal of, 75; true map of, 75; sets out to found the mission of the Immaculate Conception, 77; gives the name of "Immaculate Conception" to the Mississippi, 77; on the Chicago River, 78; return of his illness, 78; founds the mission at the village "Kaskaskia," 79; peaceful death of, 80; burial of, 81; his bones removed to St. Ignace of Michilimackinac, 81; miracle at the burial of, 81; tradition of the death of, 82; contrasted with La Salle, 83; 169, 223; route of, 276; pictured rock of, 457; maps made by, 477, 478, 480, 481. Marshall, O. H., 140, 146. Martin, 75; death of Marquette, 81. Martin, Father Felix, connection of La Salle with the Jesuits, 8. Martinique, 385, 386, 387. Mascoutins, the, location of, 43; Fathers Allouez and Dablon among, 44; joined by the Kickapoos, 62; visited by Marquette, 62; La Salle falls in with, 195. Matagorda Bay, 376, 379, 383, 391, 471. See also _St. Louis, Bay of._ Matagorda Island, 375, 379. Mather, Increase, 213. Mazarin, Cardinal, 129. Meddewakantonwan, the, 260. Medrano, Sebastian Fernandez de, 244. Membré, Father Zenobe, 150, 155, 169, 185, 191, 192, 198, 201, 204, 216; the mutineers at Fort Crèvecoeur, 217, 218; intrigues of La Salle's enemies, 220, 223, 224; the Iroquois attack on the Illinois village, 225, 227, 230, 231, 233; the Iroquois attack on the dead, 234, 238; his journal on his descent of the Mississippi with La Salle, 246; Hennepin steals passages from, 247; meeting with La Salle, 292; sets out from Fort Miami, 296; among the Arkansas Indians, 299; visits the Taensas, 301; attends La Salle during his illness, 311; joins La Salle's new enterprise, 353; on the "Joly," 372; in Texas, 388; adventure with a buffalo, 409, 417, 418; fate of, 470. Ménard, the Jesuit, attempts to plant a mission on southern shore of Lake Superior, 6. Menomonie River, the, 51. Menomonies, the, at the Jesuit mission of St. Esprit, 40; location of, 42; at Saut Ste. Marie, 51; village of, 61. "Mer Douce des Hurons" (Lake Huron), 476. "Mer du Nord," the, 480. "Messasipi" (Mississippi River), the, 480. Messier, 199, 218. "Messipi" River, the, 6. Meules, De, the Intendant of Canada, 319, 351. Mexico, 5, 6, 32, 117, 125, 126, 129, 346, 348; Spaniards in, 349; 464, 480. Mexico, Gulf of, 31, 32, 38, 48, 63, 70, 74, 84, 245, 306, 309, 311, 312, 344, 345, 358, 371, 373, 394; claimed by Spain, 468, 471, 477, 478, 479, 481, 482, 483. Mexican mines, the, 349. Miami, Fort, 162, 163; La Salle returns to, 215, 283, 284, 286, 288, 292, 294, 296, 311. Miami River, the, 32. Miamis, the, location of, 43, 44; Fathers Allouez and Dablon among, 44; receive Saint-Lusson, 50; authority and state of the chief of, 50; joined by the Kickapoos, 62; visited by Marquette, 62; join the Iroquois against the Illinois, 220; rankling jealousy between the Illinois and, 220, 223, 251, 286; village of, 288; called by La Salle to a grand council, 289; at Buffalo Rock, 314; join La Salle's colony, 316; afraid of the Iroquois, 320. Miamis, Le Fort des (Buffalo Rock), 314. Miamis River (St. Joseph), 162. Michigan, shores of, 31; forest wastes of, 153; peninsula of, 475, 476, 483, 484. Michigan, Lake, 4, 31; the Jesuits on, 37; the name of, 42, 61, 75, 77, 132; La Salle on, 155, 162, 193, 236, 309, 475, 477, 479. Michilimackinac, mission of, 41; assigned to Marquette, 41, 279, 311. Michilimackinac, Straits of, 31, 41, 42, 59, 61, 80, 110, 197, 203, 236, 288, 292. Migeon, 150. Mignan, islands of, granted to Joliet, 76. Mille Lac, 257, 265, 277. Milot, Jean, 16. Milwaukee, 159. Minet, La Salle's engineer, 373, 378, 379, 383, 387, 390. Minneapolis, city of, 267. Minong, Isle, 38. "Miskous" (Wisconsin), the, 480. Missions, early, decline in the religious exaltation of, 103. Mississaquenk, 54. Mississippi River, the, discovered by the Spaniards, 3; De Soto buried in, 3; Jean Nicollet reaches, 3; Colonel Wood reaches, 5; Captain Bolton reaches, 5; Radisson and Des Groseilliers reach, 5; the thoughts of the Jesuits dwell on, 6; speculations concerning, 6; 30, 31; Joliet makes a map of the region of, 32; 45, 46; Talon resolves to find, 56; Joliet selected to find, 56; Marquette chosen to accompany Joliet, 59; the discovery by Joliet and Marquette, 64; its outlet into the Gulf of Mexico determined by Joliet and Marquette, 74; Marquette gives the name of "Immaculate Conception" to, 77; La Salle's plans to control, 84; Hennepin sent to, 185; La Salle beholds, 212; claims of Hennepin to the discovery of, 243; Membré's journal on his descent of, 246; La Salle on, 297, 307, 310, 311, 312, 345, 346, 352, 371, 373, 374, 376, 389, 390, 391, 403, 404, 405, 457, 459, 466; early unpublished maps of, 475-486. Mississippi, Valley of the, La Salle aims at the control of, 102; the Jesuits turn their eyes towards, 103; 479; various names given to, 485. Missouri River, the, 6; Joliet and Marquette at the mouth of, 69, 297, 457, 477, 478, 479, 483, 489. Missouris, the, 279, 320. "Mitchigamea," village of, 72. Mitchigamias, the, 308. "Mitchiganong, Lac" (Lake Michigan), 477. Mobile Bay, 129, 385, 386, 387, 389, 481, 482, 483. Mobile, city of, 309, 467. Mohawk River, the, 483. Mohawks, the, 91; Bruyas among, 115; Jesuit mission among, 118; Father Hennepin among, 135, 136, 483. Mohegan Indians, the, 285, 295, 486. Moingona, the, 223. Moingouena (Peoria), 65. Monso, the Mascoutin chief, plots against La Salle, 174, 177, 192. Monsonis, the, at Saut Ste. Marie, 51. Montagnais, the, 59. Montezuma, 487. Montreal, La Salle at, 10; the most dangerous place in Canada, 10; detailed plan of, 13; Frontenac at, 87; Frontenac has it well in hand, 96; Joutel and Cavelier reach, 462, 475. Montreal, Historical Society of, 17. Moranget, La Salle's nephew, 379, 384, 385, 405, 412, 415, 420, 424; quarrel with Duhaut, 425; murder of, 426, 433. Moreau, Pierre, 78. Morel, M., 360. Morice, Marguerite, 7. Motantees (?), the, 307. Moyse, Maître, 147, 217. Mozeemlek, the, 486. Mustang Island, 375. Nadouessious (Sioux), the, 307. Nadouessioux, the country of, 307. Natchez, the, village of, 303; differ from other Indians, 304; customs of, 304, 308. Natchez, city of, 304. Neches River, the, 415, 470. Neenah (Fox) River, the, 44. Neutrals, the, exterminated by the Iroquois, 219. New Biscay, province of, 346, 348, 352, 383, 403. New England, 5, 346. New England Indians, the, 285. New France, 483, 484, 485. New Leon, province of, 468. New Mexico, 5, 350; Spanish colonists of, 414. New Orleans, 484. New York, the French in western, 19-23, 288, 484. Niagara, name of, 139; the key to the four great lakes above, 140, 197, 198, 279. Niagara Falls, 23; Father Hennepin's account of, 139; Hennepin's exaggerations respecting, 248, 476. Niagara, Fort, 129, 138, 148. Niagara Portage, the, 144, 145. Niagara River, the, 23, 96; Father Hennepin's account of, 139, 475. Nicanopé, 175, 177, 178, 192. Nicollet, Jean, reaches the Mississippi, 3; among the Indians, 3; sent to make peace between the Winnebagoes and the Hurons, 4; descends the Wisconsin, 5. Nika, La Salle's favorite Shawanoe hunter, 412, 421, 425; murder of, 426. Nipissing, Lake, 28. Nipissings, the, Jean Nicollet among, 3; Dollier de Casson among, 16; André makes a missionary tour among, 41; at Saut Ste. Marie, 51. Noiseux, M., Grand Vicar of Quebec, 82. North Sea, the, 38. Nueces, the upper, 469. Oanktayhee, principal deity of the Sioux, 267. O'Callaghan, Dr., 139. Ohio River, the, 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 29, 32; La Salle affirms that he discovered, 32; the "Beautiful River," 70, 297, 307, 457, 477, 478, 479, 480, 483, 484. Ohio, Valley of the, La Salle aims at the control of, 102. Ojibwas, the, at Ste. Marie du Saut, 39. Olighin (Alleghany) River, the, 307. "Olighin" (Alleghany) River, the, 484. Omahas, the, 478. Omawha, Chief, 175. Oneida Indians, the, 18, 91, 135. Ongiara (Niagara), 139. Onguiaahra (Niagara), 139. Onis, Luis de, 373. Onondaga, La Salle goes to, 29; the political centre of the Iroquois, 87; Hennepin reaches, 135. Onondaga Indians, the, 91; Bruyas among, 115. "Onontio," the governor of Canada, 54. Ontario, Lake, 16; discovered, 20, 23, 58, 85, 87; Frontenac reaches, 89, 96, 99, 128, 135, 147, 200, 279, 475, 476, 479. Ontonagan River, the, 39. Orange, settlement of (Albany), 136. Oris, 384. Osages, the, 174; deep-rooted jealousy of the Illinois for, 174, 184, 477. "Osages, Rivière des" (Missouri), 70. Osotouoy, the, 300. Otinawatawa, 22, 23. Ottawa, town of, 75, 169, 193. Ottawa River, the, 27, 30, 462, 476. Ottawas, the, 27; Marquette among, 40; terrified by the Sioux, 41; La Salle forbidden to trade with, 125; La Salle trades with, 156, 182. "Ouabache" (Wabash), River, the, 70, 297. Ouabona, the, join La Salle's colony, 316. "Ouabouskiaou" (Ohio) River, the, 70, 477. "Ouaboustikou" (Ohio), the, 480. Ouasicoudé, principal chief of the Sioux, 264; friendship for Hennepin, 266, 277. Ouchage (Osages), the, 477. Ouiatnoens (Weas), the, join La Salle's colony, 316. Oumalouminek, the, 61. Oumas, the, 305. Oumessourit (Missouris), the, 478. "Oumessourits, Rivière des" (Missouri), 70. Outagamies (Foxes), the, location of, 43. Outagamies, the, encounter with La Salle, 160, 161, 287. Outrelaise, Mademoiselle d', 167. Outrelaise, the Rivière del', 167. Pacific coast, the, 480. Pacific Ocean, 84. Paget, 366. Pahoutet (Pah-Utahs?), the, 478. Pah-Utahs (?), the, 478. Palluau, Count of, see _Frontenac, Count_. Palms, the River of, 307. Paniassa (Pawnees), the, 478. Panuco, Spanish town of, 350. Paraguay, the old and the new, 102, 103, 104, 117. Parassy, M. de, 356. Patron, 274. Paul, Dr. John, 317. Pawnees, the, 478. Peanqhichia (Piankishaw), the, join La Salle's colony, 316. "Pekitanouï" River (Missouri), the, 69, 477. Pelée, Point, 26, 197. Pelican Island, 379. Peloquin, 150. Pen, Sieur, obligations of La Salle to, 434. Peñalossa, Count, 350. Penicaut, customs of the Natchez, 304. Pennsylvania, State of, 346. Penobscot River, the, 483. Pensacola, 472. Peoria, city of, 34, 171. Peoria Indians, the, villages of, 171, 223, 477. Peoria Lake, 171, 190, 211, 296. Peouaria (Peoria), 65. Pepikokia, the, join La Salle's colony, 316. Pepin, 276. Pepin Lake, 256, 271, 272. Péré, 58. Perrot, the curé, 98. Pérrot, Nicolas, meeting with La Salle, 30; accompanies Saint-Lusson in search of copper mines on Lake Superior, 49; conspicuous among Canadian voyageurs, 49; characteristics of, 50; marvellous account of the authority and state of the Miami chief, 50; at Saut Ste. Marie, 51; local governor of Montreal, 87; quarrel with Frontenac, 96; arrested by Frontenac, 96; the Abbé Fénelon attempts to mediate between Frontenac and, 97; attempts to poison La Salle, 116. Peru, 350. Petit Goave, 367, 372. Philip, King, 288. Philip II. of Spain, 373. Phips, Sir William, makes a descent on Joliet's establishment, 77. Piankishaws, the, 223; join La Salle's colony, 316. "Picard, Le" (Du Gay), 186. Pierre, companion of Marquette, 78, 80. Pierron, the Jesuit, 115; among the Senecas, 115. Pierson, the Jesuit, 279. Pimitoui River, the, 171. Platte, the, 207. Plet, François, 127, 293, 463. Poisoning, the epoch of, 179. Ponchartrain, the minister, 133, 276, 455, 467, 486, 489. Pontiac, assassination of, 314. Port de Paix, 367, 368. Pottawattamies, the, in grievous need of spiritual succor, 24; the Sulpitians determine to visit, 24; at the Jesuit mission of St. Esprit, 40; location of, 42, 50, 77; friendly to La Salle, 155, 182, 236, 237, 238; Tonty among, 287; at "Starved Rock," 314. "Poualacs," the, 481. Prairie du Chien, Fort, 64. Prairie, Nation of the, 44. Provence, 441. Prudhomme, Fort, 297; La Salle ill at, 311. Prudhomme, Pierre, 297, 298. Puants, les (Winnebagoes), 42. Puants, La Baye des (Green Bay), 31, 42. Quapaws, the, 300. Quebec, 15; the Jesuits masters at, 108, 311, 460, 462, 482. Queenstown Heights, 138. Queylus, Superior of the Seminary of St. Sulpice, 11, 16. Quinipissas, the, 305; attack La Salle, 310. Quinté, Jesuit Mission at, 16. Quinté, Bay of, 87, 142, 200. Radisson, Pierre Esprit, reaches the Mississippi, 5. Raffeix, Father Pierre, the Jesuit, manuscript map of, 75; among the Senecas, 141, 276, 481. Raoul, 126. Rasle, 170. Raudin, Frontenac's engineer, 92, 167, 481. Raymbault,----, preaches among the Indians, 5. Récollet Missions, Le Clerc's account of, 246. Récollets, the, La Salle not well inclined towards, 108; protected by Frontenac, 109; comparison between the Sulpitians and the Jesuits and, 112, 218. Red River, 305, 347, 348, 451, 465, 466, 471, 484. Renaudot, Abbé, memoir of La Salle, 106, 107; assists La Salle, 127, 133, 339, 360, 361. Renault, Étienne, 223, 237. Rhode Island, State of, 288. Ribourde, Gabriel, at Fort Frontenac, 132, 137; at Niagara, 150; at Fort Crèvecoeur, 185, 187, 192, 216, 224, 229; murder of, 233. Riggs, Rev. Stephen R., divisions of the Sioux, 261. Rio Bravo, French colony proposed at the mouth of, 350. Rio Frio, the, 469. Rio Grande River, the, 309, 376, 403, 465, 469. Rios, Domingo Teran de los, 471. Robertson, 103. Rochefort, 352, 366, 393. Rochelle, 129, 364, 393, 462. "Rocher, Le," 314; Charlevoix speaks of, 314. Rochester, 140. Rocky Mountains, the, 260, 308, 309. Rouen, 7. Royale, Isle, 38. "Ruined Castles," the, 68, 457. Rum River, 265. Ruter, 445, 446, 447, 448; murders Liotot, 449, 470, 472. Sabine River, the, 415, 451, 465. Saco Indians, the, 227. Sacs, the, location of, 43; at Saut Ste. Marie, 51. Sâgean, Mathieu, the Eldorado of, 485-489; sketch of, 486; Saget, La Salle's servant, 425; murder of, 426. Saguenay River, the, 76; Albanel's journey up, 109. St. Anthony, city of, 267. St. Anthony, the falls of, 267; Hennepin's notice of, 267, 478, 482. St. Antoine Cape, 372. St. Bernard's Bay, 394, 469. St. Clair, Lake, 476. St. Claire, Lake, 152. St. Croix River, the, 277. St. Domingo, 347, 350, 367, 370, 393, 418, 468. St. Esprit, Bay of (Mobile Bay), 129, 386, 389, 481. St. Esprit, Jesuit mission of, 40; Indians at, 40. St. Francis, Order of, 133. St. Francis River, the, 265. "St. François," the ketch, 368; loss of, 369. St. François Xavier, council of congregated tribes held at, 43. St. Ignace, Point, 41, 59; Jesuit chapel at, 82. St. Ignace of Michilimackinac, 81; La Salle reaches, 153; inhabitants of, 153. "St. Joseph," the ship, 330. St. Joseph, Lac (Lake Michigan), 155. St. Joseph River, the, 44, 162, 163; La Salle on, 164, 203; La Forest on, 236, 283, 288. Saint-Laurent, Marquis de, 367, 368. St. Lawrence River, the, 3, 12, 13, 15, 34, 63, 89, 122, 197, 198, 219, 475, 480, 481, 483, 489. St. Louis, city of, 70. St. Louis, Bay of (Matagorda Bay), 376, 379, 394, 466, 468, 469, 471. St. Louis, Castle of, 87. St. Louis, Fort, of the Illinois, 241; location of, 314; La Salle's Indian allies gather at, 315; location of, 316; total number of Indians around, 317; the Indians protected at, 320; La Barre takes possession of, 327; attacked by the Iroquois, 327, 347; restored to La Salle by the King, 351; Tonty returns to, 454; Joutel at, 457; condition of, 458; Joutel's return to, 460; Tonty leaves, 465; reoccupied by the French, 468, 486. St. Louis, Fort, of Texas, 394, 395; life at, 397; La Salle returns to, 411, 415; Twelfth Night at, 417; Duhaut resolves to return to, 446; abandoned by Louis XIV., 463; the Spaniards at, 469; desolation of, 469. St. Louis, Lake of, 13, 14, 19. St. Louis, Rock of, see "_Starved Rock_." St. Louis River, the, 307, 484. Saint-Lusson, Daumont de, sent out by Talon to discover copper mines on Lake Superior, 49; winters at the Manitoulin Islands, 50; received by the Miamis, 50; at Saut Ste. Marie, 51; takes possession of the West for France, 52; proceeds to Lake Superior, 56; returns to Quebec, 56. St. Malo, 5. St. Paul, site of, 257. St. Peter, the Valley of the, unprovoked massacre by the Sioux in, 254, 260. St. Peter River, the, 486. Saint-Simon, 343. St. Simon, mission of, 41, 42. St. Sulpice, Seminary of, 10; buys back a part of La Salle's seigniory, 16; plan an expedition of discovery, 16. Ste. Barbe, mines of, 348. Sainte Claire, 152. Sainte-Famille, the, association of, a sort of female inquisition, 111; founded by Chaumonot, 111; encouraged by Laval, 111. Ste. Marie, Falls of, 155. Ste. Marie du Saut, the Sulpitians arrive at, 27; Jesuit mission at, 39; a noted fishing-place, 39; Saint-Lusson takes possession for France of, 52. San Antonio, the, 469. Sanson, map of, 139. Santa Barbara, 348. Sargent, Winthrop, 182. Sassory tribe, the, 423. Sauteurs, the, 39; the village of, 51. Sauthouis, the, 300. Saut Ste. Marie, the, 27; a noted fishing-place, 42; gathering of the tribes at, 51, 475. Sauvolle, 489. Schenectady, 483. Schoolcraft, the Falls of St. Anthony, 267. Scioto River, the, 32. Scortas, the Huron, 238. Seignelay, Marquis de, memorials presented to, 35, 120, 274, 342; La Barre defames La Salle to, 322, 344; object of La Salle's mission, 352; letters of Beaujeu to, 354-356; complaints of Beaujeu, 370; complaint of Minet, 378; receives Beaujeu coldly, 389; Jesuit petitions to, 459; Cavelier's report to, 462, 463. Seignelay River (Red River), the, 167, 347, 348, 484. Seneca Indians, the, 14, 19, 20; villages of, 21; their hospitality to La Salle, 21; cruelty of, 22, 29, 91; Pierron among, 115; village of, 138; jealous of La Motte, 140; La Motte seeks to conciliate, 140, 141; pacified by La Salle, 142; the great town of, 279; Denonville's attack on, 460. Seneff, bloody fight of, 134. Severn River, the, 203. Sévigné, 343. Sévigné, Madame de, letters of, 179. Shawanoes, the, 23, 225, 285, 307; join La Salle's colony, 316, 320. Shea, J. G., first to discover the history of Joliet, 58; the journal of Marquette, 75; death of Marquette, 81, 82, 115; the "Racines Agnières" of Bruyas, 136; the veracity of Hennepin, 244; critical examination of Hennepin's works, 247; Tonty and La Barre, 454; story of Mathieu Sâgean, 486. Silhouette, the minister, 34. Simcoe, Lake, 203, 293. Simon, St., memoirs of, 167. Simonnet, 126. Sioux Indians, the, 6; at the Jesuit mission of St. Esprit, 40; break into open war, 41; the Jesuits trade with, 110, 182, 207, 228; capture Father Hennepin, 245, 250; suspect Father Hennepin of sorcery, 253; unprovoked massacres in the valley of the St. Peter, 254; Hennepin among, 259-282; divisions of, 260; meaning of the word, 260; total number of, 261; use of the sweating-bath among, 263; Du Lhut among, 276, 307, 480. Sipou (Ohio) River, the, 307. "Sleeping Bear," the, promontory of, 81. Smith, Buckingham, 471. Society of Jesus, the, a powerful attraction for La Salle, 8; an image of regulated power, 8. Sokokis Indians, the, 227. Soto, De, Hernando, see, _De Soto, Hernando_. South Bend, village of, 164. Southey, the poet, 182. South Sea, the, 6, 14, 38, 46, 52, 63, 70. Spain, war declared against, 464; claims the Gulf of Mexico, 468. Spaniards, the, discover the Mississippi, 3; Talon's plans to keep them in check, 48; Louis XIV. irritated against, 344; in Mexico, 349; at Fort St. Louis of Texas, 469. Spanish Inquisition, the, 350. Spanish missions, the, 414, 471. Sparks, exposes the plagiarism of Hennepin, 247, 468. "Starved Rock," 169; attracts the attention of La Salle, 192; Tonty sent to examine, 192, 205, 217, 221, 239; description of, 313; La Salle and Tonty intrench themselves at, 313; described by Charlevoix, 314; origin of the name, 314. "Sturgeon Cove," 77. Sulpice, St., 9. Sulpitians, the, plan an expedition of discovery, 16; join forces with La Salle, 17; set out from La Chine, 19; journey of, 19, 20; meeting with Joliet, 23; determine to visit the Pottawattamies, 24; La Salle parts with, 25; spends the winter at Long Point, 25; resume their voyage, 26; the storm, 26; decide to return to Montreal, 26; pass through the Strait of Detroit, 26; arrive at Ste. Marie du Saut, 27; the Jesuits want no help from, 27; comparison between the Récollets and, 112. Superior, Lake, 5; Ménard attempts to plant a mission on southern shore of, 6; Allouez explores a part of, 6; Joliet attempts to discover the copper mines of, 23, 27; the Jesuits on, 37; the Jesuits make a map of, 38; Saint-Lusson sets out to find the copper mines of, 49; Saint-Lusson takes possession for France of, 52, 273, 276, 475; map of, 476, 477, 479, 481. Susquehanna River, the, 483. Sweating-baths, Indian, 262. Table Rock, 139. Tadoussac, 59. Taensas, the, great town of, 301; visited by Membrè and Tonty, 301; differ from other Indians, 304. Tahuglauk, the, 486. Taiaiagon, Indian town of, 138. Tailhan, Father, 35, 49. Talon, 15. Talon, among the Texan colonists, 471. Talon, Jean, Intendant of Canada, sends Joliet to discover the copper mines of Lake Superior, 23; claims to have sent La Salle to explore, 31; full of projects for the colony, 48; his singular economy of the King's purse, 48; sends Saint-Lusson to discover copper mines on Lake Superior, 49; resolves to find the Mississippi, 56; makes choice of Joliet, 56; quarrels with Courcelle, 56; returns to France, 57, 60, 109. Talon, Jean Baptiste, 472. Talon, Pierre, 472. Tamaroas, the, 223, 235, 286, 297. Tangibao, the, 305. Tears, the Lake of, 256. Tegahkouita, Catharine, the Iroquois saint, 275, 276. "Teiocha-rontiong, Lac" (Lake Erie), 476. Teissier, a pilot, 407, 421, 425, 451, 458. Tejas (Texas), 470. Terliquiquimechi, the, 348. Tetons, the, 260. Texan colony, the, fate of, 464-473. Texan expedition, La Salle's, 391-419, 434. Texan Indians, the, 470. Texas, fertile plains of, 308; French in, 348; shores of, 374; La Salle lands in, 379; application of the name, 470, 483. Theakiki, the, 167. Thevenot, on the journal of Marquette, 75; map made by, 478. Third Chickasaw Bluffs, the, 297. Thomassy, 115, 175, 296, 298, 302, 308. Thouret, 201, 238, 333, 342. Thousand Islands, the, 89. Three Rivers, 3, 86, 90. Thunder Bay, 275. Tilly, Sieur de, 99. "Tintons," the, 481. Tintonwans, the, 260. Tongengas, the, 300. Tonty, Alphonse de, 467. Tonty, Henri de, 127; renders assistance to La Salle, 128; in Canada, 129; La Motte at Niagara, 140; sets out to join La Motte, 141; almost wrecked, 142; at the Niagara Portage, 144-147; the building of the "Griffin," 144-148; the launch, 149; 154, 155; rejoins La Salle, 162; among the Illinois, 172; the attempt to poison La Salle, 179; Hennepin sent to the Mississippi, 187; La Salle's parting with, 188; sent to examine "Starved Rock," 192; 194; deserted by his men, 199, 217; the journey from Fort Crèvecoeur, 201; La Salle's best hope in, 202; La Salle sets out to succor, 203; La Salle has fears for the safety of, 209; sets out to examine "Starved Rock," 217; in the Illinois village, 223; attacked by the Iroquois, 225; intercedes for the Illinois, 228; peril of, 229; a truce granted to, 229; departs from the Iroquois, 233; falls ill, 236; friends in need, 237; La Salle hears good news of, 287; meeting with La Salle, 292; sets out from Fort Miami, 296; among the Arkansas Indians, 300; visits the Taensas, 301; illness of La Salle, 310; sent to Michilimackinac, 311; intrenches himself at "Starved Rock," 313; left in charge of Fort St. Louis, 326, 334, 337; attempts to attack the Spaniards of Mexico, 349, 355, 361, 421, 425; the assassination of La Salle, 430, 433; the murder of Duhaut, 448; among the Assonis, 452; plans to assist La Salle, 453-455; his journey, seeking news of La Salle, 454, 455, 458; in the Iroquois War, 460; Cavelier conceals La Salle's death from, 461; learns of La Salle's death, 464; revives La Salle's scheme of Mexican invasion, 465; sets out from Fort St. Louis of the Illinois, 465; deserted by his men, 465; courage of, 465; difficulties and hardships, 466; attacked by fever, 467; misrepresented, 467; praises of, 467; joins Iberville in Lower Louisiana, 467, 486. Topingas, the, 300. Torimans, the, 300. Toronto, 27, 138. Toronto Portage, the, 293. Toulon, 463. "Tracy, Lac" (Lake Superior), 476. Trinity River, the, 413, 424, 434, 439, 465. Tronson, Abbé, 344, 463. "Tsiketo, Lac" (Lake St. Clair), 220. Turenne, 17. Two Mountains, Lake of, 82. Upper Lakes, the, see _Lakes, Upper_. Ursulines, the, 95. Utica, village of, 79, 169, 170, 220, 239. Vaudreuil, 276. Vera Cruz, 468, 472. Vermilion River, the, 221, 225, 226. See also _Big Vermilion River, the_. "Vermilion Sea" (Gulf of California), the, 15, 38, 74, 480. "Vermilion Woods," the, 241. Verreau, H., 98. Vicksburg, 300. Victor, town of, 21, 140. "Vieux, Fort Le," 314. Villermont, Cabart de, letters of Beaujeu to, 357-360; letter of Tonty to, 454. Virginia, 288, 346, 483. "Virginia, Sea of," 6, 74. Voltaire, 7. Watteau, Melithon, 150. Weas, the, join La Salle's colony, 316. West Indies, the, 181, 404, 446, 489. Wild Rice Indians (Menomonies), the, 61. William, Fort, 275. William III. of England, 282. Winnebago Lake, 43, 44, 62. Winnebagoes, the, Jean Nicollet sent to, 4; quarrel with the Hurons, 4; location of, 42; at Saut Ste. Marie, 51. Winona, legend of, 271. Winthrop, 213. Wisconsin, shores of, 157. Wisconsin River, the, 5, 63, 245, 265, 266, 272, 278, 477, 478, 480. Wood, Colonel, reaches the Mississippi, 5. Yanktons, the, 260. Yoakum, 470. You, 210. Zenobe (Membré), Father, 181. [Illustration] FRANCIS PARKMAN'S WORKS. NEW LIBRARY EDITION. Printed from entirely new plates, in clear and beautiful type, upon a choice laid paper. Illustrated with twenty-six photogravure plates executed by Goupil from historical portraits, and from original drawings and paintings by Howard Pyle, De Cost Smith, Thule de Thulstrup, Frederic Remington, Orson Lowell, Adrien Moreau, and other artists. _Thirteen volumes, medium octavo, cloth, gilt top, price, $26.00; half calf, extra, gilt top, $58.50; half crushed Levant morocco, extra, gilt top, $78.00; half morocco, gilt top, $58.50. Any work separately in cloth, $2.00 per volume._ LIST OF VOLUMES. PIONEERS OF FRANCE IN THE NEW WORLD 1 vol. THE JESUITS IN NORTH AMERICA 1 vol. LA SALLE AND THE DISCOVERY OF THE GREAT WEST 1 vol. THE OLD RÉGIME IN CANADA 1 vol. COUNT FRONTENAC AND NEW FRANCE UNDER LOUIS XIV. 1 vol. A HALF CENTURY OF CONFLICT 2 vols. MONTCALM AND WOLFE 2 vols. THE CONSPIRACY OF PONTIAC AND THE INDIAN WAR AFTER THE CONQUEST OF CANADA 2 vols. THE OREGON TRAIL 1 vol. LIFE OF PARKMAN. By Charles Haight Farnham 1 vol. ILLUSTRATIONS. 1. Portrait of Francis Parkman. 2. Jacques Cartier. From the painting at St. Malo. 3. Madame de la Peltrie. From the painting in the Convent des Ursulines. 4. Father Jogues Haranguing the Mohawks. From the picture by Thule de Thulstrup. 5. Father Hennepin Celebrating Mass. From the picture by Howard Pyle. 6. La Salle Presenting a Petition to Louis XIV. From the painting by Adrien Moreau. 7. Jean Baptiste Colbert. From a painting by Claude Lefèvbre at Versailles. 8. Jean Guyon before Bouillé. From a picture by Orson Lowell. 9. Madame de Frontenac. From the painting at Versailles. 10. Entry of Sir William Phips into the Quebec Basin. From a picture by L. Rossi. 11. The Sacs and Foxes. From the picture by Charles Bodmer. 12. The Return from Deerfield. From the painting by Howard Pyle. 13. Sir William Pepperrell. From the painting by Smibert. 14. Marquis de Beauharnois, Governor of Canada. From the painting by Tonnières in the Musée de Grenoble. 15. Marquis de Montcalm. From the original painting in the possession of the present Marquis de Montcalm. 16. Marquis de Vaudreuil. From the painting in the possession of the Countess de Clermont Tonnerre. 17. General Wolfe. From the original painting by Highmore. 18. The Fall of Montcalm. From the painting by Howard Pyle. 19. View of the Taking of Quebec. From the early engraving of a drawing made on the spot by Captain Hervey Smyth, Wolfe's aid-de-camp. 20. Col. Henry Bouquet. From the original painting by Benjamin West. 21. The Death of Pontiac. From the picture by De Cost Smith. 22. Sir William Johnson. From a Mezzotint engraving. 23. Half Sliding, Half Plunging. From a drawing by Frederic Remington. 24. The Thunder Fighters. From the picture by Frederic Remington. 25. Francis Parkman. From a miniature taken about 1844. 26. Francis Parkman. From a photograph taken in 1882. It is hardly necessary to quote here from the innumerable tributes to so famous an American author as Francis Parkman. Among writers who have bestowed the highest praise upon his writings are such names as James Russell Lowell, Dr. John Fisk, President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard University, George William Curtis, Edward Eggleston, W. D. Howells, James Schouler, and Dr. Conan Doyle, as well as many prominent critics in the United States, in Canada, and in England. In two respects Francis Parkman was exceptionally fortunate. He chose a theme of the closest interest to his countrymen,--the colonization of the American Continent and the wars for its possession,--and he lived through fifty years of toil to complete his great historical series. The text of the New Library Edition is that of the latest issue of each work prepared for the press by the distinguished author. He carefully revised and added to several of his works, not through change of views, but in the light of new documentary evidence which his patient research and untiring zeal extracted from the hidden archives of the past. Thus he rewrote and enlarged "The Conspiracy of Pontiac"; the new edition of "La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West" (1878), and the 1885 edition of "Pioneers of France" included very important additions; and a short time before his death he added to "The Old Régime" fifty pages, under the title of "The Feudal Chiefs of Acadia." The New Library Edition therefore includes each work in its final state as perfected by the historian. The indexes have been entirely remade. LITTLE, BROWN, & CO., Publishers, 254 Washington Street. Boston. 
7196	----	THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER BY MARK TWAIN (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) Part 4 CHAPTER XIII TOM'S mind was made up now. He was gloomy and desperate. He was a forsaken, friendless boy, he said; nobody loved him; when they found out what they had driven him to, perhaps they would be sorry; he had tried to do right and get along, but they would not let him; since nothing would do them but to be rid of him, let it be so; and let them blame HIM for the consequences--why shouldn't they? What right had the friendless to complain? Yes, they had forced him to it at last: he would lead a life of crime. There was no choice. By this time he was far down Meadow Lane, and the bell for school to "take up" tinkled faintly upon his ear. He sobbed, now, to think he should never, never hear that old familiar sound any more--it was very hard, but it was forced on him; since he was driven out into the cold world, he must submit--but he forgave them. Then the sobs came thick and fast. Just at this point he met his soul's sworn comrade, Joe Harper --hard-eyed, and with evidently a great and dismal purpose in his heart. Plainly here were "two souls with but a single thought." Tom, wiping his eyes with his sleeve, began to blubber out something about a resolution to escape from hard usage and lack of sympathy at home by roaming abroad into the great world never to return; and ended by hoping that Joe would not forget him. But it transpired that this was a request which Joe had just been going to make of Tom, and had come to hunt him up for that purpose. His mother had whipped him for drinking some cream which he had never tasted and knew nothing about; it was plain that she was tired of him and wished him to go; if she felt that way, there was nothing for him to do but succumb; he hoped she would be happy, and never regret having driven her poor boy out into the unfeeling world to suffer and die. As the two boys walked sorrowing along, they made a new compact to stand by each other and be brothers and never separate till death relieved them of their troubles. Then they began to lay their plans. Joe was for being a hermit, and living on crusts in a remote cave, and dying, some time, of cold and want and grief; but after listening to Tom, he conceded that there were some conspicuous advantages about a life of crime, and so he consented to be a pirate. Three miles below St. Petersburg, at a point where the Mississippi River was a trifle over a mile wide, there was a long, narrow, wooded island, with a shallow bar at the head of it, and this offered well as a rendezvous. It was not inhabited; it lay far over toward the further shore, abreast a dense and almost wholly unpeopled forest. So Jackson's Island was chosen. Who were to be the subjects of their piracies was a matter that did not occur to them. Then they hunted up Huckleberry Finn, and he joined them promptly, for all careers were one to him; he was indifferent. They presently separated to meet at a lonely spot on the river-bank two miles above the village at the favorite hour--which was midnight. There was a small log raft there which they meant to capture. Each would bring hooks and lines, and such provision as he could steal in the most dark and mysterious way--as became outlaws. And before the afternoon was done, they had all managed to enjoy the sweet glory of spreading the fact that pretty soon the town would "hear something." All who got this vague hint were cautioned to "be mum and wait." About midnight Tom arrived with a boiled ham and a few trifles, and stopped in a dense undergrowth on a small bluff overlooking the meeting-place. It was starlight, and very still. The mighty river lay like an ocean at rest. Tom listened a moment, but no sound disturbed the quiet. Then he gave a low, distinct whistle. It was answered from under the bluff. Tom whistled twice more; these signals were answered in the same way. Then a guarded voice said: "Who goes there?" "Tom Sawyer, the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main. Name your names." "Huck Finn the Red-Handed, and Joe Harper the Terror of the Seas." Tom had furnished these titles, from his favorite literature. "'Tis well. Give the countersign." Two hoarse whispers delivered the same awful word simultaneously to the brooding night: "BLOOD!" Then Tom tumbled his ham over the bluff and let himself down after it, tearing both skin and clothes to some extent in the effort. There was an easy, comfortable path along the shore under the bluff, but it lacked the advantages of difficulty and danger so valued by a pirate. The Terror of the Seas had brought a side of bacon, and had about worn himself out with getting it there. Finn the Red-Handed had stolen a skillet and a quantity of half-cured leaf tobacco, and had also brought a few corn-cobs to make pipes with. But none of the pirates smoked or "chewed" but himself. The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main said it would never do to start without some fire. That was a wise thought; matches were hardly known there in that day. They saw a fire smouldering upon a great raft a hundred yards above, and they went stealthily thither and helped themselves to a chunk. They made an imposing adventure of it, saying, "Hist!" every now and then, and suddenly halting with finger on lip; moving with hands on imaginary dagger-hilts; and giving orders in dismal whispers that if "the foe" stirred, to "let him have it to the hilt," because "dead men tell no tales." They knew well enough that the raftsmen were all down at the village laying in stores or having a spree, but still that was no excuse for their conducting this thing in an unpiratical way. They shoved off, presently, Tom in command, Huck at the after oar and Joe at the forward. Tom stood amidships, gloomy-browed, and with folded arms, and gave his orders in a low, stern whisper: "Luff, and bring her to the wind!" "Aye-aye, sir!" "Steady, steady-y-y-y!" "Steady it is, sir!" "Let her go off a point!" "Point it is, sir!" As the boys steadily and monotonously drove the raft toward mid-stream it was no doubt understood that these orders were given only for "style," and were not intended to mean anything in particular. "What sail's she carrying?" "Courses, tops'ls, and flying-jib, sir." "Send the r'yals up! Lay out aloft, there, half a dozen of ye --foretopmaststuns'l! Lively, now!" "Aye-aye, sir!" "Shake out that maintogalans'l! Sheets and braces! NOW my hearties!" "Aye-aye, sir!" "Hellum-a-lee--hard a port! Stand by to meet her when she comes! Port, port! NOW, men! With a will! Stead-y-y-y!" "Steady it is, sir!" The raft drew beyond the middle of the river; the boys pointed her head right, and then lay on their oars. The river was not high, so there was not more than a two or three mile current. Hardly a word was said during the next three-quarters of an hour. Now the raft was passing before the distant town. Two or three glimmering lights showed where it lay, peacefully sleeping, beyond the vague vast sweep of star-gemmed water, unconscious of the tremendous event that was happening. The Black Avenger stood still with folded arms, "looking his last" upon the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing "she" could see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and death with dauntless heart, going to his doom with a grim smile on his lips. It was but a small strain on his imagination to remove Jackson's Island beyond eyeshot of the village, and so he "looked his last" with a broken and satisfied heart. The other pirates were looking their last, too; and they all looked so long that they came near letting the current drift them out of the range of the island. But they discovered the danger in time, and made shift to avert it. About two o'clock in the morning the raft grounded on the bar two hundred yards above the head of the island, and they waded back and forth until they had landed their freight. Part of the little raft's belongings consisted of an old sail, and this they spread over a nook in the bushes for a tent to shelter their provisions; but they themselves would sleep in the open air in good weather, as became outlaws. They built a fire against the side of a great log twenty or thirty steps within the sombre depths of the forest, and then cooked some bacon in the frying-pan for supper, and used up half of the corn "pone" stock they had brought. It seemed glorious sport to be feasting in that wild, free way in the virgin forest of an unexplored and uninhabited island, far from the haunts of men, and they said they never would return to civilization. The climbing fire lit up their faces and threw its ruddy glare upon the pillared tree-trunks of their forest temple, and upon the varnished foliage and festooning vines. When the last crisp slice of bacon was gone, and the last allowance of corn pone devoured, the boys stretched themselves out on the grass, filled with contentment. They could have found a cooler place, but they would not deny themselves such a romantic feature as the roasting camp-fire. "AIN'T it gay?" said Joe. "It's NUTS!" said Tom. "What would the boys say if they could see us?" "Say? Well, they'd just die to be here--hey, Hucky!" "I reckon so," said Huckleberry; "anyways, I'm suited. I don't want nothing better'n this. I don't ever get enough to eat, gen'ally--and here they can't come and pick at a feller and bullyrag him so." "It's just the life for me," said Tom. "You don't have to get up, mornings, and you don't have to go to school, and wash, and all that blame foolishness. You see a pirate don't have to do ANYTHING, Joe, when he's ashore, but a hermit HE has to be praying considerable, and then he don't have any fun, anyway, all by himself that way." "Oh yes, that's so," said Joe, "but I hadn't thought much about it, you know. I'd a good deal rather be a pirate, now that I've tried it." "You see," said Tom, "people don't go much on hermits, nowadays, like they used to in old times, but a pirate's always respected. And a hermit's got to sleep on the hardest place he can find, and put sackcloth and ashes on his head, and stand out in the rain, and--" "What does he put sackcloth and ashes on his head for?" inquired Huck. "I dono. But they've GOT to do it. Hermits always do. You'd have to do that if you was a hermit." "Dern'd if I would," said Huck. "Well, what would you do?" "I dono. But I wouldn't do that." "Why, Huck, you'd HAVE to. How'd you get around it?" "Why, I just wouldn't stand it. I'd run away." "Run away! Well, you WOULD be a nice old slouch of a hermit. You'd be a disgrace." The Red-Handed made no response, being better employed. He had finished gouging out a cob, and now he fitted a weed stem to it, loaded it with tobacco, and was pressing a coal to the charge and blowing a cloud of fragrant smoke--he was in the full bloom of luxurious contentment. The other pirates envied him this majestic vice, and secretly resolved to acquire it shortly. Presently Huck said: "What does pirates have to do?" Tom said: "Oh, they have just a bully time--take ships and burn them, and get the money and bury it in awful places in their island where there's ghosts and things to watch it, and kill everybody in the ships--make 'em walk a plank." "And they carry the women to the island," said Joe; "they don't kill the women." "No," assented Tom, "they don't kill the women--they're too noble. And the women's always beautiful, too. "And don't they wear the bulliest clothes! Oh no! All gold and silver and di'monds," said Joe, with enthusiasm. "Who?" said Huck. "Why, the pirates." Huck scanned his own clothing forlornly. "I reckon I ain't dressed fitten for a pirate," said he, with a regretful pathos in his voice; "but I ain't got none but these." But the other boys told him the fine clothes would come fast enough, after they should have begun their adventures. They made him understand that his poor rags would do to begin with, though it was customary for wealthy pirates to start with a proper wardrobe. Gradually their talk died out and drowsiness began to steal upon the eyelids of the little waifs. The pipe dropped from the fingers of the Red-Handed, and he slept the sleep of the conscience-free and the weary. The Terror of the Seas and the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main had more difficulty in getting to sleep. They said their prayers inwardly, and lying down, since there was nobody there with authority to make them kneel and recite aloud; in truth, they had a mind not to say them at all, but they were afraid to proceed to such lengths as that, lest they might call down a sudden and special thunderbolt from heaven. Then at once they reached and hovered upon the imminent verge of sleep--but an intruder came, now, that would not "down." It was conscience. They began to feel a vague fear that they had been doing wrong to run away; and next they thought of the stolen meat, and then the real torture came. They tried to argue it away by reminding conscience that they had purloined sweetmeats and apples scores of times; but conscience was not to be appeased by such thin plausibilities; it seemed to them, in the end, that there was no getting around the stubborn fact that taking sweetmeats was only "hooking," while taking bacon and hams and such valuables was plain simple stealing--and there was a command against that in the Bible. So they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in the business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing. Then conscience granted a truce, and these curiously inconsistent pirates fell peacefully to sleep. CHAPTER XIV WHEN Tom awoke in the morning, he wondered where he was. He sat up and rubbed his eyes and looked around. Then he comprehended. It was the cool gray dawn, and there was a delicious sense of repose and peace in the deep pervading calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred; not a sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation. Beaded dewdrops stood upon the leaves and grasses. A white layer of ashes covered the fire, and a thin blue breath of smoke rose straight into the air. Joe and Huck still slept. Now, far away in the woods a bird called; another answered; presently the hammering of a woodpecker was heard. Gradually the cool dim gray of the morning whitened, and as gradually sounds multiplied and life manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to the musing boy. A little green worm came crawling over a dewy leaf, lifting two-thirds of his body into the air from time to time and "sniffing around," then proceeding again--for he was measuring, Tom said; and when the worm approached him, of its own accord, he sat as still as a stone, with his hopes rising and falling, by turns, as the creature still came toward him or seemed inclined to go elsewhere; and when at last it considered a painful moment with its curved body in the air and then came decisively down upon Tom's leg and began a journey over him, his whole heart was glad--for that meant that he was going to have a new suit of clothes--without the shadow of a doubt a gaudy piratical uniform. Now a procession of ants appeared, from nowhere in particular, and went about their labors; one struggled manfully by with a dead spider five times as big as itself in its arms, and lugged it straight up a tree-trunk. A brown spotted lady-bug climbed the dizzy height of a grass blade, and Tom bent down close to it and said, "Lady-bug, lady-bug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children's alone," and she took wing and went off to see about it --which did not surprise the boy, for he knew of old that this insect was credulous about conflagrations, and he had practised upon its simplicity more than once. A tumblebug came next, heaving sturdily at its ball, and Tom touched the creature, to see it shut its legs against its body and pretend to be dead. The birds were fairly rioting by this time. A catbird, the Northern mocker, lit in a tree over Tom's head, and trilled out her imitations of her neighbors in a rapture of enjoyment; then a shrill jay swept down, a flash of blue flame, and stopped on a twig almost within the boy's reach, cocked his head to one side and eyed the strangers with a consuming curiosity; a gray squirrel and a big fellow of the "fox" kind came skurrying along, sitting up at intervals to inspect and chatter at the boys, for the wild things had probably never seen a human being before and scarcely knew whether to be afraid or not. All Nature was wide awake and stirring, now; long lances of sunlight pierced down through the dense foliage far and near, and a few butterflies came fluttering upon the scene. Tom stirred up the other pirates and they all clattered away with a shout, and in a minute or two were stripped and chasing after and tumbling over each other in the shallow limpid water of the white sandbar. They felt no longing for the little village sleeping in the distance beyond the majestic waste of water. A vagrant current or a slight rise in the river had carried off their raft, but this only gratified them, since its going was something like burning the bridge between them and civilization. They came back to camp wonderfully refreshed, glad-hearted, and ravenous; and they soon had the camp-fire blazing up again. Huck found a spring of clear cold water close by, and the boys made cups of broad oak or hickory leaves, and felt that water, sweetened with such a wildwood charm as that, would be a good enough substitute for coffee. While Joe was slicing bacon for breakfast, Tom and Huck asked him to hold on a minute; they stepped to a promising nook in the river-bank and threw in their lines; almost immediately they had reward. Joe had not had time to get impatient before they were back again with some handsome bass, a couple of sun-perch and a small catfish--provisions enough for quite a family. They fried the fish with the bacon, and were astonished; for no fish had ever seemed so delicious before. They did not know that the quicker a fresh-water fish is on the fire after he is caught the better he is; and they reflected little upon what a sauce open-air sleeping, open-air exercise, bathing, and a large ingredient of hunger make, too. They lay around in the shade, after breakfast, while Huck had a smoke, and then went off through the woods on an exploring expedition. They tramped gayly along, over decaying logs, through tangled underbrush, among solemn monarchs of the forest, hung from their crowns to the ground with a drooping regalia of grape-vines. Now and then they came upon snug nooks carpeted with grass and jeweled with flowers. They found plenty of things to be delighted with, but nothing to be astonished at. They discovered that the island was about three miles long and a quarter of a mile wide, and that the shore it lay closest to was only separated from it by a narrow channel hardly two hundred yards wide. They took a swim about every hour, so it was close upon the middle of the afternoon when they got back to camp. They were too hungry to stop to fish, but they fared sumptuously upon cold ham, and then threw themselves down in the shade to talk. But the talk soon began to drag, and then died. The stillness, the solemnity that brooded in the woods, and the sense of loneliness, began to tell upon the spirits of the boys. They fell to thinking. A sort of undefined longing crept upon them. This took dim shape, presently--it was budding homesickness. Even Finn the Red-Handed was dreaming of his doorsteps and empty hogsheads. But they were all ashamed of their weakness, and none was brave enough to speak his thought. For some time, now, the boys had been dully conscious of a peculiar sound in the distance, just as one sometimes is of the ticking of a clock which he takes no distinct note of. But now this mysterious sound became more pronounced, and forced a recognition. The boys started, glanced at each other, and then each assumed a listening attitude. There was a long silence, profound and unbroken; then a deep, sullen boom came floating down out of the distance. "What is it!" exclaimed Joe, under his breath. "I wonder," said Tom in a whisper. "'Tain't thunder," said Huckleberry, in an awed tone, "becuz thunder--" "Hark!" said Tom. "Listen--don't talk." They waited a time that seemed an age, and then the same muffled boom troubled the solemn hush. "Let's go and see." They sprang to their feet and hurried to the shore toward the town. They parted the bushes on the bank and peered out over the water. The little steam ferryboat was about a mile below the village, drifting with the current. Her broad deck seemed crowded with people. There were a great many skiffs rowing about or floating with the stream in the neighborhood of the ferryboat, but the boys could not determine what the men in them were doing. Presently a great jet of white smoke burst from the ferryboat's side, and as it expanded and rose in a lazy cloud, that same dull throb of sound was borne to the listeners again. "I know now!" exclaimed Tom; "somebody's drownded!" "That's it!" said Huck; "they done that last summer, when Bill Turner got drownded; they shoot a cannon over the water, and that makes him come up to the top. Yes, and they take loaves of bread and put quicksilver in 'em and set 'em afloat, and wherever there's anybody that's drownded, they'll float right there and stop." "Yes, I've heard about that," said Joe. "I wonder what makes the bread do that." "Oh, it ain't the bread, so much," said Tom; "I reckon it's mostly what they SAY over it before they start it out." "But they don't say anything over it," said Huck. "I've seen 'em and they don't." "Well, that's funny," said Tom. "But maybe they say it to themselves. Of COURSE they do. Anybody might know that." The other boys agreed that there was reason in what Tom said, because an ignorant lump of bread, uninstructed by an incantation, could not be expected to act very intelligently when set upon an errand of such gravity. "By jings, I wish I was over there, now," said Joe. "I do too" said Huck "I'd give heaps to know who it is." The boys still listened and watched. Presently a revealing thought flashed through Tom's mind, and he exclaimed: "Boys, I know who's drownded--it's us!" They felt like heroes in an instant. Here was a gorgeous triumph; they were missed; they were mourned; hearts were breaking on their account; tears were being shed; accusing memories of unkindness to these poor lost lads were rising up, and unavailing regrets and remorse were being indulged; and best of all, the departed were the talk of the whole town, and the envy of all the boys, as far as this dazzling notoriety was concerned. This was fine. It was worth while to be a pirate, after all. As twilight drew on, the ferryboat went back to her accustomed business and the skiffs disappeared. The pirates returned to camp. They were jubilant with vanity over their new grandeur and the illustrious trouble they were making. They caught fish, cooked supper and ate it, and then fell to guessing at what the village was thinking and saying about them; and the pictures they drew of the public distress on their account were gratifying to look upon--from their point of view. But when the shadows of night closed them in, they gradually ceased to talk, and sat gazing into the fire, with their minds evidently wandering elsewhere. The excitement was gone, now, and Tom and Joe could not keep back thoughts of certain persons at home who were not enjoying this fine frolic as much as they were. Misgivings came; they grew troubled and unhappy; a sigh or two escaped, unawares. By and by Joe timidly ventured upon a roundabout "feeler" as to how the others might look upon a return to civilization--not right now, but-- Tom withered him with derision! Huck, being uncommitted as yet, joined in with Tom, and the waverer quickly "explained," and was glad to get out of the scrape with as little taint of chicken-hearted homesickness clinging to his garments as he could. Mutiny was effectually laid to rest for the moment. As the night deepened, Huck began to nod, and presently to snore. Joe followed next. Tom lay upon his elbow motionless, for some time, watching the two intently. At last he got up cautiously, on his knees, and went searching among the grass and the flickering reflections flung by the camp-fire. He picked up and inspected several large semi-cylinders of the thin white bark of a sycamore, and finally chose two which seemed to suit him. Then he knelt by the fire and painfully wrote something upon each of these with his "red keel"; one he rolled up and put in his jacket pocket, and the other he put in Joe's hat and removed it to a little distance from the owner. And he also put into the hat certain schoolboy treasures of almost inestimable value--among them a lump of chalk, an India-rubber ball, three fishhooks, and one of that kind of marbles known as a "sure 'nough crystal." Then he tiptoed his way cautiously among the trees till he felt that he was out of hearing, and straightway broke into a keen run in the direction of the sandbar. CHAPTER XV A FEW minutes later Tom was in the shoal water of the bar, wading toward the Illinois shore. Before the depth reached his middle he was half-way over; the current would permit no more wading, now, so he struck out confidently to swim the remaining hundred yards. He swam quartering upstream, but still was swept downward rather faster than he had expected. However, he reached the shore finally, and drifted along till he found a low place and drew himself out. He put his hand on his jacket pocket, found his piece of bark safe, and then struck through the woods, following the shore, with streaming garments. Shortly before ten o'clock he came out into an open place opposite the village, and saw the ferryboat lying in the shadow of the trees and the high bank. Everything was quiet under the blinking stars. He crept down the bank, watching with all his eyes, slipped into the water, swam three or four strokes and climbed into the skiff that did "yawl" duty at the boat's stern. He laid himself down under the thwarts and waited, panting. Presently the cracked bell tapped and a voice gave the order to "cast off." A minute or two later the skiff's head was standing high up, against the boat's swell, and the voyage was begun. Tom felt happy in his success, for he knew it was the boat's last trip for the night. At the end of a long twelve or fifteen minutes the wheels stopped, and Tom slipped overboard and swam ashore in the dusk, landing fifty yards downstream, out of danger of possible stragglers. He flew along unfrequented alleys, and shortly found himself at his aunt's back fence. He climbed over, approached the "ell," and looked in at the sitting-room window, for a light was burning there. There sat Aunt Polly, Sid, Mary, and Joe Harper's mother, grouped together, talking. They were by the bed, and the bed was between them and the door. Tom went to the door and began to softly lift the latch; then he pressed gently and the door yielded a crack; he continued pushing cautiously, and quaking every time it creaked, till he judged he might squeeze through on his knees; so he put his head through and began, warily. "What makes the candle blow so?" said Aunt Polly. Tom hurried up. "Why, that door's open, I believe. Why, of course it is. No end of strange things now. Go 'long and shut it, Sid." Tom disappeared under the bed just in time. He lay and "breathed" himself for a time, and then crept to where he could almost touch his aunt's foot. "But as I was saying," said Aunt Polly, "he warn't BAD, so to say --only mischEEvous. Only just giddy, and harum-scarum, you know. He warn't any more responsible than a colt. HE never meant any harm, and he was the best-hearted boy that ever was"--and she began to cry. "It was just so with my Joe--always full of his devilment, and up to every kind of mischief, but he was just as unselfish and kind as he could be--and laws bless me, to think I went and whipped him for taking that cream, never once recollecting that I throwed it out myself because it was sour, and I never to see him again in this world, never, never, never, poor abused boy!" And Mrs. Harper sobbed as if her heart would break. "I hope Tom's better off where he is," said Sid, "but if he'd been better in some ways--" "SID!" Tom felt the glare of the old lady's eye, though he could not see it. "Not a word against my Tom, now that he's gone! God'll take care of HIM--never you trouble YOURself, sir! Oh, Mrs. Harper, I don't know how to give him up! I don't know how to give him up! He was such a comfort to me, although he tormented my old heart out of me, 'most." "The Lord giveth and the Lord hath taken away--Blessed be the name of the Lord! But it's so hard--Oh, it's so hard! Only last Saturday my Joe busted a firecracker right under my nose and I knocked him sprawling. Little did I know then, how soon--Oh, if it was to do over again I'd hug him and bless him for it." "Yes, yes, yes, I know just how you feel, Mrs. Harper, I know just exactly how you feel. No longer ago than yesterday noon, my Tom took and filled the cat full of Pain-killer, and I did think the cretur would tear the house down. And God forgive me, I cracked Tom's head with my thimble, poor boy, poor dead boy. But he's out of all his troubles now. And the last words I ever heard him say was to reproach--" But this memory was too much for the old lady, and she broke entirely down. Tom was snuffling, now, himself--and more in pity of himself than anybody else. He could hear Mary crying, and putting in a kindly word for him from time to time. He began to have a nobler opinion of himself than ever before. Still, he was sufficiently touched by his aunt's grief to long to rush out from under the bed and overwhelm her with joy--and the theatrical gorgeousness of the thing appealed strongly to his nature, too, but he resisted and lay still. He went on listening, and gathered by odds and ends that it was conjectured at first that the boys had got drowned while taking a swim; then the small raft had been missed; next, certain boys said the missing lads had promised that the village should "hear something" soon; the wise-heads had "put this and that together" and decided that the lads had gone off on that raft and would turn up at the next town below, presently; but toward noon the raft had been found, lodged against the Missouri shore some five or six miles below the village --and then hope perished; they must be drowned, else hunger would have driven them home by nightfall if not sooner. It was believed that the search for the bodies had been a fruitless effort merely because the drowning must have occurred in mid-channel, since the boys, being good swimmers, would otherwise have escaped to shore. This was Wednesday night. If the bodies continued missing until Sunday, all hope would be given over, and the funerals would be preached on that morning. Tom shuddered. Mrs. Harper gave a sobbing good-night and turned to go. Then with a mutual impulse the two bereaved women flung themselves into each other's arms and had a good, consoling cry, and then parted. Aunt Polly was tender far beyond her wont, in her good-night to Sid and Mary. Sid snuffled a bit and Mary went off crying with all her heart. Aunt Polly knelt down and prayed for Tom so touchingly, so appealingly, and with such measureless love in her words and her old trembling voice, that he was weltering in tears again, long before she was through. He had to keep still long after she went to bed, for she kept making broken-hearted ejaculations from time to time, tossing unrestfully, and turning over. But at last she was still, only moaning a little in her sleep. Now the boy stole out, rose gradually by the bedside, shaded the candle-light with his hand, and stood regarding her. His heart was full of pity for her. He took out his sycamore scroll and placed it by the candle. But something occurred to him, and he lingered considering. His face lighted with a happy solution of his thought; he put the bark hastily in his pocket. Then he bent over and kissed the faded lips, and straightway made his stealthy exit, latching the door behind him. He threaded his way back to the ferry landing, found nobody at large there, and walked boldly on board the boat, for he knew she was tenantless except that there was a watchman, who always turned in and slept like a graven image. He untied the skiff at the stern, slipped into it, and was soon rowing cautiously upstream. When he had pulled a mile above the village, he started quartering across and bent himself stoutly to his work. He hit the landing on the other side neatly, for this was a familiar bit of work to him. He was moved to capture the skiff, arguing that it might be considered a ship and therefore legitimate prey for a pirate, but he knew a thorough search would be made for it and that might end in revelations. So he stepped ashore and entered the woods. He sat down and took a long rest, torturing himself meanwhile to keep awake, and then started warily down the home-stretch. The night was far spent. It was broad daylight before he found himself fairly abreast the island bar. He rested again until the sun was well up and gilding the great river with its splendor, and then he plunged into the stream. A little later he paused, dripping, upon the threshold of the camp, and heard Joe say: "No, Tom's true-blue, Huck, and he'll come back. He won't desert. He knows that would be a disgrace to a pirate, and Tom's too proud for that sort of thing. He's up to something or other. Now I wonder what?" "Well, the things is ours, anyway, ain't they?" Pretty near, but not yet, Huck. The writing says they are if he ain't back here to breakfast." "Which he is!" exclaimed Tom, with fine dramatic effect, stepping grandly into camp. A sumptuous breakfast of bacon and fish was shortly provided, and as the boys set to work upon it, Tom recounted (and adorned) his adventures. They were a vain and boastful company of heroes when the tale was done. Then Tom hid himself away in a shady nook to sleep till noon, and the other pirates got ready to fish and explore. CHAPTER XVI AFTER dinner all the gang turned out to hunt for turtle eggs on the bar. They went about poking sticks into the sand, and when they found a soft place they went down on their knees and dug with their hands. Sometimes they would take fifty or sixty eggs out of one hole. They were perfectly round white things a trifle smaller than an English walnut. They had a famous fried-egg feast that night, and another on Friday morning. After breakfast they went whooping and prancing out on the bar, and chased each other round and round, shedding clothes as they went, until they were naked, and then continued the frolic far away up the shoal water of the bar, against the stiff current, which latter tripped their legs from under them from time to time and greatly increased the fun. And now and then they stooped in a group and splashed water in each other's faces with their palms, gradually approaching each other, with averted faces to avoid the strangling sprays, and finally gripping and struggling till the best man ducked his neighbor, and then they all went under in a tangle of white legs and arms and came up blowing, sputtering, laughing, and gasping for breath at one and the same time. When they were well exhausted, they would run out and sprawl on the dry, hot sand, and lie there and cover themselves up with it, and by and by break for the water again and go through the original performance once more. Finally it occurred to them that their naked skin represented flesh-colored "tights" very fairly; so they drew a ring in the sand and had a circus--with three clowns in it, for none would yield this proudest post to his neighbor. Next they got their marbles and played "knucks" and "ring-taw" and "keeps" till that amusement grew stale. Then Joe and Huck had another swim, but Tom would not venture, because he found that in kicking off his trousers he had kicked his string of rattlesnake rattles off his ankle, and he wondered how he had escaped cramp so long without the protection of this mysterious charm. He did not venture again until he had found it, and by that time the other boys were tired and ready to rest. They gradually wandered apart, dropped into the "dumps," and fell to gazing longingly across the wide river to where the village lay drowsing in the sun. Tom found himself writing "BECKY" in the sand with his big toe; he scratched it out, and was angry with himself for his weakness. But he wrote it again, nevertheless; he could not help it. He erased it once more and then took himself out of temptation by driving the other boys together and joining them. But Joe's spirits had gone down almost beyond resurrection. He was so homesick that he could hardly endure the misery of it. The tears lay very near the surface. Huck was melancholy, too. Tom was downhearted, but tried hard not to show it. He had a secret which he was not ready to tell, yet, but if this mutinous depression was not broken up soon, he would have to bring it out. He said, with a great show of cheerfulness: "I bet there's been pirates on this island before, boys. We'll explore it again. They've hid treasures here somewhere. How'd you feel to light on a rotten chest full of gold and silver--hey?" But it roused only faint enthusiasm, which faded out, with no reply. Tom tried one or two other seductions; but they failed, too. It was discouraging work. Joe sat poking up the sand with a stick and looking very gloomy. Finally he said: "Oh, boys, let's give it up. I want to go home. It's so lonesome." "Oh no, Joe, you'll feel better by and by," said Tom. "Just think of the fishing that's here." "I don't care for fishing. I want to go home." "But, Joe, there ain't such another swimming-place anywhere." "Swimming's no good. I don't seem to care for it, somehow, when there ain't anybody to say I sha'n't go in. I mean to go home." "Oh, shucks! Baby! You want to see your mother, I reckon." "Yes, I DO want to see my mother--and you would, too, if you had one. I ain't any more baby than you are." And Joe snuffled a little. "Well, we'll let the cry-baby go home to his mother, won't we, Huck? Poor thing--does it want to see its mother? And so it shall. You like it here, don't you, Huck? We'll stay, won't we?" Huck said, "Y-e-s"--without any heart in it. "I'll never speak to you again as long as I live," said Joe, rising. "There now!" And he moved moodily away and began to dress himself. "Who cares!" said Tom. "Nobody wants you to. Go 'long home and get laughed at. Oh, you're a nice pirate. Huck and me ain't cry-babies. We'll stay, won't we, Huck? Let him go if he wants to. I reckon we can get along without him, per'aps." But Tom was uneasy, nevertheless, and was alarmed to see Joe go sullenly on with his dressing. And then it was discomforting to see Huck eying Joe's preparations so wistfully, and keeping up such an ominous silence. Presently, without a parting word, Joe began to wade off toward the Illinois shore. Tom's heart began to sink. He glanced at Huck. Huck could not bear the look, and dropped his eyes. Then he said: "I want to go, too, Tom. It was getting so lonesome anyway, and now it'll be worse. Let's us go, too, Tom." "I won't! You can all go, if you want to. I mean to stay." "Tom, I better go." "Well, go 'long--who's hendering you." Huck began to pick up his scattered clothes. He said: "Tom, I wisht you'd come, too. Now you think it over. We'll wait for you when we get to shore." "Well, you'll wait a blame long time, that's all." Huck started sorrowfully away, and Tom stood looking after him, with a strong desire tugging at his heart to yield his pride and go along too. He hoped the boys would stop, but they still waded slowly on. It suddenly dawned on Tom that it was become very lonely and still. He made one final struggle with his pride, and then darted after his comrades, yelling: "Wait! Wait! I want to tell you something!" They presently stopped and turned around. When he got to where they were, he began unfolding his secret, and they listened moodily till at last they saw the "point" he was driving at, and then they set up a war-whoop of applause and said it was "splendid!" and said if he had told them at first, they wouldn't have started away. He made a plausible excuse; but his real reason had been the fear that not even the secret would keep them with him any very great length of time, and so he had meant to hold it in reserve as a last seduction. The lads came gayly back and went at their sports again with a will, chattering all the time about Tom's stupendous plan and admiring the genius of it. After a dainty egg and fish dinner, Tom said he wanted to learn to smoke, now. Joe caught at the idea and said he would like to try, too. So Huck made pipes and filled them. These novices had never smoked anything before but cigars made of grape-vine, and they "bit" the tongue, and were not considered manly anyway. Now they stretched themselves out on their elbows and began to puff, charily, and with slender confidence. The smoke had an unpleasant taste, and they gagged a little, but Tom said: "Why, it's just as easy! If I'd a knowed this was all, I'd a learnt long ago." "So would I," said Joe. "It's just nothing." "Why, many a time I've looked at people smoking, and thought well I wish I could do that; but I never thought I could," said Tom. "That's just the way with me, hain't it, Huck? You've heard me talk just that way--haven't you, Huck? I'll leave it to Huck if I haven't." "Yes--heaps of times," said Huck. "Well, I have too," said Tom; "oh, hundreds of times. Once down by the slaughter-house. Don't you remember, Huck? Bob Tanner was there, and Johnny Miller, and Jeff Thatcher, when I said it. Don't you remember, Huck, 'bout me saying that?" "Yes, that's so," said Huck. "That was the day after I lost a white alley. No, 'twas the day before." "There--I told you so," said Tom. "Huck recollects it." "I bleeve I could smoke this pipe all day," said Joe. "I don't feel sick." "Neither do I," said Tom. "I could smoke it all day. But I bet you Jeff Thatcher couldn't." "Jeff Thatcher! Why, he'd keel over just with two draws. Just let him try it once. HE'D see!" "I bet he would. And Johnny Miller--I wish could see Johnny Miller tackle it once." "Oh, don't I!" said Joe. "Why, I bet you Johnny Miller couldn't any more do this than nothing. Just one little snifter would fetch HIM." "'Deed it would, Joe. Say--I wish the boys could see us now." "So do I." "Say--boys, don't say anything about it, and some time when they're around, I'll come up to you and say, 'Joe, got a pipe? I want a smoke.' And you'll say, kind of careless like, as if it warn't anything, you'll say, 'Yes, I got my OLD pipe, and another one, but my tobacker ain't very good.' And I'll say, 'Oh, that's all right, if it's STRONG enough.' And then you'll out with the pipes, and we'll light up just as ca'm, and then just see 'em look!" "By jings, that'll be gay, Tom! I wish it was NOW!" "So do I! And when we tell 'em we learned when we was off pirating, won't they wish they'd been along?" "Oh, I reckon not! I'll just BET they will!" So the talk ran on. But presently it began to flag a trifle, and grow disjointed. The silences widened; the expectoration marvellously increased. Every pore inside the boys' cheeks became a spouting fountain; they could scarcely bail out the cellars under their tongues fast enough to prevent an inundation; little overflowings down their throats occurred in spite of all they could do, and sudden retchings followed every time. Both boys were looking very pale and miserable, now. Joe's pipe dropped from his nerveless fingers. Tom's followed. Both fountains were going furiously and both pumps bailing with might and main. Joe said feebly: "I've lost my knife. I reckon I better go and find it." Tom said, with quivering lips and halting utterance: "I'll help you. You go over that way and I'll hunt around by the spring. No, you needn't come, Huck--we can find it." So Huck sat down again, and waited an hour. Then he found it lonesome, and went to find his comrades. They were wide apart in the woods, both very pale, both fast asleep. But something informed him that if they had had any trouble they had got rid of it. They were not talkative at supper that night. They had a humble look, and when Huck prepared his pipe after the meal and was going to prepare theirs, they said no, they were not feeling very well--something they ate at dinner had disagreed with them. About midnight Joe awoke, and called the boys. There was a brooding oppressiveness in the air that seemed to bode something. The boys huddled themselves together and sought the friendly companionship of the fire, though the dull dead heat of the breathless atmosphere was stifling. They sat still, intent and waiting. The solemn hush continued. Beyond the light of the fire everything was swallowed up in the blackness of darkness. Presently there came a quivering glow that vaguely revealed the foliage for a moment and then vanished. By and by another came, a little stronger. Then another. Then a faint moan came sighing through the branches of the forest and the boys felt a fleeting breath upon their cheeks, and shuddered with the fancy that the Spirit of the Night had gone by. There was a pause. Now a weird flash turned night into day and showed every little grass-blade, separate and distinct, that grew about their feet. And it showed three white, startled faces, too. A deep peal of thunder went rolling and tumbling down the heavens and lost itself in sullen rumblings in the distance. A sweep of chilly air passed by, rustling all the leaves and snowing the flaky ashes broadcast about the fire. Another fierce glare lit up the forest and an instant crash followed that seemed to rend the tree-tops right over the boys' heads. They clung together in terror, in the thick gloom that followed. A few big rain-drops fell pattering upon the leaves. "Quick! boys, go for the tent!" exclaimed Tom. They sprang away, stumbling over roots and among vines in the dark, no two plunging in the same direction. A furious blast roared through the trees, making everything sing as it went. One blinding flash after another came, and peal on peal of deafening thunder. And now a drenching rain poured down and the rising hurricane drove it in sheets along the ground. The boys cried out to each other, but the roaring wind and the booming thunder-blasts drowned their voices utterly. However, one by one they straggled in at last and took shelter under the tent, cold, scared, and streaming with water; but to have company in misery seemed something to be grateful for. They could not talk, the old sail flapped so furiously, even if the other noises would have allowed them. The tempest rose higher and higher, and presently the sail tore loose from its fastenings and went winging away on the blast. The boys seized each others' hands and fled, with many tumblings and bruises, to the shelter of a great oak that stood upon the river-bank. Now the battle was at its highest. Under the ceaseless conflagration of lightning that flamed in the skies, everything below stood out in clean-cut and shadowless distinctness: the bending trees, the billowy river, white with foam, the driving spray of spume-flakes, the dim outlines of the high bluffs on the other side, glimpsed through the drifting cloud-rack and the slanting veil of rain. Every little while some giant tree yielded the fight and fell crashing through the younger growth; and the unflagging thunder-peals came now in ear-splitting explosive bursts, keen and sharp, and unspeakably appalling. The storm culminated in one matchless effort that seemed likely to tear the island to pieces, burn it up, drown it to the tree-tops, blow it away, and deafen every creature in it, all at one and the same moment. It was a wild night for homeless young heads to be out in. But at last the battle was done, and the forces retired with weaker and weaker threatenings and grumblings, and peace resumed her sway. The boys went back to camp, a good deal awed; but they found there was still something to be thankful for, because the great sycamore, the shelter of their beds, was a ruin, now, blasted by the lightnings, and they were not under it when the catastrophe happened. Everything in camp was drenched, the camp-fire as well; for they were but heedless lads, like their generation, and had made no provision against rain. Here was matter for dismay, for they were soaked through and chilled. They were eloquent in their distress; but they presently discovered that the fire had eaten so far up under the great log it had been built against (where it curved upward and separated itself from the ground), that a handbreadth or so of it had escaped wetting; so they patiently wrought until, with shreds and bark gathered from the under sides of sheltered logs, they coaxed the fire to burn again. Then they piled on great dead boughs till they had a roaring furnace, and were glad-hearted once more. They dried their boiled ham and had a feast, and after that they sat by the fire and expanded and glorified their midnight adventure until morning, for there was not a dry spot to sleep on, anywhere around. As the sun began to steal in upon the boys, drowsiness came over them, and they went out on the sandbar and lay down to sleep. They got scorched out by and by, and drearily set about getting breakfast. After the meal they felt rusty, and stiff-jointed, and a little homesick once more. Tom saw the signs, and fell to cheering up the pirates as well as he could. But they cared nothing for marbles, or circus, or swimming, or anything. He reminded them of the imposing secret, and raised a ray of cheer. While it lasted, he got them interested in a new device. This was to knock off being pirates, for a while, and be Indians for a change. They were attracted by this idea; so it was not long before they were stripped, and striped from head to heel with black mud, like so many zebras--all of them chiefs, of course--and then they went tearing through the woods to attack an English settlement. By and by they separated into three hostile tribes, and darted upon each other from ambush with dreadful war-whoops, and killed and scalped each other by thousands. It was a gory day. Consequently it was an extremely satisfactory one. They assembled in camp toward supper-time, hungry and happy; but now a difficulty arose--hostile Indians could not break the bread of hospitality together without first making peace, and this was a simple impossibility without smoking a pipe of peace. There was no other process that ever they had heard of. Two of the savages almost wished they had remained pirates. However, there was no other way; so with such show of cheerfulness as they could muster they called for the pipe and took their whiff as it passed, in due form. And behold, they were glad they had gone into savagery, for they had gained something; they found that they could now smoke a little without having to go and hunt for a lost knife; they did not get sick enough to be seriously uncomfortable. They were not likely to fool away this high promise for lack of effort. No, they practised cautiously, after supper, with right fair success, and so they spent a jubilant evening. They were prouder and happier in their new acquirement than they would have been in the scalping and skinning of the Six Nations. We will leave them to smoke and chatter and brag, since we have no further use for them at present. CHAPTER XVII BUT there was no hilarity in the little town that same tranquil Saturday afternoon. The Harpers, and Aunt Polly's family, were being put into mourning, with great grief and many tears. An unusual quiet possessed the village, although it was ordinarily quiet enough, in all conscience. The villagers conducted their concerns with an absent air, and talked little; but they sighed often. The Saturday holiday seemed a burden to the children. They had no heart in their sports, and gradually gave them up. In the afternoon Becky Thatcher found herself moping about the deserted schoolhouse yard, and feeling very melancholy. But she found nothing there to comfort her. She soliloquized: "Oh, if I only had a brass andiron-knob again! But I haven't got anything now to remember him by." And she choked back a little sob. Presently she stopped, and said to herself: "It was right here. Oh, if it was to do over again, I wouldn't say that--I wouldn't say it for the whole world. But he's gone now; I'll never, never, never see him any more." This thought broke her down, and she wandered away, with tears rolling down her cheeks. Then quite a group of boys and girls--playmates of Tom's and Joe's--came by, and stood looking over the paling fence and talking in reverent tones of how Tom did so-and-so the last time they saw him, and how Joe said this and that small trifle (pregnant with awful prophecy, as they could easily see now!)--and each speaker pointed out the exact spot where the lost lads stood at the time, and then added something like "and I was a-standing just so--just as I am now, and as if you was him--I was as close as that--and he smiled, just this way--and then something seemed to go all over me, like--awful, you know--and I never thought what it meant, of course, but I can see now!" Then there was a dispute about who saw the dead boys last in life, and many claimed that dismal distinction, and offered evidences, more or less tampered with by the witness; and when it was ultimately decided who DID see the departed last, and exchanged the last words with them, the lucky parties took upon themselves a sort of sacred importance, and were gaped at and envied by all the rest. One poor chap, who had no other grandeur to offer, said with tolerably manifest pride in the remembrance: "Well, Tom Sawyer he licked me once." But that bid for glory was a failure. Most of the boys could say that, and so that cheapened the distinction too much. The group loitered away, still recalling memories of the lost heroes, in awed voices. When the Sunday-school hour was finished, the next morning, the bell began to toll, instead of ringing in the usual way. It was a very still Sabbath, and the mournful sound seemed in keeping with the musing hush that lay upon nature. The villagers began to gather, loitering a moment in the vestibule to converse in whispers about the sad event. But there was no whispering in the house; only the funereal rustling of dresses as the women gathered to their seats disturbed the silence there. None could remember when the little church had been so full before. There was finally a waiting pause, an expectant dumbness, and then Aunt Polly entered, followed by Sid and Mary, and they by the Harper family, all in deep black, and the whole congregation, the old minister as well, rose reverently and stood until the mourners were seated in the front pew. There was another communing silence, broken at intervals by muffled sobs, and then the minister spread his hands abroad and prayed. A moving hymn was sung, and the text followed: "I am the Resurrection and the Life." As the service proceeded, the clergyman drew such pictures of the graces, the winning ways, and the rare promise of the lost lads that every soul there, thinking he recognized these pictures, felt a pang in remembering that he had persistently blinded himself to them always before, and had as persistently seen only faults and flaws in the poor boys. The minister related many a touching incident in the lives of the departed, too, which illustrated their sweet, generous natures, and the people could easily see, now, how noble and beautiful those episodes were, and remembered with grief that at the time they occurred they had seemed rank rascalities, well deserving of the cowhide. The congregation became more and more moved, as the pathetic tale went on, till at last the whole company broke down and joined the weeping mourners in a chorus of anguished sobs, the preacher himself giving way to his feelings, and crying in the pulpit. There was a rustle in the gallery, which nobody noticed; a moment later the church door creaked; the minister raised his streaming eyes above his handkerchief, and stood transfixed! First one and then another pair of eyes followed the minister's, and then almost with one impulse the congregation rose and stared while the three dead boys came marching up the aisle, Tom in the lead, Joe next, and Huck, a ruin of drooping rags, sneaking sheepishly in the rear! They had been hid in the unused gallery listening to their own funeral sermon! Aunt Polly, Mary, and the Harpers threw themselves upon their restored ones, smothered them with kisses and poured out thanksgivings, while poor Huck stood abashed and uncomfortable, not knowing exactly what to do or where to hide from so many unwelcoming eyes. He wavered, and started to slink away, but Tom seized him and said: "Aunt Polly, it ain't fair. Somebody's got to be glad to see Huck." "And so they shall. I'm glad to see him, poor motherless thing!" And the loving attentions Aunt Polly lavished upon him were the one thing capable of making him more uncomfortable than he was before. Suddenly the minister shouted at the top of his voice: "Praise God from whom all blessings flow--SING!--and put your hearts in it!" And they did. Old Hundred swelled up with a triumphant burst, and while it shook the rafters Tom Sawyer the Pirate looked around upon the envying juveniles about him and confessed in his heart that this was the proudest moment of his life. As the "sold" congregation trooped out they said they would almost be willing to be made ridiculous again to hear Old Hundred sung like that once more. Tom got more cuffs and kisses that day--according to Aunt Polly's varying moods--than he had earned before in a year; and he hardly knew which expressed the most gratefulness to God and affection for himself. 
7147	----	THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA BY JOHN FINLEY PREFACE Most of what is here written was spoken many months ago in the Amphithéâtre Richelieu of the Sorbonne, in Paris, and some of it in Lille, Nancy, Dijon, Lyons, Grenoble, Montpellier, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Poitiers, Rennes, and Caen; and all of it was in the American publisher's hands before the great war came, effacing, with its nearer adventures, perils, sufferings, and anxieties, the dim memories of the days when the French pioneers were out in the Mississippi Valley, "The Heart of America." As it was spoken, the purpose was to freshen and brighten for the French the memory of what some of them had seemingly wished to forget and to visualize to them the vigorous, hopeful, achieving life that is passing before that background of Gallic venturing and praying. It was planned also to publish the book simultaneously in France; and, less than a week before the then undreamed-of war, the manuscript was carried for that purpose to Paris and left for translation in the hands of Madame Boutroux, the wife of the beloved and eminent Émile Boutroux, head of the Fondation Thiers, and sister of the illustrious Henri Poincaré. But wounded soldiers soon came to fill the chambers of the scholars there, and the wife and mother has had to give all her thought to those who have hazarded their all for the France that is. But it was my hope that what was spoken in Paris might some day be read in America, and particularly in that valley which the French evoked from the unknown, that those who now live there might know before what a valorous background they are passing, though I can tell them less of it than they will learn from the Homeric Parkman, if they will but read his immortal story. My first debt is to him; but I must include with him many who made their contributions to these pages as I wrote them in Paris. The quotation- marks, diligent and faithful as they have tried to be, have, I fear, not reached all who have assisted, but my gratitude extends to every source of fact and to every guide of opinion along the way, from the St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, even if I have not in every instance known or remembered his name. As without Parkman's long labors I could not have prepared these chapters, so without the occasion furnished by the Hyde Foundation and the nomination made by the President of Harvard University to the exchange lectureship, I should not have undertaken this delightful filial task. The readers' enjoyment and profit of the result will not be the full measure of my gratitude to Mr. James H. Hyde, the author of the Foundation, to President Lowell, and to him whose confidence in me persuaded me to it. But I hope these enjoyments and profits will add something to what I cannot adequately express. That what was written could, in the midst of official duties, be prepared for the press is due largely to the patient, verifying, proof-reading labors of Mr. Frank L. Tolman, my young associate in the State Library. The title of this book (appearing first as the general title for some of these chapters in _Scribner's Magazine_ in 1912) has a purely geographical connotation. But I advise the reader, in these days of bitterness, to go no further if he carry any hatred in his heart. JOHN FINLEY. STATE EDUCATION BUILDING, ALBANY, N. Y. Washington's Birthday, 1915. CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION II. FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES III. THE PATHS OF THE GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS IV. FROM THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF V. THE RIVER COLBERT: A COURSE AND SCENE OF EMPIRE VI. THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE AND THE DREAM OF ITS REVIVAL VII. THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS VIII. THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN IX. IN THE TRAILS OF THE COUREURS DE BOIS X. IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN" XI WESTERN CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM FRENCH FORTS XII. WESTERN TOWNS AND CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM FRENCH PORTAGE PATHS XIII. FROM LA SALLE TO LINCOLN XIV. THE VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY XV. WASHINGTON: THE UNION OF THE EASTERN AND THE WESTERN WATERS XVI. THE PRODUCERS XVII. THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW XVIII. "THE MEN OF ALWAYS" XIX. THE HEART OF AMERICA EPILOGUE THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA From "a series of letters to a friend in England," in 1793, "tending to shew the probable rise and grandeur of the American Empire": "_It struck me as a natural object of enquiry to what a future increase and elevation of magnitude and grandeur the spreading empire of America might attain, when a country had thus suddenly risen from an uninhabited wild, to the quantum of population necessary to govern and regulate its own administration._" G. IMLAY ("A captain in the American Army during the late war, and a commissioner for laying out land in the back settlements"). CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION I address the reader as living in the land from which the pioneers of France went out to America; first, because I wrote these chapters in that land, a few steps from the Seine; second, because I should otherwise have to assume the familiarity of the reader with much that I have gathered into these chapters, though the reader may have forgotten or never known it; and, third, because I wish the reader to look at these new-world regions from without, and, standing apart and aloof, to see the present restless life of these valleys, especially of the Mississippi Valley, against the background of Gallic adventure and pious endeavor which is seen in richest color, highest charm, and truest value at a distance. But, while I must ask my readers in America to expatriate themselves in their imaginations and to look over into this valley as aliens, I wish them to know that I write, though myself in temporary exile, as a son of the Mississippi Valley, as a geographical descendant of France; that my commission is given me of my love for the boundless stretch of prairie and plain whose virgin sod I have broken with my plough; of the lure of the waterways and roads where I have followed the boats and the trails of French voyageurs and coureurs de bois; and of the possessing interest of the epic story of the development of that most virile democracy known to the world. The "Divine River," discovered by the French, ran near the place of my birth. My county was that of "La Salle," a division of the land of the Illinois, "the land of men." The Fort, or the Rock, St. Louis, built by La Salle and Tonty, was only a few miles distant. A little farther, a town, Marquette, stands near the place where the French priest and explorer, Père Marquette, ministered to the Indians. Up-stream, a busy city keeps the name of Joliet on the lips of thousands, though the brave explorer would doubtless not recognize it as his own; and below, the new- made Hennepin Canal makes a shorter course to the Mississippi River than that which leads by the ruins of La Salle's Fort Crèvecoeur. It is of such environment that these chapters were suggested, and it has been by my love for it, rather than by any profound scholarship, that they have been dictated. I write not as a scholar--since most of my life has been spent in action, not in study--but as an academic coureur de bois and of what I have known and seen in the Valley of Democracy, the fairest and most fruitful of the regions where France was pioneer in America. There should be written in further preface to all the chapters which follow a paragraph from the beloved historian to whom I am most indebted and of whom I shall speak later at length. I first read its entrancing sentences when a youth in college, a quarter of a century ago, and I have never been free of its spell. I would have it written not only in France but somewhere at the northern portals of the American continent, on the cliffs of the Saguenay, or on that Rock of Quebec which saw the first vessel of the French come up the river and supported the last struggle for formal dominion of a land which the French can never lose, _except by forgetting_: "Again their ghostly camp-fires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for Civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism. Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath of the cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage hordes with a mild, parental sway, and stood serene before the direst shapes of death. Men of courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of a far-reaching ancestry, here, with their dauntless hardihood, put to shame the boldest sons of toil." [Footnote: Parkman: "Pioneers of France in the New World." New library edition. Introduction, xii-xiii.] These are the regions we are to explore, and these are the men with whom we are to begin the journey. CHAPTER II FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES We shall not be able to enter the valley of the Mississippi in this chapter. There is a long stretch of the nearer valley of the St. Lawrence that must first be traversed. Just before I left America in 1910 two men flew in a balloon from St. Louis, the very centre of the Mississippi Valley, to the Labrador gate of the St. Lawrence, the vestibule valley, in a few hours, but it took the French pioneers a whole century and more to make their way out to where those aviators began their flight. We have but a few pages for a journey over a thousand miles of stream and portage and a hundred years of time. I must therefore leave most of the details of suffering from the rigors of the north, starvation, and the Iroquois along the way to your memories, or to your fresh reading of Parkman, Winsor, Fiske, and Thwaites in English, or to Le Clercq, Lescarbot, Champlain, Charlevoix, Sagard, and others in French. The story of the exploration and settlement of those valleys beyond the cod-banks of Newfoundland begins not in the ports of Spain or Portugal, nor in England, but in a little town on the coast of France, standing on a rocky promontory thrust out into the sea, only a few hours' ride from Paris, in the ancient town of St. Malo, the "nursery of hardy mariners," the cradle of the spirit of the West. [Footnote: After reaching Paris on my first journey, the first place to which I made a pilgrimage, even before the tombs of kings and emperors and the galleries of art, was this gray-bastioned town of St. Malo.] For a son of France was the first of Europeans, so far as we certainly know, to penetrate beyond the tidewater of those confronting coasts, the first to step over the threshold of the unguessed continent, north, at any rate, of Mexico. Columbus claimed at most but an Asiatic peninsula, though he knew that he had found only islands. The Cabots, in the service of England, sailing along its mysterious shores, had touched but the fringe of the wondrous garment. Ponce de Leon, a Spaniard, had floundered a few leagues from the sea in Florida searching for the fountain of youth. Narvaez had found the wretched village of Appalache but had been refused admission by the turbid Mississippi and was carried out to an ocean grave by its fierce current; Verrazano, an Italian in the employ of France, living at Rouen, had entered the harbor of New York, had enjoyed the primitive hospitality of what is now a most fashionable seaside resort (Newport), had seen the peaks of the White Mountains from his deck, and, as he supposed, had looked upon the Indian Ocean, or the Sea of Verrazano, which has shrunk to the Chesapeake Bay on our modern maps and now reaches not a fiftieth part of the way to the other shore. It was a true son of France who first had the persistence of courage and the endurance of imagination to enter the continent and see the gates close behind him--Jacques Cartier, a master pilot of St. Malo, commissioned of his own intrepid desire and of the jealous ambition of King Francis I to bring fresh tidings of the mysterious "square gulf," which other Frenchmen, Denys and Aubert, may have entered a quarter of a century earlier, and which it was hoped might disclose a passage to the Indies. It was from St. Malo that Carrier set sail on the highroad to Cathay, as he imagined, one April day in 1534 in two ships of sixty tons each. [Footnote: I crossed back over the same ocean, nearly four hundred years later, to a French port in a steamship of a tonnage equal to that of a fleet of four hundred of Carrier's boats; so has the sea bred giant children of such hardy parentage.] There is preserved in St. Malo what is thought to be a list of those who signed the ship's papers subscribed under Carrier's own hand. It is no such instrument as the "Compact" which the men of the _Mayflower_ signed as they approached the continent nearly a century later, but it is none the less fateful. The autumn leaves had not yet fallen from the trees of Brittany when the two ships that started out in April appeared again in the harbor of St. Malo, carrying two dusky passengers from the New World as proofs of Carrier's ventures. He had made reconnoissance of the gulf behind Newfoundland and returned for fresh means of farther quest toward Cathay. The leaves were but come again on the trees of Brittany when, with a larger crew in three small vessels (one of only forty tons), he again went out with the ebb-tide from St. Malo; his men, some of whom had been gathered from the jails, having all made their confession and attended mass, and received the benediction of the bishop. In August he entered the great river St. Lawrence, whose volume of water was so great as to brighten Carrier's hopes of having found the northern way to India. On he sailed, with his two dusky captives for pilots, seeing with regret the banks of the river gradually draw together and hearing unwelcome word of the freshening of its waters--on past the "gorge of the gloomy Saguenay with its towering cliffs and sullen depths, depths which no sounding-line can fathom, and heights at whose dizzy verge the wheeling eagle seems a speck"; on past frowning promontory and wild vineyards, to the foot of the scarped cliff of Quebec, now "rich with heroic memories, then but the site of a nameless barbarism"; thence, after parley with the Indian chief Donnacona and his people, on through walls of autumn foliage and frost- touched meadows to where the Lachine Rapids mocked with unceasing laughter those who dreamed of an easy way to China. There, entertained at the Indian capital, he was led to the top of a hill, such as Montmartre, from whose height he saw his Cathay fade into a stretch of leafy desert bounded only by the horizon and threaded by two narrow but hopeful ribbons of water. There, hundreds of miles from the sea, he stood, probably the only European, save for his companions, inside the continent, between Mexico and the Pole; for De Soto had not yet started for his burial in the Mississippi; the fathers of the Pilgrim Fathers were still in their cradles; Narvaez's men had come a little way in shore and vanished; Cabeça de Vaca was making his almost incredible journey from the Texas coast to the Pacific; Captain John Smith was not yet born; and Henry Hudson's name was to remain obscure for three quarters of a century. Francis I had sneeringly inquired of Charles V if he and the King of Portugal had parcelled out the world between them, and asked to see the last will and testament of the patriarch Adam. If King Francis had been permitted to see it, he would have found a codicil for France written that day against the bull of Pope Alexander VI and against the hazy English claim of the Cabots. For the river, "the greatest without comparison," as Cartier reported later to his king, "that is known to have ever been seen," carried drainage title to a realm larger many times than all the lands of the Seine and the Rhone and the Loire, and richer many times than the land of spices to which the falls of Lachine, "the greatest and swiftest fall of water that any where hath beene scene," seemed now to guard the way. "Hochelaga" the Indians called their city--the capital of the river into which the sea had narrowed, a thousand miles inland from the coasts of Labrador which but a few years before were the dim verge of the world and were believed even then to be infested with griffins and fiends--a city which vanished within the next three quarters of a century. For when Champlain came in 1611 to this site to build his outpost, not a trace was left of the palisades which Cartier describes and one of his men pictures, not an Indian was left of the population that gave such cordial welcome to Cartier. And for all Champlain's planning it was still a meadow and a forest--the spring flowers "blooming in the young grass" and birds of varied plumage flitting "among the boughs"--when the mystic and soldier Maisonneuve and his associates of Montreal, forty men and four women, in an enterprise conceived in the ancient Church of St. Germain-des-Prés and consecrated to the Holy Family by a solemn ceremonial at Notre-Dame, knelt upon this same ground in 1642 before the hastily reared and decorated altar while Father Vimont, standing in rich vestments, addressed them. "You are," he said, "a grain of mustard-seed that shall rise and grow till its branches overshadow the earth. You are few, but your work is the work of God. His smile is on you and your children shall fill the land." [Footnote: François Dollier de Casson, "Histoire du Montreal," quoted in Parkman's "Jesuits in North America," p. 209, a free rendering of the original. "Voyez-vous, messieurs, dit-il, ce que vous voyez n'est qu'un grain de moutarde, mais il est jeté par des mains si pieuses et animées de l'esprit de la foi et de la religion que sans doute il faut que le ciele est de grands desseins puisqu'il se sert de tels ouvriers, et je ne fais aucun doute que ce petit grain ne produise un grand arbre, ne fasse un jour des merveilles, ne soit multiplié et ne s'étende de toutes parts."] Parkman (from the same French authority) finishes the picture of the memorable day: "The afternoon waned; the sun sank behind the western forest, and twilight came on. Fireflies were twinkling over the darkened meadow. They caught them, tied them with threads into shining festoons and hung them before the altar, where the Host remained exposed. Then they pitched their tents, lighted their bivouac fires, stationed their guards and lay down to rest. Such was the birth-night of Montreal." [Footnote: François Dollier de Casson, "Histoire du Montreal," quoted in Parkman's "Jesuits in North America," p. 209, a free rendering of the original. "On avait point de lampes ardentes devant le St. Sacrement, mais on avait certaines mouches brillantes qui y luisaient fort agréablement jour et nuit étant suspendues par des filets d'une façon admirable et belle, et toute propre à honorer selon la rusticité de ce pays barbare, le plus adorable de nos mystères."] On the both of September in 1910 two hundred thousand people knelt in that same place before an out-of-door altar, and the incandescent lights were the fireflies of a less romantic and a more practical age. Maisonneuve and Mademoiselle Mance would have been enraptured by such a scene, but it would have given even greater satisfaction to the pilot of St. Malo if he could have seen that commercial capital of the north lying beneath the mountain which still bears the name he gave it, and stretching far beyond the bounds of the palisaded Hochelaga. It should please France to know that nearly two hundred thousand French keep the place of the footprint of the first pioneer, Jacques Cartier. When a few weeks before my coming to France I was making my way by a trail down the side of Mount Royal through the trees--some of which may have been there in Cartier's day--two lads, one of as beautiful face as I have ever seen, though tear-stained, emerged from the bushes and begged me, in a language which Jacques Cartier would have understood better than I, to show them the way back to "rue St. Maurice," which I did, finding that street to be only a few paces from the place where Champlain had made a clearing for his "Place Royale" in the midst of the forest three hundred years ago. That beautiful boy, Jacques Jardin, brown-eyed, bare-kneed, in French soldier's cap, is to me the living incarnation of the adventure which has made even that chill wilderness blossom as a garden in Brittany. But to come back to Cartier. It was too late in the season to make further explorations where the two rivers invited to the west and northwest, so Cartier joined the companions who had been left near Quebec to build a fort and make ready for the winter. As if to recall that bitter weather, the hail beat upon the windows of the museum at St. Malo on the day when I was examining there the relics of the vessel which Cartier was obliged to leave in the Canadian river, because so many of his men had died of scurvy and exposure that he had not sufficient crew to man the three ships home. And probably not a man would have been left and not even the _Grande Hermine_ would have come back if a specific for scurvy had not been found before the end of the winter--a decoction learned of the Indians and made from the bark or leaves of a tree so efficacious that if all the "doctors of Lorraine and Montpellier had been there, with all the drugs of Alexandria, they could not have done so much in a year as the said tree did in six days; for it profited us so much that all those who would use it recovered health and soundness, thanks to God." Cartier appears again in July, 1536, before the ramparts of St. Malo with two of his vessels. The savages on the St. Charles were given the _Petite Hermine_, [Footnote: James Phinney Baxter, "A Memoir of Jacques Cartier," p. 200, writes: "The remains of this ship, the _Petite Hermine_, were discovered in 1843, in the river St. Charles, at the mouth of the rivulet known as the Lairet. These precious relics were found buried under five feet of mud, and were divided into two portions, one of which was placed in the museum of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, and destroyed by fire in 1854. The other portion was sent to the museum at St. Malo, where it now remains. For a particular account _vide Le Canadien_ of August 25, and the _Quebec Gazette_ of August 30, 1843; 'Transactions of the Quebec Literary and Historical Society for 1862'; and 'Picturesque Quebec,' Le Moine, Montreal, 1862, pp. 484-7."] its nails being accepted in part requital for the temporary loss of their chief. Donnacona, whom Cartier kidnapped. A cross was left standing on the shores of the St. Lawrence with the fleur-de-lis planted near it. Donnacona was presented to King Francis and baptized, and with all his exiled companions save one was buried, where I have not yet learned, but probably somewhere out on that headland of France nearest Stadacone, the seat of his lost kingdom. Cartier busied himself in St. Malo (or Limoilou) till called upon, in 1541, when peace was restored in France to take the post of captain- general of a new expedition under Sieur de Roberval, "Lord of Norembega, Viceroy and Lieutenant-General of Canada, Hochelaga, Saguenay, Newfoundland, Belle Isle, Carpunt, Labrador, the Great Bay and Baccalaos," [Footnote: Baxter, "Memoir of Jacques Cartier," note, p. 40, writes: "These titles are given on the authority of Charlevoix, 'Histoire de la Nouvelle France,' Paris, 1744, tome I, p. 32. Reference, however, to the letters patent of January 15, 1540, from which he professes to quote and which are still preserved and can be identified as the same which he says were to be found in the Etat Ordinaire des Guerres in the Chambre des Comptes at Paris, does not bear out his statement."] with a commission of discovery, settlement, and conversion of the Indians, and with power to ransack the prisons for material with which to carry out these ambitious and pious designs, thereby, as the king said, employing "clemency in doing a merciful and meritorious work toward some criminals and malefactors, that by this they may recognize the Creator by rendering Him thanks, and amending their lives." Again Cartier (Roberval having failed to arrive in time) sets out; again he passes the gloomy Saguenay and the cliff of Quebec; again he leaves his companions to prepare for the winter; again he ascends the river to explore the rapids, still dreaming of the way to Asia; again after a miserable winter he sails back to France, eluding Roberval a year late, and carrying but a few worthless quartz diamonds and a little sham gold. Then Roberval, the Lord of Norembega, reigns alone in his vast and many-titled domain, for another season of snows and famine, freely using the lash and gibbet to keep his penal colonists in subjection; and then, according to some authorities, supported by the absence of Carder's name from the local records of St. Malo for a few months, Cartier was sent out to bring the Lord of Norembega home. So Cartier's name passes from the pages of history, even if it still appears again in the records of St. Malo, and he spends the rest of his days on the rugged little peninsula thrust out from France toward the west, as it were a hand. A few miles out of St. Malo the Breton tenants of the Cartier manor, Port Cartier, to-day carry their cauliflower and carrots to market and seemingly wonder at my curiosity in seeking Cartier's birthplace rather than Châteaubriand's tomb. It were far fitter that Cartier instead of Châteaubriand should have been buried out on the "Plage" beyond the ramparts, exiled for a part of every day by the sea, for the amphibious life of this master pilot, going in and out of the harbor with the tide, had added to France a thousand miles of coast and river, had opened the door of the new world, beyond the banks of the Baccalaos, to the imaginations of Europe, and unwittingly showed the way not to Asia, but to a valley with which Asia had nothing to compare. For a half century after Cartier's home bringing of Roberval--the very year that De Soto's men quitted in misery the lower valley of the Mississippi--there is no record of a sail upon the river St. Lawrence. Hochelaga became a waste, its tenants annihilated or scattered, and Cartier's fort was all but obliterated. The ambitious symbols of empire were alternately buried in snows and blistered by heat. France had too much to think of at home. But still, as Parkman says, "the wandering Esquimaux saw the Norman and Breton sails hovering around some lonely headland or anchored in fleets in the harbor of St. John, and still through salt spray and driving mist, the fishermen dragged up the riches of the sea." For "codfish must still be had for Lent and fast-days." Another authority pictures the Breton babies of this period playing with trinkets made of walrus tusks, and the Norman maidens decked in furs brought by their brothers from the shores of Anticosti and Labrador. Meanwhile in Brouage on the Bay of Biscay a boy is born whose spirit, nourished of the tales of the new world, is to make a permanent colony where Cartier had found and left a wilderness, and is to write his name foremost on the "bright roll of forest chivalry"--Samuel Champlain. Once the sea, I am told, touched the massive walls of Brouage. There are still to be seen, several feet below the surface, rings to which mariners and fishermen moored their boats--they who used to come to Brouage for salt with which to cure their fish, they whose stories of the Newfoundland cod-banks stirred in the boy Champlain the desire for discovery beyond their fogs. The boys in the school of Hiers-Brouage a mile away--in the Mairie where I went to consult the parish records--seemed to know hardly more of that land which the Brouage boy of three centuries before had lifted out of the fogs by his lifelong heroic adventures than did the boy Champlain, which makes me feel that till all French children know of, and all American children remember Brouage, the story of France in America needs to be retold. The St. Lawrence Valley has not forgotten, but I could not learn that a citizen of the Mississippi Valley had made recent pilgrimage to this spot. [Footnote: For an interesting account of Brouage to-day, see "Acadiensis," 4:226.] In the year of Champlain's birth the frightful colonial tragedy in Florida was nearing its end. By the year 1603 he had, in Spanish employ, made a voyage of two years in the West Indies, the unique illustrated journal [Footnote: "Brief Discours des Choses plus remarquables que Sammuel Champlain de Brouage, reconnues aux Indies Occidentalles au voiage qu'il en a faict en icelles en l'annee V'C IIIJ'XX XIX (1599) et en l'annee VJ'C J (1601) comme ensuite." Now in English translation by Hakluyt Society, 1859.] of which in his own hand was for two centuries and more in Dieppe, but has recently been acquired by a library in the United States [Footnote: The John Carter Brown Library at Providence, R. I.]--a journal most precious especially in its prophecy of the Panama Canal: [Footnote: Several earlier Spanish suggestions for a canal had been made. See M. F. Johnson, "Four Centuries of the Panama Canal."] "One might judge, if the territory four leagues in extent, lying between Panama and the river were cut thru, he could pass from the south sea to that on the other side, and thus shorten the route by more than fifteen hundred leagues. From Panama to Magellan would constitute an island, and from Panama to Newfoundland would constitute another, so that the whole of America would be in two islands." He had also made one expedition to the St. Lawrence, reaching the deserted Hochelaga, seeing the Lachine Rapids, and getting vague reports of the unknown West. He must have been back in Paris in time to see the eleven survivors of La Roche's unsuccessful expedition of 1590, who, having lived twelve years and more on Sable Island, were rescued and brought before King Henry IV, "standing like river gods" in their long beards and clad in shaggy skins. During the next three years this indefatigable, resourceful pioneer assisted in founding Acadia and exploring the Atlantic coast southward. Boys and girls in America are familiar with the story of the dispersion of the Acadians, a century and more later, as preserved in our literature by the poet Longfellow. But doubtless not one in a hundred thousand has ever read the earlier chapters of that Aeneid. The best and the meanest of France were of the company that set out from Dieppe to be its colonists: men of highest condition and character, and vagabonds, Catholic priests and Huguenot ministers, soldiers and artisans. There were theological discussions which led to blows before the colonists were far at sea. Fiske, the historian, says the "ship's atmosphere grew as musty with texts and as acrid with quibbles as that of a room at the Sorbonne." There was the incident of the wandering of Nicolas Aubry, "more skilled in the devious windings of the [Latin Quarter] than in the intricacies of the Acadian Forest," where he was lost for sixteen days and subsisted on berries and wild fruits; there was the ravage of the relentless maladie de terre, scurvy, for which Cartier's specific could not be found though the woods were scoured; there were the explorations of beaches and harbors and islands and rivers, including the future Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth, and the accurate mapping of all that coast now so familiar; there were the arrivals of the ship _Jonas_ once with temporal supplies and again, as the _Mayflower of the Jesuits_, with spiritual teachers; there was the "Order of Good Times," which flourished with as good cheer and as good food at Port Royal in the solitude of the continent as the gourmands at the Rue aux Ours had in Paris and that, too, at a cheaper rate; [Footnote: "Though the epicures of Paris often tell us we have no Rue aux Ours over there, as a rule we made as good cheer as we could have in this same Rue aux Ours and at less cost." Lescarbot, "Champlain Society Publication," 7:342.] there was later the news of the death of Henry IV heard from a fisherman of Newfoundland; and there was, above all else except the "indomitable tenacity" of Champlain, the unquenchable enthusiasm, lively fancy, and good sense of Lescarbot, the verse-making advocate from Paris. There is so much of tragic suffering and gloom in all this epic of the forests that one is tempted to spend more time than one ought, perhaps, on that bit of European clearing (the only spot, save one, as yet in all the continent north of Florida and Mexico), in the jolly companionship of that young poet-lawyer who had doubtless sat under lecturers in Paris and who would certainly have been quite as capable and entertaining as any lecturers on the new world brought in these later days from America to Paris, a man "who won the good-will of all and spared himself naught," "who daily invented something for the public good," and who gave the strongest proof of what advantage "a new settlement might derive from a mind cultivated by study and induced by patriotism to use its knowledge and reflections." It cannot seem unworthy of the serious purpose of this book to let the continent lie a few minutes longer in its savage slumber, or, as the Jesuits thought it, "blasted beneath the sceptre of hell," while we accompany Poutrincourt and Champlain, returning wounded and weather-beaten from inspecting the coast of New England, to find the buildings of Port Royal, under Lescarbot's care, bright with lights, and an improvised arch bearing the arms of Poutrincourt and De Monts, to be received by Neptune, who, accompanied by a retinue of Tritons, declaimed Alexandrine couplets of praise and welcome, and to sit at the sumptuous table of the Order of Good Times, of which I have just spoken, furnished by this same lawyer- poet's agricultural industry. We may even stop a moment longer to hear his stately appeal to France, which, heeded by her, would have made Lescarbot's a name familiar in the homes of America instead of one known only to those who delve in libraries: "France, fair eye of the universe, nurse from old of letters and of arms, resource to the afflicted, strong stay to the Christian religion, Dear Mother ... your children, our fathers and predecessors, have of old been masters of the sea.... They have with great power occupied Asia.... They have carried the arms and the name of France to the east and south.... All these are marks of your greatness, ... but you must now enter again upon old paths, in so far as they have been abandoned, and expand the bounds of your piety, justice and humanity, by teaching these things to the nations of New France.... Our ancient practice of the sea must be revived, we must ally the east with the west and convert those people to God before the end of the world come.... You must make an alliance in imitation of the course of the sun, for as he daily carries his light hence to New France, so let your civilization, your light, be carried thither by your children, who henceforth, by the frequent voyages they shall make to these western lands, shall be called children of the sea, which is, being interpreted, children of the west." [Footnote: Lescarbot, "Histoire de la Nouvelle France," 1618, pp. 15-22.] "Children of the west." His fervid appeal found as little response then as doubtless it would find if made to-day, and the children of the sea were interpreted as the children of the south of Africa. The sons of France have ever loved their homes. They have, except the adventurous few, preferred to remain children of the rivers and the sea of their fathers, and so it is that few of Gallic blood were "spawned," to use Lescarbot's metaphor, in that chill continent, though the venturing or missionary spirit of such as Cartier and Champlain, Poutrincourt and De Monts gave spawn of such heroism and unselfish sacrifice as have made millions in America whom we now call "children of the west," geographical offspring of Brittany and Normandy and Picardy. The lilies of France and the escutcheons of De Monts and Poutrincourt, painted by Lescarbot for the castle in the wilderness, faded; the sea which Lescarbot, as Neptune, impersonated in the pageant of welcome, and the English ships received back those who had not been gathered into the cemetery on land; and the first agricultural colony in the northern wilds lapsed for a time at least into a fur traders' station or a place of call for fishermen. It was only by locating these points on Champlain's map of Port Royal that I was able to find in 1911 the site of the ancient fort, garden, fish- pond, and cemetery. The men unloading a schooner a few rods away seemed not to know of Lescarbot or Poutrincourt or even Champlain, but that was perhaps because they were not accustomed to my tongue. The unquiet Champlain left Acadia in the summer of 1607, the charter having been withdrawn by the king. In the winter of 1607-8 he walked the streets of Paris as in a dream, we are told, longing for the northern wilderness, where he had left his heart four years before. In the spring of 1608 the white whales are floundering around his lonely ship in the river of his dreams. At the foot of the gray rock of Quebec he makes the beginning of a fort, whence he plans to go forth to trace the rivers to their sources, discover, perchance, a northern route to the Indies, and make a path for the priests to the countless savages "in bondage of Satan." Parkman speaks of him as the "Aeneas of a destined people," and he is generally called the "father of Canada." But I think of him rather as a Prometheus who, after his years of bravest defiance of elements and Indians, is to have his heart plucked out day by day, chained to that same gray rock--only that death instead of Herculean succor came. There is space for only the briefest recital of the exploits and endurances of the stout heart and hardy frame of the man of whom any people of any time might well be proud. The founding of Quebec, the rearing of the pile of wooden buildings where the lower town now stretches along the river; the unsuccessful plot to kill Champlain before the fort is finished; the death of all of the twenty-eight men save eight before the coming of the first spring--these are the incidents of the first chapter. The visit to the Iroquois country; the discovery of the lake that bears his name; the first portentous collision with the Indians of the Five Nations, undertaken to keep the friendship of the Indian tribes along the St. Lawrence; a winter in France; the breaking of ground for a post at Montreal; another visit to France to find means for the rescue and sustenance of his fading colony, make a depressing second chapter. Then follows the journey up the Ottawa with the young De Vignau, who had stirred Paris by claiming that he had at last found the northwest passage to the Pacific, when he had in fact spent the winter in an Indian lodge not two hundred miles from Montreal; the noble forgiveness of De Vignau by Champlain; his crestfallen return and his going forth from France again in 1615 with four Récollet friars (Franciscans of the strict observance) of the convent of his birthplace (Brouage) inflamed by him with holy zeal for the continent of savages. For a little these "apostolic mendicants" in their gray robes girt with the white cord, their feet naked or shod in wooden sandals, tarried beneath the gray rock and then set forth east, north, and west, soon (1626) to be followed and reinforced by their brothers of stronger resources, the Jesuits, the "black gowns," upon a mission whose story is as marvellous as a "tale of chivalry or legends of lives of the saints." Meanwhile Champlain, exploring the regions to the northwest, is the first of white men to look upon the first of the Great Lakes--the "Mer Douce" (Lake Huron) being discovered before the lakes to the south--the first after the boy Étienne Brûlé and Friar Le Caron: the latter having gone before him, celebrated the first mass on Champlain's arrival the 12th of August, 1615, a day "marked with white in the friar's calendar," and deserving to be marked with red in the calendar of the west. There follow twenty restless years in which Champlain's efforts are divided between discovery and strengthening the little colony, and his occupations between holding his Indian allies who lived along the northern pathway to the west, fighting their enemies to the south, the Iroquois, restraining the jealousies of merchants and priests, trade and missions, reconciling Catholics and Huguenots, going nearly every year to France in the interests of the colony, building and repairing, yielding for a time to the overpowering ships of the English. The grizzled soldier and explorer, restored and commissioned anew under the fostering and firm support of Richelieu, struggled to the very end of his life to make the feeble colony, which eighteen years after its founding "could scarcely be said to exist but in the founder's brain," not chiefly an agricultural settlement but a spiritual centre from which the interior was to be explored and the savage hordes won--at the same time to heaven and to France--subdued not by being crushed but by being civilized, not by the sword but by the cross. It was a far different colony that was beginning to grow fronting the harbor of Plymouth, where men quite as intolerant of priests as Richelieu was intolerant of Huguenots were building homes and making firesides in enjoyment of religious and political freedom. Champlain lay dying as the year 1635 went out, asking more help from his patron Richelieu, but his great task had been accomplished. The St. Lawrence had been opened, the first two of the Great Lakes had been reached, and explorer and priest were already on the edge of that farther valley of the "Missipi," which we are to enter in the next chapter. CHAPTER III THE PATHS OF THE GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS It was exactly a hundred years, according to some authorities, after Jacques Cartier opened and passed through the door of the St. Lawrence Valley that another son of France, Jean Nicolet, again the first of Europeans so far as is now certainly known, looked over into the great valley of the Mississippi from the north. Champlain, dying beneath the Rock of Quebec, had touched two of the Great Lakes twenty years before. He never knew probably that another of those immense inland seas lay between, though, as his last map indicates, he had some word several years before his death of a greater sea beyond, where now two mighty lakes, the largest bodies of fresh water on the globe, carry their sailless fleets and nourish the life of millions on their shores. From the coureurs de bois, "runners of the woods," whom he, tied by the interests of his feeble colony to the Rock, had sent out, enviously no doubt, upon journeys of exploration and arbitration among the Indians, and from the Gray Friars and Black Gowns who, inflamed of his spirit, had gone forth through the solitudes from Indian village to village, from suffering to suffering, reports had come which he must have been frequently translating with his practised hand into river and shore line of this precious map, the original of which is still kept among the proud archives of France. He was disappointed the while, I have no doubt, that still the fresh water kept flowing from the west, and that still there was no word of the salt sea. The straight line which makes the western border of his map is merciful of his ignorance, but merciless of his hopes. It admits no stream that does not flow into one of the lakes or into the St. Lawrence. But it was made probably four years before his death and it is possible, indeed probable, that just before paralysis came upon him, he had heard through the famous coureur de bois, Jean Nicolet, whom he had despatched the year previous, of a river which this man of the woods had descended so far that "in three days more" he would have reached what the Indians called the "Great Water." [Footnote: The Mississippi. Nicolet probably did not go beyond the Fox portage. See C. W. Butterfield, "The Discovery of the Northwest by Jean Nicolet."] There is good reason, in the appointment of this same coureur de bois as a commissioner and interpreter at Three Rivers, for thinking (as one wishes to think) that like Moses, Champlain had, through him a vision of the valley which he himself might not enter, but which his compatriots were to possess. The historian Bancroft said of that land: "Not a cape was turned, not a river entered, but a Jesuit led the way." But the men of sandalled feet had not yet penetrated so far in 1635. It is an interesting tribute to these spiritual pioneers, however, that the particular rough coureur de bois who first looked into that far valley of solitude, inhabited only by Indians and buffaloes and other untamed beasts, would doubtless never have left his Indian habits and returned to civilization if he could have lived without the sacraments of the church. This coureur de bois Nicolet presents a grotesque appearance as he mounts the rims of the two valleys where the two bowls touch each other, bowls so full that in freshet the water sometimes overflows the brim and makes one continuous valley. Nicolet would not be recognized for the Frenchman that he was, as he appears yonder; for, having been told that the men whom he was to meet were without hair upon their faces and heads, and thinking himself to be near the confines of China, he had attired himself as one about to be received at an Oriental court. Accordingly, he stands upon the edge of the prairies in a robe of Chinese damask embroidered with flowers and birds-- but with a pistol in each hand. Having succeeded in his mission to these barbarians (for such he found them to be, wearing breech-clouts instead of robes of silk), he was impelled or lured over into the great valley, it is believed. He passed from the lake on the border of Champlain's map [Footnote: Lake Michigan.] up a river (the Fox) that by and by became but a stream over which one might jump. He portaged from this stream or creek across a narrow strip of prairie, only a mile wide, to the Wisconsin River, a tributary of the Mississippi. The statement over which I have pondered, walking along that river, that he might have reached the "great water" in three more days, is intelligible only in this interpretation of his course. The next Europeans to look out over the edge of the basin of the lakes were two other sons of France, one a man of St. Malo, Radisson, a voyageur and coureur de bois, the other his brother-in-law, Groseilliers (1654). It is thought that these companions went all the way to the Mississippi and so became the discoverers of her northern waters. The journal of the voyage is unfortunately somewhat obscure. The great "rivers that divide themselves in two" are many in that valley, and no one can be certain of the identity of that river "called the forked" mentioned in the "relation" of Radisson, which had "two branches, one towards the west, the other towards the south," and, as the travellers believed, ran toward Mexico. [Footnote: See Warren Upham. Groseilliers and Radisson, the first white men in Minnesota, 1655-6 and 1659-60, and their discovery of the Upper Mississippi River, in Minn. Historical Society Collections, 10:449-594.] Then came the Hooded Faces, the friars and the priests. To the four Récollet friars whom Champlain brought out with him in 1615 from the convent of his native town (Brouage), Jamay, D'Olbeau, Le Caron, and a lay brother, Du Plessis, others were added, but there were not more than six in all for the missions extending from Acadia to where Champlain found Le Caron in 1615 in the vicinity of Lake Huron. Their experiences and ardor (not unlike those of other missionaries in other continents and in our own times) have illustration in this extract from a letter written by Le Caron: "It would be difficult to tell you the fatigue I have suffered, having been obliged to have my paddle in hand all day long and row with all my strength with the Indians. I have more than a hundred times walked in the rivers over the sharp rocks, which cut my feet, in the mud, in the woods, where I carried the canoe and my little baggage, in order to avoid the rapids and frightful waterfalls. I say nothing of the painful fast which beset us, having only a little sagamity, which is a kind of pulmentum composed of water and the meal of Indian corn, a small quantity of which is dealt out to us morning and evening. Yet I must avow that amid my pains I felt much consolation. For alas! when we see such a great number of infidels, and nothing but a drop of water is needed to make them children of God, one feels an ardor which I cannot express to labor for their conversion and to sacrifice for it one's repose and life." [Footnote: Le Clercq, "First Establishment of the Faith in New France (Shea)," 1:95.] "Six months before the Pilgrims began their meeting-house on the burial hill at Plymouth," he and his brother priests laid the corner-stone of "the earliest church erected in French-America." It was a bitter disappointment when, in 1629, he was carried away by the English from his infant mission to spend his latter days far from his savage converts, perhaps in his whitewashed cell in the convent of Brouage, and to administer before an altar where it was not necessary to have neophytes wave green boughs to drive off the mosquitoes--those pestiferous insects from whose persecutions a brother Récollet said he suffered his "worst martyrdom" in America. But more bitter chagrin was in store for Le Caron, for when the French returned to Quebec, in 1632, after the restoration under the treaty, the Gray Apostles of the White Cord (who had invited the Black Gowns to join them in their missions years before and had so hospitably entertained them when denied shelter elsewhere in Quebec) were not permitted to be of the company. [Footnote: Le Caron, says Le Clercq, when he "saw all his efforts were useless, experienced the same fate as Saint Francis Xavier, who when on the point of entering China, found so many secret obstacles to his pious design that he fell sick and died of chagrin. So was Father Joseph a martyr to the zeal which consumed him, and of that ardent charity which burned in his heart to visit his church again."--Le Clercq, 1.c. 1:324.] The Jesuits went alone. Repairing their dilapidated buildings of Notre Dame des Anges, a little way out of Quebec on the St. Charles River, where Cartier had spent his first miserable winter in America, they began their enterprises _ad majorem Dei gloriam_ in a field of labor whose vastness "might," as Parkman says, "tire the wings of thought itself." Le Jeune left the convent at Dieppe, De Noue that at Rouen, and they went out from Havre together to begin their labors among a people whose first representatives came aboard the vessel at Tadoussac with faces variously painted, black and red and yellow, as a party of "carnival maskers." One cannot well conjecture a more hopeless undertaking than that of making those half-naked, painted barbarians understand the mystery of the Trinity, for example, or the significance of the cross. Think of this gentle, holy father, Le Jeune, seated in a hovel beside one of these savages, whose language he is trying to learn, bribing his Indian tutor with a piece of tobacco at every difficulty to make him more attentive, or with half-frozen fingers writing his Algonquin exercises, or making translations of prayers for the tongues of his prospective converts--and you will be able to appreciate the beginnings of the task to which these men without the slightest question set themselves. It was a life, once these men left the mission house of Notre Dame des Anges, that was without the slightest social intercourse, that was beyond the prizes of any earthly ambition, that was frequently in imminence of torture and death, and that was usually in physical discomfort if not in pain. Obscure and constant toil for tender hands, solitude, suffering, privation, death--these made up the portion of the messengers of the faith who turned their faces toward the wilderness, their steps into the gloom of the forests, pathless except for the traces of the feet of savages and wild beasts. For it is twenty-five years after that memorable day when Le Caron first said mass on the shores of one of the Great Lakes (Champlain being present) before the farthermost shore of the farthest lake is reached by these patient and valorous pilgrims of the west. The story of that heroic journey, of the consecration of those forests and waters and clearings by suffering and unselfish ministry, fills many volumes (forty in the French edition and seventy-two in the edition recently published in the United States, the English translation being presented on the pages opposite the Latin or French originals). There is material in them for many chapters of a new-world "Odyssey." To these "Relations," as they were called, we owe the great body of information we have concerning New France, from 1603 in Acadia to the early part of the eighteenth century in the Mississippi and St. Lawrence Valleys; for they who wrote them were not priests alone, they were at the same time explorers, scientists, historical students, ethnologists (the first and best-fitted students of the North American Indian), physicians to the bodies as well as ministers to the souls of those wild creatures. There was a time when these "Relations," as they came from the famous press of Cramoisy, were eagerly awaited and devoured, and were everywhere the themes of enthusiastic discussion in circles of high devotion in Paris and throughout France, where it is doubtless believed by many to-day that the borders of the lakes which the authors of these "Relations" traversed are still possessed by Indians, or at best by half-civilized, half- barbaric peoples who would stand agape in the Louvre as the Goths stood before the temples and the statues of Rome. The "Relations" of Jesuits are among our most precious chronicles in America. With these the history of the north--the valleys of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi--begins. The coureurs de bois may have anticipated the priests in some solitary places, but they seldom made records. Doubtless, like Nicolet, they told their stories to the priests when they went back to the altars for sacrament, so that even their experiences have been for the most part preserved. But when we know under what distracting and discouraging conditions even the priest wrote, we wonder, as Thwaites says, that anything whatever has been preserved in writing. The "Relations" were written by the fathers, he reminds us, [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations," 1:39, 40.] in Indian camps, the aboriginal insects buzzing or crawling about them, in the midst of a chaos of distractions, immersed in scenes of squalor and degradation, overcome by fatigue and improper sustenance, suffering from wounds and disease, and maltreated by their hosts who were often their jailers. What they wrote under these circumstances is simple and direct. There is no florid rhetoric; there is little self-glorification; no unnecessary dwelling on the details of martyrdom; and there is not a line to give suspicion "that one of this loyal band flinched or hesitated." "I know not," says one of these apostles [Footnote: Fr. Francesco Giuseppe Bressani, "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 39:55.] in an epistle to the Romans (for this particular letter went to Rome), "I know not whether your Paternity will recognize the letter of a poor cripple, who formerly, when in perfect health was well known to you. The letter is badly written, and quite soiled because in addition to other inconveniences, he who writes it has only one whole finger on his right hand; and it is difficult to avoid staining the paper with the blood which flows from his wounds, not yet healed: he uses arquebus powder for ink, and the earth for a table." This particular early American writer, besides having his hand split and now one finger-nail or joint burned off and now another, his hair and beard pulled out, his flesh burned with live coals and red-hot stones, was hung up by the feet, had food for dogs placed upon his body that they might lacerate him as they ate, but finally escaped death itself through sale to the Dutch. Two other chroniclers of that life of which they were a part, were two men of noble birth: the giant Brébeuf, "the Ajax of the mission," a man of vigorous passions tamed by religion (as Parkman says, "a dammed-up torrent sluiced and guided to grind and saw and weave for the good of man"); and in marked and strange contrast with him, Charles Garnier, a young man of thirty-three, of beardless face--laughed at by his friends in Paris, we are told, because he was beardless but admired by the Indians for the same reason--of a delicate nature but of the most valiant spirit. It was Brébeuf who kept the westernmost outpost for many years. A man of iron frame and resoluteness, the only complaint of his that I have found, is one which would furnish a study for a great artist: it was that he had "no moment to read his breviary, except by moonlight or the fire, when stretched out to sleep on a bare rock by some savage cataract,--or in a damp nook of the adjacent forest." There is another picture of him in action, crouched in a canoe, barefoot, toiling at the paddle, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, behind the lank hair and brown shoulders and long, naked arms of his aboriginal companion. Still another simple "Relation" shows him teaching the Huron children to chant and repeat the commandments under reward of beads, raisins, or prunes. In 1637, accused of having bewitched the Huron nation and having brought famine and pest, he was doomed to death; he wrote his farewell letter to his superior, gave his farewell dinner to his enemies, taking that opportunity to preach a farewell sermon concerning the Trinity, heaven and hell, angels and fiends--the only real things to him--and so wrought upon his guests that he was spared to labor on, though often in peril, until the Iroquois (1649), still following the Hurons, found him with a brother priest giving baptism and absolution to the savages dying in that last struggle this side of the Lakes against their ancient enemies. They tied him to a stake, hung a collar of "hatchets heated red-hot" about his neck, baptized him with boiling water, cut strips of flesh from his limbs, drank his blood as if to inherit of his valiance, and finally tore out and ate his heart for supreme courage. Such cannibalism seems poetically justifiable in tribute to such unflinching constancy of devotion. His brother priest, Lalemant, who was tortured to death at the same time, had thought it no good omen ten years before (1639) that no martyr's blood had yet furnished seed for the church in that new soil, though consoling himself with the thought that the daily life amid abuse and threats, smoke, fleas, filth, and dogs might be "accepted as a living martyrdom." There was ample seed by now, and still more was soon to be added, for very soon, the same year, the gentle Garnier is to die the same death ministering to these same Hurons, whose refugees, flying beyond two lakes to escape from their murderous foes, are to lure the priests on still farther westward till, even in their unmundane thoughts, the great, mysterious river begins to flow toward a longed-for sea. It was by such a path of danger and suffering, a path which threads gloomy forests, that the first figures clad in black gowns came and peered over the edge of the valley of this mysterious stream, even before Radisson and Groseilliers wandered in that wooded and wet and fertile peninsula which, beginning at the junction of three lakes, widens to include the whole northwest of what is now the United States. You may travel in a day and a night now up the Ottawa River, above Lake Nipissing, around Huron to the point of that peninsula, from Montreal, and if you go in the season of the year in which I once made the journey you will find this path (the path on which Champlain came near losing his life, where Récollet and Jesuit, coureur de bois and soldier toiled up hundreds of portages) bordered as a garden path much of the way by wild purple flowers (that doubtless grew red in the blood-sodden ground of the old Huron country), with here and there patches of gold. The first of these was Father Raymbault and with him Father Isaac Jogues, who was later to knock with mutilated hands for shelter at the Jesuit college in Rennes. Jogues was born at Orleans; he was of as delicate mould as Garnier, modest and refined, but "so active that none of the Indians could surpass him in running." In the autumn of 1641 he stood with his companion at the end of the peninsula between the Lakes, their congregation to the number of two thousand having been gathered for them from all along the southern shore of Lake Superior, the land of the Chippewas. Father Raymbault died at Quebec from exposure and hardship encountered here, the first of the Christian martyrs on that field, and Jogues was soon after sent upon an errand of greater peril. While on his way from Quebec to the new field (the old Huron station) with wine for the eucharist, writing materials, and other spiritual and temporal supplies, he was captured by the Iroquois and with his companions subjected to such torture as even Brébeuf was not to know. Journeying from the place of his capture on the St. Lawrence to that of his protracted torture he, first of white men, saw the Lake Como of America which bears the name of "George," a king of England, instead of "Jogues," whom the holy church may honor with canonization, but who should rather be canonized by the hills and waters where he suffered. His fingers were lacerated by the savages before the journey was begun; up the Richelieu River he went, suffering from his wounds and "the clouds of mosquitoes." At the south end of Lake Champlain this gentle son of France was again subjected to special tortures for the gratification of another band of Iroquois; his hands were mangled, his body burned and beaten till he fell "drenched in blood." Where thousands now land every summer at the head of Lake George for pleasure he staggered forth under his portage burden to the shores of the Mohawk, where again the chief called the crowd to "caress" the Frenchmen with knives and other instruments of torture, the children imitating the barbarity of their elders. I should not repeat such details of this horrible story here except to give background to one moment's act in the midst of it all, illustrative of the motive which was back of this unexampled endurance. While he and his companions were on the scaffold of torture, four Huron prisoners were brought in and put beside the Frenchmen: whereupon Father Jogues began his ministry anew, for when an ear of green corn was thrown him for food, discovering a few rain-drops clinging to the husks, he secretly baptized two of his eleventh-hour converts. This was not the end, but after months of pain and privation, which make one wonder at what a frail body, fitted with a delicate organism, can endure, he escaped by the aid of the Dutch at Fort Orange (now the capital of the State of New York), whither the Iroquois had gone to trade, and after six weeks in hiding there, was sent to New Amsterdam--then a "delapidated fort garrisoned by sixty soldiers" and a village of only four or five hundred inhabitants, but even at that time so cosmopolitan that, as one of my friends who has recently revived a census of that day shows, nearly twenty different languages were spoken. It is thus that a little French father of the wilderness comes from a thousand miles behind the mountains, from the shores of the farthest lake, in the middle of the continent, at a time when New York and Boston had together scarcely more inhabitants than would fill a hall in the Sorbonne. If only Richelieu (who died in the very year that Jogues was exemplifying so faithfully the teaching of Him whose brother he called himself) had permitted the Huguenot who wanted to go, to follow this little priest into those wilds, instead of trying in vain to persuade those to go who would not, who shall say that American visitors from that far interior might not be speaking to-day in a tongue which Richelieu, were he alive, could best understand. The little father, who has always seemed to me an old man, though he was then only thirty-six, was carried back to England, suffering from nature and pirates almost as much as from the Iroquois, and at last reached Rennes, where, after his identity was disclosed, the night was given to jubilation and thanksgiving, we are told. He was summoned to Paris, where the queen "kissed his mutilated hands" and exclaimed: "People write romances for us--but was there ever a romance like this, and it is all true?" Others gladly did him honor. But all this gave no satisfaction to his soul bent upon one task, and as soon as the Pope, at the request of his friends, granted a special dispensation [Footnote: The answer of Pope Urban VIII was: "Indignum esset martyrem Christi, Christi non bibere sanguinem."] which permitted him, though deformed by the "teeth and knives of the Iroquois," to say mass once more, he returned to the wilderness where within a few months the martyrdom was complete and his head was displayed from the palisades of a Mohawk town. So vanished the face of the first priest of France from the edge of the great valley, he, too, as Raymbault, perhaps, hoping "to reach China across the wilderness" but finding his path "diverted to heaven." It was not until 1660 that another came into that peninsula at whose point Jogues had preached, the aged Ménard, who after days among the tangled swamps of northern Wisconsin was lost, and only his cassock, breviary, and kettle were ever recovered. A little later came Allouez and Dablon, and Druilletes who had been entertained at Boston by Winslow and Bradford and Dudley and John Eliot, and last of those to be selected from the increasing number of that brotherhood for mention, the young Père Marquette, "son of an old and honorable family at Laon," of extraordinary talents as a linguist (having learned, as Parkman tells us, to speak with ease six Indian languages) and in devotion the "counterpart of Garnier and Jogues." When he first appears in the west it is at the mission of Pointe de St. Esprit, near the very western end of Lake Superior. There he heard, from the Illinois who yearly visited his mission, of the great river they had crossed on their way, and from the Sioux, who lived upon its banks, "of its marvels." His desire to follow its course would seem to have been greater than his interest in the more spiritual ends of his mission, for he disappointedly, it is intimated, followed his little Huron flock suddenly driven back toward the east by the Iroquois of the West--the Sioux. At Point St. Ignace, a place midway between the two perils, the Sioux of the West and the Iroquois of the East, they huddled under his ministry. It was there in the midst of his labors among his refugees, that Louis Joliet, the son of a wagon-maker of Quebec, a grandson of France, found him on the day, as he writes in his journal, of "the Immaculate Conception of the Holy Virgin, whom I had continually invoked since I came to this country of the Ottawas to obtain from God the favor of being enabled to visit the Nations on the river Missisipi." Joliet carried orders from Frontenac the governor and Talon the intendant, that Marquette should join him--or he Marquette--upon this voyage of discovery, so consonant with Marquette's desire for divine ordering. Marquette quieted his morbid conscience, which must have reproved his exploring ambitions, by reflecting upon the "happy necessity of exposing his life" for the salvation of all the tribes upon that particular river, and especially, he adds, as if to silence any possible lingering remonstrance, "the Illinois, who when I was at St. Esprit, had begged me very earnestly to bring the Word of God among them." So the learned son of Laon and the practical son of the wagon-maker of Quebec set out westward upon their journey under the protection of Marquette's particular divinity, but provided by Joliet with supplies of smoked meat and Indian corn, and furnished with a map of their proposed route made up from rather hazy Indian data. Through the strait that leads into Lake Michigan, and along the shores of this wonderful western sea they crept, stopping at night for bivouac on shore; then up Green Bay to the old mission; and then up the Fox River, where Nicolet had gone, in his love not of souls but of mere adventure. What interests one who has lived in that region, is to hear the first word of praise of the prairies extending farther than the eye can see, interspersed with groves or with lofty trees. [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 59:103.] I have spoken of the little river, dwindling into a creek of perplexed channel before the trail is found that ties the two great valleys together. One cannot miss it now, for when I last passed over it it was being paved, or macadamized, and a steam-roller was doing in a few days what the moccasined or sandalled feet of the first travellers there would not have accomplished in a thousand thousand years. I shall speak later of what has grown upon this narrow isthmus (now crossed not merely by trail and highway, but by canal as well), but I now must hasten on where the impatient priest and his sturdy, practical companion are leading, toward the Wisconsin. Nicolet may have put his boat in this same Wisconsin River, but if he did he did not go far below the portage. La Salle may even have walked over this very path only a year or two before. But, after all, it is only a question as to which son of France it was, for we know of a certainty that on a day in June of 1673 Joliet and Marquette did let their canoes yield to the current of this broad, tranquil stream after their days of paddling up the "stream of the wild rice." I have walked in the wide valley of the Wisconsin River and have seen through the haze of an Indian summer day the same dim bluffs that Marquette looked upon, and by night the light of the same stars that Marquette saw reflected from its surface. But having never ridden upon its waters, I take the description of one who has followed its course more intimately if not more worshipfully. "They glided down the stream," he writes, "by islands choked with trees and matted with entangling grape- vines, by forests, groves and prairies, the parks and pleasure-grounds of a prodigal nature; by thickets and marshes and broad bare sand-bars; under the shadowing trees between whose tops looked down from afar the bold brow of some woody bluff. At night, the bivouac, the canoes inverted on the bank, the nickering fire, the meal of bison-flesh or venison, the evening pipes, and slumber beneath the stars; and when in the morning they embarked again, the mist hung on the river like a bridal veil, then melted before the sun, till the glassy water and the languid woods basked breathless in the sultry glare." [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," pp. 63 and 64.] But to those first voyagers it had a charm, a lure which was not of stars or shadows or wooded bluffs or companionable bivouac. It led to the great and the unknown river, which in turn led to a sea remote from that by which the French had come out of Europe into America. They were travelling over the edge of Champlain's map, away from Europe, away from Canada, away from the Great Lakes. As far as that trail which led through the grass and reeds up from the Fox, one might have come every league of the way from Havre or even from a quay of the Seine, by water, except for a few paces of portage at La Chine and at Niagara. But that narrow strip of prairie which they crossed that June day in 1673 was in a sense the coast of a new sea, they knew not what sea--or, better, it was the rim of a new world. On the 17th of June they entered the Mississippi with a joy which they could not express, Marquette naming it, according to his vow, in honor of the Virgin Mary, Rivière de la Conception, and Joliet, with an earthly diplomacy or gratitude, in honor of Frontenac, "La Buade." For days they follow its mighty current southward through the land of the buffalo, but without sight for sixty leagues of a human being, where now its banks are lined with farms, villages, and towns. At last they come upon footprints of men, and following them up from the river they enter a beautiful prairie where a little way back from the river lay three Indian villages. There, after peaceful ceremonies and salutations, they, the first Frenchmen on the farther bank, their fame having been carried westward from the missions on the shores of the lakes, were received. "I thank thee," said the sachem of the Illinois, addressing them; "I thank thee, Black Gown, and thee, O frenchman," addressing himself to Monsieur Jollyet, "for having taken so much trouble to come to visit us. Never has the earth been so beautiful, or the sun so Bright, as to-day; Never has our river been so Calm, or so clear of rocks, which your canoes have Removed in passing; never has our tobacco tasted so good, or our corn appeared so fine, as We now see Them. Here is my son, whom I give thee to Show thee my Heart. I beg thee to have pity on me, and on all my Nation. It is thou who Knowest the great Spirit who has made us all. It is thou who speakest to Him, and who hearest his word. Beg Him to give me life and health, and to come and dwell with us, in order to make us Know him." [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 59:121.] Knowing the linguistic attainments of Marquette and his sincerity, one must credit this first example of eloquence and poetry of the western Indians, cultivated of life amid the elemental forces of the water, earth, and sky. [Footnote: It was of these same prairies, rivers, and skies, these same elemental ever-present forces, that Abraham Lincoln learned the simple, rugged eloquence that made him the most powerful soul that valley has known.] A beautiful earth, sprinkled with flowers, a bright sun, a calm river free of rocks, sweet-flavored tobacco, thriving corn, an acquaintance with the Great Spirit--well might the old man who received the French man say: "thou shalt enter all our cabins in peace." Indian eloquence is not of the lips only. It is a poor Indian speech indeed that is not punctuated by gifts. And so it was that the French travellers resumed their journey laden with presents from their prairie hosts, and a slave to guide them, and a calumet to procure peace wherever they went. It is enough now, perhaps, to know that the voyagers passed the mouth of the Illinois, the Missouri, the Ohio, and reached the mouth of the Arkansas, when thinking themselves near the gulf and fearing that they might fall into the hands of the Spaniards if they ventured too near the sea, and so be robbed of the fruits of their expedition, they turned their canoes up-stream. Instead, however, of following their old course they entered the Illinois River, known sometimes as the "Divine River." I borrow the observing father's description of that particular valley as it was just two centuries before I first remember seeing it. "We have seen nothing like this river for the fertility of the land, its prairies, woods, wild cattle, stag, deer, wildcats, bustards, swans, ducks, parrots, and even beaver; its many little lakes and rivers." [Footnote: B. F. French, "Historical Collections of Louisiana," 4:51. "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 59:161.] Through this paradise of plenty they passed, up one of the branches of the Illinois, till within a few miles of Lake Michigan, where they portaged a thousand paces to a creek that emptied into the lake of the Illinois. If they were following that portage path and creek today they would be led through that city which stands next to Paris in population--the city of Chicago, in the commonwealth that bears the name of the land through which the French voyagers passed, "Illinois." At the end of September, having been absent four months, and having paddled their canoes over twenty-five hundred miles, they reached Green Bay again. There these two pioneers, companions forever in the history of the new world, separated--Joliet to bear the report of the discovery of the Rivière de Buade to Count Frontenac, Marquette to continue his devotions to his divinity and recruit his wasted strength, that he might keep his promise to return to minister to the Illinois, whom he speaks of as the most promising of tribes, for "to say 'Illinois' is in their language to say 'the men.'" By most unhappy fate Joliet's canoe was upset in the Lachine Rapids, when almost within sight of Montreal, and all his papers, including his precious map, were lost in the foam. But several maps were made under his direction or upon his data. Marquette's map, showing nothing but their course and supplying nothing from conjecture, was found nearly two hundred years later in St. Mary's College in Montreal, furnishing, I have thought, a theme and design for a mural painting in the interesting halls of the Sorbonne, where so many periods, personages, and incidents of the world's history are worthily remembered. The art of that valley has sought to reproduce or idealize the faces of these pioneers. The more eloquent, visible memorial would be the crude map from the hand of the priest Jacques Marquette, son of Rose de la Salle of the royal city of Rheims. Of his setting out again for the Illinois, where he purposed establishing a mission, of his spending the winter, ill, in a hut on the Chicago portage path, of his brief visit to the Illinois, of his journey northward, of his death by the way, and of the Indian procession that bore his bones up the lake to Point St. Ignace--of all this I may not speak in this chapter. Here let me say only the word of tribute that comes to him out of his own time, as the first stories of history came, being handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth, till a poet or a historian should make them immortal. The story of Marquette I had known for many years from the blind Parkman, but not long ago I met one day an Indian boy, with some French blood of the far past in his veins, the son of a Chippewa chief, a youth who had never read Parkman or Winsor but who knew the story of Marquette better than I, for his grandmother had told him what she had heard from her grandmother, and she in turn from her mother or grandmother, of listening to Marquette speak upon the shores of Superior, of going with other French and Indians on that missionary journey to the Illinois to prepare food for him, and of hearing the mourning among the Indians when long after his death the report of his end reached their lodges. The grim story of the labors of the followers of Loyola among the Indians has its beatific culmination in the life of this zealot and explorer. Pestilence and the Iroquois had ruined all the hopes of the Jesuits in the east. Their savage flocks were scattered, annihilated, driven farther in the fastnesses, or exiled upon islands. The shepherds who vainly followed their vanishing numbers found themselves out upon the edge of a new field. If the Iroquois east and west could have been curbed, the Jesuits would have become masters of that field and all the north. We shall, thinking of that contingency, take varying views, beyond reconciliation, as to the place of the Iroquois in American history; but we shall all agree, whatever our religious and political predilection, men of Old France and men of New France alike, in applauding the sublime disinterestedness, fearless zeal, and unquestioned devotion to something beyond the self, which have consecrated all that valley of the Lakes and have, in the person of Marquette, the son of Laon, made first claim upon the life of the valley, whose great water he helped to discover. CHAPTER IV FROM THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF Père Marquette was still in a convent in Rheims when a French wood-ranger and fur trader was out in those western forests making friends for the French, one Sieur Nicolas Perrot, who would doubtless have been forgotten with many another of his craft if he had not been able-as few of them were-to read and write. And Marquette was but on his way from France to Canada when Sieur Perrot was ministering with beads and knives and hatchets and weapons of iron to these stone-age men on the southern shore of Superior, where the priest was later to minister with baptismal water and mysterious emblems. It was Perrot, whom they would often have worshipped as a god, who prepared the way for the altars of the priests and the forts of the captains; for back of the priests there were coming the brilliantly clad figures of the king's representatives. Once when Perrot was receiving such adoration, he told the simple-minded worshippers that he was "only a Frenchman, that the real Spirit who had made all, had given the French the knowledge of iron and the ability to handle it as if it were paste"; that out of "pity for His creatures He had permitted the French nation to settle in their country." [Footnote: Emma H. Blair, "Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley," 1:310.] At another time he said: "I am the dawn of that light, which is beginning to appear in your lands," and having learned by experience the true Indian eloquence, he proceeded in his oration with most impressive pauses: "It is for these young men I leave my gun, which they must regard as the pledge of my esteem for their valor. They must use it if they are attacked. It will also be more satisfactory in hunting cattle and other animals than are all the arrows that you use. To you who are old men I leave my kettle (pause); I carry it everywhere without fear of breaking it" (being of copper or iron instead of clay). "You will cook in it meat that your young men bring from the chase, and the food which you offer to the Frenchmen who come to visit you." [Footnote: Blair, "Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley," 1:330, 331.] And so he went on, throwing iron awls to the women to be used instead of their bone bodkins, iron knives to take the place of pieces of stone in killing beavers and cutting their meat, till he reached his peroration, which was punctuated with handfuls of round beads for the adornment of their children and girls. Do not think this a petty relation. It is a detail in the story of an age of iron succeeding, in a single generation, an age of stone. The splendor of the court and age of Louis XIV was beginning to brighten the sombreness of the northern primeval forests. It is this ambassador Perrot, learned in the craft of the woods rather than in that of the courts, more effective in his forest diplomacy than an army with banners, who soon after (1671) appears again on those shores, summoning the nations to a convocation by the side of that northern tumultuous strait, known everywhere now as the "Soo," then as the Sault Ste. Marie, there to meet the representatives of the king who lived across the water and of the Onontio who governed on the St. Lawrence. This convocation, of which Perrot was the successful herald, was held in the beginning of summer in the year 1671 (the good fishing doubtless assisting the persuasiveness of Perrot's eloquence in procuring the great savage audience). When the fleets of canoes arrived from the west and the south and east, Daumont de St. Lusson and his French companions, sent out the previous autumn from Quebec, having wintered in the Mantoulin Island, were there to meet them. It is a picture for the Iliad. Coureur de bois and priest had penetrated these regions, as we have seen; but now was to take place the formal possession by the crown of a territory that was coming to be recognized as valuable in itself, even if no stream ran though it to the coasts that looked on Asia. The scene is kept for us with much detail and color. On a beautiful June morning the procession was formed, the rapids probably furnishing the only music for the stately march of soldier and priest. After St. Lusson, four Jesuits led the processional: Dablon, Allouez, whom we have already seen on the shores of Superior, André from the Mantoulin Island, and Druilletes; the last, familiar from his long visit at Plymouth and Boston with the character of the Puritan colonies and doubtless understanding as no one else in that company, the menace to the French of English sturdiness and industry and self-reliant freedom. He must have wondered in the midst of all that formal vaunt of possession, how long the mountains would hold back those who were building permanent bridges over streams, instead of traversing them in ephemeral interest, or as paths to waters beyond; who were working the iron of the bogs near by, instead of hunting for the more precious ores or metals on remote shores; who were sawing the trees into lumber for permanent homes and shops, instead of adapting themselves to the more primitive life and barter in the woods; who were getting riches from the cleared fields, instead of from the backs of beavers in the sunless forests; who were raising sheep and multiplying cattle, instead of hunting deer and buffaloes; who were beginning to trade with European ports not as mere voyageurs but as thrifty merchants; who were vitally concerned about their own salvation first, and then interested in the fate of the savage; and who, above all, were learning in town meetings to govern themselves, instead of having all their daily living regulated from Versailles or the Louvre. Druilletes, remembering New England that day, must have wondered as to the future of this unpeopled, uncultivated empire of New France, without ploughs, without tame animals, without people, even, which St. Lusson was proclaiming. [Footnote: See Justin Winsor "Pageant of St. Lusson," 1892.] Was its name indeed to be written only in the water which their canoes traversed? There were fifteen Frenchmen with St. Lusson, among them the quiet, practical, unboastful Joliet, trained for the priesthood, but turned trader and explorer, who had already been two years previous out on the shores of Superior looking for copper. Marquette was not with the priests but was urging on the reluctant Hurons and Ottawas who did not arrive until after the ceremony. The French were grouped about a cross on the top of a knoll near the rapids, and the great throng of savages, "many-tinted" and adorned in the mode of the forest, sat or stood in wider circle. Father Dablon sanctified a great wooden cross. It was raised to its place while the inner circle sang _Vexilla Regis_. Close to the cross a post bearing a plate inscribed with the royal arms, sent out by Colbert, was erected, and the woods heard the _Exaudiat_ chanted while a priest said a prayer for the king. Then St. Lusson (a sword in one hand and "crumbling turf in the other") cried to his French followers who applauded his sentences, to the savages who could not understand, to the rapids which would not heed, and to the forests which have long forgotten the vibrations of his voice, the words in French to which these words in English correspond: "'In the name of the most high, most mighty and most redoubtable monarch Louis, the XIVth of the name, most Christian King of France and Navarre, we take possession of the said place of Ste Mary of the Falls as well as of Lakes Huron and Supérieur, the Island of Caientoton and of all other Countries, rivers, lakes and tributaries, contiguous and adjacent thereunto, as well discovered as to be discovered, which are bounded on the one side by the Northern and Western Seas and on the other side by the South Sea, including all its length or breadth;' Raising at each of the said three times a sod of earth whilst crying Vive le Roy, and making the whole of the assembly as well French as Indians repeat the same; declaring to the aforesaid Nations that henceforward as from this moment they were dependent on his Majesty, subject to be controlled by his laws and to follow his customs, promising them all protection and succor on his part against the incursion or invasion of their enemies, declaring unto all other Potentates, Princes and Sovereigns, States and Republics, to them and their subjects, that they cannot or ought not seize on, or settle in, any places in said Country, except with the good pleasure of his said most Christian Majesty and of him who will govern the Country in his behalf, on pain of incurring his hatred and the effects of his arms; and in order that no one plead cause of ignorance, we have attached to the back the Arms of France thus much of the present our Minute of the taking possession." [Footnote: "Wisconsin Historical Collections," 11:28.] Then the priest Allouez (as reported by his brother priest Dablon), after speaking of the significance of the cross they had just raised, told them of the great temporal king of France, of him whom men came from every quarter of the earth to admire, and by whom all that was done to the world was decided. "But look likewise at that other post, to which are affixed the armorial bearings of the great Captain of France whom we call King. He lives beyond the sea; he is the Captain of the greatest Captains, and has not his equal in the world. All the Captains you have ever seen, or of whom you have ever heard, are mere children compared with him. He is like a great tree, and they, only like little plants that we tread under foot in walking. You know about Onnontio, that famous Captain of Quebec. You know and feel that he is the terror of the Iroquois, and that his very name makes them tremble, now that he has laid waste their country and set fire to their Villages. Beyond the sea there are ten thousand Onnontios like him, who are only the Soldiers of that great Captain, our Great King, of whom I am speaking. When he says, 'I am going to war,' all obey him; and those ten thousand Captains raise Companies of a hundred soldiers each, both on sea and on land. Some embark in ships, one or two hundred in number, like those that you have seen at Quebec. Your Canoes hold only four or five men--or, at the very most, ten or twelve. Our ships in France hold four or five hundred, and even as many as a thousand. Other men make war by land, but in such vast numbers that, if drawn up in a double file, they would extend farther than from here to Mississaquenk, although the distance exceeds twenty leagues. When he attacks, he is more terrible than the thunder: the earth trembles, the air and the sea are set on fire by the discharge of his Cannon; while he has been seen amid his squadrons, all covered with the blood of his foes, of whom he has slain so many with his sword that he does not count their scalps, but the rivers of blood which he sets flowing. So many prisoners of war does he lead away that he makes no account of them, letting them go about whither they will, to show that he does not fear them. No one now dares make war upon him, all nations beyond the sea having most submissively sued for peace. From all parts of the world people go to listen to his words and to admire him, and he alone decides all the affairs of the world. What shall I say of his wealth? You count yourselves rich when you have ten or twelve sacks of corn, some hatchets, glass beads, kettles, or other things of that sort. He has towns of his own, more in number than you have people in all these countries five hundred leagues around; while in each town there are warehouses containing enough hatchets to cut down all your forests, kettles to cook all your moose, and glass beads to fill all your cabins. His house is longer than from here to the head of the Sault"--that is, more than half a league--"and higher than the tallest of your trees; and it contains more families than the largest of your Villages can hold." [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 55:111-113.] This remarkable proclamation and this extraordinary speech are to be found in the records. And the historian would end the incident here. But one may at least wonder what impressions of Louis the Great and Paris and France these savages carried back to their lodges to ponder over and talk about in the winter nights; and one must wonder, too, what impression the proclamation and pantomime of possession made upon their primitive minds. Perrot translated the proclamation for them, and asked them to repeat "Long live the king!" but it must have been a free translation that he made into their idioms; he must have softened "vassals" to "children," and "king" to "father," and made them understand that the laws and customs of Versailles would not curb their freedom of coiffure or attire, of chase or of leisure, on the shores of Superior. The speech of Allouez may seem full of hyperbole to those who know, in history, the king, and, by sight, the palace employed in the priest's similes; but if we think of Louis XIV not in his person but as a representative of the civilization of Europe that was asserting its first claim there in the wilderness, and give to the word of the priest something of the import of prophecy, the address becomes mild, indeed. Through those very rapids a single fleet of boats carries every year enough iron ore to supply every man, woman, and child in the United States (97,000,000) with a new iron kettle every year; another fleet bears enough to meet the continent's, if not the world's, need of hatchets. Trains laden with golden grain, more precious than beads, trains that would encircle the palace at Versailles or the Louvre now cross that narrow strait every day. A track of iron, bearing the abbreviated name of the rapids and the mission, penetrates the forests and swamps from which that savage congregation was gathered in the first great non-religious convocation on the shores of the western lakes where men with the scholarship of the Sorbonne now march every year with emblems of learning on their shoulders. As to the proclamation, Parkman asks, what now remains of the sovereignty it so pompously announced? "Now and then," he answers, "the accents of France on the lips of some straggling boatman, or vagabond half-breed-- this and nothing more." But again I would ask you to think of St. Lusson not as proclaiming merely the sovereignty of Louis XIV or of France, but as heralding the new civilization, for if we are to appreciate the real significance of that pageant and of France's mission, we must associate with that day's ceremony, not merely the subsequent wanderings of a few men of French birth or ancestry in all those "countries, rivers, lakes and streams," "bounded on the one side by the seas of the north and west and on the other by the South Sea," but all that life to which they led the adventurous, perilous way. The Iroquois and disease had thinned the Indian populations of the northeast, but here was a new and a friendly menace to that stone-age barbarism whose dusky subjects found their way back to their haunts by the stars, lighted their fires by their flint, and gluttonously feasted in plenty, or stoically fasted in famine. For the French it was a challenge to "those countries, lakes and islands bounded by the seas." They must now "make good the grandeur of their hopes." And a brave beginning is soon to be made. This highly colored scene becomes frontispiece of another glorious chapter, in the midst of whose hardship one will turn many a time to look with a sneer or smile, or with pity, at the figures in court garments, burnished armor, and "cleansed vestments," standing where the east and the west and the far north and the south meet. From the shores of a seigniory on the St. Lawrence, eight or nine miles from Montreal, just above those hoarse-voiced, mocking rapids which had lured and disappointed Cartier and Champlain and Maisonneuve, and which were to get their lasting name of derision from the disappointment of the man who now (1668) stands there, Robert René Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, looks across the waters of Lake St. Louis (into which the St. Lawrence for a little way widens) to the "dim forests of Chateauguay and Beauharnois." His thoughts look still farther, for they are out in that valley of his imagination through which a river "must needs flow," as he thinks, "into the 'Vermilion Sea'"--the Gulf of California. The old possessing dream! This young man (but twenty-five years of age) was a scion of an old and rich family of Rouen. As a youth he showed unusual traits of intellect and character and (it is generally agreed) doubtless because of his promise, he was led to the benches of the Jesuits. Whether this be true or not, he was an earnest Catholic. But his temperament would not let him yield unquestioned submission to any will save his own. For it was will and not mere passion that mastered his course. "In his faults," says a sympathetic historian, "the love of pleasure had no part." At twenty-three he had left Rouen, and securing a seigniory, where we have just seen him, in the "most dangerous place in Canada," he made clearing for the settlement which he named the Seigniory of St. Sulpice (having received it from the seminary of St. Sulpice), but which his enemies named, as they named the rapids, "La Chine." There tutored in the Indian languages and inflamed of imagination as he looked day after day off to the west, his thoughts "made alliance with the sun," as Lescarbot would have said, and dwelt on' exploration and empire. It was ten years later that those who were keeping the mission and the trading-post on Point St. Ignace, where to-day candles burn before the portrait of Père Marquette, saw a vessel equipped with sails, as large as the ships with which Jacques Cartier first crossed the Atlantic, come ploughing its way through waters that had never before borne such burdens without the beating of oars or paddles. Its commander is Sieur de la Salle, now a noble and possessed of a seigniory two hundred miles west of that on which we left him--two hundred miles nearer his goal. This galleon, called the _Griffin_ because it carried on its prow the carving of a griffin, "in honor of the armorial bearings of Count Frontenac," was the precursor of those mighty fleets that now stir those waters with their commerce. These ten years of disaster and disappointment, but also of inflexible purpose and indomitable persistence, must not be left to lie unremembered, though the recital must be the briefest. In 1669, in company with some Sulpitian priests and others, twenty-four in all, he sets forth from his seigniory. Along the south shore of Ontario they coast, stopping on the way to visit the Senecas, La Salle, at least, hoping to find there a guide to the headwaters of what is now known as the Ohio River. Disappointed, he with them journeyed on westward past the mouth of the Niagara River, hearing but the sound of the mighty cataract. At the head of Lake Ontario they have the astounding fortune to meet Louis Joliet, who with a companion was returning from Superior (two years before the pageant of St. Lusson) and who had just discovered that great inland lake between the two lakes, Ontario and Huron (which had been shown on French maps as connected by a river only). This lake, Erie, now the busiest perhaps of all that great chain, had been avoided because of the hostility of the Iroquois, and so it was that it was last to rise out of the geographic darkness of that region. Even Joliet's Iroquois guide, although well acquainted with the easier route, had not dared to go to the Niagara outlet but had followed the Grand River from its northern shores and then portaged to Lake Ontario. The Sulpitian priests and their companions followed to the west the newly found course, but La Salle, the goal of whose thought was still the Ohio, feigning illness (as it is believed), received the sacrament from the priests (an altar being improvised of some paddles), parted from them, and, as they at the time supposed, went back to Montreal. But it was not of such fibre that his purposes were knit. Just where he went it is not with certainty known, but it is generally conceded that he reached and followed the Ohio as far at least as the site of Louisville, Ky. It is claimed by some that he coasted the unknown western shores of Lake Huron; that he reached the site of Chicago; and that he even saw the Mississippi two years at least before Marquette and Joliet. What Parkman says in his later edition, after full and critical acquaintance with the Margry papers in Paris, is this: "La Salle discovered the Ohio, and in all probability the Illinois also; but that he discovered the Mississippi has not been proved, nor, in the light of the evidence we have, is it likely." Winsor argues that in the minds of those who knew him in Montreal, La Salle's projects had failed, since it was then that the mocking name was given to his estate--a name which, by the way, has been made good, as some one remarks, "by the passage across La Salle's old possessions of the Canadian Pacific Railway," a new way to China. I think we must admit, with his enemies of that day and hostile authorities of this, despite Margry's documents, that except for his increased knowledge of the approaches and his acquaintance with Indians and the conditions of nature in that valley, La Salle's expedition was a failure. It was his first defiance of the wilderness before him and the first victory of his enemies behind him. While Marquette is spending the winter, sick of a mortal illness, in the hut on the Chicago portage, La Salle is in Paris, bearing a letter from Frontenac, in which he is recommended to Minister Colbert as "the most capable man I know to carry on every kind of enterprise and discovery" and as having "the most perfect knowledge of the state of the country," [Footnote: Margry, "Découvertes et établissements des Français," 1:227.] that is, of the west. A letter I find was sent to Colbert under the same or proximate date [Footnote: Winsor dates letter November 14, 1674. Margry, November 11.] acquainting Colbert with the discovery made by Joliet. La Salle must therefore have known of the Mississippi and its course, even if he himself had not beheld it with his own eyes or felt the impulse of its current. He goes back to Canada possessed of a new and valuable seigniory (having spent the proceeds of the first in his unsuccessful venture) under charge to garrison Fort Frontenac (on the north shore of Ontario) and to gather about it a French colony. For two years he labors there, bringing a hundred acres of sunlight into the forests, building ships for the navigation of the lake, and establishing a school under the direction of the friars. He might have stayed there and become rich "if he had preferred gain to glory"--there where he had both solitude and power. "Feudal lord of the forest around him, commander of a garrison raised and paid by himself, founder of the mission and patron of the church, he reigned the autocrat of his lonely little empire." But this does not satisfy him. It is but a step toward the greater empire still farther to the west. In 1677 he comes back again to Paris with a desire not for land, but for authority to explore and open up the western country, which he describes in a letter to Colbert. It is nearly all "so beautiful and fertile; so free from forests and so full of meadows, brooks and rivers; so abounding in fish, game, and venison that one can find there in plenty, and with little trouble, all that is needful for the support of powerful colonies. The soil will produce anything that is raised in France." [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 122. Margry, 1:331.] He says that cattle may be left out all winter, calls attention to some hides he has brought with him of cattle whose wool is also valuable, and again expresses confidence that colonies would become prosperous, especially as they would be increased by the tractable Indians, who will readily adapt themselves to the French way of life, as soon as they taste the advantages of French friendship. He does not fail to mention the hostility of the Iroquois and the threatened rivalry of the English, who are beginning to covet that country--all of which only animates him the more to action. Lodged in Paris in an obscure street, Rue de la Truanderie, and attacked as a visionary or worse, he is yet petitioning Louis XIV for the government of a realm larger than the king's own, and holding conference with Colbert. In the early summer, after his winter of waiting somewhere in the vicinity in which I have written this chapter, a patent comes to him from the summer palace at St.-Germain-en-Laye, which must have been to him far more than his patent of nobility or title to any estate in France: "Louis, by the grace of God King of France and Navarre, to our dear and well-beloved Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, greeting. We have received with favor the very humble petition made us in your name to permit you to undertake the discovery of the western parts of New France; and we have the more willingly consented to this proposal, since we have nothing more at heart than the exploration of this country, through which, to all appearances, a way may be found to Mexico." [Footnote: Various translations. Original in Margry, 1:337.] La Salle, accordingly, was permitted to build forts at his own expense, to carry on certain trade in buffalo-hides, and explore to his heart's content. This lodger in Rue de la Truanderie now sets about raising funds for his enterprise and, having succeeded chiefly among his brothers and relations, he gathers materials for two vessels, hires shipwrights, and starts from Rochelle for his empire, his commission doubtless bound to his body, taking with him as his lieutenant Henri de Tonty--son of the inventor of the Tontine form of life insurance who had come to France from Naples--a most valuable and faithful associate and possessed of an intrepid soul to match his own. From Fort Frontenac, an outpost, La Salle's company pushes out to build a fort below Niagara Falls near the mouth of the Niagara River, the key to the four great lakes above, and to construct a vessel of fifty tons above the Falls for the navigation of these upper lakes. It is on this journey that the world makes first acquaintance of that mendacious historian Friar Hennepin, who, equipped with a portable altar, ministered to his companions and the savages along the way and wrote the chronicles of the expedition. It is he who has left us the first picture of Niagara Falls unprofaned by tourists; of the buffalo, now extinct except for a few scrawny specimens in parks, and of St. Anthony Falls. After loss by wreck of a part of the material intended for the vessel and repeated delays, due to La Salle's creditors at Frontenac and the Indians on his way, the vessel was at last completed, launched with proper ceremonies, and started on her maiden trip up those lakes where sail was never seen before. It is this ship that found temporary haven in the cove back of Point St. Ignace in 1679 while La Salle, "very finely dressed in his scarlet cloak trimmed with gold lace," knelt, his companions about him, and again heard mass where the bones of Marquette were doubtless even then gathered before the Jesuit altar. Thence they pushed on to Green Bay, where some of his advance agents had gathered peltries for his coming. The _Griffin_, loaded with these, her first and precious cargo, was sent back to satisfy his creditors, and La Salle with fourteen men put forth in their canoes for the land of his commission, of "buffalo-hides," and of "the way toward Mexico." I will "make the _Griffin_ fly above the crows," La Salle is recorded to have said more than once in his threat toward those of the Black Gowns who were opposing his imperious plans, because they aimed at the occupation, fortification, and settlement of what the order still hoped to keep for itself. But the flight of this aquatic griffin gave to La Salle no good omen of triumph. The vessel never reached safe port, so far as is known. Tonty searched all the east coast of Lake Michigan for sight of her sail, but in vain. And those whom in America we call "researchers"--those who hunt through manuscripts in libraries--have not as yet had word of her. Many have doubtless walked, as I, the shores of that lake with thoughts of her, but no one has found so much as a feather of her pinions. Whether she foundered in a storm or was treacherously sunk and her cargo stolen, no one will probably ever know. La Salle and his men in their heavily laden canoes had a tempestuous voyage up the west shore of Lake Michigan. [Footnote: It will illustrate what a change has come over a bit of that shore along which he passed if I tell you that when I landed there one day from a later lake _Griffin_, at a place called Milwaukee--in La Salle's day but another "nameless barbarism"--the first person whom I encountered chanced to be reading a copy of _the London Spectator_--the ultimate symbol of civilization some would think it.] They passed the site of Chicago, deciding upon another course (which persuades me that La Salle must have been in that region before) and on till they reached the mouth of the St. Joseph River, where precious time was lost in waiting for Tonty and his party coming up the other shore. I take space to speak in such detail of this voyage because it traces another important route into the valley. About seventy miles up the stream there stands an old cedar-tree bearing, as it is believed by antiquarians, the blaze marks of the old French broadaxes and marking the beginning of another of those historic portage paths over the valley's low rim. I have visited this portage more than once, and when last there I dug away the sand and soil about the trunk of the tree till I could trace the scar left by the axe of the French. It is only about two miles from this tree at the bend of the St. Joseph to where a mere ditch in the midst of the prairie, a tributary of the Illinois, soon gathers enough eager water to carry a canoe toward the Gulf of Mexico. I have read in the chronicles, with a regret as great as that of the hungry Hennepin, that the Illinois, from whom La Salle expected hospitality at their village farther down the Illinois River, which had been visited by Marquette twice, were off on their hunting expeditions. But I have satisfaction in knowing that he took needful food from their caches in my own county, now named La Salle. Early in January they passed on to a village four days beyond--the site of the second largest city in the State of Illinois. There La Salle, detained by Indian suspicions of his alliance with the Iroquois, discouraged by the desertion of some of his own men and by the certainty that the _Griffin_ was lost beyond all question not only with its skins but with the materials for a vessel, which he purposed building for the Mississippi waters, stayed for the rest of the winter, building for shelter and protection a fort which he named Fort Crèvecoeur, not to memorialize his own disheartenments as some hint, but, as we are assured by other historians, to celebrate the demolition of Fort Crèvecoeur in the Netherlands by Louis XIV, in which Tonty had participated. The vessel for the Mississippi he bravely decides to build despite the desertion of his sawyers, who had fled to the embrace of barbarism and who, fortunately, did not return to prevent the employment of the unskilled hands of La Salle himself and some others of his men. And so the first settlement in Illinois begins. On the last day of February Father Hennepin and two associates were sent down the Illinois River on a voyage of exploration, carrying abundant gifts with which to make addresses to the Indians along the way. We may not follow their tribulations and experiences, but we have reason to believe that they reached the upper waters of the Mississippi. There, taken by the Sioux, they were in humiliating and even perilous captivity till rescued by the aid of Du Lhut. We almost wish that the rumor that Hennepin had been hung by his own waist-cord had been true, if only we could have had his first book without the second. On the next day La Salle, leaving Tonty in command, set out amid the drifting ice of the river with four or perhaps six [Footnote: Margry, 1:488.] men and a guide for Fort Frontenac, to replace at once the articles lost in the _Griffin_, else another year would be spent in vain. Having walked many, many miles along that particular river on those prairies, I can appreciate, as perhaps some readers cannot, what it means to enter upon a journey of a thousand miles when the "ground is oozy" and patches of snow lie about, and the ice is not strong enough to bear one's weight but thick enough to hinder one's progress. La Salle, moreover, was in constant danger of Indians of various tribes. In a letter to a friend he said that though he knew that they must suffer all the time from hunger, sleep on the open ground, and often without food, watch by night and march by day, loaded with baggage, sometimes pushing through thickets, sometimes wading whole days through marshes where the water was waist- deep; still he was resolved to go. Two of the men fell ill. A canoe was made for them and the journey continued. Two men were sent to Point St. Ignace to learn if any news had come of the _Griffin_. At Niagara, where he learned of further misfortune, he left the other two Frenchmen and the faithful Mohigan Indian as unfit for further travel and pushed on with three fresh men to Fort Frontenac, which he reached in sixty-five days from the day of his starting from Fort Crèvecoeur. This gives intimation and illustration of the will which possessed the body of this "man of thought, trained amid arts and letters." "In him," said the Puritan Parkman, "an unconquerable mind held at its service a frame of iron." And Fiske adds: "We may see here how the sustaining power of wide-ranging thoughts and a lofty purpose enabled the scholar, reared in luxury, to surpass in endurance the Indian guide and the hunter inured to the hardships of the forest." I have wondered how his petition to the king, if written after this journey, would have described this valley. But its attraction seems not to be less despite this experience, for he was setting forth again, when word came to him that his Fort Crèvecoeur had been destroyed, most of his men deserting and throwing into the river the stores and goods they could not carry away! All has to be begun again. Less than nothing is left to him of all his capital. Nothing is left except his own inflexible spirit and the loyalty of his Tonty in the heart of the wilderness. Still undismayed, he turns his hand to the giant task again, only to find when he reaches the Illinois a dread foreboding of the crowning disaster. The Iroquois, the scourge of the east, had swept down the valley of the Illinois like hyenas of the prairies, leaving total desolation in their path. After a vain, anxious search for Tonty among the ruins and the dead, he makes his way back, finding at last at the junction of the two rivers that make the Illinois a bit of wood cut by a saw. I fear to tire the reader with the monotony of the mere rehearsal of difficulty and discouragement and despairful circumstance which I feel it needful to present in order to give faithful background to the story of the valley. I have by no means told all: of continued malevolence where there should have been help; of the conspiracy of every possible untoward circumstance to block his way. But the telling of so much will be tolerated in the knowledge that, after all, his master spirit did triumph over every ill and obstacle. With Tonty, who, as he writes, is full of zeal, he confounded his enemies at home, gathered the tribes of the west into a confederacy against the Iroquois, as Champlain had done in the east, gave up for the present the building of the vessel, and in 1681, the river being frozen, set out on sledges at Chicago portage and made a prosperous journey down the Illinois to Fort Crèvecoeur. Re-embarking in his canoes, they paddled noiselessly past tenantless villages into the Mississippi. He went beyond the mouth of the Arkansas, reached by Joliet and Marquette; he was entertained by the Indians of whom Châteaubriand has written with such charm in his "Atala"; and at last, in April, 1682, fifteen years from the days that he looked longingly from his seigniory above the Lachine Rapids, he found the "brackish water changed to brine," the salt breath of the sea touched his face, and the "broad bosom of the great gulf opened on his sight--limitless, voiceless, lonely as when born of chaos, without a sail, without a sign of life." His French companions and his great company of Indians about him, he repeated there, in the subtropical spring, the ceremony which ten years before had been performed two thousand miles and more by the water to the north, but in phrases which his inflexible purpose, valorously pursued, had given him a greater right to pronounce. "In the name of the most high, mighty, invincible and victorious prince, Louis the Great--I,--in virtue of the commission of his majesty which I hold in my hand, and which may be seen by all whom it may concern, have taken and do now take, in the name of his Majesty--possession of this country of Louisiana, the seas, harbors, ports, bays, adjacent straits, and all nations, peoples, provinces, cities, towns, villages, mines, minerals, fisheries, streams, and rivers,--from the mouth of the great river St. Louis, otherwise called the Ohio,--as also along the river Colbert, or Mississippi, and the rivers which discharge themselves thereinto, from its source beyond the Nadouessioux--as far as its mouth at the sea, or Gulf of Mexico, and also to the mouth of the River of Palms, upon the assurance we have had from the natives of these countries, that we are the first Europeans who have descended or ascended the river Colbert." [Footnote: Margry, 2:191.] None could have remembered the emaciated followers of De Soto, who cared not for the land since they had found no gold there and asked only to be carried back to the sea, whence they had so foolishly wandered. There were probably not even traditions of the white god who had a century and a half before been buried in the river that his mortality might be concealed. It was, indeed, a French river, from where Hennepin had been captured by the Sioux through the stretches covered by Marquette and Joliet to the very sea which La Salle had at last touched. The water path from Belle Isle, Labrador, to the Gulf of Mexico was open, with only short portages at Lachine and Niagara and of a few paces where the Fox all but touches the Wisconsin, the Chicago the Des Plaines, or the St. Joseph the Kankakee. It took almost a century and a half to open that way, but every league of it was pioneered by the French, and if not for the French forever, is the credit the less theirs? When the "weathered voyagers" that day on the edge of the gulf planted the cross, inscribed the arms of France upon a tree, buried a leaden plate of possession in the earth and sang to the skies "The banners of heaven's king advance," La Salle in a loud voice read the proclamation which I have in part repeated. Thus "a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile," [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 308.] in fact gave to France a river and a stupendous territory, of which Parkman has made this description for the title-deed: "The fertile plains of Texas, the vast basin of the Mississippi, from its frozen springs to the sultry borders of the gulf; from the wooded ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains--a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts, and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike tribes." [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 308.] They gave it to France. That, perhaps, the people of France almost wish to forget. But it is better and more accurately written: "On that day France, pioneer among nations, gave this rich, wide region to the world." CHAPTER V THE RIVER COLBERT: A COURSE AND SCENE OF EMPIRE A CHARACTERIZATION OF THE RIVER WHOSE EXPLORATION AND CONTROL GAVE TO FRANCE LOUISIANA AND THE LAND OF THE ILLINOIS To the red barbarian tribes, of which Parkman says there were a thousand, the river which passed through their valley was the "Mississippi," that is, the Great Water. They must have named it so under the compulsion of the awe in which they stood of some parts of it, and not from any knowledge of its length. They must have been impressed, especially they of the lower valley, as is the white man of to-day, by the "overwhelming, unbending grandeur of the wonderful spirit ruling the flow of the sands, the lumping of the banks, the unceasing shifting of the channel and the send of the mighty flood." No one tribe knew both its fountains and its delta, its sources and its mouth. To those midway of the valley it came out of the mystery of the Land of Frosts and passed silently on, or, in places, complainingly on, to the mystery of the Land of the Sun, into neither of which dared they penetrate because of hostile tribes. While the red men of the Mississippi lowlands were not able as the "swamp angel" of to-day to discern the rising of its Red River tributary by the reddish tinge of the water in his particular bayou, or to measure by changing hues, now the impulses of the Wisconsin or of the Ohio, and now of the richer-silted blood of the Rockies (as Mr. Raymond S. Spears, writing of the river, has graphically described), [Footnote: "The Moods of the Mississippi," in _Atlantic Monthly_, 102:378-382. See also his "Camping on a Great River," New York, Harper, 1912, and numerous magazine articles.] yet as they gazed with wonderment at these changes of color, they must have had inward visions of hills of red, green, and blue earth somewhere above their own lodges or hunting-grounds, and must even have had at times some tangible message of their brothers of the upper waters, some fragments of their handiwork, such as a broken canoe, an arrow-shaft. But the men of the sources, up toward the "swamps of the nests of the eagles," on the low watersheds, heard only vague reports of the sea or gulf; even the Indians of Arkansas, as we read in the account of the De Soto expedition, could or would "give no account of the sea, and had no word in their language, or idea or emblem, that could make them comprehend a great expanse of salt water like the ocean." So the river was not the source or father of running waters, but the great, awe-inspiring water. The French were misled, as we have seen, when they first heard Indian references to it, thinking it was what they were longing for--the western ocean, a great stretch of salt water instead of another and a larger Seine. And when they did discover that it was a river, their first concern was not as to what lay along its course, but as to where it led. A prominent American historian, to whom we are much indebted, with Parkman, for the memorials of this period, praises by contrast those who kept within smell of tide-water along the Atlantic shore. But when we reach the underlying motives of the exploration and settlement of that continent, do they who sought the sources and the paths to the smell of other tide-waters deserve dispraise or less praise than those who sat thriftily by the Atlantic seashore? The English colonists were struggling for themselves and theirs, not for the good or glory of a country across seas. They had no reason to look beyond their short rivers, so long as their valleys were fruitful and ample. Shall they be praised the more that they did not for a century venture beyond the sources of those streams? The first French followers of the river courses were, as we have seen, devotees of a religion for the salvation of others, bearers of advancing banners for the glory of France, and lovers of nature and adventure. And if there were, as there were, avaricious men among them, we must be careful not to blame them more than those whose avarice or excessive thrift was economically more beneficial to the world and to the community and the colony and to themselves. Economic values and moral virtues, as expressed in productivity of fields, mines, factories, church attendance, and obedience to the selectmen, are so easy of assessment that it is difficult to get just appraisement for those who endured everything, not for their own freedom or gain but for others' glory, and accomplished so little that could be measured in the terms of substantial, visible, tangible, economic, or ecclesiastical progress. Who first of Europeans looked upon this river at the gulf we do not know, but on a Ptolemy map, published in Venice in 1513, it is thought by some that the delta is traced with distinctness, as less distinctly in Waldseemüller's map of 1507. Five years later (1518) on Garay's map of Alvarez de Pineda's explorations, there descends into the gulf a sourceless river, the Rio del Espiritu Santo, which is thought by some to be the same river that Marquette's map showed under the name de la Conception, ending its course in the midst of the continent; but it is more generally thought now to be the Mobile River, and the Gulf del Espiritu Santo to be the Bay of Mobile. Narvaez, as I have said, tried a score of years after to enter the Mississippi, but he was carried out to sea in his flimsy improvised craft, by its resisting current. Cabeça de Vaca may have seen it again after he left Narvaez, but we have no record in his narrative that distinguishes it from any other river. Then came the accredited discoverer De Soto, who found it but another obstacle in his gold-seeking path toward the Ozarks and who found it his grave on his harassed, disappointed journey back toward Florida. It was more than a hundred years after "it pleased God that the flood should rise," as the chronicle has it, and carry the brigantines built by De Soto's lieutenant, Moscoso, with his emaciated followers "down the Great River to the opening gulf," before another white face looked upon this great water. It was in 1543 that Moscoso and his men disappeared, sped on their voyage by the arrows of the aborigines. It was a June day in 1673 that Marquette and Joliet, coming down the Wisconsin from Green Bay, saw before them, "avec une joye que je ne peux pas expliquer," the slow, gentle-currented Mississippi; or, as Mark Twain has measured the time in a chronology of his own: "After De Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of a quarter of a century elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born, lived a trifle more than a half a century,--then died; and when he had been in his grave considerably more than half a century, the second white man saw the Mississippi." [Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," Hillcrest edition, pp. 19, 20] In 1682 La Salle followed it to where it meets the great gulf, possessing with emblems of empire and his indomitable spirit the lower reaches of the stream whose upper waters had first been touched by the gentle Marquette and the practical Joliet and the vainglorious Hennepin. Between that day and the time when it became a course of regular and active commerce (again in Mark Twain's chronology), "seven sovereigns had occupied the throne of England, America had become an independent nation, Louis XIV and Louis XV had rotted--the French monarchy had gone down in the red tempest of the Revolution--and Napoleon was a name that was beginning to be talked about." [Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," p. 20.] Of what befell in that period, marked by such figures and events, a later chapter will tell. Here our thought is of the river itself, the river of "a hundred thousand affluents," as one has characterized it; the river which for a little time bore through the valley of Louisiana and of the Illinois the name of the great French minister "Colbert." To the Spanish the river was a hazard, a difficulty to be gotten over. To the Indian it was the place of fish and defense. To the Anglo-American empire of wheels, that later came over the mountains, it was a barrier athwart the course, to be ferried or forded or bridged, but not to be followed. To be sure, it was (later) utilized by that empire, for a little while, as a path of dominant, noisy commerce in haste to get its products to market. And the keels of commerce may come again to stir its waters. But the river will never be to its later east-and-west migrants what it was to the French, whose evangelists, both of empire and of the soul, saw its significance, caught its spirit into their veins, and (from the day when Marquette and Joliet found their courage roused, and their labor of rowing from morning till night sweetened by the joy of their expedition) have possessed the river for their own and will possess it, even though all the land belongs to others, and the rivers are put to the uses of millions to whom the beautiful speech of the French is alien. Many a time in poling or paddling a boat in its tributaries in years gone by, have I thought and said to my companion: "How less inviting this stream would be if the French with valiant, adventurous spirit had not first passed over it!" And my companion was generally one who was always "Tonty" to me. It is still the river of Marquette and Joliet, Nicolet, Groseilliers and Radisson, La Salle and Tonty, Hennepin and Accau, Gray Gowns and Black Gowns, Iberville and Bienville, St. Ange and Laclede; for across every portage into the valley of that river, it was the men of France, so far as we know, who passed, first of Europeans, from Lake Erie up to Lake Chautauqua; or across to Fort Le Boeuf and down French Creek into the Alleghany and the Ohio (La Belle Rivière); or up the Maumee and across to the Wabash (the Appian Way); or from Lake Michigan up the St. Joseph and across to the Kankakee, at South Bend; or, most trodden path of all, from Green Bay up the Fox River and across to the Wisconsin; or at Chicago from the Chicago River across to the Des Plaines (to which with the Illinois River the French seem to have given the name "Divine"), and so on to the Mississippi. It is this last approach that I learned first and, though a smoke now hangs habitually over the entrance as a curtain, I have for myself but to push that aside to find the Divine River way still the best route into the greatest valley of the earth. Man has diverted this Divine River to very practical uses, and even changed its name, but it is hallowed still beyond all other approaches to the Great River. In a hut on the portage Père Jacques Marquette spent his last winter on earth in sickness; down the river the brave De la Salle built his Fort St. Louis on the great rock in the midst of his prairies, and still farther down his Fort Crèvecoeur. On no other affluent stream are there braver and more stirring memories of French adventure and sacrifice than move along those waters or bivouac on those banks. And so I would have one's imagination take that trail toward the Mississippi and first see it glisten beneath the tall white cliffs which stand at the portal of the Divine River entry. Its branches are reputed to have all borne at one time the names of saints, and it had like canonization itself. But these streams of the Mississippi, like the Seine, have none or few of the qualities that make this saintly terminology appropriate. It is anthropomorphism, not canonization, that befits its temper and its lure. Mystery no longer hangs over its waters. Now that all the prairie and plain have been occupied, the mystery has fled entirely from the valley or has hidden itself in the wilderness and "bad lands." All is translated into the values of a matter- of-fact, pragmatic, industrial occupation. These are some of the pragmatic and other facts concerning it which I have gathered from the explorers and surveyors and lovers of this region, Ogg [Footnote: Ogg, F. A., "Opening of the Mississippi," New York, 1904.] and Austin [Footnote: Austin, O. P., "Steps in the Expansion of our Territory," New York, 1903.] and Mark Twain [Footnote: Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi," various editions.] among them. Its length lies wholly within the temperate zone. In this respect it is more fortunately situated than the more fertile-valleyed Amazon, since the climate here, varied and sometimes inhospitable as it is, offers conditions of human development there denied. The main stream is two thousand five hundred and three miles in length, or more truly four thousand one hundred and ninety miles, if the Mississippi and Missouri be taken; that is, many times the length of the Seine. As Mark Twain, who is to be forever associated with its history, has said, it is "the crookedest river" in the world, travelling "one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that a crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five." For a distance of several hundred miles the Upper Mississippi is a mile in width. Back in 1882 it was seventy miles or more [Footnote: Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi," p. 456.] wide when the flood was highest, and in 1912 sixty miles wide. The volume of water discharged by it into the sea is second only to the Amazon, and is greater than that of all European rivers combined--Seine, Rhine, Rhone, Po, Danube, and all the rest, omitting the Volga. The amount is estimated at one hundred and fifty-nine cubic miles annually--that is, it would fill annually a tank one hundred and fifty-nine miles long, a mile wide, and a mile high. With its tributaries it provides somewhat more than sixteen thousand miles of navigable water, more than any other system on the globe except the Amazon, and more than enough to reach from Paris to Lake Superior by way of Kamchatka and Alaska--about three-fourths of the way around the globe. The sediment carried to the sea is estimated at four hundred million tons [Footnote: Humphrey's and Abbot's estimate.] annually. As one has put it, it would require daily for its removal five hundred trains of fifty cars, each carrying fifty tons, and would make two square miles each year over a hundred and thirty feet deep. Mark Twain in "Life on the Mississippi" is authority for the statement that the muddy water of the Missouri is more wholesome than other waters, until it has settled, when it is no better than that of the Ohio, for example. If you let a pint of it settle you will have three-fourths of an inch of mud in the bottom. His advice is to keep it stirred up. [Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," p. 182.] The area which it drains is roughly a million and a quarter square miles, or two-fifths of the United States. That is, as one graphic historian has visualized it in European terms, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, and Italy could be set down within its limits and there would still be some room to spare. The river has the strength (for the most part put to no use) of sixty million horses. The difference between high water and low water in flood conditions is in some places fifty feet, which shows that it has a wider range of moodiness than even the Seine. The rim dividing the Mississippi basin from that of the Great Lakes is, as we have seen, low and narrow; in some places, especially in wet seasons, the watershed is indistinguishable. The waters know not which way to go. This fact furnishes the explanation of the ease with which the French explorers penetrated the valley from the north. A high mountain range kept the English colonists out of it from the east. The Spanish found no physical barriers at the south (except the water, which gave the Frenchmen help), but, as we have seen, on the other hand, they found no adequate inducement. The isotherm which touches the southern limits of France passes midway between the source and mouth of the river. In the northern half, it has the mean annual temperature of France, England, and Germany; in the southern half, of the Mediterranean coasts. From the gulf into which it empties, a river (that is, an ocean river, or current) runs through the ocean to the western coasts of Europe; another runs out along the northeastern coast of South America, and, still another is in waiting at the western terminus of the Panama Canal to assist the ships across the Pacific. A fair regularity and reliability of rainfall have made the rich soil of the valley tillable and productive without irrigation, except in the far western stretches; and these blessings are likely to continue, as one authority puts it, "so long as the earth continues to revolve toward the east and the present relationship of ocean and continent continues." Including Texas and Alabama (which lie between the same ranges of mountains with this valley, though their rivers run into the gulf and not into the Mississippi), this valley has perhaps one hundred and forty thousand miles of railway, or about sixty per cent of the total mileage of the country, or twenty-five per cent of the mileage of the entire globe. "In richness of soil, variety of climate, number and value of products, facilities for communication and general conditions of wealth and prosperity, the Mississippi Valley surpasses anything known to the Old World as well as the New." It produces the bulk of the world's cotton and oil; of corn it raises much more than all the rest of the world combined, and of each of the following (produced mainly in this same valley) the United States leads in quantity all the nations of the earth: wheat, cattle, hogs, oats, hay, lumber, coal, iron and steel, and other mineral products. Its valley supports an estimated population of over fifty millions, or over half that of the whole United States; and has an estimated maintenance capacity of from 200,000,000 [Footnote: Justin Winsor, "Mississippi Basin," p. 4.] to 350,000,000 [Footnote: A. B. Hart, "Future of the Mississippi Valley," _Harper's Magazine_, 100:419, February, 1900.] or from four to seven times its present population. It has been tilled with "luxurious carelessness." A peasant in Brittany or a forester in Normandy would be scandalized by the extravagant, profligate use of its patrimony. That it is likely to have at least the 250,000,000 by the year 2100, and with intensive cultivation will be able to support them, is allowed by estimates of reliable statisticians. Europe had 175,000,000 at the beginning of the nineteenth century and North America 5,308,000. The former has somewhat more than doubled its population in the century since; America has increased hers about twenty times, and the Mississippi Valley several thousand times. It is not unreasonable to expect the doubling of the population of that valley in another century and its quadrupling in two. Let De Tocqueville make summary of those prideful items in his description of the valley, embraced by the equator-sloping half of the continent: "It is upon the whole," he says, "the most magnificent dwelling-place prepared by God for man's abode"--a "space of 1,341,649 square miles--about six times that of France"--watered by a river "which, like a god of antiquity, dispenses both good and evil." [Footnote: "Democracy in America," 1:22, 21, 20. New York, 1898.] And it was still another Frenchman who first gave to the world an accurate description of the sources of the river. On his own account, Nicollet, sometime professor in the College Louis le Grand, set out in 1831 to explore the river from its mouth to the source. He spent five years in these regions which he described as "a grand empire possessing the grandest natural limits on the earth." He then returned to a little Catholic college in Baltimore as a teacher, but the United States Government, hearing of his valuable service, commissioned him to make another expedition that would enable him to complete his map of the region of the sources. What he then accomplished has given him "distinct and conspicuous place among the explorers of the Mississippi." His map shows myriad lakes in the region of the sources (where the slightest jar of earth might turn in other directions the water of these brimming bowls), so many indeed, that there would seem to be only lake and marsh and savannas. But we see him looking off toward plateaus "looming as if [they were] a distant shore." Another picture I shall always keep from his report is of his stolid half-breed guide (who usually waited for him and his companion with face toward them) sitting one day somewhat ahead of the party on a slight elevation, which makes the watershed between the rivers of the north and the rivers of the south, his face turned from them, gazing in silent rapture upon the boundless stretch of plains. How their magical influence possessed him, as well as that child of forest and plain, Nicollet, a peasant boy of Savoy, a professor in Paris, interrupts his topographical report to tell: "It is difficult to express by words the varied impressions which the spectacle of these prairies produces. Their sight never wearies. To look a prairie up or down, to ascend one of its undulations, to reach a small plateau (or, as the voyageurs call it, a prairie planche), moving from wave to wave over alternate swells and depressions and finally to reach the vast, interminable low prairie that extends itself in front--(be it for hours, days or weeks)--one never tires; pleasurable and exhilarating sensations are all the time felt; ennui is never experienced. Doubtless there are moments when excessive heat, a want of fresh water, and other privations remind one that life is a toil; but these drawbacks are of short duration. There are no concealed dangers--no difficulties of road; a far-spreading verdure, relieved by a profusion of variously colored flowers, the azure of the sky above, or the tempest that can be seen from its beginning to its end, the beautiful modifications of the changing clouds, the curious looming of objects between earth and sky, taxing the ingenuity every moment to rectify--all, everything, is calculated to excite the perceptions and keep alive the imagination. In the summer season, especially, everything upon the prairies is cheerful, graceful, and animated. The Indians, with herds of deer, antelope and buffalo, give life and motion to them. It is then they should be visited; and I pity the man whose soul could remain unmoved under such a scene of excitement." [Footnote: Report intended to illustrate a map of the hydrographical basin of the upper Mississippi River, Washington, 1843, 26th Cong., 2d Sess., Sen. Doc. 237, p. 52.] It is a singular fortune that has made a son of France, a century and a half after the discovery of this mighty stream, the explorer and cartographer of its sources, a fortune that has its partial explanation at least in the lure of this stream for the Gallic heart. Mrs. Trollope, a famous English traveller, found its lower valley depressing, as has many another: "Unwonted to European eyes and mystically heavy is the eternal gloom that seems to have settled upon that region. Whatever wind may blow, however bright and burning the southern sun may blaze in the unclouded sky, the stream is forever turbid and forever dark." Of the scene at its mouth, where La Salle and his men had sung with such joy, she says: "Had Dante seen it, he might have drawn images of another Bolgia from its horrors." [Footnote: "Domestic Manners of the Americans," p. r] But no French visitor, so far as I know, has ever found it gloomy, even in flood or tempest on its subtropical stretches; nor has he found those level vastnesses desolate. A traveller, Paul Fountain by name, and so of French origin, I suspect, wandering over those valley plains in the early days, tells of the sense of freedom, health, and strength that they give: "There is no air like the prairie air--not even the grand freshness of the boundless ocean itself.--The loveliness and variety of the prairie odors are quite indescribable, as are its superb wild flowers. It is a paradise. No man who has lived on it long enough to know it and love it (no great time, I can assure you) ever experiences real happiness after he has left it. There is a longing and eager craving to return to the life. The vulgar cowboys and hunters, uneducated and unpoetical past all degree, never leave it except to get drunk. Their money gone, back they go to get fresh strength and more pelf for another orgie; but if by chance they abandon the wild, free life, they soon drink themselves to lunacy or death, and their last babblings are of the glorious wilderness they all love." [Footnote: "The Great Deserts and Forests of North America," p. 22.] This is the too exuberant expression of one who had probably never had a hearth of his own in France, but it gives some intimation of the charm of that great and seemingly infinite sweep of level ground, which many, and especially unimaginative minds, find so monotonous. We cannot be quite sure, when we listen to some recent critics, that Châteaubriand ever saw this great valley. Certainly we who have grown up in it have never found his reindeer and moose about our homes (save in our Christmas-time imaginations). Paroquets that in the woods repeated the words learned of settlers are not of the fauna known to reputable Ohio naturalists, nor have two-headed snakes been found except in the vision of those who see double in their intoxication. The tamarind and the terebinth are not of its forest-trees. But whether or not Châteaubriand visited it in person, his imagination had frequent residence upon the Mississippi and its tributaries. His "Atala" put into French literature a country where many have loved to dwell, though its fauna and flora were not more accurate in some respects than the mineralogy and meteorology of the John Law scheme, known later as the "Mississippi Bubble," that made France wild with excitement once. However, I have recalled the fervid pen of Châteaubriand, not as that of a faunal or floral naturalist, but to have it rewrite these sentences: "Nothing is more surprising and magnificent than this movement and this distribution of the central waters of North America" (whence flows the Mississippi), "a river which the French first descended; a river which flowed under their power, and the rich valley of which," as the translator has rendered it, "still regrets their genius," but, as Châteaubriand doubtless meant it, and as it is better translated, "still grieves for their spirit," their "familiar" ("et dont la riche vallée regrette encore leur génie"). [Footnote: "Travels in America and Italy," 1:72, 73, London, 1828.] I think that Châteaubriand had accurate instinct in divining the river's grieving for the spirit that (with all the practical genius which now inhabits the valley) is still needed to give an appreciation of that in the valley which lies beyond the counting of statistics or even the glowing rhetoric of the orators of liberty. Hamlin Garland, reared in that valley, and first known in American letters as the author of remarkable stories of life on a Western farm, "Main Travelled Roads," has recently given expression to this grieving (though he says no word of the French) in an essay on "The Silent Mississippi," published a few years ago. He speaks of the river's bold, blue-green bluffs "looking away into haze," of its golden bars of sand "jutting out into the burnished stream," of its thickets of yellow-green willows, of the splendid old trees and of its glades opening away to the hills (all making a magical way of beauty), only to use it as a background for the statement that "not one beautiful building" is to be seen on its banks "for a thousand miles." There are many towns, but "without a single distinctive building; everything is a flimsy jumble, out of key, meaningless, impertinent, evanescent, too, thanks to climate." "We took a wild land beautiful as a dream," he proceeds, "and we have made a refuse heap. The birds of the trees have disappeared, the water-fowl have gone, every edible creature has vanished. An era of hopeless, distinctive vulgarity is upon us." I have travelled down the smaller waterways of the valley with like feeling, which, though it has led to no such comprehensive generalization, yet gave me a distinct consciousness of their "grieving," if not for the French, at any rate for the silences that preceded the French, and for their own riparian architecture. The busy towns along the streams I have known have turned their faces from these streams toward the railroads. They have left the riverside to the thriftless men and the truant boys. Stables and outhouses look upon their waters, and the sewers pollute them. And if on some especially eligible bluff better buildings do stand, their owners or builders show no appreciation of what the bluff or river cares for, but reproduce the lines of some pretentious edifice that has no relation, historic or otherwise, to it or to the site. The old mills, with their feet in the water, are almost the only sympathetic structures-- especially so when they are in ruins. I once followed the upper waters of the stream (the Ohio) along which Celoron, of whom I shall speak later, planted his emblems of French possession. He would doubtless care to claim that valley even to-day, though unsightly houses and sheds line it, and pipes and shafts of iron, hastily rigged up and left to rust when done with, run everywhere, and the scum of oil is on the water. The profit of the hour was all that was visible of motive or achievement in that smoky valley, though I know it is not safe to generalize, for miracles have been wrought in that very valley. A change is coming in many of the towns and cities of both the lesser and the larger rivers. In the town that I knew best, thirty years ago only a few ventured upon the water, and they were the fishermen or rivermen who had not much to do with the community life; now the steam or gasolene launch is making these streams highways of pleasure, and so is bringing them within the daily life of thousands. Waiting for a boat in St. Louis one beautiful summer morning on the quay, where in Paris I should have found the book-stalls, I saw a Pullman train just starting for New York, and at the water's edge under the stately bridge one tramp "barbering" another. But, reading the morning paper, I found by chance that back in the city there was one man at least, a teacher and artist, who had the old-time French feeling for the grieving river. It was dark before I found him, after my day on a steamboat whose most important passenger, pointed out to me with some apparent pride by the old-time captain, was a brewer, author of a brew more famous in those parts than the artist's river pictures which I saw by candle-light that night in his schoolroom. The artist had his river studio upon one of the beautiful cliffs which La Salle must have seen when he came out of the Illinois into the Mississippi. And it was within a few miles of that studio, it may be added, that I found, too, one noteworthy exception to Mr. Hamlin Garland's statement concerning riparian architecture. These are hopeful intimations succeeding the fading of the last traces in that region of the old French days, traces which I found a few hours' journey below St. Louis, in the village of Prairie du Rocher (locally pronounced Prary de Roosh); for Cahokia, where I stopped first, had no mark of the French regime except the "congregation," which was, as the priest told me, two hundred years old. The village had no distinctiveness. But Prairie du Rocher had its own atmosphere and charm. French skies never produced a more glorious August sunset than I saw through the Corot trees of that village, which stands or reclines beneath the cliffs and looks off toward the river that has receded far to the westward. I tried to find the old French records of which I had heard, but there was a new priest who knew not the French; yet I did not need them to assure me that the French had been there. At dawn, after such a peaceful night as one might have in upper Carcasonne, I found my way to the river near which are the ruins of Fort Chartres--all that is left of the greatest French fortress in the Mississippi Valley, the last to yield to man and the last to surrender to nature. The town, Nouvelle Chartres, with all its color and gayety, has become a corn field, and only the magazine of the fort remains, hidden, a gunshot from the river, among the weeds, bushes, vines, and trees. Fourteen miles below is the site of the oldest French village in the upper valley. But the river was jealous and took it all, foundation and roof, to itself. The charms of old Kaskaskia, the sometime capital of all that region, are "one with Nineveh and Tyre." Not a vestige is left of its first days and only a broken structure or two of its later glory. Nor is there any other trace, so far as I could learn, anywhere down the winding stream till one reaches New Orleans. The red sun-worshippers in their white garments--familiar of old to the French--even they have followed their divinity toward its setting, and only among those with African shadows in their faces do they still sing, as I have heard, of the "brave days of D'Artaguette." The monuments do not remember beyond the bravery and carnage of the Civil War, or at farthest beyond the War of 1812. I was myself apprehended for a foreign spy one day while I was searching too near to the guns of a present fort for more ancient monuments. The great river and some of its tributaries have a commerce, but it is of an inanimate and unappealing kind. They no longer draw the throngs daily to the wharfs as in the days of the glory of the steamboat. Everybody is in too much of a hurry to travel by water. An old Mississippi River steamboat captain [Footnote: George B. Merrick, "Old Times on the Upper Mississippi," Cleveland, A. H. Clark Co., 1909.] has written a reminiscent book, in which he tells with sorrow of the departed majesty and glory of the river, the glamour remaining only in the memories of those who knew the river sixty years or more ago. He laments the passing of that mighty fleet, destroyed by the very civilization that built it--a civilization which cut down the impounding forests and so removed the great natural dams which must in time be replaced by artificial ones if the rivers are ever to run full again in the dry seasons and not overflow in the wet. It is that day of the Mississippi that is best known in our literature. Mark Twain has put forever on the map of letters (where the Euphrates, the Nile, the Ilyssus, the Tiber, the Seine, the Thames long have been) the Mississippi, the river which the French first traced upon the maps of geography. So we are especially indebted to the French for Mark Twain, who began his career as a "cub" pilot on the river which in turn gave him the name by which the world is ever to know him. It was he who once wrote of this river: "The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book--a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every reperusal." [Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," pp. 82-83.] When I was entering the English Channel on my way to Havre, the captain showed me what varied courses must be taken at different hours and different days to gain full advantage of tide and current and yet avoid all danger. But, as this Mississippi River pilot has observed, it is now a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run these buoyed and lighted ship channels; it was then quite another matter to pilot a steamboat in the Mississippi or Missouri, "whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sand- bars are never at rest, whose channels are forever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions" had fifty years ago to be "confronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single lighthouse or a single buoy." [Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," p. 86.] And yet that man, who came to know, in age, the courses of human emotions the world over, could, as a young man, shut his eyes and trace the river from St. Louis to New Orleans, and read its face as one "would cull the news from a morning paper." It was for years a wish of mine that when Mark Twain should come to die, he should lie not in an ordinary sepulchre of earth but in the river which he knew so well and loved, and of whose golden days he sang. I wished that the river might be turned aside from its wonted channel, as the River Busentinus for the interment of Alaric, and then, after his burial there, be let back into it again, that he might ever hear the sonorous voice of its waters above him, and, perhaps, now and then the call of the leadsman overhead, crying the depth beneath, as he himself in the pilot-house used once to hear the call "Mark Twain" from the darkness below. So it was a disappointment to me that when the world followed him to his grave it was to a little patch of earth outside the valley, beyond the reach of even the farthest tributary of the Mississippi. The great river has been the course of one empire and the scene of many. Spain, France, England, and the United States have each claimed its mastery, as we have seen or shall see. The Germans once dreamed of a state on its banks, but could not agree as to the locality (Minnesota or Texas), so variedly tempting was the fertility of its upper and its lower waters. The sons of the Norsemen are now tilling the land around its sources. Indeed, it has now upon its banks and within the reach of its myriad streams a babel of earth's races, although the river has not, as the River of the Lotus Flower, conformed them to one uniform type. We are beginning now to realize more keenly that the river has yet to be conquered. It has yielded complete sovereignty to no people. It has made light of the emblems of empire. It has even ignored the white, channel- marking signals of the government that now exercises lordship over all the land it drains. Its untamed spirit flaunts continual challenge in the face of all men. It has had in derision the building of cities and towns. One town, for example, has been left to choose between being left high and dry five miles from water, or of meeting the fate of old Kaskaskia. And though the town has already thrown a million dollars to the river, as if to some unappeased god, the river is merciless. One town and another have been ostracized or destroyed, their wharfs left far inland or carried away to some commerceless bayou. The sentiment I have regarding the river makes it difficult to excuse its infidelity toward one little French town in particular, St. Genevieve. I can do so only by assuming that the river has cared less for its later inhabitants than it did for those who gave it name. It has laughed at the embankments on which hundreds of millions have been spent by nation, state, and private enterprise to keep its flood in restraint. Shorn of its trees, as Samson of his long hair, it has pulled down the pillars of man's raising into its own destroying waters. In 1912 a space nearly two and a half times the size of the State of New Jersey was devastated. [Footnote: Seventeen thousand six hundred and five square miles.] In 1913 the loss in a single year was one hundred and sixty million dollars. [Footnote: One hundred and sixty-three million, U. S. Weather Bureau estimate.] In the last thirty years it is estimated the loss has been a half of a billion, and it would have been immensely greater, of course, if the river had not been given unchallenged freedom of great, unclaimed swamps. And yet the river has never at any one time massed its great army of waters. At one time it has been the Ohio, at another the Missouri, and then the Red that it has sent against the fortifications. If all these streams were to be brought in flood at once the lower valley would be swept clean. So it is no martial simile that I am using. It is a real battle that is continuously on. The gaunt sharp-shooter, pacing the embankment with Winchester in hand to shoot any burrowing confederate of the river, a rat, or mole, is a real and not an imaginary figure. And the battles that have been fought along its course are as play by the side of those yet to be waged before it is subdued by man. It is fitly the War Department of the government that has been watching its every movement, that has set the signals on its fitful tide, and that has recorded its every shift for years as if it were an animate enemy. Its changing area, velocity, discharge--items of infinite permutations--are all noted and analyzed. But the war department of the government is still almost as powerless to control the river as the Yazoo farmer who watches its changing moods, not by instruments but by the movement of an eddy in his own hidden bayou. The battle is with floods, shallows, and erosion, but it is essentially a battle with floods, for not until their strongholds are taken, controlled, is the complete conquest assured. It was control of the mouth of the river that seemed so important in early days. The effort to obtain that led ultimately to the purchase of Louisiana (that is, the west bank of the river) from the French by the United States. It was the confirmation of that security of navigation which gave the battle of New Orleans its high significance. Then the mouth (thus obtained) was found too shallow for the demands of commerce, and there followed what some one with poetic instincts has called the battle of the shoals, a battle in which General Eads, who had bridged the river at St. Louis, compelled the river by means of jetties to run deeper and carry heavier burdens. But the future battle-fields are perceived to lie toward the sources, at the eaves, as it were, of the watersheds, the headwaters of its tributaries as well as its own. No deepening, embanking, straightening, canalization of the river is to be permanently effective until all danger of flood can be removed. Wandering among those tributaries, seeing the trickling fountains of several of them, watching the timid stream in the naked, deforested fields (not knowing quite which way to go, east or west, north or south), I have been strongly appealed to by the plan of impounding in reservoirs these first waters, whose freedom (no longer restrained in youth by the sage forests) makes them libertines and wantons in the distant valleys below. Such impounding has successful inauguration in five small reservoirs now in operation on the headwaters of the Mississippi out of forty-two planned. An ambitious plan for controlling the turbulent Ohio by a system of from seventeen to forty-three reservoirs at an estimated cost of from twenty to thirty-four millions of dollars has been suggested by Mr. M. O. Leighton of the United States Geological Survey, and received indorsement from the Pittsburgh Flood Commission, the Dayton Flood Commission, and the National Waterways Commission. These would suffice to keep the lawless waters within temperate bounds in the spring and to give more generous navigable currents in the summer and autumn. Against the great expense of such a project is set the tremendous possibilities in the development of water-power. Of the theoretical sixty millions of horse-power in the current of the Mississippi, it is estimated that about six and a half millions can be economically developed throughout the year, while twelve millions could be developed during six months or more without storage reservoirs. An adequate system of reservoirs might double or treble these totals, while a million or two would be immediately available to begin the payment of the debt, and more of the strength would be harnessed to that purpose in time. So, it is urged, the river would be made to meet the expense of its own conquest. [Footnote: See reports of the National Conservation Commission in 1909; National Waterways Commission, 1912; Report Commissioner of Corporations on Water-Power Development in the United States, 1912; J. L. Mathews "Remaking the Mississippi," Boston, 1909.] And once that is done the river may be straightened, shortened, deepened, leveed, and made a docile, reliable carrier of commerce. It may then be compelled to a respect for cities and government signals and wharfs and mills. And the astute suggestion of the practical Joliet for the canalization of its waters, may be realized in the safe passage not merely of boats but of stately, giant, ocean-sized vessels from the Great Lakes to the gulf. A hundred years ago (1809) one Nicholas Roosevelt, commissioned of Robert Fulton (the inventor of the steamboat) and others, was sent to Pittsburgh to build the first steamboat to be launched in western waters. So confident was this young man of the success of steamboat navigation of the Ohio and Mississippi that, on his journey of inspection, he purchased coal-mines along the way and arranged to have the coal piled up on the river bank against the time of its need by boats whose keels had not been laid and whose existence even depended upon the approval of eastern capitalists. It suggests the prevision of the nephew, Theodore Roosevelt, in making provision for the coaling of ships in the east long before the Spanish War was in sight. I was on the Marquette-Joliet portage the very day that this same nephew was predicting with like confidence to the people of St. Louis that the Mississippi would be deepened till from the lakes to the gulf it should be a course for seagoing vessels. Champlain suggested the Panama Canal three hundred years before its building. Joliet, in 1673, suggested the lakes-to-the-gulf ship waterway, [Footnote: Margry, 1:268.] and by the three-hundredth anniversary, perhaps, it will be completed. I made a journey in 1911 that began at the first settlements of the French in Nova Scotia, touched the Bay of Chaleur and the lower St. Lawrence, and then followed the French water paths all the way to the mouth of the Mississippi, where the master of pilots, a descendant of France, carried me out into the Gulf of Mexico. Starting back before dawn in a little boat, I saw, just as the sun was coming up over the swamps where the river begins to divide, the hulk of a great seagoing vessel against the morning sky. It seemed then a gloomy apparition; but as I think of it now it was rather the presage of the new commerce than the ghost of that which has departed. That the Valley of a Hundred Thousand Streams--streams that together touch every community of any size from the Alleghanies to the Rockies--streams whose waters all find their way sooner or later into the Mississippi--will ever give up battle till the great water itself is conquered, no one who knows the determined people in that valley will ever question. The sixty million people will not be resisted permanently by the sixty million horses of the river, though the strength of the horses be driven by all the clouds that the gulf sends up the valley to its aid. Some day the great, free River Colbert will run vexed of impenetrable, unyielding walls to the sea. Its "titanic ambition for quiet flowing" down this beautiful, gently sloping valley to the gulf (which, as one has said, "has been its longing through ages") will have been turned to human ministry. The spirit of the great water will have become as patient, as thoughtless of its own wild comfort or ambitions as that of the priest who dedicated it to the honor of the mother of the most patient of men. CHAPTER VI THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE AND THE DREAM OF ITS REVIVAL The readers who have through these chapters been companions of Champlain, La Salle, Joliet, Marquette, and others in the discovery of the mighty rivers and the conquest of the mighty vastnesses of the new world will have, if they continue, yet before them even harder and more disheartening ventures, as La Salle himself had that April day in 1682, when he turned from the column which he had planted in sight of the Gulf of Mexico, four thousand miles from the Cape of Labrador, and began to drive his canoes up the river which he had traced forever, if too tortuously, on the maps of the earth. During the chapter since we reached the shores of that lonely sea without a sail, we have, covering in prospect two centuries, contemplated the majesty of that river of a hundred thousand affluents. Now, as we turn our faces toward the lakes and Canada again, a century of hardship confronts us. If the readers endure it with me, as I have endured it again and again, they will have added again to their France and their United States memories more precious than the titles to boundless prairies and trackless forests. La Salle was not content with the discovery of the great waterway to the gulf, the tracing of whose course had ended all dreams of a shorter route to China by aid of its current. In place of his La Chine dream grew another dream: to open this valley to France from the south instead of from the north, where the way was long and perilous, closed half the year by ice and storm, and beset all the year by hostile intrigue, envy, and dishonesty of colonial officials. A Franco-Indian colony was to be established along the Illinois under the protection of Fort St. Louis on the Rock. Ultimately a chain of forts and colonies would hold the watercourse all the way from gulf to gulf-from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico-maintained by revenues from the hides and wool of the buffalo then roaming the woods and prairies and plains from one side of the valley to the other; the Indians would gather about these centres for gain and protection; and in the midst of this wilderness he would hold for France the empire that the inscription on the column at the mouth of the river claimed. The crows might fly about his fields, but they could not then touch his rich crops. Griffins--flocks, fleets of griffins--would fly above them. That was the vision with which he started northward from the mouth of the great river, the vision out of which he might at once have been starved except for the meat of alligators shot along the way. Seized of a dangerous illness, he sent Tonty on to Mackinaw to forward news of the discovery to Canada, and unable, even after months of Father Membré's care, to go to Paris to prepare for the carrying out of his great scheme, he, joined by Tonty, climbs the Rock St. Louis and lays out ramparts on its crest, of which I thought I discovered traces many years ago. It was another Rock of Quebec, rising sheer a hundred and twenty-five feet above the river in the midst of the prairie. About it gathered under his protection many tribes of Indians, in common dread of the Iroquois, in common hope, doubtless, of gain from commerce with the French. La Salle, in a report to be found in the archives of the Marine in Paris, states that his extemporized colony numbered four thousand warriors, or twenty thousand souls. [Footnote: Margry, 2:363. Parkman, "La Salle," pp. 317, 318.] It had come up as Jonah's gourd and might as quickly wither, as the village of the Illinois but a few years previous had withered into desolation in a few hours before the hot breath of the terrorizing fame of the Iroquois. From his seigniorial aerie he sent messages to the governor of Canada, no longer the friendly Frontenac but a Pharaoh who knew not this Joseph, praying for cooperation, saying that he could not leave his red allies lest, if the Iroquois should strike in his absence, they would think him in league with their dread enemies; asking that his men who go down with hides in exchange for munitions be not retained as outlaws; urging that it is for the advantage of his creditors (for his losses had amounted to forty thousand crowns) that they do not seize his goods-since the means of meeting all his debts would then be destroyed-and begging for more men with whom to make this colony permanent and gather the more remote Indian tribes around the sheltering Rock St. Louis. [Footnote: Margry, 2:314. Parkman, "La Salle," pp. 320-324.] But it was not such prayers that reached Louis XIV, who, on May 10, 1682, before La Salle's report of the discovery of the Mississippi arrived at Versailles, had directed that no further permission should be given to make journeys of discovery toward the Mississippi, as the colonists might better be employed in cultivating the lands. This is an example of the advice the king is receiving from his governor in Quebec: "You will see that ... [La Salle] has been bold enough to give you intelligence of a false discovery and that, instead of returning to the colony to learn what the King wishes him to do, he does not come near me, but keeps in the backwoods, five hundred leagues off, with the idea of attracting the inhabitants to him, and building up an imaginary kingdom for himself, by debauching all the bankrupts and idlers of this country, ... All the men who brought me news from him have abandoned him, and say not a word about returning, but sell the furs they have brought as if they were their own; so that he cannot hold his ground much longer." [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 323.] Meanwhile the king, the same king who five years before had said in La Salle's commission that he had "nothing more at heart" than the exploration of that country, writes to the governor of Canada from Fontainebleau: "I am convinced, as you, that the discovery of the Sieur de la Salle is very useless, and that such enterprises ought to be prevented in the future." [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 324.] In his extremity, his supplies cut off, his men sent to Quebec deserting with the profits of his hides, La Salle leaves Tonty on the Rock, starts for Quebec, intending to go to France, meets on the way an officer appointed to succeed him in all his wilderness authority, and in the spring of 1684 is again a lodger in Rue de la Truanderie, a miserable little street in Paris where, as I have said before, I have tried to locate the lodging of the valiant soul who once dwelt upon the mysterious rock near my boyhood home. Thence this man of "solitary disposition," whose life had been joined to savages, and who had for years had "neither servants, clothes nor fare which did not savor more of meanness than of ostentation," and who was of such natural timidity that it took him a week "to make up his mind to go to an audience" with Monseigneur de Conti, is summoned to an interview with the king himself. La Salle's memorials, which recall by way of introduction his five journeys of upward of five thousand leagues, in great part on foot, through more than six hundred leagues of unknown country among savages and cannibals, and at the cost of one hundred and fifty thousand francs, and which propose projects that seem in some of their features quixotic and visionary, received favorable consideration of the king and his minister Colbert's son. La Salle's wilderness empire is restored to him and he is granted four ships in which to carry soldiers, mechanics, and laborers to establish a fort and colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, to open up all the interior of America from the south, and incidentally to make war on the Spaniards (who were claiming the gulf for their own), and to seize their valuable mines. The quarrellings of this expedition (due in part to the divided command); the failure to find the mouth of the Mississippi since, we are told, La Salle had been unable in 1682 to determine its longitude; the landing on the shores of Texas, far beyond the mouth of the Mississippi; the loss of one of the vessels to the Spanish, the wreck of two others, and the return of the fourth to France; the miserable fate of the colony left on those desolate shores; the long search of La Salle and his companions for the "fatal river"--these make a dismal story whose details cannot be rehearsed here, a story whose tragic end was the murder of La Salle by one of his own disaffected followers in March, 1687, on the banks of the Trinity River. There is time, as we hasten on, for only a few words over the body of this "iron man," left "a prey to the buzzards and wolves" of the wilderness in which he sacrificed all, as Champlain, for France. "One of the greatest men of his age," said Tonty, who was nearest to him in all his labors save his last. "Without question one of the most remarkable explorers whose names live in history," writes Parkman. [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 430.] His "personality is impressed in some respects more strongly than that of any other upon the history of New France," says another historian, Fiske. [Footnote: "New France and New England," p. 132.] "For force of will and vast conceptions; for various knowledge and quick adaptation of his genius to untried circumstances; for a sublime magnanimity, that resigned itself to the will of Heaven, and yet triumphed over affliction by energy of purpose and unfaltering hope--this daring adventurer had no superior among his countrymen," says Bancroft. [Footnote: "History of the United States," 3: 173.] And further, in the estimate of a recent historian of the valley, "for all the qualities of rugged manhood, courage, persistency that could not be broken, contempt of pain and hardship, he has never been surpassed." [Footnote: James K. Hosmer, "Short History of the Mississippi Valley," p. 140.] Let him who next to Tonty knew him better than all the other chroniclers say a last word--one which will justify the time that we have given to following the fortunes and adversities of this spirit, unbroken to the last: "He was a tower of adamant, against whose impregnable front hardship and danger, the rage of man and of the elements, the southern sun, the northern blast, fatigue, famine, disease, delay, disappointment and deferred hope, emptied their quivers in vain.... Never under the impenetrable mail of paladin or crusader beat a heart of more intrepid mettle than within the stoic panoply that armed the breast of La Salle. To estimate aright the marvels of his patient fortitude, one must follow on his track through the vast scene of his interminable journeyings.... America owes him an enduring memory; for in this masculine figure she sees the pioneer who guided her to her richest heritage." [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 432.] France had deserved well of that valley had she done nothing more than to set that rugged, fearless figure in the heart of America, a perpetual foil to effeminacy and submission to softening luxury, to the arts that seek merely popularity, to drunkenness and other vices which he combated even in that wilderness, to sycophancy and demagogy--a perpetual example of the "vir" and virtue in the noblest sense in which mankind has defined them. In the grand amphitheatre in the Sorbonne, I witnessed one day in Paris a celebration of the conquests of the French language in lands outside of France: conquests in the islands of the West Indies, where La Salle suffered all but death; in Canada, where he had his first visions; and in Louisiana, where he perished. Though his name was not spoken, it were a reason for greater celebration in France that the spirit of such a Frenchman as La Salle had enduring memory in the severe ideals of manhood that are for all time to possess the men of that valley to which he guided the world. There is a grave for which I wished to make search in Rouen, the grave of the mother of La Salle, to whom he wrote in 1684: "I hope ... to embrace you a year hence with all the pleasure that the most grateful of children can feel with so good a mother as you have always been." [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 364.] I wish I could have made her know--but since I could not, I tried to let France know instead--that there are millions who could speak to-day as the most "grateful of children" what her son and France's son was never permitted to utter. La Salle's dream of New France did not fade with his last sight of his empire of Louisiana. But the century in which he was born and died had all but gone out before the stirring of his life's vision and sacrifice, strengthened by appeal of the gallant and faithful Tonty, resulted in the offer by one who has been called the "Cid of Canada," Le Moyne d'Iberville, to carry out the schemes of La Salle, and it was becoming clear that France must act at once or England would build the glorious structure which La Salle had designed. In the offer of this young Canadian and his brother Bienville were the purposes that gave substantial foundation to Louisiana. Sailing with their two ships in 1699, they were caught in the "strong, muddy current of fresh water," which La Salle had unluckily passed without seeing. They entered this stream and, after several days of exploration, had verification of the identity of the river in a letter (or "speaking bark," as the Indians called it), dated the 2Oth of April, 1685, which Tonty, years before, when making the journey down the river in search of La Salle, had left in the hands of an Indian chief to be delivered to La Salle, or, as the chief called him, "the man who should come up the river." The fortunes which befell those of this colony, trying to find a suitable site in that land of bushes and cane-brakes, are not agreeable to follow. For thirteen years the "paternal providence of Versailles" watched over them, sending them marriageable women, soldiers, priests, and nuns, but so little food that famine and pestilence often came to their miserable stockades. They were under injunction "to seek out pearl fisheries," "to catch bison-calves, tame them and take their wool," and "to look for mines." What employment for the founders of an empire! [Footnote: In one of the branches of that river at whose mouth they settled I saw a summer or two ago, one of the men of that valley wading in its water, still in search of pearls. A pearl worth a thousand dollars had once been found near by, and so (in the same hope that animated the mind of King Louis XIV) man after man in that neighborhood had abandoned his fertile farm to search for pearls, only to be reduced, as the poor settlers of early, Louisiana, to live upon the shell-fish in which the pearls refused to grow.] One cannot resist the temptation to say again: If only Louis XIV had had the good sense, unblinded of pearls and gold and bigotry and some other things, to let the industrious, skilled Huguenots, flying from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, settle in Louisiana, instead of forcing them to swell the numbers of the English colonies on the Atlantic coast, and eventually assist them in taking the New France from which they had been debarred! The French engineer of an English ship, appearing on the river one day, had furtively handed Bienville a petition of four hundred Huguenots in the Carolinas to be allowed to settle in Louisiana and to have the privilege of worship, such as is enjoyed to-day. The answer came from Versailles to the cane-brakes--from Versailles, where, amid scenes "which no European court could rival," the "greatest of France, princes, warriors, statesmen," were gathered week after week in the "Halls of Abundance, Venus, Mars and Apollo," from Versailles to the half-starved little group sitting in exile by the gulf, far from abundance, without love, in dread of Mars, and with no arts of Apollo save the sound of the wind in the trees and the moan of the sea: "Have I expelled heretics from France in order that they should set up a republic in America?" One has reminded us that while Iberville was making almost futile attempts with the half-hearted support of his government to establish this colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, Peter the Great was beginning to lay the foundations of St. Petersburg in as unpromising a place--a barren, uncultivated island which was a frozen swamp in winter and a heap of mud in summer, in the midst of pathless forests and deep morasses haunted by wolves and bears. Peter the Great spent great treasure in clearing the forests, draining the swamps, and raising embankments for this future capital of an empire. Louis XIV had only to let certain Frenchmen settle on these less forbidding coasts, that might soon have become the capital of as fruitful a province as Peter the Great's; and the transformation would have been made, as in New England, without any assistance from the king except perhaps for defense. It is due the memory of Iberville, often slandered as was La Salle before him, not that the story of his all but hopeless struggles should be repeated here but that the object toward which he so valiantly struggled should be clearly seen. He had read Father Membré's account of the La Salle voyage of discovery and Joutel's story of the last expedition. He had even had a conversation with La Salle, and had heard his own lips describe the river; and he had known Tonty of the Iron Hand, faithful to the last. Iberville had a mind capable of entertaining the vision, and he had a spirit capable of following it. He seems to have been for a time after La Salle's death his only great-minded follower. He wrote on reaching Rochelle after his first voyage that "if France does not immediately seize this part of America, which is the most beautiful, and establish a colony strong enough to resist any which England may have here, the English colonies (already considerable in Carolina) will so thrive that in less than a hundred years they will be strong enough to seize all America." [Footnote: Margry, _l. c._, IV:322.] But the answer from Versailles only hastened the fulfilment of Iberville's prophecy. It is as a page torn from a contemporaneous suburban villa prospectus that speaks of one of those migratory settlements of Iberville on the shores of the gulf as a "terrestrial paradise," a "Pomona," or "The Fortunate Island." And the reality which confronts the home seeker is usually more nearly true to the idealistic details than that which Governor Cadillac, wishing no doubt to discredit his predecessor, reported when he went to succeed Bienville for a time as governor: "I have seen the garden on Dauphin Island, which had been described to me as a terrestrial paradise. I saw there three seedling pear-trees, three seedling apple- trees, a little plum-tree about three feet high, with seven bad plums on it, a vine some thirty feet long, with nine bunches of grapes, some of them withered, or rotten, and some partly ripe, about forty plants of French melons and a few pumpkins." [Footnote: Parkman, "A Half Century of Conflict," 1:309.] Bienville, the brother, also deserves remembrance both in France and America--dismissed once but exonerated, returning later to succeed the pessimistic Cadillac and to lay the foundations of New Orleans on the only dry spot he had found on his first journey up the river, there to plant the seed of the fruits and melons and pumpkins of the garden on Dauphin Island, that were to bring forth millionfold, though they have not yet entirely crowded out the cypress and the palmetto, and the fleur-de-lis that still grows wild and flowers brilliantly at certain seasons. It was some time before this, however, that the king, nearing the end of his days, vexed with his wars, tired of his expensive and unproductive venture, gave over the colony into the hands and enterprise of a speculator, one Antoine Crozat, a French merchant whose purse had been open to Louis for his wars. There was a total population at this juncture (1712) of three hundred and eighty souls, about one half of whom were "in the king's pay." Crozat, the king's deputy despot, finds no better fortune than the king, and soon (1717) resigns his charter, to be succeeded in his anxieties and privileges by that famous Scotch adventurer John Law, who organized the Mississippi Company in order to enjoy the varied monopolies assembled in its charter--monopolies which would make any inhabitant of that trust-hating valley to-day fume in denouncing. It was a tobacco trust, a coinage trust, a revenue trust, a slave-holding trust, a mining trust, a trade trust wrapped in one, with an unlimited license. It was, moreover, a conscience trust, a speech trust, a religion trust, a race trust. It was, in short, the ultimate, sublimated expression of a monopolistic theory made effective in a charter. Immigration, within these restrictions, was not likely to be voluntary and eager, as was the case in New England, and, since the company was under the one compulsion of providing a certain number of colonists and slaves, immigration was forced. Every conceivable sound economic and philosophical principle was violated, and yet investors came from all parts of Europe. "Crowds of crazed speculators jostled and fought each other" before the offices of the company in the Rue Quincampoix [Footnote: A now disreputable street, or so it seemed as I walked through it one day in the dusk.] from morning till night to get their names inscribed among the stockholders, and, though five hundred thousand foreigners were attracted to Paris by opportunities for speculation, scarcely a colonist went willingly to the Eldorado of the company, whose stock was capitalized in billions and "whose ingots of gold were displayed in Paris shop-windows." There were maps of that valley to be found in abundance in Paris in those days with mines indicated on them indiscriminately. When the bubble burst, Louisiana "became a name of disgust and terror" in Europe, and doubtless thousands hoped never to hear the word "Mississippi" again, and yet it was only time that was needed to make even such wild prophecies true. The monopolistic venture failed. Many of the colonists whom the company entered died or ran away; millions of pounds had been spent, there was no return, and there was little tangible to show for it all--a few thousand white settlers, many of whom, in a phrase current to-day in the States, were "undesirable citizens," living in palisaded cabins. So the little settlement became a crown colony again and came back to the king, but not to him in whose name it had been originally taken, for that king was dead. Louis XIV's name, kept in "Louisiana," claims now but a fragment of that vast territory which might have been his forever. The little outcast colony was laid on the steps of Versailles again, and was again subject to "paternalistic nursing," because of or in despite of which it began at last to show signs of growth. It was at the cost of a half-century of time, of eight or more millions of livres to the king, Crozat and the company, of millions upon millions more to those who bought the worthless stock of the Mississippi Company, and of ignominy and shame, that La Salle's dream began to have realization, while on the Atlantic seaboard the English colonies were growing luxuriantly in comparative neglect. Meanwhile French explorers were traversing this mighty interior valley with all the spirit of Cartier, Joliet, Champlain, and La Salle. Pierre Charles le Sueur had ascended the Mississippi far toward its source in search of copper and lead. Bernard de la Harpe and Louis Juchereau, the Sieur de St. Denis, explored the Red River and penetrated as far as the Spanish settlement of St. Jean Baptiste on the Rio Grande. Each might have a volume. The turbid Missouri even (which Marquette and Joliet first saw heading great trees down into the Mississippi) was not passed by as impervious to the hardihood of undaunted, amphibious geographers such as La Harpe and Du Tisne. Two brothers, Pierre and Paul Mallet, penetrated to the old Spanish settlement at Santa Fé and may have been the first of Frenchmen to see the farther boundary of the valley, the Rocky Mountains. Whether they did or not, it is certain that far to the northwest two other brothers did reach that mighty range and "discovered that part of it to which the name Rocky Mountains properly belongs." The brothers La Vérendrye in 1735, two centuries after Cartier, were still looking for a way to the western sea (Mer de l'Ouest). With their father these sons ventured their lives and gave their fortunes to the exploration of the northwest out beyond Lake Superior, out past the ranch where a century and a half later President Roosevelt wrote the "Winning of the West," out to or beyond the edge of what is now the great Yellowstone National Park, anticipating by more than sixty years the first stages of the famous Lewis and Clark expedition. The snow covered the peaks of the Big Horn Mountains, but the party probably forced a way to the Wind River Range before they reluctantly turned back from the foot of the mountains, disappointedly fancying that they might have seen the Pacific if they could have reached the summits. It is not far from the place where they began their homeward journey that I have seen two trickling streams, within a few yards of each other, start, one toward the gulf and one toward the Pacific--but the latter had seven or eight hundred miles of mountain and forest to pass before it could touch what the Vérendrye brothers hoped to see. Yet, though they, as Cartier, Champlain, Nicolet, La Salle, and scores of others did not find the way to the western sea, their unappreciated, heroic efforts made at their own expense stretched the line of French forts all the way across the valley from sea to mountain range, completing, as one historian has represented it, a T, but as it seems to me rather a cross, with a perpendicular column reaching from the gulf to Hudson's Bay, and its transverse strip from the Big Horn Mountains to Cape Breton. Or so it stood for a day in the world's history, raised by unspeakable suffering, a vision once seen never to be forgotten. Chevalier de la Vérendrye, who had seen, first of white men, the snow- capped mountains, "sank into poverty and neglect," and finally perished in the shipwreck off the island of Cape Breton. So was the whole east and west line of French pioneering retraced and extended in the life of one hardy French family. [Footnote: Parkman, "The Discovery of the Rocky Mountains," in _Atlantic Monthly_, 61:783-793. "A Half Century of Conflict," 2:4-43. Thwaites, "A Brief History of Rocky Mountain Exploration," pp. 26-36.] And as to the north and south line, every year saw its foundations and strength increase as if it were a a growing tree. Along the Mississippi, forts were planted and Jesuit and Sulpician missions grew. The Illinois country enjoyed a "boom," as we say in America, even in those days, and became known for a time as the Garden of New France; but only for a time, for it was so easy to earn a livelihood there that it was not long before the habitants reverted, under temptation, to the preagricultural, hunting state after giving a moment's prophecy of the stirring life that was some day to make it the garden of the new world, the busiest spot in the busy world. There are glimpses here and there of gayety and halcyon days that give brightness to the story so full of tragedy. There was in the very heart of the valley (near the site of St. Louis, where a great world's fair was held a few years ago), Fort Chartres, mentioned above, "the centre of life and fashion in the West" as well as "a bulwark against Spain and a barrier to England." [Footnote: See Edward G. Mason, "Old Fort Chartres," in his "Chapters from Illinois History," 1901.] But in time the Indians, stirred by the English rivalry, swarmed as well as mosquitoes about the place, and there were battles, the echoes of which are still heard, we are told, in the regions south of St. Louis even in Our days. A young French officer, the Chevalier d'Artaguette, captured by the Chickasaws, was burned at the stake. He and his kin were loved by all the French and the song they used to sing of him is kept in a negro melody whose "oft-repeated chorus" ran: "In the days of D'Artaguette, Hé! Ho! Hé! It was the good old time. The world was led straight with a switch, Hé! Ho! Hé! Then there were no negroes, no ribbons, No diamonds For the vulgar. Hé! Ho! Hé!" And here even in this remote place premonitions of the great and imminent struggle with the English are ominously heard. We hear the governor- general of Canada, the Marquis de la Galissonnière, asking the home government in France not to leave the little colony of Illinois to perish --not for its own sake, but "else Canada and Louisiana would fall apart"; still urging, moreover, the value for fabrics of the wool of buffaloes, which roam the prairies in innumerable multitudes, the readiness of the earth for the plough, and the availability of the buffalo as a domestic animal. "If caught and attached to a plough," says the governor, who spoke truthfully but with little knowledge of this wild animal, "it would move it at a speed superior to that of the domestic ox." I do not know how appealing this harnessing of the original motive power of the prairie to the uses of agriculture was, and it is not of importance now. The buffalo has long since gone. Even the ox and the Norman horse, so long in use there, have been largely supplanted by that mysterious force, electricity, which Franklin was discovering on the other side of the Alleghany Mountains at the very time that this suggestion was being made to the minister of Louis XV. It is known, however, that the king took thought of the little Illinois colony, for the fort of wood was transformed under the direction of Chevalier de Macarty into a fortress of stone and garrisoned by nearly a regiment of French troops. A million crowns it cost the king, but this could not have distressed his Majesty, engaged in "throwing dice with piles of Louis d'or before him" and princes about him. This was in the early fifties, and the fort was hardly transformed before the rifles of George Washington's men were heard from the eastern barriers disputing the claim of the French to the Ohio country. Jumonville, who was slain among the rocks of the Laurel Mountains, in the Alleghanies (killed in the opening skirmish of the final struggle), had a young brother, Neyon de Villiers, a captain in Chevalier de Macarty's garrison at Fort Chartres; and eastward he hastened, up the Ohio, to avenge his brother's death. "M. de Wachenston" (as the name appears in French despatches) was driven back, and so the "Old French War" in America began. It was from this mid-continent fortress and its fertile environs that help in arms and rations went to the support of that final struggle along the mountains and lakes, even as far as La Salle's old Fort Niagara, where the valiant Aubry, at the head of his Illinois expedition, fell covered with wounds and many of his men were killed or taken prisoners. That was about all that one in the interior of the valley heard of the battles of the Seven Years' War out upon its edges. What gives peculiar interest in this fortress to us to-day is that it was for a little time the only place in North America where the flag of the French was flying. All New France had been ceded by the treaty of Paris in 1763, but the little garrison of forty men still held Fort Chartres. Pontiac and other friendly Indians intercepted all approaching English forces till, in 1765 (two years after the treaty of Paris and the cession of Canada and all the valley east of the Mississippi), St. Ange, the commander, announced to Pontiac, friendly to the end, that all was over, that "Onontio, their great French father," could no longer help his red children, that he was beyond the sea and could not hear, and that he, Pontiac, must make peace with the English. Then it was that the forty- second Highlanders, the "Black Watch," were permitted to enter the fort and to put the red cross of St. George in place of the fleur-de-lis. And so it was at Fort Chartres that the mighty struggle ended and that the titular life of the great empire of France in the new world actually went out. The river, seemingly sentient, and still French, as I have said, soon swept away the site of the village outside the fort; and when the English had begun to look upon this as their permanent headquarters in the northwest--this fort, which Captain Pittman had reported to be the best- built fort in America--the still hostile river rose one night, and with its "resistless flood" tore away a bastion and a part of the river wall, then moved its channel away, and left the fort a mile inland. The magazine still stands, or did a little time ago when I visited the site and found it nearly hidden by the trees, bushes, and weeds--all that is visibly left of the old French domain--and not far away, hidden at the foot of a hill, lies, as I have said, the village of Prairie du Rocher, "a little piece of old France transplanted to the Mississippi" a century and a half ago and forgotten. It was on Champlain's cliff and beneath Cartier's Mount Royal that the unequal contest for the possession of America ended, where it began--a contest whose story, as Parkman says, in a sense demeaning his own great contribution, "would have been a history, if faults of constitution and the bigotry and folly of rulers had not dwarfed it to an episode." But if it was an episode to the New Englander, or even to Frenchmen at the distance in time at which I write, it rises to the importance of history out in that region of America, where a century of unexampled fortitude needs rather an epic poet than a historian to give it its place in the world's consciousness. Indeed, historians of the United States to-day, as well as statesmen of that time, are in substantial agreement in this: That the presence of the French on all the colonial borders compelled a confederation of the varying interests of the several English colonies, kept them penned in between the mountains and the sea until there had been developed some degree of solidarity, some ability to act together; and then by the sudden, if compulsory, withdrawal of the pressure not only allowed their expansion but relieved them of all need of help from England and so of dependence upon her. "We have caught them at last," said Louis XV's minister, Choiseul, speaking of the treaty of Paris in 1763. [Footnote: Bancroft, "History of the United States," 4:460.] Burke [Footnote: William Burke, "Remarks on the Letter Addressed to Two Great Men."] prophesied that the removal of France from North America would precipitate, as it did, the division of the British Empire. And Richard Henry Greene, the great English historian, dates the foundation of the great independent republic of the west (the United States) from the triumph of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham. It is interesting testimony in support of this fear of the eventual loss of all the colonies in such a cession, or such an acceptance, that the English commissioners debated long whether it might be more profitable to retain the little island of Guadeloupe instead of all New France. And it would appear that except for the advice of Benjamin Franklin this substitution would probably have been made. France, then, having borne the brunt of conflict with nature and the natives in that valley, having revealed the riches of that valley to the world, having consecrated its entire length and breadth by high valor and sacrifice, having possessed that valley practically to the very eve of the birth of the nation that now occupies it, and having helped by substantial aid the struggling colonies to their independence, deserves (not through her monarchs or ministers chiefly, but through the new-world pioneers, who gave illustration of the spirit and stuff of Frenchmen) a lasting and a large share of credit for the establishment of the republic which has its most vigorous life in that valley. New France has passed and New England, too, but in their stead the new republic, recruited from all nations under heaven, ties their lost dominions into a power which is immensely greater than the sum of the two could have been, greater than it could have been in the hands of either alone. There was for a little time a dream of the revival of New France out beyond the Mississippi, for there was a vast part of that valley that did not pass to England in 1763. The great territory between the Mississippi and the mountains, whose "snow-encumbered" peaks the Vérendrye brothers had so longingly looked upon, was abandoned to Spain, or rather thrust upon Spain, already claiming it. France wanted to give it to England in order that Florida might be saved to Spain, her ally, but England did not hesitate as she did in making choice between the eastern half of the valley and Guadeloupe. She declined. So with an apparent magnanimity, which is greatly to be discounted when we come to know how worthless even the people of the United States, years later, considered this trans- Mississippi country, France, "secretly tired of her colony," finally induced Spain to accept it. The Spanish monarch, as if making the best of a bad bargain, took it with many excuses for his seemingly poor judgment. But though Louis's minister, Choiseul, chuckled outwardly over the embarrassment to England of his compulsory cession of Canada, New France, Illinois, and Louisiana (instead of Guadeloupe) and made a show of magnanimity in thrusting the other half of the Mississippi upon Spain, and though Turgot's simile between colonies and ripe fruit was often repeated for justification and consolation, the loss of these possessions was undoubtedly keenly felt and the dream of their recovery cherished; at any rate, the recovery of that part which lay beyond the Mississippi. But that possession had become more precious to the sovereign of Spain, who refused the proffers that France was able to make in the next thirty years. The dream of repossession became fonder to the French republic. Talleyrand, who had spent a year in travel in the United States, urged the acquisition not merely for France's own sake but to curb the ambitions of the Americans, "whose conduct ever since the moment of their independence is enough to prove this truth: the Americans are devoured by pride, ambition, and cupidity." "There are," he said, "no other means of putting an end to the ambition of the Americans than that of shutting them up within the limits which nature seems to have traced for them; but Spain is not in a condition to do this great work alone. She cannot, therefore, hasten too quickly to engage the aid of a preponderating power, yielding to it a small part of her immense domains in order to preserve the rest." "Let the court of Madrid cede these districts to France and from that moment the power of America is bounded by the limit which it may suit the interests and the tranquillity of France and Spain to assign her. The French Republic ... will be a wall of brass forever impenetrable to the combined efforts of England and America." [Footnote: Quoted in Henry Adams's "History of the United States," 1:357.] If in Napoleon's mind the dream was as sinister, as regards the United States, it was not so for long. It contemplated at first the occupation of Santo Domingo, the quelling of the insurrection there, then the seizure of Louisiana, already promised to France by Spain, then the acquisition of Florida, the conversion of the Gulf of Mexico into a French lake, and ultimately the extension of the province of Louisiana to the Alleghanies and, perhaps, even to the old borders of New France along the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. But plague and slaughter met his armies in Santo Domingo in the first step toward the realization of his vast design, and the vision, in the shifting light of events in Europe and on the shores of America as well, soon assumed other shape and color and at last disappeared entirely, supplanted by the vision of a strengthened American republic that would come to be a rival of England. This was what came (in his own language) instead of his dream of a New France beyond the Mississippi, beyond the American republic: "I know the full value of Louisiana, and I have been desirous of repairing the fault of the French negotiator who abandoned it in 1763. A few lines of a treaty have restored it to me, and I have scarcely recovered it when I must expect to lose it. But if it escapes from me, it shall one day cost dearer to those who oblige me to strip myself of it than to those to whom I wish to deliver it. The English have successfully taken from France, Canada, Cape Breton, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the richest portions of Asia. They are engaged in exciting troubles in St. Domingo. They shall not have the Mississippi which they covet. Louisiana is nothing in comparison with their conquests in all parts of the globe, and yet the jealousy they feel at the restoration of this colony to the sovereignty of France acquaints me with their wish to take possession of it, and it is thus that they will begin the war.... I think of ceding it to the United States. I can scarcely say that I cede it to them, for it is not yet in our possession. If, however, I leave the least time to our enemies, I shall only transmit an empty title to those republicans whose friendship I seek. They only ask of me one town in Louisiana, but I already consider the colony as entirely lost, and it appears to me that in the hands of this growing power, it will be more useful to the policy and even to the commerce of France than if I should attempt to keep it." [Footnote: Marbois, "History of Louisiana," pp. 263-264.] The United States Commissioner came one day to Paris to purchase New Orleans, and he went back to America with a deed to more than 800,000 square miles of the region which La Salle had claimed for Louis XIV by virtue of the commission which he carried in his bosom from the Rue de la Truanderie more than a century before: "The First Consul of the French Republic, desiring to give to the United States a strong proof of friendship, doth hereby cede to the said United States, in the name of the French Republic, forever and in full sovereignty, the said territory, with all its rights and appurtenances, as fully and in the same manner as they might have been acquired by the French Republic." [Footnote: Treaty of Purchase between the United States and the French Republic, Art. I.] The dream faded into something undefined but greater, relieving Napoleon and France of immediate dangers and promising more to humanity, we must agree, than a colony administered at that distance and separated from a young, growing nation merely by a shifting river that must inevitably have made trouble instead of preventing it. Whatever may be said of Napoleon's motives or compulsions in this matter or of his service to mankind in others, he has been "useful to the universe," not in preventing England from ruling in that valley and so dominating America, but in making it possible for the United States to undertake the greatest task ever given into the hands of a republic, and at the same time enabling it to keep the good-will of that people who might (if the other dream had been realized) have become the worst of her enemies. It was Napoleon, whatever his motive, Napoleon in the name of the French people, who gave the United States the possibility of becoming a world-power. CHAPTER VII THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS Let us remind ourselves again, before the hordes of frontiersmen and settlers come over the mountains and up the lakes and down the rivers, erasing most of the tangible memories of the inter-montane, primeval western wilderness, that France evoked it from the unknown. A circle drawn round the Louvre with the radius of two kilometres, enclosed the little patch of earth from which were evoked these millions of acres of untouched forests and millions of acres of virgin plain and prairie, seamed and watered by a hundred thousand streams, washed by a chain of the mightiest inland fresh-water oceans, and guarded by two ranges of mountains. Within that narrow circle, four kilometres in diameter, stood Cartier dreaming of Asia, asking for permission to explore the mysterious square gulf, the St. Lawrence, and again presenting to the king the dusky captive Donnacona; within that circle was the street, Rue aux Ours, whose meat shops Lescarbot in Acadia remembered as the place of good food and doubtless of excited talk concerning the unexplored New France, whose hardships and pleasures he afterward tasted; within that circle Champlain walked, as in a dream, we are told, impatient as a lion in a cage, longing to be again upon the wilderness path, westward of Quebec, toward the unknown; within that circle the priest Olier, of St. Germain-des-Prés, had his vision that led to the founding of Montreal, whose consecration was celebrated also within that same circumference at the Cathedral of Notre Dame; within that circle La Salle lodged in Rue de la Truanderie, awaiting his fateful commission that should give him leave to make real his dream of a wilderness empire; not a stone's throw away from the Rue de la Truanderie ran the street having its beginning or end in Rue aux Ours, Rue Quincampoix, in which the thousands jostled and fought from morning till night for the purchase of stock in that same wilderness empire; and it was finally within that same circle that the wilderness dream, seen for a moment again by Napoleon, grew into the vision of a republic--a republic that might be found, as Napoleon said, "too powerful for Europe in two or three centuries," but in whose bosom dissensions, as he prophesied, could be looked for in the future. A wilderness, with a radius of nearly a thousand kilometres, was evoked from the envisioning, praying, adventuring, and enduring of a few Frenchmen, led by fewer Frenchmen, who stood sooner or later all within the narrow circle that sweeps around the Sorbonne, but four kilometres in diameter. I walked, in the afternoon of the last day of the old year 1910, entirely around the old city of Paris by way of its fortifications, in a circle three kilometres longer of radius, within a few hours encompassing a ground, rich in what it yields to-day in fruits of art, literature, and science--of indefatigable, intellectual industry and imagination--but richer than its inhabitants know in what has grown upon the billion acres which it has lifted out of the ocean, [Footnote: For it will be remembered that to geographers before Cartier this Mississippi Valley was but a sea, even as ages before it actually was.] and given as a soil where civilization could gather its forces from all peoples and begin afresh on the problems of the individual and society. It is a new view of Paris, I know. No historian of the United States has, so far as I am aware, presented it. Yet I think it is not a distorted vision which enabled me, looking in from the old fortifications, to see Paris not merely as the capital of art and of a great modern language and literature, as those who live there see her, nor as the centre of gayety and frivolity, as so many of my own countrymen see her, but as the parent of fruitful wildernesses, as a patron of pioneers, as the divinity of the verges, as the godmother of a frontier democracy. It is to be remembered, too, let me say again, that, while England held control of one half of the Mississippi Valley for twenty years after 1763, and Spain of the other half for twenty more, the occupation was hardly more than nominal. Indeed, the English king, George III, in 1763 forbade colonization--as Louis XIV at one time had wished to prevent it--beyond the Alleghany Mountains without his special permission, and, moreover, it was hardly more than ten years after the titular transfer to England that the colonists declared themselves independent. As for the Spanish sovereign, delaying five years in sending a representative to take over the government of his unprofitable half of the wilderness, he had no need to make a decree forbidding settlement. There were no eager settlers. What virtually happened, therefore, was that the pioneers of France gave the valley not to England, not to Spain, not even to the American-English colonists, but to the pioneers of the young republic, who, whatever their origin, were without European nationality. It may be said with approximate accuracy that, while the British flag supplanted the French for a little on a few scattered forts on the east side of the Mississippi and the Spanish flag floated for a little while on the other side of the river, the heart of America really knew in turn, first, only the old Americans, the Indians; second, the French pioneers; and third, the new Americans. The valley heard, as I have said, hardly a sound of the Seven Years' War, the "Old French War" as Parkman called it. Only on its border was there the slightest bloodshed. All it knew was that the fleur-de-lis flags no longer waved along its rivers and that after a few years men came with axes and ploughs through the passes in the mountains carrying an emblem that had never grown in European fields--a new flag among national banners. They were bearing, to be sure, a constitution and institutions strange to France, but only less strange to England, and perhaps no less strange to other nations of Europe. I emphasize this because our great debt to English antecedents has obscured the fact that the great physical heritage between the mountains, consecrated of Gallic spirit, came, in effect, directly from the hands that won its first title, the French, into the hands of American settlers, at the moment when a "separate and individual people" were "springing into national life." This territory was distinct from that of the British colonies up to the very time of the American Revolution. And when the Revolution was over and independence was won, by the aid of France let it be remembered, the only settlements within the valley were three little clusters of French gathered about the forts once French, then for a few years nominally English, and then American: two thousand inhabitants at Detroit and four thousand at Vincennes, on the Wabash, and in the hamlets along the Mississippi above the Ohio. How little the life of those settlements was disturbed is intimated by what occurred in one of the Illinois villages--that about Fort Chartres. The venerable and beloved commander, Louis St. Ange de Belle Rive, had upon the first formal surrender ascended the Mississippi River and crossed to the Spanish territory, where the foundations of the city of St. Louis were being laid, but the British officer in command at Fort Chartres dying suddenly, and there being no one competent to succeed him, St. Ange returned to his old post, restored order, and remained there until another British officer could reach the fort. The habitants were accustomed "to obey, without question, the orders of their superiors.... (They) yielded a passive obedience to the new rulers.... They remained the owners, the tillers of the soil." [Footnote: Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," 1:38, Alleghany edition.] And one of the last acts of the Continental Congress and the first of the new Congress, under the Constitution, was to provide for an enumeration of these French settlers and for the allotment to them of lands in this valley where they had been the sole owners. Many of the French habitants were not of pure blood. The French seldom took women with them into the wilderness. They were traders, trappers, and soldiers. They married Indian wives, untrammelled, as President Roosevelt says, "by the queer pride which makes a man of English stock unwilling to make a red-skinned woman his wife, though anxious enough to make her his concubine." [Footnote: Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," 1:41.] They were under ordinary circumstances good-humored, kindly men, "always polite" [Footnote: "Winning of the West," 1:45.]--in "agreeable contrast" to most frontiersmen--religious, yet fond of merrymaking, of music and dancing; and while, as time went on, they came to borrow traits of their red neighbors and even to forget the years and months (reckoning time, as the Indians did, from the flood of the river or the ripening of strawberries), still they kept many valuable and amiable qualities, to be merged eventually in the new life that soon swept over their beautiful little villages. Of the coming of a strange, new, strenuous life, a stray English or American fur trader gave them occasional presentment, as it were, the spray of the swelling, restless sea of human spirits, beating against the mountain barriers and flung far inland. In the early part of the eighteenth century an English governor of the colony of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, had led a band of horsemen known afterward as his "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe," with great hilarity, "stimulated by abundance of wine, champagne, rum," and other liquors, over the Blue Ridge Mountains, a part of the Alleghany Range, to the Shenandoah. He had talked menacingly of the French who held the valley beyond, had encouraged the extension of English settlements to break the line of French possessions, and had formed a short-lived Virginia-Indian company to protect the frontier against French and Indian incursions. This expedition was a visible challenge. With his merry company he buried a record of his "farthest west" journey in one of the bottles emptied en route and then went back to tidewater. That was the end of his adventure; little or nothing came of his "flourish" except the extension of the Virginia frontier to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Only traders and trappers ventured farther or even so far during the next three or four decades, and they were a "set of abandoned wretches," or so a later governor characterized them, though Parkman mentions some exceptions, and I wish to believe there were more, since one of them, I find, carried my own name far into that country on his trading and hunting expeditions among and with the Indians. Searching, a few years ago, the files of a paper published early in the nineteenth century on the edge of this wilderness, which was already calling itself the _Western World_--a paper, one of the first of the myriad white leaves into which the falling forests have been converted and scattered thick enough to cover every square foot of the valley--I happened upon this record, surprised as if a bit of the transmontane sea spray had touched my own face on the Mississippi: "That delightful country" (Kentucky), it ran, "from time immemorial had been the resort of wild beasts and of men only less savage, when in the year 1767 it was visited by John Finley and a few wandering white men from the British colony of North Carolina, allured by the love of hunting and the desire of barter with the Indians. The distance of this country from populous parts of the colonies, almost continuous wars, and the claims of the French had prevented all attempts at exploration." I seize upon this partly because, having succeeded to the name of this hunter and trader, who entered the valley just as St. Ange was yielding Fort Chartres to the English and crossing the Mississippi, I am able to show that my own ancestral sympathies while dwelling on the frontiers were not with the French. But I quote it chiefly because he was a typical forerunner, a first frontiersman. Like the coureur de bois Nicolas Perrot, of exactly a century before, he was only the dawn of the light--the light of another day, which was beginning to appear in the valley. For it was he who led Daniel Boone to the first exploring and settling of that wilderness south of the Ohio, which, to quote further from the paper called the _Western World_, [Footnote _Western World_, published at Frankfort, Ky., 1806-8, by John Wood and Joseph M. Street.] had a soil "more fat and fertile than Egypt"-- and was the place where "Pan, if he ever existed, held dominion unmolested of Ceres or Lucinia." Such was the almost soundless beginning of what soon developed into a mighty "processional," its rumblings of wagons and shoutings of drivers on land and blowing of conches on the rivers increasing, accompanied by the sound of rushing waters, the cry of frightened birds, and the thunders of crashing trees. First came this silent hunter and fur trader, almost as stealthy as the Indian in his movements; then the pale, gaunt, slow- moving, half hunter, half farmer, too indolent to disturb the wilderness from which he got a meagre living, planting his meagre crops among the girdled trees of withered foliage, which he did not take the trouble to cut down; then the backwoodsman, sallow as his immediate predecessor from the shade of the forest, who with his axe made a little clearing, built a "shack," turned his cattle into the grass that had grown for centuries untouched, and let his pigs feed on the acorns; then the more robust agriculturist who aggressively pushed back the shadows of the forest, planted the wilderness with seeds of a magic learned in the valleys of Europe and Asia, put up the fences of individualistic struggle, and built his log cabin, the wilderness castle, the birthplace of the new American; then the speculator and promoter (the hunter and explorer of the urban occupation); and finally in their wake the builders of mills and factories and cities--drab, smoky, vainglorious, ill-smelling, bad-architectured centres of economic activity, fringed with unoccupied, unimproved, naked areas, plotted and held for increment, earned only by risk and privation. This processional, "this gradual and continuous progress of the European race toward the Rocky Mountains," says the vivid pen of De Tocqueville, "has the solemnity of a providential event. It is like a deluge of men, rising unabatedly and driven daily onward by the hand of God." [Footnote: "Democracy in America," ed. Gilman, 1:512.] The story of this anabasis has been told in hundreds and thousands of fragments--the anabasis that has had no katabasis--the literal going up of a people, as we shall see, from primitive husbandry and handicraft and a neighborly individualism, to another level, of machine labor, of more comfortable living, and of socialized aspiration. De Quincey has gathered into an immortal story the dramatic details of an exodus that had its beginning and end just at the time when these half huntsmen, half traders were creeping down from the farther ridges of the Alleghanies into the wilderness, where the little French settlements were clinging like clusters of ripened grapes to a great vine--the story of the flight of the Kalmuck Tartars from the banks of the Volga, across the steppes of Europe and the deserts of Asia to the frontiers of China--the story of the journey of over a half million semi-barbarians, half of whom perished by the way from cold or heat, from starvation or thirst, or from the sabres and cannon of the savage hosts pursuing them by day and night through the endless stretches--the story of the translation of these nomad herdsmen on the steppes of Russia through "infinite misery" into stable agriculturists beneath the great wall of China. If the myriad details of this new-world migration could be summarized with like genius, we should have a drama to put beside the exodus of Israel from Egypt and their conquest of Canaan--a drama, less picturesque and highly colored than that of the flight of the Tartars--their Oriental costumes, their fierce horses, their camels and tents, showing, unhidden of tree against the snowy or sandy desert--but infinitely more consequential in the history of the human race. The Indians, hostile to this horde that built cabins upon their hunting- grounds and devoured their forests, were to the wilderness migrants, driven, not of the hand of man but, as De Tocqueville says, "of the hand of God" made manifest in some human instinct, some desire of freedom, some hatred of convention, some hope of power or possession, what the Kirghese and Bashkirs and Russians were to those Asiatic migrants, pursuing them day and night like fiends for thousands of miles. And the myriad sufferings of the American migrants from hunger and thirst, from the freezing cold and the blasting, blistering, wilting heat, from the fevers of the new-broken lands, from the ravages of locust and grasshopper, and chinch-bug and drought, from isolation from human friendships, from want of gentle nursing--even De Quincey's improvident travellers did not endure more, nor the children of Israel, to whose thirst the smitten rock yielded water, to whose hunger the heavens ministered with manna and the earth with quail, whose pursuing enemies were drowned in the sea that closed over their pathway, and whose confronting enemies in the land they entered to possess were overcome by the aid of unseen armies that were heard marching in the tops of the mulberry-trees, or were seen by friendly vision assembling their chariots in the skies above. Here across the Mississippi Valley is an exodus accomplished not of a single night, as these two of which I have just spoken, but extended through a hundred years of home leavings and love privations. Here is an anabasis of a century of privations, titanic labors, frontier battles, endured countless times, till these migrants of Europe and of the new- world seaboard, became, as children of the wilderness, a new people, with qualities so distinctive as to lead the highest authority [Footnote: Frederick J. Turner, "The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History," in Proceedings of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (1909-10), 3:159-184.] on the history of that valley to characterize the west not as a geographic division of the United States, but as a "form of society" with its own peculiar flowering, developed, not as Parkman's magnificent fleur-de-lis, [Footnote: See Epilogue.] by cross- fertilization, nor by grafting, but simply by the planting or sowing of Old World seeds on new and free land, where the mountains kept off the pollen of alien spirit, where the puritanical winds of the New England coast were somewhat tempered by the warmer winds from the south, where the waters had some iron in them, but, most of all, where the soil was practically as free as when it came from the hands of the glaciers and the streams. It is this distinctiveness of development, due to the mountains' challenge to every man's spirit as he passed, to the isolation which compelled him to work out his own salvation, and to the constant struggle, largely single-handed, with frontier forces--as well as the uniqueness of background--that gave the west a character which identifies it to discerning minds quite as much as its geographic boundaries. It is this fact which makes the French pioneering preface to a civilization different from anything that has developed elsewhere in the United States, and not only different in the past but now the dominant force in American education, politics, and industry. What that civilization would have been without the adventurous French preface we can but vainly surmise. What it is with that background, that preface, is indeed the "foremost chapter in the files of time." As Ambassador James Bryce has said: "What Europe is to Asia, what England is to the rest of Europe, what America is to England, that the western States are to the Atlantic States." [Footnote: "American Commonwealth," 1913 ed., 2:892.] The French may dispute the implied claim of the second of these comparisons, but even they will have a satisfaction in admitting that their particular part of the United States is to the rest, which was not touched by their priests and explorers, what "Europe is to Asia." And here is my particular justification for asking the imaginations of the people of France to occupy and hold that to which the preface has given them the best of titles. Meanwhile, that migration, heralded, as we have seen, just before the Revolution, by huntsmen and traders, meagre by reason of Indian hostility and the need of soldiers on the Atlantic side of the mountains till independence had been won, became appreciable at the end of the century and grew to an inundating stream after the War of 1812 had made the Mississippi secure to the new republic beyond all question. "Old America," said an observing English traveller in 1817, "seems to be breaking up and moving westward. We are seldom out of sight, as we travel on this grand track (the national turnpike through Pennsylvania) towards the Ohio, of family groups behind and before us.... A small waggon so light that you might almost carry it, yet strong enough to bear a good load of bedding and utensils and provisions and a swarm of young citizens, and to sustain marvellous shocks in its passage over these rocky heights with two small horses and sometimes a cow or two, comprises their all; excepting a little store of hard earned cash for the land-office of the district; where they may obtain a title for as many acres as they possess half dollars, being one-fourth of the purchase money. The waggon has a tilt, or cover, made of a sheet, or perhaps a blanket. The family are seen before, behind, or within the vehicle, according to the road or the weather, or perhaps the spirits of the party.... A cart and single horse, frequently affords the means of transfer, sometimes a horse and pack saddle. Often the back of the poor pilgrim bears all his effects, and his wife follows, bare footed, bending under the hopes of the family." [Footnote: Morris Birkbeck, "Notes on a Tour in America, 1817," pp. 34, 35.] This is a detail of the exodus through the most northern mountain pass. Farther south the procession moved in heavy wagons drawn by four or six horses. "Family groups, crowding the roads and fords, marching toward the sunset," at right angles to the courses of the migratory birds, not mindful as they of seasons, "were typical of the overland migration" across Tennessee and Kentucky. The poorer classes travelled on foot, as at the north, but drew after them carts with all their household effects. [Footnote: F. J. Turner, "Rise of the New West," p. 80.] Still farther south "the same type of occupation was to be seen; the poorer classes of southern emigrants cut out their clearings along the rivers that flowed to the gulf and to the lower Mississippi," [Footnote: F. J. Turner, "Rise of the New West," p. 90.] and later still farther west into what is now Texas. The squatters whom I saw in my walk around the city of Paris, inhabiting what was the military zone with their portable houses, or in their dilapidated shacks, had better shelter than they who first invaded the zone beyond the mountain walls that were the natural western fortifications of the Atlantic colonies. But though many of those western wilderness immigrants were "poor pilgrims" and for a time squatters (as the immediately extramural population of Paris), they were recruited from the sturdiest stock on the Atlantic side of the fortifications. Some went, to be sure, who had failed in the old place, but were ready to make new hazard; some wanted greater freedom than the more highly socialized and conventionalized life within the fortifications would permit; some longed for adventure; some sought a fortune or competency perhaps impossible in the old settlements; some had only the inherited promptings of the nomad savage in them, and kept ever moving on, making their nameless graves out in the gloom of the forest or upon the silent plains. It was indeed a motley procession, the by-product of the more or less conservative, sometimes politically or religiously intolerant, aristocratic tide-water settlements. Yet do not make the mistake of thinking that it was slag or refuse humanity, such as camps in the narrow zone around the gates of Paris. It is rather like an industrial by-product that has needed some slight change or adaptation to make it more valuable to society than the original product upon which the manufacturers had kept their attention fixed--or, at any rate, to make the margin of profit in the whole industry greater. Out of once discarded, seemingly valueless matter have come our coal-tar products: saccharine many times sweeter than sugar, colors unknown to the old dyers, perfumes as fragrant as those distilled from flowers, medicines potent to allay fevers. Up in the woods of Canada last summer I found a chemist trying to do with the wood waste what Remsen and Perkin and others have done with coal waste, and I cannot resist the suggestion of my metaphor that there in the forest valleys beyond the Alleghanies the elements and conditions were found to convert this Atlantic by-product, unpromising outwardly, into the substance of a new and precious civilization. This overmountain procession came chiefly up the watercourses of the south and middle States. Prior to 1830 the mass of pioneer colonists in most of the Mississippi Valley had been contributed by the up-country of the south. The dominant strain in those earlier comers, as President Roosevelt reminds us, was Scotch-Irish, a "race doubly-twisted in the making, flung from island to island and toughened by exile"--a race of frontiersmen than whom a "better never appeared"--a race which was as "steel welded into the iron of an axe." They form the kernel of the "distinctively and intensely American stock who were the pioneers of the axe and the rifle, succeeding the French pioneers of the sword and the bateaux." What I have just said of them, these Scotch-Irish, is in quotation, for as I have already intimated, my own ancestry is of that double-twisting; and since the time when my first American ancestor settled as the first permanent minister beyond the mountains, following the paths of the French priests in their missions and became a member of a presbytery extending from the mountains to the setting sun, until my last collateral ancestor living among the Indians helped survey the range lines of new States and finally marked the boundaries of the last farms in the passes of the Rockies, that ancestry has followed the frontier westward from where Céloron planted the emblems of French possession along the Ohio to where Chevalier la Vérendrye looked upon the snowy and impassable peaks of the Rockies. The immigrants to America of that stock had, many of them, at once on reaching the new land found the foot-hills of mountains, chiefly in Pennsylvania. Here they settled, gradually pushing their way southward in the troughs of the mountain streams and making finally a "broad belt from north to south, a shield of sinewy men thrust in between the people of the seaboard and the red warriors of the wilderness," the same men who declared for American independence in North Carolina before any others, even before the men of Massachusetts. With this stock there went over the mountain men of other origins, of course, English, French Huguenots, Germans, Hollanders, Swedes; but the Scotch-Irish were the core of the new life, which in "iron surroundings" became strongly homogeneous--"yet different from the rest of the world--even the world of America, and infinitely more the world of Europe." In the north the great rivers lay across the tedious paths that ran with the lines of latitude. And so it was partly for physiographic reasons that the first far-stretching expansions of the New England settlements were not toward this great western wilderness but northward along the narrower valleys. It was not until the migration had filled the meagre limits and capacities of these smaller valleys and had carried school-houses and churches and town halls well up granite hillsides, that the western exodus came, to leave those hillside homes and institutional shelters as shells found far from a receding sea, empty or habited by a new species of immigrant. [Footnote: In one of those far northern valleys which I know best there was a school, before the exodus, of some seventy pupils, gathered from the farmers' families of the neighborhood. Now there are not a half-dozen pupils, and they are carried to a neighboring district.] Farms were abandoned for the fertile fields of the far west, from which wheat can be imported for less than the cost of raising it on the sterile hills and in the short-summered valleys. New England had once claimed a fraction of the great west, as, indeed, had most of the other seaboard colonies. But these claims were surrendered to the general government, as we shall see later, "for the common good," and so her migrants had none other than that instinct which follows lines of latitude to keep them practically within the zone of her relinquished claims. Over into New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania her children overflowed till a map of these States in 1820, colored to show the origin and character of their various communities, made practically all of western New York, a part of New Jersey and the northern third of Pennsylvania, an expanded New England. Meanwhile the hardiest joined the transmontane migration, and in the decade after the opening of the Erie Canal (1830-40) the whole northern edge of the valley takes color of New England conquest. So the first peopling was a mingling of the children of the first strugglers with a raw savage continent; men already schooled in adversity, already acquainted with some of the frontier problems--civilization's most highly individualized, least socialized material, the wheat of the new world's first winnowing. What is particularly to be observed is that men of the north and the south, as far apart as Carolina and Massachusetts, came together beyond the mountains in the united building of commonwealths; for over those mountains the rivers all ran toward the Mississippi, which tied the interests of all together. There was no north-and-south line then. The men of the valley were all westerners, "men of the western world"; not yet very strong as nationalists, that is, as men of the United States. "Men of the western waters" they also called themselves, for they shunned the uplands and kept near the streams by which or along which they had come into the wilderness and from which they drank. Men of the axe they were, too, in that first occupancy, never venturing far from the trees that gave them both roof and fuel. It was later, as we have seen, that the men of the plough came where the men of the axe had cleared the way. It is interesting to notice that when these builders of new States came to devise symbols for their official seals, many of them took the plough, that implement which we know was carried in the first Aryan migration into the plains of Europe, but some of them put a rising sun on the horizon of their shields--the sign of the consciousness of a new day. The foundation, then, of the new societies was laid in what might be called a concrete of character and lineage--heterogeneous, but all of the neo-American period and not of the paleo-European. Here came the ancestors of Abraham Lincoln, among the axemen from the South, and here the ancestors of General Grant, among the builders of towns, from New England, both born in cabins. And these instances are but suggestive of the conglomerate that was to be as practicable for building purposes (the co- efficient of spirit being once determined) as any homogeneous, age-old rock used in the structure of nations. It became "homogeneous" not as bricks or stones built into a wall by mortar or cement but as concrete, eternal as the hills, needing not to be chiselled and split but only to be moulded and "set" at just the right moment. If this gives any suggestion of want of permanence, of liability of cracking, then the figure is not fortunate. I mean only to suggest, by still another metaphor, that out of the myriad rugged individualities, idiosyncrasies, and independences a new rock has been formed. How distinctly western this first migration was you may know from the fact that there was frequent talk of secession from the Union by the seaboard commonwealths in the early post-revolutionary days. There were even, as we have seen, hopes and fears that a Franco-American republic might grow out of that solidarity and independent spirit that were ready to forsake the government on the eastern side of the mountains, which seemed to be heedless of western needs. This tells us, who are conscious of the national spirit which is now stronger, perhaps, in that valley than in any other part of the Union, how strong the western, the anti-nationalistic, spirit must have been then. But that was before the coming of the east-and-west canal and the east- and-west railroads, which virtually upheaved a new watershed and changed the whole physiographic, social, and economic relationships of the west. The old French river Colbert, the Eternal River, was virtually cut into two great rivers, one of which was to empty into the gulf (just as it did in La Salle's day and in Iberville's day), while the other was to run through the valley of the Great Lakes, down through the valley of the hostile Iroquois, into the harbor of New York. This is not observable on the topographical maps simply because of our unimaginative definition of a watershed. A watershed is changed, according to that definition, only by an actual elevation or depression of the surface of the earth, whereas a railroad or canal that bridges ravines and tunnels or climbs elevations, or a freight rate that diverts traffic into a new course, as suddenly raises or lowers and as certainly removes watersheds as if mountains were miraculously lifted and carried into the midst of the sea. So there came to be not only two rivers but two valleys, the one of the lake and prairie plainsmen and the other of the gulf plainsmen. The steam shuttles flying east and west by land and water wove a pattern in the former different from the latter but on the same warp. Two widely unlike industrial and social systems gradually developed, and they, in turn, struggling for the mastery of lands beyond the Mississippi, divided the nearer west--once a homogeneous state of mind--into two wests and all but disrupted the Union. Then the direct European immigration began, millions coming from single states of Europe, sifting into the neo-American settlements, but for the most part passing on, in mighty armies, to possess whole tracts farther west, along and beyond the Mississippi. In some parts of the northwest to- day the parents of three men out of four were born in Europe--in Scandinavia, in Germany, in Russia, in Italy. So France, keeping near her those whom she loves best, her own children, has yet seen her Nouvelle France draw to it the children of all other nations. As from Hagar exiled in the wilderness has a new race sprung--has the wilderness been peopled. In my boyhood the last division of that great exodus, largely made up of migrants from the eastern half of the valley, was still passing westward. One of the banners which some of the wagons covered with canvas ("prairie- schooners," as they were called) used to fly was "Pike's Peak or Bust," an Americanism indicating the intention of the pilgrims to reach the mountain at the western terminus of the great valley or die in the attempt. Occasionally one came back with the inglorious substitute legend upon his wagon, "Busted"--a laconic intimation of failure. But this was the exception. The west kept, till it had made them her own, most of those who ventured their all for a home in the wilderness. There were "two great commemorative monuments that arose to mark the depth and permanence of the awe" which possessed all who shared the calamities or witnessed the results of the Tartar migration. One was a "Romanang"--a "national commemoration, with music rich and solemn," of all the souls who departed to the rest of Paradise from the "afflictions of the desert"--and the "other, more durable and more commensurate to the scale of the calamity and to the grandeur of the national exodus," "mighty columns of granite and brass," where the exodus had ended in the shadow of the Chinese wall. The inscription on these columns reads: By the Will of God, Here, upon the Brink of these Deserts, Which from this Point begin and stretch away Pathless, treeless, waterless, For thousands of miles, and along the margins of many mighty Nations, Rested from their labors and from great afflictions, Under the shadow of the Chinese Wall, And by the favor of Kien Long, God's Lieutenant upon Earth, The ancient Children of the Wilderness--the Turgote Tartars-- Flying before the wrath of the Grecian Czar, Wandering Sheep who had strayed away from the Celestial Empire in the year 1616, But are now mercifully gathered again, after infinite sorrow, Into the fold of their forgiving Shepherd. Hallowed be the spot forever, and Hallowed be the day--September 8, 1771! Amen. There have been many expositions of the fruits of the Mississippi Valley's agriculture and manufacture and mining and thinking and teaching and preaching and ministering, but there has been no general commemoration with "music rich and solemn" of those who endured the "afflictions of the wilderness," though the last of the pioneers will soon have departed to his rest, for fourteen years ago it was officially declared that there was no longer a frontier. But mighty columns not of man's rearing stand upon the farther edge of that western valley, columns of rock rich with gold and silver and every other precious metal, surmounted, some of them the year through, with capitals of snow and lacking only the legend: Here upon the Brink of the Plains Which stretched away pathless, treeless, boundless, Ended their century-long exodus The New Children of the Wilderness, Driven by the Hand of God Westward and ever Westward Till they have at last entered Into the full Heritage of those Who, first of Pioneers, Traced the rivers and lakes of this Valley Between the eternal mountains. CHAPTER VIII THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN The domain of Louis XIV in the midst of America (between the Great Lakes and the gulf, the Alleghanies and the Rockies) embraced over seven hundred and fifty million acres. One-half of it, roughly, was covered with giant forests inhabited by fur-bearing animals with opulence upon their backs. One-half was covered with vegetation, varying from the luxuriant prairie grass to the sage-brush of the shadeless plains, plains roamed by beasts clothed with valuable robes. Two-thirds of this domain was arable, with only the irrigation of the clouds, and all of it was destined some day to be cultivated, the clouds having the assistance of man-made irrigation or dry farming. The portion east of the Mississippi (about three hundred million acres) was at one time estimated to be worth not more, politically and physically, than the island of Guadeloupe-an island represented by a pin- head on an ordinary map-producing forty thousand tons of sugar and about two million pounds each of coffee and cocoa. Even the people of the Atlantic States were accused by westerners as late as 1786 of threatening secession and of being as ignorant of the trans- Alleghany country as Great Britain had been of America, and as inconsiderate. The western half, urged by the minister of Louis XV upon Spain after sixty or seventy millions of francs had been spent fruitlessly upon it by France, recovered by Napoleon and sold to the United States for one-fourth of the amount that was expended a century later for the celebration of the purchase, was regarded at the time of the purchase, even by many seacoast Americans, as useless, except as it secured control of the mouth of the Mississippi. An important New York paper said editorially: "... As to the unbounded region west of the Mississippi, it is, with the exception of a very few settlements of Spaniards and Frenchmen bordering on the banks of the river, a wilderness through which wander numerous tribes of Indians. And when we consider the present extent of the United States, and that not one-sixteenth part of its territory is yet under occupation, the advantage of the acquisition, as it relates to actual settlement, appears too distant and remote to strike the mind of a sober politician with much force. This, therefore, can only rest in speculation for many years, if not centuries to come, and consequently will not perhaps be allowed very great weight in the account by the majority of readers. But it may be added, that should our own citizens, more enterprizing than wise, become desirous of settling this country, and emigrate thither, it must not only be attended with all the injuries of a too widely dispersed population, but, by adding to the great weight of the western part of our territory, must hasten the dismemberment of a large portion of our country, or a dissolution of the government. On the whole, we think it may with candor be said, that whether the possession at this time of any territory west of the river Mississippi will be advantageous, is at best extremely problematical. For ourselves, we are very much inclined to the opinion that, after all, it is the Island of N. Orleans by which the command of a free navigation of the Mississippi is secured, that gives to this interesting cession its greatest value, and will render it in every view of immense benefit to our country. By this cession we hereafter shall hold within our own grasp, what we have heretofore enjoyed only by the uncertain tenure of a treaty, which might be broken at the pleasure of another, and (governed as we now are) with perfect impunity. Provided therefore we have not purchased it too dear, there is all the reason for exultation which the friends of the administration display, and which all Americans may be allowed to feel." [Footnote: York Herald, July 6, 1803.] I quote this to show how far from appreciating France's generosity the easterners, and especially the anti-Jeffersonian Federalists in America, were at that time. Other and less conscientious newspapers put the prodigality of Jefferson's commissioners more graphically: "Fifteen millions of dollars! they would exclaim. The sale of a wilderness has not usually commanded a price so high. Ferdinand Gorges received but twelve hundred and fifty pounds sterling for the Province of Maine. William Penn gave for the wilderness that now bears his name but a trifle over five thousand pounds. Fifteen millions of dollars! A breath will suffice to pronounce the words. A few strokes of the pen will express the sum on paper. But not one man in a thousand has any conception of the magnitude of the amount. Weigh it and there will be four hundred and thirty-three tons of solid silver. Load it into wagons, and there will be eight hundred and sixty-six of them. Place the wagons in a line, giving two rods to each, and they will cover a distance of five and one-third miles. Hire a laborer to shovel it into the carts, and, though he load sixteen each day, he will not finish the work in two months. Stack it up dollar on dollar, and supposing nine to make an inch, the pile will be more than three miles high. It would load twenty-five sloops; it would pay an army of twenty-five thousand men forty shillings a week each for twenty-five years; it would, divided among the population of the country, give three dollars for each man, woman, and child.... Invest the principal as school fund, and the interest will support, forever, eighteen hundred free schools, all owning fifty scholars, and five hundred dollars to each school." [Footnote: McMaster, "History of the People of the United States," 2:630.] Napoleon had, indeed, made a good bargain for France, selling a wilderness, which at best he could not well have kept long, for a price which all the specie currency in the poor young republic would not be adequate to meet. It was of this domain (a part of the claim of La Salle for Louis XIV in 1682, divided between England and Spain in 1763, made one again in 1803 by the will of Napoleon, under the control of the United States, added to by the purchase of Florida from Spain and the acquisition of Texas, filling all the Great Valley)--it was of this valley that, as late as the early fifties, a member of Congress (afterward to become vice-president of the United States, then President), Andrew Johnson, although an earnest advocate of a liberal land policy, predicted that it would take "seven hundred years to dispose of the public lands at the rate we have been disposing of them." [Footnote: Speech on the Homestead bill, April 29, 1852.] Seven hundred years--as long as from the founding of Charlemagne's new empire of the west to the discovery of the coasts of a still newer empire of the west. But in two hundred years from the day that La Salle so miserably perished on the plains of Texas, in exactly one hundred years from the time when, under the epoch-making "Ordinance of the Northwest" (as it has been called), the parcelling of the land began, and in less than half a century from the year when Andrew Johnson's seven-hundred-year prophecy began to run, practically the entire domain had been surveyed and sold or given by the nation to private or municipal or corporate possession. It was the 24th of July, 1687, that La Salle died; it was July 27, 1787, that the first great sale of a fragment of the domain was made; and it was in 1887, approximately, that all the humanly available domain was occupied by at least two persons to a square mile; for in 1890 it was officially declared by the government of the United States that it had no frontier. Not that the land was all sold, but all that was immediately valuable. As soon as the War of Independence was over, and even during the struggle, the territories of several of the Atlantic States (or colonies) expanded to the Mississippi. There was a quadrilateral, trans-Alleghany Massachusetts, as indifferent to natural boundaries as a "state of mind" (which Massachusetts has often been defined to be), respectful only of imaginary lines of latitude and the Mississippi River, the Spanish border. Little Connecticut multiplied its latitude by degrees of longitude till it reached in a thin but rich slice from Pennsylvania also to the Mississippi. Virginia disputed these mountain-to-river claims of her New England sisters, but held unquestioned still larger territories to the north and south--and so on from the sources of the river to Florida, South Carolina even claiming a strip a few miles wide and four hundred long. There was almost a duplication of the Atlantic front on the Mississippi River. These statements will not interest those who can have no particular acquaintance with the personalities of those several commonwealths, quite as marked as are those of Normandy and Brittany; but even without this knowledge it is possible to appreciate the magnanimity and the wisdom which prompted those States, many with large and rich claims, to surrender all to the central government, the Continental Congress, for the benefit of all the States, landful and landless alike. [Footnote: LANDS CEDED BY THE STATES TO THE UNITED STATES NORTHWEST OF THE OHIO RIVER SQUARE MILES Ohio......................................................... 39,964 Indiana.......................................................33,809 Illinois..................................................... 55,414 Michigan......................................................56,451 Wisconsin.................................................... 53,924 Minnesota, east of the Mississippi River......................26,000 ------- 265,562 or 169,959,680 acres. Virginia claimed this entire region. New York claimed an indefinite amount. Connecticut claimed about 25,600,000 acres and ceded all but 3,300,000. Massachusetts claimed about 34,560,000 acres. SOUTH OF KENTUCKY South Carolina ceded about 3,136,000 acres. North Carolina ceded (nominally) 29,184,000 acres. Georgia ceded 56,689,920 acres.--Payson J. Treat, "The National Land System, 1785-1820."] So it was that even before the National Government was organized under a federal constitution in 1789, the land beyond the western boundaries of the several colonies, out as far as the Mississippi, was held for the good of all. And later the same policy followed the expansion to the Rockies and beyond. Can one imagine a greater or more fateful task than confronted this young, inexperienced republic--to have the disposal of a billion acres of timber lands, grazing lands, farm lands, ore lands, oil lands, coal lands, arid lands, and swamp lands for the good not only of the first comers and of those then living in the Atlantic States but also of the millions that should inhabit all that country in future generations as well--for the good of all of all time? This one-time bed of the Paleozoic sea between Archaean shores, raised in time above the ocean and enriched of the mountains that through millions of years were gradually to be worn down by the natural forces of the valley, and finally, as we have seen, opened by the French as a new- created world to be peopled by the old world, then overflowing its brim, became all of it in the space of a single lifetime the property of a few million human beings, their heirs, and assigns forever. The "men of always" [Footnote: The Iroquois, according to Châteaubriand, called themselves Ongoueonoue, the "men of always," signifying that they were a race eternal, immortal, not to fade away.--"Travels in America," 2:93.] had actually come and were to divide and distribute among themselves the stores of millions of years as if reserved for them from the foundation of the world. When Deucalion and Pyrrha went forth to repeople the world after a flood, they were told by the oracle to cast over their shoulders the bones of their mother. These they rightly interpreted, according to the myth, to be the stones of the earth, and so the valleys of the ancient world became populous. Peopling _per se_ was not, however, the object or the first object of the act under which the government, after the manner of Deucalion, went across this new-world valley, casting in stoneless areas clods of earth and tufts of virgin sod before it and behind it. It was not people that the government wanted. Indeed, it was afraid of people. What it desired, the "common good," was the immediate payment of the debt incurred in the War of Independence, and the only resource was land. The land that the French had discovered, whose nominal transfer to England Choiseul had said he had made to destroy England's power in America, was now to meet a portion at least of the expense of the brave struggle for the winning of independence. France's practically untouched wilderness was now to supplement the succor of French ships and arms and sympathy in the firm founding of the new nation. The acres that France under other fortunes might have divided among her own descendants, children of the west, she gave to a happier destiny than La Salle could have desired in his wildest dreams as he traversed the streams that watered those first- parcelled fields. So, incidentally, the French pioneers before the fact and the first settlers of the west after the fact had their part, witting or unwitting, willing or unwilling, written or unwritten, along with George Rogers Clark and his men, who seized the British forts in that territory during the Revolution (and thus gave standing to the claim for its transfer), and along with the men of the Atlantic colonies who sacrificed their fortunes and their lives--these all had their part in the inauguration of this experiment in self-government. There was no higher, more far-reaching "common good" than this to which acres prepared from Paleozoic days and consecrated of unselfish adventure could be devoted. I cannot find anywhere in our history an appreciation of this particular contribution to the foundation of free institutions in America. But it is one that should be recorded and remembered along with the more tangible contributions. Every perilous journey of the French across that territory for which France got not a franc, every purchase which Scotch-Irish or New England or other settlers went out to conquer, was a march or a skirmish in the War of Independence, for all was turned to the confirming of the fruits of victory of the American Revolution. Those who have written of the land policy which prescribed the conditions of sale have divided its history roughly into two periods: the first, from 1783 to 1840, in which the fiscal considerations of the general government were dominant; and the second, from 1840 to the present time, when the social conditions, either within the territory itself or in the nation at large, were given first consideration. The statistical story of the first period, under that accurate classification, would be about as interesting as a bulletin of real-estate transactions in Chicago would be to a professor of paleontology in the Sorbonne. It is only when those sales are considered teleologically (as the philosophers would say) that they can seem absorbingly vital to others than economists or to the fortunate heirs of some of the purchasers. I am aware (let me say parenthetically) that customs duties might have a somewhat like interpretation under a higher imaginative power; but this possibility does not lessen to me the singularly spiritual character of this series of transactions-of land sales, or transmutations of lands, on the one hand, into the maintenance of the fabric of a government by the people, and, on the other, into the ruggedest, hardiest species of men and women the world has known in its new hemisphere. Land-offices, as I have seen them described in the newspapers of the early part of the nineteenth century, gave no outward suggestion of being places of miracles--sacred places. They were noisy, dirty, ephemeral tabernacles of canvas or of boards in the wilderness, carried westward till the day of permanent temples should come. But like the Ark of the Covenant in the history of Israel, they blessed those in whose fields they rested on the way, even as the field and household of Obed-edom the Gittite were blessed by the presence of the ark on its way up to Jerusalem in the days of David. The initial policy of the government was to sell in as great tracts as possible (the very reverse of the present conserving, anti-monopolistic policy, as we shall see). The first sale (1787) was of nearly a million acres, for which an average of two-thirds of a dollar per acre in securities worth nine or ten cents was received. This sale, whatever may be said for it as a part of a fiscal policy, was significant not only in opening up a great tract (one thousand three hundred square miles) but in the fact that the purchase and holding were conditioned by certain provisions of a precious ordinance--the last of importance of the old Continental Congress-only less important than the Constitution, which it preceded by two years--the "basis of law and politics" in the northwest. It, moreover, gave precedent for a policy of territorial control by the central government that has been effective even to the present time. Daniel Webster said of it: "I doubt whether any single law of any lawgiver, ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct, marked, and lasting character." [Footnote: First Speech on Foot's Resolution in "Writings and Speeches of Daniel Webster," national edition, 5:263.] It forbade slavery and had in this provision an important influence on the history of the valley. But there was another far-reaching and a positive provision which must be of special interest to the people of France even to-day. Its preamble lies in this memorable passage: "Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged." As to the specific means of encouraging religion, morality, and knowledge, and so, ultimately, of promoting good government and the happiness of mankind, it was proposed by the representative of the Ohio Company, which stood ready to purchase a million acres, that the government should give support both to education and religion, as was done in New England, and as follows: one lot in each township (that is, a section one mile square in every tract six miles square) to be reserved for the common schools, another for the support of the ministry, and four whole townships, in the whole tract, for the maintenance of a university. Congress thought this too liberal, but finally, under the stress of need of revenue which the high-minded, reverend lobbyist, Reverend Menasseh Cutler, was prepared through his company to furnish, acceded, with a reduction only of the proposed appropriation to the university. The provision specifically was: "Lot number sixteen to be given perpetually by Congress to the maintenance of schools, and lot number twenty-nine to the purpose of religion in the said townships; two townships near the center and of good land to be also given by Congress for the support of a literary institution, to be applied to the intended object by the legislature of the State." A second great tract was sold the same year under similar conditions. This was the last occasion on which provision for the support of religion was made by the national Congress, and what came of this particular grant I have not followed beyond the statement below. [Footnote: In 1828 Ohio petitioned for permission to sell the lands reserved for religious purposes, and in 1833 this was granted. The proceeds of the sales were to be invested and used for the support of religion, under the direction of the legislature within the townships in which the reserves were located.-- Payson J. Treat, "The National Land System, 1785-1820."] But the "section-sixteen" allotment for the aid of public schools continued as a feature of all future grants within the Northwest Territory, and also in all the new States of the southwestern and trans- Mississippi territory erected prior to 1850, from which time forward two sections in each township (sixteen and thirty-six) were granted for school purposes, besides specific grants for higher education amounting to over a million acres. A recent student [Footnote: Joseph Shafer, "The Origin of the System of Land Grants for Education." Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No. 63. History Series, Vol. i, No. i, August, 1902.] of this subject has traced this policy of public aid to education back through New England, where colonies, in grants to companies or townships, made specific stipulations and reservations for the support of schools and the ministry and where townships voluntarily often made like disposition of surplus wild lands; and through New England to England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where, the monasteries and other religious foundations being destroyed and the schools depending upon them perishing, schools were endowed by the kings, sometimes out of sequestered church lands, or were established by towns and counties, in addition to those chartered under private patronage, so strong was the new educational movement of the time. In the Mississippi Valley, then, or the greater part of it--whatever the historical origin of the provisions may be-from one-thirty-sixth to one- eighteenth of the public land has been set apart to the education of generation after generation till the end of the republic--or as Americans would be disposed to put it in synonymous phrase, "till the end of time." Acres vary in size, one of our eminent horticulturists has reminded us, measured in terms of productivity. And the gifts to the various townships have been by no means of the same size, measured in terms of revenue for school purposes. "Number sixteen" may sometimes have fallen in shallow soil or on stony ground and "thirty-six" in swamp or alkali land. The lottery of nature is as hard-hearted as the lotteries of human devising; but the general provision has put an obligation upon the other thirty-five or thirty-four sections in every township that I suppose is seldom evaded. The child's acres are practically never, I suspect, less valuable than the richest and largest of those in the township about it, for the reason that the difference is made good by the local taxpayer. The child's acre is, as a rule, then, as large as the largest, the most productive acre. And roughly there are fifty thousand of those little plots in that domain-- fifty thousand sections a mile square, thirty-two million acres reserved from the beginning of time, theoretically at least, to the end of time. As a matter of fact, they are not to be distinguished objectively from other acres now; they are to be distinguished only subjectively, that is, as one thinks of what is grown year by year in the schools, to which their proceeds, if not their products, are given. I quoted above an estimate made in 1803 of what might have been done with the fifteen million dollars, paid to the French for Louisiana. One alternative suggested was the permanent endowment of eighteen hundred free schools, allowing five hundred dollars a year per school and accommodating ninety thousand pupils. The public-school allotment for that part of the valley alone is fifteen million acres. Even at two dollars an acre (a very low estimate), the endowment is twice the total amount paid for Louisiana --and I am estimating this school acreage at but one thirty-sixth instead of one-eighteenth of the total acreage. Therefore, France may, in a sense, be said to have given these acres to the support of the "children of always"--since these plots alone have probably yielded many times the purchase price of the entire territory. To be sure, these white plots, as I would have them marked on a map of the valley, have in many States been sold and occupied as the other plots, with only this distinction, that the proceeds are inviolably set apart to this sacred use, as certain parts of animals were, under Mosaic law, reserved for public sacrifice. In one trans-Mississippi State, Iowa, for example, of a total grant of 1,013,614.21 acres [Footnote: Iowa, 1,013,614.21 acres from section 16 and 535,473.76 acres by congressional grant in 1841.] (less what the boundary rivers, the Mississippi and the Missouri, had carried away in their voracious encroachments, and plus what other natural agents had added), only 200 acres remained unsold in 1911. As we view the policy from the year 1903 and from the midst of a populous valley, in which land values have risen from one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre to a hundred or two hundred dollars in most fertile farm tracts, and to thousands in urban centres, we can but regret that these lands themselves had not been held inviolate, and can but wish that only their rentals had been devoted to the high uses to which the nation and State had consecrated these lands. This policy would have put in the heart of every township a common field whose rental would have grown with the development of the country. It would have furnished fruitful data for comparison between two systems of land tenure. And it would have kept ever visibly, tangibly before the people their heritage and their obligation. As it is, one has to use the greatest imagination in translating the figures in a State treasurer's or county supervisor's report, back into the little plots that gathered into the soil of their acres the noblest purposes that ever animated a nation--these spots where one generation made its unselfish prayer and sacrifice for the next. That the purpose still exists, despite the passing of the tangible symbol, and that the prayer is still made in every township of that territory, where even a few children live, is evidenced by the fact that every two miles north and south, east and west of settled region there stands a schoolhouse. I shall speak later of this wide-spread provision, not only for universal elementary education but also for secondary and higher education, ordained of the people and for the people, to be paid for by the people out of their common treasury. But attention must here be called, in passing, to the fact that the parcelling of the domain of Louis XIV in the new world fixed irrevocably the public school in the national consciousness and purpose and made it the foundation of a purely democratic social system and the nourisher of a more highly efficient democratic political system. On the Atlantic side of the mountains there was bitter controversy between those who held that education was necessary for the preservation of free institutions and those who held that free education increased taxation unduly; between those who desired and those who regretted the breaking down of social barriers which both claimed would ensue as a result of such education; between those who regarded education as a natural right and those who considered taxation for such a purpose a violation of the rights of the individual; between those who saw in it a panacea for poverty and distress and those who urged that it would not benefit the masses; and, finally, between those of one sect and race and those of another. But in the trans-Alleghany country north of the Ohio, and in all the territory west of the Mississippi (practically coterminous, let me again remind you, with that region where the French were pioneers within the present bounds of the United States) there was practically no dissension, though the provision was meagre at the start. The public school had no more of the atmosphere or character of a charity, a "pauper" school than the highway provided for out of the same grant, where rich and poor met in absolute equality of right and opportunity. It became the pride of a people, the expression of the people's ideal, the corner-stone of the people's hope. I suppose that three-fourths of the children of the territory whose ranges have been surveyed by the magic chains forged of this first great parcelling ordinance have had the tuition of the public schools--future Presidents of the United States, justices, railroad and university presidents, farmers, artisans, artists, and poets alike. So while it was desire for revenue that prompted the early sales of the public domain in the Mississippi Valley, the nation got in return not only means to help pay its Revolution debt, but, incidentally, settlements of highly individualistic, self-dependent, and interdependent pioneers, gathered about one highly paternalistic or maternalistic institution--the public school. The credit for this has gone to New England and New York, but the "white acres" came of the territory and the riches of Nouvelle France. You will not wish to follow in detail the ministrations of the priests of the land-offices and the surveys of the men of the magic chains, for it is a long and tedious story that would fill thousands of pages, and in the end only obscure the real significance of the movement. Here is a summary of allotments made up to 1904 of all the public domain, that of the Mississippi Valley being somewhat more than half. [Footnote: See Report of the Public Lands Commission, Washington, 1905.] _Private land claims_, donations etc. (the first of the latter being made to the early French settlers).............................................(ACRES) 33,400,000 _Wagon-road, canal, and river_ improvement grants (provision for the narrow strips of common that intersect each other at every mile of the settled parts of the valley).................................. 9,700,000 _Railroad grants_ for the subsidizing of the private building of railways chiefly up and down and across the valley.............................. 117,600,000 _Swamp-land grants_ (being tracts of wet or overflowed lands given to the various States for reclamation)............................................. 65,700,000 _School grants to States_ (those which we have been considering)....................................... 69,000,000 _Other grants to States_ (largely for educational purposes)........................................ 20,600,000 _Military and naval land warrants_........................... 61,000,000 _Scrip_ issued for various purposes (chiefly in view of service to the government)......................... 9,300,000 _Allotment to individual Indians_............................ 15,100,000 _Mineral lands_ (under special entries)....................... 1,700,000 _Homestead entries_ (that is, by settlers taking claims under homestead acts of which I shall speak later)........................................... 96,500,000 _Timber-culture entries_ (final).............................. 9,700,000 _Timber and stone entries_.................................... 7,600,000 _Cash entries_, including entries under the preemption and other acts................................... 276,600,000 _Reservoir rights of way_....................................... 300,000 _Forest reserves_ (tracts of forest land permanently reserved from sale).............................. 57,900,000 For national reclaiming purposes............................. 39,911,000 Reserved for public purposes (public buildings, forts, etc.).................................................. 6,700,000 _Indian reservations_........................................ 73,000,000 _Entries pending_............................................ 39,500,000 _Unappropriated public land_................................ 841,872,377 _Total (including Alaska)_................................ 1,852,683,377 By June 30, 1912, homestead entries had increased to 127,800,000 acres; timber and stone entries to 13,060,000 acres; forest reserves to 187,400,000 acres, and there was left 682,984,762 acres, more than half of which was in Alaska; that is, of the billion and a half of acres, exclusive of Alaska, over a billion have been sold to private uses, granted in aid of private enterprises, used for public improvements, appropriated forever to public uses, or given to the support of education. The controlling motive at the start, I repeat, was revenue. But gradually the people, seeing great tracts of land held unimproved for speculation, seeing the domain of free land narrowing while the pressure of want was beginning to make itself felt east of the mountains, as in Europe, and feeling concerned, as some men of vision did, at the passing of the world's great opportunity for the practical realization of man's natural right to the land without disturbing the system in force in older settled communities, the people strove to effect the subordination of revenue to the social good of the frontier and the country at large. By the middle of the century this many-motived feeling had expression in a party platform; that "the public lands-belong to the people and should not be sold to individuals nor granted to corporations, but should be held as a sacred trust for the benefit of the people and should be granted in limited quantities, free of cost, to landless settlers." [Footnote: Free-Soil Democratic Platform, 1892, p. 12.] It was ten years before this doctrine became embodied in law over the signature of Abraham Lincoln, but the agitation for its enactment had been active for thirty years, beginning with the cry of a poor printer in New York City, [Footnote: George Henry Evans.] taught of French doctrine, who in season and out kept asserting the equal right of man to land. It was as a voice in the wilderness proclaiming a plan of salvation to the already congested areas on the seashore and, incidentally, a means of making the wilderness blossom. He was not then a disciple of Fourier (as many of his associates were and he himself had been originally), threatening vested privileges of rights; he did not preach a communistic division of property; he was an individualistic idealist and saw in the opening of this wild, unoccupied land, not to speculators or to alien purchasers, but to actual settlers permitted to pre-empt in quarter-sections (one hundred and sixty acres) and forbidden to alienate it, a means of social regeneration that would not disturb the titles to property already granted to individuals by the State, and yet would bless all the property-less, for there was enough free land for every landless man who wanted it, and would be for decades if not for centuries beyond their lives, or so he thought. [Footnote: See J. R. Commons, "Documentary History of American Industrial Society," VII:287-349.] A German economist has expressed the view that it was only this movement, so inaugurated, that prevented America from going into socialism. One of our foremost economists in America, in discussing this very subject, begins with these observations: "The French are a nation of philosophers. Starting with the theory of the rights of man, they build up a logical system, then a revolution, and the theory goes into practice. Next a coup d'état and an emperor. "The English are a nation without too much philosophy or logic. They piece out their constitution at the spot where it becomes tight.... They are practical ... unlogical. "The Americans are French in their logic and English in their use of logic. They announce the universal rights of man and then enact into law enough to augment the rights of property." The homestead law owed its origin to the doctrine of natural rights, whose transcendental glory faded often into the light of common day during the discussions but still enhaloes a very practical and matter-of-fact statute. Economic reasons, both of eastern and western motive, were gathered under the banner of its idealism, till finally it came to be an ensign not only of free soil for the landless but of free soil for the slaves. The "homestead" movement put an end to slavery, even if within a half century it has exhausted in its generosity the nation's domain of arable land. The voice in the wilderness cried for a legalized natural right that would not disturb vested rights, for an individualism based on private property given without cost, for equality by a limitation of that property to one hundred and sixty acres, and finally for the inalienability from sale or mortgage of that little plot of earth. Thirty years later the natural right to unoccupied land was recognized, individualistic society was strengthened by the great increase in the number of property holders, and inalienability was recognized by the States; but the failure to reserve the free lands to such actual settlers alone and to limit the amount of the holding left the way open for railroad grants, which alone have in two generations exceeded the homestead entries, and for the amassing of great stretches by a few. The logic of France, speaking through the voice of that leader and other men such as Horace Greeley, led the later exodus as certainly as her pioneers opened the way for the first American settlers. And though the logic was applied in English fashion, yet it had a notable part in making, as I have just said, the free soil of the Mississippi Valley contribute to the freeing of a whole people in slavery, inside and outside of the valley. That logic learned in France would doubtless have accomplished a conclusion needing less patching and opportunistic repair if the immediate interests of those of the frontiers, those who wanted immediate settlement and development, had not disturbed one of the premises. At any rate, a great and perhaps the last opportunity to carry such doctrines to their conclusions without overturning all social and industrial institutions has gone by. A half-billion acres of inalienable farms, all of the same size, trespassing upon no ancient rights, interspersed with the white blocks held for the education of the children of that free soil, might have furnished an example for all time to be followed or shunned-if, indeed, all acres had been born of the primeval sea and glaciers not only free but equal in size. As it was, some acres were born large and some small, some fruitful and some barren, some with gold in their mouths and some with only the taste of alkali; and only an infinite wisdom could have adjusted them to the unequal capacities of that army of land lackers who declared themselves free and equal, and who, with free-soil banners, advanced to the territory where the squatters became sovereigns and homesteads became castles. President Andrew Johnson (who as a congressman, in 1852, made the seven- hundred-year prophecy) estimated that a homestead (of one hundred and sixty acres) would increase every homesteader's purchasing ability by one hundred dollars a year; and if (he argued) the government enacted a 30- per-cent duty it would be reimbursed in seven years in the amount of two hundred and ten dollars, or ten dollars more than the cost of the homestead. By such reckoning he reached the conclusion that the homesteaders would defray the expenses of the government for a period of four thousand three hundred and ninety-two years-each homesteader of the nine millions contributing indirectly twenty-four thousand four hundred dollars in seven hundred years and all of them two hundred and nineteen billion six hundred million dollars--a scheme as ingenious, says one, as Fourier's "scheme to pay off the national debt of France with a setting hen." [Footnote: Speech on the bill to encourage agriculture, July 25, 1850. Speeches on the homestead bill, April 29, 1852, and May 20, 1858.] There are approximately nine million homes (or homes, tenements, and flats) in that domain to-day, and it is quite easily demonstrable that they not only contribute to the support of government, directly and indirectly, far more than the seemingly fantastic estimates of Andrew Johnson suggested but also give to the world a surplus of product undreamed of even in 1850. It is hardly likely that any system of parcelling would have more rapidly developed this vast domain. There is a question as to whether some more logical, conserving, long-viewed policy might not have been devised for the "common good" of the generations that are yet to occupy that valley with the generation that is there and the three or four generations that have already gone. It is that "common good" that is now engaging the thought of our foremost economists, natural scientists, and public men. Of that I shall speak later. Here we celebrate merely the fact that there are fifty or sixty million geographical descendants of France living in the midst of the valley at the mouth of whose river La Salle took immediate possession for Louis XIV, but prophetic possession for all the peoples that might in any time find dwelling there. CHAPTER IX IN THE TRAILS OF THE COUREURS DE BOIS "It is a mistake," said one of the statesmen of the Mississippi Valley, Senator Thomas H. Benton, "to suppose that none but men of science lay off a road. There is a class of topographical engineers older than the schools and more unerring than the mathematicians. They are the wild animals-- buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, bears-which traverse the forest not by compass but by an instinct which leads them always the right way-to the lowest passes in the mountains, the shallowest fords in the rivers, the richest pastures in the forests, the best salt springs, and the shortest practicable lines between remote points. They travel thousands of miles, have their annual migrations backwards and forwards, and never miss the best and shortest route. These are the first engineers to lay out a road in a new country; the Indians follow them, and hence a buffalo road becomes a warpath. The first white hunters follow the same trails in pursuing their game; and after that the buffalo road becomes the wagon road of the white man, and finally the macadamized road or railroad of the scientific man." [Footnote: Speech on a bill for the construction of a highway to the Pacific, December 16, 1850.] A hunter of wild sheep in the Rocky Mountains following their trails wonders if they were made a year, five, or ten years ago, and is told by the scientist at his side that they may have been sixteen thousand years old, so long have these first engineers been at work. In some places of Europe, I am told, their fellow engineers, longer in the practice of their profession, have actually worn paths in the rocks by their cushioned feet. It is a mistake, therefore, we are reminded, to suppose that the forests and plains of the Mississippi Valley were trackless. They were coursed by many paths. If you have by chance read Châteaubriand's "Atala," you will have a rather different notion of the American forests, especially of the Mississippi Valley. "On the western side of the Mississippi," he wrote, "the waves of verdure on the limitless plains (savannas) appear as they recede to rise gradually into the azure sky"; but on the eastern half of the valley, "trees of every form, of every color, and of every perfume throng and grow together, stretching up into the air to heights that weary the eye to follow. Wild vines ... intertwine each other at the feet of these trees, escalade their trunks and creep along to the extremity of their branches, stretching from the maple to the tulip-tree, from the tulip-tree to the hollyhock, and thus forming thousands of grottos, arches and porticos. Often, in their wanderings from tree to tree, these creepers cross the arm of a river, over which they throw a bridge of flowers.... A multitude of animals spread about life and enchantment. From the extremities of the avenues may be seen bears, intoxicated with the grape, staggering upon the branches of the elm-trees; caribous bathe in the lake; black squirrels play among the thick foliage; mocking-birds, and Virginian pigeons not bigger than sparrows, fly down upon the turf, reddened with strawberries; green parrots with yellow heads, purple woodpeckers, cardinals red as fire, clamber up to the very tops of the cypress-trees; humming-birds sparkle upon the jessamine of the Floridas; and bird- catching serpents hiss while suspended to the domes of the woods, where they swing about like creepers themselves.... All here ... is sound and motion.... When a breeze happens to animate these solitudes, to swing these floating bodies, to confound these masses of white, blue, green, and pink, to mix all the colors and to combine all the murmurs, there issue such sounds from the depths of the forests, and such things pass before the eyes, that I should in vain endeavor to describe them to those who have never visited these primitive fields of nature." And when René and Atala were escaping through those forests they "advanced with difficulty under a vault of smilax, amidst vines, indigo-plants, bean-trees, and creeping-ivy that entangled our feet like nets.... Bell serpents were hissing in every direction, and wolves, bears, carcajous and young tigers, come to hide themselves in these retreats, made them resound with their roarings." [Footnote: Châteaubriand, "Atala," trans. Harry, pp. 2, 3, 19.] A trackless, howling wilderness, indeed, if we are to accept this as an accurate description of scenes which, as I have intimated, it is now suspected that Châteaubriand's imagination visited, unaccompanied of his body. But a recent indigenous writer on the valley and its roads--having in mind, to be sure, the forests a little farther north than those in which Atala and René wandered--assures us that they were neither "pathless" nor "howling." He writes that in 1775 (eighteen years before the first white settlement in the State of Ohio) there were probably as many paths within the bounds of that State on which a man could travel on horseback at the rate of five miles an hour as there are railways in that State to-day. And the buffalo paths were-some of them, at any rate--roads so wide that several wagons might have been driven abreast on them--as wide as the double-track railroads. So the Indian farther west had his highways prepared for him by the instincts of these primitive engineers that knew nothing of trigonometry or the sextant or the places of the stars. [Footnote: Hulbert, "Historic Highways," vol. I, pt. II.] Nor did these first makers of roads howl or bellow their way over them. On this same authority (Hulbert) I am able to assure you that the forest paths were noiseless "traces," as they were originally called, in the midst of silences disturbed only by the wind and the falling waters. Wolves did sometimes howl in the forests or out upon the plains, but it was only in hunger and in accentuation of the usual silence. Neither they nor the bears growled or howled, except when they came into collision with each other, or starvation. And there were not even birds to give cheer to the gloom of these black forests, whose tree tops were knitted together by vines, but had no undergrowth, since the sun could not reach the ground. "The birds of the forest came only with the white man." There were parrots in Kentucky, and there were in Ohio pigeons and birds of prey, eagles and buzzards, but the birds we know to-day and the bees were later immigrants from lands that remembered Aristophanes or the hills of Hymettus, or that knew Shelley's skylark or Keats's nightingale or Rostand's tamer fowls or Maeterlinck's bees. Even if we allow to the forests Chateaubriand's color in summer and the clamor in times of terror--color and clamor which only a keen eye and ear would have seen and heard--we cannot longer think of them as pathless, if inhabited by those ancient pathmakers, the buffalo, deer, sheep. And, naturally, when the Indian came, dependent as he was upon wild game, he followed these paths or traces made and frequented by the beasts--the ways to food, to water, to salt, to other habitats with the changing seasons. The buffalo roads and the deer trails became his vocational trails--the streets of his livelihood. And as his enemy was likely to find him by following these traces, they became not only the paths of peace but the paths of war. When the red man trespassed upon the peaceful trails of his enemy, he was, in an American idiom, "on the war-path." Then in time the European trader went in friendly search of the Indian by these same paths, and they became the avenues of petty commerce. As street venders in Paris, so these forest traders or runners went up and down these sheltered paths, as dark in summer as the narrowest streets, only they went silently, though they were often heard as distinctly in the breaking of twigs or in their muffled tread by the alert ears of the Indians as the musical voices of these venders are heard in the city. And the places where these traders put down their cheap trinkets before their dusky patrons grew into trading-posts, prophetic of future cities and towns. Such were the paths by which the runners of the woods, the French coureurs de bois, first emerged--after following the watercourses--upon the western forest glades and the edges of the prairies and astonished the aboriginal human owners of those wild highways that had known only the soft feet of the wolf and fox and bear, the hoofs of the buffalo and deer, and the bare feet or the moccasins of the Indians (the "silent shoes," as I have seen such footgear advertised in Boulevard St. Germain). It has been said by a chemist of some repute that man came, in his evolution, out of the sea; that he has in his veins certain elements-- potassium, calcium, magnesium, sodium--in the same ratio in which they appeared in the water of the Pre-Cambrian ocean. Whether this be true or not, one stage of human development carries marks of the forest, and from that period "having nothing but forest knowledge, forest dreams, forest fancies, forest faith," as an American writer has said, man emerges upon the plains of history. So, though the French civilization still smells and sounds of the sea, and followed the streams that kept its first men in touch with it, it had finally, in its pioneering, to take to the trails and the forests. And these runners of the woods were the amphibious ambassadors from this kingdom of the sea to the kingdom of the land. They were, as Étienne Brûlé of Champlain's time, the pioneers of pioneers who, often in unrecorded advance of priest and explorer, pushed their adventurous traffic in French guns and hatchets, French beads and cloth, French tobacco and brandy, till they knew and were known to the aboriginal habitants, "from where the stunted Esquimaux burrowed in their snow caves to where the Comanches scoured the plains of the south with their banditti cavalry." They were a lawless lot whom this mission, not only between water and land but also between civilization and barbarism, "spoiled for civilization." But they must not be judged too harshly in their vibrations between the two standards of life which they bridged, making periodical confession to charitable priests in one, of the sins committed in the other, which, unforgiven, might have driven them entirely away from the church and into perdition. The names of most of these coureurs de bois are forgotten by history (which is rather particular about the character of those whom it remembers--other than those in kingly or other high places). But they who have followed immediately in the trails of these men of the verges have written these names, or some of them, in places where they are more widely read than if cherished by history even. Étienne Brûlé--who, as interpreter, led Le Caron out upon the first western mission--after following trails and waters for hundreds of miles back of the English settlements, where the timid colonists had not dared to venture, suffered the martyrdom of fire, and is remembered in a tempestuous stream in the west and perhaps in an Indian tribe. The name of Jean Nicolet of Cherbourg (the ambassador to the Winnebagoes, from the record of whose picturesque advent in the "Jesuit Relations" the annals of the west really began) has been given to a path now grown into one of the most populous streets along the whole course of the Mississippi River--in Minneapolis. And Du Lhut, the cousin of Tonty, a native of Lyons--a man of "persistent hardihood, not surpassed perhaps even by La Salle," says Parkman, "continually in the forest, in the Indian towns, or in the remote wilderness outposts planted by himself, exploring, trading, fighting, ruling lawless savages, and whites scarcely less ungovernable," [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 274] and crossing the ocean for interviews with the colonial minister, "amid the splendid vanities of Versailles"--he is remembered for all time in that city, built up against the far shores of Lake Superior, bearing his name, Duluth, the city that has taken the place of London in the list of the world's great harbors. Macaulay's vision of the New Zealander standing amid the ruins of London and overlooking the mastless Thames seems to have some realization in the succeeding of a city, founded in the path of a wood runner, out on the borders of civilization, to one of London's distinctions among the cities of the world. "This class of men is not extinct," said Parkman twenty or thirty years ago; "in the cheerless wilds beyond the northern lakes, or among the solitudes of the distant west they may still be found, unchanged in life and character since the day when Louis the Great claimed sovereignty over the desert empire." But their mission, if any survive till now, is past. The paths, surveyed of the beasts and opened by these pioneers to the feet of priests, explorers, and traders, have let in the influences that in time destroyed all these forest lovers braved the solitude for. The trace has become the railroad, and the smell of the gasolene motor is even on the once wild Oregon trail; for, in general, it has been said of the forest part of the valley, "where there is a railway to-day there was a path a century and a quarter ago" (and that means longer ago); and it may be added that where there was a French trading-post, or fort, or portage, there is a city to- day, not because of the attraction of the populations of those places for the prospecting railroad, but because of their natural highway advantage, learned even by the buffaloes. Not all paths have evolved into railroads, but the railroads have followed practically all of these natural paths-- paths of the coureurs de bois, instinctively searching for mountain passes, the low portages from valley to valley, the shortest ways and the easiest grades. One of America's greatest railroad presidents has noted this significant difference between the railroads of Europe and those of America, or at any rate of the Mississippi Valley. In Europe they "took the place of the pack-animal, the stage-coach, the goods-van that crowded all the highways between populous centers," whereas in the Mississippi Valley and beyond they succeeded the pioneer and pathfinder. The railroad outran the settler and "beckoned him on," just as the coureur de bois outran the slower-going migrant and beckoned him on to ever new frontiers. The buffalo, the coureur de bois, the engineer in turn. The railroad, the more modern coureur de bois and coureur de planche, has not served the new-world society merely as a connecting-link between communities already developed. It has been the "creator of cities." [Footnote: James J. Hill, "Highways of Progress," pp. 235-236.] Out on those prairies beyond the forests I have seen this general statement of Mr. Hill's illustrated. Down from Lake Michigan the first railroad crept toward the Mississippi along the Des Plaines and then the Illinois, where La Salle had seen from his canoe great herds of buffalo "trampling by in ponderous columns or filing in long lines morning, noon, and night." That railroad was a path, not to any particular city but to the water, a path from water to water, a long portage from the lake to the Mississippi and back again. One day, within my memory, a new path was marked by stakes that led away from that river, off across the prairie, to an uninhabited place which the first engineers had not known--a place of fire, the fields of coal, of which the practical Joliet had found signs on his memorable journey. And so one and another road crossed that prairie (on which I can even now clearly see the first engine standing in the prairie-grass), making toward the places of fire, of wood, of grain, of meat, of gold, of iron, of lead, till the whole prairie was a network of these paths--and now the "transportation machine" (as Mr. Hill calls it) has grown to two hundred and fifty-four thousand seven hundred and thirty-two miles (in 1911), or about 40 per cent of the world mileage, of which one hundred and forty thousand miles are within the Mississippi Valley, carrying with them wherever they go the telegraph and telephone wires, building villages, towns, and cities-still bringing the fashions of Paris, as did Perrot, in the paths of the buffalo. When the surveyors crossed that prairie, treeless except for the woods along the Aramoni River (just back of the Rock St. Louis) and along the Illinois River at the other edge, the wild animals and the Indians had disappeared westward, the prairie ground was broken and planted in patches; fences had begun to appear on the silent stretches; houses stood four to a section, with a one-room schoolhouse every two miles and churches at long intervals. After the construction train ploughed its slow way across that same prairie, in the trail staked by the surveyors, a place was marked for a village; the farmers upon whose land it promised to trespass wanted each to give it the name of his wife, his queen, as La Salle of his king; but one day a workman, representing the unsentimental corporation, without ceremony nailed a strip of board to a post, with the name "Aramoni," let us say, painted upon it. Wooden buildings, stores, elevators, blacksmith, harness, and shoemaker shops, and the dwellings of those who did the work of the little town, gathered about; in time some of the pioneer settlers leaving their farms to the care of children or tenants moved into the town; the primitive stores were rebuilt in brick; houses of pretentious architecture crowded out of the best sites the first dwellings; and in twenty or thirty years it had become a village of several hundred people: retired farmers or their widows, men of the younger generation living on the income of their farms without more than nominal occupation, and those who buy the produce and minister to the wants of this little community. Most of the villagers and most of the farmers in all the country about have the telephone in their houses and can talk as much as they please with their neighbors at a very small yearly charge. They also keep track of the grain and stock markets by telephone, have their daily metropolitan paper, a county paper, monthly magazines (of which they are the best readers), perhaps a piano or an organ, more likely, now, a phonograph, which reproduces, if they choose, what is heard in Paris or in concerts or the grand opera; reproductions of pieces of statuary or paintings in the Louvre; and either a fast driving horse or an automobile. They are often within easy reach of a city by train, and the wives or daughters know the fashions of Paris and begin to follow the modes as quickly as local talent can make the adaptations and transformations. Aramoni is not an imaginary much less a Utopian village. There are thousands of "Aramonis" where the railroads have gone, drawing all the physical conveniences and social conventions after them, where once coureurs de bois followed the buffaloes. Mr. Hill, whom I have just quoted above, has said: "Next after the Christian religion and the public school the railroad has been the largest single contributing factor to the welfare and happiness of the people of that valley." [Footnote: James J. Hill, "Highways of Progress," pp. 236, 237.] The first great service of the railroads to the republic, as such, was to make it possible that the people of a territory three thousand miles wide, crossed by two mountain ranges, should be bound into one republic. The waters to the east of the Alleghanies ran toward the Atlantic, the waters west of the Rockies ran toward the Pacific, and the waters between the mountains ran to the Gulf of Mexico. If the great east-and-west railroads had not been built and some of the waters of the Lakes had not been made to run down the Mohawk Valley into the Hudson it is more than probable that there would have been a secession of the men who called themselves the "men of the western waters," a secession of the west from the east, rather than of the south from the north. If the men of this valley had continued men of the "western waters" there would probably have been at least three republics in North America and perhaps as many as in South America. When Josiah Quincy, a famous son of Massachusetts, said for the men of the east in the halls of Congress, "You have no authority to throw the rights and liberties and property of this people into hotchpot with the wild men on the Missouri, nor with the mixed though more respectable race of Anglo- Hispano-Gallo-Americans, who bask on the sands in the mouth of the Mississippi," he was visualizing the men whose interests followed the rivers to another tide-water than that of Boston and New York harbors. The railroads made a real prophecy of his fear that these men of the western rivers would some day be "managing the concerns of a seaboard fifteen hundred miles from their residences, and having a preponderance in the councils," into which, as he contended, "they should never have been admitted." [Footnote: Speech on the bill to admit Orleans Territory into the Union. Annals of Congress, 11th Cong., 3d Sess., 1810-11, pp. 524- 542.] He was thinking and speaking rather of the southwest than of the northwest, but it was the east-and-west lines of railroad that prevented the vital interest of that northern valley from flowing with the water along parallels of longitude to where the gulf currents would catch its commerce, instead of over the mountains along the sterner parallels of latitude and in straighter course to Europe. The force of gravity, the temptation of the tropics, the indifference of the east, the freedom from eastern and puritanical restraints, were all on the side of a "republic of the western waters" and against that larger, continent-wide nationalism which now has its most ardent support in that valley through which the iron shuttles fly from sea to sea, weaving the waters as strands of color into a unified pattern of sublimer import. It looks now as if the north-and-south lines were to be strengthened the world over, as the occupied and exploited north temperate zone reaches north toward the frigid zone, now grown warmer by the very opening of the lands to the sun and the long burning of coal, and south toward the tropics, now made more habitable by the new knowledge of tropical medicine, and even across the tropics to the sister temperate zone of the southern hemisphere. [Footnote: I have been told by one who has been studying conditions in the great northwest fields of Canada that it is now possible to grow crops there that could not have been grown before the country was opened and cultivated to the south of them, so much longer have the frosts been delayed in the autumn.] In the Mississippi Valley, the gulf ports, fed of river and railroad, are increasingly busy, partly, to be sure, because they look toward the east-and-west path through Panama, but partly, too, because they lie between the two temperate zones, which must inevitably be brought nearer to each other. We cannot imagine two permanently dissociated or distantly associated temperate civilizations on this globe, which is becoming smaller every day. It was inevitable, perhaps, and happily inevitable, that the east-and-west lines should be well established before the temperate zone should venture into tropic lotus-lands again, and perhaps it was inevitable that the west should eventually, even without the help of steam and steel, attach itself to the east--even by streams of water. Washington had hardly put off his uniform, after the peace of 1783, when he was planning for a western trip, and his diary on the third day of that trip of six hundred and eighty miles shows that his one object was to obtain information of the nearest and best communication between the eastern and the western waters. One of the kings of France said, when his grandson was made king of Spain, "There are no longer any Pyrenees," and Washington, when he saw the new republic forming, said, in effect, "There must be no Alleghanies." He expected a canal to erase the mountains, but the railroad accomplished this gigantic task with but slight aid of water. And as the railroad tied the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic coast, so in time, aided of a government that had every reason to be grateful, it reached across the uninhabited plains, over the Rocky Mountains, which even the western statesmen said were the divinely appointed barriers, and across the desert beyond to the Pacific slope and tied it to a capital which is now nearer to San Francisco than once it was to Boston. A man from Missouri is speaker of the house in which Josiah Quincy spoke his provincial fears. A man from the mouth of the Mississippi, the highest authority in America on the French code, was but a little time ago appointed as the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States by a President who was born on the banks of the Ohio; that is, the highest office in each of the three independent branches of government (the executive, the legislative, and the judicial) have at one time been filled by men of the western waters. I am anticipating a fact that belongs to a later theme, but there is no single fact that can better illustrate the political service of the paths over which we are to-day travelling. On the economic consequences we need not now dwell. They have had too frequent and sufficiently conspicuous illustration in every foreign mind that knows anything whatever of that valley to make it necessary to insist in this cursory view upon their great contribution to physical comfort. It is, however, begun to be felt that in the rapid development and exploitation of the resources of that valley (made possible only by the railroads) the future has not been enough in our minds. It was said a few years ago that there was not money enough in the world to lay track to take the traffic that the Mississippi Basin offered. The valley wanted to get everything to market in one generation, indifferent to the fate of those who should come after-the passes through the mountains being choked by cars carrying to the coasts crops from increasing acreage of declining productivity or the products of swiftly disappearing forests or the output of mines that must soon be exhausted. Perhaps the railroads are not to be blamed for this decrease in productivity--a passing phase of our agricultural life, as recent crop reports show. They are very loudly blamed that they do not carry these products fast enough or cheaply enough, though, according to a recent authority, their rates are less on the average than the cost of the French water traffic. Nevertheless, their wheels alone have made possible that phenomenal draining of the riches of the land to the coasts and other shores, assisting the waters that carry a half-billion tons of soil into the gulf every year. Perhaps this hurried, panting development has been for the good of all time, but until recently there has been little or no thought of that "all time" (as we observed in the policies of land parcelling). Practically the whole western country has tied itself to a wheel, and so whatever its happiness and welfare may be, come of or with the wheel. This territory is capable of self-support; it has still its independent spirit, bred of the pioneer who lived before the day of wheels; it is responsive to appeals that stop its restless movement--as the wheel of Ixion when Orpheus played; but none the less is it an eager, restless, unquiet life, driven as a wheel, driven by the same hand that urged it into the valley. No one asks--or few ask--if the wheel brings good or ill. The only concern is that it shall run as quickly and safely as is humanly and mechanically possible and shall not discriminate between one shipper and another, one community and another, one consumer and another. That is the railroad problem. The wheel has removed watersheds at pleasure, created cities and fortunes by its presence or its taking thought. But under the new policy of the government it is not likely that there will ever again be such ruthless disturbance of nature, or such wild, profuse creation. Democracy, beginning in that valley, is seeking now a perfect impersonal transportation machine. But such a machine will drain quite as effectively the country districts. The census returns for 1910 show, for example, that in one prosperous agricultural State, Missouri, just west of the Mississippi, while the State as a whole showed an increase of 187,000 in ten years, there was a net decrease of 84,000 in the rural districts. A partial explanation of the latter statistic is the moving on of farmers to still newer lands; another, the decline in the size of families; but it is attributable chiefly to the first statistic, the drift to the city--and to this the wheels contribute more than any other influence, carrying, as they do, the glamour or the opportunity of the city life daily before the eyes of the country boy. To be sure, these same wheels are lessening, to some extent, the congestion of the great centres of population, and lightening their shadows by extending them--spreading them--but none the less are the shadows spreading faster from the coming of the country to the city than of the suburbanizing of the city. This movement is not peculiar to the Mississippi Valley, but it is more rapid there, perhaps, than in any other great area. Let me give you an illustration of that demigrating influence. Two years ago I invited several leaders of great transportation and educational interests in New York to meet one of their number who, beginning life as a telegraph operator out beyond the Mississippi, was at the head of one of the two greatest railroads in the east. Of the guests, one, the president of another important railroad, was once a farm boy, then a freight brakeman in that same western State; another, the president of one of the longest railroads, was the son of a stone-mason out in that valley; another, the head of the Interborough system of New York, also a prairie- born boy; another, president of the greatest southern railroad, was born at the mouth of the Mississippi; and still another, one of the wealthiest men in the world, was at one time a messenger boy and telegraph operator just over the mountains on the site of Fort Duquesne. Only one man of the company of nearly twenty men, assembled without thought of origin, had been born in New York. All had come from the country or from across the water, and most of them from the great Mississippi Valley. I speak of this while discussing the railroad, because it is their paths through the valley of the French that have made this phenomenon possible. I have spoken of what the wheel has done in making the permanence of one republic of such an area a possibility. Nothing save a loose, heterogeneous confederation could have been practicable without its unifying service. It is only fair to those who made such gloomy prophecies in the early days to say that they had no intimation of what steam was destined to do. When Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, early in the nineteenth century, on a journey back from the west in a stage- coach, said that some day steam would drive wagons faster than they were going in the coach, his fellow passengers thought him a dreamer--a visionary. But it was only a man of such dreams or visions who in those days could have seen the possibility which has to-day been realized through the railroad. I have spoken of the part which the steam wheel has had in the rapid development and the exploitation of that great valley which, except for its pioneering in wild places, might have been seven hundred years, as Andrew Johnson predicted, in filling up, or at least two or three centuries. I have intimated its influence in promoting migration cityward--a movement as wide as European civilization--but intensified there, where the inhabitants have not been tied through generations of inheritance or historic associations to particular fields, where primogeniture has no observance, and where the traditions are of the wilderness and the visions are ever of a promised land beyond. The city is on every boy's horizon. Its glow is in every prairie sky at twilight. When a boy on those silent plains I had my Horace and my Euripides in the field. The unattainable eternal cities lent their charm and glory to the valley whose childhood horizon I had not crossed. But now no country boy thinks of the ancient or the mediaeval. It is the nearer city and civilization that impress the imagination. The valedictorian of a class, graduating as I entered college, told me a few months ago that he was building a trolley-line in Rome, and that, after all, Falernian wine, of which we who had never tasted wine out in that vineless region thought as some drink of the gods, was very bitter. I have hinted at what the wheel has done, in what it carries, to make all look alike and think alike and act alike, but there is one supreme service that must have mention. In that country when travel was slow we had a representative government. But while we still have the same form, the wheel has made possible, and so necessary, a more democratic government. When a representative was weeks in reaching the capital he acted on his own responsibility in larger measure than now, when his constituency can reach him every morning. The valley is reached every day, just as the people in a pure democracy were reached by the ancient stentor. The people are reserving to themselves more and more of the function of their one- time representatives, in such measures as the referendum and initiative intimate, and are trying to secure more accurate representation in such systems as the direct primary and proportional representation suggest; but these all are possible only through the aid of the wheel and of what it has brought. If the improvement of democracy is to come through more democracy, as some think, then the railroad is an essential agent of political progress as well as of economic exploitation and social homogeneity. I am not discussing this thesis but simply showing how dependent upon this physical agent is the machinery of democracy. Moreover, mobility is almost an essential quality of the spirit of democracy, the free way to the farthest horizons, the open road to the highest position and service. When the atom becomes practically fixed by its environment, reposeful and stable, stratification sets in. We may or we may not have then something better. It may seem to you a far cry from those rough, lawless coureurs de bois to the mobile but orderly people of that valley to-day. But after an experience of a few summers ago the distance does not seem so great. Here is a journal of three days: In the morning of an August day I was gathering some last data from the library of one of the greatest, though one of the newest, universities in the world--a two-hours' journey from where the coureur de bois Jean Nicolet, in robe of damask, first looked over the edge of the basin, (Not many years ago I sat there in an assembly of learned men gathered from the ends of the earth and arrayed in academic robes.) In the afternoon I walked over that first and most famous of the French portages, but not content with that, I walked on into the night along the Wisconsin, that I might see the river as the explorers saw it. However, at midnight I took a palace car, with such conveniences as even Louis the Great did not have at Versailles, and woke well up the Mississippi. I spent the day at another great State university and at dusk set off by the actual trails of the French coureurs de bois (only by wheels instead of on foot), first through the woods and along rivers, above Green Bay to the "Soo," then above Lake Huron and the Nipissing and down the Ottawa River, where I saw the second day break, and then on past La Salle's seigniory of St. Sulpice, around Carder's mountain into Montreal, and thence to the Rock of Quebec. It is a common, unimaginative metaphor in the United States to call the engine which leads the mighty trains across the country the iron horse; but it is deserving of a nobler figure. It is the iron coureur de bois, still leading Europe into America, and America into a newer America. CHAPTER X IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN" In the lower St. Lawrence Valley, among the French Canadians, where France is best remembered and where the shut-in life is not disturbed by current events or changing conventions or evanescent fashions, I am told there are traces in their language of the sea life of their ancestors on the coasts of Brittany and Normandy. When, for example, a neighbor approaches a farmhouse on horseback he is asked not to "alight" or to "dismount" but to "disembark," and he is invited not to "tie" his horse but to "moor" it. It is as if they were still crying ever in their unconscious memories, "Thalassa, Thalassa"; as if the very shells of speech still carried the roar of the ocean which they who hold them to their ears have never seen. If the language of the upper valley of the St. Lawrence and of the valley of the Mississippi remembered as distinctly its origin we should everywhere hear the plash of the oar in all the hospitality of their settlements. But all such traces have disappeared, or all but disappeared, in the Mississippi Valley. The only one that comes to me now, as possibly of the old French days, is one which is preserved in an adage not at all French but quite characteristic of the independent life that has occupied the banks of all the rivers: "Paddle your own canoe." Yet even in the space of one or two generations of agricultural life that, too, is disappearing, supplanted by a synonymous phrase, borrowed of fields that have entirely forgotten the primitive days, when men travelled only by water and lived near the streams: "Hoe your own row." The first sound of the overmountain migration of which I spoke above was of the stealthy step of the hunter, yet back of that for a century was the scarcely audible plash of the paddle and the answering swirl of the water. But as in overmountain migration the noisy wheel soon followed the foot, so in the other the noiseless sail followed the swishing paddle. The city of Paris bears a sailing ship upon her shield, though she sits a hundred miles or more from the sea. Whatever the significance of that symbol has been to the people of France, it has a peculiar appropriateness (probably never realized before) in the fact that the iron, cordage, and anchors for the first vessel which sailed upon the inland waters of the new world were carried out from France to the first shipyard, beyond the mountains, in the midst of the forest, above the mighty Falls of Niagara. Jason of Thessaly, sailing for the Golden Fleece in Colchis, and braving the fiery breath of the dragon, did not undertake a more perilous or more difficult labor than he who bore from the banks of the Seine the equipment of a vessel in which to bring back to France, as he hoped, the fleece of the forest and the plain. We are accustomed to call those who crossed the plains and the Rocky Mountains for the gold-fields of California nearly two centuries later (in 1849) the Argonautae; but the first American Argonauts went from France, and they built their _Argo_ on what is now Lake Erie, on the edge of the Field of the Bulls, near a place, grown into a beautiful city, which now bears the very name of the wild bull, the "buffalo," and within sound of the roaring of the dragon that had frightened all earlier explorers. So accurately do the details of the story of Jason's adventure become realities to-day! Champlain and others had heard only at a distance the thunder of the great cataract that was some day to become not only as docile as the dragon under Jason's taming but as useful as a million harnessed bulls. La Salle gathered his ship-carpenters and his ship furniture between his journeys to Rouen (the place of his birth) and elsewhere for the means of purchase. But before the winter had come in Normandy his messengers were out amid the snows and naked forests of Canadian winters in continuance of that voyage toward the western Colchis. In the autumn of 1678 a Franciscan friar, Hennepin, set out with two canoemen, the first solitary figures of the expedition--a gray priest from the gray Rock of Quebec, in a birch canoe, carrying with him the "furniture of a portable altar"--a priest who professed a zeal for souls, but who admitted a passion for travel and a burning desire to visit strange lands. He relates of himself that, being sent from a convent in Artois to Calais at the season of herring fishing, he made friends of the sailors and never tired of their stories. "Often," he says, "I hid myself behind tavern doors while the sailors were telling of their voyages. The tobacco smoke made me very sick at the stomach, but nevertheless I listened attentively.... I could have passed whole days and nights in this way without eating." [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 133. Hennepin, "A New Discovery of a Large Country in America," ed. Thwaites, 1:30.] Along the way up the St. Lawrence he stopped to minister to the habitants --too few and too poor to support a priest--saying mass, exhorting, and baptizing. Early in November he arrived at the mission of Fort Frontenac, which he had two or three years before helped to establish in the wilds. Soon La Salle's lieutenants, La Motte and Tonty, appeared with most of the men, and while some were despatched in canoes to Lake Michigan to gather the buffalo-hides and beaver-skins against the coming of the ship, whose keel had not yet been laid, the rest (La Motte, Hennepin, and sixteen men) embarked for the Niagara River, by which the upper lakes empty into Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence. After a tempestuous voyage up and across the lake they reached this river, whose torrent fury, gathered of "four inland oceans," stopped even the canoes. Then, led of the priest, they toiled up the cliffs called the "Three Mountains," because, I suppose, of the three terraces. (Having climbed up the face of the cliffs in winter, with a heavy camera for my portable altar, and having broken the great icicles formed by the trickling stream over one of the terraces, in order to make my way across a narrow ledge to the top of the precipice, I am able to know what the journey must have meant to those first European travellers.) Once upon the upper plateau, they marched through the wintry forest and at length, in "solitude unprofaned as yet by the pettiness of man," they beheld the "imperial cataract"--the "thunder of water," as the Indians called it--or, as Hennepin described it, that "vast and prodigious cadence of water which falls down after a surprising and most astonishing manner, insomuch that the universe does not afford its parallel, those of Italy and Switzerland being but sorry patterns." To this priest, Hennepin, we owe the first description and picture of Niagara, [Footnote: "Four leagues from Lake Frontenac there is an incredible Cataract or Waterfall, which has no equal. The Niagara river near this place is only the eighth of a league wide, but it is very deep in places, and so rapid above the great fall that it hurries down all the animals which try to cross it, without a single one being able to withstand its current. They plunge down a height of more than five hundred feet, and its fall is composed of two sheets of water and a cascade, with an island sloping down. In the middle these waters foam and boil in a fearful manner. They thunder continually, and when the wind blows in a southerly direction the noise which they make is heard for more than fifteen leagues. Four leagues from this cataract, or fall, the Niagara river rushes with extraordinary rapidity especially for two leagues into Lake Frontenac."--Hennepin, "Description of Louisiana," pp. 71-73.] probably now more familiar to the world than any other natural feature of this continent. He has somewhat magnified the height of these falls, making it five hundred feet in the edition of 1683, and raising it to six hundred in 1697; but they are impressive enough to acquit him of intentional falsification and powerful enough to run virtually all the manufacturing plants in the United States, if they could be gathered within its easy reach. As it is, less than 9 per cent of the water that overflows from the four upper Great Lakes into the lower lake, once known as Lake Frontenac and now as Ontario, is diverted for utilitarian purposes; it supplies the Americans and the Canadians almost equally between the two shores five hundred thousand horse-power. [Footnote: "Under a treaty between the United States and the British Government only about 25 per cent of the theoretical horsepower of Niagara Falls can be developed. The estimate of the minimum amount of power that can be developed on the Niagara River above and including the Falls is 5,800,000 h.p., and the assumed maximum is 6,500,000 h.p. The treaty, therefore, limits present possible minimum development on both sides of the Falls to 1,450,000 h.p. Under the treaty only five-fourteenths of the power made available thereby belongs to the United States, its share being reduced by the diversion of water from Lake Michigan into the Drainage Canal at Chicago. There is thus left at Niagara Falls only about 518,000 h.p. that can at present be developed on the American side." About one-half of this total is now developed.--United States Commissioner of Corporations. Report on water-power development in the United States. 1912.] What the conversion of the strength of this Titan (for ages entirely wasted and for a century after Hennepin only a scenic wonder) means, or may mean, to industry in the future is intimated in some statistics, furnished by a recent writer on the Great Lakes, showing the relative cost per month of a certain unit of power in a number of representative American cities. [Footnote: "Assuming the maximum power used to be one hundred horse-power, the number of working hours a day to be ten, and the 'load factor,' or average power actually used, to be seventy-five per cent of the total one hundred, the cost per month in the cities named is as [above]."--Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 135.] Boston $937.50 Philadelphia 839.25 New York 699.37 Chicago 629.43 Cleveland 559.50 Pittsburgh 419.62 Buffalo 184.91 Niagara Falls 144.17 These figures are more significant as one contemplates the diminishing supply of coal in coming centuries, if not decades. According to the estimate of a reliable authority the available and accessible coal supply of the United States will be exhausted at the present rate of exploitation by the year 2027, and the entire supply by the year 2050. Such statistics intimate the advantage possessed, perhaps beyond any other site in America, by the strip of shore on which La Salle's men, from the banks of the Seine, and Hennepin, the priest from Calais, that December night in 1678 encamped, building their bivouac fires amid the snows, three miles above the falls--and so opening to the view of the world a natural source of power and wealth more valuable than extensive coal-fields or rich mines of gold or silver. It was but a great waterfall to La Salle and Tonty and Hennepin--an impeding, noisy, hostile object. And to the half-mutinous, quarrelsome workmen (French, Flemings, Italians) it was a demon, no doubt, whose very breath froze their beards into icicles. It was, in reality, potentially the most beneficent single, incarnate force bounded by any one horizon of sky, in that new world, developed by the tipping of the continent a little to the eastward after the upper lakes had been formed and the consequent emptying of their waters into the St. Lawrence instead of the Gulf of Mexico. In January, 1679, a file of burdened men, some thirty in number, toiling slowly on their way over the snowy plains and "through the gloomy forests of spruce and naked oak trees," the priest accompanying with his altar lashed to his back, reached a favorable spot beside calm water several miles above the cataract: the site is identified as situate a little way above the mouth of Cayuga Creek, just outside the village of La Salle, in the State of New York. There is a stone erected by the local historical society to mark the spot. When I saw the bronze tablet the inscription was almost illegible, covered, as it was, with ice and the snow that was at that very hour falling upon it. There, began the felling and hewing of trees that were to touch the farther shores of Michigan. The supplies brought out from Paris had been lost by the wreck of La Salle's smaller vessel on the way up Ontario, but enough was saved, or brought by La Salle on his return from Fort Frontenac, to give this sixty-ton vessel full equipment, for in the spring she was launched. The "friar pronounced his blessing on her; the assembled company sang _Te Deum_; cannon were fired; and French and Indians ... shouted and yelped in chorus as she glided into Niagara." She carried five cannon and on her prow was carved such a "portentous monster" as doubtless is to be found among the grotesques of Notre Dame--a griffin (that is, a beast with the body of a lion and the head, beak, and pinions of a bird), in honor of the armorial bearings of Count Frontenac. Through spring and half the summer the vessel lay moored beyond reach of the Indians but near enough so that Hennepin "could preach on Sundays from the deck to the men encamped along the bank." When La Salle, who had been obliged by disasters to go back to Fort Frontenac during the building of the ship, again appeared above the falls in midsummer, the _Griffin_ was warped up into the placid lake, and on the 7th of August anchor was lifted and the fateful voyage was begun. There was (as when the _Argo_, the "first bold vessel, dared the seas") no Orpheus standing "high on the stern" and "raising his entrancing strain." Nor did a throng of proud Thessalians or of "transported demi-gods" stand round to cheer them off. The naked Indians, their hands over their mouths in wonderment or shouting, "Gannorom! Gannorom!" alone saw the great boat move out over the waters without oar or paddle or towing rope. For music there was only the _Te Deum_ again, sung by raw, unpractised voices, such as one might hear among the boatmen of the Seine. It was not such music, at any rate, as that of Orpheus, to make plain men grow "heroes at the sound." Doubtless no one felt himself a hero. The only intimation of any consciousness of a high mission comes from Hennepin, who, when the _Griffin_, some days later, was ploughing peacefully through the straits that led to the Mer Douce--"verdant prairies, dotted with groves and bordered with lofty forests" on either side, "herds of deer and flocks of swans and wild turkeys" within sight, and the "bulwarks plentifully hung with game"--wrote: "Those who will one day have the happiness to possess this fertile and pleasant strait, will be very much obliged to those who have shown them the way." "Very much obliged"? No, Hennepin! Of the hundreds of thousands who now pass through or across those straits every year, or of those thousands who possess its shores, not a hundred, I venture to say, remember "those who showed the way"! They have even forgotten "that the first European voice that Niagara ever heard was French"! Ste. Claire!--the name you gave to the beautiful strait beyond the "Symplegades" of your voyage, in gratitude and in honor of the day on which your company reached it--has become masculine in tribute to an American general. If your later praying to that patron of seamen, St. Anthony of Padua, had not availed to save you from the peril of the storm and you had gone to death in unsalted water, you could hardly have been more completely forgotten. One has spoken now and then lightly of the vow made by your commander, La Salle, to build a grateful chapel to St. Anthony if your lives were saved during that storm, forgetting that so long as the Mississippi runs to the sea there will be a chapel to St. Anthony (St. Anthony's Falls) in which gratitude will be continually chanted through ages for the preservation of the ship and its crew to find haven in quiet waters behind Point St. Ignace. It was there, at St. Ignace that we have seen La Salle, in scarlet, kneeling before the altar, where Marquette's bones were doubtless by that time gathered by his devoted savage followers, and it was thence that they passed on to an island in Green Bay, the goal of their journey. From that far port the first cargo carried of sails was sent out, bound for the shore on which the _Griffin's_ timbers had been hewn. That it never reached harbor of that calm shelter, or any other, we know; but that loss, once the path was traced in the waters, is hardly of consequence save as it helped further to illustrate the indomitable spirit of La Salle and his companions. What good came to Thessaly or Greece of the yellow peltry that Jason brought back is not even kept in myth or fable. The mere adventure was the all. They did not even think of its worth. The goatskin was valueless except as a proof or token, and the boat _Argo_, though the greatest ship known to the early myths of Greece, and though dedicated, we are told, to Neptune at the end of the voyage, became the pioneer of no such mighty fleet as did the _Griffin_. The list of the Greek ships and commanders in the Iliad offers but a pygmy analogy. And if you were to go to Buffalo to- day, near the site of that first shipyard (a little farther away from the falls), you would know that the successors of La Salle in new _Griffins_ had actually brought back the golden fleece--the priceless fleece, the fleece of the plains if not of the forests. Day after day its gold is hung against the sky as the grain is lifted from the ships into elevators which can store at one time twenty-three million bushels of wheat. The coasts of the lakes up which the _Griffin_ led the oarless way are three thousand three hundred and eighty-five miles in length, or, including those of the lower lake, Frontenac, which was also first touched of French keels, over four thousand miles. The statistics of the traffic which has grown in the furrow of that wind-drawn plough would be fatiguing if they did not carry you to heights of a wider and more exhilarating view. We have occupied and apportioned the billion acres of French domain among sixty million people. Here is an added domain in which no landmarks can be set--which belongs to all men. These are a few graphic facts gathered from recent reports and books about the Great Lakes: [Footnote: Edward Charming and M. F. Lansing, "The Story of the Great Lakes." Macmillan, New York, 1909. James O. Curwood, "The Great Lakes." Putnam, New York, 1909. James C. Mills, "Our Inland Seas." McClurg, Chicago, 1910.] Nearly as many people live in States that have ports upon those shores as in France to-day--between thirty-five and forty millions. The lakes have a tonnage equal to one-third of the total tonnage of North America. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 4. "In 1913 the total tonnage of the Great Lakes was 2,940,000 tons, of the United States 7,887,000 tons."--Report United States Commission of Navigation.] They have made possible a saving in cost of transportation (and so of production) of several hundred million dollars in a single year. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 4.] Only ninety million dollars have been spent by the government for their improvement in the whole history of their occupation, above Niagara Falls, [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 9.] while France in that time has spent for harbors and waterways alone seven hundred and fifty million dollars.[Footnote: "Four hundred and fifty million dollars of this total has been for the improvement and maintenance of the waterways."--Report of National Waterways Commission, p. 507.] They have been privately developed. Six times as much freight passes over these lakes as through the Suez Canal in a year. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 6.] Three thousand five hundred vessels, and more than twenty-five thousand men are required to move the hundred million tons of freight which every year would fill a train encircling the globe. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," pp. 25, 26, and Report of United States Commission of Navigation, 1913.] If one were to stand on the shore of that "charming strait," between Erie and Huron, the Detroit River (which Hennepin so covetously describes, wishing to make settlement there, until La Salle reminded him of his "professed passion for exploring a new country"), one would now see a vessel passing one way or the other every twelve minutes, on the average, day and night during the eight months of open navigation. Nor are they small sailing vessels of a few tons' burden, but great sailless, steam-propelled hulks, carrying from five to ten thousand tons. So it is no fleet of graceful galleons--half bird, half lion, as the _Griffin_ was--that have followed in her wake up what Hennepin called "the vast and unknown seas of which even the savages knew not the end." They have, in the evolution of nautical zoology, lost beak, wings, and feathers, and now like a shoal of wet lions, tawny and black, their powerful heads and long steel backs just visible above the blue water, they course the western Mediterranean from spring to winter. [Footnote: It is an intruding and probably whimsical, but fascinating, thought that the wings of the griffin have become evolved into the air-ships which first began successfully to fly, in America, near the shores of the lake on which the Griffin itself was hatched. The Wright brothers were born near one of those lakes. It is not a far-fetched or labored thought which pictures that simple, rough-made galleon--very like the model of the ship on the shield of Paris--as leading two broods across the valley above the Falls, one of lions that cannot fly and one of sea-birds, hydroplanes, whose paths are the air, but whose resting-places are the calm water; the brood of the sea and the brood of the sky, hatched from one nest at the water's edge.] The ships of the lion brood are, some of them, five or six hundred feet in length, and carry eleven thousand tons of cargo. I have seen the skeleton of one of these iron-boned beasts, and I have been told that eight hundred thousand rivets go into its creation. And upon hearing this I could not but hear the deafening clamor caused by La Salle's driving the first nail or bolt, Father Hennepin declining the honor because of the "modesty of [his] religious profession." As to the cargoes that these ships bring back, the story is even more marvellous. First in quantity is iron ore, forty-seven million four hundred and thirty-five thousand seven hundred and seventy-one tons in 1912 [Footnote: "Mineral Industry," 21:455.] from the shores of Superior, where Joliet had made search for copper mines, where Father Allouez--in the midst of reports of baptisms and masses--tells of nuggets and rocks of the precious metal, and where has grown up in a few years the "second greatest freight-shipping port on earth"--a port that bears the name of that famous French coureur de bois, Du Lhut. Forty-seven millions of tons, and there are still a billion and a half in sight on those shores, which have already given to the ships hundreds of millions of their dark treasure. After the ore, lumber, one billion one hundred and sixty-five million feet [Footnote: Monthly Summary of Internal Commerce of the United States, December, 1911.] in one year (1911); a waning amount from the vanishing forests that once completely encircled these lakes. Alexander Pope, whose "Ode on St. Cecilia's Day" I have quoted (and would there were a Homer, Pope, or Kipling to sing this true legend), speaks of _Argo_ seeing "her kindred trees descend from Pelion to the Main"--from the mountain to the sea, where Jason's boat was launched. So, with the departure of the _Griffin_ from her Green Bay Island, might a prophetic poet have seen her masts beckoning all the kindred trees to the water, in which one hundred and sixty billion feet of pine have descended from the forests of Michigan alone, [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 57.] and that is but one of the circling States. And there is this singular fact to be added, that nearly a third of the annual cargo goes to the "Tonawandas," [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 54.] the "greatest lumber towns" in the world that have grown up practically on the very site of the shipyard at the mouth of Cayuga Creek, a little way above the falls. And after the ore and lumber, grain--the fleece of the fields, immensely more valuable than that of the forests; one hundred and fifty million bushels in one year and eleven million barrels of flour--a fortnight's bread supply for the entire world. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 49.] And after ore and lumber and grain, fuel and other bulky necessities of life. The casual relation between the pioneer building and journey of the _Griffin_ and these statistics cannot, of course, be established, but what no inspired human prophecy could have divined, or even the wildest dreaming of La Salle have imagined, is as sequential as the history that has been made to trace all new-world development in the wake of the caravels of Columbus. The storms of nature and the jealousies in human breasts thwarted La Salle's immediate ambitions, but what has come into that northern valley has followed closely in the path of his purposes, the path traced by his ship built of the trees of Niagara and furnished by the chandleries of Paris. The mystery of the vanishing of this pioneer vessel only enhances the glory of its venture and service--as its loss but gave new foil to the hardihood of La Salle and Tonty. We can imagine the golden-brown skins scattered over the blue waters as the bits of the body of the son of the king of Colchis strewn by Medea to detain the pursuers of the Argonauts. It was the first sacrifice to the valley for the fleece. In the depths of these Lakes or on their shores were buried the bones of these French mariners who, first of Europeans, trusted themselves to sails and west winds on those uncharted seas. But this is not the all of the tragic story. The _Griffin_ carried in her the prophecies of other than lake vessels. She had in her hold on that fateful trip the cordage and iron for the pioneer of the river ships. So when she went down she spoke to the waters that engulfed her the two dreams of her builder and commander: one dream the navigation of the lakes and the other the coursing of the western rivers. The Spanish council which decreed long ago that "if it had pleased God that ... rivers should have been navigable, He would not have wanted human assistance to make them such" would be horrified by the sacrilege that has been committed and is being contemplated by the followers of the men of the _Griffin_. They have made a canal around the Falls (which Hennepin first saw breathing a cloud of mist over the great abyss)--a canal that, supplemented by other canals along the St. Lawrence River, allows vessels of fourteen-foot draught to go from Lake Erie to Montreal and so on to the sea. If this achievement were put into the poetry of legend it would show the outwitting of the dragon. They have deepened the straits where the _Griffin_ had to wait for favorable breezes and soundings to pass from Erie to Huron--the Symplegades (clashing rocks) of the new-world voyage. They have made canals on either side of the Sault Ste. Marie--the rapids of the St. Mary's River, by the side of which St. Lusson took formal possession of all that northern empire and Father Allouez made his extraordinary address--canals through which sixty-two million tons passed in 1910 toward the east and south. They have made and deepened harbors all the way around the shores till ships two hundred times the size of the _Griffin_ can ride in them. Yet this is not all. The symbols of La Salle's vision revived in the lakes memories of the days when their waters ran through the Mississippi Valley to the gulf--the very course which La Salle's unborn _Griffin_ was to take. When the continent tilted a little to the east and in the tilting poured the water of the upper lakes over the Niagara edge into the St. Lawrence, that same tilting stopped the overflow down into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico at the other end of the lakes. But so slight was the tilting that the water still sweeps over, in places, when the lakes are high, and sometimes even carries light boats across. Of late engineers have, in effect, been undoing with levels and scoops and dredges what nature did in a mighty upheaval. They are practically tipping the bowls back the other way and so making currents to run down the old channel toward the gulf through the valleys of the Des Plaines and the Illinois to the Mississippi. And so that dream which the dying _Griffin_ spoke to the lake, and the lake to the rivers in the time of flood--when intercommunication was possible--is to be realized, except that steam or electricity will take the place of winds, and screws of sails. [Footnote: Herbert Quick, "American Inland Waterways," New York, 1909.] Meanwhile a great battle of the lakes is waging--a battle of levels, it might better be called, between those, on the one side, who wish to maintain the grandeur of Niagara much as it was when Hennepin first pictured it, and with them those who for utilitarian reasons do not wish its thunderous volume diminished, except, perhaps, for their local uses, and those also who fear disaster to their harbors and canals all around the lakes, deepened at great expense, if water is led away toward the Mississippi; and, on the other side, the public health of millions at the western end of the lakes and the commercial hopes of other millions in the Mississippi Valley waiting for the _Griffins_ of the lakes to come with more generous prices for their produce and bring to their doors what the rest of the world has now to send to them by the more expensive railroad. Some day, perhaps, the great upper lake, Superior, will be made a reservoir where enough water will be impounded in wet seasons for a steady and more generous supply during the dry seasons; in which event there will be water enough to keep Niagara in perennial beauty and power, to fill all the present and prospective harbors and canals to their desired depths and float even larger fleets of _Griffins_, and, at the same time, have enough left to make the Mississippi, as the Frenchman who first saw it visualized it, and as President Roosevelt, two centuries later, expressed it, "a loop of the sea." [Footnote: Herbert Quick, "American Inland Waterways," New York, 1909.] But another amicable battle is on--a battle of the eastern levels--between the men of the old French valley to the north (_i.e._, the St. Lawrence) and the men of the old Iroquois valleys to the south, of the Mohawk and the Hudson. In 1830 a canal was built by the latter from above the Falls to the navigable Hudson, and with high ceremony a cask of the water of Lake Erie was emptied into New York harbor as symbol of the wedding of lake and ocean. Then Canada built her Welland Canal around Niagara and made canals along the St. Lawrence and channels in the St. Lawrence past the Lachine Rapids to Montreal, and even made the way from there to the sea deeper that the growing ocean vessels might come to old Hochelaga. Now New York has begun deepening the old and almost useless Erie Canal from seven and nine feet to twelve feet, and to take barges one hundred and fifty feet long and twenty-five feet beam, with a draught of ten feet, and Canada is contemplating still deeper channels that will let the ocean steamers into every port of the Great Lakes. She is even thinking of a canal that will follow the path of Champlain, up the Ottawa and across the old portage to Lake Nipissing and thence by the French River into Lake Huron; and of an alternative course by another of Champlain's paths, from Ontario across to Huron by way of Lake Simcoe and the Trent River, in either route avoiding Niagara altogether, paths that would shorten the water distance by hundreds of miles and bring Europe almost as near to the shores where Le Caron ministered to the Hurons as to New York City. It is a rivalry between the old Champlain paths and the La Salle paths, with just an intimation from those who look far into the future that a new water path still farther north--of which Radisson gave some premonition-- may carry the wheat of the far northwest from Winnipeg beyond Superior and beyond the courses of the Mississippi up to Hudson Bay and across the ocean to European ports, brought a thousand miles nearer. This is but the merest intimation of the prophetic service of the water pioneers. And when the prophecy of these pioneers, as interpreted in terms of steam and locks and dams unknown to them, is fulfilled, it is not beyond thinking that a captain of a seagoing vessel of ten or twenty thousand tons from Havre or Cherbourg may some day be calling in deep voice (as last summer in a room on the twenty-ninth floor of a Chicago "sky-scraper" I heard a local descendant of the _Griffin_ screeching) for the lifting of the bridges that will open the way to the Mississippi, the heart of America. CHAPTER XI WESTERN CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM FRENCH FORTS It is a strange and varied crop that has grown from the leaden plates with French inscriptions, planted by St. Lusson, La Salle, and Céloron by lakes and rivers in that western country. The mythical story of the sowing of Cadmus in the Boeotian field is again rather tame by comparison with a true relation of what has actually occurred within the memory of a few generations in a valley as wild when Céloron traversed the course of La Belle Rivière (the name given by the French to the Ohio, which was known to the Indians as the "River of the Whitecaps") with his little fleet only a century and a half ago as was Boeotia when Cadmus set out from Phoenicia in search of his sister, Europa (that is, Europe), back beyond the memory of history. It was a bourgeoning, most miraculous, in those spots of the west, a new Europa, where soldiers sprang up immediately upon the sowing, like the sproutings of Cadmus' dragon's teeth, to fight one another and to build strongholds that should some day be cities, even as Cadmea, the fortress of the "Spartoi," became the city of Thebes. So, in this sowing, did France become the mother of western cities, of Pittsburgh and Buffalo, of Erie, of St. Louis, of Detroit and New Orleans, of Peoria and St. Joseph, and still other cities whose names have never been heard by the people--of France--even as Phoenicia, in the wanderings of her adventurous son, Cadmus, became the mother of Thebes and the godmother of Greek culture and of European literature. Palamedes and Simonides added some letters to the alphabet brought, according to tradition, by Cadmus to Greece, and Cadmus suffered the doom of those who sow dragon's teeth, as France has suffered, but still is his name kept in the memory of every school child; and so should be remembered those who planted the lead plates and sowed the teeth that sprang into the "Spartoi" of a new civilization. Of the sowing of St. Lusson at the "Soo" and La Salle at New Orleans we have spoken. Long later (1749), the first of whom we have record after La Salle, another French sower went forth to sow along the rivers close to the foot of the Alleghany Mountains--Céloron de Bienville, Chevalier de St. Louis. It is of his sowing that the main cities have sprung, for he planted a plate of "repossession" at the entrance of every important branch of the Ohio and fastened upon trees sheets of "white iron" bearing the arms of France. Chief among them is Pittsburgh, which stands on the carboniferous site of Fort Duquesne like the prow of a vessel headed westward, a place which Céloron is believed to have had in mind when he wrote in his journal, "the finest place on La Belle Rivière"--what was then a wedge of wild black land lodged between two converging streams that drained all the slope of the northern Alleghanies being now the foundation of the world's capital of a sterner metal than lead--scarred with fires and smothered with smoke from many furnaces, two of which alone, it has been estimated by some one, have poured forth enough molten iron in the last thirty years to cover with steel plates an inch thick a road fifty feet wide stretching from the Alleghany edge of the valley not merely to the mouth of the Ohio but on to the other mountain border, where all dreams of a way to the western sea were ended. And this highway of plates across the empire of New France gives but suggestion of the meagerest fraction of the fruitage of the planting of the leaden plates or the grafting of the arms of France upon the trees along the Ohio--forty pounds of iron, it has been estimated by one graphic statistician, for every man, woman, and child on the globe to-day, [Footnote: H. N. Casson. United States produces thirty million tons annually, Pennsylvania eleven and a quarter million. "Mineral Resources," 1912.] and I do not know how much tin. And, in a sense, all from a small box or crate of plates made of lead--six, eight, or more in number, eleven inches long, seven inches wide, and one eighth of an inch thick, and engraved with an inscription--one of which was found not long ago, by some lads, protruding from the bank of one of the tributary rivers! The inscription ran (in translation): "Year 1749, in the reign of Louis XV., King of France, We, Céloron, commanding the detachment sent by the Marquis De la Galissonière, Commander General of New France, to restore tranquillity in certain villages of these cantons, have buried this plate at [here is inserted the name of the tributary at its confluence with the Ohio] this [date] as a token of renewal of possession heretofore taken of the aforesaid river, Ohio, of all streams that fall into it, and all lands on both sides to the sources of the aforesaid streams, as the preceding Kings of France enjoyed it, or ought to have enjoyed it, and which they have upheld by force of arms and by treaties, notably by those of Ryswick, Utrecht, and Aix la Chapelle." And with these plates (to be buried at the confluences of the important rivers along the way) were carried sheets of tin--of white iron--on which the arms of France had been stamped, to be nailed to trees above the places of the plates. "As the Kings of France enjoyed it, or ought to have enjoyed it"--what a blight of regret was in the very seed that in its flower of to-day makes one wish for some delicate beauty or subtle fragrance that is not there, because the Kings of France did not let France enjoy it. One can but pause here again, as I have paused many, many times in the preparation of these chapters, to ask what would have been the result if France had but chosen as Portia's successful suitor in Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" when he was confronted with the caskets of gold, silver, and lead--had but chosen "to owe and hazard all for lead," instead of deciding as did the Prince of Morocco, the other suitor, that "a golden mind stoops not to shows of dross"--if France had hazarded all for the holding and settling of those regions whose worth was symbolized in those unpromising pieces of lead planted in the fertile soil of Louisiana, Michigan, and Ohio along the watercourses, rather than in the caskets of gold and silver sought among the mountains--if Louis XV, throwing dice at Versailles in the valley of the Seine, as Parkman describes him, with his piles of louis d'or before him, and the princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses and courtiers about him, had but followed the advice of Marquis de la Galissonnière, the humpbacked governor-general of Canada, who furnished Céloron with his leaden seeds and appointed the place of the sowing--if Louis XV had but answered his Canadian governor's prayer and sent French peasants where the plates were buried, or had even let those who wanted to flee to that valley, as they would have fled by tens of thousands, preferring the hardships and privations of the pioneer to the galleys, the dungeons, or the gallows--then "Versailles" in that valley of the Ohio would not be merely what it is, a ward or township in a city that bears the name of a British statesman. "Or, if soldiers had been sent!" Parkman, approaching the great valley in imagination with Céloron, from the north, exclaims, "the most momentous and far-reaching question ever brought to issue on this continent was: 'Shall France remain here or shall she not?' If by diplomacy or war she had preserved but the half or less than half of her American possessions, then a barrier would have been set to the spread of the English-speaking races, there would have been no Revolutionary War and, for a long time at least, no independence." [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," p. 5.] (Which but emphasizes what I have said as to the part, the negative part as well as the positive, France conspicuously and unconsciously played in the making of a new nation.) If "the French soldiers left dead on inglorious continental battle-fields could," as Parkman says, "have saved Canada, and perhaps made good her claim to the vast territories of the West," [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," p. 41.] could they after all have done more for the world than those who, in effect, sacrificed their lives on glorious western battle- fields for the United States? A little way back I spoke of the first expedition looking toward that valley from the Atlantic side of the Alleghanies--the expedition of the "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe"--and of its vain threats. In 1748 a company of still wider horizon was formed in Virginia, George Washington's father being a member of it. It was known as the Ohio Land Company and derived its transmontane rights through George II from John Cabot, an Italian under English commission, who may have set foot nearly two centuries before somewhere on the coast of North America below Labrador, and from a very expansive interpretation of a treaty with the Indians at Lancaster, Pa., in 1744, the trans-Alleghany Indians protesting, however, not less firmly than the French, that the lands purchased by the English under that treaty extended no farther toward the sunset than the laurel hills on the western edge of the Alleghanies. News of this Virginia corporate enterprise was willingly carried, it is surmised, by jealous Pennsylvanians and hostile French, till it reached Montreal, and so it was that Céloron was despatched with his little company to bury "Monuments of the Renewal of Possession" by France. It was a significant and rather solemn, but most picturesque, processional that this chevalier of St. Louis led from Montreal through one thousand two hundred leagues of journey by water and land to the mouth of the Miami River and back. There are no hilarious songs in this prelude such as were heard from the crests of the Blue Ridge when Spotswood's horsemen came up from the other side. It has to me the atmosphere and movement of some Greek tragedy, though one writer likens it to mediæval mummery. Perhaps it is only a knowledge of its import and the end that makes it sombre and grave despite the beautiful setting to this prelude which one may read to- day in the French archives. So full of portent and color it is that I wonder no one has woven its incidents, slight as they are, into French literature or into that of America. "I left Lachine on the 15th of June," begins Céloron's journal, [Footnote: Margry, 6:666.] now in the Département de la Marine, in Paris, "with a detachment formed of a captain, eight subaltern officers, six cadets, an armorer, twenty men of the troops, one hundred and eighty Canadians, and nearly thirty savages--equal number of Iroquois and Abenakes." They filled twenty-three canoes in a procession that was halted by shipwreck, by heat, by lack of rain and by too much rain, by difficult portages, and damage to the canoes. Over a part of their first portage from Lake Erie I walked one night years ago through a drenching rain, such as they endured in the seven days in which they were carrying their canoes and baggage up those steep hills through the then dense forest of beech, oak, and elm, to the waters of Lake Chautauqua, where now many thousands gather every summer, from children to white-haired men and women, to study history, language, sciences, cooking, sewing, etc., and to attend conferences daily. But the expedition then was often stopped by savages who ran away to avoid the excessive speechmaking and lecturing of these old-world orators, conferenciers; and the ears and eyes of the auditors who did not run away were opened by strings of wampum, though they were often too little moved by the love of their father Onontio and his concern lest the English should make themselves masters and the Indians their victims. There is in a Paris library a map of this expedition made by the hand of Père Bonnecamps, who signs himself "Jesuitte Mathematiciant." He kept a diary, [Footnote: Translation in "Jesuit Relations," ed. Thwaites, vol. 69. "Account of the voyage on the Beautiful River made in 1749 under the direction of Monsieur de Céloron."] also preserved in Paris, in which there has crept some of the sombreness of that narrow, dark valley (now filled with oil-derricks) surrounded by mountains sometimes so high as to let them see the sun only from nine or ten o'clock in the morning till two or three in the afternoon. And across the mountains one may hear even to- day the despairful, yet appealing, voice of Céloron, speaking for the great Onontio: "My children," he says, "since I have been at war with the English I have learned that that nation has seduced you; and, not content with corrupting your hearts, they have profited by my absence from the country to invade the land which does not belong to them and which is mine.... I will give you the aid you should expect from a good father.... I will furnish you traders in abundance if you wish them. I will send here officers if that please you--to give you good spirit, so that you will only work in good affairs.... Follow my advice. Then the sky will always be beautiful and clear over your villages." [Footnote: Margry, 6: 677.] "My father," said the spokesman for the savages at another council, "we pray you have pity on us; we are young men who cannot reply as the old men could; what you have said to us has opened our eyes [received gifts], given us spirit, we see that you only work with good affairs.... [The great Onontio in Paris is playing all the while in Paris with the louis d'or.] Examine, my father, the situation in which we are. If thou makest the English to retire, who give us necessaries, and especially the smith who mends our guns and hatchets, we would be without help and exposed to die of hunger and of misery in the Belle Rivière. Have pity on us, my father, thou canst not at present give us our necessaries. Leave us at least for this winter, or at least till we go hunting, the smith and some one who can help us. We promise thee that in the spring the English will retire." [Footnote: Margry, 6:683.] And so the expedition passed on from river to river, from tribe to tribe, planting plates and making appeals to the savages, down the Ohio to the Miami, up the Miami, stopping at the village of a chief known as La Demoiselle, thence by portage to the French settlement on the Maumee, and so back to Lake Erie. Then came the fort builders in their wake, and so the "Spartoi," the soldiers, almost literally sprang from the earth of the sowing of the plates. At one place (the place where the Loups prayed for a smith) they found a young Englishman with a few dozen workmen building a stockade, but they sent him back beyond the mountains over which he had come and built upon its site Fort Duquesne--the defense of the mountain gate to the great valley--here with a few hundred men on the edge of a hostile wilderness to make beginning of that mighty struggle which was to end, as we know, on the river by which Cartier and Champlain had made their way into the continent. It is a fact, remarkable to us now, that the first to bring a challenge from behind the mountains to that brave and isolate garrison sitting in Fort Duquesne at the junction of the water paths, was Washington ("Sir Washington," as one chronicler has written it), not Washington the American but Washington the English subject, major in the colonial militia, envoy of an English governor of Virginia, Dinwiddie, who, having acquired a controlling interest in the Ohio Company, became especially active in planning to seat a hundred families on that transmontane estate of a half-million acres and so to win title to it. "So complicated [were] the political interests of [that] time that a shot fired in America [was] the signal for setting all Europe together by the ears," wrote Voltaire, [Footnote: Voltaire, "The French in America" in his "Short Studies in English and American Subjects," p. 249.] and "it was not a cannon-shot" that gave the signal but, as Parkman said, "a volley from the hunting pieces of a few backwoodsmen, commanded by a Virginia youth, George Washington." [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," 1:3.] We must stop for a moment to look at this lithe young English colonist, twenty-one years of age, standing on the nearest edge of the French explorations and claims and the farthest verge of English adventure, on the watershed twenty miles from Lake Erie, and requesting, in the name of Governor Dinwiddie and of the shade of John Cabot, the peaceable departure of those French pioneers and soldiers, who, as the letter which the young colonel bore stated, were "erecting fortresses and making settlements upon the the river [Ohio] so notoriously known to be the property of the Crown of Great Britain." The edge of the Great Lakes' basin is only a little way, at the place where he stood, from the watershed of the Mississippi River. A little farther up the shore, where Celoron made portage, it is only six or eight miles across, and here it is but a little more, and the "height of land" is hardly noticeable. The French built a fort on a promontory in the lake --a promontory almost an island--Presque Isle; and there, where the waters begin to run the other way, that is, toward the gulf, they built still another which they called Le Boeuf, an easier portage than the Chautauqua. From the former fort the city of Erie, a grimy, busy manufacturing city, has grown. The latter has produced only a village, on whose weed-grown outskirts the ruins of a fort still look out upon the meadow where the little stream called "French Creek" starts, first toward France, in its two-thousand-mile journey to the gulf that lies in the other direction. For twenty miles I followed the stream one day to where it became a part of Céloron's river-in imagination calling the French back to its banks again, but finding them slow to come, for that part of the valley seemed not particularly attractive. It is a little farther down the lake that the vineyards fill all the shore from the lake to the watershed. And in that very country I have often wondered at the miracle which raised from one bit of ground the corn and the pumpkin, and from another the vine and filled its fruit with wine. The one-eyed veteran, Legardeur de St. Pierre, the commander of Fort Le Boeuf, asked Washington, in rich diplomatic sarcasm, to descend to the particularization of facts, and the lithe figure disappeared behind the snows of the mountains only to come again across the mountains in the springtime with sterner questioning. There was then no talk of Cabot or La Salle, of Indian purchase or crown property. Jumonville may have come out from Duquesne for peaceable speech, but Washington misunderstood or would not listen. A flash of flint fire, a fresh bit of lead planted in the hill of laurel, a splash of blood on the rock, and the war for the west was begun. What actually happened out on the slope of that hill will never be accurately known; but, though Washington was only twenty-two years old then, "full of military ardor" and "vehement," he could not have been guilty of wilful firing on men of peaceful intent. It doubtless seemed but an insignificant skirmish when Washington attacked Jumonville near Pittsburgh, and it is now remembered by only a line or two in our histories and the little cairn of stones "far up among the mountain fogs near the headwaters of the Youghiogheny River," which marks the grave of Jumonville. Washington, the major of colonial militia in the Alleghany Mountains, the scout of a land company, has been entirely forgotten in Washington, the father of a nation; but Jumonville, the French ensign with no land-scrip, fighting certainly as unselfishly and with as high purpose, is not forgotten in any later achievement. That skirmish ended all for him. But let it be remembered even now that he was a representative of France standing almost alone, at the confluence of all the waters for hundreds of miles on the other slope of the Alleghanies, in defense of what other men of France had won by their hardihood. I heard a great audience at the Academy applaud the brave endurance of French priests and soldiers in Asia. Some day I hope these unrenowned men who sacrificed as much for France in America will be as notably remembered. There is a short street in Pittsburgh that bears Jumonville's name--a short street that runs from the river into a larger street with the name of one of his seven brothers, De Villiers, Coulon de Villiers, who hastened from Montreal, while another brother hastened from the Illinois to avenge his death. But the cairn on the hillside has grown to no high monument. Mr. Hulbert, who has written with filial pen of the valley, says that occasionally a traveller repairs a rough wooden cross made of boards or tree branches and planted among the rocks of the cairn. [Footnote: A. B. Hulbert, "The Ohio River," pp. 44, 45.] But on a recent visit to the grave out in that lonesome ravine, I found that a permanent tablet had been placed there instead of this fragile cross. I must leave to your unrefreshed memories the exploits of Beaujeu and Braddock, of Contrecoeur and Forbes, blow up Fort Duquesne of the past, and come into the city of to-day, for I wish to put against this background this mighty city where it is often difficult to see because of the smoke. The French, as we are well aware, came to their forts by water. Quebec, Frontenac, Niagara, Presque Isle, the Rock St. Louis, St. Joseph, Chartres, and many others stood by river or lake. But the going was often slow. Céloron (whose name is often spelled Céleron but would seem not to deserve that spelling) was fifty-three days in making his water journey from Montreal to the site of Pittsburgh. But a Céloron of to-day may see the light of the Bartholdi statue in New York harbor at ten o'clock by night and yet pass Braddock's field in the morning (before the time that Bonnecamp said the sun came up in the narrow valley of the Belle Rivière), and have breakfast at the Duquesne Club in time for a city day's work. It was about as far from Paris to Marseilles in 1750 as it is to-day from Paris to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is the front door of the valley of La Salle, as we now know the valley, and the most important door; for the tonnage that enters and leaves it by rail and water (177,071,238 tons in 1912 for the Pittsburgh district) exceeds the tonnage of the five other greatest cities of the world [Footnote: R. B. Naylor, address before the Ohio Valley Historical Association (quoted in Hulbert, "Ohio River," pp. 365-6).] and is twice the combined tonnage of both coasts of the United States to and from foreign ports--which is probably due to the fact that so much of its traffic is not in silks and furs but in iron and coal. And the multitudes of human beings that pass through it are comparable in number with the migrant tonnage and inanimate cargoes; for Pittsburgh is "the antithesis of a mediaeval town"; "it is all motion;" "it is a flow, not a tank." The mountains, once impenetrable barriers that had to be gone about, have been levelled, and in the levelling the watersheds, as we have seen, have been shifted. One who sees that throng pass to-day back and forth, to and from the valley and the ocean, must know that there are no Alleghanies in our continental topography, as Washington saw and as Webster stated there could not be in our politics. If one makes the journey from the ocean in the night, one may hear, if one wakes, the puffing of two engines, as in the Jura Mountains, but there will be nothing else to tell him that the shaggy Alleghany Mountains have not been cast into the midst of the sea-- nothing except the groaning of the wheels. The Indians near Pittsburgh, I have said, prayed the messenger of Onontio that they might keep their English smith--and the prayer seems to have been abundantly answered, for Pittsburgh appears at first to be one vast smithy, so enveloped is it in the smoke of its own toil, so reddened are its great sky walls by its flaming forges, so filled is the air with the dust from the bellows, and so clangorous is the sound of its hammers. It is a city of Vulcans--a city whose industry makes academic discussions seem as the play of girls in a field of flowers. It is not primarily a market-place, this point of land, one of the places where the French and English traders used to barter guns, whiskey, and trinkets for furs. It is a making place--a pit between the hills, where the fires of creation are still burning. Céloron and his sombre voyage had been in my mind all day, as I sat in a beautiful library of that city among books of the past; but in the evening, as Dante accompanied by Virgil, I descended circle by circle to the floor of the valley--with this difference, that it was not to a place of torment but to the halls of the swarth gods of creation, those great, dim, shadowy sheds that stretch along the river's edge. Into these, men of France, has your Fort Duquesne grown--mile on mile of flame-belching buildings, with a garrison as great as the population of all New France in the day of Duquesne. The new-world epic will find some of its color and incident there--an epic in which we have already heard the men of France nailing the sheets of "white iron" against the trees of the valley of La Belle Rivière. And as I saw the white-hot sheets of iron issuing from those crunching rollers, driven by the power of seven thousand horses, I felt that the youth with the stamping iron should have put a fleur-de-lis upon each with all his other cabalistic markings, for who of us can know that any metal would ever have flowed white from the furnaces in that valley if the white-metal signs of Louis XV had not first been carried into it? In each of these halls there pass in orderly succession cars with varied cargoes; red ore from the faraway hills beyond Superior, limestone fragments from some near-by hill, and scrap of earlier burning. These, one by one, are seized by a great arm of iron, thrust out from a huge moving structure that looks like a battering-ram and is operated by a young man about whom the lightnings play as he moves; and, one by one, they are cast into the furnaces that are heated to a temperature of a thousand degrees or more. There the red earth is freed of its "devils," as the great ironmaster has named the sulphur and phosphorus--freed of its devils as the red child was freed of his sins by the touch of holy water from the fingers of Allouez out in those very forests from which the red ore was dug--and comes forth purified, to be cast into flaming ingots, to be again heated and then crushed and moulded and sawed and pierced for the better service of man. In the course of a few minutes one sees a few iron carloads of ore that was a month before lying in the earth beyond Superior transformed into a girder for a bridge, a steel rail, a bit of armor-plate, a beam for a sky- scraper--and all in utter human silence, with the calm pushing and pulling of a few levers, the accurate shovelling by a few hands, the deliberate testing by a few pairs of experienced eyes. Here is the new Fort Duquesne that is holding the place of the confluence of the rivers and trails just beyond the Alleghanies, and this is the ammunition with which that begrimed but strong-faced garrison defends the valley to-day, supports the city on the environing hills and the convoluted plateau back of the point, spans streams the world around, builds the skeletons of new cities and protects the coasts of their country. There are many others in that garrison, but these makers of steel are the core of that city, in which "the modern world," to use the words of one of our first economists, "achieves its grandest triumph and faces its gravest problem" [Footnote: John R. Commons, in _Survey_, March 6, 1909, 1:1051.] --the "mighty storm mountain of capital and labor." I quote from this same economist a comprehensive paragraph descriptive of its riches: "Through hills which line these [confluent] rivers run enormous veins of bituminous coal. Located near the surface, the coal is easily mined, and elevated above the rivers, much of it comes down to Pittsburgh by gravity. There are twenty-nine billion tons of it, good for steam, gas or coke. Then there are vast stores of oil [seven million five hundred thousand gallons annually] natural gas [of which two hundred and fifty million feet are consumed daily], sand, shale, clay and stone, with which to give Pittsburgh and the tributary country the lead of the world in iron and steel, glass, electrical machinery, street-cars, tin plate, air-brakes and firebrick." [Footnote: J. R. Commons, "Wage Earners of Pittsburg," in _Survey_, March 6, 1909, 21:1051-64.] And to all this natural bounty the national government has added that of the tariff and of millions spent in river improvements, while Europe has contributed raw labor already fed to the strength of oxen and often already developed to highest skill. It was a young chemist trained in Europe who conducted me through the mills, explaining all the processes in a perfect idiomatic speech, though of broken accent. The white-hot steel ingot swinging beneath a smoky sky is a sign of the contribution of France through Pittsburgh to civilization, not merely the material but the human contribution. The ingot, a great block of white-hot steel, is the sign of her labor, which has assembled the scattered elements of the valley and, in the fierce heat of natural and unfed fires, has compounded them into a new metal that is something more than iron, more valuable than gold. But it is only another sign, too, of forces that have assembled from all parts of the earth, men represented in the varied cargoes that are poured by a seemingly omnipotent hand into those furnaces--red-blooded men, and with them slag that has gone through the fires of older civilizations. Here, let me say again, is being made a new metal; this no one can doubt. It is not merely a melting and a restamping of old coin with a new superscription, a new sovereignty--a composite face instead of a personal likeness--it is the making, as I have said in other illustrations and metaphors, of a new race. If I had an instinct of human character, such as the intuitive sense of the fibre and tension of steel possessed by the man who watches the boiling in the furnaces and who, from time to time, puts aside his smoked glasses and looks at the texture of a typical bit of his metal, or who stands at the emptying of the furnace into the ladle and directs the addition of carbon or magnesium to bring his output to the right constituency, I could tell you what strains and stresses this new people would stand. As it is, I can only make a surmise, perhaps not more valuable than yours. The makers of steel were concerned only to get the primacy in steel. Human character was of concern only as it made better steel and more of it. They took the red ore where they could get it richest in iron and cheapest, and they took red-blooded labor where they could get it strongest--sinewed, clearest-eyed, and cheapest. "There are no able-bodied men between the ages of sixteen and fifty years left in my native town," said a Servian workman in the mills. "They have all come to America. The agricultural districts and villages of the mid-eastern valleys of Europe are sending their strongest men and youths, nourished of good diet and in pure air, stolid and care-free, into that dim canyon-Servians, Croatians, Ruthenians, Lithuanians, Slovaks, with Italians, Poles, and Russian Jews." [Footnote: P. Roberts, "The New Pittsburg," in _Charities and the Commons_, January 2, 1909, 21:533. See also J. A. Fitch, "The Steel Workers," New York, 1910.] It is from Slavs and mixed people of the old European midland, says one, "where the successive waves of broad-headed and fair-haired peoples gathered force and swept westward to become Celt and Saxon, and Swiss and Scandinavian and Teuton," the old European midland with its "racial and religious loves and hates seared deep, that the new immigration is coming to Pittsburgh to work out civilization under tense conditions"--not with that purpose, to be sure, but with that certain result. The conscious purposes have been expressed in the tangible ingots, the wages they have offered them in their hot hands, and the profits. The civilization has been incidental. There is developing, however, an effort in the midst of this "dynamic individualism" to make both the new and the old immigration work out "civilization." This individualism was prodigal, profligate, at first. But it has learned thrift; it by and by came to burn its gas over and over; it made the purifying substances go on in a continued round of service; it became more mindful of human muscles and bones and eyes and ears; it took the latest advice of experts, but for steel's sake, not civilization's. Mr. Carnegie, when a manufacturer there, found 90 per cent of pure iron in the refuse of his competitor, it is said. This he bought under long contract and worked over in his own mills. His neighbor's waste became a part of his fortune. And the result of that discernment and thrift is now furnishing an analogue for the conscious utilization of other waste--waste of native capacity of the steel-worker for happiness and usefulness. Mr. Carnegie has indeed led the way in the establishment of libraries, art galleries, museums, institutes of training and research out of what were but waste if spent as some millionaires spend their profits. All these things upon the hills are by-products of the steel-mills down in the ravine. In every luminous ingot swung in the mills that were his, there is something toward the pension of a university professor out in Oregon, something for an artist in New York or Paris, something for an astronomer on the top of Mount Wilson, something for the teacher in the school upon the hill, something for every library established by his gift. What is now making itself felt, however, is a desire to get the wage element in the ingot as thriftily, as efficiently, as nobly converted and used to the last ounce as is the profit element. There has been in the past a masterful individualism at work. Now there is a masterful aggressive humanism beginning to make itself felt, comparable in its spirit with the masterful venturing of the French explorers or the masterful faith of the French missionaries, that promises to constrain the city "to the saving and enhancing of individual and collective human power," even as the French missionaries tried to constrain the great fur- trading prospects of France to the saving of human souls. The attempt to realize an urban paradise is becoming a conscious purpose as this extract made from a report made to a city-plan committee of a Pittsburgh commission will indicate: "A third undeveloped asset in the Pittsburgh waterfront is its value for recreation and as an element of civic comeliness and self-respect. One of the deplorable consequences of the short-sighted and wasteful commercialism of the later nineteenth century lay in its disregard of what might have been the æsthetic byproducts of economic improvement; in the false impression spread abroad that economical and useful things were normally ugly; and in the vicious idea which followed, that beauty and the higher pleasures of civilized life were to be sought only in things otherwise useless. Thus the pursuit of beauty was confounded with extravagance. "Among the most significant illustrations of the fallacy of such ideas are the comeliness and the incidental recreation value which attach to many of the commercial water fronts of European river ports, and it is along such lines that Pittsburgh still has opportunity for redeeming the sordid aspect of its business centre. "Wherever in the world, as an incident of the highways and wharves along its river banks, a city has provided opportunity for the people to walk and sit under pleasant conditions, where they can watch the water and the life upon it, where they can enjoy the breadth of outlook and the sight of the open sky and the opposite bank and the reflections in the stream, the result has added to the comeliness of the city itself, the health and happiness of the people, and their loyalty and local pride. This has been true in the case of a bare paved promenade, running along like an elevated railroad over the sheds and tracks and derricks of a busy ocean port, as at Antwerp, in the case of a tree-shaded sidewalk along a commercial street with the river quays below it, as at Paris and Lyons and hundreds of lesser cities; and in the case of a broad embankment garden won from the mud banks by dredging and filling, as at London." I had great difficulty in finding a bookstore in Pittsburgh. Some day that idealistic condition which makes the Seine so dear to thousands who know its every mood, and so dear both to the wise and the ignorant, may obtain on La Belle Rivière. This is but one item of a planning for the future of this city which thinks not merely of its beautifying and of the pleasure of its people in their leisure, but of all conditions which affect the health, convenience, education, and general welfare of the whole district--that region once called the "black country," of which Pittsburgh was the "dingy capital"-- one of the regions where the French were pioneers. I have spoken of this as the "taking thought" of a democratic community. More accurately, a body of one hundred volunteer citizens, disposing themselves in fourteen different committees (including those on rapid transit, industrial accidents, city housing, and public hygiene), have undertaken all this labor of constructive planning at their own expense (based upon a series of investigations made by endowed researchers), but with the hope of creating a public opinion favorable to their plans, which look to the establishment by the democratic community of "such living and working conditions as may set a standard for other American industrial centres." [Footnote: Olmsted, F. L., "Pittsburgh, Main Thoroughfares and the Down-Town District." Pittsburgh Civic Commission, 1910. _Survey_, February 4, 1911, 25:740-4.] No such thorough and systematic study of existing city conditions has been made anywhere else in America. It is quite as scientific as the scholarly studies of buried cities, only immensely more complex and difficult. Knowing itself and possessed of an unconquerable spirit, it seems likely now that Pittsburgh will win back the beautiful site which Céloron remarked when he passed down La Belle Rivière--a site which even "Florence might covet"--and will make it a city that will deserve to keep always the other part of the name of the sower of the leaden plates--Bienville. A pillar of cloud stands over the city by day and a pillar of fire by night. They have together shown the way out of the wilderness. It now remains to be seen whether the highest things of men's longing will have realization, in giving that "dynamic individualism" a social ideal with distinct, practicable working plans. Pittsburgh stands on the edge of the valley of the new democracy. It has put its plates along every path. There is hardly a village of any size from the Alleghanies to the Rockies that it has not laid some claim to by its strips of steel. There is hardly a stream of any size that it has not claimed by a bridge. It has, indeed, the spirit of Céloron, in other body, still planting monuments of France's renewal of possession, wherever the steel rails and girders and plates from the Pittsburgh mills have been carried. And Pittsburgh is but one of the renewed cities which encompass the eastern half of the valley where once stretched the chain of French forts futile in defense but powerful in prophecy. When we see the American city, even through the eyes of Walt Whitman, that poet of democracy, it seems a desperate hope that is left her: "Are there, indeed, men here in the city," he asks, "worthy the name? Are there athletes? Are there perfect women to match the generous material luxuriance? Is there a pervading atmosphere of beautiful manners? Are there crops of fine youths and majestic old persons? Are there arts worthy freedom and a rich people? Is there a great moral and religious civilization--the only justification of a great material one? Confess that to severe eyes, using the moral microscope upon humanity, a sort of dry and flat Sahara appears, these cities crowded with petty grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics. Confess that everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, barroom, official chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity--everywhere the youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe--everywhere an abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon'd, muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood decreasing or deceas'd, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of manners, or rather lack of manners (considering the advantages enjoy'd) probably the meanest to be seen in the world." [Footnote: "Democratic Vistas," in his "Complete Works," pp. 205, 206.] But it is no such desperate hope that the cities we have seen spring from French fort and portage keep in their hearts. It is not even a confession that one would have to make to-day in the American cities which Whitman had in mind in his gloomy, foreboding vision. I have seen on the streets of one of the Whitman cities [Footnote: New York City.] those same grotesques, malformations, and meaningless antics, that flippancy and vulgarity and cunning, that foppishness and premature ripeness, that painted, bad-complexioned, bad-mannered, shallow-beautied humanity; but touching, as I have had opportunity to touch, three of the great agencies of its aspirations--its philanthropies, its literature, and its schools--I know that no body of five million people, whether huddled in tenements or scattered over plain and mountain and along rivers and seas, has with more serious or sacrificing purpose aspired, though constantly disturbed in its prayers, its operations, by people of every tongue, nearly a million strong, who are emptied at her port every year from Europe and Asia, besides the hundreds of thousands who come up from the country. There are public schools, for example, in certain parts of that city where there is not a child of American parentage. There is one, in particular, which I visit frequently and which I call the "oasis" in the desert of humanity (Walt Whitman's Sahara), where two or three thousand children are gathered, literally from the plains of Russia, the valleys of Italy, and other parts of Europe--for these were their ancestral homes, though they come immediately from the swarming streets and dimly lighted, ill-smelling tenements of New York--and there, aspiring under the hopeful teaching of the city, I have heard them, boys and girls together, sing, with all the joy and cleanliness of shepherd children, of a leading in green pastures and by still waters. But to come back to the cities in the valley of Nouvelle France, there is no note of else than hope there. Mistakes, disappointments, crudities, infidelities? Yes, but the mistakes, disappointments, crudities, failures of youth--youth of strong passions and love of play but of a masterful will that a generous nature has so much encouraged and aided as to obscure its limitations. A few rods from the Carnegie Library and Museum of Art and Concert Hall in Pittsburgh is a baseball field, where a million people or more come in the course of the season to see trained men play an out-of-door game (and if it chanced that the President of the United States were visiting the city, he might be seen there accompanied by his secretary of state or the president of a great university). In Chicago I found the whole city, young and old, united in its interest in the results of the "game" of the day before or the prospects of the next. When games are played for the great championship pennant the city virtually takes a holiday. But that is the spirit of youth in those overgrown, awkward cities that are only now beginning to be self-conscious and seriously purposeful in doing more than the things conventionally and for the most part selfishly done by cities generally. In the conjugation of their busy, noisy life they do not often use the past tense, never the past-perfect, and they have had for the most part little concern as to the future, except the rise in real-estate values and the retaining of markets. When in Pittsburgh I asked a prominent man, of French ancestry, why the people did not keep from the destroying hand of private enterprise the site of old Fort Duquesne (the fecund plot from which the great city had grown), and he said it was all they could do to keep the little blockhouse that remained of Fort Pitt, filling a space a few yards square. What claim has the past as against the needs of industry in the present? That was the attitude of that grimy individualism born in "barefoot square" or in "slab alley," in the land of smoke and flame and "rusty rivers." And the future? Well, the voice of the French priest and of those ministers of his own and other faiths that have followed in his footsteps is still heard there crying of the world to come. Several years ago on my way into that valley, on one of those fast trains that tie the east and west together, we came shrieking, thundering down the mountain slopes in the dusk of the day, past Jumonville's grave, past Braddock's field, past miles on miles of glowing coke-ovens, past acres upon acres of factories with their thousands of lighted windows, past flaming towers and chimneys into the midst of the modern babel, the tops of whose buildings were hidden in smoke, when suddenly, above the noise and clangor of whistles and wheels, I heard the rich, deep voice of a cathedral bell telling that the priest was still at the side of the explorer and trader and the iron coureur de bois. It is not, however, of the celestial but of the terrestrial future that I am permitted to speak. For, as I intimated, these young cities of the west, only a half-century old as cities--children by the side of Paris, London, Rome--are beginning seriously to take thought of the morrow, not simply of multiplying their numbers nor of sending their multitudes back to the country but of giving them prospect and promise of a better, more comfortable, more wholesome life, capable of a higher individual and collective development within the city. For while cities have been preached against since the time when Jonah cried against Nineveh, and while cities have perished and have been buried, even as Nineveh, the generic city, the assembling of gregarious men, continues and increases. The census returns for 1910 for the American cities show, so far as I noticed, scarcely a single loss of population in the last ten years [Footnote: Cities with losses of population in the decade are Galveston, Texas: 37,389 in 1900, 36,981 in 1910; Chelsea, Mass.: 34,072 in 1900, 32,452 in 1910; St. Joseph, Mo.: 102,979 in 1900, 77,403 in 1910.] and a large gain for nearly every city of the middle west. It is prophesied that before long one-half of the people of the United States will be living in cities, and there is the more distant prospect that the urban population will be two-thirds of the whole. [Footnote: In 1910 46.3 per cent resided in communities classed by the census as urban, and 55.1 per cent in cities and incorporated or unincorporated villages.] It is hopeless to try to turn that tide away from the cities except to suburban fields. So the great problem of that valley is to improve the cities, since from them are to be the issues of the new life, since they are, indeed, the hope of democracy. I have thought it of significance that the envisioned place of ultimate celestial felicity-seen though it was by a man in the solitude of a cave in an island of the Mediterranean (the place which the civilized world has dimly hanging over it, whenever it looks away from its tasks and into the beyond)--is not a lotus-land, not an oasis of spring and palm, not a stretch of forest and mountain, not even a quiet place by a sea of jasper, but a place of many tenements--a city, a perfect city to be sure, let down ultimately from the skies, with walls of precious stones--and no zone for Kipling's "Tomlinsons" about it--with gates whose octroi officials keep out whatever makes an abomination or a lie, but which are open to the east and west, the north and south, that the kings of earth may bring their glory and honor into it--a city whose streets are clean and smooth--a city that has flowing through it a river of pure water, on whose banks grow trees whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. The obvious thing to do, since, good or bad, the country is emptying its population into the cities, since we cannot go back through the gates of Eden into the garden paradise of Genesis, is to go toward the city of the Apocalypses, not, to be sure, as the Oriental mind of John saw it, paved and walled with precious stones and gold, but made as beautiful as the Occidental taste and architectural skill will permit, as comfortable as Occidental standards demand, and as sanitary as the mortal desire for immortality can with finite wisdom make it. I was speaking some time ago of a painting I once saw, in illustration of the death of Eve, which represented her as on a journey in her haggard old age, accompanied by Cain (whose son built the first city in a wilderness), and as pausing in the journey on a height of ground, pointing toward a little cluster of trees in the distance, and saying to her son: "There was Paradise." But paradise is not to be realized by the masses of men in the return of man to the forests. The healing trees and the river are to be carried to the city. CHAPTER XII WESTERN TOWNS AND CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM FRENCH PORTAGE PATHS The old French portage paths were also fruitful of cities on the edge of the Mississippi Valley, though the growth of these short paths was not-- with one notable exception--as luxuriant as that from the earth enriched of human blood and bones about the old French forts. These portages, or carrying paths, which differ from the trails of the wood runners in that they are but short interruptions of the water paths and were not designed or laid out, as a rule, by the wild engineers of the forests and prairies but by human feet, lie across the great highway along which, before the days of canals, one might have walked dry-shod from the Atlantic to the Pacific--between the basins of the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, the Pacific and the Arctic --a highway which has, however, been trodden by no one probably through its entire length, for in places it runs over inaccessible peaks of mountains and winds around the narrowest of ledges. But the paths across it--those connecting the streams that flow in opposite directions from the continental watersheds--are like isthmian paths between great oceans-- great dry oceans with watercourses through them. There were, to be sure, still other portage paths than those across watersheds, and the most common were those that led around waterfalls or impassable rapids, such as Champlain and the Jesuits followed on their journeys up the Ottawa to the Nipissing. It was of such portages that Father Brébeuf wrote--portage paths passing almost continually by torrents, by precipices, and by places that were horrible in every way. In less than five days they made more than thirty-five portages, some of which were three leagues long. This means that on these occasions the traveller had to carry on his shoulders his canoe and all his baggage, with so little food that he was continually hungry and almost without strength and vigor. [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 8:75-77.] Another priest tells of a portage occupying an entire day, during which he climbed mountains and pierced forests and carried, the while, his chapel and his little store of provisions. Of whatever variety, however, these portage paths were frequently burying- grounds. Sometimes altars were erected beside them. They were often places of encampments, of assemblies, and more often of ambuscades. So it came about, too, that they were made the places of minor forts or gave occasion for forts farther on the way. In those precivilized Panama days, the neutrality of the isthmian paths could not be assured, and so they were fortified. Céloron tells of the mending of boats at the end of his Chautauqua portages, and that statement, with other like incidents, has led one authority to picture the birches--those beautiful white and golden trees of the sombre northern woods that gave their cloaks to the travellers who asked and shivered till they grew others--stripped of their bark where those paths came down to the streams. He has even imagined primitive carpenter shops and ovens and huts on these paths where the voyageurs must stop for repairs, food, and rest--the precursors of garage, road-house, and hotel. But on maps in the Bibliothèque Nationale names of portage paths have been found which assure us that these difficult ways were not without charm to those early travellers, as they have been to many a wanderer since; for there was Portage des Roses, where the wild rose brightened the way; and Portage de la Musique, where the water sang constantly its song in the solitude. Then there were Portage de la Roche Fendue, Portage des Chênes, Portage des Perches, Portage Talon, and Portage des Récollets, named in memory of experiences of men whom the voyageurs wished to recall or to honor, just as the French give to their streets such names as "Rue des Fleurs," "Boulevard des Capucines." [Footnote: A. B. Hulbert, "Historic Highways of America," 7:49.] The portage paths that became in time most fruitful were generally short, well-cleared, and deep-furrowed by feet. On three of the most important and historic of these paths from the basin of the Great Lakes to that of the Mississippi I have walked with the memories of these precursors; in one place it was suggested that I should ride in a carriage, but I refused, feeling that these men must be worshipped on foot. The first of these portages is that path of which I have already spoken several times (and which I never tire of letting my imagination travel again), the one over which Nicolet must have passed from the Fox River into the Wisconsin River, if he got so far on his way to Muscovy--the path to which Father Dablon said the way was as through a paradise, but was as hard as the way to heaven [Footnote: "If the country ... somewhat resembles an earthly paradise in beauty, the way leading to it may be said to bear some likeness to the one depicted by our Lord as leading to Heaven."--"Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 55:191.]--the path which the coureurs de bois Radisson and Groseilliers doubtless followed; the path which La Salle may have found in those two years of mysterious absence in the valley; the path Marquette and Joliet and hundreds after them certainly took on their way from Montreal to the Mississippi or from the Mississippi back to Montreal. You would not know this narrow strip--not a mile wide--to be a watershed dividing the continent, the north from the south; you would not know it for the threshold to the Mississippi Valley. The plain which the path crosses seems to the eye as level as a table. Undoubtedly before the tipping of the bed of the lakes the water flowed over this path. Indeed, La Salle in one of his letters refers to the portaging here of canoes past an "oak grove and across a flooded meadow." The tree of which he speaks, with two canoes clumsily drawn upon it by the savages, to mark the beginning of the portage at the Wisconsin, has gone, but a monument of red granite now stands there with the names of Marquette and Joliet upon it. At the other end of the now macadamized "path" there is a little red bridge that leads across the Fox to where a portage fort grew later into an important trading-post; but now there is no trace of those monuments of war and trade. There is a farmhouse on their site whose tenants are in fear only of drought and early frosts. A canal crosses this little isthmus and once it interlocked the east and west, the arctic plains with the subtropic cane fields; but it has given over its work to the railroads, having served, however, I have no doubt, to water the roots of the beautiful town that bears the generic name of all those places where burdens were borne between waters. "Wauona," the Indians called it, more euphoniously, but with the same significance as "Portage"--in the State that has taken the name of the river that carried the burdens on to the Mississippi--Wisconsin. This town has lately crept modestly into our western literature as "Friendship Village." [Footnote: Zona Gale, "Friendship Village." Macmillan, New York, 1908.] Except that it has a more comely setting than most towns of the plains--even of those northern plains with their restful undulations--and has a brighter, cleaner aspect --since a light-colored brick is used instead of the red so much in favor where wood is forbidden by the fire laws--it is a typical western town-- the next size larger than "Aramoni"; and so I must stop here for a moment where Marquette, son of Rose de la Salle of Rheims, and Joliet, the wagon maker of Quebec, came up out of the twisting little stream that is still one of the fountains of the Atlantic. For none the less is this village, standing beside this fountain (again more euphoniously called the Kaka-ling or Kaukauna), itself touching the Atlantic shores and even mingling with currents that reach the European coasts. There was born in this village the historian [Footnote: Frederick Jackson Turner.] who has written so well of the rise of that western country that he has been called to the professorship of American history at Harvard University, a literal son of the portage, who has rediscovered the west to the world. And recently all the valley, and other valleys, too, have been reading the stories of this place of portage (called, as I have said, "Friendship Village"), written by a young woman whose windows look out from her home upon the Wisconsin River not many paces from Marquette's place of embarkation--a true daughter of the portage. The French, who have given the new continent this portage path out of Europe into the very heart of America, should read with some gratification of the more intimate life that dwells there back of and in the midst of the bustling, tireless, noisy industry of the valley. "The long Caledonian hills" [the same which La Salle describes], "the four rhythmic spans of the bridge" [a bridge of iron, not of vines and flowers such as Chateaubriand describes], "the nearer river, the island where the first birds build--these teach our windows the quiet and the opportunity of the home town, its kindly brooding companionship, its doors to an efficiency as intimate as that of fairy fingers." [Footnote: "Friendship Village," p. vii, author's note.] And this is but one of thousands of "home towns" in that great basin, towns with Daphne streets and Queen Anne houses, and gloomy court-houses and austere churches and miniature libraries, towns that taper off into suburban shanties, towns that have in these new bottles, of varied and pretentious shapes, the best wine of that western world. The author of "Friendship Village" has vision of the more beautiful towns into which these towns will some day grow, as yours have grown more beautiful with age. "All the way," she writes, seeing the sunset from that same river of the portage as Marquette saw it, "I had been watching against the gold the jogging homeward of empty carts.... Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky. I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital.... Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising values and fresco our village libraries with them." [Footnote: Zona Gale, "Friendship Village Love Stories," p. 47.] That appreciation and expression of the beautiful is something that the French explorers in that other world--the valley reached of the pioneers of the seeing eyes and the understanding hearts--have carried and will continue to carry over those same portages, to give that virile life of the west some of those higher satisfactions of which this daughter of the portage is the prophetess. Another portage path of importance is that which Marquette may also have trodden, or may even have been carried over by his faithful attendants, Pierre Porteret and Jacques, on his death journey from the land of the Illinois to the mission of Michilimackinac, which he did not reach alive-- a journey, the latter part of which was like that of King Arthur borne in a barge by his faithful knight, Sir Bedivere, to his last resting-place, the Vale of Avalon. This portage, varying in length with the season from three to five miles, was the St. Joseph-Kankakee Portage. La Salle, Tonty, and Hennepin passed over it in 1679 on a less spiritual errand to the same land whose inhabitants Marquette had tried to instruct in the mystery of the faith. And it was well worn by adventurous and pious feet in the century that followed. What traffic in temporal and spiritual things was here carried over, is intimated by relics of that century found in the fields not far away, where for many years a French mission house stood with enough of a military garrison to invite for it the name "Fort St. Joseph." In the room of the Northern Indiana Historical Society at this portage there are to be seen some of these relics, sifted from the dirt and sand: crucifixes, knives, awls, beads--which I am told are clearly the loot of ancient Roman cities, traded to the Indians for hides--iron rings, nails, and hinges- these with flint arrow-heads and axes, relics of the first munitions of the stone and iron ages out on the edges of civilization. This portage path between the rivers is now obliterated by railroads, paved streets, furrows, graves, factories, and dwellings; but down by the St. Joseph River there stands a withered cedar, perhaps several hundred years old, which bears scars that are believed to be the blaze marks of the broad-bladed axes of the French explorers--made to indicate the place where the portage out of the river began, the place which La Salle missed when lost in the forest but afterward found, where Father Gabriel made several crosses, as Hennepin records, on the trees--perhaps these very marks-and where La Salle left letters for the guidance over the prairie of those "who were to come in the vessel"--thinking of the captain of the Griffin who was ordered to follow him to the Illinois on his return. It is only a little more than a league from this landing at the bend of the river (which has given the name "South Bend" to the town) across the "large prairie" to the wet meadows in whose ooze the tortuous Kankakee River became navigable, in La Salle's day, a hundred paces from its source, and increased so rapidly in volume that, as he says in a letter, "in a short time it becomes as broad and deep as the Marne"--the Marne which he knew in his boyhood and for which any but his iron heart must have longed. Charlevoix walked across those unchanged fields of St. Joseph a half century (1674-1720) after La Salle, and Parkman made the same journey nearly a century after Charlevoix, finding there what he called "a dirty little town." To-day a clean, industrious, eager city of over fifty-three thousand, with a world horizon, as well as a provincial pride, throws its shadow in the early morning across the path. Through its outskirts I tried years ago to trace this portage path and there with my companion (who was always the "Tonty" of my voyages on those western streams), put my boat in the river and paddled and poled the seventy-five miles down the St. Joseph River to the lake, where, as I wanted to believe, Marquette had made his last journey. Hearing, some time after, of the blaze marks on the cedar- tree, I went again to the portage, and from this old red cedar-tree again traced the probable course of the French to the fields of corn, or maize, yellow in the autumn sun that hid the fountains of the Kankakee. This time, having but little leisure, I rode in an automobile from one end to the other through and along the path, looking occasionally toward the sky for air-ships that were due to alight there on their way from Chicago to New York. In La Salle's packs, carried over that portage, were blacksmith's tools-- forge, bellows, anvil, iron for nails--and carpenter's and joiner's tools. One might easily believe that they were left there--such have been the products of that portage strip, two or three miles wide. First, there has grown there the largest wagon factory in the world. The path of the pack and the burden has here produced as its peculiar contribution to civilization that which is to carry burdens, instead of the backs of men, the world round. Second, here stands the world's largest plough factory--a place from which ploughs are sent to every arable valley that civilization has conquered and made to feel its hunger. Third, here spreading its acres, or arpents, of buildings across the high ground between the two rivers, is the largest factory in the world for the making of certain parts of the sewing-machine; in every community of any size in the world it has an agency. And here, last of all, besides more than a hundred minor industries, is what is, to my great surprise, said to be the largest toy factory in the world. The gift of wagons for the bearing and easing of men's burdens; the gift of the steel plough that has lifted man from the primitive subsistence of the hoe; the gift of the shuttle which has released woman from the tyranny of the needle; the gift of toys to the children of all races; has not this portage prairie, this meadow of St. Joseph, had some element mixed with its loam and clay from the spirit of those Gallic precursors of American energy, something that has given this industry a wider venture, if not peculiar expression? At any rate, its gifts to its time have been far beyond common, of the tangible at least; and as to the intangible, the day that I last spent on this portage an art league was being formed to foster an interest in art and bring the best examples available to what were, but a little time ago, dreary meadows half covered with snow and strewn with skulls and bones of the buffalo. The most modern schools are being developed and maintained by the public, and the University of Notre Dame and the College of St. Mary look across the river to this portage field and city. One might have passed this portage so difficult to discern, as La Salle did, and yet have found another way to the lower Mississippi, with a short portage from this same stream to the Wabash River. A still shorter way than any of these, and doubtless known to La Salle from his first years of wanderings in the eastern end of the Mississippi Valley, led from the west end of Lake Erie up the Maumee and then by portage to the Wabash and the Ohio. This was the path that Celoron followed homeward on his memorable plate-planting journey. But the portage was so long that he burned his shattered canoes near the source of the Miami and was furnished with boats at the French fort near the headwaters of the Maumee. The hostility of the Iroquois, as we have seen, made perilous to the French in the earlier days this path, so important among Indian highways as often to be called the "Indian Appian Way." Excepting the portage paths farther up the valley, notably that of St. Esprit, and important chiefly as fur-trading paths, there remains but one other historic portage path across the ridge of stone and swamp and prairie from which are pendent, on the one side, all the silver streams of the Mississippi Valley and, on the other side, all the Great Lakes and all the rivers that flow into them. This remaining path is the tenuous trail through the fields of wild onions that led from the river or creek called Chicago (the Garlic River--Rivière de l'Ail) into a stream that still bears a French name but of a pronunciation which a Parisian would not accept--the Des Plaines. This path, too, traversed a marsh and flat prairie so level that in freshet the water ran both ways and was once in the bed of a river that ran from the lake to the gulf. But it has been hallowed beyond all others of these trails, for it was beside this portage that Marquette suffered through a winter, detained there by a serious sickness when on his way to minister to the Illinois Indians a hundred miles below. His hut was the first European habitation upon its site--the site of the future city of Chicago. In a book-shop not a league from where that hut stood I found a volume valued at its weight in gold [Footnote: Thevenot, "Recueil de Voyages," with 2 folding maps and 14 plates, complete. Crown 8vo, white pigskin. Paris 1682. Contains Marquette's and Joliet's Discoveries in North America, etc. For an account of the various editions, see "Jesuit Relations," 59:294-9.] giving the account of the journey in which Marquette had passed up this portage on the way to Green Bay after the discovery of the upper Mississippi with Joliet. It tells in its closing paragraphs of the rich prairies just beyond this portage, but it recites with greater satisfaction the baptizing of a dying child brought to the side of his canoe as he was setting out for the mission house. "Had all this voyage," he said, "caused but the salvation of a single soul I should deem all my fatigue well repaid, and this I have reason to think. For, when I was returning, I passed by the Indians of Peoria, where I was three days announcing the faith, in all their cabins, after which, as we were embarking, they brought me on the water's edge a dying child which I baptized a little before it expired, by an admirable providence, for the salvation of an innocent soul." [Footnote: Shea, "Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley," 2d ed., p. 55.] That was in 1673. It was more than a year before he again entered the Chicago River, wishing to keep his promise to minister to the Illinois savages and eager "to do and suffer everything for so glorious an undertaking." In the "Jesuit Relations" [Footnote: 59:165-183.] the story of those winter days at the Chicago portage has been kept for all time. All through January his illness obliged him to stay in the portage cabin, but early in February he "commenced Novena (Neufuaine) with a mass, at which Pierre and Jacques [his companions], who do everything they can to relieve me, received communion--to ask God to restore my health." His ailment left him, but weakness and the cold and the ice in the rivers kept him still at the portage until April. On the eve of his leaving for the Illinois the journal ends with this thoughtful word of the French: "If the French procure robes in this country, they do not disrobe the savages, so great are the hardships that must be endured to obtain them." [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 59:183.] In the dusk of an autumn day I went out to find the place where the Novena had worked the miracle of his healing. As I have already intimated, few of all the hundreds of thousands there in that great city have had any consciousness of the background of French heroism and suffering and prevision in front of which they were passing daily, but I found that the policemen and the watchmen on the railroad near the river knew at least of the great black cross which stands by that drab and sluggish water, placed there in memory of Marquette and Joliet. The bit of high ground where the hut stood is now surrounded by great looming sheds and factories, which were entirely tenantless when I found my way through a long unlighted and unpaved street in the direction of the river. The cross stood, in a little patch of white, black as the father's cowl, against the night with its crescent moon. I could not make out the inscription on the river side of the monument and, seeing a signal-lantern tied to a scow moored to the bank near by, I untied it and by its light was able to read the tribute of the city to the memory of the priest and the explorer "who first of known white men had passed that way," having travelled, as it recites, "two thousand five hundred miles in canoes in one hundred and twenty days." The bronze plate bears a special tribute to the foresight of Joliet, but it commemorates first of all the dwelling of the frail body and valorous soul of Father Marquette, the first European within the bounds of the city of Chicago. I wish there might be written on Mississippi maps, in that space that is shown between the Chicago and the Des Plaines, or the "Divine River," as it was sometimes called, the words: "Portage St. Jacques." That were a fitter canonization than to put his name among the names of cities, steamboats on the lake, or tobaccos, as is our custom in America. The crescent moon dropped behind the shadows that now line the portage "like a sombre forest," but it is only a few steps through the darkness back into the light and noise of the city of more than two million people. Out of the black loam of this dark portage path fringed by marshes, in the field of wild onions, the newest of the world's great cities has sprung and spread with a promise that exceeds any other on the face of the planet, though within the life of men still living it was but a stretch of lake shore, a marshy plain with a path from its miniature river or creek toward the crescent moon. A metropolis was doubtless predestined on or near the very site of Chicago by natural conditions and the peopling of the lands to the northwest; but Louis Joliet was its first prophet. The inscription on the tablet at the foot of the black cross recites that in crossing this site Joliet recommended it for its natural advantages and as a place of first settlement. And he first suggested the lakes-to-the-gulf waterway--a prospect of which La Salle speaks with disfavor but which over two hundred years later was in some measure realized. The "Jesuit Relation" of August 1, 1674, reporting the conversation of Joliet, who had lost all his precious papers in the Lachine Rapids, makes this interesting prophecy: [Footnote: Thwaite's edition, 58:105.] "It would only be necessary to make a canal by cutting through half a league of prairie, to pass from the foot of the Lake of the Illinois [Michigan] to the River St. Louis [Mississippi].... A bark [built on Lake Erie] would easily sail to the Gulf of Mexico. "The monument to him stands by the canal that has been cut through not merely a league but many leagues (thirty-eight miles) and lets the waters of Michigan flow southward to the Illinois. Of this site Joliet is quoted as saying, "The place at which we entered the lake is a harbor, very convenient for receiving vessels and sheltering them from the wind;" [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 58:107.] and of the prairies back of the harbor: "At first when we were told of these treeless lands I imagined that it was a country ravaged by fire, where the soil was so poor that it could produce nothing. But we certainly observed the contrary, and no better soil can be found, either for corn, for vines, or for any fruit whatever.... A settler would not there spend ten years in cutting down and burning the trees; on the very day of his arrival he could put his plough into the ground, and if he had no oxen from France, he could use those of this country, or even the animals possessed by the western savages, on which they ride, as we do on horses. After sowing grain of all kinds, he might devote himself especially to planting the vine, and grafting fruit-trees, to dressing ox- hides, wherewith to make shoes; and with the wool of these oxen he could make cloth, much finer than most of that which we bring from France. Thus he could easily find in the country his food and clothing, and nothing would be wanting except salt; but, as he could make provision for it, it would not be difficult to remedy that inconvenience." [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 58:107-9.] If Marquette was the first martyr of the Illinois, Joliet was the first prophet of that great city of the Illinois. What he could not foresee was that Lake Michigan would make the Chicago of to-day not so much by giving it a waterway to the markets of the east and Europe as by standing as an obstacle in the way of a straight path to the sea from the northwest fields and so compelling those fertile lands to send all their riches around the southern end of Lake Michigan. He overestimated the economic importance, to be sure, of the buffalo. But if domesticated cattle be substituted for the wild species, he again showed remarkable prevision of the future of a city which has enjoyed a world fame by reason of its cattle-market--its stock-yards. [Footnote: Of the importance of the lakes-to-the-gulf waterway we have already spoken.] Chicago is a city without a past, save for that glow of adventure which is almost as hazy as the myths or legends that lie back of Europe. It is just eighty-one years since it came into existence as a town, [Footnote: August 12, 1833.] and but twenty-eight voters voted for the first board of trustees of the town; its population was variously estimated at from above two hundred to three hundred and fifty. As a city, it is seventy-seven years old, [Footnote: Chartered March 4, 1837.] beginning its legal life as such with fewer than five thousand people. It was of its first mayor, William B. Ogden--though some years later than his administration--that Guizot, looking upon the portrait of his benevolent face, said: "That is the representative American, who is the benefactor of his country, especially the mighty West; he built Chicago." But the Chicago which he administered was but a small town in size. Its officials from treasurer to scavenger were appointed by the common council and obliged to serve or pay certain fines. Every male resident over twenty-one was obliged to work three days each year on the streets and alleys or pay one dollar for each day. Fire wardens had no compensation except release from jury or military service. There was at first meagre school provision, [Footnote: The money derived from the sale of school lands in 1833 was distributed among the existing private schools which thus became free common schools. Less than $40,000 was received for lands now worth much more than $100, 000,000.] no public sanitary provision, no considerable public service of any sort. It was a neighborly but unsocialized place, where the individual had little restraint save of his own limitations and his personal love of his neighbors. What social functions the city performed were self-protective and not self-improving in motive. For example, fire might not be carried in the street except in a fire-proof vessel. [Footnote: S. E. Sparling, "Municipal History and Present Organization of the City of Chicago," University of Wisconsin Bulletin, No. 23, 1898.] The aboriginal frog croaked on the very site of the place where grand opera is now sung. The city's development was largely left to the haphazard, unrestrained, but whole-souled, big-hearted, self-confident individualism, such as has been potent in Pittsburgh. The restrictions were mainly those of the prohibitory Mosaic commandments. And so this city, increasing its population by a half-million in each of the last three decades, has come to stand next to Paris in population and first of all great American cities in the constructive activity of its civic consciousness and urban imagination. The city is still smoke-enwrapped (when the wind does not blow from the lake); its streets run out into prairie dust and mud; its harbor, of which Joliet spoke in praise, merits rather the disparagement of La Salle; there are offending smells and sights everywhere. But in the midst of it all and over it all is moving now, as a healing efficacy in troubled waters, a spirit of democratic aspiration. What Louis XIV or Napoleon I or Napoleon III, king and emperors, planned and did, compelling the co-operation of a people in making the city of Paris more beautiful, more habitable, that a people of millions out upon the prairies of Illinois are beginning to do out of their own desire and common treasury. It is of interest that the sovereign of France who gave her empire of those great stretches of plain, gave to Paris "those vast reaches of avenue and boulevard which to-day are the crowning features of the most beautiful of cities." But it must quicken France's interest further to know that this first systematic planning for a city, as an organic whole, by Louis XIV and Colbert, Le Notre and Blondel is now being followed out on that plain by a self-governing people, who have been making cities for barely half a century, to bring order and form and beauty, and better condition of living out of that grimy collection of homes and shops and beginnings of civic enterprise and great private philanthropies. A great deal has been already accomplished, such as the widening of the leading avenue, the addition of acres upon acres to the park space on the lake shore, the establishment of an efficient small park system; but it is only the beginning of a scheme that thinks of Chicago as a city that will some day hold ten millions of people. The prophecy of one statistician (now of New York) predicts for Chicago a population of thirteen million two hundred and fifty thousand souls in 1952; [Footnote: Bion J. Arnold, "Report of the Engineering and Operating Features of the Chicago Transportation Problem," pp. 95, 96.] and the great railroad builder, James J. Hill, has estimated that "when the Pacific coast shall have a population of twenty millions, Chicago will be the largest city in the world." The specific plans for its improvement have been developed by a small body of public-spirited citizens, but they are simply that great urban democracy thinking and speaking, trying to express itself. It has developed with less interference or compulsion on the part of the State than any other great city of America, and now it is moving voluntarily to the noblest as well as the most practical of improvements. Under like leading it built the "White City," the ephemeral city of the World's Fair, in the celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America, and that splendid achievement of the black, unkempt city back of it gave first hint, in the co-operation that made this possible, of what a community could do and at the same time gathered to it the teaching of the older cities of the earth from their long striving for the city beautiful. The city provides its own water-supply, it lights its streets, it has recently acquired control of its street-car lines, and every passenger is notified as a shareholder that 55 per cent of the profits comes into the city treasury. And now under this inspiration and yet of its own will it has begun a transformation of itself into the likeness of what it dreamed in those evanescent buildings and courts and columns and statues and frescoes out by the opalescent waters of its sea. It saw the reflection of that "White City" in the lake and then the image of its own workaday face --and it has not forgotten what manner of city it was. Remember again that what is and what is promised have come in a lifetime. Walking in the streets of that city early one morning a few years ago, as the trains were emptying the throngs who sleep outside along the lake and out on the prairie, into the canyons made by its tall buildings, I found myself immediately behind a robust old man, a civil engineer, who was born before Chicago had a hundred inhabitants. He was much older than the city whose buildings now reach out miles from the lake (one of its streets thirty-two miles long) and thirty and forty stories into the air. One hundred years ago it was the French wilderness untouched. Eighty years ago most of its citizens bore French names. The portage path has literally yielded a harvest of streets. Chicago, the city of the French portage, Chicago, which despite all that casual visitors see and say of it, was, I contend, best defined by Harriet Martineau as a "great, embryo poet," moody, wild, but bringing about results, exulting that he--for he is a masculine poet--has caught the true spirit of things of the past and has had sight of the depths of futurity. But it is only now that the brooding poet is coming to express himself in verses that are recognized for their beauty. Chicago, the field of the wild onions, threaded by La Rivière de l'Ail, the place of the shambles, the capital of the golden calf. That is her fame. Only recently I read in a book which I found in Paris, written by an English traveller, that Chicago stands apart from all other cities in that "her people are really on earth to make money"; that, magnificent as she is in many ways, chiefly in distances, she is "too busy money-making to attend to civic improvements" or to have a "keen affection for worthier things." I have gone a hundred times in and out of that dirty, unkempt city, swept only by the winds, one would think, and I know its worst, its physical, moral, political worst. But if the people there have worshipped the golden calf in their wilderness, they have now drunk of the dust of their first image, and I should be disposed to say that nowhere among American cities is there a keener affection for worthier things showing itself. Again I shall have to admit that this "affection" is not the spontaneous expression of the entire democratic community. As in Pittsburgh, a comparatively few men have voluntarily, and at their own expense, undertaken to study not only the conditions that make for better and cheaper travel, more profitable commercial intercourse and greater productiveness, but for a more wholesome and a higher spiritual existence. And again it is so with the hope that the great self-governing community will out of its desire and treasury bring about these conditions. These few men and women, possessed both by a love of that still uncouth city and an ideal objectively learned in the days when the "White City" stood between it and the lakes, have already spent a half-million francs in study and in making plans--in addition to all the months and years of volunteer, unpaid service. The principal items of this great scheme are: 1. The improvement of the lake front. 2. The creation of a system of highways outside the city. 3. The improvement of railway terminals and the development of a complete traction system for both freight and passengers. 4. The acquisition of an outer park system and of parkway circuits. 5. The systematic arrangement of the streets and avenues within the city, in order to facilitate the movement to and from the business districts. 6. The development of centres of intellectual life and of civic administration, so related as to give coherence and unity to the city. Is there not hope for democracy if in the places of its greatest strain and stress, in the midst of its fiercest passions, there is a deliberate, affectionate, intelligent striving toward cities that have been revealed not in apocalyptic vision but in the long-studied plans of terrestrial architects and engineers and altruistic souls, such as that of Jane Addams, cities that to such amphionic music shall out of the shards of the past build themselves silently, impregnably--if not in a diviner clime, at any rate in a diviner spirit--on shores and slopes and plains of that broad valley of the new democracy, conterminous in its mountain boundaries with New France in America? A little while ago some workmen who were digging trenches for the foundations of a new factory or warehouse along that portage path thrust their spades into a piece of wood buried sixteen feet below the surface. It was found to be a fragment of a French bateau, lying on one of whose thwarts was a sword--probably of one who had met his death on the edge of the portage--a sword with an inscription showing that it probably belonged to an early French voyageur. And so again in these relics but newly brought to light I find new words to remind ourselves that the roots of that mighty, virile, healthiest, most aspiring of America's great cities are entwined about the symbols of French adventure and empire in the west--the sword and the boat, and doubtless there was a crucifix not far away. CHAPTER XIII FROM LA SALLE TO LINCOLN I once heard a public lecturer in America telling a New York audience of an experience in the Mississippi Valley, where he asked an audience of children what body of water lay in the middle of the earth--wishing them to name to him, of course, the Mediterranean Ocean--and unexpectedly got the serious answer from a lad of deep conviction but narrow horizon, "the Sangamon River." I told the amused lecturer, who had never heard of this river, at any rate as locally pronounced, that the lad spoke more truly than the lecturer knew. For to those of even wider horizons, whose greatest and most beloved hero in history lived and was buried near the banks of the Sangamon, it is the middle water of the earth. It is but a little river, and it is but one of the rivers of the valley of a hundred thousand streams, truly the Medimarenean Land, since all the oceans are now being gathered about it. The Sangamon flows into the Illinois, the Illinois into the Mississippi, and the Mississippi is now to flow into all the seas, even as the life of Lincoln is to flow into all history. How little competent I am to speak dispassionately of this great incarnation of the spirit of those western waters the distorted geography of the untravelled lad whom the alien lecturer found on the prairies will suggest, for the river of the home and the fame of Lincoln empties into the river of my birth. It was along this latter river--the Illinois--as we know, that La Salle and his men, in midwinter of 1682, dragged on the ice their canoes, baggage, and disabled companions from the Chicago River, all the way to the site of Fort Crèvecoeur, where they found open water, and thence in their canoes made their way past the mouth of the Sangamon (which first appears on the maps of the new world in 1683, just after La Salle's journey, as the River Emicouen) and on into the Mississippi. We recall their "adventurous progress" and the unveiling to their eyes more and more of the vast new world, where the warm and drowsy air and hazy sunlight succeeded the frosty breath of the north. We see them floating down the winding water path. We see the red children of the sun--the Indian sun- worshippers--clothed in white cloaks, receiving the white heralds of Europe; we hear the weather-beaten voyageurs chant on the shores of the gulf solemn, exulting songs learned in church and cloister of France; we hear the faint voice of their leader crying his claim to all the great valley from the mouth of the river to its source beyond the country of the Nadouesioux--the voice not of a human throat alone but of a vision in the wilderness. We discern after long years the sounds of its realization. We see the iridescence of the John Law bubble shining over the turbid waters of that river for a moment. We see the raising and lowering of flags of various colors. We hear Napoleon's representative saying: "May the inhabitants of this valley and a Frenchman never meet upon any spot of the globe without feeling brothers!" We see the general who is later to embody the west's crude democratic ideals, Andrew Jackson, victorious in the last struggle of independence from Europe. We see the red worshippers of the sun in their white cloaks crossing the river, vanishing toward its setting; and we see the black shadows of men, the negro slaves, creeping out of Africa after the white heralds of Europe in America. Seeing and hearing all this, we have seen and heard the intimations of the glory of France in the new world, the birth of a world-power, the United States, the infancy of a new democracy, the disappearance of the aboriginal Indian, the menace of the black shadow that had made a nation half slave and half free, and the prophecy of the triumphant coming of the new-age producers and poets, the men of the Land of the Western Waters. It is out of this light and shade gathered by the Father of Waters--the Mississippi--along its banks, that there comes silently one day in 1831, the lank, bony, awkward figure of Abraham Lincoln, then a young man of twenty-two, guiding a flatboat laden with prairie products down this same tortuous waterway, from the Sangamon to the sea. He was six feet four inches tall, homely, sad-faced, handy, and as little promising outwardly as any other pilot or boatman of those days. It is still remembered in prairie legends, however, that at the beginning of the voyage, his boat being stuck midway across a dam, he had ingeniously managed to release it and save all from shipwreck. It seems now an incident fraught with prophecy. And it is said that many years later he made designs of a contrivance that would lift flatboats over shoals and even let them navigate on ice--an intimation of the resourcefulness of men left to fight alone with the forces of nature. He was not a "Yankee," as one writing me in Paris characterized the men of that valley. This awkward landsman on water was born in a cabin in the Kentucky wilderness, a house replaced by one of unhewn timber, without door or floor or window, probably not better than the meanest of the gypsy houses just outside the fortifications of Paris. He accompanied his restless, migratory father from one squatter home to another until he settled in Illinois, where the timber-land and prairie meet, near the Sangamon, and there built another cabin, made rails to fence ten acres of land--which gave him the sobriquet the "rail-splitter"--"broke" the ground, and raised a crop of corn on it the first year. You may remember that Joliet made report of such a possibility there. Lincoln's origin you will recognize as typical of that frontier, except that the character which asserted itself in the son, if there is transmission of acquired character, seems to have come from the mother and the nurturing of his stepmother rather than from the shiftless, paternal pioneer who gave the wilderness environment and soil to the nurturing of this stock and was as little paternalistic as the government. Perhaps this ne'er-do-well father is to be classed as one of those rough coureurs de bois who, in his ambassadorship from his ancestors to their frontier posterity, forgot the conventions and manners of the ancestral life in the temptations of the open country to a man without a slave. When he started down the Ohio into Indiana with his family, his carpenter's tools, his household goods, and a considerable quantity of whiskey, he was going to treat, not as the coureurs de bois, with the Indians, the savage men of the forests; he was going to treat with the savage forces of nature themselves. And one must, as I have said of Nicolet and Perrot and Du Lhut, judge charitably these men who made the reconciliations of the edges of things. They made the paths to western cities; he, to a western character; that only need be remembered. Certain trees depend for the spread of their kind on seeds equipped with spiral wings that when they fall they may reach the ground outside the shadow of the parent tree and so have a chance to grow into wide-spreading trees. Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abraham, was as the spirals that carried the precious seed where it could have free air and an unshadowed soil to grow in. And there the tuition of the experiences that made all men kin and so made a natural democracy possible began. He had little teaching of the formal sort. Six months or a year in a log schoolhouse probably measured its duration. He had the sterner discipline of the fields, the waters, and the trees, for their very temptations became disciplines to those who resisted, as his father did not. He learned his parables of the fields and of the natural instincts of his neighbors. He knew both physical and human nature about him, and this he illustrated, expressed, in such manner as to make him a faithful and favorite exponent of its coarseness, its kindliness, its gallantry, its sympathies, and its heroisms. These neighborly fellowships, not affected but genuine, equipped him not only with a vital and never-failing sense of brotherhood but with a faith in those whom he called the "plain people," the common man. His creed was, if not innate, innurtured. That fellowship and that faith were at the bottom of his democracy--not merely patient love of his neighbors but faith in their ultimate judgments--democracy that made him a nationalist and a world humanist. But in the making of Lincoln there were more than the usual disciplines. He had also the tuition of the "solemn solitude," as Bancroft says. He sought the fellowships of the past--of that "invisible multitude of the spirits of yesterday." He read every book that he could get within fifty miles, it is said. But what is more certain is that he read thoroughly and "inwardly digested" a few books. He knew the Bible, Shakespeare, and Burns, Aesop's "Fables," Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," and "Robinson Crusoe." He read a history of the United States and a life of Washington, and he learned by heart the statutes of the State of Indiana. Moreover, he studied without guidance algebra and geometry. It is said that later in life, when his political career was beginning, he continued his studies even more seriously and attempted to master a foreign language. So he had companionship of the patriarchs and prophets and poets of Israel. And it was the experience of many another prairie boy that he knew intimately these Asiatic heroes of history before he consciously heard of modern or contemporary heroes. I knew of Joshua before I was aware of Napoleon, and I remember carving upon a primitive arch of triumph--which was only the stoop at the roadside, but the most, conspicuous public place accessible to my knife--the name of one of the cities taken in the conquest of Canaan, an instinct of hero-worship--so splendidly illustrated in French art and monuments. Lincoln the youth had not only those ancient companionships but the intimate counsel of the greatest of teachers of democracy. He knew, too, the homely wisdom of Greece as well as he knew the treasured sayings of his own people handed on from generation to generation. He was as familiar with the larger-horizoned gossip and philosophies of Shakespeare's plays as with those which gathered around the post-office of Clary's Grove, where later this youth as postmaster carried the letters in his hat and read the newspapers before they were delivered. He loved Burns for his philosophy that "a man's a man for a' that." So with these and others he found his high fellowships, even while he "swapped" stories (enriched of his reading) with his neighbors at the store or his fellow lawyers at the primitive taverns. But there were less personal associations. He made the fundamental laws of a wilderness State an acquisition of his instincts. There is preserved in a law library in New York the much-worn copy of the statutes of Indiana enacted in the first years of the existence of that State. It is stated that he learned these statutes by copying extracts from them--and from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Ordinance of the Northwest, included in the same volume--on a shingle when paper was scarce, using ink made of the juice of brier-root and a pen made from the quill of a turkey-buzzard, and shaving the shingle clean for another extract when one was learned, till his primitive palimpsest was worn out. But whatever the medium of their transmigration from matter to mind, they became the law of his democracy, sacred as if they had been brought to him on tables of stone by a prophet with shining face. It was in that school, I believe, that he learned his nationalism, his devotion to the Constitution--to which in maturer years he gave this famed expression: "I would save the Union, I would save it in the shortest way under the Constitution.... My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union." [Footnote: Letter to Horace Greeley, August 22, 1862.] And when he had freed the negro by a proclamation that violated the letter of the Constitution, it was still that boy of the woods speaking in the man--the boy who had learned his lesson beyond all possibility of forgetting or misunderstanding--"I felt that measures otherwise unconstitutional might become lawful by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution through the preservation of the nation." It was from those shingles that he learned, too, the place of the State in this nationalism. Its paternalism has grown tremendously since 1824, when democracy was a negative, a repressive and not a positive, aggressive political and social spirit, but, as it was, it gave him the foundation of the political structure within whose lines he had to build later. And with all this was a self-discipline in the two great knowledges by which men have climbed from savages to gods--language and mathematics. He was told one day that there was an English grammar in a house six miles from his home, and he at once walked off to borrow it. And he studied geometry and algebra alone. This may seem to you an inconsequential thing, but having myself on those same prairies not far away from the Sangamon acquired my algebra with little teaching and my solid geometry with only the tuition of a book and of the sun or a lamp, I am able to appreciate what the hardship of that self-schooling was. It was more agreeable to watch the clouds while the horses rested at the end of the furrow, to address, as did Burns, lines to a field-mouse, or to listen to the song of the meadow-lark, than to learn the habits of the three dimensions then known, of points in motion, of lines in intersection, of surfaces in revolution, or to represent the unknown by algebraic instead of poetic symbols. But his private personal culture, as one [Footnote: Herbert Croly, Lincoln as more than an American in his "Promise of American Life," pp. 89-99.] has observed, had no "embarrassing effects," because he shared so completely and genuinely the amusements and occupations of his neighborhood. No "taint of bookishness" disturbed the local fellowships which gave him opportunity to express in "familiar and dramatic form" of story and illustration his more substantial philosophy and so find for it the perfect speech. His neighbors called him by homely, affectionate names, thinking he was entirely one of them--a little more clever, a little less ambitious in the usual channels of business and enterprise. He had no "moral strenuousness of the reformer" and no "exclusiveness" of learning. He "accepted the fabric of traditional American political thought." He seemed "but the average product," and yet, as this same writer has said, "at bottom Abraham Lincoln differed as essentially from the ordinary western American of the middle period as St. Francis of Assisi differed from the ordinary Benedictine monk of the thirteenth century." [Footnote: Croly, "Promise of American Life," p. 90.] He was not, like Jackson, simply a large, forceful version of the plain American trans-Alleghany citizen; he made no clamorous, boastful show of strength, powerful as he was physically and intellectually. He shared genuinely, with no consciousness of his own distinction, the "good-fellowship of his neighbors, their strength of will, their excellent faith, and above all their innocence." But he made himself, by discipline of his own, "intellectually candid, concentrated, and disinterested and morally humane, magnanimous and humble." This is not the picture of a conventional, generic democrat; and this is not, we are assured by the earlier writers, the picture of the westerner of that period. Indeed, Mr. Croly insists that while these Lincolnian qualities are precisely the qualities which Americans, in order to become better democrats, should add to their strength, homogeneity, and innocence, they are just the qualities (high intelligence, humanity, magnanimity, and humility) which Americans are "prevented by their individualistic practice and tradition from attaining or properly valuing." "Their deepest convictions," he contends, "make the average unintelligent man the representative democrat, and the aggressive, successful individual the admired national type." To them Lincoln is simply "a man of the people" and an example of strong will. But the man who said this did not know that land of Lincoln--which was the valley of La Salle, and even before that the valley of the tribe of men-- for I believe its inhabitants knew that he was the embodiment of what they coveted for themselves; that he was not their ordinary average but their best selves. Their individualism has been, I must say again, under practical compulsions and has had fruits that deceive the eye. It is so insistent upon national productivity, but none the less is it joined to a high idealism that worships just the qualities that were so miraculously united in Abraham Lincoln. To be sure, some remember for their own excuse his coarse stories; some recall for their own justification his acceptance of the political standards that he found; but the great body of the people keep him in reverence and affection as the incarnation of patience, honesty, fairness, magnanimity, humility; not for his strength of will primarily, but for his strength of charity and honesty, and in so doing they reveal the ideal that is in and under their own individual struggle. Montalembert said that "a social constitution which produced a Lincoln and others like him is a good tree whose sure fruit leaves nothing to envy in the product of any monarchy or aristocracy." Lincoln was not, we want to believe, a freak, a sport of nature, but the "sure fruit" that should not only leave nothing to envy in others, but leave nothing to question in the soundness of a democracy that gives evidence of its spirit in remembering Abraham Lincoln more tenderly, more affectionately, more reverentially than any one else in its history. It is less to his praise but more accurate, I think, that, as his biographer put it: "His day and generation uttered itself through him." He expressed their ugliest forms and their most beautiful developments. None the less is it remarkable that not only should the virility and nobility of the frontier have been exhibited in him, but that the consummate skill and character known to the world's centres of culture should have had, in his speech and intellectual attitude and grasp, a new example. When he wrote his letter in acceptance of the nomination to the presidency, he showed it to the superintendent of public instruction in Illinois, whom he called "Mr. Schoolmaster" (and who was years after my own beloved schoolmaster) saying: "I am not very strong on grammar and I wish you would see if it is all right." The schoolmaster had only to repair what we call a "split infinitive." But the great utterances of his life had no tuition or revision of schoolmasters. They were his own in conception and expression. He sent his Cooper Union speech in advance to several for advice, and they, I am told, changed not a word. Of his debates with Douglas (1858), his speech in Cooper Union, New York, 1860, his oration at the dedication of the Soldiers' Cemetery at Gettysburg, and of his second inaugural address, it has been said that no one of them has been surpassed in its separate field. Goldwin Smith said of the Gettysburg speech: "Saving one very flat expression, the address has no superior in literature." [Footnote: Goldwin Smith, "Early Years of A. Lincoln." In R. D. Sheppard, "Abraham Lincoln," p. 132.] These appraisements I would hesitate to repeat in France, where all letters come finally to be adjudged, if I did not know that this last document (the Gettysburg speech), at least, had been admitted to the seat of the immortal classics. It is said to have been written on scraps of paper, as the great care-worn man rode in the car from Washington to Gettysburg, and I have been told by one who was present at the ceremonies that the quiet had hardly come over the vast audience, stirred by the eloquence of Edward Everett's oration which had lasted two hours, before this briefest and noblest of American orations, spoken in a high and unmusical voice by the great lank figure, consulting his manuscript, was over. It is heard now in the memory of millions of school-children from the Atlantic to the Pacific: "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. "Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. "But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate--we cannot consecrate--we cannot hallow--this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far beyond our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work, which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Bronze tablets bearing this oration for their inscription have been put on the walls of schoolhouses and public buildings all the way across the continent--plates in renewal of possession, that are another fruitage of the valley where the French planted their plates of possession and repossession a century before. But I would also have read--especially in France, where letters are still being written that have the quality of literature--a letter of this frontiersman. The professor of history in the College of the City of New York, showing me his museum, would have me read again this letter in the hand of Abraham Lincoln; and I would have those beyond America, as well as in that valley, hear what a man of the western waters could write before the coming of the typewriter: "DEAR MADAM: I have been shown in the files of the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of five sons who have died gloriously on the field of battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost and the solemn pride that must be yours to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of freedom. "Yours very sincerely and respectfully, "ABRAHAM LINCOLN." [Footnote: "Lincoln, Complete Works" (Nicolay and Hay edition), 2:600. To Mrs. Bixby, Boston, Mass., November 1, 1864.] These two examples illustrate not only the form of his speech and writing, but the sympathy and the temper of the soul of the man. They need only the supplement of a comment on the strength of his thought in expression. It is said of his Cooper Union speech (his first speech before a large eastern urban audience, I think): "From the first line to the last, from his premises to his conclusion, he travels with a swift, unerring directness which no logician ever excelled, an argument complete and full, without the affectation of learning.... A single, easy, simple sentence ... contains a chapter of history that, in some instances, has taken days of labor to verify and which must have cost the author months of investigation to acquire.... Commencing with this address as a political pamphlet, the reader will leave it as an historical work, brief, complete, profound, truthful--which will survive the time and occasion that called it forth and be esteemed hereafter, no less for its intrinsic worth than its unpretending modesty." [Footnote: Pamphlet edition with notes and prefaces by C. C. Nott and Cephas Brainerd, September, 1860. Quoted in Nicolay and Hay, "Abraham Lincoln," 2:225.] His first wide fame grew from a speech which he delivered on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, the city that had grown on the Illinois River by the side of La Salle's Fort Crèvecoeur. "When the white man governs himself," he said there, "that is self-government; but when the white man governs himself and also governs another man, that is more than self-government-- that is despotism." [Footnote: "Lincoln, Complete Works," ed. by Nicolay and Hay, 2:227.] Two years later he made near there an address so irresistible in its eloquence that the reporters forgot why they were there and failed to take notes. So there are but fragments preserved of what is known as "the lost speech." The minor anecdotes of his life that are treasured and the stories which he is said to have told would fill a volume--perhaps volumes. They all tell of a genius who through adversity became resourceful, who through the neighborly exchanges of a village learned a sympathy as wide as humanity, and who with an infinite patience and kindliness and good sense dealt with a divided people. The world outside the valley at first thought him a buffoon because it heard only the echo of the hoarse laughter after his stories. They found when he spoke in Cooper Union that he had a mind that would have sat unembarrassed and luminous in the company of the men of the age of Pericles. But he had a sense of humor that, had he been there, would have saved Socrates from the hyssop. Mr. Bryce says, that all the world knows the Americans to be a humorous people. [Footnote: Bryce, "American Commonwealth," 2:286.] "They are," he has said, "as conspicuously the purveyors of humor to the nineteenth century as the French were the purveyors of wit to the eighteenth.... [This sense] is diffused among the whole people; it colors their ordinary life and gives to their talk that distinctively new flavor which a European palate enjoys." And he adds: "Much of President Lincoln's popularity, and much also of the gift he showed for restoring confidence to the North at the darkest moments of the war, was due to the humorous way he used to turn things, conveying the impression of not being himself uneasy, even when he was most so." Yet it was no mask, it was instinctive. On one of those days when the anxiety was keenest and the sky darkest a delegation of prohibitionists came to him and insisted that the reason the north did not win was because the soldiers drank so much whiskey and thus brought the curse of the Lord down upon them. There was, we are told, a mischievous twinkle in his eye when he replied that he considered it very unfair on the part of the Lord, because the southerners drank a good deal worse whiskey and more of it than the soldiers of the north. Most of these stories and parables had a flavor of the west and of the fields where they were collected in the days when, as a lawyer, he followed the court from one town to another, and spent the nights in talk around the tavern stove. When asked one day how he disposed of a caller who had come to him in a towering rage, he told of the farmer in Illinois who announced one Sunday to his neighbors that he had gotten rid of a great log in the middle of his field. They were anxious to know how, since it was too big to haul out, too knotty to split, too wet and soggy to burn. And the farmer announced: "I ploughed around it." "And so," he said, "I got rid of General----. I ploughed around him, but it took me three hours to do it." This, then, was the lank boatman who came down the river (that was once the River Colbert) and who, seeing the horrors of the slave markets in New Orleans, went back to the Sangamon with a memory of them that was a "continual torment," as he said, and with a vow to hit that institution hard if ever he had a chance. It was this boatman who was twenty years later to have, of all men, the chance. One cannot tell here, even in outline, the story of that irrepressible conflict in which this western ploughman and lawyer became commander-in- chief of an army of a million men and carried on a war involving the expenditure of three billion dollars. One need not tell it. It need only to be recalled that it was this man of the western waters who first saw clearly, or first made it clearly seen, that the nation could not endure permanently half slave and half free. "I do not expect the Union to be dissolved," he said, "but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or the other." And it was he who more than any one single force brought the fulfilment of his prophecy--of a nation reunited and all free. He hated slavery. "If slavery is not wrong," he said, "nothing is wrong." But he wanted to get rid of it without injustice to those to whom it was an inherited, if cherished, institution. If he saw a venomous snake in the road he would take the nearest stick and kill it, but if he found it in bed with his children, "I might hurt the children," he said, "more than the snake and it might bite them." He was as tender and considerate of the south as ever he was of an erring neighbor in Illinois, where it is remembered that he carried home with his giant strength one whom his comrades would have left to freeze, and nursed him through the night. So he sat almost sleepless, sad-hearted, through the four dark years, but resolute, cheering his own heart and those about him with a broad humor that came as "Aesop's Fables" out of the fields and their elemental wisdoms. One summer's day, when ploughing in the fields of that land of Lincoln, I heard a sound of buzzing in the air and, looking up, I saw a faint cloud against the clear sky. I recognized it as a swarm of bees making their way from a hive, they knew not where, and with an instinct born of the plains at once I began to follow them and to throw up clods of earth to stop their flight, bringing them down finally on the edge of the field upon a branch of a tree, where they were at evening gathered into a new hive and persuaded back to profitable industry instead of wasting their substance in the forest. So this great ploughman used the clods of earth, the things at his hand, illustrations from the fields, to bring the thoughts of his countrymen down to contentful co-operation again. "You may," said Alcibiades, speaking of Socrates, "imagine Brasidas and others to have been like Achilles, or you may imagine Nestor and Antenor to have been like Pericles; and the same may be said of other famous men. But of this strange being you will never be able to find any likeness, however remote, either among men that now are or who ever have been--other than ... Silenus and the Satyrs, and they represent in a figure not only himself but his words. For his words are like the images of Silenus which open. They are ridiculous when you first hear them.... His talk is of pack-beasts and smiths and cobblers and curriers.... But he who opens the bust and sees what is within will find they are the only words which have a meaning in them and also the most divine, abounding in fair images of virtue, and of the widest comprehension, or rather extending to the whole duty of a good and honorable man." [Footnote: Plato, "Symposium," Jowett's trans., 1:592.] The twenty-three centuries since Socrates do not furnish me with a fitter characterization of Lincoln. His image was as homely as that of Silenus was bestial. His talk was of ploughs and boats, polecats and whiskey. But those who opened this homely image found in him a likeness as of no other man, and in his words a meaning that was of widest and most ennobling comprehension. And, as Crito said for all ages, after the sun that was on the hilltops when Socrates took the poison had set and darkness had come: "Of all the men of his time, he was the wisest and justest and best." So has the poet of that western democracy given to all time this phrase, sung in the evening of the day of Lincoln's martyrdom, at the time when the lilac bloomed and the great star early dropped in the western sky and the thrush sang solitary: "The sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands." [Footnote: Walt Whitman, "When Lilacs Last."] We ask ourselves if he was the gift of democracy. And we find ourselves answering: his peculiar excellence could have come of no other order of society. We ask ourselves anxiously if democracy has the unerring instinct to find such men to embody its wishes, or did it take him only for a talented rail-splitter--an average man? But we have no certain answer to this anxious questioning. What gives most hope in new confusions and problems, unknown to his day, however, is that the more clearly his disinterestedness and forbearance and magnanimity and humility are revealed, the wider and deeper is the feeling of admiration and love for his character, which perhaps assures us, after all, better than anything else, of the soundness and nobility of the ideals of democracy. They carried this man at death over into the valley of his birth, into the land of the men of the western waters that was Nouvelle France, and there buried him among his neighbors, of whom he learned his spirit of democracy, in the midst of scenes where he had mastered its language, in the very ground that had taught him his parables, by the side of the stream that gave him sight of his supreme mission. It is the greatest visible monument to his achievement that the "Father of Waters ... goes unvexed to the sea" [Footnote: Letter to John C. Conkling, August 25, 1863.] through one country instead of the territory of two or more nations and that the slavery he witnessed is no more. But it is a greater monument to him, as it is a nobler monument to those who have erected it in their own hearts, that he is revered the length of the course of the river first traced by La Salle, and through all the reach of the rivers of his claim from its source, even as far as its mouth at the limitless sea. CHAPTER XIV THE VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY France evoked from the unknown the valley that may, in more than one sense, be called the heart of America. Her coureurs de bois opened its paths made by the buffalo and the red men to the shod feet of Europe. Her explorers planted the watershed with slender, silent portage traces that have multiplied into thousands of noisy streets and tied indissolubly the lakes of the north to the rivers of the south from which they were long ago severed by nature. Her one white sail above Niagara marked the way of a mighty commerce. Her soldiers sowed the molten seeds of tumultuous cities on the sites of their forts, and her priests and friars consecrated with their faith and prayers forest trail, portage path, ship's sail, and leaden plate. But that is not all--a valley of new cities like the old, of new paths for greater commerce, of more altars to the same God! The chief significance and import of the addition of this valley to the maps of the world, all indeed that makes it significant, is that here was given (though not of deliberate intent) a rich, wide, untouched field, distant, accessible only to the hardiest, without a shadowing tradition or a restraining fence, in which men of all races were to make attempt to live together under rules of their own devising and enforcing. And as here the government of the people by the people was to have even more literal interpretation than in that Atlantic strip which had traditions of property suffrage and church privilege and class distinctions, I have called it the "Valley of the New Democracy." When the French explorers entered it, it was a valley of aboriginal, anarchic individualism, with little movable spots of barbaric communistic timocracy, as Plato would doubtless have classified those migratory, predatory kingdoms of the hundreds of red kings, contemporary with King Donnacona, whom Cartier found on the St. Lawrence--communities governed by the warlike, restless spirit. The French communities that grew in the midst of those naked timocrats, whose savagery they soothed by beads and crucifixes and weapons, were the plantings of absolutism paternalistic to the last degree. One cannot easily imagine a socialism that would go further in its prescriptions than did this affectionate, capricious, generous, if unwise, as it now seems, government of a village along the St. Lawrence or the Mississippi, from a palace by the Seine where a hard-working monarch issued edicts "in the fulness of our power and of our certain knowledge." The ordinances preserved in the colonial records furnish abundant proof of that parental concern and restraint. They relate to the regulation of inns and markets, poaching, preservation of game, sale of brandy, rent of pews, stray hogs, mad dogs, matrimonial quarrels, fast driving, wards and guardians, weights and measures, nuisances, observance of Sunday, preservation of timber, and many other matters. Parkman cites these interesting ordinances, which illustrate to what absurd lengths this jealous, paternalistic care extended: "Chimney-sweeping having been neglected at Quebec, the intendant commands all householders promptly to do their duty in this respect, and at the same time fixes the pay of the sweep at six sous a chimney. Another order forbids quarrelling in church. Another assigns pews in due order of precedence." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime in Canada," p. 341.] One intendant issued a "mandate to the effect that, whereas the people of Montreal raise too many horses, which prevents them from raising cattle and sheep, 'being therein ignorant of their true interest, ... now, therefore, we command that each inhabitant of the cotes of this government shall hereafter own no more than two horses or mares and one foal--the same to take effect after the sowing season of the ensuing year (1710), giving them time to rid themselves of their horses in excess of said number, after which they will be required to kill any of such excess that may remain in their possession." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime in Canada," p. 341.] And, apropos of the trend toward cities, there is the ordinance of Bigot, issued with a view, we are told, of "promoting agriculture and protecting the morals of farmers" by saving them from the temptations of the cities: "We prohibit and forbid you to remove to this town (Quebec) under any pretext whatever, without our permission in writing, on pain of being expelled and sent back to your farms, your furniture and goods confiscated, and a fine of fifty livres laid on you for the benefit of the hospitals." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime in Canada," p. 342.] There is even a royal edict designed to prevent the undue subdivision of farms which "forbade the country people, except such as were authorized to live in villages, to build a house or barn on any piece of land less than one and a half arpents wide and thirty arpents long." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime in Canada," p. 342.] And this word should be added in intimation of the generosity of the paternalism: "One of the faults of his [Louis XIV's] rule is the excess of his benevolence, for not only did he give money to support parish priests, build churches, and aid the seminary, the Ursulines, the missions, and the hospitals, but he established a fund destined, among other objects, to relieve indigent persons, subsidized nearly every branch of trade and industry, and in other instances did for the colonists what they would far better have learned to do for themselves." [Footnote: Parkman, "Old Regime in Canada," p. 347.] Like Aeneas, therefore, these filial emigrants, seeking new homes, not only carried their _lares et penates_ in their arms but bore upon their shoulders their father Anchises. Succeeding savage individualism, this benevolent despotism gave the valley into the keeping of an individualism even purer and less restrained than that which it succeeded, for the sparse pioneer transmontane settlements were practically governed at first by only the consciences or whims of the inhabitants, instructed of parental commandments learned the other side of the mountains, and by their love of forest and of their prairie neighbors. And when formal government came a pure democracy, social and political--it came of individual interest and neighborly love and of no abstract philosophical theory or of protest against oligarchy; it came from the application, voluntary for the most part, of "older institutions and ideas to the transforming influence of land," free land; and such has been the result, says Professor Turner, [Footnote: See his "Significance of the Frontier in American History," in "Fifth Yearbook of the National Herbart Society, 1899," also his "Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History," in "Mississippi Valley Historical Association Proceedings, 1909-10."] that fundamentally "American democracy is the outcome of the American people in dealing with the West," that is, the people of this valley of the French pioneers. The democratical man, as Socrates is made to define him in Plato's "Republic," was one in whom the licentious and extravagant desires have expelled the moderate appetites and love of decorum, which he inherited from his oligarchical father. "Such a man," he adds, "lives a life of enjoyment from day to day, guided by no regulating principle, but turning from one pleasure to another, just as fancy takes him. All pleasures are in his eyes equally good and equally deserving of cultivation. In short, his motto is 'Liberty and Equality.'" But the early "democratical man" of that valley, even if he came remotely from such oligarchical sires as Socrates gives immediately to all democratical men, reached his motto of "Liberty and Equality" through no such sensual definition of life. It is true that many of those first settlers migrated from places where the opportunities seemed restricted or conventions irksome or privileges unequal, but it was no "licentious or extravagant desire" or flitting from pleasure to pleasure that filled that valley with sober, pale-faced, lean- featured men and tired, gentle women who enjoyed the "liberty" not of a choice of pleasurable indulgences but of interminable struggles, the "equality" of being each on the same social, economic, and political footing as his neighbor. The sequent democracy was derived of neighborliness and good fellowship, the "natural issue of their interests, their occupations, and their manner of life," and was not constructed of any theory of an ideal state. Nor were they frightened by the arguments of Socrates, who found in the "extravagant love of liberty" the preface to tyranny. And they would not have been frightened even if they had been familiar with his doctrine of democracy. They little dreamed that they were exemplifying the doctrines of a French philosopher or refuting those of a Greek thinker. Those primitive democratic and individualistic conditions had not yet been seriously changed when, in that bit of the valley which lies in the dim background of my own memory, there had developed a form of government more stern and uncaressing. But there was not a pauper in all the township for its stigmatizing care. There was not an orphan who did not have a home; there was not a person in prison; there was only one insane person, so far as the public knew, and she was cared for in her own home. The National Government was represented by the postmaster miles away; the State government by the tax assessor, a neighbor who came only once a year, if he came at all, to inquire about one's earthly belongings, which could not then be concealed in any way; and the local government by the school- teacher, who was usually a man incapacitated for able-bodied labor or an unmarried woman. The citizens made and mended the public roads, looked after the sick in a neighborly way, bought their children's schoolbooks, and buried their own dead. I can remember distinctly wondering what a "poor officer" was, for there were no poor in that society where none was rich. It was a community of high social consistency, promoted not by a conscious, disinterested devotion to the common welfare but by the common, eagerly interested pursuit of the same individual welfares, where there was room enough for all. It is well contended in a recent and most profound discussion of this subject by Professor Turner (of whom I spoke as born on a portage) that this homogeneity of feeling was the most promising and valuable characteristic of that American democracy. [Footnote: See his "Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History."] And it was, indeed, prolific of mighty consequences: First of all, it made it possible for the United States to accept Napoleon's proffer of Louisiana. Second, it compelled the War of 1812 and so confirmed to the United States the fruits of the purchase, demonstrating at the same time that the "abiding-place" of the national spirit was in the west. And, third, that spirit of nationalism took into its hands the reins of action in the time when nationality was in peril. Before the end of the Civil War the west was represented in the National Government by the President, the Vice-President, the Chief Justice, the Speaker of the House, the Secretary of the Treasury, the Postmaster-General, the Attorney-General, the General of the Army, and the Admiral of the Navy. And it furnished, as Turner adds in summary, the "national hero, the flower of frontier training and ideals." While the mere fact of office-holding does not indicate the place or source of power, it is noteworthy that the Presidents since the war--to the election of Wilson--Grant, Hayes, Garfield, McKinley, Harrison, and Taft all came from this valley. Cleveland went over the edge of it, when a young man, to Buffalo and left it only to become governor and President; Arthur, who succeeded to the presidency through the death of President Garfield, and President Roosevelt, who also came first to the presidency through the death of a President and was afterward elected, were both residents of New York, though the latter had a ranch in the far west and seems rather to belong to that region than the place of his birth. Thus of the elected Presidents there was not one who had not a middle-western origin, experience, or association. The Chief Justices since the war have been without exception western men, and so with few exceptions have been the Speakers of the House. And practically all these Presidents, Chief Justices, Speakers, were pioneers or sons of pioneers in that "Valley of the New Democracy" or, at any rate, were nurtured of its natural fellowships, its one-man-as-good-as-another institutions, and its unhampered ambitions. It is not mere geographical and numerical majorities that are connoted. It is the dominancy of the social, democratic, national spirit of the valley --the supremacy of the average, the useful man, his power and self- sufficiency when standing squarely, firmly upon the earth. It was the secret of the great wrestler Antaeus, the son of Terra, that he could not be thrown even by Hercules so long as his feet touched the earth. How intimately filial to the earth and neighborly the middle-west pioneers were has been suggested. And it was the secret of their success that they stood, every man in his own field, on his own feet, and wrestled with his own arms in primitive strength and virtue and self-reliant ingenuity. Democracy did not theorize much, and when it did it stumbled. If it had indulged freely in the abstractions of its practices, it would doubtless have suffered the fate of Antaeus, who was finally strangled in mid-air by a giant who came over the mountains. As it was, this valley civilization apotheosized the average man. Mr. Herbert Croly, in his "Promise of American Life," makes this picture of him: "In that country [the very valley of which I am writing] it was sheer waste to spend much energy upon tasks which demanded skill, prolonged experience, high technical standards, or exclusive devotion. The cheaply and easily made instrument was the efficient instrument, because it was adapted to a year or two of use, and then for supersession by a better instrument; and for the service of such tools one man was as likely to be good as another. No special equipment was required. The farmer was required to be all kinds of a rough mechanic. The business man was merchant, manufacturer, and storekeeper. Almost everybody was something of a politician. The number of parts which a man of energy played in his time was astonishingly large. Andrew Jackson was successively a lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, politician, and statesman; and he played most of these parts with conspicuous success. In such a society a man who persisted in one job and who applied the most rigorous and exacting standards to his work was out of place and was really inefficient. His finished product did not serve its temporary purpose much better than did the current careless and hasty product, and his higher standards and peculiar ways constituted an implied criticism upon the easy methods of his neighbors. He interfered with the rough good-fellowship which naturally arises among a group of men who submit good-naturedly and uncritically to current standards." [Footnote: Herbert Croly, "Promise of American Life," pp. 63, 64.] Is this what democracy, undefiled of aristocratic conditions and traditions, has produced? it will be asked. Has pure individualism in a virgin field wrought of its opportunity only this mediocre, all-round, good-natured, profane, rough, energetic, ingenious efficiency? Is this colorless, insipid "social consistency" the best wine that the valley can offer of its early vintages? I know those frontier Antaei, who, with their feet on the prairie ground, faced every emergency with a piece of fence wire. They differed from their European brothers in being more resourceful, more energetic, and more hopeful. If it be true that "out of a million well-established Americans taken indiscriminately from all occupations and conditions," when compared to a corresponding assortment of Europeans, "a larger proportion of the former will be leading alert, active, and useful lives," though they may not be wiser or better men; that there will be a "smaller amount of social wreckage" and a "larger amount of wholesome and profitable achievement," it may be safely said that, if the middle-west frontier Americans had been under consideration, the proportion of alert achievement would have been higher and the social wreckage smaller--partly because of the encouragement of the economic opportunity, and partly because of the encouragement of a casteless society. I cannot lead away from those familiar days without speaking of other companionships which that valley furnished beyond those intimated-- companionships which did not interfere with the rough frontier fellowships that made democracy possible. For it was in these same fields that Horace literally sat by the plough and sang of farm and city. It was there that Livy told his old-world stories by lamplight or at the noon-hour. It was there that Pythagoras explained his ancient theorem. I cannot insist that these companionships and intimacies were typical, but they were sufficiently numerous to disturb any generalizations as to the sacrifices which that democracy demanded for the sake of "social conditions" and economic regularity. The advancing frontier soon spent itself in the arid desert. The pioneer came to ride in an automobile. The people began to jostle one another in following their common aspirations, where once there was freedom for the energy, even the unscrupulous energy, of all. Time accentuated differences till those who started together were millions of dollars apart. Failures had no kinder fields for new trials. Democracy had now to govern not a puritanical, industrious, sparsely settled Arcady but communities of conflicting dynamic successes, static envies, and complaining despairs. It met the new emergencies at first, one by one, with no other programme than the most necessary restraints, encouragement of tariffs for the dynamic, improved transportation for the static, and charity for the despairful; but all with an optimism born of a belief in destined success. To this has succeeded gradually a more or less clearly defined policy of constructive individualism, under an increasingly democratic and less representative control. The paternal absolutism of Louis XIV has evolved into the paternal individualism of a people who are constantly struggling in imperfect speech to make their will understood and by imperfect machinery to get it done--and, as I believe, with increasingly disinterested purpose. It is, however, I emphasize, the paternalism of a highly individualized society. I described in an earlier chapter a frontier community in that valley. See what has come in its stead, in the city into which it has grown. The child coming from the unknown, trailing clouds of glory, creeps into the community as a vital statistic and becomes of immediate concern. From obliging the nurse to take certain precautions at its birth, the State follows the newcomer through life, sees that he is vaccinated, removes his tonsils and adenoids, furnishes him with glasses if he has bad vision, compels him to school, prepares him not only for citizenship but for a trade or profession, prevents the adulteration of his food, inspects his milk, filters his water, stands by grocer and butcher and weighs his bread and meat for him, cleans the street for him, stations a policeman at his door, transports his letters of business or affection, furnishes him with seeds, gives augur of the weather, wind, and temperature, cares for him if he is helpless, feeds him if he is starving, shelters him if he is homeless, nurses him in sickness, says a word over him if he dies friendless, buries him in its potter's field, and closes his account as a vital statistic in the mortality column. And there are many agencies of restraint or anxious care that stand in a remoter circle, ready to come in when emergencies require. I have before me a report of legislation in the States alone (that is, exclusive of national and municipal legislation) for two years. I note here a few characteristic and illustrative measures out of the thousands that have been adopted. They relate to the following subjects: Health of women and children at work; employer's liability; care of epileptics, idiots, and insane; regulation of dentistry and chiropody; control of crickets, grasshoppers, and rodents; exclusion of the boll- weevil; the introduction of parasites; the quenching of fires; the burning of debris in gardens; the destruction of predatory fish; the prohibition of automatic guns for hunting game; against hazing in schools; instruction as to tuberculosis and its prevention; the demonstration of the best methods of producing plants, cut flowers, and vegetables under glass; the establishment of trade-schools; the practice of embalming. I introduce this brief but suggestive list as intimating how far a democratic people have gone in doing for themselves what Louis XIV at Versailles in the "fulness of power" and out of "certain knowledge" did for the trustful habitants of Montreal, who were "ignorant of their true interest." And, of course, with that increased paternalism has come of necessity an army of public servants--governors and policemen, street cleaners and judges, teachers and factory inspectors, till, as I have estimated, in some communities one adult in every thirty is a paid servant of the public. Such paternalism is not peculiar to that valley. I remember, years ago, when I was following the legislation of an eastern State, that a bill was introduced fixing the depth of a strawberry box, and another obliging the vender of huckleberries to put on the boxes a label in letters of certain height indicating that they were picked in a certain way. And this paternalism is even more marked in the old-age pension provision in England, where the "mother of parliaments," as one has expressed it, has been put on the level of the newest western State in its parental solicitude. But nowhere else than in this valley, doubtless, is that paternalism so thoroughly informed of the individualistic spirit. Chesterton said of democracy that it "is not founded on pity for the common man.... It does not champion man because man is miserable, but because man is so sublime." It "does not object so much to the ordinary man being a slave as to his not being a king." Indeed, democracy is ever dreaming of "a nation of kings." [Footnote: G. K. Chesterton, "Heretics," p. 268.] And that characteristic is truer of the democracy that came stark out of the forests and out of the furrows than of the democracy which sprang from protest against and fear of single kings. The constitution east of the mountains was made in fear of a system which permitted an immediate and complete expression of the will of the people. The movement in American democracy which is most conspicuous is the effort to get that will accurately and immediately expressed--that is, a movement toward what might be called more democracy--toward a direct control of "politics" by the people--and that movement has had its rise and strength in the Mississippi Valley and beyond. But who are the people who are to control? Only those who are living and of electoral age and other qualification? I recall again Bismarck's definition: "They are the invisible multitude of spirits--the nation of yesterday and to-morrow." And that invisible multitude of yesterday and to-morrow, whose mouths are stopped with dust or who have not yet found human embodiment, must find voice in the multitude of to-day--the multitude that inherits the yesterdays and has in it the only promise of to-morrow. There may be some question there as to its being always the voice of God, but no one thinks of any other (except to add to it that of the woman). The "certain knowledge" and the "fulness of power" of Louis XIV have become the endowments of the average man--and the average man is one-half or two-thirds of all the voting men of the community or nation, plus one. But that average man, forgetful of the multitude of yesterday and ungrateful, has none the less wrought into his very fibre and spirit the uncompromising individualism, the unconventional neighborliness, and the frontier fellowships of yesterday. It is of that that he is consciously or unconsciously instructed at every turn. And he is now beginning to think more and more of the invisible multitude, the nation of tomorrow. It is deplored that the so-called individuality developed in that valley is "simply an unusual amount of individual energy, successfully spent in popular and remunerative occupations," that there is "not the remotest conception of the individuality which may reside in the gallant and exclusive devotion to some disinterested and perhaps unpopular moral, intellectual, or technical purpose," as has such illustrious exhibition in France, for example. This is, we are told, one of the sacrifices to social consistency which menaces the fulness and intensity of American national life. And the most serious problem is to make a nation of independent kings who shall not exercise their independencies "perversely or irresponsibly." Men have been always prone to make vocational pursuits the basis of social classification. In the Scripture record of man he had not been seven generations in the first inhabited valley of earth before his descendants were divided into cattlemen, musicians, and mechanics. For the record runs that Lamech had three sons, Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal--Jabal who became the father of those who live in tents and have cattle, Jubal the father of those that handle the harp and the organ, and Tubal the father of those who work in brass and iron. And we do not have to turn many pages to discover the social distinctions that grew out of the vocational. The first question of that western valley is, "Who is he?" and the answer is one which will tell you his occupation. No one who has not an occupation of some regularity and recognized practical usefulness is, as Mr. Croly intimates, likely to have much recognition. On the other hand, within the limits of approved occupations, there is, except in great centres, no marked social stratification based on vocation, as in old-world life and that of the new world more intimately touched by the old. The man is recognized for his worth. In the midst of that valley is a college town, [Footnote: Galesburg, Ill.] planted by a company of migrants from an older State seventy-five years ago who bought a township of land, founded a college, [Footnote: Knox College.] and built their homes about on the wild prairie. It has now twenty thousand inhabitants and is an important railroad as well as educational centre. It was nearly fifty years old when I entered it as a student. That I studied Greek did not keep me from knowing well a carpenter; that in spare hours I learned a manual trade and put into type my translation of "Prometheus Bound" did not bar me from the homes of the richest or the most cultured. Once, when a student, because of some little victory, I was received by the mayor and a committee of citizens, but the men at the engines in the shops and on the engines in the yards blew their whistles. When I went back to that college as its president it was not remembered against me that I had sawed wood or driven a plough. I knew all the conductors and most of the engineers on the railroads. I knew every merchant and nearly every mechanic, as well as every lawyer, judge, and doctor. Men had, to be sure, their preferential associations, but these were personal and not determined of vocation or class. A recent mayor of this city of two colleges was a cigar maker and, I was assured by a professor of theology in a local university, the best mayor it has had in years, and he died driving a smallpox patient to a pest-house. I received when in Paris, by the same mail as I recall, a resolution of felicitation from a Protestant body of which I was a member in that town, and a letter of like felicitation from the Catholic parish priest of that same city. I do not know how better to illustrate, to those who are working at the problem of democracy in other valleys, how democracy has wrought for itself in that valley of neighborliness and resourcefulness and plenty, in the wake of the monarchical, paternalistic affection of France. CHAPTER XV WASHINGTON: THE UNION OF THE EASTERN AND THE WESTERN WATERS We have followed the French explorers and priests as pioneers through the valleys of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi to the gulf and the Rocky Mountains. But there remains one further conquest, a conquest of their adventurous imaginations only, for none of their adventurous or pious feet ever travelled over the valley lying south of the St. Lawrence watershed and east of the Alleghanies, though they were probably the first of white men to see those peaks rising in the north of what is now New England, known as the White Mountains. Standing on the summit of one of the White Mountains a few summers ago, I was shown a dim little indentation of the sky at the northwest which I was told was Mont Real. And since seeing that I have imagined Jacques Cartier in 1535 looking off to the southeast, when his disappointed vision of the west had tired his eyes, and catching first sight of these dim indentations of his sky, the White Mountains, which the colonists from England did not see until a century later and then only from their ocean side. But whether the master pilot from the white-bastioned St. Malo saw them or not, we have record that Champlain in his exploration of the Atlantic coast did discern their peaks upon his horizon; and so we may think of the French as the discoverers not merely of the northern and western valleys, of the Adirondacks, in whose shadows Champlain and Brule and Father Jogues fought with the Iroquois and suffered torture, and of the snow-capped Rockies at whose feet Chevalier de la Vérendrye was obliged to turn back, but also of the tops of the white hills near the Atlantic coast, which I have often seen lighted at sunrise while the lower slopes and valleys were in darkness or shadow--hills touched by the French, as by that rising sun, only at their tops and by the trails of their eyes. For the moment those mountains stand upon the horizon as the symbol of the only part of North America east of the Rockies which the French pioneers did not possess before others by the trails of their feet or the paths of their boats. Verrazano of Dieppe had sailed along the Atlantic shore front, but so, perhaps, had Cabot. Ribaut had been "put to the knife" in Florida, but it was the knife of a Spaniard whose compatriots had been there before Ribaut. Étienne Brûlé had wandered all the way from Canada into Pennsylvania along the sources and upper waters of the Atlantic streams, but the colonists of other nations were sitting huddled at the mouths of the streams. And Father Jogues had endured the torturing portage from the shores of Lake George to the Mohawk, but the Dutch were by that time there to succor him from the Iroquois. Only with their eyes had the French beheld first of Europe the America of the eastern waters, whose inhabitants, when they came to put on uniform and fight for its independence, called themselves "Continentals," as if their little hem of the garment were the continent. One wonders--if to little purpose--what would have been the consequence if De Monts, whom Champlain accompanied to America in 1604, had planted his little colony at some place farther south in his continental grant made by Henry IV, stretching, as it did, all the way from what is now Philadelphia to the St. Lawrence--if, for example, he had anchored off the Island of Manhattan, as well he might have done, five years before Hudson came up the harbor in the _Half Moon_, had settled there instead of on the sterile island of Ste. Croix in the Bay of Fundy, where, amid the "sand, the sedge, and the matted whortleberry bushes," the commissioners to fix the boundaries between the United States and Canada discovered in 1793--nearly two centuries later--the foundations of the "Habitation de l'isle Ste. Croix" that the French had built in the gloom of the cedars. Or if, when the scurvy-stricken colony left that barren site, they had followed Champlain to the mouth of the Charles, la rivière du Guast--the site of Cambridge or Boston--or even to the Bay St. Louis--which is remembered in Champlain's journal as the place where the friendly Indians showed him their fish-hooks made of barbed bone lashed to wood, but which has become better known as Plymouth Bay where the Pilgrims landed fifteen years later--there instead of Port Royal, where even Lescarbot's "Ordre de Bon- Temps" could not overcome the evil reports in France concerning a "churlish wilderness"! Or if Champlain, instead of seeking later the Rock of Quebec--whose rugged charms he could not forget even in the presence of the site of Boston or in the streets of Paris--had laid the foundations of his faith and his courage on the Susquehanna, for example! In any one of these contingencies there might have been a more prosperous Acadia. New England might conceivably have become Nouvelle France, and New York City might be bearing to-day the name of a seventeenth-century French prince. An idle conjecture, but it does, I think, help us to appreciate the happy destiny (or by whatever name the sequence of events may be called) not that kept France out of that narrow Atlantic-coast strip but that put her in a position to become the power that should in a very true sense force the jealous, many-minded colonies of that strip into a union, make possible the erection of that feeble union into a nascent nation, give it, though under certain compulsion, territory to become a world-power, and finally furnish it, if grudgingly, with a great western, overmountain domain in which to develop a democratic and a nationalistic spirit strong enough to hold a continent-wide people in one republic. These services, intended and unintended, negative and positive, grudging and voluntary, performed, however, all in unsurpassed sacrifice and valiance not only of the explorers and priests but of the exiled soldiers, intimate how, out of all the misery of finding the northern water gate and keeping it and following the northern waterway and fortifying it, came the harvests--even if France did not gather them into her own granaries--of those who "sow by all waters." We might not have had some of the institutions we do have if Champlain or Poutrincourt had anticipated the English Pilgrims at Plymouth, but we might still be a colony or a cluster of republics, even with all that we have got by way of those and other English migrants, except for these hardy men who kept battling with the ice and snow and water and famine at the north. But what I wish to emphasize here--and I am much indebted to the young western historian Mr. Hulbert, for this view--is that France, struggling to keep the empire of her adventure and faith in the northern and western valleys of America, gave to the world George Washington. She made him, all unconsciously to be sure, first in war. She saved him, consciously, from the fate of an unsuccessful rebel. And she made it possible for him to be first in peace. These are all defensible theses, however much or little credit France may deserve in her purposes toward him. Up in those same White Mountains there rises one that bears his name, taller than the rest. It stands in a presidential range that has no rivalling peak. A singular felicity in the naming of the neighboring mountains has given the name Lafayette to the most picturesque of all. There are well-known and much-travelled trails to the austere peak of Mount Washington. There is even a railroad now. Doubtless no mountain in America is known in its contour to more people, though there are many of loftier height and of more inviting slopes. So the outlines of the life of Washington are known more widely than those of any other American. The trails to the height of his achievement and genius have doubtless been learned in the histories of France. And asking my readers to travel over one of those well-worn trails again, I can offer no better reason than that I may on the way call attention to objects and outlooks that should be of special interest to the eyes of a company of men and women whose geographical or racial ancestors gave us him in giving us the west. Washington was born a British colonist. His great-grandfather settled in Virginia at about the time that La Salle was making his way up the St. Lawrence to the seigniory of St. Sulpice above the Lachine Rapids. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were frontiersmen, farmers, or planters. He had himself the discipline of the plantation, but he learned surveying and had also the sterner experiences of its frontier practice. Then came his appointment at nineteen as an adjutant-general of colonial militia in Virginia and with that office the still sterner disciplines beyond the frontier, where France was tutor, without which tuition he would doubtless have become and remained a successful colonial Virginia planter and general of militia. I have estimated that all the young men in America of approximately Washington's age at that time could probably have been gathered into the Roman colosseum back of the Pantheon; at any rate, into an American university stadium. They could have been reached by the voice of one man. (Which will intimate how small America was--one-fourth the size of Paris when he was born, one-half the size of Paris when he became a major of militia.) They were practically all country-born. There were, indeed, no great cities in which to be born. New York was little more than a town with only eight or nine thousand inhabitants; and Boston, the largest city at that time, had but thirteen thousand in the year 1732. They were men, as Kipling says of the colonials in the Boer War, who could "shoot and ride." And Washington was a strong athletic youth of fiery passions, which, given free rein, would have made him a successful Indian chief. (Indeed, the Indians admired him and called him Ha-no-da-ga-ne-ars--"the destroyer of cities"--and at last admitted him, as a supreme tribute, to their Indian paradise, the only white man found worthy of such canonization.) But, rugged, country-born men though they were, it was in no such neighborly democracy as Lincoln knew that they were bred. Washington had his slaves, his coat of arms, and the occupations and leisures and pleasures, so far as the frontier would permit, of an English gentleman. And it is no such slouchy, shabbily dressed figure as Lincoln's that Washington presents. I saw a few years ago a letter in Washington's own hand, in which he gave directions to the tailor as to the number of buttons that his coat should have, the shape of its lapel, and the fit of its collar. He was most insistent upon the conventions, though if such an assembly had been held, as I have suggested, of the young men from the eastern waters, there would have been no such uniformity of costume as now makes an audience of men in America, or in Europe, so monotonously black and white. These young men did not dress alike; they did not spell alike. Washington's letters show that he did not even spell consistently with himself. And that first man of the eastern waters to follow the French in establishing a settlement on the western waters, Daniel Boone, left this memorial of his orthography on a tree in Kentucky: "C-I-L-L-E-D A B-A-R." They did not dress alike, they did not spell alike, they did not think alike. It was a great, and it must have seemed a hopeless, motley of men who were all unconsciously to lay the foundations of a new national structure. They were all of immigrant ancestors, and most of them of most recent immigrant ancestry, or of foreign birth. Though much more homogeneous in their lineage than the present immigration, they had not the unifying agencies that now keep Maine and Florida within a few minutes of each other by telephone or a few hours by rail. But there were in all, immigrants and sons of immigrants, hardly more in number than now enter that same land as aliens in one or two years. I spoke a few years ago at a dinner of the descendants of the _Mayflower_ and was told that they numbered in all the country, as I recall, about three thousand--three thousand descendants in three hundred years of a hundred colonists, half of whom perished in the first winter; which leads one to wonder what the land of the _Mayflower_ and the nation of George Washington will be in three hundred years, when the descendants of each shipload of immigrants of to-day will have increased in like ratio. From a single steerage passenger cargo, of the _Lusitania_ or _Mauretania_, let us say, we shall have twenty, thirty, or forty thousand Lusitanians or Mauretanians as descendants; and from a single year's immigration thirty millions. The descendants of the colonial ships will be lost in this mighty new progeny of the ships of Europe and will numerically be as negligible as the North American Indian is in our census today. But to come back to Washington: the appointment of the stripling as adjutant-general with rank of major was two years after the humpbacked Governor Galissonnière had sent Celoron down the Ohio on that historic voyage of plate-planting, the news of which had finally reached the ears of the governor of Virginia, who with many planters of Virginia (Washington's family included) had a prospective interest in lands along that same river. Then came the word through Indian and trader (the only long-distance telephones of that time) that forts were beginning to grow where the plates had been planted. It was then that the young farmer, surveyor, soldier, just come of age, was chosen to carry a message to the commander of the nearest French fort in the valley--Fort Le Boeuf, which I have already described--about fifteen miles from Lake Erie on the slight elevation from which the waters begin to flow toward the Mississippi. The commander was Legardeur de St. Pierre, a one-eyed veteran of wars, but recently come from an expedition out across the valley toward the Rockies. Parkman has made this picture of the momentous meeting of France and America in the western wilderness, which in its peopling has kept only a single tree of those forests, a tree pointed out to me as the Washington tree, though it, too, may have come with the migrants: "The surrounding forests had dropped their leaves, and in gray and patient desolation bided the coming winter. Chill rains drizzled over the gloomy 'clearing,' and drenched the palisades and log-built barracks, raw from the axe. Buried in the wilderness, the military exiles [Legardeur and his garrison] resigned themselves as they might to months of monotonous solitude; when, just after sunset on the eleventh of December, a tall youth [and he was only an inch shorter than Lincoln, six feet three inches] came out of the forest on horseback, attended by a companion much older and rougher than himself, and followed by several Indians and four or five white men with packhorses. Officers from the fort went out to meet the strangers; and, wading through mud and sodden snow, they entered at the gate. On the next day the young leader of the party, with the help of an interpreter, for he spoke no French [a deficiency which he laments with greatest regret later in life], had an interview with the commandant and gave him a letter from Governor Dinwiddie. St. Pierre and the officer next in rank, who knew a little English, took it to another room to study it at their ease; and in it, all unconsciously, they read a name destined to stand one of the noblest in the annals of mankind, for it introduced Major George Washington, Adjutant-General of the Virginia Militia." [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," 1:136-7.] At the end of three days the young British colonial officer of militia started on his perilous journey homeward, having been most hospitably entertained by the one-eyed veteran, bearing on his person a letter which St. Pierre and his officer had been the three days in preparing. The brave, courteous, soldierly lines of the frontier deserve to be heard to- day both in France and America: "I am here by Virtue of the Orders of my General; and I entreat you, Sir, not to doubt, one Moment, but that I am determined to conform myself to them with all the Exactness and Resolution which can be expected from the best Officer.... I don't know that in the Progress of this Campaign [of repossession] anything passed which can be reputed an Act of Hostility or is contrary to the Treaties which subsist between the two Crowns.... Had you been pleased, Sir, to have descended to particularize the Facts which occasioned your Complaints I should have had the Honor of answering you in the fullest, and, I am persuaded, most satisfactory Manner." In the spring the two hundred canoes which Washington saw moored by the Rivière aux Boeufs carried the builders of Fort Duquesne and a garrison for it down La Belle Rivière, and a little later is heard the volley of the Virginia backwoodsmen up on the Laurel ridges a little way back from Duquesne, the volley which began the strife that armed the civilized world--the backwoodsmen commanded by the Virginia youth, George Washington. It is in that lonely ravine up among the ridges which I have described in an earlier chapter that the union of the eastern and western waters began. And there should be a monument beside Jumonville's to keep succeeding generations mindful of the mighty consequence of what happened then. This fray of the mountains was one of the most portentous of events in American history. It was not only the grappling of two European peoples and two systems of government out upon the edges of the civilized world-- the stone-age men assisting on both sides--a fray in which Legardeur de St. Pierre, Coulon de Jumonville, and de Villiers, his avenging brother, were France, and Washington was England. It was the beginning of the making of a new nation, of which that tall youth, who found the whizzing of bullets a "charming sound," was to be the very cornerstone. He was here having his first tuition of war. De Villiers let him march back from Fort Necessity unharmed, when he might, perhaps, have ended the career of this young major in the great meadows where they fought "through the gray veil of mists and rain." Washington was taught by France, in these years of border warfare--for he went four times over the mountains-- he was spared by France in the end to help take from France the title of the west, or so it seemed when, in 1763, the war which his command had begun was ended in the surrender of that vast domain to England. But we know now that the struggle had other issue. The steep path of the years when the colonies were taught their first lessons of federation by their common fear of the French and their allies, led by the tall young man who emerged from the woods back of Fort Le Boeuf and later assisted by the moral and pecuniary sympathy of France, by the presence of her ships along their menaced coasts, by the counsels of her admirals and generals, and by the marching and fighting of her soldiers side by side with theirs, you know. It is a path so marked by memorials as to need no spoken word. Only one vista in this trail of gloom with overhanging clouded sky need detain us a moment. It lets us see Benjamin Franklin rejoicing in Paris after the news of the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga in 1777. We see Beaumarchais rushing away from Franklin's lodgings in Passy to spread the good news, and in such mad haste that he upset his carriage and dislocated his arm. And when we next look out from the path we see the British soldiers passing in surrender between two lines drawn up at Yorktown, the American soldiers on one side with Washington at their head, and on the other the French soldiers under Count Rochambeau. Washington and Legardeur de St. Pierre at Fort Le Boeuf, Washington and Rochambeau at Yorktown! You have been told again and again that except for the France of Rochambeau the War of Independence would probably have failed and that the colonies would have remained English colonies. But let us remember that except for the France of Legardeur de St. Pierre there would probably not have been, as Parkman says, a "revolution"; and by the France of Legardeur I mean the spirit of France that had illustration in his lonely, exiled watching of the regions won by her pioneers. The French man-of-war _Triumph_ brought to Philadelphia in May of 1783 the treaty of Paris. In the December following General Washington said farewell to his officers and returned to Mount Vernon, his estate on the Potomac. There he was busied through the next few months in putting his private affairs in order, in superintending the reparation of his plantation, and in receiving those who came to him for counsel or to express their gratitude. It was as a level bit of the mountain trail from which the traveller catches glimpses of a peaceful valley. And that is all that the traveller usually sees. But there is a farther view. From that level path one can see over the Alleghanies the great valley so familiar to our eyes from other points of view, stretching toward the Mississippi. In the autumn of 1784 (eight months after his farewell to the army) Washington leaves his home, as it appears, to visit some lands which he had acquired as one result of his earlier and martial trips out beyond the Laurel Hills. He had title to forty thousand acres beyond the mountains. He had even purchased the site of this first battle in the meadows, where he had built Fort Necessity and where he was himself captured by the French, but from which he was permitted to go back over the mountains with his flags flying and his drums beating. A "charming field of encounter" he called the place in his youthful exuberance before the battle in 1753. "Much Hay may be cut here When the ground is laid down in Grass; and the upland, East of the Meadow is good for grain," he wrote in his unsentimental diary, September 12, 1784. For over the mountains he went again on what was thought but a trip of personal business. But on the third day of the journey, September 3d, he writes, incidentally, as explaining his desire to talk with certain men: "one object of my journey being to obtain information of the nearest and best communication between the Eastern and Western Waters." And as he advances this becomes the possessing object. Here are a few extracts from that diary still preserved in his own hand which give the intimation of a prescience that should in itself hold for him a grateful place in the memory of the west and of a concern about little things that should bring him a bit nearer to our human selves: _September 6_. "Remained at Bath all day and was showed the Model of a Boat constructed by the ingenious Mr. (James) Rumsey for ascending rapid currents by mechanism.... Having hired three Pack horses to give my own greater relief...." _September 11._ "This is a pretty considerable water and, as it is said to have no fall in it, may, I conceive, be improved into a valuable navigation...." _September 12._ "Crossing the Mountains, I found tedious and fatieguing [_sic_].... In passing over the Mountains I met numbers of Persons and Pack horses ... from most of whom I made enquiries of the nature of the Country...." _September 13._ "I visited my Mill" [a mill which he had had built before the Revolution].... _September 15._ "This being the day appointed for the Sale of my moiety of the Co-partnership Stock many People were gathered (more out of curiosity I believe than from other motives). My Mill I could obtain no bid for...." _September 19._ "Being Sunday, and the People living on my Land, apparently very religious" [these were Scotch-Irish who had squatted on a rich piece of land patented by Washington], "it was thought best to postpone going among them till to-morrow...." _September 20._ "I told them I had no inclination to sell; however, after hearing a good deal of their hardships, their Religious principles (which had brought them together as a society of Ceceders [_sic_]) and unwillingness to seperate [_sic_] or remove; I told them I would make them a last offer...." _September 22._ "Note--In my equipage Trunk and the Canteens--were Madeira and Port Wine--Cherry bounce--Oyl, Mustard--Vinegar--and Spices of all sorts--Tea, and Sugar in the Camp Kettles (a whole loaf of white sugar broke up about 7 lbs. weight).... My fishing lines are in the Canteens...." _September 23._ "An Apology made to me from the Court of Fayette (thro' Mr. Smith) for not addressing me." The Cheat at the Mouth is about 125 y'ds wide--the Monongahela near d'ble that--the colour of the two Waters is very differ't, that of Cheat is dark (occasioned as is conjectured by the Laurel, among which it rises, and through which it runs) the other is clear, & there appears a repugnancy in both to mix, as there is a plain line of division betw'n the two for some distance below the fork; which holds, I am told near a Mile.--the Cheat keeps to the right shore as it descends, & the other the left. _September 25._ "At the crossing of this Creek McCulloch's path, which owes its origen [_sic_] to Buffaloes.... At the entrance of the above glades I lodged this night, with no other shelter or cover than my cloak & was unlucky enough to have a heavy shower of Rain." _September 26._ "We had an uncomfortable travel to one Charles Friends, about 10 miles; where we could get nothing for our horses, and only boiled Corn for ourselves." _October 1._ "I had a good deal of conversation with this Gentleman on the Waters, and trade of the Western Country." _October 4._ "I breakfasted by Candlelight, and Mounted my horse soon after daybreak. I arrived at Colchester, 30 Miles, to Dinner; and reached home before Sun down." [Footnote: A. B. Hulbert, "Washington and the West," pp. 32-85.] In this revelation of Washington out of the laconic misspelled entries of his diary we have not only a most human portrait but an intimation of his practical far-seeing statesmanship. He looms even a larger figure as he rides through the fog of the Youghiogheny, for there he appears as the prophet of the eastern and western waters. In his vision the New France and the New England are to be indissolubly bound into a New America. He had written Chevalier de Chastellux from Princeton, October 12, 1783, after a return from the Mohawk Valley, that he could not but be struck by the immense extent and importance "of the vast inland navigation of these United States," that should bring that great western valley into communication with the east, and that he would not rest contented until he had explored that western country and traversed those lines which have given bounds to a new empire. And as he comes back over the Alleghanies from this journey of six hundred and eighty miles on the same horses he writes: "No well-informed mind need be told how necessary it is to apply the cement of interest to bind all parts together by one indissoluble band." And the indissoluble band is the smooth road and the navigable stream or canal. [Footnote: A. B. Hulbert, "Washington and the West," p. 100.] England and France had both restrained western migration, and the young provincial republic was doubtless of no mind to encourage it, so far as it then knew its mind. But Washington had a larger, wiser view than any other except Franklin, and even Franklin was not ardent for the canals. Washington was thinking, some will say, of the trade that would come over those paths; and so he was, but it was not primarily for his own advantage, not for the trade's sake, but for the sake of the weak little confederation of States for which he had ventured all he was and had. He was (as my old professor of history in Johns Hopkins was the first to point out [Footnote: Herbert B. Adams, "Washington's Interests in Western Lands," in _Johns Hopkins University Studies._ Third series, No. I, 1885.]) the first to suggest the parcelling of the western country into "free, convenient, and independent governments," and here he appears the first not to speculate about but to seek out by fording streams and climbing mountains a practical way to a "more perfect union," and not merely for those jealous States lying along the Atlantic and within reach of its commerce, but for all the territory and people of their new heritage. And singularly enough this very journey led not only to the establishment of those paths between the east and west, the national road, the canals reaching toward the sources of the rivers, and ultimately the trans- Alleghany railroad, but to the making of that unmatched document, the Constitution of the United States. And in this wise: Washington called the attention of Virginia and Maryland to the importance of opening a communication between the Potomac and James and the western waters. He writes to Lafayette of being at the meeting of the Maryland Assembly in that interest. [Footnote: John Pickell, "New Chapter in the Early Life of Washington in Connection with the Narrative History of the Potomac Company, 1856," pp. 133-4.] These two States appointed commissioners to confer concerning this and other matters. Their recommendations resulted in the calling of a more widely representative convention, and this in turn in the convening of a body to revise the entire federal system. So this peaceful journey of the warrior over the mountains to the great meadows and down into the tangled ravines of West Virginia became not only the prophecy of the indissoluble bond between the east and west; it became the first step in that movement which led the original States themselves into that more perfect union. The sequence, which did not occur to me until I read recently the diary of that trans-Alleghany journey, gives Washington a new, if a homelier, majesty. Napoleon the Great has spoken his praise of Washington as a general. Many of our own historians agree that it is very doubtful if without Washington the struggle for independence would have succeeded. Other men were important. He was indispensable. This intimates the occasion we have for gratitude that the commander of the French let him march out of Fort Necessity in 1754. The world has for a century been repeating the eulogies that have outlived the invective of his day--and that are only now becoming humanized by the new school of historians who will not sacrifice facts to glowing periods. Washington is now more of a human being and less of a god than the Washington whom Lincoln found in Weems's "Life." Yet with all the humanizing is he the austere, rugged, inaccessible mountain, its fiery passions hidden, its head above the forests. And so will he stand in history the justest of men, a man of highest purity of purpose and of greatest practical wisdom; but, if as a mountain, then as one that hides somewhere in its slopes such a path as we have learned to know in our journeys over this course, a portage path between two great valleys which its summit has blessed, for he was as a portage path between the eastern and western waters, between the institutions of New England and the fleur-de-lis fields of Nouvelle France. I have visited the unmarked field where Fort Le Boeuf once stood, by French Creek, the field where "the most momentous and far-reaching question ever brought to issue on this [American] continent" [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," 1:4.] was put by the stripling Washington to the veteran Legardeur de St. Pierre. I have, in my worship of the great general, followed through the rain and sleet of a winter's night and in the mud of a country road his famous march from the crossing of the Delaware to Trenton, made in that December night of 1776 when the struggle seemed most hopeless. And I have been in the place in which--as to at least one historian--he seems to me the most of a man and the most of a prophet, even the most of a god, out in the glades and passes, the rains and fogs, of the Alleghanies, fording the streams and following the paths of buffalo and deer in an attempt to find a way between the east and west. CHAPTER XVI THE PRODUCERS On the wonderful background which the passing life of that valley has filled with dim epic figures that are now but the incarnations of European longings, as rich in color as that which lies more consciously back of Greece and Rome or in the fields of Gaul (the splendors of the court of Versailles shining through the sombre forests and into the huts of the simple habitants)--on this I have depicted the rather shadowy suggestions of a matter-of-fact, drab democracy which is usually made to obscure all that background with its smoke. But if I have made your eyes see what I have tried to show, the colors and figures of the background still show themselves. I have now to put against that wonderful background, dim as it is, the new habitants. I suggested earlier the emergence of their gaunt figures from the forests and the processional of their ships of the prairies through the tall grass that seemed as the sea itself. I had in my thought to speak of these new inhabitants as workers, but that word has in it too much of the suggestion of endless, hopeless, playless labor. Yet they are workers all-or nearly all. There are some tramps, vagrants, idlers, to be sure, the spray of that restless sea. But when a man of great wealth wishes to give up systematic work he generally goes out of the valley or begins a migratory life, as do the wild birds of the valley. But these busy, ever-working people of the valley are better characterized by other names, and they may be divided into three overlapping classes: I. The precursors, those that run before, the explorers, the discoverers, the inventors, the prophets. II. The producers, those, literally, who lead forth: the dukes, marshals, generals of democracy, bringers forth of things from the ground, the waters, by brain and muscle; and the transporters of the things brought forth to the places of need. III. The poets, that is, in the old pristine Greek sense, the makers, the creators, in the generic sense, and not merely in the specific sense of makers of verses. If you object to my terminology as exalting too much the common man, as putting sacred things to profane use, as demeaning prophecy and nobility and poesy, I shall answer that it is because of the narrowing definitions of convention that only the makers of verses, and not all of those, are poets, that only men of certain birth or ancestry or favor are dukes, and that prophets have entirely disappeared. And I bring to my support the more liberal lexicography of science, whose spectroscopy now admits the humblest elements into the society of the stars; whose microscopy, as Maeterlinck has helped us to become aware, has permitted the flowers to share the aspirations of animal intelligence; whose chemistry has gathered the elements into a social democracy in which no permanent aristocracy seems now to be possible, except that of service to man; whose physics has divided the atom and yet exalted it to a place which would lead Lucretius, were he writing now, to include it in Natura Deorum instead of Natura Rerum. The son of Sirach, in his Book of Wisdom, has described the man who did the work of the world in ancient times; for "how shall he become wise," begins this essay, "that holdeth the plough, that glorieth in the shaft of the goad, that driveth oxen, and is occupied in their labors, and whose discourse is of the stock of bulls? He will set his heart upon turning his furrows, his wakefulness is to give his heifers their fodder. So is every artificer and work-master that passeth his time by night as by day, they that cut gravings of signets; and his diligence is to make great variety; he will set his heart to preserve likeness in his portraiture, and will be wakeful to finish his work. So is the smith, sitting by the anvil, and considering the un-wrought iron; the vapor of the fire will waste his flesh, and in the heat of the furnace will he wrestle with his work; the noise of the hammer will be ever in his ears, and his eyes are upon the pattern of the vessel; he will set his heart upon perfecting his works, and he will be wakeful to adorn them perfectly. So is the potter sitting at his work, and turning the wheel about with his feet, who is always anxiously set at his work, and all his handiwork is by number; he will fashion the clay with his arm, and will bend its strength in front of his feet; he will apply his heart to finish the glazing, and he will be wakeful to make clean the furnace. All these put their trust in their hands; and each becometh wise in his own work. Without these shall not a city be inhabited, and men shall not sojourn or walk up or down therein. They shall not be sought for in the council of the people, and in the assembly they shall not mount on high; they shall not sit on the seat of the judge, and they shall not understand the covenant of judgment; neither shall they declare instruction and judgment, and where parables are they shall not be found. But they will maintain the fabric of the world; and in the handiwork of their craft is their prayer." The wisdom of the scribe, however, he said, "cometh by opportunity of leisure." That wisdom the west, as I have already intimated, has not yet learned. Such a scene as I witnessed a little time ago in the amphitheatre of the Sorbonne, a scene typical of what occurs many times a day there, is not yet to be seen in the valley. I saw that hall filled in the early afternoon with an audience markedly masculine, listening to a lecture on early Greek life, interspersed with readings from the Homeric epics. I cannot visualize, much as I could wish to, a like scene in the Mississippi Valley, except in the atmosphere of a woman's club, or at an assembly on the shore of the lake Chautauqua, which I have described in the narrative of the "sowing of the leaden plates," where men and women are for a little time shut away from their normal occupations in a fenced or walled town; or in a university where attendance upon the lecture is required for a degree. I cannot visualize it even with such a charming and amphionic lecturer as the great scholar who gave the lecture on Greece [Footnote: Dean Croiset.] to which I have referred. It is that want, in the valley, of appreciation of the value of leisure and of its wisdoms, it is that worship of what the son of Sirach called the "wisdom of business," or busyness, it is that disposition not to listen to the voices of the invisible multitude of spirits of the past (who after all help to constitute a nation no less than the multitude of spirits of the present, and of the future), it is that inability to credit disinterested, materially unproductive, purposes and pursuits, and fit them into the philosophy of a perfectibility based on material prosperity --it is all of these that intimate the shortcomings of that life of the Valley of Hurry. I saw another great and, as it seemed, non-university audience in the same amphitheatre in Paris listening just after midday to a lecture on Montesquieu, and I had not sufficient imagination to picture such an audience as near the Stock Exchange of Chicago as the Sorbonne is to the Bourse--in that western city where men take hardly time at that hour of day to eat, much less to philosophize. They will not pause to hear Montesquieu remind them that "democracy is virtue" or to hear Homer speak of virtue as the ancients conceived it.' But, on the other hand, and there is another side, they will give up private business, eating, and all to stop a patent dishonesty, to improve the mail service, to discuss the smoke nuisance that happens to be choking their throats, or get rid of the beggar at the door, or to go to a ball game. They do not there in any great number appreciate the wonderful, indefatigable, disinterested efforts of scholars, artists, poets, in the narrower sense--the wisdoms of seeming idleness or leisure. On the other hand, I am sure that the poetry and prophecy of those who (again in the language of the son of Sirach) are "building the fabric of the world" are not appreciated either in Paris or Chicago, partly because of convention and inadequate representation in the old world, and because of the smoke and noise and the thought of the "unwrought iron" in the new world. Of the geographical precursors of that valley I have spoken. But there are others who have enlarged the boundaries and increased the size of acres discovered by the first precursors. Let me without fatiguing statistics give intimation of what I mean in one or two illustrations of the successors of the coureurs de bois, the runners before, the later prophets of the valley. Out of a trough up in the Alleghany Mountains--one of those troughs occupied by the sinewy Scotch-Irish pioneers who first, after the French, as you will recall, crept down into the great valley--there journeyed one day, a century after Céloron, a young man on horseback. He rode as many miles as La Salle went on foot in that memorable heart-breaking journey from Fort Crèvecoeur to Fort Frontenac. He rode through the territory which La Salle had so appealingly described to Louis XIV, now yellow with ripe wheat. Men and women, children and grandmothers, were toiling day and night with scythes and sickles to harvest it by hand, but could not gather it all, and tons were left to rot under the "hoofs of cattle." [Footnote: "He saw hogs and cattle turned into fields of ripe wheat, for lack of laborers to gather it in. The fertile soil had given Illinois five million bushels of wheat, and it was too much. It was more than the sickle and the scythe could cut. Men toiled and sweltered to save the yellow affluence from destruction. They worked by day and by night; and their wives and children worked. But the tragic aspect of the grain crop is this--it must be gathered quickly or it breaks down and decays. It will not wait. The harvest season lasts from four to ten days only. And whoever cannot snatch his grain from the field during this short period must lose it."--H. N. Casson, "Cyrus Hall McCormick," pp. 65, 66.] This precursor came with a sword, beaten not into a ploughshare but into a something quite as indispensable, a sickle--a vibrating sickle driven by horses, that would in a day do the work of a dozen, twenty, thirty, forty men, women, children, and grandmothers. In his eastern home he had, like La Salle, suffered from creditors, from jeering neighbors who thought him visionary, if not crazed, and from fearful laborers who broke his machines; but there in that golden western valley he found sympathy, and, on the Chicago portage, a site for the making of his sickles, fitted into machines called harvesters--there where the French precursor's boat and sword were found not long ago. Seventeen years later, on his imperial farm, Napoleon III (whose royal ancestors had given the very site for the factory) fastened the cross of the Legion of Honor upon the breast of this prophet. There were others who went with him or followed him into that richer valley, adding the self-rake to the sickle, then putting a platform on the harvester so that the men who bound the sheaves had no longer to walk and bend over the grain on the ground, as they had done since before the days of Ruth and Naomi, then devising an iron arm to take the place of one of flesh, and finally putting a piece of twine in the hand of that iron arm and making it do the work of the binder. I cannot help wondering what Tonty of the iron hand would have said could he have seen that half-human machine cutting the wheat, and with its iron hand tying it in bundles, there in the fields of Aramoni, just back of the Rock St. Louis. But I do not need to idealize or emphasize to men of France the service of this particular precursor, who was for years considering the unwrought iron, making experiment after experiment before he came down into that golden valley, literally to multiply its acres a hundredfold; for the French Academy of Science declared that he had "done more for the cause of agriculture than any other living man," and a late President of the French Republic is quoted as saying that without this harvester "France would starve." The King of Spain, the Emperor of Germany, the Czar of Russia, the Sultan of Turkey, and the Shah of Persia have added their tributes to those of the President of the French Republic, and all the nations of the earth are literally bringing their glory and their honor into that city of the portage strip, which, in a sense, has leading across and out of it paths to all the other golden valleys of the earth, for we are told that the sickles are reaping the fields of "Argentina in January, Upper Egypt in February, East India in March, Mexico in April, China in May, Spain in June, Iowa in July, Canada in August, Sweden in September, Norway in October, South Africa in November, and Burma in December." When in France, walking one afternoon from Orange to Avignon, the first object I saw as I entered that charming city of the palace of the Pope was a sign advertising the McCormick harvester. I do not mean to intimate that all the sickles, that is, harvesters, are made on that portage strip, for if all the factories and coal lands (twenty thousand acres) and timber lands (one hundred thousand acres) and ore lands (with their forty million tons of ore) and railway tracks that unite to make these harvesters were brought together around that portage strip there would be no place for the city itself; but through one building on that strip the myriad paths do run, connecting all the tillable, grain-growing valleys of this planet; and yet a recent, most observing English critic, Mr. Wells, saw as he left that city only a "great industrial desolation" netted by railroads. He smelled an unwholesome reek from the stock-yards, and saw a bituminous reek that outdoes London, with vast chimneys right and left, "huge blackened grain- elevators, flame-crowned furnaces, and gauntly ugly and filthy factory buildings, monstrous mounds of refuse, desolate, empty lots, littered with rusty cans, old iron, and indescribable rubbish. Interspersed with these are groups of dirty, disreputable, insanitary-looking wooden houses." [Footnote: H. G. Wells, "Future in America," p. 59.] Nothing but these in a place whose very smoke was a sign of what had made it possible for the nations of the earth even to subsist at all in any such numbers, or if at all, on anything better than black bread. And, after all, this precursor, this runner before, was but one of hundreds of later Champlains, Nicolets, and La Salles, in the wake of whose visions came the producers, those who led forth the corn and wheat from the furrows, the trees from the forests, the coal from the ground, the iron from the hills, the steel from the retorts, the fire from the wells, the water from the mountains, electricity from the clouds and the cataract--dukes, field-marshals, generals, demigods whom no myth has enhaloed or poetry immortalized. Prometheus, bringing fire to mortals, did in a more primitive way what they have done who have led forth the oil of the rocks (petroleum) to light the lamps of the earth. Orpheus, who sang so entrancingly that mortals forgot their punishments and followed him, and Amphion, who drew the stones into their places in the walls by his music, performed no more of a miracle than a lad who tips a Bessemer converter. Hercules is remembered as a hero of the garden of the Hesperides for all time, whereas he probably but imported oranges from Spain to the eastern Mediterranean, and is hardly to be mentioned by the side of such a Mississippi Valley transporter and importer as Mr. Hill. But let us follow more particularly the producers of the fields, whom we call the farmers there, the men whom the son of Sirach had in mind when he said in the ancient days: "How shall he become wise that holdeth the plough, that glorieth in the shaft of the goad, ... and whose discourse is of the stock of bulls?" It was a farmer's son who invented the harvester, and four-fifths of the men (whom the writer, to whom I am indebted for many of these facts about the farmer, calls "harvester kings")--along with the plough kings and wagon kings of whom democracy has been dreaming-were farmers' sons. The plough, the self-binder, the thresher were all invented on the farm. The son of Sirach said: "They shall not be sought for in the council of the people, and in the assembly they shall not mount on high"; but fourteen of the first twenty-six Presidents were farmers' sons, and that statistic gives but merest suggestion of the farmer's part in all the councils of the people. Here are a few significant, graphic facts which would furnish interesting material for a new edition of Virgil's "Georgics" and "Bucolics" or lead Horace to revise his verses on rural life. There are practically five times as many farmers (under the early man- power definition of the farmer) as the census shows, for the farmer now works with the old-time power of five men. Six per cent of the human race (and the larger part of that six per cent is in the Mississippi Valley) produces, one-fifth of the wheat of the world, two-thirds of the cotton, and three fourths of the corn (and this takes no account of its reapers and mowers that gather the crops in other valleys). It would cost three hundred million dollars more to harvest the world's wheat by hand, if it were possible, than it costs now by the aid of the harvester and reaper. [Footnote: H. N. Casson, "Romance of the Reaper," p. 178.] Some years ago in a trial made in Germany in the presence of the Emperor and his ministers, it was shown that a Mississippi Valley harvester driven by one man could do more in one day than forty Polish women with old- fashioned sickles. [Footnote: H. N. Casson, "Romance of the Reaper," pp. 134, 135.] The precursor of the harvester saw grandmothers and mothers in the fields working day and night to cut and gather the harvest, but he could not now (except among the new immigrant farmers) see that spectacle. I cannot recall that, until I met that old-world population coming over the mountains as I made my first journey east out of that valley, over twenty years ago, I ever saw a woman at work in the fields. The gallantry of that primitive pioneer life kept her in the cabin, which was the castle, and, while her labor was doubtless not less than her husband's, it had the sanctity of its seclusion and its maternal ministries to life. In the new industrialism that has invited the daughters of the Polish women harvesters into the factories yonder there is this constant and increasing concern which is insisting upon a living wage, wholesome sanitary environment, and on shorter hours of labor for women and children--this purpose that will ultimately bring skies and sunsets without exposure or back-breaking labor. On my way to a provincial university in the north of France not long ago, I saw a peasant mother standing in the misty morning at the mouth of a small thresher, feeding into it the sheaves handed her by her husband, the horse in a treadmill furnishing the power. When I passed in the misty morning of the next day she was still feeding the yellow sheaves into the thresher; and I thought how much better that was than the flail. On a farm in the northwest, a hundred miles square, as long ago as 1893, three hundred self-binders were reaping the wheat at the cost of less than a cent a bushel--with practically no human labor beyond driving, [Footnote: H. N. Casson, "Romance of the Reaper," p. 178.] and there are seven thousand harvesting machines made each week [Footnote: H. N. Casson, "Cyrus Hall McCormick," p. 196.] by the one great harvester company alone. The time needed to handle an acre of wheat has been reduced by the use of machinery from sixty-one hours to three; of an acre of hay from twenty-one to four; of oats from sixty-six to seven; of potatoes from one hundred and nine to thirty-eight--which is significant in its promise of the wisdoms of leisure. [Footnote: H. N. Casson, "Romance of the Reaper," p. 179.] But machinery has also increased the size of the farm. In France and Germany, I am told, the average farm is but five acres in size, and in England nine; while in the United States it is one hundred and thirty- eight acres, and in the States west of the Mississippi two hundred and eleven acres. And the product? One harvest, in the picturesque words of Mr. Casson, would buy Belgium, two would buy Italy, three would buy Austria-Hungary, and five, at a spot-cash price, would take Russia from the Czar. Seven bushels of wheat for every man, woman, and child of the ninety or more millions in America and a thousand million dollars' worth of food to other nations! That is the sum of the product--of what has been led forth in a single year. But the leader forth, the producer, the man who set his heart upon "turning his furrows," whose "wakefulness was to give heifers their fodder," he has himself risen. He has, as I said of the farmers of Aramoni (the sons of the first settlers who are still turning up occasionally a flint arrow-head in the fields)--he has his daily paper, his daily mail, his telephone. He "pays his taxes with a week's earnings." He ploughs, plants, sows, cultivates, reaps by machinery. The poet Gray could find only with difficulty in that valley a footsore ploughman homeward wending his weary way, and Millet would in vain look for a sower, a man with a hoe, a woman reaper with a sickle, a man with a scythe or cradle. The new- world peasant is not only maintaining more than his per-capita share of the "fabric of the world" but he is taking his place in the councils of men. What is most promising now is that these followers of the old pioneers of France in that valley are beginning to add to their acres new dominions, discovered by the new pioneers of France, such as the chemists Lavoisier and Berthelot, forerunners of the modern schools of agricultural chemistry and physical chemistry. One hundred years after La Salle completed the waterway journey to the gulf through that valley, Lavoisier made a discovery of the composition of water itself that has been of immense benefit, I am told, to the farmer of that valley and of other valleys. And then came Berthelot with his teaching of how to put together again, to synthetize, what man has waste-fully dissipated. France's men of the lens and the retort have become precursors where France's men of the boat and the sword went first, and have opened paths to even richer fields than those in which the harvesters have reaped. There are as many agricultural colleges in the United States as there are States; there are at least fifty agricultural experiment stations, and there is ever new provision for scientific agricultural research. Here is a partial catalogue of the enactments and appropriations of the legislature in the valley States for two years only: LAWS AND APPROPRIATIONS SHOWING WORK DONE IN AGRICULTURAL EXPERIMENT AND EXTENSION WORK BY CERTAIN OF THE STATES, 1911-14. ALABAMA 1912.--$27,000, experiments with fertilizers, combating boll-weevil, plant breeding, horticultural investigations, agricultural extension, etc. 1913.--Same as for 1912. COLORADO 1911-12.--$5,500, experiments with potatoes. 5,000, experiments with alfalfa, grain, etc. 3,500, dry farming. 1913.--$47,500, experimental work in dry farming, dairying, etc. 1913-l4.--County commissioners, on petition of one hundred taxpayers, to appoint county agriculturist; salary paid by county and expenses by county, State, and United States. ILLINOIS 1913.--Authorized counties to appropriate $5,000 annually for soil and crop improvement. See "American Year Book, 1913," p. 466. IOWA 1913.--$500, cross-breeding of fruits and edible nuts. Authorizing establishment of county corporations for improvement of agriculture. 40,000, experiment station. 10,000, veterinary investigation. 17,000, experimental farm. 40,000, agricultural extension. See "American Year Book, 1913," p. 465. KANSAS 1913-14.--$55,000, experiment station. 15,000, production and dissemination of improved seeds. 102,500, for six branch stations, two of which are new. 125,000, pumping-plants at experiment station. LOUISIANA 1912.--Police juries of several parishes authorized to appropriate not to exceed $1,000 annually in aid of farmers' co-operative demonstration work; also to acquire and establish experimental farms. MICHIGAN 1912.--Authorizing and regulating county agricultural departments for advice and assistance to farmers. MINNESOTA 1913.--$60,000, maintenance of county agricultural agents; counties each to pay $1,000. MISSOURI 1913-14.--$25,000, county farm advisers. 20,000, soil experiments. 30,000, agricultural investigations. 5,000, promotion of corn growing. 12,000, soil survey. 50,000, hog-cholera serum work. 2,500, orchard demonstration. 10,000, agricultural laboratories. 12,000, animal husbandry. 5,000, dairying. MONTANA 1912.--$20,000, demonstration of dry-land farming. 1913.--County commissioners may, upon vote of 51 per cent of electors, appropriate $100 per month for agricultural instructor, remainder of salary to be paid by State and United States. NEBRASKA 1911-12.--$100,000, establishment of school of agriculture. 3,000, agricultural botanical work. 1913-14.--$3,000, agricultural botanical work. County to employ farm demonstrator on petition of 10 per cent of farm-land owners. 1,250 (maximum), annually to each accredited high school teaching agriculture, manual training, and home economics. 85,000, for fireproof building for agronomy, horticulture, botany, and entomology. OHIO 1913.--$229,200, aggregate of station appropriation. OKLAHOMA 1913.--Counties authorized to appropriate $500 annually for farmers' demonstration work. See "American Year Book, 1913," pp. 465-6. TEXAS 1911.--Authorizing county commissioners' courts to establish experimental farms. 1913.--Railroads may own and operate experimental farms. WISCONSIN 1913.--Beginning January 1, 1914, $10,000, county agricultural representatives, agricultural development, etc. WYOMING 1912.--$4,000, agriculture and soil-culture experiments. 1913.--$4,000, experiments along lines of agriculture and soil culture. 5,000, purchase and maintenance of experimental farm. 1914-15.--$5,000, dry-farm experiments. See "American Year Book, 1913," p. 466. And nearly every State availed itself by specific act of certain appropriations under a federal grant. In addition to all this, appropriations are generally made for the holding of farmers' institutes at which instruction is given by experts and farmers exchange experiences. The agricultural colleges have a total of over one hundred thousand graduates, men and women, and it is they, and those who follow in increasing numbers, who are to cultivate the valley of Lavoisier and Berthelot even as the pioneers and producers of the past have cultivated for the world the valley of Marquette and La Salle. It is not all as bright and promising as this rather generalized picture may seem to indicate. There are still isolations, there are bad crops in unfavorable places and untoward seasons. There are human failures. It is an intimation of the darker side that President Roosevelt appointed a commission [Footnote: Commission on Country Life.] a few years ago to see what could be done for the ignorances, the lonesomenesses, the monotonies of country life in America, and to prevent the migration to cities, even as Louis XIV. But all that I have described is there--aggressively, blusteringly, optimistically there--and is going most confidently on. It is for the most part a temperate life. All through that valley there has swept a movement, moral, economic, or both, which has closed saloons and prevented the sale of intoxicating drink of any sort in States or communities all the way from the lakes to the gulf. But, singularly enough, there is promise of a new age of alcohol, I am told. Farmers can distil a variety of alcohol from potatoes at a cost of ten cents a gallon and use it in gasolene engines most profitably, which leads one who has written most informingly and hopefully of the American farmer to foreshadow the day when the farmer "will grow his own power and know how to harness for his own use the omnipotence of the soil" and get its fruits most beneficially distributed. That there is a strong utilitarian spirit possessing all the valley I do not deny. But I often wonder whether we are not conventionally astigmatic to much of the beauty and moral value of such utilitarian life and its disciplines. There is intimation of this in a recent statement of a western economist to the effect that there was as great cultural value in developing the lines of a perfect milk cow as in studying a Venus de Milo, and in growing a perfect ear of corn as in representing it by means of color or expressing the rhythm of its growth in metered words. But, I believe that there is as much beauty and poetry there as among the isles of Greece, if only it were interpreted by the disinterested spirit and skill of the artist, the scholar, and the poet. If we turn for a moment to the precursors who have led the way to the valley that lies beneath, the valley of the strata of coal and iron, with its subterranean streams of precious metal, its currents of gold and silver, and its lakes of oil and gas, and from these precursors to the producers and transporters who have led these elements forth to the uses of man, we shall find a like story--another chapter of democracy's dreaming of kings. The same author whom I have quoted liberally above has written what he calls "The Romance of Steel" in that valley. It begins with an Englishman of French ancestry, Bessemer, and one Kelly, an Irish-American, born on the old Fort Duquesne point. They had discovered and developed, each without the knowledge of the other, the pneumatic process of treating iron--that is, of refining it with air and making steel. Bessemer's name became associated with the process. But the industry has made Kelly's birthplace, the site of the old French fort, its capital (with another of those poetic fitnesses that multiply as we put the present against the past). France not only gave to Pittsburgh her site but the crucibles in which her fortunes lay. Bessemer was the son of a French artist living in London in poverty. Young Bessemer had invented many devices, when Napoleon III, one day in a conversation, complained to him that the metal used in making cannon was of poor quality and expensive. He began experiments in London at the Emperor's suggestion and later sent the Emperor a toy cannon of his own making. It was in this experimenting, as I infer, that the idea struck him of making malleable iron by introducing air into the fluid metal. But his first experiments were not particularly encouraging, and when he read a paper on the process of manufacturing steel without fuel before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, it is said that every British steelmaker roared with laughter at the "crazy Frenchman" and that it was voted not to mention his silly paper in the minutes of the association. [Footnote: "On the 13th of August, 1856, the author had the honor of reading a paper before the mechanical section of the British Association at Cheltenham. This paper, entitled 'The Manufacture of Malleable Iron and Steel without Fuel,' was the first account that appeared shadowing forth the important manufacture now generally known as the Bessemer process. "It was only through the earnest solicitation of Mr. George Rennie, the then president of the mechanical section of this association, that the invention was, at that early stage of its development, thus prominently brought forward; and when the author reflects on the amount of labor and expenditure of time and money that were found to be still necessary before any commercial results from the working of the process were obtained, he has no doubt whatever but that, if the paper at Cheltenham had not then been read, the important system of manufacture to which it gave rise would to this hour have been wholly unknown." Henry Bessemer, "On the Manufacture of Cast Steel: Its Progress and Employment as a Substitute for Wrought Iron." British Association for the Advancement of Science, Report, 1865. Mechanical Science Section, pp. 165- 6.] To-day, on the same authority, "there are more than a hundred Bessemer converters in the United States," and they "breathe iron into steel at the rate of eighteen billion pounds a year"--"two and a quarter millions of pounds every hour of the day and night." With their companion open-hearth converters and attendant furnaces and mills, they not only hold the site of the old fort but make a circle of glowing fortresses around the valley--in Buffalo, in Birmingham, Alabama, and in the "red crags" of the Rockies at Pueblo, beneath Pike's Peak. And within ten years a whole new city, [Footnote: Gary, Indiana.] not far from Chicago, on Lake Michigan, has been made to order. A river was turned from its course, a town was moved, and an entirely new city was constructed with homes for nearly twenty thousand workmen near a square mile of furnaces and mills. The attention of the world has been centred upon the millionaires whom this mighty trade has made. The very book which I have quoted so literally carries as its luring subtitle, "The Story of a Thousand Millionaires." "A huge, exclusive preoccupation with dollar-getting," says H. G. Wells. But an occupation that finds the red earth and the white earth, carries it hundreds of miles to where the coal is stored or the gas is ready to be lighted, assembles the labor from Europe, and converts that red earth, with almost human possibilities, into rails and locomotives (that have together made a republic such as the United States possible), into forty- story buildings and watch-springs, into bridges and mariners' needles, into battle-ships and lancets, into almost every conceivable instrument of human use, can hardly be rightfully called a preoccupation with dollar- getting, though it has brought the perplexing problem that has so much disturbed the hopes of democracy, dreaming of such masterful children, producers, and poets, yet dreading the very inequalities that their energies create. There comes constantly the question as to how all this initiative which has been so titanic is to be reconciled with the general good--a world- wide and insistent problem, which will be more serious there when the neighborliness is not so intimate. But the new neighborly element will be found, we must believe, as an element has been found for the strengthening of steel. I was told by a chemist, when visiting the mills in Pittsburgh, that every steelmaker knows that a little titanium mixed with the molten iron after its boiling in air multiplies its tensile strength immeasurably, though no one knows just why it is so. Perhaps, in the plans for the new cities of Pittsburgh and Chicago, we have sign of the social titanium that will increase the tensile strength of democracy in the places where the stress and strain are greatest. But my concern just now is that the reader shall see how the valley first explored by the French has given and is giving bread to the world, and has postponed the dread augury of the Malthusian doctrine; how the larger valley of the explorers of the lens and crucible, Lavoisier and Berthelot, is opening into infinite distances; and how the under valley, when breathed upon by the air, has given its wealth to the over valley--and through this all to realize that France's geographical descendants are out of those three valleys evoking, making, a new world. For they are a people of makers--of new-age poets, not mere workers glorying in the shafts of their goads, wakeful to adorn their work and keep clean the furnace, and making their "craft their prayer" (an impossibility in these days of the high division of labor) but rough, noisy, grimy, braggart creators, caring not for the straightness of the furrow unless it produces more, the beauty of the goad unless it promotes speed, the cleanliness of the furnace unless it increases the output, or the craft itself; but only of the product, the thing led forth, and its value to the world. If so much is said of the dollar, it is because the dollar is the kilowatt, the measure of the product. And while we have not yet found the ideal way of distributing what has been led forth, do not let that fact obscure the world service of these new-world Prometheans, who have carried the fire to a mortal use which even the gods of Greece could not have imagined and have turned the air itself into fuel to feed it. A young man, born son of a stone-mason in that valley, who has been successively a student, clerk, lawyer, solicitor-general of a great railroad, its president, and later the head of an industry that is carrying electricity over the world, said to me not long ago that he was building a trolley-line in Rome. It seemed a profanation. But if the titular function of the official who holds the highest spiritual office there was once the care of bridges (Pontifex Maximus), will the higher utilization of those bridges not be some day made as poetic, as spiritual, as high a function of state and society? I see that son of the stone-mason, with blanched face and set jaw, facing and quelling a body of strikers threatening to tear up the tracks along the Chicago River, as brave as Horatius at the bridge across the Tiber. There is a vivid picture of democracy's greatest problem in that valley. Then I see him flinging almost in a day a new bridge across the Tiber. There is a companion picture, a gleam of democracy's poesy. One writing of the habitants of one of those smoky valley cities said: "They are not below poetry but above it." Rather are they making it-- rough, virile, formless, rhymeless. It reminds me of some of Walt Whitman's verses that at first seem but catalogues of homely objects on his horizon but that by and by are singing, in some rough rhythm, a song that stirs one's blood. Oil of rocks, led from cisterns in the valley, that Bonnecamp found so dark and gloomy on the Céloron journey, to the lamp of the academician and the peasant; wheat from millions of age-long fallow acres to keep the world from fear of hunger; flour from the grinding of the mills of the saint to whom La Salle prayed; wagons, sewing-machines, ploughs, harvesters from the places of the portages; bridges, steel rails, cars, ready-made structures of twenty stories from the places of the forts; unheard-of fruits from the trees of the new garden of the Hesperides (under the magic of such as Burbank); flowers from wildernesses! Would Whitman were come back to put all together into a song of the valley that should acquaint our ears with that rugged music-that rugged music wakened by the plash of the paddle and the swirl of the water in the wake of the Frenchman's canoe! As he is not, I can only wish that you who have read these chapters may have intimation of it, as not long ago in New York, standing before a rough, unsightly, entirely isolate frame in a university corridor--where there were heard normally only the noises of closing doors and shuffling feet--I put a receiver to my ears and heard, in the midst of these nearer, every-day noises, some distant cello whose vibrations were but waiting in the air to be heard. Some said there was but the slamming of doors, but I had evidence of my own ears that the music was there. I have not imagined this song of the valley, nor have I improvised it. Its vibrations which I myself feel are but transmitted as best an imperfect, detached frame in the midst of other sounds and interests can. CHAPTER XVII THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW The clearing in the forest for the log schoolhouse where Lincoln got his only formal schooling illustrates the beginning of the field of public provision for culture, a territory then made up in that valley largely of the white acres set apart from the domain of Louis XIV for the maintenance of public schools. I can tell you out of my own experience how meagre that provision was. Out on the open prairie a frame building--the successor of the log cabin--was built. I think the ground on which it stood had never been ploughed. I remember hearing, as if yesterday, a farmer's boy reciting in it one day what we thought a piece of lasting eloquence: "Not many generations ago where you now sit encircled by all the embellishments of life, the wild fox dug his hole unscared and the Indian hunter pursued the panting deer; here lived and learned another race of beings"--little realizing that, except in the encircling embellishments, we were sitting on such a site, and that we were the "new race of beings" and much nearer to the stone-age man than were they who built the ancient wall just back of the Pantheon in Paris. The thought of the nation for to-morrow was tangibly represented only by that hut twenty feet square, with its few nourishing acres, most primitively furnished, a teacher of no training in the art of teaching, a few tons of coal in a shed, a box of crayons, and perhaps a map. The master made his own fires and swept unaided, or with the aid of his pupils, the floor. When, years later, in a larger building on the same site I came to be master of the same school, and gathered for work at night the farmers' sons who could not leave the fields by day, except in winter, I even paid the expense of the light. Now, if not on that site, certainly on thousands of others, in schools springing from such beginnings, the community provides not only chalk and electric light, but pencils, paper, books, lenses, compasses, lathes, libraries, gymnastic apparatus, pianos, and even food, if not free, at any rate at cost, in addition to trained teachers, trained in public normal schools, and janitors, and automatic ventilators to insure pure air, and thermostats to preserve an even temperature. The public has become father, mother, physician, and guild master as well as teacher of the new generation. The public has even become the nurse, for in most of the large cities the kindergarten has become transformed into a public institution which takes the child from the home, sometimes almost from the cradle, but more often from the street, at the age of four, five, or six years, and keeps it until it is ready for the tuitions of the elementary grades. In St. Louis, just across and up the river from Fort Chartres, where the initial municipal experiment was made, there are now more than two hundred and eighty-three such schools. It has, moreover, gone beyond these serious maternal employments. The strenuous civilization of the west has insisted that every man shall work. But now that it has succeeded in this, it is not only beginning to insist that he shall not work too much--the maximum hours of labor in many employments being fixed by law--but he is being taught how to play wisely. One of the most stirring books that I have read recently, "The Spirit of Play and the City Streets," is an appeal written by Miss Addams, of Chicago, whose noble work has been for years among the people who live close by Marquette's portage hut--an appeal for the recognition of the play instincts and their conversion into a greater permanent human happiness. There are statistics which intimate that the per-hour efficiency of men in some parts of America, whose number of hours of labor has been lessened, has also been diminished--diminished because of their imprudent use of their leisure, of their play time. So the thought of social experts is turning to teaching children to play wisely, they whose ancestors were compelled to leave off playing. I speak of this here to intimate how far in its thought of the man of the future, the nation of to-morrow, that valley has travelled-first of all in its elementary training, and within much less than a half century, from chalk to grand pianos, and from inexpensive tuitions in reading, writing, and arithmetic to the dearer tuitions in singing, basket-weaving, cooking, sewing, carpentering, drawing, and the trained teaching of the old elementary subjects, with the addition of history, algebra, physiology, Latin, and modern languages. When the State of Iowa was admitted into the Union, in 1846, there were 100 log schoolhouses in use, valued each at $125. The latest statistics I have at hand show that in 1912 the average value of the 13,870 school properties in the State was $2,170, that the average expenditure for each pupil was $28.86, and for each inhabitant $6.58, and that of the 507,109 pupils enrolled in the State only six per cent were in private schools-- the average for the States of the west varying from less than one per cent to sixteen per cent. The elementary school followed the frontier at even pace. It was usually the first public building of every community, large or small. That everybody saw it for what it was, I cannot maintain; but that it was the symbol of the nation of to-morrow, borne daily before the people of the present is certain. The westerners carried rails in the Lincoln campaign, in their pride of his humble birth and vocation; they carried miniature log cabins in another campaign in exaltation of another frontier hero. They pictured ploughs and axes on the shields of their commonwealths. But if one were to seek a symbol for the democracy of that valley, one could find none more appropriate than the image of a frontier schoolhouse. It is the most poetical thing of all that western landscape, when it is seen for what it is, though it is not always architecturally imposing. A signal- box, says an English essayist, such as one sees along the railroads, is only called a signal-box, but it is the house of life and death, a place "where men in an agony of vigilance light blood-red and sea-green fires to keep other men from death." A post-box is only called a post-box; it is a sanctuary of human words, a place to which "friends and lovers commit their messages, conscious that when they have done so they are sacred, and not to be touched not only by others but even by themselves." [Footnote: G. K. Chesterton, on Mr. Rudyard Kipling, in his "Heretics," p. 41.] And so a schoolhouse is only called a schoolhouse, but it is a place where the invisible spirits of the past meet in the present the nascent spirits of the future--the meetinghouse of the nation of yesterday and to-morrow. And I would show that image of the schoolhouse upon a field of white, as suggesting those white acres consecrated of the domain of Louis XIV to the children of the west. Some years ago, when walking across the island of Porto Rico in the West Indies, just after its occupation and annexation by the United States, I met in the interior mountains one morning a man carrying upon his shoulders a basket filled with flowers, as it seemed to me at a distance. As he approached, however, I saw that he was bearing the dead body of his child, with flowers about it, to burial in consecrated ground miles away. The first task of the new government there, as in the western States, was to make fields consecrated for the living child, to set apart sites for schoolhouses--the place for the common school. That the common school has not in itself brought millennial conditions to the valley we are aware, even as universal man suffrage has not brought the full fruits of democracy. French philosophers and American patriots alike have expected too much perhaps of an imperfect human nature. But they have made their high demand of the only institution that can give in full measure what is sought in a democracy. First, it teaches the child the way and the means by which the race has come out of barbarism and something of the rigor of the disciplines by which civilization has been learned. Second, it gives this teaching to the whole nation of to-morrow. There are over ten million children in the public schools of that valley alone in America, and, as I stated above, less than eight per cent in the private schools; in the State of Indiana, where Lincoln had his slight schooling, less than three per cent are in private schools-that is, practically the entire people of the coming generation will have had some tuition of the common school, some equality of fitting. Third, as is to be inferred from the second fact, children of rich and poor, of banker and mechanic, doctor and tradesman, come together, and in a perfectly natural companionship, though in the great cities, where there is less homogeneity, this mingling is somewhat disturbed by social stratification and the great masses of immigrants. So is the motto of the French Republic written the length and breadth of that valley, though it may never actually be seen upon a lintel or door- post: the "liberty" of access to the knowledges which are to assist in making men as free as they can be; an elevating "equality" such as a State can give to men of unequal endowments, capacities, and ambitions; and a "fraternity" which is unconscious of else than real differences. I gave intimation in an earlier chapter of the cosmopolitan quality of the human material gathered into those houses of prophecy. There is separation of Caucasian from African in the south, and there is more or less unwilling association of Caucasian and Oriental in places of the far west on the Pacific slope, but except for these and for individual instances where, for example, the social extremes are brought together, these minglings are but microcosms of the State itself. The schools are not in that valley, in any sense, places provided by wealth for poverty, by one class for another--charity schools; they are the natural meeting-houses of democracy, with as little atmosphere of pauper or class schools as the highways, on which even the President must obey the custom which controls the humblest. And let me say in passing: there is no body of men and women in America more useful to the State, more high-minded, more patriotic, than the army of public school-teachers--our great soldiery of peace. They are a body six times the size of our standing army--more than a half- million in number (547,289)--recruited from the best stock we have and animated by higher purposes, more unselfish motives than any other half- million public or private vocationalists of America. The total expenditure for the common schools is but four and a half times the appropriation for the standing army, though the number of teachers is six times (which intimates how little we pay our public school-teachers relatively-- seventy-eight dollars per month to men, fifty-eight dollars to women teachers). These men and women, who take the place of father, mother, adviser, and nurse in the new industrial and social order--receive about one and a quarter cents a day per inhabitant, man, woman, and child--a little more than two sous per day. It is this two-sous-per-day army that is our hope of to-morrow. It is primarily upon its efficient valor that the future of democracy depends. For it is they, rather than the parents, especially in the great cities and in communities of large foreign elements, who have its making in their hands. Without them the nation of to-morrow would be defenseless. She would have to increase her standing army of soldiers, and even then, with the multitudes of individual ignorances, malices, selfishnesses growing in her own valleys and being disembarked by millions at her ports, she would be powerless to defend her ideals. One whom I have already quoted as speaking so disparagingly of Chicago said that the most touching sight he saw in America was the marching of the phalanxes of the nation of to-morrow past one of the generals or colonels of that standing army of teachers. It was not in Chicago, but it might have been. This particular phalanx had not been in America long. They were singing "Sweet Land of Liberty" as they marched, swishing their flags, and then they paused and repeated in broken speech: "Flag of our great republic, inspirer in battle, guardian of our homes, whose stars and stripes stand for bravery, purity, truth, and union, we salute thee! We, the natives of distant lands who find rest under thy folds, do pledge our hearts, our lives, and our sacred honor to love and protect thee, our country, and the liberty of the American people forever." [Footnote: H. G. Wells, "Future in America," p. 205.] A little florid, you may say. "But think," said the English visitor, even as he passed out into the filthy street, "think of the promise of it! Think of the flower of belief that may spring from this warm sowing!" And what gives most promise now is that this tuition has assumed a more positive interest in the nation of to-morrow. The pioneer school was a place of discipline, a place of fraternity, and it had the cooperation of the home discipline and of the discipline of the primitive industrial life in which the boy joined even during his school years. But that tuition was in a sense as unsocialized as was the democracy of that day. It was assumed that this meagre training would equip the boy with all the tools of citizenship. Being able to read, write, and cipher, his own instincts and interests would somehow procure good government and happiness. Whatever patriotic stimulus his school gave him, as I recall out of my experience, was through a history which engendered a feeling of hostility toward England. That is being succeeded by a positive programme that thinks very definitely of the boy's fullest development and of his social spiritualization. The schoolhouse has become, or is in the way of becoming, the civic centre of the nation. But on top of the eight years' training of the elementary school, which was considered at first the full measure of the obligation of the community, the State in that region came to build additional years of discipline--the high schools, first to equip young men for colleges or universities and then to fit them for the meeting of the more highly complex and specialized problems of life. These schools multiplied in the upper Mississippi Valley at an extraordinary rate after the elementary schools had prepared the way. In the northern part of that valley alone sixteen hundred were established between 1860 and 1902. And there is hardly a community of five thousand inhabitants that has not its fully organized and well-equipped high or secondary school; while even towns of a thousand inhabitants or less have made such provision. Near the site of the village of the Illinois Indians, the village where Père Marquette went from hut to hut in his ministries just before his death journey; where La Salle gathered about his rock-built castle his red allies to the number of thousands and attempted to build up what La Barre, in his letter to Louis XIV, characterized as an imaginary kingdom for himself--there is a beautiful river city, bearing the Indian name of "Ottawa," and in the midst of it a large building that was for me the capital of an imaginary kingdom, my one-time world, though it is called a township high school. I speak of it because it is typical of the instruction and influence that have come out of the long past, and that are looking into the long future, in thousands of the towns and cities that have each about them as many aspiring men, women, and youth as La Salle had savage souls about his solitary castle in the wilderness. These are the new Rocks St. Louis, these the eagles' nests of the new Nouvelle France--I have visited scores of them--at Peoria, that was Fort Crèvecoeur; at Joliet, where is now one of the best-equipped schools in the valley; at Marquette, upon Lake Superior; at Chicago, where I spoke one day to four thousand high-school boys and girls, for in most of these schools the boys and girls are taught together. The valley has one of these schools every few miles, where are gathered for the higher, sterner disciplines of democracy those who wish to prepare themselves for its larger service. Their courses are four years in length, and, though varying widely, have each a core of mathematics, English, foreign languages, and either science or manual training or commerce. In some large cities the schools are differentiated as general, manual training, and commercial. But the States of that valley have not stopped here. With the encouragement of national grants--again from the great domain of Louis XIV--they have established universities with colleges of liberal arts and sciences, and schools of agriculture, forestry, mining, engineering, pharmacy, veterinary surgery, commerce, law, medicine, and philosophy. There is not a State in all that valley that has not its university in name and in most instances in fact. They admit both men and women and there is no fee, or only a nominal fee, to residents of the State. These are the great strategic centres and strongholds of the new democracy. A little way back from Cadillac's fort on the Detroit River is one, the oldest, the University of Michigan-- founded in 1837--with 5,805 students. A few years ago I addressed there, at commencement, over eight hundred candidates for degrees and diplomas in law, medicine, pharmacy, liberal arts and science. A little way from the Fox-Wisconsin portage is another, the University of Wisconsin, with 5,970 students. A few years ago I sat in that beautiful seat of learning among men from all parts of the world offering their congratulations at its jubilee. And they sat in silk gowns only less ornate than Nicolet's when he came over the rim of the basin to treat with the Winnebagoes--whom he had supposed to be Chinese mandarins. I heard, too, the graduates receive their degrees on theses ranging from the poetry of a lesser Greek poet to the "pancreas of a cat." I spent a month in its library at a later time and found it superior for my purposes to any other in America. No higher institution of learning in America is more strongly possessed by the spirit of the ministry of scholarship directly to the people. It needs sorely advice of the arts that centre in Paris, as most of those universities do. It needs advice not of industry but of the indefatigable disinterestedness of the French. Behind the Falls of St. Anthony in the Mississippi River, first described and named by Father Hennepin, is the University of Minnesota, with 6,642 students. The principal deity of the Sioux was supposed to live under these falls, and Hennepin, the priest of Artois, speaks in his journal of hearing one of the Indians at the portage around the falls, in loud and lamenting voice haranguing the spirit to whom he had just hung a robe of beaver-skin among the branches of a tree. The buildings that are and are planned to be on this site would tell better than a chapter of description what a single State has done and is purposing at this portage of St. Anthony of Padua, where hardly more than a lifetime ago the savage was sacrificing beaver-skins to the god of the Mississippi. There are many great laboratories and academic buildings upon that high shore at present, but a score more are in prospect for this mighty democratic university of letters and science, law and medicine, that will house in other centuries perhaps not merely the appeased spirit of the Mississippi but such learning as is in Paris or was in Padua, whose saint is still remembered by the falls; for the university has the necessary means. When the Église of the Sorbonne, which Richelieu had consecrated, was being built, the French priests out along the shores of Superior were preparing the way for this new-world university. Certain lands in that iron region which they first explored were given by the nation as dowry to the university. These were not thought to be valuable, as at the time of the grant the most valuable timber and farming land had been sold. Fifteen years ago, more or less, a train-load of iron ore was brought down from that region to Allouez, a town on the lake named in memory of the priest of St. Esprit-- and now the lands of the university are valued at from thirty to fifty millions of dollars. [Footnote: "Forty Years at the University of Minnesota," p. 243.] One might follow the River Colbert all the way down the valley and trace its branches to the mountains on either side, and find in every State some such fortress: in Iowa a university with 2,255 students; in Illinois one with 4,330; and so on to the banks of the river in Texas where La Salle died--and there learn that the most extensive of all in its equipment may some day rise. These, besides the scores of institutions of private foundation, but compelled to the same public spirit as the State universities, tell with what thought of to-morrow the geographical descendants of France are doing their tasks of to-day, where Allouez and Marquette, Hennepin and Du Lhut, Radisson and Groseilliers, and the Sieur de la Salle wandered and suffered and died but yesterday, Their paths have opened and multiplied not only into streets of cities and highways and railroads but into curricula of the world's wisdoms, gathered from Paris and Oxford and Edinburgh and Berlin and Bologna and Prague and Salamanca, even as their students are being gathered from all peoples. Perrot spoke truer than he knew when he said to the savages of Wisconsin, "I am but the dawn of the day"; and the Indian chief who first of human beings welcomed Europeans the other side of the Mississippi River spoke in prophecy when he said that the earth had grown more beautiful with their coming. The common school, the high school, the college and university--the common school compulsory for every child; the high school open to every boy and girl, without regard to race, creed, or riches; the university accessible to every young man and woman who has the ambition, the endurance, to make his way or her way to the frontiers of the spirit and endure their hardships! For I think of these universities as the free lands that were out upon the borders of that valley, except that this frontier of the mind will never, never find its limit. There will always be a frontier beyond, for new settlers, new squatters, of the telescope which makes the universe smaller, of the microscope which enlarges it, of the written word, the spoken word, the unknown quantities, the philosophies of life. Do we not see the illimitable fields opening even beyond the vision of those men of the crucible and retort, who are but leading the new farmers on to visible fields of increasing richness? Hardly less cosmopolitan are the men of science and letters who are actually in those regions, and only less so those tens of thousands, who, like migrants of the earlier days, are going forward, many to the farthest, lonesomest frontiers of knowledge, but all to something beyond their immediate ancestral lot or field. I am not thinking of the additions to the world's learning in all this, great as it is but impossible of appraisement. Nor am I thinking chiefly of the industrial and material advantages. I think it was some bacteriological discovery, known as the Babcock test, resulting in a great improvement in the making of butter, that gave the University of Wisconsin its first wide sympathetic support. It was the discovery by a professor in one of the western universities of the means of inoculating with some fatal disease, and so exterminating, an insect that destroyed wheat and oats, which gave that professor a chancellorship, I am told, and his university more liberal appropriations. But those achievements and fames, while not to be belittled, I have no wish to catalogue and recite here. I am thinking of the social value of this great public educational system that is thinking constantly of tomorrow--of the world markets of to- morrow, to some extent, to which these curricula, as railroads' and ships' courses, lead; of the world's letters of to-morrow, perhaps; but more specifically and more especially of the higher happiness of those particular regions and the success of its democracy. I am thinking of what these institutions of the people's own devising are doing toward the making of a homogeneous spirit, in which individual, disinterested, and varied achievement will have a liberty to grow--as perhaps in no other soil of earth. Democritus said two thousand years and more ago: "Education and nature are similar. For education transforms the man, and in transforming him creates in him a new nature." The State in its three institutions--the common school, the high school, the college and university--has many in its care and under its tuitions for fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years, and in these tuitions has she created in her children a new nature, whatever their ancestry or place of birth. Memories of Europe's forges and trees, or fields of roses and golden mountains, and even of Asia's wildernesses, are in the names of many who enter those doors; the memories of other languages are in the muscles of their tongues or the formation of their organs of speech. Like the ancient Ephraimites at the fords of Jordan, they cannot "frame to pronounce" certain words. And memories of persecution or of vassalage are in the physical and mental attitudes of some. But they are all reborn of a genealogy impersonal but loftier in its gifts than any mere personal heritage--a genealogy which, like that of the children of Deucalion, begins in the earth itself, the free soil. I have often thought and spoken of how artificial differences disappear when, let us say, Smith (English) and Schmidt (German) and Cohen (Hebrew), Coletti (Italian) and D'Artagnan (French) and McGregor (Scotch) and Olsen (Scandinavian) and McCarthy (Irish) and Winslow (of old America) travel together through the parasangs of the "Anabasis," or together follow Caesar into Gaul, or together compute a solar parallax, or build an arch, or do any one of a thousand things that have no national boundaries or racial characteristics. This is an extreme but not an unheard-of assembling of elements which the State has the task of assimilating to its own ideals. I have not spoken, I cannot speak, of methods of that teaching, of its shortcomings, of it crudities in many places, of its general want of appreciation of form and color (of its particular need of France there), of its utilitarian inclinations, and of its eager haste. The essential thing that I have wanted to say is that this valley is not only more democratic socially and politically than any other part of America, unless it be that narrow strip farther west, but is also more consciously and vitally and constantly concerned about the nation of to-morrow. I spoke of the flaming ingot of steel swinging in the smoky ravine by the site of Fort Duquesne as the symbol of the new human metal that is made of the mingling of men of varied race, tradition, and ideals in the labor of that continent. But above that in a clearer sky shines a more hopeful symbol--the house of the school, the meeting-place of the invisible spirits, the place of prophecy, pictured against a white field. The historians have traced the origins of these institutions to New England, to England, to Germany, to Greece. It is not remembered that France went first and hallowed the fields. But it is my hope that out in that valley, once a year, school and university may be led to look back to the men who there ventured all for the "greater glory of God" and majesty of France and found a field for the greater freedom and fraternity of mankind. My own thought goes back to the place by the St. Charles River where Cartier's boat, which he could not take back to St. Malo because so many of his men had died, was left to be buried by the river, the place where Montcalm gathered his shattered army after the defeat on the Plains of Abraham. It was there that a structure once stood, made of planks hewn out of the forest, plastered with mud and thatched with long grass from the meadows. It was the residence of Notre Dame des Anges, the house from which the first martyrs were to go forth toward the west. This was, says Parkman, the cradle of the great mission of New France. And to this my thought goes as the precursor of the university in the Valley of the New Democracy. CHAPTER XVIII "THE MEN OF ALWAYS" If one travels along the lower St. Lawrence in summer, one sees the narrow strips of the one-time great seigniories, clinging like ribbons of varied colors, green, gold, and brown, to the ancient river, of Cartier and Champlain. There is on each strip, a little way back from the river, a picturesque cottage, usually thatched, not roofed by shingles, with its outbuildings close about, such as Longfellow writes of in Acadia-memories of homes "which the peasants of Normandy built in the reign of the Henries." There is usually on each a section of meadow for the cattle, a section of tilled field for the wheat and corn and vegetables and a section of woodland for the fire-wood--each strip, so divided, being a complete miniature seigniory. Everything is neat. One feels that not a wisp of hay is lost (for it was in haying time that I passed), that every tree is as carefully watched as a child, that whatever is taken from the fields they are not impoverished. The living owners, when they go to their graves, leave their little patches of earth as rich as they found them. There is no hurrying. The habitants go at the pace of their oxen. They are thrifty, apparently contented, conservers of what they have; they spend prudently for to-day; they save for to-morrow--not for the to-morrow of the nation, but for the to-morrow of the family. They are avowedly individualistic, nepotic conservationists and only in effect national. This is one picture. I put beside it another. Out on the farther edge of the Mississippi Valley one finds the other extreme. Within the past twenty-two years certain tracts of vacant land have been purchased by the government from the Indians (and let me here say that the government has been trying to deal fairly with these people; mistakes have been made, but I should say that the nation had in its recent treatment of them, despite reports I have heard in Paris, pauperized rather than robbed them). These tracts have been opened to settlement--all the rest of the great public domain that was immediately desirable having been occupied, as we have seen. When, in 1889, the first of these tracts, nearly two million acres, was to be opened, twenty thousand people were waiting just outside its borders--some on swift horses, some in wagons or buggies, and some in railroad trains. When the signal was given there was a race across the border and a scramble for farm sites; and on the part of the passengers on the trains, for town lots, when the trains had reached the predetermined sites of cities. At the close of the first day the future capital of what has for many years been a State had a population of several thousand inhabitants living in tents, and within a hundred days a population of fifteen thousand people, mostly men, an electric system in operation, a street-railway under contract, streets, alleys, parks, boulevards, stores, and bridges, four thousand houses under construction, five banks, fifteen hotels, fifty grocery stores, six printing-offices, and three daily papers--about as striking and unpleasant a contrast to that peaceful life on the St. Lawrence as one can well imagine. Practically all of the available land (nearly two million acres) was taken during the course of a few days. At the later opening of another tract one hundred thousand persons took part in the race for the "last of the people's land." And these scenes but illustrate the rough races to the gold-fields and the iron mountains and the oil-wells, in eagerness to seize whatever earth had to offer and turn it to immediate wealth--rough, restless precursors, producers, poets eager for to-day, yet coming by and by, as we have seen, to be ready to spend for to-morrow, building schools and universities, enlarging the field of public provision and service, and filling the land, once neighborly, individualistic, with institutions of philanthropy. But the habitant of that farther valley is considerate neither of himself nor of generous nature. He is ready to spend his all, or her all, of to- day for to-day and for to-morrow, and to some extent unselfishly, but not to save it. He lives "angerously" and takes all the risks. His thought of the future is not nepotic or thrifty; it is likely to be altruistic, publicistic. I suppose that the constitution and laws of Oklahoma, whose land was the last to be added to the public domain and its commonwealth among the last to the roll of States, has been more generous-minded toward its children than any other. It set apart not only sections sixteen and thirty-six in every township for the public schools; it reserved two more sections in every township for kindred uses. But in all this, as I pointed out, it is spending for the future, not saving, hoarding. The nepotic conservationist of the St. Lawrence, fixed in his place, saves because if he leaves but an exhausted field behind him he is robbing his children and grandchildren of their rightful, personal heritage. The "boomer" of Oklahoma exploits and spends lavishly because of a sublime confidence in the illimitability of the resources of nature and in the resourcefulness of the coming generations. But the natural scientists--the foresters, the physiographers, the geologists--have within a very few years been making themselves heard in warning. They have said that "the mountains of France, of Spain, and China have been denuded of their forests in large measure so that the supply of wood is inadequate to meet the needs of the people," [Footnote: C. R. Van Hise, "Conservation of Natural Resources in the United States," p. 3.] that "in Spain and Italy, though warm countries, the people suffer more from the cold than in America because of insufficient fuel," [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 2.] that "one-half of the people of the world go to bed hungry," [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 3.] or at any rate insufficiently nourished for the next day's work. But few listened to them except in the hills and in the valleys of abandoned farms. France, Italy, Spain, China were remote. The optimism fostered of new teeming acres and newly discovered mines was heedless of the warning. It tore down barns and built bigger, and it gave even more generously to the need of the hour and the day. But the scientists came even nearer home in their studies and statistics. These are some of the ominous and disturbing facts that are getting to the ears of the people out of their laboratories and experiment stations: The coal-fields of the United States (which lie almost exclusively in and upon the eastern and western edges of the Mississippi Valley) were, at the rate at which coal was used a few decades ago, practically inexhaustible. But the per-capita consumption has increased from about a ton in 1870 to 5.6 tons in 1907. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 23.] Up to 1908, 7,240,000,000 [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 25.] tons had been mined, but over ten million tons were wasted in the mining of seven billions. You may recall the prophecy which I quoted earlier, that if the mining and wasting go on at the same rate of increase as in the past few decades the supposed illimitable fields will be exhausted in one hundred and fifty years--that is by the year 2050. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 25.] This is one of the statistics of those watchmen on the walls who, instead of standing in high places with telescopes, sit at microscopes or over tables of figures. That seems a long period of time, one hundred and fifty years, but it was only a little longer ago that a French explorer saw the first signs of coal in that valley along the Illinois, and, as the scientist has intimated, there is no reason why we should not expect a future of thousands of years for the coal that has been thousands or millions of years in the making. The petroleum and natural-gas fields are also nearly all in that valley or on its edges. (I think it was in the narrow valley of La Belle Rivière, which Père Bonnecamp found so dark on that Celoron expedition, that this oil of the rocks was first found.) [Footnote: Natural gas and burning springs were early known to the French pioneers and Jesuits who penetrated the Iroquois country, as the following extracts show: "It was during this interval that, in order to pass away the time, I went with M. de LaSalle, under the escort of two Indians, about four leagues south of the village where we were staying, to see a very extraordinary spring. Issuing from a moderately high rock, it forms a small brook. The water is very clear but has a bad odor, like that of the mineral marshes of Paris, when the mud on the bottom is stirred with the foot. I applied a torch and the water immediately took fire and burned like brandy, and was not extinguished until it rained. This flame is among the Indians a sign of abundance or sterility according as it exhibits the contrary qualities. There is no appearance of sulphur, saltpetre or any other combustible material. The water has not even any taste, and I can neither offer nor imagine any better explanation, than that it acquires this combustible property by passing over some aluminous land."--Galinee's journal, 1669, in "Marshall Historical Writings," p. 209. "... The spring in the direction of Sonnontouan is no less wonderful; for its water--being of the same nature as the surrounding soil, which has only to be washed in order to obtain perfectly pure sulphur--ignites when shaken violently, and yields sulphur when boiled. As one approaches nearer to the country of the Cats, one finds heavy and thick water, which ignites like brandy, and boils up in bubbles of flame when fire is applied to it. It is, moreover, so oily, that all our Savages use it to anoint and grease their heads and their bodies."--"Jesuit Relations, 1657," 43:261. Pierre Boucher (governor of Three Rivers in 1653-8 and 1662-7) thus mentions the mineral products of Canada, in his "Histoire veritable et naturelle de la Nouvelle France" (Paris, 1664), chap. 1: "Springs of salt water have been discovered, from which excellent salt can be obtained; and there are others, which yield minerals. There is one in the Iroquois Country, which produces a thick liquid, resembling oil, and which is used in place of oil for many purposes."--"Jesuit Relations," 8:289.] If we assume that the fields have all been discovered and that the present rate of exploitation is to continue, the supply of petroleum will be exhausted by 1935 (twenty-one years), or, if the present production goes on without increase, in ninety years (_i.e.,_ eighty-six years), [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 48] and that of natural gas in twenty-five years (i. e., twenty-one years from 1914). [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 56.] Iron, the metal which the Indians worshipped as a spirit when they first saw it in the hands of the French, a substance so precious that their name for it meant "all kinds of good," has, too, been taken with feverish haste from its ancient places. Joliet and Marquette saw deposits of this ore near the mouth of the Ohio in 1673, but it was a century and a half before the harvesting of this crop, down among the rocks for millions of years before, began. And now, if no new fields are found and the increased use goes on at the rate of the last three decades, all the available high- grade ore will have become pig iron and steel billets, bridges, battle- ships, sky-scrapers, and locomotives, and all kinds of goods, within the next three decades. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 68.] The forests of the United States--the forests primeval, with the voice of whose murmuring pines and hemlocks Longfellow begins his sad story of the Acadians--contained approximately one billion acres, [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 210.] a region not conterminous with, but almost as large as, the Mississippi Valley. Of that great, tempering, benign shadow over the continent, tempering its heat, giving shelter from its cold, restraining the waters, there is left about 65 per cent in acreage and not more than one-half the merchantable timber--five hundred million acres gone in a century and a half. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 210.] And as to the land itself--the land first symbolized in the tuft of earth that St. Lusson lifted toward the sky that day in 1671 at Sault Ste. Marie, when he took possession of all the land between the seas of the north and west and south--in the first place, the loss each year from erosion is six hundred and ten million cubic yards. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 307, quoted from W. J. Spillman, "Report National Conservation Commission," 3:257-262.] This is, of course, inconsiderable in a short period but in a long period of years means a mighty loss of nourishing soil. With this loss is that of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, things of which the farmer had not even heard the names a few years ago. The yield of farms in the United States during the last forty years does not show a decreased average, but it must be remembered that in this period there have been brought under cultivation new and virgin acres, which have in their bountiful yield kept up the general average. One authority says that, taking the country by regions and by districts and considering what has actually happened, he is led to the conclusion that the fertility of the soil for 50 per cent of our country has been lessened. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 299.] The significance of these facts lies in the desire of the people to know the truth and seek a remedy. In a sense the public domain has been exhausted. The pick of the land has been pre-empted, occupied. But if it is to grow with all its crops, and to put forth with all its products such a public spirit as this, France will have given to America a treasure infinitely more valuable than the land itself which her explorers gave to Europe and the world. The beaver, which the French regarded as the first opulence of the valley, remains only as a synonym for industry, one of the States being called the "Beaver State," perhaps in memory of the beaver days but now in characterization of the beaverlike activity of its people. The hide of the buffalo which La Salle showed in Paris is now almost as great a curiosity in the valley as it was in Paris in 1680. Wild beasts now slink only in the mountains' margins. Domestic animals, natives of distant lands, live about the dwellings of men. Even the streams of water that bore the French into the valley have dwindled, many of them, or are in despair and tears, between shallows and torrents, longing for the forests, it is said by the scientists--longing for the days of the French, the poet would put it. So are the rivers crying, "In the days of Père Marquette"--the days of the "River of the Immaculate Conception." And so are the prophets of science crying as the prophets of inspiration cried of old: O valley of a hundred thousand streams, O valley of a million centuries of rock and iron and earth, O valley of a century of man! The riches of the gathering of a million years are spent in a day. Baldness has come upon the mountains, as upon Gaza of old. The trees have gone down to the waters. The iron has flowed like blood from the hills. The fire of the ground is being given to the air. The sky is filled with smoke. The soil is being carried into the sea; it's precious dust of nitrogen and phosphor blown to the ends of the earth. The fresh lands are no more. There are no mines to be had for the asking. The frontier has become as the centre, the new as the old. But it is not a hopeless prophecy--an unconstructive, pessimisstic, lamentation. The way of reparation is made clear. If I were to speak only of what has been done under the inspiration of that prophecy, I should have little that is definitely measurable to present, but in making a catalogue of the averting advice of that prophecy, I am giving intimation of what will in all probability be done. For the people of that valley are not wittingly going to give their once fertile lands as stones, even to the sons of others who ask for bread, nor their streams as serpents of pestilence to those who ask for fish. These are some of the items of their constructive conservation programme: _Coal._--The waste in the mining of coal must be reduced from 50 and 150 per cent of the amount taken out to 25, 15, or 10 per cent by the working of upper beds first, the utilization of slack, etc. [Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 26, 27.] The reckless waste of coal in the making of coke can be prevented by the use of the right sort of oven. It is estimated that there would be a saving of $50,000,000 per annum if such a substitution were made. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 28. ] The tremendous loss of the power value, [Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 29, 30.] from 20 to 33 per cent, and of illuminating value [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 32.] (99 per cent) in coal because of its imperfect consumption can be greatly reduced by the employment of mechanical stokers and other devices. The use of the gas- engine in the place of the steam-engine, [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 31.] the use of power developed from water, and the diffused carbon dioxide in the air tempering the climate are also intimations of forces that may lengthen the life of the coal, 99 per cent of which still remains in the keeping of the valley. It is not too late. [Footnote: See "The Coal Resources of the World," International Geological Congress, 1913.] _Petroleum._--Its probable life may be lengthened beyond ninety years by its restriction to lubricating and illuminating uses only and by the prevention of its exportation. [Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 50-55.] _Natural Gas._--Its flame is ephemeral at best, but its light may be kept burning a little longer if the prodigious waste is prevented. During 1907 four hundred billion feet were consumed and almost as great an amount wasted through uncontrolled wells, leaky pipes, etc. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 58.] _Iron (and, in less measure, gold, silver, and other metals)_, whose life does not, as coal and oil and gas, perish with the using, but some of whose value is lost in the transformation from one state of use to another, needs only to be more economically mined and used. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 68.] Non-metallic, inexhaustible materials, as stone, clay, cement, should be employed in their stead when possible. [Footnote: I watched day by day for weeks the erection of a great building in Paris, and I noticed how little iron or steel was used as compared with that in such structures in New York. We shall undoubtedly come to that.] Every scrap of iron should be conserved, cry our constructive prophets, even as the Indians treasured it. We may not need it, but succeeding generations will. It may be recast to their use. We are but its trustees. [Footnote: See, "Iron Ore Resources of the World," International Geological Congress, 1910.] _Forests_[Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 223-262.]--A reduction of the waste in cutting (this is 25 per cent of the total value of the timber cut); of the waste in milling and manufacture, and in turpentining. This last waste is appalling but preventable in full or large measure. The lessening the demand for lumber by a preservative treatment of all merchantable timber. A utilization of by-products. (Undoubtedly science will be most helpful here.) Precautions against fires and their control. Reforestation. Maintenance of forests on what are called essential areas, such as high altitudes and slopes, as tending to prevent floods and erosion. (France here gives most impressive example in planning to bring under conrol about three thousand torrential streams in the Alps, Pyrenees, Ardennes, and Cévennes by means, partly at least, of afforestation, $14,000,000 out of $40,000,000 being provided for this purpose. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 247.] Italy, because of the greatly increased destruction by the Po, has begun the reforestation of the Apennines to the extent of a million acres.) Battle with insect pests and finally the substitution of other materials for wood, thus not only saving the trees but diminishing the losses by fire. _Land._ [Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 307-352.]--The control of water to prevent erosion, deep tillage, and contour ploughing. The restoration of nitrogen and phosphorus by rotation of crops, phosphates, fertilizers, and electricity. The destruction of noxious insects, mammals, and weeds. The reclamation of wet lands. The introduction of new varieties of crops. _Water._--A fuller use in the place of other sources of power that are exhausted in use. It is believed that of the twenty-six million horse- power now developed by coal fifteen million could be more economically developed by water, thus saving not only $180,000,000 by the substitution, but 150,000,000 tons of coal for posterity. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 124.] The leading of this power through longer distances, as from Niagara Falls; its impounding for a more steady supply; [Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 125- 133.] the digging of channels of irrigation into arid places; [Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 185-207.] the drainage of wet regions; the fuller utilization of the carrying power of water to relieve the costlier use of wheels. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 164.] Making the escaping, unsatisfying stream of Sisyphus turn the mills of the gods. This is, indeed, as the writing of that ancient prophet of Israel who, in his vision of the restoration of his city and his land and the healing of its waters, saw a man with a radiant face, a line of flax in his hand and a measuring reed. And wherever this man of radiant face measured he caused the waters to run in dry places and deep rivers to course where the waters were but ankle-deep; fish to swarm again in the rivers and the seas to be free of pollution; salt to come in the miry places and trees to grow upon the land with unwithering leaves and abundant meat. So have these modern prophets with optimistic faces written of their vision, only the fulfilment comes not simply of the constructive measuring of statistics. It takes some trees a hundred years to grow; and dams and reservoirs for the deepening of shallow streams are not made over night as once they were by nature, or as they grew in the vision of Ezekiel. None the less is the prophecy a long way toward fulfilment when the vision is seen. And that it has been seen is intimated by this sentence, too optimistic no doubt, from a book on the subject by one of the major prophets of conservation, recently published in America. "Conservation," he says, "has captured the nation." It is not the thrifty, nepotic, static conservation of the St. Lawrence habitant, which depends upon the self and family interest of each landholder to keep the fields enriched and to prevent the washing away of the soil. It is a dynamic and paternalistic conservation--a conservation that thinks of great dams for the restraint of waters and reservoirs for their impounding to the extent of millions or billions of cubic feet, forestation of great stretches of mountain slope, of restrictions and compulsions of other than personal and family interests--a paternalism that looks beyond the next generation or even two generations and to the feeding of other children than one's own lineal descendants--a paternalism that is not exploiting but fiduciary. It is interesting to observe again how the beginnings of this conservation have been made in the fields where stood the first hospitals for the sick among the living, the first memorials to the dead, the first schools for the children of to-day that are to be the nation of to-morrow. Here also begin to rise the structures of the thought for the day after to-morrow. The first notable assembling of men in the interest of conservation, chiefly of men already in public service--the President of the United States, the Vice-President, members of the cabinet, justices of the Supreme Court, members of Congress, the governors of thirty-four States, representatives of the other States, the governors of the Territories, and other public officials, with a number of representatives of societies and a few guests--met in 1908, to discuss questions relative to conservation. Probably not in the history of the nation has there sat in its borders an assembly of men so widely representative. This gathering resulted in the appointment of a National Conservation Commission by the President, but Congress made no appropriation for meeting the expense of its labors; and so private enterprise and providence have undertaken the carrying out of the movement. A great body of men and women scientists, public-spirited citizens from all parts of the nation, under the presidency of Doctor Charles W. Eliot, former president of Harvard University, began a campaign of education to the end that ultimately and soon--before the riches have gone--this concern for the far future may become fixed in the law and conscious provision of the people. I spoke in the last chapter of Hennepin's seeing a savage making sacrifice to the spirit of the Mississippi, supposed to live under the Falls of St. Anthony. You will recall the description of the great public university beside it that represents the sacrifice of the democracy of to-day for the nation of to-morrow. Instead of the beaver-skin which the poor Indian hung in the branches of a tree near the falls as his offering, the State has hung its gift of forty million dollars for the highest training of its sons and daughters. But there is still, if possible, a nobler aspiration to put against that primitive background and beside the Indian's beaver- skin, for the gift is as yet little more than an aspiration. A few miles back from these same falls there was held in 1910 a convention of many thousands from all parts of the Union, the President of the United States and his predecessor among them, assembled under the auspices of the National Conservation Congress to consider, as they avowed, not alone their own affairs, not even the good of their children with theirs, but primarily the welfare of unborn millions as well. It cannot be assumed that all were looking so far ahead, but the declaration of principles which had called this great assemblage had in it this import--something loftier than any declaration of personal rights. It was a declaration of duty--of duty not to the past, not even to the present, but to the long, long distant future. "Recognizing the natural resources of the country as the prime basis of property and opportunity, we hold the rights of the people in these resources to be natural and inherent and justly inalienable and indefeasible; and we insist that the resources should and shall be developed, used, and conserved in ways consistent with current welfare and with the perpetuity of our people." When this or a like sentiment is framed out of the consciousness of a free people into a controlling declaration of public policy, we shall have not merely a nobler offering to put beside the beaver-skin and the university, but a document worthy to be put above our Declaration of Independence even, and an interpretation of the words "the people of the United States" in our Constitution that will give them an import beyond the highest conception of its authors. The movement which embodies this sentiment is as yet chiefly a private effort, as I have said, but its influence is beginning to run through the sentiment of the individualism which has so rapidly exploited the riches of the valley and spent with such generous hand for the immediate future. And the boundaries of public service are already enlarged in making room for the previsions of the "Children of Always," as the mankind now in the thought of conservationists may well be called. Already millions of acres of coal lands have been withdrawn from private entry, and plans are being made for the leasing of such lands; that is, the people are to keep them for their own. Like provision has also been made with respect to oil, natural gas, and phosphate fields. Forest lands to the extent of nearly two hundred million acres have been reserved as a perpetual national domain, and, in addition to this, several States have forest reservations amounting to nearly ten million acres. [Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 216, 217.] The volume of forest legislation in the States is unprecedented, providing for forest service, forest study, and the prevention of forest-fires, with a prospect of laws providing for a more rigid public control of private forests. An increasing public control of waters is another noticeable trend in legislation, and their increased utilization has already been noticed. Joliet's canal has been built. Champlain's is at last completed. A President of the United States has recommended the deepening of La Salle's river. The valley is coming back to the French paths. These and many others are conservation projects only indirectly, but they intimate a thought of the future as do the heavy appropriations for the reclamation of arid and subarid regions, the government having spent seventy million dollars [Footnote: To June 1, 1912.] in such undertakings, making "one hand wash the other," as our saying is; that is, making the well-watered regions meet the expense of watering the arid. And, finally, the States are beginning to take most serious and even radical measures to encourage farmers so to till their fields as to be able to bequeath them un-impoverished to those who come after. I think it not unlikely that eventually the demos, thinking of the future, will be as paternalistic as was Louis XIV, who told the habitant of the St. Lawrence how many horses he should keep. This review of the resources of the valley of France in the midst of America, and of the forces that are now assembling to preserve for posterity its vast capital of earth, air, and water, is but an intimation of what might easily be expanded into a volume of itself. Indeed, much of my statistical material I have from a book by Doctor Charles R. Van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin; but, meagre as this review is, it must give you, as it has given me, a stirring sense of the mighty reach of the paths of those few pioneers of France in those regions where the spirit of conservation is strongest. While it is true that every human life, as Carlyle has said, stands at the conflux of two eternities--the one behind him, the other before--in a sense have the material preparations, extending during a length of time that to our measurement seems an eternity, converged upon and in those pioneers of Europe in that valley; and from them has diverged a civilization that now begins to look forward in the eyes of her prophets through years that seem as another eternity. Probably, says this eminent scientist of that valley, speaking of the past, "some of the deposits at present being mined are the result of agents ... a hundred million years ago"; [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 18.] and of the future: "We hope for a future ... not to be reckoned by thousands of years but by tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. And, therefore, so far as our responsibility is concerned, it is immaterial whether the coal will be exhausted in one hundred and fifty years or fifteen hundred years, or fifteen thousand years. Our responsibility to succeeding generations demands that we reduce its use to our absolute necessities, and therefore prolong its life to the utmost." [Footnote: Van Rise, p. 25.] Conservation has in such depth of years given a new perspective to the picture we have been painting of the life in that valley. The French were pioneers not merely of an exploiting individualism of a day, or of a hundred or two hundred years, not merely of a democracy thinking of an equality of the men of one generation, but also of the conserving dynamic civilization of hundreds of centuries of a people--to come back again to that best of definitions--who are the invisible multitude of spirits, the nation of yesterday and to-morrow. The French priest, kneeling over the dying Indian child in the forest hut and stealthily touching its brow with water, had vision of another immortality than that, as we know; the empire which the French explorers and adventurers hoped to build with its capital on the Rock of Quebec, or on the Rock St. Louis of the Illinois, or at the mouth of the Mississippi did not grow in the fashion of their dream, as we of course realize. But we see, on the other hand, what promise of ages has been given to the faith and adventure which found incarnation in a frontier democracy whose energy and spirit made possible the great, lusty republic of to-day, that now begins to talk of a thousand centuries. Out in that far west, in a recent autumn, the men of the standing army were set to fighting forest-fires. This has seemed to me a happy omen of what the new conservatism of the world may ask of its soldiery--the conserving not of borders but of the resources of human life and of human life itself. And so have I added another class to the inhabitants of the valley, to the precursors, the producers, the poets, and the teachers of to-morrow-the conservers of the day after to-morrow. Our great philosopher William James gave expression in one of his last utterances to a hope that every man, rich or poor, may come to serve the State (as now every man in France does his military service) in some direct duty that asks the same obedience, the same sacrifice, the same forgetting of self that is asked of the soldier--that every man by the payment of the blood tax may be able to get and keep the spirit of neighborliness, to know how to sympathize more deeply with his fellow men, and to learn the joy of disinterested doing for the nation. [Footnote: "Memories and Studies: The Moral Equivalent of War," pp. 267-296.] But in this demand and appeal of the new theory of our common responsibility, of a dynamic conservationism, is the germ of a larger patriotism than any that history has as yet defined--a patriotism that asks the lifetime service of an individualism with an all-time horizon. CHAPTER XIX THE HEART OF AMERICA In the little town of St. Die in the east of France there was printed in the year 1507 a "Cosmographias Introductio"--an introduction to a forthcoming edition of Ptolemy--in which was included an account of the journeys of one Amerigo Vespucci, who is credited with the discovery of a new part of the world--a fourth continent. For this reason, the author recites, "quarta orbis pars, quam quis Americus invenit, Amerigen quasi Americi terram, sivi Americam nuncupare licit." And so the name America (for it was thought proper to give it the feminine form, "cum et Europa et Asia a mulieribus sua sortitae sint nomina") was probably first pronounced in the mountain-circled town of St. Die, where the scholars of the Vosges, shut away from the sea and its greedy rumors of India, conceived more accurately in their isolation the significance of the western discoveries and made the new-found shores the edge not of Asia but of another continent. Perhaps this new land should have been given some other name; but that it is futile now to discuss. America it has been these four hundred years and America it is doubtless always to be. And it is particularly gratifying to one who has come to care so much for France to find that the name of his own land--a name most euphonious and delectable to his ears--came of the christening at the font of the River Meurthe, the beautiful French dame of St. Die standing by as godmother, and that that name was first whispered to the world by the trees of the forests of the Vosges, whose wood may even have furnished the blocks to fashion first its letters. So may we go back and write this interesting if not important fact of French pioneering in America. But let us rehearse to ourselves once more before we separate the epic sequence of adventure and suffering which tells how much more than a name France gave to that continent just rising from the seas when the savants of St. Die touched her face with the baptismal water of their recluse learning. Again the "boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky"--the America not of the imaging of the mountain men of St. Die but of the seeing and enduring of the seamen of Dieppe and St. Malo and Rochelle and Rouen. Again Jacques Cartier stands alone within this "shaggy continent," a thousand miles beyond the banks of the Baccalaos and the Isles of the Demons. Again for a moment Acadia echoes of the Sorbonne and of Arcadian poesy. Again the unblenching "preux chevalier" Champlain stands with his back against the gray cliff of Quebec fighting red and white foe alike, famine and disease, to keep a foothold in the wilderness, with the sublime faith of a crusader and the patient endurance of a Prometheus. Again the zealous but narrow rigor of Richelieu, flowering in his native land in the learning of the Sorbonne and preparing for him in the new world, as Le Jeune wrote, a "dazzling crown in heaven," builds by the St. Charles and the wreckage of Cartier's _Petite Hermine_, the house of Notre Dame des Anges, the "cradle of the great mission of New France." Again the fireflies light the meadow altar of Maisonneuve at Montreal on its birth- night. Again the gray gowns and the black, Le Caron, Brébeuf, Jogues, and Gamier, enter upon their glorious toils, their bare and sandalled feet, accustomed to the smooth walks of the convents of Brouage and Rheims and Paris, begin to climb the rough paths to the west, _ad majorem Dei gloriam._ Again the swift coureurs de bois, half-savage in their ambassadorship of the woods, follow the traces of the most ancient road- makers, the buffalo and deer, and the voyageurs carry their boats across the portage places. Again the _Griffin_--the winged lion of the lakes-- flies from Niagara to the island in Green Bay, France's precursor of the million-tonned commerce of the northern seas, but sinks with her cargo of golden fleece in their blue waters. Again Marquette, the son of Laon, beholds with joy unspeakable the mysterious "great water," and yet again, La Salle stands by the lonely sea and cries his proclamation toward the limitless land. And, seeing and hearing all this again, we have seen a land as large as all Europe emerge from the unknown at the evocation of pioneers of France who stood all or nearly all sooner or later in Paris within three or four kilometres of the very place in which I sit writing these words. Carder gave to the world the St. Lawrence River as far as the Falls of Lachine; Champlain, his Récollet friars and Jesuit priests and heralds of the woods added the upper lakes; and Marquette, Joliet, La Salle, Tonty, Hennepin, Radisson, Groseilliers, Iberville, Bienville, Le Sueur, La Harpe, the Vérendrye--father and sons--and scores of other Frenchmen, many of forgotten names, added the valley of the river of a hundred thousand streams, from where at the east the French creek begins, a few miles from Lake Erie, to flow toward the Ohio even to the sources of the Missouri in the snows of the Rockies--"the most magnificent dwelling-place"--again to recall De Tocqueville, "prepared by God for man's abode; the valley destined to give the world a field for a new experiment in democracy and to become the heart of America." I have not been able to write at any length of that part of all this vast region of France's pioneering and evoking where France is best remembered --remembered in speech that imitates that which is dearest to France's ears; remembered in voices that even in the harsh winds of the north keep something of the mellowness and softness of the south; remembered in the surnames that recall beautiful trees and fields of perfume and hills of vines and things of the sea which surrounded their ancestors; remembered in the appellations of the saints that protect their firesides and their fortunes; remembered in the names that still cling tenaciously to rivers and towns of that land which calls Champlain its father--Canada. A traveller in the lower St. Lawrence Valley might well think himself east of the Atlantic as he hears the guard on the railway train from Montreal to Quebec call: St. Rochs, Les Éboulements, Portneuf, Pont Rouge, Capucins, Mont Louis, Pointe au Chêne; or hears the speech as he walks at the foot of the gray Rock of Quebec, or even reads the street signs in Montreal. There are memories there on every side, in their very houses and habits--yet memories which I fear are beginning to fade with the allurements of the land of hope to the far west and the northwest of Canada--the "land of hope," the new frontier of America, now of such interest to the people of that other valley, the Mississippi, which was once separated from Canada by no boundaries save watersheds, and these so low that there was reciprocity of their waters. But even if I could keep you longer I am thinking that I should have asked you to spend it where there are fewer memories than in Canada, in the valley where the old French names, if kept at all, are often obscured in a new orthography or a different pronunciation. Up in the boundary of waters between the two lands there is a lighthouse on an island called "Skilligallee." I was a long time in discovering that this meaningless euphonic name was but the memory of the Isle aux Galets--the island of the pebbles. So have the memories been lost in tongues that could not easily frame to pronounce the words they found when they entered that farther valley where France's pioneering is almost forgotten, but where France should be best remembered. A catalogue (and this book has been little else) of the reasons for such remembrance has doubtless brought little comfort; indeed, it may have brought some pain, because the recital of the reasons has but emphasized the forgetting and accentuated the loss. But is France not to find, in a fuller consciousness of what has developed in that valley into which she led Europe, a higher satisfaction than could have come through the formal relationship of mother and colony, or any other that could be reasonably conjectured? For Turgot's prophecy would have some day been realized, and there would perhaps have been a bitterness where now there is gratitude. I can think of no series of relations that could have been of more profound and momentous import in the history of that continent, or that should give higher satisfaction to France in her thought of America than that which this summation permits us to recall once more. France not only christened America; she not only stood first far inside that continent at the north and furnished Europe proof of its mighty dimensions; she also gave to this continent, child of her christening, the richest great valley of the world. This valley she held in the title of her own claim for more than a century from the time that her explorers first looked over its brim, held it by valors and sufferings which would have been gloriously recorded if their issue had been to keep by those waters the tongue in which they could be written and sung. When France did yield it, because of forces outside the valley, not inside (there was hardly a sound of battle there), she gave it in effect to a new nation. She shared it with the aboriginal American, she gave it to the ultimate American. She got her title from the first Americans who, as Chateaubriand said, called themselves the "Children of Always." She gave it to those who are beginning to think of it as belonging not to them but to the new "Children of Always." By her very valorous holding she taught the fringe of colonies along the Atlantic the first lessons in union, and she gave them a leader out of the disciplines of her borders, George Washington, whom in the course of time she directly assisted with her sympathy and means to make certain the independence of those same colonies. He, in turn, in the paths of the Old French War across the Alleghanies, found by a most singular fate not only the indissoluble bond between the eastern and the western waters but in those very paths the practical way to the more "perfect union" of the young nation that was to succeed to this joint heritage of England and of France. To its estate of hundreds of millions of acres east of the Mississippi Napoleon added a half-billion more out of the one-time domain of Louis XIV and made it possible that the United States should some day develop into a world-power. The half-valley, enlarged to its mountain bounds through the influence of its free soil on those whose feet touched it as pioneers, nourished a natural democracy founded in the equalities, the freedoms, and the fraternities of the frontier so vital, so powerful that it became the dominant nationalistic force in a continent-wide republic. Aided by the means of communication which a rampant individualism had prepared for it, it held that republic together, expressing itself most conspicuously in the democratic soul of Lincoln--who, following La Salle down the Mississippi, found his high mission to the world--and in the masterful, resourceful generalship of Grant. The old French forts have grown into new-world cities, the portage paths have been multiplied into streets, the trails of the coureurs de bois have become railroads, and all are the noisy, flaming, smoky places and means of such an industry and exploitation as doubtless are not to be found so extensive and so intensive in any other valley of the earth. A quantitative analysis has led me to present statistics of its production and manufacture which would seem inexcusably braggart if it were not to remind the French and my own countrymen that it was the geographical descendants of France who, out of the wealth of their heritage of France's bequeathing, untouched from the glaciers and the Indians, were confuting with their wheat the prophecies of Malthus and making the whole world a more comfortable and a somewhat brighter place with their iron, their oil, their reapers, their wagons, and their sewing-machines. It were nothing to be ashamed of unless that were all. But a careful qualitative analysis discovers in the life of that valley, which has been so widely advertised by its purely quantitative output, a certain idealism that is usually obscured by the smoke of its individualism. We have seen it in the grimy ravine by old Fort Duquesne, where, like the titanium which, in what way no chemist knows, increases the tensile strength of its steel, this practical idealism gives promise of a democracy that will stand a greater stress and strain. We have seen it in the plans for the future of the city that has risen from the onion field along the Chicago River, where Marquette's spirit lived in a sick body through a bitter winter. We have seen it in the setting apart of the white acres in every township for the training of the child of to-morrow, in the higher school that stands in thousands of towns and cities throughout the valley, and in the university supported of every State in that valley, such as that which we saw beside the falls where Hennepin tells of the Indian sacrificing his beaver-skin to the river spirit. And, finally, we have seen the men of to-day, rising to that highest definition of a people--the invisible multitude of spirits, the nation of yesterday and of to-morrow--forgetting their interests of the moment, listening to the men of the universities speaking out of the past, and planning for the conservation of what they have left to them of the resources of the land for the "interests of mankind"--the true "Children of Always." This, then, is what France has prepared the way for, in one of the vast regions where she was pioneer in America. Through the venture and the faith of her sons she won the valley with a past of a million of ages; through unrecorded valors she held it as her very own for a century, and, though she lost nominal title to it as a territory, she has a ground-rent interest in it, real title to a share in its human fruitage, which time can neither take away nor cloud but only augment. The social and industrial life which has developed there by mere coincidence, or of direct cause, is distinctive and peculiar to that part of the United States which has a French background, though it now has made itself felt throughout the nation. And, however little in its feature and language the foreground may seem to take color of it, I shall always believe that the consecration of the rivers and paths, by explorations and ministries that were for the most part as unselfish as France's scholarship is to-day, must in some subtle way have had such a potency as the catalytic substances which work miracles in matter and yet are beyond the discerning of the scientist. An English essayist [Footnote: G. K. Chesterton, "The Fallacy of the Young Nation," in his "Heretics," pp. 247-266.] has estimated that we of the United States are no longer young and finds in the fact that we have produced great artists the intimations of age. The art of Whistler and the letters of Henry James are to him the "sweet and startling" but "unmistakable cry of a dying man." But this essayist could not have known the men of the valley which is the heart of the nation as it is the heart of the country, the place of its dominant spirits. That valley, so rapidly exploited of its resources that it has grown ages poorer, is yet virile, youthful in its faults and its achievements. It has no "fine futility" as yet, and the cry is not "sweet" though it may be "startling." It is the shout of a young god, of a Jason driving the bulls in the fields of Colchis. The attenuations of distance may easily deceive one's ears who listens from across the ocean and the mountains. I think it was this same essayist who said that to understand a people one must study them with the "loyalty of a child" and the patience not of a scientist but of a poet. I thank him for that, while I excuse his confounding of sounds that he hears in England from America, and agree that what we need in that valley to tell its story, to interpret it, is not a specialist in statistics nor an annalist, not a critic who looks at the smoke of the chimneys and visits the slaughter-houses only, but a poet who will have the patience to consult both the statistician and the annalist, a patient poet with the "loyalty of a child" toward his theme. EPILOGUE FRANCIS PARKMAN THE HISTORIAN OF FRANCE IN THE NEW WORLD I make the epilogue of this story my tribute to Francis Parkman, who has in a sense made this all possible for me: first, by reason of the love he gave me long ago for his New France with its primeval forests, its virgin prairies, its glistening rivers, its untamed Indians, its explorers, its gray and black cowls, its coureurs de bois, its stars whose light had never before looked on a white face; and second, by reason of the mass of incident and color which he has supplied for the background of the life I have known in that valley. On entering a college out in the midst of that region--the middle of the Mississippi Valley--nearly thirty years ago I was assigned, as my first important task in English, the reading and criticism of one of Parkman's books. I think that "The Oregon Trail" was suggested. I read several volumes, however, but found my interest greatest in "The Pioneers of France in the New World" and "The Jesuits in North America." What I wrote I do not now remember (nor do I wish to refresh my memory), but so persistent was the grip of those graphic relations upon my imagination that years later, when leaving the presidency of that same college, I asked to be permitted to take from the library three books (replacing them with fresher copies): the chapel Bible--from which I had been read to by my president and professors and from which I in turn had read to succeeding students--a copy of Spenser's "Faerie Queene"--which my college's only poet, Eugene Field, had read through--and a volume of Parkman's on the pioneers of France. So I take the opportunity to pay my tribute to him who long ago put these figures on the frontier of my imagination, and who has prevented my ever speaking in dispassion or without favorable prejudice of them. When Parkman was leaving America for Paris in 1868, "for medical advice and research," uncertain as to whether he would ever return to take up his unfinished story of the American forest, he left in the hands of a friend a parcel, "not to be opened during his life." It is that parcel, not opened until twenty-five years later--for Parkman lived to return to America and to return again to Paris more than once, and then to go back and finish, after a full half-century of struggle with physical maladies and infirmities, the last book of the plan virtually sketched fifty years before, and with a singular felicity of coincidence named "The Half- Century of Conflict"--it is that parcel which has kept for later generations his remarkable autobiography. While on his visits in Paris he was known in a wide circle. As he himself said in writing to his sisters, "if able to accept invitations," he "would have had the run of Faubourg St. Germain." I doubt, however, if his personality is remembered by many, much less that strangely tortured life which probably gave little mark of its suffering even to those who knew him best in France. I therefore recall some of the detail of the years preceding those days when he appeared in the streets of Paris seeking health, but seeing often Margry, the "intractable yet kindly keeper" of an important department of French archives, who had in his secretive keeping documents most precious to the uses of Parkman. It is not altogether an agreeable chronicle, this autobiography. [Footnote: Printed in "Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, 1892- 4," series 2, 8:349-360.] It is rather like a "pathological record," and as totally unlike the pages of his books as can be well imagined. But it is an essential document. The first pages of this biography were withheld by him and so removed from the parcel; the record begins with a general characterization of his childhood. There is no detail. But there are to be found elsewhere the memories of others which tell of his boyish enjoyment of the little wilderness of joyous colors near the school to which he was sent-microcosm of the greater wilderness in which his body and then his imagination were to wander through all his mature days till his death. His own chronicle has forgotten or ignored those elysian days and has not in all its length a joyful note or a bright color. This is the summary: His childhood was neither healthful nor buoyant.... Chemical experiment was his favorite hobby, involving a lonely, confined, unwholesome sort of life, baneful to body and mind.... The age of fifteen or sixteen produced a revolution; retorts and crucibles were forever discarded.... He became enamoured of the woods, a fancy which soon gained full control over the course of his literary pursuits.... He resolved to confine his homage to the muse of history.... At the age of eighteen (born in 1823) the plan (to whose execution he gave his long life) was, in its most essential features, formed. His idea was clear before him, yet attended with unpleasant doubts as to his ability to realize it to his own satisfaction.... The task, as he then reckoned it, would require about twenty years. The time allowed was ample; but here he fell into a fatal error, entering upon this long pilgrimage with all the vehemence of one starting on a mile heat. His reliance, however, was less on books than on such personal experience as should intimately identify him with his theme. Let me here say that I have found traces of his steps at nearly every site that I have visited. He had been at Fort St. Louis, at the most important portages, and at the places where the French forts once stood. His natural inclinations urged him in the same direction, his thoughts were constantly in the forest, whose features, not unmixed with softer images, possessed his waking and sleeping dreams; he was as fond of hardships as he was vain of enduring them, cherishing a sovereign scorn for every physical weakness or defect. Moreover, deceived by a rapid development of frame and sinews which flattered him with the belief that discipline sufficiently unsparing would harden him into an athlete, he slighted precautions of a more reasonable woodcraft, tired old foresters with long marches, stopped neither for heat nor rain, and slept on the earth without a blanket.... He spent his summer vacations in the woods or in Canada, at the same time reading such books as he thought suited to help him toward his object.... While in the law school he entered in earnest on two other courses, one of general history, the other of Indian history and ethnology, studying diligently at the same time the models of English style.... There developed in him a state of mental tension, habitual for several years, and abundantly mischievous in its effects. With a mind overstrained and a body overtaxed, he was burning his candle at both ends.... A highly irritable organism spurred the writer to excess.... Labor became a passion, and rest intolerable yet with a keen appetite for social enjoyments.... His condition became that of a rider whose horse runs headlong with the bit between his teeth, or of a locomotive, built of indifferent material, under a head of steam too great for its strength, hissing at a score of crevices, yet rushing on with accelerating speed to the inevitable smash.... Soon appeared, as a sign of mischief, weakness of sight. Accordingly he went to the Rocky Mountains to rest his failing vision and to get an inside view of Indian life.... Reeling in the saddle, he set forth, attended by a Canadian hunter.... Joining the Ogallala Indians, he followed their wanderings for several weeks. To have worn the air of an invalid would have been an indiscretion, as he says, since "a horse, a rifle, a pair of pistols, and a red shirt might have offered temptations too strong for aboriginal virtue." So he hunted when he could scarcely sit upright.... To the maladies of the prairies other disorders succeeded on his return.... Flat stagnation followed, reaching its depth in eighteen months.... The desire to return to the prairie was intense, but exposure to the sunlight would have destroyed his sight.... When his condition was at its worst, he resolved to attempt the composition of the "History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac," for which he had been collecting material since his days in college. Suffering from extreme weakness of sight, a condition of the brain prohibiting fixed attention, and a nervous derangement, he yet set out upon this labor, using a wooden frame strung with parallel wires to guide his crayon. Books and documents were read to him, but never, without injury, for more than a half-hour at a time, and frequently not at all for days. For the first half-year he averaged six lines of composition a day. And he wrote, I suppose, at least ten hundred thousand lines. His health improving, he dictated, pacing a dark garret. He then entered upon "France in the New World." The difficulties were incalculable.... Wholly unable to use his eyes, he had before him the task of tracing out, collecting, indexing, arranging, and digesting a great mass of incongruous material, scattered on both sides of the Atlantic. He was unable to employ trained assistants and had to rely mainly on his own research, though, in some cases, receiving valuable aid of scholars and others. He used to employ as reader of French a public-school girl wholly ignorant of French (who, I suppose, gave English pronunciation to all the words), but with such help and that of members of his own family the work went on. Then came another disaster--an effusion of water on the knee which involved a close confinement for two years; and this in turn resulted in serious nervous disturbance centring in the head. These extreme conditions of disorder continued for many years.... His work was wholly interrupted for one year, four years, and numerous short intervals.... Later the condition of sight so far improved as to permit reading, not exceeding, on an average, five minutes at one time. By judicious use this modicum of power was extended. By reading for one minute and then resting for an equal time the alternate process could be continued for about half an hour, then, after a sufficient interval, repeated three or four times a day. Working under such conditions he makes this report, 1868, of progress: "Most of the material is collected or within reach; another volume, on the Jesuits of North America, is one- third written; another, on the French explorers of the Great West, is half written; while a third, devoted to the checkered career of Comte de Frontenac, is partially arranged for composition." During this period he had made many journeys in the United States and Canada for material, and had been four times in Europe.... He wonders as to the advantage of this tortoise pace, but says in conclusion that, "irksome as may be the requirements of conditions so anomalous, they are far less oppressive than the necessity they involve of being busied with the Past when the Present has claims so urgent, and of holding the pen with the hand that should have grasped the sword" (for he was greatly disappointed that he could not enter the army at the time of the Civil War). I have made this rather extensive summary of the singular autobiography-- and largely in the author's own words--not to prepare your minds for lenient judgments of his work, but to inform them of the tenacious purpose of the man whose infirmities of the knees kept him most of his life from the wild forest trails and streams and compelled him to a wheel-chair in gardens of tame roses; whose weakness of the eyes allowed him but inadequate vision of the splendor of the woods and even robbed him of the intimacy of books; whose malady of mind kept him ever in terror of devils more fierce than the inhuman tortures of Jogues and Brébeuf--a tenacious purpose that wrought its youth-selected, self-appointed work, and so well, so splendidly, so thoroughly that it needs never to be done again. One of his friends, in a memoir of Parkman, recalls an observation of Sainte-Beuve, in his paper on Taine's "English Literature," that has found its best illustration in what Parkman accomplished in spite of lameness, blindness, and mental distress: "All things considered, every allowance being made for general or particular elements and for circumstances, there still remain place and space enough around men of talent, wherein they can move and turn themselves with entire freedom. And, moreover, were the circle drawn round each a very contracted one, every man of talent, every genius, in so far as he is in some degree a magician and an enchanter, possesses a secret entirely his own, whereby to perform prodigies within this circle and work wonders there." [Footnote: "Nouveaux Lundis," vol. VIII, English translation in "English Portraits," p. 243.] This autobiography has shown how short was the radius of the circle. The twelve volumes of his work attest, under Sainte-Beuve's definition, the degree of his powers of magic and enchantment. Men of strong knees, of good eyes, and of brains that do not keep them from sleep by night or from work by day, have travelled over this same field, but of most that they gathered it may be said: "To no such aureate earth 'tis turned as, buried once, men want dug up again." I have sat for days in the Harvard University Library among the books bequeathed to it by Parkman (being the greater part of the library which surrounded him in his work--books of history, of travel, and of biography; books about Indians, flints, and folk-lore; maps and guides-among them several guides to Paris--only twenty-five hundred volumes in all); but they are not the material of his magic. His work was not legerdemain, skilful manipulation, but recreation, and he found the aureate earth in the forests, on the prairies, and in documents contemporary to his theme. In a cabinet (bearing in its carving suggestions of the fleur-de-lis) in the rooms of the Massachusetts Historical Society, I found some of this precious material, also bequeathed by the historian. Its nature is suggested in the preface to his "Montcalm and Wolfe." "A very large amount," he says, "of unpublished material has been used in its preparation, consisting for the most part of documents copied from the archives and libraries of France and England. The papers copied for the present work ["Montcalm and Wolfe"] in France alone, exceed six thousand folio pages of manuscript, additional and supplementary to the 'Paris Documents' procured for the State of New York.... The copies made in England form ten volumes, besides many English documents consulted in the original manuscript. Great numbers of autograph letters, diaries, and other writings of persons engaged in the war have also been examined on this [_i.e._, American] side of the Atlantic." But even these were as the dry bones in the valley which Ezekiel saw, till he touched these scattered fragments with his genius. The process employed by the blind workman is described by Frothingham, one of his friends: "The manuscripts were read over to him, slowly, one by one. First the chief points were considered, then the details of the story were gone over carefully and minutely. As the reading went on, he made notes, first of essential and then of non-essential. After this he welded everything together, made the narrative completely his own, infused into it his own fire, quickened it by his own imagination, and made it as it were a living experience, so that his books read like personal reminiscences." [Footnote: "Memoirs of Francis Parkman," in "Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, 1892-4," series 2, 8:555.] In a book of Parkman memorabilia of various kinds which I found in the Harvard Library, I happened one day upon a few scraps of paper which furnish illustration of the first steps of the process--paper on which were notes made in Parkman's own hand: "Deserts covered with bones of buffalo and elk"; "No sign of man from Fort Union to Fort Mackenzie"; "White clay, cactus dried up, grasshoppers"; "Poplars,--wild roses,--gooseberries"; "prairie dogs,--heat,--aridity"; "extraordinary castellated mountains, stone walls,--etc. above Fort Union"; "in 1832 Blackfeet are said to have killed 58 whites, three years before, 80"; "Blackfeet do not eat dogs--Blackfeet Societies--beaver traps lent to Blackfeet"; "wood near Fort Clark chiefly poplar"; "fossils-- terres mauvaises"; "maize cultivated by Mandans"; "catching the war eagle"; "Mandans etc. agricultural tribes"; "wolf-pits described"; "Exceptional cold Ft. Clark"; "Wolf attacked three women;--wooden carts no iron"; "Barren Mts. little dells with water,--gooseberries, strawberries, currants, very few trees, mad river." But these and many other notes on scraps of blue paper in his hand have significance only in their translation, transfusion into the color or detail of some of his wonderful pictures. Somewhere in his books I felt certain, when reading these notes, I should find those poplars growing on the plains with wild roses and gooseberry bushes not far away; some day I should come to the barren mountains and the dells with water, or should hear the roaring of the mad river and witness the catching of the war- eagle. Indeed, some of these very notes had entered, as I found, into the description of that lonely journey of the brothers Vérendrye as they passed through the bad lands (terres mauvaises of the notes), where the clay is sometimes white as chalk and the barren, castellated bluffs, "carved into fantastic shapes by the storms," stand about. "For twenty days the travellers saw no human being [see note above], so scanty was the population of these plains. Game, however, was abundant. Deer sprang from the tall reed grass of the river bottoms; buffalo tramped by in ponderous columns, or dotted the swells of the distant prairie with their grazing thousands; antelope approached, with the curiosity of their species, to gaze at the passing horsemen, then fled like the wind; and as they neared the broken uplands towards the Yellowstone, they saw troops of elk (later their bones) and flocks of mountain-sheep. Sometimes, for miles together, the dry plain was studded thick with the earthen mounds that marked the burrows of the curious marmots, called prairie dogs from their squeaking bark. Wolves, white and gray, howled about the camp at night, and their cousin, the coyote, seated in the dusk of evening upright on the grass, with nose turned to the sky, saluted them with a complication of yelpings, as if a score of petulant voices were pouring together from the throat of one small beast." [Footnote: Parkman, "Half-Century of Conflict," 2 23, 24.] It is impossible to know how much of this came from his own actual seeing (for in his journey over the Oregon trail he had passed near the trail of the Vérendrye brothers) and how much came from those scraps of color and incident picked up in his blindness from varied sources; nor is it of consequence, except as it connotes something of the quality and character of his genius, for it is all accurate and the brave brothers Vérendrye move as living men across it. He was able to revivify a dusty document as well as a personal experience. "To him," as Mr. Barrett Wendell said out of an intimate acquaintance with him and his work, "a document of whatever kind,--a state paper, a Jesuit 'relation,' the diary of a provincial soldier, the record of a Yankee church,--was merely the symbol of a fact which had once been as real as his own hardships among the western Indians, or as the lifetime of physical suffering, which never bent his will." [Footnote: "Proceedings American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1893-4," 29:439.] I have never read "The Oregon Trail" with the same keen enthusiasm as his other books, largely, I think, because it is a mere report of personal adventure and not a composition fused of his imagination. It is an excellent photograph by the side of a master's painting. But all this accuracy of detail, this revivifying of dead Indians, knights, voyageurs and soldiers, this painting of prairie, forest, and mountain, was not in itself to put him among the world's great historians. And, indeed, there are those who, appreciating the artist's skill, have expressed regret that he gave this skill to no great theme. It is as if he were (they would doubtless say) writing of the labors of sacrificing missionaries in Africa, or of colonial administration in Indo-China, or of forest adventure along the Amazon. In the Boston Public Library I found that every work of his had duplicate copies in the boys' department. (And how great the reading is to this day is intimated by my inability one evening to get a copy of "Pontiac's War," though there were several copies in the possession of the library. A reserve had finally to be called in.) But I should say that this double classification intimated rather the genuine human interest of his story, appealing alike to men and to boys (as the greatest of human writings do)--a work "for all mankind and for all time." But I should go beyond this. His books are not merely of elemental entertainment. He has seized the most fundamental, far-reaching, and consequential of themes. He found going on in his forest, of which he set out to write, not merely flame-lighted scalpings and official rapacities and picturesque maraudings and quixotic pageants and the like. His theme was even greater than the mere gathering of all these raids and rapacities and maraudings and pageants into an informed racial, national struggle for the possession of a continent. It was nothing less than the grappling, out on the frontier of the world, between two principles of organized human life. The forests are so demanding, the incidents so stirring in themselves, that many have doubtless missed the high theme that expressed itself there. But that theme possessed its author, and it possesses every sensitive reader as some fateful, recurring, tragic melody in an opera full of diverting incident and picturesque figures. Parkman is more likely to keep his generalizations within the overture, but frequently one gives summary to an act or scene, so that even he who comes for entertainment can hardly miss the significance of it all; though, as Mr. Wendell has said, to borrow again from his, the best, brief tribute: "Parkman was very sparing of generalization, of philosophic comment," whether from overconsciousness or from the intrusion of his malady which forbade long-continued thought. He made the course of events carry its own philosophy. Several noble and notable generalizations have, however, already thrust themselves into these chapters to illustrate his appreciation of the loftiness of his theme, his candor, and his genuine sympathy with those to whose ill-fated heroism he gave such "precious testimony." One has only to associate with the persistent, clearly outlined purpose of a half-century a realization of the completeness of its achievement to be stirred, as by the victory not of a fortuitously reckless assault but of a long, carefully planned campaign. Among his papers (in the fleur-de-lis cabinet of which I have spoken) there are the first prophecies: two maps of the Lake George (Champlain) region drawn by him on the inside of a red portfolio cover, marked 1842, when he was nineteen years old; and next an odd-covered blank book in which he began his note-making on the "Old French War," with such notes as these: "Rights of the two nations"; "When did Marquette make his discoveries?" "When did La Salle settle?" "Had not the French a right both of prior discovery and prior settlement?" "The English never settled"; "The letters patent to Louisiana are preposterous, perhaps, but not more so than the English claim from coasts back of the Mississippi"; "The first blood was spilt by Washington. Jumonville would seem to have been sent with peaceful intentions. His orders charged him to attack the French." The title is written in a strong hand, but before he has half filled the little book he makes entry that the "French War" is laid aside, for the time, for the history of "Pontiac's War," and thus the latter part of this thin note-book grew into "The Conspiracy of Pontiac," and that in turn became sequel to the whole series of which it also was the promise, a series of books so closely related that John Fiske speaks of them as "one book." The scope, to be sure, is a restricted one. He has two great wildernesses to cover, but it is a century and a half after the epic narrative begins before enough people enter to prevent one from keeping track of all of them. It is as if he were writing the history of man, from the last day of creation forward, starting with a few transmigrant souls still under the control of their oversea existence. He begins at the beginning, with not even a twilight zone of tradition and with a stage "far more primitive than that which is depicted in the Odyssey or even Genesis." Cartier's route is as well known as that of the steamship that sailed yesterday through the "Square Gulf," if the ice permitted, and the incidents of his first days beyond the gates of the first wilderness have been as accurately recorded, to say the least, as are yesterday's events yonder in the morning's papers here. And when his story ends, there are not as many people in the two great valleys along the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi as in a good-sized city to-day. But none the less, as I have said, are the forces (fighting in and through these few representatives of civilization) age-old and world-important. Never has historian had such fascinating theme--such "epic theme," says Fiske--"save when Herodotus told the story of Greece and Persia, or when Gibbon's pages resounded with the marshalled hosts through a thousand years of change." And Parkman met one of what Lowell calls "the convincing tests of genius" in the choice of this subject. When John Fiske said at the Harvard exercises in memory of Parkman that he was one of the world's greatest historians, I subtracted something because of the occasion and the nearness of view. But a year later he is saying of Parkman's work, in a critical review: "Strong in its individuality and like to nothing besides, it clearly belongs, I think, among the world's few masterpieces of the highest rank, along with the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Gibbon." [Footnote: _Atlantic Monthly_, 73:674; "A Century of Science and Other Essays," p. 264.] There will never be such a story to write again, for the frontier of forest and prairie has disappeared. It is now in the midst of cities where civilizations grapple in their smoke and turmoil. So shall we hold even more precious his gift and thank Heaven for "sending us such a scholar, such an artist, such a genius before it was too late to catch the fleeting light and fix it upon immortal canvas." Among the writings of Francis Parkman there are a few pages--known not even to a score of his readers, I suppose--which might very well be printed in summary of his great work--though they find no place in any volume--for the symbol they carry of his achievement. These few pages make a leaflet--a reprint of a paper contributed to the _Botanical Bulletin_ in 1878 by "Francis Parkman, late Professor of Horticulture at the Bussey Institution," and entitled "The Hybridization of Lilies." In this brief paper is related the story of Parkman's own attempts, extending through seven years, to combine certain well-established varieties of lilies, and especially two superb lilies--the "Speciosum" (_Lancifolium_) and the "Auratum,"--the pollen of the latter being carried to the deanthered flowers of the former. The patient, anxious, exquisite care with which he carried on these experiments suggests the infinite pains with which he gathered and classified and sifted and weighed his historical material (his material of "France Speciosum" and of "France Auratum"). The result of his floral experiment, the wonderfully beautiful flower which he produced, described in a London horticultural magazine as the "grandest flowering plant yet introduced into our gardens," and known as the "Lilium Parkmanni," is suggestive of his achievement in so depicting and defining that civilization which is symbolized by the lily, the fleur-de-lis, in its strange, wild, highly colored flowering on the prairies and by the rivers of Nouvelle France, as to make it for all time identified with his memory and name. He lived among roses of his own growing, through his later invalid years, in the outskirts of Boston. He even wrote a book about roses. But his peculiar triumph (the one flower that lingers in gardens carrying a memory of him) is a "magnificent" lily. And though he lived amid the heritages of the English, in the new continent, with fair mind and most acute and industrious, he has preserved the hybrid heritages of the French spirit in the American regions--heritages that, save for his research lighted by imagination, might never have blossomed in the pages of history. 
7197	----	THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER BY MARK TWAIN (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) Part 5 CHAPTER XVIII THAT was Tom's great secret--the scheme to return home with his brother pirates and attend their own funerals. They had paddled over to the Missouri shore on a log, at dusk on Saturday, landing five or six miles below the village; they had slept in the woods at the edge of the town till nearly daylight, and had then crept through back lanes and alleys and finished their sleep in the gallery of the church among a chaos of invalided benches. At breakfast, Monday morning, Aunt Polly and Mary were very loving to Tom, and very attentive to his wants. There was an unusual amount of talk. In the course of it Aunt Polly said: "Well, I don't say it wasn't a fine joke, Tom, to keep everybody suffering 'most a week so you boys had a good time, but it is a pity you could be so hard-hearted as to let me suffer so. If you could come over on a log to go to your funeral, you could have come over and give me a hint some way that you warn't dead, but only run off." "Yes, you could have done that, Tom," said Mary; "and I believe you would if you had thought of it." "Would you, Tom?" said Aunt Polly, her face lighting wistfully. "Say, now, would you, if you'd thought of it?" "I--well, I don't know. 'Twould 'a' spoiled everything." "Tom, I hoped you loved me that much," said Aunt Polly, with a grieved tone that discomforted the boy. "It would have been something if you'd cared enough to THINK of it, even if you didn't DO it." "Now, auntie, that ain't any harm," pleaded Mary; "it's only Tom's giddy way--he is always in such a rush that he never thinks of anything." "More's the pity. Sid would have thought. And Sid would have come and DONE it, too. Tom, you'll look back, some day, when it's too late, and wish you'd cared a little more for me when it would have cost you so little." "Now, auntie, you know I do care for you," said Tom. "I'd know it better if you acted more like it." "I wish now I'd thought," said Tom, with a repentant tone; "but I dreamt about you, anyway. That's something, ain't it?" "It ain't much--a cat does that much--but it's better than nothing. What did you dream?" "Why, Wednesday night I dreamt that you was sitting over there by the bed, and Sid was sitting by the woodbox, and Mary next to him." "Well, so we did. So we always do. I'm glad your dreams could take even that much trouble about us." "And I dreamt that Joe Harper's mother was here." "Why, she was here! Did you dream any more?" "Oh, lots. But it's so dim, now." "Well, try to recollect--can't you?" "Somehow it seems to me that the wind--the wind blowed the--the--" "Try harder, Tom! The wind did blow something. Come!" Tom pressed his fingers on his forehead an anxious minute, and then said: "I've got it now! I've got it now! It blowed the candle!" "Mercy on us! Go on, Tom--go on!" "And it seems to me that you said, 'Why, I believe that that door--'" "Go ON, Tom!" "Just let me study a moment--just a moment. Oh, yes--you said you believed the door was open." "As I'm sitting here, I did! Didn't I, Mary! Go on!" "And then--and then--well I won't be certain, but it seems like as if you made Sid go and--and--" "Well? Well? What did I make him do, Tom? What did I make him do?" "You made him--you--Oh, you made him shut it." "Well, for the land's sake! I never heard the beat of that in all my days! Don't tell ME there ain't anything in dreams, any more. Sereny Harper shall know of this before I'm an hour older. I'd like to see her get around THIS with her rubbage 'bout superstition. Go on, Tom!" "Oh, it's all getting just as bright as day, now. Next you said I warn't BAD, only mischeevous and harum-scarum, and not any more responsible than--than--I think it was a colt, or something." "And so it was! Well, goodness gracious! Go on, Tom!" "And then you began to cry." "So I did. So I did. Not the first time, neither. And then--" "Then Mrs. Harper she began to cry, and said Joe was just the same, and she wished she hadn't whipped him for taking cream when she'd throwed it out her own self--" "Tom! The sperrit was upon you! You was a prophesying--that's what you was doing! Land alive, go on, Tom!" "Then Sid he said--he said--" "I don't think I said anything," said Sid. "Yes you did, Sid," said Mary. "Shut your heads and let Tom go on! What did he say, Tom?" "He said--I THINK he said he hoped I was better off where I was gone to, but if I'd been better sometimes--" "THERE, d'you hear that! It was his very words!" "And you shut him up sharp." "I lay I did! There must 'a' been an angel there. There WAS an angel there, somewheres!" "And Mrs. Harper told about Joe scaring her with a firecracker, and you told about Peter and the Painkiller--" "Just as true as I live!" "And then there was a whole lot of talk 'bout dragging the river for us, and 'bout having the funeral Sunday, and then you and old Miss Harper hugged and cried, and she went." "It happened just so! It happened just so, as sure as I'm a-sitting in these very tracks. Tom, you couldn't told it more like if you'd 'a' seen it! And then what? Go on, Tom!" "Then I thought you prayed for me--and I could see you and hear every word you said. And you went to bed, and I was so sorry that I took and wrote on a piece of sycamore bark, 'We ain't dead--we are only off being pirates,' and put it on the table by the candle; and then you looked so good, laying there asleep, that I thought I went and leaned over and kissed you on the lips." "Did you, Tom, DID you! I just forgive you everything for that!" And she seized the boy in a crushing embrace that made him feel like the guiltiest of villains. "It was very kind, even though it was only a--dream," Sid soliloquized just audibly. "Shut up, Sid! A body does just the same in a dream as he'd do if he was awake. Here's a big Milum apple I've been saving for you, Tom, if you was ever found again--now go 'long to school. I'm thankful to the good God and Father of us all I've got you back, that's long-suffering and merciful to them that believe on Him and keep His word, though goodness knows I'm unworthy of it, but if only the worthy ones got His blessings and had His hand to help them over the rough places, there's few enough would smile here or ever enter into His rest when the long night comes. Go 'long Sid, Mary, Tom--take yourselves off--you've hendered me long enough." The children left for school, and the old lady to call on Mrs. Harper and vanquish her realism with Tom's marvellous dream. Sid had better judgment than to utter the thought that was in his mind as he left the house. It was this: "Pretty thin--as long a dream as that, without any mistakes in it!" What a hero Tom was become, now! He did not go skipping and prancing, but moved with a dignified swagger as became a pirate who felt that the public eye was on him. And indeed it was; he tried not to seem to see the looks or hear the remarks as he passed along, but they were food and drink to him. Smaller boys than himself flocked at his heels, as proud to be seen with him, and tolerated by him, as if he had been the drummer at the head of a procession or the elephant leading a menagerie into town. Boys of his own size pretended not to know he had been away at all; but they were consuming with envy, nevertheless. They would have given anything to have that swarthy suntanned skin of his, and his glittering notoriety; and Tom would not have parted with either for a circus. At school the children made so much of him and of Joe, and delivered such eloquent admiration from their eyes, that the two heroes were not long in becoming insufferably "stuck-up." They began to tell their adventures to hungry listeners--but they only began; it was not a thing likely to have an end, with imaginations like theirs to furnish material. And finally, when they got out their pipes and went serenely puffing around, the very summit of glory was reached. Tom decided that he could be independent of Becky Thatcher now. Glory was sufficient. He would live for glory. Now that he was distinguished, maybe she would be wanting to "make up." Well, let her--she should see that he could be as indifferent as some other people. Presently she arrived. Tom pretended not to see her. He moved away and joined a group of boys and girls and began to talk. Soon he observed that she was tripping gayly back and forth with flushed face and dancing eyes, pretending to be busy chasing schoolmates, and screaming with laughter when she made a capture; but he noticed that she always made her captures in his vicinity, and that she seemed to cast a conscious eye in his direction at such times, too. It gratified all the vicious vanity that was in him; and so, instead of winning him, it only "set him up" the more and made him the more diligent to avoid betraying that he knew she was about. Presently she gave over skylarking, and moved irresolutely about, sighing once or twice and glancing furtively and wistfully toward Tom. Then she observed that now Tom was talking more particularly to Amy Lawrence than to any one else. She felt a sharp pang and grew disturbed and uneasy at once. She tried to go away, but her feet were treacherous, and carried her to the group instead. She said to a girl almost at Tom's elbow--with sham vivacity: "Why, Mary Austin! you bad girl, why didn't you come to Sunday-school?" "I did come--didn't you see me?" "Why, no! Did you? Where did you sit?" "I was in Miss Peters' class, where I always go. I saw YOU." "Did you? Why, it's funny I didn't see you. I wanted to tell you about the picnic." "Oh, that's jolly. Who's going to give it?" "My ma's going to let me have one." "Oh, goody; I hope she'll let ME come." "Well, she will. The picnic's for me. She'll let anybody come that I want, and I want you." "That's ever so nice. When is it going to be?" "By and by. Maybe about vacation." "Oh, won't it be fun! You going to have all the girls and boys?" "Yes, every one that's friends to me--or wants to be"; and she glanced ever so furtively at Tom, but he talked right along to Amy Lawrence about the terrible storm on the island, and how the lightning tore the great sycamore tree "all to flinders" while he was "standing within three feet of it." "Oh, may I come?" said Grace Miller. "Yes." "And me?" said Sally Rogers. "Yes." "And me, too?" said Susy Harper. "And Joe?" "Yes." And so on, with clapping of joyful hands till all the group had begged for invitations but Tom and Amy. Then Tom turned coolly away, still talking, and took Amy with him. Becky's lips trembled and the tears came to her eyes; she hid these signs with a forced gayety and went on chattering, but the life had gone out of the picnic, now, and out of everything else; she got away as soon as she could and hid herself and had what her sex call "a good cry." Then she sat moody, with wounded pride, till the bell rang. She roused up, now, with a vindictive cast in her eye, and gave her plaited tails a shake and said she knew what SHE'D do. At recess Tom continued his flirtation with Amy with jubilant self-satisfaction. And he kept drifting about to find Becky and lacerate her with the performance. At last he spied her, but there was a sudden falling of his mercury. She was sitting cosily on a little bench behind the schoolhouse looking at a picture-book with Alfred Temple--and so absorbed were they, and their heads so close together over the book, that they did not seem to be conscious of anything in the world besides. Jealousy ran red-hot through Tom's veins. He began to hate himself for throwing away the chance Becky had offered for a reconciliation. He called himself a fool, and all the hard names he could think of. He wanted to cry with vexation. Amy chatted happily along, as they walked, for her heart was singing, but Tom's tongue had lost its function. He did not hear what Amy was saying, and whenever she paused expectantly he could only stammer an awkward assent, which was as often misplaced as otherwise. He kept drifting to the rear of the schoolhouse, again and again, to sear his eyeballs with the hateful spectacle there. He could not help it. And it maddened him to see, as he thought he saw, that Becky Thatcher never once suspected that he was even in the land of the living. But she did see, nevertheless; and she knew she was winning her fight, too, and was glad to see him suffer as she had suffered. Amy's happy prattle became intolerable. Tom hinted at things he had to attend to; things that must be done; and time was fleeting. But in vain--the girl chirped on. Tom thought, "Oh, hang her, ain't I ever going to get rid of her?" At last he must be attending to those things--and she said artlessly that she would be "around" when school let out. And he hastened away, hating her for it. "Any other boy!" Tom thought, grating his teeth. "Any boy in the whole town but that Saint Louis smarty that thinks he dresses so fine and is aristocracy! Oh, all right, I licked you the first day you ever saw this town, mister, and I'll lick you again! You just wait till I catch you out! I'll just take and--" And he went through the motions of thrashing an imaginary boy --pummelling the air, and kicking and gouging. "Oh, you do, do you? You holler 'nough, do you? Now, then, let that learn you!" And so the imaginary flogging was finished to his satisfaction. Tom fled home at noon. His conscience could not endure any more of Amy's grateful happiness, and his jealousy could bear no more of the other distress. Becky resumed her picture inspections with Alfred, but as the minutes dragged along and no Tom came to suffer, her triumph began to cloud and she lost interest; gravity and absent-mindedness followed, and then melancholy; two or three times she pricked up her ear at a footstep, but it was a false hope; no Tom came. At last she grew entirely miserable and wished she hadn't carried it so far. When poor Alfred, seeing that he was losing her, he did not know how, kept exclaiming: "Oh, here's a jolly one! look at this!" she lost patience at last, and said, "Oh, don't bother me! I don't care for them!" and burst into tears, and got up and walked away. Alfred dropped alongside and was going to try to comfort her, but she said: "Go away and leave me alone, can't you! I hate you!" So the boy halted, wondering what he could have done--for she had said she would look at pictures all through the nooning--and she walked on, crying. Then Alfred went musing into the deserted schoolhouse. He was humiliated and angry. He easily guessed his way to the truth--the girl had simply made a convenience of him to vent her spite upon Tom Sawyer. He was far from hating Tom the less when this thought occurred to him. He wished there was some way to get that boy into trouble without much risk to himself. Tom's spelling-book fell under his eye. Here was his opportunity. He gratefully opened to the lesson for the afternoon and poured ink upon the page. Becky, glancing in at a window behind him at the moment, saw the act, and moved on, without discovering herself. She started homeward, now, intending to find Tom and tell him; Tom would be thankful and their troubles would be healed. Before she was half way home, however, she had changed her mind. The thought of Tom's treatment of her when she was talking about her picnic came scorching back and filled her with shame. She resolved to let him get whipped on the damaged spelling-book's account, and to hate him forever, into the bargain. CHAPTER XIX TOM arrived at home in a dreary mood, and the first thing his aunt said to him showed him that he had brought his sorrows to an unpromising market: "Tom, I've a notion to skin you alive!" "Auntie, what have I done?" "Well, you've done enough. Here I go over to Sereny Harper, like an old softy, expecting I'm going to make her believe all that rubbage about that dream, when lo and behold you she'd found out from Joe that you was over here and heard all the talk we had that night. Tom, I don't know what is to become of a boy that will act like that. It makes me feel so bad to think you could let me go to Sereny Harper and make such a fool of myself and never say a word." This was a new aspect of the thing. His smartness of the morning had seemed to Tom a good joke before, and very ingenious. It merely looked mean and shabby now. He hung his head and could not think of anything to say for a moment. Then he said: "Auntie, I wish I hadn't done it--but I didn't think." "Oh, child, you never think. You never think of anything but your own selfishness. You could think to come all the way over here from Jackson's Island in the night to laugh at our troubles, and you could think to fool me with a lie about a dream; but you couldn't ever think to pity us and save us from sorrow." "Auntie, I know now it was mean, but I didn't mean to be mean. I didn't, honest. And besides, I didn't come over here to laugh at you that night." "What did you come for, then?" "It was to tell you not to be uneasy about us, because we hadn't got drownded." "Tom, Tom, I would be the thankfullest soul in this world if I could believe you ever had as good a thought as that, but you know you never did--and I know it, Tom." "Indeed and 'deed I did, auntie--I wish I may never stir if I didn't." "Oh, Tom, don't lie--don't do it. It only makes things a hundred times worse." "It ain't a lie, auntie; it's the truth. I wanted to keep you from grieving--that was all that made me come." "I'd give the whole world to believe that--it would cover up a power of sins, Tom. I'd 'most be glad you'd run off and acted so bad. But it ain't reasonable; because, why didn't you tell me, child?" "Why, you see, when you got to talking about the funeral, I just got all full of the idea of our coming and hiding in the church, and I couldn't somehow bear to spoil it. So I just put the bark back in my pocket and kept mum." "What bark?" "The bark I had wrote on to tell you we'd gone pirating. I wish, now, you'd waked up when I kissed you--I do, honest." The hard lines in his aunt's face relaxed and a sudden tenderness dawned in her eyes. "DID you kiss me, Tom?" "Why, yes, I did." "Are you sure you did, Tom?" "Why, yes, I did, auntie--certain sure." "What did you kiss me for, Tom?" "Because I loved you so, and you laid there moaning and I was so sorry." The words sounded like truth. The old lady could not hide a tremor in her voice when she said: "Kiss me again, Tom!--and be off with you to school, now, and don't bother me any more." The moment he was gone, she ran to a closet and got out the ruin of a jacket which Tom had gone pirating in. Then she stopped, with it in her hand, and said to herself: "No, I don't dare. Poor boy, I reckon he's lied about it--but it's a blessed, blessed lie, there's such a comfort come from it. I hope the Lord--I KNOW the Lord will forgive him, because it was such goodheartedness in him to tell it. But I don't want to find out it's a lie. I won't look." She put the jacket away, and stood by musing a minute. Twice she put out her hand to take the garment again, and twice she refrained. Once more she ventured, and this time she fortified herself with the thought: "It's a good lie--it's a good lie--I won't let it grieve me." So she sought the jacket pocket. A moment later she was reading Tom's piece of bark through flowing tears and saying: "I could forgive the boy, now, if he'd committed a million sins!" CHAPTER XX THERE was something about Aunt Polly's manner, when she kissed Tom, that swept away his low spirits and made him lighthearted and happy again. He started to school and had the luck of coming upon Becky Thatcher at the head of Meadow Lane. His mood always determined his manner. Without a moment's hesitation he ran to her and said: "I acted mighty mean to-day, Becky, and I'm so sorry. I won't ever, ever do that way again, as long as ever I live--please make up, won't you?" The girl stopped and looked him scornfully in the face: "I'll thank you to keep yourself TO yourself, Mr. Thomas Sawyer. I'll never speak to you again." She tossed her head and passed on. Tom was so stunned that he had not even presence of mind enough to say "Who cares, Miss Smarty?" until the right time to say it had gone by. So he said nothing. But he was in a fine rage, nevertheless. He moped into the schoolyard wishing she were a boy, and imagining how he would trounce her if she were. He presently encountered her and delivered a stinging remark as he passed. She hurled one in return, and the angry breach was complete. It seemed to Becky, in her hot resentment, that she could hardly wait for school to "take in," she was so impatient to see Tom flogged for the injured spelling-book. If she had had any lingering notion of exposing Alfred Temple, Tom's offensive fling had driven it entirely away. Poor girl, she did not know how fast she was nearing trouble herself. The master, Mr. Dobbins, had reached middle age with an unsatisfied ambition. The darling of his desires was, to be a doctor, but poverty had decreed that he should be nothing higher than a village schoolmaster. Every day he took a mysterious book out of his desk and absorbed himself in it at times when no classes were reciting. He kept that book under lock and key. There was not an urchin in school but was perishing to have a glimpse of it, but the chance never came. Every boy and girl had a theory about the nature of that book; but no two theories were alike, and there was no way of getting at the facts in the case. Now, as Becky was passing by the desk, which stood near the door, she noticed that the key was in the lock! It was a precious moment. She glanced around; found herself alone, and the next instant she had the book in her hands. The title-page--Professor Somebody's ANATOMY--carried no information to her mind; so she began to turn the leaves. She came at once upon a handsomely engraved and colored frontispiece--a human figure, stark naked. At that moment a shadow fell on the page and Tom Sawyer stepped in at the door and caught a glimpse of the picture. Becky snatched at the book to close it, and had the hard luck to tear the pictured page half down the middle. She thrust the volume into the desk, turned the key, and burst out crying with shame and vexation. "Tom Sawyer, you are just as mean as you can be, to sneak up on a person and look at what they're looking at." "How could I know you was looking at anything?" "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Tom Sawyer; you know you're going to tell on me, and oh, what shall I do, what shall I do! I'll be whipped, and I never was whipped in school." Then she stamped her little foot and said: "BE so mean if you want to! I know something that's going to happen. You just wait and you'll see! Hateful, hateful, hateful!"--and she flung out of the house with a new explosion of crying. Tom stood still, rather flustered by this onslaught. Presently he said to himself: "What a curious kind of a fool a girl is! Never been licked in school! Shucks! What's a licking! That's just like a girl--they're so thin-skinned and chicken-hearted. Well, of course I ain't going to tell old Dobbins on this little fool, because there's other ways of getting even on her, that ain't so mean; but what of it? Old Dobbins will ask who it was tore his book. Nobody'll answer. Then he'll do just the way he always does--ask first one and then t'other, and when he comes to the right girl he'll know it, without any telling. Girls' faces always tell on them. They ain't got any backbone. She'll get licked. Well, it's a kind of a tight place for Becky Thatcher, because there ain't any way out of it." Tom conned the thing a moment longer, and then added: "All right, though; she'd like to see me in just such a fix--let her sweat it out!" Tom joined the mob of skylarking scholars outside. In a few moments the master arrived and school "took in." Tom did not feel a strong interest in his studies. Every time he stole a glance at the girls' side of the room Becky's face troubled him. Considering all things, he did not want to pity her, and yet it was all he could do to help it. He could get up no exultation that was really worthy the name. Presently the spelling-book discovery was made, and Tom's mind was entirely full of his own matters for a while after that. Becky roused up from her lethargy of distress and showed good interest in the proceedings. She did not expect that Tom could get out of his trouble by denying that he spilt the ink on the book himself; and she was right. The denial only seemed to make the thing worse for Tom. Becky supposed she would be glad of that, and she tried to believe she was glad of it, but she found she was not certain. When the worst came to the worst, she had an impulse to get up and tell on Alfred Temple, but she made an effort and forced herself to keep still--because, said she to herself, "he'll tell about me tearing the picture sure. I wouldn't say a word, not to save his life!" Tom took his whipping and went back to his seat not at all broken-hearted, for he thought it was possible that he had unknowingly upset the ink on the spelling-book himself, in some skylarking bout--he had denied it for form's sake and because it was custom, and had stuck to the denial from principle. A whole hour drifted by, the master sat nodding in his throne, the air was drowsy with the hum of study. By and by, Mr. Dobbins straightened himself up, yawned, then unlocked his desk, and reached for his book, but seemed undecided whether to take it out or leave it. Most of the pupils glanced up languidly, but there were two among them that watched his movements with intent eyes. Mr. Dobbins fingered his book absently for a while, then took it out and settled himself in his chair to read! Tom shot a glance at Becky. He had seen a hunted and helpless rabbit look as she did, with a gun levelled at its head. Instantly he forgot his quarrel with her. Quick--something must be done! done in a flash, too! But the very imminence of the emergency paralyzed his invention. Good!--he had an inspiration! He would run and snatch the book, spring through the door and fly. But his resolution shook for one little instant, and the chance was lost--the master opened the volume. If Tom only had the wasted opportunity back again! Too late. There was no help for Becky now, he said. The next moment the master faced the school. Every eye sank under his gaze. There was that in it which smote even the innocent with fear. There was silence while one might count ten --the master was gathering his wrath. Then he spoke: "Who tore this book?" There was not a sound. One could have heard a pin drop. The stillness continued; the master searched face after face for signs of guilt. "Benjamin Rogers, did you tear this book?" A denial. Another pause. "Joseph Harper, did you?" Another denial. Tom's uneasiness grew more and more intense under the slow torture of these proceedings. The master scanned the ranks of boys--considered a while, then turned to the girls: "Amy Lawrence?" A shake of the head. "Gracie Miller?" The same sign. "Susan Harper, did you do this?" Another negative. The next girl was Becky Thatcher. Tom was trembling from head to foot with excitement and a sense of the hopelessness of the situation. "Rebecca Thatcher" [Tom glanced at her face--it was white with terror] --"did you tear--no, look me in the face" [her hands rose in appeal] --"did you tear this book?" A thought shot like lightning through Tom's brain. He sprang to his feet and shouted--"I done it!" The school stared in perplexity at this incredible folly. Tom stood a moment, to gather his dismembered faculties; and when he stepped forward to go to his punishment the surprise, the gratitude, the adoration that shone upon him out of poor Becky's eyes seemed pay enough for a hundred floggings. Inspired by the splendor of his own act, he took without an outcry the most merciless flaying that even Mr. Dobbins had ever administered; and also received with indifference the added cruelty of a command to remain two hours after school should be dismissed--for he knew who would wait for him outside till his captivity was done, and not count the tedious time as loss, either. Tom went to bed that night planning vengeance against Alfred Temple; for with shame and repentance Becky had told him all, not forgetting her own treachery; but even the longing for vengeance had to give way, soon, to pleasanter musings, and he fell asleep at last with Becky's latest words lingering dreamily in his ear-- "Tom, how COULD you be so noble!" CHAPTER XXI VACATION was approaching. The schoolmaster, always severe, grew severer and more exacting than ever, for he wanted the school to make a good showing on "Examination" day. His rod and his ferule were seldom idle now--at least among the smaller pupils. Only the biggest boys, and young ladies of eighteen and twenty, escaped lashing. Mr. Dobbins' lashings were very vigorous ones, too; for although he carried, under his wig, a perfectly bald and shiny head, he had only reached middle age, and there was no sign of feebleness in his muscle. As the great day approached, all the tyranny that was in him came to the surface; he seemed to take a vindictive pleasure in punishing the least shortcomings. The consequence was, that the smaller boys spent their days in terror and suffering and their nights in plotting revenge. They threw away no opportunity to do the master a mischief. But he kept ahead all the time. The retribution that followed every vengeful success was so sweeping and majestic that the boys always retired from the field badly worsted. At last they conspired together and hit upon a plan that promised a dazzling victory. They swore in the sign-painter's boy, told him the scheme, and asked his help. He had his own reasons for being delighted, for the master boarded in his father's family and had given the boy ample cause to hate him. The master's wife would go on a visit to the country in a few days, and there would be nothing to interfere with the plan; the master always prepared himself for great occasions by getting pretty well fuddled, and the sign-painter's boy said that when the dominie had reached the proper condition on Examination Evening he would "manage the thing" while he napped in his chair; then he would have him awakened at the right time and hurried away to school. In the fulness of time the interesting occasion arrived. At eight in the evening the schoolhouse was brilliantly lighted, and adorned with wreaths and festoons of foliage and flowers. The master sat throned in his great chair upon a raised platform, with his blackboard behind him. He was looking tolerably mellow. Three rows of benches on each side and six rows in front of him were occupied by the dignitaries of the town and by the parents of the pupils. To his left, back of the rows of citizens, was a spacious temporary platform upon which were seated the scholars who were to take part in the exercises of the evening; rows of small boys, washed and dressed to an intolerable state of discomfort; rows of gawky big boys; snowbanks of girls and young ladies clad in lawn and muslin and conspicuously conscious of their bare arms, their grandmothers' ancient trinkets, their bits of pink and blue ribbon and the flowers in their hair. All the rest of the house was filled with non-participating scholars. The exercises began. A very little boy stood up and sheepishly recited, "You'd scarce expect one of my age to speak in public on the stage," etc.--accompanying himself with the painfully exact and spasmodic gestures which a machine might have used--supposing the machine to be a trifle out of order. But he got through safely, though cruelly scared, and got a fine round of applause when he made his manufactured bow and retired. A little shamefaced girl lisped, "Mary had a little lamb," etc., performed a compassion-inspiring curtsy, got her meed of applause, and sat down flushed and happy. Tom Sawyer stepped forward with conceited confidence and soared into the unquenchable and indestructible "Give me liberty or give me death" speech, with fine fury and frantic gesticulation, and broke down in the middle of it. A ghastly stage-fright seized him, his legs quaked under him and he was like to choke. True, he had the manifest sympathy of the house but he had the house's silence, too, which was even worse than its sympathy. The master frowned, and this completed the disaster. Tom struggled awhile and then retired, utterly defeated. There was a weak attempt at applause, but it died early. "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck" followed; also "The Assyrian Came Down," and other declamatory gems. Then there were reading exercises, and a spelling fight. The meagre Latin class recited with honor. The prime feature of the evening was in order, now--original "compositions" by the young ladies. Each in her turn stepped forward to the edge of the platform, cleared her throat, held up her manuscript (tied with dainty ribbon), and proceeded to read, with labored attention to "expression" and punctuation. The themes were the same that had been illuminated upon similar occasions by their mothers before them, their grandmothers, and doubtless all their ancestors in the female line clear back to the Crusades. "Friendship" was one; "Memories of Other Days"; "Religion in History"; "Dream Land"; "The Advantages of Culture"; "Forms of Political Government Compared and Contrasted"; "Melancholy"; "Filial Love"; "Heart Longings," etc., etc. A prevalent feature in these compositions was a nursed and petted melancholy; another was a wasteful and opulent gush of "fine language"; another was a tendency to lug in by the ears particularly prized words and phrases until they were worn entirely out; and a peculiarity that conspicuously marked and marred them was the inveterate and intolerable sermon that wagged its crippled tail at the end of each and every one of them. No matter what the subject might be, a brain-racking effort was made to squirm it into some aspect or other that the moral and religious mind could contemplate with edification. The glaring insincerity of these sermons was not sufficient to compass the banishment of the fashion from the schools, and it is not sufficient to-day; it never will be sufficient while the world stands, perhaps. There is no school in all our land where the young ladies do not feel obliged to close their compositions with a sermon; and you will find that the sermon of the most frivolous and the least religious girl in the school is always the longest and the most relentlessly pious. But enough of this. Homely truth is unpalatable. Let us return to the "Examination." The first composition that was read was one entitled "Is this, then, Life?" Perhaps the reader can endure an extract from it: "In the common walks of life, with what delightful emotions does the youthful mind look forward to some anticipated scene of festivity! Imagination is busy sketching rose-tinted pictures of joy. In fancy, the voluptuous votary of fashion sees herself amid the festive throng, 'the observed of all observers.' Her graceful form, arrayed in snowy robes, is whirling through the mazes of the joyous dance; her eye is brightest, her step is lightest in the gay assembly. "In such delicious fancies time quickly glides by, and the welcome hour arrives for her entrance into the Elysian world, of which she has had such bright dreams. How fairy-like does everything appear to her enchanted vision! Each new scene is more charming than the last. But after a while she finds that beneath this goodly exterior, all is vanity, the flattery which once charmed her soul, now grates harshly upon her ear; the ball-room has lost its charms; and with wasted health and imbittered heart, she turns away with the conviction that earthly pleasures cannot satisfy the longings of the soul!" And so forth and so on. There was a buzz of gratification from time to time during the reading, accompanied by whispered ejaculations of "How sweet!" "How eloquent!" "So true!" etc., and after the thing had closed with a peculiarly afflicting sermon the applause was enthusiastic. Then arose a slim, melancholy girl, whose face had the "interesting" paleness that comes of pills and indigestion, and read a "poem." Two stanzas of it will do: "A MISSOURI MAIDEN'S FAREWELL TO ALABAMA "Alabama, good-bye! I love thee well! But yet for a while do I leave thee now! Sad, yes, sad thoughts of thee my heart doth swell, And burning recollections throng my brow! For I have wandered through thy flowery woods; Have roamed and read near Tallapoosa's stream; Have listened to Tallassee's warring floods, And wooed on Coosa's side Aurora's beam. "Yet shame I not to bear an o'er-full heart, Nor blush to turn behind my tearful eyes; 'Tis from no stranger land I now must part, 'Tis to no strangers left I yield these sighs. Welcome and home were mine within this State, Whose vales I leave--whose spires fade fast from me And cold must be mine eyes, and heart, and tete, When, dear Alabama! they turn cold on thee!" There were very few there who knew what "tete" meant, but the poem was very satisfactory, nevertheless. Next appeared a dark-complexioned, black-eyed, black-haired young lady, who paused an impressive moment, assumed a tragic expression, and began to read in a measured, solemn tone: "A VISION "Dark and tempestuous was night. Around the throne on high not a single star quivered; but the deep intonations of the heavy thunder constantly vibrated upon the ear; whilst the terrific lightning revelled in angry mood through the cloudy chambers of heaven, seeming to scorn the power exerted over its terror by the illustrious Franklin! Even the boisterous winds unanimously came forth from their mystic homes, and blustered about as if to enhance by their aid the wildness of the scene. "At such a time, so dark, so dreary, for human sympathy my very spirit sighed; but instead thereof, "'My dearest friend, my counsellor, my comforter and guide--My joy in grief, my second bliss in joy,' came to my side. She moved like one of those bright beings pictured in the sunny walks of fancy's Eden by the romantic and young, a queen of beauty unadorned save by her own transcendent loveliness. So soft was her step, it failed to make even a sound, and but for the magical thrill imparted by her genial touch, as other unobtrusive beauties, she would have glided away un-perceived--unsought. A strange sadness rested upon her features, like icy tears upon the robe of December, as she pointed to the contending elements without, and bade me contemplate the two beings presented." This nightmare occupied some ten pages of manuscript and wound up with a sermon so destructive of all hope to non-Presbyterians that it took the first prize. This composition was considered to be the very finest effort of the evening. The mayor of the village, in delivering the prize to the author of it, made a warm speech in which he said that it was by far the most "eloquent" thing he had ever listened to, and that Daniel Webster himself might well be proud of it. It may be remarked, in passing, that the number of compositions in which the word "beauteous" was over-fondled, and human experience referred to as "life's page," was up to the usual average. Now the master, mellow almost to the verge of geniality, put his chair aside, turned his back to the audience, and began to draw a map of America on the blackboard, to exercise the geography class upon. But he made a sad business of it with his unsteady hand, and a smothered titter rippled over the house. He knew what the matter was, and set himself to right it. He sponged out lines and remade them; but he only distorted them more than ever, and the tittering was more pronounced. He threw his entire attention upon his work, now, as if determined not to be put down by the mirth. He felt that all eyes were fastened upon him; he imagined he was succeeding, and yet the tittering continued; it even manifestly increased. And well it might. There was a garret above, pierced with a scuttle over his head; and down through this scuttle came a cat, suspended around the haunches by a string; she had a rag tied about her head and jaws to keep her from mewing; as she slowly descended she curved upward and clawed at the string, she swung downward and clawed at the intangible air. The tittering rose higher and higher--the cat was within six inches of the absorbed teacher's head--down, down, a little lower, and she grabbed his wig with her desperate claws, clung to it, and was snatched up into the garret in an instant with her trophy still in her possession! And how the light did blaze abroad from the master's bald pate--for the sign-painter's boy had GILDED it! That broke up the meeting. The boys were avenged. Vacation had come. NOTE:--The pretended "compositions" quoted in this chapter are taken without alteration from a volume entitled "Prose and Poetry, by a Western Lady"--but they are exactly and precisely after the schoolgirl pattern, and hence are much happier than any mere imitations could be. CHAPTER XXII TOM joined the new order of Cadets of Temperance, being attracted by the showy character of their "regalia." He promised to abstain from smoking, chewing, and profanity as long as he remained a member. Now he found out a new thing--namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing. Tom soon found himself tormented with a desire to drink and swear; the desire grew to be so intense that nothing but the hope of a chance to display himself in his red sash kept him from withdrawing from the order. Fourth of July was coming; but he soon gave that up --gave it up before he had worn his shackles over forty-eight hours--and fixed his hopes upon old Judge Frazer, justice of the peace, who was apparently on his deathbed and would have a big public funeral, since he was so high an official. During three days Tom was deeply concerned about the Judge's condition and hungry for news of it. Sometimes his hopes ran high--so high that he would venture to get out his regalia and practise before the looking-glass. But the Judge had a most discouraging way of fluctuating. At last he was pronounced upon the mend--and then convalescent. Tom was disgusted; and felt a sense of injury, too. He handed in his resignation at once--and that night the Judge suffered a relapse and died. Tom resolved that he would never trust a man like that again. The funeral was a fine thing. The Cadets paraded in a style calculated to kill the late member with envy. Tom was a free boy again, however --there was something in that. He could drink and swear, now--but found to his surprise that he did not want to. The simple fact that he could, took the desire away, and the charm of it. Tom presently wondered to find that his coveted vacation was beginning to hang a little heavily on his hands. He attempted a diary--but nothing happened during three days, and so he abandoned it. The first of all the negro minstrel shows came to town, and made a sensation. Tom and Joe Harper got up a band of performers and were happy for two days. Even the Glorious Fourth was in some sense a failure, for it rained hard, there was no procession in consequence, and the greatest man in the world (as Tom supposed), Mr. Benton, an actual United States Senator, proved an overwhelming disappointment--for he was not twenty-five feet high, nor even anywhere in the neighborhood of it. A circus came. The boys played circus for three days afterward in tents made of rag carpeting--admission, three pins for boys, two for girls--and then circusing was abandoned. A phrenologist and a mesmerizer came--and went again and left the village duller and drearier than ever. There were some boys-and-girls' parties, but they were so few and so delightful that they only made the aching voids between ache the harder. Becky Thatcher was gone to her Constantinople home to stay with her parents during vacation--so there was no bright side to life anywhere. The dreadful secret of the murder was a chronic misery. It was a very cancer for permanency and pain. Then came the measles. During two long weeks Tom lay a prisoner, dead to the world and its happenings. He was very ill, he was interested in nothing. When he got upon his feet at last and moved feebly down-town, a melancholy change had come over everything and every creature. There had been a "revival," and everybody had "got religion," not only the adults, but even the boys and girls. Tom went about, hoping against hope for the sight of one blessed sinful face, but disappointment crossed him everywhere. He found Joe Harper studying a Testament, and turned sadly away from the depressing spectacle. He sought Ben Rogers, and found him visiting the poor with a basket of tracts. He hunted up Jim Hollis, who called his attention to the precious blessing of his late measles as a warning. Every boy he encountered added another ton to his depression; and when, in desperation, he flew for refuge at last to the bosom of Huckleberry Finn and was received with a Scriptural quotation, his heart broke and he crept home and to bed realizing that he alone of all the town was lost, forever and forever. And that night there came on a terrific storm, with driving rain, awful claps of thunder and blinding sheets of lightning. He covered his head with the bedclothes and waited in a horror of suspense for his doom; for he had not the shadow of a doubt that all this hubbub was about him. He believed he had taxed the forbearance of the powers above to the extremity of endurance and that this was the result. It might have seemed to him a waste of pomp and ammunition to kill a bug with a battery of artillery, but there seemed nothing incongruous about the getting up such an expensive thunderstorm as this to knock the turf from under an insect like himself. By and by the tempest spent itself and died without accomplishing its object. The boy's first impulse was to be grateful, and reform. His second was to wait--for there might not be any more storms. The next day the doctors were back; Tom had relapsed. The three weeks he spent on his back this time seemed an entire age. When he got abroad at last he was hardly grateful that he had been spared, remembering how lonely was his estate, how companionless and forlorn he was. He drifted listlessly down the street and found Jim Hollis acting as judge in a juvenile court that was trying a cat for murder, in the presence of her victim, a bird. He found Joe Harper and Huck Finn up an alley eating a stolen melon. Poor lads! they--like Tom--had suffered a relapse. 
7198	----	THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER BY MARK TWAIN (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) Part 6 CHAPTER XXIII AT last the sleepy atmosphere was stirred--and vigorously: the murder trial came on in the court. It became the absorbing topic of village talk immediately. Tom could not get away from it. Every reference to the murder sent a shudder to his heart, for his troubled conscience and fears almost persuaded him that these remarks were put forth in his hearing as "feelers"; he did not see how he could be suspected of knowing anything about the murder, but still he could not be comfortable in the midst of this gossip. It kept him in a cold shiver all the time. He took Huck to a lonely place to have a talk with him. It would be some relief to unseal his tongue for a little while; to divide his burden of distress with another sufferer. Moreover, he wanted to assure himself that Huck had remained discreet. "Huck, have you ever told anybody about--that?" "'Bout what?" "You know what." "Oh--'course I haven't." "Never a word?" "Never a solitary word, so help me. What makes you ask?" "Well, I was afeard." "Why, Tom Sawyer, we wouldn't be alive two days if that got found out. YOU know that." Tom felt more comfortable. After a pause: "Huck, they couldn't anybody get you to tell, could they?" "Get me to tell? Why, if I wanted that half-breed devil to drownd me they could get me to tell. They ain't no different way." "Well, that's all right, then. I reckon we're safe as long as we keep mum. But let's swear again, anyway. It's more surer." "I'm agreed." So they swore again with dread solemnities. "What is the talk around, Huck? I've heard a power of it." "Talk? Well, it's just Muff Potter, Muff Potter, Muff Potter all the time. It keeps me in a sweat, constant, so's I want to hide som'ers." "That's just the same way they go on round me. I reckon he's a goner. Don't you feel sorry for him, sometimes?" "Most always--most always. He ain't no account; but then he hain't ever done anything to hurt anybody. Just fishes a little, to get money to get drunk on--and loafs around considerable; but lord, we all do that--leastways most of us--preachers and such like. But he's kind of good--he give me half a fish, once, when there warn't enough for two; and lots of times he's kind of stood by me when I was out of luck." "Well, he's mended kites for me, Huck, and knitted hooks on to my line. I wish we could get him out of there." "My! we couldn't get him out, Tom. And besides, 'twouldn't do any good; they'd ketch him again." "Yes--so they would. But I hate to hear 'em abuse him so like the dickens when he never done--that." "I do too, Tom. Lord, I hear 'em say he's the bloodiest looking villain in this country, and they wonder he wasn't ever hung before." "Yes, they talk like that, all the time. I've heard 'em say that if he was to get free they'd lynch him." "And they'd do it, too." The boys had a long talk, but it brought them little comfort. As the twilight drew on, they found themselves hanging about the neighborhood of the little isolated jail, perhaps with an undefined hope that something would happen that might clear away their difficulties. But nothing happened; there seemed to be no angels or fairies interested in this luckless captive. The boys did as they had often done before--went to the cell grating and gave Potter some tobacco and matches. He was on the ground floor and there were no guards. His gratitude for their gifts had always smote their consciences before--it cut deeper than ever, this time. They felt cowardly and treacherous to the last degree when Potter said: "You've been mighty good to me, boys--better'n anybody else in this town. And I don't forget it, I don't. Often I says to myself, says I, 'I used to mend all the boys' kites and things, and show 'em where the good fishin' places was, and befriend 'em what I could, and now they've all forgot old Muff when he's in trouble; but Tom don't, and Huck don't--THEY don't forget him, says I, 'and I don't forget them.' Well, boys, I done an awful thing--drunk and crazy at the time--that's the only way I account for it--and now I got to swing for it, and it's right. Right, and BEST, too, I reckon--hope so, anyway. Well, we won't talk about that. I don't want to make YOU feel bad; you've befriended me. But what I want to say, is, don't YOU ever get drunk--then you won't ever get here. Stand a litter furder west--so--that's it; it's a prime comfort to see faces that's friendly when a body's in such a muck of trouble, and there don't none come here but yourn. Good friendly faces--good friendly faces. Git up on one another's backs and let me touch 'em. That's it. Shake hands--yourn'll come through the bars, but mine's too big. Little hands, and weak--but they've helped Muff Potter a power, and they'd help him more if they could." Tom went home miserable, and his dreams that night were full of horrors. The next day and the day after, he hung about the court-room, drawn by an almost irresistible impulse to go in, but forcing himself to stay out. Huck was having the same experience. They studiously avoided each other. Each wandered away, from time to time, but the same dismal fascination always brought them back presently. Tom kept his ears open when idlers sauntered out of the court-room, but invariably heard distressing news--the toils were closing more and more relentlessly around poor Potter. At the end of the second day the village talk was to the effect that Injun Joe's evidence stood firm and unshaken, and that there was not the slightest question as to what the jury's verdict would be. Tom was out late, that night, and came to bed through the window. He was in a tremendous state of excitement. It was hours before he got to sleep. All the village flocked to the court-house the next morning, for this was to be the great day. Both sexes were about equally represented in the packed audience. After a long wait the jury filed in and took their places; shortly afterward, Potter, pale and haggard, timid and hopeless, was brought in, with chains upon him, and seated where all the curious eyes could stare at him; no less conspicuous was Injun Joe, stolid as ever. There was another pause, and then the judge arrived and the sheriff proclaimed the opening of the court. The usual whisperings among the lawyers and gathering together of papers followed. These details and accompanying delays worked up an atmosphere of preparation that was as impressive as it was fascinating. Now a witness was called who testified that he found Muff Potter washing in the brook, at an early hour of the morning that the murder was discovered, and that he immediately sneaked away. After some further questioning, counsel for the prosecution said: "Take the witness." The prisoner raised his eyes for a moment, but dropped them again when his own counsel said: "I have no questions to ask him." The next witness proved the finding of the knife near the corpse. Counsel for the prosecution said: "Take the witness." "I have no questions to ask him," Potter's lawyer replied. A third witness swore he had often seen the knife in Potter's possession. "Take the witness." Counsel for Potter declined to question him. The faces of the audience began to betray annoyance. Did this attorney mean to throw away his client's life without an effort? Several witnesses deposed concerning Potter's guilty behavior when brought to the scene of the murder. They were allowed to leave the stand without being cross-questioned. Every detail of the damaging circumstances that occurred in the graveyard upon that morning which all present remembered so well was brought out by credible witnesses, but none of them were cross-examined by Potter's lawyer. The perplexity and dissatisfaction of the house expressed itself in murmurs and provoked a reproof from the bench. Counsel for the prosecution now said: "By the oaths of citizens whose simple word is above suspicion, we have fastened this awful crime, beyond all possibility of question, upon the unhappy prisoner at the bar. We rest our case here." A groan escaped from poor Potter, and he put his face in his hands and rocked his body softly to and fro, while a painful silence reigned in the court-room. Many men were moved, and many women's compassion testified itself in tears. Counsel for the defence rose and said: "Your honor, in our remarks at the opening of this trial, we foreshadowed our purpose to prove that our client did this fearful deed while under the influence of a blind and irresponsible delirium produced by drink. We have changed our mind. We shall not offer that plea." [Then to the clerk:] "Call Thomas Sawyer!" A puzzled amazement awoke in every face in the house, not even excepting Potter's. Every eye fastened itself with wondering interest upon Tom as he rose and took his place upon the stand. The boy looked wild enough, for he was badly scared. The oath was administered. "Thomas Sawyer, where were you on the seventeenth of June, about the hour of midnight?" Tom glanced at Injun Joe's iron face and his tongue failed him. The audience listened breathless, but the words refused to come. After a few moments, however, the boy got a little of his strength back, and managed to put enough of it into his voice to make part of the house hear: "In the graveyard!" "A little bit louder, please. Don't be afraid. You were--" "In the graveyard." A contemptuous smile flitted across Injun Joe's face. "Were you anywhere near Horse Williams' grave?" "Yes, sir." "Speak up--just a trifle louder. How near were you?" "Near as I am to you." "Were you hidden, or not?" "I was hid." "Where?" "Behind the elms that's on the edge of the grave." Injun Joe gave a barely perceptible start. "Any one with you?" "Yes, sir. I went there with--" "Wait--wait a moment. Never mind mentioning your companion's name. We will produce him at the proper time. Did you carry anything there with you." Tom hesitated and looked confused. "Speak out, my boy--don't be diffident. The truth is always respectable. What did you take there?" "Only a--a--dead cat." There was a ripple of mirth, which the court checked. "We will produce the skeleton of that cat. Now, my boy, tell us everything that occurred--tell it in your own way--don't skip anything, and don't be afraid." Tom began--hesitatingly at first, but as he warmed to his subject his words flowed more and more easily; in a little while every sound ceased but his own voice; every eye fixed itself upon him; with parted lips and bated breath the audience hung upon his words, taking no note of time, rapt in the ghastly fascinations of the tale. The strain upon pent emotion reached its climax when the boy said: "--and as the doctor fetched the board around and Muff Potter fell, Injun Joe jumped with the knife and--" Crash! Quick as lightning the half-breed sprang for a window, tore his way through all opposers, and was gone! CHAPTER XXIV TOM was a glittering hero once more--the pet of the old, the envy of the young. His name even went into immortal print, for the village paper magnified him. There were some that believed he would be President, yet, if he escaped hanging. As usual, the fickle, unreasoning world took Muff Potter to its bosom and fondled him as lavishly as it had abused him before. But that sort of conduct is to the world's credit; therefore it is not well to find fault with it. Tom's days were days of splendor and exultation to him, but his nights were seasons of horror. Injun Joe infested all his dreams, and always with doom in his eye. Hardly any temptation could persuade the boy to stir abroad after nightfall. Poor Huck was in the same state of wretchedness and terror, for Tom had told the whole story to the lawyer the night before the great day of the trial, and Huck was sore afraid that his share in the business might leak out, yet, notwithstanding Injun Joe's flight had saved him the suffering of testifying in court. The poor fellow had got the attorney to promise secrecy, but what of that? Since Tom's harassed conscience had managed to drive him to the lawyer's house by night and wring a dread tale from lips that had been sealed with the dismalest and most formidable of oaths, Huck's confidence in the human race was well-nigh obliterated. Daily Muff Potter's gratitude made Tom glad he had spoken; but nightly he wished he had sealed up his tongue. Half the time Tom was afraid Injun Joe would never be captured; the other half he was afraid he would be. He felt sure he never could draw a safe breath again until that man was dead and he had seen the corpse. Rewards had been offered, the country had been scoured, but no Injun Joe was found. One of those omniscient and awe-inspiring marvels, a detective, came up from St. Louis, moused around, shook his head, looked wise, and made that sort of astounding success which members of that craft usually achieve. That is to say, he "found a clew." But you can't hang a "clew" for murder, and so after that detective had got through and gone home, Tom felt just as insecure as he was before. The slow days drifted on, and each left behind it a slightly lightened weight of apprehension. CHAPTER XXV THERE comes a time in every rightly-constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure. This desire suddenly came upon Tom one day. He sallied out to find Joe Harper, but failed of success. Next he sought Ben Rogers; he had gone fishing. Presently he stumbled upon Huck Finn the Red-Handed. Huck would answer. Tom took him to a private place and opened the matter to him confidentially. Huck was willing. Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome superabundance of that sort of time which is not money. "Where'll we dig?" said Huck. "Oh, most anywhere." "Why, is it hid all around?" "No, indeed it ain't. It's hid in mighty particular places, Huck --sometimes on islands, sometimes in rotten chests under the end of a limb of an old dead tree, just where the shadow falls at midnight; but mostly under the floor in ha'nted houses." "Who hides it?" "Why, robbers, of course--who'd you reckon? Sunday-school sup'rintendents?" "I don't know. If 'twas mine I wouldn't hide it; I'd spend it and have a good time." "So would I. But robbers don't do that way. They always hide it and leave it there." "Don't they come after it any more?" "No, they think they will, but they generally forget the marks, or else they die. Anyway, it lays there a long time and gets rusty; and by and by somebody finds an old yellow paper that tells how to find the marks--a paper that's got to be ciphered over about a week because it's mostly signs and hy'roglyphics." "HyroQwhich?" "Hy'roglyphics--pictures and things, you know, that don't seem to mean anything." "Have you got one of them papers, Tom?" "No." "Well then, how you going to find the marks?" "I don't want any marks. They always bury it under a ha'nted house or on an island, or under a dead tree that's got one limb sticking out. Well, we've tried Jackson's Island a little, and we can try it again some time; and there's the old ha'nted house up the Still-House branch, and there's lots of dead-limb trees--dead loads of 'em." "Is it under all of them?" "How you talk! No!" "Then how you going to know which one to go for?" "Go for all of 'em!" "Why, Tom, it'll take all summer." "Well, what of that? Suppose you find a brass pot with a hundred dollars in it, all rusty and gray, or rotten chest full of di'monds. How's that?" Huck's eyes glowed. "That's bully. Plenty bully enough for me. Just you gimme the hundred dollars and I don't want no di'monds." "All right. But I bet you I ain't going to throw off on di'monds. Some of 'em's worth twenty dollars apiece--there ain't any, hardly, but's worth six bits or a dollar." "No! Is that so?" "Cert'nly--anybody'll tell you so. Hain't you ever seen one, Huck?" "Not as I remember." "Oh, kings have slathers of them." "Well, I don' know no kings, Tom." "I reckon you don't. But if you was to go to Europe you'd see a raft of 'em hopping around." "Do they hop?" "Hop?--your granny! No!" "Well, what did you say they did, for?" "Shucks, I only meant you'd SEE 'em--not hopping, of course--what do they want to hop for?--but I mean you'd just see 'em--scattered around, you know, in a kind of a general way. Like that old humpbacked Richard." "Richard? What's his other name?" "He didn't have any other name. Kings don't have any but a given name." "No?" "But they don't." "Well, if they like it, Tom, all right; but I don't want to be a king and have only just a given name, like a nigger. But say--where you going to dig first?" "Well, I don't know. S'pose we tackle that old dead-limb tree on the hill t'other side of Still-House branch?" "I'm agreed." So they got a crippled pick and a shovel, and set out on their three-mile tramp. They arrived hot and panting, and threw themselves down in the shade of a neighboring elm to rest and have a smoke. "I like this," said Tom. "So do I." "Say, Huck, if we find a treasure here, what you going to do with your share?" "Well, I'll have pie and a glass of soda every day, and I'll go to every circus that comes along. I bet I'll have a gay time." "Well, ain't you going to save any of it?" "Save it? What for?" "Why, so as to have something to live on, by and by." "Oh, that ain't any use. Pap would come back to thish-yer town some day and get his claws on it if I didn't hurry up, and I tell you he'd clean it out pretty quick. What you going to do with yourn, Tom?" "I'm going to buy a new drum, and a sure-'nough sword, and a red necktie and a bull pup, and get married." "Married!" "That's it." "Tom, you--why, you ain't in your right mind." "Wait--you'll see." "Well, that's the foolishest thing you could do. Look at pap and my mother. Fight! Why, they used to fight all the time. I remember, mighty well." "That ain't anything. The girl I'm going to marry won't fight." "Tom, I reckon they're all alike. They'll all comb a body. Now you better think 'bout this awhile. I tell you you better. What's the name of the gal?" "It ain't a gal at all--it's a girl." "It's all the same, I reckon; some says gal, some says girl--both's right, like enough. Anyway, what's her name, Tom?" "I'll tell you some time--not now." "All right--that'll do. Only if you get married I'll be more lonesomer than ever." "No you won't. You'll come and live with me. Now stir out of this and we'll go to digging." They worked and sweated for half an hour. No result. They toiled another half-hour. Still no result. Huck said: "Do they always bury it as deep as this?" "Sometimes--not always. Not generally. I reckon we haven't got the right place." So they chose a new spot and began again. The labor dragged a little, but still they made progress. They pegged away in silence for some time. Finally Huck leaned on his shovel, swabbed the beaded drops from his brow with his sleeve, and said: "Where you going to dig next, after we get this one?" "I reckon maybe we'll tackle the old tree that's over yonder on Cardiff Hill back of the widow's." "I reckon that'll be a good one. But won't the widow take it away from us, Tom? It's on her land." "SHE take it away! Maybe she'd like to try it once. Whoever finds one of these hid treasures, it belongs to him. It don't make any difference whose land it's on." That was satisfactory. The work went on. By and by Huck said: "Blame it, we must be in the wrong place again. What do you think?" "It is mighty curious, Huck. I don't understand it. Sometimes witches interfere. I reckon maybe that's what's the trouble now." "Shucks! Witches ain't got no power in the daytime." "Well, that's so. I didn't think of that. Oh, I know what the matter is! What a blamed lot of fools we are! You got to find out where the shadow of the limb falls at midnight, and that's where you dig!" "Then consound it, we've fooled away all this work for nothing. Now hang it all, we got to come back in the night. It's an awful long way. Can you get out?" "I bet I will. We've got to do it to-night, too, because if somebody sees these holes they'll know in a minute what's here and they'll go for it." "Well, I'll come around and maow to-night." "All right. Let's hide the tools in the bushes." The boys were there that night, about the appointed time. They sat in the shadow waiting. It was a lonely place, and an hour made solemn by old traditions. Spirits whispered in the rustling leaves, ghosts lurked in the murky nooks, the deep baying of a hound floated up out of the distance, an owl answered with his sepulchral note. The boys were subdued by these solemnities, and talked little. By and by they judged that twelve had come; they marked where the shadow fell, and began to dig. Their hopes commenced to rise. Their interest grew stronger, and their industry kept pace with it. The hole deepened and still deepened, but every time their hearts jumped to hear the pick strike upon something, they only suffered a new disappointment. It was only a stone or a chunk. At last Tom said: "It ain't any use, Huck, we're wrong again." "Well, but we CAN'T be wrong. We spotted the shadder to a dot." "I know it, but then there's another thing." "What's that?". "Why, we only guessed at the time. Like enough it was too late or too early." Huck dropped his shovel. "That's it," said he. "That's the very trouble. We got to give this one up. We can't ever tell the right time, and besides this kind of thing's too awful, here this time of night with witches and ghosts a-fluttering around so. I feel as if something's behind me all the time; and I'm afeard to turn around, becuz maybe there's others in front a-waiting for a chance. I been creeping all over, ever since I got here." "Well, I've been pretty much so, too, Huck. They most always put in a dead man when they bury a treasure under a tree, to look out for it." "Lordy!" "Yes, they do. I've always heard that." "Tom, I don't like to fool around much where there's dead people. A body's bound to get into trouble with 'em, sure." "I don't like to stir 'em up, either. S'pose this one here was to stick his skull out and say something!" "Don't Tom! It's awful." "Well, it just is. Huck, I don't feel comfortable a bit." "Say, Tom, let's give this place up, and try somewheres else." "All right, I reckon we better." "What'll it be?" Tom considered awhile; and then said: "The ha'nted house. That's it!" "Blame it, I don't like ha'nted houses, Tom. Why, they're a dern sight worse'n dead people. Dead people might talk, maybe, but they don't come sliding around in a shroud, when you ain't noticing, and peep over your shoulder all of a sudden and grit their teeth, the way a ghost does. I couldn't stand such a thing as that, Tom--nobody could." "Yes, but, Huck, ghosts don't travel around only at night. They won't hender us from digging there in the daytime." "Well, that's so. But you know mighty well people don't go about that ha'nted house in the day nor the night." "Well, that's mostly because they don't like to go where a man's been murdered, anyway--but nothing's ever been seen around that house except in the night--just some blue lights slipping by the windows--no regular ghosts." "Well, where you see one of them blue lights flickering around, Tom, you can bet there's a ghost mighty close behind it. It stands to reason. Becuz you know that they don't anybody but ghosts use 'em." "Yes, that's so. But anyway they don't come around in the daytime, so what's the use of our being afeard?" "Well, all right. We'll tackle the ha'nted house if you say so--but I reckon it's taking chances." They had started down the hill by this time. There in the middle of the moonlit valley below them stood the "ha'nted" house, utterly isolated, its fences gone long ago, rank weeds smothering the very doorsteps, the chimney crumbled to ruin, the window-sashes vacant, a corner of the roof caved in. The boys gazed awhile, half expecting to see a blue light flit past a window; then talking in a low tone, as befitted the time and the circumstances, they struck far off to the right, to give the haunted house a wide berth, and took their way homeward through the woods that adorned the rearward side of Cardiff Hill. CHAPTER XXVI ABOUT noon the next day the boys arrived at the dead tree; they had come for their tools. Tom was impatient to go to the haunted house; Huck was measurably so, also--but suddenly said: "Lookyhere, Tom, do you know what day it is?" Tom mentally ran over the days of the week, and then quickly lifted his eyes with a startled look in them-- "My! I never once thought of it, Huck!" "Well, I didn't neither, but all at once it popped onto me that it was Friday." "Blame it, a body can't be too careful, Huck. We might 'a' got into an awful scrape, tackling such a thing on a Friday." "MIGHT! Better say we WOULD! There's some lucky days, maybe, but Friday ain't." "Any fool knows that. I don't reckon YOU was the first that found it out, Huck." "Well, I never said I was, did I? And Friday ain't all, neither. I had a rotten bad dream last night--dreampt about rats." "No! Sure sign of trouble. Did they fight?" "No." "Well, that's good, Huck. When they don't fight it's only a sign that there's trouble around, you know. All we got to do is to look mighty sharp and keep out of it. We'll drop this thing for to-day, and play. Do you know Robin Hood, Huck?" "No. Who's Robin Hood?" "Why, he was one of the greatest men that was ever in England--and the best. He was a robber." "Cracky, I wisht I was. Who did he rob?" "Only sheriffs and bishops and rich people and kings, and such like. But he never bothered the poor. He loved 'em. He always divided up with 'em perfectly square." "Well, he must 'a' been a brick." "I bet you he was, Huck. Oh, he was the noblest man that ever was. They ain't any such men now, I can tell you. He could lick any man in England, with one hand tied behind him; and he could take his yew bow and plug a ten-cent piece every time, a mile and a half." "What's a YEW bow?" "I don't know. It's some kind of a bow, of course. And if he hit that dime only on the edge he would set down and cry--and curse. But we'll play Robin Hood--it's nobby fun. I'll learn you." "I'm agreed." So they played Robin Hood all the afternoon, now and then casting a yearning eye down upon the haunted house and passing a remark about the morrow's prospects and possibilities there. As the sun began to sink into the west they took their way homeward athwart the long shadows of the trees and soon were buried from sight in the forests of Cardiff Hill. On Saturday, shortly after noon, the boys were at the dead tree again. They had a smoke and a chat in the shade, and then dug a little in their last hole, not with great hope, but merely because Tom said there were so many cases where people had given up a treasure after getting down within six inches of it, and then somebody else had come along and turned it up with a single thrust of a shovel. The thing failed this time, however, so the boys shouldered their tools and went away feeling that they had not trifled with fortune, but had fulfilled all the requirements that belong to the business of treasure-hunting. When they reached the haunted house there was something so weird and grisly about the dead silence that reigned there under the baking sun, and something so depressing about the loneliness and desolation of the place, that they were afraid, for a moment, to venture in. Then they crept to the door and took a trembling peep. They saw a weed-grown, floorless room, unplastered, an ancient fireplace, vacant windows, a ruinous staircase; and here, there, and everywhere hung ragged and abandoned cobwebs. They presently entered, softly, with quickened pulses, talking in whispers, ears alert to catch the slightest sound, and muscles tense and ready for instant retreat. In a little while familiarity modified their fears and they gave the place a critical and interested examination, rather admiring their own boldness, and wondering at it, too. Next they wanted to look up-stairs. This was something like cutting off retreat, but they got to daring each other, and of course there could be but one result--they threw their tools into a corner and made the ascent. Up there were the same signs of decay. In one corner they found a closet that promised mystery, but the promise was a fraud--there was nothing in it. Their courage was up now and well in hand. They were about to go down and begin work when-- "Sh!" said Tom. "What is it?" whispered Huck, blanching with fright. "Sh! ... There! ... Hear it?" "Yes! ... Oh, my! Let's run!" "Keep still! Don't you budge! They're coming right toward the door." The boys stretched themselves upon the floor with their eyes to knot-holes in the planking, and lay waiting, in a misery of fear. "They've stopped.... No--coming.... Here they are. Don't whisper another word, Huck. My goodness, I wish I was out of this!" Two men entered. Each boy said to himself: "There's the old deaf and dumb Spaniard that's been about town once or twice lately--never saw t'other man before." "T'other" was a ragged, unkempt creature, with nothing very pleasant in his face. The Spaniard was wrapped in a serape; he had bushy white whiskers; long white hair flowed from under his sombrero, and he wore green goggles. When they came in, "t'other" was talking in a low voice; they sat down on the ground, facing the door, with their backs to the wall, and the speaker continued his remarks. His manner became less guarded and his words more distinct as he proceeded: "No," said he, "I've thought it all over, and I don't like it. It's dangerous." "Dangerous!" grunted the "deaf and dumb" Spaniard--to the vast surprise of the boys. "Milksop!" This voice made the boys gasp and quake. It was Injun Joe's! There was silence for some time. Then Joe said: "What's any more dangerous than that job up yonder--but nothing's come of it." "That's different. Away up the river so, and not another house about. 'Twon't ever be known that we tried, anyway, long as we didn't succeed." "Well, what's more dangerous than coming here in the daytime!--anybody would suspicion us that saw us." "I know that. But there warn't any other place as handy after that fool of a job. I want to quit this shanty. I wanted to yesterday, only it warn't any use trying to stir out of here, with those infernal boys playing over there on the hill right in full view." "Those infernal boys" quaked again under the inspiration of this remark, and thought how lucky it was that they had remembered it was Friday and concluded to wait a day. They wished in their hearts they had waited a year. The two men got out some food and made a luncheon. After a long and thoughtful silence, Injun Joe said: "Look here, lad--you go back up the river where you belong. Wait there till you hear from me. I'll take the chances on dropping into this town just once more, for a look. We'll do that 'dangerous' job after I've spied around a little and think things look well for it. Then for Texas! We'll leg it together!" This was satisfactory. Both men presently fell to yawning, and Injun Joe said: "I'm dead for sleep! It's your turn to watch." He curled down in the weeds and soon began to snore. His comrade stirred him once or twice and he became quiet. Presently the watcher began to nod; his head drooped lower and lower, both men began to snore now. The boys drew a long, grateful breath. Tom whispered: "Now's our chance--come!" Huck said: "I can't--I'd die if they was to wake." Tom urged--Huck held back. At last Tom rose slowly and softly, and started alone. But the first step he made wrung such a hideous creak from the crazy floor that he sank down almost dead with fright. He never made a second attempt. The boys lay there counting the dragging moments till it seemed to them that time must be done and eternity growing gray; and then they were grateful to note that at last the sun was setting. Now one snore ceased. Injun Joe sat up, stared around--smiled grimly upon his comrade, whose head was drooping upon his knees--stirred him up with his foot and said: "Here! YOU'RE a watchman, ain't you! All right, though--nothing's happened." "My! have I been asleep?" "Oh, partly, partly. Nearly time for us to be moving, pard. What'll we do with what little swag we've got left?" "I don't know--leave it here as we've always done, I reckon. No use to take it away till we start south. Six hundred and fifty in silver's something to carry." "Well--all right--it won't matter to come here once more." "No--but I'd say come in the night as we used to do--it's better." "Yes: but look here; it may be a good while before I get the right chance at that job; accidents might happen; 'tain't in such a very good place; we'll just regularly bury it--and bury it deep." "Good idea," said the comrade, who walked across the room, knelt down, raised one of the rearward hearth-stones and took out a bag that jingled pleasantly. He subtracted from it twenty or thirty dollars for himself and as much for Injun Joe, and passed the bag to the latter, who was on his knees in the corner, now, digging with his bowie-knife. The boys forgot all their fears, all their miseries in an instant. With gloating eyes they watched every movement. Luck!--the splendor of it was beyond all imagination! Six hundred dollars was money enough to make half a dozen boys rich! Here was treasure-hunting under the happiest auspices--there would not be any bothersome uncertainty as to where to dig. They nudged each other every moment--eloquent nudges and easily understood, for they simply meant--"Oh, but ain't you glad NOW we're here!" Joe's knife struck upon something. "Hello!" said he. "What is it?" said his comrade. "Half-rotten plank--no, it's a box, I believe. Here--bear a hand and we'll see what it's here for. Never mind, I've broke a hole." He reached his hand in and drew it out-- "Man, it's money!" The two men examined the handful of coins. They were gold. The boys above were as excited as themselves, and as delighted. Joe's comrade said: "We'll make quick work of this. There's an old rusty pick over amongst the weeds in the corner the other side of the fireplace--I saw it a minute ago." He ran and brought the boys' pick and shovel. Injun Joe took the pick, looked it over critically, shook his head, muttered something to himself, and then began to use it. The box was soon unearthed. It was not very large; it was iron bound and had been very strong before the slow years had injured it. The men contemplated the treasure awhile in blissful silence. "Pard, there's thousands of dollars here," said Injun Joe. "'Twas always said that Murrel's gang used to be around here one summer," the stranger observed. "I know it," said Injun Joe; "and this looks like it, I should say." "Now you won't need to do that job." The half-breed frowned. Said he: "You don't know me. Least you don't know all about that thing. 'Tain't robbery altogether--it's REVENGE!" and a wicked light flamed in his eyes. "I'll need your help in it. When it's finished--then Texas. Go home to your Nance and your kids, and stand by till you hear from me." "Well--if you say so; what'll we do with this--bury it again?" "Yes. [Ravishing delight overhead.] NO! by the great Sachem, no! [Profound distress overhead.] I'd nearly forgot. That pick had fresh earth on it! [The boys were sick with terror in a moment.] What business has a pick and a shovel here? What business with fresh earth on them? Who brought them here--and where are they gone? Have you heard anybody?--seen anybody? What! bury it again and leave them to come and see the ground disturbed? Not exactly--not exactly. We'll take it to my den." "Why, of course! Might have thought of that before. You mean Number One?" "No--Number Two--under the cross. The other place is bad--too common." "All right. It's nearly dark enough to start." Injun Joe got up and went about from window to window cautiously peeping out. Presently he said: "Who could have brought those tools here? Do you reckon they can be up-stairs?" The boys' breath forsook them. Injun Joe put his hand on his knife, halted a moment, undecided, and then turned toward the stairway. The boys thought of the closet, but their strength was gone. The steps came creaking up the stairs--the intolerable distress of the situation woke the stricken resolution of the lads--they were about to spring for the closet, when there was a crash of rotten timbers and Injun Joe landed on the ground amid the debris of the ruined stairway. He gathered himself up cursing, and his comrade said: "Now what's the use of all that? If it's anybody, and they're up there, let them STAY there--who cares? If they want to jump down, now, and get into trouble, who objects? It will be dark in fifteen minutes --and then let them follow us if they want to. I'm willing. In my opinion, whoever hove those things in here caught a sight of us and took us for ghosts or devils or something. I'll bet they're running yet." Joe grumbled awhile; then he agreed with his friend that what daylight was left ought to be economized in getting things ready for leaving. Shortly afterward they slipped out of the house in the deepening twilight, and moved toward the river with their precious box. Tom and Huck rose up, weak but vastly relieved, and stared after them through the chinks between the logs of the house. Follow? Not they. They were content to reach ground again without broken necks, and take the townward track over the hill. They did not talk much. They were too much absorbed in hating themselves--hating the ill luck that made them take the spade and the pick there. But for that, Injun Joe never would have suspected. He would have hidden the silver with the gold to wait there till his "revenge" was satisfied, and then he would have had the misfortune to find that money turn up missing. Bitter, bitter luck that the tools were ever brought there! They resolved to keep a lookout for that Spaniard when he should come to town spying out for chances to do his revengeful job, and follow him to "Number Two," wherever that might be. Then a ghastly thought occurred to Tom. "Revenge? What if he means US, Huck!" "Oh, don't!" said Huck, nearly fainting. They talked it all over, and as they entered town they agreed to believe that he might possibly mean somebody else--at least that he might at least mean nobody but Tom, since only Tom had testified. Very, very small comfort it was to Tom to be alone in danger! Company would be a palpable improvement, he thought. CHAPTER XXVII THE adventure of the day mightily tormented Tom's dreams that night. Four times he had his hands on that rich treasure and four times it wasted to nothingness in his fingers as sleep forsook him and wakefulness brought back the hard reality of his misfortune. As he lay in the early morning recalling the incidents of his great adventure, he noticed that they seemed curiously subdued and far away--somewhat as if they had happened in another world, or in a time long gone by. Then it occurred to him that the great adventure itself must be a dream! There was one very strong argument in favor of this idea--namely, that the quantity of coin he had seen was too vast to be real. He had never seen as much as fifty dollars in one mass before, and he was like all boys of his age and station in life, in that he imagined that all references to "hundreds" and "thousands" were mere fanciful forms of speech, and that no such sums really existed in the world. He never had supposed for a moment that so large a sum as a hundred dollars was to be found in actual money in any one's possession. If his notions of hidden treasure had been analyzed, they would have been found to consist of a handful of real dimes and a bushel of vague, splendid, ungraspable dollars. But the incidents of his adventure grew sensibly sharper and clearer under the attrition of thinking them over, and so he presently found himself leaning to the impression that the thing might not have been a dream, after all. This uncertainty must be swept away. He would snatch a hurried breakfast and go and find Huck. Huck was sitting on the gunwale of a flatboat, listlessly dangling his feet in the water and looking very melancholy. Tom concluded to let Huck lead up to the subject. If he did not do it, then the adventure would be proved to have been only a dream. "Hello, Huck!" "Hello, yourself." Silence, for a minute. "Tom, if we'd 'a' left the blame tools at the dead tree, we'd 'a' got the money. Oh, ain't it awful!" "'Tain't a dream, then, 'tain't a dream! Somehow I most wish it was. Dog'd if I don't, Huck." "What ain't a dream?" "Oh, that thing yesterday. I been half thinking it was." "Dream! If them stairs hadn't broke down you'd 'a' seen how much dream it was! I've had dreams enough all night--with that patch-eyed Spanish devil going for me all through 'em--rot him!" "No, not rot him. FIND him! Track the money!" "Tom, we'll never find him. A feller don't have only one chance for such a pile--and that one's lost. I'd feel mighty shaky if I was to see him, anyway." "Well, so'd I; but I'd like to see him, anyway--and track him out--to his Number Two." "Number Two--yes, that's it. I been thinking 'bout that. But I can't make nothing out of it. What do you reckon it is?" "I dono. It's too deep. Say, Huck--maybe it's the number of a house!" "Goody! ... No, Tom, that ain't it. If it is, it ain't in this one-horse town. They ain't no numbers here." "Well, that's so. Lemme think a minute. Here--it's the number of a room--in a tavern, you know!" "Oh, that's the trick! They ain't only two taverns. We can find out quick." "You stay here, Huck, till I come." Tom was off at once. He did not care to have Huck's company in public places. He was gone half an hour. He found that in the best tavern, No. 2 had long been occupied by a young lawyer, and was still so occupied. In the less ostentatious house, No. 2 was a mystery. The tavern-keeper's young son said it was kept locked all the time, and he never saw anybody go into it or come out of it except at night; he did not know any particular reason for this state of things; had had some little curiosity, but it was rather feeble; had made the most of the mystery by entertaining himself with the idea that that room was "ha'nted"; had noticed that there was a light in there the night before. "That's what I've found out, Huck. I reckon that's the very No. 2 we're after." "I reckon it is, Tom. Now what you going to do?" "Lemme think." Tom thought a long time. Then he said: "I'll tell you. The back door of that No. 2 is the door that comes out into that little close alley between the tavern and the old rattle trap of a brick store. Now you get hold of all the door-keys you can find, and I'll nip all of auntie's, and the first dark night we'll go there and try 'em. And mind you, keep a lookout for Injun Joe, because he said he was going to drop into town and spy around once more for a chance to get his revenge. If you see him, you just follow him; and if he don't go to that No. 2, that ain't the place." "Lordy, I don't want to foller him by myself!" "Why, it'll be night, sure. He mightn't ever see you--and if he did, maybe he'd never think anything." "Well, if it's pretty dark I reckon I'll track him. I dono--I dono. I'll try." "You bet I'll follow him, if it's dark, Huck. Why, he might 'a' found out he couldn't get his revenge, and be going right after that money." "It's so, Tom, it's so. I'll foller him; I will, by jingoes!" "Now you're TALKING! Don't you ever weaken, Huck, and I won't." 
7199	----	THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER BY MARK TWAIN (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) Part 7 CHAPTER XXVIII THAT night Tom and Huck were ready for their adventure. They hung about the neighborhood of the tavern until after nine, one watching the alley at a distance and the other the tavern door. Nobody entered the alley or left it; nobody resembling the Spaniard entered or left the tavern door. The night promised to be a fair one; so Tom went home with the understanding that if a considerable degree of darkness came on, Huck was to come and "maow," whereupon he would slip out and try the keys. But the night remained clear, and Huck closed his watch and retired to bed in an empty sugar hogshead about twelve. Tuesday the boys had the same ill luck. Also Wednesday. But Thursday night promised better. Tom slipped out in good season with his aunt's old tin lantern, and a large towel to blindfold it with. He hid the lantern in Huck's sugar hogshead and the watch began. An hour before midnight the tavern closed up and its lights (the only ones thereabouts) were put out. No Spaniard had been seen. Nobody had entered or left the alley. Everything was auspicious. The blackness of darkness reigned, the perfect stillness was interrupted only by occasional mutterings of distant thunder. Tom got his lantern, lit it in the hogshead, wrapped it closely in the towel, and the two adventurers crept in the gloom toward the tavern. Huck stood sentry and Tom felt his way into the alley. Then there was a season of waiting anxiety that weighed upon Huck's spirits like a mountain. He began to wish he could see a flash from the lantern--it would frighten him, but it would at least tell him that Tom was alive yet. It seemed hours since Tom had disappeared. Surely he must have fainted; maybe he was dead; maybe his heart had burst under terror and excitement. In his uneasiness Huck found himself drawing closer and closer to the alley; fearing all sorts of dreadful things, and momentarily expecting some catastrophe to happen that would take away his breath. There was not much to take away, for he seemed only able to inhale it by thimblefuls, and his heart would soon wear itself out, the way it was beating. Suddenly there was a flash of light and Tom came tearing by him: "Run!" said he; "run, for your life!" He needn't have repeated it; once was enough; Huck was making thirty or forty miles an hour before the repetition was uttered. The boys never stopped till they reached the shed of a deserted slaughter-house at the lower end of the village. Just as they got within its shelter the storm burst and the rain poured down. As soon as Tom got his breath he said: "Huck, it was awful! I tried two of the keys, just as soft as I could; but they seemed to make such a power of racket that I couldn't hardly get my breath I was so scared. They wouldn't turn in the lock, either. Well, without noticing what I was doing, I took hold of the knob, and open comes the door! It warn't locked! I hopped in, and shook off the towel, and, GREAT CAESAR'S GHOST!" "What!--what'd you see, Tom?" "Huck, I most stepped onto Injun Joe's hand!" "No!" "Yes! He was lying there, sound asleep on the floor, with his old patch on his eye and his arms spread out." "Lordy, what did you do? Did he wake up?" "No, never budged. Drunk, I reckon. I just grabbed that towel and started!" "I'd never 'a' thought of the towel, I bet!" "Well, I would. My aunt would make me mighty sick if I lost it." "Say, Tom, did you see that box?" "Huck, I didn't wait to look around. I didn't see the box, I didn't see the cross. I didn't see anything but a bottle and a tin cup on the floor by Injun Joe; yes, I saw two barrels and lots more bottles in the room. Don't you see, now, what's the matter with that ha'nted room?" "How?" "Why, it's ha'nted with whiskey! Maybe ALL the Temperance Taverns have got a ha'nted room, hey, Huck?" "Well, I reckon maybe that's so. Who'd 'a' thought such a thing? But say, Tom, now's a mighty good time to get that box, if Injun Joe's drunk." "It is, that! You try it!" Huck shuddered. "Well, no--I reckon not." "And I reckon not, Huck. Only one bottle alongside of Injun Joe ain't enough. If there'd been three, he'd be drunk enough and I'd do it." There was a long pause for reflection, and then Tom said: "Lookyhere, Huck, less not try that thing any more till we know Injun Joe's not in there. It's too scary. Now, if we watch every night, we'll be dead sure to see him go out, some time or other, and then we'll snatch that box quicker'n lightning." "Well, I'm agreed. I'll watch the whole night long, and I'll do it every night, too, if you'll do the other part of the job." "All right, I will. All you got to do is to trot up Hooper Street a block and maow--and if I'm asleep, you throw some gravel at the window and that'll fetch me." "Agreed, and good as wheat!" "Now, Huck, the storm's over, and I'll go home. It'll begin to be daylight in a couple of hours. You go back and watch that long, will you?" "I said I would, Tom, and I will. I'll ha'nt that tavern every night for a year! I'll sleep all day and I'll stand watch all night." "That's all right. Now, where you going to sleep?" "In Ben Rogers' hayloft. He lets me, and so does his pap's nigger man, Uncle Jake. I tote water for Uncle Jake whenever he wants me to, and any time I ask him he gives me a little something to eat if he can spare it. That's a mighty good nigger, Tom. He likes me, becuz I don't ever act as if I was above him. Sometime I've set right down and eat WITH him. But you needn't tell that. A body's got to do things when he's awful hungry he wouldn't want to do as a steady thing." "Well, if I don't want you in the daytime, I'll let you sleep. I won't come bothering around. Any time you see something's up, in the night, just skip right around and maow." CHAPTER XXIX THE first thing Tom heard on Friday morning was a glad piece of news --Judge Thatcher's family had come back to town the night before. Both Injun Joe and the treasure sunk into secondary importance for a moment, and Becky took the chief place in the boy's interest. He saw her and they had an exhausting good time playing "hi-spy" and "gully-keeper" with a crowd of their school-mates. The day was completed and crowned in a peculiarly satisfactory way: Becky teased her mother to appoint the next day for the long-promised and long-delayed picnic, and she consented. The child's delight was boundless; and Tom's not more moderate. The invitations were sent out before sunset, and straightway the young folks of the village were thrown into a fever of preparation and pleasurable anticipation. Tom's excitement enabled him to keep awake until a pretty late hour, and he had good hopes of hearing Huck's "maow," and of having his treasure to astonish Becky and the picnickers with, next day; but he was disappointed. No signal came that night. Morning came, eventually, and by ten or eleven o'clock a giddy and rollicking company were gathered at Judge Thatcher's, and everything was ready for a start. It was not the custom for elderly people to mar the picnics with their presence. The children were considered safe enough under the wings of a few young ladies of eighteen and a few young gentlemen of twenty-three or thereabouts. The old steam ferryboat was chartered for the occasion; presently the gay throng filed up the main street laden with provision-baskets. Sid was sick and had to miss the fun; Mary remained at home to entertain him. The last thing Mrs. Thatcher said to Becky, was: "You'll not get back till late. Perhaps you'd better stay all night with some of the girls that live near the ferry-landing, child." "Then I'll stay with Susy Harper, mamma." "Very well. And mind and behave yourself and don't be any trouble." Presently, as they tripped along, Tom said to Becky: "Say--I'll tell you what we'll do. 'Stead of going to Joe Harper's we'll climb right up the hill and stop at the Widow Douglas'. She'll have ice-cream! She has it most every day--dead loads of it. And she'll be awful glad to have us." "Oh, that will be fun!" Then Becky reflected a moment and said: "But what will mamma say?" "How'll she ever know?" The girl turned the idea over in her mind, and said reluctantly: "I reckon it's wrong--but--" "But shucks! Your mother won't know, and so what's the harm? All she wants is that you'll be safe; and I bet you she'd 'a' said go there if she'd 'a' thought of it. I know she would!" The Widow Douglas' splendid hospitality was a tempting bait. It and Tom's persuasions presently carried the day. So it was decided to say nothing anybody about the night's programme. Presently it occurred to Tom that maybe Huck might come this very night and give the signal. The thought took a deal of the spirit out of his anticipations. Still he could not bear to give up the fun at Widow Douglas'. And why should he give it up, he reasoned--the signal did not come the night before, so why should it be any more likely to come to-night? The sure fun of the evening outweighed the uncertain treasure; and, boy-like, he determined to yield to the stronger inclination and not allow himself to think of the box of money another time that day. Three miles below town the ferryboat stopped at the mouth of a woody hollow and tied up. The crowd swarmed ashore and soon the forest distances and craggy heights echoed far and near with shoutings and laughter. All the different ways of getting hot and tired were gone through with, and by-and-by the rovers straggled back to camp fortified with responsible appetites, and then the destruction of the good things began. After the feast there was a refreshing season of rest and chat in the shade of spreading oaks. By-and-by somebody shouted: "Who's ready for the cave?" Everybody was. Bundles of candles were procured, and straightway there was a general scamper up the hill. The mouth of the cave was up the hillside--an opening shaped like a letter A. Its massive oaken door stood unbarred. Within was a small chamber, chilly as an ice-house, and walled by Nature with solid limestone that was dewy with a cold sweat. It was romantic and mysterious to stand here in the deep gloom and look out upon the green valley shining in the sun. But the impressiveness of the situation quickly wore off, and the romping began again. The moment a candle was lighted there was a general rush upon the owner of it; a struggle and a gallant defence followed, but the candle was soon knocked down or blown out, and then there was a glad clamor of laughter and a new chase. But all things have an end. By-and-by the procession went filing down the steep descent of the main avenue, the flickering rank of lights dimly revealing the lofty walls of rock almost to their point of junction sixty feet overhead. This main avenue was not more than eight or ten feet wide. Every few steps other lofty and still narrower crevices branched from it on either hand--for McDougal's cave was but a vast labyrinth of crooked aisles that ran into each other and out again and led nowhere. It was said that one might wander days and nights together through its intricate tangle of rifts and chasms, and never find the end of the cave; and that he might go down, and down, and still down, into the earth, and it was just the same--labyrinth under labyrinth, and no end to any of them. No man "knew" the cave. That was an impossible thing. Most of the young men knew a portion of it, and it was not customary to venture much beyond this known portion. Tom Sawyer knew as much of the cave as any one. The procession moved along the main avenue some three-quarters of a mile, and then groups and couples began to slip aside into branch avenues, fly along the dismal corridors, and take each other by surprise at points where the corridors joined again. Parties were able to elude each other for the space of half an hour without going beyond the "known" ground. By-and-by, one group after another came straggling back to the mouth of the cave, panting, hilarious, smeared from head to foot with tallow drippings, daubed with clay, and entirely delighted with the success of the day. Then they were astonished to find that they had been taking no note of time and that night was about at hand. The clanging bell had been calling for half an hour. However, this sort of close to the day's adventures was romantic and therefore satisfactory. When the ferryboat with her wild freight pushed into the stream, nobody cared sixpence for the wasted time but the captain of the craft. Huck was already upon his watch when the ferryboat's lights went glinting past the wharf. He heard no noise on board, for the young people were as subdued and still as people usually are who are nearly tired to death. He wondered what boat it was, and why she did not stop at the wharf--and then he dropped her out of his mind and put his attention upon his business. The night was growing cloudy and dark. Ten o'clock came, and the noise of vehicles ceased, scattered lights began to wink out, all straggling foot-passengers disappeared, the village betook itself to its slumbers and left the small watcher alone with the silence and the ghosts. Eleven o'clock came, and the tavern lights were put out; darkness everywhere, now. Huck waited what seemed a weary long time, but nothing happened. His faith was weakening. Was there any use? Was there really any use? Why not give it up and turn in? A noise fell upon his ear. He was all attention in an instant. The alley door closed softly. He sprang to the corner of the brick store. The next moment two men brushed by him, and one seemed to have something under his arm. It must be that box! So they were going to remove the treasure. Why call Tom now? It would be absurd--the men would get away with the box and never be found again. No, he would stick to their wake and follow them; he would trust to the darkness for security from discovery. So communing with himself, Huck stepped out and glided along behind the men, cat-like, with bare feet, allowing them to keep just far enough ahead not to be invisible. They moved up the river street three blocks, then turned to the left up a cross-street. They went straight ahead, then, until they came to the path that led up Cardiff Hill; this they took. They passed by the old Welshman's house, half-way up the hill, without hesitating, and still climbed upward. Good, thought Huck, they will bury it in the old quarry. But they never stopped at the quarry. They passed on, up the summit. They plunged into the narrow path between the tall sumach bushes, and were at once hidden in the gloom. Huck closed up and shortened his distance, now, for they would never be able to see him. He trotted along awhile; then slackened his pace, fearing he was gaining too fast; moved on a piece, then stopped altogether; listened; no sound; none, save that he seemed to hear the beating of his own heart. The hooting of an owl came over the hill--ominous sound! But no footsteps. Heavens, was everything lost! He was about to spring with winged feet, when a man cleared his throat not four feet from him! Huck's heart shot into his throat, but he swallowed it again; and then he stood there shaking as if a dozen agues had taken charge of him at once, and so weak that he thought he must surely fall to the ground. He knew where he was. He knew he was within five steps of the stile leading into Widow Douglas' grounds. Very well, he thought, let them bury it there; it won't be hard to find. Now there was a voice--a very low voice--Injun Joe's: "Damn her, maybe she's got company--there's lights, late as it is." "I can't see any." This was that stranger's voice--the stranger of the haunted house. A deadly chill went to Huck's heart--this, then, was the "revenge" job! His thought was, to fly. Then he remembered that the Widow Douglas had been kind to him more than once, and maybe these men were going to murder her. He wished he dared venture to warn her; but he knew he didn't dare--they might come and catch him. He thought all this and more in the moment that elapsed between the stranger's remark and Injun Joe's next--which was-- "Because the bush is in your way. Now--this way--now you see, don't you?" "Yes. Well, there IS company there, I reckon. Better give it up." "Give it up, and I just leaving this country forever! Give it up and maybe never have another chance. I tell you again, as I've told you before, I don't care for her swag--you may have it. But her husband was rough on me--many times he was rough on me--and mainly he was the justice of the peace that jugged me for a vagrant. And that ain't all. It ain't a millionth part of it! He had me HORSEWHIPPED!--horsewhipped in front of the jail, like a nigger!--with all the town looking on! HORSEWHIPPED!--do you understand? He took advantage of me and died. But I'll take it out of HER." "Oh, don't kill her! Don't do that!" "Kill? Who said anything about killing? I would kill HIM if he was here; but not her. When you want to get revenge on a woman you don't kill her--bosh! you go for her looks. You slit her nostrils--you notch her ears like a sow!" "By God, that's--" "Keep your opinion to yourself! It will be safest for you. I'll tie her to the bed. If she bleeds to death, is that my fault? I'll not cry, if she does. My friend, you'll help me in this thing--for MY sake --that's why you're here--I mightn't be able alone. If you flinch, I'll kill you. Do you understand that? And if I have to kill you, I'll kill her--and then I reckon nobody'll ever know much about who done this business." "Well, if it's got to be done, let's get at it. The quicker the better--I'm all in a shiver." "Do it NOW? And company there? Look here--I'll get suspicious of you, first thing you know. No--we'll wait till the lights are out--there's no hurry." Huck felt that a silence was going to ensue--a thing still more awful than any amount of murderous talk; so he held his breath and stepped gingerly back; planted his foot carefully and firmly, after balancing, one-legged, in a precarious way and almost toppling over, first on one side and then on the other. He took another step back, with the same elaboration and the same risks; then another and another, and--a twig snapped under his foot! His breath stopped and he listened. There was no sound--the stillness was perfect. His gratitude was measureless. Now he turned in his tracks, between the walls of sumach bushes--turned himself as carefully as if he were a ship--and then stepped quickly but cautiously along. When he emerged at the quarry he felt secure, and so he picked up his nimble heels and flew. Down, down he sped, till he reached the Welshman's. He banged at the door, and presently the heads of the old man and his two stalwart sons were thrust from windows. "What's the row there? Who's banging? What do you want?" "Let me in--quick! I'll tell everything." "Why, who are you?" "Huckleberry Finn--quick, let me in!" "Huckleberry Finn, indeed! It ain't a name to open many doors, I judge! But let him in, lads, and let's see what's the trouble." "Please don't ever tell I told you," were Huck's first words when he got in. "Please don't--I'd be killed, sure--but the widow's been good friends to me sometimes, and I want to tell--I WILL tell if you'll promise you won't ever say it was me." "By George, he HAS got something to tell, or he wouldn't act so!" exclaimed the old man; "out with it and nobody here'll ever tell, lad." Three minutes later the old man and his sons, well armed, were up the hill, and just entering the sumach path on tiptoe, their weapons in their hands. Huck accompanied them no further. He hid behind a great bowlder and fell to listening. There was a lagging, anxious silence, and then all of a sudden there was an explosion of firearms and a cry. Huck waited for no particulars. He sprang away and sped down the hill as fast as his legs could carry him. CHAPTER XXX AS the earliest suspicion of dawn appeared on Sunday morning, Huck came groping up the hill and rapped gently at the old Welshman's door. The inmates were asleep, but it was a sleep that was set on a hair-trigger, on account of the exciting episode of the night. A call came from a window: "Who's there!" Huck's scared voice answered in a low tone: "Please let me in! It's only Huck Finn!" "It's a name that can open this door night or day, lad!--and welcome!" These were strange words to the vagabond boy's ears, and the pleasantest he had ever heard. He could not recollect that the closing word had ever been applied in his case before. The door was quickly unlocked, and he entered. Huck was given a seat and the old man and his brace of tall sons speedily dressed themselves. "Now, my boy, I hope you're good and hungry, because breakfast will be ready as soon as the sun's up, and we'll have a piping hot one, too --make yourself easy about that! I and the boys hoped you'd turn up and stop here last night." "I was awful scared," said Huck, "and I run. I took out when the pistols went off, and I didn't stop for three mile. I've come now becuz I wanted to know about it, you know; and I come before daylight becuz I didn't want to run across them devils, even if they was dead." "Well, poor chap, you do look as if you'd had a hard night of it--but there's a bed here for you when you've had your breakfast. No, they ain't dead, lad--we are sorry enough for that. You see we knew right where to put our hands on them, by your description; so we crept along on tiptoe till we got within fifteen feet of them--dark as a cellar that sumach path was--and just then I found I was going to sneeze. It was the meanest kind of luck! I tried to keep it back, but no use --'twas bound to come, and it did come! I was in the lead with my pistol raised, and when the sneeze started those scoundrels a-rustling to get out of the path, I sung out, 'Fire boys!' and blazed away at the place where the rustling was. So did the boys. But they were off in a jiffy, those villains, and we after them, down through the woods. I judge we never touched them. They fired a shot apiece as they started, but their bullets whizzed by and didn't do us any harm. As soon as we lost the sound of their feet we quit chasing, and went down and stirred up the constables. They got a posse together, and went off to guard the river bank, and as soon as it is light the sheriff and a gang are going to beat up the woods. My boys will be with them presently. I wish we had some sort of description of those rascals--'twould help a good deal. But you couldn't see what they were like, in the dark, lad, I suppose?" "Oh yes; I saw them down-town and follered them." "Splendid! Describe them--describe them, my boy!" "One's the old deaf and dumb Spaniard that's ben around here once or twice, and t'other's a mean-looking, ragged--" "That's enough, lad, we know the men! Happened on them in the woods back of the widow's one day, and they slunk away. Off with you, boys, and tell the sheriff--get your breakfast to-morrow morning!" The Welshman's sons departed at once. As they were leaving the room Huck sprang up and exclaimed: "Oh, please don't tell ANYbody it was me that blowed on them! Oh, please!" "All right if you say it, Huck, but you ought to have the credit of what you did." "Oh no, no! Please don't tell!" When the young men were gone, the old Welshman said: "They won't tell--and I won't. But why don't you want it known?" Huck would not explain, further than to say that he already knew too much about one of those men and would not have the man know that he knew anything against him for the whole world--he would be killed for knowing it, sure. The old man promised secrecy once more, and said: "How did you come to follow these fellows, lad? Were they looking suspicious?" Huck was silent while he framed a duly cautious reply. Then he said: "Well, you see, I'm a kind of a hard lot,--least everybody says so, and I don't see nothing agin it--and sometimes I can't sleep much, on account of thinking about it and sort of trying to strike out a new way of doing. That was the way of it last night. I couldn't sleep, and so I come along up-street 'bout midnight, a-turning it all over, and when I got to that old shackly brick store by the Temperance Tavern, I backed up agin the wall to have another think. Well, just then along comes these two chaps slipping along close by me, with something under their arm, and I reckoned they'd stole it. One was a-smoking, and t'other one wanted a light; so they stopped right before me and the cigars lit up their faces and I see that the big one was the deaf and dumb Spaniard, by his white whiskers and the patch on his eye, and t'other one was a rusty, ragged-looking devil." "Could you see the rags by the light of the cigars?" This staggered Huck for a moment. Then he said: "Well, I don't know--but somehow it seems as if I did." "Then they went on, and you--" "Follered 'em--yes. That was it. I wanted to see what was up--they sneaked along so. I dogged 'em to the widder's stile, and stood in the dark and heard the ragged one beg for the widder, and the Spaniard swear he'd spile her looks just as I told you and your two--" "What! The DEAF AND DUMB man said all that!" Huck had made another terrible mistake! He was trying his best to keep the old man from getting the faintest hint of who the Spaniard might be, and yet his tongue seemed determined to get him into trouble in spite of all he could do. He made several efforts to creep out of his scrape, but the old man's eye was upon him and he made blunder after blunder. Presently the Welshman said: "My boy, don't be afraid of me. I wouldn't hurt a hair of your head for all the world. No--I'd protect you--I'd protect you. This Spaniard is not deaf and dumb; you've let that slip without intending it; you can't cover that up now. You know something about that Spaniard that you want to keep dark. Now trust me--tell me what it is, and trust me --I won't betray you." Huck looked into the old man's honest eyes a moment, then bent over and whispered in his ear: "'Tain't a Spaniard--it's Injun Joe!" The Welshman almost jumped out of his chair. In a moment he said: "It's all plain enough, now. When you talked about notching ears and slitting noses I judged that that was your own embellishment, because white men don't take that sort of revenge. But an Injun! That's a different matter altogether." During breakfast the talk went on, and in the course of it the old man said that the last thing which he and his sons had done, before going to bed, was to get a lantern and examine the stile and its vicinity for marks of blood. They found none, but captured a bulky bundle of-- "Of WHAT?" If the words had been lightning they could not have leaped with a more stunning suddenness from Huck's blanched lips. His eyes were staring wide, now, and his breath suspended--waiting for the answer. The Welshman started--stared in return--three seconds--five seconds--ten --then replied: "Of burglar's tools. Why, what's the MATTER with you?" Huck sank back, panting gently, but deeply, unutterably grateful. The Welshman eyed him gravely, curiously--and presently said: "Yes, burglar's tools. That appears to relieve you a good deal. But what did give you that turn? What were YOU expecting we'd found?" Huck was in a close place--the inquiring eye was upon him--he would have given anything for material for a plausible answer--nothing suggested itself--the inquiring eye was boring deeper and deeper--a senseless reply offered--there was no time to weigh it, so at a venture he uttered it--feebly: "Sunday-school books, maybe." Poor Huck was too distressed to smile, but the old man laughed loud and joyously, shook up the details of his anatomy from head to foot, and ended by saying that such a laugh was money in a-man's pocket, because it cut down the doctor's bill like everything. Then he added: "Poor old chap, you're white and jaded--you ain't well a bit--no wonder you're a little flighty and off your balance. But you'll come out of it. Rest and sleep will fetch you out all right, I hope." Huck was irritated to think he had been such a goose and betrayed such a suspicious excitement, for he had dropped the idea that the parcel brought from the tavern was the treasure, as soon as he had heard the talk at the widow's stile. He had only thought it was not the treasure, however--he had not known that it wasn't--and so the suggestion of a captured bundle was too much for his self-possession. But on the whole he felt glad the little episode had happened, for now he knew beyond all question that that bundle was not THE bundle, and so his mind was at rest and exceedingly comfortable. In fact, everything seemed to be drifting just in the right direction, now; the treasure must be still in No. 2, the men would be captured and jailed that day, and he and Tom could seize the gold that night without any trouble or any fear of interruption. Just as breakfast was completed there was a knock at the door. Huck jumped for a hiding-place, for he had no mind to be connected even remotely with the late event. The Welshman admitted several ladies and gentlemen, among them the Widow Douglas, and noticed that groups of citizens were climbing up the hill--to stare at the stile. So the news had spread. The Welshman had to tell the story of the night to the visitors. The widow's gratitude for her preservation was outspoken. "Don't say a word about it, madam. There's another that you're more beholden to than you are to me and my boys, maybe, but he don't allow me to tell his name. We wouldn't have been there but for him." Of course this excited a curiosity so vast that it almost belittled the main matter--but the Welshman allowed it to eat into the vitals of his visitors, and through them be transmitted to the whole town, for he refused to part with his secret. When all else had been learned, the widow said: "I went to sleep reading in bed and slept straight through all that noise. Why didn't you come and wake me?" "We judged it warn't worth while. Those fellows warn't likely to come again--they hadn't any tools left to work with, and what was the use of waking you up and scaring you to death? My three negro men stood guard at your house all the rest of the night. They've just come back." More visitors came, and the story had to be told and retold for a couple of hours more. There was no Sabbath-school during day-school vacation, but everybody was early at church. The stirring event was well canvassed. News came that not a sign of the two villains had been yet discovered. When the sermon was finished, Judge Thatcher's wife dropped alongside of Mrs. Harper as she moved down the aisle with the crowd and said: "Is my Becky going to sleep all day? I just expected she would be tired to death." "Your Becky?" "Yes," with a startled look--"didn't she stay with you last night?" "Why, no." Mrs. Thatcher turned pale, and sank into a pew, just as Aunt Polly, talking briskly with a friend, passed by. Aunt Polly said: "Good-morning, Mrs. Thatcher. Good-morning, Mrs. Harper. I've got a boy that's turned up missing. I reckon my Tom stayed at your house last night--one of you. And now he's afraid to come to church. I've got to settle with him." Mrs. Thatcher shook her head feebly and turned paler than ever. "He didn't stay with us," said Mrs. Harper, beginning to look uneasy. A marked anxiety came into Aunt Polly's face. "Joe Harper, have you seen my Tom this morning?" "No'm." "When did you see him last?" Joe tried to remember, but was not sure he could say. The people had stopped moving out of church. Whispers passed along, and a boding uneasiness took possession of every countenance. Children were anxiously questioned, and young teachers. They all said they had not noticed whether Tom and Becky were on board the ferryboat on the homeward trip; it was dark; no one thought of inquiring if any one was missing. One young man finally blurted out his fear that they were still in the cave! Mrs. Thatcher swooned away. Aunt Polly fell to crying and wringing her hands. The alarm swept from lip to lip, from group to group, from street to street, and within five minutes the bells were wildly clanging and the whole town was up! The Cardiff Hill episode sank into instant insignificance, the burglars were forgotten, horses were saddled, skiffs were manned, the ferryboat ordered out, and before the horror was half an hour old, two hundred men were pouring down highroad and river toward the cave. All the long afternoon the village seemed empty and dead. Many women visited Aunt Polly and Mrs. Thatcher and tried to comfort them. They cried with them, too, and that was still better than words. All the tedious night the town waited for news; but when the morning dawned at last, all the word that came was, "Send more candles--and send food." Mrs. Thatcher was almost crazed; and Aunt Polly, also. Judge Thatcher sent messages of hope and encouragement from the cave, but they conveyed no real cheer. The old Welshman came home toward daylight, spattered with candle-grease, smeared with clay, and almost worn out. He found Huck still in the bed that had been provided for him, and delirious with fever. The physicians were all at the cave, so the Widow Douglas came and took charge of the patient. She said she would do her best by him, because, whether he was good, bad, or indifferent, he was the Lord's, and nothing that was the Lord's was a thing to be neglected. The Welshman said Huck had good spots in him, and the widow said: "You can depend on it. That's the Lord's mark. He don't leave it off. He never does. Puts it somewhere on every creature that comes from his hands." Early in the forenoon parties of jaded men began to straggle into the village, but the strongest of the citizens continued searching. All the news that could be gained was that remotenesses of the cavern were being ransacked that had never been visited before; that every corner and crevice was going to be thoroughly searched; that wherever one wandered through the maze of passages, lights were to be seen flitting hither and thither in the distance, and shoutings and pistol-shots sent their hollow reverberations to the ear down the sombre aisles. In one place, far from the section usually traversed by tourists, the names "BECKY & TOM" had been found traced upon the rocky wall with candle-smoke, and near at hand a grease-soiled bit of ribbon. Mrs. Thatcher recognized the ribbon and cried over it. She said it was the last relic she should ever have of her child; and that no other memorial of her could ever be so precious, because this one parted latest from the living body before the awful death came. Some said that now and then, in the cave, a far-away speck of light would glimmer, and then a glorious shout would burst forth and a score of men go trooping down the echoing aisle--and then a sickening disappointment always followed; the children were not there; it was only a searcher's light. Three dreadful days and nights dragged their tedious hours along, and the village sank into a hopeless stupor. No one had heart for anything. The accidental discovery, just made, that the proprietor of the Temperance Tavern kept liquor on his premises, scarcely fluttered the public pulse, tremendous as the fact was. In a lucid interval, Huck feebly led up to the subject of taverns, and finally asked--dimly dreading the worst--if anything had been discovered at the Temperance Tavern since he had been ill. "Yes," said the widow. Huck started up in bed, wild-eyed: "What? What was it?" "Liquor!--and the place has been shut up. Lie down, child--what a turn you did give me!" "Only tell me just one thing--only just one--please! Was it Tom Sawyer that found it?" The widow burst into tears. "Hush, hush, child, hush! I've told you before, you must NOT talk. You are very, very sick!" Then nothing but liquor had been found; there would have been a great powwow if it had been the gold. So the treasure was gone forever--gone forever! But what could she be crying about? Curious that she should cry. These thoughts worked their dim way through Huck's mind, and under the weariness they gave him he fell asleep. The widow said to herself: "There--he's asleep, poor wreck. Tom Sawyer find it! Pity but somebody could find Tom Sawyer! Ah, there ain't many left, now, that's got hope enough, or strength enough, either, to go on searching." CHAPTER XXXI NOW to return to Tom and Becky's share in the picnic. They tripped along the murky aisles with the rest of the company, visiting the familiar wonders of the cave--wonders dubbed with rather over-descriptive names, such as "The Drawing-Room," "The Cathedral," "Aladdin's Palace," and so on. Presently the hide-and-seek frolicking began, and Tom and Becky engaged in it with zeal until the exertion began to grow a trifle wearisome; then they wandered down a sinuous avenue holding their candles aloft and reading the tangled web-work of names, dates, post-office addresses, and mottoes with which the rocky walls had been frescoed (in candle-smoke). Still drifting along and talking, they scarcely noticed that they were now in a part of the cave whose walls were not frescoed. They smoked their own names under an overhanging shelf and moved on. Presently they came to a place where a little stream of water, trickling over a ledge and carrying a limestone sediment with it, had, in the slow-dragging ages, formed a laced and ruffled Niagara in gleaming and imperishable stone. Tom squeezed his small body behind it in order to illuminate it for Becky's gratification. He found that it curtained a sort of steep natural stairway which was enclosed between narrow walls, and at once the ambition to be a discoverer seized him. Becky responded to his call, and they made a smoke-mark for future guidance, and started upon their quest. They wound this way and that, far down into the secret depths of the cave, made another mark, and branched off in search of novelties to tell the upper world about. In one place they found a spacious cavern, from whose ceiling depended a multitude of shining stalactites of the length and circumference of a man's leg; they walked all about it, wondering and admiring, and presently left it by one of the numerous passages that opened into it. This shortly brought them to a bewitching spring, whose basin was incrusted with a frostwork of glittering crystals; it was in the midst of a cavern whose walls were supported by many fantastic pillars which had been formed by the joining of great stalactites and stalagmites together, the result of the ceaseless water-drip of centuries. Under the roof vast knots of bats had packed themselves together, thousands in a bunch; the lights disturbed the creatures and they came flocking down by hundreds, squeaking and darting furiously at the candles. Tom knew their ways and the danger of this sort of conduct. He seized Becky's hand and hurried her into the first corridor that offered; and none too soon, for a bat struck Becky's light out with its wing while she was passing out of the cavern. The bats chased the children a good distance; but the fugitives plunged into every new passage that offered, and at last got rid of the perilous things. Tom found a subterranean lake, shortly, which stretched its dim length away until its shape was lost in the shadows. He wanted to explore its borders, but concluded that it would be best to sit down and rest awhile, first. Now, for the first time, the deep stillness of the place laid a clammy hand upon the spirits of the children. Becky said: "Why, I didn't notice, but it seems ever so long since I heard any of the others." "Come to think, Becky, we are away down below them--and I don't know how far away north, or south, or east, or whichever it is. We couldn't hear them here." Becky grew apprehensive. "I wonder how long we've been down here, Tom? We better start back." "Yes, I reckon we better. P'raps we better." "Can you find the way, Tom? It's all a mixed-up crookedness to me." "I reckon I could find it--but then the bats. If they put our candles out it will be an awful fix. Let's try some other way, so as not to go through there." "Well. But I hope we won't get lost. It would be so awful!" and the girl shuddered at the thought of the dreadful possibilities. They started through a corridor, and traversed it in silence a long way, glancing at each new opening, to see if there was anything familiar about the look of it; but they were all strange. Every time Tom made an examination, Becky would watch his face for an encouraging sign, and he would say cheerily: "Oh, it's all right. This ain't the one, but we'll come to it right away!" But he felt less and less hopeful with each failure, and presently began to turn off into diverging avenues at sheer random, in desperate hope of finding the one that was wanted. He still said it was "all right," but there was such a leaden dread at his heart that the words had lost their ring and sounded just as if he had said, "All is lost!" Becky clung to his side in an anguish of fear, and tried hard to keep back the tears, but they would come. At last she said: "Oh, Tom, never mind the bats, let's go back that way! We seem to get worse and worse off all the time." "Listen!" said he. Profound silence; silence so deep that even their breathings were conspicuous in the hush. Tom shouted. The call went echoing down the empty aisles and died out in the distance in a faint sound that resembled a ripple of mocking laughter. "Oh, don't do it again, Tom, it is too horrid," said Becky. "It is horrid, but I better, Becky; they might hear us, you know," and he shouted again. The "might" was even a chillier horror than the ghostly laughter, it so confessed a perishing hope. The children stood still and listened; but there was no result. Tom turned upon the back track at once, and hurried his steps. It was but a little while before a certain indecision in his manner revealed another fearful fact to Becky--he could not find his way back! "Oh, Tom, you didn't make any marks!" "Becky, I was such a fool! Such a fool! I never thought we might want to come back! No--I can't find the way. It's all mixed up." "Tom, Tom, we're lost! we're lost! We never can get out of this awful place! Oh, why DID we ever leave the others!" She sank to the ground and burst into such a frenzy of crying that Tom was appalled with the idea that she might die, or lose her reason. He sat down by her and put his arms around her; she buried her face in his bosom, she clung to him, she poured out her terrors, her unavailing regrets, and the far echoes turned them all to jeering laughter. Tom begged her to pluck up hope again, and she said she could not. He fell to blaming and abusing himself for getting her into this miserable situation; this had a better effect. She said she would try to hope again, she would get up and follow wherever he might lead if only he would not talk like that any more. For he was no more to blame than she, she said. So they moved on again--aimlessly--simply at random--all they could do was to move, keep moving. For a little while, hope made a show of reviving--not with any reason to back it, but only because it is its nature to revive when the spring has not been taken out of it by age and familiarity with failure. By-and-by Tom took Becky's candle and blew it out. This economy meant so much! Words were not needed. Becky understood, and her hope died again. She knew that Tom had a whole candle and three or four pieces in his pockets--yet he must economize. By-and-by, fatigue began to assert its claims; the children tried to pay attention, for it was dreadful to think of sitting down when time was grown to be so precious, moving, in some direction, in any direction, was at least progress and might bear fruit; but to sit down was to invite death and shorten its pursuit. At last Becky's frail limbs refused to carry her farther. She sat down. Tom rested with her, and they talked of home, and the friends there, and the comfortable beds and, above all, the light! Becky cried, and Tom tried to think of some way of comforting her, but all his encouragements were grown threadbare with use, and sounded like sarcasms. Fatigue bore so heavily upon Becky that she drowsed off to sleep. Tom was grateful. He sat looking into her drawn face and saw it grow smooth and natural under the influence of pleasant dreams; and by-and-by a smile dawned and rested there. The peaceful face reflected somewhat of peace and healing into his own spirit, and his thoughts wandered away to bygone times and dreamy memories. While he was deep in his musings, Becky woke up with a breezy little laugh--but it was stricken dead upon her lips, and a groan followed it. "Oh, how COULD I sleep! I wish I never, never had waked! No! No, I don't, Tom! Don't look so! I won't say it again." "I'm glad you've slept, Becky; you'll feel rested, now, and we'll find the way out." "We can try, Tom; but I've seen such a beautiful country in my dream. I reckon we are going there." "Maybe not, maybe not. Cheer up, Becky, and let's go on trying." They rose up and wandered along, hand in hand and hopeless. They tried to estimate how long they had been in the cave, but all they knew was that it seemed days and weeks, and yet it was plain that this could not be, for their candles were not gone yet. A long time after this--they could not tell how long--Tom said they must go softly and listen for dripping water--they must find a spring. They found one presently, and Tom said it was time to rest again. Both were cruelly tired, yet Becky said she thought she could go a little farther. She was surprised to hear Tom dissent. She could not understand it. They sat down, and Tom fastened his candle to the wall in front of them with some clay. Thought was soon busy; nothing was said for some time. Then Becky broke the silence: "Tom, I am so hungry!" Tom took something out of his pocket. "Do you remember this?" said he. Becky almost smiled. "It's our wedding-cake, Tom." "Yes--I wish it was as big as a barrel, for it's all we've got." "I saved it from the picnic for us to dream on, Tom, the way grown-up people do with wedding-cake--but it'll be our--" She dropped the sentence where it was. Tom divided the cake and Becky ate with good appetite, while Tom nibbled at his moiety. There was abundance of cold water to finish the feast with. By-and-by Becky suggested that they move on again. Tom was silent a moment. Then he said: "Becky, can you bear it if I tell you something?" Becky's face paled, but she thought she could. "Well, then, Becky, we must stay here, where there's water to drink. That little piece is our last candle!" Becky gave loose to tears and wailings. Tom did what he could to comfort her, but with little effect. At length Becky said: "Tom!" "Well, Becky?" "They'll miss us and hunt for us!" "Yes, they will! Certainly they will!" "Maybe they're hunting for us now, Tom." "Why, I reckon maybe they are. I hope they are." "When would they miss us, Tom?" "When they get back to the boat, I reckon." "Tom, it might be dark then--would they notice we hadn't come?" "I don't know. But anyway, your mother would miss you as soon as they got home." A frightened look in Becky's face brought Tom to his senses and he saw that he had made a blunder. Becky was not to have gone home that night! The children became silent and thoughtful. In a moment a new burst of grief from Becky showed Tom that the thing in his mind had struck hers also--that the Sabbath morning might be half spent before Mrs. Thatcher discovered that Becky was not at Mrs. Harper's. The children fastened their eyes upon their bit of candle and watched it melt slowly and pitilessly away; saw the half inch of wick stand alone at last; saw the feeble flame rise and fall, climb the thin column of smoke, linger at its top a moment, and then--the horror of utter darkness reigned! How long afterward it was that Becky came to a slow consciousness that she was crying in Tom's arms, neither could tell. All that they knew was, that after what seemed a mighty stretch of time, both awoke out of a dead stupor of sleep and resumed their miseries once more. Tom said it might be Sunday, now--maybe Monday. He tried to get Becky to talk, but her sorrows were too oppressive, all her hopes were gone. Tom said that they must have been missed long ago, and no doubt the search was going on. He would shout and maybe some one would come. He tried it; but in the darkness the distant echoes sounded so hideously that he tried it no more. The hours wasted away, and hunger came to torment the captives again. A portion of Tom's half of the cake was left; they divided and ate it. But they seemed hungrier than before. The poor morsel of food only whetted desire. By-and-by Tom said: "SH! Did you hear that?" Both held their breath and listened. There was a sound like the faintest, far-off shout. Instantly Tom answered it, and leading Becky by the hand, started groping down the corridor in its direction. Presently he listened again; again the sound was heard, and apparently a little nearer. "It's them!" said Tom; "they're coming! Come along, Becky--we're all right now!" The joy of the prisoners was almost overwhelming. Their speed was slow, however, because pitfalls were somewhat common, and had to be guarded against. They shortly came to one and had to stop. It might be three feet deep, it might be a hundred--there was no passing it at any rate. Tom got down on his breast and reached as far down as he could. No bottom. They must stay there and wait until the searchers came. They listened; evidently the distant shoutings were growing more distant! a moment or two more and they had gone altogether. The heart-sinking misery of it! Tom whooped until he was hoarse, but it was of no use. He talked hopefully to Becky; but an age of anxious waiting passed and no sounds came again. The children groped their way back to the spring. The weary time dragged on; they slept again, and awoke famished and woe-stricken. Tom believed it must be Tuesday by this time. Now an idea struck him. There were some side passages near at hand. It would be better to explore some of these than bear the weight of the heavy time in idleness. He took a kite-line from his pocket, tied it to a projection, and he and Becky started, Tom in the lead, unwinding the line as he groped along. At the end of twenty steps the corridor ended in a "jumping-off place." Tom got down on his knees and felt below, and then as far around the corner as he could reach with his hands conveniently; he made an effort to stretch yet a little farther to the right, and at that moment, not twenty yards away, a human hand, holding a candle, appeared from behind a rock! Tom lifted up a glorious shout, and instantly that hand was followed by the body it belonged to--Injun Joe's! Tom was paralyzed; he could not move. He was vastly gratified the next moment, to see the "Spaniard" take to his heels and get himself out of sight. Tom wondered that Joe had not recognized his voice and come over and killed him for testifying in court. But the echoes must have disguised the voice. Without doubt, that was it, he reasoned. Tom's fright weakened every muscle in his body. He said to himself that if he had strength enough to get back to the spring he would stay there, and nothing should tempt him to run the risk of meeting Injun Joe again. He was careful to keep from Becky what it was he had seen. He told her he had only shouted "for luck." But hunger and wretchedness rise superior to fears in the long run. Another tedious wait at the spring and another long sleep brought changes. The children awoke tortured with a raging hunger. Tom believed that it must be Wednesday or Thursday or even Friday or Saturday, now, and that the search had been given over. He proposed to explore another passage. He felt willing to risk Injun Joe and all other terrors. But Becky was very weak. She had sunk into a dreary apathy and would not be roused. She said she would wait, now, where she was, and die--it would not be long. She told Tom to go with the kite-line and explore if he chose; but she implored him to come back every little while and speak to her; and she made him promise that when the awful time came, he would stay by her and hold her hand until all was over. Tom kissed her, with a choking sensation in his throat, and made a show of being confident of finding the searchers or an escape from the cave; then he took the kite-line in his hand and went groping down one of the passages on his hands and knees, distressed with hunger and sick with bodings of coming doom. 
7200	----	THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER BY MARK TWAIN (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) Part 8 CHAPTER XXXII TUESDAY afternoon came, and waned to the twilight. The village of St. Petersburg still mourned. The lost children had not been found. Public prayers had been offered up for them, and many and many a private prayer that had the petitioner's whole heart in it; but still no good news came from the cave. The majority of the searchers had given up the quest and gone back to their daily avocations, saying that it was plain the children could never be found. Mrs. Thatcher was very ill, and a great part of the time delirious. People said it was heartbreaking to hear her call her child, and raise her head and listen a whole minute at a time, then lay it wearily down again with a moan. Aunt Polly had drooped into a settled melancholy, and her gray hair had grown almost white. The village went to its rest on Tuesday night, sad and forlorn. Away in the middle of the night a wild peal burst from the village bells, and in a moment the streets were swarming with frantic half-clad people, who shouted, "Turn out! turn out! they're found! they're found!" Tin pans and horns were added to the din, the population massed itself and moved toward the river, met the children coming in an open carriage drawn by shouting citizens, thronged around it, joined its homeward march, and swept magnificently up the main street roaring huzzah after huzzah! The village was illuminated; nobody went to bed again; it was the greatest night the little town had ever seen. During the first half-hour a procession of villagers filed through Judge Thatcher's house, seized the saved ones and kissed them, squeezed Mrs. Thatcher's hand, tried to speak but couldn't--and drifted out raining tears all over the place. Aunt Polly's happiness was complete, and Mrs. Thatcher's nearly so. It would be complete, however, as soon as the messenger dispatched with the great news to the cave should get the word to her husband. Tom lay upon a sofa with an eager auditory about him and told the history of the wonderful adventure, putting in many striking additions to adorn it withal; and closed with a description of how he left Becky and went on an exploring expedition; how he followed two avenues as far as his kite-line would reach; how he followed a third to the fullest stretch of the kite-line, and was about to turn back when he glimpsed a far-off speck that looked like daylight; dropped the line and groped toward it, pushed his head and shoulders through a small hole, and saw the broad Mississippi rolling by! And if it had only happened to be night he would not have seen that speck of daylight and would not have explored that passage any more! He told how he went back for Becky and broke the good news and she told him not to fret her with such stuff, for she was tired, and knew she was going to die, and wanted to. He described how he labored with her and convinced her; and how she almost died for joy when she had groped to where she actually saw the blue speck of daylight; how he pushed his way out at the hole and then helped her out; how they sat there and cried for gladness; how some men came along in a skiff and Tom hailed them and told them their situation and their famished condition; how the men didn't believe the wild tale at first, "because," said they, "you are five miles down the river below the valley the cave is in" --then took them aboard, rowed to a house, gave them supper, made them rest till two or three hours after dark and then brought them home. Before day-dawn, Judge Thatcher and the handful of searchers with him were tracked out, in the cave, by the twine clews they had strung behind them, and informed of the great news. Three days and nights of toil and hunger in the cave were not to be shaken off at once, as Tom and Becky soon discovered. They were bedridden all of Wednesday and Thursday, and seemed to grow more and more tired and worn, all the time. Tom got about, a little, on Thursday, was down-town Friday, and nearly as whole as ever Saturday; but Becky did not leave her room until Sunday, and then she looked as if she had passed through a wasting illness. Tom learned of Huck's sickness and went to see him on Friday, but could not be admitted to the bedroom; neither could he on Saturday or Sunday. He was admitted daily after that, but was warned to keep still about his adventure and introduce no exciting topic. The Widow Douglas stayed by to see that he obeyed. At home Tom learned of the Cardiff Hill event; also that the "ragged man's" body had eventually been found in the river near the ferry-landing; he had been drowned while trying to escape, perhaps. About a fortnight after Tom's rescue from the cave, he started off to visit Huck, who had grown plenty strong enough, now, to hear exciting talk, and Tom had some that would interest him, he thought. Judge Thatcher's house was on Tom's way, and he stopped to see Becky. The Judge and some friends set Tom to talking, and some one asked him ironically if he wouldn't like to go to the cave again. Tom said he thought he wouldn't mind it. The Judge said: "Well, there are others just like you, Tom, I've not the least doubt. But we have taken care of that. Nobody will get lost in that cave any more." "Why?" "Because I had its big door sheathed with boiler iron two weeks ago, and triple-locked--and I've got the keys." Tom turned as white as a sheet. "What's the matter, boy! Here, run, somebody! Fetch a glass of water!" The water was brought and thrown into Tom's face. "Ah, now you're all right. What was the matter with you, Tom?" "Oh, Judge, Injun Joe's in the cave!" CHAPTER XXXIII WITHIN a few minutes the news had spread, and a dozen skiff-loads of men were on their way to McDougal's cave, and the ferryboat, well filled with passengers, soon followed. Tom Sawyer was in the skiff that bore Judge Thatcher. When the cave door was unlocked, a sorrowful sight presented itself in the dim twilight of the place. Injun Joe lay stretched upon the ground, dead, with his face close to the crack of the door, as if his longing eyes had been fixed, to the latest moment, upon the light and the cheer of the free world outside. Tom was touched, for he knew by his own experience how this wretch had suffered. His pity was moved, but nevertheless he felt an abounding sense of relief and security, now, which revealed to him in a degree which he had not fully appreciated before how vast a weight of dread had been lying upon him since the day he lifted his voice against this bloody-minded outcast. Injun Joe's bowie-knife lay close by, its blade broken in two. The great foundation-beam of the door had been chipped and hacked through, with tedious labor; useless labor, too, it was, for the native rock formed a sill outside it, and upon that stubborn material the knife had wrought no effect; the only damage done was to the knife itself. But if there had been no stony obstruction there the labor would have been useless still, for if the beam had been wholly cut away Injun Joe could not have squeezed his body under the door, and he knew it. So he had only hacked that place in order to be doing something--in order to pass the weary time--in order to employ his tortured faculties. Ordinarily one could find half a dozen bits of candle stuck around in the crevices of this vestibule, left there by tourists; but there were none now. The prisoner had searched them out and eaten them. He had also contrived to catch a few bats, and these, also, he had eaten, leaving only their claws. The poor unfortunate had starved to death. In one place, near at hand, a stalagmite had been slowly growing up from the ground for ages, builded by the water-drip from a stalactite overhead. The captive had broken off the stalagmite, and upon the stump had placed a stone, wherein he had scooped a shallow hollow to catch the precious drop that fell once in every three minutes with the dreary regularity of a clock-tick--a dessertspoonful once in four and twenty hours. That drop was falling when the Pyramids were new; when Troy fell; when the foundations of Rome were laid when Christ was crucified; when the Conqueror created the British empire; when Columbus sailed; when the massacre at Lexington was "news." It is falling now; it will still be falling when all these things shall have sunk down the afternoon of history, and the twilight of tradition, and been swallowed up in the thick night of oblivion. Has everything a purpose and a mission? Did this drop fall patiently during five thousand years to be ready for this flitting human insect's need? and has it another important object to accomplish ten thousand years to come? No matter. It is many and many a year since the hapless half-breed scooped out the stone to catch the priceless drops, but to this day the tourist stares longest at that pathetic stone and that slow-dropping water when he comes to see the wonders of McDougal's cave. Injun Joe's cup stands first in the list of the cavern's marvels; even "Aladdin's Palace" cannot rival it. Injun Joe was buried near the mouth of the cave; and people flocked there in boats and wagons from the towns and from all the farms and hamlets for seven miles around; they brought their children, and all sorts of provisions, and confessed that they had had almost as satisfactory a time at the funeral as they could have had at the hanging. This funeral stopped the further growth of one thing--the petition to the governor for Injun Joe's pardon. The petition had been largely signed; many tearful and eloquent meetings had been held, and a committee of sappy women been appointed to go in deep mourning and wail around the governor, and implore him to be a merciful ass and trample his duty under foot. Injun Joe was believed to have killed five citizens of the village, but what of that? If he had been Satan himself there would have been plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon-petition, and drip a tear on it from their permanently impaired and leaky water-works. The morning after the funeral Tom took Huck to a private place to have an important talk. Huck had learned all about Tom's adventure from the Welshman and the Widow Douglas, by this time, but Tom said he reckoned there was one thing they had not told him; that thing was what he wanted to talk about now. Huck's face saddened. He said: "I know what it is. You got into No. 2 and never found anything but whiskey. Nobody told me it was you; but I just knowed it must 'a' ben you, soon as I heard 'bout that whiskey business; and I knowed you hadn't got the money becuz you'd 'a' got at me some way or other and told me even if you was mum to everybody else. Tom, something's always told me we'd never get holt of that swag." "Why, Huck, I never told on that tavern-keeper. YOU know his tavern was all right the Saturday I went to the picnic. Don't you remember you was to watch there that night?" "Oh yes! Why, it seems 'bout a year ago. It was that very night that I follered Injun Joe to the widder's." "YOU followed him?" "Yes--but you keep mum. I reckon Injun Joe's left friends behind him, and I don't want 'em souring on me and doing me mean tricks. If it hadn't ben for me he'd be down in Texas now, all right." Then Huck told his entire adventure in confidence to Tom, who had only heard of the Welshman's part of it before. "Well," said Huck, presently, coming back to the main question, "whoever nipped the whiskey in No. 2, nipped the money, too, I reckon --anyways it's a goner for us, Tom." "Huck, that money wasn't ever in No. 2!" "What!" Huck searched his comrade's face keenly. "Tom, have you got on the track of that money again?" "Huck, it's in the cave!" Huck's eyes blazed. "Say it again, Tom." "The money's in the cave!" "Tom--honest injun, now--is it fun, or earnest?" "Earnest, Huck--just as earnest as ever I was in my life. Will you go in there with me and help get it out?" "I bet I will! I will if it's where we can blaze our way to it and not get lost." "Huck, we can do that without the least little bit of trouble in the world." "Good as wheat! What makes you think the money's--" "Huck, you just wait till we get in there. If we don't find it I'll agree to give you my drum and every thing I've got in the world. I will, by jings." "All right--it's a whiz. When do you say?" "Right now, if you say it. Are you strong enough?" "Is it far in the cave? I ben on my pins a little, three or four days, now, but I can't walk more'n a mile, Tom--least I don't think I could." "It's about five mile into there the way anybody but me would go, Huck, but there's a mighty short cut that they don't anybody but me know about. Huck, I'll take you right to it in a skiff. I'll float the skiff down there, and I'll pull it back again all by myself. You needn't ever turn your hand over." "Less start right off, Tom." "All right. We want some bread and meat, and our pipes, and a little bag or two, and two or three kite-strings, and some of these new-fangled things they call lucifer matches. I tell you, many's the time I wished I had some when I was in there before." A trifle after noon the boys borrowed a small skiff from a citizen who was absent, and got under way at once. When they were several miles below "Cave Hollow," Tom said: "Now you see this bluff here looks all alike all the way down from the cave hollow--no houses, no wood-yards, bushes all alike. But do you see that white place up yonder where there's been a landslide? Well, that's one of my marks. We'll get ashore, now." They landed. "Now, Huck, where we're a-standing you could touch that hole I got out of with a fishing-pole. See if you can find it." Huck searched all the place about, and found nothing. Tom proudly marched into a thick clump of sumach bushes and said: "Here you are! Look at it, Huck; it's the snuggest hole in this country. You just keep mum about it. All along I've been wanting to be a robber, but I knew I'd got to have a thing like this, and where to run across it was the bother. We've got it now, and we'll keep it quiet, only we'll let Joe Harper and Ben Rogers in--because of course there's got to be a Gang, or else there wouldn't be any style about it. Tom Sawyer's Gang--it sounds splendid, don't it, Huck?" "Well, it just does, Tom. And who'll we rob?" "Oh, most anybody. Waylay people--that's mostly the way." "And kill them?" "No, not always. Hive them in the cave till they raise a ransom." "What's a ransom?" "Money. You make them raise all they can, off'n their friends; and after you've kept them a year, if it ain't raised then you kill them. That's the general way. Only you don't kill the women. You shut up the women, but you don't kill them. They're always beautiful and rich, and awfully scared. You take their watches and things, but you always take your hat off and talk polite. They ain't anybody as polite as robbers --you'll see that in any book. Well, the women get to loving you, and after they've been in the cave a week or two weeks they stop crying and after that you couldn't get them to leave. If you drove them out they'd turn right around and come back. It's so in all the books." "Why, it's real bully, Tom. I believe it's better'n to be a pirate." "Yes, it's better in some ways, because it's close to home and circuses and all that." By this time everything was ready and the boys entered the hole, Tom in the lead. They toiled their way to the farther end of the tunnel, then made their spliced kite-strings fast and moved on. A few steps brought them to the spring, and Tom felt a shudder quiver all through him. He showed Huck the fragment of candle-wick perched on a lump of clay against the wall, and described how he and Becky had watched the flame struggle and expire. The boys began to quiet down to whispers, now, for the stillness and gloom of the place oppressed their spirits. They went on, and presently entered and followed Tom's other corridor until they reached the "jumping-off place." The candles revealed the fact that it was not really a precipice, but only a steep clay hill twenty or thirty feet high. Tom whispered: "Now I'll show you something, Huck." He held his candle aloft and said: "Look as far around the corner as you can. Do you see that? There--on the big rock over yonder--done with candle-smoke." "Tom, it's a CROSS!" "NOW where's your Number Two? 'UNDER THE CROSS,' hey? Right yonder's where I saw Injun Joe poke up his candle, Huck!" Huck stared at the mystic sign awhile, and then said with a shaky voice: "Tom, less git out of here!" "What! and leave the treasure?" "Yes--leave it. Injun Joe's ghost is round about there, certain." "No it ain't, Huck, no it ain't. It would ha'nt the place where he died--away out at the mouth of the cave--five mile from here." "No, Tom, it wouldn't. It would hang round the money. I know the ways of ghosts, and so do you." Tom began to fear that Huck was right. Misgivings gathered in his mind. But presently an idea occurred to him-- "Lookyhere, Huck, what fools we're making of ourselves! Injun Joe's ghost ain't a going to come around where there's a cross!" The point was well taken. It had its effect. "Tom, I didn't think of that. But that's so. It's luck for us, that cross is. I reckon we'll climb down there and have a hunt for that box." Tom went first, cutting rude steps in the clay hill as he descended. Huck followed. Four avenues opened out of the small cavern which the great rock stood in. The boys examined three of them with no result. They found a small recess in the one nearest the base of the rock, with a pallet of blankets spread down in it; also an old suspender, some bacon rind, and the well-gnawed bones of two or three fowls. But there was no money-box. The lads searched and researched this place, but in vain. Tom said: "He said UNDER the cross. Well, this comes nearest to being under the cross. It can't be under the rock itself, because that sets solid on the ground." They searched everywhere once more, and then sat down discouraged. Huck could suggest nothing. By-and-by Tom said: "Lookyhere, Huck, there's footprints and some candle-grease on the clay about one side of this rock, but not on the other sides. Now, what's that for? I bet you the money IS under the rock. I'm going to dig in the clay." "That ain't no bad notion, Tom!" said Huck with animation. Tom's "real Barlow" was out at once, and he had not dug four inches before he struck wood. "Hey, Huck!--you hear that?" Huck began to dig and scratch now. Some boards were soon uncovered and removed. They had concealed a natural chasm which led under the rock. Tom got into this and held his candle as far under the rock as he could, but said he could not see to the end of the rift. He proposed to explore. He stooped and passed under; the narrow way descended gradually. He followed its winding course, first to the right, then to the left, Huck at his heels. Tom turned a short curve, by-and-by, and exclaimed: "My goodness, Huck, lookyhere!" It was the treasure-box, sure enough, occupying a snug little cavern, along with an empty powder-keg, a couple of guns in leather cases, two or three pairs of old moccasins, a leather belt, and some other rubbish well soaked with the water-drip. "Got it at last!" said Huck, ploughing among the tarnished coins with his hand. "My, but we're rich, Tom!" "Huck, I always reckoned we'd get it. It's just too good to believe, but we HAVE got it, sure! Say--let's not fool around here. Let's snake it out. Lemme see if I can lift the box." It weighed about fifty pounds. Tom could lift it, after an awkward fashion, but could not carry it conveniently. "I thought so," he said; "THEY carried it like it was heavy, that day at the ha'nted house. I noticed that. I reckon I was right to think of fetching the little bags along." The money was soon in the bags and the boys took it up to the cross rock. "Now less fetch the guns and things," said Huck. "No, Huck--leave them there. They're just the tricks to have when we go to robbing. We'll keep them there all the time, and we'll hold our orgies there, too. It's an awful snug place for orgies." "What orgies?" "I dono. But robbers always have orgies, and of course we've got to have them, too. Come along, Huck, we've been in here a long time. It's getting late, I reckon. I'm hungry, too. We'll eat and smoke when we get to the skiff." They presently emerged into the clump of sumach bushes, looked warily out, found the coast clear, and were soon lunching and smoking in the skiff. As the sun dipped toward the horizon they pushed out and got under way. Tom skimmed up the shore through the long twilight, chatting cheerily with Huck, and landed shortly after dark. "Now, Huck," said Tom, "we'll hide the money in the loft of the widow's woodshed, and I'll come up in the morning and we'll count it and divide, and then we'll hunt up a place out in the woods for it where it will be safe. Just you lay quiet here and watch the stuff till I run and hook Benny Taylor's little wagon; I won't be gone a minute." He disappeared, and presently returned with the wagon, put the two small sacks into it, threw some old rags on top of them, and started off, dragging his cargo behind him. When the boys reached the Welshman's house, they stopped to rest. Just as they were about to move on, the Welshman stepped out and said: "Hallo, who's that?" "Huck and Tom Sawyer." "Good! Come along with me, boys, you are keeping everybody waiting. Here--hurry up, trot ahead--I'll haul the wagon for you. Why, it's not as light as it might be. Got bricks in it?--or old metal?" "Old metal," said Tom. "I judged so; the boys in this town will take more trouble and fool away more time hunting up six bits' worth of old iron to sell to the foundry than they would to make twice the money at regular work. But that's human nature--hurry along, hurry along!" The boys wanted to know what the hurry was about. "Never mind; you'll see, when we get to the Widow Douglas'." Huck said with some apprehension--for he was long used to being falsely accused: "Mr. Jones, we haven't been doing nothing." The Welshman laughed. "Well, I don't know, Huck, my boy. I don't know about that. Ain't you and the widow good friends?" "Yes. Well, she's ben good friends to me, anyway." "All right, then. What do you want to be afraid for?" This question was not entirely answered in Huck's slow mind before he found himself pushed, along with Tom, into Mrs. Douglas' drawing-room. Mr. Jones left the wagon near the door and followed. The place was grandly lighted, and everybody that was of any consequence in the village was there. The Thatchers were there, the Harpers, the Rogerses, Aunt Polly, Sid, Mary, the minister, the editor, and a great many more, and all dressed in their best. The widow received the boys as heartily as any one could well receive two such looking beings. They were covered with clay and candle-grease. Aunt Polly blushed crimson with humiliation, and frowned and shook her head at Tom. Nobody suffered half as much as the two boys did, however. Mr. Jones said: "Tom wasn't at home, yet, so I gave him up; but I stumbled on him and Huck right at my door, and so I just brought them along in a hurry." "And you did just right," said the widow. "Come with me, boys." She took them to a bedchamber and said: "Now wash and dress yourselves. Here are two new suits of clothes --shirts, socks, everything complete. They're Huck's--no, no thanks, Huck--Mr. Jones bought one and I the other. But they'll fit both of you. Get into them. We'll wait--come down when you are slicked up enough." Then she left. CHAPTER XXXIV HUCK said: "Tom, we can slope, if we can find a rope. The window ain't high from the ground." "Shucks! what do you want to slope for?" "Well, I ain't used to that kind of a crowd. I can't stand it. I ain't going down there, Tom." "Oh, bother! It ain't anything. I don't mind it a bit. I'll take care of you." Sid appeared. "Tom," said he, "auntie has been waiting for you all the afternoon. Mary got your Sunday clothes ready, and everybody's been fretting about you. Say--ain't this grease and clay, on your clothes?" "Now, Mr. Siddy, you jist 'tend to your own business. What's all this blow-out about, anyway?" "It's one of the widow's parties that she's always having. This time it's for the Welshman and his sons, on account of that scrape they helped her out of the other night. And say--I can tell you something, if you want to know." "Well, what?" "Why, old Mr. Jones is going to try to spring something on the people here to-night, but I overheard him tell auntie to-day about it, as a secret, but I reckon it's not much of a secret now. Everybody knows --the widow, too, for all she tries to let on she don't. Mr. Jones was bound Huck should be here--couldn't get along with his grand secret without Huck, you know!" "Secret about what, Sid?" "About Huck tracking the robbers to the widow's. I reckon Mr. Jones was going to make a grand time over his surprise, but I bet you it will drop pretty flat." Sid chuckled in a very contented and satisfied way. "Sid, was it you that told?" "Oh, never mind who it was. SOMEBODY told--that's enough." "Sid, there's only one person in this town mean enough to do that, and that's you. If you had been in Huck's place you'd 'a' sneaked down the hill and never told anybody on the robbers. You can't do any but mean things, and you can't bear to see anybody praised for doing good ones. There--no thanks, as the widow says"--and Tom cuffed Sid's ears and helped him to the door with several kicks. "Now go and tell auntie if you dare--and to-morrow you'll catch it!" Some minutes later the widow's guests were at the supper-table, and a dozen children were propped up at little side-tables in the same room, after the fashion of that country and that day. At the proper time Mr. Jones made his little speech, in which he thanked the widow for the honor she was doing himself and his sons, but said that there was another person whose modesty-- And so forth and so on. He sprung his secret about Huck's share in the adventure in the finest dramatic manner he was master of, but the surprise it occasioned was largely counterfeit and not as clamorous and effusive as it might have been under happier circumstances. However, the widow made a pretty fair show of astonishment, and heaped so many compliments and so much gratitude upon Huck that he almost forgot the nearly intolerable discomfort of his new clothes in the entirely intolerable discomfort of being set up as a target for everybody's gaze and everybody's laudations. The widow said she meant to give Huck a home under her roof and have him educated; and that when she could spare the money she would start him in business in a modest way. Tom's chance was come. He said: "Huck don't need it. Huck's rich." Nothing but a heavy strain upon the good manners of the company kept back the due and proper complimentary laugh at this pleasant joke. But the silence was a little awkward. Tom broke it: "Huck's got money. Maybe you don't believe it, but he's got lots of it. Oh, you needn't smile--I reckon I can show you. You just wait a minute." Tom ran out of doors. The company looked at each other with a perplexed interest--and inquiringly at Huck, who was tongue-tied. "Sid, what ails Tom?" said Aunt Polly. "He--well, there ain't ever any making of that boy out. I never--" Tom entered, struggling with the weight of his sacks, and Aunt Polly did not finish her sentence. Tom poured the mass of yellow coin upon the table and said: "There--what did I tell you? Half of it's Huck's and half of it's mine!" The spectacle took the general breath away. All gazed, nobody spoke for a moment. Then there was a unanimous call for an explanation. Tom said he could furnish it, and he did. The tale was long, but brimful of interest. There was scarcely an interruption from any one to break the charm of its flow. When he had finished, Mr. Jones said: "I thought I had fixed up a little surprise for this occasion, but it don't amount to anything now. This one makes it sing mighty small, I'm willing to allow." The money was counted. The sum amounted to a little over twelve thousand dollars. It was more than any one present had ever seen at one time before, though several persons were there who were worth considerably more than that in property. CHAPTER XXXV THE reader may rest satisfied that Tom's and Huck's windfall made a mighty stir in the poor little village of St. Petersburg. So vast a sum, all in actual cash, seemed next to incredible. It was talked about, gloated over, glorified, until the reason of many of the citizens tottered under the strain of the unhealthy excitement. Every "haunted" house in St. Petersburg and the neighboring villages was dissected, plank by plank, and its foundations dug up and ransacked for hidden treasure--and not by boys, but men--pretty grave, unromantic men, too, some of them. Wherever Tom and Huck appeared they were courted, admired, stared at. The boys were not able to remember that their remarks had possessed weight before; but now their sayings were treasured and repeated; everything they did seemed somehow to be regarded as remarkable; they had evidently lost the power of doing and saying commonplace things; moreover, their past history was raked up and discovered to bear marks of conspicuous originality. The village paper published biographical sketches of the boys. The Widow Douglas put Huck's money out at six per cent., and Judge Thatcher did the same with Tom's at Aunt Polly's request. Each lad had an income, now, that was simply prodigious--a dollar for every week-day in the year and half of the Sundays. It was just what the minister got --no, it was what he was promised--he generally couldn't collect it. A dollar and a quarter a week would board, lodge, and school a boy in those old simple days--and clothe him and wash him, too, for that matter. Judge Thatcher had conceived a great opinion of Tom. He said that no commonplace boy would ever have got his daughter out of the cave. When Becky told her father, in strict confidence, how Tom had taken her whipping at school, the Judge was visibly moved; and when she pleaded grace for the mighty lie which Tom had told in order to shift that whipping from her shoulders to his own, the Judge said with a fine outburst that it was a noble, a generous, a magnanimous lie--a lie that was worthy to hold up its head and march down through history breast to breast with George Washington's lauded Truth about the hatchet! Becky thought her father had never looked so tall and so superb as when he walked the floor and stamped his foot and said that. She went straight off and told Tom about it. Judge Thatcher hoped to see Tom a great lawyer or a great soldier some day. He said he meant to look to it that Tom should be admitted to the National Military Academy and afterward trained in the best law school in the country, in order that he might be ready for either career or both. Huck Finn's wealth and the fact that he was now under the Widow Douglas' protection introduced him into society--no, dragged him into it, hurled him into it--and his sufferings were almost more than he could bear. The widow's servants kept him clean and neat, combed and brushed, and they bedded him nightly in unsympathetic sheets that had not one little spot or stain which he could press to his heart and know for a friend. He had to eat with a knife and fork; he had to use napkin, cup, and plate; he had to learn his book, he had to go to church; he had to talk so properly that speech was become insipid in his mouth; whithersoever he turned, the bars and shackles of civilization shut him in and bound him hand and foot. He bravely bore his miseries three weeks, and then one day turned up missing. For forty-eight hours the widow hunted for him everywhere in great distress. The public were profoundly concerned; they searched high and low, they dragged the river for his body. Early the third morning Tom Sawyer wisely went poking among some old empty hogsheads down behind the abandoned slaughter-house, and in one of them he found the refugee. Huck had slept there; he had just breakfasted upon some stolen odds and ends of food, and was lying off, now, in comfort, with his pipe. He was unkempt, uncombed, and clad in the same old ruin of rags that had made him picturesque in the days when he was free and happy. Tom routed him out, told him the trouble he had been causing, and urged him to go home. Huck's face lost its tranquil content, and took a melancholy cast. He said: "Don't talk about it, Tom. I've tried it, and it don't work; it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me; I ain't used to it. The widder's good to me, and friendly; but I can't stand them ways. She makes me get up just at the same time every morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem to any air git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar-door for--well, it 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and sweat--I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in there, I can't chaw. I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell--everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it." "Well, everybody does that way, Huck." "Tom, it don't make no difference. I ain't everybody, and I can't STAND it. It's awful to be tied up so. And grub comes too easy--I don't take no interest in vittles, that way. I got to ask to go a-fishing; I got to ask to go in a-swimming--dern'd if I hain't got to ask to do everything. Well, I'd got to talk so nice it wasn't no comfort--I'd got to go up in the attic and rip out awhile, every day, to git a taste in my mouth, or I'd a died, Tom. The widder wouldn't let me smoke; she wouldn't let me yell, she wouldn't let me gape, nor stretch, nor scratch, before folks--" [Then with a spasm of special irritation and injury]--"And dad fetch it, she prayed all the time! I never see such a woman! I HAD to shove, Tom--I just had to. And besides, that school's going to open, and I'd a had to go to it--well, I wouldn't stand THAT, Tom. Looky here, Tom, being rich ain't what it's cracked up to be. It's just worry and worry, and sweat and sweat, and a-wishing you was dead all the time. Now these clothes suits me, and this bar'l suits me, and I ain't ever going to shake 'em any more. Tom, I wouldn't ever got into all this trouble if it hadn't 'a' ben for that money; now you just take my sheer of it along with your'n, and gimme a ten-center sometimes--not many times, becuz I don't give a dern for a thing 'thout it's tollable hard to git--and you go and beg off for me with the widder." "Oh, Huck, you know I can't do that. 'Tain't fair; and besides if you'll try this thing just a while longer you'll come to like it." "Like it! Yes--the way I'd like a hot stove if I was to set on it long enough. No, Tom, I won't be rich, and I won't live in them cussed smothery houses. I like the woods, and the river, and hogsheads, and I'll stick to 'em, too. Blame it all! just as we'd got guns, and a cave, and all just fixed to rob, here this dern foolishness has got to come up and spile it all!" Tom saw his opportunity-- "Lookyhere, Huck, being rich ain't going to keep me back from turning robber." "No! Oh, good-licks; are you in real dead-wood earnest, Tom?" "Just as dead earnest as I'm sitting here. But Huck, we can't let you into the gang if you ain't respectable, you know." Huck's joy was quenched. "Can't let me in, Tom? Didn't you let me go for a pirate?" "Yes, but that's different. A robber is more high-toned than what a pirate is--as a general thing. In most countries they're awful high up in the nobility--dukes and such." "Now, Tom, hain't you always ben friendly to me? You wouldn't shet me out, would you, Tom? You wouldn't do that, now, WOULD you, Tom?" "Huck, I wouldn't want to, and I DON'T want to--but what would people say? Why, they'd say, 'Mph! Tom Sawyer's Gang! pretty low characters in it!' They'd mean you, Huck. You wouldn't like that, and I wouldn't." Huck was silent for some time, engaged in a mental struggle. Finally he said: "Well, I'll go back to the widder for a month and tackle it and see if I can come to stand it, if you'll let me b'long to the gang, Tom." "All right, Huck, it's a whiz! Come along, old chap, and I'll ask the widow to let up on you a little, Huck." "Will you, Tom--now will you? That's good. If she'll let up on some of the roughest things, I'll smoke private and cuss private, and crowd through or bust. When you going to start the gang and turn robbers?" "Oh, right off. We'll get the boys together and have the initiation to-night, maybe." "Have the which?" "Have the initiation." "What's that?" "It's to swear to stand by one another, and never tell the gang's secrets, even if you're chopped all to flinders, and kill anybody and all his family that hurts one of the gang." "That's gay--that's mighty gay, Tom, I tell you." "Well, I bet it is. And all that swearing's got to be done at midnight, in the lonesomest, awfulest place you can find--a ha'nted house is the best, but they're all ripped up now." "Well, midnight's good, anyway, Tom." "Yes, so it is. And you've got to swear on a coffin, and sign it with blood." "Now, that's something LIKE! Why, it's a million times bullier than pirating. I'll stick to the widder till I rot, Tom; and if I git to be a reg'lar ripper of a robber, and everybody talking 'bout it, I reckon she'll be proud she snaked me in out of the wet." CONCLUSION SO endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a BOY, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a MAN. When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop--that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can. Most of the characters that perform in this book still live, and are prosperous and happy. Some day it may seem worth while to take up the story of the younger ones again and see what sort of men and women they turned out to be; therefore it will be wisest not to reveal any of that part of their lives at present. 
8471	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 1. THE 'BODY OF THE NATION' BUT the basin of the Mississippi is the BODY OF THE NATION. All the other parts are but members, important in themselves, yet more important in their relations to this. Exclusive of the Lake basin and of 300,000 square miles in Texas and New Mexico, which in many aspects form a part of it, this basin contains about 1,250,000 square miles. In extent it is the second great valley of the world, being exceeded only by that of the Amazon. The valley of the frozen Obi approaches it in extent; that of La Plata comes next in space, and probably in habitable capacity, having about eight-ninths of its area; then comes that of the Yenisei, with about seven-ninths; the Lena, Amoor, Hoang-ho, Yang-tse-kiang, and Nile, five-ninths; the Ganges, less than one-half; the Indus, less than one-third; the Euphrates, one-fifth; the Rhine, one-fifteenth. It exceeds in extent the whole of Europe, exclusive of Russia, Norway, and Sweden. IT WOULD CONTAIN AUSTRIA FOUR TIMES, GERMANY OR SPAIN FIVE TIMES, FRANCE SIX TIMES, THE BRITISH ISLANDS OR ITALY TEN TIMES. Conceptions formed from the river-basins of Western Europe are rudely shocked when we consider the extent of the valley of the Mississippi; nor are those formed from the sterile basins of the great rivers of Siberia, the lofty plateaus of Central Asia, or the mighty sweep of the swampy Amazon more adequate. Latitude, elevation, and rainfall all combine to render every part of the Mississippi Valley capable of supporting a dense population. AS A DWELLING-PLACE FOR CIVILIZED MAN IT IS BY FAR THE FIRST UPON OUR GLOBE. EDITOR'S TABLE, HARPER'S MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 1863 Chapter 1 The River and Its History THE Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world--four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five. It discharges three times as much water as the St. Lawrence, twenty-five times as much as the Rhine, and three hundred and thirty-eight times as much as the Thames. No other river has so vast a drainage-basin: it draws its water supply from twenty-eight States and Territories; from Delaware, on the Atlantic seaboard, and from all the country between that and Idaho on the Pacific slope--a spread of forty-five degrees of longitude. The Mississippi receives and carries to the Gulf water from fifty-four subordinate rivers that are navigable by steamboats, and from some hundreds that are navigable by flats and keels. The area of its drainage-basin is as great as the combined areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Italy, and Turkey; and almost all this wide region is fertile; the Mississippi valley, proper, is exceptionally so. It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper. From the junction of the Ohio to a point half way down to the sea, the width averages a mile in high water: thence to the sea the width steadily diminishes, until, at the 'Passes,' above the mouth, it is but little over half a mile. At the junction of the Ohio the Mississippi's depth is eighty- seven feet; the depth increases gradually, reaching one hundred and twenty-nine just above the mouth. The difference in rise and fall is also remarkable--not in the upper, but in the lower river. The rise is tolerably uniform down to Natchez (three hundred and sixty miles above the mouth)--about fifty feet. But at Bayou La Fourche the river rises only twenty-four feet; at New Orleans only fifteen, and just above the mouth only two and one half. An article in the New Orleans 'Times-Democrat,' based upon reports of able engineers, states that the river annually empties four hundred and six million tons of mud into the Gulf of Mexico--which brings to mind Captain Marryat's rude name for the Mississippi--'the Great Sewer.' This mud, solidified, would make a mass a mile square and two hundred and forty-one feet high. The mud deposit gradually extends the land--but only gradually; it has extended it not quite a third of a mile in the two hundred years which have elapsed since the river took its place in history. The belief of the scientific people is, that the mouth used to be at Baton Rouge, where the hills cease, and that the two hundred miles of land between there and the Gulf was built by the river. This gives us the age of that piece of country, without any trouble at all--one hundred and twenty thousand years. Yet it is much the youthfullest batch of country that lies around there anywhere. The Mississippi is remarkable in still another way--its disposition to make prodigious jumps by cutting through narrow necks of land, and thus straightening and shortening itself. More than once it has shortened itself thirty miles at a single jump! These cut-offs have had curious effects: they have thrown several river towns out into the rural districts, and built up sand bars and forests in front of them. The town of Delta used to be three miles below Vicksburg: a recent cutoff has radically changed the position, and Delta is now TWO MILES ABOVE Vicksburg. Both of these river towns have been retired to the country by that cut- off. A cut-off plays havoc with boundary lines and jurisdictions: for instance, a man is living in the State of Mississippi to-day, a cut-off occurs to-night, and to-morrow the man finds himself and his land over on the other side of the river, within the boundaries and subject to the laws of the State of Louisiana! Such a thing, happening in the upper river in the old times, could have transferred a slave from Missouri to Illinois and made a free man of him. The Mississippi does not alter its locality by cut-offs alone: it is always changing its habitat BODILY--is always moving bodily SIDEWISE. At Hard Times, La., the river is two miles west of the region it used to occupy. As a result, the original SITE of that settlement is not now in Louisiana at all, but on the other side of the river, in the State of Mississippi. NEARLY THE WHOLE OF THAT ONE THOUSAND THREE HUNDRED MILES OF OLD MISSISSIPPI RIVER WHICH LA SALLE FLOATED DOWN IN HIS CANOES, TWO HUNDRED YEARS AGO, IS GOOD SOLID DRY GROUND NOW. The river lies to the right of it, in places, and to the left of it in other places. Although the Mississippi's mud builds land but slowly, down at the mouth, where the Gulfs billows interfere with its work, it builds fast enough in better protected regions higher up: for instance, Prophet's Island contained one thousand five hundred acres of land thirty years ago; since then the river has added seven hundred acres to it. But enough of these examples of the mighty stream's eccentricities for the present--I will give a few more of them further along in the book. Let us drop the Mississippi's physical history, and say a word about its historical history--so to speak. We can glance briefly at its slumbrous first epoch in a couple of short chapters; at its second and wider-awake epoch in a couple more; at its flushest and widest-awake epoch in a good many succeeding chapters; and then talk about its comparatively tranquil present epoch in what shall be left of the book. The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word 'new' in connection with our country, that we early get and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it. We do of course know that there are several comparatively old dates in American history, but the mere figures convey to our minds no just idea, no distinct realization, of the stretch of time which they represent. To say that De Soto, the first white man who ever saw the Mississippi River, saw it in 1542, is a remark which states a fact without interpreting it: it is something like giving the dimensions of a sunset by astronomical measurements, and cataloguing the colors by their scientific names;--as a result, you get the bald fact of the sunset, but you don't see the sunset. It would have been better to paint a picture of it. The date 1542, standing by itself, means little or nothing to us; but when one groups a few neighboring historical dates and facts around it, he adds perspective and color, and then realizes that this is one of the American dates which is quite respectable for age. For instance, when the Mississippi was first seen by a white man, less than a quarter of a century had elapsed since Francis I.'s defeat at Pavia; the death of Raphael; the death of Bayard, SANS PEUR ET SANS REPROCHE; the driving out of the Knights-Hospitallers from Rhodes by the Turks; and the placarding of the Ninety-Five Propositions,--the act which began the Reformation. When De Soto took his glimpse of the river, Ignatius Loyola was an obscure name; the order of the Jesuits was not yet a year old; Michael Angelo's paint was not yet dry on the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel; Mary Queen of Scots was not yet born, but would be before the year closed. Catherine de Medici was a child; Elizabeth of England was not yet in her teens; Calvin, Benvenuto Cellini, and the Emperor Charles V. were at the top of their fame, and each was manufacturing history after his own peculiar fashion; Margaret of Navarre was writing the 'Heptameron' and some religious books,--the first survives, the others are forgotten, wit and indelicacy being sometimes better literature preservers than holiness; lax court morals and the absurd chivalry business were in full feather, and the joust and the tournament were the frequent pastime of titled fine gentlemen who could fight better than they could spell, while religion was the passion of their ladies, and classifying their offspring into children of full rank and children by brevet their pastime. In fact, all around, religion was in a peculiarly blooming condition: the Council of Trent was being called; the Spanish Inquisition was roasting, and racking, and burning, with a free hand; elsewhere on the continent the nations were being persuaded to holy living by the sword and fire; in England, Henry VIII. had suppressed the monasteries, burnt Fisher and another bishop or two, and was getting his English reformation and his harem effectively started. When De Soto stood on the banks of the Mississippi, it was still two years before Luther's death; eleven years before the burning of Servetus; thirty years before the St. Bartholomew slaughter; Rabelais was not yet published; 'Don Quixote' was not yet written; Shakespeare was not yet born; a hundred long years must still elapse before Englishmen would hear the name of Oliver Cromwell. Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity. De Soto merely glimpsed the river, then died and was buried in it by his priests and soldiers. One would expect the priests and the soldiers to multiply the river's dimensions by ten--the Spanish custom of the day-- and thus move other adventurers to go at once and explore it. On the contrary, their narratives when they reached home, did not excite that amount of curiosity. The Mississippi was left unvisited by whites during a term of years which seems incredible in our energetic days. One may 'sense' the interval to his mind, after a fashion, by dividing it up in this way: After De Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short of a quarter of a century elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born; lived a trifle more than half a century, then died; and when he had been in his grave considerably more than half a century, the SECOND white man saw the Mississippi. In our day we don't allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. If somebody should discover a creek in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in, Europe and America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither: one to explore the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt for each other. For more than a hundred and fifty years there had been white settlements on our Atlantic coasts. These people were in intimate communication with the Indians: in the south the Spaniards were robbing, slaughtering, enslaving and converting them; higher up, the English were trading beads and blankets to them for a consideration, and throwing in civilization and whiskey, 'for lagniappe;' and in Canada the French were schooling them in a rudimentary way, missionarying among them, and drawing whole populations of them at a time to Quebec, and later to Montreal, to buy furs of them. Necessarily, then, these various clusters of whites must have heard of the great river of the far west; and indeed, they did hear of it vaguely,--so vaguely and indefinitely, that its course, proportions, and locality were hardly even guessable. The mere mysteriousness of the matter ought to have fired curiosity and compelled exploration; but this did not occur. Apparently nobody happened to want such a river, nobody needed it, nobody was curious about it; so, for a century and a half the Mississippi remained out of the market and undisturbed. When De Soto found it, he was not hunting for a river, and had no present occasion for one; consequently he did not value it or even take any particular notice of it. But at last La Salle the Frenchman conceived the idea of seeking out that river and exploring it. It always happens that when a man seizes upon a neglected and important idea, people inflamed with the same notion crop up all around. It happened so in this instance. Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations? Apparently it was because at this late day they thought they had discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California, and therefore afforded a short cut from Canada to China. Previously the supposition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic, or Sea of Virginia. Chapter 2 The River and Its Explorers LA SALLE himself sued for certain high privileges, and they were graciously accorded him by Louis XIV of inflated memory. Chief among them was the privilege to explore, far and wide, and build forts, and stake out continents, and hand the same over to the king, and pay the expenses himself; receiving, in return, some little advantages of one sort or another; among them the monopoly of buffalo hides. He spent several years and about all of his money, in making perilous and painful trips between Montreal and a fort which he had built on the Illinois, before he at last succeeded in getting his expedition in such a shape that he could strike for the Mississippi. And meantime other parties had had better fortune. In 1673 Joliet the merchant, and Marquette the priest, crossed the country and reached the banks of the Mississippi. They went by way of the Great Lakes; and from Green Bay, in canoes, by way of Fox River and the Wisconsin. Marquette had solemnly contracted, on the feast of the Immaculate Conception, that if the Virgin would permit him to discover the great river, he would name it Conception, in her honor. He kept his word. In that day, all explorers traveled with an outfit of priests. De Soto had twenty-four with him. La Salle had several, also. The expeditions were often out of meat, and scant of clothes, but they always had the furniture and other requisites for the mass; they were always prepared, as one of the quaint chroniclers of the time phrased it, to 'explain hell to the savages.' On the 17th of June, 1673, the canoes of Joliet and Marquette and their five subordinates reached the junction of the Wisconsin with the Mississippi. Mr. Parkman says: 'Before them a wide and rapid current coursed athwart their way, by the foot of lofty heights wrapped thick in forests.' He continues: 'Turning southward, they paddled down the stream, through a solitude unrelieved by the faintest trace of man.' A big cat-fish collided with Marquette's canoe, and startled him; and reasonably enough, for he had been warned by the Indians that he was on a foolhardy journey, and even a fatal one, for the river contained a demon 'whose roar could be heard at a great distance, and who would engulf them in the abyss where he dwelt.' I have seen a Mississippi cat- fish that was more than six feet long, and weighed two hundred and fifty pounds; and if Marquette's fish was the fellow to that one, he had a fair right to think the river's roaring demon was come. 'At length the buffalo began to appear, grazing in herds on the great prairies which then bordered the river; and Marquette describes the fierce and stupid look of the old bulls as they stared at the intruders through the tangled mane which nearly blinded them.' The voyagers moved cautiously: 'Landed at night and made a fire to cook their evening meal; then extinguished it, embarked again, paddled some way farther, and anchored in the stream, keeping a man on the watch till morning.' They did this day after day and night after night; and at the end of two weeks they had not seen a human being. The river was an awful solitude, then. And it is now, over most of its stretch. But at the close of the fortnight they one day came upon the footprints of men in the mud of the western bank--a Robinson Crusoe experience which carries an electric shiver with it yet, when one stumbles on it in print. They had been warned that the river Indians were as ferocious and pitiless as the river demon, and destroyed all comers without waiting for provocation; but no matter, Joliet and Marquette struck into the country to hunt up the proprietors of the tracks. They found them, by and by, and were hospitably received and well treated--if to be received by an Indian chief who has taken off his last rag in order to appear at his level best is to be received hospitably; and if to be treated abundantly to fish, porridge, and other game, including dog, and have these things forked into one's mouth by the ungloved fingers of Indians is to be well treated. In the morning the chief and six hundred of his tribesmen escorted the Frenchmen to the river and bade them a friendly farewell. On the rocks above the present city of Alton they found some rude and fantastic Indian paintings, which they describe. A short distance below 'a torrent of yellow mud rushed furiously athwart the calm blue current of the Mississippi, boiling and surging and sweeping in its course logs, branches, and uprooted trees.' This was the mouth of the Missouri, 'that savage river,' which 'descending from its mad career through a vast unknown of barbarism, poured its turbid floods into the bosom of its gentle sister.' By and by they passed the mouth of the Ohio; they passed cane-brakes; they fought mosquitoes; they floated along, day after day, through the deep silence and loneliness of the river, drowsing in the scant shade of makeshift awnings, and broiling with the heat; they encountered and exchanged civilities with another party of Indians; and at last they reached the mouth of the Arkansas (about a month out from their starting-point), where a tribe of war-whooping savages swarmed out to meet and murder them; but they appealed to the Virgin for help; so in place of a fight there was a feast, and plenty of pleasant palaver and fol-de-rol. They had proved to their satisfaction, that the Mississippi did not empty into the Gulf of California, or into the Atlantic. They believed it emptied into the Gulf of Mexico. They turned back, now, and carried their great news to Canada. But belief is not proof. It was reserved for La Salle to furnish the proof. He was provokingly delayed, by one misfortune after another, but at last got his expedition under way at the end of the year 1681. In the dead of winter he and Henri de Tonty, son of Lorenzo Tonty, who invented the tontine, his lieutenant, started down the Illinois, with a following of eighteen Indians brought from New England, and twenty-three Frenchmen. They moved in procession down the surface of the frozen river, on foot, and dragging their canoes after them on sledges. At Peoria Lake they struck open water, and paddled thence to the Mississippi and turned their prows southward. They plowed through the fields of floating ice, past the mouth of the Missouri; past the mouth of the Ohio, by-and-by; 'and, gliding by the wastes of bordering swamp, landed on the 24th of February near the Third Chickasaw Bluffs,' where they halted and built Fort Prudhomme. 'Again,' says Mr. Parkman, 'they embarked; and with every stage of their adventurous progress, the mystery of this vast new world was more and more unveiled. More and more they entered the realms of spring. The hazy sunlight, the warm and drowsy air, the tender foliage, the opening flowers, betokened the reviving life of nature.' Day by day they floated down the great bends, in the shadow of the dense forests, and in time arrived at the mouth of the Arkansas. First, they were greeted by the natives of this locality as Marquette had before been greeted by them--with the booming of the war drum and the flourish of arms. The Virgin composed the difficulty in Marquette's case; the pipe of peace did the same office for La Salle. The white man and the red man struck hands and entertained each other during three days. Then, to the admiration of the savages, La Salle set up a cross with the arms of France on it, and took possession of the whole country for the king--the cool fashion of the time--while the priest piously consecrated the robbery with a hymn. The priest explained the mysteries of the faith 'by signs,' for the saving of the savages; thus compensating them with possible possessions in Heaven for the certain ones on earth which they had just been robbed of. And also, by signs, La Salle drew from these simple children of the forest acknowledgments of fealty to Louis the Putrid, over the water. Nobody smiled at these colossal ironies. These performances took place on the site of the future town of Napoleon, Arkansas, and there the first confiscation-cross was raised on the banks of the great river. Marquette's and Joliet's voyage of discovery ended at the same spot--the site of the future town of Napoleon. When De Soto took his fleeting glimpse of the river, away back in the dim early days, he took it from that same spot--the site of the future town of Napoleon, Arkansas. Therefore, three out of the four memorable events connected with the discovery and exploration of the mighty river, occurred, by accident, in one and the same place. It is a most curious distinction, when one comes to look at it and think about it. France stole that vast country on that spot, the future Napoleon; and by and by Napoleon himself was to give the country back again!--make restitution, not to the owners, but to their white American heirs. The voyagers journeyed on, touching here and there; 'passed the sites, since become historic, of Vicksburg and Grand Gulf,' and visited an imposing Indian monarch in the Teche country, whose capital city was a substantial one of sun-baked bricks mixed with straw--better houses than many that exist there now. The chiefs house contained an audience room forty feet square; and there he received Tonty in State, surrounded by sixty old men clothed in white cloaks. There was a temple in the town, with a mud wall about it ornamented with skulls of enemies sacrificed to the sun. The voyagers visited the Natchez Indians, near the site of the present city of that name, where they found a 'religious and political despotism, a privileged class descended from the sun, a temple and a sacred fire.' It must have been like getting home again; it was home with an advantage, in fact, for it lacked Louis XIV. A few more days swept swiftly by, and La Salle stood in the shadow of his confiscating cross, at the meeting of the waters from Delaware, and from Itaska, and from the mountain ranges close upon the Pacific, with the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, his task finished, his prodigy achieved. Mr. Parkman, in closing his fascinating narrative, thus sums up: 'On that day, the realm of France received on parchment a stupendous accession. The fertile plains of Texas; the vast basin of the Mississippi, from its frozen northern springs to the sultry borders of the Gulf; from the woody ridges of the Alleghanies to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains--a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers, ranged by a thousand warlike tribes, passed beneath the scepter of the Sultan of Versailles; and all by virtue of a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile.' Chapter 3 Frescoes from the Past APPARENTLY the river was ready for business, now. But no, the distribution of a population along its banks was as calm and deliberate and time-devouring a process as the discovery and exploration had been. Seventy years elapsed, after the exploration, before the river's borders had a white population worth considering; and nearly fifty more before the river had a commerce. Between La Salle's opening of the river and the time when it may be said to have become the vehicle of anything like a regular and active commerce, seven sovereigns had occupied the throne of England, America had become an independent nation, Louis XIV. and Louis XV. had rotted and died, the French monarchy had gone down in the red tempest of the revolution, and Napoleon was a name that was beginning to be talked about. Truly, there were snails in those days. The river's earliest commerce was in great barges--keelboats, broadhorns. They floated and sailed from the upper rivers to New Orleans, changed cargoes there, and were tediously warped and poled back by hand. A voyage down and back sometimes occupied nine months. In time this commerce increased until it gave employment to hordes of rough and hardy men; rude, uneducated, brave, suffering terrific hardships with sailor-like stoicism; heavy drinkers, coarse frolickers in moral sties like the Natchez-under-the-hill of that day, heavy fighters, reckless fellows, every one, elephantinely jolly, foul-witted, profane; prodigal of their money, bankrupt at the end of the trip, fond of barbaric finery, prodigious braggarts; yet, in the main, honest, trustworthy, faithful to promises and duty, and often picturesquely magnanimous. By and by the steamboat intruded. Then for fifteen or twenty years, these men continued to run their keelboats down-stream, and the steamers did all of the upstream business, the keelboatmen selling their boats in New Orleans, and returning home as deck passengers in the steamers. But after a while the steamboats so increased in number and in speed that they were able to absorb the entire commerce; and then keelboating died a permanent death. The keelboatman became a deck hand, or a mate, or a pilot on the steamer; and when steamer-berths were not open to him, he took a berth on a Pittsburgh coal-flat, or on a pine-raft constructed in the forests up toward the sources of the Mississippi. In the heyday of the steamboating prosperity, the river from end to end was flaked with coal-fleets and timber rafts, all managed by hand, and employing hosts of the rough characters whom I have been trying to describe. I remember the annual processions of mighty rafts that used to glide by Hannibal when I was a boy,--an acre or so of white, sweet- smelling boards in each raft, a crew of two dozen men or more, three or four wigwams scattered about the raft's vast level space for storm- quarters,--and I remember the rude ways and the tremendous talk of their big crews, the ex-keelboatmen and their admiringly patterning successors; for we used to swim out a quarter or third of a mile and get on these rafts and have a ride. By way of illustrating keelboat talk and manners, and that now-departed and hardly-remembered raft-life, I will throw in, in this place, a chapter from a book which I have been working at, by fits and starts, during the past five or six years, and may possibly finish in the course of five or six more. The book is a story which details some passages in the life of an ignorant village boy, Huck Finn, son of the town drunkard of my time out west, there. He has run away from his persecuting father, and from a persecuting good widow who wishes to make a nice, truth-telling, respectable boy of him; and with him a slave of the widow's has also escaped. They have found a fragment of a lumber raft (it is high water and dead summer time), and are floating down the river by night, and hiding in the willows by day,--bound for Cairo,--whence the negro will seek freedom in the heart of the free States. But in a fog, they pass Cairo without knowing it. By and by they begin to suspect the truth, and Huck Finn is persuaded to end the dismal suspense by swimming down to a huge raft which they have seen in the distance ahead of them, creeping aboard under cover of the darkness, and gathering the needed information by eavesdropping:-- But you know a young person can't wait very well when he is impatient to find a thing out. We talked it over, and by and by Jim said it was such a black night, now, that it wouldn't be no risk to swim down to the big raft and crawl aboard and listen--they would talk about Cairo, because they would be calculating to go ashore there for a spree, maybe, or anyway they would send boats ashore to buy whiskey or fresh meat or something. Jim had a wonderful level head, for a nigger: he could most always start a good plan when you wanted one. I stood up and shook my rags off and jumped into the river, and struck out for the raft's light. By and by, when I got down nearly to her, I eased up and went slow and cautious. But everything was all right-- nobody at the sweeps. So I swum down along the raft till I was most abreast the camp fire in the middle, then I crawled aboard and inched along and got in amongst some bundles of shingles on the weather side of the fire. There was thirteen men there--they was the watch on deck of course. And a mighty rough-looking lot, too. They had a jug, and tin cups, and they kept the jug moving. One man was singing--roaring, you may say; and it wasn't a nice song--for a parlor anyway. He roared through his nose, and strung out the last word of every line very long. When he was done they all fetched a kind of Injun war-whoop, and then another was sung. It begun:-- 'There was a woman in our towdn, In our towdn did dwed'l (dwell,) She loved her husband dear-i-lee, But another man twyste as wed'l. Singing too, riloo, riloo, riloo, Ri-too, riloo, rilay - - - e, She loved her husband dear-i-lee, But another man twyste as wed'l. And so on--fourteen verses. It was kind of poor, and when he was going to start on the next verse one of them said it was the tune the old cow died on; and another one said, 'Oh, give us a rest.' And another one told him to take a walk. They made fun of him till he got mad and jumped up and begun to cuss the crowd, and said he could lame any thief in the lot. They was all about to make a break for him, but the biggest man there jumped up and says-- 'Set whar you are, gentlemen. Leave him to me; he's my meat.' Then he jumped up in the air three times and cracked his heels together every time. He flung off a buckskin coat that was all hung with fringes, and says, 'You lay thar tell the chawin-up's done;' and flung his hat down, which was all over ribbons, and says, 'You lay thar tell his sufferin's is over.' Then he jumped up in the air and cracked his heels together again and shouted out-- 'Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper- bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!--Look at me! I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen!--and lay low and hold your breath, for I'm bout to turn myself loose!' All the time he was getting this off, he was shaking his head and looking fierce, and kind of swelling around in a little circle, tucking up his wrist-bands, and now and then straightening up and beating his breast with his fist, saying, 'Look at me, gentlemen!' When he got through, he jumped up and cracked his heels together three times, and let off a roaring 'Whoo-oop! I'm the bloodiest son of a wildcat that lives!' Then the man that had started the row tilted his old slouch hat down over his right eye; then he bent stooping forward, with his back sagged and his south end sticking out far, and his fists a-shoving out and drawing in in front of him, and so went around in a little circle about three times, swelling himself up and breathing hard. Then he straightened, and jumped up and cracked his heels together three times, before he lit again (that made them cheer), and he begun to shout like this-- 'Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the kingdom of sorrow's a- coming! Hold me down to the earth, for I feel my powers a-working! whoo- oop! I'm a child of sin, don't let me get a start! Smoked glass, here, for all! Don't attempt to look at me with the naked eye, gentlemen! When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales! I scratch my head with the lightning, and purr myself to sleep with the thunder! When I'm cold, I bile the Gulf of Mexico and bathe in it; when I'm hot I fan myself with an equinoctial storm; when I'm thirsty I reach up and suck a cloud dry like a sponge; when I range the earth hungry, famine follows in my tracks! Whoo-oop! Bow your neck and spread! I put my hand on the sun's face and make it night in the earth; I bite a piece out of the moon and hurry the seasons; I shake myself and crumble the mountains! Contemplate me through leather--don't use the naked eye! I'm the man with a petrified heart and biler-iron bowels! The massacre of isolated communities is the pastime of my idle moments, the destruction of nationalities the serious business of my life! The boundless vastness of the great American desert is my enclosed property, and I bury my dead on my own premises!' He jumped up and cracked his heels together three times before he lit (they cheered him again), and as he come down he shouted out: 'Whoo-oop! bow your neck and spread, for the pet child of calamity's a-coming! ' Then the other one went to swelling around and blowing again--the first one--the one they called Bob; next, the Child of Calamity chipped in again, bigger than ever; then they both got at it at the same time, swelling round and round each other and punching their fists most into each other's faces, and whooping and jawing like Injuns; then Bob called the Child names, and the Child called him names back again: next, Bob called him a heap rougher names and the Child come back at him with the very worst kind of language; next, Bob knocked the Child's hat off, and the Child picked it up and kicked Bob's ribbony hat about six foot; Bob went and got it and said never mind, this warn't going to be the last of this thing, because he was a man that never forgot and never forgive, and so the Child better look out, for there was a time a-coming, just as sure as he was a living man, that he would have to answer to him with the best blood in his body. The Child said no man was willinger than he was for that time to come, and he would give Bob fair warning, now, never to cross his path again, for he could never rest till he had waded in his blood, for such was his nature, though he was sparing him now on account of his family, if he had one. Both of them was edging away in different directions, growling and shaking their heads and going on about what they was going to do; but a little black-whiskered chap skipped up and says-- 'Come back here, you couple of chicken-livered cowards, and I'll thrash the two of ye!' And he done it, too. He snatched them, he jerked them this way and that, he booted them around, he knocked them sprawling faster than they could get up. Why, it warn't two minutes till they begged like dogs-- and how the other lot did yell and laugh and clap their hands all the way through, and shout 'Sail in, Corpse-Maker!' 'Hi! at him again, Child of Calamity!' 'Bully for you, little Davy!' Well, it was a perfect pow- wow for a while. Bob and the Child had red noses and black eyes when they got through. Little Davy made them own up that they were sneaks and cowards and not fit to eat with a dog or drink with a nigger; then Bob and the Child shook hands with each other, very solemn, and said they had always respected each other and was willing to let bygones be bygones. So then they washed their faces in the river; and just then there was a loud order to stand by for a crossing, and some of them went forward to man the sweeps there, and the rest went aft to handle the after-sweeps. I laid still and waited for fifteen minutes, and had a smoke out of a pipe that one of them left in reach; then the crossing was finished, and they stumped back and had a drink around and went to talking and singing again. Next they got out an old fiddle, and one played and another patted juba, and the rest turned themselves loose on a regular old- fashioned keel-boat break-down. They couldn't keep that up very long without getting winded, so by and by they settled around the jug again. They sung 'jolly, jolly raftman's the life for me,' with a musing chorus, and then they got to talking about differences betwixt hogs, and their different kind of habits; and next about women and their different ways: and next about the best ways to put out houses that was afire; and next about what ought to be done with the Injuns; and next about what a king had to do, and how much he got; and next about how to make cats fight; and next about what to do when a man has fits; and next about differences betwixt clear-water rivers and muddy-water ones. The man they called Ed said the muddy Mississippi water was wholesomer to drink than the clear water of the Ohio; he said if you let a pint of this yaller Mississippi water settle, you would have about a half to three-quarters of an inch of mud in the bottom, according to the stage of the river, and then it warn't no better than Ohio water--what you wanted to do was to keep it stirred up--and when the river was low, keep mud on hand to put in and thicken the water up the way it ought to be. The Child of Calamity said that was so; he said there was nutritiousness in the mud, and a man that drunk Mississippi water could grow corn in his stomach if he wanted to. He says-- 'You look at the graveyards; that tells the tale. Trees won't grow worth chucks in a Cincinnati graveyard, but in a Sent Louis graveyard they grow upwards of eight hundred foot high. It's all on account of the water the people drunk before they laid up. A Cincinnati corpse don't richen a soil any.' And they talked about how Ohio water didn't like to mix with Mississippi water. Ed said if you take the Mississippi on a rise when the Ohio is low, you'll find a wide band of clear water all the way down the east side of the Mississippi for a hundred mile or more, and the minute you get out a quarter of a mile from shore and pass the line, it is all thick and yaller the rest of the way across. Then they talked about how to keep tobacco from getting moldy, and from that they went into ghosts and told about a lot that other folks had seen; but Ed says-- 'Why don't you tell something that you've seen yourselves? Now let me have a say. Five years ago I was on a raft as big as this, and right along here it was a bright moonshiny night, and I was on watch and boss of the stabboard oar forrard, and one of my pards was a man named Dick Allbright, and he come along to where I was sitting, forrard--gaping and stretching, he was--and stooped down on the edge of the raft and washed his face in the river, and come and set down by me and got out his pipe, and had just got it filled, when he looks up and says-- '"Why looky-here," he says, "ain't that Buck Miller's place, over yander in the bend." '"Yes," says I, "it is--why." He laid his pipe down and leant his head on his hand, and says-- '"I thought we'd be furder down." I says-- '"I thought it too, when I went off watch"--we was standing six hours on and six off--"but the boys told me," I says, "that the raft didn't seem to hardly move, for the last hour," says I, "though she's a slipping along all right, now," says I. He give a kind of a groan, and says-- '"I've seed a raft act so before, along here," he says, "'pears to me the current has most quit above the head of this bend durin' the last two years," he says. 'Well, he raised up two or three times, and looked away off and around on the water. That started me at it, too. A body is always doing what he sees somebody else doing, though there mayn't be no sense in it. Pretty soon I see a black something floating on the water away off to stabboard and quartering behind us. I see he was looking at it, too. I says-- '"What's that?" He says, sort of pettish,-- '"Tain't nothing but an old empty bar'l." '"An empty bar'l!" says I, "why," says I, "a spy-glass is a fool to your eyes. How can you tell it's an empty bar'l?" He says-- '"I don't know; I reckon it ain't a bar'l, but I thought it might be," says he. '"Yes," I says, "so it might be, and it might be anything else, too; a body can't tell nothing about it, such a distance as that," I says. 'We hadn't nothing else to do, so we kept on watching it. By and by I says-- '"Why looky-here, Dick Allbright, that thing's a-gaining on us, I believe." 'He never said nothing. The thing gained and gained, and I judged it must be a dog that was about tired out. Well, we swung down into the crossing, and the thing floated across the bright streak of the moonshine, and, by George, it was bar'l. Says I-- '"Dick Allbright, what made you think that thing was a bar'l, when it was a half a mile off," says I. Says he-- '"I don't know." Says I-- '"You tell me, Dick Allbright." He says-- '"Well, I knowed it was a bar'l; I've seen it before; lots has seen it; they says it's a haunted bar'l." 'I called the rest of the watch, and they come and stood there, and I told them what Dick said. It floated right along abreast, now, and didn't gain any more. It was about twenty foot off. Some was for having it aboard, but the rest didn't want to. Dick Allbright said rafts that had fooled with it had got bad luck by it. The captain of the watch said he didn't believe in it. He said he reckoned the bar'l gained on us because it was in a little better current than what we was. He said it would leave by and by. 'So then we went to talking about other things, and we had a song, and then a breakdown; and after that the captain of the watch called for another song; but it was clouding up, now, and the bar'l stuck right thar in the same place, and the song didn't seem to have much warm-up to it, somehow, and so they didn't finish it, and there warn't any cheers, but it sort of dropped flat, and nobody said anything for a minute. Then everybody tried to talk at once, and one chap got off a joke, but it warn't no use, they didn't laugh, and even the chap that made the joke didn't laugh at it, which ain't usual. We all just settled down glum, and watched the bar'l, and was oneasy and oncomfortable. Well, sir, it shut down black and still, and then the wind begin to moan around, and next the lightning begin to play and the thunder to grumble. And pretty soon there was a regular storm, and in the middle of it a man that was running aft stumbled and fell and sprained his ankle so that he had to lay up. This made the boys shake their heads. And every time the lightning come, there was that bar'l with the blue lights winking around it. We was always on the look-out for it. But by and by, towards dawn, she was gone. When the day come we couldn't see her anywhere, and we warn't sorry, neither. 'But next night about half-past nine, when there was songs and high jinks going on, here she comes again, and took her old roost on the stabboard side. There warn't no more high jinks. Everybody got solemn; nobody talked; you couldn't get anybody to do anything but set around moody and look at the bar'l. It begun to cloud up again. When the watch changed, the off watch stayed up, 'stead of turning in. The storm ripped and roared around all night, and in the middle of it another man tripped and sprained his ankle, and had to knock off. The bar'l left towards day, and nobody see it go. 'Everybody was sober and down in the mouth all day. I don't mean the kind of sober that comes of leaving liquor alone--not that. They was quiet, but they all drunk more than usual--not together--but each man sidled off and took it private, by himself. 'After dark the off watch didn't turn in; nobody sung, nobody talked; the boys didn't scatter around, neither; they sort of huddled together, forrard; and for two hours they set there, perfectly still, looking steady in the one direction, and heaving a sigh once in a while. And then, here comes the bar'l again. She took up her old place. She staid there all night; nobody turned in. The storm come on again, after midnight. It got awful dark; the rain poured down; hail, too; the thunder boomed and roared and bellowed; the wind blowed a hurricane; and the lightning spread over everything in big sheets of glare, and showed the whole raft as plain as day; and the river lashed up white as milk as far as you could see for miles, and there was that bar'l jiggering along, same as ever. The captain ordered the watch to man the after sweeps for a crossing, and nobody would go--no more sprained ankles for them, they said. They wouldn't even walk aft. Well then, just then the sky split wide open, with a crash, and the lightning killed two men of the after watch, and crippled two more. Crippled them how, says you? Why, sprained their ankles! 'The bar'l left in the dark betwixt lightnings, towards dawn. Well, not a body eat a bite at breakfast that morning. After that the men loafed around, in twos and threes, and talked low together. But none of them herded with Dick Allbright. They all give him the cold shake. If he come around where any of the men was, they split up and sidled away. They wouldn't man the sweeps with him. The captain had all the skiffs hauled up on the raft, alongside of his wigwam, and wouldn't let the dead men be took ashore to be planted; he didn't believe a man that got ashore would come back; and he was right. 'After night come, you could see pretty plain that there was going to be trouble if that bar'l come again; there was such a muttering going on. A good many wanted to kill Dick Allbright, because he'd seen the bar'l on other trips, and that had an ugly look. Some wanted to put him ashore. Some said, let's all go ashore in a pile, if the bar'l comes again. 'This kind of whispers was still going on, the men being bunched together forrard watching for the bar'l, when, lo and behold you, here she comes again. Down she comes, slow and steady, and settles into her old tracks. You could a heard a pin drop. Then up comes the captain, and says:-- '"Boys, don't be a pack of children and fools; I don't want this bar'l to be dogging us all the way to Orleans, and YOU don't; well, then, how's the best way to stop it? Burn it up,--that's the way. I'm going to fetch it aboard," he says. And before anybody could say a word, in he went. 'He swum to it, and as he come pushing it to the raft, the men spread to one side. But the old man got it aboard and busted in the head, and there was a baby in it! Yes, sir, a stark naked baby. It was Dick Allbright's baby; he owned up and said so. '"Yes," he says, a-leaning over it, "yes, it is my own lamented darling, my poor lost Charles William Allbright deceased," says he,--for he could curl his tongue around the bulliest words in the language when he was a mind to, and lay them before you without a jint started, anywheres. Yes, he said he used to live up at the head of this bend, and one night he choked his child, which was crying, not intending to kill it,--which was prob'ly a lie,--and then he was scared, and buried it in a bar'l, before his wife got home, and off he went, and struck the northern trail and went to rafting; and this was the third year that the bar'l had chased him. He said the bad luck always begun light, and lasted till four men was killed, and then the bar'l didn't come any more after that. He said if the men would stand it one more night,--and was a-going on like that,--but the men had got enough. They started to get out a boat to take him ashore and lynch him, but he grabbed the little child all of a sudden and jumped overboard with it hugged up to his breast and shedding tears, and we never see him again in this life, poor old suffering soul, nor Charles William neither.' 'WHO was shedding tears?' says Bob; 'was it Allbright or the baby?' 'Why, Allbright, of course; didn't I tell you the baby was dead. Been dead three years--how could it cry?' 'Well, never mind how it could cry--how could it KEEP all that time?' says Davy. 'You answer me that.' 'I don't know how it done it,' says Ed. 'It done it though--that's all I know about it.' 'Say--what did they do with the bar'l?' says the Child of Calamity. 'Why, they hove it overboard, and it sunk like a chunk of lead.' 'Edward, did the child look like it was choked?' says one. 'Did it have its hair parted?' says another. 'What was the brand on that bar'l, Eddy?' says a fellow they called Bill. 'Have you got the papers for them statistics, Edmund?' says Jimmy. 'Say, Edwin, was you one of the men that was killed by the lightning.' says Davy. 'Him? O, no, he was both of 'em,' says Bob. Then they all haw-hawed. 'Say, Edward, don't you reckon you'd better take a pill? You look bad-- don't you feel pale?' says the Child of Calamity. 'O, come, now, Eddy,' says Jimmy, 'show up; you must a kept part of that bar'l to prove the thing by. Show us the bunghole--do--and we'll all believe you.' 'Say, boys,' says Bill, 'less divide it up. Thar's thirteen of us. I can swaller a thirteenth of the yarn, if you can worry down the rest.' Ed got up mad and said they could all go to some place which he ripped out pretty savage, and then walked off aft cussing to himself, and they yelling and jeering at him, and roaring and laughing so you could hear them a mile. 'Boys, we'll split a watermelon on that,' says the Child of Calamity; and he come rummaging around in the dark amongst the shingle bundles where I was, and put his hand on me. I was warm and soft and naked; so he says 'Ouch!' and jumped back. 'Fetch a lantern or a chunk of fire here, boys--there's a snake here as big as a cow!' So they run there with a lantern and crowded up and looked in on me. 'Come out of that, you beggar!' says one. 'Who are you?' says another. 'What are you after here? Speak up prompt, or overboard you go. 'Snake him out, boys. Snatch him out by the heels.' I began to beg, and crept out amongst them trembling. They looked me over, wondering, and the Child of Calamity says-- 'A cussed thief! Lend a hand and less heave him overboard!' 'No,' says Big Bob, 'less get out the paint-pot and paint him a sky blue all over from head to heel, and then heave him over!' 'Good, that 's it. Go for the paint, Jimmy.' When the paint come, and Bob took the brush and was just going to begin, the others laughing and rubbing their hands, I begun to cry, and that sort of worked on Davy, and he says-- ''Vast there! He 's nothing but a cub. 'I'll paint the man that tetches him!' So I looked around on them, and some of them grumbled and growled, and Bob put down the paint, and the others didn't take it up. 'Come here to the fire, and less see what you're up to here,' says Davy. 'Now set down there and give an account of yourself. How long have you been aboard here?' 'Not over a quarter of a minute, sir,' says I. 'How did you get dry so quick?' 'I don't know, sir. I'm always that way, mostly.' 'Oh, you are, are you. What's your name?' I warn't going to tell my name. I didn't know what to say, so I just says-- 'Charles William Allbright, sir.' Then they roared--the whole crowd; and I was mighty glad I said that, because maybe laughing would get them in a better humor. When they got done laughing, Davy says-- 'It won't hardly do, Charles William. You couldn't have growed this much in five year, and you was a baby when you come out of the bar'l, you know, and dead at that. Come, now, tell a straight story, and nobody'll hurt you, if you ain't up to anything wrong. What IS your name?' 'Aleck Hopkins, sir. Aleck James Hopkins.' 'Well, Aleck, where did you come from, here?' 'From a trading scow. She lays up the bend yonder. I was born on her. Pap has traded up and down here all his life; and he told me to swim off here, because when you went by he said he would like to get some of you to speak to a Mr. Jonas Turner, in Cairo, and tell him--' 'Oh, come!' 'Yes, sir; it's as true as the world; Pap he says--' 'Oh, your grandmother!' They all laughed, and I tried again to talk, but they broke in on me and stopped me. 'Now, looky-here,' says Davy; 'you're scared, and so you talk wild. Honest, now, do you live in a scow, or is it a lie?' 'Yes, sir, in a trading scow. She lays up at the head of the bend. But I warn't born in her. It's our first trip.' 'Now you're talking! What did you come aboard here, for? To steal?' 'No, sir, I didn't.--It was only to get a ride on the raft. All boys does that.' 'Well, I know that. But what did you hide for?' 'Sometimes they drive the boys off.' 'So they do. They might steal. Looky-here; if we let you off this time, will you keep out of these kind of scrapes hereafter?' ''Deed I will, boss. You try me.' 'All right, then. You ain't but little ways from shore. Overboard with you, and don't you make a fool of yourself another time this way.--Blast it, boy, some raftsmen would rawhide you till you were black and blue!' I didn't wait to kiss good-bye, but went overboard and broke for shore. When Jim come along by and by, the big raft was away out of sight around the point. I swum out and got aboard, and was mighty glad to see home again. The boy did not get the information he was after, but his adventure has furnished the glimpse of the departed raftsman and keelboatman which I desire to offer in this place. I now come to a phase of the Mississippi River life of the flush times of steamboating, which seems to me to warrant full examination--the marvelous science of piloting, as displayed there. I believe there has been nothing like it elsewhere in the world. Chapter 4 The Boys' Ambition WHEN I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village{footnote [1. Hannibal, Missouri]} on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained. Once a day a cheap, gaudy packet arrived upward from St. Louis, and another downward from Keokuk. Before these events, the day was glorious with expectancy; after them, the day was a dead and empty thing. Not only the boys, but the whole village, felt this. After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep--with shingle-shavings enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk, doing a good business in watermelon rinds and seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles scattered about the 'levee;' a pile of 'skids' on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side; the 'point' above the town, and the 'point' below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of those remote 'points;' instantly a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, 'S-t-e- a-m-boat a-comin'!' and the scene changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurrying from many quarters to a common center, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time. And the boat IS rather a handsome sight, too. She is long and sharp and trim and pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys, with a gilded device of some kind swung between them; a fanciful pilot-house, a glass and 'gingerbread', perched on top of the 'texas' deck behind them; the paddle-boxes are gorgeous with a picture or with gilded rays above the boat's name; the boiler deck, the hurricane deck, and the texas deck are fenced and ornamented with clean white railings; there is a flag gallantly flying from the jack-staff; the furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys--a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before arriving at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecastle; the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied deckhand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gauge- cocks, the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steamer is at rest. Then such a scramble as there is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take in freight and to discharge freight, all at one and the same time; and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facilitate it all with! Ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, with no flag on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys. After ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkard asleep by the skids once more. My father was a justice of the peace, and I supposed he possessed the power of life and death over all men and could hang anybody that offended him. This was distinction enough for me as a general thing; but the desire to be a steamboatman kept intruding, nevertheless. I first wanted to be a cabin-boy, so that I could come out with a white apron on and shake a tablecloth over the side, where all my old comrades could see me; later I thought I would rather be the deckhand who stood on the end of the stage-plank with the coil of rope in his hand, because he was particularly conspicuous. But these were only day-dreams,--they were too heavenly to be contemplated as real possibilities. By and by one of our boys went away. He was not heard of for a long time. At last he turned up as apprentice engineer or 'striker' on a steamboat. This thing shook the bottom out of all my Sunday-school teachings. That boy had been notoriously worldly, and I just the reverse; yet he was exalted to this eminence, and I left in obscurity and misery. There was nothing generous about this fellow in his greatness. He would always manage to have a rusty bolt to scrub while his boat tarried at our town, and he would sit on the inside guard and scrub it, where we could all see him and envy him and loathe him. And whenever his boat was laid up he would come home and swell around the town in his blackest and greasiest clothes, so that nobody could help remembering that he was a steamboatman; and he used all sorts of steamboat technicalities in his talk, as if he were so used to them that he forgot common people could not understand them. He would speak of the 'labboard' side of a horse in an easy, natural way that would make one wish he was dead. And he was always talking about 'St. Looy' like an old citizen; he would refer casually to occasions when he 'was coming down Fourth Street,' or when he was 'passing by the Planter's House,' or when there was a fire and he took a turn on the brakes of 'the old Big Missouri;' and then he would go on and lie about how many towns the size of ours were burned down there that day. Two or three of the boys had long been persons of consideration among us because they had been to St. Louis once and had a vague general knowledge of its wonders, but the day of their glory was over now. They lapsed into a humble silence, and learned to disappear when the ruthless 'cub'-engineer approached. This fellow had money, too, and hair oil. Also an ignorant silver watch and a showy brass watch chain. He wore a leather belt and used no suspenders. If ever a youth was cordially admired and hated by his comrades, this one was. No girl could withstand his charms. He 'cut out' every boy in the village. When his boat blew up at last, it diffused a tranquil contentment among us such as we had not known for months. But when he came home the next week, alive, renowned, and appeared in church all battered up and bandaged, a shining hero, stared at and wondered over by everybody, it seemed to us that the partiality of Providence for an undeserving reptile had reached a point where it was open to criticism. This creature's career could produce but one result, and it speedily followed. Boy after boy managed to get on the river. The minister's son became an engineer. The doctor's and the post-master's sons became 'mud clerks;' the wholesale liquor dealer's son became a barkeeper on a boat; four sons of the chief merchant, and two sons of the county judge, became pilots. Pilot was the grandest position of all. The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary--from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay. Two months of his wages would pay a preacher's salary for a year. Now some of us were left disconsolate. We could not get on the river--at least our parents would not let us. So by and by I ran away. I said I never would come home again till I was a pilot and could come in glory. But somehow I could not manage it. I went meekly aboard a few of the boats that lay packed together like sardines at the long St. Louis wharf, and very humbly inquired for the pilots, but got only a cold shoulder and short words from mates and clerks. I had to make the best of this sort of treatment for the time being, but I had comforting daydreams of a future when I should be a great and honored pilot, with plenty of money, and could kill some of these mates and clerks and pay for them. Chapter 5 I Want to be a Cub-pilot MONTHS afterward the hope within me struggled to a reluctant death, and I found myself without an ambition. But I was ashamed to go home. I was in Cincinnati, and I set to work to map out a new career. I had been reading about the recent exploration of the river Amazon by an expedition sent out by our government. It was said that the expedition, owing to difficulties, had not thoroughly explored a part of the country lying about the head-waters, some four thousand miles from the mouth of the river. It was only about fifteen hundred miles from Cincinnati to New Orleans, where I could doubtless get a ship. I had thirty dollars left; I would go and complete the exploration of the Amazon. This was all the thought I gave to the subject. I never was great in matters of detail. I packed my valise, and took passage on an ancient tub called the 'Paul Jones,' for New Orleans. For the sum of sixteen dollars I had the scarred and tarnished splendors of 'her' main saloon principally to myself, for she was not a creature to attract the eye of wiser travelers. When we presently got under way and went poking down the broad Ohio, I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration. I was a traveler! A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before. I had an exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distant climes which I never have felt in so uplifting a degree since. I was in such a glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departed out of me, and I was able to look down and pity the untraveled with a compassion that had hardly a trace of contempt in it. Still, when we stopped at villages and wood-yards, I could not help lolling carelessly upon the railings of the boiler deck to enjoy the envy of the country boys on the bank. If they did not seem to discover me, I presently sneezed to attract their attention, or moved to a position where they could not help seeing me. And as soon as I knew they saw me I gaped and stretched, and gave other signs of being mightily bored with traveling. I kept my hat off all the time, and stayed where the wind and the sun could strike me, because I wanted to get the bronzed and weather-beaten look of an old traveler. Before the second day was half gone I experienced a joy which filled me with the purest gratitude; for I saw that the skin had begun to blister and peel off my face and neck. I wished that the boys and girls at home could see me now. We reached Louisville in time--at least the neighborhood of it. We stuck hard and fast on the rocks in the middle of the river, and lay there four days. I was now beginning to feel a strong sense of being a part of the boat's family, a sort of infant son to the captain and younger brother to the officers. There is no estimating the pride I took in this grandeur, or the affection that began to swell and grow in me for those people. I could not know how the lordly steamboatman scorns that sort of presumption in a mere landsman. I particularly longed to acquire the least trifle of notice from the big stormy mate, and I was on the alert for an opportunity to do him a service to that end. It came at last. The riotous powwow of setting a spar was going on down on the forecastle, and I went down there and stood around in the way--or mostly skipping out of it--till the mate suddenly roared a general order for somebody to bring him a capstan bar. I sprang to his side and said: 'Tell me where it is--I'll fetch it!' If a rag-picker had offered to do a diplomatic service for the Emperor of Russia, the monarch could not have been more astounded than the mate was. He even stopped swearing. He stood and stared down at me. It took him ten seconds to scrape his disjointed remains together again. Then he said impressively: 'Well, if this don't beat hell!' and turned to his work with the air of a man who had been confronted with a problem too abstruse for solution. I crept away, and courted solitude for the rest of the day. I did not go to dinner; I stayed away from supper until everybody else had finished. I did not feel so much like a member of the boat's family now as before. However, my spirits returned, in installments, as we pursued our way down the river. I was sorry I hated the mate so, because it was not in (young) human nature not to admire him. He was huge and muscular, his face was bearded and whiskered all over; he had a red woman and a blue woman tattooed on his right arm,--one on each side of a blue anchor with a red rope to it; and in the matter of profanity he was sublime. When he was getting out cargo at a landing, I was always where I could see and hear. He felt all the majesty of his great position, and made the world feel it, too. When he gave even the simplest order, he discharged it like a blast of lightning, and sent a long, reverberating peal of profanity thundering after it. I could not help contrasting the way in which the average landsman would give an order, with the mate's way of doing it. If the landsman should wish the gang-plank moved a foot farther forward, he would probably say: 'James, or William, one of you push that plank forward, please;' but put the mate in his place and he would roar out: 'Here, now, start that gang-plank for'ard! Lively, now! WHAT're you about! Snatch it! SNATCH it! There! there! Aft again! aft again! don't you hear me. Dash it to dash! are you going to SLEEP over it! 'VAST heaving. 'Vast heaving, I tell you! Going to heave it clear astern? WHERE're you going with that barrel! FOR'ARD with it 'fore I make you swallow it, you dash-dash-dash-DASHED split between a tired mud-turtle and a crippled hearse-horse!' I wished I could talk like that. When the soreness of my adventure with the mate had somewhat worn off, I began timidly to make up to the humblest official connected with the boat--the night watchman. He snubbed my advances at first, but I presently ventured to offer him a new chalk pipe; and that softened him. So he allowed me to sit with him by the big bell on the hurricane deck, and in time he melted into conversation. He could not well have helped it, I hung with such homage on his words and so plainly showed that I felt honored by his notice. He told me the names of dim capes and shadowy islands as we glided by them in the solemnity of the night, under the winking stars, and by and by got to talking about himself. He seemed over-sentimental for a man whose salary was six dollars a week-- or rather he might have seemed so to an older person than I. But I drank in his words hungrily, and with a faith that might have moved mountains if it had been applied judiciously. What was it to me that he was soiled and seedy and fragrant with gin? What was it to me that his grammar was bad, his construction worse, and his profanity so void of art that it was an element of weakness rather than strength in his conversation? He was a wronged man, a man who had seen trouble, and that was enough for me. As he mellowed into his plaintive history his tears dripped upon the lantern in his lap, and I cried, too, from sympathy. He said he was the son of an English nobleman--either an earl or an alderman, he could not remember which, but believed was both; his father, the nobleman, loved him, but his mother hated him from the cradle; and so while he was still a little boy he was sent to 'one of them old, ancient colleges'--he couldn't remember which; and by and by his father died and his mother seized the property and 'shook' him as he phrased it. After his mother shook him, members of the nobility with whom he was acquainted used their influence to get him the position of 'loblolly-boy in a ship;' and from that point my watchman threw off all trammels of date and locality and branched out into a narrative that bristled all along with incredible adventures; a narrative that was so reeking with bloodshed and so crammed with hair-breadth escapes and the most engaging and unconscious personal villainies, that I sat speechless, enjoying, shuddering, wondering, worshipping. It was a sore blight to find out afterwards that he was a low, vulgar, ignorant, sentimental, half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the wilds of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated its marvels, until in time he had woven odds and ends of the mess into this yarn, and then gone on telling it to fledglings like me, until he had come to believe it himself. 
8472	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 2. Chapter 6 A Cub-pilot's Experience WHAT with lying on the rocks four days at Louisville, and some other delays, the poor old 'Paul Jones' fooled away about two weeks in making the voyage from Cincinnati to New Orleans. This gave me a chance to get acquainted with one of the pilots, and he taught me how to steer the boat, and thus made the fascination of river life more potent than ever for me. It also gave me a chance to get acquainted with a youth who had taken deck passage--more's the pity; for he easily borrowed six dollars of me on a promise to return to the boat and pay it back to me the day after we should arrive. But he probably died or forgot, for he never came. It was doubtless the former, since he had said his parents were wealthy, and he only traveled deck passage because it was cooler.{footnote [1. 'Deck' Passage, i.e. steerage passage.]} I soon discovered two things. One was that a vessel would not be likely to sail for the mouth of the Amazon under ten or twelve years; and the other was that the nine or ten dollars still left in my pocket would not suffice for so imposing an exploration as I had planned, even if I could afford to wait for a ship. Therefore it followed that I must contrive a new career. The 'Paul Jones' was now bound for St. Louis. I planned a siege against my pilot, and at the end of three hard days he surrendered. He agreed to teach me the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis for five hundred dollars, payable out of the first wages I should receive after graduating. I entered upon the small enterprise of 'learning' twelve or thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi River with the easy confidence of my time of life. If I had really known what I was about to require of my faculties, I should not have had the courage to begin. I supposed that all a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river, and I did not consider that that could be much of a trick, since it was so wide. The boat backed out from New Orleans at four in the afternoon, and it was 'our watch' until eight. Mr. Bixby, my chief, 'straightened her up,' plowed her along past the sterns of the other boats that lay at the Levee, and then said, 'Here, take her; shave those steamships as close as you'd peel an apple.' I took the wheel, and my heart-beat fluttered up into the hundreds; for it seemed to me that we were about to scrape the side off every ship in the line, we were so close. I held my breath and began to claw the boat away from the danger; and I had my own opinion of the pilot who had known no better than to get us into such peril, but I was too wise to express it. In half a minute I had a wide margin of safety intervening between the 'Paul Jones' and the ships; and within ten seconds more I was set aside in disgrace, and Mr. Bixby was going into danger again and flaying me alive with abuse of my cowardice. I was stung, but I was obliged to admire the easy confidence with which my chief loafed from side to side of his wheel, and trimmed the ships so closely that disaster seemed ceaselessly imminent. When he had cooled a little he told me that the easy water was close ashore and the current outside, and therefore we must hug the bank, up-stream, to get the benefit of the former, and stay well out, down-stream, to take advantage of the latter. In my own mind I resolved to be a down-stream pilot and leave the up-streaming to people dead to prudence. Now and then Mr. Bixby called my attention to certain things. Said he, 'This is Six-Mile Point.' I assented. It was pleasant enough information, but I could not see the bearing of it. I was not conscious that it was a matter of any interest to me. Another time he said, 'This is Nine-Mile Point.' Later he said, 'This is Twelve-Mile Point.' They were all about level with the water's edge; they all looked about alike to me; they were monotonously unpicturesque. I hoped Mr. Bixby would change the subject. But no; he would crowd up around a point, hugging the shore with affection, and then say: 'The slack water ends here, abreast this bunch of China-trees; now we cross over.' So he crossed over. He gave me the wheel once or twice, but I had no luck. I either came near chipping off the edge of a sugar plantation, or I yawed too far from shore, and so dropped back into disgrace again and got abused. The watch was ended at last, and we took supper and went to bed. At midnight the glare of a lantern shone in my eyes, and the night watchman said-- 'Come! turn out!' And then he left. I could not understand this extraordinary procedure; so I presently gave up trying to, and dozed off to sleep. Pretty soon the watchman was back again, and this time he was gruff. I was annoyed. I said:-- 'What do you want to come bothering around here in the middle of the night for. Now as like as not I'll not get to sleep again to-night.' The watchman said-- 'Well, if this an't good, I'm blest.' The 'off-watch' was just turning in, and I heard some brutal laughter from them, and such remarks as 'Hello, watchman! an't the new cub turned out yet? He's delicate, likely. Give him some sugar in a rag and send for the chambermaid to sing rock-a-by-baby to him.' About this time Mr. Bixby appeared on the scene. Something like a minute later I was climbing the pilot-house steps with some of my clothes on and the rest in my arms. Mr. Bixby was close behind, commenting. Here was something fresh--this thing of getting up in the middle of the night to go to work. It was a detail in piloting that had never occurred to me at all. I knew that boats ran all night, but somehow I had never happened to reflect that somebody had to get up out of a warm bed to run them. I began to fear that piloting was not quite so romantic as I had imagined it was; there was something very real and work-like about this new phase of it. It was a rather dingy night, although a fair number of stars were out. The big mate was at the wheel, and he had the old tub pointed at a star and was holding her straight up the middle of the river. The shores on either hand were not much more than half a mile apart, but they seemed wonderfully far away and ever so vague and indistinct. The mate said:-- 'We've got to land at Jones's plantation, sir.' The vengeful spirit in me exulted. I said to myself, I wish you joy of your job, Mr. Bixby; you'll have a good time finding Mr. Jones's plantation such a night as this; and I hope you never WILL find it as long as you live. Mr. Bixby said to the mate:-- 'Upper end of the plantation, or the lower?' 'Upper.' 'I can't do it. The stumps there are out of water at this stage: It's no great distance to the lower, and you'll have to get along with that.' 'All right, sir. If Jones don't like it he'll have to lump it, I reckon.' And then the mate left. My exultation began to cool and my wonder to come up. Here was a man who not only proposed to find this plantation on such a night, but to find either end of it you preferred. I dreadfully wanted to ask a question, but I was carrying about as many short answers as my cargo-room would admit of, so I held my peace. All I desired to ask Mr. Bixby was the simple question whether he was ass enough to really imagine he was going to find that plantation on a night when all plantations were exactly alike and all the same color. But I held in. I used to have fine inspirations of prudence in those days. Mr. Bixby made for the shore and soon was scraping it, just the same as if it had been daylight. And not only that, but singing-- 'Father in heaven, the day is declining,' etc. It seemed to me that I had put my life in the keeping of a peculiarly reckless outcast. Presently he turned on me and said:-- 'What's the name of the first point above New Orleans?' I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know. 'Don't KNOW?' This manner jolted me. I was down at the foot again, in a moment. But I had to say just what I had said before. 'Well, you're a smart one,' said Mr. Bixby. 'What's the name of the NEXT point?' Once more I didn't know. 'Well, this beats anything. Tell me the name of ANY point or place I told you.' I studied a while and decided that I couldn't. 'Look here! What do you start out from, above Twelve-Mile Point, to cross over?' 'I--I--don't know.' 'You--you--don't know?' mimicking my drawling manner of speech. 'What DO you know?' 'I--I--nothing, for certain.' 'By the great Caesar's ghost, I believe you! You're the stupidest dunderhead I ever saw or ever heard of, so help me Moses! The idea of you being a pilot--you! Why, you don't know enough to pilot a cow down a lane.' Oh, but his wrath was up! He was a nervous man, and he shuffled from one side of his wheel to the other as if the floor was hot. He would boil a while to himself, and then overflow and scald me again. 'Look here! What do you suppose I told you the names of those points for?' I tremblingly considered a moment, and then the devil of temptation provoked me to say:-- 'Well--to--to--be entertaining, I thought.' This was a red rag to the bull. He raged and stormed so (he was crossing the river at the time) that I judge it made him blind, because he ran over the steering-oar of a trading-scow. Of course the traders sent up a volley of red-hot profanity. Never was a man so grateful as Mr. Bixby was: because he was brim full, and here were subjects who would TALK BACK. He threw open a window, thrust his head out, and such an irruption followed as I never had heard before. The fainter and farther away the scowmen's curses drifted, the higher Mr. Bixby lifted his voice and the weightier his adjectives grew. When he closed the window he was empty. You could have drawn a seine through his system and not caught curses enough to disturb your mother with. Presently he said to me in the gentlest way-- 'My boy, you must get a little memorandum book, and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away. There's only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.' That was a dismal revelation to me; for my memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges. However, I did not feel discouraged long. I judged that it was best to make some allowances, for doubtless Mr. Bixby was 'stretching.' Presently he pulled a rope and struck a few strokes on the big bell. The stars were all gone now, and the night was as black as ink. I could hear the wheels churn along the bank, but I was not entirely certain that I could see the shore. The voice of the invisible watchman called up from the hurricane deck-- 'What's this, sir?' 'Jones's plantation.' I said to myself, I wish I might venture to offer a small bet that it isn't. But I did not chirp. I only waited to see. Mr. Bixby handled the engine bells, and in due time the boat's nose came to the land, a torch glowed from the forecastle, a man skipped ashore, a darky's voice on the bank said, 'Gimme de k'yarpet-bag, Mars' Jones,' and the next moment we were standing up the river again, all serene. I reflected deeply awhile, and then said--but not aloud--'Well, the finding of that plantation was the luckiest accident that ever happened; but it couldn't happen again in a hundred years.' And I fully believed it was an accident, too. By the time we had gone seven or eight hundred miles up the river, I had learned to be a tolerably plucky up-stream steersman, in daylight, and before we reached St. Louis I had made a trifle of progress in night- work, but only a trifle. I had a note-book that fairly bristled with the names of towns, 'points,' bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc.; but the information was to be found only in the notebook--none of it was in my head. It made my heart ache to think I had only got half of the river set down; for as our watch was four hours off and four hours on, day and night, there was a long four-hour gap in my book for every time I had slept since the voyage began. My chief was presently hired to go on a big New Orleans boat, and I packed my satchel and went with him. She was a grand affair. When I stood in her pilot-house I was so far above the water that I seemed perched on a mountain; and her decks stretched so far away, fore and aft, below me, that I wondered how I could ever have considered the little 'Paul Jones' a large craft. There were other differences, too. The 'Paul Jones's' pilot-house was a cheap, dingy, battered rattle-trap, cramped for room: but here was a sumptuous glass temple; room enough to have a dance in; showy red and gold window-curtains; an imposing sofa; leather cushions and a back to the high bench where visiting pilots sit, to spin yarns and 'look at the river;' bright, fanciful 'cuspadores' instead of a broad wooden box filled with sawdust; nice new oil-cloth on the floor; a hospitable big stove for winter; a wheel as high as my head, costly with inlaid work; a wire tiller-rope; bright brass knobs for the bells; and a tidy, white-aproned, black 'texas-tender,' to bring up tarts and ices and coffee during mid-watch, day and night. Now this was 'something like,' and so I began to take heart once more to believe that piloting was a romantic sort of occupation after all. The moment we were under way I began to prowl about the great steamer and fill myself with joy. She was as clean and as dainty as a drawing-room; when I looked down her long, gilded saloon, it was like gazing through a splendid tunnel; she had an oil-picture, by some gifted sign-painter, on every stateroom door; she glittered with no end of prism-fringed chandeliers; the clerk's office was elegant, the bar was marvelous, and the bar-keeper had been barbered and upholstered at incredible cost. The boiler deck (i.e. the second story of the boat, so to speak) was as spacious as a church, it seemed to me; so with the forecastle; and there was no pitiful handful of deckhands, firemen, and roustabouts down there, but a whole battalion of men. The fires were fiercely glaring from a long row of furnaces, and over them were eight huge boilers! This was unutterable pomp. The mighty engines--but enough of this. I had never felt so fine before. And when I found that the regiment of natty servants respectfully 'sir'd' me, my satisfaction was complete. Chapter 7 A Daring Deed WHEN I returned to the pilot-house St. Louis was gone and I was lost. Here was a piece of river which was all down in my book, but I could make neither head nor tail of it: you understand, it was turned around. I had seen it when coming up-stream, but I had never faced about to see how it looked when it was behind me. My heart broke again, for it was plain that I had got to learn this troublesome river BOTH WAYS. The pilot-house was full of pilots, going down to 'look at the river.' What is called the 'upper river' (the two hundred miles between St. Louis and Cairo, where the Ohio comes in) was low; and the Mississippi changes its channel so constantly that the pilots used to always find it necessary to run down to Cairo to take a fresh look, when their boats were to lie in port a week; that is, when the water was at a low stage. A deal of this 'looking at the river' was done by poor fellows who seldom had a berth, and whose only hope of getting one lay in their being always freshly posted and therefore ready to drop into the shoes of some reputable pilot, for a single trip, on account of such pilot's sudden illness, or some other necessity. And a good many of them constantly ran up and down inspecting the river, not because they ever really hoped to get a berth, but because (they being guests of the boat) it was cheaper to 'look at the river' than stay ashore and pay board. In time these fellows grew dainty in their tastes, and only infested boats that had an established reputation for setting good tables. All visiting pilots were useful, for they were always ready and willing, winter or summer, night or day, to go out in the yawl and help buoy the channel or assist the boat's pilots in any way they could. They were likewise welcome because all pilots are tireless talkers, when gathered together, and as they talk only about the river they are always understood and are always interesting. Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings. We had a fine company of these river-inspectors along, this trip. There were eight or ten; and there was abundance of room for them in our great pilot-house. Two or three of them wore polished silk hats, elaborate shirt-fronts, diamond breast-pins, kid gloves, and patent-leather boots. They were choice in their English, and bore themselves with a dignity proper to men of solid means and prodigious reputation as pilots. The others were more or less loosely clad, and wore upon their heads tall felt cones that were suggestive of the days of the Commonwealth. I was a cipher in this august company, and felt subdued, not to say torpid. I was not even of sufficient consequence to assist at the wheel when it was necessary to put the tiller hard down in a hurry; the guest that stood nearest did that when occasion required--and this was pretty much all the time, because of the crookedness of the channel and the scant water. I stood in a corner; and the talk I listened to took the hope all out of me. One visitor said to another-- 'Jim, how did you run Plum Point, coming up?' 'It was in the night, there, and I ran it the way one of the boys on the "Diana" told me; started out about fifty yards above the wood pile on the false point, and held on the cabin under Plum Point till I raised the reef--quarter less twain--then straightened up for the middle bar till I got well abreast the old one-limbed cotton-wood in the bend, then got my stern on the cotton-wood and head on the low place above the point, and came through a-booming--nine and a half.' 'Pretty square crossing, an't it?' 'Yes, but the upper bar 's working down fast.' Another pilot spoke up and said-- 'I had better water than that, and ran it lower down; started out from the false point--mark twain--raised the second reef abreast the big snag in the bend, and had quarter less twain.' One of the gorgeous ones remarked-- 'I don't want to find fault with your leadsmen, but that's a good deal of water for Plum Point, it seems to me.' There was an approving nod all around as this quiet snub dropped on the boaster and 'settled' him. And so they went on talk-talk-talking. Meantime, the thing that was running in my mind was, 'Now if my ears hear aright, I have not only to get the names of all the towns and islands and bends, and so on, by heart, but I must even get up a warm personal acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed cotton-wood and obscure wood pile that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve hundred miles; and more than that, I must actually know where these things are in the dark, unless these guests are gifted with eyes that can pierce through two miles of solid blackness; I wish the piloting business was in Jericho and I had never thought of it.' At dusk Mr. Bixby tapped the big bell three times (the signal to land), and the captain emerged from his drawing-room in the forward end of the texas, and looked up inquiringly. Mr. Bixby said-- 'We will lay up here all night, captain.' 'Very well, sir.' That was all. The boat came to shore and was tied up for the night. It seemed to me a fine thing that the pilot could do as he pleased, without asking so grand a captain's permission. I took my supper and went immediately to bed, discouraged by my day's observations and experiences. My late voyage's note-booking was but a confusion of meaningless names. It had tangled me all up in a knot every time I had looked at it in the daytime. I now hoped for respite in sleep; but no, it reveled all through my head till sunrise again, a frantic and tireless nightmare. Next morning I felt pretty rusty and low-spirited. We went booming along, taking a good many chances, for we were anxious to 'get out of the river' (as getting out to Cairo was called) before night should overtake us. But Mr. Bixby's partner, the other pilot, presently grounded the boat, and we lost so much time in getting her off that it was plain that darkness would overtake us a good long way above the mouth. This was a great misfortune, especially to certain of our visiting pilots, whose boats would have to wait for their return, no matter how long that might be. It sobered the pilot-house talk a good deal. Coming up-stream, pilots did not mind low water or any kind of darkness; nothing stopped them but fog. But down-stream work was different; a boat was too nearly helpless, with a stiff current pushing behind her; so it was not customary to run down-stream at night in low water. There seemed to be one small hope, however: if we could get through the intricate and dangerous Hat Island crossing before night, we could venture the rest, for we would have plainer sailing and better water. But it would be insanity to attempt Hat Island at night. So there was a deal of looking at watches all the rest of the day, and a constant ciphering upon the speed we were making; Hat Island was the eternal subject; sometimes hope was high and sometimes we were delayed in a bad crossing, and down it went again. For hours all hands lay under the burden of this suppressed excitement; it was even communicated to me, and I got to feeling so solicitous about Hat Island, and under such an awful pressure of responsibility, that I wished I might have five minutes on shore to draw a good, full, relieving breath, and start over again. We were standing no regular watches. Each of our pilots ran such portions of the river as he had run when coming up-stream, because of his greater familiarity with it; but both remained in the pilot house constantly. An hour before sunset, Mr. Bixby took the wheel and Mr. W----stepped aside. For the next thirty minutes every man held his watch in his hand and was restless, silent, and uneasy. At last somebody said, with a doomful sigh-- 'Well, yonder's Hat Island--and we can't make it.' All the watches closed with a snap, everybody sighed and muttered something about its being 'too bad, too bad--ah, if we could only have got here half an hour sooner!' and the place was thick with the atmosphere of disappointment. Some started to go out, but loitered, hearing no bell-tap to land. The sun dipped behind the horizon, the boat went on. Inquiring looks passed from one guest to another; and one who had his hand on the door-knob and had turned it, waited, then presently took away his hand and let the knob turn back again. We bore steadily down the bend. More looks were exchanged, and nods of surprised admiration--but no words. Insensibly the men drew together behind Mr. Bixby, as the sky darkened and one or two dim stars came out. The dead silence and sense of waiting became oppressive. Mr. Bixby pulled the cord, and two deep, mellow notes from the big bell floated off on the night. Then a pause, and one more note was struck. The watchman's voice followed, from the hurricane deck-- 'Labboard lead, there! Stabboard lead!' The cries of the leadsmen began to rise out of the distance, and were gruffly repeated by the word-passers on the hurricane deck. 'M-a-r-k three!.... M-a-r-k three!.... Quarter-less three! .... Half twain! .... Quarter twain! .... M-a-r-k twain! .... Quarter-less--' Mr. Bixby pulled two bell-ropes, and was answered by faint jinglings far below in the engine room, and our speed slackened. The steam began to whistle through the gauge-cocks. The cries of the leadsmen went on--and it is a weird sound, always, in the night. Every pilot in the lot was watching now, with fixed eyes, and talking under his breath. Nobody was calm and easy but Mr. Bixby. He would put his wheel down and stand on a spoke, and as the steamer swung into her (to me) utterly invisible marks--for we seemed to be in the midst of a wide and gloomy sea--he would meet and fasten her there. Out of the murmur of half-audible talk, one caught a coherent sentence now and then--such as-- 'There; she's over the first reef all right!' After a pause, another subdued voice-- 'Her stern's coming down just exactly right, by George!' 'Now she's in the marks; over she goes!' Somebody else muttered-- 'Oh, it was done beautiful--BEAUTIFUL!' Now the engines were stopped altogether, and we drifted with the current. Not that I could see the boat drift, for I could not, the stars being all gone by this time. This drifting was the dismalest work; it held one's heart still. Presently I discovered a blacker gloom than that which surrounded us. It was the head of the island. We were closing right down upon it. We entered its deeper shadow, and so imminent seemed the peril that I was likely to suffocate; and I had the strongest impulse to do SOMETHING, anything, to save the vessel. But still Mr. Bixby stood by his wheel, silent, intent as a cat, and all the pilots stood shoulder to shoulder at his back. 'She'll not make it!' somebody whispered. The water grew shoaler and shoaler, by the leadsman's cries, till it was down to-- 'Eight-and-a-half!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!.... E-i-g-h-t feet!.... Seven- and--' Mr. Bixby said warningly through his speaking tube to the engineer-- 'Stand by, now!' 'Aye-aye, sir!' 'Seven-and-a-half! Seven feet! Six-and--' We touched bottom! Instantly Mr. Bixby set a lot of bells ringing, shouted through the tube, 'NOW, let her have it--every ounce you've got!' then to his partner, 'Put her hard down! snatch her! snatch her!' The boat rasped and ground her way through the sand, hung upon the apex of disaster a single tremendous instant, and then over she went! And such a shout as went up at Mr. Bixby's back never loosened the roof of a pilot-house before! There was no more trouble after that. Mr. Bixby was a hero that night; and it was some little time, too, before his exploit ceased to be talked about by river men. Fully to realize the marvelous precision required in laying the great steamer in her marks in that murky waste of water, one should know that not only must she pick her intricate way through snags and blind reefs, and then shave the head of the island so closely as to brush the overhanging foliage with her stern, but at one place she must pass almost within arm's reach of a sunken and invisible wreck that would snatch the hull timbers from under her if she should strike it, and destroy a quarter of a million dollars' worth of steam-boat and cargo in five minutes, and maybe a hundred and fifty human lives into the bargain. The last remark I heard that night was a compliment to Mr. Bixby, uttered in soliloquy and with unction by one of our guests. He said-- 'By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!' Chapter 8 Perplexing Lessons At the end of what seemed a tedious while, I had managed to pack my head full of islands, towns, bars, 'points,' and bends; and a curiously inanimate mass of lumber it was, too. However, inasmuch as I could shut my eyes and reel off a good long string of these names without leaving out more than ten miles of river in every fifty, I began to feel that I could take a boat down to New Orleans if I could make her skip those little gaps. But of course my complacency could hardly get start enough to lift my nose a trifle into the air, before Mr. Bixby would think of something to fetch it down again. One day he turned on me suddenly with this settler-- 'What is the shape of Walnut Bend?' He might as well have asked me my grandmother's opinion of protoplasm. I reflected respectfully, and then said I didn't know it had any particular shape. My gunpowdery chief went off with a bang, of course, and then went on loading and firing until he was out of adjectives. I had learned long ago that he only carried just so many rounds of ammunition, and was sure to subside into a very placable and even remorseful old smooth-bore as soon as they were all gone. That word 'old' is merely affectionate; he was not more than thirty-four. I waited. By and by he said-- 'My boy, you've got to know the SHAPE of the river perfectly. It is all there is left to steer by on a very dark night. Everything else is blotted out and gone. But mind you, it hasn't the same shape in the night that it has in the day-time.' 'How on earth am I ever going to learn it, then?' 'How do you follow a hall at home in the dark. Because you know the shape of it. You can't see it.' 'Do you mean to say that I've got to know all the million trifling variations of shape in the banks of this interminable river as well as I know the shape of the front hall at home?' 'On my honor, you've got to know them BETTER than any man ever did know the shapes of the halls in his own house.' 'I wish I was dead!' 'Now I don't want to discourage you, but--' 'Well, pile it on me; I might as well have it now as another time.' 'You see, this has got to be learned; there isn't any getting around it. A clear starlight night throws such heavy shadows that if you didn't know the shape of a shore perfectly you would claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death every fifteen minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can't see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it. Then there's your pitch- dark night; the river is a very different shape on a pitch-dark night from what it is on a starlight night. All shores seem to be straight lines, then, and mighty dim ones, too; and you'd RUN them for straight lines only you know better. You boldly drive your boat right into what seems to be a solid, straight wall (you knowing very well that in reality there is a curve there), and that wall falls back and makes way for you. Then there's your gray mist. You take a night when there's one of these grisly, drizzly, gray mists, and then there isn't any particular shape to a shore. A gray mist would tangle the head of the oldest man that ever lived. Well, then, different kinds of MOONLIGHT change the shape of the river in different ways. You see--' 'Oh, don't say any more, please! Have I got to learn the shape of the river according to all these five hundred thousand different ways? If I tried to carry all that cargo in my head it would make me stoop- shouldered.' 'NO! you only learn THE shape of the river, and you learn it with such absolute certainty that you can always steer by the shape that's IN YOUR HEAD, and never mind the one that's before your eyes.' 'Very well, I'll try it; but after I have learned it can I depend on it. Will it keep the same form and not go fooling around?' Before Mr. Bixby could answer, Mr. W---- came in to take the watch, and he said-- 'Bixby, you'll have to look out for President's Island and all that country clear away up above the Old Hen and Chickens. The banks are caving and the shape of the shores changing like everything. Why, you wouldn't know the point above 40. You can go up inside the old sycamore- snag, now.{footnote [1. It may not be necessary, but still it can do no harm to explain that 'inside' means between the snag and the shore.-- M.T.]} So that question was answered. Here were leagues of shore changing shape. My spirits were down in the mud again. Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was, that in order to be a pilot a man had got to learn more than any one man ought to be allowed to know; and the other was, that he must learn it all over again in a different way every twenty-four hours. That night we had the watch until twelve. Now it was an ancient river custom for the two pilots to chat a bit when the watch changed. While the relieving pilot put on his gloves and lit his cigar, his partner, the retiring pilot, would say something like this-- 'I judge the upper bar is making down a little at Hale's Point; had quarter twain with the lower lead and mark twain {footnote [Two fathoms. 'Quarter twain' is two-and-a-quarter fathoms, thirteen-and-a-half feet. 'Mark three' is three fathoms.]} with the other.' 'Yes, I thought it was making down a little, last trip. Meet any boats?' 'Met one abreast the head of 21, but she was away over hugging the bar, and I couldn't make her out entirely. I took her for the "Sunny South"- -hadn't any skylights forward of the chimneys.' And so on. And as the relieving pilot took the wheel his partner{footnote ['Partner' is a technical term for 'the other pilot'.]} would mention that we were in such-and-such a bend, and say we were abreast of such-and-such a man's wood-yard or plantation. This was courtesy; I supposed it was necessity. But Mr. W---- came on watch full twelve minutes late on this particular night,--a tremendous breach of etiquette; in fact, it is the unpardonable sin among pilots. So Mr. Bixby gave him no greeting whatever, but simply surrendered the wheel and marched out of the pilot-house without a word. I was appalled; it was a villainous night for blackness, we were in a particularly wide and blind part of the river, where there was no shape or substance to anything, and it seemed incredible that Mr. Bixby should have left that poor fellow to kill the boat trying to find out where he was. But I resolved that I would stand by him any way. He should find that he was not wholly friendless. So I stood around, and waited to be asked where we were. But Mr. W---- plunged on serenely through the solid firmament of black cats that stood for an atmosphere, and never opened his mouth. Here is a proud devil, thought I; here is a limb of Satan that would rather send us all to destruction than put himself under obligations to me, because I am not yet one of the salt of the earth and privileged to snub captains and lord it over everything dead and alive in a steamboat. I presently climbed up on the bench; I did not think it was safe to go to sleep while this lunatic was on watch. However, I must have gone to sleep in the course of time, because the next thing I was aware of was the fact that day was breaking, Mr. W---- gone, and Mr. Bixby at the wheel again. So it was four o'clock and all well--but me; I felt like a skinful of dry bones and all of them trying to ache at once. Mr. Bixby asked me what I had stayed up there for. I confessed that it was to do Mr. W---- a benevolence,--tell him where he was. It took five minutes for the entire preposterousness of the thing to filter into Mr. Bixby's system, and then I judge it filled him nearly up to the chin; because he paid me a compliment--and not much of a one either. He said, 'Well, taking you by-and-large, you do seem to be more different kinds of an ass than any creature I ever saw before. What did you suppose he wanted to know for?' I said I thought it might be a convenience to him. 'Convenience D-nation! Didn't I tell you that a man's got to know the river in the night the same as he'd know his own front hall?' 'Well, I can follow the front hall in the dark if I know it IS the front hall; but suppose you set me down in the middle of it in the dark and not tell me which hall it is; how am I to know?' 'Well you've GOT to, on the river!' 'All right. Then I'm glad I never said anything to Mr. W---- ' 'I should say so. Why, he'd have slammed you through the window and utterly ruined a hundred dollars' worth of window-sash and stuff.' I was glad this damage had been saved, for it would have made me unpopular with the owners. They always hated anybody who had the name of being careless, and injuring things. I went to work now to learn the shape of the river; and of all the eluding and ungraspable objects that ever I tried to get mind or hands on, that was the chief. I would fasten my eyes upon a sharp, wooded point that projected far into the river some miles ahead of me, and go to laboriously photographing its shape upon my brain; and just as I was beginning to succeed to my satisfaction, we would draw up toward it and the exasperating thing would begin to melt away and fold back into the bank! If there had been a conspicuous dead tree standing upon the very point of the cape, I would find that tree inconspicuously merged into the general forest, and occupying the middle of a straight shore, when I got abreast of it! No prominent hill would stick to its shape long enough for me to make up my mind what its form really was, but it was as dissolving and changeful as if it had been a mountain of butter in the hottest corner of the tropics. Nothing ever had the same shape when I was coming downstream that it had borne when I went up. I mentioned these little difficulties to Mr. Bixby. He said-- 'That's the very main virtue of the thing. If the shapes didn't change every three seconds they wouldn't be of any use. Take this place where we are now, for instance. As long as that hill over yonder is only one hill, I can boom right along the way I'm going; but the moment it splits at the top and forms a V, I know I've got to scratch to starboard in a hurry, or I'll bang this boat's brains out against a rock; and then the moment one of the prongs of the V swings behind the other, I've got to waltz to larboard again, or I'll have a misunderstanding with a snag that would snatch the keelson out of this steamboat as neatly as if it were a sliver in your hand. If that hill didn't change its shape on bad nights there would be an awful steamboat grave-yard around here inside of a year.' It was plain that I had got to learn the shape of the river in all the different ways that could be thought of,--upside down, wrong end first, inside out, fore-and-aft, and 'thortships,'--and then know what to do on gray nights when it hadn't any shape at all. So I set about it. In the course of time I began to get the best of this knotty lesson, and my self-complacency moved to the front once more. Mr. Bixby was all fixed, and ready to start it to the rear again. He opened on me after this fashion-- 'How much water did we have in the middle crossing at Hole-in-the-Wall, trip before last?' I considered this an outrage. I said-- 'Every trip, down and up, the leadsmen are singing through that tangled place for three-quarters of an hour on a stretch. How do you reckon I can remember such a mess as that?' 'My boy, you've got to remember it. You've got to remember the exact spot and the exact marks the boat lay in when we had the shoalest water, in everyone of the five hundred shoal places between St. Louis and New Orleans; and you mustn't get the shoal soundings and marks of one trip mixed up with the shoal soundings and marks of another, either, for they're not often twice alike. You must keep them separate.' When I came to myself again, I said-- 'When I get so that I can do that, I'll be able to raise the dead, and then I won't have to pilot a steamboat to make a living. I want to retire from this business. I want a slush-bucket and a brush; I'm only fit for a roustabout. I haven't got brains enough to be a pilot; and if I had I wouldn't have strength enough to carry them around, unless I went on crutches.' 'Now drop that! When I say I'll learn {footnote ['Teach' is not in the river vocabulary.]} a man the river, I mean it. And you can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him.' Chapter 9 Continued Perplexities THERE was no use in arguing with a person like this. I promptly put such a strain on my memory that by and by even the shoal water and the countless crossing-marks began to stay with me. But the result was just the same. I never could more than get one knotty thing learned before another presented itself. Now I had often seen pilots gazing at the water and pretending to read it as if it were a book; but it was a book that told me nothing. A time came at last, however, when Mr. Bixby seemed to think me far enough advanced to bear a lesson on water- reading. So he began-- 'Do you see that long slanting line on the face of the water? Now, that's a reef. Moreover, it's a bluff reef. There is a solid sand-bar under it that is nearly as straight up and down as the side of a house. There is plenty of water close up to it, but mighty little on top of it. If you were to hit it you would knock the boat's brains out. Do you see where the line fringes out at the upper end and begins to fade away?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Well, that is a low place; that is the head of the reef. You can climb over there, and not hurt anything. Cross over, now, and follow along close under the reef--easy water there--not much current.' I followed the reef along till I approached the fringed end. Then Mr. Bixby said-- 'Now get ready. Wait till I give the word. She won't want to mount the reef; a boat hates shoal water. Stand by--wait--WAIT--keep her well in hand. NOW cramp her down! Snatch her! snatch her!' He seized the other side of the wheel and helped to spin it around until it was hard down, and then we held it so. The boat resisted, and refused to answer for a while, and next she came surging to starboard, mounted the reef, and sent a long, angry ridge of water foaming away from her bows. 'Now watch her; watch her like a cat, or she'll get away from you. When she fights strong and the tiller slips a little, in a jerky, greasy sort of way, let up on her a trifle; it is the way she tells you at night that the water is too shoal; but keep edging her up, little by little, toward the point. You are well up on the bar, now; there is a bar under every point, because the water that comes down around it forms an eddy and allows the sediment to sink. Do you see those fine lines on the face of the water that branch out like the ribs of a fan. Well, those are little reefs; you want to just miss the ends of them, but run them pretty close. Now look out--look out! Don't you crowd that slick, greasy-looking place; there ain't nine feet there; she won't stand it. She begins to smell it; look sharp, I tell you! Oh blazes, there you go! Stop the starboard wheel! Quick! Ship up to back! Set her back! The engine bells jingled and the engines answered promptly, shooting white columns of steam far aloft out of the 'scape pipes, but it was too late. The boat had 'smelt' the bar in good earnest; the foamy ridges that radiated from her bows suddenly disappeared, a great dead swell came rolling forward and swept ahead of her, she careened far over to larboard, and went tearing away toward the other shore as if she were about scared to death. We were a good mile from where we ought to have been, when we finally got the upper hand of her again. During the afternoon watch the next day, Mr. Bixby asked me if I knew how to run the next few miles. I said-- 'Go inside the first snag above the point, outside the next one, start out from the lower end of Higgins's wood-yard, make a square crossing and--' 'That's all right. I'll be back before you close up on the next point.' But he wasn't. He was still below when I rounded it and entered upon a piece of river which I had some misgivings about. I did not know that he was hiding behind a chimney to see how I would perform. I went gaily along, getting prouder and prouder, for he had never left the boat in my sole charge such a length of time before. I even got to 'setting' her and letting the wheel go, entirely, while I vaingloriously turned my back and inspected the stem marks and hummed a tune, a sort of easy indifference which I had prodigiously admired in Bixby and other great pilots. Once I inspected rather long, and when I faced to the front again my heart flew into my mouth so suddenly that if I hadn't clapped my teeth together I should have lost it. One of those frightful bluff reefs was stretching its deadly length right across our bows! My head was gone in a moment; I did not know which end I stood on; I gasped and could not get my breath; I spun the wheel down with such rapidity that it wove itself together like a spider's web; the boat answered and turned square away from the reef, but the reef followed her! I fled, and still it followed, still it kept--right across my bows! I never looked to see where I was going, I only fled. The awful crash was imminent--why didn't that villain come! If I committed the crime of ringing a bell, I might get thrown overboard. But better that than kill the boat. So in blind desperation I started such a rattling 'shivaree' down below as never had astounded an engineer in this world before, I fancy. Amidst the frenzy of the bells the engines began to back and fill in a furious way, and my reason forsook its throne--we were about to crash into the woods on the other side of the river. Just then Mr. Bixby stepped calmly into view on the hurricane deck. My soul went out to him in gratitude. My distress vanished; I would have felt safe on the brink of Niagara, with Mr. Bixby on the hurricane deck. He blandly and sweetly took his tooth-pick out of his mouth between his fingers, as if it were a cigar-- we were just in the act of climbing an overhanging big tree, and the passengers were scudding astern like rats--and lifted up these commands to me ever so gently-- 'Stop the starboard. Stop the larboard. Set her back on both.' The boat hesitated, halted, pressed her nose among the boughs a critical instant, then reluctantly began to back away. 'Stop the larboard. Come ahead on it. Stop the starboard. Come ahead on it. Point her for the bar.' I sailed away as serenely as a summer's morning Mr. Bixby came in and said, with mock simplicity-- 'When you have a hail, my boy, you ought to tap the big bell three times before you land, so that the engineers can get ready.' I blushed under the sarcasm, and said I hadn't had any hail. 'Ah! Then it was for wood, I suppose. The officer of the watch will tell you when he wants to wood up.' I went on consuming and said I wasn't after wood. 'Indeed? Why, what could you want over here in the bend, then? Did you ever know of a boat following a bend up-stream at this stage of the river?' 'No sir,--and I wasn't trying to follow it. I was getting away from a bluff reef.' 'No, it wasn't a bluff reef; there isn't one within three miles of where you were.' 'But I saw it. It was as bluff as that one yonder.' 'Just about. Run over it!' 'Do you give it as an order?' 'Yes. Run over it.' 'If I don't, I wish I may die.' 'All right; I am taking the responsibility.' I was just as anxious to kill the boat, now, as I had been to save her before. I impressed my orders upon my memory, to be used at the inquest, and made a straight break for the reef. As it disappeared under our bows I held my breath; but we slid over it like oil. 'Now don't you see the difference? It wasn't anything but a WIND reef. The wind does that.' 'So I see. But it is exactly like a bluff reef. How am I ever going to tell them apart?' 'I can't tell you. It is an instinct. By and by you will just naturally KNOW one from the other, but you never will be able to explain why or how you know them apart' It turned out to be true. The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book--a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparkingly renewed with every reperusal. The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface (on the rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether); but to the pilot that was an ITALICIZED passage; indeed, it was more than that, it was a legend of the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it; for it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever floated. It is the faintest and simplest expression the water ever makes, and the most hideous to a pilot's eye. In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading-matter. Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the somber shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring. I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark. No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease. Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade? Chapter 10 Completing My Education WHOSOEVER has done me the courtesy to read my chapters which have preceded this may possibly wonder that I deal so minutely with piloting as a science. It was the prime purpose of those chapters; and I am not quite done yet. I wish to show, in the most patient and painstaking way, what a wonderful science it is. Ship channels are buoyed and lighted, and therefore it is a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run them; clear-water rivers, with gravel bottoms, change their channels very gradually, and therefore one needs to learn them but once; but piloting becomes another matter when you apply it to vast streams like the Mississippi and the Missouri, whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sandbars are never at rest, whose channels are for ever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions must be confronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single light-house or a single buoy; for there is neither light nor buoy to be found anywhere in all this three or four thousand miles of villainous river.{footnote [True at the time referred to; not true now (1882).]} I feel justified in enlarging upon this great science for the reason that I feel sure no one has ever yet written a paragraph about it who had piloted a steamboat himself, and so had a practical knowledge of the subject. If the theme were hackneyed, I should be obliged to deal gently with the reader; but since it is wholly new, I have felt at liberty to take up a considerable degree of room with it. When I had learned the name and position of every visible feature of the river; when I had so mastered its shape that I could shut my eyes and trace it from St. Louis to New Orleans; when I had learned to read the face of the water as one would cull the news from the morning paper; and finally, when I had trained my dull memory to treasure up an endless array of soundings and crossing-marks, and keep fast hold of them, I judged that my education was complete: so I got to tilting my cap to the side of my head, and wearing a tooth-pick in my mouth at the wheel. Mr. Bixby had his eye on these airs. One day he said-- 'What is the height of that bank yonder, at Burgess's?' 'How can I tell, sir. It is three-quarters of a mile away.' 'Very poor eye--very poor. Take the glass.' I took the glass, and presently said--'I can't tell. I suppose that that bank is about a foot and a half high.' 'Foot and a half! That's a six-foot bank. How high was the bank along here last trip?' 'I don't know; I never noticed.' 'You didn't? Well, you must always do it hereafter.' 'Why?' 'Because you'll have to know a good many things that it tells you. For one thing, it tells you the stage of the river--tells you whether there's more water or less in the river along here than there was last trip.' 'The leads tell me that.' I rather thought I had the advantage of him there. 'Yes, but suppose the leads lie? The bank would tell you so, and then you'd stir those leadsmen up a bit. There was a ten-foot bank here last trip, and there is only a six-foot bank now. What does that signify?' 'That the river is four feet higher than it was last trip.' 'Very good. Is the river rising or falling?' 'Rising.' 'No it ain't.' 'I guess I am right, sir. Yonder is some drift-wood floating down the stream.' 'A rise starts the drift-wood, but then it keeps on floating a while after the river is done rising. Now the bank will tell you about this. Wait till you come to a place where it shelves a little. Now here; do you see this narrow belt of fine sediment That was deposited while the water was higher. You see the driftwood begins to strand, too. The bank helps in other ways. Do you see that stump on the false point?' 'Ay, ay, sir.' 'Well, the water is just up to the roots of it. You must make a note of that.' 'Why?' 'Because that means that there's seven feet in the chute of 103.' 'But 103 is a long way up the river yet.' 'That's where the benefit of the bank comes in. There is water enough in 103 NOW, yet there may not be by the time we get there; but the bank will keep us posted all along. You don't run close chutes on a falling river, up-stream, and there are precious few of them that you are allowed to run at all down-stream. There's a law of the United States against it. The river may be rising by the time we get to 103, and in that case we'll run it. We are drawing--how much?' 'Six feet aft,--six and a half forward.' 'Well, you do seem to know something.' 'But what I particularly want to know is, if I have got to keep up an everlasting measuring of the banks of this river, twelve hundred miles, month in and month out?' 'Of course!' My emotions were too deep for words for a while. Presently I said--' And how about these chutes. Are there many of them?' 'I should say so. I fancy we shan't run any of the river this trip as you've ever seen it run before--so to speak. If the river begins to rise again, we'll go up behind bars that you've always seen standing out of the river, high and dry like the roof of a house; we'll cut across low places that you've never noticed at all, right through the middle of bars that cover three hundred acres of river; we'll creep through cracks where you've always thought was solid land; we'll dart through the woods and leave twenty-five miles of river off to one side; we'll see the hind-side of every island between New Orleans and Cairo.' 'Then I've got to go to work and learn just as much more river as I already know.' 'Just about twice as much more, as near as you can come at it.' 'Well, one lives to find out. I think I was a fool when I went into this business.' 'Yes, that is true. And you are yet. But you'll not be when you've learned it.' 'Ah, I never can learn it.' 'I will see that you DO.' By and by I ventured again-- 'Have I got to learn all this thing just as I know the rest of the river--shapes and all--and so I can run it at night?' 'Yes. And you've got to have good fair marks from one end of the river to the other, that will help the bank tell you when there is water enough in each of these countless places--like that stump, you know. When the river first begins to rise, you can run half a dozen of the deepest of them; when it rises a foot more you can run another dozen; the next foot will add a couple of dozen, and so on: so you see you have to know your banks and marks to a dead moral certainty, and never get them mixed; for when you start through one of those cracks, there's no backing out again, as there is in the big river; you've got to go through, or stay there six months if you get caught on a falling river. There are about fifty of these cracks which you can't run at all except when the river is brim full and over the banks.' 'This new lesson is a cheerful prospect.' 'Cheerful enough. And mind what I've just told you; when you start into one of those places you've got to go through. They are too narrow to turn around in, too crooked to back out of, and the shoal water is always up at the head; never elsewhere. And the head of them is always likely to be filling up, little by little, so that the marks you reckon their depth by, this season, may not answer for next.' 'Learn a new set, then, every year?' 'Exactly. Cramp her up to the bar! What are you standing up through the middle of the river for?' The next few months showed me strange things. On the same day that we held the conversation above narrated, we met a great rise coming down the river. The whole vast face of the stream was black with drifting dead logs, broken boughs, and great trees that had caved in and been washed away. It required the nicest steering to pick one's way through this rushing raft, even in the day-time, when crossing from point to point; and at night the difficulty was mightily increased; every now and then a huge log, lying deep in the water, would suddenly appear right under our bows, coming head-on; no use to try to avoid it then; we could only stop the engines, and one wheel would walk over that log from one end to the other, keeping up a thundering racket and careening the boat in a way that was very uncomfortable to passengers. Now and then we would hit one of these sunken logs a rattling bang, dead in the center, with a full head of steam, and it would stun the boat as if she had hit a continent. Sometimes this log would lodge, and stay right across our nose, and back the Mississippi up before it; we would have to do a little craw-fishing, then, to get away from the obstruction. We often hit WHITE logs, in the dark, for we could not see them till we were right on them; but a black log is a pretty distinct object at night. A white snag is an ugly customer when the daylight is gone. Of course, on the great rise, down came a swarm of prodigious timber- rafts from the head waters of the Mississippi, coal barges from Pittsburgh, little trading scows from everywhere, and broad-horns from 'Posey County,' Indiana, freighted with 'fruit and furniture'--the usual term for describing it, though in plain English the freight thus aggrandized was hoop-poles and pumpkins. Pilots bore a mortal hatred to these craft; and it was returned with usury. The law required all such helpless traders to keep a light burning, but it was a law that was often broken. All of a sudden, on a murky night, a light would hop up, right under our bows, almost, and an agonized voice, with the backwoods 'whang' to it, would wail out-- 'Whar'n the ---- you goin' to! Cain't you see nothin', you dash-dashed aig-suckin', sheep-stealin', one-eyed son of a stuffed monkey!' Then for an instant, as we whistled by, the red glare from our furnaces would reveal the scow and the form of the gesticulating orator as if under a lightning-flash, and in that instant our firemen and deck-hands would send and receive a tempest of missiles and profanity, one of our wheels would walk off with the crashing fragments of a steering-oar, and down the dead blackness would shut again. And that flatboatman would be sure to go into New Orleans and sue our boat, swearing stoutly that he had a light burning all the time, when in truth his gang had the lantern down below to sing and lie and drink and gamble by, and no watch on deck. Once, at night, in one of those forest-bordered crevices (behind an island) which steamboatmen intensely describe with the phrase 'as dark as the inside of a cow,' we should have eaten up a Posey County family, fruit, furniture, and all, but that they happened to be fiddling down below, and we just caught the sound of the music in time to sheer off, doing no serious damage, unfortunately, but coming so near it that we had good hopes for a moment. These people brought up their lantern, then, of course; and as we backed and filled to get away, the precious family stood in the light of it--both sexes and various ages--and cursed us till everything turned blue. Once a coalboatman sent a bullet through our pilot-house, when we borrowed a steering oar of him in a very narrow place. 
8473	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 3. Chapter 11 The River Rises DURING this big rise these small-fry craft were an intolerable nuisance. We were running chute after chute,--a new world to me,--and if there was a particularly cramped place in a chute, we would be pretty sure to meet a broad-horn there; and if he failed to be there, we would find him in a still worse locality, namely, the head of the chute, on the shoal water. And then there would be no end of profane cordialities exchanged. Sometimes, in the big river, when we would be feeling our way cautiously along through a fog, the deep hush would suddenly be broken by yells and a clamor of tin pans, and all in instant a log raft would appear vaguely through the webby veil, close upon us; and then we did not wait to swap knives, but snatched our engine bells out by the roots and piled on all the steam we had, to scramble out of the way! One doesn't hit a rock or a solid log craft with a steamboat when he can get excused. You will hardly believe it, but many steamboat clerks always carried a large assortment of religious tracts with them in those old departed steamboating days. Indeed they did. Twenty times a day we would be cramping up around a bar, while a string of these small-fry rascals were drifting down into the head of the bend away above and beyond us a couple of miles. Now a skiff would dart away from one of them, and come fighting its laborious way across the desert of water. It would 'ease all,' in the shadow of our forecastle, and the panting oarsmen would shout, 'Gimme a pa-a-per!' as the skiff drifted swiftly astern. The clerk would throw over a file of New Orleans journals. If these were picked up without comment, you might notice that now a dozen other skiffs had been drifting down upon us without saying anything. You understand, they had been waiting to see how No. 1 was going to fare. No. 1 making no comment, all the rest would bend to their oars and come on, now; and as fast as they came the clerk would heave over neat bundles of religious tracts, tied to shingles. The amount of hard swearing which twelve packages of religious literature will command when impartially divided up among twelve raftsmen's crews, who have pulled a heavy skiff two miles on a hot day to get them, is simply incredible. As I have said, the big rise brought a new world under my vision. By the time the river was over its banks we had forsaken our old paths and were hourly climbing over bars that had stood ten feet out of water before; we were shaving stumpy shores, like that at the foot of Madrid Bend, which I had always seen avoided before; we were clattering through chutes like that of 82, where the opening at the foot was an unbroken wall of timber till our nose was almost at the very spot. Some of these chutes were utter solitudes. The dense, untouched forest overhung both banks of the crooked little crack, and one could believe that human creatures had never intruded there before. The swinging grape-vines, the grassy nooks and vistas glimpsed as we swept by, the flowering creepers waving their red blossoms from the tops of dead trunks, and all the spendthrift richness of the forest foliage, were wasted and thrown away there. The chutes were lovely places to steer in; they were deep, except at the head; the current was gentle; under the 'points' the water was absolutely dead, and the invisible banks so bluff that where the tender willow thickets projected you could bury your boat's broadside in them as you tore along, and then you seemed fairly to fly. Behind other islands we found wretched little farms, and wretcheder little log-cabins; there were crazy rail fences sticking a foot or two above the water, with one or two jeans-clad, chills-racked, yellow-faced male miserables roosting on the top-rail, elbows on knees, jaws in hands, grinding tobacco and discharging the result at floating chips through crevices left by lost teeth; while the rest of the family and the few farm-animals were huddled together in an empty wood-flat riding at her moorings close at hand. In this flat-boat the family would have to cook and eat and sleep for a lesser or greater number of days (or possibly weeks), until the river should fall two or three feet and let them get back to their log-cabin and their chills again--chills being a merciful provision of an all-wise Providence to enable them to take exercise without exertion. And this sort of watery camping out was a thing which these people were rather liable to be treated to a couple of times a year: by the December rise out of the Ohio, and the June rise out of the Mississippi. And yet these were kindly dispensations, for they at least enabled the poor things to rise from the dead now and then, and look upon life when a steamboat went by. They appreciated the blessing, too, for they spread their mouths and eyes wide open and made the most of these occasions. Now what COULD these banished creatures find to do to keep from dying of the blues during the low-water season! Once, in one of these lovely island chutes, we found our course completely bridged by a great fallen tree. This will serve to show how narrow some of the chutes were. The passengers had an hour's recreation in a virgin wilderness, while the boat-hands chopped the bridge away; for there was no such thing as turning back, you comprehend. From Cairo to Baton Rouge, when the river is over its banks, you have no particular trouble in the night, for the thousand-mile wall of dense forest that guards the two banks all the way is only gapped with a farm or wood-yard opening at intervals, and so you can't 'get out of the river' much easier than you could get out of a fenced lane; but from Baton Rouge to New Orleans it is a different matter. The river is more than a mile wide, and very deep--as much as two hundred feet, in places. Both banks, for a good deal over a hundred miles, are shorn of their timber and bordered by continuous sugar plantations, with only here and there a scattering sapling or row of ornamental China-trees. The timber is shorn off clear to the rear of the plantations, from two to four miles. When the first frost threatens to come, the planters snatch off their crops in a hurry. When they have finished grinding the cane, they form the refuse of the stalks (which they call BAGASSE) into great piles and set fire to them, though in other sugar countries the bagasse is used for fuel in the furnaces of the sugar mills. Now the piles of damp bagasse burn slowly, and smoke like Satan's own kitchen. An embankment ten or fifteen feet high guards both banks of the Mississippi all the way down that lower end of the river, and this embankment is set back from the edge of the shore from ten to perhaps a hundred feet, according to circumstances; say thirty or forty feet, as a general thing. Fill that whole region with an impenetrable gloom of smoke from a hundred miles of burning bagasse piles, when the river is over the banks, and turn a steamboat loose along there at midnight and see how she will feel. And see how you will feel, too! You find yourself away out in the midst of a vague dim sea that is shoreless, that fades out and loses itself in the murky distances; for you cannot discern the thin rib of embankment, and you are always imagining you see a straggling tree when you don't. The plantations themselves are transformed by the smoke, and look like a part of the sea. All through your watch you are tortured with the exquisite misery of uncertainty. You hope you are keeping in the river, but you do not know. All that you are sure about is that you are likely to be within six feet of the bank and destruction, when you think you are a good half-mile from shore. And you are sure, also, that if you chance suddenly to fetch up against the embankment and topple your chimneys overboard, you will have the small comfort of knowing that it is about what you were expecting to do. One of the great Vicksburg packets darted out into a sugar plantation one night, at such a time, and had to stay there a week. But there was no novelty about it; it had often been done before. I thought I had finished this chapter, but I wish to add a curious thing, while it is in my mind. It is only relevant in that it is connected with piloting. There used to be an excellent pilot on the river, a Mr. X., who was a somnambulist. It was said that if his mind was troubled about a bad piece of river, he was pretty sure to get up and walk in his sleep and do strange things. He was once fellow-pilot for a trip or two with George Ealer, on a great New Orleans passenger packet. During a considerable part of the first trip George was uneasy, but got over it by and by, as X. seemed content to stay in his bed when asleep. Late one night the boat was approaching Helena, Arkansas; the water was low, and the crossing above the town in a very blind and tangled condition. X. had seen the crossing since Ealer had, and as the night was particularly drizzly, sullen, and dark, Ealer was considering whether he had not better have X. called to assist in running the place, when the door opened and X. walked in. Now on very dark nights, light is a deadly enemy to piloting; you are aware that if you stand in a lighted room, on such a night, you cannot see things in the street to any purpose; but if you put out the lights and stand in the gloom you can make out objects in the street pretty well. So, on very dark nights, pilots do not smoke; they allow no fire in the pilot-house stove if there is a crack which can allow the least ray to escape; they order the furnaces to be curtained with huge tarpaulins and the sky-lights to be closely blinded. Then no light whatever issues from the boat. The undefinable shape that now entered the pilot-house had Mr. X.'s voice. This said-- 'Let me take her, George; I've seen this place since you have, and it is so crooked that I reckon I can run it myself easier than I could tell you how to do it.' 'It is kind of you, and I swear _I_ am willing. I haven't got another drop of perspiration left in me. I have been spinning around and around the wheel like a squirrel. It is so dark I can't tell which way she is swinging till she is coming around like a whirligig.' So Ealer took a seat on the bench, panting and breathless. The black phantom assumed the wheel without saying anything, steadied the waltzing steamer with a turn or two, and then stood at ease, coaxing her a little to this side and then to that, as gently and as sweetly as if the time had been noonday. When Ealer observed this marvel of steering, he wished he had not confessed! He stared, and wondered, and finally said-- 'Well, I thought I knew how to steer a steamboat, but that was another mistake of mine.' X. said nothing, but went serenely on with his work. He rang for the leads; he rang to slow down the steam; he worked the boat carefully and neatly into invisible marks, then stood at the center of the wheel and peered blandly out into the blackness, fore and aft, to verify his position; as the leads shoaled more and more, he stopped the engines entirely, and the dead silence and suspense of 'drifting' followed when the shoalest water was struck, he cracked on the steam, carried her handsomely over, and then began to work her warily into the next system of shoal marks; the same patient, heedful use of leads and engines followed, the boat slipped through without touching bottom, and entered upon the third and last intricacy of the crossing; imperceptibly she moved through the gloom, crept by inches into her marks, drifted tediously till the shoalest water was cried, and then, under a tremendous head of steam, went swinging over the reef and away into deep water and safety! Ealer let his long-pent breath pour out in a great, relieving sigh, and said-- 'That's the sweetest piece of piloting that was ever done on the Mississippi River! I wouldn't believed it could be done, if I hadn't seen it.' There was no reply, and he added-- 'Just hold her five minutes longer, partner, and let me run down and get a cup of coffee.' A minute later Ealer was biting into a pie, down in the 'texas,' and comforting himself with coffee. Just then the night watchman happened in, and was about to happen out again, when he noticed Ealer and exclaimed-- 'Who is at the wheel, sir?' 'X.' 'Dart for the pilot-house, quicker than lightning!' The next moment both men were flying up the pilot-house companion way, three steps at a jump! Nobody there! The great steamer was whistling down the middle of the river at her own sweet will! The watchman shot out of the place again; Ealer seized the wheel, set an engine back with power, and held his breath while the boat reluctantly swung away from a 'towhead' which she was about to knock into the middle of the Gulf of Mexico! By and by the watchman came back and said-- 'Didn't that lunatic tell you he was asleep, when he first came up here?' 'NO.' 'Well, he was. I found him walking along on top of the railings just as unconcerned as another man would walk a pavement; and I put him to bed; now just this minute there he was again, away astern, going through that sort of tight-rope deviltry the same as before.' 'Well, I think I'll stay by, next time he has one of those fits. But I hope he'll have them often. You just ought to have seen him take this boat through Helena crossing. I never saw anything so gaudy before. And if he can do such gold-leaf, kid-glove, diamond-breastpin piloting when he is sound asleep, what COULDN'T he do if he was dead!' Chapter 12 Sounding WHEN the river is very low, and one's steamboat is 'drawing all the water' there is in the channel,--or a few inches more, as was often the case in the old times,--one must be painfully circumspect in his piloting. We used to have to 'sound' a number of particularly bad places almost every trip when the river was at a very low stage. Sounding is done in this way. The boat ties up at the shore, just above the shoal crossing; the pilot not on watch takes his 'cub' or steersman and a picked crew of men (sometimes an officer also), and goes out in the yawl--provided the boat has not that rare and sumptuous luxury, a regularly-devised 'sounding-boat'--and proceeds to hunt for the best water, the pilot on duty watching his movements through a spy-glass, meantime, and in some instances assisting by signals of the boat's whistle, signifying 'try higher up' or 'try lower down;' for the surface of the water, like an oil-painting, is more expressive and intelligible when inspected from a little distance than very close at hand. The whistle signals are seldom necessary, however; never, perhaps, except when the wind confuses the significant ripples upon the water's surface. When the yawl has reached the shoal place, the speed is slackened, the pilot begins to sound the depth with a pole ten or twelve feet long, and the steersman at the tiller obeys the order to 'hold her up to starboard;' or, 'let her fall off to larboard;'{footnote [The term 'larboard' is never used at sea now, to signify the left hand; but was always used on the river in my time]} or 'steady--steady as you go.' When the measurements indicate that the yawl is approaching the shoalest part of the reef, the command is given to 'ease all!' Then the men stop rowing and the yawl drifts with the current. The next order is, 'Stand by with the buoy!' The moment the shallowest point is reached, the pilot delivers the order, 'Let go the buoy!' and over she goes. If the pilot is not satisfied, he sounds the place again; if he finds better water higher up or lower down, he removes the buoy to that place. Being finally satisfied, he gives the order, and all the men stand their oars straight up in the air, in line; a blast from the boat's whistle indicates that the signal has been seen; then the men 'give way' on their oars and lay the yawl alongside the buoy; the steamer comes creeping carefully down, is pointed straight at the buoy, husbands her power for the coming struggle, and presently, at the critical moment, turns on all her steam and goes grinding and wallowing over the buoy and the sand, and gains the deep water beyond. Or maybe she doesn't; maybe she 'strikes and swings.' Then she has to while away several hours (or days) sparring herself off. Sometimes a buoy is not laid at all, but the yawl goes ahead, hunting the best water, and the steamer follows along in its wake. Often there is a deal of fun and excitement about sounding, especially if it is a glorious summer day, or a blustering night. But in winter the cold and the peril take most of the fun out of it. A buoy is nothing but a board four or five feet long, with one end turned up; it is a reversed school-house bench, with one of the supports left and the other removed. It is anchored on the shoalest part of the reef by a rope with a heavy stone made fast to the end of it. But for the resistance of the turned-up end of the reversed bench, the current would pull the buoy under water. At night, a paper lantern with a candle in it is fastened on top of the buoy, and this can be seen a mile or more, a little glimmering spark in the waste of blackness. Nothing delights a cub so much as an opportunity to go out sounding. There is such an air of adventure about it; often there is danger; it is so gaudy and man-of-war-like to sit up in the stern-sheets and steer a swift yawl; there is something fine about the exultant spring of the boat when an experienced old sailor crew throw their souls into the oars; it is lovely to see the white foam stream away from the bows; there is music in the rush of the water; it is deliciously exhilarating, in summer, to go speeding over the breezy expanses of the river when the world of wavelets is dancing in the sun. It is such grandeur, too, to the cub, to get a chance to give an order; for often the pilot will simply say, 'Let her go about!' and leave the rest to the cub, who instantly cries, in his sternest tone of command, 'Ease starboard! Strong on the larboard! Starboard give way! With a will, men!' The cub enjoys sounding for the further reason that the eyes of the passengers are watching all the yawl's movements with absorbing interest if the time be daylight; and if it be night he knows that those same wondering eyes are fastened upon the yawl's lantern as it glides out into the gloom and dims away in the remote distance. One trip a pretty girl of sixteen spent her time in our pilot-house with her uncle and aunt, every day and all day long. I fell in love with her. So did Mr. Thornburg's cub, Tom G----. Tom and I had been bosom friends until this time; but now a coolness began to arise. I told the girl a good many of my river adventures, and made myself out a good deal of a hero; Tom tried to make himself appear to be a hero, too, and succeeded to some extent, but then he always had a way of embroidering. However, virtue is its own reward, so I was a barely perceptible trifle ahead in the contest. About this time something happened which promised handsomely for me: the pilots decided to sound the crossing at the head of 21. This would occur about nine or ten o'clock at night, when the passengers would be still up; it would be Mr. Thornburg's watch, therefore my chief would have to do the sounding. We had a perfect love of a sounding-boat--long, trim, graceful, and as fleet as a greyhound; her thwarts were cushioned; she carried twelve oarsmen; one of the mates was always sent in her to transmit orders to her crew, for ours was a steamer where no end of 'style' was put on. We tied up at the shore above 21, and got ready. It was a foul night, and the river was so wide, there, that a landsman's uneducated eyes could discern no opposite shore through such a gloom. The passengers were alert and interested; everything was satisfactory. As I hurried through the engine-room, picturesquely gotten up in storm toggery, I met Tom, and could not forbear delivering myself of a mean speech-- 'Ain't you glad YOU don't have to go out sounding?' Tom was passing on, but he quickly turned, and said-- 'Now just for that, you can go and get the sounding-pole yourself. I was going after it, but I'd see you in Halifax, now, before I'd do it.' 'Who wants you to get it? I don't. It's in the sounding-boat.' 'It ain't, either. It's been new-painted; and it's been up on the ladies' cabin guards two days, drying.' I flew back, and shortly arrived among the crowd of watching and wondering ladies just in time to hear the command: 'Give way, men!' I looked over, and there was the gallant sounding-boat booming away, the unprincipled Tom presiding at the tiller, and my chief sitting by him with the sounding-pole which I had been sent on a fool's errand to fetch. Then that young girl said to me-- 'Oh, how awful to have to go out in that little boat on such a night! Do you think there is any danger?' I would rather have been stabbed. I went off, full of venom, to help in the pilot-house. By and by the boat's lantern disappeared, and after an interval a wee spark glimmered upon the face of the water a mile away. Mr. Thornburg blew the whistle, in acknowledgment, backed the steamer out, and made for it. We flew along for a while, then slackened steam and went cautiously gliding toward the spark. Presently Mr. Thornburg exclaimed-- 'Hello, the buoy-lantern's out!' He stopped the engines. A moment or two later he said-- 'Why, there it is again!' So he came ahead on the engines once more, and rang for the leads. Gradually the water shoaled up, and then began to deepen again! Mr. Thornburg muttered-- 'Well, I don't understand this. I believe that buoy has drifted off the reef. Seems to be a little too far to the left. No matter, it is safest to run over it anyhow.' So, in that solid world of darkness we went creeping down on the light. Just as our bows were in the act of plowing over it, Mr. Thornburg seized the bell-ropes, rang a startling peal, and exclaimed-- 'My soul, it's the sounding-boat!' A sudden chorus of wild alarms burst out far below--a pause--and then the sound of grinding and crashing followed. Mr. Thornburg exclaimed-- 'There! the paddle-wheel has ground the sounding-boat to lucifer matches! Run! See who is killed!' I was on the main deck in the twinkling of an eye. My chief and the third mate and nearly all the men were safe. They had discovered their danger when it was too late to pull out of the way; then, when the great guards overshadowed them a moment later, they were prepared and knew what to do; at my chiefs order they sprang at the right instant, seized the guard, and were hauled aboard. The next moment the sounding-yawl swept aft to the wheel and was struck and splintered to atoms. Two of the men and the cub Tom, were missing--a fact which spread like wildfire over the boat. The passengers came flocking to the forward gangway, ladies and all, anxious-eyed, white-faced, and talked in awed voices of the dreadful thing. And often and again I heard them say, 'Poor fellows! poor boy, poor boy!' By this time the boat's yawl was manned and away, to search for the missing. Now a faint call was heard, off to the left. The yawl had disappeared in the other direction. Half the people rushed to one side to encourage the swimmer with their shouts; the other half rushed the other way to shriek to the yawl to turn about. By the callings, the swimmer was approaching, but some said the sound showed failing strength. The crowd massed themselves against the boiler-deck railings, leaning over and staring into the gloom; and every faint and fainter cry wrung from them such words as, 'Ah, poor fellow, poor fellow! is there no way to save him?' But still the cries held out, and drew nearer, and presently the voice said pluckily-- 'I can make it! Stand by with a rope!' What a rousing cheer they gave him! The chief mate took his stand in the glare of a torch-basket, a coil of rope in his hand, and his men grouped about him. The next moment the swimmer's face appeared in the circle of light, and in another one the owner of it was hauled aboard, limp and drenched, while cheer on cheer went up. It was that devil Tom. The yawl crew searched everywhere, but found no sign of the two men. They probably failed to catch the guard, tumbled back, and were struck by the wheel and killed. Tom had never jumped for the guard at all, but had plunged head-first into the river and dived under the wheel. It was nothing; I could have done it easy enough, and I said so; but everybody went on just the same, making a wonderful to do over that ass, as if he had done something great. That girl couldn't seem to have enough of that pitiful 'hero' the rest of the trip; but little I cared; I loathed her, any way. The way we came to mistake the sounding-boat's lantern for the buoy- light was this. My chief said that after laying the buoy he fell away and watched it till it seemed to be secure; then he took up a position a hundred yards below it and a little to one side of the steamer's course, headed the sounding-boat up-stream, and waited. Having to wait some time, he and the officer got to talking; he looked up when he judged that the steamer was about on the reef; saw that the buoy was gone, but supposed that the steamer had already run over it; he went on with his talk; he noticed that the steamer was getting very close on him, but that was the correct thing; it was her business to shave him closely, for convenience in taking him aboard; he was expecting her to sheer off, until the last moment; then it flashed upon him that she was trying to run him down, mistaking his lantern for the buoy-light; so he sang out, 'Stand by to spring for the guard, men!' and the next instant the jump was made. Chapter 13 A Pilot's Needs BUT I am wandering from what I was intending to do, that is, make plainer than perhaps appears in the previous chapters, some of the peculiar requirements of the science of piloting. First of all, there is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection. Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory. He cannot stop with merely thinking a thing is so and so; he must know it; for this is eminently one of the 'exact' sciences. With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times, if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase 'I think,' instead of the vigorous one 'I know!' One cannot easily realize what a tremendous thing it is to know every trivial detail of twelve hundred miles of river and know it with absolute exactness. If you will take the longest street in New York, and travel up and down it, conning its features patiently until you know every house and window and door and lamp-post and big and little sign by heart, and know them so accurately that you can instantly name the one you are abreast of when you are set down at random in that street in the middle of an inky black night, you will then have a tolerable notion of the amount and the exactness of a pilot's knowledge who carries the Mississippi River in his head. And then if you will go on until you know every street crossing, the character, size, and position of the crossing-stones, and the varying depth of mud in each of those numberless places, you will have some idea of what the pilot must know in order to keep a Mississippi steamer out of trouble. Next, if you will take half of the signs in that long street, and CHANGE THEIR PLACES once a month, and still manage to know their new positions accurately on dark nights, and keep up with these repeated changes without making any mistakes, you will understand what is required of a pilot's peerless memory by the fickle Mississippi. I think a pilot's memory is about the most wonderful thing in the world. To know the Old and New Testaments by heart, and be able to recite them glibly, forward or backward, or begin at random anywhere in the book and recite both ways and never trip or make a mistake, is no extravagant mass of knowledge, and no marvelous facility, compared to a pilot's massed knowledge of the Mississippi and his marvelous facility in the handling of it. I make this comparison deliberately, and believe I am not expanding the truth when I do it. Many will think my figure too strong, but pilots will not. And how easily and comfortably the pilot's memory does its work; how placidly effortless is its way; how UNCONSCIOUSLY it lays up its vast stores, hour by hour, day by day, and never loses or mislays a single valuable package of them all! Take an instance. Let a leadsman cry, 'Half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain! half twain!' until it become as monotonous as the ticking of a clock; let conversation be going on all the time, and the pilot be doing his share of the talking, and no longer consciously listening to the leadsman; and in the midst of this endless string of half twains let a single 'quarter twain!' be interjected, without emphasis, and then the half twain cry go on again, just as before: two or three weeks later that pilot can describe with precision the boat's position in the river when that quarter twain was uttered, and give you such a lot of head-marks, stern-marks, and side- marks to guide you, that you ought to be able to take the boat there and put her in that same spot again yourself! The cry of 'quarter twain' did not really take his mind from his talk, but his trained faculties instantly photographed the bearings, noted the change of depth, and laid up the important details for future reference without requiring any assistance from him in the matter. If you were walking and talking with a friend, and another friend at your side kept up a monotonous repetition of the vowel sound A, for a couple of blocks, and then in the midst interjected an R, thus, A, A, A, A, A, R, A, A, A, etc., and gave the R no emphasis, you would not be able to state, two or three weeks afterward, that the R had been put in, nor be able to tell what objects you were passing at the moment it was done. But you could if your memory had been patiently and laboriously trained to do that sort of thing mechanically. Give a man a tolerably fair memory to start with, and piloting will develop it into a very colossus of capability. But ONLY IN THE MATTERS IT IS DAILY DRILLED IN. A time would come when the man's faculties could not help noticing landmarks and soundings, and his memory could not help holding on to them with the grip of a vise; but if you asked that same man at noon what he had had for breakfast, it would be ten chances to one that he could not tell you. Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business. At the time that wages soared so high on the Missouri River, my chief, Mr. Bixby, went up there and learned more than a thousand miles of that stream with an ease and rapidity that were astonishing. When he had seen each division once in the daytime and once at night, his education was so nearly complete that he took out a 'daylight' license; a few trips later he took out a full license, and went to piloting day and night-- and he ranked A 1, too. Mr. Bixby placed me as steersman for a while under a pilot whose feats of memory were a constant marvel to me. However, his memory was born in him, I think, not built. For instance, somebody would mention a name. Instantly Mr. Brown would break in-- 'Oh, I knew HIM. Sallow-faced, red-headed fellow, with a little scar on the side of his throat, like a splinter under the flesh. He was only in the Southern trade six months. That was thirteen years ago. I made a trip with him. There was five feet in the upper river then; the "Henry Blake" grounded at the foot of Tower Island drawing four and a half; the "George Elliott" unshipped her rudder on the wreck of the "Sunflower"--' 'Why, the "Sunflower" didn't sink until--' 'I know when she sunk; it was three years before that, on the 2nd of December; Asa Hardy was captain of her, and his brother John was first clerk; and it was his first trip in her, too; Tom Jones told me these things a week afterward in New Orleans; he was first mate of the "Sunflower." Captain Hardy stuck a nail in his foot the 6th of July of the next year, and died of the lockjaw on the 15th. His brother died two years after 3rd of March,--erysipelas. I never saw either of the Hardys,--they were Alleghany River men,--but people who knew them told me all these things. And they said Captain Hardy wore yarn socks winter and summer just the same, and his first wife's name was Jane Shook--she was from New England--and his second one died in a lunatic asylum. It was in the blood. She was from Lexington, Kentucky. Name was Horton before she was married.' And so on, by the hour, the man's tongue would go. He could NOT forget any thing. It was simply impossible. The most trivial details remained as distinct and luminous in his head, after they had lain there for years, as the most memorable events. His was not simply a pilot's memory; its grasp was universal. If he were talking about a trifling letter he had received seven years before, he was pretty sure to deliver you the entire screed from memory. And then without observing that he was departing from the true line of his talk, he was more than likely to hurl in a long-drawn parenthetical biography of the writer of that letter; and you were lucky indeed if he did not take up that writer's relatives, one by one, and give you their biographies, too. Such a memory as that is a great misfortune. To it, all occurrences are of the same size. Its possessor cannot distinguish an interesting circumstance from an uninteresting one. As a talker, he is bound to clog his narrative with tiresome details and make himself an insufferable bore. Moreover, he cannot stick to his subject. He picks up every little grain of memory he discerns in his way, and so is led aside. Mr. Brown would start out with the honest intention of telling you a vastly funny anecdote about a dog. He would be 'so full of laugh' that he could hardly begin; then his memory would start with the dog's breed and personal appearance; drift into a history of his owner; of his owner's family, with descriptions of weddings and burials that had occurred in it, together with recitals of congratulatory verses and obituary poetry provoked by the same: then this memory would recollect that one of these events occurred during the celebrated 'hard winter' of such and such a year, and a minute description of that winter would follow, along with the names of people who were frozen to death, and statistics showing the high figures which pork and hay went up to. Pork and hay would suggest corn and fodder; corn and fodder would suggest cows and horses; cows and horses would suggest the circus and certain celebrated bare-back riders; the transition from the circus to the menagerie was easy and natural; from the elephant to equatorial Africa was but a step; then of course the heathen savages would suggest religion; and at the end of three or four hours' tedious jaw, the watch would change, and Brown would go out of the pilot-house muttering extracts from sermons he had heard years before about the efficacy of prayer as a means of grace. And the original first mention would be all you had learned about that dog, after all this waiting and hungering. A pilot must have a memory; but there are two higher qualities which he must also have. He must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake. Give a man the merest trifle of pluck to start with, and by the time he has become a pilot he cannot be unmanned by any danger a steamboat can get into; but one cannot quite say the same for judgment. Judgment is a matter of brains, and a man must START with a good stock of that article or he will never succeed as a pilot. The growth of courage in the pilot-house is steady all the time, but it does not reach a high and satisfactory condition until some time after the young pilot has been 'standing his own watch,' alone and under the staggering weight of all the responsibilities connected with the position. When an apprentice has become pretty thoroughly acquainted with the river, he goes clattering along so fearlessly with his steamboat, night or day, that he presently begins to imagine that it is HIS courage that animates him; but the first time the pilot steps out and leaves him to his own devices he finds out it was the other man's. He discovers that the article has been left out of his own cargo altogether. The whole river is bristling with exigencies in a moment; he is not prepared for them; he does not know how to meet them; all his knowledge forsakes him; and within fifteen minutes he is as white as a sheet and scared almost to death. Therefore pilots wisely train these cubs by various strategic tricks to look danger in the face a little more calmly. A favorite way of theirs is to play a friendly swindle upon the candidate. Mr. Bixby served me in this fashion once, and for years afterward I used to blush even in my sleep when I thought of it. I had become a good steersman; so good, indeed, that I had all the work to do on our watch, night and day; Mr. Bixby seldom made a suggestion to me; all he ever did was to take the wheel on particularly bad nights or in particularly bad crossings, land the boat when she needed to be landed, play gentleman of leisure nine-tenths of the watch, and collect the wages. The lower river was about bank-full, and if anybody had questioned my ability to run any crossing between Cairo and New Orleans without help or instruction, I should have felt irreparably hurt. The idea of being afraid of any crossing in the lot, in the DAY-TIME, was a thing too preposterous for contemplation. Well, one matchless summer's day I was bowling down the bend above island 66, brimful of self-conceit and carrying my nose as high as a giraffe's, when Mr. Bixby said-- 'I am going below a while. I suppose you know the next crossing?' This was almost an affront. It was about the plainest and simplest crossing in the whole river. One couldn't come to any harm, whether he ran it right or not; and as for depth, there never had been any bottom there. I knew all this, perfectly well. 'Know how to RUN it? Why, I can run it with my eyes shut.' 'How much water is there in it?' 'Well, that is an odd question. I couldn't get bottom there with a church steeple.' 'You think so, do you?' The very tone of the question shook my confidence. That was what Mr. Bixby was expecting. He left, without saying anything more. I began to imagine all sorts of things. Mr. Bixby, unknown to me, of course, sent somebody down to the forecastle with some mysterious instructions to the leadsmen, another messenger was sent to whisper among the officers, and then Mr. Bixby went into hiding behind a smoke-stack where he could observe results. Presently the captain stepped out on the hurricane deck; next the chief mate appeared; then a clerk. Every moment or two a straggler was added to my audience; and before I got to the head of the island I had fifteen or twenty people assembled down there under my nose. I began to wonder what the trouble was. As I started across, the captain glanced aloft at me and said, with a sham uneasiness in his voice-- 'Where is Mr. Bixby?' 'Gone below, sir.' But that did the business for me. My imagination began to construct dangers out of nothing, and they multiplied faster than I could keep the run of them. All at once I imagined I saw shoal water ahead! The wave of coward agony that surged through me then came near dislocating every joint in me. All my confidence in that crossing vanished. I seized the bell-rope; dropped it, ashamed; seized it again; dropped it once more; clutched it tremblingly one again, and pulled it so feebly that I could hardly hear the stroke myself. Captain and mate sang out instantly, and both together-- 'Starboard lead there! and quick about it!' This was another shock. I began to climb the wheel like a squirrel; but I would hardly get the boat started to port before I would see new dangers on that side, and away I would spin to the other; only to find perils accumulating to starboard, and be crazy to get to port again. Then came the leadsman's sepulchral cry-- 'D-e-e-p four!' Deep four in a bottomless crossing! The terror of it took my breath away. 'M-a-r-k three!... M-a-r-k three... Quarter less three!... Half twain!' This was frightful! I seized the bell-ropes and stopped the engines. 'Quarter twain! Quarter twain! MARK twain!' I was helpless. I did not know what in the world to do. I was quaking from head to foot, and I could have hung my hat on my eyes, they stuck out so far. 'Quarter LESS twain! Nine and a HALF!' We were DRAWING nine! My hands were in a nerveless flutter. I could not ring a bell intelligibly with them. I flew to the speaking-tube and shouted to the engineer-- 'Oh, Ben, if you love me, BACK her! Quick, Ben! Oh, back the immortal SOUL out of her!' I heard the door close gently. I looked around, and there stood Mr. Bixby, smiling a bland, sweet smile. Then the audience on the hurricane deck sent up a thundergust of humiliating laughter. I saw it all, now, and I felt meaner than the meanest man in human history. I laid in the lead, set the boat in her marks, came ahead on the engines, and said-- 'It was a fine trick to play on an orphan, WASN'T it? I suppose I'll never hear the last of how I was ass enough to heave the lead at the head of 66.' 'Well, no, you won't, maybe. In fact I hope you won't; for I want you to learn something by that experience. Didn't you KNOW there was no bottom in that crossing?' 'Yes, sir, I did.' 'Very well, then. You shouldn't have allowed me or anybody else to shake your confidence in that knowledge. Try to remember that. And another thing: when you get into a dangerous place, don't turn coward. That isn't going to help matters any.' It was a good enough lesson, but pretty hardly learned. Yet about the hardest part of it was that for months I so often had to hear a phrase which I had conceived a particular distaste for. It was, 'Oh, Ben, if you love me, back her!' Chapter 14 Rank and Dignity of Piloting IN my preceding chapters I have tried, by going into the minutiae of the science of piloting, to carry the reader step by step to a comprehension of what the science consists of; and at the same time I have tried to show him that it is a very curious and wonderful science, too, and very worthy of his attention. If I have seemed to love my subject, it is no surprising thing, for I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it. The reason is plain: a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth. Kings are but the hampered servants of parliament and people; parliaments sit in chains forged by their constituency; the editor of a newspaper cannot be independent, but must work with one hand tied behind him by party and patrons, and be content to utter only half or two-thirds of his mind; no clergyman is a free man and may speak the whole truth, regardless of his parish's opinions; writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we 'modify' before we print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none. The captain could stand upon the hurricane deck, in the pomp of a very brief authority, and give him five or six orders while the vessel backed into the stream, and then that skipper's reign was over. The moment that the boat was under way in the river, she was under the sole and unquestioned control of the pilot. He could do with her exactly as he pleased, run her when and whither he chose, and tie her up to the bank whenever his judgment said that that course was best. His movements were entirely free; he consulted no one, he received commands from nobody, he promptly resented even the merest suggestions. Indeed, the law of the United States forbade him to listen to commands or suggestions, rightly considering that the pilot necessarily knew better how to handle the boat than anybody could tell him. So here was the novelty of a king without a keeper, an absolute monarch who was absolute in sober truth and not by a fiction of words. I have seen a boy of eighteen taking a great steamer serenely into what seemed almost certain destruction, and the aged captain standing mutely by, filled with apprehension but powerless to interfere. His interference, in that particular instance, might have been an excellent thing, but to permit it would have been to establish a most pernicious precedent. It will easily be guessed, considering the pilot's boundless authority, that he was a great personage in the old steamboating days. He was treated with marked courtesy by the captain and with marked deference by all the officers and servants; and this deferential spirit was quickly communicated to the passengers, too. I think pilots were about the only people I ever knew who failed to show, in some degree, embarrassment in the presence of traveling foreign princes. But then, people in one's own grade of life are not usually embarrassing objects. By long habit, pilots came to put all their wishes in the form of commands. It 'gravels' me, to this day, to put my will in the weak shape of a request, instead of launching it in the crisp language of an order. In those old days, to load a steamboat at St. Louis, take her to New Orleans and back, and discharge cargo, consumed about twenty-five days, on an average. Seven or eight of these days the boat spent at the wharves of St. Louis and New Orleans, and every soul on board was hard at work, except the two pilots; they did nothing but play gentleman up town, and receive the same wages for it as if they had been on duty. The moment the boat touched the wharf at either city, they were ashore; and they were not likely to be seen again till the last bell was ringing and everything in readiness for another voyage. When a captain got hold of a pilot of particularly high reputation, he took pains to keep him. When wages were four hundred dollars a month on the Upper Mississippi, I have known a captain to keep such a pilot in idleness, under full pay, three months at a time, while the river was frozen up. And one must remember that in those cheap times four hundred dollars was a salary of almost inconceivable splendor. Few men on shore got such pay as that, and when they did they were mightily looked up to. When pilots from either end of the river wandered into our small Missouri village, they were sought by the best and the fairest, and treated with exalted respect. Lying in port under wages was a thing which many pilots greatly enjoyed and appreciated; especially if they belonged in the Missouri River in the heyday of that trade (Kansas times), and got nine hundred dollars a trip, which was equivalent to about eighteen hundred dollars a month. Here is a conversation of that day. A chap out of the Illinois River, with a little stern-wheel tub, accosts a couple of ornate and gilded Missouri River pilots-- 'Gentlemen, I've got a pretty good trip for the upcountry, and shall want you about a month. How much will it be?' 'Eighteen hundred dollars apiece.' 'Heavens and earth! You take my boat, let me have your wages, and I'll divide!' I will remark, in passing, that Mississippi steamboatmen were important in landsmen's eyes (and in their own, too, in a degree) according to the dignity of the boat they were on. For instance, it was a proud thing to be of the crew of such stately craft as the 'Aleck Scott' or the 'Grand Turk.' Negro firemen, deck hands, and barbers belonging to those boats were distinguished personages in their grade of life, and they were well aware of that fact too. A stalwart darkey once gave offense at a negro ball in New Orleans by putting on a good many airs. Finally one of the managers bustled up to him and said-- 'Who IS you, any way? Who is you? dat's what I wants to know!' The offender was not disconcerted in the least, but swelled himself up and threw that into his voice which showed that he knew he was not putting on all those airs on a stinted capital. 'Who IS I? Who IS I? I let you know mighty quick who I is! I want you niggers to understan' dat I fires de middle do'{footnote [Door]} on de "Aleck Scott!"' That was sufficient. The barber of the 'Grand Turk' was a spruce young negro, who aired his importance with balmy complacency, and was greatly courted by the circle in which he moved. The young colored population of New Orleans were much given to flirting, at twilight, on the banquettes of the back streets. Somebody saw and heard something like the following, one evening, in one of those localities. A middle-aged negro woman projected her head through a broken pane and shouted (very willing that the neighbors should hear and envy), 'You Mary Ann, come in de house dis minute! Stannin' out dah foolin' 'long wid dat low trash, an' heah's de barber offn de "Gran' Turk" wants to conwerse wid you!' My reference, a moment ago, to the fact that a pilot's peculiar official position placed him out of the reach of criticism or command, brings Stephen W---- naturally to my mind. He was a gifted pilot, a good fellow, a tireless talker, and had both wit and humor in him. He had a most irreverent independence, too, and was deliciously easy-going and comfortable in the presence of age, official dignity, and even the most august wealth. He always had work, he never saved a penny, he was a most persuasive borrower, he was in debt to every pilot on the river, and to the majority of the captains. He could throw a sort of splendor around a bit of harum-scarum, devil-may-care piloting, that made it almost fascinating--but not to everybody. He made a trip with good old Captain Y----once, and was 'relieved' from duty when the boat got to New Orleans. Somebody expressed surprise at the discharge. Captain Y---- shuddered at the mere mention of Stephen. Then his poor, thin old voice piped out something like this:-- 'Why, bless me! I wouldn't have such a wild creature on my boat for the world--not for the whole world! He swears, he sings, he whistles, he yells--I never saw such an Injun to yell. All times of the night--it never made any difference to him. He would just yell that way, not for anything in particular, but merely on account of a kind of devilish comfort he got out of it. I never could get into a sound sleep but he would fetch me out of bed, all in a cold sweat, with one of those dreadful war-whoops. A queer being--very queer being; no respect for anything or anybody. Sometimes he called me "Johnny." And he kept a fiddle, and a cat. He played execrably. This seemed to distress the cat, and so the cat would howl. Nobody could sleep where that man--and his family--was. And reckless. There never was anything like it. Now you may believe it or not, but as sure as I am sitting here, he brought my boat a-tilting down through those awful snags at Chicot under a rattling head of steam, and the wind a-blowing like the very nation, at that! My officers will tell you so. They saw it. And, sir, while he was a-tearing right down through those snags, and I a-shaking in my shoes and praying, I wish I may never speak again if he didn't pucker up his mouth and go to WHISTLING! Yes, sir; whistling "Buffalo gals, can't you come out tonight, can't you come out to-night, can't you come out to-night;" and doing it as calmly as if we were attending a funeral and weren't related to the corpse. And when I remonstrated with him about it, he smiled down on me as if I was his child, and told me to run in the house and try to be good, and not be meddling with my superiors!' Once a pretty mean captain caught Stephen in New Orleans out of work and as usual out of money. He laid steady siege to Stephen, who was in a very 'close place,' and finally persuaded him to hire with him at one hundred and twenty-five dollars per month, just half wages, the captain agreeing not to divulge the secret and so bring down the contempt of all the guild upon the poor fellow. But the boat was not more than a day out of New Orleans before Stephen discovered that the captain was boasting of his exploit, and that all the officers had been told. Stephen winced, but said nothing. About the middle of the afternoon the captain stepped out on the hurricane deck, cast his eye around, and looked a good deal surprised. He glanced inquiringly aloft at Stephen, but Stephen was whistling placidly, and attending to business. The captain stood around a while in evident discomfort, and once or twice seemed about to make a suggestion; but the etiquette of the river taught him to avoid that sort of rashness, and so he managed to hold his peace. He chafed and puzzled a few minutes longer, then retired to his apartments. But soon he was out again, and apparently more perplexed than ever. Presently he ventured to remark, with deference-- 'Pretty good stage of the river now, ain't it, sir?' 'Well, I should say so! Bank-full IS a pretty liberal stage.' 'Seems to be a good deal of current here.' 'Good deal don't describe it! It's worse than a mill-race.' 'Isn't it easier in toward shore than it is out here in the middle?' 'Yes, I reckon it is; but a body can't be too careful with a steamboat. It's pretty safe out here; can't strike any bottom here, you can depend on that.' The captain departed, looking rueful enough. At this rate, he would probably die of old age before his boat got to St. Louis. Next day he appeared on deck and again found Stephen faithfully standing up the middle of the river, fighting the whole vast force of the Mississippi, and whistling the same placid tune. This thing was becoming serious. In by the shore was a slower boat clipping along in the easy water and gaining steadily; she began to make for an island chute; Stephen stuck to the middle of the river. Speech was WRUNG from the captain. He said-- 'Mr. W----, don't that chute cut off a good deal of distance?' 'I think it does, but I don't know.' 'Don't know! Well, isn't there water enough in it now to go through?' 'I expect there is, but I am not certain.' 'Upon my word this is odd! Why, those pilots on that boat yonder are going to try it. Do you mean to say that you don't know as much as they do?' 'THEY! Why, THEY are two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pilots! But don't you be uneasy; I know as much as any man can afford to know for a hundred and twenty-five!' The captain surrendered. Five minutes later Stephen was bowling through the chute and showing the rival boat a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pair of heels. Chapter 15 The Pilots' Monopoly ONE day, on board the 'Aleck Scott,' my chief, Mr. Bixby, was crawling carefully through a close place at Cat Island, both leads going, and everybody holding his breath. The captain, a nervous, apprehensive man, kept still as long as he could, but finally broke down and shouted from the hurricane deck-- 'For gracious' sake, give her steam, Mr. Bixby! give her steam! She'll never raise the reef on this headway!' For all the effect that was produced upon Mr. Bixby, one would have supposed that no remark had been made. But five minutes later, when the danger was past and the leads laid in, he burst instantly into a consuming fury, and gave the captain the most admirable cursing I ever listened to. No bloodshed ensued; but that was because the captain's cause was weak; for ordinarily he was not a man to take correction quietly. Having now set forth in detail the nature of the science of piloting, and likewise described the rank which the pilot held among the fraternity of steamboatmen, this seems a fitting place to say a few words about an organization which the pilots once formed for the protection of their guild. It was curious and noteworthy in this, that it was perhaps the compactest, the completest, and the strongest commercial organization ever formed among men. For a long time wages had been two hundred and fifty dollars a month; but curiously enough, as steamboats multiplied and business increased, the wages began to fall little by little. It was easy to discover the reason of this. Too many pilots were being 'made.' It was nice to have a 'cub,' a steersman, to do all the hard work for a couple of years, gratis, while his master sat on a high bench and smoked; all pilots and captains had sons or nephews who wanted to be pilots. By and by it came to pass that nearly every pilot on the river had a steersman. When a steersman had made an amount of progress that was satisfactory to any two pilots in the trade, they could get a pilot's license for him by signing an application directed to the United States Inspector. Nothing further was needed; usually no questions were asked, no proofs of capacity required. Very well, this growing swarm of new pilots presently began to undermine the wages, in order to get berths. Too late--apparently--the knights of the tiller perceived their mistake. Plainly, something had to be done, and quickly; but what was to be the needful thing. A close organization. Nothing else would answer. To compass this seemed an impossibility; so it was talked, and talked, and then dropped. It was too likely to ruin whoever ventured to move in the matter. But at last about a dozen of the boldest--and some of them the best--pilots on the river launched themselves into the enterprise and took all the chances. They got a special charter from the legislature, with large powers, under the name of the Pilots' Benevolent Association; elected their officers, completed their organization, contributed capital, put 'association' wages up to two hundred and fifty dollars at once--and then retired to their homes, for they were promptly discharged from employment. But there were two or three unnoticed trifles in their by- laws which had the seeds of propagation in them. For instance, all idle members of the association, in good standing, were entitled to a pension of twenty-five dollars per month. This began to bring in one straggler after another from the ranks of the new-fledged pilots, in the dull (summer) season. Better have twenty-five dollars than starve; the initiation fee was only twelve dollars, and no dues required from the unemployed. Also, the widows of deceased members in good standing could draw twenty- five dollars per month, and a certain sum for each of their children. Also, the said deceased would be buried at the association's expense. These things resurrected all the superannuated and forgotten pilots in the Mississippi Valley. They came from farms, they came from interior villages, they came from everywhere. They came on crutches, on drays, in ambulances,--any way, so they got there. They paid in their twelve dollars, and straightway began to draw out twenty-five dollars a month, and calculate their burial bills. By and by, all the useless, helpless pilots, and a dozen first-class ones, were in the association, and nine-tenths of the best pilots out of it and laughing at it. It was the laughing-stock of the whole river. Everybody joked about the by-law requiring members to pay ten per cent. of their wages, every month, into the treasury for the support of the association, whereas all the members were outcast and tabooed, and no one would employ them. Everybody was derisively grateful to the association for taking all the worthless pilots out of the way and leaving the whole field to the excellent and the deserving; and everybody was not only jocularly grateful for that, but for a result which naturally followed, namely, the gradual advance of wages as the busy season approached. Wages had gone up from the low figure of one hundred dollars a month to one hundred and twenty-five, and in some cases to one hundred and fifty; and it was great fun to enlarge upon the fact that this charming thing had been accomplished by a body of men not one of whom received a particle of benefit from it. Some of the jokers used to call at the association rooms and have a good time chaffing the members and offering them the charity of taking them as steersmen for a trip, so that they could see what the forgotten river looked like. However, the association was content; or at least it gave no sign to the contrary. Now and then it captured a pilot who was 'out of luck,' and added him to its list; and these later additions were very valuable, for they were good pilots; the incompetent ones had all been absorbed before. As business freshened, wages climbed gradually up to two hundred and fifty dollars--the association figure--and became firmly fixed there; and still without benefiting a member of that body, for no member was hired. The hilarity at the association's expense burst all bounds, now. There was no end to the fun which that poor martyr had to put up with. However, it is a long lane that has no turning. Winter approached, business doubled and trebled, and an avalanche of Missouri, Illinois and Upper Mississippi River boats came pouring down to take a chance in the New Orleans trade. All of a sudden pilots were in great demand, and were correspondingly scarce. The time for revenge was come. It was a bitter pill to have to accept association pilots at last, yet captains and owners agreed that there was no other way. But none of these outcasts offered! So there was a still bitterer pill to be swallowed: they must be sought out and asked for their services. Captain ---- was the first man who found it necessary to take the dose, and he had been the loudest derider of the organization. He hunted up one of the best of the association pilots and said-- 'Well, you boys have rather got the best of us for a little while, so I'll give in with as good a grace as I can. I've come to hire you; get your trunk aboard right away. I want to leave at twelve o'clock.' 'I don't know about that. Who is your other pilot?' 'I've got I. S----. Why?' 'I can't go with him. He don't belong to the association.' 'What!' 'It's so.' 'Do you mean to tell me that you won't turn a wheel with one of the very best and oldest pilots on the river because he don't belong to your association?' 'Yes, I do.' 'Well, if this isn't putting on airs! I supposed I was doing you a benevolence; but I begin to think that I am the party that wants a favor done. Are you acting under a law of the concern?' 'Yes.' 'Show it to me.' So they stepped into the association rooms, and the secretary soon satisfied the captain, who said-- 'Well, what am I to do? I have hired Mr. S---- for the entire season.' 'I will provide for you,' said the secretary. 'I will detail a pilot to go with you, and he shall be on board at twelve o'clock.' 'But if I discharge S----, he will come on me for the whole season's wages.' 'Of course that is a matter between you and Mr. S----, captain. We cannot meddle in your private affairs.' The captain stormed, but to no purpose. In the end he had to discharge S----, pay him about a thousand dollars, and take an association pilot in his place. The laugh was beginning to turn the other way now. Every day, thenceforward, a new victim fell; every day some outraged captain discharged a non-association pet, with tears and profanity, and installed a hated association man in his berth. In a very little while, idle non-associationists began to be pretty plenty, brisk as business was, and much as their services were desired. The laugh was shifting to the other side of their mouths most palpably. These victims, together with the captains and owners, presently ceased to laugh altogether, and began to rage about the revenge they would take when the passing business 'spurt' was over. Soon all the laughers that were left were the owners and crews of boats that had two non-association pilots. But their triumph was not very long-lived. For this reason: It was a rigid rule of the association that its members should never, under any circumstances whatever, give information about the channel to any 'outsider.' By this time about half the boats had none but association pilots, and the other half had none but outsiders. At the first glance one would suppose that when it came to forbidding information about the river these two parties could play equally at that game; but this was not so. At every good-sized town from one end of the river to the other, there was a 'wharf-boat' to land at, instead of a wharf or a pier. Freight was stored in it for transportation; waiting passengers slept in its cabins. Upon each of these wharf-boats the association's officers placed a strong box fastened with a peculiar lock which was used in no other service but one--the United States mail service. It was the letter-bag lock, a sacred governmental thing. By dint of much beseeching the government had been persuaded to allow the association to use this lock. Every association man carried a key which would open these boxes. That key, or rather a peculiar way of holding it in the hand when its owner was asked for river information by a stranger--for the success of the St. Louis and New Orleans association had now bred tolerably thriving branches in a dozen neighboring steamboat trades--was the association man's sign and diploma of membership; and if the stranger did not respond by producing a similar key and holding it in a certain manner duly prescribed, his question was politely ignored. From the association's secretary each member received a package of more or less gorgeous blanks, printed like a billhead, on handsome paper, properly ruled in columns; a bill-head worded something like this-- STEAMER GREAT REPUBLIC. JOHN SMITH MASTER PILOTS, JOHN JONES AND THOMAS BROWN. + ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- + | CROSSINGS. | SOUNDINGS. | MARKS. | REMARKS. | + ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- + These blanks were filled up, day by day, as the voyage progressed, and deposited in the several wharf-boat boxes. For instance, as soon as the first crossing, out from St. Louis, was completed, the items would be entered upon the blank, under the appropriate headings, thus-- 'St. Louis. Nine and a half (feet). Stern on court-house, head on dead cottonwood above wood-yard, until you raise the first reef, then pull up square.' Then under head of Remarks: 'Go just outside the wrecks; this is important. New snag just where you straighten down; go above it.' The pilot who deposited that blank in the Cairo box (after adding to it the details of every crossing all the way down from St. Louis) took out and read half a dozen fresh reports (from upward-bound steamers) concerning the river between Cairo and Memphis, posted himself thoroughly, returned them to the box, and went back aboard his boat again so armed against accident that he could not possibly get his boat into trouble without bringing the most ingenious carelessness to his aid. Imagine the benefits of so admirable a system in a piece of river twelve or thirteen hundred miles long, whose channel was shifting every day! The pilot who had formerly been obliged to put up with seeing a shoal place once or possibly twice a month, had a hundred sharp eyes to watch it for him, now, and bushels of intelligent brains to tell him how to run it. His information about it was seldom twenty-four hours old. If the reports in the last box chanced to leave any misgivings on his mind concerning a treacherous crossing, he had his remedy; he blew his steam- whistle in a peculiar way as soon as he saw a boat approaching; the signal was answered in a peculiar way if that boat's pilots were association men; and then the two steamers ranged alongside and all uncertainties were swept away by fresh information furnished to the inquirer by word of mouth and in minute detail. The first thing a pilot did when he reached New Orleans or St. Louis was to take his final and elaborate report to the association parlors and hang it up there,--after which he was free to visit his family. In these parlors a crowd was always gathered together, discussing changes in the channel, and the moment there was a fresh arrival, everybody stopped talking till this witness had told the newest news and settled the latest uncertainty. Other craftsmen can 'sink the shop,' sometimes, and interest themselves in other matters. Not so with a pilot; he must devote himself wholly to his profession and talk of nothing else; for it would be small gain to be perfect one day and imperfect the next. He has no time or words to waste if he would keep 'posted.' But the outsiders had a hard time of it. No particular place to meet and exchange information, no wharf-boat reports, none but chance and unsatisfactory ways of getting news. The consequence was that a man sometimes had to run five hundred miles of river on information that was a week or ten days old. At a fair stage of the river that might have answered; but when the dead low water came it was destructive. Now came another perfectly logical result. The outsiders began to ground steamboats, sink them, and get into all sorts of trouble, whereas accidents seemed to keep entirely away from the association men. Wherefore even the owners and captains of boats furnished exclusively with outsiders, and previously considered to be wholly independent of the association and free to comfort themselves with brag and laughter, began to feel pretty uncomfortable. Still, they made a show of keeping up the brag, until one black day when every captain of the lot was formally ordered to immediately discharge his outsiders and take association pilots in their stead. And who was it that had the dashing presumption to do that? Alas, it came from a power behind the throne that was greater than the throne itself. It was the underwriters! It was no time to 'swap knives.' Every outsider had to take his trunk ashore at once. Of course it was supposed that there was collusion between the association and the underwriters, but this was not so. The latter had come to comprehend the excellence of the 'report' system of the association and the safety it secured, and so they had made their decision among themselves and upon plain business principles. There was weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth in the camp of the outsiders now. But no matter, there was but one course for them to pursue, and they pursued it. They came forward in couples and groups, and proffered their twelve dollars and asked for membership. They were surprised to learn that several new by-laws had been long ago added. For instance, the initiation fee had been raised to fifty dollars; that sum must be tendered, and also ten per cent. of the wages which the applicant had received each and every month since the founding of the association. In many cases this amounted to three or four hundred dollars. Still, the association would not entertain the application until the money was present. Even then a single adverse vote killed the application. Every member had to vote 'Yes' or 'No' in person and before witnesses; so it took weeks to decide a candidacy, because many pilots were so long absent on voyages. However, the repentant sinners scraped their savings together, and one by one, by our tedious voting process, they were added to the fold. A time came, at last, when only about ten remained outside. They said they would starve before they would apply. They remained idle a long while, because of course nobody could venture to employ them. By and by the association published the fact that upon a certain date the wages would be raised to five hundred dollars per month. All the branch associations had grown strong, now, and the Red River one had advanced wages to seven hundred dollars a month. Reluctantly the ten outsiders yielded, in view of these things, and made application. There was another new by-law, by this time, which required them to pay dues not only on all the wages they had received since the association was born, but also on what they would have received if they had continued at work up to the time of their application, instead of going off to pout in idleness. It turned out to be a difficult matter to elect them, but it was accomplished at last. The most virulent sinner of this batch had stayed out and allowed 'dues' to accumulate against him so long that he had to send in six hundred and twenty-five dollars with his application. The association had a good bank account now, and was very strong. There was no longer an outsider. A by-law was added forbidding the reception of any more cubs or apprentices for five years; after which time a limited number would be taken, not by individuals, but by the association, upon these terms: the applicant must not be less than eighteen years old, and of respectable family and good character; he must pass an examination as to education, pay a thousand dollars in advance for the privilege of becoming an apprentice, and must remain under the commands of the association until a great part of the membership (more than half, I think) should be willing to sign his application for a pilot's license. All previously-articled apprentices were now taken away from their masters and adopted by the association. The president and secretary detailed them for service on one boat or another, as they chose, and changed them from boat to boat according to certain rules. If a pilot could show that he was in infirm health and needed assistance, one of the cubs would be ordered to go with him. The widow and orphan list grew, but so did the association's financial resources. The association attended its own funerals in state, and paid for them. When occasion demanded, it sent members down the river upon searches for the bodies of brethren lost by steamboat accidents; a search of this kind sometimes cost a thousand dollars. The association procured a charter and went into the insurance business, also. It not only insured the lives of its members, but took risks on steamboats. The organization seemed indestructible. It was the tightest monopoly in the world. By the United States law, no man could become a pilot unless two duly licensed pilots signed his application; and now there was nobody outside of the association competent to sign. Consequently the making of pilots was at an end. Every year some would die and others become incapacitated by age and infirmity; there would be no new ones to take their places. In time, the association could put wages up to any figure it chose; and as long as it should be wise enough not to carry the thing too far and provoke the national government into amending the licensing system, steamboat owners would have to submit, since there would be no help for it. The owners and captains were the only obstruction that lay between the association and absolute power; and at last this one was removed. Incredible as it may seem, the owners and captains deliberately did it themselves. When the pilots' association announced, months beforehand, that on the first day of September, 1861, wages would be advanced to five hundred dollars per month, the owners and captains instantly put freights up a few cents, and explained to the farmers along the river the necessity of it, by calling their attention to the burdensome rate of wages about to be established. It was a rather slender argument, but the farmers did not seem to detect it. It looked reasonable to them that to add five cents freight on a bushel of corn was justifiable under the circumstances, overlooking the fact that this advance on a cargo of forty thousand sacks was a good deal more than necessary to cover the new wages. So, straightway the captains and owners got up an association of their own, and proposed to put captains' wages up to five hundred dollars, too, and move for another advance in freights. It was a novel idea, but of course an effect which had been produced once could be produced again. The new association decreed (for this was before all the outsiders had been taken into the pilots' association) that if any captain employed a non-association pilot, he should be forced to discharge him, and also pay a fine of five hundred dollars. Several of these heavy fines were paid before the captains' organization grew strong enough to exercise full authority over its membership; but that all ceased, presently. The captains tried to get the pilots to decree that no member of their corporation should serve under a non-association captain; but this proposition was declined. The pilots saw that they would be backed up by the captains and the underwriters anyhow, and so they wisely refrained from entering into entangling alliances. As I have remarked, the pilots' association was now the compactest monopoly in the world, perhaps, and seemed simply indestructible. And yet the days of its glory were numbered. First, the new railroad stretching up through Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, to Northern railway centers, began to divert the passenger travel from the steamers; next the war came and almost entirely annihilated the steamboating industry during several years, leaving most of the pilots idle, and the cost of living advancing all the time; then the treasurer of the St. Louis association put his hand into the till and walked off with every dollar of the ample fund; and finally, the railroads intruding everywhere, there was little for steamers to do, when the war was over, but carry freights; so straightway some genius from the Atlantic coast introduced the plan of towing a dozen steamer cargoes down to New Orleans at the tail of a vulgar little tug-boat; and behold, in the twinkling of an eye, as it were, the association and the noble science of piloting were things of the dead and pathetic past! 
8474	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 4. Chapter 16 Racing Days IT was always the custom for the boats to leave New Orleans between four and five o'clock in the afternoon. From three o'clock onward they would be burning rosin and pitch pine (the sign of preparation), and so one had the picturesque spectacle of a rank, some two or three miles long, of tall, ascending columns of coal-black smoke; a colonnade which supported a sable roof of the same smoke blended together and spreading abroad over the city. Every outward-bound boat had its flag flying at the jack-staff, and sometimes a duplicate on the verge staff astern. Two or three miles of mates were commanding and swearing with more than usual emphasis; countless processions of freight barrels and boxes were spinning athwart the levee and flying aboard the stage-planks, belated passengers were dodging and skipping among these frantic things, hoping to reach the forecastle companion way alive, but having their doubts about it; women with reticules and bandboxes were trying to keep up with husbands freighted with carpet-sacks and crying babies, and making a failure of it by losing their heads in the whirl and roar and general distraction; drays and baggage-vans were clattering hither and thither in a wild hurry, every now and then getting blocked and jammed together, and then during ten seconds one could not see them for the profanity, except vaguely and dimly; every windlass connected with every forehatch, from one end of that long array of steamboats to the other, was keeping up a deafening whiz and whir, lowering freight into the hold, and the half-naked crews of perspiring negroes that worked them were roaring such songs as 'De Las' Sack! De Las' Sack!'--inspired to unimaginable exaltation by the chaos of turmoil and racket that was driving everybody else mad. By this time the hurricane and boiler decks of the steamers would be packed and black with passengers. The 'last bells' would begin to clang, all down the line, and then the powwow seemed to double; in a moment or two the final warning came,--a simultaneous din of Chinese gongs, with the cry, 'All dat ain't goin', please to git asho'!'--and behold, the powwow quadrupled! People came swarming ashore, overturning excited stragglers that were trying to swarm aboard. One more moment later a long array of stage-planks was being hauled in, each with its customary latest passenger clinging to the end of it with teeth, nails, and everything else, and the customary latest procrastinator making a wild spring shoreward over his head. Now a number of the boats slide backward into the stream, leaving wide gaps in the serried rank of steamers. Citizens crowd the decks of boats that are not to go, in order to see the sight. Steamer after steamer straightens herself up, gathers all her strength, and presently comes swinging by, under a tremendous head of steam, with flag flying, black smoke rolling, and her entire crew of firemen and deck-hands (usually swarthy negroes) massed together on the forecastle, the best 'voice' in the lot towering from the midst (being mounted on the capstan), waving his hat or a flag, and all roaring a mighty chorus, while the parting cannons boom and the multitudinous spectators swing their hats and huzza! Steamer after steamer falls into line, and the stately procession goes winging its flight up the river. In the old times, whenever two fast boats started out on a race, with a big crowd of people looking on, it was inspiring to hear the crews sing, especially if the time were night-fall, and the forecastle lit up with the red glare of the torch-baskets. Racing was royal fun. The public always had an idea that racing was dangerous; whereas the opposite was the case--that is, after the laws were passed which restricted each boat to just so many pounds of steam to the square inch. No engineer was ever sleepy or careless when his heart was in a race. He was constantly on the alert, trying gauge-cocks and watching things. The dangerous place was on slow, plodding boats, where the engineers drowsed around and allowed chips to get into the 'doctor' and shut off the water supply from the boilers. In the 'flush times' of steamboating, a race between two notoriously fleet steamers was an event of vast importance. The date was set for it several weeks in advance, and from that time forward, the whole Mississippi Valley was in a state of consuming excitement. Politics and the weather were dropped, and people talked only of the coming race. As the time approached, the two steamers 'stripped' and got ready. Every encumbrance that added weight, or exposed a resisting surface to wind or water, was removed, if the boat could possibly do without it. The 'spars,' and sometimes even their supporting derricks, were sent ashore, and no means left to set the boat afloat in case she got aground. When the 'Eclipse' and the 'A. L. Shotwell' ran their great race many years ago, it was said that pains were taken to scrape the gilding off the fanciful device which hung between the 'Eclipse's' chimneys, and that for that one trip the captain left off his kid gloves and had his head shaved. But I always doubted these things. If the boat was known to make her best speed when drawing five and a half feet forward and five feet aft, she was carefully loaded to that exact figure--she wouldn't enter a dose of homoeopathic pills on her manifest after that. Hardly any passengers were taken, because they not only add weight but they never will 'trim boat.' They always run to the side when there is anything to see, whereas a conscientious and experienced steamboatman would stick to the center of the boat and part his hair in the middle with a spirit level. No way-freights and no way-passengers were allowed, for the racers would stop only at the largest towns, and then it would be only 'touch and go.' Coal flats and wood flats were contracted for beforehand, and these were kept ready to hitch on to the flying steamers at a moment's warning. Double crews were carried, so that all work could be quickly done. The chosen date being come, and all things in readiness, the two great steamers back into the stream, and lie there jockeying a moment, and apparently watching each other's slightest movement, like sentient creatures; flags drooping, the pent steam shrieking through safety- valves, the black smoke rolling and tumbling from the chimneys and darkening all the air. People, people everywhere; the shores, the house- tops, the steamboats, the ships, are packed with them, and you know that the borders of the broad Mississippi are going to be fringed with humanity thence northward twelve hundred miles, to welcome these racers. Presently tall columns of steam burst from the 'scape-pipes of both steamers, two guns boom a good-bye, two red-shirted heroes mounted on capstans wave their small flags above the massed crews on the forecastles, two plaintive solos linger on the air a few waiting seconds, two mighty choruses burst forth--and here they come! Brass bands bray Hail Columbia, huzza after huzza thunders from the shores, and the stately creatures go whistling by like the wind. Those boats will never halt a moment between New Orleans and St. Louis, except for a second or two at large towns, or to hitch thirty-cord wood- boats alongside. You should be on board when they take a couple of those wood-boats in tow and turn a swarm of men into each; by the time you have wiped your glasses and put them on, you will be wondering what has become of that wood. Two nicely matched steamers will stay in sight of each other day after day. They might even stay side by side, but for the fact that pilots are not all alike, and the smartest pilots will win the race. If one of the boats has a 'lightning' pilot, whose 'partner' is a trifle his inferior, you can tell which one is on watch by noting whether that boat has gained ground or lost some during each four-hour stretch. The shrewdest pilot can delay a boat if he has not a fine genius for steering. Steering is a very high art. One must not keep a rudder dragging across a boat's stem if he wants to get up the river fast. There is a great difference in boats, of course. For a long time I was on a boat that was so slow we used to forget what year it was we left port in. But of course this was at rare intervals. Ferryboats used to lose valuable trips because their passengers grew old and died, waiting for us to get by. This was at still rarer intervals. I had the documents for these occurrences, but through carelessness they have been mislaid. This boat, the 'John J. Roe,' was so slow that when she finally sunk in Madrid Bend, it was five years before the owners heard of it. That was always a confusing fact to me, but it is according to the record, any way. She was dismally slow; still, we often had pretty exciting times racing with islands, and rafts, and such things. One trip, however, we did rather well. We went to St. Louis in sixteen days. But even at this rattling gait I think we changed watches three times in Fort Adams reach, which is five miles long. A 'reach' is a piece of straight river, and of course the current drives through such a place in a pretty lively way. That trip we went to Grand Gulf, from New Orleans, in four days (three hundred and forty miles); the 'Eclipse' and 'Shotwell' did it in one. We were nine days out, in the chute of 63 (seven hundred miles); the 'Eclipse' and 'Shotwell' went there in two days. Something over a generation ago, a boat called the 'J. M. White' went from New Orleans to Cairo in three days, six hours, and forty-four minutes. In 1853 the 'Eclipse' made the same trip in three days, three hours, and twenty minutes.{footnote [Time disputed. Some authorities add 1 hour and 16 minutes to this.]} In 1870 the 'R. E. Lee' did it in three days and ONE hour. This last is called the fastest trip on record. I will try to show that it was not. For this reason: the distance between New Orleans and Cairo, when the 'J. M. White' ran it, was about eleven hundred and six miles; consequently her average speed was a trifle over fourteen miles per hour. In the 'Eclipse's' day the distance between the two ports had become reduced to one thousand and eighty miles; consequently her average speed was a shade under fourteen and three-eighths miles per hour. In the 'R. E. Lee's' time the distance had diminished to about one thousand and thirty miles; consequently her average was about fourteen and one-eighth miles per hour. Therefore the 'Eclipse's' was conspicuously the fastest time that has ever been made. THE RECORD OF SOME FAMOUS TRIPS (From Commodore Rollingpin's Almanack.) FAST TIME ON THE WESTERN WATERS FROM NEW ORLEANS TO NATCHEZ--268 MILES D. H. M. 1814 Orleans made the run in 6 6 40 1814 Comet " " 5 10 1815 Enterprise " " 4 11 20 1817 Washington " " 4 1817 Shelby " " 3 20 1818 Paragon " " 3 8 1828 Tecumseh " " 3 1 20 1834 Tuscarora " " 1 21 1838 Natchez " " 1 17 1840 Ed. Shippen " " 1 8 1842 Belle of the West " 1 18 1844 Sultana " " 19 45 1851 Magnolia " " 19 50 1853 A. L. Shotwell " " 19 49 1853 Southern Belle " " 20 3 1853 Princess (No. 4) " 20 26 1853 Eclipse " " 19 47 1855 Princess (New) " " 18 53 1855 Natchez (New) " " 17 30 1856 Princess (New) " " 17 30 1870 Natchez " " 17 17 1870 R. E. Lee " " 17 11 FROM NEW ORLEANS TO CAIRO--1,024 MILES D. H. M. 1844 J. M. White made the run in 3 6 44 1852 Reindeer " " 3 12 45 1853 Eclipse " " 3 4 4 1853 A. L. Shotwell " " 3 3 40 1869 Dexter " " 3 6 20 1870 Natchez " " 3 4 34 1870 R. E. Lee " " 3 1 FROM NEW ORLEANS TO LOUISVILLE--1,440 MILES D. H. M. 1815 Enterprise made the run in 25 2 40 1817 Washington " " 25 1817. Shelby " " 20 4 20 1818 Paragon " " 18 10 1828 Tecumseh " " 8 4 1834 Tuscarora " " 7 16 1837 Gen. Brown " " 6 22 1837 Randolph " " 6 22 1837 Empress " " 6 17 1837 Sultana " " 6 15 1840 Ed. Shippen " " 5 14 1842 Belle of the West " 6 14 1843 Duke of Orleans" " 5 23 1844 Sultana " " 5 12 1849 Bostona " " 5 8 1851 Belle Key " " 3 4 23 1852 Reindeer " " 4 20 45 1852 Eclipse " " 4 19 1853 A. L. Shotwell " " 4 10 20 1853 Eclipse " " 4 9 30 FROM NEW ORLEANS TO DONALDSONVILLE--78 MILES H. M. 1852 A. L. Shotwell made the run in 5 42 1852 Eclipse " " 5 42 1854 Sultana " " 4 51 1860 Atlantic " " 5 11 1860 Gen. Quitman " " 5 6 1865 Ruth " " 4 43 1870 R. E. Lee " " 4 59 FROM NEW ORLEANS TO ST. LOUIS--1,218 MILES D. H. M. 1844 J. M. White made the run in 3 23 9 1849 Missouri " " 4 19 1869 Dexter " " 4 9 1870 Natchez " " 3 21 58 1870 R. E. Lee " " 3 18 14 FROM LOUISVILLE TO CINCINNATI--141 MILES D. H. M. 1819 Gen. Pike made the run in 1 16 1819 Paragon " " 1 14 20 1822 Wheeling Packet " " 1 10 1837 Moselle " " 12 1843 Duke of Orleans " " 12 1843 Congress " " 12 20 1846 Ben Franklin (No. 6) " 11 45 1852 Alleghaney " " 10 38 1852 Pittsburgh " " 10 23 1853 Telegraph No. 3 " " 9 52 FROM LOUISVILLE TO ST. LOUIS--750 MILES D. H. M. 1843 Congress made the run in 2 1 1854 Pike " " 1 23 1854 Northerner " " 1 22 30 1855 Southemer " " 1 19 FROM CINCINNATI TO PITTSBURGH--490 MILES D. H. 1850 Telegraph No. 2 made the run in 1 17 1851 Buckeye State " " 1 16 1852 Pittsburgh " " 1 15 FROM ST. LOUIS TO ALTON--30 MILES D. M. 1853 Altona made the run in 1 35 1876 Golden Eagle " " 1 37 1876 War Eagle " " 1 37 MISCELLANEOUS RUNS In June, 1859, the St. Louis and Keokuk Packet, City of Louisiana, made the run from St. Louis to Keokuk (214 miles) in 16 hours and 20 minutes, the best time on record. In 1868 the steamer Hawkeye State, of the Northern Packet Company, made the run from St. Louis to St. Paul (800 miles) in 2 days and 20 hours. Never was beaten. In 1853 the steamer Polar Star made the run from St. Louis to St. Joseph, on the Missouri River, in 64 hours. In July, 1856, the steamer Jas. H. Lucas, Andy Wineland, Master, made the same run in 60 hours and 57 minutes. The distance between the ports is 600 miles, and when the difficulties of navigating the turbulent Missouri are taken into consideration, the performance of the Lucas deserves especial mention. THE RUN OF THE ROBERT E. LEE The time made by the R. E. Lee from New Orleans to St. Louis in 1870, in her famous race with the Natchez, is the best on record, and, inasmuch as the race created a national interest, we give below her time table from port to port. Left New Orleans, Thursday, June 30th, 1870, at 4 o'clock and 55 minutes, p.m.; reached D. H. M. Carrollton 27{half} Harry Hills 1 00{half} Red Church 1 39 Bonnet Carre 2 38 College Point 3 50{half} Donaldsonville 4 59 Plaquemine 7 05{half} Baton Rouge 8 25 Bayou Sara 10 26 Red River 12 56 Stamps 13 56 Bryaro 15 51{half} Hinderson's 16 29 Natchez 17 11 Cole's Creek 19 21 Waterproof 18 53 Rodney 20 45 St. Joseph 21 02 Grand Gulf 22 06 Hard Times 22 18 Half Mile below Warrenton 1 Vicksburg 1 38 Milliken's Bend 1 2 37 Bailey's 1 3 48 Lake Providence 1 5 47 Greenville 1 10 55 Napoleon 1 16 22 White River 1 16 56 Australia 1 19 Helena 1 23 25 Half Mile Below St. Francis 2 Memphis 2 6 9 Foot of Island 37 2 9 Foot of Island 26 2 13 30 Tow-head, Island 14 2 17 23 New Madrid 2 19 50 Dry Bar No. 10 2 20 37 Foot of Island 8 2 21 25 Upper Tow-head--Lucas Bend 3 Cairo 3 1 St. Louis 3 18 14 The Lee landed at St. Louis at 11.25 A.M., on July 4th, 1870--6 hours and 36 minutes ahead of the Natchez. The officers of the Natchez claimed 7 hours and 1 minute stoppage on account of fog and repairing machinery. The R. E. Lee was commanded by Captain John W. Cannon, and the Natchez was in charge of that veteran Southern boatman, Captain Thomas P. Leathers. Chapter 17 Cut-offs and Stephen THESE dry details are of importance in one particular. They give me an opportunity of introducing one of the Mississippi's oddest peculiarities,--that of shortening its length from time to time. If you will throw a long, pliant apple-paring over your shoulder, it will pretty fairly shape itself into an average section of the Mississippi River; that is, the nine or ten hundred miles stretching from Cairo, Illinois, southward to New Orleans, the same being wonderfully crooked, with a brief straight bit here and there at wide intervals. The two hundred-mile stretch from Cairo northward to St. Louis is by no means so crooked, that being a rocky country which the river cannot cut much. The water cuts the alluvial banks of the 'lower' river into deep horseshoe curves; so deep, indeed, that in some places if you were to get ashore at one extremity of the horseshoe and walk across the neck, half or three quarters of a mile, you could sit down and rest a couple of hours while your steamer was coming around the long elbow, at a speed of ten miles an hour, to take you aboard again. When the river is rising fast, some scoundrel whose plantation is back in the country, and therefore of inferior value, has only to watch his chance, cut a little gutter across the narrow neck of land some dark night, and turn the water into it, and in a wonderfully short time a miracle has happened: to wit, the whole Mississippi has taken possession of that little ditch, and placed the countryman's plantation on its bank (quadrupling its value), and that other party's formerly valuable plantation finds itself away out yonder on a big island; the old watercourse around it will soon shoal up, boats cannot approach within ten miles of it, and down goes its value to a fourth of its former worth. Watches are kept on those narrow necks, at needful times, and if a man happens to be caught cutting a ditch across them, the chances are all against his ever having another opportunity to cut a ditch. Pray observe some of the effects of this ditching business. Once there was a neck opposite Port Hudson, Louisiana, which was only half a mile across, in its narrowest place. You could walk across there in fifteen minutes; but if you made the journey around the cape on a raft, you traveled thirty-five miles to accomplish the same thing. In 1722 the river darted through that neck, deserted its old bed, and thus shortened itself thirty-five miles. In the same way it shortened itself twenty- five miles at Black Hawk Point in 1699. Below Red River Landing, Raccourci cut-off was made (forty or fifty years ago, I think). This shortened the river twenty-eight miles. In our day, if you travel by river from the southernmost of these three cut-offs to the northernmost, you go only seventy miles. To do the same thing a hundred and seventy- six years ago, one had to go a hundred and fifty-eight miles!-- shortening of eighty-eight miles in that trifling distance. At some forgotten time in the past, cut-offs were made above Vidalia, Louisiana; at island 92; at island 84; and at Hale's Point. These shortened the river, in the aggregate, seventy-seven miles. Since my own day on the Mississippi, cut-offs have been made at Hurricane Island; at island 100; at Napoleon, Arkansas; at Walnut Bend; and at Council Bend. These shortened the river, in the aggregate, sixty-seven miles. In my own time a cut-off was made at American Bend, which shortened the river ten miles or more. Therefore, the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cut-off of 1722. It was one thousand and forty after the American Bend cut-off. It has lost sixty- seven miles since. Consequently its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present. Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and 'let on' to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! Nor 'development of species,' either! Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague--vague. Please observe:-- In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,' just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty- two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three- quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. When the water begins to flow through one of those ditches I have been speaking of, it is time for the people thereabouts to move. The water cleaves the banks away like a knife. By the time the ditch has become twelve or fifteen feet wide, the calamity is as good as accomplished, for no power on earth can stop it now. When the width has reached a hundred yards, the banks begin to peel off in slices half an acre wide. The current flowing around the bend traveled formerly only five miles an hour; now it is tremendously increased by the shortening of the distance. I was on board the first boat that tried to go through the cut-off at American Bend, but we did not get through. It was toward midnight, and a wild night it was--thunder, lightning, and torrents of rain. It was estimated that the current in the cut-off was making about fifteen or twenty miles an hour; twelve or thirteen was the best our boat could do, even in tolerably slack water, therefore perhaps we were foolish to try the cut-off. However, Mr. Brown was ambitious, and he kept on trying. The eddy running up the bank, under the 'point,' was about as swift as the current out in the middle; so we would go flying up the shore like a lightning express train, get on a big head of steam, and 'stand by for a surge' when we struck the current that was whirling by the point. But all our preparations were useless. The instant the current hit us it spun us around like a top, the water deluged the forecastle, and the boat careened so far over that one could hardly keep his feet. The next instant we were away down the river, clawing with might and main to keep out of the woods. We tried the experiment four times. I stood on the forecastle companion way to see. It was astonishing to observe how suddenly the boat would spin around and turn tail the moment she emerged from the eddy and the current struck her nose. The sounding concussion and the quivering would have been about the same if she had come full speed against a sand-bank. Under the lightning flashes one could see the plantation cabins and the goodly acres tumble into the river; and the crash they made was not a bad effort at thunder. Once, when we spun around, we only missed a house about twenty feet, that had a light burning in the window; and in the same instant that house went overboard. Nobody could stay on our forecastle; the water swept across it in a torrent every time we plunged athwart the current. At the end of our fourth effort we brought up in the woods two miles below the cut-off; all the country there was overflowed, of course. A day or two later the cut-off was three-quarters of a mile wide, and boats passed up through it without much difficulty, and so saved ten miles. The old Raccourci cut-off reduced the river's length twenty-eight miles. There used to be a tradition connected with it. It was said that a boat came along there in the night and went around the enormous elbow the usual way, the pilots not knowing that the cut-off had been made. It was a grisly, hideous night, and all shapes were vague and distorted. The old bend had already begun to fill up, and the boat got to running away from mysterious reefs, and occasionally hitting one. The perplexed pilots fell to swearing, and finally uttered the entirely unnecessary wish that they might never get out of that place. As always happens in such cases, that particular prayer was answered, and the others neglected. So to this day that phantom steamer is still butting around in that deserted river, trying to find her way out. More than one grave watchman has sworn to me that on drizzly, dismal nights, he has glanced fearfully down that forgotten river as he passed the head of the island, and seen the faint glow of the specter steamer's lights drifting through the distant gloom, and heard the muffled cough of her 'scape-pipes and the plaintive cry of her leadsmen. In the absence of further statistics, I beg to close this chapter with one more reminiscence of 'Stephen.' Most of the captains and pilots held Stephen's note for borrowed sums, ranging from two hundred and fifty dollars upward. Stephen never paid one of these notes, but he was very prompt and very zealous about renewing them every twelve months. Of course there came a time, at last, when Stephen could no longer borrow of his ancient creditors; so he was obliged to lie in wait for new men who did not know him. Such a victim was good-hearted, simple natured young Yates (I use a fictitious name, but the real name began, as this one does, with a Y). Young Yates graduated as a pilot, got a berth, and when the month was ended and he stepped up to the clerk's office and received his two hundred and fifty dollars in crisp new bills, Stephen was there! His silvery tongue began to wag, and in a very little while Yates's two hundred and fifty dollars had changed hands. The fact was soon known at pilot headquarters, and the amusement and satisfaction of the old creditors were large and generous. But innocent Yates never suspected that Stephen's promise to pay promptly at the end of the week was a worthless one. Yates called for his money at the stipulated time; Stephen sweetened him up and put him off a week. He called then, according to agreement, and came away sugar-coated again, but suffering under another postponement. So the thing went on. Yates haunted Stephen week after week, to no purpose, and at last gave it up. And then straightway Stephen began to haunt Yates! Wherever Yates appeared, there was the inevitable Stephen. And not only there, but beaming with affection and gushing with apologies for not being able to pay. By and by, whenever poor Yates saw him coming, he would turn and fly, and drag his company with him, if he had company; but it was of no use; his debtor would run him down and corner him. Panting and red- faced, Stephen would come, with outstretched hands and eager eyes, invade the conversation, shake both of Yates's arms loose in their sockets, and begin-- 'My, what a race I've had! I saw you didn't see me, and so I clapped on all steam for fear I'd miss you entirely. And here you are! there, just stand so, and let me look at you! just the same old noble countenance.' [To Yates's friend:] 'Just look at him! LOOK at him! Ain't it just GOOD to look at him! AIN'T it now? Ain't he just a picture! SOME call him a picture; I call him a panorama! That's what he is--an entire panorama. And now I'm reminded! How I do wish I could have seen you an hour earlier! For twenty-four hours I've been saving up that two hundred and fifty dollars for you; been looking for you everywhere. I waited at the Planter's from six yesterday evening till two o'clock this morning, without rest or food; my wife says, "Where have you been all night?" I said, "This debt lies heavy on my mind." She says, "In all my days I never saw a man take a debt to heart the way you do." I said, "It's my nature; how can I change it?" She says, "Well, do go to bed and get some rest." I said, "Not till that poor, noble young man has got his money." So I set up all night, and this morning out I shot, and the first man I struck told me you had shipped on the "Grand Turk" and gone to New Orleans. Well, sir, I had to lean up against a building and cry. So help me goodness, I couldn't help it. The man that owned the place come out cleaning up with a rag, and said he didn't like to have people cry against his building, and then it seemed to me that the whole world had turned against me, and it wasn't any use to live any more; and coming along an hour ago, suffering no man knows what agony, I met Jim Wilson and paid him the two hundred and fifty dollars on account; and to think that here you are, now, and I haven't got a cent! But as sure as I am standing here on this ground on this particular brick,--there, I've scratched a mark on the brick to remember it by,--I'll borrow that money and pay it over to you at twelve o'clock sharp, tomorrow! Now, stand so; let me look at you just once more.' And so on. Yates's life became a burden to him. He could not escape his debtor and his debtor's awful sufferings on account of not being able to pay. He dreaded to show himself in the street, lest he should find Stephen lying in wait for him at the corner. Bogart's billiard saloon was a great resort for pilots in those days. They met there about as much to exchange river news as to play. One morning Yates was there; Stephen was there, too, but kept out of sight. But by and by, when about all the pilots had arrived who were in town, Stephen suddenly appeared in the midst, and rushed for Yates as for a long-lost brother. 'OH, I am so glad to see you! Oh my soul, the sight of you is such a comfort to my eyes! Gentlemen, I owe all of you money; among you I owe probably forty thousand dollars. I want to pay it; I intend to pay it every last cent of it. You all know, without my telling you, what sorrow it has cost me to remain so long under such deep obligations to such patient and generous friends; but the sharpest pang I suffer--by far the sharpest--is from the debt I owe to this noble young man here; and I have come to this place this morning especially to make the announcement that I have at last found a method whereby I can pay off all my debts! And most especially I wanted HIM to be here when I announced it. Yes, my faithful friend,--my benefactor, I've found the method! I've found the method to pay off all my debts, and you'll get your money!' Hope dawned in Yates's eye; then Stephen, beaming benignantly, and placing his hand upon Yates's head, added, 'I am going to pay them off in alphabetical order!' Then he turned and disappeared. The full significance of Stephen's 'method' did not dawn upon the perplexed and musing crowd for some two minutes; and then Yates murmured with a sigh-- 'Well, the Y's stand a gaudy chance. He won't get any further than the C's in THIS world, and I reckon that after a good deal of eternity has wasted away in the next one, I'll still be referred to up there as "that poor, ragged pilot that came here from St. Louis in the early days!" Chapter 18 I Take a Few Extra Lessons DURING the two or two and a half years of my apprenticeship, I served under many pilots, and had experience of many kinds of steamboatmen and many varieties of steamboats; for it was not always convenient for Mr. Bixby to have me with him, and in such cases he sent me with somebody else. I am to this day profiting somewhat by that experience; for in that brief, sharp schooling, I got personally and familiarly acquainted with about all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. The fact is daily borne in upon me, that the average shore-employment requires as much as forty years to equip a man with this sort of an education. When I say I am still profiting by this thing, I do not mean that it has constituted me a judge of men--no, it has not done that; for judges of men are born, not made. My profit is various in kind and degree; but the feature of it which I value most is the zest which that early experience has given to my later reading. When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before--met him on the river. The figure that comes before me oftenest, out of the shadows of that vanished time, is that of Brown, of the steamer 'Pennsylvania'--the man referred to in a former chapter, whose memory was so good and tiresome. He was a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-shaven, horse-faced, ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault hunting, mote-magnifying tyrant. I early got the habit of coming on watch with dread at my heart. No matter how good a time I might have been having with the off-watch below, and no matter how high my spirits might be when I started aloft, my soul became lead in my body the moment I approached the pilot-house. I still remember the first time I ever entered the presence of that man. The boat had backed out from St. Louis and was 'straightening down;' I ascended to the pilot-house in high feather, and very proud to be semi- officially a member of the executive family of so fast and famous a boat. Brown was at the wheel. I paused in the middle of the room, all fixed to make my bow, but Brown did not look around. I thought he took a furtive glance at me out of the corner of his eye, but as not even this notice was repeated, I judged I had been mistaken. By this time he was picking his way among some dangerous 'breaks' abreast the woodyards; therefore it would not be proper to interrupt him; so I stepped softly to the high bench and took a seat. There was silence for ten minutes; then my new boss turned and inspected me deliberately and painstakingly from head to heel for about--as it seemed to me--a quarter of an hour. After which he removed his countenance and I saw it no more for some seconds; then it came around once more, and this question greeted me-- 'Are you Horace Bigsby's cub?' 'Yes, sir.' After this there was a pause and another inspection. Then-- 'What's your name?' I told him. He repeated it after me. It was probably the only thing he ever forgot; for although I was with him many months he never addressed himself to me in any other way than 'Here!' and then his command followed. 'Where was you born?' 'In Florida, Missouri.' A pause. Then-- 'Dern sight better staid there!' By means of a dozen or so of pretty direct questions, he pumped my family history out of me. The leads were going now, in the first crossing. This interrupted the inquest. When the leads had been laid in, he resumed-- 'How long you been on the river?' I told him. After a pause-- 'Where'd you get them shoes?' I gave him the information. 'Hold up your foot!' I did so. He stepped back, examined the shoe minutely and contemptuously, scratching his head thoughtfully, tilting his high sugar-loaf hat well forward to facilitate the operation, then ejaculated, 'Well, I'll be dod derned!' and returned to his wheel. What occasion there was to be dod derned about it is a thing which is still as much of a mystery to me now as it was then. It must have been all of fifteen minutes--fifteen minutes of dull, homesick silence-- before that long horse-face swung round upon me again--and then, what a change! It was as red as fire, and every muscle in it was working. Now came this shriek-- 'Here!--You going to set there all day?' I lit in the middle of the floor, shot there by the electric suddenness of the surprise. As soon as I could get my voice I said, apologetically:--'I have had no orders, sir.' 'You've had no ORDERS! My, what a fine bird we are! We must have ORDERS! Our father was a GENTLEMAN--owned slaves--and we've been to SCHOOL. Yes, WE are a gentleman, TOO, and got to have ORDERS! ORDERS, is it? ORDERS is what you want! Dod dern my skin, I'LL learn you to swell yourself up and blow around here about your dod-derned ORDERS! G'way from the wheel!' (I had approached it without knowing it.) I moved back a step or two, and stood as in a dream, all my senses stupefied by this frantic assault. 'What you standing there for? Take that ice-pitcher down to the texas- tender-come, move along, and don't you be all day about it!' The moment I got back to the pilot-house, Brown said-- 'Here! What was you doing down there all this time?' 'I couldn't find the texas-tender; I had to go all the way to the pantry.' 'Derned likely story! Fill up the stove.' I proceeded to do so. He watched me like a cat. Presently he shouted-- 'Put down that shovel! Deadest numskull I ever saw--ain't even got sense enough to load up a stove.' All through the watch this sort of thing went on. Yes, and the subsequent watches were much like it, during a stretch of months. As I have said, I soon got the habit of coming on duty with dread. The moment I was in the presence, even in the darkest night, I could feel those yellow eyes upon me, and knew their owner was watching for a pretext to spit out some venom on me. Preliminarily he would say-- 'Here! Take the wheel.' Two minutes later-- 'WHERE in the nation you going to? Pull her down! pull her down!' After another moment-- 'Say! You going to hold her all day? Let her go--meet her! meet her!' Then he would jump from the bench, snatch the wheel from me, and meet her himself, pouring out wrath upon me all the time. George Ritchie was the other pilot's cub. He was having good times now; for his boss, George Ealer, was as kindhearted as Brown wasn't. Ritchie had steeled for Brown the season before; consequently he knew exactly how to entertain himself and plague me, all by the one operation. Whenever I took the wheel for a moment on Ealer's watch, Ritchie would sit back on the bench and play Brown, with continual ejaculations of 'Snatch her! snatch her! Derndest mud-cat I ever saw!' 'Here! Where you going NOW? Going to run over that snag?' 'Pull her DOWN! Don't you hear me? Pull her DOWN!' 'There she goes! JUST as I expected! I TOLD you not to cramp that reef. G'way from the wheel!' So I always had a rough time of it, no matter whose watch it was; and sometimes it seemed to me that Ritchie's good-natured badgering was pretty nearly as aggravating as Brown's dead-earnest nagging. I often wanted to kill Brown, but this would not answer. A cub had to take everything his boss gave, in the way of vigorous comment and criticism; and we all believed that there was a United States law making it a penitentiary offense to strike or threaten a pilot who was on duty. However, I could IMAGINE myself killing Brown; there was no law against that; and that was the thing I used always to do the moment I was abed. Instead of going over my river in my mind as was my duty, I threw business aside for pleasure, and killed Brown. I killed Brown every night for months; not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new and picturesque ones;--ways that were sometimes surprising for freshness of design and ghastliness of situation and environment. Brown was ALWAYS watching for a pretext to find fault; and if he could find no plausible pretext, he would invent one. He would scold you for shaving a shore, and for not shaving it; for hugging a bar, and for not hugging it; for 'pulling down' when not invited, and for not pulling down when not invited; for firing up without orders, and for waiting FOR orders. In a word, it was his invariable rule to find fault with EVERYTHING you did; and another invariable rule of his was to throw all his remarks (to you) into the form of an insult. One day we were approaching New Madrid, bound down and heavily laden. Brown was at one side of the wheel, steering; I was at the other, standing by to 'pull down' or 'shove up.' He cast a furtive glance at me every now and then. I had long ago learned what that meant; viz., he was trying to invent a trap for me. I wondered what shape it was going to take. By and by he stepped back from the wheel and said in his usual snarly way-- 'Here!--See if you've got gumption enough to round her to.' This was simply BOUND to be a success; nothing could prevent it; for he had never allowed me to round the boat to before; consequently, no matter how I might do the thing, he could find free fault with it. He stood back there with his greedy eye on me, and the result was what might have been foreseen: I lost my head in a quarter of a minute, and didn't know what I was about; I started too early to bring the boat around, but detected a green gleam of joy in Brown's eye, and corrected my mistake; I started around once more while too high up, but corrected myself again in time; I made other false moves, and still managed to save myself; but at last I grew so confused and anxious that I tumbled into the very worst blunder of all--I got too far down before beginning to fetch the boat around. Brown's chance was come. His face turned red with passion; he made one bound, hurled me across the house with a sweep of his arm, spun the wheel down, and began to pour out a stream of vituperation upon me which lasted till he was out of breath. In the course of this speech he called me all the different kinds of hard names he could think of, and once or twice I thought he was even going to swear--but he didn't this time. 'Dod dern' was the nearest he ventured to the luxury of swearing, for he had been brought up with a wholesome respect for future fire and brimstone. That was an uncomfortable hour; for there was a big audience on the hurricane deck. When I went to bed that night, I killed Brown in seventeen different ways--all of them new. Chapter 19 Brown and I Exchange Compliments Two trips later, I got into serious trouble. Brown was steering; I was 'pulling down.' My younger brother appeared on the hurricane deck, and shouted to Brown to stop at some landing or other a mile or so below. Brown gave no intimation that he had heard anything. But that was his way: he never condescended to take notice of an under clerk. The wind was blowing; Brown was deaf (although he always pretended he wasn't), and I very much doubted if he had heard the order. If I had two heads, I would have spoken; but as I had only one, it seemed judicious to take care of it; so I kept still. Presently, sure enough, we went sailing by that plantation. Captain Klinefelter appeared on the deck, and said-- 'Let her come around, sir, let her come around. Didn't Henry tell you to land here?' 'NO, sir!' 'I sent him up to do, it.' 'He did come up; and that's all the good it done, the dod-derned fool. He never said anything.' 'Didn't YOU hear him?' asked the captain of me. Of course I didn't want to be mixed up in this business, but there was no way to avoid it; so I said-- 'Yes, sir.' I knew what Brown's next remark would be, before he uttered it; it was-- 'Shut your mouth! you never heard anything of the kind.' I closed my mouth according to instructions. An hour later, Henry entered the pilot-house, unaware of what had been going on. He was a thoroughly inoffensive boy, and I was sorry to see him come, for I knew Brown would have no pity on him. Brown began, straightway-- 'Here! why didn't you tell me we'd got to land at that plantation?' 'I did tell you, Mr. Brown.' 'It's a lie!' I said-- 'You lie, yourself. He did tell you.' Brown glared at me in unaffected surprise; and for as much as a moment he was entirely speechless; then he shouted to me-- 'I'll attend to your case in half a minute!' then to Henry, 'And you leave the pilot-house; out with you!' It was pilot law, and must be obeyed. The boy started out, and even had his foot on the upper step outside the door, when Brown, with a sudden access of fury, picked up a ten-pound lump of coal and sprang after him; but I was between, with a heavy stool, and I hit Brown a good honest blow which stretched-him out. I had committed the crime of crimes--I had lifted my hand against a pilot on duty! I supposed I was booked for the penitentiary sure, and couldn't be booked any surer if I went on and squared my long account with this person while I had the chance; consequently I stuck to him and pounded him with my fists a considerable time--I do not know how long, the pleasure of it probably made it seem longer than it really was;--but in the end he struggled free and jumped up and sprang to the wheel: a very natural solicitude, for, all this time, here was this steamboat tearing down the river at the rate of fifteen miles an hour and nobody at the helm! However, Eagle Bend was two miles wide at this bank-full stage, and correspondingly long and deep; and the boat was steering herself straight down the middle and taking no chances. Still, that was only luck--a body MIGHT have found her charging into the woods. Perceiving, at a glance, that the 'Pennsylvania' was in no danger, Brown gathered up the big spy-glass, war-club fashion, and ordered me out of the pilot-house with more than Comanche bluster. But I was not afraid of him now; so, instead of going, I tarried, and criticized his grammar; I reformed his ferocious speeches for him, and put them into good English, calling his attention to the advantage of pure English over the bastard dialect of the Pennsylvanian collieries whence he was extracted. He could have done his part to admiration in a cross-fire of mere vituperation, of course; but he was not equipped for this species of controversy; so he presently laid aside his glass and took the wheel, muttering and shaking his head; and I retired to the bench. The racket had brought everybody to the hurricane deck, and I trembled when I saw the old captain looking up from the midst of the crowd. I said to myself, 'Now I AM done for!'--For although, as a rule, he was so fatherly and indulgent toward the boat's family, and so patient of minor shortcomings, he could be stern enough when the fault was worth it. I tried to imagine what he WOULD do to a cub pilot who had been guilty of such a crime as mine, committed on a boat guard-deep with costly freight and alive with passengers. Our watch was nearly ended. I thought I would go and hide somewhere till I got a chance to slide ashore. So I slipped out of the pilot-house, and down the steps, and around to the texas door--and was in the act of gliding within, when the captain confronted me! I dropped my head, and he stood over me in silence a moment or two, then said impressively-- 'Follow me.' I dropped into his wake; he led the way to his parlor in the forward end of the texas. We were alone, now. He closed the after door; then moved slowly to the forward one and closed that. He sat down; I stood before him. He looked at me some little time, then said-- 'So you have been fighting Mr. Brown?' I answered meekly-- 'Yes, sir.' 'Do you know that that is a very serious matter?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Are you aware that this boat was plowing down the river fully five minutes with no one at the wheel?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Did you strike him first?' 'Yes, sir.' 'What with?' 'A stool, sir.' 'Hard?' 'Middling, sir.' 'Did it knock him down?' 'He--he fell, sir.' 'Did you follow it up? Did you do anything further?' 'Yes, sir.' 'What did you do?' 'Pounded him, sir.' 'Pounded him?' 'Yes, sir.' 'Did you pound him much?--that is, severely?' 'One might call it that, sir, maybe.' 'I'm deuced glad of it! Hark ye, never mention that I said that. You have been guilty of a great crime; and don't you ever be guilty of it again, on this boat. BUT--lay for him ashore! Give him a good sound thrashing, do you hear? I'll pay the expenses. Now go--and mind you, not a word of this to anybody. Clear out with you!--you've been guilty of a great crime, you whelp!' I slid out, happy with the sense of a close shave and a mighty deliverance; and I heard him laughing to himself and slapping his fat thighs after I had closed his door. When Brown came off watch he went straight to the captain, who was talking with some passengers on the boiler deck, and demanded that I be put ashore in New Orleans--and added-- 'I'll never turn a wheel on this boat again while that cub stays.' The captain said-- 'But he needn't come round when you are on watch, Mr. Brown. 'I won't even stay on the same boat with him. One of us has got to go ashore.' 'Very well,' said the captain, 'let it be yourself;' and resumed his talk with the passengers. During the brief remainder of the trip, I knew how an emancipated slave feels; for I was an emancipated slave myself. While we lay at landings, I listened to George Ealer's flute; or to his readings from his two bibles, that is to say, Goldsmith and Shakespeare; or I played chess with him--and would have beaten him sometimes, only he always took back his last move and ran the game out differently. Chapter 20 A Catastrophe WE lay three days in New Orleans, but the captain did not succeed in finding another pilot; so he proposed that I should stand a daylight watch, and leave the night watches to George Ealer. But I was afraid; I had never stood a watch of any sort by myself, and I believed I should be sure to get into trouble in the head of some chute, or ground the boat in a near cut through some bar or other. Brown remained in his place; but he would not travel with me. So the captain gave me an order on the captain of the 'A. T. Lacey,' for a passage to St. Louis, and said he would find a new pilot there and my steersman's berth could then be resumed. The 'Lacey' was to leave a couple of days after the 'Pennsylvania.' The night before the 'Pennsylvania' left, Henry and I sat chatting on a freight pile on the levee till midnight. The subject of the chat, mainly, was one which I think we had not exploited before--steamboat disasters. One was then on its way to us, little as we suspected it; the water which was to make the steam which should cause it, was washing past some point fifteen hundred miles up the river while we talked;--but it would arrive at the right time and the right place. We doubted if persons not clothed with authority were of much use in cases of disaster and attendant panic; still, they might be of SOME use; so we decided that if a disaster ever fell within our experience we would at least stick to the boat, and give such minor service as chance might throw in the way. Henry remembered this, afterward, when the disaster came, and acted accordingly. The 'Lacey' started up the river two days behind the 'Pennsylvania.' We touched at Greenville, Mississippi, a couple of days out, and somebody shouted-- 'The "Pennsylvania" is blown up at Ship Island, and a hundred and fifty lives lost!' At Napoleon, Arkansas, the same evening, we got an extra, issued by a Memphis paper, which gave some particulars. It mentioned my brother, and said he was not hurt. Further up the river we got a later extra. My brother was again mentioned; but this time as being hurt beyond help. We did not get full details of the catastrophe until we reached Memphis. This is the sorrowful story-- It was six o'clock on a hot summer morning. The 'Pennsylvania' was creeping along, north of Ship Island, about sixty miles below Memphis on a half-head of steam, towing a wood-flat which was fast being emptied. George Ealer was in the pilot-house-alone, I think; the second engineer and a striker had the watch in the engine room; the second mate had the watch on deck; George Black, Mr. Wood, and my brother, clerks, were asleep, as were also Brown and the head engineer, the carpenter, the chief mate, and one striker; Captain Klinefelter was in the barber's chair, and the barber was preparing to shave him. There were a good many cabin passengers aboard, and three or four hundred deck passengers --so it was said at the time--and not very many of them were astir. The wood being nearly all out of the flat now, Ealer rang to 'come ahead' full steam, and the next moment four of the eight boilers exploded with a thunderous crash, and the whole forward third of the boat was hoisted toward the sky! The main part of the mass, with the chimneys, dropped upon the boat again, a mountain of riddled and chaotic rubbish--and then, after a little, fire broke out. Many people were flung to considerable distances, and fell in the river; among these were Mr. Wood and my brother, and the carpenter. The carpenter was still stretched upon his mattress when he struck the water seventy-five feet from the boat. Brown, the pilot, and George Black, chief clerk, were never seen or heard of after the explosion. The barber's chair, with Captain Klinefelter in it and unhurt, was left with its back overhanging vacancy--everything forward of it, floor and all, had disappeared; and the stupefied barber, who was also unhurt, stood with one toe projecting over space, still stirring his lather unconsciously, and saying, not a word. When George Ealer saw the chimneys plunging aloft in front of him, he knew what the matter was; so he muffled his face in the lapels of his coat, and pressed both hands there tightly to keep this protection in its place so that no steam could get to his nose or mouth. He had ample time to attend to these details while he was going up and returning. He presently landed on top of the unexploded boilers, forty feet below the former pilot-house, accompanied by his wheel and a rain of other stuff, and enveloped in a cloud of scalding steam. All of the many who breathed that steam, died; none escaped. But Ealer breathed none of it. He made his way to the free air as quickly as he could; and when the steam cleared away he returned and climbed up on the boilers again, and patiently hunted out each and every one of his chessmen and the several joints of his flute. By this time the fire was beginning to threaten. Shrieks and groans filled the air. A great many persons had been scalded, a great many crippled; the explosion had driven an iron crowbar through one man's body--I think they said he was a priest. He did not die at once, and his sufferings were very dreadful. A young French naval cadet, of fifteen, son of a French admiral, was fearfully scalded, but bore his tortures manfully. Both mates were badly scalded, but they stood to their posts, nevertheless. They drew the wood-boat aft, and they and the captain fought back the frantic herd of frightened immigrants till the wounded could be brought there and placed in safety first. When Mr. Wood and Henry fell in the water, they struck out for shore, which was only a few hundred yards away; but Henry presently said he believed he was not hurt (what an unaccountable error!), and therefore would swim back to the boat and help save the wounded. So they parted, and Henry returned. By this time the fire was making fierce headway, and several persons who were imprisoned under the ruins were begging piteously for help. All efforts to conquer the fire proved fruitless; so the buckets were presently thrown aside and the officers fell-to with axes and tried to cut the prisoners out. A striker was one of the captives; he said he was not injured, but could not free himself; and when he saw that the fire was likely to drive away the workers, he begged that some one would shoot him, and thus save him from the more dreadful death. The fire did drive the axmen away, and they had to listen, helpless, to this poor fellow's supplications till the flames ended his miseries. The fire drove all into the wood-flat that could be accommodated there; it was cut adrift, then, and it and the burning steamer floated down the river toward Ship Island. They moored the flat at the head of the island, and there, unsheltered from the blazing sun, the half-naked occupants had to remain, without food or stimulants, or help for their hurts, during the rest of the day. A steamer came along, finally, and carried the unfortunates to Memphis, and there the most lavish assistance was at once forthcoming. By this time Henry was insensible. The physicians examined his injuries and saw that they were fatal, and naturally turned their main attention to patients who could be saved. Forty of the wounded were placed upon pallets on the floor of a great public hall, and among these was Henry. There the ladies of Memphis came every day, with flowers, fruits, and dainties and delicacies of all kinds, and there they remained and nursed the wounded. All the physicians stood watches there, and all the medical students; and the rest of the town furnished money, or whatever else was wanted. And Memphis knew how to do all these things well; for many a disaster like the 'Pennsylvania's' had happened near her doors, and she was experienced, above all other cities on the river, in the gracious office of the Good Samaritan' The sight I saw when I entered that large hall was new and strange to me. Two long rows of prostrate forms--more than forty, in all--and every face and head a shapeless wad of loose raw cotton. It was a gruesome spectacle. I watched there six days and nights, and a very melancholy experience it was. There was one daily incident which was peculiarly depressing: this was the removal of the doomed to a chamber apart. It was done in order that the MORALE of the other patients might not be injuriously affected by seeing one of their number in the death-agony. The fated one was always carried out with as little stir as possible, and the stretcher was always hidden from sight by a wall of assistants; but no matter: everybody knew what that cluster of bent forms, with its muffled step and its slow movement meant; and all eyes watched it wistfully, and a shudder went abreast of it like a wave. I saw many poor fellows removed to the 'death-room,' and saw them no more afterward. But I saw our chief mate carried thither more than once. His hurts were frightful, especially his scalds. He was clothed in linseed oil and raw cotton to his waist, and resembled nothing human. He was often out of his mind; and then his pains would make him rave and shout and sometimes shriek. Then, after a period of dumb exhaustion, his disordered imagination would suddenly transform the great apartment into a forecastle, and the hurrying throng of nurses into the crew; and he would come to a sitting posture and shout, 'Hump yourselves, HUMP yourselves, you petrifactions, snail-bellies, pall-bearers! going to be all DAY getting that hatful of freight out?' and supplement this explosion with a firmament-obliterating irruption or profanity which nothing could stay or stop till his crater was empty. And now and then while these frenzies possessed him, he would tear off handfuls of the cotton and expose his cooked flesh to view. It was horrible. It was bad for the others, of course--this noise and these exhibitions; so the doctors tried to give him morphine to quiet him. But, in his mind or out of it, he would not take it. He said his wife had been killed by that treacherous drug, and he would die before he would take it. He suspected that the doctors were concealing it in his ordinary medicines and in his water--so he ceased from putting either to his lips. Once, when he had been without water during two sweltering days, he took the dipper in his hand, and the sight of the limpid fluid, and the misery of his thirst, tempted him almost beyond his strength; but he mastered himself and threw it away, and after that he allowed no more to be brought near him. Three times I saw him carried to the death-room, insensible and supposed to be dying; but each time he revived, cursed his attendants, and demanded to be taken back. He lived to be mate of a steamboat again. But he was the only one who went to the death-room and returned alive. Dr. Peyton, a principal physician, and rich in all the attributes that go to constitute high and flawless character, did all that educated judgment and trained skill could do for Henry; but, as the newspapers had said in the beginning, his hurts were past help. On the evening of the sixth day his wandering mind busied itself with matters far away, and his nerveless fingers 'picked at his coverlet.' His hour had struck; we bore him to the death-room, poor boy. 
8475	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 5. Chapter 21 A Section in My Biography IN due course I got my license. I was a pilot now, full fledged. I dropped into casual employments; no misfortunes resulting, intermittent work gave place to steady and protracted engagements. Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed--and hoped--that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended. But by and by the war came, commerce was suspended, my occupation was gone. I had to seek another livelihood. So I became a silver miner in Nevada; next, a newspaper reporter; next, a gold miner, in California; next, a reporter in San Francisco; next, a special correspondent in the Sandwich Islands; next, a roving correspondent in Europe and the East; next, an instructional torch-bearer on the lecture platform; and, finally, I became a scribbler of books, and an immovable fixture among the other rocks of New England. In so few words have I disposed of the twenty-one slow-drifting years that have come and gone since I last looked from the windows of a pilot- house. Let us resume, now. Chapter 22 I Return to My Muttons AFTER twenty-one years' absence, I felt a very strong desire to see the river again, and the steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left; so I resolved to go out there. I enlisted a poet for company, and a stenographer to 'take him down,' and started westward about the middle of April. As I proposed to make notes, with a view to printing, I took some thought as to methods of procedure. I reflected that if I were recognized, on the river, I should not be as free to go and come, talk, inquire, and spy around, as I should be if unknown; I remembered that it was the custom of steamboatmen in the old times to load up the confiding stranger with the most picturesque and admirable lies, and put the sophisticated friend off with dull and ineffectual facts: so I concluded, that, from a business point of view, it would be an advantage to disguise our party with fictitious names. The idea was certainly good, but it bred infinite bother; for although Smith, Jones, and Johnson are easy names to remember when there is no occasion to remember them, it is next to impossible to recollect them when they are wanted. How do criminals manage to keep a brand-new ALIAS in mind? This is a great mystery. I was innocent; and yet was seldom able to lay my hand on my new name when it was needed; and it seemed to me that if I had had a crime on my conscience to further confuse me, I could never have kept the name by me at all. We left per Pennsylvania Railroad, at 8 A.M. April 18. 'EVENING. Speaking of dress. Grace and picturesqueness drop gradually out of it as one travels away from New York.' I find that among my notes. It makes no difference which direction you take, the fact remains the same. Whether you move north, south, east, or west, no matter: you can get up in the morning and guess how far you have come, by noting what degree of grace and picturesqueness is by that time lacking in the costumes of the new passengers,--I do not mean of the women alone, but of both sexes. It may be that CARRIAGE is at the bottom of this thing; and I think it is; for there are plenty of ladies and gentlemen in the provincial cities whose garments are all made by the best tailors and dressmakers of New York; yet this has no perceptible effect upon the grand fact: the educated eye never mistakes those people for New-Yorkers. No, there is a godless grace, and snap, and style about a born and bred New-Yorker which mere clothing cannot effect. 'APRIL 19. This morning, struck into the region of full goatees-- sometimes accompanied by a mustache, but only occasionally.' It was odd to come upon this thick crop of an obsolete and uncomely fashion; it was like running suddenly across a forgotten acquaintance whom you had supposed dead for a generation. The goatee extends over a wide extent of country; and is accompanied by an iron-clad belief in Adam and the biblical history of creation, which has not suffered from the assaults of the scientists. 'AFTERNOON. At the railway stations the loafers carry BOTH hands in their breeches pockets; it was observable, heretofore, that one hand was sometimes out of doors,--here, never. This is an important fact in geography.' If the loafers determined the character of a country, it would be still more important, of course. 'Heretofore, all along, the station-loafer has been often observed to scratch one shin with the other foot; here, these remains of activity are wanting. This has an ominous look.' By and by, we entered the tobacco-chewing region. Fifty years ago, the tobacco-chewing region covered the Union. It is greatly restricted now. Next, boots began to appear. Not in strong force, however. Later--away down the Mississippi--they became the rule. They disappeared from other sections of the Union with the mud; no doubt they will disappear from the river villages, also, when proper pavements come in. We reached St. Louis at ten o'clock at night. At the counter of the hotel I tendered a hurriedly-invented fictitious name, with a miserable attempt at careless ease. The clerk paused, and inspected me in the compassionate way in which one inspects a respectable person who is found in doubtful circumstances; then he said-- 'It's all right; I know what sort of a room you want. Used to clerk at the St. James, in New York.' An unpromising beginning for a fraudulent career. We started to the supper room, and met two other men whom I had known elsewhere. How odd and unfair it is: wicked impostors go around lecturing under my NOM DE GUERRE and nobody suspects them; but when an honest man attempts an imposture, he is exposed at once. One thing seemed plain: we must start down the river the next day, if people who could not be deceived were going to crop up at this rate: an unpalatable disappointment, for we had hoped to have a week in St. Louis. The Southern was a good hotel, and we could have had a comfortable time there. It is large, and well conducted, and its decorations do not make one cry, as do those of the vast Palmer House, in Chicago. True, the billiard-tables were of the Old Silurian Period, and the cues and balls of the Post-Pliocene; but there was refreshment in this, not discomfort; for there is rest and healing in the contemplation of antiquities. The most notable absence observable in the billiard-room, was the absence of the river man. If he was there he had taken in his sign, he was in disguise. I saw there none of the swell airs and graces, and ostentatious displays of money, and pompous squanderings of it, which used to distinguish the steamboat crowd from the dry-land crowd in the bygone days, in the thronged billiard-rooms of St. Louis. In those times, the principal saloons were always populous with river men; given fifty players present, thirty or thirty-five were likely to be from the river. But I suspected that the ranks were thin now, and the steamboatmen no longer an aristocracy. Why, in my time they used to call the 'barkeep' Bill, or Joe, or Tom, and slap him on the shoulder; I watched for that. But none of these people did it. Manifestly a glory that once was had dissolved and vanished away in these twenty-one years. When I went up to my room, I found there the young man called Rogers, crying. Rogers was not his name; neither was Jones, Brown, Dexter, Ferguson, Bascom, nor Thompson; but he answered to either of these that a body found handy in an emergency; or to any other name, in fact, if he perceived that you meant him. He said-- 'What is a person to do here when he wants a drink of water?--drink this slush?' 'Can't you drink it?' 'I could if I had some other water to wash it with.' Here was a thing which had not changed; a score of years had not affected this water's mulatto complexion in the least; a score of centuries would succeed no better, perhaps. It comes out of the turbulent, bank-caving Missouri, and every tumblerful of it holds nearly an acre of land in solution. I got this fact from the bishop of the diocese. If you will let your glass stand half an hour, you can separate the land from the water as easy as Genesis; and then you will find them both good: the one good to eat, the other good to drink. The land is very nourishing, the water is thoroughly wholesome. The one appeases hunger; the other, thirst. But the natives do not take them separately, but together, as nature mixed them. When they find an inch of mud in the bottom of a glass, they stir it up, and then take the draught as they would gruel. It is difficult for a stranger to get used to this batter, but once used to it he will prefer it to water. This is really the case. It is good for steamboating, and good to drink; but it is worthless for all other purposes, except baptizing. Next morning, we drove around town in the rain. The city seemed but little changed. It WAS greatly changed, but it did not seem so; because in St. Louis, as in London and Pittsburgh, you can't persuade a new thing to look new; the coal smoke turns it into an antiquity the moment you take your hand off it. The place had just about doubled its size, since I was a resident of it, and was now become a city of 400,000 inhabitants; still, in the solid business parts, it looked about as it had looked formerly. Yet I am sure there is not as much smoke in St. Louis now as there used to be. The smoke used to bank itself in a dense billowy black canopy over the town, and hide the sky from view. This shelter is very much thinner now; still, there is a sufficiency of smoke there, I think. I heard no complaint. However, on the outskirts changes were apparent enough; notably in dwelling-house architecture. The fine new homes are noble and beautiful and modern. They stand by themselves, too, with green lawns around them; whereas the dwellings of a former day are packed together in blocks, and are all of one pattern, with windows all alike, set in an arched frame-work of twisted stone; a sort of house which was handsome enough when it was rarer. There was another change--the Forest Park. This was new to me. It is beautiful and very extensive, and has the excellent merit of having been made mainly by nature. There are other parks, and fine ones, notably Tower Grove and the Botanical Gardens; for St. Louis interested herself in such improvements at an earlier day than did the most of our cities. The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for six million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it. It was bitter now to look abroad over this domed and steepled metropolis, this solid expanse of bricks and mortar stretching away on every hand into dim, measure-defying distances, and remember that I had allowed that opportunity to go by. Why I should have allowed it to go by seems, of course, foolish and inexplicable to-day, at a first glance; yet there were reasons at the time to justify this course. A Scotchman, Hon. Charles Augustus Murray, writing some forty-five or fifty years ago, said--'The streets are narrow, ill paved and ill lighted.' Those streets are narrow still, of course; many of them are ill paved yet; but the reproach of ill lighting cannot be repeated, now. The 'Catholic New Church' was the only notable building then, and Mr. Murray was confidently called upon to admire it, with its 'species of Grecian portico, surmounted by a kind of steeple, much too diminutive in its proportions, and surmounted by sundry ornaments' which the unimaginative Scotchman found himself 'quite unable to describe;' and therefore was grateful when a German tourist helped him out with the exclamation--'By ---, they look exactly like bed-posts!' St. Louis is well equipped with stately and noble public buildings now, and the little church, which the people used to be so proud of, lost its importance a long time ago. Still, this would not surprise Mr. Murray, if he could come back; for he prophesied the coming greatness of St. Louis with strong confidence. The further we drove in our inspection-tour, the more sensibly I realized how the city had grown since I had seen it last; changes in detail became steadily more apparent and frequent than at first, too: changes uniformly evidencing progress, energy, prosperity. But the change of changes was on the 'levee.' This time, a departure from the rule. Half a dozen sound-asleep steamboats where I used to see a solid mile of wide-awake ones! This was melancholy, this was woeful. The absence of the pervading and jocund steamboatman from the billiard- saloon was explained. He was absent because he is no more. His occupation is gone, his power has passed away, he is absorbed into the common herd, he grinds at the mill, a shorn Samson and inconspicuous. Half a dozen lifeless steamboats, a mile of empty wharves, a negro fatigued with whiskey stretched asleep, in a wide and soundless vacancy, where the serried hosts of commerce used to contend!{footnote [Capt. Marryat, writing forty-five years ago says: 'St. Louis has 20,000 inhabitants. THE RIVER ABREAST OF THE TOWN IS CROWDED WITH STEAMBOATS, LYING IN TWO OR THREE TIERS.']} Here was desolation, indeed. 'The old, old sea, as one in tears, Comes murmuring, with foamy lips, And knocking at the vacant piers, Calls for his long-lost multitude of ships.' The towboat and the railroad had done their work, and done it well and completely. The mighty bridge, stretching along over our heads, had done its share in the slaughter and spoliation. Remains of former steamboatmen told me, with wan satisfaction, that the bridge doesn't pay. Still, it can be no sufficient compensation to a corpse, to know that the dynamite that laid him out was not of as good quality as it had been supposed to be. The pavements along the river front were bad: the sidewalks were rather out of repair; there was a rich abundance of mud. All this was familiar and satisfying; but the ancient armies of drays, and struggling throngs of men, and mountains of freight, were gone; and Sabbath reigned in their stead. The immemorial mile of cheap foul doggeries remained, but business was dull with them; the multitudes of poison-swilling Irishmen had departed, and in their places were a few scattering handfuls of ragged negroes, some drinking, some drunk, some nodding, others asleep. St. Louis is a great and prosperous and advancing city; but the river- edge of it seems dead past resurrection. Mississippi steamboating was born about 1812; at the end of thirty years, it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more, it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature. Of course it is not absolutely dead, neither is a crippled octogenarian who could once jump twenty-two feet on level ground; but as contrasted with what it was in its prime vigor, Mississippi steamboating may be called dead. It killed the old-fashioned keel-boating, by reducing the freight-trip to New Orleans to less than a week. The railroads have killed the steamboat passenger traffic by doing in two or three days what the steamboats consumed a week in doing; and the towing-fleets have killed the through-freight traffic by dragging six or seven steamer-loads of stuff down the river at a time, at an expense so trivial that steamboat competition was out of the question. Freight and passenger way-traffic remains to the steamers. This is in the hands--along the two thousand miles of river between St. Paul and New Orleans---of two or three close corporations well fortified with capital; and by able and thoroughly business-like management and system, these make a sufficiency of money out of what is left of the once prodigious steamboating industry. I suppose that St. Louis and New Orleans have not suffered materially by the change, but alas for the wood-yard man! He used to fringe the river all the way; his close-ranked merchandise stretched from the one city to the other, along the banks, and he sold uncountable cords of it every year for cash on the nail; but all the scattering boats that are left burn coal now, and the seldomest spectacle on the Mississippi to-day is a wood-pile. Where now is the once wood-yard man? Chapter 23 Traveling Incognito MY idea was, to tarry a while in every town between St. Louis and New Orleans. To do this, it would be necessary to go from place to place by the short packet lines. It was an easy plan to make, and would have been an easy one to follow, twenty years ago--but not now. There are wide intervals between boats, these days. I wanted to begin with the interesting old French settlements of St. Genevieve and Kaskaskia, sixty miles below St. Louis. There was only one boat advertised for that section--a Grand Tower packet. Still, one boat was enough; so we went down to look at her. She was a venerable rack- heap, and a fraud to boot; for she was playing herself for personal property, whereas the good honest dirt was so thickly caked all over her that she was righteously taxable as real estate. There are places in New England where her hurricane deck would be worth a hundred and fifty dollars an acre. The soil on her forecastle was quite good--the new crop of wheat was already springing from the cracks in protected places. The companionway was of a dry sandy character, and would have been well suited for grapes, with a southern exposure and a little subsoiling. The soil of the boiler deck was thin and rocky, but good enough for grazing purposes. A colored boy was on watch here--nobody else visible. We gathered from him that this calm craft would go, as advertised, 'if she got her trip;' if she didn't get it, she would wait for it. 'Has she got any of her trip?' 'Bless you, no, boss. She ain't unloadened, yit. She only come in dis mawnin'.' He was uncertain as to when she might get her trip, but thought it might be to-morrow or maybe next day. This would not answer at all; so we had to give up the novelty of sailing down the river on a farm. We had one more arrow in our quiver: a Vicksburg packet, the 'Gold Dust,' was to leave at 5 P.M. We took passage in her for Memphis, and gave up the idea of stopping off here and there, as being impracticable. She was neat, clean, and comfortable. We camped on the boiler deck, and bought some cheap literature to kill time with. The vender was a venerable Irishman with a benevolent face and a tongue that worked easily in the socket, and from him we learned that he had lived in St. Louis thirty-four years and had never been across the river during that period. Then he wandered into a very flowing lecture, filled with classic names and allusions, which was quite wonderful for fluency until the fact became rather apparent that this was not the first time, nor perhaps the fiftieth, that the speech had been delivered. He was a good deal of a character, and much better company than the sappy literature he was selling. A random remark, connecting Irishmen and beer, brought this nugget of information out of him-- They don't drink it, sir. They can't drink it, sir. Give an Irishman lager for a month, and he's a dead man. An Irishman is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him, sir.' At eight o'clock, promptly, we backed out and crossed the river. As we crept toward the shore, in the thick darkness, a blinding glory of white electric light burst suddenly from our forecastle, and lit up the water and the warehouses as with a noon-day glare. Another big change, this-- no more flickering, smoky, pitch-dripping, ineffectual torch-baskets, now: their day is past. Next, instead of calling out a score of hands to man the stage, a couple of men and a hatful of steam lowered it from the derrick where it was suspended, launched it, deposited it in just the right spot, and the whole thing was over and done with before a mate in the olden time could have got his profanity-mill adjusted to begin the preparatory services. Why this new and simple method of handling the stages was not thought of when the first steamboat was built, is a mystery which helps one to realize what a dull-witted slug the average human being is. We finally got away at two in the morning, and when I turned out at six, we were rounding to at a rocky point where there was an old stone warehouse--at any rate, the ruins of it; two or three decayed dwelling- houses were near by, in the shelter of the leafy hills; but there were no evidences of human or other animal life to be seen. I wondered if I had forgotten the river; for I had no recollection whatever of this place; the shape of the river, too, was unfamiliar; there was nothing in sight, anywhere, that I could remember ever having seen before. I was surprised, disappointed, and annoyed. We put ashore a well-dressed lady and gentleman, and two well-dressed, lady-like young girls, together with sundry Russia-leather bags. A strange place for such folk! No carriage was waiting. The party moved off as if they had not expected any, and struck down a winding country road afoot. But the mystery was explained when we got under way again; for these people were evidently bound for a large town which lay shut in behind a tow-head (i.e., new island) a couple of miles below this landing. I couldn't remember that town; I couldn't place it, couldn't call its name. So I lost part of my temper. I suspected that it might be St. Genevieve--and so it proved to be. Observe what this eccentric river had been about: it had built up this huge useless tow-head directly in front of this town, cut off its river communications, fenced it away completely, and made a 'country' town of it. It is a fine old place, too, and deserved a better fate. It was settled by the French, and is a relic of a time when one could travel from the mouths of the Mississippi to Quebec and be on French territory and under French rule all the way. Presently I ascended to the hurricane deck and cast a longing glance toward the pilot-house. Chapter 24 My Incognito is Exploded AFTER a close study of the face of the pilot on watch, I was satisfied that I had never seen him before; so I went up there. The pilot inspected me; I re-inspected the pilot. These customary preliminaries over, I sat down on the high bench, and he faced about and went on with his work. Every detail of the pilot-house was familiar to me, with one exception,--a large-mouthed tube under the breast-board. I puzzled over that thing a considerable time; then gave up and asked what it was for. 'To hear the engine-bells through.' It was another good contrivance which ought to have been invented half a century sooner. So I was thinking, when the pilot asked-- 'Do you know what this rope is for?' I managed to get around this question, without committing myself. 'Is this the first time you were ever in a pilot-house?' I crept under that one. 'Where are you from?' 'New England.' 'First time you have ever been West?' I climbed over this one. 'If you take an interest in such things, I can tell you what all these things are for.' I said I should like it. 'This,' putting his hand on a backing-bell rope, 'is to sound the fire- alarm; this,' putting his hand on a go-ahead bell, 'is to call the texas-tender; this one,' indicating the whistle-lever, 'is to call the captain'--and so he went on, touching one object after another, and reeling off his tranquil spool of lies. I had never felt so like a passenger before. I thanked him, with emotion, for each new fact, and wrote it down in my note-book. The pilot warmed to his opportunity, and proceeded to load me up in the good old- fashioned way. At times I was afraid he was going to rupture his invention; but it always stood the strain, and he pulled through all right. He drifted, by easy stages, into revealments of the river's marvelous eccentricities of one sort and another, and backed them up with some pretty gigantic illustrations. For instance-- 'Do you see that little boulder sticking out of the water yonder? well, when I first came on the river, that was a solid ridge of rock, over sixty feet high and two miles long. All washed away but that.' [This with a sigh.] I had a mighty impulse to destroy him, but it seemed to me that killing, in any ordinary way, would be too good for him. Once, when an odd-looking craft, with a vast coal-scuttle slanting aloft on the end of a beam, was steaming by in the distance, he indifferently drew attention to it, as one might to an object grown wearisome through familiarity, and observed that it was an 'alligator boat.' 'An alligator boat? What's it for?' 'To dredge out alligators with.' 'Are they so thick as to be troublesome?' 'Well, not now, because the Government keeps them down. But they used to be. Not everywhere; but in favorite places, here and there, where the river is wide and shoal-like Plum Point, and Stack Island, and so on-- places they call alligator beds.' 'Did they actually impede navigation?' 'Years ago, yes, in very low water; there was hardly a trip, then, that we didn't get aground on alligators.' It seemed to me that I should certainly have to get out my tomahawk. However, I restrained myself and said-- 'It must have been dreadful.' 'Yes, it was one of the main difficulties about piloting. It was so hard to tell anything about the water; the damned things shift around so-- never lie still five minutes at a time. You can tell a wind-reef, straight off, by the look of it; you can tell a break; you can tell a sand-reef--that's all easy; but an alligator reef doesn't show up, worth anything. Nine times in ten you can't tell where the water is; and when you do see where it is, like as not it ain't there when YOU get there, the devils have swapped around so, meantime. Of course there were some few pilots that could judge of alligator water nearly as well as they could of any other kind, but they had to have natural talent for it; it wasn't a thing a body could learn, you had to be born with it. Let me see: there was Ben Thornburg, and Beck Jolly, and Squire Bell, and Horace Bixby, and Major Downing, and John Stevenson, and Billy Gordon, and Jim Brady, and George Ealer, and Billy Youngblood--all A 1 alligator pilots. THEY could tell alligator water as far as another Christian could tell whiskey. Read it?--Ah, COULDN'T they, though! I only wish I had as many dollars as they could read alligator water a mile and a half off. Yes, and it paid them to do it, too. A good alligator pilot could always get fifteen hundred dollars a month. Nights, other people had to lay up for alligators, but those fellows never laid up for alligators; they never laid up for anything but fog. They could SMELL the best alligator water it was said; I don't know whether it was so or not, and I think a body's got his hands full enough if he sticks to just what he knows himself, without going around backing up other people's say-so's, though there's a plenty that ain't backward about doing it, as long as they can roust out something wonderful to tell. Which is not the style of Robert Styles, by as much as three fathom--maybe quarter-LESS.' [My! Was this Rob Styles?--This mustached and stately figure?-A slim enough cub, in my time. How he has improved in comeliness in five-and- twenty year and in the noble art of inflating his facts.] After these musings, I said aloud-- 'I should think that dredging out the alligators wouldn't have done much good, because they could come back again right away.' 'If you had had as much experience of alligators as I have, you wouldn't talk like that. You dredge an alligator once and he's CONVINCED. It's the last you hear of HIM. He wouldn't come back for pie. If there's one thing that an alligator is more down on than another, it's being dredged. Besides, they were not simply shoved out of the way; the most of the scoopful were scooped aboard; they emptied them into the hold; and when they had got a trip, they took them to Orleans to the Government works.' 'What for?' 'Why, to make soldier-shoes out of their hides. All the Government shoes are made of alligator hide. It makes the best shoes in the world. They last five years, and they won't absorb water. The alligator fishery is a Government monopoly. All the alligators are Government property--just like the live-oaks. You cut down a live-oak, and Government fines you fifty dollars; you kill an alligator, and up you go for misprision of treason--lucky duck if they don't hang you, too. And they will, if you're a Democrat. The buzzard is the sacred bird of the South, and you can't touch him; the alligator is the sacred bird of the Government, and you've got to let him alone.' 'Do you ever get aground on the alligators now?' 'Oh, no! it hasn't happened for years.' 'Well, then, why do they still keep the alligator boats in service?' 'Just for police duty--nothing more. They merely go up and down now and then. The present generation of alligators know them as easy as a burglar knows a roundsman; when they see one coming, they break camp and go for the woods.' After rounding-out and finishing-up and polishing-off the alligator business, he dropped easily and comfortably into the historical vein, and told of some tremendous feats of half-a-dozen old-time steamboats of his acquaintance, dwelling at special length upon a certain extraordinary performance of his chief favorite among this distinguished fleet--and then adding-- 'That boat was the "Cyclone,"--last trip she ever made--she sunk, that very trip--captain was Tom Ballou, the most immortal liar that ever I struck. He couldn't ever seem to tell the truth, in any kind of weather. Why, he would make you fairly shudder. He WAS the most scandalous liar! I left him, finally; I couldn't stand it. The proverb says, "like master, like man;" and if you stay with that kind of a man, you'll come under suspicion by and by, just as sure as you live. He paid first-class wages; but said I, What's wages when your reputation's in danger? So I let the wages go, and froze to my reputation. And I've never regretted it. Reputation's worth everything, ain't it? That's the way I look at it. He had more selfish organs than any seven men in the world--all packed in the stern-sheets of his skull, of course, where they belonged. They weighed down the back of his head so that it made his nose tilt up in the air. People thought it was vanity, but it wasn't, it was malice. If you only saw his foot, you'd take him to be nineteen feet high, but he wasn't; it was because his foot was out of drawing. He was intended to be nineteen feet high, no doubt, if his foot was made first, but he didn't get there; he was only five feet ten. That's what he was, and that's what he is. You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear. That "Cyclone" was a rattler to go, and the sweetest thing to steer that ever walked the waters. Set her amidships, in a big river, and just let her go; it was all you had to do. She would hold herself on a star all night, if you let her alone. You couldn't ever feel her rudder. It wasn't any more labor to steer her than it is to count the Republican vote in a South Carolina election. One morning, just at daybreak, the last trip she ever made, they took her rudder aboard to mend it; I didn't know anything about it; I backed her out from the wood-yard and went a-weaving down the river all serene. When I had gone about twenty-three miles, and made four horribly crooked crossings--' 'Without any rudder?' 'Yes--old Capt. Tom appeared on the roof and began to find fault with me for running such a dark night--' 'Such a DARK NIGHT ?--Why, you said--' 'Never mind what I said,--'twas as dark as Egypt now, though pretty soon the moon began to rise, and--' 'You mean the SUN--because you started out just at break of--look here! Was this BEFORE you quitted the captain on account of his lying, or--' 'It was before--oh, a long time before. And as I was saying, he--' 'But was this the trip she sunk, or was--' 'Oh, no!--months afterward. And so the old man, he--' 'Then she made TWO last trips, because you said--' He stepped back from the wheel, swabbing away his perspiration, and said-- 'Here!' (calling me by name), 'YOU take her and lie a while--you're handier at it than I am. Trying to play yourself for a stranger and an innocent!--why, I knew you before you had spoken seven words; and I made up my mind to find out what was your little game. It was to DRAW ME OUT. Well, I let you, didn't I? Now take the wheel and finish the watch; and next time play fair, and you won't have to work your passage.' Thus ended the fictitious-name business. And not six hours out from St. Louis! but I had gained a privilege, any way, for I had been itching to get my hands on the wheel, from the beginning. I seemed to have forgotten the river, but I hadn't forgotten how to steer a steamboat, nor how to enjoy it, either. Chapter 25 From Cairo to Hickman THE scenery, from St. Louis to Cairo--two hundred miles--is varied and beautiful. The hills were clothed in the fresh foliage of spring now, and were a gracious and worthy setting for the broad river flowing between. Our trip began auspiciously, with a perfect day, as to breeze and sunshine, and our boat threw the miles out behind her with satisfactory despatch. We found a railway intruding at Chester, Illinois; Chester has also a penitentiary now, and is otherwise marching on. At Grand Tower, too, there was a railway; and another at Cape Girardeau. The former town gets its name from a huge, squat pillar of rock, which stands up out of the water on the Missouri side of the river--a piece of nature's fanciful handiwork--and is one of the most picturesque features of the scenery of that region. For nearer or remoter neighbors, the Tower has the Devil's Bake Oven--so called, perhaps, because it does not powerfully resemble anybody else's bake oven; and the Devil's Tea Table--this latter a great smooth-surfaced mass of rock, with diminishing wine-glass stem, perched some fifty or sixty feet above the river, beside a beflowered and garlanded precipice, and sufficiently like a tea-table to answer for anybody, Devil or Christian. Away down the river we have the Devil's Elbow and the Devil's Race-course, and lots of other property of his which I cannot now call to mind. The Town of Grand Tower was evidently a busier place than it had been in old times, but it seemed to need some repairs here and there, and a new coat of whitewash all over. Still, it was pleasant to me to see the old coat once more. 'Uncle' Mumford, our second officer, said the place had been suffering from high water, and consequently was not looking its best now. But he said it was not strange that it didn't waste white- wash on itself, for more lime was made there, and of a better quality, than anywhere in the West; and added--'On a dairy farm you never can get any milk for your coffee, nor any sugar for it on a sugar plantation; and it is against sense to go to a lime town to hunt for white-wash.' In my own experience I knew the first two items to be true; and also that people who sell candy don't care for candy; therefore there was plausibility in Uncle Mumford's final observation that 'people who make lime run more to religion than whitewash.' Uncle Mumford said, further, that Grand Tower was a great coaling center and a prospering place. Cape Girardeau is situated on a hillside, and makes a handsome appearance. There is a great Jesuit school for boys at the foot of the town by the river. Uncle Mumford said it had as high a reputation for thoroughness as any similar institution in Missouri! There was another college higher up on an airy summit--a bright new edifice, picturesquely and peculiarly towered and pinnacled--a sort of gigantic casters, with the cruets all complete. Uncle Mumford said that Cape Girardeau was the Athens of Missouri, and contained several colleges besides those already mentioned; and all of them on a religious basis of one kind or another. He directed my attention to what he called the 'strong and pervasive religious look of the town,' but I could not see that it looked more religious than the other hill towns with the same slope and built of the same kind of bricks. Partialities often make people see more than really exists. Uncle Mumford has been thirty years a mate on the river. He is a man of practical sense and a level head; has observed; has had much experience of one sort and another; has opinions; has, also, just a perceptible dash of poetry in his composition, an easy gift of speech, a thick growl in his voice, and an oath or two where he can get at them when the exigencies of his office require a spiritual lift. He is a mate of the blessed old-time kind; and goes gravely damning around, when there is work to the fore, in a way to mellow the ex-steamboatman's heart with sweet soft longings for the vanished days that shall come no more. 'GIT up there you! Going to be all day? Why d'n't you SAY you was petrified in your hind legs, before you shipped!' He is a steady man with his crew; kind and just, but firm; so they like him, and stay with him. He is still in the slouchy garb of the old generation of mates; but next trip the Anchor Line will have him in uniform--a natty blue naval uniform, with brass buttons, along with all the officers of the line--and then he will be a totally different style of scenery from what he is now. Uniforms on the Mississippi! It beats all the other changes put together, for surprise. Still, there is another surprise--that it was not made fifty years ago. It is so manifestly sensible, that it might have been thought of earlier, one would suppose. During fifty years, out there, the innocent passenger in need of help and information, has been mistaking the mate for the cook, and the captain for the barber--and being roughly entertained for it, too. But his troubles are ended now. And the greatly improved aspect of the boat's staff is another advantage achieved by the dress-reform period. Steered down the bend below Cape Girardeau. They used to call it 'Steersman's Bend;' plain sailing and plenty of water in it, always; about the only place in the Upper River that a new cub was allowed to take a boat through, in low water. Thebes, at the head of the Grand Chain, and Commerce at the foot of it, were towns easily rememberable, as they had not undergone conspicuous alteration. Nor the Chain, either--in the nature of things; for it is a chain of sunken rocks admirably arranged to capture and kill steamboats on bad nights. A good many steamboat corpses lie buried there, out of sight; among the rest my first friend the 'Paul Jones;' she knocked her bottom out, and went down like a pot, so the historian told me--Uncle Mumford. He said she had a gray mare aboard, and a preacher. To me, this sufficiently accounted for the disaster; as it did, of course, to Mumford, who added-- 'But there are many ignorant people who would scoff at such a matter, and call it superstition. But you will always notice that they are people who have never traveled with a gray mare and a preacher. I went down the river once in such company. We grounded at Bloody Island; we grounded at Hanging Dog; we grounded just below this same Commerce; we jolted Beaver Dam Rock; we hit one of the worst breaks in the 'Graveyard' behind Goose Island; we had a roustabout killed in a fight; we burnt a boiler; broke a shaft; collapsed a flue; and went into Cairo with nine feet of water in the hold--may have been more, may have been less. I remember it as if it were yesterday. The men lost their heads with terror. They painted the mare blue, in sight of town, and threw the preacher overboard, or we should not have arrived at all. The preacher was fished out and saved. He acknowledged, himself, that he had been to blame. I remember it all, as if it were yesterday.' That this combination--of preacher and gray mare--should breed calamity, seems strange, and at first glance unbelievable; but the fact is fortified by so much unassailable proof that to doubt is to dishonor reason. I myself remember a case where a captain was warned by numerous friends against taking a gray mare and a preacher with him, but persisted in his purpose in spite of all that could be said; and the same day--it may have been the next, and some say it was, though I think it was the same day--he got drunk and fell down the hatchway, and was borne to his home a corpse. This is literally true. No vestige of Hat Island is left now; every shred of it is washed away. I do not even remember what part of the river it used to be in, except that it was between St. Louis and Cairo somewhere. It was a bad region-- all around and about Hat Island, in early days. A farmer who lived on the Illinois shore there, said that twenty-nine steamboats had left their bones strung along within sight from his house. Between St. Louis and Cairo the steamboat wrecks average one to the mile;--two hundred wrecks, altogether. I could recognize big changes from Commerce down. Beaver Dam Rock was out in the middle of the river now, and throwing a prodigious 'break;' it used to be close to the shore, and boats went down outside of it. A big island that used to be away out in mid-river, has retired to the Missouri shore, and boats do not go near it any more. The island called Jacket Pattern is whittled down to a wedge now, and is booked for early destruction. Goose Island is all gone but a little dab the size of a steamboat. The perilous 'Graveyard,' among whose numberless wrecks we used to pick our way so slowly and gingerly, is far away from the channel now, and a terror to nobody. One of the islands formerly called the Two Sisters is gone entirely; the other, which used to lie close to the Illinois shore, is now on the Missouri side, a mile away; it is joined solidly to the shore, and it takes a sharp eye to see where the seam is--but it is Illinois ground yet, and the people who live on it have to ferry themselves over and work the Illinois roads and pay Illinois taxes: singular state of things! Near the mouth of the river several islands were missing--washed away. Cairo was still there--easily visible across the long, flat point upon whose further verge it stands; but we had to steam a long way around to get to it. Night fell as we were going out of the 'Upper River' and meeting the floods of the Ohio. We dashed along without anxiety; for the hidden rock which used to lie right in the way has moved up stream a long distance out of the channel; or rather, about one county has gone into the river from the Missouri point, and the Cairo point has 'made down' and added to its long tongue of territory correspondingly. The Mississippi is a just and equitable river; it never tumbles one man's farm overboard without building a new farm just like it for that man's neighbor. This keeps down hard feelings. Going into Cairo, we came near killing a steamboat which paid no attention to our whistle and then tried to cross our bows. By doing some strong backing, we saved him; which was a great loss, for he would have made good literature. Cairo is a brisk town now; and is substantially built, and has a city look about it which is in noticeable contrast to its former estate, as per Mr. Dickens's portrait of it. However, it was already building with bricks when I had seen it last--which was when Colonel (now General) Grant was drilling his first command there. Uncle Mumford says the libraries and Sunday-schools have done a good work in Cairo, as well as the brick masons. Cairo has a heavy railroad and river trade, and her situation at the junction of the two great rivers is so advantageous that she cannot well help prospering. When I turned out, in the morning, we had passed Columbus, Kentucky, and were approaching Hickman, a pretty town, perched on a handsome hill. Hickman is in a rich tobacco region, and formerly enjoyed a great and lucrative trade in that staple, collecting it there in her warehouses from a large area of country and shipping it by boat; but Uncle Mumford says she built a railway to facilitate this commerce a little more, and he thinks it facilitated it the wrong way--took the bulk of the trade out of her hands by 'collaring it along the line without gathering it at her doors.' 
8476	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 6. Chapter 26 Under Fire TALK began to run upon the war now, for we were getting down into the upper edge of the former battle-stretch by this time. Columbus was just behind us, so there was a good deal said about the famous battle of Belmont. Several of the boat's officers had seen active service in the Mississippi war-fleet. I gathered that they found themselves sadly out of their element in that kind of business at first, but afterward got accustomed to it, reconciled to it, and more or less at home in it. One of our pilots had his first war experience in the Belmont fight, as a pilot on a boat in the Confederate service. I had often had a curiosity to know how a green hand might feel, in his maiden battle, perched all solitary and alone on high in a pilot house, a target for Tom, Dick and Harry, and nobody at his elbow to shame him from showing the white feather when matters grew hot and perilous around him; so, to me his story was valuable--it filled a gap for me which all histories had left till that time empty. THE PILOT'S FIRST BATTLE He said-- It was the 7th of November. The fight began at seven in the morning. I was on the 'R. H. W. Hill.' Took over a load of troops from Columbus. Came back, and took over a battery of artillery. My partner said he was going to see the fight; wanted me to go along. I said, no, I wasn't anxious, I would look at it from the pilot-house. He said I was a coward, and left. That fight was an awful sight. General Cheatham made his men strip their coats off and throw them in a pile, and said, 'Now follow me to hell or victory!' I heard him say that from the pilot-house; and then he galloped in, at the head of his troops. Old General Pillow, with his white hair, mounted on a white horse, sailed in, too, leading his troops as lively as a boy. By and by the Federals chased the rebels back, and here they came! tearing along, everybody for himself and Devil take the hindmost! and down under the bank they scrambled, and took shelter. I was sitting with my legs hanging out of the pilot-house window. All at once I noticed a whizzing sound passing my ear. Judged it was a bullet. I didn't stop to think about anything, I just tilted over backwards and landed on the floor, and staid there. The balls came booming around. Three cannon-balls went through the chimney; one ball took off the corner of the pilot-house; shells were screaming and bursting all around. Mighty warm times--I wished I hadn't come. I lay there on the pilot-house floor, while the shots came faster and faster. I crept in behind the big stove, in the middle of the pilot-house. Presently a minie-ball came through the stove, and just grazed my head, and cut my hat. I judged it was time to go away from there. The captain was on the roof with a red-headed major from Memphis--a fine-looking man. I heard him say he wanted to leave here, but 'that pilot is killed.' I crept over to the starboard side to pull the bell to set her back; raised up and took a look, and I saw about fifteen shot holes through the window panes; had come so lively I hadn't noticed them. I glanced out on the water, and the spattering shot were like a hailstorm. I thought best to get out of that place. I went down the pilot-house guy, head first--not feet first but head first--slid down--before I struck the deck, the captain said we must leave there. So I climbed up the guy and got on the floor again. About that time, they collared my partner and were bringing him up to the pilot-house between two soldiers. Somebody had said I was killed. He put his head in and saw me on the floor reaching for the backing bells. He said, 'Oh, hell, he ain't shot,' and jerked away from the men who had him by the collar, and ran below. We were there until three o'clock in the afternoon, and then got away all right. The next time I saw my partner, I said, 'Now, come out, be honest, and tell me the truth. Where did you go when you went to see that battle?' He says, 'I went down in the hold.' All through that fight I was scared nearly to death. I hardly knew anything, I was so frightened; but you see, nobody knew that but me. Next day General Polk sent for me, and praised me for my bravery and gallant conduct. I never said anything, I let it go at that. I judged it wasn't so, but it was not for me to contradict a general officer. Pretty soon after that I was sick, and used up, and had to go off to the Hot Springs. When there, I got a good many letters from commanders saying they wanted me to come back. I declined, because I wasn't well enough or strong enough; but I kept still, and kept the reputation I had made. A plain story, straightforwardly told; but Mumford told me that that pilot had 'gilded that scare of his, in spots;' that his subsequent career in the war was proof of it. We struck down through the chute of Island No. 8, and I went below and fell into conversation with a passenger, a handsome man, with easy carriage and an intelligent face. We were approaching Island No. 10, a place so celebrated during the war. This gentleman's home was on the main shore in its neighborhood. I had some talk with him about the war times; but presently the discourse fell upon 'feuds,' for in no part of the South has the vendetta flourished more briskly, or held out longer between warring families, than in this particular region. This gentleman said-- 'There's been more than one feud around here, in old times, but I reckon the worst one was between the Darnells and the Watsons. Nobody don't know now what the first quarrel was about, it's so long ago; the Darnells and the Watsons don't know, if there's any of them living, which I don't think there is. Some says it was about a horse or a cow-- anyway, it was a little matter; the money in it wasn't of no consequence--none in the world--both families was rich. The thing could have been fixed up, easy enough; but no, that wouldn't do. Rough words had been passed; and so, nothing but blood could fix it up after that. That horse or cow, whichever it was, cost sixty years of killing and crippling! Every year or so somebody was shot, on one side or the other; and as fast as one generation was laid out, their sons took up the feud and kept it a-going. And it's just as I say; they went on shooting each other, year in and year out--making a kind of a religion of it, you see --till they'd done forgot, long ago, what it was all about. Wherever a Darnell caught a Watson, or a Watson caught a Darnell, one of 'em was going to get hurt--only question was, which of them got the drop on the other. They'd shoot one another down, right in the presence of the family. They didn't hunt for each other, but when they happened to meet, they puffed and begun. Men would shoot boys, boys would shoot men. A man shot a boy twelve years old--happened on him in the woods, and didn't give him no chance. If he HAD 'a' given him a chance, the boy'd 'a' shot him. Both families belonged to the same church (everybody around here is religious); through all this fifty or sixty years' fuss, both tribes was there every Sunday, to worship. They lived each side of the line, and the church was at a landing called Compromise. Half the church and half the aisle was in Kentucky, the other half in Tennessee. Sundays you'd see the families drive up, all in their Sunday clothes, men, women, and children, and file up the aisle, and set down, quiet and orderly, one lot on the Tennessee side of the church and the other on the Kentucky side; and the men and boys would lean their guns up against the wall, handy, and then all hands would join in with the prayer and praise; though they say the man next the aisle didn't kneel down, along with the rest of the family; kind of stood guard. I don't know; never was at that church in my life; but I remember that that's what used to be said. 'Twenty or twenty-five years ago, one of the feud families caught a young man of nineteen out and killed him. Don't remember whether it was the Darnells and Watsons, or one of the other feuds; but anyway, this young man rode up--steamboat laying there at the time--and the first thing he saw was a whole gang of the enemy. He jumped down behind a wood-pile, but they rode around and begun on him, he firing back, and they galloping and cavorting and yelling and banging away with all their might. Think he wounded a couple of them; but they closed in on him and chased him into the river; and as he swum along down stream, they followed along the bank and kept on shooting at him; and when he struck shore he was dead. Windy Marshall told me about it. He saw it. He was captain of the boat. 'Years ago, the Darnells was so thinned out that the old man and his two sons concluded they'd leave the country. They started to take steamboat just above No. 10; but the Watsons got wind of it; and they arrived just as the two young Darnells was walking up the companion-way with their wives on their arms. The fight begun then, and they never got no further--both of them killed. After that, old Darnell got into trouble with the man that run the ferry, and the ferry-man got the worst of it-- and died. But his friends shot old Darnell through and through--filled him full of bullets, and ended him.' The country gentleman who told me these things had been reared in ease and comfort, was a man of good parts, and was college bred. His loose grammar was the fruit of careless habit, not ignorance. This habit among educated men in the West is not universal, but it is prevalent-- prevalent in the towns, certainly, if not in the cities; and to a degree which one cannot help noticing, and marveling at. I heard a Westerner who would be accounted a highly educated man in any country, say 'never mind, it DON'T MAKE NO DIFFERENCE, anyway.' A life-long resident who was present heard it, but it made no impression upon her. She was able to recall the fact afterward, when reminded of it; but she confessed that the words had not grated upon her ear at the time--a confession which suggests that if educated people can hear such blasphemous grammar, from such a source, and be unconscious of the deed, the crime must be tolerably common--so common that the general ear has become dulled by familiarity with it, and is no longer alert, no longer sensitive to such affronts. No one in the world speaks blemishless grammar; no one has ever written it--NO one, either in the world or out of it (taking the Scriptures for evidence on the latter point); therefore it would not be fair to exact grammatical perfection from the peoples of the Valley; but they and all other peoples may justly be required to refrain from KNOWINGLY and PURPOSELY debauching their grammar. I found the river greatly changed at Island No. 10. The island which I remembered was some three miles long and a quarter of a mile wide, heavily timbered, and lay near the Kentucky shore--within two hundred yards of it, I should say. Now, however, one had to hunt for it with a spy-glass. Nothing was left of it but an insignificant little tuft, and this was no longer near the Kentucky shore; it was clear over against the opposite shore, a mile away. In war times the island had been an important place, for it commanded the situation; and, being heavily fortified, there was no getting by it. It lay between the upper and lower divisions of the Union forces, and kept them separate, until a junction was finally effected across the Missouri neck of land; but the island being itself joined to that neck now, the wide river is without obstruction. In this region the river passes from Kentucky into Tennessee, back into Missouri, then back into Kentucky, and thence into Tennessee again. So a mile or two of Missouri sticks over into Tennessee. The town of New Madrid was looking very unwell; but otherwise unchanged from its former condition and aspect. Its blocks of frame-houses were still grouped in the same old flat plain, and environed by the same old forests. It was as tranquil as formerly, and apparently had neither grown nor diminished in size. It was said that the recent high water had invaded it and damaged its looks. This was surprising news; for in low water the river bank is very high there (fifty feet), and in my day an overflow had always been considered an impossibility. This present flood of 1882 Will doubtless be celebrated in the river's history for several generations before a deluge of like magnitude shall be seen. It put all the unprotected low lands under water, from Cairo to the mouth; it broke down the levees in a great many places, on both sides of the river; and in some regions south, when the flood was at its highest, the Mississippi was SEVENTY MILES wide! a number of lives were lost, and the destruction of property was fearful. The crops were destroyed, houses washed away, and shelterless men and cattle forced to take refuge on scattering elevations here and there in field and forest, and wait in peril and suffering until the boats put in commission by the national and local governments and by newspaper enterprise could come and rescue them. The properties of multitudes of people were under water for months, and the poorer ones must have starved by the hundred if succor had not been promptly afforded.{footnote [For a detailed and interesting description of the great flood, written on board of the New Orleans TIMES-DEMOCRAT'S relief-boat, see Appendix A]} The water had been falling during a considerable time now, yet as a rule we found the banks still under water. Chapter 27 Some Imported Articles WE met two steamboats at New Madrid. Two steamboats in sight at once! an infrequent spectacle now in the lonesome Mississippi. The loneliness of this solemn, stupendous flood is impressive--and depressing. League after league, and still league after league, it pours its chocolate tide along, between its solid forest walls, its almost untenanted shores, with seldom a sail or a moving object of any kind to disturb the surface and break the monotony of the blank, watery solitude; and so the day goes, the night comes, and again the day--and still the same, night after night and day after day--majestic, unchanging sameness of serenity, repose, tranquillity, lethargy, vacancy--symbol of eternity, realization of the heaven pictured by priest and prophet, and longed for by the good and thoughtless! Immediately after the war of 1812, tourists began to come to America, from England; scattering ones at first, then a sort of procession of them--a procession which kept up its plodding, patient march through the land during many, many years. Each tourist took notes, and went home and published a book--a book which was usually calm, truthful, reasonable, kind; but which seemed just the reverse to our tender-footed progenitors. A glance at these tourist-books shows us that in certain of its aspects the Mississippi has undergone no change since those strangers visited it, but remains to-day about as it was then. The emotions produced in those foreign breasts by these aspects were not all formed on one pattern, of course; they HAD to be various, along at first, because the earlier tourists were obliged to originate their emotions, whereas in older countries one can always borrow emotions from one's predecessors. And, mind you, emotions are among the toughest things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion. Captain Basil Hall. R.N., writing fifty-five years ago, says-- 'Here I caught the first glimpse of the object I had so long wished to behold, and felt myself amply repaid at that moment for all the trouble I had experienced in coming so far; and stood looking at the river flowing past till it was too dark to distinguish anything. But it was not till I had visited the same spot a dozen times, that I came to a right comprehension of the grandeur of the scene.' Following are Mrs. Trollope's emotions. She is writing a few months later in the same year, 1827, and is coming in at the mouth of the Mississippi-- 'The first indication of our approach to land was the appearance of this mighty river pouring forth its muddy mass of waters, and mingling with the deep blue of the Mexican Gulf. I never beheld a scene so utterly desolate as this entrance of the Mississippi. Had Dante seen it, he might have drawn images of another Borgia from its horrors. One only object rears itself above the eddying waters; this is the mast of a vessel long since wrecked in attempting to cross the bar, and it still stands, a dismal witness of the destruction that has been, and a boding prophet of that which is to come.' Emotions of Hon. Charles Augustus Murray (near St. Louis), seven years later-- 'It is only when you ascend the mighty current for fifty or a hundred miles, and use the eye of imagination as well as that of nature, that you begin to understand all his might and majesty. You see him fertilizing a boundless valley, bearing along in his course the trophies of his thousand victories over the shattered forest--here carrying away large masses of soil with all their growth, and there forming islands, destined at some future period to be the residence of man; and while indulging in this prospect, it is then time for reflection to suggest that the current before you has flowed through two or three thousand miles, and has yet to travel one thousand three hundred more before reaching its ocean destination.' Receive, now, the emotions of Captain Marryat, R.N. author of the sea tales, writing in 1837, three years after Mr. Murray-- 'Never, perhaps, in the records of nations, was there an instance of a century of such unvarying and unmitigated crime as is to be collected from the history of the turbulent and blood-stained Mississippi. The stream itself appears as if appropriate for the deeds which have been committed. It is not like most rivers, beautiful to the sight, bestowing fertility in its course; not one that the eye loves to dwell upon as it sweeps along, nor can you wander upon its banks, or trust yourself without danger to its stream. It is a furious, rapid, desolating torrent, loaded with alluvial soil; and few of those who are received into its waters ever rise again, {footnote [There was a foolish superstition of some little prevalence in that day, that the Mississippi would neither buoy up a swimmer, nor permit a drowned person's body to rise to the surface.]} or can support themselves long upon its surface without assistance from some friendly log. It contains the coarsest and most uneatable of fish, such as the cat-fish and such genus, and as you descend, its banks are occupied with the fetid alligator, while the panther basks at its edge in the cane-brakes, almost impervious to man. Pouring its impetuous waters through wild tracks covered with trees of little value except for firewood, it sweeps down whole forests in its course, which disappear in tumultuous confusion, whirled away by the stream now loaded with the masses of soil which nourished their roots, often blocking up and changing for a time the channel of the river, which, as if in anger at its being opposed, inundates and devastates the whole country round; and as soon as it forces its way through its former channel, plants in every direction the uprooted monarchs of the forest (upon whose branches the bird will never again perch, or the raccoon, the opossum, or the squirrel climb) as traps to the adventurous navigators of its waters by steam, who, borne down upon these concealed dangers which pierce through the planks, very often have not time to steer for and gain the shore before they sink to the bottom. There are no pleasing associations connected with the great common sewer of the Western America, which pours out its mud into the Mexican Gulf, polluting the clear blue sea for many miles beyond its mouth. It is a river of desolation; and instead of reminding you, like other beautiful rivers, of an angel which has descended for the benefit of man, you imagine it a devil, whose energies have been only overcome by the wonderful power of steam.' It is pretty crude literature for a man accustomed to handling a pen; still, as a panorama of the emotions sent weltering through this noted visitor's breast by the aspect and traditions of the 'great common sewer,' it has a value. A value, though marred in the matter of statistics by inaccuracies; for the catfish is a plenty good enough fish for anybody, and there are no panthers that are 'impervious to man.' Later still comes Alexander Mackay, of the Middle Temple, Barrister at Law, with a better digestion, and no catfish dinner aboard, and feels as follows-- 'The Mississippi! It was with indescribable emotions that I first felt myself afloat upon its waters. How often in my schoolboy dreams, and in my waking visions afterwards, had my imagination pictured to itself the lordly stream, rolling with tumultuous current through the boundless region to which it has given its name, and gathering into itself, in its course to the ocean, the tributary waters of almost every latitude in the temperate zone! Here it was then in its reality, and I, at length, steaming against its tide. I looked upon it with that reverence with which everyone must regard a great feature of external nature.' So much for the emotions. The tourists, one and all, remark upon the deep, brooding loneliness and desolation of the vast river. Captain Basil Hall, who saw it at flood-stage, says-- 'Sometimes we passed along distances of twenty or thirty miles without seeing a single habitation. An artist, in search of hints for a painting of the deluge, would here have found them in abundance.' The first shall be last, etc. just two hundred years ago, the old original first and gallantest of all the foreign tourists, pioneer, head of the procession, ended his weary and tedious discovery-voyage down the solemn stretches of the great river--La Salle, whose name will last as long as the river itself shall last. We quote from Mr. Parkman-- 'And now they neared their journey's end. On the sixth of April, the river divided itself into three broad channels. La Salle followed that of the west, and D'Autray that of the east; while Tonty took the middle passage. As he drifted down the turbid current, between the low and marshy shores, the brackish water changed to brine, and the breeze grew fresh with the salt breath of the sea. Then the broad bosom of the great Gulf opened on his sight, tossing its restless billows, limitless, voiceless, lonely as when born of chaos, without a sail, without a sign of life.' Then, on a spot of solid ground, La Salle reared a column 'bearing the arms of France; the Frenchmen were mustered under arms; and while the New England Indians and their squaws looked on in wondering silence, they chanted the TE DEUM, THE EXAUDIAT, and the DOMINE SALVUM FAC REGEM.' Then, whilst the musketry volleyed and rejoicing shouts burst forth, the victorious discoverer planted the column, and made proclamation in a loud voice, taking formal possession of the river and the vast countries watered by it, in the name of the King. The column bore this inscription-- LOUIS LE GRAND, ROY DE FRANCE ET DE NAVARRE, REGNE; LE NEUVIEME AVRIL, 1682. New Orleans intended to fittingly celebrate, this present year, the bicentennial anniversary of this illustrious event; but when the time came, all her energies and surplus money were required in other directions, for the flood was upon the land then, making havoc and devastation everywhere. Chapter 28 Uncle Mumford Unloads ALL day we swung along down the river, and had the stream almost wholly to ourselves. Formerly, at such a stage of the water, we should have passed acres of lumber rafts, and dozens of big coal barges; also occasional little trading-scows, peddling along from farm to farm, with the peddler's family on board; possibly, a random scow, bearing a humble Hamlet and Co. on an itinerant dramatic trip. But these were all absent. Far along in the day, we saw one steamboat; just one, and no more. She was lying at rest in the shade, within the wooded mouth of the Obion River. The spy-glass revealed the fact that she was named for me --or HE was named for me, whichever you prefer. As this was the first time I had ever encountered this species of honor, it seems excusable to mention it, and at the same time call the attention of the authorities to the tardiness of my recognition of it. Noted a big change in the river, at Island 21. It was a very large island, and used to be out toward mid-stream; but it is joined fast to the main shore now, and has retired from business as an island. As we approached famous and formidable Plum Point, darkness fell, but that was nothing to shudder about--in these modern times. For now the national government has turned the Mississippi into a sort of two- thousand-mile torchlight procession. In the head of every crossing, and in the foot of every crossing, the government has set up a clear-burning lamp. You are never entirely in the dark, now; there is always a beacon in sight, either before you, or behind you, or abreast. One might almost say that lamps have been squandered there. Dozens of crossings are lighted which were not shoal when they were created, and have never been shoal since; crossings so plain, too, and also so straight, that a steamboat can take herself through them without any help, after she has been through once. Lamps in such places are of course not wasted; it is much more convenient and comfortable for a pilot to hold on them than on a spread of formless blackness that won't stay still; and money is saved to the boat, at the same time, for she can of course make more miles with her rudder amidships than she can with it squared across her stern and holding her back. But this thing has knocked the romance out of piloting, to a large extent. It, and some other things together, have knocked all the romance out of it. For instance, the peril from snags is not now what it once was. The government's snag-boats go patrolling up and down, in these matter-of-fact days, pulling the river's teeth; they have rooted out all the old clusters which made many localities so formidable; and they allow no new ones to collect. Formerly, if your boat got away from you, on a black night, and broke for the woods, it was an anxious time with you; so was it also, when you were groping your way through solidified darkness in a narrow chute; but all that is changed now--you flash out your electric light, transform night into day in the twinkling of an eye, and your perils and anxieties are at an end. Horace Bixby and George Ritchie have charted the crossings and laid out the courses by compass; they have invented a lamp to go with the chart, and have patented the whole. With these helps, one may run in the fog now, with considerable security, and with a confidence unknown in the old days. With these abundant beacons, the banishment of snags, plenty of daylight in a box and ready to be turned on whenever needed, and a chart and compass to fight the fog with, piloting, at a good stage of water, is now nearly as safe and simple as driving stage, and is hardly more than three times as romantic. And now in these new days, these days of infinite change, the Anchor Line have raised the captain above the pilot by giving him the bigger wages of the two. This was going far, but they have not stopped there. They have decreed that the pilot shall remain at his post, and stand his watch clear through, whether the boat be under way or tied up to the shore. We, that were once the aristocrats of the river, can't go to bed now, as we used to do, and sleep while a hundred tons of freight are lugged aboard; no, we must sit in the pilot-house; and keep awake, too. Verily we are being treated like a parcel of mates and engineers. The Government has taken away the romance of our calling; the Company has taken away its state and dignity. Plum Point looked as it had always looked by night, with the exception that now there were beacons to mark the crossings, and also a lot of other lights on the Point and along its shore; these latter glinting from the fleet of the United States River Commission, and from a village which the officials have built on the land for offices and for the employees of the service. The military engineers of the Commission have taken upon their shoulders the job of making the Mississippi over again --a job transcended in size by only the original job of creating it. They are building wing-dams here and there, to deflect the current; and dikes to confine it in narrower bounds; and other dikes to make it stay there; and for unnumbered miles along the Mississippi, they are felling the timber-front for fifty yards back, with the purpose of shaving the bank down to low-water mark with the slant of a house roof, and ballasting it with stones; and in many places they have protected the wasting shores with rows of piles. One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver-- not aloud, but to himself--that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known of their abstruse science; and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. Captain Eads, with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one would pipe out and say the Commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct. I consulted Uncle Mumford concerning this and cognate matters; and I give here the result, stenographically reported, and therefore to be relied on as being full and correct; except that I have here and there left out remarks which were addressed to the men, such as 'where in blazes are you going with that barrel now?' and which seemed to me to break the flow of the written statement, without compensating by adding to its information or its clearness. Not that I have ventured to strike out all such interjections; I have removed only those which were obviously irrelevant; wherever one occurred which I felt any question about, I have judged it safest to let it remain. UNCLE MUMFORD'S IMPRESSIONS Uncle Mumford said-- 'As long as I have been mate of a steamboat--thirty years--I have watched this river and studied it. Maybe I could have learnt more about it at West Point, but if I believe it I wish I may be WHAT ARE YOU SUCKING YOUR FINGERS THERE FOR ?--COLLAR THAT KAG OF NAILS! Four years at West Point, and plenty of books and schooling, will learn a man a good deal, I reckon, but it won't learn him the river. You turn one of those little European rivers over to this Commission, with its hard bottom and clear water, and it would just be a holiday job for them to wall it, and pile it, and dike it, and tame it down, and boss it around, and make it go wherever they wanted it to, and stay where they put it, and do just as they said, every time. But this ain't that kind of a river. They have started in here with big confidence, and the best intentions in the world; but they are going to get left. What does Ecclesiastes vii. 13 say? Says enough to knock THEIR little game galley-west, don't it? Now you look at their methods once. There at Devil's Island, in the Upper River, they wanted the water to go one way, the water wanted to go another. So they put up a stone wall. But what does the river care for a stone wall? When it got ready, it just bulged through it. Maybe they can build another that will stay; that is, up there--but not down here they can't. Down here in the Lower River, they drive some pegs to turn the water away from the shore and stop it from slicing off the bank; very well, don't it go straight over and cut somebody else's bank? Certainly. Are they going to peg all the banks? Why, they could buy ground and build a new Mississippi cheaper. They are pegging Bulletin Tow-head now. It won't do any good. If the river has got a mortgage on that island, it will foreclose, sure, pegs or no pegs. Away down yonder, they have driven two rows of piles straight through the middle of a dry bar half a mile long, which is forty foot out of the water when the river is low. What do you reckon that is for? If I know, I wish I may land in-HUMP YOURSELF, YOU SON OF AN UNDERTAKER!--OUT WITH THAT COAL-OIL, NOW, LIVELY, LIVELY! And just look at what they are trying to do down there at Milliken's Bend. There's been a cut-off in that section, and Vicksburg is left out in the cold. It's a country town now. The river strikes in below it; and a boat can't go up to the town except in high water. Well, they are going to build wing-dams in the bend opposite the foot of 103, and throw the water over and cut off the foot of the island and plow down into an old ditch where the river used to be in ancient times; and they think they can persuade the water around that way, and get it to strike in above Vicksburg, as it used to do, and fetch the town back into the world again. That is, they are going to take this whole Mississippi, and twist it around and make it run several miles UP STREAM. Well you've got to admire men that deal in ideas of that size and can tote them around without crutches; but you haven't got to believe they can DO such miracles, have you! And yet you ain't absolutely obliged to believe they can't. I reckon the safe way, where a man can afford it, is to copper the operation, and at the same time buy enough property in Vicksburg to square you up in case they win. Government is doing a deal for the Mississippi, now--spending loads of money on her. When there used to be four thousand steamboats and ten thousand acres of coal-barges, and rafts and trading scows, there wasn't a lantern from St. Paul to New Orleans, and the snags were thicker than bristles on a hog's back; and now when there's three dozen steamboats and nary barge or raft, Government has snatched out all the snags, and lit up the shores like Broadway, and a boat's as safe on the river as she'd be in heaven. And I reckon that by the time there ain't any boats left at all, the Commission will have the old thing all reorganized, and dredged out, and fenced in, and tidied up, to a degree that will make navigation just simply perfect, and absolutely safe and profitable; and all the days will be Sundays, and all the mates will be Sunday-school su-WHAT-IN-THE-NATION-YOU-FOOLING-AROUND-THERE-FOR, YOU SONS OF UNRIGHTEOUSNESS, HEIRS OF PERDITION! GOING TO BE A YEAR GETTING THAT HOGSHEAD ASHORE?' During our trip to New Orleans and back, we had many conversations with river men, planters, journalists, and officers of the River Commission-- with conflicting and confusing results. To wit:-- 1. Some believed in the Commission's scheme to arbitrarily and permanently confine (and thus deepen) the channel, preserve threatened shores, etc. 2. Some believed that the Commission's money ought to be spent only on building and repairing the great system of levees. 3. Some believed that the higher you build your levee, the higher the river's bottom will rise; and that consequently the levee system is a mistake. 4. Some believed in the scheme to relieve the river, in flood-time, by turning its surplus waters off into Lake Borgne, etc. 5. Some believed in the scheme of northern lake-reservoirs to replenish the Mississippi in low-water seasons. Wherever you find a man down there who believes in one of these theories you may turn to the next man and frame your talk upon the hypothesis that he does not believe in that theory; and after you have had experience, you do not take this course doubtfully, or hesitatingly, but with the confidence of a dying murderer--converted one, I mean. For you will have come to know, with a deep and restful certainty, that you are not going to meet two people sick of the same theory, one right after the other. No, there will always be one or two with the other diseases along between. And as you proceed, you will find out one or two other things. You will find out that there is no distemper of the lot but is contagious; and you cannot go where it is without catching it. You may vaccinate yourself with deterrent facts as much as you please--it will do no good; it will seem to 'take,' but it doesn't; the moment you rub against any one of those theorists, make up your mind that it is time to hang out your yellow flag. Yes, you are his sure victim: yet his work is not all to your hurt-- only part of it; for he is like your family physician, who comes and cures the mumps, and leaves the scarlet-fever behind. If your man is a Lake-Borgne-relief theorist, for instance, he will exhale a cloud of deadly facts and statistics which will lay you out with that disease, sure; but at the same time he will cure you of any other of the five theories that may have previously got into your system. I have had all the five; and had them 'bad;' but ask me not, in mournful numbers, which one racked me hardest, or which one numbered the biggest sick list, for I do not know. In truth, no one can answer the latter question. Mississippi Improvement is a mighty topic, down yonder. Every man on the river banks, south of Cairo, talks about it every day, during such moments as he is able to spare from talking about the war; and each of the several chief theories has its host of zealous partisans; but, as I have said, it is not possible to determine which cause numbers the most recruits. All were agreed upon one point, however: if Congress would make a sufficient appropriation, a colossal benefit would result. Very well; since then the appropriation has been made--possibly a sufficient one, certainly not too large a one. Let us hope that the prophecy will be amply fulfilled. One thing will be easily granted by the reader; that an opinion from Mr. Edward Atkinson, upon any vast national commercial matter, comes as near ranking as authority, as can the opinion of any individual in the Union. What he has to say about Mississippi River Improvement will be found in the Appendix.{footnote [See Appendix B.]} Sometimes, half a dozen figures will reveal, as with a lightning-flash, the importance of a subject which ten thousand labored words, with the same purpose in view, had left at last but dim and uncertain. Here is a case of the sort--paragraph from the 'Cincinnati Commercial'-- 'The towboat "Jos. B. Williams" is on her way to New Orleans with a tow of thirty-two barges, containing six hundred thousand bushels (seventy- six pounds to the bushel) of coal exclusive of her own fuel, being the largest tow ever taken to New Orleans or anywhere else in the world. Her freight bill, at 3 cents a bushel, amounts to $18,000. It would take eighteen hundred cars, of three hundred and thirty-three bushels to the car, to transport this amount of coal. At $10 per ton, or $100 per car, which would be a fair price for the distance by rail, the freight bill would amount to $180,000, or $162,000 more by rail than by river. The tow will be taken from Pittsburg to New Orleans in fourteen or fifteen days. It would take one hundred trains of eighteen cars to the train to transport this one tow of six hundred thousand bushels of coal, and even if it made the usual speed of fast freight lines, it would take one whole summer to put it through by rail.' When a river in good condition can enable one to save $162,000 and a whole summer's time, on a single cargo, the wisdom of taking measures to keep the river in good condition is made plain to even the uncommercial mind. Chapter 29 A Few Specimen Bricks WE passed through the Plum Point region, turned Craighead's Point, and glided unchallenged by what was once the formidable Fort Pillow, memorable because of the massacre perpetrated there during the war. Massacres are sprinkled with some frequency through the histories of several Christian nations, but this is almost the only one that can be found in American history; perhaps it is the only one which rises to a size correspondent to that huge and somber title. We have the 'Boston Massacre,' where two or three people were killed; but we must bunch Anglo-Saxon history together to find the fellow to the Fort Pillow tragedy; and doubtless even then we must travel back to the days and the performances of Coeur de Lion, that fine 'hero,' before we accomplish it. More of the river's freaks. In times past, the channel used to strike above Island 37, by Brandywine Bar, and down towards Island 39. Afterward, changed its course and went from Brandywine down through Vogelman's chute in the Devil's Elbow, to Island 39--part of this course reversing the old order; the river running UP four or five miles, instead of down, and cutting off, throughout, some fifteen miles of distance. This in 1876. All that region is now called Centennial Island. There is a tradition that Island 37 was one of the principal abiding places of the once celebrated 'Murel's Gang.' This was a colossal combination of robbers, horse-thieves, negro-stealers, and counterfeiters, engaged in business along the river some fifty or sixty years ago. While our journey across the country towards St. Louis was in progress we had had no end of Jesse James and his stirring history; for he had just been assassinated by an agent of the Governor of Missouri, and was in consequence occupying a good deal of space in the newspapers. Cheap histories of him were for sale by train boys. According to these, he was the most marvelous creature of his kind that had ever existed. It was a mistake. Murel was his equal in boldness; in pluck; in rapacity; in cruelty, brutality, heartlessness, treachery, and in general and comprehensive vileness and shamelessness; and very much his superior in some larger aspects. James was a retail rascal; Murel, wholesale. James's modest genius dreamed of no loftier flight than the planning of raids upon cars, coaches, and country banks; Murel projected negro insurrections and the capture of New Orleans; and furthermore, on occasion, this Murel could go into a pulpit and edify the congregation. What are James and his half-dozen vulgar rascals compared with this stately old-time criminal, with his sermons, his meditated insurrections and city-captures, and his majestic following of ten hundred men, sworn to do his evil will! Here is a paragraph or two concerning this big operator, from a now forgotten book which was published half a century ago-- He appears to have been a most dexterous as well as consummate villain. When he traveled, his usual disguise was that of an itinerant preacher; and it is said that his discourses were very 'soul-moving'--interesting the hearers so much that they forgot to look after their horses, which were carried away by his confederates while he was preaching. But the stealing of horses in one State, and selling them in another, was but a small portion of their business; the most lucrative was the enticing slaves to run away from their masters, that they might sell them in another quarter. This was arranged as follows; they would tell a negro that if he would run away from his master, and allow them to sell him, he should receive a portion of the money paid for him, and that upon his return to them a second time they would send him to a free State, where he would be safe. The poor wretches complied with this request, hoping to obtain money and freedom; they would be sold to another master, and run away again, to their employers; sometimes they would be sold in this manner three or four times, until they had realized three or four thousand dollars by them; but as, after this, there was fear of detection, the usual custom was to get rid of the only witness that could be produced against them, which was the negro himself, by murdering him, and throwing his body into the Mississippi. Even if it was established that they had stolen a negro, before he was murdered, they were always prepared to evade punishment; for they concealed the negro who had run away, until he was advertised, and a reward offered to any man who would catch him. An advertisement of this kind warrants the person to take the property, if found. And then the negro becomes a property in trust, when, therefore, they sold the negro, it only became a breach of trust, not stealing; and for a breach of trust, the owner of the property can only have redress by a civil action, which was useless, as the damages were never paid. It may be inquired, how it was that Murel escaped Lynch law under such circumstances This will be easily understood when it is stated that he had MORE THAN A THOUSAND SWORN CONFEDERATES, all ready at a moment's notice to support any of the gang who might be in trouble. The names of all the principal confederates of Murel were obtained from himself, in a manner which I shall presently explain. The gang was composed of two classes: the Heads or Council, as they were called, who planned and concerted, but seldom acted; they amounted to about four hundred. The other class were the active agents, and were termed strikers, and amounted to about six hundred and fifty. These were the tools in the hands of the others; they ran all the risk, and received but a small portion of the money; they were in the power of the leaders of the gang, who would sacrifice them at any time by handing them over to justice, or sinking their bodies in the Mississippi. The general rendezvous of this gang of miscreants was on the Arkansas side of the river, where they concealed their negroes in the morasses and cane-brakes. The depredations of this extensive combination were severely felt; but so well were their plans arranged, that although Murel, who was always active, was everywhere suspected, there was no proof to be obtained. It so happened, however, that a young man of the name of Stewart, who was looking after two slaves which Murel had decoyed away, fell in with him and obtained his confidence, took the oath, and was admitted into the gang as one of the General Council. By this means all was discovered; for Stewart turned traitor, although he had taken the oath, and having obtained every information, exposed the whole concern, the names of all the parties, and finally succeeded in bringing home sufficient evidence against Murel, to procure his conviction and sentence to the Penitentiary (Murel was sentenced to fourteen years' imprisonment); so many people who were supposed to be honest, and bore a respectable name in the different States, were found to be among the list of the Grand Council as published by Stewart, that every attempt was made to throw discredit upon his assertions--his character was vilified, and more than one attempt was made to assassinate him. He was obliged to quit the Southern States in consequence. It is, however, now well ascertained to have been all true; and although some blame Mr. Stewart for having violated his oath, they no longer attempt to deny that his revelations were correct. I will quote one or two portions of Murel's confessions to Mr. Stewart, made to him when they were journeying together. I ought to have observed, that the ultimate intentions of Murel and his associates were, by his own account, on a very extended scale; having no less an object in view than RAISING THE BLACKS AGAINST THE WHITES, TAKING POSSESSION OF, AND PLUNDERING NEW ORLEANS, AND MAKING THEMSELVES POSSESSORS OF THE TERRITORY. The following are a few extracts:-- 'I collected all my friends about New Orleans at one of our friends' houses in that place, and we sat in council three days before we got all our plans to our notion; we then determined to undertake the rebellion at every hazard, and make as many friends as we could for that purpose. Every man's business being assigned him, I started to Natchez on foot, having sold my horse in New Orleans,--with the intention of stealing another after I started. I walked four days, and no opportunity offered for me to get a horse. The fifth day, about twelve, I had become tired, and stopped at a creek to get some water and rest a little. While I was sitting on a log, looking down the road the way that I had come, a man came in sight riding on a good-looking horse. The very moment I saw him, I was determined to have his horse, if he was in the garb of a traveler. He rode up, and I saw from his equipage that he was a traveler. I arose and drew an elegant rifle pistol on him and ordered him to dismount. He did so, and I took his horse by the bridle and pointed down the creek, and ordered him to walk before me. He went a few hundred yards and stopped. I hitched his horse, and then made him undress himself, all to his shirt and drawers, and ordered him to turn his back to me. He said, 'If you are determined to kill me, let me have time to pray before I die,' I told him I had no time to hear him pray. He turned around and dropped on his knees, and I shot him through the back of the head. I ripped open his belly and took out his entrails, and sunk him in the creek. I then searched his pockets, and found four hundred dollars and thirty-seven cents, and a number of papers that I did not take time to examine. I sunk the pocket-book and papers and his hat, in the creek. His boots were brand-new, and fitted me genteelly; and I put them on and sunk my old shoes in the creek, to atone for them. I rolled up his clothes and put them into his portmanteau, as they were brand-new cloth of the best quality. I mounted as fine a horse as ever I straddled, and directed my course for Natchez in much better style than I had been for the last five days. 'Myself and a fellow by the name of Crenshaw gathered four good horses and started for Georgia. We got in company with a young South Carolinian just before we got to Cumberland Mountain, and Crenshaw soon knew all about his business. He had been to Tennessee to buy a drove of hogs, but when he got there pork was dearer than he calculated, and he declined purchasing. We concluded he was a prize. Crenshaw winked at me; I understood his idea. Crenshaw had traveled the road before, but I never had; we had traveled several miles on the mountain, when he passed near a great precipice; just before we passed it Crenshaw asked me for my whip, which had a pound of lead in the butt; I handed it to him, and he rode up by the side of the South Carolinian, and gave him a blow on the side of the head and tumbled him from his horse; we lit from our horses and fingered his pockets; we got twelve hundred and sixty-two dollars. Crenshaw said he knew a place to hide him, and he gathered him under his arms, and I by his feet, and conveyed him to a deep crevice in the brow of the precipice, and tumbled him into it, and he went out of sight; we then tumbled in his saddle, and took his horse with us, which was worth two hundred dollars. 'We were detained a few days, and during that time our friend went to a little village in the neighborhood and saw the negro advertised (a negro in our possession), and a description of the two men of whom he had been purchased, and giving his suspicions of the men. It was rather squally times, but any port in a storm: we took the negro that night on the bank of a creek which runs by the farm of our friend, and Crenshaw shot him through the head. We took out his entrails and sunk him in the creek. 'He had sold the other negro the third time on Arkansaw River for upwards of five hundred dollars; and then stole him and delivered him into the hand of his friend, who conducted him to a swamp, and veiled the tragic scene, and got the last gleanings and sacred pledge of secrecy; as a game of that kind will not do unless it ends in a mystery to all but the fraternity. He sold the negro, first and last, for nearly two thousand dollars, and then put him for ever out of the reach of all pursuers; and they can never graze him unless they can find the negro; and that they cannot do, for his carcass has fed many a tortoise and catfish before this time, and the frogs have sung this many a long day to the silent repose of his skeleton.' We were approaching Memphis, in front of which city, and witnessed by its people, was fought the most famous of the river battles of the Civil War. Two men whom I had served under, in my river days, took part in that fight: Mr. Bixby, head pilot of the Union fleet, and Montgomery, Commodore of the Confederate fleet. Both saw a great deal of active service during the war, and achieved high reputations for pluck and capacity. As we neared Memphis, we began to cast about for an excuse to stay with the 'Gold Dust' to the end of her course--Vicksburg. We were so pleasantly situated, that we did not wish to make a change. I had an errand of considerable importance to do at Napoleon, Arkansas, but perhaps I could manage it without quitting the 'Gold Dust.' I said as much; so we decided to stick to present quarters. The boat was to tarry at Memphis till ten the next morning. It is a beautiful city, nobly situated on a commanding bluff overlooking the river. The streets are straight and spacious, though not paved in a way to incite distempered admiration. No, the admiration must be reserved for the town's sewerage system, which is called perfect; a recent reform, however, for it was just the other way, up to a few years ago--a reform resulting from the lesson taught by a desolating visitation of the yellow-fever. In those awful days the people were swept off by hundreds, by thousands; and so great was the reduction caused by flight and by death together, that the population was diminished three-fourths, and so remained for a time. Business stood nearly still, and the streets bore an empty Sunday aspect. Here is a picture of Memphis, at that disastrous time, drawn by a German tourist who seems to have been an eye-witness of the scenes which he describes. It is from Chapter VII, of his book, just published, in Leipzig, 'Mississippi-Fahrten, von Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg.'-- 'In August the yellow-fever had reached its extremest height. Daily, hundreds fell a sacrifice to the terrible epidemic. The city was become a mighty graveyard, two-thirds of the population had deserted the place, and only the poor, the aged and the sick, remained behind, a sure prey for the insidious enemy. The houses were closed: little lamps burned in front of many--a sign that here death had entered. Often, several lay dead in a single house; from the windows hung black crape. The stores were shut up, for their owners were gone away or dead. 'Fearful evil! In the briefest space it struck down and swept away even the most vigorous victim. A slight indisposition, then an hour of fever, then the hideous delirium, then--the Yellow Death! On the street corners, and in the squares, lay sick men, suddenly overtaken by the disease; and even corpses, distorted and rigid. Food failed. Meat spoiled in a few hours in the fetid and pestiferous air, and turned black. 'Fearful clamors issue from many houses; then after a season they cease, and all is still: noble, self-sacrificing men come with the coffin, nail it up, and carry it away, to the graveyard. In the night stillness reigns. Only the physicians and the hearses hurry through the streets; and out of the distance, at intervals, comes the muffled thunder of the railway train, which with the speed of the wind, and as if hunted by furies, flies by the pest-ridden city without halting.' But there is life enough there now. The population exceeds forty thousand and is augmenting, and trade is in a flourishing condition. We drove about the city; visited the park and the sociable horde of squirrels there; saw the fine residences, rose-clad and in other ways enticing to the eye; and got a good breakfast at the hotel. A thriving place is the Good Samaritan City of the Mississippi: has a great wholesale jobbing trade; foundries, machine shops; and manufactories of wagons, carriages, and cotton-seed oil; and is shortly to have cotton mills and elevators. Her cotton receipts reached five hundred thousand bales last year--an increase of sixty thousand over the year before. Out from her healthy commercial heart issue five trunk lines of railway; and a sixth is being added. This is a very different Memphis from the one which the vanished and unremembered procession of foreign tourists used to put into their books long time ago. In the days of the now forgotten but once renowned and vigorously hated Mrs. Trollope, Memphis seems to have consisted mainly of one long street of log-houses, with some outlying cabins sprinkled around rearward toward the woods; and now and then a pig, and no end of mud. That was fifty-five years ago. She stopped at the hotel. Plainly it was not the one which gave us our breakfast. She says-- 'The table was laid for fifty persons, and was nearly full. They ate in perfect silence, and with such astonishing rapidity that their dinner was over literally before ours was begun; the only sounds heard were those produced by the knives and forks, with the unceasing chorus of coughing, ETC.' 'Coughing, etc.' The 'etc.' stands for an unpleasant word there, a word which she does not always charitably cover up, but sometimes prints. You will find it in the following description of a steamboat dinner which she ate in company with a lot of aristocratic planters; wealthy, well-born, ignorant swells they were, tinselled with the usual harmless military and judicial titles of that old day of cheap shams and windy pretense-- 'The total want of all the usual courtesies of the table; the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured; the strange uncouth phrases and pronunciation; the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterward with a pocket knife, soon forced us to feel that we were not surrounded by the generals, colonels, and majors of the old world; and that the dinner hour was to be anything rather than an hour of enjoyment.' Chapter 30 Sketches by the Way IT was a big river, below Memphis; banks brimming full, everywhere, and very frequently more than full, the waters pouring out over the land, flooding the woods and fields for miles into the interior; and in places, to a depth of fifteen feet; signs, all about, of men's hard work gone to ruin, and all to be done over again, with straitened means and a weakened courage. A melancholy picture, and a continuous one;--hundreds of miles of it. Sometimes the beacon lights stood in water three feet deep, in the edge of dense forests which extended for miles without farm, wood-yard, clearing, or break of any kind; which meant that the keeper of the light must come in a skiff a great distance to discharge his trust,--and often in desperate weather. Yet I was told that the work is faithfully performed, in all weathers; and not always by men, sometimes by women, if the man is sick or absent. The Government furnishes oil, and pays ten or fifteen dollars a month for the lighting and tending. A Government boat distributes oil and pays wages once a month. The Ship Island region was as woodsy and tenantless as ever. The island has ceased to be an island; has joined itself compactly to the main shore, and wagons travel, now, where the steamboats used to navigate. No signs left of the wreck of the 'Pennsylvania.' Some farmer will turn up her bones with his plow one day, no doubt, and be surprised. We were getting down now into the migrating negro region. These poor people could never travel when they were slaves; so they make up for the privation now. They stay on a plantation till the desire to travel seizes them; then they pack up, hail a steamboat, and clear out. Not for any particular place; no, nearly any place will answer; they only want to be moving. The amount of money on hand will answer the rest of the conundrum for them. If it will take them fifty miles, very well; let it be fifty. If not, a shorter flight will do. During a couple of days, we frequently answered these hails. Sometimes there was a group of high-water-stained, tumble-down cabins, populous with colored folk, and no whites visible; with grassless patches of dry ground here and there; a few felled trees, with skeleton cattle, mules, and horses, eating the leaves and gnawing the bark--no other food for them in the flood-wasted land. Sometimes there was a single lonely landing-cabin; near it the colored family that had hailed us; little and big, old and young, roosting on the scant pile of household goods; these consisting of a rusty gun, some bed-ticks, chests, tinware, stools, a crippled looking-glass, a venerable arm-chair, and six or eight base- born and spiritless yellow curs, attached to the family by strings. They must have their dogs; can't go without their dogs. Yet the dogs are never willing; they always object; so, one after another, in ridiculous procession, they are dragged aboard; all four feet braced and sliding along the stage, head likely to be pulled off; but the tugger marching determinedly forward, bending to his work, with the rope over his shoulder for better purchase. Sometimes a child is forgotten and left on the bank; but never a dog. The usual river-gossip going on in the pilot-house. Island No. 63--an island with a lovely 'chute,' or passage, behind it in the former times. They said Jesse Jamieson, in the 'Skylark,' had a visiting pilot with him one trip--a poor old broken-down, superannuated fellow--left him at the wheel, at the foot of 63, to run off the watch. The ancient mariner went up through the chute, and down the river outside; and up the chute and down the river again; and yet again and again; and handed the boat over to the relieving pilot, at the end of three hours of honest endeavor, at the same old foot of the island where he had originally taken the wheel! A darkey on shore who had observed the boat go by, about thirteen times, said, 'clar to gracious, I wouldn't be s'prised if dey's a whole line o' dem Sk'ylarks!' Anecdote illustrative of influence of reputation in the changing of opinion. The 'Eclipse' was renowned for her swiftness. One day she passed along; an old darkey on shore, absorbed in his own matters, did not notice what steamer it was. Presently someone asked-- 'Any boat gone up?' 'Yes, sah.' 'Was she going fast?' 'Oh, so-so--loafin' along.' 'Now, do you know what boat that was?' 'No, sah.' 'Why, uncle, that was the "Eclipse."' 'No! Is dat so? Well, I bet it was--cause she jes' went by here a- SPARKLIN'!' Piece of history illustrative of the violent style of some of the people down along here, During the early weeks of high water, A's fence rails washed down on B's ground, and B's rails washed up in the eddy and landed on A's ground. A said, 'Let the thing remain so; I will use your rails, and you use mine.' But B objected--wouldn't have it so. One day, A came down on B's ground to get his rails. B said, 'I'll kill you!' and proceeded for him with his revolver. A said, 'I'm not armed.' So B, who wished to do only what was right, threw down his revolver; then pulled a knife, and cut A's throat all around, but gave his principal attention to the front, and so failed to sever the jugular. Struggling around, A managed to get his hands on the discarded revolver, and shot B dead with it--and recovered from his own injuries. Further gossip;--after which, everybody went below to get afternoon coffee, and left me at the wheel, alone, Something presently reminded me of our last hour in St. Louis, part of which I spent on this boat's hurricane deck, aft. I was joined there by a stranger, who dropped into conversation with me--a brisk young fellow, who said he was born in a town in the interior of Wisconsin, and had never seen a steamboat until a week before. Also said that on the way down from La Crosse he had inspected and examined his boat so diligently and with such passionate interest that he had mastered the whole thing from stem to rudder-blade. Asked me where I was from. I answered, New England. 'Oh, a Yank!' said he; and went chatting straight along, without waiting for assent or denial. He immediately proposed to take me all over the boat and tell me the names of her different parts, and teach me their uses. Before I could enter protest or excuse, he was already rattling glibly away at his benevolent work; and when I perceived that he was misnaming the things, and inhospitably amusing himself at the expense of an innocent stranger from a far country, I held my peace, and let him have his way. He gave me a world of misinformation; and the further he went, the wider his imagination expanded, and the more he enjoyed his cruel work of deceit. Sometimes, after palming off a particularly fantastic and outrageous lie upon me, he was so 'full of laugh' that he had to step aside for a minute, upon one pretext or another, to keep me from suspecting. I staid faithfully by him until his comedy was finished. Then he remarked that he had undertaken to 'learn' me all about a steamboat, and had done it; but that if he had overlooked anything, just ask him and he would supply the lack. 'Anything about this boat that you don't know the name of or the purpose of, you come to me and I'll tell you.' I said I would, and took my departure; disappeared, and approached him from another quarter, whence he could not see me. There he sat, all alone, doubling himself up and writhing this way and that, in the throes of unappeasable laughter. He must have made himself sick; for he was not publicly visible afterward for several days. Meantime, the episode dropped out of my mind. The thing that reminded me of it now, when I was alone at the wheel, was the spectacle of this young fellow standing in the pilot-house door, with the knob in his hand, silently and severely inspecting me. I don't know when I have seen anybody look so injured as he did. He did not say anything--simply stood there and looked; reproachfully looked and pondered. Finally he shut the door, and started away; halted on the texas a minute; came slowly back and stood in the door again, with that grieved look in his face; gazed upon me awhile in meek rebuke, then said-- 'You let me learn you all about a steamboat, didn't you?' 'Yes,' I confessed. 'Yes, you did--DIDN'T you?' 'Yes.' 'You are the feller that--that--' Language failed. Pause--impotent struggle for further words--then he gave it up, choked out a deep, strong oath, and departed for good. Afterward I saw him several times below during the trip; but he was cold--would not look at me. Idiot, if he had not been in such a sweat to play his witless practical joke upon me, in the beginning, I would have persuaded his thoughts into some other direction, and saved him from committing that wanton and silly impoliteness. I had myself called with the four o'clock watch, mornings, for one cannot see too many summer sunrises on the Mississippi. They are enchanting. First, there is the eloquence of silence; for a deep hush broods everywhere. Next, there is the haunting sense of loneliness, isolation, remoteness from the worry and bustle of the world. The dawn creeps in stealthily; the solid walls of black forest soften to gray, and vast stretches of the river open up and reveal themselves; the water is glass-smooth, gives off spectral little wreaths of white mist, there is not the faintest breath of wind, nor stir of leaf; the tranquillity is profound and infinitely satisfying. Then a bird pipes up, another follows, and soon the pipings develop into a jubilant riot of music. You see none of the birds; you simply move through an atmosphere of song which seems to sing itself. When the light has become a little stronger, you have one of the fairest and softest pictures imaginable. You have the intense green of the massed and crowded foliage near by; you see it paling shade by shade in front of you; upon the next projecting cape, a mile off or more, the tint has lightened to the tender young green of spring; the cape beyond that one has almost lost color, and the furthest one, miles away under the horizon, sleeps upon the water a mere dim vapor, and hardly separable from the sky above it and about it. And all this stretch of river is a mirror, and you have the shadowy reflections of the leafage and the curving shores and the receding capes pictured in it. Well, that is all beautiful; soft and rich and beautiful; and when the sun gets well up, and distributes a pink flush here and a powder of gold yonder and a purple haze where it will yield the best effect, you grant that you have seen something that is worth remembering. We had the Kentucky Bend country in the early morning--scene of a strange and tragic accident in the old times, Captain Poe had a small stern-wheel boat, for years the home of himself and his wife. One night the boat struck a snag in the head of Kentucky Bend, and sank with astonishing suddenness; water already well above the cabin floor when the captain got aft. So he cut into his wife's state-room from above with an ax; she was asleep in the upper berth, the roof a flimsier one than was supposed; the first blow crashed down through the rotten boards and clove her skull. This bend is all filled up now--result of a cut-off; and the same agent has taken the great and once much-frequented Walnut Bend, and set it away back in a solitude far from the accustomed track of passing steamers. Helena we visited, and also a town I had not heard of before, it being of recent birth--Arkansas City. It was born of a railway; the Little Rock, Mississippi River and Texas Railroad touches the river there. We asked a passenger who belonged there what sort of a place it was. 'Well,' said he, after considering, and with the air of one who wishes to take time and be accurate, 'It's a hell of a place.' A description which was photographic for exactness. There were several rows and clusters of shabby frame-houses, and a supply of mud sufficient to insure the town against a famine in that article for a hundred years; for the overflow had but lately subsided. There were stagnant ponds in the streets, here and there, and a dozen rude scows were scattered about, lying aground wherever they happened to have been when the waters drained off and people could do their visiting and shopping on foot once more. Still, it is a thriving place, with a rich country behind it, an elevator in front of it, and also a fine big mill for the manufacture of cotton-seed oil. I had never seen this kind of a mill before. Cotton-seed was comparatively valueless in my time; but it is worth $12 or $13 a ton now, and none of it is thrown away. The oil made from it is colorless, tasteless, and almost if not entirely odorless. It is claimed that it can, by proper manipulation, be made to resemble and perform the office of any and all oils, and be produced at a cheaper rate than the cheapest of the originals. Sagacious people shipped it to Italy, doctored it, labeled it, and brought it back as olive oil. This trade grew to be so formidable that Italy was obliged to put a prohibitory impost upon it to keep it from working serious injury to her oil industry. Helena occupies one of the prettiest situations on the Mississippi. Her perch is the last, the southernmost group of hills which one sees on that side of the river. In its normal condition it is a pretty town; but the flood (or possibly the seepage) had lately been ravaging it; whole streets of houses had been invaded by the muddy water, and the outsides of the buildings were still belted with a broad stain extending upwards from the foundations. Stranded and discarded scows lay all about; plank sidewalks on stilts four feet high were still standing; the board sidewalks on the ground level were loose and ruinous,--a couple of men trotting along them could make a blind man think a cavalry charge was coming; everywhere the mud was black and deep, and in many places malarious pools of stagnant water were standing. A Mississippi inundation is the next most wasting and desolating infliction to a fire. We had an enjoyable time here, on this sunny Sunday: two full hours' liberty ashore while the boat discharged freight. In the back streets but few white people were visible, but there were plenty of colored folk--mainly women and girls; and almost without exception upholstered in bright new clothes of swell and elaborate style and cut--a glaring and hilarious contrast to the mournful mud and the pensive puddles. Helena is the second town in Arkansas, in point of population--which is placed at five thousand. The country about it is exceptionally productive. Helena has a good cotton trade; handles from forty to sixty thousand bales annually; she has a large lumber and grain commerce; has a foundry, oil mills, machine shops and wagon factories--in brief has $1,000,000 invested in manufacturing industries. She has two railways, and is the commercial center of a broad and prosperous region. Her gross receipts of money, annually, from all sources, are placed by the New Orleans 'Times-Democrat' at $4,000,000. 
8477	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 7. Chapter 31 A Thumb-print and What Came of It WE were approaching Napoleon, Arkansas. So I began to think about my errand there. Time, noonday; and bright and sunny. This was bad--not best, anyway; for mine was not (preferably) a noonday kind of errand. The more I thought, the more that fact pushed itself upon me--now in one form, now in another. Finally, it took the form of a distinct question: is it good common sense to do the errand in daytime, when, by a little sacrifice of comfort and inclination, you can have night for it, and no inquisitive eyes around. This settled it. Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities. I got my friends into my stateroom, and said I was sorry to create annoyance and disappointment, but that upon reflection it really seemed best that we put our luggage ashore and stop over at Napoleon. Their disapproval was prompt and loud; their language mutinous. Their main argument was one which has always been the first to come to the surface, in such cases, since the beginning of time: 'But you decided and AGREED to stick to this boat, etc.; as if, having determined to do an unwise thing, one is thereby bound to go ahead and make TWO unwise things of it, by carrying out that determination. I tried various mollifying tactics upon them, with reasonably good success: under which encouragement, I increased my efforts; and, to show them that I had not created this annoying errand, and was in no way to blame for it, I presently drifted into its history--substantially as follows: Toward the end of last year, I spent a few months in Munich, Bavaria. In November I was living in Fraulein Dahlweiner's PENSION, 1a, Karlstrasse; but my working quarters were a mile from there, in the house of a widow who supported herself by taking lodgers. She and her two young children used to drop in every morning and talk German to me--by request. One day, during a ramble about the city, I visited one of the two establishments where the Government keeps and watches corpses until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in a trance state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows--all of them with wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds. Along the sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows; and in each of these lay several marble- visaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands. Around a finger of each of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring; and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a watch-room yonder, where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring to the aid of any of that pallid company who, waking out of death, shall make a movement--for any, even the slightest, movement will twitch the wire and ring that fearful bell. I imagined myself a death-sentinel drowsing there alone, far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a twinkling all my body stricken to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that awful summons! So I inquired about this thing; asked what resulted usually? if the watchman died, and the restored corpse came and did what it could to make his last moments easy. But I was rebuked for trying to feed an idle and frivolous curiosity in so solemn and so mournful a place; and went my way with a humbled crest. Next morning I was telling the widow my adventure, when she exclaimed-- 'Come with me! I have a lodger who shall tell you all you want to know. He has been a night-watchman there.' He was a living man, but he did not look it. He was abed, and had his head propped high on pillows; his face was wasted and colorless, his deep-sunken eyes were shut; his hand, lying on his breast, was talon- like, it was so bony and long-fingered. The widow began her introduction of me. The man's eyes opened slowly, and glittered wickedly out from the twilight of their caverns; he frowned a black frown; he lifted his lean hand and waved us peremptorily away. But the widow kept straight on, till she had got out the fact that I was a stranger and an American. The man's face changed at once; brightened, became even eager--and the next moment he and I were alone together. I opened up in cast-iron German; he responded in quite flexible English; thereafter we gave the German language a permanent rest. This consumptive and I became good friends. I visited him every day, and we talked about everything. At least, about everything but wives and children. Let anybody's wife or anybody's child be mentioned, and three things always followed: the most gracious and loving and tender light glimmered in the man's eyes for a moment; faded out the next, and in its place came that deadly look which had flamed there the first time I ever saw his lids unclose; thirdly, he ceased from speech, there and then for that day; lay silent, abstracted, and absorbed; apparently heard nothing that I said; took no notice of my good-byes, and plainly did not know, by either sight or hearing, when I left the room. When I had been this Karl Ritter's daily and sole intimate during two months, he one day said, abruptly-- 'I will tell you my story.' A DYING MAN S CONFESSION Then he went on as follows:-- I have never given up, until now. But now I have given up. I am going to die. I made up my mind last night that it must be, and very soon, too. You say you are going to revisit your river, by-and-bye, when you find opportunity. Very well; that, together with a certain strange experience which fell to my lot last night, determines me to tell you my history--for you will see Napoleon, Arkansas; and for my sake you will stop there, and do a certain thing for me--a thing which you will willingly undertake after you shall have heard my narrative. Let us shorten the story wherever we can, for it will need it, being long. You already know how I came to go to America, and how I came to settle in that lonely region in the South. But you do not know that I had a wife. My wife was young, beautiful, loving, and oh, so divinely good and blameless and gentle! And our little girl was her mother in miniature. It was the happiest of happy households. One night--it was toward the close of the war--I woke up out of a sodden lethargy, and found myself bound and gagged, and the air tainted with chloroform! I saw two men in the room, and one was saying to the other, in a hoarse whisper, 'I told her I would, if she made a noise, and as for the child--' The other man interrupted in a low, half-crying voice-- 'You said we'd only gag them and rob them, not hurt them; or I wouldn't have come.' 'Shut up your whining; had to change the plan when they waked up; you done all you could to protect them, now let that satisfy you; come, help rummage.' Both men were masked, and wore coarse, ragged 'nigger' clothes; they had a bull's-eye lantern, and by its light I noticed that the gentler robber had no thumb on his right hand. They rummaged around my poor cabin for a moment; the head bandit then said, in his stage whisper-- 'It's a waste of time--he shall tell where it's hid. Undo his gag, and revive him up.' The other said-- 'All right--provided no clubbing.' 'No clubbing it is, then--provided he keeps still.' They approached me; just then there was a sound outside; a sound of voices and trampling hoofs; the robbers held their breath and listened; the sounds came slowly nearer and nearer; then came a shout-- 'HELLO, the house! Show a light, we want water.' 'The captain's voice, by G--!' said the stage-whispering ruffian, and both robbers fled by the way of the back door, shutting off their bull's-eye as they ran. The strangers shouted several times more, then rode by--there seemed to be a dozen of the horses--and I heard nothing more. I struggled, but could not free myself from my bonds. I tried to speak, but the gag was effective; I could not make a sound. I listened for my wife's voice and my child's--listened long and intently, but no sound came from the other end of the room where their bed was. This silence became more and more awful, more and more ominous, every moment. Could you have endured an hour of it, do you think? Pity me, then, who had to endure three. Three hours--? it was three ages! Whenever the clock struck, it seemed as if years had gone by since I had heard it last. All this time I was struggling in my bonds; and at last, about dawn, I got myself free, and rose up and stretched my stiff limbs. I was able to distinguish details pretty well. The floor was littered with things thrown there by the robbers during their search for my savings. The first object that caught my particular attention was a document of mine which I had seen the rougher of the two ruffians glance at and then cast away. It had blood on it! I staggered to the other end of the room. Oh, poor unoffending, helpless ones, there they lay, their troubles ended, mine begun! Did I appeal to the law--I? Does it quench the pauper's thirst if the King drink for him? Oh, no, no, no--I wanted no impertinent interference of the law. Laws and the gallows could not pay the debt that was owing to me! Let the laws leave the matter in my hands, and have no fears: I would find the debtor and collect the debt. How accomplish this, do you say? How accomplish it, and feel so sure about it, when I had neither seen the robbers' faces, nor heard their natural voices, nor had any idea who they might be? Nevertheless, I WAS sure-- quite sure, quite confident. I had a clue--a clue which you would not have valued--a clue which would not have greatly helped even a detective, since he would lack the secret of how to apply it. I shall come to that, presently--you shall see. Let us go on, now, taking things in their due order. There was one circumstance which gave me a slant in a definite direction to begin with: Those two robbers were manifestly soldiers in tramp disguise; and not new to military service, but old in it--regulars, perhaps; they did not acquire their soldierly attitude, gestures, carriage, in a day, nor a month, nor yet in a year. So I thought, but said nothing. And one of them had said, 'the captain's voice, by G--!'--the one whose life I would have. Two miles away, several regiments were in camp, and two companies of U.S. cavalry. When I learned that Captain Blakely, of Company C had passed our way, that night, with an escort, I said nothing, but in that company I resolved to seek my man. In conversation I studiously and persistently described the robbers as tramps, camp followers; and among this class the people made useless search, none suspecting the soldiers but me. Working patiently, by night, in my desolated home, I made a disguise for myself out of various odds and ends of clothing; in the nearest village I bought a pair of blue goggles. By-and-bye, when the military camp broke up, and Company C was ordered a hundred miles north, to Napoleon, I secreted my small hoard of money in my belt, and took my departure in the night. When Company C arrived in Napoleon, I was already there. Yes, I was there, with a new trade--fortune-teller. Not to seem partial, I made friends and told fortunes among all the companies garrisoned there; but I gave Company C the great bulk of my attentions. I made myself limitlessly obliging to these particular men; they could ask me no favor, put upon me no risk, which I would decline. I became the willing butt of their jokes; this perfected my popularity; I became a favorite. I early found a private who lacked a thumb--what joy it was to me! And when I found that he alone, of all the company, had lost a thumb, my last misgiving vanished; I was SURE I was on the right track. This man's name was Kruger, a German. There were nine Germans in the company. I watched, to see who might be his intimates; but he seemed to have no especial intimates. But I was his intimate; and I took care to make the intimacy grow. Sometimes I so hungered for my revenge that I could hardly restrain myself from going on my knees and begging him to point out the man who had murdered my wife and child; but I managed to bridle my tongue. I bided my time, and went on telling fortunes, as opportunity offered. My apparatus was simple: a little red paint and a bit of white paper. I painted the ball of the client's thumb, took a print of it on the paper, studied it that night, and revealed his fortune to him next day. What was my idea in this nonsense? It was this: When I was a youth, I knew an old Frenchman who had been a prison-keeper for thirty years, and he told me that there was one thing about a person which never changed, from the cradle to the grave--the lines in the ball of the thumb; and he said that these lines were never exactly alike in the thumbs of any two human beings. In these days, we photograph the new criminal, and hang his picture in the Rogues' Gallery for future reference; but that Frenchman, in his day, used to take a print of the ball of a new prisoner's thumb and put that away for future reference. He always said that pictures were no good--future disguises could make them useless; 'The thumb's the only sure thing,' said he; 'you can't disguise that.' And he used to prove his theory, too, on my friends and acquaintances; it always succeeded. I went on telling fortunes. Every night I shut myself in, all alone, and studied the day's thumb-prints with a magnifying-glass. Imagine the devouring eagerness with which I pored over those mazy red spirals, with that document by my side which bore the right-hand thumb-and-finger- marks of that unknown murderer, printed with the dearest blood--to me-- that was ever shed on this earth! And many and many a time I had to repeat the same old disappointed remark, 'will they NEVER correspond!' But my reward came at last. It was the print of the thumb of the forty- third man of Company C whom I had experimented on--Private Franz Adler. An hour before, I did not know the murderer's name, or voice, or figure, or face, or nationality; but now I knew all these things! I believed I might feel sure; the Frenchman's repeated demonstrations being so good a warranty. Still, there was a way to MAKE sure. I had an impression of Kruger's left thumb. In the morning I took him aside when he was off duty; and when we were out of sight and hearing of witnesses, I said, impressively-- 'A part of your fortune is so grave, that I thought it would be better for you if I did not tell it in public. You and another man, whose fortune I was studying last night,--Private Adler,--have been murdering a woman and a child! You are being dogged: within five days both of you will be assassinated.' He dropped on his knees, frightened out of his wits; and for five minutes he kept pouring out the same set of words, like a demented person, and in the same half-crying way which was one of my memories of that murderous night in my cabin-- 'I didn't do it; upon my soul I didn't do it; and I tried to keep HIM from doing it; I did, as God is my witness. He did it alone.' This was all I wanted. And I tried to get rid of the fool; but no, he clung to me, imploring me to save him from the assassin. He said-- 'I have money--ten thousand dollars--hid away, the fruit of loot and thievery; save me--tell me what to do, and you shall have it, every penny. Two-thirds of it is my cousin Adler's; but you can take it all. We hid it when we first came here. But I hid it in a new place yesterday, and have not told him--shall not tell him. I was going to desert, and get away with it all. It is gold, and too heavy to carry when one is running and dodging; but a woman who has been gone over the river two days to prepare my way for me is going to follow me with it; and if I got no chance to describe the hiding-place to her I was going to slip my silver watch into her hand, or send it to her, and she would understand. There's a piece of paper in the back of the case, which tells it all. Here, take the watch--tell me what to do!' He was trying to press his watch upon me, and was exposing the paper and explaining it to me, when Adler appeared on the scene, about a dozen yards away. I said to poor Kruger-- 'Put up your watch, I don't want it. You shan't come to any harm. Go, now; I must tell Adler his fortune. Presently I will tell you how to escape the assassin; meantime I shall have to examine your thumbmark again. Say nothing to Adler about this thing--say nothing to anybody.' He went away filled with fright and gratitude, poor devil. I told Adler a long fortune--purposely so long that I could not finish it; promised to come to him on guard, that night, and tell him the really important part of it--the tragical part of it, I said--so must be out of reach of eavesdroppers. They always kept a picket-watch outside the town--mere discipline and ceremony--no occasion for it, no enemy around. Toward midnight I set out, equipped with the countersign, and picked my way toward the lonely region where Adler was to keep his watch. It was so dark that I stumbled right on a dim figure almost before I could get out a protecting word. The sentinel hailed and I answered, both at the same moment. I added, 'It's only me--the fortune-teller.' Then I slipped to the poor devil's side, and without a word I drove my dirk into his heart! YA WOHL, laughed I, it WAS the tragedy part of his fortune, indeed! As he fell from his horse, he clutched at me, and my blue goggles remained in his hand; and away plunged the beast dragging him, with his foot in the stirrup. I fled through the woods, and made good my escape, leaving the accusing goggles behind me in that dead man's hand. This was fifteen or sixteen years ago. Since then I have wandered aimlessly about the earth, sometimes at work, sometimes idle; sometimes with money, sometimes with none; but always tired of life, and wishing it was done, for my mission here was finished, with the act of that night; and the only pleasure, solace, satisfaction I had, in all those tedious years, was in the daily reflection, 'I have killed him!' Four years ago, my health began to fail. I had wandered into Munich, in my purposeless way. Being out of money, I sought work, and got it; did my duty faithfully about a year, and was then given the berth of night watchman yonder in that dead-house which you visited lately. The place suited my mood. I liked it. I liked being with the dead--liked being alone with them. I used to wander among those rigid corpses, and peer into their austere faces, by the hour. The later the time, the more impressive it was; I preferred the late time. Sometimes I turned the lights low: this gave perspective, you see; and the imagination could play; always, the dim receding ranks of the dead inspired one with weird and fascinating fancies. Two years ago--I had been there a year then--I was sitting all alone in the watch-room, one gusty winter's night, chilled, numb, comfortless; drowsing gradually into unconsciousness; the sobbing of the wind and the slamming of distant shutters falling fainter and fainter upon my dulling ear each moment, when sharp and suddenly that dead-bell rang out a blood-curdling alarum over my head! The shock of it nearly paralyzed me; for it was the first time I had ever heard it. I gathered myself together and flew to the corpse-room. About midway down the outside rank, a shrouded figure was sitting upright, wagging its head slowly from one side to the other--a grisly spectacle! Its side was toward me. I hurried to it and peered into its face. Heavens, it was Adler! Can you divine what my first thought was? Put into words, it was this: 'It seems, then, you escaped me once: there will be a different result this time!' Evidently this creature was suffering unimaginable terrors. Think what it must have been to wake up in the midst of that voiceless hush, and, look out over that grim congregation of the dead! What gratitude shone in his skinny white face when he saw a living form before him! And how the fervency of this mute gratitude was augmented when his eyes fell upon the life-giving cordials which I carried in my hands! Then imagine the horror which came into this pinched face when I put the cordials behind me, and said mockingly-- 'Speak up, Franz Adler--call upon these dead. Doubtless they will listen and have pity; but here there is none else that will.' He tried to speak, but that part of the shroud which bound his jaws, held firm and would not let him. He tried to lift imploring hands, but they were crossed upon his breast and tied. I said-- 'Shout, Franz Adler; make the sleepers in the distant streets hear you and bring help. Shout--and lose no time, for there is little to lose. What, you cannot? That is a pity; but it is no matter--it does not always bring help. When you and your cousin murdered a helpless woman and child in a cabin in Arkansas--my wife, it was, and my child!--they shrieked for help, you remember; but it did no good; you remember that it did no good, is it not so? Your teeth chatter--then why cannot you shout? Loosen the bandages with your hands--then you can. Ah, I see-- your hands are tied, they cannot aid you. How strangely things repeat themselves, after long years; for MY hands were tied, that night, you remember? Yes, tied much as yours are now--how odd that is. I could not pull free. It did not occur to you to untie me; it does not occur to me to untie you. Sh--! there's a late footstep. It is coming this way. Hark, how near it is! One can count the footfalls--one--two--three. There--it is just outside. Now is the time! Shout, man, shout!--it is the one sole chance between you and eternity! Ah, you see you have delayed too long--it is gone by. There--it is dying out. It is gone! Think of it--reflect upon it--you have heard a human footstep for the last time. How curious it must be, to listen to so common a sound as that, and know that one will never hear the fellow to it again.' Oh, my friend, the agony in that shrouded face was ecstasy to see! I thought of a new torture, and applied it--assisting myself with a trifle of lying invention-- 'That poor Kruger tried to save my wife and child, and I did him a grateful good turn for it when the time came. I persuaded him to rob you; and I and a woman helped him to desert, and got him away in safety.' A look as of surprise and triumph shone out dimly through the anguish in my victim's face. I was disturbed, disquieted. I said-- 'What, then--didn't he escape?' A negative shake of the head. 'No? What happened, then?' The satisfaction in the shrouded face was still plainer. The man tried to mumble out some words--could not succeed; tried to express something with his obstructed hands--failed; paused a moment, then feebly tilted his head, in a meaning way, toward the corpse that lay nearest him. 'Dead?' I asked. 'Failed to escape?--caught in the act and shot?' Negative shake of the head. 'How, then?' Again the man tried to do something with his hands. I watched closely, but could not guess the intent. I bent over and watched still more intently. He had twisted a thumb around and was weakly punching at his breast with it. 'Ah--stabbed, do you mean?' Affirmative nod, accompanied by a spectral smile of such peculiar devilishness, that it struck an awakening light through my dull brain, and I cried-- 'Did I stab him, mistaking him for you?--for that stroke was meant for none but you.' The affirmative nod of the re-dying rascal was as joyous as his failing strength was able to put into its expression. 'O, miserable, miserable me, to slaughter the pitying soul that, stood a friend to my darlings when they were helpless, and would have saved them if he could! miserable, oh, miserable, miserable me!' I fancied I heard the muffled gurgle of a, mocking laugh. I took my face out of my hands, and saw my enemy sinking back upon his inclined board. He was a satisfactory long time dying. He had a wonderful vitality, an astonishing constitution. Yes, he was a pleasant long time at it. I got a chair and a newspaper, and sat down by him and read. Occasionally I took a sip of brandy. This was necessary, on account of the cold. But I did it partly because I saw, that along at first, whenever I reached for the bottle, he thought I was going to give him some. I read aloud: mainly imaginary accounts of people snatched from the grave's threshold and restored to life and vigor by a few spoonsful of liquor and a warm bath. Yes, he had a long, hard death of it--three hours and six minutes, from the time he rang his bell. It is believed that in all these eighteen years that have elapsed since the institution of the corpse-watch, no shrouded occupant of the Bavarian dead-houses has ever rung its bell. Well, it is a harmless belief. Let it stand at that. The chill of that death-room had penetrated my bones. It revived and fastened upon me the disease which had been afflicting me, but which, up to that night, had been steadily disappearing. That man murdered my wife and my child; and in three days hence he will have added me to his list. No matter--God! how delicious the memory of it!--I caught him escaping from his grave, and thrust him back into it. After that night, I was confined to my bed for a week; but as soon as I could get about, I went to the dead-house books and got the number of the house which Adler had died in. A wretched lodging-house, it was. It was my idea that he would naturally have gotten hold of Kruger's effects, being his cousin; and I wanted to get Kruger's watch, if I could. But while I was sick, Adler's things had been sold and scattered, all except a few old letters, and some odds and ends of no value. However, through those letters, I traced out a son of Kruger's, the only relative left. He is a man of thirty now, a shoemaker by trade, and living at No. 14 Konigstrasse, Mannheim--widower, with several small children. Without explaining to him why, I have furnished two-thirds of his support, ever since. Now, as to that watch--see how strangely things happen! I traced it around and about Germany for more than a year, at considerable cost in money and vexation; and at last I got it. Got it, and was unspeakably glad; opened it, and found nothing in it! Why, I might have known that that bit of paper was not going to stay there all this time. Of course I gave up that ten thousand dollars then; gave it up, and dropped it out of my mind: and most sorrowfully, for I had wanted it for Kruger's son. Last night, when I consented at last that I must die, I began to make ready. I proceeded to burn all useless papers; and sure enough, from a batch of Adler's, not previously examined with thoroughness, out dropped that long-desired scrap! I recognized it in a moment. Here it is--I will translate it: 'Brick livery stable, stone foundation, middle of town, corner of Orleans and Market. Corner toward Court-house. Third stone, fourth row. Stick notice there, saying how many are to come.' There--take it, and preserve it. Kruger explained that that stone was removable; and that it was in the north wall of the foundation, fourth row from the top, and third stone from the west. The money is secreted behind it. He said the closing sentence was a blind, to mislead in case the paper should fall into wrong hands. It probably performed that office for Adler. Now I want to beg that when you make your intended journey down the river, you will hunt out that hidden money, and send it to Adam Kruger, care of the Mannheim address which I have mentioned. It will make a rich man of him, and I shall sleep the sounder in my grave for knowing that I have done what I could for the son of the man who tried to save my wife and child--albeit my hand ignorantly struck him down, whereas the impulse of my heart would have been to shield and serve him. Chapter 32 The Disposal of a Bonanza 'SUCH was Ritter's narrative,' said I to my two friends. There was a profound and impressive silence, which lasted a considerable time; then both men broke into a fusillade of exciting and admiring ejaculations over the strange incidents of the tale; and this, along with a rattling fire of questions, was kept up until all hands were about out of breath. Then my friends began to cool down, and draw off, under shelter of occasional volleys, into silence and abysmal reverie. For ten minutes now, there was stillness. Then Rogers said dreamily-- 'Ten thousand dollars.' Adding, after a considerable pause-- 'Ten thousand. It is a heap of money.' Presently the poet inquired-- 'Are you going to send it to him right away?' 'Yes,' I said. 'It is a queer question.' No reply. After a little, Rogers asked, hesitatingly: 'ALL of it?--That is--I mean--' 'Certainly, all of it.' I was going to say more, but stopped--was stopped by a train of thought which started up in me. Thompson spoke, but my mind was absent, and I did not catch what he said. But I heard Rogers answer-- 'Yes, it seems so to me. It ought to be quite sufficient; for I don't see that he has done anything.' Presently the poet said-- 'When you come to look at it, it is more than sufficient. Just look at it--five thousand dollars! Why, he couldn't spend it in a lifetime! And it would injure him, too; perhaps ruin him--you want to look at that. In a little while he would throw his last away, shut up his shop, maybe take to drinking, maltreat his motherless children, drift into other evil courses, go steadily from bad to worse--' 'Yes, that's it,' interrupted Rogers, fervently, 'I've seen it a hundred times--yes, more than a hundred. You put money into the hands of a man like that, if you want to destroy him, that's all; just put money into his hands, it's all you've got to do; and if it don't pull him down, and take all the usefulness out of him, and all the self-respect and everything, then I don't know human nature--ain't that so, Thompson? And even if we were to give him a THIRD of it; why, in less than six months--' 'Less than six WEEKS, you'd better say!' said I, warming up and breaking in. 'Unless he had that three thousand dollars in safe hands where he couldn't touch it, he would no more last you six weeks than--' 'Of COURSE he wouldn't,' said Thompson; 'I've edited books for that kind of people; and the moment they get their hands on the royalty--maybe it's three thousand, maybe it's two thousand--' 'What business has that shoemaker with two thousand dollars, I should like to know?' broke in Rogers, earnestly. 'A man perhaps perfectly contented now, there in Mannheim, surrounded by his own class, eating his bread with the appetite which laborious industry alone can give, enjoying his humble life, honest, upright, pure in heart; and BLEST!-- yes, I say blest! blest above all the myriads that go in silk attire and walk the empty artificial round of social folly--but just you put that temptation before him once! just you lay fifteen hundred dollars before a man like that, and say--' 'Fifteen hundred devils!' cried I, 'FIVE hundred would rot his principles, paralyze his industry, drag him to the rumshop, thence to the gutter, thence to the almshouse, thence to ----' 'WHY put upon ourselves this crime, gentlemen?' interrupted the poet earnestly and appealingly. 'He is happy where he is, and AS he is. Every sentiment of honor, every sentiment of charity, every sentiment of high and sacred benevolence warns us, beseeches us, commands us to leave him undisturbed. That is real friendship, that is true friendship. We could follow other courses that would be more showy; but none that would be so truly kind and wise, depend upon it.' After some further talk, it became evident that each of us, down in his heart, felt some misgivings over this settlement of the matter. It was manifest that we all felt that we ought to send the poor shoemaker SOMETHING. There was long and thoughtful discussion of this point; and we finally decided to send him a chromo. Well, now that everything seemed to be arranged satisfactorily to everybody concerned, a new trouble broke out: it transpired that these two men were expecting to share equally in the money with me. That was not my idea. I said that if they got half of it between them they might consider themselves lucky. Rogers said-- 'Who would have had ANY if it hadn't been for me? I flung out the first hint--but for that it would all have gone to the shoemaker.' Thompson said that he was thinking of the thing himself at the very moment that Rogers had originally spoken. I retorted that the idea would have occurred to me plenty soon enough, and without anybody's help. I was slow about thinking, maybe, but I was sure. This matter warmed up into a quarrel; then into a fight; and each man got pretty badly battered. As soon as I had got myself mended up after a fashion, I ascended to the hurricane deck in a pretty sour humor. I found Captain McCord there, and said, as pleasantly as my humor would permit-- 'I have come to say good-bye, captain. I wish to go ashore at Napoleon.' 'Go ashore where?' 'Napoleon.' The captain laughed; but seeing that I was not in a jovial mood, stopped that and said-- 'But are you serious?' 'Serious? I certainly am.' The captain glanced up at the pilot-house and said-- 'He wants to get off at Napoleon!' 'Napoleon ?' 'That's what he says.' 'Great Caesar's ghost!' Uncle Mumford approached along the deck. The captain said-- 'Uncle, here's a friend of yours wants to get off at Napoleon!' 'Well, by ---?' I said-- 'Come, what is all this about? Can't a man go ashore at Napoleon if he wants to?' 'Why, hang it, don't you know? There ISN'T any Napoleon any more. Hasn't been for years and years. The Arkansas River burst through it, tore it all to rags, and emptied it into the Mississippi!' 'Carried the WHOLE town away?-banks, churches, jails, newspaper-offices, court-house, theater, fire department, livery stable EVERYTHING ?' 'Everything. just a fifteen-minute job.' or such a matter. Didn't leave hide nor hair, shred nor shingle of it, except the fag-end of a shanty and one brick chimney. This boat is paddling along right now, where the dead-center of that town used to be; yonder is the brick chimney-all that's left of Napoleon. These dense woods on the right used to be a mile back of the town. Take a look behind you--up-stream--now you begin to recognize this country, don't you?' 'Yes, I do recognize it now. It is the most wonderful thing I ever heard of; by a long shot the most wonderful--and unexpected.' Mr. Thompson and Mr. Rogers had arrived, meantime, with satchels and umbrellas, and had silently listened to the captain's news. Thompson put a half-dollar in my hand and said softly-- 'For my share of the chromo.' Rogers followed suit. Yes, it was an astonishing thing to see the Mississippi rolling between unpeopled shores and straight over the spot where I used to see a good big self-complacent town twenty years ago. Town that was county-seat of a great and important county; town with a big United States marine hospital; town of innumerable fights--an inquest every day; town where I had used to know the prettiest girl, and the most accomplished in the whole Mississippi Valley; town where we were handed the first printed news of the 'Pennsylvania's' mournful disaster a quarter of a century ago; a town no more--swallowed up, vanished, gone to feed the fishes; nothing left but a fragment of a shanty and a crumbling brick chimney! Chapter 33 Refreshments and Ethics IN regard to Island 74, which is situated not far from the former Napoleon, a freak of the river here has sorely perplexed the laws of men and made them a vanity and a jest. When the State of Arkansas was chartered, she controlled 'to the center of the river'--a most unstable line. The State of Mississippi claimed 'to the channel'--another shifty and unstable line. No. 74 belonged to Arkansas. By and by a cut-off threw this big island out of Arkansas, and yet not within Mississippi. 'Middle of the river' on one side of it, 'channel' on the other. That is as I understand the problem. Whether I have got the details right or wrong, this FACT remains: that here is this big and exceedingly valuable island of four thousand acres, thrust out in the cold, and belonging to neither the one State nor the other; paying taxes to neither, owing allegiance to neither. One man owns the whole island, and of right is 'the man without a country.' Island 92 belongs to Arkansas. The river moved it over and joined it to Mississippi. A chap established a whiskey shop there, without a Mississippi license, and enriched himself upon Mississippi custom under Arkansas protection (where no license was in those days required). We glided steadily down the river in the usual privacy--steamboat or other moving thing seldom seen. Scenery as always: stretch upon stretch of almost unbroken forest, on both sides of the river; soundless solitude. Here and there a cabin or two, standing in small openings on the gray and grassless banks--cabins which had formerly stood a quarter or half-mile farther to the front, and gradually been pulled farther and farther back as the shores caved in. As at Pilcher's Point, for instance, where the cabins had been moved back three hundred yards in three months, so we were told; but the caving banks had already caught up with them, and they were being conveyed rearward once more. Napoleon had but small opinion of Greenville, Mississippi, in the old times; but behold, Napoleon is gone to the cat-fishes, and here is Greenville full of life and activity, and making a considerable flourish in the Valley; having three thousand inhabitants, it is said, and doing a gross trade of $2,500,000 annually. A growing town. There was much talk on the boat about the Calhoun Land Company, an enterprise which is expected to work wholesome results. Colonel Calhoun, a grandson of the statesman, went to Boston and formed a syndicate which purchased a large tract of land on the river, in Chicot County, Arkansas--some ten thousand acres--for cotton-growing. The purpose is to work on a cash basis: buy at first hands, and handle their own product; supply their negro laborers with provisions and necessaries at a trifling profit, say 8 or 10 per cent.; furnish them comfortable quarters, etc., and encourage them to save money and remain on the place. If this proves a financial success, as seems quite certain, they propose to establish a banking-house in Greenville, and lend money at an unburdensome rate of interest--6 per cent. is spoken of. The trouble heretofore has been--I am quoting remarks of planters and steamboatmen--that the planters, although owning the land, were without cash capital; had to hypothecate both land and crop to carry on the business. Consequently, the commission dealer who furnishes the money takes some risk and demands big interest--usually 10 per cent., and 2{half} per cent. for negotiating the loan. The planter has also to buy his supplies through the same dealer, paying commissions and profits. Then when he ships his crop, the dealer adds his commissions, insurance, etc. So, taking it by and large, and first and last, the dealer's share of that crop is about 25 per cent.'{footnote ['But what can the State do where the people are under subjection to rates of interest ranging from 18 to 30 per cent., and are also under the necessity of purchasing their crops in advance even of planting, at these rates, for the privilege of purchasing all their supplies at 100 per cent. profit?'--EDWARD ATKINSON.]} A cotton-planter's estimate of the average margin of profit on planting, in his section: One man and mule will raise ten acres of cotton, giving ten bales cotton, worth, say, $500; cost of producing, say $350; net profit, $150, or $15 per acre. There is also a profit now from the cotton-seed, which formerly had little value--none where much transportation was necessary. In sixteen hundred pounds crude cotton four hundred are lint, worth, say, ten cents a pound; and twelve hundred pounds of seed, worth $12 or $13 per ton. Maybe in future even the stems will not be thrown away. Mr. Edward Atkinson says that for each bale of cotton there are fifteen hundred pounds of stems, and that these are very rich in phosphate of lime and potash; that when ground and mixed with ensilage or cotton-seed meal (which is too rich for use as fodder in large quantities), the stem mixture makes a superior food, rich in all the elements needed for the production of milk, meat, and bone. Heretofore the stems have been considered a nuisance. Complaint is made that the planter remains grouty toward the former slave, since the war; will have nothing but a chill business relation with him, no sentiment permitted to intrude, will not keep a 'store' himself, and supply the negro's wants and thus protect the negro's pocket and make him able and willing to stay on the place and an advantage to him to do it, but lets that privilege to some thrifty Israelite, who encourages the thoughtless negro and wife to buy all sorts of things which they could do without--buy on credit, at big prices, month after month, credit based on the negro's share of the growing crop; and at the end of the season, the negro's share belongs to the Israelite,' the negro is in debt besides, is discouraged, dissatisfied, restless, and both he and the planter are injured; for he will take steamboat and migrate, and the planter must get a stranger in his place who does not know him, does not care for him, will fatten the Israelite a season, and follow his predecessor per steamboat. It is hoped that the Calhoun Company will show, by its humane and protective treatment of its laborers, that its method is the most profitable for both planter and negro; and it is believed that a general adoption of that method will then follow. And where so many are saying their say, shall not the barkeeper testify? He is thoughtful, observant, never drinks; endeavors to earn his salary, and WOULD earn it if there were custom enough. He says the people along here in Mississippi and Louisiana will send up the river to buy vegetables rather than raise them, and they will come aboard at the landings and buy fruits of the barkeeper. Thinks they 'don't know anything but cotton;' believes they don't know how to raise vegetables and fruit--'at least the most of them.' Says 'a nigger will go to H for a watermelon' ('H' is all I find in the stenographer's report--means Halifax probably, though that seems a good way to go for a watermelon). Barkeeper buys watermelons for five cents up the river, brings them down and sells them for fifty. 'Why does he mix such elaborate and picturesque drinks for the nigger hands on the boat?' Because they won't have any other. 'They want a big drink; don't make any difference what you make it of, they want the worth of their money. You give a nigger a plain gill of half-a-dollar brandy for five cents--will he touch it? No. Ain't size enough to it. But you put up a pint of all kinds of worthless rubbish, and heave in some red stuff to make it beautiful--red's the main thing--and he wouldn't put down that glass to go to a circus.' All the bars on this Anchor Line are rented and owned by one firm. They furnish the liquors from their own establishment, and hire the barkeepers 'on salary.' Good liquors? Yes, on some of the boats, where there are the kind of passengers that want it and can pay for it. On the other boats? No. Nobody but the deck hands and firemen to drink it. 'Brandy? Yes, I've got brandy, plenty of it; but you don't want any of it unless you've made your will.' It isn't as it used to be in the old times. Then everybody traveled by steamboat, everybody drank, and everybody treated everybody else. 'Now most everybody goes by railroad, and the rest don't drink.' In the old times the barkeeper owned the bar himself, 'and was gay and smarty and talky and all jeweled up, and was the toniest aristocrat on the boat; used to make $2,000 on a trip. A father who left his son a steamboat bar, left him a fortune. Now he leaves him board and lodging; yes, and washing, if a shirt a trip will do. Yes, indeedy, times are changed. Why, do you know, on the principal line of boats on the Upper Mississippi, they don't have any bar at all! Sounds like poetry, but it's the petrified truth.' Chapter 34 Tough Yarns STACK ISLAND. I remembered Stack Island; also Lake Providence, Louisiana--which is the first distinctly Southern-looking town you come to, downward-bound; lies level and low, shade-trees hung with venerable gray beards of Spanish moss; 'restful, pensive, Sunday aspect about the place,' comments Uncle Mumford, with feeling--also with truth. A Mr. H. furnished some minor details of fact concerning this region which I would have hesitated to believe if I had not known him to be a steamboat mate. He was a passenger of ours, a resident of Arkansas City, and bound to Vicksburg to join his boat, a little Sunflower packet. He was an austere man, and had the reputation of being singularly unworldly, for a river man. Among other things, he said that Arkansas had been injured and kept back by generations of exaggerations concerning the mosquitoes here. One may smile, said he, and turn the matter off as being a small thing; but when you come to look at the effects produced, in the way of discouragement of immigration, and diminished values of property, it was quite the opposite of a small thing, or thing in any wise to be coughed down or sneered at. These mosquitoes had been persistently represented as being formidable and lawless; whereas 'the truth is, they are feeble, insignificant in size, diffident to a fault, sensitive'--and so on, and so on; you would have supposed he was talking about his family. But if he was soft on the Arkansas mosquitoes, he was hard enough on the mosquitoes of Lake Providence to make up for it--'those Lake Providence colossi,' as he finely called them. He said that two of them could whip a dog, and that four of them could hold a man down; and except help come, they would kill him--'butcher him,' as he expressed it. Referred in a sort of casual way--and yet significant way--to 'the fact that the life policy in its simplest form is unknown in Lake Providence--they take out a mosquito policy besides.' He told many remarkable things about those lawless insects. Among others, said he had seen them try to vote. Noticing that this statement seemed to be a good deal of a strain on us, he modified it a little: said he might have been mistaken, as to that particular, but knew he had seen them around the polls 'canvassing.' There was another passenger--friend of H.'s--who backed up the harsh evidence against those mosquitoes, and detailed some stirring adventures which he had had with them. The stories were pretty sizable, merely pretty sizable; yet Mr. H. was continually interrupting with a cold, inexorable 'Wait--knock off twenty-five per cent. of that; now go on;' or, 'Wait--you are getting that too strong; cut it down, cut it down-- you get a leetle too much costumery on to your statements: always dress a fact in tights, never in an ulster;' or, 'Pardon, once more: if you are going to load anything more on to that statement, you want to get a couple of lighters and tow the rest, because it's drawing all the water there is in the river already; stick to facts--just stick to the cold facts; what these gentlemen want for a book is the frozen truth--ain't that so, gentlemen?' He explained privately that it was necessary to watch this man all the time, and keep him within bounds; it would not do to neglect this precaution, as he, Mr. H., 'knew to his sorrow.' Said he, 'I will not deceive you; he told me such a monstrous lie once, that it swelled my left ear up, and spread it so that I was actually not able to see out around it; it remained so for months, and people came miles to see me fan myself with it.' Chapter 35 Vicksburg During the Trouble WE used to plow past the lofty hill-city, Vicksburg, down-stream; but we cannot do that now. A cut-off has made a country town of it, like Osceola, St. Genevieve, and several others. There is currentless water --also a big island--in front of Vicksburg now. You come down the river the other side of the island, then turn and come up to the town; that is, in high water: in low water you can't come up, but must land some distance below it. Signs and scars still remain, as reminders of Vicksburg's tremendous war experiences; earthworks, trees crippled by the cannon balls, cave- refuges in the clay precipices, etc. The caves did good service during the six weeks' bombardment of the city--May 8 to July 4, 1863. They were used by the non-combatants--mainly by the women and children; not to live in constantly, but to fly to for safety on occasion. They were mere holes, tunnels, driven into the perpendicular clay bank, then branched Y shape, within the hill. Life in Vicksburg, during the six weeks was perhaps--but wait; here are some materials out of which to reproduce it:-- Population, twenty-seven thousand soldiers and three thousand non- combatants; the city utterly cut off from the world--walled solidly in, the frontage by gunboats, the rear by soldiers and batteries; hence, no buying and selling with the outside; no passing to and fro; no God- speeding a parting guest, no welcoming a coming one; no printed acres of world-wide news to be read at breakfast, mornings--a tedious dull absence of such matter, instead; hence, also, no running to see steamboats smoking into view in the distance up or down, and plowing toward the town--for none came, the river lay vacant and undisturbed; no rush and turmoil around the railway station, no struggling over bewildered swarms of passengers by noisy mobs of hackmen--all quiet there; flour two hundred dollars a barrel, sugar thirty, corn ten dollars a bushel, bacon five dollars a pound, rum a hundred dollars a gallon; other things in proportion: consequently, no roar and racket of drays and carriages tearing along the streets; nothing for them to do, among that handful of non-combatants of exhausted means; at three o'clock in the morning, silence; silence so dead that the measured tramp of a sentinel can be heard a seemingly impossible distance; out of hearing of this lonely sound, perhaps the stillness is absolute: all in a moment come ground-shaking thunder-crashes of artillery, the sky is cobwebbed with the crisscrossing red lines streaming from soaring bomb- shells, and a rain of iron fragments descends upon the city; descends upon the empty streets: streets which are not empty a moment later, but mottled with dim figures of frantic women and children scurrying from home and bed toward the cave dungeons--encouraged by the humorous grim soldiery, who shout 'Rats, to your holes!' and laugh. The cannon-thunder rages, shells scream and crash overhead, the iron rain pours down, one hour, two hours, three, possibly six, then stops; silence follows, but the streets are still empty; the silence continues; by-and-bye a head projects from a cave here and there and yonder, and reconnoitres, cautiously; the silence still continuing, bodies follow heads, and jaded, half smothered creatures group themselves about, stretch their cramped limbs, draw in deep draughts of the grateful fresh air, gossip with the neighbors from the next cave; maybe straggle off home presently, or take a lounge through the town, if the stillness continues; and will scurry to the holes again, by-and-bye, when the war- tempest breaks forth once more. There being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers--merely the population of a village--would they not come to know each other, after a week or two, and familiarly; insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate experiences of one would be of interest to all? Those are the materials furnished by history. From them might not almost anybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in Vicksburg? Could you, who did not experience it, come nearer to reproducing it to the imagination of another non-participant than could a Vicksburger who did experience it? It seems impossible; and yet there are reasons why it might not really be. When one makes his first voyage in a ship, it is an experience which multitudinously bristles with striking novelties; novelties which are in such sharp contrast with all this person's former experiences that they take a seemingly deathless grip upon his imagination and memory. By tongue or pen he can make a landsman live that strange and stirring voyage over with him; make him see it all and feel it all. But if he wait? If he make ten voyages in succession--what then? Why, the thing has lost color, snap, surprise; and has become commonplace. The man would have nothing to tell that would quicken a landsman's pulse. Years ago, I talked with a couple of the Vicksburg non-combatants--a man and his wife. Left to tell their story in their own way, those people told it without fire, almost without interest. A week of their wonderful life there would have made their tongues eloquent for ever perhaps; but they had six weeks of it, and that wore the novelty all out; they got used to being bomb-shelled out of home and into the ground; the matter became commonplace. After that, the possibility of their ever being startlingly interesting in their talks about it was gone. What the man said was to this effect:-- 'It got to be Sunday all the time. Seven Sundays in the week--to us, anyway. We hadn't anything to do, and time hung heavy. Seven Sundays, and all of them broken up at one time or another, in the day or in the night, by a few hours of the awful storm of fire and thunder and iron. At first we used to shin for the holes a good deal faster than we did afterwards. The first time, I forgot the children, and Maria fetched them both along. When she was all safe in the cave she fainted. Two or three weeks afterwards, when she was running for the holes, one morning, through a shell-shower, a big shell burst near her, and covered her all over with dirt, and a piece of the iron carried away her game-bag of false hair from the back of her head. Well, she stopped to get that game-bag before she shoved along again! Was getting used to things already, you see. We all got so that we could tell a good deal about shells; and after that we didn't always go under shelter if it was a light shower. Us men would loaf around and talk; and a man would say, 'There she goes!' and name the kind of shell it was from the sound of it, and go on talking--if there wasn't any danger from it. If a shell was bursting close over us, we stopped talking and stood still;-- uncomfortable, yes, but it wasn't safe to move. When it let go, we went on talking again, if nobody hurt--maybe saying, 'That was a ripper!' or some such commonplace comment before we resumed; or, maybe, we would see a shell poising itself away high in the air overhead. In that case, every fellow just whipped out a sudden, 'See you again, gents!' and shoved. Often and often I saw gangs of ladies promenading the streets, looking as cheerful as you please, and keeping an eye canted up watching the shells; and I've seen them stop still when they were uncertain about what a shell was going to do, and wait and make certain; and after that they sa'ntered along again, or lit out for shelter, according to the verdict. Streets in some towns have a litter of pieces of paper, and odds and ends of one sort or another lying around. Ours hadn't; they had IRON litter. Sometimes a man would gather up all the iron fragments and unbursted shells in his neighborhood, and pile them into a kind of monument in his front yard--a ton of it, sometimes. No glass left; glass couldn't stand such a bombardment; it was all shivered out. Windows of the houses vacant--looked like eye-holes in a skull. WHOLE panes were as scarce as news. 'We had church Sundays. Not many there, along at first; but by-and-bye pretty good turnouts. I've seen service stop a minute, and everybody sit quiet--no voice heard, pretty funeral-like then--and all the more so on account of the awful boom and crash going on outside and overhead; and pretty soon, when a body could be heard, service would go on again. Organs and church-music mixed up with a bombardment is a powerful queer combination--along at first. Coming out of church, one morning, we had an accident--the only one that happened around me on a Sunday. I was just having a hearty handshake with a friend I hadn't seen for a while, and saying, 'Drop into our cave to-night, after bombardment; we've got hold of a pint of prime wh--.' Whiskey, I was going to say, you know, but a shell interrupted. A chunk of it cut the man's arm off, and left it dangling in my hand. And do you know the thing that is going to stick the longest in my memory, and outlast everything else, little and big, I reckon, is the mean thought I had then? It was 'the whiskey IS SAVED.' And yet, don't you know, it was kind of excusable; because it was as scarce as diamonds, and we had only just that little; never had another taste during the siege. 'Sometimes the caves were desperately crowded, and always hot and close. Sometimes a cave had twenty or twenty-five people packed into it; no turning-room for anybody; air so foul, sometimes, you couldn't have made a candle burn in it. A child was born in one of those caves one night, Think of that; why, it was like having it born in a trunk. 'Twice we had sixteen people in our cave; and a number of times we had a dozen. Pretty suffocating in there. We always had eight; eight belonged there. Hunger and misery and sickness and fright and sorrow, and I don't know what all, got so loaded into them that none of them were ever rightly their old selves after the siege. They all died but three of us within a couple of years. One night a shell burst in front of the hole and caved it in and stopped it up. It was lively times, for a while, digging out. Some of us came near smothering. After that we made two openings--ought to have thought of it at first. 'Mule meat. No, we only got down to that the last day or two. Of course it was good; anything is good when you are starving. This man had kept a diary during--six weeks? No, only the first six days. The first day, eight close pages; the second, five; the third, one--loosely written; the fourth, three or four lines; a line or two the fifth and sixth days; seventh day, diary abandoned; life in terrific Vicksburg having now become commonplace and matter of course. The war history of Vicksburg has more about it to interest the general reader than that of any other of the river-towns. It is full of variety, full of incident, full of the picturesque. Vicksburg held out longer than any other important river-town, and saw warfare in all its phases, both land and water--the siege, the mine, the assault, the repulse, the bombardment, sickness, captivity, famine. The most beautiful of all the national cemeteries is here. Over the great gateway is this inscription:-- "HERE REST IN PEACE 16,600 WHO DIED FOR THEIR COUNTRY IN THE YEARS 1861 TO 1865" The grounds are nobly situated; being very high and commanding a wide prospect of land and river. They are tastefully laid out in broad terraces, with winding roads and paths; and there is profuse adornment in the way of semi-tropical shrubs and flowers,' and in one part is a piece of native wild-wood, left just as it grew, and, therefore, perfect in its charm. Everything about this cemetery suggests the hand of the national Government. The Government's work is always conspicuous for excellence, solidity, thoroughness, neatness. The Government does its work well in the first place, and then takes care of it. By winding-roads--which were often cut to so great a depth between perpendicular walls that they were mere roofless tunnels--we drove out a mile or two and visited the monument which stands upon the scene of the surrender of Vicksburg to General Grant by General Pemberton. Its metal will preserve it from the hackings and chippings which so defaced its predecessor, which was of marble; but the brick foundations are crumbling, and it will tumble down by-and-bye. It overlooks a picturesque region of wooded hills and ravines; and is not unpicturesque itself, being well smothered in flowering weeds. The battered remnant of the marble monument has been removed to the National Cemetery. On the road, a quarter of a mile townward, an aged colored man showed us, with pride, an unexploded bomb-shell which has lain in his yard since the day it fell there during the siege. 'I was a-stannin' heah, an' de dog was a-stannin' heah; de dog he went for de shell, gwine to pick a fuss wid it; but I didn't; I says, "Jes' make you'seff at home heah; lay still whah you is, or bust up de place, jes' as you's a mind to, but I's got business out in de woods, I has!"' Vicksburg is a town of substantial business streets and pleasant residences; it commands the commerce of the Yazoo and Sunflower Rivers; is pushing railways in several directions, through rich agricultural regions, and has a promising future of prosperity and importance. Apparently, nearly all the river towns, big and little, have made up their minds that they must look mainly to railroads for wealth and upbuilding, henceforth. They are acting upon this idea. The signs are, that the next twenty years will bring about some noteworthy changes in the Valley, in the direction of increased population and wealth, and in the intellectual advancement and the liberalizing of opinion which go naturally with these. And yet, if one may judge by the past, the river towns will manage to find and use a chance, here and there, to cripple and retard their progress. They kept themselves back in the days of steamboating supremacy, by a system of wharfage-dues so stupidly graded as to prohibit what may be called small RETAIL traffic in freights and passengers. Boats were charged such heavy wharfage that they could not afford to land for one or two passengers or a light lot of freight. Instead of encouraging the bringing of trade to their doors, the towns diligently and effectively discouraged it. They could have had many boats and low rates; but their policy rendered few boats and high rates compulsory. It was a policy which extended--and extends--from New Orleans to St. Paul. We had a strong desire to make a trip up the Yazoo and the Sunflower--an interesting region at any time, but additionally interesting at this time, because up there the great inundation was still to be seen in force--but we were nearly sure to have to wait a day or more for a New Orleans boat on our return; so we were obliged to give up the project. Here is a story which I picked up on board the boat that night. I insert it in this place merely because it is a good story, not because it belongs here--for it doesn't. It was told by a passenger--a college professor--and was called to the surface in the course of a general conversation which began with talk about horses, drifted into talk about astronomy, then into talk about the lynching of the gamblers in Vicksburg half a century ago, then into talk about dreams and superstitions; and ended, after midnight, in a dispute over free trade and protection. 
8478	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 8. Chapter 36 The Professor's Yarn IT was in the early days. I was not a college professor then. I was a humble-minded young land-surveyor, with the world before me--to survey, in case anybody wanted it done. I had a contract to survey a route for a great mining-ditch in California, and I was on my way thither, by sea --a three or four weeks' voyage. There were a good many passengers, but I had very little to say to them; reading and dreaming were my passions, and I avoided conversation in order to indulge these appetites. There were three professional gamblers on board--rough, repulsive fellows. I never had any talk with them, yet I could not help seeing them with some frequency, for they gambled in an upper-deck stateroom every day and night, and in my promenades I often had glimpses of them through their door, which stood a little ajar to let out the surplus tobacco smoke and profanity. They were an evil and hateful presence, but I had to put up with it, of course, There was one other passenger who fell under my eye a good deal, for he seemed determined to be friendly with me, and I could not have gotten rid of him without running some chance of hurting his feelings, and I was far from wishing to do that. Besides, there was something engaging in his countrified simplicity and his beaming good-nature. The first time I saw this Mr. John Backus, I guessed, from his clothes and his looks, that he was a grazier or farmer from the backwoods of some western State--doubtless Ohio--and afterward when he dropped into his personal history and I discovered that he WAS a cattle-raiser from interior Ohio, I was so pleased with my own penetration that I warmed toward him for verifying my instinct. He got to dropping alongside me every day, after breakfast, to help me make my promenade; and so, in the course of time, his easy-working jaw had told me everything about his business, his prospects, his family, his relatives, his politics--in fact everything that concerned a Backus, living or dead. And meantime I think he had managed to get out of me everything I knew about my trade, my tribe, my purposes, my prospects, and myself. He was a gentle and persuasive genius, and this thing showed it; for I was not given to talking about my matters. I said something about triangulation, once; the stately word pleased his ear; he inquired what it meant; I explained; after that he quietly and inoffensively ignored my name, and always called me Triangle. What an enthusiast he was in cattle! At the bare name of a bull or a cow, his eye would light and his eloquent tongue would turn itself loose. As long as I would walk and listen, he would walk and talk; he knew all breeds, he loved all breeds, he caressed them all with his affectionate tongue. I tramped along in voiceless misery whilst the cattle question was up; when I could endure it no longer, I used to deftly insert a scientific topic into the conversation; then my eye fired and his faded; my tongue fluttered, his stopped; life was a joy to me, and a sadness to him. One day he said, a little hesitatingly, and with somewhat of diffidence-- 'Triangle, would you mind coming down to my stateroom a minute, and have a little talk on a certain matter?' I went with him at once. Arrived there, he put his head out, glanced up and down the saloon warily, then closed the door and locked it. He sat down on the sofa, and he said-- 'I'm a-going to make a little proposition to you, and if it strikes you favorable, it'll be a middling good thing for both of us. You ain't a-going out to Californy for fun, nuther am I--it's business, ain't that so? Well, you can do me a good turn, and so can I you, if we see fit. I've raked and scraped and saved, a considerable many years, and I've got it all here.' He unlocked an old hair trunk, tumbled a chaos of shabby clothes aside, and drew a short stout bag into view for a moment, then buried it again and relocked the trunk. Dropping his voice to a cautious low tone, he continued, 'She's all there--a round ten thousand dollars in yellow-boys; now this is my little idea: What I don't know about raising cattle, ain't worth knowing. There's mints of money in it, in Californy. Well, I know, and you know, that all along a line that 's being surveyed, there 's little dabs of land that they call "gores," that fall to the surveyor free gratis for nothing. All you've got to do, on your side, is to survey in such a way that the "gores" will fall on good fat land, then you turn 'em over to me, I stock 'em with cattle, in rolls the cash, I plank out your share of the dollars regular, right along, and--' I was sorry to wither his blooming enthusiasm, but it could not be helped. I interrupted, and said severely-- 'I am not that kind of a surveyor. Let us change the subject, Mr. Backus.' It was pitiful to see his confusion and hear his awkward and shamefaced apologies. I was as much distressed as he was--especially as he seemed so far from having suspected that there was anything improper in his proposition. So I hastened to console him and lead him on to forget his mishap in a conversational orgy about cattle and butchery. We were lying at Acapulco; and, as we went on deck, it happened luckily that the crew were just beginning to hoist some beeves aboard in slings. Backus's melancholy vanished instantly, and with it the memory of his late mistake. 'Now only look at that!' cried he; 'My goodness, Triangle, what WOULD they say to it in OHIO. Wouldn't their eyes bug out, to see 'em handled like that?--wouldn't they, though?' All the passengers were on deck to look--even the gamblers--and Backus knew them all, and had afflicted them all with his pet topic. As I moved away, I saw one of the gamblers approach and accost him; then another of them; then the third. I halted; waited; watched; the conversation continued between the four men; it grew earnest; Backus drew gradually away; the gamblers followed, and kept at his elbow. I was uncomfortable. However, as they passed me presently, I heard Backus say, with a tone of persecuted annoyance-- 'But it ain't any use, gentlemen; I tell you again, as I've told you a half a dozen times before, I warn't raised to it, and I ain't a-going to resk it.' I felt relieved. 'His level head will be his sufficient protection,' I said to myself. During the fortnight's run from Acapulco to San Francisco I several times saw the gamblers talking earnestly with Backus, and once I threw out a gentle warning to him. He chuckled comfortably and said-- 'Oh, yes! they tag around after me considerable--want me to play a little, just for amusement, they say--but laws-a-me, if my folks have told me once to look out for that sort of live-stock, they've told me a thousand times, I reckon.' By-and-bye, in due course, we were approaching San Francisco. It was an ugly black night, with a strong wind blowing, but there was not much sea. I was on deck, alone. Toward ten I started below. A figure issued from the gamblers' den, and disappeared in the darkness. I experienced a shock, for I was sure it was Backus. I flew down the companion-way, looked about for him, could not find him, then returned to the deck just in time to catch a glimpse of him as he re-entered that confounded nest of rascality. Had he yielded at last? I feared it. What had he gone below for?--His bag of coin? Possibly. I drew near the door, full of bodings. It was a-crack, and I glanced in and saw a sight that made me bitterly wish I had given my attention to saving my poor cattle-friend, instead of reading and dreaming my foolish time away. He was gambling. Worse still, he was being plied with champagne, and was already showing some effect from it. He praised the 'cider,' as he called it, and said now that he had got a taste of it he almost believed he would drink it if it was spirits, it was so good and so ahead of anything he had ever run across before. Surreptitious smiles, at this, passed from one rascal to another, and they filled all the glasses, and whilst Backus honestly drained his to the bottom they pretended to do the same, but threw the wine over their shoulders. I could not bear the scene, so I wandered forward and tried to interest myself in the sea and the voices of the wind. But no, my uneasy spirit kept dragging me back at quarter-hour intervals; and always I saw Backus drinking his wine--fairly and squarely, and the others throwing theirs away. It was the painfullest night I ever spent. The only hope I had was that we might reach our anchorage with speed-- that would break up the game. I helped the ship along all I could with my prayers. At last we went booming through the Golden Gate, and my pulses leaped for joy. I hurried back to that door and glanced in. Alas, there was small room for hope--Backus's eyes were heavy and bloodshot, his sweaty face was crimson, his speech maudlin and thick, his body sawed drunkenly about with the weaving motion of the ship. He drained another glass to the dregs, whilst the cards were being dealt. He took his hand, glanced at it, and his dull eyes lit up for a moment. The gamblers observed it, and showed their gratification by hardly perceptible signs. 'How many cards?' 'None!' said Backus. One villain--named Hank Wiley--discarded one card, the others three each. The betting began. Heretofore the bets had been trifling--a dollar or two; but Backus started off with an eagle now, Wiley hesitated a moment, then 'saw it' and 'went ten dollars better.' The other two threw up their hands. Backus went twenty better. Wiley said-- 'I see that, and go you a hundred better!' then smiled and reached for the money. 'Let it alone,' said Backus, with drunken gravity. 'What! you mean to say you're going to cover it?' 'Cover it? Well, I reckon I am--and lay another hundred on top of it, too.' He reached down inside his overcoat and produced the required sum. 'Oh, that's your little game, is it? I see your raise, and raise it five hundred!' said Wiley. 'Five hundred better.' said the foolish bull-driver, and pulled out the amount and showered it on the pile. The three conspirators hardly tried to conceal their exultation. All diplomacy and pretense were dropped now, and the sharp exclamations came thick and fast, and the yellow pyramid grew higher and higher. At last ten thousand dollars lay in view. Wiley cast a bag of coin on the table, and said with mocking gentleness-- 'Five thousand dollars better, my friend from the rural districts--what do you say NOW?' 'I CALL you!' said Backus, heaving his golden shot-bag on the pile. 'What have you got?' 'Four kings, you d--d fool!' and Wiley threw down his cards and surrounded the stakes with his arms. 'Four ACES, you ass!' thundered Backus, covering his man with a cocked revolver. 'I'M A PROFESSIONAL GAMBLER MYSELF, AND I'VE BEEN LAYING FOR YOU DUFFERS ALL THIS VOYAGE!' Down went the anchor, rumbledy-dum-dum! and the long trip was ended. Well--well, it is a sad world. One of the three gamblers was Backus's 'pal.' It was he that dealt the fateful hands. According to an understanding with the two victims, he was to have given Backus four queens, but alas, he didn't. A week later, I stumbled upon Backus--arrayed in the height of fashion-- in Montgomery Street. He said, cheerily, as we were parting-- 'Ah, by-the-way, you needn't mind about those gores. I don't really know anything about cattle, except what I was able to pick up in a week's apprenticeship over in Jersey just before we sailed. My cattle- culture and cattle-enthusiasm have served their turn--I shan't need them any more.' Next day we reluctantly parted from the 'Gold Dust' and her officers, hoping to see that boat and all those officers again, some day. A thing which the fates were to render tragically impossible! Chapter 37 The End of the 'Gold Dust' FOR, three months later, August 8, while I was writing one of these foregoing chapters, the New York papers brought this telegram-- A TERRIBLE DISASTER. SEVENTEEN PERSONS KILLED BY AN EXPLOSION ON THE STEAMER 'GOLD DUST.' 'NASHVILLE, Aug. 7.--A despatch from Hickman, Ky., says-- 'The steamer "Gold Dust" exploded her boilers at three o'clock to-day, just after leaving Hickman. Forty-seven persons were scalded and seventeen are missing. The boat was landed in the eddy just above the town, and through the exertions of the citizens the cabin passengers, officers, and part of the crew and deck passengers were taken ashore and removed to the hotels and residences. Twenty-four of the injured were lying in Holcomb's dry-goods store at one time, where they received every attention before being removed to more comfortable places.' A list of the names followed, whereby it appeared that of the seventeen dead, one was the barkeeper; and among the forty-seven wounded, were the captain, chief mate, second mate, and second and third clerks; also Mr. Lem S. Gray, pilot, and several members of the crew. In answer to a private telegram, we learned that none of these was severely hurt, except Mr. Gray. Letters received afterward confirmed this news, and said that Mr. Gray was improving and would get well. Later letters spoke less hopefully of his case; and finally came one announcing his death. A good man, a most companionable and manly man, and worthy of a kindlier fate. Chapter 38 The House Beautiful WE took passage in a Cincinnati boat for New Orleans; or on a Cincinnati boat--either is correct; the former is the eastern form of putting it, the latter the western. Mr. Dickens declined to agree that the Mississippi steamboats were 'magnificent,' or that they were 'floating palaces,'--terms which had always been applied to them; terms which did not over-express the admiration with which the people viewed them. Mr. Dickens's position was unassailable, possibly; the people's position was certainly unassailable. If Mr. Dickens was comparing these boats with the crown jewels; or with the Taj, or with the Matterhorn; or with some other priceless or wonderful thing which he had seen, they were not magnificent--he was right. The people compared them with what they had seen; and, thus measured, thus judged, the boats were magnificent--the term was the correct one, it was not at all too strong. The people were as right as was Mr. Dickens. The steamboats were finer than anything on shore. Compared with superior dwelling-houses and first-class hotels in the Valley, they were indubitably magnificent, they were 'palaces.' To a few people living in New Orleans and St. Louis, they were not magnificent, perhaps; not palaces; but to the great majority of those populations, and to the entire populations spread over both banks between Baton Rouge and St. Louis, they were palaces; they tallied with the citizen's dream of what magnificence was, and satisfied it. Every town and village along that vast stretch of double river-frontage had a best dwelling, finest dwelling, mansion,--the home of its wealthiest and most conspicuous citizen. It is easy to describe it: large grassy yard, with paling fence painted white--in fair repair; brick walk from gate to door; big, square, two-story 'frame' house, painted white and porticoed like a Grecian temple--with this difference, that the imposing fluted columns and Corinthian capitals were a pathetic sham, being made of white pine, and painted; iron knocker; brass door knob--discolored, for lack of polishing. Within, an uncarpeted hall, of planed boards; opening out of it, a parlor, fifteen feet by fifteen--in some instances five or ten feet larger; ingrain carpet; mahogany center- table; lamp on it, with green-paper shade--standing on a gridiron, so to speak, made of high-colored yarns, by the young ladies of the house, and called a lamp-mat; several books, piled and disposed, with cast-iron exactness, according to an inherited and unchangeable plan; among them, Tupper, much penciled; also, 'Friendship's Offering,' and 'Affection's Wreath,' with their sappy inanities illustrated in die-away mezzotints; also, Ossian; 'Alonzo and Melissa:' maybe 'Ivanhoe:' also 'Album,' full of original 'poetry' of the Thou-hast-wounded-the-spirit-that-loved-thee breed; two or three goody-goody works--'Shepherd of Salisbury Plain,' etc.; current number of the chaste and innocuous Godey's 'Lady's Book,' with painted fashion-plate of wax-figure women with mouths all alike-- lips and eyelids the same size--each five-foot woman with a two-inch wedge sticking from under her dress and letting-on to be half of her foot. Polished air-tight stove (new and deadly invention), with pipe passing through a board which closes up the discarded good old fireplace. On each end of the wooden mantel, over the fireplace, a large basket of peaches and other fruits, natural size, all done in plaster, rudely, or in wax, and painted to resemble the originals--which they don't. Over middle of mantel, engraving--Washington Crossing the Delaware; on the wall by the door, copy of it done in thunder-and- lightning crewels by one of the young ladies--work of art which would have made Washington hesitate about crossing, if he could have foreseen what advantage was going to be taken of it. Piano--kettle in disguise-- with music, bound and unbound, piled on it, and on a stand near by: Battle of Prague; Bird Waltz; Arkansas Traveler; Rosin the Bow; Marseilles Hymn; On a Lone Barren Isle (St. Helena); The Last Link is Broken; She wore a Wreath of Roses the Night when last we met; Go, forget me, Why should Sorrow o'er that Brow a Shadow fling; Hours there were to Memory Dearer; Long, Long Ago; Days of Absence; A Life on the Ocean Wave, a Home on the Rolling Deep; Bird at Sea; and spread open on the rack, where the plaintive singer has left it, RO-holl on, silver MOO-hoon, guide the TRAV-el-lerr his WAY, etc. Tilted pensively against the piano, a guitar--guitar capable of playing the Spanish Fandango by itself, if you give it a start. Frantic work of art on the wall--pious motto, done on the premises, sometimes in colored yarns, sometimes in faded grasses: progenitor of the 'God Bless Our Home' of modern commerce. Framed in black moldings on the wall, other works of arts, conceived and committed on the premises, by the young ladies; being grim black-and-white crayons; landscapes, mostly: lake, solitary sail-boat, petrified clouds, pre-geological trees on shore, anthracite precipice; name of criminal conspicuous in the corner. Lithograph, Napoleon Crossing the Alps. Lithograph, The Grave at St. Helena. Steel-plates, Trumbull's Battle of Bunker Hill, and the Sally from Gibraltar. Copper- plates, Moses Smiting the Rock, and Return of the Prodigal Son. In big gilt frame, slander of the family in oil: papa holding a book ('Constitution of the United States'); guitar leaning against mamma, blue ribbons fluttering from its neck; the young ladies, as children, in slippers and scalloped pantelettes, one embracing toy horse, the other beguiling kitten with ball of yarn, and both simpering up at mamma, who simpers back. These persons all fresh, raw, and red--apparently skinned. Opposite, in gilt frame, grandpa and grandma, at thirty and twenty-two, stiff, old-fashioned, high-collared, puff-sleeved, glaring pallidly out from a background of solid Egyptian night. Under a glass French clock dome, large bouquet of stiff flowers done in corpsy-white wax. Pyramidal what-not in the corner, the shelves occupied chiefly with bric-a-brac of the period, disposed with an eye to best effect: shell, with the Lord's Prayer carved on it; another shell--of the long-oval sort, narrow, straight orifice, three inches long, running from end to end--portrait of Washington carved on it; not well done; the shell had Washington's mouth, originally--artist should have built to that. These two are memorials of the long-ago bridal trip to New Orleans and the French Market. Other bric-a-brac: Californian 'specimens'--quartz, with gold wart adhering; old Guinea-gold locket, with circlet of ancestral hair in it; Indian arrow-heads, of flint; pair of bead moccasins, from uncle who crossed the Plains; three 'alum' baskets of various colors-- being skeleton-frame of wire, clothed-on with cubes of crystallized alum in the rock-candy style--works of art which were achieved by the young ladies; their doubles and duplicates to be found upon all what-nots in the land; convention of desiccated bugs and butterflies pinned to a card; painted toy-dog, seated upon bellows-attachment--drops its under jaw and squeaks when pressed upon; sugar-candy rabbit--limbs and features merged together, not strongly defined; pewter presidential- campaign medal; miniature card-board wood-sawyer, to be attached to the stove-pipe and operated by the heat; small Napoleon, done in wax; spread-open daguerreotypes of dim children, parents, cousins, aunts, and friends, in all attitudes but customary ones; no templed portico at back, and manufactured landscape stretching away in the distance--that came in later, with the photograph; all these vague figures lavishly chained and ringed--metal indicated and secured from doubt by stripes and splashes of vivid gold bronze; all of them too much combed, too much fixed up; and all of them uncomfortable in inflexible Sunday-clothes of a pattern which the spectator cannot realize could ever have been in fashion; husband and wife generally grouped together--husband sitting, wife standing, with hand on his shoulder--and both preserving, all these fading years, some traceable effect of the daguerreotypist's brisk 'Now smile, if you please!' Bracketed over what-not--place of special sacredness--an outrage in water-color, done by the young niece that came on a visit long ago, and died. Pity, too; for she might have repented of this in time. Horse-hair chairs, horse-hair sofa which keeps sliding from under you. Window shades, of oil stuff, with milk-maids and ruined castles stenciled on them in fierce colors. Lambrequins dependent from gaudy boxings of beaten tin, gilded. Bedrooms with rag carpets; bedsteads of the 'corded' sort, with a sag in the middle, the cords needing tightening; snuffy feather-bed--not aired often enough; cane- seat chairs, splint-bottomed rocker; looking-glass on wall, school-slate size, veneered frame; inherited bureau; wash-bowl and pitcher, possibly --but not certainly; brass candlestick, tallow candle, snuffers. Nothing else in the room. Not a bathroom in the house; and no visitor likely to come along who has ever seen one. That was the residence of the principal citizen, all the way from the suburbs of New Orleans to the edge of St. Louis. When he stepped aboard a big fine steamboat, he entered a new and marvelous world: chimney-tops cut to counterfeit a spraying crown of plumes--and maybe painted red; pilot-house, hurricane deck, boiler-deck guards, all garnished with white wooden filigree work of fanciful patterns; gilt acorns topping the derricks; gilt deer-horns over the big bell; gaudy symbolical picture on the paddle-box, possibly; big roomy boiler-deck, painted blue, and furnished with Windsor armchairs; inside, a far-receding snow-white 'cabin;' porcelain knob and oil-picture on every stateroom door; curving patterns of filigree-work touched up with gilding, stretching overhead all down the converging vista; big chandeliers every little way, each an April shower of glittering glass-drops; lovely rainbow-light falling everywhere from the colored glazing of the skylights; the whole a long- drawn, resplendent tunnel, a bewildering and soul-satisfying spectacle! In the ladies' cabin a pink and white Wilton carpet, as soft as mush, and glorified with a ravishing pattern of gigantic flowers. Then the Bridal Chamber--the animal that invented that idea was still alive and unhanged, at that day--Bridal Chamber whose pretentious flummery was necessarily overawing to the now tottering intellect of that hosannahing citizen. Every state-room had its couple of cozy clean bunks, and perhaps a looking-glass and a snug closet; and sometimes there was even a washbowl and pitcher, and part of a towel which could be told from mosquito netting by an expert--though generally these things were absent, and the shirt-sleeved passengers cleansed themselves at a long row of stationary bowls in the barber shop, where were also public towels, public combs, and public soap. Take the steamboat which I have just described, and you have her in her highest and finest, and most pleasing, and comfortable, and satisfactory estate. Now cake her over with a layer of ancient and obdurate dirt, and you have the Cincinnati steamer awhile ago referred to. Not all over--only inside; for she was ably officered in all departments except the steward's. But wash that boat and repaint her, and she would be about the counterpart of the most complimented boat of the old flush times: for the steamboat architecture of the West has undergone no change; neither has steamboat furniture and ornamentation undergone any. Chapter 39 Manufactures and Miscreants WHERE the river, in the Vicksburg region, used to be corkscrewed, it is now comparatively straight--made so by cut-off; a former distance of seventy miles is reduced to thirty-five. It is a change which threw Vicksburg's neighbor, Delta, Louisiana, out into the country and ended its career as a river town. Its whole river-frontage is now occupied by a vast sand-bar, thickly covered with young trees--a growth which will magnify itself into a dense forest by-and-bye, and completely hide the exiled town. In due time we passed Grand Gulf and Rodney, of war fame, and reached Natchez, the last of the beautiful hill-cities--for Baton Rouge, yet to come, is not on a hill, but only on high ground. Famous Natchez-under- the-hill has not changed notably in twenty years; in outward aspect-- judging by the descriptions of the ancient procession of foreign tourists--it has not changed in sixty; for it is still small, straggling, and shabby. It had a desperate reputation, morally, in the old keel-boating and early steamboating times--plenty of drinking, carousing, fisticuffing, and killing there, among the riff-raff of the river, in those days. But Natchez-on-top-of-the-hill is attractive; has always been attractive. Even Mrs. Trollope (1827) had to confess its charms: 'At one or two points the wearisome level line is relieved by bluffs, as they call the short intervals of high ground. The town of Natchez is beautifully situated on one of those high spots. The contrast that its bright green hill forms with the dismal line of black forest that stretches on every side, the abundant growth of the pawpaw, palmetto and orange, the copious variety of sweet-scented flowers that flourish there, all make it appear like an oasis in the desert. Natchez is the furthest point to the north at which oranges ripen in the open air, or endure the winter without shelter. With the exception of this sweet spot, I thought all the little towns and villages we passed wretched- looking in the extreme.' Natchez, like her near and far river neighbors, has railways now, and is adding to them--pushing them hither and thither into all rich outlying regions that are naturally tributary to her. And like Vicksburg and New Orleans, she has her ice-factory: she makes thirty tons of ice a day. In Vicksburg and Natchez, in my time, ice was jewelry; none but the rich could wear it. But anybody and everybody can have it now. I visited one of the ice-factories in New Orleans, to see what the polar regions might look like when lugged into the edge of the tropics. But there was nothing striking in the aspect of the place. It was merely a spacious house, with some innocent steam machinery in one end of it and some big porcelain pipes running here and there. No, not porcelain--they merely seemed to be; they were iron, but the ammonia which was being breathed through them had coated them to the thickness of your hand with solid milk-white ice. It ought to have melted; for one did not require winter clothing in that atmosphere: but it did not melt; the inside of the pipe was too cold. Sunk into the floor were numberless tin boxes, a foot square and two feet long, and open at the top end. These were full of clear water; and around each box, salt and other proper stuff was packed; also, the ammonia gases were applied to the water in some way which will always remain a secret to me, because I was not able to understand the process. While the water in the boxes gradually froze, men gave it a stir or two with a stick occasionally--to liberate the air-bubbles, I think. Other men were continually lifting out boxes whose contents had become hard frozen. They gave the box a single dip into a vat of boiling water, to melt the block of ice free from its tin coffin, then they shot the block out upon a platform car, and it was ready for market. These big blocks were hard, solid, and crystal-clear. In certain of them, big bouquets of fresh and brilliant tropical flowers had been frozen-in; in others, beautiful silken-clad French dolls, and other pretty objects. These blocks were to be set on end in a platter, in the center of dinner- tables, to cool the tropical air; and also to be ornamental, for the flowers and things imprisoned in them could be seen as through plate glass. I was told that this factory could retail its ice, by wagon, throughout New Orleans, in the humblest dwelling-house quantities, at six or seven dollars a ton, and make a sufficient profit. This being the case, there is business for ice-factories in the North; for we get ice on no such terms there, if one take less than three hundred and fifty pounds at a delivery. The Rosalie Yarn Mill, of Natchez, has a capacity of 6,000 spindles and 160 looms, and employs 100 hands. The Natchez Cotton Mills Company began operations four years ago in a two-story building of 50 x 190 feet, with 4,000 spindles and 128 looms; capital $105,000, all subscribed in the town. Two years later, the same stockholders increased their capital to $225,000; added a third story to the mill, increased its length to 317 feet; added machinery to increase the capacity to 10,300 spindles and 304 looms. The company now employ 250 operatives, many of whom are citizens of Natchez. 'The mill works 5,000 bales of cotton annually and manufactures the best standard quality of brown shirtings and sheetings and drills, turning out 5,000,000 yards of these goods per year.'{footnote [New Orleans Times-Democrat, 26 Aug, 1882.]} A close corporation--stock held at $5,000 per share, but none in the market. The changes in the Mississippi River are great and strange, yet were to be expected; but I was not expecting to live to see Natchez and these other river towns become manufacturing strongholds and railway centers. Speaking of manufactures reminds me of a talk upon that topic which I heard--which I overheard--on board the Cincinnati boat. I awoke out of a fretted sleep, with a dull confusion of voices in my ears. I listened-- two men were talking; subject, apparently, the great inundation. I looked out through the open transom. The two men were eating a late breakfast; sitting opposite each other; nobody else around. They closed up the inundation with a few words--having used it, evidently, as a mere ice-breaker and acquaintanceship-breeder--then they dropped into business. It soon transpired that they were drummers--one belonging in Cincinnati, the other in New Orleans. Brisk men, energetic of movement and speech; the dollar their god, how to get it their religion. 'Now as to this article,' said Cincinnati, slashing into the ostensible butter and holding forward a slab of it on his knife-blade, 'it's from our house; look at it--smell of it--taste it. Put any test on it you want to. Take your own time--no hurry--make it thorough. There now-- what do you say? butter, ain't it. Not by a thundering sight--it's oleomargarine! Yes, sir, that's what it is--oleomargarine. You can't tell it from butter; by George, an EXPERT can't. It's from our house. We supply most of the boats in the West; there's hardly a pound of butter on one of them. We are crawling right along--JUMPING right along is the word. We are going to have that entire trade. Yes, and the hotel trade, too. You are going to see the day, pretty soon, when you can't find an ounce of butter to bless yourself with, in any hotel in the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys, outside of the biggest cities. Why, we are turning out oleomargarine NOW by the thousands of tons. And we can sell it so dirt-cheap that the whole country has GOT to take it--can't get around it you see. Butter don't stand any show--there ain't any chance for competition. Butter's had its DAY--and from this out, butter goes to the wall. There's more money in oleomargarine than--why, you can't imagine the business we do. I've stopped in every town from Cincinnati to Natchez; and I've sent home big orders from every one of them.' And so-forth and so-on, for ten minutes longer, in the same fervid strain. Then New Orleans piped up and said-- Yes, it's a first-rate imitation, that's a certainty; but it ain't the only one around that's first-rate. For instance, they make olive-oil out of cotton-seed oil, nowadays, so that you can't tell them apart.' 'Yes, that's so,' responded Cincinnati, 'and it was a tip-top business for a while. They sent it over and brought it back from France and Italy, with the United States custom-house mark on it to indorse it for genuine, and there was no end of cash in it; but France and Italy broke up the game--of course they naturally would. Cracked on such a rattling impost that cotton-seed olive-oil couldn't stand the raise; had to hang up and quit.' 'Oh, it DID, did it? You wait here a minute.' Goes to his state-room, brings back a couple of long bottles, and takes out the corks--says: 'There now, smell them, taste them, examine the bottles, inspect the labels. One of 'm's from Europe, the other's never been out of this country. One's European olive-oil, the other's American cotton-seed olive-oil. Tell 'm apart? 'Course you can't. Nobody can. People that want to, can go to the expense and trouble of shipping their oils to Europe and back--it's their privilege; but our firm knows a trick worth six of that. We turn out the whole thing--clean from the word go--in our factory in New Orleans: labels, bottles, oil, everything. Well, no, not labels: been buying them abroad--get them dirt-cheap there. You see, there's just one little wee speck, essence, or whatever it is, in a gallon of cotton-seed oil, that give it a smell, or a flavor, or something--get that out, and you're all right--perfectly easy then to turn the oil into any kind of oil you want to, and there ain't anybody that can detect the true from the false. Well, we know how to get that one little particle out--and we're the only firm that does. And we turn out an olive-oil that is just simply perfect--undetectable! We are doing a ripping trade, too--as I could easily show you by my order-book for this trip. Maybe you'll butter everybody's bread pretty soon, but we'll cotton-seed his salad for him from the Gulf to Canada, and that's a dead-certain thing.' Cincinnati glowed and flashed with admiration. The two scoundrels exchanged business-cards, and rose. As they left the table, Cincinnati said-- 'But you have to have custom-house marks, don't you? How do you manage that?' I did not catch the answer. We passed Port Hudson, scene of two of the most terrific episodes of the war--the night-battle there between Farragut's fleet and the Confederate land batteries, April 14th, 1863; and the memorable land battle, two months later, which lasted eight hours--eight hours of exceptionally fierce and stubborn fighting--and ended, finally, in the repulse of the Union forces with great slaughter. Chapter 40 Castles and Culture BATON ROUGE was clothed in flowers, like a bride--no, much more so; like a greenhouse. For we were in the absolute South now--no modifications, no compromises, no half-way measures. The magnolia-trees in the Capitol grounds were lovely and fragrant, with their dense rich foliage and huge snow-ball blossoms. The scent of the flower is very sweet, but you want distance on it, because it is so powerful. They are not good bedroom blossoms--they might suffocate one in his sleep. We were certainly in the South at last; for here the sugar region begins, and the plantations--vast green levels, with sugar-mill and negro quarters clustered together in the middle distance--were in view. And there was a tropical sun overhead and a tropical swelter in the air. And at this point, also, begins the pilot's paradise: a wide river hence to New Orleans, abundance of water from shore to shore, and no bars, snags, sawyers, or wrecks in his road. Sir Walter Scott is probably responsible for the Capitol building; for it is not conceivable that this little sham castle would ever have been built if he had not run the people mad, a couple of generations ago, with his medieval romances. The South has not yet recovered from the debilitating influence of his books. Admiration of his fantastic heroes and their grotesque 'chivalry' doings and romantic juvenilities still survives here, in an atmosphere in which is already perceptible the wholesome and practical nineteenth-century smell of cotton-factories and locomotives; and traces of its inflated language and other windy humbuggeries survive along with it. It is pathetic enough, that a whitewashed castle, with turrets and things--materials all ungenuine within and without, pretending to be what they are not--should ever have been built in this otherwise honorable place; but it is much more pathetic to see this architectural falsehood undergoing restoration and perpetuation in our day, when it would have been so easy to let dynamite finish what a charitable fire began, and then devote this restoration- money to the building of something genuine. Baton Rouge has no patent on imitation castles, however, and no monopoly of them. Here is a picture from the advertisement of the 'Female Institute' of Columbia; Tennessee. The following remark is from the same advertisement-- 'The Institute building has long been famed as a model of striking and beautiful architecture. Visitors are charmed with its resemblance to the old castles of song and story, with its towers, turreted walls, and ivy-mantled porches.' Keeping school in a castle is a romantic thing; as romantic as keeping hotel in a castle. By itself the imitation castle is doubtless harmless, and well enough; but as a symbol and breeder and sustainer of maudlin Middle-Age romanticism here in the midst of the plainest and sturdiest and infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the world has seen, it is necessarily a hurtful thing and a mistake. Here is an extract from the prospectus of a Kentucky 'Female College.' Female college sounds well enough; but since the phrasing it in that unjustifiable way was done purely in the interest of brevity, it seems to me that she-college would have been still better--because shorter, and means the same thing: that is, if either phrase means anything at all-- 'The president is southern by birth, by rearing, by education, and by sentiment; the teachers are all southern in sentiment, and with the exception of those born in Europe were born and raised in the south. Believing the southern to be the highest type of civilization this continent has seen, the young ladies are trained according to the southern ideas of delicacy, refinement, womanhood, religion, and propriety; hence we offer a first-class female college for the south and solicit southern patronage.' {footnote (long one) [Illustrations of it thoughtlessly omitted by the advertiser: KNOXVILLE, Tenn., October 19.--This morning a few minutes after ten o'clock, General Joseph A. Mabry, Thomas O'Connor, and Joseph A. Mabry, Jr., were killed in a shooting affray. The difficulty began yesterday afternoon by General Mabry attacking Major O'Connor and threatening to kill him. This was at the fair grounds, and O'Connor told Mabry that it was not the place to settle their difficulties. Mabry then told O'Connor he should not live. It seems that Mabry was armed and O'Connor was not. The cause of the difficulty was an old feud about the transfer of some property from Mabry to O'Connor. Later in the afternoon Mabry sent word to O'Connor that he would kill him on sight. This morning Major O'Connor was standing in the door of the Mechanics' National Bank, of which he was president. General Mabry and another gentleman walked down Gay Street on the opposite side from the bank. O'Connor stepped into the bank, got a shot gun, took deliberate aim at General Mabry and fired. Mabry fell dead, being shot in the left side. As he fell O'Connor fired again, the shot taking effect in Mabry's thigh. O'Connor then reached into the bank and got another shot gun. About this time Joseph A. Mabry, Jr., son of General Mabry, came rushing down the street, unseen by O'Connor until within forty feet, when the young man fired a pistol, the shot taking effect in O'Connor's right breast, passing through the body near the heart. The instant Mabry shot, O'Connor turned and fired, the load taking effect in young Mabry's right breast and side. Mabry fell pierced with twenty buckshot, and almost instantly O'Connor fell dead without a struggle. Mabry tried to rise, but fell back dead. The whole tragedy occurred within two minutes, and neither of the three spoke after he was shot. General Mabry had about thirty buckshot in his body. A bystander was painfully wounded in the thigh with a buckshot, and another was wounded in the arm. Four other men had their clothing pierced by buckshot. The affair caused great excitement, and Gay Street was thronged with thousands of people. General Mabry and his son Joe were acquitted only a few days ago of the murder of Moses Lusby and Don Lusby, father and son, whom they killed a few weeks ago. Will Mabry was killed by Don Lusby last Christmas. Major Thomas O'Connor was President of the Mechanics' National Bank here, and was the wealthiest man in the State.--ASSOCIATED PRESS TELEGRAM. One day last month, Professor Sharpe, of the Somerville, Tenn., Female College, 'a quiet and gentlemanly man,' was told that his brother-in- law, a Captain Burton, had threatened to kill him. Burton, t seems, had already killed one man and driven his knife into another. The Professor armed himself with a double-barreled shot gun, started out in search of his brother-in-law, found him playing billiards in a saloon, and blew his brains out. The 'Memphis Avalanche' reports that the Professor's course met with pretty general approval in the community; knowing that the law was powerless, in the actual condition of public sentiment, to protect him, he protected himself. About the same time, two young men in North Carolina quarreled about a girl, and 'hostile messages' were exchanged. Friends tried to reconcile them, but had their labor for their pains. On the 24th the young men met in the public highway. One of them had a heavy club in his hand, the other an ax. The man with the club fought desperately for his life, but it was a hopeless fight from the first. A well-directed blow sent his club whirling out of his grasp, and the next moment he was a dead man. About the same time, two 'highly connected' young Virginians, clerks in a hardware store at Charlottesville, while 'skylarking,' came to blows. Peter Dick threw pepper in Charles Roads's eyes; Roads demanded an apology; Dick refused to give it, and it was agreed that a duel was inevitable, but a difficulty arose; the parties had no pistols, and it was too late at night to procure them. One of them suggested that butcher-knives would answer the purpose, and the other accepted the suggestion; the result was that Roads fell to the floor with a gash in his abdomen that may or may not prove fatal. If Dick has been arrested, the news has not reached us. He 'expressed deep regret,' and we are told by a Staunton correspondent of the PHILADELPHIA PRESS that 'every effort has been made to hush the matter up.'--EXTRACTS FROM THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.]} What, warder, ho! the man that can blow so complacent a blast as that, probably blows it from a castle. From Baton Rouge to New Orleans, the great sugar plantations border both sides of the river all the way, and stretch their league-wide levels back to the dim forest-walls of bearded cypress in the rear. Shores lonely no longer. Plenty of dwellings all the way, on both banks-- standing so close together, for long distances, that the broad river lying between the two rows, becomes a sort of spacious street. A most home-like and happy-looking region. And now and then you see a pillared and porticoed great manor-house, embowered in trees. Here is testimony of one or two of the procession of foreign tourists that filed along here half a century ago. Mrs. Trollope says-- 'The unbroken flatness of the banks of the Mississippi continued unvaried for many miles above New Orleans; but the graceful and luxuriant palmetto, the dark and noble ilex, and the bright orange, were everywhere to be seen, and it was many days before we were weary of looking at them.' Captain Basil Hall-- 'The district of country which lies adjacent to the Mississippi, in the lower parts of Louisiana, is everywhere thickly peopled by sugar planters, whose showy houses, gay piazzas, trig gardens, and numerous slave-villages, all clean and neat, gave an exceedingly thriving air to the river scenery. All the procession paint the attractive picture in the same way. The descriptions of fifty years ago do not need to have a word changed in order to exactly describe the same region as it appears to-day--except as to the 'trigness' of the houses. The whitewash is gone from the negro cabins now; and many, possibly most, of the big mansions, once so shining white, have worn out their paint and have a decayed, neglected look. It is the blight of the war. Twenty-one years ago everything was trim and trig and bright along the 'coast,' just as it had been in 1827, as described by those tourists. Unfortunate tourists! People humbugged them with stupid and silly lies, and then laughed at them for believing and printing the same. They told Mrs. Trollope that the alligators--or crocodiles, as she calls them-- were terrible creatures; and backed up the statement with a blood- curdling account of how one of these slandered reptiles crept into a squatter cabin one night, and ate up a woman and five children. The woman, by herself, would have satisfied any ordinarily-impossible alligator; but no, these liars must make him gorge the five children besides. One would not imagine that jokers of this robust breed would be sensitive--but they were. It is difficult, at this day, to understand, and impossible to justify, the reception which the book of the grave, honest, intelligent, gentle, manly, charitable, well-meaning Capt. Basil Hall got. Mrs. Trollope's account of it may perhaps entertain the reader; therefore I have put it in the Appendix.{footnote [See Appendix C.]} 
8480	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 10. Chapter 46 Enchantments and Enchanters THE largest annual event in New Orleans is a something which we arrived too late to sample--the Mardi-Gras festivities. I saw the procession of the Mystic Crew of Comus there, twenty-four years ago--with knights and nobles and so on, clothed in silken and golden Paris-made gorgeousnesses, planned and bought for that single night's use; and in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquerie--a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking and flickering torches; but it is said that in these latter days the spectacle is mightily augmented, as to cost, splendor, and variety. There is a chief personage--'Rex;' and if I remember rightly, neither this king nor any of his great following of subordinates is known to any outsider. All these people are gentlemen of position and consequence; and it is a proud thing to belong to the organization; so the mystery in which they hide their personality is merely for romance's sake, and not on account of the police. Mardi-Gras is of course a relic of the French and Spanish occupation; but I judge that the religious feature has been pretty well knocked out of it now. Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary, and he will stay. His medieval business, supplemented by the monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy- land, is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabble of the priest's day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holy one is reached. This Mardi-Gras pageant was the exclusive possession of New Orleans until recently. But now it has spread to Memphis and St. Louis and Baltimore. It has probably reached its limit. It is a thing which could hardly exist in the practical North; would certainly last but a very brief time; as brief a time as it would last in London. For the soul of it is the romantic, not the funny and the grotesque. Take away the romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles, and Mardi-Gras would die, down there in the South. The very feature that keeps it alive in the South--girly-girly romance--would kill it in the North or in London. Puck and Punch, and the press universal, would fall upon it and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would be also its last. Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the Revolution broke the chains of the ANCIEN REGIME and of the Church, and made of a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty, that whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men, since, and can never be gods again, but only figureheads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress. Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner--or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it--would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter. Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any other thing or person. One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds. If one take up a Northern or Southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality--all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done, too--innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact. This sort of literature being the fashion in both sections of the country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition; and as a consequence, the South was able to show as many well-known literary names, proportioned to population, as the North could. But a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair competition between North and South. For the North has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer still clings to it-- clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence. There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language. But when a Southerner of genius writes modern English, his book goes upon crutches no longer, but upon wings; and they carry it swiftly all about America and England, and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Germany--as witness the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of the very few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style. Instead of three or four widely-known literary names, the South ought to have a dozen or two--and will have them when Sir Walter's time is out. A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by 'Don Quixote' and those wrought by 'Ivanhoe.' The first swept the world's admiration for the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. As far as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott's pernicious work undermined it. Chapter 47 Uncle Remus and Mr. Cable MR. JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS ('Uncle Remus') was to arrive from Atlanta at seven o'clock Sunday morning; so we got up and received him. We were able to detect him among the crowd of arrivals at the hotel-counter by his correspondence with a description of him which had been furnished us from a trustworthy source. He was said to be undersized, red-haired, and somewhat freckled. He was the only man in the party whose outside tallied with this bill of particulars. He was said to be very shy. He is a shy man. Of this there is no doubt. It may not show on the surface, but the shyness is there. After days of intimacy one wonders to see that it is still in about as strong force as ever. There is a fine and beautiful nature hidden behind it, as all know who have read the Uncle Remus book; and a fine genius, too, as all know by the same sign. I seem to be talking quite freely about this neighbor; but in talking to the public I am but talking to his personal friends, and these things are permissible among friends. He deeply disappointed a number of children who had flocked eagerly to Mr. Cable's house to get a glimpse of the illustrious sage and oracle of the nation's nurseries. They said-- 'Why, he 's white!' They were grieved about it. So, to console them, the book was brought, that they might hear Uncle Remus's Tar-Baby story from the lips of Uncle Remus himself--or what, in their outraged eyes, was left of him. But it turned out that he had never read aloud to people, and was too shy to venture the attempt now. Mr. Cable and I read from books of ours, to show him what an easy trick it was; but his immortal shyness was proof against even this sagacious strategy, so we had to read about Brer Rabbit ourselves. Mr. Harris ought to be able to read the negro dialect better than anybody else, for in the matter of writing it he is the only master the country has produced. Mr. Cable is the only master in the writing of French dialects that the country has produced; and he reads them in perfection. It was a great treat to hear him read about Jean-ah Poquelin, and about Innerarity and his famous 'pigshoo' representing 'Louisihanna RIF-fusing to Hanter the Union,' along with passages of nicely-shaded German dialect from a novel which was still in manuscript. It came out in conversation, that in two different instances Mr. Cable got into grotesque trouble by using, in his books, next-to-impossible French names which nevertheless happened to be borne by living and sensitive citizens of New Orleans. His names were either inventions or were borrowed from the ancient and obsolete past, I do not now remember which; but at any rate living bearers of them turned up, and were a good deal hurt at having attention directed to themselves and their affairs in so excessively public a manner. Mr. Warner and I had an experience of the same sort when we wrote the book called 'The Gilded Age.' There is a character in it called 'Sellers.' I do not remember what his first name was, in the beginning; but anyway, Mr. Warner did not like it, and wanted it improved. He asked me if I was able to imagine a person named 'Eschol Sellers.' Of course I said I could not, without stimulants. He said that away out West, once, he had met, and contemplated, and actually shaken hands with a man bearing that impossible name--'Eschol Sellers.' He added-- 'It was twenty years ago; his name has probably carried him off before this; and if it hasn't, he will never see the book anyhow. We will confiscate his name. The name you are using is common, and therefore dangerous; there are probably a thousand Sellerses bearing it, and the whole horde will come after us; but Eschol Sellers is a safe name--it is a rock.' So we borrowed that name; and when the book had been out about a week, one of the stateliest and handsomest and most aristocratic looking white men that ever lived, called around, with the most formidable libel suit in his pocket that ever--well, in brief, we got his permission to suppress an edition of ten million {footnote [Figures taken from memory, and probably incorrect. Think it was more.]} copies of the book and change that name to 'Mulberry Sellers' in future editions. Chapter 48 Sugar and Postage ONE day, on the street, I encountered the man whom, of all men, I most wished to see--Horace Bixby; formerly pilot under me--or rather, over me--now captain of the great steamer 'City of Baton Rouge,' the latest and swiftest addition to the Anchor Line. The same slender figure, the same tight curls, the same springy step, the same alertness, the same decision of eye and answering decision of hand, the same erect military bearing; not an inch gained or lost in girth, not an ounce gained or lost in weight, not a hair turned. It is a curious thing, to leave a man thirty-five years old, and come back at the end of twenty-one years and find him still only thirty-five. I have not had an experience of this kind before, I believe. There were some crow's-feet, but they counted for next to nothing, since they were inconspicuous. His boat was just in. I had been waiting several days for her, purposing to return to St. Louis in her. The captain and I joined a party of ladies and gentlemen, guests of Major Wood, and went down the river fifty-four miles, in a swift tug, to ex-Governor Warmouth's sugar plantation. Strung along below the city, were a number of decayed, ram- shackly, superannuated old steamboats, not one of which had I ever seen before. They had all been built, and worn out, and thrown aside, since I was here last. This gives one a realizing sense of the frailness of a Mississippi boat and the briefness of its life. Six miles below town a fat and battered brick chimney, sticking above the magnolias and live-oaks, was pointed out as the monument erected by an appreciative nation to celebrate the battle of New Orleans--Jackson's victory over the British, January 8, 1815. The war had ended, the two nations were at peace, but the news had not yet reached New Orleans. If we had had the cable telegraph in those days, this blood would not have been spilt, those lives would not have been wasted; and better still, Jackson would probably never have been president. We have gotten over the harms done us by the war of 1812, but not over some of those done us by Jackson's presidency. The Warmouth plantation covers a vast deal of ground, and the hospitality of the Warmouth mansion is graduated to the same large scale. We saw steam-plows at work, here, for the first time. The traction engine travels about on its own wheels, till it reaches the required spot; then it stands still and by means of a wire rope pulls the huge plow toward itself two or three hundred yards across the field, between the rows of cane. The thing cuts down into the black mold a foot and a half deep. The plow looks like a fore-and-aft brace of a Hudson river steamer, inverted. When the negro steersman sits on one end of it, that end tilts down near the ground, while the other sticks up high in air. This great see-saw goes rolling and pitching like a ship at sea, and it is not every circus rider that could stay on it. The plantation contains two thousand six hundred acres; six hundred and fifty are in cane; and there is a fruitful orange grove of five thousand trees. The cane is cultivated after a modern and intricate scientific fashion, too elaborate and complex for me to attempt to describe; but it lost $40,000 last year. I forget the other details. However, this year's crop will reach ten or twelve hundred tons of sugar, consequently last year's loss will not matter. These troublesome and expensive scientific methods achieve a yield of a ton and a half and from that to two tons, to the acre; which is three or four times what the yield of an acre was in my time. The drainage-ditches were everywhere alive with little crabs-- 'fiddlers.' One saw them scampering sidewise in every direction whenever they heard a disturbing noise. Expensive pests, these crabs; for they bore into the levees, and ruin them. The great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks and vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery. The process of making sugar is exceedingly interesting. First, you heave your cane into the centrifugals and grind out the juice; then run it through the evaporating pan to extract the fiber; then through the bone-filter to remove the alcohol; then through the clarifying tanks to discharge the molasses; then through the granulating pipe to condense it; then through the vacuum pan to extract the vacuum. It is now ready for market. I have jotted these particulars down from memory. The thing looks simple and easy. Do not deceive yourself. To make sugar is really one of the most difficult things in the world. And to make it right, is next to impossible. If you will examine your own supply every now and then for a term of years, and tabulate the result, you will find that not two men in twenty can make sugar without getting sand into it. We could have gone down to the mouth of the river and visited Captain Eads' great work, the 'jetties,' where the river has been compressed between walls, and thus deepened to twenty-six feet; but it was voted useless to go, since at this stage of the water everything would be covered up and invisible. We could have visited that ancient and singular burg, 'Pilot-town,' which stands on stilts in the water--so they say; where nearly all communication is by skiff and canoe, even to the attending of weddings and funerals; and where the littlest boys and girls are as handy with the oar as unamphibious children are with the velocipede. We could have done a number of other things; but on account of limited time, we went back home. The sail up the breezy and sparkling river was a charming experience, and would have been satisfyingly sentimental and romantic but for the interruptions of the tug's pet parrot, whose tireless comments upon the scenery and the guests were always this- worldly, and often profane. He had also a superabundance of the discordant, ear-splitting, metallic laugh common to his breed--a machine-made laugh, a Frankenstein laugh, with the soul left out of it. He applied it to every sentimental remark, and to every pathetic song. He cackled it out with hideous energy after 'Home again, home again from a foreign shore,' and said he 'wouldn't give a damn for a tug-load of such rot.' Romance and sentiment cannot long survive this sort of discouragement; so the singing and talking presently ceased; which so delighted the parrot that he cursed himself hoarse for joy. Then the male members of the party moved to the forecastle, to smoke and gossip. There were several old steamboatmen along, and I learned from them a great deal of what had been happening to my former river friends during my long absence. I learned that a pilot whom I used to steer for is become a spiritualist, and for more than fifteen years has been receiving a letter every week from a deceased relative, through a New York spiritualist medium named Manchester--postage graduated by distance: from the local post-office in Paradise to New York, five dollars; from New York to St. Louis, three cents. I remember Mr. Manchester very well. I called on him once, ten years ago, with a couple of friends, one of whom wished to inquire after a deceased uncle. This uncle had lost his life in a peculiarly violent and unusual way, half a dozen years before: a cyclone blew him some three miles and knocked a tree down with him which was four feet through at the butt and sixty- five feet high. He did not survive this triumph. At the seance just referred to, my friend questioned his late uncle, through Mr. Manchester, and the late uncle wrote down his replies, using Mr. Manchester's hand and pencil for that purpose. The following is a fair example of the questions asked, and also of the sloppy twaddle in the way of answers, furnished by Manchester under the pretense that it came from the specter. If this man is not the paltriest fraud that lives, I owe him an apology-- QUESTION. Where are you? ANSWER. In the spirit world. Q. Are you happy? A. Very happy. Perfectly happy. Q. How do you amuse yourself? A. Conversation with friends, and other spirits. Q. What else? A. Nothing else. Nothing else is necessary. Q. What do you talk about? A. About how happy we are; and about friends left behind in the earth, and how to influence them for their good. Q. When your friends in the earth all get to the spirit land, what shall you have to talk about then?--nothing but about how happy you all are? No reply. It is explained that spirits will not answer frivolous questions. Q. How is it that spirits that are content to spend an eternity in frivolous employments, and accept it as happiness, are so fastidious about frivolous questions upon the subject? No reply. Q. Would you like to come back? A. No. Q. Would you say that under oath? A. Yes. Q. What do you eat there? A. We do not eat. Q. What do you drink? A. We do not drink. Q. What do you smoke? A. We do not smoke. Q. What do you read? A. We do not read. Q. Do all the good people go to your place? A. Yes. Q. You know my present way of life. Can you suggest any additions to it, in the way of crime, that will reasonably insure my going to some other place. A. No reply. Q. When did you die? A. I did not die, I passed away. Q. Very well, then, when did you pass away? How long have you been in the spirit land? A. We have no measurements of time here. Q. Though you may be indifferent and uncertain as to dates and times in your present condition and environment, this has nothing to do with your former condition. You had dates then. One of these is what I ask for. You departed on a certain day in a certain year. Is not this true? A. Yes. Q. Then name the day of the month. (Much fumbling with pencil, on the part of the medium, accompanied by violent spasmodic jerkings of his head and body, for some little time. Finally, explanation to the effect that spirits often forget dates, such things being without importance to them.) Q. Then this one has actually forgotten the date of its translation to the spirit land? This was granted to be the case. Q. This is very curious. Well, then, what year was it? (More fumbling, jerking, idiotic spasms, on the part of the medium. Finally, explanation to the effect that the spirit has forgotten the year.) Q. This is indeed stupendous. Let me put one more question, one last question, to you, before we part to meet no more;--for even if I fail to avoid your asylum, a meeting there will go for nothing as a meeting, since by that time you will easily have forgotten me and my name: did you die a natural death, or were you cut off by a catastrophe? A. (After long hesitation and many throes and spasms.) NATURAL DEATH. This ended the interview. My friend told the medium that when his relative was in this poor world, he was endowed with an extraordinary intellect and an absolutely defectless memory, and it seemed a great pity that he had not been allowed to keep some shred of these for his amusement in the realms of everlasting contentment, and for the amazement and admiration of the rest of the population there. This man had plenty of clients--has plenty yet. He receives letters from spirits located in every part of the spirit world, and delivers them all over this country through the United States mail. These letters are filled with advice--advice from 'spirits' who don't know as much as a tadpole--and this advice is religiously followed by the receivers. One of these clients was a man whom the spirits (if one may thus plurally describe the ingenious Manchester) were teaching how to contrive an improved railway car-wheel. It is coarse employment for a spirit, but it is higher and wholesomer activity than talking for ever about 'how happy we are.' Chapter 49 Episodes in Pilot Life IN the course of the tug-boat gossip, it came out that out of every five of my former friends who had quitted the river, four had chosen farming as an occupation. Of course this was not because they were peculiarly gifted, agriculturally, and thus more likely to succeed as farmers than in other industries: the reason for their choice must be traced to some other source. Doubtless they chose farming because that life is private and secluded from irruptions of undesirable strangers--like the pilot- house hermitage. And doubtless they also chose it because on a thousand nights of black storm and danger they had noted the twinkling lights of solitary farm-houses, as the boat swung by, and pictured to themselves the serenity and security and coziness of such refuges at such times, and so had by-and-bye come to dream of that retired and peaceful life as the one desirable thing to long for, anticipate, earn, and at last enjoy. But I did not learn that any of these pilot-farmers had astonished anybody with their successes. Their farms do not support them: they support their farms. The pilot-farmer disappears from the river annually, about the breaking of spring, and is seen no more till next frost. Then he appears again, in damaged homespun, combs the hayseed out of his hair, and takes a pilot-house berth for the winter. In this way he pays the debts which his farming has achieved during the agricultural season. So his river bondage is but half broken; he is still the river's slave the hardest half of the year. One of these men bought a farm, but did not retire to it. He knew a trick worth two of that. He did not propose to pauperize his farm by applying his personal ignorance to working it. No, he put the farm into the hands of an agricultural expert to be worked on shares--out of every three loads of corn the expert to have two and the pilot the third. But at the end of the season the pilot received no corn. The expert explained that his share was not reached. The farm produced only two loads. Some of the pilots whom I had known had had adventures--the outcome fortunate, sometimes, but not in all cases. Captain Montgomery, whom I had steered for when he was a pilot, commanded the Confederate fleet in the great battle before Memphis; when his vessel went down, he swam ashore, fought his way through a squad of soldiers, and made a gallant and narrow escape. He was always a cool man; nothing could disturb his serenity. Once when he was captain of the 'Crescent City,' I was bringing the boat into port at New Orleans, and momently expecting orders from the hurricane deck, but received none. I had stopped the wheels, and there my authority and responsibility ceased. It was evening--dim twilight--the captain's hat was perched upon the big bell, and I supposed the intellectual end of the captain was in it, but such was not the case. The captain was very strict; therefore I knew better than to touch a bell without orders. My duty was to hold the boat steadily on her calamitous course, and leave the consequences to take care of themselves--which I did. So we went plowing past the sterns of steamboats and getting closer and closer--the crash was bound to come very soon--and still that hat never budged; for alas, the captain was napping in the texas.... Things were becoming exceedingly nervous and uncomfortable. It seemed to me that the captain was not going to appear in time to see the entertainment. But he did. Just as we were walking into the stern of a steamboat, he stepped out on deck, and said, with heavenly serenity, 'Set her back on both'--which I did; but a trifle late, however, for the next moment we went smashing through that other boat's flimsy outer works with a most prodigious racket. The captain never said a word to me about the matter afterwards, except to remark that I had done right, and that he hoped I would not hesitate to act in the same way again in like circumstances. One of the pilots whom I had known when I was on the river had died a very honorable death. His boat caught fire, and he remained at the wheel until he got her safe to land. Then he went out over the breast- board with his clothing in flames, and was the last person to get ashore. He died from his injuries in the course of two or three hours, and his was the only life lost. The history of Mississippi piloting affords six or seven instances of this sort of martyrdom, and half a hundred instances of escapes from a like fate which came within a second or two of being fatally too late; BUT THERE IS NO INSTANCE OF A PILOT DESERTING HIS POST TO SAVE HIS LIFE WHILE BY REMAINING AND SACRIFICING IT HE MIGHT SECURE OTHER LIVES FROM DESTRUCTION. It is well worth while to set down this noble fact, and well worth while to put it in italics, too. The 'cub' pilot is early admonished to despise all perils connected with a pilot's calling, and to prefer any sort of death to the deep dishonor of deserting his post while there is any possibility of his being useful in it. And so effectively are these admonitions inculcated, that even young and but half-tried pilots can be depended upon to stick to the wheel, and die there when occasion requires. In a Memphis graveyard is buried a young fellow who perished at the wheel a great many years ago, in White River, to save the lives of other men. He said to the captain that if the fire would give him time to reach a sand bar, some distance away, all could be saved, but that to land against the bluff bank of the river would be to insure the loss of many lives. He reached the bar and grounded the boat in shallow water; but by that time the flames had closed around him, and in escaping through them he was fatally burned. He had been urged to fly sooner, but had replied as became a pilot to reply-- 'I will not go. If I go, nobody will be saved; if I stay, no one will be lost but me. I will stay.' There were two hundred persons on board, and no life was lost but the pilot's. There used to be a monument to this young fellow, in that Memphis graveyard. While we tarried in Memphis on our down trip, I started out to look for it, but our time was so brief that I was obliged to turn back before my object was accomplished. The tug-boat gossip informed me that Dick Kennet was dead--blown up, near Memphis, and killed; that several others whom I had known had fallen in the war--one or two of them shot down at the wheel; that another and very particular friend, whom I had steered many trips for, had stepped out of his house in New Orleans, one night years ago, to collect some money in a remote part of the city, and had never been seen again--was murdered and thrown into the river, it was thought; that Ben Thornburgh was dead long ago; also his wild 'cub' whom I used to quarrel with, all through every daylight watch. A heedless, reckless creature he was, and always in hot water, always in mischief. An Arkansas passenger brought an enormous bear aboard, one day, and chained him to a life-boat on the hurricane deck. Thornburgh's 'cub' could not rest till he had gone there and unchained the bear, to 'see what he would do.' He was promptly gratified. The bear chased him around and around the deck, for miles and miles, with two hundred eager faces grinning through the railings for audience, and finally snatched off the lad's coat-tail and went into the texas to chew it. The off-watch turned out with alacrity, and left the bear in sole possession. He presently grew lonesome, and started out for recreation. He ranged the whole boat--visited every part of it, with an advance guard of fleeing people in front of him and a voiceless vacancy behind him; and when his owner captured him at last, those two were the only visible beings anywhere; everybody else was in hiding, and the boat was a solitude. I was told that one of my pilot friends fell dead at the wheel, from heart disease, in 1869. The captain was on the roof at the time. He saw the boat breaking for the shore; shouted, and got no answer; ran up, and found the pilot lying dead on the floor. Mr. Bixby had been blown up, in Madrid bend; was not injured, but the other pilot was lost. George Ritchie had been blown up near Memphis--blown into the river from the wheel, and disabled. The water was very cold; he clung to a cotton bale--mainly with his teeth--and floated until nearly exhausted, when he was rescued by some deck hands who were on a piece of the wreck. They tore open the bale and packed him in the cotton, and warmed the life back into him, and got him safe to Memphis. He is one of Bixby's pilots on the 'Baton Rouge' now. Into the life of a steamboat clerk, now dead, had dropped a bit of romance--somewhat grotesque romance, but romance nevertheless. When I knew him he was a shiftless young spendthrift, boisterous, goodhearted, full of careless generosities, and pretty conspicuously promising to fool his possibilities away early, and come to nothing. In a Western city lived a rich and childless old foreigner and his wife; and in their family was a comely young girl--sort of friend, sort of servant. The young clerk of whom I have been speaking--whose name was not George Johnson, but who shall be called George Johnson for the purposes of this narrative--got acquainted with this young girl, and they sinned; and the old foreigner found them out, and rebuked them. Being ashamed, they lied, and said they were married; that they had been privately married. Then the old foreigner's hurt was healed, and he forgave and blessed them. After that, they were able to continue their sin without concealment. By-and-bye the foreigner's wife died; and presently he followed after her. Friends of the family assembled to mourn; and among the mourners sat the two young sinners. The will was opened and solemnly read. It bequeathed every penny of that old man's great wealth to MRS. GEORGE JOHNSON! And there was no such person. The young sinners fled forth then, and did a very foolish thing: married themselves before an obscure Justice of the Peace, and got him to antedate the thing. That did no sort of good. The distant relatives flocked in and exposed the fraudful date with extreme suddenness and surprising ease, and carried off the fortune, leaving the Johnsons very legitimately, and legally, and irrevocably chained together in honorable marriage, but with not so much as a penny to bless themselves withal. Such are the actual facts; and not all novels have for a base so telling a situation. Chapter 50 The 'Original Jacobs' WE had some talk about Captain Isaiah Sellers, now many years dead. He was a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both ashore and on the river. He was very tall, well built, and handsome; and in his old age--as I remember him--his hair was as black as an Indian's, and his eye and hand were as strong and steady and his nerve and judgment as firm and clear as anybody's, young or old, among the fraternity of pilots. He was the patriarch of the craft; he had been a keelboat pilot before the day of steamboats; and a steamboat pilot before any other steamboat pilot, still surviving at the time I speak of, had ever turned a wheel. Consequently his brethren held him in the sort of awe in which illustrious survivors of a bygone age are always held by their associates. He knew how he was regarded, and perhaps this fact added some trifle of stiffening to his natural dignity, which had been sufficiently stiff in its original state. He left a diary behind him; but apparently it did not date back to his first steamboat trip, which was said to be 1811, the year the first steamboat disturbed the waters of the Mississippi. At the time of his death a correspondent of the 'St. Louis Republican' culled the following items from the diary-- 'In February, 1825, he shipped on board the steamer "Rambler," at Florence, Ala., and made during that year three trips to New Orleans and back--this on the "Gen. Carrol," between Nashville and New Orleans. It was during his stay on this boat that Captain Sellers introduced the tap of the bell as a signal to heave the lead, previous to which time it was the custom for the pilot to speak to the men below when soundings were wanted. The proximity of the forecastle to the pilot-house, no doubt, rendered this an easy matter; but how different on one of our palaces of the present day. 'In 1827 we find him on board the "President," a boat of two hundred and eighty-five tons burden, and plying between Smithland and New Orleans. Thence he joined the "Jubilee" in 1828, and on this boat he did his first piloting in the St. Louis trade; his first watch extending from Herculaneum to St. Genevieve. On May 26, 1836, he completed and left Pittsburgh in charge of the steamer "Prairie," a boat of four hundred tons, and the first steamer with a STATE-ROOM CABIN ever seen at St. Louis. In 1857 he introduced the signal for meeting boats, and which has, with some slight change, been the universal custom of this day; in fact, is rendered obligatory by act of Congress. 'As general items of river history, we quote the following marginal notes from his general log-- 'In March, 1825, Gen. Lafayette left New Orleans for St. Louis on the low-pressure steamer "Natchez." 'In January, 1828, twenty-one steamers left the New Orleans wharf to celebrate the occasion of Gen. Jackson's visit to that city. 'In 1830 the "North American" made the run from New Orleans to Memphis in six days--best time on record to that date. It has since been made in two days and ten hours. 'In 1831 the Red River cut-off formed. 'In 1832 steamer "Hudson" made the run from White River to Helena, a distance of seventy-five miles, in twelve hours. This was the source of much talk and speculation among parties directly interested. 'In 1839 Great Horseshoe cut-off formed. 'Up to the present time, a term of thirty-five years, we ascertain, by reference to the diary, he has made four hundred and sixty round trips to New Orleans, which gives a distance of one million one hundred and four thousand miles, or an average of eighty-six miles a day.' Whenever Captain Sellers approached a body of gossiping pilots, a chill fell there, and talking ceased. For this reason: whenever six pilots were gathered together, there would always be one or two newly fledged ones in the lot, and the elder ones would be always 'showing off' before these poor fellows; making them sorrowfully feel how callow they were, how recent their nobility, and how humble their degree, by talking largely and vaporously of old-time experiences on the river; always making it a point to date everything back as far as they could, so as to make the new men feel their newness to the sharpest degree possible, and envy the old stagers in the like degree. And how these complacent baldheads WOULD swell, and brag, and lie, and date back--ten, fifteen, twenty years,--and how they did enjoy the effect produced upon the marveling and envying youngsters! And perhaps just at this happy stage of the proceedings, the stately figure of Captain Isaiah Sellers, that real and only genuine Son of Antiquity, would drift solemnly into the midst. Imagine the size of the silence that would result on the instant. And imagine the feelings of those bald-heads, and the exultation of their recent audience when the ancient captain would begin to drop casual and indifferent remarks of a reminiscent nature--about islands that had disappeared, and cutoffs that had been made, a generation before the oldest bald-head in the company had ever set his foot in a pilot-house! Many and many a time did this ancient mariner appear on the scene in the above fashion, and spread disaster and humiliation around him. If one might believe the pilots, he always dated his islands back to the misty dawn of river history; and he never used the same island twice; and never did he employ an island that still existed, or give one a name which anybody present was old enough to have heard of before. If you might believe the pilots, he was always conscientiously particular about little details; never spoke of 'the State of Mississippi,' for instance --no, he would say, 'When the State of Mississippi was where Arkansas now is,' and would never speak of Louisiana or Missouri in a general way, and leave an incorrect impression on your mind--no, he would say, 'When Louisiana was up the river farther,' or 'When Missouri was on the Illinois side.' The old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them 'MARK TWAIN,' and give them to the 'New Orleans Picayune.' They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable; and thus far, they contained no poison. But in speaking of the stage of the river to-day, at a given point, the captain was pretty apt to drop in a little remark about this being the first time he had seen the water so high or so low at that particular point for forty-nine years; and now and then he would mention Island So- and-so, and follow it, in parentheses, with some such observation as 'disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly.' In these antique interjections lay poison and bitterness for the other old pilots, and they used to chaff the 'Mark Twain' paragraphs with unsparing mockery. It so chanced that one of these paragraphs--{footnote [The original MS. of it, in the captain's own hand, has been sent to me from New Orleans. It reads as follows-- VICKSBURG May 4, 1859. 'My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans: The water is higher this far up than it has been since 8. My opinion is that the water will be feet deep in Canal street before the first of next June. Mrs. Turner's plantation at the head of Big Black Island is all under water, and it has not been since 1815. 'I. Sellers.']} became the text for my first newspaper article. I burlesqued it broadly, very broadly, stringing my fantastics out to the extent of eight hundred or a thousand words. I was a 'cub' at the time. I showed my performance to some pilots, and they eagerly rushed it into print in the 'New Orleans True Delta.' It was a great pity; for it did nobody any worthy service, and it sent a pang deep into a good man's heart. There was no malice in my rubbish; but it laughed at the captain. It laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful. I did not know then, though I do now, that there is no suffering comparable with that which a private person feels when he is for the first time pilloried in print. Captain Sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day forth. When I say he did me the honor, I am not using empty words. It was a very real honor to be in the thoughts of so great a man as Captain Sellers, and I had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud of it. It was distinction to be loved by such a man; but it was a much greater distinction to be hated by him, because he loved scores of people; but he didn't sit up nights to hate anybody but me. He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again signed 'Mark Twain' to anything. At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the ancient mariner's discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands--a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say. The captain had an honorable pride in his profession and an abiding love for it. He ordered his monument before he died, and kept it near him until he did die. It stands over his grave now, in Bellefontaine cemetery, St. Louis. It is his image, in marble, standing on duty at the pilot wheel; and worthy to stand and confront criticism, for it represents a man who in life would have stayed there till he burned to a cinder, if duty required it. The finest thing we saw on our whole Mississippi trip, we saw as we approached New Orleans in the steam-tug. This was the curving frontage of the crescent city lit up with the white glare of five miles of electric lights. It was a wonderful sight, and very beautiful. 
8481	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 11. Chapter 51 Reminiscences WE left for St. Louis in the 'City of Baton Rouge,' on a delightfully hot day, but with the main purpose of my visit but lamely accomplished. I had hoped to hunt up and talk with a hundred steamboatmen, but got so pleasantly involved in the social life of the town that I got nothing more than mere five-minute talks with a couple of dozen of the craft. I was on the bench of the pilot-house when we backed out and 'straightened up' for the start--the boat pausing for a 'good ready,' in the old-fashioned way, and the black smoke piling out of the chimneys equally in the old-fashioned way. Then we began to gather momentum, and presently were fairly under way and booming along. It was all as natural and familiar--and so were the shoreward sights--as if there had been no break in my river life. There was a 'cub,' and I judged that he would take the wheel now; and he did. Captain Bixby stepped into the pilot- house. Presently the cub closed up on the rank of steamships. He made me nervous, for he allowed too much water to show between our boat and the ships. I knew quite well what was going to happen, because I could date back in my own life and inspect the record. The captain looked on, during a silent half-minute, then took the wheel himself, and crowded the boat in, till she went scraping along within a hand-breadth of the ships. It was exactly the favor which he had done me, about a quarter of a century before, in that same spot, the first time I ever steamed out of the port of New Orleans. It was a very great and sincere pleasure to me to see the thing repeated--with somebody else as victim. We made Natchez (three hundred miles) in twenty-two hours and a half-- much the swiftest passage I have ever made over that piece of water. The next morning I came on with the four o'clock watch, and saw Ritchie successfully run half a dozen crossings in a fog, using for his guidance the marked chart devised and patented by Bixby and himself. This sufficiently evidenced the great value of the chart. By and by, when the fog began to clear off, I noticed that the reflection of a tree in the smooth water of an overflowed bank, six hundred yards away, was stronger and blacker than the ghostly tree itself. The faint spectral trees, dimly glimpsed through the shredding fog, were very pretty things to see. We had a heavy thunder-storm at Natchez, another at Vicksburg, and still another about fifty miles below Memphis. They had an old-fashioned energy which had long been unfamiliar to me. This third storm was accompanied by a raging wind. We tied up to the bank when we saw the tempest coming, and everybody left the pilot-house but me. The wind bent the young trees down, exposing the pale underside of the leaves; and gust after gust followed, in quick succession, thrashing the branches violently up and down, and to this side and that, and creating swift waves of alternating green and white according to the side of the leaf that was exposed, and these waves raced after each other as do their kind over a wind-tossed field of oats. No color that was visible anywhere was quite natural--all tints were charged with a leaden tinge from the solid cloud-bank overhead. The river was leaden; all distances the same; and even the far-reaching ranks of combing white-caps were dully shaded by the dark, rich atmosphere through which their swarming legions marched. The thunder-peals were constant and deafening; explosion followed explosion with but inconsequential intervals between, and the reports grew steadily sharper and higher-keyed, and more trying to the ear; the lightning was as diligent as the thunder, and produced effects which enchanted the eye and sent electric ecstasies of mixed delight and apprehension shivering along every nerve in the body in unintermittent procession. The rain poured down in amazing volume; the ear-splitting thunder-peals broke nearer and nearer; the wind increased in fury and began to wrench off boughs and tree-tops and send them sailing away through space; the pilot-house fell to rocking and straining and cracking and surging, and I went down in the hold to see what time it was. People boast a good deal about Alpine thunderstorms; but the storms which I have had the luck to see in the Alps were not the equals of some which I have seen in the Mississippi Valley. I may not have seen the Alps do their best, of course, and if they can beat the Mississippi, I don't wish to. On this up trip I saw a little towhead (infant island) half a mile long, which had been formed during the past nineteen years. Since there was so much time to spare that nineteen years of it could be devoted to the construction of a mere towhead, where was the use, originally, in rushing this whole globe through in six days? It is likely that if more time had been taken, in the first place, the world would have been made right, and this ceaseless improving and repairing would not be necessary now. But if you hurry a world or a house, you are nearly sure to find out by and by that you have left out a towhead, or a broom-closet, or some other little convenience, here and there, which has got to be supplied, no matter how much expense and vexation it may cost. We had a succession of black nights, going up the river, and it was observable that whenever we landed, and suddenly inundated the trees with the intense sunburst of the electric light, a certain curious effect was always produced: hundreds of birds flocked instantly out from the masses of shining green foliage, and went careering hither and thither through the white rays, and often a song-bird tuned up and fell to singing. We judged that they mistook this superb artificial day for the genuine article. We had a delightful trip in that thoroughly well- ordered steamer, and regretted that it was accomplished so speedily. By means of diligence and activity, we managed to hunt out nearly all the old friends. One was missing, however; he went to his reward, whatever it was, two years ago. But I found out all about him. His case helped me to realize how lasting can be the effect of a very trifling occurrence. When he was an apprentice-blacksmith in our village, and I a schoolboy, a couple of young Englishmen came to the town and sojourned a while; and one day they got themselves up in cheap royal finery and did the Richard III swordfight with maniac energy and prodigious powwow, in the presence of the village boys. This blacksmith cub was there, and the histrionic poison entered his bones. This vast, lumbering, ignorant, dull-witted lout was stage-struck, and irrecoverably. He disappeared, and presently turned up in St. Louis. I ran across him there, by and by. He was standing musing on a street corner, with his left hand on his hip, the thumb of his right supporting his chin, face bowed and frowning, slouch hat pulled down over his forehead--imagining himself to be Othello or some such character, and imagining that the passing crowd marked his tragic bearing and were awestruck. I joined him, and tried to get him down out of the clouds, but did not succeed. However, he casually informed me, presently, that he was a member of the Walnut Street theater company--and he tried to say it with indifference, but the indifference was thin, and a mighty exultation showed through it. He said he was cast for a part in Julius Caesar, for that night, and if I should come I would see him. IF I should come! I said I wouldn't miss it if I were dead. I went away stupefied with astonishment, and saying to myself, 'How strange it is! WE always thought this fellow a fool; yet the moment he comes to a great city, where intelligence and appreciation abound, the talent concealed in this shabby napkin is at once discovered, and promptly welcomed and honored.' But I came away from the theater that night disappointed and offended; for I had had no glimpse of my hero, and his name was not in the bills. I met him on the street the next morning, and before I could speak, he asked-- 'Did you see me?' 'No, you weren't there.' He looked surprised and disappointed. He said-- 'Yes, I was. Indeed I was. I was a Roman soldier.' 'Which one?' 'Why didn't you see them Roman soldiers that stood back there in a rank, and sometimes marched in procession around the stage?' 'Do you mean the Roman army?--those six sandaled roustabouts in nightshirts, with tin shields and helmets, that marched around treading on each other's heels, in charge of a spider-legged consumptive dressed like themselves?' 'That's it! that's it! I was one of them Roman soldiers. I was the next to the last one. A half a year ago I used to always be the last one; but I've been promoted.' Well, they told me that that poor fellow remained a Roman soldier to the last--a matter of thirty-four years. Sometimes they cast him for a 'speaking part,' but not an elaborate one. He could be trusted to go and say, 'My lord, the carriage waits,' but if they ventured to add a sentence or two to this, his memory felt the strain and he was likely to miss fire. Yet, poor devil, he had been patiently studying the part of Hamlet for more than thirty years, and he lived and died in the belief that some day he would be invited to play it! And this is what came of that fleeting visit of those young Englishmen to our village such ages and ages ago! What noble horseshoes this man might have made, but for those Englishmen; and what an inadequate Roman soldier he DID make! A day or two after we reached St. Louis, I was walking along Fourth Street when a grizzly-headed man gave a sort of start as he passed me, then stopped, came back, inspected me narrowly, with a clouding brow, and finally said with deep asperity-- 'Look here, HAVE YOU GOT THAT DRINK YET?' A maniac, I judged, at first. But all in a flash I recognized him. I made an effort to blush that strained every muscle in me, and answered as sweetly and winningly as ever I knew how-- 'Been a little slow, but am just this minute closing in on the place where they keep it. Come in and help.' He softened, and said make it a bottle of champagne and he was agreeable. He said he had seen my name in the papers, and had put all his affairs aside and turned out, resolved to find me or die; and make me answer that question satisfactorily, or kill me; though the most of his late asperity had been rather counterfeit than otherwise. This meeting brought back to me the St. Louis riots of about thirty years ago. I spent a week there, at that time, in a boarding-house, and had this young fellow for a neighbor across the hall. We saw some of the fightings and killings; and by and by we went one night to an armory where two hundred young men had met, upon call, to be armed and go forth against the rioters, under command of a military man. We drilled till about ten o'clock at night; then news came that the mob were in great force in the lower end of the town, and were sweeping everything before them. Our column moved at once. It was a very hot night, and my musket was very heavy. We marched and marched; and the nearer we approached the seat of war, the hotter I grew and the thirstier I got. I was behind my friend; so, finally, I asked him to hold my musket while I dropped out and got a drink. Then I branched off and went home. I was not feeling any solicitude about him of course, because I knew he was so well armed, now, that he could take care of himself without any trouble. If I had had any doubts about that, I would have borrowed another musket for him. I left the city pretty early the next morning, and if this grizzled man had not happened to encounter my name in the papers the other day in St. Louis, and felt moved to seek me out, I should have carried to my grave a heart-torturing uncertainty as to whether he ever got out of the riots all right or not. I ought to have inquired, thirty years ago; I know that. And I would have inquired, if I had had the muskets; but, in the circumstances, he seemed better fixed to conduct the investigations than I was. One Monday, near the time of our visit to St. Louis, the 'Globe- Democrat' came out with a couple of pages of Sunday statistics, whereby it appeared that 119,448 St. Louis people attended the morning and evening church services the day before, and 23,102 children attended Sunday-school. Thus 142,550 persons, out of the city's total of 400,000 population, respected the day religious-wise. I found these statistics, in a condensed form, in a telegram of the Associated Press, and preserved them. They made it apparent that St. Louis was in a higher state of grace than she could have claimed to be in my time. But now that I canvass the figures narrowly, I suspect that the telegraph mutilated them. It cannot be that there are more than 150,000 Catholics in the town; the other 250,000 must be classified as Protestants. Out of these 250,000, according to this questionable telegram, only 26,362 attended church and Sunday-school, while out of the 150,000 Catholics, 116,188 went to church and Sunday-school. Chapter 52 A Burning Brand ALL at once the thought came into my mind, 'I have not sought out Mr. Brown.' Upon that text I desire to depart from the direct line of my subject, and make a little excursion. I wish to reveal a secret which I have carried with me nine years, and which has become burdensome. Upon a certain occasion, nine years ago, I had said, with strong feeling, 'If ever I see St. Louis again, I will seek out Mr. Brown, the great grain merchant, and ask of him the privilege of shaking him by the hand.' The occasion and the circumstances were as follows. A friend of mine, a clergyman, came one evening and said-- 'I have a most remarkable letter here, which I want to read to you, if I can do it without breaking down. I must preface it with some explanations, however. The letter is written by an ex-thief and ex-vagabond of the lowest origin and basest rearing, a man all stained with crime and steeped in ignorance; but, thank God, with a mine of pure gold hidden away in him, as you shall see. His letter is written to a burglar named Williams, who is serving a nine-year term in a certain State prison, for burglary. Williams was a particularly daring burglar, and plied that trade during a number of years; but he was caught at last and jailed, to await trial in a town where he had broken into a house at night, pistol in hand, and forced the owner to hand over to him $8,000 in government bonds. Williams was not a common sort of person, by any means; he was a graduate of Harvard College, and came of good New England stock. His father was a clergyman. While lying in jail, his health began to fail, and he was threatened with consumption. This fact, together with the opportunity for reflection afforded by solitary confinement, had its effect--its natural effect. He fell into serious thought; his early training asserted itself with power, and wrought with strong influence upon his mind and heart. He put his old life behind him, and became an earnest Christian. Some ladies in the town heard of this, visited him, and by their encouraging words supported him in his good resolutions and strengthened him to continue in his new life. The trial ended in his conviction and sentence to the State prison for the term of nine years, as I have before said. In the prison he became acquainted with the poor wretch referred to in the beginning of my talk, Jack Hunt, the writer of the letter which I am going to read. You will see that the acquaintanceship bore fruit for Hunt. When Hunt's time was out, he wandered to St. Louis; and from that place he wrote his letter to Williams. The letter got no further than the office of the prison warden, of course; prisoners are not often allowed to receive letters from outside. The prison authorities read this letter, but did not destroy it. They had not the heart to do it. They read it to several persons, and eventually it fell into the hands of those ladies of whom I spoke a while ago. The other day I came across an old friend of mine--a clergyman--who had seen this letter, and was full of it. The mere remembrance of it so moved him that he could not talk of it without his voice breaking. He promised to get a copy of it for me; and here it is --an exact copy, with all the imperfections of the original preserved. It has many slang expressions in it--thieves' argot--but their meaning has been interlined, in parentheses, by the prison authorities'-- St. Louis, June 9th 1872. Mr. W---- friend Charlie if i may call you so: i no you are surprised to get a letter from me, but i hope you won't be mad at my writing to you. i want to tell you my thanks for the way you talked to me when i was in prison--it has led me to try and be a better man; i guess you thought i did not cair for what you said, & at the first go off I didn't, but i noed you was a man who had don big work with good men & want no sucker, nor want gasing & all the boys knod it. I used to think at nite what you said, & for it i nocked off swearing months before my time was up, for i saw it want no good, nohow--the day my time was up you told me if i would shake the cross (QUIT STEALING) & live on the square for months, it would be the best job i ever done in my life. The state agent give me a ticket to here, & on the car i thought more of what you said to me, but didn't make up my mind. When we got to Chicago on the cars from there to here, I pulled off an old woman's leather; (ROBBED HER OF HER POCKETBOOK) i hadn't no more than got it off when i wished i hadn't done it, for awhile before that i made up my mind to be a square bloke, for months on your word, but forgot it when i saw the leather was a grip (EASY TO GET)--but i kept clos to her & when she got out of the cars at a way place i said, marm have you lost anything. & she tumbled (DISCOVERED) her leather was off (GONE)--is this it says i, giving it to her--well if you aint honest, says she, but i hadn't got cheak enough to stand that sort of talk, so i left her in a hurry. When i got here i had $1 and 25 cents left & i didn't get no work for 3 days as i aint strong enough for roust about on a steam bote (FOR A DECK HAND)--The afternoon of the 3rd day I spent my last 10 cts for moons (LARGE, ROUND SEA-BISCUIT) & cheese & i felt pretty rough & was thinking i would have to go on the dipe (PICKING POCKETS) again, when i thought of what you once said about a fellows calling on the Lord when he was in hard luck, & i thought i would try it once anyhow, but when i tryed it i got stuck on the start, & all i could get off wos, Lord give a poor fellow a chance to square it for 3 months for Christ's sake, amen; & i kept a thinking, of it over and over as i went along--about an hour after that i was in 4th St. & this is what happened & is the cause of my being where i am now & about which i will tell you before i get done writing. As i was walking along herd a big noise & saw a horse running away with a carriage with 2 children in it, & I grabed up a peace of box cover from the side walk & run in the middle of the street, & when the horse came up i smashed him over the head as hard as i could drive--the bord split to peces & the horse checked up a little & I grabbed the reigns & pulled his head down until he stopped--the gentleman what owned him came running up & soon as he saw the children were all rite, he shook hands with me and gave me a $50 green back, & my asking the Lord to help me come into my head, & i was so thunderstruck i couldn't drop the reigns nor say nothing--he saw something was up, & coming back to me said, my boy are you hurt? & the thought come into my head just then to ask him for work; & i asked him to take back the bill and give me a job--says he, jump in here & lets talk about it, but keep the money--he asked me if i could take care of horses & i said yes, for i used to hang round livery stables & often would help clean & drive horses, he told me he wanted a man for that work, & would give me $16 a month & bord me. You bet i took that chance at once. that nite in my little room over the stable i sat a long time thinking over my past life & of what had just happened & i just got down on my nees & thanked the Lord for the job & to help me to square it, & to bless you for putting me up to it, & the next morning i done it again & got me some new togs (CLOTHES) & a bible for i made up my mind after what the Lord had done for me i would read the bible every nite and morning, & ask him to keep an eye on me. When I had been there about a week Mr. Brown (that's his name) came in my room one nite and saw me reading the bible--he asked me if i was a Christian & i told him no--he asked me how it was i read the bible instead of papers & books--Well Charlie i thought i had better give him a square deal in the start, so i told him all about my being in prison & about you, & how i had almost done give up looking for work & how the Lord got me the job when I asked him; & the only way i had to pay him back was to read the bible & square it, & i asked him to give me a chance for 3 months--he talked to me like a father for a long time, & told me i could stay & then i felt better than ever i had done in my life, for i had given Mr. Brown a fair start with me & now i didn't fear no one giving me a back cap (EXPOSING HIS PAST LIFE) & running me off the job--the next morning he called me into the library & gave me another square talk, & advised me to study some every day, & he would help me one or 2 hours every nite, & he gave me a Arithmetic, a spelling book, a Geography & a writing book, & he hers me every nite--he lets me come into the house to prayers every morning, & got me put in a bible class in the Sunday School which i likes very much for it helps me to understand my bible better. Now, Charlie the 3 months on the square are up 2 months ago, & as you said, it is the best job i ever did in my life, & i commenced another of the same sort right away, only it is to God helping me to last a lifetime Charlie--i wrote this letter to tell you I do think God has forgiven my sins & herd your prayers, for you told me you should pray for me--i no i love to read his word & tell him all my troubles & he helps me i know for i have plenty of chances to steal but i don't feel to as i once did & now i take more pleasure in going to church than to the theater & that wasnt so once--our minister and others often talk with me & a month ago they wanted me to join the church, but I said no, not now, i may be mistaken in my feelings, i will wait awhile, but now i feel that God has called me & on the first Sunday in July i will join the church--dear friend i wish i could write to you as i feel, but i cant do it yet--you no i learned to read and write while prisons & i aint got well enough along to write as i would talk; i no i aint spelled all the words rite in this & lots of other mistakes but you will excuse it i no, for you no i was brought up in a poor house until i run away, & that i never new who my father and mother was & i dont no my right name, & i hope you wont be mad at me, but i have as much rite to one name as another & i have taken your name, for you wont use it when you get out i no, & you are the man i think most of in the world; so i hope you wont be mad--I am doing well, i put $10 a month in bank with $25 of the $50-- if you ever want any or all of it let me know, & it is yours. i wish you would let me send you some now. I send you with this a receipt for a year of Littles Living Age, i didn't know what you would like & i told Mr. Brown & he said he thought you would like it--i wish i was nere you so i could send you chuck (REFRESHMENTS) on holidays; it would spoil this weather from here, but i will send you a box next thanksgiving any way--next week Mr. Brown takes me into his store as lite porter & will advance me as soon as i know a little more--he keeps a big granary store, wholesale--i forgot to tell you of my mission school, sunday school class--the school is in the sunday afternoon, i went out two sunday afternoons, and picked up seven kids (LITTLE BOYS) & got them to come in. two of them new as much as i did & i had them put in a class where they could learn something. i dont no much myself, but as these kids cant read i get on nicely with them. i make sure of them by going after them every Sunday hour before school time, I also got 4 girls to come. tell Mack and Harry about me, if they will come out here when their time is up i will get them jobs at once. i hope you will excuse this long letter & all mistakes, i wish i could see you for i cant write as i would talk--i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--i was afraid when you was bleeding you would die--give my respects to all the boys and tell them how i am doing--i am doing well and every one here treats me as kind as they can--Mr. Brown is going to write to you sometime--i hope some day you will write to me, this letter is from your very true friend C---- W---- who you know as Jack Hunt. I send you Mr. Brown's card. Send my letter to him. Here was true eloquence; irresistible eloquence; and without a single grace or ornament to help it out. I have seldom been so deeply stirred by any piece of writing. The reader of it halted, all the way through, on a lame and broken voice; yet he had tried to fortify his feelings by several private readings of the letter before venturing into company with it. He was practising upon me to see if there was any hope of his being able to read the document to his prayer-meeting with anything like a decent command over his feelings. The result was not promising. However, he determined to risk it; and did. He got through tolerably well; but his audience broke down early, and stayed in that condition to the end. The fame of the letter spread through the town. A brother minister came and borrowed the manuscript, put it bodily into a sermon, preached the sermon to twelve hundred people on a Sunday morning, and the letter drowned them in their own tears. Then my friend put it into a sermon and went before his Sunday morning congregation with it. It scored another triumph. The house wept as one individual. My friend went on summer vacation up into the fishing regions of our northern British neighbors, and carried this sermon with him, since he might possibly chance to need a sermon. He was asked to preach, one day. The little church was full. Among the people present were the late Dr. J. G. Holland, the late Mr. Seymour of the 'New York Times,' Mr. Page, the philanthropist and temperance advocate, and, I think, Senator Frye, of Maine. The marvelous letter did its wonted work; all the people were moved, all the people wept; the tears flowed in a steady stream down Dr. Holland's cheeks, and nearly the same can be said with regard to all who were there. Mr. Page was so full of enthusiasm over the letter that he said he would not rest until he made pilgrimage to that prison, and had speech with the man who had been able to inspire a fellow-unfortunate to write so priceless a tract. Ah, that unlucky Page!--and another man. If they had only been in Jericho, that letter would have rung through the world and stirred all the hearts of all the nations for a thousand years to come, and nobody might ever have found out that it was the confoundedest, brazenest, ingeniousest piece of fraud and humbuggery that was ever concocted to fool poor confiding mortals with! The letter was a pure swindle, and that is the truth. And take it by and large, it was without a compeer among swindles. It was perfect, it was rounded, symmetrical, complete, colossal! The reader learns it at this point; but we didn't learn it till some miles and weeks beyond this stage of the affair. My friend came back from the woods, and he and other clergymen and lay missionaries began once more to inundate audiences with their tears and the tears of said audiences; I begged hard for permission to print the letter in a magazine and tell the watery story of its triumphs; numbers of people got copies of the letter, with permission to circulate them in writing, but not in print; copies were sent to the Sandwich Islands and other far regions. Charles Dudley Warner was at church, one day, when the worn letter was read and wept over. At the church door, afterward, he dropped a peculiarly cold iceberg down the clergyman's back with the question-- 'Do you know that letter to be genuine?' It was the first suspicion that had ever been voiced; but it had that sickening effect which first-uttered suspicions against one's idol always have. Some talk followed-- 'Why--what should make you suspect that it isn't genuine?' 'Nothing that I know of, except that it is too neat, and compact, and fluent, and nicely put together for an ignorant person, an unpractised hand. I think it was done by an educated man.' The literary artist had detected the literary machinery. If you will look at the letter now, you will detect it yourself--it is observable in every line. Straightway the clergyman went off, with this seed of suspicion sprouting in him, and wrote to a minister residing in that town where Williams had been jailed and converted; asked for light; and also asked if a person in the literary line (meaning me) might be allowed to print the letter and tell its history. He presently received this answer-- Rev. ---- ---- MY DEAR FRIEND,--In regard to that 'convict's letter' there can be no doubt as to its genuineness. 'Williams,' to whom it was written, lay in our jail and professed to have been converted, and Rev. Mr. ----, the chaplain, had great faith in the genuineness of the change--as much as one can have in any such case. The letter was sent to one of our ladies, who is a Sunday-school teacher,--sent either by Williams himself, or the chaplain of the State's prison, probably. She has been greatly annoyed in having so much publicity, lest it might seem a breach of confidence, or be an injury to Williams. In regard to its publication, I can give no permission; though if the names and places were omitted, and especially if sent out of the country, I think you might take the responsibility and do it. It is a wonderful letter, which no Christian genius, much less one unsanctified, could ever have written. As showing the work of grace in a human heart, and in a very degraded and wicked one, it proves its own origin and reproves our weak faith in its power to cope with any form of wickedness. 'Mr. Brown' of St. Louis, some one said, was a Hartford man. Do all whom you send from Hartford serve their Master as well? P.S.--Williams is still in the State's prison, serving out a long sentence--of nine years, I think. He has been sick and threatened with consumption, but I have not inquired after him lately. This lady that I speak of corresponds with him, I presume, and will be quite sure to look after him. This letter arrived a few days after it was written--and up went Mr. Williams's stock again. Mr. Warner's low-down suspicion was laid in the cold, cold grave, where it apparently belonged. It was a suspicion based upon mere internal evidence, anyway; and when you come to internal evidence, it's a big field and a game that two can play at: as witness this other internal evidence, discovered by the writer of the note above quoted, that 'it is a wonderful letter--which no Christian genius, much less one unsanctified, could ever have written.' I had permission now to print--provided I suppressed names and places and sent my narrative out of the country. So I chose an Australian magazine for vehicle, as being far enough out of the country, and set myself to work on my article. And the ministers set the pumps going again, with the letter to work the handles. But meantime Brother Page had been agitating. He had not visited the penitentiary, but he had sent a copy of the illustrious letter to the chaplain of that institution, and accompanied it with--apparently inquiries. He got an answer, dated four days later than that other Brother's reassuring epistle; and before my article was complete, it wandered into my hands. The original is before me, now, and I here append it. It is pretty well loaded with internal evidence of the most solid description-- STATE'S PRISON, CHAPLAIN'S OFFICE, July 11, 1873. DEAR BRO. PAGE,--Herewith please find the letter kindly loaned me. I am afraid its genuineness cannot be established. It purports to be addressed to some prisoner here. No such letter ever came to a prisoner here. All letters received are carefully read by officers of the prison before they go into the hands of the convicts, and any such letter could not be forgotten. Again, Charles Williams is not a Christian man, but a dissolute, cunning prodigal, whose father is a minister of the gospel. His name is an assumed one. I am glad to have made your acquaintance. I am preparing a lecture upon life seen through prison bars, and should like to deliver the same in your vicinity. And so ended that little drama. My poor article went into the fire; for whereas the materials for it were now more abundant and infinitely richer than they had previously been, there were parties all around me, who, although longing for the publication before, were a unit for suppression at this stage and complexion of the game. They said: 'Wait --the wound is too fresh, yet.' All the copies of the famous letter except mine disappeared suddenly; and from that time onward, the aforetime same old drought set in in the churches. As a rule, the town was on a spacious grin for a while, but there were places in it where the grin did not appear, and where it was dangerous to refer to the ex-convict's letter. A word of explanation. 'Jack Hunt,' the professed writer of the letter, was an imaginary person. The burglar Williams--Harvard graduate, son of a minister--wrote the letter himself, to himself: got it smuggled out of the prison; got it conveyed to persons who had supported and encouraged him in his conversion--where he knew two things would happen: the genuineness of the letter would not be doubted or inquired into; and the nub of it would be noticed, and would have valuable effect--the effect, indeed, of starting a movement to get Mr. Williams pardoned out of prison. That 'nub' is so ingeniously, so casually, flung in, and immediately left there in the tail of the letter, undwelt upon, that an indifferent reader would never suspect that it was the heart and core of the epistle, if he even took note of it at all, This is the 'nub'-- 'i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--I WAS AFRAID WHEN YOU WAS BLEEDING YOU WOULD DIE--give my respects,' etc. That is all there is of it--simply touch and go--no dwelling upon it. Nevertheless it was intended for an eye that would be swift to see it; and it was meant to move a kind heart to try to effect the liberation of a poor reformed and purified fellow lying in the fell grip of consumption. When I for the first time heard that letter read, nine years ago, I felt that it was the most remarkable one I had ever encountered. And it so warmed me toward Mr. Brown of St. Louis that I said that if ever I visited that city again, I would seek out that excellent man and kiss the hem of his garment if it was a new one. Well, I visited St. Louis, but I did not hunt for Mr. Brown; for, alas! the investigations of long ago had proved that the benevolent Brown, like 'Jack Hunt,' was not a real person, but a sheer invention of that gifted rascal, Williams-- burglar, Harvard graduate, son of a clergyman. Chapter 53 My Boyhood's Home WE took passage in one of the fast boats of the St. Louis and St. Paul Packet Company, and started up the river. When I, as a boy, first saw the mouth of the Missouri River, it was twenty-two or twenty-three miles above St. Louis, according to the estimate of pilots; the wear and tear of the banks have moved it down eight miles since then; and the pilots say that within five years the river will cut through and move the mouth down five miles more, which will bring it within ten miles of St. Louis. About nightfall we passed the large and flourishing town of Alton, Illinois; and before daylight next morning the town of Louisiana, Missouri, a sleepy village in my day, but a brisk railway center now; however, all the towns out there are railway centers now. I could not clearly recognize the place. This seemed odd to me, for when I retired from the rebel army in '61 I retired upon Louisiana in good order; at least in good enough order for a person who had not yet learned how to retreat according to the rules of war, and had to trust to native genius. It seemed to me that for a first attempt at a retreat it was not badly done. I had done no advancing in all that campaign that was at all equal to it. There was a railway bridge across the river here well sprinkled with glowing lights, and a very beautiful sight it was. At seven in the morning we reached Hannibal, Missouri, where my boyhood was spent. I had had a glimpse of it fifteen years ago, and another glimpse six years earlier, but both were so brief that they hardly counted. The only notion of the town that remained in my mind was the memory of it as I had known it when I first quitted it twenty-nine years ago. That picture of it was still as clear and vivid to me as a photograph. I stepped ashore with the feeling of one who returns out of a dead-and-gone generation. I had a sort of realizing sense of what the Bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out and look upon Paris after years of captivity, and note how curiously the familiar and the strange were mixed together before them. I saw the new houses-- saw them plainly enough--but they did not affect the older picture in my mind, for through their solid bricks and mortar I saw the vanished houses, which had formerly stood there, with perfect distinctness. It was Sunday morning, and everybody was abed yet. So I passed through the vacant streets, still seeing the town as it was, and not as it is, and recognizing and metaphorically shaking hands with a hundred familiar objects which no longer exist; and finally climbed Holiday's Hill to get a comprehensive view. The whole town lay spread out below me then, and I could mark and fix every locality, every detail. Naturally, I was a good deal moved. I said, 'Many of the people I once knew in this tranquil refuge of my childhood are now in heaven; some, I trust, are in the other place.' The things about me and before me made me feel like a boy again--convinced me that I was a boy again, and that I had simply been dreaming an unusually long dream; but my reflections spoiled all that; for they forced me to say, 'I see fifty old houses down yonder, into each of which I could enter and find either a man or a woman who was a baby or unborn when I noticed those houses last, or a grandmother who was a plump young bride at that time.' From this vantage ground the extensive view up and down the river, and wide over the wooded expanses of Illinois, is very beautiful--one of the most beautiful on the Mississippi, I think; which is a hazardous remark to make, for the eight hundred miles of river between St. Louis and St. Paul afford an unbroken succession of lovely pictures. It may be that my affection for the one in question biases my judgment in its favor; I cannot say as to that. No matter, it was satisfyingly beautiful to me, and it had this advantage over all the other friends whom I was about to greet again: it had suffered no change; it was as young and fresh and comely and gracious as ever it had been; whereas, the faces of the others would be old, and scarred with the campaigns of life, and marked with their griefs and defeats, and would give me no upliftings of spirit. An old gentleman, out on an early morning walk, came along, and we discussed the weather, and then drifted into other matters. I could not remember his face. He said he had been living here twenty-eight years. So he had come after my time, and I had never seen him before. I asked him various questions; first about a mate of mine in Sunday school--what became of him? 'He graduated with honor in an Eastern college, wandered off into the world somewhere, succeeded at nothing, passed out of knowledge and memory years ago, and is supposed to have gone to the dogs.' 'He was bright, and promised well when he was a boy.' 'Yes, but the thing that happened is what became of it all.' I asked after another lad, altogether the brightest in our village school when I was a boy. 'He, too, was graduated with honors, from an Eastern college; but life whipped him in every battle, straight along, and he died in one of the Territories, years ago, a defeated man.' I asked after another of the bright boys. 'He is a success, always has been, always will be, I think.' I inquired after a young fellow who came to the town to study for one of the professions when I was a boy. 'He went at something else before he got through--went from medicine to law, or from law to medicine--then to some other new thing; went away for a year, came back with a young wife; fell to drinking, then to gambling behind the door; finally took his wife and two young children to her father's, and went off to Mexico; went from bad to worse, and finally died there, without a cent to buy a shroud, and without a friend to attend the funeral.' 'Pity, for he was the best-natured, and most cheery and hopeful young fellow that ever was.' I named another boy. 'Oh, he is all right. Lives here yet; has a wife and children, and is prospering.' Same verdict concerning other boys. I named three school-girls. 'The first two live here, are married and have children; the other is long ago dead--never married.' I named, with emotion, one of my early sweethearts. 'She is all right. Been married three times; buried two husbands, divorced from the third, and I hear she is getting ready to marry an old fellow out in Colorado somewhere. She's got children scattered around here and there, most everywheres.' The answer to several other inquiries was brief and simple-- 'Killed in the war.' I named another boy. 'Well, now, his case is curious! There wasn't a human being in this town but knew that that boy was a perfect chucklehead; perfect dummy; just a stupid ass, as you may say. Everybody knew it, and everybody said it. Well, if that very boy isn't the first lawyer in the State of Missouri to-day, I'm a Democrat!' 'Is that so?' 'It's actually so. I'm telling you the truth.' 'How do you account for it?' 'Account for it? There ain't any accounting for it, except that if you send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned fool they'll never find it out. There's one thing sure--if I had a damned fool I should know what to do with him: ship him to St. Louis-- it's the noblest market in the world for that kind of property. Well, when you come to look at it all around, and chew at it and think it over, don't it just bang anything you ever heard of?' 'Well, yes, it does seem to. But don't you think maybe it was the Hannibal people who were mistaken about the boy, and not the St. Louis people' 'Oh, nonsense! The people here have known him from the very cradle-- they knew him a hundred times better than the St. Louis idiots could have known him. No, if you have got any damned fools that you want to realize on, take my advice--send them to St. Louis.' I mentioned a great number of people whom I had formerly known. Some were dead, some were gone away, some had prospered, some had come to naught; but as regarded a dozen or so of the lot, the answer was comforting: 'Prosperous--live here yet--town littered with their children.' I asked about Miss ----. Died in the insane asylum three or four years ago--never was out of it from the time she went in; and was always suffering, too; never got a shred of her mind back.' If he spoke the truth, here was a heavy tragedy, indeed. Thirty-six years in a madhouse, that some young fools might have some fun! I was a small boy, at the time; and I saw those giddy young ladies come tiptoeing into the room where Miss ---- sat reading at midnight by a lamp. The girl at the head of the file wore a shroud and a doughface, she crept behind the victim, touched her on the shoulder, and she looked up and screamed, and then fell into convulsions. She did not recover from the fright, but went mad. In these days it seems incredible that people believed in ghosts so short a time ago. But they did. After asking after such other folk as I could call to mind, I finally inquired about MYSELF: 'Oh, he succeeded well enough--another case of damned fool. If they'd sent him to St. Louis, he'd have succeeded sooner.' It was with much satisfaction that I recognized the wisdom of having told this candid gentleman, in the beginning, that my name was Smith. Chapter 54 Past and Present Being left to myself, up there, I went on picking out old houses in the distant town, and calling back their former inmates out of the moldy past. Among them I presently recognized the house of the father of Lem Hackett (fictitious name). It carried me back more than a generation in a moment, and landed me in the midst of a time when the happenings of life were not the natural and logical results of great general laws, but of special orders, and were freighted with very precise and distinct purposes--partly punitive in intent, partly admonitory; and usually local in application. When I was a small boy, Lem Hackett was drowned--on a Sunday. He fell out of an empty flat-boat, where he was playing. Being loaded with sin, he went to the bottom like an anvil. He was the only boy in the village who slept that night. We others all lay awake, repenting. We had not needed the information, delivered from the pulpit that evening, that Lem's was a case of special judgment--we knew that, already. There was a ferocious thunder-storm, that night, and it raged continuously until near dawn. The winds blew, the windows rattled, the rain swept along the roof in pelting sheets, and at the briefest of intervals the inky blackness of the night vanished, the houses over the way glared out white and blinding for a quivering instant, then the solid darkness shut down again and a splitting peal of thunder followed, which seemed to rend everything in the neighborhood to shreds and splinters. I sat up in bed quaking and shuddering, waiting for the destruction of the world, and expecting it. To me there was nothing strange or incongruous in heaven's making such an uproar about Lem Hackett. Apparently it was the right and proper thing to do. Not a doubt entered my mind that all the angels were grouped together, discussing this boy's case and observing the awful bombardment of our beggarly little village with satisfaction and approval. There was one thing which disturbed me in the most serious way; that was the thought that this centering of the celestial interest on our village could not fail to attract the attention of the observers to people among us who might otherwise have escaped notice for years. I felt that I was not only one of those people, but the very one most likely to be discovered. That discovery could have but one result: I should be in the fire with Lem before the chill of the river had been fairly warmed out of him. I knew that this would be only just and fair. I was increasing the chances against myself all the time, by feeling a secret bitterness against Lem for having attracted this fatal attention to me, but I could not help it--this sinful thought persisted in infesting my breast in spite of me. Every time the lightning glared I caught my breath, and judged I was gone. In my terror and misery, I meanly began to suggest other boys, and mention acts of theirs which were wickeder than mine, and peculiarly needed punishment--and I tried to pretend to myself that I was simply doing this in a casual way, and without intent to divert the heavenly attention to them for the purpose of getting rid of it myself. With deep sagacity I put these mentions into the form of sorrowing recollections and left-handed sham- supplications that the sins of those boys might be allowed to pass unnoticed--'Possibly they may repent.' 'It is true that Jim Smith broke a window and lied about it--but maybe he did not mean any harm. And although Tom Holmes says more bad words than any other boy in the village, he probably intends to repent--though he has never said he would. And whilst it is a fact that John Jones did fish a little on Sunday, once, he didn't really catch anything but only just one small useless mud-cat; and maybe that wouldn't have been so awful if he had thrown it back--as he says he did, but he didn't. Pity but they would repent of these dreadful things--and maybe they will yet.' But while I was shamefully trying to draw attention to these poor chaps --who were doubtless directing the celestial attention to me at the same moment, though I never once suspected that--I had heedlessly left my candle burning. It was not a time to neglect even trifling precautions. There was no occasion to add anything to the facilities for attracting notice to me--so I put the light out. It was a long night to me, and perhaps the most distressful one I ever spent. I endured agonies of remorse for sins which I knew I had committed, and for others which I was not certain about, yet was sure that they had been set down against me in a book by an angel who was wiser than I and did not trust such important matters to memory. It struck me, by and by, that I had been making a most foolish and calamitous mistake, in one respect: doubtless I had not only made my own destruction sure by directing attention to those other boys, but had already accomplished theirs!--Doubtless the lightning had stretched them all dead in their beds by this time! The anguish and the fright which this thought gave me made my previous sufferings seem trifling by comparison. Things had become truly serious. I resolved to turn over a new leaf instantly; I also resolved to connect myself with the church the next day, if I survived to see its sun appear. I resolved to cease from sin in all its forms, and to lead a high and blameless life for ever after. I would be punctual at church and Sunday-school; visit the sick; carry baskets of victuals to the poor (simply to fulfil the regulation conditions, although I knew we had none among us so poor but they would smash the basket over my head for my pains); I would instruct other boys in right ways, and take the resulting trouncings meekly; I would subsist entirely on tracts; I would invade the rum shop and warn the drunkard-- and finally, if I escaped the fate of those who early become too good to live, I would go for a missionary. The storm subsided toward daybreak, and I dozed gradually to sleep with a sense of obligation to Lem Hackett for going to eternal suffering in that abrupt way, and thus preventing a far more dreadful disaster--my own loss. But when I rose refreshed, by and by, and found that those other boys were still alive, I had a dim sense that perhaps the whole thing was a false alarm; that the entire turmoil had been on Lem's account and nobody's else. The world looked so bright and safe that there did not seem to be any real occasion to turn over a new leaf. I was a little subdued, during that day, and perhaps the next; after that, my purpose of reforming slowly dropped out of my mind, and I had a peaceful, comfortable time again, until the next storm. That storm came about three weeks later; and it was the most unaccountable one, to me, that I had ever experienced; for on the afternoon of that day, 'Dutchy' was drowned. Dutchy belonged to our Sunday-school. He was a German lad who did not know enough to come in out of the rain; but he was exasperatingly good, and had a prodigious memory. One Sunday he made himself the envy of all the youth and the talk of all the admiring village, by reciting three thousand verses of Scripture without missing a word; then he went off the very next day and got drowned. Circumstances gave to his death a peculiar impressiveness. We were all bathing in a muddy creek which had a deep hole in it, and in this hole the coopers had sunk a pile of green hickory hoop poles to soak, some twelve feet under water. We were diving and 'seeing who could stay under longest.' We managed to remain down by holding on to the hoop poles. Dutchy made such a poor success of it that he was hailed with laughter and derision every time his head appeared above water. At last he seemed hurt with the taunts, and begged us to stand still on the bank and be fair with him and give him an honest count--'be friendly and kind just this once, and not miscount for the sake of having the fun of laughing at him.' Treacherous winks were exchanged, and all said 'All right, Dutchy--go ahead, we'll play fair.' Dutchy plunged in, but the boys, instead of beginning to count, followed the lead of one of their number and scampered to a range of blackberry bushes close by and hid behind it. They imagined Dutchy's humiliation, when he should rise after a superhuman effort and find the place silent and vacant, nobody there to applaud. They were 'so full of laugh' with the idea, that they were continually exploding into muffled cackles. Time swept on, and presently one who was peeping through the briers, said, with surprise-- 'Why, he hasn't come up, yet!' The laughing stopped. 'Boys, it 's a splendid dive,' said one. 'Never mind that,' said another, 'the joke on him is all the better for it.' There was a remark or two more, and then a pause. Talking ceased, and all began to peer through the vines. Before long, the boys' faces began to look uneasy, then anxious, then terrified. Still there was no movement of the placid water. Hearts began to beat fast, and faces to turn pale. We all glided out, silently, and stood on the bank, our horrified eyes wandering back and forth from each other's countenances to the water. 'Somebody must go down and see!' Yes, that was plain; but nobody wanted that grisly task. 'Draw straws!' So we did--with hands which shook so, that we hardly knew what we were about. The lot fell to me, and I went down. The water was so muddy I could not see anything, but I felt around among the hoop poles, and presently grasped a limp wrist which gave me no response--and if it had I should not have known it, I let it go with such a frightened suddenness. The boy had been caught among the hoop poles and entangled there, helplessly. I fled to the surface and told the awful news. Some of us knew that if the boy were dragged out at once he might possibly be resuscitated, but we never thought of that. We did not think of anything; we did not know what to do, so we did nothing--except that the smaller lads cried, piteously, and we all struggled frantically into our clothes, putting on anybody's that came handy, and getting them wrong- side-out and upside-down, as a rule. Then we scurried away and gave the alarm, but none of us went back to see the end of the tragedy. We had a more important thing to attend to: we all flew home, and lost not a moment in getting ready to lead a better life. The night presently closed down. Then came on that tremendous and utterly unaccountable storm. I was perfectly dazed; I could not understand it. It seemed to me that there must be some mistake. The elements were turned loose, and they rattled and banged and blazed away in the most blind and frantic manner. All heart and hope went out of me, and the dismal thought kept floating through my brain, 'If a boy who knows three thousand verses by heart is not satisfactory, what chance is there for anybody else?' Of course I never questioned for a moment that the storm was on Dutchy's account, or that he or any other inconsequential animal was worthy of such a majestic demonstration from on high; the lesson of it was the only thing that troubled me; for it convinced me that if Dutchy, with all his perfections, was not a delight, it would be vain for me to turn over a new leaf, for I must infallibly fall hopelessly short of that boy, no matter how hard I might try. Nevertheless I did turn it over--a highly educated fear compelled me to do that--but succeeding days of cheerfulness and sunshine came bothering around, and within a month I had so drifted backward that again I was as lost and comfortable as ever. Breakfast time approached while I mused these musings and called these ancient happenings back to mind; so I got me back into the present and went down the hill. On my way through town to the hotel, I saw the house which was my home when I was a boy. At present rates, the people who now occupy it are of no more value than I am; but in my time they would have been worth not less than five hundred dollars apiece. They are colored folk. After breakfast, I went out alone again, intending to hunt up some of the Sunday-schools and see how this generation of pupils might compare with their progenitors who had sat with me in those places and had probably taken me as a model--though I do not remember as to that now. By the public square there had been in my day a shabby little brick church called the 'Old Ship of Zion,' which I had attended as a Sunday- school scholar; and I found the locality easily enough, but not the old church; it was gone, and a trig and rather hilarious new edifice was in its place. The pupils were better dressed and better looking than were those of my time; consequently they did not resemble their ancestors; and consequently there was nothing familiar to me in their faces. Still, I contemplated them with a deep interest and a yearning wistfulness, and if I had been a girl I would have cried; for they were the offspring, and represented, and occupied the places, of boys and girls some of whom I had loved to love, and some of whom I had loved to hate, but all of whom were dear to me for the one reason or the other, so many years gone by--and, Lord, where be they now! I was mightily stirred, and would have been grateful to be allowed to remain unmolested and look my fill; but a bald-summited superintendent who had been a tow-headed Sunday-school mate of mine on that spot in the early ages, recognized me, and I talked a flutter of wild nonsense to those children to hide the thoughts which were in me, and which could not have been spoken without a betrayal of feeling that would have been recognized as out of character with me. Making speeches without preparation is no gift of mine; and I was resolved to shirk any new opportunity, but in the next and larger Sunday-school I found myself in the rear of the assemblage; so I was very willing to go on the platform a moment for the sake of getting a good look at the scholars. On the spur of the moment I could not recall any of the old idiotic talks which visitors used to insult me with when I was a pupil there; and I was sorry for this, since it would have given me time and excuse to dawdle there and take a long and satisfying look at what I feel at liberty to say was an array of fresh young comeliness not matchable in another Sunday-school of the same size. As I talked merely to get a chance to inspect; and as I strung out the random rubbish solely to prolong the inspection, I judged it but decent to confess these low motives, and I did so. If the Model Boy was in either of these Sunday-schools, I did not see him. The Model Boy of my time--we never had but the one--was perfect: perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie. This fellow's reproachlessness was a standing reproach to every lad in the village. He was the admiration of all the mothers, and the detestation of all their sons. I was told what became of him, but as it was a disappointment to me, I will not enter into details. He succeeded in life. Chapter 55 A Vendetta and Other Things DURING my three days' stay in the town, I woke up every morning with the impression that I was a boy--for in my dreams the faces were all young again, and looked as they had looked in the old times--but I went to bed a hundred years old, every night--for meantime I had been seeing those faces as they are now. Of course I suffered some surprises, along at first, before I had become adjusted to the changed state of things. I met young ladies who did not seem to have changed at all; but they turned out to be the daughters of the young ladies I had in mind--sometimes their grand-daughters. When you are told that a stranger of fifty is a grandmother, there is nothing surprising about it; but if, on the contrary, she is a person whom you knew as a little girl, it seems impossible. You say to yourself, 'How can a little girl be a grandmother.' It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still, in that matter. I noticed that the greatest changes observable were with the women, not the men. I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be good. There was a saddler whom I wished to see; but he was gone. Dead, these many years, they said. Once or twice a day, the saddler used to go tearing down the street, putting on his coat as he went; and then everybody knew a steamboat was coming. Everybody knew, also, that John Stavely was not expecting anybody by the boat--or any freight, either; and Stavely must have known that everybody knew this, still it made no difference to him; he liked to seem to himself to be expecting a hundred thousand tons of saddles by this boat, and so he went on all his life, enjoying being faithfully on hand to receive and receipt for those saddles, in case by any miracle they should come. A malicious Quincy paper used always to refer to this town, in derision as 'Stavely's Landing.' Stavely was one of my earliest admirations; I envied him his rush of imaginary business, and the display he was able to make of it, before strangers, as he went flying down the street struggling with his fluttering coat. But there was a carpenter who was my chiefest hero. He was a mighty liar, but I did not know that; I believed everything he said. He was a romantic, sentimental, melodramatic fraud, and his bearing impressed me with awe. I vividly remember the first time he took me into his confidence. He was planing a board, and every now and then he would pause and heave a deep sigh; and occasionally mutter broken sentences-- confused and not intelligible--but out of their midst an ejaculation sometimes escaped which made me shiver and did me good: one was, 'O God, it is his blood!' I sat on the tool-chest and humbly and shudderingly admired him; for I judged he was full of crime. At last he said in a low voice-- 'My little friend, can you keep a secret?' I eagerly said I could. 'A dark and dreadful one?' I satisfied him on that point. 'Then I will tell you some passages in my history; for oh, I MUST relieve my burdened soul, or I shall die!' He cautioned me once more to be 'as silent as the grave;' then he told me he was a 'red-handed murderer.' He put down his plane, held his hands out before him, contemplated them sadly, and said-- 'Look--with these hands I have taken the lives of thirty human beings!' The effect which this had upon me was an inspiration to him, and he turned himself loose upon his subject with interest and energy. He left generalizing, and went into details,--began with his first murder; described it, told what measures he had taken to avert suspicion; then passed to his second homicide, his third, his fourth, and so on. He had always done his murders with a bowie-knife, and he made all my hairs rise by suddenly snatching it out and showing it to me. At the end of this first seance I went home with six of his fearful secrets among my freightage, and found them a great help to my dreams, which had been sluggish for a while back. I sought him again and again, on my Saturday holidays; in fact I spent the summer with him--all of it which was valuable to me. His fascinations never diminished, for he threw something fresh and stirring, in the way of horror, into each successive murder. He always gave names, dates, places--everything. This by and by enabled me to note two things: that he had killed his victims in every quarter of the globe, and that these victims were always named Lynch. The destruction of the Lynches went serenely on, Saturday after Saturday, until the original thirty had multiplied to sixty--and more to be heard from yet; then my curiosity got the better of my timidity, and I asked how it happened that these justly punished persons all bore the same name. My hero said he had never divulged that dark secret to any living being; but felt that he could trust me, and therefore he would lay bare before me the story of his sad and blighted life. He had loved one 'too fair for earth,' and she had reciprocated 'with all the sweet affection of her pure and noble nature.' But he had a rival, a 'base hireling' named Archibald Lynch, who said the girl should be his, or he would 'dye his hands in her heart's best blood.' The carpenter, 'innocent and happy in love's young dream,' gave no weight to the threat, but led his 'golden- haired darling to the altar,' and there, the two were made one; there also, just as the minister's hands were stretched in blessing over their heads, the fell deed was done--with a knife--and the bride fell a corpse at her husband's feet. And what did the husband do? He plucked forth that knife, and kneeling by the body of his lost one, swore to 'consecrate his life to the extermination of all the human scum that bear the hated name of Lynch.' That was it. He had been hunting down the Lynches and slaughtering them, from that day to this--twenty years. He had always used that same consecrated knife; with it he had murdered his long array of Lynches, and with it he had left upon the forehead of each victim a peculiar mark--a cross, deeply incised. Said he-- 'The cross of the Mysterious Avenger is known in Europe, in America, in China, in Siam, in the Tropics, in the Polar Seas, in the deserts of Asia, in all the earth. Wherever in the uttermost parts of the globe, a Lynch has penetrated, there has the Mysterious Cross been seen, and those who have seen it have shuddered and said, "It is his mark, he has been here." You have heard of the Mysterious Avenger--look upon him, for before you stands no less a person! But beware--breathe not a word to any soul. Be silent, and wait. Some morning this town will flock aghast to view a gory corpse; on its brow will be seen the awful sign, and men will tremble and whisper, "He has been here--it is the Mysterious Avenger's mark!" You will come here, but I shall have vanished; you will see me no more.' This ass had been reading the 'Jibbenainosay,' no doubt, and had had his poor romantic head turned by it; but as I had not yet seen the book then, I took his inventions for truth, and did not suspect that he was a plagiarist. However, we had a Lynch living in the town; and the more I reflected upon his impending doom, the more I could not sleep. It seemed my plain duty to save him, and a still plainer and more important duty to get some sleep for myself, so at last I ventured to go to Mr. Lynch and tell him what was about to happen to him--under strict secrecy. I advised him to 'fly,' and certainly expected him to do it. But he laughed at me; and he did not stop there; he led me down to the carpenter's shop, gave the carpenter a jeering and scornful lecture upon his silly pretensions, slapped his face, made him get down on his knees and beg--then went off and left me to contemplate the cheap and pitiful ruin of what, in my eyes, had so lately been a majestic and incomparable hero. The carpenter blustered, flourished his knife, and doomed this Lynch in his usual volcanic style, the size of his fateful words undiminished; but it was all wasted upon me; he was a hero to me no longer, but only a poor, foolish, exposed humbug. I was ashamed of him, and ashamed of myself; I took no further interest in him, and never went to his shop any more. He was a heavy loss to me, for he was the greatest hero I had ever known. The fellow must have had some talent; for some of his imaginary murders were so vividly and dramatically described that I remember all their details yet. The people of Hannibal are not more changed than is the town. It is no longer a village; it is a city, with a mayor, and a council, and water- works, and probably a debt. It has fifteen thousand people, is a thriving and energetic place, and is paved like the rest of the west and south--where a well-paved street and a good sidewalk are things so seldom seen, that one doubts them when he does see them. The customary half-dozen railways center in Hannibal now, and there is a new depot which cost a hundred thousand dollars. In my time the town had no specialty, and no commercial grandeur; the daily packet usually landed a passenger and bought a catfish, and took away another passenger and a hatful of freight; but now a huge commerce in lumber has grown up and a large miscellaneous commerce is one of the results. A deal of money changes hands there now. Bear Creek--so called, perhaps, because it was always so particularly bare of bears--is hidden out of sight now, under islands and continents of piled lumber, and nobody but an expert can find it. I used to get drowned in it every summer regularly, and be drained out, and inflated and set going again by some chance enemy; but not enough of it is unoccupied now to drown a person in. It was a famous breeder of chills and fever in its day. I remember one summer when everybody in town had this disease at once. Many chimneys were shaken down, and all the houses were so racked that the town had to be rebuilt. The chasm or gorge between Lover's Leap and the hill west of it is supposed by scientists to have been caused by glacial action. This is a mistake. There is an interesting cave a mile or two below Hannibal, among the bluffs. I would have liked to revisit it, but had not time. In my time the person who then owned it turned it into a mausoleum for his daughter, aged fourteen. The body of this poor child was put into a copper cylinder filled with alcohol, and this was suspended in one of the dismal avenues of the cave. The top of the cylinder was removable; and it was said to be a common thing for the baser order of tourists to drag the dead face into view and examine it and comment upon it. 
8479	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 9. Chapter 41 The Metropolis of the South THE approaches to New Orleans were familiar; general aspects were unchanged. When one goes flying through London along a railway propped in the air on tall arches, he may inspect miles of upper bedrooms through the open windows, but the lower half of the houses is under his level and out of sight. Similarly, in high-river stage, in the New Orleans region, the water is up to the top of the enclosing levee-rim, the flat country behind it lies low--representing the bottom of a dish-- and as the boat swims along, high on the flood, one looks down upon the houses and into the upper windows. There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction. The old brick salt-warehouses clustered at the upper end of the city looked as they had always looked; warehouses which had had a kind of Aladdin's lamp experience, however, since I had seen them; for when the war broke out the proprietor went to bed one night leaving them packed with thousands of sacks of vulgar salt, worth a couple of dollars a sack, and got up in the morning and found his mountain of salt turned into a mountain of gold, so to speak, so suddenly and to so dizzy a height had the war news sent up the price of the article. The vast reach of plank wharves remained unchanged, and there were as many ships as ever: but the long array of steamboats had vanished; not altogether, of course, but not much of it was left. The city itself had not changed--to the eye. It had greatly increased in spread and population, but the look of the town was not altered. The dust, waste-paper-littered, was still deep in the streets; the deep, trough-like gutters alongside the curbstones were still half full of reposeful water with a dusty surface; the sidewalks were still--in the sugar and bacon region--encumbered by casks and barrels and hogsheads; the great blocks of austerely plain commercial houses were as dusty- looking as ever. Canal Street was finer, and more attractive and stirring than formerly, with its drifting crowds of people, its several processions of hurrying street-cars, and--toward evening--its broad second-story verandas crowded with gentlemen and ladies clothed according to the latest mode. Not that there is any 'architecture' in Canal Street: to speak in broad, general terms, there is no architecture in New Orleans, except in the cemeteries. It seems a strange thing to say of a wealthy, far- seeing, and energetic city of a quarter of a million inhabitants, but it is true. There is a huge granite U.S. Custom-house--costly enough, genuine enough, but as a decoration it is inferior to a gasometer. It looks like a state prison. But it was built before the war. Architecture in America may be said to have been born since the war. New Orleans, I believe, has had the good luck--and in a sense the bad luck-- to have had no great fire in late years. It must be so. If the opposite had been the case, I think one would be able to tell the 'burnt district' by the radical improvement in its architecture over the old forms. One can do this in Boston and Chicago. The 'burnt district' of Boston was commonplace before the fire; but now there is no commercial district in any city in the world that can surpass it--or perhaps even rival it--in beauty, elegance, and tastefulness. However, New Orleans has begun--just this moment, as one may say. When completed, the new Cotton Exchange will be a stately and beautiful building; massive, substantial, full of architectural graces; no shams or false pretenses or uglinesses about it anywhere. To the city, it will be worth many times its cost, for it will breed its species. What has been lacking hitherto, was a model to build toward; something to educate eye and taste; a SUGGESTER, so to speak. The city is well outfitted with progressive men--thinking, sagacious, long-headed men. The contrast between the spirit of the city and the city's architecture is like the contrast between waking and sleep. Apparently there is a 'boom' in everything but that one dead feature. The water in the gutters used to be stagnant and slimy, and a potent disease-breeder; but the gutters are flushed now, two or three times a day, by powerful machinery; in many of the gutters the water never stands still, but has a steady current. Other sanitary improvements have been made; and with such effect that New Orleans claims to be (during the long intervals between the occasional yellow-fever assaults) one of the healthiest cities in the Union. There's plenty of ice now for everybody, manufactured in the town. It is a driving place commercially, and has a great river, ocean, and railway business. At the date of our visit, it was the best lighted city in the Union, electrically speaking. The New Orleans electric lights were more numerous than those of New York, and very much better. One had this modified noonday not only in Canal and some neighboring chief streets, but all along a stretch of five miles of river frontage. There are good clubs in the city now--several of them but recently organized--and inviting modern-style pleasure resorts at West End and Spanish Fort. The telephone is everywhere. One of the most notable advances is in journalism. The newspapers, as I remember them, were not a striking feature. Now they are. Money is spent upon them with a free hand. They get the news, let it cost what it may. The editorial work is not hack- grinding, but literature. As an example of New Orleans journalistic achievement, it may be mentioned that the 'Times-Democrat' of August 26, 1882, contained a report of the year's business of the towns of the Mississippi Valley, from New Orleans all the way to St. Paul--two thousand miles. That issue of the paper consisted of forty pages; seven columns to the page; two hundred and eighty columns in all; fifteen hundred words to the column; an aggregate of four hundred and twenty thousand words. That is to say, not much short of three times as many words as there are in this book. One may with sorrow contrast this with the architecture of New Orleans. I have been speaking of public architecture only. The domestic article in New Orleans is reproachless, notwithstanding it remains as it always was. All the dwellings are of wood--in the American part of the town, I mean--and all have a comfortable look. Those in the wealthy quarter are spacious; painted snow-white usually, and generally have wide verandas, or double-verandas, supported by ornamental columns. These mansions stand in the center of large grounds, and rise, garlanded with roses, out of the midst of swelling masses of shining green foliage and many- colored blossoms. No houses could well be in better harmony with their surroundings, or more pleasing to the eye, or more home-like and comfortable-looking. One even becomes reconciled to the cistern presently; this is a mighty cask, painted green, and sometimes a couple of stories high, which is propped against the house-corner on stilts. There is a mansion-and- brewery suggestion about the combination which seems very incongruous at first. But the people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water. Neither can they conveniently have cellars, or graves,{footnote [The Israelites are buried in graves--by permission, I take it, not requirement; but none else, except the destitute, who are buried at public expense. The graves are but three or four feet deep.]} the town being built upon 'made' ground; so they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of the others. Chapter 42 Hygiene and Sentiment THEY bury their dead in vaults, above the ground. These vaults have a resemblance to houses--sometimes to temples; are built of marble, generally; are architecturally graceful and shapely; they face the walks and driveways of the cemetery; and when one moves through the midst of a thousand or so of them and sees their white roofs and gables stretching into the distance on every hand, the phrase 'city of the dead' has all at once a meaning to him. Many of the cemeteries are beautiful, and are kept in perfect order. When one goes from the levee or the business streets near it, to a cemetery, he observes to himself that if those people down there would live as neatly while they are alive as they do after they are dead, they would find many advantages in it; and besides, their quarter would be the wonder and admiration of the business world. Fresh flowers, in vases of water, are to be seen at the portals of many of the vaults: placed there by the pious hands of bereaved parents and children, husbands and wives, and renewed daily. A milder form of sorrow finds its inexpensive and lasting remembrancer in the coarse and ugly but indestructible 'immortelle'--which is a wreath or cross or some such emblem, made of rosettes of black linen, with sometimes a yellow rosette at the conjunction of the cross's bars--kind of sorrowful breast-pin, so to say. The immortelle requires no attention: you just hang it up, and there you are; just leave it alone, it will take care of your grief for you, and keep it in mind better than you can; stands weather first-rate, and lasts like boiler-iron. On sunny days, pretty little chameleons--gracefullest of legged reptiles--creep along the marble fronts of the vaults, and catch flies. Their changes of color--as to variety--are not up to the creature's reputation. They change color when a person comes along and hangs up an immortelle; but that is nothing: any right-feeling reptile would do that. I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have been trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot accomplish it. I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it. It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible. Graveyards may have been justifiable in the bygone ages, when nobody knew that for every dead body put into the ground, to glut the earth and the plant-roots, and the air with disease-germs, five or fifty, or maybe a hundred persons must die before their proper time; but they are hardly justifiable now, when even the children know that a dead saint enters upon a century-long career of assassination the moment the earth closes over his corpse. It is a grim sort of a thought. The relics of St. Anne, up in Canada, have now, after nineteen hundred years, gone to curing the sick by the dozen. But it is merest matter-of-course that these same relics, within a generation after St. Anne's death and burial, MADE several thousand people sick. Therefore these miracle-performances are simply compensation, nothing more. St. Anne is somewhat slow pay, for a Saint, it is true; but better a debt paid after nineteen hundred years, and outlawed by the statute of limitations, than not paid at all; and most of the knights of the halo do not pay at all. Where you find one that pays--like St. Anne--you find a hundred and fifty that take the benefit of the statute. And none of them pay any more than the principal of what they owe--they pay none of the interest either simple or compound. A Saint can never QUITE return the principal, however; for his dead body KILLS people, whereas his relics HEAL only--they never restore the dead to life. That part of the account is always left unsettled. 'Dr. F. Julius Le Moyne, after fifty years of medical practice, wrote: "The inhumation of human bodies, dead from infectious diseases, results in constantly loading the atmosphere, and polluting the waters, with not only the germs that rise from simply putrefaction, but also with the SPECIFIC germs of the diseases from which death resulted." 'The gases (from buried corpses) will rise to the surface through eight or ten feet of gravel, just as coal-gas will do, and there is practically no limit to their power of escape. 'During the epidemic in New Orleans in 1853, Dr. E. H. Barton reported that in the Fourth District the mortality was four hundred and fifty-two per thousand--more than double that of any other. In this district were three large cemeteries, in which during the previous year more than three thousand bodies had been buried. In other districts the proximity of cemeteries seemed to aggravate the disease. 'In 1828 Professor Bianchi demonstrated how the fearful reappearance of the plague at Modena was caused by excavations in ground where, THREE HUNDRED YEARS PREVIOUSLY, the victims of the pestilence had been buried. Mr. Cooper, in explaining the causes of some epidemics, remarks that the opening of the plague burial-grounds at Eyam resulted in an immediate outbreak of disease.'--NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, NO. 3, VOL. 135. In an address before the Chicago Medical Society, in advocacy of cremation, Dr. Charles W. Purdy made some striking comparisons to show what a burden is laid upon society by the burial of the dead:-- 'One and one-fourth times more money is expended annually in funerals in the United States than the Government expends for public-school purposes. Funerals cost this country in 1880 enough money to pay the liabilities of all the commercial failures in the United States during the same year, and give each bankrupt a capital of $8,630 with which to resume business. Funerals cost annually more money than the value of the combined gold and silver yield of the United States in the year 1880! These figures do not include the sums invested in burial-grounds and expended in tombs and monuments, nor the loss from depreciation of property in the vicinity of cemeteries.' For the rich, cremation would answer as well as burial; for the ceremonies connected with it could be made as costly and ostentatious as a Hindu suttee; while for the poor, cremation would be better than burial, because so cheap {footnote [Four or five dollars is the minimum cost.]}--so cheap until the poor got to imitating the rich, which they would do by-and-bye. The adoption of cremation would relieve us of a muck of threadbare burial-witticisms; but, on the other hand, it would resurrect a lot of mildewed old cremation-jokes that have had a rest for two thousand years. I have a colored acquaintance who earns his living by odd jobs and heavy manual labor. He never earns above four hundred dollars in a year, and as he has a wife and several young children, the closest scrimping is necessary to get him through to the end of the twelve months debtless. To such a man a funeral is a colossal financial disaster. While I was writing one of the preceding chapters, this man lost a little child. He walked the town over with a friend, trying to find a coffin that was within his means. He bought the very cheapest one he could find, plain wood, stained. It cost him twenty-six dollars. It would have cost less than four, probably, if it had been built to put something useful into. He and his family will feel that outlay a good many months. Chapter 43 The Art of Inhumation ABOUT the same time, I encountered a man in the street, whom I had not seen for six or seven years; and something like this talk followed. I said-- 'But you used to look sad and oldish; you don't now. Where did you get all this youth and bubbling cheerfulness? Give me the address.' He chuckled blithely, took off his shining tile, pointed to a notched pink circlet of paper pasted into its crown, with something lettered on it, and went on chuckling while I read, 'J. B----, UNDERTAKER.' Then he clapped his hat on, gave it an irreverent tilt to leeward, and cried out-- 'That's what's the matter! It used to be rough times with me when you knew me--insurance-agency business, you know; mighty irregular. Big fire, all right--brisk trade for ten days while people scared; after that, dull policy-business till next fire. Town like this don't have fires often enough--a fellow strikes so many dull weeks in a row that he gets discouraged. But you bet you, this is the business! People don't wait for examples to die. No, sir, they drop off right along--there ain't any dull spots in the undertaker line. I just started in with two or three little old coffins and a hired hearse, and now look at the thing! I've worked up a business here that would satisfy any man, don't care who he is. Five years ago, lodged in an attic; live in a swell house now, with a mansard roof, and all the modern inconveniences.' 'Does a coffin pay so well. Is there much profit on a coffin?' 'Go-way! How you talk!' Then, with a confidential wink, a dropping of the voice, and an impressive laying of his hand on my arm; 'Look here; there's one thing in this world which isn't ever cheap. That's a coffin. There's one thing in this world which a person don't ever try to jew you down on. That's a coffin. There's one thing in this world which a person don't say--"I'll look around a little, and if I find I can't do better I'll come back and take it." That's a coffin. There's one thing in this world which a person won't take in pine if he can go walnut; and won't take in walnut if he can go mahogany; and won't take in mahogany if he can go an iron casket with silver door-plate and bronze handles. That's a coffin. And there's one thing in this world which you don't have to worry around after a person to get him to pay for. And that's a coffin. Undertaking?--why it's the dead-surest business in Christendom, and the nobbiest. 'Why, just look at it. A rich man won't have anything but your very best; and you can just pile it on, too--pile it on and sock it to him-- he won't ever holler. And you take in a poor man, and if you work him right he'll bust himself on a single lay-out. Or especially a woman. F'r instance: Mrs. O'Flaherty comes in--widow--wiping her eyes and kind of moaning. Unhandkerchiefs one eye, bats it around tearfully over the stock; says-- '"And fhat might ye ask for that wan?" '"Thirty-nine dollars, madam," says I. '"It 's a foine big price, sure, but Pat shall be buried like a gintleman, as he was, if I have to work me fingers off for it. I'll have that wan, sor." '"Yes, madam," says I, "and it is a very good one, too; not costly, to be sure, but in this life we must cut our garment to our clothes, as the saying is." And as she starts out, I heave in, kind of casually, "This one with the white satin lining is a beauty, but I am afraid--well, sixty-five dollars is a rather--rather--but no matter, I felt obliged to say to Mrs. O'Shaughnessy--" '"D'ye mane to soy that Bridget O'Shaughnessy bought the mate to that joo-ul box to ship that dhrunken divil to Purgatory in?" '"Yes, madam." '"Then Pat shall go to heaven in the twin to it, if it takes the last rap the O'Flaherties can raise; and moind you, stick on some extras, too, and I'll give ye another dollar." 'And as I lay-in with the livery stables, of course I don't forget to mention that Mrs. O'Shaughnessy hired fifty-four dollars' worth of hacks and flung as much style into Dennis's funeral as if he had been a duke or an assassin. And of course she sails in and goes the O'Shaughnessy about four hacks and an omnibus better. That used to be, but that's all played now; that is, in this particular town. The Irish got to piling up hacks so, on their funerals, that a funeral left them ragged and hungry for two years afterward; so the priest pitched in and broke it all up. He don't allow them to have but two hacks now, and sometimes only one.' 'Well,' said I, 'if you are so light-hearted and jolly in ordinary times, what must you be in an epidemic?' He shook his head. 'No, you're off, there. We don't like to see an epidemic. An epidemic don't pay. Well, of course I don't mean that, exactly; but it don't pay in proportion to the regular thing. Don't it occur to you, why?' No. 'Think.' 'I can't imagine. What is it?' 'It's just two things.' 'Well, what are they?' 'One's Embamming.' 'And what's the other?' 'Ice.' 'How is that?' 'Well, in ordinary times, a person dies, and we lay him up in ice; one day two days, maybe three, to wait for friends to come. Takes a lot of it--melts fast. We charge jewelry rates for that ice, and war-prices for attendance. Well, don't you know, when there's an epidemic, they rush 'em to the cemetery the minute the breath's out. No market for ice in an epidemic. Same with Embamming. You take a family that's able to embam, and you've got a soft thing. You can mention sixteen different ways to do it--though there AIN'T only one or two ways, when you come down to the bottom facts of it--and they'll take the highest-priced way, every time. It's human nature--human nature in grief. It don't reason, you see. Time being, it don't care a dam. All it wants is physical immortality for deceased, and they're willing to pay for it. All you've got to do is to just be ca'm and stack it up--they'll stand the racket. Why, man, you can take a defunct that you couldn't GIVE away; and get your embamming traps around you and go to work; and in a couple of hours he is worth a cool six hundred--that's what HE'S worth. There ain't anything equal to it but trading rats for di'monds in time of famine. Well, don't you see, when there's an epidemic, people don't wait to embam. No, indeed they don't; and it hurts the business like hell-th, as we say--hurts it like hell-th, HEALTH, see?--Our little joke in the trade. Well, I must be going. Give me a call whenever you need any--I mean, when you're going by, sometime.' In his joyful high spirits, he did the exaggerating himself, if any has been done. I have not enlarged on him. With the above brief references to inhumation, let us leave the subject. As for me, I hope to be cremated. I made that remark to my pastor once, who said, with what he seemed to think was an impressive manner-- 'I wouldn't worry about that, if I had your chances.' Much he knew about it--the family all so opposed to it. Chapter 44 City Sights THE old French part of New Orleans--anciently the Spanish part--bears no resemblance to the American end of the city: the American end which lies beyond the intervening brick business-center. The houses are massed in blocks; are austerely plain and dignified; uniform of pattern, with here and there a departure from it with pleasant effect; all are plastered on the outside, and nearly all have long, iron-railed verandas running along the several stories. Their chief beauty is the deep, warm, varicolored stain with which time and the weather have enriched the plaster. It harmonizes with all the surroundings, and has as natural a look of belonging there as has the flush upon sunset clouds. This charming decoration cannot be successfully imitated; neither is it to be found elsewhere in America. The iron railings are a specialty, also. The pattern is often exceedingly light and dainty, and airy and graceful--with a large cipher or monogram in the center, a delicate cobweb of baffling, intricate forms, wrought in steel. The ancient railings are hand-made, and are now comparatively rare and proportionately valuable. They are become BRIC-A-BRAC. The party had the privilege of idling through this ancient quarter of New Orleans with the South's finest literary genius, the author of 'the Grandissimes.' In him the South has found a masterly delineator of its interior life and its history. In truth, I find by experience, that the untrained eye and vacant mind can inspect it, and learn of it, and judge of it, more clearly and profitably in his books than by personal contact with it. With Mr. Cable along to see for you, and describe and explain and illuminate, a jog through that old quarter is a vivid pleasure. And you have a vivid sense as of unseen or dimly seen things--vivid, and yet fitful and darkling; you glimpse salient features, but lose the fine shades or catch them imperfectly through the vision of the imagination: a case, as it were, of ignorant near-sighted stranger traversing the rim of wide vague horizons of Alps with an inspired and enlightened long- sighted native. We visited the old St. Louis Hotel, now occupied by municipal offices. There is nothing strikingly remarkable about it; but one can say of it as of the Academy of Music in New York, that if a broom or a shovel has ever been used in it there is no circumstantial evidence to back up the fact. It is curious that cabbages and hay and things do not grow in the Academy of Music; but no doubt it is on account of the interruption of the light by the benches, and the impossibility of hoeing the crop except in the aisles. The fact that the ushers grow their buttonhole- bouquets on the premises shows what might be done if they had the right kind of an agricultural head to the establishment. We visited also the venerable Cathedral, and the pretty square in front of it; the one dim with religious light, the other brilliant with the worldly sort, and lovely with orange-trees and blossomy shrubs; then we drove in the hot sun through the wilderness of houses and out on to the wide dead level beyond, where the villas are, and the water wheels to drain the town, and the commons populous with cows and children; passing by an old cemetery where we were told lie the ashes of an early pirate; but we took him on trust, and did not visit him. He was a pirate with a tremendous and sanguinary history; and as long as he preserved unspotted, in retirement, the dignity of his name and the grandeur of his ancient calling, homage and reverence were his from high and low; but when at last he descended into politics and became a paltry alderman, the public 'shook' him, and turned aside and wept. When he died, they set up a monument over him; and little by little he has come into respect again; but it is respect for the pirate, not the alderman. To-day the loyal and generous remember only what he was, and charitably forget what he became. Thence, we drove a few miles across a swamp, along a raised shell road, with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other; and here and there, in the distance, a ragged and angular-limbed and moss-bearded cypress, top standing out, clear cut against the sky, and as quaint of form as the apple-trees in Japanese pictures--such was our course and the surroundings of it. There was an occasional alligator swimming comfortably along in the canal, and an occasional picturesque colored person on the bank, flinging his statue-rigid reflection upon the still water and watching for a bite. And by-and-bye we reached the West End, a collection of hotels of the usual light summer-resort pattern, with broad verandas all around, and the waves of the wide and blue Lake Pontchartrain lapping the thresholds. We had dinner on a ground-veranda over the water--the chief dish the renowned fish called the pompano, delicious as the less criminal forms of sin. Thousands of people come by rail and carriage to West End and to Spanish Fort every evening, and dine, listen to the bands, take strolls in the open air under the electric lights, go sailing on the lake, and entertain themselves in various and sundry other ways. We had opportunities on other days and in other places to test the pompano. Notably, at an editorial dinner at one of the clubs in the city. He was in his last possible perfection there, and justified his fame. In his suite was a tall pyramid of scarlet cray-fish--large ones; as large as one's thumb--delicate, palatable, appetizing. Also deviled whitebait; also shrimps of choice quality; and a platter of small soft- shell crabs of a most superior breed. The other dishes were what one might get at Delmonico's, or Buckingham Palace; those I have spoken of can be had in similar perfection in New Orleans only, I suppose. In the West and South they have a new institution--the Broom Brigade. It is composed of young ladies who dress in a uniform costume, and go through the infantry drill, with broom in place of musket. It is a very pretty sight, on private view. When they perform on the stage of a theater, in the blaze of colored fires, it must be a fine and fascinating spectacle. I saw them go through their complex manual with grace, spirit, and admirable precision. I saw them do everything which a human being can possibly do with a broom, except sweep. I did not see them sweep. But I know they could learn. What they have already learned proves that. And if they ever should learn, and should go on the war- path down Tchoupitoulas or some of those other streets around there, those thoroughfares would bear a greatly improved aspect in a very few minutes. But the girls themselves wouldn't; so nothing would be really gained, after all. The drill was in the Washington Artillery building. In this building we saw many interesting relics of the war. Also a fine oil-painting representing Stonewall Jackson's last interview with General Lee. Both men are on horseback. Jackson has just ridden up, and is accosting Lee. The picture is very valuable, on account of the portraits, which are authentic. But, like many another historical picture, it means nothing without its label. And one label will fit it as well as another-- First Interview between Lee and Jackson. Last Interview between Lee and Jackson. Jackson Introducing Himself to Lee. Jackson Accepting Lee's Invitation to Dinner. Jackson Declining Lee's Invitation to Dinner--with Thanks. Jackson Apologizing for a Heavy Defeat. Jackson Reporting a Great Victory. Jackson Asking Lee for a Match. It tells ONE story, and a sufficient one; for it says quite plainly and satisfactorily, 'Here are Lee and Jackson together.' The artist would have made it tell that this is Lee and Jackson's last interview if he could have done it. But he couldn't, for there wasn't any way to do it. A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture. In Rome, people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in front of the celebrated 'Beatrice Cenci the Day before her Execution.' It shows what a label can do. If they did not know the picture, they would inspect it unmoved, and say, 'Young girl with hay fever; young girl with her head in a bag.' I found the half-forgotten Southern intonations and elisions as pleasing to my ear as they had formerly been. A Southerner talks music. At least it is music to me, but then I was born in the South. The educated Southerner has no use for an r, except at the beginning of a word. He says 'honah,' and 'dinnah,' and 'Gove'nuh,' and 'befo' the waw,' and so on. The words may lack charm to the eye, in print, but they have it to the ear. When did the r disappear from Southern speech, and how did it come to disappear? The custom of dropping it was not borrowed from the North, nor inherited from England. Many Southerners--most Southerners-- put a y into occasional words that begin with the k sound. For instance, they say Mr. K'yahtah (Carter) and speak of playing k'yahds or of riding in the k'yahs. And they have the pleasant custom--long ago fallen into decay in the North--of frequently employing the respectful 'Sir.' Instead of the curt Yes, and the abrupt No, they say 'Yes, Suh', 'No, Suh.' But there are some infelicities. Such as 'like' for 'as,' and the addition of an 'at' where it isn't needed. I heard an educated gentleman say, 'Like the flag-officer did.' His cook or his butler would have said, 'Like the flag-officer done.' You hear gentlemen say, 'Where have you been at?' And here is the aggravated form--heard a ragged street Arab say it to a comrade: 'I was a-ask'n' Tom whah you was a-sett'n' at.' The very elect carelessly say 'will' when they mean 'shall'; and many of them say, 'I didn't go to do it,' meaning 'I didn't mean to do it.' The Northern word 'guess'--imported from England, where it used to be common, and now regarded by satirical Englishmen as a Yankee original--is but little used among Southerners. They say 'reckon.' They haven't any 'doesn't' in their language; they say 'don't' instead. The unpolished often use 'went' for 'gone.' It is nearly as bad as the Northern 'hadn't ought.' This reminds me that a remark of a very peculiar nature was made here in my neighborhood (in the North) a few days ago: 'He hadn't ought to have went.' How is that? Isn't that a good deal of a triumph? One knows the orders combined in this half- breed's architecture without inquiring: one parent Northern, the other Southern. To-day I heard a schoolmistress ask, 'Where is John gone?' This form is so common--so nearly universal, in fact--that if she had used 'whither' instead of 'where,' I think it would have sounded like an affectation. We picked up one excellent word--a word worth traveling to New Orleans to get; a nice limber, expressive, handy word--'lagniappe.' They pronounce it lanny-yap. It is Spanish--so they said. We discovered it at the head of a column of odds and ends in the Picayune, the first day; heard twenty people use it the second; inquired what it meant the third; adopted it and got facility in swinging it the fourth. It has a restricted meaning, but I think the people spread it out a little when they choose. It is the equivalent of the thirteenth roll in a 'baker's dozen.' It is something thrown in, gratis, for good measure. The custom originated in the Spanish quarter of the city. When a child or a servant buys something in a shop--or even the mayor or the governor, for aught I know--he finishes the operation by saying-- 'Give me something for lagniappe.' The shopman always responds; gives the child a bit of licorice-root, gives the servant a cheap cigar or a spool of thread, gives the governor--I don't know what he gives the governor; support, likely. When you are invited to drink, and this does occur now and then in New Orleans--and you say, 'What, again?--no, I've had enough;' the other party says, 'But just this one time more--this is for lagniappe.' When the beau perceives that he is stacking his compliments a trifle too high, and sees by the young lady's countenance that the edifice would have been better with the top compliment left off, he puts his 'I beg pardon--no harm intended,' into the briefer form of 'Oh, that's for lagniappe.' If the waiter in the restaurant stumbles and spills a gill of coffee down the back of your neck, he says 'For lagniappe, sah,' and gets you another cup without extra charge. Chapter 45 Southern Sports IN the North one hears the war mentioned, in social conversation, once a month; sometimes as often as once a week; but as a distinct subject for talk, it has long ago been relieved of duty. There are sufficient reasons for this. Given a dinner company of six gentlemen to-day, it can easily happen that four of them--and possibly five--were not in the field at all. So the chances are four to two, or five to one, that the war will at no time during the evening become the topic of conversation; and the chances are still greater that if it become the topic it will remain so but a little while. If you add six ladies to the company, you have added six people who saw so little of the dread realities of the war that they ran out of talk concerning them years ago, and now would soon weary of the war topic if you brought it up. The case is very different in the South. There, every man you meet was in the war; and every lady you meet saw the war. The war is the great chief topic of conversation. The interest in it is vivid and constant; the interest in other topics is fleeting. Mention of the war will wake up a dull company and set their tongues going, when nearly any other topic would fail. In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere: they date from it. All day long you hear things 'placed' as having happened since the waw; or du'in' the waw; or befo' the waw; or right aftah the waw; or 'bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo' the waw or aftah the waw. It shows how intimately every individual was visited, in his own person, by that tremendous episode. It gives the inexperienced stranger a better idea of what a vast and comprehensive calamity invasion is than he can ever get by reading books at the fireside. At a club one evening, a gentleman turned to me and said, in an aside-- 'You notice, of course, that we are nearly always talking about the war. It isn't because we haven't anything else to talk about, but because nothing else has so strong an interest for us. And there is another reason: In the war, each of us, in his own person, seems to have sampled all the different varieties of human experience; as a consequence, you can't mention an outside matter of any sort but it will certainly remind some listener of something that happened during the war--and out he comes with it. Of course that brings the talk back to the war. You may try all you want to, to keep other subjects before the house, and we may all join in and help, but there can be but one result: the most random topic would load every man up with war reminiscences, and shut him up, too; and talk would be likely to stop presently, because you can't talk pale inconsequentialities when you've got a crimson fact or fancy in your head that you are burning to fetch out.' The poet was sitting some little distance away; and presently he began to speak--about the moon. The gentleman who had been talking to me remarked in an 'aside:' 'There, the moon is far enough from the seat of war, but you will see that it will suggest something to somebody about the war; in ten minutes from now the moon, as a topic, will be shelved.' The poet was saying he had noticed something which was a surprise to him; had had the impression that down here, toward the equator, the moonlight was much stronger and brighter than up North; had had the impression that when he visited New Orleans, many years ago, the moon-- Interruption from the other end of the room-- 'Let me explain that. Reminds me of an anecdote. Everything is changed since the war, for better or for worse; but you'll find people down here born grumblers, who see no change except the change for the worse. There was an old negro woman of this sort. A young New-Yorker said in her presence, "What a wonderful moon you have down here!" She sighed and said, "Ah, bless yo' heart, honey, you ought to seen dat moon befo' de waw!"' The new topic was dead already. But the poet resurrected it, and gave it a new start. A brief dispute followed, as to whether the difference between Northern and Southern moonlight really existed or was only imagined. Moonlight talk drifted easily into talk about artificial methods of dispelling darkness. Then somebody remembered that when Farragut advanced upon Port Hudson on a dark night--and did not wish to assist the aim of the Confederate gunners--he carried no battle-lanterns, but painted the decks of his ships white, and thus created a dim but valuable light, which enabled his own men to grope their way around with considerable facility. At this point the war got the floor again--the ten minutes not quite up yet. I was not sorry, for war talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull. We went to a cockpit in New Orleans on a Saturday afternoon. I had never seen a cock-fight before. There were men and boys there of all ages and all colors, and of many languages and nationalities. But I noticed one quite conspicuous and surprising absence: the traditional brutal faces. There were no brutal faces. With no cock-fighting going on, you could have played the gathering on a stranger for a prayer-meeting; and after it began, for a revival--provided you blindfolded your stranger--for the shouting was something prodigious. A negro and a white man were in the ring; everybody else outside. The cocks were brought in in sacks; and when time was called, they were taken out by the two bottle-holders, stroked, caressed, poked toward each other, and finally liberated. The big black cock plunged instantly at the little gray one and struck him on the head with his spur. The gray responded with spirit. Then the Babel of many-tongued shoutings broke out, and ceased not thenceforth. When the cocks had been fighting some little time, I was expecting them momently to drop dead, for both were blind, red with blood, and so exhausted that they frequently fell down. Yet they would not give up, neither would they die. The negro and the white man would pick them up every few seconds, wipe them off, blow cold water on them in a fine spray, and take their heads in their mouths and hold them there a moment--to warm back the perishing life perhaps; I do not know. Then, being set down again, the dying creatures would totter gropingly about, with dragging wings, find each other, strike a guesswork blow or two, and fall exhausted once more. I did not see the end of the battle. I forced myself to endure it as long as I could, but it was too pitiful a sight; so I made frank confession to that effect, and we retired. We heard afterward that the black cock died in the ring, and fighting to the last. Evidently there is abundant fascination about this 'sport' for such as have had a degree of familiarity with it. I never saw people enjoy anything more than this gathering enjoyed this fight. The case was the same with old gray-heads and with boys of ten. They lost themselves in frenzies of delight. The 'cocking-main' is an inhuman sort of entertainment, there is no question about that; still, it seems a much more respectable and far less cruel sport than fox-hunting--for the cocks like it; they experience, as well as confer enjoyment; which is not the fox's case. We assisted--in the French sense--at a mule race, one day. I believe I enjoyed this contest more than any other mule there. I enjoyed it more than I remember having enjoyed any other animal race I ever saw. The grand-stand was well filled with the beauty and the chivalry of New Orleans. That phrase is not original with me. It is the Southern reporter's. He has used it for two generations. He uses it twenty times a day, or twenty thousand times a day; or a million times a day-- according to the exigencies. He is obliged to use it a million times a day, if he have occasion to speak of respectable men and women that often; for he has no other phrase for such service except that single one. He never tires of it; it always has a fine sound to him. There is a kind of swell medieval bulliness and tinsel about it that pleases his gaudy barbaric soul. If he had been in Palestine in the early times, we should have had no references to 'much people' out of him. No, he would have said 'the beauty and the chivalry of Galilee' assembled to hear the Sermon on the Mount. It is likely that the men and women of the South are sick enough of that phrase by this time, and would like a change, but there is no immediate prospect of their getting it. The New Orleans editor has a strong, compact, direct, unflowery style; wastes no words, and does not gush. Not so with his average correspondent. In the Appendix I have quoted a good letter, penned by a trained hand; but the average correspondent hurls a style which differs from that. For instance-- The 'Times-Democrat' sent a relief-steamer up one of the bayous, last April. This steamer landed at a village, up there somewhere, and the Captain invited some of the ladies of the village to make a short trip with him. They accepted and came aboard, and the steamboat shoved out up the creek. That was all there was 'to it.' And that is all that the editor of the 'Times-Democrat' would have got out of it. There was nothing in the thing but statistics, and he would have got nothing else out of it. He would probably have even tabulated them, partly to secure perfect clearness of statement, and partly to save space. But his special correspondent knows other methods of handling statistics. He just throws off all restraint and wallows in them-- 'On Saturday, early in the morning, the beauty of the place graced our cabin, and proud of her fair freight the gallant little boat glided up the bayou.' Twenty-two words to say the ladies came aboard and the boat shoved out up the creek, is a clean waste of ten good words, and is also destructive of compactness of statement. The trouble with the Southern reporter is--Women. They unsettle him; they throw him off his balance. He is plain, and sensible, and satisfactory, until a woman heaves in sight. Then he goes all to pieces; his mind totters, he becomes flowery and idiotic. From reading the above extract, you would imagine that this student of Sir Walter Scott is an apprentice, and knows next to nothing about handling a pen. On the contrary, he furnishes plenty of proofs, in his long letter, that he knows well enough how to handle it when the women are not around to give him the artificial-flower complaint. For instance-- 'At 4 o'clock ominous clouds began to gather in the south-east, and presently from the Gulf there came a blow which increased in severity every moment. It was not safe to leave the landing then, and there was a delay. The oaks shook off long tresses of their mossy beards to the tugging of the wind, and the bayou in its ambition put on miniature waves in mocking of much larger bodies of water. A lull permitted a start, and homewards we steamed, an inky sky overhead and a heavy wind blowing. As darkness crept on, there were few on board who did not wish themselves nearer home.' There is nothing the matter with that. It is good description, compactly put. Yet there was great temptation, there, to drop into lurid writing. But let us return to the mule. Since I left him, I have rummaged around and found a full report of the race. In it I find confirmation of the theory which I broached just now--namely, that the trouble with the Southern reporter is Women: Women, supplemented by Walter Scott and his knights and beauty and chivalry, and so on. This is an excellent report, as long as the women stay out of it. But when they intrude, we have this frantic result-- 'It will be probably a long time before the ladies' stand presents such a sea of foam-like loveliness as it did yesterday. The New Orleans women are always charming, but never so much so as at this time of the year, when in their dainty spring costumes they bring with them a breath of balmy freshness and an odor of sanctity unspeakable. The stand was so crowded with them that, walking at their feet and seeing no possibility of approach, many a man appreciated as he never did before the Peri's feeling at the Gates of Paradise, and wondered what was the priceless boon that would admit him to their sacred presence. Sparkling on their white-robed breasts or shoulders were the colors of their favorite knights, and were it not for the fact that the doughty heroes appeared on unromantic mules, it would have been easy to imagine one of King Arthur's gala-days.' There were thirteen mules in the first heat; all sorts of mules, they were; all sorts of complexions, gaits, dispositions, aspects. Some were handsome creatures, some were not; some were sleek, some hadn't had their fur brushed lately; some were innocently gay and frisky; some were full of malice and all unrighteousness; guessing from looks, some of them thought the matter on hand was war, some thought it was a lark, the rest took it for a religious occasion. And each mule acted according to his convictions. The result was an absence of harmony well compensated by a conspicuous presence of variety--variety of a picturesque and entertaining sort. All the riders were young gentlemen in fashionable society. If the reader has been wondering why it is that the ladies of New Orleans attend so humble an orgy as a mule-race, the thing is explained now. It is a fashion-freak; all connected with it are people of fashion. It is great fun, and cordially liked. The mule-race is one of the marked occasions of the year. It has brought some pretty fast mules to the front. One of these had to be ruled out, because he was so fast that he turned the thing into a one-mule contest, and robbed it of one of its best features--variety. But every now and then somebody disguises him with a new name and a new complexion, and rings him in again. The riders dress in full jockey costumes of bright-colored silks, satins, and velvets. The thirteen mules got away in a body, after a couple of false starts, and scampered off with prodigious spirit. As each mule and each rider had a distinct opinion of his own as to how the race ought to be run, and which side of the track was best in certain circumstances, and how often the track ought to be crossed, and when a collision ought to be accomplished, and when it ought to be avoided, these twenty-six conflicting opinions created a most fantastic and picturesque confusion, and the resulting spectacle was killingly comical. Mile heat; time 2:22. Eight of the thirteen mules distanced. I had a bet on a mule which would have won if the procession had been reversed. The second heat was good fun; and so was the 'consolation race for beaten mules,' which followed later; but the first heat was the best in that respect. I think that much the most enjoyable of all races is a steamboat race; but, next to that, I prefer the gay and joyous mule-rush. Two red-hot steamboats raging along, neck-and-neck, straining every nerve--that is to say, every rivet in the boilers--quaking and shaking and groaning from stem to stern, spouting white steam from the pipes, pouring black smoke from the chimneys, raining down sparks, parting the river into long breaks of hissing foam--this is sport that makes a body's very liver curl with enjoyment. A horse-race is pretty tame and colorless in comparison. Still, a horse-race might be well enough, in its way, perhaps, if it were not for the tiresome false starts. But then, nobody is ever killed. At least, nobody was ever killed when I was at a horse-race. They have been crippled, it is true; but this is little to the purpose. ===10 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 10. Chapter 46 Enchantments and Enchanters THE largest annual event in New Orleans is a something which we arrived too late to sample--the Mardi-Gras festivities. I saw the procession of the Mystic Crew of Comus there, twenty-four years ago--with knights and nobles and so on, clothed in silken and golden Paris-made gorgeousnesses, planned and bought for that single night's use; and in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquerie--a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking and flickering torches; but it is said that in these latter days the spectacle is mightily augmented, as to cost, splendor, and variety. There is a chief personage--'Rex;' and if I remember rightly, neither this king nor any of his great following of subordinates is known to any outsider. All these people are gentlemen of position and consequence; and it is a proud thing to belong to the organization; so the mystery in which they hide their personality is merely for romance's sake, and not on account of the police. Mardi-Gras is of course a relic of the French and Spanish occupation; but I judge that the religious feature has been pretty well knocked out of it now. Sir Walter has got the advantage of the gentlemen of the cowl and rosary, and he will stay. His medieval business, supplemented by the monsters and the oddities, and the pleasant creatures from fairy- land, is finer to look at than the poor fantastic inventions and performances of the reveling rabble of the priest's day, and serves quite as well, perhaps, to emphasize the day and admonish men that the grace-line between the worldly season and the holy one is reached. This Mardi-Gras pageant was the exclusive possession of New Orleans until recently. But now it has spread to Memphis and St. Louis and Baltimore. It has probably reached its limit. It is a thing which could hardly exist in the practical North; would certainly last but a very brief time; as brief a time as it would last in London. For the soul of it is the romantic, not the funny and the grotesque. Take away the romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles, and Mardi-Gras would die, down there in the South. The very feature that keeps it alive in the South--girly-girly romance--would kill it in the North or in London. Puck and Punch, and the press universal, would fall upon it and make merciless fun of it, and its first exhibition would be also its last. Against the crimes of the French Revolution and of Bonaparte may be set two compensating benefactions: the Revolution broke the chains of the ANCIEN REGIME and of the Church, and made of a nation of abject slaves a nation of freemen; and Bonaparte instituted the setting of merit above birth, and also so completely stripped the divinity from royalty, that whereas crowned heads in Europe were gods before, they are only men, since, and can never be gods again, but only figureheads, and answerable for their acts like common clay. Such benefactions as these compensate the temporary harm which Bonaparte and the Revolution did, and leave the world in debt to them for these great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress. Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner--or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it--would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter. Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war. It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might, perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition. The Southerner of the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War: but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman. The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's influence than to that of any other thing or person. One may observe, by one or two signs, how deeply that influence penetrated, and how strongly it holds. If one take up a Northern or Southern literary periodical of forty or fifty years ago, he will find it filled with wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence,' romanticism, sentimentality--all imitated from Sir Walter, and sufficiently badly done, too--innocent travesties of his style and methods, in fact. This sort of literature being the fashion in both sections of the country, there was opportunity for the fairest competition; and as a consequence, the South was able to show as many well-known literary names, proportioned to population, as the North could. But a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair competition between North and South. For the North has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer still clings to it-- clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence. There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms, and a dead language. But when a Southerner of genius writes modern English, his book goes upon crutches no longer, but upon wings; and they carry it swiftly all about America and England, and through the great English reprint publishing houses of Germany--as witness the experience of Mr. Cable and Uncle Remus, two of the very few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style. Instead of three or four widely-known literary names, the South ought to have a dozen or two--and will have them when Sir Walter's time is out. A curious exemplification of the power of a single book for good or harm is shown in the effects wrought by 'Don Quixote' and those wrought by 'Ivanhoe.' The first swept the world's admiration for the medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence; and the other restored it. As far as our South is concerned, the good work done by Cervantes is pretty nearly a dead letter, so effectually has Scott's pernicious work undermined it. Chapter 47 Uncle Remus and Mr. Cable MR. JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS ('Uncle Remus') was to arrive from Atlanta at seven o'clock Sunday morning; so we got up and received him. We were able to detect him among the crowd of arrivals at the hotel-counter by his correspondence with a description of him which had been furnished us from a trustworthy source. He was said to be undersized, red-haired, and somewhat freckled. He was the only man in the party whose outside tallied with this bill of particulars. He was said to be very shy. He is a shy man. Of this there is no doubt. It may not show on the surface, but the shyness is there. After days of intimacy one wonders to see that it is still in about as strong force as ever. There is a fine and beautiful nature hidden behind it, as all know who have read the Uncle Remus book; and a fine genius, too, as all know by the same sign. I seem to be talking quite freely about this neighbor; but in talking to the public I am but talking to his personal friends, and these things are permissible among friends. He deeply disappointed a number of children who had flocked eagerly to Mr. Cable's house to get a glimpse of the illustrious sage and oracle of the nation's nurseries. They said-- 'Why, he 's white!' They were grieved about it. So, to console them, the book was brought, that they might hear Uncle Remus's Tar-Baby story from the lips of Uncle Remus himself--or what, in their outraged eyes, was left of him. But it turned out that he had never read aloud to people, and was too shy to venture the attempt now. Mr. Cable and I read from books of ours, to show him what an easy trick it was; but his immortal shyness was proof against even this sagacious strategy, so we had to read about Brer Rabbit ourselves. Mr. Harris ought to be able to read the negro dialect better than anybody else, for in the matter of writing it he is the only master the country has produced. Mr. Cable is the only master in the writing of French dialects that the country has produced; and he reads them in perfection. It was a great treat to hear him read about Jean-ah Poquelin, and about Innerarity and his famous 'pigshoo' representing 'Louisihanna RIF-fusing to Hanter the Union,' along with passages of nicely-shaded German dialect from a novel which was still in manuscript. It came out in conversation, that in two different instances Mr. Cable got into grotesque trouble by using, in his books, next-to-impossible French names which nevertheless happened to be borne by living and sensitive citizens of New Orleans. His names were either inventions or were borrowed from the ancient and obsolete past, I do not now remember which; but at any rate living bearers of them turned up, and were a good deal hurt at having attention directed to themselves and their affairs in so excessively public a manner. Mr. Warner and I had an experience of the same sort when we wrote the book called 'The Gilded Age.' There is a character in it called 'Sellers.' I do not remember what his first name was, in the beginning; but anyway, Mr. Warner did not like it, and wanted it improved. He asked me if I was able to imagine a person named 'Eschol Sellers.' Of course I said I could not, without stimulants. He said that away out West, once, he had met, and contemplated, and actually shaken hands with a man bearing that impossible name--'Eschol Sellers.' He added-- 'It was twenty years ago; his name has probably carried him off before this; and if it hasn't, he will never see the book anyhow. We will confiscate his name. The name you are using is common, and therefore dangerous; there are probably a thousand Sellerses bearing it, and the whole horde will come after us; but Eschol Sellers is a safe name--it is a rock.' So we borrowed that name; and when the book had been out about a week, one of the stateliest and handsomest and most aristocratic looking white men that ever lived, called around, with the most formidable libel suit in his pocket that ever--well, in brief, we got his permission to suppress an edition of ten million {footnote [Figures taken from memory, and probably incorrect. Think it was more.]} copies of the book and change that name to 'Mulberry Sellers' in future editions. Chapter 48 Sugar and Postage ONE day, on the street, I encountered the man whom, of all men, I most wished to see--Horace Bixby; formerly pilot under me--or rather, over me--now captain of the great steamer 'City of Baton Rouge,' the latest and swiftest addition to the Anchor Line. The same slender figure, the same tight curls, the same springy step, the same alertness, the same decision of eye and answering decision of hand, the same erect military bearing; not an inch gained or lost in girth, not an ounce gained or lost in weight, not a hair turned. It is a curious thing, to leave a man thirty-five years old, and come back at the end of twenty-one years and find him still only thirty-five. I have not had an experience of this kind before, I believe. There were some crow's-feet, but they counted for next to nothing, since they were inconspicuous. His boat was just in. I had been waiting several days for her, purposing to return to St. Louis in her. The captain and I joined a party of ladies and gentlemen, guests of Major Wood, and went down the river fifty-four miles, in a swift tug, to ex-Governor Warmouth's sugar plantation. Strung along below the city, were a number of decayed, ram- shackly, superannuated old steamboats, not one of which had I ever seen before. They had all been built, and worn out, and thrown aside, since I was here last. This gives one a realizing sense of the frailness of a Mississippi boat and the briefness of its life. Six miles below town a fat and battered brick chimney, sticking above the magnolias and live-oaks, was pointed out as the monument erected by an appreciative nation to celebrate the battle of New Orleans--Jackson's victory over the British, January 8, 1815. The war had ended, the two nations were at peace, but the news had not yet reached New Orleans. If we had had the cable telegraph in those days, this blood would not have been spilt, those lives would not have been wasted; and better still, Jackson would probably never have been president. We have gotten over the harms done us by the war of 1812, but not over some of those done us by Jackson's presidency. The Warmouth plantation covers a vast deal of ground, and the hospitality of the Warmouth mansion is graduated to the same large scale. We saw steam-plows at work, here, for the first time. The traction engine travels about on its own wheels, till it reaches the required spot; then it stands still and by means of a wire rope pulls the huge plow toward itself two or three hundred yards across the field, between the rows of cane. The thing cuts down into the black mold a foot and a half deep. The plow looks like a fore-and-aft brace of a Hudson river steamer, inverted. When the negro steersman sits on one end of it, that end tilts down near the ground, while the other sticks up high in air. This great see-saw goes rolling and pitching like a ship at sea, and it is not every circus rider that could stay on it. The plantation contains two thousand six hundred acres; six hundred and fifty are in cane; and there is a fruitful orange grove of five thousand trees. The cane is cultivated after a modern and intricate scientific fashion, too elaborate and complex for me to attempt to describe; but it lost $40,000 last year. I forget the other details. However, this year's crop will reach ten or twelve hundred tons of sugar, consequently last year's loss will not matter. These troublesome and expensive scientific methods achieve a yield of a ton and a half and from that to two tons, to the acre; which is three or four times what the yield of an acre was in my time. The drainage-ditches were everywhere alive with little crabs-- 'fiddlers.' One saw them scampering sidewise in every direction whenever they heard a disturbing noise. Expensive pests, these crabs; for they bore into the levees, and ruin them. The great sugar-house was a wilderness of tubs and tanks and vats and filters, pumps, pipes, and machinery. The process of making sugar is exceedingly interesting. First, you heave your cane into the centrifugals and grind out the juice; then run it through the evaporating pan to extract the fiber; then through the bone-filter to remove the alcohol; then through the clarifying tanks to discharge the molasses; then through the granulating pipe to condense it; then through the vacuum pan to extract the vacuum. It is now ready for market. I have jotted these particulars down from memory. The thing looks simple and easy. Do not deceive yourself. To make sugar is really one of the most difficult things in the world. And to make it right, is next to impossible. If you will examine your own supply every now and then for a term of years, and tabulate the result, you will find that not two men in twenty can make sugar without getting sand into it. We could have gone down to the mouth of the river and visited Captain Eads' great work, the 'jetties,' where the river has been compressed between walls, and thus deepened to twenty-six feet; but it was voted useless to go, since at this stage of the water everything would be covered up and invisible. We could have visited that ancient and singular burg, 'Pilot-town,' which stands on stilts in the water--so they say; where nearly all communication is by skiff and canoe, even to the attending of weddings and funerals; and where the littlest boys and girls are as handy with the oar as unamphibious children are with the velocipede. We could have done a number of other things; but on account of limited time, we went back home. The sail up the breezy and sparkling river was a charming experience, and would have been satisfyingly sentimental and romantic but for the interruptions of the tug's pet parrot, whose tireless comments upon the scenery and the guests were always this- worldly, and often profane. He had also a superabundance of the discordant, ear-splitting, metallic laugh common to his breed--a machine-made laugh, a Frankenstein laugh, with the soul left out of it. He applied it to every sentimental remark, and to every pathetic song. He cackled it out with hideous energy after 'Home again, home again from a foreign shore,' and said he 'wouldn't give a damn for a tug-load of such rot.' Romance and sentiment cannot long survive this sort of discouragement; so the singing and talking presently ceased; which so delighted the parrot that he cursed himself hoarse for joy. Then the male members of the party moved to the forecastle, to smoke and gossip. There were several old steamboatmen along, and I learned from them a great deal of what had been happening to my former river friends during my long absence. I learned that a pilot whom I used to steer for is become a spiritualist, and for more than fifteen years has been receiving a letter every week from a deceased relative, through a New York spiritualist medium named Manchester--postage graduated by distance: from the local post-office in Paradise to New York, five dollars; from New York to St. Louis, three cents. I remember Mr. Manchester very well. I called on him once, ten years ago, with a couple of friends, one of whom wished to inquire after a deceased uncle. This uncle had lost his life in a peculiarly violent and unusual way, half a dozen years before: a cyclone blew him some three miles and knocked a tree down with him which was four feet through at the butt and sixty- five feet high. He did not survive this triumph. At the seance just referred to, my friend questioned his late uncle, through Mr. Manchester, and the late uncle wrote down his replies, using Mr. Manchester's hand and pencil for that purpose. The following is a fair example of the questions asked, and also of the sloppy twaddle in the way of answers, furnished by Manchester under the pretense that it came from the specter. If this man is not the paltriest fraud that lives, I owe him an apology-- QUESTION. Where are you? ANSWER. In the spirit world. Q. Are you happy? A. Very happy. Perfectly happy. Q. How do you amuse yourself? A. Conversation with friends, and other spirits. Q. What else? A. Nothing else. Nothing else is necessary. Q. What do you talk about? A. About how happy we are; and about friends left behind in the earth, and how to influence them for their good. Q. When your friends in the earth all get to the spirit land, what shall you have to talk about then?--nothing but about how happy you all are? No reply. It is explained that spirits will not answer frivolous questions. Q. How is it that spirits that are content to spend an eternity in frivolous employments, and accept it as happiness, are so fastidious about frivolous questions upon the subject? No reply. Q. Would you like to come back? A. No. Q. Would you say that under oath? A. Yes. Q. What do you eat there? A. We do not eat. Q. What do you drink? A. We do not drink. Q. What do you smoke? A. We do not smoke. Q. What do you read? A. We do not read. Q. Do all the good people go to your place? A. Yes. Q. You know my present way of life. Can you suggest any additions to it, in the way of crime, that will reasonably insure my going to some other place. A. No reply. Q. When did you die? A. I did not die, I passed away. Q. Very well, then, when did you pass away? How long have you been in the spirit land? A. We have no measurements of time here. Q. Though you may be indifferent and uncertain as to dates and times in your present condition and environment, this has nothing to do with your former condition. You had dates then. One of these is what I ask for. You departed on a certain day in a certain year. Is not this true? A. Yes. Q. Then name the day of the month. (Much fumbling with pencil, on the part of the medium, accompanied by violent spasmodic jerkings of his head and body, for some little time. Finally, explanation to the effect that spirits often forget dates, such things being without importance to them.) Q. Then this one has actually forgotten the date of its translation to the spirit land? This was granted to be the case. Q. This is very curious. Well, then, what year was it? (More fumbling, jerking, idiotic spasms, on the part of the medium. Finally, explanation to the effect that the spirit has forgotten the year.) Q. This is indeed stupendous. Let me put one more question, one last question, to you, before we part to meet no more;--for even if I fail to avoid your asylum, a meeting there will go for nothing as a meeting, since by that time you will easily have forgotten me and my name: did you die a natural death, or were you cut off by a catastrophe? A. (After long hesitation and many throes and spasms.) NATURAL DEATH. This ended the interview. My friend told the medium that when his relative was in this poor world, he was endowed with an extraordinary intellect and an absolutely defectless memory, and it seemed a great pity that he had not been allowed to keep some shred of these for his amusement in the realms of everlasting contentment, and for the amazement and admiration of the rest of the population there. This man had plenty of clients--has plenty yet. He receives letters from spirits located in every part of the spirit world, and delivers them all over this country through the United States mail. These letters are filled with advice--advice from 'spirits' who don't know as much as a tadpole--and this advice is religiously followed by the receivers. One of these clients was a man whom the spirits (if one may thus plurally describe the ingenious Manchester) were teaching how to contrive an improved railway car-wheel. It is coarse employment for a spirit, but it is higher and wholesomer activity than talking for ever about 'how happy we are.' Chapter 49 Episodes in Pilot Life IN the course of the tug-boat gossip, it came out that out of every five of my former friends who had quitted the river, four had chosen farming as an occupation. Of course this was not because they were peculiarly gifted, agriculturally, and thus more likely to succeed as farmers than in other industries: the reason for their choice must be traced to some other source. Doubtless they chose farming because that life is private and secluded from irruptions of undesirable strangers--like the pilot- house hermitage. And doubtless they also chose it because on a thousand nights of black storm and danger they had noted the twinkling lights of solitary farm-houses, as the boat swung by, and pictured to themselves the serenity and security and coziness of such refuges at such times, and so had by-and-bye come to dream of that retired and peaceful life as the one desirable thing to long for, anticipate, earn, and at last enjoy. But I did not learn that any of these pilot-farmers had astonished anybody with their successes. Their farms do not support them: they support their farms. The pilot-farmer disappears from the river annually, about the breaking of spring, and is seen no more till next frost. Then he appears again, in damaged homespun, combs the hayseed out of his hair, and takes a pilot-house berth for the winter. In this way he pays the debts which his farming has achieved during the agricultural season. So his river bondage is but half broken; he is still the river's slave the hardest half of the year. One of these men bought a farm, but did not retire to it. He knew a trick worth two of that. He did not propose to pauperize his farm by applying his personal ignorance to working it. No, he put the farm into the hands of an agricultural expert to be worked on shares--out of every three loads of corn the expert to have two and the pilot the third. But at the end of the season the pilot received no corn. The expert explained that his share was not reached. The farm produced only two loads. Some of the pilots whom I had known had had adventures--the outcome fortunate, sometimes, but not in all cases. Captain Montgomery, whom I had steered for when he was a pilot, commanded the Confederate fleet in the great battle before Memphis; when his vessel went down, he swam ashore, fought his way through a squad of soldiers, and made a gallant and narrow escape. He was always a cool man; nothing could disturb his serenity. Once when he was captain of the 'Crescent City,' I was bringing the boat into port at New Orleans, and momently expecting orders from the hurricane deck, but received none. I had stopped the wheels, and there my authority and responsibility ceased. It was evening--dim twilight--the captain's hat was perched upon the big bell, and I supposed the intellectual end of the captain was in it, but such was not the case. The captain was very strict; therefore I knew better than to touch a bell without orders. My duty was to hold the boat steadily on her calamitous course, and leave the consequences to take care of themselves--which I did. So we went plowing past the sterns of steamboats and getting closer and closer--the crash was bound to come very soon--and still that hat never budged; for alas, the captain was napping in the texas.... Things were becoming exceedingly nervous and uncomfortable. It seemed to me that the captain was not going to appear in time to see the entertainment. But he did. Just as we were walking into the stern of a steamboat, he stepped out on deck, and said, with heavenly serenity, 'Set her back on both'--which I did; but a trifle late, however, for the next moment we went smashing through that other boat's flimsy outer works with a most prodigious racket. The captain never said a word to me about the matter afterwards, except to remark that I had done right, and that he hoped I would not hesitate to act in the same way again in like circumstances. One of the pilots whom I had known when I was on the river had died a very honorable death. His boat caught fire, and he remained at the wheel until he got her safe to land. Then he went out over the breast- board with his clothing in flames, and was the last person to get ashore. He died from his injuries in the course of two or three hours, and his was the only life lost. The history of Mississippi piloting affords six or seven instances of this sort of martyrdom, and half a hundred instances of escapes from a like fate which came within a second or two of being fatally too late; BUT THERE IS NO INSTANCE OF A PILOT DESERTING HIS POST TO SAVE HIS LIFE WHILE BY REMAINING AND SACRIFICING IT HE MIGHT SECURE OTHER LIVES FROM DESTRUCTION. It is well worth while to set down this noble fact, and well worth while to put it in italics, too. The 'cub' pilot is early admonished to despise all perils connected with a pilot's calling, and to prefer any sort of death to the deep dishonor of deserting his post while there is any possibility of his being useful in it. And so effectively are these admonitions inculcated, that even young and but half-tried pilots can be depended upon to stick to the wheel, and die there when occasion requires. In a Memphis graveyard is buried a young fellow who perished at the wheel a great many years ago, in White River, to save the lives of other men. He said to the captain that if the fire would give him time to reach a sand bar, some distance away, all could be saved, but that to land against the bluff bank of the river would be to insure the loss of many lives. He reached the bar and grounded the boat in shallow water; but by that time the flames had closed around him, and in escaping through them he was fatally burned. He had been urged to fly sooner, but had replied as became a pilot to reply-- 'I will not go. If I go, nobody will be saved; if I stay, no one will be lost but me. I will stay.' There were two hundred persons on board, and no life was lost but the pilot's. There used to be a monument to this young fellow, in that Memphis graveyard. While we tarried in Memphis on our down trip, I started out to look for it, but our time was so brief that I was obliged to turn back before my object was accomplished. The tug-boat gossip informed me that Dick Kennet was dead--blown up, near Memphis, and killed; that several others whom I had known had fallen in the war--one or two of them shot down at the wheel; that another and very particular friend, whom I had steered many trips for, had stepped out of his house in New Orleans, one night years ago, to collect some money in a remote part of the city, and had never been seen again--was murdered and thrown into the river, it was thought; that Ben Thornburgh was dead long ago; also his wild 'cub' whom I used to quarrel with, all through every daylight watch. A heedless, reckless creature he was, and always in hot water, always in mischief. An Arkansas passenger brought an enormous bear aboard, one day, and chained him to a life-boat on the hurricane deck. Thornburgh's 'cub' could not rest till he had gone there and unchained the bear, to 'see what he would do.' He was promptly gratified. The bear chased him around and around the deck, for miles and miles, with two hundred eager faces grinning through the railings for audience, and finally snatched off the lad's coat-tail and went into the texas to chew it. The off-watch turned out with alacrity, and left the bear in sole possession. He presently grew lonesome, and started out for recreation. He ranged the whole boat--visited every part of it, with an advance guard of fleeing people in front of him and a voiceless vacancy behind him; and when his owner captured him at last, those two were the only visible beings anywhere; everybody else was in hiding, and the boat was a solitude. I was told that one of my pilot friends fell dead at the wheel, from heart disease, in 1869. The captain was on the roof at the time. He saw the boat breaking for the shore; shouted, and got no answer; ran up, and found the pilot lying dead on the floor. Mr. Bixby had been blown up, in Madrid bend; was not injured, but the other pilot was lost. George Ritchie had been blown up near Memphis--blown into the river from the wheel, and disabled. The water was very cold; he clung to a cotton bale--mainly with his teeth--and floated until nearly exhausted, when he was rescued by some deck hands who were on a piece of the wreck. They tore open the bale and packed him in the cotton, and warmed the life back into him, and got him safe to Memphis. He is one of Bixby's pilots on the 'Baton Rouge' now. Into the life of a steamboat clerk, now dead, had dropped a bit of romance--somewhat grotesque romance, but romance nevertheless. When I knew him he was a shiftless young spendthrift, boisterous, goodhearted, full of careless generosities, and pretty conspicuously promising to fool his possibilities away early, and come to nothing. In a Western city lived a rich and childless old foreigner and his wife; and in their family was a comely young girl--sort of friend, sort of servant. The young clerk of whom I have been speaking--whose name was not George Johnson, but who shall be called George Johnson for the purposes of this narrative--got acquainted with this young girl, and they sinned; and the old foreigner found them out, and rebuked them. Being ashamed, they lied, and said they were married; that they had been privately married. Then the old foreigner's hurt was healed, and he forgave and blessed them. After that, they were able to continue their sin without concealment. By-and-bye the foreigner's wife died; and presently he followed after her. Friends of the family assembled to mourn; and among the mourners sat the two young sinners. The will was opened and solemnly read. It bequeathed every penny of that old man's great wealth to MRS. GEORGE JOHNSON! And there was no such person. The young sinners fled forth then, and did a very foolish thing: married themselves before an obscure Justice of the Peace, and got him to antedate the thing. That did no sort of good. The distant relatives flocked in and exposed the fraudful date with extreme suddenness and surprising ease, and carried off the fortune, leaving the Johnsons very legitimately, and legally, and irrevocably chained together in honorable marriage, but with not so much as a penny to bless themselves withal. Such are the actual facts; and not all novels have for a base so telling a situation. Chapter 50 The 'Original Jacobs' WE had some talk about Captain Isaiah Sellers, now many years dead. He was a fine man, a high-minded man, and greatly respected both ashore and on the river. He was very tall, well built, and handsome; and in his old age--as I remember him--his hair was as black as an Indian's, and his eye and hand were as strong and steady and his nerve and judgment as firm and clear as anybody's, young or old, among the fraternity of pilots. He was the patriarch of the craft; he had been a keelboat pilot before the day of steamboats; and a steamboat pilot before any other steamboat pilot, still surviving at the time I speak of, had ever turned a wheel. Consequently his brethren held him in the sort of awe in which illustrious survivors of a bygone age are always held by their associates. He knew how he was regarded, and perhaps this fact added some trifle of stiffening to his natural dignity, which had been sufficiently stiff in its original state. He left a diary behind him; but apparently it did not date back to his first steamboat trip, which was said to be 1811, the year the first steamboat disturbed the waters of the Mississippi. At the time of his death a correspondent of the 'St. Louis Republican' culled the following items from the diary-- 'In February, 1825, he shipped on board the steamer "Rambler," at Florence, Ala., and made during that year three trips to New Orleans and back--this on the "Gen. Carrol," between Nashville and New Orleans. It was during his stay on this boat that Captain Sellers introduced the tap of the bell as a signal to heave the lead, previous to which time it was the custom for the pilot to speak to the men below when soundings were wanted. The proximity of the forecastle to the pilot-house, no doubt, rendered this an easy matter; but how different on one of our palaces of the present day. 'In 1827 we find him on board the "President," a boat of two hundred and eighty-five tons burden, and plying between Smithland and New Orleans. Thence he joined the "Jubilee" in 1828, and on this boat he did his first piloting in the St. Louis trade; his first watch extending from Herculaneum to St. Genevieve. On May 26, 1836, he completed and left Pittsburgh in charge of the steamer "Prairie," a boat of four hundred tons, and the first steamer with a STATE-ROOM CABIN ever seen at St. Louis. In 1857 he introduced the signal for meeting boats, and which has, with some slight change, been the universal custom of this day; in fact, is rendered obligatory by act of Congress. 'As general items of river history, we quote the following marginal notes from his general log-- 'In March, 1825, Gen. Lafayette left New Orleans for St. Louis on the low-pressure steamer "Natchez." 'In January, 1828, twenty-one steamers left the New Orleans wharf to celebrate the occasion of Gen. Jackson's visit to that city. 'In 1830 the "North American" made the run from New Orleans to Memphis in six days--best time on record to that date. It has since been made in two days and ten hours. 'In 1831 the Red River cut-off formed. 'In 1832 steamer "Hudson" made the run from White River to Helena, a distance of seventy-five miles, in twelve hours. This was the source of much talk and speculation among parties directly interested. 'In 1839 Great Horseshoe cut-off formed. 'Up to the present time, a term of thirty-five years, we ascertain, by reference to the diary, he has made four hundred and sixty round trips to New Orleans, which gives a distance of one million one hundred and four thousand miles, or an average of eighty-six miles a day.' Whenever Captain Sellers approached a body of gossiping pilots, a chill fell there, and talking ceased. For this reason: whenever six pilots were gathered together, there would always be one or two newly fledged ones in the lot, and the elder ones would be always 'showing off' before these poor fellows; making them sorrowfully feel how callow they were, how recent their nobility, and how humble their degree, by talking largely and vaporously of old-time experiences on the river; always making it a point to date everything back as far as they could, so as to make the new men feel their newness to the sharpest degree possible, and envy the old stagers in the like degree. And how these complacent baldheads WOULD swell, and brag, and lie, and date back--ten, fifteen, twenty years,--and how they did enjoy the effect produced upon the marveling and envying youngsters! And perhaps just at this happy stage of the proceedings, the stately figure of Captain Isaiah Sellers, that real and only genuine Son of Antiquity, would drift solemnly into the midst. Imagine the size of the silence that would result on the instant. And imagine the feelings of those bald-heads, and the exultation of their recent audience when the ancient captain would begin to drop casual and indifferent remarks of a reminiscent nature--about islands that had disappeared, and cutoffs that had been made, a generation before the oldest bald-head in the company had ever set his foot in a pilot-house! Many and many a time did this ancient mariner appear on the scene in the above fashion, and spread disaster and humiliation around him. If one might believe the pilots, he always dated his islands back to the misty dawn of river history; and he never used the same island twice; and never did he employ an island that still existed, or give one a name which anybody present was old enough to have heard of before. If you might believe the pilots, he was always conscientiously particular about little details; never spoke of 'the State of Mississippi,' for instance --no, he would say, 'When the State of Mississippi was where Arkansas now is,' and would never speak of Louisiana or Missouri in a general way, and leave an incorrect impression on your mind--no, he would say, 'When Louisiana was up the river farther,' or 'When Missouri was on the Illinois side.' The old gentleman was not of literary turn or capacity, but he used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them 'MARK TWAIN,' and give them to the 'New Orleans Picayune.' They related to the stage and condition of the river, and were accurate and valuable; and thus far, they contained no poison. But in speaking of the stage of the river to-day, at a given point, the captain was pretty apt to drop in a little remark about this being the first time he had seen the water so high or so low at that particular point for forty-nine years; and now and then he would mention Island So- and-so, and follow it, in parentheses, with some such observation as 'disappeared in 1807, if I remember rightly.' In these antique interjections lay poison and bitterness for the other old pilots, and they used to chaff the 'Mark Twain' paragraphs with unsparing mockery. It so chanced that one of these paragraphs--{footnote [The original MS. of it, in the captain's own hand, has been sent to me from New Orleans. It reads as follows-- VICKSBURG May 4, 1859. 'My opinion for the benefit of the citizens of New Orleans: The water is higher this far up than it has been since 8. My opinion is that the water will be feet deep in Canal street before the first of next June. Mrs. Turner's plantation at the head of Big Black Island is all under water, and it has not been since 1815. 'I. Sellers.']} became the text for my first newspaper article. I burlesqued it broadly, very broadly, stringing my fantastics out to the extent of eight hundred or a thousand words. I was a 'cub' at the time. I showed my performance to some pilots, and they eagerly rushed it into print in the 'New Orleans True Delta.' It was a great pity; for it did nobody any worthy service, and it sent a pang deep into a good man's heart. There was no malice in my rubbish; but it laughed at the captain. It laughed at a man to whom such a thing was new and strange and dreadful. I did not know then, though I do now, that there is no suffering comparable with that which a private person feels when he is for the first time pilloried in print. Captain Sellers did me the honor to profoundly detest me from that day forth. When I say he did me the honor, I am not using empty words. It was a very real honor to be in the thoughts of so great a man as Captain Sellers, and I had wit enough to appreciate it and be proud of it. It was distinction to be loved by such a man; but it was a much greater distinction to be hated by him, because he loved scores of people; but he didn't sit up nights to hate anybody but me. He never printed another paragraph while he lived, and he never again signed 'Mark Twain' to anything. At the time that the telegraph brought the news of his death, I was on the Pacific coast. I was a fresh new journalist, and needed a nom de guerre; so I confiscated the ancient mariner's discarded one, and have done my best to make it remain what it was in his hands--a sign and symbol and warrant that whatever is found in its company may be gambled on as being the petrified truth; how I have succeeded, it would not be modest in me to say. The captain had an honorable pride in his profession and an abiding love for it. He ordered his monument before he died, and kept it near him until he did die. It stands over his grave now, in Bellefontaine cemetery, St. Louis. It is his image, in marble, standing on duty at the pilot wheel; and worthy to stand and confront criticism, for it represents a man who in life would have stayed there till he burned to a cinder, if duty required it. The finest thing we saw on our whole Mississippi trip, we saw as we approached New Orleans in the steam-tug. This was the curving frontage of the crescent city lit up with the white glare of five miles of electric lights. It was a wonderful sight, and very beautiful. ===11 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 11. Chapter 51 Reminiscences WE left for St. Louis in the 'City of Baton Rouge,' on a delightfully hot day, but with the main purpose of my visit but lamely accomplished. I had hoped to hunt up and talk with a hundred steamboatmen, but got so pleasantly involved in the social life of the town that I got nothing more than mere five-minute talks with a couple of dozen of the craft. I was on the bench of the pilot-house when we backed out and 'straightened up' for the start--the boat pausing for a 'good ready,' in the old-fashioned way, and the black smoke piling out of the chimneys equally in the old-fashioned way. Then we began to gather momentum, and presently were fairly under way and booming along. It was all as natural and familiar--and so were the shoreward sights--as if there had been no break in my river life. There was a 'cub,' and I judged that he would take the wheel now; and he did. Captain Bixby stepped into the pilot- house. Presently the cub closed up on the rank of steamships. He made me nervous, for he allowed too much water to show between our boat and the ships. I knew quite well what was going to happen, because I could date back in my own life and inspect the record. The captain looked on, during a silent half-minute, then took the wheel himself, and crowded the boat in, till she went scraping along within a hand-breadth of the ships. It was exactly the favor which he had done me, about a quarter of a century before, in that same spot, the first time I ever steamed out of the port of New Orleans. It was a very great and sincere pleasure to me to see the thing repeated--with somebody else as victim. We made Natchez (three hundred miles) in twenty-two hours and a half-- much the swiftest passage I have ever made over that piece of water. The next morning I came on with the four o'clock watch, and saw Ritchie successfully run half a dozen crossings in a fog, using for his guidance the marked chart devised and patented by Bixby and himself. This sufficiently evidenced the great value of the chart. By and by, when the fog began to clear off, I noticed that the reflection of a tree in the smooth water of an overflowed bank, six hundred yards away, was stronger and blacker than the ghostly tree itself. The faint spectral trees, dimly glimpsed through the shredding fog, were very pretty things to see. We had a heavy thunder-storm at Natchez, another at Vicksburg, and still another about fifty miles below Memphis. They had an old-fashioned energy which had long been unfamiliar to me. This third storm was accompanied by a raging wind. We tied up to the bank when we saw the tempest coming, and everybody left the pilot-house but me. The wind bent the young trees down, exposing the pale underside of the leaves; and gust after gust followed, in quick succession, thrashing the branches violently up and down, and to this side and that, and creating swift waves of alternating green and white according to the side of the leaf that was exposed, and these waves raced after each other as do their kind over a wind-tossed field of oats. No color that was visible anywhere was quite natural--all tints were charged with a leaden tinge from the solid cloud-bank overhead. The river was leaden; all distances the same; and even the far-reaching ranks of combing white-caps were dully shaded by the dark, rich atmosphere through which their swarming legions marched. The thunder-peals were constant and deafening; explosion followed explosion with but inconsequential intervals between, and the reports grew steadily sharper and higher-keyed, and more trying to the ear; the lightning was as diligent as the thunder, and produced effects which enchanted the eye and sent electric ecstasies of mixed delight and apprehension shivering along every nerve in the body in unintermittent procession. The rain poured down in amazing volume; the ear-splitting thunder-peals broke nearer and nearer; the wind increased in fury and began to wrench off boughs and tree-tops and send them sailing away through space; the pilot-house fell to rocking and straining and cracking and surging, and I went down in the hold to see what time it was. People boast a good deal about Alpine thunderstorms; but the storms which I have had the luck to see in the Alps were not the equals of some which I have seen in the Mississippi Valley. I may not have seen the Alps do their best, of course, and if they can beat the Mississippi, I don't wish to. On this up trip I saw a little towhead (infant island) half a mile long, which had been formed during the past nineteen years. Since there was so much time to spare that nineteen years of it could be devoted to the construction of a mere towhead, where was the use, originally, in rushing this whole globe through in six days? It is likely that if more time had been taken, in the first place, the world would have been made right, and this ceaseless improving and repairing would not be necessary now. But if you hurry a world or a house, you are nearly sure to find out by and by that you have left out a towhead, or a broom-closet, or some other little convenience, here and there, which has got to be supplied, no matter how much expense and vexation it may cost. We had a succession of black nights, going up the river, and it was observable that whenever we landed, and suddenly inundated the trees with the intense sunburst of the electric light, a certain curious effect was always produced: hundreds of birds flocked instantly out from the masses of shining green foliage, and went careering hither and thither through the white rays, and often a song-bird tuned up and fell to singing. We judged that they mistook this superb artificial day for the genuine article. We had a delightful trip in that thoroughly well- ordered steamer, and regretted that it was accomplished so speedily. By means of diligence and activity, we managed to hunt out nearly all the old friends. One was missing, however; he went to his reward, whatever it was, two years ago. But I found out all about him. His case helped me to realize how lasting can be the effect of a very trifling occurrence. When he was an apprentice-blacksmith in our village, and I a schoolboy, a couple of young Englishmen came to the town and sojourned a while; and one day they got themselves up in cheap royal finery and did the Richard III swordfight with maniac energy and prodigious powwow, in the presence of the village boys. This blacksmith cub was there, and the histrionic poison entered his bones. This vast, lumbering, ignorant, dull-witted lout was stage-struck, and irrecoverably. He disappeared, and presently turned up in St. Louis. I ran across him there, by and by. He was standing musing on a street corner, with his left hand on his hip, the thumb of his right supporting his chin, face bowed and frowning, slouch hat pulled down over his forehead--imagining himself to be Othello or some such character, and imagining that the passing crowd marked his tragic bearing and were awestruck. I joined him, and tried to get him down out of the clouds, but did not succeed. However, he casually informed me, presently, that he was a member of the Walnut Street theater company--and he tried to say it with indifference, but the indifference was thin, and a mighty exultation showed through it. He said he was cast for a part in Julius Caesar, for that night, and if I should come I would see him. IF I should come! I said I wouldn't miss it if I were dead. I went away stupefied with astonishment, and saying to myself, 'How strange it is! WE always thought this fellow a fool; yet the moment he comes to a great city, where intelligence and appreciation abound, the talent concealed in this shabby napkin is at once discovered, and promptly welcomed and honored.' But I came away from the theater that night disappointed and offended; for I had had no glimpse of my hero, and his name was not in the bills. I met him on the street the next morning, and before I could speak, he asked-- 'Did you see me?' 'No, you weren't there.' He looked surprised and disappointed. He said-- 'Yes, I was. Indeed I was. I was a Roman soldier.' 'Which one?' 'Why didn't you see them Roman soldiers that stood back there in a rank, and sometimes marched in procession around the stage?' 'Do you mean the Roman army?--those six sandaled roustabouts in nightshirts, with tin shields and helmets, that marched around treading on each other's heels, in charge of a spider-legged consumptive dressed like themselves?' 'That's it! that's it! I was one of them Roman soldiers. I was the next to the last one. A half a year ago I used to always be the last one; but I've been promoted.' Well, they told me that that poor fellow remained a Roman soldier to the last--a matter of thirty-four years. Sometimes they cast him for a 'speaking part,' but not an elaborate one. He could be trusted to go and say, 'My lord, the carriage waits,' but if they ventured to add a sentence or two to this, his memory felt the strain and he was likely to miss fire. Yet, poor devil, he had been patiently studying the part of Hamlet for more than thirty years, and he lived and died in the belief that some day he would be invited to play it! And this is what came of that fleeting visit of those young Englishmen to our village such ages and ages ago! What noble horseshoes this man might have made, but for those Englishmen; and what an inadequate Roman soldier he DID make! A day or two after we reached St. Louis, I was walking along Fourth Street when a grizzly-headed man gave a sort of start as he passed me, then stopped, came back, inspected me narrowly, with a clouding brow, and finally said with deep asperity-- 'Look here, HAVE YOU GOT THAT DRINK YET?' A maniac, I judged, at first. But all in a flash I recognized him. I made an effort to blush that strained every muscle in me, and answered as sweetly and winningly as ever I knew how-- 'Been a little slow, but am just this minute closing in on the place where they keep it. Come in and help.' He softened, and said make it a bottle of champagne and he was agreeable. He said he had seen my name in the papers, and had put all his affairs aside and turned out, resolved to find me or die; and make me answer that question satisfactorily, or kill me; though the most of his late asperity had been rather counterfeit than otherwise. This meeting brought back to me the St. Louis riots of about thirty years ago. I spent a week there, at that time, in a boarding-house, and had this young fellow for a neighbor across the hall. We saw some of the fightings and killings; and by and by we went one night to an armory where two hundred young men had met, upon call, to be armed and go forth against the rioters, under command of a military man. We drilled till about ten o'clock at night; then news came that the mob were in great force in the lower end of the town, and were sweeping everything before them. Our column moved at once. It was a very hot night, and my musket was very heavy. We marched and marched; and the nearer we approached the seat of war, the hotter I grew and the thirstier I got. I was behind my friend; so, finally, I asked him to hold my musket while I dropped out and got a drink. Then I branched off and went home. I was not feeling any solicitude about him of course, because I knew he was so well armed, now, that he could take care of himself without any trouble. If I had had any doubts about that, I would have borrowed another musket for him. I left the city pretty early the next morning, and if this grizzled man had not happened to encounter my name in the papers the other day in St. Louis, and felt moved to seek me out, I should have carried to my grave a heart-torturing uncertainty as to whether he ever got out of the riots all right or not. I ought to have inquired, thirty years ago; I know that. And I would have inquired, if I had had the muskets; but, in the circumstances, he seemed better fixed to conduct the investigations than I was. One Monday, near the time of our visit to St. Louis, the 'Globe- Democrat' came out with a couple of pages of Sunday statistics, whereby it appeared that 119,448 St. Louis people attended the morning and evening church services the day before, and 23,102 children attended Sunday-school. Thus 142,550 persons, out of the city's total of 400,000 population, respected the day religious-wise. I found these statistics, in a condensed form, in a telegram of the Associated Press, and preserved them. They made it apparent that St. Louis was in a higher state of grace than she could have claimed to be in my time. But now that I canvass the figures narrowly, I suspect that the telegraph mutilated them. It cannot be that there are more than 150,000 Catholics in the town; the other 250,000 must be classified as Protestants. Out of these 250,000, according to this questionable telegram, only 26,362 attended church and Sunday-school, while out of the 150,000 Catholics, 116,188 went to church and Sunday-school. Chapter 52 A Burning Brand ALL at once the thought came into my mind, 'I have not sought out Mr. Brown.' Upon that text I desire to depart from the direct line of my subject, and make a little excursion. I wish to reveal a secret which I have carried with me nine years, and which has become burdensome. Upon a certain occasion, nine years ago, I had said, with strong feeling, 'If ever I see St. Louis again, I will seek out Mr. Brown, the great grain merchant, and ask of him the privilege of shaking him by the hand.' The occasion and the circumstances were as follows. A friend of mine, a clergyman, came one evening and said-- 'I have a most remarkable letter here, which I want to read to you, if I can do it without breaking down. I must preface it with some explanations, however. The letter is written by an ex-thief and ex-vagabond of the lowest origin and basest rearing, a man all stained with crime and steeped in ignorance; but, thank God, with a mine of pure gold hidden away in him, as you shall see. His letter is written to a burglar named Williams, who is serving a nine-year term in a certain State prison, for burglary. Williams was a particularly daring burglar, and plied that trade during a number of years; but he was caught at last and jailed, to await trial in a town where he had broken into a house at night, pistol in hand, and forced the owner to hand over to him $8,000 in government bonds. Williams was not a common sort of person, by any means; he was a graduate of Harvard College, and came of good New England stock. His father was a clergyman. While lying in jail, his health began to fail, and he was threatened with consumption. This fact, together with the opportunity for reflection afforded by solitary confinement, had its effect--its natural effect. He fell into serious thought; his early training asserted itself with power, and wrought with strong influence upon his mind and heart. He put his old life behind him, and became an earnest Christian. Some ladies in the town heard of this, visited him, and by their encouraging words supported him in his good resolutions and strengthened him to continue in his new life. The trial ended in his conviction and sentence to the State prison for the term of nine years, as I have before said. In the prison he became acquainted with the poor wretch referred to in the beginning of my talk, Jack Hunt, the writer of the letter which I am going to read. You will see that the acquaintanceship bore fruit for Hunt. When Hunt's time was out, he wandered to St. Louis; and from that place he wrote his letter to Williams. The letter got no further than the office of the prison warden, of course; prisoners are not often allowed to receive letters from outside. The prison authorities read this letter, but did not destroy it. They had not the heart to do it. They read it to several persons, and eventually it fell into the hands of those ladies of whom I spoke a while ago. The other day I came across an old friend of mine--a clergyman--who had seen this letter, and was full of it. The mere remembrance of it so moved him that he could not talk of it without his voice breaking. He promised to get a copy of it for me; and here it is --an exact copy, with all the imperfections of the original preserved. It has many slang expressions in it--thieves' argot--but their meaning has been interlined, in parentheses, by the prison authorities'-- St. Louis, June 9th 1872. Mr. W---- friend Charlie if i may call you so: i no you are surprised to get a letter from me, but i hope you won't be mad at my writing to you. i want to tell you my thanks for the way you talked to me when i was in prison--it has led me to try and be a better man; i guess you thought i did not cair for what you said, & at the first go off I didn't, but i noed you was a man who had don big work with good men & want no sucker, nor want gasing & all the boys knod it. I used to think at nite what you said, & for it i nocked off swearing months before my time was up, for i saw it want no good, nohow--the day my time was up you told me if i would shake the cross (QUIT STEALING) & live on the square for months, it would be the best job i ever done in my life. The state agent give me a ticket to here, & on the car i thought more of what you said to me, but didn't make up my mind. When we got to Chicago on the cars from there to here, I pulled off an old woman's leather; (ROBBED HER OF HER POCKETBOOK) i hadn't no more than got it off when i wished i hadn't done it, for awhile before that i made up my mind to be a square bloke, for months on your word, but forgot it when i saw the leather was a grip (EASY TO GET)--but i kept clos to her & when she got out of the cars at a way place i said, marm have you lost anything. & she tumbled (DISCOVERED) her leather was off (GONE)--is this it says i, giving it to her--well if you aint honest, says she, but i hadn't got cheak enough to stand that sort of talk, so i left her in a hurry. When i got here i had $1 and 25 cents left & i didn't get no work for 3 days as i aint strong enough for roust about on a steam bote (FOR A DECK HAND)--The afternoon of the 3rd day I spent my last 10 cts for moons (LARGE, ROUND SEA-BISCUIT) & cheese & i felt pretty rough & was thinking i would have to go on the dipe (PICKING POCKETS) again, when i thought of what you once said about a fellows calling on the Lord when he was in hard luck, & i thought i would try it once anyhow, but when i tryed it i got stuck on the start, & all i could get off wos, Lord give a poor fellow a chance to square it for 3 months for Christ's sake, amen; & i kept a thinking, of it over and over as i went along--about an hour after that i was in 4th St. & this is what happened & is the cause of my being where i am now & about which i will tell you before i get done writing. As i was walking along herd a big noise & saw a horse running away with a carriage with 2 children in it, & I grabed up a peace of box cover from the side walk & run in the middle of the street, & when the horse came up i smashed him over the head as hard as i could drive--the bord split to peces & the horse checked up a little & I grabbed the reigns & pulled his head down until he stopped--the gentleman what owned him came running up & soon as he saw the children were all rite, he shook hands with me and gave me a $50 green back, & my asking the Lord to help me come into my head, & i was so thunderstruck i couldn't drop the reigns nor say nothing--he saw something was up, & coming back to me said, my boy are you hurt? & the thought come into my head just then to ask him for work; & i asked him to take back the bill and give me a job--says he, jump in here & lets talk about it, but keep the money--he asked me if i could take care of horses & i said yes, for i used to hang round livery stables & often would help clean & drive horses, he told me he wanted a man for that work, & would give me $16 a month & bord me. You bet i took that chance at once. that nite in my little room over the stable i sat a long time thinking over my past life & of what had just happened & i just got down on my nees & thanked the Lord for the job & to help me to square it, & to bless you for putting me up to it, & the next morning i done it again & got me some new togs (CLOTHES) & a bible for i made up my mind after what the Lord had done for me i would read the bible every nite and morning, & ask him to keep an eye on me. When I had been there about a week Mr. Brown (that's his name) came in my room one nite and saw me reading the bible--he asked me if i was a Christian & i told him no--he asked me how it was i read the bible instead of papers & books--Well Charlie i thought i had better give him a square deal in the start, so i told him all about my being in prison & about you, & how i had almost done give up looking for work & how the Lord got me the job when I asked him; & the only way i had to pay him back was to read the bible & square it, & i asked him to give me a chance for 3 months--he talked to me like a father for a long time, & told me i could stay & then i felt better than ever i had done in my life, for i had given Mr. Brown a fair start with me & now i didn't fear no one giving me a back cap (EXPOSING HIS PAST LIFE) & running me off the job--the next morning he called me into the library & gave me another square talk, & advised me to study some every day, & he would help me one or 2 hours every nite, & he gave me a Arithmetic, a spelling book, a Geography & a writing book, & he hers me every nite--he lets me come into the house to prayers every morning, & got me put in a bible class in the Sunday School which i likes very much for it helps me to understand my bible better. Now, Charlie the 3 months on the square are up 2 months ago, & as you said, it is the best job i ever did in my life, & i commenced another of the same sort right away, only it is to God helping me to last a lifetime Charlie--i wrote this letter to tell you I do think God has forgiven my sins & herd your prayers, for you told me you should pray for me--i no i love to read his word & tell him all my troubles & he helps me i know for i have plenty of chances to steal but i don't feel to as i once did & now i take more pleasure in going to church than to the theater & that wasnt so once--our minister and others often talk with me & a month ago they wanted me to join the church, but I said no, not now, i may be mistaken in my feelings, i will wait awhile, but now i feel that God has called me & on the first Sunday in July i will join the church--dear friend i wish i could write to you as i feel, but i cant do it yet--you no i learned to read and write while prisons & i aint got well enough along to write as i would talk; i no i aint spelled all the words rite in this & lots of other mistakes but you will excuse it i no, for you no i was brought up in a poor house until i run away, & that i never new who my father and mother was & i dont no my right name, & i hope you wont be mad at me, but i have as much rite to one name as another & i have taken your name, for you wont use it when you get out i no, & you are the man i think most of in the world; so i hope you wont be mad--I am doing well, i put $10 a month in bank with $25 of the $50-- if you ever want any or all of it let me know, & it is yours. i wish you would let me send you some now. I send you with this a receipt for a year of Littles Living Age, i didn't know what you would like & i told Mr. Brown & he said he thought you would like it--i wish i was nere you so i could send you chuck (REFRESHMENTS) on holidays; it would spoil this weather from here, but i will send you a box next thanksgiving any way--next week Mr. Brown takes me into his store as lite porter & will advance me as soon as i know a little more--he keeps a big granary store, wholesale--i forgot to tell you of my mission school, sunday school class--the school is in the sunday afternoon, i went out two sunday afternoons, and picked up seven kids (LITTLE BOYS) & got them to come in. two of them new as much as i did & i had them put in a class where they could learn something. i dont no much myself, but as these kids cant read i get on nicely with them. i make sure of them by going after them every Sunday hour before school time, I also got 4 girls to come. tell Mack and Harry about me, if they will come out here when their time is up i will get them jobs at once. i hope you will excuse this long letter & all mistakes, i wish i could see you for i cant write as i would talk--i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--i was afraid when you was bleeding you would die--give my respects to all the boys and tell them how i am doing--i am doing well and every one here treats me as kind as they can--Mr. Brown is going to write to you sometime--i hope some day you will write to me, this letter is from your very true friend C---- W---- who you know as Jack Hunt. I send you Mr. Brown's card. Send my letter to him. Here was true eloquence; irresistible eloquence; and without a single grace or ornament to help it out. I have seldom been so deeply stirred by any piece of writing. The reader of it halted, all the way through, on a lame and broken voice; yet he had tried to fortify his feelings by several private readings of the letter before venturing into company with it. He was practising upon me to see if there was any hope of his being able to read the document to his prayer-meeting with anything like a decent command over his feelings. The result was not promising. However, he determined to risk it; and did. He got through tolerably well; but his audience broke down early, and stayed in that condition to the end. The fame of the letter spread through the town. A brother minister came and borrowed the manuscript, put it bodily into a sermon, preached the sermon to twelve hundred people on a Sunday morning, and the letter drowned them in their own tears. Then my friend put it into a sermon and went before his Sunday morning congregation with it. It scored another triumph. The house wept as one individual. My friend went on summer vacation up into the fishing regions of our northern British neighbors, and carried this sermon with him, since he might possibly chance to need a sermon. He was asked to preach, one day. The little church was full. Among the people present were the late Dr. J. G. Holland, the late Mr. Seymour of the 'New York Times,' Mr. Page, the philanthropist and temperance advocate, and, I think, Senator Frye, of Maine. The marvelous letter did its wonted work; all the people were moved, all the people wept; the tears flowed in a steady stream down Dr. Holland's cheeks, and nearly the same can be said with regard to all who were there. Mr. Page was so full of enthusiasm over the letter that he said he would not rest until he made pilgrimage to that prison, and had speech with the man who had been able to inspire a fellow-unfortunate to write so priceless a tract. Ah, that unlucky Page!--and another man. If they had only been in Jericho, that letter would have rung through the world and stirred all the hearts of all the nations for a thousand years to come, and nobody might ever have found out that it was the confoundedest, brazenest, ingeniousest piece of fraud and humbuggery that was ever concocted to fool poor confiding mortals with! The letter was a pure swindle, and that is the truth. And take it by and large, it was without a compeer among swindles. It was perfect, it was rounded, symmetrical, complete, colossal! The reader learns it at this point; but we didn't learn it till some miles and weeks beyond this stage of the affair. My friend came back from the woods, and he and other clergymen and lay missionaries began once more to inundate audiences with their tears and the tears of said audiences; I begged hard for permission to print the letter in a magazine and tell the watery story of its triumphs; numbers of people got copies of the letter, with permission to circulate them in writing, but not in print; copies were sent to the Sandwich Islands and other far regions. Charles Dudley Warner was at church, one day, when the worn letter was read and wept over. At the church door, afterward, he dropped a peculiarly cold iceberg down the clergyman's back with the question-- 'Do you know that letter to be genuine?' It was the first suspicion that had ever been voiced; but it had that sickening effect which first-uttered suspicions against one's idol always have. Some talk followed-- 'Why--what should make you suspect that it isn't genuine?' 'Nothing that I know of, except that it is too neat, and compact, and fluent, and nicely put together for an ignorant person, an unpractised hand. I think it was done by an educated man.' The literary artist had detected the literary machinery. If you will look at the letter now, you will detect it yourself--it is observable in every line. Straightway the clergyman went off, with this seed of suspicion sprouting in him, and wrote to a minister residing in that town where Williams had been jailed and converted; asked for light; and also asked if a person in the literary line (meaning me) might be allowed to print the letter and tell its history. He presently received this answer-- Rev. ---- ---- MY DEAR FRIEND,--In regard to that 'convict's letter' there can be no doubt as to its genuineness. 'Williams,' to whom it was written, lay in our jail and professed to have been converted, and Rev. Mr. ----, the chaplain, had great faith in the genuineness of the change--as much as one can have in any such case. The letter was sent to one of our ladies, who is a Sunday-school teacher,--sent either by Williams himself, or the chaplain of the State's prison, probably. She has been greatly annoyed in having so much publicity, lest it might seem a breach of confidence, or be an injury to Williams. In regard to its publication, I can give no permission; though if the names and places were omitted, and especially if sent out of the country, I think you might take the responsibility and do it. It is a wonderful letter, which no Christian genius, much less one unsanctified, could ever have written. As showing the work of grace in a human heart, and in a very degraded and wicked one, it proves its own origin and reproves our weak faith in its power to cope with any form of wickedness. 'Mr. Brown' of St. Louis, some one said, was a Hartford man. Do all whom you send from Hartford serve their Master as well? P.S.--Williams is still in the State's prison, serving out a long sentence--of nine years, I think. He has been sick and threatened with consumption, but I have not inquired after him lately. This lady that I speak of corresponds with him, I presume, and will be quite sure to look after him. This letter arrived a few days after it was written--and up went Mr. Williams's stock again. Mr. Warner's low-down suspicion was laid in the cold, cold grave, where it apparently belonged. It was a suspicion based upon mere internal evidence, anyway; and when you come to internal evidence, it's a big field and a game that two can play at: as witness this other internal evidence, discovered by the writer of the note above quoted, that 'it is a wonderful letter--which no Christian genius, much less one unsanctified, could ever have written.' I had permission now to print--provided I suppressed names and places and sent my narrative out of the country. So I chose an Australian magazine for vehicle, as being far enough out of the country, and set myself to work on my article. And the ministers set the pumps going again, with the letter to work the handles. But meantime Brother Page had been agitating. He had not visited the penitentiary, but he had sent a copy of the illustrious letter to the chaplain of that institution, and accompanied it with--apparently inquiries. He got an answer, dated four days later than that other Brother's reassuring epistle; and before my article was complete, it wandered into my hands. The original is before me, now, and I here append it. It is pretty well loaded with internal evidence of the most solid description-- STATE'S PRISON, CHAPLAIN'S OFFICE, July 11, 1873. DEAR BRO. PAGE,--Herewith please find the letter kindly loaned me. I am afraid its genuineness cannot be established. It purports to be addressed to some prisoner here. No such letter ever came to a prisoner here. All letters received are carefully read by officers of the prison before they go into the hands of the convicts, and any such letter could not be forgotten. Again, Charles Williams is not a Christian man, but a dissolute, cunning prodigal, whose father is a minister of the gospel. His name is an assumed one. I am glad to have made your acquaintance. I am preparing a lecture upon life seen through prison bars, and should like to deliver the same in your vicinity. And so ended that little drama. My poor article went into the fire; for whereas the materials for it were now more abundant and infinitely richer than they had previously been, there were parties all around me, who, although longing for the publication before, were a unit for suppression at this stage and complexion of the game. They said: 'Wait --the wound is too fresh, yet.' All the copies of the famous letter except mine disappeared suddenly; and from that time onward, the aforetime same old drought set in in the churches. As a rule, the town was on a spacious grin for a while, but there were places in it where the grin did not appear, and where it was dangerous to refer to the ex-convict's letter. A word of explanation. 'Jack Hunt,' the professed writer of the letter, was an imaginary person. The burglar Williams--Harvard graduate, son of a minister--wrote the letter himself, to himself: got it smuggled out of the prison; got it conveyed to persons who had supported and encouraged him in his conversion--where he knew two things would happen: the genuineness of the letter would not be doubted or inquired into; and the nub of it would be noticed, and would have valuable effect--the effect, indeed, of starting a movement to get Mr. Williams pardoned out of prison. That 'nub' is so ingeniously, so casually, flung in, and immediately left there in the tail of the letter, undwelt upon, that an indifferent reader would never suspect that it was the heart and core of the epistle, if he even took note of it at all, This is the 'nub'-- 'i hope the warm weather is doing your lungs good--I WAS AFRAID WHEN YOU WAS BLEEDING YOU WOULD DIE--give my respects,' etc. That is all there is of it--simply touch and go--no dwelling upon it. Nevertheless it was intended for an eye that would be swift to see it; and it was meant to move a kind heart to try to effect the liberation of a poor reformed and purified fellow lying in the fell grip of consumption. When I for the first time heard that letter read, nine years ago, I felt that it was the most remarkable one I had ever encountered. And it so warmed me toward Mr. Brown of St. Louis that I said that if ever I visited that city again, I would seek out that excellent man and kiss the hem of his garment if it was a new one. Well, I visited St. Louis, but I did not hunt for Mr. Brown; for, alas! the investigations of long ago had proved that the benevolent Brown, like 'Jack Hunt,' was not a real person, but a sheer invention of that gifted rascal, Williams-- burglar, Harvard graduate, son of a clergyman. Chapter 53 My Boyhood's Home WE took passage in one of the fast boats of the St. Louis and St. Paul Packet Company, and started up the river. When I, as a boy, first saw the mouth of the Missouri River, it was twenty-two or twenty-three miles above St. Louis, according to the estimate of pilots; the wear and tear of the banks have moved it down eight miles since then; and the pilots say that within five years the river will cut through and move the mouth down five miles more, which will bring it within ten miles of St. Louis. About nightfall we passed the large and flourishing town of Alton, Illinois; and before daylight next morning the town of Louisiana, Missouri, a sleepy village in my day, but a brisk railway center now; however, all the towns out there are railway centers now. I could not clearly recognize the place. This seemed odd to me, for when I retired from the rebel army in '61 I retired upon Louisiana in good order; at least in good enough order for a person who had not yet learned how to retreat according to the rules of war, and had to trust to native genius. It seemed to me that for a first attempt at a retreat it was not badly done. I had done no advancing in all that campaign that was at all equal to it. There was a railway bridge across the river here well sprinkled with glowing lights, and a very beautiful sight it was. At seven in the morning we reached Hannibal, Missouri, where my boyhood was spent. I had had a glimpse of it fifteen years ago, and another glimpse six years earlier, but both were so brief that they hardly counted. The only notion of the town that remained in my mind was the memory of it as I had known it when I first quitted it twenty-nine years ago. That picture of it was still as clear and vivid to me as a photograph. I stepped ashore with the feeling of one who returns out of a dead-and-gone generation. I had a sort of realizing sense of what the Bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out and look upon Paris after years of captivity, and note how curiously the familiar and the strange were mixed together before them. I saw the new houses-- saw them plainly enough--but they did not affect the older picture in my mind, for through their solid bricks and mortar I saw the vanished houses, which had formerly stood there, with perfect distinctness. It was Sunday morning, and everybody was abed yet. So I passed through the vacant streets, still seeing the town as it was, and not as it is, and recognizing and metaphorically shaking hands with a hundred familiar objects which no longer exist; and finally climbed Holiday's Hill to get a comprehensive view. The whole town lay spread out below me then, and I could mark and fix every locality, every detail. Naturally, I was a good deal moved. I said, 'Many of the people I once knew in this tranquil refuge of my childhood are now in heaven; some, I trust, are in the other place.' The things about me and before me made me feel like a boy again--convinced me that I was a boy again, and that I had simply been dreaming an unusually long dream; but my reflections spoiled all that; for they forced me to say, 'I see fifty old houses down yonder, into each of which I could enter and find either a man or a woman who was a baby or unborn when I noticed those houses last, or a grandmother who was a plump young bride at that time.' From this vantage ground the extensive view up and down the river, and wide over the wooded expanses of Illinois, is very beautiful--one of the most beautiful on the Mississippi, I think; which is a hazardous remark to make, for the eight hundred miles of river between St. Louis and St. Paul afford an unbroken succession of lovely pictures. It may be that my affection for the one in question biases my judgment in its favor; I cannot say as to that. No matter, it was satisfyingly beautiful to me, and it had this advantage over all the other friends whom I was about to greet again: it had suffered no change; it was as young and fresh and comely and gracious as ever it had been; whereas, the faces of the others would be old, and scarred with the campaigns of life, and marked with their griefs and defeats, and would give me no upliftings of spirit. An old gentleman, out on an early morning walk, came along, and we discussed the weather, and then drifted into other matters. I could not remember his face. He said he had been living here twenty-eight years. So he had come after my time, and I had never seen him before. I asked him various questions; first about a mate of mine in Sunday school--what became of him? 'He graduated with honor in an Eastern college, wandered off into the world somewhere, succeeded at nothing, passed out of knowledge and memory years ago, and is supposed to have gone to the dogs.' 'He was bright, and promised well when he was a boy.' 'Yes, but the thing that happened is what became of it all.' I asked after another lad, altogether the brightest in our village school when I was a boy. 'He, too, was graduated with honors, from an Eastern college; but life whipped him in every battle, straight along, and he died in one of the Territories, years ago, a defeated man.' I asked after another of the bright boys. 'He is a success, always has been, always will be, I think.' I inquired after a young fellow who came to the town to study for one of the professions when I was a boy. 'He went at something else before he got through--went from medicine to law, or from law to medicine--then to some other new thing; went away for a year, came back with a young wife; fell to drinking, then to gambling behind the door; finally took his wife and two young children to her father's, and went off to Mexico; went from bad to worse, and finally died there, without a cent to buy a shroud, and without a friend to attend the funeral.' 'Pity, for he was the best-natured, and most cheery and hopeful young fellow that ever was.' I named another boy. 'Oh, he is all right. Lives here yet; has a wife and children, and is prospering.' Same verdict concerning other boys. I named three school-girls. 'The first two live here, are married and have children; the other is long ago dead--never married.' I named, with emotion, one of my early sweethearts. 'She is all right. Been married three times; buried two husbands, divorced from the third, and I hear she is getting ready to marry an old fellow out in Colorado somewhere. She's got children scattered around here and there, most everywheres.' The answer to several other inquiries was brief and simple-- 'Killed in the war.' I named another boy. 'Well, now, his case is curious! There wasn't a human being in this town but knew that that boy was a perfect chucklehead; perfect dummy; just a stupid ass, as you may say. Everybody knew it, and everybody said it. Well, if that very boy isn't the first lawyer in the State of Missouri to-day, I'm a Democrat!' 'Is that so?' 'It's actually so. I'm telling you the truth.' 'How do you account for it?' 'Account for it? There ain't any accounting for it, except that if you send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned fool they'll never find it out. There's one thing sure--if I had a damned fool I should know what to do with him: ship him to St. Louis-- it's the noblest market in the world for that kind of property. Well, when you come to look at it all around, and chew at it and think it over, don't it just bang anything you ever heard of?' 'Well, yes, it does seem to. But don't you think maybe it was the Hannibal people who were mistaken about the boy, and not the St. Louis people' 'Oh, nonsense! The people here have known him from the very cradle-- they knew him a hundred times better than the St. Louis idiots could have known him. No, if you have got any damned fools that you want to realize on, take my advice--send them to St. Louis.' I mentioned a great number of people whom I had formerly known. Some were dead, some were gone away, some had prospered, some had come to naught; but as regarded a dozen or so of the lot, the answer was comforting: 'Prosperous--live here yet--town littered with their children.' I asked about Miss ----. Died in the insane asylum three or four years ago--never was out of it from the time she went in; and was always suffering, too; never got a shred of her mind back.' If he spoke the truth, here was a heavy tragedy, indeed. Thirty-six years in a madhouse, that some young fools might have some fun! I was a small boy, at the time; and I saw those giddy young ladies come tiptoeing into the room where Miss ---- sat reading at midnight by a lamp. The girl at the head of the file wore a shroud and a doughface, she crept behind the victim, touched her on the shoulder, and she looked up and screamed, and then fell into convulsions. She did not recover from the fright, but went mad. In these days it seems incredible that people believed in ghosts so short a time ago. But they did. After asking after such other folk as I could call to mind, I finally inquired about MYSELF: 'Oh, he succeeded well enough--another case of damned fool. If they'd sent him to St. Louis, he'd have succeeded sooner.' It was with much satisfaction that I recognized the wisdom of having told this candid gentleman, in the beginning, that my name was Smith. Chapter 54 Past and Present Being left to myself, up there, I went on picking out old houses in the distant town, and calling back their former inmates out of the moldy past. Among them I presently recognized the house of the father of Lem Hackett (fictitious name). It carried me back more than a generation in a moment, and landed me in the midst of a time when the happenings of life were not the natural and logical results of great general laws, but of special orders, and were freighted with very precise and distinct purposes--partly punitive in intent, partly admonitory; and usually local in application. When I was a small boy, Lem Hackett was drowned--on a Sunday. He fell out of an empty flat-boat, where he was playing. Being loaded with sin, he went to the bottom like an anvil. He was the only boy in the village who slept that night. We others all lay awake, repenting. We had not needed the information, delivered from the pulpit that evening, that Lem's was a case of special judgment--we knew that, already. There was a ferocious thunder-storm, that night, and it raged continuously until near dawn. The winds blew, the windows rattled, the rain swept along the roof in pelting sheets, and at the briefest of intervals the inky blackness of the night vanished, the houses over the way glared out white and blinding for a quivering instant, then the solid darkness shut down again and a splitting peal of thunder followed, which seemed to rend everything in the neighborhood to shreds and splinters. I sat up in bed quaking and shuddering, waiting for the destruction of the world, and expecting it. To me there was nothing strange or incongruous in heaven's making such an uproar about Lem Hackett. Apparently it was the right and proper thing to do. Not a doubt entered my mind that all the angels were grouped together, discussing this boy's case and observing the awful bombardment of our beggarly little village with satisfaction and approval. There was one thing which disturbed me in the most serious way; that was the thought that this centering of the celestial interest on our village could not fail to attract the attention of the observers to people among us who might otherwise have escaped notice for years. I felt that I was not only one of those people, but the very one most likely to be discovered. That discovery could have but one result: I should be in the fire with Lem before the chill of the river had been fairly warmed out of him. I knew that this would be only just and fair. I was increasing the chances against myself all the time, by feeling a secret bitterness against Lem for having attracted this fatal attention to me, but I could not help it--this sinful thought persisted in infesting my breast in spite of me. Every time the lightning glared I caught my breath, and judged I was gone. In my terror and misery, I meanly began to suggest other boys, and mention acts of theirs which were wickeder than mine, and peculiarly needed punishment--and I tried to pretend to myself that I was simply doing this in a casual way, and without intent to divert the heavenly attention to them for the purpose of getting rid of it myself. With deep sagacity I put these mentions into the form of sorrowing recollections and left-handed sham- supplications that the sins of those boys might be allowed to pass unnoticed--'Possibly they may repent.' 'It is true that Jim Smith broke a window and lied about it--but maybe he did not mean any harm. And although Tom Holmes says more bad words than any other boy in the village, he probably intends to repent--though he has never said he would. And whilst it is a fact that John Jones did fish a little on Sunday, once, he didn't really catch anything but only just one small useless mud-cat; and maybe that wouldn't have been so awful if he had thrown it back--as he says he did, but he didn't. Pity but they would repent of these dreadful things--and maybe they will yet.' But while I was shamefully trying to draw attention to these poor chaps --who were doubtless directing the celestial attention to me at the same moment, though I never once suspected that--I had heedlessly left my candle burning. It was not a time to neglect even trifling precautions. There was no occasion to add anything to the facilities for attracting notice to me--so I put the light out. It was a long night to me, and perhaps the most distressful one I ever spent. I endured agonies of remorse for sins which I knew I had committed, and for others which I was not certain about, yet was sure that they had been set down against me in a book by an angel who was wiser than I and did not trust such important matters to memory. It struck me, by and by, that I had been making a most foolish and calamitous mistake, in one respect: doubtless I had not only made my own destruction sure by directing attention to those other boys, but had already accomplished theirs!--Doubtless the lightning had stretched them all dead in their beds by this time! The anguish and the fright which this thought gave me made my previous sufferings seem trifling by comparison. Things had become truly serious. I resolved to turn over a new leaf instantly; I also resolved to connect myself with the church the next day, if I survived to see its sun appear. I resolved to cease from sin in all its forms, and to lead a high and blameless life for ever after. I would be punctual at church and Sunday-school; visit the sick; carry baskets of victuals to the poor (simply to fulfil the regulation conditions, although I knew we had none among us so poor but they would smash the basket over my head for my pains); I would instruct other boys in right ways, and take the resulting trouncings meekly; I would subsist entirely on tracts; I would invade the rum shop and warn the drunkard-- and finally, if I escaped the fate of those who early become too good to live, I would go for a missionary. The storm subsided toward daybreak, and I dozed gradually to sleep with a sense of obligation to Lem Hackett for going to eternal suffering in that abrupt way, and thus preventing a far more dreadful disaster--my own loss. But when I rose refreshed, by and by, and found that those other boys were still alive, I had a dim sense that perhaps the whole thing was a false alarm; that the entire turmoil had been on Lem's account and nobody's else. The world looked so bright and safe that there did not seem to be any real occasion to turn over a new leaf. I was a little subdued, during that day, and perhaps the next; after that, my purpose of reforming slowly dropped out of my mind, and I had a peaceful, comfortable time again, until the next storm. That storm came about three weeks later; and it was the most unaccountable one, to me, that I had ever experienced; for on the afternoon of that day, 'Dutchy' was drowned. Dutchy belonged to our Sunday-school. He was a German lad who did not know enough to come in out of the rain; but he was exasperatingly good, and had a prodigious memory. One Sunday he made himself the envy of all the youth and the talk of all the admiring village, by reciting three thousand verses of Scripture without missing a word; then he went off the very next day and got drowned. Circumstances gave to his death a peculiar impressiveness. We were all bathing in a muddy creek which had a deep hole in it, and in this hole the coopers had sunk a pile of green hickory hoop poles to soak, some twelve feet under water. We were diving and 'seeing who could stay under longest.' We managed to remain down by holding on to the hoop poles. Dutchy made such a poor success of it that he was hailed with laughter and derision every time his head appeared above water. At last he seemed hurt with the taunts, and begged us to stand still on the bank and be fair with him and give him an honest count--'be friendly and kind just this once, and not miscount for the sake of having the fun of laughing at him.' Treacherous winks were exchanged, and all said 'All right, Dutchy--go ahead, we'll play fair.' Dutchy plunged in, but the boys, instead of beginning to count, followed the lead of one of their number and scampered to a range of blackberry bushes close by and hid behind it. They imagined Dutchy's humiliation, when he should rise after a superhuman effort and find the place silent and vacant, nobody there to applaud. They were 'so full of laugh' with the idea, that they were continually exploding into muffled cackles. Time swept on, and presently one who was peeping through the briers, said, with surprise-- 'Why, he hasn't come up, yet!' The laughing stopped. 'Boys, it 's a splendid dive,' said one. 'Never mind that,' said another, 'the joke on him is all the better for it.' There was a remark or two more, and then a pause. Talking ceased, and all began to peer through the vines. Before long, the boys' faces began to look uneasy, then anxious, then terrified. Still there was no movement of the placid water. Hearts began to beat fast, and faces to turn pale. We all glided out, silently, and stood on the bank, our horrified eyes wandering back and forth from each other's countenances to the water. 'Somebody must go down and see!' Yes, that was plain; but nobody wanted that grisly task. 'Draw straws!' So we did--with hands which shook so, that we hardly knew what we were about. The lot fell to me, and I went down. The water was so muddy I could not see anything, but I felt around among the hoop poles, and presently grasped a limp wrist which gave me no response--and if it had I should not have known it, I let it go with such a frightened suddenness. The boy had been caught among the hoop poles and entangled there, helplessly. I fled to the surface and told the awful news. Some of us knew that if the boy were dragged out at once he might possibly be resuscitated, but we never thought of that. We did not think of anything; we did not know what to do, so we did nothing--except that the smaller lads cried, piteously, and we all struggled frantically into our clothes, putting on anybody's that came handy, and getting them wrong- side-out and upside-down, as a rule. Then we scurried away and gave the alarm, but none of us went back to see the end of the tragedy. We had a more important thing to attend to: we all flew home, and lost not a moment in getting ready to lead a better life. The night presently closed down. Then came on that tremendous and utterly unaccountable storm. I was perfectly dazed; I could not understand it. It seemed to me that there must be some mistake. The elements were turned loose, and they rattled and banged and blazed away in the most blind and frantic manner. All heart and hope went out of me, and the dismal thought kept floating through my brain, 'If a boy who knows three thousand verses by heart is not satisfactory, what chance is there for anybody else?' Of course I never questioned for a moment that the storm was on Dutchy's account, or that he or any other inconsequential animal was worthy of such a majestic demonstration from on high; the lesson of it was the only thing that troubled me; for it convinced me that if Dutchy, with all his perfections, was not a delight, it would be vain for me to turn over a new leaf, for I must infallibly fall hopelessly short of that boy, no matter how hard I might try. Nevertheless I did turn it over--a highly educated fear compelled me to do that--but succeeding days of cheerfulness and sunshine came bothering around, and within a month I had so drifted backward that again I was as lost and comfortable as ever. Breakfast time approached while I mused these musings and called these ancient happenings back to mind; so I got me back into the present and went down the hill. On my way through town to the hotel, I saw the house which was my home when I was a boy. At present rates, the people who now occupy it are of no more value than I am; but in my time they would have been worth not less than five hundred dollars apiece. They are colored folk. After breakfast, I went out alone again, intending to hunt up some of the Sunday-schools and see how this generation of pupils might compare with their progenitors who had sat with me in those places and had probably taken me as a model--though I do not remember as to that now. By the public square there had been in my day a shabby little brick church called the 'Old Ship of Zion,' which I had attended as a Sunday- school scholar; and I found the locality easily enough, but not the old church; it was gone, and a trig and rather hilarious new edifice was in its place. The pupils were better dressed and better looking than were those of my time; consequently they did not resemble their ancestors; and consequently there was nothing familiar to me in their faces. Still, I contemplated them with a deep interest and a yearning wistfulness, and if I had been a girl I would have cried; for they were the offspring, and represented, and occupied the places, of boys and girls some of whom I had loved to love, and some of whom I had loved to hate, but all of whom were dear to me for the one reason or the other, so many years gone by--and, Lord, where be they now! I was mightily stirred, and would have been grateful to be allowed to remain unmolested and look my fill; but a bald-summited superintendent who had been a tow-headed Sunday-school mate of mine on that spot in the early ages, recognized me, and I talked a flutter of wild nonsense to those children to hide the thoughts which were in me, and which could not have been spoken without a betrayal of feeling that would have been recognized as out of character with me. Making speeches without preparation is no gift of mine; and I was resolved to shirk any new opportunity, but in the next and larger Sunday-school I found myself in the rear of the assemblage; so I was very willing to go on the platform a moment for the sake of getting a good look at the scholars. On the spur of the moment I could not recall any of the old idiotic talks which visitors used to insult me with when I was a pupil there; and I was sorry for this, since it would have given me time and excuse to dawdle there and take a long and satisfying look at what I feel at liberty to say was an array of fresh young comeliness not matchable in another Sunday-school of the same size. As I talked merely to get a chance to inspect; and as I strung out the random rubbish solely to prolong the inspection, I judged it but decent to confess these low motives, and I did so. If the Model Boy was in either of these Sunday-schools, I did not see him. The Model Boy of my time--we never had but the one--was perfect: perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie. This fellow's reproachlessness was a standing reproach to every lad in the village. He was the admiration of all the mothers, and the detestation of all their sons. I was told what became of him, but as it was a disappointment to me, I will not enter into details. He succeeded in life. Chapter 55 A Vendetta and Other Things DURING my three days' stay in the town, I woke up every morning with the impression that I was a boy--for in my dreams the faces were all young again, and looked as they had looked in the old times--but I went to bed a hundred years old, every night--for meantime I had been seeing those faces as they are now. Of course I suffered some surprises, along at first, before I had become adjusted to the changed state of things. I met young ladies who did not seem to have changed at all; but they turned out to be the daughters of the young ladies I had in mind--sometimes their grand-daughters. When you are told that a stranger of fifty is a grandmother, there is nothing surprising about it; but if, on the contrary, she is a person whom you knew as a little girl, it seems impossible. You say to yourself, 'How can a little girl be a grandmother.' It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still, in that matter. I noticed that the greatest changes observable were with the women, not the men. I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be good. There was a saddler whom I wished to see; but he was gone. Dead, these many years, they said. Once or twice a day, the saddler used to go tearing down the street, putting on his coat as he went; and then everybody knew a steamboat was coming. Everybody knew, also, that John Stavely was not expecting anybody by the boat--or any freight, either; and Stavely must have known that everybody knew this, still it made no difference to him; he liked to seem to himself to be expecting a hundred thousand tons of saddles by this boat, and so he went on all his life, enjoying being faithfully on hand to receive and receipt for those saddles, in case by any miracle they should come. A malicious Quincy paper used always to refer to this town, in derision as 'Stavely's Landing.' Stavely was one of my earliest admirations; I envied him his rush of imaginary business, and the display he was able to make of it, before strangers, as he went flying down the street struggling with his fluttering coat. But there was a carpenter who was my chiefest hero. He was a mighty liar, but I did not know that; I believed everything he said. He was a romantic, sentimental, melodramatic fraud, and his bearing impressed me with awe. I vividly remember the first time he took me into his confidence. He was planing a board, and every now and then he would pause and heave a deep sigh; and occasionally mutter broken sentences-- confused and not intelligible--but out of their midst an ejaculation sometimes escaped which made me shiver and did me good: one was, 'O God, it is his blood!' I sat on the tool-chest and humbly and shudderingly admired him; for I judged he was full of crime. At last he said in a low voice-- 'My little friend, can you keep a secret?' I eagerly said I could. 'A dark and dreadful one?' I satisfied him on that point. 'Then I will tell you some passages in my history; for oh, I MUST relieve my burdened soul, or I shall die!' He cautioned me once more to be 'as silent as the grave;' then he told me he was a 'red-handed murderer.' He put down his plane, held his hands out before him, contemplated them sadly, and said-- 'Look--with these hands I have taken the lives of thirty human beings!' The effect which this had upon me was an inspiration to him, and he turned himself loose upon his subject with interest and energy. He left generalizing, and went into details,--began with his first murder; described it, told what measures he had taken to avert suspicion; then passed to his second homicide, his third, his fourth, and so on. He had always done his murders with a bowie-knife, and he made all my hairs rise by suddenly snatching it out and showing it to me. At the end of this first seance I went home with six of his fearful secrets among my freightage, and found them a great help to my dreams, which had been sluggish for a while back. I sought him again and again, on my Saturday holidays; in fact I spent the summer with him--all of it which was valuable to me. His fascinations never diminished, for he threw something fresh and stirring, in the way of horror, into each successive murder. He always gave names, dates, places--everything. This by and by enabled me to note two things: that he had killed his victims in every quarter of the globe, and that these victims were always named Lynch. The destruction of the Lynches went serenely on, Saturday after Saturday, until the original thirty had multiplied to sixty--and more to be heard from yet; then my curiosity got the better of my timidity, and I asked how it happened that these justly punished persons all bore the same name. My hero said he had never divulged that dark secret to any living being; but felt that he could trust me, and therefore he would lay bare before me the story of his sad and blighted life. He had loved one 'too fair for earth,' and she had reciprocated 'with all the sweet affection of her pure and noble nature.' But he had a rival, a 'base hireling' named Archibald Lynch, who said the girl should be his, or he would 'dye his hands in her heart's best blood.' The carpenter, 'innocent and happy in love's young dream,' gave no weight to the threat, but led his 'golden- haired darling to the altar,' and there, the two were made one; there also, just as the minister's hands were stretched in blessing over their heads, the fell deed was done--with a knife--and the bride fell a corpse at her husband's feet. And what did the husband do? He plucked forth that knife, and kneeling by the body of his lost one, swore to 'consecrate his life to the extermination of all the human scum that bear the hated name of Lynch.' That was it. He had been hunting down the Lynches and slaughtering them, from that day to this--twenty years. He had always used that same consecrated knife; with it he had murdered his long array of Lynches, and with it he had left upon the forehead of each victim a peculiar mark--a cross, deeply incised. Said he-- 'The cross of the Mysterious Avenger is known in Europe, in America, in China, in Siam, in the Tropics, in the Polar Seas, in the deserts of Asia, in all the earth. Wherever in the uttermost parts of the globe, a Lynch has penetrated, there has the Mysterious Cross been seen, and those who have seen it have shuddered and said, "It is his mark, he has been here." You have heard of the Mysterious Avenger--look upon him, for before you stands no less a person! But beware--breathe not a word to any soul. Be silent, and wait. Some morning this town will flock aghast to view a gory corpse; on its brow will be seen the awful sign, and men will tremble and whisper, "He has been here--it is the Mysterious Avenger's mark!" You will come here, but I shall have vanished; you will see me no more.' This ass had been reading the 'Jibbenainosay,' no doubt, and had had his poor romantic head turned by it; but as I had not yet seen the book then, I took his inventions for truth, and did not suspect that he was a plagiarist. However, we had a Lynch living in the town; and the more I reflected upon his impending doom, the more I could not sleep. It seemed my plain duty to save him, and a still plainer and more important duty to get some sleep for myself, so at last I ventured to go to Mr. Lynch and tell him what was about to happen to him--under strict secrecy. I advised him to 'fly,' and certainly expected him to do it. But he laughed at me; and he did not stop there; he led me down to the carpenter's shop, gave the carpenter a jeering and scornful lecture upon his silly pretensions, slapped his face, made him get down on his knees and beg--then went off and left me to contemplate the cheap and pitiful ruin of what, in my eyes, had so lately been a majestic and incomparable hero. The carpenter blustered, flourished his knife, and doomed this Lynch in his usual volcanic style, the size of his fateful words undiminished; but it was all wasted upon me; he was a hero to me no longer, but only a poor, foolish, exposed humbug. I was ashamed of him, and ashamed of myself; I took no further interest in him, and never went to his shop any more. He was a heavy loss to me, for he was the greatest hero I had ever known. The fellow must have had some talent; for some of his imaginary murders were so vividly and dramatically described that I remember all their details yet. The people of Hannibal are not more changed than is the town. It is no longer a village; it is a city, with a mayor, and a council, and water- works, and probably a debt. It has fifteen thousand people, is a thriving and energetic place, and is paved like the rest of the west and south--where a well-paved street and a good sidewalk are things so seldom seen, that one doubts them when he does see them. The customary half-dozen railways center in Hannibal now, and there is a new depot which cost a hundred thousand dollars. In my time the town had no specialty, and no commercial grandeur; the daily packet usually landed a passenger and bought a catfish, and took away another passenger and a hatful of freight; but now a huge commerce in lumber has grown up and a large miscellaneous commerce is one of the results. A deal of money changes hands there now. Bear Creek--so called, perhaps, because it was always so particularly bare of bears--is hidden out of sight now, under islands and continents of piled lumber, and nobody but an expert can find it. I used to get drowned in it every summer regularly, and be drained out, and inflated and set going again by some chance enemy; but not enough of it is unoccupied now to drown a person in. It was a famous breeder of chills and fever in its day. I remember one summer when everybody in town had this disease at once. Many chimneys were shaken down, and all the houses were so racked that the town had to be rebuilt. The chasm or gorge between Lover's Leap and the hill west of it is supposed by scientists to have been caused by glacial action. This is a mistake. There is an interesting cave a mile or two below Hannibal, among the bluffs. I would have liked to revisit it, but had not time. In my time the person who then owned it turned it into a mausoleum for his daughter, aged fourteen. The body of this poor child was put into a copper cylinder filled with alcohol, and this was suspended in one of the dismal avenues of the cave. The top of the cylinder was removable; and it was said to be a common thing for the baser order of tourists to drag the dead face into view and examine it and comment upon it. ===12 LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 12. Chapter 56 A Question of Law THE slaughter-house is gone from the mouth of Bear Creek and so is the small jail (or 'calaboose') which once stood in its neighborhood. A citizen asked, 'Do you remember when Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, was burned to death in the calaboose?' Observe, now, how history becomes defiled, through lapse of time and the help of the bad memories of men. Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn to die. The calaboose victim was not a citizen; he was a poor stranger, a harmless whiskey-sodden tramp. I know more about his case than anybody else; I knew too much of it, in that bygone day, to relish speaking of it. That tramp was wandering about the streets one chilly evening, with a pipe in his mouth, and begging for a match; he got neither matches nor courtesy; on the contrary, a troop of bad little boys followed him around and amused themselves with nagging and annoying him. I assisted; but at last, some appeal which the wayfarer made for forbearance, accompanying it with a pathetic reference to his forlorn and friendless condition, touched such sense of shame and remnant of right feeling as were left in me, and I went away and got him some matches, and then hied me home and to bed, heavily weighted as to conscience, and unbuoyant in spirit. An hour or two afterward, the man was arrested and locked up in the calaboose by the marshal--large name for a constable, but that was his title. At two in the morning, the church bells rang for fire, and everybody turned out, of course--I with the rest. The tramp had used his matches disastrously: he had set his straw bed on fire, and the oaken sheathing of the room had caught. When I reached the ground, two hundred men, women, and children stood massed together, transfixed with horror, and staring at the grated windows of the jail. Behind the iron bars, and tugging frantically at them, and screaming for help, stood the tramp; he seemed like a black object set against a sun, so white and intense was the light at his back. That marshal could not be found, and he had the only key. A battering-ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder of its blows upon the door had so encouraging a sound that the spectators broke into wild cheering, and believed the merciful battle won. But it was not so. The timbers were too strong; they did not yield. It was said that the man's death-grip still held fast to the bars after he was dead; and that in this position the fires wrapped him about and consumed him. As to this, I do not know. What was seen after I recognized the face that was pleading through the bars was seen by others, not by me. I saw that face, so situated, every night for a long time afterward; and I believed myself as guilty of the man's death as if I had given him the matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them. I had not a doubt that I should be hanged if my connection with this tragedy were found out. The happenings and the impressions of that time are burnt into my memory, and the study of them entertains me as much now as they themselves distressed me then. If anybody spoke of that grisly matter, I was all ears in a moment, and alert to hear what might be said, for I was always dreading and expecting to find out that I was suspected; and so fine and so delicate was the perception of my guilty conscience, that it often detected suspicion in the most purposeless remarks, and in looks, gestures, glances of the eye which had no significance, but which sent me shivering away in a panic of fright, just the same. And how sick it made me when somebody dropped, howsoever carelessly and barren of intent, the remark that 'murder will out!' For a boy of ten years, I was carrying a pretty weighty cargo. All this time I was blessedly forgetting one thing--the fact that I was an inveterate talker in my sleep. But one night I awoke and found my bed-mate--my younger brother--sitting up in bed and contemplating me by the light of the moon. I said-- 'What is the matter?' 'You talk so much I can't sleep.' I came to a sitting posture in an instant, with my kidneys in my throat and my hair on end. 'What did I say. Quick--out with it--what did I say?' 'Nothing much.' 'It's a lie--you know everything.' 'Everything about what?' 'You know well enough. About THAT.' 'About WHAT?--I don't know what you are talking about. I think you are sick or crazy or something. But anyway, you're awake, and I'll get to sleep while I've got a chance.' He fell asleep and I lay there in a cold sweat, turning this new terror over in the whirling chaos which did duty as my mind. The burden of my thought was, How much did I divulge? How much does he know?--what a distress is this uncertainty! But by and by I evolved an idea--I would wake my brother and probe him with a supposititious case. I shook him up, and said-- 'Suppose a man should come to you drunk--' 'This is foolish--I never get drunk.' 'I don't mean you, idiot--I mean the man. Suppose a MAN should come to you drunk, and borrow a knife, or a tomahawk, or a pistol, and you forgot to tell him it was loaded, and--' 'How could you load a tomahawk?' 'I don't mean the tomahawk, and I didn't say the tomahawk; I said the pistol. Now don't you keep breaking in that way, because this is serious. There's been a man killed.' 'What! in this town?' 'Yes, in this town.' 'Well, go on--I won't say a single word.' 'Well, then, suppose you forgot to tell him to be careful with it, because it was loaded, and he went off and shot himself with that pistol--fooling with it, you know, and probably doing it by accident, being drunk. Well, would it be murder?' 'No--suicide.' 'No, no. I don't mean HIS act, I mean yours: would you be a murderer for letting him have that pistol?' After deep thought came this answer-- 'Well, I should think I was guilty of something--maybe murder--yes, probably murder, but I don't quite know.' This made me very uncomfortable. However, it was not a decisive verdict. I should have to set out the real case--there seemed to be no other way. But I would do it cautiously, and keep a watch out for suspicious effects. I said-- 'I was supposing a case, but I am coming to the real one now. Do you know how the man came to be burned up in the calaboose?' 'No.' 'Haven't you the least idea?' 'Not the least.' 'Wish you may die in your tracks if you have?' 'Yes, wish I may die in my tracks.' 'Well, the way of it was this. The man wanted some matches to light his pipe. A boy got him some. The man set fire to the calaboose with those very matches, and burnt himself up.' 'Is that so?' 'Yes, it is. Now, is that boy a murderer, do you think?' 'Let me see. The man was drunk?' 'Yes, he was drunk.' 'Very drunk?' 'Yes.' 'And the boy knew it?' 'Yes, he knew it.' There was a long pause. Then came this heavy verdict-- 'If the man was drunk, and the boy knew it, the boy murdered that man. This is certain.' Faint, sickening sensations crept along all the fibers of my body, and I seemed to know how a person feels who hears his death sentence pronounced from the bench. I waited to hear what my brother would say next. I believed I knew what it would be, and I was right. He said-- 'I know the boy.' I had nothing to say; so I said nothing. I simply shuddered. Then he added-- 'Yes, before you got half through telling about the thing, I knew perfectly well who the boy was; it was Ben Coontz!' I came out of my collapse as one who rises from the dead. I said, with admiration-- 'Why, how in the world did you ever guess it?' 'You told it in your sleep.' I said to myself, 'How splendid that is! This is a habit which must be cultivated.' My brother rattled innocently on-- 'When you were talking in your sleep, you kept mumbling something about "matches," which I couldn't make anything out of; but just now, when you began to tell me about the man and the calaboose and the matches, I remembered that in your sleep you mentioned Ben Coontz two or three times; so I put this and that together, you see, and right away I knew it was Ben that burnt that man up.' I praised his sagacity effusively. Presently he asked-- 'Are you going to give him up to the law?' 'No,' I said; 'I believe that this will be a lesson to him. I shall keep an eye on him, of course, for that is but right; but if he stops where he is and reforms, it shall never be said that I betrayed him.' 'How good you are!' 'Well, I try to be. It is all a person can do in a world like this.' And now, my burden being shifted to other shoulders, my terrors soon faded away. The day before we left Hannibal, a curious thing fell under my notice-- the surprising spread which longitudinal time undergoes there. I learned it from one of the most unostentatious of men--the colored coachman of a friend of mine, who lives three miles from town. He was to call for me at the Park Hotel at 7.30 P.M., and drive me out. But he missed it considerably--did not arrive till ten. He excused himself by saying-- 'De time is mos' an hour en a half slower in de country en what it is in de town; you'll be in plenty time, boss. Sometimes we shoves out early for church, Sunday, en fetches up dah right plum in de middle er de sermon. Diffunce in de time. A body can't make no calculations 'bout it.' I had lost two hours and a half; but I had learned a fact worth four. Chapter 57 An Archangel FROM St. Louis northward there are all the enlivening signs of the presence of active, energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practical nineteenth-century populations. The people don't dream, they work. The happy result is manifest all around in the substantial outside aspect of things, and the suggestions of wholesome life and comfort that everywhere appear. Quincy is a notable example--a brisk, handsome, well-ordered city; and now, as formerly, interested in art, letters, and other high things. But Marion City is an exception. Marion City has gone backwards in a most unaccountable way. This metropolis promised so well that the projectors tacked 'city' to its name in the very beginning, with full confidence; but it was bad prophecy. When I first saw Marion City, thirty-five years ago, it contained one street, and nearly or quite six houses. It contains but one house now, and this one, in a state of ruin, is getting ready to follow the former five into the river. Doubtless Marion City was too near to Quincy. It had another disadvantage: it was situated in a flat mud bottom, below high-water mark, whereas Quincy stands high up on the slope of a hill. In the beginning Quincy had the aspect and ways of a model New England town: and these she has yet: broad, clean streets, trim, neat dwellings and lawns, fine mansions, stately blocks of commercial buildings. And there are ample fair-grounds, a well kept park, and many attractive drives; library, reading-rooms, a couple of colleges, some handsome and costly churches, and a grand court-house, with grounds which occupy a square. The population of the city is thirty thousand. There are some large factories here, and manufacturing, of many sorts, is done on a great scale. La Grange and Canton are growing towns, but I missed Alexandria; was told it was under water, but would come up to blow in the summer. Keokuk was easily recognizable. I lived there in 1857--an extraordinary year there in real-estate matters. The 'boom' was something wonderful. Everybody bought, everybody sold--except widows and preachers; they always hold on; and when the tide ebbs, they get left. Anything in the semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated, was salable, and at a figure which would still have been high if the ground had been sodded with greenbacks. The town has a population of fifteen thousand now, and is progressing with a healthy growth. It was night, and we could not see details, for which we were sorry, for Keokuk has the reputation of being a beautiful city. It was a pleasant one to live in long ago, and doubtless has advanced, not retrograded, in that respect. A mighty work which was in progress there in my day is finished now. This is the canal over the Rapids. It is eight miles long, three hundred feet wide, and is in no place less than six feet deep. Its masonry is of the majestic kind which the War Department usually deals in, and will endure like a Roman aqueduct. The work cost four or five millions. After an hour or two spent with former friends, we started up the river again. Keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasional loafing-place of that erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean. I believe I never saw him but once; but he was much talked of when I lived there. This is what was said of him-- He began life poor and without education. But he educated himself--on the curbstones of Keokuk. He would sit down on a curbstone with his book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce and the tramp of the passing crowds, and bury himself in his studies by the hour, never changing his position except to draw in his knees now and then to let a dray pass unobstructed; and when his book was finished, its contents, however abstruse, had been burnt into his memory, and were his permanent possession. In this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning, and had it pigeon-holed in his head where he could put his intellectual hand on it whenever it was wanted. His clothes differed in no respect from a 'wharf-rat's,' except that they were raggeder, more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and therefore more extravagantly picturesque), and several layers dirtier. Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself. He was an orator--by nature in the first place, and later by the training of experience and practice. When he was out on a canvass, his name was a lodestone which drew the farmers to his stump from fifty miles around. His theme was always politics. He used no notes, for a volcano does not need notes. In 1862, a son of Keokuk's late distinguished citizen, Mr. Claggett, gave me this incident concerning Dean-- The war feeling was running high in Keokuk (in '61), and a great mass meeting was to be held on a certain day in the new Athenaeum. A distinguished stranger was to address the house. After the building had been packed to its utmost capacity with sweltering folk of both sexes, the stage still remained vacant--the distinguished stranger had failed to connect. The crowd grew impatient, and by and by indignant and rebellious. About this time a distressed manager discovered Dean on a curb-stone, explained the dilemma to him, took his book away from him, rushed him into the building the back way, and told him to make for the stage and save his country. Presently a sudden silence fell upon the grumbling audience, and everybody's eyes sought a single point--the wide, empty, carpetless stage. A figure appeared there whose aspect was familiar to hardly a dozen persons present. It was the scarecrow Dean--in foxy shoes, down at the heels; socks of odd colors, also 'down;' damaged trousers, relics of antiquity, and a world too short, exposing some inches of naked ankle; an unbuttoned vest, also too short, and exposing a zone of soiled and wrinkled linen between it and the waistband; shirt bosom open; long black handkerchief, wound round and round the neck like a bandage; bob- tailed blue coat, reaching down to the small of the back, with sleeves which left four inches of forearm unprotected; small, stiff-brimmed soldier-cap hung on a corner of the bump of--whichever bump it was. This figure moved gravely out upon the stage and, with sedate and measured step, down to the front, where it paused, and dreamily inspected the house, saying no word. The silence of surprise held its own for a moment, then was broken by a just audible ripple of merriment which swept the sea of faces like the wash of a wave. The figure remained as before, thoughtfully inspecting. Another wave started-- laughter, this time. It was followed by another, then a third--this last one boisterous. And now the stranger stepped back one pace, took off his soldier-cap, tossed it into the wing, and began to speak, with deliberation, nobody listening, everybody laughing and whispering. The speaker talked on unembarrassed, and presently delivered a shot which went home, and silence and attention resulted. He followed it quick and fast, with other telling things; warmed to his work and began to pour his words out, instead of dripping them; grew hotter and hotter, and fell to discharging lightnings and thunder--and now the house began to break into applause, to which the speaker gave no heed, but went hammering straight on; unwound his black bandage and cast it away, still thundering; presently discarded the bob tailed coat and flung it aside, firing up higher and higher all the time; finally flung the vest after the coat; and then for an untimed period stood there, like another Vesuvius, spouting smoke and flame, lava and ashes, raining pumice-stone and cinders, shaking the moral earth with intellectual crash upon crash, explosion upon explosion, while the mad multitude stood upon their feet in a solid body, answering back with a ceaseless hurricane of cheers, through a thrashing snowstorm of waving handkerchiefs. 'When Dean came,' said Claggett, 'the people thought he was an escaped lunatic; but when he went, they thought he was an escaped archangel.' Burlington, home of the sparkling Burdette, is another hill city; and also a beautiful one; unquestionably so; a fine and flourishing city, with a population of twenty-five thousand, and belted with busy factories of nearly every imaginable description. It was a very sober city, too--for the moment--for a most sobering bill was pending; a bill to forbid the manufacture, exportation, importation, purchase, sale, borrowing, lending, stealing, drinking, smelling, or possession, by conquest, inheritance, intent, accident, or otherwise, in the State of Iowa, of each and every deleterious beverage known to the human race, except water. This measure was approved by all the rational people in the State; but not by the bench of Judges. Burlington has the progressive modern city's full equipment of devices for right and intelligent government; including a paid fire department, a thing which the great city of New Orleans is without, but still employs that relic of antiquity, the independent system. In Burlington, as in all these Upper-River towns, one breathes a go-ahead atmosphere which tastes good in the nostrils. An opera-house has lately been built there which is in strong contrast with the shabby dens which usually do duty as theaters in cities of Burlington's size. We had not time to go ashore in Muscatine, but had a daylight view of it from the boat. I lived there awhile, many years ago, but the place, now, had a rather unfamiliar look; so I suppose it has clear outgrown the town which I used to know. In fact, I know it has; for I remember it as a small place--which it isn't now. But I remember it best for a lunatic who caught me out in the fields, one Sunday, and extracted a butcher-knife from his boot and proposed to carve me up with it, unless I acknowledged him to be the only son of the Devil. I tried to compromise on an acknowledgment that he was the only member of the family I had met; but that did not satisfy him; he wouldn't have any half-measures; I must say he was the sole and only son of the Devil--he whetted his knife on his boot. It did not seem worth while to make trouble about a little thing like that; so I swung round to his view of the matter and saved my skin whole. Shortly afterward, he went to visit his father; and as he has not turned up since, I trust he is there yet. And I remember Muscatine--still more pleasantly--for its summer sunsets. I have never seen any, on either side of the ocean, that equaled them. They used the broad smooth river as a canvas, and painted on it every imaginable dream of color, from the mottled daintinesses and delicacies of the opal, all the way up, through cumulative intensities, to blinding purple and crimson conflagrations which were enchanting to the eye, but sharply tried it at the same time. All the Upper Mississippi region has these extraordinary sunsets as a familiar spectacle. It is the true Sunset Land: I am sure no other country can show so good a right to the name. The sunrises are also said to be exceedingly fine. I do not know. Chapter 58 On the Upper River THE big towns drop in, thick and fast, now: and between stretch processions of thrifty farms, not desolate solitude. Hour by hour, the boat plows deeper and deeper into the great and populous North-west; and with each successive section of it which is revealed, one's surprise and respect gather emphasis and increase. Such a people, and such achievements as theirs, compel homage. This is an independent race who think for themselves, and who are competent to do it, because they are educated and enlightened; they read, they keep abreast of the best and newest thought, they fortify every weak place in their land with a school, a college, a library, and a newspaper; and they live under law. Solicitude for the future of a race like this is not in order. This region is new; so new that it may be said to be still in its babyhood. By what it has accomplished while still teething, one may forecast what marvels it will do in the strength of its maturity. It is so new that the foreign tourist has not heard of it yet; and has not visited it. For sixty years, the foreign tourist has steamed up and down the river between St. Louis and New Orleans, and then gone home and written his book, believing he had seen all of the river that was worth seeing or that had anything to see. In not six of all these books is there mention of these Upper River towns--for the reason that the five or six tourists who penetrated this region did it before these towns were projected. The latest tourist of them all (1878) made the same old regulation trip--he had not heard that there was anything north of St. Louis. Yet there was. There was this amazing region, bristling with great towns, projected day before yesterday, so to speak, and built next morning. A score of them number from fifteen hundred to five thousand people. Then we have Muscatine, ten thousand; Winona, ten thousand; Moline, ten thousand; Rock Island, twelve thousand; La Crosse, twelve thousand; Burlington, twenty-five thousand; Dubuque, twenty-five thousand; Davenport, thirty thousand; St. Paul, fifty-eight thousand, Minneapolis, sixty thousand and upward. The foreign tourist has never heard of these; there is no note of them in his books. They have sprung up in the night, while he slept. So new is this region, that I, who am comparatively young, am yet older than it is. When I was born, St. Paul had a population of three persons, Minneapolis had just a third as many. The then population of Minneapolis died two years ago; and when he died he had seen himself undergo an increase, in forty years, of fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine persons. He had a frog's fertility. I must explain that the figures set down above, as the population of St. Paul and Minneapolis, are several months old. These towns are far larger now. In fact, I have just seen a newspaper estimate which gives the former seventy-one thousand, and the latter seventy-eight thousand. This book will not reach the public for six or seven months yet; none of the figures will be worth much then. We had a glimpse of Davenport, which is another beautiful city, crowning a hill--a phrase which applies to all these towns; for they are all comely, all well built, clean, orderly, pleasant to the eye, and cheering to the spirit; and they are all situated upon hills. Therefore we will give that phrase a rest. The Indians have a tradition that Marquette and Joliet camped where Davenport now stands, in 1673. The next white man who camped there, did it about a hundred and seventy years later--in 1834. Davenport has gathered its thirty thousand people within the past thirty years. She sends more children to her schools now, than her whole population numbered twenty-three years ago. She has the usual Upper River quota of factories, newspapers, and institutions of learning; she has telephones, local telegraphs, an electric alarm, and an admirable paid fire department, consisting of six hook and ladder companies, four steam fire engines, and thirty churches. Davenport is the official residence of two bishops--Episcopal and Catholic. Opposite Davenport is the flourishing town of Rock Island, which lies at the foot of the Upper Rapids. A great railroad bridge connects the two towns--one of the thirteen which fret the Mississippi and the pilots, between St. Louis and St. Paul. The charming island of Rock Island, three miles long and half a mile wide, belongs to the United States, and the Government has turned it into a wonderful park, enhancing its natural attractions by art, and threading its fine forests with many miles of drives. Near the center of the island one catches glimpses, through the trees, of ten vast stone four-story buildings, each of which covers an acre of ground. These are the Government workshops; for the Rock Island establishment is a national armory and arsenal. We move up the river--always through enchanting scenery, there being no other kind on the Upper Mississippi--and pass Moline, a center of vast manufacturing industries; and Clinton and Lyons, great lumber centers; and presently reach Dubuque, which is situated in a rich mineral region. The lead mines are very productive, and of wide extent. Dubuque has a great number of manufacturing establishments; among them a plow factory which has for customers all Christendom in general. At least so I was told by an agent of the concern who was on the boat. He said-- 'You show me any country under the sun where they really know how to plow, and if I don't show you our mark on the plow they use, I'll eat that plow; and I won't ask for any Woostershyre sauce to flavor it up with, either.' All this part of the river is rich in Indian history and traditions. Black Hawk's was once a puissant name hereabouts; as was Keokuk's, further down. A few miles below Dubuque is the Tete de Mort--Death's- head rock, or bluff--to the top of which the French drove a band of Indians, in early times, and cooped them up there, with death for a certainty, and only the manner of it matter of choice--to starve, or jump off and kill themselves. Black Hawk adopted the ways of the white people, toward the end of his life; and when he died he was buried, near Des Moines, in Christian fashion, modified by Indian custom; that is to say, clothed in a Christian military uniform, and with a Christian cane in his hand, but deposited in the grave in a sitting posture. Formerly, a horse had always been buried with a chief. The substitution of the cane shows that Black Hawk's haughty nature was really humbled, and he expected to walk when he got over. We noticed that above Dubuque the water of the Mississippi was olive- green--rich and beautiful and semi-transparent, with the sun on it. Of course the water was nowhere as clear or of as fine a complexion as it is in some other seasons of the year; for now it was at flood stage, and therefore dimmed and blurred by the mud manufactured from caving banks. The majestic bluffs that overlook the river, along through this region, charm one with the grace and variety of their forms, and the soft beauty of their adornment. The steep verdant slope, whose base is at the water's edge is topped by a lofty rampart of broken, turreted rocks, which are exquisitely rich and mellow in color--mainly dark browns and dull greens, but splashed with other tints. And then you have the shining river, winding here and there and yonder, its sweep interrupted at intervals by clusters of wooded islands threaded by silver channels; and you have glimpses of distant villages, asleep upon capes; and of stealthy rafts slipping along in the shade of the forest walls; and of white steamers vanishing around remote points. And it is all as tranquil and reposeful as dreamland, and has nothing this-worldly about it-- nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon. Until the unholy train comes tearing along--which it presently does, ripping the sacred solitude to rags and tatters with its devil's warwhoop and the roar and thunder of its rushing wheels--and straightway you are back in this world, and with one of its frets ready to hand for your entertainment: for you remember that this is the very road whose stock always goes down after you buy it, and always goes up again as soon as you sell it. It makes me shudder to this day, to remember that I once came near not getting rid of my stock at all. It must be an awful thing to have a railroad left on your hands. The locomotive is in sight from the deck of the steamboat almost the whole way from St. Louis to St. Paul--eight hundred miles. These railroads have made havoc with the steamboat commerce. The clerk of our boat was a steamboat clerk before these roads were built. In that day the influx of population was so great, and the freight business so heavy, that the boats were not able to keep up with the demands made upon their carrying capacity; consequently the captains were very independent and airy--pretty 'biggity,' as Uncle Remus would say. The clerk nut-shelled the contrast between the former time and the present, thus-- 'Boat used to land--captain on hurricane roof--mighty stiff and straight--iron ramrod for a spine--kid gloves, plug tile, hair parted behind--man on shore takes off hat and says-- '"Got twenty-eight tons of wheat, cap'n--be great favor if you can take them." 'Captain says-- '"'ll take two of them"--and don't even condescend to look at him. 'But nowadays the captain takes off his old slouch, and smiles all the way around to the back of his ears, and gets off a bow which he hasn't got any ramrod to interfere with, and says-- '"Glad to see you, Smith, glad to see you--you're looking well--haven't seen you looking so well for years--what you got for us?" '"Nuth'n", says Smith; and keeps his hat on, and just turns his back and goes to talking with somebody else. 'Oh, yes, eight years ago, the captain was on top; but it's Smith's turn now. Eight years ago a boat used to go up the river with every stateroom full, and people piled five and six deep on the cabin floor; and a solid deck-load of immigrants and harvesters down below, into the bargain. To get a first-class stateroom, you'd got to prove sixteen quarterings of nobility and four hundred years of descent, or be personally acquainted with the nigger that blacked the captain's boots. But it's all changed now; plenty staterooms above, no harvesters below--there's a patent self-binder now, and they don't have harvesters any more; they've gone where the woodbine twineth--and they didn't go by steamboat, either; went by the train.' Up in this region we met massed acres of lumber rafts coming down--but not floating leisurely along, in the old-fashioned way, manned with joyous and reckless crews of fiddling, song-singing, whiskey-drinking, breakdown-dancing rapscallions; no, the whole thing was shoved swiftly along by a powerful stern-wheeler, modern fashion, and the small crews were quiet, orderly men, of a sedate business aspect, with not a suggestion of romance about them anywhere. Along here, somewhere, on a black night, we ran some exceedingly narrow and intricate island-chutes by aid of the electric light. Behind was solid blackness--a crackless bank of it; ahead, a narrow elbow of water, curving between dense walls of foliage that almost touched our bows on both sides; and here every individual leaf, and every individual ripple stood out in its natural color, and flooded with a glare as of noonday intensified. The effect was strange, and fine, and very striking. We passed Prairie du Chien, another of Father Marquette's camping- places; and after some hours of progress through varied and beautiful scenery, reached La Crosse. Here is a town of twelve or thirteen thousand population, with electric lighted streets, and with blocks of buildings which are stately enough, and also architecturally fine enough, to command respect in any city. It is a choice town, and we made satisfactory use of the hour allowed us, in roaming it over, though the weather was rainier than necessary. Chapter 59 Legends and Scenery WE added several passengers to our list, at La Crosse; among others an old gentleman who had come to this north-western region with the early settlers, and was familiar with every part of it. Pardonably proud of it, too. He said-- 'You'll find scenery between here and St. Paul that can give the Hudson points. You'll have the Queen's Bluff--seven hundred feet high, and just as imposing a spectacle as you can find anywheres; and Trempeleau Island, which isn't like any other island in America, I believe, for it is a gigantic mountain, with precipitous sides, and is full of Indian traditions, and used to be full of rattlesnakes; if you catch the sun just right there, you will have a picture that will stay with you. And above Winona you'll have lovely prairies; and then come the Thousand Islands, too beautiful for anything; green? why you never saw foliage so green, nor packed so thick; it's like a thousand plush cushions afloat on a looking-glass--when the water 's still; and then the monstrous bluffs on both sides of the river--ragged, rugged, dark-complected--just the frame that's wanted; you always want a strong frame, you know, to throw up the nice points of a delicate picture and make them stand out.' The old gentleman also told us a touching Indian legend or two--but not very powerful ones. After this excursion into history, he came back to the scenery, and described it, detail by detail, from the Thousand Islands to St. Paul; naming its names with such facility, tripping along his theme with such nimble and confident ease, slamming in a three-ton word, here and there, with such a complacent air of 't isn't-anything,-I-can-do-it-any-time-I- want-to, and letting off fine surprises of lurid eloquence at such judicious intervals, that I presently began to suspect-- But no matter what I began to suspect. Hear him-- 'Ten miles above Winona we come to Fountain City, nestling sweetly at the feet of cliffs that lift their awful fronts, Jovelike, toward the blue depths of heaven, bathing them in virgin atmospheres that have known no other contact save that of angels' wings. 'And next we glide through silver waters, amid lovely and stupendous aspects of nature that attune our hearts to adoring admiration, about twelve miles, and strike Mount Vernon, six hundred feet high, with romantic ruins of a once first-class hotel perched far among the cloud shadows that mottle its dizzy heights--sole remnant of once-flourishing Mount Vernon, town of early days, now desolate and utterly deserted. 'And so we move on. Past Chimney Rock we fly--noble shaft of six hundred feet; then just before landing at Minnieska our attention is attracted by a most striking promontory rising over five hundred feet-- the ideal mountain pyramid. Its conic shape--thickly-wooded surface girding its sides, and its apex like that of a cone, cause the spectator to wonder at nature's workings. From its dizzy heights superb views of the forests, streams, bluffs, hills and dales below and beyond for miles are brought within its focus. What grander river scenery can be conceived, as we gaze upon this enchanting landscape, from the uppermost point of these bluffs upon the valleys below? The primeval wildness and awful loneliness of these sublime creations of nature and nature's God, excite feelings of unbounded admiration, and the recollection of which can never be effaced from the memory, as we view them in any direction. 'Next we have the Lion's Head and the Lioness's Head, carved by nature's hand, to adorn and dominate the beauteous stream; and then anon the river widens, and a most charming and magnificent view of the valley before us suddenly bursts upon our vision; rugged hills, clad with verdant forests from summit to base, level prairie lands, holding in their lap the beautiful Wabasha, City of the Healing Waters, puissant foe of Bright's disease, and that grandest conception of nature's works, incomparable Lake Pepin--these constitute a picture whereon the tourist's eye may gaze uncounted hours, with rapture unappeased and unappeasable. 'And so we glide along; in due time encountering those majestic domes, the mighty Sugar Loaf, and the sublime Maiden's Rock--which latter, romantic superstition has invested with a voice; and oft-times as the birch canoe glides near, at twilight, the dusky paddler fancies he hears the soft sweet music of the long-departed Winona, darling of Indian song and story. 'Then Frontenac looms upon our vision, delightful resort of jaded summer tourists; then progressive Red Wing; and Diamond Bluff, impressive and preponderous in its lone sublimity; then Prescott and the St. Croix; and anon we see bursting upon us the domes and steeples of St. Paul, giant young chief of the North, marching with seven-league stride in the van of progress, banner-bearer of the highest and newest civilization, carving his beneficent way with the tomahawk of commercial enterprise, sounding the warwhoop of Christian culture, tearing off the reeking scalp of sloth and superstition to plant there the steam-plow and the school-house--ever in his front stretch arid lawlessness, ignorance, crime, despair; ever in his wake bloom the jail, the gallows, and the pulpit; and ever--' 'Have you ever traveled with a panorama?' 'I have formerly served in that capacity.' My suspicion was confirmed. 'Do you still travel with it?' 'No, she is laid up till the fall season opens. I am helping now to work up the materials for a Tourist's Guide which the St. Louis and St. Paul Packet Company are going to issue this summer for the benefit of travelers who go by that line.' 'When you were talking of Maiden's Rock, you spoke of the long-departed Winona, darling of Indian song and story. Is she the maiden of the rock?--and are the two connected by legend?' 'Yes, and a very tragic and painful one. Perhaps the most celebrated, as well as the most pathetic, of all the legends of the Mississippi.' We asked him to tell it. He dropped out of his conversational vein and back into his lecture-gait without an effort, and rolled on as follows-- 'A little distance above Lake City is a famous point known as Maiden's Rock, which is not only a picturesque spot, but is full of romantic interest from the event which gave it its name, Not many years ago this locality was a favorite resort for the Sioux Indians on account of the fine fishing and hunting to be had there, and large numbers of them were always to be found in this locality. Among the families which used to resort here, was one belonging to the tribe of Wabasha. We-no-na (first-born) was the name of a maiden who had plighted her troth to a lover belonging to the same band. But her stern parents had promised her hand to another, a famous warrior, and insisted on her wedding him. The day was fixed by her parents, to her great grief. She appeared to accede to the proposal and accompany them to the rock, for the purpose of gathering flowers for the feast. On reaching the rock, We-no-na ran to its summit and standing on its edge upbraided her parents who were below, for their cruelty, and then singing a death-dirge, threw herself from the precipice and dashed them in pieces on the rock below.' 'Dashed who in pieces--her parents?' 'Yes.' 'Well, it certainly was a tragic business, as you say. And moreover, there is a startling kind of dramatic surprise about it which I was not looking for. It is a distinct improvement upon the threadbare form of Indian legend. There are fifty Lover's Leaps along the Mississippi from whose summit disappointed Indian girls have jumped, but this is the only jump in the lot hat turned out in the right and satisfactory way. What became of Winona?' 'She was a good deal jarred up and jolted: but she got herself together and disappeared before the coroner reached the fatal spot; and 'tis said she sought and married her true love, and wandered with him to some distant clime, where she lived happy ever after, her gentle spirit mellowed and chastened by the romantic incident which had so early deprived her of the sweet guidance of a mother's love and a father's protecting arm, and thrown her, all unfriended, upon the cold charity of a censorious world.' I was glad to hear the lecturer's description of the scenery, for it assisted my appreciation of what I saw of it, and enabled me to imagine such of it as we lost by the intrusion of night. As the lecturer remarked, this whole region is blanketed with Indian tales and traditions. But I reminded him that people usually merely mention this fact--doing it in a way to make a body's mouth water--and judiciously stopped there. Why? Because the impression left, was that these tales were full of incident and imagination--a pleasant impression which would be promptly dissipated if the tales were told. I showed him a lot of this sort of literature which I had been collecting, and he confessed that it was poor stuff, exceedingly sorry rubbish; and I ventured to add that the legends which he had himself told us were of this character, with the single exception of the admirable story of Winona. He granted these facts, but said that if I would hunt up Mr. Schoolcraft's book, published near fifty years ago, and now doubtless out of print, I would find some Indian inventions in it that were very far from being barren of incident and imagination; that the tales in Hiawatha were of this sort, and they came from Schoolcraft's book; and that there were others in the same book which Mr. Longfellow could have turned into verse with good effect. For instance, there was the legend of 'The Undying Head.' He could not tell it, for many of the details had grown dim in his memory; but he would recommend me to find it and enlarge my respect for the Indian imagination. He said that this tale, and most of the others in the book, were current among the Indians along this part of the Mississippi when he first came here; and that the contributors to Schoolcraft's book had got them directly from Indian lips, and had written them down with strict exactness, and without embellishments of their own. I have found the book. The lecturer was right. There are several legends in it which confirm what he said. I will offer two of them-- 'The Undying Head,' and 'Peboan and Seegwun, an Allegory of the Seasons.' The latter is used in Hiawatha; but it is worth reading in the original form, if only that one may see how effective a genuine poem can be without the helps and graces of poetic measure and rhythm-- PEBOAN AND SEEGWUN. An old man was sitting alone in his lodge, by the side of a frozen stream. It was the close of winter, and his fire was almost out, He appeared very old and very desolate. His locks were white with age, and he trembled in every joint. Day after day passed in solitude, and he heard nothing but the sound of the tempest, sweeping before it the new- fallen snow. One day, as his fire was just dying, a handsome young man approached and entered his dwelling. His cheeks were red with the blood of youth, his eyes sparkled with animation, and a smile played upon his lips. He walked with a light and quick step. His forehead was bound with a wreath of sweet grass, in place of a warrior's frontlet, and he carried a bunch of flowers in his hand. 'Ah, my son,' said the old man, 'I am happy to see you. Come in. Come and tell me of your adventures, and what strange lands you have been to see. Let us pass the night together. I will tell you of my prowess and exploits, and what I can perform. You shall do the same, and we will amuse ourselves.' He then drew from his sack a curiously wrought antique pipe, and having filled it with tobacco, rendered mild by a mixture of certain leaves, handed it to his guest. When this ceremony was concluded they began to speak. 'I blow my breath,' said the old man, 'and the stream stands still. The water becomes stiff and hard as clear stone.' 'I breathe,' said the young man, 'and flowers spring up over the plain.' 'I shake my locks,' retorted the old man, 'and snow covers the land. The leaves fall from the trees at my command, and my breath blows them away. The birds get up from the water, and fly to a distant land. The animals hide themselves from my breath, and the very ground becomes as hard as flint.' 'I shake my ringlets,' rejoined the young man, 'and warm showers of soft rain fall upon the earth. The plants lift up their heads out of the earth, like the eyes of children glistening with delight. My voice recalls the birds. The warmth of my breath unlocks the streams. Music fills the groves wherever I walk, and all nature rejoices.' At length the sun began to rise. A gentle warmth came over the place. The tongue of the old man became silent. The robin and bluebird began to sing on the top of the lodge. The stream began to murmur by the door, and the fragrance of growing herbs and flowers came softly on the vernal breeze. Daylight fully revealed to the young man the character of his entertainer. When he looked upon him, he had the icy visage of Peboan.{footnote [Winter.]} Streams began to flow from his eyes. As the sun increased, he grew less and less in stature, and anon had melted completely away. Nothing remained on the place of his lodge-fire but the miskodeed,{footnote [The trailing arbutus.]} a small white flower, with a pink border, which is one of the earliest species of northern plants. 'The Undying Head' is a rather long tale, but it makes up in weird conceits, fairy-tale prodigies, variety of incident, and energy of movement, for what it lacks in brevity.{footnote [See appendix D.]} Chapter 60 Speculations and Conclusions WE reached St. Paul, at the head of navigation of the Mississippi, and there our voyage of two thousand miles from New Orleans ended. It is about a ten-day trip by steamer. It can probably be done quicker by rail. I judge so because I know that one may go by rail from St. Louis to Hannibal--a distance of at least a hundred and twenty miles--in seven hours. This is better than walking; unless one is in a hurry. The season being far advanced when we were in New Orleans, the roses and magnolia blossoms were falling; but here in St. Paul it was the snow, In New Orleans we had caught an occasional withering breath from over a crater, apparently; here in St. Paul we caught a frequent benumbing one from over a glacier, apparently. But I wander from my theme. St. Paul is a wonderful town. It is put together in solid blocks of honest brick and stone, and has the air of intending to stay. Its post-office was established thirty-six years ago; and by and by, when the postmaster received a letter, he carried it to Washington, horseback, to inquire what was to be done with it. Such is the legend. Two frame houses were built that year, and several persons were added to the population. A recent number of the leading St. Paul paper, the 'Pioneer Press,' gives some statistics which furnish a vivid contrast to that old state of things, to wit: Population, autumn of the present year (1882), 71,000; number of letters handled, first half of the year, 1,209,387; number of houses built during three- quarters of the year, 989; their cost, $3,186,000. The increase of letters over the corresponding six months of last year was fifty per cent. Last year the new buildings added to the city cost above $4,500,000. St. Paul's strength lies in her commerce--I mean his commerce. He is a manufacturing city, of course--all the cities of that region are--but he is peculiarly strong in the matter of commerce. Last year his jobbing trade amounted to upwards of $52,000,000. He has a custom-house, and is building a costly capitol to replace the one recently burned--for he is the capital of the State. He has churches without end; and not the cheap poor kind, but the kind that the rich Protestant puts up, the kind that the poor Irish 'hired-girl' delights to erect. What a passion for building majestic churches the Irish hired-girl has. It is a fine thing for our architecture but too often we enjoy her stately fanes without giving her a grateful thought. In fact, instead of reflecting that 'every brick and every stone in this beautiful edifice represents an ache or a pain, and a handful of sweat, and hours of heavy fatigue, contributed by the back and forehead and bones of poverty,' it is our habit to forget these things entirely, and merely glorify the mighty temple itself, without vouchsafing one praiseful thought to its humble builder, whose rich heart and withered purse it symbolizes. This is a land of libraries and schools. St. Paul has three public libraries, and they contain, in the aggregate, some forty thousand books. He has one hundred and sixteen school-houses, and pays out more than seventy thousand dollars a year in teachers' salaries. There is an unusually fine railway station; so large is it, in fact, that it seemed somewhat overdone, in the matter of size, at first; but at the end of a few months it was perceived that the mistake was distinctly the other way. The error is to be corrected. The town stands on high ground; it is about seven hundred feet above the sea level. It is so high that a wide view of river and lowland is offered from its streets. It is a very wonderful town indeed, and is not finished yet. All the streets are obstructed with building material, and this is being compacted into houses as fast as possible, to make room for more--for other people are anxious to build, as soon as they can get the use of the streets to pile up their bricks and stuff in. How solemn and beautiful is the thought, that the earliest pioneer of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school, never the missionary--but always whiskey! Such is the case. Look history over; you will see. The missionary comes after the whiskey--I mean he arrives after the whiskey has arrived; next comes the poor immigrant, with ax and hoe and rifle; next, the trader; next, the miscellaneous rush; next, the gambler, the desperado, the highwayman, and all their kindred in sin of both sexes; and next, the smart chap who has bought up an old grant that covers all the land; this brings the lawyer tribe; the vigilance committee brings the undertaker. All these interests bring the newspaper; the newspaper starts up politics and a railroad; all hands turn to and build a church and a jail--and behold, civilization is established for ever in the land. But whiskey, you see, was the van- leader in this beneficent work. It always is. It was like a foreigner-- and excusable in a foreigner--to be ignorant of this great truth, and wander off into astronomy to borrow a symbol. But if he had been conversant with the facts, he would have said-- Westward the Jug of Empire takes its way. This great van-leader arrived upon the ground which St. Paul now occupies, in June 1837. Yes, at that date, Pierre Parrant, a Canadian, built the first cabin, uncorked his jug, and began to sell whiskey to the Indians. The result is before us. All that I have said of the newness, briskness, swift progress, wealth, intelligence, fine and substantial architecture, and general slash and go, and energy of St. Paul, will apply to his near neighbor, Minneapolis--with the addition that the latter is the bigger of the two cities. These extraordinary towns were ten miles apart, a few months ago, but were growing so fast that they may possibly be joined now, and getting along under a single mayor. At any rate, within five years from now there will be at least such a substantial ligament of buildings stretching between them and uniting them that a stranger will not be able to tell where the one Siamese twin leaves off and the other begins. Combined, they will then number a population of two hundred and fifty thousand, if they continue to grow as they are now growing. Thus, this center of population at the head of Mississippi navigation, will then begin a rivalry as to numbers, with that center of population at the foot of it--New Orleans. Minneapolis is situated at the falls of St. Anthony, which stretch across the river, fifteen hundred feet, and have a fall of eighty-two feet--a waterpower which, by art, has been made of inestimable value, business-wise, though somewhat to the damage of the Falls as a spectacle, or as a background against which to get your photograph taken. Thirty flouring-mills turn out two million barrels of the very choicest of flour every year; twenty sawmills produce two hundred million feet of lumber annually; then there are woolen mills, cotton mills, paper and oil mills; and sash, nail, furniture, barrel, and other factories, without number, so to speak. The great flouring-mills here and at St. Paul use the 'new process' and mash the wheat by rolling, instead of grinding it. Sixteen railroads meet in Minneapolis, and sixty-five passenger trains arrive and depart daily. In this place, as in St. Paul, journalism thrives. Here there are three great dailies, ten weeklies, and three monthlies. There is a university, with four hundred students--and, better still, its good efforts are not confined to enlightening the one sex. There are sixteen public schools, with buildings which cost $500,000; there are six thousand pupils and one hundred and twenty-eight teachers. There are also seventy churches existing, and a lot more projected. The banks aggregate a capital of $3,000,000, and the wholesale jobbing trade of the town amounts to $50,000,000 a year. Near St. Paul and Minneapolis are several points of interest--Fort Snelling, a fortress occupying a river-bluff a hundred feet high; the falls of Minnehaha, White-bear Lake, and so forth. The beautiful falls of Minnehaha are sufficiently celebrated--they do not need a lift from me, in that direction. The White-bear Lake is less known. It is a lovely sheet of water, and is being utilized as a summer resort by the wealth and fashion of the State. It has its club-house, and its hotel, with the modern improvements and conveniences; its fine summer residences; and plenty of fishing, hunting, and pleasant drives. There are a dozen minor summer resorts around about St. Paul and Minneapolis, but the White-bear Lake is the resort. Connected with White-bear Lake is a most idiotic Indian legend. I would resist the temptation to print it here, if I could, but the task is beyond my strength. The guide-book names the preserver of the legend, and compliments his 'facile pen.' Without further comment or delay then, let us turn the said facile pen loose upon the reader-- A LEGEND OF WHITE-BEAR LAKE. Every spring, for perhaps a century, or as long as there has been a nation of red men, an island in the middle of White-bear Lake has been visited by a band of Indians for the purpose of making maple sugar. Tradition says that many springs ago, while upon this island, a young warrior loved and wooed the daughter of his chief, and it is said, also, the maiden loved the warrior. He had again and again been refused her hand by her parents, the old chief alleging that he was no brave, and his old consort called him a woman! The sun had again set upon the 'sugar-bush,' and the bright moon rose high in the bright blue heavens, when the young warrior took down his flute and went out alone, once more to sing the story of his love, the mild breeze gently moved the two gay feathers in his head-dress, and as he mounted on the trunk of a leaning tree, the damp snow fell from his feet heavily. As he raised his flute to his lips, his blanket slipped from his well-formed shoulders, and lay partly on the snow beneath. He began his weird, wild love-song, but soon felt that he was cold, and as he reached back for his blanket, some unseen hand laid it gently on his shoulders; it was the hand of his love, his guardian angel. She took her place beside him, and for the present they were happy; for the Indian has a heart to love, and in this pride he is as noble as in his own freedom, which makes him the child of the forest. As the legend runs, a large white-bear, thinking, perhaps, that polar snows and dismal winter weather extended everywhere, took up his journey southward. He at length approached the northern shore of the lake which now bears his name, walked down the bank and made his way noiselessly through the deep heavy snow toward the island. It was the same spring ensuing that the lovers met. They had left their first retreat, and were now seated among the branches of a large elm which hung far over the lake. (The same tree is still standing, and excites universal curiosity and interest.) For fear of being detected, they talked almost in a whisper, and now, that they might get back to camp in good time and thereby avoid suspicion, they were just rising to return, when the maiden uttered a shriek which was heard at the camp, and bounding toward the young brave, she caught his blanket, but missed the direction of her foot and fell, bearing the blanket with her into the great arms of the ferocious monster. Instantly every man, woman, and child of the band were upon the bank, but all unarmed. Cries and wailings went up from every mouth. What was to be done'? In the meantime this white and savage beast held the breathless maiden in his huge grasp, and fondled with his precious prey as if he were used to scenes like this. One deafening yell from the lover warrior is heard above the cries of hundreds of his tribe, and dashing away to his wigwam he grasps his faithful knife, returns almost at a single bound to the scene of fear and fright, rushes out along the leaning tree to the spot where his treasure fell, and springing with the fury of a mad panther, pounced upon his prey. The animal turned, and with one stroke of his huge paw brought the lovers heart to heart, but the next moment the warrior, with one plunge of the blade of his knife, opened the crimson sluices of death, and the dying bear relaxed his hold. That night there was no more sleep for the band or the lovers, and as the young and the old danced about the carcass of the dead monster, the gallant warrior was presented with another plume, and ere another moon had set he had a living treasure added to his heart. Their children for many years played upon the skin of the white-bear--from which the lake derives its name--and the maiden and the brave remembered long the fearful scene and rescue that made them one, for Kis-se-me-pa and Ka-go- ka could never forget their fearful encounter with the huge monster that came so near sending them to the happy hunting-ground. It is a perplexing business. First, she fell down out of the tree--she and the blanket; and the bear caught her and fondled her--her and the blanket; then she fell up into the tree again--leaving the blanket; meantime the lover goes war-whooping home and comes back 'heeled,' climbs the tree, jumps down on the bear, the girl jumps down after him-- apparently, for she was up the tree--resumes her place in the bear's arms along with the blanket, the lover rams his knife into the bear, and saves--whom, the blanket? No--nothing of the sort. You get yourself all worked up and excited about that blanket, and then all of a sudden, just when a happy climax seems imminent you are let down flat--nothing saved but the girl. Whereas, one is not interested in the girl; she is not the prominent feature of the legend. Nevertheless, there you are left, and there you must remain; for if you live a thousand years you will never know who got the blanket. A dead man could get up a better legend than this one. I don't mean a fresh dead man either; I mean a man that's been dead weeks and weeks. We struck the home-trail now, and in a few hours were in that astonishing Chicago--a city where they are always rubbing the lamp, and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities. It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago--she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time. The Pennsylvania road rushed us to New York without missing schedule time ten minutes anywhere on the route; and there ended one of the most enjoyable five-thousand-mile journeys I have ever had the good fortune to make. APPENDIX A (FROM THE NEW ORLEANS TIMES DEMOCRAT OF MARCH 29, 1882.) VOYAGE OF THE TIMES-DEMOCRAT'S RELIEF BOAT THROUGH THE INUNDATED REGIONS IT was nine o'clock Thursday morning when the 'Susie' left the Mississippi and entered Old River, or what is now called the mouth of the Red. Ascending on the left, a flood was pouring in through and over the levees on the Chandler plantation, the most northern point in Pointe Coupee parish. The water completely covered the place, although the levees had given way but a short time before. The stock had been gathered in a large flat-boat, where, without food, as we passed, the animals were huddled together, waiting for a boat to tow them off. On the right-hand side of the river is Turnbull's Island, and on it is a large plantation which formerly was pronounced one of the most fertile in the State. The water has hitherto allowed it to go scot-free in usual floods, but now broad sheets of water told only where fields were. The top of the protecting levee could be seen here and there, but nearly all of it was submerged. The trees have put on a greener foliage since the water has poured in, and the woods look bright and fresh, but this pleasant aspect to the eye is neutralized by the interminable waste of water. We pass mile after mile, and it is nothing but trees standing up to their branches in water. A water-turkey now and again rises and flies ahead into the long avenue of silence. A pirogue sometimes flits from the bushes and crosses the Red River on its way out to the Mississippi, but the sad- faced paddlers never turn their heads to look at our boat. The puffing of the boat is music in this gloom, which affects one most curiously. It is not the gloom of deep forests or dark caverns, but a peculiar kind of solemn silence and impressive awe that holds one perforce to its recognition. We passed two negro families on a raft tied up in the willows this morning. They were evidently of the well-to-do class, as they had a supply of meal and three or four hogs with them. Their rafts were about twenty feet square, and in front of an improvised shelter earth had been placed, on which they built their fire. The current running down the Atchafalaya was very swift, the Mississippi showing a predilection in that direction, which needs only to be seen to enforce the opinion of that river's desperate endeavors to find a short way to the Gulf. Small boats, skiffs, pirogues, etc., are in great demand, and many have been stolen by piratical negroes, who take them where they will bring the greatest price. From what was told me by Mr. C. P. Ferguson, a planter near Red River Landing, whose place has just gone under, there is much suffering in the rear of that place. The negroes had given up all thoughts of a crevasse there, as the upper levee had stood so long, and when it did come they were at its mercy. On Thursday a number were taken out of trees and off of cabin roofs and brought in, many yet remaining. One does not appreciate the sight of earth until he has traveled through a flood. At sea one does not expect or look for it, but here, with fluttering leaves, shadowy forest aisles, house-tops barely visible, it is expected. In fact a grave-yard, if the mounds were above water, would be appreciated. The river here is known only because there is an opening in the trees, and that is all. It is in width, from Fort Adams on the left bank of the Mississippi to the bank of Rapides Parish, a distance of about sixty miles. A large portion of this was under cultivation, particularly along the Mississippi and back of the Red. When Red River proper was entered, a strong current was running directly across it, pursuing the same direction as that of the Mississippi. After a run of some hours, Black River was reached. Hardly was it entered before signs of suffering became visible. All the willows along the banks were stripped of their leaves. One man, whom your correspondent spoke to, said that he had had one hundred and fifty head of cattle and one hundred head of hogs. At the first appearance of water he had started to drive them to the high lands of Avoyelles, thirty-five miles off, but he lost fifty head of the beef cattle and sixty hogs. Black River is quite picturesque, even if its shores are under water. A dense growth of ash, oak, gum, and hickory make the shores almost impenetrable, and where one can get a view down some avenue in the trees, only the dim outlines of distant trunks can be barely distinguished in the gloom. A few miles up this river, the depth of water on the banks was fully eight feet, and on all sides could be seen, still holding against the strong current, the tops of cabins. Here and there one overturned was surrounded by drift-wood, forming the nucleus of possibly some future island. In order to save coal, as it was impossible to get that fuel at any point to be touched during the expedition, a look-out was kept for a wood-pile. On rounding a point a pirogue, skilfully paddled by a youth, shot out, and in its bow was a girl of fifteen, of fair face, beautiful black eyes, and demure manners. The boy asked for a paper, which was thrown to him, and the couple pushed their tiny craft out into the swell of the boat. Presently a little girl, not certainly over twelve years, paddled out in the smallest little canoe and handled it with all the deftness of an old voyageur. The little one looked more like an Indian than a white child, and laughed when asked if she were afraid. She had been raised in a pirogue and could go anywhere. She was bound out to pick willow leaves for the stock, and she pointed to a house near by with water three inches deep on the floors. At its back door was moored a raft about thirty feet square, with a sort of fence built upon it, and inside of this some sixteen cows and twenty hogs were standing. The family did not complain, except on account of losing their stock, and promptly brought a supply of wood in a flat. From this point to the Mississippi River, fifteen miles, there is not a spot of earth above water, and to the westward for thirty-five miles there is nothing but the river's flood. Black River had risen during Thursday, the 23rd, 1{three-quarters} inches, and was going up at night still. As we progress up the river habitations become more frequent, but are yet still miles apart. Nearly all of them are deserted, and the out-houses floated off. To add to the gloom, almost every living thing seems to have departed, and not a whistle of a bird nor the bark of the squirrel can be heard in this solitude. Sometimes a morose gar will throw his tail aloft and disappear in the river, but beyond this everything is quiet--the quiet of dissolution. Down the river floats now a neatly whitewashed hen-house, then a cluster of neatly split fence- rails, or a door and a bloated carcass, solemnly guarded by a pair of buzzards, the only bird to be seen, which feast on the carcass as it bears them along. A picture-frame in which there was a cheap lithograph of a soldier on horseback, as it floated on told of some hearth invaded by the water and despoiled of this ornament. At dark, as it was not prudent to run, a place alongside the woods was hunted and to a tall gum-tree the boat was made fast for the night. A pretty quarter of the moon threw a pleasant light over forest and river, making a picture that would be a delightful piece of landscape study, could an artist only hold it down to his canvas. The motion of the engines had ceased, the puffing of the escaping steam was stilled, and the enveloping silence closed upon us, and such silence it was! Usually in a forest at night one can hear the piping of frogs, the hum of insects, or the dropping of limbs; but here nature was dumb. The dark recesses, those aisles into this cathedral, gave forth no sound, and even the ripplings of the current die away. At daylight Friday morning all hands were up, and up the Black we started. The morning was a beautiful one, and the river, which is remarkably straight, put on its loveliest garb. The blossoms of the haw perfumed the air deliciously, and a few birds whistled blithely along the banks. The trees were larger, and the forest seemed of older growth than below. More fields were passed than nearer the mouth, but the same scene presented itself--smoke-houses drifting out in the pastures, negro quarters anchored in confusion against some oak, and the modest residence just showing its eaves above water. The sun came up in a glory of carmine, and the trees were brilliant in their varied shades of green. Not a foot of soil is to be seen anywhere, and the water is apparently growing deeper and deeper, for it reaches up to the branches of the largest trees. All along, the bordering willows have been denuded of leaves, showing how long the people have been at work gathering this fodder for their animals. An old man in a pirogue was asked how the willow leaves agreed with his cattle. He stopped in his work, and with an ominous shake of his head replied: 'Well, sir, it 's enough to keep warmth in their bodies and that's all we expect, but it's hard on the hogs, particularly the small ones. They is dropping off powerful fast. But what can you do? It 's all we've got.' At thirty miles above the mouth of Black River the water extends from Natchez on the Mississippi across to the pine hills of Louisiana, a distance of seventy-three miles, and there is hardly a spot that is not ten feet under it. The tendency of the current up the Black is toward the west. In fact, so much is this the case, the waters of Red River have been driven down from toward the Calcasieu country, and the waters of the Black enter the Red some fifteen miles above the mouth of the former, a thing never before seen by even the oldest steamboatmen. The water now in sight of us is entirely from the Mississippi. Up to Trinity, or rather Troy, which is but a short distance below, the people have nearly all moved out, those remaining having enough for their present personal needs. Their cattle, though, are suffering and dying off quite fast, as the confinement on rafts and the food they get breeds disease. After a short stop we started, and soon came to a section where there were many open fields and cabins thickly scattered about. Here were seen more pictures of distress. On the inside of the houses the inmates had built on boxes a scaffold on which they placed the furniture. The bed- posts were sawed off on top, as the ceiling was not more than four feet from the improvised floor. The buildings looked very insecure, and threatened every moment to float off. Near the houses were cattle standing breast high in the water, perfectly impassive. They did not move in their places, but stood patiently waiting for help to come. The sight was a distressing one, and the poor creatures will be sure to die unless speedily rescued. Cattle differ from horses in this peculiar quality. A horse, after finding no relief comes, will swim off in search of food, whereas a beef will stand in its tracks until with exhaustion it drops in the water and drowns. At half-past twelve o'clock a hail was given from a flat-boat inside the line of the bank. Rounding to we ran alongside, and General York stepped aboard. He was just then engaged in getting off stock, and welcomed the 'Times-Democrat' boat heartily, as he said there was much need for her. He said that the distress was not exaggerated in the least. People were in a condition it was difficult even for one to imagine. The water was so high there was great danger of their houses being swept away. It had already risen so high that it was approaching the eaves, and when it reaches this point there is always imminent risk of their being swept away. If this occurs, there will be great loss of life. The General spoke of the gallant work of many of the people in their attempts to save their stock, but thought that fully twenty-five per cent. had perished. Already twenty-five hundred people had received rations from Troy, on Black River, and he had towed out a great many cattle, but a very great quantity remained and were in dire need. The water was now eighteen inches higher than in 1874, and there was no land between Vidalia and the hills of Catahoula. At two o'clock the 'Susie' reached Troy, sixty-five miles above the mouth of Black River. Here on the left comes in Little River; just beyond that the Ouachita, and on the right the Tensas. These three rivers form the Black River. Troy, or a portion of it, is situated on and around three large Indian mounds, circular in shape, which rise above the present water about twelve feet. They are about one hundred and fifty feet in diameter, and are about two hundred yards apart. The houses are all built between these mounds, and hence are all flooded to a depth of eighteen inches on their floors. These elevations, built by the aborigines, hundreds of years ago, are the only points of refuge for miles. When we arrived we found them crowded with stock, all of which was thin and hardly able to stand up. They were mixed together, sheep, hogs, horses, mules, and cattle. One of these mounds has been used for many years as the grave-yard, and to-day we saw attenuated cows lying against the marble tomb-stones, chewing their cud in contentment, after a meal of corn furnished by General York. Here, as below, the remarkable skill of the women and girls in the management of the smaller pirogues was noticed. Children were paddling about in these most ticklish crafts with all the nonchalance of adepts. General York has put into operation a perfect system in regard to furnishing relief. He makes a personal inspection of the place where it is asked, sees what is necessary to be done, and then, having two boats chartered, with flats, sends them promptly to the place, when the cattle are loaded and towed to the pine hills and uplands of Catahoula. He has made Troy his headquarters, and to this point boats come for their supply of feed for cattle. On the opposite side of Little River, which branches to the left out of Black, and between it and the Ouachita, is situated the town of Trinity, which is hourly threatened with destruction. It is much lower than Troy, and the water is eight and nine feet deep in the houses. A strong current sweeps through it, and it is remarkable that all of its houses have not gone before. The residents of both Troy and Trinity have been cared for, yet some of their stock have to be furnished with food. As soon as the 'Susie' reached Troy, she was turned over to General York, and placed at his disposition to carry out the work of relief more rapidly. Nearly all her supplies were landed on one of the mounds to lighten her, and she was headed down stream to relieve those below. At Tom Hooper's place, a few miles from Troy, a large flat, with about fifty head of stock on board, was taken in tow. The animals were fed, and soon regained some strength. To-day we go on Little River, where the suffering is greatest. DOWN BLACK RIVER Saturday Evening, March 25. We started down Black River quite early, under the direction of General York, to bring out what stock could be reached. Going down river a flat in tow was left in a central locality, and from there men poled her back in the rear of plantations, picking up the animals wherever found. In the loft of a gin-house there were seventeen head found, and after a gangway was built they were led down into the flat without difficulty. Taking a skiff with the General, your reporter was pulled up to a little house of two rooms, in which the water was standing two feet on the floors. In one of the large rooms were huddled the horses and cows of the place, while in the other the Widow Taylor and her son were seated on a scaffold raised on the floor. One or two dug-outs were drifting about in the roam ready to be put in service at any time. When the flat was brought up, the side of the house was cut away as the only means of getting the animals out, and the cattle were driven on board the boat. General York, in this as in every case, inquired if the family desired to leave, informing them that Major Burke, of 'The Times-Democrat,' has sent the 'Susie' up for that purpose. Mrs. Taylor said she thanked Major Burke, but she would try and hold out. The remarkable tenacity of the people here to their homes is beyond all comprehension. Just below, at a point sixteen miles from Troy, information was received that the house of Mr. Tom Ellis was in danger, and his family were all in it. We steamed there immediately, and a sad picture was presented. Looking out of the half of the window left above water, was Mrs. Ellis, who is in feeble health, whilst at the door were her seven children, the oldest not fourteen years. One side of the house was given up to the work animals, some twelve head, besides hogs. In the next room the family lived, the water coming within two inches of the bed-rail. The stove was below water, and the cooking was done on a fire on top of it. The house threatened to give way at any moment: one end of it was sinking, and, in fact, the building looked a mere shell. As the boat rounded to, Mr. Ellis came out in a dug-out, and General York told him that he had come to his relief; that 'The Times-Democrat' boat was at his service, and would remove his family at once to the hills, and on Monday a flat would take out his stock, as, until that time, they would be busy. Notwithstanding the deplorable situation himself and family were in, Mr. Ellis did not want to leave. He said he thought he would wait until Monday, and take the risk of his house falling. The children around the door looked perfectly contented, seeming to care little for the danger they were in. These are but two instances of the many. After weeks of privation and suffering, people still cling to their houses and leave only when there is not room between the water and the ceiling to build a scaffold on which to stand. It seemed to be incomprehensible, yet the love for the old place was stronger than that for safety. After leaving the Ellis place, the next spot touched at was the Oswald place. Here the flat was towed alongside the gin-house where there were fifteen head standing in water; and yet, as they stood on scaffolds, their heads were above the top of the entrance. It was found impossible to get them out without cutting away a portion of the front; and so axes were brought into requisition and a gap made. After much labor the horses and mules were securely placed on the flat. At each place we stop there are always three, four, or more dug-outs arriving, bringing information of stock in other places in need. Notwithstanding the fact that a great many had driven a part of their stock to the hills some time ago, there yet remains a large quantity, which General York, who is working with indomitable energy, will get landed in the pine hills by Tuesday. All along Black River the 'Susie' has been visited by scores of planters, whose tales are the repetition of those already heard of suffering and loss. An old planter, who has lived on the river since 1844, said there never was such a rise, and he was satisfied more than one quarter of the stock has been lost. Luckily the people cared first for their work stock, and when they could find it horses and mules were housed in a place of safety. The rise which still continues, and was two inches last night, compels them to get them out to the hills; hence it is that the work of General York is of such a great value. From daylight to late at night he is going this way and that, cheering by his kindly words and directing with calm judgment what is to be done. One unpleasant story, of a certain merchant in New Orleans, is told all along the river. It appears for some years past the planters have been dealing with this individual, and many of them had balances in his hands. When the overflow came they wrote for coffee, for meal, and, in fact, for such little necessities as were required. No response to these letters came, and others were written, and yet these old customers, with plantations under water, were refused even what was necessary to sustain life. It is needless to say he is not popular now on Back River. The hills spoken of as the place of refuge for the people and stock on Black River are in Catahoula parish, twenty-four miles from Black River. After filling the flat with cattle we took on board the family of T. S. Hooper, seven in number, who could not longer remain in their dwelling, and we are now taking them up Little River to the hills. THE FLOOD STILL RISING Troy: March 27, 1882, noon. The flood here is rising about three and a half inches every twenty-four hours, and rains have set in which will increase this. General York feels now that our efforts ought to be directed towards saving life, as the increase of the water has jeopardized many houses. We intend to go up the Tensas in a few minutes, and then we will return and go down Black River to take off families. There is a lack of steam transportation here to meet the emergency. The General has three boats chartered, with flats in tow, but the demand for these to tow out stock is greater than they can meet with promptness. All are working night and day, and the 'Susie' hardly stops for more than an hour anywhere. The rise has placed Trinity in a dangerous plight, and momentarily it is expected that some of the houses will float off. Troy is a little higher, yet all are in the water. Reports have come in that a woman and child have been washed away below here, and two cabins floated off. Their occupants are the same who refused to come off day before yesterday. One would not believe the utter passiveness of the people. As yet no news has been received of the steamer 'Delia,' which is supposed to be the one sunk in yesterday's storm on Lake Catahoula. She is due here now, but has not arrived. Even the mail here is most uncertain, and this I send by skiff to Natchez to get it to you. It is impossible to get accurate data as to past crops, etc., as those who know much about the matter have gone, and those who remain are not well versed in the production of this section. General York desires me to say that the amount of rations formerly sent should be duplicated and sent at once. It is impossible to make any estimate, for the people are fleeing to the hills, so rapid is the rise. The residents here are in a state of commotion that can only be appreciated when seen, and complete demoralization has set in, If rations are drawn for any particular section hereabouts, they would not be certain to be distributed, so everything should be sent to Troy as a center, and the General will have it properly disposed of. He has sent for one hundred tents, and, if all go to the hills who are in motion now, two hundred will be required. APPENDIX B THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER COMMISSION THE condition of this rich valley of the Lower Mississippi, immediately after and since the war, constituted one of the disastrous effects of war most to be deplored. Fictitious property in slaves was not only righteously destroyed, but very much of the work which had depended upon the slave labor was also destroyed or greatly impaired, especially the levee system. It might have been expected by those who have not investigated the subject, that such important improvements as the construction and maintenance of the levees would have been assumed at once by the several States. But what can the State do where the people are under subjection to rates of interest ranging from 18 to 30 per cent., and are also under the necessity of pledging their crops in advance even of planting, at these rates, for the privilege of purchasing all of their supplies at 100 per cent. profit? It has needed but little attention to make it perfectly obvious that the control of the Mississippi River, if undertaken at all, must be undertaken by the national government, and cannot be compassed by States. The river must be treated as a unit; its control cannot be compassed under a divided or separate system of administration. Neither are the States especially interested competent to combine among themselves for the necessary operations. The work must begin far up the river; at least as far as Cairo, if not beyond; and must be conducted upon a consistent general plan throughout the course of the river. It does not need technical or scientific knowledge to comprehend the elements of the case if one will give a little time and attention to the subject, and when a Mississippi River commission has been constituted, as the existing commission is, of thoroughly able men of different walks in life, may it not be suggested that their verdict in the case should be accepted as conclusive, so far as any a priori theory of construction or control can be considered conclusive? It should be remembered that upon this board are General Gilmore, General Comstock, and General Suter, of the United States Engineers; Professor Henry Mitchell (the most competent authority on the question of hydrography), of the United States Coast Survey; B. B. Harrod, the State Engineer of Louisiana; Jas. B. Eads, whose success with the jetties at New Orleans is a warrant of his competency, and Judge Taylor, of Indiana. It would be presumption on the part of any single man, however skilled, to contest the judgment of such a board as this. The method of improvement proposed by the commission is at once in accord with the results of engineering experience and with observations of nature where meeting our wants. As in nature the growth of trees and their proneness where undermined to fall across the slope and support the bank secures at some points a fair depth of channel and some degree of permanence, so in the project of the engineer the use of timber and brush and the encouragement of forest growth are the main features. It is proposed to reduce the width where excessive by brushwood dykes, at first low, but raised higher and higher as the mud of the river settles under their shelter, and finally slope them back at the angle upon which willows will grow freely. In this work there are many details connected with the forms of these shelter dykes, their arrangements so as to present a series of settling basins, etc., a description of which would only complicate the conception. Through the larger part of the river works of contraction will not be required, but nearly all the banks on the concave side of the beds must be held against the wear of the stream, and much of the opposite banks defended at critical points. The works having in view this conservative object may be generally designated works of revetment; and these also will be largely of brushwood, woven in continuous carpets, or twined into wire-netting. This veneering process has been successfully employed on the Missouri River; and in some cases they have so covered themselves with sediments, and have become so overgrown with willows, that they may be regarded as permanent. In securing these mats rubble-stone is to be used in small quantities, and in some instances the dressed slope between high and low river will have to be more or less paved with stone. Any one who has been on the Rhine will have observed operations not unlike those to which we have just referred; and, indeed, most of the rivers of Europe flowing among their own alluvia have required similar treatment in the interest of navigation and agriculture. The levee is the crowning work of bank revetment, although not necessarily in immediate connection. It may be set back a short distance from the revetted bank; but it is, in effect, the requisite parapet. The flood river and the low river cannot be brought into register, and compelled to unite in the excavation of a single permanent channel, without a complete control of all the stages; and even the abnormal rise must be provided against, because this would endanger the levee, and once in force behind the works of revetment would tear them also away. Under the general principle that the local slope of a river is the result and measure of the resistance of its bed, it is evident that a narrow and deep stream should have less slope, because it has less frictional surface in proportion to capacity; i.e., less perimeter in proportion to area of cross section. The ultimate effect of levees and revetments confining the floods and bringing all the stages of the river into register is to deepen the channel and let down the slope. The first effect of the levees is to raise the surface; but this, by inducing greater velocity of flow, inevitably causes an enlargement of section, and if this enlargement is prevented from being made at the expense of the banks, the bottom must give way and the form of the waterway be so improved as to admit this flow with less rise. The actual experience with levees upon the Mississippi River, with no attempt to hold the banks, has been favorable, and no one can doubt, upon the evidence furnished in the reports of the commission, that if the earliest levees had been accompanied by revetment of banks, and made complete, we should have to-day a river navigable at low water, and an adjacent country safe from inundation. Of course it would be illogical to conclude that the constrained river can ever lower its flood slope so as to make levees unnecessary, but it is believed that, by this lateral constraint, the river as a conduit may be so improved in form that even those rare floods which result from the coincident rising of many tributaries will find vent without destroying levees of ordinary height. That the actual capacity of a channel through alluvium depends upon its service during floods has been often shown, but this capacity does not include anomalous, but recurrent, floods. It is hardly worth while to consider the projects for relieving the Mississippi River floods by creating new outlets, since these sensational propositions have commended themselves only to unthinking minds, and have no support among engineers. Were the river bed cast- iron, a resort to openings for surplus waters might be a necessity; but as the bottom is yielding, and the best form of outlet is a single deep channel, as realizing the least ratio of perimeter to area of cross section, there could not well be a more unphilosophical method of treatment than the multiplication of avenues of escape. In the foregoing statement the attempt has been made to condense in as limited a space as the importance of the subject would permit, the general elements of the problem, and the general features of the proposed method of improvement which has been adopted by the Mississippi River Commission. The writer cannot help feeling that it is somewhat presumptuous on his part to attempt to present the facts relating to an enterprise which calls for the highest scientific skill; but it is a matter which interests every citizen of the United States, and is one of the methods of reconstruction which ought to be approved. It is a war claim which implies no private gain, and no compensation except for one of the cases of destruction incident to war, which may well be repaired by the people of the whole country. EDWARD ATKINSON. Boston: April 14, 1882. APPENDIX C RECEPTION OF CAPTAIN BASIL HALL'S BOOK IN THE UNITED STATES HAVING now arrived nearly at the end of our travels, I am induced, ere I conclude, again to mention what I consider as one of the most remarkable traits in the national character of the Americans; namely, their exquisite sensitiveness and soreness respecting everything said or written concerning them. Of this, perhaps, the most remarkable example I can give is the effect produced on nearly every class of readers by the appearance of Captain Basil Hall's 'Travels in North America.' In fact, it was a sort of moral earthquake, and the vibration it occasioned through the nerves of the republic, from one corner of the Union to the other, was by no means over when I left the country in July 1831, a couple of years after the shock. I was in Cincinnati when these volumes came out, but it was not till July 1830, that I procured a copy of them. One bookseller to whom I applied told me that he had had a few copies before he understood the nature of the work, but that, after becoming acquainted with it, nothing should induce him to sell another. Other persons of his profession must, however, have been less scrupulous; for the book was read in city, town, village, and hamlet, steamboat, and stage-coach, and a sort of war-whoop was sent forth perfectly unprecedented in my recollection upon any occasion whatever. An ardent desire for approbation, and a delicate sensitiveness under censure, have always, I believe, been considered as amiable traits of character; but the condition into which the appearance of Captain Hall's work threw the republic shows plainly that these feelings, if carried to excess, produce a weakness which amounts to imbecility. It was perfectly astonishing to hear men who, on other subjects, were of some judgment, utter their opinions upon this. I never heard of any instance in which the commonsense generally found in national criticism was so overthrown by passion. I do not speak of the want of justice, and of fair and liberal interpretation: these, perhaps, were hardly to be expected. Other nations have been called thin-skinned, but the citizens of the Union have, apparently, no skins at all; they wince if a breeze blows over them, unless it be tempered with adulation. It was not, therefore, very surprising that the acute and forcible observations of a traveler they knew would be listened to should be received testily. The extraordinary features of the business were, first, the excess of the rage into which they lashed themselves; and, secondly, the puerility of the inventions by which they attempted to account for the severity with which they fancied they had been treated. Not content with declaring that the volumes contained no word of truth, from beginning to end (which is an assertion I heard made very nearly as often as they were mentioned), the whole country set to work to discover the causes why Captain Hall had visited the United States, and why he had published his book. I have heard it said with as much precision and gravity as if the statement had been conveyed by an official report, that Captain Hall had been sent out by the British Government expressly for the purpose of checking the growing admiration of England for the Government of the United States,--that it was by a commission from the treasury he had come, and that it was only in obedience to orders that he had found anything to object to. I do not give this as the gossip of a coterie; I am persuaded that it is the belief of a very considerable portion of the country. So deep is the conviction of this singular people that they cannot be seen without being admired, that they will not admit the possibility that any one should honestly and sincerely find aught to disapprove in them or their country. The American Reviews are, many of them, I believe, well known in England; I need not, therefore, quote them here, but I sometimes wondered that they, none of them, ever thought of translating Obadiah's curse into classic American; if they had done so, on placing (he, Basil Hall) between brackets, instead of (he, Obadiah) it would have saved them a world of trouble. I can hardly describe the curiosity with which I sat down at length to peruse these tremendous volumes; still less can I do justice to my surprise at their contents. To say that I found not one exaggerated statement throughout the work is by no means saying enough. It is impossible for any one who knows the country not to see that Captain Hall earnestly sought out things to admire and commend. When he praises, it is with evident pleasure; and when he finds fault, it is with evident reluctance and restraint, excepting where motives purely patriotic urge him to state roundly what it is for the benefit of his country should be known. In fact, Captain Hall saw the country to the greatest possible advantage. Furnished, of course, with letters of introduction to the most distinguished individuals, and with the still more influential recommendation of his own reputation, he was received in full drawing- room style and state from one end of the Union to the other. He saw the country in full dress, and had little or no opportunity of judging of it unhouselled, unanointed, unannealed, with all its imperfections on its head, as I and my family too often had. Captain Hall had certainly excellent opportunities of making himself acquainted with the form of the government and the laws; and of receiving, moreover, the best oral commentary upon them, in conversation with the most distinguished citizens. Of these opportunities he made excellent use; nothing important met his eye which did not receive that sort of analytical attention which an experienced and philosophical traveler alone can give. This has made his volumes highly interesting and valuable; but I am deeply persuaded, that were a man of equal penetration to visit the United States with no other means of becoming acquainted with the national character than the ordinary working-day intercourse of life, he would conceive an infinitely lower idea of the moral atmosphere of the country than Captain Hall appears to have done; and the internal conviction on my mind is strong, that if Captain Hall had not placed a firm restraint on himself, he must have given expression to far deeper indignation than any he has uttered against many points in the American character, with which he shows from other circumstances that he was well acquainted. His rule appears to have been to state just so much of the truth as would leave on the mind of his readers a correct impression, at the least cost of pain to the sensitive folks he was writing about. He states his own opinions and feelings, and leaves it to be inferred that he has good grounds for adopting them; but he spares the Americans the bitterness which a detail of the circumstances would have produced. If any one chooses to say that some wicked antipathy to twelve millions of strangers is the origin of my opinion, I must bear it; and were the question one of mere idle speculation, I certainly would not court the abuse I must meet for stating it. But it is not so. . . . . . . . The candor which he expresses, and evidently feels, they mistake for irony, or totally distrust; his unwillingness to give pain to persons from whom he has received kindness, they scornfully reject as affectation, and although they must know right well, in their own secret hearts, how infinitely more they lay at his mercy than he has chosen to betray; they pretend, even to themselves, that he has exaggerated the bad points of their character and institutions; whereas, the truth is, that he has let them off with a degree of tenderness which may be quite suitable for him to exercise, however little merited; while, at the same time, he has most industriously magnified their merits, whenever he could possibly find anything favorable. APPENDIX D THE UNDYING HEAD IN a remote part of the North lived a man and his sister, who had never seen a human being. Seldom, if ever, had the man any cause to go from home; for, as his wants demanded food, he had only to go a little distance from the lodge, and there, in some particular spot, place his arrows, with their barbs in the ground. Telling his sister where they had been placed, every morning she would go in search, and never fail of finding each stuck through the heart of a deer. She had then only to drag them into the lodge and prepare their food. Thus she lived till she attained womanhood, when one day her brother, whose name was Iamo, said to her: 'Sister, the time is at hand when you will be ill. Listen to my advice. If you do not, it will probably be the cause of my death. Take the implements with which we kindle our fires. Go some distance from our lodge and build a separate fire. When you are in want of food, I will tell you where to find it. You must cook for yourself, and I will for myself. When you are ill, do not attempt to come near the lodge, or bring any of the utensils you use. Be sure always to fasten to your belt the implements you need, for you do not know when the time will come. As for myself, I must do the best I can.' His sister promised to obey him in all he had said. Shortly after, her brother had cause to go from home. She was alone in her lodge, combing her hair. She had just untied the belt to which the implements were fastened, when suddenly the event, to which her brother had alluded, occurred. She ran out of the lodge, but in her haste forgot the belt. Afraid to return, she stood for some time thinking. Finally, she decided to enter the lodge and get it. For, thought she, my brother is not at home, and I will stay but a moment to catch hold of it. She went back. Running in suddenly, she caught hold of it, and was coming out when her brother came in sight. He knew what was the matter. 'Oh,' he said, 'did I not tell you to take care. But now you have killed me.' She was going on her way, but her brother said to her, 'What can you do there now. The accident has happened. Go in, and stay where you have always stayed. And what will become of you? You have killed me.' He then laid aside his hunting-dress and accoutrements, and soon after both his feet began to turn black, so that he could not move. Still he directed his sister where to place the arrows, that she might always have food. The inflammation continued to increase, and had now reached his first rib; and he said: 'Sister, my end is near. You must do as I tell you. You see my medicine-sack, and my war-club tied to it. It contains all my medicines, and my war-plumes, and my paints of all colors. As soon as the inflammation reaches my breast, you will take my war-club. It has a sharp point, and you will cut off my head. When it is free from my body, take it, place its neck in the sack, which you must open at one end. Then hang it up in its former place. Do not forget my bow and arrows. One of the last you will take to procure food. The remainder, tie in my sack, and then hang it up, so that I can look towards the door. Now and then I will speak to you, but not often.' His sister again promised to obey. In a little time his breast was affected. 'Now,' said he, 'take the club and strike off my head.' She was afraid, but he told her to muster courage. 'Strike,' said he, and a smile was on his face. Mustering all her courage, she gave the blow and cut off the head. 'Now,' said the head, 'place me where I told you.' And fearfully she obeyed it in all its commands. Retaining its animation, it looked around the lodge as usual, and it would command its sister to go in such places as it thought would procure for her the flesh of different animals she needed. One day the head said: 'The time is not distant when I shall be freed from this situation, and I shall have to undergo many sore evils. So the superior manito decrees, and I must bear all patiently.' In this situation we must leave the head. In a certain part of the country was a village inhabited by a numerous and warlike band of Indians. In this village was a family of ten young men--brothers. It was in the spring of the year that the youngest of these blackened his face and fasted. His dreams were propitious. Having ended his fast, he went secretly for his brothers at night, so that none in the village could overhear or find out the direction they intended to go. Though their drum was heard, yet that was a common occurrence. Having ended the usual formalities, he told how favorable his dreams were, and that he had called them together to know if they would accompany him in a war excursion. They all answered they would. The third brother from the eldest, noted for his oddities, coming up with his war-club when his brother had ceased speaking, jumped up. 'Yes,' said he, 'I will go, and this will be the way I will treat those I am going to fight;' and he struck the post in the center of the lodge, and gave a yell. The others spoke to him, saying: 'Slow, slow, Mudjikewis, when you are in other people's lodges.' So he sat down. Then, in turn, they took the drum, and sang their songs, and closed with a feast. The youngest told them not to whisper their intention to their wives, but secretly to prepare for their journey. They all promised obedience, and Mudjikewis was the first to say so. The time for their departure drew near. Word was given to assemble on a certain night, when they would depart immediately. Mudjikewis was loud in his demands for his moccasins. Several times his wife asked him the reason. 'Besides,' said she, 'you have a good pair on.' 'Quick, quick,' said he, 'since you must know, we are going on a war excursion; so be quick.' He thus revealed the secret. That night they met and started. The snow was on the ground, and they traveled all night, lest others should follow them. When it was daylight, the leader took snow and made a ball of it, then tossing it into the air, he said: 'It was in this way I saw snow fall in a dream, so that I could not be tracked.' And he told them to keep close to each other for fear of losing themselves, as the snow began to fall in very large flakes. Near as they walked, it was with difficulty they could see each other. The snow continued falling all that day and the following night, so it was impossible to track them. They had now walked for several days, and Mudjikewis was always in the rear. One day, running suddenly forward, he gave the SAW-SAW- QUAN,{footnote [War-whoop.]} and struck a tree with his war-club, and it broke into pieces as if struck with lightning. 'Brothers,' said he, 'this will be the way I will serve those we are going to fight.' The leader answered, 'Slow, slow, Mudjikewis, the one I lead you to is not to be thought of so lightly.' Again he fell back and thought to himself: 'What! what! who can this be he is leading us to?' He felt fearful and was silent. Day after day they traveled on, till they came to an extensive plain, on the borders of which human bones were bleaching in the sun. The leader spoke: 'They are the bones of those who have gone before us. None has ever yet returned to tell the sad tale of their fate.' Again Mudjikewis became restless, and, running forward, gave the accustomed yell. Advancing to a large rock which stood above the ground, he struck it, and it fell to pieces. 'See, brothers,' said he, 'thus will I treat those whom we are going to fight.' 'Still, still,' once more said the leader; 'he to whom I am leading you is not to be compared to the rock.' Mudjikewis fell back thoughtful, saying to himself: 'I wonder who this can be that he is going to attack;' and he was afraid. Still they continued to see the remains of former warriors, who had been to the place where they were now going, some of whom had retreated as far back as the place where they first saw the bones, beyond which no one had ever escaped. At last they came to a piece of rising ground, from which they plainly distinguished, sleeping on a distant mountain, a mammoth bear. The distance between them was very great, but the size of the animal caused him to be plainly seen. 'There,' said the leader, 'it is he to whom I am leading you; here our troubles will commence, for he is a mishemokwa and a manito. It is he who has that we prize so dearly (i.e. wampum), to obtain which, the warriors whose bones we saw, sacrificed their lives. You must not be fearful: be manly. We shall find him asleep.' Then the leader went forward and touched the belt around the animal's neck. 'This,' said he, 'is what we must get. It contains the wampum.' Then they requested the eldest to try and slip the belt over the bear's head, who appeared to be fast asleep, as he was not in the least disturbed by the attempt to obtain the belt. All their efforts were in vain, till it came to the one next the youngest. He tried, and the belt moved nearly over the monster's head, but he could get it no farther. Then the youngest one, and the leader, made his attempt, and succeeded. Placing it on the back of the oldest, he said, 'Now we must run,' and off they started. When one became fatigued with its weight, another would relieve him. Thus they ran till they had passed the bones of all former warriors, and were some distance beyond, when looking back, they saw the monster slowly rising. He stood some time before he missed his wampum. Soon they heard his tremendous howl, like distant thunder, slowly filling all the sky; and then they heard him speak and say, 'Who can it be that has dared to steal my wampum? earth is not so large but that I can find them;' and he descended from the hill in pursuit. As if convulsed, the earth shook with every jump he made. Very soon he approached the party. They, however, kept the belt, exchanging it from one to another, and encouraging each other; but he gained on them fast. 'Brothers,' said the leader, 'has never any one of you, when fasting, dreamed of some friendly spirit who would aid you as a guardian?' A dead silence followed. 'Well,' said he, 'fasting, I dreamed of being in danger of instant death, when I saw a small lodge, with smoke curling from its top. An old man lived in it, and I dreamed he helped me; and may it be verified soon,' he said, running forward and giving the peculiar yell, and a howl as if the sounds came from the depths of his stomach, and what is called CHECAUDUM. Getting upon a piece of rising ground, behold! a lodge, with smoke curling from its top, appeared. This gave them all new strength, and they ran forward and entered it. The leader spoke to the old man who sat in the lodge, saying, 'Nemesho, help us; we claim your protection, for the great bear will kill us.' 'Sit down and eat, my grandchildren,' said the old man. 'Who is a great manito?' said he. 'There is none but me; but let me look,' and he opened the door of the lodge, when, lo! at a little distance he saw the enraged animal coming on, with slow but powerful leaps. He closed the door. 'Yes,' said he, 'he is indeed a great manito: my grandchildren, you will be the cause of my losing my life; you asked my protection, and I granted it; so now, come what may, I will protect you. When the bear arrives at the door, you must run out of the other door of the lodge.' Then putting his hand to the side of the lodge where he sat, he brought out a bag which he opened. Taking out two small black dogs, he placed them before him. 'These are the ones I use when I fight,' said he; and he commenced patting with both hands the sides of one of them, and he began to swell out, so that he soon filled the lodge by his bulk; and he had great strong teeth. When he attained his full size he growled, and from that moment, as from instinct, he jumped out at the door and met the bear, who in another leap would have reached the lodge. A terrible combat ensued. The skies rang with the howls of the fierce monsters. The remaining dog soon took the field. The brothers, at the onset, took the advice of the old man, and escaped through the opposite side of the lodge. They had not proceeded far before they heard the dying cry of one of the dogs, and soon after of the other. 'Well,' said the leader, 'the old man will share their fate: so run; he will soon be after us.' They started with fresh vigor, for they had received food from the old man: but very soon the bear came in sight, and again was fast gaining upon them. Again the leader asked the brothers if they could do nothing for their safety. All were silent. The leader, running forward, did as before. 'I dreamed,' he cried, 'that, being in great trouble, an old man helped me who was a manito; we shall soon see his lodge.' Taking courage, they still went on. After going a short distance they saw the lodge of the old manito. They entered immediately and claimed his protection, telling him a manito was after them. The old man, setting meat before them, said: 'Eat! who is a manito? there is no manito but me; there is none whom I fear;' and the earth trembled as the monster advanced. The old man opened the door and saw him coming. He shut it slowly, and said: 'Yes, my grandchildren, you have brought trouble upon me.' Procuring his medicine-sack, he took out his small war-clubs of black stone, and told the young men to run through the other side of the lodge. As he handled the clubs, they became very large, and the old man stepped out just as the bear reached the door. Then striking him with one of the clubs, it broke in pieces; the bear stumbled. Renewing the attempt with the other war-club, that also was broken, but the bear fell senseless. Each blow the old man gave him sounded like a clap of thunder, and the howls of the bear ran along till they filled the heavens. The young men had now run some distance, when they looked back. They could see that the bear was recovering from the blows. First he moved his paws, and soon they saw him rise on his feet. The old man shared the fate of the first, for they now heard his cries as he was torn in pieces. Again the monster was in pursuit, and fast overtaking them. Not yet discouraged, the young men kept on their way; but the bear was now so close, that the leader once more applied to his brothers, but they could do nothing. 'Well,' said he, 'my dreams will soon be exhausted; after this I have but one more.' He advanced, invoking his guardian spirit to aid him. 'Once,' said he, 'I dreamed that, being sorely pressed, I came to a large lake, on the shore of which was a canoe, partly out of water, having ten paddles all in readiness. Do not fear,' he cried, 'we shall soon get it.' And so it was, even as he had said. Coming to the lake, they saw the canoe with ten paddles, and immediately they embarked. Scarcely had they reached the center of the lake, when they saw the bear arrive at its borders. Lifting himself on his hind legs, he looked all around. Then he waded into the water; then losing his footing he turned back, and commenced making the circuit of the lake. Meantime the party remained stationary in the center to watch his movements. He traveled all around, till at last he came to the place from whence he started. Then he commenced drinking up the water, and they saw the current fast setting in towards his open mouth. The leader encouraged them to paddle hard for the opposite shore. When only a short distance from land, the current had increased so much, that they were drawn back by it, and all their efforts to reach it were in vain. Then the leader again spoke, telling them to meet their fates manfully. 'Now is the time, Mudjikewis,' said he, 'to show your prowess. Take courage and sit at the bow of the canoe; and when it approaches his mouth, try what effect your club will have on his head.' He obeyed, and stood ready to give the blow; while the leader, who steered, directed the canoe for the open mouth of the monster. Rapidly advancing, they were just about to enter his mouth, when Mudjikewis struck him a tremendous blow on the head, and gave the SAW- SAW-QUAN. The bear's limbs doubled under him, and he fell, stunned by the blow. But before Mudjikewis could renew it, the monster disgorged all the water he had drank, with a force which sent the canoe with great velocity to the opposite shore. Instantly leaving the canoe, again they fled, and on they went till they were completely exhausted. The earth again shook, and soon they saw the monster hard after them. Their spirits drooped, and they felt discouraged. The leader exerted himself, by actions and words, to cheer them up; and once more he asked them if they thought of nothing, or could do nothing for their rescue; and, as before, all were silent. 'Then,' he said, 'this is the last time I can apply to my guardian spirit. Now, if we do not succeed, our fates are decided.' He ran forward, invoking his spirit with great earnestness, and gave the yell. 'We shall soon arrive,' said he to his brothers, 'at the place where my last guardian spirit dwells. In him I place great confidence. Do not, do not be afraid, or your limbs will be fear-bound. We shall soon reach his lodge. Run, run,' he cried. Returning now to Iamo, he had passed all the time in the same condition we had left him, the head directing his sister, in order to procure food, where to place the magic arrows, and speaking at long intervals. One day the sister saw the eyes of the head brighten, as if with pleasure. At last it spoke. 'Oh, sister,' it said, 'in what a pitiful situation you have been the cause of placing me! Soon, very soon, a party of young men will arrive and apply to me for aid; but alas! How can I give what I would have done with so much pleasure? Nevertheless, take two arrows, and place them where you have been in the habit of placing the others, and have meat prepared and cooked before they arrive. When you hear them coming and calling on my name, go out and say, "Alas! it is long ago that an accident befell him. I was the cause of it." If they still come near, ask them in, and set meat before them. And now you must follow my directions strictly. When the bear is near, go out and meet him. You will take my medicine-sack, bows and arrows, and my head. You must then untie the sack, and spread out before you my paints of all colors, my war-eagle feathers, my tufts of dried hair, and whatever else it contains. As the bear approaches, you will take all these articles, one by one, and say to him, "This is my deceased brother's paint," and so on with all the other articles, throwing each of them as far as you can. The virtues contained in them will cause him to totter; and, to complete his destruction, you will take my head, and that too you will cast as far off as you can, crying aloud, "See, this is my deceased brother's head." He will then fall senseless. By this time the young men will have eaten, and you will call them to your assistance. You must then cut the carcass into pieces, yes, into small pieces, and scatter them to the four winds; for, unless you do this, he will again revive.' She promised that all should be done as he said. She had only time to prepare the meat, when the voice of the leader was heard calling upon Iamo for aid. The woman went out and said as her brother had directed. But the war party being closely pursued, came up to the lodge. She invited them in, and placed the meat before them. While they were eating, they heard the bear approaching. Untying the medicine-sack and taking the head, she had all in readiness for his approach. When he came up she did as she had been told; and, before she had expended the paints and feathers, the bear began to totter, but, still advancing, came close to the woman. Saying as she was commanded, she then took the head, and cast it as far from her as she could. As it rolled along the ground, the blood, excited by the feelings of the head in this terrible scene, gushed from the nose and mouth. The bear, tottering, soon fell with a tremendous noise. Then she cried for help, and the young men came rushing out, having partially regained their strength and spirits. Mudjikewis, stepping up, gave a yell and struck him a blow upon the head. This he repeated, till it seemed like a mass of brains, while the others, as quick as possible, cut him into very small pieces, which they then scattered in every direction. While thus employed, happening to look around where they had thrown the meat, wonderful to behold, they saw starting up and turning off in every direction small black bears, such as are seen at the present day. The country was soon overspread with these black animals. And it was from this monster that the present race of bears derived their origin. Having thus overcome their pursuer, they returned to the lodge. In the meantime, the woman, gathering the implements she had used, and the head, placed them again in the sack. But the head did not speak again, probably from its great exertion to overcome the monster. Having spent so much time and traversed so vast a country in their flight, the young men gave up the idea of ever returning to their own country, and game being plenty, they determined to remain where they now were. One day they moved off some distance from the lodge for the purpose of hunting, having left the wampum with the woman. They were very successful, and amused themselves, as all young men do when alone, by talking and jesting with each other. One of them spoke and said, 'We have all this sport to ourselves; let us go and ask our sister if she will not let us bring the head to this place, as it is still alive. It may be pleased to hear us talk, and be in our company. In the meantime take food to our sister.' They went and requested the head. She told them to take it, and they took it to their hunting-grounds, and tried to amuse it, but only at times did they see its eyes beam with pleasure. One day, while busy in their encampment, they were unexpectedly attacked by unknown Indians. The skirmish was long contested and bloody; many of their foes were slain, but still they were thirty to one. The young men fought desperately till they were all killed. The attacking party then retreated to a height of ground, to muster their men, and to count the number of missing and slain. One of their young men had stayed away, and, in endeavoring to overtake them, came to the place where the head was hung up. Seeing that alone retain animation, he eyed it for some time with fear and surprise. However, he took it down and opened the sack, and was much pleased to see the beautiful feathers, one of which he placed on his head. Starting off, it waved gracefully over him till he reached his party, when he threw down the head and sack, and told them how he had found it, and that the sack was full of paints and feathers. They all looked at the head and made sport of it. Numbers of the young men took the paint and painted themselves, and one of the party took the head by the hair and said-- 'Look, you ugly thing, and see your paints on the faces of warriors.' But the feathers were so beautiful, that numbers of them also placed them on their heads. Then again they used all kinds of indignity to the head, for which they were in turn repaid by the death of those who had used the feathers. Then the chief commanded them to throw away all except the head. 'We will see,' said he, 'when we get home, what we can do with it. We will try to make it shut its eyes.' When they reached their homes they took it to the council-lodge, and hung it up before the fire, fastening it with raw hide soaked, which would shrink and become tightened by the action of the fire. 'We will then see,' they said, 'if we cannot make it shut its eyes.' Meantime, for several days, the sister had been waiting for the young men to bring back the head; till, at last, getting impatient, she went in search of it. The young men she found lying within short distances of each other, dead, and covered with wounds. Various other bodies lay scattered in different directions around them. She searched for the head and sack, but they were nowhere to be found. She raised her voice and wept, and blackened her face. Then she walked in different directions, till she came to the place from whence the head had been taken. Then she found the magic bow and arrows, where the young men, ignorant of their qualities, had left them. She thought to herself that she would find her brother's head, and came to a piece of rising ground, and there saw some of his paints and feathers. These she carefully put up, and hung upon the branch of a tree till her return. At dusk she arrived at the first lodge of a very extensive village. Here she used a charm, common among Indians when they wish to meet with a kind reception. On applying to the old man and woman of the lodge, she was kindly received. She made known her errand. The old man promised to aid her, and told her the head was hung up before the council-fire, and that the chiefs of the village, with their young men, kept watch over it continually. The former are considered as manitoes. She said she only wished to see it, and would be satisfied if she could only get to the door of the lodge. She knew she had not sufficient power to take it by force. 'Come with me,' said the Indian, 'I will take you there.' They went, and they took their seats near the door. The council-lodge was filled with warriors, amusing themselves with games, and constantly keeping up a fire to smoke the head, as they said, to make dry meat. They saw the head move, and not knowing what to make of it, one spoke and said: 'Ha! ha! It is beginning to feel the effects of the smoke.' The sister looked up from the door, and her eyes met those of her brother, and tears rolled down the cheeks of the head. 'Well,' said the chief, 'I thought we would make you do something at last. Look! look at it--shedding tears,' said he to those around him; and they all laughed and passed their jokes upon it. The chief, looking around, and observing the woman, after some time said to the man who came with her: 'Who have you got there? I have never seen that woman before in our village.' 'Yes,' replied the man, 'you have seen her; she is a relation of mine, and seldom goes out. She stays at my lodge, and asked me to allow her to come with me to this place.' In the center of the lodge sat one of those young men who are always forward, and fond of boasting and displaying themselves before others. 'Why,' said he, 'I have seen her often, and it is to this lodge I go almost every night to court her.' All the others laughed and continued their games. The young man did not know he was telling a lie to the woman's advantage, who by that means escaped. She returned to the man's lodge, and immediately set out for her own country. Coming to the spot where the bodies of her adopted brothers lay, she placed them together, their feet toward the east. Then taking an ax which she had, she cast it up into the air, crying out, 'Brothers, get up from under it, or it will fall on you.' This she repeated three times, and the third time the brothers all arose and stood on their feet. Mudjikewis commenced rubbing his eyes and stretching himself. 'Why,' said he, 'I have overslept myself.' 'No, indeed,' said one of the others, 'do you not know we were all killed, and that it is our sister who has brought us to life?' The young men took the bodies of their enemies and burned them. Soon after, the woman went to procure wives for them, in a distant country, they knew not where; but she returned with ten young women, which she gave to the ten young men, beginning with the eldest. Mudjikewis stepped to and fro, uneasy lest he should not get the one he liked. But he was not disappointed, for she fell to his lot. And they were well matched, for she was a female magician. They then all moved into a very large lodge, and their sister told them that the women must now take turns in going to her brother's head every night, trying to untie it. They all said they would do so with pleasure. The eldest made the first attempt, and with a rushing noise she fled through the air. Toward daylight she returned. She had been unsuccessful, as she succeeded in untying only one of the knots. All took their turns regularly, and each one succeeded in untying only one knot each time. But when the youngest went, she commenced the work as soon as she reached the lodge; although it had always been occupied, still the Indians never could see any one. For ten nights now, the smoke had not ascended, but filled the lodge and drove them out. This last night they were all driven out, and the young woman carried off the head. The young people and the sister heard the young woman coming high through the air, and they heard her saying: 'Prepare the body of our brother.' And as soon as they heard it, they went to a small lodge where the black body of Iamo lay. His sister commenced cutting the neck part, from which the neck had been severed. She cut so deep as to cause it to bleed; and the others who were present, by rubbing the body and applying medicines, expelled the blackness. In the meantime, the one who brought it, by cutting the neck of the head, caused that also to bleed. As soon as she arrived, they placed that close to the body, and, by aid of medicines and various other means, succeeded in restoring Iamo to all his former beauty and manliness. All rejoiced in the happy termination of their troubles, and they had spent some time joyfully together, when Iamo said: 'Now I will divide the wampum,' and getting the belt which contained it, he commenced with the eldest, giving it in equal portions. But the youngest got the most splendid and beautiful, as the bottom of the belt held the richest and rarest. They were told that, since they had all once died, and were restored to life, they were no longer mortal, but spirits, and they were assigned different stations in the invisible world. Only Mudjikewis's place was, however, named. He was to direct the west wind, hence generally called Kebeyun, there to remain for ever. They were commanded, as they had it in their power, to do good to the inhabitants of the earth, and, forgetting their sufferings in procuring the wampum, to give all things with a liberal hand. And they were also commanded that it should also be held by them sacred; those grains or shells of the pale hue to be emblematic of peace, while those of the darker hue would lead to evil and war. The spirits then, amid songs and shouts, took their flight to their respective abodes on high; while Iamo, with his sister Iamoqua, descended into the depths below. 
8482	----	LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI BY MARK TWAIN Part 12. Chapter 56 A Question of Law THE slaughter-house is gone from the mouth of Bear Creek and so is the small jail (or 'calaboose') which once stood in its neighborhood. A citizen asked, 'Do you remember when Jimmy Finn, the town drunkard, was burned to death in the calaboose?' Observe, now, how history becomes defiled, through lapse of time and the help of the bad memories of men. Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn to die. The calaboose victim was not a citizen; he was a poor stranger, a harmless whiskey-sodden tramp. I know more about his case than anybody else; I knew too much of it, in that bygone day, to relish speaking of it. That tramp was wandering about the streets one chilly evening, with a pipe in his mouth, and begging for a match; he got neither matches nor courtesy; on the contrary, a troop of bad little boys followed him around and amused themselves with nagging and annoying him. I assisted; but at last, some appeal which the wayfarer made for forbearance, accompanying it with a pathetic reference to his forlorn and friendless condition, touched such sense of shame and remnant of right feeling as were left in me, and I went away and got him some matches, and then hied me home and to bed, heavily weighted as to conscience, and unbuoyant in spirit. An hour or two afterward, the man was arrested and locked up in the calaboose by the marshal--large name for a constable, but that was his title. At two in the morning, the church bells rang for fire, and everybody turned out, of course--I with the rest. The tramp had used his matches disastrously: he had set his straw bed on fire, and the oaken sheathing of the room had caught. When I reached the ground, two hundred men, women, and children stood massed together, transfixed with horror, and staring at the grated windows of the jail. Behind the iron bars, and tugging frantically at them, and screaming for help, stood the tramp; he seemed like a black object set against a sun, so white and intense was the light at his back. That marshal could not be found, and he had the only key. A battering-ram was quickly improvised, and the thunder of its blows upon the door had so encouraging a sound that the spectators broke into wild cheering, and believed the merciful battle won. But it was not so. The timbers were too strong; they did not yield. It was said that the man's death-grip still held fast to the bars after he was dead; and that in this position the fires wrapped him about and consumed him. As to this, I do not know. What was seen after I recognized the face that was pleading through the bars was seen by others, not by me. I saw that face, so situated, every night for a long time afterward; and I believed myself as guilty of the man's death as if I had given him the matches purposely that he might burn himself up with them. I had not a doubt that I should be hanged if my connection with this tragedy were found out. The happenings and the impressions of that time are burnt into my memory, and the study of them entertains me as much now as they themselves distressed me then. If anybody spoke of that grisly matter, I was all ears in a moment, and alert to hear what might be said, for I was always dreading and expecting to find out that I was suspected; and so fine and so delicate was the perception of my guilty conscience, that it often detected suspicion in the most purposeless remarks, and in looks, gestures, glances of the eye which had no significance, but which sent me shivering away in a panic of fright, just the same. And how sick it made me when somebody dropped, howsoever carelessly and barren of intent, the remark that 'murder will out!' For a boy of ten years, I was carrying a pretty weighty cargo. All this time I was blessedly forgetting one thing--the fact that I was an inveterate talker in my sleep. But one night I awoke and found my bed-mate--my younger brother--sitting up in bed and contemplating me by the light of the moon. I said-- 'What is the matter?' 'You talk so much I can't sleep.' I came to a sitting posture in an instant, with my kidneys in my throat and my hair on end. 'What did I say. Quick--out with it--what did I say?' 'Nothing much.' 'It's a lie--you know everything.' 'Everything about what?' 'You know well enough. About THAT.' 'About WHAT?--I don't know what you are talking about. I think you are sick or crazy or something. But anyway, you're awake, and I'll get to sleep while I've got a chance.' He fell asleep and I lay there in a cold sweat, turning this new terror over in the whirling chaos which did duty as my mind. The burden of my thought was, How much did I divulge? How much does he know?--what a distress is this uncertainty! But by and by I evolved an idea--I would wake my brother and probe him with a supposititious case. I shook him up, and said-- 'Suppose a man should come to you drunk--' 'This is foolish--I never get drunk.' 'I don't mean you, idiot--I mean the man. Suppose a MAN should come to you drunk, and borrow a knife, or a tomahawk, or a pistol, and you forgot to tell him it was loaded, and--' 'How could you load a tomahawk?' 'I don't mean the tomahawk, and I didn't say the tomahawk; I said the pistol. Now don't you keep breaking in that way, because this is serious. There's been a man killed.' 'What! in this town?' 'Yes, in this town.' 'Well, go on--I won't say a single word.' 'Well, then, suppose you forgot to tell him to be careful with it, because it was loaded, and he went off and shot himself with that pistol--fooling with it, you know, and probably doing it by accident, being drunk. Well, would it be murder?' 'No--suicide.' 'No, no. I don't mean HIS act, I mean yours: would you be a murderer for letting him have that pistol?' After deep thought came this answer-- 'Well, I should think I was guilty of something--maybe murder--yes, probably murder, but I don't quite know.' This made me very uncomfortable. However, it was not a decisive verdict. I should have to set out the real case--there seemed to be no other way. But I would do it cautiously, and keep a watch out for suspicious effects. I said-- 'I was supposing a case, but I am coming to the real one now. Do you know how the man came to be burned up in the calaboose?' 'No.' 'Haven't you the least idea?' 'Not the least.' 'Wish you may die in your tracks if you have?' 'Yes, wish I may die in my tracks.' 'Well, the way of it was this. The man wanted some matches to light his pipe. A boy got him some. The man set fire to the calaboose with those very matches, and burnt himself up.' 'Is that so?' 'Yes, it is. Now, is that boy a murderer, do you think?' 'Let me see. The man was drunk?' 'Yes, he was drunk.' 'Very drunk?' 'Yes.' 'And the boy knew it?' 'Yes, he knew it.' There was a long pause. Then came this heavy verdict-- 'If the man was drunk, and the boy knew it, the boy murdered that man. This is certain.' Faint, sickening sensations crept along all the fibers of my body, and I seemed to know how a person feels who hears his death sentence pronounced from the bench. I waited to hear what my brother would say next. I believed I knew what it would be, and I was right. He said-- 'I know the boy.' I had nothing to say; so I said nothing. I simply shuddered. Then he added-- 'Yes, before you got half through telling about the thing, I knew perfectly well who the boy was; it was Ben Coontz!' I came out of my collapse as one who rises from the dead. I said, with admiration-- 'Why, how in the world did you ever guess it?' 'You told it in your sleep.' I said to myself, 'How splendid that is! This is a habit which must be cultivated.' My brother rattled innocently on-- 'When you were talking in your sleep, you kept mumbling something about "matches," which I couldn't make anything out of; but just now, when you began to tell me about the man and the calaboose and the matches, I remembered that in your sleep you mentioned Ben Coontz two or three times; so I put this and that together, you see, and right away I knew it was Ben that burnt that man up.' I praised his sagacity effusively. Presently he asked-- 'Are you going to give him up to the law?' 'No,' I said; 'I believe that this will be a lesson to him. I shall keep an eye on him, of course, for that is but right; but if he stops where he is and reforms, it shall never be said that I betrayed him.' 'How good you are!' 'Well, I try to be. It is all a person can do in a world like this.' And now, my burden being shifted to other shoulders, my terrors soon faded away. The day before we left Hannibal, a curious thing fell under my notice-- the surprising spread which longitudinal time undergoes there. I learned it from one of the most unostentatious of men--the colored coachman of a friend of mine, who lives three miles from town. He was to call for me at the Park Hotel at 7.30 P.M., and drive me out. But he missed it considerably--did not arrive till ten. He excused himself by saying-- 'De time is mos' an hour en a half slower in de country en what it is in de town; you'll be in plenty time, boss. Sometimes we shoves out early for church, Sunday, en fetches up dah right plum in de middle er de sermon. Diffunce in de time. A body can't make no calculations 'bout it.' I had lost two hours and a half; but I had learned a fact worth four. Chapter 57 An Archangel FROM St. Louis northward there are all the enlivening signs of the presence of active, energetic, intelligent, prosperous, practical nineteenth-century populations. The people don't dream, they work. The happy result is manifest all around in the substantial outside aspect of things, and the suggestions of wholesome life and comfort that everywhere appear. Quincy is a notable example--a brisk, handsome, well-ordered city; and now, as formerly, interested in art, letters, and other high things. But Marion City is an exception. Marion City has gone backwards in a most unaccountable way. This metropolis promised so well that the projectors tacked 'city' to its name in the very beginning, with full confidence; but it was bad prophecy. When I first saw Marion City, thirty-five years ago, it contained one street, and nearly or quite six houses. It contains but one house now, and this one, in a state of ruin, is getting ready to follow the former five into the river. Doubtless Marion City was too near to Quincy. It had another disadvantage: it was situated in a flat mud bottom, below high-water mark, whereas Quincy stands high up on the slope of a hill. In the beginning Quincy had the aspect and ways of a model New England town: and these she has yet: broad, clean streets, trim, neat dwellings and lawns, fine mansions, stately blocks of commercial buildings. And there are ample fair-grounds, a well kept park, and many attractive drives; library, reading-rooms, a couple of colleges, some handsome and costly churches, and a grand court-house, with grounds which occupy a square. The population of the city is thirty thousand. There are some large factories here, and manufacturing, of many sorts, is done on a great scale. La Grange and Canton are growing towns, but I missed Alexandria; was told it was under water, but would come up to blow in the summer. Keokuk was easily recognizable. I lived there in 1857--an extraordinary year there in real-estate matters. The 'boom' was something wonderful. Everybody bought, everybody sold--except widows and preachers; they always hold on; and when the tide ebbs, they get left. Anything in the semblance of a town lot, no matter how situated, was salable, and at a figure which would still have been high if the ground had been sodded with greenbacks. The town has a population of fifteen thousand now, and is progressing with a healthy growth. It was night, and we could not see details, for which we were sorry, for Keokuk has the reputation of being a beautiful city. It was a pleasant one to live in long ago, and doubtless has advanced, not retrograded, in that respect. A mighty work which was in progress there in my day is finished now. This is the canal over the Rapids. It is eight miles long, three hundred feet wide, and is in no place less than six feet deep. Its masonry is of the majestic kind which the War Department usually deals in, and will endure like a Roman aqueduct. The work cost four or five millions. After an hour or two spent with former friends, we started up the river again. Keokuk, a long time ago, was an occasional loafing-place of that erratic genius, Henry Clay Dean. I believe I never saw him but once; but he was much talked of when I lived there. This is what was said of him-- He began life poor and without education. But he educated himself--on the curbstones of Keokuk. He would sit down on a curbstone with his book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce and the tramp of the passing crowds, and bury himself in his studies by the hour, never changing his position except to draw in his knees now and then to let a dray pass unobstructed; and when his book was finished, its contents, however abstruse, had been burnt into his memory, and were his permanent possession. In this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning, and had it pigeon-holed in his head where he could put his intellectual hand on it whenever it was wanted. His clothes differed in no respect from a 'wharf-rat's,' except that they were raggeder, more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and therefore more extravagantly picturesque), and several layers dirtier. Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself. He was an orator--by nature in the first place, and later by the training of experience and practice. When he was out on a canvass, his name was a lodestone which drew the farmers to his stump from fifty miles around. His theme was always politics. He used no notes, for a volcano does not need notes. In 1862, a son of Keokuk's late distinguished citizen, Mr. Claggett, gave me this incident concerning Dean-- The war feeling was running high in Keokuk (in '61), and a great mass meeting was to be held on a certain day in the new Athenaeum. A distinguished stranger was to address the house. After the building had been packed to its utmost capacity with sweltering folk of both sexes, the stage still remained vacant--the distinguished stranger had failed to connect. The crowd grew impatient, and by and by indignant and rebellious. About this time a distressed manager discovered Dean on a curb-stone, explained the dilemma to him, took his book away from him, rushed him into the building the back way, and told him to make for the stage and save his country. Presently a sudden silence fell upon the grumbling audience, and everybody's eyes sought a single point--the wide, empty, carpetless stage. A figure appeared there whose aspect was familiar to hardly a dozen persons present. It was the scarecrow Dean--in foxy shoes, down at the heels; socks of odd colors, also 'down;' damaged trousers, relics of antiquity, and a world too short, exposing some inches of naked ankle; an unbuttoned vest, also too short, and exposing a zone of soiled and wrinkled linen between it and the waistband; shirt bosom open; long black handkerchief, wound round and round the neck like a bandage; bob- tailed blue coat, reaching down to the small of the back, with sleeves which left four inches of forearm unprotected; small, stiff-brimmed soldier-cap hung on a corner of the bump of--whichever bump it was. This figure moved gravely out upon the stage and, with sedate and measured step, down to the front, where it paused, and dreamily inspected the house, saying no word. The silence of surprise held its own for a moment, then was broken by a just audible ripple of merriment which swept the sea of faces like the wash of a wave. The figure remained as before, thoughtfully inspecting. Another wave started-- laughter, this time. It was followed by another, then a third--this last one boisterous. And now the stranger stepped back one pace, took off his soldier-cap, tossed it into the wing, and began to speak, with deliberation, nobody listening, everybody laughing and whispering. The speaker talked on unembarrassed, and presently delivered a shot which went home, and silence and attention resulted. He followed it quick and fast, with other telling things; warmed to his work and began to pour his words out, instead of dripping them; grew hotter and hotter, and fell to discharging lightnings and thunder--and now the house began to break into applause, to which the speaker gave no heed, but went hammering straight on; unwound his black bandage and cast it away, still thundering; presently discarded the bob tailed coat and flung it aside, firing up higher and higher all the time; finally flung the vest after the coat; and then for an untimed period stood there, like another Vesuvius, spouting smoke and flame, lava and ashes, raining pumice-stone and cinders, shaking the moral earth with intellectual crash upon crash, explosion upon explosion, while the mad multitude stood upon their feet in a solid body, answering back with a ceaseless hurricane of cheers, through a thrashing snowstorm of waving handkerchiefs. 'When Dean came,' said Claggett, 'the people thought he was an escaped lunatic; but when he went, they thought he was an escaped archangel.' Burlington, home of the sparkling Burdette, is another hill city; and also a beautiful one; unquestionably so; a fine and flourishing city, with a population of twenty-five thousand, and belted with busy factories of nearly every imaginable description. It was a very sober city, too--for the moment--for a most sobering bill was pending; a bill to forbid the manufacture, exportation, importation, purchase, sale, borrowing, lending, stealing, drinking, smelling, or possession, by conquest, inheritance, intent, accident, or otherwise, in the State of Iowa, of each and every deleterious beverage known to the human race, except water. This measure was approved by all the rational people in the State; but not by the bench of Judges. Burlington has the progressive modern city's full equipment of devices for right and intelligent government; including a paid fire department, a thing which the great city of New Orleans is without, but still employs that relic of antiquity, the independent system. In Burlington, as in all these Upper-River towns, one breathes a go-ahead atmosphere which tastes good in the nostrils. An opera-house has lately been built there which is in strong contrast with the shabby dens which usually do duty as theaters in cities of Burlington's size. We had not time to go ashore in Muscatine, but had a daylight view of it from the boat. I lived there awhile, many years ago, but the place, now, had a rather unfamiliar look; so I suppose it has clear outgrown the town which I used to know. In fact, I know it has; for I remember it as a small place--which it isn't now. But I remember it best for a lunatic who caught me out in the fields, one Sunday, and extracted a butcher-knife from his boot and proposed to carve me up with it, unless I acknowledged him to be the only son of the Devil. I tried to compromise on an acknowledgment that he was the only member of the family I had met; but that did not satisfy him; he wouldn't have any half-measures; I must say he was the sole and only son of the Devil--he whetted his knife on his boot. It did not seem worth while to make trouble about a little thing like that; so I swung round to his view of the matter and saved my skin whole. Shortly afterward, he went to visit his father; and as he has not turned up since, I trust he is there yet. And I remember Muscatine--still more pleasantly--for its summer sunsets. I have never seen any, on either side of the ocean, that equaled them. They used the broad smooth river as a canvas, and painted on it every imaginable dream of color, from the mottled daintinesses and delicacies of the opal, all the way up, through cumulative intensities, to blinding purple and crimson conflagrations which were enchanting to the eye, but sharply tried it at the same time. All the Upper Mississippi region has these extraordinary sunsets as a familiar spectacle. It is the true Sunset Land: I am sure no other country can show so good a right to the name. The sunrises are also said to be exceedingly fine. I do not know. Chapter 58 On the Upper River THE big towns drop in, thick and fast, now: and between stretch processions of thrifty farms, not desolate solitude. Hour by hour, the boat plows deeper and deeper into the great and populous North-west; and with each successive section of it which is revealed, one's surprise and respect gather emphasis and increase. Such a people, and such achievements as theirs, compel homage. This is an independent race who think for themselves, and who are competent to do it, because they are educated and enlightened; they read, they keep abreast of the best and newest thought, they fortify every weak place in their land with a school, a college, a library, and a newspaper; and they live under law. Solicitude for the future of a race like this is not in order. This region is new; so new that it may be said to be still in its babyhood. By what it has accomplished while still teething, one may forecast what marvels it will do in the strength of its maturity. It is so new that the foreign tourist has not heard of it yet; and has not visited it. For sixty years, the foreign tourist has steamed up and down the river between St. Louis and New Orleans, and then gone home and written his book, believing he had seen all of the river that was worth seeing or that had anything to see. In not six of all these books is there mention of these Upper River towns--for the reason that the five or six tourists who penetrated this region did it before these towns were projected. The latest tourist of them all (1878) made the same old regulation trip--he had not heard that there was anything north of St. Louis. Yet there was. There was this amazing region, bristling with great towns, projected day before yesterday, so to speak, and built next morning. A score of them number from fifteen hundred to five thousand people. Then we have Muscatine, ten thousand; Winona, ten thousand; Moline, ten thousand; Rock Island, twelve thousand; La Crosse, twelve thousand; Burlington, twenty-five thousand; Dubuque, twenty-five thousand; Davenport, thirty thousand; St. Paul, fifty-eight thousand, Minneapolis, sixty thousand and upward. The foreign tourist has never heard of these; there is no note of them in his books. They have sprung up in the night, while he slept. So new is this region, that I, who am comparatively young, am yet older than it is. When I was born, St. Paul had a population of three persons, Minneapolis had just a third as many. The then population of Minneapolis died two years ago; and when he died he had seen himself undergo an increase, in forty years, of fifty-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine persons. He had a frog's fertility. I must explain that the figures set down above, as the population of St. Paul and Minneapolis, are several months old. These towns are far larger now. In fact, I have just seen a newspaper estimate which gives the former seventy-one thousand, and the latter seventy-eight thousand. This book will not reach the public for six or seven months yet; none of the figures will be worth much then. We had a glimpse of Davenport, which is another beautiful city, crowning a hill--a phrase which applies to all these towns; for they are all comely, all well built, clean, orderly, pleasant to the eye, and cheering to the spirit; and they are all situated upon hills. Therefore we will give that phrase a rest. The Indians have a tradition that Marquette and Joliet camped where Davenport now stands, in 1673. The next white man who camped there, did it about a hundred and seventy years later--in 1834. Davenport has gathered its thirty thousand people within the past thirty years. She sends more children to her schools now, than her whole population numbered twenty-three years ago. She has the usual Upper River quota of factories, newspapers, and institutions of learning; she has telephones, local telegraphs, an electric alarm, and an admirable paid fire department, consisting of six hook and ladder companies, four steam fire engines, and thirty churches. Davenport is the official residence of two bishops--Episcopal and Catholic. Opposite Davenport is the flourishing town of Rock Island, which lies at the foot of the Upper Rapids. A great railroad bridge connects the two towns--one of the thirteen which fret the Mississippi and the pilots, between St. Louis and St. Paul. The charming island of Rock Island, three miles long and half a mile wide, belongs to the United States, and the Government has turned it into a wonderful park, enhancing its natural attractions by art, and threading its fine forests with many miles of drives. Near the center of the island one catches glimpses, through the trees, of ten vast stone four-story buildings, each of which covers an acre of ground. These are the Government workshops; for the Rock Island establishment is a national armory and arsenal. We move up the river--always through enchanting scenery, there being no other kind on the Upper Mississippi--and pass Moline, a center of vast manufacturing industries; and Clinton and Lyons, great lumber centers; and presently reach Dubuque, which is situated in a rich mineral region. The lead mines are very productive, and of wide extent. Dubuque has a great number of manufacturing establishments; among them a plow factory which has for customers all Christendom in general. At least so I was told by an agent of the concern who was on the boat. He said-- 'You show me any country under the sun where they really know how to plow, and if I don't show you our mark on the plow they use, I'll eat that plow; and I won't ask for any Woostershyre sauce to flavor it up with, either.' All this part of the river is rich in Indian history and traditions. Black Hawk's was once a puissant name hereabouts; as was Keokuk's, further down. A few miles below Dubuque is the Tete de Mort--Death's- head rock, or bluff--to the top of which the French drove a band of Indians, in early times, and cooped them up there, with death for a certainty, and only the manner of it matter of choice--to starve, or jump off and kill themselves. Black Hawk adopted the ways of the white people, toward the end of his life; and when he died he was buried, near Des Moines, in Christian fashion, modified by Indian custom; that is to say, clothed in a Christian military uniform, and with a Christian cane in his hand, but deposited in the grave in a sitting posture. Formerly, a horse had always been buried with a chief. The substitution of the cane shows that Black Hawk's haughty nature was really humbled, and he expected to walk when he got over. We noticed that above Dubuque the water of the Mississippi was olive- green--rich and beautiful and semi-transparent, with the sun on it. Of course the water was nowhere as clear or of as fine a complexion as it is in some other seasons of the year; for now it was at flood stage, and therefore dimmed and blurred by the mud manufactured from caving banks. The majestic bluffs that overlook the river, along through this region, charm one with the grace and variety of their forms, and the soft beauty of their adornment. The steep verdant slope, whose base is at the water's edge is topped by a lofty rampart of broken, turreted rocks, which are exquisitely rich and mellow in color--mainly dark browns and dull greens, but splashed with other tints. And then you have the shining river, winding here and there and yonder, its sweep interrupted at intervals by clusters of wooded islands threaded by silver channels; and you have glimpses of distant villages, asleep upon capes; and of stealthy rafts slipping along in the shade of the forest walls; and of white steamers vanishing around remote points. And it is all as tranquil and reposeful as dreamland, and has nothing this-worldly about it-- nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon. Until the unholy train comes tearing along--which it presently does, ripping the sacred solitude to rags and tatters with its devil's warwhoop and the roar and thunder of its rushing wheels--and straightway you are back in this world, and with one of its frets ready to hand for your entertainment: for you remember that this is the very road whose stock always goes down after you buy it, and always goes up again as soon as you sell it. It makes me shudder to this day, to remember that I once came near not getting rid of my stock at all. It must be an awful thing to have a railroad left on your hands. The locomotive is in sight from the deck of the steamboat almost the whole way from St. Louis to St. Paul--eight hundred miles. These railroads have made havoc with the steamboat commerce. The clerk of our boat was a steamboat clerk before these roads were built. In that day the influx of population was so great, and the freight business so heavy, that the boats were not able to keep up with the demands made upon their carrying capacity; consequently the captains were very independent and airy--pretty 'biggity,' as Uncle Remus would say. The clerk nut-shelled the contrast between the former time and the present, thus-- 'Boat used to land--captain on hurricane roof--mighty stiff and straight--iron ramrod for a spine--kid gloves, plug tile, hair parted behind--man on shore takes off hat and says-- '"Got twenty-eight tons of wheat, cap'n--be great favor if you can take them." 'Captain says-- '"'ll take two of them"--and don't even condescend to look at him. 'But nowadays the captain takes off his old slouch, and smiles all the way around to the back of his ears, and gets off a bow which he hasn't got any ramrod to interfere with, and says-- '"Glad to see you, Smith, glad to see you--you're looking well--haven't seen you looking so well for years--what you got for us?" '"Nuth'n", says Smith; and keeps his hat on, and just turns his back and goes to talking with somebody else. 'Oh, yes, eight years ago, the captain was on top; but it's Smith's turn now. Eight years ago a boat used to go up the river with every stateroom full, and people piled five and six deep on the cabin floor; and a solid deck-load of immigrants and harvesters down below, into the bargain. To get a first-class stateroom, you'd got to prove sixteen quarterings of nobility and four hundred years of descent, or be personally acquainted with the nigger that blacked the captain's boots. But it's all changed now; plenty staterooms above, no harvesters below--there's a patent self-binder now, and they don't have harvesters any more; they've gone where the woodbine twineth--and they didn't go by steamboat, either; went by the train.' Up in this region we met massed acres of lumber rafts coming down--but not floating leisurely along, in the old-fashioned way, manned with joyous and reckless crews of fiddling, song-singing, whiskey-drinking, breakdown-dancing rapscallions; no, the whole thing was shoved swiftly along by a powerful stern-wheeler, modern fashion, and the small crews were quiet, orderly men, of a sedate business aspect, with not a suggestion of romance about them anywhere. Along here, somewhere, on a black night, we ran some exceedingly narrow and intricate island-chutes by aid of the electric light. Behind was solid blackness--a crackless bank of it; ahead, a narrow elbow of water, curving between dense walls of foliage that almost touched our bows on both sides; and here every individual leaf, and every individual ripple stood out in its natural color, and flooded with a glare as of noonday intensified. The effect was strange, and fine, and very striking. We passed Prairie du Chien, another of Father Marquette's camping- places; and after some hours of progress through varied and beautiful scenery, reached La Crosse. Here is a town of twelve or thirteen thousand population, with electric lighted streets, and with blocks of buildings which are stately enough, and also architecturally fine enough, to command respect in any city. It is a choice town, and we made satisfactory use of the hour allowed us, in roaming it over, though the weather was rainier than necessary. Chapter 59 Legends and Scenery WE added several passengers to our list, at La Crosse; among others an old gentleman who had come to this north-western region with the early settlers, and was familiar with every part of it. Pardonably proud of it, too. He said-- 'You'll find scenery between here and St. Paul that can give the Hudson points. You'll have the Queen's Bluff--seven hundred feet high, and just as imposing a spectacle as you can find anywheres; and Trempeleau Island, which isn't like any other island in America, I believe, for it is a gigantic mountain, with precipitous sides, and is full of Indian traditions, and used to be full of rattlesnakes; if you catch the sun just right there, you will have a picture that will stay with you. And above Winona you'll have lovely prairies; and then come the Thousand Islands, too beautiful for anything; green? why you never saw foliage so green, nor packed so thick; it's like a thousand plush cushions afloat on a looking-glass--when the water 's still; and then the monstrous bluffs on both sides of the river--ragged, rugged, dark-complected--just the frame that's wanted; you always want a strong frame, you know, to throw up the nice points of a delicate picture and make them stand out.' The old gentleman also told us a touching Indian legend or two--but not very powerful ones. After this excursion into history, he came back to the scenery, and described it, detail by detail, from the Thousand Islands to St. Paul; naming its names with such facility, tripping along his theme with such nimble and confident ease, slamming in a three-ton word, here and there, with such a complacent air of 't isn't-anything,-I-can-do-it-any-time-I- want-to, and letting off fine surprises of lurid eloquence at such judicious intervals, that I presently began to suspect-- But no matter what I began to suspect. Hear him-- 'Ten miles above Winona we come to Fountain City, nestling sweetly at the feet of cliffs that lift their awful fronts, Jovelike, toward the blue depths of heaven, bathing them in virgin atmospheres that have known no other contact save that of angels' wings. 'And next we glide through silver waters, amid lovely and stupendous aspects of nature that attune our hearts to adoring admiration, about twelve miles, and strike Mount Vernon, six hundred feet high, with romantic ruins of a once first-class hotel perched far among the cloud shadows that mottle its dizzy heights--sole remnant of once-flourishing Mount Vernon, town of early days, now desolate and utterly deserted. 'And so we move on. Past Chimney Rock we fly--noble shaft of six hundred feet; then just before landing at Minnieska our attention is attracted by a most striking promontory rising over five hundred feet-- the ideal mountain pyramid. Its conic shape--thickly-wooded surface girding its sides, and its apex like that of a cone, cause the spectator to wonder at nature's workings. From its dizzy heights superb views of the forests, streams, bluffs, hills and dales below and beyond for miles are brought within its focus. What grander river scenery can be conceived, as we gaze upon this enchanting landscape, from the uppermost point of these bluffs upon the valleys below? The primeval wildness and awful loneliness of these sublime creations of nature and nature's God, excite feelings of unbounded admiration, and the recollection of which can never be effaced from the memory, as we view them in any direction. 'Next we have the Lion's Head and the Lioness's Head, carved by nature's hand, to adorn and dominate the beauteous stream; and then anon the river widens, and a most charming and magnificent view of the valley before us suddenly bursts upon our vision; rugged hills, clad with verdant forests from summit to base, level prairie lands, holding in their lap the beautiful Wabasha, City of the Healing Waters, puissant foe of Bright's disease, and that grandest conception of nature's works, incomparable Lake Pepin--these constitute a picture whereon the tourist's eye may gaze uncounted hours, with rapture unappeased and unappeasable. 'And so we glide along; in due time encountering those majestic domes, the mighty Sugar Loaf, and the sublime Maiden's Rock--which latter, romantic superstition has invested with a voice; and oft-times as the birch canoe glides near, at twilight, the dusky paddler fancies he hears the soft sweet music of the long-departed Winona, darling of Indian song and story. 'Then Frontenac looms upon our vision, delightful resort of jaded summer tourists; then progressive Red Wing; and Diamond Bluff, impressive and preponderous in its lone sublimity; then Prescott and the St. Croix; and anon we see bursting upon us the domes and steeples of St. Paul, giant young chief of the North, marching with seven-league stride in the van of progress, banner-bearer of the highest and newest civilization, carving his beneficent way with the tomahawk of commercial enterprise, sounding the warwhoop of Christian culture, tearing off the reeking scalp of sloth and superstition to plant there the steam-plow and the school-house--ever in his front stretch arid lawlessness, ignorance, crime, despair; ever in his wake bloom the jail, the gallows, and the pulpit; and ever--' 'Have you ever traveled with a panorama?' 'I have formerly served in that capacity.' My suspicion was confirmed. 'Do you still travel with it?' 'No, she is laid up till the fall season opens. I am helping now to work up the materials for a Tourist's Guide which the St. Louis and St. Paul Packet Company are going to issue this summer for the benefit of travelers who go by that line.' 'When you were talking of Maiden's Rock, you spoke of the long-departed Winona, darling of Indian song and story. Is she the maiden of the rock?--and are the two connected by legend?' 'Yes, and a very tragic and painful one. Perhaps the most celebrated, as well as the most pathetic, of all the legends of the Mississippi.' We asked him to tell it. He dropped out of his conversational vein and back into his lecture-gait without an effort, and rolled on as follows-- 'A little distance above Lake City is a famous point known as Maiden's Rock, which is not only a picturesque spot, but is full of romantic interest from the event which gave it its name, Not many years ago this locality was a favorite resort for the Sioux Indians on account of the fine fishing and hunting to be had there, and large numbers of them were always to be found in this locality. Among the families which used to resort here, was one belonging to the tribe of Wabasha. We-no-na (first-born) was the name of a maiden who had plighted her troth to a lover belonging to the same band. But her stern parents had promised her hand to another, a famous warrior, and insisted on her wedding him. The day was fixed by her parents, to her great grief. She appeared to accede to the proposal and accompany them to the rock, for the purpose of gathering flowers for the feast. On reaching the rock, We-no-na ran to its summit and standing on its edge upbraided her parents who were below, for their cruelty, and then singing a death-dirge, threw herself from the precipice and dashed them in pieces on the rock below.' 'Dashed who in pieces--her parents?' 'Yes.' 'Well, it certainly was a tragic business, as you say. And moreover, there is a startling kind of dramatic surprise about it which I was not looking for. It is a distinct improvement upon the threadbare form of Indian legend. There are fifty Lover's Leaps along the Mississippi from whose summit disappointed Indian girls have jumped, but this is the only jump in the lot hat turned out in the right and satisfactory way. What became of Winona?' 'She was a good deal jarred up and jolted: but she got herself together and disappeared before the coroner reached the fatal spot; and 'tis said she sought and married her true love, and wandered with him to some distant clime, where she lived happy ever after, her gentle spirit mellowed and chastened by the romantic incident which had so early deprived her of the sweet guidance of a mother's love and a father's protecting arm, and thrown her, all unfriended, upon the cold charity of a censorious world.' I was glad to hear the lecturer's description of the scenery, for it assisted my appreciation of what I saw of it, and enabled me to imagine such of it as we lost by the intrusion of night. As the lecturer remarked, this whole region is blanketed with Indian tales and traditions. But I reminded him that people usually merely mention this fact--doing it in a way to make a body's mouth water--and judiciously stopped there. Why? Because the impression left, was that these tales were full of incident and imagination--a pleasant impression which would be promptly dissipated if the tales were told. I showed him a lot of this sort of literature which I had been collecting, and he confessed that it was poor stuff, exceedingly sorry rubbish; and I ventured to add that the legends which he had himself told us were of this character, with the single exception of the admirable story of Winona. He granted these facts, but said that if I would hunt up Mr. Schoolcraft's book, published near fifty years ago, and now doubtless out of print, I would find some Indian inventions in it that were very far from being barren of incident and imagination; that the tales in Hiawatha were of this sort, and they came from Schoolcraft's book; and that there were others in the same book which Mr. Longfellow could have turned into verse with good effect. For instance, there was the legend of 'The Undying Head.' He could not tell it, for many of the details had grown dim in his memory; but he would recommend me to find it and enlarge my respect for the Indian imagination. He said that this tale, and most of the others in the book, were current among the Indians along this part of the Mississippi when he first came here; and that the contributors to Schoolcraft's book had got them directly from Indian lips, and had written them down with strict exactness, and without embellishments of their own. I have found the book. The lecturer was right. There are several legends in it which confirm what he said. I will offer two of them-- 'The Undying Head,' and 'Peboan and Seegwun, an Allegory of the Seasons.' The latter is used in Hiawatha; but it is worth reading in the original form, if only that one may see how effective a genuine poem can be without the helps and graces of poetic measure and rhythm-- PEBOAN AND SEEGWUN. An old man was sitting alone in his lodge, by the side of a frozen stream. It was the close of winter, and his fire was almost out, He appeared very old and very desolate. His locks were white with age, and he trembled in every joint. Day after day passed in solitude, and he heard nothing but the sound of the tempest, sweeping before it the new- fallen snow. One day, as his fire was just dying, a handsome young man approached and entered his dwelling. His cheeks were red with the blood of youth, his eyes sparkled with animation, and a smile played upon his lips. He walked with a light and quick step. His forehead was bound with a wreath of sweet grass, in place of a warrior's frontlet, and he carried a bunch of flowers in his hand. 'Ah, my son,' said the old man, 'I am happy to see you. Come in. Come and tell me of your adventures, and what strange lands you have been to see. Let us pass the night together. I will tell you of my prowess and exploits, and what I can perform. You shall do the same, and we will amuse ourselves.' He then drew from his sack a curiously wrought antique pipe, and having filled it with tobacco, rendered mild by a mixture of certain leaves, handed it to his guest. When this ceremony was concluded they began to speak. 'I blow my breath,' said the old man, 'and the stream stands still. The water becomes stiff and hard as clear stone.' 'I breathe,' said the young man, 'and flowers spring up over the plain.' 'I shake my locks,' retorted the old man, 'and snow covers the land. The leaves fall from the trees at my command, and my breath blows them away. The birds get up from the water, and fly to a distant land. The animals hide themselves from my breath, and the very ground becomes as hard as flint.' 'I shake my ringlets,' rejoined the young man, 'and warm showers of soft rain fall upon the earth. The plants lift up their heads out of the earth, like the eyes of children glistening with delight. My voice recalls the birds. The warmth of my breath unlocks the streams. Music fills the groves wherever I walk, and all nature rejoices.' At length the sun began to rise. A gentle warmth came over the place. The tongue of the old man became silent. The robin and bluebird began to sing on the top of the lodge. The stream began to murmur by the door, and the fragrance of growing herbs and flowers came softly on the vernal breeze. Daylight fully revealed to the young man the character of his entertainer. When he looked upon him, he had the icy visage of Peboan.{footnote [Winter.]} Streams began to flow from his eyes. As the sun increased, he grew less and less in stature, and anon had melted completely away. Nothing remained on the place of his lodge-fire but the miskodeed,{footnote [The trailing arbutus.]} a small white flower, with a pink border, which is one of the earliest species of northern plants. 'The Undying Head' is a rather long tale, but it makes up in weird conceits, fairy-tale prodigies, variety of incident, and energy of movement, for what it lacks in brevity.{footnote [See appendix D.]} Chapter 60 Speculations and Conclusions WE reached St. Paul, at the head of navigation of the Mississippi, and there our voyage of two thousand miles from New Orleans ended. It is about a ten-day trip by steamer. It can probably be done quicker by rail. I judge so because I know that one may go by rail from St. Louis to Hannibal--a distance of at least a hundred and twenty miles--in seven hours. This is better than walking; unless one is in a hurry. The season being far advanced when we were in New Orleans, the roses and magnolia blossoms were falling; but here in St. Paul it was the snow, In New Orleans we had caught an occasional withering breath from over a crater, apparently; here in St. Paul we caught a frequent benumbing one from over a glacier, apparently. But I wander from my theme. St. Paul is a wonderful town. It is put together in solid blocks of honest brick and stone, and has the air of intending to stay. Its post-office was established thirty-six years ago; and by and by, when the postmaster received a letter, he carried it to Washington, horseback, to inquire what was to be done with it. Such is the legend. Two frame houses were built that year, and several persons were added to the population. A recent number of the leading St. Paul paper, the 'Pioneer Press,' gives some statistics which furnish a vivid contrast to that old state of things, to wit: Population, autumn of the present year (1882), 71,000; number of letters handled, first half of the year, 1,209,387; number of houses built during three- quarters of the year, 989; their cost, $3,186,000. The increase of letters over the corresponding six months of last year was fifty per cent. Last year the new buildings added to the city cost above $4,500,000. St. Paul's strength lies in her commerce--I mean his commerce. He is a manufacturing city, of course--all the cities of that region are--but he is peculiarly strong in the matter of commerce. Last year his jobbing trade amounted to upwards of $52,000,000. He has a custom-house, and is building a costly capitol to replace the one recently burned--for he is the capital of the State. He has churches without end; and not the cheap poor kind, but the kind that the rich Protestant puts up, the kind that the poor Irish 'hired-girl' delights to erect. What a passion for building majestic churches the Irish hired-girl has. It is a fine thing for our architecture but too often we enjoy her stately fanes without giving her a grateful thought. In fact, instead of reflecting that 'every brick and every stone in this beautiful edifice represents an ache or a pain, and a handful of sweat, and hours of heavy fatigue, contributed by the back and forehead and bones of poverty,' it is our habit to forget these things entirely, and merely glorify the mighty temple itself, without vouchsafing one praiseful thought to its humble builder, whose rich heart and withered purse it symbolizes. This is a land of libraries and schools. St. Paul has three public libraries, and they contain, in the aggregate, some forty thousand books. He has one hundred and sixteen school-houses, and pays out more than seventy thousand dollars a year in teachers' salaries. There is an unusually fine railway station; so large is it, in fact, that it seemed somewhat overdone, in the matter of size, at first; but at the end of a few months it was perceived that the mistake was distinctly the other way. The error is to be corrected. The town stands on high ground; it is about seven hundred feet above the sea level. It is so high that a wide view of river and lowland is offered from its streets. It is a very wonderful town indeed, and is not finished yet. All the streets are obstructed with building material, and this is being compacted into houses as fast as possible, to make room for more--for other people are anxious to build, as soon as they can get the use of the streets to pile up their bricks and stuff in. How solemn and beautiful is the thought, that the earliest pioneer of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school, never the missionary--but always whiskey! Such is the case. Look history over; you will see. The missionary comes after the whiskey--I mean he arrives after the whiskey has arrived; next comes the poor immigrant, with ax and hoe and rifle; next, the trader; next, the miscellaneous rush; next, the gambler, the desperado, the highwayman, and all their kindred in sin of both sexes; and next, the smart chap who has bought up an old grant that covers all the land; this brings the lawyer tribe; the vigilance committee brings the undertaker. All these interests bring the newspaper; the newspaper starts up politics and a railroad; all hands turn to and build a church and a jail--and behold, civilization is established for ever in the land. But whiskey, you see, was the van- leader in this beneficent work. It always is. It was like a foreigner-- and excusable in a foreigner--to be ignorant of this great truth, and wander off into astronomy to borrow a symbol. But if he had been conversant with the facts, he would have said-- Westward the Jug of Empire takes its way. This great van-leader arrived upon the ground which St. Paul now occupies, in June 1837. Yes, at that date, Pierre Parrant, a Canadian, built the first cabin, uncorked his jug, and began to sell whiskey to the Indians. The result is before us. All that I have said of the newness, briskness, swift progress, wealth, intelligence, fine and substantial architecture, and general slash and go, and energy of St. Paul, will apply to his near neighbor, Minneapolis--with the addition that the latter is the bigger of the two cities. These extraordinary towns were ten miles apart, a few months ago, but were growing so fast that they may possibly be joined now, and getting along under a single mayor. At any rate, within five years from now there will be at least such a substantial ligament of buildings stretching between them and uniting them that a stranger will not be able to tell where the one Siamese twin leaves off and the other begins. Combined, they will then number a population of two hundred and fifty thousand, if they continue to grow as they are now growing. Thus, this center of population at the head of Mississippi navigation, will then begin a rivalry as to numbers, with that center of population at the foot of it--New Orleans. Minneapolis is situated at the falls of St. Anthony, which stretch across the river, fifteen hundred feet, and have a fall of eighty-two feet--a waterpower which, by art, has been made of inestimable value, business-wise, though somewhat to the damage of the Falls as a spectacle, or as a background against which to get your photograph taken. Thirty flouring-mills turn out two million barrels of the very choicest of flour every year; twenty sawmills produce two hundred million feet of lumber annually; then there are woolen mills, cotton mills, paper and oil mills; and sash, nail, furniture, barrel, and other factories, without number, so to speak. The great flouring-mills here and at St. Paul use the 'new process' and mash the wheat by rolling, instead of grinding it. Sixteen railroads meet in Minneapolis, and sixty-five passenger trains arrive and depart daily. In this place, as in St. Paul, journalism thrives. Here there are three great dailies, ten weeklies, and three monthlies. There is a university, with four hundred students--and, better still, its good efforts are not confined to enlightening the one sex. There are sixteen public schools, with buildings which cost $500,000; there are six thousand pupils and one hundred and twenty-eight teachers. There are also seventy churches existing, and a lot more projected. The banks aggregate a capital of $3,000,000, and the wholesale jobbing trade of the town amounts to $50,000,000 a year. Near St. Paul and Minneapolis are several points of interest--Fort Snelling, a fortress occupying a river-bluff a hundred feet high; the falls of Minnehaha, White-bear Lake, and so forth. The beautiful falls of Minnehaha are sufficiently celebrated--they do not need a lift from me, in that direction. The White-bear Lake is less known. It is a lovely sheet of water, and is being utilized as a summer resort by the wealth and fashion of the State. It has its club-house, and its hotel, with the modern improvements and conveniences; its fine summer residences; and plenty of fishing, hunting, and pleasant drives. There are a dozen minor summer resorts around about St. Paul and Minneapolis, but the White-bear Lake is the resort. Connected with White-bear Lake is a most idiotic Indian legend. I would resist the temptation to print it here, if I could, but the task is beyond my strength. The guide-book names the preserver of the legend, and compliments his 'facile pen.' Without further comment or delay then, let us turn the said facile pen loose upon the reader-- A LEGEND OF WHITE-BEAR LAKE. Every spring, for perhaps a century, or as long as there has been a nation of red men, an island in the middle of White-bear Lake has been visited by a band of Indians for the purpose of making maple sugar. Tradition says that many springs ago, while upon this island, a young warrior loved and wooed the daughter of his chief, and it is said, also, the maiden loved the warrior. He had again and again been refused her hand by her parents, the old chief alleging that he was no brave, and his old consort called him a woman! The sun had again set upon the 'sugar-bush,' and the bright moon rose high in the bright blue heavens, when the young warrior took down his flute and went out alone, once more to sing the story of his love, the mild breeze gently moved the two gay feathers in his head-dress, and as he mounted on the trunk of a leaning tree, the damp snow fell from his feet heavily. As he raised his flute to his lips, his blanket slipped from his well-formed shoulders, and lay partly on the snow beneath. He began his weird, wild love-song, but soon felt that he was cold, and as he reached back for his blanket, some unseen hand laid it gently on his shoulders; it was the hand of his love, his guardian angel. She took her place beside him, and for the present they were happy; for the Indian has a heart to love, and in this pride he is as noble as in his own freedom, which makes him the child of the forest. As the legend runs, a large white-bear, thinking, perhaps, that polar snows and dismal winter weather extended everywhere, took up his journey southward. He at length approached the northern shore of the lake which now bears his name, walked down the bank and made his way noiselessly through the deep heavy snow toward the island. It was the same spring ensuing that the lovers met. They had left their first retreat, and were now seated among the branches of a large elm which hung far over the lake. (The same tree is still standing, and excites universal curiosity and interest.) For fear of being detected, they talked almost in a whisper, and now, that they might get back to camp in good time and thereby avoid suspicion, they were just rising to return, when the maiden uttered a shriek which was heard at the camp, and bounding toward the young brave, she caught his blanket, but missed the direction of her foot and fell, bearing the blanket with her into the great arms of the ferocious monster. Instantly every man, woman, and child of the band were upon the bank, but all unarmed. Cries and wailings went up from every mouth. What was to be done'? In the meantime this white and savage beast held the breathless maiden in his huge grasp, and fondled with his precious prey as if he were used to scenes like this. One deafening yell from the lover warrior is heard above the cries of hundreds of his tribe, and dashing away to his wigwam he grasps his faithful knife, returns almost at a single bound to the scene of fear and fright, rushes out along the leaning tree to the spot where his treasure fell, and springing with the fury of a mad panther, pounced upon his prey. The animal turned, and with one stroke of his huge paw brought the lovers heart to heart, but the next moment the warrior, with one plunge of the blade of his knife, opened the crimson sluices of death, and the dying bear relaxed his hold. That night there was no more sleep for the band or the lovers, and as the young and the old danced about the carcass of the dead monster, the gallant warrior was presented with another plume, and ere another moon had set he had a living treasure added to his heart. Their children for many years played upon the skin of the white-bear--from which the lake derives its name--and the maiden and the brave remembered long the fearful scene and rescue that made them one, for Kis-se-me-pa and Ka-go- ka could never forget their fearful encounter with the huge monster that came so near sending them to the happy hunting-ground. It is a perplexing business. First, she fell down out of the tree--she and the blanket; and the bear caught her and fondled her--her and the blanket; then she fell up into the tree again--leaving the blanket; meantime the lover goes war-whooping home and comes back 'heeled,' climbs the tree, jumps down on the bear, the girl jumps down after him-- apparently, for she was up the tree--resumes her place in the bear's arms along with the blanket, the lover rams his knife into the bear, and saves--whom, the blanket? No--nothing of the sort. You get yourself all worked up and excited about that blanket, and then all of a sudden, just when a happy climax seems imminent you are let down flat--nothing saved but the girl. Whereas, one is not interested in the girl; she is not the prominent feature of the legend. Nevertheless, there you are left, and there you must remain; for if you live a thousand years you will never know who got the blanket. A dead man could get up a better legend than this one. I don't mean a fresh dead man either; I mean a man that's been dead weeks and weeks. We struck the home-trail now, and in a few hours were in that astonishing Chicago--a city where they are always rubbing the lamp, and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities. It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago--she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time. The Pennsylvania road rushed us to New York without missing schedule time ten minutes anywhere on the route; and there ended one of the most enjoyable five-thousand-mile journeys I have ever had the good fortune to make. APPENDIX A (FROM THE NEW ORLEANS TIMES DEMOCRAT OF MARCH 29, 1882.) VOYAGE OF THE TIMES-DEMOCRAT'S RELIEF BOAT THROUGH THE INUNDATED REGIONS IT was nine o'clock Thursday morning when the 'Susie' left the Mississippi and entered Old River, or what is now called the mouth of the Red. Ascending on the left, a flood was pouring in through and over the levees on the Chandler plantation, the most northern point in Pointe Coupee parish. The water completely covered the place, although the levees had given way but a short time before. The stock had been gathered in a large flat-boat, where, without food, as we passed, the animals were huddled together, waiting for a boat to tow them off. On the right-hand side of the river is Turnbull's Island, and on it is a large plantation which formerly was pronounced one of the most fertile in the State. The water has hitherto allowed it to go scot-free in usual floods, but now broad sheets of water told only where fields were. The top of the protecting levee could be seen here and there, but nearly all of it was submerged. The trees have put on a greener foliage since the water has poured in, and the woods look bright and fresh, but this pleasant aspect to the eye is neutralized by the interminable waste of water. We pass mile after mile, and it is nothing but trees standing up to their branches in water. A water-turkey now and again rises and flies ahead into the long avenue of silence. A pirogue sometimes flits from the bushes and crosses the Red River on its way out to the Mississippi, but the sad- faced paddlers never turn their heads to look at our boat. The puffing of the boat is music in this gloom, which affects one most curiously. It is not the gloom of deep forests or dark caverns, but a peculiar kind of solemn silence and impressive awe that holds one perforce to its recognition. We passed two negro families on a raft tied up in the willows this morning. They were evidently of the well-to-do class, as they had a supply of meal and three or four hogs with them. Their rafts were about twenty feet square, and in front of an improvised shelter earth had been placed, on which they built their fire. The current running down the Atchafalaya was very swift, the Mississippi showing a predilection in that direction, which needs only to be seen to enforce the opinion of that river's desperate endeavors to find a short way to the Gulf. Small boats, skiffs, pirogues, etc., are in great demand, and many have been stolen by piratical negroes, who take them where they will bring the greatest price. From what was told me by Mr. C. P. Ferguson, a planter near Red River Landing, whose place has just gone under, there is much suffering in the rear of that place. The negroes had given up all thoughts of a crevasse there, as the upper levee had stood so long, and when it did come they were at its mercy. On Thursday a number were taken out of trees and off of cabin roofs and brought in, many yet remaining. One does not appreciate the sight of earth until he has traveled through a flood. At sea one does not expect or look for it, but here, with fluttering leaves, shadowy forest aisles, house-tops barely visible, it is expected. In fact a grave-yard, if the mounds were above water, would be appreciated. The river here is known only because there is an opening in the trees, and that is all. It is in width, from Fort Adams on the left bank of the Mississippi to the bank of Rapides Parish, a distance of about sixty miles. A large portion of this was under cultivation, particularly along the Mississippi and back of the Red. When Red River proper was entered, a strong current was running directly across it, pursuing the same direction as that of the Mississippi. After a run of some hours, Black River was reached. Hardly was it entered before signs of suffering became visible. All the willows along the banks were stripped of their leaves. One man, whom your correspondent spoke to, said that he had had one hundred and fifty head of cattle and one hundred head of hogs. At the first appearance of water he had started to drive them to the high lands of Avoyelles, thirty-five miles off, but he lost fifty head of the beef cattle and sixty hogs. Black River is quite picturesque, even if its shores are under water. A dense growth of ash, oak, gum, and hickory make the shores almost impenetrable, and where one can get a view down some avenue in the trees, only the dim outlines of distant trunks can be barely distinguished in the gloom. A few miles up this river, the depth of water on the banks was fully eight feet, and on all sides could be seen, still holding against the strong current, the tops of cabins. Here and there one overturned was surrounded by drift-wood, forming the nucleus of possibly some future island. In order to save coal, as it was impossible to get that fuel at any point to be touched during the expedition, a look-out was kept for a wood-pile. On rounding a point a pirogue, skilfully paddled by a youth, shot out, and in its bow was a girl of fifteen, of fair face, beautiful black eyes, and demure manners. The boy asked for a paper, which was thrown to him, and the couple pushed their tiny craft out into the swell of the boat. Presently a little girl, not certainly over twelve years, paddled out in the smallest little canoe and handled it with all the deftness of an old voyageur. The little one looked more like an Indian than a white child, and laughed when asked if she were afraid. She had been raised in a pirogue and could go anywhere. She was bound out to pick willow leaves for the stock, and she pointed to a house near by with water three inches deep on the floors. At its back door was moored a raft about thirty feet square, with a sort of fence built upon it, and inside of this some sixteen cows and twenty hogs were standing. The family did not complain, except on account of losing their stock, and promptly brought a supply of wood in a flat. From this point to the Mississippi River, fifteen miles, there is not a spot of earth above water, and to the westward for thirty-five miles there is nothing but the river's flood. Black River had risen during Thursday, the 23rd, 1{three-quarters} inches, and was going up at night still. As we progress up the river habitations become more frequent, but are yet still miles apart. Nearly all of them are deserted, and the out-houses floated off. To add to the gloom, almost every living thing seems to have departed, and not a whistle of a bird nor the bark of the squirrel can be heard in this solitude. Sometimes a morose gar will throw his tail aloft and disappear in the river, but beyond this everything is quiet--the quiet of dissolution. Down the river floats now a neatly whitewashed hen-house, then a cluster of neatly split fence- rails, or a door and a bloated carcass, solemnly guarded by a pair of buzzards, the only bird to be seen, which feast on the carcass as it bears them along. A picture-frame in which there was a cheap lithograph of a soldier on horseback, as it floated on told of some hearth invaded by the water and despoiled of this ornament. At dark, as it was not prudent to run, a place alongside the woods was hunted and to a tall gum-tree the boat was made fast for the night. A pretty quarter of the moon threw a pleasant light over forest and river, making a picture that would be a delightful piece of landscape study, could an artist only hold it down to his canvas. The motion of the engines had ceased, the puffing of the escaping steam was stilled, and the enveloping silence closed upon us, and such silence it was! Usually in a forest at night one can hear the piping of frogs, the hum of insects, or the dropping of limbs; but here nature was dumb. The dark recesses, those aisles into this cathedral, gave forth no sound, and even the ripplings of the current die away. At daylight Friday morning all hands were up, and up the Black we started. The morning was a beautiful one, and the river, which is remarkably straight, put on its loveliest garb. The blossoms of the haw perfumed the air deliciously, and a few birds whistled blithely along the banks. The trees were larger, and the forest seemed of older growth than below. More fields were passed than nearer the mouth, but the same scene presented itself--smoke-houses drifting out in the pastures, negro quarters anchored in confusion against some oak, and the modest residence just showing its eaves above water. The sun came up in a glory of carmine, and the trees were brilliant in their varied shades of green. Not a foot of soil is to be seen anywhere, and the water is apparently growing deeper and deeper, for it reaches up to the branches of the largest trees. All along, the bordering willows have been denuded of leaves, showing how long the people have been at work gathering this fodder for their animals. An old man in a pirogue was asked how the willow leaves agreed with his cattle. He stopped in his work, and with an ominous shake of his head replied: 'Well, sir, it 's enough to keep warmth in their bodies and that's all we expect, but it's hard on the hogs, particularly the small ones. They is dropping off powerful fast. But what can you do? It 's all we've got.' At thirty miles above the mouth of Black River the water extends from Natchez on the Mississippi across to the pine hills of Louisiana, a distance of seventy-three miles, and there is hardly a spot that is not ten feet under it. The tendency of the current up the Black is toward the west. In fact, so much is this the case, the waters of Red River have been driven down from toward the Calcasieu country, and the waters of the Black enter the Red some fifteen miles above the mouth of the former, a thing never before seen by even the oldest steamboatmen. The water now in sight of us is entirely from the Mississippi. Up to Trinity, or rather Troy, which is but a short distance below, the people have nearly all moved out, those remaining having enough for their present personal needs. Their cattle, though, are suffering and dying off quite fast, as the confinement on rafts and the food they get breeds disease. After a short stop we started, and soon came to a section where there were many open fields and cabins thickly scattered about. Here were seen more pictures of distress. On the inside of the houses the inmates had built on boxes a scaffold on which they placed the furniture. The bed- posts were sawed off on top, as the ceiling was not more than four feet from the improvised floor. The buildings looked very insecure, and threatened every moment to float off. Near the houses were cattle standing breast high in the water, perfectly impassive. They did not move in their places, but stood patiently waiting for help to come. The sight was a distressing one, and the poor creatures will be sure to die unless speedily rescued. Cattle differ from horses in this peculiar quality. A horse, after finding no relief comes, will swim off in search of food, whereas a beef will stand in its tracks until with exhaustion it drops in the water and drowns. At half-past twelve o'clock a hail was given from a flat-boat inside the line of the bank. Rounding to we ran alongside, and General York stepped aboard. He was just then engaged in getting off stock, and welcomed the 'Times-Democrat' boat heartily, as he said there was much need for her. He said that the distress was not exaggerated in the least. People were in a condition it was difficult even for one to imagine. The water was so high there was great danger of their houses being swept away. It had already risen so high that it was approaching the eaves, and when it reaches this point there is always imminent risk of their being swept away. If this occurs, there will be great loss of life. The General spoke of the gallant work of many of the people in their attempts to save their stock, but thought that fully twenty-five per cent. had perished. Already twenty-five hundred people had received rations from Troy, on Black River, and he had towed out a great many cattle, but a very great quantity remained and were in dire need. The water was now eighteen inches higher than in 1874, and there was no land between Vidalia and the hills of Catahoula. At two o'clock the 'Susie' reached Troy, sixty-five miles above the mouth of Black River. Here on the left comes in Little River; just beyond that the Ouachita, and on the right the Tensas. These three rivers form the Black River. Troy, or a portion of it, is situated on and around three large Indian mounds, circular in shape, which rise above the present water about twelve feet. They are about one hundred and fifty feet in diameter, and are about two hundred yards apart. The houses are all built between these mounds, and hence are all flooded to a depth of eighteen inches on their floors. These elevations, built by the aborigines, hundreds of years ago, are the only points of refuge for miles. When we arrived we found them crowded with stock, all of which was thin and hardly able to stand up. They were mixed together, sheep, hogs, horses, mules, and cattle. One of these mounds has been used for many years as the grave-yard, and to-day we saw attenuated cows lying against the marble tomb-stones, chewing their cud in contentment, after a meal of corn furnished by General York. Here, as below, the remarkable skill of the women and girls in the management of the smaller pirogues was noticed. Children were paddling about in these most ticklish crafts with all the nonchalance of adepts. General York has put into operation a perfect system in regard to furnishing relief. He makes a personal inspection of the place where it is asked, sees what is necessary to be done, and then, having two boats chartered, with flats, sends them promptly to the place, when the cattle are loaded and towed to the pine hills and uplands of Catahoula. He has made Troy his headquarters, and to this point boats come for their supply of feed for cattle. On the opposite side of Little River, which branches to the left out of Black, and between it and the Ouachita, is situated the town of Trinity, which is hourly threatened with destruction. It is much lower than Troy, and the water is eight and nine feet deep in the houses. A strong current sweeps through it, and it is remarkable that all of its houses have not gone before. The residents of both Troy and Trinity have been cared for, yet some of their stock have to be furnished with food. As soon as the 'Susie' reached Troy, she was turned over to General York, and placed at his disposition to carry out the work of relief more rapidly. Nearly all her supplies were landed on one of the mounds to lighten her, and she was headed down stream to relieve those below. At Tom Hooper's place, a few miles from Troy, a large flat, with about fifty head of stock on board, was taken in tow. The animals were fed, and soon regained some strength. To-day we go on Little River, where the suffering is greatest. DOWN BLACK RIVER Saturday Evening, March 25. We started down Black River quite early, under the direction of General York, to bring out what stock could be reached. Going down river a flat in tow was left in a central locality, and from there men poled her back in the rear of plantations, picking up the animals wherever found. In the loft of a gin-house there were seventeen head found, and after a gangway was built they were led down into the flat without difficulty. Taking a skiff with the General, your reporter was pulled up to a little house of two rooms, in which the water was standing two feet on the floors. In one of the large rooms were huddled the horses and cows of the place, while in the other the Widow Taylor and her son were seated on a scaffold raised on the floor. One or two dug-outs were drifting about in the roam ready to be put in service at any time. When the flat was brought up, the side of the house was cut away as the only means of getting the animals out, and the cattle were driven on board the boat. General York, in this as in every case, inquired if the family desired to leave, informing them that Major Burke, of 'The Times-Democrat,' has sent the 'Susie' up for that purpose. Mrs. Taylor said she thanked Major Burke, but she would try and hold out. The remarkable tenacity of the people here to their homes is beyond all comprehension. Just below, at a point sixteen miles from Troy, information was received that the house of Mr. Tom Ellis was in danger, and his family were all in it. We steamed there immediately, and a sad picture was presented. Looking out of the half of the window left above water, was Mrs. Ellis, who is in feeble health, whilst at the door were her seven children, the oldest not fourteen years. One side of the house was given up to the work animals, some twelve head, besides hogs. In the next room the family lived, the water coming within two inches of the bed-rail. The stove was below water, and the cooking was done on a fire on top of it. The house threatened to give way at any moment: one end of it was sinking, and, in fact, the building looked a mere shell. As the boat rounded to, Mr. Ellis came out in a dug-out, and General York told him that he had come to his relief; that 'The Times-Democrat' boat was at his service, and would remove his family at once to the hills, and on Monday a flat would take out his stock, as, until that time, they would be busy. Notwithstanding the deplorable situation himself and family were in, Mr. Ellis did not want to leave. He said he thought he would wait until Monday, and take the risk of his house falling. The children around the door looked perfectly contented, seeming to care little for the danger they were in. These are but two instances of the many. After weeks of privation and suffering, people still cling to their houses and leave only when there is not room between the water and the ceiling to build a scaffold on which to stand. It seemed to be incomprehensible, yet the love for the old place was stronger than that for safety. After leaving the Ellis place, the next spot touched at was the Oswald place. Here the flat was towed alongside the gin-house where there were fifteen head standing in water; and yet, as they stood on scaffolds, their heads were above the top of the entrance. It was found impossible to get them out without cutting away a portion of the front; and so axes were brought into requisition and a gap made. After much labor the horses and mules were securely placed on the flat. At each place we stop there are always three, four, or more dug-outs arriving, bringing information of stock in other places in need. Notwithstanding the fact that a great many had driven a part of their stock to the hills some time ago, there yet remains a large quantity, which General York, who is working with indomitable energy, will get landed in the pine hills by Tuesday. All along Black River the 'Susie' has been visited by scores of planters, whose tales are the repetition of those already heard of suffering and loss. An old planter, who has lived on the river since 1844, said there never was such a rise, and he was satisfied more than one quarter of the stock has been lost. Luckily the people cared first for their work stock, and when they could find it horses and mules were housed in a place of safety. The rise which still continues, and was two inches last night, compels them to get them out to the hills; hence it is that the work of General York is of such a great value. From daylight to late at night he is going this way and that, cheering by his kindly words and directing with calm judgment what is to be done. One unpleasant story, of a certain merchant in New Orleans, is told all along the river. It appears for some years past the planters have been dealing with this individual, and many of them had balances in his hands. When the overflow came they wrote for coffee, for meal, and, in fact, for such little necessities as were required. No response to these letters came, and others were written, and yet these old customers, with plantations under water, were refused even what was necessary to sustain life. It is needless to say he is not popular now on Back River. The hills spoken of as the place of refuge for the people and stock on Black River are in Catahoula parish, twenty-four miles from Black River. After filling the flat with cattle we took on board the family of T. S. Hooper, seven in number, who could not longer remain in their dwelling, and we are now taking them up Little River to the hills. THE FLOOD STILL RISING Troy: March 27, 1882, noon. The flood here is rising about three and a half inches every twenty-four hours, and rains have set in which will increase this. General York feels now that our efforts ought to be directed towards saving life, as the increase of the water has jeopardized many houses. We intend to go up the Tensas in a few minutes, and then we will return and go down Black River to take off families. There is a lack of steam transportation here to meet the emergency. The General has three boats chartered, with flats in tow, but the demand for these to tow out stock is greater than they can meet with promptness. All are working night and day, and the 'Susie' hardly stops for more than an hour anywhere. The rise has placed Trinity in a dangerous plight, and momentarily it is expected that some of the houses will float off. Troy is a little higher, yet all are in the water. Reports have come in that a woman and child have been washed away below here, and two cabins floated off. Their occupants are the same who refused to come off day before yesterday. One would not believe the utter passiveness of the people. As yet no news has been received of the steamer 'Delia,' which is supposed to be the one sunk in yesterday's storm on Lake Catahoula. She is due here now, but has not arrived. Even the mail here is most uncertain, and this I send by skiff to Natchez to get it to you. It is impossible to get accurate data as to past crops, etc., as those who know much about the matter have gone, and those who remain are not well versed in the production of this section. General York desires me to say that the amount of rations formerly sent should be duplicated and sent at once. It is impossible to make any estimate, for the people are fleeing to the hills, so rapid is the rise. The residents here are in a state of commotion that can only be appreciated when seen, and complete demoralization has set in, If rations are drawn for any particular section hereabouts, they would not be certain to be distributed, so everything should be sent to Troy as a center, and the General will have it properly disposed of. He has sent for one hundred tents, and, if all go to the hills who are in motion now, two hundred will be required. APPENDIX B THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER COMMISSION THE condition of this rich valley of the Lower Mississippi, immediately after and since the war, constituted one of the disastrous effects of war most to be deplored. Fictitious property in slaves was not only righteously destroyed, but very much of the work which had depended upon the slave labor was also destroyed or greatly impaired, especially the levee system. It might have been expected by those who have not investigated the subject, that such important improvements as the construction and maintenance of the levees would have been assumed at once by the several States. But what can the State do where the people are under subjection to rates of interest ranging from 18 to 30 per cent., and are also under the necessity of pledging their crops in advance even of planting, at these rates, for the privilege of purchasing all of their supplies at 100 per cent. profit? It has needed but little attention to make it perfectly obvious that the control of the Mississippi River, if undertaken at all, must be undertaken by the national government, and cannot be compassed by States. The river must be treated as a unit; its control cannot be compassed under a divided or separate system of administration. Neither are the States especially interested competent to combine among themselves for the necessary operations. The work must begin far up the river; at least as far as Cairo, if not beyond; and must be conducted upon a consistent general plan throughout the course of the river. It does not need technical or scientific knowledge to comprehend the elements of the case if one will give a little time and attention to the subject, and when a Mississippi River commission has been constituted, as the existing commission is, of thoroughly able men of different walks in life, may it not be suggested that their verdict in the case should be accepted as conclusive, so far as any a priori theory of construction or control can be considered conclusive? It should be remembered that upon this board are General Gilmore, General Comstock, and General Suter, of the United States Engineers; Professor Henry Mitchell (the most competent authority on the question of hydrography), of the United States Coast Survey; B. B. Harrod, the State Engineer of Louisiana; Jas. B. Eads, whose success with the jetties at New Orleans is a warrant of his competency, and Judge Taylor, of Indiana. It would be presumption on the part of any single man, however skilled, to contest the judgment of such a board as this. The method of improvement proposed by the commission is at once in accord with the results of engineering experience and with observations of nature where meeting our wants. As in nature the growth of trees and their proneness where undermined to fall across the slope and support the bank secures at some points a fair depth of channel and some degree of permanence, so in the project of the engineer the use of timber and brush and the encouragement of forest growth are the main features. It is proposed to reduce the width where excessive by brushwood dykes, at first low, but raised higher and higher as the mud of the river settles under their shelter, and finally slope them back at the angle upon which willows will grow freely. In this work there are many details connected with the forms of these shelter dykes, their arrangements so as to present a series of settling basins, etc., a description of which would only complicate the conception. Through the larger part of the river works of contraction will not be required, but nearly all the banks on the concave side of the beds must be held against the wear of the stream, and much of the opposite banks defended at critical points. The works having in view this conservative object may be generally designated works of revetment; and these also will be largely of brushwood, woven in continuous carpets, or twined into wire-netting. This veneering process has been successfully employed on the Missouri River; and in some cases they have so covered themselves with sediments, and have become so overgrown with willows, that they may be regarded as permanent. In securing these mats rubble-stone is to be used in small quantities, and in some instances the dressed slope between high and low river will have to be more or less paved with stone. Any one who has been on the Rhine will have observed operations not unlike those to which we have just referred; and, indeed, most of the rivers of Europe flowing among their own alluvia have required similar treatment in the interest of navigation and agriculture. The levee is the crowning work of bank revetment, although not necessarily in immediate connection. It may be set back a short distance from the revetted bank; but it is, in effect, the requisite parapet. The flood river and the low river cannot be brought into register, and compelled to unite in the excavation of a single permanent channel, without a complete control of all the stages; and even the abnormal rise must be provided against, because this would endanger the levee, and once in force behind the works of revetment would tear them also away. Under the general principle that the local slope of a river is the result and measure of the resistance of its bed, it is evident that a narrow and deep stream should have less slope, because it has less frictional surface in proportion to capacity; i.e., less perimeter in proportion to area of cross section. The ultimate effect of levees and revetments confining the floods and bringing all the stages of the river into register is to deepen the channel and let down the slope. The first effect of the levees is to raise the surface; but this, by inducing greater velocity of flow, inevitably causes an enlargement of section, and if this enlargement is prevented from being made at the expense of the banks, the bottom must give way and the form of the waterway be so improved as to admit this flow with less rise. The actual experience with levees upon the Mississippi River, with no attempt to hold the banks, has been favorable, and no one can doubt, upon the evidence furnished in the reports of the commission, that if the earliest levees had been accompanied by revetment of banks, and made complete, we should have to-day a river navigable at low water, and an adjacent country safe from inundation. Of course it would be illogical to conclude that the constrained river can ever lower its flood slope so as to make levees unnecessary, but it is believed that, by this lateral constraint, the river as a conduit may be so improved in form that even those rare floods which result from the coincident rising of many tributaries will find vent without destroying levees of ordinary height. That the actual capacity of a channel through alluvium depends upon its service during floods has been often shown, but this capacity does not include anomalous, but recurrent, floods. It is hardly worth while to consider the projects for relieving the Mississippi River floods by creating new outlets, since these sensational propositions have commended themselves only to unthinking minds, and have no support among engineers. Were the river bed cast- iron, a resort to openings for surplus waters might be a necessity; but as the bottom is yielding, and the best form of outlet is a single deep channel, as realizing the least ratio of perimeter to area of cross section, there could not well be a more unphilosophical method of treatment than the multiplication of avenues of escape. In the foregoing statement the attempt has been made to condense in as limited a space as the importance of the subject would permit, the general elements of the problem, and the general features of the proposed method of improvement which has been adopted by the Mississippi River Commission. The writer cannot help feeling that it is somewhat presumptuous on his part to attempt to present the facts relating to an enterprise which calls for the highest scientific skill; but it is a matter which interests every citizen of the United States, and is one of the methods of reconstruction which ought to be approved. It is a war claim which implies no private gain, and no compensation except for one of the cases of destruction incident to war, which may well be repaired by the people of the whole country. EDWARD ATKINSON. Boston: April 14, 1882. APPENDIX C RECEPTION OF CAPTAIN BASIL HALL'S BOOK IN THE UNITED STATES HAVING now arrived nearly at the end of our travels, I am induced, ere I conclude, again to mention what I consider as one of the most remarkable traits in the national character of the Americans; namely, their exquisite sensitiveness and soreness respecting everything said or written concerning them. Of this, perhaps, the most remarkable example I can give is the effect produced on nearly every class of readers by the appearance of Captain Basil Hall's 'Travels in North America.' In fact, it was a sort of moral earthquake, and the vibration it occasioned through the nerves of the republic, from one corner of the Union to the other, was by no means over when I left the country in July 1831, a couple of years after the shock. I was in Cincinnati when these volumes came out, but it was not till July 1830, that I procured a copy of them. One bookseller to whom I applied told me that he had had a few copies before he understood the nature of the work, but that, after becoming acquainted with it, nothing should induce him to sell another. Other persons of his profession must, however, have been less scrupulous; for the book was read in city, town, village, and hamlet, steamboat, and stage-coach, and a sort of war-whoop was sent forth perfectly unprecedented in my recollection upon any occasion whatever. An ardent desire for approbation, and a delicate sensitiveness under censure, have always, I believe, been considered as amiable traits of character; but the condition into which the appearance of Captain Hall's work threw the republic shows plainly that these feelings, if carried to excess, produce a weakness which amounts to imbecility. It was perfectly astonishing to hear men who, on other subjects, were of some judgment, utter their opinions upon this. I never heard of any instance in which the commonsense generally found in national criticism was so overthrown by passion. I do not speak of the want of justice, and of fair and liberal interpretation: these, perhaps, were hardly to be expected. Other nations have been called thin-skinned, but the citizens of the Union have, apparently, no skins at all; they wince if a breeze blows over them, unless it be tempered with adulation. It was not, therefore, very surprising that the acute and forcible observations of a traveler they knew would be listened to should be received testily. The extraordinary features of the business were, first, the excess of the rage into which they lashed themselves; and, secondly, the puerility of the inventions by which they attempted to account for the severity with which they fancied they had been treated. Not content with declaring that the volumes contained no word of truth, from beginning to end (which is an assertion I heard made very nearly as often as they were mentioned), the whole country set to work to discover the causes why Captain Hall had visited the United States, and why he had published his book. I have heard it said with as much precision and gravity as if the statement had been conveyed by an official report, that Captain Hall had been sent out by the British Government expressly for the purpose of checking the growing admiration of England for the Government of the United States,--that it was by a commission from the treasury he had come, and that it was only in obedience to orders that he had found anything to object to. I do not give this as the gossip of a coterie; I am persuaded that it is the belief of a very considerable portion of the country. So deep is the conviction of this singular people that they cannot be seen without being admired, that they will not admit the possibility that any one should honestly and sincerely find aught to disapprove in them or their country. The American Reviews are, many of them, I believe, well known in England; I need not, therefore, quote them here, but I sometimes wondered that they, none of them, ever thought of translating Obadiah's curse into classic American; if they had done so, on placing (he, Basil Hall) between brackets, instead of (he, Obadiah) it would have saved them a world of trouble. I can hardly describe the curiosity with which I sat down at length to peruse these tremendous volumes; still less can I do justice to my surprise at their contents. To say that I found not one exaggerated statement throughout the work is by no means saying enough. It is impossible for any one who knows the country not to see that Captain Hall earnestly sought out things to admire and commend. When he praises, it is with evident pleasure; and when he finds fault, it is with evident reluctance and restraint, excepting where motives purely patriotic urge him to state roundly what it is for the benefit of his country should be known. In fact, Captain Hall saw the country to the greatest possible advantage. Furnished, of course, with letters of introduction to the most distinguished individuals, and with the still more influential recommendation of his own reputation, he was received in full drawing- room style and state from one end of the Union to the other. He saw the country in full dress, and had little or no opportunity of judging of it unhouselled, unanointed, unannealed, with all its imperfections on its head, as I and my family too often had. Captain Hall had certainly excellent opportunities of making himself acquainted with the form of the government and the laws; and of receiving, moreover, the best oral commentary upon them, in conversation with the most distinguished citizens. Of these opportunities he made excellent use; nothing important met his eye which did not receive that sort of analytical attention which an experienced and philosophical traveler alone can give. This has made his volumes highly interesting and valuable; but I am deeply persuaded, that were a man of equal penetration to visit the United States with no other means of becoming acquainted with the national character than the ordinary working-day intercourse of life, he would conceive an infinitely lower idea of the moral atmosphere of the country than Captain Hall appears to have done; and the internal conviction on my mind is strong, that if Captain Hall had not placed a firm restraint on himself, he must have given expression to far deeper indignation than any he has uttered against many points in the American character, with which he shows from other circumstances that he was well acquainted. His rule appears to have been to state just so much of the truth as would leave on the mind of his readers a correct impression, at the least cost of pain to the sensitive folks he was writing about. He states his own opinions and feelings, and leaves it to be inferred that he has good grounds for adopting them; but he spares the Americans the bitterness which a detail of the circumstances would have produced. If any one chooses to say that some wicked antipathy to twelve millions of strangers is the origin of my opinion, I must bear it; and were the question one of mere idle speculation, I certainly would not court the abuse I must meet for stating it. But it is not so. . . . . . . . The candor which he expresses, and evidently feels, they mistake for irony, or totally distrust; his unwillingness to give pain to persons from whom he has received kindness, they scornfully reject as affectation, and although they must know right well, in their own secret hearts, how infinitely more they lay at his mercy than he has chosen to betray; they pretend, even to themselves, that he has exaggerated the bad points of their character and institutions; whereas, the truth is, that he has let them off with a degree of tenderness which may be quite suitable for him to exercise, however little merited; while, at the same time, he has most industriously magnified their merits, whenever he could possibly find anything favorable. APPENDIX D THE UNDYING HEAD IN a remote part of the North lived a man and his sister, who had never seen a human being. Seldom, if ever, had the man any cause to go from home; for, as his wants demanded food, he had only to go a little distance from the lodge, and there, in some particular spot, place his arrows, with their barbs in the ground. Telling his sister where they had been placed, every morning she would go in search, and never fail of finding each stuck through the heart of a deer. She had then only to drag them into the lodge and prepare their food. Thus she lived till she attained womanhood, when one day her brother, whose name was Iamo, said to her: 'Sister, the time is at hand when you will be ill. Listen to my advice. If you do not, it will probably be the cause of my death. Take the implements with which we kindle our fires. Go some distance from our lodge and build a separate fire. When you are in want of food, I will tell you where to find it. You must cook for yourself, and I will for myself. When you are ill, do not attempt to come near the lodge, or bring any of the utensils you use. Be sure always to fasten to your belt the implements you need, for you do not know when the time will come. As for myself, I must do the best I can.' His sister promised to obey him in all he had said. Shortly after, her brother had cause to go from home. She was alone in her lodge, combing her hair. She had just untied the belt to which the implements were fastened, when suddenly the event, to which her brother had alluded, occurred. She ran out of the lodge, but in her haste forgot the belt. Afraid to return, she stood for some time thinking. Finally, she decided to enter the lodge and get it. For, thought she, my brother is not at home, and I will stay but a moment to catch hold of it. She went back. Running in suddenly, she caught hold of it, and was coming out when her brother came in sight. He knew what was the matter. 'Oh,' he said, 'did I not tell you to take care. But now you have killed me.' She was going on her way, but her brother said to her, 'What can you do there now. The accident has happened. Go in, and stay where you have always stayed. And what will become of you? You have killed me.' He then laid aside his hunting-dress and accoutrements, and soon after both his feet began to turn black, so that he could not move. Still he directed his sister where to place the arrows, that she might always have food. The inflammation continued to increase, and had now reached his first rib; and he said: 'Sister, my end is near. You must do as I tell you. You see my medicine-sack, and my war-club tied to it. It contains all my medicines, and my war-plumes, and my paints of all colors. As soon as the inflammation reaches my breast, you will take my war-club. It has a sharp point, and you will cut off my head. When it is free from my body, take it, place its neck in the sack, which you must open at one end. Then hang it up in its former place. Do not forget my bow and arrows. One of the last you will take to procure food. The remainder, tie in my sack, and then hang it up, so that I can look towards the door. Now and then I will speak to you, but not often.' His sister again promised to obey. In a little time his breast was affected. 'Now,' said he, 'take the club and strike off my head.' She was afraid, but he told her to muster courage. 'Strike,' said he, and a smile was on his face. Mustering all her courage, she gave the blow and cut off the head. 'Now,' said the head, 'place me where I told you.' And fearfully she obeyed it in all its commands. Retaining its animation, it looked around the lodge as usual, and it would command its sister to go in such places as it thought would procure for her the flesh of different animals she needed. One day the head said: 'The time is not distant when I shall be freed from this situation, and I shall have to undergo many sore evils. So the superior manito decrees, and I must bear all patiently.' In this situation we must leave the head. In a certain part of the country was a village inhabited by a numerous and warlike band of Indians. In this village was a family of ten young men--brothers. It was in the spring of the year that the youngest of these blackened his face and fasted. His dreams were propitious. Having ended his fast, he went secretly for his brothers at night, so that none in the village could overhear or find out the direction they intended to go. Though their drum was heard, yet that was a common occurrence. Having ended the usual formalities, he told how favorable his dreams were, and that he had called them together to know if they would accompany him in a war excursion. They all answered they would. The third brother from the eldest, noted for his oddities, coming up with his war-club when his brother had ceased speaking, jumped up. 'Yes,' said he, 'I will go, and this will be the way I will treat those I am going to fight;' and he struck the post in the center of the lodge, and gave a yell. The others spoke to him, saying: 'Slow, slow, Mudjikewis, when you are in other people's lodges.' So he sat down. Then, in turn, they took the drum, and sang their songs, and closed with a feast. The youngest told them not to whisper their intention to their wives, but secretly to prepare for their journey. They all promised obedience, and Mudjikewis was the first to say so. The time for their departure drew near. Word was given to assemble on a certain night, when they would depart immediately. Mudjikewis was loud in his demands for his moccasins. Several times his wife asked him the reason. 'Besides,' said she, 'you have a good pair on.' 'Quick, quick,' said he, 'since you must know, we are going on a war excursion; so be quick.' He thus revealed the secret. That night they met and started. The snow was on the ground, and they traveled all night, lest others should follow them. When it was daylight, the leader took snow and made a ball of it, then tossing it into the air, he said: 'It was in this way I saw snow fall in a dream, so that I could not be tracked.' And he told them to keep close to each other for fear of losing themselves, as the snow began to fall in very large flakes. Near as they walked, it was with difficulty they could see each other. The snow continued falling all that day and the following night, so it was impossible to track them. They had now walked for several days, and Mudjikewis was always in the rear. One day, running suddenly forward, he gave the SAW-SAW- QUAN,{footnote [War-whoop.]} and struck a tree with his war-club, and it broke into pieces as if struck with lightning. 'Brothers,' said he, 'this will be the way I will serve those we are going to fight.' The leader answered, 'Slow, slow, Mudjikewis, the one I lead you to is not to be thought of so lightly.' Again he fell back and thought to himself: 'What! what! who can this be he is leading us to?' He felt fearful and was silent. Day after day they traveled on, till they came to an extensive plain, on the borders of which human bones were bleaching in the sun. The leader spoke: 'They are the bones of those who have gone before us. None has ever yet returned to tell the sad tale of their fate.' Again Mudjikewis became restless, and, running forward, gave the accustomed yell. Advancing to a large rock which stood above the ground, he struck it, and it fell to pieces. 'See, brothers,' said he, 'thus will I treat those whom we are going to fight.' 'Still, still,' once more said the leader; 'he to whom I am leading you is not to be compared to the rock.' Mudjikewis fell back thoughtful, saying to himself: 'I wonder who this can be that he is going to attack;' and he was afraid. Still they continued to see the remains of former warriors, who had been to the place where they were now going, some of whom had retreated as far back as the place where they first saw the bones, beyond which no one had ever escaped. At last they came to a piece of rising ground, from which they plainly distinguished, sleeping on a distant mountain, a mammoth bear. The distance between them was very great, but the size of the animal caused him to be plainly seen. 'There,' said the leader, 'it is he to whom I am leading you; here our troubles will commence, for he is a mishemokwa and a manito. It is he who has that we prize so dearly (i.e. wampum), to obtain which, the warriors whose bones we saw, sacrificed their lives. You must not be fearful: be manly. We shall find him asleep.' Then the leader went forward and touched the belt around the animal's neck. 'This,' said he, 'is what we must get. It contains the wampum.' Then they requested the eldest to try and slip the belt over the bear's head, who appeared to be fast asleep, as he was not in the least disturbed by the attempt to obtain the belt. All their efforts were in vain, till it came to the one next the youngest. He tried, and the belt moved nearly over the monster's head, but he could get it no farther. Then the youngest one, and the leader, made his attempt, and succeeded. Placing it on the back of the oldest, he said, 'Now we must run,' and off they started. When one became fatigued with its weight, another would relieve him. Thus they ran till they had passed the bones of all former warriors, and were some distance beyond, when looking back, they saw the monster slowly rising. He stood some time before he missed his wampum. Soon they heard his tremendous howl, like distant thunder, slowly filling all the sky; and then they heard him speak and say, 'Who can it be that has dared to steal my wampum? earth is not so large but that I can find them;' and he descended from the hill in pursuit. As if convulsed, the earth shook with every jump he made. Very soon he approached the party. They, however, kept the belt, exchanging it from one to another, and encouraging each other; but he gained on them fast. 'Brothers,' said the leader, 'has never any one of you, when fasting, dreamed of some friendly spirit who would aid you as a guardian?' A dead silence followed. 'Well,' said he, 'fasting, I dreamed of being in danger of instant death, when I saw a small lodge, with smoke curling from its top. An old man lived in it, and I dreamed he helped me; and may it be verified soon,' he said, running forward and giving the peculiar yell, and a howl as if the sounds came from the depths of his stomach, and what is called CHECAUDUM. Getting upon a piece of rising ground, behold! a lodge, with smoke curling from its top, appeared. This gave them all new strength, and they ran forward and entered it. The leader spoke to the old man who sat in the lodge, saying, 'Nemesho, help us; we claim your protection, for the great bear will kill us.' 'Sit down and eat, my grandchildren,' said the old man. 'Who is a great manito?' said he. 'There is none but me; but let me look,' and he opened the door of the lodge, when, lo! at a little distance he saw the enraged animal coming on, with slow but powerful leaps. He closed the door. 'Yes,' said he, 'he is indeed a great manito: my grandchildren, you will be the cause of my losing my life; you asked my protection, and I granted it; so now, come what may, I will protect you. When the bear arrives at the door, you must run out of the other door of the lodge.' Then putting his hand to the side of the lodge where he sat, he brought out a bag which he opened. Taking out two small black dogs, he placed them before him. 'These are the ones I use when I fight,' said he; and he commenced patting with both hands the sides of one of them, and he began to swell out, so that he soon filled the lodge by his bulk; and he had great strong teeth. When he attained his full size he growled, and from that moment, as from instinct, he jumped out at the door and met the bear, who in another leap would have reached the lodge. A terrible combat ensued. The skies rang with the howls of the fierce monsters. The remaining dog soon took the field. The brothers, at the onset, took the advice of the old man, and escaped through the opposite side of the lodge. They had not proceeded far before they heard the dying cry of one of the dogs, and soon after of the other. 'Well,' said the leader, 'the old man will share their fate: so run; he will soon be after us.' They started with fresh vigor, for they had received food from the old man: but very soon the bear came in sight, and again was fast gaining upon them. Again the leader asked the brothers if they could do nothing for their safety. All were silent. The leader, running forward, did as before. 'I dreamed,' he cried, 'that, being in great trouble, an old man helped me who was a manito; we shall soon see his lodge.' Taking courage, they still went on. After going a short distance they saw the lodge of the old manito. They entered immediately and claimed his protection, telling him a manito was after them. The old man, setting meat before them, said: 'Eat! who is a manito? there is no manito but me; there is none whom I fear;' and the earth trembled as the monster advanced. The old man opened the door and saw him coming. He shut it slowly, and said: 'Yes, my grandchildren, you have brought trouble upon me.' Procuring his medicine-sack, he took out his small war-clubs of black stone, and told the young men to run through the other side of the lodge. As he handled the clubs, they became very large, and the old man stepped out just as the bear reached the door. Then striking him with one of the clubs, it broke in pieces; the bear stumbled. Renewing the attempt with the other war-club, that also was broken, but the bear fell senseless. Each blow the old man gave him sounded like a clap of thunder, and the howls of the bear ran along till they filled the heavens. The young men had now run some distance, when they looked back. They could see that the bear was recovering from the blows. First he moved his paws, and soon they saw him rise on his feet. The old man shared the fate of the first, for they now heard his cries as he was torn in pieces. Again the monster was in pursuit, and fast overtaking them. Not yet discouraged, the young men kept on their way; but the bear was now so close, that the leader once more applied to his brothers, but they could do nothing. 'Well,' said he, 'my dreams will soon be exhausted; after this I have but one more.' He advanced, invoking his guardian spirit to aid him. 'Once,' said he, 'I dreamed that, being sorely pressed, I came to a large lake, on the shore of which was a canoe, partly out of water, having ten paddles all in readiness. Do not fear,' he cried, 'we shall soon get it.' And so it was, even as he had said. Coming to the lake, they saw the canoe with ten paddles, and immediately they embarked. Scarcely had they reached the center of the lake, when they saw the bear arrive at its borders. Lifting himself on his hind legs, he looked all around. Then he waded into the water; then losing his footing he turned back, and commenced making the circuit of the lake. Meantime the party remained stationary in the center to watch his movements. He traveled all around, till at last he came to the place from whence he started. Then he commenced drinking up the water, and they saw the current fast setting in towards his open mouth. The leader encouraged them to paddle hard for the opposite shore. When only a short distance from land, the current had increased so much, that they were drawn back by it, and all their efforts to reach it were in vain. Then the leader again spoke, telling them to meet their fates manfully. 'Now is the time, Mudjikewis,' said he, 'to show your prowess. Take courage and sit at the bow of the canoe; and when it approaches his mouth, try what effect your club will have on his head.' He obeyed, and stood ready to give the blow; while the leader, who steered, directed the canoe for the open mouth of the monster. Rapidly advancing, they were just about to enter his mouth, when Mudjikewis struck him a tremendous blow on the head, and gave the SAW- SAW-QUAN. The bear's limbs doubled under him, and he fell, stunned by the blow. But before Mudjikewis could renew it, the monster disgorged all the water he had drank, with a force which sent the canoe with great velocity to the opposite shore. Instantly leaving the canoe, again they fled, and on they went till they were completely exhausted. The earth again shook, and soon they saw the monster hard after them. Their spirits drooped, and they felt discouraged. The leader exerted himself, by actions and words, to cheer them up; and once more he asked them if they thought of nothing, or could do nothing for their rescue; and, as before, all were silent. 'Then,' he said, 'this is the last time I can apply to my guardian spirit. Now, if we do not succeed, our fates are decided.' He ran forward, invoking his spirit with great earnestness, and gave the yell. 'We shall soon arrive,' said he to his brothers, 'at the place where my last guardian spirit dwells. In him I place great confidence. Do not, do not be afraid, or your limbs will be fear-bound. We shall soon reach his lodge. Run, run,' he cried. Returning now to Iamo, he had passed all the time in the same condition we had left him, the head directing his sister, in order to procure food, where to place the magic arrows, and speaking at long intervals. One day the sister saw the eyes of the head brighten, as if with pleasure. At last it spoke. 'Oh, sister,' it said, 'in what a pitiful situation you have been the cause of placing me! Soon, very soon, a party of young men will arrive and apply to me for aid; but alas! How can I give what I would have done with so much pleasure? Nevertheless, take two arrows, and place them where you have been in the habit of placing the others, and have meat prepared and cooked before they arrive. When you hear them coming and calling on my name, go out and say, "Alas! it is long ago that an accident befell him. I was the cause of it." If they still come near, ask them in, and set meat before them. And now you must follow my directions strictly. When the bear is near, go out and meet him. You will take my medicine-sack, bows and arrows, and my head. You must then untie the sack, and spread out before you my paints of all colors, my war-eagle feathers, my tufts of dried hair, and whatever else it contains. As the bear approaches, you will take all these articles, one by one, and say to him, "This is my deceased brother's paint," and so on with all the other articles, throwing each of them as far as you can. The virtues contained in them will cause him to totter; and, to complete his destruction, you will take my head, and that too you will cast as far off as you can, crying aloud, "See, this is my deceased brother's head." He will then fall senseless. By this time the young men will have eaten, and you will call them to your assistance. You must then cut the carcass into pieces, yes, into small pieces, and scatter them to the four winds; for, unless you do this, he will again revive.' She promised that all should be done as he said. She had only time to prepare the meat, when the voice of the leader was heard calling upon Iamo for aid. The woman went out and said as her brother had directed. But the war party being closely pursued, came up to the lodge. She invited them in, and placed the meat before them. While they were eating, they heard the bear approaching. Untying the medicine-sack and taking the head, she had all in readiness for his approach. When he came up she did as she had been told; and, before she had expended the paints and feathers, the bear began to totter, but, still advancing, came close to the woman. Saying as she was commanded, she then took the head, and cast it as far from her as she could. As it rolled along the ground, the blood, excited by the feelings of the head in this terrible scene, gushed from the nose and mouth. The bear, tottering, soon fell with a tremendous noise. Then she cried for help, and the young men came rushing out, having partially regained their strength and spirits. Mudjikewis, stepping up, gave a yell and struck him a blow upon the head. This he repeated, till it seemed like a mass of brains, while the others, as quick as possible, cut him into very small pieces, which they then scattered in every direction. While thus employed, happening to look around where they had thrown the meat, wonderful to behold, they saw starting up and turning off in every direction small black bears, such as are seen at the present day. The country was soon overspread with these black animals. And it was from this monster that the present race of bears derived their origin. Having thus overcome their pursuer, they returned to the lodge. In the meantime, the woman, gathering the implements she had used, and the head, placed them again in the sack. But the head did not speak again, probably from its great exertion to overcome the monster. Having spent so much time and traversed so vast a country in their flight, the young men gave up the idea of ever returning to their own country, and game being plenty, they determined to remain where they now were. One day they moved off some distance from the lodge for the purpose of hunting, having left the wampum with the woman. They were very successful, and amused themselves, as all young men do when alone, by talking and jesting with each other. One of them spoke and said, 'We have all this sport to ourselves; let us go and ask our sister if she will not let us bring the head to this place, as it is still alive. It may be pleased to hear us talk, and be in our company. In the meantime take food to our sister.' They went and requested the head. She told them to take it, and they took it to their hunting-grounds, and tried to amuse it, but only at times did they see its eyes beam with pleasure. One day, while busy in their encampment, they were unexpectedly attacked by unknown Indians. The skirmish was long contested and bloody; many of their foes were slain, but still they were thirty to one. The young men fought desperately till they were all killed. The attacking party then retreated to a height of ground, to muster their men, and to count the number of missing and slain. One of their young men had stayed away, and, in endeavoring to overtake them, came to the place where the head was hung up. Seeing that alone retain animation, he eyed it for some time with fear and surprise. However, he took it down and opened the sack, and was much pleased to see the beautiful feathers, one of which he placed on his head. Starting off, it waved gracefully over him till he reached his party, when he threw down the head and sack, and told them how he had found it, and that the sack was full of paints and feathers. They all looked at the head and made sport of it. Numbers of the young men took the paint and painted themselves, and one of the party took the head by the hair and said-- 'Look, you ugly thing, and see your paints on the faces of warriors.' But the feathers were so beautiful, that numbers of them also placed them on their heads. Then again they used all kinds of indignity to the head, for which they were in turn repaid by the death of those who had used the feathers. Then the chief commanded them to throw away all except the head. 'We will see,' said he, 'when we get home, what we can do with it. We will try to make it shut its eyes.' When they reached their homes they took it to the council-lodge, and hung it up before the fire, fastening it with raw hide soaked, which would shrink and become tightened by the action of the fire. 'We will then see,' they said, 'if we cannot make it shut its eyes.' Meantime, for several days, the sister had been waiting for the young men to bring back the head; till, at last, getting impatient, she went in search of it. The young men she found lying within short distances of each other, dead, and covered with wounds. Various other bodies lay scattered in different directions around them. She searched for the head and sack, but they were nowhere to be found. She raised her voice and wept, and blackened her face. Then she walked in different directions, till she came to the place from whence the head had been taken. Then she found the magic bow and arrows, where the young men, ignorant of their qualities, had left them. She thought to herself that she would find her brother's head, and came to a piece of rising ground, and there saw some of his paints and feathers. These she carefully put up, and hung upon the branch of a tree till her return. At dusk she arrived at the first lodge of a very extensive village. Here she used a charm, common among Indians when they wish to meet with a kind reception. On applying to the old man and woman of the lodge, she was kindly received. She made known her errand. The old man promised to aid her, and told her the head was hung up before the council-fire, and that the chiefs of the village, with their young men, kept watch over it continually. The former are considered as manitoes. She said she only wished to see it, and would be satisfied if she could only get to the door of the lodge. She knew she had not sufficient power to take it by force. 'Come with me,' said the Indian, 'I will take you there.' They went, and they took their seats near the door. The council-lodge was filled with warriors, amusing themselves with games, and constantly keeping up a fire to smoke the head, as they said, to make dry meat. They saw the head move, and not knowing what to make of it, one spoke and said: 'Ha! ha! It is beginning to feel the effects of the smoke.' The sister looked up from the door, and her eyes met those of her brother, and tears rolled down the cheeks of the head. 'Well,' said the chief, 'I thought we would make you do something at last. Look! look at it--shedding tears,' said he to those around him; and they all laughed and passed their jokes upon it. The chief, looking around, and observing the woman, after some time said to the man who came with her: 'Who have you got there? I have never seen that woman before in our village.' 'Yes,' replied the man, 'you have seen her; she is a relation of mine, and seldom goes out. She stays at my lodge, and asked me to allow her to come with me to this place.' In the center of the lodge sat one of those young men who are always forward, and fond of boasting and displaying themselves before others. 'Why,' said he, 'I have seen her often, and it is to this lodge I go almost every night to court her.' All the others laughed and continued their games. The young man did not know he was telling a lie to the woman's advantage, who by that means escaped. She returned to the man's lodge, and immediately set out for her own country. Coming to the spot where the bodies of her adopted brothers lay, she placed them together, their feet toward the east. Then taking an ax which she had, she cast it up into the air, crying out, 'Brothers, get up from under it, or it will fall on you.' This she repeated three times, and the third time the brothers all arose and stood on their feet. Mudjikewis commenced rubbing his eyes and stretching himself. 'Why,' said he, 'I have overslept myself.' 'No, indeed,' said one of the others, 'do you not know we were all killed, and that it is our sister who has brought us to life?' The young men took the bodies of their enemies and burned them. Soon after, the woman went to procure wives for them, in a distant country, they knew not where; but she returned with ten young women, which she gave to the ten young men, beginning with the eldest. Mudjikewis stepped to and fro, uneasy lest he should not get the one he liked. But he was not disappointed, for she fell to his lot. And they were well matched, for she was a female magician. They then all moved into a very large lodge, and their sister told them that the women must now take turns in going to her brother's head every night, trying to untie it. They all said they would do so with pleasure. The eldest made the first attempt, and with a rushing noise she fled through the air. Toward daylight she returned. She had been unsuccessful, as she succeeded in untying only one of the knots. All took their turns regularly, and each one succeeded in untying only one knot each time. But when the youngest went, she commenced the work as soon as she reached the lodge; although it had always been occupied, still the Indians never could see any one. For ten nights now, the smoke had not ascended, but filled the lodge and drove them out. This last night they were all driven out, and the young woman carried off the head. The young people and the sister heard the young woman coming high through the air, and they heard her saying: 'Prepare the body of our brother.' And as soon as they heard it, they went to a small lodge where the black body of Iamo lay. His sister commenced cutting the neck part, from which the neck had been severed. She cut so deep as to cause it to bleed; and the others who were present, by rubbing the body and applying medicines, expelled the blackness. In the meantime, the one who brought it, by cutting the neck of the head, caused that also to bleed. As soon as she arrived, they placed that close to the body, and, by aid of medicines and various other means, succeeded in restoring Iamo to all his former beauty and manliness. All rejoiced in the happy termination of their troubles, and they had spent some time joyfully together, when Iamo said: 'Now I will divide the wampum,' and getting the belt which contained it, he commenced with the eldest, giving it in equal portions. But the youngest got the most splendid and beautiful, as the bottom of the belt held the richest and rarest. They were told that, since they had all once died, and were restored to life, they were no longer mortal, but spirits, and they were assigned different stations in the invisible world. Only Mudjikewis's place was, however, named. He was to direct the west wind, hence generally called Kebeyun, there to remain for ever. They were commanded, as they had it in their power, to do good to the inhabitants of the earth, and, forgetting their sufferings in procuring the wampum, to give all things with a liberal hand. And they were also commanded that it should also be held by them sacred; those grains or shells of the pale hue to be emblematic of peace, while those of the darker hue would lead to evil and war. The spirits then, amid songs and shouts, took their flight to their respective abodes on high; while Iamo, with his sister Iamoqua, descended into the depths below. 
9153	----	THE HISTORY OF LOUISIANA, OR OF THE WESTERN PARTS OF VIRGINIA AND CAROLINA: Containing a DESCRIPTION of the Countries that lie on both Sides of the River Missisippi: With an ACCOUNT of the SETTLEMENTS, INHABITANTS, SOIL, CLIMATE, AND PRODUCTS. Translated from the FRENCH Of M. LE PAGE Du PRATZ; With some Notes and Observations relating to our Colonies. Foreword Antoine Simon Le Page Du Pratz was a Dutchman, as his birth in Holland about 1695 apparently proves. He died in 1775, just where available records do not tell us, but the probabilities are that he died in France, for it is said he entered the French Army, serving with the Dragoons, and saw service in Germany. While there is some speculation about all the foregoing, there can be no speculation about the statement that on May 25, 1718 he left La Rochelle, France, in one of three ships bound for a place called Louisiana. For M. Le Page tells us about this in a three-volume work he wrote called, Histoire de la Louisiane, recognized as the authority to be consulted by all who have written on the early history of New Orleans and the Louisiana province. Le Page, who arrived in Louisiana August 25, 1718, three months after leaving La Rochelle, spent four months at Dauphin Island before he and his men made their way to Bayou St. John where he set up a plantation. He had at last reached New Orleans, which he correctly states, "existed only in name," and had to occupy an old lodge once used by an Acolapissa Indian. The young settler, he was only about 23 at the time, after arranging his shelter tells us: "A few days afterwards I purchased from a neighbour a native female slave, so as to have a woman to cook for us. My slave and I could not speak each other's language; but I made myself understood by means of signs." This slave, a girl of the Chitimacha tribe, remained with Le Page for years, and one draws the inference that she was possessed of a vigorous personality, and was not devoid of charm or bravery. Le Page writes that when frightened by an alligator approaching his camp fire, he ran to the lodge for his gun. However, the Indian girl calmly picked up a stick and hammered the 'gator so lustily on its nose that it retreated. As Le Page arrived with his gun, ready to shoot "the monster," he tells us: "She began to smile, and said many things which I did not comprehend, but she made me understand by signs, that there was no occasion for a gun to kill such a beast." It is unfortunate, for the purpose of sociological study, that this Indian girl appears so infrequently in the many accounts Le Page has left us in his highly interesting studies of early Louisiana and its original inhabitants. He does not even tell us the Indian girl's name. We are told that after living on the banks of Bayou St. John for about two years, he left for the bluff lands of the Natchez country. His Indian girl decided she would go with him, as she had relatives there. Hearing of her plan, her old father offered to buy her back from Le Page. The Chitimacha girl, however, refused to leave her master, whereupon, the Indian father performed a rite of his tribe, which made her the ward of the white man--a simple ceremony of joining hands. Le Page spent eight years among the Natchez and what he wrote about them--their lives, their customs, their ceremonials--has been acknowledged to be the best and most accurate accounts we have of these original inhabitants of Louisiana. He has left us, in his splendid history, much information on the other Indian tribes of the lower Mississippi River country. Antoine Simon Le Page Du Pratz tells us he spent sixteen years in Louisiana before returning to France in 1734. They were years well spent--to judge by what he wrote. As it was written and published in the French language, Le Page's history proved in many instances to be a tantalizing casket of historical treasure that could not be opened by those who had not mastered French. The original edition, published in Paris in 1758, a score of years after the author landed in New Orleans, was followed in 1763 by a two-volume edition in English, and eleven years later in 1774, by a one-volume edition in English, entitled: "The History of Louisiana, or of the Western Parts of Virginia and Carolina." The texts in the English editions are identical. Fortunately, early historians who could not read the French edition, were now able to read M. Le Page's accounts of his adventures in the New World. Unfortunately, especially for present day historians, the English editions have become increasingly rare--many libraries do not have them on their shelves. Therefore, the present re-publication fills a long-felt want. The English translation, with its added matter, is reproduced exactly as it was printed for T. Becket to be sold in his shop at the corner of the Adelphi in the Strand, London, 1774. Errors of grammar and spelling are not corrected. The only change is the modernizing of the old _s_'s which look like _f_'s. The present edition is really two works in one, for the English translation did not include any of the original edition's many illustrations. The London books did have two folding maps, one of the Louisiana province, the other of the country about the mouths of the Mississippi River. Not only are these maps reproduced in the present work, but in addition, all the other illustrations, including the rare map of New Orleans, appearing in the original French edition, are included. These quaint engravings of the birds, the beasts, the flowers, the shrubs, the trees, fish, the deer and buffalo hunts, and the habits and customs of the Natchez Indians, add much to the value of the present re-publication. I have captioned them with present-day names of the flora and fauna. STANLEY CLISBY ARTHUR. (_Mr. Arthur is a naturalist, historian and writer, and executive-director of the Louisiana State Museum.--J. S. W. Harmanson, Publisher_.) CONTENTS Preface BOOK I. The Transactions of the French in Louisiana. CHAP. I. Of the first Discovery and Settlement of Louisiana CHAP. II. The Return of M. de St. Denis: His settling the Spaniards at the Assinaïs. His second Journey to Mexico, and Return from thence CHAP. III. Embarkation of eight hundred Men by the West-India Company to Louisiana. Arrival and Stay at Cape François. Arrival at the Isle Dauphine. Description of that Island CHAP. IV. The Author's Departure for his Grant. Description of the Places he passed through, as far as New Orleans CHAP. V. The Author put in Possession of his Territory. His Resolution to go and settle among the Natchez CHAP. VI. The Voyage of the Author to Biloxi. Description of that Place. Settlement of Grants. The Author discovers two Copper Mines. His Return to the Natchez CHAP. VII. First War with the Natchez. Cause of the War CHAP. VIII. The Governor surprized the Natchez with seven hundred Men. Astonishing Cures performed by the Natives. The Author sends upwards of three hundred Simples to the Company CHAP. IX. French Settlements, or Posts. Post at Mobile. The Mouths of the Missisippi. The Situation and Description of New Orleans CHAP. X. The Voyages of the French to the Missouris, Canzas, and Padoucas. The Settlements they in vain attempted to make in those Countries; with a Description of an extraordinary Phaenomenon CHAP. XI. The War with the Chitimachas. The Conspiracy of the Negroes against the French. Their Execution CHAP. XII. The War of the Natchez. Massacre of the French in 1729. Extirpation of the Natchez in 1730 CHAP. XIII. The War with the Chicasaws. The first Expedition by the River Mobile. The second by the River Missisippi. The War with the Chactaws terminated by the Prudence of M. de Vaudreuil CHAP. XIV. Reflections on what gives Occasion to Wars in Louisiana. The Means of avoiding Wars in that Province, as also the Manner of coming off with Advantage and little Expence in them CHAP. XV. Pensacola taken by Surprize by the French. Retaken by the Spaniards. Again retaken by the French, and demolished BOOK II. Of the Country and its Products. CHAP. I. Geographical Description of Louisiana. Its climate Description of the Lower Louisiana, and the Mouths of the Missisippi. CHAP. II. The Author's journey in Louisiana, from the Natchez to the River St. Francis, and the Country of the Chicasaws CHAP. III. The Nature of the Lands of Louisiana. The Lands on the Coast. CHAP. IV. Quality of the Lands above the Fork. A Quarry of Stone for building. High Lands to the East: Their vast Fertility. West Coast: West Lands: Saltpetre CHAP. V. Quality of the Lands of the Red River. Posts of Nachitoches. A Silver Mine. Lands of the Black River CHAP. VI. A Brook of salt Water: Salt Lakes. Lands of the River of the Arkansas. Red-veined Marble: Slate: Plaster. Hunting the Buffalo. The dry Sand-banks in the Missisippi CHAP. VII. The Lands of the River St. Francis. Mine of Marameg, and other Mines. A Lead Mine. A soft Stone, resembling Porphyry. Lands of the Missouri. The Lands North of the Wabache. The Lands of the Illinois. De La Mothe's Mine, and other Mines CHAP. VIII. Of the Agriculture, or Manner of cultivating, ordering, and manufacturing the Commodities that are proper Articles of Commerce. Of the Culture of Maiz, Rice, and other Fruits of the Country. Of the Silk Worm CHAP. IX. Of Indigo, Tobacco, Cotton, Wax, Hops, and Saffron CHAP. X. Of the Commerce that is, and may be carried on in Louisiana. Of the Commodities which that Province may furnish in Return for those of Europe. Of the Commerce of Louisiana with the Isles CHAP. XI. Of the Commerce with the Spaniards. The Commodities they bring to the Colony, if there is a Demand for them. Of such as may be given in Return, and may suit them. Reflections on the Commerce of this Province, and the great Advantages which the State and particular Persons may derive therefrom Some Abstracts from the Historical Memoirs of Louisiana, by M. Dumont. I. Of Tobacco, with the Way of cultivating and curing it II. Of the Way of making Indigo III. Of Tar; the Way of making it; and of making it into pitch IV. Of the Mines of Louisiana Extract from a late French Writer, concerning the Importance of Louisiana to France BOOK III. The Natural History of Louisiana. CHAP. I. Of Corn and Pulse CHAP. II. Of the Fruit Trees of Louisiana CHAP. III. Of Forest Trees CHAP. IV. Of Shrubs and Excrescences CHAP. V. Of Creeping Plants CHAP. VI. Of the Quadrupedes CHAP. VII. Of Birds and flying Insects CHAP. VIII. Of Fishes and Shell-Fish BOOK IV. Of the Natives of Louisiana. CHAP. I. The Origin of the Americans CHAP. II. An Account of the several Nations of Louisiana SECT. I. Of the Nations inhabiting on the East of the Missisippi SECT. II. Of the Nations inhabiting on the West of the Missisippi CHAP. III. A Description of the Natives of Louisiana; of their Manners and Customs, particularly those of the Natchez: Of their Language, their Religion, Ceremonies, Rulers, or Suns, Feasts, Marriages, &c SECT. I. A Description of the Natives; the different Employments of the two Sexes; and their Manner of bringing up their Children SECT. II. Of the Language, Government, Religion, Ceremonies, and Feasts of the Natives SECT. III. Of their Marriages, and Distinction of Ranks SECT. IV. Of the Temples, Tombs, Burials, and other religious Ceremonies of the People of Louisiana SECT. V. Of the Arts and Manufactures of the Natives SECT. VI. Of the Attire and Diversions of the Natives: Of their Meals and Fastings SECT. VII. Of the Indian Art of War CHAP. IV. Of the Negroes of Louisiana SECT. I. Of the Choice of Negroes; of their Distempers, and the Manner of curing them SECT. II. Of the Manner of governing the Negroes INDEX List of Illustrations Indian in Summer Time Indian in Winter Time Indian Woman and Daughter Plan of New Orleans, 1720 Beaver, Beaver lodge, Beaver dam Indians of the North Leaving in the Winter with their Families for a Hunt Indigo Cotton and Rice on the Stalk Appalachean Beans. Sweet Potatoes Watermelon Pawpaw. Blue Whortle-berry Sweet Gum or Liquid-Amber Cypress Magnolia Sassafras Myrtle Wax Tree. Vinegar Tree Poplar ("Cotton Tree") Black Oak Linden or Bass Tree Box Elder or Stink-wood Tree Cassine or Yapon. Tooth-ache Tree or Prickly Ash Passion Thorn or Honey Locust. Bearded Creeper Palmetto Bramble, Sarsaparilla Rattlesnake Herb Red Dye Plant. Flat Root Panther or Catamount. Bison or Buffalo Indian Deer Hunt Wild Cat. Opossum. Skunk Alligator. Rattle Snake. Green Snake Pelican. Wood Stock Flying Squirrel. Roseate Spoonbill. Snowy Heron White Ibis. Tobacco Worm. Cock Roach Cat Fish. Gar Fish. Spoonbill Catfish Indian Buffalo Hunt on Foot Dance of the Natchez Indians Burial of the Stung Serpent Bringing the Pipe of Peace Torture of Prisoners. Plan of Fort {i} PREFACE The History of Louisiana, which we here present to the public, was wrote by a planter of sixteen years experience in that country, who had likewise the advantage of being overseer or director of the public plantations, both when they belonged to the company, and afterwards when they fell to the crown; by which means he had the best opportunities of knowing the nature of the soil and climate, and what they produce, or what improvements they are likely to admit of; a thing in which this nation is, without doubt, highly concerned and interested. And when our author published this history in 1758, he had likewise the advantage, not only of the accounts of F. Charlevoix, and others, but of the Historical Memoirs of Louisiana, published at Paris in 1753, by Mr. Dumont, an officer who resided two-and-twenty years in the country, and was personally concerned and acquainted with many of the transactions in it; from whom we have extracted some passages, to render this account more complete. But whatever opportunities our author had of gaining a knowledge of his subject, it must be owned, that he made his accounts of it very perplexed. By endeavoring to take in every thing, he descends to many trifles; and by dwelling too long on a subject, he comes to render it obscure, by being prolix in things which hardly relate to what he treats of. He interrupts the thread of his discourse with private anecdotes, long harangues, and tedious narrations, which have little or no relation to the subject, and are of much less consequence to the reader. The want of method and order throughout the whole work is still more apparent; and that, joined to these digressions, renders his accounts, however just and interesting, so tedious and irksome to read, and at the same time so indistinct, that few seem to have reaped the benefit of them. For these reasons it was necessary to methodize the whole work; to abridge some parts of it; and to leave out many things that appear to be trifling. This we have endeavored to do in the translation, by reducing the whole work to four general heads or books; and {ii} by bringing the several subjects treated of, the accounts of which lie scattered up and down in different parts of the original, under these their proper heads; so that the connection between them, and the accounts of any one subject, may more easily appear. This, it is presumed, will appear to be a subject of no small consequence and importance to this nation, especially at this time. The countries here treated of, have not only by right always belonged to Great-Britain, but part of them is now acknowledged to it by the former usurpers: and it is to be hoped, that the nation may now reap some advantages from those countries, on which it has expended so many millions; which there is no more likely way to do, than by making them better known in the first place, and by learning from the experience of others, what they do or are likely to produce, that may turn to account to the nation. It has been generally suspected, that this nation has suffered much, from the want of a due knowledge of her dominions in America, which we should endeavor to prevent for the future. If that may be said of any part of America, it certainly may of those countries, which have been called by the French Louisiana. They have not only included under that name all the western parts of Virginia and Carolina; and thereby imagined, that they had, from this nominal title, a just right to those antient dominions of the crown of Britain: but what is of worse consequence perhaps, they have equally deceived and imposed upon many, by the extravagant hopes and unreasonable expectations they had formed to themselves, of the vast advantages they were to reap from those countries, as soon as they had usurped them; which when they came to be disappointed in, they ran from one extreme to another, and condemned the country as good for nothing, because it did not answer the extravagant hopes they had conceived of it; and we seem to be misled by their prejudices, and to be drawn into mistakes by their artifice or folly. Because the Missisippi scheme failed in 1719, every other reasonable scheme of improving that country, and of reaping any advantage from it, must do the same. It is to wipe off these prejudices, that the following account of these countries, which appears to be both {iii} just and reasonable, and agreeable to every thing we know of America, may be the more necessary. We have been long ago told by F. Charlevoix, from whence it is, that many people have formed a contemptible opinion of this country that lies on and about the Missisippi. They are misled, says he, by the relations of some seafaring people, and others, who are no manner of judges of such things, and have never seen any part of the country but the coast side, about Mobile, and the mouths of the Mississippi; which our author here tells us is as dismal to appearance, the only thing those people are capable of judging of, as the interior parts of the country, which they never saw, are delightful, fruitful, and inviting. They tell us, besides, that the country is unhealthful; because there happens to be a marsh at the mouth of the Missisippi, (and what river is there without one?) which they imagine must be unhealthful, rather than that they know it to be so; not considering, that all the coast both of North and South America is the same; and not knowing, that the whole continent, above this single part on the coast, is the most likely, from its situation, and has been found by all the experience that has been had of it, to be the most healthy part of all North America in the same climates, as will abundantly appear from the following and all other accounts. To give a general view of those countries, we should consider them as they are naturally divided into four parts; 1. The sea coast; 2. The Lower Louisiana, or western part of Carolina; 3. The Upper Louisiana, or western part of Virginia; and 4, the river Missisippi. I. The sea coast is the same with all the rest of the coast of North America to the southward of New York, and indeed from thence to Mexico, as far as we are acquainted with it. It is all a low flat sandy beach, and the soil for some twenty or thirty miles distance from the shore, more or less, is all a _pine barren_, as it is called, or a sandy desart; with few or no good ports or harbours on the coast, especially in all those southern parts of America, from Chesapeak bay to Mexico. But however barren this coast is in other respects, it is entirely covered with tall pines, which afford great store of pitch, tar, and turpentine. {iv} These pines likewise make good masts for ships; which I have known to last for twenty odd years, when it is well known, that our common masts of New England white pine will often decay in three or four years. These masts were of that kind that is called the pitch pine, and lightwood pine; of which I knew a ship built that ran for sixteen years, when her planks of this pine were as sound and rather harder than at first, although her oak timbers were rotten. The cypress, of which there is such plenty in the swamps on this coast, is reckoned to be equally serviceable, if not more so, both for masts (of which it would afford the largest of any tree that we know), and for ship building. And ships might be built of both these timbers for half the price perhaps of any others, both on account of the vast plenty of them, and of their being so easily worked. In most parts of these coasts likewise, especially about the Missisippi, there is great plenty of cedars and ever-green oaks; which make the best ships of any that are built in North America. And we suspect it is of these cedars and the American cypress, that the Spaniards build their ships of war at the Havanna. Of these there is the greatest plenty, immediately; to the westward of the mouth of the Missisippi where "large vessels can go to the lake of the Chetimachas, and nothing hinders them to go and cut the finest oaks in the world, with which all that coast is covered;" [Footnote: _Charlevoix_ Hist. N. France, Tom. III. p. 444.] which, moreover, is a sure sign of a very good, instead of a bad soil; and accordingly we see the French have settled their tobacco plantations thereabouts. It is not without reason then, that our author tells us, the largest navies might be built in that country at a very small expence. From this it appears, that even the sea coast, barren as it is, from which the whole country has been so much depreciated, is not without its advantages, and those peculiarly adapted to a trading and maritime nation. Had these sandy desarts indeed been in such a climate as Canada, they would have been of as little value, as many would make them here. It might be difficult indeed to settle colonies merely for these or any other {v} productions of those poor lands: but to the westward of the Missisippi, the coast is much more fruitful all along the bay of Mexico; being watered with a great number of rivers, the banks of which are very fertile, and are covered with forests of the tallest oaks, &c. as far as to New Mexico, a thing not to be seen any where else on these coasts. The coast alone will supply all the products of North America, and is as convenient to navigation as any part of it, without going nigh the Missisippi; so that it is with good reason our author says, "That country promises great riches to such as shall inhabit it, from the excellent quality of its lands," [Footnote: See p. 163.] in such a climate. These are the productions of the dry (we cannot call them high) grounds: the swamps, with which this coast abounds, are still more fruitful, and abundantly compensate the avidity and barrenness of the soil around them. They bear rice in such plenty, especially the marsh about New Orleans, "That the inhabitants reap the greatest advantage from it, and reckon it the manna of the land." [Footnote: _Dumont_, I. 15.] It was such marshes on the Nile, in the same climate, that were the granary of the Roman empire. And from a few such marshes in Carolina, not to be compared to those on the Missisippi, either in extent or fertility, Britain receives at least two or three hundred thousand pounds a year, and might vend twice that value of their products. But however barren or noxious these low lands on the sea coast may be, they extend but a little way about the Missisippi, not above thirty or forty miles in a straight line, on the east side of that river, and about twice as far on the west side; in which last, the lands are, in recompence, much more fruitful. To follow the course of the river indeed, which runs very obliquely south-east and north-west, as well as crooked, they reckon it eighty-two leagues from the mouth of the river to the Cut-Point, where the high lands begin. II. By the Lower Louisiana, our author means only the Delta of the Missisippi, or the drowned lands made by the overflowing of the river. But we may more properly give {vi} that appellation to the whole country, from the low and flat sea coast above described, to the mountains, which begin about the latitude 35°, a little above the river St. Francis; that is, five degrees of latitude, or three hundred and fifty statute miles from the coast; which they reckon to be six hundred and sixty miles up the Missisippi. About that latitude a continued ridge of mountains runs westward from the Apalachean mountains nigh to the banks of the Missisippi, which are thereabouts very high, at what we have called the Chicasaw Cliffs. Opposite to these on the west side of the Missisippi, the country is mountainous, and continues to be so here and there, as far as we have any accounts of it, westward to the mountains of New Mexico; which run in a chain of continued ridges from north to south, and are reckoned to divide that country from Louisiana, about 900 miles west from the Missisippi. This is one entire level champaign country; the part of which that lies west of the Missisippi is 900 miles (of sixty to a degree) by 300, and contains 270,000 square miles, as much as both France and Spain put together. This country lies in the latitude of those fruitful regions of Barbary, Syria, Persia, India, and the middle of China, and is alone sufficient to supply the world with all the products of North America. It is very fertile in every thing, both in lands and metals, by all the accounts we have of it; and is watered by several large navigable rivers, that spread over the whole country from the Missisippi to New Mexico; besides several smaller rivers on the coast west of the Missisippi, that fall into the bay of Mexico; of which we have no good accounts, if it be not that Mr. Coxe tells us of one, the river of the Cenis, which, he says, "is broad, deep, and navigable almost to its heads, which chiefly proceed from the ridge of hills that separate this province from New Mexico," [Footnote: Description of Carolina, p. 37] and runs through the rich and fertile country on the coast above mentioned. The western part of this country is more fertile, says our author, than that on the east side of the Missisippi; in which part, however, says he, the lands are very fertile, with a rich {vii} black mould three feet deep in the hills, and much deeper in the bottoms, with a strong clayey foundation. Reeds and canes even grow upon the hill sides; which, with the oaks, walnuts, tulip-trees, &c. are a sure sign of a good and rich soil. And all along the Missisippi on both sides, Dumont tells, "The lands, which are all free from inundations, are excellent for culture, particularly those about Baton Rouge, Cut-Point, Arkansas, Natchez, and Yasous, which produce Indian corn, tobacco, indigo, &c. and all kinds of provisions and esculent plants, with little or no care or labour, and almost without culture; the soil being in all those places a black mould of an excellent quality." [Footnote: Memoires, I. 16.] These accounts are confirmed by our own people, who were sent by the government of Virginia in 1742, to view these the western parts of that province; and although they only went down the Ohio and Missisippi to New Orleans, they reported, that "they saw more good land on the Missisippi, and its many large branches, than they judge is in all the English colonies, as far as they are inhabited;" as appears from the report of that government to the board of trade. What makes this fertile country more eligible and valuable, is, that it appears both from its situation, and from the experience the French have had of it, [Footnote: See p. 120, 121.] to be by far the most healthful of any in all these southern parts of North America; a thing of the last consequence in settling colonies, especially in those southern parts of America, which are in general very unhealthful. All the sea coasts of our colonies, to the southward of Chesapeak bay, or even of New-York, are low and flat, marshy and swampy, and very unhealthful on that account and those on and about the bay of Mexico, and in Florida, are withal excessively hot and intemperate, so that white people are unfit for labour in them; by which all our southern colonies, which alone promise to be of any great advantage to the nation, are so thin of people, that we have but 25,000 white people in all South Carolina. [Footnote: Description of South Carolina. by----, p. 30.] But those lands on the Missisippi are, on {viii} the contrary, high, dry, hilly, and in some places mountainous at no great distance from the river, besides the ridges of the Apalachean mountains above mentioned, that lie to the northward of them; which must greatly refresh and cool the air all over the country, especially in comparison of what it is on the low and flat, sandy and parched sea coasts of our present colonies. These high lands begin immediately above the Delta, or drowned lands, at the mouth of the Missisippi; above which the banks of that river are from one hundred to two hundred feet high, without any marshes about them; and continue such for nine hundred miles to the river Ohio, especially on the east side of the river. [Footnote: See p. 158] Such a situation on rich and fertile lands in that climate, and on a navigable river, must appear to be of the utmost consequence. It is only from the rich lands on the river sides (which indeed are the only lands that can generally be called rich in all countries, and especially in North America), that this nation reaps any thing of value from all the colonies it has in that part of the world. But "rich lands on river sides in hot climates are extremely unhealthful," says a very good judge, [Footnote: _Arbuthnot_ on Air. _App_.] and we have often found to our cost. How ought we then to value such rich and healthful countries on the Missisippi? As much surely as some would depreciate and vilify them. It may be observed, that all the countries in America are only populous in the inland parts, and generally at a distance from navigation; as the sea coasts both of North and South America are generally low, damp, excessively hot, and unhealthful; at least in all the southern parts, from which alone we can expect any considerable returns. Instances of this may be seen in the adjacent provinces of Mexico, New Mexico, Terra Firma, Peru, Quito, etc. and far more in our southern colonies, which never became populous, till the people removed to the inland parts, at a distance from the sea. This we are in a manner prevented to do in our colonies, by the mountains which surround us, and confine us to the coast; whereas on the Missisippi the whole continent is open to them, and they have, besides, this healthy {ix} situation on the lower parts of that river, at a small distance from the sea. If those things are duly considered, it will appear, that they who are possessed of the Missisippi, will in time command that continent; and that we shall be confined on the sea coasts of our colonies, to that unhealthful situation, which many would persuade us is so much to be dreaded on the Missisippi. It is by this means that we have so very few people in all our southern colonies; and have not been able to get in one hundred years above twenty-five thousand people in South Carolina; when the French has not less than eighty or ninety thousand in Canada, besides ten or twelve thousand on the Missisippi, to oppose to them. The low and drowned lands, indeed, about the mouth of the Missisippi must no doubt be more or less unhealthful; but they are far from being so very pernicious as many represent them. The waters there are fresh, which we know, by manifold experience in America, are much less prejudicial to health than the offensive fetid marshes, that are to be found every where else on the salt waters. Accordingly we are credibly informed, that some of the inhabitants of New Orleans say, they never enjoyed better health even in France; and for that reason they invite their countrymen, in their letters to them, we are told, to come and partake of the salutary benefits of that delightful country. The clearing, draining, and cultivating of those low lands, must make a very great change upon them, from the accounts we have had of them in their rude and uncultivated state. III. The Upper Louisiana we call that part of the continent, which lies to the northward of the mountains above mentioned in latitude 35°. This country is in many places hilly and mountainous for which reason we cannot expect it to be so fertile as the plains below it. But those hills on the west side of the Missisippi are generally suspected to contain mines, as well as the mountains of New Mexico, of which they are a continuation. But the fertile plains of Louisiana are perhaps more valuable than all the mines of Mexico; which there would be no doubt of, if they were duly cultivated. They will breed and maintain ten times as many people, and supply them with {x} many more necessaries, and articles of trade and navigation, than the richest mines of Peru. The most important place in this country, and perhaps in all North America, is at the Forks of the Missisippi, where the Ohio falls into that river; which, like another ocean, is the general receptacle of all the rivers that water the interior parts of that vast continent. Here those large and navigable rivers, the Ohio, river of the Cherokees, Wabache, Illinois, Missouri, and Missisippi, besides many others, which spread over that whole continent, from the Apalachean mountains to the mountains of New Mexico, upwards of one thousand miles, both north, south, east, and west, all meet together at this spot; and that in the best climate, and one of the most fruitful countries of any in all that part of the world, in the latitude 37°, the latitude of the Capes of Virginia, and of Santa Fe, the capital of New Mexico. By that means there is a convenient navigation to this place from our present settlements to New Mexico; and from all the inland parts of North America, farther than we are acquainted with it: and all the natives of that continent, those old friends and allies of the French, have by that means a free and ready access to this place; nigh to which the French formed a settlement, to secure their interest on the frontiers of all our southern colonies. In short this place is the centre of that vast continent, and of all the nations in it, and seems to be intended by nature to command them both; for which reason it ought no longer to be neglected by Britain. As soon as we pass the Apalachean mountains, this seems to be the most proper place to settle at; and was pitched upon for that purpose, by those who were the best acquainted with those countries, and the proper places of making settlements in them, of any we know. And if the settlements at this place had been made, as they were proposed, about twenty years ago, they might have prevented, or at least frustrated, the late attempts to wrest that country, and the territories of the Ohio, out of the hands of the English; and they may do the same again. But many will tell us, that those inland parts of North America will be of no use to Britain, on account of their distance {xi} from the sea, and inconvenience to navigation. That indeed might be said of the parts which lie immediately beyond the mountains, as the country of the Cherokees, and Ohio Indians about Pitsburg, the only countries thereabouts that we can extend our settlements to; which are so inconvenient to navigation, that nothing can be brought from them across the mountains, at least none of those gross commodities, which are the staple of North America; and they are as inconvenient to have any thing carried from them, nigh two thousand miles, down the river Ohio, and then by the Missisippi. For that reason those countries, which we look upon to be the most convenient, are the most inconvenient to us of any, although they join upon our present settlements. It is for these reasons, that the first settlements we make beyond the mountains, that is, beyond those we are now possessed of, should be upon the Missisippi, as we have said, convenient to the navigation of that river; and in time those new settlements may come to join to our present plantations; and we may by that means reap the benefit of all those inland parts of North America, by means of the navigation of the Missisippi, which will be secured by this post at the Forks. If that is not done, we cannot see how any of those inland parts of America, and the territories of the Ohio, which were the great objects of the present war, can ever be of any use to Britain, as the inhabitants of all those countries can otherwise have little or no correspondence with it. IV. This famous river, the Missisippi, is navigable upwards of two thousand miles, to the falls of St. Anthony in latitude 45°, the only fall we know in it, which is 16 degrees of latitude above its mouth; and even above that fall, our author tells us, there is thirty fathom of water in the river, with a proportionate breadth. About one thousand miles from its mouth it receives the river Ohio, which is navigable one thousand miles farther, some say one thousand five hundred, nigh to its source, not far from Lake Ontario in New York; in all which space there is but one fall or rapide in the Ohio, and that navigable both up and down, at least in canoes. This fall is three hundred miles from the Missisippi, and one thousand three hundred from the sea, with five fathom of water up to {xii} it. The other large branches of the Ohio, the river of the Cherokees, and the Wabache, afford a like navigation, from lake Erie in the north to the Cherokees in the south, and from thence to the bay of Mexico, by the Missisippi: not to mention the great river Missouri, which runs to the north-west parts of New Mexico, much farther than we have any good accounts of that continent. From this it appears, that the Missouri affords the most extensive navigation of any river we know; so that it may justly be compared to an inland sea, which spreads over nine tenths of all the continent of North America; all which the French pretended to lay claim to, for no other reason but because they were possessed of a paltry settlement at the mouth of this river. If those things are considered, the importance of the navigation of the Missisippi, and of a port at the mouth of it, will abundantly appear. Whatever that navigation is, good or bad, it is the only one for all the interior parts of North America, which are as large as a great part of Europe; no part of which can be of any service to Britain, without the navigation of the Missisippi, and settlements upon it. It is not without reason then, that we say, whoever are possessed of this river, and of the vast tracts of fertile lands upon it, must in time command that continent, and the trade of it, as well as all the natives in it, by the supplies which this navigation will enable them to furnish those people. By those means, if the French, or any others, are left in possession of the Missisippi, while we neglect it, they must command all that continent beyond the Apalachean mountains, and disturb our settlements much more than ever they did, or were able to do; the very thing they engaged in this war to accomplish, and we to prevent. The Missisippi indeed is rapid for twelve hundred miles, as far as to the Missouri, which makes it difficult to go up the river by water. For that reason the French have been used to quit the Missisippi at the river St. Francis, from which they have a nigher way to the Forks of the Missisippi by land. But however difficult it may be to ascend the river, it is, notwithstanding often done; and its rapidity facilitates a descent upon it, and a ready conveyance for those gross commodities, which {xiii} are the chief staple of North America, from the most remote places of the continent above mentioned: and as for lighter European goods, they are more easily carried by land, as our Indian traders do, over great part of the continent, on their horses, of which this country abounds with great plenty. The worst part of the navigation, as well as of the country, is reckoned to be at the mouth of the river; which, however, our author tells us, is from seventeen to eighteen feet deep, and will admit ships of five hundred tons, the largest generally used in the plantation trade. And even this navigation might be easily mended, not only by clearing the river of a narrow bar in the passes, which our author, Charlevoix, and others, think might be easily done; but likewise by means of a bay described by Mr. Coxe, from the actual survey of his people, lying to the westward of the south pass of the river; which, he says, has from twenty-five to six fathom water in it, close to the shore, and not above a mile from the Missisippi, above all the shoals and difficult passes in it, and where the river has one hundred feet of water. By cutting through that one mile then, it would appear that a port might be made there for ships of any burden; the importance of which is evident, from its commanding all the inland parts of North America on one side, and the pass from Mexico on the other; so as to be preferable in these respects even to the Havanna; not to mention that it is fresh water, and free from worms, which destroy all the ships in those parts. And as for the navigation from the Missisippi to Europe, our author shews that voyage may be performed in six weeks; which is as short a time as our ships generally take to go to and from our colonies. They go to the Missisippi with the trade winds, and return with the currents. It would lead us beyond the bounds of a preface, to shew the many advantages of those lands on the Missisippi to Britain, or the necessity of possessing them. That would require a treatise by itself, of which we can only give a few abstracts in this place. For this purpose we should compare those lands with our present colonies; and should be well informed of the quantity and condition of the lands we already possess, before {xiv} we can form any just judgement of what may be farther proper or requisite. Our present possessions in North America between the sea and the mountains appear, from many surveys and actual mensurations, as well as from all the maps and other accounts we have of them, to be at a medium about three degrees of longitude, or one hundred and forty miles broad, in a straight line; and they extend from Georgia, in latitude 32°, to the bay of Fundi, in latitude 45° (which is much farther both north and south, than the lands appear to be of any great value); which makes 13 degrees difference of latitude, or 780 miles: this length multiplied by the breadth 140, makes 109,200 square miles., This is not above as much land as is contained in Britain and Ireland; which, by Templeman's Survey, make 105,634 square miles. Instead of being as large as a great part of Europe then, as we are commonly told, all the lands we possess in North America, between the sea and mountains, do not amount to much more than these two islands. This appears farther, from the particular surveys of each of our colonies, as well as from this general estimate of the whole. Of these lands which we thus possess, both the northern and southern parts are very poor and barren, and produce little or nothing, at least for Britain. It is only in our middle plantations, Virginia, Maryland, and Carolina, that the lands produce any staple commodity for Britain, or that appear to be fit for that purpose. In short, it is only the more rich and fertile lands on and about Chesapeak bay, with a few swamps in Carolina, like the lands on the Missisippi, that turn to any great account to this nation in all North America, or that are ever likely to do it. This makes the quantity of lands that produce any staple commodity for Britain in North America incredibly small, and vastly less than what is commonly imagined. It is reckoned, that there are more such lands in Virginia, than in all the rest of our colonies; and yet it appeared from the public records, about twenty-five years ago, that there was not above as much land patented in that colony, which is at the same time the oldest of any in all North America, than is in the county of Yorkshire, in England, to-wit, {xv} 4684 square miles; although the country was then settled to the mountains. If we examine all our other colonies, there will appear to be as great a scarcity and want of good lands in them, at least to answer the great end of colonies, the making of a staple commodity for Britain. In short, our colonies are already settled to the mountains, and have no lands, either to extend their settlements, as they increase and multiply; to keep up their plantations of staple commodities for Britain; or to enlarge the British dominions by the number of foreigners that remove to them; till they pass those mountains, and settle on the Missisippi. This scarcity of land in our colonies proceeds from the mountains, with which they are surrounded, and by which they are confined to this narrow tract, and a low vale, along the sea side. The breadth of the continent from the Atlantic ocean to the Missisippi, appears to be about 600 miles (of 60 to a degree) of which there is about 140 at a medium, or 150 at most, that lies between the sea and mountains: and there is such another, and rather more fertile tract of level and improveable lands, about the same breadth, between the western parts of those mountains and the Missisippi: so that the mountainous country which lies between these two, is equal to them both, and makes one half of all the lands between the Missisippi and Atlantic ocean; if we except a small tract of a level champaign country upon the heads of the Ohio, which is possessed by the Six Nations, and their dependents. These mountainous and barren desarts, which lie immediately beyond our present settlements, are not only unfit for culture themselves, and so inconvenient to navigation, whether to the ocean, or to the Missisippi, that little or no use can be made of them; but they likewise preclude us from any access to those more fertile lands that lie beyond them, which would otherwise have been occupied long ago, but never can be settled, so at least as to turn to any account to Britain, without the possession and navigation of the Missisippi; which is, as it were, the sea of all the inland parts of North America beyond the Apalachean mountains, without which those inland parts of that continent can never turn to any account to this nation. {xvi} It is this our situation in North America, that renders all that continent beyond our present settlements of little or no use, at least to Britain; and makes the possession of the Missisippi absolutely necessary to reap the benefit of it. We possess but a fourth part of the continent between that river and the ocean; and but a tenth part of what lies east of Mexico; and can never enjoy any great advantages from any more of it, till we settle on the Missisippi. How necessary such settlements on the Missisippi may be, will farther appear from what we possess on this side of it. The lands in North America are in general but very poor or barren; and if any of them are more fertile, the soil is light and shallow, and soon worn out with culture. It is only the virgin fertility of fresh lands, such as those on the Missisippi, that makes the lands in North America appear to be fruitful, or that renders them of any great value to this nation. But such lands in our colonies, that have hitherto produced their staple commodities for Britain, are now exhausted and worn out, and we meet with none such on this side of the Missisippi. But when their lands are worn out, neither the value of their commodities, nor the circumstances of the planters, will admit of manuring them, at least to any great advantage to this nation. The staple commodities of North America are so gross and bulky, and of so small value, that it generally takes one half of them to pay the freight and other charges in sending them to Britain; so that unless our planters have some advantage in making them, such as cheap, rich, and fresh lands, they never can make any; their returns to Britain are then neglected, and the trade is gained by others who have these advantages; such as those who may be possessed of the Missisippi, or by the Germans, Russians, Turks, &c. who have plenty of lands, and labour cheap: by which means they make more of our staple of North America, tobacco, than we do ourselves; while we cannot make their staple of hemp, flax, iron, pot-ash, &c. By that means our people are obliged to interfere with their mother country, for want of the use of those lands of which there is such plenty in North America, to produce these commodities that are so much wanted from thence. {xvii} The consequences of this may be much more prejudicial to this nation, than is commonly apprehended. This trade of North America, whatever may be the income from it, consists in those gross and bulky commodities that are the chief and principal sources of navigation; which maintain whole countries to make them, whole fleets to transport them, and numbers of people to manufacture them at home; on which accounts this trade is more profitable to a nation, than the mines of Mexico or Peru. If we compare this with other branches of trade, as the sugar trade, or even the fishery, it will appear to be by far the most profitable to the nation, whatever those others may be to a few individuals. We set a great value on the fishery, in which we do not employ a third part of the seamen that we do in the plantation trade of North America; and the same may be said of the sugar trade. The tobacco trade alone employs more seamen in Britain, than either the fishery, or sugar trade; [Footnote: By the best accounts we have, there were 4000 seamen employed in the tobacco trade, in the year 1733, when the inspection on tobacco passed into a law; and we may perhaps reckon them now 4500, although some reckon them less. By the same accounts, taken by the custom-house officers, it appeared, that the number of British ships employed in all America, including the fishery, were 1400, with 17,000 seamen; besides 9000 or 10,000 seamen belonging to North-America, who are all ready to enter into the service of Britain on, any emergency or encouragement. Of these there were but 4000 seamen employed in the fishery from Britain; and about as many, or 3600, in the sugar trade. The French, on the other hand, employ upwards of 20,000 seamen in the fishery, and many more than we do in the sugar trade. In short, the plantation trade of North America is to Britain, what the fishery is to France, the great nursery of seamen, which may be much improved. It is for this reason that we have always thought this nation ought, for its safety, to enjoy an exclusive right to the one or the other of these at least.] and brings in more money to the nation than all the products of America perhaps put together. But those gross commodities that afford these sources of navigation, however valuable they may be to the public, and to this nation in particular, are far from being so to individuals: they are cheap, and of small value, either to make, or to trade {xviii} in them; and for that reason they are neglected by private people, who never think of making them, unless the public takes care to give them all due encouragement, and to set them about those employments; for which purpose good and proper lands, such as those on the Missisippi, are absolutely necessary, without which nothing can be done. The many advantages of such lands that produce a staple for Britain, in North America, are not to be told. The whole interest of the nation in those colonies depends upon them, if not the colonies themselves. Such lands alone enable the colonies to take their manufactures and other necessaries from Britain, to the mutual advantage of both. And how necessary that may be will appear from the state of those colonies in North America, which do not make, one with another, as much as is sufficient to supply them only with the necessary article of cloathing; not to mention the many other things they want and take from Britain; and even how they pay for that is more than any man can tell. In short, it would appear that our colonies in North America cannot subsist much longer, if at all, in a state of dependence for all their manufactures and other necessaries, unless they are provided with other lands that may enable them to purchase them; and where they will find any such lands, but upon the Missisippi, is more than we can tell. When their lands are worn out, are poor and barren, or in an improper climate or situation, or that they will produce nothing to send to Britain, such lands can only be converted into corn and pasture grounds; and the people in our colonies are thereby necessarily obliged, for a bare subsistence, to interfere with Britain, not only in manufactures, but in the very produce of their lands. By this we may perceive the absurdity of the popular outcry, that we have already _land enough_, and more than we can make use of in North America. They who may be of that opinion should shew us, where that land is to be found, and what it will produce, that may turn to any account to the nation. Those people derive their opinion from what they see in Europe, where the quantity of land that we possess in North America, will, no doubt, maintain a greater number of people than we have there. But they should consider, that those people in {xix} Europe are not maintained by the planting of a bare raw commodity, with such immense charges upon it, but by farming, manufactures, trade, and commerce; which they will soon reduce our colonies to, who would confine them to their present settlements, between the sea coast and the mountains that surround them. Some of our colonies perhaps may imagine they cannot subsist without these employments; which indeed would appear to be the case in their present state: but that seems to be as contrary to their true interest, as it is to their condition of British colonies. They have neither skill, materials, nor any other conveniences to make manufactures; whereas their lands require only culture to produce a staple commodity, providing they are possessed of such as are fit for that purpose. Manufactures are the produce of labour, which is both scarce and dear among them; whereas lands are, or may, and should be made, both cheap and in plenty; by which they may always reap much greater profits from the one than the other. That is, moreover, a certain pledge for the allegiance and dependance of the colonies; and at the same time makes their dependance to become their interest. It has been found by frequent experience, that the making of a staple commodity for Britain, is more profitable than manufactures, providing they have good lands to work. It were to be wished indeed, that we could support our interest in America, and those sources of navigation, by countries that were more convenient to it, than those on the Missisippi. But that, we fear, is not to be done, however it may be desired. We wish we could say as much of the lands in Florida, and on the bay of Mexico, as of those on the Missisippi: but they are not to be compared to these, by all accounts, however convenient they may be in other respects to navigation. In all those southern and maritime parts of that continent the lands are in general but very poor and mean, being little more than _pine barrens_, or _sandy desarts_. The climate is at the same time so intemperate, that white people are in a great measure unfit for labour in it, as much as they are in the islands; this obliges them to make use of slaves, which are now become so dear, that it is to be doubted, whether all the produce {xx} of those lands will enable the proprietors of them to purchase slaves, or any other labourers; without which they can turn to little or no account to the nation, and those countries can support but very few people, if it were only to protect and defend them. The most convenient part of those countries seems to be about Mobile and Pensacola; which are, as it were, an entrepot between our present settlements and the Missisippi, and safe station for our ships. But it is a pity that the lands about them are the most barren, and the climate the most intemperate, by all accounts, of any perhaps in all America. [Footnote: See page 49, 111, &c. _Charlevoix_ Hist. N. France, Tom. III. 484. _Laval, infra_, &c.] And our author tells us, the lands are not much better even on the river of Mobile; which is but a very inconsiderable one. But the great inconvenience of those countries proceeds from the number of Indians in them; which will make it very difficult to settle any profitable plantations among them, especially in the inland parts that are more fertile; whereas the Missisippi is free from Indians for 1000 miles. It was but in the year 1715, that those Indians overran all the colony of Carolina, even to Charles-Town; by which the French got possession of that country, and of the Missisippi; both which they had just before, in June 1713, dispossessed us of. If we turn our eyes again to the lands in our northern colonies, it is to be feared we can expect much less from them. There is an inconvenience attending them, with regard to any improvements on them for Britain, which is not to be remedied. The climate is so severe, and the winters so long, that the people are obliged to spend that time in providing the necessaries of life, which should be employed in profitable colonies, on the making of some staple commodity, and returns to Britain. They are obliged to feed their creatures for five or six months in the year, which employs their time in summer, and takes up the best of their lands, such as they are, which should produce their staple commodities, to provide for themselves and their stocks against winter. For that reason the people in all our northern colonies are necessarily obliged to become farmers, {xxi} to make corn and provisions, instead of planters, who make a staple commodity for Britain; and thereby interfere with their mother country in the most material and essential of all employments to a nation, agriculture. In short, neither the soil nor climate will admit of any improvements for Britain, in any of those northern colonies. If they would produce any thing of that kind, it must be hemp; which never could be made in them to any advantage, as appears from many trials of it in New England. [Footnote: See _Douglas's_ Hist. N. America. _Elliot's_ Improvements on New England, &c.] The great dependance of those northern colonies is upon the supplies of lumber and provisions which they send to the islands. But as they increase and multiply, their woods are cut down, lumber becomes scarce and dear, and the number of people inhances the value of land, and of every thing it produces, especially provisions. If this is the case of those northern colonies on the sea coast, what can we expect from the inland parts; in which the soil is not only more barren, and the climate more severe, but they are, with all these disadvantages, so inconvenient to navigation, both on account of their distance, and of the many falls and currents in the river St. Lawrence, that it is to be feared those inland parts of our northern colonies will never produce any thing for Britain, more than a few furrs; which they will do much better in the hands of the natives, than in ours. These our northern colonies, however, are very populous, and increase and multiply very fast. There are above a million of people in them, who can make but very little upon their lands for themselves, and still less for their mother country. For these reasons it is presumed, it would be an advantage to them, as well as to the whole nation, to remove their spare people, who want lands, to those vacant lands in the southern parts of the continent, which turn to so much greater account than any that they are possessed of. There they may have the necessaries of life in the greatest plenty; their stocks maintain themselves the whole year round, with little or no cost or labour; "by which means many people have a thousand head {xxii} of cattle, and for one man to have two hundred, is very common, with other stock in proportion." [Footnote: Description of South Carolina, p. 68.] This enables them to bestow their whole labour, both in summer and winter, on the making of some staple commodity for Britain, getting lumber and provisions for the islands, &c. which both enriches them and the whole nation. That is much better, surely, than to perish in winter for want of cloathing, which they must do unless they make it; and to excite those grudges and jealousies, which must ever subsist between them and their mother country in their present state, and grow so much the worse, the longer they continue in it. The many advantages that would ensue from the peopling of those southern parts of the continent from our northern colonies, are hardly to be told. We might thereby people and secure those countries, and reap the profits of them, without any loss of people; which are not to be spared for that purpose in Britain, or any other of her dominions. This is the great use and advantage that may be made of the expulsion of the French from those northern parts of America. They have hitherto obliged us to strengthen those northern colonies, and have confined the people in them to towns and townships, in which their labour could turn to no great account, either to themselves or to the nation, by which we have, in a great measure, loss the labour of one half of the people in our colonies. But as they are now free from any danger on their borders, they may extend their settlements with safety, disperse themselves on plantations, and cultivate those lands that may turn to some account, both to them and to the whole nation. In short, they may now make some staple commodity for Britain; on which the interest of the colonies, and of the nation in them, chiefly depends; and which we can never expect from those colonies in their present situation. What those commodities are, that we might get from those southern parts of North America, will appear from the following accounts; which we have not room here to consider more particularly. We need only mention hemp, flax, and silk, those great articles and necessary materials of manufactures; for which alone this nation pays at least a million and an half {xxiii} a-year, if not two millions, and could never get them from all the colonies we have. Cotton and indigo are equally useful. Not to mention copper, iron, potash, &c. which, with hemp, flax, and silk, make the great balance of trade against the nation, and drain it of its treasure; when we might have those commodities from our colonies for manufactures, and both supply ourselves and others with them. Wine, oil, raisins, and currants, &c. those products of France and Spain, on which Britain expends so much of her treasure, to enrich her enemies, might likewise be had from those her own dominions. Britain might thereby cut off those resources of her enemies; secure her colonies for the future; and prevent such calamities of war, by cultivating those more laudable arts of peace: which will be the more necessary, as these are the only advantages the nation can expect, for the many millions that have been expended on America. _A Description of the Harbour of_ PENSACOLA. As the harbour of Pensacola will appear to be a considerable acquisition to Britain, it may be some satisfaction to give the following account of it, from F. Laval, royal professor of mathematics, and master of the marine academy at Toulon; who was sent to Louisiana, on purpose to make observations, in 1719; and had the accounts of the officers who took Pensacola at that time, and surveyed the place. "The colonies of Pensacola, and of Dauphin-Island, are at present on the decline, the inhabitants having removed to settle at Mobile and Biloxi, or at New-Orleans, where the lands are much better; for at the first the soil is chiefly sand, mixed with little earth. The land, however, is covered with woods of pines, firs, and oaks; which make good trees, as well as at Ship-Island. The road of Pensacola is the only good port thereabouts for large ships, and Ship-Island for small ones, where vessels that draw from thirteen to fourteen feet water, may ride in safety, under the island, in fifteen feet, and a good holding ground; as well as in the other ports, which are all only open roads, exposed to the south, and from west to east. "Pensacola is in north-latitude 30° 25'; and is the only road in the bay of Mexico, in which ships can be safe from all {xxiv} winds. It is land-locked on every side, and will hold a great number of ships, which have very good anchorage in it, in a good holding ground of soft sand, and from twenty-five to thirty-four feet of water. You will find not less than twenty-one feet of water on the barr, which is at the entrance into the road, providing you keep in the deepest part of the channel. Before a ship enters the harbour, she should bring the fort of Pensacola to bear between north and north 1/4 east, and keep that course till she is west or west 1/4 south, from the fort on the island of St. Rose, that is, till that fort bears east, and east 1/4 north. Then she must bear away a little to the land on the west side, keeping about mid-way between that and the island, to avoid a bank on this last, which runs out to some distance west-north-west from the point of the island. "If there are any breakers on the ledge of rocks, which lie to the westward of the barr, as often happens; if there is any wind, that may serve for a mark to ships, which steer along that ledge, at the distance of a good musket-shot, as they enter upon the barr; then keep the course above mentioned. Sometimes the currents set very strong out of the road, which you should take care of, less they should carry you upon these rocks. "As there is but half a foot rising (_levèe_) on the barr of Pensacola, every ship of war, if it be not in a storm, may depend upon nineteen (perhaps twenty) feet of water, to go into the harbour, as there are twenty-one feet on the barr. Ships that draw twenty feet must be towed in. By this we see, that ships of sixty guns may go into this harbour: and even seventy gun ships, the largest requisite in that country in time of war, if they were built flat-bottomed, like the Dutch ships, might pass every where in that harbour. "In 1719 Pensacola was taken by Mr. Champmelin, in the Hercules man of war, of sixty-four guns, but carried only fifty-six; in company with the Mars, pierced for sixty guns, but had in only fifty-four; and the Triton, pierced for fifty-four guns, but carried only fifty; with two frigates of thirty-six and twenty guns. [Footnote: The admiral was on board of the Hercules, which drew twenty-one feet of water, and there were but twenty-two feet into the harbour in the highest tides; so that they despaired of carrying in this ship. But an old Canadian, named Crimeau, a man of experience, who was perfectly acquainted with that coast, boasted of being able to do it, and succeeded; for which he was the next year honoured with letters of noblesse. _Dumont_ (an officer there at that time) 11.22. But _Bellin_, from the charts of the admiralty, makes but twenty feet of water on the barr of Pensacola. The difference may arise from the tides, which are very irregular and uncertain on all that coast, according to the winds; never rising above three feet, sometimes much less. In twenty-four hours the tide ebbs in the harbour for eighteen or nineteen hours, and flows five or six. _Laval_.] {xxv} "This road is subject to one inconvenience; several rivers fall into it, which occasion strong currents, and make boats or canoes, as they pass backwards and forwards, apt to run a-ground; but as the bottom is all sand, they are not apt to founder. On the other hand there is a great advantage in this road; it is free from worms, which never breed in fresh water, so that vessels are never worm-eaten in it." But F. Charlevoix seems to contradict this last circumstance: "The bay of Pensacola would be a pretty good port, (says he) if the worms did not eat the vessels in it, and if there was a little more water in the entrance into it; for the Hercules, commanded by Mr. Champmelin, touched upon it." It is not so certain then, that this harbour is altogether free from worms; although it may not be so subject to them, as other places in those climes, from the many small fresh water rivers that fall into this bay, which may have been the occasion of these accounts, that are seemingly contradictory. In such a place ships might at least be preserved from worms, in all likelihood, by paying their bottoms with aloes, or mixing it with their other stuff. That has been found to prevent the biting of these worms; and might be had in plenty on the spot. Many kinds of aloes would grow on the barren sandy lands about Pensacola, and in Florida, which is the proper soil for them; and would be a good improvement for those lands, which will hardly bear any thing else to advantage, whatever use is made of it. Having room in this place, we may fill it up with an answer to a common objection against Louisiana; which is, {xxvi} that this country is never likely to turn to any account, because the French have made so little of it. But that objection, however common, will appear to proceed only from the ignorance of those who make it. No country can produce any thing without labourers; which, it is certain, the French have never had in Louisiana, in any numbers at least, sufficient to make it turn to any greater account than it has hitherto done. The reason of this appears not to be owing to the country, but to their proceedings and misconduct in it. Out of the many thousand people who were contracted for by the grantees, to be sent to Louisiana in 1719, there were but eight hundred sent, we see; and of these the greatest part were ruined by their idle schemes, which made them and others abandon the country entirely. The few again who remained in it were cut off by an Indian massacre in 1729, which broke up the only promising settlements they had in the country, those of the Natchez, and Yasous, which were never afterwards reinstated. Instead of encouraging the colony in such misfortunes, the minister, Cardinal Fleuri, either from a spirit of oeconomy, or because it might be contrary to some other of his views, withdrew his protection from it, gave up the public plantations, and must thereby, no doubt, have very much discouraged others. By these means they have had few or no people in Louisiana, but such as were condemned to be sent to it for their crimes, women of ill fame, deserted soldiers, insolvent debtors, and galley-slaves, _forçats_, as they call them; "who, looking on the country only as a place of exile, were disheartened at every thing in it; and had no regard for the progress of a colony, of which they were only members by compulsion, and neither knew nor considered its advantages to the state. It is from such people that many have their accounts of this country; and throw the blame of all miscarriages in it upon the country, when they are only owing to the incapacity and negligence of those who were instructed to settle it." [Footnote: _Charlevoix_ Hist. New France, Tom. III. p. 447.] {1} THE HISTORY OF LOUISIANA BOOK I. _The Transactions of the_ French _in_ LOUISIANA. CHAPTER I. _Of the first Discovery and Settlement of_ LOUISIANA. After the Spaniards came to have settlements on the Great Antilles, it was not long before they attempted to make discoveries on the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico. In 1520, Lucas Vasquez de Aillon landed on the continent to the north of that Gulf, being favourably received by the people of that country, who made him presents in gold, pearls, and plated silver. This favourable reception made him return thither four years after; but the natives having changed their friendly sentiments towards him, killed two hundred of his men, and obliged him to retire. In 1528, Pamphilo Nesunez [Footnote: Narvaez.] landed also on that coast, receiving from the first nations he met in his way, presents made in gold; which, by signs, they made him to understand, came from the Apalachean mountains, in the country which at this day goes under the name of Florida: and thither he attempted to go, undertaking a hazardous journey of twenty-five days. In this march he was so often attacked by the new people he continually discovered, and lost so many of his men, as only to think of re-embarking with the few that were left, {2} happy to have himself escaped the dangers which his imprudence had exposed him to. The relation published by the Historian of Dominico [Footnote: Ferdinando.] Soto, who in 1539 landed in the Bay of St. Esprit, is so romantic, and so constantly contradicted by all who have travelled that country, that far from giving credit to it, we ought rather to suppose his enterprize had no success; as no traces of it have remained, any more than of those that went before. The inutility of these attempts proved no manner of discouragement to the Spaniards. After the discovery of Florida, it was with a jealous eye they saw the French settle there in 1564, under René de Laudonniere, sent thither by the Admiral de Coligni, where he built Fort Carolin; the ruins of which are still to be seen above the Fort of Pensacola. [Footnote: This intended settlement of Admiral Coligni was on the east coast of Florida, about St. Augustin, instead of Pensacola. De Laet is of opinion, that their Fort Carolin was the same with St. Augustin.] There the Spaniards some time after attacked them, and forcing them to capitulate, cruelly murdered them, without any regard had to the treaty concluded between them. As France was at that time involved in the calamities of a religious war, this act of barbarity had remained unresented, had not a single man of Mont Marfan, named Dominique de Gourges, attempted, in the name of the nation, to take vengeance thereof. In 1567, having fitted out a vessel, and sailed for Florida, he took three forts built by the Spaniards; and after killing many of them in the several attacks he made, hanged the rest: and having settled there a new post, [Footnote: He abandoned the country without making any settlement; nor have the French ever had any settlement in it from that day to this. See Laudonniere. Hakluyt, &c.] returned to France. But the disorders of the state having prevented the maintaining that post, the Spaniards soon after retook possession of the country, where they remain to this day. From that time the French seemed to have dropped all thoughts of that coast, or of attempting any discoveries therein; when the wars in Canada with the natives afforded them the {3} knowledge of the vast country they are possessed of at this day. In one of these wars a Recollet, or Franciscan Friar, name F. Hennepin, was taken and carried to the Illinois. As he had some skill in surgery, he proved serviceable to that people, and was also kindly treated by them: and being at full liberty, he travelled over the country, following for a considerable time the banks of the river St. Louis, or Missisipi, without being able to proceed to its mouth. However, he failed not to take possession of that country, in the name of Louis XIV., calling it Louisiana. Providence having facilitated his return to Canada, he gave the most advantageous account of all he had seen; and after his return to France, drew up a relation thereof, dedicated to M. Colbert. The account he gave of Louisiana failed not to produce its good effects. Me de la Salle, equally famous for his misfortunes and his courage, undertook to traverse these unknown countries quite to the sea. In Jan. 1679 he set out from Quebec with a large detachment, and being come among the Illinois, there built the first fort France ever had in that country, calling it Crevecæur; and there he left a good garrison under the command of the Chevalier de Tonti. From thence he went down the river St. Louis, quite to its mouth; which, as has been said, is in the Gulf of Mexico; and having made observations, and taken the elevation in the best manner he could, returned by the same way to Quebec, from whence he passed over to France. After giving the particulars of his journey to M. Colbert, that great minister, who knew of what importance it was to the state to make sure of so fine and extensive a country, scrupled not to allow him a ship and a small frigate, in order to find out, by the way of the gulf of Mexico, the mouth of the river St. Louis. He set sail in 1685: but his observations, doubtless, not having had all the justness requisite, after arriving in the gulf, he got beyond the river, and running too far westward, entered the bay of St. Bernard: and some misunderstanding happening between him and the officers of the vessels, he debarqued with the men under his command, and having settled a post in that place, undertook to go by land in quest of {4} the great river. But after a march of several days, some of his people, irritated on account of the fatigue he exposed them to, availing themselves of an opportunity, when separated from the rest of his men, basely assassinated him. The soldiers, though deprived of their commander, still continued their route, and, after crossing many rivers, arrived at length at the Arkansas, where they unexpectedly found a French post lately settled. The Chevalier de Tonti was gone down from the fort of the Illinois, quite to the mouth of the river, about the time he judged M. de la Salle might have arrived by sea; and not finding him, was gone up again, in order to return to his post. And in his way entering the river of the Arkansas, quite to the village of that nation, with whom he made an alliance, some of his people insisted, they might be allowed to settle there; which was agreed to, he leaving ten of them in that place; and this small cantonment maintained its ground, not only because from time to time encreased by some Canadians, who came down this river; but above all, because those who formed it had the prudent precaution to live in peace with the natives, and treat as legitimate the children they had by the daughters of the Arkansas, with whom they matched out of necessity. The report of the pleasantness of Louisiana spreading through Canada, many Frenchmen of that country repaired to settle there, dispersing themselves at pleasure along the river St. Louis, especially towards its mouth, and even in some islands on the coast, and on the river Mobile, which lies nearer Canada. The facility of the commerce with St. Domingo was, undoubtedly, what invited them to the neighbourbood of the sea, though the interior parts of the country be in all respects far preferable. However, these scattered settlements, incapable to maintain their ground of themselves, and too distant to be able to afford mutual assistance, neither warranted the possession of this country, nor could they be called a taking of possession. Louisiana remained in this neglected state, till M. d'Hiberville, Chef d' Escadre, having discovered, in 1698, the mouths of the river St. Louis, and being nominated Governor General of that vast country, carried thither the first colony in 1699. As he was a native of Canada, the colony almost entirely consisted of Canadians, among whom M. de Luchereau, {5} uncle of Madam d'Hiberville, particularly distinguished himself. The settlement was made on the river Mobile, with all the facility that could be wished; but its progress proved slow: for these first inhabitants had no other advantage above the natives, as to the necessaries of life, but what their own industry, joined to some rude tools, to give the plainest forms to timbers, afforded them. The war which Louis IV, had at that time to maintain, and the pressing necessities of the state, continually engrossed the attention of the ministry, nor allowed them time to think of Louisiana. What was then thought most advisable, was to make a grant of it to some rich person; who, finding it his interest to improve that country, would, at the same time that he promoted his own interest, promote that of the state. Louisiana was thus ceded to M. Crozat. And it is to be presumed, had M. d'Hiberville lived longer, the colony would have made considerable progress: but that illustrious sea-officer, whose authority was considerable, dying at the Havannah, in 1701 (after which this settlement was deserted) a long time must intervene before a new Governor could arrive from France. The person pitched upon to fill that post, was M. de la Motte Cadillac, who arrived in that country in June 1713. The colony had but a scanty measure of commodities, and money scarcer yet: it was rather in a state of languor, than of vigorous activity, in one of the finest countries in the world; because impossible for it to do the laborious works, and make the first advances, always requisite in the best lands. The Spaniards, for a long time, considered Louisiana as a property justly theirs, because it constitutes the greatest Part of Florida, which they first discovered. The pains the French were at then to settle there, roused their jealousy, to form the design of cramping us, by settling at the Assinaïs, a nation not very distant from the Nactchitoches, whither some Frenchmen had penetrated. There the Spaniards met with no small difficulty to form that settlement, and being at a loss how to accomplish it, one F. Ydalgo, a Franciscan Friar, took it in his head to write to the French, to beg their assistance in {6} settling a mission among the Assinaïs. He sent three different copies of his letter hap-hazard three different ways to our settlements, hoping one of them at least might fall into the hands of the French. Nor was he disappointed in his hope, one of them, from one post to another, and from hand to hand, falling into the hands of M. de la Motte. That General, incessantly taken up with the concerns of the colony, and the means of relieving it, was not apprized of the designs of the Spaniards in that letter; could only see therein a sure and short method to remedy the present evils, by favouring the Spaniards, and making a treaty of commerce with them, which might procure to the colony what it was in want of, and what the Spaniards abounded with, namely, horses, cattle, and money: He therefore communicated that letter to M. de St. Denis, to whom he proposed to undertake a journey by land to Mexico. M. de St. Denis, for the fourteen years he was in Louisiana, had made several excursions up and down the country; and having a general knowledge of all the languages of the different nations which inhabit it, gained the love and esteem of these people, so far as to be acknowledged their Grand Chief. This gentleman, in other respects a man of courage, prudence, and resolution, was then the fittest person M. de la Motte could have pitched upon, to put his design in execution. How fatiguing soever the enterprize was, M. de St. Denis undertook it with pleasure, and set out with twenty-five men. This small company would have made some figure, had it continued entire; but some of them dropped M. de St. Denis by the way, and many of them remained among the Nactchitoches, to whose country he was come. He was therefore obliged to set out from that place, accompanied only by ten men, with whom he traversed upwards of an hundred and fifty leagues in a country entirely depopulated, having on his route met with no nation, till he came to the Presidio, or fortress of St. John Baptist, on the Rio (river) del Norte, in New Mexico. The Governor of this fort was Don Diego Raimond, an officer advanced in years, who favourbly received M. de St. {7} Denis, on acquainting him, that the motive to his journey was F. Ydalgo's letter, and that he had orders to repair to Mexico. But as the Spaniards do not readily allow strangers to travel through the countries of their dominion in America, for fear the view of these fine countries should inspire notions, the consequences of which might be greatly prejudicial to them, D. Diego did not chuse to permit M. de St. Denis to continue his route, without the previous consent of the Viceroy. It was therefore necessary to dispatch a courier to Mexico, and to wait his return. The courier, impatiently longed for, arrived at length, with the permission granted by the Duke of Linarez, Viceroy of Mexico. Upon which M. de St. Denis set out directly, and arrived at Mexico, June 5, 1715. The Viceroy had naturally an affection to France; M. de St. Denis was therefore favourably received, saving some precautions, which the Duke thought proper to take, not to give any disgust to some officers of justice who were about him. The affair was soon dispatched; the Duke of Linarez having promised to make a treaty of commerce, as soon as the Spaniards should be settled at the Assinaïs; which M. de St. Denis undertook to do, upon his return to Louisiana. CHAPTER II. _The Return of M. de St. Denis: His settling the_ Spaniards _at the_ Assinaïs. _His Second Journey to_ Mexico, _and Return from thence_. M. De St. Denis soon returned to the fort of St. John Baptist; after which he resolved to form the caravan, which was to be settled at the Assinaïs; at whose head M. de St. Denis put himself, and happily conducted it to the place appointed. And then having, in quality of Grand Chief, assembled the nation of the Assinaïs, he exhorted them to receive and use the Spaniards well. The veneration which that people had for him, made them submit to his will in all things; and thus the promise he had made to the Duke of Linarez was faithfully fulfilled. {8} The Assinaïs are fifty leagues distant from the Nactchitoches. The Spaniards, finding themselves still at too great a distance from us, availed themselves of that first settlement, in order to form a second among the Adaies, a nation which is ten leagues from our post of the Nactchitoches: whereby they confine us on the west within the neighbourhood of the river St. Louis; and from that time it was not their fault, that they had not cramped us to the north, as I shall mention in its place. To this anecdote of their history I shall, in a word or two, add that of their settlement at Pensacola, on the coast of Florida, three months after M. d'Hiberville had carried the first inhabitants to Louisiana, that country having continued to be inhabited by Europeans, ever since the garrison left there by Dominique de Gourges; which either perished, or deserted, for want of being supported.[Footnote: They returned to France. See p. 3.] To return to M. de la Motte and M. de St. Denis: the former, ever attentive to the project of having a treaty of commerce concluded with the Spaniards, and pleased with the success of M. de St. Denis's journey to Mexico, proposed his return thither again, not doubting but the Duke of Linarez would be as good as his word, as the French had already been. M. de St. Denis, ever ready to obey, accepted the commission of his General. But this second journey was not to be undertaken as the first; it was proper to carry some goods, in order to execute that treaty, as soon as it should be concluded, and to indemnify himself for the expences he was to be at. Though the store-houses of M. Crozat were full, it was no easy matter to get the goods. The factors refused to give any on credit; nay, refused M. de la Motte's security; and there was no money to be had to pay them. The Governor was therefore obliged to form a company of the most responsible men of the colony: and to this company only the factors determined to advance the goods. This expedient was far from being agreeable to M. de St. Denis, who opened his mind to M. de la Motte on that head, and told him, that some or all of his partners would accompany the goods they had engaged to be security for; and that, although it was absolutely necessary the effects should appear to be his {9} property alone, they would not fail to discover they themselves were the proprietors; which would be sufficient to cause their confiscation, the commerce between the two nations not being open. M. de la Motte saw the solidity of these reasons; but the impossibility of acting otherwise constrained him to supersede them: and, as M. de St. Denis had foreseen, it accordingly happened. He set out from Mobile, August 13, 1716, escorted, as he all along apprehended, by some of those concerned; and being come to the Assinaïs, he there passed the winter. On the 19th of March, the year following, setting out on his journey, he soon arrived at the Presidio of St. John Baptist. M. de St. Denis declared these goods to be his own property, in order to obviate their confiscation, which was otherwise unavoidable; and wanted to shew some acts of bounty and generosity, in order to gain the friendship of the Spaniards. But the untractableness, the avarice, and indiscretion of the parties concerned, broke through all his measures; and to prevent the entire disconcerting of them, he hastened his departure for Mexico, where he arrived May 14, 1717. The Duke of Linarez was yet there, but sick, and on his death-bed. M. de St. Denis had, however, time to see him, who knew him again: and that Nobleman took care to have him recommended to the Viceroy his successor; namely, the Marquis of Balero, a man as much against the French as the Duke was for them. M. de St. Denis did not long solicit the Marquis of Balero for concluding the treaty of commerce; he soon had other business to mind. F. Olivarez, who, on the representation of P. Ydalgo, as a person of a jealous, turbulent, and dangerous disposition, had been excluded from the mission to the Assinaïs, being then at the court of the Viceroy, saw with an evil eye the Person who had settled F. Ydalgo in that mission, and resolved to be avenged on him for the vexation caused by that disappointment. He joined himself to an officer, named Don Martin de Alaron, a person peculiarly protected by the Marquis of Balero: and they succeeded so well with that nobleman that in the time M. de St. Denis least expected, he found himself arrested, and clapt in a dungeon; from which he was not discharged {10} till December 20 of this year, by an order of the Sovereign Council of Mexico, to which he found means to present several petitions. The Viceroy, constrained to enlarge him, allotted the town for his place of confinement. The business of the treaty of commerce being now at an end, M. de St. Denis's attention was only engaged how to make the most of the goods, of which Don Diego Raymond had sent as large a quantity as he could, to the town of Mexico; where they were seized by D. Martin de Alaron, as contraband; he being one of the emissaries of his protector, appointed to persecute such strangers as did not dearly purchase the permission to sell their goods. M. de St. Denis could make only enough of his pillaged and damaged effects just to defray certain expences of suit, which, in a country that abounds with nothing else but gold and silver, are enormous. Our prisoner having nothing further to engross his attention in Mexico, but the safety of his person, seriously bethought himself how to secure it; as he had ever just grounds to apprehend some bad treatment at the bands of his three avowed enemies. Having therefore planned the means of his flight, on September 25, 1718, as the night came on, he quitted Mexico, and placing himself in ambush at a certain distance from the town, waited till his good fortune should afford the means of travelling otherwise than on foot. About nine at night, a horseman, well-mounted, cast up. To rush of a sudden upon him, dismount him, mount his horse, turn the bridle, and set up a gallop, was the work of a moment only for St. Denis. He rode on at a good pace till day, then quitted the common road, to repose him: a precaution he observed all along, till he came near to the Presidio of St. John Baptist. From thence he continued his journey on foot; and at length, on April 2, 1719, arrived at the French colony, where he found considerable alterations. From the departure of M. de St. Denis from Mexico, to his return again, almost three years had elapsed. In that long time, the grant of Louisiana was transferred from M. Crozat to the West India Company; M. de la Motte Cadillac was dead, and M. de Biainville, brother to M. d'Hiberville, succeeded as {11} governor general. The capital place of the colony was no longer at Mobile, nor even at Old Biloxi, whither it had been removed: New Orleans, now begun to be built, was become the capital of the country, whither he repaired to give M. de Biainville an account of his journey; after which he retired to his settlement. The king afterwards conferred upon him the cross of St. Louis, in acknowledgement and recompence of his services. The West India Company, building great hopes of commerce on Louisiana, made efforts to people that country, sufficient to accomplish their end. Thither, for the first time, they sent, in 1718, a colony of eight hundred: men some of which settled at New Orleans, others formed the settlements of the Natchez. It was with this embarkation I passed over to Louisiana. CHAPTER III. _Embarkation of eight hundred Men by the_ West India Company _to_ Louisiana. _Arrival and Stay at _Cape François. _Arrival at_ Isle Dauphine. _Description of that Island_. The embarkation was made at Rochelle on three different vessels, on one of which I embarked. For the first days of our voyage we had the wind contrary, but no high sea. On the eighth the wind turned more favourable. I observed nothing interesting till we came to the Tropick of Cancer, where the ceremony of baptizing was performed on those who had never been a voyage: after passing the Tropick, the Commodore steered too much to the south, our captain observed. In effect, after several days sailing, we were obliged to bear off to the north: we afterwards discovered the isle of St. Juan de Porto Rico, which belongs to the Spaniards. Losing sight of that, we discovered the island of St. Domingo; and a little after, as we bore on, we saw the Grange, which is a rock, overtopping the steep coast, which is almost perpendicular to the edge of the water. This rock, seen at a distance, seems to have the figure of a grange, or barn. A few hours after we {12} arrived at Cape François, distant from that rock only twelve leagues. We were two months in this passage to Cape François; both on account of the contrary winds, we had on setting out, and of the calms, which are frequent in those seas: our vessel, besides, being clumsy and heavy, had some difficulty to keep up with the others; which, not to leave us behind, carried only their four greater sails, while we had out between seventeen and eighteen. It is in those seas we meet with the Tradewinds; which though weak, a great deal of way might be made, did they blow constantly, because their course is from east to west without varying: storms are never observed in these seas, but the calms often prove a great hindrance; and then it is necessary to wait some days, till a _grain_, or squall, brings back the wind: a _grain_ is a small spot seen in the air, which spreads very fast, and forms a cloud, that gives a wind, which is brisk at first, but not lasting, though enough to make way with. Nothing besides remarkable is here seen, but the chace of the _flying-fish_ by the Bonitas. The Bonita is a fish, which is sometimes two feet long; extremely fond of the _flying-fish_; which is the reason it always keeps to the places where these fish are found: its flesh is extremely delicate and of a good flavour. The _flying-fish_ is of the length of a herring, but rounder. From its sides, instead of fins, issue out two wings, each about four inches in length, by two in breadth at the extremity; they fold together and open out like a fan, and are round at the end; consisting of a very fine membrane, pierced with a vast many little holes, which keep the water, when the fish is out of it: in order to avoid the pursuit of the Bonita, it darts into the air, spreads out its wings, goes straight on, without being able to turn to the right or left; which is the reason, that as soon as the toilets, or little sheets of water, which fill up the small holes of its wings, are dried up, it falls down again; and the same Bonita, which pursued it in the water, still following it with his eye in the air, catches it when fallen into the water; it sometimes falls on board ships. The Bonita, in his turn, {13} becomes the prey of the seamen, by means of little puppets, in the form of _flying-fish_, which it swallows, and by that means is taken. We stayed fifteen days at Cape François, to take in wood and water, and to refresh. It is situate on the north part of the island of St. Domingo, which part the French are in possession of, as the Spaniards are of the other. The fruits and sweet-meats of the country are excellent, but the meat good for nothing, hard, dry, and tough. This country being scorched, grass is very scarce, and animals therein languish and droop. Six weeks before our arrival, fifteen hundred persons died of an epidemic distemper, called the Siam distemper. We sailed from Cape François, with the same wind, and the finest weather imaginable. We then passed between the islands of Tortuga and St. Domingo, where we espied Port de Paix, which is over-against Tortuga: we afterwards found ourselves between the extremities of St. Domingo and Cuba which belongs to the Spaniards: we then steered along the south coast of this last, leaving to the left Jamaica, and the great and little Kayemans, which are subject to the English. We at length quitted Cuba at Cape Anthony, steering for Louisiana a north west course. We espied land in coming towards it, but so flat, though distant but a league from us, that we had great difficulty to distinguish it, though we had then but four fathom water. We put out the boat to examine the land, which we found to be Candlemas island (la Chandeleur.) We directly set sail for the island of Massacre, since called Isle Dauphine, situated three leagues to the south of that continent, which forms the Gulf of Mexico to the north, at about 27° 35' North latitude, and 288° of longitude. A little after we discovered the Isle Dauphine, and cast anchor before the harbour, in the road, because the harbour itself was choaked up. To make this passage we took three months, and arrived only August 25th. We had a prosperous voyage all along, and the more so, as no one died, or was even dangerously ill the whole time, for which we caused _Te Deum_ solemnly to be sung. We were then put on shore with all our effects. The company had undertaken to transport us with our servants and {14} effects, at their expence, and to lodge, maintain and convey us to our several concessions, or grants. This gulf abounds with delicious fish; as the _sarde_ (pilchard) red fish, cod, sturgeon, ringed thornback, and many other sorts, the best in their kind. The _sarde_ is a large fish; its flesh is delicate, and of a fine flavour, the scales grey, and of a moderate size. The red fish is so called, from its red scales, of the size of a crown piece. The cod, fished for on this coast, is of the middling sort, and very delicate. The thornback is the same as in France. Before we quit this island, it will not, perhaps, be improper to mention some things about it. The Isle Massacre was so called by the first Frenchman who landed there, because on the shore of this island they found a small rising ground, or eminence, which appeared the more extraordinary in an island altogether flat, and seemingly formed only by the sand, thrown in by some high gusts of wind. As the whole coast of the gulf is very flat, and along the continent lies a chain of such islands, which seem to be mutually joined by their points, and to form a line parallel with the continent, this small eminence appeared to them extraordinary: it was more narrowly examined, and in different parts thereof they found dead mens bones, just appearing above the little earth that covered them. Then their curiosity led them to rake off the earth in several places; but finding nothing underneath, but a heap of bones, they cried out with horror, _Ah! what a Massacre!_ They afterwards understood by the natives, who are at no great distance off, that a nation adjoining to that island, being at war with another much more powerful, was constrained to quit the continent, which is only three leagues off, and to remove to this island, there to live in peace the rest of their days; but that their enemies, justly confiding in their superiority, pursued them to this their feeble retreat, and entirely destroyed them; and after raising this inhuman trophy of their victorious barbarity, retired again. I myself saw this fatal monument, which made me imagine this unhappy nation must have been even numerous toward its period, as only the bones of their warriors, and aged men must have lain there, their custom being to make slaves of their {15} young people. Such is the origin of the first name of this island, which, on our arrival, was changed to that of Isle Dauphine: an act of prudence, it should-seem, to discontinue an appellation, so odious, of a place that was the cradle of the colony; as Mobile was its birth-place. This island is very flat, and all a white sand, as are all the others, and the coast in like manner. Its length is about seven leagues from east to west; its breadth a short league from south to north, especially to the east, where the settlement was made, on account of the harbour which was at the south end of the island, and choaked up by a high sea, a little before our arrival: this east end runs to a point. It is tolerably well stored with pine; but so dry and parched, on account of its crystal sand, as that no greens or pulse can grow therein, and beasts are pinched and hard put to it for sustenance. In the mean time, M. de Biainville, commandant general for the company in this colony, was gone to mark out the spot on which the capital was to be built, namely, one of the banks of the river Missisippi, where at present stands the city of New Orleans, so called in honour of the duke of Orleans, then regent. CHAPTER IV. _The Author's Departure for his Grant. Description of the Places he passed through, as far as_ New Orleans. The time of my departure, so much wished for, came at length. I set out with my hired servants, all my effects, and a letter for M. Paillou, major general at New Orleans, who commanded there in the absence of M. de Biainville. We coasted along the continent, and came to lie in the mouth of the river of the Pasca-Ogoulas; so called, because near its mouth, and to the east of a bay of the same name, dwells a nation, called Pasca-Ogoulas, which denotes the Nation of Bread. Here it may be remarked, that in the province of Louisiana, the appellation of several people terminates in the word Ogoula, which signifies _nation_; and that most of the rivers derive their names from the nations which dwell on {16} their banks. We then passed in view of Biloxi, where formerly was a petty nation of that name; then in view of the bay of St. Louis, leaving to the left successively Isle Dauphine, Isle a Corne, (Horne-island,) Isle aux Vaisseaux, (Ship-island,) and Isle aux Chats, (Cat-island). I have already described Isle Dauphine, let us now proceed to the three following. Horn-island is very flat and tolerably wooded, about six leagues in length, narrowed to a point to the west side. I know not whether it was for this reason, or on account of the number of horned cattle upon it, that it received this name; but it is certain, that the first Canadians, who settled on Isle Dauphine, had put most of their cattle, in great numbers, there; whereby they came to grow rich even when they slept. These cattle not requiring any attendance, or other care, in this island, came to multiply in such a manner, that the owners made great profits of them on our arrival in the colony. Proceeding still westward, we meet Ship-island; so called, because there is a small harbour, in which vessels at different times have put in for shelter. But as the island is distant four leagues from the coast, and that this coast is so flat, that boats cannot approach nearer than half a league, this harbour comes to be entirely useless. This island may be about five leagues in length, and a large league in breadth at the west point. Near that point to the north is the harbour, facing the continent; towards the east end it may be half a league in breadth: it is sufficiently wooded, and inhabited only by rats, which swarm there. At two leagues distance, going still westward, we meet Cat-island; so called, because at the time it was discovered, great numbers of cats were found upon it. This island is very small, not above half a league in diameter. The forests are over-run with underwood: a circumstance which, doubtless, determined M. de Biainville to put in some hogs to breed; which multiplied to such numbers, that, in 1722, going to hunt them, no other creatures were to be seen; and it was judged, that in time they must have devoured each other. It was found they had destroyed the cats. {17} All these islands are very flat, and have the same bottom of white sand; the woods, especially of the three first, consist of pine; they are almost all at the same distance from the continent, the coast of which is equally sandy. After passing the bay of St. Louis, of which I have spoken, we enter the two channels which lead to Lake Pontchartrain, called at present the Lake St. Louis: of these channels, one is named the Great, the other the Little; and they are about two leagues in length, and formed by a chain of islets, or little isles, between the continent and Cockle-island. The great channel is to the south. We lay at the end of the channels in Cockle-island; so called, because almost entirely formed of the shells named Coquilles des Palourdes, in the sea-ports, without a mixture of any others. This isle lies before the mouth of the Lake St. Louis to the east, and leaves at its two extremities two outlets to the lake; the one, by which we entered, which is the channel just mentioned; the other, by the Lake Borgne. The lake, moreover, at the other end westward, communicates, by a channel, with the Lake Maurepas; and may be about ten leagues in length from east to west, and seven in breadth. Several rivers, in their course southward, fall into it. To the south of the lake is a great creek (Bayouc, a stream of dead water, with little or no observable current) called Bayouc St. Jean; it comes close to New Orleans, and falls into this lake at Grass Point (Pointe aux Herbes) which projects a great way into the lake, at two leagues distance from Cockle-island. We passed near that Point, which is nothing but a quagmire. From thence we proceeded to the Bayouc Choupic, so denominated from a fish of that name, and three leagues from the Pointe aux Herbes. The many rivulets, which discharge themselves into this lake, make its waters almost fresh, though it communicates with the sea: and on this account it abounds not only with sea fish but with fresh water fish, some of which, particularly carp, would appear to be of a monstrous size in France. We entered this Creek Choupic: at the entrance of which is a fort at present. We went up this creek for the space of a league, and landed at a place where formerly stood the village {18} of the natives, who are called Cola-Pissas, an appellation corrupted by the French, the true name of that nation being Aquelou-Pissas, that is, _the nation of men that hear and see_. From this place to New Orleans, and the river Missisippi, on which that capital is built, the distance is only a league. CHAPTER V. _The Author put in Possession of his Territory. His Resolution to go and settle among the_ Natchez. Being arrived at the Creek Choupic the Sicur Lavigne, a Canadian, lodged me in a cabin of the Aquelou-Pissas, whose village he had bought. He gave others to my workmen for their lodging; and we were all happy to find, upon our arrival, that we were under shelter, in a place that was uninhabited. A few days after my arrival I bought an Indian female slave of one of the inhabitants, in order to have a person who could dress our victuals, as I perceived the inhabitants did all they could to entice away our labourers, and to gain them by fair promises. As for my slave and me, we did not understand one another's language; but I made myself to be understood by signs, which these natives comprehend very easily: she was of the nation of the Chitimachas, with whom the French had been at war for some years. I went to view a spot on St. John's Creek, about half a league distant from the place where the capital was to be founded, which was yet only marked out by a hut, covered with palmetto-leaves, and which the commandant had caused to be built for his own lodging; and after him for M. Paillou, whom he left commandant of that post. I had chosen that place preferably to any others, with a view to dispose more easily of my goods and provisions, and that I might not have them to transport to a great distance. I told M. Paillou of my choice, who came and put me in possession, in the name of the West-India company. I built a hut upon my settlement, about forty yards from the creek of St. John, till I could build my house, and lodging {19} for my people. As my hut was composed of very combustible materials, I caused a fire to be made at a distance, about half way from the creek, to avoid accidents: which occasioned an adventure, that put me in mind of the prejudices they have in Europe, from the relations that are commonly current. The account I am going to give of it, may have upon those who think as I did then, the same effect that it had upon me. It was almost night, when my slave perceived, within two yards of the fire, a young alligator, five feet long, which beheld the fire without moving. I was in the garden hard by, when she made me repeated signs to come to her; I ran with speed, and upon my arrival she shewed me the crocodile, without speaking to me; the little time that I examined it, I could see, its eyes were so fixed on the fire, that all our motions could not take them off. I ran to my cabin to look for my gun, as I am a pretty good marksman: but what was my surprize, when I came out, and saw the girl with a great stick in her hand attacking the monster! Seeing me arrive, she began to smile, and said many things, which I did not comprehend. But she made me understand, by signs, that there was no occasion for a gun to kill such a beast; for the stick she shewed me was sufficient for the purpose. The next day the former master of my slave came to ask me for some salad-plants; for I was the only one who had any garden-stuff, having taken care to preserve the seeds I had brought over with me. As he understood the language of the natives, I begged him to ask the girl, why she had killed the alligator so rashly. He began to laugh, and told me, that all new comers were afraid of those creatures, although they have no reason to be so: and that I ought not to be surprized at what the girl had done, because her nation inhabited the borders of a lake, which was full of those creatures; that the children, when they saw the young ones come on land, pursued them, and killed them, by the assistance of the people of the cabin, who made good cheer of them. I was pleased with my habitation, and I had good reasons, which I have already related, to make me prefer it to others; notwithstanding I had room to believe, that the situation was {20} none of the healthiest, the country about it being very damp. But this cause of an unwholesome air does not exist at present, since they have cleared the ground, and made a bank before the town. The quality of that land is very good, for what I had sown came up very well. Having found in the spring some peach-stones which began to sprout, I planted them; and the following autumn they had made shoots, four feet high, with branches in proportion. Notwithstanding these advantages, I took a resolution to quit this settlement, in order to make another one, about a hundred leagues higher up; and I shall give the reasons, which, in my opinion, will appear sufficient to have made me take that step. My surgeon came to take his leave of me, letting me know, he could be of no service to me, near such a town as was forming; where there was a much abler surgeon than himself; and that they had talked to him so favourably of the post of the Natchez, that he was very desirous to go there, and the more so, as that place, being unprovided with a surgeon, might be more to his advantage. To satisfy me of the truth of what he told me, he went immediately and brought one of the old inhabitants, of whom I had bought my slave, who confirmed the account he had given me of the fineness of the country of the Natchez. The account of the old man, joined to many other advantages, to be found there, had made him think of abandoning the place where we were, to settle there; and he reckoned to be abundantly repaid for it in a little time. My slave heard the discourse that I have related, and as she began to understand French, and I the language of the country, she addressed herself to me thus: "Thou art going, then, to that country; the sky is much finer there; game is in much greater plenty; and as I have relations, who retired there in the war which we had with the French, they will bring us every thing we want: they tell me that country is very fine, that they live well in it, and to a good old age." Two days afterwards I told M. Hubert what I had heard of the country of the Natchez. He made answer, that he was {21} so persuaded of the goodness of that part of the country, that he was making ready to go there himself, to take up his grant, and to establish a large settlement for the company: and, continued he, "I shall be very glad, if you do the same: we shall be Company to one another, and you will unquestionably do your business better there than here." [Illustration: _Indian in summer time_] This determined me to follow his advice: I quitted my settlement, and took lodgings in the town, till I should find an {22} opportunity to depart, and receive some negroes whom I expected in a short time. [Footnote: Chap. VIII.] My stay at New Orleans appeared long, before I heard of the arrival of the negroes. Some days after the news of their arrival, M. Hubert brought me two good ones, which had fallen to me by lot. One was a young negro about twenty, with his wife of the same age; which cost me both together 1320 livres, or L. sterling. Two days after that I set off with them alone in a pettyaugre (a large canoe,) because I was told we should make much better speed in such a vessel, than in the boats that went with us; and that I had only to take powder and ball with me, to provide my whole company with game sufficient to maintain us; for which purpose it was necessary to make use of a paddle, instead of oars, which make too much noise for the game. I had a barrel of powder, with fifteen pounds of shot, which I thought would be sufficient for the voyage: but I found by experience, that this was not sufficient for the vast plenty of game that is to be met with upon that river, without ever going out of your way. I had not gone above twenty-eight leagues, to the grant of M. Paris du Vernai, when I was obliged to borrow of him fifteen pounds of shot more. Upon this I took care of my ammunition, and shot nothing but what was fit for our provision; such as wild ducks, summer ducks, teal, and saw-bills. Among the rest I killed a carancro, wild geese, cranes, and flamingo's; I likewise often killed young alligators; the tail of which was a feast for the slaves, as well as for the French and Canadian rowers. Among other things I cannot omit to give an account of a monstrous large alligator I killed with a musquet ball, as it lay upon the bank, about ten feet above the edge of the water. We measured it, and found it to be nineteen feet long, its head three feet and a half long, above two feet nine inches broad, and the other parts in proportion: at the belly it was two feet two inches thick; and it infected the whole air with the odor of musk. M. Mehane told me, he had killed one twenty-two feet long. {23} After several days navigation, we arrived at Tonicas on Christmas eve; where we heard mass from M. d' Avion, of the foreign missions, with whom we passed the rest of the holy days, on account of the good reception and kind invitation he gave us. I asked him, if his great zeal for the salvation of the natives was attended with any success; he answered me, that notwithstanding the profound respect the people shewed him, it was with the greatest difficulty he could get leave to baptize a few children at the point of death; that those of an advanced age excused themselves from embracing our holy religion because they are too old, say they, to accustom themselves to rules, that are so difficult to be observed; that the chief, who had killed the physician, that attended his only son in a distemper of which he died, had taken a resolution to fast every Friday while he lived, in remorse for his inhumanity with which he had been so sharply reproached by him. This grand chief attended both morning and evening prayers; the women and children likewise assisted regularly at them; but the men, who did not come very often, took more pleasure in ringing the bell. In other respects, they did not suffer this zealous pastor to want for any thing, but furnished him with whatever he desired. We were yet twenty-five leagues to the end of our journey to the Natchez, and we left the Tonicas, where we saw nothing interesting, if it were not several steep hills, which stand together; among which there is one that they name the White Hill, because they find in it several veins of an earth, that is white, greasy, and very fine, with which I have seen very good potters ware made. On the same hill there are veins of ochre, of which the Natchez had just taken some to stain their earthen Ware, which looked well enough; when it was besmeared with ochre, it became red on burning. At last we arrived at the Natchez, after a voyage of twenty-four leagues; and we put on shore at a landing-place, which is at the foot of a hill two hundred feet high, upon the top of which Fort Rosalie [Footnote: Fort Rosalie, in the country of the Natchez, was at first pitched upon for the metropolis of this colony. But though it be necessary to begin by a settlement near the sea; yet if ever Louisiana comes to be in a flourishing condition, as it may very well be, it appears to me, that the capital of it cannot be better situated than in this place. It is not subject to inundations of the river; the air is pure; the country very extensive; the land fit for every thing, and well watered; it is not at too great a distance from the sea, and nothing hinders vessels to go up to it. In fine, it is within reach of every place intended to be settled. Charlevoix, Hist. de la N. France, III. 415. This is on the east side of the Missisippi, and appears to be the first post on that river which we ought to secure.] is built, surrounded only with pallisadoes. {24} About the middle of the hill stands the magazine, nigh to some houses of the inhabitants, who are settled there, because the ascent is not so steep in that place; and it is for the same reason that the magazine is built there. When you are upon the top of this hill, you discover the whole country, which is an extensive beautiful plain, with several little hills interspersed here and there, upon which the inhabitants have built and made their settlements. The prospect of it is charming. On our arrival at the Natchez I was very well received by M. Loire de Flaucourt, storekeeper of this post, who regaled us with the game that abounds in this place; and after two days I hired a house near the fort, for M. Hubert and his family, on their arrival, till he could build upon his own plantation. He likewise desired me to choose two convenient parcels of land, whereon to settle two considerable plantations, one for the company, and the other for himself. I went to them in two or three days after my arrival, with an old inhabitant for my guide, and to shew me the proper places, and at the same time to choose a spot of ground for myself; this last I pitched upon the first day, because it is more easy to choose for one's self than for others. I found upon the main road that leads from the chief village of the Natchez to the fort, about an hundred paces from this last, a cabin of the natives upon the road side, surrounded with a spot of cleared ground, the whole of which I bought by means of an interpreter. I made this purchase with the more pleasure, as I had upon the spot, wherewithal to lodge me and my people, with all my effects: the cleared ground was about six acres, which would form a garden and a plantation for {25} tobacco, which was then the only commodity cultivated by the inhabitants. I had water convenient for my house, and all my land was very good. On one side stood a rising ground with a gentle declivity, covered with a thick field of canes, which always grow upon the rich lands; behind that was a great meadow, and on the other side was a forest of white walnuts (Hiecories) of nigh fifty acres, covered with grass knee deep. All this piece of ground was in general good, and contained about four hundred acres of a measure greater than that of Paris: the soil is black and light. The other two pieces of land, which M. Hubert had ordered me to look for, I took up on the border of the little river of the Natchez, each of them half a league from the great village of that nation, and a league from the fort; and my plantation stood between these two and the fort, bounding the two others. After this I took up my lodging upon my own plantation, in the hut I had bought of the Indian, and put my people in another, which they built for themselves at the side of mine; so that I was lodged pretty much like our wood-cutters in France, when they are at work in the woods. As soon as I was put in possession of my habitation, I went with an interpreter to see the other fields, which the Indians had cleared upon my land, and bought them all, except one, which an Indian would never sell to me: it was situated very convenient for me, I had a mind for it, and would have given him a good price; but I could never make him agree to my proposals. He gave me to understand, that without selling it, he would give it up to me, as soon as I should clear my ground to his; and that while he stayed on his own ground near me, I should always find him ready to serve me, and that he would go a-hunting and fishing for me. This answer satisfied me, because I must have had twenty negroes, before I could have been able to have reached him; they assured me likewise, that he was an honest man; and far from having any occasion to complain of him as a neighbour, his stay there was extremely serviceable to me. I had not been settled at the Natchez six months, when I found a pain in my thigh, which, however, did not hinder me {26} to go about my business. I consulted our surgeon about it, who caused me to be bleeded; on which the humour fell upon the other thigh, and fixed there with such violence, that I could not walk without extreme pain. I consulted the physicians and surgeons of New Orleans, who advised me to use aromatic baths; and if they proved of no service, I must go to France, to drink the waters, and to bathe in them. This answer satisfied me so much the less, as I was neither certain of my cure by that means, nor would my present situation allow me to go to France. This cruel distemper, I believe, proceeded from the rains, with which I was wet, during our whole voyage; and might be some effects of the fatigues I had undergone in war, during several campaigns I had made in Germany. As I could not go out of my hut, several neighbours were so good as to come and see me, and every day we were no less than twelve at table from the time of our arrival, which was on the fifth of January, 1720. Among the rest F. de Ville, who waited there, in his journey to the Illinois, till the ice, which began to come down from the north, was gone. His conversation afforded me great satisfaction in my confinement, and allayed the vexation I was under from my two negroes being run away. In the mean time my distemper did not abate, which made me resolve to apply to one of the Indian conjurers, who are both surgeons, divines, and sorcerers; and who told me he would cure me by sucking the place where I felt my pain. He made several scarifications upon the part with a sharp flint, each of them about as large as the prick of a lancet, and in such a form, that he could suck them all at once, which gave me extreme pain for the space of half an hour. The next day I found myself a little better, and walked about into my field, where they advised me to put myself in the hands of some of the Natchez, who, they said, did surprising cures, of which they told me many instances, confirmed by creditable people. In such a situation a man will do any thing for a cure, especially as the remedy, which they told me of, was very simple: it was only a poultice, which they put upon the part affected, and in eight days time I was able to walk to the fort, finding myself perfectly cured, as I have felt no return of my pain since that {27} time. This was, without doubt, a great satisfaction to a young man, who found himself otherwise in good health, but had been confined to the house for four months and a half, without being able to go out a moment; and gave me as much joy as I could well have, after the loss of a good negro, who died of a defluxion on the breast, which he catched by running away into the woods, where his youth and want of experience made him believe he might live without the toils of slavery; but being found by the Tonicas, constant friends of the French, who live about twenty leagues from the Nàtchez, they carried him to their village, where he and his wife were given to a Frenchman, for whom they worked, and by that means got their livelihood; till M. de Montplaisir sent them home to me. This M. de Montplaisir, one of the most agreeable gentlemen in the colony, was sent by the company from Clerac in Gascony, to manage their plantation at the Natchez, to make tobacco upon it, and to shew the people the way of cultivating and curing it; the company having learned, that this place produced excellent tobacco, and that the people of Clerac were perfectly well acquainted with the culture and way of managing it. CHAPTER VI. _The Voyage of the Author to_ Biloxi. _Description of that Place. Settlement of Grants. The Author discovers two Coppermines. His Return to the Natchez._ <b>The</b> second year after my settling among the Natchez, I went to New Orleans, as I was desirous to sell my goods and commodities myself, instead of selling them to the travelling pedlars, who often require too great a profit for their pains. Another reason that made me undertake this voyage, was to send my letters to France myself, which I was certainly informed, were generally intercepted. Before my departure, I went to the commandant of the fort, and asked him whether he had any letters for the government. I was not on very good terms of friendship with this commandant of the Natchez, who endeavoured to pay his court {28} to the governor, at the expence of others. I knew he had letters for M. de Biainville, although he told me he had none, which made me get a certificate from the commissary general of this refusal to my demand; and at the same time the commissary begged me to carry down a servant of the company, and gave me an order to pay for his maintenance. As I made no great haste, but stopt to see my friends, in my going down the river, the commandant had time to send his letters, and to write to the governor, that I refused to take them. As soon as I arrived at Biloxi, this occasioned M. de Biainville to tell me, with some coldness, that I refused to charge myself with his letters. Upon this I shewed him the certificate of the commissary general; to which he could give no other answer, than by telling me, that at least I could not deny, that I had brought away by stealth a servant of the company. Upon this I shewed him the other certificate of the commissary general, by which he desired the directors to reimburse me the charges of bringing down this servant, who was of no use to him above; which put the governor in a very bad humour. Upon my arrival at New Orleans I was informed, that there were several grantees arrived at New Biloxi. I thought fit then to go thither, both to sell my goods, and to get sure conveyance for my letters to France. Here I was invited to sup with M. d'Artaguette, king's lieutenant, who usually invited all the grantees, as well as myself. I there found several of the grantees, who were all my friends; and among us we made out a sure conveyance for our letters to France, of which we afterwards made use. Biloxi is situate opposite to Ship-Island, and four leagues from it. But I never could guess the reason, why the principal settlement was made at this place, nor why the capital should be built at it; as nothing could be more repugnant to good sense; vessels not being able to come within four leagues of it; but what was worse, nothing could be brought from them, but by changing the boats three different times, from a smaller size to another still smaller; after which they had to go upwards of an hundred paces with small carts through the water to unload the least boats. But what ought still to have {29} been a greater discouragement against making a settlement at Biloxi, was, that the land is the most barren of any to be found thereabouts; being nothing but a fine sand, as white and shining as snow, on which no kind of greens can be raised; besides, the being extremely incommoded with rats, which swarm there in the sand, and at that time ate even the very stocks of the guns, the famine being there so very great, that more than five hundred people died of hunger; bread being very dear, and flesh-meat still more rare. There was nothing in plenty but fish, with which this place abounds. This scarcity proceeded from the arrival of several grantees all at once; so as to have neither provisions, nor boats to transport them to the places of their destination, as the company had obliged themselves to do. The great plenty of oysters, found upon the coast, saved the lives of some of them, although obliged to wade almost up to their thighs for them, a gun-shot from the shore. If this food nourished several of them, it threw numbers into sickness; which was still more heightened by the long time they were obliged to be in the water. The grants were those of M. Law, who was to have fifteen hundred men, consisting of Germans, Provençals, &c. to form the settlement. His land being marked out at the Arkansas, consisted of four leagues square, and was erected into a duchy, with accoutrements for a company of dragoons, and merchandize for more than a million of livres. M. Levans, who was a trustee of it, had his chaise to visit the different posts of the grant. But M. Law soon after becoming bankrupt, the company seized on all the effects and merchandise; and but a few of those who engaged in the service of that grant, remained at the Arkansas; they were afterwards all dispersed and set at liberty. The Germans almost to a man settled eight leagues above, and to the west of the capital. This grant ruined near a thousand persons at L'Orient before their embarkation, and above two hundred at Biloxi; not to mention those who came out at the same time with me in 1718. All this distress, of which I was a witness at Biloxi, determined me to make an excursion a few leagues on the coast, in order to pass some days {30} with a friend, who received me with pleasure. We mounted horse to visit the interior part of the country a few leagues from the sea. I found the fields pleasant enough, but less fertile than along the Missisippi; as they have some resemblance of the neighbouring coast, which has scarce any other plants but pines, that run a great way, and some red and white cedars. When we came to the plain, I carefully searched every spot that I thought worth my attention. In consequence of the search I found two mines of copper, whose metal plainly appeared above ground. They stood about half a league asunder. We may justly conclude that they are very rich, as they thus disclose themselves on the surface of the earth. When I had made a sufficient excursion, and judged I could find nothing further to satisfy my curiosity, I returned to Biloxi, where I found two boats of the company, just preparing to depart for New Orleans, and a large pettyaugre, which belonged to F. Charlevoix the jesuit, whose name is well known in the republic of letters: with him I returned to New Orleans. Some time after my return from New Orleans to the Natchez, towards the month of March 1722, a phaenomenon happened, which frightened the whole province. Every morning, for eight days running, a hollow noise, somewhat loud, was heard to reach from the sea to the Illinois; which arose from the west. In the afternoon it was heard to descend from the east, and that with an incredible quickness; and though the noise seemed to bear on the water, yet without agitating it, or discovering any more wind on the river than before. This frightful noise was only the prelude of a most violent tempest. The hurricane, the most furious ever felt in the province, lasted three days. As it arose from the south-west and north-east, it reached all the settlements which were along the Missisippi; and was felt for some leagues more or less strong, in proportion to the greater or less distance: but in the places, where the force or height of the hurricane passed, it overturned every thing in its way, which was an extent of a large quarter of a league broad; so that one would take it for {31} an avenue made on purpose, the place where it passed being entirely laid flat, whilst every thing stood upright on each side. The largest trees were torn up by the roots, and their branches broken to pieces and laid flat to the earth, as were also the reeds of the woods. In the meadows, the grass itself, which was then but six inches high, and which is very fine, could not escape, but was trampled, faded, and laid quite flat to the earth. [Illustration: Indian in winter time] {32} The height of the hurricane passed at a league from my habitation; and yet my hose, which was built on piles, would have been overturned, had I not speedily propped it with a timber, with the great end in the earth, and nailed to the house with an iron hook seven or eight inches long. Several houses of our post were overturned. But it was happy for us in this colony, that the height of the hurricane passed not directly oer any post, but obliquely traversed the Missisippi, over a country intirely uninhabited. As this hurricane came from the south, it so swelled the sea, that the Missisippi flowed back against its current, so as to rise upwards of fifteen feet high. CHAPTER VII. _First War with the_ Natchez. _Cause of the War._ In the same year, towards the end of summer, we had the first war with the Natchez. The French had settled at the Natchez, without any opposition from these people; so far from opposing them, they did them a great deal of service, and gave them very material assistance in procuring provisions; for those, who were sent by the West India Comany with the first fleet, had been detained at New Orleans. Had it not been for the natives, the people must have perished by famine and distress: for, how excellent soever a new country it may be, it must be cleared, grubbed up, and sown, and then at least we are to wait the first harvest, or crop. But during all that time people must live, and the company was well apprized of this, as they had send, witht he eight hundred men they had transported to Louisiana, provisions for three years. The grantees and planters, obliged _to treat_, or truck for provisions with the Natchez, in consequence of that saw their funds wasted, and themselves incapable of forming so considerable a settlement, without this trucking, as necessary, as it was frequent. However, some benefit resulted from this; namely that the Natchez, enticed by the facility of trucking for goods, before unknown to them, as fusils, gun-powder, lead, brandy, linen, cloths, and other like things, by means of an exchange of what they abounded with, came to be more and more attached {33} to the French; and would have continued very useful friends, had not the little satisfaction which the commandant of Fort Rosalie had given them, for the misbehavior of one of his soldiers, alienated their minds. This fort covered the settlement of the Natchez, and protected that of St. Catharine, which was on the banks of the rivulet of the Natchez; but botht he defence and protection it afforded were very inconsiderable; for this fort was only pallisadoed, open at six breaches, without a ditch, and with a very weak garrison. On the other hand, the houses of the inhabitants, though considerably numerous, were of themselves of no strength; and then the inhabitants, dispersed in the country, each amidst his field, far from affording mutual assistance, as they would had they been in a body, stood each of them, upon any accident, in need of the assistance of others. A young soldier of Fort Rosalie had given some credit to an old warrior of a village of the Natchez; which was that of the White Apple, each village having its peculiar name: the warrior, in return, was to give him some corn. Towards the beginning of the winter 1723, this soldier lodging near the fort, the old warrior came to see him; the soldier insisted on his corn; the native answered calmly, that the corn was not yet dry enough to shake out the grain; that besides, his wife had been ill, and that he would pay him as soon as possible. The young man, little satisfied with this answer, threatened to cudgel the old man: upon which, this last, who was in the soldier's hut, affronted at this threat, told him, he should turn out, and try who was the best man. On this challenge, the soldier, calling out murder, brings the guard to his assistance. The guard being come, the young fellow pressed them to fire upon the warrior, who was returning to his village at his usual pace; a soldier was imprudent enough to fire: the old man dropt down. The commandant was soon apprized of what happened, and came to the spot; where the witnesses, both French and Natchez, informed him of the fact. Both justice and prudence demanded to take an exemplary punishment of the soldier; but he got off with a reprimand. After this the natives made a litter, and carried off their warrior, who died the {34} following night of his wounds, though the fusil was only charged with great shot. Revenge is the predominant passion of the people in America: so that we ought not to be surprised, if the death of this old warrior raised his whole village against the French. The rest of the nation took no part at first in the quarrel. The first effect of the resentment of the Natchez fell upon a Frenchman named M. Guenot, whom they surprised returning from the fort to St. Catharine, and upon another inhabitant, whom they killed in his bed. Soon after they attacked, all in a body, the settlement of St. Catharine, and the other below Fort Rosalie. It was at this last I had fixed my abode: I therefore saw myself exposed, like many others, to pay with my goods, and perhaps my life, for the rashness of a soldier, and the too great indulgence of his captain. But as I was already acquainted with the character of the people we had to deal with, I despaired not to save both. I therefore barricadoed myself in my house, and having put myself in a posture of defence, when they came in the night, according to their custom, to surprise me, they durst not attack me. This first attempt, which I justly imagined was to be followed by another, if not by many such, made me resolve, as soon as day came, to retire under the fort, as all the inhabitants also did, and thither to carry all the provisions I had at my lodge. I could execute only half of my scheme. My slaves having begun to remove the best things, I was scarce arrived under the fort, but the commandant begged I might put myself at the head of the inhabitants, to go to succour St. Catharine. He had already sent thither all his garrison, reserving only five men to guard the fort; but this succour was not sufficient to relieve the settlement, which the natives in great numbers vigorously straitned. I departed without delay: we heard the firing at a distance, but the noise ceased as soon as I was come, and the natives appeared to have retired: they had, doubtless, discovered me on my march, and the sight of a reinforcement which I had brought with me, deceived them. The officer who commanded the detachment of the garrison, and whom I relieved, returned {35} to the fort with his men; and the command being thus devolved on me, I caused all the Negroes to be assembled, and ordered them to cut down all the bushes; which covering the country, favoured the approach of the enemy, quite to the doors of the houses of that Grant. This operation was performed without molestation, if you except a few shot, fired by the natives from the woods, where they lay concealed on the other side of the rivulet; for the plain round St. Catharine being entirely cleared of every thing that could screen them, they durst not shew themselves any more. However, the commandant of Fort Rosalie sent to treat with the _Stung Serpent_; in order to prevail with him to appease that part of his nation, and procure a peace. As that great warrior was our friend, he effectually laboured therein, and hostilities ceased. After I had passed twenty-four hours in St. Catharine, I was relieved by a new detachment from the inhabitants, whom, in my turn, I relieved next day. It was on this second guard, which I mounted, that the village we had been at war with sent me, by their deputies, the _calumet_ or _pipe of peace_. I at first had some thoughts of refusing it, knowing that this honour was due to the commandant of the fort; and it appeared to me a thing so much the more delicate to deprive him of it, as we were not upon very good terms with each other. However, the evident risk of giving occasion to protract the war, by refusing it, determined me to accept of it; after having, however, taken the advice of those about me; who all judged it proper to treat these people gently, to whom the commandant was become odious. I asked the deputies, what they would have? They answered, faultering, _Peace_. "Good, said I; but why bring you the Calumet of Peace to me? It is to the Chief of the Fort you are to carry it, if you wish to have a Peace." "Our orders" said they, "are to carry it first to you, if you choose to receive it by only smoking therein: after which we will carry it to the Chief of the Fort; but if you refuse receiving it, our orders are to return." Upon this I told them, that I agreed to smoke in their pipe, on condition they would carry it to the Chief of the Fort. {36} They then made me an harangue; to which I answered, that it were best to resume our former manner of living together, and that the French and the _Red-men_ should entirely forget what had passed. To conclude, that they had nothing further to do, but to go and carry the Pipe to the Chief of the Fort, and then go home and sleep in peace. This was the issue of the first war we had with the Natchez, which lasted only three or four days. The commerce, or truck, was set again on the same footing it had been before; and those who had suffered any damage, now thought only how they might best repair it. Some time after, the Major General arrived from New Orleans, being sent by the Governor of Louisiana to ratify the peace; which he did, and mutual sincerity was restored, and became as perfect as if there had never been any rupture between us. It had been much to be wished, that matters had remained on so good a footing. As we were placed in one of the best and finest countries of the world; were in strict connection with the natives, from whom we derived much knowledge of the nature of the productions of the country, and of the animals of all sorts, with which it abounds; and likewise reaped great advantage in our traffic for furs and provisions; and were aided by them in many laborious works, we wanted nothing but a profound peace, in order to form solid settlements, capable of making us lay aside all thoughts of Europe: but Providence had otherwise ordered. The winter which succeeded this war was so severe, that a colder was never remembered. The rain fell in icicles in such quantities as to astonish the oldest Natchez, to whom this great cold appeared new and uncommon. Towards the autumn of this year I saw a phaenomenon which struck the superstitious with great terror: it was in effect so extraordinary, that I never remember to have heard of any thing that either resembled, or even came up to it. I had just supped without doors, in order to enjoy the cool of the evening; my face was turned to the west, and I sat before my table to examine some planets which had already appeared. {37} I perceived a glimmering light, which made me raise my eyes; and immediately I saw, at the elevation of about 45 degrees above the horizon, a light proceeding from the south, of the breadth of three inches, which went off to the north, always spreading itself as it moved, and made itself heard by a whizzing light like that of the largest sky-rocket. I judged by the eye that this light could not be above our atmosphere, and the whizzing noise which I heard confirmed me in that notion. {38} When it came in like manner to be about 45 degrees to the north above the horizon, it stopped short, and ceased enlargeing itself: in that place it appeared to be twenty inches broad; so that in its course, which had been very rapid, it formed the figure of a trumpet-marine, and left in its passage very lively sparks, shining brighter than those which fly from under a smith's hammer; but they were extinguished almost as fast as they were emitted. [Illustration: _Indian woman and daughter_ (on p. 37)] At the north elevation I just mentioned, there issued out with a great noise from the middle of the large end, a ball quite round, and all on fire: this ball was about six inches in diameter; it fell below the horizon to the north, and emitted, about twenty minutes after, a hollow, but very loud noise for the space of a minute, which appeared to come from a great distance. The light began to be weakened to the south, after emitting the ball, and at length disappeared, before the noise of the ball was heard. CHAPTER VIII. _The Governor surprized the_ Natchez _with seven hundred Men. Astonishing Cures performed by the Natives. The Author sends upwards of three hundred Simples to the Company._ M. De Biainville, at the beginning of the winter which followed this phaenomenonived very privately at our quarter of the Natchez, his march having been communicated to none but the Commandant of this Post, who had orders to seize all the Natchez that should come to the Fort that day, to prevent the news of his arrival being carried to their country men. He brought with him, in regular troops, inhabitants and natives, who were our allies, to the number of seven hundred men. Orders were given that all our settlers at the Natchez should repair before his door at midnight at the latest: I went thither and mixed with the crowd, without making myself known. We arrived two hours before day at the settlement of St. Catharine. The Commandant having at length found me out, {39} ordered me, in the King's name, to put myself at the head of the settlers among the Natchez, and to take the command upon me; and these he ordered to pay the same obedience to me as to himself. We advanced with great silence towards the village of the Apple. It may be easily seen that all this precaution was taken in order to surprise our enemies, who ought so much the less to expect this act of hostility, as they had fairly made peace with us, and as M. Paillou, Major General, had come and ratified this peace in behalf of the Governor. We marched to the enemy and invested the first hut of the Natchez, which we found separate; the drums, in concert with the fifes, beat the charge; we fired upon the hut, in which were only three men and two women. From thence we afterwards moved on to the village, that is, several huts that stood together in a row. We halted at three of them that lay near each other, in which between twelve and fifteen Natchez had entrenched themselves. By our manner of proceeding one would have thought that we came only to view the huts. Full of indignation that none exerted himself to fall upon them, I took upon me with my men to go round and take the enemy in rear. They took to their heels, and I pursued; but we had need of the swiftness of deer to be able to come up with them. I came so near, however, that they threw away their cloaths, to run with the greater speed. I rejoined our people, and expected a reprimand for having forced the enemy without orders; though I had my excuse ready. But here I was mistaken; for I met with nothing but encomiums. This war, of which I shall give no further detail, lasted only four days. M. de Biainville demanded the head of an old mutinous Chief of this village; and the natives, in order to obtain a peace, delivered him up. I happened to live at some distance from the village of the Apple, and very seldom saw any of the people. Such as lived nearer had more frequent visits from them; but after this war, and the peace which followed upon it, I never saw one of them. My neighbours who lived nearer to them saw but a few of them, even a long time after the conclusion of the war. The {40} natives of the other villages came but very seldom among us; and indeed, if we could have done well without them, I could have wished to have been rid of them for ever. But we had neither a flesh nor a fish-market; therefore, without them, we must have taken up with what the poultry-yard and kitchen-garden furnished; which would have been extremely inconvenient. I one day stopped the Stung Serpent, who was passing without taking notice of any one. He was brother to the Great Sun, and Chief of the Warriors of the Natchez. I accordingly called to him, and said, "We were formerly friends, are we no longer so?" He answered, _Noco_; that is, I cannot tell. I replied, "You used to come to my house; at present you pass by. Have you forgot the way; or is my house disagreeable to you? As for me, my heart is always the same, both towards you and all my friends. I am not capable of changing, why then are you changed?" He took some time to answer, and seemed to be embarrassed by what I said to him. He never went to the fort, but when sent for the Commandant, who put me upon sounding him; in order to discover whether his people still retained any grudge. He at length broke silence, and told me, "he was ashamed to have been so long without seeing me; but I imagined," said he, "that you were displeased at our nation; because among all the French who were in the war, you were the only one that fell upon us." "You are in the wrong," said I, "to think so. M. de Biainville being our War-chief, we are bound to obey him; in like manner as you, though a Sun, are obliged to kill, or cause to be killed, whomsoever your brother, the Great Sun orders to be put to death. Many other Frenchmen, besides me, sought an opportunity to attack your countrymen, in obedience to the orders of M. de Biainville; and several other Frenchmen fell upon the nearest hut, one of whom was killed by the first shot which the Natchez fired." He then said: "I did not approve, as you know, the war our people made upon the French to avenge the death of their {41} relation, seeing I made them carry the _pipe of peace_ to the French. This you well know, as you first smoked in the pipe yourself. Have the French two hearts, a good one today, and tomorrow a bad one? As for my brother and me, we have but one heart and one word. Tell me then, if thou art, as thou sayest, my true friend, what thou thinketh of all this, and shut thy mouth to every thing else. We know not what to think of the French, who, after having begun the war, granted a peace, and offered it of themselves; and then at the time we were quiet, believing ourselves to be at peace, people come to kill us, without saying a word." "Why," continued he, with an air of displeasure, "did the French come into our country? We did not go to seek them: they asked for land of us, because their country was too little for all the men that were in it. We told them they might take land where they pleased, there was enough for them and for us; that it was good the same sun should enlighten us both, and that we would walk as friends in the same path; and that we would give them of our provisions, assist them to build, and to labour in their fields. We have done so; is not this true? What occasion then had we for Frenchmen? Before they came, did we not live better than we do, seeing we deprive ourselves of a part of our corn, our game, and fish, to give a part to them? In what respect, then, had we occasion for them? Was it for their guns? The bows and arrows which we used, were sufficient to make us live well. Was it for their white, blue, and red blankets? We can do well enough with buffalo skins, which are warmer; our women wrought feather-blankets for the winter, and mulberry-mantles for the summer; which indeed were not so beautiful; but our women were more laborious and less vain than they are now. In fine, before the arrival of the French, we lived like men who can be satisfied with what they have; whereas at this day we are like slaves, who are not suffered to do as they please." To this unexpected discourse I know not what answer another would have made; but I frankly own, that if at my first address he seemed to be confused, I really was so in my turn. "My heart," said I to him, "better understands thy {42} reasons than my ears, though they are full of them; and though I have a tongue to answer, my ears have not heard the reasons of M. de Biainville, to tell them thee: but I know it was necessary to have the head he demanded, in order to a peace. When our Chiefs command us, we never require the reasons: I can say nothing else to thee. But to shew you that I am always your real friend, I have here a beautiful _pipe of peace_, which I wanted to carry to my own country. I know you have ordered all your warriors to kill some white eagles, in order to make one, because you have occasion for it. I give it you without any other design than to shew you that I reckon nothing dear to me, when I want to do you a pleasure." I went to look for it, and I gave it him, telling him, that it was _without design;_ that is, according to them, from no interested motive. The natives put as great a value on a _pipe of peace_ as on a gun. Mine was adorned with tinsel and silver wire: so that in their estimation my pipe was worth two guns. He appeared to be extremely well pleased with it; put it up hastily in his case, squeezed my hand with a smile, and called me his true friend. The winter was now drawing to a close, and in a little time the natives were to bring us bear-oil to truck. I hoped that by his means I should have of the best preferably to any other; which was the only compensation I expected for my pipe. But I was agreeably disappointed. He sent me a deer-skin of bear-oil, so very large that a stout man could hardly carry it, and the bearer told me, that he sent it to me as his true friend, _without design_. This deer-skin contained thirty-one pots of the measure of the country, or sixty-two pints Paris measure. Three days after, the Great Sun, his brother, sent me another deer-skin of the same oil, to the quantity of forty pints. The commonest sort sold this year at twenty sols a pint, and I was sure mine was not of the worst kind. For some days a _fistula lacrymalis_ had come into my left eye, which discharged an humour, when pressed, that portended danger. I shewed it to M. St. Hilaire, an able surgeon, who {43} had practised for about twelve years in the Hôtel Dieu at Paris. He told me it was necessary to use the fire for it; and that, notwithstanding this operation, my sight would remain as good as ever, only my eye would be blood-shot: and that if I did not speedily set about the operation, the bone of the nose would become carious. These reasons gave me much uneasiness, as having both to fear and to suffer at the same time: however, after I had resolved to undergo the operation, the Grand Sun and his brother came one morning very early, with a man loaded with game, as a present for me. The Great Sun observed I had a swelling in my eye, and asked me what was the matter with it. I shewed it him, and told him, that in order to cure it, I must have fire put to it; but that I had some difficulty to comply, as I dreaded the consequences of such an operation. Without replying, or in the least apprizing me, he ordered the man who brought the game to go in quest of his physician, and tell him, he waited for him at my house. The messenger and physician made such dispatch, that this last came in an hour after. The Great Sun ordered him to look at my eye, and endeavour to cure me: after examining it, the physician said, he would undertake to cure me with simples and common water. I consented to this with so much the greater pleasure and readiness, as by this treatment I ran no manner of risque. That very evening the physician came with his simples, all pounded together, and making but a single ball, which he put with the water in a deep bason, he made me bend my head into it, so as the eye affected stood dipt quite open in the water. I continued to do so for eight or ten days, morning and evening; after which, without any other operation, I was perfectly cured, and never after had any return of the disorder. It is easy from this relation to understand what dextrous physicians the natives of Louisiana are. I have seen them perform surprising cures on Frenchmen; on two especially, who had put themselves under the hands of a French surgeon {44} settled at this post. Both patients were about to undergo the grand cure; and after having been under the hands of the surgeon for some time, their heads swelled to such a degree, that one of them made his escape, with as much agility as a criminal would from the hands of justice, when a favourable opportunity offers. He applied to a Natchez physician, who cured him in eight days: his comrade continuing still under the French surgeon, died under his hands three days after the escape of his companion, whom I saw three years after in a state of perfect health. In the war which I lately mentioned, the Grand Chief of the Tonicas, our allies, was wounded with a ball, which went through his cheek, came out under the jaw, again entered his body at the neck, and pierced through to the shoulder-blade, lodging at last between the flesh and the skin: the wound had its direction in this manner; because when he received it, he happened to be in a stooping posture, as were all his men, in order to fire. The French surgeon, under whose care he was, and who dressed him with great precaution, was an able man, and spared no pains in order to effect a cure. But the physicians of this Chief, who visited him every day, asked the Frenchman what time the cure would take? he answered, six weeks at least: they returned no answer, but went directly and made a litter; spoke to their Chief, and put him on it, carried him off, and treated him in their own manner, and in eight days affected a complete cure. These are facts well known in the colony. The physicians of the country have performed many other cures, which, if they were to be all related, would require a whole volume apart; but I have confined myself to the three above mentioned, in order to shew that disorders frequently accounted almost incurable, are, without any painful operation, and in a short time, cured by physicians, natives of Louisiana. The West India Company being informed that this province produces a great many simples, whose virtues, known by the natives, afforded so easy a cure to all sorts of distempers, ordered M. de la Chaise, who was sent from France in quality of Director General of this colony, to cause enquiry to be made {45} into the simples proper for physick and for dying, by means of some Frenchmen, who might perhaps be masters of the secrets of the natives. I was pointed out for this purpose to M. de la Chaise, who was but just arrived, and who wrote to me, desiring my assistance in this enquiry; which I gave him with pleasure, and in which I exerted myself to my utmost, because I well knew the Company continually aimed at what might be for the benefit of the colony. After I thought I had done in that respect, what might give satisfaction to the Company, I transplanted in earth, put into cane baskets, above three hundred simples, with their numbers, and a memorial, which gave a detail of their virtues, and taught the manner of using them. I afterwards understood that they were planted in a botanic garden made for the purpose, by order of the Company. CHAPTER IX. _French Settlements, or Posts. The Post at Mobile. The Mouths of the Missisippi. The Situation and Description of_ New Orleans. The Settlement at Mobile was the first seat of the colony in this province. It was the residence of the Commandant General, the Commissary General, the Staff-officers, &c. As vessels could not enter the river Mobile, and there was a small harbour at Isle Dauphine, a settlement was made suited to the harbour, with a guardhouse for its security: so that these two settlements may be said to have made but one; both on account of their proximity, and necessary connection with each other. The settlement of Mobile, ten leagues, however, from its harbour, lies on the banks of the river of that name; and Isle Dauphine, over against the mouth of that river, is four leagues from the coast. Though the settlement of Mobile be the oldest, yet it is far from being the most considerable. Only some inhabitants remained there, the greatest part of the first inhabitants having left it, in order to settle on the river Missisippi, ever since New Orleans became the capital of the colony. That old post is the {46} ordinary residence of a King's Lieutenant, a Regulating Commissary, and a Treasurer. The fort, with four bastions, terraced and palisaded, has a garrison. This post is a check upon the nation of Choctaws, and cuts off the communication of the English with them; it protects the neighbouring nations, and keeps them in our alliance; in fine, it supports our peltry trade, which is considerable with the Choctaws and other nations. [Footnote: Fort Lewis at Mobile is built upon the river that bears the same name, which falls into the sea opposite to Dauphine island. The fort is about 15 or 16 leagues distant from that island; and is built of brick, fortified with four bastions, in the manner of Vauban, with half-moons, a covered way and glacis. There is a magazine in it, with barracks for the troops of the garrison, which is generally pretty numerous, and a flag for the commandant. I must own, I never could see for what reason this fort was built, or what could be the use of it. For although it is 120 leagues from the capital, to go down the river, yet it is from thence that they must have every thing that is necessary for the support of the garrison: and the soil is so bad, being nothing but sand, that it produces nothing but pines and firs, with a little pulse, which grows there but very indifferently: so that there are here but very few people. The only advantage of this place is, that the air is mild and healthful, and that it affords a traffick with the Spaniards who are near it. The winter is the most agreeable season, as it is mild, and affords plenty of game. But in summer the heats are excessive; and the inhabitants have nothing hardly to live upon but fish, which are pretty plentiful on the coast, and in the river. _Dumont_, II. 80.] The same reason which pointed out the necessity of this post, with respect to the Choctaws, also shewed the necessity of building a fort at Tombecbé, to check the English in their ambitious views on the side of the Chicasaws. That fort was built only since the war with the Chicasaws in 1736. Near the river Mobile stands the small settlement of the Pasca-Ogoulas; which consists only of a few Canadians, lovers of tranquillity, which they prefer to all the advantages they could reap from commerce. They content themselves with a frugal country life, and never go to New Orleans but for necessaries. From that settlement quite to New Orleans, by the way of Lake St. Louis, there is no post at present. Formerly, and {47} just before the building of the capital, there were the old and new Biloxi: settlements, which have deserved an oblivion as lasting as their duration was short. To proceed with order and perspicuity, we will go up the Missisippi from its mouth. Fort Balise is at the entrance of the Missisippi, in 29° degrees North Latitude, and 286° 30' of Longitude. This fort is built on an isle, at one of the mouths of the Missisippi. Tho' there are but seventeen feet water in the channel, I have seen vessels of five hundred ton enter into it. I know not why this entrance is left so neglected, as we are not in want of able engineers in France, in the hydraulic branch, a part of the mathematics to which I have most applyed myself. I know it is no easy matter so to deepen or hollow the channel of a bar, that it may never after need clearing, and that the expences run high: but my zeal for promoting the advantage of this colony having prompted me to make reflections on those passes, or entrances of the Missisippi, and being perfectly well acquainted both with the country and the nature of the soil, I dare flatter myself, I may be able to accomplish it, to the great benefit of the province, and acquit myself therein with honour, at a small charge, and in a manner not to need repetition. [Footnote: Seven leagues above the mouth of the river we meet with two other passes, as large as the middle one by which we entered; one is called the Otter Pass, and the other the East Pass; and they assure me, it is only by this last Pass that ships now go up or down the river, they having entirely deserted the ancient middle pass. _Dumont,_ I. 4. Many other bays and rivers, not known to our authors, lying along the bay of Mexico, to the westward of the Missisippi, are described by Mr. Coxe, in his account of Carolina, called by the French Louisiana.] I say, fort Balise is built upon an island; a circumstance, I imagine, sufficient to make it understood, that this fort is irregular; the figure and extent of this small island not admitting it to be otherwise. In going up the Missisippi, we meet with nothing remarkable before we come to the Detour aux Anglois, the English Reach: in that part the river takes a large compass; so that {48} the same wind, which was before fair, proves contrary in this elbow, or reach. For this reason it was thought proper to build two forts at that place, one on each side of the river, to check any attempts of strangers. These forts are more than sufficient to oppose the passage of an hundred sail; as ships can go up the river, only one after another, and can neither cast anchor, nor come on shore to moor. It will, perhaps, be thought extraordinary that ships cannot anchor in this place. I imagine the reader will be of my opinion, when I tell him, the bottom is only a soft mud, or ooze, almost entirely covered with dead trees, and this for upwards of an hundred leagues. As to putting on shore, it is equally impossible and needless to attempt it; because the place where these forts stand, is but a neck of land between the river and the marshes: now it is impossible for a shallop, or canoe, to come near to moor a vessel, in sight of a fort well guarded, or for an enemy to throw up a trench in a neck of land so soft. Besides, the situation of the two forts is such, that they may in a short time receive succours, both from the inhabitants, who are on the interior edge of the crescent, formed by the river, and from New Orleans, which is very near thereto. The distance from this place to the capital is reckoned six leagues by water, and the course nearly circular; the winding, or reach, having the figure of a C almost close. Both sides of the river are lined with houses, which afford a beautiful prospect to the eye; however, as this voyage is tedious by water, it is often performed on horseback by land. The great difficulties attending the going up the river under sail, particularly at the English Reach, for the reasons mentioned, put me upon devising a very simple and cheap machine, to make vessels go up with ease quite to New-Orleans. Ships are sometimes a month in the passage from Balise to the capital; whereas by my method they would not be eight days, even with a contrary wind; and thus ships would go four times quicker than by towing, or turning it. This machine might be deposited at Balise, and delivered to the vessel, in order to go up the current, and be returned again on its setting sail. It is besides proper to observe, that this machine would be no detriment {49} to the forts, as they would always have it in their power to stop the vessels of enemies, who might happen to use it. New Orleans, the capital of the colony, is situated to the East, on the banks of the Missisippi, in 30° of North Latitude. At my first arrival in Louisiana, it existed only in name; for on my landing I understood M. de Biainville, commandant general, was only gone to mark out the spot; whence he returned three days after our arrival at Isle Dauphine. He pitched upon this spot in preference to many others, more agreeable and commodious; but for that time this was a place proper enough: besides, it is not every man that can see so far as some others. As the principal settlement was then at Mobile, it was proper to have the capital fixed at a place from which there could be an easy communication with this post: and thus a better choice could not have been made, as the town being on the banks of the Missisippi, vessels, tho' of a thousand ton, may lay their sides close to the shore even at low water; or at most, need only lay a small bridge, with two of their yards, in order to load or unload, to roll barrels and bales, &c. without fatiguing the ship's crew. This town is only a league from St. John's creek, where passengers take water for Mobile, in going to which they pass Lake St. Louis, and from thence all along the coast; a communication which was necessary at that time. I should imagine, that if a town was at this day to be built in this province, a rising ground would be pitched upon, to avoid inundations; besides, the bottom should be sufficiently firm, for bearing grand stone edifices. Such as have been a good way in the country, without seeing stone, or the least pebble, in upwards of a hundred leagues extent, will doubtless say, such a proposition is impossible, as they never observed stone proper for building in the parts they travelled over. I might answer, and tell them, they have eyes, and see not. I narrowly considered the nature of this country, and found quarries in it; and if there were any in the colony I ought to find them, as my condition and profession of architect should have procured me the knowledge of {51} them. After giving the situation of the capital, it is proper I describe the order in which it is built. [Illustration: _Plan of New Orleans, 1720_ (on p. 50)] The place of arms is in the middle of that part of the town which faces the river; in the middle of the ground of the place of arms stands the parish church, called St. Louis, where the Capuchins officiate, whose house is to the left of the church. To the right stand the prison, or jail, and the guard-house: both sides of the place of arms are taken up by two bodies or rows of barracks. This place stands all open to the river. All the streets are laid out both in length and breadth by the line, and intersect and cross each other at right angles. The streets divide the town into sixty-six isles; eleven along the river lengthwise, or in front, and six in depth: each of those isles is fifty square toises, and each again divided into twelve emplacements, or compartments, for lodging as many families. The Intendant's house stands behind the barracks on the left; and the magazine, or warehouse-general behind the barracks on the right, on viewing the town from the river side. The Governor's house stands in the middle of that part of the town, from which we go from the place of arms to the habitation of the Jesuits, which is near the town. The house of the Ursulin Nuns is quite at the end of the town, to the right; as is also the hospital of the sick, of which the nuns have the inspection. What I have just described faces the river. On the banks of the river runs a causey, or mole, as well on the side of the town as on the opposite side, from the English Reach quite to the town, and about ten leagues beyond it; which makes about fifteen or sixteen leagues on each side the river; and which may be travelled in a coach or on horseback, on a bottom as smooth as a table. The greatest part of the houses is of brick; the rest are of timber and brick. The length of the causeys, I just mentioned, is sufficient to shew, that on these two sides of the Missisippi there are many habitations standing close together; each making a causey to secure his ground from inundations, which fail not to come every year with the spring: and at that time, if any ships {52} happen to be in the harbour of New Orleans, they speedily set sail; because the prodigious quantity of dead wood, or trees torn up by the roots, which the river brings down, would lodge before the ship, and break the stoutest cables. At the end of St. John's Creek, on the banks of the Lake St. Louis, there is a redoubt, and a guard to defend it. From this creek to the town, a part of its banks is inhabited by planters; in like manner as are the long banks of another creek: the habitations of this last go under the name of Gentilly. After these habitations, which are upon the Missisippi quite beyond the Cannes Brulées, Burnt Canes, we meet none till we come to the Oumas, a petty nation so called. This settlement is inconsiderable, tho' one of the oldest next to the capital. It lies on the east of the Missisippi. The Baton Rogue is also on the east side of the Missisippi, and distant twenty-six leagues from New Orleans: it was formerly the grant of M. Artaguette d'Iron: it is there we see the famouse cypress-tree of which a ship-carpenter offered to make two pettyaugres, one of sixteen, the other of fourteen tons. Some one of the first adventurers, who landed in this quarter, happened to say, that tree would make a fine walking-stick, and as cypress is a red wood, it was afterwards called le Baton Rouge. Its height could never be measured, it rises so out of sight. Two leagues higher up than le Baton Rouge, was the Grant of M. Paris du Vernai. This settlement is called Bayou-Ogoulas, from a nation of that name, which formerly dwelt here. It is on the west side of the Missisippi, and twenty-eight leagues from New Orleans. At a league on this side of Pointe Coupée, are les Petits Ecores, (little Cliffs) where was the grant of the Marquis de Mezieres. At this grant were a director and under-director; but the surgeon found out the secret of remaining sole master. The place is very beautiful, especially behind les Petits Ecores, where we go up by a gentle ascent. Near these cliffs, a rivulet falls into the Missisippi, into which a spring discharges its waters, which so attract the buffalos, that they are very often {53} found on its banks. 'Tis a pity this ground was deserted; there was enough of it to make a very considerable grant: a good water-mill might be guilt on the brook I just mentioned. At forty leagues from New Orleans lies a la Pointe Coupée, so called, because the Missisippi made there an elbow or winding, and formed the figure of a circle, open only about an hundred and odd toises, thro' which it made itself a shorter way, and where all its water runs at present. This was not the work of nature alone: two travellers, coming down the Missisippi, were forced to stop short at this place, because they observed at a distance the surff, or waves, to be very high, the wind beating against the current, and the river being out, so that they durst not venture to proceed. Just by them passed a rivulet, caused by the inundation, which might be a foot deep, by four or five feet broad, more or less. One of the travellers, seeing himself without any thing to do, took his fusil and followed the course of this rivulet, in hopes of killing some game. He had not gone an hundred toises, before he was put into a very great surprize, on perceiving a great opening, as when one is just getting out of a thick forest. He continues to advance, sees a large extent of water, which he takes for a lake; but turning on his left, he espies les Petits Ecores, just mentioned, and by experience he knew, he must go ten leagues to get thither: Upon this he knew, these were the waters of the river. He runs to acquaint his companion: this last wants to be sure of it: certain as they are both of it, they resolve, that it was necessary to cut away the roots, which stood in the passage, and to level the more elevated places. They attempted at length to pass their pettyaugre through, by pushing it before them. They succeeded beyond their expectation; the water which came on, aided them as much by its weight as by its depth, which was increased by the obstacle it met in its way: and they saw themselves in a short time in the Missisippi, ten leagues lower down than they were an hour before; or than they would have been, if they had followed the bed of the river, as they were formerly constrained to do. This little labour of our travellers moved the earth; the roots being cut away in part, proved no longer an obstacle to {54} the course of the water; the slope or descent in this small passage was equal to that in the river for the ten leagues of the compass it took; in fine, nature, though feebly aided, performed the rest. The first time I went up the river, its entire body of water passed through this part; and though the channel was only made six years before, the old bed was almost filled with the ooze, which the river had there deposited; and I have seen trees growing there of an astonishing size, that one might wonder how they should come to be so large in so short a time. In this spot, which is called la Pointe Coupée, the Cut-point, was the Grant of M. de Meuse, at present one of the most considerable posts of the colony, with a fort, a garrison, and an officer to command there. The river is on each side lined with inhabitants, who make a great deal of tobacco. There an Inspector resides, who examines and receives it, in order to prevent the merchants being defrauded. The inhabitants of the west side have high lands behind them, which form a very fine country, as I have observed above. Twenty leagues above this Cut-point, and sixty leagues from New Orleans, we meet with the Red River. In an island formed by that river, stands a French post, with a fort, a garrison, its commandant and officers. The first inhabitants who settled there, were some soldiers of that post, discharged after their time of serving was expired, who set themselves to make tobacco in the island. But the fine sand, carried by the wind upon the leaves of the tobacco, made it of a bad quality, which obliged them to abandon the island and settle on the continent, where they found a good soil, on which they made better tobacco. This post is called the Nachitoches, from a nation of that name, settled in the neighbourhood. At this post M. de St. Denis commanded. Several inhabitants of Louisiana, allured thither by the hopes of making soon great fortunes, because distant only seven leagues from the Spaniards, imagined the abundant treasures of New Mexico would pour in upon them. But in this they happened to be mistaken; for the Spanish post, called the Adaïes less money in it than the poorest village in Europe: the Spaniards being ill clad, ill fed, and always ready to buy {55} goods of the French on credit: which may be said in general of all the Spaniards of New Mexico, amidst all their mines of gold and silver. This we are well informed of by our merchants, who have dealt with the Spaniards of this post, and found their habitations and way of living to be very mean, and more so than those of the French. From the confluence of this Red River, in going up the Missisippi, as we have hitherto done, we find, about thirty leagues higher up, the post of the Natchez. Let not the reader be displeased at my saying often, _nearly_, or _about so many leagues_: we can ascertain nothing justly as to the distances in a country where we travel only by water. Those who go up the Missisippi, having more trouble, and taking more time than those who go down, reckon the route more or less long, according to the time in which they make their voyage; besides, when the water is high, it covers passes, which often shorten the way a great deal. The Natchez are situate in about 32° odd minutes of north latitude, and 280° of longitude. The fort at this post stands two hundred feet perpendicular above low-water mark. From this fort the point of view extends west of the Missisippi quite to the horizon, that is, on the side opposite to that where the fort stands, though the west side be covered with woods, because the foot of the fort stands much higher than the trees. On the same side with the fort, the country holds at a pretty equal height, and declines only by a gentle and almost imperceptible slope, insensibly losing itself from one eminence to another. The nation which gave name to this post, inhabited this very place at a league from the landing-place on the Missisippi, and dwelt on the banks of a rivulet, which has only a course of four or five leagues to that river. All travellers who passed and stopped here, went to pay a visit to the natives, the Natchez. The distance of the league they went to them is through so fine and good a country, the natives themselves were so obliging and familiar, and the women so amiable, that all travellers failed not to make the greatest encomiums both on the country, and on the native inhabitants. {56} The just commendations bestowed upon them drew thither inhabitants in such numbers, as to determine the Company to give orders for building a fort there, as well to support the French already settled, and those who should afterwards come thither, as to be a check on that nation. The garrison consisted only of between thirty and forty men, a Captain, a Lieutenant, Under Lieutenant, and two Serjeants. The Company had there a warehouse for the supply of the inhabitants, who were daily increasing in spite of all the efforts of one of the principal Superiors, who put all imaginable obstacles in the way: and notwithstanding the progress this settlement made, and the encomiums bestowed upon it, and which it deserved, God in his providence gave it up to the rage of its enemies, in order to take vengeance of the sins committed there; for without mentioning those who escaped the general massacre, there perished of them upwards of five hundred. Forty leagues higher up than the Natchez, is the river Yasou. The Grant of M. le Blanc, Minister, or Secretary at War, was settled there, four leagues from the Missisippi, as you go up this little river. [Footnote: The village of the Indians (Yasous) is a league from this settlement; and on one side of it there is a hill, on which they pretend that the English formerly had a fort; accordingly there are still some traces of it to be seen. _Dumont_, II. 296.] There a fort stands, with a company of men, commanded by a Captain, a Lieutenant, Under-Lieutenant, and two Serjeants. This company, together with the servants, were in the pay of this Minister. This post was very advantageously situated, as well for the goodness of the air as the quality of the soil, like to that of the Natchez, as for the landing-place, which was very commodious, and for the commerce with the natives, if our people but knew how to gain and preserve their friendship. But the neighbourhood of the Chicasaws, ever fast friends of the English, and ever instigated by them to give us uneasiness, almost cut off any hopes of succeeding. This post was on these accounts threatened with utter ruin, sooner or later; as actually happened in 1722, by means of those wretched Chicasaws; {57} who came in the night and murdered the people in the settlements that were made by two serjeants out of the fort. But a boy who was scalped by them was cured, and escaped with life. Sixty miles higher up than the Yasouz, and at the distance of two hundred leagues from New Orleans, dwell the Arkansas, to the west of the Missisippi. At the entrance of the river which goes by the name of that nation, there is a small fort, which defends that post, which is the second of the colony in point of time. It is a great pity so good and fine a country is distant from the sea upwards of two hundred leagues. I cannot omit mentioning, that wheat thrives extremely well here, without our being obliged ever to manure the land; and I am so prepossessed in its favour, that I persuade myself the beauty of the climate has a great influence on the character of the inhabitants, who are at the same time very gentle and very brave. They have ever had an inviolable friendship for the French, uninfluenced thereto either by fear or views of interest; and live with the French near them as brethren rather than as neighbours. In going from the Arkansas to the Illinois, we meet with the river St. Francis, thirty leagues more to the north, and on the west side of the Missisippi. There a small fort has been built since my return to France. To the East of the Missisippi, but more to the north, we also meet, at about thirty leagues, the river Margot, near the steep banks of Prud'homme: there a fort was also built, called Assumption, for undertaking an expedition against the Chicasaws, who are nearly in the same latitude. These two forts, after that expedition, were entirely demolished by the French, because they were thought to be no longer necessary. It is, however, probable enough, that this fort Assumption would have been a check upon the Chicasaws, who are always roving in those parts. Besides, the steep banks of Prud'homme contain iron and pit-coal. On the other hand, the country is very beautiful, and of an excellent quality, abounding with plains and meadows, which favour the excursions of the Chicasaws, and which they will ever continue to make upon us, till we have the address to divert them from their commerce with the English. {58} We have no other French settlements to mention in Louisiana, but that of the Illinois; in which part of the colony we had the first fort. At present the French settlement here is on the banks of the Missisippi, near one of the villages of the Illinois. [Footnote: They have, or had formerly, other settlements hereabouts, at Kaskaskies, fort Chartres, Tamaroas, and on the river Marameg, on the west side of the Missisippi, where they found those mines that gave rise to the Missisippi scheme in 1719. In 1742, when John Howard, Sallee and others, were sent from Virginia to view those countries, they were made prisoners by the French; who came from a settlement they had on an island in the Missisippi, a little above the Ohio, where they made salt, lead, &c. and went from thence to New Orleans, in a fleet of boats and canoes, guarded by a large armed schooner. _Report of the Government of Virginia_.] That post is commanded by one of the principal officers; and M. de Bois-Briant, who was lieutenant of the king, has commanded at it. Many French inhabitants both from Canada and Europe live there at this day; but the Canadians make three-fourths at least. The Jesuits have the Cure there, with a fine habitation and a mill; in digging the foundation of which last, a quarry of orbicular flat stones was found, about two inches in diameter, of the shape of a buffoon's cap, with six sides, whose groove was set with small buttons of the size of the head of a minikin or small pin. Some of these stones were bigger, some smaller; between the stones which could not be joined, there was no earth found. The Canadians, who are numerous in Louisiana, are most of them at the Illinois. This climate, doubtless, agrees better with them, because nearer Canada than any other settlement of the colony. Besides, in coming from Canada, they always pass through this settlement; which makes them choose to continue here. They bring their wives with them, or marry the French or India women. The ladies even venture to make this long and painful voyage from Canada, in order to end their days in a country which the Canadians look upon as a terrestrial paradise [Footnote: It is this that has made the French undergo so many long and perilous voyages in North-America, upwards of two thousand miles, against currents, cataracts, and boisterous winds on the lakes, in order to get to this settlement of the Illinois, which is nigh to the Forks of the Missisippi, the most important place in all the inland parts of North-America, to which the French will sooner or later remove from Canada; and there erect another Montreal, that will be much more dangerous and prejudicial to us, than ever the other in Canada was. They will here be in the midst of all their old friends and allies, and much more convenient to carry on a trade with them, to spirit them up against the English, &c. than ever they were at Montreal. To this settlement, where they likewise are not without good hopes of finding mines, the French will for ever be removing, as long as any of them are left in Canada.] {59} CHAPTER X. _The Voyages of the_ French _to the_ Missouris, Canzas, _and_ Padoucas. _The Settlements they in vain attempted to make in those Countries; with a Description of an extraordinary Phaenomenon._ The Padoucas, who lie west by northwest of the Missouris, happened at that time to be at war with the neighbouring nations, the Canzas, Othouez, Aiaouez, Osages, Missouris, and Panimahas, all in amity with the French. To conciliate a peace between all these nations and the Padoucas, M. de Bourgmont sent to engage them, as being our allies, to accompany him on a journey to the Padoucas, in order to bring about a general pacification, and by that means to facilitate the traffick or truck between them and us, and conclude an alliance with the Padoucas. For this purpose M. de Bourgmont set out on the 3d of July, 1724, from Fort Orleans, which lies near the Missouris, a nation dwelling on the banks of the river of that name, in order to join that people, and then to proceed to the Canzas, where the general rendezvous of the several nations was appointed. M. de Bourgmont was accompanied by an hundred Missouris, commanded by their Grand Chief, and eight other Chiefs of war, and by sixty-four Osages, commanded by four Chiefs of war, besides a few Frenchmen. On the sixth he joined the Grand Chief, six other Chiefs of war, and several Warriors of the Canzas, who presented him the Pipe of Peace, {60} and performed the honours customary on such occasions, to the Missouris and Osages. On the 7th they passed through extensive meadows and woods, and arrived on the banks of the river Missouri, over against the village of the Canzas. On the 8th the French crossed the Missouri in a pettyaugre, the Indians on floats of cane, and the horses were swam over. They landed within a gun-shot of the Canzas, who flocked to receive them with the Pipe; their Grand Chief, in the name of the nation, assuring M. de Bourgmont that all their warriors would accompany him in his journey to the Padoucas, with protestations of friendship and fidelity, confirmed by smoking the Pipe. The same assurances were made him by the other Chiefs, who entertained him in their huts, and [Footnote: It is thus they express their joy and caresses, at the sight of a person they respect.] rubbed him over and his companions. On the 9th M. de Bourgmont dispatched five Missouris to acquaint the Othouez with his arrival at the Canzas. They returned on the 10th, and brought word that the Othouez promised to hunt for him and his Warriors, and to cause provisions to be dried for the journey; that their Chief would set out directly, in order to wait on M. de Bourgmont, and carry him the word of the whole nation. The Canzas continued to regale the French; brought them also great quantities of grapes, of which the French made a good wine. On the 24th of July, at six in the morning, this little army set out, consisting of three hundred Warriors, including the Chiefs of the Canzas, three hundred women, about five hundred young people, and at least three hundred dogs. The women carried considerable loads, to the astonishment of the French, unaccustomed to such a sight. The young women also were well loaded for their years; and the dogs were made to trail a part of the baggage, and that in the following manner: the back of the dog was covered with a skin, with its pile on, then the dog was girthed round, and his breast-leather put on; and {61} taking two poles of the thickness of one's arm, and twelve feet long, they fastened their two ends half a foot asunder, laying on the dog's saddle the thong that fastened the two poles; and to the poles they also fastened, behind the dog, a ring or hoop, lengthwise, on which they laid the load. On the 28th and 29th the army crossed several brooks and small rivers, passed through several meadows and thickets, meeting every where on their way a great deal of game. On the 30th M. de Bourgmont, finding himself very ill, was obliged to have a litter made, in order to be carried back to Fort Orleans till he should recover. Before his departure he gave orders about two Padouca slaves whom he had ransomed, and was to send before him to that nation, in order to ingratiate himself by this act of generosity. These he caused to be sent by one Gaillard, who was to tell their nation, that M. de Bourgmont, being fallen ill on his intended journey to their country, was obliged to return home; but that as soon as he got well again, he would resume his journey to their country, in order to procure a general peace between them and the other nations. On the evening of the same day arrived at the camp the Grand Chief of the Othouez: who acquainted M. de Bourgmont, that a great part of his Warriors waited for him on the road to the Padoucas, and that he came to receive his orders; but was sorry to find him ill. At length, on the 4th of August, M. de Bourgmont set out from the Canzas in a pettyaugre, and arrived the 5th at Fort Orleans. On the 6th of September, M. de Bourgmont, who was still at Fort Orleans, was informed of the arrival of the two Padouca slaves on the 25th of August at their own nation; and that meeting on the way a body of Padouca hunters, a day's journey from their village, the Padouca slaves made the signal of their nation, by throwing their mantles thrice over their heads: that they spoke much in commendation of the generosity of M. de Bourgmont, who had ransomed them: told all he had done in order to a general pacification: in fine, extolled the French to such a degree, that their discourse, held in presence {62} of the Grand Chief and of the whole nation, diffused an universal joy that Gaillard told them, the flag they saw was the symbol of Peace, and the word of the Sovereign of the French: that in a little time the several nations would come to be like brethren, and have but one heart. The Grand Chief of the Padoucas was so well assured that the war was now at an end, that he dispatched twenty Padoucas with Gaillard to the Canzas, by whom they were extremely well received. The Padoucas, on their return home, related their good reception among the Canzas; and as a plain and real proof of the pacification meditated by the French, brought with them fifty of the Canzas and three of their women; who, in their turn, were received by the Padoucas with all possible marks of friendship. Though M. de Bourgmont was but just recovering of his illness; he, however, prepared for his departure, and on the 20th of September actually set out from Fort Orleans by water, and arrived at the Canzas on the 27th. Gaillard arrived on the 2nd of October at the camp of the Canzas, with three Chiefs of war, and three Warriors of the Padoucas, who were received by M. de Bourgmont with flag displayed, and other testimonies of civility, and had presents made them of several goods, proper for their use. On the 4th of October arrived at the Canzas the Grand Chief, and seven other Chiefs of war of the Othouez; and next day, very early, six Chiefs of war of the Aiaouez. M. de Bourgmant assembled all the Chiefs present, and setting them round a large fire made before his tent, rose up, and addressing himself to them, said, he was come to declare to them, in the name of his Sovereign, and of the Grand French Chief in the country, [Footnote: The Governor of Louisiana.] that it was the will of his Sovereign, they should all live in peace for the future, like brethren and friends, if they expected to enjoy his love and protection: and since, says he, you are here all assembled this day, it is good you conclude a peace, and all smoke in the same pipe. {63} The Chiefs of these different nations rose up to a man, and said with one consent, they were well satisfied to comply with his request; and instantly gave each other their pipes of peace. After an entertainment prepared for them, the Padoucas sung the songs, and danced the dances of peace; a kind of pantomimes, representing the innocent pleasures of peace. On the 6th of October, M. de Bourgmont caused three lots of goods to be made out; one for the Othouez, one for the Aiaouez, and one for the Panimahas, which last arrived in the mean time; and made them all smoke in the same pipe of peace. On the 8th M. de Bourgmont set out from the Canzas with all the baggage, and the flag displayed, at the head of the French and such Indians as he had pitched on to accompany him, in all forty persons. The goods intended for presents were loaded on horses. As they set out late, they travelled but five leagues, in which they crossed a small river and two brooks, in a fine country, with little wood. The same day Gaillard, Quenel, and two Padoucas were dispatched to acquaint their nation with the march of the French. That day they travelled ten leagues, crossed one river and two brooks. The 10th they made eight leagues, crossed two small rivers and three brooks. To their right and left they had several small hills, on which one could observe pieces of rock even with the ground. Along the rivers there is found a slate, and in the meadows, a reddish marble, standing out of the earth, one, two, and three feet; some pieces of it upwards of six feet in diameter. The 11th they passed over several brooks and a small river, and then the river of the Canzas, which had only three feet water. Further on, they found several brooks, issuing from the neighbouring little hills. The river of the Canzas runs directly from west to east, and falls into the Missouri; is very great in floods, because, according to the report of the Padoucas, it comes a great way off. The woods, which border this river, afford a retreat to numbers of buffaloes and other game. On the left were seen great eminences, with hanging rocks. {64} The 12th of October, the journey, as the preceding day, was extremely diversified by the variety of objects. They crossed eight brooks, beautiful meadows, covered with herds of elks and buffaloes. To the right the view was unbounded, but to the left small hills were seen at a distance, which from time to time presented the appearance of ancient castles. The 13th, on their march they saw the meadows covered almost entirely with buffaloes, elks and deer; so that one could scarce distinguish the different herds, so numerous and so intermixed they were. The same day they passed through a wood almost two leagues long, and a pretty rough ascent; a thing which seemed extraordinary, as till then they only met with little groves, the largest of which scarce contained an hundred trees, but straight as a cane; groves too small to afford a retreat to a quarter of the buffaloes and elks seen there. The 14th the march was retarded by ascents and descents; from which issued many springs of an extreme pure water, forming several brooks, whose waters uniting make little rivers that fall into the river of the Canzas: and doubtless it is this multitude of brooks which traverse and water these meadows, extending a great way out of sight, that invite those numerous herds of buffaloes. The 15th they crossed several brooks and two little rivers. It is chiefly on the banks of the waters that we find those enchanting groves, adorned with grass underneath, and so clear of underwood, that we may there hunt down the stag with ease. The 16th they continued to pass over a similar landscape, the beauties of which were never cloying. Besides the larger game, these groves afforded also a retreat to flocks of turkeys. The 17th they made very little way, because they wanted to get into the right road, from which they had strayed the two preceding days, which they at length recovered; and, at a small distance from their camp, saw an encampment of the Padoucas, which appeared to have been quitted only about eight days before. This yielded them so much the more pleasure, as it shewed the nearness of that nation, which made them encamp, after having travelled only six leagues, in order {65} to make signals from that place, by setting fire to the parts of the meadows which the general fire had spared. In a little time after the signal was answered in the same manner; and confirmed by the arrival of two Frenchmen, who had orders given them to make the signals. On the 18th they met a little river of brackish water; on the banks of which they found another encampment of the Padoucas, which appeared to have been abandoned but four days before: at half a league further on, a great smoke was seen to the west, at no great distance off, which was answered by setting fire to the parts of the meadows, untouched by the general fire. About half an hour after, the Padoucas were observed coming at full gallop with the flag which Gaillard had left them on his first journey to their country. M. de Bourgmont instantly ordered the French under arms, and at the head of his people thrice saluted these strangers with his flag, which they also returned thrice, by raising their mantles as many times over their heads. After this first ceremony, M. de Bourgmont made them all sit down and smoke in the Pipe of Peace. This action, being the seal of the peace, diffused a general joy, accompanied with loud acclamations. The Padoucas, after mounting the French and the Indians who accompanied them, on their horses, set out for their camp: and after a journey of three leagues, arrived at their encampment; but left a distance of a gun-shot between the two camps. The day after their arrival at the Padoucas, M. de Bourgmont caused the goods allotted for this nation to be unpacked, and the different species parcelled out, which he made them all presents of.[Footnote: Red and blue Limburgs, shirts, fusils, sabres, gun-powder, ball, musket-flints, gunscrews, mattocks, hatchets, looking-glasses, Flemish knives, wood cutters knives, clasp-knives, scissars, combs, bells, awls, needles, drinking glasses, brass-wire, boxes, rings, &c.] After which M. de Bourgmont sent for the Grand Chief and other Chiefs of the Padoucas, who came to the camp to the number of two hundred: and placing himself between them and {66} the goods thus parcelled and laid out to view, told them, he was sent by his Sovereign to carry them the word of peace, this flag, and these goods, and to exhort them to live as brethren with their neighbours the Panimahas, Aiaouez, Othouez, Canzas, Missouris, Osages, and Illinois, to traffick and truck freely together, and with the French. He at the same time gave the flag to the Grand Chief of the Padoucas, who received it with demonstrations of respect, and told him, I accept this flag, which you present to me on the part of your Sovereign: we rejoice at our having peace with all the nations you have mentioned; and promise in the name of our nation never to make war on any of your allies; but receive them, when they come among us, as our brethren; as we shall, in like manner, the French, and conduct them, when they want to go to the Spaniards, who are but twelve days journey from our village, and who truck with us in horses, of which they have such numbers, they know not what to do with them; also in bad hatchets of a soft iron, and some knives, whose points they break off, lest we should use them one day against themselves. You may command all my Warriors; I can furnish you with upwards of two thousand. In my own, and in the name of my whole nation, I entreat you to send some Frenchmen to trade with us; we can supply them with horses, which we truck with the Spaniards for buffalo-mantles, and with great quantities of furs. Before I quit the Padoucas, I shall give a summary of their manners; it may not, perhaps, be disagreeable to know in what respects they differ from other Indian nations.[Footnote: The Author should likewise have informed us of the fate of those intended settlements of the French, which Dumont tells us were destroyed, and all the French murdered by the Indians, particularly among the Missouris; which is confirmed below in book 11. ch. 7.] The Padoucas, who live at a distance from the Spaniards, cultivate no grain, and live only on hunting. But they are not to be considered as a wandering nation, tho' employed in hunting winter and summer; seeing they have large villages, consisting of a great number of cabins, which contain very numerous families: these are their permanent abodes; from which a {67} hundred hunters set out at a time with their horses, their bows, and a good stock of arrows. They go thus two or three days journey from home, where they find herds of buffaloes, the least of which consists of a hundred head. They load their horses with their baggage, tents and children, conducted by a man on horseback: by this means the men, women, and young people travel unencumbered and light, without being fatigued by the journey. When come to the hunting-spot, they encamp near a brook, where there is always wood; the horses they tie by one of their fore-feet with a string to a stake or bush. Next morning they each of them mount a horse, and proceed to the first herd, with the wind at their back, to the end the buffaloes may scent them, and take to flight, which they never fail to do, because they have a very quick scent. Then the hunters pursue them close at an easy gallop, and in a crescent, or half ring, till they hang out the tongue through fatigue, and can do no more than just walk: the hunters then dismount, point a dart at the extremity of the shoulder, and kill each of them one cow, sometimes more: for, as I said above, they never kill the males. Then they flay them, take out the entrails, and cut the carcasse in two; the head, feet, and entrails they leave to the wolves and other carnivorous animals: the skin they lay on the horse, and on that the flesh, which they carry home. Two days after they go out again; and then they bring home the meat stript from the bones; the women and young people dress it in the Indian fashion; while the men return for some days longer to hunt in the same manner. They carry home their dry provisions, and let their horses rest for three or four days: at the end of which, those who remained in the village, set out with the others to hunt in the like manner; which has made ignorant travellers affirm this people was a wandering nation. If they sow little or no maiz, they as little plant any citruis, never any tobacco; which last the Spaniards bring them in rolls, along with the horses they truck with them for buffalo-mantles. The nation of the Padoucas is very numerous, extends almost two hundred leagues, and they have villages quite close {68} to the Spaniards of New Mexico. They are acquainted with silver, and made the French understand they worked at the mines. The inhabitants of the villages at a distance from the Spaniards, have knives made of fire-stone, (_pierre de feu_,) of which they also make hatchets; the largest to fell middling and little trees with; the less, to flay and cut up the beasts they kill. These people are far from being savage, nor would it be a difficult matter to civilize them; a plain proof they have had long intercourse with the Spaniards. The few days the French stayed among them, they were become very familiar, and would fain have M. de Bourgmont leave some Frenchmen among them; especially they of the village at which the peace was concluded with the other nations. This village consisted of an hundred and forty huts, containing about eight hundred warriors, fifteen hundred women, and at least two thousand children, some Padoucas having four wives. When they are in want of horses, they train up great dogs to carry their baggage. The men for the most part wear breeches and stockings all of a piece, made of dressed skins, in the manner of the Spaniards: the women also wear petticoats and bodices all of a piece, adorning their waists with fringes of dressed skins. They are almost without any European goods among them, and have but a faint knowledge of them. They knew nothing of fire-arms before the arrival of M. de Bourgmont; were much frighted at them; and on hearing the report, quaked and bowed their heads. They generally go to war on horseback, and cover their horses with dressed leather, hanging down quite round, which secures them from darts. All we have hitherto remarked is peculiar to this people, besides the other usages they have in common with the nations of Louisiana. On the 22nd of October, M. de Bourginont set out from the Padoucas, and travelled only five leagues that day: the 23d, and the three following days, he travelled in all forty leagues: the 27th, six leagues: the 28th, eight leagues: the 29th, six leagues; and the 30th, as many: the 31st, he travelled only four leagues, and that day arrived within half a league of the Canzas. From the Padoucas to the Canzas, proceeding always {69} east, we may now very safely reckon sixty-five leagues and a half. The river of the Canzas is parallel to this route. On the 1st of November they all arrived on the banks of the Missouri. M. de Bourgmont embarked the 2d on a canoe of skins; and at length, on the 5th of November, arrived at Fort Orleans. I shall here subjoin the description of one of these canoes. They choose for the purpose branches of a white and supple wood, such as poplar; which are to form the ribs or curves, and are fastened on the outside with three poles, one at bottom and two on the sides, to form the keel; to these curves two other stouter poles are afterwards made fast, to form the gunnels; then they tighten these sides with cords, the length of which is in proportion to the intended breadth of the canoe: after which they tie fast the ends. When all the timbers are thus disposed, they sew on the skins, which they take care previously to soak a considerable time to render them manageable. From the account of this journey, extracted and abridged from M. de Bourgmont's Journal, we cannot fail to observe the care and attention necessary to be employed in such enterprizes; the prudence and policy requisite to manage the natives, and to behave with them in an affable manner. If we view these nations with an eye to commerce, what advantages might not be derived from them, as to furs? A commerce not only very lucrative, but capable of being carried on without any risque; especially if we would follow the plan I am to lay down under the article Commerce. The relation of this journey shews, moreover, that Louisiana maintains its good qualities throughout; and that the natives of North America derive their origin from the same country, since at bottom they all have the same manners and usages, as also the same manner of speaking and thinking. I, however, except the Natchez, and the people they call their brethren, who have preserved festivals and ceremonies, which clearly shew they have a far nobler origin. Besides, the richness of their language distinguishes them from all those other people that come from Tartary; whose language, on the {70} contrary, is very barren: but if they resemble the others in certain customs, they were constrained thereto from the ties of a common society with them, as in their wars, embassies, and in every thing that regards the common interests of these nations. Before I put an end to this chapter, I shall relate an extraordinary phænomenon which appeared in Louisiana. Towards the end of May 1726, the sun was then concealed for a whole day by large clouds, but very distinct one from another; they left but little void space between, to permit the view of the azure sky, and but in very few places: the whole day was very calm; in the evening especially these clouds were entirely joined; no sky was to be seen; but all the different configurations of the clouds were distinguishable: I observed they stood very high above the earth. The weather being so disposed, the sun was preparing to set. I saw him in the instant he touched the horizon, because there was a little clear space between that and the clouds. A little after, these clouds turned luminous, or reflected the light: the contour or outlines of most of them seemed to be bordered with gold, others but with a faint tincture thereof. It would be a very difficult matter to describe all the beauties which these different colourings presented to the view: but the whole together formed the finest prospect I ever beheld of the kind. I had my face turned to the east; and in the little time the sun formed this decoration, he proceeded to hide himself more and more; when sufficiently low, so that the shadow of the earth could appear on the convexity of the clouds, there was observed as if a veil, stretched north to south, had concealed or removed the light from off that part of the clouds which extended eastwards, and made them dark, without hindering their being perfectly well distinguished; so that all on the same line were partly luminous, partly dark. This very year I had a strong inclination to quit the post at the Natchez, where I had continued for eight years. I had taken that resolution, notwithstanding my attachment to that {71} settlement. I sold off my effects and went down to New Orleans, which I found greatly altered by being entirely built. I intended to return to Europe; but M. Perier, the Governor, pressed me so much, that I accepted the inspection of the plantation of the Company; which, in a little time after, became the King's. CHAPTER XI. _The War with the_ Chitimachas. _The Conspiracy of the Negroes against the_ French. _Their Execution._ Before my arrival in Louisiana, we happened to be at war with the nation of the Chitimachas; owing to one of that people, who being gone to dwell in a bye-place on the banks of the Missisippi, had assassinated M. de St. Come, a Missionary of that colony; who, in going down the river, imagined he might in safety retire into this man's hut for a night. M. de Biainville charged the whole nation with this assassination; and in order to save his own people, caused them to be attacked by several nations in alliance with the French. Prowess is none of the greatest qualities of the Indians, much less of the Chitimachas. They were therefore worsted, and the loss of their bravest warriors constrained them to sue for peace. This the Governor granted, on condition that they brought him the head of the assassin; which they accordingly did, and concluded a peace by the ceremony of the Calumet, hereafter described. At the time the succours were expected from France, in order to destroy the Natchez, the negroes formed a design to rid themselves of all the French at once, and to settle in their room, by making themselves masters of the capital, and of all the property of the French. It was discovered in the following manner. A female negroe receiving a violent blow from a French soldier for refusing to obey him, said in her passion, that the French should not long insult negroes. Some Frenchmen overhearing these threats, brought her before the Governor, {72} who sent her to prison. The Judge Criminal not being able to draw any thing out of her, I told the Governor, who seemed to pay no great regard to her threats, that I was of opinion, that a man in liquor, and a woman in passion, generally speak truth. It is therefore highly probable, said I that there is some truth in what she said: and if so, there must be some conspiracy ready to break out, which cannot be formed without many negroes of the King's plantation being accomplices therein: and if there are any, I take upon me, said I, to find them out, and arrest them, if necessary, without any disorder or tumult. The Governor and the whole Court approved of my reasons: I went that very evening to the camp of the negroes, and from hut to hut, till I saw a light. In this hut I heard them talking together of their scheme. One of them was my first commander and my confidant, which surprised me greatly; his name was Samba. I speedily retired for fear of being discovered; and in two days after, eight negroes, who were at the head of the conspiracy, were separately arrested, unknown to each other, and clapt in irons without the least tumult. The day after, they were put to the torture of burning matches, which, though several times repeated, could not bring them to make any confession. In the mean time I learnt that Samba had in his own country been at the head of the revolt by which the French lost Fort Arguin; and when it was recovered again by M. Perier de Salvert, one of the principal articles of the peace was, that this negro should be condemned to slavery in America: that Samba, on his passage, had laid a scheme to murder the crew, in order to become master of the ship; but that being discovered, he was put in irons, in which he continued till he landed in Louisiana. I drew up a memorial of all this; which was read before Samba by the Judge Criminal; who, threatening him again with torture, told him, he had ever been a seditious fellow: upon which Samba directly owned all the circumstances of the conspiracy; and the rest being confronted with him, confessed {73} also: after which, the eight negroes were condemned to be broke alive on the wheel, and the woman to be hanged before their eyes; which was accordingly done, and prevented the conspiracy from taking effect. CHAPTER XII. _The War of the Natchez. Massacre of the_ French _in 1729. Extirpation of the_ Natchez _in 1730._ In the beginning of the month of December 1729, we heard at New Orleans, with the most affecting grief, of the massacre of the French at the post of the Natchez, occasioned by the imprudent conduct of the Commandant. I shall trace that whole affair from its rise. The Sieur de Chopart had been Commandant of the post of the Natchez, from which he was removed on account of some acts of injustice. M. Perier, Commandant General, but lately arrived, suffered himself to be prepossessed in his favour, on his telling him, that he had commanded that post with applause: and thus he obtained the command from M. Perier, who was unacquainted with his character. This new Commandant, on taking possession of his post, projected the forming one of the most eminent settlements of the whole colony. For this purpose he examined all the grounds unoccupied by the French, but could not find any thing that came up to the grandeur of his views. Nothing but the village of the White Apple, a square league at least in extent, could give him satisfaction; where he immediately resolved to settle. This ground was distant from the fort about two leagues. Conceited with the beauty of his project, the Commandant sent for the Sun of that village to come to the fort. The Commandant, upon his arrival at the fort, told him, without further ceremony, that he must look out for another ground to build his village on, as he himself resolved, as soon as possible, to build on the village of the Apple; that he must directly clear the huts, and retire somewhere else. The better to cover his design, he gave out, that it was necessary for the {74} French to settle on the banks of the rivulet, where stood the Great Village, and the abode of the Grand Sun. The Commandant, doubtless, supposed that he was speaking to a slave, whom we may command in a tone of absolute authority. But he knew not that the natives of Louisiana are such enemies to a state of slavery, that they prefer death itself thereto; above all, the Suns, accustomed to govern despotically, have still a greater aversion to it. The Sun of the Apple thought, that if he was talked to in a reasonable manner, he might listen to him: in this he had been right, had he to deal with a reasonable person. He therefore made answer, that his ancestors had lived in that village for as many years as there were hairs in his double cue; and therefore it was good they should continue there still. Scarce had the interpreter explained this answer to the Commandant, but he fell into a passion, and threatened the Sun, if he did not quit his village in a few days, he might repent it. The Sun replied, when the French came to ask us for lands to settle on, they told us there was land enough still unoccupied, which they might take; the same sun would enlighten them all, and all would walk in the same path. He wanted to proceed, farther in justification of what he alleged; but the Commandant, who was in a passion, told him, he was resolved to be obeyed, without any further reply. The Sun, without discovering any emotion or passion, withdrew; only saying, he was going to assemble the old men of his village, to hold a council on this affair. He actually assembled them: and in this council it was resolved to represent to the Commandant, that the corn of all the people of their village was already shot a little out of the earth, and that all the hens were laying their eggs; that if they quitted their village at present, the chickens and corn would be lost both to the French and to themselves; as the French were not numerous enough to weed all the corn they had sown in their fields. This resolution taken, they sent to propose it to the Commandant, who rejected it with a menace to chastise them if they did not obey in a very short time, which he prefixed. {75} The Sun reported this answer to his council, who debated the question, which was knotty. But the policy of the old men was, that they should propose to the Commandant, to be allowed to stay in their village till harvest, and till they had time to dry their corn, and shake out the grain; on condition each hut of the village should pay him in so many moons (months,) which they agreed on, a basket of corn and a fowl; that this Commandant appeared to be a man highly self-interested; and that this proposition would be a means of gaining time, till they should take proper measures to withdraw themselves from the tyrrany of the French. The Sun returned to the Commandant, and proposed to pay him the tribute I just mentioned, if he waited till the first colds, (winter;) and then the corn would be gathered in, and dry enough to shake out the grain; that thus they would not be exposed to lose their corn, and die of hunger: that the Commandant himself would find his account in it; and that as soon as any corn was shaken out, they should bring him some. The avidity of the Commandant made him accept the proposition with joy, and blinded him with regard to the consequences of his tyrrany. He, however, pretended that he agreed to the offer out of favour, to do a pleasure to a nation so beloved, and who had ever been good friends of the French. The Sun appeared highly satisfied to have obtained a delay sufficient for taking the precautions necessary to the security of the nation; for he was by no means the dupe of the feigned benevolence of the Commandant. The Sun, upon his return, caused the council to be assembled; told the old men, that the French Commandant had acquiesced in the offers which he had made him, and granted the term of time they demanded. He then laid before them, that it was necessary wisely to avail themselves of this time, in order to withdraw themselves from the proposed payment and tyrannic domination of the French, who grew dangerous in proportion as they multiplied. That the Natchez ought to remember the war made upon them, in violation of the peace concluded between them: that this war having been made upon their village alone, they ought to consider of the surest means {76} to take a just and bloody vengeance: that this enterprise being of the utmost consequence, it called for much secrecy, for solid measures, and for much policy: that thus it was proper to cajole the French Chief more than ever: that this affair required some days to reflect on, before they came to a resolution therein, and before it should be proposed to the Grand Sun and his council: that at present they had only to retire; and in a few days he would assemble them again, that they might then determine the part they were to act. In five or six days he brought together the old men, who in that interval were consulting with each other: which was the reason that all the suffrages were unanimous in the same and only means of obtaining the end they proposed to themselves, which was the entire destruction of the French in this province. The Sun, seeing them all assembled, said: "You have had time to reflect on the proposition I made you; and so I imagine you will soon set forth the best means how to get rid of your bad neighbours without hazard." The Sun having done speaking, the oldest rose up, saluted his Chief after his manner, and said to him: "We have a long time been sensible that the neighbourhood of the French is a greater prejudice than benefit to us: we, who are old men, see this; the young see it not. The wares of the French yield pleasure to the youth; but in effect, to what purpose is all this, but to debauch the young women, and taint the blood of the nation, and make them vain and idle? The young men are in the same case; and the married must work themselves to death to maintain their families, and please their children. Before the French came amongst us, we were men, content with what we had, and that was sufficient: we walked with boldness every road, because we were then our own masters: but now we go groping, afraid of meeting thorns, we walk like slaves, which we shall soon be, since the French already treat us as if we were such. When they are sufficiently strong, they will no longer dissemble. For the least fault of our young people, they will tie them to a post, and whip them as they do their black slaves. Have they not {77} already done so to one of our young men; and is not death preferable to slavery?" Here he paused a while, and after taking breath, proceeded thus: "What wait we for? Shall we suffer the French to multiply, till we are no longer in a condition to oppose their efforts? What will the other nations say of us, who pass for the most ingenious of all the Red-men? They will then say, we have less understanding than other people. Why then wait we any longer? Let us set ourselves at liberty, and show we are really men, who can be satisfied with what we have. From this very day let us begin to set about it, order our women to get provisions ready, without telling them the reason; go and carry the Pipe of Peace to all the nations of this country; make them sensible, that the French being stronger in our neighbourhood than elsewhere, make us, more than others, feel that they want to enslave us; and when become sufficiently strong, will in like manner treat all the nations of the country; that it is their interest to prevent so great a misfortune; and for this purpose they have only to join us, and cut off the French to a man, in one day and one hour; and the time to be that on which the term prefixed and obtained of the French Commandant, to carry him the contribution agreed on, is expired; the hour to be the quarter of the day (nine in the morning;) and then several warriors to go and carry him the corn, as the beginning of their several payments, also carry with them their arms, as if going out to hunt: and that to every Frenchman in a French house, there shall be two or three Natchez; to ask to borrow arms and ammunition for a general hunting-match, on account of a great feast, and to promise to bring them meat; the report of the firing at the Commandant's, to be the signal to fall at once upon, and kill the French: that then we shall be able to prevent those who may come from the old French village, (New Orleans) by the great water (Missisippi) ever to settle here." He added, that after apprising the other nations of the necessity of taking that violent step, a bundle of rods, in number equal to that they should reserve for themselves, should be {78} left with each nation, expressive of the number of days that were to precede that on which they were to strike the blow at one and the same time. And to avoid mistakes, and to be exact in pulling out a rod every day, and breaking and throwing it away, it was necessary to give this in charge to a person of prudence. Here he ceased and sat down: they all approved his counsel, and were to a man of his mind. The project was in like manner approved of by the Sun of the Apple: the business was to bring over the Grand Sun, with the other petty Suns, to their opinion; because all the Princes being agreed as to that point, the nation would all to a man implicitly obey. They however took the precaution to forbid apprising the women thereof, not excepting the female Suns, (Princesses) or giving them the least suspicion of their designs against the French. The Sun of the Apple was a man of good abilities; by which means he easily brought over the Grand Sun to favour his scheme, he being a young man of no experience in the world, and having no great correspondence with the French: he was the more easily gained over, as all the Suns were agreed, that the Sun of the Apple was a man of solidity and penetration; who having repaired to the Sovereign of nation, apprised him of the necessity of taking that step, as in time himself would be forced to quit his own village; also of the wisdom of the measures concerted, such as even ascertained success; and of the danger to which his youth was exposed with neighbours so enterprising; above all, with the present French Commandant, of whom the inhabitants, and even the soldiers complained: that as long as the Grand Sun, his father, and his uncle, the Stung Serpent, lived, the Commandant of the fort durst never undertake any thing to their detriment; because the Grand Chief of the French, who resides at their great village (New Orleans,) had a love for them: but that he, the Grand Sun, being unknown to the French, and but a youth, would be despised. In fine, that the only means to preserve his authority, was to rid himself of the French, by the method, and with the precautions projected by the old men. {79} The result of this conversation was, that on the day following, when the Suns should in the morning come to salute the Grand Sun, he was to order them to repair to the Sun of the Apple, without taking notice of it to any one. This was accordingly executed, and the seducing abilities of the Sun of the Apple drew all the Suns into his scheme. In consequences of which they formed a council of Suns and aged Nobles, who all approved of the design: and then these aged Nobles were nominated heads of embassies to be sent to the several nations; had a guard of Warriors to accompany them, and on pain of death, were discharged from mentioning it to any one whatever. This resolution taken, they set out severally at the same time, unknown to the French. Notwithstanding the profound secrecy observed by the Natchez, the council held by the Suns and aged Nobles gave the people uneasiness, unable as they were to penetrate into the matter. The female Suns (Princesses) had alone in this nation a right to demand why they were kept in the dark in this affair. The young Grand female Sun was a Princess scarce eighteen: and none but the Stung Arm, a woman of great wit, and no less sensible of it, could be offended that nothing was disclosed to her. In effect, she testified her displeasure at this reserve with respect to herself, to her son; who replied, that the several deputations were made, in order to renew their good intelligence with the other nations, to whom they had not of a long time sent an embassy, and who might imagine themselves slighted by such a neglect. This feigned excuse seemed to appease the Princess, but not quite to rid her of all her uneasiness; which, on the contrary, was heightened, when, on the return of the embassies, she saw the Suns assemble in secret council together with the deputies, to learn what reception they met with; whereas ordinarily they assembled in public. At this the female Sun was filled with rage, which would have openly broke out, had not her prudence set bounds to it. Happy it was for the French, she imagined herself neglected: for I am persuaded the colony owes its preservation to the vexation of this woman rather than to any remains of affection {80} she entertained for the French, as she was now far advanced in years, and her gallant dead some time. In order to get to the bottom of the secret, she prevailed on her son to accompany her on a visit to a relation, that lay sick at the village of the Meal; and leading him the longest way about, and most retired, took occasion to reproach him with the secrecy he and the other Suns observed with regard to her, insisting with him on her right as a mother, and her privilege as a Princess: adding, that though all the world, and herself too, had told him he was the son of a Frenchman, yet her own blood was much dearer to her than that of strangers; that he needed not apprehend she would ever betray him to the French, against whom, she said, you are plotting. Her son, stung with these reproaches, told her, it was unusual to reveal what the old men of the council had once resolved upon; alledging, he himself, as being Grand Sun, ought to set a good example in this respect: that the affair was concealed from the Princess his consort as well as from her; and that though he was the son of a Frenchman, this gave no mistrust of him to the other Suns. But seeing, says he, you have guessed the whole affair, I need not inform you farther; you know as much as I do myself, only hold your tongue. She was in no pain, she replied, to know against whom he had taken his precautions: but as it was against the French, this was the very thing that made her apprehensive he had not taken his measures aright in order to surprise them; as they were a people of great penetration, though their Commandant had none: that they were brave, and could bring over by their presents, all the Warriors of the other nations; and had resources, which the Red-men were without. Her son told her she had nothing to apprehend as to the measures taken: that all the nations had heard and approved their project, and promised to fall upon the French in their neighbourhood, on the same day with the Natchez: that the Chactaws took upon them to destroy all the French lower down and along the Missisippi, up as far as the Tonicas; to which last people, he said, we did not send, as they and the Oumas {81} are too much wedded to the French; and that it was better to involve both these nations in the same general destruction with the French. He at last told her, the bundle of rods lay in the temple, on the flat timber. The Stung Arm being informed of the whole design, pretended to approve of it, and leaving her son at ease, henceforward was only solicitous how she might defeat this barbarous design: the time was pressing, and the term prefixed for the execution was almost expired. This woman, unable to bear to see the French cut off to a man in one day by the conspiracy of the natives, sought how to save the greatest part of them: for this purpose she be thought herself of acquainting some young women therewith, who loved the French, enjoining them never to tell from whom they had their information. She herself desired a soldier she met, to go and tell the Commandant, that the Natchez had lost their senses, and to desire him to be upon his guard: that he need only make the smallest repairs possible on the fort, in presence of some of them, in order to shew his mistrust; when all their resolutions and bad designs would vanish and fall to the ground. The soldier faithfully performed his commission: but the Commandant, far from giving credit to the information, or availing himself thereof; or diving into, and informing him self of the grounds of it, treated the soldier as a coward and a visionary, caused him to be clapt in irons, and said, he would never take any step towards repairing the fort, or putting himself on his guard, as the Natchez would then imagine he was a man of no resolution, and was struck with a mere panick. The Stung Arm fearing a discovery, notwithstanding her utmost precaution, and the secrecy she enjoined, repaired to the temple, and pulled some rods out of the fatal bundle: her design was to hasten or forward the term prefixed, to the end that such Frenchmen as escaped the massacre, might apprize their countrymen, many of whom had informed the Commandant; who clapt seven of them in irons, treating them as cowards on that account. {82} The female Sun, seeing the term approaching, and many of those punished, whom she had charged to acquaint the Governor, resolved to speak to the Under-Lieutenant; but to no better purpose, the Commandant paying no greater regard to him than to the common soldiers. Notwithstanding all these informations, the Commandant went out the night before on a party of pleasure, with some other Frenchmen, to the grand village of the Natchez, without returning to the fort till break of day; where he was no sooner come, but he had pressing advice to be upon his guard. The Commandant, still flustered with his last night's debauch, added imprudence to his neglect of these last advices; and ordered his interpreter instantly to repair to the grand village, and demand of the Grand Sun, whether he intended, at the head of his Warriors, to come and kill the French, and to bring him word directly. The Grand Sun, though but a young man, knew how to dissemble, and spoke in such a manner to the interpreter, as to give full satisfaction to the Commandant, who valued himself on his contempt of former advices; he then repaired to his house, situate below the fort. The Natchez had too well taken their measures to be disappointed in the success thereof. The fatal moment was at last come. The Natchez set out on the Eve of St. Andrew, 1729, taking care to bring with them one of the lower sort, armed with a wooden hatchet, in order to knock down the Commandant: they had so high a contempt for him, that no Warrior would deign to kill him. [Footnote: Others say he was shot: but neither account can be ascertained, as no Frenchman present escaped.] The houses of the French filled with enemies, the fort in like manner with the natives, who entered in at the gate and breaches, deprived the soldiers, without officers, or even a serjeant at their head, of the means of self defence. In the mean time the Grand Sun arrived, with some Warriors loaded with corn, in appearance as the first payment of the contribution; when several shot were fired. As this firing was the signal, several shot were heard at the same instant. Then at length the Commandant saw, but too late, his folly: he ran into his garden, whither he was pursued {83} and killed. This Massacre was executed every where at the same time. Of about seven hundred persons, but few escaped to carry the dreadful news to the capital; on receiving which the Governor and Council were sensibly affected, and orders were dispatched every where to put people on their guard. The other Indians were displeased at the conduct of the Natchez, imagining they had forwarded the term agreed on, in order to make them ridiculous, and proposed to take vengeance the first opportunity, not knowing the true cause of the precipitation of the Natchez. After they had cleared the fort, warehouse, and other houses, the Natchez set them all on fire, not leaving a single building standing. The Yazous, who happened to be at that very time on an embassy to the Natchez, were prevailed on to destroy the post of the Yazous; which they failed not to effect some days after, making themselves masters of the fort, under colour of paying a visit, as usual, and knocking all the garrison on the head. M. Perier, Governor of Louisiana, was then taking the proper steps to be avenged: he sent M. le Sueur to the Chactaws, to engage them on our side against the Natchez; in which he succeeded without any difficulty. The reason of their readiness to enter into this design was not then understood, it being unknown that they were concerned in the plot of the Natchez to destroy all the French, and that it was only to be avenged of the Natchez, who had taken the start of them, and not given them a sufficient share of the booty. M. de Loubois, king's lieutenant, was nominated to be at the head of this expedition: he went up the river with a small army, and arrived at the Tonicas. The Chactaws at length in the month of February near the Natchez, to the number of fifteen or sixteen hundred men, with M. le Sueur at their head; whither M. de Loubois came the March following. The army encamped near the ruins of the old French settlement; and after resting five days there, they marched to the enemy's fort, which was a league from thence. {84} After opening the trenches and firing for several days upon the fort without any great effect, the French at last made their approach so near as to frighten the enemy, who sent to offer to release all the French women and children, on the condition of obtaining a lasting peace, and of being suffered to live peaceably on their ground, without being driven from thence, or molested for the future. M. de Loubois assured them of peace on their own terms, if they also gave up the French, who were in the fort, and all the negroes they had taken belonging to the French; and if they agreed to destroy the fort by fire. The Grand Sun accepted these conditions, provided the French general should promise, he would neither enter the fort with the French, nor suffer their auxiliaries to enter; which was accepted by the general; who sent the allies to receive all the slaves. The Natchez, highly pleased to have gained time, availed themselves of the following night, and went out of the fort, with their wives and children, loaded with their baggage and the French plunder, leaving nothing but the cannon and ball behind. M. de Loubois was struck with amazement at this escape, and only thought of retreating to the landing-place, in order to build a fort there: but first it was necessary to recover the French out of the hands of the Chactaws, who insisted on a very high ransom. The matter was compromised by means of the grand chief of the Tonicas, who prevailed on them to accept what M. de Loubois was constrained to offer them, to satisfy their avarice; which they accordingly accepted, and gave up the French slaves, on promise of being paid as soon as possible: but they kept as security a young Frenchman and some negro slaves, whom they would never part with, till payment was made. M. de Loubois gave orders to build a terrace-fort, far preferable to a stoccado; there he left M. du Crenet, with an hundred and twenty men in garrison, with cannon and ammunition; after which he went down the Missisippi to New Orleans. The Chactaws, Tonicas, and other allies, returned home. {85} After the Natchez had abandoned the fort, it was demolished, and its piles, or stakes, burnt. As the Natchez dreaded both the vengeance of the French, and the insolence of the Chactaws, that made them take the resolution of escaping in the night. A short time after, a considerable party of the Natchez carried the Pipe of Peace to the Grand Chief of the Tonicas, under pretence of concluding a peace with him and all the French. The Chief sent to M. Perier to know his pleasure: but the Natchez in the mean time assassinated the Tonicas, beginning with their Grand Chief; and few of them escaped this treachery. M. Perier, Commandant General, zealous for the service, neglected no means, whereby to discover in what part the Natchez had taken refuge. And after many enquiries he was told, they had entirely quitted the east side of the Missisippi, doubtless to avoid the troublesome and dangerous visits of the Chactaws; and in order to be more concealed from the French, had retired to the West of the Missisippi, near the Silver Creek, about sixty leagues from the mouth of the Red River. These advices were certain: but the Commandant General not thinking himself in a condition fit to attack them without succours, had applied for that purpose to the Court; and succours were accordingly sent him. In the mean time the Company, who had been apprized of the misfortune at the Post of the Natchez, and the losses they had sustained by the war, gave up that Colony to the King, with the privileges annexed thereto. The Company at the same time ceded to the King all that belonged to them in that Colony, as fortresses, artillery, ammunition, warehouses, and plantations, with the negroes belonging thereto. In consequence of which, his Majesty sent one of his ships, commanded by M. de Forant, who brought with him M. de Salmont, Commissary-General of the Marine, and Inspector of Louisiana, in order to take possession of that Colony in the King's name. I was continued in the inspection of this plantation, now become the King's in 1730, as before. {86} M. Perier, who till then had been Commandant General of Louisiana for the West India Company, was now made Governor for the King; and had the satisfaction to see his brother arrive, in one of the King's ships, commanded by M. Perier de Salvert, with the succours he demanded, which were an hundred and fifty soldiers of the marine. This Officer had the title of Lieutenant General of the Colony conferred upon him. The Messrs. Perier set out with their army in very favourable weather; and arrived at last, without obstruction, near to the retreat of the Natchez. To get to that place, they went up the Red river, then the Black River, and from thence up the Silver Creek, which communicates with a small Lake at no great distance from the fort, which the Natchez had built, in order to maintain their ground against the French. The Natchez, struck with terror at the sight of a vigilant enemy, shut themselves up in their fort. Despair assumed the place of prudence, and they were at their wits end, on seeing the trenches gain ground on the fort: they equip themselves like warriors, and stain their bodies with different colours, in order to make their last efforts by a sally, which resembled a transport of rage more than the calmness of valour, to the terror, at first, of the soldiers. The reception they met from our men, taught them, however, to keep themselves shut up in their fort; and though the trench was almost finished, our Generals were impatient to have the mortars put in a condition to play on the place. At last they are set in battery; when the third bomb happened to fall in the middle of the fort, the usual place of residence of the women and children, they set up a horrible screaming; and the men, seized with grief at the cries of their wives and children, made the signal to capitulate. The Natchez, after demanding to capitulate, started difficulties, which occasioned messages to and fro till night, which they waited to avail themselves of, demanding till next day to settle the articles of capitulation. The night was granted them, but being narrowly watched on the side next the gate, they could not execute the same project of escape, as in the war {87} with M. de Loubois. However, they attempted it, by taking advantage of the obscurity of the night, and of the apparent stillness of the French: but they were discovered in time, the greatest part being constrained to retire into the fort. Some of them only happened to escape, who joined those that were out a hunting, and all together retired to the Chicasaws. The rest surrendered at discretion, among whom was the Grand Sun, and the female Suns, with several warriors, many women, young people, and children. The French army re-embarked, and carried the Natchez as slaves to New Orleans, where they were put in prison; but afterwards, to avoid an infection, the women and children were disposed of in the King's plantation, and elsewhere; among these women was the female Sun, called the Stung Arm, who then told me all she had done, in order to save the French. Some time after, these slaves were embarked for St. Domingo, in order to root out that nation in the Colony; which was the only method of effecting it, as the few that escaped had not a tenth of the women necessary to recruit the nation. And thus that nation, the most conspicuous in the Colony, and most useful to the French, was destroyed. CHAPTER XIII. _The War with the_ Chicasaws. _The first Expedition by the river_ Mobile. _The second by the_ Missisippi. _The war with the_ Chactaws _terminated by the prudence of_ M. de Vaudreuil. The war with the Chicasaws was owing to their having received and adopted the Natchez: though in this respect they acted only according to an inviolable usage and sacred custom, established among all the nations of North America; that when a nation, weakened by war, retires for shelter to another, who are willing to adopt them, and is pursued thither by their enemies, this is in effect to declare war against the nation adopting. But M. de Biainville, whether displeased with this act of hospitality, or losing sight of this unalterable law, constantly {88} prevailing among those nations, sent word to the Chicasaws, to give up the Natchez. In answer to his demand they alledged, that the Natchez having demanded to be incorporated with them, were accordingly received and adopted; so as now to constitute but one nation, or people, under the name of Chicasaws, that of Natchez being entirely abolished. Besides, added they, had Biainville received our enemies, should we go to demand them? or, if we did, would they be given up? Notwithstanding this answer, M. de Biainville made warlike preparations against the Chicasaws, sent off Captain le Blanc, with six armed boats under his command; one laden with gun-powder, the rest with goods, the whole allotted for the war against the Chicasaws; the Captain at the same time carrying orders to M. d'Artaguette, Commandant of the Post of the Illinois, to prepare to set out at the head of all the troops, inhabitants and Indians, he could march from the Illinois, in order to be at the Chicasaws the 10th of May following, as the Governor himself was to be there at the same time. The Chicasaws, apprized of the warlike preparations of the French, resolved to guard the Missisippi, imagining they would be attacked on that side. In vain they attempted to surprise M. le Blanc's convoy, which got safe to the Arkansas, where the gun-powder was left, for reasons no one can surmise. From thence he had no cross accident to the Illinois, at which place he delivered the orders the Governor had dispatched for M. d'Artaguette; who finding a boat laden with gun-powder, designed for his post, and for the service of the war intended against the Chicasaws, left at the Arkansas, sent off the same day a boat to fetch it up; which on its return was taken by a party of Chicasaws; who killed all but M. du Tiffenet, junior, and one Rosalie, whom they made slaves. In the mean time, M. de Biainville went by sea to Fort Mobile, where the Grand Chief of the Chactaws waited for him, in consequence of his engaging to join his Warriours with ours, in order to make war upon the Chicasaws, in consideration of a certain quantity of goods, part to be paid down directly, the rest at a certain time prefixed. The Governor, {89} after this, returned to New Orleans, there to wait the opening of the campaign. M. de Biainville, on his return, made preparations against his own departure, and that of the army, consisting of regular troops, some inhabitants and free negroes, and some slaves, all which set out from New Orleans for Mobile; where, on the 10th of March, 1736, the army, together with the Chactaws, was assembled; and where they rested till the 2d of April, when they began their march, those from New Orleans taking their route by the river Mobile, in thirty large boats and as many pettyaugres; the Indians by land, marching along the east bank of that river; and making but short marches, they arrived at Tombecbec only the 20th of April, where M. de Biainville caused a fort to be built: here he gave the Chactaws the rest of the goods due to them, and did not set out from thence till the 4th of May. All this time was taken up with a Council of War, held on four soldiers, French and Swiss, who had laid a scheme to kill the Commandant and garrison, to carry off M. du Tiffenet and Rosalie, who had happily made their escape from the Chicasaws, and taken refuge in the fort, and to put them again into the hands of the enemy, in order to be better received by them, and to assist, and shew them how to make a proper defence against the French, and from thence to go over to the English of Carolina. From the 4th of May, on which the army set out from Tombeebee, they took twenty days to come to the landing-place. After landing, they built a very extensive inclosure of palisadoes, with a shed, as a cover for the goods and ammuninition, then the army passed the night. On the 25th powder and ball were given out to the soldiers, and inhabitants, the sick with some raw soldiers being left to guard this old sort of fort. From this place to the fort of the Chicasaws are seven leagues: this day they marched five leagues and a half in two columns and in file, across the woods. On the wings marched the Chactaws, to the number of twelve hundred at least, commanded by their Grand Chief. In the evening they encamped in a meadow, surrounded with wood. {90} On the 26th of May they marched to the enemy's fort, across thin woods; and with water up to the waist, passed over a rivulet, which traverses a small wood; on coming out of which, they entered a fine plain: in this plain stood the fort of the Chicasaws, with a village defended by it. This fort is situated on an eminence, with an easy ascent; around it stood several huts, and at a greater distance towards the bottom, other huts, which appeared to have been put in a state of defence: quite close to the fort ran a little brook, which watered a part of the plain. The Chactaws no sooner espied the enemy's fort, than they rent the air with their death-cries, and instantly flew to the fort: but their ardour flagged at a carabin-shot from the place. The French marched in good order, and got beyond a small wood, which they left in their rear, within cannon-shot of the enemy's fort, where an English flag was seen flying. At the same time four Englishmen, coming from the huts, were seen to go up the ascent, and enter the fort, where their flag was set up. Upon this, it was imagined, they would be summoned to quit the enemy's fort, and to surrender, as would in like manner the Chicasaws: but nothing of this was once proposed. The General gave orders to the Majors to form large detachments of each of their corps, in order to go and take the enemy's fort. These orders were in part executed: three large detachments were made; namely, one of grenadiers, one of soldiers, and another of militia, or train-bands; who, to the number of twelve hundred men, advanced with ardour towards the enemy's fort, crying out aloud several times, _Vive le Roi_, as if already masters of the place; which, doubtless, they imagined to carry sword in hand; for in the whole army there was not a single iron tool to remove the earth, and form the attacks. The rest of the army marched in battle-array, ten men deep; mounted the eminence whereon the fort stood, and being come there, set fire to some huts, with wild-fire thrown at the ends of darts; but the smoke stifled the army. The regular troops marched in front, and the militia, or train-bands, in rear. According to rule these train-bands {91} made a quarter turn to right and left, with intent to go and invest the place. But M. de Jusan, Aid-Major of the troops, stopt short their ardor, and sent them to their proper post, reserving for his own corps the glory of carrying the place, which continued to make a brisk defence. Biainville remained at the quarters of reserve; where he observed what would be the issue of the attack, than which none could be more disadvantageous. Both the regulars and inhabitants, or train-bands, gave instances of the greatest valour: but what could they do, open and exposed as they were, against a fort, whose stakes or wooden posts were a fathom in compass, and their joinings again lined with other posts, almost as big? From this fort, which was well garrisoned, issued a shower of balls; which would have mowed down at least half the assailants, if directed by men who knew how to fire. The enemy were under cover from all the attacks of the French, and could have defended themselves by their loop-holes. Besides, they formed a gallery of flat pallisadoes quite round, covered with earth, which screened it from the effects of grenadoes. In this manner the troops lavished their ammunition against the wooden posts, or stakes, of the enemy's fort, without any other effect than having thirty-two men killed, and almost seventy wounded; which last were carried to the body of reserve; from whence the General, seeing the bad success of the attack, ordered to beat the retreat, and sent a large detachment to favour it. It was now five in the evening, and the attack had been begun at half an hour after one. The troops rejoined the body of the army, without being able to carry off their dead, which were left on the field of battle, exposed to the rage of the enemy. After taking some refreshment, they directly fortified themselves, by felling trees, in order to pass the night secure from the insults of the enemy, by being carefully on their guard. Next day it was observed the enemy had availed themselves of that night to demolish some huts, where the French, during the attack, had put themselves under cover, in order from thence to batter the fort. {92} On the 27th, the day after the attack, the army began its march, and lay at a league from the enemy. The day following, at a league from the landing-place, whither they arrived next day, the French embarked for Fort Mobile, and from thence for the Capital, from which each returned to his own home. A little time after, a serjeant of the garrison of the Illinois arrived at New Orleans, who reported, that, in consequence of the General's orders, M. d'Artaguette had taken his measures so well, that on the 9th of May he arrived with his men near the Chicasaws, sent out scouts to discover the arrival of the French army; which he continued to do till the 20th: that the Indians in alliance hearing no accounts of the French, wanted either to return home, or to attack the Chicasaws; which last M. d'Artaguette resolved upon, on the 21st, with pretty good success at first, having forced the enemy to quit their village and fort: that he then attacked another village with the same success, but that pursuing the runaways, M. d'Artaguette had received two wounds, which the Indians finding, resolved to abandon that Commandant, with forty-six soldiers and two serjeants, who defended their Commandant all that day, but were at last obliged to surrender; that they were well used by the enemy, who understanding that the French were in their country, prevailed on M. d'Artaguette to write to the General: but that this deputation having had no success, and learning that the French were retired, and despairing of any ransom for their slaves, put them to death by a slow fire. The serjeant added, he had the happiness to fall into the hands of a good master, who favoured his escape to Mobile. M. de Biainville, desirous to take vengeance of the Chicasaws, wrote to France for succours, which the Court sent, ordering also the Colony of Canada to send succours. In the mean time M. de Biainville sent off a large detachment for the river St. Francis, in order to build a fort there, called also St. Francis. The squadron which brought the succours from France being arrived, they set out, by going up the Missisippi, for the fort that had been just built. This army consisted of Marines, {93} of the troops of the Colony, of several Inhabitants, many Negroes, and some Indians, our allies; and being assembled in this place, took water again, and still proceeded up the Missisippi to a little river called Margot, near the Cliffs called Prud'homme, and there the whole army landed. They encamped on a fine plain, at the foot of a hill, about fifteen leagues from the enemy; fortified themselves by way of precaution, and built in the fort a house for the Commandant, some cazerns, and a warehouse for the goods. This fort was called Assumption, from the day on which they landed. They had waggons and sledges made, and the roads cleared for transporting cannon, ammunition, and other necessaries for forming a regular siege. There and then it was the succours from Canada arrived, consisting of French, Iroquois, Hurons, Episingles, Algonquins, and other nations: and soon after arrived the new Commandant of the Illinois, with the garrison, inhabitants, and neighbouring Indians, all that he could bring together, with a great number of horses. This formidable army, consisting of so many different nations, the greatest ever seen, and perhaps that ever will be seen, in those parts, remained in this camp without undertaking any thing, from the month of August 1739, to the March following. Provisions, which at first were in great plenty, came at last to be so scarce, that they were obliged to eat the horses which were to draw the artillery, ammunition, and provisions: afterwards sickness raged in the army. M. de Biainville, who hitherto had attempted nothing against the Chicasaws, resolved to have recourse to mild methods. He therefore detached, about the 15th of March, the company of Cadets, with their Captain, M. de Celoron, their Lieutenant, M. de St. Laurent, and the Indians, who came with them from Canada, against the Chicasaws, with orders to offer peace to them in his name, if they sued for it. What the General had foreseen, failed not to happen. As soon as the Chicasaws saw the French, followed by the Indians of Canada, they doubted not in the least, but the rest of that numerous army would soon follow; and they no sooner saw them approach, but they made signals of peace, and came out {94} of their fort in the most humble manner, exposing themselves to all the consequences that might ensue, in order to obtain peace. They solemnly protested that they actually were, and would continue to be inviolable friends of the French; that it was the English, who prevailed upon them to act in this manner; but that they had fallen out with them on this account, and at that very time had two of that nation, whom they made slaves; and that the French might go and see whether they spoke truth. M. de St. Laurent asked to go, and accordingly went with a young slave: but he might have had reason to have repented it, had not the men been more prudent than the women, who demanded the head of the Frenchman: but the men, after consulting together, were resolved to save him, in order to obtain peace of the French, on giving up the two Englishmen. The women risk scarce any thing near so much as the men; these last are either slain in battle, or put to death by their enemies; whereas the women at worst are but slaves; and they all perfectly well know, that the Indian women are far better off when slaves to the French, than if married at home. M. de St. Laurent, highly pleased with this discovery, promised them peace in the name of M. de Biainville, and of all the French: after these assurances, they went all in a body out of the fort, to present the Pipe to M. de Celoron, who accepted it, and repeated the same promise. In a few days after, he set out with a great company of Chicasaws, deputed to carry the Pipe to the French General, and deliver up the two Englishmen. When they came before M. de Biainville, they fell prostrate at his feet, and made him the same protestations of fidelity and friendship, as they had already made to M. de Celoron; threw the blame on the English; said they were entirely fallen out with them, and had taken these two, and put them in his hands, as enemies. They protested, in the most solemn manner, they would for ever be friends of the French and of their friends, and enemies of their enemies; in fine, that they would make war on the English, if it was thought proper, in order to shew that they renounced them as traitors. {95} Thus ended the war with the Chicasaws, about the beginning of April, 1740. M. de Biainville dismissed the auxiliaries, after making them presents; razed the Fort Assumption, thought to be no longer necessary, and embarked with his whole army; and in passing down, caused the Fort St. Francis to be demolished, as it was now become useless; and he repaired to the Capital, after an absence of more than ten months. Some years after, we had disputes with a part of the Chactaws, who followed the interests of the Red-Shoe, a Prince of that nation, who, in the first expedition against the Chicasaws, had some disputes with the French. This Indian, more insolent than any one of his nation, took a pretext to break out, and commit several hostilities against the French. M. de Vaudreuil, then Governor of Louisiana, being apprised of this, and of the occasion thereof, strictly forbad the French to frequent that nation, and to truck with them any arms or ammunition, in order to put a stop to that disorder in a short time, and without drawing the sword. M. de Vaudreuil, after taking these precautions, sent to demand of the Grand Chief of the whole nation, whether, like the Red-Shoe, he was also displeased with the French. He made answer, he was their friend: but that the Red-Shoe was a young man, without understanding. Having returned this answer, they sent him a present: but he was greatly surprised to find neither arms, powder, nor ball in this present, at a time when they were friends as before. This manner of proceeding, joined to the prohibition made of trucking with them arms or ammunition, heightened their surprise, and put them on having an explication on this head with the Governor; who made answer, That neither arms nor ammunition would be trucked with them, as long as the Red-Shoe had no more understanding; that they would not fail, as being brethren, to share a good part of the ammunition and arms with the Warriors of the Red-Shoe. This answer put them on remonstrating to the Village that insulted us; told them, if they did not instantly make peace with the French, they would themselves make war upon them. This threatening declaration made them sue for peace with the French, who were not in a condition to maintain {96} a war against a nation so numerous. And thus the prudent policy of M. de Vaudreuil put a stop to this war, without either expence or the loss of a man. CHAPTER XIV. _Reflections on what gives Occasions to Wars in_ Louisiana. _The Means of avoiding Wars in that Province, as also the Manner of coming off with Advantage and little Expence in them._ The experience I have had in the art of war, from some campaigns I made in a regiment of dragoons till the peace of 1713, my application to the study of the wars of the Greeks, Romans, and other ancient people, and the wars I have seen carried on with the Indians of Louisiana, during the time I resided in that Province, gave me occasion to make several reflections on what could give rise to a war with the Indians, on the means of avoiding such a war, and on such methods as may be employed, in order either to make or maintain a war to advantage against them, when constrained thereto. In the space of sixteen years that I resided in Louisiana, I remarked, that the war, and even the bare disputes we have had with the Indians of this Colony, never had any other origin, but our too familiar intercourse with them. In order to prove this, let us consider the evils produced by this familiarity. In the first place, it makes them gradually drop that respect, which they naturally entertain for our nation. In the second place, the French traffickers, or traders, are generally young people without experience, who, in order to gain the good-will of these people, afford them lights, or instruction, prejudicial to our interest. These young merchants are not, it is true, sensible of these consequences: but again, these people never lose sight of what can be of any utility to them, and the detriment thence accruing is not less great, nor less real. In the third place, this familiarity gives occasion to vices, whence dangerous distempers ensue, and corruption of blood, {97} which is naturally highly pure in this colony. These persons, who frequently resort to the Indians, imagined themselves authorized to give a loose to their vices, from the practice of these last, which is to give young women to their guests upon their arrival; a practice that greatly injures their health, and proves a detriment to their merchandizing. In the fourth place, this resorting to the Indians puts these last under a constraint, as being fond of solitude; and this constraint is still more heightened, if the French settlement is near them; which procures them too frequent visits, that give them so much more uneasiness, as they care not on any account that people should see or know any of their affairs. And what fatal examples have we not of the dangers the settlements which are too near the Indians incur. Let but the massacre of the French be recollected, and it will be evident that this proximity is extremely detrimental to the French. In the fifth and last place, commerce, which is the principal allurement that draws us to this new world instead of flourishing, is, on the contrary, endangered by the too familiar resort to the Indians of North America. The proof of this is very simple. All who resort to countries beyond sea, know by experience, that when there is but one ship in the harbour, the Captain sells his cargo at what price he pleases: and then we hear it said, such a ship gained two, three, and sometimes as high as four hundred per cent. Should another ship happen to arrive in that harbour, the profit abates at least one half; but should three arrive, or even four successively, the goods then are, so to speak, thrown at the head of the buyer: so that in this case a merchant has often great difficulty to recover his very expenses of fitting out. I should therefore be led to believe, that it would be for the interest of commerce, if the Indians were left to come to fetch what merchandize they wanted, who having none but us in their neighbourhood, would come for it, without the French running any risk in their commerce, much less in their lives. For this purpose, let us suppose a nation of Indians on the banks of some river or rivulet, which is always the case, as all {98} men whatever have at all times occasion for water. This being supposed, I look out for a spot proper to build a small terras-fort on, with fraises or stakes, and pallisadoes. In this fort I would build two small places for lodgings, of no great height; one to lodge the officers, the other the soldiers: this fort to have an advanced work, a half-moon, or the like, according to the importance of the post. The passage to be through this advanced work to the fort, and no Indian allowed to enter on any pretence whatever; not even to receive the Pipe of Peace there, but only in the advanced work; the gate of the fort to be kept shut day and night against all but the French. At the gate of the advanced work a sentinel to be posted, and that gate to be opened and shut on each person appearing before it. By these precautions we might be sure never to be surprised, either by avowed enemies, or by treachery. In the advanced work a small building to be made for the merchants, who should come thither to traffick or truck with the neighbouring Indians; of which last only three or four to be admitted at a time, all to have the merchandize at the same price, and no one to be favoured above another. No soldier or inhabitant to go to the villages of the neighbouring Indians, under severe penalties. By this conduct disputes would be avoided, as they only arise from too great a familiarity with them. These forts to be never nearer the villages than five leagues, or more distant than seven or eight. The Indians would make nothing of such a jaunt; it would be only a walk for them, and their want of goods would easily draw them, and in a little time they would become habituated to it. The merchants to pay a salary to an interpreter, who might be some orphan, brought up very young among these people. This fort, thus distant a short journey, might be built without obstruction, or giving any umbrage to the Indians: as they might be told it was built in order to be at hand to truck their furs, and at the same time to give them no manner of uneasiness. One advantage would be, besides that of commerce, which would be carried on there, that these forts would prevent the English from having any communication with the Indians, as these last would find a great facility for their truck, and in forts so near them, every thing they could want. {99} The examples of the surprise of the forts of the Natchez, the Yazoux, and the Missouris, shew but too plainly the fatal consequences of negligence in the service, and of a misplaced condescension in favour of the soldiers, by suffering them to build huts near the fort, and to lie in them. None should be allowed to lie out of the fort, not even the Officers. The Commandant of the Natchez, and the other Officers, and even the Serjeants, were killed in their houses without the fort. I should not be against the soldiers planting little fields of tobacco, potatoes, and other plants, too low to conceal a man: on the contrary, these employments would incline them to become settlers; but I would never allow them houses out of the fort. By this means a fort becomes impregnable against the most numerous; because they never will attack, should they have ever so much cause, as long as they see people on their guard. Should it be objected that these forts would cost a great deal: I answer, that though there was to be a fort for each nation, which is not the case, it would not cost near so much as from time to time it takes to support wars, which in this country are very expensive, on account of the long journeys, and of transporting all the implements of war, hitherto made use of. Besides, we have a great part of these forts already built, so that we only want the advanced works; and two new forts more would suffice to compleat this design, and prevent the fraudulent commerce of the English traders. As to the manner of carrying on the war in Louisiana, as was hitherto done, it is very expensive, highly fatiguing, and the risk always great; because you must first transport the ammunition to the landing-place; from thence travel for many leagues; then drag the artillery along by main force, and carry the ammunition on men's shoulders, a thing that harasses and weakens the troops very much. Moreover, there is a great deal of risk in making war in this manner: you have the approaches of a fort to make, which cannot be done without loss of lives: and should you make a breach, how many brave men are lost, before you can force men who fight like desperadoes, because they prefer death to slavery. {100} I say, should you make a breach; because in all the time I resided in this Province, I never saw nor heard that the cannon which were brought against the Indian forts, ever made a breach for a single man to pass: it is therefore quite useless to be at that expence, and to harass the troops to bring artillery, which can be of no manner of service. That cannon can make no breach in Indian forts may appear strange: but not more strange than true; as will appear, if we consider that the wooden posts or stakes which surround these forts, are too big for a bullet of the size of those used in these wars, to cut them down, though it were even to hit their middle. If the bullet gives more towards the edge of the tree, it glides off, and strikes the next to it; should the ball hit exactly between two posts, it opens them, and meets the post of the lining, which stops it short: another ball may strike the same tree, at the other joining, then it closes the little aperture the other had made. Were I to undertake such a war, I would bring only a few Indian allies; I could easily manage them; they would not stand me so much in presents, nor consume so much ammunition and provisions: a great saving this; and bringing no cannon with me, I should also save expences. I would have none but portable arms; and thus my troops would not be harassed. The country every where furnishes wherewithal to make moveable intrenchments and approaches, without opening the ground: and I would flatter myself to carry the fort in two days time. There I stop: the reader has no need of this detail, nor I to make it public. CHAPTER XV. Pensacola _taken by Surprize by the_ French. _Retaken by the_ Spaniards. _Again retaken by the_ French, _and demolished_. Before I go any farther, I think it necessary to relate what happened with respect to the Fort of Pensacola in Virginia. [Footnote: The author must mean Carolina.] This fort belongs to the Spaniards, and serves for an {101} Entrepot, or harbour for the Spanish galleons to put into, in their passage from La Vera Cruz to Europe. Towards the beginning of the year 1719, the Commandant General having understood by the last ships which arrived, that war was declared between France and Spain, resolved to take the post of Pensacola from the Spaniards; which stands on the continent, about fifteen leagues from Isle Dauphine, is defended by a staccado-fort the entrance of the road: over against it stands a fortin, or small fort, on the west point of the Isle St. Rose; which, on that side, defends the entrance of the road: this fort has only a guard-house to defend it. The Commandant General, persuaded it would be impossible to besiege the place in form, wanted to take it by surprise, confiding in the ardor of the French, and security of the Spaniards, who were as yet ignorant of our being at war with them in Europe. With that view he assembled the few troops he had, with several Canadian and French planters, newly arrived, who went as volunteers. M. de Chateauguier, the Commandant's brother, and King's Lieutenant, commanded under him; and next him, M. de Richebourg, Captain. After arming this body of men, and getting the necessary supplies of ammunition and provisions, he embarked with his small army, and by the favour of a prosperous wind, arrived in a short time at his place of destination. The French anchored near the Fortin, made their descent undiscovered, seized on the guard-house, and clapt the soldiers in irons; which was done in less than half an hour. Some French soldiers were ordered to put on the cloaths of the Spaniards, in order to facilitate the surprising the enemy. The thing succeeded to their wish. On the morrow at day-break, they perceived the boat which carried the detachment from Pensacola, in order to relieve the guard of the fortin; on which the Spanish march was caused to be beat up; and the French in disguise receiving them, and clapping them in irons, put on their cloaths; and stepping into the same boat, surprised the sentinel, the guard-house, and at last the garrison, to the very Governor himself, who was taken in bed; so that they all were made prisoners without any bloodshed. {102} The Commandant General, apprehensive of the scarcity of provisions, shipped off the prisoners, escorted by some soldiers, commanded by M. de Richebourg, in order to land them at the Havanna: he left his brother at Pensacola, to command there, with a garrison of sixty men. As soon as the French vessel had anchored at the Havanna, M. de Richebourg went on shore, to acquaint the Spanish Governor with his commission; who received him with politeness, and as a testimony of his gratitude, made him and his officers prisoners, put the soldiers in irons and in prison, where they lay for some time, exposed to hunger and the insults of the Spaniards, which determined many of them to enter into the service of Spain, in order to escape the extreme misery under which they groaned. Some of the French, newly enlisted in the Spanish troops, informed the Governor of the Havanna, that the French garrison left at Pensacola was very weak: he, in his turn, resolved to carry that fort by way of reprisal. For that purpose he caused a Spanish vessel, with that which the French had brought to the Havanna, to be armed. The Spanish vessel stationed itself behind the Isle St. Rose, and the French vessel came before the fort with French colours. The sentinel enquired, who commanded the vessel? They answered, M. de Richebourg. This vessel, after anchoring, took down her French, and hoisted Spanish colours, firing three guns: at which signal, agreed on by the Spaniards, the Spanish vessel joined the first; then they summoned the French to surrender. M. de Chateauguiere rejected the proposition, fired upon the Spaniards, and they continued cannonading each other till night. On the following day the cannonading was continued till noon, when the Spaniards ceased firing, in order to summon the Commandant anew to surrender the fort: he demanded four days, and was allowed two. During that time, he sent to ask succours of his brother, who was in no condition to send him any. The term being expired, the attack was renewed, the Commandant bravely defending himself till night; which two thirds of the garrison availed themselves of, to abandon their Governor, {103} who, having only twenty men left, saw himself unable to make any longer resistance, demanded to capitulate, and was allowed all the honours of war; but in going out of the place, he and all his men were made prisoners. This infraction of the capitulation was occasioned by the shame the Spaniards conceived, of being constrained to capitulate in this manner with twenty men only. As soon as the Governor of the Havanna was apprised of the surrender of the fort, vainly imagining he had overthrown half his enemies at least, he caused great rejoicings to be made in the island, as if he had gained a decisive victory, or carried a citadel of importance. He also sent off several vessels to victual and refresh his warriors, who, according to him, must have been greatly fatigued in such an action as I have just described. The new Governor of Pensacola caused the fortifications to be repaired and even augmented; sent afterwards the vessel, named the Great Devil, armed with six pieces of cannon, to take Dauphin Island, or at least to strike terror into it. The vessel St. Philip, which lay in the road, entered a gut or narrow place, and there mooring across, brought all her guns to bear on the enemy; and made the Great Devil sensible, that Saints resist all the efforts of Hell. This ship, by her position, served for a citadel to the whole island, which had neither fortifications nor intrenchments, nor any other sort of defence, excepting a battery of cannon at the east point, with some inhabitants, who guarded the coast, and prevented a descent. The Great Devil, finding she made no progress, was constrained, by way of relaxation, to go and pillage on the continent the habitation of the Sieur Miragouine, which was abandoned. In the mean time arrived from Pensacola, a little devil, a pink, to the assistance of the Great Devil. As soon as they joined, they began afresh to cannonade the island, which made a vigorous defence. In the time that these two vessels attempted in vain to take the island, a squadron of five ships came in sight, four of them with Spanish colours, and the least carrying French hoisted to {104} the top of the staff, as if taken by the four others. In this the French were equally deceived with the Spaniards: the former, however, knew the small vessel, which was the pink, the Mary, commanded by the brave M. Iapy. The Spaniards, convinced by these appearances, that succours were sent them, deputed two officers in a shallop on board the commodore: but they were no sooner on board, than they were made prisoners. They were in effect three French men of war, with two ships of the Company, commanded by M. Champmelin. These ships brought upwards of eight hundred men, and thirty officers, as well superior as subaltern, all of them old and faithful servants of the King, in order to remain in Louisiana. The Spaniards, finding their error, fled to Pensacola, to carry the news of this succour being arrived for the French. The squadron anchored before the island, hoisted French colours, and fired a salvo, which was answered by the place. The St. Philip was drawn out and made to join the squadron: a new embarkation of troops was made, and the Mary left before Isle Dauphine. On September the 7th, finding the wind favourable, the squadron set sail for Pensacola: by the way, the troops that were to make the attack on the continent, were landed near Rio Perdido; after which the ships, preceded by a boat, which shewed the way, entered the harbour, and anchored, and laid their broad sides, in spite of several discharges of cannon from the fort, which is upon the Isle of St. Rose. The ships had no sooner laid their broad-sides, but the cannonade began on both sides. Our ships had two forts to batter, and seven sail of ships that lay in the harbour. But the great land fort fired only one gun on our army, in which the Spanish Governor, having observed upwards of three hundred Indians, commanded by M. de St. Denis, whose bravery was universally acknowledged, was struck with such a panick, from the fear of falling into their hands, that he struck, and surrendered the place. The fight continued for about two hours longer: but the heavy metal of our Commodore making great execution, the Spaniards cried out several times on board their ships, to {105} strike; but fear prevented their executing these orders: none but a French prisoner durst do it for them. They quitted their ships, leaving matches behind, which would have soon set them on fire. The French prisoners between decks, no longer hearing the least noise, surmised a flight, came on deck, discovered the stratagem of the Spaniards, removed the matches, and thus hindered the vessels from taking fire, acquainting the Commodore therewith. The little fort held out but an hour longer, after which it surrendered for want of gunpowder. The Commandant came himself to put his sword in the hands of M. Champmelin, who embraced him, returned him his sword, and told him, he knew how to distinguish between a brave officer, and one who was not. He made his own ship his place of confinement, whereas the Commandant of the great fort was made the laughing-stock of the French. All the Spaniards on board the ships, and those of the two forts were made prisoners of war: but the French deserters, to the number of forty, were made to cast lots; half of them were hanged at the yard-arms, the rest condemned to be galley-slaves to the Company for ten years in the country. M. Champmelin caused the two forts to be demolished, preserving only three or four houses, with a warehouse. These houses were to lodge the officer, and the few soldiers that were left there, and one to be a guard-house. The rest of the planters were transported to Isle Dauphine, and M. Champmelin set sail for France. [Footnote: At the peace that soon succeeded between France and Spain, Pensacola was restored to the last.] The history of Pensacola is the more necessary, as it is so near our settlements, that the Spaniards hear our guns, when we give them notice by that signal of our design to come and trade with them. {107} THE HISTORY OF LOUISIANA BOOK II. _Of the Country, and its Products_. CHAPTER I. _Geographical Description of Louisiana. Its Climate_ Louisiana that part of North America, which is bounded on the south by the Gulf of Mexico; on the east by Carolina, an English colony, and by a part of Canada; on the west by New Mexico; and on the north, in part by Canada; in part it extends, without any assignable bounds, to the Terrae Incognitae, adjoining to Hudson's Bay. [Footnote: By the charter granted by Louis XIV. to M. Crozat, Louisiana extends only "from the edge of the sea as far as the Illinois," which is not above half the extent assigned by our author.] Its breadth is about two hundred leagues, [Footnote: According to the best maps and accounts extant, the distance from the Missisippi to the mountains of New Mexico is about nine hundred miles, and from the Missisippi to the Atlantic Ocean about six hundred; reckoning sixty miles to a degree, and in a straight line.] extending between the Spanish and English settlements; its length undetermined, as being altogether unknown. However, the source of the Missisippi will afford us some light on this head. The climate of Louisiana varies in proportion as it extends northward: all that can be said of it in general is, that its southern parts are not so scorching as those of Africa in the {108} same latitude; and that the northern parts are colder than the corresponding parts of Europe. New Orleans, which lies in lat. 30°, as do the more northerly coasts of Barbary and Egypt, enjoys the same temperature of climate as Languedoc. Two degrees higher-up, at the Natchez, where I resided for eight years, the climate is far more mild than at New Orleans, the country lying higher: and at the Illinois, which is between 45° and 46°, the summer is in no respect hotter than at Rochelle; but we find the frosts harder, and a more plentiful fall of snow. This difference of climate from that of Africa and Europe, I ascribe to two causes: the first is, the number of woods, which, though scattered up and down, cover the face of this country: the second, the great number of rivers. The former prevent the sun from warming the earth; and the latter diffuse a great degree of humidity: not to mention the continuity of this country with those to the northward; from which it follows, that the winds blowing from that quarter are much colder than if they traversed the sea in their course. For it is well known that the air is never so hot, and never so cold at sea, as on land. We ought not therefore to be surprised, if in the southern part of Louisiana, a north wind obliges people in summer to be warmer cloathed; or if in winter a south wind admits of a lighter dress; as naturally owing, at the one time to the dryness of the wind, at the other, to the proximity of the Equator. Few days pass in Louisiana without seeing the sun. The rain pours down there in sudden heavy showers, which do not last long, but disappear in half an hour, perhaps. The dews are very plentiful, advantageously supplying the place of rain. We may therefore well imagine that the air is perfectly good there; the blood is pure; the people are healthy; subject to few diseases in the vigour of life, and without decrepitude in old age, which they carry to a far greater length than in France. People live to a long and agreeable old age in Louisiana, if they are but sober and temperate. This country is extremely well watered, but much more so in some places than in others. The Missisippi divides this {109} colony from north to south into two parts almost equal. The first discoverers of this river by the way of Canada, called it Colbert, in honour of that great Minister. By some of the savages of the north it is called Meact-Chassipi, which literally denotes, The Ancient Father of Rivers, of which the French have, by corruption formed Missisippi. Other Indians, especially those lower down the river, call it Balbancha; and at last the French have given it the name of St. Louis. Several travellers have in vain attempted to go up to its source; which, however, is well known, whatever some authors, misinformed, may alledge to the contrary. We here subjoin the accounts that may be most depended upon. M. de Charleville, a Canadian, and a relation of M. de Biainville, Commandant General of this colony, told me, that at the time of the settlement of the French, curiosity alone had led him to go up this river to its sources; that for this end he fitted out a canoe, made of the bark of the birch-tree, in order to be more portable in case of need. And that having thus set out with two Canadians and two Indians, with goods, ammunition, and provisions, he went up the river three hundred leagues to the north, above the Illinois: that there be found the Fall, called St. Antony's. This fall is a flat-rock, which traverses the river, and gives it only between eight or ten feet fall. He caused his canoe and effects to be carried over that place; and that embarking afterwards above the fall, he continued going up the river an hundred leagues more to the north, where he met the Sioux, a people inhabiting that country, at some distance from the Missisippi; some say, on each side of it. The Sioux, little accustomed to see Europeans, were surprized at seeing him, and asked whither he was going. He told them, up the Missisippi to its source. They answered, that the country whither he was going was very bad, and where he would have great difficulty to find game for subsistence; that it was a great way off, reckoned as far from the source to the fall, as from this last to the sea. According to this information, the Missisippi must measure from its source to its mouth between fifteen and sixteen hundred leagues, as they reckon eight hundred leagues from St. Antony's Fall to the sea. This {110} conjecture is the more probable, as that far to the north, several rivers of a pretty long course fall into the Missisippi; and that even above St. Antony's Fall, we find in this river between thirty and thirty-five fathom water, and a breadth in proportion; which can never be from a source at no great distance off. I may add, that all the Indians, informed by those nearer the source, are of the same opinion. Though M. de Charleville did not see the source of the Missisippi, he, however, learned, that a great many rivers empty their waters into it: that even above St. Antony's Fall, he saw rivers on each side of the Missisippi, having a course of upwards of an hundred leagues. It is proper to observe, that in going down the river from St. Antony's Fall, the right hand is the west, the left the east. The first river we meet from the fall, and some leagues lower down, is the river St. Peter, which comes from the west: lower down to the east, is the river St. Croix, both of them tolerable large rivers. We meet several others still less, the names of which are of no consequence. Afterwards we meet with the river Moingona, which comes from the west, about two hundred and fifty leagues below the fall, and upwards of an hundred and fifty leagues in length. This river is somewhat brackish. From that river to the Illinois, several rivulets or brooks, both to the right and left, fall into the Missisippi. The river of the Illinois comes from the east, and takes its rise on the frontiers of Canada; its length is two hundred leagues. The river Missouri comes from a source about eight hundred leagues distant; and running from north-west to south-east, discharges itself into the Missisippi, about four or five leagues below the river of the Illinois. This river receives several others, in particular the river of the Canzas, which runs above an hundred and fifty leagues. From the rivers of the Illinois and the Missouri to the sea are reckoned five hundred leagues, and three hundred to St. Antony's Fall: from the Missouri to the Wabache, or Ohio, an hundred leagues. By this last river is the passage from Louisiana to Canada. This voyage is performed from New Orleans by going up the Missisippi to the Wabache; which they go up in the same manner quite to {111} the river of the Miamis; in which they proceed as far as the Carrying-place; from which there are two leagues to a little river which falls into Lake Erie. Here they change their vessels; they come in pettyaugres, and go down the river St. Laurence to Quebec in birch canoes. On the river St. Laurence are several carrying-places, on account of its many falls or cataracts. Those who have performed this voyage, have told me they reckoned eighteen hundred leagues from New Orleans to Quebec. [Footnote: It is not above nine hundred leagues.] Though the Wabache is considered in Louisiana, as the most considerable of the rivers which come from Canada, and which, uniting in one bed, form the river commonly called by that name, yet all the Canadian travellers assure me, that the river called Ohio, and which falls into the Wabache, comes a much longer way than this last; which should be a reason for giving it the name Ohio; but custom has prevailed in this respect. [Footnote: But not among the English; we call it the Ohio.] From the Wabache, and on the same side, to Manchac, we see but very few rivers, and those very small ones, which fall into the Missisippi, though there are nearly three hundred and fifty leagues from the Wabache to Manchac. [Footnote: That is, from the mouth of the Ohio to the river Iberville, which other accounts make but two hundred and fifty leagues.] This will, doubtless, appear something extraordinary to those unacquainted with the country. The reason, that may be assigned for it, appears quite natural and striking. In all that part of Louisiana, which is to the east of the Missisippi, the lands are so high in the neighbourhood of the river, that in many places the rain-water runs off from the banks of the Missisippi, and discharges itself into rivers, which fall either directly into the sea, or into lakes. Another very probable reason is, that from the Wabache to the sea, no rain falls but in sudden gusts; which defect is compensated by the abundant dews, so that the plants lose nothing by that means. The Wabache has a course of three hundred {112} leagues, and the Ohio has its source a hundred leagues still farther off. In continuing to go down the Missisippi, from the Wabache to the river of the Arkansas, we observe but few rivers, and those pretty small. The most considerable is that of St. Francis, which is distant thirty and odd leagues from that of the Arkansas. It is on this river of St. Francis, that the hunters of New Orleans go every winter to make salt provisions, tallow, and bears oil, for the supply of the capital. The river of the Arkansas, which is thirty-five leagues lower down, and two hundred leagues from New Orleans, is so denominated from the Indians of that name, who dwell on its banks, a little above its confluence with the Missisippi. It runs three hundred leagues, and its source is in the same latitude with Santa-Fé, in New Mexico, in the mountains of which it rises. It runs up a little to the north for a hundred leagues, by forming a flat elbow, or winding, and returns from thence to the south-east, quite to the Missisippi. It has a cataract, or fall, about the middle of its course. Some call it the White River, because in its course it receives a river of that name. The Great Cut-point is about forty leagues below the river of the Arkansas: this was a long circuit which the Missisippi formerly took, and which it has abridged, by making its way through this point of land. Below this river, still going towards the sea, we observe scarce any thing but brooks or rivulets, except the river of the Yasous, sixty leagues lower down. This river runs but about fifty leagues, and will hardly admit of a boat for a great way: it has taken its name from the nation of the Yasous, and some others dwelling on its banks. Twenty-eight leagues below the river of the Yasous, is a great cliff of a reddish free-stone: over-against this cliff are the great and little whirlpools. From this little river, we meet but with very small ones, till we come to the Red River, called at first the Marne, because nearly as big as that river, which falls into the Seine. The Nachitoches dwell on its banks, and it was distinguished by the name of that nation; but its common name, and which it still bears, is that of the Red River. It takes its rise in New Mexico, {113} forms an elbow to the north, in the same manner as the river of the Arkansas, falls down afterwards towards the Missisippi, running south east. They generally allow it a course of two hundred leagues. At about ten leagues from its confluence it receives the Black River, or the river of the Wachitas, which takes its rise pretty near that of the Arkansas. This rivulet, or source, forms, as is said, a fork pretty near its rise, one arm of which falls into the river of the Arkansas; the largest forms the Black River. Twenty leagues below the Red River is the Little Cut-point, and a league below that point are the little cliffs. From the Red River to the sea we observe nothing but some small brooks: but on the east side, twenty-five leagues above New Orleans, we find a channel, which is dry at low water. The inundations of the Missisippi formed this channel (which is called Manchac) below some high lands, which terminate near that place. It discharges itself into the lake Maurepas, and from thence into that of St. Louis, of which I gave an account before. The channel runs east south-east: formerly there was a passage through it; but at present it is so choaked up with dead wood, that it begins to have no water [Footnote: Manchac is almost dry for three quarters of the year: but during the inundation, the waters of the river have a vent through it into the lakes Ponchartrain and St. Louis. _Dumont_, II. 297. This is the river Iberville, which is to be the boundary of the British dominions.] but at the place where it receives the river Amité, which is pretty large, and which runs seventy leagues in a very fine country. A very small river falls into the lake Maurepas, to the east of Manchac. In proceeding eastward, we may pass from this lake into that of St. Louis, by a river formed by the waters of the Amité. In going to the north of this lake, we meet to the east the little river Tandgipao. From thence proceeding always east, we come to the river Quéfoncté, which is long and beautiful, and comes from the Chactaws. Proceeding in the same route, we meet the river Castin-Bayouc: we may afterwards quit the lake by the channel, which borders the same country, {114} and proceeding eastward we meet with Pearl River which falls into this channel. Farther up the coast, which lies from west to east, we meet St. Louis's Bay, into which a little river of that name discharges itself: farther on, we meet the river of the Paska-Ogoulas: and at length we arrive at the Bay of Mobile, which runs upwards of thirty leagues into the country, where it receives the river of the same name, which runs for about a hundred and fifty leagues from north to south. All the rivers I have just mentioned, and which fall not into the Missisippi, do in like manner run from north to south. _Description of the Lower_ Louisiana, _and the Mouths of the_ Missisippi. I return to Manchac, where I quitted the Missisippi. At a little distance from Manchac we meet the river of the Plaqumines; it lies to the west, and is rather a creek than a river. Three or four leagues lower down is the Fork, which is channel running to the west of the Missisippi, through which part of the inundations of that river run off. These waters pass through several lakes, and from thence to the sea, by Ascension Bay. As to the other rivers to the west of this bay, their names are unknown. The waters which fall into those lakes consist not only of such as pass through this channel, but also of those that come out of the Missisippi, when overflowing its banks on each side: for, of all the water which comes out of the Missisippi over its banks, not a drop ever returns into its bed; but this is only to be understood of the low lands, that is, between fifty and sixty leagues from the sea eastward, and upwards of a hundred leagues westward. It will, doubtless, seem strange, that a river which overflows its banks, should never after recover its waters again, either in whole or in part; and this will appear so much the more singular, as every where else it happens otherwise in the like circumstances. It appeared no less strange to myself; and I have on all occasions endeavoured to the utmost, to find out what could {115} produce an effect, which really appeared to me very extraordinary, and, I imagine, not without success. From Manchac down to the sea, it is probable, and even in some degree certain, that all the lands thereabouts are brought down and accumulated by means of the ooze which the Missisippi carries along with it in its annual inundations; which begin in the month of March, by the melting of the snow to the north, and last for about three months. Those oozy or muddy lands easily produce herbs and reeds; and when the Missisippi happens to overflow the following year, these herbs and reeds intercept a part of this ooze, so that those at a distance from the river cannot retain so large a quantity of it, since those that grow next the river have stopt the greatest part; and by a necessary consequence, the others farther off, and in proportion as they are distant from the Missisippi, can retain a much less quantity of the mud. In this manner the land rising higher along the river, in process of time the banks of the Missisippi became higher than the lands about it. In like manner also these neighbouring lakes on each side of the river are remains of the sea, which are not yet filled up. Other rivers have firm banks, formed by the lands of Nature, a land of the same nature with the continent, and always adhering thereto: these sorts of banks, instead of augmenting, do daily diminish, either by sinking, or tumbling down into the bed of the river. The banks of the Missisippi, on the contrary, increase, and cannot diminish in the low and accumulated lands; because the ooze, alone deposited on its banks, increase them; which, besides, is the reason that the Missisippi becomes narrower, in place of washing away the earth, and enlarging its bed, as all other known rivers do. If we consider these facts, therefore, we ought no longer to be surprised that the waters of the Missisippi, when once they have left their bed, can never return thither again. In order to prove this augmentation of lands, I shall relate what happened near Orleans: one of the inhabitants caused a well to be sunk at a little distance from the Missisippi, in order to procure a clearer water. At twenty feet deep there was found a tree laid flat, three feet in diameter: the height of the earth was therefore augmented twenty feet since the fall or lodging of that tree, as well by the accumulated mud, as by the {116} rotting of the leaves, which fall every winter, and which the Missisippi carries down in vast quantities. In effect, it sweeps down a great deal of mud, because it runs for twelve hundred leagues at least across a country which is nothing else but earth, which the depth of the river sufficiently proves. It carries down vast quantities of leaves, canes and trees, upon its waters, the breadth of which is always above half a league, and sometimes a league and a quarter. Its banks are covered with much wood, sometimes for the breadth of a league on each side, from its source to its mouth. There is nothing therefore more easy to be conceived, than that this river carries down with its waters a prodigious quantity of ooze, leaves, canes and trees, which it continually tears up by the roots, and that the sea throwing back again all these things, they should necessarily produce the lands in question, and which are sensibly increasing. At the entrance of the pass or channel to the south-east, there was built a small fort, still called Balise. This fort was built on a little island, without the mouth of the river. In 1734 it stood on the same spot, and I have been told that at present it is half a league within the river: the land therefore hath in twenty years gained this space on the sea. Let us now resume the sequel of the Geographical Description of Louisiana. The coast is bounded to the west by St. Bernard's Bay, where M. de la Salle landed; into this bay a small river falls, and there are some others which discharge their waters between this bay and Ascension bay; the planters seldom frequent that coast. On the east the coast is bounded by Rio Perdido, which the French corruptedly call aux Perdrix; Rio Perdido signifying Lost River, aptly so called by the Spaniards, because it loses itself under ground, and afterwards appears again, and discharges itself into the sea, a little to the East of Mobile, on which the first French planters settled. From the Fork down to the sea, there is no river; nor is it possible there should be any, after what I have related: on the contrary, we find at a small distance from the Fork, another channel to the east, called the Bayoue of le Sueur: it is full of a soft ooze or mud, and communicates with the lakes which lie to the east. {117} On coming nearer to the sea, we meet, at about eight leagues from the principal mouth of the Missisippi, the first Pass; and a league lower down, the Otter Pass. These two passes or channels are only for pettyaugres. From this place there is no land fit to tread on, it being all a quagmire down to the sea. There also we find a point, which parts the mouths of the Missisippi: that to the right is called the South-Pass, or Channel; the west point of which runs two leagues farther into the sea than the point of the South-east Pass, which is to the left of that of the South Pass. At first vessels entered by the South-east Pass, but before we go down to it, we find to the left the East-Pass, which is that by which ships enter at present. At each of these three Passes or Channels there is a Bar, as in all other rivers: these bars are three quarters of a league broad, with only eight or nine feet water: but there is a channel through this bar, which being often subject to shift, the coasting pilot is obliged to be always sounding, in order to be sure of the pass: this channel is, at low water, between seventeen and eighteen feet deep. [Footnote: I shall make no mention of the islands, which are frequent in the Missisippi, as being, properly speaking, nothing but little isles, produced by some trees, though the soil be nothing but a sand bottom.] This description may suffice to shew that the falling in with the land from sea is bad; the land scarce appears two leagues off; which doubtless made the Spaniards call the Missisippi Rio Escondido, the Hid River. This river is generally muddy, owing to the waters of the Missouri; for before this junction the water of the Missisippi is very clear. I must not omit mentioning that no ship can either enter or continue in the river when the waters are high, on account of the prodigious numbers of trees, and vast quantities of dead wood, which it carries down, and which, together with the canes, leaves, mud, and sand, which the sea throws back upon the coast, are continually augmenting the land, and make it project into the Gulf of Mexico, like the bill of a bird. I should be naturally led to divide Louisiana into the Higher and Lower, on account of the great difference between {118} the two principal parts of this vast country. The Higher I would call that part in which we find stone, which we first meet with between the river of the Natchez and that of the Yasous, between which is a cliff of a fine free stone; and I would terminate that part at Manchac, where the high lands end. I would extend the Lower Louisiana from thence down to the sea. The bottom of the lands on the hills is a red clay, and so compact, as might afford a solid foundation for any building whatever. This clay is covered by a light earth, which is almost black, and very fertile. The grass grows there knee deep; and in the bottoms, which separate these small eminences, it is higher than the tallest man. Towards the end of September both are successively set on fire; and in eight or ten days young grass shoots up half a foot high. One will easily judge, that in such pastures herds of all creatures fatten extraordinarily. The flat country is watery, and appears to have been formed by every thing that comes down to the sea. I shall add, that pretty near the Nachitoches, we find banks of muscle-shells, such as those of which Cockle-Island is formed. The neighbouring nation affirms, that according to their old tradition, the sea formerly came up to this place. The women of this nation go and gather these shells, and make a powder of them, which they mix with the earth, of which they make their pottery, or earthen ware. However, I would not advise the use of these shells indifferently for this purpose, because they are naturally apt to crack in the fire: I have therefore reason to think, that those found at the Nachitoches have acquired their good quality only by the discharge of their salts, from continuing for so many ages out of the sea. If we may give credit to the tradition of these people, and if we would reason on the facts I have advanced, we shall be naturally led to believe, and indeed every thing in this country shews it, that the Lower Louisiana is a country gained on the sea, whose bottom is a crystal sand, white as snow, fine as flour, and such as is found both to the east and west of the Missisippi; and we may expect, that in future ages the sea and river may form another land like that of the Lower Louisiana. The Fort Balise shews that a century is sufficient to extend Louisiana two leagues towards the sea. {119} CHAPTER II. _The Author's Journey in_ Louisiana, _from the Natchez to the River St. Francis, and the Country of the Chicasaws._ Ever since my arrival in Louisiana, I made it my business to get information in whatever was new therein, and to make discoveries of such things as might be serviceable to society. I therefore resolved to take a journey through the country. And after leaving my plantation to the care of my friends and neighbours, I prepared for a journey into the interior parts of the province, in order to learn the nature of the soil, its various productions, and to make discoveries not mentioned by others. I wanted to travel both for my own instruction, and for the benefit of the publick: but at the same time I desired to be alone, without any of my own countrymen with me; who, as they neither have patience, nor are made for fatigue, would be ever teazing me to return again, and not readily take up either with the fare or accommodations, to be met with on such a journey. I therefore pitched upon ten Indians, who were indefatigable, robust, and tractable, and sufficiently skilled in hunting, a qualification necessary on such journeys. I explained to them my whole design; told them, we should avoid passing through any inhabited countries, and would take our journeys through such as were unknown and uninhabited; because I travelled in order to discover what no one before could inform me about. This explication pleased them; and on their part they promised, I should have no reason to be dissatisfied with them. But they objected, they were under apprehensions of losing themselves in countries they did not know. To remove these apprehensions, I shewed them a mariner's compass, which removed all their difficulties, after I had explained to them the manner of using it, in order to avoid losing our way. We set out in the month of September, which is the best season of the year for beginning a journey in this country: in the first place, because, during the summer, the grass is too high for travelling; whereas in the month of September, the meadows, the grass of which is then dry, are set on fire, and {120} the ground becomes smooth, and easy to walk on: and hence it is, that at this time, clouds of smoke are seen for several days together to extend over a long track of country; sometimes to the extent of between twenty and thirty leagues in length, by two or three leagues in breadth, more or less, according as the wind sets, and is higher or lower. In the second place, this season is the most commodious for travelling over those countries; because, by means of the rain, which ordinarily falls after the grass is burnt, the game spread themselves all over the meadows, and delight to feed on the new grass; which is the reason why travellers more easily find provisions at this time than at any other. What besides facilitates these excursions in Autumn, or in the beginning of Winter, is, that all works in the fields are then at an end, or at least the hurry of them is over. For the first days of our journey the game was pretty rare, because they shun the neighbourhood of men; if you except the deer, which are spread all over the country, their nature being to roam indifferently up and down; so that at first we were obliged to put up with this fare. We often met with flights of partridges, which the natives cannot kill, because they cannot shoot flying; I killed some for a change. The second day I had a turkey-hen brought to regale me. The discoverer, who killed it, told me, there were a great many in the same place, but that he could do nothing without a dog. I have often heard of a turkey-chace, but never had an opportunity of being at one: I went with him and took my dog along with me. On coming to the spot, we soon descried the hens, which ran off with such speed, that the swiftest Indian would lose his labour in attempting to outrun them. My dog soon came up with them, which made them take to their wings, and perch on the next trees; as long as they are not pursued in this manner, they only run, and are soon out of sight. I came near their place of retreat, killed the largest, a second, and my discoverer a third. We might have killed the whole flock; for, while they see any men, they never quit the tree they have once perched on. Shooting scares them not, as they only look at the bird that drops, and set up a timorous cry, as he falls. {121} Before I proceed, it is proper to say a word concerning my discoverers, or scouts. I had always three of them out, one a-head, and one on each hand of me; commonly distant a league from me, and as much from each other. Their condition of scouts prevented not their carrying each his bed, and provisions for thirty-six hours upon occasion. Though those near my own person were more loaded, I however sent them out, sometimes one, sometimes another, either to a neighbouring mountain or valley: so that I had three or four at least, both on my right and left, who went out to make discoveries a small distance off. I did thus, in order to have nothing to reproach myself with, in point of vigilance, since I had begun to take the trouble of making discoveries. The next business was, to make ourselves mutually understood, notwithstanding our distance: we agreed, therefore, on certain signals, which are absolutely necessary on such occasions. Every day, at nine in the morning, at noon, and at three in the afternoon, we made a smoke. This signal was the hour marked for making a short halt, in order to know, whether the scouts followed each other, and whether they were nearly at the distance agreed on. These smokes were made at the hours I mentioned, which are the divisions of the day according to the Indians. They divide their day into four equal parts; the first contains the half of the morning; the second is at noon; the third comprizes the half of the afternoon; and the fourth, the other half of the afternoon to the evening. It was according to this usage our signals were mutually made, by which we regulated our course, and places of rendezvous. We marched for some days without finding any thing which could either engage my attention, or satisfy my curiosity. True it is, this was sufficiently made up in another respect; as we travelled over a charming country, which might justly furnish our painters of the finest imagination with genuine notions of landskips. Mine, I own, was highly delighted with the sight of fine plains, diversified with very extensive and highly delightful meadows. The plains were intermixed with thickets, planted by the hand of Nature herself; and interspersed with hills, running off in gentle declivities, and with {122} valleys, thick set, and adorned with woods, which serve for a retreat to the most timorous animals, as the thickets screen the buffaloes from the abundant dews of the country. I longed much to kill a buffalo with my own hand; I therefore told my people my intention to kill one of the first herd we should meet; nor did a day pass, in which we did not see several herds; the least of which exceeded a hundred and thirty or a hundred and fifty in number. Next morning we espied a herd of upwards of two hundred. The wind stood as I could have wished, being in our faces, and blowing from the herd; which is a great advantage in this chace; because when the wind blows from you towards the buffaloes, they come to scent you, and run away, before you can come within gun-shot of them; whereas, when the wind blows from them on the hunters, they do not fly till they can distinguish you by sight; and then, what greatly favours your coming very near to them is, that the curled hair, which falls down between their horns upon their eyes, is so bushy, as greatly to confuse their sight. In this manner I came within full gun-shot of them, pitched upon one of the fattest, shot him at the extremity of the shoulder, and brought him down stone-dead. The natives, who stood looking on, were ready to fire, had I happened to wound him but slightly; for in that case, these animals are apt to turn upon the hunter, who thus wounds them. Upon seeing the buffalo drop down dead, and the rest taking to flight, the natives told me, with a smile: "You kill the males, do you intend to make tallow?" I answered, I did it on purpose, to shew them the manner of making him good meat, though a male. I caused his belly to be opened quite warm, the entrails to be taken out directly, the bunch, tongue, and chines to be cut out; one of the chines to be laid on the coals, of which I made them all taste; and they all agreed the meat was juicy, and of an exquisite flavour. I then took occasion to remonstrate to them, that if, instead of killing the cows, as was always their custom, they killed the bulls, the difference in point of profit would be very considerable: {123} as, for instance, a good commerce with the French in tallow, with which the bulls abound; bull's flesh is far more delicate and tender than cow's; a third advantage is, the selling of the skins at a higher rate, as being much better; in fine, this kind of game, so advantageous to the country, would thereby escape being quite destroyed; whereas, by killing the cows, the breed of these animals is greatly impaired. I made a soup, that was of an exquisite flavour, but somewhat fat, of the broth boiled from the marrow-bones of this buffalo, the rest of the broth serving to make maiz-gruel, called Sagamity, which to my taste surpassed the best dish in France: the bunch on the back would have graced the table of a prince. In the route I held, I kept more on the sides of the hills than on the plains. Above some of these sides, or declivities, I found, in some places, little eminences, which lay peeled, or bare, and disclosed a firm and compact clay, or pure matrix, and of the species of that of Lapis Calaminaris. The intelligent in Mineralogy understand what I would be at. The little grass, which grows there, was observed to droop, as also three or four misshapen trees, no bigger than one's leg; one of which I caused to be cut down; when, to my astonishment, I saw it was upwards of sixty years standing. The neighbouring country was fertile, in proportion to its distance from this spot. Near that place we saw game of every kind, and in plenty, and never towards the summit. We crossed the Missisippi several times upon Cajeux (rafts, or floats, made of several bundles of canes, laid across each other; a kind of extemporaneous pontoon,) in order to take a view of mountains which had raised my curiosity. I observed, that both sides of the river had their several advantages; but that the West side is better watered; appeared also to be more fruitful both in minerals, and in what relates to agriculture; for which last it seems much more adapted than the East side. Notwithstanding our precaution to make signals, one of my scouts happened one day to stray, because the weather was {124} foggy; so that he did not return at night to our hut; at which I was very uneasy, and could not sleep; as he was not returned, though the signals of call had been repeated till night closed. About nine the next morning he cast up, telling us he had been in pursuit of a drove of deer, which were led by one that was altogether white: but that not being able to come up with them, he picked up, on the side of a hill, some small sharp stones, of which he brought a sample. These stones I received with pleasure, because I had not yet seen any in all this country, only a hard red free-stone in a cliff on the Missisippi. After carefully examining those which my discoverer brought me, I found they were a gypsum. I took home some pieces, and on my return examined them more attentively; found them to be very clear, transparent, and friable; when calcined, they turned extremely white, and with them I made some factitious marble. This gave me hopes that this country, producing Plaster of Paris, might, besides, have stones for building. I wanted to see the spot myself: we set out about noon, and travelled for about three leagues before we came to it. I examined the spot, which to me appeared to be a large quarry of Plaster. As to the white deer above mentioned, I learned from the Indians, that some such were to be met with, though but rarely, and that only in countries not frequented by the hunters. The wind being set in for rain, we resolved to put ourselves under shelter. The place where the bad weather overtook us was very fit to set up at. On going out to hunt, we discovered at five hundred paces off, in the defile, or narrow pass, a brook of a very clear water, a very commodious watering-place for the buffaloes, which were in great numbers all around us. My companions soon raised a cabin, well-secured to the North. As we resolved to continue there for eight days at least, they made it so close as to keep out the cold: in the night, I felt nothing of the severity of the North wind, though I lay but lightly covered. My bed consisted of a bear's skin, and two robes or coats of buffalo; the bear skin, with the flesh side {125} undermost, being laid on leaves, and the pile uppermost by way of straw-bed; one of the buffalo coats folded double by way of feather-bed; one half of the other under me served for a matrass, and the other over me for a coverlet: three canes, or boughs, bent to a semicircle, one at the head, another in the middle, and a third at the feet, supported a cloth which formed my tester and curtains, and secured me from the injuries of the air, and the stings of gnats and moskitto's. My Indians had their ordinary hunting and travelling beds, which consist of a deer skin and a buffalo coat, which they always carry with them, when they expect to lie out of their villages. We rested nine days, and regaled ourselves with choice buffalo, turkey, partridge, pheasants, &c. The discovery I had made of the plaster, put me to look out, during our stay, in all the places round about, for many leagues. I was at last tired of beating about such fine plains, without discovering the least thing, and I had resolved to go forward to the North when at the noon-signal the scout a-head waited to shew me a shining and sharp stone, of the length and size of one's thumb, and as square as a joiner could have made a piece of wood of the same bigness. I imagined it might be rock-crystal; to be assured thereof, I took a large musquet flint in my left hand, presenting its head, or thick end, on which I struck with one of the edges of the crystal, and drew much more fire than with the finest steel: and notwithstanding the many strokes I gave, the piece of crystal was not in the least scratched or streaked. I examined these stones, and found pieces of different magnitudes, some square, others with six faces, even and smooth like mirrors, highly transparent, without any veins or spots. Some of these pieces jutted out of the earth, like ends of beams, two feet and upwards in length; others in considerable numbers, from seven to nine inches; above all, those with six panes or faces. There was a great number of a middling and smaller sort: my people wanted to carry some with them; but I dissuaded them. My reason was, I apprehended some Frenchman might by presents prevail on them to discover the place. {126} For my part, I carefully observed the latitude, and followed, on setting out, a particular point of the compass, to come to a river which I knew. I took that route, under pretense of going to a certain nation to procure dry provisions, which we were in want of, and which are of great help on a journey. We arrived, after seven days march, at that nation, by whom we were well received. My hunters brought in daily many duck and teal. I agreed with the natives of the place for a large pettyaugre of black walnut, to go down the river, and afterwards to go up the Missisippi. I had a strong inclination to go up still higher north, in order to discover mines. We embarked, and the eleventh day of our passage I caused the pettyaugre to be unladen of every thing, and concealed in the water, which was then low. I loaded seven men with the things we had. Matters thus ordered, we set out according to the intention I had to go to the northward. I observed every day, with new pleasure, the more we advanced to that quarter, the more beautiful and fertile the country was, abounding in game of every kind: the herds of deer are numerous; at every turn we meet with them; and not a day passed without seeing herds of buffaloes, sometimes five or six, of upwards of an hundred in a drove. In such journeys as these we always take up our night's lodging near wood and water, where we put up in good time: then at sun-set, when every thing in nature is hushed, we were charmed with the enchanting warbling of different birds; so that one would be inclined to say, they reserved this favourable moment for the melody and harmony of their song, to celebrate undisturbed and at their ease, the benefits of the Creator. On the other hand, we are disturbed in the night, by the hideous noise of the numberless water-fowls that are to be seen on the Missisippi, and every river or lake near it, such as cranes, flamingo's, wild geese, herons, saw-bills, ducks, &c. As we proceeded further north, we began to see flocks of swans roam through the air, mount out of sight, and proclaim {127} their passage by their piercing shrill cries. We for some days followed the course of a river, at the head of which we found, in a very retired place, a beaver-dam. We set up our hut within reach of this retreat, or village of beavers, but at such a distance, as that they could not observe our fire. I put my people on their guard against making any noise, or firing their pieces, for fear of scaring those animals; and thought it even necessary to forbid them to cut any wood, the better to conceal ourselves. After taking all these precautions, we rose and were on foot against the time of moonshine, posted ourselves in a place as distant from the huts of the beavers, as from the causey or bank, which dammed up the waters of the place where they were. I took my fusil and pouch, according to my custom of never travelling without them. But each Indian was only to take with him a little hatchet, which all travellers in this country carry with them. I took the oldest of my retinue, after having pointed out to the others the place of ambush, and the manner in which the branches of trees we had cut were to be set to cover us. I then went towards the middle of the dam, with my old man, who had his hatchet, and ordered him softly to make a gutter or trench, a foot wide, which he began on the outside of the causey or dam, crossing it quite to the water. This he did by removing the earth with his hands. As soon as the gutter was finished, and the water ran into it, we speedily, and without any noise, retired to our place of ambush, in order to observe the behaviour of the beavers in repairing this breach. A little after we were got behind our screen of boughs, we heard the water of the gutter begin to make a noise: and a moment after, a beaver came out of his hut and plunged into the water. We could only know this by the noise, but we saw him at once upon the bank or dam, and distinctly perceived that he took a survey of the gutter, after which he instantly gave with all his force four blows with his tail; and had scarce struck the fourth, but all the beavers threw themselves pell-mell into the water, and came upon the dam: when they were all come thither, one of them muttered and mumbled to the {128} rest (who all stood very attentive) I know not what orders, but which they doubtless understood well, because they instantly departed, and went out on the banks of the pond, one party one way; another, another way. Those next us were between us and the dam, and we at the proper distance not to be seen, and to observe them. Some of them made mortar, others carried it on their tails, which served for sledges. I observed they put themselves two and two, side by side, the one with his head to the other's tail, and thus mutually loaded each other, and trailed the mortar, which was pretty stiff, quite to the dam, where others remained to take it, put it into the gutter, and rammed it with blows of their tails. The noise which the water made before by its fall, soon ceased, and the breach was closed in a short time: upon which one of the beavers struck two great blows with his tail, and instantly they all took to the water without any noise, and disappeared. We retired, in order to take a little rest in our hut, where we remained till day; but as soon as it appeared, I longed much to satisfy my curiosity about these creatures. My people together made a pretty large and deep breach, in order to view the construction of the dam, which I shall describe presently: we then made noise enough without further ceremony. This noise, and the water, which the beavers observed soon to lower, gave them much uneasiness; so that I saw one of them at different times come pretty near to us, in order to examine what passed. As I apprehended that when the water was run off they would all take flight to the woods, we quitted the breach, and went to conceal ourselves all round the pond, in order to kill only one, the more narrowly to examine it; especially as these beavers were of the grey kind, which are not so common as the brown. One of the beavers ventured to go upon the breach, after having several times approached it, and returned again like a spy. I lay in ambush in the bottom, at the end of the dam: I saw him return; he surveyed the breach, then struck four blows, which saved his life, for I then aimed at him. But these {129} four blows, so well struck, made me judge it was the signal of call for all the rest, just as the night before. This also made me think he might be the overseer of the works, and I did not choose to deprive the republic of beavers of a member who appeared so necessary to it. I therefore waited till others should appear: a little after, one came and passed close by me, in order to go to work; I made no scruple to lay him at his full length, on the persuasion he might only be a common labourer. My shot made them all return to their cabins, with greater speed than a hundred blows of the tail of their Overseer could have done. As soon as I had killed this beaver, I called my companions; and finding the water did not run off quick enough, I caused the breach to be widened, and I examined the dead. I observed these beavers to be a third less than the brown or common sort, but their make the same; having the same head, same sharp teeth, same beards, legs as short, paws equally furnished with claws, and with membranes or webs, and in all respects made like the others. The only difference is, that they are of an ash-gray, and that the long pile, which passes over the soft wool, is silvered, or whitish. During this examination, I caused my people to cut boughs, canes, and reeds, to be thrown in towards the end of the pond, in order to pass over the little mud which was in that place; and at the same time I caused some shot to be fired on the cabins that lay nearest us. The report of the guns, and the rattling of the shot on the roofs of the cabins, made them all fly into the woods with the greatest precipitation imaginable. We came at length to a cabin, in which there were not six inches of water. I caused to undo the roof without breaking any thing, during which I saw the piece of aspin-tree, which was laid under the cabin for their provisions. I observed fifteen pieces of wood, with their bark in part gnawed. The cabin also had fifteen cells round the hole in the middle, at which they went out; which made me think each had his own cell. I am now to give a sketch of the architecture of these amphibious animals, and an account of their villages; it is thus {130} I call the place of their abode, after the Canadians and the Indians, with whom I agree; and allow, these animals deserve, so much the more to be distinguished from others, as I find their instinct far superior to that of other animals. I shall not carry the parallel any farther, it might become offensive. [Illustration: TOP: _Beaver_--MIDDLE: _Beaver lodge_--BOTTOM: _Beaver dam_] The cabins of the beavers are round, having about ten or twelve feet in diameter, according to the number, more or {131} less, of fixed inhabitants. I mean, that this diameter is to be taken on the flooring at about a foot above the water, when it is even with the dam: but as the upper part runs to a point, the under is much larger than the flooring, which we may represent to ourselves, by supposing all the upright posts to resemble the legs of a great A, whose middle stroke is the flooring. These posts are picked out, and we might say, well proportioned, seeing, at the height this flooring is to be laid at, there is a hook for bearing bars, which by that means form the circumference of the flooring. The bars again bear traverses, or cross pieces of timber, which are the joists; canes and grass complete this flooring, which has a hole in the middle to go out at, when they please, and into this all the cells open. The dam is formed of timbers, in the shape of St. Andrew's cross, or of a great X, laid close together, and kept firm by timbers laid lengthwise, which are continued from one end of the dam to the other, and placed on the St. Andrew's crosses: the whole is filled with earth, clapped close by great blows of their tails. The inside of the dam, next the water, is almost perpendicular; but on the outside it has a great slope, that grass coming to grow thereon, may prevent the water that passes there, to carry away the earth. I saw them neither cut nor convey the timbers along, but it is to be presumed their manner is the same as that of other Beavers, who never cut but a soft wood; for which purpose they use their fore-teeth, which are extremely sharp. These timbers they push and roll before them on the land, as they do on the water, till they come to the place where they want to lay them. I observed these grey Beavers to be more chilly, or sensible of cold, than the other species: and it is doubtless for this reason they draw nearer to the south. We set out from this place to come to a high ground, which seemed to be continued to a great distance. We came the same evening to the foot of it, but the day was too far advanced to ascend it. The day following we went to its top, found it a flat, except some small eminences at intervals. There appeared to be very little wood on it, still less water, and least of all stone; though probably there may be some in its bowels, having {132} observed some stones in a part where the earth was tumbled down. We accurately examined all this rising ground, without discovering any thing; and though that day we travelled upwards of five leagues, yet we were not three leagues distant from the hut we set out from in the morning. This high ground would have been a very commodious situation for a fine palace; as from its edges is a very distant prospect. Next day, after a ramble of about two leagues and a half, I had the signal of call to my right. I instantly flew thither; and when I came, the scout shewed me a stump sticking out of the earth knee high, and nine inches in diameter. The Indian took it at a distance for the stump of a tree, and was surprised to find wood cut in a country which appeared to have been never frequented: but when he came near enough to form a judgement about it, he saw from the figure, that it was a very different thing: and this was the reason he made the signal of call. I was highly pleased at this discovery, which was that of a lead-ore. I had also the satisfaction to find my perseverance recompensed; but in particular I was ravished with admiration, on seeing this wonderful production, and the power of the soil of this province, constraining, as it were, the minerals to disclose themselves. I continued to search all around, and I discovered ore in several places. We returned to lodge at our last hut, on account of the convenience of water, which was too scarce on this high ground. We set out from thence, in order to come nearer to the Missisippi: through every place we passed, nothing but herds of buffaloes, elk, deer, and other animals of every kind, were to be seen; especially near rivers and brooks. Bears, on the other hand, keep in the thick woods, where they find their proper food. After a march of five days I espied a mountain to my right, which seemed so high as to excite my curiosity. Next morning I directed thither my course, where we arrived about three in the afternoon. We stopped at the foot of the mountain, where we found a fine spring issuing out of the rock. {133} The day following we went up to its top, where it is stony. Though there is earth enough for plants, yet they are so thin sown, that hardly two hundred could be found on an acre of ground. Trees are also very rare on that spot, and these poor, meagre, and cancerous. The stones I found there are all fit for making lime. We from thence took the route that should carry us to our pettyaugre, a journey but of a few days. We drew the pettyaugre out of the water, and there passed the night. Next day we crossed the Missisippi; in going up which we killed a she-bear, with her cubs: for during the winter, the banks of the Missisippi are lined with them; and it is rare, in going up the river, not to see many cross it in a day, in search of food: the want of which makes them quit the banks. I continued my route in going up the Missisippi quite to the Chicasaw Cliffs, (Ecores à Prud'homme) where I was told I should find something for the benefit of the colony: this was what excited my curiosity. Being arrived at those cliffs we landed, and concealed, after unlading it, the pettyaugre in the water; and from that day I sought, and at length found the iron-mine, of which I had some hints given me. After being sure of this, I carefully searched all around, to find Castine: but this was impossible: however, I believe it may be found higher up in ascending the Missisippi, but that care I leave to those who hereafter shall choose to undertake the working that mine. I had, however, some amends made me for my trouble; as in searching, I found some marks of pit-coal in the neighbourhood, a thing at least as useful in other parts of the colony as in this. After having made my reflections, I resolved in a little time to return home; but being loth to leave so fine a country, I penetrated a little farther into it; and in his short excursion I espied a small hill, all bare and parched, having on its top only two trees in a very drooping condition, and scarce any grass, besides some little tufts, distant enough asunder, which grew on a very firm clay. The bottom of this hill was not so barren, and the adjacent country fertile as in other parts. {134} These indications made me presume there might be a mine in that spot. I at length returned towards the Missisippi, in order to meet again the pettyaugre. As in all this country, and in all the height of the colony we find numbers of buffaloes, elk, deer, and other game; so we find numbers of wolves, some tigers, Cat-a-mounts, (Pichous) and carrion-crows, all of them carnivorous animals, which I shall hereafter describe. When we came near the Missisippi we made the signal of recognition, which was answered, though at some distance. It was there my people killed some buffaloes, to be dressed and cured in their manner, for our journey. We embarked at length, and went down the Missisippi, till we came within a league of the common landing-place. The Indians hid the pettyaugre, and went to their village. As for myself, I got home towards dusk, where I found my neighbours and slaves surprised, and at the same time glad, at my unexpected return, as if it had been from a hunting-match in the neighbourhood. I was really well pleased to have got home, to see my slaves in perfect health, and all my affairs in good order: But I was strongly impressed with the beauties of the countries I had seen. I could have wished to end my days in those charming solitudes, at a distance from the tumultuous hurry of the world, far from the pinching gripe of avarice and deceit. There it is, said I to myself, one relishes a thousand innocent delights, and which are repeated with a satisfaction ever new. It is there one lives exempt from the assaults of censure, detraction, and calumny. In those delightsome meadows, which often extend far out of sight, and where we see so many different species of animals, there it is we have occasion to admire the beneficence of the Creator. To conclude, there it is, that at the gentle purling of a pure and living water, and enchanted with the concerts of birds, which fill the neighbouring thickets, we may agreeably contemplate the wonders of nature, and examine them all at our leisure. I had reasons for concealing my journey, and stronger reasons still to suppress what I had discovered, in order to avail myself thereof afterwards: but the crosses I underwent, and {135} the misfortunes of my life, have, to this day, prevented me from profiting by these discoveries, in returning to that charming country, and even so much as to lay them before the public. CHAPTER III. _Of the Nature of the Lands of Louisiana. The Lands on the Coast._ In order to describe the nature of this country with some method, I shall first speak of the place we land at, and shall therefore begin with the coast: I shall then go up the Missisippi; the reverse of what I did in the Geographical Description, in which I described that river from its source down to its mouth. The coast, which was the first inhabited, extends from Rio Perdido to the lake of St. Louis: this ground is a very fine land, white as snow, and so dry, as not to be fit to produce any thing but pine, cedar, and some ever-green oaks. The river Mobile is the most considerable of that coast to the east. [Footnote: This river, which they call Mobile, and which after the rains of winter is a fine river in spring, is but a brook in summer, especially towards its source. _Dumont_, II, 228.] It rolls its waters over a pure sand, which cannot make it muddy. But if this water is clear, it partakes of the sterility of its bottom, so that it is far from abounding so much in fish as the Missisippi. Its banks and neighbourhood are not very fertile from its source down to the sea. The ground is stony, and scarce any thing but gravel, mixt with a little earth. Though these lands are not quite barren, there is a wide difference between their productions and those of the lands in the neighbourhood of the Missisippi. Mountains there are, but whether stone fit for building, I know not. In the confines of the river of the Alibamous (Creeks) the lands are better: the river falls into the Mobile, above the bay of the same name. This bay may be about thirty leagues in length, after having received the Mobile, which runs from {136} north to south for about one hundred and fifty leagues. On the banks of this river was the first settlement of the French in Louisiana, which stood till New Orleans was founded, which is at this day the capital of the colony. The lands and water of the Mobile are not only unfruitful in all kinds of vegetables and fish, but the nature of the waters and the soil contributes also to prevent the multiplication of animals; even women have experienced this. I understood by Madam Hubert, whose husband was at my arrival Commissary Director of the colony, that in the time the French were in that post, there were seven or eight barren women, who all became fruitful, after settling with their husbands on the banks of the Missisippi, where the capital was built, and whither the settlement was removed. Fort St. Louis of Mobile was the French post. This fort stands on the banks of that river, near another small river, called Dog River, which falls into the bay to the south of the fort. Though these countries are not so fertile as those in the neighbourhood of the Missisippi; we are, however, to observe, that the interior parts of the country are much better than those near the sea. On the coast to the west of Mobile, we find islands not worth mentioning. From the sources of the river of the Paska-Ogoulas, quite to those of the river of Quefoncté, which falls into the lake of St. Louis, the lands are light and fertile, but something gravelly, on account of the neighbourhood of the mountains that lie to the north. This country is intermixt with extensive hills, fine meadows, numbers of thickets, and sometimes with woods, thick set with cane, particularly on the banks of rivers and brooks; and is extremely proper for agriculture. The mountains which I said these countries have to the north, form nearly the figure of a chaplet, with one end pretty near the Missisippi, the other on the banks of the Mobile. The inner part of this chaplet or chain is filled with hills; which {137} are pretty fertile in grass, simples, fruits of the country, horse-chesnuts, and wild-chesnuts, as large, and at least as good as those of Lyons. To the north of this chain of mountains lies the country of the Chicasaws, very fine and free of mountains: it has only very extensive and gentle eminences, or rising grounds, fertile groves and meadows, which in springtime are all over red, from the great plenty of wood strawberries: in summer, the plains exhibit the most beautiful enamel, by the quantity and variety of the flowers: in autumn, after the setting fire to the grass, they are covered with mushrooms. All the countries I have just mentioned are stored with game of every kind. The buffalo is found on the most rising grounds; the partridge in thick open woods, such as the groves in meadows; the elks delight in large forests, as also the pheasant; the deer, which is a roving animal, is every where to be met with, because in whatever place it may happen to be, it always has something to browse on. The ring-dove here flies in winter with such rapidity, as to pass over a great deal of country in a few hours; ducks and other aquatick game are in such numbers, that wherever there is water, we are sure to find many more than it is possible for us to shoot, were we to do nothing else; and thus we find game in every place, and fish in plenty in the rivers. Let us resume the coast; which, though flat and dry, on account of its sand, abounds with delicious fish, and excellent shell-fish. But the crystal sand, which is pernicious to the sight by its whiteness, might it not be adapted for making some beautiful composition or manufacture? Here I leave the learned to find out what use this sand may be of. If this coast is flat, it has in this respect an advantage; as we might say, Nature wanted to make it so, in order to be self-defended against the descent of an enemy. Coming out of the Bay of Paska-Ogoulas, if we still proceed west, we meet in our way with the Bay of Old Biloxi, where a fort was built, and a settlement begun; but a great fire, spread by a violent wind, destroyed it in a few moments, which in prudence ought never to have been built at all. {138} Those who settled at Old Biloxi could not, doubtless, think of quitting the sea-coast. They settled to the west, close to New-Biloxi, on a sand equally dry and pernicious to the sight. In this place the large grants happened to be laid off, which were extremely inconvenient to have been made on so barren a soil; where it was impossible to find the least plant or greens for any money, and where the hired servants died with hunger in the most fertile colony in the whole world. In pursuing the same route and the same coast westward, the lands are still the same, quite to the small Bay of St. Louis, and to the Channels, which lead to the lake of that name. At a distance from the sea the earth is of a good quality, fit for agriculture; as being a light soil, but something gravelly. The coast to the north of the Bay of St. Louis is of a different nature, and much more fertile. The lands at a greater distance to the north of this last coast, are not very distant from the Missisippi; they are also much more fruitful than those to the cast of this bay in the same latitude. In order to follow the sea-coast down to the mouth of the Missisippi, we must proceed almost south, quitting the Channel. I have elsewhere mentioned, that we have to pass between Cat-Island, which we leave to the left, and Cockle-Island, which we leave to the right. In making this ideal route, we pass over banks almost level with the water, covered with a vast number of islets; we leave to the left the Candlemas-Isles, which are only heaps of sand, having the form of a gut cut in pieces; they rise but little above the sea, and scarcely yield a dozen of plants, just as in the neighbouring islets I have now mentioned. We leave to the right lake Borgne, which is another outlet of the lake St. Louis, and continuing the same route by several outlets for a considerable way, we find a little open clear sea, and the coast to the right, which is but a quagmire, gradually formed by a very soft ooze, on which some reeds grow. This coast leads soon to the East Pass or channel, which is one of the mouths of the Missisippi, and this we find bordered with a like soil, if indeed it deserves the name of soil. There is, moreover, the South-east Pass, where stands Balise, and the South Pass, which projects farther into the sea. {139} Balise is a fort built on an island of sand, secured by a great number of piles bound with good timber-work. There are lodgings in it for the officers and the garrison; and a sufficient number of guns for defending the entrance of the Missisippi. It is there they take the bar-pilot on board, in order to bring the ships into the river. All the passes and entrances of the Missisippi are as frightful to the eye, as the interior part of the colony is delightful to it. The quagmires continue still for about seven leagues going up the Missisippi, at the entrance of which we meet a bar, three fourths of a league broad; which we cannot pass without the bar-pilot, who alone is acquainted with the channel. All the west coast resembles that which I mentioned, from Mobile to the bay of St. Louis; it is equally flat, formed of a like sand, and a bar of isles, which lengthen out the coast, and hinder a descent; the coast continues thus, going westward, quite to Ascension Bay, and even a little farther. Its soil also is also barren, and in every respect like to that I have just mentioned. I again enter the Missisippi, and pass with speed over these quagmires, incapable to bear up the traveller, and which only afford a retreat to gnats and moskittos, and to some water-fowl, which, doubtless, find food to live on, and that in security. On coming out of these marshes, we find a neck of land on each side of the Missisippi; this indeed is firm land, but lined with marshes, resembling those at the entrance of the river. For the space of three or four leagues, this neck of land is at first bare of trees, but comes after to be covered with them, so as to intercept the winds, which the ships require, in order to go up the river to the capital. This land, though very narrow, is continued, together with the trees it bears, quite to the English Reach, which is defended by two forts; one to the right, the other to the left of the Missisippi. The origin of the name, English Reach, (Detour aux Anglois) is differently assigned. I made enquiry of the oldest of the country, to what circumstance this Reach might owe its {140} name. And they told me, that before the first settlement of the French in this colony, the English, having heard of the beauty of the country, which they had, doubtless, visited before, in going thither from Carolina by land, attempted to make themselves masters of the entrance of the Missisippi, and to go up the river, in order to fortify themselves on the first firm ground they could meet. Excited by that jealousy which is natural to them, they took such precautions as they imagined to be proper, in order to succeed. The Indians on their part, who had already seen or heard of several people (French) having gone up and down the Missisippi at different times; the Indians, I say, who, perhaps, were not so well pleased with such neighbours, were still more frightened at seeing a ship enter the river, which determined them to stop its passage; but this was impossible, as long as the English had any wind, of which they availed themselves quite to this Reach. These Indians were the Ouachas and Chaouachas, who dwelt to the west of the Missisippi, and below this Reach. There were of them on each side of the river, and they lying in the canes, observed the English, and followed them as they went up, without daring to attack them. When the English were come to the entrance of this Reach, the little wind they had failed them; observing besides, that the Missisippi made a great turn or winding, they despaired of succeeding; and wanted to moor in this spot, for which purpose they must bring a rope to land: but the Indians shot a great number of arrows at them, till the report of a cannon, fired at random, scattered them, and gave the signal to the English to go on board, for fear the Indians should come in greater numbers, and cut them to pieces. Such is the origin of the name of this Reach. The Missisippi in this place forms the figure of a crescent, almost closed; so that the same wind which brings up a ship, proves often contrary, when come to the Reach; and this is the reason that ships moor, and go up towed, or tacking. This Reach is six or seven leagues; some assign it eight, more or less, according as they happen to make way. {141} The lands on both sides of this Reach are inhabited, though the depth of soil is inconsiderable. Immediately above this Reach stands New Orleans, the capital of this colony, on the east of the Missisippi. A league behind the town, directly back from the river, we meet with a Bayouc or creek, which can bear large boats with oars. In following this Bayouc for the space of a league, we go to the lake St. Louis, and after traversing obliquely this last, we meet the Channels, which lead to Mobile, where I began my description of the nature of the soil of Louisiana. The ground on which New Orleans is situated, being an earth accumulated by the ooze, in the same manner as is that both below and above, a good way from the capital, is of a good quality for agriculture, only that it is strong, and rather too fat. This land being flat, and drowned by the inundations for several ages, cannot fail to be kept in moisture, there being, moreover, only a mole or bank to prevent the river from over-flowing it; and would be even too moist, and incapable of cultivation, had not this mole been made, and ditches, close to each other, to facilitate the draining off the waters: by this means it has been put in a condition to be cultivated with success. From New Orleans to Manchac on the east of the Missisippi, twenty-five leagues above the capital, and quite to the Fork to the west, almost over-against Manchac, and a little way off, the lands are of the same kind and quality with those of New Orleans. CHAPTER IV. _Quality of the Lands above the_ Fork. _A Quarry of Stone for building_. _High Lands to the East: Their vast Fertility. West Coast: West Lands: Saltpetre_. To the west, the Fork, the lands are pretty flat, but exempt from inundations. The part best known of these lands is called Baya-Ogoula, a name framed Bayouc and Ogoula, which signifies the nation dwelling near the Bayouc; there having been a nation of that name in that place, when the first Frenchmen {142} came down the Missisippi; it lies twenty-five leagues from the capital. [Illustration: _Indians of the North leaving in the winter with their families for a hunt_] But to the east, the lands are a good deal higher, seeing from Manchac to the river Wabache they are between an hundred and two hundred feet higher than the Missisippi in its greatest floods. The slope of these lands goes off perpendicularly from the Missisippi, which on that side receives but few rivers, and those very small, if we except the river of the Yasous, whose course is not above fifty leagues. All these high lands are, besides, surmounted, in a good many places, by little eminences, or small hills, and rising grounds running off lengthwise, with gentle slopes. It is only when we go a little way from the Missisippi, that we find these high lands are over-topped by little mountains, which appear to be all of earth, though steep, without the least gravel or pebble being perceived on them. The soil on these high lands is very good; it is a black light mold, about three feet deep on the hills or rising grounds. This upper earth lies upon a reddish clay, very strong and stiff; the lowest places between these hills are of the same nature, {143} but there the black earth is between five and six feet deep. The grass growing in the hollows is of the height of a man, and very slender and fine; whereas the grass of the same meadow on the high lands rises scarce knee deep; as it does on the highest eminences, unless there is found something underneath, which not only renders the grass shorter, but even prevents its growth by the efficacy of some exhalations; which is not ordinarily the case on hills, though rising high, but only on the mountains properly so called. My experience in architecture having taught me, that several quarries have been found under a clay like this, I was always of opinion there must be some in those hills. Since I made these reflections, I have had occasion, in my journey to the country, to confirm these conjectures. We had set up our hut at the foot of an eminence, which was steep towards us, and near a fountain, whose water was lukewarm and pure. This fountain appeared to me to issue out of a hole, which was formed by the sinking of the earth. I stooped in order to take a better view of it, and I observed stone, which to the eye appeared proper for building, and the upper part which was this clay, which is peculiar to the country. I was highly pleased to be thus ascertained, that there was stone fit for building in this colony, where it is imagined there is none, because it does not come out of the earth to shew-itself. It is not to be wondered, that there is none to be found in the Lower Louisiana, which is only an earth accumulated by ooze; but it is far more extraordinary, not to see a flint, nor even a pebble on the hills, for upwards of an hundred leagues sometimes; however, this is a thing common in this province. I imagine I ought to assign a reason for it, which seems pretty probable to me. This land has never been turned, or dug, and is very close above the clay, which is extremely hard, and covers the stone, which cannot shew itself through such a covering: it is therefore no such surprise, that we observe no stone out of the earth in these plains and on these eminences. {144} All these high lands are generally meadows and forests of tall trees, with grass up to the knee. Along gullies they prove to be thickets, in which wood of every kind is found, and also the fruits of the country. Almost all these lands on the east of the river are such as I have described; that is, the meadows are on those high grounds, whose slope is very gentle; we also find there tall forests, and thickets in the low bottoms. In the meadows we observe here and there groves of very tall and straight oaks, to the number of fourscore or an hundred at most: there are others of about forty or fifty, which seem to have been planted by men's hands in these meadows, for a retreat to the buffaloes, deer, and other animals, and a screen against storms, and the sting of the flies. The tall forests are all hiccory, or all oak: in these last we find a great many morels; but then there grows a species of mushrooms at the feet of felled walnut-trees, which the Indians carefully gather; I tasted of them, and found them good. The meadows are not only covered with grass fit for pasture, but produce quantities of wood-strawberries in the month of April; for the following months the prospect is charming; we scarce observe a pile of grass, unless what we tread under foot; the flowers, which are then in all their beauty, exhibit to the view the most ravishing sight, being diversified without end; one in particular I have remarked, which would adorn the most beautiful parterre; I mean the Lion's Mouth (_la gueule de Lion_). These meadows afford not only a charming prospect to the eye; they, moreover, plentifully produce excellent simples, (equally with tall woods) as well for the purposes of medicine as of dying. When all these plants are burnt, and a small rain comes on, mushrooms of an excellent flavour succeed to them, and whiten the surface of the meadows all over. Those rising meadows and tall forests abound with buffaloes, elk, and deer, with turkeys, partridges, and all kinds of game; consequently wolves, catamounts, and other carnivorous animals are found there; which, in following the other animals, destroy and devour such as are too old or too fat; and when the {145} Indians go a hunting, these animals are sure to have the offal, or hound's fee, which makes them follow the hunters. These high lands naturally produce mulberry-trees, the leaves of which are very grateful to the silk-worm. Indigo, in like manner, grows there along the thickets, without culture. There also a native tobacco is found growing wild, for the culture of which, as well as for other species of tobacco, these lands are extremely well adapted. Cotton is also cultivated to advantage: wheat and flax thrive better and more easily there, than lower down towards the capital, the land there being too fat; which is the reason that, indeed, oats come there to a greater height than in the lands I am speaking of; but the cotton and the other productions are neither so strong nor so fine there, and the crops of them are often less profitable, though the soil be of an excellent nature. In fine, those high lands to the east of the Missisippi, from Manchae to the river Wabache, may and ought to contain mines: we find in them, just at the surface, iron and pit-coal, but no appearance of silver mines; gold there may be, copper also, and lead. Let us return to Manchac, where I quitted the Missisippi; which I shall cross, in order to visit the west side, as I have already done the east. I shall begin with the west coast, which resembles that to the east; but is still more dry and barren on the shore. On quitting that coast of white and crystal sand, in order to go northward, we meet five or six lakes, which communicate with one another, and which are, doubtless, remains of the sea. Between these lakes and the Missisippi, is an earth accumulated on the sand, and formed by the ooze of that river, as I said; between these lakes there is nothing but sand, on which there is so little earth, that the sand-bottom appears to view; so that we find there but little pasture, which some strayed buffaloes come to eat; and no trees, if we except a hill on the banks of one of these lakes, which is all covered with ever-green oaks, fit for ship-building. This spot may be a league in length by half a league in breadth; and was called Barataria, because enclosed by these lakes and their outlets, to form almost an island on dry land. {146} These lakes are stored with monstrous carp, as well for size as for length; which slip out of the Missisippi and its muddy stream, when overflowed, in search of clearer water. The quantity of fish in these lakes is very surprising, especially as they abound with vast numbers of alligators. In the neighbourhood of these lakes there are some petty nations of Indians, who partly live on this amphibious animal. Between these lakes and the banks of the Missisippi, there is some thin herbage, and among others, natural hemp, which grows like trees, and very branched. This need not surprise us, as each plant stands very distant from the other: hereabouts we find little wood, unless when we approach the Missisippi. To the west of these lakes we find excellent lands, covered in many places with open woods of tall trees, through which one may easily ride on horseback; and here we find some buffaloes, which only pass through these woods because the pasture under the trees is bitter; and therefore they prefer the grass of the meadows, which lying exposed to the rays of the sun, becomes thereby more savoury. In going still farther west, we meet much thicker woods, because this country is extremely well watered; we here find numbers of rivers, which fall into the sea; and what contributes to the fertility of this land, is the number of brooks, that fall into these rivers. This country abounds with deer and other game; buffaloes are rare; but it promises great riches to such as shall inhabit it, from the excellent quality of its lands. The Spaniards, who bound us on that side, are jealous enough: but the great quantities of land they possess in America, have made them lose sight of settling there, though acquainted therewith before us: however, they took some steps to traverse our designs, when they saw we had some thoughts that way. But they are not settled there as yet; and who could hinder us from making advantageous settlements in that country? I resume the banks of the Missisippi, above the lakes, and the lands above the Fork, which, as I have sufficiently acquainted {147} the reader, are none of the best; and I go up to the north, in order to follow the same method I observed in describing the nature of the lands to the east. The banks of the Missisippi are of a fat and strong soil; but far less subject to inundations than the lands of the east. If we proceed a little way westward, we meet land gradually rising, and of an excellent quality; and even meadows, which we might well affirm to be boundless, if they were not intersected by little groves. These meadows are covered with buffaloes and other game, which live there so much the more peaceably, as they are neither hunted by men, who never frequent those countries; nor disquieted by wolves or tigers, which keep more to the north. The country I have just described is such as I have represented it, till we come to New Mexico: it rises gently enough, near the Red River, which bounds it to the north, till we reach a high land, which was no more than five or six leagues in breadth, and in certain places only a league; it is almost flat, having but some eminences at some considerable distance from each other: we also meet some mountains of a middling height, which appear to contain something more than bare stone. This high land begins at some leagues from the Missisippi, and continues so quite to New Mexico; it lowers towards the Red River, by windings, where it is diversified alternately with meadows and woods. The top of this height, on the contrary, has scarce any wood. A fine grass grows between the stones, which are common there. The buffaloes come to feed on this grass, when the rains drive them out of the plains; otherwise they go but little thither, because they find there neither water, nor saltpetre. We are to remark, by the bye, that all cloven-footed animals are extremely fond of salt, and that Louisiana in general contains a great deal of saltpetre. And thus we are not to wonder, if the buffalo, the elk, and the deer, have a greater inclination to some certain places than to others, though they are there often hunted. We ought therefore to conclude, that there is more saltpetre in those places, than in such as they {148} haunt but rarely. This is what made me remark, that these animals, after their ordinary repass, fail but rarely to go to the torrents, where the earth is cut, and even to the clay; which they lick, especially after rain, because they there find a taste of salt, which allures them thither. Most of those who have made this remark imagine that these animals eat the earth; whereas in such places they only go in quest of the salt, which to them is so strong an allurement as to make them bid defiance to dangers in order to get at it. CHAPTER V. _Quality of the Lands of the_ Red River. _Posts of the_ Nachitoches. _A Silver Mine. Lands of the_ Black River. The Banks of the Red River, towards its confluence, are pretty low, And sometimes drowned by the inundations of the Missisippi; but above all, the north side, which is but a marshy land for upwards of ten leagues in going up to the Nachitoches, till we come to the Black River, which falls into the Red. This last takes its name from the colour of its sand, which is red in several places: it is also called the Marne, a name given it by some geographers, but unknown in the country. Some call it the River of the Nachitoches, because they dwell on its banks: but the appellation, Red River, has remained to it. Between the Black River and the Red River the soil is but very light, and even sandy, where we find more firs than other trees; we also observe therein some marshes. But these lands, though not altogether barren, if cultivated, would be none of the best. They continue such along the banks of the river, only to the rapid part of it, thirty leagues from the Missisippi. This rapid part cannot justly be called a fall; however, we can scarce go up with oars, when laden, but must land and tow. I imagine, if the waterman's pole was used, as on the Loire and other rivers in France, this obstacle would be easily surmounted. The south side of this river, quite to the rapid part, is entirely different from the opposite side; it is something higher, {149} and rises in proportion as it approaches to the height I have mentioned; the quality is also very different. This land is good and light, and appears disposed to receive all the culture imaginable, in which we may assuredly hope to succeed. It naturally produces beautiful fruit trees and vines in plenty; it was on that side muscadine grapes were found. The back parts have neater woods, and the meadows intersected with tall forests. On that side the fruit trees of the country are common; above all, the hiccory and walnut-trees, which are sure indications of a good soil. From the rapid part to the Nachitoches, the lands on both sides of this river sufficiently resemble those I have just mentioned. To the left, in going up, there is a petty nation, called the Avoyelles, and known only for the services they have done the Colony by the horses, oxen, and cows they have brought from New Mexico for the service of the French in Louisiana. I am ignorant what view the Indians may have in that commerce: but I well know, that notwithstanding the fatigues of the journey, these cattle, one with another, did not come, after deducting all expenses, and even from the second hand, but to about two pistoles a head; whence I ought to presume, that they have them cheap in New Mexico. By means of this nation we have in Louisiana very beautiful horses, of the species of those of Old Spain, which, if managed or trained, people of the first rank might ride. As to the oxen and cows, they are the same as those of France, and both are at present very common in Louisiana. The south side conveys into the Red River only little brooks. On the north side, and pretty near the Nachitoches, there is, as is said, a spring of water very salt, running only four leagues. This spring, as it comes out of the earth, forms a little river, which, during the heats, leaves some salt on its banks. And what may render this more credible is, that the country whence it takes its rise contains a great deal of mineral salt, which discovers itself by several springs of salt water, and by two salt lakes, of which I shall presently speak. In fine, in going up we come to the French fort of the Nachitoches, built in an island, formed by the Red River. {150} This island is nothing but sand, and that so fine, that the wind drives it like dust; so that the tobacco attempted to be cultivated there at first was loaded with it. The leaf of the tobacco having a very fine down, easily retains this sand, which the least breath of air diffuses every where; which is the reason that no more tobacco is raised in this island, but provisions only, as maiz, potatoes, pompions, &c. which cannot be damaged by the sands. M. de St. Denis commanded at this place, where he insinuated himself into the good graces of the natives in such a manner, that, altho' they prefer death to slavery, or even to the government of a sovereign, however mild, yet twenty or twenty-five nations were so attached to his person, that, forgetting they were born free, they willingly surrendered themselves to him; the people and their Chiefs would all have him for their Grand Chief; so that at the least signal, he could put himself at the head of thirty thousand men, drawn out of those nations, which had of their own accord submitted themselves to his orders; and that only by sending them a paper on which he drew the usual hieroglyphics that represent war among them, with a large leg, which denoted himself. This was still the more surprising, as the greatest part of these people were on the Spanish territories, and ought rather to have attached themselves to them, than to the French, if it had not been for the personal merits of this Commander. At the distance of seven leagues from the French Post, the Spaniards have settled one, where they have resided ever since M. de la Motte, Governor of Louisiana, agreed to that settlement. I know not by what fatal piece of policy the Spaniards were allowed to make this settlement; but I know, that, if it had not been for the French, the natives would never have suffered the Spaniards to settle in that place. However, several French were allured to this Spanish settlement, doubtless imagining, that the rains which come from Mexico, rolled and brought gold along with them, which would cost nothing but the trouble of picking up. But to what purpose serves this beautiful metal, but to make the people vain and idle among whom it is so common, and to make them {151} neglect the culture of the earth, which constitutes true riches, by the sweets it procures to man, and by the advantages it furnishes to commerce. Above the Nachitoches dwell the Cadodaquious, whose scattered villages assume different names. Pretty near one of these villages was discovered a silver mine, which was found to be rich, and of a very pure metal. I have seen the assay of it, and its ore is very fine. This silver lies concealed in small invisible particles, in a stone of a chesnut colour, which is spongy, pretty light, and easily calcinable: however, it yields a great deal more than it promises to the eye. The assay of this ore was made by a Portuguese, who had worked at the mines of New Mexico, whence he made his escape. He appeared to be master of his business, and afterwards visited other mines farther north, but he ever gave the preference to that of the Red River. This river, according to the Spaniards, takes its rise in 32 degrees of north latitude; runs about fifty leagues north-east; forms a great elbow, or winding to the east; then proceeding thence south-east, at which place we begin to know it, it comes and falls into the Missisippi, about 31° and odd minutes. I said above, that the Black River discharges itself into the Red, ten leagues above the confluence of this last with the Missisippi: we now proceed to resume that river, and follow its course, after having observed, that the fish of all those rivers which communicate with the Missisippi, are the same as to species, but far better in the Red and Black Rivers, because their water is clearer and better than that of the Missisippi, which they always quit with pleasure. Their delicate and finer flavour may also arise from the nourishment they take in those rivers. The lands of which we are going to speak are to the north of the Red River. They may be distinguished into two parts; which are to the right and left of the Black River, in going up to its source, and even as far as the river of the Arkansas. It is called the Black River, because its depth gives it that colour, {152} which is, moreover, heightened by the woods which line it throughout the Colony. All the rivers have their banks covered with woods; but this river, which is very narrow, is almost quite covered by the branches, and rendered of a dark colour in the first view. It is sometimes called the river of the Wachitas, because its banks were occupied by a nation of that name, who are now extinct. I shall continue to call it by its usual name. The lands which we directly find on both sides are low, and continue thus for the space of three or four leagues, till we come to the river of the Taensas, thus denominated from a nation of that name, which dwelt on its banks. This river of the Taensas is, properly speaking, but a channel formed by the overflowings of the Missisippi, has its course almost parallel thereto, and separates the low lands from the higher. The lands between the Missisippi and the river of the Taensas are the same as in the Lower Louisiana. The lands we find in going up the Black River are nearly the same, as well for the nature of the soil, as for their good qualities. They are rising grounds, extending in length, and which in general may be considered as one very extensive meadow, diversified with little groves, and cut only by the Black River and little brooks, bordered with wood up to their sources. Buffaloes and deer are seen in whole herds there. In approaching to the river of the Arkansas, deer and pheasants begin to be very common; and the same species of game is found there, as is to the east of the Missisippi; in like manner wood-strawberries, simples, flowers, and mushrooms. The only difference is, that this side of the Missisippi is more level, there being no lands so high and so very different from the rest of the country. The woods are like those to the east of the Missisippi, except that to the west there are more walnut and hiccory trees. These last are another species of walnut, the nuts of which are more tender, and invite to these parts a greater number of parrots. What we have just said, holds in general of this west side; let us now consider what is peculiar thereto. {153} CHAPTER VI. _A Brook of Salt Water: Salt Lakes. Lands of the River of the_ Arkansas. _Red veined Marble: Slate: Plaster. Hunting the Buffalo. The dry Sand-banks in the_ Missisippi. After we have gone up the Black River about thirty leagues, we find to the left a brook of salt water, which comes from the west. In going up this brook about two leagues, we meet with a lake of salt water, which may be two leagues in length, by one in breadth. A league higher up to the north, we meet another lake of salt water, almost as long and broad as the former. This water, doubtless, passes through some mines of salt; it has the taste of salt, without that bitterness of the sea-water. The Indians come a great way off to this place, to hunt in winter, and make salt. Before the French trucked coppers with them, they made upon the spot pots of earth for this operation: and they returned home loaded with salt and dry provisions. To the east of the Black River we observe nothing that indicates mines; but to the west one might affirm there should be some, from certain marks, which might well deceive pretended connoisseurs. As for my part, I would not warrant that there were two mines in that part of the country, which seems to promise them. I should rather be led to believe that they are mines of salt, at no great depth from the surface of the earth, which, by their volatile and acid spirits, prevent the growth of plants in those spots. Ten or twelve leagues above this brook is a creek, near which those Natchez retreated, who escaped being made slaves with the rest of their nation, when the Messrs. Perier extirpated them on the east side of the river, by order of the Court. The Black River takes its rise to the north-west of its confluence, and pretty near the river of the Arkansas, into which falls a branch from this rise or source; by means of which we may have a communication from the one to the other with a middling carriage. This communication with the river of the {154} Arkansas is upwards of an hundred leagues from the Post of that name. In other respects, this Black River might carry a boat throughout, if cleared of the wood fallen into its bed, which generally traverses it from one side to the other. It receives some brooks, and abounds in excellent fish, and in alligators. I make no doubt but these lands are very fit to bear and produce every thing that can be cultivated with success on the east of the Missisippi, opposite to this side, except the canton or quarter between the river of the Taensas and the Missisippi; that land, being subject to inundations, would be proper only for rice. I imagine we may now pass on to the north of the river of the Arkansas, which takes its rise in the mountains adjoining to the east of Santa Fé. It afterwards goes up a little to the north, from whence it comes down to the south, a little lower than its source. In this manner it forms a line parallel almost with the Red River. That river has a cataract or fall, at about an hundred and fifty leagues from its confluence. Before we come to this fall, we find a quarry of red-veined marble, one of slate, and one of plaster. Some travellers have there observed grains of gold in a little brook: but as they happened to be going in quest of a rock of emeralds, they deigned not to amuse themselves with picking up particles of gold. This river of the Arkansas is stored with fish; has a great deal of water; having a course of two hundred and fifty leagues, and can carry large boats quite to the cataract. Its banks are covered with woods, as are all the other rivers of the country. In its course it receives several brooks or rivulets, of little consequence, unless we except that called the White River, and which discharges itself into the curve or elbow of that we are speaking of, and below its fall. In the whole tract north of this river, we find plains that extend out of sight, which are vast meadows, intersected by groves, at no great distance from one another, which are all tall woods, where we might easily hunt the stag; great numbers {155} of which, as also of buffaloes, are found here. Deer also are very common. From having seen those animals frightened at the least noise, especially at the report of a gun, I have thought of a method to hunt them, in the manner the Spaniards of New Mexico do, which would not scare them at all, and which would turn to the great advantage of the inhabitants, who have this game in plenty in their country. This hunting might be set about in winter, from the beginning of October, when the meadows are burnt, till the month of February. This hunting is neither expensive nor fatiguing: horses are had very cheap in that country, and maintained almost for nothing. Each hunter is mounted on horseback, and armed with a crescent somewhat open, whose inside should be pretty sharp; the top of the outside to have a socket, to put in a handle: then a number of people on horseback to go in quest of a herd of buffaloes, and always attack them with the wind in their backs. As soon as they smell a man, it is true, they run away; but at the sight of the horses they will moderate their fears, and thus not precipitate their flight; whereas the report of a gun frightens them so as to make them run at full speed. In this chace, the lightest would run fast enough; but the oldest, and even the young of two or three years old, are so fat, that their weight would make them soon be overtaken: then the armed hunter may strike the buffalo with his crescent above each ham, and cut his tendons; after which he is easily mastered. Such as never saw a buffalo, will hardly believe the quantity of fat they yield: but it ought to be considered, that, continuing day and night in plentiful pastures of the finest and most delicious grass, they must soon fatten, and that from their youth. Of this we have an instance in a bull at the Natchez, which was kept till he was two years old, and grew so fat, that he could not leap on a cow, from his great weight; so that we were obliged to kill him, and got nigh an hundred and fifty pounds of tallow from him. His neck was near as big as his body. From what I have said, it may be judged what profit such hunters might make of the skins and tallow of those buffaloes; {156} the hides would be large, and their wool would be still an additional benefit. I may add, that this hunting of them would not diminish the species, those fat buffaloes being ordinarily the prey of wolves, as being too heavy to be able to defend themselves. Besides, the wolves would not find their account in attacking them in herds. It is well known that the buffaloes range themselves in a ring, the strongest without, and the weakest within. The strong standing pretty close together, present their horns to the enemy, who dare not attack them in this disposition. But wolves, like all other animals, have their particular instinct, in order to procure their necessary food. They come so near that the buffaloes smell them some way off, which makes them run for it. The wolves then advance with a pretty equal pace, till they observe the fattest out of breath. These they attack before and behind; one of them seizes on the buffalo by the hind-quarter, and overturns him, the others strangle him. The wolves being many in a body, kill not what is sufficient for one alone, but as many as they can, before they begin to eat. For this is the manner of the wolf, to kill ten or twenty times more than he needs, especially when he can do it with ease, and without interruption. Though the country I describe has very extensive plains, I pretend not to say that there are no rising grounds or hills; but they are more rare there than elsewhere, especially on the west side. In approaching to New Mexico we observe great hills and mountains, some of which are pretty high. I ought not to omit mentioning here, that from the low lands of Louisiana, the Missisippi has several shoal banks of sand in it, which appear very dry upon the falling of the waters, after the inundations. These banks extend more or less in length; some of them half a league, and not without a considerable breadth. I have seen the Natchez, and other Indians, sow a sort of grain, which they called Choupichoul, on these dry sand-banks. This sand received no manner of culture; and the women and children covered the grain any how with their feet, without taking any great pains about it. After this sowing, {157} and manner of culture, they waited till autumn, when they gathered a great quantity of the grain. It was prepared like millet, and very good to eat. This plant is what is called Belle Dame Sauvage, [Footnote: He seems to mean Buck-wheat.] which thrives in all countries, but requires a good soil: and whatever good quality the soil in Europe may have, it shoots but a foot and a half high; and yet, on this sand of the Missisippi, it rises, without any culture, three feet and a half, and four feet high. Such is the virtue of this sand all up the Missisippi; or, to speak more properly, for the whole length of its course; if we except the accumulated earth of the Lower Louisiana, across which it passes, and where it cannot leave any dry sand-banks; because it is straitened within its banks, which the river itself raises, and continually augments. In all the groves and little forests I have mentioned, and which lie to the north of the Arkansas, pheasants, partridges, snipes, and woodcocks, are in such great numbers, that those who are most fond of this game, might easily satisfy their longing, as also every other species of game. Small birds are still vastly more numerous. CHAPTER VII. _The Lands of the River_ St. Francis. _Mine of_ Marameg, _and other Mines. A Lead Mine. A soft Stone resembling Porphyry. Lands of the_ Missouri. _The Lands north of the _ Wabache. _The Lands of the Illinois_. De la Mothe's _Mine, and other Mines._ Thirty leagues above the river of the Arkansas, to the north, and on the same side of the Missisippi, we find the river St. Francis. The lands adjoining to it are always covered with herds of buffaloes, nothwithstanding they are hunted every winter in those parts: for it is to this river, that is, in its neighbourhood, that the French and Canadians go and make their salt provisions for the inhabitants of the capital, and of the neighbouring {158} plantations, in which they are assisted by the native Arkansas, whom they hire for that purpose. When they are upon the spot, they chuse a tree fit to make a pettyaugre, which serves for a salting or powdering-tub in the middle, and is closed at the two ends, where only is left room for a man at each extremity. The trees they choose are ordinarily the poplar, which grow on the banks of the water. It is a white wood, soft and binding. The pettyaugres might be made of other wood, be cause such are to be had pretty large; but either too heavy for pettyaugres, or too apt to split. The species of wood in this part of Louisiana is tall oak; the fields abound with four sorts of walnut, especially the black kind; so called, because it is of a dark brown colour, bordering on black; this sort grows very large. There are besides fruit trees in this country, and it is there we begin to find commonly Papaws. We have also here other trees of every species, more or less, according as the soil is favourable. These lands in general are fit to produce every thing the low lands can yield, except rice and indigo. But in return, wheat thrives there extremely well: the vine is found every where; the mulberry-tree is in plenty; tobacco grows fine, and of a good quality; as do cotton and garden plants: so that by leading an easy and agreeable life in that country, we may at the same time be sure of a good return to France. The land which lies between the Missisippi and the river St. Francis, is full of rising grounds, and mountains of a middling height, which, according to the ordinary indications, contain several mines: some of them have been assayed; among the rest, the mine of Marameg, on the little river of that name; the other mines appear not to be so rich, nor so easy to be worked. There are some lead mines, and others of copper, as is pretended. The mine of Marameg, which is silver, is pretty near the confluence of the river which gives it name; which is a great advantage to those who would work it, because they might {159} easily by that means have their goods from Europe. It is situate about five hundred leagues from the sea. I shall continue on the west side of the Missisippi, and to the north of the famous river of Missouri, which we are now to cross. This river takes its rise at eight hundred leagues distance, as is alledged, from the place where it discharges itself into the Missisippi. Its waters are muddy, thick, and charged with nitre; and these are the waters that make the Missisippi muddy down to the sea, its waters being extremely clear above the confluence of the Missouri: the reason is, that the former rolls its waters over a sand and pretty firm soil; the latter, on the contrary, flows across rich and clayey lands, where little stone is to be seen; for though the Missouri comes out of a mountain, which lies to the north-west of New Mexico, we are told, that all the lands it passes through are generally rich; that is, low meadows, and lands without stone. This great river, which seems ready to dispute the pre-eminence with the Missisippi, receives in its long course many rivers and brooks, which considerably augment its waters. But except those that have received their names from some nation of Indians who inhabit their banks, there are very few of their names we can be well assured of, each traveller giving them different appellations. The French having penetrated up the Missouri only for about three hundred leagues at most, and the rivers which fall into its bed being only known by the Indians, it is of little importance what names they may bear at present, being besides in a country but little frequented. The river which is the best known is that of the Osages, so called from a nation of that name, dwelling on its banks. It falls into the Missouri, pretty near its confluence. The largest known river which falls into the Missouri, is that of the Canzas; which runs for near two hundred leagues in a very fine country. According to what I have been able to learn about the course of this great river, from its source to the Canzas, it runs from west to east; and from that nation it falls down to the southward, where it receives the river of the Canzas, which comes from the west; there it forms a great elbow, which terminates in the neighbourhood of the Missouri; {160} then it resumes its course to the south-east, to lose at last both its name and waters in the Missisippi, about f our leagues lower down than the river of the Illinois. There was a French Post for some time in an island a few leagues in length, overagainst the Missouris; the French settled in this fort at the east-point, and called it Fort Orleans. M. de Bourgmont commanded there a sufficient time to gain the friendship of the Indians of the countries adjoining to this great river. He brought about a peace among all those nations, who before his arrival were all at war; the nations to the north being more war-like than those to the south. After the departure of that commandant, they murdered all the garrison, not a single Frenchman having escaped to carry the news: nor could it be ever known whether it happened through the fault of the French, or through treachery. As to the nature of that country, I refer to M. de Bourgmont's Journal, an extract from which I have given above. That is an original account, signed by all the officers, and several others of the company, which I thought was too prolix to give at full length, and for that reason I have only extracted from it what relates to the people and the quality of the soil, and traced out the route to those who have a mind to make that journey; and even this we found necessary to abridge in this translation. In this journey of M. de Bourgmont, mention is only made of what we meet with from Fort Orleans, from which we set out, in order to go to the Padoucas: wherefore I ought to speak of a thing curious enough to be related, and which is found on the banks of the Missouri; and that is, a pretty high cliff, upright from the edge of the water. From the middle of this cliff juts out a mass of red stone with white spots, like porphyry, with this difference, that what we are speaking of is almost soft and tender, like sand-stone. It is covered with another sort of stone of no value; the bottom is an earth, like that on other rising grounds. This stone is easily worked, and bears the most violent fire. The Indians of the country have contrived to strike off pieces thereof with their arrows, {161} and after they fall in the water plunge for them. When they can procure pieces thereof large enough to make pipes, they fashion them with knives and awls. This pipe has a socket two or three inches long, and on the opposite side the figure of a hatchet; in the middle of all is the boot, or bowl of the pipe, to put the tobacco in. These sort of pipes are highly esteemed among them. All to the north of the Missouri is entirely unknown, unless we give credit to the relations of different travellers; but to which of them shall we give the preference? In the first place, they almost all contradict each other: and then, men of the most experience treat them as impostors; and therefore I choose to pay no regard to any of them. Let us therefore now repass the Missisippi, in order to resume the description of the lands to the east, and which we quitted at the river Wabache. This river is distant from the sea four hundred and sixty (three hundred) leagues; it is reckoned to have four hundred leagues in length, from its source to its confluence into the Missisippi. It is called Wabache, though, according to the usual method, it ought to be called the Ohio, or Beautiful River; seeing the Ohio is known under that name in Canada, before its confluence was known: and as the Ohio takes its rise at a greater distance off than the three others, which mix together, before they empty themselves into the Missisippi, this should make the others lose their names; but custom has prevailed on the occasion. [Footnote: But not among the English; we call it the Ohio.] The first river known to us, which falls into the Ohio, is that of the Miamis, which takes its rise towards lake Erié. It is by this river of the Miamis that the Canadians come to Louisiana. For this purpose they embark on the river St. Laurence, go up this river, pass the cataracts quite to the bottom of Lake Erié, where they find a small river, on which they also go up to a place called the Carriage of the Miamis; because that people come and take their effects, and carry them on their backs for two leagues from thence to the banks of the river of their name, which I just said empties itself into {162} the Ohio. From thence the Canadians go down that river, enter the Wabache, and at last the Missisippi, which brings them to New Orleans, the capital of Louisiana. They reckon eighteen hundred leagues [Footnote: It is but nine hundred leagues.] from the capital of Canada to that of Louisiana, on account of the great turns and windings they are obliged to take. The river of the Miamis is thus the first to the north, which falls into the Ohio; then that of the Chaouanons to the south; and lastly, that of the Cherakees; all which together empty themselves into the Missisippi. This is what we call the Wabache, and what in Canada and New England they call the Ohio. This river is beautiful, greatly abounding in fish, and navigable almost up to its source. To the north of this river lies Canada, which inclines more to the east than the source of the Ohio, and extends to the country of the Illinois. It is of little importance to dispute here about the limits of these two neighbouring colonies, as they both appertain to France. The lands of the Illinois are reputed to be a part of Louisiana; we have there a post near a village of that nation, called Tamaroüas. The country of the Illinois is extremely good, and abounds with buffalo and other game. On the north of the Wabache we begin to see the Orignaux; a species of animals which are said to partake of the buffalo and the stag; they have, indeed, been described to me to be much more clumsy than the stag. Their horns have something of the stag, but are shorter and more massy; the meat of them, as they say, is pretty good. Swans and other water-fowl are common in these countries. The French Post of the Illinois is, of all the colony, that in which with the greatest ease they grow wheat, rye, and other like grain, for the sowing of which you need only to turn the earth in the slightest manner; that slight culture is sufficient to make the earth produce as much as we can reasonably desire. I have been assured, that in the last war, when the flour from France was scarce, the Illinois sent down to New Orleans upwards of eight hundred thousand weight thereof in {163} one winter. Tobacco also thrives there, but comes to maturity with difficulty. All the plants transported thither from France succeed well, as do also the fruits. In those countries there is a river, which takes its name from the Illinois. It was by this river that the first travellers came from Canada into the Missisippi. Such as come from Canada, and have business only on the Illinois, pass that way yet: but such as want to go directly to the sea, go down the river of the Miamis into the Wabache, or Ohio, and from thence into the Missisippi. In this country there are mines, and one in particular, called De la Mothe's mine, which is silver, the assay of which has been made; as also of two lead-mines, so rich at first as to vegetate, or shoot a foot and a half at least out of the earth. The whole continent north of the river of the Illinois is not much frequented, consequently little known. The great extent of Louisiana makes us presume, that these parts will not soon come to our knowledge, unless some curious person should go thither to open mines, where they are said to be in great numbers, and very rich. CHAPTER VIII. _Of the Agriculture, or Manner of cultivating, ordering, and manufacturing the Commodities that are proper Articles of Commerce. Of the Culture of_ Maiz, Rice, _and other Fruits of the Country. Of the_ Silk-worm. In order to give an account of the several sorts of plants cultivated in Louisiana, I begin with Maiz, as being the most useful grain, seeing it is the principal food of the people of America, and that the French found it cultivated by the Indians. Maiz, which in France we call Turkey corn, (and we Indian-corn) is a grain of the size of a pea; there is of it as large as our sugar-pea: it grows on a sort of husks, (Quenouille) in ascending rows: some of these husks have to the {164} number of seven hundred grains upon them, and I have counted even to a greater number. This husk may be about two inches thick, by seven or eight inches and upwards in length: it is wrapped up in several covers or thin leaves, which screen it from the avidity of birds. Its foot or stalk is often of the same size: it has leaves about two inches and upwards broad, by two feet and a half long, which are chanelled, or formed like gutters, by which they collect the dew which dissolves at sun-rising, and trickles down to the stalk, sometimes in such plenty, as to wet the earth around them for the breadth of six or seven inches. Its flower is on the top of the stalk, which is sometimes eight feet high. We ordinarily find five or six ears on each stalk, and in order to procure a greater crop, the part of the stalk above the ears ought to be cut away. For sowing the Maiz in a field already cleared and prepared, holes are made four feet asunder every way, observing to make the rows as straight as may be, in order to weed them the easier: into every hole five or six grains are put, which are previously to be steeped for twenty-four hours at least, to make them rise or shoot the quicker, and to prevent the fox and birds from eating such quantities of them: by day there are people to guard them against birds; by night fires are made at proper distances to frighten away the fox, who would otherwise turn up the ground, and eat the corn of all the rows, one after another, without omitting one, till he has his fill, and is therefore the most pernicious animal to this corn. The corn, as soon as shot out of the earth, is weeded: when it mounts up, and its stalks are an inch big, it is hilled, to secure it against the wind. This grain produces enough for two negroes to make fifty barrels, each weighing an hundred and fifty pounds. Such as begin a plantation in woods, thick set with cane, have an advantage in the Maiz, that makes amends for the labour of clearing the ground; a labour always more fatiguing than cultivating a spot already cleared. The advantage is this: they begin with cutting down the canes for a great extent of ground; the trees they peel two feet high quite round: this operation is performed in the beginning of March, as then the sap is in motion in that country: about fifteen days after, the canes, {165} being dry, are set on fire: the sap of the trees are thereby made to descend, and the branches are burnt, which kills the trees. On the following day they sow the corn in the manner I have just shewn: the roots of the cane, which are not quite dead, shoot fresh canes, which are very tender and brittle; and as no other weeds grow in the field that year, it is easy to be weeded of these canes, and as much corn again may be made, as in a field already cultivated. This grain they eat in many different ways; the most common way is to make it into Sagamity, which is a kind of gruel made with water, or strong broth. They bake bread of it like cakes (by baking it over the fire on an iron plate, or on a board before the fire,) which is much better than what they bake in the oven, at least for present use; but you must make it every day; and even then it is too heavy to soak in soup of any kind. They likewise make Parched Meal [Footnote: See Book III, Chap. I.] of it, which is a dish of the natives, as well as the Cooedlou, or bread mixt with beans. The ears of corn roasted are likewise a peculiar dish of theirs; and the small corn dressed in that manner is as agreeable to us as to them. A light and black earth agrees much better with the Maiz than a strong and rich one. The Parched Meal is the best preparation of this corn; the French like it extremely well, no less than the Indians themselves: I can affirm that it is a very good food, and at the same time the best sort of provision that can be carried on a journey, because it is refreshing and extremely nourishing. As for the small Indian corn, you may see an account of it in the first chapter of the third Book; where you will likewise find an account of the way of sowing wheat, which if you do not observe, you may as well sow none. Rice is sown in a soil well laboured, either by the plough or hoe, and in winter, that it may be sowed before the time of the inundation. It is sown in furrows of the breadth of a hoe: when shot, and three or four inches high, they let water into the furrows, but in a small quantity, in proportion as it grows, and then give water in greater plenty. {166} The ear of this grain nearly resembles that of oats; its grains are fastened to a beard, and its chaff is very rough, and full of those fine and hard beards: the bran adheres not to the grain, as that of the corn of France; it consists of two lobes, which easily separate and loosen, and are therefore readily cleaned and broke off. They eat their rice as they do in France, but boiled much thicker, and with much less cookery, although it is not inferior in goodness to ours: they only wash it in warm water, taken out of the same pot you are to boil it in, then throw it in all at once, and boil it till it bursts, and so it is dressed without any further trouble. They make bread of it that is very white and of a good relish; but they have tried in vain to make any that will soak in soup. The culture of the Water-melon is simple enough. They choose for the purpose a light soil, as that of a rising ground, well exposed: they make holes in the earth, from two and a half to three feet in diameter, and distant from each other fifteen feet every way, in each of which holes they put five or six seeds. When the seeds are come up, and the young plants have struck out five or six leaves, the four most thriving plants are pitched upon, and the others plucked up to prevent their starving each other, when too numerous. It is only at that time that they have the trouble of watering them, nature alone performing the rest, and bringing them to maturity; which is known by the green rind beginning to change colour. There is no occasion to cut or prune them. The other species of melons are cultivated in the same manner, only that between the holes the distance is but five or six feet. All sorts of garden plants and greens thrive extremely well in Louisiana, and grow in much greater abundance than in France: the climate is warmer, and the soil much better. However, it is to be observed, that onions and other bulbous plants answer not in the low lands, without a great deal of pains and labour; whereas in the high grounds they grow very large and of a fine flavour. The inhabitants of Louisiana may very easily make Silk, having mulberries ready at hand, which grow naturally in the {167} high lands, and plantations of them may be easily made. The leaves of the natural mulberries of Louisiana are what the silk-worms are very fond of; I mean the more common mulberries with a large leaf, but tender, and the fruit of the colour of Burgundy wine. The province produces also the White Mulberry, which has the same quality with the red. I shall next relate some experiments that have been made on this subject, by people who were acquainted with it. Madam Hubert, a native of Provence, where they make a great deal of silk, which she understood the management of, was desirous of trying whether they could raise silk-worms with the mulberry leaves of this province, and what sort of silk they would afford. The first of her experiments was, to give some large silk-worms a parcel of the leaves of the Red Mulberry, and another parcel of the White Mulberry both upon the same frame. She observed the worms went over the leaves of both sorts, without shewing any greater liking to the one than to the other: then she put to the other two sorts of leaves some of the leaves of the White-sweet or Sugar-Mulberry, and she found that the worms left the other sorts to go to these, and that they preferred them to the leaves of the common Red and White Mulberry. [Footnote: See an account of these different sorts of Mulberry, in the notes at the end of this Volume.] The second experiment of Madam Hubert was, to raise and feed some silk-worms separately. To some she gave the leaves of the common White Mulberry, and to others the leaves of the White Sugar-Mulberry; in order to see the difference of the silk from the difference of their food. Moreover, she raised and fed some of the native silk-worms of the country, which were taken very young from the mulberry-trees; but she observed that these last were very flighty, and did nothing but run up and down, their nature being, without doubt, to live upon trees: she then changed their place, that they might not mix with the other worms that came from France, and gave them little branches with the leaves on them, which made them a little more settled. {168} This industrious lady waited till the cocoons were perfectly made, in order to observe the difference between them in unwinding the silk; the success of which, and of all her other experiments, she was so good as to give me a particular account of. When the cocoons were ready to be wound, she took care of them herself, and found that the wild worms yielded less silk than those from France; for although they were of a larger size, they were not so well furnished with silk, which proceeded, no doubt, from their not being sufficiently nourished, by their running incessantly up and down; and accordingly she observed that they were but meagre; but notwithstanding, their silk was strong and thick, though coarse. Those who were fed with the leaves of the Red Mulberry made cocoons well furnished with silk; which was stronger and finer than that of France. Those that were fed upon the leaves of the common White Mulberry, had the same silk with those that were fed on the leaves of the Red Mulberry. The fourth sort, again, that had been fed with the leaves of the White Sugar-Mulberry, had but little silk; it was indeed as fine as the preceding, but it was so weak and so brittle, that it was with great difficulty they could wind it. These are the experiments of this lady on silk-worms, which every one may make his own uses of, in order to have the sorts of silk, mulberries, or worms, that are most suitable to his purpose, and most likely to turn to his account: which we are very glad of this opportunity to inform them of, that they may see how much society owes to those persons who take care to study nature, in order to promote industry and public utility. CHAPTER IX. _Of_ Indigo, Tobacco, Cotton, Wax, Hops, _and_ Saffron. The high lands of Louisiana produce a natural Indigo: what I saw in two or three places where I have observed it, grew at the edges of the thick woods, which shews it delights in a good, but light soil. One of these stalks was but ten or twelve inches high, its wood at least three lines in diameter, and of as {169} fine a green as its leaf; it was as tender as the rib of a cabbage leaf; when its head was blown a little, the two other stalks shot in a few days, the one seventeen, the other nineteen inches high; the stem was six lines thick below, and of a very lively green, and still very tender, the lower part only began to turn brown a little; the tops of both were equally ill furnished with leaves, and without branches; which makes it to be presumed, that being so thriving and of so fine a growth, it would have shot very high, and surpass in vigour and heighth the cultivated Indigo. The stalk of the Indigo, cultivated by the French at the Natchez, turned brown before it shot eleven or twelve inches; when in seed it was five feet high and upwards, and surpassed in vigour what was cultivated in the Lower Louisiana, that is, in the quarter about New Orleans: but the natural, which I had an opportunity of seeing only young and tender, promised to become much taller and stouter than ours, and to yield more. [Illustration: Indigo.] The Indigo cultivated in Louisiana comes from the islands; its grain is of the bigness of one line, and about a quarter longer, brown and hard, flatted at the extremities, because it is compressed in its pod. This grain is sown in a soil prepared like a garden, and the field where it is cultivated is called the Indigo-garden. In order to sow it, holes are made on a straight line with a small hoe, a foot asunder; in each hole four or five {170} seeds are put, which are covered with earth; great care is had not to suffer any strange plants to grow near it, which would choak it; and it is sown a foot asunder, to the end it may draw the fuller nourishment, and be weeded without grazing or ruffling the leaf, which is that which gives the Indigo. When its leaf is quite come to its shape, it resembles exactly that of the Acacia, so well known in France, only that it is smaller. It is cut with large pruning-knives, or a sort of sickles, with about six or seven inches aperture, which should be pretty strong. It ought to be cut before its wood hardens; and to be green as its leaf, which ought, however, to have a bluish eye or cast. When cut it is conveyed into the rotting-tub, as we shall presently explain. According as the soil is better or worse, it shoots higher or lower; the tuft of the first cutting, which grows round, does not exceed eight inches in heighth and breadth: the second cutting rises sometimes to a foot. In cutting the Indigo you are to set your foot upon the root, in order to prevent the pulling it out of the earth; and to be upon your guard not to cut yourself, as the tool is dangerous. In order to make an Indigo-work, a shed is first of all to be built: this building is at least twenty feet high, without walls or flooring, but only covered. The whole is built upon posts, which may be closed with mats, if you please: this building has twenty feet in breadth, and at least thirty in length. In this shed three vats or large tubs are set in such a manner, that the water may be easily drained off from the first, which is the lowermost and smallest. The second rests with the edge of its bottom on the upper edge of the first, so that the water may easily run from it into the one below. This second vat is not broader but deeper than the first, and is called the Battery; for this reason it has its beaters, which are little buckets formed of four ends of boards, about eight inches long, which together have the figure of the hopper of a mill; a stick runs across them, which is put into a wooden fork, in order to beat the Indigo: there are two of them on each side, which in all make four. The third vat is placed in the same manner over the second, and is as big again, that it may hold the leaves; it is called the {171} Rotting-tub, because the leaves which are put into it are deadened, not corrupted or spoiled therein. The Indigo-operator, who conducts the whole work, knows when it is time to let the water into the second vat; then he lets go the cock; for if the leaves were left too long, the Indigo would be too black; it must have no more time than what is sufficient to discharge a kind of flower or froth that is found upon the leaf. The water, when it is all in the second vat, is beat till the Indigo-operator gives orders to cease; which he does not before he has several times taken up some of this water with a silver cup, by way of assay, in order to know the exact time in which they ought to give over beating the water: and this is a secret which practice alone can teach with certainty. When the Indigo-operator finds that the water is sufficiently beaten, he lets it settle till he can draw off the water clear; which is done by means of several cocks one above another, for fear of losing the Indigo. For this purpose, if the water is clear, the highest cock is opened, the second in like manner, till the water is observed to be tinged; then they shut the cock: the same is done in all the cocks till all the Indigo be in a pap at the bottom of the second vat. The first, or small vat, serves only to purify the water which is found to be tinged, and let run while clear. When the Indigo is well settled, they put it in cloth bags a foot and six inches wide, with a small circle at top, which helps to receive the Indigo with ease; it is suffered to drain till it gives no more water: however, it must be moist enough to spread it in the mould with a wooden knife or spatula. In order to have the seed, they suffer it to run up as many feet as they foresee shall be necessary for seed; it shoots four or five feet high, according to the quality of the soil. There are four cuttings of it in the islands, where the climate is warmer; three good cuttings are made in Louisiana, and of as good a quality at least as in the islands. Tobacco, which was found among the Indians of Louisiana, seems also to be a native of the country, seeing their ancient tradition informs us, that from time immemorial they {172} have, in their treaties of peace and in their embassies, used the pipe, the principal use of which is that the deputies shall all smoke therein. This native Tobacco is very large; its stalk, when suffered to run to seed, shoots to five feet and a half and six feet; the lower part of its stem is at least eighteen lines in diameter, and its leaves often near two feet long, which are thick and succulent, its juice is strong, but never disorders the head. The Tobacco of Virginia has a broader but shorter leaf; its stalk is smaller, and runs not up so high; its smell is not disagreeable, but not so strong; it takes more plants to make a pound, because its leaf is thinner, and not so full of sap as the native. What is cultivated in the Lower Louisiana is smaller, and not so strong; but that made in the islands is thinner than that of Louisiana, but much stronger, and disorders the head. In order to sow Tobacco, you make a bed on the best piece of ground you are master of, and give it six inches in heighth; this earth you beat and make level with the back of a spade; you afterwards sow the seed, which is extremely fine, nearly resembling poppy seed. It must be sown thin, and notwithstanding that attention, it often happens to be too thick. When the seed is sown, the earth is no longer stirred, but the seed is covered with ashes the thickness of a farthing, to prevent the worms from eating the tobacco when it is just shooting out of the earth. As soon as the tobacco has four leaves, it is transplanted into a soil prepared for it, put into holes a foot broad made in a line, and distant three feet every way; a distance not too great, in order to weed it with ease, without breaking the leaves. The best time for transplanting it is after rain, otherwise you must water it: in like manner, when the seed is in the earth, if it rains not, you must gently sprinkle it towards evening, because it is somewhat slow in rising, and when it is sprouted it requires a little water. You must lightly cover the plant in the day time with some leaves plucked the night before; a precaution on no account to be dispensed with, till the young plant has fully struck root. You must also daily visit the {173} tobacco, to clear it of caterpillars, which fasten upon it, and would entirely eat it up, if they are not destroyed. The tobacco-caterpillar is of the shape of a silk-worm, has a prickle on its back towards its extremity; its colour is of the most beautiful sea-green, striped with silver-streaks; in a word, it is as beautiful to the eye as it is fatal to the plant it is fond of. I gave great attention to keep my plantation clear of all weeds, observing in weeding it with the hoe not to touch the stalks, about which I caused to lay new earth, as well to secure them against gusts of wind, as to enable them to draw from the earth a more abundant nourishment. When the tobacco began to put forth suckers, I plucked them off, because they would have shot into branches, which would impoverish the leaves, and for the same reason stopped the tobacco from shooting above the twelfth leaf, afterwards stripping off the four lowermost, which never come to any thing. Hitherto I did nothing but what was ordinarily done by those who cultivate tobacco with some degree of care; but my method of proceeding afterwards was different. I saw my neighbours strip the leaves of tobacco from the stalk, string them, set them to dry, by hanging them out in the air, then put them in heaps, to make them sweat. As for me, I carefully examined the plant, and when I observed the stem begin to turn yellow here and there, I caused the stalk to be cut with a pruning-knife, and left it for some time on the earth to deaden. Afterwards it was carried off, on handbarrows, because it is thus less exposed to be broken than on the necks of negroes. When it was brought to the house, I caused it to be hung up, with the big end of the stem turned upwards, the leaves of each stalk slightly touching one another, being well assured they would shrivel in drying, and no longer touch each other. It hereby happened, that the juice contained in the pith (sometimes as big as one's finger) of the stem of the plant, flowed into the leaves, and augmenting their sap, made them much more mild and waxy. As fast as these leaves assumed a bright chesnut colour, I stripped them from the stalk, and made them directly into bundles, which I wrapped up in a cloth, and bound it close with a cord for twenty four hours; {174} then undoing the cloth, they were tied up closer still. This tobacco turned black and so waxy, that it could not be rasped in less than a year; but then it had a substance and flavour so much the more agreeable, as it never affected the head; and so I sold it for double the price of the common. The cotton which is cultivated in Louisiana, is of the species of the white Siam, [Footnote: This East-India annual cotton has been found to be much better and whiter than what is cultivated in our colonies, which is of the Turkey kind. Both of them keep their colour better in washing, and are whiter than the perennial cotton that comes from the islands, although this last is of a longer staple.] though not so soft, nor so long as the silk-cotton; it is extremely white and very fine, and a very good use may be made of it. This cotton is produced, not from a tree, as in the East-Indies, but from a plant, and thrives much better in light than in strong and fat lands, such as those of the Lower Louisiana, where it is not so fine as on the high grounds. This plant may be cultivated in lands newly cleared, and not yet proper for tobacco, much less for indigo, which requires a ground well worked like a garden. The seeds of cotton are planted three feet asunder, more or less according to the quality of the soil: the field is weeded at the proper season, in order to clear it of the noxious weeds, and fresh earth laid to the root of the plant, to secure it against the winds. The cotton requires weeding, neither so often, nor so carefully as other plants; and the care of gathering is the employment of young people, incapable of harder labour. When the root of the cotton is once covered with fresh earth, and the weeds are removed, it is suffered to grow without further touching it, till it arrives to maturity. Then its heads or pods open into five parts, and expose their cotton to view. When the sun has dried the cotton well, it is gathered in a proper manner, and conveyed into the conservatory; after which comes on the greatest task, which is to separate it from the grain or seed to which it closely adheres; and it is this part of the work, which disgusts the inhabitants in the cultivation {175} of it. I contrived a mill for the purpose, tried it, and found it to succeed, so as to dispatch the work very much. [Illustration: Top: Cotton on the stalk--Bottom: Rice on the stalk] The culture of indigo, tobacco, and cotton, may be easily carried on without any interruption to the making of silk, as any one of these is no manner of hindrance to the other. In the first place, the work about these three plants does not come on till after the worms have spun their silk: in the second place, {176} the feeding and cleaning the silk-worm requires no great degree of strength; and thus the care employed about them interrupts no other sort of work, either as to time, or as to the persons employed therein. It suffices for this operation to have a person who knows how to feed and clean the worms; young negroes of both sexes might assist this person, little skill sufficing for this purpose: the oldest of the young negroes, when taught, might shift the worms and lay the leaves; the other young negroes gather and fetch them; and all this labour, which takes not up the whole day, lasts only for about six weeks. It appears therefore, that the profit made of the silk is an additional benefit, so much the more profitable, as it diverts not the workmen from their ordinary tasks. If it be objected, that buildings are requisite to make silk to advantage; I answer, buildings for the purpose cost very little in a country where wood may be had for taking; I add farther, that these buildings may be made and daubed with mud by any persons about the family; and besides, may serve for hanging tobacco in, two months after the silk-worms are gone. I own I have not seen the wax-tree cultivated in Louisiana; people content themselves to take the berries of this tree, without being at pains to rear it; but as I am persuaded it would be very advantageous to make plantations of it, I shall give my sentiments on the culture proper for this tree, after the experiments I made in regard to it. I had some seeds of the wax-tree brought me to Fontenai le Comte, in Poictou, some of which I gave to several of my friends, but not one of them came up. I began to reflect, that Poictou not being by far so warm as Louisiana, these seeds would have difficulty to shoot; I therefore thought it was necessary to supply by art the defect of nature; I procured horse, cow, sheep, and pigeon's dung in equal quantity, all which I put in a vessel of proportionable size, and poured on them water, almost boiling, in order to dissolve their salts: this water I drew off, and steeped the grains in a sufficient quantity thereof for forty-eight hours; after which I sowed them in a box full of good earth; seven of them came up, and made shoots between seven and eight inches high, but they were all {177} killed by the frost for want of putting them into the greenhouse. This seed having such difficulty to come up, I presume that the wax, in which it is wrapped up, hinders the moisture from penetrating into, and making its kernel shoot; and there fore I should think that those who choose to sow it, would do well if they previously rolled it lightly between two small boards just rough from the saw; this friction would cause the pellicle of wax to scale off with so much the greater facility, as it is naturally very dry; and then it might be put to steep. Hops grow naturally in Louisiana, yet such as have a desire to make use of them for themselves, or sell them to brewers, cultivate this plant. It is planted in alleys, distant asunder six feet, in holes two feet and one foot deep, in which the root is lodged. When shot a good deal, a pole of the size of one's arm, and between twelve and fifteen feet long, is fixed in the hole; care is had to direct the shoots towards it, which fail not to run up the pole. When the flower is ripe and yellowish, the stem is cut quite close to the earth and the pole pulled out, in order to pick the flowers, which are saved. If we consider the climate of Louisiana, and the quality of the high lands of that province, we might easily produce saffron there. The culture of this plant would be so much the more advantageous to the planters, as the neighbourhood of Mexico would procure a quick and useful vent for it. CHAPTER X. _Of the Commerce that, and may be carried on in_ Louisiana. _Of the Commodities which that Province may furnish in return for those of_ Europe. _Of the Commerce of_ Louisiana _with the Isles_. I have often reflected on the happiness of France in the portion which Providence has allotted her in America. She has found in her lands neither the gold nor silver of Mexico and Peru, nor the precious stones and rich stuffs of the East-Indies; but she will find therein, when she pleases, mines of iron, lead, and copper. She is there possessed of a fertile soil, {178} which only requires to be occupied in order to produce not only all the fruits necessary and agreeable to life, but also all the subjects on which human industry may exercise itself in order to supply our wants. What I have already said of Louisiana ought to make this very plain; but to bring the whole together, in order, and under one point of view, I shall next relate every thing that regards the commerce of this province. _Commodities which_ Louisiana _may furnish in return for those of_ Europe. France might draw from this colony several sorts of furs, which would not be without their value, though held cheap in France; and by their variety, and the use that might be made of them, would yield satisfaction. Some persons have dissuaded the traders from taking any furs from the Indians, on a supposition that they would be moth-eaten when carried to New-Orleans, on account of the heat of the climate: but I am acquainted with people of the business, who know how to preserve them from such an accident. Dry buffalo hides are of sufficient value to encourage the Indians to procure them, especially if they were told, that only their skins and tallow were wanted; they would then kill the old bulls, which are so fat as scarce to be able to go: each buffalo would yield at least a hundred pounds of tallow; the value of which, with the skin, would make it worth their while to kill them, and thus none of our money would be sent to Ireland in order to have tallow from that country; besides the species of buffaloes would not be diminished, because these fat buffaloes are always the prey of wolves. Deer-skins, which were bought of the Indians at first, did not please the manufacturers of Niort, where they are dressed, because the Indians altered the quality by their way of dressing them; but since these skins have been called for without any preparation but taking off the hair, they make more of them, and sell them cheaper than before. The wax-tree produces wax, which being much drier than bees-wax, may bear mixture, which will not hinder its lasting longer than bees-wax. Some of this wax was sent to Paris to {179} a factor of Louisiana, who set so low a price upon it as to discourage the planters from sowing any more. The sordid avarice of this factor has done a service to the islands, where it gives a higher price than that of France. The islands also draw timber for building from Louisiana, which might in time prevent France from making her profits of the beauty, goodness, and quantity of wood of this province. The quality of the timber is a great inducement to build docks there for the construction of ships: the wood might be had at a low price of the inhabitants, because they would get it in winter, which is almost an idle time with them. This labour would also clear the grounds, and so this timber might be had almost for nothing. Masts might be also had in the country, on account of the number of pines which the coast produces; and for the same reason pitch and tar would be common. For the planks of ships, there is no want of oak; but might not very good one be made of cypress? this wood is, indeed, softer than oak, but endowed with qualities surpassing this last: it is light, not apt to split or warp, is supple and easily worked; in a word, it is incorruptible both in air and water; and thus making the planks stouter than ordinary, there would be no inconvenience from the use of cypress. I have observed, that this wood is not injured by the worm, and ship-worms might perhaps have the same aversion to it as other worms have. Other wood fit for the building of ships is very common in this country; such as elm, ash, alder, and others. There are likewise in this country several species of wood, which might sell in France for joiners work and fineering, as the cedar, the black walnut, and the cotton-tree. Nothing more would therefore be wanting for compleating ships but cordage and iron. As to hemp, it grows so strong as to be much fitter for making cables than cloth. The iron might be brought from France, as also sails; however, there needs only to open the iron mine at the cliffs of the Chicasaws, called Prud'homme, to set up forges, and iron will be readily had. The king, therefore, might cause all sorts of shipping to be built there at so small a charge, that a moderate expence would procure a numerous fleet. If the English build ships in their colonies {180} from which they draw great advantages, why might not we do the same in Louisiana? France fetches a great deal of saltpetre from Holland and Italy; she may draw from Louisiana more than she will have occasion for, if once she sets about it. The great fertility of the country is an evident proof thereof, confirmed by the avidity of cloven-footed animals to lick the earth, in all places where the torrents have broke it up: it is well known how fond these creatures are of salt. Saltpetre might be made there with all the ease imaginable, on account of the plenty of wood and water; it would besides be much more pure than what is commonly had, the earth not being fouled with dunghills; and on the other hand, it would not be dearer than what is now purchased by France in other places. What commerce might not be made with Silk? The silk-worms might be reared with much greater success in this country than in France, as appears from the trials that have been made, and which I have above related. The lands of Louisiana are very proper for the culture of Saffron, and the climate would contribute to produce it in great abundance; and, what would still be a considerable advantage, the Spaniards of Mexico, who consume a great deal of it, would enhance its price. I have spoken of Hemp, in respect to the building of ships: but such as might be built there, would never be sufficient to employ all the hemp which might be raised in that colony, did the inhabitants cultivate as much of it as they well might. But you will say, Why do they not? My answer is, the inhabitants of this colony only follow the beaten track they have got into: but if they saw an intelligent person sow hemp without any great expence or labour, as the soil is very fit for it; if, I say, they saw that it thrives without weeding; that in the winter evenings the negroes and their children can peel it; in a word, if they saw that there is good profit to be had by the sale of it; they then would all make hemp. They think and act in the same manner as to all the other articles of culture in this country. {181} Cotton is also a good commodity for commerce; and the culture of it is attended with no difficulty. The only impediment to the culture of it in a greater quantity, is the difficulty of separating it from the seed. However, if they had mills, which would do this work with greater dispatch, the profit would considerably increase. The Indigo of Louisiana, according to intelligent merchants, is as good as that of the islands; and has even more of the copper colour. As it thrives extremely well, and yields more herb than in the islands, as much Indigo may be made as there, though they have four cuttings, and only three in Louisiana. The climate is warmer in the islands, and therefore they make four gatherings; but the soil is drier, and produces not so much as Louisiana: so that the three cuttings of this last are as good as the four cuttings in the islands. The Tobacco of this colony is so excellent, that if the commerce thereof was free, it would sell for one hundred sols and six livres the pound, so fine and delicate is its juice and flavour. Rice may also form a fine branch of trade. We go to the East-Indies for the rice we consume in France; and why should we draw from foreign countries, what we may have of our own countrymen? We should have it at less trouble, and with more security. Besides, as sometimes, perhaps too often, years of scarcity happen, we might always depend upon finding rice in Louisiana, because it is not subject to fail, an advantage which few provinces enjoy. We may add to this commerce some drugs, used in medicine and dying. As to the first, Louisiana produces Sassafras, Sarsaparilla, Esquine, but above all the excellent balm of Copalm (Sweet-gum) the virtues of which, if well known, would save the life of many a person. This colony also furnishes us with bears oil, which is excellent in all rheumatic pains. For dying, I find only the wood Ayac, or Stinking Wood, for yellow; and the Achetchi for red; of the beauty of which colours we shall give an account in the third book. Such are the commodities which may form a commerce of this colony with France, which last may carry in exchange all {182} sorts of European goods and merchandize; the vent whereof is certain, as every thing answers there, where luxury reigns equally as in France. Flour, wines, and strong liquors sell well; and though I have spoken of the manner of growing wheat in this country, the inhabitants, towards the lower part of the river especially, will never grow it, any more than they will cultivate the vine, because in these sorts of work a negro will not earn his master half as much as in cultivating Tobacco; which, however, is less profitable than Indigo. _The Commerce of_ Louisiana _with the Islands._ From Louisiana to the Islands they carry cypress wood squared for building, of different scantlings: sometimes they transport houses, all framed and marked out, ready to set up, on landing at their place of destination. Bricks, which cost fourteen or fifteen livres the thousand, delivered on board the ship. Tiles for covering houses and sheds, of the same price. Apalachean beans, (Garavanzas) worth ten livres the barrel, of two hundred weight. Maiz, or Indian corn. Cypress plank of ten or twelve feet. Red peas, which cost in the country twelve or thirteen livres the barrel. Cleaned rice, which costs twenty livres the barrel, of two hundred weight. There is a great profit to be made in the islands, by carrying thither the goods I have just mentioned: this profit is generally _cent. per cent._ in returns. The shipping which go from the colony bring back sugar, coffee, rum, which the negroes consume in drink; besides other goods for the use of the country. The ships which come from France to Louisiana put all in at Cape François. Sometimes there are ships, which not having a lading for France, because they may have been paid in money or bills of exchange, are obliged to return by Cape François, in order to take in their cargo for France. {183} CHAPTER XI. _Of the Commerce with the_ Spaniards. _The Commodities they bring to the Colony, if there is a Demand for them. Of such as may be given in return, and may suit them. Reflections on the Commerce of this Province, and the great Advantage which the State and particular Persons may derive therefrom._ _The Commerce with the_ Spaniards. The commodities which suit the Spaniards are sufficiently known by traders, and therefore it is not necessary to give an account of them: I have likewise forebore to give the particulars of the commodities which they carry to this colony, though I know them all: that is not our present business. I shall only apprise such as shall settle in Louisiana, in order to traffick with the Spaniards, that it is not sufficient to be furnished with the principal commodities which suit their commerce, but they should, besides, know how to make the proper assortments; which are most advantageous to us, as well as to them, when they carry them to Mexico. _The Commodities which the_ Spaniards _bring to_ Louisiana, _if there is a demand for them_. Campeachy wood, which is generally worth from ten to fifteen livres the hundred weight. Brasil wood, which has a quality superior to that of Campeachy. Very good Cacoa, which is to be met with in all the ports of Spain, worth between eighteen and twenty livres the quintal, or hundred weight. Cochineal, which comes from Vera Cruz: there is no difficulty to have as much of it as one can desire, because so near; it is worth fifteen livres the pound: there is an inferior sort, called Sylvester. Tortoise-shell, which is common in the Spanish islands, is worth seven or eight livres the pound. Tanned leather, of which they have great quantities; that marked or stamped is worth four livres ten sols the levee. {184} Marroquin, or Spanish leather, of which they have great quantities, and cheap. Turned calf, which is also cheap. Indigo, which is manufactured at Guatimala, is worth three or four livres the pound: there is of it of a perfect good quality, and therefore sells at twelve livres the pound. Sarsaparilla, which they have in very great quantities, and sell at thirteen or fifteen sols. Havanna snuff, which is of different prices and qualities: I have seen it at three shillings the pound, which in our money make thirty-seven sols six deniers. Vanilla, which is of different prices. They have many other things very cheap, on which great profits might be made, and for which an easy vent may be found in Europe; especially for their drugs: but a particular detail would carry me too far, and make me lose sight of the object I had in view. What I have just said of the commerce of Louisiana, may easily shew that it will necessarily encrease in proportion as the country is peopled; and industry also will be brought to perfection. For this purpose nothing more is requisite than some inventive and industrious geniuses, who coming from Europe, may discover such objects of commerce as may turn to account. I imagine a good tanner might in this colony tan the leather of the country, and cheaper than in France; I even imagine that the leather might there be brought to its perfection in less time; and what makes me think so, is, that I have heard it averred, that the Spanish leather is extremely good, and is never above three or four months in the tan-pit. The same will hold of many other things, which would prevent money going out of the kingdom to foreign countries. Would it not be more suitable and more useful, to devise means of drawing the same commodities from our own colonies? As these means are so easy, at least money would not go out of our hands; France and her colonies would be as two families who traffick together, and render each other mutual service. Besides, there would not be occasion for so much money to carry on a commerce to Louisiana, seeing the inhabitants have need of European goods. It would therefore be a commerce {185} very different from that which, without exporting the merchandise of the kingdom, exports the money; a commerce still very different from that which carries to France commodities highly prejudicial to our own manufactures. I may add to all that I have said on Louisiana, as one of the great advantages of this country, that women are very fruitful in it, which they attribute to the waters of the Missisippi. Had the intentions of the Company been pursued, and their orders executed, there is no doubt but this colony had at this day been very strong, and blessed with a numerous young progeny, whom no other climate would allure to go and settle in; but being retained by the beauty of their own, they would improve its riches, and multiplied anew in a short time, could offer their mother-country succours in men and ships, and in many other things that are not to be contemned. I cannot too much shew the importance of the succours in corn, which this colony might furnish in a time of scarcity. In a bad year we are obliged to carry our money to foreigners for corn, which has been oftentimes purchased in France, because they have had the secret of preserving their corn; but if the colony of Louisiana was once well settled, what supplies of corn might not be received from that fruitful country? I shall give two reasons which will confirm my opinion. The first is, That the inhabitants always grow more corn than is necessary for the subsistence of themselves, their workmen, and slaves. I own, that in the lower part of the colony only rice could be had, but this is always a great supply. Now, were the colony gradually settled to the Arkansas, they would grow wheat and rye in as great quantities as one could well desire, which would be of great service to France, when her crops happen to fail. The second reason is, That in this colony a scarcity is never to be apprehended. On my arrival in it, I informed myself of what had happened therein from 1700, and I myself remained in it till 1734; and since my return to France I have had accounts from it down to this present year 1757; and from these accounts I can aver, that no intemperature of season has caused {186} any scarcity since the beginning of this century. I was witness to one of the severest winters that had been known in that country in the memory of the oldest people living; but provisions were then not dearer than in other years. The soil of this province being excellent, and the seasons always suitable, the provisions and other commodities cultivated in it never fail to thrive surprizingly. One will, perhaps, be surprized to hear me promise such fine things of a country which has been reckoned to be so much inferior to the Spanish or Portuguese colonies in America; but such as will take the trouble to reflect on that which constitutes the genuine strength of states, and the real goodness of a country, will soon alter their opinion, and agree with me, that a country fertile in men, in productions of the earth, and in necessary metals, is infinitely preferable to countries from which men draw gold, silver, and diamonds: the first effect of which is to pamper luxury and render the people indolent; and the second to stir up the avarice of neighbouring nations. I therefore boldly aver, that Louisiana, well governed, would not long fail to fulfil all I have advanced about it; for though there are still some nations of Indians who might prove enemies to the French, the settlers, by their martial character, and their zeal for their king and country, aided by a few troops, commanded, above all, by good officers, who at the same time know how to command the colonists: the settlers, I say, will be always match enough for them, and prevent any foreigners whatever from invading the country. What would therefore be the consequence if, as I have projected, the first nation that should become our enemy were attacked in the manner I have laid down in my reflections on an Indian war? They would be directly brought to such a pass as to make all other nations tremble at the very name of the French, and to be ever cautious of making war upon them. Not to mention the advantage there is in carrying on wars in this manner; for as they cost little, as little do they hazard the loss of lives. In 1734, M. Perier, Governor of Louisiana, was relieved by M. de Biainville, and the King's plantation put on a new footing, by an arrangement suitable to the notions of the person {187} who advised it. A sycophant, who wanted to make his court to Cardinal Fleury, would persuade that minister, that the plantation cost his Majesty ten thousand livres a year, and that this sum might be well saved; but took care not to tell his Eminence, that for these ten thousand it saved at least fifty thousand livres. Upon this, my place of Director of the public plantations was abolished, and I at length resolved to quit the colony and return to France, nothwithstanding all the fair promises and warm solicitations of my superiors to prevail upon me to stay. A King's ship, La Gironde, being ready to sail, I went down the river in her to Balise, and from thence we set sail, on the 10th of May, 1734. We had tolerable fine weather to the mouth of the Bahama Streights; afterwards we had the wind contrary, which retarded our voyage for a week about the banks of Newfoundland, to which we were obliged to stretch for a wind to carry us to France: from thence we made the passage without any cross accident, and happily arrived in the road of Chaidbois before Rochelle, on the 25th of June following, which made it a passage of forty-five days from Louisiana to France. * * * * * _Some Abstracts from the Historical Memoirs of Louisiana, by_ M. Du Mont. I _Of_ Tobacco, _with the way of cultivating and curing it._ The lands of Louisiana are as proper as could be desired, for the culture of tobacco; and, without despising what is made in other countries, we may affirm that the tobacco which grows in the country of the Natchez, is even preferable to that of Virginia or St. Domingo; I say, in the country of the Natchez, because the soil at that post appears to be more suitable to this plant than any other: although it must be owned, that there is but very little difference betwixt the tobacco which grows there and in some other parts of the colony, as at the Cut-point, at the Nachitoches, and even at New Orleans; but whether it is owing to the exposure, or to the goodness of {188} the soil, it is allowed that the tobacco of the Natchez and Yasous is preferable to the rest. The way of planting and curing tobacco in this country, is as follows: they sow it on beds well worked with the hoe or spade in the months of December, January, or February; and because the seed is very small, they mix it with ashes, that it may be thinner sowed: then they rake the beds, and trample them with their feet, or clap them with a plank, that the seed may take sooner in the ground. The tobacco does not come up till a month afterwards, or even for a longer time; and then they ought to take great care to cover the beds with straw or cypress-bark, to preserve the plants from the white frosts, that are very common in that season. There are two sorts of tobacco; the one with a long and sharp-pointed leaf, the other has a round and hairy leaf; which last they reckon the best sort. At the end of April, and about St. George's day, the plants have about four leaves, and then they pull the best and strongest of them: these they plant out on their tobacco-ground by a line stretched across it, and at three feet distance one from another: this they do either with a planting-stick, or with their finger, leaving a hole on one side of the plant, to receive the water, with which they ought to water it. The tobacco being thus planted, it should be looked over evening and morning, in order to destroy a black worm, which eats the bud of the plant, and afterwards buries itself in the ground. If any of the plants are eat by this worm, you must set another one by it. You must choose a rainy season to plant your tobacco, and you should water it three times to make it take root. But they never work their ground in this country to plant their tobacco; they reckon it sufficient to stir it a little about four inches square round the plant. When the tobacco is about four or five inches high, they weed it, and clean the ground all about it, and hill up every plant. They do the same again, when it is about a foot and a half high. And when the plant has, about eight or nine leaves, and is ready to put forth a stalk, they nip off the top, which they call topping the tobacco: this amputation makes the {189} leaves grow longer and thicker. After this, you must look over every plant, and every leaf, in order to sucker it, or to pull off the buds, which grow at the joints of the leaves; and at the same time you must destroy the large green worms that are found on the tobacco, which are often as large as a man's finger, and would eat up the whole plant in a night's time. After this, you must take care to have ready a hanger (or tobacco-house,) which in Louisiana they make in the following manner: they set several posts in the ground, at equal distances from one another, and lay a beam or plate on the top of them, making thus the form of a house of an oblong square. In the middle of this square they set up two forks, about one third higher than the posts, and lay a pole cross them, for the ridge-pole of the building; upon which they nail the rafters, and cover them with cypress-bark, or palmetto-leaves. The first settlers likewise build their dwelling-houses in this manner, which answer the purpose very well, and as well as the houses which their carpenters build for them, especially for the curing of tobacco; which they hang in these houses upon sticks or canes, laid across the building, and about four feet and a half asunder, one above another. The tobacco-house being ready, you wait till your tobacco is ripe, and fit to be cut; which you may know by the leaves being brittle, and easily broke between the fingers, especially in the morning before sun-rising; but those versed in it know when the tobacco is fit to cut by the looks of it, and at first sight. You cut your tobacco with a knife as nigh the ground as you can, after which you lay it upon the ground for some time, that the leaves may fall, or grow tender, and not break in carrying. When you carry your tobacco to the house, you hang it first at the top by pairs, or two plants together, thus continuing from story to story, taking care that the plants thus hung are about two inches asunder, and that they do not touch one another, lest they should rot. In this manner they fill their whole house with tobacco, and leave it to sweat and dry. After the tobacco is cut, they weed and clean the ground on which it grew: each root then puts out several suckers, which are all pulled off, and only one of the best is left to {190} grow, of which the same care is taken as of the first crop. By this means a second crop is made on the same ground, and sometimes a third. These seconds, indeed, as they are called, do not usually grow so high as the first plant, but notwithstanding they make very good tobacco. [Footnote: This is an advantage that they have in Louisiana over our tobacco planters, who are prohibited by law to cultivate these seconds; the summers are so short, that they do not come to due maturity in our tobacco colonies; whereas in Louisiana the summers are two or three months longer, by which they make two or three crops of tobacco a year upon the same ground, as early as we make one. Add to this, their fresh lands will produce three times as much of that commodity, as our old plantations; which are now worn out with culture, by supplying the whole world almost with tobacco for a hundred and fifty years. Now if their tobacco is worth five and six shillings a pound, as we are told above, or even the tenth part of it, when ours is worth but two pence or three pence, and they give a bounty upon ships going to the Missisippi, when our tobacco is loaded with a duty equal to seven times its prime cost; they may, with all these advantages, soon get this trade from us, the, only one this nation has left entire to itself. These advantages enable the planters to give a much better price for servants and slaves, and thereby to engross the trade. It was by these means, that the French got the sugar trade from us, after the treaty of Utrecht, by being allowed to transport their people from St. Christopher's to the rich and fresh lands of St. Domingo; and by removing from Canada to Louisiana, they may in the like manner get not only this, but every other branch of the trade of North America.] If you have a mind to make your tobacco into rolls, there is no occasion to wait till the leaves are perfectly dry; but as soon as they have acquired a yellowish brown colour, although the stem is green, you unhang your tobacco, and strip the leaves from the stalks, lay them up in heaps, and cover them with woolen cloths, in order to sweat them. After that you stem the tobacco, or pull out the middle rib of the leaf, which you throw away with the stalks, as good for nothing; laying by the longest and largest of the leaves, that are of a good blackish brown colour, and keep them for a covering for your rolls. After this you take a piece of coarse linen, at least eight inches broad and a foot long, which you spread on the ground, and on it lay the large leaves you have picked out, and the others over them in handfuls, taking care always to have more in the middle than at the ends: then you roll the {191} tobacco up in the cloth, tying it in the middle and at each end. When you have made a sufficient number of these bundles, the negroes roll them up as hard as they can with a cord about as big as the little finger, which is commonly about fifteen or sixteen fathom long: you tighten them three times, so as to make them as hard as possible; and to keep them so, you might tie them up with a string. But since the time of the West India company, we have seldom cured our tobacco in this manner, if it is not for our own use; we now cure it in hands, or bundles of the leaves, which they pack in hogsheads, and deliver it thus in France to the farmers general. In order to cure the tobacco in this manner, they wait till the leaves of the stem are perfectly dry, and in moist, giving weather, they strip the leaves from the stalk, till they have a handful of them, called a hand, or bundle of tobacco, which they tie up with another leaf. These bundles they lay in heaps, in order to sweat them, for which purpose they cover those heaps with blankets, and lay boards or planks over them. But you should take care that the tobacco is not over-heated, and does not take fire, which may easily happen; for which purpose you uncover your heaps from time to time, and give the tobacco air, by spreading it abroad. This you continue to do till you find no more heat in the tobacco; then you pack it in hogsheads, and may transport it any where, without danger either of its heating or rotting. II. _Of the way of making_ Indigo. The blue stone, known by the name of Indigo, is the extract of a plant which they who have a sufficient number of slaves to manage it, make some quantities throughout all this colony. For this purpose they first weed the ground, and make small holes in it with a hoe, about five inches asunder, and on a straight line. In each of these holes they put five or six seeds of the indigo, which are small, long, and hard. When they come up, they put forth leaves somewhat like those of box, but a little longer and broader, and not so thick and indented. When the plant is five or six inches high, they take {192} care to loosen the earth about the root, and at the same time to weed it. They reckon it has acquired a proper maturity, when it is about three feet and a half high: this you may likewise know, if the leaf cracks as you squeeze the plant in your hand. Before you cut it, you get ready a place that is covered in the same manner with the one made for tobacco, about twenty-five feet high; in which you put three vats, one above another, as it were in different stories, so that the highest is the largest; that in the middle is square, and the deepest; the third, at bottom, is the least. After these operations, you cut the indigo, and when you have several arms-full, or bundles of the plant, to the quantity judged necessary for one working, you fill the vat at least three quarters full; after which you pour water thereon up to the brim, and the plant is left to steep, in order to rot it; which is the reason why this vat is called the rotting-tub. For the three or four hours which the plant takes to rot, the water is impregnated with its virtue; and, though the plant is green, communicates thereto a blue colour. At the bottom of the great vat, and where it bears on the one in the middle (which, as was said, is square) is a pretty large hole, stopped with a bung; which is opened when the plant is thought to be sufficiently rotten, and all the water of this vat, mixed with the mud, formed by the rotting of the plant, falls by this hole into the second vat; on the edges of which are placed, at proper distances, forks of iron or wood, on which large long poles are laid, which reach from the two sides to the middle of the water in the vat; the end plunged in the water is furnished with a bucket without a bottom. A number of slaves lay hold on these poles, by the end which is out of the water; and alternately pulling them down, and then letting the buckets fall into the vat, they thus continue to beat the water; which being thus agitated and churned, comes to be covered with a white and thick scum; and in such quantity as that it would rise up and flow over the brim of the vat, if the operator did not take care to throw in, from time to time, some fish-oil, which he sprinkles with a feather upon this scum. For these reasons this vat is called the battery. {193} They continue to beat the water for an hour and a half, or two hours; after which they give over, and the water is left to settle. However, they from time to time open three holes, which are placed at proper distances from top to bottom in one of the sides of this second vat in order to let the water run off clear. This is repeated for three several times; but when at the third time the muddy water is ready to come out at the lowermost hole, they stop it, and open another pierced in the lower part of that side, which rests on the third vat. Then all the muddy water falls through that hole of the second vat, into the third, which is the least, and is called the _deviling (diablotin.)_ They have sacks, a foot long, made of a pretty close cloth, which they fill with this liquid thick matter, and hang them on nails round the indigo-house. The water drains out gradually; and the matter which is left behind, resembles a real mud, which they take out of these sacks, and put in moulds, made like little drawers, two feet long by half a foot broad, and with a border, or ledge, an inch and a half high. Then they lay them out in the sun, which draws off all the moisture: and as this mud comes to dry, care is taken to work it with a mason's trowel: at length it forms a body, which holds together, and is cut in pieces, while fresh, with wire. It is in this manner that they draw from a green herb this fine blue colour, of which there are two sorts, one of which is of a purple dove colour. III. _Of Tar; the way of making it; and of making it into Pitch_. I have said, that they made a great deal of tar in this colony, from pines and firs; which is done in the following manner. It is a common mistake, that tar is nothing but the sap or gum of the pine, drawn from the tree by incision; the largest trees would not yield two pounds by this method; and if it were, to be made in that manner, you must choose the most thriving and flourishing trees for the purpose; whereas it is only made from the trees that are old, and are beginning to decay, because the older they are, the greater quantities they contain of that fat bituminous substance, which yields tar; it {194} is even proper that the tree should be felled a long time, before they use them for this purpose. It is usually towards the mouth of the river, and along the sea-coasts, that they make tar; because it is in those places that the pines chiefly grow. When they have a sufficient number of these trees, that are fit for the purpose, they saw them in cuts with a cross-cut saw, about two feet in length; and while the slaves are employed in sawing them, others split these cuts lengthwise into small pieces, the smaller the better. They sometimes spend three or four months in cutting and preparing the trees in this manner. In the mean time they make a square hollow in the ground, four or five feet broad, and five or six inches deep: from one side of which goes off a canal or gutter, which discharges itself into a large and pretty deep pit, at the distance of a few paces. From this pit proceeds another canal, which communicates with a second pit; and even from the first square you make three or four such trenches, which discharge themselves into as many pits, according to the quantity of wood you have, or the quantity of tar you imagine you may draw from it. Then you lay over the square hole four or five pretty strong bars of iron, and upon these bars you arrange crosswise the split pieces of pine, of which you should have a quantity ready; laying them so, that there may be a little air between them. In this manner you raise a large and high pyramid of the wood, and when it is finished, you set fire to it at the top. As the wood burns, the fire melts the resin in the pine, and this liquid tar distills into the square hole, and from thence runs into the pits made to receive it. If you would make pitch of this tar, take two or three red-hot cannon bullets, and throw them into the pits, full of the tar, which you intend for this purpose: immediately upon which, the tar takes fire with a terrible noise and a horrible thick smoke, by which the moisture that may remain in the tar is consumed and dissipated, and the mass diminishes in proportion; and when they think it is sufficiently burnt, they extinguish the fire, not with water, but with a hurdle covered with turf and earth. As it grows cold, it becomes hard and shining, so that you cannot take it out of the pits, but by cutting it with an axe. {195} IV. _Of the Mines of_ Louisiana. Before we quit this subject, I shall conclude this account by answering a question, which has often been proposed to me. Are there any Mines, say they, in this province? There are, without all dispute; and that is so certain, and so well known, that they who have any knowledge of this country never once called it in question. And it is allowed by all, that there are to be found in this country quarries of plaster of Paris, slate, and very fine veined marble; and I have learned from one of my friends, who as well as myself had been a great way on discoveries, that in travelling this province he had found a place full of fine stones of rock-crystal. As for my share, I can affirm, without endeavoring to impose on any one, that in one of my excursions I found, upon the river of the Arkansas, a rivulet that rolled down with its waters gold-dust; from which there is reason to believe that there are mines of this metal in that country. And as for silver-mines, there is no doubt but they might be found there, as well as in New Mexico, on which this province borders. A Canadian traveller, named Bon Homme, as he was hunting at some distance from the Post of the Nachitoches, melted some parcels of a mine, that is found in rocks at a very little distance from that Post, which appeared to be very good silver, without any farther purification. [Footnote: See a farther account and assay of this mine above.] It will be objected to me, perhaps, that if there is any truth in what I advance, I should have come from that country laden with silver and gold; and that if these precious metals are to be found there, as I have said, it is surprizing that the French have never thought of discovering and digging them in thirty years, in which they have been settled in Louisiana. To this I answer, that this objection is only founded on the ignorance of those who make it; and that a traveller, or an officer, ordered by his superiors to go to reconnoitre the country, to draw plans, and give an account of what he has seen, in nothing but immense woods and deserts, where they cannot so {196} much as find a path, but what is made by the wild beasts; I say, that such people have enough to do to take care of themselves and of their present business, instead of gathering riches; and think it sufficient, that they return in a whole skin. With regard to the negligence that the French seem hitherto to have shewn in searching for these mines, and in digging them, we ought to take due notice, that in order to open a silver-mine, for example, you must advance at least a hundred thousand crowns, before you can expect to get a penny of profit from it, and that the people of the country are not in a condition to be at any such charge. Add to this, that the inhabitants are too ignorant of these mines; the Spaniards, their neighbours, are too discreet to teach them; and the French in Europe are too backward and timorous to engage in such an undertaking. But notwithstanding, it is certain that the thing has been already done, and that just reasons, without doubt, but different from an impossibility, have caused it to be laid aside. This author gives a like account of the culture of Rice in Louisiana, and of all the other staple commodities of our colonies in North America. {197} _Extract from a late_ French _Writer, concerning the Importance of_ Louisiana _to France_. "One cannot help lamenting the lethargic state of that colony, (Louisiana) which carries in its bosom the bed of the greatest riches; and in order to produce them, asks only arms proper for tilling the earth, which is wholly disposed to yield an hundred fold. Thanks to the fertility of our islands, our Sugar plantations are infinitely superior to those of the English, and we likewise excel them in our productions of Indigo, Coffee, and Cotton. "Tobacco is the only production of the earth which gives the English an advantage over us. Providence, which reserved for us the discovery of Louisiana, has given us the possession of it, that we may be their rivals in this particular, or at least that we may be able to do without their Tobacco. Ought we to continue tributaries to them in this respect, when we can so easily do without them? "I cannot help remarking here, that among several projects presented of late years for giving new force to this colony, a company of creditable merchants proposed to furnish negroes to the inhabitants, and to be paid for them in Tobacco alone at a fixed valuation. "The following advantages, they demonstrated, would attend their scheme. I. It would increase a branch of commerce in France, which affords subsistence to two of the English colonies in America, namely Virginia and Maryland, the inhabitants of which consume annually a very considerable quantity of English stuffs, and employ a great number of ships in the transportation of their Tobacco. The inhabitants of those two provinces are so greatly multiplied, in consequence of the riches they have acquired by their commerce with us, that they begin to spread themselves upon territories that belong to us. II. The second advantage arising from the scheme would be, to carry the cultivation of Tobacco to its greatest extent and perfection. III. To diminish in proportion the cultivation of the English plantations, as well as lessen their navigation in that part. IV. To put an end entirely to the {198} importation of any Tobacco from Great-Britain into France, in the space of twelve years. V. To diminish annually, and in the same space of time finally put an end to, the exportation of specie from France to Great-Britain, which amounts annually to five millions of our money for the purchase of Tobacco, and the freightage of English ships, which bring it into our ports. VI. By diminishing the cause of the outgoing specie, to augment the balance of commerce in favour of the nation. These are the principal advantages which France would have reason to have expected from the establishment of this company, if it had been effected." _Essai sur les Interêts du Commerce Maritime, par_ M. du Haye. 1754. The probability of succeeding in such a scheme will appear from the foregoing accounts of Tobacco in Louisiana, pag. 172, 173, 181, 188, &c. They only want hands to make any quantities of Tobacco in Louisiana. The consequences of that will appear from the following account. {199} _An Account of the Quantity of Tobacco imported into_ Britain, _and exported from it, in the four Years of Peace, after the late Tobacco-Law took place, according to the Custom-House Accounts._ Imported Exported Hhds. Hhds. 1752 - - - 55,997 - - 48,922 England, 1753 - - - 70,925 - - 57,353 1754 - - - 59,744 - - 50,476 1755 - - - 71,881 - - 54,384 --------- --------- 258,547 - - 211,135 --------- --------- 1752 - - - 22,322 - - 21,642 Scotland, 1753 - - - 26,210 - - 24,728 1754 - - - 22,334 - - 21,764 1755 - - - 20,698 - - 19,711 --------- --------- 91,564 - - 87,845 --------- --------- Total - - - 350,111 - - 298,980 Average - - 87,528 - - 74,745 Imported yearly - - - hhds 87,528 Exported - - - - - - - - - 74,745 --------- Home consumption - - - - - 12,783 To 87,528 hogsheads, at 10£ per hogshead, £875,280 To duty on 12,783 hogsheads at 20£ - - - 255,660 --------- Annual income from Tobacco - - - - - 1,130,940 The number of seamen employed in the Tobacco trade is computed at 4500;--in the Sugar trade 3600;--and in the Fishery of Newfoundland 4000, from Britain. {201} THE HISTORY OF LOUISIANA BOOK III. _The Natural History of_ Louisiana. CHAPTER I. _Of Corn and Pulse_. Having, in the former part of this work, given an account of the nature of the soil of Louisiana, and observed that some places were proper for one kind of plants, and some for another; and that almost the whole country was capable of producing, and bringing to the utmost maturity, all kinds of grain, I shall now present the industrious planter with an account of the trees and plants which may be cultivated to advantage in those lands with which he is now made acquainted. During my abode in that country, where I myself have a grant of lands, and where I lived sixteen years, I have had leisure to study this subject, and have made such progress in it, that I have sent to the West-India Company in France no less than three hundred medicinal plants, found in their possessions, and worthy of the attention of the public. The reader may depend upon my being faithful and exact; he must not however here expect a description of every thing that Louisiana produces of the vegetable kind. Its prodigious fertility makes it impracticable for me to undertake so extensive a work. I shall chiefly describe those plants and fruits that are most useful to the inhabitants, either in regard to their own subsistence or preservation, or in regard to their foreign commerce; {202} and I shall add the manner of cultivating and managing the plants that are of greatest advantage to the colony. Louisiana produces several kinds of Maiz, namely Flour-maiz, which is white, with a flat and shrivelled surface, and is the softest of all the kinds; Homony corn, which is round, hard, and shining; of this there are four sorts, the white, the yellow, the red, and the blue; the Maiz of these two last colours is more common in the high lands than in the Lower Louisiana. We have besides small corn, or small Maiz, so called because it is smaller than the other kinds. New settlers sow this corn upon their first arrival, in order to have whereon to subsist as soon as possible; for it rises very fast, and ripens in so short a time, that from the same field they may have two crops of it in one year. Besides this, it has the advantage of being more agreeable to the taste than the large kind. Maiz, which in France is called Turkey Corn, (and in England Indian Corn) is the natural product of this country; for upon our arrival we found it cultivated by the natives. It grows upon a stalk six, seven, and eight feet high; the ear is large, and about two inches diameter, containing sometimes seven hundred grains and upwards; and each stalk bears sometimes six or seven ears, according to the goodness of the ground. The black and light soil is that which agrees best with it; but strong ground is not so favourable to it. This corn, it is well known, is very wholesome both for man and other animals, especially for poultry. The natives, that they may have change of dishes, dress it in various ways. The best is to make it into what is called Parched Meal, (Farine Froide.) As there is nobody who does not eat of this with pleasure, even though not very hungry, I will give the manner of preparing it, that our provinces of France, which reap this grain, may draw the same advantage from it. The corn is first parboiled in water; then drained and well dried. When it is perfectly dry, it is then roasted in a plate made for that purpose, ashes being mixed with it to hinder it from burning; and they keep continually stirring it, that it may take only the red colour which they want. When it has taken that colour, they remove the ashes, rub it well, and then {203} put it in a mortar with the ashes of dried stalks of kidney beans, and a little water; they then beat it gently, which quickly breaks the husk, and turns the whole into meal. This meal, after being pounded, is dried in the sun, and after this last operation it may be carried any where, and will keep six months, if care be taken from time to time to expose it to the sun. When they want to eat of it, they mix in a vessel two thirds water with one third meal, and in a few minutes the mixture swells greatly in bulk, and is fit to eat. It is a very nourishing food, and is an excellent provision for travellers, and those who go to any distance to trade. This parched meal, mixed with milk and a little sugar, may be served up at the best tables. When mixed with milk-chocolate it makes a very lasting nourishment. From Maiz they make a strong and agreeable beer; and they likewise distil brandy from it. Wheat, rye, barley, and oats grow extremely well in Louisiana; but I must add one precaution in regard to wheat; when it is sown by itself, as in France, it grows at first wonderfully; but when it is in flower, a great number of drops of red water may be observed at the bottom of the stalk within six inches of the ground, which are collected there during the night, and disappear at sun-rising. This water is of such an acrid nature, that in a short time it consumes the stalk, and the ear falls before the grain is formed. To prevent this misfortune, which is owing to the too great richness of the soil, the method I have taken, and which has succeeded extremely well, is to mix with the wheat you intend to sow, some rye and dry mould, in such a proportion that the mould shall be equal to the rye and wheat together. This method I remember to have seen practised in France; and when I asked the reason of it, the farmer told me that as the land was new, and had lately been a wood, it contained an acid that was prejudicial to the wheat; and that as the rye absorbed that acid without being hurt, it thereby preserved the other grain. I have seen barley and oats in that country three feet high. The rice which is cultivated in that country was brought from Carolina. It succeeds surprizingly well, and experience {204} has there proved, contrary to the common notion, that it does not want to have its foot always in the water. It has been sown in the flat country without being flooded, and the grain that was reaped was full grown, and of a very delicate taste. The fine relish need not surprise us; for it is so with all plants and fruits that grow without being watered, and at a distance from watery places. Two crops may be reaped from the same plant; but the second is poor if it be not flooded. I know not whether they have attempted, since I left Louisiana, to sow it upon the sides of hills. The first settlers found in the country French-beans of various colours, particularly red and black, and they have been called beans of forty days, because they require no longer time to grow and to be fit to eat green. The Apalachean beans are so called because we received them from a nation of the natives of that name. They probably had them from the English of Carolina, whither they had been brought from Guinea. Their stalks spread upon the ground to the length of four or five feet. They are like the other beans, but much smaller, and of a brown colour, having a black ring round the eye, by which they are joined to the shell. These beans boil tender, and have a tolerable relish, but they are sweetish, and somewhat insipid. The potatoes are roots more commonly long than thick; their form is various, and their fine skin is like that of the Topinambous (Irish potatoes.) In their substance and taste they very much resemble sweet chesnuts. They are cultivated in the following manner; the earth is raised in little hills or high furrows about a foot and a half broad, that by draining the moisture, the roots may have a better relish. The small potatoes being cut in little pieces with an eye in each, four or five of those pieces are planted on the head of the hills. In a short time they push out shoots, and these shoots being cut off about the middle of August within seven or eight inches of the ground, are planted double, cross-ways, in the crown of other hills. The roots of these last are the most esteemed, not only on account of their fine relish, but because they are easier kept during the winter. In order to preserve them during {205} that season, they dry them in the sun as soon as they are dug up, and then lay them up in a close and dry place, covering them first with ashes, over which they lay dry mould. They boil them, or bake them, or roast them on hot coals like chesnuts; but they have the finest relish when baked or roasted. They are eat dry, or cut into small slices in milk without sugar, for they are sweet of themselves. Good sweetmeats are also {206} made of them, and some Frenchmen have drawn brandy from them. [Illustration: Top: _Appalachean Beans,_--Bottom: _Sweet Potatoes_ (on p. 205)] The Cushaws are a kind of pompion. There are two sorts of them, the one round, and the other in the shape of a hunting horn. These last are the best, being of a more firm substance, which makes them keep much better than the others; their sweetness is not so insipid, and they have fewer seeds. They make sweetmeats of these last, and use both kinds in soup; they make fritters of them, fry them, bake them, and roast them on the coals, and in all ways of cooking they are good and palatable. All kinds of melons grow admirably well in Louisiana. Those of Spain, of France, of England, which last are called white melons, are there infinitely finer than in the countries from whence they have their name; but the best of all are the water melons. As they are hardly known in France, except in Provence, where a few of the small kind grow, I fancy a description of them will not be disagreeable to the reader. The stalk of this melon spreads like ours upon the ground, and extends to the length of ten feet. It is so tender, that when it is any way bruised by treading upon it, the fruit dies; and if it is rubbed in the least, it grows warm. The leaves are very much indented, as broad as the hand when they are spread out, and are somewhat of a sea-green colour. The fruit is either round like a pompion, or long. There are some good melons of this last kind, but the first sort are most esteemed, and deservedly so. The weight of the largest rarely exceeds thirty pounds, but that of the smallest is always above ten pounds. Their rind is of a pale green colour, interspersed with large white spots. The substance that adheres to the rind is white, crude, and of a disagreeable tartness, and is therefore never eaten. The space within that is filled with a light and sparkling substance, that may be called for its properties a rose-coloured snow. It melts in the mouth as if it were actually snow, and leaves a relish like that of the water prepared for sick people from gooseberry jelly. This fruit cannot fail therefore of being very refreshing, and is so wholesome, that persons in all kinds of distempers may satisfy their {207} appetite with it, without any apprehension of being the worse for it. The water-melons of Africa are not near so relishing as those of Louisiana. [Illustration: Watermelon] The seeds of water-melons are placed like those of the French melons. Their shape is oval and flat, being as thick at the ends as towards the middle; their length is about six lines, and their breadth four. Some are black and others red; but the black are the best, and it is those you ought to choose {208} for sowing, if you would wish to have good fruit; which you cannot fail of, if they are not planted in strong ground, where they would degenerate and become red. All kinds of greens and roots which have been brought from Europe into that colony succeed better there than in France, provided they be planted in a soil suited to them; for it is certainly absurd to think that onions and other bulbous plants should thrive there in a soft and watery soil, when every where else they require a light and dry earth. CHAPTER II. _Of the Fruit Trees of_ Louisiana. I shall now proceed to give an account of the fruit trees of this colony, and shall begin with the Vine, which is so common in Louisiana, that whatever way you walk from the sea coast for five hundred leagues northwards, you cannot proceed an hundred steps without meeting with one; but unless the vine-shoots should happen to grow in an exposed place, it cannot be expected that their fruit should ever come to perfect maturity. The trees to which they twine are so high, and so thick of leaves, and the intervals of underwood are so filled with reeds, that the sun cannot warm the earth, or ripen the fruit of this shrub. I will not undertake to describe all the kinds of grapes which this country produces; it is even impossible to know them all; I shall only speak of three or four. The first sort that I shall mention does not perhaps deserve the name of a grape, although its wood and its leaf greatly resemble the vine. This shrub bears no bunches, and you hardly ever see upon it above two grapes together. The grape in substance and colour is very like a violet damask plum, and its stone, which is always single, greatly resembles a nut. Though not very relishing, it has not however that disagreeable sharpness of the grape that grows in the neighbourhood of New Orleans. On the edge of the savannahs or meadows we meet with a grape, the shoots of which resemble those of the Burgundy {209} grape. They make from this a tolerable good wine, if they take care to expose it to the sun in summer, and to the cold in winter. I have made this experiment myself, and must say that I never could turn it into vinegar. There is another kind of grape which I make no difficulty of classing with the grapes of Corinth, commonly called currants. It resembles them in the wood, the leaf, the tree, the size, and the sweetness. Its tartness is owing to its being prevented from ripening by the thick shade of the large trees to which it twines. If it were planted and cultivated in an open field, I make not the least doubt but it would equal the grape of Corinth, with which I class it. Muscadine grapes, of an amber colour, of a very good kind, and very sweet, have been found upon declivities of a good exposure, even so far north as the latitude of 31 degrees. There is the greatest probability that they might make excellent wine of these, as it cannot be doubted but the grapes might be brought to great perfection in this country, since in the moist soil of New Orleans, the cuttings of the grape which some of the inhabitants of that city brought from France, have succeeded extremely well, and afforded good wine. As a proof of the fertility of Louisiana, I cannot forbear mentioning the following fact; an inhabitant of New Orleans having planted in his garden a few twigs of this Muscadine vine, with a view of making an arbour of them, one of his sons, with another negro boy, entered the garden in the month of June, when the grapes are ripe, and broke off all the bunches they could find. The father, after severely chiding the two boys, pruned the twigs that had been broken and bruised; and as several months of summer still remained, the vine pushed out new shoots, and new bunches, which ripened and were as good as the former. The Persimmon, which the French of the colony call Placminier, very much resembles our medlar-tree in its leaf and wood: its flower, which is about an inch and a half broad, is white, and is composed of five petals; its fruit is about the size of a large hen's egg; it is shaped like our medlar, but its substance is sweeter and more delicate. This fruit is astringent; {210} when it is quite ripe the natives make bread of it, which they keep from year to year; and the bread has this remarkable property that it will stop the most violent looseness or dysentery; therefore it ought to be used with caution, and only after physic. The natives, in order to make this bread, squeeze the fruit over fine sieves to separate the pulp from the skin and the kernels. Of this pulp, which is like paste or thick pap, they make cakes about a foot and a half long, a foot broad, and a finger's breadth in thickness: these they dry in an oven, upon gridirons, or else in the sun; which last method of drying gives a greater relish to the bread. This is one of their articles of traffick with the French. Their plum-trees are of two sorts: the best is that which bears violet-coloured plums, quite like ours, which are not disagreeable, and which certainly would be good if they did not grow in the middle of woods. The other kind bears plums of the colour of an unripe cherry, and these are so tart that no body can eat them; but I am of opinion they might be preserved like gooseberries; especially if pains were taken to cultivate them in open grounds. The small cherries, called the Indian cherry, are frequent in this country. Their wood is very beautiful, and their leaves differ in nothing from those of the cherry tree. The Papaws are only to be found far up in Higher Louisiana. These trees, it would seem, do not love heat; they do not grow so tall as the plum-trees; their wood is very hard and flexible; for the lower branches are sometimes so loaded with fruit that they hang perpendicularly downwards; and if you unload them of their fruit in the evening, you will find them next morning in their natural erect position. The fruit resembles a middle-sized cucumber; the pulp is very agreeable and very wholesome; but the rind, which is easily stripped off, leaves on the fingers so sharp an acid, that if you touch your eye with them before you wash them, it will be immediately inflamed, and itch most insupportably for twenty-four hours after. The natives had doubtless got the peach-trees and fig-trees from the English colony of Carolina, before the French {211} established themselves in Louisiana. The peaches are of the kind which we call Alberges; are of the size of the fist, adhere to the stone, and contain so much water that they make a kind of wine of it. The figs are either blue or white; are large and well enough tasted. Our colonists plant the peach stones about the end of February, and suffer the trees to grow exposed to all weathers. In the third year they will gather from one tree at least two hundred peaches, and double that number for six {212} or seven years more, when the tree dies irrecoverably. As new trees are so easily produced, the loss of the old ones is not in the least regretted. [Illustration: Top: _Pawpaw_--Bottom: _Blue Whortle-berry_ (on p. 211)] The orange-trees and citron-trees that were brought from Cape François have succeeded extremely well; however I have seen so severe a winter that those kinds of trees were entirely frozen to the very trunk. In that case they cut the trees down to the ground, and the following summer they produced shoots that were better than the former. If these trees have succeeded in the flat and moist soil of New Orleans, what may we not expect when they are planted in better soil, and upon declivities of a good exposure? The oranges and citrons are as good as those of other countries; but the rind of the orange in particular is very thick, which makes it the better for a sweet-meat. There is plenty of wild apples in Louisiana, like those in Europe; and the inhabitants have got many kind of fruit trees from France, such as apples, pears, plums, cherries, &c. which in the low grounds run more into wood than fruit; the few I had at the Natches proved that high ground is much more suited to them than the low. The blue Whortle-berry is a shrub somewhat taller than our largest gooseberry bushes, which are left to grow as they please. Its berries are of the shape of a gooseberry, grow single, and are of a blue colour: they taste like a sweetish gooseberry, and when infused in brandy it makes a good dram. They attribute several virtues to it, which, as I never experienced, I cannot answer for. It loves a poor gravelly soil. Louisiana produces no black mulberries: but from the sea to the Arkansas, which is an extent of navigation upon the river of two hundred leagues, we meet very frequently with three kinds of mulberries; one a bright red, another perfectly white, and a third white and sweetish. The first of these kinds is very common, but the two last are more rare. Of the red mulberries they make excellent vinegar, which keeps a long time, provided they take care in the making of it to keep it in the shade in a vessel well stopped, contrary to the practice in France. They make vinegar also of bramble berries, but this {213} is not so good as the former. I do not doubt but the colonists at present apply themselves seriously to the cultivation of mulberries, to feed silk-worms, especially as the countries adjoining to France, and which supplied us with silk, have now made the exportation of it difficult. The olive-trees in this colony are surprisingly beautiful. The trunk is sometimes a foot and a half diameter, and thirty feet high before it spreads out into branches. The Provençals settled in the colony affirm, that its olives would afford as good an oil as those of their country. Some of the olives that were prepared to be eat green, were as good as those of Provence. I have reason to think, that if they were planted on the coasts, the olives would have a finer relish. They have great numbers and a variety of kinds of walnut-trees in this country. There is a very large kind, the wood of which is almost as black as ebony, but very porous. The fruit, with the outer shell, is of the size of a large hen's egg: the shell has no cleft, is very rough and so hard as to require a hammer to break it. Though the fruit be very relishing, yet it is covered with such a thick film, that few can bestow the pains of separating the one from the other. The natives make bread of it, by throwing the fruit into water, and rubbing it till the film and oil be separated from it. If those trees were engrafted with the French walnut, their fruit would probably be improved. Other walnut-trees have a very white and flexible wood. Of this wood the natives make their crooked spades for hoeing their fields. The nut is smaller than ours, and the shell more tender; but the fruit is so bitter that none but perroquets can put up with it. The Hicori bears a very small kind of nut, which at first sight one would take for filberts, as they have the same shape and colour, and their shell is as tender, but within they are formed like walnuts. They have such an excellent relish, that the French make fried cakes of them as good as those of almonds. Louisiana produces but a few filberts, as the filbert requires a poor gravelly soil which is not to be met with in this {214} province, except in the neighbourhood of the sea, especially near the river Mobile. [Illustration: Sweet Gum or Liquid-Amber] The large chesnuts are not to be met with but at the distance of one hundred leagues from the sea, and far from rivers in the heart of the woods, between the country of the Chactaws and that of the Chicasaws. The common chesnuts succeed best upon high declivities, and their fruit is like the chesnuts that grow in our woods. There is another kind of chesnuts, which are called the Acorn chesnuts, as they are shaped like an acorn, {215} and grow in such a cup. But they have the colour and taste of a chesnut; and I have often thought that those were the acorns which the first of men were said to have lived upon. The Sweet-Gum, or Liquid-Ambar (Copalm) is not only extremely common, but it affords a balm, the virtues of which are infinite. Its bark is black and hard, and its wood so tender and supple, that when the tree is felled you may draw from the middle of it rods of five or six feet in length. It cannot be employed in building or furniture, as it warps continually; nor is it fit for burning on account of its strong smell; but a little of it in a fire yields an agreeable perfume. Its leaf is indented with five points like a star. I shall not undertake to particularize all the virtues of this Sweet-Gum or Liquid-Ambar, not having learned all of them from the natives of the country, who would be no less surprised to find that we used it only as a varnish, than they were to see our surgeons bleed their patients. This balm, according to them, is an excellent febrifuge; they take ten or a dozen drops of it in gruel fasting, and before their meals; and if they should take a little more, they have no reason to apprehend any danger. The physicians among the natives purge their patients before they give it them. It cures wounds in two days without any bad consequences: it is equally sovereign for all kinds of ulcers, after having applied to them for some days a plaster of bruised ground-ivy. It cures consumptions, opens obstructions; it affords relief in the colic and all internal diseases; it comforts the heart; in short, it contains so many virtues, that they are every day discovering some new property that it has. CHAPTER III. Of Forest Trees. Having described the most remarkable of their fruit trees, I shall now proceed to give an account of their forest trees. White and red cedars are very common upon the coast. The incorruptibility of the wood, and many other excellent properties which are well known, induced the first French settlers to build their houses of it; which were but very low. {216} [Illustration: Cypress] Next to the cedar the cypress-tree is the most valuable wood. Some reckon it incorruptible; and if it be not, it is at least a great many years in rotting. The tree that was found twenty feet deep in the earth near New Orleans was a cypress, and was uncorrupted. Now if the lands of Lower Louisiana are augmented two leagues every century, this tree must have been buried at least twelve centuries. The cypress grows very straight and tall, with a proportionable thickness. They commonly {217} make their pettyaugres of a single trunk of this tree, which will carry three or four thousand weight, and sometimes more. Of one of those trees a carpenter offered to make two pettyaugres, one of which carried sixteen ton, and the other fourteen. There is a cypress at Baton Rouge, a French settlement twenty-six leagues above New Orleans, which measures twelve yards round, and is of a prodigious height. The cypress has few branches, and its leaf is long and narrow. The trunk close by the ground sometimes sends off two or three stems, which enter the earth obliquely, and serve for buttresses to the tree. Its wood is of a beautiful colour, somewhat reddish; it is soft, light, and smooth; its grain is straight, and its pores very close. It is easily split by wedges, and though used green it never warps. It renews itself in a very extraordinary manner: a short time after it is cut down, a shoot is observed to grow from one of its roots exactly in the form of a sugar-loaf, and this sometimes rises ten feet high before any leaf appears: the branches at length arise from the head of this conical shoot. [Footnote: This is a mistake, according to Charlevoix.] The cypresses were formerly very common in Louisiana; but they have wasted them so imprudently, that they are now somewhat rare. They felled them for the sake of their bark, with which they covered their houses, and they sawed the wood into planks which they exported at different places. The price of the wood now is three times as much as it was formerly. The Pine-tree, which loves a barren soil, is to be found in great abundance on the sea coasts, where it grows very high and very beautiful. The islands upon the coast, which are formed wholly of shining sand, bear no other trees, and I am persuaded that as fine masts might be made of them as of the firs of Sweden. All the south parts of Louisiana abound with the Wild Laurel, which grows in the woods without any cultivation: the same may be said of the stone laurel, but if a person is not upon his guard he may take for the laurel a tree natural to the country, which would communicate its bad smell to every thing it is applied to. Among the laurels the preference ought to be {218} given to the tulip laurel (magnolia) which is not known in Europe. This tree is of the height and bulk of one of our common walnut-trees. Its head is naturally very round, and so thick of leaves that neither the sun nor rain can penetrate it. Its leaves are full four inches long, near three inches broad, and very thick, of a beautiful sea-green on the upperside, and resembling white velvet on the under-side: its bark is smooth and of a grey colour; its wood is white, soft and flexible, and {219} the grain interwoven. It owes its name to the form of its great white flowers, which are at least two inches broad. These appearing in the spring amidst the glossy verdure of the leaves, have a most beautiful effect. As the top is naturally round, and the leaves are ever-green, avenues of this tree would doubtless be worthy of a royal garden. After it has shed its leaves, its fruit appears in the form of a pine apple, and upon the first approach of the cold its grain turns into a lively red. Its {220} kernel is very bitter, and it is said to be a specific against fevers. [Illustration: _Magnolia_ (on p. 218)] [Illustration: _Sassafras_ (on p. 219)] The sassafras, the name of which is familiar to botanists on account of its medicinal qualities, is a large and tall tree. Its bark is thick, and cracked here and there; its wood is some what of the colour of cinnamon, and has an agreeable smell. It will not burn in the fire without the mixture of other wood, and even in the fire, if it should be separated from the flaming wood, it is immediately extinguished as if it were dipped in water. The maple grows upon declivities in cold climates, and is much more plentiful in the northern than the southern parts of the colony. By boring it they draw from it a sweet syrup which I have drunk of, and which they alledge is an excellent stomachic. The myrtle wax-tree is one of the greatest blessings with which nature has enriched Louisiana, as in this country the bees lodge their honey in the earth to save it from the ravages of the bears, who are very fond of it, and do not value their stings. One would be apt to take it at first sight, both from its bark and its height, for that kind of laurel used in the kitchens. It rises in several stems from the root; its leaf is like that of the laurel, but not so thick nor of such a lively green. It bears its fruit in bunches like a nosegay, rising from the same place in various stalks about two inches long: at the end of each of those stalks is a little pea, containing a kernel in a nut, which last is wholly covered with wax. The fruit, which is very plentiful, is easily gathered, as the shrub is very flexible. The tree thrives as well in the shade of other trees as in the open air; in watry places and cold countries, as well as in dry grounds and hot climates; for I have been told that some of them have been found in Canada, a country as cold as Denmark. This tree yields two kinds of wax, one a whitish yellow, and the other green. It was a long time before they learned to separate them, and they prepared the wax at first in the, following manner. They threw the grains and the stalks into a large kettle of boiling water, and when the wax was detached {221} from them, they scummed off the grains. When the water cooled the wax floated in a cake at the top, and being cut small, bleached in a shorter time than bees wax. They now prepare it in this manner; they throw boiling water upon the stalks and grains till they are entirely floated, and when they have stood thus a few minutes, they pour off the water, which carries the finest wax with it. This wax when cold is of a {222} pale yellow colour, and may be bleached in six or seven days. Having separated the best wax, they pour the water again upon the stalks and grains, and boil all together till they think they have separated all the wax. Both kinds are exported to our sugar islands, where the first is sold for a hundred sols the pound, and the second for forty. [Illustration: TOP: _Myrtle Wax Tree_--BOTTOM: _Vinegar tree (Acacia or Locust)_ (on p. 221)] This wax is so brittle and dry that if it falls it breaks into several pieces; on this account however it lasts longer than that of France, and is preferred to it in our sugar islands, where the latter is softened by the great heats, and, consumes like tallow. I would advise those who prepare this wax to separate the grain from the short stalk before they boil it, as the stalk is greener than the grain, and seems to part easily with its colour. The water which serves to melt and separate the wax is far from being useless. The fruit communicates to it such an astringent virtue, as to harden the tallow that is melted in it to such a degree, that the candles made of that tallow are as firm as the wax candles of France. This astringent quality likewise renders it an admirable specific against a dysentery or looseness. From what I have said of the myrtle wax-tree, it may well be believed that the French of Louisiana cultivate it carefully, and make plantations of it. The cotton-tree (a poplar) is a large tree which no wise deserves the name it bears, unless for some beards that it throws out. Its fruit which contains the grain is about the size of a walnut, and of no use; its wood is yellow, smooth, somewhat hard, of a fine grain, and very proper for cabinet work. The bark of its root is a sovereign remedy for cuts, and so red that it may even serve to dye that colour. The acacia (locust) is the same in Louisiana as in France, much more common, and less streight. The natives call it by a name that signifies hard wood, and they make their bows of it because it is very stiff. They look upon it as an incorruptible wood, which induced the French settlers to build their houses of it. The posts fixed in the earth must be entirely {223} stripped of their bark, for notwithstanding their hardness, if the least bark be left upon them they will take root. [Illustration: _Poplar ("Cotton Tree")_] The holm-oak grows to a surprising bulk and height in this country; I have seen of them a foot and a half diameter, and about 30 feet from the ground to the lowest branches. The mangrove is very common all over America. it grows in Louisiana near the sea, even to the bounds of low water mark. It is more prejudicial than useful, inasmuch as {224} it occupies a great deal of good land, prevents sailors from landing, and affords shelter to the fish from the fishermen. [Illustration: _Black Oak_] Oak-trees abound in Louisiana; there are some red, some white, and some ever-green. A ship-builder of St. Maloes assured me that the red is as good as the ever-green upon which we set so high a value in France. The ever-green oak is most common toward the sea-coasts, and near the banks of rivers, consequently may be transported with great ease, and {225} become a great resource for the navy of France. [Footnote: Eleven leagues above the mouth of the Mississippi, on the west side, there is great plenty of ever-green oaks, the wood of which is very proper for the timbers of ships, as it does not rot in water. _Dumont_, I. & 50. Accordingly the best ships built in America are well known to be those that have their timbers of ever-green oak, and their plank of cedar, of both which there are great plenty on all the coasts of Louisiana.] I forgot to mention a fourth kind of oak, namely the black oak, so called from the colour of its bark. Its wood is very hard, and of a {226} deep red. It grows upon the declivities of hills and in the savannahs. Happening after a shower of rain to examine one of these which I cut down, I observed some water to come from it as red as blood, which made me think that it might be used for dying. [Illustration: _Linden or Bass Tree_ (on p. 225)] The ash is very common in this country; but more and better upon the sea-coasts than in the inland parts. As it is easy to be had, and is harder than the elm, the wheel-wrights make use of it for wheels, which it is needless to, ring with iron in a country where there are neither stones nor gravel. The elm, beech, lime, and hornbeam, are exactly the same in Louisiana as in France; the last of these trees is very common here. The bark of the lime-tree of this country is equally proper for the making of ropes, as the bark of the common lime; but its leaf is twice as large, and shaped like an oblong trefoil leaf with the point cut off. The white woods are the aspen, willow, alder and liart. This last grows very large, its wood is white and light, and its fibres are interwoven; it is very flexible and is easily cut, on which account they make their large pettyaugres of it. CHAPTER IV. Of Shrubs and Excrescences. The ayac, or stinking-wood, is usually a small tree, seldom exceeding the thickness of a man's leg; its leaf is of a yellowish green, glossy, and of an oval form, being about three inches in length. The wood is yellow, and yields a water of the same colour, when it is cut in the sap: but both the wood and the water that comes from it have a disagreeable, smell. The natives use the wood for dying; they cut it into small bits, pound them, and then boil them in water. Having strained this water, they dip the feathers and hair into it, which it is their custom to dye first yellow, and then red. When they intend to use it for the yellow dye, they take care to cut the wood in the winter, but if they want only a slight colour they never mind the season of cutting it. {227} [Illustration: _Box Elder or Stink-wood Tree_] The machonchi, or vinegar-tree, is a shrub with leaves, somewhat resembling those of the ash; but the foot-stalk from which the leaves hang is much longer. When the leaves are dry the natives mix them with their tobacco to weaken it a little, for they do not love strong tobacco for smoaking. The wood is of an astringent nature, and if put into vinegar makes it stronger. {228} [Illustration: TOP: _Cassine or Yapon_--BOTTOM: _Tooth-ache Tree or Prickly Ash_] The cassine, or yapon, is a shrub which never grows higher than 15 feet; its bark is very smooth, and the wood flexible. Its leaf is very much indented, and when used as tea is reckoned good for the stomach. The natives make an intoxicating liquor from it, by boiling it in water till great part of the liquor evaporate. The tooth-ache tree does not grow higher than 10 to 12 feet. The trunk, which is not very large, is wholly covered over with {229} short thick prickles, which are easily rubbed off. The pith of this shrub is almost as large as that of the elder, and the form of the leaf is almost the same in both. It has two barks, the outer almost black, and the inner white, with somewhat of a pale reddish hue. This inner bark has the property of curing the tooth-ach. The patient rolls it up to the size of a bean, puts it upon the aching tooth, and chews it till the pain ceases. Sailors and other such people powder it, and use it as pepper. [Illustration: TOP: _Passion Thorn or Honey Locust_--BOTTOM: _Bearded Creeper_] {230} [Illustration: _Palmetto_] The passion-thorn does not rise above the height of a shrub; but its trunk is rather thick for its height. This shrub is in great esteem among the Natches; but I never could learn for what reason. Its leaf resembles that of the black thorn; and its wood while it is green is not very hard. Its prickles are at least two inches long, and are very hard and piercing; within half an inch of their root two other small prickles grow out from them so as to form a cross. The whole trunk is covered {231} with these prickles, so that you must be very wary how you approach it, or cut it. The elder-tree is exactly like that of France, only that its leaf is a little more indented. The juice of its leaves mixed with hog's lard is a specific against the haemorrhoids. The palmetto has its leaves in the form of an open fan, scolloped at the end of each of its folds. Its bark is more rough and knotty than that of the palm-tree. Although it is less than that of the East Indies, it may however serve to the same purposes. Its wood is not harder than that of a cabbage, and its trunk is so soft that the least wind overturns it, so that I never saw any but what were lying on the ground. It is very common in Lower Louisiana, where there are no wild oxen; for those animals who love it dearly, and are greatly fattened by it, devour it wherever they can find it. The Spanish women make hats of its leaves that do not weigh an ounce, riding-hoods, and other curious works. The birch-tree is the same with that of France. In the north they make canoes of its bark large enough to hold eight persons. When the sap rises they strip off the bark from the tree in one piece with wedges, after which they sew up the two ends of it to serve for stem and stern, and anoint the whole with gum. I make not the least doubt but that there are great numbers of other trees in the forests of Louisiana that deserve to be particularly described; but I know of none, nor have I heard of any, but what I have already spoken of. For our travellers, from whom alone we can get any intelligence of those things, are more intent upon discovering game which they stand in need of for their subsistence, than in observing the productions of nature in the vegetable kingdom. To what I have said of trees, I shall only add, from my own knowledge, an account of two singular excrescences. The first is a kind of agaric or mushroom, which grows from the root of the walnut-tree, especially when it is felled. The natives, who are very careful in the choice of their food, gather it with great attention, boil it in water, and eat it with {232} their gruel. I had the curiosity to taste of it, and found it very delicate, but rather insipid, which might easily be corrected with a little seasoning. The other excrescence is commonly found upon trees near the banks of rivers and lakes. It is called Spanish beard, which name was given it by the natives, who, when the Spaniards first appeared in their country about 240 years ago, were greatly surprised at their mustachios and beards. This excrescence appears like a bunch of hair hanging from the large branches of trees, and might at first be easily mistaken for an old perruque, especially when it is dancing with the wind. As the first settlers of Louisiana used only mud walls for their houses, they commonly mixed it with the mud for strengthening the building. When gathered it is of a grey colour, but when it is dry its bark falls off, and discovers black filaments as long and as strong as the hairs of a horse's tail. I dressed some of it for stuffing a mattress, by first laying it up in a heap to make it part with the bark, and afterwards beating it to take off some small branches that resemble so many little hooks. It is affirmed by some to be incorruptible: I myself have seen of it under old rotten trees that was perfectly fresh and strong. CHAPTER V. _Of Creeping Plants._ The great fertility of Louisiana renders the creeping plants extremely common, which, exclusive of the ivy, are all different from those which we have in France. I shall only mention the most remarkable. The bearded-creeper is so called from having its whole stalk covered with a beard about an inch long, hooked at the end, and somewhat thicker than a horse's hair. There is no tree which it loves to cling to so much as to the sweet gum; and so great is its sympathy, if I may be allowed the expression, for that tree, that if it grow between it and any other tree, it turns solely towards the sweet gum, although it should be at the greatest distance from it. This is likewise the tree upon which {233} it thrives best. It has the same virtue with its balm of being a febrifuge, and this I affirm after a great number of proofs. The physicians among the natives use this simple in the following manner. They take a piece of it, above the length of the finger, which they split into as many threads as possible; these they boil in a quart of water, till one third of the decoction evaporate, and the remainder is strained clear. They then purge the patient, and the next day, upon the approach of the fit, they give a third of the decoction to drink. If the patient be not cured with the first dose, he is again purged and drinks another third, which seldom fails of having the wished-for effect. This medicine is indeed very bitter, but it strengthens the stomach; a singular advantage it has over the Jesuits bark, which is accused of having a contrary effect. There is another creeper very like salsaparilla, only that it bears its leaves by threes. It bears a fruit smooth on one side like a filbert, and on the other as rough as the little shells which serve for money on the Guinea coast. I shall not speak of its properties; they are but too well known by the women of Louisiana, especially the girls, who very often have recourse to it. Another creeper is called by the native physicians the remedy against poisoned arrows. It is large and very beautiful; its leaves are pretty long, and the pods it bears are narrow, about an inch broad, and eight inches long. The salsaparilla grows naturally in Louisiana, and it is not inferior in its qualities to that of Mexico. It is so well known that it is needless to enlarge upon it. The esquine partly resembles a creeper and partly a bramble. It is furnished with hard spikes like prickles, and its oblong leaves are like those of the common creeper (liane;) its stalk is straight, long, shining, and hard, and it runs up along the reeds: its root is spungy, and sometimes as large as one's head, but more long than round. Besides the sudorific virtue which the esquine possesses in common with the salsaparilla, it has the property of making the hair grow, and the women among the natives use it successfully with this view. {234} They cut the root into small bits, boil them in water, and wash their heads with the decoction. I have seen several of them whose hair came down below their knees, and one particularly whose hair came lower than the ankle bones. [Illustration: TOP: _Bramble_--BOTTOM: _Sarsaparilla_] Hops grow naturally in the gullies in the high lands. Maiden-hair grows in Louisiana more beautiful, at least as good as that of Canada, which is in so great repute. It {235} grows in gullies upon the sides of hills, in places that are absolutely impenetrable to the most ardent rays of the sun. It seldom rises above a foot, and it bears a thick shaggy head. The native physicians know more of its virtues than we do in France. The canes or reeds which I have mentioned so often may be divided into two kinds. One kind grows in moist places to the height of eighteen feet, and the thickness of the wrist. The natives makes matts, sieves, small boxes, and other works of it. Those that grow in dry places are neither so high nor so thick, but are so hard, that before the arrival of the French, the natives used splits of those canes to cut their victuals with. After a certain number of years, the large canes bear a great abundance of grain, which is somewhat like oats, but about three times as large. The natives carefully gather these grains and make bread or gruel of them. This flour swells as much as that of wheat. When the reeds have yielded the grain they die, and none appear for a long time after in the same place, especially if fire has been set to the old ones. The flat-root receives its name from the form of its root, which is thin, flat, pretty often indented, and sometimes even pierced through: it is a line or sometimes two lines in thickness, and its breadth is commonly a foot and a half. From this large root hang several other small straight roots, which draw the nourishment from the earth. This plant, which grows in meadows that are not very rich, sends up from the same root several straight stalks about eighteen inches high, which are as hard as wood, and on the top of the stalks it bears small purplish, flowers, in their figure greatly resembling those of heath; its seed is contained in a deep cup closed at the head, and in a manner crowned. Its leaves are about an inch broad, and about two long, without any indenting, of a dark green, inclining to a brown. It is so strong a sudorific, that the natives never use any other for promoting sweating, although they are perfectly acquainted with sassafras, salsaparilla, the esquine and others. The rattle-snake-herb has a bulbous root, like that of the tuberose, but twice as large. The leaves of both have the same {236} shape and the same colour, and on the under side have some flame-coloured spots; but those of the rattle-snake plant are twice as large as the others, end in a very firm point, and are armed with very hard prickles on both sides. Its stalk grows to the height of about three feet, and from the head rise five or six sprigs in different directions, each of which bears a purple flower an inch broad, with five leaves in the form of a {237} cup. After these leaves are shed there remains a head about the size of a small nut, but shaped like the head of a poppy. This head is separated into four divisions, each of which contains four black seeds, equally thick throughout, and about the size of a large lentil. When the head is ripe, it will, when shaken, give the same sound as the tail of a rattle-snake, which seems to indicate the property of the plant; for it is the specific remedy against the bite of that dangerous reptile. The person who has been bit ought immediately to take a root, bite off part of it, chew it for some time, and apply it to the wound. In five or six hours it will extract the whole poison, and no bad consequences need be apprehended. [Illustration: _Rattlesnake herb_ (on p. 236)] Ground-ivy is said by the natives to possess many more virtues than are known to our botanists. It is said to ease women in labour when drank in a decoction; to cure ulcers, if bruised and laid upon the ulcered part; to be a sovereign remedy for the head-ach; a considerable quantity of its leaves bruised, and laid as a cataplasm. upon the head, quickly removes the pain. As this is an inconvenient application to a person that wears his hair, I thought of taking the salts of the plant, and I gave some of them in vulnerary water to a friend of mine who was often attacked with the head-ach, advising him likewise to draw up some drops by the nose: he seldom practised this but he was relieved a few moments after. The Achechy is only to be found in the shade of a wood, and never grows higher than six or seven inches. It has a small stalk, and its leaves are not above three lines long. Its root consists of a great many sprigs a line in diameter, full of red juice like chickens blood. Having transplanted this plant from an overshadowed place into my garden, I expected to see it greatly improved; but it was not above an inch taller, and its head was only a little bushier than usual. It is with the juice of this plant that the natives dye their red colour. Having first dyed their feathers or hair yellow or a beautiful citron colour with the ayac wood, they boil the roots of the achechy in water, then squeeze them with all their force, and the expressed liquor serves for the red dye. That which was naturally white before it was dyed yellow, takes a beautiful scarlet; {238} that which was brown, such as buffalo's hair, which is of a chesnut colour, becomes a reddish brown. [Illustration: TOP: _Red Dye Plant_--BOTTOM: _Flat Root_] I shall not enlarge upon the strawberries, which are of an excellent flavour, and so plentiful, that from the beginning of April the savannahs or meadows appear quite red with them. I shall also only just mention the tobacco, which I reserve for the article of agriculture; but I ought not to omit to take notice, that hemp grows naturally on the lands adjoining to the lakes {239} on the west of the Missisippi. The stalks are as thick as one's finger, and about six feet long. They are quite like ours both in the wood, the leaf, and the rind. The flax which was sown in this country rose three feet high. I cannot affirm from my own knowledge that the soil in this province produces either white mushrooms or truffles. But morelles in their season are to be found in the greatest abundance, and round mushrooms in the autumn. When I consider the mild temperature of this climate, I am persuaded that all our flowers would succeed extremely well in it. The country has flowers peculiar to itself, and, in such abundance, that from the month of May till the end of summer, you can hardly see the grass in the meadows; and of such various hues that one is at a loss which to admire most and declare to be the most beautiful. The number and diversity of those flowers quite enchant the sight. I will not however attempt to give a particular account of them, as I am not qualified on this head to satisfy the desires of the curious, from my having neglected to consider the various flowers themselves. I have seen single and small roses without any smell; and another kind of rose with four white petals, which in its smell, chives, and pointal, differed in nothing from our damask roses. But of all the flowers of this country, that which struck me most, as it is both very common and lasts a long time, is the flower called Lion's Mouth. The flowers which decorate its stalk, its shady colours, its blowing for more than three months, justly entitle it to the preference before all other flowers. It forms of itself an agreeable nosegay; and in my opinion, it deserves to be ranked with the finest flowers, and to be cultivated with attention in the gardens of our kings. As to cotton and indigo, I defer speaking of them till I come to the chapter of agriculture. {240} CHAPTER VI. _Of the Quadrupedes._ Before I speak of the animals which the first settlers found in Louisiana, it is proper to observe, that all those which were brought hither from France, or from New Spain and Carolina, such as horses, oxen, sheep, goats, dogs, cats, and others, have multiplied and thriven perfectly well. However it ought to be remarked, that in Lower Louisiana, where the ground is moist and much covered with wood, they can neither be so good nor so beautiful as in Higher Louisiana, where the soil is dry, where there are most extensive meadows, and where the sun warms the earth to a much greater degree. The buffalo is about the size of one of our largest oxen, but he appears rather bigger, on account of his long curled wool, which makes him appear to the eye much larger than he really is. This wool is very fine and very thick, and is of a dark chesnut colour, as are likewise his bristly hairs, which are also curled, and so long, that the bush between his horns often falls over his eyes, and hinders him from seeing before him; but his sense of hearing and smelling is so exquisite as in some measure to supply the want of the other. A pretty large bunch rises on his shoulders in the place where they join to the neck. His horns are thick, short, and black; and his hoof is also black. The cows of this species have small udders like those of a mare. This buffalo is the chief food of the natives, and of the French also for a long time past; the best piece is the bunch on the shoulders, the taste of which is extremely delicate. They hunt this animal in the winter; for which purpose they leave Lower Louisiana, and the river Missisippi, as he cannot penetrate thither on account of the thickness of the woods; and besides loves to feed on long grass, which is only to be found in the meadows of the high lands. In order to get near enough to fire upon him, they go against the wind, and they take aim at the hollow of the shoulder, that they may bring him to the ground at once, for if he is only slightly wounded, he runs against his enemy. The natives when hunting seldom {241} choose to kill any but the cows, having experienced that the flesh of the male smells rank; but this they might easily prevent, if they did but cut off the testicles from the beast as soon as he is dead, as they do from stags and wild boars. By killing the males there is less hazard of diminishing the species than by killing the females; and besides, the males have much more tallow, and their skins are the largest and best. [Illustration: Top: _Panther or Catamount_--BOTTOM: _Bison or Buffalo_] {242} These skins are an object of no small consideration. The natives dress them with their wool on, to such great perfection, as to render them more pliable than our buff. They dye them different colours, and cloath themselves therewith. To the French they supply the place of the best blankets, being at the same time very warm and very light. The stag is entirely the same with that of France, only he is a little larger. They are only to be found in Upper Louisiana, where the woods are much thinner than in Lower Louisiana, and the chesnuts which the stag greatly loves are very common. The deer is very frequent in this province, notwithstanding the great numbers of them that are killed by the natives. According to the hunters, he partly resembles the stag, the rein-deer, and the roe-buck. As to myself, I can only say what I have seen; that he is about four feet high, has large horns bending forwards, and decorated with several antlers, the ends of which are formed somewhat like a rose; that his flesh is dry like that of ours, and when he is fat tastes like mutton. They feed in herds, and are not in the least of a fierce nature. They are excessively capricious, hardly remain a moment in one place, but are coming and going continually. The natives dress the skin extremely well, like buff, and afterwards paint it. Those skins that are brought to France are often called does skins. The natives hunt the deer sometimes in companies, and sometimes alone. The hunter who goes out alone, furnishes himself with the dried head of a deer, with part of the skin of the neck fastened to it, and this skin is stretched out with several hoops made of split cane, which are kept in their places by other splits placed along the inside of the skin, so that the hands and arms may be easily put within the neck. Being thus provided, he goes in quest of the deer, and takes all necessary precautions not to be discovered by that animal: when he sees one, he approaches it as gently as possible, hiding himself behind a bush which he carries in his hand, till he be within shot of it. But if, before he can come near enough, the buck shakes its head, which is a sign that he is going to make some {243} capers and run away, the hunter immediately counterfeits the cries of those animals when they call each other, in which case the buck frequently comes up towards him. He then shews the head which he holds in his hand, and by lowering and lifting his arm by turns, it makes the appearance of a buck feeding, and lifting his head from time to time to graze. The hunter still keeps himself behind the bush, till the buck comes near enough to him, and the moment he turns his side, he fires at the hollow of his shoulder, and lays him dead. [Illustration: _Indian Deer Hunt_] {244} When the natives want to make the dance of the deer; or if they want to exercise themselves merrily; or if it should happen that the Great Sun inclines to such sport, they go about an hundred of them in a company to the hunting of this animals, which they must bring home alive. As it is a diverting exercise, many young men are generally of the party, who disperse themselves in the meadows among the thickets in order to discover the deer. They no sooner perceive one than they advance towards him in a wide crescent, one point of which may be a quarter of a league from the other. Part of the crescent draws near to him, which frightens him away to another point; that part likewise advancing, he immediately flies back to the other sidee. He is kept thus running from one side to another a considerable time, on purpose to exercise the young men, and afford diversion to the Great Sun, or to another Little Sun, who is nominated to supply his place. The deer sometimes attempts to get out and escape by the openings of the crescent, in which case those who are at the points run forwards, and oblige him to go back. The crescent then gradually forms a circle; and when they perceive the deer beginning to be tired, part of them stoop almost to the ground, and remain in that posture till he approaches them, when they rise and shout: he instantly flies off to the other side, where they do the same; by which means he is at length so exhausted, that he is no longer able to stand on his legs, and suffers himself to be taken like a lamb. Sometimes, however, he defends himself on the ground with his antlers and forefeet; they therefore use the precaution to seize upon him behind, and even in that case they are sometimes wounded. The hunters having seized the deer present it to the Great Sun, or in his absence, to the person whom he sent to represent him. If he says, _well_, the roe-buck is immediately opened, and its four quarters carried to the hut of the Great Sun, who gives portions of them to the chief men among the hunters. The wolf is not above fifteen inches high, and of a proportionable length. He is not so brown as our wolves, nor so fierce and dangerous; he is therefore more like a dog than a wolf, especially the dog of the natives, who differs from him {245} in nothing, but that he barks. The wolf is very common in the hunting countries; and when the hunter makes a hut for himself in the evening upon the bank of a river, if he sees the wolf, he may be confident that the buffaloes are not at a very great distance. It is said, that this animal, not daring to attack the buffalo when in a herd, will come and give notice to the hunter that he may kill him, in hopes of coming in for the offals. The wolves are actually so familiar, that they come and go on all sides when looking for something to eat, without minding in the least whether they be near or at a distance from the habitations of men. In my time two very large black wolves were seen in Louisiana. The oldest inhabitants, and those who travel to the remotest parts of the colony, declared that they had never before seen any such; from whence it was concluded, that they were foreign wolves which had lost their way. Fortunately they killed them both; for one of them was a she-wolf big with young. The bear appears in Louisiana in winter, as the snows, which then cover the northern climates, hinder him from procuring a subsistence there, and force him southwards. If some few are seen in the summer time, they are only the slow young bears, that have not been strong enough to follow the herd northwards. The bear lives upon roots and fruits, particularly acorns; but this most delicate food is honey and milk. When he meets with either of these last, he will suffer himself to be killed than quit his prize. Our colonists have sometimes diverted themselves by burying a small pail with some milk in it almost up to the edge in the ground, and setting two young bears to it. The contest then was which of the two should hinder the other from tasting the milk, and both of them so tore the earth with their paws, and pulled at the pail, that they generally overturned the milk, before either of them had tasted of it. In opposition to the general opinion, which supposes the bear a carnivorous animal, I affirm, with all the inhabitants of this colony, and the neighbouring countries, that he never feeds upon flesh. It is indeed to be lamented that the first {246} travellers had the impudence to publish to the world a thousand false stories, which were easily believed because they were new. People, so far from wishing to be undeceived, have even been offended with those who attempted to detect the general errors; but it is my duty to speak the truth, for the sake of those who are willing to hear it. What I maintain here is not a mere conjectural supposition, but a known fact over all North America, which may be attested by the evidence of a great number of people who have lived there, and by the traders who are going and coming continually. There is not one instance can be given of their having devoured men, notwithstanding their great multitudes, and the extreme hunger which they must sometimes have suffered; for even in that case they never so much as touch the butchers meat which they meet with. The bears seldom quit the banks of the Missisippi, as it is there that they can best procure a subsistence; but when I lived at the Natchez there happened so severe a winter, that those animals came from the north in such numbers that they starved each other, and were very lean. Their great hunger obliged them to quit the woods which line the banks of the river: they were seen at night running among the settlements; and they sometimes even entered those court-yards that were not well shut; they there found butchers meat exposed to the open air, but they never touched it, and eat only the corn or roots they could meet with. Certainly on such occasion as this, and in such a pressing want, they would have proved carnivorous, if it had been in the least degree their natural disposition. But perhaps one will say, "It is true they never touch dead flesh; it is only living flesh that they devour." That is being very delicate indeed, and what I can by no means allow them: for if they were flesh-eaters, I greatly suspect that, in the severe famine which I have spoken of, they would have made a hearty meal of the butchers meat which they found in the court-yards; or at least would have devoured several persons, who fell in their way, which they never did. The following fact however will be a more compleat answer to this objection. {247} Two Canadians, who were on a journey, landed on a sand-bank, when they perceived a bear crossing the river. As he appeared fat, and consequently would yield a great deal of oil, one of the travellers ran forwards and fired at him. Unhappily however he only slightly wounded him; and as the bears in that case always turn upon their enemy, the hunter was immediately seized by the wounded bear, who in a few moments squeezed him to death, without wounding him in the least with his teeth, although his muzzle was against his face, and he must certainly have been exasperated. The other Canadian, who was not above three hundred paces distance, ran to save his comrade with the utmost speed, but he was dead before he came up to him; and the bear escaped into the wood. Upon examining the corpse he found the place, where the bear had squeezed it, pressed in two inches more than the rest of the breast. Some perhaps may still add, that the mildness of the climate of Louisiana may have an effect upon the disposition of the bears, and prevent them from being so voracious as those of our continent; but I affirm that carnivorous animals retain the same disposition in all countries. The wolves of Louisiana are carnivorous as well as those of Europe, although they differ in other particulars. The tigers of Africa, and those of America, are equally mischievous animals. The wild-cats of America, though very different from those of Europe, have however the same appetite for mice when they are tamed. It is the same with other species, naturally inclined to live upon other animals; and the bears of America, if flesh-eaters, would not quit the countries covered with snow, where they would find men and other animals in abundance, to come so far in search of fruits and roots; which kind of nourishment carnivorous animals refuse to taste. [Footnote: Since I wrote the above account of the bears, I have been certainly informed, that in the mountains of Savoy there are two sorts of bears. The one black, like that of Louisiana, and not carnivorous; the other red, and no less carnivorous than the wolves. Both turn upon their enemy when wounded.] Bears are seen very frequently in Louisiana in the winter time, and they are so little dreaded, that the people sometimes {248} make it a diversion to hunt them. When they are fat, that is about the end of December, they cannot run so fast as a man; therefore the hunters are in no danger if they should turn upon them. The she-bears are tolerably fat when they are big with young; but after they have littered they quickly become lean. The bears usually arrive in Louisiana towards the end of autumn; and then they are very lean, as they do not leave the north till the earth be wholly covered with snow, and find often but a very scanty subsistence in their way southwards. I said above, that those animals seldom go to any great distance from the river; and on both banks travellers meet with such a beaten path in winter, that to those who are not acquainted with it, it appears like the track of men. I myself, the first time I observed it, was deceived by it. I was then near two hundred miles from any human dwelling, yet the path at first appeared to me as if it had been made by thousands of men, who had walked that way bare-footed. Upon a narrower inspection however, I observed, that the prints of the feet were shorter than that of a man, and that there was the impression of a claw at the end of each toe. It is proper to observe that in those paths the bear does not pique himself upon politeness, and will yield the way to nobody; therefore it is prudent in a traveller not to fall out with him for such a trifling affair. The bears, after they have been a short time in the country, and found abundance of fruits, turn fat and lazy, and it is then the natives go out to hunt them. The bear, when he is fat, huts himself, that is, retires into the hollow trunk of some rotten tree that has died on end. The natives, when they meet with any of those trees, which they suspect contains a bear in it, give two or three strong blows against the trunk, and immediately run behind the next tree opposite to the lowest breach. If there be a bear within, he appears in a few minutes at the breach, to look out and spy the occasion of the disturbance; but upon observing nothing likely to annoy him, he goes down again to the bottom of his castle. The natives having once seen their prey, gather a heap of dried canes, which they bruise with their feet, that they may {249} burn the easier, and one of them mounting upon a tree adjoining to that in which the bear is, sets fire to the reeds, and darts them one after another into the breach; the other hunters having planted themselves in ambuscade upon other trees. The bear is quickly burned out of his habitation, and he no sooner appears on the outside, than they let fly their arrows at him, and often kill him before he gets to the bottom of the tree. He is no sooner dead than some of the hunters are dispatched to look for a deer, and they seldom fail of bringing in one or two. When a deer is brought, they cut off the head, and then take off the skin whole, beginning at the neck, and rolling it down, as they cut it, like a stocking. The legs they cut off at the knee-joints, and having cleaned and washed the skin, they stop all the holes except the neck, with a kind of paste made of the fat of the deer mixed with ashes, over which they tie several bindings with the bark of the lime-tree. Having thus provided a kind of cask, they fill it with the oil of the bear, which they prepare by boiling the flesh and fat together. This Deer of Oil, as it is called, they sell to the French for a gun, a yard of cloth, or any other thing of that value. The French, before they use it, purify it, by putting it into a large kettle, with a handful of laurel leaves; and sprinkling it when it begins to be hot with some water, in which they have dissolved a large quantity of salt. The smoke that rises upon this sprinkling carries off with it any bad smell the fat may have; they next pour it off into a vessel, and eight days after there is found on the top of it a clear oil which serves all the purposes of olive oil; what remains below is a fine kind of lard, proper for the kitchen, and a sovereign remedy for all kinds of pains. I myself was cured of the rheumatism in my shoulder by it. The Tiger is not above a foot and a half high, and long in proportion: his hair is somewhat of a bright bay colour, and he is brisk as all tigers naturally are. His flesh when boiled tastes like veal, only it is not so insipid. There are very few of them to be seen; I never saw but two near my settlement; and I have great reason to think that it was the same beast I saw both times. The first time he laid hold of my dog, who barked and howled; but upon my running towards him the {250} tiger left him. The next time he seized a pig; but this I likewise rescued, and his claws had gone no deeper than the fat. This animal is not more carnivorous than fearful; he flies at the sight of a man, and makes off with greater speed, if you shout and halloo as he runs. [Illustration: TOP: _Wild Cat_--MIDDLE: _Opossum_--BOTTOM: _Skunk_] The Cat-a-mount is a kind of wild cat, as high as the tiger, but not so thick, and his skin is extremely beautiful. He is a great destroyer of poultry, but fortunately his species is rare. {251} Foxes are so numerous, that upon the woody heights you frequently see nothing but their holes. As the woods afford them plenty of game, they do not molest the poultry, which are always allowed to run at large. The foxes are exactly shaped like ours, but their skin is much more beautiful. Their hair is fine and thick, of a deep brown colour, and over this rise several long silver-coloured hairs, which have a fine effect. The Wild Cat has been improperly so called by the first French settlers in Louisiana; for it has nothing of the cat but its nimble activity, and rather resembles a monkey. It is not above eight or ten inches high, and about fifteen long. Its head is like that of a fox; it has long toes, but very short claws, not made for seizing game; accordingly it lives upon fruit, bread, and other such things. This animal may be tamed, and then becomes very frolicksome and full of tricks. The hair of those that are tame is grey; but of the wild is reddish; neither of them is so beautiful as that of the fox; it grows very fat, and its flesh is good to eat. I shall not describe the real wild cat, as it is entirely like ours. The Rabbit is extremely common over all Louisiana; it is particular in this, that its pile is like that of the hare, and it never burrows. Its flesh is white and delicate, and has the usual taste, without any rankness. There is no other kind of rabbit or hare, if you please to call it, in all the colony, than that above described. The Wood-Rat has the head and tail of a common rat, but has the bulk and length of a cat. Its legs are short, its paws long, and its toes are armed with claws: its tail is almost without hair, which serves for hooking itself to any thing; for when you take hold of it by that part, it immediately twists itself round your finger. Its pile is grey, and though very fine, yet is never smooth. The women among the natives spin it and dye it red. It hunts by night, and makes war upon the poultry, only sucking their blood and leaving their flesh. It is very rare to see any creature walk so slow; and I have often catched them when walking my ordinary pace. When he sees himself upon the point of being caught, instinct prompts him to counterfeit being dead; and in this he perseveres with such {252} constancy, that though laid on a hot gridiron, he will not make the least sign of life. He never moves, unless the person go to a distance or hide himself, in which case he endeavors as fast as possible to escape into some hole or bush. When the she-one is about to litter, she chooses a place in the thick bushes at the foot of a tree, after which she and the male crop a great deal of fine dry grass, which is loaded upon her belly, and then the male drags her and her burden by the tail to the littering-place. She never quits her young a moment; but when she is obliged to change her lodging, carries them with her in a pouch or double skin that wraps round her belly, and there they may sleep or suck at their ease. The two sides of this pouch lap so close that the joining can hardly be observed; nor can they be separated without tearing the skin. If the she-one be caught carrying her young thus with her, she will suffer herself to be roasted alive, without the least sign of life, rather than open the pouch and expose her young ones. The flesh of this animal is very good, and tastes somewhat like that of a sucking pig, when it is first broiled, and afterwards roasted on the spit. The Pole-cat or Skunk is about the size of a kitten eight months old. The male is of a beautiful black, but the female has rings of white intermixed with the black. Its ear and its paw are like that of a mouse, and it has a very lively eye. I suppose it lives upon fruits and seeds. It is most justly called the Stinking Beast, for its odour is so strong, that it may be pursued upon the track twenty-four hours after it has passed. It goes very slow, and when the hunter approaches it, it squirts out, far and wide such a stinking urine, that neither man nor beast can hardly approach it. A drop of this creature's blood, and probably some of its urine, having one day fallen upon my coat when I was hunting, I was obliged as fast as possible to go home and change my cloaths; and before I, could use my coat, it was scoured and exposed for several days to the dew. The Squirrels of Louisiana are like those of France, excepting one kind, which are called Flying-Squirrels, because they leap from one tree to another, though the distance between them be twenty-five or thirty feet. It is about the size of a {253} rat, and of a deep ash-colour. Its two fore-legs are joined to its two hind-legs by two membranes, so that when it leaps it seems to fly, though it always leaps somewhat downwards. This animal may be very easily tamed; but even then it is best to chain it. There is another sort, not much bigger than a mouse, and of a bright bay-colour. These are so familiar that they will come out of the woods, will enter the houses, and sit within two yards of the people of the house, if they do not make any motion; and there they will feed on any maiz within their reach. I never was so well diverted in my life with the frolics of any animal, as I have been with the vivacity and attitudes of this little squirrel. The Porcupine is large and fine of this kind; but as he lives only upon fruit, and loves cold, is most common about the river Illinois, where the climate is somewhat cold, and there is plenty of wild fruits. The skin, when stripped of the quills, is white and brown. The natives dye part of the white, yellow and red, and the brown they dye black. They have likewise the art of splitting the skin, and applying it to many curious works, particularly to trim the edges of their deer-skin, and to line small bark-boxes, which are very neat. The Hedge-hog of Louisiana is in every respect the same with that of Europe. I shall not enlarge upon the Beavers, which are universally known, from the many descriptions we have of them. The Otters are the same with those of France, and there are but few of them to be seen. Some Turtle are seen in this country; but very rarely. In the many hundred leagues of country that I have passed over, I have hardly seen above a hundred. Frogs are very common, especially in Lower Louisiana, notwithstanding the great number of snakes that destroy them. There are some that grow very large, sometimes above a foot and a half long, and astonish strangers at first by their croaking especially if they are in a hollow tree. The Crocodile is very common in the river Missisippi. Although this amphibious animal be almost as well known as {254} those I have just mentioned, I cannot however omit taking some notice of it. Without troubling the reader with a description of it, which he will meet with every where, I shall observe that it shuns the banks of the river frequented by men. It lays its eggs in the months of May, when the sun is already hot in that country, and it deposits them in the most concealed place it can find among grass exposed to the heats of the south. The eggs are about the size of those of a goose, but longer in proportion. Upon breaking them you will find hardly any thing but white, the yolk being about the size of that of a young hen. I never saw any that were new hatched. The smallest I ever met with, which I concluded to be about three months old, was as long as a middle-sized eel, and an inch and a half thick. I have killed one nineteen feet long, and three feet and a half in its greatest breadth. A friend of mine killed one twenty-two feet long, and the legs of both these, which on land seemed to move with great difficulty, were not above a foot in length. But however sluggish they be on land, in the water they move with great agility. This animal has his body always covered with slime, which is the case with all fishes that live in muddy waters. When he comes on shore his track is covered with that slime, as his belly trails on the ground, and this renders the earth very slippery in that part, especially as he returns by the same path to the water. He never hunts the fish upon which he subsists; but places himself in ambuscade, and catches them as they pass. For that purpose he digs a hole in the bank of the river, below the surface of the water, where the current is strong, having a small entrance, but large enough within to turn himself round in. The fish, which are fatigued with the strong current, are glad to get into the smooth water in that corner, and there they are immediately seized by the crocodile. I shall not contradict the accounts of venerable antiquity about the crocodiles of the Nile, who fall upon men and devour them; who cross the roads, and make a slippery path upon them to trip passengers, and make them slide into the river; who counterfeit the voice of an infant, to draw children into their snares; neither shall I contradict the travellers who have {255} confirmed those stories from mere hearsays. But as I profess to speak the truth, and to advance nothing but what I am certain of from my own knowledge, I may safely affirm that the crocodiles of Louisiana are doubtless of another species than those of other countries. In fact, I never heard them imitate the cries of an infant, nor is it at all probable that they can counterfeit them. Their voice is as strong as that of a bull. It is true they attack men in the water, but never on land, where they are not at all formidable. Besides, there are nations that in great part subsist upon this animal, which is hunted out by the fathers and mothers, and killed by the children. What can we then believe of those stories that have been told us of the crocodile? I myself killed all that ever I met of them; and they are so much the less to be dreaded, in that they can neither run nor rise up against a man. In the water indeed, which is their favourite element, they are dangerous; but in that case it is easy to guard against them. The largest of all the reptiles of Louisiana, is the Rattle-Snake: some of them have been seen fifteen inches thick, and long in proportion; but this species is naturally shorter in proportion to their thickness than the other kinds of serpents. This serpent gets its name from several hollow knots at its tail, very thin and dry, which make a rattling noise. These knots, though inserted into each other, are yet quite detached, and only the first of them is fastened to the skin. The number of the knots, it is said, marks the age of the serpent, and I am much inclined to believe it; for as I have killed a great number of them, I always observed, that the longer and thicker the serpent was, it had the more knots. Its skin is almost black; but the lower part of its belly is striped black and white. As soon as it hears or sees a man, it rouses itself by shaking its tail, which makes a rattling noise that may be heard at several paces distance, and gives warning to the traveller to be upon his guard. It is much to be dreaded when it coils itself up in a spiral line, for then it may easily dart upon a man. It shuns the habitations of men, and by a singular providence, wherever it retires to, there the herb which cures its bite, is likewise to be found. {256} [Illustration: TOP: _Alligator_--MIDDLE: _Rattle Snake_--BOTTOM: _Green Snake_] There are several other kinds of serpents to be seen here, some of which resemble those of France, and attempt to slip into the hen-houses to devour the eggs and new-hatched chickens. Others are green, about two feet long, and not thicker than a goose-quill; they frequent the meadows, and may be seen running over the spires of grass, such is their lightness and nimbleness. {257} Vipers are very rare in Lower Louisiana, as that reptile loves stoney grounds. In the highlands they are now-and-then to met with, and there they quite resemble ours. Lizards are very common: there is a small kind of these that are called Cameleons, because they change their colour according to that of the place they pass over. [Footnote: When the Cameleon is angry, a nerve rises arch-wise from his mouth to the middle of his throat; and the skin which covers it is so stretched as to remain red, whatever colour the rest of the body be. He never does any hurt, and always runs away when observed.] Among the spiders of Louisiana there is one kind that will appear very extraordinary. It is as large, but rather longer than a pigeon's egg, black with gold-coloured specks. Its claws are pierced through above the joints. It does not carry its eggs like the rest, but encloses them in a kind of cup covered with its silk. It lodges itself in a kind of nut made of the same silk, and hung to the branches of the trees. The web which this insect weaves is so strong, that it not only stops birds, but cannot even be broken by men without a considerable effort. I never saw any Moles in Louisiana, nor heard of any being seen by others. CHAPTER VII. _Of Birds, and Flying Insects_. Birds are so very numerous in Louisiana, that if all the different kinds of them were known, which is far from being the case at present, the description of them alone would require an entire volume. I only undertake the description of all those which have come within my knowledge, the number of which, I am persuaded, will be sufficient to satisfy the curious reader. The Eagle, the king of the birds, is smaller than the eagle of the Alps; but he is much more beautiful, being entirely white, excepting only the tips of his wings, which are black. As he is also very rare, this is another reason for heightening his value to the native, who purchase at a great price the large {258} feathers of his wings, with which they ornament the Calumet, or Symbol of Peace, as I have elsewhere described. When speaking of the king of birds, I shall take notice of the Wren, called by the French Roitelet (Petty King) which is the same in Louisiana as in France. The reason of its name in French will plainly enough appear from the following history. A magistrate, no less remarkable for his probity than for the rank he holds in the law, assured me that, when he was at Sables d'Olonne in Poitou, on account of an estate which he had in the neighbourhood of that city, he had the curiosity to go and see a white eagle which was then brought from America. After he had entered the house a wren was brought, and let fly in the hall where the eagle was feeding. The wren perched upon a beam, and was no sooner perceived by the eagle, than he left off feeding, flew into a corner, and hung down his head. The little bird, on the other hand, began to chirp and appear angry, and a moment after flew upon the neck of the eagle, and pecked him with the greatest fury, the eagle all the while hanging his head in a cowardly manner, between his feet. The wren, after satisfying its animosity, returned to the beam. The Falcon, the Hawk, and the Tassel are the same as in France; but the falcons are much more beautiful than ours. The Carrion-Crow, or Turky Bustard, is of the size and shape of a Turky-cock; his head is covered with red flesh, and his plumage is black: he has a hooked beak, but his toes are armed with very small talons, and are therefore very improper for seizing live game, which indeed he does not chuse to attack, as his want of agility prevents him from darting upon it with the rapidity of a bird of prey. Accordingly he lives only upon the dead beasts that he happens to meet with, and yet notwithstanding this kind of food he smells of musk. Several people maintain, that the Carrion-Crow, or Carancro, is the same with our Vulture. The Spaniards forbid the killing of it under pain of corporal punishment; for as they do not use the whole carcase of the buffaloes which they kill, those birds eat what they leave, which otherwise, by rotting on the ground, would, according to them, infect the air. {259} The Cormorant is shaped very much like a duck, but its plumage is different and much more beautiful. This bird frequents the shores of the sea and of lakes, but rarely appears in rivers. Its usual food is fish; but as it is very voracious, it likewise eats dead flesh; and this it can tear to pieces by means of a notch in its bill, which is about the size of that of a duck. The Swan of Louisiana are like those of France, only they are larger. However, notwithstanding their bulk and their weight, they often rise so high in the air, that they cannot be distinguished but by their shrill cry. Their flesh is very good to eat, and their fat is a specific against cold humours. The natives set a great value upon the feathers of the Swan. Of the large ones they make the diadems of their sovereigns, hats, and other ornaments; and they weave the small ones as the peruke-makers weave hair, and make coverings of them for their noble women. The young people of both sexes make tippets of the skin, without stripping it of its down. The Canada-Goose is a water-fowl, of the shape of a goose; but twice as large and heavy. Its plumage is ash-coloured; its eyes are covered with a black spot; its cries are different from those of a goose, and shriller; its flesh is excellent. The Pelican is so called from its large head, its large bill, and above all for its large pouch, which hangs from its neck, and has neither feather nor down. It fills this pouch with fish, which it afterwards disgorges for the nourishment of its young. It never removes from the shores of the sea, and is often killed by sailors for the sake of the pouch, which when dried serves them as a purse for their tobacco. The Geese are the same with the wild geese of France. They abound upon the shores of the sea and of lakes, but are rarely seen in rivers. In this country there are three kinds of Ducks; first, the Indian Ducks, so called because they came originally from that country. These are almost entirely white, having but a very few grey feathers. On each side of their head they have flesh of a more lively red than that of the Turky-cock, and they are larger than our tame ducks. They are as tame as those of {260} Europe, and their flesh when young is delicate, and of a fine flavour. The Wild Ducks are fatter, more delicate, and of better taste than those of France; but in other respects they are entirely the same. For one you see in France you may here count a thousand. The Perching-Ducks, or Carolina Summer-Ducks, are somewhat larger than our teals. Their plumage is quite beautiful, and so changeable that no painting can imitate it. Upon their head they have a beautiful tuft of the most {261} lively colours, and their red eyes appear like flames. The natives ornament their calumets or pipes with the skin of their neck. Their flesh is very good, but when it is too fat it tastes oily. These ducks are to be met with the whole year round; they perch upon the branches of trees, which the others do not, and it is from this they have their name. [Illustration: TOP: _Pelican_--BOTTOM: _Wood Stock_ (on p. 260)] The Teal are found in every season; and they differ nothing from those of France but in having a finer relish. The Divers of Louisiana are the same with those of France: they no sooner see the fire in the pan, than they dive so suddenly that the shot cannot touch them, and they are therefore called Lead-Eaters. The Saw-bill has the inside of its beak indented like the edge of a saw: it is said to live wholly upon shrimps, the shells of which it can easily break. The Crane is a very common water-fowl; it is larger than a turkey, very lean, and of an excellent taste. It eats somewhat like beef, and makes very good soup. The Flamingo has only a little down upon its head; its plumage is grey, and its flesh good. The Spatula has its name from the form of its bill, which is about seven or eight inches long, an inch broad towards the head, and two inches and a half towards the extremity; it is not quite so large as a wild goose; its thighs and legs are about the height of those of a turkey. Its plumage is rose-coloured, the wings being brighter than any other part. This is a water-fowl, and its flesh is very good. The Heron of Louisiana is not in the least different from that of Europe. The Egret, or White Heron, is so called from tufts of feathers upon the wings near the body, which hinder it from flying high; it is a water-fowl with white plumage; but its flesh tastes very oily. The Bec-croche, or Crook-bill, has indeed a crooked bill, with which it seizes the cray-fish upon which it subsists. Its {262} flesh has that taste, and is red. Its plumage is a whitish grey; and it is about the size of a capon. [Illustration: TOP: _Flying Squirrel_--MIDDLE: _Roseate Spoon-bill_--BOTTOM: _Snowy Heron_] The Indian Water-Hen, and the Green-Foot, are the same as in France. The Hatchet-Bill is so called on account of its bill, which is red, and formed like the edge of an ax. Its feet are also Of a beautiful red, and it is therefore often called Red-Foot. As {263} it lives upon shell-fish, it never removes from the sea-coast, but upon the approach of a storm, which is always sure to follow its retiring into the inland parts. The King-Fisher excels ours in nothing but in the beauty of its plumage, which is as various as the rainbow. This bird, it is well known, goes always against the wind; but perhaps few people know that it preserves the same property when it is dead. I myself hung a dead one by a silk thread directly over a sea-compass, and I can declare it as a fact, that the bill was always turned towards the wind. The Sea-Lark and Sea-Snipe never quit the sea; their flesh may be eat, as it has very little of the oily taste. The Frigate-Bird is a large bird, which in the day-time keeps itself in the air above the shore of the sea. It often rises very high, probably for exercise; for it feeds upon fish, and every night retires to the coast. It appears larger than it really is, as it is covered with a great many feathers of a grey colour. Its wings are very long, its tail forked, and it cuts the air with great swiftness. The Draught-Bird is a large bird, not much unlike the Frigate-Bird, as light, but not so swift. The under-part of its plumage is chequered brown and white, but the upper-part is of greyish brown. The Fool is of a yellowish colour, and about the size of a hen; it is so called, because it will suffer a man to approach it so near as to seize it with his hand: but even then it is too soon to cry victory; for if the person who seizes it does not take the greatest precaution, it will snap off his finger at one bite. When those three last birds are observed to hover very low over the shore, we may most certainly expect an approaching storm. On the other hand, when the sailors see the Halcyons behind their vessel, they expect and generally meet with fine weather for some days. Since I have mentioned the Halcyon, I shall here describe it. It is a small bird, about the size of a swallow, but its beak {264} is longer, and its plumage is violet-coloured. It has two streaks of a yellowish brown at the end of the feathers of its wings, which when it sits appear upon its back. When we left Louisiana, near an hundred halcyons followed our vessel for near three days: they kept at the distance of about a stone-cast, and seemed to swim, yet I could never discover that their feet were webbed, and was therefore greatly surprised. They probably live upon the small insects that drop from the outside of the vessel when sailing; for they now-and-then dived, and came up in the same place. I have some suspicion that, by keeping in the wake of the ship, they float after it without swimming; for when they happened to be out of the wake of the ship, they were obliged to fly, in order to come up with the ship again. This bird is said to build its nest of the glutinous froth of the sea close upon the shore, and to launch it when a land breeze arises, raising one of its wings in the form of a sail, which receiving the wind, helps to carry it out to sea. I shall now proceed to speak of the fowls which frequent the woods, and shall begin with the Wild-Turky, which is very common all over the colony. It is finer, larger, and better than that in France. The feathers of the turky are of a duskish grey, edged with a streak of gold colour, near half an inch broad. In the small feathers the gold-coloured streak is not above one tenth of an inch broad. The natives make fans of the tail, and of four tails joined together, the French make an umbrella. The women among the natives weave the feathers as our peruke-makers weave their hair, and fasten them to an old covering of bark, which they likewise line with them, so that it has down on both sides. Its flesh is more delicate, fatter, and more juicy than that of ours. They go in flocks, and with a dog one may kill a great many of them. I never could procure any of the turky's eggs, to try to hatch them, and discover whether they were as difficult to bring up in this country as in France, since the climate of both countries is almost the same. My slave told me, that in his nation they brought up the young turkies as easily as we do chickens. The Pheasant is the most beautiful bird that can be painted, and in every respect entirely like that of Europe. {265} Their rarity, in my opinion, makes them more esteemed than they deserve. I would at any time prefer a slice off the fillet of a buffalo to any pheasant. [Illustration: TOP: _White Ibis_--MIDDLE: _Tobacco Worm_--BOTTOM: _Cock Roach_] The Partridges of Louisiana are not larger than a wood-pigeon. Their plumage is exactly the same with that of our grey partridges; they have also the horse-shoe upon the breast; they perch upon trees, and are seldom seen in flocks. Their {266} cry consists only of two strong notes, somewhat resembling the name given them by the natives, who call them Ho-ouy. Their flesh is white and delicate, but, like all the other game in this country, it has no _fumet_, and only excels in the fine taste. The Woodcock is very rare, because it is only to be met with in inhabited countries. It is like that of France; its flesh is white, but rather plumper and more delicate than that of ours, which is owing to the plenty and goodness of its fruit. The Snipe is much more common than the woodcock, and in this country is far from being shy. Its flesh is white, and of a much better relish than that of ours. I am of opinion that the Quail is very rare in Louisiana; I have sometimes heard it, but never saw it, nor know any Frenchman that ever did. Some of our colonists have thought proper to give the name of Ortolan to a small bird which has the same plumage, but in every other respect does not in the least resemble it. The Corbijeau is as large as the woodcock, and very common. Its plumage is varied with several shady colours, and is different from that of the woodcock; its feet and beak are also longer, which last is crooked and of a reddish yellow colour; its flesh is likewise firmer and better tasted. The Parroquet of Louisiana is not quite so large as those that are usually brought to France. Its plumage is usually of a fine sea-green, with a pale rose-coloured spot upon the crown, which brightens into red towards the beak, and fades off into green towards the body. It is with difficulty that it learns to speak, and even then it rarely practices it, resembling in this the natives themselves, who speak little. As a silent parrot would never make its fortune among our French ladies, it is doubtless on this account that we see so few of these in France. The Turtle-Dove is the same with that of Europe, but few of them are seen here. The Wood-Pigeons are seen in such prodigious numbers, that I do not fear to exaggerate, when I affirm that they sometimes {267} cloud the sun. One day on the banks of the Missisippi I met with a flock of them which was so large, that before they all passed, I had leisure to fire with the same piece four times at them. But the rapidity of their flight was so great, that though I do not fire ill, with my four shots I brought down but two. These birds come to Louisiana only in the winter, and remain in Canada during the summer, where they devour the corn, as they eat the acorns in Louisiana. The Canadians have used every art to hinder them from doing so much mischief, but without success. But if the inhabitants of those colonies were to go a fowling for those birds in the manner that I have done, they would insensibly destroy them. When they walk among the high forest trees, they ought to remark under the trees the largest quantity of dung is to be seen. Those trees being once discovered, the hunters ought to go out when it begins to grow dark, and carry with them a quantity of brimstone which they must set fire to in so many earthen plates placed at regular distances under the trees. In a very short time they will hear a shower of wood-pigeons falling to the ground, which, by the light of some dried canes, they may gather into sacks, as soon as the brimstone is extinguished. I shall here give an instance that proves not only the prodigious number of those birds, but also their singular instinct. In one of my journeys at land, when I happened to be upon the bank of the river, I heard a confused noise which seemed to come along the river from a considerable distance below us. As the sound continued uniformly I embarked, as fast as I could, on board the pettyaugre, with four other men, and steered down the river, keeping in the middle, that I might go to any side that best suited me. But how great was my surprise when I approached the place from whence the noise came, and observed it to proceed from a thick short pillar on the bank of the river. When I drew still nearer to it, I perceived that it was formed by a legion of wood-pigeons, who kept continually flying up and down successively among the branches of an ever-green oak, in order to beat down the acorns with their wings. Every now and then some alighted to eat the {268} acorns which they themselves or the others had beat down; for they all acted in common, and eat in common; no avarice nor private interest appearing among them, but each labouring as much for the rest as for himself. Crows are common in Louisiana, and as they eat no carrion their flesh is better tasted than that of the crows of France. Whatever their appetite may be, they dare not for the carrion crow approach any carcass. I never saw any Ravens in this country, and if there be any they must be very rare. The Owls are larger and whiter than in France, and their cry is much more frightful. The Little Owl is the same with ours, but much more rare. These two birds are more common in Lower Louisiana than in the higher. The Magpye resembles those of Europe in nothing but its cry; it is more delicate, is quite black, has a different manner of flying, and chiefly frequents the coasts. The Blackbirds are black all over, not excepting their bills nor their feet, and are almost as large again as ours. Their notes are different, and their flesh is hard. There are two sorts of Starlings in this country; one grey and spotted, and the other black. In both the tip of the shoulder is of a bright red. They are only to be seen in winter; and then they are so numerous, that upwards of three hundred of them have been taken at once in a net. A beaten path is made near a wood, and after it is cleaned and smoothed, it is strewed with rice. On each side of this path is stretched a long narrow silken net, with very small meshes, and made to turn over at once by strings fastened to the stick that stretches the end of it. The starlings no sooner alight to pick up the grain, than the fowler, who lies concealed with the strings in his hand, pulls the net over them. The Wood-pecker is much the same as in France; but here there are two kinds of them; one has grey feathers spotted with black; the other has the head and the neck of a bright red, and the rest of the body as the former. This bird lives upon the {269} worms which it finds in rotten wood, and not upon ants, as a modern author would have us believe, for want of having considered the nature of the things which he relates. The bird, when looking for its food, examines the trunks of trees that have lost their bark; it clasps by its feet with its belly close to the tree, and hearkens if it can hear a worm eating the wood; in this manner it leaps from place to place upon the trunk till it hears a worm, then it pierces the wood in that part, pricks the worm with its hard and pointed tongue, and draws it out. The arms which nature has furnished it with are very proper for this kind of hunting; its claws are hard and very sharp; its beak is formed like a little ax, and is very hard; its neck is long and flexible, to give proper play to its beak; and its hard tongue, which it can extend three or four inches, has a most sharp point with several beards that help to hold the prey. The Swallows of this country have that part yellow which ours have white, and they, as well as the martins, live in the woods. The Nightingale differs in nothing from ours in respect to its shape or plumage, unless that it has the bill a little longer. But in this it is particular that it is not shy, and sings through the whole year, though rarely. It is very easy to entice them to your roof, where it is impossible for the cats to reach them, by laying something for them to eat upon a lath, with a piece of the shell of a gourd which serves to hold their nest. You may in that case depend upon their not changing their habitation. The Pope is a bird that has a red and black plumage. It has got that name perhaps because its colour makes it look somewhat old, and none but old men are promoted to that dignity; or because its notes are soft, feeble, and rare; or lastly, because they wanted a bird of that name in the colony, having two other kinds named cardinals and bishops. The Cardinal owes its name to the bright red of the feathers, and to a little cowl on the hind part of the head, which resembles that of the bishop's ornament, called a camail. It is as large as a black-bird, but not so long. Its bill and toes are {270} large, strong, and black. Its notes are so strong and piercing that they are only agreeable in the woods. It is remarkable for laying up its winter provision in the summer, and near a Paris bushel of maiz has been found in its retreat, artfully covered, first with leaves and then with small branches, with only a little opening for the bird itself to enter. The Bishop is a bird smaller than the linnet; its plumage is a violet-coloured blue, and its wings, which serve it for a cope, are entirely violet-colour. Its notes are so sweet, so variable, and tender, that those who have once heard it, are apt to abate in their praises of the nightingale. I had such great pleasure in hearing this charming bird, that I left an oak standing very near my apartment, upon which he used to come and perch, though I very well knew, that the tree, which stood single, might be overturned by a blast of wind, and fall upon my house to my great loss. The Humming-Bird is not larger even with its feathers than a large beetle. The colour of its feathers is variable, according to the light they are exposed in; in the sun they appear like enamel upon a gold ground, which delights the eyes. The longest feathers of the wings of this bird are not much more than half an inch long; its bill is about the same length, and pointed like an awl; and its tongue resembles a sowing-needle; its feet are like those of a large fly. Notwithstanding its little size, its flight is so rapid, that it is always heard before it be seen. Although like the bee it sucks the flowers, it never rests upon them, but supports itself upon its wings, and passes from one flower to another with the rapidity of lightening. It is a rare thing to catch a humming-bird alive; one of my friends however had the happiness to catch one. He had observed it enter the flower of a convolvulus, and as it had quite buried itself to get at the bottom, he ran forwards, shut the flower, cut it from the stalk, and carried off the bird a prisoner. He could not however prevail upon it to eat, and it died four days after. The Troniou is a small bird about the size of a sparrow; its plumage is likewise the same; but its beak is slenderer. Its notes seem to express its name. {271} The French settlers raise in this province turkies of the same kind with those of France, fowls, capons, &c. of an excellent taste. The pigeons for their fine flavour and delicacy are preferred by Europeans to those of any other country. The Guinea fowl is here delicious. In Louisiana we have two kinds of Silk-worms; one was brought from France, the other is natural to the country. I shall enlarge upon them under the article of agriculture. The Tobacco-worm is a caterpillar of the size and figure of a silk-worm. It is of a fine sea-green colour, with rings of a silver colour; on its rump it has a sting near a quarter of an inch long. These insects quickly do a great deal of mischief, therefore care is taken every day, while the tobacco is rising, to pick them off and kill them. In summer Caterpillars are sometimes found upon the plants, but these insects are very rare in the colony. Glow-worms are here the same as in France. Butterflies are not near so common as in France; the consequence of there being fewer caterpillars; but they are of incomparable beauty, and have the most brilliant colours. In the meadows are to be seen black grasshoppers, which almost always walk, rarely leap, and still seldomer fly. They are about the size of a finger or thum, and their head is shaped somewhat like that of a horse. Their four small wings are of a most beautiful purple. Cats are very fond of grasshoppers. The Bees of Louisiana lodge in the earth, to secure their honey from the ravages of the bears. Some few indeed build their combs in the trunks of trees, as in Europe; but by far the greatest number in the earth in the lofty forests, where the bears seldom go. The Flies are of two kinds, one a yellowish brown, as in France, and the other black. The Wasps in this country take up their abode near the houses where they smell victuals. Several French settlers endeavored to root them out of their neighbourhood; but I acted otherwise; for reflecting, that no flies are to be seen where the {272} wasps frequent, I invited them by hanging up a piece of flesh in the air. The quick-stinger is a long and yellowish fly, and it receives its name from its stinging the moment it lights. The common flies of France are very common also in Louisiana. The Cantharides, or Spanish flies, are very numerous, and larger than in Europe; they are of such an acid nature, that if they but slightly touch the skin as they pass, a pretty large blister instantly rises. These flies live upon the leaves of the oak. The Green-flies appear only every other year, and the natives superstitiously look upon their appearance as a presage of a good crop. It is a pity that the cattle are so greatly molested by them, that they cannot remain in the fields; for they are extremely beautiful and twice as large as bees. Fire flies are very common; when the night is serene they are so very numerous, that if the light they dart out were constant, one might see as clearly as in fine moonshine. The Fly-ants, which we see attach themselves to the flower of the acacia, and which disappear when that flower is gone, do not proceed from the common ants. The fly ants, though shaped like the other kind, are however longer and larger. They have a square head; their colour is a brownish red bordered with black; they have four red and grey wings, and fly like common flies, which the other ants do not even when they have wings. The Dragon-flies are pretty numerous; they do not want to destroy them because they feed upon moskitos, which is one of the most troublesome kind of insects. The Moskitos are famous all over America, for their multitude, the troublesomeness of their buzzing and the venom of their stings, which occasion an insupportable itching, and often form so many ulcers, if the person stung does not immediately put some spittle on the wound. In open places they are less tormenting; but still they are troublesome; and the best way of driving them out of the houses is to burn a little brimstone in {273} the mornings and evenings. The smoke of this infallibly kills them, and the smell keeps others away for several days. An hour after the brimstone has been burnt, the apartments may be safely entered into by men. By the same means we may rid ourselves of the flies and moskitos, whose sting is so painful and so frequent during the short time they fly about; for they do not rise till about sun-set, and they retire at night. This is not the case with the Burning-fly. These, though not much larger than the point of a pin, are insupportable to the people who labour in the fields. They fly from sun-rising to sun-setting, and the wounds they give burn like fire. The Lavert is an insect about an inch and a quarter long, a little more than a quarter broad, and a tenth part of an inch thick. It enters the houses by the smallest crevices and in the night-time it falls upon dishes that are covered even with a plate, which renders it very troublesome to those whose houses are only built of wood. Bue they are so relishing to the cats, that these last quit everything to fall upon them wherever they perceive them. When a new settler has once cleared the ground about his house, and is at some distance from the woods, he is quickly freed from them. In Louisiana there are white ants, which seem to love dead wood. Persons who have been in the East-Indies have assured me, that they are quite like those which in that country are called _cancarla_, and that they would eat through glass, which I never had the experience of. There are in Louisiana, as in France, red, black, and flying ants. {274} CHAPTER VIII. _Of Fishes and Shell-Fish_. Though there is an incredible quantity of fishes in this country, I shall however be very concise in my account of them; because during my abode in the country they were not sufficiently known; and the people were not experienced enough in the art of catching them. The most of the rivers being very deep, and the Missisippi, as I have mentioned, being between thirty-eight and forty fathoms, from its mouth to the fall of St. Anthony, it may be easily conceived that the instruments used for fishing in France, cannot be of any use in Louisiana, because they cannot go to the bottom of the rivers, or at least so deep as to prevent the fish from escaping. The line therefore can be only used and it is with it they catch all the fish that are eaten by the settlers upon the river. I proceed to an account of those fish. The Barbel is of two sorts, the large and the small. The first is about four feet long, and the smallest of this sort that is ever seen is two feet long, the young ones doubtless keeping at the bottom of the water. This kind has a very large head, and a round body, which gradually lessens toward the tail. The fish has no scales, nor any bones, excepting that of the middle: its flesh is very good and delicate, but in a small degree vary insipid, which is easily remedied; in other respects it eats very like the fresh cod of the country. The small is from a foot to two in length. Its head is shaped like that of the other kind; but its body is not so round, nor so pointed at the tail. The Carp of the river Missisippi is monstrous. None are seen under two feet long; and many are met with three and four feet in length. The carps are not so very good in the lower part of the river; but the higher one goes the finer they are, on account of the plenty of sand in those parts. A great number of carps are carried into the lakes that are filled by the overflowing of the river, and in those lakes they are found {275} of all sizes, in great abundance, and of a better relish than those of the river. [Illustration: Top: _Cat Fish_--Middle: _Gar Fish_--Bottom: _Spoonbill Catfish_] The Burgo-Breaker is an excellent fish; it is usually a foot and a foot and a half long: it is round, with gold-coloured scales. In its throat it has two bones with a surface like that of a file to break the shell-fish named Burgo. Though delicate, it is nevertheless very firm. It is best when not much boiled. {276} The Ring-Skate is found in the river up as far as New Orleans, but no higher. It is very good, and no way tough. In other respects it is exactly like that of France. The Spatula is so called, because from its snout a substance extends about a foot in length, in the form of an apothecary's Spatula. This fish, which is about two feet in length, is neither round or flat, but square, having at its sides and in the under part bones that forman angle like those of the back. No Pikes are caught above a foot and a half long. As this is a voracious fish, perhaps the Armed-fish pursues it, both from jealousy and appetite. The pike, besides being small, is very rare. The Choupic is a very beautiful fish; many people mistake it for the trout, as it takes a fly in the same manner. But it is very different from the trout, as it prefers muddy and dead water to a clear stream, and its flesh is so soft that it is only good when fried. The Sardine or small Pilchard of the river Missisippi, is about three or four fingers in breadth, and between six and seven inches long; it is good and delicate. One year I salted about the quantity of forty pints of them, and all the French who eat of them acknowledged them to be Sardines from their flesh, their bones, and their taste. They appear only for a short season, and are caught by the natives, when swimming against the strongest current, with nets made for that purpose only. The Patassa, so called by the natives for its flatness, is the roach or fresh-water mullet of this country. The Armed-Fish has its name from its arms, and its scaly mail. Its arms are its very sharp teeth, about the tenth of an inch in diameter, and as much distant from each other, and near half an inch long. The interval of the larger teeth is filled with shorter teeth. These arms are a proof of its voracity. Its mail is nothing but its scales, which are white, as hard as ivory, and about the tenth of an inch in thickness. They are near an inch long, about half as much in breadth, end in a {277} point, and have two cutting sides. There are two ranges of them down the back, shaped exactly like the head of a spontoon, and opposite to the point of the scale has a little shank, about three tenths of an inch long, which the natives insert into the end of their arrows, making the scale serve for a head. The flesh of this fish is hard and not relishing. There are a great number of Eels in the river Missisippi, and very large ones are found in all the rivers and creeks. The whole lower part of the river abounds in Crayfish. Upon my first arrival in the colony the ground was covered with little hillocks, about six or seven inches high, which the crayfish had made for taking the air out of the water; but since dikes have been raised for keeping off the river from the low grounds, they no longer shew themselves. Whenever they are wanted, they fish for them with the leg of a frog, and in a few moments they will catch a large dish of them. The Shrimps are diminutive crayfish; they are usually about three inches long, and of the size of the little finger. Although in other countries they are generally found in the sea only, yet in Louisiana you will meet with great numbers of them more than an hundred leagues up the river. In the lake St. Louis, about two leagues from New Orleans, the waters of which, having a communication with the sea, are somewhat brackish, are found several sorts both of sea fish, and fresh water fish. As the bottom of the lake is very level, they fish in it with large nets lately brought from France. Near the lake, when we pass by the outlets to the sea, and continue along the coasts, we meet with small oysters in great abundance, that are very well tasted. On the other hand, when we quit the lake by another lake that communicates with one of the mouths of the river, we meet with oysters four or five inches broad, and six or seven long. These large oysters eat best fried, having hardly any saltness, but in other respects are large and delicate. Having spoken of the oysters of Louisiana, I shall take some notice of the oysters that are found on the trees at St. Domingo. When I arrived at the harbour of Cape François in {278} my way to Louisiana, I was much surprised to see oysters hanging to the branches of some shrubs; but M. Chaineau, who was our second captain, explained the phaenomenon to me. According to him, the twigs of the shrubs are bent down at high water, to the very bottom of the shore, whenever the sea is any ways agitated. The oysters in that place no sooner feel the twigs than they lay hold of them, and when the sea retires they appear suspended upon them. Towards the mouths of the river we meet with mussels no salter than the large oysters above mentioned; and this is owing to the water being only brackish in those parts, as the river there empties itself by three large mouths, and five other small ones, besides several short creeks, which all together throw at once an immense quantity of water into the sea; the whole marshy ground occupies an extent of ten or twelve leagues. There are likewise excellent mussels upon the northern shore of the lake St. Louis, especially in the river of Pearls; they may be about six or seven inches long, and sometimes contain pretty large pearls, but of no great value. The largest of the shell-fish on the coast is the Burgo, well known in France. There is another fish much smaller and of a different shape. Its hollow shell is strong and beautiful, and the flat one is generally black; some blue ones are found, and are much esteemed. These shells have long been in request for tobacco-boxes. {279} THE HISTORY OF LOUISIANA BOOK IV. CHAPTER I. _The Origin of the Americans._ The remarkable difference I observed between the Natchez, including in that name the nations whom they treat as brethren, and the other people of Louisiana, made me extremely desirous to know whence both of them might originally come. We had not then that full information which we have since received from the voyages and discoveries of M. De Lisle in the eastern parts of the Russian empire. I therefore applied myself one day to put the keeper of the temple in good humour, and having succeeded in that without much difficulty, I then told him, that from the little resemblance I observed between the Natchez and the neighbouring nations, I was inclined to believe that they were not originally of the country which they then inhabited; and that if the ancient speech taught him any thing on that subject, he would do me a great pleasure to inform me of it. At these words he leaned his head on his two hands, with which he covered his eyes, and having remained in that posture about a quarter of an hour, as if to recollect himself, he answered to the following effect: "Before we came into this land we lived yonder under the sun, (pointing with his finger nearly south-west, by which I understood that he meant Mexico;) we lived in a fine country where the earth is always pleasant; there our Suns had their abode, and our nation maintained itself for a long time against the ancients of the country, who conquered some of our villages {280} in the plains, but never could force us from the mountains. Our nation extended itself along the great water where this large river loses itself; but as our enemies were become very numerous, and very wicked, our Suns sent some of their subjects who lived near this river, to examine whether we could retire into the country through which it flowed. The country on the east side of the river being found extremely pleasant, the Great Sun, upon the return of those who had examined it, ordered all his subjects who lived in the plains, and who still defended themselves against the antients of this country, to remove into this land, here to build a temple, and to preserve the eternal fire. "A great part of our nation accordingly settled here, where they lived in peace and abundance for several generations. The Great Sun, and those who had remained with him, never thought of joining us, being tempted to continue where they were by the pleasantness of the country, which was very warm, and by the weakness of their enemies, who had fallen into civil dissentions, in consequence of the ambition of one of their chiefs, who wanted to raise himself from a state of equality with the other chiefs of the villages, and to treat all the people of his nation as slaves. During those discords among our enemies, some of them even entered into an alliance with the Great Sun, who still remained in our old country, that he might conveniently assist our other brethren who had settled on the banks of the Great Water to the east of the large river, and extended themselves so far on the coast and among the isles, that the Great Sun did not hear of them sometimes for five or six years together. "It was not till after many generations that the Great Suns came and joined us in this country, where, from the fine climate, and the peace we had enjoyed, we had multiplied like the leaves of the trees. Warriors of fire, who made the earth to tremble, had arrived in our old country, and having entered into an alliance with our brethren, conquered our ancient enemies; but attempting afterwards to make slaves of our Suns, they, rather than submit to them, left our brethren who refused to follow them, and came hither attended only with their slaves." {281} Upon my asking him who those warriors of fire were, he replied, that they were bearded white men, somewhat of a brownish colour, who carried arms that darted out fire with a great noise, and killed at a great distance; that they had likewise heavy arms which killed a great many men at once, and like thunder made the earth tremble; and that they came from the sun-rising in floating villages. The ancients of the country he said were very numerous, and inhabited from the western coast of the great water to the northern countries on his side the sun, and very far upon the same coast beyond the sun. They had a great number of large and small villages, which were all built of stone, and in which there were houses large enough to lodge a whole village. Their temples were built with great labour and art, and they made beautiful works of all kinds of materials. But ye yourselves, said I, whence are ye come? The ancient speech, he replied, does not say from what land we came; all that we know is, that our fathers, to come hither, followed the sun, and came with him from the place where he rises; that they were a long time on their journey, were all on the point of perishing, and were brought into this country without seeking it. To this account of the keeper of the temple, which was afterwards confirmed to me by the Great Sun, I shall add the following passage of Diodorus Siculus, which seems to confirm the opinion of those who think the eastern Americans are descended from the Europeans, who may have been driven by the winds upon the coasts of Guiana or Brazil. "To the west of Africa, he says, lies a very large island, distant many days sail from that part of our continent. Its fertile soil is partly plain, and partly mountainous. The plain country is most sweet and pleasant, being watered every where with rivulets, and navigable rivers; it is beautified with many gardens, which are planted with all kinds of trees, and the orchards particularly are watered with pleasant streams. The villages are adorned with houses built in a magnificent taste, having parterres ornamented with arbours covered with flowers. Hither the inhabitants retire during the summer to enjoy the fruits which the country furnishes them with in the greatest {282} abundance. The mountainous part is covered with large woods, and all manner of fruit trees, and in the vallies, which are watered with rivulets, the inhabitants meet with every thing that can render life agreeable. In a word, the whole island, by its fertility and the abundance of its springs, furnishes the inhabitants not only with every thing that may flatter their wishes, but with what may also contribute to their health and strength of body. Hunting furnishes them with such an infinite number of animals, that in their feasts they have nothing to wish for in regard either to plenty or delicacy. Besides, the sea, which surrounds the island, supplies them plentifully with all kinds of fish, and indeed the sea in general is very abundant. The air of this island is so temperate that the trees bear leaves and fruit almost the whole year round. In a word, this island is so delicious, that it seems rather the abode of the gods than of men. "Anciently, on account of its remote situation, it was altogether unknown; but afterwards it was discovered by accident. It is well known, that from the earliest ages the Phenicians undertook long voyages in order to extend their commerce, and in consequence of those voyages established several colonies in Africa and the western parts of Europe. Every thing succeeding to their wish, and being become very powerful, they attempted to pass the pillars of Hercules and enter the ocean. They accordingly passed those pillars, and in their neighbourhood built a city upon a peninsula of Spain, which they named Gades. There, amongst the other buildings proper for the place, they built a temple to Hercules, to whom they instituted splendid sacrifices after the manner of their country. This temple is in great veneration at this day, and several Romans who have rendered themselves illustrious by their exploits, have performed their vows to Hercules for the success of their enterprizes. "The Phenicians accordingly having passed the Streights of Spain, sailed along Africa, when by the violence of the winds they were driven far out to sea, and the storm continuing several days, they were at length thrown on this island. Being the first who were acquainted with its beauty and fertility, they {283} published them to other nations. The Tuscans, when they were masters at sea, designed to send a colony thither, but the Carthaginians found means to prevent them on the two following accounts; first, they were afraid lest their citizens, tempted by the charms of that island, should pass over hither in too great numbers, and desert their own country; next they looked upon it as a secure asylum for themselves, if ever any terrible disaster should befal their republic." This description of Diodorus is very applicable in many circumstances to America, particularly in the agreeable temperature of the climate to Africans, the prodigious fertility of the earth, the vast forests, the large rivers, and the multitude of rivulets and springs. The Natchez may then justly be supposed to be descended from some Phenicians or Carthaginians, who had been wrecked on the shores of South America, in which case they might well be imagined to have but little acquaintance with the arts, as those who first landed would be obliged to apply all their thoughts to their immediate subsistence, and consequently would soon become rude and barbarous. Their worship of the eternal fire likewise implies their descent from the Phenicians; for every body knows that this superstition, which first took its rise in Egypt, was introduced by the Phenicians into all the countries that they visited. The figurative stile, and the bold and Syriac expressions in the language of the Natchez, is likewise another proof of their being descended from the Phenicians. [Footnote: The author might have mentioned a singular custom, in which both nations agree; for it appears from _Polybius_, 1 I. c. 6. that Carthaginians practised scalping.] As to those whom the Natchez, long after their first establishment, found inhabiting the western coasts of America, and whom we name Mexicans, the arts which they possessed and cultivated with success, obliged me to give them a different origin. Their temples, their sacrifices, their buildings, their form of government, and their manner of making war, all denote a people who have transmigrated in a body, and brought with them the arts, the sciences, and the customs of their country. Those people had the art of writing, and also of {284} painting. Their archives consisted of cloths of cotton, whereon they had painted or drawn all those transactions which they thought worthy of being transmitted to posterity. It were greatly to be wished that the first conquerors of this new world had preserved to us the figures of those drawings; for by comparing them with the characters used by other nations, we might perhaps have discovered the origin of the inhabitants. The knowledge which we have of the Chinese characters, which are rather irregular drawings than characters, would probably have facilitated such a discovery; and perhaps those of Japan would have been found greatly to have resembled the Mexican; for I am strongly of opinion that the Mexicans are descended from one of those two nations. In fact, where is the impossibility, that some prince in one of those countries, upon failing in an attempt to raise himself to the sovereign power, should leave his native country with all his partizans, and look for some new land, where, after he had established himself, he might drop all foreign correspondence? The easy navigation of the South Sea renders the thing probable; and the new map of the eastern bounds of Asia, and the western of North America, lately published by Mr. De Lisle, makes it still more likely. This map makes it plainly appear, that between the islands of Japan, or northern coasts of China, and those of America, there are other lands, which to this day have remained unknown; and who will take upon him to say there is no land, because it has never yet been discovered? I have therefore good grounds to believe, that the Mexicans came originally from China or Japan, especially when I consider their reserved and uncommunicative disposition, which to this day prevails among the people of the eastern parts of Asia. The great antiquity of the Chinese nation likewise makes it possible that a colony might have gone from thence to America early enough to be looked upon as _the Ancients of the country_, by the first of the Phenicians who could be supposed to arrive there. As a further corroboration of my conjectures, I was informed by a man of learning in 1752, that in the king's library there is a Chinese manuscript, which positively affirms that America was peopled by the inhabitants of Corea. {285} When the Natchez retired to this part of America, where I saw them, they there found several nations, or rather the remains of several nations, some on the east, others on the west of the Missisippi. These are the people who are distinguished among the natives by the name of Red Men; and their origin is so much the more obscure, as they have not so distinct a tradition, as the Natchez, nor arts and sciences like the Mexicans, from whence we might draw some satisfactory inferences. All that I could learn from them was, that they came from between the north and the sun-setting; and this account they uniformly adhered to whenever they gave any account of their origin. This lame tradition no ways satisfying the desire I had to be informed on this point, I made great inquiries to know if there was any wise old man among the neighbouring nations, who could give me further intelligence about the origin of the natives. I was happy enough to discover one, named Moncacht-apé among the Yazous, a nation about forty leagues north from the Natchez. This man was remarkable for his solid understanding and elevation of sentiments; and I may justly compare him to those first Greeks, who travelled chiefly into the east to examine the manners and customs of different nations, and to communicate to their fellow-citizens, upon their return, the knowledge which they had acquired. Moncacht-apé, indeed, never executed so noble a plan; but he had however conceived it, and had spared no labour and pains to effectuate it. He was by the French called the Interpreter, because he understood several of the North American languages; but the other name which I have mentioned was given him by his own nation, and signifies _the killer of pain and fatigue_. This name was indeed most justly applicable to him; for, to satisfy his curiosity, he had made light of the most dangerous and painful journeys, in which he had spent several years of his life. He stayed two or three days with me; and upon my desiring him to give me an account of his travels, he very readily complied with my request, and spoke to the following effect: "I had lost my wife, and all the children whom I had by her, when I undertook my journey towards the sun-rising. I set out from my village contrary to the inclinations of all my {286} relations, and went first to the Chicasaws, our friends and neighbours. I continued among them several days to inform myself whether they knew whence we all came, or at least whence they themselves came; they, who were our elders; since from them came the language of the country. As they could not inform me, I proceeded on my journey. I reached the country of the Chaouanous, and afterwards went up the Wabash or Ohio, almost to its source, which is in the country of the Iroquois or Five Nations. I left them however towards the north; and during the winter, which in that country is very severe and very long, I lived in a village of the Abenaquis, where I contracted an acquaintance with a man somewhat older than myself, who promised to conduct me the following spring to the Great Water. Accordingly when the snows were melted, and the weather was settled, we proceeded eastward, and, after several days journey, I at length saw the Great Water, which filled me with such joy and admiration that I could not speak. Night drawing on, we took up our lodging on a high bank above the water, which was sorely vexed by the wind, and made so great a noise that I could not sleep. Next day the ebbing and flowing of the water filled me with great apprehension; but my companion quieted my fears, by assuring me that the water observed certain bounds both in advancing and retiring. Having satisfied our curiosity in viewing the Great Water, we returned to the village of the Abenaquis, where I continued the following winter; and after the snows were melted, my companion and I went and viewed the great fall of the river St. Laurence at Niagara, which was distant from the village several days journey. The view of this great fall at first made my hair stand on end, and my heart almost leap out of its place; but afterwards, before I left it, I had the courage to walk under it. Next day we took the shortest road to the Ohio, and my companion and I cutting down a tree on the banks of the river, we formed it into a pettiaugre, which served to conduct me down the Ohio and the Missisippi, after which, with much difficulty I went up our small river; and at length arrived safe among my relations, who were rejoiced to see me in good health. {287} "This journey, instead of satisfying, only served to excite my curiosity. Our old men, for several years, had told me that the antient speech informed them that the Red Men of the north came originally much higher and much farther than the source of the river Missouri; and as I had longed to see, with my own eyes, the land from whence our first fathers came, I took my precautions for my journey westwards. Having provided a small quantity of corn, I proceeded up along the eastern bank of the river Missisippi, till I came to the Ohio. I went up along the bank of this last river about the fourth part of a day's journey, that I might be able to cross it without being carried into the Missisippi. There I formed a Cajeux or raft of canes, by the assistance of which I passed over the river; and next day meeting with a herd of buffaloes in the meadows, I killed a fat one, and took from it the fillets, the bunch, and the tongue. Soon after I arrived among the Tamaroas, a village of the nation of the Illinois, where I rested several days, and then proceeded northwards to the mouth of the Missouri, which, after it enters the great river, runs for a considerable time without intermixing its muddy waters with the clear stream of the other. Having crossed the Missisippi, I went up the Missouri along its northern bank, and after several days journey I arrived at the nation of the Missouris, where I staid a long time to learn the language that is spoken beyond them. In going along the Missouri I passed through meadows a whole day's journey in length, which were quite covered with buffaloes. "When the cold was past, and the snows were melted, I continued my journey up along the Missouri till I came to the nation of the West, or the Canzas. Afterwards, in consequence of directions from them, I proceeded in the same course near thirty days, and at length I met with some of the nation of the Otters, who were hunting in that neighbourhood, and were surprised to see me alone. I continued with the hunters two or three days, and then accompanied one of them and his wife, who was near her time of lying-in, to their village, which lay far off betwixt the north and west. We continued our journey along the Missouri for nine days, and then we marched {288} directly northwards for five days more, when we came to the Fine River, which runs westwards in a direction contrary to that of the Missouri. We proceeded down this river a whole day, and then arrived at the village of the Otters, who received me with as much kindness as if I had been of their own nation. A few days after I joined a party of the Otters, who were going to carry a calumet of peace to a nation beyond them, and we embarked in a pettiaugre, and went down the river for eighteen days, landing now and then to supply ourselves with provisions. When I arrived at the nation who were at peace with the Otters, I staid with them till the cold was passed, that I might learn their language, which was common to most of the nations that lived beyond them. "The cold was hardly gone, when I again embarked on the Fine River, and in my course I met with several nations, with whom I generally staid but one night, till I arrived at the nation that is but one day's journey from the Great Water on the west. This nation live in the woods about the distance of a league from the river, from their apprehension of bearded men, who come upon their coasts in floating villages, and carry off their children to make slaves of them. These men were described to be white, with long black beards that came down to their breasts; they were thick and short, had large heads, which were covered with cloth; they were always dressed, even in the greatest heats; their cloaths fell down to the middle of their legs, which with their feet were covered with red or yellow stuff. Their arms made a great fire and a great noise; and when they saw themselves outnumbered by Red Men, they retired on board their large pettiaugre, their number sometimes amounting to thirty, but never more. "Those strangers came from the sun-setting, in search of a yellow stinking wood, which dyes a fine yellow colour; but the people of this nation, that they might not be tempted to visit them, had destroyed all those kind of trees. Two other nations in their neighbourhood however, having no other wood, could not destroy the trees, and were still visited by the strangers; and being greatly incommoded by them, had invited their allies to assist them in making an attack upon them the next {289} time they should return. The following summer I accordingly joined in this expedition, and after traveling five long days journey, we came to the place where the bearded men usually landed, where we waited seventeen days for their arrival. The Red Men, by my advice, placed themselves in ambuscade to surprize the strangers, and accordingly when they landed to cut the wood, we were so successful as to kill eleven of them, the rest immediately escaping on board two large pettiaugres, and flying westward upon the Great Water. "Upon examining those whom we had killed, we found them much smaller than ourselves, and very white; they had a large head, and in the middle of the crown the hair was very long; their head was wrapt in a great many folds of stuff, and their cloaths seemed to be made neither of wool nor silk; they were very soft, and of different colours. Two only of the eleven who were slain had fire-arms with powder and ball. I tried their pieces, and found that they were much heavier than yours, and did not kill at so great a distance. "After this expedition I thought of nothing but proceeding on my journey, and with that design I let the Red Men return home, and joined myself to those who inhabited more westward on the coast, with whom I travelled along the shore of the Great Water, which bends directly betwixt the north and the sun-setting. When I arrived at the villages of my fellow-travellers, where I found the days very long and the night very short, I was advised by the old men to give over all thoughts of continuing my journey. They told me that the land extended still a long way in a direction between the north and sun-setting, after which it ran directly west, and at length was cut by the Great Water from north to south. One of them added, that when he was young, he knew a very old man who had seen that distant land before it was eat away by the Great Water, and that when the Great Water was low, many rocks still appeared in those parts. Finding it therefore impracticable to proceed much further, on account of the severity of the climate, and the want of game, I returned by the same route by which I had set out; and reducing my whole travels westward to days journeys, I compute that they would have employed {290} me thirty-six moons; but on account of my frequent delays, it was five years before I returned to my relations among the Yazous." Moncacht-apé, after giving me an account of his travels, spent four or five days visiting among the Natchez, and then returned to take leave of me, when I made him a present of several wares of no great value, among which was a concave mirror about two inches and a half diameter, which had cost me about three halfpence. As this magnified the face to four or five times its natural size, he was wonderfully delighted with it, and would not have exchanged it with the best mirror in France. After expressing his regret at parting with me, he returned highly satisfied to his own nation. Moncacht-apé's account of the junction of America with the eastern parts of Asia seems confirmed from the following remarkable fact. Some years ago the skeletons of two large elephants and two small ones were discovered in a marsh near the river Ohio; and as they were not much consumed, it is supposed that the elephants came from Asia not many years before. If we also consider the form of government, and the manner of living among the northern nations of America, there will appear a great resemblance betwixt them and the Tartars in the north-east parts of Asia. CHAPTER II. _An Account of the Several Nations of_ Indians _in_ Louisiana. SECTION I. _Of the Nations inhabiting on the East of the_ Missisippi. If to the history of the discoveries and conquests of the Spaniards we join the tradition of all the nations of America, we shall be fully persuaded, that this quarter of the world, before it was discovered by Christopher Columbus, was very populous, not only on the continent but also in the islands. However, by an incomprehensible fatality, the arrival of the Spaniards in this new world seems to have been the unhappy epoch of the destruction of all the nations of America, {291} not only by war, but by nature itself. As it is but too well known how many millions of natives were destroyed by the Spanish sword, I shall not therefore present my readers with that horrible detail; but perhaps many people do not know that an innumerable multitude of the natives of Mexico and Peru voluntarily put an end to their own lives, some by sacrificing themselves to the manes of their sovereigns who had been cut off, and whose born victims they, according to their detestable customs, looked upon themselves to be; and others, to avoid falling under the subjection of the Spaniards, thinking death a less evil by far than slavery. The same effect has been produced among the people of North America by two or three warlike nations of the natives. The Chicasaws have not only cut off a great many nations who were adjoining to them, but have even carried their fury as far as New Mexico, near six hundred miles from the place of their residence, to root out a nation that had removed at that distance from them, in a firm expectation that their enemies would not come so far in search of them. They were however deceived and cut off. The Iroquois have done the same in the east parts of Louisiana; and the Padoucas and others have acted in the same manner to nations in the west of the colony. We may here observe, that those nations could not succeed against their enemies without considerable loss to themselves, and that they have therefore greatly lessened their own numbers by their many warlike expeditions. I mentioned that nature had contributed no less than war to the destruction of these people. Two distempers, that are not very fatal in other parts of the world, make dreadful ravages among them; I mean the small-pox and a cold, which baffle all the art of their physicians, who in other respects are very skilful. When a nation is attacked by the small-pox, it quickly makes great havock; for as a whole family is crowded into a small hut, which has no communications with the external air, but by a door about two feet wide and four feet high, the distemper, if it seizes one, is quickly communicated to all. The aged die in consequence of their advanced years and the bad quality of their food; and the young, if they are not {292} strictly watched, destroy themselves, from an abhorrence of the blotches in their skin. If they can but escape from their hut, they run out and bathe themselves in the river, which is certain death in that distemper. The Chatkas, being naturally not very handsome, are not so apt to regret the loss of their beauty; consequently suffer less, and are much more numerous than the other nations. Colds, which are very common in the winter, likewise destroy great numbers of the natives. In that season they keep fires in their huts day and night; and as there is no other opening but the door, the air within the hut is kept excessive warm without any free circulation; so that when they have occasion to go out, the cold seizes them, and the consequences of it are almost always fatal. The first nations that the French were acquainted with in this part of North America, were those on the east of the colony; for the first settlement we made there was at Fort Louis on the river Mobile. I shall therefore begin my account of the different nations of Indians on this side of the colony, and proceed westwards in the same order as they are situated. But however zealous I may be in displaying not only the beauties, but the riches and advantages of Louisiana, yet I am not at all inclined to attribute to it what it does not possess; therefore I warn my reader not to be surprised, if I make mention of a few nations in this colony, in comparison of the great number which he may perhaps have seen in the first maps of this country. Those maps were made from memoirs sent by different travellers, who noted down all the names they heard mentioned, and then fixed upon a spot for their residence; so that a map appeared stiled with the names of nations, many of whom were destroyed, and others were refugees among nations who had adopted them and taken them under their protection. Thus, though the nations on this continent were formerly both numerous and populous, they are now so thinned and diminished, that there does not exist at present a third part of the nations whose names are to be found in the maps. The most eastern nation of Louisiana is that called the Apalaches, which is a branch of the great nation of the Apalaches, {293} who inhabited near the mountains to which they have given their name. This great nation is divided into several branches, who take different names. The branch in the neighbourhood of the river Mobile is but inconsiderable, and part of it is Roman Catholic. On the north of the Apalaches are the Alibamous, a pretty considerable nation; they love the French, and receive the English rather out of necessity than friendship. On the first settling of the colony we had some commerce with them; but since the main part of the colony has fixed on the river, we have somewhat neglected them, on account of the great distance. East from the Alibamous are the Caouitas, whom M. de Biainville, governor of Louisiana, wanted to distinguish above the other nations, by giving the title of emperor to their sovereign, who then would have been chief of all the neighbouring nations; but those nations refused to acknowledge him as such, and said that it was enough if each nation obeyed its own chief; that it was improper for the chiefs themselves to be subject to other chiefs, and that such a custom had never prevailed among them, as they chose rather to be destroyed by a great nation than to be subject to them. This nation is one of the most considerable; the English trade with them, and they suffer the traders to come among them from policy. To, the north of the Alibamous are the Abeikas and Conchacs, who, as far as I can learn, are the same people; yet the name of Conchac seems appropriated to one part more than another. They are situated at a distance from the great rivers and consequently have no large canes in their territory. The canes that grow among them are not thicker than one's finger, and are at the same time so very hard, that when they are split, they cut like knives, which these people call _conchacs_. The language of this nation is almost the same with that of the Chicasaws, in which the word _conchac_ signifies a knife. The Abeikas, on the east of them, have the Cherokees, divided into several branches, and situated very near the Apalachean mountains. All the nations whom I have mentioned {294} have been united in a general alliance for a long time past, in order to defend themselves against the Iroquois, or Five Nations, who, before this alliance was formed, made continual war upon them; but have ceased to molest them since they have seen them united. All these nations, and some small ones intermixed among them, have always been looked upon as belonging to no colony, excepting the Apalaches; but since the breaking out of the war with the English in 1756, it is said they have voluntarily declared for us. The nations in the neighbourhood of the Mobile, are first the Chatots, a small nation consisting of about forty huts, adjoining to the river and the sea. They are Roman Catholics, or reputed such; and are friends to the French, whom they are always ready to serve upon being paid for it. North from the Chatots, and very near them, is the French settlement of Fort Louis on the Mobile. A little north from Fort Louis are situated the Thomez, which are not more numerous than the Chatots, and are said to be Roman Catholics. They are our friends to to such a degree as even to teaze us with their officiousness. Further north live the Taensas, who are a branch of the Natchez, of whom I shall have occasion to speak more at large. Both of these nations keep the eternal fire with the utmost care; but they trust the guard of it to men, from a persuasion that none of their daughters would sacrifice their liberty for that office. The whole nation of the Taensas consists only of about one hundred huts. Proceeding still northwards along the bay, we meet with the nation of the Mobiliens, near the mouth of the river Mobile, in the bay of that name. The true name of this nation is Mouvill, which the French have turned into Mobile, calling the river and the bay from the nation that inhabited near them. All these small nations were living in peace upon the arrival of the French, and still continue so; the nations on the east of the Mobile serving as a barrier to them against the incursions of the Iroquois. Besides, the Chicasaws look upon them as their brethren, as both they, and their neighbours on the east of the {295} Mobile, speak a language which is nearly the same with that of the Chicasaws. Returning towards the sea, on the west of the Mobile, we find the small nation of the Pacha-Ogoulas, that is, Nation of Bread, situated upon the bay of the same name. This nation consists only of one village of about thirty huts. Some French Canadians have settled in their neighbourhood, and they live together like brethren, as the Canadians, who are naturally of a peaceable disposition, know the character of the natives, and have the art of living with the nations of America. But what chiefly renders the harmony betwixt them durable, is the absence of soldiers, who never appear in this nation. Further northwards, near the river Pacha-Ogoulas, is situated the great nation of the Chatkas, or Flat-heads. I call them the great nation, for I have not known or heard of any other near so numerous. They reckon in this nation twenty-five thousand warriors. There may perhaps be such a number of men among them, who take that name; but I am far from thinking that all these have a title to the character of warriors. According to the tradition of the natives, this nation arrived so suddenly, and passed so rapidly through the territories of others, that when I asked them, whence came the Chatkas? they answered me, that they sprung out of the ground; by which they meant to express their great surprize at seeing them appear so suddenly. Their great numbers awed the natives near whom they passed; their character being but little inclined to war, did not inspire them with the fury of conquest; thus they at length arrived in an uninhabited country which nobody disputed with them. They have since lived without any disputes with their neighbours; who on the other hand have never dared to try whether they were brave or not. It is doubtless owing to this that they have increased to their present numbers. They are called Flat-heads; but I do not know why that name has been given to them more than to others, since all the nations of Louisiana have their heads as flat, or nearly so. They are situated about two hundred and fifty miles north {296} from the sea, and extend more from east to west than from south to north. [Illustration: _Indian Buffalo Hunt on foot_] Those who travel from the Chatkas to the Chicasaws, seldom go by the shortest road, which extends about one hundred and eighty miles, and is very woody and mountainous. They choose rather to go along the river Mobile, which is both the easiest and most pleasant route. The nation of the Chicasaws is very warlike. The men have very regular features, {297} are large, well-shaped, and neatly dressed; they are fierce, and have a high opinion of themselves. They seem to be the remains of a populous nation, whose warlike disposition had prompted them to invade several nations, whom they have indeed destroyed, but not without diminishing their own numbers by those expeditions. What induces me to believe that this nation has been formerly very considerable, is that the nations who border upon them, and whom I have just mentioned, speak the Chicasaw language, though somewhat corrupted, and those who speak it best value themselves upon it. I ought perhaps to except out of this number the Taensas, who being a branch of the Natchez, have still preserved their peculiar language; but even these speak, in general, the corrupted Chicasaw language, which our French settlers call the Mobilian language. As to the Chatkas, I suppose, that being very numerous, they have been able to preserve their own language in a great measure; and have only adopted some words of the Chicasaw language. They always spoke to me in the Chicasaw tongue. In returning towards the coast next the river Missisippi, we meet with a small nation of about twenty huts, named Aquelou-Pissas, that is, _Men who understand and see_. This nation formerly lived within three of four miles of the place where New Orleans is built; but they are further north at present, and not far from the lake St. Lewis, or Pontchartrain. They speak a language somewhat approaching to that of the Chicasaws. We have never had great dealings with them. Being now arrived at the river Missisippi, I shall proceed upwards along its banks as far as to the most distant nations that are known to us. The first nation that I meet with is the Oumas, which signifies the Red Nation. They are situated about twenty leagues from New Orleans, where I saw some of them upon my arrival in this province. Upon the first establishment of the colony, some French went and settled near them; and they have been very fatal neighbours, by furnishing them with brandy, which they drink to great excess. {298} Crossing the Red River, and proceeding still upwards, we find the remains of the nation of the Tonicas, who have always been very much attached to the French, and have even been our auxiliaries in war. The Chief of this nation was our very zealous friend; and as he was full of courage, and always ready to make war on the enemies of the French, the king sent him a brevet of brigadier of the red armies, and a blue ribbon, from whence hung a silver medal, which on one side represented the marriage of the king, and on the reverse had the city of Paris. He likewise sent him a gold-headed cane; and the Indian Chief was not a little proud of wearing those honourable distinctions, which were certainly well bestowed. This nation speaks a language so far different from that of their neighbours, in that they pronounce the letter R, which the others have not. They have likewise different customs. The Natchez in former times appear to have been one of the most respectable nations in the colony, not only from their own tradition, but from that of the other nations, in whom their greatness and civilized customs raised no less jealousy than admiration. I could fill a volume with what relates to this people alone; but as I am now giving a concise account of the people of Louisiana, I shall speak of them as of the rest, only enlarging a little upon some important transactions concerning them. When I arrived in 1720 among the Natchez, that nation was situated upon a small river of the same name; the chief village where the Great Sun resided was built along the banks of the river, and the other villages were planted round it. They were two leagues above the confluence of the river, which joins the Missisippi at the foot of the great precipices of the Natchez. From thence are four leagues to its source, and as many to Rosalie, and they were situated within a league of the fort. Two small nations lived as refugees among the Natchez. The most ancient of these adopted nations were the Grigras, who seem to have received that name from the French, because when talking with one another they often pronounce those two syllables, which makes them be remarked as strangers among the Natchez, who, as well as the Chicasaws, and all the nations {299} that speak the Chicasaw language, cannot pronounce the letter R. The other small nation adopted by the Natchez, are the Thioux, who have also the letter R in their language. These were the weak remains of the Thioux nation, formerly one of the strongest in the country. However, according to the account of the other nations, being of a turbulent disposition, they drew upon themselves the resentment of the Chicasaws, which was the occasion of their ruin; for by their many engagements they were at length so weakened that they durst not face their enemy, and consequently were obliged to take refuge among the Natchez. The Natchez, the Grigras, and the Thioux, may together raise about twelve hundred warriors; which is but a small force in comparison of what the Natchez could formerly have raised alone; for according to their traditions they were the most powerful nation of all North America, and were looked upon by the other nations as their superiors, and on that account respected by them. To give an idea of their power, I shall only mention, that formerly they extended from the river Manchac, or Iberville, which is about fifty leagues from the sea, to the river Wabash, which is distant from the sea about four hundred and sixty leagues; and that they had about five hundred Suns or princes. From these facts we may judge how populous this nation formerly has been; but the pride of their Great Suns, or sovereigns, and likewise of their inferior Suns, joined to the prejudices of the people, has made greater havock among them, and contributed more to their destruction, than long and bloody wars would have done. As their sovereigns were despotic, they had for a long time past established the following inhuman and impolitic custom, that when any of them died, a great number of their subjects, both men and women, should likewise be put to death. A proportionable number of subjects were likewise killed upon the death of any of the inferior Suns; and the people on the other hand had imbibed a belief that all those who followed their princes into the other world, to serve them there, would be eternally happy. It is easy to conceive how ruinous such an {300} inhuman custom would be among a nation who had so many princes as the Natchez. It would seem that some of the Suns, more humane than the rest, had disapproved of this barbarous custom, and had therefore retired to places at a remote distance from the centre of their nation. For we have two branches of this great nation settled in other parts of the colony, who have preserved the greatest part of the customs of the Natchez. One of these branches is the nation of the Taensas on the banks of the Mobile, who preserve the eternal fire, and several other usages of the nation from whom they are descended. The other branch is the nation of the Chitimachas, whom the Natchez have always looked upon as their brethren. Forty leagues north from the Natchez is the river Yasous, which runs into the Missisippi, and is so called from a nation of the same name who had about a hundred huts on its banks. Near the Yazous, on the same river, lived the Coroas, a nation consisting of about forty huts. These two nations pronounce the letter R. Upon the same river likewise lived the Chacchi-Oumas, a name which signifies _red Cray-fish_. These people had not above fifty huts. Near the same river dwelt the Ouse-Ogoulas, or the Nation of the Dog, which might have about sixty huts. The Tapoussas likewise inhabited upon the banks of this river, and had not above twenty-five huts. These three last nations do not pronounce the letter R, and seem to be branches of the Chicasaws, especially as they speak their language. Since the massacre of the French settlers at the Natchez, these five small nations, who had joined in the conspiracy against us, have all retired among the Chicasaws, and make now but one nation with them. To the north of the Ohio, not far from the banks of the Missisippi, inhabit the Illinois, who have given their name to the river on the banks of which they have settled. They are divided into several villages, such as the Tamaroas, the Caskaquias, {301} the Caouquias, the Pimiteouis, and some others. Near the village of the Tamaroas is a French post, where several French Canadians have settled. This is one of the most considerable posts in all Louisiana, which will appear not at all surprising, when we consider that the Illinois were one of the first nations whom we discovered in the colony, and that they have always remained most faithful allies of the French; an advantage which is in a great measure owing to the proper manner of living with the natives of America, which the Canadians have always observed. It is not their want of courage that renders them so peaceable, for their valour is well known. The letter R is pronounced by the Illinois. Proceeding further northwards we meet with a pretty large nation, known by the name of the Foxes, with whom we have been at war near these forty years past, yet I have not heard that we have had any blows with them for a long time. From the Foxes to the fall of St. Anthony, we meet with no nation, nor any above the Fall for near an hundred leagues. About that distance north of the Fall, the Sioux are settled, and are said to inhabit several scattered villages both on the east and west of the Missisippi. SECTION II. _Of the Nations inhabiting on the West of the_ Missisippi. Having described as exactly as possible all the nations on the east of the Missisippi, as well those who are included within the bounds of the colony, as those who are adjoining to it, and have some connection with the others; I shall now proceed to give an account of those who inhabit on the west of the river, from the sea northwards. Between the river Missisippi, and those lakes which are filled by its waters upon their overflowing, is a small nation named Chaouchas, or Ouachas, who inhabit some little villages, but are of so little consequences that they are no otherwise known to our colonists but by their name. {302} In the neighbourhood of the lakes abovementioned live the Chitimachas. These are the remains of a nation which was formerly pretty considerable; but we have destroyed part of them by exciting our allies to attack them. I have already observed that they were a branch of the Natchez, and upon my first settling among these, I found several Chitimachas, who had taken refuge among them to avoid the calamities of the war which had been made upon them near the lakes. Since the peace that was concluded with them in 1719, they have not only remained quiet, but kept themselves so prudently retired, that, rather than have any intercourse with the French, or traffic with them for what they look upon as superfluities, they choose to live in the manner they did an hundred years ago. Along the west coast, not far from the sea, inhabit the nation named Atacapas, that is, Man-eaters, being so called by the other nations on account of their detestable custom of eating their enemies, or such as they believe to be their enemies. In this vast country there are no other cannibals to be met with besides the Atacapas; and since the French have gone among them, they have raised in them so great an horror of that abominable practice of devouring creatures of their own species, that they have promised to leave it off; and accordingly for a long time past we have heard of no such barbarity among them. The Bayouc-Ogoulas were formerly situated in the country that still bears their name. This nation is now confounded with the others to whom it is joined. The Oque-Loussas are a small nation situated north-west from the Cut Point. They live on the banks of two small lakes, the waters of which appear black by reason of the great number of leaves which cover the bottom of them, and have given name to the nation, Oque-Loussas in their language signifying Black Water. From the Oque-Loussas to the Red River, we meet with no other nation; but upon the banks of this river, a little above the Rapid, is seated the small nation of the Avoyels. These are the people who bring to our settlers horses, oxen, and cows. {303} I know not in what fair they buy them, nor with what money they pay for them; but the truth is, they sell them to us for about seventeen shillings a-piece. The Spaniards of New-Spain have such numbers of them that they do not know what to do with them, and are obliged to those who will take them off their hands. At present the French have a greater number of them than they want, especially of horses. About fifty leagues higher up the Red River, live the Nachitoches, near a French post of the same name. They are a pretty considerable nation, having about two hundred huts. They have always been greatly attached to the French; but never were friends to the Spaniards. There are some branches of this nation situated further westward; but the huts are not numerous. Three hundred miles west from the Missisippi, upon the Red River, we find the great nation of the Cadodaquioux. It is divided into several branches which extend very widely. This people, as well as the Nachitoches, have a peculiar language; however, there is not a village in either of the nations, nor indeed in any nation of Louisiana, where there are not some who can speak the Chicasaw language, which is called the vulgar tongue, and is the same here as the Lingua Franca is in the Levant. Between the Red River and the Arkansas there is at present no nation. Formerly the Ouachites lived upon the Black River, and gave their name to it; but at this time there are no remains of that nation; the Chicasaws having destroyed great part of them, and the rest took refuge among the Cadodaquioux, where their enemies durst not molest them. The Taensas lived formerly in this neighbourhood upon a river of their name; but they took refuge on the banks of the Mobile near the allies of the Chicasaws, who leave them undisturbed. The nation of the Arkansas have given their name to the river on which they are situated, about four leagues from its confluence with the Missisippi. This nation is pretty considerable, and its men are no less distinguished for being good hunters than stout warriors. The Chicasaws, who are of a {304} restless disposition, have more than once wanted to make trial of the bravery of the Arkansas; but they were opposed with such firmness, that they have now laid aside all thoughts of attacking them, especially since they have been joined by the Kappas, the Michigamias, and a part of the Illinois, who have settled among them. Accordingly there is no longer any mention either of the Kappas or Michigamias, who are now all adopted by the Arkansas. The reader may have already observed in this account of the natives of Louisiana, that several nations of those people had joined themselves to others, either because they could no longer resist their enemies, or because they hoped to improve their condition by intermixing with another nation. I am glad to have this occasion of observing that those people respect the rights of hospitality, and that those rights always prevail, notwithstanding any superiority that one nation may have over another with whom they are at war, or even over those people among whom their enemies take refuge. For example, a nation of two thousand warriors makes war upon, and violently pursues another nation of five hundred warriors, who retire among a nation in alliance with their enemies. If this last nation adopt the five hundred, the first nation, though two thousand in number, immediately lay down their arms, and instead of continuing hostilities, reckon the adopted nation among the number of their allies. Besides the Arkansas, some authors place other nations upon their river. I cannot take upon me to say that there never were any; but I can positively affirm, from my own observation upon the spot, that no other nation is to be met with at present on this river, or even as far as the Missouri. Not far from the river Missouri is situated the nation of the Osages, upon a small river of the same name. This nation is said to have been pretty considerable formerly, but at present they can neither be said to be great nor small. The nation of the Missouris is very considerable, and has given its name to the large river that empties itself into the Missisippi. It is the first nation we meet with from the confluence {305} of the two rivers, and yet it is situated above forty leagues up the Missouri. The French had a settlement pretty near this nation, at the time when M. de Bourgmont was commandant in those parts; but soon after he left them, the inhabitants massacred the French garrison. The Spaniards, as well as our other neighbours, being continually jealous of our superiority over them, formed a design of establishing themselves among the Missouris, about forty leagues from the Illinois, in order to limit our boundaries westward. They judged it necessary, for the security of their colony, entirely to cut off the Missouris, and for that purpose they courted the friendship of the Osages, whose assistance they thought would be of service to them in their enterprize, and who were generally at enmity with the Missouris. A company of Spaniards, men, women, and soldiers, accordingly set out from Santa Fe, having a Dominican for their chaplain, and an engineer for their guide and commander. The caravan was furnished with horses, and all other kinds of beasts necessary; for it is one of their prudent maxims, to send off all those things together. By a fatal mistake the Spaniards arrived first among the Missouris, whom they mistook for the Osages, and imprudently discovering their hostile intentions, they were themselves surprised and cut off by those whom they intended for destruction. The Missouris some time afterwards dressed themselves with the ornaments of the chapel; and carried them in a kind of triumphant procession to the French commandant among the Illinois. Along with the ornaments they brought a Spanish map, which seemed to me to be a better draught of the west part of our colony, towards them, than of the countries we are most concerned with. From this map it appears, that we ought to bend the Red River, and that of the Arkansas, somewhat more, and place the source of the Missisippi more westerly than our geographers do. The principal nations who inhabit upon the banks, or in the neighbourhood of the Missouri, are, besides those already mentioned, the Canzas, the Othoues, the White Panis, the Black Panis, the Panimachas, the Aiouez, and the Padoucas. The most numerous of all those nations are the Padoucas, the smallest {306} are the Aiouez, the Othoues, and the Osages; the others are pretty considerable. To the north of all those nations, and near the river Missisippi, it is pretended that a part of the nation of the Sioux have their residence. Some affirm that they inhabit now on one side of the river, now on another. From what I could learn from travellers, I am inclined to think, that they occupy at the same time both sides of the Missisippi, and their settlements, as I have elsewhere observed, are more than an hundred leagues above the Fall of St. Anthony. But we need not yet disquiet ourselves about the advantages which might result to us from those very remote countries. Many ages must pass before we can penetrate into the northern parts of Louisiana. CHAPTER III. _A Description of the natives of_ Louisiana; _of their manners and customs, particularly those of the_ Natchez: _of their language, their religion, ceremonies_, Rulers _or_ Suns, _feasts, marriages, &c._ SECTION I. _A description of the natives; the different employments of the two sexes; and their manner of bringing up their children._ In the concise history which I have given of the people of Louisiana, and in several other places where I have happened to mention them, the reader may have observed that these nations have not all the same character, altho' they live adjoining to each other. He therefore ought not to expect a perfect uniformity in their manners, or that I should describe all the different usages that prevail in different parts, which would create a disagreeable medley, and tend only to confound his ideas which cannot be too clear. My design is only to shew in general, from the character of those people, what course we ought to observe, in order to draw advantage from our intercourse with them. I shall however be more full in speaking of the Natchez, a populous nation, among whom I lived the space of eight years, and whose sovereign, the chief of war, and the chief of the keepers of the temple, were among my most intimate {307} friends. Besides, their manners were more civilized, their manner of thinking more just and fuller of sentiment, their customs more reasonable, and their ceremonies more natural and serious; on all which accounts they were eminently distinguished above the other nations. All the natives of America in general are extremely well made; very few of them are to be seen under five feet and a half, and very many of them above that; their leg seems as if it was fashioned in a mould; it is nervous, and the calf is firm; they are long waisted; their head is upright and somewhat flat in the upper part, and their features are regular; they have black eyes, and thick black hair without curls. If we see none that are extremely fat and pursy, neither do we meet with any that are so lean as if they were in a consumption. The men in general are better made than the women; they are more nervous, and the women more plump and fleshy; the men are almost all large, and the women of a middle size. I have always been inclined to think, that the care they take of their children in their infancy contributes greatly to their fine shapes, tho' the climate has also its share in that, for the French born in Louisiana are all large, well shaped, and of good flesh and blood. When any of the women of the natives is delivered, she goes immediately to the water and washes herself and the infant; she then comes home and lies down, after having disposed her infant in the cradle, which is about two feet and a half long, nine inches broad, and half a foot deep, being formed of straight pieces of cane bent up at one end, to serve for a foot or stay. Betwixt the canes and the infant is a kind of matrass of the tufted herb called Spanish Beard, and under its head is a little skin cushion, stuffed with the same herb. The infant is laid on its back in the cradle, and fastened to it by the shoulders, the arms, the legs, the thighs, and the hips; and over its forehead are laid two bands of deer-skin which keeps its head to the cushion, and renders that part flat. As the cradle does not weigh much above two pounds, it generally lies on the mother's bed, who suckles the infant occasionally. The infant is rocked not side-ways but end-ways, and when it is a {308} month old they put under its knees garters made of buffalo's wool which is very soft, and above the ankle bones they bind the legs with threads of the same wool for the breadth of three or four inches. And these ligatures the child wears till it be four or five years old. The infants of the natives are white when they are born, but they soon turn brown, as they are rubbed with bear's oil and exposed to the sun. They rub them with oil, both to render their nerves more flexible, and also to prevent the flies from stinging them, as they suffer them to roll about naked upon all fours, before they are able to walk upright. They never put them upon their legs till they are a year old, and they suffer them to suck as long as they please, unless the mother prove with child, in which case she ceases to suckle. When the boys are about twelve years of age, they give them a bow and arrows proportioned to their strength, and in order to exercise them they tie some hay, about twice as large as the fist, to the end of a pole about ten feet high. He who brings down the hay receives the prize from an old man who is always present: the best shooter is called the young warrior, the next best is called the apprentice warrior, and so on of the others, who are prompted to excel more by sentiments of honour than by blows. As they are threatened from their most tender infancy with the resentment of the old man, if they are any ways refractory or do any mischievous tricks, which is very rare, they fear and respect him above every one else. This old man is frequently the great-grandfather, or the great-great-grand-father of the family, for those natives live to a very great age. I have seen some of them not able to walk, without having any other distemper or infirmity than old age, so that when the necessities of nature required it, or they wanted to take the air, they were obliged to be carried out of their hut, an assistance which is always readily offered to the old men. The respect paid to them by their family is so great, that they are looked upon as the judges of all differences, and their counsels are decrees. An old man who is the head of a family is called father, even by his grand-children, and great-grand-children, {309} who to distinguish their immediate father call him their true father. If any of their young people happen to fight, which I never saw nor heard of during the whole time I resided in their neighbourhood, they threaten to put them in a hut at a great distance from their nation, as persons unworthy to live among others; and this is repeated to them so often, that if they happen to have had a battle, they take care never to have another. I have already observed that I studied them a considerable number of years; and I never could learn that there ever were any disputes or boxing matches among either their boys or men. As the children grow up, the fathers and mothers take care each to accustom those of their own sex to the labours and exercises suited to them, and they have no great trouble to keep them employed; but it must be confessed that the girls and the women work more than the men and the boys. These last go a hunting and fishing, cut the wood, the smallest bits of which are carried home by the women; they clear the fields for corn, and hoe it; and on days when they cannot go abroad they amuse themselves with making, after their fashion, pickaxes, oars, paddles, and other instruments, which once made last a long while. The women on the other hand have their children to bring up, have to pound the maiz for the subsistence of the family, have to keep up the fire, and to make a great many utensils, which require a good deal of work, and last but a short time, such as their earthen ware, their matts, their clothes, and a thousand other things of that kind. When the children are about ten or twelve years of age they accustom them by degrees to carry small loads, which they increase with their years. The boys are from time to time exercised in running; but they never suffer them to exhaust themselves by the length of the race, lest they should overheat themselves. The more nimble at that exercise sometimes sportfully challenges those who are more slow and heavy; but the old man who presides hinders the raillery from being carried to any excess, carefully avoiding all subjects of quarrel and dispute, on which account doubtless it is that they will never suffer them to wrestle. {310} Both boys and girls are early accustomed to bathe every morning, in order to strengthen the nerves, and harden them against cold and fatigue, and likewise to teach them to swim, that they may avoid or pursue an enemy, even across a river. The boys and girls, from the time they are three years of age, are called out every morning by an old man, to go to the river; and here is some more employment for the mothers who accompany them thither to teach them to swim. Those who can swim tolerably well, make a great noise in winter by beating the water in order to frighten away the crocodiles, and keep themselves warm. The reader will have observed that most of the labour and fatigue falls to the share of the women; but I can declare that I never heard them complain of their fatigues, unless of the trouble their children gave them, which complaint arose as much from maternal affection, as from any attention that the children required. The girls from their infancy have it instilled into them, that if they are sluttish or unhandy they will have none but a dull aukward fellow for their husband; I observed in all the nations I visited, that this threatening was never lost upon the young girls. I would not have it thought however, that the young men are altogether idle. Their occupations indeed are not of such a long continuance; but they are much more laborious. As the men have occasion for more strength, reason requires that they should not exhaust themselves in their youth; but at the same time they are not exempted from those exercises that fit them for war and hunting. The children are educated without blows; and the body is left at full liberty to grow, and to form and strengthen itself with their years. The youths accompany the men in hunting, in order to learn the wiles and tricks necessary to be practised in the field, and accustom themselves to suffering and patience. When they are full grown men, they dress the field or waste land, and prepare it to receive the seed; they go to war or hunting, dress the skins, cut the wood, make their bows and arrows, and assist each other in building their huts. They have still I allow a great deal of more spare time than the women; but this is not all thrown away. As these {311} people have not the assistance of writing, they are obliged to have recourse to tradition, in order to preserve the remembrance of any remarkable transactions; and this tradition cannot be learned but by frequent repetitions, consequently many of the youths are often employed in hearing the old men narrate the history of their ancestors, which is thus transmitted from generation to generation. In order to preserve their traditions pure and uncorrupt, they are careful not to deliver them indifferently to all their young people, but teach them only to those young men of whom they have the best opinion. SECTION II. _Of the language, government, religion, ceremonies, and feasts of the natives._ During my residence among the Natchez I contracted an intimate friendship, not only with the chiefs or guardians of the temple, but with the Great Sun, or the sovereign of the nation, and his brother the Stung Serpent, the chief of the warriors; and by my great intimacy with them, and the respect I acquired among the people, I easily learned the peculiar language of the nation. This language is easy in the pronunciation, and expressive in the terms. The natives, like the Orientals, speak much in a figurative stile, the Natchez in particular more than any other people of Louisiana. They have two languages, that of the nobles and that of the people, and both are very copious. I will give two or three examples to shew the difference of these two languages. When I call one of the common people, I say to him _aquenan_, that is, hark ye: if, on the other hand, I want to speak to a Sun, or one of their nobles, I say to him, _magani_, which signifies, hark ye. If one of the common people call at my house, I say to him, _tachte-cabanacte, are you there_, or I am glad to see you, which is equivalent to our goodmorrow. I express the same thing to a Sun by the word _apapegouaiché_. Again, according to their custom, I say to one of the common people, _petchi, sit you down_; but to a Sun, when I desire him to sit down, I say, _caham_. The two languages are {312} nearly the same in all other respects; for the difference of expression seems only to take place in matters relating to the persons of the Suns and nobles, in distinction from those of the people. Tho' the women speak the same language with the men, yet, in their manner of pronunciation, they soften and smooth the words, whereas the speech of the men is more grave and serious. The French, by chiefly frequenting the women, contracted their manner of speaking, which was ridiculed as an effeminacy by the women, as well as the men, among the natives. From my conversations with the chief of the guardians of the temple, I discovered that they acknowledged a supreme being, whom they called _Coyococop-Chill_, or _Great Spirit_. The _Spirit infinitely great_, or the _Spirit_ by way of excellence. The word _chill_, in their language, signifies the most superlative degree of perfection, and is added by them to the word which signifies _fire_, when they want to mention the Sun; thus _Oua_ is _fire_, and _Oua-chill_ is the _supreme fire_, or the _Sun_; therefore, by the word _Coyocop-Chill_ they mean a spirit that surpasses other spirits as much as the sun does common fire. "God," according to the definition of the guardian of the temple, "was so great and powerful, that, in comparison with him, all other things were as nothing; he had made all that we see, all that we can see, and all that we cannot see; he was so good, that he could not do ill to any one, even if he had a mind to it. They believe that God had made all things by his will; that nevertheless the little spirits, who are his servants, might, by his orders, have made many excellent works in the universe, which we admire; but that God himself had formed man with his own hands." The guardian added, that they named those little spirits, _Coyocop-techou_, that is, a _free servant_, but as submissive and as respectful as a slave; that those spirits were always present before God, ready to execute his pleasure with an extreme diligence; that the air was filled with other spirits, some good some wicked; and that the latter had a chief, who was more {313} wicked than them all; that God had found him so wicked, that he had bound him for ever, so that the other spirits of the air no longer did so much harm, especially when they were by prayers entreated not to do it; for it is one of the religious customs of those people to invoke the spirits of the air for rain or fine weather, according as each is needed. I have seen the Great Sun fast for nine days together, eating nothing but maiz-corn, without meat or fish, drinking nothing but water, and abstaining from the company of his wives during the whole time. He underwent this rigorous fast out of complaisance to some Frenchmen, who had been complaining that it had not rained for a long time. Those inconsiderate people had not remarked, that notwithstanding the want of rain, the fruits of the earth had not suffered, as the dew is so plentiful in summer as fully to supply that deficiency. The guardian of the temple having told me that God had made man with his own hands, I asked him if he knew how that was done. He answered, "that God had kneaded some clay, such as that which potters use, and had made it into a little man; and that after examining it, and finding it well formed, he blew up his work, and forthwith that little man had life, grew, acted, walked, and found himself a man perfectly well shaped." As he made no mention of the woman, I asked him how he believed she was made; he told me, "that probably in the same manner as the man; that their _antient speech_ made no mention of any difference, only told them that the man was made first, and was the strongest and most courageous, because he was to be the head and support of the woman, who was made to be his companion." Here I did not omit to rectify his notions on the subjects we had been talking about, and to give him those just ideas which religion teaches us, and the sacred writings have transmitted to us. He hearkened to me with great attention, and promised to repeat all that I had told him to the old men of his nation, who certainly would not forget it; adding, that we were very happy in being able to retain the knowledge of such fine things by means of the speaking cloth, so they name books and manuscripts. {314} I next proceeded to ask him, who had taught them to build a temple; whence had they their eternal fire, which they preserved with so much care; and who was the person that first instituted their feasts? He replied, "The charge I am entrusted with obliges me to know all these things you ask of me; I will therefore satisfy you: hearken to me. A great number of years ago there appeared among us a man and his wife, who came down from the sun. Not that we believe that the sun had a wife who bore him children, or that these were the descendants of the sun; but when they first appeared among us they were so bright and luminous that we had no difficulty to believe that they came down from the sun. This man told us, that having seen from on high that we did not govern ourselves well; that we had no master; that each of us had presumption enough to think himself capable of governing others, while he could not even conduct himself; he had thought fit to come down among us to teach us to live better. "He moreover told us, that in order to live in peace among ourselves, and to please the supreme Spirit, we must indispensably observe the following points; we must never kill any one but in defence of our own lives; we must never know any other woman besides our own; we must never take any thing that belongs to another; we must never lye nor get drunk; we must not be avaricious, but must give liberally, and with joy, part of what we have to others who are in want, and generously share our subsistence with those who are in need of it." "The words of this man deeply affected us, for he spoke them with authority, and he procured the respect even of the old men themselves, tho' he reprehended them as freely as the rest. Next day we offered to acknowledge him as our sovereign. He at first refused, saying that he should not be obeyed, and that the disobedient would infallibly die; but at length he accepted the offer that was made him on the following condition: "That we would go and inhabit another country, better than that in which we were, which he would shew us; that we would afterwards live conformable to the instructions he had given us; that we would promise never to acknowledge any {315} other sovereigns but him and his descendants; that the nobility should be perpetuated by the women after this manner; if I, said he, have male and female children, they being brothers and sisters cannot marry together; the eldest boy may chuse a wife from among the people, but his sons shall be only nobles; the children of the eldest girl, on the other hand, shall be princes and princesses, and her eldest son be sovereign; but her eldest daughter be the mother of the next sovereign, even tho' she should marry one of the common people; and, in defect of the eldest daughter, the next female relation to the person reigning shall be the mother of the future sovereign; the sons of the sovereign and princes shall lose their rank, but the daughters shall preserve theirs." "He then told us, that in order to preserve the excellent precepts he had given us, it was necessary to build a temple, into which it should be lawful for none but the princes and princesses to enter, to speak to the Spirit. That in the temple they should eternally preserve a fire, which he would bring down from the sun, from whence he himself had descended, that the wood with which the fire was supplied should be pure wood without bark; that eight wise men of the nation should be chosen for guarding the fire night and day; that those eight men should have a chief, who should see them do their duty, and that if any of them failed in it he should be put to death. He likewise ordered another temple to be built in a distant part of our nation, which was then very populous, and the eternal fire to be kept there also, that in case it should be extinguished in the one it might be brought from the other; in which case, till it was again lighted, the nation would be afflicted with a great mortality." "Our nation having consented to these conditions, he agreed to be our sovereign; and in presence of all the people he brought down the fire from the sun, upon some wood of the walnut-tree which he had prepared, which fire was deposited in both the temples. He lived a long time, and saw his children's children. To conclude, he instituted our feasts such as you see them." The Natchez have neither sacrifices, libations, nor offerings: their whole worship consists in preserving the eternal {316} fire, and this the Great Sun watches over with a peculiar attention. The Sun, who reigned when I was in the country, was extremely solicitous about it, and visited the temple every day. His vigilance had been awakened by a terrible hurricane which some years before had happened in the country, and was looked upon as an extraordinary event, the air being generally clear and serene in that climate. If to that calamity should be joined the extinction of the eternal fire, he was apprehensive their whole nation would be destroyed. One day, when the Great Sun called upon me, he gave me an account of a dreadful calamity that had formerly befallen the nation of the Natchez, in consequence, as he believed, of the extinction of the eternal fire. He introduced his account in the following manner: "Our nation was formerly very numerous and very powerful; it extended more than twelve days journey from east to west, and more than fifteen from south to north. We reckoned then 500 Suns, and you may judge by that what was the number of the nobles, of the people of rank, and the common people. Now in times past it happened, that one of the two guardians, who were upon duty in the temple, left it on some business, and the other fell asleep, and suffered the fire to go out. When he awaked and saw that he had incurred the penalty of death, he went and got some profane fire, as tho' he had been going to light his pipe, and with that he renewed the eternal fire. His transgression was by that means concealed; but a dreadful mortality immediately ensued, and raged for four years, during which many Suns and an infinite number of the people died. "The guardian at length sickened, and found himself dying, upon which he sent for the Great Sun, and confessed the heinous crime he had been guilty of. The old men were immediately assembled, and, by their advice, fire being snatched from the other temple, and brought into this, the mortality quickly ceased." Upon my asking him what he meant by "snatching the fire," he replied, "that it must always be brought away by violence, and that some blood must be shed, unless some tree on the road was set on fire by lightning, and {317} then the fire might be brought from thence; but that the fire of the sun was always preferable." It is impossible to express his astonishment when I told him, that it was a trifling matter to bring down fire from the sun, and that I had it in my power to do it whenever I pleased. As he was extremely desirous to see me perform that seeming miracle, I took the smallest of two burning glasses which I had brought from France, and placing some dry punk (or agaric) upon a chip of wood, I drew the focus of the glass upon it, and with a tone of authority pronounced the word _Caheuch_, that is, _come_, as tho' I had been commanding the fire to come down. The punk immediately smoking, I blew a little and made it flame to the utter astonishment of the Great Sun and his whole retinue, some of whom stood trembling with amazement and religious awe. The prince himself could not help exclaiming, "Ah, what an extraordinary thing is here!" I confirmed him in his idea, by telling him, that I greatly loved and esteemed that useful instrument, as it was most valuable, and was given to me by my grandfather, who was a very learned man. Upon his asking me, if another man could do the same thing with that instrument that he had seen me do, I told him that every man might do it, and I encouraged him to make the experiment himself. I accordingly put the glass in his hand, and leading it with mine over another piece of agaric, I desired him to pronounce the word _Caheuch_, which he did, but with a very faint and diffident tone; nevertheless, to his great amazement, he saw the agaric begin to smoke, which so confounded him that he dropt both the chip on which it was laid and the glass out of his hands, crying out, "Ah, what a miracle!" Their curiosity being now fully raised, they held a consultation in my yard, and resolved to purchase at any rate my wonderful glass, which would prevent any future mortality in their nation, in consequence of the extinction of the eternal fire. I, in the mean time, had gone out to my field, as if about some business; but in reality to have a hearty laugh at the comical scene which I had just occasioned. Upon my return the Great Sun entered my apartment with me, and laying his hand upon mine, told me, that tho' he loved all the French, he {318} was more my friend than of any of the rest, because most of the French carried all their understanding upon their tongue, but that I carried mine in my whole head and my whole body. After this preamble he offered to bargain for my glass, and desired me to set what value I pleased upon it, adding that he would not only cause the price to be paid by all the families of the nation, but would declare to them that they lay under an obligation to me for giving up to them a thing which saved them from a general mortality. I replied, that tho' I bore his whole nation in my heart, yet nothing made me part with my glass, but my affection for him and his brother; that, besides, I asked nothing in return but things necessary for my subsistence, such as corn, fowls, game, and fish, when they brought him any of these. He offered me twenty barrels of maiz, of 150 pounds each, twenty fowls, twenty turkies, and told me that he would send me game and fish every time his warriors brought him any, and his promise was punctually fulfilled. He engaged likewise not to speak any thing about it to the Frenchmen, lest they should be angry with me for parting with an instrument of so great a value. Next day the glass was tried before a general assembly of all the Suns, both men and women, the nobles, and the men of rank, who all met together at the temple; and the same effect being produced as the day before, the bargain was ratified; but it was resolved not to mention the affair to the common people, who, from their curiosity to know the secrets of their court, were assembled in great numbers not far from the temple, but only to tell them, that the whole nation of the Natchez were under great obligations to me. The Natchez are brought up in a most perfect submission to their sovereign; the authority which their princes exercise over them is absolutely despotic, and can be compared to nothing but that of the first Ottoman emperors. Like these, the Great Sun is absolute master of the lives and estates of his subjects, which he disposes of at his pleasure, his will being the only law; but he has this singular advantage over the Ottoman princes, that he has no occasion to fear any seditious tumults, or any conspiracy against his person. If he orders a man guilty of a capital crime to be put to death, the criminal {319} neither supplicates, nor procures intercession to be made for his life, nor attempts to run away. The order of the sovereign is executed on the spot, and nobody murmurs. But however absolute the authority of the Great Sun may be, and although a number of warriors and others attach themselves to him, to serve him, to follow him wherever he goes, and to hunt for him, yet he raises no stated impositions; and what he receives from those people appears given, not so much as a right due, as a voluntary homage, and a testimony of their love and gratitude. The Natchez begin their year in the month of March, as was the practice a long time in Europe, and divide it into thirteen moons. At every new moon they celebrate a feast, which takes its name from the principal fruits reaped in the preceding moon, or from animals that are then usually hunted. I shall give an account of one or two of these feasts as concisely as I can. The first moon is called that of the Deer, and begins their new year, which is celebrated by them with universal joy, and is at the same time an anniversary memorial of one of the most interesting events in their history. In former times a Great Sun, upon hearing a sudden tumult in his village, had left his hut in a great hurry, in order to appease it, and fell into the hands of his enemies; but was quickly after rescued by his warriors, who repulsed the invaders, and put them to flight. In order to preserve the remembrance of this honourable exploit, the warriors divide themselves into two bodies, distinguished from each other by the colour of their feathers. One of these bodies represents the invaders, and after raising loud shouts and cries, seize the Great Sun, who comes out of his hut undressed, and rubbing his eyes, as though he were just awake. The Great Sun defends himself intrepidly with a wooden tomahawk, and lays a great many of his enemies upon the ground, without however giving them a single blow, for he only seems to touch them with his weapon. In the mean time the other party come out of their ambuscade, attack the invaders, and, after fighting with them for some time, rescue their prince, and drive them into a wood, which is represented by an arbour {320} made of canes. During the whole time of the skirmish, the parties keep up the war-cry, or the cry of terror, as each of them seem to be victors or vanquished. The Great Sun is brought back to his hut in a triumphant manner; and the old men, women, and children, who were spectators of the engagement, rend the sky with their joyful acclamations. The Great Sun continues in his hut about half an hour, to repose himself after his great fatigues, which are such that an actor of thirty years of age would with difficulty have supported them, and he however, when I saw this feast, was above ninety. He then makes his appearance again to the people, who salute him with loud acclamations, which cease upon his proceeding towards the temple. When he is arrived in the middle of the court before the temple, he makes several gesticulations, then stretches out his arms horizontally, and remains in that posture motionless as a statute for half an hour. He is then relieved by the master of the ceremonies, who places himself in the same attitude, and half an hour after is relieved by the great chief of war, who remains as long in the same posture. When this ceremony is over, the Great Sun, who, when he was relieved, had returned to his hut, appears again before the people in the ornaments of his dignity, is placed upon his throne, which is a large stool with four feet cut out of one piece of wood, has a fine buffalo's skin thrown over his shoulders, and several furs laid upon his feet, and receives various presents from the women, who all the while continue to express their joy by their shouts and acclamations. Strangers are then invited to dine with the Great Sun, and in the evening there is a dance in his hut, which is about thirty feet square, and twenty feet high, and like the temple is built upon a mount of earth, about eight feet high, and sixty feet over on the surface. The second moon, which answers to our April, is called the Strawberry moon, as that fruit abounds then in great quantities. The third moon is that of the Small Corn. This moon is often impatiently looked for, their crop of large corn never sufficing to nourish them from one harvest to another. {321} The fourth is that of Water-melons, and answers to our June. The fifth moon is that of the Fishes: in this month also they gather grapes, if the birds have suffered them to ripen. The sixth, which answers to our August, is that of the Mulberries. At this feast they likewise carry fowls to the Great Sun. The seventh, which is that of Maiz, or Great Corn. This feast is beyond dispute the most solemn of all. It principally consists in eating in common, and in a religious manner, of new corn, which had been sown expressly with that design, with suitable ceremonies. This corn is sown upon a spot of ground never before cultivated; which ground is dressed and prepared by the warriors alone, who also are the only persons that sow the corn, weed it, reap it, and gather it. When this corn is near ripe, the warriors fix on a place proper for the general feast, and close adjoining to that they form a round granary, the bottom and sides of which are of cane; this they fill, with the corn, and when they have finished the harvest, and covered the granary, they acquaint the Great Sun, who appoints the day for the general feast. Some days before the feast, they build huts for the Great Sun, and for all the other families, round the granary, that of the Great Sun being raised upon a mount of earth about two feet high. On the feast-day the whole nation set out from their village at sun-rising, leaving behind only the aged and infirm that are not able to travel, and a few warriors, who are to carry the Great Sun on a litter upon their shoulders. The seat of this litter is covered with several deer skins, and to its four sides are fastened four bars which cross each other, and are supported by eight men, who at every hundred paces transfer their burden to eight other men, and thus successively transport it to the place where the feast is celebrated, which may be near two miles from the village. About nine o'clock the Great Sun comes out of his hut dressed in the ornaments of his dignity, and being placed in his litter, which has a canopy at the head formed of flowers, he is carried in a few minutes to the sacred granary, shouts of {322} joy re-echoing on all sides. Before he alights he makes the tour of the whole place deliberately, and when he comes before the corn, he salutes it thrice with the words, _hoo, hoo, hoo_, lengthened and pronounced respectfully. The salutation is repeated by the whole nation, who pronounce the word _hoo_ nine times distinctly, and at the ninth time he alights and places himself on his throne. Immediately after they light a fire by rubbing two pieces of wood violently against each other, and when every thing is prepared for dressing the corn, the chief of war, accompanied by the warriors belonging to each family, presents himself before the throne, and addresses the Sun in these words, "speak, for I hear thee." The sovereign then rises up, bows towards the four quarters of the world, and advancing to the granary, lifts his eyes and hands to heaven, and says, "Give us corn:" upon which the great chief of war, the princes and princesses, and all the men, thank him separately, by pronouncing the word _hoo_. The corn is then distributed, first to the female Suns, and then to all the women, who run with it to their huts, and dress it with the utmost dispatch. When the corn is dressed in all the huts, a plate of it is put into the hands of the Great Sun, who presents it to the four quarters of the world, and then says to the chief of war, _eat_; upon this signal the warriors begin to eat in all the huts; after them the boys of whatever age, excepting those who are on the breast; and last of all the women. When the warriors have finished their repast, they form themselves into two choirs before the huts, and sing war songs for half an hour; after which the chief of war, and all the warriors in succession, recount their brave exploits, and mention, in a boasting manner, the number of enemies they have slain. The youths are next allowed to harangue, and each tells in the best manner he can, not what he has done, but what he intends to do; and if his discourse merits approbation, he is answered by a general _hoo_; if not, the warriors hang down their heads and are silent. This great solemnity is concluded with a general dance by torch-light. Upwards of two hundred torches of dried canes, each of the thickness of a child, are lighted round the place, {323} where the men and women often continue dancing till day-light; and the following is the disposition of their dance. A man places himself on the ground with a pot covered with a deer-skin, in the manner of a drum, to beat time to the dances; round him the women form themselves into a circle, not joining hands, but at some distance from each other; and they are inclosed by the men in another circle, who have in each hand a chichicois, or calabash, with a stick thrust through it to serve for a handle. When the dance begins, the women move round {324} the men in the centre, from left to right, and the men contrariwise from right to left, and they sometimes narrow and sometimes widen their circles. In this manner the dance continues without intermission the whole night, new performers successively taking the place of those who are wearied and fatigued. [Illustration: _Dance of the Natchez indians_ (on p. 323)] Next morning no person is seen abroad before the Great Sun comes out of his hut, which is generally about nine o'clock, and then upon signal made by the drum, the warriors make their appearance distinguished into two troops, by the feathers which they wear on their heads. One of these troops is headed by the Great Sun, and the other by the chief of war, who begin a new diversion by tossing a ball of deer-skin stuffed with Spanish beard from the one to the other. The warriors quickly take part in the sport, and a violent contest ensues which of the two parties shall drive the ball to the hut of the opposite chief. The diversion generally lasts two hours, and the victors are allowed to wear the feathers of superiority till the following year, or till the next time they play at the ball. After this the warriors perform the war dance; and last of all they go and bathe; an exercise which they are very fond of when they are heated or fatigued. The rest of that day is employed as the preceding; for the feasts holds as long as any of the corn remains. When it is all eat up, the Great Sun is carried back in his litter, and they all return to the village, after which he sends the warriors to hunt both for themselves and him. The eighth moon is that of Turkies, and answers to our October. The ninth moon is that of the Buffalo; and it is then they go to hunt that animal. Having discovered whereabouts the herd feeds, they go out in a body to hunt them. Young and old, girls and married women, except those who are with child, are all of the party, for there is generally work for them all. Some nations are a little later in going out to this hunting, that they may find the cows fatter, and the herds more numerous. The tenth moon is that of Bears; at this time of hunting the feasts are not so grand and solemn, because great part of the nations are accompanying the hunters in their expeditions. {325} The eleventh answers to our January, and is named as Cold-meal Moon. The twelfth is that of Chesnuts. That fruit has been gathered long before, nevertheless it gives its name to this moon. Lastly, the thirteenth is that of Walnuts, and it is added to compleat the year. It is then they break the nuts to make bread of them by mixing with them the flour of Maiz. The feasts which I saw celebrated in the chief village of the Natchez, which is the residence of the Great Sun, are celebrated in the same manner in all the villages of the nation, which are each governed by a Sun, who is subordinate to the Great Sun, and acknowledge his absolute authority. It is not to be conceived how exact these people are in assigning the pre-eminence to the men. In every assembly, whether of the whole nation in general, or of several families together, or of one family, the youngest boys have the preference to the women of the most advanced age; and at their meals, when their food is distributed, none is presented to the women, till all the males have received their share, so that a boy of two years old is served before his mother. The women being always employed, without ever being diverted from their duty, or seduced by the gallantries of lovers, never think of objecting to the propriety of a custom, in which they have been constantly brought up. Never having seen any example that contradicted it, they have not the least idea of varying from it. Thus being submissive from the habit, as well as from reason, they, by their docility, maintain that peace in their families, which they find established upon entering them. {326} SECTION III. _Of their Marriages, and Distinction of Ranks._ Paternal authority, as I have elsewhere observed, is not less sacred and inviolable than the pre-eminence of the men. It still subsists among the Natchez, such as it was in the first ages of the world. The children belong to the father, and while he lives they are under his power. They live with him, they, their wives, and their children; the same hut contains the whole family. The old man alone commands there, and nothing but death puts an end to his empire. As these people have seldom or rather never any differences among them, the paternal authority appears in nothing more conspicuous than in the marriages. When the boys and girls arrive at the perfect age of puberty, they visit each other familiarly, and are suffered so to do. The girls, sensible that they will be no longer mistresses of their heart, when once they are married, know how to dispose of it to advantage, and form their wardrobe by the sale of their favours; for there, as well as in other countries, nothing for nothing. The lover, far from having any thing to object to this, on the contrary, rates the merit of his future spouse, in proportion to the fruits she has produced. But when they are married they have no longer any intrigues, neither the husband nor the wife, because their heart is no longer their own. They may divorce their wives; it is, however, so rare to see the man and wife part, that during the eight years I lived in their neighbourhood, I knew but one example of it, and then each took with them the children of their own sex. If a young man has obtained a girl's consent, and they desire to marry, it is not their fathers, and much less their mothers, or male or female relations who take upon them to, conclude the match; it is the heads of the two families alone, who are usually great-grandfathers, and sometimes more. These two old men have an interview, in which, after the young man has formally made a demand of the girl, they examine if there be any relation between the two parties, and if any, what degree {327} it is; for they do not marry within the third degree. Notwithstanding this interview, and the two parties be found not within the prohibited degrees, yet if the proposed wife be disagreeable to the father, grandfather, &c. of the husband, the match is never concluded. On the other hand, ambition, avarice, and the other passions, so common with us, never stifle in the breasts of the fathers those dictates of nature, which make us desire to see ourselves perpetuated in our offspring, nor influence them to thwart their children, improperly, and much less to force their inclinations. By an admirable harmony, very worthy of our imitation, they only marry those who love one another, and those who love one another, are only married when their parents agree to it. It is rare for young men to marry before they be five-and-twenty. Till they arrive at that age they are looked upon as too weak, without understanding and experience. When the marriage-day is once fixed, preparations are made for it both by the men and women; the men go a hunting, and the women prepare the maiz, and deck out the young man's cabin to the best of their power. On the wedding-day the old man on the part of the girl leaves his hut, and conducts the bride to the hut of the bridegroom; his whole family follow him in order and silence; those who are inclined to laugh or be merry, indulging themselves only in a smile. He finds before the other hut all the relations of the bridegroom, who receive and salute him with their usual expression of congratulation, namely, _hoo, hoo_, repeated several times. When he enters the hut, the old man on the part of the bridegroom says to him in their language, _are you there?_ to which he answers, _yes_. He is next desired to sit down, and then not a word passes for near ten minutes, it being one of their prudent customs to suffer a guest to rest himself a little after his arrival, before they begin a conversation; and besides, they look upon the time spent in compliments as thrown away. After both the old men are fully rested, they rise, and the bridegroom and bride appearing before them, they ask them, if they love each other? and if they are willing to take one another for man and wife? observing to them at the same time, {328} that they ought not to marry unless they propose to live amicably together; that nobody forces them, and that as they are each other's free choice, they will be thrust out of the family if they do not live in peace. After this remonstrance the father of the bridegroom delivers the present which his son is to make into his hands, the bride's father at the same time placing himself by her side. The bridegroom then addresses the bride; "Will you have me for your husband?" she answers, "Most willingly, and it gives me joy; love me, as well as I love you; for I love, and ever will love none but you." At these words the bridegroom covers the head of the bride with the present which he received from his father, and says to her, "I love you, and have therefore taken you for my wife, and this I give to your parents, to purchase you." He then gives the present to the bride's father. The husband wears a tuft of feathers fastened to his hair, which is in the form of a cue, and hangs over his left ear, to which is fastened a sprig of oak with the leaves on, and in his left hand he bears a bow and arrows. The young wife bears in her left hand a small branch of laurel, and in her right a stalk of maiz, which was delivered to her by her mother at the time she received the present from her husband. This stalk she presents to her husband, who takes it from her with his right hand, and says, "I am your husband;" she answers, and "I am your wife." They then shake hands reciprocally with each other's relations; after which he leads her towards the bed, and says, "There is our bed, keep it tight;" which is as much as to say, do not defile the nuptial bed. The marriage ceremony being thus concluded, the bridegroom and the bride, with their friends, sit down to a repast, and in the evening they begin their dances, which continue often till day-light. The nation of the Natchez is composed of nobility and common people. The common people are named in their language _Miche-Miche-Quipy_, that is, _Stinkards_; a name however which gives them great offense, and which it is proper to avoid pronouncing before them, as it would not fail to put them into a very bad humour. The common people are to the {329} last degree submissive to the nobility, who are divided into Suns, nobles, and men of rank. The Suns are the descendants of the man and woman who pretended to have come down from the sun. Among the other laws they gave to the Natchez, they ordained that their race should always be distinguished from the bulk of the nation, and that none of them should ever be put to death upon any account. They established likewise another usage which is found among no other people, except a nation of Scythians mentioned by Herodotus. They ordained that nobility should only be transmitted by the women. Their male and female children were equally named Suns, and regarded as such, but with this difference, that the males enjoyed this privilege only in their own person, and during their own lives. Their children had only the title of nobles, and the male children of those nobles were only men of rank. Those men of rank, however, if they distinguished themselves by their war-like exploits, might raise themselves again to the rank of nobles; but their children became only men of rank, and the children of those men of rank, as well as of the others, were confounded with the common people, and classed among the Stinkards. Thus as these people are very long-lived, and frequently see the fourth generation, it often happens that a Sun sees some of his posterity among the Stinkards; but they are at great pains to conceal this degradation of their race, especially from strangers, and almost totally disown those great-grand children; for when they speak of them they only say, they are dear to them. It is otherwise with the female posterity of the Suns, for they continue through all generations to enjoy their rank. The descendants of the Suns being pretty numerous, it might be expected that those who are out of the prohibited degrees might intermarry, rather than ally with the Stinkards; but a most barbarous custom obliges them to their mis-alliances. When any of the Suns, either male or female, die, their law ordains that the husband or wife of the Sun shall be put to death on the day of the interment of the deceased: now as another law prohibits the issue of the Suns from being put to death, it is therefore impossible for the descendants of the Suns to match with each other. {330} Whether it be that they are tired of this law, or that they with their Suns descended of French blood, I shall not determine; but the wife of the Great Sun came one day to visit me so early in the morning that I was not got out of bed. She was accompanied with her only daughter, a girl between fourteen and fifteen years of age, handsome and well shaped; but she only sent in her own name by my slave; so that without getting up, I made no scruple of desiring her to come in. When her daughter appeared I was not a little surprized; but I shook hands with them both, and desired them to sit down. The daughter sat down on the foot of my bed, and kept her eyes continually fixed on me, while the mother addressed herself to me in the most serious and pathetic tone. After some compliments to me, and commendations of our customs and manners, she condemned the barbarous usages that prevailed among themselves, and ended with proposing me as a husband for her daughter, that I might have it in my power to civilize their nation by abolishing their inhuman customs, and introducing those of the French. As I foresaw the danger of such an alliance, which would be opposed by the whole nation of the Natchez, and at the same time was sensible that the resentment of a slighted woman is very formidable, I returned her such an answer as might shew my great respect for her daughter, and prevent her from making the same application to some brainless Frenchman, who, by accepting the offer, might expose the French settlement to some disastrous event. I told her that her daughter was handsome, and pleased me much, as she had a good heart, and a well turned mind; but the laws we received from the Great Spirit, forbad us to marry women who did not pray; and that those Frenchmen who lived with their daughters took them only for a time; but it was not proper that the daughter of the Great Sun should be disposed of in that manner. The mother acquiesced in my reasons; but when they took their leave I perceived plainly that the daughter was far from being satisfied. I never saw her from that day forwards; and I heard she was soon after married to another. From this relation the reader may perceive that there needs nothing but prudence and good sense to persuade those people {331} to what is reasonable, and to preserve their friendship without interruption. We may safely affirm that the differences we have had with them have been more owing to the French than to them. When they are treated insolently or oppressively, they have no less sensibility of injuries than others. If those who have occasion to live among them, will but have sentiments of humanity, they will in them meet with men. SECTION IV. _Of the Temples, Tombs, Burials, and other religious Ceremonies of the People of_ Louisiana. I shall now proceed to give some account of the customs that prevail in general among all the nations of North America; and these have a great resemblance to each other, as there is hardly any difference in the manner of thinking and acting among the several nations. These people have no religion expressed by any external worship. The strongest evidences that we discover of their having any religion at all, are their temples, and the eternal fire therein kept up by some of them. Some of them indeed do not keep up the eternal fire, and have turned their temples into charnel-houses. However, all those people, without exception, acknowledge a supreme Being, but they never on any account address their prayers to him, from their fixt belief that God, whom they call the Great Spirit, is so good, that he cannot do evil, whatever provocation he may have. They believe the existence of two Great Spirits, a good and a bad. They do not, as I have said, invoke the Good Spirit; but they pray to the bad, in order to avert from their persons and possessions the evils which he might inflict upon them. They pray to the evil spirit, not because they think him almighty; for it is the Good Spirit whom they believe so; but because, according to them, he governs the air, the seasons, the rain, the fine weather, and all that may benefit or hurt the productions of the earth. They are very superstitious in respect to the flight of birds, and the passage of some animals that are seldom seen in their country. They are much inclined to hear and believe {332} diviners, especially in regard to discovering things to come; and they are kept in their errors by the Jongleurs, who find their account in them. The natives have all the same manner of bringing up their children, and are in general well shaped, and their limbs are justly proportioned. The Chicasaws are the most fierce and arrogant, which they undoubtedly owe to their frequent intercourse with the English of Carolina. They are brave; a disposition they may have inherited as the remains of that martial spirit that prompted them to invade their neighbouring nations, by which they themselves were at length greatly weakened. All the nations on the north of the colony are likewise brave, but they are more humane than the Chicasaws, and have not their high-spirited pride. All these nations of the north, and all those of Louisiana, have been inviolably attached to us ever since our establishment in this colony. The misfortune of the Natchez, who, without dispute, were the finest of all those nations, and who loved us, ought not in the least to lessen our sentiments of those people, who are in general distinguished for their natural goodness of character. All those nations are prudent, and speak little; they are sober in their diet, but they are passionately fond of brandy, though they are singular in never tasting any wine, and neither know nor care to learn any composition of liquors. In their meals they content themselves with maiz prepared various ways, and sometimes they use fish and flesh. The meat that they eat is chiefly recommended to them for being wholesome; and therefore I have conjectured that dog's flesh, for which we have such an aversion, must however be as good as it is beautiful, since they rate it so highly as to use it by way of preference in their feasts of ceremony. They eat no young game, as they find plenty of the largest size, and do not think delicacy of taste alone any recommendation; and therefore, in general, they would not taste our ragouts, but, condemning them as unwholesome, prefer to them gruel made of maiz, called in the colony Sagamity. The Chactaws are the only ugly people among all the nations in Louisiana; which is chiefly owing to the fat with which {333} they rub their skin and their hair, and to their manner of defending themselves against the moskitos, which they keep off by lighting fires of fir-wood, and standing in the smoke. Although all the people of Louisiana have nearly the same usages and customs, yet as any nation is more or less populous, it has proportionally more or fewer ceremonies. Thus when the French first arrived in the colony, several nations kept up the eternal fire, and observed other religious ceremonies, which they have now disused, since their numbers have been greatly diminished. Many of them still continue to have temples, but the common people never enter these, nor strangers, unless peculiarly favoured by the nation. As I was an intimate friend of the sovereign of the Natchez, he shewed me their temple, which is about thirty feet square, and stands upon an artificial mount about eight feet high, by the side of a small river. The mount slopes insensibly from the main front, which is northwards, but on the other sides it is somewhat steeper. The four corners of the temple consist of four posts, about a foot and an half diameter, and ten feet high, each made of the heart of the cypress tree, which is incorruptible. The side-posts are of the same wood, but only about a foot square; and the walls are of mud, about nine inches thick; so that in the inside there is a hollow between every post. The inner space is divided from east to west into two apartments one of which is twice as large as the other. In the largest apartment the eternal fire is kept, and there is likewise a table or altar in it, about four feet high, six long, and two broad. Upon this table lie the bones of the late Great Sun in a coffin of canes very neatly made. In the inner apartment, which is very dark, as it receives no light but from the door of communication, I could meet with nothing but two boards, on which were placed some things like small toys, which I had not light to peruse. The roof is in the form of a pavilion, and very neat both within and without, and on the top of it are placed three wooden birds, twice as large as a goose, with their heads turned towards the east. The corner and side-posts, as has been mentioned, rise above the earth ten feet high, and it is said they are as much sunk under ground; it cannot therefore but appear surprising how the natives could transport such large beams, fashion them, and raise them {334} upright, when we know of no machines they had for that purpose. Besides the eight guardians of the temple, two of whom are always on watch, and the chief of those guardians, there also belongs to the service of the temple a master of the ceremonies, who is also master of the mysteries; since, according to them, he converses very familiarly with the Spirit. Above all these persons is the Great Sun, who is at the same time chief priest and sovereign of the nation. The temples of some of the nations of Louisiana are very mean, and one would often be apt to mistake them for the huts of private persons, but to those who are acquainted with their manners, they are easily distinguishable, as they have always before the door two posts formed like the ancient Termini, that is, having the upper part cut into the shape of a man's head. The door of the temple, which is pretty weighty, is placed between the wall and those two posts, so that children may not be able to remove it, to go and play in the temple. The private huts have also posts before their doors, but these are never formed like Termini. None of the nations of Louisiana are acquainted with the custom of burning their dead, which was practised by the Greeks and Romans; nor with that of the Egyptians, who studied to preserve them to perpetuity. The different American nations have a most religious attention for their dead, and each have some peculiar customs in respect to them; but all of them either inter them, or place them in tombs, and carefully carry victuals to them for some time. These tombs are either within their temples, or close adjoining to them, or in their neighbourhood. They are raised about three feet above the earth, and rest upon four pillars, which are forked stakes fixed fast in the ground. The tomb, or rather bier, is about eight feet long, and a foot and a half broad; and after the body is placed upon it, a kind of basket-work of twigs is wove round it, and covered with mud, an opening being left at the head for placing the victuals that are presented to the dead person. When the body is all rotted but the bones, these are taken out of the tomb, and placed in a box of canes, which is deposited in the temple. They usually weep and lament for their dead three days; but for those who are killed in war, they make a much longer and more grievous lamentation. {335} Among the Natchez the death of any of their Suns, as I have before observed, is a most fatal event; for it is sure to be attended with the destruction of a great number of people of both sexes. Early in the spring 1725, the Stung Serpent, who was the brother of the Great Sun, and my intimate friend, was seized with a mortal distemper, which filled the whole nation of the Natchez with the greatest consternation and terror; for the two brothers had mutually engaged to follow each other to the land of spirits; and if the Great Sun should kill himself for the sake of his brother, very many people would likewise be put to death. When the Stung Serpent was despaired of, the chief of the guardians of the temple came to me in the greatest confusion, and acquainting me with the mutual engagements of the two brothers, begged of me to interest myself in preserving the Great Sun, and consequently a great part of the nation. He made the same request to the commander of the fort. Accordingly we were no sooner informed of the death of the Stung Serpent, than the commander, some of the principal Frenchmen, and I, went in a body to the hut of the Great Sun. We found him in despair; but, after some time, he seemed to be influenced by the arguments I used to dissuade him from putting himself to death. The death of the Stung Serpent was published by the firing of two muskets, which were answered by the other villages, and immediately cries and lamentations were heard on all sides. The Great Sun, in the mean time, remained inconsolable, and sat bent forwards, with his eyes towards the ground. In the evening, while we were still in his hut, he made a sign to his favourite wife; who in consequence of that threw a pailful of water on the fire, and extinguished it. This was a signal for extinguishing all the fires of the nation, and filled every one with terrible alarms, as it denoted that the Great Sun was still resolved to put himself to death. I gently chided him for altering his former resolution, but he assured me he had not, and desired us to go and sleep securely. We accordingly left him, pretending to rely on the assurance he had given us; but we took up our lodging in the hut of his chief servants, and stationed a soldier at the door of his hut, whom we ordered to give us notice of whatever happened. There was no need to fear our being betrayed by the wife of {336} the Great Sun, or any others about him; for none of them had the least inclination to die, if they could help it. On the contrary, they all expressed the greatest thankfulness and gratitude to us for our endeavors to avert the threatened calamity from their nation. Before we went to our lodgings we entered the hut of the deceased, and found him on his bed of state, dressed in his finest cloaths, his face painted with vermilion, shod as if for a journey, with his feather-crown on his head. To his bed were fastened his arms, which consisted of a double-barreled gun, a pistol, a bow, a quiver full of arrows, and a tomahawk. Round his bed were placed all the calumets of peace he had received during his life, and on a pole, planted in the ground near it, hung a chain of forty-six rings of cane painted red, to express the number of enemies he had slain. All his domesticks were round him, and they presented victuals to him at the usual hours, as if he were alive. The company in his hut were composed of his favourite wife, of a second wife, which he kept in another village, and visited when his favourite was with child; of his chancellor, his physician, his chief domestic, his pipe-bearer, and some old women, who were all to be strangled at his interment. To these victims a noble woman voluntarily joined herself, resolving, from her friendship to the Stung Serpent, to go and live with him in the country of spirits. I regretted her on many accounts, but particularly as she was intimately acquainted with the virtues of simples, had by her skill saved many of our people's lives, and given me many useful instructions. After we had satisfied our curiosity in the hut of the deceased, we retired to our hut, where we spent the night. But at day-break we were suddenly awaked, and told that it was with difficulty the Great Sun was kept from killing himself. We hastened to his hut, and upon entering it I remarked dismay and terror painted upon the countenances of all who were present. The Great Sun held his gun by the butt-end, and seemed enraged that the other Suns had seized upon it, to prevent him from executing his purpose. I addressed myself to him, and after opening the pan of the lock, to let the priming fall out, I chided him gently for his not acting according to his former resolution. He pretended at first {337} not to see me; but, after some time, he let go his hold of the musket, and shook hands with me without speaking a word. I then went towards his wife, who all this while had appeared in the utmost agony and terror, and I asked her if she was ill. She answered me, "Yes, very ill," and added, "if you leave us, my husband is a dead man, and all the Natchez will die; stay then, for he opens his ears only to your words, which have the sharpness and strength of arrows. You are his true friend, and do not laugh when you speak, like most of the Frenchmen." The Great Sun at length consented to order his fire to be again lighted, which was the signal for lighting the other fires of the nation, and dispelled all their apprehensions. Soon after the natives begun the dance of death, and prepared for the funeral of the Stung Serpent. Orders were given to put none to death on that occasion, but those who were in the hut of the deceased. A child however had been strangled already by its father and mother, which ransomed their lives upon the death of the Great Sun, and raised them from the rank of Stinkards to that of Nobles. Those who were appointed to die were conducted twice a day, and placed in two rows before the temple, where they acted over the scene of their death, each accompanied by eight of their own relations who were to be their executioners, and by that office exempted themselves from dying upon the death of any of the Suns, and likewise raised themselves to the dignity of men of rank. Mean while thirty warriors brought in a prisoner, who had formerly been married to a female Sun; but, upon her death, instead of submitting to die with her, had fled to New Orleans, and offered to become the hunter and slave of our commander in chief. The commander accepting his offer, and granting him his protection, he often visited his countrymen, who, out of complaisance to the commander, never offered to apprehend him: but that officer being now returned to France, and the runaway appearing in the neighbourhood, he was now apprehended, and numbered among the other victims. Finding himself thus unexpectedly trapped, he began to cry bitterly; but three old women, who were his relations, offering to die in his stead, he was not only again exempted from death, but {338} raised to the dignity of a man of rank. Upon this he afterwards became insolent, and profiting by what he had seen and learned at New Orleans, he easily, on many occasions, made his fellow-countrymen his dupes. [Illustration: _Burial of the Stung Serpent_] On the day of the interment, the wife of the deceased made a very moving speech to the French who were present, recommending her children, to whom she also addressed herself, to their friendship, and advising perpetual union between {339} the two nations. Soon after the master of the ceremonies appeared in a red-feathered crown, which half encircled his head, having a red staff in his hand in the form of a cross, at the end of which hung a garland of black feathers. All the upper part of his body was painted red, excepting his arms, and from his girdle to his knees hung a fringe of feathers, the rows of which were alternately white and red. When he came before the hut of the deceased, he saluted him with a great _hoo_, and then began the cry of death, in which he was followed by the whole people. Immediately after the Stung Serpent was brought out on his bed of state, and was placed on a litter, which six of the guardians of the temple bore on their shoulders. The procession then began, the master of the ceremonies walking first, and after him the oldest warrior, holding in one hand the pole with the rings of canes, and in the other the pipe of war, a mark of the dignity of the deceased. Next followed the corpse, after which came those who were to die at the interment. The whole procession went three times round the hut of the deceased, and then those who carried the corpse proceeded in a circular kind of march, every turn intersecting the former, until they came to the temple. At every turn the dead child was thrown by its parents before the bearers of the corpse, that they might walk over it; and when the corpse was placed in the temple the victims were immediately strangled. The Stung Serpent and his two wives were buried in the same grave within the temple; the other victims were interred in different parts, and after the ceremony they burnt, according to custom, the hut of the deceased. {340} SECTION V. _Of the Arts and Manufactures of the Natives._ The arts and manufactures of the natives are so insignificant, when compared with ours, that I should not have thought of treating of them, if some persons of distinction had not desired me to say something of them, in order to shew the industry of those people, and how far invention could carry them, in supplying those wants which human nature is continually exposed to. As they would have frequent occasion for fire, the manner of lighting it at pleasure must have been one of the first things that they invented. Not having those means which we use, they bethought themselves of another ingenious method which they generally practise. They take a dry dead stick from a tree, about the thickness of their finger, and pressing one end against another dry piece of wood, they turn it round as swiftly as they can till they see the smoke appear, then blowing gently soon make the wood flame. Cutting instruments are almost continually wanted; but as they had no iron, which, of all metals, is the most useful in human society, they were obliged, with infinite pains, to form hatchets out of large flints, by sharpening their thin edge, and making a hole through them for receiving the handle. To cut down trees with these axes would have been almost an impracticable work; they were therefore obliged to light fires round the roots of them, and to cut away the charcoal as the fire eat into the tree. They supplied the want of knives for cutting their victuals with thin splits of a hard cane, which they could easily renew as they wore out. They made their bows of acacia wood, which is hard and easily cleft; and at first their bowstrings were made of the bark of the wood, but now they make them of the thongs of hides. Their arrows are made of a shrub that sends out long straight shoots; but they make some of small hard reeds: those that are intended for war, or against the buffalo, the deer, or large carp, are pointed with the sharp scale of the armed fish, which is neatly fastened to the head of the arrow with splits of cane and fish-glue. {341} The skins of the beasts which they killed in hunting naturally presented themselves for their covering; but they must be dressed however before they could be properly used. After much practice they at length discovered that the brain of any animal suffices to dress its skin. To sew those skins they use the tendons of animals beat and split into threads, and to pierce the skins they apply the bone of a heron's leg, sharpened like an awl. To defend themselves against the inclemencies of the weather, they built huts of wood, which were close and strong enough to resist the impetuosity of the wind. These huts are each a perfect square; none of them are less than fifteen feet square, and some of them are more than thirty feet in each of their fronts. They erect these huts in the following manner: they bring from the woods several young walnut-trees, about four inches in diameter, and thirteen or twenty feet high; they plant the strongest of these in the four corners, and the others fifteen inches from each other in straight lines, for the sides of the building; a pole is then laid horizontally along the sides in the inside, and all the poles are strongly fastened to it by split canes. Then the four corner poles are bent inwards till they all meet in the centre, where they are strongly fastened together; the side-poles are then bent in the same direction, and bound down to the others; after which they make a mortar of mud mixed with Spanish beard, with which they fill up all the chinks, leaving no opening but the door, and the mud they cover both outside and inside with mats made of the splits of cane. The roof is thatched with turf and straw intermixed, and over all is laid a mat of canes, which is fastened to the tops of the walls by the creeping plant. These huts will last twenty years without any repairs. The natives having once built for themselves fixed habitations, would next apply themselves to the cultivation of the ground. Accordingly, near all their habitations, they have fields of maiz, and of another nourishing grain called Choupichoul, which grows without culture. For dressing their fields they invented hoes, which are formed in the shape of an L, having the lower part flat and sharp; and to take the husk {342} from their corn they made large wooden mortars, by hollowing the trunks of trees with fire. To prepare their maiz for food, and likewise their venison and game, there was a necessity for dressing them over the fire, and for this purpose they bethought themselves of earthen ware, which is made by the women, who not only form the vessel, but dig up and mix the clay. In this they are tolerable artists; they make kettles of an extraordinary size, pitchers with a small opening, gallon bottles with long necks, pots or pitchers for their bear oil, which will hold forty pints; lastly, large and small plates in the French fashion: I had some made out of curiosity upon the model of my delf-ware, which were a very pretty red. For sifting the flour of their maiz, and for other uses, the natives make sieves of various finenesses of the splits of cane. To supply themselves with fish they make nets of the bark of the limetree; but the large fish they shoot with arrows. The beds of the natives are placed round the sides of their huts, about a foot and a half from the ground, and are formed in this manner. Six forked stakes support two poles, which are crossed by three others, over which canes are laid so close as to form an even surface, and upon these are laid several bear skins, which serve for the bed furniture; a buffalo's skin is the coverlet, and a sack stuft with Spanish beard is the bolster. The women sometimes add to this furniture of the bed mats wove of canes, dyed of three colours, which colours in the weaving are formed into various figures. These mats render the bottom of the bed still smoother, and in hot weather they remove the bear skins and lie upon them. Their seats or stools, which they seldom use, are about six or seven inches high, and the seat and feet are made of the same piece. The women likewise make a kind of hampers to carry corn, flesh, fish, or any other thing which they want to transport from one place to another; they are round, deeper than broad, and of all sizes. Here, as well as in other countries, the women take special care to lay up securely all their trinkets and finery. They make baskets with long lids that roll doubly over them, and in these they place their ear-rings and pendants, their {343} bracelets, garters, their ribbands for their hair, and their vermilion for painting themselves, if they have any, but when they have no vermilion they boil ochre, and paint themselves with that. The women also make the men's girdles and garters, and the collars for carrying their burdens. These collars are formed of two belts of the breadth of the hand of bear's skin, dressed so as to soften it, and these belts are joined together by long cross straps of the same leather, that serve to tie the bundles, which are oftener carried by the women than the men. One of the broad belts goes over their shoulders, and the other across their forehead, so that those two parts mutually ease each other. The women also make several works in embroidery with the skin of the porcupine, which is black and white, and is cut by them into thin threads, which they dye of different colours. Their designs greatly resemble those which we meet with on gothic architecture; they are formed of straight lines, which when they meet always cross each other, or turn off at square angles. The conveniences for passing rivers would soon be suggested to them by the floating of wood upon the water. Accordingly one of their methods of crossing rivers is upon floats of canes, which are called by them Cajeu, and are formed in this manner: They cut a great number of canes, which they tie up into faggots, part of which they fasten together side-ways, and over these they lay a row crossways, binding all close together, and then launching it into the water. For carrying a great number of men with their necessary baggage, they soon found it necessary to have other conveniences; and nothing appeared so proper for this as some of their large trees hollowed; of these they accordingly made their pettyaugres, which as I mentioned above are sometimes so large as to carry ten or twelve ton weight. These pettyaugres are conducted by short oars, called Pagaies, about six feet long, with broad points, which are not fastened to the vessel, but managed by the rowers like shovels. {344} SECTION VI. _Of the Attire and Diversions of the Natives: Of their Meals and Fastings._ The natives of Louisiana, both men and women, wear a very thin dress in the summer. During the heat the men wear only a little apron of deer skin, dressed white or dyed black; but hardly any but chiefs wear black aprons. Those who live in the neighbourhood of the French settlements wear aprons of coarse limbourgs, a quarter of a yard broad, and the whole breadth of the cloth, or five quarters long; these aprons are fastened by a girdle about their waists, and tucked up between the thighs. I During the heats the women wear only half a yard of limbourg stuff about their middle, which covers them down to the knees; or in place of that they use deer skin; and the rest of the body both in men and women is naked. Many of the women wear cloaks of the bark of the mulberry-tree, or of the feathers of swans, turkies, or India ducks. The bark they take from young mulberry shoots that rise from the roots of trees that have been cut down; after it is dried in the sun they beat it to make all the woody part fall off, and they give the threads that remain a second beating, after which they bleach them by exposing them to the dew. When they are well whitened they spin them about the coarseness of pack-thread, and weave them in the following manner: they plant two stakes in the ground about a yard and a half asunder, and having stretched a cord from the one to the other, they fasten their threads of bark double to this cord, and then interweave them in a curious manner into a cloak of about a yard square with a wrought border round the edges. The young boys and girls go quite naked; but the girls at the age of eight or ten put on a little petticoat, which is a kind of fringe made of threads of mulberry bark. The boys do not wear any covering till they are twelve or thirteen years of age. Some women even in hot weather have a small cloak wrapt round like a waistcoat; but when the cold sets in, they wear a {345} second, the middle of which passes under the right arm, and the two ends are fastened over the left shoulder, so that the two arms are at liberty, and one of the breasts is covered. They wear nothing on their heads; their hair is suffered to grow to its full length, except in the fore-part, and it is tied in a cue behind in a kind of net made of mulberry threads. They carefully pick out all the hairs that grow upon any part of the body. The shoes of the men and women are of the same fashion, but they rarely wear any but when they travel. They are made of deer-skin, the sole and upper-leather of the same piece, which is sewed together on the upper part of the foot; they are cut about three inches longer than the foot, and are folded over the toes; the quarters are about nine inches high, and fasten round the leg like a buskin. The womens' ear-rings are made of the center part of a large shell, called burgo, which is about the thickness of one's little finger, and there is a hole in the ear about that size for holding it. Their necklaces are composed of several strings of longish or roundish kernel-stones, somewhat resembling porcelaine; and with the smallest of these kernel-stones they ornament their furs, garters, &c. From their early youth the women get a streak pricked cross their nose; some of them have a streak pricked down the middle of their chin; others in different parts, especially the women of the nations who have the R in their language. I have seen some who were pricked all over the upper part of the body, not even excepting the breasts which are extremely sensible. In the cold weather the men cover themselves with a shirt made of two dressed deer-skins, which is more like a fur night-gown than a shirt: they likewise, at the same time, wear a kind of breeches, which cover both the thighs and the legs. If the weather be very severe, they throw over all a buffalo's skin, which is dressed with the wool on, and this they keep next to their body to increase the warmth. In the countries where they hunt beavers, they make robes of six skins of those animals sewed together. {346} The youths here are as much taken up about dress, and as fond of vying with each other in finery as in other countries; they paint themselves with vermilion very often; they deck themselves with bracelets made of the ribs of deer, which are bent by the means of boiling water, and when polished, look as fine as ivory; they wear necklaces like the women, and sometimes have a fan in their hand; they clip off the hair from the crown of the head, and there place a piece of swan's skin with the down on; to a few hairs that they leave on that part they fasten the finest white feathers that they can meet with; a part of their hair which is suffered to grow long, they weave into a cue, which hangs over their left ear. They likewise have their nose pricked, but no other part till they are warriors, and have performed some brave action, such as killing an enemy, and bringing off his scalp. Those who have signalized themselves by some gallant exploit, cause a tomahawk to be pricked on their left shoulder, underneath which is also pricked the hieroglyphic sign of the conquered nation. Whatever figure they intend to prick, is first traced on the skin with a bit of charcoal, and having fixed six needles in a piece of wood in two rows, in such a manner that they only stick out about the tenth part of an inch, they prick the skin all over the mark, and then rub charcoal dust over the part, which enters the punctures, and leaves a mark that can never be effaced. This pricking generally gives a fit of sickness to the patient, who is obliged for some time to live only on boiled maiz. The warriors also pierce the lower part of their ears, and make a hole an inch diameter, which they fill with iron wire. Besides these ear-rings they have a belt hung round with little bells, if they can purchase any from the French, so that they march more like mules than men. When they can get no bells, they fasten to their belts wild gourds with two or three pebbles in each. The chief ornament of the sovereigns, is their crown of feathers; this crown is composed of a black bonnet of net work, which is fastened to a red diadem about two inches broad. The diadem is embroidered with white kernel-stones, and surmounted with white feathers, which in the fore-part are about eight inches long, and half as much behind. This crown or feather hat makes a very pleasing appearance. {347} All nations are not equally ingenious at inventing feasts, shews, and diversions, for employing the people agreeably, and filling up the void of their usual employments. The natives of Louisiana have invented but a very few diversions, and these perhaps serve their turn as well as a greater variety would do. The warriors practise a diversion which is called the game of _the pole_, at which only two play together at a time. Each has a pole about eight feet long, resembling a Roman f, and the game consists in rolling a flat round stone, about three inches diameter and an inch thick, with the edge somewhat sloping, and throwing the pole at the same time in such a manner, that when the stone rests, the pole may touch it or be near it. Both antagonists throw their poles at the same time, and he whose pole is nearest the stone counts one, and has the right of rolling the stone. The men fatigue themselves much at this game, as they run after their poles at every throw; and some of them are so bewitched by it, that they game away one piece of furniture after another. These gamesters however are very rare, and are greatly discountenanced by the rest of the people. The women play with small bits of cane, about eight or nine inches long. Three of these they hold loosely in one hand, and knock them to the ground with another; if two of them fall with the round side undermost, she that played counts one; but if only one, she counts nothing. They are ashamed to be seen or found playing; and as far as I could discover, they never played for any stake. The young people, especially the girls, have hardly any kind of diversion but that of the ball: this consists in tossing a ball from one to the other with the palm of the hand, which they perform with a tolerable address. When the natives meet with a Frenchman whom they know, they shake hands with him, incline their head a little, and say in their own language, "Are you there, my friend?" If he has no serious affair to propose to them, or if they themselves have nothing of consequence to say, they pursue their journey. If they happen to be going the same way with a French man, they never go before him, unless something of consequence {348} oblige them. When you enter into their hut, they welcome you with the word of salutation, which signifies "Are you there, my friend?" then shake hands with you, and pointing to a bed, desire you to sit down. A silence of a few minutes then ensues till the stranger begins to speak, when he is offered some victuals, and desired to eat. You must taste of what they offer you, otherwise they will imagine that you despise them. When the natives converse together, however numerous the assembly be, never more than one person speaks at once. If one of the company has any thing to say to another, he speaks so low that none of the rest hear him. Nobody is interrupted, even with the chiding of a child; and if the child be stubborn, it is removed elsewhere. In the council, when a point is deliberated upon and debated, they keep silence for a short time, and then they speak in their turns, no one offering to interrupt another. The natives being habituated to their own prudent custom, it is with the utmost difficulty they can keep from laughing, when they see several French men or French women together, and always several of them speaking at the same time. I had observed them for two years stifling a laugh on those occasions, and had often asked the reason of it, without receiving any satisfactory answer. At length I pressed one of them so earnestly to satisfy me, that after some excuses, he told me in their language, "Our people say, that when several Frenchmen are together, they speak all at once, like a flock of geese." All the nations whom I have known, and who inhabit from the sea as far as the Illinois, and even farther, which is a space of about fifteen hundred miles, carefully cultivate the maiz corn, which they make their principal subsistence. They make bread of it baked in cakes, another kind baked among the ashes, and another kind in water; they make of it also cold meal, roasted meal, gruel, which in this country is called Sagamity. This and the cold meal in my opinion are the two best dishes that are made of it; the others are only for a change. They eat the Sagamity as we eat soup, with a spoon made of a buffalo's horn. When they eat flesh or fish they use bread. They likewise use two kinds of millet, which they shell in the manner {349} of rice; one of these is called Choupichoul, and the other Widlogouil, and they both grow almost without any cultivation. In a scarcity of these kinds of corn, they have recourse to earth-nuts, which they find in the woods; but they never use these or chestnuts but when necessity obliges them. The flesh-meats they usually eat are the buffalo, the deer, the bear, and the dog: they eat of all kind of water-fowl and fish; but they have no other way of dressing their meat but by roasting or boiling. The following is their manner of roasting their meat when they are in the fields hunting: they plant a stake in the ground sloping towards the fire, and on the point of this stake they spit their meat, which they turn from time to time. To preserve what they do not use, they cut it into thin pieces, which they dry, or rather half-roast, upon a grate made of canes placed cross-ways. They never eat raw flesh, as so many people have falsely imagined, and they limit themselves to no set hours for their meals, but eat whenever they are hungry; so that we seldom see several of them eating at once, unless at their feasts, when they all eat off the same plate, except the women, the boys, and the young girls, who have each a plate to themselves. When the natives are sick, they neither eat flesh nor fish, but take Sagamity boiled in the broth of meat. When a man falls sick, his wife sleeps with the woman in the next bed to him, and the husband of that woman goes elsewhere. The natives, when they eat with Frenchmen, taste of nothing but of pure roast and boiled: they eat no sallad, and nothing raw but fruit. Their drink is pure water or pure brandy, but they dislike wine and all made liquors. Having mentioned their manner of feeding, I shall say a word or two of their manner of fasting. When they want rain, or when they desire hot weather for ripening their corn, they address themselves to the old man who has the greatest character for living wisely, and they intreat him to invoke the aerial spirits, in order to obtain what they demand. This old man, who never refuses his countrymen's request, prepares to fast for nine days together. He orders his wife to withdraw, and {350} during the whole time he eats nothing but a dish of gruel boiled in water, without salt, which is brought him once a day by his wife after sun-set. They never will accept of any reward for this service, that the spirits may not be angry with them. SECTION VII. _Of the_ Indian _Art of War._ I will now present the reader with their manner of making war, which is uniformly the same among all the nations. When one nation intends to make war upon another in all the forms, they hold a council of war, which is composed of the oldest and bravest warriors. It is to be supposed that this nation has been insulted, that the other has committed some hostilities against it, or that they have disturbed them in their hunting country, coming thither to steal their game, as they call it. There is always some pretence for declaring war; and this pretence, whether true or false, is explained by the war-chief, who omits no circumstance that may excite his nation to take up arms. After he has explained the reasons for the war, the old men debate the question in presence of the great chief or sovereign of the nation. This sovereign and the great chief of war are only witnesses of the debate; for the opinion of the old men always prevails, and the two chiefs voluntarily agree to it, from their respect and their great regard for the experience and wisdom of those venerable counsellors. If it is resolved to demand from the other nation the reason of the hostilities committed by them, they name one of their bravest and most eloquent warriors, as a second to their speech-maker or chancellor, who is to carry the pipe of peace, and address that nation. These two are accompanied by a troop of the bravest warriors, so that the embassy has the appearance of a warlike expedition; and, if satisfaction is not given, sometimes ends in one. The ambassadors carry no presents with them, to shew that they do not intend to supplicate or beg a peace: they take with them only the pipe of peace, {351} as a proof that they come as friends. The embassy is always well received, entertained in the best manner, and kept as long as possible; and if the other nation is not inclined to begin a war, they make very large presents to the ambassadors, and all their retinue, to make up for the losses which their nation complains of. [Illustration: _Bringing the Pipe of Peace_] If a nation begins actual hostilities without any formalities, the nation invaded is generally assisted by several allies, {352} keeps itself on the defensive, gives orders to those who live at a great distance to join the main body of the nation, prepares logs for building a fort, and every morning sends some warriors out upon the scout, choosing for that purpose those who trust more to their heels than their heart. The assistance of the allies is generally solicited by the pipe of peace, the stalk of which is about four feet and a half long, and is covered all over with the skin of a duck's neck, the feathers of which are glossy and of various colours. To this pipe is fastened a fan made of the feathers of white eagles, the ends of which are black, and are ornamented with a tuft dyed a beautiful red. When the allies are assembled a general council is held in presence of the sovereign, and is composed of the great war-chief, the war-chiefs of the allies, and all the old warriors. The great war-chief opens the assembly with a speech, in which he exhorts them to take vengeance of the insults they have received; and after the point is debated, and the war agreed upon, all the warriors go a hunting to procure game for the war-feast, which, as well as the war-dance, lasts three days. The natives distinguish the warriors into three classes, namely, true warriors, who have always given proofs of their courage; common warriors, and apprentice-warriors. They likewise divide our military men into the two classes of true warriors and young warriors. By the former they mean the settlers, of whom the greatest part, upon their arrival, were soldiers, who being now perfectly acquainted with the tricks and wiles of the natives, practice them upon their enemy, whom they do not greatly fear. The young warriors are the soldiers of the regular troops, as the companies are generally composed of young men, who are ignorant of the stratagems used by the natives in time of war. When the war-feast is ready the warriors repair to it, painted from head to foot with stripes of different colours. They have nothing on but their belt, from whence hangs their apron, their bells, or their rattling gourds, and their tomahawk. In their right hand they have a bow, and those of the {353} north in their left carry a buckler formed of two round pieces of buffalo's hide sewed together. The feast is kept in a meadow, the grass of which is mowed to a great extent; there the dishes, which are of hollow wood, are placed round in circles of about twelve or fifteen feet diameter, and the number of those circular tables is proportioned to the largeness of the assembly, in the midst of whom is placed the pipe of war upon the end of a pole seven or eight feet high. At the foot of this pole, in the middle of a circle is placed the chief dish of all, which is a large dog roasted whole; the other plates are ranged circularly by threes; one of these contains maiz boiled in broth like gruel, another roasted deer's flesh, and the other boiled. They all begin with eating of the dog, to denote their fidelity and attachment to their chief; but before they taste of any thing, an old warrior, who, on account of his great age, is not able to accompany the rest to the war, makes an harangue to the warriors, and by recounting his own exploits, excites them to act with bravery against the enemy. All the warriors then, according to their rank, smoke in the pipe of war, after which they begin their repast; but while they eat, they keep walking continually, to signify that a warrior ought to be always in action and upon his guard. While they are thus employed, one of the young men goes behind a bush about two hundred paces off, and raises the cry of death. Instantly all the warriors seize their arms, and run to the place whence the cry comes; and when they are near it the young warrior shews himself again, raises the cry of death, and is answered by all the rest, who then return to the feast, and take up the victuals which in their hurry they had thrown upon the ground. The same alarm is given two other times, and the warriors each time act as at first. The war drink then goes round, which is a heady liquor drawn from the leaves of the Cassine after they have been a long while boiled. The feast being finished, they all assemble about fifty paces from a large post, which represents the enemy; and this each of them in his turn runs up to, and strikes with his tomahawk, recounting at the same time all his former brave exploits, and sometimes boasting of valorous deeds that he never performed. But {354} they have the complaisance to each other to pardon this gasconading. All of them having successively struck the post, they begin the dance of war with their arms in their hands; and this dance and the war-feast are celebrated for three days together, after which they set out for the war. The women some time before are employed in preparing victuals for their husbands, and the old men in engraving upon bark the hieroglyphic sign of the nation that attacks, and of their number of warriors. Their manner of making war is to attack by surprize; accordingly, when they draw near to any of the enemy's villages, they march only in the night; and that they may not be discovered, raise up the grass over which they trod. One half of the warriors watch, while the other half sleep in the thickest and most unfrequented part of the wood. If any of their scouts can discover a hut of the enemy detached from the rest, they all surround it about day-break, and some of the warriors entering, endeavor to knock the people on the head as they awake, or take some man prisoner. Having scalped the dead, they carry off the women and children prisoners, and place against a tree near the hut the hieroglyphic picture, before which they plant two arrows with their points crossing each other. Instantly they retreat into the woods, and make great turnings to conceal their route. The women and children whom they take prisoners are made slaves. But if they take a man prisoner the joy is universal, and the glory of their nation is at its height. The warriors, when they draw near to their own villages after an expedition, raise the cry of war three times successively; and if they have a man prisoner with them, immediately go and look for three poles to torture him upon; which, however weary or hungry they be, must be provided before they take any refreshment. When they have provided those poles, and tied the prisoner to them, they may then go and take some victuals. The poles are about ten feet long; two of them are planted upright in the ground at a proper distance, and the other is cut through in the middle, and the two pieces are fastened crossways {355} to the other two, so that they form a square about five feet every way. The prisoner being first scalped by the person who took him, is tied to this square, his hands to the upper part, and his feet to the lower, in such a manner that he forms the figure of a St. Andrew's cross. The young men in the mean time having prepared several bundles of canes, set fire to them; and several of the warriors taking those flaming canes, burn the prisoner in different parts of his body, while others burn him in other parts with their tobacco-pipes. The patience of prisoners in those miserable circumstances is altogether astonishing. No cries or lamentations proceed from them; and some have been known to suffer tortures, and sing for three days and nights without intermission. Sometimes it happens that a young woman who has lost her husband in the war, asks the prisoner to supply the room of the deceased, and her request is immediately granted. [Illustration: _Torture of Prisoners_--INSET: _Plan of Fort_] I mentioned above that when one nation declares war against another, they leave a picture near one of their villages. That picture is designed in the following manner. On the top towards the right hand is the hieroglyphic sign of the nation that declares war; next is a naked man with a tomahawk in his hand; and then an arrow pointed against a woman, who is flying away, her hair floating behind her in the air; immediately {356} before this woman is the proper emblem of the nation against whom the war is declared. All this is on one line; and below is drawn the figure of the moon, which is followed by one I, or more; and a man is here represented, before whom is a number of arrows which seem to pierce a woman who is running away. By this is denoted, when such a moon is so many days old, they will come in great numbers and attack such a nation; but this lower part of the picture does not always carry true intelligence. The nation that has offered the insult, or commenced hostilities wrongfully, rarely finds any allies even among those nations who call them brothers. In carrying on a war they have no such thing as pitched battles, or carrying on of sieges; all the mischief they do each other, is by surprise and skirmishing, and in this their courage and address consists. Among them flight is no ways shameful; their bravery lies often in their legs; and to kill a man asleep or at unawares, is quite as honourable among them, as to gain a signal victory after a stout battle. When a nation is too weak to defend itself in the field, they endeavour to protect themselves by a fort. This fort is built circularly of two rows of large logs of wood, the logs of the inner row being opposite to the joining of the logs of the outer row. These logs are about fifteen feet long, five feet of which are sunk in the ground. The outer logs are about two feet thick, and the inner about half as much. At every forty paces along the wall a circular tower jets out; and at the entrance of the fort, which is always next to the river, the two ends of the wall pass beyond each other, and leave a side opening. In the middle of the fort stands a tree with its branches lopt off within six or eight inches of the trunk, and this serves for a watch-tower. Round this tree are some huts, for the protection of the women and children from random arrows; but notwithstanding all these precautions for defense, if the besieged are but hindered from coming out to water, they are soon obliged to retire. When a nation finds itself no longer able to oppose its enemy, the chiefs send a pipe of peace to a neutral nation, and solicit their mediation, which is generally successful, the vanquished {357} nation sheltering themselves under the name of the mediators, and for the future making but one nation with them. Here it may be observed that when they go to attack others, it sometimes happens that they lose some of their own warriors. In that case, they immediately, if possible, scalp their dead friends, to hinder the enemy from having that subject of triumph. Moreover, when they return home, whether as victors or otherwise, the great warchief pays to the respective families for those whom he does, not bring back with him; which renders the chiefs very careful of the lives of their warriors. CHAPTER IV. _Of the Negroes of_ Louisiana. SECTION I. _Of the Choice of Negroes; of their Distemper, and the Manner of curing them._ Having finished my account of the natives of Louisiana, I shall conclude this treatise with some observations relating to the negroes; who, in the lower part of the province especially, perform all the labours of agriculture. On that account I have thought proper to give some instructions concerning them, for the benefit of those who are inclined to settle in that province. The negroes must be governed differently from the Europeans; not because they are black, nor because they are slaves; but because they think differently from the white men. First, they imbibe a prejudice from their infancy, that the white men buy them for no other purpose but to drink their blood; which is owing to this, that when the first negroes saw the Europeans drink claret, they imagined it was blood, as that wine is of a deep red colour; so that nothing but the actual experience of the contrary can eradicate the false opinion. But as none of those slaves who have had that experience ever return to their own country, the same prejudice continues to subsist on the coast of Guinea where we purchase them. Some {358} who are strangers to the manner of thinking that prevails among the negroes, may perhaps think that the above remark is of no consequence, in respect to those slaves who are already sold to the French. There have been instances however of bad consequences flowing from this prejudice; especially if the negroes found no old slave of their own country upon their first arrival in our colonies. Some of them have killed or drowned themselves, several of them have deserted (which they call making themselves Marons) and all this from an apprehension that the white men were going to drink their blood. When they desert they believe they can get back to their own country by going round the sea, and may live in the woods upon the fruits, which they imagine are as common every where as with them. They are very superstitious, and are much attached to their prejudices, and little toys which they call _gris, gris_. It would be improper therefore to take them from them, or even speak of them to them; for they would believe themselves undone, if they were stripped of those trinkets. The old negroes soon make them lose conceit of them. The first thing you ought to do when you purchase negroes, is to cause them to be examined by a skilful surgeon and an honest man, to discover if they have the venereal or any other distemper. When they are viewed, both men and women are stripped naked as the hand, and are carefully examined from the crown of the head to the sole of the feet, then between the toes and between the fingers, in the mouth, in the ears, not excepting even the parts naturally concealed, though then exposed to view. You must ask your examining surgeon if he is acquainted with the distemper of the yaws, which is the virus of Guinea, and incurable by a great many French surgeons, though very skilful in the management of European distempers. Be careful not to be deceived in this point; for your surgeon may be deceived himself; therefore attend at the examination yourself, and observe carefully over all the body of the negro, whether you can discover any parts of the skin, which though black like the rest, are however as smooth as a looking-glass, without any tumor or rising. Such spots may be easily discovered; {359} for the skin of a person who goes naked is usually all over wrinkles. Wherefore if you see such marks you must reject the negro, whether man or woman. There are always experienced surgeons at the sale of new negroes, who purchase them; and many of those surgeons have made fortunes by that means; but they generally keep their secret to themselves. Another mortal distemper with which many negroes from Guinea are attacked, is the scurvy. It discovers itself by the gums, but sometimes it is so inveterate as to appear outwardly, in which case it is generally fatal. If any of my readers shall have the misfortune to have a negro attacked with one of those distempers, I will now teach him how to save him, by putting him in a way of being radically cured by the surgeons; for I have no inclination to fall out with those gentlemen. I learned this secret from a negro physician, who was upon the king's plantation, when I took the superintendence of it. You must never put an iron instrument into the yaw; such an application would be certain death. In order to open the yaw, you take iron rust reduced to an impalpable powder, and passed through a fine search; you afterwards mix that powder with citron juice till it be of the consistence of an ointment, which you spread upon a linen cloth greased with hog's grease, or fresh lard without salt, for want of a better. You lay the plastier upon the yaw, and renew it evening and morning, which will open the yaw in a very short time without any incision. The opening being once made, you take about the bulk of a goose's egg of hog's lard without salt, in which you incorporate about an ounce of good terebinthine; after which take a quantity of powdered verdigris, and soak it half a day in good vinegar, which you must then pour off gently with all the scum that floats at top. Drop a cloth all over with the verdigris that remains, and upon that apply your last ointment. All these operations are performed without the assistance of fire. The whole ointment being well mixed with a spatula, you dress the yaw with it; after that put your negro into a copious sweat, and he will be cured. Take special care that your surgeon uses no mercurial medicine, as I have seen; for that will occasion the death of the patient. {360} The scurvy is no less to be dreaded than the yaws; nevertheless you may get the better of it, by adhering exactly to the following prescription: take some scurvy-grass, if you have any plants of it, some ground-ivy, called by some St. John's wort, water-cresses from a spring or brook, and for want of that, wild cresses; take these three herbs, or the two last, if you have no scurvy-grass; pound them, and mix them with citron-juice, to make of them a soft paste, which the patient must keep upon both his gums till they be clean, at all times but when he is eating. In the mean while he must be suffered to drink nothing but an infusion of the herbs above named. You pound two handfuls of them, roots and all, after washing off any earth that may be upon the roots or leaves; to these you join a fresh citron, cut into slices. Having pounded all together, you then steep them in an earthen pan in a pint of pure water of the measure of Paris; after that you add about the size of a walnut of powdered and purified saltpetre, and to make it a little relishing to the negro, you add some powder sugar. After the water has stood one night, you squeeze out the herbs pretty strongly. The whole is performed cold, or without fire. Such is the dose for a bottle of water Paris measure; but as the patient ought to drink two pints a day, you may make several pints at a time in the above proportion. In these two distempers the patients must be supported with good nourishment, and made to sweat copiously. It would be a mistake to think that they ought to be kept to a spare diet; you must give them nourishing food, but a little at a time. A negro can no more than any other person support remedies upon bad food, and still less upon a spare diet; but the quantity must be proportioned to the state of the patient, and the nature of the distemper. Besides, good food makes the best part of the remedy to those who in common are but poorly fed. The negro who taught me these two remedies, observing the great care I took of both the negro men and negro women, taught me likewise the cure of all the distempers to which the women are subject; for the negro women are as liable to diseases as the white women. {361} SECTION II. _Of the Manner of governing the Negroes._ When a negro man or woman comes home to you, it is proper to caress them, to give them something good to eat, with a glass of brandy; it is best to dress them the same day, to give them something to sleep on, and a covering. I suppose the others have been treated in the same manner; for those marks of humanity flatter them, and attach them to their masters. If they are fatigued or weakened by a journey, or by any distempers, make them work little; but keep them always busy as long as they are able to do any thing, never suffering them to be idle, but when they are at their meals. Take care of them when they are sick, and give attention both to their remedies and their food, which last ought then to be more nourishing than what they usually subsist upon. It is your interest so to do, both for their preservation, and to attach them more closely to you; for though many Frenchmen say that negroes are ungrateful, I have experienced that it is very easy to render them much attached to you by good treatment, and by doing them justice, as I shall mention afterwards. If a negro woman lies-in, cause her to be taken care of in every thing that her condition makes necessary, and let your wife, if you have one, not disdain to take the immediate care of her herself, or at least have an eye over her. A Christian ought to take care that the children be baptised and instructed, since they have an immortal soul. The mother ought then to receive half a ration more than usual, and a quart of milk a day, to assist her to nurse her child. Prudence requires that your negroes be lodged at a proper distance, to prevent them from being troublesome or offensive; but at the same time near enough for your conveniently observing what passes among them. When I say that they ought not to be placed so near your habitation as to be offensive, I mean by that the smell which is natural to some nations of negroes, such as the Congos, the Angolas, the Aradas, and others. On this account it is proper to have in their camp a bathing place formed by thick planks, buried in the earth about a foot or a {362} foot and a half at most, and never more water in it than about that depth, for fear lest the children should drown themselves in it; it ought likewise to have an edge, that the little children may not have access to it, and there ought to be a pond without the camp to supply it with water and keep fish. The negro camp ought to be inclosed all round with palisades, and to have a door to shut with a lock and key. The huts ought to be detached from each other, for fear of fire, and to be built in direct lines, both for the sake of neatness, and in order to know easily the hut of each negro. But that you may be as little incommoded as possible with their natural smell, you must have the precaution to place the negro camp to the north or north-east of your house, as the winds that blow from these quarters are not so warm as the others, and it is only when the negroes are warm that they send forth a disagreeable smell. The negroes that have the worst smell are those that are the least black; and what I have said of their bad smell, ought to warn you to keep always on the windward side of them when you visit them at their work; never to suffer them to come near your children, who, exclusive of the bad smell, can learn nothing good from them, either as to morals, education, or language. From what I have said, I conclude that a French father and his wife are great enemies to their posterity when they give their children such nurses. For the milk being the purest blood of the woman, one must be a step-mother indeed to give her child to a negro nurse in such a country as Louisiana, where the mother has all conveniences of being served, of accommodating and carrying their children, who by that means may be always under their eyes. The mother then has nothing else to do but to give the breast to her child. I have no inclination to employ my pen in censuring the over-delicacy and selfishness of the women, who thus sacrifice their children; it may, without further illustration, be easily perceived how much society is interested in this affair. I shall only say, that for any kind of service whatever about the house, I would advise no other kind of negroes, either young or old, but Senegals, called among themselves Diolaufs, because of all {363} the negroes I have known, these have the purest blood; they have more fidelity and a better understanding than the rest, and are consequently fitter for learning a trade, or for menial services. It is true they are not so strong as the others for the labours of the field, and for bearing the great heats. The Senegals however are the blackest, and I never saw any who had a bad smell. They are very grateful; and when one knows how to attach them to him, they have been found to sacrifice their own life to save that of their master. They are good commanders over other negroes, both on account of their fidelity and gratitude, and because they seem to be born for commanding. As they are high-minded, they may be easily encouraged to learn a trade, or to serve in the house, by the distinction they will thereby acquire over the other negroes, and the neatness of dress which that condition will entitle them to. When a settler wants to make a fortune, and manage his plantation with oeconomy, he ought to prefer his interest to his pleasure, and only take the last by snatches. He ought to be the first up and the last a-bed, that he may have an eye over every thing that passes in his plantation. It is certainly his interest that his negroes labour a good deal: but it ought to be an equal and moderate labour, for violent and continual labours would soon exhaust and ruin them; whereas by keeping them always moderately employed, they neither exhaust their strength nor ruin their constitution. By this they are kept in good health, and labour longer, and with more good will: besides it must be allowed that the day is long enough for an assiduous labourer to deserve the repose of the evening. To accustom them to labour in this manner I observed the following method: I took care to provide one piece of work for them before another was done, and I informed their commander or driver in their presence, that they might not lose time, some in coming to ask what they were to do, and others in waiting for an answer. Besides I went several times a day to view them, by roads which they did not expect, pretending to be going a hunting or coming from it. If I observed them idle, I reprimanded them, and if when they saw me coming, they wrought too hard, I told them that they fatigued themselves, {364} and that they could not continue at such hard labour during the whole day, without being harassed, which I did not want. When I surprised them singing at their work, and perceived that they had discovered me, I said to them chearfully, Courage, my boys, I love to see you merry at your work; but do not sing so loud, that you may not fatigue yourselves, and at night you shall have a cup of Tafia (or rum) to give you strength and spirits. One cannot believe the effect such a discourse would have upon their spirits, which was easily discernible from the chearfulness upon their countenances, and their ardour at work. If it be necessary not to pass over any essential fault in the negroes, it is no less necessary never to punish them but when they have deserved it, after a serious enquiry and examination supported by an absolute certainty, unless you happen to catch them in the fact. But when you are fully convinced of the crime, by no means pardon them upon any assurances or protestations of theirs, or upon the solicitations of others; but punish them in proportion to the fault they have done, yet always with humanity, that they may themselves be brought to confess that they have deserved the punishment they have received. A Christian is unworthy of that name when he punishes with cruelty, as is done to my knowledge in a certain colony, to such a degree that they entertain their guests with such spectacles, which have more of barbarity than humanity in them. When a negro comes from being whipped, cause the sore parts to be washed with vinegar mixed with salt, Jamaica pepper, which grows in the garden, and even a little gun-powder. As we know from experience that most men of a low extraction, and without education, are subject to thieving in their necessities, it is not at all surprising to see negroes thieves, when they are in want of every thing, as I have seen many badly fed, badly cloathed, and having nothing to lie upon but the ground. I shall make but one reflection. If they are slaves, it is also true that they are men, and capable of becoming Christians: besides, it is your intention to draw advantage from them, is it not therefore reasonable to take all the care of {365} them that you can? We see all those who understand the government of horses give an extraordinary attention to them, whether they be intended for the saddle or the draught. In the cold season they are well covered and kept in warm stables. In the summer they have a cloth thrown over them, to keep them from the dust, and at all times good litter to lie upon. Every morning their dung is carried away, and they are well curried and combed. If you ask those masters, why they bestow so much pains upon beasts? they will tell you, that, to make a horse serviceable to you, you must take a good deal of care of him, and that it is for the interest of the person to whom a horse belongs, so to do. After this example, can one hope for labour from negroes, who very often are in want of necessaries? Can one expect fidelity from a man, who is denied what he stands most in need of? When one sees a negro, who labours hard and with much assiduity, it is common to say to him, by way of encouragement, that they are well pleased with him, and that he is a good negro. But when any of them, who understand our language, are so complimented, they very properly reply, _Masser, when negre be much fed, negre work much; when negre has good masser, negre be good._ If I advise the planters to take great care of their negroes, I at the same time shew them that their interest is connected in that with their humanity. But I do no less advise them always to distrust them, without seeming to fear them, because it is as dangerous to shew a concealed enemy that you fear him, as to do him an injury. Therefore make it your constant custom to shut your doors securely, and not to suffer any negro to sleep in the house with you, and have it in their power to open your door. Visit your negroes from time to time, at night and on days and hours when they least expect you, in order to keep them always in fear of being found absent from their huts. Endeavour to assign each of them a wife, to keep clear of debauchery and its bad consequences. It is necessary that the negroes have wives, and you ought to know that nothing attaches them so much to a plantation as children. But above all do not suffer any of them to abandon his wife, when he has once made choice of one {366} in your presence. Prohibit all fighting under pain of the lash, otherwise the women will often raise squabbles among the men. Do not suffer your negroes to carry their children to the field with them, when they begin to walk, as they only spoil the plants and take off the mothers from their work. If you have a few negro children, it is better to employ an old negro woman to keep them in the camp, with whom the mothers may leave something for their children to eat. This you will find to be the most profitable way. Above all do not suffer the mothers ever to carry them to the edge of the water, where there is too much to be feared. For the better subsistence of your negroes, you ought every week to give them a small quantity of salt and of herbs of your garden, to give a better relish to their Couscou, which is a dish made of the meal of rice or maiz soaked in broth. If you have any old negro, or one in weak health, employ him in fishing both for yourself and your negroes. His labour will be well worth his subsistence. It is moreover for your own interest to give your negroes a small piece of waste ground to improve at the end of your own, and to engage them to cultivate it for their own profit, that they may be able to dress a little better, by selling the produce of it, which you ought to buy from them upon fair and just terms. It were better that they should employ themselves in cultivating that field on Sundays, when they are not Christians, than do worse. In a word, nothing is more to be dreaded than to see the negroes assemble together on Sundays, since, under pretence of Calinda or the dance, they sometimes get together to the number of three or four hundred, and make a kind of Sabbath, which it is always prudent to avoid; for it is in those tumultuous meetings that they sell what they have stolen to one another, and commit many crimes. In these likewise they plot their rebellions. To conclude, one may, by attention and humanity, easily manage negroes; and, as an inducement, one has the satisfaction to draw great advantage from their labours. [THE END] INDEX Index Abeikas Indians--293 Acacia Tree--222 Achechy--237 Adaies Indians--9; Post of, 54 Agriculture, Indian--341 Aiaouez Indians--59, 62; 63; 66; 305 Alaron, Martin de--9, 10 Algonquins--93 Alder--226 Alibamous Indians--293 Alibamous River--135 Alligator-- slave girl kills, 19; author kills large one, 22; description of, 253-255 Amite River--113 Ants--272; 273 Aplaches Indians--293 Apples, wild--212 Aquelou-Pissas Indians--18; 297 Arkansas-- German colonists there, 29; 88 Arkansas Indians-- mate with Canadians, 4; 57; 303 Arkansas River-- reached by Tonti, 4; 112; 113; 153-154 Armed-fish--276-277 Ascension Bay--114; 139 Ash--226 Aspen--226 Assinais Indians--5-9 Attakapas Indians-- cannibals, 302 Avoyelles Indians--149; home of, 302-303 Ayac Shrub--226 Balers, Marquis of--9 Barataria--145 Barbel, description of--274 Barley--203 Baton Rouge--52; named after a cypress tree, 217 Bay of St. Bernard--3 Bay of St. Esprit--2 Bay of St. Louis--16; 17; 114; lands around, 138 Bayou Choupic--17; 18 Bayou Goula--141 Bayou-Ogoulas Indians--52; 302 Bayou St. John--17; 18; 49; 52 Beans-- cultivation in La., 204 Bears--132; 133; description of, 245-249; feast of, 324 Beavers-- description of, 127-131 Bec-croche--261 Bees--271 Bienville-- becomes Gov. Gen. of La., 10-11; founds New Orleans, 15; breeds hogs, 16; 28; 38; defeats Natchez Indians, 39; 42; 49; 71; 87; 88; 92; 93; war against Chicasaws, 94-95; 109; returns to La., 186 Biloxi--11; 16; not suitable for settlement, 28; distress of German colonists, 29; country back of, 30; 47; settlement destroyed, 137. Birch Tree--231 Bishop (Bird)--270 Blackbirds--268 Black River--113; land around it, 148; lands along, 151-154 Bon Homme--195 Bois-Briant--58 Bonita Fish--12 Bourgrnont, Commander de-- voyage to Missouri and Kansas, 59-68; his journal, 69; 160; 305 Bows-- how made, 340 Buffalo--64; hunt by author, 122; 132; 134; 146; 147; 152; hunt in New Mexico, 155; hides and tallow, 155-156; 162, 178; description of, 240; Indian hunt, 240; feast of, 324 Burgo-Breaker (fish)--275 Burial customs--333-337 Butterflies--271 Buzzard-- deseciption of, 258 Caouquias Indians--301 Caouitas Indians--293 Caddo Indians--151; 303 Cadillac, de la Motte-- arrives in La., 5; 6; 8; 9; death of, 10; his mine, 163 Calendar of Natchez--319 Calumet (Pipe of Peace)--35; feathers for, 258 Campeachy wood--183 Canadians-- early voyagers to La., 4; at Dauphin Island, 16; at Mobile, 46; 58; 59; get salt, 157; Route to La., 161-163 Candlemas Islands--138 Cannes Brulee's--52 Canoe-- how made, 69 Cantharadies--272 Canzas (see Kansas) Cape Anthony--13 Cape Francois--11-13; 182 Capuchins--51 Caranco--22 Cardinal--269 Carolina-- population, IX; 47 Carp--17; 146; 274 Carrion-Crow--258 Carthaginians-- practised scalping, 283 Caskaquias (see Kaskasia) Cassine Shrub--228 Castin Bayou--113 Castine Mine--133 Catamounts--134; 144 Caterpillars--271 Catfish-- description of, 274 Cat Island--16; 138 Cedar Trees--215; 225 Celoron, Capt. de--93; 94 Chacchi-Oumas Indians--300 Chactaw Indians (see Choctaws) Chaineau, M.--278 Chameleons--257 Champmelin, Commander-- captures Pensacola XXIV; 104; 105 Chandeleur Islands--13 Chaouachas Indians--140; 301 Chaouanous River--162 Charleville, M. de--109; 110 Charlevoix--I; III; IV; XXV; XXVI; 24; 30 Chateauguier--101 Chatkas Indians--295; language, 297 Chatots Indians--294 Cherokees--293 Cherokee River--162 Chestnut Trees--214 Chicasaw Cliffs--133 Chicasaw Indians--46; murder French, 56-57; war with, 87-90; make peace, 94; country of, 137; destructive wars, 291; language, 297; destroy other tribes, 303-304; fierce and arrogant, 332. Chitimachas Indians--18; war with, 71; 300; home of, 302 Choctaws--46; 80; 84; 85; 113 Chopart, de--73; his death, 82 Choupic--276 Choupichoul (buck wheat)-156-157 Clerac (Gascony)-27 Climate-- of Gulf Coast, III; VIII; severe weather, 36; at Mobile, 46; of the Miss. Valley, 57; of La., 107-108 Clothing of Indians--344-346 Cochineal--183 Cockle-Island--17, 138 Codfish--14 Cola-Pissas--18 Colbert--3 Coligni, Admiral de--2 Conchac Indians--293 Copper Mines--30, 145 Corbijeau--266 Cormorant, 259 Coroas Indians--300 Cooking, Indian--342 Corn-- description of, 164-165; importance of.185; its cultivation in La., 202; feast of, 321-322; 347 Cotton--145; 158; how cultivated, 174-175; for export, 181 Cotton Tree--222 Coxe-- account of Carolina, VI; XIII; 47 Cranes--22; 126; description of, 261 Crayfish--277 Creeper, bearded--232 Crocodile--253-255 Crows--268 Crozat-- La. ceded to, 5; full store-houses, 8; transfers to West India Co., 10; 107 Cuba--13 Cushaws-- cultivation in La., 206 Cypress Tree--IV; at Baton Rouge, 52; 216; 217 d'Artaguette--28; 52; 88; 92 Dauphin Isle--13; 15; 45; 46; 49; 101; 103 d'Avion--23 Deer--64; white, 124; 132; 134; 144; 152; hunt, 242-244; feast of, 319 Deer Oil--249 DeLaet--2 De Lisle--279 de Meuse-- grant, 54 de Soto--2 de Ville, Father--26 Diodorus Siculus-- his description of lands west of Africa, 281-282 Diseases-- fatal to Indians--291; of Negroes, 359-360 Dove--266 Dragon flies--272 Draught (Bird)--263 Ducks--126; description of, 259-261 du Crenet--84 du Haye--198 Dumont (Historian)--I; V; VII; XXV; 46; 56; 66; 113; 135; historical memoirs, 187; 225 Du Pratz--1eaves La., 187 du Tiffenet--88; 89 du Vernai, Paris--52 Eagles--257 Eels--277 Egret--261 Elder Tree--231 Elephant-- skeletons found in Ohio--290 Elk--64, 132, 134, 144 Elm--226 English-- extent of American possessions, XIV; shipping, XVII; at English Turn, 47-51; on the Yazoo, 56; 57; on the Miss. River, 140; tobacco trade, 199 English Turn (Reach)--47; 51; why its name, 139-140 Epidemic--13 Episingles Indians--93 Esquine--181, 233 Eye Inflammation-- treatment for, 43 Exports-- from La. to Islands, 182 Falcon--258 Feast of War--352-353 Feasts of Indians--320-322 Ferns-- Maiden hair, 234-235 Fig Trees--210-211 Filberts--213 Fire, how made--340 Fireflies--272 Fish-- plentiful in La., 274 Five Nations--294 Flamingo--22; 126; description of, 261 Flat root--235 Flaucourt, Loire de, 24 Flax--145 Fleury, Cardinal--187 Flies--271 Florida-- French settle there, 2; Spanish attack them, 2; French later attack Spanish, 2 Flowers--239 Flying Fish--12 Food of Indians--348-350 Fool-- description of, 263 Forant, M. de--85 Fort Assumption--57; 93; 95 Fort Balise--47; 48; 116; 118; where built, 139 Fort Carolin (Fla.)--2 Fort Chartres--58 Fort Crevecoeur--3 Fort Louis--46; 294 Fort Mobile--88; 92 Fort Orleans--59; 61; 62; 69; 160 Fort Rosalie--23-24; 33; 34; 35 Fort St. Francis--92; 95 Fort St. John Baptist--6; 7; 9; 10 Fort St. Louis--136 Fox Indians-- home of, 301 Foxes--251 French-- shipping, XVII; in Fla., 2, 18; at Natchez, 32-33; bad influence, 41; massacre at Natchez, 82-83; commerce with La., 177-182 Frigate (Bird)--263 Frogs--253 Fur trade--178 Gar fish-- description of, 276-277 Gaillard--61-63; 65 Games-- Indian, 347 Geese-- wild, 127; 259 Gentilly--52 Germans-- in La., 29 Gold--145; plentiful in Mexico, 150 Gourges, Dominque de--2; 8 Grapes--208-209 Grass Point--17 Great Sun--40; 42-43 burial, 333-336 Green flies--272 Grigas Indians--298 Guenot--34 Gulf of Mexico Coast--1; northern boundary, 13; description of land bordering, 135-137 Gypsum--124 Habitations of Indians--341 Hakluyt (Fla.)--2 Halcyon-- description of, 263-264 Hatchet-bill--262 Havana--102 Hawks--258 Hedge-hog--253 Hennepin, Father--3 Herons--126; 261 Hemp-- cultivation, 180; 238 Hickory Trees--213 Horn Island--16 Hornbean Trees--226 Hops--177; 234 Howard, John--58 Hubert-- planter, 20; 22; 24; 25 Hubert, Mme.--136; 167 Humming Bird--270 Hurons--93 Hurricane--30; 31; 32 Huts-- how made, 341 Iapy, Commander--104 Iberville-- made Gov. Gen. of La., 4; his death, 5; 8; 10 Iberville River--113 Illinois-- visited by Hennepin and LaSalle, 3; hurricane, 30; 57; 58; 88; 162; 163 Illinois Indians--66; home of, 300-301 Illinois River--110 Indians-- travel, 60-61; how to fight, 99-100; origin of, 279; descended from Europeans, 281 Indigo-- cultivation and processing, 168-171; for export, 181; Dumont's method of making, 191-193 Iron--145 Iroquois--93; destructive wars of, 291 Ivy-- ground, 237 Jamaica--13 Jesuits--51; 58 Kappas Indians--304 Kansas Indians--59; 60; 61; 62; 66; 68; 69; 305 Kansas River--63; 64; 110; description of, 159 Kayemans--13 Kaskasia--58 Kaskasia Indians--301 King-fisher-- description of, 263 la Chaise, Director Gen.--44; 45 Lake Borgne--17; 138 Lake Erie--111; 161 Lake Maurepas--17; 113 Lake Pontchartrain--17 Lake St. Louis--17; 46; 49; 52; 113; 135 Lafourche (the Fork)--141 Language of Natchez--311 LaSalle-- travels from Canada to the Gulf, 3; is killed on second trip, 4; 116 Lavert--273 Laudonviere, René de--2 Laurel Trees--217 Laval, Father--XXIII; XXV Lavigne, Sieur--18 Law, John--29 Lead--132; 145; 158; 163 LeBlanc-- grant, 56; 88 LeSueur--83 LeSueur, Bayou--116 Levans--29 Liart Trees--226 Lime Trees--226 Linarez, Duke of--7-9 Lion's Mouth (flower) 239 Lizards--257 Locust Tree--222 Longevity of Indians--329 L'Orient--29 Loubois, Lieut. de--83; 84 Louis XIV--3; 5; 107 Louisiana-- poor colonization, XXVI; named after Louis XIV, 3; names, 15; boundary of, 107; description of soil, 117-118; a fine country, 185; fertility of, 197 Luchereau, M. de--4 Magnolia Trees--218-219 Magpie--268 Maize--163-165; 202-203 Manchac River--111; 114 Mangrove--223 Maple Trees--220 Marameg Mine--158 Marameg River--58 Margat River--57; 93 Marriage customs--326-328 Massacre Island-- Now Dauphin Isle, 13; how it was named, 14 Massacre of French at Natchez--73; 82 Medicines--44; 45; 181; 215 Medicine, Indian--26; 27; 43; 44 Mehane--22 Mexicans-- descent from Chinese or Japanese, 284 Mexico--6; 7; 10; home of ancient Natchez tribe, 279; natives kill themselves, 291 Mezieres, Marquis de--52 Miami River--111; 161; 162; 163 Michigamias Indians--304 Mines in Illinois--163; in La., 195-196 Miragouine, Sieur--103 Mississippi River-- lands of lower basin, VI; VII; commands continent, IX; navigation of, XI-XII; mouths of, XIII; reached by Hennepin, 3; 15; 18; 24; hurricane, 30; 47; 48; 49; 51; inhabitants along, 52; 53; 55; 58; 59; 63; 107; As names, 109; attempts to find source, 109; mouths of, 114-115; the passes, 117; 133; soil at mouth, 138-139; on east bank, 141-142; lands west of, 145; 161; 162; 163; voyage to source by Indian, 289-290 Mississippi Scheme--II; 58 Missionary--23 Missouri Indians--59; 60; 66; home of, 304-305 Missouri River-- navigation of, XII; 60; 63; 69; 110; description of, 159 Mobile-- barren lands, XX; 9; 11; birth place of La., 15; 45; 49; 89; native of land, 135-136; fertility of animals and women, 136 Mobile Bay--114 Mobile Indians--294 Mobile River-- Canadians settle on, 4-5; 46; 135 Moingona River--110 Moncacht-apé, old wise man of Yazoo tribe-- his voyages, 285-290 Montplaisir, M. de--27 Montreal--59 Mosquitoes-- description of, 272-273; how Indians fight, 333 Mulberry Trees--145; 158; for silk growing, 167-168; 212; feast of, 321 Muscadine Grapes--209 Mushroom--231 Myrtle Wax-tree--220 Narvaez--1 Natchez-- goodness of the country, 20-21; commandment, 27-28; terrible storm, 30-32; settlement at, 38-39; 55-56 Natchez Indians-- DuPratz arrives among, 23-27; first war with French, 32-36; second war, 38-39; 55; 69; council of war, 76-77; 84; destroyed by French, 86-87; 153; grow grain, 156; origin of, 279-280; 297; home of, 298; power of, 299; description of social habits-- birth and rearing children, 306-311; language, government, religion, 311-320 Natchitoches-- French settle, 5; St. Denis at, 6; Spanish settle near, 8; 54; quality of land, 148; silver there, 195 Natchitoches Indians--112; home of, 303 Negroes-- revolt, 71; choice of for slaves, 357; how to handle, 361; odors of, 362 Nesunez, Pamphilo--1 New Orleans--V; health good, IX; settlement of, 11; founded, 15; 17; 18; 22; physicians and surgeons of, 26; 30; 45; 46; forts below, 48; description of, 49-52; harbor of, 52; 58; 71; climate, 108; 136; nature of soil, 141; distance from Canada, 162 New Mexico--6; 54; 55; 112; nature of land, 147; hunting there, 155 Niagara Falls--286 Nightingale--269 Nobility-- Natchez, 328 North America-- extent of, XV; its products, XVI Oak Trees--IV; V; 223-225 Oats--203 Ohio River-- navigation of, XII; 58; 111; 161; 162; 163; skeleton of elephants found, 290 Ochre--23 Olivarez, Friar--9 Olive Trees--213 Orange Trees--212 Opelousas Indians--302 Opossum (wood-rat)--251 Orignaux--162 Osage Indians--59-60; 66; 304; 305 Osage River--159 Othouez Indians--59; 60; 61; 62; 66; 305 Otters--253 Otter Indians--287-288 Ouachas Indians--140 Ouchitas Indains-- former home of, 303 Ouachita River--113 Oumas Indians--52; 80; home of, 297 Ouse-Ogoulas Indians--300 Owls--268 Oysters-- in La., 277; on trees in St. Domingo, 278 Paducah Indians--59; 61; 62; 63; 65; Customs and manners, 66-68 destructive wars of, 291; 305 Paillou, Major General-- at N. O., 15; 18; 39 Parroquets--266 Palmetto--231 Panimahas Indians--59; 63; 66; 305 Panis Indians--305 Partridges--144; 265 Paseagoulas River--114; 136 Pasca-Ogoulas Indians--15; 46; 295 Patassa (fish)--276 Pawpaws--158; 210 Peach Trees--210-211 Pearl River--114 Pelican-- description of, 259 Pensacola-- description of, XXIII; 2; Spanish settle, 8; captured by French, 100-105 Perdido River--104; 116; 135 Perrier-- Gov. of La., 71; 73; 83; 85; defeats Natchez Indians, 86-87; 153; leaves La., 186 Perrier de Salvert--72; 86 Persimmons--209 Peru-- natives killed themselves, 291 Petits Ecores--52; 53 Pheasant--264 Phoenicians-- ancestors of Natchez Indians, 283 Phenomenon-- alarming, 30; at Natchez, 36-38; extraordinary, 70 Pigeons-- description of, 266-267 Pike--276 Pilchard--14; description of, 276 Pimiteouis Indians--301 Pin--IV; for tar, 193-194; 217 Pipe of Peace--59; 60; 63; 65; 258 Pitch-- how to make, 194 Plaquemine Bayou--114 Plums--210 Pointe Coupeé--52; 53; 54 Pole Cat--252 Pope (Bird)--269 Poplar--222 Porcupine--253 Port de Paix--13 Puerto Rico--11 Potatoes (sweet)-- cultivation in La., 204-205 Pottery-- how made, 342 Provencals-- in La., 29 Prud'homme Cliffs--93 Prud'homme River--57 Pumpkins--206 Quail--266 Quebec--3; 111 Rabbits--251 Raimond, Diego--6; 10 Rattle snake-- cure for bite, 237; description of, 255 Rattle-snake herb--235-237 Red fish--14 Red River--54; 55; 112; nature of land, 148; 151 Red Shoe, Prince of Chactaws--95 Religion of Natchez--312 Rice-- how grown, 165; how eaten, 166; in La., 204-205 Richebourg, Captain--101; 102 Ring-skate (fish)--276 Rio del Norte--6 Rochelle-- author leaves, 11; returns to, 187 Rye-- in Illinois, 162; 203 Saffron--180 Sagamity--348; 349 St. Anthony's Falls--109; 110 St. Augustin, Fla.--2 St. Bernard's Bay--116 St. Catherine's Creek--33; 34; 35; 38 St. Come-- Missionary, 71 St. Croix River--110 St. Denis-- journey to Mexico, 6-11; 54; 104; popular with natives, 150 St. Domingo--4; 11; 13; oysters on trees, 277 St. Francis River--57; lands around, 157-158; 112 St. Hilaire, Surgeon--42 St. Laurent--93; 94 St. Lawrence River--111; 161; 286 St. Louis Church--51 St. Louis River--3; 4; 8 St. Rose Isle--101; 102 St. Peter River--110 Sallee--58 Salmont, Com. Gen.--85 Salt-- in lower La., 147; spring near Natchitoches, 149; mines, 153 Salt petre--147; 180 Samba--72 Santa Fé--112 Sarde (fish)--14 Sardine--276 Sarsaparilla--233 Sassafras--181; 220 Saw Bill--261 Scalping--283 Scotland-- tobacco trade, 199 Scurvy-- how to cure--360 Sea-Lark--263 Sea Snipe--263 Ship Island--16; 28 Shrimp--277 Siam distemper--13 Silk-- growing experiments, 167-168 cultivation possible, 176; worms, 271 Silver--145; 151; 158; 163; 195 Sioux Indians--109; home of, 301-306 Skunk--252 Smallpox-- fatal to Indians, 291 Snipe--266 Spanish-- claim La., 5; 54; 55; on west of La., colony, 146; near Natchitoches, 150; how they hunt in Mexico, 155; commerce with La., 183-184; attempt to settle Missouri, 305 Starlings--268 Stag--242 Spatula-- description of, 261; 276 Spiders-- description of, 257 Squirrels--252 Stink Wood Tree--226 Strawberries--238; feast of, 320 Stung Arm--79; 80; 81 Stung Serpent--35; 40; death of, 335-336 Sturgeon--14 Sun of the Apple Village-- negotiates with the French, 73-78 Swallows--269 Swans--127; 162; 259 Sweet gum--181; 215 Tamarouas Indians--58; 162; 300; 301 Tangipahoa River--113 Tar-- how to make--193-194 Tassel--258 Tattooing--346 Tchefuncte River--113; 136 Teal--261 Temple, Indian-- description of, 333 Tensas Indians-- near Mobile, 294; language, 297; 300; former home of, 303 Tensas River-- lands along, 152 Termites--273 Thioux Indians--299 Thomez Indians--294 Thorn, Passion--229-230 Thornback (fish)--14 Tigers--134; description of, 249-250 Timber-- for shipbuilding, 179 Tobacco-- trade, XVII; plantation, 25; 145; 158; in Illinois, 163; how cultivated, 171-174; for export, 181; DuMont's description of cultivation, 187-191; advantages of La. cultivation, 197-198; British imports and exports, 199; worm, 271 Tombigbee--46; 89 Tonicas Indians--23; 27; 44; 80; 84; 85; language of, 298 Tonti, Chevalier de--3; 4 Topoussas Indians--300 Torture, Indian--354-355 Tortuga--13 Tooth-ache Tree--228 Tradewinds--12 Troniou--270 Turkeys, wild--120; 144; description of, 264; feast of, 324 Turkey Buzzard--258 Turtles--253 Ursuline Nuns--51 Vanilla--184 Vasquez de Aillon, Lucas--1 Vauban--46 Vaudreuil, Gov.--95; 96 Vinegar Tree--227 Virginia--58 Wabash River--110; 111; 161; 162; 163 Walnut Tree--158; 213 War-- with Natchez Indians, 32-36; 38-39; causes of Indian wars, 96-97; how they fight, 350; war feast, 352-353 Wasps--271 Water-hen--262 Water Melons-- how grown, 166; cultivation of in La., 206-207; feast of, 321 Wax-- from Wax Tree, 220-222 Wax Tree--176; 220-222 West India Company-- Takes over La., 10; sends colonists, 11; 18; 32; 44; gives up colony, 85 Wheat--145; in Illinois, 162; in La., 203 White Apple Village--33; 39; demanded by French, 73 Whortle-berries--212 Wild Cat--251 Wild Geese--22; 259 Wild Turkey-- description of, 264 (see turkey) Willow Tree--226 Wolves--134; 144; kill buffaloes, 156; description of, 244-245 Women-- "fruitful" in La., 185 Woodcock--266 Wood-pecker-- description of, 268-269 Wood-Rat--251 Wren--258 Yapon Shrub--228 Yaws--359 Yazoo Indians--56; kill the garrison at their Post, 83; 300 Yazoo River--56; 112 Ydalgo, Friar--5; 7; 9 [Illustration: A Map of Louisiana] [Illustration: THE GULPH OF MEXICO]